An Omnibus of Mark Moxon’s Travel Writing

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

All rights reserved

This version was compiled on 31 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: Looking up the Hooker Glacier, with Mt Cook in cloud in the background

See www.moxon.net for more information

Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering all the travelling that I’ve done since I set out on my first long trip back in 1995.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled the world over the years, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

Australia: New South Wales

Sydney

Written: 7 November 1995

I didn’t spend too long in Sydney, just long enough to see the sights, visit some friends, write some articles for cash, and to blag myself a job offer at Acorn Computers in Melbourne. I was also suffering from jet lag, culture clash and the hollow feeling you get when you’re just starting a potentially very long trip, so the highlights that follow don’t do Sydney justice. I must go back...

- Sydney harbour is just as beautiful as they say it is. When I landed it was a gorgeous day, the sun was out, and the Harbour Bridge and Opera House were spectacular. It’s also a pretty laid-back place, with none of the traffic that makes London such a grim place to live. Having a coffee overlooking Circular Quay is one of those things you have to do, so I did it, despite the price tag of A$3. They saw me coming, I reckon.

- The next stop: my first taste of an Aussie pub. Bear in mind that it was only about midday when I pitched up, but seeing as my body thought it was late at night, it was fair enough to have a couple. Unfortunately the tap beer was off – they were cleaning the lines – so I settled for a stubby of Victoria Bitter (a stubby being a 375ml bottle). It wasn’t bad stuff, if you like freezing lager, which I figured I’d better, seeing as that’s pretty much all they have in Australia. Ask for a lager, and you’ll get blank stares here; it’s all called bitter, even if it looks, smells and tastes just like lager.

- Sunday, and the heavens opened. Ironically Sunday was Water Conservation Day down in Darling Harbour, with water skiing shows, lots of stands, and a concert by John Williamson, whose folksy tunes about billabongs and gum trees have yet to make it beyond Australia’s borders. Everyone kept going on about how important it is to conserve water because it’s running out, and all the time water was chucking down in torrents. It was, frankly, bizarre.

- If there’s one beautiful sight, it’s a city from above at night. That night I went up the Sydney Centre Point Observation Tower, at that time the tallest man-made structure in the southern hemisphere, but in the shitty weather visibility was pretty well zero. So I waited, as there wasn’t much else to do, and soon the skies cleared and the most amazing sight appeared: Sydney by night. The Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, boats, a wicked lightning storm over Botany Bay – it was stunning.

- After a few days in the Youth Hostel in Glebe I moved to a hostel in King’s Cross, easily the seediest area in Sydney, with sex shows, 24-hour bars and hookers lining the streets; it’s not that scary after Soho and King’s Cross in London, but it was a lot more interesting than Glebe, which was what I wanted. My only memory is of the noisy couple having sex in the room directly above me that night. I swear the whole hostel broke into spontaneous applause when she finally came.

- The following Saturday I climbed the southeast pylon of the Harbour Bridge, for a spectacular view of the city. The only problem was that the rain kicked in just as I got down, so I sheltered for about half an hour before the storm really got going, with thunder and lightning and rain like you’ve never seen. Every time the lightning struck I heard these cheers, and after another fifteen minutes I realised that this was nothing to do with the weather – there was a pub just over the road.

It was great. After a couple of schooners of VB I’d met this South African guy who now lived in Sydney, and we went on a bit of a pub crawl which culminated in us watching the Rugby League final (England vs. Oz) in a pub, live from Wembley. Unfortunately I was so pissed by half time that I had to go home... which was quite fortunate, seeing as Australia won, and they like to rub it in if there are any handy Poms around.

- On Tuesday I contacted a lovely guy called Colin, whom I’d met through work at home, and who’d emigrated to Australia not long before. His story is worth retelling.

Colin is a writer of excellent children’s picture books[1], and he used to live and work in Cumbria, where I got to know him because he used Acorn computers for his work. Anyway, there was this school in Sydney where the teacher, Anne, had bought a copy of his book Looking for Atlantis, and her class had gone wild about it. Then one day, one of the kids asked Anne, ‘Could we meet the author?’ She explained that no, Colin lived in England, so they couldn’t meet him. The kids protested, and asked her why they couldn’t buy a plane ticket for him to fly out, and eventually Anne and her class organised lots of fund-raising in order to pay for Colin to come over for a two-week visit.

So Colin came out to Australia to meet Anne and her classroom of fans, and spent two weeks at the school showing the kids how he draws and writes his books. And guess what? Anne and Colin fell in love, and two weeks after getting back to the UK, Colin had left his unhappy marriage (which was on the point of breaking up anyway), packed up his computer and pens, and moved to Sydney. It’s a real life-affirming story.

Colin and Anne put me up in their house for a week, and it was great – what lovely people. We went to parties, had barbecues in the garden, and it all went far too quickly.

- On my last night in Sydney, before heading off on a tour to Melbourne, I sloped off to the hotel’s bar to see what was making such a huge noise. The name of the band, according to the board, was Jam Right, and boy, were they weird. They kept swapping musicians around, people from the audience kept joining in and singing vocals, and the whole thing seemed to be getting pretty random. It was only after an hour of this I realised the sign actually said Jam Night. Funny how it all started making more sense then...

[1] Though they’re not just for kids, like all the best children’s books. I can’t recommend his books enough; his full name is Colin Thompson. Tell him I sent you...

Sydney to Melbourne

Written: 9 November 1995

So, on Tuesday I set off on a coach tour to Melbourne. The company was called Stray Cat, and it was pretty good, though I saw so much in those three days that most of it is a blur.

The first stop was Canberra. On the surface Canberra appears to be the most boring city in the whole world – it has the same vibe as Milton Keynes, though I presume something happens behind the ordered, dull exterior. We did a tour round Parliament House and watched the Melbourne Cup, the Aussie equivalent of the Grand National, but there were no politicians in the house because of the race. We also stopped off in a shopping mall in Canberra to stock up with beer, which reminded me of the film The Stepford Wives where they replace all the women in the town with robots, and nobody notices. It felt slightly eerie, to be honest.

From Canberra we headed into Namadji National Park, and stopped off in a field full of kangaroos. What funny creatures; we all got off and stalked around, and they were really quite cautious. They’d just look at you until you got a certain distance away, and then they’d lollop away, stop, and start staring at you all over again. I felt miles away from it all.

Not quite as far as I felt when we got to our stop for the night, though: Bolaro sheep station. Talk about the middle of bloody nowhere; you couldn’t see any civilisation for miles in any direction. We made a fire in the main building and all settled round with our beers, just like real bushrangers. I nipped outside for a cigar, and you’ll never guess what I saw: a full rainbow, right in the middle of the night. I thought it must be the beer, so I popped inside to get someone else and showed them first before getting the rest of the team; yes, it really was there. I suppose the moon was just doing the same thing as the sun when you get a daytime rainbow, but it sure looked weird sitting there. Perhaps you get a pot of silver at the end of moon-bows...

Into the Mountains

Wednesday was mainly spent driving through Mt Kosciusko National Park, where Australia’s highest peak stands, shrouded in cloud. We stopped at these gorgeous little towns like Adaminaby, Jindabyne and Thredbo, which are the main resorts in the Australian Alpine area, and as a result they’re beautiful, but deserted in the summer. We passed Lake Hume, which is a man-made lake that stores water in the winter so the Murray River, one of the main rivers through southeast Australia, can be kept at a reasonable level through the summer. The lake fills valleys that were once filled with gum trees, and quite a few of the trees are still there, dead but standing, making it look like a ghost lake. It’s pretty spooky stuff.

Our stop for the night was in Bright, one of the most picturesque places to visit and, fortunately, void of tourists. We had the mother of all barbecues, and guess who got roped into the cooking? I’m now the world’s foremost expert on the Australian Method of Cooking Sausages. One thing that was weird is that Aussies cook chopped pumpkin on their barbies, and it tastes likes smoked carrot. I think I’ll stick to salad in future.

The last day of the trip we climbed Mt Buffalo – the view was amazing – and visited the place where Ned Kelly and his gang used to hang about. In the town where he lived there’s this huge model of him wearing his homemade armour, and it’s possibly the tackiest thing I’ve ever seen; it didn’t stop us all having our photo taken round it, though like good little tourists.

And that night we arrived in Melbourne...

Australia: Victoria

Melbourne

Written: 12 March 1996

That night we arrived in Melbourne, and the next day I rang Acorn to see what they wanted me to do. The next thing you know I’ve been picked up from the hostel, put behind a desk, and given a job... and as if that wasn’t enough, my boss Laurence, his wife Mary and their ten-year-old son Alistair put me up in their lovely house in the eastern suburbs. The day I arrived also happened to be the one Friday of the month when the staff stayed behind for a drink after work, on a sort-of morale-boosting piss-up, which was a pretty good introduction for the new boy, especially as I managed to get invited to a stag night on the Saturday (or buck’s night, as they say in Oz).

Bloody hell, they know how to throw a stag night in Melbourne! The details are a bit hazy, but I know we ended up in a strip joint called Bar 20, and I had to smuggle some shoes out to Laurence because the bouncer refused him entry in his trainers. I’d only been in Melbourne a couple of days and had landed a job, a place to stay, and an invitation to a lap-dancing joint... which didn’t seem too bad, really.

Hanging Out in Melbourne

Life in Melbourne proved to be much like life in any friendly, cultural city. Steady work meant that I could afford to go out regularly, and it wasn’t long before I felt as settled as I had been back home.

Laurence and Mary were incredibly kind, letting me stay for far too long, and Chris, a friend of Laurence’s, put me up for a week in his delightful house in Clifton Hill. Meanwhile drinking sessions with Andy (a friend I made at work), and Sheridan and Elizabeth (friends of Andy) opened up areas of the city that I definitely wouldn’t have found using my guidebook. Memories follow, in no particular order, in the hope that they will accidentally describe Melbourne:

- One Saturday we went up into the Dandenongs, the mountain range round the northeast of Melbourne, and visited a little village called Olinda. What a time warp! It’s full of these strange little shops and art galleries that sell aromatherapy oils, incense and strange furniture from India; I found the whole thing most entertaining, especially the peaceful hippies running the shops. Far out, man.

- It wasn’t long before I realised I needed to do some real exercise, so I took up jogging every weekday night, through the State Park in Doncaster East. There aren’t many people in Europe who can say they go jogging after work and see kangaroos, brightly coloured parrots, rabbits, creeks, gum trees and all of the rest of the park’s sights. It sure beats jogging round London, and it’s a lot healthier.

- Melbourne has a whole street full of cake shops, the famous Myer’s Christmas windows (Myer’s is a department store and its Christmas window displays are a part of Australian shopping culture), trams, the bay (which is the size of Somerset, so it’s not so much a bay, more a little sea) and a lovely skyline. Australian cities seem to rise out of nowhere, because the suburbs are so flat, though clear weather helps with the view, too.

- Chris once showed me his collection of Tasmanian postcards, to get me in the mood for when I went there in the New Year. But these weren’t ordinary Tasmanian postcards: they were black and white postcards from the turn of the century. That’s interesting in its own right, but the most incredible thing was that a lot of them were written on; they were postcards from Chris’ grandfather to his grandmother, before they were married, and when grandfather was in Tasmania and she was on the ‘northern island’, as Tasmanians sometimes refer to mainland Australia. The style of writing was superb, and so formal, but they were so obviously love letters. Try this for a quote: ‘I hope you will come to stay soon, for I am dead without you.’ It was just like something out of Mills and Boon, 1911. This island nation does have a history, after all.

- Melbourne is a very arty place: it’s more like Covent Garden and the West End, whereas Sydney is more like the Houses of Parliament and Tower Bridge, if you see what I mean. Melbourne has these lovely trams everywhere, which are easier to use than buses, and are much more fun. There’s even a restaurant tram, and a free tram for tourists. The railway network is also good, and you can get two-hour tickets for A$2.10 and all-day tickets for A$4.10 that enable you to use buses, trains and trams, all for the one price. It’s quite excellent, and a great way to get to see the city. There’s something reassuring about the way the tram has to follow tracks, so you know exactly where it is going to go...

- I quickly realised why it’s important to get up early on Christmas Day in Australia. The sun was up, the sky was really clear, and it was hot, really hot. As we sat on the veranda, munching freshly cooked ham and melon and basking in the sun, I really felt that Christmas in the sun was different. Sure, we had a huge turkey, roast potatoes, presents round the tree, and port after Christmas pud, but we also had a swim in the outdoor pool before lunch, a walk into the State Park to play with Alistair’s new Frisbee, and had to make sure the sunblock was on thick.

- At the risk of sounding a bit slushy, I must mention Laurence and Mary’s present to me for Christmas 1995. It was a bush hat that folded up into a little bag and could be sat on, crushed or folded as much as you like, and it bounced back into shape without any problem. A wide-brimmed hat is an essential piece of the Australian garb, and I loved my hat dearly, so much so that when it finally died after my voyage to Polynesia, I bought an identical hat in Brisbane, which travelled throughout Asia with me. I am now officially a card-carrying fan of the Australian bush hat.

- Wilson’s Promontory, the National Park to the southeast of Melbourne and the southernmost point of mainland Australia, is gorgeous, with beaches that blow the mind and moody mountains as a backdrop. The beach we visited is called Squeaky Beach, because the sand is so clean it squeaks as you walk on it, and I can confirm that this is indeed the case. Alistair and I had huge wads of fun boogie boarding on the two-metre waves, with great success. For the uninitiated, boogie boarding is like surfing, but you just lie on the board on your front, and ride the crests of the waves straight onto the beach. You actually go pretty fast as you glide the foam onto the sand, and it’s the next best thing to surfing; anyone can do it without any training.

- The Big Day Out on Friday 26th January was, indeed, a big day out. Andy and I went together, along with his girlfriend Elizabeth and her brother Alan; we lost Alan pretty early on, but the three of us spent a most enjoyable day watching Australian, American and English bands thrash around in the Melbourne Showgrounds. It was good to see some contemporary Aussie bands after the Tassie folk.

- I went to the polling booth during the Federal Elections, and even put a voting slip into the ballot box (it was Andy’s, not mine, I hasten to add before I get arrested). The politics in Oz was almost American; the party political adverts only went on about how crap the other party was, and I couldn’t remember hearing about any real policies. Shoddy is the word that springs to mind.

An English View of Australia

Written: 27 November 1995

When talking to people in Australia – people who actually live here, rather than tourists – you notice how different things are between Australia and England, even though, on the surface, they can seem almost anticlimactically similar.

Take Chris, a recently divorced university researcher who knows Laurence through Acorn. He lives in a lovely old house near the centre of Melbourne; I’m probably going to be staying with him for a couple of weeks while the Hardwicks take Laurence’s parents to Ayers Rock. Last Sunday Laurence, Mary, Alistair (Laurence and Mary’s ten-year old son), Chris and myself went off to St Kilda beach to stroll in the sun and look at the market, but Alistair felt sick – he’d been off school with a virus for the latter half of the week – so they left me with Chris to explore.

Chris is a quiet man who is rediscovering what it means to be single and in a big city, and as we were hanging out on St Kilda beach looking at the women in their swimsuits – like all men do on the beach, regardless of what they say – he commented how interesting it was to bump into someone who was looking at Melbourne for the first time. By my interest in the city I was helping him rediscover places that he’d forgotten about; he’s lived here for decades, but in the same way that I didn’t explore huge tracts of London when I lived there, he felt he’d not been seeing as much of Melbourne as he could have done.

This is where the little differences cropped up. I was telling him what I found fascinating about the place, and Australia in general, and he’d never thought of it that way. For example, most people know that in the southern hemisphere the sun goes round from east to west via the north side of the sky, as opposed to the south in the northern, and this is why people always get their sense of direction mixed up when they swap hemispheres. But not a lot of people know that runner beans grow round poles in a different direction in each of the hemispheres, because they follow the light round the poles. Little things like that are really weird to a stranger.

Houses and Cities

Another big difference that is really obvious to a Pom is that in Australia all the houses are flat. There’s so much space, there’s no need to build multi-storey buildings, so ninety-nine per cent of the houses are bungalows; in fact, nobody uses the word ‘bungalow’, they’re all just ‘houses’. Sure, some areas have houses with stairs, and there are skyscrapers in the city centres, but the suburbs are just full of flat houses with red roofs. It also means you can see all the trees between the houses, so although the amount of greenery in suburbia isn’t hugely different to that in the UK, you can actually see it when you look over the city.

The upshot? Every suburb in Australia looks the same, and it looks pretty boring too – red roofs and gum trees, acre after acre. If you’ve seen Neighbours, then you’ve seen most of the modern suburbs in Oz, though there are obviously exceptions, such as Balmain in Sydney. Here I visited some friends of my mum’s who had stairs, which I’m sure they regularly showed off to unbelieving visitors...

Another legacy of modern buildings and design is that all Australian cities (except inner Sydney) are built on a grid road system, so every junction is a crossroads. In the UK every junction is different (except in Milton Keynes) so it’s relatively easy to find your way around by memory, but here it’s impossible; every junction looks identical, and when you consider the number of orthogonal roads around, there’s a lot of grid to get lost in. It’s a nightmare when you’re used to windy roads and junctions with character. Add in Melbourne’s tram system – you have to turn right from the left-hand lane, so you’re not sitting in the central tram lane – and driving becomes a challenge, shall we say. Sometimes I’d rather have London’s chaos than Melbourne’s grid, because it’s more interesting, but to be fair grid systems are far better suited to traffic... they’re just a bit boring.

Talking of driving, get this: a lot of the cars here run on gas. Not gasoline, but real gas. They have big tanks in the back, and petrol stations have these special pressurised hoses that clamp onto the car and pump in liquid gas at about 20¢ per litre (about 10p). It’s amazing stuff, and you wonder why it’s not available in England.

The way people approach university is totally different, too. There isn’t any such thing as free further education here, so most students stay at home and go to their local university, which also makes sense considering the size of the country. The only problem is that you keep coming across these 21-year-olds who haven’t got a clue about coping for themselves, because they’ve never left home, or got into life as a student. They simply stay with mum and dad until they get a job, and then they buy a house, and some parents are really protective. Can you imagine a 23-year old saying, ‘I can’t stay out too late, my parents are expecting me back?’ Nor could I until I came to Oz...

House buying is strange too. Here people don’t tend to buy houses, they buy plots of land, and when they’ve got enough money to start building, they do just that. As a result you get these housing estates with empty, overgrown plots, surrounded by neat little suburban gardens and twee red roofs, which looks kind of odd. Apparently in the north you get people building houses in stages; because it’s so hot, they can build the roof on pillars, then fill in the walls, then partition the rooms, then add water and electricity, all in stages that spread over years. That must be a wacky sight, roofs without walls in the bush...

Television

Television is a different world, too. There are plenty of English programmes on the Australian networks – one night we had To the Manor Born followed by The Good Life, with Heartbeat on the other side – but there are loads more advert breaks than at home, and they repeat the same adverts all the time. What happens is that you get companies sponsoring certain programmes, and part of the deal is that the company gets its adverts in the break; this means you see the same advert maybe four or five times an hour, which is pretty tiring. Another annoying habit is the advert break two minutes before the programme finishes, so if you want to watch the end of anything, you have to sit through those bloody adverts again. It really makes you appreciate the BBC.

Another confusing thing for the English visitor to Australia are all the signs saying ‘Cheap Manchester’ and ‘Huge Manchester Sale’ – even ‘Best Deals On Manchester Inside’. This one took me a long time to work out, but ‘Manchester’ is what Australians call linen, bed sheets and so on, presumably because they used to be imported from Manchester. This must be the only place in the world where you can put your Manchester in the washing machine and wash all the crap out of it...

Everyone drinks champagne here, too. Not the French stuff – anyone caught with French wine would be a social outcast after the nuclear blasts in the Pacific – but Australian champagne, which is rather a nice drop, to be honest. The main thing, though, is how cheap it is; you can get a good bottle of champagne for £5, and it goes as low as £3 per bottle. Back home we’re conditioned to think that champagne is expensive and for special occasions, but with prices like this, you can drink it all the time.

There are lots of other little things you notice about Australia, too. Absolutely nobody watches Neighbours or Home and Away except little kids, and nobody can quite believe that the Poms love it so much.

Lots of trees in Australia (gum trees, mainly) don’t shed their leaves in autumn; instead, they shed their bark in spring. As a result Australia is very green, much more so than people expect, and it’s green all year round. OK, the red centre is desert, but there’s a lot of rainforest and green parkland about.

People in uniform, like policemen and traffic wardens, wear shorts when the weather’s hot. Businessmen also wear suits with shorts, which can be a bit of a surprise; you keep thinking they’ve put on the wrong pair of trousers! There’s also an interesting approach to business called the ‘weekend beach attitude’; how can you get stressed about the job when you know you’re going to spend the weekend soaking up the sun on the beach? It’s great for relaxing, but not so good for hammering out a difficult business matter on a Friday afternoon.

Some things are the same, though. The national dishes (if there are such things) are pie ‘n’ chips and fish ‘n’ chips, and the way they cook them is just like in the UK (though the fish is normally much better). And do you know what the biggest news stories were last week? No, nothing to do with the Keating government or the Asian economic summit. The two headline grabbers were Princess Di and her Panorama interview, and the release of the first new Beatles material in 25 years. In some respects, I hardly felt that I’d left England.

The Pig Hunt

Written: 3 January 1996

It wasn’t the best of starts, by any standards. If we’d have known that the God of Pig Hunting Trips was looking down, going, ‘Sorry, lads, can’t help you,’ we would have thought twice. Cool, hip and armed with bows we might have been, but clairvoyant we were not.

I used to reckon I knew how to handle long distances; driving between London and Macclesfield every week for almost two years is good training, but nothing prepares you for how mind-bogglingly large Australia is, especially when you drive round it. The three-day trip I made from Sydney to Melbourne gave me an idea, but the pig hunt really drove it home. In outback driving, size is everything.

The place we planned to hunt for pigs is 1111km from Melbourne. It’s called Gunnedah, and it’s 250km west of the coast from Port Macquarie, which is 300km north of Sydney. The nearest place of merit is Tamworth, the Australian home of country and western music. Yes, it’s remote.

Warning Signs

We set off early on Boxing Day in two cars. One, Andy’s, carried Andy, Rick and me, while the other car, Dave’s, carried Dave and Steve. Five of us, two cars, loads of stuff... and lots of kilometres.

At about 9am on Boxing Day, Andy’s battery light started flashing, but as his car was pretty old and knackered, he said it was just a dodgy connection. We fixed it by ripping a strip off a cigarette packet, writing ‘OK’ on it, and sticking it over the light – out of sight, out of mind...

So when Dave pulled over in front of us at 9.30am with smoke billowing out of his bonnet, we thought, ‘No worries, we’ll fix this.’ One of the hoses connecting the engine to the radiator had split, so we did a quick roadside fix by fitting a new hose and refilling the radiator, and set off again.

It started to dawn on us that things were not going according to plan when Dave had to pull over again because the engine was knocking seriously. A quick look under the bonnet, and we’d blown a gasket: oil was dripping out, so we had to sort out a rescue. Luckily Dave was a member of the NRMA – the Aussie equivalent to the AA – so Andy, Rick and I set off for Morundah, the nearest blob on the map, to find a phone.

Just a quick word about the outback. It’s empty. The bleak, dry landscape goes on forever, the sun is scorching, and everything is a very, very long way away from everywhere. Morundah is a little place, and everything was shut, it being Boxing Day. Even the pub was shut, as the tumbleweed blew across its porch. Nobody was going to be driving through for a while, it seemed.

At least the public phone worked, which is more than can be said for Andy’s car. It was dead; the battery hadn’t been charging, and our loud music had obviously drained all the juice out of it. A moral is that sticking ‘OK’ over your battery light doesn’t fix the battery; we had to push start the thing, but thankfully made it back to Dave’s wreck.

I say wreck, because when the guy from the NRMA turned up, he had a look at the engine, turned it over, and announced in the blunt way that Australians do, ‘It’s fucked.’ The engine was blown, and it wasn’t going anywhere. We put Dave’s battery in Andy’s car and set off for Narrandera, the nearest place with life in it. Luckily there was room at the local caravan park, so we pitched our tents and resigned ourselves to the Aussie solution to all woes: get pissed down the local pub.

Rental Cars

The following day we got to the local wreckers and miraculously found a new alternator for Andy, which he fitted. At least one car was working now, but Dave’s wasn’t so easy. Yes, the local wrecker could get a new engine by tomorrow, but the garage couldn’t fit it until 2nd January. We had lost one car. Luckily there was a travel agent that rented cars, so we booked one to arrive the next day, and settled into life at the campsite, with its crazy swimming pool with huge slide and local Aussie holidaymakers. The people opposite had been coming to the same caravan park for 34 years without a change, and they thought we were a travelling rock group, which was kind of cool.

That night, as we were sitting round the tents – mine, incidentally, I borrowed from Chris, and it had no groundsheet, and didn’t even touch the ground in places – one of us spotted this thing in the tree next to us. I went over and it was a possum, this friendly thing about the size of a cat, with big, wide eyes and a mouse-like face. It was so sweet, and even ate a bit of food from us. I did the tourist bit and got some photos... what a cutie!

We also had loads of cicadas around the site, making a racket all the time. These little critters are one of the less desirable creatures you might meet; they’re like massive flies, with bodies about an inch-and-a-half long, and huge wings that make masses of noise. As a moth-fearer, for me they’re right up there with boring drunks and Barratt homes as things to avoid. They start their lives living in the ground as wingless bugs, and when they emerge they climb the nearest tall thing (normally a tree), shed their outer skin, unfold their wings and fly away. They leave the skin stuck to the tree, so when you get up in the morning, the trees look like they’re covered in huge bugs. It isn’t particularly pleasant...

By Thursday we were behind schedule, but back on the road. I joined Dave and Steve in the hire car because I had used my visa card to get it and what a difference! It had air conditioning! Power steering! An automatic gearbox! I almost couldn’t believe it was a Ford.

The air conditioning was, it turned out, an absolute blessing. It gets incredibly hot in inland Australia, and it got hotter and hotter as we headed north, heading through such delightful places as Dead Bird Lead Creek and Poisoned Waterhole Creek. By the time we got to Gunnedah, well after dark, Andy and Rick were knackered, but we chosen three were saved by the godly gift of air-con.

Those beers in the pub were among the best I’ve ever had, not because of the beer itself, but because they were cold, wet and hit the spot just right. Little did we care that a sign outside declared that this little pub was proud to be the host for the 1995 New South Wales Billy Boiling Finals[1], because the beer was gorgeous. We ended up staying in a field at the back of town, as it was too late to bother with a caravan park, so we pitched our tents by the local river, and got some take-out stubbies from the pub. This field had a good point and a bad point.

The good point was that it was out of town, so the view of the sky at night was incredible. You haven’t seen the stars until you’ve seen them in the middle of nowhere, and from the southern hemisphere you get a great view of the Milky Way stretching across the sky; it’s easy to see where it gets its name. We also saw some shooting stars; I loved it.

The bad point was that we weren’t alone. Rivers mean bugs, and with my tent being so, well, perfunctory, I got bitten to pieces. In fact, I can’t remember ever getting so many bites; on my left foot alone I had 20 itchy blotches in the morning. The others didn’t get bitten at all, even Rick who shared my tent; obviously Pom is a delicacy for bugs down here.

Police Marksmen

On Friday we moved camp to a site called Lake Keepit, and having seen the lake, that’s exactly what you could do with it. The brochure showed it as much bluer, but when we went for a swim we found muddy water full of strange little plants. Perfectly healthy and safe, but very strange on the feet, so I decided I needed some thongs (that’s flip-flops, or sandals, not sexy underwear, by the way).

Thongs need shops, so Dave and I drove to Gunnedah, with the additional mission of finding out where the best hunting territory would be. Would you believe that at the first petrol station we stopped at (or ‘servo’ as they’re called here) the attendant knew the president of the local bow-hunting club, and in fact he’d just filled up his car there. He suggested the tourist information bureau, where we managed to get this guy’s number.

So we rang the number, and got the local police station; the bloke we were after was a policeman, and he would meet us at the station in half an hour. We met him and had a chat about where to go, and found out that, in New South Wales, crossbows are illegal, so we couldn’t use the two bows we’d brought, making us one bow short. Then the policeman only offered to lend us his bow so we could all hunt – what a champion! We left for the campsite content in the knowledge that we were well in with the local coppers.

That night we went for real Aussie burgers, cooked in a pan in the dying sunlight. Guess what the secret ingredient of Aussie burgers is? That’s right: add beer. Bloody good they were too, but there was a bit of a worry when Dave was cutting up the onions on the barbecue plate, and he spotted a redback spider sitting there, watching him. Redbacks are the second most deadly spider in Australia, and untreated bites can be fatal, so we just let it be. Actually, they only bite if disturbed, but you never know. We’re all still alive, so it obviously didn’t crawl into the burgers.

Real Aussie burgers were followed by a real Aussie electrical storm. Andy and I sat in the car, watching huge lightning strikes and major rain action. Miraculously my tent survived reasonably intact, but the ants decided to take refuge in my sleeping bag... at least it seemed they did, judging by the number of new bites on my arms and legs in the morning. Remember, the outback has teeth.

Dripping Rock

Following the policeman’s advice, on Saturday we headed off for a place called Dripping Rock, 30km from Gunnedah, near the charmingly named town of Boggabri. Dripping Rock is a hell of a long way from everywhere; we had to travel for an hour down the dirtiest dirt tracks I’ve ever seen, and eventually we had to give up and stop, as the holes in the road were getting as big as the rocks beside them. Another wicked storm had just started up too, flooding sections of the road and making the fords a little too big for the Ford, but luckily we found a suitable camping spot on a little bug-free stream, and settled in for the night.

Sunday awoke to bright, hot, sticky sunshine. The area we were in was north enough to be sub-tropical, which means they don’t have summer and winter, they have the wet season and the dry season, and it’s turning wet right about now. Humidity and storms are the order of the day, and boy it’s hot. With this in mind we headed for Dripping Rock, which is one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen.

Imagine a semi-circular cliff, 50m high, with bush forest covering the area underneath, where a waterfall drops into a little lake at the bottom. Now imagine that this cliff is made of sedimentary rock, so the water seeps through and creates a waterfall all around a portion of the cliff, and that’s Dripping Rock. There was even a ledge going all around the cliff, halfway up, which we could easily walk around. It was like a piece of paradise, and was only a couple of minutes’ walk from our camp; in fact, the pond flowed into the stream that we camped beside.

The ledge proved to be most useful, as it went behind the waterfall and let you climb onto the rocks directly below the water; it formed a natural shower, which we used as much as possible. We would have gone swimming in the lake, but Andy had a go and got a leech on his big toe, so we stuck to showering. What a beautiful place!

As was the countryside around, where we hunted. Hills and valleys stretched as far as the eye could see, with trees everywhere, and spiders and bugs all over the place. The hunting consisted of going out in camouflage gear, armed with bow and quiver of arrows, and stalking animals. Unfortunately we’d lost so much time through breakdowns that we didn’t have time for lots of hunts, so we didn’t get to scour the area and work out the animals’ habits, but I spotted a couple of wallabies that got away, and found another one we stalked for about an hour, before losing it.

Imagine the thrill of walking silently up a four-wheel drive track, and finding a couple of grey wallabies at the top, oblivious to your presence. It’s incredible, even if, like me, you’re mentally and physically incapable of killing for sport – I was there for the stalking, in much the same way people pretend to be in the army at weekends and then go back to their accountancy jobs on Monday morning. Luckily (from my point of view, anyway) the only kills we got between us was a rabbit under the wheels on the way up, and a couple of budgies in the car radiator on the way back, so I didn’t feel too guilty.

New Year’s Eve

On New Year’s Eve we headed out to Gunnedah to party with the country locals, and party we did. I wish I could tell you more about what happened, but it’s all a bit of a blur, like all good parties. I do know that we headed out to Dripping Rock after returning in the wee hours, where the others lit a fire, and I fell asleep. The only reason I know we went to Dripping Rock is that I woke up there at dawn, one of the mellowest ways of waking up to the New Year that I’ve experienced.

We spent New Year’s Day hunting, and again we only spotted wallabies and didn’t shoot anything. It also rained like buggery; you’ve never been soaked until you’ve been soaked in an Australian forest. We spotted a funnel web spider – the most poisonous spider in Australia – and a whole family of redbacks, complete with baby sacks, all right next to where we’d been sleeping. In the outback, it doesn’t pay to be scared of spiders.

Tuesday signalled the end of the hunt, and the start of the long journey back. It was pretty uneventful, except for a huge accident that blocked the freeway for an hour, and we camped at Narrandera for, hopefully, the last time.

The next day we went to pick up Dave’s car, only to find that not only had the engine blown, but so had the radiator. Guess what the guy in the radiator shop said about the radiator? ‘It’s fucked, mate.’ And the guy in the wreckers? ‘It’s totally fucked.’ Luckily we found a replacement at the wrecker’s, and eventually got home to things like traffic lights, houses, people and other strangely urban concepts. It really was quite a special trip...

[1] A billy is a pot of water, and billy boiling is the art of boiling a pot of water. Country folk: they be mighty strange.

Lawbreaker

Written: 8 January 1996

I’m sorry, dear parents. You’ve spent 25 years bringing up your middle son to respect the system, and to live life without breaking any laws (or, at the very least, to make sure you don’t get caught if you do). I’m sorry to say that I have failed you miserably, and I can’t apologise enough that your son is a criminal, for on Monday 8th January, the Melbourne police arrested me. For jaywalking.

There can be no excuse. I heinously ignored the little red man at the crossing, and took the law of the land into my own hands as I crossed the completely traffic-free road to the other side. I can attach no blame to the complete bastard copper who pulled me over and gave me a A$15 dollar fine for contravening the traffic code of 1967. The fact that my Aussie friends couldn’t believe it when I told them, and that they didn’t know it was a crime either, can be no excuse. I hang my head in humility.

Bloody jaywalking! Whatever next? Being banged in a cell for talking too loudly, or smoking in the street? If I never get out of Australia, and you have to plead with the British Consulate to try to get me out of jail, I can only apologise in advance...

Australia: Tasmania

Dock of the Bay

Written: 12 January 1996

Having heard good things about Tasmania, I flew to Hobart, the state capital – it’s a short one-hour flight from Melbourne, and it’s easier (and cheaper) to fly than the 14-hour ferry trip aboard The Spirit of Tasmania. It wasn’t more than two hours into my visit that things began to happen, and I mean happen.

It all kicked off as I was wandering along the dockside in Hobart, heading towards this interesting-sounding heavy rock band who were playing in a warehouse on the quay – I never turn down the chance to find original local music, however loud the amps. I went over to the entrance, only to find a small crowd hanging round a corner of the dock, all looking down into the water. ‘There’s a car down there,’ said one observer, though there wasn’t anything to be seen except a couple of worried-looking men swimming to shore, carrying a little girl to a boat.

My neighbour at the dock told me what had happened. A car had been driving along the road by the dock, and had failed to stop at a pedestrian crossing, hitting a man crossing the road and flinging him off onto the sidewalk. The car then swerved through the car park that lined the dock, and shot straight over the side into the water, narrowly missing two kids who were sitting there.

Right next to the dock was a skateboard competition in full flow, and two skateboarders dived into the water and managed to open the back seat and let a little girl out, whom they carried to the shore: she was the lucky one. The car had sunk about five metres into the black water, so they couldn’t dive back down to it, but obviously the driver was still in there, apparently with another passenger. The police were soon on the scene, and it wasn’t long before the frogmen were in the dock.

I’d never seen dead bodies before. The first one up was an overweight woman in a black dress. It struck me how incredibly white she looked compared to her clothes. She was closely followed by an old woman, who looked just as pale, trailing white vomit in her wake while her eyes rolled lazily in her head. CPR ensued, and eventually they were carted off in ambulances. They were dead on arrival.

And all the time this heavy rock band was playing away in the background. Some requiem, eh.

Hobart

Written: 12 January 1996

My visit to Hobart had started off in strange fashion, and it continued to surprise me. The next incident was at a pub called Knopwood’s Retreat, where I was sitting outside having a nice, peaceful Cascade (the local Tasmanian brew, which is apparently made from the purest water in the world – it certainly tastes good). These two guys were sitting a couple of tables down from me, and an argument erupted, about nothing in particular. It got a bit noisy, and then one guy threatened the other – who was trying to calm it down, to be honest – and the publican jumped in to calm it down. This failed, so she called the police. Meanwhile the noisy one kicked over the calmer one’s bike, and walked off in a huff, and the calmer one got on his bike – a moped, really – and drove off down the road. Just at that moment the police arrived, and the publican pointed out that one of the troublemakers was heading off on a bike. The next thing you know it’s all red and blue flashing lights and screeching tyres, and the police car shot off after the bike.

We all thought that was the end of it – the publican even got a round of applause – but, whaddya know, two minutes later this yellow moped screamed past, followed by a cop car, closely followed by another copper. It turned out one of the men – the touchy one – was trying to come off heroin using methadone, which is bound to wind you up, I guess.

The entertainment was so good I decided to stay for another beer, it being rather good in Tassie. As is the way with pubs, I bumped into this old English guy in the pisser with whom I struck up a conversation, and eventually joined for some more beer. Dicky was his name, and he was out having a beer with his son, Nick, who had emigrated to Sydney; Dicky was on holiday visiting his son, and they’d both come to Tassie for a holiday. What a nice couple of people; they even gave me a lift to the hostel, which was about 2km out of town, which isn’t a particularly big walk, but it’s a whole lot bigger when you’re zigzagging in a contented stupor.

Narryna

That night I decided I’d like to visit the Cygnet Folk Festival, a three-day collection of folkies and hippies on the south coast of Tassie; it seemed like a good place to find some real Australian music. However, the coach didn’t leave until late the next afternoon, so there was time to kill on Friday. I spent this visiting a folk museum in Battery Point called Narryna. The museum is actually a house built in 1836 that has been restored and filled with lots of interesting historical bits and bobs from the colonial days, and I struggled up the hill to the place carrying my overstuffed backpack.

You have to ring the doorbell to get in, and this quiet little man comes and lets you in. I obviously looked knackered as I dumped my bag, and I struck up a conversation with the guide as he asked me where I was from. I told him I was from London – I always do, because people have heard of London, and I can’t be bothered to explain about the Midlands, when they all think Liverpool is a suburb of London – and he told me about the history of the house. Five minutes later he looked at me and said, ‘You’re not originally from London, though, are you?’

Impressive deduction: I assumed he’d spotted an accent, and said so, but he said, ‘No, it’s just that you’ve got a sense of humour.’ Which was an interesting take on events...

Wandering round Narryna was delightful and very interesting. There were some great bits, with old collections of homeopathic medicines, and ancient books on etiquette, but the best part was when the guide invited me to have a cup of tea with him. It turned out he was a real Anglophile, and we sat and chatted for a couple of hours in the (authentically old) kitchen while the other visitors looked around us and assumed I was part of the staff. What a nice bloke he was; he gave me some great hints on what to see, and I told him the best parts of the UK to visit. He was planning to visit in about a year, and he said he knew that when he eventually got to England, he’d stay there forever. I hope he does.

Cygnet

Written: 16 January 1996

The search for traditional Australian music was beginning to feel like an impossible task. The contemporary Australian bands I’d come across on Triple J[1] were great, but the only rootsy music I’d heard was didgeridoo music packaged up for tourists, and myriad chill-out albums with titles like Tropical Rainforest, Red Desert and other such inspiring names. I wanted to discover music from the days of convicts and colonies, and the Huon Folk Festival in Cygnet seemed the perfect place to try.

The coach from Hobart to Cygnet passed through truly gorgeous countryside – Tasmania is one of the most beautiful states in Oz – and eventually I ended up in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere called Huonville, waiting for the only bus out to Cygnet. Cygnet is very near the coast and only has a population of 960, which might give you a vague idea of how isolated it is, so I killed time waiting for the bus by buying a copy of the Hobart Mercury, to find out what had happened to the two women in the car accident. I read with a sinking feeling that they were dead on arrival, and tucked away in the depths of the photo on the front page was me, peering out from under my bush hat, gawping into the dock along with everyone else. It was rather unnerving, to be honest.

The Metropolis of Cygnet

I eventually got to the hostel on Friday night, a lovely place perched on the side of a valley 2km out of Cygnet. It was beautiful – the view down the valley to Cradoc was spectacular, and the perfect setting for a folk festival. The people at the hostel were very friendly, especially three of them: Tommy from Ireland, who taught English at Sydney University and was on summer vacation, and Cathy and Maureen, both lawyers from Adelaide. It wasn’t long before the four of us were heading into town to check out the food and the folk scene, accompanied by a fifth hosteller called James, who was buzzing with entertaining stories about how he’d slept on the beach at Broome for six blissful weeks...

The pizza restaurant – the only food place open late at night – was a complete delight. The waitress described the pizzas as being more like gourmet meals with pizza bases, and after some live entertainment from a guitarist whose blistering talent was matched only by his impressive baldness, she was proved right. Meanwhile James had bumped into a friend of his whom he hadn’t seen for a year and who was heading off drinking, so we all wandered off to check out the pubs.

Country folk don’t muck about with silly pub names: the three pubs in Cygnet are called Bottom Pub, Middle Pub and Top Pub, for geographically obvious reasons. Just like beer fat, everything seems to congregate around the middle, so after sampling the local brews in all three, we settled for the spacious Middle Pub, and this was where my eyes were really opened.

Sure, I’ve seen folkies in pubs before. The Normandy Hotel in Melbourne, where Chris and I went a few times when I was staying with him, had a bunch of locals who got together to play jigs and reels, but that was more the sort of music that stayed in the background and made you glad that it did. In Cygnet, however, the whole pub revolved round the folk circle, with all these singers, fiddlers, guitarists, accordion players, penny whistlers, mandolin players and goodness knows what else... you name it, it was there, right down to the double bass. At first I thought the whole thing was rather random, but the way it works is that when someone finishes their song, someone else starts up, either as a solo, or as a riff (for want of a better word) and everyone gradually joins in. It’s all from memory, and it’s fascinating to watch. I sat there with Tommy, Cathy and Mo until about three in the morning, soaking up the atmosphere and the Cascade Draught. Before long James had disappeared into the night, and we decided to weave our way home to catch some sleep.

Scrumpy and Love

That set the scene, really. The next day we bought tickets for the various concerts and marquees around, and just went from pub to concert to pub to concert, meeting people on the way. We bumped into James and found out he’d stayed in a teepee that night, which had really set off his hay fever, so he was looking for the chemist; the poor bugger’s face was like a balloon. There were some stunningly good performers on offer, such as Alistair Hulett, a brilliant nationalist Scottish singer; Danny Spooner, an overweight, overbearing Londoner; and the Fagans, a prodigiously talented family ensemble that elicited as much jealousy as joy from the other performers. I’d never heard of any of these people before, and it made it all the more fascinating to discover them.

There was one more element of folk festivals that, as yet, we hadn’t managed to track down: scrumpy. As if by magic, we bumped into a stall in the Middle Pub that served 10oz glasses of scrumpy for A$2, with a variety of brews, all with different flavours, and all at nine per cent alcohol. It tasted divine, so while the girls headed off to a concert in the Town Hall, Tommy and I stayed in the Middle Pub to sample the wares and enjoy the music.

And that’s when Tommy, bless him, fell in love, and I learned how to make a farting sound in a didgeridoo, though not necessarily in that order. I started chatting to these two guys at the bar, one of whom was playing his didge, and he told me how it had taken him four weeks to get the hang of the circular breathing technique required to play it properly. He let me have a go, but I quite literally sounded shit, not to anyone’s great surprise.

Tommy, meanwhile, had spotted these two lovely girls sitting in a corner, enjoying the folk gathering in the next room, so we went over to chat to them. The man from Ireland was right, too: they were lovely, and it was obvious that he was falling for Verity Rose, the cutest one. It was a good sign that they walked up the hill with us as we headed home after a long night drinking scrumpy, before peeling off to head back to their campsite. As Tommy said, while walking the final 3km back to the hostel at dawn, ‘I’m a gone man.’ Bless him.

That walk was a hell of an effort, though. Dawn was breaking as we trudged up the hill, but the view was delightful. The valley bottom (which we were above) was filled with low cloud, so we could see right down the river, with this cotton-wool effect of the fog slowly evaporating as the sun rose. I saved a little bird’s life on the way, by removing some wire that its foot was tangled up in, and when we got back to the hostel, sleep wasn’t long in coming.

Folk Remedies

The formula for Sunday was similar, except Mo and Cathy had to fly back to the mainland, leaving just Tommy and me to fly the folkie flag. We spotted James in the street, on his way back from visiting the local Russian witch; she’d prescribed him some herbal drops that had completely sorted out the problem... which, funnily enough, seemed perfectly normal and in order.

After a truly excellent concert on Sunday afternoon, we headed up to the Middle Pub for the last session, and a real session it was. To Tommy’s eternal delight we spotted Verity and her two friends, so he set about charming the love of his life while the rest of us settled into the scrumpy. Then – horror of horrors – the other girls decided that, as they had to be up early to pick fruit in the morning, they had to go to bed, so I was faced with staying with Tommy and Verity and being gooseberry of the month, or going off to find another spot to explore. Being tactful I chose the latter option, and this is when the good god of folkies smiled on me.

There were two rooms at the Middle Pub: one, the large one, was where we had spent most of our time, and where the big folk sessions were happening, but the other, a small room on the other side of the pub, was where the festival performers had decided to gather to play. I spotted a gap in the corner by the bar, and after telling Tommy that I was going to join in the session, I slunk in with my scrumpy.

What an experience! The session was all singing, which is the best type because people listen to the songs then, and you can sing anything you like: folk songs, ballads, the works. Anyone can sing, and anyone is welcome, and after a bit more scrumpy – well, OK, a lot – I realised I wanted to sing a song. The only problem was that I didn’t know any folk songs from memory, so I thought it appropriate to educate the cream of Antipodean folk with some Billy Bragg, the Big-nosed Bard from Barking. So I started to sing Valentine’s Day is Over, just me with no instruments...

Someday boy you’ll reap what you sow,

You’ll catch a cold and be on your own,

And you will see that what’s wrong with me

Is wrong with everyone that

You want to play your little games on.

Poetry and flowers, pretty words and threats,

You’ve gone to the dogs again and I’m not placing bets

On you coming home tonight anything but blind...

And at that line the man whom everyone had been referring to as the ‘Master of Ceremonies’ – an ancient guy called Colin who was obviously highly respected as an elder of the festival – shouted out, ‘That’s me!’ referring to being ‘anything but blind’ (drunk), and it totally threw me. I had a complete mind-blank as to the rest of the song, but they all wanted me to continue, so I finished off the chorus, and they loved it. Imagine: me, a folk singer! Thank God I was drunk...

Tommy soon reappeared, having arranged to meet Verity the next morning, but eventually the landlord closed the pub and the session deteriorated, so we hung around outside for a while, trying to put off the long walk back to the hostel. It was here that us dregs left over from the session continued to sing for a couple of hours, watching dawn creep slowly over the mountains.

The next thing you know half the dregs have wandered off, leaving four of us: me, Tommy and these two charming middle-aged women, Delores and Moya, who had heard us sing and had sung themselves. Just as I was about to fall asleep on my feet – or on the steps of the pub, to be more accurate – they suggested that, as they had a car, perhaps we would like to come to their friend’s house for breakfast, where they were staying. Of course we would!

Home Sweet Home

You’ve never seen anything like it. The house sat on the shore of the river that flows through Cygnet, quite a long way from the town, where the river looks more like the sea (possibly because the mouth of the river is very close). The owner Rob, originally from London, had built the entire house himself, from foundations to roof to furniture to plumbing to goodness only knows what else you do when building a house, and he’d done it all single-handedly. We sat on the shore, drinking coffee and eating toast, as I slowly became more incapable of staying awake. The next thing I knew Delores was waking me up, the sun was about to start frying me, and I was dreaming of huge, menacing blowflies. I’ve never been so happy to take up the offer of a free bed to crash in.

So Monday morning disappeared into Monday lunchtime, and I woke up, utterly alone in a strange house, and miles away from my bags. It was rather disconcerting, but eventually some strangers came back to the house – a woman called Pam and her son William – and we got talking about the festival and Australia in general; she had come over from England years ago, so we had some common ground. It’s incredible how often that happens, as so many people have recent ancestors who were from England, and lots of older people can remember coming over as children. Most of the people I seem to meet are originally from Liverpool, for some strange reason.

Eventually Delores appeared – she’d been asleep upstairs, but I hadn’t seen her – and Moya and Rob returned from town, with a bunch of other folkies. We had a spot of lunch, and sat around feeling sorry for ourselves, as Moya hadn’t slept at all and Delores and I had had precious little. Plans were laid to get to this party that was being held to celebrate the end of the festival, and they very kindly invited me along, as Tommy was out with ‘the Lovely Verity’ and probably wasn’t coming back.

Quite why it took us 45 minutes to get there and only ten to get back I have no idea – the map has been blamed – but it was a simply gorgeous venue for a party. The house was out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and there was a barbecue, folk music on the veranda, and all the wonderful people I’d met over the three days were there, along with many more whom I met that night. Delores was on fine form telling jokes – there is surely no finer exponent of this art than Delores[2] – and we met this wacky hippy teacher called Claire who had us in stitches, and ended up getting a lift into town with us.

Jammo was another excellent character at the party; he was thrilled to discover from another partygoer that everyone in Queensland calls each other ‘bloke’, as in ‘G’day bloke’ and ‘How are you bloke?’ He also told me all about the wonderfully poisonous snakes that live in Tassie; his advice, suitably influenced by his new-found knowledge of Queensland, was: ‘Watch where you piss, bloke.’

After dark, Moya and I went for a walk down to the river, and as we approached the pool of light coming from the little house’s garden, folk music lilted down the valley. It was a perfect sight, a collection of folkies all cosy in the light of the lanterns. It was just like something out of books I’d read as a child, and I was privileged to be a part of it; what a way to celebrate the end of a wonderful festival.

[1] Triple J is an excellent national Aussie radio station that plays alternative music pretty much all the time. Anyone wondering what modern Australian music is all about should check it out; the fact that Aussie music doesn’t tend to break beyond the country’s shores is no reason to ignore it. When Australians rock, they rock.

[2] Here’s one of Delores’ jokes for you, just to give you a feel. Take note of the emphasis in the punchline and imagine, if you can, an animated Delores telling it...

A man walks into confession, sits down and says, ‘Father, I’m a married man, but last night I slept with two gorgeous blonde 18-year-old twins, and I don’t regret a thing.’

‘That’s disgusting’, says the priest, ‘How can you call yourself a devout Catholic if you don’t respect the holy union of wedlock?’

‘I’m not a Catholic,’ says the man.

‘Then why on earth have you come to confession to tell me that?’ says the priest.

‘I’m telling everyone!’ says the man.

Bicheno

Written: 18 January 1996

Saying goodbye to the Cygnet gang, Tommy and I caught a coach up to Bicheno on the east coast of Tassie, hoping to get a connection to Coles Bay in the beautiful Freycinet National Park just south of Bicheno. Unfortunately the connection wasn’t possible, and after half an hour’s unsuccessful attempts at hitching in the fading light, we gave up and stayed the night in Bicheno, and very pleasant it was too.

Bicheno is a picturesque little port, and has a colony of fairy penguins that crawl around the coast at sunset. We hit the beach at sundown and waited around for a while, but we couldn’t see anything except for a wicked blowhole that shot water everywhere when the waves hit it. So we went off wandering, and before long we stumbled across nest with a baby penguin in it. It was so cute, but it was cowering away under a rock, so we left it and returned to the shore where, half an hour later, this tiny foot-tall fairy penguin waddled right past Tommy and into the rocks. There might not have been penguins exactly everywhere, but that made it even more special to see some.

Wednesday meant an early start to catch the coach to Coles Bay, which was simply stunning. We went for a walk that took in the beaches of Wine Glass Bay and Hazards Bay, some of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen. I just had to have a swim, but it was freezing; on the other hand, when you actually got numb, it was beautifully refreshing, and it was crystal clear, like all good beach swims. What a lovely area the east coast of Tasmania is.

Launceston

Written: 19 January 1996

I had the number of Claire, the teacher whom I’d met at the end-of-festival party in Cygnet, jotted down in my book; she’d said she would be going to the folk festival in George Town, so when I got to Launceston I rang her and got invited to dinner. It was gorgeous: homemade quiche, eaten in the garden with all these amazingly right-on women who lived in the house, complete with a view of Launceston that took the breath away. Launceston – named after the town in Cornwall that also lies on a river called the Tamar – is built across a valley, and Claire’s house is at the top of one side, so you can imagine the view.

One of the women at Claire’s, a visiting friend called Mandy, had to go off to do a cleaning job that night, so we went along for the walk and, of course, ended up helping out. Mandy had promised a beer for helping, and if there’s one carrot that shifts this donkey, that’s it.

The twist was that the place we cleaned, the Laurel House, was a rape crisis centre, so men weren’t allowed on the property; it felt kind of strange skulking into an empty building to clean it, knowing that if I were caught on the premises, I’d be in trouble. I sure felt I deserved that beer afterwards; a 10oz Boag’s seems to be the drink up the north of the island, but it tastes just like all other Aussie beers, cold and wet. Just what the doctor ordered.

George Town

Written: 22 January 1996

Yet again it all came together late on a Sunday night, in a little room in the Pier Hotel on the north coast of Tasmania. But this time I got the whole song out, and the listeners weren’t just punters, they were the performers...

Another weekend, another folk festival: this time it was the Tamar Valley Folk Festival, held for the fifth year in the industrial town of George Town on the north part of the Tamar River. Have you any idea how it feels to walk into a completely strange town, having only been in the state for a week, and to meet loads of people you know? It’s quite a buzz, but it started getting confusing when I’d go for a piss, and the bloke next to me would go, ‘G’day Mark, how’s the travelling going?’ This happened on more than one occasion, but the scary thing was I couldn’t remember meeting these people in the first place (though it must have been from the folk festival in Cygnet).

The weirdest thing happened on Saturday night, though. I was standing in the back bar at the Pier, watching these mad people do some strange Scottish dance, and this old boy taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘My mate here says you’re travelling round Australia. How’s it going?’ Now I’d never clapped eyes on either of these blokes before, and they hadn’t been at the folk festival in Cygnet, so how the hell they knew I was travelling was beyond me, but they obviously knew me as the travelling Pom who goes to folk festivals. Fame’s a funny thing, you know.

Getting to George Town

Claire (whom I’d met in Cygnet) had offered me a lift from Launceston to George Town on Friday afternoon, so I spent the morning wandering round Cataract Gorge, this amazing river valley just outside the city. That’s one of the lovely things about Tassie: the cities are small, and are generally close to stunning scenery, so you can walk out of the centre and, bang! It’s all gorgeous gorges and valley vistas.

Unfortunately George Town doesn’t fall into the category of ‘generally’: it’s an industrial town, and it’s not a particularly pretty picture. The folk festival, small as it was, was centred around the Pier Hotel and its grounds, where the marquees had been set up. The hostel where I stayed was, oh, let me see, about 30 yards from the pub where all the sessions happened, so there was no more of this walk-for-forty-bloody-minutes-to-get-home malarkey we went through in Cygnet. Unfortunately they’d run out of beds, so I ended up on an inflatable mattress in the front lounge, but at least I was inside.

Claire had some friends who had opened up a restaurant in George Town, so we went to visit, and had the most wonderful meal. If you find yourself in George Town, visit The Buffalo Café, and ask them to show you the electric cactus. You won’t regret it.

And so I arrived at my second folk festival in as many weekends. They’re interesting these things; a lot of the people at George Town were also at Cygnet, and most of them seemed to remember the Pom in the Hat. Again I met some wonderful people, and although it wasn’t quite as atmospheric as Cygnet – heck, the pubs closed at 2am, which was when things were just getting going in Cygnet – a splendid time was guaranteed for all.

The weather went ballistic on the Saturday afternoon, drenching the folkies and blowing down the marquees, but it soon dried out, and I spent most of the day indoors, listening to workshops by people like Alistair Hulett (on the history of the Poll Tax) and Martin Pearson (who spoke about ancient myths and legends).

That night we all went dancing, but perhaps this was where I ended and real folkies started. I eventually bottled out when this middle-aged woman grabbed me for one of these dances, and I told her I didn’t know the steps. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said. ‘It’s right foot there, left foot and slide, and then break into a normal waltz.’

‘Ah, waltz,’ says I. ‘Now that’s where I have the problem.’ Thank goodness the dance finished then; she found the concept of someone not knowing how to waltz quite alien. Modern times, I don’t know.

The concerts were good too, with such folk luminaries as Fairport Convention’s Dave Swarbrick, a trio of amazing singers called Simpson, Gillespie and Wright, and people like the Fagans, who had played Cygnet. Sunday, however, would prove even better.

Sing Along Again

When I eventually got up on Sunday ‘morning’, everyone else was hanging out somewhere in the festival, so I just wandered about, and eventually ended up having brunch in The Buffalo. What luck: just as I was finishing a divine BLT sandwich, in walked Simpson, Gillespie and Wright to do a singing workshop. These three women are really rather talented, and Claire had been going on about how great they were for days before, so how chuffed was I to join in the workshop? Just a little: it’s actually quite a laugh singing these folkie tunes, in the round, in harmony and all the rest. You just have to get over the clothes first...

It’s also an interesting way to watch folkies in action. It’s always annoyed me a little the way that folkies constantly smile when they sing their little songs, but I started to get a glimpse of what it’s all about. The one thought that went through my head, watching people young and old singing traditional songs from olde England, was that I hoped they had also tasted the joys of other types of music. For my part, I’ve got drunk to heart-rending blues, I’ve enjoyed headbanging to the heaviest thrash metal (and even strained my neck in the process), swung to funky jazz, drifted to guitar-layered indie rock, danced for hours to happy house music, cried to beautiful ballads, and done goodness only knows what to all sorts of other types of music. But your average folkie doesn’t understand what they call ‘bloody heavy metal’; when someone put the jukebox on in the pub, they all sat there complaining about the noise, and all I could think was that Live’s ‘I Alone’ was a damn good song, and I wished they would stop fiddling and accordioning and turn the bugger up. It takes all sorts, I guess.

Then, after the farewell concert, came Sunday night. The session was in full swing, with Beatles numbers, traditional folk songs, anything that people knew really, but then Claire came back from getting a round in, and whispered that there was a lovely little session starting up in a tiny room at the front, and it looked worth joining. So off we went, and found this tiny gathering of about eight people, which included two of the Fagans, Martin Pearson, Kerrie Maguire, one of the organisers (whose name I didn’t catch), one of Simpson, Gillespie and Wright (though I don’t know which one) and some others I’d seen on stage. Claire and I pulled up a stool each, and settled in to listen.

They were doing ‘a round’ – not the type of song, of which ‘London’s Burning’ is an example, but the sort where you go round the circle of people, each person singing a song of their choice. The criterion was that the song had to be English, and they each sang a song, brilliantly. My heart missed a beat when Claire whispered, ‘You’d better get a song ready, then’, and I realised we were sitting in the circle. And then they were all looking at me expectantly, waiting for a song. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the only round I was familiar with required a bar, so I launched into song.

Now I’m no singer, but they loved it. Good old Billy Bragg: I knew that, one day, playing his albums incessantly would come in handy. I sang the same song I hadn’t managed to finish at Cygnet, ‘Valentine’s Day is Over’, and this time I got through to the end without stumbling; the thrill of having a whole room fall silent to hear you sing – a room of the cream of Australian folk musicians, no less – sure beats a lot of other thrills... and so ended another wonderful Tasmanian folk festival.

Launceston to Port Arthur

Written: 26 January 1996

A fuzzy Monday morning saw me return from George Town to Launceston to pick up a rental car for the week, easily the best way to see Tassie. It was great to be back behind the wheel, even if a yellow VW Beetle wasn’t quite the Ford Falcon we’d rented in New South Wales; in a Beetle you really feel the corners and bumps in the road, especially if you’re constantly breaking the speed limit[1].

Driving through Tasmania is a wonderful experience, with beautiful landscapes and plenty of little towns that haven’t been overrun with concrete or high-rises. They say Tasmania is the last real wilderness in Australia, and during my circuit of the island I saw what they meant. The route I took was the obvious one, but staying as out-of-the-way as possible: I struck west from Launceston in the middle of the north coast to Stanley at the far northwestern tip, where I stayed a night; I then headed south, halfway down the rugged west cost to Strahan (pronounced ‘Strawn’, to rhyme with dawn); then I cut east through the middle of the island, past Queenstown and the Lake St Clair area (where I spent another night); and finally I drove down to Hobart and Port Arthur on the southeastern tip.

Each area of Tasmania has its characteristics and charms. The east coast, home to Bicheno and Coles Bay, is the drier area, and is very much like the wilderness areas of England; in fact, Tasmania’s Midlands area is often used for filming movie scenes set in England because it is more like cinema’s interpretation of countryside England than England itself – there are too many satanic mills in the mother country for the moguls’ liking. The west and southwest is rugged beyond belief, and the southwest in particular is largely unpopulated. The south coast is rugged too, but has more bays and coves, and the north coast is relatively industrial and isn’t so daunting. All this in an island that takes four hours to drive across: it’s the holiday motorist’s dream.

So my first destination was Stanley, population 580 and home of the Nut, a kind of small Ayers Rock in the sea. Climbing up the Nut was a serious piece of exercise; 152m straight up is tiring, but the view was worth it, as was the sunset. The Nut is supposed to be 12.5 million years old, which is pretty much how I felt when I eventually reached the summit.

The West

The next day I drove for miles, down through the rugged forests of the northwest, and over stunning mountains to the west coast and Strahan. What a gorgeous place, with just 600 inhabitants and some great forest parks around, not to mention the 33km Ocean Beach to the north. I went for a walk in the People’s Park, home of the Hogarth Falls, a picturesque waterfall surrounded by rainforest. It’s amazing to walk into these forests: outside it’s hot and sunny, but under the high ceiling of trees it’s cool and quite dark, the perfect setting for a waterfall.

On from Strahan I arrived in Queenstown, a mining village due east of Strahan and set in the most weather-savaged terrain I’ve ever seen. ‘Terrain’ is the right word; ‘landscape’ seems too tame. The area has been completely ripped apart by man, and there are opencast mines all over the place, but the incredible hues of the rock mountains have to be seen to be believed, as do the roads. There are hairpin bends everywhere, and in a Beetle you feel every single one.

After Queenstown I drove over Lake Burbury, surely one of the bluest lakes in the world, and stopped for a walk at Nelson Falls, part of the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. Yes, it was another waterfall, but this time even more spectacular; if I’m not careful, I could be well on my way to becoming a waterfall fetishist.

Finally I pulled up at Derwent Bridge, a little town on the southern point of Lake St Clair, the deepest natural freshwater lake in the whole of Australia, and home to one end of the 80km-long Overland Track, a bushwalkers’ Mecca. Perhaps one day I’ll come back and do this walk, which takes about five or six days to complete; it starts off at the idyllic Cradle Mountain and ends at Lake St Clair, where I spent Wednesday morning walking.

The landscape round Lake St Clair is beautiful and tranquil. I did one of the shorter walks, which took me five hours of trudging through rainforest, marshland, rocky plains and rivers. ‘Trudging’ is exactly the right word: it even sounds like the noise you make when walking Tasmania’s parks. If it were a real word, ‘sludging’ would be another; lots of rain had fallen the night before.

The track led up the mountains to two glacial lakes, Lake Sorrow and Forgotten Lake: lonely names for lonely places, though with a stark beauty that’s humbling. There was an optional extra track going up Little Hugel, a small mountain but still quite a challenge, so I thought I’d go for it, and after some seriously wet climbing through rainforest, up vertical rock slopes and onto the top, the whole park lay at my feet. It’s quite a feeling, climbing for an hour completely on your own, and standing right at the top of a mountain, especially when you know that if you stumbled and twisted an ankle, you wouldn’t be found for days.

It’s also quite a feeling when you can see a storm rolling in on top of you, and you know you’ve still got to get down, so I took a couple of self-timed photos – Edmund Hillary conquers mountain-type shots – and headed back, timing it perfectly. The heavens opened as I drove off, and they stayed open all the way to Port Arthur, right down in the Tasman Peninsula on the southeast of Tassie.

Port Arthur

Port Arthur was the site of the worst-of-the-worst penal prisons, and it’s still got that air about it. The port itself is rather beautiful, but sitting on the slopes behind the port are the ruins of some really nasty places, like the Model Prison (where convicts were isolated completely for months) and the Penitentiary (where inmates eked out an existence in tiny cells). It’s an amazing place, but it’s deeply spooky, especially if you visit the Isle of the Dead – Port Arthur’s cemetery on a little island in the bay – or take the night-time ghost tour, which consists of an hour-and-a-half of lantern-lit tale-telling among the eerie ruins. Atmospheric isn’t the word; it’s brilliant.

I spent the Thursday afternoon and Friday morning exploring the south coast of the Tasman Peninsula, though it wasn’t quite as spectacular as I’d imagined it would be. With names like Remarkable Cave (which it is) and the Devil’s Kitchen, you can probably imagine the sort of rugged coastline there is. It’s also the kind of attraction that’s really hard to visit without your own car – in fact, the whole of the Tasman Peninsula is poorly served by public transport – so renting a car was a great flash of inspiration. I’m beginning to think that it might be a good idea to look into buying a car and a tent, and going round Australia via campsites...

So that was Tasmania. In Australia, they say, dwell the salt of the earth; if that’s true, then Tasmania has the whole condiment set, including a silver mustard jar with spoon and blue glass lining, and a handcrafted vinaigrette jug. Visit it: you’ll love it too.

[1] I didn’t break the speed limit on purpose – the speedometer was in miles per hour not kilometres per hour, but I only realised at the end of the trip. I thought those corners were a bit tight...

Australia: Victoria

Session Musicians

Written: 7 March 1996

Occasionally you get a drinking session that lives with you as a classic of its type, and this was one of them. Soon after returning from my trip round Tasmania, I’d suggested to Andrew that we pop out for a beer on a Friday night, and maybe catch a band: nothing too heavy, just a beer. He suggested Brunswick Street[1].

The first band we found were appalling, but that didn’t matter – if there’s one thing Melbourne isn’t short of, it’s bands. So we grabbed a copy of the local freebie music guide, had a quick flick, and discovered our mission: to get to The Club on Smith Street. So we set off...

...and stopped at a long, thin bar on the way, which had this funky groove band pumping out serious vibes onto the street. We ordered a bourbon and coke – the most popular Aussie drink after beer – and settled in, but just as we got into it, they took a half-hour break. So it was back to the mission: to find The Club.

I’m not too sure of the distances, but we eventually got there at about 1am. There it was: The Club, proudly announcing that Manic Suede would take the stage at 2am. In we went, coughing up the entrance fee, and settled into a few games of pool peppered with yet more beer.

Manic Suede were excellent and quite apt. They were manic, and I just swayed.

It was while drinking a beer at the bar after the gig that I realised that it was getting light outside. This came as a bit of a shock; I had thought it was about 3am, but it was actually 6am, which gradually turned into 7am, when the place shut. Time to go home...

...not! One thing that must be done after a drinking session is to have a kebab, and it appears that the rules are the same on both sides of the world. In Australia they call them souvlaki, and the best souvlaki in the world are served on Lygon Street, Melbourne (according to Andrew). So we wandered off to Lygon Street, taking in the sights of the city, wondering where the time had gone. Irritatingly the souvlaki shop was shut, but you can’t go home without souvlaki: those are the rules. So Andrew decided that, as we were up and still alive, we should see some of the alternative sights of Melbourne while waiting for the souvlaki shop to open. We saw the trams opening up, and even blagged a free ride on the premise that Andrew was showing his Pommy friend the sights of their fair city. We saw street performers starting up and Saturday businessmen rush to work, but the sight of the day had to be The Carlton.

The Carlton is a 24-hour bar, and it’s the shadiest hovel I’ve ever seen, especially at eight in the morning. We met the dregs of society there, and beat them at pool. There were drunk Aborigines, including one guy who lectured Aboriginal history at Melbourne TAFE (the Aussie equivalent of colleges of further education); there were drunk Maoris, including one guy who told me all the shady places to visit in New Zealand; there were drunk Aussies; there were drunk travellers with jet lag... you name it, they were there, and drunk. You only visit The Carlton once, but it’s an eye-opener.

Enter the Pokies!

So is Young and Jackson’s Hotel, which houses one of the finest collections of pokies in Melbourne. The pokies – short for poker machines – are the Australian equivalent of fruit machines, and they’re a serious problem. Until about two years ago gambling was illegal in Victoria, and everyone used to go to the border towns for their gambling. Now it’s been legalized, and it’s spread so quickly it’s become a serious social problem. A good night’s debauchery wouldn’t be complete without a gamble, so we hit the pokies.

Pokies use computer screens, and each has about ten different games to play, all of which eat your money. We were only there as an exercise in tourism, but you should have seen some of the men there – all men, of course – who were pouring money into these things; it was really rather lonely.

Things got a little hazy at this stage; I know we watched some skateboarders for a while, and then climbed over some fountains before having a run-in with the local police, the usual thing... but having a souvlaki is the rule, so we made our drunken way back to Lygon Street, where the souvlaki did indeed live up to its reputation. Suitably refreshed, we crashed out in the park for about four hours, until five o’clock in the afternoon. This was more or less unintentional; the next thing we knew it was five o’clock, but what can you expect after an all-nighter?

In fact, when I woke up, Andrew had gone, and I made my dazed way off in the direction I thought would take me home. It was only by bumping back into Andrew – who had gone off for a leak, and had panicked when he’d lost me, because he didn’t know where we were staying – that I realised I was going in totally the wrong direction. We made it back eventually, after making up the rule that we had to have a beer in every pub on the way. And when we got back to where I was staying we realised, ‘Hey! It’s Saturday night. Where shall we go?’

But that is another story...

[1] Brunswick is one of those amazing streets: it’s a combination of shady clubs, posh restaurants, and fascinating little shops selling arty goods that you can’t really believe anybody buys. It’s a haven for the bizarre, and as such it’s a hoot.

Buying a Car

Written: 7 March 1996

Car salesmen are the same the world over: they are soul-sucking demons from hell who should be avoided at all costs. The same seems to apply to people selling cars privately, just not as badly. I hate buying cars and everything that goes with it, I always have, and I think I always will, but it’s the only way to see a country like Australia. Not long after I got back from my trip to Tasmania, I decided I was going to have to get things rolling if I didn’t want to waste my entire year working in the city, so Andy and I spent a number of evenings looking at cars being sold privately, and it brought me down, to be honest. I have no real idea what happened during the first week of looking – not a lot, really – but I eventually ended up buying a car with a good engine but a knackered body for A$750 (£375). It was a bargain, but not roadworthy.

The Roadworthy Certificate (RWC) is the equivalent of the UK’s MOT test, but you only need one when buying or selling a car, and this one was so cheap because it had failed the RWC because of the body. We therefore needed to get the body fixed up to get an RWC, and the car needed further work to make the engine mechanically sound. If you’re crossing deserts you don’t care about the bodywork, you just don’t want to break down...

Since buying my first Australian car, I’ve been to goodness only knows how many backstreet mechanics getting the bodywork done, the electrics sorted, the stereo wired (the most important bit, of course), the wheels aligned, the engine overhauled... and I’ve learned a hell of a lot about cars in the process. Ever seen deep inside an engine? I now have, and if it goes wrong at that level, I know I’ve got no chance of fixing it, but at least I feel that I’ve done everything in my power and my budget to make sure this car makes it round Highway One. If it does break down miles from anywhere, I’ll be pretty annoyed, but I’m also a member of the RACV, the Aussie equivalent to the RAC and AA, and something tells me that will prove to be the soundest investment of all.

Ready to Drive

So, at last I’ve got my wheels, all legal and insured to the hilt. He’s a gypsum green Toyota Corona, 1977 model, he’s called Oz[1], and he’s running pretty well. The idea is to go clockwise round Australia, but I don’t want to tie myself down to any particular plan; it’s a long, long way round this continent, and my finances are looking pretty poor after my manic visit to Tasmania and the cash I’ve lashed out on the car, so we’ll just have to see what happens.

I’ve got a good collection of stuff in the boot, too. My tent (a three man tent – yeah, like you could fit three men in there, I don’t think) is one of those dome ones which takes about two minutes to put up and doesn’t have any of those annoying poles, just three carbon fibre rods that break down into little bits. I’ve also got a blow-up bed and a pump that works off the car’s cigarette lighter; it’s OK but it has a built-in pillow, something that might end up driving me mad, seeing as none of the normal mattresses I’ve come across in the world have a slope at one end.

The cooker and lamp are of the same type, and can either run off normal liquid stove fuel or – get this – unleaded petrol. You pour the petrol in, pump up the pressure by hand, light it and whoosh! Heat and light. I’m writing this by the light of burning Mobil Super petrol, which costs a whacking 35p per litre – it’s considerably cheaper than gas, and I much prefer these filament burner-type lamps to electric light. The cooker is ferocious and I burnt most of my first night’s meal, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it; it might have been expensive to buy, but it’s very, very cheap to run.

All the rest of my stuff is pretty normal: tons of emergency ‘add-water’ rations, an Esky for keeping everything cold, some big water containers, one of those wooden-ball seat covers which I got because it was the cheapest seat cover I could get, a metal petrol can containing 200km of spare fuel... it’s all there, and fits into the car. I’ve even got a fold-up card table and a deck chair, so it’s all very civilised as I sit outside at night, reading by lamplight and trying to ignore the moths attacking me. I think I’m going to read quite a lot over the next six months, but what a wonderful place in which to read...

[1] All of my cars have had names. There was Syd (my first car, on loan from a relative), named after Syd Barrett; Colin (my Talbot Horizon), named because he was a C-reg, and ‘Colin the Car’ sounded cool at the time; Jefry with one ‘f’ (my first Golf), named after a line from a Pixies song; Floyd (my second Golf), named after Pink Floyd, for no apparent reason except he was a reddish colour, which is vaguely related to pink; and Oz (Toyota Corona par excellence), named for obvious reasons. When I buy a car in New Zealand, I’ll call him Zed, after the letter Z for Zealand, with a passing reference to that great rubber-burnin’ scene in Pulp Fiction... ‘Where did you get the bike, honey?’ ‘This ain’t no bike, baby, it’s a Chopper.’ ‘Well, where did you get the Chopper, then?’ ‘Zed.’ ‘Who’s Zed?’ ‘Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead.’ Sheer poetry...

Australian Greetings

Written: 12 March 1996

There’s one way to tell different cultures apart that’s foolproof: just listen to how strangers greet each other in the street, or how people talk to each other in shops or banks.

In America, for example, it’s all ‘Hi, nice to meet you’ and ‘Have a nice day’, normally accompanied by a broad grin.

In Britain there are millions of different rules, depending on the social situation. At a cocktail party, before the beer’s kicked in, it might be ‘Hello’, followed by a pregnant pause, and then both parties saying ‘Lovely out, isn’t it?’ or ‘Bit nippy today, don’t you think?’ followed by each person apologising for interrupting the other, followed by another pregnant pause and nervous laughter, and so on and so forth. Or, if it’s two strangers passing in the street in London, it’s an almost antisocial silence, where both parties pretend not to notice the other; in the North, it might be an ‘Awlrite’ or an ‘Ello’, and a nod of the head. Whatever it is, if it’s your home you understand the rules, so passing people in the street isn’t difficult. It’s not even an issue.

So why am I finding it so hard to grasp the basics of Australian greetings? Well, you’ve got the good old ‘G’day’, which is nice and easy and a good way of hiding your nationality under a generic phrase. But just as common – no, more common – is ‘How are ya?’ phrased as if the person really wants to know. It’s not ‘Howyadoin’’, which is generally regarded as rhetorical: no, the way people say it implies you must answer. But how?

‘How are you?’ ‘G’day’ – No, this doesn’t make sense, but it’s something. It’s what I use when I panic.

‘How are you?’ ‘I’m very well thank you, how are you’ – OK, it’s obvious you’re a Pom, and it’s good for parties, but in the street? You’re ten yards past the other person by the time you’ve said it, and you’ve left him or her with a question, which is not fair unless you’re on the pull.

‘How are you?’ ‘How are you?’ – No good, too many questions left unanswered.

‘How are you?’ ‘Good thanks’ – This is the one, apparently. When this is the method used, both parts are taken to be relatively meaningless, they’re just politeness. If you want to continue the conversation, as you might in a shop or bank where you’re there for a couple of minutes, you might append your own ‘How are you?’ which is a signal for the other person to say ‘Good thanks’ and then move onto the weather or the cricket scores.

You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to work that little piece of social interaction out. And they say that Australia doesn’t have a complicated social code...

Great Ocean Road

Written: 13 March 1996

The Great Ocean Road follows the Victorian coast west for 243km from Torquay, just south of Geelong, to Warrnambool, not far from the border with South Australia, and its name sums it up: it’s a great road that follows the ocean. It’s also one of the most breathtaking drives around – it hugs the coast, sandwiched between the sea (which I think is called the Bass Strait, but it varies depending on which map I look at) and the various mountain ranges inland. It’s one way to test the steering on the car, anyway... one slip and you’re history, geography and biology all rolled into one.

My first stop was Lorne, a popular tourist spot on a lovely bay about an hour from Geelong. If I was here with the boys from London, you know exactly what sort of holiday this would be: beers for breakfast, down to the surf beach for sunbaking[1] and swimming and more beers, then back to the tent for a quick kip, a shower and then on to the pub to check out the scene. Luckily I’m turning into my parents, so instead I spent two days in Lorne, testing out my camping equipment and getting the hang of living under the stars. Typically the weather wasn’t great – really cold at night and a bit cloudy in the mornings – but I survived the first real pitching of the tent, the first self-cooked meal and all the rest of the stuff that soon becomes second nature.

I spent the first afternoon lazing around on the beach, but on Sunday I decided to go on a bush walk to Erskine Falls, 8km north of Lorne. They were gorgeous, and I saw my very first snakes on the way back, slithering off the path just where I had to walk to get home. The secret is to stomp around; snakes are more afraid of you than you are of them. Not surprisingly, after a 16km round trip on foot, I hit the beach, jumped some of the surf, and relaxed. If you’re not careful, Lorne can very easily become a procrastinator’s paradise, so the next day I headed off west along the coast to Apollo Bay...

...which is another coastal beachside resort, but slightly smaller and therefore less crowded. The inland geography changes to rolling hills around the bay, although the Great Ocean Road is both hairy and spectacular between Lorne and Apollo Bay. It gives Apollo Bay a much more ‘open’ feel, with its long curved beach and one street of touristy and expensive shops. I get the feeling that when you’ve seen one beach town you’ve seen then all, but so what? It’s still pleasant.

Amazing Scenery

The Bass Strait stretches as far west as Cape Otway, my first stop on leaving Apollo Bay. Cape Otway is a really treacherous area of the coast – for ships, not Toyotas – and there’s a great little lighthouse 14km off the Great Ocean Road, so I took the turn and went on a guided tour of the blighter.

Bloody hell, there’s always one. Take any collection of people who are on a guided tour, and there’s always one person who wants to talk to the guide as much as is humanly possible. It’s so annoying: we’re paying the guide to tell all of us about it, not just you! If I had a penny for every over-keen know-all who’s tried to hijack a tour I’m on, I’d be able to buy quite a few penny chews. Still, it was a most pleasant tour, with a very informative – and patient – guide, and the view along the coast from the top of the lighthouse was astounding.

The coast between Otway and Warrnambool is incredible – Warrnambool is Victoria’s fifth biggest city, and signals the end of the Great Ocean Road, but we’ll come to that later. In the meantime, marvel at the Twelve Apostles! Prepare to be amazed by London Bridge! Steel yourself for Loch Ard Gorge! Gasp in awe at the Arch!

Yeah, OK, it’s amazing coastal scenery, but after a while it did get a bit like, ‘Oh. Another amazing and unlikely rock formation etched out by the sea over millions of years. Must tell the kids.’ Yes, the coast is incredible, and London Bridge – which used to be two arches, like a bridge, until the landward one collapsed in 1990, stranding two extremely surprised, not to mention lucky tourists on the newly formed island – is wonderful, and the Twelve Apostles – huge stacks of limestone, 12 of ’em, that rear out of the sea right next to sheer cliffs – are like 12 Old Men of Hoy all together, but somehow it didn’t quite click for me.

Meanwhile, the Great Ocean Road ends in Warrnambool, which turned out to be an oldies’ paradise. I hadn’t seen so many pensioners in one place since the last time I went to Southport on a cold and windy day. So Victoria’s fifth city turned out to be one of its most boring, but all I wanted was some kip, some fish and chips, and a tank of petrol, and for that, it did the job.

[1] Australians don’t sunbathe, they sunbake. In fact, Australians don’t even sunbake, they cover themselves in sunblock when they hit the beach. Only tourists sunbake; it’s an indication of the seriousness with which Aussies take the threat of skin cancer.

The Grampians

Written: 15 March 1996

Interestingly – at least, interestingly when compared to Warrnambool – Tuesday turned out to be a Bad Shoe Day. By accident I left my pair of incredibly smelly and rotting canvas shoes in the car park at Loch Ard Gorge, which was sentimentally tough but a good thing in retrospect, and then that night my thongs snapped[1]. I prayed that God would look after their little lost soles, and tried to move on.

On Wednesday I headed off to Hall’s Gap, 200km away to the north and deep in the heart of the Grampians, an impressive range of mountains at the southern end of the Great Dividing Range, which runs parallel to the east coast of the continent. Wow! You’ve never seen anything like the approach to the range across the dry, flat land of the southwest of Victoria. Slowly, ever so slowly, these huge forms appear on the hazy horizon, so jagged that they look like black broken glass. One minute, the horizon is totally flat, and then these shapes appear that reach to an apparent elevation of about 30° as you drive straight for them – it is quite a sight.

Close up, the Grampians are even more amazing, and I instantly decided to spend a good two days at the campsite at Hall’s Gap. After pitching my tent, I managed to fit in a couple of bushwalks: first I walked to the Balconies – flat bits of rock jutting out of the top of a mountain that you can climb to the end of and look over, if you like a fright like I do – and then to Sundial Peak – a 4km round-trip that produced spectacular views of lakes and wooded peaks, right next to the flat, dry farmland I’d just driven through. I returned to camp with my appetite well and truly whetted, to find the caravan park full of friendly little kangaroos munching on the grass.

It occurs to me that ‘bushwalking’ isn’t something you come across back home, even though I now take it for granted. It’s not a case of arriving somewhere, looking at the sun, working out where south is and disappearing into unexplored rainforest – at least, not intentionally. National Parks, which are everywhere, and include places like the Grampians, have Ranger Stations where you can get maps of the marked walks around, which range from five minutes to five hours to five days. There are paths and signposts and protective railings on the nasty bits, so it’s relatively easy to go bushwalking safely, and without needing huge amounts of gear (though if you want a real bush experience, you can, of course, go off piste, as it were).

Lost at the Pinnacle

Having said that, a funny thing happened to me in the Grampians when I went on the day-long Wonderland Tour walk the following day. I was making my merry way to the first stop on the walk – Venus Falls it was called, though the summer had reduced it to Venus Dribbles – when I came across a couple having a rest in the shade. Well, we got a-talkin’, as you do when walking these tracks, and they invited me to walk with them, so I did, not having so much as talked to anyone for about a week. Up to the Pinnacle we trudged, me, Dave and Karen, eventually getting to the top – the views you wouldn’t believe! – and then continuing along the trail, following the white arrows painted on the rocks.

It was then that Karen noticed that we hadn’t passed a white arrow for some time... we were lost. We backtracked, and after about half an hour (which seemed like much longer in the burning sun) we found some more arrows, which we followed... and eventually ended up back where we’d started, at the Pinnacle! So we tried again, and this time found the trail, but if I hadn’t been with other people I could have been well and truly scuppered. The fact that later on Dave and I climbed a mountain – more incredible views, peering over a sheer cliff face – while Karen stayed at the bottom, and we got totally lost on the way back down, only proves that painted white arrows aren’t the best way to mark a trail. When coming down, we nearly walked over a cliff edge; there’s nothing like a thrill to clear the head.

Dave and Karen, it turned out, are from just north of Adelaide, and they invited me to visit them, so we could go walking at a place called World’s End. It should be interesting; when we got back to camp we got well and truly hammered on Diamond lager, so if I do get to see them in Adelaide, it should prove to be another fun experience.

I also met an old guy called Danny, who had pitched his tent next to me. He was an interesting bloke; he was recovering from a brain tumour, and was taking time off to explore the areas of Australia that he’d driven through while selling computerised tills to shops over the years. We kicked into his bottle of rum he had brought along, and kept drinking after Dave and Karen went back to their cabin (lucky them, they had a spa in their apartment!). As if meeting three great people wasn’t enough, while we were coming back from the bottle shop we saw these two guys having a barbie in the campsite, and went over to chat. It turned out these two – Michael and Remko from Holland – had just spent four days in the bush, walking around and camping wherever they fancied: an amazing experience. They were hitching around, and I offered them a lift in the morning to Mt Gambier, down on the south coast of South Australia, about 400km from Adelaide.

[1] This is not as rude as it sounds – ‘thongs’ are what Australians call flip-flops or sandals.

Australia: South Australia

Mt Gambier

Written: 16 March 1996

Setting off from the Grampians, with the car crammed full to the brim with Pom, Dutchmen and extra backpacks, I noticed the car was rather unsteady on the road, so I slowed the pace down. At first I thought that the car was giving up the ghost, which was a bit worrying this early in the trip. But no: in fact a serious wind storm had started up, which buffeted us all the way to Mt Gambier, across the border in South Australia. Apparently there was a cyclone in Western Australia, and we were feeling it all that distance away.

The town of Mt Gambier is built on the side of three huge volcano craters, one of which – the Blue Lake – is full of water to a depth of over 70m. It’s quite a sight, driving round the rim of a huge crater, full of deep blue water; for half the year the lake turns grey, for some unknown reason, and the town has a festival to celebrate when it goes blue again. Any excuse for a party in Australia...

However, the township of Mt Gambier didn’t look all that thrilling, so we decided by unanimous vote to drive to the beach 29km away, to a tiny little fishing village called Port MacDonnell. The sign that greeted us proudly proclaimed that Port MacDonnell has the largest fleet of lobster boats in Australia, which didn’t exactly sound that thrilling, but in fairness the beach was beautiful, and the sea was pure blue. After struggling to put up our tents in gale force ten, we hit the beach; some things about Oz are spot on, even in the wind.

South Australia is the driest state in Australia, but when you’re a Pom you’re never far from rain, and the winds gave way to the most almighty rainstorm I’ve spent in a tent for a while. Luckily the tent held up well – no leaks at all, and it didn’t take off in the gales – but the car didn’t fare quite as well. I first noticed the problem when I opened the back door in the morning and noticed that my fold-up table was soaking, along with most of the parcel shelf behind the back seats. The worst was yet to come... my rear stereo speakers, which are in the parcel shelf and face upwards, were full of water; I looked through the grilles and I couldn’t see speaker, just pools. They seem OK, but if my stereo blows, I’ll be gutted. I’ve sellotaped the window seals up, because they’re obviously completely crap, but hopefully that cyclone will have blown itself out when I tackle the Nullarbor Desert. I don’t fancy opening my car door, only to have torrents of water pour out onto my feet...

Anyway, the next day we went into Mt Gambier, did a bit of shopping, and I left the guys on the main road so they could hitch to Adelaide. As for me, I headed north to Naracoorte, where I saw some truly beautiful caves, and then I turned due west to Kingston SE, about 300km south of Adelaide down the coast. It was here that I discovered that it’s illegal to park on the side of the street if your car is facing against the traffic, which is why all the cars parked along the pavement in Australia face the same way, namely in the direction of the traffic. That sounds like a strange rule when you’re used to haphazard English parking, but the reason? If you’re facing the wrong way when you park your car, the police will give you a ticket for parking too far from the kerb, meaning too far from the kerb on the other side of the road! Some things are too strange for words, but hey, I learned my lesson with the jaywalking ticket in Melbourne, so when in Rome and all that...

The Coorong

Written: 17 March 1996

On Sunday I left Kingston SE[1], passing the 30 ft model of Larry the Lobster on the way out, and headed north to a little coastal town called Port Elliot, via the Coorong.

The Coorong is completely strange. It’s a National Park that goes along the coast below the Fleurieu Peninsula, just south of Adelaide. Essentially the coast goes north-south, with the sea on the west; running parallel to the coast, in the sea, is this huge sand dune called the Younghusband Peninsula, which meets the coast at its southern end, but leaves a gap to the sea at the north tip. The dune stretches for 145km, and if you’ve followed this so far, you’ll understand why the long, thin ‘lake’ between the coast and the sand dune dries out in the summer, and fills up in the winter. Imagine a 145km-long lake that is very shallow and quite thin (compared to its length, anyway) and you’ll get the picture.

I caught the lake when it was dry, and you’ve never seen anything like it. I drove for miles along this awful unsealed road on the west side of this lake – imagine driving over corrugated iron for ages, and you’ll k-k-know w-w-what it-t-t f-f-feels lik-k-ke – and it was quite amazing, with dune on the left and flat wetland on the right. But nothing prepared me for the vastness of the lake near the Chinaman’s Well, a well dug by the Chinese some years ago. I walked to the well, decided to head into the bush for a little wander and suddenly – wham! – there was nothing but flat, white ground for miles to the right and to the left, with the sand dune a considerable walk straight ahead. It was so big that it melted into heat haze at each end; it’s the sort of place that you can imagine someone trying to break the land speed record... and it’s so big it makes you dizzy. I walked out into the middle of it and just danced around; if anyone saw me they’d have thought I was quite mad. Perhaps I was...

[1] I never found out what the SE stood for when I was in Australia, but Cassie Blatchford emailed me to say, ‘In South Australia there are two towns called Kingston. To distinguish between the two, one is called Kingston SE (because it’s in the southeast of South Australia), and the other one, a little town on the Murray River, is called Kingston on Murray.’ Thanks Cassie – that’s another mystery cleared up!

Adelaide

Written: 21 March 1996

When is a capital city not a capital city? When it’s a capital town. Adelaide, capital of South Australia and home to 957,000 Australians, two-thirds of the population of the state, is miniscule when you’re used to cities like London, Birmingham and more locally, Melbourne and Sydney. It’s only seven times bigger than Hobart, and Hobart is tiny – indeed, even those who live in Adelaide refer to ‘the town’ rather than ‘the city’.

This has its advantages. The most obvious is that you can walk everywhere in the centre, and anywhere else is a very quick drive away. But there are other advantages, such as the availability of parking spaces really close to the centre, uncrowded beaches and a chance to explore the entire city in a relatively short period, something you can’t say about Melbourne or Sydney.

However, there are disadvantages. Adelaide isn’t one of the great cities of the world, and although it is charming, it can’t compete with the bigger cities when it comes to sights; it has just one street where there’s any real nightlife, and it’s not the most amazing experience; the beaches are fairly average compared to those down the coast; the city isn’t big enough to support a tram network, and in fact only has one, out to the beach; and things like petrol aren’t quite as cheap as in the bigger cities. But I enjoyed Adelaide, albeit briefly[1], and it made for a pleasant stop before I headed off for the Nullarbor Desert and the first real test of my plans to drive round the continent.

Arrival and Exploration

After the Coorong I headed up the coast to where the Fleurieu Peninsula starts, and hung a left to Wellington, where I crossed the Murray River (one of the most important rivers in southeast Australia) on a cable-driven car ferry. Then it was a short drive down to the coast and along to Port Elliot, a picturesque spot on Horseshoe Bay, itself a cute little beach with granite boulders either side of the bay. Luckily the wind that had plagued me in Kingston had died, so I managed to get the tent up without getting Mary Poppinsed up into the sky.

The following morning I visited Victor Harbour, down the road from Port Elliot, and walked along the long tram bridge that connects the harbour to Granite Island. A horse-drawn tram goes up and down the tramway, and the island is a particularly pleasant place to wander around while watching the sea batter the granite rocks on the shore. If you go to Granite Island you can see fairy penguins, but I had to move on, and move on I did, all the way to Adelaide, 90km to the north.

The campsite I stayed in was on West Beach, about 8km west of the city centre (which is not exactly far considering it’s a beach). The beach was fairly nondescript, with a bit too much seaweed, but you can’t really complain when you’re that close to a city. That night I drove into town and wandered around; my one memory of that wander is a strange old man, who started talking to me at a pedestrian crossing, and kept babbling on for four whole blocks before turning off the street. I didn’t understand a single word he said, but it was definitely Australian, of a sort. I rather warmed to him, whatever it was he was trying to tell me.

I explored Adelaide for the next couple of days, and there’s no doubt it’s a gorgeous place. I visited the State Museum (which was very good, and free); I walked through the botanic gardens, which are quite spectacular; I went up to Light’s Vision, a statue which shows the spot on a hill where Colonel Light sat and designed Adelaide’s street layout, and from where you can see the whole town; I wandered past the interesting architecture of Adelaide’s many old and solid buildings; I checked out the university, which turned out to be an interesting spot, right next to the botanic gardens and teeming with Australian students moving from lecture to lecture or just sitting under the trees studying or chatting... in fact, I simply walked for miles, because Adelaide is a walker’s town.

At Home in Yankalilla

While in Adelaide I decided to ring up one of the people I’d met while doing telephone support for Acorn in Melbourne, who’d invited me to get in touch when I was in Adelaide. He and his wife live south of Adelaide but on the west coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula, an area I hadn’t seen, so on Thursday I went down there to stay the night.

It was lovely; what a sweet couple. Charles and Ena were originally from the Midlands, near Cannock Chase, and they retired about seven years ago. They decided to live in Australia, mainly because most of Charles’ family now lives here, and they have a house just outside Yankalilla, a tiny village some 89km south of Adelaide. They made me feel right at home, with a guided tour of the surrounding countryside and beaches, then back home for a cooked roast and plenty of port. Charles and I swapped advice about computers, I told them about my travels, and it turned out Charles had been a magazine printer so we talked about editing, publishing as we whittled away at the port. I found them and their way of life quite incredible – getting water pumped from a borehole, feeding possums in the back garden, seeing all sorts of wild animals hanging around, taming local wild cats and keeping them as pets... it’s not your normal retirement home, is it?

We even got to see a comet. Over the previous few nights there had been this huge comet in the sky, but you could only spot it if you were looking, and then the tail suddenly became obvious. The view from their house was really clear, as they’re so far from city lights, and I was quite spun out by it all. It proved to be yet another excellent contact in Australia; what a delightful country this is.

[1] This is probably the best way to enjoy it, rather like very loud music or rich chocolate mousse. Otherwise you might find yourself getting bored, which is what happened to one friend from Melbourne who had to spend a year of university there. ‘It felt like exile,’ she said with a wince...

World’s End

Written: 25 March 1996

My world is very small tonight. There’s a babble from the creek as it pours over the stepping-stones, and the stars are visible over the light from the fire. The shadows flicker up the multi-coloured trunks of the Red River Gums surrounding the little clearing where my tent and cooking equipment reflect the light. The nearest civilisation is 20 miles away, and I’m totally alone; there isn’t a human for miles around.

The fire is incredibly hot, but it’s throwing off enough red light to light my computer screen, so I can type. There are animals all around – I occasionally hear the rustle of a possum looking for food, the croak of a frog, the call of a wild bird – and the weather is warm, still and clear. This is what bush camping is all about: fire, the sounds of the world, and isolation.

Dave and Karen, the couple I met in the Grampians a week ago, left earlier today. I’d rung them on my way through Adelaide, and we spent Friday night in typical Aussie fashion: drinking ridiculous amounts of beer. It felt good after abstaining for most of my road trip; drinking and driving would be bad (so I obviously don’t even go there), but getting up, packing away a tent and driving with a hangover would be another thing altogether.

We arrived here on Saturday afternoon after a journey through some of the smallest towns in the world, ‘we’ being three humans and two dogs, Thor being a cute little black puppy, and Tia a very fat Staffordshire bull terrier, with the nickname of Lumpy Dog. Our destination: World’s End, 150km northeast of Adelaide and somewhere in the vicinity of Burra, the place where the copper was discovered that saved South Australia from bankruptcy. It sounds quite close to civilisation, but there’s nothing to the north and east but desolate outback.

When we got here, we set up camp and started to get a good fire going, and the whole Saturday night was the most incredible experience. We cooked on a little cooking fire that Karen made, as Dave had brought the wrong connector for the gas barbie (which didn’t make him too popular); you make a cooking fire by digging a little hole, lining it with rocks, and putting the red-hot coals from the main fire in the hole to create a really intense, smoke-free heat source that’s perfect for cooking.

We marvelled at the night sky and saw the comet in the northeast that I’d first seen in Yankalilla. But even more impressively, we fished for yabbies in the creek, and caught a fair number. Yabbies are like prawns with big pincers like lobsters; they’re freshwater crayfish, and you catch them in a yabbie net from waterholes in slow-flowing creeks, and chuck them into a boiling billy of water, which we had on a stand over the fire. Yabbies are lovely – they taste like fishy prawns – and there’s something amazingly Australian about catching yabbies in a creek...

Family Reunions

The next day we went for a bushwalk into the hills round the camp, and hung out by a watering hole for the afternoon. It was really hot, and when we got back to camp that afternoon, we discovered that our creek had been invaded by a family reunion.

Apparently family reunions are all the rage in Australia; people can sometimes feel a bit rootless here, and if a family member bothers to trace the family tree – and a lot of families do – then the family reunion is a must. It normally takes the form of a big gathering at a convenient spot, and this family thought that World’s End would be convenient. It’s a nice spot for a reunion, without a doubt, but it’s a bit harsh coming along to a public site, setting up a loudspeaker and stand, getting what must have been over 200 people together, and ruining the peace. So as soon as we saw all these cars arrive and everyone putting their nametags on, we went bushwalking again.

How amused were we on our return, then, to see the last car trying to leave, but coughing, spluttering and refusing to work? Dave and Karen had to go, and rang the RAA for the poor family who were stranded, but I saw an opportunity and roped in the kids to collect firewood. We then sat there in my camp, making tea and waiting for the RAA to find the end of the world. You should have seen their faces; they thought I was a serious bushman, with my dirty clothes, campfire, cooking stuff and so on. They were horrified at the prospect of spending the night there, stranded under the stars, but I couldn’t wait. Luckily the RAA man fixed them up, but not after I’d got another address and an invitation to pop in if I was ever back in the area.

And so I’ve been left alone, miles from anywhere, with just me and a fire and a campsite, sitting under the southern stars, with the firelight flickering on the bushes, and the possums tackling the mess left behind by the day’s visitors. It’s paradise... and it’s all mine, for this little moment in time.

Flinders Ranges

Written: 27 March 1996

It was a shame to leave World’s End behind, but I had plans for some serious bushwalking in the Flinders Ranges to the north, after some hearty recommendations from Dave and Karen. After a quick bath in the creek and porridge for brekkie cooked on the fire, I headed north up the dirt road, aiming for Burra.

Driving down dirt tracks is an art, and one you learn quickly if you know what’s good for you. There are plenty of hazards, like the massive dips that indicate floodwater channels, potholes where anything could have happened and corners with loose shingle (which are pretty challenging in a rear-wheel drive like Oz). It’s no picnic. An added thrill is that of the dust trail; if you look behind you when you’re driving along you can’t see a thing because you’re chucking up a huge dust cloud behind you. That’s no problem – it’s behind you after all – but when you pass someone coming the other way, you’re both totally blinded for a while, and that’s rather entertaining if it happens to be on a corner. It’s also quite a sight if you stop and look at the still, barren landscape around you, and see a dust trail on a distant road; it looks like a fire, but it’s moving along, so it can’t be.

Another amazing thing about the outback is the strange localised weather phenomenon called the willie-willie[1]. Imagine mini-whirlwinds that reach up into the sky, but are only about 20 feet across; they’re a bit like little tornados, I suppose. They occur quite frequently in the dusty outback, and once I came over a hill to find about five of these things whirling away over the fields. They’re quite amazing, but they don’t half create havoc if you drive right past one; there’s a lot of energy kicking around inside a whirlwind. It made the journey to Burra that little bit more interesting, anyway.

Burra is a pretty little spot; at least, the town is. I had a traditional Aussie meat pie there, something I’ve grown to love (if it’s possible to love food with all the goodness taken out... which, of course, it is), and went off to see the mines that, according to the local blurb, had saved South Australia from bankruptcy. They’re no longer mined, but they’re quite a sight; the mining was opencast, and all that’s left are huge craters that are half full of water, with old buildings dotted around in a kind of mining ghost-town pose. It was interesting, and a good stop on the way to the Flinders Ranges.

Wilpena Pound

I drove down more dirt roads and eventually reached Wilpena, 300km north of my last campsite. It was getting late, so I cooked up, lit my lamp and settled in for a read. Or that’s what the plan was, anyway.

Wilpena must be the most bug-infested place in the world (note that I say bug-infested, because the most fly-infested place is the Nullarbor). I sat there with my lamp, and these little bugs kept falling on me from the trees, moths kept flying round the lamp and straight into me and I got eaten by mozzies, again. I was writing a letter at the time, and I was so moved I caught a mozzie and sellotaped it onto the page. I don’t know whether the recipient appreciated it.

It was worth all the hardship, though. Wilpena is at the only entrance to Wilpena Pound, an amazing natural structure that defies description. Imagine an oval of mountains, 8km wide and 17km long. The inside of the oval gently slopes in a bowl shape, but the outside of the mountains is sheer cliff, so you can only get into the Pound via a pass carved by Wilpena Creek on the eastern edge of the oval. I spent a whole day walking right across the middle of the Pound to Bridle Gap on the other side, a return journey of some 15.5km, and the views were astounding. When I reached Bridle’s Gap, near a mountain suspiciously called Dick Nob on the west side of the Pound, I could see a huge range of mountains to the east – the Elder Range – with a massive tableland of scrub in between. It was a good job the sun was out for the photos, as on my return the heavens opened, cooling me down and making the arid interior of the Pound smell like a wet blazer.

That can of beer I bought on my return was one of the most heavenly treats in the world...

[1] At least, that’s what they’re called in Western Australia. Many thanks to Ian Belford, who emailed me with the name plus a warning that he nearly saw someone decapitated by a willie-willie; a bit of corrugated iron that was trapped inside the whirlwind narrowly missed a cyclist’s head. Be careful out there!

Australia: Western Australia

Nullarbor Desert

Written: 30 March 1996

Wednesday marked the beginning of my journey west towards Western Australia and, ultimately, the state capital Perth, on the other side of the Nullarbor Desert. I spent the day driving the 415km to Wudinna, a convenient stop at the north of the Eyre Peninsula, where I met some guys from England who had just arrived from Perth. I got some handy driving tips off them, which helped me feel a bit more confident about driving such huge distances through the outback.

But the most memorable thing about Wudinna was my cooking. I’d stocked up on provisions at Port Augusta, a rather forgettable industrial port, and one of the things I bought was a 500g box of minced kangaroo meat. Supper for my last night in civilisation was therefore fettuccine with kangaroo bolognese, which was gorgeous; it was like traditional bolognese, but with a more tangy and meaty taste. It’s hard to describe the taste of kangaroo, but if you ever get the chance to try it, do; it set me up for the longest drive of my trip so far... the trek across the Nullarbor Desert.

No Trees

Someone comes up to you in the street and says, ‘Desert.’ What’s the first thing that comes into your head? ‘Sand’ maybe. Or perhaps ‘very hot’. How about ‘dry’? Or ‘yellow’? Maybe even ‘lemon meringue pie’, if you’re hard of hearing.

But the Nullarbor Desert, which fills an awful of a lot of central southern Australia, is none of these things, especially lemon meringue pie. It’s a totally flat, vegetated area, although it’s more scrubland than anything else; the name is a corruption of the Latin for ‘no trees’, which isn’t quite accurate, it’s just that the trees are either stunted to the size of bushes, or so straggly it’s hard to believe they’re alive. There are resident kangaroos, camels, snakes and all the other strange animals that inhabit this side of the globe, and being a desert, it’s normally very dry... but not when I decided to cross it. Oh no.

The real trip west across the Nullarbor begins at Ceduna, a sorry little place 770km from Adelaide that exists to provide a last town before the end of the world. The only settlements between Ceduna and Norseman, some 1200km to the west (and itself 720km east of Perth), are roadhouses and Aboriginal settlements, neither of which are terribly inviting.

The road is, well, pretty straight. The landscape, while different at one end to the other, looks the same as you drive along; it’s flat and covered with little bushes and struggling gum trees. The only variation – and, believe me, any variation is a good thing – is the number of trees. Don’t take your kids on this trip unless you’ve got Valium for the whole family; they’ll drive you insane. Luckily I enjoyed it and discovered a number of interesting things along the way, but then I do have a good stereo and in the desert nobody can hear you sing.

I did the trip in two stages, the first from Wudinna to Ceduna and on to the Nullarbor Roadhouse (538km), and the second from the Nullarbor to Norseman (912km). I camped at the roadhouse, which happened to coincide with a desert downpour, forcing me under cover to cook my kangaroo burgers (just mix kangaroo mince with corn flour and some herbs, and fry ’em: very tasty). This soon forced me to concede that the best way to spend the evening was in the bar, making the inside of my head as soggy as the back shelf of my car. It was a good job I did spend the evening in the bar; when the wind blows in the desert, it doesn’t blow, it howls. That’s just one of the strange things about the outback.

Aboriginal Land

One aspect of Australia that is more apparent in the desert is Aboriginal land. There are a number of large areas of Australia that have been given back to the Aboriginal people – mostly unproductive desert areas, it has to be said – because they have managed to prove that they were there first (this is intriguing: the guidebooks always go on about how Aborigines lived everywhere, but of course they never get given the good parts, like the cities or the bits of land sitting on large mineral deposits). A number of important sites, like Uluru and Kakadu, are now Aboriginal lands, but are leased back to the government for use as National Parks; however, most areas aren’t leased, and you can’t go into them without a permit. One such place, Yalata, is crossed by the Eyre Highway (the road across the Nullarbor) though as long as you stick to the highway, you don’t need a permit.

That’s why there was a notice in the roadhouse bar, which said that if you were travelling in the direction of Yalata or Maralinga Tjarutja, another Aboriginal area to the north of the highway, you couldn’t buy beer to take away, only low alcohol beer. The reason for this highlights a cultural situation in Australia. Because Aboriginal people never made wine or brewed beer, their first experience with alcohol was when the white man arrived, and as a result their metabolism never grew accustomed to it: Aboriginal biology has no tolerance of alcohol. The unfortunate side effect is that it takes very little to get an Aborigine off his or her trolley, so alcoholism is a serious problem among Aborigine communities, which is often quoted by white Australians as a reason not to trust the Aborigines.

The communities on reclaimed Aboriginal land, like Yalata, therefore ban alcohol from the area, as the whole point of the community is to live as they used to, living in harmony with the land, and not spending their lives lying in the gutter... hence the sign in the bar.

Sights of the Nullarbor

There are lots of strange things about crossing the desert, and one of the most obvious is the road train. Imagine a large lorry, and add another similar-sized lorry onto the back, and you’ve got a road train. They go ridiculously fast, and I got three cracks in my (new) windscreen courtesy of road trains coming the other way and stirring up stones from the side of the road. They’re quite a sight.

Another sight is the coastline for the 100km before you reach the Western Australia/South Australia border. There are plenty of lookouts along the way, and the cliffs have to be seen to be believed. The Nullarbor plain used to be at the bottom of the sea (which is one reason for its sandy soils and lack of vegetation), but over time it rose straight up above sea level, and you can see the evidence in the cliffs; they’re huge, white and totally vertical, for as far as the eye can see (except, of course, when the weather is miserable, as it was for me). The sea pounds away with no remorse, and the Eyre Highway passes within a few hundred metres for quite a long stretch.

The first lookout isn’t a lookout as such; it’s a gravel road that takes you 10km to the Head of the Bight, the most northerly point of the Great Australian Bight. It’s not long before the Nullarbor Roadhouse, and I saw the sign and thought ‘what the hell’ and went for it. It was only after an age of driving along this awful unsealed road that I realised that if I broke down, or had a puncture, nobody would be along to help for ages, if at all. That’s one reason why I carry 30 litres of water, 20 litres of spare petrol and a week’s worth of food in the car; it’s the recommended minimum if you’re planning to visit the outback. Luckily I didn’t have a breakdown, and the Head of the Bight was quite a sight, but I was glad to get back to the safety of the main highway.

As you head west after the Nullarbor Roadhouse, the cliffs kick in, and you can go right to the edge and peer over, if you don’t get vertigo. Possibly the spookiest part is looking at the cliffs along the coast from you, and seeing how the edges look really unstable, as if they could fall in at any time. After a while of going west the cliffs gradually turn into flatter scrubland, with these incredibly huge sand dunes lining rough beaches; if it didn’t look so dangerous, these beaches would be paradise.

Every now and then I’d drive over what looked like pedestrian crossings – in the middle of the desert! – which came in pairs, a kilometre or so apart, with a sign saying ‘RFDS Emergency Airstrip’. It took me ages to work out that RFDS stands for Royal Flying Doctor Service, and they use the highway to land in emergencies.

Eventually you reach the border, 185km past the Nullarbor Roadhouse, where the lookouts stop and the drive gets long and pretty boring. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were a bit of variety or something on the radio, but there’s neither, and there’s nothing to stop for on the way. Norseman, the first real town in Western Australia, is like an oasis; I stopped the night and had a long, hot shower for the first time since Wudinna.

‘Sounds a bit unhygienic’ you’re thinking, and you’re right, but water is really scarce in the desert. At the Nullarbor Roadhouse there aren’t any taps, the showers are A$1 for five minutes of hot water – so I had a cold shower, and because it’s so hot in the desert, it was actually rather pleasant – and the only water you can buy is bottled. It was a good job I’d packed plenty of water; there are signs in all the garages that tell you there’s no water available, due to serious shortages; this is a desert, after all.

Desert Rules

Because it’s a wilderness, the Nullarbor has its own rules. The most obvious one to a driver is the Waving Rule, another nicety of Aussie culture that I think I got the hang of, but I’m not sure. The idea is that, because the desert is so empty, you wave at oncoming traffic to say hello. That’s easy enough, surely. Then why did only half of those to whom I waved wave back? Did they spot my Victoria number plates and think, ‘Bloody Victorians, I hate them’ and ignore me, or was it more sinister? And why, whenever I decided that enough was enough and I wasn’t going to wave to these ungrateful buggers who didn’t reciprocate, did someone then wave at me? The solution: just wave at everyone but don’t look at them, so it doesn’t matter if they wave back; you’re being polite, end of story. The only problem is that when you’re back in civilisation, you have this urge to wave at every living thing, and that doesn’t really work when you’re driving through a busy town centre.

You might also be thinking that 912km is a pretty hefty drive; at an average of 100km/h it’s nine hours of driving, and that’s no joke. However, I crossed three time zones during the journey, so by the time I got to Norseman I’d put the clocks back by two-and-a-half hours, making it just about the right length for a day’s drive. There’s logic in there somewhere... but whatever, by the time I’d reached Norseman, had the local police check the car to make sure I wasn’t carrying any fresh fruit, vegetables or wool, I realised I’d arrived in Western Australia, and pitched for the night. At last I can genuinely say, ‘G’day from WA!’

Esperance

Written: 1 April 1996

Esperance is a picturesque little town. I had a day to kill there, so I wandered around, just exploring, and I discovered this wonderful little museum packed with seemingly random exhibits. City museums are one thing, with their multiple levels, priceless paintings and mummies from ancient Egypt (it’s funny how every museum seems to have something from a pyramid), but little town museums are a different kettle of exhibits altogether, and they’re a hoot. This one was typical – an old, disused railway station, with junk scattered everywhere – but I thought it was particularly interesting. I went in there because they had bits of the Skylab space station that fell to earth in 1979 over Esperance, and as a budding space cadet I just had to see them: those things had been in space, man! But there were other bits and bobs that were worth the effort, none more so than the unexpected appearance of a BBC Master Compact on display; this computer was only released in about 1985, when I was using BBC Micros at school, and seeing it in a museum made me feel ancient...

That afternoon I left Esperance and turned back on myself to visit the Cape Le Grand National Park, a beautiful set of granite hills set in scrubland right on the coast. The most intriguing peak was the 262m-high Frenchman’s Cap, so called because the top of this mountain is home to a huge cave that goes right through the peak, so when you look at it, it looks like a cap on top of the mountain. I bounded up the very steep granite surface, and reached the top in record time; the view was well worth it. On the way up I passed a group of middle-aged women having a breather, and I met them again at the bottom, as they started to get out lunch for them and the rest of their family. Whaddya know, five minutes later I was joining them for lunch, chatting about my trip and where I was from; the group consisted of a family from Birmingham and the relatives from WA that they were visiting. What a lovely collection of people... it just shows how easy it is to meet people in the countryside compared to the cities, where people are much more aloof.

Beautiful Coastline

My next destination was Bremer Bay, a tiny coastal town at the western end of the Fitzgerald River National Park (there are quite a few National Parks along the southwest coast). I arrived at Bremer Bay in the dark, after a considerable drive down some evil dirt roads, and pitched my tent in pitch black – something that becomes second nature after doing it every day for over a month.

The morning of April Fool’s Day I awoke to the sound of the sea, not uncommon when you’re on a coast-hugging trek. But Bremer Bay was quite beautiful, with a huge curved beach and deep blue surf, and I would have lingered longer if it hadn’t been for the call of the National Park up the road. Somewhere in that park was a mountain with my name on it, and I was going to conquer it.

West Mt Barren was the nearest one open to the public, so I headed out there; there’s a disease called dieback that gets spread by walkers, and it’s particularly prevalent on the southwest coast, so some mountains are closed off periodically to trudgers like me. Dieback rots plants’ roots, so it’s the botanical equivalent of athlete’s foot, but don’t try telling that to an Australian. Here Athlete’s Foot is a shop that sells sporting footwear, and tinea is the fungus that hangs around in showers. Another useful tip from Dr Mark’s Travel Almanac...

Anyway, West Mt Barren was delightful, and the sun beamed down as I headed up the slope. I was rather pleased that I’d got there in one piece, as the dirt roads through the park were particularly challenging; one thing I’m getting rather good at is doing controlled skids around corners, and it’s all down to those driving games you get down the pub. I knew those Wednesday nights down The Crown in St Albans would come in handy one day.

It’s hard to describe being totally alone on a hill, surrounded by barren scrubland and beautiful coastline in the distance. But it’s even more amazing when a wedge-tailed eagle decides to do its hunting right around the corner, and keeps swooping over your head. I’m no ornithologist, but even I’m amazed by birds that big and graceful[1]. Not a sound, just gliding into the sun... it’s quite a sight.

Point Ann

Having conquered West Mt Barren, I continued down the dirt road from hell to Point Ann, surely the most wonderful beach in the world. Here I was, completely alone, miles from civilisation, and there was this beach going, ‘You know you’re hot, you know you’re sweaty, so go on, jump in,’ which is exactly what I did. Nobody on the beach, not a cloud in the sky, endless, squeaky-clean sand... there isn’t much more that paradise can offer. I dried out in the sun, got out my guitar and serenaded the sand dunes, something I’d never do if there were any chance of someone actually hearing me. Still, the crabs enjoyed it.

Behind Point Ann is St Mary’s Inlet, which is... an inlet! But it’s no ordinary inlet, as it’s so flat it goes on for ages. I stalked through the bush and round the side of the water, and eventually battled through the undergrowth to the inlet itself. The tide happened to be out, and there was this huge – and I mean huge – flat area of white sand, surrounded by gently sloping bush. It had the same feeling as the Coorong, just smaller, but I still danced around like a madman, adding boot prints to the roo marks all over the place.

It couldn’t last forever, though, and although I could have camped the night, I wanted to get to civilisation and to a long, hot shower, so I packed up and skidded my merry way to Albany, further west along the coast.

[1] Be careful where you repeat this phrase...

Albany

Written: 3 April 1996

Albany is cute, but it drove me insane, almost literally. It seems to be an Australian thing, not bothering with road signs or making them so hard to find that by the time you spot them, you’ve missed your turning. One theory is that in a country where roads are all orthogonal and people work in blocks, you don’t need road signs, it’s all a case of ‘two blocks west’ and so on. I think that’s crazy: in a world where everything is at right angles and the roads look pretty much the same everywhere, you surely need signs even more. My pet theory is that it’s a bravado thing; when I see a bumper sticker that says ‘Real Men Do It Without Road Signs’ I’ll know I was right all along.

So after getting lost a number of times, I did eventually manage to get to the top of Mt Melville to look over the city – not one of the world’s most inspiring panoramas, it must be said – and I eventually found the right direction for Torndirrup National Park, the most visited park on the southwest coast. I couldn’t, however, work out why this is the case; I like National Parks because they’re challenging, they’re as near to wilderness as you’re going to get in this day and age, and they have beautiful walks, stunning sights, and hardly any tourists. But Torndirrup is the most popular National Park because it’s close to Albany, which is a tourist centre. Sure, I saw the Gap (a reasonably impressive cliff), I went to see the Natural Bridge (not bad, I suppose), I visited the Blowholes (which steadfastly refused to blow), I climbed Stony Hill (where the view was good, but not mind-boggling), and everything was pleasant enough. But what was mind-boggling was the group of people I met there.

Backpackers vs Travellers

When I got to the top of Stony Hill after an easy five-minute stroll, there was a little group of people there, and when I got my camera out to capture the view, one member of the group offered to take a picture of me, with the view included. He then proceeded to explain what it was I was looking at – the Gap, Natural Bridge, Blowholes, Albany – and I listened politely, not mentioning that I knew all this, thank you, and I wasn’t a complete moron and did know how to read a map, so nice to have met you. It turned out that this guy was a manager of the Youth Hostel in Albany, and he had a tour in tow, so I instantly forgave him for treating me like a tourist, especially when he asked whether I would like a cup of coffee, seeing as they were about to have one.

‘Thank you very much, that’s very kind of you,’ I said and I sat down to enjoy coffee and biscuits with this little group from the hostel. And that’s when I realised what has happened: in the time since I last stayed in a hostel, back in Port Arthur at the end of January, I’ve developed into a traveller, and these people were backpackers. The distinction is subtle but important; I go where I want, precisely, even to the point of driving past a sign, doing a double take, reversing back and following it just to see what’s there (I’ve got 200km of spare fuel in the boot, so I won’t run dry). But backpackers are bound by the laws of Coach and Hostel: they need both to exist, and travel from one place to another, staring at the world through bus windows, and meeting other people from within this culture, mainly other Europeans, Asians, Americans and so on. They think they’re travelling, and they think they’re really experiencing Australia, but they’re only experiencing part of it. Ask them if they’ve met any nice Australians, and they only talk about tour guides and hostel managers. These people made me realise that getting a car – even one that has not only eaten up my funds, but also chewed the cud seven times and converted it into milk – was a great move. If I did it again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

One handy thing about backpackers, though, is the discount they get at museums, and the guy from the hostel got me into the Whaleworld museum for a dollar less than normal, and then gave us all a guided tour of the old whaling station on the peninsula, and most interesting it was too. Actually, it was rather horrific – we saw where they chopped the whales up, and boiled the blubber to release the oils, and the harpoons they used to kill the whales, and so on – but it was well worth the visit. So perhaps I should stop being too critical; after all, backpackers are still nice people. They’re just not quite the same as travellers.

Porongurups and Stirling Ranges

Unsatisfied by the views at Torndirrup, I decided to spend the afternoon in the Porongurups, a range of hills to the north of Albany. The Porongurups are home to Castle Rock, a mountain that sounded about the right size for an afternoon’s climb. It was gorgeous, with these huge granite boulders perched precariously (or so it looked) on the top, and the view was worth the effort, even if I did get mauled by a huge cloud of flying ants when I reached the summit. The area round Albany is truly weird; it’s totally flat, but you get these big triangular mountains that just appear out of nowhere, and when you climb them you can see for miles. This is what happened at Castle Rock, though the best was yet to come...

After Castle Rock, I headed north again towards the Stirling Ranges, a bigger range of mountains still. As it was getting late, I pitched camp in the National Park; a lot of parks allow camping at specific sites, and although you don’t get any amenities, they’re really cheap, and their locations are second to none. The beauty of them is the silence and the ruggedness; you don’t get too many families with kids in National Park sites, as they tend to need the amenities. I sat in a clearing that night, reading my book by the light of the full moon, and the way it lit everything up was quite beautiful, albeit rather eerie.

The next day was when the weather started to turn; since the Nullarbor things hadn’t been too bad, with cloudy mornings, beautiful afternoons and freezing nights, but on Wednesday, the rain came to say hello. Luckily I had an early start and managed to climb Bluff Knoll, the highest peak in the Stirling Ranges, before the weather joined the party, but I could see it rolling in from the peak, and made a hasty return to the car to drive to Pemberton.

Pemberton

Written: 5 April 1996

It was getting pretty murky as I drove from Bluff Knoll and through Walpole, visiting the Tingle Tree and Circular Pool, the first being a huge karri tree, and the second being, well, a circular pool. The whole area to the west of Albany is home to the most amazing forests you’ve ever seen, with really tall trees stretching up into the distant canopy, and driving to Pemberton, my next destination, was a delight, especially as I was leaving the weather behind.

Pemberton is as pretty as a picture. Imagine a tiny village completely surrounded by huge karri forests, and you’re almost there. One of the main attractions of Pemberton is the Gloucester Tree, a 61m karri tree with a lookout at the top; it’s open to the public, and you can climb up a rickety old ladder of steel rods set into the tree, all the way to the top. It’s a scary climb – one mistake and you could easily fall to your doom – but the view is amazing. The lookout used to be used to spot fires, and as a result the top is above the forest canopy, giving quite a view.

The caravan park I stayed at had a fireplace for every site and a huge pile of logs out the back that you could raid as much as you liked, and it didn’t take me long to get a pile of wood together, seeing as the night was drawing in. And then it happened: despite the fact that I was miles from the beach, my site got invaded by a family of Germans, who didn’t speak a word of English, but who took over the picnic table, expressed extreme interest in my fireplace, and well-and-truly towelled my beach. My response? I decided to hit the bottle shop and make the best of a bad job.

Which I did, in style. Putting down their utter disregard for privacy to a forgivable difference in cultures, I proceeded to have the most interesting Pidgin English conversation with the family; at least, I think it was interesting, but it’s always hard to know what the subject is in Pidgin, especially alcohol-Pidgin. Never mind; they offered to feed me steak and salad (seeing as I’d offered them all a beer and was being extremely polite about their invasion tactics) and we had a very pleasant evening by the fire, talking gobbledygook.

But I paid for it in the morning. I don’t know why it is – old age, something they put in Aussie beer, a developing stomach ulcer perhaps, who knows? – but sometimes I wake up after only a few beers (not necessarily too many) and feel just awful, much worse than with a normal hangover. I reckon that this time I got a serious hangover because I hadn’t had a drink since the Nullarbor Roadhouse, and I was out of practice.

Thursday was, therefore, a bit of a washout; no sooner had I finished my Coco Pops for brekkie than I was throwing them up. Suffice to say I wasn’t going anywhere, and I paid for another night in the caravan park, feeling very sorry for myself. To compound the agony my air mattress had sprung a leak in the night, a slow one that let the air out over a matter of hours, so I woke up at five in the morning, lying on cold, hard ground and aching to the core. I felt terrible, and it was all my own fault.

But here’s a perfect example of every cloud having a silver lining. Pemberton has a thriving wood industry, and one of the offshoots is the local art and craft set-up. When I felt a little better I walked to the Fine Woodcraft Gallery to ease my aching bones, and I was truly stunned. What a place! The most amazing woodcraft was on display, from all-wood clocks to whole furniture displays to sculptures, all made out of the most beautiful woods. The proprietor of the shop was a friendly soul, too, and when he found out I was a computer journalist, he took me to the back to show me his Apple Mac, of which he was justly proud. It’s little touches like this that make these visits worthwhile, and I felt compelled to buy something to remember the shop by; when I walked out of the shop I was the proud owner of a little sack of fragrant herbs that were specially mixed to promote alertness while driving, ideal for hanging up in the car.

But even that couldn’t shake the ache I had behind my eyes, and to add insult to injury, Thursday night was when the weather I had spotted in the Stirling Ranges finally caught up with me. There I was, with my fireplace finally all to myself, and a large pile of logs, and it suddenly went very cold and started to rain. So when I got up on Friday, the tent was soaked, the car was sodden, and my enthusiasm was dampened... but I wanted to move on, so move on I did.

Cape Leeuwin

Written: 6 April 1996

My first port of call after Pemberton was Augusta, right on the southwest coast of the continent. I drove to Cape Leeuwin lighthouse, the most southwesterly point of Australia, and the only place where you can see the Indian Ocean to your right, and the Southern Ocean to your left. After climbing the lighthouse, I headed north to Jewel Cave, and went on an hour-long tour of this most amazing sight. There are about 150 caves in the southwestern tip, four of which are open to the public, and they are stunning, much better than the ones I saw in Naracoorte in South Australia. I would have liked to have seen them all, but the prices they charge are not exactly cheap, so I went for the most picturesque. The other highly recommended one, Lake Cave, has a huge underground lake, but I’m far too scared of dark water for that... that’s one phobia I still have to conquer.

I then realised that not only was there precious little between me and Perth except for roads and holiday resorts, but it was also Good Friday, and every man and his wallaby was heading south for the weekend. The logical solution? Go into town for some peace and quiet, and it worked. I arrived at Fremantle (a suburb of Perth, effectively, though the locals count themselves as a separate town) on Friday night, and found it totally dead, completely empty, and with plenty of vacancies in the camping ground. I’ve since found out that the only two days in the year that Australian pubs close are Good Friday and Christmas Day, which might have had something to do with it.

It’s now Easter Saturday, and I’ve had my first taste of Perth in the form of Fremantle on a Saturday. The sun is out, the market is swinging, and the atmosphere is cosmopolitan, chic and quite wonderful. I’m going to get a beer in one of the wonderful pubs (or ‘taverns’ as they call then in Western Australia), and I’m going to pamper myself. I think I could fall in love with Perth; I might get a job here for a couple of weeks, but I still have to move on before too long if I’m to see northern WA. But that’s a whole new adventure, and I’ve got me some city dwellin’ to do first.

Isn’t this fun!

Drop Bears

Written: 12 April 1996

It’s quiz time! You should by now have a pretty good idea what the general Australian psyche is like, so see if you can identify who’s talking to whom in the following conversations, all, of course, overheard on a bus. It’s the same two people in every instance, just to make it easy. Here we go...

Conversation A

‘Of course, you’ve got to be careful of drop bears: they’re everywhere at this time of year.’

‘Drop bears? What on earth are they?’

‘Well, they’re these bears that are distantly related to koalas, and they hang around in trees, sleeping most of the time.’

‘What’s so dangerous about that?’

‘Well, when a drop bear gets hungry, he sits there, up in the tree, looking round for something to eat. And he sits and sits and sits, and waits until some unsuspecting animal wanders under his tree and then – wallop! – he drops down on top of ’em. So if you happen to be walking under a tree when a drop bear’s looking for a meal, you’re in for a nasty shock.’

‘Yeah...’

‘But the worst thing is the claws. Because they have to climb trees, they’ve got long, sharp claws for gripping bark, and if a drop bear lands on you, the chances are he’s going to rip huge gashes down your back. It’s not a pleasant way to go; the loss of blood can be enough to kill you, even if he decides not to eat you.’

‘No shit...’

‘Yup, and they just love trees in sleepy suburbs, so watch it when you’re walking to the pub, eh.’

‘Yeah... thanks man.’

‘No worries. Anytime...’

Conversation B

‘Of course, you won’t be able to open a bank account with an Australian bank.’

‘Why not? I’ve had no problems in places like England.’

‘Didn’t you know? You can’t open a bank account in Australia if you’re a woman.’

‘What? That’s ridiculous!’

‘Well, it’s the way it is. You can only open a bank account if you’re a man. Works really well, too; you can keep a woman in her place when she can’t deal with banks.’

‘In this day and age, I don’t believe it...’

‘It’s true. Would I lie to you?’

‘Err...’

Conversation C

‘You know you told me that you guys all ride around on kangaroos in Australia?’

‘Yeah. Well, they’re easy to park, cheaper than running a car, and they go really fast round town.’

‘Yeah, you told me. But there’s one thing I don’t get.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Well, how can you tell if a kangaroo is a police kangaroo, rather than a normal one?’

‘Easy. It’s got a flashing blue light on its head.’

‘Ah... right.’

Conversation D

‘You know Tasmania? The little island off the bottom of Australia?’

‘Err... I guess so.’

‘You know it’s right on the edge of a huge rift in the ocean floor?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it is. Anyway, a few years ago it started to break away from the ocean floor, and Tassie’s slowly falling into this massive underwater canyon.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep, and they had to build these two huge chains to attach Tassie to the mainland, so it won’t drift off and disappear underwater. Massive buggers they are, with huge anchor points either side of Melbourne.’

‘Wow. That’s amazing.’

‘Isn’t it?’

Solutions

Yes, they’re all genuine conversations between serious Aussie wind-up merchants, and gullible tourists, who end up genuinely believing that Aussies ride around on kangaroos, have problems with drop bears, don’t let women open bank accounts and chain their island states to the mainland. I kid you not: I nearly fell for the drop bear story in Melbourne (but not quite) and there’s plenty more where they come from. Never trust an Australian who grins wickedly all the time...

Kalgoorlie

Written: 20 April 1996

Before arriving in Perth, I’d fired off an email to the city’s Acorn dealer and said it would be nice to meet up, and much to my surprise he invited me round for a chat. Wouldn’t you know, my visit coincided with the girl on technical support going on holiday, so when we met up and I mentioned in passing that I was looking for a job, it suddenly turned a job interview. Much to my delight, I got offered three weeks’ employment, starting in a couple of weeks’ time; it would end up turning into five weeks of very satisfying work, charging up my coffers with impeccable timing.

After exhausting the sights and sounds of Perth, I decided to kill my last free week before work by heading due east from Perth to Kalgoorlie, the gold mining centre of WA, and the place that secured the future of the state. There was no point in rushing, so I plotted my course before setting off down the freeway.

My first stop on my journey east was York, a pleasant little town that proclaims itself to be the oldest town in WA after Perth. It was nice enough, if a little quiet, and proved the perfect place to relax in preparation for the journey into the outback. The only excitement was an incident involving this guy in a unit adjacent to the caravan park, who was obviously beating the shit out of his girlfriend, though she managed to escape and drive off in his car, which was a relief.

The next day I headed off to a little place called Hyden, home to some weird and wonderful rock formations. The most famous of these is Wave Rock, a strange wall of stone that has been eroded into a frozen surfing wave, complete with vertical stripes that make it look like a huge ice-cream breaker. Also in the area was a strange sight called the Hippo’s Yawn, which looked just like a hippo’s mouth, but to be honest I’ve seen more fascinating places; Tourist’s Yawn is perhaps a more accurate name. One thing that is amazing about Wave Rock, though, is the wind. The area is so strangely shaped that when the wind blows through the treetops and you’re hanging round the rock, the sound is really eerie. I was wandering around the back of the rock, keeping away from the busload of Japanese tourists who were destroying everything in their path (including the peace), when I first heard it – and it sounded utterly ancient. It’s moments like this when you realise what a deeply spiritual land this is.

Wave Rock is also home to the largest collection of moths I’ve ever seen. I set up camp in the nearby campsite, and there I was, sitting by my petrol lamp and minding my own business with a good book, when suddenly all hell broke loose. I’m used to moths coming along to share my light, but this was more like a moth storm. Despite me constantly moving my chair – a rolling stone gathers no moths, after all – I eventually gave up and let the buggers use me as a bedroom. Two minutes later I looked up and saw this two-inch-long furry sod sitting on my knee, soaking up the rays, and, calm as someone whose mind is still involved in his book, I just brushed him off onto the floor, before it hit me just how big he was; it was only then that my skin crawled and I had to stand up and jump out of the light to calm down. Still, it’s an improvement on screaming a lot and having to find someone else to deal with the problem for me...

Dreaming Sites

The next morning I set off up a dirt road towards Southern Cross, which is about 200km west of Kalgoorlie, and on the way I visited a place called Mulka’s Cave, home to some Aboriginal cave paintings. It strikes me that I’ve not said much about Aboriginal culture so far, so I’d better explain how the Aboriginal myths hang together.

All the Aboriginal tribes have their own stories about the regions they inhabited, and these stories all come together to form the mythology of the Aboriginal people. The mythology is collectively called the Dreaming, so when you visit parts of Australia and read about how the Aborigines believed the landscape was formed and so on, you’re reading part of the Dreaming, and in its entirety the Dreaming describes how everything was formed, from the earth to the animals to the laws of the tribes. For example, the story of the Coorong involves this guy chasing a huge fish about, thus forming the huge dune during the chase, and making the Murray River really wide at that point with the fish’s passage. Mulka’s Cave also has a story in the Dreaming.

The story goes that this unmarried couple had a child, and because it was forbidden to have children out of wedlock, the child, Mulka, was born cross-eyed. This made it impossible for Mulka to aim his spear straight, so he couldn’t hunt animals for food, and was forced to kill and eat little children. This diet made him so large and fierce that the local tribesmen decided to rid themselves of the menace. They chased him out of his cave, and eventually killed him some miles away, where they dumped the body on an ant’s nest, without a proper burial. You can still see the handprints of Mulka on the roof of his cave today.

The idea behind the story was to make sure that people didn’t flaunt the tribe’s marriage laws, rather than trying to stop people from eating children. The handprints are there, too, along with some pictures of hunting that were probably added later. It’s quite a thrill seeing these pieces of history, especially when places like Mulka’s Cave are so far off the beaten track that very few people will bother. Even I wouldn’t have bothered if I weren’t taking the back road to Southern Cross.

Another interesting thing about Mulka’s Cave, and indeed Wave Rock, is that they are water catchment areas. What this means is that when it rains, water pours over the rocks, and the enterprising local council has built a series of channels and dams to store the water; after all, it’s so dry out here most of the time. It’s strange to see these ancient rock mounds topped with modern concrete walls to direct the water; it’s a bit of a shame, but I suppose it’s preferable to huge pipelines from the coast.

My next stop was Southern Cross, a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere that was as peaceful as most little outback towns are. An interesting gimmick in Southern Cross is that every street is named after a constellation (as is the town), and indeed there wasn’t a cloud in the sky that night, so the stars were spectacular. But nothing much happens in Southern Cross, so after barbying some snags (that’s cooking some sausages on the barbecue to you and me) I hit the sack and awoke on Wednesday to wonderful weather and a straight road heading into the rising sun, all the way to the Eastern Goldfields.

Kalgoorlie

Kalgoorlie is really stranded. Gold was discovered there towards the end of the last century by these wandering travellers looking for grazing land, and the place went ballistic, with crowds of people heading for the desert with gold in their eyes. The only problem? There’s precious little water out here, and plenty of them died, or had such terrible living standards that survival was a serious challenge.

The solution, built at the turn of the century, was a huge pipeline from Perth all the way to Kalgoorlie, with storage reservoirs on the way and pumping stations along the route. It’s still the way that the goldfields get most of their water, and you notice it when you follow the main highway east. I’d been plying the scenic route until Southern Cross, but then I joined the highway, which has this huge metal pipe along its side all the way to Kalgoorlie. It’s quite a strange sight, especially when you get a straight bit that cuts through trees, and you can see two parallel cleared strips heading off into the distance, like a huge railway track. And the way it glitters in the rising sun is quite something...

Kalgoorlie is an oddity. It’s in the middle of nowhere, at the end of this pipeline, and it’s beautiful. The buildings are exquisite, built when the gold was producing fabulous wealth, and the whole town is surrounded by mines that are still worked. I visited one of these opencast mines, but got turned away while they blasted, so after a quick beer I went back, and you’ve never seen such a big hole in the ground. When you first see it you think, ‘OK, it’s big,’ but then you look down and see trucks in the bottom that look like Tonka toys, and it’s then you realise it’s just huge.

I also visited the town museum, and as with other smallish towns in Australia, it was pretty good. I’m not particularly interested in mining or gold (though I probably wouldn’t turn down the latter), but it just seemed right to be reading all about it in Kalgoorlie.

Back to Perth

Thursday came along and I decided to head back towards Perth, so I drove south to Kambalda, another mining town, to see the salt lake there, Lake Lefroy. Imagine being on top of a hill, with a searing blue sky above, a dull, reddish desert all around, and this huge, flat, white lake surrounding most of the hill; it was quite a sight in the hot sunshine.

It was a reasonably uneventful journey back to Merredin, except for my lunch stop. I pulled off the road into a picnic spot, and saw a sign to a lookout, just 200m into the bush. I jumped at the chance to pop into the bush and stretch my legs, so I wandered over to this rock outcrop, and what should I see at the nearby waterhole but a flock of emus. They soon spotted me and ran off into the undergrowth, but it was a fascinating sight; the view from the lookout wasn’t half bad, either.

Merredin was where the weather broke. It rained. And it rained. I sheltered in the campsite’s kitchen, where I was joined by a friendly Siamese cat and a Japanese guy who was cycling across the Nullarbor, which struck me as a pretty intriguing way to spend your life.

Friday saw me arrive in Toodyay (pronounced ‘Toojay’) in the Avon Valley, only 90km from Perth. The idea had been to go walking in the local National Park, but the weather was so bad I settled for a tour of the Old Gaol (where I learned the story of Moondyne Joe, the convict who just kept escaping) and spent the rest of the day sheltering in the tent. That’s because the tent is more waterproof than the car...

...a fact that became quite apparent on Saturday. I drove to Perth and booked myself into a hostel in Scarborough, just down the road from where I was going to be working, and it kept niggling me on the way that the area smelt like Stilton cheese... but it was only on unpacking the car that I discovered the mould in the rear passenger’s floor space. Yes, my car is mouldy, and I’m strangely proud of the fact. I might even try to grow some mustard and cress next time it rains...

Rottnest Island

Written: 28 May 1996

After a few weeks back in the office routine, I finally got around to visiting Rottnest Island, a popular place to visit just 20km west of Perth. Rotto, as it’s affectionately known by the locals, was first ‘discovered’ by a Dutchman in the 1690s, and was named Rat’s Nest Island in Dutch, due to the local inhabitants – quokkas – that look like huge rats. They’re actually marsupials, and on closer inspection they’re like a cross between a rat and a kangaroo, and stand about a foot tall. They’ve also got cute little faces, which is perfect for survival in the tourist age (even if you’re not supposed to feed them).

Rotto is an interesting place. You can’t bring a car onto the island, and the most popular way to ‘do’ the island is by bike. As the island is only 11km long (that’s just under seven miles) it’s an easy bike ride to explore the whole thing, but I decided to walk it, and it turned out to be a good idea.

Rottnest is pretty well untouched once you’re out of the tourist settlement on the east end of the island; at least, that’s how it looks when you’re used to the city. However, there are some serious gun emplacements left over from the second world war, a grand old lighthouse right in the middle of the island, and some other little settlements, all of which turn the relatively scrubby landscape into something worth touring. There are a number of salt lakes inside the perimeter of the island that dry up in summer, but as it was winter when I visited, they were reasonably full.

The coast is quite varied within a short distance. The north and west coasts (insofar as an east-west lozenge shaped island can be said to have a west coast) are very rugged, and the eastern coast has sandy beaches, but the fun part of the island – and the reason it is well known – is the quokka population. Sit down and break out the food, and you’ll get these cocky little things climbing up your legs, jumping on the table, all to get a little taste of your lunch... but they’re so cute it’s great fun. You can see why Rotto is a fun day out for the kids – and big kids, of course.

Perth

Written: 16 June 1996

Perth was where Lady Luck smiled on me, and gave me not just one job, but two. A couple of weeks into my stint at the city’s Acorn dealer, the head honcho from Acorn New Zealand, whom I’d met when working for Acorn in Melbourne, was visiting Perth to talk to the dealer about developments in the company, and to reassure them following the closure of the Melbourne office, which had been announced not long after I struck west. Much to my surprise, he only went and offered me a job at Acorn in Auckland for when I got to New Zealand, which suddenly opened up huge possibilities for my ongoing travel plans. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know...

Exploring Perth

So I worked during the week, and spent the weekends exploring Perth and its surroundings. Highlights of this wonderful city – well, edited highlights anyway – follow, in no particular order:

- When I first arrived in Perth, I contacted a friend of a friend called Glen, who kindly offered to put me up for a week of barbecues, golf, drinking and gambling. The Saturday I spent in his company proved to be particularly interesting; Glen, his friends and I headed out to the pub in the afternoon for a few drinks, and ended up having a bit of a flutter on the horses. A lot of pubs in Australia are also bookies, with sports-friendly TVs dotted around the place and a separate counter for betting; it’s quite unobtrusive, and good for the bookies’ business, obviously. Anyway, three of us – Glen, Rick and me – went in for a tiny flutter, putting A$2 each into something called a trifecta (which I didn’t understand at all) where we each picked a horse from the same race, and if those three were the first three across the line, ignoring the ordering of the three, we’d win.

Incredibly our second race (of three) came up; we’d accidentally picked the first three in the race, and our A$6 bet won us a whopping A$365! I couldn’t believe it, but when I got handed A$100 cash and we still had a drinking pot of A$65 between us, I soon got the hang of it. It was typical beginner’s luck – I don’t bet, even on the Grand National, and I was the one who filled in the winning slip. After a win like that, how could we fail to celebrate?

But that was just the beginning. Gradually everyone left the pub to go home for supper except for the three of us, so Glen rang up his mate Tyler to see what he was up to. It turned out he was off to play cards at this bloke’s house, and we could come along if we wanted, just bring the beer. Red rag to a bull...

I don’t know much about cards, but I remembered the rules of blackjack from way back, and luckily that was the game rather than poker, which I don’t understand at all. The three of us who won on the horses were there, with Whitey (the guy who owned the house) and a bloke called Digger. I’d have been quite intimidated if I hadn’t been so merry, and I was a bit concerned when I came away with A$75 more than I arrived with, but nobody seemed to mind that I was looking suspiciously like a hustler. When we left at 4am, I’d managed to drink all night, eat a huge pizza, and still come out about A$150 up on the whole day. I couldn’t believe it...

- On quite a few occasions I visited Kings Park, a luscious botanical garden that overlooks the centre of Perth, with a breathtaking vista of gleaming skyscrapers, the deep blue Swan River, and the greenery of Perth’s trees, all laid out at your feet. One particularly memorable visit involved an afternoon of sitting under a gum tree, writing articles, followed by a deep red sunset that lit up the skyscrapers in the weirdest way – as Kings Park is to the west of Perth, I was between the sun and the city. Slowly the city lights came on, and within an hour the view has turned into a classic cityscape by night. It was really rather memorable.

- The centre of Perth is quite compact, and you can walk around it pretty easily; there’s a number of historical buildings, but not quite as many as in the eastern state capitals, as Perth took considerably longer to develop. It’s the most remote capital city in the world, and it wasn’t until gold was discovered in Kalgoorlie in the late 19th century that things started to take off. Still, places like Government House (surrounded by walls and trees, though unfortunately closed to the public) and St George’s Cathedral (a large, red church dwarfed by skyscrapers) are worth the visit. With such a small population, there’s precious little traffic or pollution, and parking is a dream.

- Work has its perks, too. There’s a rather posh public school in Perth called Scotch College, where every pupil has a Pocket Book computer (just like mine), and I’ve been commissioned to write an article about them. The teacher in charge of the computer department, who also happens to be a housemaster, invited me out to dinner one Friday night; Barney (the housemaster), his wife Candy and I went to Fremantle, and had a very entertaining meal on the ‘cappuccino strip’, the main drag in Freo. It’s little things like this that make what I’m doing so different to the ‘year off before university’-type round the world trip. I’m getting paid to write articles, and I’m also getting invited out to dinner; I can’t lose! One thing’s for sure: Barney’s going to get a pretty damn good write up...

- So, lots of entertainment, conversation, food and drink... and a nice warm feeling – a stark contrast to the hostel that weekend. For the first time since using hostels, I’d found a place with a really sound bunch of people: not too many naive Poms, some interesting Aussies and a good location, close to work and close to the beach. But there’s always a bad side, and Scarborough’s bad side was called Clayton.

Clayton was the local loony; it’s part of the hostel culture to have at least one misunderstood alcoholic, with a string of disastrous love affairs behind him and a problem with reality. Clayton had already gained a name for himself in the hostel with his irrational mood swings, and after the news hit of the gun massacre at Port Arthur, we were all a little wary of the man. Anyway, when I returned to the hostel on Saturday afternoon, Clayton was crashed out in the corner of one of the communal rooms in the hostel, obviously after a heavy session the night before. That wasn’t anything surprising.

The fact that he was still there, immobile, well into the evening caused little concern, until someone tried to wake him and found that he was totally out of it, and had blood all down his face. The hostel manager called the paramedics, and when they got there Clayton was totally spun out: shaking like a leaf in a typhoon, unable to hold a glass of water... he was a wreck. They found a prescription for Prozac in his room, which they thought he might have tried to overdose on, and then he was in the ambulance and being whisked away into the night. We never saw him again; poor Clayton.

- The freelance writing has also taken off rather pleasingly, as I’ve managed to get commissions worth more than £1700 over the next 12 months, and that goes a long way on the road. It seems that all the favours I did other freelancers by giving them a break when I was an editor are turning back to me; now they’re in the editorial seat, and I’m getting all the work. I never thought of being nice to people as an investment before, but it’s paying off handsomely.

- I also stayed with a lovely couple called Rags and Judy – Judy worked with me at the Acorn dealer – from whom I rented a spare room and good company. It turned out that Rags was really into his sailing, and in a fit of Shiraz Cabernet he asked me if I wanted to come along. It was quite an experience: four men in a yacht, Rags, Bernie, Ken and me, racing round the sea with just the wind to push us along. I sat there, clueless as to how to read the winds, change the direction of the foresail or hoist the spinnaker. I don’t know much more now, but I can safely say that yachting is up there with fishing in the ‘quiet day out, male bonding’ stakes. I’ve never been in a race where you’re constantly competing, but in such a slow, mellow way. Maybe if I can find some sucker with a yacht in Queensland, I’ll give it another go.

- I’d been meaning to change the oil and oil filter in my car for some time – whenever I took out the dip-stick it’d be covered in thick, black sludge – and I finally got around to it in Perth. It’s the first oil change I’ve done on my own, and although it’s not a major task, it’s good to know I can do it. I’d spent the week at work hacking this chemical container into something to catch the oil, and it worked a treat. Lo, Mark the Mechanic! Rags also hacked around with the engine, sorting out the distributor to stop the engine ‘pinking’ – it had been making a fair old racket when accelerating – and now it’s running as well as it ever has. It was good to see that the day’s work would have cost me about A$140 in a garage, but only cost me about A$20 in parts in the end.

- I’ve really got into libraries lately, for some reason; they’re really peaceful, and they give you a great idea about what people read and think about in the city you’re visiting. You also get an interesting cross-section of the city in the clientele, with students, businessmen, mothers and children... it’s a fascinating microcosm, and it’s totally free. It’s a bonus if the library is beautiful, as with Melbourne, but even the ultra-modern Perth library has a strangely compelling atmosphere. I have no idea how these libraries compare to English ones, as ‘library’ and ‘leisure’ are two words that were previously incompatible to me, but I certainly enjoyed whiling away the afternoons, typing away between the bookshelves. I truly am becoming middle-aged...

The Baby Ward

Written: 17 June 1996

There are lots of defining moments in life. Your first proper drinking session; losing your virginity; realising that some of the music your parents liked isn’t all that bad; growing your hair before realising that it doesn’t suit you, then cutting it off, before growing it again; realising that the only thing love and logic have in common are the first two letters; learning to drive, and then learning to crash; leaving home and getting to grips with laundry, banks and two-minute noodles; sitting in a field in Glastonbury, finding reality a problem; being a best man... and that’s just a start. But one of the weirdest is one of the most innocuous: the other day I visited a baby factory, and it blew my mind.

I spent my last few days in Perth at Ron’s house (Ron being a friend of Steve, the service manager at ECS, the Acorn dealer where I’d been working). Steve and his wife, Anne, were staying with Ron until their new house was ready, as it was still being built, and I needed somewhere to stay before heading off on the next leg of my trip; Ron, bless him, came up trumps. All three were wonderfully kind to me, I have to say.

Anyway, Anne had about seven weeks of her pregnancy to go, and on Sunday 16th June she realised the baby had stopped kicking, so she went to the hospital. They induced birth straight away, to stop the baby from dying; it hadn’t got enough water in the womb, or something along those lines, so Ron and I got a call from Steve on Sunday afternoon to say that he was a Dad. All together now... ahhh!

On Monday we all went to visit, my first visit to a premature baby ward. Bloody hell! It was a stunningly bright white ward, with tiny little creatures dotted around, some in incubators, some in clear plastic cots, all hooked up to beeping machines and oscilloscopes. And there, among this amazing collection of life struggling to gain a foothold in the world, was Steve and Anne’s little baby, lying in a glass box with tubes and sensors hooked up to him, pink as a sunset and breathing like an engine. The fingers! They were so tiny. A little sucking mouth, a stubby nose: what a cute little thing he was.

But the atmosphere was what hit me. I don’t like hospitals much – not many people do, really – but this one was different. Everyone was there for a purpose, to bring a squealing, chundering package into the world, and the optimism was quite amazing. A room full of newborn babies, with goo-goo eyed mothers clucking around, fussing over the little blighters; it’s a sight I’ll not forget in a hurry. It almost made me broody.

Still, it didn’t take much imagination to take it from a maternity ward to something far scarier, at least as far as I was concerned. A few nights before I’d had a dream about an ex-girlfriend ringing me up in the bush – how, I don’t know – and telling me that she’d had my baby and I had to come back to look after it. Obviously my maths isn’t too good in dreamland, but whatever the implausibility of the plot, I woke up in a cold sweat...

Not surprising, then, that it was wonderful to be setting off on the road again.

Drive-through Heaven

Written: 18 June 1996

The drive-through: that’s the best thing about Australia’s huge distances. At least, I think it’s down to the distance; it could be the American influence, but because everyone in Australia has a car, you can get pretty much everything at a drive-through.

Sure, we have drive-through McDonald’s in the UK, but they’re not everywhere like they are here; and here you’ve also got drive-through Kentucky Fried Chicken, drive-through Hungry Jack’s (the Australian name for Burger King), drive-through Chicken Treat, even drive-through Red Rooster. Yes, Australia likes its junk food.

Then you’ve got the drive-through bottle shop, surely the best idea in the world. Going to a party? No worries: just go via the bottle shop on the way and pick up a carton of tinnies and some smokes. It makes all the difference; if you’re sitting at home, vegging out, then the fact that you can drive to the bottle shop and don’t even have to leave your car makes it that much easier to prise yourself off the sofa to get the beers. You’ll know what I mean when they get ’em back home.

But the strangest drive-through has to be the one I saw in northern Perth. There it was, bold as brass, a sign proclaiming:

24-HOURS A DAY

SEVEN DAYS A WEEK

DRIVE-THROUGH CHEMIST

One presumes this is to help out those who went down the drive-through bottle shop the night before. Genius!

Nambung (Pinnacles Desert)

Written: 20 June 1996

My first destination after Perth was Cervantes, some 200km north up the coast and home to the incomparable Nambung National Park. It was also home to serious amounts of wind and torrential rain – it was obviously payback time for all the good weather I’ve been having, as it was all I could do to get the tent pegged down in time for the downpour. The rain out here comes in very short, very sharp bursts; it may only rain for one minute, but you’ll be soaked to the skin by the time the rain stops, and there’s absolutely no warning that it’s about to rain. It’s like there’s someone up there with a tap, and this is the time of year he gets to play with it. Then again, this is a desert, so you can’t really complain when it does rain; the poor place really needs the water.

After spending the first night huddled inside my tent, I got up early and headed out to the park’s main attraction: the Pinnacles Desert. There are mountains in Australia, but everyone’s seen mountains. There are rivers, deserts, gorges, forests and lakes, and everyone’s seen this sort of thing somewhere, though possibly not on the scale of those in Australia. But unless you’ve been to the Pinnacles Desert, you won’t have seen anything quite like it. Imagine a gently rolling, sandy desert, with the odd bit of green scrub around; it’s actually a dune system, but one that’s now a few kilometres inland, with the sea just visible in the distance. Now imagine over 4000 limestone stacks, ranging from tiny to about four metres high, dotted around for as far as the eye can see. These stacks are all sorts of shapes, from long and thin, to stubby, to something out of the caterpillar’s hookah smoke in Alice in Wonderland. There’s a suspension-challenging dirt road to the desert, and you can then take a short loop road through the desert. I drove it once, and decided it was so impressive I’d do it again, but this time on foot.

This turned out to be a good decision. I walked it in the morning while the sun was still quite low, so the shadows were quite surreal and much more interesting close up, rather than from the car. There was also quite a lot to see off the beaten track, something that driving visitors would miss in their hasty day trips from Perth. The rain managed to hold off for most of my wander, though I got caught in the odd shower, prompting the offer of a lift from the park ranger who rolled up in his truck. I politely declined, but we got chatting, and he ended up inviting me on a five-day bushwalk in July up in the Pilbara, a very dry, barren area that I’m visiting in the next few weeks. Who knows, I may take him up on his offer; I’ve not been on a week-long hike yet, and who better to do it with than a team led by a park ranger?

On my return I got talking to my neighbour in the caravan park, a friendly German called Andreas who was taking time off from a conference in Perth to head up the coast. He was an interesting guy; he was studying Astronomy at Sydney University, and had chosen that subject because he’d wanted to study his PhD in the southern hemisphere, and by choosing a research subject of ‘southern skies’ he knew they’d have to send him to Australia to study – crafty fellow! We had a conversation-filled walk along the beach, followed by a trip to the pub, which set us up perfectly to travel together to Kalbarri.

Top-up, Sir?

Written: 20 June 1996

Ah, the local pub in Cervantes. Funny things happen in the country, not least of which are some of the methods publicans use to entice people to drink in the pub, a slightly unnecessary thing to do seeing as there’s hardly any choice anyway. Andreas and I were sitting at the bar minding our own business, and he nudged me and said, ‘Hey, check it out! There’s a girl getting changed in the room behind the bar, but I don’t think she knows we can all see her. How embarrassing!’

And sure enough, there was this blonde getting changed in the bar office, stripped down to her underwear, completely oblivious to those of us at the bar who could see everything – though, of course, being gentlemen we didn’t look. Much.

We were more than a little surprised, then, when she sauntered out into the bar wearing nothing but a two-piece. Andreas was as speechless as me, not that we were complaining; it’s just that you don’t expect the bar staff to strip off halfway through the afternoon. The attitude of our fellow drinkers was perhaps the most surprising; they didn’t bat an eyelid between them. She could have jumped up on the bar, smothered herself in whipped cream and done strange things with a banana, and the old gits sitting and staring at the results of the 4.15 handicap from Fremantle would have probably just asked her to move out of the way. Country folk, I don’t know...

So, obviously ignored by all and sundry, she started to make polite conversation with Andreas and me. She was from Tasmania, she said, but I can’t remember what else she talked about. We found it rather hard to have a conversation with twin zeppelins homing into view behind the beer taps, so after another swift beer we beat a hasty retreat back to the camp.

Back at camp we met some other campers, a young couple who were heading south back to Perth, and it wasn’t long before we all went back to the pub for a drink. The Tasmanian barmaid was still there, and still in her summer gear, but the plan had obviously worked. The pub was packed with leery old men, sex-starved young bucks and tarty girls, obviously the sort of clientele a scantily clad barmaid attracts. It’s funny how sex sells the one thing that makes it droop...

Kalbarri

Written: 23 June 1996

After teaming up in Cervantes, I happily offered Andreas a lift to Kalbarri, 400km to the north, as we were both planning to visit the National Park there. Little did we expect such terrible driving conditions; at times, I couldn’t see a thing through the driving rain, and had to use the Force to see the road. However, we got there in one piece, and managed to fit in a visit to the coast to see Red Bluff before sunset. Red Bluff is a large, jutting cliff that gives you a good view of Kalbarri town and the Indian Ocean; it was extremely pleasant, and followed by a mean, lean spaghetti bolognese à la tent.

The next morning the rain held off, so we drove out to the ranger station to see which roads were open. Unfortunately the road to the most spectacular area of the park was closed, but the ranger suggested a walk from Ross Graham Lookout to Hawks Head along a gorge, so off we went.

As you drive through Kalbarri National Park, whose boundaries encompass most of the Murchison River as it meanders towards the sea, it looks pretty boring and flat. However, the parts of the park that are worth exploring – apart from the coastal features – are the stunning gorges that the Murchison has cut into the bedrock. The ground in Kalbarri was, until recently (in geological terms), under water, and much like the cliffs along the Great Australian Bight, it rose up to create a flat, barren plain. It’s made out of sedimentary sandstone, so the mighty river found it reasonably easy to erode an erratic and deep gorge system, which obviously isn’t visible as you drive through the park. But take the roads to the lookouts and there, laid at your feet, are these amazingly deep cuts into the red earth, with huge cliffs made up of all sorts of strange, red-coloured bands.

The first walk we did followed the river through a couple of u-bends, and after climbing down into the gorge at Ross Graham, we followed the river-bed along. There’s a knack to gorge-hopping, which involves trying to keep to the inside of any bend, as the river will cut a sheer face on the outside of any bends, and will deposit all its sand and shingle on the inside of the bend, which is easier to walk on than a vertical cliff face. This meant we had to cross the river a total of four times, a slightly hairy prospect after such heavy rains. One crossing involved carefully climbing through dead and dying gum trees while the river flowed beneath, hoping that you didn’t pick a brittle branch that would give way and mean a rather soggy trek along the bank; most of the other crossings were of the stepping-stone variety. We eventually got to Hawks Head, after about four hours, and the view was quite magnificent, the gorge being much deeper at that end of the walk.

We followed that walk with a trek along the coastline, just down from our campsite. Despite names like Mushroom Rock, Rainbow Alley and Pot Alley, it wasn’t that thrilling, reminding me of the volcanic coast of Gran Canaria, which just brought back memories of bad holidays. The wind was also getting into its stride, so we soon retired to cook a mean chilli con carne, with a six pack of very welcome Victoria Bitters, made all the more enjoyable by the interesting conversation.

The Z-Bend and Loop

By Saturday all the park’s roads were open, so we were able to visit the park’s highlights, the Z-Bend and the Loop. We drove to the Z-Bend early in the morning, and if we thought the earlier gorges were stunning, this was just incredible. I have no idea how deep the gorge is at this point, but I’ve read it reaches down 80m (240 ft), and I can well believe it. It’s hard to describe looking at a bend in the river, as it cuts a Grand Canyon-esque furrow through deep red, stripy rock, the cliffs speckled with stumpy green bushes, and a deep blue sky above to accentuate the colours. It was quite incredible.

The Loop, some 10km north of the Z-Bend, is a walk around a loop in the river, about 8km in length. We set off in mid-morning, and it has to rate as one of the best bushwalks I’ve done yet. It starts off by following the cliffs into the bend, then goes down into the gorge to river level, where the sand and silt create these little grassy meadows, with kangaroos hopping all around and the river flowing alongside huge, red cliffs. We had to climb along the cliff when the silt ran out, walking along ledges jutting out of the red walls, just above water level. As the rock is so sedimentary, erosion has created this amazing layering of rock, so it’s quite easy to make your way along the cliff faces. After turning the bend, we started to climb back up, before reaching Nature’s Window, a hole in the rock from which we’d started.

The dirt roads in Kalbarri are also worth a mention. If you’ve got a car you don’t mind throwing around, like a hire car, or maybe a 1977 Toyota Corona, give them a go. It’s the biggest driving thrill, speeding 26km along a road that’s effectively a long, thin sandpit. I didn’t have proper road grip for the whole skidding drive, and the potholes made it just like a video game: go right, jump the hole in the road, slam a left, steer into the skid, accelerate out... great fun, and absolutely not safe at all. Especially when these bloody great emus keep running out in front of you just as you’re getting some serious speed up. It’s a hoot.

After we got back and Andreas bought me a couple of beers for doing the driving – it didn’t take him long to figure out where my weak spot was! – I took him to the bus after getting his address. He was great company and I was sorry to see him go, even though I knew it was better to be travelling on my own. There’s a well-known theory of parting: it’s easier for the person going away than the poor soul staying behind, because there are fewer reminders and more distractions if you’re the traveller. So I waved him off and headed back to plan my journey north, and further into the unknown.

Shark Bay

Written: 25 June 1996

I set off nice and early for Denham, on Shark Bay, further up the west coast. Denham is on the northern tip of a long peninsula that juts west and north from the mainland, creating this sheltered bay, Hamelin Pool. The result is an idyllic blue ocean with a large number of unique natural phenomena, hence the area’s World Heritage status. It’s a very famous area – at least, it’s famous to readers of National Geographic – and as I turned off the highway onto the peninsula the clouds cleared, and that good old blue sky appeared for the first time in a few weeks.

My first stop was Hamelin, a tiny place up a dirt track on the southern end of the bay. Normally this place wouldn’t be that interesting – a nice beach, a couple of buildings – but there are two completely freaky aspects to Hamelin. The first is the collection of stromatolites on the beach, and the second is the shell mine.

Stromatolites are the oldest living things on earth; they look like little stumpy coral reefs just under the surface of the sea, right on the beach, but the patterns they form are quite surreal. They’re made up of microbes that exude sticky chemicals, forming these strange underwater towers that slowly grow over thousands of years. Because of the geography of Hamelin Pool and the huge sea-grass meadow up the coast (itself pretty special), the water in the south of the bay is really salty, the perfect spot for stromatolites. Apparently stromatolites were once very common, and were responsible for releasing huge amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere, thus creating the right conditions for life, so without those stumpy bits of splodge, we wouldn’t be here today. I was unwittingly looking at our ancestors, there in the shallows of Hamelin.

Shells Galore

The shell mine is another odd thing. The Great Australian Bight, the huge bay that sits to the south of the Nullarbor, is full of millions of tiny shellfish, and when they die, their shells get caught up in the sea currents. Quite why these shells end up in Shark Bay is anyone’s guess, but they do, by the bucketload. The beaches round Hamelin are packed with shells, and in some parts they are so densely packed they’ve reacted with water to stick together in a kind of prehistoric concrete, just right for cutting building blocks from. There’s a shell quarry in Hamelin where you can see blocks have been cut out from the dunes, and, indeed, the toilet block there is made out of shell blocks. This is definitely not normal.

Shell Beach was my next stop, further up the peninsula; there are no points for guessing what was there. Shell Beach is a 110km-long beach, totally made up of white shells about half an inch wide, packed to a depth of nearly ten metres. That’s an awful lot of shells...

My final stopping-off point before Denham was Eagle Bluff, a little hill with views out to the west of the peninsula, where there’s yet another peninsula and a collection of small islands. I fancied a bit of a walk, having been cooped up in the car for most of the day, so I grabbed my rucksack and headed off down the coast, just to get away from the crowds (not that there was anyone about, really). This turned out to be an excellent plan; after about half-an-hour I’d discovered this beautiful beach with really shallow water, just ripe for a swim. Unfortunately I’d forgotten my swimming trunks and towel, but it was so hot and isolated I just stripped off and ran in: back to nature, and why the hell not. The water was a gorgeous temperature and crystal clear, and I had to paddle miles out to get even waist deep. It’s times like this that you remember for a long time...

Monkey Mia

Denham is Australia’s most westerly settlement, and it’s not a bad spot to camp. I settled in for the night, and got up the next day for a day trip to Monkey Mia, 26km east of Denham. Easily the most famous spot in Shark Bay, Monkey Mia isn’t famous for its beaches, even though they are beautiful and golden. It isn’t famous for its weather either, even though the sun shines for almost the entire year and rain is rare. It isn’t even famous for being a near-perfect paradise setting. No, it’s famous for its dolphins, for Monkey Mia is home to a collection of wild dolphins that just love to hang around with humans.

If you stand knee-deep in the rather chilly sea when the dolphins decide to visit – which they do a few times a day, though totally at their own whim – then they swim right past you, posing for photographs and taking fish from the rangers. The feeding is carefully monitored, so the dolphins don’t get too dependent on mankind, and if you catch feeding time you can get to drop a fish in one of the dolphin’s mouths. On their second visit I even stroked one as she went past; she felt kind of rubbery and incredibly smooth. There were even tame pelicans who hung around the beach like kids bunking off school; eventually they got around to going to hunt for food, which was hardly difficult as the beach was packed with tiny fish that would collect around your feet while the dolphins played. It must be some life, being a lazy pelican at Monkey Mia.

I was so impressed with the place, with its gorgeous beach and beautiful weather, not to mention the dolphins, that I spent all day sunbaking, lazing around and writing letters. I also stayed around for the sunset: big, red, round, incredibly slow and lazy, and quite breathtaking – it was paradise, and apart from the sandflies, everything was perfect.

Which – rather obtusely – reminds me of an odd thing that happened at the local Foodland in Denham that day. I parked my car outside the supermarket (a word I use with caution, as it was anything but ‘super’), and a woman who was getting out of her car called over as I locked my car. ‘You don’t need to do that,’ she said, ‘this is Shark Bay, you know. No one’s going to break into your car here.’ I mumbled something about it being a habit and that I was from the city, but by this time she’d disappeared.

I couldn’t help the feeling that if I was a car thief, not only would I hang around Shark Bay a little longer on hearing that, but – hey! – she’d just left her car and wandered off, and she wouldn’t have locked it, would she? Sometimes the most trusting of souls leave themselves wide open; when crime hits Shark Bay, as it no doubt will one day, the locals will all probably sit there on their seaside benches, chewing baccy and spitting out, ‘I remember the days when you didn’t have to lock your car. I don’t know, the youth of today.’

But if you’re going to wave a carrot on a stick, don’t be surprised if the donkeys come a-runnin’, that’s what I say. I sincerely hope Shark Bay’s trusting mentality doesn’t backfire on it. It’s a wonderful place.

Carnarvon

Written: 26 June 1996

Although there was a little bit of Shark Bay that I hadn’t seen – a homestead with hot artesian wells, apparently – I was in the mood to drive, so I set off down the peninsula, back past Hamelin, and onto the highway again. I took a left turn to head north, and after watching the kilometres slip by I soon arrived in Carnarvon, a very pretty little town on the coast.

My traveller’s conditioning can sniff out the tourist bureau anywhere, and it wasn’t long before I had an armful of goodies and leaflets, all telling me how easy it would be to spend all my money on so-and-so’s wonderful glass-bottomed boat tour, before dining at the most wonderful seafood restaurant ‘in the southern hemisphere’. Nothing’s ever the biggest, best, fastest, loudest or whatever ‘in Australia’ – no, it’s always ‘in the southern hemisphere’. Sometimes I wonder if the Australians are aware of Southeast Asia, Africa and South America.

But what clinched my somewhat hurried departure from Carnarvon was the huge banana as you come into town. It’s massive, maybe 20 feet high, but they’ve thoughtfully planted trees round its base, so unless you’re right next to it, it just looks like a huge yellow phallus, which presumably isn’t what the designers intended. Carnarvon is the banana-growing capital of Australia, hence the phallus, but really, this Australian obsession with massive models and statues is quite bizarre. I’ve seen looming lobsters, massive miners, bulbous bananas, big beefburgers and a huge Ned Kelly... will it never end? I suppose if you have a big country, you feel obliged to build massive statues, but sometimes it’s hard not to laugh.

Beyond the Suburbs

One of the most impressive sights in Carnarvon is the tracking station just outside town, even though it was closed to visitors when I visited. The tracking station consists of a big radio dish on a hill, pointing straight up at the sky, and the local tourist office’s literature proudly claims that this dish was used to track the Apollo and Gemini spacecraft, as well as being the dish that beamed Australia’s first ever live satellite TV programme. Irritatingly, the first claim turns out to be untrue, as the NASA antenna that was used to track manned spacecraft is no longer with us; that antenna was part of the NASA Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN) Tracking Station, which has now been bulldozed. Instead, the dish that the tourist office falsely claims to be the MSFN antenna is actually one of two antennae from the OTC Earth Station, which was used to talk to a communications satellite in geo-stationary orbit over the Indian Ocean[1].

Despite this disappointment, the tracking station is still an atmospheric spot, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from leaving town and heading up the coast to the famous Carnarvon blowholes. I’ve seen blowholes before, and I’ve always been disappointed, but these were supposed to be really good, and bloody hell, were they ever! Imagine serious sea, a great big hole, and water being whooshed 20m (60 ft) into the air; you can hear the water coming before it hits, and steam shoots out (well, it’s just spray, but it looks like steam) before this massive jet spurts up into the sky. All around, smaller holes spray sea water like some supernatural reticulation[2] system, while the ground shakes under your feet. It makes you feel incredibly humble, like all the best natural wonders.

I spent the night 500m down the coast from the blowholes in a campsite, over 70km from the nearest civilisation. Well, perhaps ‘campsite’ is being kind; I camped on a sand dune with no amenities, but that’s exactly what I wanted. No water; no phones; no screaming kids; nowhere to spend money – perfect. The dunny was a hole in the ground with a tin shed tacked round it, à la Glastonbury, and the campsite itself was on a gorgeous little beach, though with a wicked undertow that would make swimming suicidal. But the best thing of all was the price: at just A$1 per night, it was much appreciated by my slowly dissolving funds.

[1] Many thanks to Terence Kierans, who contacted me with the real story behind the antenna at Carnarvon. Terence was an Operations Supervisor during some of the Apollo missions, and he worked at the NASA MSFN Tracking Station from 1965 to 1970, so he should know!

[2] Reticulation is the name given to automatic watering systems normally found in gardens and greenhouses; everyone’s garden in Australia has a reticulation system, so the word has passed into normal usage here.

Coral Bay

Written: 27 June 1996

Today I drove north again, to a place called Coral Bay, a lovely little tourist spot with an idyllic beach and tourist prices to match. My current project is to plan a route that will cost me just A$5 per day (plus petrol), which is perfectly possible with a bit of camping in the scrub and staying in National Parks as much as possible, using creeks and the sea instead of expensive amenities. I’m going through a minor financial crisis, but if everything was free, there’d be no challenge, would there? I can’t rely on finding a job when I reach Sydney, but I can hope...

I’d been led to believe by some backpackers I’d met that Coral Bay was a paradise, and indeed it has a cute little bay with a pleasant enough sandy beach, and the Ningaloo Reef passes quite close to the shore so you can snorkel the reef from the beach. But it is a bit of a tourist spot, and it didn’t take me long to figure out why it had been recommended: there’s a hostel, a big – and very expensive – caravan park, and it’s not too far from the northwest coastal highway. It’s perfect if you’re a coach traveller or a city dweller in search of a family holiday on the coast. But it was far from perfect for me.

For a start, the whole area seemed to be full of building sites, which made it particularly noisy, with power generators churning all night, and the relaxing sounds of builders building wafted across the beach during the day; the caravan park, which cost as much as the one in Adelaide for goodness sake, didn’t even have taps for drinking water near the sites (I had to traipse across to the office for water); and the beach turned out to be right next to loads of moored boats, which was hardly a beautiful sight.

I wasn’t terribly impressed, to be honest, and wondered if the Northwest Cape was going to be worth exploring further. Luckily, it most definitely was, and Coral Bay proved to be the exception rather than the rule.

Cape Range

Written: 29 June 1996

The Northwest Cape juts out into the Indian Ocean like an extended middle finger on the top-left tip of the Australian mainland. There’s one town, Exmouth[1], which used to be an American naval base and looks like it, and not a lot else except for Cape Range National Park. If you’re going up the Cape you have to follow the road that goes up the east side, passing through Exmouth and curling round the end of the Cape before finally coming down the west side and stopping at the southern end of the Park. There’s nowhere else to go: to get back, you have to retrace your skid marks. Perhaps that’s why it’s so beautiful.

Cape Range has some of the most stunning beaches you’re likely to see, as well as a few interesting gorges such as Mundu Mundu and Yardie Creek, which aren’t on the same scale as the monsters of Kalbarri or Karijini, but are still great to explore on foot. After driving through the bizarre sight of hundreds of termite mounds surrounding the road – I thought I was back at the Pinnacles for a moment – the serious rain that I’d been dodging on the way up started to clear, and the sun eventually made an appearance as I approached the coastline. I set up camp just behind South Mundu Mundu Beach, a spot where the only amenity was one bin. There was absolutely nothing else – no toilets, no camping sites, no water: no nothing – and after the tourism of Coral Bay, it felt like I’d found paradise.

Just off the beaches of the Cape is the Ningaloo Reef, a barrier reef that comes very close to the shore, sometimes only a few metres away. This means that not only is the snorkelling and diving superb, but the beaches are amazingly sheltered too. When you look out to sea, you can see these huge waves breaking on the reef about 200m away, fierce and violent, but the reef takes all the oomph out of the might of the Indian Ocean, leaving gentle, lapping waves at the beach and beautiful stretches of sand. The slow sun setting over this distant cataclysm at night was really something else...

Stunning Sandy Bay

The next day, though, I found a real paradise. After exploring the two gorges in the morning, where I was lucky enough to see the rare black-footed wallaby in its native environment, I decided to cool off at Sandy Bay, just down the dirt track from my campsite. Wow! The name was appropriate, the weather was cloudless, the water was warm and turquoise, and the seabed was such a gentle, sandy slope that I could go a serious distance out and still only be waist deep, just right for me and my warped phobia of deep water. But the best bit was the splendid isolation; there were no more than four of us on this beach that stretched for miles in either direction, and I just lay there and soaked up the sun, thinking how it compared with all those soggy English beaches that I doubt I’ll visit again now that I’ve tasted the real thing.

But that night, a minor disaster struck. There I was, sitting under a moonlit sky, reading my book and feeling totally relaxed after my day on the beach, when the lights went out. My trusty petrol lamp just died, and nothing I could do would coax her to light up again. The petrol pipe was blocked, and I was going to have to get a lamp doctor from a camping shop to look at her. I felt like I’d lost an old friend; there’s something wonderfully cosy about fossil fuel lamp light, the same sort of warm glow you get from a real fire in an English pub. My electric torch just wasn’t quite the same...

I woke up on Saturday feeling sluggish, and a peek outside the tent showed why; it was overcast. For some reason, I wake up feeling (relatively) alive when the sun’s streaming down, and hung-over when the rain’s streaming down. I had originally planned to hang around on Sandy Bay for another day, but that wasn’t going to be much fun with no sun, so after striking camp I headed back towards Exmouth.

On the way back down the east side of the Cape, I stopped to do a walk (called the Badjirrajirra Walk) that the booklet said would take five hours, but which only took me one-and-a-half. Perhaps I was walking quite quickly, because I need to get fit for my forthcoming trek in the Pilbara, or because I was in mourning for my lamp and walking was a good way to work off my frustration; but even so, the guidelines were considerably different to my experience. Even so, it was still a nice little walk along a mountain ridge to Shothole Canyon, a huge gorge beaten into the mountain range by a since dried-up river. In the end it was lucky that I did only take one-and-a-half hours, because just as I shut the car door to set off south again, the heavens opened.

And they stayed open, all the way back down onto Highway One, the highway that goes round Australia and the backbone of my route. I took a dirt road shortcut to get to the highway, which took about an hour of bouncing around and skidding out of the way of oncoming tour buses, but it cut a serious corner off the journey, enabling me to reach the Nanutarra Roadhouse before dark.

[1] Pronounced as it’s spelt, so that’s ‘Ex-mowth’, rather than ‘Ex-muth’ as we Poms would say.

Nanutarra Roadhouse

Written: 30 June 1996

I reached the Nanutarra Roadhouse before dark. While the rain poured down I put up my sodden tent – with a little help from a neighbour in a campervan, who was from Geelong and had spotted my Victorian number plate, bless him – and cooked myself some pasta, before finding shelter outside the roadhouse café.

Roadhouses are strange places. Like airports, they’re transit stations; nobody stays at roadhouses longer than they have to, and they’re often totally isolated. Truckers make up the bulk of the roadhouse trade, and as such these places manage to take the most bizarre qualities of European truck stops, double the prices, add some serious isolation, and come up trumps. You meet some interesting people at roadhouses, that’s for sure.

Classic examples, and a common sight in these odd places, are the Japanese cyclists. In Australia, the distances of totally flat, featureless scrubland are so huge that cycling round Highway One is a bit like walking round the London orbital motorway; the interesting stuff is off the road, but the road itself can be a bit of a long haul. Enter the two Japanese cyclists I met at Nanutarra, soaked to the bone. It’s dark by this stage, but they don miner’s lights, making them look like a couple of modernist Daleks, set up their tents, and zip themselves up for what can only be a sweaty, cramped night. You’ve never seen such small shelters, and looking at the way their torch lights swing around on the insides of their tents, it’s as if two strange anthropoid chrysalises have landed in the camp area and are communicating using some mysterious light code. All these cyclists ever seem to eat is noodles, all the way round the whole continent. It sounds like one hell of a challenge, and I feel nothing but complete admiration for those who pedal their way round Australia. It sure takes determination...

They’re peaceful, though, these remote roadhouses. Or, they are normally; there I was, sitting by the café reading, and two coaches full of sixth-form schoolkids turned up, and for half an hour the place was chaos, with everyone bursting to the toilets, and rushing off to buy cans of Coke and packets of crisps. It was a school trip, I assume, taking a quick stop en route. The peace when they left was palpable – even the road trains seemed quiet after that invasion, as Nanutarra settled back into the tumbleweed vibe of the truly isolated.

Karijini (Hammersley Range)

Written: 7 July 1996

Luckily Sunday saw the rain hold off long enough for me to drive from Nanutarra to Karijini National Park, previously known as the Hammersley Range National Park. I went via Tom Price, a remote mining centre that’s actually quite an attractive spot, again taking the dirt roads to save time. But this time the rain had done its work, and it wasn’t so much like driving on a sandpit, more like driving through a mud bath. I took it very slowly, but one thing’s for sure: the front onside wheel arch on my car, which for some reason is missing the part that stops dirt getting inside the panel, is now rammed full of Western Australian dirt. When I open the passenger door, different coloured earth falls out every time, littering petrol stations and parking bays all over the state. I like to think of it as my sedimentary diary; perhaps I’ll be able to sell it to a geologist in Melbourne when I get back.

Karijini is where the real gorge action is: Kalbarri and Cape Range may have gorges, but Karijini is king. The reason? Karijini has loads of ’em, and they tend to meet up in the most spectacular displays of rock, water, height and sheer splendour, and that takes some beating. I spent Monday exploring the large clump of gorges in the centre of the park, and I must say it blew my mind.

I started early; the rain was still holding off, so I thought I’d beat the weather and get some exploring in before the clouds broke. Luckily they cleared and the day was beautiful, but there’s no point in tempting fate up here in the northwest, as apparently it’s wetter than normal at the moment; it looks like I’ve brought the weather with me again, so I’m not taking any chances.

After setting up the tent at Fortescue Camp, my first visit was to Joffre Falls, a waterfall in Joffre Gorge. The area I decided to explore consists of four gorges, which meet together to form a pattern like spokes in a wheel, the hub being a place called Oxer Lookout. After last night’s rain, each of the gorges was flowing (albeit slowly compared to the torrents in summer), so the falls were falling and the gorges gorging, which was one good thing about the unseasonable weather. Joffre Falls, apparently a three hour hike into and out of the gorge, took me all of 15 minutes to get into, and the same to get out; this is perhaps another example of the rangers over-estimating times to put off casual tourists, which is better than making them sound too easy, I suppose.

There’s a system in operation in Karijini, where walks are classified in four categories: walks (really easy), tracks (a little more challenging), Level One routes (you might break into a sweat) and Level Two routes (you have to get details from the ranger, because these are only for hardcore walkers and climbers). I’m beginning to discover that Level One routes are a breeze; I wonder what Level Two is like...

Oxer Lookout

Having explored Joffre and enjoyed the solitude of the gorge, where even sunlight doesn’t stir the utter stillness, I jumped in the car and slid my way along to Red Gorge, adding yet more layers to my sedimentary diary in the process. Here the gorges start to get really deep; you could fit quite a few houses on top of one another before they poked over the top. I walked a fair old pace round the Red Gorge lookout, which ended with a stunning view, at least as impressive as the Z-Bend in Kalbarri. All along the way were these termite mounds, and when I got to the lookout I came across a huge cloud of their occupants, who suddenly looked very interested in my sweaty T-shirt. I suppose that when you haven’t washed your hair for three weeks you just have to take the grief when it comes, so for a bit of sport I spent a while hanging round a spider’s web I’d spotted, watching him catch hundreds of the tiny insects in his web, tying each of them up before devouring them for his breakfast. That was one satisfying way to get rid of a cloud of pesky termites.

Another walk from the same car park led down Knox Gorge, which took me down into the heart of the gorge, through flood waters and alluvial forest, to the end of the Level One section, which changed into a Level Two when the creek disappeared down a very thin v-shaped gorge. I would have explored further, but the sign said that this was only for very experienced rock climbers with flotation devices and ranger backup, so I turned back. It was a shame really, but it’s pure stupidity to tackle things like this when you’re on your own and unequipped.

Handrail Pool was another story, though not immediately. Handrail Pool is in Weano Gorge, and when I’d climbed down into the depths of the fissure, I turned up the gorge instead of down it. After a few kilometres of easy creek-navigation, I decided I’d gone wrong, so I headed back to the car to drive to Oxer Lookout.

Wow. Oxer is positioned where the four creeks meet, and the sight is truly immense. It’s hard to describe how overpowering these gorges are, and Oxer Lookout is quite staggering. Photos just don’t do it justice; the impressive bit is the depth of the thing, and you have to be there to experience the vertigo first-hand. There I was, looking down into a gorge that nobody could get to without specialised equipment, a good 100 metres below. It was knockout stuff.

Welcome to Level Two

Just off from Oxer was the track down into Hancock Gorge, a challenging little number that took a little longer to navigate. For part of it I had to shuffle along ledges jutting out of the rock – as with Kalbarri the rock is sedimentary, but in Karijini the rock is much harder, and has been worn smooth by torrents of water, making the climbing both easier (because the rock is hard and will support your weight) and harder (because it’s devilishly slippery when wet). However it wasn’t long before I got to the delightfully named Kermit’s Pool, where there was another sign to say this was where the walk graduated to a Level Two.

Then along came this young couple from Melbourne, and we got chatting, as you do when you’re in a deep gorge far from the sun. They were about to turn back when this middle-aged couple came out of the gorge – from the Level Two area – and said it was really quite easy, as long as you kept your head. Emboldened by numbers, the three of us trekked some distance down the Level Two track, rock-climbing some bits and scrambling the rest, before eventually deciding enough was enough, and heading back to the car for lunch.

That short introduction to gorging was just what I needed. It brought back all sorts of tricks I’d learned at school in the rock-climbing society – like putting your hand into a fissure and clenching it into a fist, from which you can hang your body weight; and hugging the sheer face so smooth hand grips are as secure as possible – and all of a sudden the gorges didn’t seem so frightening. To cap it all, a tourist van arrived with loads of choking old smokers and beer-bellies who headed off down to Handrail Pool, so when I’d finished my lunch I tromped back down the track, turning the right way this time. Before long I’d arrived at this amazing circular pool in a deep gorge.

I have a phobia that involves dark water. I just hate it. I’ve managed to cope with it in the past, such as when I went water-skiing off the coast of Spain, but I still hate dark water. I even get scared if I’m in the bath and someone turns the light off; that’s irrational enough to be a phobia. Gorges are peppered with really deep rock pools, full of water fresh enough to drink and cold enough to shrink your manly pride to the size of a peanut, and if you’re going to really explore gorges, you’ve got to swim these pools. I took one look at the pool and thought, ‘Stuff that!’ and hung around the side, unable to go further.

And that’s where I thought my walk would end, but as the Beatles said, it’s getting better all the time, and I think my phobia might be slowly shrinking. There I was, minding my own business on the side of this circular pool which drained out of the gorge on the opposite side from the entrance, when these two cute little blondes came in and proceeded to strip down to swimwear and jump into the rock pool. I just watched and made polite small talk, offering to take their photos for them and commenting on how cold it looked. I’m clearly still a smooth operator even when I haven’t washed for a week; besides, there’s something attractively hypnotic about girls and rock pools, as the ancients knew when they concocted all those myths about nymphs...

And then this other couple arrived, and we got chatting. Meanwhile the two blondes had disappeared off down the gorge over on the other side, into Level Two territory, and after a few minutes they returned to say that it was quite beautiful down there, and go on, it wasn’t that cold or deep, you big wuss, go for it. The other couple – Graham and Sandy – looked interested, so we said, ‘What the hell?’ and stripped off down to our shorts.

The ensuing journey down the water-filled gorge was amazing. We scrambled over slippery rock faces, waded waist-deep in freezing water, avoided the evil-looking snake that dropped onto us from the lip of the gorge above and swam menacingly away, and eventually got to the end of the creek. By this time the two blondes had decided that they were cold and headed back – they had been in the water for some time, it has to be said, but I suspect the snake scared them off – but we three plodded on, arriving at a hole looking out down a sheer cliff face, where the creek cascaded out and into the gorge I’d seen from Oxer Lookout.

That, we thought, was the end of the trail, but a little exploring showed that we could climb round the hole – some 100 metres up – and edge our way down to the bottom of the main gorge. Sandy wisely decided to stay behind, but Graham and I climbed down the cliff and eventually stood at the bottom of the gorge that I had seen from Oxer Lookout earlier in the day. Little did I think I’d be standing there later... we must have been insane.

Strange things happen in gorges, too. While we were looking up at Sandy, this dog appeared at the top of the waterfall. We couldn’t believe it, but these guys following behind had brought their Jack Russell along, and he so nearly went over the edge. Now that would have been a sight.

It was a long way back up, but before long we’d made our way back to the pool, where even I went for a swim, something I’d never have managed even hours before. The entertainment wasn’t over, though, as this old guy turned up and started climbing the walls of the gorge, like Spiderman; we watched, amazed at his progress, before he eventually fell back into the pool to a round of applause. You meet all sorts in these gorges, you really do.

That night disaster struck my light sources for the second time, following the loss of my petrol lamp in Cape Range. My torch, the only source of light I had, died while I was just getting to the exciting part of my book. The bulb just blew, and as it was a Maglite, not a normal torch, I was going to have to try to resurrect it at – yes, you guessed it – a camping shop, Meanwhile the only light I have at night is the little light inside my car, and even that’s beginning to flicker. A portent of some kind, perhaps?

Mt Bruce

Tuesday was another lovely day, so I headed off to Mt Bruce, Western Australia’s second highest peak, in the south of the National Park (the highest peak, Mt Meharry, is in the southeastern part of the park, and is a fair drive off the highway through private land that you need permission to cross; as it’s only a few metres higher than Mt Bruce, I figured I’d stick to the runner-up). It was a pretty challenging climb, particularly in the heat of the morning sun, but after an hour and a quarter I was at the top of the world and the view was stunning. Unfortunately there’s a rather ugly iron ore mine to one side of the mountain, just outside the borders of the park, but the view over the park was like nothing else.

I’d managed the climb before lunch – not bad for a climb that was supposed to take six hours – so I decided to up sticks and head out east to the last clump of gorges left to explore. On the way I climbed down into Kalamina Gorge to see the waterfalls, and again, it was a totally different type of experience. It had a fern-lined waterfall cascading over black, layered rock into a shaded rock pool: very relaxing. I explored the gorge for as far as you could go, but after some precarious rock scrambling I found the gorge was totally flooded, and I didn’t fancy a swim on my own, so I tromped back to the car to drive to Fortescue Camp, just down the road.

This was where disaster struck – which you can read about it in the next tale – so it was a few days before I was able to return to Karijini to see the other gorges. My blown tyre had prevented me from exploring Dales Gorge, so I drove back into the park slowly, because I was in a pretty black mood and I knew that if I drove as aggressively as I felt, the dirt road would win.

Before long I passed Mt Bruce, for what seemed the umpteenth time. Then it struck me: what better way to get rid of all the negative energy I’d built up in the last couple of days than with a forced march up a mountain? So I set off in a huff and covered the 4.5km and goodness only knows how much vertical climbing in 55 minutes, which was a pretty good time. At the top I just collapsed, completely knackered, legs burning and sweat dripping off my face. And d’you know what? It worked. I felt great! There was that gorgeous view, and at once I knew I’d made the right decision. My worries seemed so irrelevant as the desert stretched out in front of me... and all of a sudden my burst tyre and collapsing plans didn’t seem quite so important after all.

Dales Gorge

Feeling better, I drove to the campsite at Dales Gorge and had a quick look round – though not enough to spoil the walk for the next day – and ended up in a beautiful waterfall, Fortescue Falls, reading a book and just relaxing. That night the stars were out with no moon, and I felt totally at ease again; my stress had evaporated and I felt complete happiness about my journey. It looks like I’ve found a cure for temper tantrums: climb a mountain. It’s not much use if it happens in the middle of a city, but perhaps I can find another cure for that culture.

So on Saturday I finally explored Dales Gorge. I took it nice and slow, and wandered up and down it a couple of times, exploring off the track and relaxing by the beautiful Circular Pool and Fortescue Falls, before eventually coming back to camp for a nice cup of afternoon tea, an enjoyable habit that I’ve picked up recently. That night was a stunner, with the Milky Way stretching right across the clear night sky, the clear skies dropping temperatures to just above freezing, quite a contrast after the mid-twenties of the midday sun.

Under this canopy I went for a wander round the circle of campsites I was in (Fortescue Camp consists of a collection of circular roads with sites jutting off them). As I walked round, by starlight rather than torchlight, I passed all these cosy pools of light, each with a different scene captured inside. The elderly couple reading; the young lovebirds nattering while huddling together to keep out the chill; the middle-aged couple arguing about something trivial; the family playing cards, trying to tone down the young kids’ competitive edge by telling them it’s only a game; the lone traveller, checking his maps; the foreign couple, speaking fluid French over a steaming pot... such variety. It made me think of mediaeval times, with the old storyteller gathering the people round the campfire, flames flickering on expectant children’s faces, more animated with each twist in the tale. Or perhaps a camp of travelling revellers celebrating the summer solstice, complete with druids, conjurers and roasting pigs. It reminded me of the Glastonbury Festival at night, too; happy memories of campfires, gentle sounds of merriment, and folk songs on the breeze. I felt a little sad that this sort of thing doesn’t happen much in England – going off into the wilderness for a weekend’s camping – possibly because there isn’t much wilderness to do it in. And camping in the English winter would be rather more uncomfortable than camping in the Australian winter, not that it’s particularly comfortable sleeping in a frost anywhere...

Start of the Breakdown

Written: 7 July 1996

Karijini was when disaster struck. On the way from Kalamina Gorge to Fortescue Camp I blew a rear tyre, but because of the way your back end slides over dirt roads, I didn’t realise until I’d reached the camp, when I saw this lacerated and melted tyre hanging limply round the wheel hub. Cursing, because I’d only got new tyres in Perth and they still had plenty of tread left, I hoisted out the jack and set to work, but however high I jacked the car, I couldn’t get the tyre to lift: it just stayed on the ground. Stumped, I assumed I’d smashed the rear axle or the suspension; this looked serious.

Just as I was trying to decide whether to panic, kick the car or make a cup of tea – all good reactions to a motoring problem when you’re a huge distance from anything remotely civilised – a car pulled up containing a couple of Swiss girls. After I explained my problem, they very kindly offered to drive me down to the ranger’s office, some 21km away, where I borrowed the ranger’s phone to ring the RAC; by this time it was about five o’clock in the evening.

Now I’ve been on the receiving end of the AA’s help in the UK, but considering the distances involved in this country, and the fact that I was about as stranded as it’s possible to get in non-desert Australia, the RAC’s service was pretty impressive. They took all my details and said they’d try to sort something out and would let the ranger know what was happening, and as she was visiting my campsite in the morning, she could tell me what was happening. Meanwhile the girls and I returned to camp, and I offered to cook for all of us as a thank you for helping me out.

Can you believe that these two – Eve and Sybil – only had an apple between them? To me this was bordering on the insane, so my offer of a rather tasty fettuccine with sour cream, mushrooms, broccoli, onions and mixed vegetables, plus some beef for the non-vegetarians among us, was pretty welcome, and yet again I discovered that things always work out; they needed food and I needed help, and everyone came out smiling. They were excellent company, and all of a sudden the prospect of having to resurrect poor old Oz in the morning lost its edge.

Off to Tom Price

The next day saw me waiting for the pick-up truck in the boiling sun, and eventually this old guy turned up with his winch and hooks. Imagine my embarrassment when he hoisted it up onto his truck, and took a look; the axle was fine, and he couldn’t see any problems with it. We put on the spare tyre and it seemed to drive perfectly. I simply hadn’t put the jack on the right spot; I’d put it under bodywork, rather than chassis, and this, of course, makes quite a difference, as I’d been jacking up the car body instead of the chassis. It would be an understatement to say that I felt like a total muppet.

Anyway, I still needed a new tyre – you don’t go driving through the bush without at least one spare tyre – so I followed the pick-up man back to Tom Price, some 130km away. All the way I was gearing up for the cost of this fiasco and silently kicking myself; the pick-up man was charging A$1.75 per kilometre for his 260km round trip, and I still needed a new tyre on top of that. This was going to cost me a lot of money.

Imagine my amazement when the RAC said they’d pay for the whole pick-up cost – my policy said they would only pay for 100km of towing, but who was I to argue? – so all I had to do was buy a new tyre for just over A$100, and that was me dealt with. I’d gone from a possible disaster to an escape with the minimum price possible; I couldn’t believe my luck, and while I was there I got the same garage to fix a loose plate under the car that was nearly coming off.

So I’ll be taking those dirt roads a little more slowly, I think. They play havoc with your tyres and suspension, and if I had a posh car, I’d keep it well clear. You’re not allowed to take hired cars onto dirt roads, and now I know why.

Plans Going Astray

I’m still in Tom Price, staying in a wonderful caravan park just by Mt Nameless, a huge, jutting, red mountain outside town. I’ve had a shower, washed my hair, and even washed my clothes, though the dreaded red dust is absolutely everywhere; even my black clothes are going red, though don’t ask me how. The car engine is red, and the paintwork is that yucky sort of brown you get when you mix red and green, but what the hell; it’s worth it.

But I’ve just been planning the next stage of my trip, and it’s hit me that it all had to be too good to be true. I’ve simply run out of time; looking at the calendar, there is no way I can complete a whole circuit of Australia without growing wings or extending my visa, both of which are pretty impossible. It’s a shame, because there’s something cool about having driven round an entire continent, but I have to draw the line somewhere between the quality of travel and the amount of travel.

The part of the journey I’ve decided to sacrifice is the east coast, so from Darwin I’ll drive down through the centre (which I was going to do as far as Uluru anyway), and I’ll keep on going to Adelaide. The only part of the journey I’ll be repeating is the Adelaide-Melbourne section, which can be driven in a day anyway, and if Dave and Karen are about, we could have a little reunion.

That way I still get to see the Red Centre, which is supposed to be really interesting, and I omit the most touristy area of the whole country, the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. Although the Great Barrier Reef, Cape Tribulation, Cairns and Brisbane are supposed to be great, I can always visit the area later on in life, but I don’t think I’ll be able to go bushwalking in the Pilbara again, at least, not so easily. I’m disappointed, but there’s nothing that I’d change if I had my time again – except, perhaps, not spending a month getting the car ready, but that was unavoidable – so I can hardly complain. I’ll still have done the country justice.

The reason for the change of plan? I’d entered one figure wrong in my spreadsheet – or, rather, I’d forgotten to change the dates once I’d decided to stay in the Pilbara for the bushwalk – and I only spotted the error when I settled in Tom Price to fix up the car and review my plans. It’s another valuable lesson: don’t trust computers, because they’re only as reliable as you are. There is a positive side to this, too: the shorter route is also considerably cheaper, as I’ll be saving a heap of petrol. My car costs about A$8 of petrol per 100km, which is very cheap by British standards, but when you consider that I’ll be omitting 4000km by leaving out the east coast, that’s a lot of money saved. Besides, I have an excuse to return to Australia in the future: to explore Queensland!

However, I didn’t arrive at this decision lightly. On my first night in Tom Price I sat and brooded, really annoyed at the prospect of having to drop Queensland from the itinerary. When I woke up the next day, I was in a foul mood, and decided to head up to the Millstream-Chichester National Park, between Tom Price and Karratha, to occupy my troubled mind

To get there, you need to get a (free) permit for the private mining road that heads north from Tom Price, which I duly did by visiting Hammersley Iron Pty Ltd[1]. I then set off in search of the mining road.

Could I find it? Could I hell, and before I knew it I was on the road back to Karijini. I backed up for a while and tried to find the turning, but I didn’t know where I’d gone wrong, and I just flipped. All the pent up anger over the blown tyre, the change of plans, the lack of money in my account... it all came to a head, and I sat in the car, punching the steering wheel and shouting ‘Aaargh’ until I was hoarse. I was angry with myself, and my complete inability to get anything right.

Luckily Karijini had a solution in the form of Mt Bruce, and after pounding my way to the top of the mountain and taking some time out to explore some more gorges, I was ready for my second attempt to reach Millstream-Chichester.

[1] If you’ve ever wondered what Pty Ltd stands for – it’s after every company name in Australia, like just Ltd in the UK – it’s ‘Proprietary Limited’, and much like limited companies back home, these are companies that have limited liability for shareholders, in return for certain restrictions.

Millstream-Chichester

Written: 10 July 1996

Warning; On the way to Millstream-Chichester, I passed through Wittenoom. While Millstream-Chichester itself is fine, Wittenoom is a lethal place to be, and you are very strongly advised to avoid it. In October 2007, the Department of Local Government and Regional Development contacted me with the following information. ‘The Government of Western Australia is proceeding with the closure of the area, and to date, Wittenoom’s status as a townsite has been removed, the electricity has been shut off, the postal service has ceased operation and water has been restricted to permanent residences. Any accommodation offered is unlicensed and is believed to be functioning without the appropriate environmental health permits. It is important that backpackers and visitors to the area are aware of the present risks associated with asbestos contamination in the Wittenoom area, and should be urged to find alternate travel destinations in the Pilbara region. Information, including the non-technical summary of a recent report into the nature and extent of asbestos contamination in the Wittenoom area, can be found at www.wa.gov.au/wittenoom.’ You have been warned...

On Sunday I upped sticks and headed off towards Millstream-Chichester National Park, this time actually getting there. On the way I passed through Yampire Gorge and Wittenoom, site of one of the worst industrial disasters in Australian history. The area is home to seams and seams of asbestos, and between 1947 and 1966 these areas were mined, well before asbestos was known to cause cancer. A lot of Aborigines were used as cheap labour – remember that Aborigines were only classed as citizens from 1967, and were only given the vote in 1972 – and a significant number of Wittenoom’s miners have since contracted asbestosis, giving rise to the mother of all court cases.

The area is now pretty deserted; Wittenoom is almost a ghost town, and Yampire Gorge, site of a lot of asbestos seams, is full of signs warning you to stay in the car and keep your windows closed, although the risk is relatively minimal. Still, there’s an added thrill to driving down a dirt road when you know that if you break down, not only will it be a long wait, but you might get asbestosis in the meantime; I made it through, but I wasn’t surprised to find that they’d built an alternative route to avoid further trouble.

I arrived at Millstream, the western half of Millstream-Chichester National Park, to beautiful weather and the school holidays. There were people everywhere, or that’s how it felt after being totally alone in Karijini. I pitched by the Fortescue River (the same river that flows through Karijini) at a spot called Deep Reach Pool, under the trees and right on the bank. I amazed myself by actually swimming in the river; not just dipping, but swimming right out into the brown, flowing water. It looks like I might be slowly getting over my phobia of dark water, but the weather was so hot and the water was so cool it didn’t take much persuading.

Later that evening a new crowd turned up to camp next to me, and before long we were all sitting round the barbie chatting. Robin and Barbara, with their kids Sam and Tara, were from Useless Loop, a tiny town of 35 families out beyond Denham, on the second peninsula in Shark Bay. And they were great company, so along with another family we whittled the night away with idle chat, sitting by the campfire and watching an amazing night sky unfold. I stayed up a little once they’d all gone to bed, and sitting there by the fire with just the stars for company was just idyllic.

Robin the Bushman

The next morning we all set out to do the only notable walk at Millstream, a trek from the homestead to Crossing Pool, and with four young kids and five adults it turned into quite a family outing. Robin – a bit of a bushman, it has to be said – surprised us all when he spotted a flock of emus, and got us all to crouch down. Meanwhile he’d grabbed the hat off little Natalie, one of the other couple’s kids, and was waving it around for about five seconds, then hiding it, and repeating the performance. After a couple of minutes the flock of emus walked over towards us and passed right by; apparently they’re incredibly curious birds, and if you wave anything brightly coloured but hide it, they can’t resist coming over to investigate. It was a neat trick, and the kids loved it.

When we got to Crossing Pool, we all went for a swim, but this time it was a real swim, right across the river to the other side. I managed it with flying colours, and even enjoyed the sensation; the water was murky but I managed to swim across without losing my cool. On our return to camp, Robin set up a rope by the river that we could all swing on to land in the water, which added quite a bit to the creek-dipping experience.

That night I entertained the crowd. They’d spotted my guitar in the back of the car, so I fished it out and performed a couple of songs for the ensemble, the first time I’ve ever played guitar and sung together in public. It wasn’t exactly high quality, but I stumbled through The Beatles’ ‘Rocky Racoon’ and The Senators’ ‘The Girl I Adore’ to a noisy response, and a reward of copious sherry to see the night through. Another roaring fire, another starry night... it made me think I was in some magical wood, with elves and goblins lurking in the shadows, and all manner of mysterious beastie moving through the undergrowth just beyond the circle of firelight.

The Camel Track

On Tuesday I drove north to the Chichester end of the park, stopping at a spot called Snake Creek. Just nearby is a wonderful rock pool called Python Pool, which marks the start of the Camel Track, a 16km round trip from Python Pool via McKenzie Spring to Mt Herbert and back, tracing the track used until 1892 to herd camels from the farms of the Pilbara to the ports on the northern coast. I tramped along the track for most of the day, getting hopelessly lost a lot of the time, but eventually getting to Mt Herbert after an hour and a half.

The problem with following the track was twofold: first, the markers were tiny yellow triangles which were very hard to spot, and second the spinifex growth made the entire landscape a labyrinth of possible tracks, only one of which was right. Spinifex is a bastard: it’s a very tough, very sharp grass that rips your legs to shreds, but the view was just amazing and well worth the raw calves. Imagine mountains with concave slopes – as if they’ve been scooped out – but with tops that look like they’ve been chopped off flat before the summit. ‘Tableland’ and ‘plateau country’ might be the words that describe it, but to me the views were quite fantastic, as in ‘like fantasy’. I could easily imagine huge armies and great citadels in this landscape, like something out of The Lord of the Rings.

When I got back after 16km of walking, Python Pool was perfect. I jumped straight in, swimming right across the dark, murky water, and it was bliss; swimming in rock pools can be habit forming. Snake Creek turned out to be a very friendly camping spot, though primitive and almost empty, and the two elderly couples there were excellent company, especially Ted and Rosemary, who had lived in Stafford for 14 years at one stage in their very varied life, not far from where I grew up. They plied me with tea and cake as the sun came down and the stars put on their display, which was all the more captivating because there was no moon. We all stood around for about an hour searching for satellites, which appear as twinkling lights that move slowly across the sky, getting brighter and dimmer as they rotate and catch the sun’s rays; I spotted one and the others saw a couple. It’s amazing to think that they were put there on a rocket and that you can see them from the ground; it adds a whole new dimension to the night sky.

Another thing you notice about the sun going down in the clear-skied bush are the silhouettes. The gum trees are especially weird, with their gnarled trunks and branches sticking up from barren earth, black against the sunset-red sky. The whole scene reminds me of books we had as children, which were illustrated with pictures made up of silhouettes against psychedelic painted backdrops – the books were by Joan Aiken, with illustrations by Jan Pienkowski. I loved those pictures, and for much the same reason I love desert sunsets. Sunrise is a similar event, but I don’t seem to experience that quite as much...

Cleaverville Beach

Written: 13 July 1996

On Wednesday I headed north from Millstream-Chichester, back to the highway and civilisation. I stopped in Karratha, home to the biggest shopping centre outside Perth (which only goes to show how empty the rest of Western Australia is), where I knuckled down to shop for my forthcoming Pilbara bushwalk. Unfortunately I couldn’t get my lamp fixed, but everything else fell into place, and after spending a small fortune on food, bush gear and various other bits and bobs, I drove east of Karratha to Cleaverville Beach.

Cleaverville Beach is a free camping area on the dunes between Roebourne and Karratha, and it’s a great spot (though the beach is rock, not sand, so it’s a bit sharp on the feet). I went searching for a site, but it wasn’t long before I’d got myself in a bit of a jam. The rear wheels had got themselves stuck in the sand, and as my Toyota is rear wheel drive, I just dug myself deeper and deeper, until the back end was sitting on the ground. This was not a good thing.

The first bloke I asked for help was just rude to me, so I ignored him – he’s the first really mean-spirited Aussie I’ve met – and wandered off to the next caravan, where a very kind man came and helped me out. He started off by getting out his ‘bull bag’, an inflatable bag that attaches to the exhaust pipe; you put the bag under the car, start the engine, and hey presto! The car gets jacked up. This, however, didn’t work, as no matter how much we shovelled sand under the rear wheels, they just dug straight down again when I tried to drive.

Thank goodness he had a four-wheel drive. We attached a rope to my rear axle, and he dragged me back onto hard ground: what a champion! To avoid a repeat performance, I headed back down the road to find a harder site just off the dirt. I set up camp just as a big black snake slithered right across the spot I’d picked for my tent, and settled in. Just as in Cape Range the sky was gorgeous, the flies were hungry, civilisation was miles away, and all this was completely free, so I lit a fire – isn’t it good, Australian wood? – and watched the stars twinkle as the ashes glowed in the hearth.

I stayed at Cleaverville for a few nights, collecting more wood from the hillocks behind the dunes for a nightly fire, more for the cosy feeling of a hearth than for the heat, as the nights had lost most of the bite they’d had in Karijini. Besides, it kept the damn flies and mozzies away, something worth appreciating after a whole day of flies crawling in your mouth, nose, ears and – worst of all – your cup of tea. I listened to the ABC’s Radio National – the only really national radio service, which is a bit like Radio Four but with shorter programmes and more news – and read plenty.

But all good things must come to an end, and on Saturday I drove back to Karratha, booked in to the local caravan park to get clean – the sea might be a handy bath, but my last shower proper was in Tom Price when the car broke down, well over a week ago – and started getting ready for my first real bushwalk.

Pilbara Bushwalk

Written: 21 July 1996

You know that feeling when you’ve always thought, ‘I’d love to do that, but it’s just too scary/expensive/difficult/oh, you know,’ and then you actually get to do it? I’m feeling like that right now. I felt the same after I’d done my first bungee jump in a pub car park in Essex. I felt pretty much the same after eventually getting round to having sex after all those years. I suppose I felt it when I landed in Sydney, having made the big decision to go travelling. And now I’ve done my first real week-long walk, and the feeling of accomplishment is immense.

When I was a kid – ignoring the debate on whether I still am one – I used to love the Moomin books. One of my favourite characters was Snufkin, Moomintroll’s best friend, who was a strange sort of creature who played the mouth organ and who knew everything there was to know about the Great Outdoors. For when the Moomins hibernated during the cold Finnish winter, Snufkin would head off and travel for six months, wandering through the forests and fjords of northern Europe. The stories of little Snufkin camping overnight in the forest and meeting all sorts of wondrous creatures really caught my imagination, and strangely enough, this walk fulfilled that old, forgotten dream. It’s funny how you remember little things from your early years when they strike a chord in later life.

Anyway, from Karratha I rang Scott, the ranger whom I’d met in Nambung and with whom I was walking, did some last minute shopping, and booked into a campsite to do some washing and freshen up after the roughing-it of Cleaverville Beach. To be honest, I don’t know why I bother, considering the clothes come out just as stained as when they go in, everything I own has a dusty red hue, and as soon as I’ve showered my hair blows all over the place and I look as dishevelled as before... but it feels good to try, and it’s almost worth paying the caravan park fee for luxuries like toilets, running water, grassy sites and all those other things you take for granted when you’re not out in the bush.

I even explored the area a bit, between hanging out my clothes and trying – in vain – to clean the piles of dirt from inside the wheel arches of my car. I drove west of Karratha to the Burrup Peninsula, a north-jutting finger of land that contains Dampier, the main port for shipping the iron ore mined at Tom Price, and some pretty little coast. One particularly intriguing spot was Hearson’s Cove, where the beach sloped so incredibly gently that it took me ten minutes to walk from the water’s edge to where it was deep enough to have waves; by that stage it had got about ankle high. Because of the overcast sky and the angle of the sun it looked like I was walking on water, and apart from the strange-looking spikes extruding from the sand – some kind of odd sea dweller, I presumed, so I kept my thongs on just in case – it was a lovely place to swim. Or it would have been if I’d bothered to wade out to deeper water, but it probably would have taken me ages to get to knee height, so I contented myself with ankle-deep wave-hopping.

I drove back via Dampier, a forgettable place with a huge jetty out to a massive container ship where the ore is loaded. By all accounts the tour of Hammersley Iron’s depot is interesting, but I didn’t have time to go on the tour, so I headed back to camp, cooked, and turned in for my last night in comfort for about a week...

So here’s a day-to-day account of my first genuine bushwalk, without a doubt the highlight of my journey so far, complete with snippets of the songs that were floating round my head as we explored the Pilbara.

Day 1, Sunday 14th, 4.5km

It rained so hard that morning

I could hardly see the road

The wind a-blowin’ and the rain a-fallin’

‘Highway 13’, John Lee Hooker

Having met up earlier in the day, Scott and I decided to get stuck into the walk straight away. He’d drawn up a route that covered a fair amount of the Chichester Ranges, with about 65km of walking, so after checking our equipment, we headed out towards Python Pool. It was about 4.30 in the afternoon by the time we got to Snake Creek, the campsite I’d stayed in a week or so before, and we decided that although we’d only have about two hours of walking that day, we might as well start and make Monday’s trip easier, so we drove past the campsite and ducked off the road down a dodgy four-wheel-drive track to a place called Narrina Pool. This was the last time I would see any trace of modern human beings for seven days...

We hadn’t checked the weather report as it was slightly cloudy but nothing to worry about, so we donned our rather heavy backpacks, full of everything we’d need for a week except water, and trudged up the start of Narrina Creek for 4.5km, by which stage it was getting dark, so we pitched camp.

A couple of points before going on. First, the route went vaguely like this: imagine a square map, with north at the top, and three parallel rivers, each running from south to north (that’s up and down the map); from west to east (that’s left to right on the map) they’re called Narrina Creek, George River and Pillinginni Creek. We started at the north end of Narrina Creek, headed south upstream, cut east from the south end of the creek to the south end of George River, then east again to the south end of Pillinginni, then northwards down Pillinginni, before turning west to cross the end of the George and head back to the end of Narinna, giving a vaguely square route.

Second, life on a walk like this isn’t luxurious. ‘Making camp’ means finding a vaguely flat piece of whatever is to hand, laying out your roll mat, chucking on the sleeping bag and sleeping out in the great wide open. We had no tents, but we both had waterproof sheets in case of dew, which can appear at about four in the morning, as it gets pretty cold at night. We drank water from the creeks, washed in the rock pools, and the only food we had was what we had brought with us.

So we set up camp by the side of Narrina Creek, on the bank, and decided to erect a bit of a shelter, just in case it rained; you never know in the outback, though the Pilbara is one of the driest areas of Australia. The shelter consisted of my flysheet pegged into the ground at one end and held up on sticks at the other, so we could slide under and put the packs in with us and keep some space above our heads.

We cooked up – a soon-to-be familiar meal of packet rice, the sort I’ve been eating for ages on the road – and settled in for the night, gazing at the stars in the clear sky. No wonder we didn’t think it was going to rain. Bad mistake.

The first drops appeared about ten o’clock – you retire early when you walk – so we nipped under cover and tried to sleep. But the rain wasn’t just a passing shower, it meant business, and it wasn’t long before my flysheet showed its true colours; waterproof, my arse, it leaked whenever you touched it and rain ran down the inside almost as much as is ran down the outside. At about two in the morning Scott made a brave attempt to prop up the sides with sticks to try to direct the flow of water down past our feet, but it took a lot of willpower not to get up and head back to the cars; we were extremely wet and water was dripping on our faces in a kind of self-inflicted Chinese water torture. It wasn’t terribly pleasant.

It wasn’t exactly an auspicious start to the trip. It didn’t feel much like the driest part of Australia, that’s for sure...

Day 2, Monday 15th, 10km

Oh, a storm is threat’ning

My very life today

If I don’t get some shelter

Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away

‘Gimme Shelter’, The Rolling Stones

It stopped raining at about seven, when we got up. It wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference if it hadn’t, seeing as both our sleeping bags and our enthusiasm were totally dampened, but I cooked up some porridge for myself while Scott had his usual breakfast of muesli bars, and before long we’d decided that although the weather was lousy, we were already about as wet as it was possible to get, so we might as well press on and try to find a cave where we could shelter. It was pretty obvious we weren’t equipped for rain, so it was up to nature herself to provide shelter.

We walked for 10km through patchy but heavy rain, stopping for lunch halfway up the creek. That was when the powers that be smiled on us, because about five minutes after lunch – a sodden affair – we found the perfect spot for shelter. Imagine a vertical cliff with jutting overhangs about four feet from the bottom, with further outcrops above. We spotted the area because the ground was so dry near the cliff, the first dry ground we’d seen on the trip; the rocks we’d been clambering over had been dangerously slippery in the creek beds we’d been navigating.

We didn’t waste much time setting up camp, mainly because we needed to dry out our sodden sleeping bags and roll mats. Typically it stopped raining just as we found the shelter, so we thought it would be a good idea to head up to the top of the hill opposite to try out the radio that Scott had brought along in case of an emergency. The problem was that the handheld unit we had brought with us needed to trigger the main transmitter at Millstream, and it simply couldn’t do it when we were in the river gorges; then again, it didn’t have any luck on top of the hill either. We did manage to get totally soaked in the attempt, though, so it didn’t take much convincing for us to go in search of firewood to warm up proceedings.

The fire did the job; we managed to find enough dry wood to smoulder our way to dusk, and the beds were almost luxurious after the dripping of the night before. Quite why that night the heavens above decided to throw the worst rainstorm of the last few weeks at us, I’ll never know. Despite being protected from the elements on three sides out of four, the rain managed to blow into our dry areas enough to make it totally uncomfortable, and the only solution was the Clint Eastwood approach: zip up the sleeping bag, lie on your back, pull the drawstring around the head of the bag tight so it covers everything bar your face, with your dry clothes squeezed inside it as a pillow, and lie there, with your face covered by your hat. Comfortable it wasn’t, but after one wet night and a day’s walking through a creek bed, it’s amazing how tired you can be.

Unfortunately it’s at times like this that your mind casts around for something to occupy itself, in an attempt to keep itself thinking random thoughts long enough to drift into sleep: nostalgic thoughts of friends and family, the good bits of old relationships, important events in life, the warm feeling of eiderdown... little things that help sleep come quickly. The problem is that thoughts often stray to the day before, as it’s the most recent time for inspiration. For example, strained backs, aching feet, spinifex-slashed hands and all manner of muscular problems, they all haunt Clint’s dreams. The fire we’d lit to dry our clothes spattered into a grey, wet puddle, and eventually I woke up to a clear day, with a dry sleeping bag and limbs that protested from the solidity of the bedrock.

After the night under the cliff, which kept most of the rain off us, sleeping in a ditch in Glastonbury seems like a walk in the park. Except we were sober, an unlikely event at Glastonbury...

Day 3, Tuesday 16th, 13km

I need to laugh

And when the sun is out

I’ve got something I can laugh about

I feel good

In a special way

I’m in love and it’s a sunny day

‘Good Day Sunshine’, The Beatles

‘You only appreciate something when it’s gone,’ they say, and they’re right. Tuesday awoke to a blue sky and warmth, little things that those with roofs take for granted, but which can make a day feel really beautiful to those who’ve lived through the ravages of a storm. It didn’t take much effort to get brekkie, get those packs hoisted and get moving.

As we headed south up Narrina Creek, it gradually widened out into smaller tributaries, eventually drying out altogether, so we could walk right along the creek bed. Luckily there wasn’t too much growth along the way; because creek beds are often the best places to find water, white River Gums and all sorts of strange plant life spring up in the creek itself. This is useful for a couple of reasons: first, you can tell which way a creek flows even if there’s no water, as the trees lean with the current, and debris gets deposited on one side of the trunk only, the upstream side; and second, the vegetation in the creeks is greener than the surrounding scrub, so you can tell where creeks are by looking for lines of green, which is useful when there’s no water to try to spot.

Halfway up the creek we stopped for lunch by a little sloping waterfall, where these tiny fish were desperately trying to swim upstream, presumably to breed. It was quite entertaining watching the little buggers flipping around madly, trying to swim up this gush of water, made quite strong by the recent rains. And soon after lunch we disturbed a wild dog and her pups, and when she’d run off we got a good look at the litter; cute little things they were. We were obviously not alone...

After a while we reached the top of the creek, and struck east in search of the start of the George River. Unfortunately we’d gone a little too far south down Narrina Creek, so when we did reach the George, we were quite high up it and had to hack our way through serious undergrowth for a few hours to reach our destination. The George River has a much higher catchment area than its neighbouring creeks, and as a result it was huge, flowing fast and wide, leaving little room between the water and the surrounding forest, and making it impossible to cross. But our dedication was worth it, because when we’d battled through the worst of it, we got to the waterfalls.

Apparently I’m lucky to have seen the George in full flow, because even in the wet season it doesn’t flow constantly, and when it’s raining in the summer, you don’t tend to go walking for fear of being whisked away. But our downpour had raised the water level to make the waterfalls flow quite dramatically, and it wasn’t a hard decision to camp right by them. We found some reasonably flat rock, and spread sand around in the gaps to make a relatively flat bed, albeit pretty damn hard, and settled in for the duration.

The waterfalls consisted of lots of little falls, followed by a colossal one that fell into a huge, deep pool. The big one was too dangerous to fool around in, but the little ones were great, and before long we were washing away the grime of the journey in cool, flowing water; it was beautiful, and well worth the grief of the rains to have them flowing so much. We set up a makeshift shelter, because although the skies were clear, we didn’t want to take any chances. Indeed, the night started out as clear as a bell, but soon enough a cloud front had rolled in and was threatening to repeat the performance of the last couple of days. Luckily it held off and the sky cleared again, looking great as usual, but the excess moisture and cool temperature brought down some seriously heavy dew, so we woke up on Wednesday with soaking sleeping bags anyway. Was there no escape from the water?

And to cap it all, I cut my foot badly on the rock when walking round in the dark, a big gash on the underside of my left foot, just behind the middle toe. God, it hurt, and proved to be rather uncomfortable for the rest of the trip. But, hey! Nobody said it would be easy...

Day 4, Wednesday 17th, Rest Day

River, oh river, river running deep

Bring me something that will let me get to sleep

In the washing of the water will you take it all away

Bring me something to take this pain away

‘Washing of the Water’, Peter Gabriel

Rest days are important, especially when your body feels like it’s been put on the rack. Besides, discovering a beautiful waterfall system and failing to make the most of it is a capital offence, so we lounged around all day, swimming, exploring and sunbaking.

At least, I was sunbaking – Scott preferred the shade – and it turned out to be a mistake. Yes, I burnt my shoulders ever so slightly, but when you’re carrying a backpack, burnt shoulders aren’t all that comfortable. Still, I didn’t notice until the next day, so the rest day was just great. I went for a wander down the river after lunch, and discovered some Aboriginal rock carvings; in the Pilbara, the art tends to be scratches on rock rather than painting, and I found a rock covered with stick men with big phalluses, like a kind of Aboriginal Picasso exhibition.

Further down the river was a stepped waterfall, a gentle slope of running water with convenient steps all the way down, which had been created by the water wearing through the sedimentary rock. The afternoon sun was pretty hot, so I stripped off and sat in the middle of the falls, looking at the view as the river cut through a gorge with red cliffs lining the sides, huge rockfalls all over the place, and all manner of strange trees hanging over the rock pools. It was bliss.

But the best was yet to come. When I returned to camp, Scott had discovered that if you kept your socks on, then walking around the creeks and down the waterfalls was much easier than in bare feet, so we set off in socks and swimmers in search of the perfect massage. We found it, just before the big waterfall, where water was gushing down right onto perfectly formed seats in the rock; it was just what the doctor ordered. It’s amazing how the aches and pains of walking for days just melt away under a water massage.

That night we constructed dew covers for our sleeping areas, and lit a fire overlooking the river. The sky was dreamy, the smoke kept getting in our eyes, and life just couldn’t get any better. Scott kept me entertained with his stories of caring for the dunnies you get in National Parks; they’re called long-neck dunnies because they’re simply a bowl with a long neck that leads down into a rather unpleasant drum, which simply gets dragged out when full, and replaced by a new drum. Take the example of the huge goanna that got stuck down one of the long-necks for a few days, and managed to scare enough people to make action necessary. The rangers managed to hook it with a circle of wire attached to a pole, but of course, when the shit-covered goanna came out into the light, it did what all sensible animals would have done in its place; it shook itself. So it wasn’t just the goanna that was covered in shit by the end of the operation, but a whole bunch of suddenly much wiser rangers too...

Or how about the tool used to push the contents of the drum down when it’s getting full, but not quite full to the brim? It’s a metal disc welded to the end of a pole, and it’s delightfully called the ‘poo poker’. Or the Irish girl who asked the ranger what it was like inside bush dunny, so he took her video camera, attached it to a rope, turned it to record, and lowered it down inside one. Unique footage, you might say.

There’s something really special about sitting round a campfire, miles from civilisation, and talking into the wee hours...

Day 5, Thursday 18th, 14km

I’ve seen the needle

And the damage done

‘The Needle and the Damage Done’, Neil Young

Neil might have been talking about a different kind of needle, but I reckon if he’d gone walking through spinifex, he’d have written the same lyrics all over again. Spinifex is a bastard, and if I never see it again, I won’t complain. However, seeing as it’s as common as mud in the outback, I think I’m going to be spending plenty of time in its pleasurable company in the coming weeks.

Spinifex is a type of grass that grows in clumps. It looks nice enough, but closer inspection shows the clump to be made up of seriously sharp spikes, as thin and as dangerous as needles, and when you walk through the stuff it lacerates your legs. The points aren’t quite tough enough to puncture leg skin, but they scratch, and if you accidentally fall and use your hands to stop yourself hitting the ground by grabbing a nearby clump of spinifex, you too will have the delightful job of trying to get hundreds of little splinters out of your hand for the next few days. I’m still trying to find them all...

Spinifex is also the reason for controlled burning, as practised by the Aborigines for thousands of years, and more recently by park rangers. After about four or five years spinifex gets too tough for kangaroos to eat, so if you burn it in a bushfire, it starts growing again and the roos can eat it for the next few years. It’s called ‘firestick farming’, and it works; I found that the areas where there had been recent bushfires were much easier to walk through.

Still, we’d known this leg of the walk would be tough, as it took us over the hills of the Chichester Ranges, which roll around without any real distinguishing points for miles. We spent most of the day guessing where we were on the map, and we cut north too soon, heading for a creek that we though must lead to Pillinginni Creek, only to find it was flowing the wrong way and obviously led back to the George again. Damn!

Never mind, we did manage to get radio contact for the first time in the trip, being on the top of the range, so it wasn’t too worrying, but it took longer than anticipated to find the start of Pillinginni Creek. It also turned out to be a very overgrown creek bed, with loads of gums, bushes and nasty plants with sharp bits, so by the time we reached water and cliffs, we were knackered and pretty lacerated.

The problem was that Pillinginni Creek, in its beauty, is very rocky, and its vertical sides are very close together, reducing the number of campsites to, well, zero. We ended up sleeping on a silt bar on a corner of the creek – quite a comfortable spot, as it turned out – and after a refreshing dip in the creek, we turned in for the night. By this stage sleeping on the ground wasn’t much of a problem; it’s amazing how you adapt when you have to.

Day 6, Friday 19th, 18.5km

Do I love you, my oh my

River deep, mountain high

If I lost you would I cry

Oh how I love you baby, baby, baby, baby

‘River Deep, Mountain High’, Ike and Tina Turner

Pillinginni was a pretty little creek, but it was pretty nasty to walk down. One time we got to a dry waterfall, which we had to navigate by me climbing down, Scott then handing me the packs, and then him coming down. The only problem was that the climb down, a good few metres, required you to get a hand grip on a crack, and then effectively jump off and let yourself dangle, as there were no footholds; only then could you drop to the ground.

No problem, I thought, and in my reckless disregard for personal safety that a sure foot and a climbing background give you, I hopped down. Scott, however, was seriously scared of heights, and it took some persuasion to get him to swing out. He made it, all credit to him, but it just shows what a pain some of the terrain was. It took us some time to get to the wider parts of the creek, and then we started to pick up speed, heading for a waterhole at the bottom of the creek, where we’d meet a four-wheel-drive track, camp the night, and then have an easy but long trek back to the cars.

That was the idea, anyway. The only problem was that the waterhole we were going to camp by turned out to be completely dry, so we had to make a decision: walk back to the last one, or push on down the track to the bottom of the George River. We opted to push on, making very good time, and by nightfall we were camping 10km from the cars, on a silted area right below the foot of the Chichester Range. The river was still flowing, the swimming was excellent, and the hues on the red cliffs as the sun set were just amazing.

Day 7, Saturday 20th, 10km

Homeward bound, I wish I was homeward bound

Home, where my thought’s escaping

Home, where the music’s playing

Home, where my love lies waiting silently for me...

‘Homeward Bound’, Simon and Garfunkel

We covered the remaining distance in no time, at least compared to the hard going through the creeks and spinifex. Apart from a kilometre through the scrub it was all road, and according to some warped tradition of Scott’s, we ran the last 50m to the cars, which were a sight for sore eyes.

We packed up the cars while being devoured by a nest of meat ants – big, red ants with a particular craving for meat, dead or alive – and parted company after exchanging addresses and taking photos of us holding up the map in victory. He was a top man, was Scott, and I’m in his debt for providing me with an experience that people would pay serious money for. It would be worth every penny.

So, that was the walk. I then drove straight to Whim Creek, the nearest civilisation in my direction; it’s basically a pub in the middle of nowhere, and I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be. I feasted on beer and burgers, watched the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and wondered at the beauty of it all. A very happy drunk, I was.

Port Hedland

Written: 22 July 1996

The day after the bushwalk, I finally hit real civilisation. Port Hedland is on the north coast of the Pilbara, and is home to a huge, deep sea port that ships out all sorts of minerals dug from underneath Western Australia: iron ore, manganese, zinc and heaven knows what else. I stayed the night with Kath, mother of Ron from Perth, and the proprietor of Kath’s Kitchen, a top establishment in Port Hedland if burgers and fry-ups are your thing (which for me, they are).

Unfortunately Kath had a touch of the flu, but that didn’t stop us attacking the Bundi and Cokes (a very Australian drink, Bundi being Bundaberg Rum) and taking a Jacuzzi in the back garden as the sun went down over the docks. Kath and her husband, Bert, were top company, as were their friends Des and Theresa, who had parked their campervan in the back garden, not to mention Ron’s brother Chris and his family. There were grandchildren absolutely everywhere (or ‘grannies’ as they called ’em), and it was delightfully insane.

That night Bert, Des and I all went down the pub for a few drinks, and to watch the two-up. Two-up is a real Aussie institution, and you’ve never seen anything like it. It takes place in the back of the pub, where there’s a big area surrounded by a large rope on the ground, a little like a small bowling green. The idea of the game is that the spinner stands in the area, puts two pennies into the tosser (a bit of wood with two round indents for the coins) and tosses the coins high into the air. He’s bet a stake against the bank that he will get two heads (a ‘two-up’), and if he does, he doubles his money. He can keep throwing if he wins, and if he doesn’t reduce his bet, it doubles every time (though most people stick to the same amount every time and cream off any winnings). If he throws a head and a tail it’s a ‘one-up’, and he simply throws again, but if he gets two tails, he loses and it’s the next thrower’s turn. Simple enough.

The amazing part is that everyone around the throwing area is constantly betting with each other on whether it’ll be heads or tails. Each bet is between two people, and they bet the same amount; the person who wins simply keeps the money, so you either lose your stake, or double it. It’s incredible how much money changes hands – hundreds and hundreds of dollars all on one toss of the coins – and the atmosphere is insane. It’s great entertainment even if you don’t bet, and is quite addictive. That’s probably why I didn’t put anything on... as Bert said, you only win if you bet, but you only lose if you bet. Actually, he put it a little better; his exact words were, ‘If the dog hadn’t stopped for a shit, he wouldn’t have got run over.’ Good point that.

That night we pigged out on pies, roast beef, kebabs, spring rolls and anything else Kath had brought back from the café; life has its perks when you own a food joint. Brekkie the next day was a great bacon and egg combo, and before long I’d said my thank you’s and goodbyes, and was back on the road to Broome, glowing from the wonderful hospitality of Kath and her family.

Broome

Written: 25 July 1996

‘Slip into Broome time,’ they say, and figured I might as well do just that. I liked Broome so much that I stayed an extra day, which gave me two days of lazing around doing very little except soaking up the rays and lounging on the beach. Actually I got a bit of sunburn on my upper right thigh on the first day – I’d been writing a letter lying on my side, and of course you can’t just swap hands and turn over, so without realising it I’d burned my rump – so I spent the second day sitting in the shade of a palm tree, looking out over Cable Beach and wondering where all the promised bathing beauties had got to. I suppose with it not being the holidays the beauties were somewhere else, but there were plenty of wrinklies around, so at least it wasn’t dead (though it was a pretty close thing, looking at some of them).

Despite this lethargic vibe, I did manage to visit all the sights of Broome (well, the free ones anyway). Gantheaume Point, at the southern end of the 22km Cable Beach, was home to some weird and wonderful red rock formations carved over time by the coastal winds, but Broome Harbour was covered in fog when I visited it very early in the morning, though I was lucky enough to see it slowly roll back, revealing fishermen, a BP depot and deep, blue ocean. In fact, the only real event I missed out on in Broome was the fabled Roebuck Hotel (the ‘Roey’), the only place to be if you’re a backpacker or a bottle of beer. Actually, I missed it out intentionally, though large numbers of hostellers round Australia will tell you that the Roey is where they had their most unforgettable experiences in Oz. Then again, if you push those hostellers about what was so unforgettable about the Roey, it seems they’ve forgotten...

Talking of spending your time at the bottom of a beer glass, Broome must have the highest concentration of British this side of the Costa del Sol, and that comparison isn’t coincidental. Yes, there’s a lot of the Brits Abroad crowd here – either from the far north of England or the ubiquitous Landan Tahn – and it reminded me of something Robin had mentioned in Millstream-Chichester. He asked if I knew why the Aussies called the English ‘Poms’, and blow me, I had no idea why. He said there were two popular theories, both of which could be rubbish, but nobody I’ve asked seems to know which one’s right. Take your pick from the following:

- Pom comes from POME (pronounced ‘Pommy’), an acronym for Prisoner Of Mother England.

- Pomegranates have pale flesh with rosy-coloured skin, and this reminded the bronzed Aussies of pale Victorian English skin with rosy cheeks; hence, Pom is short for pomegranate.

I don’t know which one is right, if either, but I tend to favour the first one. Whatever, Broome was chocka with Pommies, so after a couple of days I decided not to add to the problem, and hit the road for the heart of the Kimberley.

The Kimberley

Written: 25 July 1996

Everything you’ve heard about the Kimberley area of northern Western Australia is true (unless you’re thinking, ‘The Kimberley, what the hell’s that?’, in which case bear with me). It’s generally very inaccessible, unless you have a four-wheel-drive, tons of spare fuel, spare tyres coming out of your ears and a lot of balls, and as the only one I have of that lot comes in a pair, I haven’t seen the half of it. However, what I have seen of the area has been spectacular; it’s another place I’d definitely visit again.

I had a choice of route from Broome: either head east along Highway One straight to Fitzroy Crossing and then on to Kununurra, or do a little detour up to Derby (pronounced to rhyme with Kirby), head east along the Gibb River Road, and visit two National Parks en route, namely Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek. Of course, I went for the adventurous route.

I say adventurous because the Gibb River Road is no joke. It goes from Derby right across to Kununurra, and I would have tried to follow it all the way if it wasn’t one of the nastiest roads in Australia, only to be attempted by four-wheel-drive, and then only in the dry season (it all but disappears in the wet). It’s the road that cuts through the heart of the Kimberley, and the first section is manageable with a conventional car, after which you can cut south to the National Parks and then on to the highway, hitting the bitumen just west of Fitzroy Crossing.

‘Manageable’ is, obviously, a relative term. The first 80km or so is bitumen, so there you go, speeding along, thinking to yourself, ‘This isn’t that bad, I wonder what all the fuss is about.’ Then you hit the dirt, and I mean hit it, but by that time you’re trapped, as it’s a hell of a long way to turn back. Never have I juddered so much, or had to take it so slow for fear not just of bursting tyres, but of shaking the nuts, bolts and rivets out of the whole car. I’ve driven on corrugated roads[1] before, but this was more like driving over millions of super-sharp sleeping policemen than a road.

It’s roads like this that make me realise I’ve bought the vehicular equivalent of the Starship Enterprise. When the road is terrible, and when most conventional cars would have given up and fallen apart, I end up thinking, ‘She cannae take it no more, Captain!’ But next episode she’s still there purring like a contented cat, the only difference being that the Starship Enterprise doesn’t have as good a stereo as my trusty Toyota.

Windjana Gorge

The drive along the Gibb River Road and down through the gorges is stunning, when the view stops shaking. To add to the surreal flavour of the Kimberley, this is the home of the boab tree (known as the baobab in Africa), and it’s a tree like no other. It has a huge, thick trunk, strange tentacle-like branches, and a totally unique aura of science fiction meets mind-bending drug about it. It’s a strangely apt inhabitant for this stranger-than-fiction part of the world.

The countryside along the road is reasonably flat, but then you come to Windjana Gorge. Back in the days of the dinosaurs the north of Australia was underwater, and there was a huge barrier reef, the Devonian Reef, that stretched east from Broome, up to what is now the coast, and round to Kununurra; as the land rose to form modern Australia, the reef left the sea behind and became a huge, long wall of limestone. So when you get to Windjana Gorge, there’s a huge, vertical cliff stretching out on either side – what used to be the reef – and the Lennard River has cut a gorge straight through it. The reef is only about 3.5km deep, and you can walk along the river straight through to the other side, where the reef again drops away to flat ground. The reef’s texture is truly weird, and as you walk the 8km return track along the gorge, you come to tropical rainforest, sandy spits, odd birds and loads of that creeper that Tarzan used to take instead of the bus. And there, wallowing in the river, I saw my first crocodiles.

There were lots of them, but they were freshwater crocs, the relatively harmless type. Freshies still look pretty mean though, and in the shade of the gorge they looked particularly menacing. They might not eat you without provocation like salties do, but they still have those huge teeth and menacing grins...

Tunnel Creek

After a quick lunch and the 8km hike down the gorge and back, I was raring to keep going. Some days it feels like someone’s sprinkled speed on my Coco Pops and the energy’s boundless – I’d got up at 6.30am, for goodness sake, and was totally hyper until I set up camp for the night – so I hopped back in the car and rattled down to Tunnel Creek National Park. Tunnel Creek used to be a normal creek that ran over the top of the Devonian Reef, but with water seepage and erosion it eventually started flowing into the range, and nowadays it flows through a big tunnel of caves underneath the mountains. In the wet season the creek is huge, but in the dry it effectively stops flowing, just leaving a bunch of permanent rock pools in its wake.

There’s a walk at Tunnel Creek through this tunnel, but it’s not conventional. For a start, in places you have to wade through stomach-deep, cold water. Then there’s a bit of scrambling over rocks and trees. But the most eerie thing is that all this happens in the dark. There aren’t any man-made lights, and because it’s a cave, there’s no natural light either, just you and your torch. They recommend you wear sneakers and swimmers to do the walk, so I kitted myself out, grabbed my camera and my torch – a tiny penlight-sized affair – and headed for the cave.

This must rate as one of the most incredibly scary things I’ve ever done. Although there were other people about outside, inside I was totally alone, in the pitch black, sloshing around through water that went from sand bank to stomach-high to ankle-high and back to sand, and there was me with a tiny pool of light to guide me. It’s totally silent, apart from the drip of the stalactites and the sploshing of your walking, and towards the end of the 750m tunnel (which felt more like 75km) there’s a colony of bats to scare the hell out of you. Halfway along the tunnel there’s a bit where the roof has collapsed, so there’s light and you can see the colours of the cave decorations which are hard to see in the light of a torch, but to be honest it just makes it harder, because you then have to plunge straight back into pitch darkness and icy water. The light at the end of the tunnel is a relief, but only momentarily because, you guessed it, the only way back is the way you came.

Add in the wildlife – the bats, the freshwater crayfish swimming around your toes and scurrying to get away from the light, and various other beasties that I could feel brushing past my submerged knees in the dark – and you have one of the most eerie experiences in the world. I recommend you do it alone; it’s easy to be brave when you’re in a group, but being alone in dark, waist-deep water you can’t see through, with a pathetic beam of light for company, is really challenging. I still can’t believe I made it; another phobia bites the dust. Besides, walking through freezing subterranean water is a great soother for a sunburnt rump...

After conquering Tunnel Creek, I drove straight back to the bitumen, which seemed to take ages, and I didn’t get there until after nightfall. On the way I had to drive through a creek that was still flowing, and the height of the water was rather scary; it came over the top of the wheels, and I was lucky I made it. I now know that there’s a hole in the floor of the passenger footrest, which could be responsible for the periodic Stilton cultivations... but luckily it wasn’t long before I was cooking up spaghetti bolognese in Fitzroy Crossing Caravan Park (a very nice spot), camped next to two whizz-bangs[2]. Boy, did I sleep well that night.

[1] I’d always assumed that corrugation on dirt roads was intentional, put there to provide added grip in the wet. However, it turns out it’s a totally natural phenomenon that occurs when cars drive along dirt roads, and nobody knows how to prevent it happening. I found myself wishing that they did.

[2] ‘Whizz-bang’ was how an old couple I met in Karijini referred to campervans. I’d assumed they called them whizz-bangs because their engines sounded like that, but there’s a better reason. Remember those sliding doors that campervans have down the side? And the noise it makes when you slide it shut? That’s right: whizz-bang. It’s a name that makes sense after you’ve camped next to a few of them.

Kununurra

Written: 29 July 1996

Friday was a long driving day, but before I set off on the seven-hour slog from Fitzroy Crossing to Kununurra, I popped 20km off the highway to Geikie Gorge, another of the Devonian Reef gorges. If anyone ever says to you, ‘When you’ve seen one gorge you’ve seen them all,’ you can tell they’ve never been to Australia, because however many gorges I’ve seen – and I can think of a dozen I’ve seen in WA off the top of my head – every one is unique. Geikie is picture-postcard pretty, not quite as rugged as most, and its green vegetation makes it quite an oasis. There’s a lovely little 1.5km walk up the gorge where I met a very interesting travelling group, comprising an Irishman, a Swiss guy and American girl, all trucking round in one van bought in Sydney. Now that’s what I call a tolerant bunch, and good fun they were too.

Then I set off on the long drive to Kununurra. I could have stopped at a number of tiny towns on the way, but I fancied a nice long drive and Kununurra was where I’d booked a tour of the Bungle Bungles, so getting there early would mean I wouldn’t have to pitch the tent somewhere different every morning. The journey, though long and pretty desolate, was amazing when it turned north to head through the Kimberley. The mountain ranges and odd shapes of the landscape are just stunning, especially when the sun is setting and casting red shadows everywhere. I drove solidly between 10.30am and 6.00pm, with a half hour stop for lunch, and I didn’t even feel tired at the end. Compare that with half-an-hour’s drive through rush-hour Birmingham...

My camping spot was odd, though. The first place I tried, the caravan park in the centre of Kununurra, was totally full, but just as the lady was about to explain directions to another park, her husband bounded up and said there was room for a small one, so I paid up for the weekend and set up camp. I was totally surrounded by lots of little dome tents, none with attending cars, and after I’d set mine up it looked a bit like an adult dome, surrounded by lots of little babies. It turned out that Kununurra is the spot in the north for getting work as a fruit picker – mainly to pick melons – and I’d picked a spot full of young fruit pickers, all out here on a working holiday visa.

Whoops: here I am, the other side of the globe, and I’m surrounded by teenage Londoners who seem to think the whole world’s like Ibiza. It’s nice to meet fellow travellers, but some people haven’t got a clue: they don’t visit National Parks, they visit pubs; they don’t get into the local culture, they get onto the beach; they don’t often crop up west of Broome, because they stick to the east coast. I even got offered two jobs picking melons, but I politely declined...

Still, I can’t be too critical of how parochial the Poms are. The Olympic coverage here in Australia – at least, the coverage on the radio, as I haven’t watched TV for ages – is incredible; there might as well be no other nationalities involved except Australia. This nation might be sporty, but it doesn’t appear to be terribly sporting; I’ve never come across such a bunch of bad losers in my life. It’s all medal tally, medal tally, medal tally, and when the swimming team had a shaky start to the games, everyone was saying how crap they were, and what a bunch of losers the team was. Luckily the swimming medals started rolling in, stemming the criticism, but it was all a bit sad; no wonder Greg Norman emigrated to the USA, complaining that all the press did was criticise him.

Never mind: Kununurra is a pretty little spot, just right for a lazy weekend. After an excellent start to the day – I downloaded my email to find £440-worth of writing commissions and an invitation to visit a fellow journalist in Auckland – I spent Saturday morning exploring on foot, as it’s far too easy to explore by car, and you miss all the sounds and smells. I started by climbing Kelly’s Knob for an excellent lookout over the town, and then walking into the very nearby Mirima (Hidden Valley) National Park. The latter is a sweet little park, with some really far out rock formations and vegetation. Its only real drawback is its close proximity to the town, which means it’s full of day trippers scrambling around and videoing it (I ask you, what’s the point in videoing a still valley?); it was a shame, as this sort of place is perfect for quiet contemplation perched atop a cliff, something made challenging, if not impossible, by noisy kids and day trippers complaining about the flies.

Which reminds me: I have found a name for my pain, and that name is ‘caravan’. I hate them! Never in my life have I seen so many caravans blocking up the roads; four out of five vehicles on the road here seem to be towing one, and after a while they drive you nuts. They drive so slowly, often because they’re being driven by retired couples who can’t see more than a couple of feet beyond their bumper, and over a seven-hour drive, the joke begins to wear thin. Very, very thin.

Clearly in need of a break from driving, I spent a lazy weekend just pootling around, soaking up the rays and the water in the public swimming pool (the only crocodile-free water I could find). I needed it, because on the Monday I had to meet the tour bus for the Bungle Bungles at 5.30am on the other side of town – yes, 5.30am. And it was still dark, a bit like my mood at that time in the morning... though that would soon change.

Purnululu (Bungle Bungles)

Written: 31 July 1996

The Bungle Bungles – or Purnululu National Park, to give the park its official title – is one of those places that is not only totally unique in the world, it’s also breathtakingly weird and completely inexplicable. Access to the park is off Highway One at Turkey Creek, south of Kununurra, but it’s not for the fainthearted: it’s definitely only for four-wheel drive vehicles, and even they find it tough. From the highway to the park is just 53km (33 miles) away, but it takes over two hours to do that stretch, so I took a tour as it was the only practical way to get there.

I’m glad I did, too, though at A$390 for a three-day tour it wasn’t cheap. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and taking a tour does make it rather luxurious. Luckily the group I went with – just ten of us, plus the guide – was full of interesting people, with me being the youngest by a serious gap (most of the group were retired), as well as the only non-Australian. Compared to the irritating people on the large backpacker tour bus that we bumped into out there, this was high culture indeed...

We stayed in little huts with comfortable beds – a novelty for me after all this camping – with all meals provided; this felt like real decadence after cooking up rice in my billy for the last few months. We drove into the park on Monday and spent the afternoon visiting Cathedral Gorge, a huge pool in the famous beehives of the Bungle Bungle mountain range. The whole area is made up of a raised range of sedimentary sandstone that has been worn into huge beehive-shaped mounds, with horizontal stripes alternating black and red across them all. It’s hard to explain, but walking through these superbly odd formations as the sun highlights the reds, greens and blacks and casts eerie shadows, is just... well, I’m lost for words. There’s a two-day 18km walk through the area up the Picaninny River, and one day I hope to do it. It might be only a two-day walk, but it’s hard going and there’s no water anywhere; because the area is all rock, when it rains in the wet season the creeks run hard and fast, but as soon as the rain stops, the water runs away and the area dries up very quickly, leaving very few permanent pools.

That night we had an excellent meal, with billy tea round the fire (a recipe for billy tea: boil up a billy on the fire, chuck in a handful of tea leaves, bring back to the boil and pour a cup of cold water in to make the leaves sink – beautiful!). I also had the immense pleasure of christening my first-ever stubby holder, which I’d bought a few days before. A stubby holder, an essential part of every Australian beer drinker’s life, is a hollow cylinder of foam with only one open end, into which you stuff your can to keep it cold as you drink it. Stubby holders have all sorts of things printed on them – they’re the beer drinker’s equivalent of car bumper stickers – and mine says ‘North West Australia: Best Bloody Place in the World’ on it, along with all the places you should visit there (most of which I’ve visited). My stubby holder and my hat: I’ll take them wherever I travel.

The Northern Bungles

On the second day in the park we went on three walks in the northern end of the Bungles. The first was along Mini Palm Gorge, a scramble up a gorge to a sheltered, sandy area that was full of tiny, squat palm trees; it looks for all the world like a palm nursery. Climbing gorges in the Bungles is an experience, with a lot of scrambling over what looks like pebble-dash and concrete blocks; the area is made up of conglomerate rock, a strange mixture of sandstone and pebbles, washed there by prehistoric rivers. All along the gorges grow luscious palms, with some trees growing in the most amazingly unfriendly spots, like halfway up cliffs. Although they’re gorges, they’re not like the others I’ve seen, they’re more like river-beds that flow steeply down from the top of the range, and you climb up the fissure created by the flow. It’s like another world.

At the end of Mini Palm Gorge is a narrow crack in the rock, and John, our guide, took us all in there and got us to feel our way along the wall in the pitch black; we couldn’t see a thing, but he made us go on. After about five minutes our eyes started to adjust, and you wouldn’t believe how much we could see in this huge crack in the mountains. The hues cast by the very small amount of light coming from the entrance lit up the walls, and although we were totally in the dark when we went in, after a bit we could see really quite well. It was spooky, but well worth doing.

Froghole Gorge is another beautiful walk, with a permanent rock pool at the end. The view up from the pool is amazing; you can see where the water flows in during the wet season, and it’s quite obvious why the park is closed during the rains, as the amount of water rushing around must be tremendous. Finally, we walked up Echidna Chasm, a massive and very deep crack in the range, which you can walk down for a considerable distance before reaching the end. You can see the sky above you all the way, and the reflected light that comes down is truly strange.

When we got back to camp we immediately headed down the road to watch the sunset, or rather the view as the sun set behind us, shining onto the Bungles range in front of us. As the sun set and the red hues changed every few minutes, the full moon came up over the range, probably the most amazing sight of the lot. As I sat on the roof of the large Oka truck we’d been travelling in, beer in hand, I really thought I’d found heaven. The full moon was also the first blue moon I’ve knowingly seen, which just added to the magic (a blue moon being the second full moon in the same month, something that only happens up every two or three years). We rounded off the evening with a bloody good barbecue, and more yarns and idle chat round the fire.

The following morning those who wanted could go on a A$120 helicopter flight over the range, something I couldn’t afford – though I vowed to come back one day and fly over the Bungles before walking through Picaninny Gorge – and we spent the rest of the day driving back to Kununurra. I slept incredibly well that night; it was an excellent tour.

Australia: Northern Territory

Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge)

Written: 3 August 1996

Thursday was just another driving day, despite it being my birthday. Actually, it was the shortest birthday I’ve ever had, as I crossed the border from Western Australia to the Northern Territory, losing an hour-and-a-half in the process. I drove from Kununurra to Katherine through the most amazing scenery, and to break the journey I stopped for a couple of walks in the Gregory National Park, home to the Stokes Range and the Escarpment, the latter walk ending in a beautiful view over the Victoria River valley.

I turned up at Katherine in mid-afternoon, and after swimming in the hot springs – a little river that is really quite warm, and very refreshing after a long, dusty drive – and filling up with dried food at Woolworths, I headed north to Nitmiluk National Park.

The following day was quite a contrast; instead of spending all day behind the wheel, I spent it in the bush. Katherine Gorge is the main attraction of Nitmiluk National Park, and I set off at 8.10am to explore the area, initially heading for Smitt’s Rock, some 11.3km along the gorge. The gorge itself is always flowing, so you can’t walk down it (though you can take boat tours and hire canoes, a rather attractive idea in retrospect); there is, however, a long trail that goes parallel to the river, from which you can duck off down creek beds to the gorge proper.

The ranger suggested that a good day’s walk would be out to Smitt’s Rock and back, 22.6km in length, but I made such good time to the Rock – where I had the first of many welcome swims, a wise move in the mid-30°C heat – that I decided to visit the other walks on the way back. Undeterred by mountain tracks and searing heat I ended up visiting Smitt’s Rock (a huge fork in the river, complete with soaring heights and deep, dark water), the Lily Ponds (not a bad spot, but a little dry at this time of the year), Butterfly Gorge (a lovely, shady inlet where black and white butterflies flit around in the trees), the Windolf Walk (a very open part of the gorge, with spectacular views up and down the Katherine River) and the Southern Rockhole (a beautiful, tiny beach, just right for a final dip).

It was a lovely walk and I made it back by the allotted time, but I paid for it in the end. The total walk came to a whopping 35.7km (a shade over 22 miles), and my feet were totally shredded. I line my boots with Odor Eaters, to cushion my feet and keep the smell manageable, and I’d forgotten to get a new pair after wearing out the current ones on the Chichester walk; the result was a collection of big blisters where the holes in the Odor Eaters were. It served me right, but I had to soak them that night and take it easy over the next few days... feet aren’t like tyres, where you just bung on a spare. At least my leg muscles recovered quickly, so I could walk, at least.

That night I gorged on a burger ‘with the lot’ – that’s burger, cheese, bacon, egg, lettuce, grated carrot, pickles, beetroot, pineapple and anything else that will fit in the bun, plus chips... it’s easy to see why it’s an Aussie favourite. I also drank tons of high-energy fizzy drinks and cups of tea; I’d already drunk about six litres of water on the walk, but I was still thirsty, and I didn’t need to take a leak for the entire day. But, boy, did I sweat! This tropical heat is no joke; I’ve been putting up my tent without the flysheet, effectively using it as a glorified mosquito net, and it’s still boiling at night. I’d sleep in the open if it weren’t for the fact that the mozzies can carry the Ross River Virus, a nasty piece of work that can make you quite ill. I daren’t think what this place is like in the middle of summer...

Kakadu

Written: 8 August 1996

After wearing myself out in Nitmiluk, I drove northeast to Kakadu National Park, without a doubt the most famous National Park in Australia. It’s certainly one of the most popular, and people either love it or loathe it. I’ve heard some people call it Kaka-don’t, but it’s not the sort of attraction you miss out just because someone else didn’t like it. At A$15 the entry fee is three times the fee at any of the Western Australian parks, but you do get your money’s worth; you can stay for 14 days, and bush camping is free (though there are sites with amenities for a paltry A$5 per night). When I paid, I mentioned to the ranger that I was interested in walking, and he handed me a huge bundle of leaflets, detailing the marked tracks available, and apart from three sites, they were all accessible by two-wheel-drive. (The most notable 4WD sites are Jim Jim Falls and Twin Falls, to which day tours cost A$120; maybe next time.)

Some criticisms levelled at Kakadu are well founded. First, even in winter, it’s very hot and humid, to the point of being really uncomfortable. Second, because all the creeks and rivers are croc-infested, you can’t swim anywhere except the odd rock pool and the commercial swimming pools at the various resorts; camping next to a cool, flowing creek that you really want to jump into is a bit of a nightmare when all you can do is look at it. Third, because it’s so humid and you’re so sweaty, the flies and mozzies are not just a nuisance, they’re a serious inconvenience. Even after the flies of northern WA, Kakadu is really annoying; the Aussie salute (waving your hand in front of your face to brush away flies) is in serious evidence here. And finally, there aren’t many dirt roads, but when there are, they are terrible and of a much lower standard than you would expect from such a popular tourist spot (though, of course, this does help prevent huge numbers of vehicles travelling down them, which is possibly the point).

But hidden away in Kakadu are some truly world-class sights, so taken as a whole, it’s worth a visit. You just have to know what to look for...

Southern Kakadu

I spent my first day in Kakadu at Gunlom (also known as Waterfall Creek), a beautiful crocodile-free rock pool full of fish and cold, clear water; it was the perfect antidote to the long drive over the endless corrugation, so I set up camp there and planned my visit. The park looked so good from all the literature I’d been given and I was really enthusiastic, particularly after reading the glowing entries in my Lonely Planet guide. Little was I to know that Gunlom would be one of the most beautiful spots on the entire trip.

The next morning I got up early and went for a scramble round the top of Gunlom, where there are some very pretty rock pools, and took a quick dip in the falls to wake me up. I then drove back towards the highway, stopping to do a picturesque walk at Yurmikmik to Motor Car Falls, another croc-free swimming hole. After a relaxed lunch in the shade I walked back and drove to a bush camp next to Kambolgie Creek. As I sat there, boiling my billy on the fire after supper, and chatting to a couple of lads who had driven a 4WD all around Australia (who I’d meet at every campsite during my stay in the park), I reckoned Kakadu must be one of the finest spots in Oz. But the next day I headed north...

And as you head north, the real Kakadu begins to rear its ugly head. As I drove up the sealed Kakadu Highway – missing a lookout that was on the map but didn’t seem to exist in real life, however hard I looked – I noticed that most of the cars I was passing were very expensive, very clean, very new, very fast and very rude (not one of them returned my waves). I stopped off to do a couple of walks on the way – the dismal Gun-gardun walk and the pretty, but short Mardugal Billabong walk, where I took advantage of the campsite’s showers, something you have to do to keep sane in the humidity – and eventually got to Cooinda, home to Yellow Water Creek. Talk about beauty and the beast.

Yellow Water is wetland, which means it’s flooded for a lot of the year. Wetland is under serious threat from man, and Kakadu has some of the most important tropical wetlands in the world, a haven for migrating birds and water-happy plants. The walk round Yellow Water is beautifully tranquil, and I was so impressed I drove the three kilometres to Cooinda to buy a ticket for the Yellow Water boat cruise.

Slick Tourism

Cooinda is one of the hotel complexes in Kakadu, and I was culture-shocked; blubbery, whingeing tourists oozed out of their air-conditioned coaches to book into soulless units and ensure that their seats on the whizz-through tours of Kakadu’s highlights had been reserved, while cheery girls with American accents greeted potential tour-victims with cheesy smiles and ingratiating sales talk. I nearly upped and ran away, but I spotted a boat tour for 6.45am the next day and paid up; my theory was that the sort of tourists I wanted to avoid wouldn’t be up for a tour that early. After a quick lunch on the lawn – during which a huge black crow swooped down on the half-eaten sandwich in my hand, snatched it clean out of my fingers and flew up into a tree to eat it, the little swine – I got out as fast as I could.

But obviously not fast enough. I popped into the Warradjan Aboriginal Cultural Centre on the way, a fascinating museum to Aboriginal culture, Dreaming stories and how Kakadu is still an important part of their way of life, and discovered that sometimes there’s no escape from the masses. The lunchtime hordes were right on my tail, bursting through the whole thing at breakneck speeds. You could almost imagine them saying, ‘Right, that’s the Aborigines done, what’s on tomorrow? Driving through the whole of Europe and back home by six? Great!’

So I drove off to camp at Jim Jim Billabong, the nearest bush camp to Yellow Water. I drove back to see the sunset at Yellow Water, unfortunately coinciding with hundreds of video camera junkies and an astounding number of loud French and Germans, all with the same idea, and turned in to try to get some sleep in the closeness of Kakadu’s nights.

Up before the sun, I duly headed off for my A$25-worth of entertainment on Yellow Water, ‘the highlight of most people’s trip to Kakadu’ according to my increasingly inaccurate guidebook. Well, I suppose it was all right, but I like to leave a tour having found out something I hadn’t known, and I didn’t, except for the names of a few birds that I would have known if I were into ornithology (when it comes to birds, my favourites come with roast potatoes). True, if you are a devoted fan of eagles, jabirus, ducks, geese and all those other water-dwelling birds, Yellow Water is a dream come true (almost literally for the orgasmic feathered-friend freak I sat next to), but it’s not really my cuppa, so I was destined to be slightly mesmerized by the two-hour cruise. It was pleasant, but no highlight.

I spent the rest of the day doing a few more of the slightly disappointing walks of Kakadu. The Mirrai Lookout was interesting, though largely obscured by the smoke from the controlled burning being lit at this time of year (though the smoke does give the vista a unique charm, an air of mystery that’s rather pleasant). Only half of the Bubba Walk at Muirella Camp was open, and although it was pleasant, it was nothing I hadn’t seen at Yellow Water, and it was only meeting a very nice couple from Melbourne en route that raised it above the forgettable. I then headed out to Nourlangie Rock, home to my first batch of rock art; rock art isn’t, as I had previously thought, pop art with noisier guitars, it’s Aboriginal cave painting, and interesting though it is, it’s not the rather clumsy paintings that are fun, it’s the stories behind them. I’ve always enjoyed stories of the Dreaming, and Kakadu is chocka with ’em, from stories of Lightning Man to the Rainbow Serpent to how the crocodiles came about... lots of fun, but more entertaining from a book than a rock wall. I came, I saw, I Kodaked, and I preferred the explanations in the Aboriginal Cultural Centre.

Iligadjarr and Tea

The next walk was round the Anbangbang Billabong – more wetland, same story, but with a very pleasing backdrop of the awesome Nourlangie Rock – followed by a hop up Nawurlandja Lookout, a view that was again rather smoky, but good nonetheless. My next jaunt was to Gubara, a walk that started at the end of a god-awful 9km dirt boneshaker, and which ended up at some stagnant and rather smelly rock pools, rather than the luscious flowing river promised in the brochure. There was just enough flowing stream to have a quick dip, but only time will tell if I’ve caught something fatal in the process. It didn’t take much persuasion to head off to the Burdulba Camp to set up the tent and have a cuppa... or two, or three, or four...

Every cloud has a silver lining, and every day has its sunset, and for Tuesday’s I went on the Iligadjarr Wetlands walk, a fine example of what a wetland walk should be, helped by the guide leaflet I’d got from the ranger. The best part of the walk was the solitude, and the sounds and smells of the swampy sunset were divine, even if the mozzies had a field day. Iligadjarr and tea helped to revive my flagging interest in Kakadu, even if I did get gobbled up by a bunch of evil blood suckers; I have never encountered so many thirsty mozzies before. There are clouds of them, and they’re huge. It makes sitting outside at night impossible, as they seem able to ignore sprays, burning coils, the lot; they even managed to infiltrate my car one night, as I found out when trying to get away from the bites. Thank goodness I managed to kill all the ones that got into the tent, as I could hear their friends buzzing round outside all night...

Tuesday night ended on a slightly surreal note. Just as I was about to tuck in for the night, the ranger pulled up and went round every tent, handing out census forms. Yes, August 6th was census night in Oz, and everyone, including non-residents, had to fill out their details. So I’m in the Australian census statistics as an unemployed traveller who isn’t looking for work... who would have thought it? Me, an official bum. I thank you.

The Wonder of Ubir

The following day was the day of reckoning, Kakadu’s last chance to prove to me that it deserved its position as Australia’s Number One National Park. I suppose it tried its hardest, but by the end of the day all I could think of was driving to Darwin. I started the day early – before the sun rises is the only remotely cool time of day or night – and headed back to Nourlangie Rock to start the Barrk Sandstone Bush Walk, which I did at 8am (by which time the temperature had already reached 22°C, or 70°F). This bushwalk is the longest in the park at 12km, and it’s supposed to take 6-8 hours. By 11am I was back, having trudged through some interesting sandstone mountains with ornate erosion patters, and having visited the Naguluwur rock art site. It wasn’t the best walk I’ve ever done, but it wasn’t the worst; it was average, as much of Kakadu’s walks seem to be.

I then drove to the Bowali Visitor’s Centre, the administration centre for the park, and although it wasn’t a patch on the Aboriginal Cultural Centre, it was interesting enough. After a quick petrol stop at Jabiru – Kakadu’s only town and tourist haven, a nice spot for staying in luxurious hotels and swimming in the sun, but not really in keeping with my budget – I set off for Ubir.

Tucked away at the northern end of the park, right on the border with the Aboriginal territory of Arnhem Land, Ubir was the only site, apart from Gunlom, that I found really special. The rock art there is superb, and the view from the rock of the huge Arnhem Land escarpment is just amazing; it’s worth visiting Kakadu for this sight alone, to be honest. I went off to camp at Merl[1] thinking that although I was disappointed with Kakadu, I wouldn’t have missed Ubir for the world.

I rounded off the day with two more walks: the Mangarre walk, which was mostly closed, and therefore a bit of a waste of time; and the combined Bardedjilidji/Rock Holes walk, which was long (6.5km), monotonous, very sandy (a walker’s nightmare) and not worth the effort, despite the pleasant East Alligator River flowing along half the walk. You know a walk isn’t going well when, halfway round, you just want to be back at camp with the kettle on. It wasn’t long before I was doing just that, but only after I’d decided not to bother with the two short walks remaining for me to do on the way to Darwin – more wetlands and more rainforest I could live without. I left Kakadu the following morning – a day earlier than planned – smothered in bites, with a sackful of dirty, sweaty clothes, and – to be honest – relief that Darwin was so close.

So, that was Kakadu. I wasn’t so much disappointed as underwhelmed; after the most amazing sights and walks I’ve seen in Western Australia, Kakadu really wasn’t that special. It’s a cultural treasure, a haven for rare animals, and all that jazz, but there’s nothing that sticks in the mind like Nambung’s pinnacles, Kalbarri and Karijini’s gorges, Fitzgerald River and Cape Range’s beaches, Purnululu’s beehives, Wilpena Pound’s mountains, Tunnel Creek’s atmosphere... need I go on? The wetlands at Yellow Water are nice, and Gunlom and Ubir are delightful (which is probably why they filmed some of Crocodile Dundee at Gunlom), but they’re hidden among a lot of rather average walks and sights. I get the feeling that Kakadu is such a success because most people don’t know that there are better places out there. I’ve done Kakadu, and although it pains me to say so, I don’t think I’ll be coming back.

[1] A funny thing happened to me in Merl on my last night in Kakadu, as I torchlit my way through the night to make use of the A$5 ablutions. There I was, minding my own business, a sitting target for all the mozzies who’d discovered that the toilet was a perfect spot for target practice, when I spotted an odd shape sticking out of the top of the door. Closer inspection showed it to be a lizard that I’d accidentally trapped, so I opened the door, let him go and went back to the job in hand. The next thing I knew a huge beetle was wandering around my feet, trying to climb up to join me, so I finished off and headed off back into the night. The lizard and beetle weren’t a drama, but as I walked back, this huge bird – well, I couldn’t see it, but it sounded huge – swooped down from the trees, right past my head, squawking as it went. Now that did scare the shit out of me... good job I’d just done what I’d done, if you catch my drift.

Darwin

Written: 12 August 1996

Darwin’s a strange place. Back on Christmas Day in 1974 the entire town was flattened by Cyclone Tracy, so everything’s brand new, there are very few old buildings (and by ‘old’ I mean any dating from the town’s inception in 1869), and it’s a very cosmopolitan city, if you can call a place with only 70,000 inhabitants a city. I spent most of my four days in Darwin doing very little, enjoying the lack of mosquitoes after Kakadu, and doing things like picking up my post, finally tracking down the right part to fix my petrol lamp (hurrah!), and getting a haircut. The haircut was rather savage, and definitely the shortest hair I’ve ever had; I had it shaved all over to a no.4, which makes my ears stick out, but it’s wonderfully cool in this tropical heat, dries straight away without a towel, doesn’t need brushing, and doesn’t attract flies as much as long, greasy hair... if I didn’t look like such a squaddie, I’d probably stick to it all the time, but I don’t think the hippy in me could handle it.

On my first night in Darwin I met my neighbours in the Shady Glen Caravan Park (and extremely shady it was too, full of dossers and crusties... I should have known something would go wrong, but then it was the cheapest in town). On one side were Kevin and Louise from Cork, and on the other Adrienne (also from Cork) and Darren (from St Albans). They’d all been travelling round together for a while, having done the east coast/through the middle trip, and they were waiting to fly to Thailand before heading back home. I butted in on their conversation – something you get rather good at when you’re a lonely solo traveller – and we whiled away the night, swapping travel stories, with me sitting there entranced by their beautiful Irish accents. The company was just what I needed after quite a few weeks alone, and the wine they happened to be drinking helped cement our temporary connection.

Into Darwin

The next day I visited the city’s botanic gardens; Darwin city centre is tiny, and you can park right in the middle for free, something these small cities all seem to have in common. Darwin’s gardens are naturally very tropical in nature, and are packed with palm trees, shady walks and waterfalls, and there’s a beautiful grass amphitheatre where concerts are often held; the gardens would have been really attractive if I hadn’t caught them halfway through a renovation, but when they’re finished, they’ll be lovely. Of the botanic gardens I’ve seen so far, Perth still comes out tops with the magnificent Kings Park, followed by Adelaide’s huge and delightful parks; then I’d say it’s a close thing between Darwin and Melbourne, though they’re hard to compare, as Melbourne has a large expanse of picnic-friendly grass with the Yarra wending its way through, and Darwin is small and tropical; Sydney definitely comes last, as its gardens are just like a normal, city park with a vaguely botanical theme. I wonder what the ones in Brisbane are like: pretty, I would assume, but I’ll have to go to find out for myself one day.

That night my neighbours and I decided to get drunk. Sometimes it just has to be done, and who needs an excuse? We got in two slabs of VB stubbies (48 bottles in total), a four-litre cask of wine (the Aussie name for a wine box), and two bags of ice, the whole lot coming to a paltry A$16 each... and we got hideously slaughtered, sitting round my newly resurrected petrol lamp, talking nonsense for hours. It was quite wonderful, but it did mean Saturday proved to be a bit of a struggle.

I had decided to have a lazy day anyway and to write some letters, but that morning someone decided to nick my sleeping bag and towel from the washing line, so I spent most of the day trying to get a crime report from the police. To be honest I wasn’t too bothered about the theft, as it was too hot in Darwin to use a sleeping bag anyway, and the bag had been getting to the end of its useful life and kept leaking feathers everywhere; besides, I need a thicker one for more temperate New Zealand, so I was going to have to get a replacement anyway. Still, it’s never nice to have stuff stolen, and it made me quite paranoid to leave anything around, not a pleasant state of affairs. We commiserated my loss by drinking the cask of wine that we’d been too drunk to tackle the night before.

Sunday turned out to be the perfect antidote to missing towels and sleeping bags, as it was host to the annual Beer Can Regatta. The general idea is that there’s a carnival on Mindil Beach, just out of the centre of Darwin, where competitors bring their boats, entirely made out of empty beer cans, and race them in the sea (they have to row them; these aren’t little models, but full-sized boats). The sea was incredibly warm, the boats were impressive, and there were all sorts of odd competitions, from tugs-of-war to Ladies’ Thong[1] Throwing (or ‘tong trowing’ as my Irish friends liltingly called it). Junk food, cans of Coke, and another slab that night – because it was my last night, a tenuous but totally valid excuse – rounded off a pretty pleasant day. I vaguely recall talking to a Frenchman called Pierre, who joined us for our slab, but I can’t remember much except he was a juggler and wanted to travel Europe, juggling and unicycling to earn his keep. You meet all sorts, when you’ve had a few. I think...

[1] ‘Thongs’ being the Australian name for flip-flops, or sandals, in case you were getting all excited at the thought of ladies ripping off their thongs on the beach...

Litchfield

Written: 14 August 1996

After drinking Darwin dry, I struck west for Litchfield National Park, some 150km from the state capital. A lot of people rate Litchfield more highly than Kakadu, and I wasn’t disappointed; what a lovely place. It’s lusciously green, the rivers and waterfalls are fast-flowing and you can swim in them, the mozzies aren’t that bad, and, as with Kakadu, the main roads are all bitumen (there are dirt tracks, but they’re all 4WD-only).

My first stop was at the Magnetic Anthills that the area is famous for. These odd-looking things are termite mounds, but they’re shaped like really thin, flat fins – unlike most mounds, which are like towers – and they’re all aligned in exactly the same way along the north-south axis, making the area look like a cosmic graveyard. The theory is that termites like a constant temperature, and most dig down into the ground to attain it, but magnetic termites build on floodplains, so they can’t dig too deep or they’ll drown, so they have to have a constant temperature in the mound itself. As the faces of the ‘gravestone’ face east and west, it catches the early morning and late evening sun full on, but only a little of the burning midday sun, which helps to keep the temperature inside reasonably constant and bearable; the effect of hundreds of these mounds, all facing the same way, is completely bizarre.

After my introduction to the world of magnetic insects, I headed straight for Wangi Falls (pronounced ‘Wong-eye’) and pitched my tent, followed by a dip in the beautifully cold pool at the foot of the twin falls. The waterfalls in the Northern Territory – including those in Kakadu, to be fair – are spectacular, and generally the swimming is superb; Litchfield has a great collection of them, which is probably why so many people prefer the place to Kakadu.

Again that night I interrupted a conversation, and met Ted and Gill from the north of England, who had driven their van on the same route as me, but had started in Sydney and had seen the east coast, sacrificing Tasmania to do so. They were giving a lift to Ralph, a quiet but very well spoken German, and Lisa, a lively girl from Rickmansworth who had spent most of her life in Tenerife as a hairdresser, and most of her year in Australia on the beach on the east coast. We all got on famously, and spent the next day exploring the sights of Litchfield.

Our first stop was Florence Falls, the most beautiful falls you could possibly hope for. We dived, we swam, we marvelled at the huge water monitor lizard that swam in the pool and climbed the rocks around us, and we jumped off crazy rock walls into deep, cool water. Unfortunately we also scratched our heads at how my daypack had mysteriously become waterlogged while we were swimming, totally ruining my camera in the process; presumably someone knocked it in, noticed and fished it out again, as there were a lot of people clambering around taking photos, and we were swimming for a fair old time. Losing my camera and the photos on the ruined film distressed me no end, but Ted and Gill said they’d send me copies of their pictures from Litchfield (which they very kindly did), and there was no point in getting annoyed at something that couldn’t be undone, so I put it out of my mind and we set off for Buley Rockhole.

Buley Rockhole is another delight; it’s a series of really deep rock pools, connected by little waterfalls, and the water is clear, cold and just what you need in the tropical jungle that makes up a lot of Litchfield. We spent ages lounging around, diving and jumping, and boy, did I sleep well that night.

The next morning I was up early to head off out of the park, back towards Katherine. I decided to take the tourist route, which runs parallel to the main highway but passes through some lovely countryside, and on the way I stopped off at Robin Falls – a pretty little spot with a dribbling waterfall, miles from anywhere – and Douglas Hot Springs, a little river that’s heated by thermal activity. The springs are really relaxing; the hot spring mixes with a cold one, and you have to bathe at the mix, as the hot one is a bit too hot on its own. I bumped into Ted, Gill and their passengers again here, and we arranged to meet in Katherine at one of the caravan parks, seeing as we were enjoying each other’s company so much.

Elsey

Written: 17 August 1996

After a night in Katherine, I waved goodbye to Ted and Gill and hit the road south, but I didn’t get very far; just over 100km south of Katherine I turned off the highway to Elsey National Park, home to the Mataranka Homestead and some thermal springs, and I instantly fell in love with the place.

Elsey is the setting for the famous Australian novel We of the Never Never – well, when I say famous, it is in terms of Australian literature – and it’s now a pretty little National Park, covering a stretch of the Roper River. I visited the rather touristy Mataranka thermal pool – at only 7km off the relatively busy Stuart Highway it’s going to attract a fair number of people – and headed out further into the National Park to a campsite right on the Roper River, where the swimming was divine, the environment very pretty, and the number of tourists much smaller than at Mataranka. The remoteness and quiet atmosphere were so calming that I stayed for two days, visiting Mataranka Falls (a short 4km walk from camp), and finishing off the stack of letters I’d been meaning to write.

The local wildlife was intriguing: the strange birds sitting in a tree under which I was drinking tea, biting off the flowers and letting them fall in a blizzard of petals on my head; the endearing kookaburra, a large type of kingfisher that eats meat and breaks up its meal by smashing its beak against the nearest hard surface (its loud cry is one of the most notorious – and weird – in Australia’s extensive soundtrack); the bower bird, whose males build a beautiful ‘bower’ of sticks, shells and anything bright and shiny they can find, in order to attract females; buzzing bugs that simply wouldn’t take no for an answer; big fish, lurking in the reeds on the river bank... it’s amazing how many strange animals you get used to in the bush, from bandicoots to kangaroos to wombats to koalas. Wildlife in England all seems a bit normal after the platypus and the possum.

It’s also interesting how you keep meeting the same people in the Northern Territory, like the guys in Kakadu and the group from Litchfield. As I was sitting in Elsey, reading an excellent book about the life of Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong of China, this girl walked past who recognised me from Katherine Gorge some two weeks before, even though I now had no hair and was 26 rather than 25. It’s a very small road in a very big country, up here in the Top End.

Travelling Possessions

Written: 18 August 1996

One thing I’d hoped to lose by travelling on a tight budget was my possessiveness – from the man with a mobile phone to the man in a mobile home, that sort of thing – but I didn’t really want to end up losing my possessions themselves. Within the space of four days both my sleeping bag and my camera – the two most expensive things I own, after my little computer – were no more, one to theft and one to a swimming hole in Litchfield National Park. What a pain.

Losing the actual items wasn’t the problem, though I was particularly sad about my camera, as that was a present, and it didn’t so much disappear as die right there in my hands... sob! The problem was thinking afterwards, ‘If only I’d made sure my bag was safer,’ or ‘If only I’d taken it off the line when I last checked it: it was dry, after all.’ In the normal course of things you’d just shrug your shoulders, kick the nearest small furry animal and get on with it, but when you’re a long way from home and on your own, losing possessions is a bugger.

On the other hand, I met a girl in Litchfield whose entire backpack had been stolen from a hostel on the same weekend, which makes my little losses, both of them speedily replaced, seem trivial. My new sleeping bag cost less than half the price of my previous one, doesn’t leak feathers everywhere, is warmer, comes in a much better bag and weighs less; I’ve bought three disposable cameras to see me through to Melbourne, where I can easily get a new camera; and the very friendly people I met in Litchfield are going to send me copies of their photos of us all in Litchfield and Douglas Hot Springs, so I won’t miss out on the photos I’d already taken when the camera went swimming.

Money, Money, Money

Anyway, I’m over the distress and I’m setting my sights on Melbourne, where I can sell all my stuff and go back to the glorious situation of being able to pack everything I own into one little bag; this appeals to my sense of tidiness, and if you own very little, there’s very little to be stolen or dropped into the river. Having thought about it, though, I’ll probably end up getting another car in New Zealand and it’ll start all over again; my original idea of cycling round New Zealand was fine as an idea, but you end up spending most of your time cycling from A to B, rather than doing the wonderful bushwalk at A, marvelling at the views at B and visiting the sight-of-a-lifetime at C en route. I want be able to really explore New Zealand, and for this the only real option is to go by car, but this time I’ll try to get a station wagon, so I can kip in the back and camp absolutely anywhere, rather than in pricey caravan parks. I quite fancy going feral[1], as they say round these parts.

My problem is money – not the lack of money, but the way in which I spend it. I’m trying to do things within sensible budgets – not too little that I spend my time doing nothing and eating instant noodles all the time, but not too much that I spend everything too quickly – but I’ve spent quite a bit in Australia. New Zealand is not a problem, and I can afford six months there from the earnings I’ve made as a writer in Oz, but it might drain the resources for any onwards travel. The problem is one of attitude; I have a credit card that I can start filling up if I need to, but if I let myself spend away, as I did in Sydney and Melbourne, I’ll soon end up broke and not necessarily better off in terms of travel experiences. It’s hard to define; on one hand I’m trying to be a shoestring traveller, not spending much on beer, eating well but cheaply, avoiding tours, public transport and expensive caravan parks in favour of cheap campsites and beautiful National Parks, but on the other hand I have money coming in from articles that could support me for a while, living like a king. I guess Jarvis Cocker hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

Still you’ll never get it right

’Cos when you’re sitting there at night

Watching roaches climb the wall

If you called your dad he could stop it all

This doesn’t sound like a problem as such, but there is a bad side: I’m becoming obsessed with the financial planning of this trip. I’ve always been interested in money matters, but here I’m constantly controlling my expenditure and planning the rest of the trip, almost to the point of distraction. I regularly tweak my budgets, which I keep in a spreadsheet, and it’s almost too much; I’m always drawing up new travel plans to fit changing budgets, when I could simply slap it on a credit card and just go and do what I wanted to do in the first place. I suppose I’m having to draw the line between doing everything I want to do and doing everything I can afford to, while knowing in the back of my mind that if I wanted to get into debt, I could afford to do almost everything, it’s just a matter of how long I want to spend travelling. I think what I need is a mate who says to me occasionally, ‘Sod it, let’s go out, have a ball, spend loads, and just forget about money for a while: she’ll be right[2].’ I guess that’s where my friends in Melbourne come in...

In fact, the only thing that worries me about getting to Melbourne is that it signals the end of my trip round Australia; sure, there’ll be plenty going on in the city, and there’ll be plenty of trips from the city to do, but it’s going to be the end of this type of travelling for a while. That little tent will have been my home for six months by the time I get back to the city, and then I’ll be selling it; it’ll definitely be the end of an era.

[1] What the English call ‘gypsies’ or ‘new age travellers’, the Aussies call ‘ferals’.

[2] ‘She’ll be right’ is another timeless Aussie saying, meaning that everything will be fine. Quite who she is, and why she’ll be right, is not something that is particularly relevant. A similar saying is ‘She’s apples’, which makes even less sense, but every language has its strange idioms, I guess. After all, Bob’s your uncle...

Daly Waters

Written: 20 August 1996

After a couple of days relaxing in the bush, I set off from Elsey to take a big chunk out of the journey south. The road stretches for an awfully long way with very little to see on the way – Darwin to Adelaide by road is 3019km, or about 30 hours of driving – and the only way to get it done is to devote entire days to driving. So to break up the first day back on the highway, I made two little stops, one at Daly Waters, and one at Tennant Creek.

Daly Waters is a little like Whim Creek in that it is basically a pub and precious little else, but the pub at Daly Waters is really special. I stopped off there on a recommendation from a couple whom I’d met on the Bungles tour, and ended up sitting in the beer garden, nursing a Coke. For some reason this pub really reminded me of pubs back in England, probably the first Aussie pub to do so; but what was it that made me think of pints and pies? It wasn’t the beer – that was standard Aussie fare. It wasn’t the weather, or the thatched sunshade covering the beer garden, of a type you so often see in the tropics. It certainly wasn’t the tour group who were on a long bus tour to the north, and who were obviously still in the early stages of their journey. Then it struck me: it was all the memorabilia stuck all over the walls, from bank notes to number plates to junk from the old homestead. Just like in English pubs, this place was a rag-and-bone repository, and it really worked. How odd to find such an unintentionally English oasis in the middle of nowhere, as far from civilisation as Australian beer is from real ale.

My other stop was Tennant Creek, a totally forgettable town on the way to somewhere else. The only reason I remember it is that my Visa card bounced when I filled up with Super (what the Aussies call leaded petrol). That wasn’t the odd thing – I’d been putting quite a bit on it recently – but what was odd was what the girl in the shop said when her machine rejected the card. ‘Is it stolen?’ she asked conversationally. I just smiled and asked if she would accept MasterCard; sometimes intuition tells you that intelligent conversation will be a struggle if you try to pursue it...

I had decided to try to save expensive caravan park fees by avoiding spending the night in towns, so I kept driving south until I got to the Devil’s Marbles, where the camping was a very acceptable A$1 per night. The marbles themselves are quite an interesting sight – huge red boulders, piled together in the most unlikely formations – but as I was setting up the tent, the weather turned very, very nasty, and the rain decided to come out to play. Although still in the tropics, it was really cold when the wind struck up, so after a quick instant noodle feast in the paltry shelter, where I met a South African who had been in Asia for a year and who had done the whole trip overland – and off whom I got some good advice – I turned in, glad of my new sleeping bag.

The next day I drove all the way to The Alice, as Alice Springs is affectionately known. The drive was pretty uneventful, though as with most desert drives, there was quite a bit of variety on offer as the kilometres drifted by. For example, as you head south, the termite mounds go from massive (twice the height of a man in places) to tiny, stubby affairs, but their numbers increase. They also change colour, going from grey to green to red to cream, and from cathedral shapes to thin spikes to round mounds. Considering termites only eat spinifex – and, in fact, they’re the biggest eaters of spinifex in the desert, believe it or not – they manage pretty well for such an inhospitable environment. The only drawback is that they come out at night, so if you happen to be sitting there with a pretty little petrol lamp, they just can’t help visiting you in droves...

I’m now in Alice Springs and out of the tropics, though I seem to have picked up a bit of a stomach bug somewhere along the line – it’s probably all the swimming in rivers in Elsey. Let’s just hope it passes, because I’m now in the Red Centre, and people really rave about this part of Australia.

Alice Springs

Written: 20 August 1996

Oh take me back up north, where you can wear shorts and thongs and the T-shirt is optional. The Red Centre is freezing – or, at least, it’s freezing when it’s not bloody hot. It’s funny how you dream of cold mornings when you’re stuck in the muggy sweat shop they call Darwin, but it’s a different matter when you wake up and, no, you can’t feel your feet, your fingers just can’t get the hang of fumbling the radio on, and your breath is frosting in the early morning air (it gets to 2°C at night at this time of year). This morning I kept dreaming of thick walls, cosy fireplaces and warm mugs of ale, but instead I got something even more delightful: the first cold milk on my Coco Pops since Perth. What a way to start the day!

Despite the temperature, Alice Springs is a delight. Considering how remote it is – there’s a rather tacky signpost in the centre of town showing just how remote it is from various famous cities of the world, but no, I didn’t waste a photo on it – it’s remarkably modern and enjoyable. True, the historic buildings in the town aren’t terribly historic, but that’s more than made up for by the fascinating Old Telegraph Station, some 2km north of town, to which there’s a scenic walk up the Todd River. This is interesting if only because it shows how utterly dry the area is; the Todd River doesn’t flow that much, and when it does it doesn’t flow for long, and when I walked along it, there wasn’t a drop to be seen. There’s an annual event in Alice Springs called Henley-on-Todd, and – you guessed it – it’s a rowing contest. The difference? The boats don’t have bottoms so the crews’ legs stick out the bottom, and they run along the river-bed; how ironic, then, that the river flooded in 1974, and the regatta had to be abandoned because there was too much water...

The Old Telegraph Station is great – it’s a wonderful balance of historic buildings, an interesting museum and a selection of walking tracks, all brought to life by the superb guide booklet that you get for your A$2.50 entry fee. This describes the story of the overland telegraph line, built in the 1870s from Adelaide to Darwin to connect the colony to London, and it fills out the buildings with considerable historic atmosphere. Overall Alice Springs does its tourism bits rather well, as ANZAC Hill, a lookout over the town, also had some excellent plaques explaining the view; they almost kept my mind off the freezing winds whistling through the three layers I had on.

If you don’t believe how cold it gets in The Alice, how about this. I’ve got two mugs that have made it all the way round Australia with me, holding more cups of tea than most mugs would hold in a lifetime. When I brewed up one teatime after a day’s sightseeing, the boiling water cracked one mug from top to bottom. Go on, tell me it wasn’t because of the cold...

MacDonnell Ranges (Western)

Written: 22 August 1996

The following morning I got up, thawed out under a hot shower, and set off for the Western Macdonnell Ranges National Park. Alice Springs is situated in the middle of a range of mountains – the Macdonnell Ranges – that extend to the east and west, and along this range are various gorges and waterholes that make for a pleasant day’s drive, especially as the tourist-conscious Territory government has sealed the roads to both sides of the range.

Heading west I visited Simpson’s Gap, a pretty schism in the rolling red ranges with a pool of extremely cold water in the bottom (far too cold to swim in); Ellery Creek Bighole, a permanent rock pool with a lovely climb onto the surrounding mountains for a great view of the surrounding area; the Ochre Pits, an Aboriginal source of ochre, used for painting, healing and all sorts of other stuff; Inarlanga Pass, a brisk walk from the Ochre Pits, and thankfully well away from the tourists; and Ormiston Gorge, my final stop and home to a picturesque camping ground.

Ormiston Gorge is a not just a gorge, it’s a pound too – a circle of mountains, like at Wilpena – and I’d fancied a good walk the next day; however, Wednesday didn’t quite turn out as planned. The stomach bug I’d had since the Devil’s Marbles, which I thought had subsided, flared up again on Tuesday night, and I had to spend Wednesday sitting in the shade, eating nothing but a little toast and Vegemite and drinking loads of water. To be honest, it’s not so bad being ill in the middle of a stunning mountain range, it’s just that I kept wanting to jump up and do the four-hour walk round the pound, but every time I stood up, the ground shook and the sky swam.

It would just have to wait: I was in no state to go walking, let alone continue the exploration along the road, which turned to gravel after Ormiston. I read a lot on Wednesday, mainly these terrible books that I’d exchanged for some of my terrible books with Ted and Gill. Still, when you’re feeling crook and there’s nothing else to do, you’ll read anything, even what the blurb on the back cover so amusingly calls ‘humour’. I didn’t even have the energy to be annoyed at the lousy writing: I must have been ill. On Thursday I felt much better, despite the annoying German to my left, who whistled to himself all night and pottered around in a makeshift world of his own, just like Peter Ustinov in Logan’s Run, and the loud-voiced French family to my right, who had managed to ensnare a couple of Aussies into a couple of glasses of wine and very, very small talk. I walked round the pound, a beautiful wander through Ormiston Gorge into a huge circle of mountains, and set off east, back to the Alice.

On the way I visited Glen Helen Gorge, with its surprisingly large amount of water, and Standley Chasm, which cost A$3 to visit, but which was worth it, with its very thin, towering crack in the rocks. I kept exploring past the chasm itself, despite the lack of a track and signs to keep off the rocks, and was rewarded by the most stunning ruggedness I’d yet seen in the Macdonnells; I think they stop you climbing the rocks because Elmer and Flo from Arkansas would probably slip and scuff an ankle, thus ensuring enough court action to close down the Parks and Wildlife Commission, but if you fly in the face of the bureaucracy, the views are well worth it.

MacDonnell Ranges (Eastern)

Written: 24 August 1996

Tourists just love the Western Macdonnells, with their hire cars and impractical white clothes. After all, you can drive there on bitumen, it’s easy to squash into a day trip, and if you’ve never seen the outback before, it’s pretty impressive stuff. But they don’t seem to have discovered the Eastern Macdonnells, which stretch to the east of Alice Springs. Again, the road is sealed, although it’s mainly single lane (so you have to pull over onto dirt if anyone comes the other way), and as I checked out the few gorges and hillocks on the way east, there were almost no people to be seen, which was rather pleasant after the busier western ranges.

At the end of the road I pulled into Trephina Gorge campsite and found a full house of Australians; this came as quite a relief after experiencing mainly European tourists in the west. I paid for two nights, and settled in to read about the area.

It didn’t take me long to realise what a real gem Trephina is. I remembered one guy I’d met en route who’d told me to visit the Western Macdonnells but not to bother with the east side, and he was totally and utterly wrong. The Eastern Macdonnell Range is everything the west range isn’t: peaceful, tourist-free, primitive (in terms of camping) and isolated (it’s a dirt road from the single-track bitumen into the park)... in short, I loved it.

And what a wonderful collection of people I met during a campfire talk that the ranger held at the campsite, where he made us billy tea, and chatted about being a ranger, the role of the Parks and Wildlife Commission, and a whole variety of stuff from local wildlife to the night sky. How atmospheric it was, with only about 20 of us in the entire National Park.

Exploring by Foot

By Friday I was feeling 100 per cent again, a great relief after the awful exhaustion and total lack of energy I’d been feeling; when I woke up I felt fantastic, much better than I had in Ormiston, so I decided to do some real walking. The walking tracks at Trephina are some of the best laid out I’ve seen, with markers everywhere and some stunning scenery, and I couldn’t wait to get started.

My first walk was the 10km Ridgetop Walk, which took me from the gorge over a ridge of mountains where the views alone made all the effort worthwhile. One bluff overlooked a pound that had lots of little hills inside it; as I climbed the hills in the early morning sun they were lit up from behind, and looked quite bizarre. The view reminded me of those depth-contour pictures you see on album covers and computer screens, where lines are drawn from left to right, wiggling with the lie of some virtual terrain (Joy Division’s wonderful Unknown Pleasures is the best example). I hadn’t expected to find 1980s album art in the middle of the desert, but if there’s one thing I’m learning, it’s that deserts are full of surprises.

The walk continued to John Hayes Rock Hole, which was home to a chain of ponds. This string of rock pools in an ever-deepening gorge was surprising, not just because of the beauty of it all, but also because of the large amount of water; when I visited there was even a waterfall flowing (well, trickling) between two of the larger pools, which I wasn’t expecting from an area where the average annual rainfall is just ten inches.

The only problem with the walk is that at the end of a wonderful 10km across the wilderness, you have to walk 8km back to camp along a road, but as luck would have it Dave the ranger came along and kindly offered me a lift, so I was back at camp by lunch, much to the surprise of those having a lazy day in the sun who had seen me set off first thing. I spent the afternoon doing two walks in the gorge itself, meeting various people on the way, including one very friendly retired couple who were full of conversation about their travels and experiences of emigrating from England 32 years ago.

As if that weren’t enough, when I got back to camp, everyone in our little area got together for a cuppa, and we continued the conversation round a campfire, into the starry night. There were Bruce and Lorna, kings of acerbic Aussie wit; Diane and her young daughter Ashleigh, who together had travelled to more places than most of us can place on the map (I picked up some good tips about travelling in Russia, Italy and Africa from them... maybe someday!); Annette, an elderly painter who spent every winter in Trephina, and knew lots of stories about the people and places around Alice Springs; and Geoff and Betty, who had been caravanning for years, and could remember when places like Ayers Rock and King’s Canyon were deserted. And there was me, the only non-Aussie, loving every minute of it...

The icing on the cake was my first ever bush shower. A bush shower is exactly what it sounds like: a shower in the bush. You can buy these black bags that you fill with water and leave in the sun, and by the end of the day the water’s amazingly hot; there’s a little tap and shower head on the bottom of the bag, so you can hang it off a tree and have a shower right there in the middle of nature. Diane and Ashleigh, bless ’em, had brought one with them, and had left enough water for me to try it out, as I’d never had one before. There’s only one catch: don’t drop the soap in the sand unless you want a truly exfoliating experience. I discovered that handy tip the hard way, though apart from that, the shower was a real luxury.

Ah, the bush... you’ve got to love it!

Watarrka (King’s Canyon)

Written: 26 August 1996

I was loath to leave Trephina Gorge, but I had to if I wanted to see any of the rest of the Red Centre, so I said goodbye to the crowd, who all assembled to wave me off, and bumped back to Alice Springs, where I shopped, checked over the car, filled it up, and struck south.

My first target was the Henbury Meteorite Craters, some 15km off the highway down the Ernest Giles Road, a dirt track that goes to King’s Canyon – my destination for the day – but which is a bit more strenuous than the bitumen route (which is some 160km longer, but is sealed all the way). The craters are now just dents in the desert, mainly due to erosion, but it’s quite a thought that something huge and fast shot down from space and rammed into the ground 40,000 years ago in this very spot. They’re pretty unique and most people don’t bother to visit them, as they’re down such a juddering road, but I thought they were well worth the detour.

The road was juddering, yes, but quite driveable, so I decided to go against my original plan to stick to the bitumen, and instead take the shortcut across the desert to Watarrka National Park, home to King’s Canyon. The road was a quintessential dirt road: it had corrugated parts, bull dust, bedrock outcrops, gravel stretches, mud holes where everyone drives round a flooded part of the road, creating corrugation on one side and dried ravines of mud on the other... it had the lot, and hardly any other cars to boot. After the hell of the Gibb River Road and the tyre-shredding roads of Karijini I felt quite at home for the 100km drive to the bitumen, and it was with a note of sadness that I realised this would be my last dirt road drive in Australia; the route from King’s Canyon to Melbourne is sealed all the way.

I didn’t camp in the National Park when I arrived, as the only place you can camp that is actually inside the park is an extortionate tourist hole. Instead I stayed at the much cheaper and utterly delightful King’s Creek, 35km from the canyon and a world away from the commercial tourism to the north. This is a bone of contention for many travellers and caravan users; there isn’t any cheap accommodation or real bush camping to be had in the park any more, which is not only a shame, it seems to go against the concept of a National Park. I’d been forewarned, though, so I was quite happy to stay away from the main attraction, and King’s Creek was very pretty, well within my budget, and reasonably quiet.

I did notice one thing that disturbed the silence when I parked the car, though: a fizzing noise from under the bonnet. On closer inspection I found that The Last Dirt Road had cruelly wounded my trusty travelling companion by shaking the battery loose and making it leak acid all over the bodywork, where it was having a great time feeding on the metalwork. Poor old Oz! I secured the battery and poured lots of water over the acidified areas, and then I noticed that one of the six battery cells was shattered and wouldn’t hold any liquid; never mind, I thought, my first Golf had one buggered cell in its battery, and it never had a problem. Besides, ignoring problems hadn’t done too much harm this far – if you discount the red light on Andy’s dashboard on the way north to Gunnedah – and five-sixths of a battery is better than no battery...

Exploring King’s Canyon

Sunday, far from being a day of rest, was my chance to explore King’s Canyon. I got up before the sun, showered, breakfasted, and hopped in the car, only to find that Oz had decided it was going definitely to be a day of rest for him: the engine wouldn’t even turn over. Mechanical failure never bothered me before, though, so I got a jump start from the two lads camped over the lawn from me, thinking that the 35km run to the canyon would charge up the battery, or at worst would prove it was totally dead. Whatever, I got there in one piece, and on time.

King’s Canyon is pretty spectacular. It’s a large gorge carved out by a river that only flows in the wet, with towering 200m walls and overhangs to make even the most hardened cliff-edge-peekers think twice. There are two walks – round the rim for 6km, or down the gorge and back for 1.3km – and both are well worth doing. The rim walk takes you through sandstone domes, like smaller Bungles formations, and into the Garden of Eden, a permanent waterhole that’s surrounded by plush and rare vegetation (though it’s far too cold to swim in at this time of year, unless your dip is very quick). You can see why the area is a tourist haven, with its easily accessible parks that are beautiful and so rugged.

I met two lovely couples on the walk and we chatted away for ages. One couple, Graham and Helen, were from the Gove Peninsula, right up on the northeast tip of Arnhem Land – now that’s what I call remote – and I joined another couple, Dennis and Marion from Adelaide, who were walking in the same direction as me all the way round the rim. That’s something about being a lone traveller: you pick up conversations very easily, whereas if you’re in a couple or group it’s not so easy. (People ask me if I’m lonely, being on my own; ‘I’m alone, but not lonely,’ I reply.) Interestingly, I tend to meet a lot of older people, whether retired or middle-aged; a lot of those who are still working take advantage of ‘long service leave’, which every Australian job provides by law. With this system you build up leave, year by year, until after ten years with a company you can take loads of time off as paid holiday. That’s cool, but with certain jobs you can even transfer long leave with you between jobs, so you’re guaranteed a holiday opportunity whatever you do. Actually, middle-aged is the wrong term, too; lots of people in their 30s take off on long trips too, without ruining their careers. How enlightened a society this is...

Repairs

After exploring the canyon, I decided to head out to the only other walk in the park, at Kathleen Springs. Oz, though, had other ideas: his battery was truly dead, so after a push start – thank you Dennis and Marion! – I trucked into King’s Canyon Resort and tracked down the service station. King’s Canyon Resort is the cause of most budget travellers’ complaints, but I was very glad it existed, with its stock of new car batteries. A$87 lighter – twice the price of a battery in Melbourne, but worth every cent – and after a bit of hacking around under the bonnet, Oz was back in business, but not after both the couples I’d met in the canyon had come over to check I was OK, and to admire the cheapest and best-travelled car in the whole resort. I’d just broken through the 20,000 kilometre mark on my trip, and it saddened me to see a battery that I’d bought new on my departure reduced to an acid-charred lump of plastic, but at least it’ll be a selling point: ‘New battery for sale, comes with free Toyota Corona.’ Actually, I shouldn’t say things like that... cars have feelings too, and it’s still a long way to Melbourne.

Repaired and refreshed, I headed off to Kathleen Springs for lunch. I couldn’t believe it; by this point in the weekend, bus after coach after car after truckload of tourists were pouring into the area, making me quite glad I had tackled the canyon early on a Sunday morning, but at Kathleen Springs there was just one other car in the car park. My lunch was totally undisturbed as the occupants of said car were out on the walk, and after a ham and cheese sandwich feast, I set off to explore it myself, passing the other drivers on the way, so I had the whole walkway to myself. And what a lovely walk it was; nice and short at just 1.3km into the little gorge, it passed through some interesting relics from pastoral days complete with explanatory signs, and at the end of the walk I found a peaceful, dark water hole, surrounded by thick vegetation and sheer, red walls. I sat there for quite a while, listening to the wind whistle through the treetops; it was easy to see why this water hole is extremely sacred to the local Aborigines.

I couldn’t understand how this little haven could be so quiet and unvisited when the next-door canyon was being systematically ground down by mass tourism. Perhaps it’s because the road to the springs is dirt, though at only 500m of very smooth gravel it hardly counts as dangerous. Perhaps I just caught it at lunchtime, and people prefer eating in the human melee of the famous King’s Canyon. Who knows, but I was sure glad to get away from the bustle for a while.

But despite the crowds and the increased prices, Watarrka National Park was well worth the effort, even if it was the straw that nearly broke the camel’s back and forced the camel rider to fork out for a new feeding bag. I’ve really enjoyed exploring the central outback so far, and I can’t wait to get stuck into the most famous place in the whole of the Red Centre: Uluru (or, as it’s known by the tourist hordes, Ayers Rock).

Uluru-Kata Tjuta (Ayers Rock)

Written: 29 August 1996

On Monday my itchy feet got me rolling to the Rock. Ayers Rock, or Uluru to give it its proper title, is part of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, so called because it contains Uluru and Kata Tjuta, the latter being more commonly called the Olgas. I’d approached this final blast on my journey with some trepidation, mainly because of what I’d heard from fellow travellers. Comments such as ‘It’s incredibly expensive’ and ‘It’s just a big rock’ didn’t paint the prettiest picture, and after Kakadu, I wasn’t going to let myself get all excited only to come away disappointed.

Fear not. Uluru-Kata Tjuta is a complete delight, and I really can’t understand people’s complaints. The only accommodation is outside the park at Yulara, about 20km from Uluru, and although I’ve met loads of people who’ve complained that it’s prohibitively expensive and aimed at rich tourists, I found A$9 per night at the beautifully manicured camp ground to be a good deal cheaper than a lot of other places I’ve stayed, and the showers were the most powerful I’ve seen for a long time (an important point in the dusty heat of the desert). I think some people moan because they charge A$9 per person rather than per site, so if there’s four of you crammed into one car, it’s A$36 per night, a fairly high charge; then again, I’ve often had to pay site rates for two, regardless of the fact that I’m alone, so what comes around goes around, and I can sympathise with charging per head when resources like water are so expensive.

When I arrived after the morning drive from Watarrka, I booked in, set up camp in a lovely shady bay on the most luscious grass you’ve ever seen (particularly given that this is the middle of a desert), and headed out to explore Uluru. As I’d booked in for three nights I wasn’t in a rush – back in Trephina Gorge, Annette had recommended that I really soak up the atmosphere if I wanted to get into the spirit of the place – so I popped into the Cultural Centre on the way to the Rock. As with the one in Kakadu it was excellent, with plenty of information about the dreaming stories of the area, and displays about everything from bush tucker to religious ceremonies to Aboriginal history, and it began to make me realise that Uluru isn’t just a rock sticking out of the scrub, it’s something culturally significant and utterly unique. This was a view shared by Graham and Helen, the couple from Gove whom I’d met at King’s Canyon and whom I bumped into again at the Cultural Centre, reminding me just how small the tourist trail is in the Red Centre. I was starting to get excited.

Exploring Uluru

Champing at the bit, I drove off to Uluru itself. It’s pretty difficult to explain just how impressive it is – you have to see it yourself to understand – but everyone has seen pictures of it, so try to imagine a towering monolith that’s 348m above the ground at its highest point, and you start to get the picture. Although it’s against Aboriginal wishes – the park is owned by the Aborigines now, after some serious legal wrangling in the 1970s and 1980s – you can climb the Rock, so climb it I did.

Wow, it was scary. It’s a hell of a long climb, with a very steep start where you haul yourself up on a chain for what seems like miles, and then the chain stops and the fun really starts. When I climbed it, the wind was howling and I was seriously scared to go beyond the end of the chain for fear of being blown off (and I’m being serious – it really was petrifying!). But I persevered and eventually reached the top, after following a dotted line that wound around through the desolate moonscape on the summit. The views were good, but not spectacular – there’s not a lot to see in a flat desert, really – so after a quick scout around the top I climbed back down, where I was really relieved to be on the ground, with chapped lips, aching ears and – ahhh! – no wind. I could understand how a number of people have died on the climb from heart attacks or falling off, and there are five in memoriam plaques attached to the rock at the bottom of the climb. The climb is worth doing, but certainly only once.

However the walk round the base of Uluru is quite stunning, and is well worth repeating. Happily most tourists are too rushed to do this 9km wander round the Rock – they want to climb it, photograph it, watch the sunset change its colours, and then go back to their air-conditioned coaches and hotel rooms – but it’s so awesome that I’d rate it much higher than the climb. The pictures one sees of Uluru are all from the same angle, because commercial photography is banned from the other angles, and walking round it really gives you an appreciation of Uluru’s weird and wonderful shapes and textures. There are numerous points of interest along the track, from sacred rock pools to rock art to amazing wind erosion patterns, and you come across certain areas that are very significant to the Aborigines which you can’t enter or photograph. Aborigines believe that photography steals part of the spirit from people, which is why you won’t find any pictures of indigenous people in my collection, unless they’re there by accident; with sacred sites they also believe that these areas are too important to have their relationship with the surrounding area ignored by isolating the site in a photograph, which is one of the reasons for the constraints on commercial photography.

I was really moved by the walk. It’s such a powerful place, and I totally fell in love. One incident summed up the big difference between my experience and that of others; as I was walking up to one of the rock art sites, this middle-aged woman turned to her husband and said, ‘Well, it does nothing for me. A child could do better. This isn’t art, it’s a mess.’ And she turned on her heel, flicked her overdone hair and waltzed off. What a fool she was: if she’d bothered to read anything about rock art, she would have known it isn’t aesthetic, it’s functional; it’s not beautiful, it’s ceremonial. The Aborigines painted pictures because they never wrote anything down; Aboriginal language has only just started to be written down in an attempt to preserve cultural stories. It isn’t supposed to look good, in the same way that a book isn’t supposed to taste great and music isn’t supposed to smell terrific. How can people spend thousands of dollars on luxury tours and trips to such important sites without even spending a couple of minutes reading up about the place? They came, they climbed, they photographed and they left empty Coke cans behind. What a shame...

That night I went to see the sunset over Uluru, though the cloud covering made it less spectacular than it can be, and on my way back to the tent I bumped into two wonderful old ladies whom I’d met at Ormiston Gorge. They echoed my sentiments; they’d arrived with niggling doubts about whether it would be worth it, but they were as impressed as I was. I felt quite elated that my last real tourist spot in Australia was turning out to be one of the best.

Exploring Kata Tjuta

The next day I set off to explore Kata Tjuta (or the Olgas as Europeans call them). This collection of beautifully shaped mounds and hills is like a very eroded Uluru, with winding gorges and a couple of lovely walking tracks that pick their way through the same red rock as Uluru, all twisted into these amazing shapes. Kata Tjuta means ‘many heads’ in the local Aboriginal dialect, and it’s a good name; it’s easy to see why a lot of people prefer it to Uluru itself.

I’d driven off to see the sunrise on Uluru early in the morning, but the clouds put pay to that idea, so I drove straight on to the Kata Tjuta lookout, arriving there before the tourist masses (though I did bump into a couple whom I’d chatted to in Trephina Gorge – meeting people from the tourist trail is obviously becoming something of a habit).

The walks at Kata Tjuta are delightful; I set off on the longer of the two, which passes in a loop through the Valley of the Winds, and I figured it was a good thing I was on disposable cameras, as otherwise I would have taken far too many pictures – this place is truly amazing. I bumped into Graham and Helen again, and we joined up for the (supposedly) three-hour hike through the range, nattering away through the scenery; sometimes it’s great to walk with people, and sometimes it’s not, but for this walk it was very welcome, and to cap it all, we bumped into the couple from Trephina at the end of the walk, and all five of us started yarning away; whoever thought you’re lonely when you’re alone has obviously never visited the Red Centre.

Watching Kata Tjuta

By now I’d explored all the walks and thoroughly enjoyed them, so it was time to take the advice of Annette, the painter I’d met in the Eastern Macdonnell Ranges, and just sit around watching for the next day and a half. So the following morning I drove off to the sunset-viewing site for Kata Tjuta, had lunch, settled down in the shade and started to write, all in full view of the spectacular curves of Mt Olga. And Annette was right: if you settle down, relax and just take in the atmosphere, that’s when you really begin to understand. If I’d been living here before the white man came, I’d have made up stories about the place too.

I spent the whole afternoon at Kata Tjuta, reading about and getting all excited about visiting New Zealand, and at about tea time, who should walk into my secluded little picnic area but yet another couple I’d met briefly at Trephina Gorge (they had been about to leave the gorge as I’d arrived). We got talking, and Craig and Sue, as they introduced themselves, brewed up cups of coffee that we supped while waiting for the sunset. They’d been travelling for seven months on long-service leave, and when they got back home to Tassie they were planning to sell up, buy a bigger caravan and travel for good, picking up work en route. I envied them something rotten; I hope I get to do something similar when I’m their age.

So imagine my amazement when, on this day of bumping into people by coincidence, they revealed that they’d camped next to Ted, Gill and their passengers (whom I’d met in Litchfield) at the Devil’s Marbles; unfortunately Ted and Gill had been having a bit of a traumatic day, with a blown tyre and a problem with their cooker’s gas bottle. The reason we discovered this further connection? Because I’d mentioned that I’d had my sleeping bag stolen from Shady Glen, and Craig and Sue said they’d heard about the theft from quite a few people and that the story was doing the rounds of the travelling community, and that one of the couples who had warned them about Shady Glen was Ted and Gill. Craig and Sue even knew who I meant when I said I had camped next to a mad German in Ormiston, who kept muttering to himself and packing and unpacking his red 4WD. It really is a terribly small world in the huge expanse of the outback...

Sunset Storm

The sunset over Kata Tjuta was beautiful, though cut short by low clouds on the horizon, and before long I’d started the 50km drive back to Yulara. On the far eastern horizon there were some serious clouds lurking, and as I drove towards them they started to flash with electrical activity, even though the skies above me were as clear as a bell. As I continued driving, the sight took on a strangely mystical air; on my right-hand side a nearly full moon was lighting up Uluru, while on my left was the reddish-purple glow of the sunset, and straight ahead the sky flashed with tremendous force. It must rate as one of the most incredible sights I’ve ever seen; I’m not ashamed to say I was nearly moved to tears.

When I got back to camp I got my washing in and shot up to the lookout, where I sat and watched the heavens rip themselves apart, while not a drop fell on Yulara. At the lookout I struck up a conversation with a very pleasant couple from Geelong who were really enjoying the park and were gutted they had to leave in the morning, but before long I had to eat, so I wandered down to the kitchen and cooked my usual rice-type dish on the free barbies there. It was there that I started chatting with a couple of Poms who had driven down from Darwin, and then it hit me: throughout the day I’d been meeting older Aussie travellers who were all full of life, thrilled by the area, and really interesting to talk to. But these two seemed so unhappy, even though they said they were enjoying themselves; they looked dour, never smiled or laughed, and conversation was a serious effort on my part (so eventually I just gave up). This is happening more and more with my fellow countrymen; I try and try but so often they’re just so bloody miserable. Combine this with the English character trait of an inferiority complex mixed, paradoxically, with a superiority complex, and you have the quintessential whinging Pom; I often find myself thinking not so much ‘Will I cope when I return?’ as much as ‘Will I bother to cope when I return?’ I just hope my continued disillusionment with the place I still regard as home is simply a symptom of the stunning journey I am having; I’d hate to fall out of love with my home country, as so many ex-pats do.

Oh, and just for the record, when I settled down with my lamp and a book, I noticed that the guy camped next to me had also camped next to me in Alice Springs. By this stage, I wasn’t even surprised, and just went back to reading about my next destination.

Watching Uluru

The following day I decided to give Uluru the same treatment as I’d afforded Mt Olga; Annette’s advice was so good that I couldn’t just save it for Kata Tjuta. The night before, the storm I’d been watching had passed overhead, bringing serious lightning and massive thunderclaps but mercifully little rain, so I got up really early on Wednesday morning to catch the sunrise over Uluru. The skies had totally cleared, and I parked and walked some distance from the crowded sunrise-viewing area, to avoid all the amateur Spielbergs who were clogging up the view[1]. Sunrise over Uluru is an amazing sight, and it’s pretty pointless trying to capture its immensity on film, so I just settled back and watched the rock change from black to purple to deep red to lighter and lighter shades as the sun broke the horizon. It was a cold but beautiful experience.

I spent the rest of the day in peace at Uluru. I popped into the Cultural Centre to buy a leaflet that explains the base walk round Uluru, telling all the Aboriginal Dreaming stories relating to interesting spots; the two old ladies had showed me their copy, and for A$1 it makes a lovely memento of the area. It explains how the Anangu (the Aboriginal tribe that lives in the area) live their lives by the religious heritage of Tjukurpa (the generic term for which is Dreaming), and how Uluru is a living reminder of Anangu Tjukurpa. The leaflet went on to say that when you see Uluru, you might begin to understand just how powerful this place is; I completely concur.

On the way I passed the climbing chain, and I couldn’t believe how packed it was; I just had to take a photo of the line of silhouettes going all the way up the Rock. It made me realise how lucky I was, because when I did the climb, I only saw three other people between the end of the chain and the cairn – the wind had probably put the others off. It must be impossible to appreciate the barren and surreal nature of the top of the Rock when it’s full of babbling tourists, and you can bet none of them had bothered to buy a booklet on the Anangu Tjukurpa. It’s easy to see why the Anangu call the tourists minga (‘ants’) when they climb.

Luckily even the busloads of tourists can’t destroy the powerful atmosphere of Uluru. It’s really something else.

[1] You have never seen so many video cameras in your life. It seems that people film entire sunrises and sunsets, but do they actually watch them at home? A good point was made by a fellow traveller I met in WA, who said, ‘I’m sure some of these people have to go home and watch their videos to know what they’ve seen.’ I can see his point; it’s a shame to think that lots of people’s view of the Uluru sunrise is as a small black-and-white TV image in the eyepiece of a video camera.

Indeed, I sometimes wish I didn’t have a camera (though, of course, the desire to record what I see outweighs the inconvenience). If you have no camera, then you don’t get obsessed with getting the right shot, capturing the moment or having enough film, and you don’t get annoyed if you miss that amazing shot of a croc or a sunrise. You just look, and I sometimes really wish I could be like that, though I know I’d regret it later if I had no photos on my return. Perhaps people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, though I’m still not convinced by videos of sunsets...

Australia: South Australia & Victoria

Coober Pedy

Written: 1 September 1996

The drive from Uluru to Melbourne was huge – about 2400km all told – so I did it in three stages, with breaks at Coober Pedy and Adelaide. The landscape between Uluru and Coober Pedy is flat and desolate desert scrub, but on approaching Coober Pedy the road is surrounded by hundreds of mounds of earth, varying from a few feet high to the size of a caravan. Coober Pedy is home to serious numbers of opal mines, and the mounds are the dirt from the vertical shafts built in the search for gems; the miners don’t fill the holes in because when you’re following a seam of opal rich dirt and you dig underneath a filled-in hole, the loose earth will collapse down on top of you. It’s a sensible reason, but it makes Coober Pedy look like it’s home to a colony of huge desert moles.

The town itself is pretty apocalyptic, which is probably why a lot of Mad Max 3 was filmed here, back in the days when Mel Gibson still pretended to be Australian. The summer heat is so searing and the winter nights are so cold that a large number of houses and hotels are underground, where the temperature is comfortably stable; it’s a novel sight and a good excuse for a local tourist industry (along with the opal mines, of course), but overall Coober Pedy is a pretty rugged place, and I didn’t waste a great deal of time exploring. I simply booked into a caravan park, pitched, cooked, and settled in with a book. I got talking to this middle-aged guy who was driving his motorbike round the eastern route, and who should hear my voice and wander over but Dennis and Marion (of King’s Canyon push-starting fame), who happened to be staying in the same park. It was yet another coincidence in the small world of the Red Centre.

The following day I drove from Coober Pedy to Two Wells, the little town that’s north of Adelaide and home to Dave and Karen. The drive was desert until Port Augusta, and then the most amazing thing happened: greenery. I’d forgotten what green fields and forests looked like, not having seen any since Perth, and it quite spun me out as I drove past Mt Remarkable (something I’d missed on the way up as I’d gone via the Flinders Ranges before). There were loads of cows and sheep, all kept off the road by fences, each looking well-fed and healthy; I just wasn’t used to this environment at all. Luckily Dave and Karen had the antidote in the form of a slab of ice-cold beer, and it didn’t take long for everything to start making sense, of a sort.

On Saturday we went for a drive round the Barossa, with Karen very kindly driving while Dave and I ploughed our way through an Esky of beers. I still hadn’t got used to greenery, let alone beer (between Darwin and Adelaide I’d had just one stubby), and the whole experience was beautiful. The Barossa is a stunning area, but after months of desert and stark landscapes, it’s even more wonderful; more than once I found myself wondering whether I was back in England, which goes to show that either I’m beginning to forget what England really looks like, or West End Bitter is powerful stuff.

Sunday turned out to be a struggle, not surprisingly; the drive to Adelaide and then on to Melbourne is a long one, and it’s even longer with a hangover. It passed without incident, however, and it was pleasant to be driving down Adelaide streets that I’d walked around some five-and-a-half months before; the nostalgia really kicked in as I got lost in the middle of South Australia’s capital city. The same would have happened with Melbourne, except when I arrived it was dark, the traffic was a huge shock after months of not even seeing a traffic light, and – surprise, surprise – it was raining. Good old Andy; he’d stocked the fridge with a selection of international bottled beers, and we made a brave attempt to drink ’em all while catching up on all the gossip. It was quite a homecoming...

Selling a Car

Written: 15 September 1996

After the initial culture shock of returning to traffic, people, pollution, noise and rain – all of which totally threw me after such a long time in the desert – I set about selling my trusty travelling companion Oz, a rather sad moment after all we’d been through together.

It turned out to be easier than expected. After obtaining a roadworthy certificate, which required about A$500-worth of mechanical work, I advertised in The Trading Post and settled back for the flood of calls. They never came. Five days after the advert appeared I’d received precisely no calls, so I rang up The Trading Post and changed the price for the next ad from the rather optimistic A$2000 I’d started with to a slightly more palatable A$1700. Five minutes later I had a call from an interested party, and that night I’d sold it, for the original asking price of A$2000; I cancelled the second ad straight away, before it even got published.

And how was this miracle possible? My buyer was a classic: she had just passed her test and her Dad had said he would buy her a car. His budget was A$2000, and he was happy to pay anything up to that amount as long as his daughter liked the car. Two things worked in my favour: they’d seen one other car that day and it had been terrible, and my stereo blew the young girl’s mind. Ker-ching! It had been a while since I’d seen a roll of cash that big...

Melbourne

Written: 30 September 1996

Here are some more memories from Melbourne, after I returned from my year driving round Australia:

- High up on my list of brilliantly fun experiences was the canoeing trip I took with Steve, a good mate of Andy’s. While I was away driving round Oz, Steve had somehow managed to get hold of a knackered old canoe – goodness knows where from – and one fine day the two of us set off to explore a canal in Frankston, on the east coast of the bay. What a trip! There’s something incredibly surreal about paddling past houses that back onto the canal, looking into people’s back gardens as you crack open another stubby, a feeling that you simply don’t get from any other kind of journey through a city. And as for the tranquillity... it was Melbourne from the inside, you might say.

- Our weekend in Sorrento was also great fun, mostly because of the hosting talents of Sheridan’s brother Nigel, who is a ranger down at Point Nepean National Park, on the southern end of Philip Bay. Melbourne is on the northern part of this circular bay that has a very small entrance to the ocean at the south; the western tip of this gap is Queenscliff, my first point of call after leaving Melbourne some six months before, and the eastern tip is the National Park. We all packed off to Nigel’s house in nearby Sorrento, armed with far too much beer, champagne and brandy, and on the Saturday evening we drove out to the point, which was at that time closed to the public; here we explored all the gun emplacements and tunnels in the hill, dating from the defences built for World War II (not that they were needed as Australia was never invaded). Nigel, in true explorer mode, took us through the tunnels with all the lights switched off, and it was incredibly dark; the whole thing reminded me of a dry Tunnel Creek, although with five of us it wasn’t quite as scary, and as the tunnels were man-made, at least there weren’t any tree stumps or crayfish tripping us up. We repeated the tour with the lights on, which only goes to prove that when you can’t see a thing, your imagination really kicks in. Finishing off the rest of the weekend with champagne cocktails and drinking games seemed only fair after that bit of culture...

- I spent my last week in Australia working for a company called Oriental Merchants at the Royal Melbourne Show; Sheridan had got me the job, as she worked for the company at the time. The Royal Melbourne Show is an annual event, and it’s huge; the Showgrounds, where I had gone to see the Big Day Out months before, were packed with exhibitors and punters, all of them spending heaps of dough. The original idea of the show when it first started was that it would ‘bring the country to the city’, so farmers would bring their animals and produce to show the city dwellers; now it’s a huge event in its own right, and although the cows, pigs and chickens still come, there are stalls selling everything from Barbie dolls to milkshakes to two-minute noodles. And I was selling the two-minute noodles.

Actually, it was a hoot. I had to man a stand, wearing a natty red apron, where people would turn up clutching a piece of paper that I would stamp before handing them some two-minute noodles and a smile. This all formed part of the do-it-yourself show bag; show bags are a peculiarly Australian concept where you get a bag full of goodies with a theme, so the Barbie show bag has loads of bits for Barbie, and the Cadbury’s show bag is full of chocolate. Our show bag was one where you bought an empty bag for A$7 and then followed a map round the show, collecting the items to put in your bag, including some yummy two-minute noodles from Oriental Merchants. Well, it was for the kids really, and four days of stamping and smiling was pretty soul-sapping, but hey, it was cultural, I guess.

And so, after a life-changing year in Australia, my working holiday visa started making pinging noises and I had to leave the country, so I booked a flight to New Zealand, contacted the head of Acorn New Zealand who kindly offered me a bed for my first couple of nights, and waved goodbye to my friends from Melbourne. What a place, and what wonderful people. I will be back...

New Zealand: North Island

Auckland

Written: 18 November 1996

Auckland is the first place I’ve seen that genuinely nestles. Looking at the city from a vantage point like Mt Eden, the way that the buildings crowd round the edges of the city’s many green volcanoes reminds me of the way a cat rubs the back of his neck against your leg; Auckland positively embraces its peaks. Some of the cones even have cows grazing on them; there can’t be too many western cities that have cows in their very midst.

How worrying, then, that the volcanic field on which Auckland sits is ‘dormant’ – for which read ‘could wake up at any time’. The most recent addition to Auckland’s igneous family is Rangitoto, a wide, forbidding peak that suddenly appeared in the middle of Auckland harbour some 600 years ago, and whose activities only stopped about 200 years ago; it’s pretty untouched by humans, and its looming slopes – which always look dark, even in bright sunlight – dominate the view. My hostel was situated right at the bottom of the biggest cone in the city area – Mt Eden, a luscious, green hill with a big crater in the top – and although most sane people wouldn’t consider living in a dormant volcanic field, it’s water off Aucklanders’ backs.

‘It’s no more dangerous than driving a car... actually, it’s considerably safer,’ a local friend told me. He’s right, of course, but when you hear that the most likely spot for the next eruption is Takapuna, home to some of the most expensive houses in Auckland, it makes you wonder how bad the casualties will be when it finally happens. New Zealand is a time bomb waiting to go off, but you’d never know from looking at it.

Initial Explorations

My arrival in Auckland was made considerably easier by the wonderful hospitality of Doug, the director of the computer company Acorn New Zealand, his wife Raewyn and their two daughters, who put me up in their house and gave me a job at Acorn on the technical support team, starting straight away. This job would end up funding most of my Asian travels, but first I needed to sort myself out with a roof over my head.

Before long I’d settled into my own room at the Berlin Lodge in Mt Eden, a rather pleasant suburb only 20 minutes’ walk from Acorn’s office. When I moved in it seemed that the hostel was full to the brim with lots of incredibly friendly people from Bangladesh, who appeared to have bulk-booked the place. It was rather refreshing; the place was being run by a German, it was full of strange accents, languages and smells, and it didn’t seem to be full of the normal backpacker crowd. I instantly loved it.

I spent my first weekend exploring Auckland with a middle-aged American called Paul[1], who proved delightful company and a source of top-notch travel advice. Auckland is a tiny place, with only a million inhabitants, and it’s simplicity itself to explore. There are trees everywhere, the air is clear, the traffic problems are minimal, and you can walk almost everywhere with ease, like a lot of the cities in this part of the world.

One of my most enduring memories of these first few days was in an area where New Zealand excels and Australia fails, namely Indian cuisine. Although there isn’t the proliferation of Indian curry houses here that you see in the UK, the ones here are of a very high quality, and the sight of blobs of meat and potato stewed in a thick, brown gravy with pools of dark, dank oil floating on the top was enough to make me go weak at the knees after an almost complete lack of Indian restaurants in Australia. A civilisation that knows what you mean when you say ‘vindaloo’ can’t be all bad, and I was more than happy to slip into an easy life of regular income and luxury food while hunting for a suitable vehicle to take me round New Zealand.

Working in Auckland

It wasn’t long before work threw out some exciting opportunities. Because the Acorn market is still relatively thriving in New Zealand, especially when compared to Australia, there are stories everywhere begging to be written down, and somehow I managed to get Acorn to employ me on my way round New Zealand. They commissioned me to write a portfolio of case studies of their prime school sites, as well as a collection of articles on their dealers, and they even promised to give me a job when I returned to Auckland to round off my stay.

I would end up working for Acorn for a whole month before heading off round the country to write a total of 59 articles, each netting me NZ$100. I couldn’t believe my luck; travelling round New Zealand was going to mean loads of paid work, lots of hospitality, and lots of interesting stories. Each time the teachers would be different, the stories would be different, and the schools would be different; what a wonderful way to get a unique view on the culture of what the locals call Godzone (short for ‘God’s own country). I couldn’t believe my luck – and all this from a chance meeting in Perth.

Working is also a guaranteed way to get a social life, perhaps because it’s easier to be social if you have an income. The combination of the Berlin Lodge and Acorn would introduce me to some wonderful people, and while I was lounging round in New Zealand’s biggest city, I spent most of my time following the usual city pursuits of eating, drinking, exploring and talking with friends I met on the way, like Greg[2], Thomas, John, Anne-Marie, Sjouke, Ian and countless others. As I discovered in the Australian outback, when you’re travelling alone, you’re never on your own for long.

The Domain

On the Labour Day long weekend I visited Centennial Park to the west of Auckland, at the southern tip of the Waitakere Ranges. The views were stunning, but this was where I learned why Aucklanders always carry umbrellas or raincoats around with them, even when there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Auckland’s weather is completely unreliable, and while Melbourne might be home to ‘four seasons in one day’, Auckland feels like it’s managed to invent a few more of its own. As the locals say, ‘If you can see the Waitakeres, it’s going to rain; if you can’t see the Waitakeres, it’s already raining.’ Too bloody right.

I next spent the public holiday on Monday wandering around Auckland Domain, the big park in the heart of the city (as in Australia, city parks are called ‘domains’). I sat there watching the kite flyers, snap-happy tourists, panting joggers, lovebirds, touch rugby players, picnickers... all the classic park scenes, in fact, except this park has a completely rugged bush area, which to all intents and purposes is a wild forest, bang in the middle of the city. What a delight, even if the weather still wasn’t playing ball.

Refuge came in the form of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, with its fascinating Maori exhibits and rather run-of-the-mill ‘old’ European displays. Although Captain Cook circumnavigated New Zealand just before Australia, England didn’t colonise the country until well after Australia; Auckland, for example, wasn’t settled by Europeans until the 1840s, by which stage Australia was well and truly colonised. This means that ‘old’ is even younger in New Zealand than ‘old’ in Australia, and this feeling even extends to Maori history.

Where the Aborigines have been around for at least 20,000 years – and recent discoveries in the Western Australian desert point to a much longer ancestry, possibly around 40,000 years – the Maoris only arrived in New Zealand in any numbers around 1350 AD. This was when they migrated from Polynesia, kicking out the existing inhabitants, the Morioris, who were themselves settlers from an earlier migration from Polynesia at least 1000 years ago. As a result Maori culture is not only considerably Polynesian in style, it has a much shorter history than the indigenous population of Australia. The Aborigines were nomadic, truly tribal, and had a unique culture; the Maoris built villages, fought each other, farmed, and their dances and rites feel – to an outsider like me – very like the ones in Polynesia. It’s fascinating to explore the history of Maoris when compares to the Aborigines; they’re like chalk and cheese, except for the devastating effect of colonialism, which they very much have in common...

Fireworks Over Auckland

The Kiwis celebrate Fireworks Night[3] in style. It’s a bit strange that a country on the opposite side of the world should celebrate an event that happened 12,000 miles away and hundreds of years ago; the Australians don’t even know who Guy Fawkes is, let alone what he did, but New Zealand is much more like England than Australia, and as in the UK, the locals will use any excuse for a party.

Unfortunately the rather mollycoddling attitude that is responsible for the Draconian drinking laws in this land has also decreed that Joe Public cannot buy rockets – they’re far too dangerous, apparently – so public displays are fast becoming the norm... but when Greg and I went up One Tree Hill on the night of the fifth, armed with a six-pack and an umbrella, we saw a city fizzing gently as hundreds of families let off their Roman Candles and the public displays spent thousands in seconds. It wasn’t as impressive to look at as you would have thought – to see a firework you have to be looking at it when it goes off, and with a 360° view, you miss most of them – but the delayed sound of hundreds of bangs was completely bizarre. Greg, a veteran of the South African army, said it sounded just like a war zone; I had to take his word for it, but I could easily see his point.

Surf Casting in Whatipu

Me and fishing aren’t exactly good bedfellows; while I love the sport, my catch rate is terrible, a fact that hasn’t escaped my friend and fishing partner Bill, who said in his last letter that he’d discovered the secret to successful fishing – to go without me. Suffice to say that visiting Whatipu did little to change this, but at least I found a new method in which to expend heaps of energy while achieving nothing: surf casting.

Surf casting, as far as I can make out, involves standing on the beach, casting a line baited with pilchards as far out into the sea as possible, sticking the rod in the sand, and settling back with a vodka and coke. At least, that’s how Greg, Thomas and I went surf casting, and between us we managed one tiny fish (courtesy of Thomas) and a crab (courtesy of me). Successful? No. Entertaining? You bet. The area we visited, Whatipu (pronounced ‘Fatty-poo’), is at the northern tip of the western entrance to Auckland’s harbour, and it’s as rough as hell, with scary cliffs and a tide to make you think twice about even going ankle deep; this is no swimming beach. It is, however, ruggedly beautiful, and was a perfect setting for Three Men, No Fish, Lots of Vodka and a Beach.

It was almost impossible to imagine we were only a few miles from Auckland... but then again, that’s New Zealand all over.

[1] I’ll never forget what happened when Paul asked me why Vegemite was not so much a spread as an Antipodean religion; my response was that if he wanted to find out why, he could help himself to my jar, but I forgot to tell him to only use a little bit, so he layered it on like thick jam. When I came back from work he declared that Aussies and Kiwis were obviously quite insane worshipping a spread that burned the roof of your mouth off; I didn’t have the heart to tell him that not even the biggest fan of Vegemite would put it on toast that thickly.

[2] I thoroughly liked Greg, and bizarrely all the photos I have of him show him either in jeans and camouflaged shirt, or camouflaged trousers and blue T-shirt. This isn’t particularly noteworthy, but I mention it so I can gratuitously shoehorn in one of my favourite Kiwi advertising slogans, the one for Camouflaged Condoms. The sales pitch? ‘Don’t let them see you coming...’ Pure genius!

[3] I think – though I could be wrong – that Fireworks Night is only celebrated in the UK and New Zealand (Australians don’t bother, that’s for sure). The night of November 5th is given over to fireworks, bonfires and jacket potatoes, to celebrate the failed attempt by Guy Fawkes and his gang to blow up the Houses of Parliament with a cellar packed with gunpowder (hence the name of the attempted coup, the Gunpowder Plot). It’s fun, unless you happen to work in an Accident and Emergency Department... alcohol and gunpowder can be a dangerously explosive mix.

Whangarei

Written: 13 October 1996

Whangarei was the first place I visited outside Auckland. Ten days after I landed in New Zealand, I found myself heading north for two hours in a hire car, stopping only to avoid a lorry that had managed to overturn and block both lanes of the main road; the roads in New Zealand twist and turn wickedly and are rarely level, what with all the hills, mountains, valleys and forests in the way, and the journey made me extremely glad that I’d aborted the crazy idea of cycling round New Zealand before it had even got off the ground. I don’t know if the rugged terrain is the reason for the slightly dubious quality of New Zealand’s driving, but it certainly can’t help.

I was visiting Whangarei on business, to help on a stand at a small education show where Peter, the newly appointed Acorn dealer for the area, needed a bit of help getting to know the products and how to sell them. I met up with him at the show, managed to lock myself out of my car (NZ$25 later, I had the keys in my hand and felt a right wally), and met up with Mel and Sue, a lovely couple who looked after me and put me up in their house for the weekend (Sue’s brother is the marketing manager at Acorn). The show was a bit quiet, but it was a pleasant weekend, and it all helps to fill the coffers. I also got to see what all the fuss is about: although the drive I did was far from scenic in relative terms, it was so luscious and green that I now know driving round New Zealand will be a wonderful experience.

The highlight of the weekend, though, was the election. I turned up in Australia just as the election was kicking in there, and a year later I’ve arrived in New Zealand to find myself in the middle of party political broadcasts, election promises, and a fair splattering of confusion. The confusion is mainly because unlike previous elections, this election is New Zealand’s first MMP election (that’s proportional representation to you and me). MMP means everyone gets two votes – one for the local MP, and another one for the party you’d like to see running the country – and most people I spoke to got quite confused when trying to explain the new system to a foreigner. None of this mattered, though, as Mel and Sue had some friends round on the Saturday night for an election party, so we all drank far too much wine, had a ball, and watched the results roll in (quite a fun experience when you know nothing about the personalities involved). I learned a lot about Kiwi politics as well as a lot about New Zealand, not least from a wonderful Dutch couple who had emigrated here years ago, and who had really lapped up the lifestyle[1].

In the end the election concluded with no party having a clear majority, which means the politics will keep on going while someone tries to form a coalition government. It all seems a bit silly, really, especially as the chances are high that the party that got the most votes, the National party, won’t get into power because the third party (New Zealand First, a party lead by an MP who defected from National) holds the balance of power, and almost definitely won’t want to form a coalition with the Nationals. Ah well, that’s proportional representation for you.

[1] As well as the sense of humour. I must thank Hank, the male half of the couple, for my first taste of Kiwi humour:

Two paedophiles on a beach, one says to the other, ‘Hey! Get out of my son!’

Well, I laughed, anyway.

Rangitoto

Written: 3 November 1996

Despite having a deep and abiding love of the weekend lie-in, I’d still said ‘yes’ to the offer of a kayaking trip with a couple of guys from the hostel, so at 8.30am on the morning of Sunday 20th October, Greg and I drove to Orakei harbour, where we met John (also from the hostel) and Thomas (a German molecular biologist and friend of Greg’s). John was taking a group of kids out kayaking as part of his weekend job, so he set us up with our boats and life jackets, and off we sailed into the harbour, Thomas and I in one two-man kayak, and Greg in a single. Our destination for the day was Rangitoto, the island that dominates the skyline outside Auckland’s natural harbour.

Kayaking through a city bay is a simply stunning experience. On one hand you have the hustle and bustle of a busy port – big container ships, posers in their expensive speedboats, yachts hoisting their spinnakers to catch the breeze, a breathtaking city skyline seen from an unusual angle – and on the other hand you’re out there alone, with no sounds except the slapping of the waves against the kayak, the quiet gliding of seagulls, and the splashing of oars against water. It’s a radically different way to see a city, and the trek across the harbour to Rangitoto took well over an hour of paddling away, all the while discovering muscles that I didn’t think had any business to ache quite so much. Poor old Greg found the single boat almost too much, and by the time we beached on the island he was exhausted, while Thomas and I felt reasonably well.

But you can’t hang around all day on the shores of an island like Rangitoto. Being a volcano, the island has a classic cone shape, and where there’s a mountain to climb, you’ll find me raring to go. After dragging the kayaks beyond the tide’s reach, we set off in search of the summit, checking out some strange lava caves on the way, and wondering how anything could survive on this barren and rugged island, let alone the forest that covers the entire landmass. After a pretty challenging walk – enhanced by too much beer the night before, and the fact that I’m not as fit as I was when running up the peaks of Western Australia – we cracked open a bottle of Australian red and took in the most awesome view of Auckland you can imagine. The crater was quite a sight, too, a huge and perfectly conical hole in the top of the mountain, a stark reminder that at any time Rangitoto could blow its top.

The return journey was even more beautiful, this time heading towards the amazing city skyline that had previously been behind us. Unfortunately, Greg was having serious problems with the single kayak – he’d hurt his back on the way over, which is never a good idea when you’re in a one-man vessel – so John directed us while Greg and I swapped places, right there in the middle of the sea. I got to paddle my way back all on my own, and it was just wonderful. Kayaks have two little pedals with which you steer yourself, and once you’ve worked out that it’s pretty hard to roll yourself over, and that the secret is in long, slow strokes, it’s a delight gliding through the gentle waves, gradually getting closer and closer to shore. I was wet, knackered and totally happy...

Kayaking to Motutapu

Not content with kayaking to Rangitoto and back in a day, the four of us concocted a plan to explore the waters of Auckland for a whole weekend, so Saturday 2nd November saw us heading off into the bay in a motley collection of sea kayaks. The trip was bittersweet; the islands of Rangitoto and Motutapu are quite stunning, and kayaking round them and spending a night on an island like Motutapu is wonderfully peaceful and very enjoyable. But the pain of kayaking over 30km in two days is intense, especially when you haven’t done that sort of exercise before, and I’ve never been so glad as the moment we landed on Sunday afternoon, with sore arms, aching backs, blisters on our fingers and salt water rubbed into every crevice.

Still, that Saturday night on the island was great. We weren’t supposed to camp there, so we found a secluded bay with a little forest and set up camp, hidden from view. We collected driftwood, lit a fire and collected a bag full of mussels off the rocks, cooking them up on the hot coals. Greg and Thomas went out in a kayak with a couple of fishing lines and returned after an hour with five luscious snapper, which we hungrily devoured after Thomas and I cooked them on the fire. Combined with the copious alcohol and lack of rain, it turned into a classic night out in the bush. I’d definitely do it again... but next time I’ll probably take the boat.

Finding Wheels

Written: 18 November 1996

Zed lives! He might be younger than his brother Oz – the trusty 1977 Corona that got me round Australia – but it’s obvious from that jaw line and the obstinately old-fashioned looks that he’s still a Toyota Corona. He’s also quite a lot bigger, being a 1984 station wagon, and with the white paint and dodgy stereo he’s certainly got a different character to the little monster that made it round the emptiest continent in the world, but as far as spacious accommodation goes, Zed’s got it just right.

With a foam mattress in the back, enough water to feed the strangely thirsty radiator, and a road map, I’m ready to tackle the Land of the Long White Cloud from tip to tail. With insurance, AA membership and all the other little security devices secured, I’ve got until the end of March in New Zealand, not long enough to see everything, but long enough to put a serious dent in the map.

My workmates have been towers of strength, helping me out with advice galore. Buying a car is one of the most traumatic events I can imagine, but after a couple of false starts, and a rashly placed deposit on a wreck that I (thankfully) didn’t end up buying, I finally discovered Zed and liberated him from one of the most down-trodden, miserable suburbs on the planet; without my friend Anne-Marie’s down-to-earth advice, I’d have probably lost my marbles in the search for my wheels.

It’s also opened my eyes, travelling around and exploring Auckland in the search for cars. Auckland might be beautiful when it comes to Mt Eden (where I’ve been staying), Epsom (where I’ve been working), Parnell (the trendy area) and the beautiful harbour; but when Auckland is grim, it’s very grim. Every city has its downside, and with the current wave of Maori and Islander[1] trouble, gang warfare is a way of life in quite a few areas, crime is high, and the murder rate is surprisingly large for such a small population.

But not only have I sorted out my wheels, and therefore my house for the next few months, I’ve also got my tramping gear sorted out (‘tramping’ being the New Zealand term for long-distance walking). I’ve bought a very light, compact tent that I can shove in my backpack and take on tramps without breaking my back, I’m slowly breaking in my new tramping boots (and ripping my ankles to pieces in the process, as per usual), and I’ve got my bedding sorted out for the back of Zed. All this is making my feet itch worse than a plaster cast, and it’ll be a fun day indeed when I finally set off to explore.

I don’t have a plan; it’s not like Australia, where there’s one road round the outside, one down the middle, and that’s your lot. The South Island is easier to circumnavigate – it’s long and thin, so it’s up one side and down the other, with the odd foray into the mountainous middle to brave the passes – but the North Island is inconveniently round, with both the coasts and the middle worth a visit. Nothing’s too far away, though, so I don’t think it’ll be too difficult to visit most parts of the country, but I’ve been putting off the detailed planning until I’m actually on the road. Perhaps that’s the best idea, seeing as my plans for Australia changed by the day; plans are made to be broken, after all.

[1] ‘Islanders’ are people from the Polynesian islands like Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and so on.

Wellington

Written: 26 November 1996

‘Unseasonable rain’ they called it as I headed south from Auckland towards Wellington, on the first leg my exploration of New Zealand. As I pulled in to Taupo for my first night sleeping in the back of Zed, the news reader on the radio said, ‘There have been strong gales throughout the North Island, ripping roofs off buildings and bringing trees down on power lines. The worst area hit is between Taupo and Rotorua, but the whole of the north can expect very heavy rain and serious wind.’ I didn’t need to be told; when you’re trying to get to sleep in the back of a Toyota Corona parked precariously close to the edge of a huge lake, you know when there’s a bloody great storm chucking down more water than you’ve ever seen, while threatening to blow your car on its side. I swear that there was so much rain in the air that the fishes in the lake didn’t know which side of the horizon they were supposed to be. New Zealand is known for being wet, but it seems a whole lot wetter when you’re actually in it.

Luckily I still managed to get a good night’s sleep, safely tucked up in the back of Zed, and the next day I headed down the west coast to Paekakariki, on the Kapiti Coast. On the way I stopped off at Otaki, home to a large beach that was being so battered and bashed by the raging sea that I cowered in the car, hiding from the flying sand and ocean spray. The Kapiti Coast itself was scary; foam kept blowing onto the road from the sea, which had turned a dirty brown from the violence, and I spent Tuesday night in a lay-by, where the wind ripped through the trees and made a hellish racket.

Normally I wouldn’t travel so far in weather like that, but I had to get to Wellington for the Wednesday to give a presentation to the Wellington Acorn Users’ Group. However, when I finally made it to Wellington at lunchtime, the sun came out, the sky cleared to a pure blue, and after the manic storms of the previous two days it felt like paradise. Walking round the city, which is a very pleasant little settlement on a calm harbour – though much smaller than one would expect from a capital city – I discovered the botanic gardens, a little beach, and buildings that defied description, like the Beehive, the home of New Zealand’s parliament. I rather enjoyed Wellington, I have to say.

Though there is one genuinely annoying thing about Wellington, and that’s the wind, which is beyond a joke. It’s not just a quaint little oddity of life in the nation’s capital; it’s a daily struggle against ruined hairstyles and constant litter shooting across the street. It’s a cliché, but Wellington is the windy city, and it takes some getting used to.

Around Wellington

I spent most of the week working, first in Wellington, and then in Palmerston North, where I visited four schools, wrote four case studies, and stayed with Judy, the dealer in Palmerston. Judy is a bon viveur, no doubt about it, and if it hadn’t been for my body feeling like it had been put through the ringer, I’d have risen to the challenge. Even so, we ate well and drank well, and generally had a ball, as one should always do when one is working. The schools we visited were interesting too, ranging from small schools in the middle of nowhere, to very rich public schools that made all the others look distinctly shabby. It’s certainly a great way of getting to see a country from the inside.

On Saturday I left Palmerston for Otaki Forks, a DOC[1] campsite in the heart of the Tararua Forest Park. The area was heavily forested and mountainous, and I went for a couple of little walks just to get myself going after my recent illness. It was pleasant to settle down without any work to do, but it would have been nicer if it hadn’t been so cold and windy; if it isn’t raining here, it’s blowing. Summer had better hurry up and arrive: knowing that the weather is ‘unseasonable’ doesn’t help much when I’m chattering away in my tent, warming my hands on a candle.

Luckily Monday saw the beautiful weather return, and as I drove through the Tararua Ranges back towards Wellington, down the windiest and narrowest road I’ve ever seen, the landscape really began to thrill. I spent the night in Eastbourne, a little beach town on the opposite side of the bay to Wellington, where I lounged on the beach, and even went for my first swim in the New Zealand sea – freezing isn’t the word! Still, when you’re living in the back of a car and sleeping where you park, you’ve got to get clean somehow. I took a tiring but enjoyable bush walk up the hills behind the village, and as the sun went down over Wellington and the lights began to twinkle, I felt, for the first time since leaving Auckland, really pleased to be on the road. Perhaps my cold was finally lifting with my mood.

[1] DOC – the Department of Conservation – is in charge of National and Forest Parks, and runs a huge collection of out-of-the-way campsites that are very cheap and very picturesque. They’re a highly recommended source of information on the outdoors.

Low Patch

Written: 27 November 1996

When I wrote the following, I was feeling pretty low. This has obviously happened before, such as when I had to wait around for ages in Melbourne for my car to be ready, or when I had to drop Queensland from my plans because I’d miscalculated the amount of time I had left on my visa. Both of those times I had good reason to be annoyed – delay and disappointment, respectively – but this time I had no good reason at all: I just felt really miserable and I simply didn’t want to be on the road.

Needless to say my mood lifted eventually, as it’s hard to remain miserable when you’re surrounded by the endlessly interesting world of travel, but for most of the first week after I left Auckland, I was a bit of a miserable sod. Yes, I had a nasty cold, and ill health can really spoil things, but these mood swings happen to all long-term travellers at some point, so I feel I need to document it. But please read the following section with a huge pinch of salt, and I apologise in advance, because when I whinge, I whinge. At least that part of me is still English.

The Three Month Blues

Even cats don’t fall on their feet this well, and they’re genetically programmed to land right side up. Then why do I still feel a nagging doubt about this whole New Zealand thing? The last time I sat down to write, I edited my original transcript to remove all these little whinges about my current travels, as I put my grumpiness down to continuing flu; but even though my health is much better, there’s something not quite firing on all cylinders here in New Zealand.

To be honest, I think I’m just suffering from a bout of cynicism. Yes, the countryside’s beautiful and yes, the travelling’s easy, but I keep finding myself thinking, ‘Not another bloody mountain,’ and I haven’t even reached the real McCoy yet. The people have been quite superb – of that there can be no doubt – but I think I must be suffering from what most travellers call the ‘three month blues’, except I’ve taken thirteen months to reach it, and it needed ill health to set it off. By all accounts the three month blues hit you when you’re beginning to get used to the travelling life, when you cease to be amazed by everything just because it’s new, and you begin to change from being a tourist to being a traveller; at that stage you get a little homesick, and just wish everything was back to ‘normal’. This doesn’t exactly fit what I’m feeling, but I can’t find any other reason for my current desire to jack it all in and come home. It’s not a strong enough feeling to actually make me book a flight to London, and a quick waltz around the nearest sunny bay brings me back to the happy reality of my situation, but I do need to address this, because there’s no point in obstinately travelling for ages just because I said I would.

I wonder if it could be that I’m simply not as impressed by what I’ve seen as I thought I would be; I just can’t make my mind up about New Zealand. One theory I’ve got is that because the human environment here is quite English – the physical environment is too mountainous to be English, but it’s still more English than the Australian outback, that’s for sure – I keep seeing a watered down version of home. This version has a very short modern history, an emerging culture in terms of music and art (though it’s a very strong emerging culture), and – to me – a lack of cultural identity. I’m sure a lot of Kiwis would disagree with me on this, but this does sometimes feel like a country of people from other countries, rather than a definite place with a definite identity. Any country where the sports presenters start talking about Arsenal beating Newcastle United, without once mentioning that they’re talking about the English football league, is going to struggle to feel exotic to a visiting Englishman.

It doesn’t help that a lot of the towns and villages I’ve seen so far are pretty uninspiring; they’re mostly modern and they all tend to look the same. The map might be smothered in little dots, but this isn’t Europe, and most of the actual towns are rather boring; the North Island might have some beautiful landscapes, but when settlements aren’t in those beautiful areas, they can be rather depressing.

The scale of the country is also a bit of a shock after Australia. For example, I drove from Auckland to Wellington in two easy days, and I could have done it in less time if I’d been in a hurry, but gone are the days of being able to drive and drive and drive, and still get nowhere. The weather is another big shock; after the dry climate of Australia, it’s really rather odd to be rained on constantly, especially when you’re living in the back of a car and notice every drop. And the west coast of the South Island, home to some stunning scenery, is the wettest area of all, so I’ll just have to get used to it (though I guess it’s an unavoidable trade-off to have such a green and pleasant land).

And yet I know that I haven’t even tried to scratch the surface, and that there’s so much potential in them there hills. I think that I might be suffering from a simple case of overload; I’ve seen so many amazing views, done so amazing walks, lounged on so many amazing beaches and explored so many amazing cities in the last year, that one more picture-postcard view is enough to drive me over the edge. The desire to have exhaust fumes blown in my face as another London bus chugs around a near-stationary Piccadilly Circus is worryingly strong...

But never mind; I am convinced that this melancholy will pass, if only because it feels more like a chemical imbalance than a genuine attitude problem. As soon as I manage to shake the feeling of grogginess and aching limbs by doing a bit of healthy exercise, I’m sure the same person that fell in love with exploring Australia will emerge. Besides, I’ve been living with unexplained bouts of grumpiness for as long as I can remember; it’s just that they’ve been considerably less common since I hit the trail. I get the feeling that this is the silver lining that will finally banish these clouds; I just hope it gets on with it.

New Zealand: South Island

Down the Casino

Written: 2 December 1996

At 6pm I finally managed to get through to Graham, who’d invited me to stay for a few days of work in Christchurch. He told me that if I could get to his house by 6.20, and I could play blackjack, then how would I like to go to the casino and help his local Rotary club spend NZ$3500 of someone else’s money, all for charity? As if I needed asking: half an hour later we were heading off to the town’s main den of iniquity.

The plot went like this. Each of the local Rotary clubs would put forward seven players, who would then play against each other; the winner from each club would then go through to the final, where they’d play the winners from all the other clubs, and the winner of that game could choose the charity to which the Rotary clubs would donate NZ$1000. At least, that had been the plan, but Graham’s club had a few last-minute cancellations; luckily, when I appeared, I was only too happy to fill the gap, so the game was back on.

The alcohol was completely free all night, and there were plenty of sandwiches and little nibbles, so I was counting myself a winner before we even started. As for the blackjack, it was a rather close thing; I hadn’t played blackjack for years – ignoring a few drunken hands in Perth – but the old skill was obviously still there, as by the last hand of the third shoe it was down to me, with NZ$2400, and a jovial bloke called Noel, with NZ$1900 (not bad, considering we’d started with NZ$500 each). In theory it’s pretty hard to lose from that sort of position, but Noel was a real gambler, and with it being someone else’s money he put his whole stash on the last hand, and it came up trumps. So Noel went through, thankfully as he was the much better player and I was beginning to get far too drunk for another game, and we all settled round to support our man.

Halfway through the game we were a little concerned, because Noel, being the classic big gambler, was down to just one chip, a blue NZ$100 disc, and all the others had stacks of brown NZ$500 chips, and huge piles of green NZ$25 chips. Quite how Noel came through to win I’ll never know, but it involved betting everything he had a number of times, and ending up with blackjacks all over the place; meanwhile our support was getting louder and louder, and the beer just kept on flowing. Before we’d known it Noel had won, against all the odds.

So we had a drunken team photo for the local paper and got invited upstairs into the High Flyer room, where all the drinks and food continued to be free (so I drank champagne all night, ate oysters and generally fulfilled all the fantasies I’ve developed while travelling on a budget). I vaguely remember having long, in-depth conversations with various important local figures, but by this stage I was well past the point of no return. It was quite an introduction to Christchurch.

Christchurch

Written: 3 December 1996

A number of people have told me that Christchurch is the most English settlement in New Zealand, and from the very first moment I could see their point; for a start, as I wandered through the beautiful botanic gardens, I found myself following the River Avon, surrounded on either side by Oxford and Cambridge Terraces. The gardens themselves are a gardener’s dream, with a water garden, a rose garden, a pinetum, a Primula garden, a daffodil woodland, a cherry collection, an herbaceous border, a fragrant garden, a conservatory complex, a New Zealand garden, a rock garden and more... they’re certainly comprehensive. All this is surrounded by huge swathes of park, a smattering of art museums and some very posh schools, and right in the centre of town is Cathedral Square, home to a beautiful gothic cathedral with a huge spire, the top of which is made of copper after the original stone one fell into the square during an earthquake.

It’s a bit strange, seeing red telephone boxes, school children in blazers and boaters, people punting down the Avon, trees like weeping willows, oaks and sycamores, and street names that are almost entirely based on roads in England... but every now and then you look through the trees and spot a tussock-covered hill in the distance, something that wouldn’t crop up in the sort of English countryside that would be home to a city like Christchurch. Perhaps that’s why Christchurch, beautiful though it is, doesn’t quite convince as a genuine slice of England; I kept thinking of a watercolour with too much water and not enough colour, or a theme park version of Little England, though thankfully without the tackiness. Perhaps actually living in one of the cities Christchurch is trying to be – Oxford – has spoilt me. But by all accounts the Japanese tourists lap it up, as you can tell by the group photo stand in the square, where busloads of Asians cram onto the platform to have their tour shot taken with the cathedral in the background. At least that part’s an exact copy of Oxford...

Around Christchurch

I arrived in Christchurch after a long journey from Wellington, which consisted of a cold and rather rough ferry voyage across the Cook Strait to Picton; a dark arrival in the South Island at 2.30am; a restless night in the back of the car in a suitable rest area; the long and winding drive to Christchurch, down the east coast of the island strewn with rough volcanic rocks, odd weather, and dangerous hairpin bends (which I took very slowly indeed); and finally my arrival at the home of the local Acorn dealer Graham and his wife Bev.

Their hospitality was as wonderful as I’d come to expect from the Acorn dealership, and following a baptism by fire and a few days’ work visiting local schools and writing case studies, the weekend arrived and Graham, Bev and I headed out to the Banks Peninsula, a strange hand-shaped peninsula sticking out of the east coast of New Zealand, just south of Christchurch. The main town, Akaroa, is just beautiful, with an azure harbour broken by fingers of deep green volcano jutting out from the hills. The town itself is as pretty a seaside town as you will find, with an interesting mix of French and English architecture; apparently the French inhabitants and English inhabitants didn’t mix, and there was a self-imposed apartheid in the town, both socially and architecturally, something that has disappeared in all but the buildings. After a leisurely lunch and a lazy walk down the sea front, we met Bev’s parents who were holidaying in the family bungalow – a lovely couple, full of stories about New Zealand – before winding our way back home through a sudden rainstorm.

This struck me as odd, because I’d been told that Christchurch was one of the driest places in the South Island. In New Zealand the west side is very, very wet – the weather comes from the southwest over the sea, where the clouds pick up plenty of water, ready to dump it all on the west coast and the Southern Alps. This means that the east coast gets comparatively little rain, so where places like Milford and Taranaki on the west side get metres of rain every year, the likes of Christchurch and Napier get far less (Auckland, meanwhile, being on both the west and the east at the same time, gets an intriguing mixture of both, with one type of weather coming straight after the other). As a result, Christchurch weather is most enjoyable, which explains a lot about the lifestyle there... but it still rains. After all, this is New Zealand.

Dunedin

Written: 7 December 1996

On the way to Dunedin, I made an overnight stop at Waikouaiti – home to a beautiful little beach where I played my guitar and tried to play my harmonica, much to the delight of the local wildlife – and in the morning I headed south of Oamaru to the Moeraki Boulders.

The Moeraki Boulders are pretty weird. They’re big, round balls of rock, which isn’t so strange when you’ve seen the likes of the Devil’s Marbles, but they’re not in the middle of the Australian outback, they’re on a beach, and they’re not formed by cooling and contracting rock splitting into cubes which then erode, as the Marbles were. No, the Moeraki Boulders were formed by accretion, a similar process to that which an oyster uses to create a pearl. Nobody knows how or why the Boulders were formed – except for the Maoris, of course, who have their own story of their creation – but they’re certainly an odd sight, sitting there in the middle of the beach. It made for a very pleasant stop en route, but I had to get to Dunedin for work.

Delightful Dunedin

When I arrived in Dunedin I met up with Mac, the local Acorn dealer, who turned out to be a real find. Mac is an ex-pat Englishman who, along with his delightful wife Gill, has spent his life in all sorts of interesting places, such as the Bahamas (where he was an air traffic controller), Australia and now New Zealand. They live in the countryside – and by the countryside I mean the middle of absolutely nowhere, in a tiny village called Owaka, population about 380, some 120km southwest of Dunedin – in a beautiful house that is mostly self-built. They heat the house via a radiator from a solid fuel range in the kitchen, which also doubles as an Aga-type cooker; they grew everything in their beautiful one-acre garden from seed, from trees to hedges to flowers; they brought up their three children in the country, against the problems of low income, harsh weather and a depressed job market; they’re both qualified teachers and are very well educated; and they’re wonderful company.

I wax lyrical about Mac and Gill because they really looked after me for my entire stay in Dunedin, putting me up in their idyllic home for all but one night. I spent three days working with Mac, visiting schools throughout the Central Otago region and writing articles about them; this entailed spending hours in the car with him, and the conversation never ran dry. Come Friday night we polished off a number of beers and a fair old amount of Wilson’s whisky – distilled in Dunedin, no less – and talked well into the night. What a wonderful couple.

Dunedin Folk

For the only night that Mac and Gill couldn’t put me up, I was offered a room in the Cable Court Hotel in Dunedin. As luck would have it, the night I was there coincided with the hotel’s Christmas party, to which all residents were, naturally, invited. So there was the marquee in the car park – with a stack of chilled beers as big as an alcoholic’s wet dream, and a barbecue on the side – crammed with people from all sorts of places, as well as a large number of locals who knew the proprietors, and to cap it all, it was all free (even the room, as Mac’s company was paying for my luxury accommodation).

I drunkenly nattered to all sorts of people, and made friends with a bunch of folk musicians who played round the pubs of Dunedin. Of course, as always seems to happen with folkies, they were heading off to a session later in the night, and they invited me along; with the amount of alcohol I had drunk, I had a rip-roaring time. I eventually got a lift back to the hotel with a guy named Dudley, who, it turned out, was from the same small village in Staffordshire as me. It’s a very small planet, this.

So yes, I had a delightful time in Dunedin, with its odd architecture and steep, hilly streets. I had an even more delightful time in Owaka, staying in the countryside with Mac and Gill, and by the time I left them on Saturday afternoon, I drove off down the coastal road, heading west along the south coast of the South Island, with not a cloud in the sky. It felt good to be alive.

Southern Scenic Route (East)

Written: 10 December 1996

Leaving happy Dunedin behind, I drove off down the coastal road, heading west along the south coast of the South Island, with not a cloud in the sky.

My first stop was a little walk to Purakaunui Falls, a gushing torrent of water surrounded by forest that reminded me of the rainforest around Strahan in western Tasmania. As it was getting late, though, I drove straight to Papatowai, home to a beautiful little campsite and the prettiest little bay. That night it hit me that I was well and truly back on the road again, with very little work left and lots of time to explore the South Island; apart from a handful of write-ups in Christchurch, I had no work scheduled until Nelson, just before I’m planning to return to the North Island.

The next day I followed the coast road for a bit more, in search of a number of little walks and lookouts on the way. This is one of the most pleasant aspects of driving through this sort of scenery; I love the large number of nature walks and tracks that only take a few minutes to walk, but that take you through scenery that you’d think you’d have to travel to the ends of the earth to see. The Tautuku Bay area was my first stop, with some beautiful views from Florence Hill over sweeping forest, reaching right up to the golden sands of a huge beach. This is native bush country, and slowly but surely the bush is advancing into the sea as more sand gets washed up onto the beaches.

Just down from Tautuku Bay, where I rather surprisingly found an obstacle course tucked away in the rainforest, is Lake Wilkie, an inland lake that’s hemmed in by sand dunes. A pretty little boardwalk took me through the forest to the lake, which is apparently left over from the ice age. The bush is slowly reclaiming the lake, and there’s an interesting collection of signs explaining the process. It’s a serene place, with still brown waters and lots of frogs that swim away as you approach, making the water shimmer as you walk along.

Porpoise and Curio Bay

My next port of call was so pretty I decided to stay the night, as I had a number of letters to write. Porpoise Bay is a beautiful half-moon bay with golden sands that stretch as far as the eye can see; here you can see Hobson’s dolphins – a rare breed of dolphin – playing in the surf, which is a wonderful sight as you take in the views and soak up the sun. But the most amazing thing about Porpoise Bay is that it backs onto Curio Bay, a different kettle of fish altogether. Curio Bay is rocky in the extreme, with a large shelf of what looks like savage, lumpy volcanic rock, bashed by the sea but exposed at low tide. This shelf is in fact a petrified forest, the remains of a 16 million year old forest that was covered in volcanic ash back in the Jurassic period and preserved, turning into hard rock in the process. It’s a strange sight, walking along among these stumps of stone that look exactly like tree stumps – complete with rings in the trunk – except they’re made of rock. There are trunks that have obviously fallen over and turned into rocky bark, and all sorts of little stumps everywhere, sticking up out of the rock pools. Talk about surreal.

However, one of the biggest drawbacks of camping by the sea in New Zealand is the dreaded sandfly. There were sandflies on the coast in Western Australia, but New Zealand has managed to elevate the sandfly to an art form: an art form with teeth. Wherever you go, especially in wet, coastal areas, there are swarms of tiny flies, each of which can give you a nip as nasty as a mosquito. I’ve invested in the recommended insect repellent, but if that doesn’t work I may be reduced to taking the advice of a bushman I met in Monkey Mia: mix 70 per cent baby oil and 30 per cent Dettol, and smother yourself in it. You might smell awful, but the sandflies stay away[1]... as well as any other sentient beings, I shouldn’t wonder.

On Monday I headed off from Curio Bay, only to find that my clutch wasn’t working. For some reason it gave absolutely no resistance when I pressed my foot on it, and only bit in at the very fullest extension; by some quirk of fate, all my clutch fluid had run out overnight. Still, I wasn’t going to sit around all day doing nothing and praying for a psychic mechanic to stop by, so I crunched my gears all the way to Slope Point, down some of the most confusing dirt roads I’ve ever encountered. At least, I think I found Slope Point, the southernmost point of the South Island, but I could have been anywhere, to be honest. Never mind: I would definitely have seen Slope Point at some stage during my meanderings, even if I didn’t know exactly which point it was, and it wasn’t long before I managed to find a garage and some brake fluid, and all was solved. It demonstrated something, anyway: a year ago I wouldn’t have even known that a clutch needed brake fluid, but after a year driving round strange countries, you soon pick up what goes on under the bonnet.

Happily, the car behaved impeccably once I hit the bitumen once again, and I completed my circuit of the southeastern corner by continuing on to Invercargill, before turning northeast for Dunedin and back to Christchurch once again.

[1] In the Malaysian rainforest this would prove an invaluable piece of advice – it genuinely works. Though you do smell awful.

Christchurch

Written: 16 December 1996

The second time I visited Christchurch, I was very kindly put up by another Acorn stalwart, Steve, and his lovely wife Jenni, in their house out near the beach in northeast Christchurch. The whole stay was very pleasant, more so because of Steve and Jenni’s kids, two-year-old Ellie and nine-month-old Benjy; Ellie took quite a shine to me, driving Steve and Jenni to distraction with her constant demands as to whether Mark could come too, whether Mark was up yet, did Mark want a biscuit, and so on. Mark was quite happy with the attention, to be honest; it appealed to the unrealised paternal side in me.

I stayed with Steve and Jenni for four days, fitting in such pleasantries as a game of golf with Steve and Simon (another Acorn nut and great company to boot); a Christmas tree buying session with Steve; a Christmas tree decorating session with Ellie; a tyre shopping trip to replace all my tyres, inspired by the rather sad flat I got soon after my arrival; a total of four interviews and articles, my final work until Nelson; a pizza and video session on Saturday night with Simon and some of his pals, which, after living the life of a traveller, was worryingly enjoyable; some very, very strong and very, very drinkable beer at Chats, a lovely little pub round the corner from Steve’s house; and some final planning for Christmas and the rest of my time in the South Island.

Peel Forest

Written: 18 December 1996

By Monday I’d finally finished off all the work I’d been doing in Christchurch, so I hopped into the car once more, promising to come back for some more of that wonderful Christchurch beer when I cross back over the Southern Alps via Arthur’s Pass in late January.

I stopped for the night at a rest area in Rakaia Gorge, a beautiful river valley with the towering Mt Hutt on the far side. The wind whistled down the gorge like a busy football crowd squeezing down a small alley, and it was a good job I was kipping in the car rather than a tent, or I’d have been blown to bits – it’s amazing how safe you feel in the back of a big old Toyota, whatever the weather. It was a very clear night, so I lay there looking at the moon and stars, thinking how pleasant it all looked as the trees bent over and bits of bush went hurtling down the valley. It was even more obvious when I got up for breakfast and my Coco Pops nearly got blown away, forcing me to retreat into the passenger seat for my chocolate fix (a treat to myself after eating porridge for a month).

Windy Tuesday morning saw Zed and I trundling up the road to Peel Forest Park, a delightful reserve on the foothills of the mountains just north of Geraldine. Peel Forest is famous for its native bush, something that is getting rarer with the onslaught of farming and commercial forestry. Until now the only forests I’ve seen are the pine forests of the North Island and the towering kauri forests of Northland, but native bush is much more interesting; when you look at pine forests, they’re a rather monochromatic green, but native bush is much more varied and its texture feels far more organic. As for walking through it, it’s like temperate rainforest peppered with some seriously big trees, with the native podocarp trees (such as New Zealand’s biggest tree, the kahikatea) towering above the rest of the forest, forming three distinct canopies: upper, middle and scrub.

I went ballistic in Peel Forest, spending the whole day walking my legs down to the knees. I tackled walks like the Allans, Fern and Kaikawaka Tracks; I visited some lovely little waterfalls such as Emily Falls, Rata Falls and Acland Falls; I wandered along the interesting nature walk of Dennistoun Bush... and I loved ’em all. As for the big trees, they have to be seen to be believed; they reminded me of the karri trees in the southwest of Western Australia, but these were different again. Disaster nearly fell when I drove off from one of the walks having left my trusty (and by now slightly crusty) bush hat on the roof, but luckily it had blown into the middle of the road, so I was able to spot it fairly easily when I drove back. That was a close shave...

That night all hell broke loose. If I’d thought Rakaia Gorge was windy, I was in for a shock. Despite the fact that I’d pitched my tent behind a row of thick bushes, one of my guy ropes snapped and the main tent pole smacked me right on top of my head as I was trying to read my book, so I abandoned the idea of sleeping under canvas, took the tent down and retreated to Zed. Thank goodness for my Corona; I wouldn’t have been able to finish my chapter without him.

Twizel

Written: 19 December 1996

After a good night’s sleep in the immovable Zed, while the storms raged around me, I set off for Twizel. The journey was quite stunning; I’ve reached the mountains now, the real mountains, and it’s quite breathtaking, with all these peaks glinting in the sun with their snowy summits and savage slopes.

The first real sight on the way was Lake Tekapo, which suddenly appeared spread out in front of me as I crested a hill. It took me a few seconds to realise that my mouth was hanging open, because in front of me was this stunningly turquoise lake, complete with a backdrop of perfectly formed mountains; and when I say turquoise, I mean turquoise, because it was as if someone had put colouring in the water. This distinctive tint is down to rock flour – tiny particles of rock suspended in the glacial melt water – and it is an otherworldly sight. The little town of Tekapo sits innocently on the end of Lake Tekapo, complete with the sweet little Church of the Good Shepherd, whose view from the altar must take some beating, and which I managed to photograph once the ubiquitous busload of Asian tourists had finally packed up and driven off. What a gorgeous place.

After following the tourist route that runs alongside a similarly turquoise canal – part of the area’s dam system – I arrived at Lake Pukaki. Lake Pukaki is another stunner; I arrived at the south end, from where you can easily see Mt Cook, the highest peak in New Zealand and Australia, towering over the skyline. Unfortunately it was a bit cloudy when I arrived, so I couldn’t actually see Mt Cook itself, but all the other peaks were visible, and with the almost fluorescent lake, it proved a beautiful spot for lunch (complete with copious Kiwi fruit, the most wondrous fruit that, now it’s in season, only costs 95 cents per kilogram... which is a lot of Kiwi fruit for not a lot of money). Lake Pukaki is at the end of the Tasman Glacier – Tekapo is also at the end of a glacier – which helps explain why there’s so much rock flour in the water, but it also means the water is bloody cold. Apparently people swim here in the summer, but there’s no accounting for taste.

When I got to Twizel, a little town south of Lake Pukaki, I dropped my final film of article photos into the chemist to be developed, checked out the local DOC office, and booked into the lovely Ruataniwha motor camp, perched on the banks of another turquoise lake, Lake Ruataniwha. I downloaded my email, did my washing and settled down to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and total lack of wind. I rounded off the day with a quick walk down to the shores of the lake just as the sun started to sink behind a set of rolling hills, picking out every little undulation on the hillsides. It reminded me of the mountains in the Pilbara, as Scott and I camped at their feet on the final day of our bushwalk, all those months ago.

And as I stood there, looking at the sun sinking slowly behind the hills, I thought of all the other sunsets I’d seen around Australia and New Zealand. The sun slipping down behind the dunes of Cleaverville Beach; the orange glow of the Perth skyline as the sun sets behind Kings Park; Kata Tjuta coming alive with the dying beams of sunset; the Ningaloo reef reflecting every ray at Cape Range; the deep red gorges of Karijini simulating sunset halfway through the afternoon; the humid and bloated sun dropping behind the wetlands of Kakadu; the stripes and domes slowly fading as the moon rose over the Bungle Bungles; and now, the sun casting shadows through the pine forests overlooking turquoise Lake Ruataniwha. It’s wonderful to kick back when the sun’s setting and think of all the places where you’ve seen the same thing look so different. Therein lies the legacy of travel: memories.

Mt Cook

Written: 22 December 1996

Thursday came with the rain. Until now the rain has been annoying but it’s generally been pretty warm, but here in the mountains it’s cold, and when things get wet they don’t dry out. The drive to Mt Cook village was pleasant enough, but when I arrived the clouds had gathered en masse, spilling over the mountains and dribbling constant rain on the village. I’d been planning to pop up a couple of the mountains and staying in some of the DOC huts, but the weather rained on that idea, so I did a quick walk up to the Red Tarns (a tarn being a mountain lake) and then hit the public shelter.

Public shelters are great in the wet, because everyone who isn’t living in an expensive hotel hangs out there for shelter. For some reason the shelter was full of Australians, most of whom were staying at the campsite and had taken refuge from their leaky tents in the cold but dry shelter. There were three mad men from Melbourne who were planning an assault on the Copland Pass, one of the toughest walks in the area; Ben and Mira, a lovely couple from Perth who were cycling round New Zealand; Grenville, a mountaineer from another planet who seemed to want to die before he got old; and a Swede who’d decided to join the Copland Pass team, despite his lack of gear and training. It was all good entertainment as the rain drove down; by all accounts the weather in New Zealand is particularly miserable this year, with spring arriving very late (if at all). If I hear the word ‘unseasonable’ once more, I’ll probably break down.

So I spent a couple of days just hanging round the shelters, sticking it out and sleeping in an increasingly condensed car, and enjoying the camaraderie of huddling together with others while the elements did their worst. The snow poured down on the mountains while the rain poured down on us, and the NZ$1.60 pies we got from the pub tasted like heaven after all those camping rice dishes.

And then there were the keas. Keas are New Zealand’s mountain parrots, and they’re a highly intelligent and endangered species. It’s easy to understand why they’re so endangered, because they’re the ornithological equivalent of juvenile delinquents. Leave any food around, and the keas will steal it; leave the seats on your bicycle overnight, and the keas will have torn them to shreds by the morning; stay in the public shelter overnight, and the keas will wake you up in the middle of the night by dropping stones on the tin roof and letting them clatter down the corrugations. There are even stories of keas locking trampers in their huts, having watched how humans push the bolts shut. One wonders if the kea is endangered because no matter how much you like birds, you end up wanting to kill the little buggers every time they fly in for a squawk. Still, they’re pretty good fun, as long as it’s not your kit that’s being ravaged.

The Hooker Glacier

Saturday morning started in exactly the same way as the previous two days, with despondent skies and constant rain, but by lunchtime there were signs that the sky might be clearing, so Ben, Mira and I decided to hedge our bets and go off on a short walk up the Hooker Glacier, the one that leads to the foot of Mt Cook. How to describe the views? When the clouds finally cleared, there in front of us was this beast of a mountain, reaching up to an almost-perfect pyramid peak, snow-capped and icing-sugar white. The tranquillity, only broken by the huge glacial river that you cross on two swing bridges, simply has to be experienced; these mountains have been here a lot longer than any of us, and they’re quite content just to sit there, minding their own business, like old men on a park bench staring at the world passing by.

It’s worth introducing the mountains, even though it’s hard to really understand these peaks without seeing them firsthand. Mt Cook is the biggest, of course. It sits at the northern end of the Hooker Glacier, with three main peaks; the one you can see from Mt Cook village is a lovely pyramid shape, but the highest peak is just behind it, which you can only see by viewing the mountain from a different angle. On the western side of the glacier (that’s the left as you look at Mt Cook) is Mt Sefton, with the Footstool just to the right of it; Mt Sefton is very snowy and icy, and there are regular booms as the snow avalanches off the slopes. Of course, avalanches happen all the time throughout these mountains, but Mt Cook is much further away than Sefton, so you only really get to hear Sefton’s grumbling. Further to the left of Sefton are the Sealy Ranges, with peaks including Mt Ollivier and Mt Kitchener, and the Mt Cook campsite sits at the base of this range. To the east of the glacier (the right) is Mt Wakefield, the first peak in a range that stretches all along the glacier’s east side, right up to Mt Cook, and further east still is the Tasman Glacier.

Back to the Hooker Glacier, though. Glaciers are huge ‘rivers’ of ice that slowly move downhill, carving out valleys and leaving behind rock debris known as the moraine. The Hooker Glacier is a beast indeed, and walking up to it involves following the valley that it has carved over the years – mainly in the Ice Age when it stretched a lot further than it now does – until you reach the terminal lake, which is formed by the melt-waters of the glacier. Cold isn’t the word; terminal lakes aren’t exactly swimming pools, which is made pretty obvious by the icebergs that float past. In the spirit of adventure, Ben and I scooted up along the moraine shores of the lake, almost to the strangely blue glacial wall, but it was pretty hairy scrambling along slopes that could collapse at any moment, so after a short exploration we headed back to camp to watch the sun set over the mountains.

The sunset was another to add to my ever-growing list of memorable twilights. The orange glow of an iridescent snow peak with clouds swirling round the ranges, moving at breakneck speeds in the savage crosswinds at that altitude, is as unique as any sight you’ll see. Mt Cook is 3754m (12,315 ft) high, some 2992m (9815 ft) above the town, which is big in anyone’s book. The view from the hills around the campsite was just perfect, and we spent the night celebrating the break in the weather with the Copland Pass group, who were planning to head off in the morning; inspired by all this activity, Ben and I started to concoct our own little plan.

The Mueller Hut

Sunday arrived to clear skies and savage winds. The heavy snowfalls on the mountains were most noticeable on Sefton and the Sealys, but Ben and I were determined; we were going to climb the 1006m (3300 ft) from the campsite to the Mueller Hut, right on top of the Sealy ridge. We packed our backpacks – well, I did, as Ben wanted to travel light, and only took a daypack of clothes and a bit of food – and we set off on the track to the Sealy Tarns, a pleasant set of lakes about halfway up the mountainside and well below the snowline.

Meanwhile we had a serious climb to tackle. The snow had long since obliterated all signs of a track, and we had to make up our route, not so easy as the hut is just over the top of the range and is therefore invisible until you’re almost on top of it. The route we chose was straight up to where we believed the hut was, skirting a precarious-looking snow slide and avoiding most of the drifts. The wind was strong, the snow was freezing, and I was glad of the ski pants and gloves I’d borrowed as I climbed a near-vertical snowy moraine on all fours, a full pack on my back. In retrospect we must have been slightly mad; one false step or one slip, both of which were very possible on the loose stones and rocks we were clambering up, and it would be a fall down a few hundred feet into goodness only knows what. To be honest we were both more than a little spooked by the whole thing, but the sight of the dunny roof after hours of sweaty climbing made it all worthwhile, and it wasn’t long before we’d made it to the hut.

One of the wonderful things about tramping in New Zealand – or, indeed, mountaineering, which is more what the trip to the Mueller Hut turned out to be, the way we’d gone – is the large selection of huts dotted around the National Parks. Australia doesn’t have such a proliferation of huts, which enable you to do long walks without worrying about where to stay, and it’s one of the reasons New Zealand is such a walker’s paradise. The Mueller Hut, one of the more popular huts in the Mt Cook area, is a cosy little building, sleeping 12 people and containing a kitchen with fuel and water supplies.

It also has what has been described as the best alpine view in the world, looking over the whole Hooker Glacier on one side – with stunning views of Mt Cook and Mt Sefton – and the Mueller Glacier on the other. It’s difficult to describe the sheer power of being up in the middle of a serious mountain range; it’s a bit like trying to explain to a teetotaller what it feels like to be drunk. In some ways the sight was just as moving as that of Uluru, because these mountains aren’t just lumps of rock and ice, they’re awesome enough to be almost religiously powerful. It’s small wonder that the Maoris regard Mt Cook – which they call Aoraki, or ‘Cloud Piercer’ – as a sacred place; I spent a lot of the early evening up at Mueller sitting in the freezing wind and just soaking up the whole environment (after having made a snowman, of course).

The whole Mueller experience was pure excellence. The other people in the hut were great company, and we played cards after dark as the wind howled and shook the hut, making it feel like the inside of a combustion engine. The wind has to be felt to be believed; it’s constantly gusting and at times blows so hard that you simply can’t walk into it, and have to dig your feet into the snow to avoid being blown over. It didn’t let up for one minute and blew throughout the night. Still, the bunks were cosy enough, if you could ignore the frosting breath and shaking walls, and soon enough we all woke up, on top of the world, to a crisp but still blustery Monday morning.

Imagine waking up to such a view; this isn’t a pleasant little alpine village ski resort-type view, it’s savage, elemental stuff, and it’s pretty invigorating. Wanting to extend our stay for as long as possible, Ben and I climbed up nearby Mt Ollivier, the peak of which is at 6288 ft; all the way we battled against evil winds from hell and sleet being blown in our faces. Luckily the snow had melted quite a lot since our ascent the day before, so we made the summit without incident, and the astounding views of the Mueller Glacier were well worth the frozen hands and feet. Unfortunately, by the time we got back to the hut and made a cup of tea, it was time to head back down to the campsite.

Climbing a mountain is one thing, but getting down is quite another. The whole point of climbing safely is not to fall down, but when you’re trying to walk down a slope that’s steeper than 45° and it’s covered in a good foot of snow (and often more) it’s challenging just keeping your balance. After skirting the ridge to avoid the rocks we’d originally followed up, we started to make our descent down a huge snow channel... and that’s when we really discovered how to have fun on a mountain. It all began with Ben slipping over and sliding down the slope on his butt, only managing to stop at the bottom by digging in his heels. I tried the same thing, but seeing as I was carrying a big pack with all our possessions in it, I just sank into the snow and didn’t manage a slide. Instead I just ran straight down the mountainside, taking huge moon steps through the snow, trying to stay ahead of the mini-avalanche that Ben’s slide had started. Before you could say ‘sheeeit!’ we were halfway down to the snow line, covering the same distance that had taken us a good hour to climb in about 30 seconds.

Still, the best buzz came when I found a huge snow slide that was still hard enough for me to go down with a pack on, and I slid down on my behind, discovering as I went that I could steer by clenching the relevant buttock; flying by the seat of your pants, I suppose you could call it. Sledging down a snowy hill might be fun, but throwing yourself down a mountain with a heavy pack for added momentum gets my vote every time. It certainly cut our descent time down, and we were down in the campsite after about two-and-a-half hours of sliding and tramping, compared to a day’s walk to get up.

Not surprisingly we spent the afternoon cleaning up; it was my first shower in five days, which made it practically orgasmic. We then popped into the Hermitage, the rather posh hotel in Mt Cook (at over NZ$200 a night) and soaked up the atmosphere, the firelight and the piano playing[1] while our washing dried, and then it was back to the camp for some well-earned rest. It was also pleasant to note that the weather had turned sour again, so we’d made it through the whole experience in the nick of time; my car felt particularly nice and warm that night.

[1] The piano man, all suited up and playing the sort of seamless popular-tune piano medleys that you tend to hear in hotels – guaranteed to offend no one and to bring a smile to the lips of any ancient and loaded widows in the room, in other words – had just one book from which he played his pretty little ditties. The name of the book? 101 Great Songs for Buskers...

A Glacial Christmas

Written: 25 December 1996

Christmas Eve came on a high-pressure front, bringing with it the best weather I’ve yet seen in New Zealand. By lunchtime there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, making Mt Cook shine like a huge beacon, and the three of us popped into town, stocked up on genuine Christmas fayre (as the retail trade likes to call it) and packed our packs. No way were we going to spend the Festive Season in the campground, where the over-zealous wardens had earned the nicknames of Mr and Mrs Himmler; nope, we were planning to go bush for Santa’s visit. The place: Ball Shelter, some 16km from Mount Cook village, up the huge Tasman Glacier. Ball Shelter sleeps about six, has very few amenities, and has stunning views of the Minarets, a pretty little multiple-peak mountain that’s heavily covered in snow; it certainly sounded like a pretty good spot for Christmas.

However DOC, the beloved Department of Conservation, weren’t quite so festive-spirited. The staff at the Mt Cook office were completely off-hand and told us that the walk up the Tasman Glacier to Ball Shelter was boring and that the views weren’t any good, which was an interesting approach. In the event they were quite, quite wrong; it would turn out to be a fantastic spot for the festivities.

The trek to Ball Shelter is along 9km of rocky paths from the terminal ice-face of the Tasman Glacier, and it was a very pleasant jaunt as we followed a small valley, surrounded by steep, rocky slopes on both sides (where avalanches happen frequently in winter). We hadn’t realised that this valley was running up the west side of the Tasman Glacier, so when the track finally went over the top of the little valley wall, suddenly there was the glacier laid out in front of us. Breathtaking isn’t the word; the glacier is about 3km wide, carving out this huge valley through the mountains under a covering of evil-looking moraine. It’s a lunar landscape, but one with watery potholes everywhere, gurgling and cracking as the whole mass slowly grinds down towards the terminal lake. The hut is precariously balanced on the side of the glacier, so that about 20 feet from the front door is a long, vertical, 150m drop into the depths of the glacier; it’s some view.

So there we were, the three of us, in the middle of nowhere, with not a cloud in the sky as the sun slowly slipped behind the craggy peaks. After lighting a fire and doing as little as possible after the long haul, we started to cook; but this was not just any meal, this was our Christmas meal. The menu was as follows, all created on a camping stove in the middle of absolutely nowhere:

Entrée

Asparagus spears in butter and black pepper

Main dish

Pan-fried loins of lamb

Petit pois

Carrots

Creamed potatoes

Dessert

Christmas pudding and fresh cream

Coffee

With mince pies

Beverages

Delegat’s Cabernet Merlot 1995

Guinness Extra Stout

Black Mac

Speight’s Distinction Ale

It was one of the best meals I’ve had on the road for some time – made all the tastier by the clean mountain air, no doubt – and the views made the front room at Mt Cook village’s famous Hermitage Hotel look pretty tame. Clear skies and twinkling stars framed the pastel-coloured afterglow on the peaks as a full moon rose over the Minarets; it takes a lot to beat that sort of vista. It was the perfect place for Santa to fly across the sky in his sleigh...

Waking up on Christmas morning to total peace is quite a novelty. Looking down at the Tasman Glacier, still gurgling away, made a pleasant change from staring through the mists of my more usual festive hangover, and before long we had the kettle on the boil and Christmas breakfast ready to go, consisting of:

Breakfast

Pan-fried chipolatas with sweet chilli sauce

Haricot beans in tomato sauce

Scrambled eggs

Focaccia

Real Ceylon tea

Laden down by packs and full stomachs, we sauntered back to the car park, had some lunch and drove back into the village to recover. We showered and went up to the Hermitage for a lazy afternoon staring at Mt Cook, Mt Sefton and the cloudless sky, and so ended an excellent and most unusual Christmas.

Queenstown

Written: 26 December 1997

On Boxing Day, after spending the night in the Blue Lake public shelter with Ben and Mira – where there were no Himmlers or camp fees, but then again, no right to be there either – I said my goodbyes and started south through the Lindis Pass towards Queenstown, making a lunch stop on the way at the historic Kawarau Suspension Bridge, a lovely little bridge across a deep gorge in the mountains. Well, it would have been lovely, but it’s near Queenstown, the tourist centre of the South Island, and so Kawarau is now a bungee bridge, and being right on the main highway, it’s an extremely popular and rather overcrowded stop-off for busloads of tourists. Still, it was interesting to see my first bungee bridge, even though it’s quite a small one at 43m high – the biggest, Skippers Canyon Bridge, is 69m high, and is also near Queenstown – but at NZ$130 a jump I decided to stick to watching.

As for Queenstown, I only visited it quickly to do some very expensive shopping and go for a quick wander; I was going to be coming back in January, so figured I’d explore it properly then. My first impressions were of a beautiful little town on the edge of Lake Wakatipu, with mountains sloping all around and plenty of interesting and trendy shops and cafés, full of beautiful people, posers and backpackers who were only after one thing: a laugh. I’d been warned that Queenstown is the Costa del Sol of the South Island, but I’m beginning to get immune to tourists now, after such a long time doing my own thing, so I bought what I had to buy and quickly moved on.

Kepler Track

Written: 1 January 1997

The little town of Te Anau is home to DOC’s headquarters for Fiordland National Park, and it’s also the start and end point of the circular Kepler Track, which I thought would be a good introduction to New Zealand’s longer treks. Stocking up for the Kepler was pretty easy, as it’s one of the more mollycoddled walks in the country, with relatively luxurious huts, gas cookers, plenty of beds and a very high standard of track. I decided to take a leisurely four days over the walk, which is about as long as you can take, so I bought all the provisions I needed, and after exploring Te Anau and its various points of interest, I headed north to Ten Mile Bush, the nearest DOC campsite to town, and settled in for the night. I never really got to see Ten Mile Bush because it was dark when I arrived, but when I woke up and saw that it was little more than a normal rest area, I popped up to the next one, Henry Creek, and spent Saturday unwinding and packing in preparation for the walk.

In comparison, Henry Creek was a divine stop. Te Anau town is on the southernmost tip of Lake Te Anau, and up the eastern side of the lake are quite a few DOC campsites, all primitive, but all situated in beautiful scenery. Crashing out on the lakeside, sunbathing and swimming, reading and sleeping... it was the perfect preparation for a long walk.

It helped that the weather was excellent, which was a relief as Fiordland is renowned for its serious rain; Milford Sound, for example, gets between 7m and 9m of rain per year, depending on which book you read, but whatever the figure, that’s an awful lot of precipitation. By the time I set off for Te Anau early on Sunday morning, I was about as ready for the tramp as I was going to get.

The Kepler Track

I’d chosen the 67km Kepler Track as a gentle introduction to real tramping; the walks to Mueller Hut and Ball Shelter in Mt Cook National Park were both ‘real’ tramps, but neither required carrying serious provisions (although we managed to pack a fair bit in for our Christmas Day celebrations, naturally). The Kepler, on the other hand, is one of the country’s eight Great Walks, which are slightly more expensive than other walks (or much more expensive in the case of the Milford and Routeburn tracks) but which are reckoned to be the classic Kiwi walks. Of course, all this has a whiff of marketing claptrap about it, because there are plenty of astounding walks in New Zealand that aren’t classified as Great Walks, but the scheme is a useful way of focussing tourists on those tracks that DOC has put money into maintaining, and the classification indicates that the walks are worth doing, which is handy if you’re visiting New Zealand on a short holiday and don’t have the luxury of time.

The Kepler Track is a round trip, beginning and ending just down the road from Te Anau, so I parked in the car park and set off early on Sunday, my pack bulging and muscles as yet pleasantly ache-free. Day 1 took me from Te Anau to Mt Luxmore Hut, climbing up the mountain along 14.1km of track. To be honest I found the rainforest section slightly tedious after a while, but during a stop for lunch at the limestone bluffs about two-thirds up Luxmore, I fell into conversation with another tramper, Jo from Sydney, and we fell in step – even though hers were shorter than mine – and the rest of the day flew by.

We arrived at the hut in early afternoon after breaking through the bush-line to wonderful views that made the long, slow climb worthwhile; we picked out our bunks, and decided to explore the area. The first stop, the Luxmore Cave, was well worth it; the cave is just a big slit in the ground, down which you can crawl with a torch, and before long Jo and I were stuck in pitch darkness, with only a couple of Maglites to guide us.

That’s when I remembered the guide on the tour that I had taken in the Bungle Bungles, who had taken us into one of the Bungle caves, turned off his torch, and made us stand there for about five minutes, while our eyes got used to the gloom. Slightly spooked, we did the same in Luxmore, and sure enough we could see all sorts of strange shapes and shadows from the tiny amount of light seeping in through the cracks; Jo had never experienced it before and was suitably impressed.

To round off the day and expend our excess energy we decided to hoof up Mt Luxmore itself, as the weather was clear and the views would be stunning. We were right; there, 1471m above sea level, the views were awe-inspiring, looking over Lake Te Anau to the northeast, towards Mt Aspiring in the north, and over Fiordland to the west and to the south. The climb also helped me build up an appetite; pasta, tuna, tomato purée, cayenne pepper and mixed herbs never tasted so good.

Into the Bush

Day 2 was a gorgeous trek through the mountaintops, made all the more beautiful by the continuing good weather. After 18.6km and a seriously steep descent through more rainforest – but this time a rainforest filled with babbling brooks, squawking birds and wonderful waterfalls – I arrived at the next hut, Iris Burn, in time for lunch. This points out one of the delights of easy tracks like the Kepler; the scheduled time for a day’s walk is normally five to six hours, but as with most DOC times, I ended up doing them in about three to four hours, so even with a lie in I’d make it to the next hut for lunch, leaving ample time for exploration.

Iris Burn sits in the big glacial valley through which the Iris Burn River flows, and just down from the hut is a powerful waterfall that’s created a clear swimming hole that would be perfect if the water wasn’t so cold; I went in up to my knees before realising that I couldn’t feel my toes any more. The ferocious sandflies were also a bit too hungry for my taste, so I headed back to the hut, where the night culminated in a search for a kiwi, led by the hut warden’s husband, but without success; we did, however, get to see lots of glow worms lighting up the forest canopy like the night sky.

Day 3 awoke to cloud covering the mountaintops, which just goes to show what luck I’d had in deciding when to do the track. Ahead of me by a day was a huge group who had met another huge group coming the other way, which meant there had been 76 people in the Iris Burn Hut the night before I arrived; and if I’d been a day later I’d have missed all the views on the mountain path. The 17.2km track from Iris Burn to Motarau Hut was, however, low level, so before long I was tucked up in Motarau Hut on the edges of Lake Manapouri, watching the world go by from under sandfly-proof clothes.

That night, being New Year’s Eve, I cracked open the 250ml bottle of port I’d been lugging for the last 50km (how’s that for dedication?), and the other English speakers followed suit with a bottle of gin and tonic, a bottle of bourbon and a small bottle of champagne to complete our makeshift minibar. We all managed to stay awake until midnight, when we went out on the veranda and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the tops of our voices, much to the bemusement of the Germans in the hut who were seeing in 1997 with some comparatively staid celebrations of their own.

Day 4, New Year’s Day, entailed a rather uneventful 17.1km walk through more forest, before I arrived at the car. The Kepler Track had turned out to be easy walking and a very pleasant introduction to the Great Walks, but it only served to whet my appetite; I now couldn’t wait for the next challenge.

Lake Ponderings

Written: 1 January 1997

The one thing I really miss – and I mean really miss – when I’m travelling through this world is my music. There are, of course, plenty of other things I miss as well, such as family, friends, pint glasses and regular income... but that’s about all I can think of, to be honest, and I’m surviving without the pints and regular income perfectly well. Music, however, is a really painful vacuum.

There I am, watching another sunset over a Fiordland lake, and everything’s perfect except for the soundtrack. Sure, the gentle lapping waves are beautiful, the chirping birds are probably rare and the complete lack of human intrusion is pleasant, but nothing would beat a bit of Pink Floyd to go down with the sun. Or I’m sitting in the middle of a busy New Zealand town – yes, there are some out there, believe it or not – and the riff from a Led Zeppelin track pumps through my head, making me want to start playing my air-guitar right there in the street. Driving requires all sorts of mood music, from vicious metal riffs to cool, ambient vibes, depending on the type of journey and the speed of the car, and although I have a few tapes that I’m playing to death, I really, really miss being able to take CDs from my collection at home and simply stick ’em on the stereo.

I’ve just finished reading a book about U2, something I picked up in Invercargill from the second-hand book shop for a few dollars; the subject appealed to me, despite being nearly ten years out of date, because I have fond memories of seeing U2 live at Wembley Stadium on their Zooropa tour. I was dumbstruck then – it was a powerful event – and reading this book really brought it all home, how much the idea of carving out a career in something like music has always appealed to me. I say ‘like music’ because I’m definitely over the ‘I wanna be a rock star’ stage – I have neither the talent nor the confidence, unfortunately – but whereas my dream job as a teenager was to be a computer magazine editor (a dream that I’d realised by the time I was 23), I now look at the perfect job as something slightly more artistically rewarding, whether it’s writing or something I haven’t discovered yet.

I’ve often given thought to what I will do when I return, and the possibilities are intriguing: I could work for a technology company; I could go back into journalism; I could go back to university and study a course that I actually care about this time; or I could move into an area which is totally new to me. There’s little use in planning anything at this stage, but whatever the future holds, at least the present is pretty damn rosy, so I have the luxury of being able to ponder my future without actually having to do anything about it.

Oscar Wilde once wrote, ‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?’ and the same can be said about travelling around Fiordland, the huge area of wilderness in the southwest of the South Island. According to the guidebooks it’s the highlight of most people’s trip to New Zealand, and it’s certainly been my highlight, though probably for different reasons to the bungee-jumping crowd. I’ve been tramping myself into oblivion, sometimes quite literally, and loving every minute of it. Perhaps my next career aspiration will be to be a professional walker? Who knows...

Hollyford-Pyke Route

Written: 9 January 1997

Not wasting any time after finishing the Kepler Track, I got straight back on the road and headed up the Milford Road, past Lake Te Anau, to Gunn’s Camp at Hollyford. While walking the Kepler Track, I’d decided on my next plan: to conquer the Hollyford Track. The Hollyford Track is a step up from the Kepler Track, being a 56km track from the road end to the sea... and another 56km back again. The track is much tougher and the overall distance much longer – 112km there and back compared to 67km for the Kepler round trip – but I was feeling pretty confident after and didn’t feel at all tired, so the Hollyford it was. I’d already stocked up with ten days’ worth of food just in case, so after a night at Gunn’s Camp, I headed for the start of the track.

You might be wondering what a tramper has to carry on his or her back for a walk like this; well, for a nine-day hike like the Hollyford, it’s a hell of a lot. For a start, this is Fiordland, so you need clothes for all types of weather, from boiling sun to freezing hail, so the clothes take up a fair amount of weight, with waterproof tops and bottoms, long trousers, shorts, T-shirts, sweatshirts, plenty of socks, swimming trunks... and more. Then there’s the food for ten days (and always take a spare day or two, just in case you get stranded), which in my case included 1kg of muesli, powdered milk, 40 Ryvita, cheese, meat paste, seven packets of rice, four tins of tuna, tomato paste, spices, coffee, sugar... all ready to be split into strict daily rations. Throw in my Trangia cooker and half a litre of meths, and it’s getting heavier. Add in a sleeping bag and inflatable pillow, a toiletries/first aid bag, and things like torches, candles, compass, maps, books and so on, and you have your survival pack for over a week.

I could hardly lift the thing as I set off for the track, but the pack gets lighter as you eat your way through your supplies. You also get fitter as you progress, so one thing’s for sure: that first lift is always the worst.

Of course, the rain started straight away. I couldn’t really moan, seeing as I’d had four days of glorious weather on the Kepler and Fiordland isn’t exactly known for its sunshine, but it did mean that the first day, from the road end to the Alabaster Hut on Lake Alabaster, wasn’t that thrilling; I couldn’t see much of the Hollyford Valley that I was walking down, and the promised mountains weren’t anywhere to be seen. Still, the motley collection of people I found in the hut soon dispelled all thoughts of the weather; if the Kepler had been full of rather predictable traveller-types, the Hollyford was full of New Zealanders from all walks of life. From the six Tararua Tramping Club members to the two mad adventurers who had braved insane terrain to get there from Queenstown, the conversation flowed as freely as the water down the panes.

I met a guy called Rick who had the same sort of plan as me – nine days to go to the end of the track and back – and a family from Timaru who provided their own little soap opera in family politics for us all to enjoy, with an ancient but tough-as-old-boots mother taking her three late-twenties kids on the track, as well as two tag-along American friends who were well out of their depth. The Hollyford, being constructed as a one-way track, ensured that I’d end up with most of these people every night (except the Tararuas who were heading south), and this seemed a reasonable prospect, as long as nobody snored. Luckily nobody did.

Tempting Tracks

One of the stories the Tararuas told was of the Pyke Loop. The Hollyford is a one-way track, but there is a continuation of the track up the coast and back down the Pyke river, coming out at the Alabaster Hut again; if you imagine the whole loop as a Y-shape, then the Hollyford Track goes from the bottom of the Y to the top of the left fork, and the Pyke Loop crosses the top of the Y and heads back down the left-hand side, back to the stem. Although this loop track sounds ideal, reducing the only repeated section of the walk to the last day from Alabaster to the road end, it’s not really a sensible option; it’s classed as a route rather than a track, which means it’s hardly marked, it’s not maintained, and if it rains you’re in serious trouble, with flooding rivers, big swamps and only two huts on the entire 60km stretch. When I’d first looked at the walk details for the Hollyford I’d briefly entertained the idea of doing the Pyke Loop, only to read that the walk was only suitable for experienced, well-equipped parties, so I’d stuck to the Hollyford. Half of the Tararua group had just returned from the Pyke Loop, and with mud up to your waist, fast-flowing rivers and seriously thick scrub lacerating your legs, it sounded like the Hollyford was the better bet. Still, the Pyke would have been an interesting option if I’d been with a group.

The second day took me through forest bog and along the first section of the cutely named Demon Trail, and up the eastern shore of the north-south Lake McKerrow (the left branch of the Y, if you like). The rain had mercifully stopped, producing some interesting views in the morning over Lake Alabaster, with wispy clouds hanging round the tops – ‘hogs backs’ as Rick said the clouds were called – but the track was pretty nasty, coming complete with big mud puddles to negotiate, and heaps of moss-covered boulders that were so slimy they were lethal underfoot.

It didn’t take too long, though, and it was a pretty little walk, and by lunchtime I’d arrived at the Demon Trail Hut, where I found a beautiful little beach where I washed all my clothes. By now the sun had truly come out, and apart from the sandflies, who were epic all the way along the track, it was bliss. I also met more people – Phil, Tash and Steve from Christchurch – and before long we were all yarning the evening away. Too late we all discovered that Phil’s snoring was about as loud as a human being’s can be, but after a day’s tramping it takes considerable noise to keep you awake, and besides, I’d packed my earplugs. There were some tired looking walkers the next morning, though...

Day 3 consisted of the rest of the Demon Trail to Hokuri Hut, almost at the northern tip of Lake McKerrow, and apart from a couple of breaks in the bush, it was mainly tricky and slippery track, undulating along the lakeside, but totally enclosed by thick forest. Hokuri Hut was a welcome sight, and here I met Bill and Gary, who had just come from a trip anti-clockwise round the Pyke Loop. They looked in a real state, with scratched legs, raw elbows, and some serious stories. Gary kept on going south, but Bill stayed the night and kept us all entertained with tales of places like Lake Wilmot and the Black Swamp, both evil spots by the sound of it. And that’s when I caught the glint in Rick’s eye.

Gary, you see, had got the wrong end of the stick. When I’d met him on my arrival at the hut, I’d told him that I’d have loved to try the Pyke, but I wasn’t equipped, and besides, I was on my own, off he went, leaving me and Bill in the hut. But when Gary bumped into Rick, who was still on his way to the hut back on the Demon Trail, they’d also got talking about the Pyke, and Gary told Rick that if he wanted to do it, he should talk to this guy with a beard in Hokuri Hut; me, in other words. So Rick told me this, and we laughed and dismissed it out of hand, but as Bill unfolded his story of a living hell, we started looking at each other in that ‘whaddya reckon’ way. And so was born the germ of an idea that grew, and by the time we went to bed we were seriously considering the Pyke Loop, against all common sense. It all depended on the weather, and it turned out we could get a weather report from the Lodge at Martins Bay the next day, as the Lodge is a private hut for guided walkers, and they have luxuries like radios and food.

Teaming Up

So on day 4, Rick and I set off together on the trail to Martins Bay, which marks the end of the Hollyford Track. The walk was pretty lovely as it followed the beach on northern Lake McKerrow, before ducking into more bush and arriving at the Lodge...and here we asked for the weather report, nervous as to what it might say. It turned out that it would be fine for at least a couple of days – and no Fiordland weather report can be relied upon beyond a couple of days – so we committed to our plan (and should have been committed, frankly); the Pyke Loop it was.

We pushed on to the Martins Bay Hut, which was along a glorious beach, and stopped for lunch there, right at the end of the Hollyford Track. All of a sudden, Martins Bay had changed from the end of the track to the beginning of the Hard Part... and the butterflies were there in my stomach. We were about to enter dangerous territory where people die, territory where you can’t afford to give up, because if you give up, you get stranded, and if you get stranded, you either get rescued, or you get discovered weeks later. We’d both told DOC of our intentions, as one always should, but they wouldn’t be searching until a day or so after we were supposed to return, and even then they’d still have to find us. It was a sobering thought.

We pushed through to Big Bay that afternoon, effectively crossing the top of the Y. It was instantly obvious that the type of walking had changed; there were no more lovely tracks, just little worn routes with the odd marker. At the same time, the walk instantly became much more interesting; the path from Martins Bay to Big Bay was mainly along the coast, passing a truly stinking seal colony and some amazing rock sculptures, and all the time we had this wonderful view ahead of us of these huge mountains, such as Mt McKenzie, with their snowy tops and barren slopes where nothing grows at all. Big Bay itself lived up to its name, and the long slog along the beach was getting a bit painful after such a long day, but with views like this, it’s amazing how you forget your aching feet and straining shoulders. The hut, right at the northern end of the bay, wasn’t one of the most delightful I’ve ever seen, but we didn’t care and, apart from one other person (who turned out to be a bit of a weirdo from Te Anau[1]) we were totally alone in one of the most isolated spots in New Zealand. It was quite wonderful.

Big Bay might have been isolated, but there was one surprise in store. People tend to leave their excess food in huts, just in case a needy traveller turns up, and among the bags of milk powder and sugar was a packet of blackcurrant Vitafresh, a cordial powder that makes dodgy creek water taste palatable. And there, emblazoned across the packet that dated back to 1995, was a competition; ‘Win an Acorn Home Computer’ it proclaimed, along with the logo and a picture of an ancient Acorn machine. Of all the places to find a bit of advertising from the company who were effectively paying my way round New Zealand...

Into the Wilderness

On day 5 we got up at 5am to make an early start, mainly because we wanted all the walking time we could get. The next hut, Olivine, was too far away for a normal day’s walk, and most people camp out halfway along the loop, but having no tents we had to try for the hut, or stay out in a homemade bivvy (which was a feasible proposition, just not as nice as a hut). Bill’s party had taken 14 hours to get from Olivine to Big Bay, so we set off with some idea of what lay ahead, and it all looked so easy on the map. If only we’d known.

The track started off with a reasonably simple trudge through thick forest – in which we managed to get lost, rather worryingly – and across a swing bridge, and then we struck out due east, heading towards the Pyke River. After about 10km of bashing through the bush we reached the Pyke, and here the fun started. After crossing the river, which was quite braided at this point and only just above knee deep, we hit the track, only to find it went through flax quagmire, not the most pleasant walking in the world. After wading through knee-deep water, by which time our boots were well and truly soaked, we decided that walking in the river itself might be a good idea, seeing as it hadn’t been raining that much recently.

This turned out to be a good idea. While the track passed through goodness only knows what, we simply stuck to the river, crossing it in a zigzag fashion and sticking to the insides of corners where there was plenty of silt to walk on. The added bonus of river-hopping was the astounding view as we waltzed through the deep blue water (which was pretty damn cold, but refreshing nonetheless after the bush); looking down the valley we could see the Skippers Range rising up ahead on the right, with the Little Red Hill Range on the left, and occasional glimpses of the mighty Darran Range in the distance. It seemed that the stories of a living hell had to be wrong; this was beautiful tramping.

Before long we reached Lake Wilmot, where we stopped for a late lunch. The lake was pure beauty, and apart from some confusion with regard to the map – the one I was using was a 1988 revision, since which the whole area has been flooded a number of times, changing the area considerably – we’d managed really well. After lunch, full of Ryvita and confidence, we picked up the track along the eastern shore of the lake, making great progress to the southern end of the lake by about 3pm. And that’s when things started to go wrong.

We lost the track pretty quickly, which wasn’t that surprising as we’d been following our noses, there being no markers at all along the lake track. The problem was that we’d seen two different versions of the route on various maps; the one on mine said to go straight on after the lake, sticking to the east side of the valley, but the more modern map had shown a different track, crossing along the southern shore of the lake to the western side of the valley, before following the river down (which flows out of the southwestern tip of the lake).

We tossed a mental coin and went for the more modern option, crossing the southern shore to the river; we figured that having come this far down the river, we could probably continue to follow it all the way down. Whoops: bad choice.

When a river flows out of a lake, it’s going fast and deep. As we reached the southwestern tip of the lake, it became painfully obvious that we weren’t going to be able to follow the river any more, even if we stuck to the banks, so we decided to try to follow the river bank a few metres in from the water, through the bush.

This was when it really began to fall apart; I have never experienced the likes of hardcore Kiwi river-flat bush, and I hope I never do again. Imagine the thickest thicket, and double it; our progress was by inches, there was no respite, and the only tracks we found were made by deer. It’s not just a case of slow progress either; by far the worst aspect of bush-bashing is the pain involved, and here we discovered the source of Gary and Bill’s bloodied legs – bush bastards like hook grass and bush lawyer, which take absolutely no prisoners.

Going Nowhere Slowly

It took us about an hour of bush-bashing to realise that it was hopeless; we were getting nowhere, and were in considerable pain to boot. We turned right around, smashed our way back to the lake – what a gorgeous sight after that hell! – and threaded back to the southeastern corner of the lake, where we nursed our pride and tried to save the day by finding the track. The relief when we found the first marker deep in the considerably easier bush was huge, and we followed the markers through beech forest until we hit the Barrier River; we constantly lost the track, but after our experiences with the river bush, we were determined to keep to the path now that we had it in our sights, so if we lost the markers we’d turn back and try again. Cries of ‘marker!’ from whoever was leading were like manna from heaven.

The Barrier River posed no problems, being only knee deep, and the next stage was relatively easy, passing through the river flats where Davey Gunn, a legendary figure in the area and original proprietor of Gunn’s Camp, used to run his cattle. After crossing the Diorite Stream, from which we could see some beautiful waterfalls tumbling off the Little Red Hill Range near the source of the Diorite, we hit more bush, which the map said was the last stretch before the hut. If only it was that simple; the track wound round and round, seemingly going on forever, and we kept stumbling on parts that had been completely washed out. What do you do when a track disappears into the river? You get inventive, but when the sun’s already ducked below the mountains and the hut has got to be close, it’s soul destroying.

How we made it, I don’t know; I was on autopilot as my legs followed the rutted track, even though I couldn’t see the ground through the bush. I now understand what it’s like to have a huge beer belly, when your feet become old friends that you never see any more, but eventually we got to the Olivine River, where a strange contraption awaited us: a cage bridge. This involved getting into a cage, one at a time, and winding your way over the river, a painful and tiring experience after the 14.5 hours we’d been walking... but at last we could see the hut, and boy, it looked cosy.

That night we slept like the dead, after cooking a hasty meal and passing on all our tips onto the two Kiwi women whom we met in the hut, and who were doing the Pyke the other way around. We got plenty of tips off them for the ensuing trip back to Alabaster, but we were so exhausted that most of it went over our heads, and when we woke up late on day 6, life was starting to return to normal after the struggles of the day before.

Well-earned Rest

The rest day is a long-honoured and essential tramping tradition. Back in the Pilbara, Scott and I spent a wonderful rest day on the George River, massaging ourselves in the fast-flowing rapids, and slowly getting our aching bodies back into shape for the return run. The rest day gives you time to reflect on where you are and how you got there; after all, tramping isn’t so much a destination, as a journey – indeed, quite often the destination is the same car that you left from – and the rest day is when you can sit down and enjoy the complete solitude and total lack of the human world that you can only get by walking for miles into the wilderness.

I spent most of the day writing letters, talking with Rick about the hardships we’d suffered to get to where we were, and counting my scars. It felt good to know that the worst of the trip was over – the journey to Alabaster sounded easy in comparison – and we spent the day revelling in the knowledge that we’d managed to conquer the Pyke Loop. If only I’d known what lay in store for the next day, as I watched the stars appear in the clear night sky; it’s not over until the fat lady sings, and she hadn’t even turned up yet...

Day 7 saw an early start of 6am and more beautiful weather, with strong sunlight and a gentle breeze to take the sting out of the ultraviolet. On paper the route looked pretty easy; follow the river for about 10km before hitting the northern tip of Lake Alabaster, from where it was plain sailing if you just walked in the lake, according to the Kiwis. How could we go wrong? One word: washout.

We lost the track relatively early on, when we came upon a dry river that crossed our path. We crossed that easily enough, but soon after we hit the bush again, and we realised we hadn’t seen a marker for a while. Never mind, we thought, we’ll stick to the river bank, where we assumed the path would have been if the river hadn’t washed the markers away. That was our mistake; the track actually headed inland, but we missed it, and the rest, as they say, is history. Bush-bashing our way through reasonably thick bush – not as thick as around Lake Wilmot, but thick enough – we eventually came out at the river again, rather lost, but heading in the right sort of direction. And that’s where Rick decided he needed to get out of the grass, pronto.

Poor old Rick; he suffered badly from hay fever, and first thing in the morning we’d walked through a field full of pollen-heavy grass. He’d gone in front, and it had looked like he’d got an exhaust pipe fitted, the way he stirred up the pollen from the grass heads; now he was swelling up all over in a fearsome rash.

He clearly needed a break from the bush, and there was the river, all shallow and silted, so we decided to walk down the river again. It had been such a success before, so why not? It all went swimmingly for about 3km, until we tried to cross the river back to the eastern bank, but by this time it wasn’t such a friendly, shallow trickle: by now it had got its act together.

It’s vital to take river crossings very seriously. The biggest cause of death in areas like the Pyke is drowning – indeed, Davey Gunn drowned in the Hollyford, and he would have known the dangers better than anyone – and as we tried to cross the river, now waist deep, it became increasingly obvious that if one of us was to lose his foothold, we’d be swept away. We aborted the attempt, and after a couple of further tries, we realised we would have to tramp back to our original crossing place, and resume the bush-bashing.

The whole river episode had been a waste of time and effort, but we looked at it philosophically; braver and more stupid trampers might have pushed on and tried the crossing, and they might have drowned. We, on the other hand, were suffering, but very much alive[2].

The Black Swamp

One good thing about the river escapade was that it enabled us to pinpoint our position on the map; we were just north of a river that flowed across the track, and we reasoned that if we could get to the river, we could walk up and down it relatively unhindered and find the markers. We soon found the river, and Rick headed west towards the Pyke, while I headed east. I must have walked for a good half a kilometre through waist-deep, brown water, not seeing or caring what lay in the muddy creek; I was just glad that this wasn’t northern Australia, or I’d have been chomped up by a crocodile in no time at all. By the time I returned, soaked to the skin and with boots full of silt, I discovered that Rick had found the track, and had been yelling my name for ages. That’s another nasty aspect of the bush; it eats all sound. But we were so glad to have found the track again, I didn’t really care.

Actually, finding the track turned out to be a mixed blessing. The next obstacle was the one with the most emotive name on the map: the Black Swamp. We’d heard stories about the Black Swamp, and every one of them proved correct. It stank of rotting vegetation; it was, indeed, a very black, swampy area, dotted with odd tussocks of vegetation with strange grassy growths appearing out of the top; and it was waist deep in gooey, quicksand-like mud, as both Rick and I discovered as we waded through it. We started out by trying to hop from clump to clump, but this turned out to be pretty hopeless with the combination of heavy backpack and unstable vegetation, and by the end of the swamp, which can only have been about 200m wide, we were filthy, soaked, and, frankly, having a ball. When you’re already muddy, you might as well wallow in it, and wallow in it we did.

After the Black Swamp we miraculously managed to keep to the markers, despite large numbers of washouts. I had decided to wear my waterproof over-trousers to keep out the hook grass, as my legs were too sore to cope otherwise, and progress was generally good, although the bush we bashed through was monotonous, dark and pretty soul destroying. As we emerged onto the beach at the northern tip of Lake Alabaster, I sank onto the ground and collapsed into lunch; we’d taken the best part of seven hours to get from the hut to the lake, a very long time for such a short distance.

The view, though, was like no other. It was quite dreamy sitting at the end of the lake and looking south towards Mt Madeline and the Darran Mountains (the highest peaks in the region), especially after the darkness of the bush. From here on the walk was as near to perfect as you can get; we skirted the eastern shore of the lake, walking in the water which only came up to our knees, and making full use of the beaches when they arrived. The map reading was pretty easy too, as the western shore had a number of obvious features, and it was a big relief to be able to gauge our progress after the numbing frustration of the bush. We arrived at the Alabaster Hut just in time for tea, and for a wonderfully warm swim in the sun-heated lake.

On our last night the sunset had to be seen to be believed. There were pinks and violets and purples and reds, all reflecting off the lake, with the strangest cloud formations making the sky look like a poster from the late sixties. It was no coincidence that we slept really well that night, and the next day the tramp out to the car was blissfully easy, with well-formed tracks, no mud and no bloody hook grass; it wasn’t long before I’d met up with Zed – a welcome sight, I can tell you – dropped Rick off at his bus stop, and hopped into a gorgeously hot shower back at Gunn’s Camp, probably one of the most pleasurable moments of a long tramp.

After eight days in the bush – one less than originally planned, but far more challenging and rewarding than originally planned, too – even the rugged and rustic charm of Gunn’s Camp, with its fire-fuelled hot water system and friendly sandfly population, was civilised. That night I slept the sleep of the just.

[1] Southlanders – that’s people who live in Southland, which includes places like Invercargill and Te Anau, right at the bottom end of the South Island – have an accent all of their own. The area was settled by the Scottish, and as a result the locals have a very distinctive ‘r’ sound, derived from the rolling r’s of the Scots. These days it makes Southlanders sound like people from Devon, but they tend to speak very slowly and have an odd habit of repeating themselves. All this tends to make Southlanders sound a bit simple, which is a shame, as they’re actually the salt of the earth. What a pity we had to be stuck in a hut with the only one who lived up to his accent...

[2] It’s a serious point, this. I later read in the paper about a German who died on the Tasman Glacier when he fell off a moraine wall while taking a photograph; I’d spent Christmas Eve on the Tasman Glacier, and I’d climbed plenty of moraine around there. There but for the Grace of God...

Bush Bastards

Written: 6 January 1997

The New Zealand bush is wild, and the bush on the Pyke Route is no exception; it’s laced with some of the most unfriendly plants you could ever hope to meet. Forget familiar forest friends like waist-high thistles and huge clumps of stinging nettles, because the bush is full of bush bastards – there’s no other word for it.

The first bush bastard is hook grass, an innocent-looking little grass with brown seeds stored in clumps at the end of the stalks. So far so good, but hook grass has a clever little way of spreading its seeds; each seed has a little hook on it which attaches itself to any hairy beast that brushes past it, enabling the seeds to stick to the animal and fall off at a later date, thus spreading themselves around. This is mighty clever, but human leg hairs just aren’t as hardcore as deer hairs, so hook grass is an incredibly painful way of depilating your legs. Imagine walking through tall grass that constantly pulls your leg hairs out, and you can probably guess how much I hate hook grass; next time I either shave my legs or I invest in gaiters.

The next bush bastard is bush lawyer. I don’t know how it got its name, but bush lawyer rips you up and draws plenty of blood, which could be a clue. After the walk I was covered in bush lawyer scars that looked like claw gouges, and every one of them hurt like hell when it happened. Bush lawyer looks lovely, like a small-leafed ivy, and it climbs in much the same way – everywhere, in other words. The only problem is that bush lawyer is covered in extremely sharp thorns that all point one way, away from the end of the stem. This means that if some lawyer is hanging down and you walk into it, it lodges its thorns in your skin and as you walk away it rips into you like a plough ripping into a field. By the time you notice it, it’s too late, as it’s never just one strand; it comes with friends that will be stuck on your pack, in your clothes, in your hair and around your neck. Turning around or struggling only makes it worse; the solution is to slowly remove each bit, wincing as you go, and trying to avoid sudden movements. Having two people helps, if only because the first person can warn the other person not to follow. Bush lawyer is surely the ultimate bush bastard.

Then there’s the unnamed grass with big thick blades that act like paper. By this I don’t mean you can write on it, add a stamp and send a pretty postcard home; I mean the blades lacerate you with paper cuts. You’re walking along, minding your own business, and suddenly you find that blood is pouring down between your fingers from a nasty slash across your knuckles. It might not hurt yet, but it will do in about a minute... and it’ll hurt like hell for about three days, because the blades are smothered in a mild poison that irritates the cuts as they heal.

On top of all these friendly little plants are the usual challenges you face when hacking through forests, like the creeper that hangs across your path, catching your pack, stringing itself round your neck, and tripping you up. Or the countless fallen trees covered in slippery moss that turn out to be rotten as you put your foot right through the bark and into an angry insect nest. Or the sharp sticks everywhere that you can’t see because there’s so much foliage between you and the ground, but which spike your legs, causing gashes and cuts. Or even the ubiquitous bushes that don’t scratch as such, but slowly grind down your skin until it’s red raw and incredibly sore.

Never underestimate the wild bush; it hurts. But we keep coming back, so there must be something in it...

Milford

Written: 10 January 1997

The next day, stiff and stretching, I struck camp, hopped into Zed and headed off to Milford Sound. Milford is the main tourist attraction in Fiordland, with its stunning fiord and huge cliffs rising almost vertically out of the water, up to heights of nearly 1700m: it’s quite a sight. The drive to Milford is spectacular enough, with a dangerously winding road that’s home to millions of breakneck tour coaches; the Homer Tunnel, which blasts its way through the mountains to get to the sea, is probably the scariest tunnel I’ve ever driven through. Barely wide enough to accommodate two cars side by side, it’s pitch black, leaks frightening amounts of water, and the road surface is dodgy to say the least. Add the slope of the tunnel – sloping down towards the Milford end at quite a rate – and it’s enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies, especially when you meet four oncoming tour buses in a row, as I did on my return. It’s incredible that it isn’t permanently blocked by accidents...

The sight when you finally come out of the Homer Tunnel has to be seen to be believed. Sheer walls shoot up into the clouds on either side of you, with waterfalls cascading down all over the place, and tucked right down at the end of this huge glacial valley is Milford Sound, a beautiful body of water with huge peaks and rugged wilderness that seems to defy gravity. Unfortunately all this is too much of a lure for the tourists, and Milford township consists of very little except the usual tourist traps – hotels, restaurants, lots of parking space and very little else – and I hadn’t seen so many tour buses lined up since Uluru. Add in the noisy and smoky ferries that cart crowds of sightseers up and down the sound and you end up with something that isn’t exactly serene. That said, the short walk to Bowen Falls, a spectacular waterfall down the slopes, soon takes you away from the bustle of the car parks, and the magnificence of Mitre Peak, the 1695m mountain that rises right out of the sea in front of you, is well worth braving the madding crowd for.

Then there’s the wildlife, which is mostly underwater. It’s pretty unique because Milford’s huge annual rainfall – between 7m and 9m a year – creates a 3-4m layer of fresh water that floats on top of the sound (as fresh water is lighter than salt water), and the peaty stain of the fresh water makes the top 40m of the fiord much darker than normal. This means that some very strange animals and plants live in Milford Sound, some that otherwise wouldn’t live that near the surface, and despite the busy tourism and the ‘been there, taken the photo’ attitude of most visitors, Milford deserves its place in the guidebooks. Just don’t expect to be alone.

Southern Scenic Route (West)

Written: 11 January 1997

Heading back to Te Anau on the Milford Road, I stopped off at a place called the Chasm to see some seriously weird water-sculpted rock formations – water, in case you haven’t guessed, plays an important part in Fiordland’s ecology – and eventually arrived in Te Anau, reported my return to DOC and decided to change my plans. With an extra day in hand I thought it might be fun to do the western half of the Southern Scenic Route from Te Anau to Invercargill, seeing as I’d already enjoyed the eastern half from Dunedin. Leaflet in hand, I filled up the car and set off... only to find that the weather, which had been incredibly good since I’d started the Kepler, decided to do its stuff. The Southern Scenic Route turned into the Southern Drizzle Drive, but about halfway through I found a place that didn’t depend on a wonderful view: the Clifden Suspension Bridge.

And here I spent the night, right by this beautiful bridge, built in 1898 and preserved in an historic reserve. It might be less than a century old, but it feels historic in the same way that Iron Bridge Gorge and the original Clifton Suspension Bridge do, and as I listened to the radio, rain gently dribbling down, I felt rather lucky. A cyclone – Cyclone Dorina – had just hit Auckland, ripping roofs of houses in Whangarei, gusting at 90km/h, blowing down power lines, causing floods and generally spoiling people’s holidays, and here I was in supposedly the wettest area of the country – and one of the wettest places in the world, in fact – with only a light splattering of rain.

Unfortunately the drizzle continued the next day along with the Southern Scenic Route, so it wasn’t long before I reached Invercargill, having driven through similar coastal scenery to the eastern arm of the Route: trees growing at desperate angles, farmland that must be a nightmare to maintain, and beaches that look innocent until the rip tide carries you off into the Tasman Sea. It was rugged but attractive, unlike Invercargill.

I know that cities aren’t best viewed in the rain, but Invercargill was just as depressing in the storm as it had been in the strong sunlight. On the other hand it is a city, which means it has supermarkets, so I visited a Pack ‘n’ Save and stocked up with a couple of weeks’ worth of food before setting off due south to Bluff.

I’d not had time to visit Bluff, the southernmost town in the South Island, on my previous visit, which was a shame; in the rain the visibility was pretty awful, and although I walked round the bluff to the lookout point where the signs helpfully pointed out all the little islands to the south – such as Stewart Island, a famous tramping spot – I couldn’t see a thing, and simply succeeded in getting soaked. But hey! I’ve been to Bluff, the Kiwi equivalent to Land’s End, and all I have to do now is visit Cape Reinga on the northern tip of Northland and I’ll have travelled the New Zealand mainland from tip to toe (especially as I’ve already been to Slope Point, the southernmost tip of the South Island). Trivia is a wonderful travelling companion sometimes...

Queenstown

Written: 13 January 1997

After visiting Bluff I took advantage of the lack of distractions in Southland to head north to Queenstown once again. My plans to camp in a dirt cheap DOC campsite at 12 Mile Creek were dashed when I discovered a bikers’ rally there for the weekend, so after pussyfooting about – something I tend to do when my plans get scuppered – I checked into a rather posh caravan park right in the town at the princely sum of NZ$10 per night, the most expensive place I’ve yet camped in New Zealand. Still, Queenstown is regarded as one of the most expensive places in the country, so I decided to treat myself, and despite the fact that in the dining room I heard every language except English, making it rather hard to believe I was in New Zealand, I enjoyed the pampering; I also enjoyed the real meat that I’d bought for my supper, my first meat this year after eating nothing but dried rice and the odd bit of tinned tuna on my tramps.

Sunday saw a slight clearing of the rain, so I popped up Queenstown Hill after lunch for stunning views of the Remarkables, the mountains round Queenstown, and Lake Wakatipu, on which Queenstown sits. It’s a lovely place... or, to be more accurate, it’s a lovely setting, as Queenstown itself is just another modern town, albeit somewhat more interesting than most, with its quaint tourist-friendly centre, Ye Real Olde English Pubbe and Real Old Kiwi Pub (both of which are stunningly new) and shops that stay open until 11pm (even on a Sunday). It’s a tourist Mecca, but as one of my hobbies is watching the world go by, I found it fascinating, even though it stirred up some strange emotions. As I wandered past the restaurants, where people tucked into exquisite dishes over bottles of wine, and tiptoed past the pubs, hearing beery laughter waft out with the smell of pies and pints, I couldn’t help being whisked back to the days when I used to spend a lot of my time in pubs and restaurants, back when I had an income and before I started budgeting in earnest. Right there, on the streets of Queenstown, it hit me how much I miss that lifestyle sometimes; cooking in a campsite is all very well, but I miss the social aspect of everyone going down the pub and hitting the curry house afterwards. There is a positive side to living on a budget – you really appreciate going out when you do, and it’s the only way I can afford to travel for a decent period – but eating in restaurants and relaxing in warm pubs are luxuries that destroy travel budgets, and sometimes it’s hard to be the one living on a shoestring with your nose pressed to the glass.

But despite the odd pang for a rich, western lifestyle, Queenstown was a great place to relax while waiting for the weather to roll away, as I planned my next walk.

Routeburn-Greenstone Track

Written: 17 January 1997

The next bout of activity I’d planned was the Routeburn Track, which starts just north of Glenorchy (itself to the northwest of Queenstown) and takes you to over the mountains to a point called the Divide on the Milford Road. There I planned to pick up the Greenstone Track, taking me back towards Glenorchy, but ending some 25km of dusty road and a good day’s walk from the start of the Routeburn (and my car). ‘Never mind, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,’ I thought, and jumped in the car for Glenorchy.

The Routeburn is interesting; before I did it I had doubts about whether it was going to be worth the effort. After the Hollyford-Pyke it looked like plain sailing, with only one extra challenge; with the huts being NZ$28 a night – it’s one of the most popular Great Walks and is priced accordingly – I opted to camp for only NZ$9 a night, but that meant adding over 2kg of tent to my already back-straining pack. The problem with the Routeburn is that it’s a bit of a surrogate for the Milford, which means it’s very touristy; some 10,000 people a year tramp the Routeburn, and most of them (like me) aren’t locals. I figured I’d just have to bite the bullet and put up with the crowds, though in the end the fact that I was camping meant I never had any real problems, even though there were plenty of people on the track. Sure, there were some busy spots, such as the Harris Saddle Shelter, but no self-respecting tourist is going to worry about saving NZ$19 a night for the privilege of lugging a tent around, so the campsites were pretty empty, and actually I rather enjoyed the tourist-watching.

So in the end the Routeburn turned out to be a real highlight, with less crowding than on the Kepler. The track itself is incredible; from east to west you climb steadily up until you reach the Harris Saddle, before winding your way down to the Divide, and almost all of the walk is above the bush-line, so you get some incredible views. It’s a more immediate walk than the Kepler; with the Kepler you’re above the mountains, which gives great vistas, but on the Routeburn you’re really inside the mountain range, with huge peaks rising right beside the track, making you feel very small indeed. I loved it, and it turned out to be the most spectacular walk I’ve yet done (apart from the Mueller Hut, but that’s a special case).

Trekking the Routeburn

Day 1 was an easy two-hour wander to Routeburn Flats, a lovely river flat where the sandflies weren’t too bad (at least compared to the Hollyford) and the views were wonderful. The weather, in an atypical display of sympathy, had cleared to sunny and hot, and the skies got clearer and clearer as the walk went on, which I appreciated as I would have been high enough to be right inside the clouds if the weather had turned.

Day 2 saw the most spectacular landscapes on the way up to the Harris Saddle, home to the beautiful Lake Harris and some of the most inspiring peaks you’ll ever see. It’s a bit pointless me going on about how impressive the views are, because it’s only possible to understand when you’ve actually been there, but suffice to say that the trek over the saddle would on its own make the Routeburn worth doing, and the short climb up to Conical Hill made me feel as if I was on top of the world.

All this is a very different type of walking to the Hollyford-Pyke; there it was all about river valleys, bush and bog, none of which tend to crop up on alpine tracks like the Routeburn. The differences between the two tracks were instantly apparent from Conical Hill, from where I could see right down the Hollyford Valley to Martins Bay; that was quite a sight, knowing that I’d spent a week or so hacking my way up the valley laid out before me. Skirting back down the western side of the range, I could see Gunn’s Camp, the Hollyford Road and all sorts of familiar sights, all brought to life by my previous tramp. It felt a bit like coming home...

That night at Mackenzie Camp was a delight, with especially beautiful views towards Emily Peak as it reflected in Lake Mackenzie. The campsite was a bit pitiful and, as with Routeburn Flats, rather cold and dewy, but at least it kept my milk mixture cold for my morning muesli, and meant that when I woke up, I had absolutely no desire to lie in and freeze in the perishing morning mist. Stalking down towards the Divide on day 3, I made good time to Lake Howden; from here I took a track up to Key Summit, which was home to more great views, especially of Lake Marian, and I also took the time to take in a nature trail. And that marked the end of the Routeburn; now for the Greenstone.

Back on the Greenstone

The Greenstone, while undoubtedly a lovely walk, did rather bore me. The reason? It’s another leafy, forested valley walk, and I’d had quite a lot of that already on the Kepler and Hollyford Tracks already. The solution? I hoofed it and walked all the way to the last hut, Sly Burn, in the one day, on top of the 11km or so from the last part of the Routeburn and the side trip up Key Summit. The views were wonderful most of the way, even though I was a bit tired of river valleys, and although my body ached and my feet throbbed, I made it to the hut to find there was one spare bed in the hut – mine! – and a refreshingly freezing swimming hole down the river bank. I almost felt human after my evening rice dish, and fell asleep on the soft, warm mattress the second I hit it.

The last day went beyond pain. The last couple of hours to the road end were sheer agony as I had some kind of muscle strain in my left ankle, and by the time I reached the road end, I really needed a rest. Quite how I was going to manage the next 25km along the road to my car, I didn’t know, but then the gods smiled on me. On my first attempt at a hitch, I snagged a ride from a Japanese tramper who was heading to the Routeburn to drop off his car, which was perfect, as that’s where I’d left Zed. As we bombed down the dirt road towards the car park, I realised just how far it would have been to walk, and I thanked my stars that I wasn’t going to be left stranded... and sure enough, after a short drive there was good old Zed, in one piece and looking like home to me.

Before long I was showering, beard-trimming and clothes-washing in the Glenorchy Motor Camp, feeling that happy and healthy glow you get when another tramp is consigned to memory. When you return from days in the wilderness, it’s surprising how acute your senses become. Without everyday chemicals, smells, culinary delights and washing routines to clog the senses, you really notice things that you normally don’t spot, like people’s perfume, from ladies’ cologne to men’s after-shave and deodorant; it hits you in the face when you walk in the door. The same happens on the track when you walk past day walkers, and it makes you really appreciate how much we pamper our bodies in everyday life. Then there are the good old taste buds; that Snickers bar and bag of crisps is never going to taste as good as just after a long tramp. Modern day noises, like car horns and telephones, all sound out of place, and real bedding feels like God’s gift to the Insomniacs. If you want to appreciate life’s little luxuries, opt out of them for a week and go bush.

And so ended my last big tramp for a while, after walking a total of 278km on the map over 16 days (that’s over 17km, or nearly 11 miles, per day). I’d never been this fit, this full of stamina, or this glad to sink back into the driver’s seat and enjoy the world through a car window. I’m even tempted to pamper myself a little more, after all that dried rice and pasta I’ve been eating...

West Coast (South Island)

Written: 21 January 1997

The night after finishing the Routeburn-Greenstone Track, I pampered myself with a couple of cold beers in the local pub, while chatting away to a fellow tramper whom I’d met in the caravan park, and who was full of stories of grizzly bears in North America and the desolation of Alaska. The next day was pretty desolate too, as I headed off to Wanaka over the highest road in New Zealand, some 1121m above sea level at the highest point. Unfortunately it’s also one of the most corrugated and disastrously steep roads I’ve ever driven on, so the stunning views and pretty little settlement of Cardrona were less memorable than the struggle to avoid falling off the cliffs. Still, it was a worthy detour, and got me in the mood for a little driving.

I shot through Wanaka, another picturesque town on another beautiful glacial lake, and kept driving over the Haast Pass to the wild west coast, stopping off at various stunning sights such as Knight’s Point (with its beautiful views up and down the rugged coast) and the glacial lakes of the interior. There were plenty of waterfalls and forest walks along the way, but after my Fiordland tramps, the last thing I wanted was more trekking through rainforest, so I just drove and drove until I found a little DOC campsite at Lake Paringa, yet another picturesque glacial lake that came complete with plenty of sandflies and masses of forest. It was pretty and wild, but to be honest, the appeal of forested wilderness is wearing a little thin after the overdose I’ve just had.

And that’s where the glaciers came in.

Fox Glacier

The next day I put my foot down and headed north to Fox Glacier, a tiny tourist settlement at the end of – you guessed it – the Fox Glacier. The weather was miserable, so I booked into the local caravan park, set up my tent in the howling rain, and drove off to have a look at the glacier. I managed the walk up to the glacier terminal – a very big affair that differs from the Hooker and Tasman Glaciers by having no terminal lake, so you can walk right up to the ice wall – but the weather was truly dismal, so I headed back to the relative comfort of the campsite.

As I was walking towards the communal kitchen, I thought I recognised the Jim Morrison haircut sitting by the window. Then I recognised the jacket, and then the person... and who should be sitting in the kitchen but Ben and Mira, with whom I’d gone climbing in Mt Cook, and who’d cycled all the way from Mt Cook while I’d been tramping in Fiordland. The irony was that here we were again, looking at Mt Cook and not being able to see it as the weather was so dismal, but this time we were looking from the other side, as Fox Glacier is another glacier that flows from the Mt Cook range. We nattered the night away, making friends with other campers in the way people do when it’s raining and there’s precious else to do.

The next day the weather cleared, as it tends to do on the coast – changeable isn’t the word for the weather I’ve been enjoying – so we made the most of it and headed off to Lake Matheson, a beautiful lake that reflects a view of the Southern Alps that has to be seen to be believed. It wasn’t perfect weather, but the view was still breathtaking, and when we got back to the campsite I stuck most of Ben and Mira’s panniers in my car and arranged to meet them in the next town, Franz Josef, so they could enjoy a lighter ride on their next leg. Meanwhile I did a quick walk up to a viewpoint over Fox Glacier, on the site of an old chalet where you could see right up the glacier to its starting point in the mountains; it was another stunning view in a country that’s full of them. And then it was back in the car to drive to Franz Josef.

Franz Josef Glacier and Okarito

Ben and Mira made excellent time without their baggage weighing down their bikes, and once they’d arrived we walked all around the Franz Josef Glacier together, before heading up to the Tatare Tunnels, a collection of surreal man-made tunnels into the mountains that are half full with water, and are about as spooky as Tunnel Creek (though considerably less so with Ben and Mira tagging along). Before long we moved on to a little settlement called Okarito right on the west coast, where we set up camp and made a quick dash to the top of the Okarito Trig Point.

Okarito is amazing. It’s a tiny little village right on the edge of the wild Tasman Sea, and it’s real frontier stuff. There’s a beautiful lagoon right next to the village, which is home to some extremely rare bird life, and the view from the Trig Point is probably as good as it gets. You can see all along the coast, and right into the Southern Alps range as it spreads out in front of you. Mt Cook and Mt Tasman are huge peaks on the horizon, with the other peaks of the area, like the Minarets, clearly visible in the distance.

We caught it as the sun was going down, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Okarito is the home town of Keri Hulme, author of The Bone People, and it’s easy to see how such a setting can bring out the artist in you. That night we drank a couple of beers that Ben had bought in thanks for me carting their stuff around – which was hardly difficult, I must say – and in the morning we were truly sad to leave, them on bicycle and me by car. I assumed I’d never see Ben and Mira again[1], but I really wished I would.

Yet again I was in a driving mood, which is not that surprising after the amount of foot travel I’ve been doing. I drove straight up to Greymouth, and after a quick lunch stop I continued north to Punakaiki, home of the eccentric Pancake Rocks, a coastal formation that defies belief. The rocks are made up of layers that make them look like piles of pancakes, and if it wasn’t for the immense popularity and accessibility of the area – and hence the huge numbers of tourists – it would be truly magnificent. Instead it’s a wee bit commercial, but still well worth the visit.

[1] I was wrong – I’d bump into them again in Nelson.

Arthur’s Pass

Written: 23 January 1997

I’d originally been planning to continue north from Punakaiki, but the weather had other ideas and turned distinctly miserable, so instead I headed back to Greymouth and turned inland towards the Southern Alps, hoping that things might improve away from the gusty coast. After a night in a rest area, I arrived at Arthur’s Pass to surprisingly beautiful weather, and made the most of it to scoot up Avalanche Peak, a fairly steep track up to the top of a mountain with wonderful views over the pass and surrounding mountains. My timing was impeccable: as I sat at the top surveying the view, the clouds rolled in, and the visibility changed from tens of kilometres to tens of feet in a matter of minutes. It just goes to show that carrying all those spare clothes, even on the shortest tramp, is a good idea, because I went up in T-shirt and shorts and came down in trackie bottoms, three layers and my Gore-Tex top, and I still felt bloody freezing...

It stayed cold and miserable for the rest of the day, so I hung out in the public shelter where I met plenty of interesting and chatty people (public shelters obviously being the place to be in shitty weather) and that evening, when the skies cleared temporarily, I managed to do the Arthur’s Pass Historic Walk, a short jaunt round a number of plaques that describe the history of the place. The driving wind only convinced me to head back indoors, and after putting up the tent (you can camp at the Arthur’s Pass public shelter quite legally) we yarned the night away while the wind whistled around the eaves.

The next day saw no change in the weather, but a group of five of us battled up the walk to Temple Basin, a fairly pointless exercise in the end as the views were non-existent and the rain was freezing. However, one good thing did come from the morning jaunt: it made us all more than happy to stay huddled up in the relatively pleasant shelter, and the rest of the day passed into history in the same way that my first few shelter-bound days in Mt Cook National Park had. Never mind: I’ve been incredibly lucky with the weather so far in the South Island, so I can’t really moan.

Thursday continued the rainy tradition, so I aborted my plans to visit Craigieburn Forest Park on the way to Christchurch and just drove straight to the east coast, where the weather was hot, clear and a big relief after the storms of the Alps. It proved a typically English subject for conversation as I tried to dry out the contents of the car.

Christchurch

Written: 28 January 1997

There are plenty of sayings peppering the English language that concern themselves with jealousy and bemoaning your unhappy lot – ‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’ is probably the most classic idiom – but in New Zealand I feel I’ve found a way of slipping through the fence whenever I fancy; if my grass isn’t green enough, I find some that is, and visit it. It’s obviously a luxury that comes from being free of the constraints of job, mortgage and attachments, but that doesn’t make it any less valid.

It struck me when I arrived in Christchurch for the third time, after exploring most of the South Island, just how different life in civilisation and the wilderness can be. I might have thought that Glenorchy, Queenstown and Te Anau were bustling metropolises when I came back from days of tramping, but Christchurch, the biggest city in the South Island, highlighted the little things in life that you so often taken for granted. Playing golf with Simon and Steve was so different to walking in the bush; eating roast chicken and roast potatoes was a taste sensation after trail food; drinking ridiculous amounts of beer and cider and dancing the night away was something I used to do at least once a week in London, but it now seemed debauched and luxurious after weeks of living on a budget. Christchurch was pure western luxury, and I overdosed on it. That’s what I mean by being able to cross the fence; people working in offices look out on green fields and wish they were there, and people out in the wilderness dream of hot showers, decent food and beer on tap. In New Zealand I’ve been lucky enough to be able to hop between the two lifestyles at the drop of a hat.

So yet again Christchurch life turned into a succession of golf, drinking, junk food, comfortable beds and, worryingly, karaoke, and if it hadn’t been for my car being broken into while parked on a suburban backstreet, I’d have found it hard to leave. However, the shock of losing my hiking boots, guitar, harmonica, empty backpack, torch, knife and radio to a casual car thief gave me a real urge to head out into the wilderness once again, so after Steve kindly leant me his spare backpack, I headed north, aiming in the general direction of Nelson, a step closer to the volcanoes of the North Island.

Nelson

Written: 31 January 1997

On Tuesday I drove to Nelson via the Lewis Pass, a beautiful afternoon’s drive through stunning mountain scenery with the sun beating down from a clear blue sky. That night I stayed with Mike, the local Acorn dealer, and the next day I visited a couple of schools to the west of Nelson, before heading north to explore the area round Golden Bay. Talk about paradise: Golden Bay is well named, and it’s worth the drive up the steep and bendy road just to see those beautiful beaches stretching into the sunset, backed by tree-covered mountains and valleys. I made my way to Pakawau, almost at the northern tip of the South Island, and on the way I visited the Pupu Springs where clear, cold water pours out of the ground in such quantities that it moves rocks. After setting up the tent in Pakawau I drove north up a dirt road to the stunning and wild Whakariki Beach, one of the northernmost points of the South Island. I can think of far worse ways of spending a Wednesday afternoon.

That night, back at camp, I fell into a conversation with this bloke who was staying in one of the cabins, and he ended up inviting me in for a coffee. Robin was a Kiwi who had lived in England for 12 years, and he was spending time away from it all in Pakawau while waiting for a court case to come up; his business had collapsed and he was out on bail for some kind of fraud charge, and despite the circumstances, both he and his cat Floyd were excellent company. Robin even fed me, and offered me one of the beds in the other room (the cabins had two rooms, and he was on his own); it was quite a luxury after a roll-mat on grass.

The next day Robin drove me to a place called Bainham; as he lived in Nelson and had spent quite a lot of time exploring the area, he knew all the interesting places to visit. In Bainham the landscape is beautiful and the rivers have carved deep gorges through the mountains, and one of these gorges is home to a bungee jump and huge swing, so once again I got to see someone leaping into the unknown with only an elastic band for comfort. Our final visit was to the Devil’s Boots, strange rock formations that look like a giant’s boots sticking out of the earth, and then it was time to say goodbye, hop into Zed, and head off back to Nelson to visit more schools.

And just to rub in the fact that New Zealand is a small place, in Nelson I bumped into my Christmas buddies Ben and Mira for the third time. It had been bizarre enough seeing them again in Fox Glacier, but spotting them walking down the street in Nelson – and not even the main street – was truly freaky. They just laughed when they saw me; they’d already bumped into a couple of other people they knew, even though they’d only just arrived, and they’d been wondering whether I was still around. It’s a small place, the South Island...

New Zealand: North Island

Catchpool Valley

Written: 3 February 1997

After finishing my business in Nelson – five articles in all, not bad for a couple of days’ work in paradise – I drove to Picton and hopped on the late-night ferry to Wellington. The only problem with late-night ferries is arriving in a place when most self-respecting citizens are in bed, but ‘No worries,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just hit a DOC campsite,’ and indeed there was a very convenient camp just 50km from Wellington at the Catchpool Valley in the Rimutaka Forest Park. How on earth I managed to pick the only DOC campsite in the country that has gates that close at dusk, I don’t know, so after discovering in the pitch black of night that I was stranded in the middle of nowhere, I drove around until I found a secluded spot, and gratefully fell asleep in the back of Zed, thanking my lucky stars that I’d bought a station wagon.

The Rimutaka Forest Park stretches along the Rimutaka Range to the east of Wellington, and is home to plenty of pine forest, some pretty little valleys, and, of course, the weekend tourists from the city. That didn’t cause me any grief, as it was rather pleasant to see all the happy (and unhappy) families enjoying the sun, picnicking away in what they thought was the wilderness, but it brought something home to me. City dwellers, wherever they are in the world, can sometimes come across as quite antisocial compared to country folk, and despite my best smiles and g’days, the vast majority of people looked at the floor, metaphorically shuffling their feet as I passed them on the walking tracks. It seems that New Zealand has a similar but inverse problem to England, in that the further north you go, the more accidentally antisocial the people get (in England it’s traditionally the other way around, with southerners being less inclined to talk to strangers).

The two tracks I did in the Catchpool Valley were short and sweet, though predictably tame after the South Island. The Orongorongo Track, one of the most popular walks in New Zealand according to the blurb, was reasonable but not that inspiring; it’s popular because of its ease and its proximity to Wellington rather than its amazing scenery, no doubt. The Butcher Track, on the other hand, took me to the top of the hills, resulting in a beautiful view over Wellington harbour, far more impressive than the view from the hills above Eastbourne that I’d enjoyed on my first visit to Wellington, all those weeks ago. In the background I could see the South Island, and on top of the hill I found a peaceful pine canopy where the pine needles were comfortable enough for a Sunday afternoon snooze. My tramping stamina has dropped by a fair amount since Fiordland, no doubt a consequence of a few days’ of beery socialising in Christchurch and Nelson; you can’t have your cake and eat it, I guess.

Taranaki

Written: 9 February 1997

I’d been looking forward to getting back to the North Island, because I had a plan: to explore the amazing volcanoes of Taranaki and Tongariro. I thought I’d start with the Around the Mountain Circuit (AMC) at Taranaki, with a trip up to the top of Mt Taranaki itself if possible, because there was an Acorn dealer nearby whom I’d arranged to meet for some post-walk work; so I didn’t waste any time in driving straight from the Catchpool Valley to Egmont National Park on the western coast of the North Island.

Mt Taranaki was named Mt Egmont by Captain Cook after the Earl of Egmont, who sponsored his first voyage, but the Maori went to court to try to get the name changed to Taranaki, their original name for the mountain, and in an astounding case of trying to please everyone, the court ruled in 1986 that both names were valid. As a result, on all the maps you see ‘Mt Egmont or Mt Taranaki’ printed by the peak, but whatever you call it – and I prefer Taranaki, because it seems more appropriate – it’s a stunner.

Egmont National Park – at least that name hasn’t changed – is almost circular and encloses Mt Taranaki at its centre, and it’s fair to say that the mountain dominates the entire area. Taranaki is an almost perfect volcanic cone, with a beautiful snowy peak and, from a distance, only one blemish on its slopes, that of Fanthams Peak, another little cone. I didn’t appreciate just how immense the mountain is, because when I drove towards the peak, the weather was totally overcast and I couldn’t see a thing; but when I woke up on the morning of my trek, having slept in the back of Zed at the National Park’s headquarters, there it was, looming above me. The day started off as clear as a bell, and it wasn’t long before I was stomping off on the track, with my borrowed backpack filled to the brim, and my backup pair of faithful old walking boots on my feet.

The AMC is a swine, no doubt about it. It might look all innocent on the map, but it goes up and down more times than the New Zealand dollar’s exchange rate; volcanoes have huge lava flows down their slopes, so the mountain is a bit like your hand if you put your fingertips on the table with your palm facing down. This means that walking round the peak means climbing and descending throughout the day, but despite the physical challenges, it’s a beautiful track, and when the weather is clear, you can see for miles from the volcanic slopes. That’s when the weather is clear, though...

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Day 1 started well, as would most of my days on the trail, but it soon started clouding over and it wasn’t long before the rain set in. I’d decided to follow the higher alpine route because of the better views (the other route was mainly through forest), and after climbing up the aptly named Puffer – a really steep track that I thought would never end – I clambered around the mountain to Dawson Falls and started heading downhill towards Lake Dive, and that’s when the cloud kicked it. I could see it approaching from the west, in a big thick rolling mass, and before ten minutes was up I was surrounded by cloud, with a visibility of about 20 metres and a temperature drop from boiling down to seriously cold; the weather rolls in pretty quickly when you’re this close to the west coast, and it’s particularly noticeable when you’re up in the mountains.

Still, the rain kept off long enough for me to reach the hut at Lake Dive, at which point the heavens opened. Luckily the hut I was in had a stove with plenty of dry wood, and it wasn’t long before I had a roaring fire going, slowly drying out my sodden clothes. When I arrived at the hut I was alone, quite a rarity on a popular walk like the AMC, but soon I had company in the shape of Jacek (pronounced ‘Yatsik’), a Kiwi who had come over from Poland with his family when he was 11, back in the bad old days of martial law and Solidarity. He was very interesting company, and we decided to walk together for the rest of the trip, especially as the weather had made the track a lot more treacherous than normal, and a broken ankle is a bit of a downer if you’re on your own.

Friday saw us scramble over the alpine route to Waiaua Gorge, and again the visibility was pretty bad, although we did get a good view of the volcano in the morning before the clouds rolled in. Saturday was much the same, with the track wandering around through alpine scrub and rainforest to Holly Hut. This walk is probably the most physically demanding track I’ve yet done, with climbs and descents of about 1000m every day, and by the time we reached the huts I was totally exhausted, even more than I’d been on the Pyke Loop; I can generally walk for miles and miles on the flat, but put a hill in front of me and watch me squirm.

Saturday evening was fun, with a large Kiwi family taking up half the hut and entertaining us with tramping stories and wee drams of whisky, the generous souls. The Christmas pud and custard they gave us went down a treat, too; needless to say the family was only on a one-night trip, something that was more and more apparent as they unpacked sausages, potatoes, vegetables, bottles of wine and all the other delights that you take for granted in the outside world, but which suddenly become perishable and heavy when you’re on a long trek.

To the Top!

Sunday morning was very cloudy, but Jacek and I got up at 6am to try to get to the base of the summit track nice and early. Luckily the cloud was mainly round the northern side of the mountain, and as we came round to the northeastern side (where the AMC begins) the sky cleared slightly, showing a huge billowing mass of cloud pouring off the mountain towards the north; as with the Southern Alps, winds come in from the west and get forced upwards by the mountain where they condense into rain clouds, but slowly the cloud cleared from the peak until it was all blue skies, so I decided I just had to go up. Jacek’s knee had been playing up and he sensibly decided to give it a miss, so we said our goodbyes and I started the long haul up to the 2518m (8261 ft) peak, complete with a full pack and my trusty old boots.

There were two major problems, though. The most pressing, and the most painful, was that my trusty old boots were, by now, my crusty old boots; the soles were so thin it was like walking in crepe paper sandals, and with volcanic rock being the sharp stuff it is, I felt every stone, which wore out my feet far more quickly than it would have done in the old leather toughies that had been stolen in Christchurch. The second problem was that however I tried to adjust my pack, it was truly uncomfortable; I’d had my own pack stolen in Christchurch and had borrowed this one off a friend for a few weeks, and there’s just no substitute for your own backpack. After a four-day circuit walk with shoes from hell and a backpack that didn’t fit, the 45° scree slope and the serious climb to the top of Taranaki really took it out of me. I got to the top but it hurt, it really hurt; however the view was stunning, not because I could see for miles, but because a low layer of cloud was covering the country as far as the eye could see, and from the height of the summit I could see above the clouds, just like in an aeroplane. Mt Ruapehu, the highest peak in the North Island, was a cloudy hump in the distance, and the crater at top of Taranaki itself was quite stunning, and well worth the strains in my knees and back.

Climbing volcanoes is an art, though. You might look at a volcano and think it’s just a case of plodding up a 45° rock face until you topple into the crater, but however solid the thing might look from a distance, it feels more like a pile of sand than a mountain. Imagine trying to walk up a massive heap of gravel, and you’re not far off the experience of climbing a volcano; add in a full backpack weighing you down, and it’s definitely a case of three steps forward, two back. The best part, though, is coming down; on the snowy slopes at the peak I simply skied down on my shoes, with the backpack giving me enough weight to push me down, and on the scree I moonwalked down in half the time it took me to get up. I paid for it with aching knees, but with a kilometre of volcano to slide down, it was quite an experience.

Coming back to civilisation in the form of Dennis and Heather’s hospitality – Dennis being the local Acorn dealer in New Plymouth, and Heather being his wife – was pure luxury, especially as Dennis had stocked his fridge full of beers in preparation (it seems I’m getting a reputation for turning up at the dealers and demonstrating exactly what a bottomless appetite looks like). We spent the next three days travelling round schools in the Taranaki area, driving right round the mountain on the Monday and heading up the coast on Tuesday, with one local school slipped in on Wednesday morning. I can think of worse ways to earn NZ$500, and by the time I left New Plymouth I’d gorged out on barbecues, brews and excellent company, and was ready for the next volcano.

Tongariro

Written: 15 February 1997

With my work done in Taranaki, I didn’t waste any time in driving to Whakapapa Village, the main town in Tongariro National Park in the centre of the North Island. On the way I passed through sleepy Raurimu, where only the Saturday before a loony had gone crazy with a gun and blown a bunch of innocent people away. It was such a tiny little place, easy to miss in the blink of an eye, which just goes to show that in this day and age, it’s always the quiet ones that go off at the deep end...

Tongariro is the oldest National Park in New Zealand, having been donated to the government by the local Maori chief when he realised that it would otherwise be taken by force. It proved a sensible move – National Parks are protected, after all – and it means that the most amazing area in the North Island is relatively untouched by man. I arrived in cloud, as seems to be the norm for whenever I drive towards New Zealand’s volcanoes, and set up camp at the local campsite, only to discover that my tent had gone slightly mouldy since I last opened it, and it stank something rotten. Never mind; I’ve slept in worse places than a rancid tent, and I’m sure I will again.

As if to apologise for hiding the mountains from me yet again, the following day awoke to glorious sunshine, a huge bonus seeing as that’s when I was planning to set off on the Tongariro Northern Circuit, a three-day tramp through the volcano-ridden northern half of the park. I can safely say that I have never experienced anything like the might of Mts Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu (pronounced ‘Tong-a-reer-oh’, ‘Nara-hoe-wee’ and ‘Roo-a-pay-hoo’) and I doubt I ever will[1]. Unless you’ve been to a volcanic area, only the photographs can really show what the place is like, but I’ll have a go at describing it. Yet again a place in New Zealand goes beyond mere vocabulary...

The volcanoes of Tongariro are totally different to Taranaki. Taranaki is bush-clad until the tree line, and after that it’s tussock and, finally, rock and snow; it’s a classic dormant volcano, having last erupted about 200 years ago. In Tongariro the eruptions are much more regular – Ruapehu last erupted in June 1996 and smoke still pours out every now and then – and the whole area is pretty desolate; if you want to know what it’s like on the moon, come to Tongariro. I walked through areas where the ground was steaming with sulphuric clouds; places where the ground wasn’t visible through the huge clouds of steam rising from subterranean pools of boiling acid; spots where clear, cold water erupted out of the ground to form oases in the desert; craters so big you could hold rock concerts in them; and lakes whose fluorescence put the glacial waters of the Southern Alps to shame. It was another stunning walk, and totally different from the mountain walks, bush bashes and river valley tracks that I’ve been on so far.

The Circuit

The walk took me clockwise round the circuit, staying for two nights in huts. I went round Tongariro and Ngauruhoe – Ngauruhoe being a younger, parasitic cone on the side of Tongariro, but looking more impressive due to its size – and along the flanks of Ruapehu. Throughout the walk the weather was cloudless, which made a massive difference. I started off at Whakapapa, home to the famous Tongariro Chateau, an imposing hotel that was apparently used to house mental patients in the war (which only adds to the slightly eerie air of The Shining that the hotel has). From there I headed northeast through tussock and occasional clumps of forest; the first two hours of track were eroded, slippery and, to be honest, a bit of a pain, but once I reached the Mangatepopo Hut things started to hot up, quite literally. After a quick side trip to the Soda Springs, one of the few waterfalls in the area, it was time to start climbing.

The trek up towards the towering mass of Tongariro and Ngauruhoe was extremely hot and bothersome, especially as my legs hadn’t quite recovered from the ascent of Taranaki, but it was worth every drop of sweat. I gave the side trip to the top of Ngauruhoe a miss – an hour’s clambering up scree was something I didn’t fancy after the previous tramp – but round the corner from the volcanic cone was something even more amazing: the South Crater. Imagine a huge crater, surrounded by mountains, that’s big enough to fit a football stadium in, with a path cutting right across the middle, and that’s the South Crater: it’s a massive, flat-bottomed bowl on the top on the world that’s guaranteed to make you feel small and insignificant. Climbing up the side of the crater gave great views of the surrounding moonscape, and at the top was yet another surprise: the Red Crater.

The Red Crater is to Mars what the South Crater is to the moon; it’s red, steaming and gaping, and where the South Crater is flat and round, the Red Crater is more like a chasm in the earth, full of hellish shapes and colours. As you climb round the edge of the crater, the ground starts to steam with foul sulphurous fumes that smell just like rotten eggs, and just as you think it can’t get any more bizarre, the Emerald Lakes come into view down in the next valley. The Emerald Lakes are pure turquoise with bright yellow edges, and although you wouldn’t want to go swimming in them, they’re awesome to look at, especially in contrast to the barren lunar landscape around the volcanoes.

It was on this steaming peak that I met my first tramping companion, Delia from Sydney (though she was originally from Sweden, which she left when just four years old). We nattered and walked on together, heading for the Blue Lake across the flat expanse of the Central Crater, before continuing on to the Ketetahi Hut, our stop for the night. On the way we made a useful trade; Delia gave me a polarising filter for my camera that she no longer needed, and she got my dubbin (not much use to me without my leather boots) and some of my leaflets from the South Island that I no longer needed. I’d been meaning to get a polarising filter since I saw Scott of the Pilbara use one to bring out the blues in the sky, and it proved excellent timing; Tongariro through a polarising filter is truly something to behold.

Ketetahi Hut is just up the hill from the Ketetahi Springs, a pit of boiling water that throws steam high up into the sky. Delia and I went to visit the springs, which are technically on private land but nobody seemed to be watching, and that was where I got my first up-close taste of thermal activity; New Zealand is on the junction of two tectonic plates, and in the centre of the North Island there are lots boiling pools, thermal resorts and so on. Ketetahi Springs, though, was free of tourists, which made it somewhat unique.

In the Shadow of Ruapehu

On day 2 we picked up another tramper – Monika from Munich – and stomped our way through the moonscape to the eastern side of the park, eventually passing through Oturere Hut and on to Waihohonu Hut.

On the way the views of Ruapehu were impressive, to say the least, and when we reached our destination, we dropped our packs and wandered off to the Ohinepango Springs, where gallons of water pours out of the rock every second, creating a pretty little river in the wilderness. The girls swam, but in a typical show of male cowardice I stayed on dry land, seeing as my hand had gone numb with cold when I’d filled up my water bottles from the spring. And that night the silhouette of Ruapehu beside a perfectly clear sunset was a real sight to behold...

Day 3 saw us walking back to Whakapapa, passing the gushing Taranaki Falls and arriving back at Whakapapa after a reasonably long but relatively easy trudge; the carrot for the donkey on those last long kilometres was the thought of a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke that I had stashed in the depths of Zed. I gave Delia a lift to National Park, the nearest village to the park after Whakapapa, and after giving a lift to two hitchers to the Ketetahi road end, I drove to Taupo, where I dropped Monika off at a hostel and found myself a place to camp.

That night I redeemed two vouchers I’d got from the petrol station for two McDonald’s cheeseburgers, and got a further NZ$2 fish and chips that I ate on the lake shore. After pasta for the last three days, it was probably the best junk food I’d ever had, ranking up there with the Big Macs I’d crammed into my face in Christchurch. Sometimes it’s good to be bad, especially when you feel you’ve earned it...

[1] Oh yes I would, at Gunung Rinjani in Indonesia.

Taupo

Written: 17 February 1997

I’d briefly stopped at Taupo on the very first day of my road trip, but it was raining so hard that I simply hid in the car, wondering just what I’d got myself into. Luckily my second visit proved a much more interesting one, especially as it was the first real experience I’d had of hardcore tourism since I’d last been in the North Island; the South Island is relatively untouched by tourism, apart from the Queenstown area, but not so the North Island. The caravan park I was in was crammed full of backpackers and tourists, and it brought back the sinking feeling that I’d felt when I finally hit the busy Stuart Highway after six months exploring remote Western Australia. As I tried to fall asleep in my tent, the sound of Saturday night drinking and banging music made me realise just how far I am from the type of travelling that the Kiwi Experience brings to town.

I must digress here, because the Kiwi Experience (and its cousin the Oz Experience) is my idea of a living hell, and one of the reasons I got on so well with Delia in Tongariro was that her opinions on the Kiwi Experience tallied with mine. The Experience is a bus ticket you can buy, and you can jump on and off the bus as many times as you like, as long as you follow the route on the ticket. The buses have commentary and follow the main tourist routes, but the problem is the people; the Kiwi Experience is full of young drinkers, sex-obsessed teenagers and people whose idea of a good time is getting pissed every night and sleeping it off on the bus. No thanks; I’ve managed to stay away from this kind of crowd by avoiding backpacker hostels like the plague, and if there’s one excellent justification for me spending large amounts of cash on the likes of Zed and Oz, it’s so I can avoid the 18-30 mentality of the Experiences. There, that’s my spleen vented, even if it does make me sound like a bitter old git.

Getting up well before my hungover neighbours, I decided to explore the thermal areas of the central region, before heading east to Napier for some more school visits. My main destination for the day was Orakei Korako, arguably the most impressive thermal area of them all, and I think for once that the hype is justified. The gushing geysers, boiling mud pools, beautiful caves and amazing multi-coloured lakes are a wonder to behold, and photographs just can’t do justice to the stench, the atmosphere and the noises of nature at its most hell-like. After Orakei Korako I popped in to the Craters of the Moon conservation area just north of Taupo, home to yet more impressive boiling mud craters, and after breathing in enough fumes to kill a cat, I drove east to the fresh coastal air of Napier.

Mahia Beach

Written: 18 February 1997

The east coast of the North Island is dry and hot, just like the east coast of the South Island, and for the same climactic reasons. As I drove through Napier and along the curved coastline of Hawke’s Bay, the sun blasted down without letting up for one minute; this made the drive along the incredibly winding coast road very pleasant, though it was pretty hard to look at any of the scenery with all the right-angle bends every few metres and some serious drop-offs on either side of the road.

In fact, pretty much all I can remember about driving north from Napier to Mahia was the hot sun and the excellent company of a couple of hitchhikers whom I took to Wairoa, where we hung around by the river and had lunch while they gleefully told me about all the natural marijuana that grows round this part of the world.

My original plan had been to drive all around the East Cape, the landmass that juts east out of the North Island, but seeing the nature of the road and how long it was taking me to get anywhere, I decided to hang around on the beach instead. The two hitchers recommended Mahia Beach, which sits on a little peninsula that juts out of the northern end of Hawke’s Bay, and knowing that local knowledge is better than any number of guidebooks, I followed the bay round until I reached Mahia. The hitchers were right; Mahia Beach is a little paradise.

It’s also one of the few places on the east coast where you get a sunset across the sea; because the peninsula juts south into Hawke’s Bay and Mahia Beach is on the western side of the peninsula, the sun sets into the bay. As I sat on the beach staring at the strange cloud formations that make New Zealand’s sky so unique, I felt completely at ease, the sort of feeling that you can only get when everything is going right. I might not have explored the East Cape, but it all turned out well anyway.

Coromandel

Written: 23 February 1997

My next scheduled work visit was with the Acorn dealer in Thames, so I reluctantly left the beach behind and headed west, back towards civilisation. Gwynne and his wife Alice live with their son Tobin in a beautiful house in tiny Thames, a little town tucked away at the southern end of the Coromandel Peninsula. If my previous dealer experiences had been great, this visit was simply wonderful. Alice’s dad owns a yacht – one he built himself from scratch, no less – and we spent the weekend out in the Hauraki Gulf, exploring, swimming and fishing.

The Hauraki Gulf is between Auckland and Coromandel, and is home to Rangitoto, Motutapu and all the other islands I came across in my time in Auckland; indeed, although we were far enough away from Auckland for it not to be visible, it almost felt like I was close to home, an unexpected feeling seeing as I only spent six weeks in Auckland. The eastern coast of the Hauraki Gulf consists of the north-south Coromandel Peninsula, and off the coast of the peninsula are lots of pretty little islands, totally untouched for the most part.

The sailing was fun enough on its own, but add in the beautiful bays where we dropped anchor and went swimming, the bush on Green Island that we hacked our way through to reach a huge breeding colony of gannets – arguably the smelliest experience of my life so far – and the snorkelling around the rocks, and it suddenly felt like a tropical holiday, the sort that people class as a once-in-a-lifetime event.

On the Saturday afternoon we fished, and unlike my usual experience with rod and line, it seemed I couldn’t fail; as soon as my line went in I’d hook another snapper, and before long we had enough fish to complement the chicken we’d got for dinner. On the way to the sheltered island harbour where we were planning to spend the night, a school of dolphins joined the boat and swam in our wake, veering off like fighter jets before swimming back up to the front of the boat without seeming to move a muscle. Not since Monkey Mia have I seen dolphins this close, and you could have sworn they turned on their sides to purposely look up at us as we hung over the stern.

The snapper were quite superb. I haven’t tasted fish this fresh since my kayaking trip to Rangitoto, and the captain’s batter was the product of an experienced chef. As we settled down for the night, the full moon came out, the already calm sea flattened out totally, and I slept the sleep of the happily knackered. Fresh air in the bush is one thing, but a fresh sea breeze really brings on the sleep. I didn’t even notice the chattering of the sea shrimp as the they banged into the boat in their hundreds, or the clanking of the steel hawsers against the mast; it was the best sleep I’ve had in ages.

Sea Morning

Waking up on a yacht in a remote natural harbour is quite an experience. As your eyes open, you notice a slight swaying, and it took me some time to work out where on earth I was, even though I’ve spent practically every night in a different place on my travels. Then the smell of the sea wafts into the cabin, the sounds of merry breakfasting carry gently across the boat, and the next thing you know it’s time to eat, shake the sleepy dust out of your eyes and get moving. Having the sea air breeze through your hair as the boat catches the wind is surely one the best ways to wake up in the morning; it even beats coffee.

Before long we’d dropped anchor off a reasonably sized island just off the coast, and Gwynne and I climbed up the island’s biggest hill for a gorgeous view along the coast. However, the weather had turned from beautiful to humid and the sky was pregnant with potential, so after fishing for sprats on the beach with a net – with no success, defeating our plans to fish for big game – we finished off our existing bait, again catching nothing, and headed back to Coromandel, a cosmopolitan seaside village that has more to do with expensive boats than serious fishing, but which still manages to ooze charm.

Coromandel is a perfect spot for lunch, and we were lucky, because as soon as we’d finished eating, the heavens opened. I’ve been through plenty of storms where the rain falls down in vertical shards, but this storm had attitude. Thames isn’t a terribly wet area, and normally has pretty good weather, but the build-up of humidity had been particularly unpleasant, and I thought the storm would wash away the atmosphere. I was wrong.

Earlier in the month, when I was enjoying the most delightful weather in Fiordland (an unusual piece of luck given Fiordland’s huge rainfall) the Coromandel area was being battered by a cyclone. In my distant position I hadn’t realised how serious the storm had been, but the combination of torrential rain, heavy winds and very high tide had conspired to wash out most of the road from Thames to Coromandel, and seeing the Coromandel rain sloshing down from the sky and right into my leaky car brought home the eternal truth about New Zealand weather; when it decides to be moody, it makes PMS look like a mild headache.

Still, it’s a small price to pay for such wonderful company in such a wonderful place...

Whangarei

Written: 2 March 1997

I visited Whangarei for the second time, just as I was about to finish off my trip round New Zealand. From Thames I shot straight through Auckland to Whangarei, coming across my first real rush hour for months. Whangarei was hot and humid, but seeing Peter and his family again was worth the effort. I discovered that mixing Kahlua and milk is delicious (and is called a ‘brown cow’ by middle-aged Kiwis, though their children just look at them in despair when they tell you that), and after visiting schools with Peter all day, I was invited to a meeting of the Whangarei North Rotary Club. Now that was an interesting experience.

I’ve never really understood Rotary, simply because I’ve never actually thought about it; I suppose I just assumed that Rotary was another of these funny little clubs with quaint customs and a no-women policy. Of course, I was wrong on some counts – women can be Rotarians, as long as the members don’t black-ball them, and the only wacky clothing I could see was the chairman’s chain of office – but there was still plenty of formality and a slight whiff of committee meeting about parts of the evening.

All the more credit, then, to Peter and his Rotary friends, who were nothing if not interesting, friendly, and above all, laid-back. I suppose enjoying a Rotary meeting means that not only have you turned into your parents, you’re doing a better job at being middle-aged than they are, but there’s not many Pommy tourists who can say they’ve not only been involved in a Rotary club flutter down Christchurch casino and won, but they’ve also been to a meeting as an official guest. That’s one more interesting and pleasant social experience to chalk up on the blackboard of life...

Northland

Written: 1 March 1997

From Whangarei I drove north to Matauri Bay, home to an extremely picturesque primary school, and the best views from a principal’s office in the country, and possibly the world. It’s also the resting place of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior; after being blown up in Auckland by the French in 1995, the ship was laid to rest off Matauri Bay, which is a fitting resting place for a ship dedicated to saving the planet. The interview with the school principal went very well, and I had the honour of having a full haka performed for me by the school children; a haka is what the All Blacks perform before playing rugby, and the version I witnessed went on for about five minutes. Hakas are performed for honoured guests and very important people, and it gave me quite a buzz to see this classroom of Maori kids getting really into it. Soon after I was back on the road, with the sun still shining, and I drove to the small town of Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands and pitched camp, ready to visit the local Acorn dealer in the morning.

That was where I saw the advert. The woman from the caravan park waved it in front of my face like a page from Paradise Lost, and moaned about how nice it would be to take a year off and go travelling, and how hot it was, and it was probably a dirty old man anyway looking for some young girls, and that’ll be NZ$8 for the campsite please. I went back later and had a look at the advert, and there it was: a good idea. ‘Boat looking for crew to cruise to Tahiti, and then around the Pacific islands for a year. Only NZ$15 a day, including food. Ring Rob...’ So I did. The next day I went to Paihia to see the boat and meet Rob, and he said he would make a decision in a few weeks, and I should keep in touch. And that was that... for the moment anyway.

Meanwhile, I had more exploring to do, and by late afternoon I had driven up the tip of Northland, heading for Cape Reinga, the northernmost part of the North Island. Just in case I thought I was going to get away with visiting one of New Zealand’s extremities in fine weather, it started to chuck it down, and when I got to the campsite, I pitched the tent and sat in the car, typing up my articles while the rain pounded down.

I sometimes wonder why I bother to go to places when it’s raining. The next day the fog had come to join the party, and when I drove the 3km to the cape itself, I couldn’t see the famed meeting point of the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea, I couldn’t see the lighthouse until I bumped into it, and the signpost that declared how far London, Tokyo, Bluff and all the other metropolises of the world were from Cape Reinga, simply pointed into grey mist. But I can now say that I’ve been to the north of the North Island and the south of the South Island, and that’s why I do these things. The map on which I’ve been drawing my route in thick black felt tip wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the tip, so drenched as I was, I still felt pretty pleased with myself.

Submarine Car

Written: 1 March 1997

By now I was thoroughly pleased that I was coming to the end of my road trip round New Zealand; it had been a total success. That is, I felt pleased until I reached a river some 22km north of Whangarei. In a move that didn’t prove too popular with the local traffic, the river had decided that the best place to flow was right over the main highway, and I came across a huge queue, waiting to cross this flowing torrent with some help from the local farmers. I got a little nervous and remembered the last time I’d had to brave it and cross deep water; it was at a creek in Australia, somewhere in the Kimberley, where I’d just had to go for it with nobody around to help. If water gets into a petrol engine, it’ll stall it, and the water level on the Whangarei highway was well above my headlights, but the best way to get into the sea is to jump, so I jumped.

Before I go on, I should perhaps mention something I did to the car just after I bought him. Zed, bless him, was a bit old, and his seals weren’t quite what they used to be, so when it rained, the foot wells tended to get a bit waterlogged. Now I’d got a few things soaked in the storm that had hit Lake Taupo when I first left Auckland, so I’d investigated and found these rubber plugs that I could take out, opening up a hole in each foot well so the water could drain out. After all, water doesn’t go uphill, does it, so it couldn’t get into the car, could it?

Of course, Zed had no problem with the crossing. Sailing across the river, behind a tractor that was breaking the bow wave for me, he managed the crossing without faltering. There was, however, a rising tide within the car, and as I kept accelerating gently, muddy river water poured into the foot wells, oozing over my ankles and threatening to soak all my possessions. Luckily I’d worn my old tramping boots so I was able to keep a reasonable grip on the pedals, and before long we’d reached the other side and the holes in the car started doing what they were supposed to do: draining, not filling.

When I arrived in Whangarei I noticed a tidemark along the side where the river had washed away four months of accumulated dirt. It guilt-tripped me into cleaning the old bugger, the first time I’d done it manually. Underneath it all, Zed was still a surprisingly white colour... which was handy, as I now had to sell him.

Kiwi Trivia

Written: 2 March 1997

Here are some interesting oddities that I noted about New Zealand, written during my six month trip around this wonderful country...

Nice Names

This is ridiculous. I’ve just been glancing through my AA map of New Zealand, and up on the east coast of the North Island, not a million miles south of Hastings, is a mountain. It’s not a very big mountain at only 305m (Mt Cook is 3754m, by comparison), but what it lacks in height it more than makes up in its name. And what’s the name of this mountain? It is, of course, the easy-to-remember:

Mt Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu

It almost deserves a visit just for a photo of the signposts. I bet the map makers are pleased it’s on the east coast, so its name can stretch out into the Pacific...

Add in the pronunciation of place names in New Zealand, and it can make navigation quite a challenge. In the Maori language, ‘wh’ is pronounced ‘f’, and all vowels are long, so Whangarei is pronounced ‘Farn-gar-ray’, to rhyme with ‘way’. At least, that’s the theory. Even people in Whangarei pronounce it differently depending on the phases of the moon; I heard ‘Wangaray’, ‘Wan-garry’, ‘Fan-garry’, ‘Fongorray’... you name it, nobody seems to know where the hell they live. However any European-named places that contain ‘wh’ are pronounced in the European manner, and the Whanganui River spoils the party by being a Maori name that’s pronounced ‘Won-gan-ooey’.

Prepare to be confused...

Drinking Laws

Another interesting aspect of New Zealand is the law on drinking. The legal drinking age is 20, but if you’re married and you’re in the pub with your spouse, you can drink at 18; in other words, if you don’t have your spouse with you, you have to be 20 to drink, but if you’re with them you can drink at 18. Don’t ask me why, but I’m surprised the country isn’t full of kids getting married simply so they can get slaughtered at the same time as most other country’s kids can. Or perhaps it is, and I’m already too old to spot them...

Driving

You always notice lots of odd little things when driving round a foreign country, and here’s what I discovered when exploring of New Zealand’s road system:

- The age for driving in this country is 15 – yes, 15 – which might help to explain why some Kiwi drivers are lethal. I’d have been a terrible driver at 15, too.

- Welcome to New Zealand, home of the left-turn rule. Driving here is pretty easy if you’re used to driving on the left as I am, except for this one seriously strange law. If you’re driving along and want to turn left into a side street, you have to give way to anybody turning into the road from your right. This makes crossroads somewhat exciting, and as the rule was only introduced relatively recently – in the seventies, I think – and it seems that there are plenty of drivers out there who don’t understand the rule themselves. It all makes for a bit of a gamble; if you’re turning right and it’s your right of way, are you going to exercise it if the vehicle turning left from the opposite direction is a huge truck? I think not...

- Kiwi drivers are some of the, um, most adventurous drivers in the western world. They overtake on blind corners, they regard indicators as optional extras, and, possibly worst of all, they all seem to think of themselves as the worst drivers in the world, while at the same time thinking that London drivers are courteous and safe. It’s very weird...

- Perhaps one of the reasons that Kiwi drivers are so bad is that there are roadworks just about everywhere. The marketing brains have got involved in the act, too, and the signs preceding the piles of monster trucks and bitumen machines proclaim things like ‘Pavement rehabilitation’ instead of ‘Fixing a buggered road’, making it all sound terribly pleasant. The fact that Kiwi workmen leave loads of gravel on the road when they reseal it, which shoots up into your windscreen and scratches your paintwork, is by the by. Another interesting difference with Kiwi roadworks is the large number of women on the team; there’s normally at least one per set of roadworks, which you wouldn’t see in the UK, and to the single-too-long traveller, it’s a pleasant sight. My pet theory? Kiwis have too many distractions on the road, especially in dangerous areas like roadworks. This produces crashes...

- ...which produce crosses. Whenever someone dies on the road, the local council erects a small white cross at the crash site, one for every fatality. They also do this in Australia, the idea being that you see the crosses and it reminds you of your own mortality, and you drive more carefully. In my experience, people tend to think, ‘Wow! A wipe-out crash! I bet I don’t slide if I take this corner at break-neck speed...’

Lead Syringes

One interesting aspect of driving round New Zealand is that you can’t buy leaded petrol anywhere in the country; this worried me to start with, because the car I bought didn’t run on unleaded. It’s no problem, though; instead you buy lead additive from the garage too, which comes in a little syringe for NZ$1 (that’s one syringe per 20 litres of petrol). These syringes are commonly known as ‘squirts’, so you should ask the man to fill it up with premium, and ‘add a couple of squirts’ – as most petrol stations have attendants, it’s all taken care of. So it seems that in New Zealand you can have little squirts in the driving seat as well as the petrol tank; OK, I’ll get me coat.

North vs South

Compared to the South Island, the North Island looks a bit like a plucked chicken. Where the South Island has acres of untouched wilderness where the trees are random, ancient and indigenous and the bush bastards flourish, the North Island’s forests are planted in lines, they’re mostly made up of pine trees, and they’re farmed. The hills that have recently been logged and are now covered in stunted baby trees look a lot like plucked chickens, with rows and rows of orderly blobs where there should be chaos. That’s just one reason the North Island feels more developed; as one of the guys at my Auckland hostel said, wherever you are in the South Island, you feel isolated, and he was right. In the North Island, you feel almost cosmopolitan in comparison, even in the bush.

The same is true in the wilderness. National Parks like Tongariro and Egmont feel much more developed than the likes of Fiordland, mainly because there are more tourists, more tracks, and fewer totally unexplored regions. Tongariro is the oldest National Park in New Zealand, and as a result it feels a little bit exploited; at the other end, Fiordland is too inhospitable to be westernised, with its weather, sandflies and ruggedness. I know which one I’d prefer to travel in... but then again, I also know which one I’d rather live in. It’s horses for courses, I suppose.

Learning to Dive

Written: 27 March 1997

After my visit to Rob and his yacht Zeke in Northland, I thought no more of it until Rob got in touch to say that he’d be delighted to have me on board for his trip across the Pacific. It took a while for it to sink in, but soon enough I was back in the Bay of Islands and staying on Zeke, who was still holed up in Paihia harbour.

Perhaps the biggest sign that I’d mentally committed to crossing the Pacific in a 36 ft sloop was that I took advantage of a delay in our departure to enrol on a diving course at the local dive shop. My first visit to the shop was slightly worrying, as I stared at rows and rows of strange underwater clothing hanging from the racks, daring me to browse as if I knew what the hell they were. Luck was on my side, though, as we had a girl staying on board Zeke – Susie from Liverpool, who was trying to get enough money together to come on the trip, but without success – and she had qualified in Australia as a Dive Master. Before long I’d booked four days of diving tuition, the end result hopefully being a PADI Open Water certification.

But first I had to overcome another of my water-related phobias. It’s a fact that man can’t breathe underwater – at least, this one can’t, and every time I’d tried to snorkel, I’d manage no more than two breaths with my face in the drink before the reflexes kicked me back up into the atmosphere, coughing and panicking. It’s not logical to inhale underwater, and I couldn’t seem to get around my mental block.

As I sank into the swimming pool with my instructor Glen and nobody else around – it being the off-season, I was lucky enough to have one-on-one tuition – the phobia came back to me. Don’t breathe. It’s silly. Gas, gas, quick boys, and shit there’s chlorine in my gullet, the chest is tightening, this isn’t logical, get up, get up! But the regulator – the mouthpiece from a scuba tank – isn’t a snorkel, and intellectually I knew that water can’t get into it unless you take it out of your mouth, so where logic was giving me breathing problems with a snorkel, logic also saved the day with scuba. Breathe, you bastard, and prove to yourself that this phobia’s just that, and that it’s going the same way as all those phobias about moths and dark caves...

And then it happened: one breath. A slight gag, and the sight of Glen’s encouragement reduced the chest tightening, and then there was another breath. And then a third before the panic surfaced, but standing up in the four-feet water brought relief, and then it was back down for some more breaths. Ten minutes later, and we’re still down, and it strikes me that I’m breathing underwater. Astounding!

After the pool sessions for the first two days, my first ever dive in the sea was at the Poor Knights Islands, a marine reserve that is home to New Zealand’s finest diving, bar none: it’s quite an introduction to the sport, with bizarre fish everywhere, manta rays oscillating along the sea floor, and enough distractions to keep my mind off the insanity of my situation. I had two dives at the Knights and, on the final day, two dives at the Hen and Chicken Islands, where Glen caught six crayfish (two each, as I had a diving buddy called Lisa from Whangarei). That night I ripped into crayfish claw, reflecting that I’d managed to get round another phobia and could now breathe underwater.

So I’m now a qualified diver and I’m about to set off on a voyage into the unknown (well, the south Pacific, anyway). Who would have thought it?

French Polynesia: New Zealand to Polynesia

Anatomy of a Yacht

Written: 24 April 1997

Let’s look at this yacht, then, all 36-feet of it. Zeke – a happy name, don’t you think? – is a home, a place to explore and explore in, an intriguing mixture of mod cons, traditional equipment and sea-salt-worn fittings that hold together as a safe environment. Let’s do a tour...

The main cabin is large, stretching from the bow of the boat to about three quarters of the way to the stern. It’s very open plan, with the front point being taken up by the forward locker, which is home to spare sails, ropes, the anchor chain, diving equipment and a huge collection of bits and bobs that are essential for an easy life on board. The rest of the room contains a v-shaped settee with a collapsible table that turns into a double bed; there are loads of lockers, with storage space for more tins of tomatoes, sweetcorn, corned beef and processed peas than you’ve ever seen in your life... all the provisions we bought in New Zealand are tucked away in here somewhere; further up near the mast is the toilet, or the ‘head’ as it’s called on a boat, which also contains a hot shower (though it’s only usable when there’s enough fresh water and the engine’s been running); opposite the head is the kitchen, or ‘galley’, which comes complete with a kerosene stove, a fridge and a spice collection to rival the best; then there’s the navigation table, where the charts, radios and GPS (Global Positioning System) live; and finally, right at the back of the boat and separated from the main cabin by the engine compartment, is Rob’s cabin. The only other area is the cockpit, above the engine, where the actual sailing is done and where the ropes all come back to.

Ah yes, the ropes. My first sailing experience back in the Coromandel was confusing, to say the least, and one reason is the terminology. Sailing language isn’t English, at least it’s not the English normal people use, and the rope names cloud the issue on what is, at heart, a relatively easy system. Halyards are ropes that pull sails up, sheets are ropes that alter angles of sails, and then you have the more specialised ropes.

Zeke is a sloop, which means it has one mast in the middle of the boat, with the mainsail attached to the back of it, and a boom along the bottom of the sail. There’s also another sail in front of the mast, called the jib, which rolls up around a rigid wire, the forestay, which goes from the top of the mast to the bow. The main and jib halyards raise and lower the mainsail and jib respectively, and the main sheet and port and starboard jib sheets alter the angles of the mainsail and jib. The boom vang pulls the boom down, the topping lift lifts the boom up, the preventer stops the boom from swinging from side to side... and now you know enough to blag your way through a crew position on a yacht. All you have to perfect now is the ‘blurrghhh’ sound that marks the graduation from landlubber to seasick mariner, and you’re sorted.

Though if you can remember all that when the sea’s pitching at 45° and the sea is breaking over your head, you’re doing better than I ever did...

Sailing to French Polynesia

Written: 13 May 1997

The journey to the Gambier Islands was as near to a living hell as I have ever been. I had never been sailing on the open ocean before, and I discovered early on that there was a reason for that. I hated it.

The final stages before leaving involved shopping for supplies – a total of about NZ$1400 at Pak ‘n’ Save, in eight baskets, covering us for five months for items that would be expensive in French Polynesia, like canned food, and about three or four months for everything else – and finishing off all those little jobs that had to be done. I’d spent a total of about four weeks on the boat, painting it when it came out of the water, working on all sorts of jobs from stripping plastic off the rails to fixing electrical switches in the bathroom, and by the time we finally got out of Whangarei, I was getting pretty impatient. There’s always too much to do on a boat, but four weeks was getting ridiculous. Luckily the immigration man was very understanding and didn’t give a hoot about my lack of visa.

We finally left New Zealand on Wednesday 16th April, saying farewell to Whangarei after an overstay, for me, of 17 days, something that the immigration people didn’t seem to mind much at all. The crew: Rob, Australian captain and owner of the yacht Zeke; Laurent, Swiss-French chef and pending disaster; and me, still slightly bewildered from plan changes and the enormity of the coming challenge.

As with all strange departures from normality, I had done my research: it’s surely easier to be aloof and nominally detached from reality if you’re well informed. Boats, the sea, diving, swells and maritime climates were all a mystery, slowly unravelled by books and other people’s advice (the latter mainly consisting of ‘Have you ever been on yacht before? No? You must be crazy... but I’m as jealous as hell!’). I still know relatively little, but I can get by at cocktail parties on the subject of cruising, even if I end up explaining in graphic detail how much I loathe it.

So I had lots of theory – sailing theory, weather theory, outdoor survival theory, even social interaction theory – but theory is no use when the mind is no longer in control of the body. The concentration slips, and before long the wrong thoughts are slipping in: too much saliva, goddamn it; stomach contents slopping; another hard roll of the boat; don’t whatever you do think of badly made meringue; a cold sweat; slightly itchy palms; logic goes out of the window; and it feels like your first alcoholic experience again...

Shit. Over the side for the fifth time, unintentionally feeding the fish. I was stuck in the middle of the South Pacific, and my very worst fear had struck. I had le mal de mer, and it hurt.

No Peace, No Quiet

The first week of the trip was probably the worst week of my entire life: the seasickness was pretty severe, though totally normal according to the captain, who managed to keep his colour only because of the time he’d already spent over the years hurling his guts up over the side. As I ran for the side again I couldn’t help picturing that split second when the last glass of port suddenly makes itself known, awkwardly sitting on top of too much Stilton and cheddar biscuits, and the world switches from a rosy glow to a shaky sweat. The toilet beckons, there’s no escape, but once the dinner’s been dispatched, it’s back to the party as a great feeling of relief sweeps over you...

Except with seasickness the relief is only a reprieve, and the feeling’s back within an hour, as rough as ever and worse on an empty stomach. On top of the nausea, though, is the real killer: the feeling of having absolutely no energy. I had never felt so consistently exhausted in my life, and the resulting lack of interest in life and the art of sailing didn’t help me to appreciate my situation. Truth be told, at times I found myself regretting ever seeing the advert for the position: surely nothing is worth four weeks of feeling as rough as the human body can, while still having to do things like sail the boat, do the washing up, go on watch and so on.

There’s another aspect to ocean passages that’s particularly unpleasant (and bear in mind that the vast majority of yachties haven’t done even a few days at sea, let alone the long four-week haul to the Gambier Islands, something that I can totally understand after enduring such a journey). The boat’s moving: fine. But it moves a hell of a lot, because the swell out in the Pacific is huge, and it’s incessant: when Magellan named the ocean after his word for ‘peace’ because it was so calm compared to the Atlantic, he obviously wasn’t in the same ocean as I was.

When the boat’s moving – rolling constantly, pitching and yawing most of the time, and getting smacked on the side by hefty waves that knock you over reasonably regularly – imagine trying to wash up, when anything you put down rolls away unless you wedge it in. Or how about cooking, something that mutates from a simple act of combining and heating into a test of endurance? Even simply existing – standing up, sitting down, and, surprisingly, just lying down – is a major effort, because your body is constantly tensing and relaxing muscles to maintain its balance, and it takes it out of you even when you’re doing nothing. Even sleeping is an effort if you’re being thrown from one side of the boat to the other every two seconds, and on top of the debilitating effect of seasickness, it’s a serious shock to the system.

The Ship’s Watch

The other main aspect of sailing that your average crewmember gets to know and love is being on watch. You might think that the chance of boats colliding in the middle of the ocean is minimal – and you’d be right, as the chances are ridiculously small – but it is possible that you might hit another boat and die, so keeping a good watch for 24 hours of every day of every week is essential, until you’re safely anchored. It’s simply not worth risking death for want of checking the sea every so often.

Being on watch is, unfortunately, the most boring part of sailing, but in a strange way. On one hand sitting in the cockpit for three-and-a-half hours, scanning the horizon every 20 minutes, is pretty tedious, especially on the 12am to 3.30am shift, and if the weather’s lousy then it’s simply miserable. On the other hand, though, is the realisation that you’re a good 1000 nautical miles from the nearest land, surrounded by water that is kilometres deep, and that you’re surviving... that’s quite a thought, though I think you appreciate it more when the trip is over and you can sit down and examine the marine charts of the voyage.

Cravings

I also developed more cravings than a pregnant mother. I had passionate feelings for pizza, a craving such as I had never experienced before. Visions of pepperoni, ham and mushroom on a thick crust brought back memories of Pizza Huts and the exquisite pizzas in Spain, where they crack an egg in the middle just before taking it out, so the yolk goes everywhere and is still runny when they serve it. I simply adore pizza, and the fact that I couldn’t get any on board Zeke made the longing even keener.

Then there was the craving for anything fresh, prompted by the last of our fruit and vegetables disappearing after ten days at sea. Fresh tropical mango, pineapple straight off the tree, freshly squeezed orange juice... all these cravings were quite understandable in the circumstances. But the biggest craving I had was for fresh cream cakes or chocolate sponge in custard, and on top of that I wanted to start a long and deep relationship with a plate of chips.

And finally, I craved land. Land doesn’t move; land is predictable; land lets you get a good night’s sleep. And land doesn’t wash over the boat and crew when there’s a storm going. One particular night springs to mind, the night, quite early on in the trip, when all hell broke loose. We had to reef the sail in the middle of the night, while the waves lashed around us and the wind smashed the sails around, and we froze in our wet weather gear, falling asleep on one hand and desperately trying to save the boat on the other. It was a nightmare: the boat gybed twice – when the wind, coming from behind us, snatched the boom and swung it across from one side to the other, a frightening and dangerous event, smashing the GPS housing and compass mount – and the whole event stressed us out completely, enhancing the grief we felt at such a long voyage. On top of this I was being copiously seasick: I was totally miserable.

And yes, the sea really does wash over the boat and crew when there’s a storm going, just like in the movies. And yes, it really sucks.

Low Point

On the fourth day Laurent and I had a full-blooded but extremely short argument about nothing at all, and I swear if I had had a gun I would have blown his head off. We made up two minutes later, but as I sat outside afterwards, sitting in the unpleasant afterglow of altercation, I broke down and cried. All I craved was peace: peace from the constant rolling of the boat, peace from the continuing sickness, peace from the mundane rigours of conversation. I just wanted to be alone, and paradoxically it was the feeling of being totally alone that brought tears. They were brief, but signalled a low point from which I hoped things could only get better.

The real low point happened exactly halfway through the journey, after 14 days of rolling and throwing up. By this time I realised that I had to eat something if I was going to survive, so I went below decks to make myself something edible. It took forever: the smell of kerosene nearly knocked me out and I kept having to go outside for air and to stare at the horizon, but in a feat of sheer willpower I managed to make myself a bowl of perfect scrambled egg. I ate it very slowly, savouring the flavour, and the second I swallowed the last mouthful I felt that old familiar ache spreading through my stomach muscles and the whole lot came right back up, sitting in the bowl as if I had never touched it. I lay down in the bottom of the boat, curled up and cried my heart out.

I remember thinking that whatever happened to me in the future, things would never get worse than this. So far, they haven’t.

Fresh Tuna

On 28th April we caught a tuna. I’d never seen a whole tuna before, and they are the most gorgeous fish you’ve ever seen, with shiny silver flanks and yellow-green tints that make supermarket tins look positively dull. They’re big too: the one we caught was about four feet from tip to tail, and it tasted delicious, keeping us in fish for about three days. The fishing method? Drag a long line behind the boat, fitted with a big metal hook, shaped vaguely like a fish: this twists and turns like a little fish, luring the bigger fish to take an early lunch and become a late dinner (the system, not surprisingly, is called a lure).

This was the first time we’d used the lure on the trip, and it worked a treat: after that we were either too knackered to go through the rigmarole of scaling and gutting, or we were too close to the Tuamotus and the paranoia of contamination from the nuclear testing (though this was only paranoia, as the fish outside of the affected atolls are fine).

Phosphorescence

It was on board Zeke that I discovered the delights of ocean phosphorescence. There I was, pissing off the back of the boat, and thinking how beautifully the stars were reflected in the wake. And then I realised that it was cloudy, and that’s when I remembered about phosphorescence. There’s a certain type of plankton that lives throughout the oceans of the world, and when it gets excited, such as by the passage of a yacht, it lights up like a glow worm, so the boat leaves a trail of little lights behind it at night. Most eerie, I can tell you.

The Death of Doris

Perhaps the most annoying mishap on the trip was the death of Doris. Doris, the wind vane, steered the boat automatically, using the wind as a guide and as a power source, but on the fourth day of the trip an especially heavy swell ripped off Doris’s bottom part, breaking the stainless steel joint, totally removing the wooden rudder part of the vane, and rendering the whole thing useless.

So we moved onto Eric, the computerised autopilot, who steered us remarkably well to our destination, gobbling up electricity like buggery but preventing us from having to hand steer all the way. If we hadn’t had Eric we’d have been hand steering for 24 hours a day for the remaining 24 days, a particularly unpleasant concept (and something racing yachts do, the mad bastards).

Company... of a Sort

We saw one ship once we’d pulled out of New Zealand waters. Yes, one ship during the whole bloody trip. And there we were, scanning the horizon every 20 minutes, looking for potential collisions for 28 days and finding just one, one that was nowhere near hitting us anyway. Perhaps that’s why finally arriving in a place with human activity and other boats was such a momentous feeling.

I should add that when we spotted this ship, we decided to call it up on the radio so the crew could tell us how big our radar shadow was (a handy thing to know). So we cranked up the radio and raised the ship, finding out it was a Philippino cargo boat bound for somewhere far, far away.

‘Can you tell us how big our radar shadow is, please?’ asked Rob when the niceties were over.

‘Sure thing,’ said the radio operator on the other ship. ‘Hang on a second while I just turn our radar on...’

Makes you feel all safe and sound, doesn’t it?

The End in Sight

Relief arrived on May 14th... or, to be more accurate May 13th, because we’d done a Phileas Fogg and crossed the dateline, meaning we turned up to find ourselves a day ahead of ourselves, if you see what I mean. The final approach to the Gambier Islands was frustrated by three days of almost no wind, but finally on the last morning we saw land. The relief was like nothing I have experienced before: all the grief and stress of the last four weeks seemed to evaporate as the sun silhouetted the islands against the sky.

As we approached the islands, painfully slowly because of the serious reefs around the Gambiers, an amazing thing happened. I could smell land! It smells musty, damp and downright homely, and with the sensitised nose of someone who has only smelt salt and sea breezes for four weeks, I could smell pine trees, damp earth and the scents of civilisation. The final journey into the anchorage at Rikitea on the island of Mangareva was idyllic, and after a quick but necessary shower the three of us piled onto land to clear immigration and customs.

And the land swayed. I fell around like a drunken sailor, tripping over invisible obstacles and falling sideways for no apparent reason. I felt like you do when you come off a particularly violent fairground ride, and I spent the whole day in a haze. I clearly remember finding ice creams for sale, and almost freaking out on the taste sensation, but a lot of the rest of the day was a haze of delight and relief. The long trip was finally over.

As soon as we arrived, Laurent jumped ship to await any other yacht to take him away – he was sick of arguing with Rob, and Rob was sick of him. I was just incredibly relieved that I survived 28 days of mental and physical stress – the likes of which I have never experienced before and hope never to experience again – without falling out with anyone, and without leaving the boat myself. That’s no mean feat.

And just for the statisticians out there, the length of the trip was 3000 nautical miles (3450 normal miles, or 5550km). To put that in perspective, that’s exactly the distance from London to New York, and is further than the distance Columbus sailed when he discovered America. From stepping off land at Whangarei to stepping on land in Rikitea, the trip took exactly 28 days in real time (but only 27 days on the calendar). It’s the longest sea voyage I’ve ever done, and I’m sure it will always be the longest sea voyage I’ve ever done.

‘Never again’ is a phrase that springs to mind... but I don’t regret going. I’ll just never get on an ocean-going yacht again.

The Strange World of Sailing

Written: 1 May 1997

On the Pacific, my dreams have become rather numbed (and by ‘dreams’ I mean my aspirations rather than REM sleep, of which there is precious little to be had). For some reason, my usual concerns – destination, cash flow, cultural experience, maintaining a reasonable social life, wishing I’d been around in the sixties, the normal sort of thing – become both irrelevant and disconnected when I’m surrounded by sea for weeks, with no contact for so long. The desert was never like this, because however desolate the outback might be, it’s teeming with folklore, wildlife, mountains, gorges, strange plants and, above all, amazing people and settlements. The Pacific is totally different, and although I wasn’t expecting the sea to be anything like the desert in terms of psychological effect, it’s surprised me to feel so detached.

So what if I’ve got so-and-so dollars in the bank? It’s no use to me in the middle of the ocean. So what if I meant to write a letter to blah-de-blah? There aren’t any post offices halfway to the Gambier Islands. So what if I haven’t showered in two weeks, and all my clothes are smothered in salt crystals? There aren’t any people here to meet anyway. The situation is like no other; if it wasn’t for the daily radio contact, the whole world could disappear and we wouldn’t have a clue. (In fact, I arrived at the Gambiers knowing that the UK had had a General Election about two weeks before, but I didn’t have any idea as to the result. It took quite a bit of effort to find out, too; apparently Tony Blair won for Labour.)

The world of Zeke on the open ocean makes me feel like I’m in a play; a play is self-contained, with a few actors, a handful of different scenes, and a plot (or, in this case, a destination), and just like on Zeke, a play is an escape from reality. Sure, plays are normally set in familiar environments – houses, gardens, cities, and so on – but the connections to reality are all in the audience’s imagination, and taken as a self-contained entity, a play exists apart from the world in which it plays. How else can one play be a story of everyday life in one country, and a seriously subversive piece of literature in another? So Zeke is like a play, and like all plays the actors don’t necessarily behave like normal humans would; there’s melodrama, comedy, soliloquy and so on, things that happen in everyday life, but which occur more intensely or dramatically in a play than in the real world. Believe me, four weeks on the ocean in Zeke is nothing if not melodramatic.

One particularly memorable example of the tragicomic nature of Zeke’s script happened deep in the voyage, around halfway to the Gambiers. Rob and Laurent were not getting on by this stage: Laurent’s gallic shrug of a character wasn’t compatible with the control freak that Rob became on the sea, and by the third week, they were no longer speaking. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except they decided to treat me like the lawyer in their messy divorce, so all I got was an earful of, ‘Tell the chef that it’s time he got cooking,’ and ‘Tell the captain I’ll cook when I’m goddamn ready.’ Which was all very well, but I was over the side of the boat most of the time, wondering when this seasickness hell would stop, so all they heard from each other was, ‘Tell the chef that it’s time he got bleaurghh...’ and ‘Tell the captain I’ll hueaurghh when I’m goddamn ready.’ I didn’t particularly enjoy that part of the plot.

Another result of Zeke being like a play is this feeling of being totally cut off from reality. I have never felt so truly alone before, yet this doesn’t imply loneliness, more an appreciation of isolation. We’ve sailed 2000 miles and the nearest land is 1000 miles away, and the progress of Zeke at around 100 nautical miles per day makes this distance feel sizable. We’re getting there, but it’s a slow process, and it’s such a radical change from the hustle and bustle of normal life. I’m not particularly enjoying it, but it’s certainly an experience I won’t forget in a hurry.

French Polynesia: The Gambier Islands

Gambier Islands

Written: 16 May 1997

The Gambier Islands are part of French Polynesia, the French-controlled area of paradise that comprises the following:

- The Society Islands, which include Tahiti and Bora Bora and most of the tourism in French Polynesia.

- The Marquesas Islands, a collection of 12 islands some distance to the northeast of the Society Islands and north of the Tuamotus.

- The Austral Archipelago, seven islands lying due south of the Society Islands, and home to the southern islands in French Polynesia.

- The Tuamotu Archipelago, the biggest of the five archipelagos, which stretches in a 1000-mile line southeast from Tahiti and contains Hao, Makemo, Amanu and Mururoa among the 76 Tuamotuan islands.

- The Gambier Archipelago at the southeastern tip of Polynesia. This archipelago is made up of the main Gambier lagoon, plus the Actéon (or Actaeon) group of islands and the atolls of Marutea Sud, Maria and Morane. The Gambier lagoon comprises four main islands (Mangareva, Taravai, Akamaru and Aukena) and ten smaller islands or motus (including Agakauitai, and the coral motu of Totegegie, home to the airport).

The Gambier lagoon is a classic atoll surrounding the inner Gambier Islands. An atoll (pronounced ‘ah-toll’, not ‘ay-toll’) is one of the archetypal natural phenomena in the Pacific, and is responsible for beautiful coral reef, motus and protected anchorages galore. The islands of the southwest Pacific are all volcanic in origin, being formed by the clash of the Pacific, Indian, Eurasian and Philippines tectonic plates; the clashes force magma up into the sea, which creates islands in the ocean, and with the perpetual drift of the plates, this has formed a string of islands from Pitcairn Island and the Gambiers in the east, to Indonesia in the west and Japan in the north.

As the volcanoes form, they cool and harden to form islands, and over time the islands are slowly eroded away by the sea, and this process gives rise to the atoll; coral forms around the islands, and as these islands erode and disappear the coral remains, leaving large strung-out rings of coral reefs, sometimes containing islands (as in the Gambiers). The resultant lagoons inside coral atolls are placid and full of life, and assuming there’s an entrance into the lagoon (which is not that common), the anchorage is wonderfully sheltered from the ocean swell. A motu (pronounced ‘mow-too’) is an island formed by debris and sand collecting on top of an atoll reef, and normally consists of a thin strip of sand, a few coconut palms, and wonderful diving opportunities. The Tuamotus are mainly atolls, and as such they’re beautiful but a pain to navigate because atolls aren’t visible until you’re very close; then again, that’s part of their charm.

The Gambiers are in the remotest part of French Polynesia, some 1643km from Tahiti; if you head east from the Gambiers you will come across Pitcairn Island (owned by the British, at the continuing behest of the inhabitants), Easter Island (which is Chilean), and then after a long, long stretch of ocean you reach South America. The biggest of the Gambiers at 14km^2 is Île Mangareva, which contains the capital of the Gambiers, Rikitea. That’s not a large area when you consider how remote these islands are and that the total land area of the archipelago is a mere 35km^2...

The first people to visit the Gambiers probably came from the Marquesas around 1200 AD. The remains of houses and burial grounds have been found on the smaller islands, but some of the more interesting archaeological remains were destroyed in the euphoric insanity of the Jesuit mission that arrived in the 19th century. Before then, the first European to arrive in the Gambiers was Captain John Wilson of the London Missionary Society, who explored the islands in 1797 aboard HMS Duff, naming the islands after Captain Gambier, a Frenchman who had supported his expedition.

But it was the French evangelists who had the biggest impact on these remote islands. The record of Honoré Laval, the Jesuit priest who came to the Gambiers in 1834 with Father François Caret and Friar Columban Murphy in tow, is shameful and, unfortunately, typical. After converting and completely dominating Maputeoa, the last king, Laval ruled the islands as a despot. He set stringent rules (called the Mangarevan Code) and started a huge building programme in which he forced the people to erect more than 116 coral stone churches, convents, mills and other buildings, some of which are strewn all over Mangareva as ruins, and some of which are still standing and cared for, like the monstrously large cathedral in Rikitea. In the process Laval caused the death of over 5000 people, eliminating the will of the people to survive, and destroying an entire culture. The cathedral and ruins stand as monuments to his egomania, yet the inscription on the statue donated by France reads, ‘His memory is blessed in these islands.’ Laval’s rule came to an end when Tahiti was declared a French protectorate in 1871; today, only a few pure blood Mangarevans are left, and there certainly aren’t many people blessing Laval’s memory.

Rikitea is an interesting mixture of tropical primitiveness and modern influence. The islands are full of lush vegetation, with fruit trees everywhere that provide more fruit than the population can eat; the result is a paradise where you can walk around picking fruit whenever you want it, or even plucking one of the plentiful fishes or lobsters from the sea. On the other hand, the shops sell canned fruit, canned fish and other western delicacies like Coca Cola and ice cream, and the islanders find it easier to buy cans than catch their own meals. It’s a bizarre turnaround when you consider how westerners think of cans as a poor substitute for fresh produce.

There are other problems too. The lobsters and fish inside the lagoon are not fit to eat for two reasons: there’s a nasty red algae that originates in the vicinity of L’Île des Lapins, and then there’s the bacterial contamination from raw sewage released off Île Mangareva. The locals told me that their lobsters were bad to eat because of the nuclear tests in nearby Mururoa; they said that the French had washed their contaminated ships down inside the atoll and had poisoned the fish. However this, like much of the local gossip relating to the nuclear tests, is just a myth; in fact the 1995 tests in Mururoa were performed underground in sealed chambers and no external contamination was possible, and in 1996 a test by the International Commission found no contamination in the Gambiers. The only two instances of contaminated maritime vessels in the area happened when two rockets were launched through a mushroom cloud in a 1967 experiment to collect samples, but these were decontaminated at Hao in a dedicated facility. Nobody would deny that the 1995 tests were unfortunate given the gradual turn away from nuclear weaponry in the West, but it’s easy – and unfair – to blame France for everything just because we can’t fathom how anyone could think of performing nuclear tests in such a paradise.

And it is a paradise. The weather is balmy with little rain at this time of year, the local wildlife is exquisite, the water is warm and fresh and away from the settlements it’s incredibly clear. The sight of coconut palms fronting an idyllic island beach where nobody goes and sunbathes is enough to make you understand why the locals are so friendly and are always smiling. And as for the little kids... they’re a picture of innocence and happiness, which bodes well for the islands’ future.

Gambier Islands (Mangareva)

Written: 4 June 1997

Soon after arriving in the Gambier Islands the chef, Laurent, jumped ship onto another yacht. Rob (the captain) and Laurent had spent considerable periods of the trip from New Zealand arguing and threatening to kill each other, so it was a pleasant change to have just two of us on board as we settled into island life.

All through the long haul to the Gambiers it had never felt as if we were anywhere particularly foreign; the sea is the sea wherever you are, and it doesn’t have any cultural or geographical differences between the various seas and oceans (apart from the weather, perhaps). The Gambier Islands, however, were a wonderful culture shock.

‘It’s the television that’s really destroying the island’s culture,’ said Napoleon, sipping his sake and sampling the latest batch of Rob’s award-winning pancakes. ‘Before we got TV a year ago, the main street would be full at night with people walking over to see their friends, and the place would be buzzing. Now the town is dead, because everyone’s watching TV. They watch it all day, and do nothing. It’s destroying our culture.’

Napoleon lived over the hill from the main harbour in a bay called Baie Ngatavake, and he was a real find; one of only three people on the island who could speak English, he transformed us from lost tourists to informed experts in the space of one day. It all started on the morning of Thursday 15th May; we’d decided to get some fruit, not a tricky procedure given the number of communal fruit trees around, but we figured it was only polite to ask the people in the nearby houses if would be all right to pick their fruit. So we waltzed up to this young guy who had just turned up in a jeep, and asked him if he knew where we could get some fruit, especially some mangoes.

He introduced himself as Napoleon, a twenty-six year old farmer from Ngatavake, and he told us that if we wanted some really good fruit, we could hop in his jeep and get a lift over to his house on the other side of the island. That wasn’t the sort of offer we could turn down, so before long we were bouncing along the dirt road, hanging on for dear life as the jeep careened over the hill to Ngatavake, a collection of two or three houses looking over the most stunning bay you’re ever likely to see. Napoleon’s house was surrounded by fruit trees of all descriptions, and as we wandered around, he pointed out all the goodies we could pluck.

Top of my list were the mangoes, which have to be one of the most delicious fruits in existence. I first came across the sweet taste of mango in Melbourne, where they correctly proclaimed it was the food of the gods and showed me how to eat it by slicing off one side of the fruit, scoring it crisscross and turning it inside out so the flesh stands up like a grid of cocktail cheese cubes. But the mangoes in the Pacific islands are from another world, with a flavour that makes Melbournian mangoes taste like old boots, and I soon became quite an expert at spotting mango trees and hunting for any mangoes that had fallen to the forest floor.

With our mangoes safely stashed, we happily wandered off down the road towards Rikitea, stopping every few metres as Napoleon spotted another fruit tree and insisted that we fill our bags. We had mangoes, grapefruit, papaya, mandarins, guavas, lemons, breadfruit, pistache, coconut, little red tomatoes and oranges, all as fresh as they come; by the time we got back to the boat we figured Napoleon deserved a drink, so we pulled out the bottle of sake that Rob had stashed away in the bottom of the cupboard (the only alcohol we had on board) and treated ourselves to a glass each.

It was then that we cooked up the pancakes and started talking about the island. We learned lots of intriguing facts about the Gambiers that you wouldn’t read in books, like the fact that the islanders used to make their own fruit wine, but the French made it illegal so the locals would have to buy beer and wine at inflated prices from the local shops; indeed, the attitude of the local gendarmes (two French and one local) towards the natives was apparently quite arrogant, something the islanders didn’t like at all. It’s a sad story, but a familiar one if you know anything about the exploitation of the Pacific, and it was made all the more real by Napoleon’s explanations. It was a very interesting afternoon.

Meeting the Other Yachties

That night we expanded our social circle even further by meeting some of the other yacht crews in the harbour (there were five other yachts in Rikitea harbour when we arrived). Joe and Janet from the Canadian sloop Tegan dropped by for a chat on the way to their boat; their visit soon extended into a couple of beers and a sampling of my freshly baked mango cake, of which I was rather proud. Joe and Janet were to turn out to be excellent company during our Gambier stay, and told us lots about the other yachties in the harbour. It never ceases to amaze me how the world of yachting is like an extended family, with people just striking up conversations with other yachts, and extending the warm hand of friendship to complete strangers for no other reason than the fact that they have a boat too. It’s a very pleasant club, and it makes distant harbours feel like home in the space of a few days.

Joe and Janet also mentioned that one of the boats had a welding machine on it, and that the owner – known as ‘Peeyoo’ for no better reason than his initials were P.U. – was a very friendly guy who, if we asked him nicely, would probably help us out with fixing Doris, our broken wind vane. Rob jumped at the chance, and the next day he went over to Peeyoo and enlisted his help to spend half a day welding steel; as a thank-you we invited him round for dinner and yarned the night away. Peeyoo, a fascinating man from Sweden, was sailing round the world single-handed – no mean feat! – and proved highly entertaining company.

Initial Exploration of Mangareva

The next day, Friday 16th May, I explored the southeast corner of Île Mangareva, following the road to what I hoped would be a beach, but which turned out to be a dead-end in the hilly forests of the island. Undeterred, I decided to bush-bash my way to the beach, but I wasn’t expecting such seriously spiky plants (it wasn’t quite bush lawyer, but enough to lacerate my legs) and towering fern thickets, so after half an hour of struggling downhill towards the shore and getting Pyke-like déjà vu, I turned round, made my way back to the road, sat down and ate a couple of mangoes. The moral of the story: rainforest is a nightmare to bash through, whatever the country.

To make up for my bleeding legs, I got a lift back with a passing jeep, full to the brim with young teenage kids, who were squeezed in between sacksful of oranges that they’d spent the day picking. They filled my bag with oranges, gave me chilled orange juice to drink when we stopped at one of their houses, and deposited me safely back in town with huge smiles and waves all around. It’s a wonderfully friendly world out here in Polynesia, it really is.

Water Catchers

You may wonder how yachts survive in terms of water; after all, you can envisage months’ worth of food, but water? Surely it runs out?

Indeed, it does, and our tanks ran out along with the month of May, not surprisingly seeing as we hadn’t filled them since leaving New Zealand in April. But where do you get water in a place like the Gambiers, where the local mains water isn’t fit to drink – even for the islanders – and there are no taps on the quay? The answer is to use a rain catcher.

A rain catcher does just what it sounds like: it catches rain and puts it into your tank. Your average rain catcher is simply a tarpaulin with a hole in the middle, to which you attach a hose that feeds into your water tank. Zeke had a rain catcher – at least it did when we arrived in the Gambiers – and we decided to set it up on the morning of Monday 26th. The rain had been streaming down all night with a persistency that made us think it would keep on going for days, but we’d been entertaining Joe and Janet to a night of cookies and videos, so I’d only put up the small rain catcher, more as a gesture than a practicality. The next day, though, we decided to go for the big one.

Whoops. Zeke’s rain catcher, which Rob had never actually used before, turned out to be rubbish, being nothing more than a huge piece of porous (porous!) material and a kinked hose, down two sides of which you put wooden slats to retain the shape. The theory was fine, but in the strong gusts we were having, the material ripped right across the middle where the stitching had rotted, and one of the slats snapped in half as a result. So we got soaked to the skin and remained waterless while the heavens poured down more liquid than even Moses had had to cope with.

Tegan, bless them, had seen our plight, and offered us their rain catcher, seeing as they’d had theirs up all night and had filled their entire tank, as well as all the other containers they could get their hands on. We gladly accepted, and in the next weather lull we dinghied over, picked up the catcher, and installed it on Zeke; as a result the sun came out and the rain disappeared faster than a shoplifter who’s seen a blue flashing light.

My only other experience with rain catchers was during a later storm, when we again borrowed Joe and Janet’s system. I have no idea how much water we collected, but when Bob Geldof wrote, ‘There’s nothing more useless than a car that won’t start/But it’s even more useless at the end of the world,’ he’d obviously never had to use a bloody rain catcher. We finally filled our tanks by doing three dinghy journeys to the local school, run by the Frères du Sacré Coeur, filling up jerry cans from their rain water tank until the dinghy was close to sinking, and siphoning it into our tanks. It cost us sweat and effort, but it was still far less grief than getting the rain catcher to work.

Fixing Doris

The Frères were useful for more than water, too. Being the local school – or one of them, I should say, the other being a state school rather than a convent – they were well equipped in the workshop stakes. We visited them on Tuesday 27th May to ask them if they could complete the repairs to Doris by making a new rudder for it, and we spent an interesting morning communicating in pidgin French what we wanted, and making sure that the pupils who did the work drilled holes in the right place and knew what shape we wanted the rudder to be.

The job was very polished, and the cost was peanuts; we paid them US$25 for the piece of wood, and US$25 for something like four hours’ labour, probably a quarter of what it would have cost in New Zealand. Some things, like labour, are very cheap in the middle of nowhere, and some things, like chocolate, alcohol and electrical parts, are extortionate. Depending on your lifestyle, it either balances out, or it’s a very expensive life in paradise.

Mont Duff

That afternoon saw Rob and I climb to the highest point in the Gambiers – nay, in the whole Tuamotu Archipelago. Mont Duff towers above the area to a snow-brushing height of 411m, and the climb up is something everyone who visits the Gambiers should do. We, however, managed to get our bearings completely confused, and ended up climbing the wrong mountain, Mont Mokoto, the second highest peak in the Tuamotus.

Still, with the mountains being so huge, we simply slid down one and up the other, so after beating through some beautiful bush we finally got to the top of Mont Duff, admired the quite stunning view, and discovered a marked path all the way down to the main road, something we’d missed on the way up. The grapefruit we found at the bottom never tasted so sweet...

Six People and a Boat

On our way back to the quay we got talking to a new couple on the block, Laurent and Sonia from Chile, who invited us over for tea and a natter. I remember a number of things about our visit: excellent conversation, despite a language barrier (only Laurent spoke English); two adults and four kids crammed into a boat not that much larger than Zeke; wonderful ham sandwiches, fulfilling one of my most intense ocean passage fantasies; harrowing stories of the family coming through the Straits of Magellan, at the southern tip of South America; the kids showing me their homework, and the courses they had to follow by correspondence; and a delightful caramel spread that transformed toast into something special, created by simply boiling an unopened can of condensed milk in water for two hours.

It’s amazing what you can learn from one quick visit to another person’s boat.

Walking Round Mangareva

To alleviate the potential boredom and frustration associated with staying in the harbour and spending most of the time fixing things on the boat – our current project was to paint all the rust spots on the deck, which was pretty tedious – I decided to circumnavigate Île Mangareva by foot. The total distance looked fairly large on the map – something like 20km – but that wasn’t enough to deter a tramper like me, so armed with lunch, some water and a compass, I set off on the morning of Friday 30th May for a good, long walk.

It went well. The walk round Mangareva is beautiful, to say the least, with bay after bay stretching out into the pale blue sea, with lots of little pearl farms standing in the sea and houses every now and then along the way. As I was leaving the outskirts of Rikitea – if a village that small can be said to have outskirts – I managed to pick up a dog, who started to follow me and wouldn’t take the hint when I made a point of ignoring him and not being at all friendly. After a couple of miles I realised that the little blighter was going to hang around for the duration, so I started to make polite conversation, asking him if he knew any good spots for a swim.

The response was pretty poor; all he did was run off the road every now and chase chickens, much to my embarrassment, so I named him ‘Colonel’ after the finger-lickin’ father of Kentucky Fried, Colonel Sanders. Unfortunately, Colonel had one bad trait when it came to human obedience; like an experienced lover he only came when it suited him, which meant I ended up feeling responsible for him every time the farm dogs started their frenzied ‘he be a stranger round these parts’ barking. Still, he deserved part of my sandwich just for sticking with me all the way round.

The end arrived prematurely; I’d assumed I was no more than halfway round, but straight after lunch I arrived in Baie de Ngatavake, home to Napoleon and just over the hill from Rikitea, and true to form, as I wandered past Napoleon’s house, his family called over and asked, in French, if I would like any pamplemousse. Now I was pretty thirsty – thinking I had miles to go, I’d been rationing my water – so I took up the offer and wolfed down the grapefruit like there was no tomorrow. The conversation flowed like the juice dribbling down my beard, despite the low level of my French, and after about ten minutes I discovered that Napoleon’s brother, Terii, spoke good English, and we continued the conversation to my advantage. Napoleon was working that day – and, it being pay day, would be getting plastered that night – but Terii, the older brother and more mature, told me all about his 12 years working for Marlon Brando on his private island near Tahiti, the reasons why he moved to Mangareva, what work was like on his own private pearl farm, his experiences of Tahiti, and plenty more. Needless to say, he filled up my backpack with fruit, and when he offered me a lift back to Rikitea, he chopped down the biggest bunch of bananas you’ve ever seen and handed it to me. Fruit might be ubiquitous in the Gambiers, but the kindness of the locals is still something to marvel at.

To cap it all, Terii gave me a lift over to Zeke in his canoe when we got to Rikitea. Mangarevan canoes are very fast (they use outboard motors to burn through the surf) and have outriggers to make them really stable. Arriving at Zeke via local transport with sacks of fruit felt pretty good, and we happily ate bananas for the rest of our stay in Mangareva.

The Supply Boat

On Saturday 31st May a huge boat came into port, docked, dropped off lots of containers and fuel, and left again. I only say this to highlight the supply system here: you wait for the supply ship, buy everything you can while the shops are well stocked, and then you hold out for another four weeks or so until the next one arrives.

The only other commercial traffic is by air, with three flights a month to Tahiti that are mainly used by the locals to get to Tahiti for medical treatment or to discuss business there. The flight costs a lot of money – not surprisingly when you consider the remoteness of the islands – which might help to explain why the Gambiers aren’t a major tourist spot.

Even when the supply ship has unloaded its goods, it can be challenging to buy anything. The shops shut for siesta in the Gambier Islands between 12 noon and 3pm, even the shop that sells sandwiches...

Welcome to Rikitea, the only place in the world where the lunch bars shut for lunch.

Ships’ Party

Tuesday 3rd June was party night; Richard and Gail on the schooner Jan van Gent invited everybody who was anybody to a ‘bring a dessert and a musical instrument’ evening, a very well attended do that saw some amazing desserts (oh, and some of my ANZAC cookies from Zeke). I took my penny whistle, on which I could play ‘Molly Malone’, but that was about all I could manage until Laurent fished out his guitar. I scraped together a solo performance of The Senators’ ‘The Girl I Adore’ and Billy Bragg’s ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ – it was good to play a guitar after so long without one – and we all saw the wee hours in with beer and good cheer.

It was a wonderful evening, especially as we arrived with a bowl of ANZAC cookies and left with a goody bag filled with chocolate cake, guava and peach pie, chocolate cookies, coconut balls, and a couple of leftover ANZACs... quite a trade!

Come and Go

Sometime during our stay in Rikitea, the gorgeous yacht Illusion arrived, complete with Jim and Ami, the American couple sailing it. Joe and Janet from Tegan had met Jim and Ami in South America, and their induction into the Gambier knitting circle was swift and welcome.

Illusion was also interesting because it was there that I got my first look at an American map of the world. As a European I’m used to seeing maps with the Americas on the left, Australia in the bottom-right, the zero degrees line sensibly arranged in the middle of the map, and the equator halfway down the page, equidistant between the top and bottom. Of course this is a fairly Euro-centric view of the world, and I’ve seen amusing maps in Australia and New Zealand where the world is upside down, with south at the top and north at the bottom, thus showing Australia at the top of the map. However, every map in the USA – yes, apparently every map, because Jim said he’d never seen a Euro-centric map until he left the States, and it had blown his mind – has the Americas in the middle of the page, with Europe and Africa on the right, and Japan, Australia and so on to the left.

That’s not the weird bit though, because it’s only fair and understandable that the Americans should have USA-centric maps; but on closer inspection, they’ve also moved the equator down the page, so the northern hemisphere is bigger than the southern, making North America look huge and pushing Antarctica off the bottom of the map; and, even better, they’ve arbitrarily chopped Asia down the middle, with one half on the right and one on the left, but without any real overlap, so some countries simply disappear, or become so crushed onto the periphery that they’re easily missed. The position of the dividing line? Uncannily close to Vietnam. At least we have the decency to chop the world in half along a line between Russia and Alaska, which doesn’t cut through any continents and only sacrifices a couple of mid-Pacific islands that wouldn’t show up on a map of the world anyway. I suppose I should be grateful that the landmasses that aren’t in North America weren’t labelled terra incognita... but if you’ve ever wondered why Americans consider Vietnam to be at the ends of the earth, perhaps this might be the reason why.

The Sociability of Yachties

Written: 18 May 1997

The sociability of the Rikitea yachties really hit home on Saturday 17th May, when Joe and Janet came up with an idea for a party on their boat, Tegan: a pot-luck party where everyone provided something. We provided the meat, because when we left New Zealand we had 42kg of vacuum-packed frozen meat in the oversized freezer on Zeke, which had lasted very well and meant we had meat for longer than most yachts (who can normally only store a couple of weeks’ worth). Our kilogram of gravy beef was like manna from heaven for Joe, Janet and Peeyoo, the other party-goers (Peeyoo being the solo captain of the yacht Rammen).

The night was pure delight. Joe is a gourmet chef, no doubt about it, and his marinade transformed our slightly turning beef into a succulent delight that barbecued up a treat; the jacket potatoes, fresh salad and copious rum from Panama made even my cooking look humble. Stuffed and sated, we settled back for a night on Tegan, sitting in sheltered Rikitea harbour as the stars twinkled and the waves gently lapped.

Balmy evenings on a yacht don’t get much better than this: perfect temperature (shorts and T-shirts all day and all night, without too much humidity), no annoying insects (they get more serious further north), a gentle breeze, perfect peace (a total lack of tourists means a total lack of noisy all-night bars, nightclubs and so on), and wonderful company. Yachts are also immeasurably cosy, with dim lights casting homely shadows inside the alfresco cockpit, and comfortable settees inside with pub-like combinations of wood panelling and memorabilia. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that yachts pitch and roll, and take a serious amount of effort and expense to maintain, it would be a pretty close thing to a perfect living environment for one or two people. Maybe a canal boat is the compromise, but sitting out on the Trent and Mersey isn’t quite the same as decking out under the Polynesian moon...

The party went on until 5.30am, by which time Rob had gone to bed, the rest of us had quaffed a fair amount of alcohol, and we’d had a good ol’ sing-along to a collection of songs, most of which I either didn’t know or wouldn’t admit to knowing. True to form, I lost all public-performance nerves after the rum, and we sang into the wee hours; but surely the best part of the whole evening was when Joe asked if any of us smoked cigars, and my face lit up like a beacon. That was when Joe showed us his cigar collection.

I should add at this point that Tegan had spent the last goodness only knows how many months making its way from Vancouver (Joe and Janet’s home) down the west coast of the USA, and down to Panama and South America, where Joe had been able to pick up stunning Cuban and Panamanian cigars for next to nothing, the sort of delights that people, literally, pay US$50 each for in the USA and London. Imagine my delight, then, to find that Joe was as pleased to have someone to smoke cigars with as I was to be someone with whom to smoke cigars, and we whiled away the moonlight talking about fine port, good whisky, excellent food and the art of enjoying life to the maximum, Cubans gently glowing in the gloom.

What wonderful people with whom to explore the Gambiers...

Cooking on Board

Written: 18 May 1997

My culinary skills have improved immeasurably since Laurent left the boat and I became honorary cook. It’s been quite an awakening to discover a latent interest in something I’ve traditionally regarded as a pain in the proverbials; cooking in the bush was OK, because I had such a long time in which to do it, but my kitchen was little more than a camping stove, so the standard of my meals was pretty lousy (although very good in terms of nutrients, vitamins, carbohydrates, fibre and all that). I now have a whole galley to myself, a huge stock of ingredients, and time to be creative. It’ll be a different story when the boat’s pitching and rolling to 45°, but while we’re in a nice calm anchorage, it’s wonderful.

And by ‘cooking’ I don’t mean the reasonably standard spaghetti bolognese, stir fry, bangers and beans kind of meal, I mean real feasts with inventive use of spices; proper cooking with a modicum of help from recipe books. Witness the following successes from the kitchen of Zeke, all in the first few days of my self-appointment as chef...

On 14th May, we got given a rib cage from a goat that had been slaughtered that afternoon, so I cleaned it up, cut up the ribs and roasted them in a garlic and thyme concoction, producing spare ribs that would have made a restaurant proud. The main course of chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce with roast potatoes knocked every meal we’d had on the ocean into a hat. We finished off with a banana cake I’d thrown together, and which tasted delicious (though I say so myself).

The next day, encouraged by my success with the banana cake, I made a less successful, but perfectly delightful mango cake from the fruits of our day with Napoleon, and for a main course we had pancakes with a pork curry filling (the pork had to be curried, as it was about to walk out of the fridge and demand squatter’s rights). It went down a treat.

The night of Peeyoo’s visit, I concocted a meat loaf, something I’d never even thought of making before. Damn, it’s easy, and tastes bloody good with sautéed potatoes in garlic and basil. It makes me hungry just thinking about it.

I’ve even cooked a pizza (and I now know two different ways of making the dough), and I’ve become a complete expert at making the most flavoursome and filling white bread. Meanwhile, all this fresh fruit has spawned a collection of fruity and milky drinks that are heaven after a heavy snorkelling session.

I can even cook ANZAC biscuits, a traditional Australian cookie. The English know them as flapjacks, but the Aussie story is that the ANZAC soldiers at Gallipoli only had access to golden syrup, oats, sugar and flour, so they combined them to come up with these delicious cookies. I decided to cook some to try to make a dent in the massive supply of rolled oats we had on board; we’d bought loads of oats in New Zealand because we’d thought that porridge would be the best breakfast idea on the boat, but I’ve thrown up so much of it that I’m simply not interested any more, and we’ve still got about ten huge bags of the stuff. One day I’ll discover something that requires mountains of rolled oats, but until then it’s acting as padding for all the cans so they don’t rattle in the night. They were damn fine cookies, though.

On the subject of food, I’ve bloated since arriving in paradise. To be fair, when I arrived after 28 days of appetite and breakfast loss I was as thin as a rake, and my hips stuck out like Karen Carpenter’s rib cage. I am glad to report, then, that after only a few weeks of fine and copious food, I am beginning to grow fat (at least, fat by my standards) and can, once again, pinch an inch. It’s good to be back, especially as this gut was replenished without the aid of beer, which at over US$2 a bottle here is a definite luxury.

Marvellous.

Rikitea Harbour

Written: 26 May 1997

Quick! Let me grab the moment and describe the feeling, as it’s a succinct summary of the sub-tropical paradise of anchoring off Île Mangareva. The date – I have to check this electronically as I have absolutely no idea what day of the week it is, let alone what date – is Monday 26th May, and it’s 9.30pm, after dark.

Zeke is moored in the beautifully sheltered harbour at Rikitea, the water gently rippling against the sides and lapping the dinghy with slightly metallic slaps, a homely sound because it shows we haven’t lost our means of getting to shore. The last three days have been pretty miserable (in terms of weather, not lifestyle), and this is the calm after the storm.

That’s why the air feels so clean, so light, so cooling. The humidity that can build up in the sub-tropics is totally absent, and the gentle breeze wafts the smoky scent of the locals’ fires over the bow, where I’m sitting. Rikitea is spread around me like an arc, a crescent row of electric bulbs running from the town generator, reflecting in the water like lantern light reflecting off the river at Mardi Gras, like restaurant table light glimmering off the Seine as cognac and cigars are served, like pub firelight shining over the canal boats tied up alongside... it’s a painting, and the air is still.

But not totally still. Surrounding Zeke are the other boats that have been sheltering in Rikitea for the last few days: Tegan, where Joe and Janet are sitting outside, listening to music on their wonderful waterproof hi-fi, a cigar glowing in the dark and the occasional lilt of Canadian accent floating over the water (ironically the song’s ‘Another Day’ by Paul McCartney, a song all about the repetitiveness of working life); Teba, the huge French boat that we befriended in Whangarei and kept in contact with all the way over, where there is activity involving generators and flickering torchlight; the schooner[1] Jan van Gent, whose crew are the very friendly Canadians Richard and Gail; these boats and others are all here, creating a community feel in an otherwise empty arc of water.

When yachts get together, they synchronise. This isn’t a social phenomenon: it’s physical. When a number of yachts are anchored in the same spot, they do the maritime equivalent of synchronised swimming; when the wind blows, yachts turn bow into the wind because of the way they’re shaped, and to the casual observer it looks as if the yachts are obeying some cosmic law of conformity, all swinging in the same way like a ballroom dancing troupe. It’s yet another way the community feeling gets strengthened in the harbour, albeit subliminally.

This is the feeling, then, of the real sub-tropics. Here there are no work pressures, no western stresses, no traffic jams, no worries about where to get food, no pollution (beyond the French nuclear legacy and the dodgy fish) and no similarity to city life that I can see. Now I’ve been here for a little while, it’s become second nature to relax, procrastinate and live for the moment, with a healthy regard for doing those little jobs on the boat that still need to be done. It’s a pleasant feeling, one made more enjoyable by the fact that after the first few days, when the sheer joy of reaching land had worn off, life became surprisingly mundane.

It’s a weird concept, being morose in paradise, but it’s understandable. Both Rob and I found that having survived the voyage from hell, and having Laurent jump ship, life suddenly took a turn, a change from constant stress, both physical and mental, to an existence where all-night sleeping sessions were a reality, there were no watches to keep, the boat didn’t roll and the food was fresh. The thrill of this was great for a few days – I would say incredible, in all fairness – but it hits everyone sooner or later: paradise complacency. It only lasts for a couple of days, but the feeling of being strangely unimpressed and, I dare say, a little depressed in the midst of heaven is interesting, to say the least. It’s understandable as the psychological calm after the storm, but it’s still a strange phenomenon. Needless to say, we got over it pretty quickly.

That’s just one more reason why the gentle serenity of this nocturnal harbour scene is so beautiful. We’ve not only arrived, we’ve begun to adjust, and now the cruising really starts. Roll on the Pacific Islands...

Tonight truly is the calm after the storm.

[1] A quick course in yacht types might be handy. The most common is the sloop, of which Zeke is an example: a sloop has one main mast, with one sail on a boom behind it and one sail in front (the mainsail and jib, as previously explained). If there’s one mast and two sails in front of the mast, it’s a cutter, like Teba. A schooner like Jan van Gent has two masts, with the front mast being smaller than the back. A ketch has two masts, but the other way round to a schooner – the front mast is taller than the back – and a yawl is a ketch whose rear boom hangs over the back of the boat (normally the boom is totally inside the lines of the boat). So now you’ve got enough info to hop on down to Great Yarmouth and sound knowledgeable... and interestingly, at one point in our visit there was at least one of each of these types present at Rikitea, something of a rare occurrence in such a remote spot as the Gambiers.

Gambier Islands (Southeast)

Written: 23 May 1997

Given the way we were all getting on together it was logical that we should go off exploring the Gambiers together, so we teamed up with Joe and Janet on Tegan (unfortunately Peeyoo was about to leave for Tahiti on his yacht Rammen, so he was too busy to come with us). And so the four of us set off south towards a little sheltered spot off Île Akamaru, a reef-surrounded 246m-high peak just a short trip 7km southeast from Rikitea.

The Gambier lagoon is surrounded by a huge barrier reef (technically a large atoll) in the shape of a vertical diamond with points at north, south, east and west; this surrounds both the four main islands and the smaller islets dotted around. Île Mangareva, the northernmost island, is the largest and highest, and is home to almost all the people who live in the Gambiers (they mostly live in the village of Rikitea). The other islands are mostly uninhabited, and the only settlements you can see consist of one or two houses for workers on the pearl farms that form the basis for the islands’ wealth. The anchorage we found near Île Akamaru proved to be pretty idyllic, with no houses in sight (except for a work hut on the beach that nobody lived in anyway) and coral reef everywhere. Akamaru is only inhabited occasionally, and is (in)famous for being the island where Laval and Caret celebrated their first mass in the Gambiers after they’d arrived in 1834.

Come to think of it, it’s pretty damn hard for me to sit here on the deck of Zeke and describe how beautiful this paradise is, because however I rearrange phrases like ‘stunning coral reef’, ‘striking volcanic peaks’, ‘palm-fringed beaches’, ‘deep turquoise water’, ‘sparkling sunshine’, ‘cloudless skies’, ‘gently lapping water’, ‘cool sea breezes’, ‘sweet and succulent fruit’, ‘hot white sand’, ‘unspoilt and uninhabited’ and ‘refreshing swimming’, I still won’t be able to describe just how amazing this paradise really is. The first step is to understand that paradise has nothing to do with what you see in the tourist brochures – cocktail bars, crowded beaches and only two weeks in which to cram a sun tan, three James Clavell novels and at least one cultural experience – so it’s not all bumming around on the beach. This is the real thing, and we’re not tourists, we’re living here.

This became really apparent when we went for the beach barbecue experience, an off-the-cuff decision that simply isn’t possible in places like Tahiti. In thanks for hosting the wonderful party the Saturday before, Rob and I invited Joe and Janet to join us for a genuine Aussie beach barbie, complete with real-fire barbecue and great food. It turned into another amazing night.

Barbecue in Paradise

I spent most of the morning slaving over a hot oven, creating some wonderful fresh bread, a great creamy banana pudding and some pasta salad with homemade pesto. I did, however, manage to grab the dinghy and go exploring on my own for a couple of hours, one of the true pleasures of having your own transport and life-support system in an island setting. I discovered a beautiful and tiny beach with a little reef just off it, and spent the afternoon snorkelling and reading a Graham Greene novel in the shade of a tropical tree. It set the scene perfectly for the barbecue itself.

For the barbie we had good old snags (sausages for those not used to Aussie English); sweet potatoes that we wrapped in foil, chucked in the fire and ate with butter (and which tasted great, despite the purple colour of the insides, a shock to those of us who weren’t prepared for it); and possibly the strangest experiment of all, a breadfruit. This staple of the Pacific grows on trees all over the place, and is about the size of a football with a tough and knobbly green skin that looks totally unappetising. Shove a breadfruit in a roaring fire for a couple of hours, turning it regularly, and you end up with something about the size of a football with a tough and knobbly black skin that looks totally unappetising. However, smash it open when it’s ready, and you end up with a strange white doughy substance that’s vaguely bread-like and not at all bad with salt and butter. I prefer the other two ways to cook it – slice it up very thinly and fry it like potato chips, or chop it up into chunks and roast it – but there’s something fun about the whole breadfruit-in-the-fire experience, as it’s an essential part of Polynesian culture.

The cigars and rum made a welcome appearance too, with the rum adding a great kick to a milk and fruit juice concoction I’d whipped up, and as the almost full moon lit up the coral off the beach and the fire crackled away, casting shadows on the coconut palms above our heads and along the beautiful beach we’d decided to call home for the evening, I felt about as far away from the crazy world of commuting and stress as I’ll ever be. I’ve gained another fantastic memory, and I’ll gain a fair few more while cruising on Zeke; life can be very pleasant sometimes.

Under the Sea

We were enjoying ourselves so much that we decided to stay in the anchorage for the following day as well, and Joe made a fantastic Caesar salad for lunch, a thank-you for the night before. Real ground coffee made an appearance – wow, what a taste experience after all that instant coffee with powdered milk – and after relaxing for some hours, Joe and I took the dinghy over to the main reef and snorkelled for some time, exploring the reef and the local wildlife. As my first proper snorkelling session on coral it was quite an experience; the surreal shapes of the coral and the sheer intensity of the colours of fish you see are overwhelming.

The next day Rob and I decided to do some more serious diving, so we set off for the southernmost corner of the barrier reef, beyond all the islands. Here the coral looked promising for a Hookah dive, so we steamed out there and dropped anchor just before the seabed took a dive into the deep ol’ Pacific.

A Hookah dive isn’t scuba; with scuba you have everything in a self-contained unit, with an air tank strapped to your back and complete independence. A Hookah dive uses a compressor on the boat that feeds air down a long hose to a mouthpiece at the other end (hence the name, which comes from the tobacco pipes that people always claim they never use for marijuana, officer); the techniques for breathing are similar to scuba, but you don’t have a buoyancy jacket and the air never runs out. The disadvantage, of course, is that you have to stay within 60m or so of the boat, but there is one big plus: there’s nowhere in the Gambiers to refill scuba tanks, so once we’d emptied them, that would be the end of the diving until we found someone with a scuba compressor (unlikely until Tahiti). If your Hookah runs out of air, then it’s a safe assumption that the rest of the planet has too.

The dive proved to be interesting, but probably not worth the few hours of travelling back into the wind we had to go through afterwards. If you add in the fact that I managed to get my hose in an almighty tangle, then it probably wasn’t the best introduction to Hookah diving, but I can’t complain; diving on coral is still a novelty for me, and even a mediocre reef is amazing at that stage in your diving career. The fish were pretty amazing, and the colours had to be seen to be believed; it truly is a different world on the bottom of the ocean.

Our return trip wasn’t back to Île Akamaru, but to Île Agakauitai over on the western side of the group. The reason was that Rob had a mission: to find the caves of the cannibal kings. The story goes that before Laval came and screwed up all the fun, the locals buried their dead kings in caves on Agakauitai. We’d heard that the introduction of goats had rather screwed things up, seeing as the caves on the island are no more that indents in the mountains, and goats are no great respecters of the dead, tending to turf anything out of a cave they fancy for a home. However, Rob wanted to explore the island anyway, just in case anything was left, so we decided to spend the day climbing and exploring Île Agakauitai.

Predictably we didn’t find any cannibal kings, but we did get some wonderful views, and there were some interesting bush-bashing opportunities. The weather wasn’t that flash, and as we headed back to the boat the rain came in and made the rest of the night somewhat bumpy and blowy; returning to Rikitea the next morning was a welcome move, as Rikitea is about as sheltered as anchorages get.

Back in Rikitea we found Joe and Janet and settled back into the routine. Ah... harbour life. It’s a home from home.

Gambier Islands (East)

Written: 15 June 1997

We made our last sortie from Rikitea on Thursday 5th June, accompanied by Tegan as per usual (no other yachts joined us, as they seemed to be far more interested in simply lazing around off Rikitea, probably a side-effect of visiting too many island paradises). Our mission: to head a couple of miles east towards the airport motu, Totegegie.

A motu has to be one of the most classic tropical formations – or, at least, an important part of one of the most classic tropical formations, the atoll – and Totegegie is a classic example. A motu is an island that forms when debris and sand collects on top of an atoll reef, normally in a long, thin line, and the motu at Totegegie stretches for about five miles (with a couple of small breaks where you can dinghy through to the ocean), is only about 100m wide at its widest point, and is smothered with coconut palms, firs and pandanus trees. It’s also the site of the Gambier Islands’ airport, a one-and-a-half mile sealed strip, presumably left over from the days of the military tests in the area, and which now hosts just three planes a month. One thing’s for sure: living under the flight path in the Gambiers doesn’t bring the property prices down by much.

The motu stretches north-south along the eastern side of the Gambier atoll, and we anchored just inside the atoll, opposite sandy beaches and swaying trees, and with the Pacific Ocean peeping through gaps in the reef. The sound of the sea crashing against the outside of the reef was particularly soothing as we relaxed in the smooth waters of the lagoon; when there’s a huge, living coral reef between you and the swell, it takes one hell of a storm to spoil the tranquillity.

Rob and I explored the airport and terminal shacks – which were surprisingly modern considering the total lack of tourists who fly to the Gambiers – and plunged into the bush to the south of the airstrip to tackle the rough-looking road that would, we hoped, lead us to a collection of abandoned buildings that we’d spotted from the boat. Sure enough, after wandering down the road for some time – avoiding the countless hermit crabs who were sunbathing right in our path and who would roll themselves into balls at our approach – we reached a group of old warehouses, relics from an earlier age when machinery was fixed on the motu. The buildings were totally abandoned and crumbling, a hopeful sign that the French have finally pulled the stopper on the military activity and tests that have plagued the area for far too long.

The day was rounded off with Joe’s homemade pizza, probably the best pizza I have ever tasted anywhere (not surprisingly, given my lucid dreams of pizza on the way to the Gambiers). Goodness knows how he did it – practice, he assured me – but his pizza dough was as good as any restaurant’s that I’d come across, and his jalapeno peppers really added zest to the experience. I might have been proud of my cooking on board Zeke, but some people are just born to the kitchen (or, rather, the galley).

Barbecues, Cigars and Scuba Diving

We spent the next day preparing for another beach barbecue, this time on the motu. As with our Île Akamaru barbecue, it all went swimmingly, with my first attempt at a marinade going down a treat. The cigars made an appearance – José Llopis Churchills, maduros and naturals, just for the record – and we all spent a sizable portion of the evening scouring the outside of the reef, exposed at low tide, for crabs and lobsters, but failed to catch a glimpse of even one. Never mind, walking round an exposed reef by torchlight after a large barbecue is an interesting experience even if you don’t spot anything.

The conversation turned to cigars, naturally, but this time with more gusto that at the last barbie. The reason? A couple of days before I had borrowed a copy of an American magazine off Joe called Cigar Aficionado, a wonderful and decadent quarterly publication that pays unbridled homage to the cigar. It contains interviews with famous people who smoke cigars, it discusses the latest Cuban harvest, it does taste tests on cigar types, it discusses anything to do with being a rich jetsetter... it was completely fascinating and surprisingly a rather good read, even if it shamelessly promoted an image of the incredibly rich that left a slightly bad taste in my mouth. Still, I learned an awful lot about cigars in one brief reading, and it helped to break up the afternoon of cooking, washing up and singing along to a Neil Diamond tape I discovered in the back of one of Zeke’s draws (which just goes to show how tolerant one becomes after months in a yacht).

The next couple of days we lazed and snorkelled, fixing the odd thing on the boat, and on Monday 9th, Rob and I decided to do a scuba dive, a momentous decision, for this was to be my first dive on coral with my new scuba equipment. It’s all very well snorkelling and Hookah diving, but scuba is the only real way to explore, and explore we did. We ended up diving separately, one after the other – which you should never do, if you follow the rule book to the letter – because Rob wanted to go spearing fish, and with sharks in the water, it’s a good idea to have someone in the dinghy ready to pick up any fish you might catch before the predators get in there. He didn’t get any fish, but it meant that I got an hour of solo diving round the reef, exploring and just sitting there watching the sea life, quite overwhelmed by the experience.

Diving round coral is hard to explain. The geography of the ocean floor – ‘bommies’ of coral pushing up from the sand; sheets of flat coral that you can poke your head under; valleys through coral that are great to swim down and thrilling to catch the ocean swell in; caves full of hiding fish – makes the exploring far more interesting than with a flat-bottomed sandy sea. On top of that there’s the life surrounding the coral: huge, brightly coloured fish in shoals that all turn to flee at the same time, like herds of swimming sheep; eels three metres long that hug the floor, slipping in and out of coral corridors; large, ugly grouper that look miserable but taste good; sharks that you basically try to avoid; coral trout hugging the bommies... the delights never end.

And on top of the fish and coral are the shellfish, from which I collected two spider conch and two trochus (the former proving to be delicious when smashed open, gutted and fried in a little flour and oil, a process that Richard from Jan van Gent showed us on our return to Rikitea). The whole dive, lasting an hour, was again a confirmation that despite the initial cost of scuba training and equipment, it’s worth every penny.

We returned to Rikitea through rain and high winds on Tuesday 10th, and spent the night watching videos on Illusion with Jim and Ami and the Tegan crew. We spent the last few days before our planned departure from the Gambiers living the harbour life, finalising preparations for the journey ahead, and cooking as many meals in advance as we could, ready for freezing, to make things easier for me in my new role as ship’s cook. Not that I was complaining; if you’re in charge of the food, you never go hungry, though that wasn’t much use as the seasickness returned for the trip to Amanu...

French Polynesia: Heading for Tahiti

Man vs Cyclone Kelly

Written: 18 June 1997

We finally left the Gambier Islands on Sunday 15th June, at least as finally as is possible when your passage and plans depend on the weather. We had initially planned to leave on the Friday, but having checked out with the gendarmes, the other yachties pointed out that Friday was the 13th, and if there’s one thing that sailors are, it’s superstitious. Besides, we still had a few jobs to get done before leaving, so we spent Friday working on the boat and trying to get hold of the weather forecast for the area.

The next day we did a final check of everything – engine, rigging, below deck and so on – and discovered a large crack in one of the plates to which the lower starboard shrouds were attached (the shrouds being the thick steel cables that connect the mast to the boat, keeping it straight). We could have sailed with the crack, but there’s no point in risking something that might give way in a storm, potentially taking the mast with it, so we delayed departure until Sunday while the Frères did a quick welding job for us. After a delightful steak and baked potato meal courtesy of Tegan on Saturday night (a thank you to us for spending most of the afternoon trying to fix a leaky exhaust manifold on their engine), Sunday finally came, and we raised anchor and left Rikitea.

However, we didn’t leave the Gambiers straight away, but anchored off the southern coast of Mangareva. The reason: Cyclone Kelly had been ripping Fiji to bits over the previous few days, a real shock in the non-cyclone season, and it was slowly heading towards the southeast. Although this wasn’t straight for us, if it passed south of us the clockwise cyclonic winds would give us winds from the north or northeast, and seeing as we were planning to head north-northwest, that would mean an unpleasant bash almost straight into the wind; so we weighed anchor to try to get a better reception for the weather forecast broadcast from New Zealand, to see what the future held.

In the meantime, Jan van Gent and Illusion, who had both struck out northwest for Tahiti on Saturday while we were fixing the rigging, limped back into Rikitea, after studying the weather map and deciding that it wasn’t worth risking a confrontation with a cyclone, even if it had been reclassified as a tropical depression, a sign that the cyclone was slowly blowing itself out. Despite this worrying development, the winds were still supposed to be coming from the north, so we figured we’d be safe enough on the south side of Mangareva and stayed where we were, deciding to explore the beaches right next to us.

Beaches vary in much the same way gorges in Australia do; you might assume they’re all the same, but each beach has its own character, just like cities, deserts, forests and mountains, and the southern Mangarevan beaches were particularly beautiful. Unfortunately the weather was overcast, but even so we explored the area for a while, discovering old walls from a previous settlement, an old shack inhabited by chickens, and some wonderful palm-tree vistas. Returning through the colourful coral, we reckoned that our decision to stay the night just off the south coast was a good one.

Whoops: bad call. During supper the weather began to pick up, with some serious gusts of wind bursting round the corner from the east, and a swell slowly began to build up, sloshing the boat around enough to make us feel a bit uneasy (even though we had the whole anchor chain laid out, so there was no way we were going anywhere). We turned in early, with Rob getting up at 12.30am to get the weather from New Zealand. And that’s when he noticed the dinghy.

A cry of ‘Quick! Get up Mark, the dinghy’s flipped!’ woke me up at a quarter to one. The wind was crazy, but mercifully it wasn’t raining, so rushing onto deck I had to rely on the waves being blown over the sides to soak me to the skin. The dinghy, which we normally towed behind the boat (except on ocean passages, when it got lashed to the deck) had been blown over by the wind, flipping the oars out into the ocean and immersing the outboard in salt water. This was not a good thing.

It took total immersion from Rob and spiritual guidance and helpful torch lighting from me for us to get the outboard off the flipped dinghy and up onto the deck. We then managed to right the dinghy and hang it off the back of Zeke, only to have it flipped back over by the first wave that hit it, so we shrugged it off and left it to float upside down for the night. Saving the outboard was a higher priority.

When an outboard gets immersed in salt water, it gets water into the cylinder heads, and if you don’t flush it out, that’s one ruined motor (especially with salt water, a substance that makes concentrated acid look positively innocent). We spent until 3am disassembling, oiling, squirting and drying the outboard before finally turning in, and then we had to take it in turns to check our position every half hour through the night, to make sure we hadn’t dragged the anchor towards the surrounding coral reef.

Monday morning saw us battle to drag the upturned dinghy onto the deck in extreme winds – gusts of up to 50 miles per hour – and to pull up the anchor, with me at the helm and Rob at the anchor winch. The relief as we powered into the comparative shelter of Rikitea was huge, not dulled at all by the fact that we were supposed to have left for good. There was Illusion; there was Jan van Gent; and next to them Tegan; it felt like a homecoming, and we counted ourselves lucky to have lost no more than a couple of oars. Boats have been dashed on the reef in better conditions than that, and it drove home the message that sailing is sometimes a dangerous occupation, and people can get into trouble. That evening it was as if all the boats were nursing their wounds... dented pride for Jan van Gent and Illusion, who had had to turn back; engine headaches for Tegan, who had spent days fixing the bloody thing, only to have it still leaking and in need of an overhaul; and Zeke, happy to have fixed the outboard, but smarting from the loss of two oars (and wondering how to cope with only one spare oar on board). Such is the power of the weather.

Quite what a cyclone was doing cropping up in the middle of June, normally a totally cyclone-free month, was anybody’s guess. It wasn’t terribly sporting, having Kelly spoil our weather pattern, but I suppose I should have been glad that we weren’t inside the cyclone itself; that would have been dangerous.

We finally left the Gambiers on Wednesday 18th June, this time for good. We left Rikitea with the sadness reserved for leaving home... over a month in the one area is long enough to build up a pleasant social scene, and I looked back at the slowly disappearing Gambiers with great fondness.

Amanu

Written: 26 June 1997

The ocean passage from the Gambier Islands to the atoll of Amanu – some four days’ travel north-northwest to where the large atoll Hao dominates the map – was as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. I only lost one meal to the fish, and we didn’t get hit by any storms, but having already done one hugely unpleasant ocean passage (and a particularly long one too, judging by the reaction of the other yachties in Rikitea) I wasn’t exactly keen on doing any more.

At least this time the yacht didn’t pitch and roll as badly, and there were only two of us on board, which prevented overcrowding, but even though it was only a four-day trip to Amanu, I was desperate to hit land again. Memories of the trip from New Zealand flooded back – getting up at 3am while waves crashed over the side of the boat, the three of us desperately trying to reef the main sail while the wind whipped us to the bone for an hour; or having to put up with the sheer, exasperating boredom of 28 days on the sea – but while these feelings didn’t apply to the four days ambling through the smooth, pleasant-weather sailing of the trade winds, I still had to grit my teeth and persuade myself that Zeke was simply a means to an end, that end being the islands of incomparable beauty that we were exploring.

We eventually reached Amanu on Sunday 22nd June, after chalking up another 450 nautical miles. Let’s not dwell on the sailing and instead move swiftly on to the important part: the destination of Amanu.

Navigating the Pass

«Non, la bas c’est la passe deuxième,» said Marerenui, shaking his long-hair and looking for all the world like a Polynesian Shaggy temporarily without his Scooby Doo. «Vous voulez la première; c’est deux kilometres au sud.»

Squinting through the rain, I didn’t quite know what to make of Amanu. Our progress through the Dangerous Archipelago (the old name for the Tuamotus) had proved that without a GPS – the electronic gizmo that gives your latitude and longitude from satellite fixes – life in the Tuamotus would not only be dangerous, it would be downright suicidal. The Tuamotu atolls are invisible until you’re about five miles away from them – since they have no mountainous islands in the Tuamotus as they do in the Gambiers – and before you know it you can be run aground on a coral reef and sinking in the South Pacific with no means of escape. In the days before GPS, navigation by sextant would be petrifying in such an area, especially if the weather was cloudy, as it had been for most of our passage. Even with a GPS, it’s no picnic.

Amanu is a classic atoll, an oval-shaped ring of coral scattered with coconut palms and breaking surf, with only three passes into the lagoon. The problem, however, lies in actually getting through the passes, because the whole atoll is hugely tidal; the sea rushes into the narrow gaps in the reef, creating huge, swirling currents that suck in unsuspecting boats, and six hours later the tide turns and Amanu disgorges itself of all the flotsam it’s drawn in, like some huge sea monster’s lung. We arrived at what we thought was the main pass, and all we could see was a torrent of foamy water, rushing out of the lagoon over sharp rocks, jutting reef and treacherous-looking sand bars. Coupled with the squalls that blew in to add to the already atrocious visibility, and we were rapidly getting cold feet as to getting into the lagoon.

Our sketchy information and lack of good charts didn’t help. Until the last couple of years the whole of the south Tuamotu archipelago was interdit, as it was home to the French government’s nuclear testing and secret military training; nobody, absolutely nobody got in, bar the locals and the legionnaires. Now the exclusion zone is limited to an area around Mururoa and Fangatuafa atolls, home to the last nuclear tests in 1995, and you can go anywhere else without hindrance... that is, if you can get the information you need to explore the archipelago. All the guidebooks still list the Tuamotus as a no-go area, there is no information on passes, no up-to-date charts of the area, and all the yachties we’d met had the same problem: ils ne savent pas de tout. The typical reaction of the unadventurous sailor is to go straight to Tahiti, leaving the Tuamotus to the east, but the captain and I wanted to explore the Forbidden Zone and had spent some time doing the detective work on places we could visit in the southern Dangerous Archipelago.

Our options were limited by only considering atolls with passes into the lagoons; anchoring off the outside of an atoll is normally impossible because the ocean floor drops off too steeply on the ocean side, and even if you can drop anchor, it’s fatal if the wind turns and blows you onto the reef. The atolls in the southern Tuamotus that have passes are small in number: there are the Gambiers, where we’d already been; Mururoa, where we couldn’t sail without going via the inside of a French prison cell; Hao, home to the main military base in the Tuamotus, and not too desirable for just that reason, with its jets and legionnaires; Makemo, not far from Hao; and Amanu, an intriguing spot if only because there was so little information on it anywhere. The other atolls were either impossible to get into or were privately owned by pearl farmers, and were therefore out of bounds.

Our research had thrown up just two facts about Amanu: there were two passes into the lagoon (though we found out later there are actually three), and they were both ferociously tidal, far too swift at high or low tide for a yacht to motor through. In the books we also found a formula linking the time of moonrise and moonset to the best time to enter the passes, so we tried to measure the times of the moon’s passage as we sailed from Mangareva, though without any success; it was far too cloudy. The electronic almanac I’d picked up off the Internet for my faithful palmtop turned out to be as trustworthy as a cockney trying to sell genuine Yves Saint Laurent perfume for five quid on Oxford Street, so we arrived with very little to go on. Looking at the boiling inferno that we were supposed to tackle we felt our resolve buckle, despite our four-day journey to get there. Dejected, we decided to scoot south down the coast of the atoll to see if we had possibly missed another entrance.

Marerenui to the Rescue

That’s when the speedboat came planing over the surf, pounding along with three brown-skinned natives bouncing up and down in a synchronised dance that’s instantly familiar to anyone who has witnessed insane driving on tropical islands. We flagged them down, and in broken French I asked them about the pass. Marerenui, Angelo and Laurent were to turn into our saviours.

‘That’s the second of the three passes you’ve been looking at,’ said Marerenui, in one phrase making the facts and figures we’d creamed about Amanu look completely reliable. ‘You don’t want to go through that one unless you’ve been drinking too much champagne; the best pass is down there, by the village.’ And hopping onto Zeke with Angelo, leaving Laurent to motor off back home at breakneck speed, Marerenui pointed us south to the real pass. To be honest, it didn’t look that much more encouraging.

‘Give it an hour and a half,’ he said, ‘and then we can motor into the lagoon.’ The hour and a half was spent chatting in pidgin French, drinking coffee, listening to Bob Marley, and wondering quite what was going to happen to the apparent Niagara by two o’clock in the afternoon. But sure enough, after one and a half hours, the pass was as placid as a baby on methadone, and we set off, me at the wheel, responding to gauche, droit and tout droit with more confidence than the usual port and starboard, which I’ve never really managed to get the hang of.

It might have looked passive, but our new-found friends’ conversation was nagging at the back of my mind. There had been two yachts run aground on the reef in recent years, resulting in one angry Frenchman who lost his boat after getting drunk and screwing up his entry, and one even angrier German who had lost his life because he was playing his guitar in the cockpit and didn’t realise the reef had sucked him in. The locals had to pull the latter’s body from the wreckage and make sure it went through the right channels, something the owner of the body had quite obviously failed to do in the last moments of his life. Considering that Amanu gets about five or six yachts visiting it every year, that’s quite a high fatality rate.

We managed to get through, though, relieved and somewhat thrilled by our introduction into the lives of the locals. We anchored, after politely declining the offer of tying up to a rusty steel buoy in the harbour which would have scratched the hell out of the boat had the wind blown us onto it, and thanked our saviours for their kindness. However, having spent the last four days in watch shifts of three hours – three on, three off for 24 hours a day, somewhat ruining the sleep pattern – we left the boys to go off and play their Sunday afternoon game of volleyball on the village green, and instead accepted a dinner invitation from Marerenui for that evening, by which time we’d be rested and clean.

Amanuan Hospitality

We showered and hit the sack for a couple of hours’ rest, but I was rudely awoken after an hour by the arrival of another boat, this time heralding another type of native: the Gimme-Something. Most of the locals we’d met so far had been incredibly kind, handing out fruit and advice freely and not expecting anything in return. The Gimme-Something, however, equates ‘yacht’ with ‘rich American’ and pays a visit to see what he can get. The two Gimmes who turned up, with a young son in tow, enjoyed the tour of the boat I gave them in pidgin French, declined the offer of une tasse du café, and after some idle banter revealed their mission.

«Avez-vous du bier?» inquired the scrawny one with the moustache. «Du vin? Du whisky?»

«Non,» I replied, almost truthfully, and had to go through the same routine three times before they finally lost interest and went back to the village. I explained that we’d failed to stock up in New Zealand – a mistake in retrospect, because rum is as valuable as gold in these islands – and that alcohol had been too expensive for us to buy in Rikitea. The reply was that you couldn’t buy alcohol in Amanu for any price, and that you had to go to Hao to get it; all the natives had was tobacco and marijuana, which to me didn’t sound like too bad a deal, but they wanted beer. Or wine. Or whisky. But all I wanted was some sleep, and eventually they left me to grab some while I could.

The evening with Marerenui was quite, quite different; the family were extremely polite, extremely generous, and extremely patient with my stilted communications and the captain’s grammar-free string-of-vocabulary attempt at French. We arrived, kicked off our shoes (as one should do when entering houses throughout Polynesia), and sat down at the kitchen table for a feast. It struck me as odd that there were only two places laid, and as we served ourselves portions of ris, poulet, raw bonito and some superb poisson à soy, drinking jus de coconut straight from the shell, we realised that we were the only ones eating; the family looked on, making conversation and obviously pleased to see such healthy appetites. There were some slightly worrying moments as I realised I knew nothing about Polynesian manners: does one eat with one’s hands, or does one eat everything with the one fork provided? And the coffee, served in a soup bowl: does one slurp it from the bowl like a parched desert nomad, or use the teaspoon to drink it like soup? And should one bring gifts to the house, as we had? And, as I recalled reading, should one make sure not to admire anything too much, because Polynesian custom dictates that the host must give that something to the visitor? Whatever, we scoffed, and we scoffed a second helping, and then we rounded it off with un peu de glace and un cigarette, stretching my knowledge of French superlatives to the utmost limit; how many times can you say «le repas est tres bon, magnifique, superbe» and so on?

Fumbling in French

It soon became apparent that my French was pretty poor and I understood only a little, though luckily Hinano, Marerenui’s wife, spoke much clearer and simplistic French than the men, probably because she was used to talking to her kiddies. Still, the French that I did have was enough for basic communication, and with a few simple inventions I managed to turn the language into my own communications tool.

The first rule I followed was the 50:50 sex rule; learning the sex of nouns in French is probably the hardest vocabulary challenge to a speaker of a generally sexless language like English, so I made up the sex of each noun as I went along, using le for about half, and la for the rest. The second rule was to keep talking, and if I couldn’t remember the word for something, I simply signed it, or just grunted in a Gallic shrug and tried to transmit what I meant psychically. Third, I kept trying to sound enthusiastic about simply being able to communicate, with choice phrases like «Le Bob Marley: il est la langue universale, eh!» as reggae beats throbbed out into the jungle. This approach seemed to work most of the time.

On the other hand, the language barrier was sometimes just that. When I asked the boys what they did with their time, they replied, «Pechant, copra et la femme», rhythmically pulling on imaginary female hips in much the same way as drunk package holidaymakers do in discos in Ibiza and Majorca in time to the latest Euro-pop one-hit-wonders. I initially assumed that this meant they had their way with loads of women but, of course, femme is not only the word for woman, it also means wife, and all the boys were saying was that they fished, made copra and spent a lot of quality time with their wives. I can think of worse ways to while away the days.

We learned plenty from our hosts. Marerenui was a fisherman some of the time, and a copra farmer for the rest. Copra is dried coconut pulp, laid out in the island sun, and is exported from most of the islands in Polynesia; it is used to produce coconut oil, which is in turn used to make such varied items as soap, margarine and nitro-glycerine. It’s a lucrative trade, and has provided the 200 Amanuans with a standard of living that isn’t quite up to Mangarevan standards (where everyone has expensive four-wheel-drives due to the thriving pearl farming there), but which is pretty luxurious by normal desert island standards. Marerenui’s house, perched by the breaking surf at the entrance to the pass, from which a soothing sound of pounding currents lilted all night, was about as well positioned as a house can be. If Amanu had been a tourist resort, Marerenui would have been a property tycoon.

In fact the coconut, the staple product of Polynesia, deserves an aside of its own. The coconut palm, the ubiquitous symbol of tropical paradise, grows just about everywhere; the coconuts themselves, if allowed to mature on the tree and fall off, will germinate, sending out roots from two of its three ‘eyes’, and a leafy stalk from the third. The nuts also float, and coconuts can be seen drifting through the ocean currents, eventually landing on other islands and populating them with coconut palms. The trees themselves are used for building material, making mats and other objets d’art, and for making clothes.

However the nut, which comes inside a fibrous husk (itself used for making rope) is the real source of wealth. After one year growing from a flower into a full coconut, the husk is greeny-brown and the nut drinkable; chop off the husk, smash off the top, and drink down that wonderfully sweet coconut juice, something that tasted good in Mangareva, but which proved really luxurious and as sweet as nectar in Amanu. As the coconut ripens further, the milk gets weaker and the flesh gets thicker, becoming the familiar white pulp that we know and love in the West. Eating flesh from a fresh coconut knocks the sterile western version into a cocked hat, and sliced and sautéed in teriyaki sauce it makes a wonderful nibble for between meals.

So that’s the coconut: it provides food, drink, shelter, body covering, ornamentation, copra and, possibly the most important contribution, it gives you somewhere to hang your hammock as you sip a rum and coconut juice. Ah, the tropics...

So we idled away the night, chatting in fifth-form Français about life on the island, the trials and tribulations of living on a yacht, and all of the other stuff you talk when you don’t know enough vocabulary to get deep in discussion. We discovered how the locals swam in the pass when the current was flowing, using fins and masks to spear the fish as they struggled against the flow. We found out that the nuclear atoll Mururoa was apparently home to «tout le merde de France» and that the local policeman on Amanu, who took over from Marerenui’s late father-in-law, was very strict. Then there was the supply ship, which arrived every two weeks, servicing Hao, Amanu and Mangareva among others, and from which everyone bought direct because it was cheaper than the prices on the atoll (a hand-sized piece of frozen beef cost about US$30 from the local shop). The supply boat had arrived the day before, which explained the frozen chicken and ice cream we’d scoffed.

Then there were the flights to Tahiti, only a few hundred miles away but an eye-watering US$520 for a one-way flight (though the flight is free if it’s a trip to the hospital there); the security blanket that one of the little kids was clutching throughout the night, proving that the world of the comforter transcends mere cultural barriers; and the wonderful cushion covers that Hinano spent her spare time on... it was an evening of interesting discoveries.

Soon enough the three little kids were starting to yawn and we thanked our guests using some Tahitian words they’d taught us during the evening, and got a lift back to Zeke in Marerenui’s boat, the same boat he used to zip across to Hao in one-and-a-quarter hours. The boats in the Tuamotus are interesting. Every one of them has a huge engine – and by huge I mean at least 40 horsepower, a meaty outboard if ever there was one – and every engine is brand spanking new. We assumed there was some special deal going on in the South Pacific with outboards, but nobody in Amanu has a car – there’s one communal vehicle on the whole atoll – so the outboard is the equivalent of the family car. Still, these engines would cost a fair amount in the West, and the houses are pretty luxurious, so there’s money round here somewhere. Whatever the cost, the local skiffs have no trouble surging through the pass at any time of day, chopping through the waves like manic surfers. (Talking of which, Marerenui told us about this mad teacher from Hao who comes over to Amanu every weekend to teach the kids, and who goes surfing on the outside of the reef every weekend too. Looking at the reef, that’s a teacher with lot of nerve... which is surprising, considering he’s an Englishman rather than a surf-mad Aussie or a sun-bronzed Californian.)

And all this in a village with one shop, two churches, 200 inhabitants and no other yachts to be seen. Compared to neighbouring Hao with its 1000 people, hundreds of military personnel, strings of shops and the noisy airstrip, Amanu is a beautiful, unspoilt haven.

Saying Goodbye to Amanu

Our final day on Amanu was a perfect example of the extreme kindness of the Amanuans. Marerenui, finding out that it was our last day, invited us to dinner again, laying on a wonderful spread of poisson cru (raw bonito in vinegar, quite a delicacy), chicken, rice, pasta, coconut milk and entertainment.

We talked all night, with conversation returning to the same topics as covered in all my French chats: snorkelling, weather, excellence of food, kindness of hosts, and so on. We talked about our exploration of the island the day before, where we’d wandered through the copra fields, finding beautiful beaches with incredible coral drop-offs just off the shore; here we swam among sharks, coral cod, amazing parrot fish, and coral that had to be seen to be believed. We talked about fishing, copra making, pearls, the other islands we could visit, and before long the meal was over and the chess began.

Yes, out came the chess set, and Daniel, a friend of Marerenui’s who had come to visit, proceeded to have two extremely close games with Rob, the result ending up at one game each. Then Marerenui and I sat down for a contest, but he must have been having a bad day, because I won both of them, and I’m genuinely no chess player. It was a thrill, though, being the centre of attention as other locals wandered in and out of the house, some staying to watch the game, some just passing through. It also meant we were communing without conversation, a relief after the struggle of thinking in French all the time.

The final act of kindness came as we stood up to leave, some five minutes before the electricity was due to be killed. We had brought a little present – a half-bottle of sake, left over from Napoleon’s visit back in Mangareva – but we were unprepared for the wonderful shell necklaces Marerenui presented us with, garlanding our necks as if we were Olympic medal winners. We also got two beautiful spider conch shells – quite how they removed the inhabitants I don’t know, considering how we’d had to smash the hell out of the shells to eat them in Mangareva – and a couple of red papaya, as sweet and succulent as they come. We were escorted back to our dinghy, the end of another evening where I was struck dumb by the kindness and generosity of the island people.

Not surprisingly, I was loath to set off for the next atoll, Makemo, on June 26th; in retrospect, I had good reason to worry.

Amanu Street Scene

Written: 26 June 1997

Picture the street scene...

There are dogs wandering up and down the streets, searching for food scraps and sex from the various bitches around, whose reaction to the males’ interest is to sit down violently, turn round and try to bite the male’s neck; it’s an effective prophylactic. The same dogs are chasing a black pig down the main street, if ‘street’ is the right word for the single dirt track that carries the one communal car; the pig squeals and cries, unhappy as the dogs yelp and snap around it, like cats cornering a wounded rabbit. The pig escapes back into its pen, where the owner shuts the gate and stops the canine invasion, much to the pig’s relief. If only the pig knew what its owner was planning for it, it might not be so keen to go back home.

The main square in Amanu is not very large, but it’s big enough to house a volleyball court, and this is where some 20 young people have gathered for the daily practice game. Angelo saunters up to ask for a cigarette; I have bought some tobacco as something to be able to offer to the islanders, and besides, it enables me to have the odd toke myself. Between drags, he informs me that there is a training session here every day, in preparation for August’s competition in Hao, which lots of the islands attend (including Mangareva, Amanu, Makemo and other islands on our itinerary). The standard of volleyball is very good: with such a hard, dusty pitch there are none of the crazy dives that you see in beach volleyball in Miami or California, but instead the shots are accurate and bullet-fast, with the atmosphere friendly rather than too competitive.

Around the volleyball, competing with the dogs and pigs, are the children. Polynesian children are as cute as cute can be; seeing the adults, it’s sometimes hard to equate the children with the parents, with Polynesian women tending towards the large and the men tending towards the tattoo. The children seem to have one love in life: the bicycle. In a world where television hasn’t yet tightened its socially stifling grip, the Victorian child with his hoop and stick lives on in the form of the Polynesian child riding his bicycle along the dusty motu streets. There are old bicycles with plastic bottles stuffed in the spokes to make a racket as the protagonist peddles past; bikes with flat tyres, that manage to grip perfectly well nonetheless; bikes with millions of kids balancing on top, making circus troupes look positively uncoordinated. It’s a joy to behold, as well as making sure you keep your eyes peeled when crossing the main drag.

This is Amanu life: work starts at 7am, siesta starts at around 12 noon, and volleyball starts at 3pm. It’s relaxing, healthy, and about as far from life in a London bedsit that you can get. After obtaining information on various islands in the area from the local mother’s meeting on the corner, stretching my French to the limits in the process, I return to the boat, wondering at the simplicity of life on the Pacific islands, and saddened to know that I would probably go out of my mind with boredom if I had to live it. But a little bit of paradise is very, very good for the soul, especially on a remote paradise like Amanu, and it’s a world away from Tahitian tourism. Long may it remain so.

Makemo

Written: 2 July 1997

The trip from Amanu to Makemo was another ocean passage, and this time surely the unkindest. The wind was good, the sea was calm and the seasickness relatively under control, but on the second day I was knocked down by another problem: food poisoning. I threw up every fifteen minutes for about five hours, starting at 6am, and to add to the pleasure my guts decided to do a convincing impression of a milkshake maker. Both ends thus ruined, I survived on glasses of water and staying above deck, running over to the side to retch on an empty stomach, and shooting down below in that race-against-time otherwise known as Delhi-belly. The trip only took two days, but it seemed to drag on for eternity. I spent most of the second day sleeping, with the captain masterfully sailing the boat himself. Finally we sighted Makemo and its large navigable pass.

We entered the pass and tied up to the pier, because when we left Amanu the electric anchor winch fell to pieces, meaning we’ll have to haul in the anchor by hand until it can be fixed. On the pier, though, there was precious little privacy, and every few minutes we’d hear a muted ‘Hello? Bonjour?’ down the hatch as we tried to snatch a little sleep on the now stationary boat. After a couple of hours’ I gave up trying, and invited the locals on board.

The children, bless ’em, were as cute as cute can be, though Rob kept asking me to kick them off the boat, perhaps because he was as tired as I was worn out. Our visitors were Sebastian, to whom we’d talked to on the radio when trying to work out how to approach the pass and who turned out to be the local radio hack; John, who spoke English and therefore enabled the captain to ask his questions in his native language; Prospère, who lived up to his name by swanning over on his own little catamaran with his boom-box throbbing, a beer in his hand and wide boy written all over his face (he worked in the pearl industry, it transpired, not entirely to my surprise); and Simon, who had visited Los Angeles and Australia and as such was regarded with great awe by those around him. It was quite a party, and it was only when the wind blew up, forcing us to move the boat into the bay and drop anchor there, that the conversation dried up, which is more than could be said for the weather.

That night we went ashore to watch some Tahitian dance practice (the village was preparing for a festival in a few days’ time), and explored the village a little before returning back to the boat. It was here that I spotted a growing problem: I was beginning to get seriously blasé about the whole paradise thing. All my French conversations were exactly the same, all the islands felt the same, all the food was the same, and all the shops sold the same things... it’s a terrible thing to say, I know, but I was in danger of getting bored in paradise. And that’s not a good thing when you’re travelling, so we didn’t hang around too long before heading north to the comparative metropolis of Tahiti.

Escape from the Yacht

Written: 5 July 1997

The final ocean passage was notable for one reason: it was the first leg of the entire journey on which I didn’t throw up (although I still felt pretty awful for the two-and-a-half days it took to sail from Makemo to Tahiti). I’d chundered from Pahia to Whangarei, hurled from Whangarei to Mangareva, spewed from Mangareva to Amanu and vomited from Amanu to Makemo, but I kept it down from Makemo to Tahiti. Despite this seeming progress, sea legs still elude me.

I finally made the decision to leave Zeke when we were about to head off for Tahiti. Being a kind, considerate person, I told Rob just before we left Makemo that I was thinking of leaving, as I didn’t want to screw him around and leave him short of crew without a fair amount of notice. He said it was a real shame and that I’d been an excellent crewmember, but he was glad I’d told him, and if I really wanted to leave, he could probably find crew in Tahiti; besides having seen me suffering on all the passages so far, he understood where I was coming from.

The real reason I wanted to leave Zeke was that I’m never going to be at home on a boat. As we sailed off to Tahiti, I realised that this was perfect sailing: constant, unchanging trade winds aft of the beam, not too much swell and only a little rolling, but I was still totally miserable. I just don’t like ocean sailing; I find it uninspiring, boring and a lot of effort for little return. Talking to other yachties it’s almost universal that sailors find ocean passages a bore and that it’s the landfalls that make yachting worthwhile, but this goes against much of what I’ve enjoyed about exploration; in Australia and New Zealand the journey was at least as important as the destination, if not more so, and on the way to Papeete I realised that I no longer wanted to travel in a way that reversed this emphasis, stressed me out and made me physically ill.

The other overwhelming reason for disembarking at Papeete was that I’d realised (not for the first time) that I like to travel alone. When you’re alone, survival depends on your own actions, and this makes talking French, working out public transport, ordering food and simply managing to exist quite a thrill; however, on a yacht you have a home from home, which removes a lot of the stress and fun of day to day living, and there’s a plan that isn’t really that changeable, and there are always people around on the boat from whom you can’t easily get away (and when Laurent and Rob were arguing through me as their proxy, that’s precisely what I wanted to do). So before I got to Papeete, my mind was made up; it was back to solid ground for me.

Approaching Tahiti was wonderful. I could smell the city of Papeete (pronounced ‘Pah-pay-eh-tay’) from afar – my first real city smell since Auckland – and the lights glowed as we sailed into the harbour at 2am on Saturday 5th July. We dropped anchor and hit the sack, the elation of impending change quite tiring me out.

We spent the next day trying to squeeze the boat into the overcrowded quay at Papeete, which we eventually managed after discovering that we’d dragged anchor while visiting the information centre in town (a scary experience, when you find the boat’s moved considerable distance down the harbour, only being saved by other yachties leaping on board and dropping more chain). I had visions of us being stuck in the middle of the harbour for days, having to keep an anchor watch, but by Saturday afternoon we were tied up at the quay on the end of a line consisting of all kinds of yachts, from mansions to mouse holes. Our neighbours were fun, and I sighed with relief as I realised that I would never have to do another ocean passage. I was a man set free.

Tahiti

Written: 22 July 1997

Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, is the biggest settlement on Tahiti and the only place in the territory that can be called a city (with a population of around 150,000). It is also a mixed bag. I found the very idea of a population explosion delightful after such a long spell in the enforced hermitage of Zeke, and as we approached the city lights, the smell of thousands of bodies and their excretions drifted across the tide.

I instantly recognised it, a combination of exhaust, sewage and sweat. I suddenly realised that I’ve spent most of my life living in this smell, so much so that I’ve also spent most of my life not noticing it. Mangareva reminded me that healthy earth and trees smell; Papeete reminded me that humans smell too. I revelled in it.

But Papeete, despite my initial euphoria, wasn’t that flash. It’s an intriguing combination of French culture, Polynesian flair and tropical weather, but it’s a pretty smelly and dirty place. As a place to visit it’s interesting, but only that, and the landscape around the city – Tahiti with its high mountains and Moorea, the neighbouring island, with its jagged peaks – is rather more enticing and exotic than the town itself.

The quay was an interesting place to observe the oddities of Papeete, like the huge Club Med ships that frequent the Society Islands, full of holidaymakers who, when asked, are convinced that the huge sails on those boats actually push the things along (they’re actually engine driven, with four huge gibs stuck on to make them look good when sailing).

Perhaps the most amusing and downright French spectacle was the pedestrian crossing just opposite the boat. In typical Parisian fashion, the cars have absolutely no intention of stopping for mere pedestrians, which produces a collection of bemused and critical Americans and English standing on the crossing and mumbling about how rude these French drivers are.

One fool Englishman walked out into the road, looking the wrong way (as they drive on the right here, of course) and promptly got the shit scared out of him as a car slammed on the anchors and skidded to a halt inches from his knees. The Englishman launched into an angry tirade against the driver, shouting, ‘Are you drunk?’ in very loud English, which had the same effect on the driver as Belgian sitcoms would on the rest of us; he knew what the Pommy guy was going on about, but how relevant was it to him?

As the Tahitian casually drove off, thinking to himself that the world would be a better place if the tourists calmed down, the English guy raved on at his poor travelling companions, re-enacting Agincourt in all but physical violence. There’s no doubt, though, that Papeete is a pedestrian’s nightmare, with blind corners coinciding with a disappearing pavement, drivers who think the whole world is Le Mans, scooters that treat the sidewalk as an extension of the road, and parking rules that were obviously made to be broken.

Tahitian Dancing

Still, we did see some local culture, mainly in the form of real Tahitian dancing. As part of the Bastille Day fête (Bastille Day being on 14th July, the excuse for a long celebration in Tahiti called the Heiva) there was a three-week long dancing contest, and for most of the nights we were in Papeete, you could watch the various teams strut their stuff in a makeshift stadium erected by the harbour. It was rather fun; the way those girls wiggle their hips is enough to make otherwise healthy men get palpitations, and even though the dancing we’d seen in Makemo had been more raw and powerful, the Tahitian programme of dance, choral ditties and instrumentals was certainly entertaining. Especially when the grass skirts and amazingly ornamental flower hats[1] started to fall apart with the vigorous shaking they were getting...

There is one thing that bothers me about Tahitian music, though. They have the most powerful drummers that you’re likely to see, but over the drumming they play – wait for it – the ukulele. Now quite what the ukulele is doing here, I don’t know; perhaps the Tahitians invented the bloody thing, but my appreciation of Polynesian rhythms is somewhat scarred by the fact that bits of it remind me of George Formby. That’s not good, even if the drum sounds are second to none.

My visit to the Musée des Îles et de Tahiti confirmed what I dreaded: the stringed instruments used by the islanders were brought in by the Europeans, though quite why a nation of powerful music makers should embrace such a tinny instrument and include it in their every composition is beyond me. The native instruments on display were far more interesting; the pahu drum, a hollowed out tree trunk popular in eastern Polynesia; the to’ere, a split drum popular in western Polynesia; triton conch shells that make the most amazingly loud howl you’ve ever heard; bamboo nose flutes that you wouldn’t want to play after someone else already has; reed pipes; and, from the Marquesas, a type of xylophone. That’s more like it: instruments with attitude.

Wandering Round Tahiti

Another result of my visit to the Musée was my rediscovery of the joys of walking. Apart from a few stints in Mangareva and the odd beach walk in the Tuamotus, I hadn’t been on any serious walks since Tongariro and I really missed it. So I took le truck to the museum – le truck being the local bus, a wacky combination of bus and truck, and cheap to boot – but decided to walk back, it being a beautiful day. The 15km, three-hour jaunt wasn’t exactly picturesque – it followed the dirty coast road back to Papeete – but it felt good, and woke up those walking muscles that just don’t get any exercise on the sea.

The rediscovery of walking opened up Papeete like never before. I hadn’t had the time or the inclination to do much exploring in the first week, as I’d promised Rob I’d help him with the varnishing, a job that took a lot longer than anticipated, but when that was done, I declared myself a non-working guest on the boat and started to explore.

In a vain attempt to find some aspect of Tahiti that wasn’t entirely spoiled by exposure to western tourism, I spent one day visiting a craft fair, which turned out to be an intriguing combination of craft shops (selling, mostly, tourist-friendly junk, but pleasant junk nonetheless) and a little arena in which all sorts of competitions and displays took place. I spent the best part of a day watching a basket-weaving contest, in which a group of large Tahitian women[2] sat around nattering and moving their hands in well-practised combinations to produce intricate baskets and hats. There was also a race to create these strange traditional shapes out of big, flat, round leaves; a fashion show, in which three lovelies from the Tuamotus showed us various ways of tying a pareo (the Tahitian equivalent of the sarong or saree); dancing, which interestingly featured some of the dancers I’d seen practising in Amanu; and a kids’ dancing competition which managed to show up the fundamental differences between male dancing and female dancing.

Male dancing and female dancing are quite different to each other, although they often dance at the same time. The males tend to leap around in a more violent manner, with their mainstay being to crouch down and knock their knees together very quickly; the females waggle their hips from side to side incredibly fast, while keeping their shoulders absolutely still. It’s quite a sight when there are about 100 dancers on the stage, the girls all wobbling hips in time, and the boys all knocking knees together, with serious drums smashing in the background, and the tinny lilt of a ukulele sounding like a lost little girl at a footy match. And as for the costumes... well, the coconut bra might not be the most comfortable accoutrement in the world, but it does wonders for a man’s libido when he’s been cooped up in a 36 ft yacht for so long.

Le Retro

The ice creams at Le Retro, the café over the road from the yacht quay, were hard to beat. Not only were there some 30 flavours to choose from, but it became quite a social spot for the yachties: ‘Fancy an ice cream?’ became a byword for ‘Stop trying to fix that and take a break.’ Many a tale of derring-do was relayed over une glace du chocolat at Le Retro, I can tell you.

Indeed, the social life on the quay was buoyant, to say the least. On one side of us were very friendly Canadians Dave and Dorothy in Kabloona III, and on the other was the ketch Tir Na Nog, with its crew of Merl (known to his mates as Claw), his wife Mary (who had the most delightful Irish accent) and their daughter, eight-year-old Crystal, who was a vivacious American-accented tornado. Then there were all the other boats around, some of whom we had met in the Gambiers, and some of whom we met through others. Hearing stories from other yachties of awful passages, sea sickness, wonderful anchorages and the ups and downs that form the fabric of cruising made me feel that at least I wasn’t alone in feeling ill at ease on the sea.

We never got to see Illusion, who’d set off for Tahiti soon after us, but Jan van Gent did pull into the quay on the day before I flew out, having spent a couple of weeks over in Moorea, Tahiti’s sister island. It was genuinely great to see Richard and Gail again; such good friendships are forged out there on the ocean.

Real Food!

Food and drink, so long a subject of fantasies and restrictions, was initially a wonderful experience, and gradually it became normality again. Drinking beer; eating baguettes and the most amazing French contribution to international cuisine, the pain au chocolat; ice cream; real coffee; real milk... these things transformed my life more than I would have anticipated.

I rediscovered alcohol after four months of abstinence, spending one night guzzling over nine pints of Hinano beer in a slightly worryingly self-destructive solo beer session, the product of internal stress over having to wait for my escape to Brisbane and a general disappointment at Papeete; the next day’s hangover served me right, and proved that getting drunk on a boat is no fun at all.

The Reality of Yachting

Papeete quay also showed me once and for all the ugly side of cruising – in fact, whoever adopted the word ‘cruising’ for the task of getting a yacht round the world obviously hadn’t done it themselves (one yachtie I met described ‘cruising’ as ‘fixing your boat in exotic locations’, and it was a deadly accurate observation). It’s the constant battle to keep your yacht shipshape, a considerable challenge when the sea is constantly doing its best to eat away at your pride and joy. Dave and Dorothy had their engine die on them, and by the time I left Tahiti the problem had graduated from a possible electrical fault in the inverter to a burnt-out alternator. Rob had to fix his broken anchor winch, a thankless task that required a whole day’s hacking around to botch a solution. Claw and Mary had to survive without their wind generator after it broke down, requiring a courier to take it to Hawaii to be mended. All along the quay yachts were having to stay longer than originally hoped due to ripped sails, dents in the hull, damaged equipment and, in one case, a badly broken leg. At least two yachts I saw had decided enough was enough, and were trying to sell their floating homes, with little success.

So next time you look at those beautiful pictures of yachts sitting in blue coral lagoons, think of the effort involved. A sailing holiday? That sounds like an oxymoron to me. I heard of an outfit that charged US$4000 for two weeks’ sailing experience, where you went out on a yacht and learned about sailing by actually doing it – all of it. The quaysiders’ view was that anyone who paid US$4000 for two weeks of having to wash up, cook, reef the main in high winds and pump out the bilges must be completely insane. I didn’t tell them that I considered anyone who would pay US$100,000 for a yacht in the first place completely insane too.

Leaving Zeke and Polynesia

Due to my unexpected departure, Rob had to find more crew, so Zeke became an interview zone for prospective sailors who had replied to the advert tacked on the bow (an advert noticed by plenty of people as we were tied to the yacht quay). Some were idiots, some were potentially good, and some were good choices, but every interview made me feel a little sad to be leaving as Rob reeled off the plans for the trip, and the places he was going on to visit: Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Vanuatu and the rest of the Polynesian pantheon. But it didn’t take much to realise that leaving the boat was still the best thing I’d done on the whole trip; sometimes you just have to accept that you don’t have sea legs and are never going to get them.

One thing I’ll never forget was the feeling of euphoria when I shook Rob’s hand and finally stepped off Zeke for the last time. No more swell! No more seasickness! No more sailing to contend with! I said goodbye to my newfound friends on the quay and hopped onto the airport bus; I was back on my own two feet again, with nobody to answer to or worry about, and I felt unshackled. As Tom Wolfe once wrote, you’re either on the bus or off the bus, and I was well and truly back on the bus.

[1] San Francisco might have flowers in its hair, but Tahiti has them in its hair, round its neck, on its clothes... everywhere. Never have I seen a people so happily obsessed with flowers, to the point of it being strange to see someone without a flower somewhere on their body. It makes a welcome change from drab pinstripe suits.

[2] This is a confusing issue. Many older women in Polynesia are huge, and wear these awful Mother Hubbard dresses that the missionaries brought in to cover up the previously naked natives. I had been told that Polynesian men like their women on the large side, and that being fat is regarded as a good thing, rather than the social stigma it is in the stick-thin fashion consciousness of the western world; this struck me as a particularly healthy attitude, as there’s nothing remotely attractive about anorexic models. There’s only one odd thing: Miss Tahiti is a gorgeous, slim girl, whom I was lucky enough to watch dancing at the craft show, and the girls who shake their hips at the dance contests are hardly what one would call overweight. Somewhere between young girl and old woman there occurs a metabolic change of immense proportions, literally, and it’s weird.

Bushwalking in Tahiti

Written: 19 July 1997

On a whim, I decided to spend the afternoon of July 19th trying to get to the houses above Tahiti, from where I imagined the view would be something special; the problem was, the only map we had of Tahiti was over ten years old, and it stopped short of what was obviously a relatively new housing development. This didn’t deter me, and after striking out from Papeete towards the interior, I discovered a road that I assumed would take me into the mountains. Of course, it did nothing of the sort, and instead it led up a valley, following the River Tipaerui up the Vallée Tipaerui, heading towards the mountains of the interior rather than the hills of the coast.

The road passed a huge industrial estate and eventually came to a little housing development, a terrace of scraggly little flats where a number of islanders lived in relatively poor surroundings, obviously a long way from prying tourists’ eyes. I wandered along the road, which soon came across a little building full of locals taking the opportunity of a sunny Saturday afternoon to play boules and get slaughtered on Hinano beer, the local brew. As I walked past, noticing that the road had by now petered away into a rough dirt track with a chain across to deter vehicles, a couple of the louder men yelled «Attention!» at me, gesturing up the road. When I asked them why I should be careful, they replied that a big serpent lived up that road, and that I should make sure it didn’t eat me. It would have been quite effective, except for the fact that the alcohol meant they couldn’t keep a straight face between them for more than five seconds, so I told them I’d watch out for the monster, and headed up the track.

At last, some real bushwalking! The track crossed the river a number of times, slowly becoming thinner and thinner and winding up an increasingly gorge-like valley, and I began to wonder where on earth it went. Right into the interior of Tahiti? Up Mt Aorai, the highest peak in Tahiti? Or did it go nowhere, just petering out?

After a fairly easy but humid walk, I reached the end at the bottom of a beautiful waterfall that had managed to carve an almost tubular niche in the valley wall, forming a deep pool at the bottom and a sheltered spot that would have been perfect for a picnic. The only drawback was the immense population of no-no flies (the rather colourful Tahitian name for sandflies) that smelt me coming and flew over to make friends, so after naming the falls Sandfly Falls for want of a better name – it didn’t even appear in the maps of the area – I ducked back down the track and headed downhill towards Papeete.

Passing the locals again, they asked me if I’d come across their serpent; one of them even did a fearsome impression of the monster said to inhabit the pool at the base of the waterfall, holding his arms up in the air, throwing back his head and roaring as his eyes rolled in his head. The performance was made all the more impressive by the fact that he had no front teeth, making his mouth look not unlike the fanged jaws of a monstrous snake.

I told them I’d managed to escape the clutches of their monster – at least, I think that’s what I said in my rusty French – and they laughed as I ambled back down to Papeete, with me wondering if the monster had perhaps left the waterfall and was now lurking in the bottles of beer they were necking like water. Aboriginal, Maori, Polynesian... the Europeans might have invaded and screwed up these cultures, but it’s alcohol that’s continuing the effect. No wonder they hide it from the tourists up dead-end valleys with serpents guarding the waterfalls.

Australia: Queensland

Brisbane

Written: 30 July 1997

Brisbane is a fairly typical Australian city. It’s a pleasant place that doesn’t quite have the sophistication of Melbourne or the physical beauty of Sydney, but it does have better weather, and that makes a huge difference. I found Brisbane to be incredible and quite engrossing, but for different reasons; having just arrived back from Tahiti, I hadn’t seen a shopping mall for so long that simply walking round the Myer Centre off Queen Street in the city centre sent me into spasms. Large Big Mac meals for just A$4.95! Endless clothes shops! Camping stores that stretched for miles! Rows and rows of current CDs in the record shops! Concert tickets! Supermarkets! Coffee-flavoured milk! People! People! People! It’s no understatement to say that I spent a few days wandering around Brisbane with my mouth open, just window shopping and easing myself back into western civilisation; little things like businessmen with mobile phones, roads with three lanes and cheap, copious Coca Cola were, after four months on Zeke, mind-bogglingly amazing. I felt like Dick Whittington on his first visit to London, and it was a hoot.

As with other Australian cities, Brisbane is relatively young: it was founded in 1824 as a penal colony. It tends to be regarded as a bit backward by the larger cities to the south, which might have something to do with a 1965 photograph I saw of the city; there wasn’t one skyscraper on the skyline, which says a lot when you compare it to the blue and gold glass of the ultra-modern, ultra-shiny phallic symbols that define the centre of modern Brisbane. Beneath the heights of the office blocks lives a city that’s as modern and prosperous as any city in Australia, a fact that I really noticed after places like Papeete and Amanu. By the time I came to leave Brisbane, the novelty of western luxuries had worn off, but as far as I was concerned, Brisbane wasn’t backward at all – quite the opposite, in fact.

Stradbroke Island

When they heard that I was flying back to Australia, Dave and Dorothy, our neighbours on the Papeete quay, had kindly given me the contact details of their son and daughter, Gavin and Jenine, who lived in Brisbane. So as soon as I landed, I negotiated the public transport system to arrive at Gavin and Jenine’s house just in time for tea. Jenine shot through a couple of days after I arrived – she flew out to Papeete to join her parents on Kabloona for the rest of the year – which left Gavin and his two Japanese flat mates, Kumiko and Tumomi, to explore the area with. Gavin spoke fluent Japanese and was off to Japan for a year at university in September, so they were all fascinating company, but because Tumomi’s English was on a par with my French, a lot of the conversations lapsed back into Japanese, a language in which I have yet to learn ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘two beers please’ (these three phrases forming the basis for the Englishman Abroad’s Fluency Certificate). However, their hospitality was second to none, and the amazing Japanese cooking they produced – noodles, stir-fries, chicken dishes, the works – were up to restaurant standard, and I don’t exaggerate. Gavin was the first to admit that although he had spent his first two years at the University of Queensland living off macaroni cheese and Big Macs, he was quite a convert to the healthy and absorbing range of Japanese dishes the three of them managed to rustle up. It all made pie and chips look rather primitive (although pie and chips is still a favourite... I don’t see that ever changing).

My only expedition out of Brisbane during my week-long stay was with Gavin, Kumiko, and Gavin’s previous landlord John, an elderly Aussie bloke who treated driving with the casual disdain of someone who learned to drive when the roads were still empty. John turned out to be a really pleasant bloke, and the four of us took the ferry over to North Stradbroke Island for a day’s exploration, combining some sightseeing with a delivery John had to make to a friend of his.

Stradbroke Island, or Straddie as it’s affectionately known[1], is a long sand island to the east of Brisbane, just one of the many sand islands off the coast of Queensland (the most famous of which is Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world[2]). We met Donald, John’s friend, who struck me as an interesting type. He had lived in Dunwich, Straddie’s main town, for as long as you’d care to remember, and the slow, pleasant lifestyle fitted in with his slightly ponderous nature. Nursing a shock of white hair and a beer belly to make you proud, he was obviously light years away from city life, despite the presence of Brisbane only a few kilometres away on the mainland (which he kept referring to as ‘out west’). When John asked him which number his house was on Flinders Avenue – we’d driven past his house a couple of times before spotting Donald on his veranda – he replied, ‘I dunno, didn’t know I was supposed to have a number,’ which didn’t surprise me one bit.

Straddie was very pleasant. We lunched in a pub with stunning sea views, walked on the beaches, and explored the Brown Lake and the Blue Lake, the latter involving a short 2.6km walk to the lake itself. This little jaunt only served to whet my appetite; it’s been so long since I’ve done a decent bushwalk that it left me chomping at the bit. Apart from a short walk on Tahiti to Sandfly Falls, and a little bit of exploring in the Gambiers, the last bushwalk I did was the Tongariro Northern Circuit, and that was an awfully long time ago. Innocent little Blue Lake gave me the impetus to explore Queensland by foot, which would turn out to be a great decision.

Exploring Brisbane

Other highlights of Brisbane included a night on the town with Gavin, where I rediscovered the delights of drinking in pubs; a visit to Indooroopilly Shoppingtown, the biggest shopping mall in Brisbane, which was a freaky experience after so long away from the worlds of affordable fashion, massive K-Marts and bargains, bargains, bargains; the purchase of a replacement for my poor old bush hat, whose shape and texture was battered so badly by the passage to Polynesia that I had to bury it at sea; a 13-cannon salute on the South Bank in the city, which I happened to be passing at the right time, receiving a free pair of ear plugs as part of the bargain; the Brisbane museum, which was being refurbished when I visited it, something that seems to happen to most museums I wander into, as if they know I’m coming; and a visit to the doctor[3] to get some cream for a bout of body-wide eczema that I’d developed on the Pacific, where I discovered that the doctor was himself a yachtie, and wanted to talk about it at length while patients waited outside for their turn.

Brisbane’s botanic gardens are also worth a mention. My first attempt at a visit got rained off – I cowered in the covered shopping mall in the city centre instead of braving the astonishingly fierce downpour that suddenly arrived out of the blue – but when it cleared I finally got to see the famed Brisbane gardens. They’re tucked into a corner of the Brisbane River[4], and manage to squeeze some pleasant parkland and mangrove swamps into a compact and skyscraper-lined little spot. However, when put alongside Perth’s Kings Park, or even Adelaide’s more botanical collection, Brisbane’s garden comes out as just another park, albeit pleasant. I’ve seen a lot of gardens now, and in order of preference with my favourite first, here’s my summary of Botanic Gardens I Have Known (I didn’t have time to visit Canberra’s gardens, and Hobart don’t have a botanic garden as such, just a park – though it is lovely):

1. Perth

2. Christchurch

3. Adelaide

4. Darwin

5. Auckland

6. Melbourne

7. Brisbane

8. Wellington

9. Sydney

Actually, there was one more thing I did in Brisbane: I discovered an HMV store and spent hours browsing. I’m totally out of touch with the music scene, as demonstrated by the number of new albums and band splits that occurred while I was pitching and rolling in Zeke. As I discovered new albums from the likes of Radiohead, Ride, Madder Rose, Erasure, U2 and countless others, I was caught in a quandary. I couldn’t buy anything, due not only to budgetary restraints but also to the fact that I don’t have a CD player or Walkman, but I wanted to; the temptation to jack in this travelling lark and go back to England – to my music collection, to Melody Maker and the NME, to the London music scene – came back and, although I never seriously entertain a return for just one reason, it happens every time I hit a record store. Reading some of the issues of Melody Maker that Gavin had bought over the past few weeks, I made the sad discovery that Jeff Buckley had died by walking into a river, especially sad because his album Grace was one of the soundtracks to my exploration of New Zealand. The splits of Belly and Soundgarden were equally distressing, but some things just aren’t meant to last, I guess.

Despite the temptation of the music scene, I decided that if I didn’t get out of Brisbane soon, I never would, so I booked a coach ticket to Cairns, some 1930km north of Brisbane, and home to some of the most famous diving spots on the Great Barrier Reef (after all, diving the reef is the main object of my visit to Queensland). So after a week of city life I said my goodbyes to my kind hosts and boarded a bus for Cairns, a 28-hour journey to the north along the coast that would take me back into the tropics.

[1] Here’s a tip for visitors who want to learn how to speak Australian (or ‘Strine’ as the language is called). All you have to do is shorten words to one syllable, and add ‘ie’ to the end. Hence Straddie, Brizzie, barbie, stubbie, footie, cozzie (for swimming costume), and lots of other timeless favourites. There are exceptions, such as bottle-o for bottle shop (as in, ‘I’m off dahn the bottle-o for a slab of VB’) and ‘snags’ for ‘sausages’, but as a general guide, the ‘ie’ rule is invaluable for those wanting to blend in.

[2] Of course it’s the largest sand island in the world – this is Australia, after all, where everything’s the biggest and best in the world. I’ve mentioned the Australian obsession with large-scale models before – all those big bananas, large lobsters and so on – and Queensland has, as one of its landmark tourists spots, a huge pineapple which you can climb for a view of the surrounding countryside. It’s all a bit weird, really, though it’s probably nothing more than good old penis envy. Bless ’em.

[3] Actually, the doctor was very good, and prescribed me lots of antibiotic and dodgy-stomach pills for when I go to Asia. He also said that for stays of ten months in malaria areas, they don’t recommend that you take malaria pills, because the pills are so toxic that they’ll do you more harm than good over such a long time (pills are only recommended for shorter visits). His advice: avoid getting bitten by wrapping up at dawn and dusk, carrying a mosquito net, and using insect repellent.

[4] Interestingly, Brisbane is the only city in Australia whose river has the same name as the city. Perth is on the Swan River, Adelaide on the Torrens River, Canberra on Lake Burley Griffin (formed by the Molonglo River), Melbourne on the Yarra River, Sydney on the Parramatta River, Hobart on the Derwent River, and Darwin is on the coast and doesn’t have a river. How unusual it seems to have Brisbane on the Brisbane River, after all that variety.

Cairns

Written: 13 August 1997

I shan’t dwell on the bus journey from Brisbane to Cairns; it was pretty long and tedious, but at least I managed to get some sleep. Coaches are designed to stop light sleepers like me from getting any shut-eye, with their hissing pneumatic brakes, stops every three hours or so that jolt you wide awake, seats that recline only as far as is uncomfortable for both yourself and the person behind you, movies that don’t even tax the mentality of test-tube babies, leg room that makes a coffin look like a two-up two-down... love ’em or hate ’em, they’re cheaper than flying, and for good reason. Still, I got there without terminal cramp, and at least you can look out of the window and really appreciate what it is that those crazy cyclists see as they pedal their way round the continent.

Cairns turned out to be just another Australian town, but this time it had one big difference: unashamed and excessive tourism. I haven’t seen so many hostels, tour operators or touts since the Costa del Sol, and a worryingly large percentage of them seem to be run by the English, another reason not to spend too long in Cairns itself. If I had a car I’d have been camping up in the bush in Cape Tribulation, but I don’t, so I decided to stay in a hostel.

In truth, it wasn’t so bad. I had visions of drunk teenage backpackers stumbling off the Oz Experience bus and lolling about in the hostel, telling everyone what a wonderful place Fraser Island is if you’re into driving fast and getting pissed, but I got lucky. The U2 Hostel – terrible name, pretty terrible rooms, bloody good price – wasn’t right in the centre of town, and its short distance from the main drag meant it didn’t get such a throughput of backpackers, but instead provided a roof over the heads of a more interesting clientele of dole bludgers, broke hitchers looking for work and ex-drug addicts searching for lost family. Salubrious it wasn’t, but it was far more fun than the normal Youth Hostel scene, and at least the rooms had locks on the doors to prevent too many wandering possessions.

My first night in Cairns went the way of most people’s: I got drunk. It wasn’t intentional, but the U2 provided a free meal down the Woolshed pub as part of the deal, and the next thing I knew I was too drunk to stand and having a ball. After having the boat sway for four months it was novel to see land pitch and yaw.

This fortunate start to Cairns life did have one bad repercussion; when I woke up on my 27th birthday I felt pretty awful, so I just spent the day wandering around town, nursing my hangover. As a place to relax, Cairns isn’t too bad; the foreshore is mud, not sand, which isn’t the most delightful central feature for a town, but there are plenty of parks and pubs to break the monotony.

I did buy myself a birthday present, though. By an amazing piece of luck I arrived in Cairns just in time to catch Powderfinger on the last night of their Australian tour; Powderfinger are, in my humble opinion, the best band in Australia today, and their second album Double Allergic was another soundtrack to my Kiwi tour. The ticket was the best birthday present I could have hoped for and the concert turned out to be as good as I had hoped it to be; I certainly lost a few pounds dancing myself stupid in the mosh pit. Some things never change...

Feeling Old in Cairns

Written: 2 August 1997

The gulf opened up in front of me on the evening of my 27th birthday. I’d gone to the Woolshed for my evening meal with Chris and Alan from the U2 Hostel, but unfortunately Chris was feeling too rough from the night before to touch any alcohol, and Alan had to get up early the next day to catch the bus down south, so before long I was left alone, sitting in the pub, enjoying the beer, the music and all those other things that I’ve learned to appreciate since the enforced abstinence of Zeke.

Luckily, sitting alone in pubs is a skill that travelling has taught me. Sometimes it’s not terribly pleasant, and can simply make you feel lonelier than ever, but most of the time it’s kind of fun, and pubs are great places to watch people. I’m finding my own company more and more enjoyable as time goes on... after all, I always shout the drinks, I laugh at all my jokes, and I never leave before I want to, so I sat there and soaked up the Woolshed’s atmosphere, along with the beer.

And that was when I realised that I’m getting older; I was going to write ‘getting old’ there, but 27 isn’t old by any stretch of the imagination, and I don’t want this article to annoy when I read it in ten years. The Woolshed is a backpackers’ haunt, with cheap beer, large meals and music straight from MTV. I loved the music, I guzzled the cheap beer, I ate the food, but the people... God, they were just so painful to listen to. Most of them were English, and the average age was less than my own: university student age, mainly. And I felt so old... their conversations were so empty, and I couldn’t believe how out of touch I was with student culture, not because I didn’t understand it, but because I just didn’t want to be like that.

Was I like this, a vacuous piss head, before I started turning into my parents? I’d rather walk for 20km into the bush and settle into an early night ready for an early start, than hang around places like the Woolshed with people born after punk rock had been and gone. I suddenly realised I had to leave Cairns as soon as I’d done some diving; Cairns is the Charybdis of the backpacker scene, sucking in the unwary with its free evening meals, cheap beer and tropical weather. The number of people I’ve met who came for a couple of days and stayed for months is extraordinary, especially as Cairns itself isn’t even worth a week; the surrounding area is worth exploring, but the backpackers who stay for months don’t tend to get out of Cairns much at all.

If I’d had a car, you wouldn’t have seen me for bull dust.

Great Barrier Reef

Written: 8 August 1997

The Great Barrier Reef is like another world. I don’t think anything can replace the feeling of your first scuba dive or reef exploration, but they say that the Barrier Reef has some of the best diving in the world, and I wanted to find out what the buzz was all about.

So I booked myself passage on Taka II, which would be home to about 25 people for a three-and-a-half day trip to the reef. We left Cairns late one afternoon and spent the night steaming north, ending up at the world-famous Cod Hole the following morning, just off Lizard Island; we then then spent the next three days making our way south down the reef, stopping at various spots to dive (we did ten dives in all). Perhaps the best way to describe the diving is to quote from my dive log, which every diver is supposed to keep, though please note that I filled in my log on a pitching boat, using a pen, so forgive me if the prose is a little stilted. Suffice to say the trip was quite extraordinary, and this one event alone ensured that my brief trip to Queensland was well worth the effort and expenditure.

[Some quick terminology for non-divers: the regulator is the thing that goes in your mouth and provides air; the deeper you go, the faster you get through your air, because air is always provided through the regulator at the same pressure as the surrounding water; your first dive of the day should always be your deepest, with the rest getting progressively shallower; you always dive with a buddy, and my buddy was a delightful American called Molly; and coral stacks are called ‘bommies’.]

Dive One, 6 August 1997, Ribbon Reef 10 (Cod Hole)

The first dive of a three-day trip to the Great Barrier Reef, and those of us who hadn’t done umpteen zillion dives already had to do a quick ‘check out’ dive. Memories of New Zealand came flooding back, quite literally, as I had to clear a partially filled mask, recover my regulator and so on. This was followed by a hop down to 30.5m, the deepest I’ve been yet (allowed under Queensland law as I had a dive computer; for those on tables the deepest allowed is 18m), and by the time I got back to a reasonable depth, my air was running low. A short dive.

So the chats afterwards about ‘Did you see the grey whaler shark?’ made me realise just how much you miss if your scuba is more mask-clearing than shark-stroking. One day I might manage the scuba equivalent of changing gear and steering at the same time. One day...

Dive Two, 6 August 1997, Ribbon Reef 10 (Cod Hole)

More time to explore the reef, the ‘first dive’ jitters being consigned to the bin. Buddy Molly – har-dee-har – and I queued up (after all, this is a tour) to kiss a bloody great cod. These fish are a wonder to behold: before scuba, the only cod I knew came with chips. Behind the doleful eyes and low slung, thick-lipped mouth lives a curious, graceful creature. For some reason fish feel more alien to me than land animals, and the cod makes you feel like a temporary guest rather than a distant relation. Kissing the bugger didn’t change a thing.

The reef was pleasant, but no more special than the Gambiers. I have high hopes for the coral as we head down the reef, though. I just wish there was more sun[1]...

Dive Three, 6 August 1997, Pixie’s Pinnacle

Circling a tall bommie, spiralling upwards, is a good thing if everyone is going in the same direction. We – Molly and I, and another couple called Caroline and Amanda – headed off clockwise, seemingly the opposite way to everyone else. Still, it added a challenge to the proceedings.

Pixie’s Pinnacle, obviously named by a fantasy-reading hippy with hair down to his hips and red-tinted Lennon specs, was beautiful. Hundreds of types of coral, which I can’t name because I haven’t done any homework, flutter in the current while fish of all shapes, sizes and colours mind their own business among the formations. They said it was more an aquarium than a reef, and they were right.

Good old They. You can always rely on him.

Dive Four, 6 August 1997, Challenger Bay

The progression: swimming in clear, cool rock pools in Karijini; swimming across a muddy and wide river in Millstream-Chichester; walking through a waist-deep, freezing, mountain-boring river in Tunnel Creek; snorkelling off a yacht in the Coromandel; learning to scuba dive in the Poor Knights Islands; exploring coral reefs in the Gambier Islands... and the final piece in this phobia-shattering sequence, a night dive on the Great Barrier Reef.

Defining memories of the dive: seeing groups of divers with lights, self-contained units in a sea of black; a stillness not unlike the peace of loneliness on the central desert; swarms of fish, bright flecks of light in our torch beams...

And no, I don’t remember what I saw. I was too amazed to find myself diving in the dark.

Dive Five, 7 August 1997, Clam Gardens

The first dive of the day – and therefore the deepest – and, I am glad to report, no longer the air-guzzling experience it was before. Molly and I had to stop for a breather or two while heading back from 30m up to the reef, but the blood, sweat and tears were all well worth it: clams the size of sumo wrestlers were littered around the site like boulders on Mars.

Wildlife was impressive, with plenty of young fish around to bring out the paternal instinct. I also found the toilet-brush-shaped animal[2] that sticks out of the coral and shoots back inside its hole when you go to touch it.

One final point: we were woken at 7am and were in the water by 7.30am, so some of the above may be the result of me still dreaming. Certainly felt like it...

Dive Six, 7 August 1997, Steve’s Bommie

Mask clearing, probably the most annoying part of scuba, became a real burden round Steve’s Bommie. For some reason known only to him upstairs, only my right eye had a problem with flooding, and clearing a mask by blowing through just one nostril makes the sort of thing you see in American ‘Frat Pack’ movies look positively innocuous. I still don’t get it: the two sides of a mask are connected, aren’t they?

Steve’s Bommie – named after a late scuba diver, who has his own plaque at the base of the bommie – is a haven of marine life. As the dives progress on the Great Barrier Reef, I am beginning to recognise fish, coral and so on. No, I don’t know their Latin names, let alone their English ones, and that doesn’t detract from them at all. After all, the sights are indescribable, so what use nomenclature?

Dive Seven, 7 August 1997, Temple of Doom

Seven dives into this marathon three-day trip, and they’re all beginning to meld into one. A hectic ‘three before lunch’ schedule ensured a rush of experiences without much time for reflection, a bit of a shame – but more than made up for by the opportunity after this dive to snorkel with a minkie whale (but that’s another story).

Temple of Doom, named because it’s full of fish whose main diet is, er, other fish, is a long, oval bommie with plenty of plate coral, and schools and schools of seemingly unfazed fish. Molly and I managed a circuit in the time it took for me to guzzle my air, during which we managed to make sufficiently touristy gestures into the videographer’s camera, just for that perfect memento. Thank goodness fish don’t pull gormless faces when a camera gets pointed at them, or Cousteau would have died a poor man.

Dive Eight, 7 August 1997, Beer Gardens

Another night dive, and this time no qualms about jumping into a pitch-black ocean – it’s amazing how quickly your phobias become your friends. In fact the only thoughts were of the water temperature rather than scary things lurking in the murky depths.

The highlight was a loggerhead turtle, who was asleep on our first pass, but who woke up and swam right past us in a graceful motion that made Nureyev look like a klutz. The size of the turtle was hard to gauge with the magnifying effect of underwater viewing, but it looked bloody huge: certainly the biggest turtle I’ve ever seen!

Molly has a problem now, though: she has achieved two of her life’s ambitions, to swim with whales and to swim with turtles. What now?

Dive Nine, 8 August 1997, Hog’s Breath

Up at 6am, in the water at 6.30am, and I do sometimes wonder if this is for pain or pleasure, this trip. Immersion in cold sea water while the sun makes its feeble attempt to make the already-wet suit less freezing isn’t my idea of larf-a-minute.

The bommies were pretty surreal, with arches and sixties-acid-influenced towers, but to be honest we were both so spaced out from the rude hour of our awakening that our wide-eyed stares were more a sympathetic pleading for matchsticks than amazement at the sights.

After an already hectic schedule, this early bird couldn’t care about the worm. Not this time.

Dive Ten, 8 August 1997, No Name Bommie

Ten dives in two-and-a-half days, two early mornings, and I’m out for the count. The best fun was finding big blobs of Christmas worms with their ‘trees’ out, and waving a hand to make them disappear like some corny magician.

A perfect illustration of how familiarity breeds apathy: another bommie, another day. It seems that diving is going to be another of those activities that are better if they’re rare, like good port, walks in the rainforest, and nights on the town. However, I guarantee that next time, it will still be well worth it: I’m not jaded, just faded.

And there is one good thing. By the end of Hop 17[3] I am proficient enough that the mask doesn’t flood, the buoyancy control is good, and the air lasts longer. I might even become a novice one of these days.

Minkie Whale

So, those were my dive log entries for the trip. One thing they didn’t mention (well, only briefly) was the minkie whale who turned up on the penultimate day and who let us snorkel right above him. These whales are simply huge, and they move around with a lack of effort that has to be seen to be believed. We also came across a number of humpback whales on the last day, while we were heading back to Cairns, and they put on quite a display of tail slapping and fin smacking. Not a bad bonus...

[1] A wish that came true the next day, as the clouds cleared and the sun came out in all its skin-bubbling glory.

[2] I found out later this was called the Christmas worm, because the brush it sticks out is shaped like a Christmas tree.

[3] This was my 17th dive overall.

Hinchinbrook Island

Written: 19 August 1997

Quite why I got drunk on the Tuesday night, I don’t know; the excuse was something about it being my last night in Cairns, and the next thing you know... but whatever the justification, Wednesday morning was a struggle, boarding the 8.45am coach while still quite drunk. I slowly surfaced throughout the day, but there was one good thing: I was out of Cairns, camping again, and looking forward to some good walking.

Cardwell was the little town I stopped in, which is famous for neighbouring Hinchinbrook Island... and the reason that Hinchinbrook Island is famous? It’s the biggest island National Park in the world, and it’s got a wonderful four-day walking track down the east coast, the Thorsborne Trail. Like a horse to a carrot, I was drawn to the walking track as if my life depended on it, and I managed to book onto the number-limited track by the skin of my teeth, getting the last camping permit and avoiding a wait of four days for the next available slot. Lucky old me; you’d almost think it was fate.

As I walked, I span between two different and quite opposing opinions of Hinchinbrook Island and the Thorsborne Trail:

- On one hand, the rainforests in Fiordland are more majestic than in Hinchinbrook; the swimming holes in Karijini are more surreal than in Hinchinbrook; the beaches in northern Western Australia are more beautiful than in Hinchinbrook; the mountains of the Southern Alps are more striking than in Hinchinbrook; the sandflies and mosquitoes of Fiordland and Kakadu are bigger than in Hinchinbrook[1]; the views over Mt Cook are more stunning than in Hinchinbrook; the weather of the western desert is more reliable than in Hinchinbrook; the walking of the Pyke Valley is more challenging than in Hinchinbrook; the waterfalls of Litchfield National Park are more awesome than in Hinchinbrook; and the transport to and from the track is cheaper almost everywhere else than in Hinchinbrook.

- However, walking under the rainforest canopy, trundling along beaches, climbing hills, swimming in clear pools at the bottoms of waterfalls, camping by crocodile-infested lagoons, experiencing rain and shine within minutes of one another... these experiences, all rolled into one walk, are the reason that Hinchinbrook Island is just wonderful for bushwalking. Sure, I’ve seen ‘better’ somewhere along the line, but they’re just memories now; Hinchinbrook Island was reality while I was walking the trail, and it was just great, which only goes to show that presence in the present is all you need to experience the here and now. Yes, there were drawbacks, such as my A$30 tent I’d bought in Brisbane, which leaked like a sieve[2] and made my first night on the trail more like Taka than Thorsborne; but my kit worked well, nonetheless, and I’ve proved that I can go out, spend very few dollars, and still come up with a survival kit for the bush. (For the record, my tent was A$30, roll mat A$10, stove A$7.50, food A$20, and the rest of the stuff I already had, making the equipment cost roughly the same as the ferries to and from the walk.)

The Rainforests of Hinchinbrook

Suffice to say that while walking through the lovely tree-clad bays of Hinchinbrook, I felt I was well at home, and as the track was easy – just 32km in four days – I found I could spend plenty of time soaking in the atmosphere (literally, on the first day) and revelling in the contrast with Cairns. I’m finding a big benefit of the first opinion voiced above; because of my extensive experience walking through Australia and New Zealand, I can compare and contrast with lot of other walks, and I’ve grown to appreciate certain areas for what they are. Just as I can look at the sunset and it brings back memories of sunsets all over Australasia, when I walked through Hinchinbrook I thought of Freycinet, Wilson’s Prom, Litchfield, Hollyford and others. It adds a whole new dimension to the experience, which is already pretty immense.

And the fact that I developed a stinking cold on the first day (undoubtedly caught in Cairns when my defences were down) which stayed with me beyond the end of the trail, didn’t detract from the walk one bit, even if one handkerchief for four days with a streaming nose is pretty gross. In fact, what better place to suffer: a cold, a smog-laden city, or a fresh-air island? Indeed.

One particularly interesting thing about Hinchinbrook is the large number of rats on the island. If you aren’t careful, the rats will gnaw through your tent and pack to get to your food – even toothpaste smells like food to them – so the rangers have thoughtfully provided steel boxes at each campsite for you to put your food in. I could see the rats hanging around at night, looking for a feed; big buggers they are, too. And on the subject of food, for the first time in a long tramping career I met not one but two couples who had brought along filter coffee systems. Now, I’ve seen people with all sorts of teas, but filter coffee? That’s something altogether different. I tend to buy coffee in a tube – Nestlé do a tube of coffee, condensed milk and sugar, all mixed together in a tube to which you just add boiling water, which is perfect for tramping – and when I brought it out of my pack and proceeded to make a cup, you should have seen the look of pure horror on the filter coffee drinkers’ faces. I’d have probably got the same reaction if I’d proceeded to make a nice, fresh rat sandwich.

After finishing the Thorsborne and returning to Cardwell for the traditional ritual of showering, clothes-washing and reacquainting oneself with life’s little luxuries one by one (in this case Vegemite, Coke and cold remedies), I booked into the caravan park for another couple of nights, and settled in to do some writing. It was only then that I thought I might as well take my temperature, more on a whim than anything else; it was 100.4°F, and it’s funny how you suddenly feel worse when there’s physical proof that you’re ill. My cold instantly changed from serious sniffles to full on flu, and I realised that taking it easy was not only a good idea, it was vital, and the first step had to be to get out of that leaky old tent and into a bed.

[1] A handy hint, picked up in Shark Bay, that’s worth repeating. Take 70 per cent baby oil and 30 per cent Dettol, mix, and smear on your body for the ultimate insect repellent. The sandflies stick to the baby oil and die, and the mozzies simply hate the smell of disinfectant. It worked a treat for me on Hinchinbrook – it beats paying a fortune for normal sprays, and it works better, too.

[2] Just to point out how leaky my A$30 tent is, consider this. Dew, which is sometimes quite heavy in the tropics in winter, started to drip through the lining onto my head one morning. I thought it must have been raining, but no: my tent can’t even handle dew, for goodness sake. It looks like I’ll be saving the 2.5kg it takes up when I head off to Asia, and I probably won’t shed a tear, even if I discover the perfect free campsite in some beautiful National Park in Indonesia and don’t have a tent. Still, for A$30 it was a wonderful investment to enable me to walk the Thorsborne and, later, Fraser Island, so no harm done.

Townsville

Written: 20 August 1997

My next stop after two days’ recuperating in Cardwell was Townsville. Townsville’s main claim to fame on the travelling circuit is its ferry port, which serves nearby Magnetic Island, and most visitors head straight through with little more than a stop to stock up on sun tan lotion and books for the beach. Having just walked across another island, I thought I’d stay in town for a while before heading for the ferry.

This turned out to be a bad move, not because there’s anything terribly wrong with Townsville, but because it’s not a particularly great place to be when you’re still feeling under the weather. Townsville, as its rather exciting name manages to convey, has a rather industrial air to it, and even though I spent a whole day hunting down its attractions, I spectacularly failed to warm to the place. My subdued feelings are probably best summed up by the strange beast that greets visitors in the centre of town; most cities have some kind of central point, denoted by a flashy skyscraper, a large square or even a huge shopping mall, but Townsville has a blue cylindrical apartment block that looks like it’s been rescued from a failed experiment in urban disaster during the concrete 1960s, and to cap it all there’s a strange funnel sitting atop the monstrosity that’s shaped like a huge lipstick. It’s pointless, ugly and summed up how I felt as I stomped around Townsville, under a dark cloud of my own making.

The people in the hostel didn’t help matters much. Some places attract itinerant weirdoes, and Townsville seems one of the most magnetic[1]; the hostel I stayed in was uncanny in its resemblance to a human zoo, packed as it was with dole bludgers, vacant stares and people who looked like they might fly off the hook at any moment, ripping the wall fittings out with them. I got talking to the only three sane people I could find in the hostel – two Poms and a Dutchman – who said they’d stayed in three other hostels in Townsville, and they were all the same. Before arriving I’d heard that Townsville’s hostels were a bit dubious, but proof is always more effective than print, so after one night, I figured I’d take my chances on Magnetic Island instead.

But before jumping on the ferry out to the island, I went shopping for a pair of swimming shorts, and that’s when I realised that perhaps the problem wasn’t with Townsville, but with the event that it was hosting that weekend. Banners proclaimed that I’d just wandered into the 1997 Vietnam Veterans reunion, and the central mall was full of war stalls, sitting in the shadow of the lipstick monument. Veterans of all ages sat around chatting, exchanging pleasantries and not-so-pleasant anecdotes; some were old war heroes, some were hippies, some were coherent, and some were not, but collectively they managed to bring back memories of that terrible conflict, which rather dampened the atmosphere. Clearly it’s important to have reunions like this, so please don’t think I’m complaining, but as I walked into the sports shop to shell out for a nice new set of swimming shorts, the mall’s canned music system kicked in with the familiar refrain of ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair’, and I thought that perhaps I was better off leaving Townsville to its quiet contemplation of the ruined hippy dream, and headed off to pack.

[1] Though it’s important to note that some visitors love Townsville, and never leave. For example, the slightly cheesy tourist brochure for the town contains the usual political waffle from the mayor, the usual content-free sales talk from the tourist bureau, and the usual exhortations that whatever anyone else says about the rest of Queensland, Townsville does it better. But most telling were the words of wisdom from a local DJ who had come to Townsville for a temporary assignment, and had stayed because he had fallen in love with the place. ‘Home is not where you were born,’ he wrote beneath a bizarre photograph of him in a dinner jacket emblazoned with ‘Townsville, Queensland’ and pictures of tropical paradise, none of which bore any resemblance to the town centre I’d been exploring. ‘Home is not where you were born, home is where you want to die,’ he said. I couldn’t help thinking that, perhaps, this wasn’t quite what he’d meant to say...

Magnetic Island

Written: 25 August 1997

Magnetic Island is just 20 minutes away from Townsville on the ferry, and it’s a holiday spot par excellence. It’s a smallish island, roughly triangular with each side about 10km long, and about 75 per cent of it is National Park. The easiest aspect of it, though – as far as recuperating flu victims are concerned – is that it’s set up perfectly for tourists, and the packages to get you over to the island and staying in one of the many hostels are very cheap, readily available, and hassle-free. So, for A$59 I got a return ticket to the island and five nights in Centaur House, a quiet and friendly place halfway up the east coast in a village called Arcadia. It was spot on.

Most people spend their time on Magnetic Island hanging around on the beach, and this is exactly what I did for the first couple of days; I would normally have kicked straight into the walking tracks, but until I’d got my temperature down and stopped coughing and spluttering, I wasn’t going to do anything strenuous. Casting my mind back as the surf broke, the sun burned and the sand blew into my sandwiches, I tried to remember the last time I’d put a whole day aside to sit on the beach; it’s not something I normally get much of a kick out of, as I tend to be the sort of person who needs to be occupied. I don’t think I’ve dedicated a whole day to the beach since Broome back in July 1996, and it was only the light-headed, ears-blocked feeling of fading flu that made the whole dreamy experience enjoyable. I don’t need a tan – after this long in the sun, a tan is automatic, even if you keep out of the sun like I tend to – but relaxing in the sun is a great way to get better.

Toad Racing

A great way not to get better is to drink beer, but a strange thing happened on my first night on the island. The local pub was having a toad racing night (as you do), and a group of us from the hostel went along to participate, after putting together a kitty to bet on the toads (I ended up putting in the princely sum of A$1). The ringmaster, for want of a better name, had a personality that was larger than life, not to mention a belly that in most civilisations would be classed as gross, but which in Australia would be classed as an investment; watching him introduce the toads was fun in itself. The Centaur House syndicate bet on the yellow toad in the second race – yellow being the colour of the ribbon round the toad’s neck – which we had to secure by bidding the highest amount for that toad, and we sat down and waited for the race to start.

Toad racing is simple. All the toads are placed in a plastic container in the centre of a circle, and then the container is removed; the first toad to go outside the circle is the winner. The yellow toad made a dash for it, easily leading the pack, and then he froze. He stopped, and just sat there and croaked, while the blue toad shot past him and claimed the prize. Undeterred, we bid the rest of the kitty, some A$27, on the purple toad in the third race, in which the winner would get A$130.

As the purple toad cruised over the line, miles ahead of the competition, our corner erupted. A$130 buys a lot of beer, crisps and pool, and as I ploughed through the very welcome jugs of VB with all the other lucky winners, I figured that, yet again, my beginner’s luck with placing bets was getting me drunk, a little like it did back in Perth all those months ago, and a little like it did in Christchurch at the casino. One dollar for a whole night down the pub... life began well on Magnetic Island, I can tell you.

Kicking Back

It continued well, too. Magnetic Island lives up to its name in that people come to stay and never want to leave, but the reasons are less hedonistic than in places like Cairns; if you pick the right hostel, as I managed to in Centaur House, the pace of life becomes procrastinatingly attractive, with the most difficult decision of the day being whether to have toast or cereal for breakfast. Walking round the island with the other hostellers was relaxing, stopping at different bays every day and soaking up rays in the likes of Arthur Bay, Florence Bay, Radical Bay, Horseshoe Bay and Alma Bay. There were highlights, like the Forts – where we spotted 13 koalas, one of them with a baby – and the sounds of chuckling kookaburras and screaming curlews serenading us to sleep, all of which made Magnetic Island one of the most relaxed spots I have yet found.

It was so relaxing that on my last night, as we all sat around in the hostel’s spacious and TV-free outdoor lounge – a setting whose bright green couches would normally be classed as a flagrant flouting of the laws of aesthetics but which seemed so right at Centaur House – the assembly demanded that they be allowed to read some of the travelogue that I’d been hammering out for the last few days. Not since Melbourne has anyone giggled their way through my jottings, but as I fired up my Pocket Book and handed it round, I actually found people laughing at my prose. It was a pleasant sensation...

I eventually left Magnetic Island after five days, visiting Townsville on the way to buy some food, and that night I leapt on the southbound bus, heading on the overnight blinder to Hervey Bay. In fact, leaving the island was quite sad, a real empty-house-after-the-party-the-night-before feeling, as everyone seemed to leave at the same time. It’s rare that I get too involved in any one place, because it’s the people that make the place and the people often disappear, but sometimes it’s worth letting one place become home for a few days, and Centaur House fitted the bill. There was talk of a reunion when we all get back to Europe, but like so many things that are talked about when on the road, I’ll believe it when I see it. It would be nice, though; perhaps I’ll need such therapy when I return.

All I know is that I elected to spend the afternoon waiting for the bus in the ferry terminal, as the thought of returning to the mainland reality of Townsville made me feel rather depressed. Magnetic Island nine out of ten, Townsville nil points.

Fraser Island

Written: 4 September 1997

Please note that you can no longer light your own campfires on Fraser Island; they were banned in 2005, eight years after I visited, to help protect the island’s fragile ecology. Instead, pack a camping stove, and make sure you check out all the other regulations on the Queensland Government website.

The bus trip south from Magnetic Island to Hervey Bay was interminable, the excitement broken only by a visit to Gin Gin, where a two-tyre wheel came off a truck as it pulled into the roadhouse, shooting past the picnic table I was occupying and miraculously bouncing through the neighbouring caravan park without hitting anything. As I helped the relieved trucker to roll his unexpected deposit back to his semi-trailer, I realised that even expensive monsters like that have mechanical problems, and for once I was glad not to have the stress associated with car ownership. Sure, they’re well worth the money in terms of travel quality, but a lightweight backpack needs precious little maintenance, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

Hervey Bay is famous for two things: the humpback whales that hang around in the bay during the migration season, and Fraser Island. Unfortunately it isn’t whale season, and the reputation of Fraser Island is slightly dubious; I’d been told by more than one backpacker that Fraser Island was ‘well wicked’ and that the only way to see it was to rent a four-wheel-drive in which to burn along the sandy beaches – some 20,000 vehicles visit the island every year, and doing doughnuts on the beach in a 4WD while necking slabs of XXXX seems to be the norm. Still, it’s a big island – the biggest sand island in the world, no less – and getting lost by foot is a real possibility, so ignoring the island’s reputation, I decided to spend a day in Hervey Bay doing some research.

Fraser Island has a lot of very under-publicised walking tracks, and I spent the day hunting round to find out about them, eventually discovering the maps and leaflets I needed in the City Council offices. For such a gateway to a popular National Park, Hervey Bay is seriously lacking in not having an office for the QNP&WS (Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service, the unpronounceable acronym that equates to New Zealand’s DOC and Western Australia’s CALM); all the tour operators are geared up for 4WD tours, and foot passengers are pretty well ignored, because they don’t make anyone a fast buck. On the other hand, this attitude means the tracks and hiker’s campsites are wonderfully empty, as long as I could get myself onto the island, things were looking up.

Getting to the Island

Fraser Island is a long – actually, a very long island that is about 120km from north to south, and only about 15-20km wide, on average. The west coast, facing the mainland, is a sandfly-infested mangrove swamp, but the east coast, which is swept by north-flowing currents and trade winds, is one big, beautiful beach; they call it Seventy-Five Mile Beach, rather imaginatively. Having studied the maps and trails, I decided to attempt a long walk, taking in the central area of the island, as well as a fair stretch of beach. If you imagine the trail being a lower-case ‘d’, then I started on the left-hand edge of the d’s circle, headed south and round to the beach, then north up the beach (the d’s stalk) for some distance, eventually turning round and walking back down the beach, to cut back into the centre via the top of the d’s circle, and back to square one. This meant I could tailor the walk to be as long or short as I liked by altering the distance walked up the beach (i.e. the height of the d’s stalk). It turned out to be a brilliant route.

I set off from Hervey Bay with a dangerously heavy pack – intending to stay for eight days, I had a lot of food stashed away, some 25 meals in total, plus spare emergency rations – and hitched down to the ferry from River Heads. This is another example of the lack of attention paid to non-driving and non-touring visitors to Fraser Island; the ferry leaves from River Heads, some 17km south of Hervey Bay, but there are no buses there, so if you have no car you either have to hitch, take a taxi, or pay three times the price to leave from Hervey Bay itself. I hitched, and within ten minutes I was on my way to the ferry, a little poodle sitting in my lap, licking my legs with worrying intensity and dedication, while I entertained the driver with idle banter about the outback.

Day 1: Central Station

The first day on the island, I took it easy. The secret of a long tramp is not to rush it; as you get further into the expedition, the pack gets lighter, you get fitter, you get used to sleeping on the ground and it generally gets easier to walk all day. However, the first days are always tough, and this was no exception. From the ferry, the only track leading into the island is the road, and with Fraser Island being entirely made out of sand (with only three small outcrops of bedrock on the whole island), the road walking is very hard, as you’re basically traipsing through dune systems. The 8km walk to Central Station – a grand-sounding name for nothing more than a ranger station, toilet block and campground – took me a good couple of hours, and I just collapsed into my tent on arrival. I have to admit I was a little worried; if all the walking was going to be this tough, this was going to be a very long visit.

The area I walked through, though, was indicative of interesting times to come. Starting from the mangrove mudflats, the road winds its way through eucalyptus, banksia and cypress pine forests, without a doubt my favourite tramping environment after spinifex outback. There’s banksia with its odd, brushy seed cones (hence its nickname ‘the loo brush tree’) and strange, serrated leaves; the gum trees with their distinctive and refreshing smell, striking white trunks and, at this time of year, peeling bark; the pine needles strewn across the ground, creating a fertile mulch from which wattles and bushes of all sorts of shapes and sizes grow... and all this in an environment that looks parched, nutrient-free and downright oppressive. It’s a great example of nature reclaiming the land in a far more effective way than man ever could.

By the time I arrived at Central Station, the gum forests had given way to closed-canopy sub-tropical rainforest, something that I hadn’t explored a great deal before visiting Fraser Island. I saw plenty of tropical rainforest in northern Queensland and the islands of the South Pacific, and an awful lot of temperate rainforest in New Zealand, but the sub-tropical variety is different again, being a real mixture of tropical and temperate; the canopy isn’t as closed and outrageously full as in the tropics, where vegetation hangs from just about everywhere, but sub-tropical rainforest still has all the huge fern palms and lush greenery that isn’t so common in temperate zones. The area around Central Station is beautiful, with the wonderfully cool and clear Wanggoolba Creek flowing over its sandy bed, past rare ferns (found only in this one spot in the world) and through a canopy where the sun only manages to penetrate as shards, picking out trees and vines with the accuracy of a stage spotlight. After setting up camp, I wandered off on a 4km track to Pile Valley, noting with some relief that the walking tracks in the forest are firm and easy to walk on; it’s hard to imagine that everything’s sand, because the forest has laid down such a thick layer of what we would call soil (albeit sandy soil) that it feels no different to walk on than normal earth.

Pile Valley is home to a strand of satinay trees, kings of the forest with their perfectly straight, 70m (210 ft) trunks soaring up above the canopy. Back in the bad old days when Fraser Island was a logging site, satinay trees were cut down for use in marine building, because they have such a high sap content that they’re resistant to rotting from sea water, a bit like teak. Fraser’s satinay was used to line the Suez Canal in the 1920s, and luckily there are quite a few trees left for tourists like me to stare at.

That night was bloody freezing, my first taste of the somewhat unpredictable nature of Fraser’s weather. Clear skies mean cold weather, and I had to wear everything I owned to stop my teeth from chattering. Luckily the family next to me in the campground had built up a fire, so I warmed myself by that, chatting away to the kids and parents and gladly accepting a couple of beers to while away the night. The first night in the bush is always fairly strenuous – roll mats aren’t mattresses, and inflatable pillows are, literally, a pain in the neck – but the next day I was up with the worms, and ready to take off south through the bush.

Day 2: Lake Benaroon

Day 2 was when I saw my first dingo. Every silver lining has its cloud and every politician his perversion, and it seems that every Queensland island has its problem child: on Hinchinbrook it’s the rat, and on Fraser it’s the dingo. Dingoes are wild dogs, and the ones on Fraser Island are thought to be the purest breed left, due to isolation from interbreeding with other dogs.

Your average dingo is sleek, naturally thin, and has all the usual mannerisms of canine kind, including the sad, sideways tilt of the head that makes hearts melt and grown adults speak in goo-goo language. Yes, the dingo has a genetic ability to charm the food out of a tourist’s hands, and this has caused huge problems on Fraser Island, because the dingoes have cottoned on. Whenever humans feed wild animals the whole eco-structure gets upset; more food breeds more dingoes, and when the number of humans on the island drops in the off-season, there are too many dingoes for natural food sources, so dingoes die off and, worse, they start to get aggressive if humans don’t hand over the food when they sit up and beg. Fraser Island is now home to over 200 dingo delinquents, whose daily routine involves ripping into tents if they can smell food, and terrorising little children who don’t know how to react to wildlife (in fact, a dingo had been shot the week before I arrived for biting a child, a child who had apparently been baiting the poor thing for three hours).

The guidelines, then, are strict but sensible. Don’t feed or interact with the dingoes. Don’t leave any food or rubbish inside your tent; lock it in your car. Leave your tent flaps open, so the dingo can enter your tent, sniff around and leave when it finds no food (as the ranger told me, the worst it can do then is leave a deposit on your sleeping bag, a prospect that, to me, sounded just as bad as having all your food stolen). So, every time I camped, I hoisted my backpack up a tree, well out of the range of the dingoes.

And was I glad I took the precaution. On my second day on the island, I was about to set off from Central Station when I saw a dingo trotting off into the forest, a plastic bag of goodies in its mouth. Following the culprit’s tracks backwards, I saw a large tent, its flaps pinned open as suggested. The only problem was that the owners hadn’t read the small print, and they’d left everything inside the tent, to which the dingo was slowly helping itself. As I watched, it came back, trotted straight into the tent, and after a bit of investigation, obviously decided that a litre carton of milk constituted food, so, jaws clamped round the prize, it started walking off to the forest, leaving a trail of milk behind it. I fully assumed that by the time the owners got back from their day’s walk, all they would find would be an empty tent with a puddle of milk in one corner. It served them right, unfortunately.

Into the Bush

I decided to take the walking as it came, and headed south from Central Station and through the centre of the island to the first of the many freshwater lakes that dominate the geography of Fraser Island. The walk took me through more gum forest, with patches of rainforest, and I discovered a tree that was new to me, the scribbly gum. Like most gum trees the trunk is pure white, but the scribbly gum gets its names from the zigzag shapes all over its trunk, which are formed by burrowing insects. On first inspection it looks like some artistic vandal has come along with a sharp knife and scribbled on the trunks, in much the same pattern as you make when trying to get a stubborn biro to work, but after a while you notice the variety in the work, and it’s quite hypnotic. Combined with the hiker’s high – a condition that combines the exhaustion of hiking with the meditative hypnotic effect of regular plod-plod-plod, and which sends you off into a whole new plane of thought as you trudge through the bush – it proved quite a pleasant experience.

I arrived at Lake Benaroon after a fairly quick and stress-free 7km walk, passing pretty Lake Birrabeen on the way, and decided to stay the night in the hiker’s campsite next to the lake. I collected a sizable pile of wood for a fire, relaxed on the beach – by definition, every shoreline in Fraser is a beach, with beautiful white sandy foreshores and dune systems to die for – and lit the fire at about 4pm, ready to reduce the flames to glowing coals in time to cook my tea. It was lining up to be the perfect night.

My companions in the campsite, a Swiss couple, turned up just before dark, and we nattered away as darkness fell and I munched my way through my billy of rice. And that’s when the rain started. I’d spent so much time collecting wood and creating the perfect campfire that there was no way I was going to retreat to my tent – which wasn’t any drier than standing in the rain anyway, as I’d found out in Hinchinbrook – so I fished out my umbrella and sat by the fire, staying perfectly dry and quite warm, thank you very much.

It was at that time, in the perfect darkness, that another couple stumbled into the campsite. They couldn’t quite believe it; after a long struggle through the rainforest they had arrived at the southern end of the lake, only to find it was chucking it down (you tend not to notice things like that when the forest canopy is protecting you) and that they still had to find the campsite. But lo and behold, that glow over there was someone sitting and tending a good-looking fire and sheltering under an umbrella, so they found the campsite and a welcoming fire to boot. In all their days of tramping, Jenni and George from Melbourne had never seen anything quite like it, and we got on like a house on fire, as they thought I was a real bush character with my billy, fire and unconventional means of staying dry.

The umbrella didn’t just prove useful round the fire. By the time I got into my tent, the rain had just settled in for a long stay, and before long it was the same old story of sleeping in a puddle and getting dripped on all night. On Hinchinbrook I had simply ducked into my sleeping bag and put up with it, but I now had umbrella on the brain, and I realised there was a solution to my problem: put the umbrella up inside the tent. It worked a treat, with the umbrella protecting my head, and my waterproof jacket draped over my legs. It was almost comfortable. Almost.

Day 3: Perched Lakes

Day 3 awoke by turning over, splashing into the puddle pooled on either side of my roll mat, and realising that the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. Like every challenging bush experience, there’s the sunny spell after the storm, and I swear I was high on life as I draped my belongings out on the tea trees strung along the shores of Lake Benaroon. You get wet, but you dry out, and packing everything into plastic bags had saved most of my belongings from a fate worse than drowning; the Swiss couple, however, hadn’t been so lucky, as a dingo had come along at four in the morning and ripped a hole in their tent while looking for food, and I counted myself lucky that he hadn’t decided to rip a hole in mine. Not that it would have made any difference to the general effectiveness of the bloody thing...

The sun, coupled with the clear breeze you get after a stormy night, made the day ripe for walking. The first two days had warmed up my muscles a bit, and on day 3 I took off with a spring in my step, still heading south. As trees crashed to the ground around me, losing branches that the storm had broken off the night before, I walked through more forest to Lake Boomanjin, the world’s largest perched lake.

According to the blurb, a perched lake is formed when a saucer-shaped ‘hard pad’ of bonded mud, sand, rock and peat forms in a depression between sand dunes, and water collects there; at 200 hectares, Boomanjin is the biggest in the world. There’s no doubt that it’s a wonderful sight, which is why this was the site for the filming of the 1970s flick Eliza Fraser. A quick history lesson might be in order; in 1836 the brig Stirling Castle, commanded by Captain James Fraser, went down 300km north of Fraser Island, and the survivors made their way to Fraser Island. Among them was Eliza Fraser, the captain’s wife, who managed to stay alive on the island until help came (unlike her husband, who died). In an entrepreneurial spirit not so common then but ubiquitous now, she wrote a book about her experiences, which became a best seller and ensured that the name Fraser Island stuck. Anyway, the film of the book was made at Lake Boomanjin, so now you know.

The area around the lake was eerie. Odd tannin-stained water trickled into the lake across the sand-flats, and the wind whistled spookily across the plains. As the sun scorched the sand and made the air shimmer gently in the distance, it reminded me of the opening and closing scenes of High Plains Drifter, when Clint Eastwood appears riding on horseback, ready to play his game of revenge on the town that stood idly by while he was murdered in the main street. The only things missing were tumbleweed and an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

After a brief lunch stop, I changed direction and followed the track out towards the beach, walking through more scribbly gum forests towards the east. Every hill I crested I’d get a tantalising glimpse of the sea in the distance, but water being water, it’s impossible to tell how far away it is unless you have a reference point like surf or a ship... but I was in no hurry. The wind was playing tricks, too; forest walking is anything but quiet, and when the wind gets up in the canopy, it sounds like the sea, a motorway and a freshwater stream all piled into one. But when you finally hear the sea, it’s unmistakable, and bursting out onto Seventy-Five Mile Beach down at Dilli Village (a fancy name for one of the commercial campgrounds) was an experience, believe me.

Seventy-Five Mile Beach

Going from closed canopy to a beach that stretches as far as the eye can see is a shock. The beach is very flat – when the tide goes out, it goes out a long way – and the sea is violent, to say the least (you don’t swim off the east coast of Fraser Island, because if the rip tide doesn’t get you, the sharks will). My walk had changed from beautiful bush to breathtaking beach, and it’s this sort of contrast that makes Fraser Island such a great place for walking.

That night I camped 3km south of the village of Eurong, out on the eastern beach. My feet were in serious pain – 21.5km in a day with a still very heavy pack is a hard slog in anyone’s book – but worst of all I had an area of raw skin on my left heel. Blisters I can handle, but when the sand gets down your socks and rubs the skin raw, you’re in trouble. The problem is that the combination of hiker’s high and a higher exertion rate kills the feeling of pain while you’re exercising; we’ve all experienced the pain of stopping during a long walk and having the feeling seep back into your feet, and when I finally stopped to camp, I felt my feet for the first time that day. God, they hurt.

Camping on the beach, though, was something special. You can camp almost anywhere in the dunes along Seventy-Five Mile Beach, and pitching the tent between the small front dune and the larger secondary one meant I was protected from both sea breezes (easterlies) and land winds (westerlies), but there was enough breeze getting through to prevent dewfall. The sound of the surf and the total lack of people (if you ignore the 4WDs ploughing up and down the beach, which tend to stop at nightfall anyway) made for perfect bush camping.

Day 4: Beer on the Beach

Walking on the beach was easier than I had anticipated. Luckily, when the tide’s out, there’s plenty of firm sand near the surf where you can walk at a regular, easy pace, something that isn’t possible in dune walking (in comparison, dune walking is a complete nightmare). I’d made good time on the beach on the previous day, but as day 4 broke, my feet were still in a bad way.

Despite this, I resolved to head north some 27.5km to Eli Creek, the point I’d decided would be the furthest north I’d reach on the beach. Walking was pure agony, and after 14.5km I was still plodding along, thoroughly enjoying the scenery and the environment, but concerned that I was going to do some permanent damage to my feet by pushing on too far. Every stop made them hurt more, but not stopping did more damage, so what to do? And that’s when I heard a voice from a bunch of flatbed trucks parked on the beach shouting, ‘Hey mate! Fancy a beer?’ God moves in mysterious ways, and that day he came down to earth as a group of fishermen.

Fraser Island is full of fishermen, all going for the big catch by surf casting off the beach. I was pleased to note that their idea of surf casting was much the same as mine had been back in Whatipu, except my introduction had been via vodka and coke, and theirs was via XXXX. That stubby was probably the most enjoyable drink I’ve ever quaffed, and as they forced another can[1] on me, the conversation flowed between me and the ten-or-so full-on Aussie blokes like there was no tomorrow, which was quite a possibility given the way the two beers went straight to my head. Not surprisingly, when they offered me a lift to Eli Creek, I jumped at the bait like a suicidal whiting, and twenty minutes later my walking was over for the day. As I left the fishermen behind, them chugging into another round of stubbies before heading north for ten days’ fishing, they called after me, ‘When you write an article about us, tell ’em we love Poms, but don’t tell ’em about Fraser Island. We want it all to ourselves, eh!’ As another convoy of 4WDs ploughed past us, I couldn’t help feeling that for Fraser Island, it was perhaps already too late.

Eli Creek, the biggest freshwater creek on the east coast of Fraser, is just amazing. Every hour of every day it pours over four million litres of water into the sea, and the water’s been so filtered by sand that it’s about as pure as any mineral water you’ll find in a bottle. Jumping into the creek and coasting down it to the beach is a pretty fine way to round off a day of beach slogging, and camping just down from the creek proved another delightful experience.

Day 5: Waves, Wrecks and Dunes

I designated day 5 as a rest day, both because I had planned for an extra day somewhere along the line, and because my feet were quite, quite buggered. Despite it being a rest day, I wandered north up the beach for some 6.5km, but this time without a pack or shoes; it was then that I realised the best way to walk on the beach is with what the Aussies call ‘beach shoes’: bare feet.

As I walked along the beach, burden-free, I really began to appreciate the beach for what it is. The sights are strange to behold: fishermen down at the low tidemark, dragging a rotting fish head round and round on the sand, enticing worms to the surface which they then grab round the back of the neck and drop in a bucket for bait; couples digging holes in the sand for pipis, little triangular shellfish who dig into the sand, leaving a tell-tale and fatal little mound on the surface that enables fishermen to dig them up for bait; and, of course, there’s the sea itself.

It has character, the sea. Since time immemorial authors have waxed lyrical about it (myself included), but they always talk about the ocean, the realm of Poseidon, the storms and the swells. But what I discovered on the beach on day 5 was the spectator sport that is Wave Watching, and it’s right up there with synchronised swimming for raw emotion and power. After wandering the beach for days, I discovered six types of wave, each with its own crowd-pleasing characteristics and judge-tickling merits. The idea of Wave Watching is to try to guess the type of wave before it breaks, with extra points if they go a long way up the beach.

First up is the Normal Wave, the one that everyone is familiar with. Its approach to the beach is good, its speed constant, and it breaks harmlessly and gracefully on the waterline to a polite ripple of applause from the crowd. Not one of life’s achievers, the Normal Wave is the mainstay of the Wave Watching scene.

Next up is the Leaping Wave. As a Normal Wave breaks on the beach, the Leaping Wave rolls in from behind, leaping over the stranded Normal Wave and making it all the way to the waterline and sometimes beyond, filling up any new 4WD tracks and breaking all previous records. The crowd loves it, the TV companies thrill to the escalating viewing figures, and if you’re not careful you’ll get soaked.

Type three is the Big Wave, one of the all-time favourites, but it’s a rare sight. Breaking with foam flecking and sand booming, the Big Wave doesn’t necessarily make it a long way up the beach – in fact, he quite often performs quite poorly in this respect – but he’s impressive, and the crowd is on its feet.

More common is the Stationary Wave. He’s coming up the beach, preparing to break that waterline, and he meets another wave sliding back down the beach, taking the track out from underneath him. The result? He just sits there, not going forwards, and not going backwards. It’s a disappointment, but it’s all in the timing, and some waves have it, and some don’t. Actually, the Stationary Wave is my favourite, because you can walk along it and get a free foot spa without the groin-soaking experience of a Leaping Wave.

The Backwards Wave is a real let-down; like the Stationary Wave, he meets another wave coming backwards, but this time the sliding wave is a big one, and the new wave ends up being swept out to sea, often breaking backwards. Still, every sport has its losers, otherwise you wouldn’t have winners.

The final category, the Head-on Wave, is one of life’s bittersweet stories. After weeks, months, maybe even years of being built up by offshore winds, this wave is full of confidence and energy as he bounds up to the beach. Will he be a Big Wave? Or maybe he’ll be lucky enough to be a Leaping Wave? But fate deals him a cruel hand; instead of finding a nice, smooth beach to break on, he meets head-on the freshwater Canute that is Eli Creek, and he’s got no chance. Four million litres an hour smash him back, and after all that preparation, all the Head-on Wave can do is foam at the mouth. Eli wins every time, but the crowd loves a trier, and that’s what counts.

The Maheno

About 3.5km north of Eli Creek lies the wreck of the Maheno. The Maheno was a luxury passenger ship that was sold off to the Japanese for scrap in 1935, but as it was being towed north towards its new home, a cyclone blew it onto the beach on Fraser Island where it still rests and rusts today. It’s a weird sight that you can see for a good hour’s walk to the north and south, and at low tide you can get right up to the wreck and, if you ignore the warning signs, walk round inside it.

The fishermen who had plied me with beer had their own unique take on events. They reckoned that the Japs beached the wreck intentionally so that they could then send people over to try to salvage it, who could make maps of the area in preparation for an invasion in the war that they knew was going to happen. This wonderful conspiracy theory was apparently backed up by the fact that ‘the Japs had better maps of the east coast of Fraser Island than the Aussies during the war’, a titbit that would be interesting to confirm or disprove. Still, one of the boys made a good point. ‘It’s not fuckin’ hard to make a fuckin’ map of this fuckin’ beach,’ he said so eloquently. ‘It’s just a big fuckin’ straight line with a couple of fuckin’ curves at each end.’

‘Bloody oath,’ I muttered in agreement, as I raised my wide-mouthed can to the sky. Sometimes you can’t beat the Aussie bloke for perception and articulation, so why try?

The Pinnacles

A couple of kilometres north of the Maheno are the Pinnacles, the northernmost point that I reached on the island. As a destination, if a tramp such as this can be said to have a destination, the Pinnacles were a marvel. Fraser Island is famous not only for its fairly unique environment – rainforest thriving on nothing but sand – but also for its actual sand, which has built up over such a long time that it gives geologists the same feelings that Pirelli calendars give car mechanics. For these reasons Fraser Island is a World Heritage area[2] and the layered coloured sands of the Pinnacles are a vivid reminder of its deserved standing among natural phenomena. Imagine a combination of Purnululu and Nambung, and you’re not far off the rainbow-coloured spires of the Pinnacles; stick in a blue sky peppered with surreal cloud formations, and it’s a postcard photographer’s delight. It certainly made a worthy and fitting destination for my rest day’s walk.

The Pinnacles have a lovely Dreaming story associated with them, too. The Butchulla people, the Aboriginal inhabitants of Fraser Island, who call Fraser Island k’gari (pronounced ‘gurri’), tell of a girl who left her man to go off with the rainbow man. Now the man she jilted was a bit of a hero when it came to using the boomerang and spear, so he decided to hunt down his ex and kill her for shaming him. He eventually found her on k’gari and threw his boomerang at her. The rainbow man, however, threw himself in front of her in an act of selfless love, and the boomerang hit him and shattered him into a million pieces that fell onto the dunes of k’gari. And that’s why the sands of Fraser Island are coloured, whatever the geologists say.

Day 6: Back Down the Beach

After spending the remainder of my rest day watching tourists at Eli Creek and planes landing and taking off on the beach – it’s not lonely on the beach at Fraser, I can tell you – I turned in early in preparation for a long old walk back down the beach. Day 6 started with a 7.30am dip in Eli Creek – a refreshing experience with no tourists around and morning birdsong erupting round me – and before long I’d struck camp and started wandering south, this time wearing only my beach shoes. My feet had benefited hugely from a day without hiking boots, and the walking was tiring but easy enough, and to my surprise I got to Rainbow Gorge, the halfway point, by mid-morning.

Rainbow Gorge, which I’d bypassed by getting a lift with the fishermen, also contained examples of coloured sand, but after the Pinnacles it visibly paled. However the 2.5km walking track round the area passed through the Kirral sandblow, and yet again Fraser Island surprised me with its natural beauty. Not since the moonscape of Tongariro have I seen such desolate landscape, with miles of sand blown into Sahara-esque dunes and mountains. Kirral lived up to its name – the wind howled down the valley, filling my eyes, ears and various other crevices with sand – but it added a real atmosphere to the place as it whistled through the cypress pines. Not since Wave Rock has the wind felt so aboriginal and primeval...

That night, after a fairly uneventful but thoroughly enjoyable wander down the beach for 25km, I camped just south of where the track ducked back into the middle of the island. The stars on the beach that night were quite stunning, with not a cloud in the sky.

Day 7: Inland Lakes and Diana

Day 7, my last full day on the island, arrived after I’d slept the sleep of the dead. Heading inland towards the west, I arrived at Lake Wabby at 8am, a time well before the arrival of any tourists. Lake Wabby is an interesting place; it’s the deepest lake on the island, and it’s slowly being encroached by a massive sandblow that’s moving about three metres a year into the lake. It’s a serene place, with its green water and surrounding forest, and after a refreshing stop, I struck into the forest in the direction of Lake McKenzie, which I reached without further ado after some 14km.

Lake McKenzie is idyllic, with crystal clear blue water, white sandy banks and a lovely camping ground nearby, and after setting up camp and securing my pack out of reach of the dingoes, I made my way down for a swim and some people-watching at the lake’s edge. McKenzie is one of the most popular tourist spots on the island, and watching the day trippers get towels and thongs stolen by the prowling dingoes was fun in itself, especially as the rangers had made every effort to warn people not to leave anything around by putting up big signs plastered on all the pathways. Then there was the Irish couple; the man dived straight into the icy water, but the girl got up to her waist and refused to budge any further, despite about half an hour of good natured cajoling by her boyfriend. I even heard the Aussies sitting next to me taking bets on whether she’d go in (she didn’t) and whether she’d put her head under (she didn’t). Humans are a wonderful species, but I wouldn’t want to own one.

That night I had one other camper in the hiker’s area with me, dreadlocked Vince from Malvern, who turned out to be great company. As he unfurled the story of his travels, I had déjà vu after déjà vu as he described exactly the same experiences as had befallen me. Nice job (computer graphic designer), nice life, got bored, spent a few months saving, sold everything and bought a one-way ticket to Sydney, bought a cheap car and set off round Australia to explore, would have a year in Oz and six months in New Zealand and then who knows... sound familiar? We lit a fire and boiled up the billy – my first attempt saw a charred log collapse, tipping the billy of water all in the fire, creating clouds of ash and a desperately sullen fire, which is not a recommended course of action – and yarned the night away.

And as you do, we got onto the subject of our respective jobs and how we liked or disliked them. I told him how I preferred magazine work to newspaper work because there’s more time to do a good job and, besides, on a no-news day, newspapers will publish any old crap just to fill the columns. ‘Well,’ said Vince, ‘they’ve got plenty to write about now, eh!’

‘Whaddya mean?’ I said.

‘Shit, you won’t have heard,’ he said. ‘Princess Di’s dead.’

‘Yeah, nice one Vince!’ I replied.

‘No, I’m serious,’ he said. ‘Car crash in Paris. Happened a few days ago...’

‘Shit...’

Amazing. It happened on Saturday and I only found out on Wednesday night. After the news saturation it got in Australia, I must have been the only person in the whole country who didn’t know. As they say, ‘unless you’ve been on another planet, you’ll know that...’, but another version is ‘unless you’ve been bush, you’ll know that...’ It quite blew my mind to be reminded so vividly just how cut off I’ve been for the last week.

Day 8: Back to Hervey Bay

The next day, day 8 and the last day of my trip to k’gari, I donated my crappy cooker and crusty billy to Vince, who needed it more than me and promised to give them a good home; and after a dip in Lake McKenzie, I wound my way through the bush to Basin Lake, and from there out to the ferry terminal. There I sweet-talked a Sydney couple into giving me a lift from the ferry to Hervey Bay, which they gladly did, and as I nursed my feet after their 110km of walking, I showered, washed my clothes and sunk back into the luxuries of the western world.

Fraser Island was one of the most beautiful walking experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m glad I didn’t let the 4WD tourist façade put me off. It’s almost always possible to get off the beaten track and see a lot more of a place than the tourists will see, and although it’s fun to take three days zooming around the island in a grunting Land Cruiser, it’s much more satisfying to do it properly and by foot. Shades of Uluru here, I think...

[1] Only in Australia could this happen. Castlemaine, brewers of XXXX, the main beer in Queensland, have just come up with the next marketing coup in beer consumerism. Aware that Australians plough through cans of beer like a steroid-fuelled bull in a Wedgwood store, they’ve come up with the ultimate drink-delivery system, the wide-mouthed can. Research obviously showed that conventional can technology didn’t allow beer to be poured down the throat as quickly as desired, so XXXX cans now come with a double-sized hole in the top, so a can can be downed in half the time it used to take. Sceptical, I tried my first wide-mouthed can on Seventy-Five Mile Beach, and it worked; surely the fact that the beer disappeared quicker than ever before had nothing to do with the fact that I’d just walked 14.5km down a burning beach. It’s another great Aussie invention, and I’m sure it will soon be everywhere.

[2] World Heritage areas, like the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and the Egyptian pyramids, are protected for future generations to enjoy by the United Nations World Heritage Committee; they are deemed to be places that, if altered, would be an irreplaceable loss to the planet. Australia is particularly rich in World Heritage sites; there’s the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu, Uluru, Tasmania’s western wilderness, the wet tropics of northern Queensland, Shark Bay, Fraser Island, Lord Howe Island and the Willandra Lakes, and the list is growing all the time.

Noosa

Written: 8 September 1997

Noosa is simply lovely. It’s an upmarket and fairly yuppie holiday spot, just over 100km north of Brisbane at the northern tip of the Sunshine Coast. I hadn’t been expecting anything much – it has a particularly small National Park covering various picturesque spots, but not a lot else – but the atmosphere was spot on. I don’t know what it was that made Noosa feel so different from the comparatively tacky Hervey Bay or the overly touristy Cairns, but it felt more like a holiday version of Cardwell than a Sunshine Coast package trap. Perhaps it was down to all the enticing restaurants, which I couldn’t afford to visit, but which looked very pleasant. Or perhaps it was the incredible weather; after the unpredictable rains of Fraser Island (which is only just north of Noosa) the cloudless blue skies were paradise.

Or perhaps it was the National Park. Noosa might be small, but it’s perfectly formed, and it has lots of lovely Magnetic Island-esque beaches. Most of them seem to be nude beaches, which is an interesting twist; never have I seen so many beached whales hiding up in the dunes, or nude males jogging along the waterline with a bangers-and-chips bounce that you really wouldn’t want to see in slow motion. ‘Noody Noosa’ should be its nickname; perhaps it already is.

Noosa also has good walking tracks and wondrous headlands, though I noticed my proximity to Brisbane pretty early on. Nobody smiled or said hello on the walking tracks, so I adopted a permanent and slightly unnerving smile, and turned it on the townies. There’s something disconcerting about people who smile all the time, especially when you’re used to city sullenness, but I do love baiting the wilfully miserable. It was similar on Fraser Island; some 4WDs burning down the beach would react to my wave with a whole mob of hands and, on one memorable occasion, a howling of hellos and wha-heys as the whole car seemed to threw themselves out of the windows to say g’day; some would amble slowly past, waving with a peacefulness that meant they knew how I was feeling, because they were feeling the same; and then there were those who still appeared to be commuting, despite the sand, sea, surf and sun, with their dead-ahead stares, polished 4WDs and thin, unsmiling lips. I like to think that even they would eventually be charmed by their island holiday...

But whatever the reason, Noosa recharged my batteries after the exertions of k’gari, ready for the final push back to Brisbane.

Funeral for a Friend

My visit to Noosa also coincided with the media event of the decade; bigger news than the Challenger explosion, more headline-intensive than the Falklands War, more important to the masses than tragedy in Yugoslavia/East Timor/Tibet/Northern Ireland/Taiwan (delete as applicable)... yes, it was the weekend of Princess Di’s funeral. Having been so cut off during the first six or so days of the whole event, I’d been lucky enough to miss a fair amount of the hysterical media saturation that ensued, but Australia’s journos – with their fascinating love-hate obsession with both the royals and republicanism – managed to lose themselves in the kind of feeding frenzy that gives journalism a bad name; indeed, they almost didn’t notice that Mother Theresa had died a few days later, surely an equally important event.

This made me sad. I’ve always worried how the Australian media emulates the British tabloid mentality, but where Britain can claim to have at least four good, quality newspapers – The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times spring to mind – the best Australian broadsheet, The Australian, is relatively trashy. As well as the papers, the magazines like New Idea, Woman’s Day and That’s Life are as you might expect from their names, with an obsession with royalty that borders on the criminally intrusive (so they’re not unlike publications like Take a Break in the UK).

Given this approach to journalism, I couldn’t face watching the funeral and (more to the point) listening to the commentary. So I shut myself off from the television; the funeral was being shown live (6pm to midnight on Saturday night, Australian time) on four out of five channels, and instead I spent the night chatting to Richard, a fascinating Australian who had led a life of travel, getting out of a rat race that had threatened to pull him under, and avoiding the trappings of suburbia, something I found much easier to relate to than the coverage of a sad event by the very people who’d helped to fuel the tragedy in the first place.

The Noosa National Park Information Booth

It was funny, then, that as I headed off to explore the National Park on Sunday morning, the lady in the information booth, from whom I tried to get a map of the park, automatically assumed that because I was English, I would have watched the funeral from start to finish. When I tried to tell her that I’d seen plenty of pomp and circumstance before, and that watching her funeral didn’t interest me half as much as watching the effect of the whole affair on the media, she couldn’t understand what I was talking about. I told her that not everyone in England is obsessed by the royal family, but I think she was a little dismayed that I hadn’t cried softly into my silk hankie as the procession wound its way to Westminster Abbey. (In fact, if you wanted to sign the official books to say ‘goodbye’ to Diana, which were set up in all the major Australian cities, then in Brisbane you had to queue for 11 hours – yes, 11 – which says a lot about how much people here liked Diana.)

All I know is that, post-Diana, when I tell people I’m a journalist, I have to tag on something like ‘but I’m not a nasty one’ if I’m to avoid jokes about journos and ethics. At least in Asia I will become a ‘computer programmer’ on all application forms. They know how to treat unannounced journalists there; they simply refuse them entry.

And, as an afterthought, it seems incredible to me that none of the papers I’ve read have caught onto the incredible irony in Elton John singing a modified version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ at the funeral. OK, so it was Diana’s favourite song, but apart from the fact that it’s a classic, why do you think it appealed to her? The original is a lament over the premature death of Marilyn Munroe, and the way that she was portrayed by an unsympathetic press. Check out this snippet from the original lyrics:

Loneliness is tough

The toughest role you ever played

Hollywood created a superstar

And fame was the price you paid

But even when you died

Well, the press still hounded you

All the papers had to say

Was that Marilyn was found in the nude

Now how much more relevant is that version than the rather soppy one that Elton came up with for the funeral? Perhaps it was a bit too close for comfort...

Familiarity Breeds

Written: 13 September 1997

I’m developing a theory. Perhaps it’s an after-effect of the pre-flight Vic Bitter, but more and more I’m beginning to think I know people. Looking around the transit lounge at Darwin airport – my flight out of Australia isn’t direct from Brisbane to Bali, but has stopped in Darwin for about an hour – I keep thinking, ‘Now where do I know that face from? And she’s hauntingly familiar too...’ I’ve had this experience before, and it’s rather unnerving.

Now I know that coincidences do happen, and that travellers continually bump into each other – witness Ben and Mira in New Zealand turning up in the remotest places, or all the people I kept meeting in the Red Centre – but it’s becoming pretty commonplace that I see a face, and try to remember where I’ve seen it before. Unsurprisingly, I fail to connect nine times out of ten.

Perhaps travel simply increases the number of faces you see – it certainly increases it over a normal, regular, nine-to-five suburban existence – and perhaps the faces I see aren’t actually those I remember, they’re just close. Or perhaps there are only a few hundred of us travelling each well-worn trail, and seeing the same faces is an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability. Whatever the reason, I could have sworn that I’d seen the girl sitting two rows in front of me on the plane somewhere before... but I couldn’t for the life of me work it out, and after a while perhaps I wasn’t so sure after all.

And should I ask them if we’ve met before? Not on your nelly; that’s the corniest chat up line in the book. In fact, that’s probably the answer; disillusioned by my stunning lack of relationships since going travelling, my brain has probably decided to con me into thinking I already know all these single women in a desperate attempt to get me to pull. Well, I’m not going to fall for it. So there.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 13 September 1997

I’ll miss Australia. Yet again it’s proved to be a fascinating and friendly place, full of surprises, beauty, beer and, of course, the biggest and best of everything in the world[1].

On my penultimate day in Brisbane I visited the botanic gardens at Mt Coot-tha (not the botanic gardens in the city centre, but a bigger and better version on the outskirts of the city). Wandering through the lush undergrowth, I came across a sign containing a poem by the one and only Bill Neidjie, the famous Aboriginal poet; I read a lot about him when I was hanging around Kakadu and Uluru. The poem sums up the relationship between me and the natural beauty of Australia quite well. It’s called ‘Story About Feeling’, and here it is in all its glory:

Tree same thing. E watching you.

You look tree you say... ‘Oh’

That tree e listen to you, what you!

E got no finger, e can’t speak

But that leaf, e pumping his.

Way e grow in the night while you sleeping...

You dream something, that tree and grass same thing...

E grow with your body, your feeling...

When you feeling tree, e work with you tree.

You cut im little bit, you got water coming out.

That’s his blood, same as your blood. So e alive...

Well that tree same as you. If you feel sore...

‘Oh, I’m my body sore!’

Well that means somebody killing tree

Because your body on that tree or earth.

I love this poem. It probably sounds better if you know what the Aboriginal accent sounds like – it sure isn’t the same as straight Australian – but the imagery is simple and powerful, whatever the accent.

Perhaps I like it because one of the most delightful pleasures in life is sitting under a tree, shaded from the boiling sun by protective branches while you watch the world float past. Or perhaps I like it because it sums up Australia to me; it’s a deeply spiritual place, behind the tourist façade, and that’s probably why I like it so much. Australia is like Bill Neidjie’s tree: you cut him a little bit, and you got water coming out, because beneath the surface, this country’s alive...

Yes, I’ll miss Australia, no doubt about it.

[1] To tell the truth, I rather enjoy the Australian obsession with size: out here it’s all about the biggest, the smallest, the furthest, the best. Aussie law doesn’t prevent advertisers from saying things like ‘the best pizza in Australia’ or ‘the funniest show on earth’ – I swear I’ve never seen so many places claiming to be the ‘best eating place in the world’, and this in a country where a test on doner kebabs showed that one in four are likely to make you ill. Still, the hospitals are probably the best in the world, so I guess it all fits together...

Indonesia: Bali

Kuta

Written: 14 September 1997

And so it’s time for the Big Challenge... or that’s how I’ve been feeling about leaving the safe haven of Australia and heading into the anarchy of Asia. Landing in Indonesia in the middle of the night, without any accommodation booked, precious little local currency, hardly a word of the local language, and nothing but an open mind... well, two years ago I wouldn’t even have boarded the plane. Back then, landing in Sydney with everything pre-booked was scary enough.

Because I landed late at night, Bali’s Denpasar airport was almost totally shut when I landed, and the hotel booking desk, on which I had been pinning my hopes, was closed. ‘Never mind,’ I thought, and wandered out into the airport car park, where I started asking the hotel reps hanging round whether they had any rooms. My first request ended up with a US$30-per-night response, which was expensive, but better than sleeping on the streets. Another passenger had booked into a US$15-per-night hotel, but they’d made their reservation some six weeks in advance. Things were looking grim, but funnily enough, I didn’t really mind. Tired and stiff from the flight, I was too dumbstruck to worry.

That’s when I saw a little man carrying a sign saying ‘Hostelling International’, the universal name for Youth Hostels worldwide. I’d renewed my hostel card back in Cairns, mainly to get a discount on the coach ticket to Brisbane, so I grabbed the man and asked him if he had any rooms and how much they were; ‘Yes, we have rooms, at 12,000rp a night,’ he said. After some quick mental arithmetic – 3000rp is about one US dollar, so that was about US$4 per night – and I was home and dry. I got into the van, seemingly the only person stupid enough to turn up in Denpasar without a prior booking, and off we went through the night streets of Bali.

Driving in Bali is everything you thought the Greeks were, but worse. Nominally the Indonesians drive on the left, which I hadn’t been expecting as this used to be a Dutch colony, but given the astonishing number of motorbikes and crazy drivers, it’s more a case of, ‘Give way to me, ’cos I ain’t giving way to you.’ Jet-lagged and wide-eyed, I small-talked with Putu, the hostel manager, and wondered how fortunate I was to be heading towards a bed; the feeling of landing on your feet by the skin of your teeth is quite an adrenalin rush.

Even arriving at a hostel – a clean, secure and pleasant one, I should add – is a culture shock when you first visit a country like Indonesia. I decided to get into some good habits early on, so I set up my mosquito net (even though Bali isn’t a malaria area) and went off to brush my teeth. Not so fast, though... the drinking water is guaranteed to give you Bali belly, even if you only do your teeth with it, but luckily I’d brought a bottle of Aussie water[1] from Darwin, so fresh-breathed and sweating profusely in the tropical temperatures, I bivvied down for the night.

A First Taste of Asia

The next day was my first proper experience of culture shock, and it filled my mind with all manner of thrills and spills, particularly as I’ve spent most of my travelling life so far in highly anglicised cultures. I’m sure that southern Bali is pretty mild stuff compared to legendary places like India, but it’s still a world apart from the West, and I wasn’t disappointed. I also wasn’t that spooked – I found places like Amanu far more remote, not surprisingly – but that first day in Kuta will stay with me for a very long time.

That morning I joined the hostel’s free shuttle bus to Kuta, the main tourist centre on Bali and some 6km west of the hostel’s pleasantly suburban setting. Kuta is home to a long stretch of surfing paradise, a beach populated by lobster-coloured tourists and the most bewildering supply of hawkers you’ve ever seen. My first mission was to change some money, and if I was worried about the banks being closed on a Sunday, I needn’t have been; every Tom, Dick and Harry in Kuta is a money changer, and the process was no different from any other country; I just wandered around trying to find the best deal in town. I bumped into a couple from the hostel in my wanderings – Emma and Doug from Muswell Hill – and we teamed up to explore the bustling tourist Mecca that is Kuta.

The first rule of buying anything that doesn’t have a fixed price is to barter. Some advice I’d picked up was to ask how much something was, and to offer one third of that, smiling as if it’s a game (which it is, really). The vendor looks suitably shell-shocked and makes another offer, which you counter, and eventually you meet somewhere halfway and it’s a deal. If the deal isn’t to your liking, say you’ll go down the road where you got a better offer, and just watch the price tumble. My first experience of tumbling prices came in a clothes shop off the main market road in Kuta.

So what did I buy? Some baggy cotton trousers and a cotton shirt (which I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing in London, but which proved practical and mozzie-proof garb for Indonesia) and a lovely sarong, an essential multi-purpose purchase that can be used as a body wrap, towel, bed sheet, sunshade, pillow and just about anything else you can think of. I don’t think I managed to strike a terribly competitive bargain; all three cost me 42,000rp, or about £8.50, which might sound like a bargain in western terms, but isn’t so great when you consider that’s the cost of four or five nights in an average hotel in Bali. Still, I needed the clothes, and I needed the practice at haggling, so it was a good start.

Lunch was a pleasant surprise, too. For little over one pound each we ate like kings, with a huge plate of crispy noodles and vegetables and a Coke from one of the most beautiful settings you’re likely to find, a restaurant right on the beach. Food is ridiculously cheap here, and you can eat for a few pence per meal if you’re willing to risk the street vendors’ appetising but sometimes slightly dubious offerings. For the first few meals, I sensibly stuck to the restaurants, trying such wonders as gado-gado (boiled vegetable salad with a spicy peanut sauce), nasi goreng (fried rice topped with a fried egg) and mie goreng (fried noodles). Indonesian food might not be that spectacular when compared to its more famous neighbours in Southeast Asia, but it’s certainly value for money.

Hawkers of Kuta

Sitting on the beach, supping a cold and very inexpensive beer, the ubiquitous hawkers landed on us like flies on shit. Every two seconds a new face would buzz into view, trying to off-load fake watches, sarongs, jewellery, massages... you name it, it’s here. The secret, I quickly discovered, is to say, ‘No thanks,’ firmly and repetitively, or even better a quick tidak (Indonesian for ‘no’). Wearing shades helps, as once they’ve got eye contact, they latch on like hyenas moving in for the kill, but the golden rule is not to start a conversation (unless, of course, you actually want to buy something) and not to tell them your name. Doug, in one of his most endearing features, couldn’t resist having a chat; he just loved to talk to people, and if there’s one thing that’s free in Bali, it’s a conversation involving one side trying to sell something, and the other side trying to dump them politely. I sat back and watched him and Emma dig themselves deeper and deeper; he ended up buying a massage that he didn’t really want, and she bought an ankle necklace simply to get rid of the woman selling it. For some reason I wasn’t a target; perhaps my tidaks were more forceful than Doug and Emma’s.

The whole day was constantly amazing. Waiting for our bus, we just watched the world go by; if money makes the world go round, then crazy places like Kuta make it turn a little faster, and the combination of canny natives, confused tourists and a distinctly tropical attitude towards life produces a cultural soap opera that never ceases to amaze. The littlest things become fascinating – the man in charge of parking motorbikes, the ticket touts who shout lewd comments at any girl in a miniskirt, the dogs eating discarded scraps in the streets, the taxis doing u-turns in the middle of the busiest road in Kuta, the Australian accents that the locals have adopted as a survival trait in the competitive street-selling environment – and I get the feeling this will continue throughout Indonesia.

I find myself thinking that if I get this much of a buzz from Kuta, the most touristy place in Bali, then getting out into the sticks is really going to be something...

The Warung

And so, to the next challenge. The hostel, good though it was, was essentially not that different from hostels the world over, except that it had an excellent and very cheap restaurant (at least, cheap by western standards). A good, filling meal of gado-gado or nasi goreng cost 4000rp (about 85p), but I couldn’t rely on hostel food forever, so I decided to go native and check out one of the warungs, the small restaurants dotted all over the place.

‘Restaurant’ is a euphemism when applied to some warungs. The fanciest are like restaurants, but the majority aren’t, and if you had to compare the average warung to a garage, it would be the one with a greasy attendant who fills up your car with a cigarette hanging from his unshaven lips while a mangy dingo pisses on your front tyre, and the rag used to clean your windscreen smears more dirt on it than you’d ever pick up on the road. Indonesia is, according to the guidebooks, the place in Southeast Asia where most people get a bad stomach, and judging by your average warung, it’s not hard to see why.

The warung I chose for my first roadside easting experience was just down the road from the hostel – a long way from the tourist strip in Kuta – and it was pretty damn grubby. I figured that if I was going to get Bali belly, I might as well get it over and done with, so I sat down on a plastic stool and ordered a nasi goreng. To my immense relief it was created and cooked in front of my very eyes – reheated food is a guaranteed way to get ill, so you should only go for freshly cooked meals – but the knife the woman used was so rusty that I wondered whether even a very hot wok would kill off all the nasties. Still, it tasted excellent, and didn’t cost too much (although, not sure whether one should haggle in a warung, I paid the asking price, which could have been a rip off), and 24 hours later I was still firing on all cylinders. In retrospect, this was lucky; with dirty cats prowling about and a distinctive smell of sewers drifting into the open-air warung whenever the wind changed, I felt like I was dicing with death[2].

I probably saved the situation by drinking a few cheap beers that night with Emma and Doug, and another Pommy couple, Caroline and Stuart, whom Emma and Doug had met in Australia. There’s camaraderie between fellow travellers in places like this that provides a safety blanket from the slightly scary world of reality, and talking to them about their plans for the morrow – driving north in their newly rented 4WD – helped make up my own mind. I was going to head north, too, but without the luxury of self-drive; instead, I was going to check out Balinese public transport.

[1] On the subject of water, I made a last-minute and truly liberating purchase in Brisbane. Aware that travellers buy bottled water all the time throughout Asia, I did a mental calculation of how much ten months’ worth of water might cost me, and came up with a pretty large figure... enough to consider buying a water filter. The iodine tablets I’d bought for water purification in New Zealand would have done the job, but they taste pretty rough and you shouldn’t drink iodine water more than you have to, so I scoured the Yellow Pages and found a shop in the city that specialised in water filters.

Some A$265 later (a fraction of the price of buying bottled water for a year) I was the proud owner of a pocket-sized 250g Katadyn Mini water filter that says it will remove all the nasties I might come across, even cholera, giardia, amoebic and bacillary dysentery, viral gastroenteritis, typhoid and, of course, things like worms and cysts. Between my myriad inoculations and the water filter, I should now be able to drink the water pretty much anywhere, and I can always fall back on the iodine tablets if things look particularly grim and there’s no bottled water available. I’ve got two plastic bottles, one labelled ‘Cool’ and the other ‘Crap’, and I simply filter from one to the other, meaning I never run out of water if there’s a water source nearby.

[2] I would return to Kuta to fly out to Singapore, nearly two months later on November 7th, after a long bus ride from Yogyakarta during which the drivers insisted on playing extremely loud gamelan music at 11.30pm, 1am and 2.30am (not that I was counting or anything). Soon after arriving, I would get a nasty batch of Bali belly, the final insult from a country whose standard of health isn’t as bad as some other countries, but is just as effective; E.coli doesn’t mind where it lives, but it really enjoys the human gut. It’s funny how I was joking about it at the beginning of my trip through Indonesia; it was no laughing matter by the time I left.

Some things, though, put your health in perspective. That Saturday night, I was woken up by a drunken brawl downstairs – at least, it sounded like a drunken brawl – and a car backfiring. Chatting to the janitor the next day, I got a different story.

‘So we got woken up early morning, by poliss,’ he said. ‘And polissmen go to room below you, and knock on door saying, “We know you got heroin, hashish, and stuff, let us in.” But they didn’t open up, saying, “We ain’t got nothin’ in here, man”, so they got me to get spare key, I open the door, and bash the door down. One of them runs off down the corridor, so polissman gets out his gun and shoots him. Got his leg just here. They from Java, you know.’

Excitement in Kuta? No surprises there, then.

Balinese Public Transport

Written: 16 September 1997

Tuesday morning saw me standing outside the hostel in Kuta, waiting for a bemo (the local bus) while chaos erupted around me. Lining the street were loads of motorbikes, each with an owner hanging round nattering and waiting for something to happen. There was a policeman on hand, and all I could assume was that there had been an accident of some sort, and everyone was basically hanging around to see if anything juicy was going to happen. The fact that I understood not one word added to the confusion on my part; about three bemos went past before I realised I’d have to stand in the middle of the road to catch one’s attention.

Bemos are the staple ingredient of Balinese transport. A bemo can be anything from a minibus to a truck with seats tacked on the back, and luckily in southern Bali they’re fairly pleasant, and mainly of the minibus variety (on some of the other islands they do tend to be a bit more cobbled together). I thought that would be a good thing; the only problem is that when a minibus is packed to the brim, it’s stifling, whereas an open truck has built-in air conditioning.

My first bemo, from the hostel to southern Denpasar, wasn’t too bad; wedged between two warbling Indonesians with my backpack crunched under my knees, I got to Denpasar without any major problems. Then I realised I didn’t really know how to proceed; I had directions to go to Sanglah, then Kreneng, then Batubulan, and then Ubud, my destination for the day. But changing bemos isn’t exactly like changing tube stations; you get out in the middle of a street, and you take it from there.

As it happened, it took me all of five seconds to find the next bemo. A guy came up to me and asked where I was going, I told him Kreneng, and I was bustled into a waiting bemo. This was when the fun started: at official bemo stops the driver waits until he’s filled the bemo, and then he sets off; outside of the official stops, you simply hail a bemo, and if there’s room, he’ll stop and pick you up. The problem comes in the Indonesian definition of ‘full’: in the western world it means as many passengers as the regulations allow, but as with everything to do with Indonesia, regulations seem to be things that happen to someone else, so by the time the driver had filled his bemo and started for Kreneng, the bus was bursting at the seams, a situation that wasn’t helped by my backpack.

The next station, Kreneng, was when I first came up against the payload surcharge. My first rides had cost 500rp and 700rp respectively (11p and 15p), and the next leg was supposed to be 700rp, but for the grossly inflated sum of 1000rp I got to sit in the front seat, with enough room for me and my bag to breathe. This turned out to be well worth the extra charge, and after we arrived at Batubulan, I hopped out and searched for the bemo to Ubud. Unfortunately the front seat was already taken, and it took 20 minutes to fill up the bus to capacity, but eventually we trundled off, bearing 22 passengers in a shuttle not much bigger than a Renault Espace. I lost feeling in my left foot and circulation in my buttocks, but we soon pulled into Ubud, some 20km north of my original starting point, and as I got off the bus, I felt immensely proud of myself for managing another milestone in my Asian education. The total cost of the trip was 3700rp, or just under 80p, which was great value, particularly for a cultural experience akin to being holed up in the Black Hole of Calcutta with half the population of Outer Mongolia while the whole world shakes and lurches around you.

Sitting on a street corner and watching the Balinese drive is a bit like going to watch motor racing; you’re there to see someone crash (at least, that’s the only reason I’ve ever watched motor racing). Being actively involved in the whole traffic scene is the difference between watching a bull fight and waving the red cloth yourself, and using public transport in Indonesia manages to be both thrilling and deeply scary. Driving down the right-hand side of the road to overtake isn’t unusual, but in the West we normally wait until there’s nobody coming the other way before pulling out; red traffic lights mean ‘stop’ in the West, but here they mean ‘grit your teeth, we’re going through’; and pedestrian crossings here mean ‘sound the horn’ rather than ‘look out for pedestrians’. As an outside observer the horn sounds are almost lyrical, providing a sonic backdrop to the traffic scene in much the same way that kookaburras and curlews provide a backdrop to the Australian bush, but when you’re actually inside the maelstrom, horns are a matter of survival.

But there is one thing that strikes me about the Balinese driving system: it works. Given the amount of traffic and the random development of the road system – a relief after the orthogonal sterility of Australasia – the traffic’s always moving, even if it’s only millimetres from the oncoming trucks in the middle of the road. London drivers come in for a knocking, but their automotive audacity is nothing compared to the crazy stunts in Indonesia, and you can’t help wondering if cabbies couldn’t learn a thing or two from their Balinese cousins.

Learning Bahasa Indonesia

Written: 16 September 1997

I’m learning a new language while in Indonesia, and it’s making travelling here so much more rewarding. Bahasa Indonesia (bahasa means ‘language’ in Indonesian) is a whole lot easier to pick up than English, and it doesn’t take long to become proficiently fluent (by which I mean able to travel without having to resort to screaming loudly and slowly in your native tongue).

Bahasa Indonesia has no tenses, no conjugation, no sexes, no irregular verbs and no plurals, it uses the Latin alphabet, and it’s easy to pronounce. Literally all you need is a good vocabulary, because once you’ve got the words and a basic understanding of the grammar, you can speak the language as fluently as is possible for a foreigner. To say something like, ‘I want to go and climb that mountain tomorrow,’ you say, ‘I like climb that mountain tomorrow,’ or to say, ‘Can I please have a cup of sweet tea,’ you say ‘Please sweet tea’. It’s very easy.

There is only one important point: in Indonesian, the letter ‘c’ is pronounced ‘ch’, so cap cai is pronounced ‘chap-chai’; the letter ‘k’ is used for hard k-sounds. There one notable exception, though: Coke is pronounced as in western English, probably because it wouldn’t sell too well if pronounced correctly in Indonesian...

I spent the first few days learning the greetings, the numbers and the basic grammar, and within a week was speaking reasonable sentences. With the constant learning of new words that happens as a result of travelling alone, the language barrier I’d feared simply evaporated; besides, so many people speak a smattering of English in Indonesia that you can’t really lose.

Finally, as an added bonus, Bahasa Indonesia is almost identical to Bahasa Malaysia, so what I learn in Indonesia will also be very useful for Malaysia.

All this rather goes against the grain of this particularly telling joke that I heard on the road:

What do you call someone who can speak three languages?

A polyglot.

What do you call someone who can speak two languages?

Bilingual.

And what do you call someone who can only speak one language?

English.

Ha bloody ha.

Ubud

Written: 18 September 1997

Stepping out of a bemo from Kuta into a chaotic street in Ubud, how the hell do you know where you are? The guidebook has a map, and a blob saying where it thinks you should be, but how do you find somewhere to stay that won’t break the bank? So I wandered aimlessly for half a minute, and then a man on a motorbike came up to me and asked if I was looking for a room. ‘How much?’ I asked. ‘10,000rp a night,’ he said. ‘I’ll take a look, then,’ I said. ‘OK,’ he smiled, taking my pack and stuffing it between him and the steering wheel, and indicating that I should sit on the back.

The hotel – or losmen in Indonesian – was very pleasant, and for my 10,000rp I got a room to myself (as is standard) with two beds (a single room almost always has two beds, while a double has a double bed and a single bed) and an en suite bathroom, complete with westernised ablutions. The traditional Asian ablution involves the squat toilet and mandi, the latter being a tub of water and a scoop; you don’t get in the tub, but scoop water onto yourself like a do-it-yourself shower, but in Bali, western ablutions are becoming the norm. Not only that, every room had a lovely shaded veranda to itself, and the price included breakfast, as well as coffee and tea all day. Not bad for £2.15 per day, and I was staying in fairly expensive lodgings, too. When you get all this for less than the cost of a pint of beer in London, it makes you wonder how you’ll ever cope with western prices again.

For lunch I tried my second warung – a cleaner and cheaper one than the one I’d tried in Kuta – where I had a wonderful nasi campur and Coke. Nasi campur (nasi means ‘rice’ and campur means ‘mixed’) is basically rice with odds and ends, meaning you get about five or six portions of whatever’s going; all of the odds and ends I had were exquisite, even if I had no idea what most of them were, and suitably stuffed, I decided to explore a bit of Ubud.

The Sights of Ubud

After soaking up the central Ubud scene, I wandered south to the Monkey Forest, a small and almost dead forest populated by a large Balinese temple and an even larger population of monkeys. If you imagine that scene from Disney’s Jungle Book then you’re not far off what the Monkey Forest could be; huge trees slowly being crushed by strangling figs, pesky monkeys attacking tourists for peanuts, vines hanging off temple buildings – it could be so wonderful, but it’s actually rather sad. The forest is dead, the monkeys are only after one thing – food – and the tourists are only there to take their pictures so they can say they’ve ‘done’ the monkeys in Bali. Never mind, I suppose it’s one way to fill up the afternoon.

It was also my first experience of the entry fee system in Bali. Most things have an entry fee, which is fine because it’s normally something like 10p, but you not only pay entry for yourself, you pay a fee for your camera too, and if you’ve got a video camera, the charge is even more. It seems a bit strange at first, but you soon get used to it, though I never really understood why some tourists hid their compact cameras in their bags to avoid paying a few rupiah; if you don’t pay, you can’t expect the sights to be protected from the sort of decay that the Monkey Forest demonstrates all too sadly.

That night I shelled out to visit the ballet. Balinese dance is something else; it’s totally different to western dancing, and is a step beyond Polynesian tribal displays. It’s quite beautiful, with its combination of colourful and ornate dress, strange pentatonic and diatonic orchestral music played on the local equivalent of the xylophone, and eye and hand movements that are surprisingly expressive. The ballet I went to see, the Ramayana, was the story of the kidnapping of a beautiful girl by a demon, and helped along by some notes in English describing the plot, I found it a wonderful experience. The ‘stage’ was open air and in the round, set up very much like a temple with burning butter lamps and beautiful stone carvings everywhere, and as the moon rose over the whole proceedings, I really felt for the first time that here I was, in a radically different culture, rather than just a radically different lifestyle.

The only drawback was that every time a new character hit the stage, the camera flashes went off like the Oscars when the stars arrive. Ah well, Bali is a tourist trap, and Ubud is its cultural heart, so I guess I should have seen that coming...

Around Ubud

My second day in Ubud turned out well, too, despite a rather unpromising start. Waking up leisurely and enjoying a breakfast on the veranda felt pretty damn luxurious after all the lame breakfasts I’ve had to make for myself over the last two years, but on visiting the centre of the sprawling metropolis of Ubud, I found it comparatively dead. The public holiday that was in force, set to coincide with September’s full moon, turned out to be more of a holy day than a holiday; everyone disappeared into the temples, leaving the shops closed and the streets rather quiet, except for the beautiful bamboo poles set up by the sides of the road, which bent over the streets like decorated street lamps, with wind chimes dangling off the ends and gently tinkling in the breeze. I suppose it would be similar to a non-Christian turning up on December 25th expecting a riot, only to find empty streets stuffed with Santa decorations, Christmas trees, and closed shops. Never mind; if the town centre was sleeping, I’d simply go exploring the surrounding countryside.

Walking west out of Ubud, I soon left the hotels and restaurants behind, and headed off into my first experience of rural Bali. Coming round a corner, I was confronted by lush green meadows, which on closer inspection turned out to be paddy fields. Dotted throughout the fields were flags on large poles, stone pillars where floral offerings were being made to the gods, little thatched shelters, and people working the fields (though not many, as most were praying somewhere else). I stopped to take a quick break on the side of the road, fishing out my inadequate map in the process to try to work out where I was, and before you know it I was accosted by this elderly man, all dressed up in the basic farmer’s garb of sarong, flip-flops and baggy shirt. Smiling, he asked me in English where I was from.

So, we got talking. He introduced himself as Made Tunas (pronounced ‘Maday Toonas’) and said he lived in Sayan, a village some 2km west of central Ubud, and home to huge spreads of paddy fields. He offered to guide me to his village, which seemed a sensible prospect seeing as I wasn’t exactly sure where I was, and we strode off towards the nearest paddy field.

Given that I was wearing my new cotton trousers – I was trying to look respectable, so as not to offend the locals – I wasn’t too keen on marching through the quagmire that makes a paddy field a paddy field, but, of course, I hadn’t been thinking. Criss-crossing all paddy fields are perfectly dry paths; paddy fields are effectively fields fed by man-made streams, and to keep the water in they need sides. These are what you walk down, sometimes hopping across flowing streams on bamboo sticks, sometimes scaling steep terraces, but mainly just wandering through a confusing but fairly logical network of little raised tracks. Every few metres is a little statue or stone monument – it seems each field needs its own little offering spot to ensure the gods make the rice grow – and there are also plenty of wind-powered rattles that play out a strange tune, not a million miles from the sound a wooden wind chime makes. Combine this with the Hindu singing you often come across, and it’s a step into another world. I felt deeply spooked to be wandering through a segment of photographic pastiche as the sun beat down mercilessly; after all, how many pictures of paddy fields being worked have I seen? Countless. And how many paddy fields have I actually explored? Well, none... until now.

Arriving in the little village of Sayan, we took a few sharp turns down tiny alleyways, and before long Made Tunas pointed to a collection of ramshackle and crumbling buildings and proclaimed, ‘This my house.’ We sweltered across a small courtyard and sat down in the shade, and while the ducks clacked around, the dogs sniffed at the daily offerings[1] and the cows in the field snored and chewed the cud, Made Tunas offered me a drink.

Thinking quickly, I asked him if he had any tea; after all, tea has to be heated somewhere along the way, and I figured that I was probably going to get as sick as a dog if I ate or drank anything at all, but tea might just be all right. Off he pottered to put the proverbial kettle on, and I sat down to examine the area. There were four small houses around the courtyard, with some beds kicking around (though to call a flat wooden palette a bed is a bit of an exaggeration) and odds and ends everywhere. Off to one side was a small, private temple area, decorated with beautiful cloths and flower arrangements, and the smell of incense wafted over in the gentle breeze. When Made Tunas came back with a grotty glass full of sweet but worryingly tepid tea, I gingerly sipped it, finding a delicious and refreshing sweet drink, containing goodness only knows what. We made small talk – his English was quite passable, something that surprised me for a farmer – and he showed me the woodcarvings that his son made and sold in the market, even giving me a little wooden tortoise as a present. Of course, I knew all this was going to cost me something in the end, but I was having such a sensory overload that I figured it would be worth it.

After a while, during which I picked up some more Bahasa Indonesia, I declined his kind offer of some food, figuring that eating would really screw up my intestines, and we set off back through the paddy fields, heading towards the road to Ubud. When we finally reached the road, I offered to give him some something (‘I have nothing to give you, but perhaps some money...?’), and after some gentle negotiation I coughed up a pretty paltry sum; he seemed happy enough, and I reckoned I’d got a fair old experience for my cash. Satisfied but hungry, I set off back into Ubud, picked up a wonderful spicy chicken dish at a restaurant on the way, and ducked back into the hotel for a well-earned siesta. I slept like a baby...

[1] Throughout Bali you’ll see these little offerings on the street, in the houses... pretty much everywhere, in fact. Consisting of a small tray made of woven leaves, filled with dried flowers, a couple of rice balls and an incense stick or two, they’re put out every morning outside the front door, where the dogs come and eat the rice, the motorbikes drive over them and the ravages of the world turn them into a squashed mass on the highway of life. Still, the next day there’s another one, and they’re a pretty pleasant way of littering the streets with biodegradable art.

Curse of the 60-day Visa

Written: 18 September 1997

Ubud was where the enormity of my Asian trip kicked in. In Australia and New Zealand I had plenty of time, my own transport, and mounds of information on walks, sights to see and places to stay. In French Polynesia I had a much more fixed schedule: where Zeke went, I went. But in Asia there are no guidelines except for time: I have 60 days in Indonesia, and then I have to leave, end of story. I can leave via plenty of recognised entry/exit points, but it’s still only 60 days, and that adds a certain impetus to proceedings.

A quick geography update might help explain the quandary of the 60-day visa. Heading south and east from Singapore in a rough circle (from about nine o’clock to four o’clock, with the clock centre in the middle of Indonesia) stretches the main archipelago of Indonesia. The larger islands are, west to east, Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Komodo, Flores, Lembata and Timor, with Sumba tucked in south of Flores; the islands east of Bali, ending in Timor, are collectively called Nusa Tenggara. Then, north of the archipelago (at the centre of the clock) are, west to east, Kalimantan (previously Borneo), Sulawesi, the Malukus (the fabled Spice Islands) and finally Irian Jaya, which borders on Papua New Guinea.

Anyway, finding myself with a free afternoon in Ubud after my walk round Sayan, I sat down to make my plans. Plan one, the easy plan and a guaranteed good trip, although extremely touristy, was to head west to Java, then through Sumatra, and finally into Singapore. Plan two, a more challenging route, was to head east from Bali through the islands of Nusa Tenggara, then to fly or sail north to Sulawesi, then west to Kalimantan (southern Borneo), and further west to Singapore. Plan three started like plan two, but instead of crossing Kalimantan from east to west (a bit of a misnomer, as you have to sail around the south coast, there being no roads), I would take the boat south from eastern Kalimantan to Java, from where I would go back to Bali, and would fly to Singapore using the relevant part of my Tahiti-London ticket.

The problem? Well, apart from not knowing how much time to give to each place, and not knowing how reliable the inter-island transport will be, it isn’t exactly the same as planning a self-drive trip round Australia, and besides, most of the Indonesian section of my guidebook seems to talk about Java, Sumatra and Bali, with only sketchy details of the other islands. Perhaps this is why I’ve decided to go for plan three: most tourists don’t get to Kalimantan or Sulawesi, they go to the sights in Java, which I should still manage to catch. So, I’ve decided to change some more money in Ubud, where the rates were good, and catch a bemo east to the port of Padangbai, leaving Bali behind for my return in eight weeks’ time. I hope I’m doing the right thing; only time will tell.

Types of Traveller

Written: 18 September 1997

Ubud is billed as the ‘centre of cultural tourism in Bali’, which basically means it’s full of art galleries, wood carving shops, hotels and restaurants. It’s also full of tourists, and where Kuta is full of Australians on shag-and-tan holidays, Ubud is full of Germans on a more cultural experience. While I perused the streets, I noticed a complete social stratum in the tourist scene, one I’d never quite spotted before because in a white culture, it’s not always so easy to spot who the tourists are.

First up there are the package tourists, who come in two flavours: beach bums and smarter couples. They’re obviously only here for a short time, because they spend money like there’s no tomorrow, buying big and bulky souvenirs for inflated prices and making the local tourist industry rub its hands in glee.

Next up are the obvious backpackers, who tend to hang around in couples or groups, with young girls gossiping just like they were back in the hairdressers at home, and the lads being lads but without quite stooping to the depths of the beach bums. They wear lightweight hiking boots, daypacks, big money belts and keep talking about travelling and how it opens your mind and how they’ll be so different from their friends when they get back home and how they don’t know what they’ll do for a job when they get back and how everyone should go travelling and how much they miss real beer and how amazing it is to think that people can survive in suburbia... and so on, ad nauseam. Quite a few of them have visited Cairns and Uluru and think they’ve done Australia, if you know what I mean.

Then there’s the dropout crowd, made up of hippies who hit the Asian trail, discovered cheap Thai grass and never looked back. Not as prevalent as they used to be due to stricter entry requirements, they’re still here, wearing scraggy clothes and inane grins. The dress code for Southeast Asia is clear; in most countries, modesty is highly respected, and both men and women should cover up in public (so that’s trousers and shirts rather than tiny shorts and bikini tops). Flip-flops, swimwear and long hair are generally frowned upon by the locals, but they tolerate it because these strangers have money to spend, particularly in tourist spots like Kuta. Long shorts seem to be reasonably acceptable, but skimpy swimming trunks or teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikinis... well, they’re really not the done thing.

And me? Where do I fit in? Well, I’m obviously a tourist, but I’m trying to look like someone who’s attempting to fit in. I wear passably smart clothes. I have a respectable, short haircut. I keep myself to myself, don’t get rip-roaringly drunk in the watering holes, avoid the expensive restaurants, and try to take public buses rather than the pricier tourist shuttles. I’ve got a hell of a lot to learn, but I’ve already done more adventurous things than most people do in their whole year in Asia. Give me a couple of months, and I hope to be able to go anywhere, and survive.

Indonesia: Lombok

Ampenan

Written: 19 September 1997

Once I’d decided to head east from Bali to the neighbouring island of Lombok, it all fell into place; in the end, I managed to get from Ubud into the thick of Lombok in just two days, which struck me as pretty reasonable. I left Ubud on a Wednesday morning, jumping on a couple of bemos that took me across Bali to the port of Padangbai on the east coast. On the way I shared the inside of a tiny van with 22 other people, and even had a little kid throw up on my backpack, which was a nice touch. Still, I count myself lucky; the breakneck driver didn’t hit anything, I didn’t have anything stolen, and I got the feeling back in my legs and bottom within about half an hour of arriving in Padangbai.

Shrugging off the hawker trying to sell me hugely inflated prices for the tourist buses in Lombok, I managed to track down the ferry ticket office, paid my 5500rp fee and ran all the way up the gangway, jumping on the 12 noon ferry just as the ropes were falling off. The four-hour journey went pretty smoothly, as I managed to sit next to a couple of interesting English couples who killed time by providing me with tips on Malaysia, Thailand et al (and I reciprocated with bits and bobs about Australia and New Zealand, a ritual that soon becomes familiar on the road, but never tiring).

Docking in Lombok after the crossing didn’t quite go according to plan. We got there spot on four o’clock, but then spent 40 minutes circling round the harbour in the marine equivalent of the plane stack above Heathrow. There was another ferry in our spot, and when it eventually filled up and headed off, a ship’s horn slagging match ensued that left the passengers on both boats deaf, but the captains sufficiently de-stressed. I’ve never witnessed the maritime equivalent of road rage before and it’s quite something, though it’s mainly bluster, seeing as the captains can’t leap out of their vessels for the traditional punch-up.

Despite my, er, relatively extensive experience of bemos, I got stung on the ride from the port of Lembar to the main city of Mataram. Yes, I was grabbed and bundled into what I thought was a bemo, and yes, they thought I’d pay them the extortionate fee of 3000rp they had mentioned; but I told them when I got in that I wouldn’t go above 2000rp, not realising that this wasn’t a public bemo, the rate for which was about 700rp. Oh well; private citizens on the make I can handle, but when they refused to budge on the price and so did I, they kicked me out of the van in the middle of nowhere, and one of their accomplices stuck me on a public bemo to Ampenan (the suburb I wanted to go to). It was another learning experience; don’t trust anyone who’s simply after your money.

Peaceful Ampenan

Soon I was wandering around Ampenan, trying to fit my map to the roads themselves. The concept of road signs is apparently alien to the Indonesians, and after walking around for half an hour with no success, I collared a passing horse cart and asked him to take me to the Hotel Zahir. These wonderful little constructions, called dokars if they have two wheels and andongs if they have four, are a pleasant way to get around; the cart is tiny, seating four at a push, and the donkey trots along the road, crapping when it feels like it and adding to an atmosphere that is already explosive enough. The cost is the same as your average bemo, except you tend to bargain more with a dokar, knocking him down from his initially ridiculous offer to something that’s only about four times the price the locals will pay... and it all adds up to a heap of fun.

The Hotel Zahir, at a whopping 8000rp per night including breakfast, was a rather more earthy hotel than the one in Ubud. As I arrived, a disgruntled Australian woman was complaining that she’d given 10,000rp to a masseur, who’d then gone off to change the money in the market and hadn’t come back. The Aussie was miffed and the proprietor was offering to refund the 10,000rp himself (because the masseur, Maria, was a regular at the hotel), but in a fit of obstinate pique, the girl was having none of it. She looked over to me sipping Indonesian tea outside my room door, warned me not to buy anything because I would probably get ripped off, and stormed off in a huff and a sarong. The masseur turned up five minutes later, of course, having had trouble changing the large denomination note, but it made an impression on me; how stupid complaining westerners can look when banging their heads against problems that only they perceive as being problems. It beats television any day.

After booking in and using the mandi, I ducked out to a warung – a stall on the main street, selling fabulous nasi campur that I ate under a makeshift tent next to the stall – and there got talking to a friendly couple from Holland who were over here on a three-week holiday in Bali and Lombok. We were on the same wavelength, so we went off for some pisang goreng (fried bananas, 50rp each, or about one penny) and then a bir bintang (a surprisingly pleasant make of beer) in a local watering hole. It never ceases to amaze me how I keep meeting people in the middle of this social quagmire; I suppose when you’re bouncing around in a boiling pot, you’re going to bump into a lot of other bubbles.

Gunung Rinjani

Written: 25 September 1997

Friday morning saw me catch two bemos to the little village of Senaru, which teeters on the northern slopes of Lombok’s towering volcano Gunung Rinjani (gunung means ‘mountain’ in Indonesian). On the way I got talking to a young bloke called Saina who said he ran a new losmen in Senaru, and he could help me get all the equipment needed for the hike up the still-active volcano that dominates the centre of Lombok. I gently refused his offers of a guide or a porter – a guy I met in Ubud convinced me they were totally unnecessary – but I rented a tent and roll mat off him for 24,000rp, and bought four days’ food and some water for 28,000rp, somewhat cheaper than the equivalent costs in Australia and New Zealand. Packed and ready to roll, I spent a night in his new and delightfully positioned losmen, relaxing as the sun went down and the local mosque broadcast its chants over the valleys (Lombok is mainly Muslim, while Bali is mainly Hindu). The next day I got up ridiculously early to conquer another volcano.

Gunung Rinjani is huge; in fact, it’s the biggest peak in Indonesia outside Irian Jaya, which has mountains that make even professionals think twice. The only times you can see the peak from the towns around the volcano’s base are first thing in the morning and last thing at night; it’s so big that clouds form around it after a couple of hours of sunlight, shrouding the crater in mysterious grey swathes. At a height of 3726m (12,224 ft) it’s a lot bigger than anything else I’ve attempted to climb so far, and the walk up to the top from the village of Senaru takes a little over two days of solid mountain hiking.

Most people, by which I mean about 99 per cent of visitors to Rinjani, hire a porter to carry all the food, camping equipment and so on. These porters, who double as guides, are astounding; walking up sheer mountain paths with everything strapped to two ends of a bamboo pole that they balance on their shoulders, they manage to traverse sharp pumice trails with nothing but flimsy sandals on their feet. The weights they carry are nothing short of backbreaking, and you never hear a word of complaint as they trudge their way round the park. So most people load up their porters and do the walk with just a daypack, carrying maybe some water and a bit of warm clothing.

But I decided I wasn’t most people, so I packed up my tent and sleeping mat, along with eight ready-cooked meals of nasi goreng wrapped in banana leaves, and set off into Rinjani National Park with a heavy pack and a hastily copied map of the area that looked more like something from The Hobbit than a serious proposition. The pack weighed quite a bit, the other tourists thought I was crazy, and I started up the track at 7am on Saturday 20th September.

Senaru to the Summit

From Senaru, which is to the north of the mountain, I headed south through rainforest, climbing from Senaru at 600m to the crater rim at 2600m; the ascent was tiring, but it was a simple case of putting one foot in front of the other. I passed three very basic mountain shelters, known as Pos I, II and III on my map, but soon enough I reached the rim, where the most incredible views opened up in front of me. For the first night I camped right there on the rim, overlooking the inside of the crater, with its beautiful lake and second, still-smoking cone (the latter being the result of a recent eruption in 1994). The whole place was stunning; suffice to say that I have never seen a sight quite like the crater of Rinjani, even in Tongariro, and it was worth the six-hour uphill struggle just to see that view.

Delightful though the walk up to the rim was, it didn’t take me long to spot Rinjani’s biggest problem. Indonesians have absolutely no concept of litter; to them the world is a dustbin, and as a result Rinjani often looks more like Binjani.

There is shit everywhere, both figuratively and literally; because there aren’t any toilets in the park (not that you would expect any) there are piles of toilet paper and the associated dried masses behind every outcrop and tree, and the tracks are piled with litter, dropped by guides and locals alike. This applies throughout Indonesia; on the ferry to Lombok, people just threw their rubbish overboard and nobody seemed to care, but the effect is a bit more obvious in the natural environment of a volcano.

It’s probably a result of there being little ecological awareness here – being green is, after all, a luxury only afforded by the rich West – but I still packed out what I packed in, being careful not to add to the pile of sweet wrappers and plastic bottles that threatens to choke the park; one day the attitude might change, but in the meantime I would even discover that there are discarded cigarette packets and biscuit boxes on the summit, at 3726m.

By all accounts the problem is worse in people-heavy areas like Java. It really makes you appreciate how clean the western world is, even places like London where people complain about the mess. This, rather than the incredible views, is one of the most striking impressions of Gunung Rinjani, and it’s a terrible shame.

The next day I was up for the sunrise, a pleasant affair that would have been better if the whole of Lombok hadn’t been covered in cloud (though, being above the cloud layer by now, it was still beautiful). An early start saw me loping down the crater rim towards the east, stopping at the crater lake for a breather. Then it was on to the hot springs, a delightful river that cascades in waterfalls into rock pools with temperatures between boiling and warm; I found a lovely spot under a 40° waterfall and washed away all those aches and pains. However, it wasn’t long before I had to strike back up to the crater rim, this time on the eastern side, ready to tackle the summit.

The summit itself is part of the crater rim, a sharp tooth that juts out of the eastern side of the volcano, dominating the whole area. The second rim campsite is at about 3000m, just below the slopes that lead to the summit, and there I tasted real Indonesian hospitality, as the sun went down and lit up Bali in the distance. I had made some friends on the way: one girl, a Slovenian, had broken her sandals, and I’d whipped out my penknife and twine and fixed it up for her; another couple of girls had blisters, which I patched up with plasters and anti-bacterial cream; another bloke had a painful knee, so I gave him some pain killers... yes, some people try to climb mountains without the most basic equipment, and by the time I got to the rim, I’d earned a bit of a reputation as a survivor[1]. My kindness was repaid that night, as the porters from the group containing all these people fed me noodle soup and tea, a pleasant change from my cold nasi goreng.

We were up at 2am on the morning of the next day, and after some tea and biscuits, a group of us set off for the top, to catch the sunrise at 6am. This climb of over 700m was as close to hell as you can get; the first stage up to the main ridge was hard, the second stage along the top of the ridge was reasonable, but the last 100m or so was terrible. Imagine trying to walk up a big mound of coal, or a pile of sand, and you might get close to imagining the summit of Rinjani; it’s one step up and three steps backwards, clawing with your hands to maintain a grip in the freezing winds as dust fills your eyes and stones fill your shoes. This kind of volcanic rubble is called scoria, and it’s an absolute killer.

It took a good three hours of torturous ascent before I reached the top, arriving at the top alone and just in time to see the sunrise. Eventually everyone else arrived, bar the casualties who had turned back, and the world spread out below us. 12,000 feet is a hell of a long way above sea level, I can tell you, and the kretek cigarette that the porter gave me as the lake lit up in the sunlight was the icing on the cake...

Bouncing down the scoria was like walking in ten-league boots; it felt just like coming down Taranaki as I covered in one hour what it had taken three hours to climb. There were more hot noodles and tea for breakfast, and then it was time to retrace my steps back to the lake and hot springs for some thermal therapy, just a four-hour walk down from the crater rim. That night I camped by the lake, with the clouds pouring into the crater in their nightly ritual, settling on the water and making it look like a seething and bubbling cauldron. I got talking to Morton and Linda, a Danish couple whom I’d met on the second rim, and who were finding the walk a real struggle (despite their having a porter), but soon enough the early morning start up the summit caught up with us, and it was early to bed, and early to rise.

Monkey Business

Every park has its pests, whether they’re rats, mosquitoes, dingoes or sandflies, but in Rinjani there are two especially annoying pests, namely monkeys and humans. The humans are only irritating for the rubbish they leave behind, but the monkeys are as annoying as Fraser Island’s dingoes; they will open your tent (yes, they know how to operate zips), steal your food and throw the rest of your stuff around, if you don’t keep guard. I never left my tent alone, and when I hit the summit one of the guides stayed behind to guard the camp, but occasionally you come across a territorial monkey who’s got an attitude.

On my second visit to the hot springs, when I happened to be alone, a monkey appeared, slowly loping its way over towards my pack, which I’d left in the shade of a rocky outcrop. I got up and shouted at it, but unlike the soppy specimens I’d come across on the way up, this guy wasn’t going to take any shit from a pesky human, and he bared his teeth, let fly a vicious screeching, and started running straight at me, looking for a fight.

There’s not much that’s scarier than a monkey running at you, full pelt, fangs glinting in the midday sun. Because their faces are so expressive, you can see the evil in their eyes well before they get to you, and those teeth are simply savage. Luckily I stepped back into the hot pool, discovering in the process that monkeys don’t like hot water, and satisfied myself with a few feeble expletives from the safety of the pool, more like a coward who knows he’s unreachable than an all-conquering explorer. Eventually the monkey gave up trying to scare me into submission – well, he’d already succeeded, to be fair – took a few contemptuous sniffs at my backpack, and wandered back up the hill, casting the odd look back at the springs and hissing at me, making sure I knew who had won...

The last day was a simple job, back up to the first crater rim, and down the long slope to Senaru. I met Morton and Linda again, along with an Aussie couple called Mick and Ruth, and by the time we all reached the village, we’d arranged to meet up with each other for a feed and a couple of beers, as ever one of the sweetest moments of a long walk. It was also exactly what I needed; company helped banish the feeling of emptiness I’d had before arriving in Senaru, and my plans started to fall into place as we talked about good places to visit and how to get there. And as if I needed reminding about fate, it turned out that Mick had a Pelni timetable – Pelni being the inter-island ferry company in Indonesia, an outfit notorious for not being able to provide punters with timetables – so I copied the relevant details from him, and used it to sit down and plan my itinerary through Sulawesi. It was simply perfect timing.

So, those are the bare bones of the long grind up Gunung Rinjani, but aside from the schedule, what did it mean? Well, I’ve walked through deserts, climbed snow-bound volcanoes, slogged through rainforests, stomped up steep-sided river valleys and trekked along huge beaches, but Rinjani has to rate as one of the most amazing walks I’ve ever done, for a number of reasons. For a start, the scenery is quite unique, as hard to describe as Mt Cook and Uluru. But beyond that is the fact that Rinjani was my first solo walk outside of an English-speaking, westernised culture, and it was tough, challenging and all the more satisfying for its cultural isolation. My map was rudimentary, to say the least, and there were precious few signs on the way (and they were in Indonesian). Add in the altitude, the extremes of temperature and the seriously steep gradients, and you’ve got a challenge that’s easily on a par with the Pyke Route.

Aside from the physical and mental demands, there were the unusual points about Rinjani that made the walk such a different experience from other volcano treks I’d done. For example, down by the lake were women in Islamic dress, with burqas hiding their heads and prayer mats laid out to face Mecca. The locals just slept on the ground, or in the makeshift shelters dotted along the way, and they did the walk with gear that no self-respecting westerner would even consider using. And I didn’t see one cooker on the whole trip; everyone made a fire on which to cook their meal, something that’s quite rightly banned in a lot of western National Parks, but which added a wonderful atmosphere to the world inside the crater. What a place...

[1] A few weeks before I visited, a Dutchman died on Rinjani from exposure while camping on one of the rims. Rinjani is not a climb to take lightly, though with sensible precautions it’s not unsafe.

Indonesian Peace and Quiet

Written: 25 September 1997

In compiling this travelogue, I came across a note in my ‘diary summary’ document – a list of one-liners that remind me what I want to write about – that read as follows:

JUST FUCK OFF! (JFO)

This demonstrates how the friendliness of the locals really got to me on the day after my walk up Gunung Rinjani, though it wasn’t their fault at all. To the Indonesians a foreigner is someone to be friendly to, to talk to, to be interested in, but for the foreigner it can be more wearing than brakes without pads. There is no such thing as sitting quietly in Indonesia; one of the things I used to love doing in Australia and New Zealand was sitting in a park or botanic garden, watching the world go by as I read another chapter of my book, wrote some more travelogue, planned the next stage of the trip, or whatever. This simple pleasure is just not possible here.

In Indonesia, people are constantly coming up to you and talking at you, whether you like it or not. There is no concept of personal space here; everyone is a potential conversation, and although it’s meant well, it can really start to grind you down after the tenth local in a row has had the following conversation:

Local: ‘Hello meester, what your name?’

Me: ‘Mark.’

Local: ‘Where you from, Meester Marrr?’

Me: ‘England.’

Local: ‘Ah, Ingran. You know Laydee Deeana?’

Me: ‘Ah, Lady Diana.’

Local: ‘Lady Deeana dead, meester.’

Me: ‘That’s right.’

Local: ‘What job you do, Meester Marrr?’

Me: ‘I’m a journalist.’

Local: ‘Ah. You be Indonesia long?’

Me: ‘Oh, about two months.’

Local: ‘Your hat. Marlboro Man, ha, ha.’

Me: ‘Yes. Ha, ha.’

Local: ‘Yes. Ha, ha... you very funny man, Meester Marrr...’

[Conversation draws to a close. Local eventually makes a polite withdrawal when he’s realised that getting further conversation from me is like getting money out of an insurance company, to be replaced by an identical conversationalist just two minutes later. As we leave this happy scene, we can hear Meester Marrr quietly screaming for peace. Poor bastard.]

Yes, it can sometimes be a right royal pain in the arse to be a tourist in Indonesia, though it’s important to realise that the locals are just being friendly and that it’s rude not to chat back. It’s just that sometimes you wish they’d give it a rest... and JFO.

Indonesia: Sumbawa and Flores

Sumbawa

Written: 26 September 1997

After climbing Gunung Rinjani, I decided to strike east from Senaru, in the general direction of the island of Flores, from where a passenger ship would be departing for Sulawesi in just over a week’s time. I got offered a ridiculously high-priced ticket from Senaru to Flores by a local tout, but I turned it down; he wanted 85,000rp for a trip that ended up costing me about 35,000rp, and he would have been using a ferry that turned out to be non-existent, an unsurprising discovery for this tout-weary cynic. Public bemos took me, bruised and cramped, to Labuhan Lombok on the eastern side of Lombok, crammed between locals with live chickens, dead expressions and suspicious eyes; one bemo even had to stop and fill a flat tyre with air, before it could crunch and grind its way through the dusty northeast of Lombok. In Labuhan Lombok I alighted, was grabbed by a tout trying to persuade me to come to his hotel for information on a ticket to eastern Sumbawa, and figuring there could be worse options I hopped on his bike. This time it turned out to be a good move.

Chris, the Indonesian proprietor of the losmen, turned out to be extremely helpful, and he was very well tuned in to the needs of travellers; it helped that he spoke English, French, German, Indonesian and a smattering of other languages, having spent a fair amount of time travelling in Europe. It didn’t take much to part me from a bargain 27,000rp to buy passage from Lombok, across to Sumbawa, and almost right across that long island to Bima, from where a bemo would take us to Sumbawa’s eastern port of Sape; the ferry to Flores, bypassing Komodo, would leave at 8am on Friday morning. Perfect.

Or, perhaps not. Ever been on a long bus journey? Well, take it and double the pain. Add in steaming temperatures; shocking roads; a driver who only knows how to accelerate at full whack and brake suddenly, often at the same time; a TV blaring out a terrible kung fu movie from America[1], subtitled in Indonesian and guaranteed to hard boil even the most vacuous of brains; incessant Indonesian music, turned up loud, all through the night, bringing to mind an Indonesian Demis Roussos mixed with awful Bontempi organ; sweaty locals, sitting next to you and falling asleep on you, kretek[2] ash dropping onto your trousers as the smoke licks round the holes in the seats; cockroaches crawling up your legs; a time schedule to disturb even the deepest of sleepers (leaving at 2pm, arriving at 2am... which actually turned into 4.30am); even the Australian long distance bus wasn’t this bad, but I suppose it’s unfair to complain too much when you look at the price.

Luckily I met a very pleasant French couple on the way, Luc and Marilyn, providing each of us with someone at whom to glance sideways every time something straight out of a disaster movie occurred (which was pretty much all the time). Sleeping sporadically and in positions normally reserved for tantric yoga, we eventually reached Flores, arriving at the western port of Labuanbajo on Friday afternoon, after yet another kung fu movie on the ferry’s TV. Hi-ya!

[1] Every bloody American kung fu movie has the same plot. Boy trains himself in ju-jitsu/kung fu/karate, is driving through the city, finds girl being attacked by no-good gang, beats the crap out of gang and saves girl, gets seen in the process by an old eastern mystic who used to be a wicked fighter in his youth, old man trains boy even more, boy goes on to enter and win big contest, in the process destroying a huge drugs/firearms cartel. Oh, and the acting’s really lame. Now can I have my US$10,000 for the screenplay, please? Thank you.

[2] Indonesian cigarettes, or kreteks, are something else. As well as tobacco they contain cloves, which means the smoke smells rather exotic and the filters leave a sweet, herbal taste on your lips. They’re not that bad, but smoking a whole packet would be in the same league as eating a whole jar of Marmite, or sucking a whole packet of Polos in one go. They are certainly intense... but then again, so is the nicotine rush, because if there’s one thing that kreteks are, it’s strong. Which could explain the amount of deep-chested coughing you get round these parts...

Labuanbajo

Written: 28 September 1997

The island of Flores, named ‘Flower’ by the Portuguese before they sold the island to the Dutch, is quite beautiful, which came as a bit of a relief after the long bus journey through the comparatively desolate and barren Sumbawa; the island of Komodo, which is sandwiched between Sumbawa and Flores, is well worth a visit to see the huge Komodo dragons that live there, but unfortunately I had to sacrifice it to my schedule.

Labuanbajo, the western port of Flores, is a small town with the ubiquitous mosque, a number of dodgy shops, and plenty of places to stay, the most popular of which is at Waecicu Beach. A free ferry takes you to this wonderful collection of beachfront bamboo bungalows, and before embarking on the trip across the pond to the hotel, I decided to search out the Pelni office to book a ticket for the ferry to Ujung Pandang.

This turned out to be a bad move. I eventually found the Pelni ‘office’, which turned out to be a tiny shack, locked and unattended, and tucked up a dirty and forgotten dust-laden street; I then realised that Pelni, despite being an Indonesian-wide company, isn’t exactly P&O. When someone did arrive and I managed to communicate in broken Indonesian that I wanted to buy a ticket from Maumere to Sulawesi, the women told me that I would have to go to Maumere to buy that ticket, as all they sold in Labuanbajo was tickets from, well, Labuanbajo. I later discovered that this wonderful concept applies not only to all Pelni offices, but also to all Merpati offices, Merpati being the domestic airline. The thought of being able to book ahead by telephone from one office to the other hasn’t quite reached the scrubs, rather making one wonder how the hell anyone gets organised enough to get anywhere in Indonesia.

Never mind, I thought, and headed back to the free ferry, only to have to wait for an hour for a lift to Waecicu, where it turned out they had no bungalows left anyway. However, if there’s one thing that your average Indonesian is, it’s enterprising, especially when money’s involved, and they offered me and another guy the ultimate crash pad: a bed on the boat moored off the beach. How could I refuse, when my idea of perfect hell is sleeping on a small yacht...?

Actually, the Hotel of a Thousand Stars, as the staff euphemistically called the boat, was a delightful place to sleep, particularly as there were no mosquitoes out on the sea; I slept under the stars, snug and warm in my sleeping bag, waking up every now and then to admire the firmament, watch the sun rise or listen to the geckos with their distinctive cry of ‘gecko... gecko...’ Peace reigned, and the following day I lazed on the beach, chatting for most of the day with other travellers staying there. That night I managed to get a bungalow, but it was a little academic, as the next day I had to get up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus to Bajawa.

How to Survive Indonesia

Written: 28 September 1997

It’s downright impossible for a visitor like me to be fair in any commentary on Indonesia (or, indeed, Asia in general); the basic fabric of society is so different here that imposing western values is not only pretty hopeless, it’s foolhardy. But as a part of the ongoing education that happens to all travellers – an education better known as culture shock – I’ve formulated a number of suggestions that might help when trying to cope with travelling in Indonesia.

1. Always stay cool. If you lose your cool, you’ve lost the game. Sure, the bus might be massively delayed, and the man behind you in the bemo might be blowing cigarette smoke right into your face (when he’s not coughing up half a lung, that is), but complaining or getting stressed is totally counter-productive. Not only will it increase your personal frustration level, it won’t achieve anything, and will simply bemuse those who are used to life being this way.

2. Accept that you will be ripped off. Some Indonesians (but by no means all) are out to make a buck at all costs. As a tourist – a fact that is rather hard to conceal unless you have local blood in you – you will be charged more, you will be harangued constantly while locals slip through the melee, and you will be told outright lies: ‘No, that hotel has burned down, you must stay at mine’; ‘This is the cheapest and best deal you will find’; ‘Yes, this bus is going to Senaru’; ‘No, we have no bread, so you can’t have toast,’ and five minutes later someone else gets served hot, buttered toast... that kind of thing. You will also be subjected to constant sniggering and hassle from a people who are so fascinated by foreigners that being one can feel like being an animal in the zoo. But if you know you’ll always be stung, it helps. Which leads nicely to number three.

3. If you have already paid for something, never, ever ask anyone else how much they paid. You will invariably be horrified to find that they paid half what you did for the same thing, which will, in turn, make you feel inadequate and a little miffed. If you have yet to buy something, then asking another tourist at least gives you a ceiling price, but I’ve found nothing but distress when talking prices with anyone other than obvious package tourists (who really pay through the nose when they buy tours from home or from tourist centres like Kuta). In this case, ignorance is bliss.

4. Just eat it. All the advice is to be very careful about what you eat – always peel fruit, never eat reheated food, don’t drink the water – and most of it, such as be careful with the water, is good advice indeed. However, you can take it too far, and paranoia is often more depressing than a bout of dodgy guts, so I say mellow out and try that fruit, eat at that squalid looking warung, and immerse yourself in the whole experience. Hell, if it’s good enough for the cockroaches, it’s good enough for you.

5. Remember: if things get really bad, you can always fly home. As Stewart Copeland once wrote, ‘Life was easy/When it was boring,’ and the converse is true; good travel is often hard work, and the lows come thick and fast. Then again, so do the highs, and before you know it things are going well again, the world is rolling by as you march on to the next destination, and life is looking good. Still, knowing you have a safety net is a great asset.

6. Never, ever drive in Indonesia. Not unless you habitually carry five pints of A+ blood around in your backpack, or you’re one of those nutters who drive from London to Sydney every year (in which case hats off to you!).

7. Get off the beaten track. OK, you’ll probably still bump into Gunta and Friedrich from München on the way, but it’s good to get away from the crowd. Ignorant tourists suck the life blood out of any society – watching people complain in public is a pet hobby of mine, but all it does is enforce the attitude of the locals that, as Asterix put it, ‘These foreigners are crazy,’ (tap side of head with finger) – and getting away from them is all part of the experience. However, the further you get from the infiltration of the paleface, the more of a centre of attention you will be, and the Hello Mister cult will become a way of life. How much this is worth the effort is up to you; sometimes I’d trade all the amazing views and cultural isolation in the world for a peaceful spot under a tree somewhere in civilisation, and sometimes I can’t get enough of the insanity and amphetamine pace of life in Indonesia. That’s the contradiction of travel here; at times it’s invigorating, but at other times it’s just incredibly wearing.

8. But do come back to the beaten track every now and then. Without a fairly regular taste of life as we know it – beer, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, beaches, good music, English conversation – you will go quite, quite mad. And that rather spoils the travelling, if you ask me; immersing yourself in Australian culture is somewhat different to losing your bearings in the Indonesian quagmire.

9. Don’t believe your guidebook. Most people travel with guidebooks that are a couple of years old, and in Indonesia this means everything will be totally inaccurate. For example, paying for a bemo is easy if you know the price – just hand the readies over – but if you don’t know the fare and ask how much it is, you will be told a fictitious figure that’s at least double what it should be. I have a formula: take the price in the guidebook, if there is one, add about 20 per cent, and hand that over. If it’s too much, look expectant for change; if it’s not enough, he’ll demand more. You’ll probably still get ripped off – see rule two – but at least you’ll be in the right ballpark.

10. Detach yourself. I find that viewing life as if it was a movie is very handy in places like Indonesia. There’s no way you’re ever going to get really involved in the culture – even westerners who spend whole lifetimes in Asia can still find the ideas and attitudes alien – so just accept you’re a tourist and go with the flow. In Australia and New Zealand I felt I fitted in, even to the point of being mistaken for a local on a few memorable occasions, but that can never happen in Asia. It’s an experience, but nothing like the travelling I’ve already done; there’ll be no whingeing about the bus and hostel option here, because it’s pretty much the only way to travel.

11. Never believe the times that you’re given. This applies both to times of day and durations. On the ferry from Sumbawa to Flores I heard four different possibilities for the length of the voyage: six hours, seven hours, eight hours and ten hours (it turned out to be six and a half). And our bus to Bima in Sumbawa should have arrived at 2am, but turned up at 4.30am. This, apparently, is perfectly normal, and comes as no surprise when you look at the crappy watches the hawkers try to off-load onto unsuspecting tourists in Kuta.

12. Plan your plan to fall apart. Nobody who lives their lives by timetables and strict pricing will survive beyond the first night in Indonesia. If your plan is ‘Go from point A to point B’, rephrase it as ‘Go from point A to point C, which may or may not be somewhere near point B, and then make up a new plan’. If you don’t, you’ll lose your hair quicker than Sampson as you tear it out by the roots in frustrated clumps...

Follow these simple guidelines and your Indonesian trip will still prove to be as unpredictable and strenuous as a triple bypass operation. But at least you won’t be surprised when, yet again, you find yourself wondering how Indonesia manages to survive as a nation, and you might even get into it. I do hope so... it’s always worth the hassle.

Bajawa

Written: 29 September 1997

Rosy-fingered dawn[1] saw me getting up at 6am to catch the bus east from Labuanbajo to Bajawa. This I missed, thanks to some creative timekeeping from the hotel manager (‘Oh, the bus leaves at 7.15’, he said confidently, when it actually left at 7am). Still, I caught another bus, and instead of a direct journey, I had to change in some backwater where the bus terminal was home to as many squealing pigs as humans.

After a long ten-hour bus journey through the beautiful volcanic scenery of western Flores, I finally arrived in Bajawa with little more than a hotel name and an extremely bruised coccyx. The hotel proved to be full with a package tour, but after a lengthy search through sleepy Bajawa, I managed to find a place with some help from an Israeli girl called Idit (pronounced ‘Ee-deet’, not unlike an exotic form of Edith), whom I’d met on the bus.

Surreal things began to happen as Idit and I set off on our evening mission: I wanted to find a bus ticket for the morrow to take me to Moni, and Idit wanted to find out about tours in the area. The whole town seemed to be having private parties, and the streets bustled with smartly dressed Indonesian families. Idit decided to poke her nose into one of these noisome gatherings, and before you could say, ‘Where’s the party?’ we were introduced to a middle-aged man and a young boy, were plonked down on a couple of plastic chairs, and were offered some tea. All around us milled smiling locals, with new arrivals appearing all the time, all shaking the hands of the man and child, all thrilled to be there. Had we stumbled on a crazy birthday party, or was it something more bizarre?

No, it wasn’t a birthday, explained a woman who knew rudimentary English and who was sitting between Idit and myself. Exactly what it was, though, remained a mystery; there was a cake, with the boy’s name emblazoned on it, and people kept giving him envelopes containing money (or so I supposed from the way he eyed their contents). Confused, Idit and I accepted the invitation to have a little food, so we did, being careful to take only a very little from the various scrumptious dishes laid out on the table.

After some very basic small talk, not helped by me leaving my phrase book back at the hotel, the woman suggested we go to another party. Another? Well, why not; either these Bajawans were crazy, or we were a party to a party the likes of which we’d never seen. If Bajawa was going to go ballistic, I sure wanted in on the action.

The second party prompted déjà vu. We shook hands with the father and son, admired the cake, accepted some more delicious food, marvelled at the decorations and loud, crackling music, and smiled our best cocktail party smiles. Before long we were whisked off to a third party... and it would have gone on all night if we hadn’t made our excuses and left, much to the distress of our hostess, who was obviously getting quite a thrill by being able to bring a couple of westerners into this strangest of communal parties (and, judging by the photos being taken of us with various other party-goers, so were the other locals).

It turned out that my only night in Bajawa was timed perfectly to coincide with Confirmation Day, the Sunday when young boys throughout the country get confirmed. Flores is mostly Catholic (yet another religion in highly multi-cultural Indonesia), and the custom is for the families to throw open parties to celebrate the confirmations, to which anyone can go. However, to ensure that this practice doesn’t cost the party-throwers too much, party-goers give a donation to the proud father upon entry (hence the envelopes). We were spared this financial sacrifice because we paid with our novelty value, but suddenly it all became clear, and I realised that I’d been wishing young boys and girls throughout Bajawa a happy religious life... and this from a man who only got confirmed because he thought it was a good idea to take up all options, especially those that were free.

Bus Hawkers

My next mission was to try to find a ticket to Moni for the morning, an impossible task on a Sunday evening, especially when everyone was out revelling in each other’s houses. I tracked down the bus office with the help of a local, and found out that tickets weren’t available any more, and that I would have to get up early and get to the bus terminal to ensure a lift. This was a bit of a pain: normally the buses in Flores will pick you up from your hotel, but only if you have a ticket, and the bus terminal was a good few kilometres out of town.

But I should have remembered the first law of Indonesian transport: if you stand around for long enough looking like a lost tourist, then someone will come along and coerce you onto their bus, a good prospect if it’s going your way, an expensive inconvenience if it’s not. I got up early on Monday – 5.30am, to be precise – and wandered into town, slowly making my way to the bemo station, where I hoped to catch a bemo to the bus terminal. That’s when I heard a voice.

‘Hey Meester! You go to Moni? Moni???’ Of course I was, so I chucked him my pack and squashed myself into the bus between the chickens and spare tyres. From Bajawa, tourists either go west to Labuanbajo, or east to Moni, so I was an easy target for the bus hawkers.

Bus hawkers are an astounding breed. They sniff out potential bus travellers with an enthusiasm that borders on the rabid, and spotting tourists seems to make them even more enthusiastic. Hanging out of the back door of the bus, holding on by fingertips and cigarette butts as it careens round another hairpin, they shout at any vaguely sentient being, ‘Maumere! Moni! MauMERE! MoNI! MAUMERE! MONI! MAUMEREMONIIIII!’ Presumably they employ the same logic that the British abroad use when trying to make themselves understood in a foreign language: shout; shout louder; and if they still don’t want to get onto your bus, try to persuade them by screaming the destination at a lung-ripping intensity, and this time with feeling. It works; sometimes you wonder if the people on the bus actually meant to go to Maumere, or whether they simply popped down the shop for some eggs, and ended up being cajoled into a journey to some mythical far-off land. At least, that would help explain the wonderfully surreal nature of the Indonesian bus system...

[1] A quotation from Homer, not a lesbian porno movie. Not to be confused with being up at the crack of dawn, either, which is quite a different experience.

Indonesian Habits

Written: 30 September 1997

The Indonesians are amazing. The differences between western and eastern culture are sometimes huge, sometimes tiny; I challenge anyone to define the Indonesian mentality, as much as I challenge anyone to define the western mentality. One thing’s for sure, though: apart from a few bad eggs, the Indonesians are a good people, always kind, considerate, interested and willing to chat. Yes, when the lonesome traveller is tired and wants some peace the overly keen Asian instantly becomes a pain, but compared to westerners, Indonesians are friendly beyond the call of duty.

Here, then, is a quick summary of face-value Indonesians, based purely on the observations of a fleeting visitor. Take it with a pinch of salt; I’m no anthropologist, but welcome to the eleven S’s...

1. Smoking

The Indonesians smoke an incredible amount, and there are, of course, absolutely no rules or regulations when it comes to the national habit. You can smoke anywhere, and the butts go on the floor, out of the car window, wherever; it came as no surprise to me to learn that, when I arrived in Indonesia, there were bushfires raging all over Kalimantan and Sumatra, because when the weather is dry (as it has been in this El Niño year) it only takes one carelessly discarded cigarette butt to spark a disaster. And there’s no shortage of butts flying out of car windows in Indonesia.

Smoking is incredibly cheap, at least by European standards. A packet of 20 American cigarettes costs about 850rp, or around 18p, so it doesn’t break the bank to smoke as much as everyone else does (they’re called American cigarettes to distinguish them from kretek, the clove cigarettes that the locals love so much, which are even cheaper). Besides, without smoking there couldn’t be as much of the following...

2. Spitting

Ah yes, smoking and spitting, two Indonesian hobbies that go hand in hand. Along with the sweet-smelling smoke is the universal soundtrack; it starts as a cough, a black-lung rattler that makes you really appreciate the effect of tar on the bronchial tubes. This is followed by that deep throat-clearing sound that even the boffins at the Oxford English Dictionary can’t transcribe using the letters of the Latin alphabet, and then comes the inevitable spit. It’s pretty foul, and as with the smoking, there are no social rules governing the sport of spitting: it’s valid anywhere, any time.

It’s not just a male occupation, either; women spit plenty, too. An added bonus is the effect of the betel nut, which a lot of Indonesians chew continuously, staining their lips red and giving their spittle a hue that Jackson Pollock would be proud of. It’s mainly a rural habit, chewing the betel, but that’s a good thing; if everyone in the city chewed betel nuts, the sewers would run red.

3. Staring

Yes, as your bus burns rubber through the tiny villages of rural Indonesia, people just sit there and let their jaws drop. Children flock out of the houses to watch the strange shiny box rumble its way along the road... it’s bizarre. And if you’re a traveller wandering into a small village in the middle of nowhere, everyone stares at you, as if they’re waiting for you to do something weird.

But this isn’t rudeness; it’s simply the locals being interested in seeing something unusual and different. Before long they’ll be talking to you and trying to find out all about you, and this is where learning the language comes in handy – even a few words of Indonesian can make things that much more interesting, as the staring changes into conversation.

But it’s weird and unnerving to be stared at all the time, believe me...

4. Sleeping

This observation doesn’t mean that the Indonesians are lazy; far from it. In fact I’ve never seen such a hard-working bunch in my life. Up at the crack of dawn with the 4am Muslim call to prayer, working hard at jobs that would drive westerners to distraction... they’re an astoundingly conscientious race. But with this physical burden comes an increased need to sleep.

The amazing thing about the Indonesians and their sleep is that they can sleep absolutely anywhere. On the buses, on the street, standing up, sitting down... shut-eye isn’t the problem it seems to be in the world of nine-to-five and insomnia. I’ve seen people literally sleeping on concrete, curled up on thin reed mats and snoring in a way that no soft-boned white man could manage; I’ve seen men crashed out in their tiny becaks (bicycle rickshaws), grabbing a few minutes’ rest after hurtling round the backstreets, legs and arms sticking out of their tiny compartments like octopuses in a bucket; I’ve seen men drifting off in buses whose spine-shattering jolts would keep normal humans awake for the following three days; yes, the Indonesians have a talent for being able to grab forty winks whenever and wherever, which is a skill that all of us could use (especially when visiting Indonesia itself).

5. Speeding

I’m not talking drug abuse, but road abuse: the speed at which Indonesians drive is simply scary. Probably the craziest thing is that even the drivers have no idea how fast they are going; a sizeable proportion of bemos I had the pleasure of riding in either had no speedometer, or had one that obstinately stuck at zero km/h when it was pretty obvious that there should be a lot more needle movement. I suppose ignorance is bliss, but with the tyre screeches echoing round the streets, there’s no way the bemo drivers can convince me that they don’t know they’re speeding.

Of course, the definition of ‘speeding’ is important here. Speeding, in the traditional sense, implies that there’s a speed limit and that you’re breaking it, but in Indonesia I only saw a handful of ‘40’ signs (all of which were heartily ignored), so it’s debatable whether the drivers are speeding, or whether there is no speed limit anyway. The answer to this is that any speed where the tyres leave the road when cornering is too fast, but when you only drive a car with the accelerator or the brake fully depressed, how can you drive any other way? Exactly.

6. Smiling

Infectious and irrepressible, the Indonesian smile is universal and a real joy to behold. The kids do it best, of course, but even adults spend a lot of time smiling, especially if you greet them with an ear-to-ear teeth rattler yourself. The Indonesian laugh is also pretty common, but without understanding the language, a group of Indonesians standing and laughing at you can make even the most confident person paranoid, but they’re not being rude, they’re just expressing their amusement and bemusement in the most natural way, something that the miserable sods on the London Underground could do with remembering.

After all, a smile a day keeps the doctor away, something that’s pretty damn useful when the doctor’s probably on the other side of the island, and doesn’t even know his plasters from his penicillin...

7. Selling

The Indonesians have an entrepreneurial streak a mile wide, and they’ve worked out that all tourists are rich and just love parting with their money. As a consequence, a large number of conversations end up with them trying to sell you something, but after a few of these you get the hang of sweeping the offer aside with an off the cuff, ‘I’m not interested.’ To be honest, most people who end up talking to you are interested in talking for the sake of talking, but some locals, especially in places like Bali’s Kuta, are little more than walking, talking salesmen.

8. Screaming

If you can’t make yourself heard above the millions of other people in your crowded country, then shout louder than they do. Shout if you’re at the market. Shout if you’re on the bus. Shout if you’re trying to talk English with a tourist. Shout if you’re a becak driver who wants a customer. Shout if you’re working in the kitchen. Or just shout for the hell of it.

Indonesia can be a very noisy place; the locals are either so laid-back they’re mummified, or they’re cackling around as if they were extras in a Shakespearian crowd scene. The women seem to be the worst culprits, shrieking across the road at other people at all hours; it seems that it’s all in the delivery here. If you want quiet, go to the Australian outback.

9. Speaking

As already mentioned, the Indonesians just love to talk, especially if the object of their conversation is a tourist. I’ve come across a number of survival instincts amongst the westerners who have been subjected to endless hello-mister what-is-your-name where-do-you-come-from how-long-have-you-been-in-Indonesia conversations, such as telling them your name is ‘Load of shit’ or the name of some celebrity, and then carrying on the conversation regardless. It’s a bit cruel – after all, ‘Hello Mister’ is what the Indonesians are taught in school to say to tourists to be polite, and most of them don’t actually know what it means – but it’s totally understandable if you’ve ever been subjected to hours of locals constantly being interested in you.

Another interesting runaround is to go up to complete strangers and go, ‘Hello Mister,’ in their faces; not too many locals bother with you after that. Or you can just ignore the small talk, but that’s rude; after all, the reason that the locals want to talk is that they’re genuinely interested in you, and the reason that it’s an awful conversation is because you can’t speak the language. Wearing or not, it’s a part of Indonesia that you can’t avoid, so you might as well revel in it. If you don’t lose the plot first...

10. Singing

It’s not just the colourful and delightful way that Indonesians spontaneously burst into song – whether they’re walking down the street, sitting in a hotel or killing time on a ferry – but also the bad side to Indonesian music, namely that it’s terrible.

By Indonesian music I don’t mean classical ballet or old songs; those are the equivalent of western classical music, and you don’t get too many new pieces, in the same way that you don’t get so many new symphonies or choral masterpieces back in Europe these days. I mean that the Indonesian pop scene is about as depressingly awful as you can possibly imagine; their most popular artists are terrible MOR[1] balladeers, inoffensive beyond belief, but simply depressing to anyone with a modicum of interest in modern music. Take Neil Diamond and suck out all his talent; or take the band from down your local pub and remove any vestiges of musical ability... and you’re close. The best approximation to Indonesian rock that I’ve seen is the credit roll on Alas Smith and Jones from a few years ago, when they played a cringe-worthy electronic organ and bongo extravaganza to end the show. The difference is that, sadly, the Indo rockers are serious, and their records sell. Now that’s what I call a culture gap.

11. Stamina

Indonesians have an astoundingly high boredom threshold, and are able to do things for hours that would send westerners totally round the loophole. They painstakingly tend rice fields. They carry heavy loads for hours up mountains, repeating the trip many times a week. They sit for hours, staring at westerners who are doing their damnedest to ignore them. They sit around when they’re not tending the fields, talking and smoking lots. They make small talk to every foreigner they meet, repeating the same conversations every time, simply to practice English. You and I would lose the plot if we had to live the way the Indonesians live, and that’s an important thing to remember when trying to comprehend a culture that is, effectively, so different that most westerners never really understand it.

And that’s probably the most useful thing to remember: it’s OK not to understand Indonesian culture. This is their country, it’s their culture, and you’re the alien, which will be painfully obvious more often than not. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t all get along...

[1] MOR means Market-Orientated Rock, the record company acronym for music that shifts units because it’s inoffensive and guaranteed to sell: Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard... the usual crowd. However, MOR is also known as Middle of the Road, because it treads on nobody’s toes, unlike real music. But Indonesian rock is beyond MOR; it’s just too terrible to comprehend. The chords are straight from the fifties, before The Beatles showed the world how to write songs, and the arrangements are from the electro-pop factories of the mid-80s. Thank goodness I can’t understand the lyrics; I’m sure they’re just as awful as they sound.

Moni

Written: 1 October 1997

Five hours after leaving Bajawa I arrived in Moni unscathed[1] and checked into the Hiddayah Bungalows, a lovely collection of bamboo huts clustered next to some paddy fields on the uphill side of the village. As I wasn’t feeling too great and had a bit of a sore throat from all the kretek smoke and dusty roads (though no fever, so there was no worry that it might be malaria), I figured I’d take a day off and relax, and that’s precisely what I did the next day, sitting on my balcony, drinking Indonesian tea (no milk, lots of sugar, delicious flavour), visiting the local market and waterfall, and generally watching the world wander past.

As if to answer the change in my outlook, on my first night in Moni I met a very friendly German called Rainer (pronounced ‘Rhiner’) and we went out for a slap up beer and cap cai (vegetables, noodles and a stunning soupy sauce), improving my low physical and psychological state immensely. The next day I met more and more people, and by the evening six of us had gathered together to eat a huge buffet of local cuisine (for the less-than-scary sum of 4000rp per person, or about 85p). We were practically one big happy family as we prepared to scale the heights of Keli Mutu at 4am the next morning.

Keli Mutu is one of the big tourist attractions of Nusa Tenggara, along with Lombok’s Gili Islands and Komodo’s dragons. My guidebook says, ‘This extinct volcano is the most fantastic sight in Nusa Tenggara, if not all of Indonesia,’ and although this is a bit of an exaggeration, Keli Mutu is well worth a visit.

The big attractions of Keli Mutu are twofold: first, it’s easy to get to the top, as a truck goes up and down for 3000rp a ride; and second, the three main craters are full of coloured water, making the whole experience somewhat surreal. The black, green and blue lakes change their colours regularly over time, so although they’re named after their colours, the green lake is now very dark brown, the colour it was in the mid-70s. There’s a convenient lookout where hawkers sell tea, coffee and pancakes, and the truck leaves Moni at 4am, reaching the summit in time for the sunrise.

Hyped up sunrises are, generally, disappointing, and Keli Mutu didn’t prove the exception to the rule. I always find a good sunset to be far more enjoyable and relaxing, but it never ceases to amaze me how many places make a real thing of the sunrise – Uluru, Keli Mutu, Yellow Waters in Kakadu and Rinjani, to name but a few – and how, about an hour after sunrise, all most of the tourists have disappeared, as if the location has nothing more to offer now that the sun’s up. This happened at Keli Mutu, much to my satisfaction, and as the sun climbed up and lit up the blue lake, showing off its real colours, I was left almost alone. I’d decided to walk round to the other side of the crater, a walk that maybe three other people bothered to do, and the view as the sun rose behind me was breathtaking; it isn’t Rinjani, but it’s well worth getting up for. As Peter, a friendly German whom I’d meet on the bus to Maumere, said, ‘When God made the world, he washed his paint bushes in Keli Mutu.’ That’s a very good description.

The walk down from the top – a preferable alternative to taking the 7am bus back down – was pleasant, but it did illustrate one of the frustrating things about Indonesia. I was bounding down the path, passing through villages where locals tried to flog me warm Coke and cold pancakes, and when I got to the second village, very close to Moni, I passed a couple of kids who said hello and tried to start a conversation in the best traditions of the Indonesians. I mumbled a hello, but not wanting to be too delayed, I hurried straight on, passing them by and heading for my breakfast back in Moni.

It was only after half an hour of following the path away from Moni that I realised I’d made a wrong turn. Backtracking, I discovered that the kids had been standing right across the right turn I was supposed to make, and when I asked them why they hadn’t pointed me in the right direction, they said that I hadn’t stopped for a conversation, so they thought it served me right to go off down the wrong path. This might have annoyed me if I hadn’t already discovered that getting angry with the locals is like punching bread dough: it’s pointless and more than a little tiring. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that you’re a guest in their country, and that your western expectations are not only wrong, they’re your problem. I had to laugh at the little bastards; it served me right for commuting when I should have been strolling.

[1] Well, physically unscathed at least. With my musical sensibilities I found the hardest part of the journey to be the music, played at decibel levels that the British police would claim justified all those arrests, m’lud. Every bus has two tapes, one in Indonesian and one in English, and they’re both absolutely abysmal; these tapes are played on auto-reverse for the entire journey, so by the end you know the lyrics to everything (even though you don’t know what they mean), and for days these god-awful ditties lilt through the subconscious, gnawing at the soul until you’re left weeping on the sidewalk. That’s just my humble opinion, of course; I’m sure that some people find Indonesian bus music to be the epitome of symphonic excellence. Like the Indonesians, for example, who sing along like people possessed, not exactly adding to the listening experience...

Loneliness on the Road

Written: 1 October 1997

The following excerpts from my travelogue illustrate one of the downsides of travelling alone: it can really get to you when you don’t meet people for a while. But you do meet people on the road, especially in Southeast Asia, as the following two stories show. So if you’re on the road and feeling lonely, rest assured we all get like this sometimes. It does get better – honestly!

Ubud

Back on Magnetic Island, one of the girls who read my travelogue had asked if I believed in fate; I’d used the phrase ‘as if by fate’ somewhere along the line, not through any great belief, but because it’s a useful stock phrase when trying to sound mystical. Judging by the events of last Wednesday night, I’m beginning to wonder if fate isn’t a constant companion of the solo traveller after all.

I spent the early evening sitting on my little veranda, swatting mosquitoes and wondering where to eat. The truth was, I was feeling alone; not so much lonely, just alone, and the reason was obvious. Throughout my wanderings in Ubud (excluding my visit to Sayan) I had been surrounded by white folk, mainly in couples or groups. Nothing makes you feel more alone than being an unaccompanied traveller in a sea of white faces; when everyone else is obviously a local, it doesn’t feel so strange to be alone, and any success in talking to the locals is almost always rewarding. It’s only when there are loads of other white people around that you feel the pinch of being isolated and a long way from home.

It was with this feeling that I set off to a warung for some nasi goreng. I wandered around, found a good-looking spot, and parked myself in a seat; as with most warungs, you just pick a seat at any table, rather than getting a table to yourself. When I looked where I had sat, I saw a European guy opposite munching his way through a plate of nasi padang (a mixture of rice with whatever you fancy from the various cold dishes sitting in the warung window; the dish originated in Padang in Sumatra, hence the name). I told him that it looked rather good and asked him what it was, and the conversation flowed from there.

Simon, from Lincolnshire and Derbyshire in the same way that I’m from London and Staffordshire, was the perfect nattering partner for this stage of my travels. He was just finishing off ten months travelling round most of Southeast Asia, taking in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, including every island on my Indonesian itinerary, and a couple of the more out-of-the-way places I’d earmarked for Malaysia. He filled me with stories and tips, and when I discovered he was a keen walker (taking a tent with him round Southeast Asia and camping in National Parks, a familiar concept to yours truly) I told him of the wonders of New Zealand and Australia; we both came out wishing we’d done what the other had done, the sign of a good meeting of minds. We tried to go for a cheap beer afterwards, but found that the cheap beer hole was closed for the festival and so called it a day, but he really fired me up to visit Lombok, Flores, Sulawesi and Kalimantan.

It was just what I needed. Perhaps I do believe in fate after all; if not fate, then perhaps there’s somebody upstairs looking after me. It certainly feels like it sometimes...

Moni

I feel change; everybody does, especially when it happens relatively quickly. Whether the reaction is a scared ‘We Fear Change’ or a mellower ‘Go With The Flow’, humans have an uncanny knack of knowing when something is amiss, when things aren’t quite what they used to be, when the gods are rolling the proverbial dice. As I write this, I’m feeling a change.

In this travelogue I’m sometimes guilty of hiding my real feelings behind semantics. My earlier claim that I was alone but not lonely back in Ubud is not strictly true; in fact, it’s complete rubbish, but I have left that section as written to demonstrate the process of change. The truth of the matter is this: when travelling in western countries, it’s easy to talk to the locals, to pop into a pub or restaurant and mix and mingle, and any conscious decision not to do this is justified by financial restrictions, normal reticence or simply the sometimes less than salubrious nature of the establishment. However, the option of joining in with a local social scene, or even a travellers’ social scene, is always there.

In Indonesia, indeed in the whole of Southeast Asia, that option is no longer there to provide assurance to the lonely traveller. When you are alone in Asia, you are very alone, and conversation with the locals makes one feel even more isolated, with the inevitable succession of pleasantries and small talk, but no real substance. Talking to other travellers is rewarding, and is really the only solution, but these meetings are, by their very nature, transient.

It took a good couple of weeks of travelling in Indonesia, but I soon realised that a change had occurred in my outlook. Previously I was delighted to be travelling alone, able to make up my own itinerary, able to do exactly what I liked, satisfied beyond all measure to be achieving things by myself, without help from anyone. And always the spectre of solo travel in Southeast Asia loomed on the horizon, the ultimate challenge, the big test of my ability to survive on my own in an alien world. I’ve managed to succeed in clearing the hurdle – that of finding my feet in Indonesia – and from now on it should be reasonably plain sailing. But there’s something missing.

That something is a travelling companion. I met a girl back in New Zealand who was very interested in how I managed to travel alone. She heard about how I could decide where to go when I woke up; she listened as I told her of the thrill of solo bushwalking; she put up with my soliloquies on how coping by yourself means you experience everything, and I mean everything. My argument was that travelling with someone split the experience, halved the responsibility and watered down the intensity of the challenge by providing you with someone to help, to take the first step when you can’t be bothered, to share the burden. Her reply was that to her, one of the most beautiful aspects of travelling was being able to share the sights, the sounds, the whole experience, and without a travelling companion, she would only get half the story.

I didn’t really agree with her – at least, not as far as my travelling experience was concerned – but Asia brought her words back to me. I wondered, is sharing essential to the appreciation of an experience? Without someone to bounce ideas off, is life monocular rather than binocular? Do we need to paint our experiences on the canvas of company to bring it to life, or is a view, a culture, a journey just as amazing if you have nobody to talk to about it, nobody to relive it with over a beer and packet of crisps? Even this travelogue, by its very definition, needs a reader to make it worthwhile; it’s interesting for me to read it every now and then, but nothing beats the thrill of having other people look at it, and to see their reactions.

So, that’s the change; after a little over two weeks in Indonesia, I have revised my opinion on solo travel and, for the moment, will actively search out travelling companions. There’s only one problem; my rather out-of-the-way schedule is hardly tourist-friendly, which could prove a problem. We’ll just have to see.

(And the very night after I wrote this, I started meeting people in Moni, some of whom would make it all the way through Maumere to Ujung Pandang with me. Fate again? Perhaps...)

Indonesia: Sulawesi

Maumere to Ujung Pandang

Written: 3 October 1997

The bus trip from Moni to Maumere in eastern Flores went according to plan, and Rainer and I alighted that evening, along with another friendly German called Peter whom we met en route. We booked into a hotel and hit the local restaurant, where we bumped into Idit (whom I’d met in Bajawa) and a very pleasant Dutch couple who had just landed in Flores. That night managed to banish any pretensions of loneliness I was having, as we talked the night away over copious teas and banana ice drinks. The conversation concerned travel in general and India in particular; the more I hear about India, the more intriguing it sounds.

The reason for the rush to Maumere was to catch a Pelni to Sulawesi; Pelni is Indonesia’s domestic passenger ship service, connecting all the islands for fares can’t be sniffed at. The 22-hour trip from Maumere to Ujung Pandang cost me 44,000rp (just under £10), but the drawback was that the boat only goes every two weeks, so if I’d missed it, with my 60-day visa, it would have really scuppered my plans... hence the rush to get tickets and to ensure a place.

Our motley crew of three other westerners and I set out from Maumere at 4.45am to catch the Sulawesi-bound KM Awu. The number of locals hanging round the harbour was astounding; more people were there to welcome people travelling from Dili in Timor than were joining the boat, but it was still an elbows-in-and-scrum-down event as we crushed our way down to the economy class deck, right in the bowels of the ship.

Economy is the word: the beds were simply flat wooden strips, onto which millions of locals crushed themselves in a territorial thrust that even their Timor-invading government would have been proud of. For 1500rp you can rent a mattress for the voyage, so Peter and I grabbed two empty berths – despite the protestations of a nearby Indonesian who seemed to be saving every space available for his friends who had yet to arrive – and he managed to track down two mattresses, converting our sweaty corner of the crushed deck into a semblance of comfort, despite the lack of free-flowing air and the stifling heat and noise.

The Pelni experience is cheap and it shows. There’s no real way to complain when the trip costs so little (to western pockets, anyway), but some things are pretty disgusting, whatever the price. For example, the meals on board, which come included in the price, are abysmal, and after one I fully understood why foreigners who travel Pelni either go first class, or bring their own food. A tiny pile of tepid rice, an inch-square slop of, er, red stuff, and a fish head... that was supper. Luckily there was a cafeteria where we could buy suitably expensive Coke and coffee, and the biscuits we’d bought as a last-minute gesture filled the gaps. Not surprisingly we ignored breakfast the next morning.

And as for the toilets... overflowing is one description, swamped is another, and blocked hardly starts to bring home the squalor of the Pelni ablutions. And nobody seems to mind, despite the fact that in a 22-hour boat trip, people need to go to the toilet. I daren’t think where the more enterprising passengers ended up leaving their deposits.

And don’t forget the crowds of devout Muslims who have to pray their allotted five times a day, including the 4am slot, when the whole boat gets woken up by loudspeaker to enjoy the wisdom of Allah, whether they care or not. They very effectively clogged up the aisles at prayer time, as anyone who walks through a Muslim prayer meeting is obviously in danger of causing considerable offence, even if the meeting is blocking the main thoroughfare.

In all, the Pelni experience is hard to beat, though perhaps not in the way you’d expect. Not that I’m complaining; it was fascinating, no doubt about it.

Ujung Pandang

Written: 4 October 1997

Sulawesi, according to the papers and travellers I’ve managed to consult en route, is looking like a pretty dangerous place to visit in early October 1997. There have been riots in the capital of Ujung Pandang between the Chinese and the Indonesians, resulting in a military infiltration to keep the peace, but not before a number of people were killed and huge amounts of property burned; there’s been an earthquake in Parepare, some 100km north of Ujung Pandang, that is supposed to have caused chaos; and northern and central Sulawesi are apparently on fire and full of smoke. However, like most news you hear along the grapevine, some of the facts have given way to fiction somewhere in the telling.

The earthquake and riots did happen, but now that we’ve arrived, peace is reigning once again in Ujung Pandang and Parepare is back to normal. The fires were relatively small, apparently, but there’s one major piece of news that Peter and I have managed to confirm in an English-language paper we tracked down: the chaotic fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan are definitely still burning.

It hasn’t been a terribly good couple of months for Indonesia. On Friday 26th September a Garuda airbus plying the Jakarta-Medan route crashed into a ravine, killing 234 people in Indonesia’s worst ever plane disaster; the blame was put on bad air traffic control, with the pilot and the ground staff apparently reaching a misunderstanding on the meaning of ‘left’ and ‘right’. At the same time, the currency slump in Southeast Asia is seriously devaluing the Thai baht, the Malaysian ringgit, the Philippino peso and the Indonesian rupiah, and to cap it all, serious bushfires have started raging in Kalimantan and Sumatra.

Plane crashes and currency slides are fairly common round these parts, but the bushfires are among the worst ever seen; a smoky haze covers northern and western Borneo, Sumatra, most of Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, and Indonesia is being squarely blamed. The smoke is posing a serious health hazard to people in affected areas, tourists are being warned off the area, airports are being closed, and the monsoon season is late, with rain not expected for months. Back in 1982 fires in Kalimantan spread to the peat beds underneath the forest and continued to burn for two years, and concerns are rife that a similar disaster will happen this time. More affluent Malaysia and Singapore have had ‘several sunless weeks’, according to The Indonesia Times, and are evacuating their residents to better areas.

The blame for the fires is being apportioned in typical Indonesian fashion; the loggers blame the farmers for their slash-and-burn farming techniques, and the farmers blame the loggers for chopping down the trees and leaving dry, tinder-like areas behind, but whatever the real story, one thing is clear: Indonesia is destroying its countryside by degrees, and fires like this are simply a symptom of a country that doesn’t even know how to spell ‘conservation’. The Borneo jungle is fast becoming a myth, and by some accounts, in ten years’ time it won’t even exist, especially if fires like this continue to occur.

However, I digress. Sulawesi, being east-southeast of Borneo, is potentially at risk of being smothered in smoke, but due to fortunate winds, it’s managing to stay clear and fresh for the time I’m planning to be there. This is lucky: the thought of putting up with an environmental smoke hazard on top of the usual Indonesian kretek habit is daunting, to say the least. But despite these worries, in reality Ujung Pandang is turning out to be a pretty cool place.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gained a travelling companion – Peter and I have decided to team up for a few days, as our plans coincide fairly well – but I actually thrived on the ‘Hello Mister’s in Ujung Pandang. And they came thick and fast when we first struck out to explore the city; every two seconds there was someone calling out as we wandered the streets, first in search of a bank to exchange money and then in search of the Pelni office to work out times for boats out of Sulawesi. We bought a bus ticket for the overnight bus heading north, we went on a short bus ride to Old Gowa in search of some sultan’s tomb that proved too elusive for us to track down, and we explored the city’s sights such as Fort Rotterdam (an excellent example of colonial architecture) and the bustling market... but nothing prepared us for the evening meal experience.

In preparation for our forthcoming overnight bus experience, Peter and I decided to stock up on essential vitamins by buying some fruit from the market, and after some hard bargaining we were the proud owners of a water melon and a handful of sumptuous mangoes. So we sat down on the sidewalk to eat them.

The first observers turned up after about ten seconds, mainly people from the shop just down the road from where we’d sat. Then some more drifted in from the sides, a group of kids stood there watching, and before we’d got halfway through our melons, there must have been about 30 people just standing round, staring at us and giggling to each other. Some brave souls attempted to talk to us, and one woman was so intent on practising her English with us that she got a chair and sat in front of us, as if we were a television. She screeched at us in pidgin, we smiled politely and ate our fruit, and marvelled at the total lack of privacy in a culture such as this. For some reason, the sight of two foreigners eating a water melon was the most exciting thing happening in Ujung Pandang that evening, and we drew a huge crowd, especially when we started eating our mangoes in the Polynesian manner, slicing off half of the mango, crisscross cutting it and turning the skin inside out to give a pleasing, cubist design, perfect for guzzling. It was amazing to the Indonesians, who perhaps had never seen it before.

It was here that I began to get an inkling, albeit a small one, of what it must be like to be a celebrity...

Bada Valley

Written: 11 October 1997

By the following afternoon, Peter and I had arrived in Tentena, a small village in Central Sulawesi that took a bus journey from hell to reach, not just because of the normal problems of awful music and cramped seats, but also because the roads in Sulawesi are shocking. We settled in for a relaxing evening in a good but pricey losmen, and made our plans for the morrow. Our mission: to discover the megaliths of the Bada Valley.

The Bada Valley follows the Lariang River along the southern border of the forested Lore Lindu National Park, and it’s world famous for its ancient and mysterious statues, or megaliths; megaliths are large stone carvings along the lines of those on Easter Island. Our options were many, but we decided we’d go it alone and try to find the megaliths ourselves; guides from Tentena came in at 50,000rp per day per person, which sounded like a right royal waste of money, so we bought a seat on a jeep heading east into the valley the next day, and tried to glean as much information as we could from local tour guides and other travellers. It wasn’t the most successful fact finding mission; all we got was a photocopy of a dodgy-looking map and some vague walking times, but at least it confirmed that we were in the right area. And besides, a walk with a proper map just wouldn’t be right in Indonesia, would it?

We took off from Tentena the next morning, crammed onto the back of a shoddy old jeep that had seven other occupants, along with boxes of smelly fish and peanuts, a blindingly loud sound system and a radiator that overheated every twenty minutes and guzzled water faster than a hot westerner in the middle of the tropical forest. The trip along the terrible dirt road to Bomba at the eastern end of the valley took some seven hours, and although it was pretty tiring, perched on the back of the jeep with legs dangling and arse bruising, it was kind of entertaining, and we experienced the pinnacle of Indonesian pop music for most of the trip; Deddy Dorres, an overweight crooner who looks like an Indonesian Fat Elvis, graced the jeep’s stereo, adding a flavour of big shades and bigger sideburns to the whole exercise. His music was terrible, his image embarrassing, but he is, by all accounts, one of the most successful artistes in Indonesia today. Ye gods.

The losmen in Bomba was expensive, but it did have a map of the area on the wall, which I hurriedly copied down, giving us a totally different version from the map we’d obtained in Tentena. Still, we were determined not to waste money on a guide, and the next morning we set out for the valley itself, home to the megaliths and a slice of human history that’s as mysterious as Stonehenge.

The Megaliths of Bada

Nobody really knows how old the Bada megaliths are, or who made them, or even why they’re there. They probably date from the first millennium AD, but this figure is fairly debatable, depending on which scientist you consult. The locals don’t have a clue – ‘They’ve always been here,’ is the most common response if you ask someone where the statues came from – and all this adds to a wonderful sense of mystery. Even more interestingly, all the objects in the area are made from a type of grey stone of which there are no deposits in the near vicinity, so work that one out; these megaliths are huge, heavy, and in the middle of nowhere, a long way from where they should be.

There are 14 statues in total, plus many large stone vats scattered along the 15km valley. In 1984 the government persuaded the locals to build some wooden houses next to some of the megaliths, which appear to serve no purpose, and some concrete walkways around some of the more famous statues. You would assume that this makes the megaliths easy to find – it’s almost set up as a tourist destination, after all, just without the tourists – but it’s never that easy.

Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. The Bada Valley is a farming area, smothered in paddy fields and little streams, and there’s just no way you’re going to find megaliths in something like that, especially with a map that looked great when I copied it down, but which proved to be pretty useless in the field. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and we just kept asking the local farmers where the megaliths were until, eventually, we realised that they were sending us in totally the wrong direction. And that’s when we saw the house, complete with little kid and grandmother, who turned themselves into our guides for the morning.

Following this odd couple through the fields, we soon realised that finding megaliths was fine if you know where to look, but not so good if you don’t. Luckily our guides managed the job fairly successfully, guiding us to all sorts of statues and large stone pots, and only getting lost a couple of times, and before you knew it we’d seen standing megaliths, sleeping megaliths, large pots, small pots and all sorts of odd stone shapes, all of which we would never have found alone. Returning to their house we gently knocked their initial demands for huge sums down to a more reasonable 3000rp, and then persuaded the old man of the house to take us to another megalith on our way out of the valley, all for another 2000rp and half a packet of cigarettes; this one turned out to be hidden inside a paddy field, along a network of paths that nobody could navigate without help. It all felt rather satisfying to have found the megaliths, but without resorting to the tourist trap of hiring an expensive guide for the day.

The megaliths we saw were among the best of the bunch, and trekking round the whole valley to find them all is a long and difficult process, only suited to those who live, breathe and eat megalith mythology. We got to see the following:

- Palindo (‘The Entertainer’), 4.5m. The largest statue in the area and the most celebrated, it is situated south of the tiny village of Sepe. It is perhaps a representation of Sepe’s first mythological inhabitant, Tosaloge. A local legend tells of the Raja of Luwu, who once ordered 1800 of his subjects to move the statue from Sepe to Palopo (a very long way to the south) to prove his dominance over Bada, but the effort failed. The statue was said to originally face Luwu in the south, but the Bada people turned it to face the west as a snub to the Raja, and when the Raja’s followers tried to turn it back, it fell onto its side, killing 200 of them. In the past, offerings were brought to this figure before embarking on any new enterprise, such as opening up a new garden. Whatever the legends, it’s a wonderfully atmospheric sight.

- Maturu (‘Sleeping’), 3.5m. This statue lies on its back, and has good features, like a reclining Palindo. As with its bigger brother, it’s a male; the erect genitals on both are a bit of a giveaway.

- Mesinga (‘Wearing a Scarf’). Actually, this looked more like a little penis and I didn’t even waste a photograph on it. The features are very faded and if it wasn’t in the Bada Valley, you’d think it was just a rock. It’s only just up the path from the Kalamba, which are far more interesting.

- Kalamba. These are vast stone cisterns, dotted all over the place, which may have been used as baths, or burial chambers for aristocrats. Some are better than others.

- Oba (‘Monkey’). This was the one that the old man took us to on the way out of the valley, and it’s a real cutie. Only as high as a squatting man, its features are amusingly monkey-like and cheeky. It’s right in the middle of a paddy field.

We could have seen more, but the rest of the walk beckoned, and after this many megaliths, we’d seen plenty. To be honest, it was a thrill just to find them, especially under our own steam.

That night we camped in the forest, just for the jungle experience, walking in the dark until we found a suitable spot to drop everything, set up the mozzie nets and sleep. It most definitely was an experience...

Leaving the Valley

The second day of our walk was comparatively uneventful. The path cut through tropical forest, following the huge Lariang River north towards the town of Moa. At 225km long, the Lariang is Sulawesi’s longest river and it’s an impressively powerful beast, strewn with rocks and the detritus of rainforest. The walking was easy enough, which was lucky as our map didn’t stretch beyond the valley of the megaliths, and soon after lunch we arrived in the small riverside village of Moa.

Here we spent the night in a basic losmen and sat there watching the entire village using the river as a bathroom, toilet, clothes washer, water source and village meeting place. I’m sure that Peter, ever the adventurous sort, was keen on the idea of spending this night in the forest too, but to be honest I wasn’t feeling too ecstatic after the heavy walking. I had blisters on my feet and aches and pains everywhere, and I wanted a bed; for this reason alone, Moa was a pleasant surprise.

The last half a day from Moa to Gimpu was, unfortunately, rather depressing, with little to recommend it. After the archaeologically interesting Bada Valley and the beautiful tropical rainforest along the Lariang, the final stretch to Gimpu showed signs of being pretty much destroyed by man, with plenty of logging, farming and environmental destruction littering a flat, boring road that insisted on staying at a slight incline that wore me down, bit by bit.

The rain didn’t help either, and as we arrived in Gimpu after the three-day slog, the tropical sky exploded in a torrent of rain that soaked us to the skin and made the little losmen down the road look doubly inviting; thankfully the rain held off until we arrived, or we’d have been thoroughly miserable, it came down so heavily. As it was we found some beds and greedily launched into supper, drank loads of tea, and settled into a good night’s sleep, extremely happy to have discovered the elusive megaliths of the Bada Valley.

Bada Belly

I thought it was all over, but it was not to be. A couple of hours after retiring at the ridiculously early hour of 6pm, I was back up again, rushing to the toilet for my first bout of Indonesian food poisoning. I threw up every couple of hours until about 6am, and I won’t debase this travelogue by talking about my other orifices. There was no way I was going anywhere when Friday finally arrived; not only was I suffering from the intestinal equivalent of the levee breaking, but I had the associated total lack of energy and interest. I wasn’t going anywhere.

Peter, however, had to head off as his itinerary was far less flexible than mine, and Gimpu isn’t exactly an interesting place to spend your holiday, so I bade him goodbye through a haze of illness, promising to keep in touch and let him know how the rest of my trip went. All of a sudden I was on my own, frighteningly ill, and alternating between the toilet, my bed and the little shop down the road where they sold bottled water, as I didn’t even have enough energy to operate my water filter.

By lunchtime on Friday I was no better, so the concerned losmen owner took me along the main road to visit the doctor, who worked from a basic-looking room that I wouldn’t have identified as a doctor’s surgery if it hadn’t been for the discoloured white coat she was wearing. After filling in the paperwork and explaining the problem, I had myself weighed, had my blood pressure taken, and after refusing an injection – just as much to do with my needle phobia as for fear of contaminated needles – I was given a selection of pills, tipped by the nurse from a collection of bottles that looked extensive enough to cater for every illness from malaria to mumps. I had to take the little white one, the big white one and the big black one three times a day, and that was that.

Goodness only knows what the pills were, but they worked. Within an hour I was bunged up, able to keep my rehydration mixture down, and although I still felt bloody awful, I was no longer exploding quite so badly. My temperature, which had fleetingly gone up, came back down and stayed down, and I managed a few bananas to start the digestive process working again. I had survived my first case of Asian food poisoning, though quite what had caused it remains a mystery. Suffice to say it was pretty unpleasant, but inevitable too. It hasn’t stop me trying the food, though; the best meals are often to be found in the dodgy warung stalls in the city roads, and some of the snacks are simply great – almost worth the risk. The result? This is almost certainly not going to be my last batch of food poisoning in Asia...

Togian Islands

Written: 16 October 1997

After recovering from my forest food poisoning, I took a long bus ride from Gimpu to Palu, then on to Poso and finally Ampana, where I managed to stay in the noisiest losmen I’ve ever been in; between the nocturnal cockerels, the cats on heat and the workmen who ripped the roof off my mandi at 7am, I was dog tired and ready for a rest. This proved to be fortuitous, because my ultimate destination, and the reason for the long bus journey, were the Togian Islands, an undiscovered paradise of coral-fringed islands just 25 miles south of the equator, sitting in the middle of the c-shaped bay formed by northern Sulawesi. After so long in French Polynesia I might not be that impressed by yet more beautiful islands, but in the Togians I saw a potential advantage: peace in isolation.

The Togian Islands are pretty much undiscovered territory as far as tourism goes. There are a number of beach losmen dotted around, and the clientele is almost exclusively western, but in terms of mainstream tourism, the Togians are well off the beaten track.

I suspect this won’t be the case for much longer. If you manage to ignore the fairly typical and disgusting town of Wakai – smelly, dirty, environmentally hopeless and only there as a port for the boats sailing to and from the mainland – the Togian Islands are relatively untouched, though trends such as fish bombing and hunting the almost extinct coconut crab are symptoms of a worrying lack of foresight. There are six main islands, plus the recently erupted volcano of Unauna, as well as countless tiny islands dotted all around, and with the lush vegetation and beautiful blue sea it’s a perfect place for paradise.

The big attraction of the Togian Islands is the large amount of good coral reef surrounding the islands, and it’s one of the few areas in the world where all three main types of reef are found: barrier reef, atoll and fringing reef. I met a couple of fascinating travellers in Ampana who had been hiking through Sulawesi in search of very rare pitcher plants, and we teamed up to take the ferry to the Togians, all in search of some relaxation; our destination was Kadidiri Island off the north coast of Togian Island itself. What we didn’t realise was that Kadidiri Island was also home to the only diving operator in the Togians.

Living on the Togian Islands was Paul, our Australian dive master, but that wasn’t Paul’s most distinguishing feature: that would be his long blonde dreadlocks, something of a unique sight in an island community full of Indonesians. When Paul first arrived in the Togians, he would visit Wakai, the main village on the islands, and the kids would run up to him and shout, ‘Hello mister, what’s your name?’

Before long everyone in Wakai got to know Paul: the shopkeepers, the ferrymen and the hotel owners. He’d been there for eight months when I met him, and when he walked down the street, the kids still ran out and followed him. And what did they say to Paul when he walked down the street after eight months?

‘Hello Paul, what’s your name?’

Diving in the Togians

With all that reef about, it turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to throw off all the cares of the outside world, and enter the silent world of scuba. During the four days I spent in the Togians, I went on two dives. The first was easily the most amazing: a B-24 bomber had come down in the sea off the south coast of Pulau Togian back in 1945, and it’s a pleasant 20m below the surface, perfect for diving. It’s now encrusted in coral, and exploring a wrecked but pretty intact plane at the bottom of the sea is an amazing experience, especially when the water at 20m is a balmy 29°C. Everything is covered in growth, not surprisingly after over 50 years, but it’s amazing how much is almost untouched: the pilot’s throttle controls, the engine’s radiator fins, the machine guns, the landing gear and so on are all instantly recognisable, and living on this plane-shaped reef are plenty of weird and wonderful marine creatures. Diving the site was a clash of history, surrealism and imagination, where you could almost hear the conversation as the crew prepared for crash landing, an event that they would all survive, to be rescued by the inhabitants of the local fishing village of Liberty. It was my first wreck dive, and hopefully not my last.

After a day’s snorkelling the following day – a poor man’s second when you’ve learned to dive, but a worthwhile occupation when the coral is just off the hotel beach – I decided that the budget could stretch to another dive, so the next day I joined the others for a dive in the Labyrinth, a more standard coral bommie dive that was nonetheless very pleasant.

The two Togian dives were just what I needed, and they acted as a catalyst to relieving the accumulated travel stress and fatigue that Indonesia has so far piled onto my shoulders. It also helped that the place was seriously relaxed; for example, our last night on the island coincided with the full moon, so out came the beer and the arak (rice wine) and, when the arak had run dry, out came the Indonesian vodka. I passed out on the beach by the fire, and the next day awoke with a familiar feeling: I was still quite drunk. Which was just what I needed for a long bus ride through bumpy Sulawesi... though even through the haze of the morning after, I was sad to see Kadidiri disappear over the horizon, as I now felt properly recharged.

Wild Mood Swings

Written: 18 October 1997

After some 30 days of fairly hectic and intense travelling in Indonesia, I had totally lost the plot and was basically at the end of my tether. It’s a travel trap that I’ve fallen into before; if you push yourself too far too quickly, you’ll burn out, and the whole experience suffers as a result. When I got to Ampana, I was almost ready to throw in the towel and fly back to London. Let me elaborate.

For a few days, aided and abetted by my bout of intestinal hockey, a really bad feeling had been growing inside of me. I sat back and looked at my Indonesian experience to date, and to be honest, I wasn’t that impressed. Despite the fact that I had found so much to write about, had had so many different experiences to describe and a constant battering of ideas and intrusions that had kept me on my toes, there was one thing that I realised when I got down to the nitty-gritty; I was in serious danger of getting bored of travelling in Indonesia. The novelty had already worn off.

I even went as far as to make a list of things that were really winding me up, as a kind of organisational therapy. I repeat the list here, to give you a peek into the mind of a long-term traveller, though bear in mind that these notes were jotted down under a black cloud of illness and travel fatigue, so take them with a large pinch of salt:

- I came to Southeast Asia for the culture; after Australia and New Zealand I’m not too bothered by trying to find amazing landscapes here, but I want to discover different ways of life and different ideas. The problem is that I’m finding Indonesian culture rather hard to experience, outside of the neatly packaged cultural experiences like Ubud. Essentially, I can’t find the culture I so badly want to see.

- The effort involved in travelling in Indonesia is astounding. The constant and weary Hello Misters and JFOs, the tiring and eternal public transport... however good the destinations, sometimes you find yourself thinking that the gain is not worth the pain.

- After about a week, the food becomes pretty damn boring. Constant rice and noodles gets pretty uninspiring when you’re used to western food. I now find myself craving Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, which isn’t a good sign.

Pretty miserable, eh! On the other hand, rereading the above after the low patch had passed didn’t make me press ‘delete’ and start again, something I normally find essential if this travelogue isn’t going to be just a collection of moans and groans written at a bad time of the day. No, these whinges are pretty valid, and not the result of illness or exhaustion, so I’ve left them in.

A big result of the above discoveries was that I decided then and there not to bother with Kalimantan; apart from the fact that Borneo was pretty much smothered in choking smoke at the time, I realised that I simply didn’t fancy hacking my way up another river to discover a jungle that’s been logged, or a culture that’s being swallowed by Coke and MTV. I decided that I’d try to go straight from Sulawesi to Java, skipping the bushfires altogether and heading for some guaranteed sightseers’ delights.

After cheering up during my stay in the Togians, though, I began to see the other side to my complaints. Take the difficulty in discovering the real Indonesian culture; my initial problem was that I thought Indonesian culture was dead. Looking around, the biggest influences you see are Coke, English language slogan T-shirts, motorbikes, cars, television, and all the rest of the axioms of westernisation. This didn’t surprise me one bit; Indonesia is a developing country, so western ideals and concepts will be greedily guzzled up by the populace.

But everywhere you go there are signs of the culture that are very different to the western world, it’s just that it doesn’t take long to become immune enough for you to begin to take it all for granted. Try the following everyday sights: people walking cattle down the street; bicycle rickshaws rattling over the stony roads; warung stalls dotted about town, selling cheap snacks and meals; colourful markets everywhere; Muslim mosques, Buddhist temples and Christian churches, all on the same street; lush vegetation and tropical palms just about everywhere; clothes like sarongs, Islamic hats, batik designs and so on; smiling and laughing, the likes of which you’d never get in a western city; a people who are always helping you find the right bus, the right boat, the right bemo, without expecting anything in return except a little conversation and politeness; yes, Indonesian culture is far from dead, it’s just ingrained so deeply into everyday life that after a month, it’s no longer new, so you get used to it. Actually Indonesia is culturally very interesting, and I’ve learned to look at everything with new eyes every day to appreciate the subtleties of the local psyche.

My whinge about the effort required in travelling through Indonesia is totally fair, and most western travellers I have met have to take regular breaks at places like beach resorts to regain their sanity. Which is exactly what I did in the Togians, and is exactly what I shall continue to do.

Finally, the food. Yes, it is a bit disappointing, no doubt about it. But there are plenty of other more exciting countries on my itinerary, and at least the food here is incredibly cheap. So I can’t really complain, can I? Exactly.

Poso

Written: 18 October 1997

I don’t want to think too much about the journey south. From the Togian Islands to Ampana to Poso to Tentena to Pendolo to Rantepao, this mammoth three-day journey on painful buses, crowded boats and sore feet was only made bearable by a friendship struck up on the Togian ferry; Rose, a solo traveller from New York state, was on my wavelength, going my way and would prove an amiable companion until we were rudely parted after a couple of weeks... but that’s another story. For now we’re bouncing through central Sulawesi, Rose full of stories about her eight-month trip through Southeast Asia, and me full of dread at having to repeat the awful stretch of road that Peter and I had put up with when heading north to Tentena for the first time.

Salvation, though, came in the form of the Lake Poso ferry. The worst stretch of road – between Tentena and Pendolo – skirts the shores of Lake Poso, a huge freshwater soak in the middle of Sulawesi, and where there’s a lake, there’s a boat. We arrived in Tentena to find that the boat was leaving that evening, and would arrive in Pendolo to meet a night bus heading to Rantepao, our ultimate destination. This gave us a day to kill in Tentena, which we filled by lounging about in a forest-clad waterfall called Saluopa, some 20km west of Tentena in the general direction of Lore Lindu.

I should have revelled in the cool waters more, because the next twelve hours were typically awful. The waters of Lake Poso splashed over the sides of the crowded ferry onto our legs; the restaurant where the bus was due to arrive was a good half-an-hour’s hard walk from the ferry terminal; the night bus didn’t turn up until 1am (so we slept on the floor of the restaurant, without anyone seeming to mind); and the seats we managed to squeeze into for the journey proved inadequate as seats, let alone beds. Our arrival in Rantepao on Saturday morning was fairly ethereal as sleep deprivation washed away any good intentions about leaping into the culture straight away, but at least we’d made it in one piece.

The Torajan People

Written: 23 October 1997

We arrived in Rantepao totally exhausted, and as is always the way when you’re tired beyond comprehension, we discovered that we’d arrived on market day. As market day in Rantepao is only every six days, we just had to make the effort to go, so go we did, catching a bemo to Bolu where all manner of produce gathered dust on the ground under makeshift tents and the wilful gaze of the hawkers. It was hot and strenuous, but Rose saved the day by announcing that she had a mission: as she was going to go home in just a few weeks, she had to buy presents for her close family, and she had seen the perfect thing. Torajan boxes, stuffed with Arabica coffee beans, the best coffee in Indonesia, would make a wonderful gift, and we spent a few entertaining hours buying ten boxes and a big bag of coffee beans, haggling the price from ridiculous to almost acceptable, and discovering plenty about coffee merchants in the process.

For it is the Torajan people that attract tourists to Rantepao, and it’s not just their boxes that are interesting. Hidden away in the folding hills of the central highlands is an animist religion with myriad rituals and ceremonies that have miraculously survived the steamroller effect of Islam. Chief among these unique aspects of Tana Toraja, as the area is known, are the traditions associated with the dead; never has dying been such a huge event.

The Torajans are animist: they believe in the spirits of the dead, spirits of dead animals, the underworld and so on. They believe that when a person dies and goes onto the next plane, they can take their possessions with them, which means that people are buried with all sorts of expensive items. In the past this led, not surprisingly, to a serious amount of grave robbing, so the Torajans began to bury their dead in caves, hewn from the surrounding cliffs and closed off with doors, thus preventing the robbers from getting in and the dead from oozing out. There was one problem, though: the local rock is so hard that digging a burial cave is a highly expensive exercise, so the cave diggers are traditionally paid in the well-known currency of water buffalo, which are very expensive. This means that only the rich can have cave graves, and as a result the whole burying and funeral process has assumed an important status: the better the cave, the more expensive and elaborate the funeral preparations, and the higher the status that is afforded to the family.

So far this sounds fairly reasonable; after all, westerners are just as fickle in wanting to show off their wealth, except it generally happens at more celebratory events that at a funeral. But the Torajans are really into celebrating death, from throwing multiple-day funeral parties to carving spooky wooden effigies of dead people and sticking them outside the cave graves; the carving of these tau-tau, as they are called, can cost nearly a whole year’s wages, for just one effigy. In fact, families have been known to bankrupt themselves to put on a good funeral show and build a good cave, something that seems illogical to me, but which is perfectly acceptable to the Torajans; they live for death, it seems, and everywhere you go there is something to see that’s connected with the next world. It’s quite eerie, and utterly fascinating.

Tongkonan Houses

The funerals might be the most famous events in Tana Toraja, but the most obvious cultural objects are the houses. The tongkonan, as the traditional houses are called, are distinctively ornate in a way that makes the layered paddy fields of central Sulawesi look totally unique; everywhere you look there are houses whose roofs curve up at opposite ends, not unlike a water buffalo’s horns, or a huge, thatched banana. It is a beautiful sight, an architectural study in symmetry and precision that could teach modern builders a thing or two, especially when you consider that the wooden houses don’t use nails: they are built so everything just slots together and holds together through rain and shine.

But, like everything the Torajans do, this wonderful tradition is tinged with something that smacks of idiocy to the casual observer. They don’t live in these beautiful constructions, they live in normal crappy Indonesian tin-roof squats right next door, saving the tongkonan for special occasions, ceremonies and status symbols; size is everything in Tana Toraja, and if your roof doesn’t curve at the right angle, you’re a nobody. Then there are the rice barns, built in the same style as the tongkonan, and the more rice barns you’ve got, the richer you are – or, rather, the richer you appear, because if you build too many rice barns, you’ll have precious little capital left over.

The reason for this distinctive house design has baffled historians. Some think the roof is based on the design of the water buffalo’s horns, another reflection of the Torajans’ obsession with the beast, while some say that the design is based on the shape of an overturned boat, something I can’t really see myself. All the houses face north, possibly because the Torajans came from the north, carrying their boats, and the theory goes that they then inverted these boats to make shelters, hence the curved shape. Though that sounds like a load of buffalo to me...

Oh, and one more thing about the houses. They each have a wooden carving of a water buffalo’s head stuck on the front, as well as a collection of genuine buffalo horns tacked to the front beam, again as a show of fiscal superiority. I didn’t quite appreciate the reason for all these horns when I first saw them, but I was to learn the hard way exactly what they symbolised... and where they came from.

Rantepao

Written: 23 October 1997

Rose and I tackled the area around Rantepao as a team, by taking public transport to interesting spots and then exploring by foot. Despite the smoke hanging round the mountains from the forest fires in western Sulawesi, we spent two days wandering around a number of different areas, marvelling at the houses (which, after two days, became more familiar than interesting, but were still fascinating) and checking out the area’s tourist-friendly sights and smells.

Without a doubt one of the most amazing things you can see in Rantepao is a Torajan funeral, but to put such an event in context it’s good to explore the area first. There’s plenty to see...

Lemo

Lemo is a classic cliff-grave and tau-tau site. There are balconies cut into the cliff-side where dozens of tau-tau figures stand, their arms outstretched in front of them as if in supplication. OK, there are plenty of tourist shops selling all sorts of toys and trinkets, and yes, the huts tucked away round the corner where the tau-tau are carved are little more than money-spinners, but the atmosphere of the place is pretty impressive; those tau-tau are disturbing whatever the environment.

Tilanga

Tilanga is apparently a waterhole, but it’s too dried up to be of interest at this time of the year. However, I mention it not because of the sodden turf that bore as much resemblance to a swimming pool as Kuta does to paradise, but because of whom Rose and I met there. Dawdling about the path between Lemo and Tilanga were two English girls, Jenny and Sarah, with whom we fell into step and conversation. This world being as small as it is, it turned out that they were from Poynton, a tiny town north of Macclesfield where I used to work, and they knew some of the people from the office; Jenny and Sarah will crop up later in this story, and in retrospect it was very good luck that we met up together. Life would have been much harder without their peculiar knowledge of pharmacies...

Londa

Further along the road from Tilanga is Londa, one of the most touristy areas we visited, but also one of the most atmospheric. To understand Londa, you should know about the four types of Torajan graves: the first, the grave dug out of a cliff, is used when there is a convenient cliff in the vicinity; the second, the cave grave, is used if there is a handy naturally formed cave around; the third, the hanging grave, is hung from a suitably high spot, such as an overhanging cliff that’s too dangerous to dig a cave into and where nobody will climb up to steal the body; and the fourth is the house grave, used when none of the other three can be built, where a hollow is dug in the ground, the body placed there, and a miniature tongkonan house is built over the grave.

Londa is a naturally occurring cave that’s full of coffins, some extremely recently occupied, with a large collection of tau-tau guarding the entrance. Young men with kerosene lamps guide you through the winding corridors for a small fee, pointing out delightful sights such as the coffin that’s broken open, allowing you to see the decomposing body inside, the skull that’s still got a few tufts of hair stuck to it, the coffins of children stacked up high in the roof of the cave... yes, it’s pretty gruesome at times, but it’s all a part of the Torajan lifestyle, and once you get over your western hang-ups about death, it’s fascinating.

Especially when there’s a tiny tunnel through which you can crawl for ten metres to get from one side of the cave complex to the other. It seems we can add claustrophobia to the phobias that my travelling has helped tackle, because even though the tunnel was so small in places that we had to crawl single file on our bellies, I didn’t freak out; even Jenny, a self-professed cave hater, managed to soldier through without panicking. I remember a particularly vivid part of Alan Garner’s book The Weirdstone of Brisingamen where the heroes have to crawl through a rabbit-sized tunnel, and although it used to send me into a cold sweat to read it, I now find myself crazy enough to crawl down pitch-black tunnels through to chambers filled with rotting humans and babies’ skulls. I never thought I’d end up saying something like that...

Palawa

Stone circles are another aspect of Torajan religion, with each stone standing for an important noble who departed this life. Some of the stone circles are ancient and covered in lichen, such as the one at Palawa, which is just down the road from a particularly impressive collection of tongkonan.

Bori

However the stone circle at Bori has been tidied up, cleaned and surrounded by a well-kept hedge and an immaculate garden, which rather spoils things... and then they charge you 2000rp for the privilege of going inside. So we opted not to pay, and instead settled for some snapshots from outside. Charging entrance fees is fine, but rebuilding the natural setting of a historical site to make it more appealing – and more hidden from non-paying passers-by – doesn’t get my vote, at least not in this case.

Pa’piong

There was another cultural experience that promised much but failed to deliver: pa’piong. This local dish sounds scrumptious; buffalo meat (or chicken) is mixed with a bunch of vegetables and a spinach-like leaf, which is stuffed into a bamboo tube and slow roasted over a fire for three hours, before being served with black or red rice. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately we all thought it tasted pretty disgusting, which was a bit of a disappointment. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

A Torajan Funeral

Written: 21 October 1997

Whatever the sights, there’s no doubt that the highlight of a trip to Tana Toraja – the area of central Sulawesi whose capital is Rantepao – is to visit a funeral. This is easier than it sounds; because the funeral celebrations take a lot of preparation, not to mention expense, the Torajans have two funerals for each death, much like the Balinese. The first one is a private affair straight away after the death, and the body is preserved in the house where it died until the necessary cash has been saved up for the second one, a much bigger, more public affair. Because the second funeral is effectively a huge party and can be held at any time, it tends to be organised for between July and October, when the relatives can come to visit more easily during the school holidays. This leads to the strange concept of the Funeral Season, which Rose and I were lucky enough to catch the end of.

It was pure luck, but Rose and I managed to get ‘invited’ to a medium-sized funeral in a place called Buntulepong, somewhere that didn’t even appear on the local maps. We had just returned to our hotel after our evening meal when this local guy called Sam rushed up and wondered if we would like to go to a funeral tomorrow, in his home village; we had no plans, and so we agreed. Of course our ‘invitation’ cost us US$15, but our cynicism was short lived; the three of us – the two of us plus a third girl from the same hotel – were the only tourists at the whole event. And what an event!

Torajan funerals are, by English standards, badly named; ‘funeral’, at least in English, is a word that conjures up images of black-clad mourners, weeping by a graveside on a cold winter’s day, the priest’s mournful words forming frostily in the air. In Tana Toraja they wear black, but that’s where the mourning ends; the second funeral is a celebration of the person’s life, of him or her making the step into the next world, where those left on earth make sure they send all the help they can to the person’s spirit.

The theory goes something like this. When a Torajan dies, the spirit journeys to a netherworld. Here it is judged, and one of the ways it is judged is on how successful it was in its previous life, and this is influenced by looking at the number of animal spirits that have been sent along with the person... in other words, the larger the number of animals that get slaughtered at the funeral, the better the spirit’s chance of getting to the Torajan version of heaven. And of course the best animal to get sent along for your journey to the netherworld is the water buffalo, the most expensive animal around. Is it any wonder that throwing a funeral can, literally, bankrupt a family? Still, it’s a hell of a way to blow the family fortune.

The Funeral Celebrations

We were welcomed like long lost family members when we finally arrived at the village, having traipsed through paddy fields and some stunning mountain views. Arabica coffee was offered – without a doubt the best coffee I’d had in Indonesia – and kreteks were passed around, for this is the way of the party. Guests are expected to bring presents, whether it’s water buffalo, pigs, food or cigarettes, and our gift of a large box of Gudang Garam kreteks went down a treat. And if we were concerned about breaching etiquette with our cameras, we needn’t have been; within two minutes of our arrival, the locals had whipped out their own cameras to snap the three white people who had come to pay their respects to the deceased.

The entertainment began in earnest at about 10am. Our first experience of what was to come was the screeching of pigs; strapped to long pieces of bamboo, the pigs were brought in, dumped on the ground and left to squeal at their fate. Seeing as the pigs were soon to end up as roast pork, the locals didn’t exactly worry about how they treated the bacon; animal lovers would have been horrified. And if the sound of squealing pigs was disturbing, the water buffalo took the spectacle from the unnerving to the downright shocking.

The smell of death is distinctive; it permeates utterly. We took a seat right by the rectangular area where the killing was to take place, and as the slaughtering continued, I couldn’t help thinking of Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty-four; at the end the hero is a broken man, sitting in his local café every day, drinking nothing but clove-flavoured gin, sweating clove-flavoured sweat, crying clove-flavoured tears... the smell of death, of blood and faeces and frightened animal, is similarly overpowering in its permeation.

The first water buffalo of the three we saw ritually murdered was the most intense sight; it’s amazing how the human mind accepts the unacceptable after a while. I made my mind up to watch; I am not a vegetarian and I have never had any inkling to become one, but I still have some morals when it comes to what I eat. I don’t want to stick my head in the sand, I want to know what it takes to kill an animal, what’s involved, and if I can live with that knowledge, I can continue to eat meat with a clear conscience. So I watched everything.

The buffalo is surprisingly calm as it is led into the arena. Its keeper pulls it along by a rope attached to the ring in its nose, a method of control it has been obeying since it was born; why should today be any different? Even the dismembered pigs strewn across the centre of the arena – killed elsewhere, as only buffalo are honoured enough to be killed in front of everyone – don’t worry the huge beast. It doesn’t seem to notice, or care, as its front left foot is tied to a rock outcrop in the middle of the arena. After all, its owner is there, the person who has been working alongside it in the paddy fields for years.

The knife is out before you know it; about six inches long, it’s the same type of blade that every farmer seems to carry in central Sulawesi. In the wink of an eye the young man holds up the knife for all to see, and in one quick, fluid movement he takes a swing and slashes a huge cut across the buffalo’s neck, as calmly as if he’s cutting through an inconvenient bush, or cutting down rice during the harvest.

The buffalo changes in an instant. Eyes roll in their sockets, searching for something, like a young child in a crowded shopping mall who suddenly realises that his mummy isn’t by his side any more. The buffalo’s legs jerk involuntarily, trying to run away from the pain, but its tied foot brings it crashing to the ground, convulsing. The cry of fear, loud and hoarse, becomes a loud gurgle as the buffalo throws its head backwards in a confused reflex action, turning the slit into a huge, gaping wound, pumping bright crimson blood into the arena with every heartbeat. Dust from the ground sticks to the buffalo’s hide, mixing with the blood and sweat, attracting flies in clouds as the buffalo gradually slows down, jerking less and starting to shiver.

Is it dead? It certainly looks like it, but after a couple of minutes its hind left leg starts to twitch spasmodically, and as the young man who made the cut walks over to the body and wipes the blade of his knife clean on the buffalo’s stomach, the beast reacts to the touch. It thrashes around, aware now that the creeping numbness is permanent, that it is dying, and for another two minutes its breathing changes from a gurgle to a hoarse coughing, a rattle that signals the final struggle; and then the beast lets its bowels go, its eyes change from panic stricken to glazed, and finally it’s dead.

Within ten minutes of the buffalo’s demise, the local boys have started to chop it up. It’s amazing how this previously proud animal soon becomes nothing more than an exercise in butchery, and somewhere there’s a point at which it ceases to be a buffalo, and becomes a selection of prime cuts and offal. Looking at the huge pile of red cutlets, it’s strange to think that just half an hour ago, every piece of bone and flesh had a function, every globule of glistening gut was essential to the existence of a water buffalo; now it’s off with the skin, slice open the stomach and discard the cud, chop through bone and sinew by taking huge axe swings with the butcher’s knife... bits of body fly everywhere as the flies home in on the smelliest parts, and odours of guts, blood and stomach contents fill the air. No wonder everyone smokes kreteks at funerals.

After the second and third sacrifices, I see steak, not slaughter. Western sensibilities about cruelty to animals seem out of place here; this is no more horrific than inventing factories where chickens, cows, pigs and sheep are murdered on conveyor belts. The roasted pig fat and rice for lunch tastes good, too; and the pigs are even killed quickly, with a knife straight through the heart. Unlike the water buffalo.

Tuak and Bemos

Many more sights made the rest of the day a fascinating glimpse into the Torajan way of life. Every half an hour the people from another village would arrive, bearing gifts of pigs and buffalo, cigarettes and food, parading themselves and their gifts round the arena, stepping lightly round headless carcasses and piles of excrement. A woman clad in a bright yellow dress guided the villagers, men first and then women, in a line round the edge of the arena, making sure that the details of every gift were noted down in a little book, so that every gift would be reciprocated at the next funeral; in this way a vague balance of payments is kept between villages, helping to prevent too much of an imbalance.

And then there’s the tuak, or palm wine, served in long, green tubes of bamboo and tasting rather like a fruity cider. If there’s one justification that living in the tropics is as close to heaven as you can get in this life, it’s the existence of palm wine. Certain palms naturally produce a sweet, sticky liquid, and if this is tapped in the morning, it slowly ferments during the day to produce a truly delightful alcoholic drink that’s perfectly in tune with the way serious drunks like to drink. For tuak starts off in the morning almost free of alcohol, and is as easy to drink as lemonade, but as the day progresses the alcoholic content increases, the taste becomes more intense, and by the end of the day it’s gone red and it’ll blow your mind. Drinking tuak all day not only rots your brain, it gets stronger just when you need more alcohol to give you the same effect; it’s nature and man’s self-destructive tendencies in perfect balance.

But surely the strangest experience, the icing on the cake, came on the way home after a day of celebrating, a day full of shocks and surprises. As the bemo rattled its way back towards Rantepao, the driver slammed on the anchors and swerved, Rose and Cora gasping in the front passenger seat. A kitten had run out across the road, and as the bemo backed up I saw a little girl cradling a tiny tabby kitten, its paws limp and lifeless as its head lolled unnaturally to the side, its neck broken. In the West there would have been tears, a difficult time for the parents and a tearful ritual burial in an old shoe box. But in Tana Toraja death has less of a sting, and there was no reaction at all. Instead the bemo driver found a stick and started digging a shallow grave, right there on the roadside.

‘If we don’t bury the cat, then this bemo will have a crash sometime in the next two weeks,’ explained one of the locals, jammed into the back of the bus alongside me. Apparently cats have a special meaning in Toraja, and as the driver finished off his work, everyone seemed to consider that that was the end of it; the child whose pet it was didn’t bat an eyelid as we shot off, leaving rubber and black exhaust as the only sign that anything had happened. I’d read about Buddhist attitudes to death and I’d seen Christian funerals, but I’d never seen people react so calmly to loss of life before, and that wasn’t just when it came to cats.

I sometimes wonder if life would be easier if we didn’t fear death so much. It happens to us all; acceptance would be a wonderful thing if it weren’t so difficult. But then the image of a water buffalo with mad, rolling eyes comes back, and I can’t help but suppress a shiver. Perhaps it’s just too late for me to learn to accept death so calmly?

Unwell in Tana Toraja

Written: 22 October 1997

Wednesday started like a typical Indonesian Disaster Day. I’ve already discovered that travel in Indonesia won’t let a week pass without something going wrong, but I thought that after my recent food poisoning and horrific bus journeys, I was due a respite. Think again.

I woke up with liquid stools, presumably due to the roasted pig fat I’d tried at the funeral the day before, but they didn’t seem that serious, so I popped a couple of Imodium, drank plenty of water, and prepared to tackle the day. Just as I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes, Rose in the next door room made a discovery of her own in the bathroom: a Peeping Tom looking through the window of her bathroom while she was taking a mandi. Sometimes I wonder how lone women travellers manage to cope with the unwelcome affections of the local populace – something us men don’t have to put up with – but I soon found out; it was a good job that the pervert made good his escape, or he would have been a dead man. Luckily Rose had spent long enough travelling through Asia to take it all in her stride – ‘You just have to get used to this sort of thing,’ she said – and after a few strong words of complaint to the management, we went to pay for our rooms.

Only to discover that they were charging us more than we’d originally agreed on our arrival. There’s a ten per cent government tax that all hotels have to put onto their bills, and if you don’t make sure that tax is included in the price when you book in, you’ll get it slapped on at check-out time, which is fair enough; the thing is, we’d specifically agreed that tax was included in the 8000rp per night rate, so what was this 8800rp per night business on the bill? Still, unless you’ve got something in writing, you’re on shaky ground, and often it’s not worth the argument, so we grumbled that we weren’t very impressed, but paid anyway. After all, you just have to get used to this sort of thing.

Our next destination was the tourist office in town. Bolstered by our amazing funeral experience, Rose and I had decided to go to another with Jenny and Sarah, who wanted to see a funeral but hadn’t wanted to go on the day that they slaughtered the water buffalo; as today was mine and Rose’s last day in Rantepao – we both had tickets for the 8pm overnight bus to Ujung Pandang – we’d booked a guide for 9am to take us to a funeral in Tallunglipu, just up the road from Rantepao. So, there we all were, at the office to meet our guide, only to get told to come back at 11.30... which didn’t particularly surprise me. You just have to get used to this sort of thing, you know.

Phones and Pharmacies

We decided to take advantage of the extra time on our hands by making some phone calls. Indonesia has many public phones, but they use phone cards and can’t make international calls, so most tourists nip down to the Wartel, an office with a number of phone booths from which you can make a call anywhere, and pay afterwards in cash. Rose needed to call Garuda, the Indonesian airline, to try to change the date of her flight from Ujung Pandang to Denpasar, so we popped into the Wartel, asked the price per minute to call Ujung Pandang – 1020rp per minute – and she dialled into the nightmare of Indonesian bureaucracy. She’d already tried once, the day before, but this time she actually got a human operator, and after going through the rigmarole of trying to get him to change her flight details – a pain, because he kept trying to tell her to ring these other numbers, which she’d already done, discovering nothing but answerphones and unobtainable tones – she asked him to confirm her new flight details. ‘You need to ring this other number to do that,’ he said, as Rose’s knuckles whitened around the already gasping receiver. Whether she actually managed to change her flight, I never found out. But I did learn a valuable lesson: airlines come in strata too, with Garuda down in the murky depths somewhere. One day computerised booking will reach the archipelago... but until then, you just have to get used to this sort of thing.

And to add insult to infuriation, Rose discovered that the telephone’s computer had charged her 1800rp per minute, a considerable difference from 1020rp on such a long phone call, so she spent half an hour arguing with the dopey assistant, who rued the day she’d ever crossed swords with such a feisty American tourist. She still didn’t care, of course, and Rose ended up having to pay the full price, but by this stage I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my stomach, both at the way the day was turning out, and at the severe indigestion bubbling through my colon.

So I went to the chemist and tried to explain what I wanted: some Oral Rehydration Salts. The assistant seemed rather confused when I tried to explain what I wanted, and after a while I figured it might be easier if she pointed me towards the diarrhoea section in the rows and rows of pills on display, so I could look for myself. So I asked her if she could do just that (an easy enough question, as the Indonesian word for diarrhoea is diare), but I wasn’t prepared for her response. ‘We don’t have diarrhoea in Indonesia, sir,’ she chirped, and I suddenly found myself totally lost for words. I mean, what can you say to that?

So I gave up and instead bought some bottles of Gatorade from the supermarket, which seemed to contain the sugar and salts I needed. And in a move that could only happen in the happy world of travellers, everyone fished out their spare ORS packets and diarrhoea tablets; how many other people do you know who regularly carry such medication around with them?

The Funeral

Finally we met our guide, Paulus, and walked for over an hour to get to the funeral. It was a much bigger affair than the previous, more intimate event, and there were many more tourists, some of them even dressed in skimpy garb that would offend in Europe, much less an Indonesian funeral. However, we found Paulus to be more informative than Sam, but so he should be; Paulus was a professional, and as a result the whole thing felt rather more like a tour, unlike the previous day when we’d genuinely felt welcomed into the community.

Much to Jenny and Sarah’s chagrin we saw more buffalo getting their throats slit, and to their credit they watched. There were processions, singing, roasted pig fat for lunch, and there was the problem with my guts. Discovering that the funeral was running out of water and couldn’t spare any for the toilet, I hailed Paulus and explained that if I didn’t get to a toilet soon, the buffalo wouldn’t be the only ones spilling their guts everywhere. Thankfully he said, ‘No problem, I live just 600m away; you can go there.’ And so we set off.

It was the longest 600m of my life, but we got there in time. Just.

The rest of the funeral was interesting, but paled in comparison with the one in Buntulepong. We saw buffalo fights, where two buffalo run amok, trying to gore each other, and quite often rushing off into the crowd, who run away like characters out of Hemingway’s Fiesta. We saw Torajan kick-boxing, or sisemba, where young men tie themselves together by the wrist into pairs, and teams of pairs tackle each other with flying kicks and roundhouses. And finally we saw the long road home, through paddy fields and back to Rantepao.

My Funeral

By this stage my energy levels were pretty low, so Rose and I headed off to a restaurant in town, one we’d been frequenting a lot. I soon began to perk up, and Jenny and Sarah wandered in to say goodbye; conversation flowed, time ticked on towards eight o’clock, when our bus would leave, and then things suddenly started to go badly wrong. Paling and failing, I rushed off to the mandi, lost my toasted sandwich to the plumbing, and only just managed to drag myself back to the table.

‘I don’t think you’re in any state to travel,’ said Rose. ‘Want me to change your ticket?’

‘Umm. Yeah, I think you’re right. Thanks,’ I murmured. Things began to look bleak; the room started to spin as Rose went to the bus station, returning with an endorsed ticket for the next night. ‘When you’re ill, hang the plans and stay put,’ I thought.

‘Are you OK, Mark?’ asked Jenny, who was sitting on my right. ‘You’ve gone awfully pale, you know.’

I felt confused. My lips sagged and trembled, and wouldn’t work. Cold sweat kicked in, and a familiar feeling started to grip my stomach.

‘Dunno,’ was all I could manage. And then I had what alcoholics call A Moment of Clarity, and realised that I was going to throw up. Badly. ‘Bag. Gonna be sick,’ I blurted out, grabbing a plastic bag I’d used to carry my bottle of water.

Jenny was superb. She held the plastic bag – a good, thick Australian bag, I noted with relief – while I threw up violently and copiously, idly wondering where the hell all that food had come from. I didn’t know where I was, the reflex of the upheavals confusing the brain and muddling the mind.

Jenny: ‘Someone get a doctor. Hey Mark? Do you wanna lie down? On the floor? Mark?’

Sarah: ‘Fuck, I’m glad I’ve got some beer left. I need it now, having seen that.’

Jenny: ‘Yeah, same here. Never seen someone throw up so much. Where’s the doctor? Come on, you lie here.’

Cold floor, my head resting on my arm. Where’s the clear-headed feeling you normally get after being sick? My bare forearm on the tiled floor is leaving a patch of condensation on the white ceramic. I don’t want to think about my stomach. Pins and needles shoot through my arms and legs, and I can’t clench my hand: I’ve no energy, no muscle control. ‘Burning up,’ I mumble.

Jenny feels my forehead. ‘He’s bloody freezing. Where’s the doctor, Sam?’ Sam? What the hell’s Sam doing here?

‘How is he?’ I recognise Acu, a local we’ve met over the last few nights. Good man. Not a doctor, though. There’s a crowd around, smart people in smart clothes, looking concerned but spectator-like.

‘Was there blood in his vomit?’ That must be the doctor: well-dressed, young Chinese woman in a pink dress, glasses, stumbling English[1]. The girls think it’s amusing: ‘I wasn’t exactly looking, you know. I’ll check... the bag’s over there, in the bin.’

‘Nothing but chillies and tomatoes, I think.’

Doctor: ‘We should take him into the back. To a bed.’

Sam and Acu, one under each arm, and I’m in a back room while the doctor’s writing something on a pad. ‘Injection, yes, and some pills.’ Oh God, my worst fear: an injection in a dodgy backwater, and the clean needles I’ve carted across the world are back in my hotel.

‘I’ll go with her to check you get the right medicine,’ says Jenny. She’s a pharmacologist, I remember. A piece of sanity to grab onto in this spinning room.

Time passes, voices reappear. ‘Had to get them to find some stock that wasn’t expired,’ says Jenny. ‘Got some.’

The jab goes in. Things start to swing back to normality.

Jenny: ‘The jab is an anti-spasmodic, to stop your body muscles going crazy; your heart’s been palpitating, you’ve had a body chill and this jab will stop the gut wrenches. Then there are antibiotics to kill the infection. I’ve checked the leaflets; they’re strong, but I’m familiar with them all. It’s not a problem.’

And then, mercifully, I slept...

[1] Many thanks to Lina Peters, who kindly emailed me to say that the doctor who helped me is called Dr Terry. So here’s to you, Dr Terry – thanks for your timely jab!

Indonesia: Java

Ujung Pandang to Surabaya

Written: 24 October 1997

Following my sudden illness, I found myself with a bonus recuperation day. There were bananas, biscuits and conversations with a delightful Canadian couple who had moved into Rose’s old room; I hadn’t managed to say goodbye to my American friend, as she’d had to catch her bus while I writhed on the floor, which was a great shame. We’d meant to have a pizza in Ujung Pandang and to swap books when I’d finished the last few pages of mine on the bus – she had a John Irving book, A Prayer for Owen Meany, that I would have loved to read, especially after she described his other books to me – but I didn’t even have an address. Such is life.

Still, I was just happy to be alive, and by the time the bus was ready to leave that evening, I almost felt better, if a little fragile. Jenny and Sarah were on the same bus south, and the journey passed pretty uneventfully, arriving at the bus station at some awful hour in the middle of the night, from where we shared a taxi into town, taking the girls to a dodgy hotel, and me to the docks. I had a boat to catch.

Pelni. Ah, how I missed you! I had no ticket and no idea where to go, but I eventually found a company representative who told me the boat left at 7am, and the Pelni office opened at 8am.

Hang on, run that past me again...

‘So I can’t buy a ticket, then?’ I ventured.

Oh yes I could, from the ticket touts, who are technically illegal, but who work in collaboration with Pelni. I got a ticket for 73,000rp, only 3000rp over the odds, and bustled onto the KM Tidar, bound for the port of Surabaya on the island of Java. I couldn’t believe how easy it was, but then again, the efficient connections you get with Indonesian transport never cease to amaze me, even if the transport itself often leaves something to be desired.

I wasn’t the only one to catch the boat from Sulawesi to Java. Apart from the people – not as many as on the Flores-Sulawesi ferry, I was pleased to find, meaning the toilets worked and there were plenty of free beds – there was half the cockroach population of Indonesia, who decided to settle down in the same corner as me. Every time I rolled over I heard the familiar crunch of cockroach shell, and opening my packet of biscuits[1], I had to shoo the hordes out before they had me out of house and home. I don’t mind cockroaches that much – they die, eventually, just like other insects, and at least they don’t bite – but I’m less keen when they turn up in numbers. And they tickle, which isn’t much fun.

I also found A Prayer for Owen Meany tucked away in my backpack, put there by Rose as she caught her bus south. It brought a tear to my eye, and gave me something good to read as we sailed south. What a kind thought; such are the good parts of solo travel.

[1] After my previous Pelni trip, I took my own food and ate Pop Mie (Pot Noodle to you and me) in the cafeteria. Those biscuits saved my life... eating Pelni food after my last batch of food poisoning would have been fatal.

Surabaya to Yogyakarta

Written: 25 October 1997

In Surabaya I shot straight through from the ferry terminal to the train station, bought my ticket and settled in for the Indonesian train experience. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not quite British Rail.

Some things are the same: the ‘bing-bong-bing-bong’ over the loudspeaker is based on Big Ben’s chime, the station sells overpriced snack foods, and there’s a Dunkin’ Donut in every corner. But in England you would never have men working right above the heads of the crowd, painting the tin roof a silver hue, hanging on by nothing more safety-conscious than a toe curled round a rafter. And in a major station with six platforms, you would definitely have bridges between the platforms; here you just plonk across the tracks, making sure you don’t step in front of an express train. So it goes; when life is cheap, protective measures are expensive.

The train itself was like something from another world. I had an economy ticket – a bargain at 4500rp (about 80p) for a seven-hour journey right across the island – and luckily I managed to get a seat, as the train was originating in Surabaya. This proved fortunate; later on in the journey there would be no seats free, and people would have to stand, or sit on the floor, not unlike the commuter run at home but with much longer travel times. I had worried that seven hours on a train would be boring, but I was wrong, very wrong.

A continuous stream of people wandered down the central aisle, some of them selling food, some of them beggars with bowls and no legs, others busking, but all of them trying to turn a buck, with more joining the train at every station. One young man with his string box and tambourine was so awful at singing that he made a fortune; aware of how infuriating his singing was, he serenaded each booth until he got some money, safe in the knowledge that everyone would pay up, eventually. Then there was the guy with the portable karaoke machine, who was intent on letting the public get their own back on the busker, and there were even some beggars who had expensive clothes and no obvious physical ailments. And talking of clothes, one guy got on with a whole rack of dresses and shirts; he probably had a changing room and a full-length mirror tucked away somewhere, too.

But top of the pile of surreal hawkers was the dictionary man. He wandered along the aisle, selling dictionaries for English into Indonesia. Who on earth is going to buy a dictionary on a train? Imagine my amazement when he walked back down the aisle with an almost empty box; perhaps he’d come across a bunch of people with Bali belly who desperately needed paper. I couldn’t think of any other explanation...

McDonald’s, Indonesian Style

Written: 3 November 1997

I arrived in Yogyakarta to a flourish of westernisation. I found a cheap hotel without too much ado, and after six weeks of forests, valleys, small villages, rice and noodles, I was mesmerised: Yogyakarta has McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, shopping malls, TVs and CD players. These things have been constant companions in my life since the year dot, and after six weeks away from the tourist trail, I was so amazed by their reappearance that it felt like rediscovering technology all over again. It’s a powerful drug, westernisation; I wanted to flash the plastic right there and then, to buy some music, some computer hardware, or some trendy clothes that didn’t look they’d been dragged backwards though the rainforest.

And McDonald’s was there, Ronald holding out his hands just like the tau-tau, enticing the tourists in. For Yogya (pronounced ‘Jogja’) is a tourist town par excellence, and although at first glance it seems that there aren’t that many tourists, look again; there aren’t necessarily that many white tourists, but there are plenty of Indonesians and Malaysians visiting the malls and the junk food stalls.

But it’s not quite the same McDonald’s as we’re used to back home. Java is a Muslim island, and McDonald’s here is halal; it has the halal sign plastered on its food packaging, on its publicity, and on the certificate from the nation’s Islamic leaders that proves that McDonald’s might be lacking in nutrition and redeeming qualities, but at least the meat has been bled properly. Then there are all the differences in the restaurant itself: there’s McDonald’s chilli sauce, which is an essential part of Indonesian cuisine western or otherwise; the McRice meal, an addition to the McRange that I gave a wide McBerth after my recent problems; the area in the centre of the restaurant where the tables and chairs give way to six-inch high tables and floor mats, so people can eat their Big Macs in their favourite manner; the sign above the door that proclaims, in Indonesian, ‘Thank you, please come back tomorrow,’ a rather more optimistic version of the more western ‘Please come again’; the automatic question ‘Do you want ice?’ when you buy a drink, a result of the dangers of drinking iced drinks in a country where the water is dodgy and can only be purified by boiling, not freezing; then there’s the fact that the most popular dish with the locals is chicken, cooked just like Kentucky Fried Chicken – Big Macs come in a poor second; and finally, the large number of staff who are ready to take away your tray, which is noticeable compared to Europe, where labour costs are much higher. But it’s still McDonald’s, with the same taste, the same gut-plugging effect, the same wonderful fries... and all at a price that’s truly Indonesian, with a Big Mac meal going for 6900rp, or about £1.25.

Not that Yogya was just McDonald’s, oh no. On the second night I went to Pizza Hut with four others from our hotel, and I swear that it was one of the most delightful meals I have ever had. Cheese, bread, meat that doesn’t kill you... it was worth paying the western prices for the thrill of the taste sensation. It confirms what I’ve been suspecting for some time; Indonesian food is OK, but sometimes, only comfort food will do.

Yogyakarta

Written: 3 November 1997

Yogyakarta is a famous tourist centre for a number of reasons, but the most impressive – after batik, for which the city is very well known, but which has been exported enough not to be uniquely Yogyakartan any more – are the temples and buildings in the surrounding area. I spent a whole day exploring the Sultan’s Palace, watching some Javanese dancing and examining the batik shops, but this was just a stepping-stone on the way to the two serious sights of the area: Borobudur and Prambanan.

I tackled both temple complexes with the help of Tim and Bjorn, a couple of Belgian reprobates[1] whom I’d met at the hotel, and who had been just as keen to sample the delights of Pizza Hut and McDonald’s as I was. Swiftly proving themselves to be good company, we combined lazing around and cultural tourism in a way that only those with plenty of time and nothing better to do can. The fact that I was to spend a good ten days in Yogya waiting for a package that had never been sent[2] was frustrating, but the Belgian boys made it more than enjoyable.

Cycling in Yogyakarta

The other ‘cultural’ event that we managed to experience in Yogyakarta – putting aside our junk-food visits – was a bicycle trip round the local villages and farms. For a tourist tour it was pretty damn good; Tim, Bjorn, myself, and our local guide headed off on the most astoundingly painful bicycles for a bone-rattling and arse-bruising trip into the paddy fields, and I have to say I learned a lot. Try the following, none of which I knew before cycling round Yogya. I mean, I didn’t even know how rice grew until I took this tour...

- Yes, rice. If you’d asked me before Yogya to tell you all I knew about rice, I would have told you it grows in waterlogged paddy fields, and, err, that’s about it. But does the rice grow in the water or above water level? Does it grow in sheaths, like corncobs, or like wheat, or what? Well, here’s the complete guide to growing rice.

Rice has a three-month growing cycle. Seeds are sown in a soft field by the traditional sower’s-parable method, where they are left for 25 days to form baby shoots. These shoots are then transplanted into a new paddy field, where they are spaced out with 20cm between each shoot, measured using a bamboo stick with notches cut into it.

The field is left for three months. Fertiliser is added in the first month, when the water level is kept high, and the field is allowed to dry up during the second and third months.

By the end of the third month the rice has grown to about three or four feet high, and the seeds are in clusters at the end of the shoots, exactly like wheat or barley.

The rice is then cut down, and the seeds are removed by one of two methods: they are either bashed against wooden planks by energetic young men (the method we witnessed and, indeed, tried for ourselves), or they are stamped on. Whatever the method, the result is bags and bags of light brown seeds, the kernels of which are the traditional grains of rice; at this stage some are put aside to sow into empty fields, starting the process all over again.

The rest of the grains are laid out in the sun to dry for three or more days, depending on the weather; there are concrete slabs all over Indonesia, covered in yellow grains drying in the hot sun. Once dried, the chaff is separated from the kernel by throwing the grain up in the air from a round, flat bowl; the wind blows away the chaff, leaving rice. They sometimes stamp on the dried grains instead to separate the rice out, but it’s a more common sight to see women tossing the grains like tropical versions of the American gold panners.

And that is where we get rice from. Thank you Yogya, for teaching me something that I really should have known in the first place...

- The Pancasila. Ah yes, the Pancasila. On a large sign in every village in Indonesia are the five points of the Pancasila, a kind of creed for the Indonesian Republic, that was first put forward by President Soekarno in 1945, when he fought the Dutch for an end to colonialism. The five points each have a symbol, and they go together with the garuda to make up the main coat of arms of the Pancasila. Believe in it...

- Star: This represents faith in one god. This god can be anyone – Christ, Buddha, Siva, Allah, whoever – as long as it’s not subversive. People like the Torajans, with their animist views, have special permission to worship their idols.

- Chain: The chain ring symbolises humanity, a sign that Indonesia is part of the unity of humankind.

- Banyan Tree: This represents a united Indonesia, a coming together of all ethnic and religious groups into one united country. Incidentally, it’s also the tree under which Buddha achieved enlightenment, but I don’t think that’s relevant to its inclusion in the Pancasila, seeing as Soekarno was a Muslim.

- Buffalo Head: The symbol for democracy, or at least Indonesia’s interpretation of it. It’s a democracy based on village deliberation, a governing of local issues by locals while the government makes all the important, nationwide decisions. Most Indonesians describe their country as a democracy, but this is a semantic subtlety; the government throws elections every few years, but seeing as the ruling Golkar party has the power to choose the opposition party’s policies, leaders and election candidates, the balance is a little one-sided. Combined with Golkar’s control of the media and its huge election resources, it comes as no surprise that President Soeharto tends to get around 70 per cent of the vote every time an election is called, as he has done since he turfed out Soekarno in the 1965 coup. This isn’t a democracy that we would recognise in the West, though things do seem to be changing, albeit slowly.

- Rice and Cotton Stalks: These represent social justice, or that a just society will provide adequate food and clothing for all its people. That presumably doesn’t include all the beggars in the trains...

- The Siskamling is a good example of the people’s part of this democracy in action. In every village, at midnight, ten locals meet in a building called the Poskamling according to a rota, and tour the village, checking for any law-breakers, like thieves or murderers. If they find anything they call the police, but it’s a clever way of taking the onus off the police to be everywhere all the time, and makes the people think they’re responsible for upholding the law; Siskamling means System (sistem) Security (keamanan) Environment (lingkungan). Of course, the people are powerless over the government’s human rights and environmental policies, but nobody seems to complain that much, as presumably the Siskamling would have something to say about that...

- Brick making is a manual process in Indonesia; of course it is, as labour is cheap. Bricks are made from a mixture of clay and water, stuffed into a simple five-brick mould, and turned out onto concrete to dry in the sun for a week. That’s all there is to it, and a good brick maker makes 500 bricks a day, worth 50rp each. Even breeze blocks are made this way: manually.

- Tempe is a local delicacy, made by boiling soya beans for three hours, stamping on them, leaving them overnight, boiling for another three hours, mixing them with yeast and packing them in banana leaves. After exactly three days – no more, no less – the tempe is ready to eat, lightly fried in oil with garlic and salt. It’s actually rather pleasant, but don’t risk eating out-of-date tempe: it goes mouldy like there’s no tomorrow, which will almost certainly be the case if you eat it.

It wasn’t a bad haul for a day’s cycling. We also invaded a school and thrilled a classroom of children with our strange ways – which wasn’t scheduled: Tim and Bjorn just rode into the school and wandered into a classroom – and we saw peanut farms, corn fields, sugar cane, soya bean plants, teak trees, banana trees... and plenty of other weird and wonderful parts of the Indonesian countryside that you wouldn’t spot from a speeding bus.

It was almost worth the sore buttocks, which hurt even more than after the buses in Flores and Sulawesi. Which is saying something.

Fort Vredeburg

The other venue of note in Yogyakarta is Fort Vredeburg in the middle of town. This Dutch colonial fort is pleasant enough for its classic architecture, but more interesting are the three rooms of dioramas depicting the history of the independence movement (a diorama, I discovered, is the name given to a model of an event in time, such as the signing of an important document, or the invasion of a building).

The dioramas are interesting more for what they don’t say than what they do. As should be expected from a dictatorship, the version of the story told in the Vredeburg is, well, rather biased. The first room tells of the early history of Indonesia, from the underhand Dutch capture of the local sultan and his exile to Sulawesi, to the creation of the health service and education system, right up to the beginning of the war. The second room shows the brutality of the Japanese invasion and occupation, and the end of the war. Both these rooms are captioned in both Indonesian and English, and both are reasonably fair.

But the third room is only captioned in Indonesian, and depicts the struggle for independence against the scurrilous Dutchmen and their underhand collaborators. Every Dutch soldier is depicted as mad with blood lust, and every Indonesian as heroic, of course. But I couldn’t help wondering why the captions were solely in a language that most foreigners wouldn’t understand...

[1] Our relationship is probably best summed up by the fact that Tim and Bjorn said they’d buy me two large beers each if I shaved off my beard, so I did. Fickle, vacuous and college-boy stoopid it might have been, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting heartily drunk on my last night in Bali, at someone else’s expense. It seems that if I run out of money, I can always count on my facial hair to bail me out...

[2] My computer had died, and Acorn were kindly sending me a replacement, but it turned out that they couldn’t send it to the Post Restante in Yogyakarta as the parcel company refused to send it to anywhere that didn’t have a phone number. I would have to wait until Singapore to receive the replacement, which was hard to handle for such a technology addict.

Borobudur

Written: 27 October 1997

The temple complex of Borobudur, about 30km northwest of Yogyakarta, contains the biggest single Buddhist temple in the world; there are larger complexes elsewhere, notably in Cambodia, but none of the individual temples themselves are as big as the one at Borobudur. And it’s absolutely massive; covering the top of a hill in a square that’s about 120m by 120m, this huge construction is built in a series of layers, getting progressively smaller as you get to the top; if you think of a square-bottomed pyramid that’s made up of thick layers, you’re not far off. And if the size doesn’t impress you, around each layer is an open corridor, smothered with sculptures and stone reliefs absolutely everywhere you look. It’s stunning.

There are three layers in the temple, representing the three divisions in Buddhist cosmology, namely the world of desires, the transitional sphere, and the sphere of perfection and enlightenment. The idea of Borobudur is that walking through the corridors and layers represents the journey through life, from the world we live in through to enlightenment, and students of Buddhism would walk through the monument as a way of appreciating the philosophy behind their religion. In all honesty, unless you’re a Buddhist expert it’s going be less of a spiritual journey and more of a cultural one, and the subjects of the thousands of reliefs and sculptures will mean precious little... but in the end, that matters little.

For it’s the scale of this whole exercise that’s astounding. The reliefs alone would stretch for three kilometres if laid end to end. There are 1460 individual narrative reliefs and 1212 decorative reliefs. The first layer is covered up by stone walls; they’re not sure why they were covered, but it’s an indication of how Borobudur wasn’t created for show, but for spiritual purposes. The second layer is dominated by 504 statues of Buddha, in various hand poses. The third layer, which is circular rather than rectangular and creates a pleasing aspect at the top of the structure, contains 72 lattice dagobs (stone stupa-shaped constructions that look like large hand-bells), each containing a Buddha statue inside the lattice.

Everywhere you look are more sculptures, statues, stories and dagobs, and you can walk around the whole complex for a considerable time without repeating yourself. The sheer labour involved in building Borobudur is amazing, but little is known about the actual construction, rather like the Pyramids and Stonehenge.

So, Borobudur is astounding; indeed, it’s worth visiting Java for Borobudur alone. Having read about Buddhism and its history and practice, it was good to see some concrete examples of what the Buddhists achieved, architecturally speaking. The most famous Buddhist monuments might be in Cambodia, Thailand and India, but Borobudur is still unique, and the fact that it is a stone’s throw from the amazing Hindu complex of Prambanan is simply icing on the cake.

Even if you’re not interested in Buddhism or the history of religion in Indonesia, Borobudur is still an amazingly atmospheric place to explore. It’s even more incredible to think that until the start of the 20th century, the whole complex was in complete ruins, buried under rainforest and the detritus of volcanic eruptions. Between 1907 and 1911 the Dutch ran a restoration project, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s and early 1980s that the complex was fully rebuilt by UNESCO, leading to World Heritage status in 1991. Hats off to the archaeologists who pieced the puzzle back together; it was well worth the effort.

Prambanan

Written: 30 October 1997

Not far from Borobudur is Prambanan, some 10km east of Yogyakarta. Prambanan is a Hindu temple complex, and as with Borobudur, not that much is known about who built it and when. It’s interesting to note that these two huge complexes are so close together, were built at roughly the same time, and yet are from two completely opposing religions; Buddhists and Hindus don’t agree on a lot of matters, but the chief dispute is about where Buddha came from. Hindus maintain that Buddha is the last reincarnation of Vishnu, after the reincarnations as Rama and Krishna; Buddhists, however, believe Buddha was the Indian Prince Siddhartha, a real person rather than the reincarnation of a Hindu god. Over this difference, the religions fell out.

One answer to the riddle of having opposing religious structures built at the same time is this: around the time that Borobudur and Prambanan were built, there was a marriage in the ruling classes between a Hindu and a Buddhist lineage. This was back in the eighth century AD, but by the 14th century Islam had invaded Java and forced the Hindus and Buddhists into Bali, which is why Bali is predominantly Hindu today. The temples fell into disrepair and a huge eruption by nearby Mt Merapi in the 16th century shook them to the ground, leaving only piles of rubble that were discovered by western invaders and scientists in the early 19th century.

The reconstruction of Borobudur is an astonishing feat, but Prambanan is an even more impressive feat of modern puzzle solving. Whereas Borobudur is a large temple on top of a hill, it’s more wide than high; Prambanan however is more typical of Hindu temples, with the largest temple stretching 47m into the air. The piles of rubble that the archaeologists had to work bore absolutely no relation to temples at all, and having no idea what the finished product should look like, it’s amazing that they were able to rebuild what they have. It took over 35 years to restore the 18 temples that now stand, but there are plenty more in the complex; there are 240 in all, but the money is beginning to dry up for the project, and there are still piles of rock and rubble dotted all around the area.

The 18 temples that have been restored are quite amazing, though. Prambanan has two areas, an outer and an inner, and all the inner temples – 16 of them – have been rebuilt. There are three main temples, three smaller temples in front of these, and a number of smaller ones to complete the symmetry. And as with Borobudur, the stonework is all carved, depicting stories from the Hindu scriptures.

Possibly the most impressive part is that you can walk inside these temples, structures that are held together purely by gravity, not concrete. The biggest temple, that of Siva, contains four rooms with four statues inside, while the others contain one room and one statue (where the status hasn’t been sold or stolen, that is). Here’s a list of the main temples at Prambanan:

- The temple of Siva, the Destroyer: The four-armed Siva – the two back arms destroy, the two front arms rebuild – is husband to Durga (also known as Kali), the woman who is traditionally depicted with many arms. Siva and Durga begat Ganesh, the God of Knowledge, who has an elephant’s head. The statues inside the Siva Temple are of Siva, Durga, Ganesh and Agastya, an incarnation of Siva. In front of the Siva Temple is the temple of Nandi the bull, Siva’s transport.

- The temple of Brahma, the Creator: He has four heads. In front of Brahma’s pad is the temple of the swan, his vehicle.

- The temple of Vishnu, the Protector: Vishnu also has four arms. The temple in front of him is the temple of the garuda, the mythical phoenix-like eagle who crops up all over Indonesia, and after whom the national airline is named.

It’s hard to say which was more amazing, Borobudur or Prambanan. I think that Prambanan is more impressive, visually, but Borobudur is more incredible when you think of the amount of work involved. On the other hand, if all the temples at Prambanan were standing, that would be fairly awesome too...

Whatever, they make modern churches look positively pathetic.

Dieng Plateau

Written: 5 November 1997

The package that I’d already spent a week waiting for in Yogyakarta still hadn’t arrived, despite (or perhaps because of) me visiting the post office every day, so the boys and I decided to make a break from Yogyakarta, for me to get away from the bloody poste restante, and for Bjorn and Tim to do something worthwhile before heading back to the beach in Bali. Our chosen destination was the Dieng Plateau, northwest of Yogya and up in them there hills, if only for the reason that the heat in Yogyakarta is steadily building up, and we fancied a bit of cool, mountain air for a change.

The bus journey to Dieng was long and arduous – at least, it was for Tim and Bjorn, who haven’t quite mastered the survival technique forced onto me by Sulawesi’s crushing buses. Tim was especially unlucky; he managed to get one Indonesian in the last bus who seemed obsessed with putting his hand on Tim’s knee. The Indonesians are a very physical people – it’s common to see young men with their arms around each other, in much the same way that it’s common to see girls holding hands in England – but it still freaks out most westerners to have a local feel your leg or clasp his mitts where the sun doesn’t shine. It scared the hell out of me the first time it happened, too...

Still, the journey was worth it. Way up in the mountains, Dieng certainly gets cold; in winter it even gets frost at night. This might be pleasantly refreshing after the lowlands, where lifting your little toe can bring you out in a sweat, but it does have one disadvantage: the mandi water is so cold that taking a wash is almost unbearable. Tim went for a mandi in Dieng, and his shrieks as the icy water ran down his neck made the local mosque’s loudspeaker broadcasts look positively pathetic. Bjorn and I decided we’d rather smell instead.

Dieng is an ancient volcanic caldera, one that isn’t about to erupt again, but which still provides some interesting thermal areas. The volcanic soil is very fertile, and everywhere you look – on the plains, the hillsides, in the steep valleys – there are fields, but they’re not your usual rice and corn fields: they’re full of potatoes. This makes the price of French fries in the restaurants pleasantly cheap, and the local landscape is quite fascinating. While turquoise and green lakes effervesce with sulphurous fumes, pits of boiling mud bubble and steam vents roar into the clear sky, farmers go about their daily business, planting and harvesting, digging and irrigating. It’s a strange sight.

And stuck in the middle of the plateau, surrounded by fields, are yet more Hindu temples, smaller than their Prambanan counterparts but in a picture-perfect setting. The Candi Arjuna complex, a collection of about five semi-ruined temples, stands in the middle of the plain, and other more solitary temples are dotted around the area. The three of us spent a whole day exploring the Dieng Plateau, though we decided not to bother with the famous sunrise tour – getting up at 3.30am is always a tricky experience to actually pay for – and instead spent the next day making our way back to Yogya, in preparation for the hop to Bali.

And that’s when I found out that my package, for which I had been patiently waiting over 12 days, wasn’t coming in the first place. Oh well, it’s not as if the partying in Yogya was boring...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 12 November 1997

So, that was Indonesia; I’m now in Singapore, getting over my last dose of Indonesian food poisoning, which has proved more obstinate to move than anticipated. And what do I think of my first real Asian experience? I wish I knew.

I can’t decide whether I love or hate Indonesia, which probably means I’m somewhere in the middle. It’s certainly been infuriating, but it’s also been satisfying. It’s been hard work, but it’s been uplifting. It’s been boring, but also exciting. It’s a paradise, but it’s ruined. I’ve had easy travelling, logistically speaking, and very hard travelling, physically speaking. Indonesia is a contradiction. If I think about the bad times, then I’ve hated Indonesia with a passion, for its invasively friendly people, its rammed buses, its unceasing heat, its cultural destruction and its repetitive food. But the good times have been great: Gunung Rinjani, the Bada Valley, the Togian Islands, Tana Toraja, Java’s temples... and the list goes on. So will I go back one day? Probably... but not definitely.

For now, though, I have a more pressing problem. Where do I go next?

Planning for Southeast Asia

Just as I have very little physical baggage left over from the good old days of London smog, I have precious little emotional baggage too. If you’d asked me two years ago whether I’d like to visit Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, India and Nepal, I’d have jumped up, kissed you and screamed, ‘What do you think?’ Now, faced with the glorious choice of where to spend the next eight months – which can be anywhere, as long as I end up in Delhi for my flight home – I’m a bit stumped.

Why? One reason, and one I can’t ignore, is the health aspect. Travelling’s not a lot of fun when you’re passing out in restaurants, rushing off to the toilet at every opportunity and burning a temperature; and, possibly worse, any illness brings you down psychologically, and that lasts a lot longer than the physical effect. I spent an awful lot of my time in Indonesia under a cloud of illness and lack of energy, which can’t have helped the experience. Is the rest of Southeast Asia going to be the same?

I have met plenty of people who have come through Asia the other way. The impression I get from them[1] is that Singapore has no soul, Malaysia is too Muslim, Thailand is touristy, Laos is lovely, Vietnam is very easy travelling, Cambodia is carnage, and Myanmar is magnificent... but India and Nepal are in a totally different league, especially if you’re into trekking. So do I spend time in countries that might potentially disappoint, or do I go straight for the jugular and head straight for the Indian subcontinent? Or do I explore the rest of Southeast Asia first, no doubt finding some wonderful places and experiences, but gambling away time that I could be spending in a guaranteed hotspot like the Himalayas?

One thing’s for sure: after this long on the road, very little surprises me and very little makes my jaw hit the ground, and that’s a concern. So a third possibility would be to go home, save the cash, work for a while, and then get back into the travelling, all fresh and keen. But this assumes two things: that I’ll want to travel again after I get back home, and that I want to go home this early in the first place. I don’t think either of these things is particularly applicable.

So here’s my plan[2]. In total accordance with the Asian inability to make decisions, I’ll play it by ear. I’ll float into Malaysia and check it out, then I’ll make my way up to Bangkok somehow – either by flying from Singapore, or by going overland – and make a decision there. I have to buy a flight to India at some stage, as the land borders of Myanmar are firmly closed; Bangkok is the best place in the region for buying flights, so it makes sense to make my decision then. Most likely I’ll be casting around for ideas in Thailand, too; I suspect the heat is affecting my ability to plan properly.

Having the world at your fingertips has never been so confusing. Still, it could be worse. I could be working for a living...

[1] Impressions that were not that accurate; Singapore does have a soul and Malaysia is a delight, but Thailand was indeed too touristy for me. I didn’t make it to the rest of Southeast Asia, so I can’t comment on Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia or Myanmar, but the other travellers were right about one thing: India and Nepal are definitely in a different league.

[2] You can find out which route I eventually took in the My Travels section.

Singapore: Singapore

Singapore City

Written: 22 November 1997

What seems like a long time ago, my sister visited Singapore. I remember thinking how brave this was, and my mind conjured up images of sparkling skyscrapers catching the equatorial sun, Chinese lanterns hanging in the streets, and junks lapping in the harbour. I imagined Singapore to be like Hong Kong, with its distinctive smells, immense crowds and tiny people... and I was almost completely wrong.

Singapore is just another city. It has neither the insane appeal of Hong Kong or, from what I gather, Bangkok; it’s much more a western city than an Asian[1] one, and feels no different from big Australian cities. I would say that it’s no different from most European and American cities, but Singapore has almost no historical feeling to it, as most of the old buildings have long been razed to the ground to make way for skyscrapers, and even those still standing are pretty modern, in the great scheme of things.

So is Singapore a city with no soul, as its critics have been heard to say? That’s not so easy to answer; arriving from Indonesia, Singapore’s soul reached out and mesmerized me, right from my arrival at the sprawling metropolis of Changi Airport. As the taxi sped through sparkling lights towards the skyline of glowing skyscrapers and huge neon signs, the taxi driver told me about his workaholic brother who didn’t take a holiday for three years, took his accrued time off in one go, and after a week was back at the office, working during his holiday because he didn’t have a life outside of the office. This was more than a little hard to imagine after the astoundingly lackadaisical world of Indonesia.

I was staying with a friend – Philip, an investment banker, a showman, an excellent host, a city socialite, a work-hard-play-hard go-getter and an entertaining conversationalist rolled into one – and because he was only going to be there for one night before shooting off to Bangkok, we hit the town. It almost proved too much. Real beer, yuppie pubs, a late night and high-powered people with brains... the tentacles of western civilisation reached out for me with its promises of a better life and solutions for all. I had visions of what this short but sweet visit to Singapore might offer me: hot showers, a kitchen in which I could cook, supermarkets[2], phones that didn’t crackle and hiss, pizzas and burgers... my pupils were probably dilated with the opiate of Singapore.

The effect of seductive Singapore lasted well into the next day, despite my waking up with Indonesia’s parting gift; yes, you guessed it, I left Bali with a few extra friends living in my stomach, and it took about five days to shift the bastards and get my temperature down to normal. I simply wandered around, shamelessly gawping at the scenery.

And it rained![3] I’d forgotten what it was like to be soaked by nature; the last rain I remembered had been in the Bada Valley towards the end of the trek with Peter. It was simply wonderful, cleaning the air, removing the humidity, reducing the famed haze to almost nothing. I was truly in the Promised Land, and then I realised; for the first time in 25 months I was back in the northern hemisphere, my home. Perhaps Singapore was putting on a special English weather pattern to welcome me back into the bosom of the north, where a northerly wind is cold, where the sun is in the south, and where the constellations are those of the ancient civilisations[4].

Exploring Singapore

Singapore has a smell, too; it smells of perfume. If you’re in one of the millions of immaculately manicured parks dotted between the high-rises, the smell of flowers permeates the air; maybe the gardeners, of which there are many (most of Indian descent), spray the flowers with scent, but I’ve never experienced a city’s gardens in such an olfactory way before. And if you’re walking down the street, well away from the parks, the smell is of Opium, Escape, Kouros, Obsession... it’s like a nasal trip through the pages of Vogue. The result is a city that smells divine, and reeks of expense.

For Singapore is a monument to money and capitalism. Every sign and advert is in the language of business, English, and everyone speaks English too (or, at the very least, the local version of English, known as Singlish, in which ‘chequebook’ becomes ‘che-boo’, ‘last week’ becomes ‘las-wee’ and so on). The money is printed in English. The street names are in English. I presume the meetings held on the executive floors of those sparklingly phallic tower blocks are in English. There are half a million ex-pats living in Singapore – an astounding number when you consider the entire population of Singapore is a little over three million – and the whole place reflects this. If I had visited Singapore straight from England without first having explored the multiculturalism of Australia, the European-Polynesian confluence of the Tuamotus, or the insanity of Indonesia, I would no doubt have been bowled over by the Asian character of Singapore; but having come straight from the jugular, so to speak, Singapore appears to be so different from the rest of its region that it’s hard to think of it as Asian. It’s Ameropean, Euramerican or some other disgusting nouveau-word; it’s not soulless, it’s just an amalgam, and as with all amalgams, some things get lost in the mix.

The high standard of Singaporean technology is also to blame for hiding the city’s character behind closed doors. It’s those closed doors that drive home the difference between the plastic world of Singapore’s offices and the harsh reality of equatorial life; if you walk past an office block just as the next stock market guru is bursting through the automatic doors, the rush of chilled air that blasts out is intense. Air conditioning is a way of life in Singapore – not a bad thing when the average temperature at this time of year is 35 degrees with 90 per cent humidity – but being blasted by office blocks is a novel experience. You’ve got to be careful if it happens when there’s a crowd about; I swear that if I’d bumped into someone as they strolled out of an office I’d have shattered them into lots of tiny pieces. It really is that cold.

And the crowds are guaranteed at lunchtime. Standing outside an office block at 12.30pm is fatal; millions of clean-suited and perfumed people suddenly appear, whisked by on a breath of frozen oxygen, all heading for the local food market, clogging up the pedestrian crossings and pavements in a crowd scene that makes the London Marathon look like a few old ladies out for an evening stroll. It only lasts for a couple of seconds, but it’s more destructive than a plague of locusts.

Law and Order

Of course, if this were London or New York, the crowd would disperse into the jammed traffic, spreading out like ink in water. But Singapore is the law and order capital of the world, where jaywalking is just one of millions of offences that will get you a hefty fine; being arrested for jaywalking in the West is simply unlucky, but in Singapore there are even signs everywhere, warning you not to cross the road outside of the glare of the little green man. Other heinous crimes include importing chewing gum (which is illegal in Singapore, though individual possession isn’t an offence), not flushing public toilets, smoking just about anywhere and criticising the government. The result is a wonderfully clean, fresh and clinical city, populated by people who are treated like children.

You know that feeling in the pit of the stomach when you’re at a wedding and the priest says, ‘Speak now, or forever hold your peace,’ and you think, ‘I wonder what would happen if I stood up and said something?’ Or when you’re in a meeting with your boss, and you think to yourself, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I stood up and told him exactly what we all think of him?’ Well, I kept getting the same feeling when walking round Singapore, except my thoughts were more along the lines of ‘I wonder what would happen if I crossed the street right here?’ or ‘I wonder what they’d do if I didn’t flush’. It quite unnerved me to be in a city where passing wind in a public place probably contravenes the Health Regulation Code of 1987, Appendix C Subsection III. No wonder everyone suffers from executive stress.

It is a peaceful and relaxing place, though, despite the draconian government and its desire to make sure everyone is safe and happy – by decree. I was able to realise my dream of the last two months, to sit in parks undisturbed, able to type up my travelogue, read a book or just snooze. Indeed, in the whole time I was in Singapore I was approached by just one chatty local, who turned out to be a well-educated, well-travelled and interesting man, speaking fluent English, French and Mandarin; our conversation was only terminated because the heavens opened. What a difference from Indonesia!

Love or Hate?

But is this place a Utopian paradise or an Orwellian nightmare? Damned if I know, but I do know that in this modern-as-tomorrow city, not everything’s as ultra-futuristic as it might first appear. For example, at the supermarket you still have to weigh your fruit and vegetables at a separate counter, as the checkouts don’t have scales; I thought this had gone out with Fred Flintstone. And neither the supermarket nor the post office would accept credit cards, unlike almost everywhere else in the city that leapt on plastic like a hungry dog does a bone; I had to cash an extra travellers cheque to mail off my photographs.

And then there are the stories of the government that go beyond belief. The birth control programme introduced in the early 1970s was so effective that it had to be reversed, and now there are tax incentives for families to have three children, and adverts everywhere about how wonderful families are; it seems too many Singaporeans are caught up in office life to appreciate that there’s a world out there. Then there was the government’s statement that they are actively seeking more people from abroad to reside in Singapore, because the current younger generation is too damn lazy to push Singapore into the next century; they’ve grown up with everything, and have no reason to struggle like their parents and grandparents had to.

The talented and driven members of the younger generation aren’t that interested in staying in Singapore either, an understandable attitude, and they have the skills to bugger off, so Singapore needs to bring in foreigners to help it continue to be a success. And this true story has to be the best summary of Singapore’s attitude towards life; when asked to comment on what he thought of the fact that some foreigners found Singapore dull, the Minister for Finance and Foreign Affairs, George Yeo, said, ‘We have to pursue this subject of fun very seriously if we want to stay competitive in the 21st century’. Doh!

Still, I found Singapore to be an addictive drug, in the same way that an easy life in London was addictive until I left. Cable television, a fridge, air conditioning, swimming pool, nearby shopping malls (millions of them), peaceful parks, no language barrier... it’s easy to understand why it was hard to break away in the end. Indeed, the company was excellent, and although I’d planned to spend only a few days hanging round the parks and malls, I ended up staying for 12 days, 12 days of sheer bliss.

For example, one Friday night I hit the town with Rebecca (Philip’s flatmate) and her boyfriend Daniel; Rebecca, a 6 ft-something stunner from Australia, had proved to be wonderful company through the week (on the few occasions that she wasn’t staying round Daniel’s), and Daniel, the proprietor of a local bar/restaurant called Brewerkz, was a scholar and a gentleman. I’d forgotten how mesmeric intellectual conversation could be, and Friday night – supposedly a quick meal and maybe a beer, seeing as Rebecca was suffering from exhaustion[5] – turned into a huge meal, copious beers and back-home-somewhere-around-3.30am night. I enjoyed every lip-smacking second of it, not least because Brewerkz makes its own beer on the premises, and it’s quite superb.

Saturday night saw Philip and I hit the town for a curry and a couple of beers, in a little restaurant situated right on the Singapore River in the area known as Boat Quay. A hundred yards away are the skyscrapers of the Central Business District, over the river is the first landing point of Sir Stamford Raffles – the British Governor who is regarded as the father of modern Singapore – and milling round the quay is the most wonderful collection of people you’re ever likely to see: ex-pats, tourists and locals of all sorts of nationalities; suits, shorts and T-shirts; young people, old people... as an exercise in multiculturalism, Singapore excels.

[1] You’ll often see the countries in this part of the world referred to as ASEAN, rather than Asian. ASEAN stands for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, namely Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, so these are all Asean countries. Asian is too broad an area to be useful, so you’ll often see this acronym used to refer to the Southeast Asian area.

[2] Yes, Singapore has plenty of supermarkets whose aisles stretch so far that when you look down them, you can see the curvature of the earth. I feel no shame when I tell you I happily spent hours staring at things like loaves of bread, packaged meat, frozen peas and chips, milk cartons, apples and oranges... and one joyous night I was shopping in the Cold Storage supermarket, and I spotted something on special offer: Heinz Baked Beans. That night, I made some toast, heated up the beans, cracked a can of Coke and sat down to the culinary equivalent of sex. As I shovelled the beans in and tomato sauce dribbled down my bristly chin, I realised that I had unwittingly discovered where advertising agencies get all those plonkers who appear on TV commercials, sitting at the breakfast table and eating Kellogg’s new Krispy Coco Frosty Bix, faces lighting up the instant the food hits the mouth, regardless of the fact that the brain can’t have processed the taste sensation yet; the sort of people who glare wide-eyed into the lens and say things like, ‘All this taste... and it’s healthy too!’ All the agencies do is find people who have been stuck in bloody Indonesia for two months; my face as the beans slid down was a picture, and I could have sworn I kept making those little whooping noises, the ones you make when you finally get to have that piss that’s been bursting your bladder for hours.

[3] It’s the monsoon season now and the rains, which might only last for an hour or so each day, are spectacularly heavy, often accompanied by thunder and lightning. One memorable time I was returning from a sodden wander through Fort Canning park, only to discover that the drainage system simply couldn’t cope with the sudden downpour, and muddy water was gushing right down the main street, desperately trying to find a river to flow into. It was quite a sight; the buildings are so modern they’ve got amazingly efficient water-shedding systems, channelling all the rain that lands on them into specially designed drains that take the water down to street level in super-quick time, making sure that not a drop ends up on a veranda or – heaven forbid – inside any of the condos. Unfortunately some of the condo designers forgot to connect the drains to anything downstairs, and in some areas the water simply pours out onto the pavement; in a storm, that’s a hell of a lot of water crashing down onto the pedestrians, who are already pissed off enough by the buses and trucks splashing them from the other side. It’s one of the few design faults I found in Singapore, but I doubt anyone else knows about it; they’re all probably inside, sitting in moisture-free controlled environments, with virtual fires and computer screens showing sunny beaches. Bastards.

[4] Even if the southern hemisphere has far more stars and is a much more impressive sight, there’s nothing quite like seeing Orion rising in a cold, clear European night sky. In my very humble opinion, anyway...

[5] Singapore is full of stressed executives. Rebecca, in her job for a huge multi-national accountancy firm, had just completed something like thirteen consecutive days at work, during which she’d had to have an operation to remove samples of her stomach lining to discover the cause of her latest acquisition, a stomach ulcer. Philip had just spent nine days in Bangkok and Beijing, staying up until the wee hours to prepare presentations and meetings. Rebecca had to take Friday off work, because she felt absolutely terrible; Philip slept until 3pm on Saturday. It made me appreciate travelling more than usual...

A Day at the Golf Course

Written: 23 November 1997

We cut our Saturday night hedonism off before it got out of hand, because we had plans for Sunday: namely, golf. Philip had decided that he needed some fresh air after the city pollution of his business trip to Bangkok and Beijing, and golf was his chosen solution; it so happened that a colleague of his was also playing golf with a friend at his club, so we all teamed up to make a foursome, Philip saying that it was his treat, and that I would owe him a round of golf if he ever made it back to England. We set off on the 8.30am ferry to Bintan Island, home to a resort and three golf courses for which the brochures looked not only professional, they positively glittered; I was about to experience a side of ex-pat life that was not just well beyond my budget, but well beyond my lifestyle even when I did have a job. Good old Philip.

Andy and Chris, the other two in our foursome, shone on the golf course. Philip held his own. I stank. Actually, my game did improve as we progressed, and Philip began to show his true colours with shots landing in the impenetrable rough and the copious lakes... between us we lost sixteen balls in eighteen holes, a fairly good record, especially as I have never experienced such anti-social rough. I have no idea what it was made of, but once it had your ball, it kept it. As per usual, if you looked for long enough you’d probably find someone else’s ball – every time emblazoned with a company logo, making me wonder if employees didn’t lose their balls on purpose as a sort of subtle advertising campaign – but once you hit the rough, your ball was lost, end of story. On one hole I casually mentioned that that piece of rough over there, on the cusp, was almost definitely going to get my ball, and funnily enough it did; henceforth the rough was known as ‘the cusp’ to all and sundry, a word on a par with ‘Thatcher’ for in-built phonetic venom. I hit the cusp a lot, and so, therefore, did my caddy, who helped with the search (we had two local lady caddies allocated to our foursome, who handed us clubs, polished the balls, raked the bunkers we kept landing in, and generally made us feel like royalty). She didn’t find many of my wayward shots, but on one memorable occasion on the 14th hole she did find a snake lurking in the undergrowth. Indonesian rough really is a hazard.

But however the scoring went – and that’s never the important part, especially when you don’t mark down the scores, as Philip and I made sure we didn’t – the setting was immaculate, with glittering seas, manicured greens, perfect sand-traps and blissful weather. I almost couldn’t believe that Bintan is in Indonesia; when we landed on the island, we had to go through immigration and customs (or, rather, slick versions created to ease the golfing business) and I found myself the proud owner of another 60-day visa. Not surprisingly, I didn’t opt to hang around in Indonesia any longer than the one day, but it felt rather good to be able to converse in Indonesian with the girls in the pro shop, the waiters at the bar, and the towel man at the pool; the others were most impressed.

After the game, the lap of luxury well and truly grabbed me and plonked me on its knee. We drank beer by the pool, we swam among high budget holidaymakers, we ate classy junk food in the hotel, and a little voice in my head reminded me that, not that long ago, this was the stuff of my life. I swatted it quicker than a mosquito on my thigh; given the insane work ethic of Singapore, you sometimes have to earn luxuries like golf clubs by sacrificing your freedom, and while it might be wonderful playing golf in the tropical sun, I’m not entirely sure it’s worth burning yourself out for the pleasure.

Though ask me again after another of these ice-cold beers...

Malaysia: Southern Malaysia

Pre-Malaysian Apathy

Written: 24 November 1997

After 12 days of luxury in Singapore, I finally pulled myself out of my relaxed stupor and hopped on the bus to Johor Bahru. Before I’d had time to blink the lethargy from my eyes I’d left the city behind, and taken the bus over the Causeway and into Malaysia.

Planning a trip through Malaysia isn’t that easy; at least, it’s not easy when you’re sitting in a penthouse suite in Singapore, with the TV and hi-fi within infra-red range, the fridge bristling with beer, and the contents of your backpack finally clean and drying on the line. Never before have I read a guidebook and been so utterly uninspired.

Take this description of the Perhentian Islands, a gorgeous spot off the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia: ‘As far as things to “see and do” go, it’s a simple case of lazing around watching the coconuts fall.’ No! The book is full of stuff like this, places that would have sounded like paradise to me two years ago, but which sound pretty dull now. Have I lost the point?

Or how about the Cameron Highlands, one of the most popular backpacker spots in Malaysia? ‘Jungle walks are the thing to do here...’ it says. Bloody jungle! If I never see jungle again, I shan’t be sorry[1]. From my scouring of the book, Peninsula Malaysia has nothing I particularly want to see, and eastern Malaysia is still full of smoke from Kalimantan. This doesn’t look good[2].

So do I skip a whole country because it sounds boring? Of course not, but I won’t hang around if it turns out to be as mundane as it sounds. The man I met in the Singaporean park said Malaysia was pretty much exactly the same as Indonesia; if that’s the case, I’ll go through Malaysia faster than a Bali burger goes through an Englishman.

Something else bugs me, too. I look ahead, and whatever my plans, I feel apathy. Travelling – at least at the moment – has lost its sparkle; this nagging feeling started halfway through Indonesia, but it hasn’t evaporated like most chemical depressions. So what on earth has happened? I think it’s this: I now know I can cope with anything, go anywhere, explore any part of the country, survive in forest, desert, ocean, mountain and river, cope with cultural challenges, language barriers, health problems and sourcing money... so what else is left?

The housebound of you will answer, ‘The travelling is left; now you’ve got an experience where you don’t have to worry about the logistics, because you know you’ll cope, so just go out and enjoy it, you self-indulgent whinger!’ So why do I keep thinking that I can’t be bothered, that it’s all a little bit too much effort to go and see Malaysia, Thailand and so on? Not for the first time in my life I’m at a total loss; my alternative lifestyle from the last two years is becoming normal, everyday, almost mundane. It’s no longer a challenge, and this is exactly why I left my job in the first place. Am I destined to have to screw up my life every two years just to keep the variety intact? I hope not...

One thing that does keep me going is reading other travelogues, though. For example, I spent some of my Singapore trip reading Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent, one of the few books in this world that actually makes me laugh out loud. When I read book reviews that contain lines like ‘tears ran down my face’ I normally squirm at the blatant lie, but seriously, I laughed out loud at The Lost Continent. Buy it: it’s a hoot. I’d love to write something that good... and to do that, I have to keep on going, I guess.

[1] I wrote this paragraph before deciding to spend a week in the central jungle of Peninsula Malaysia, which would turn out to be a highlight. Funnily enough, after that week I vowed never to go on a rainforest trek again; the lack of views, the hard going and the astounding selection of creepy-crawlies is enough to wear down any resolve. I also remember making the same comment after leaving Fiordland, and Hinchinbrook and Fraser Island all came complete with rainforest... and, of course, I’ve happily ended up in the forest a number of times since. I obviously don’t listen to myself a great deal, which is clearly a good thing.

[2] I wrote this article on the way into Malaysia. I ended up loving Malaysia to bits, of course, which just goes to show that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, or a country by the guidebook.

Melaka

Written: 27 November 1997

I’d incorrectly assumed that Malaysia would be like Indonesia; after all, they’re geographically close, they’re both predominantly Islamic, and they both have dictatorial leaders. So I wasn’t prepared for the fact that Malaysia is a totally different travelling experience from Indonesia.

Malaysia is an advanced nation. It’s not as advanced as Singapore, which has managed to make advancement a clinical science, but Malaysia is instantly a step up from Indonesia. The shops have fixed prices on their goods; transport costs are fixed and the ticket touts don’t inflate them; everyone, absolutely everyone, either speaks English or knows someone who does; the roads are wide, multi-lane and efficient; the food is clean, wonderfully varied and inexpensive; the tap water is drinkable; you don’t get mobbed by people everywhere you go; and tourists are not a source of amazement and intrigue, they’re just accepted and pretty much ignored. I was astounded.

In fact the only example I could find of Indonesian insanity in Malaysia was with the labelling on cigarettes. Malaysian cigarette packets are labelled with the amount of nicotine and tar in each smoke, much as in Europe and America; in Indonesia they don’t even bother to tell you, or to distinguish between high tar or low tar. However, every single packet in Malaysia claims to contain cigarettes with 20mg of tar and 1.5mg of nicotine, putting them in the very high tar bracket, irrespective of the actual strength; for example, Marlboro are labelled 20mg and 1.5mg, and Marlboro Lights – that come with the caption ‘Lowered tar and nicotine’ – still weigh in at 20mg and 1.5mg. So are the figures intentionally misleading? In a sense they are, because Malaysian law dictates that packets should list the maximum possible figures for tar and nicotine for all cigarettes, irrespective of which cigarettes the figures are talking about. I suppose it’s better than no warnings at all, but it’s still a bit odd.

I was so blown away by the unexpected modernity of Malaysia that for the first few days I couldn’t help pointing out to everyone I met that it was so quiet, so easy and so civilised here; Malaysia looks like it’s going to be a halfway house between Indonesia and Singapore, with Singaporean civilisation and Indonesian pricing. I didn’t waste any time in going for the cultural jugular, hopping on a bus from Johor straight to Melaka, the famous historical port on the west coast of Peninsula Malaysia. As the air-conditioned bus sped along the superhighway, with ample seat space and very few other passengers, I figured that life was going to be a lot better than the guidebooks had made out. I think Malaysia is going to be fun.

Melakan Culture

Melaka is steeped in history and is one of the best examples of multicultural colonialism in existence. In its long and distinguished career the port has been inhabited in turn by the original indigenous people; by Prince Parameswara, who settled in Melaka in 1389, setting it up as an important port and starting the long line of Malay Sultans; by the Portuguese, who captured it in 1511 from the sultans but totally failed to capitalise on its potential as a port; by the Dutch, who captured it in 1641 and still totally failed to capitalise on its potential; by the British, who took control of it for the Dutch in 1795 during the French occupation of the Netherlands, and who retained it permanently in 1824 along with Singapore and India, in exchange for letting the Dutch keep Indonesia; by the Japanese who occupied it in World War II between 1941 and 1945; by the British again, after the war; and finally in 1957 by Malaya (now called Peninsular Malaysia) when the British handed the area back to its rightful owners as part of independence. Every change of owner was bloody, except the first, the Dutch-to-British change and the last, and a lot of the historical sites and sights are remnants of fortifications or ruins of churches destroyed in the conflicts. It seeps colonial atmosphere.

I spent my first day in Melaka exploring the museums and cultural oddities of this delightful place. I was reminded of one of the Germans I met in the Togian Islands – one of the pitcher plant enthusiasts – who kept banging on about the ‘steamroller effect’ of Islam, a force that was destroying Indonesian culture in the same way that it had already destroyed Malaysian culture, according to his observations. At the time I didn’t have enough information to agree or disagree with him, but it’s certainly true that Islam is extremely influential. Exploring Melaka showed me both sides to the argument.

There is no doubt that the historical aspects of Melaka haven’t been swept away by the arrival of Islam. They are actively pushed as tourist attractions, and the major museums are excellent. On the other hand, the exhibits that pertain to Muslim life in Melaka do come across as something of a shock to those who may not be familiar with the ways of Islam, probably because your average westerner isn’t exposed to the details of Islam that much, and ignorance is a terrible interpreter.

Marriage and the Stadhuys Museum

In the Stadhuys Museum in Melaka, there is a very informative display about Islamic marriage in the Melaka area. I couldn’t resist copying it down, because some of the things it says appear completely bizarre to someone used to a western version of marriage. In Indonesia I found myself wondering why some of the women hide every inch of flesh under head scarves and full-length burqas – a custom that seems like a cruel torment in a climate that can fry eggs on the sidewalk – but the Melaka museum display on marriage is even more intriguing. Here’s my attempt at a summary:

- The process starts when the parents of a boy decide that it’s time he married, and they put out their feelers to look for a suitable girl (this is, interestingly, a different way round to some other religions that practice arranged marriages, when it’s up to the mother of the girl to find a suitable boy).

- When a potential bride is found, the boy’s parents visit the girl to see if she has the correct manners, looks and so on, and if they reckon she’s a good ’un, the two sets of parents agree on a suitable dowry.

- The agreement is ratified by the payment of half the dowry from the girl’s parents to the boy’s, but here’s the catch: if the groom decides to back out, the dowry deposit is considered lost and the groom’s family keeps it, but if the bride backs out, then the bride’s family has to pay the groom’s family twice the dowry as compensation.

- When the couple actually marry, the holy oath and vows are made just between the men: the groom, the Imam (holy leader) and male attendees from the wedding party. The bride has nothing to do with it; she gets married in absentia, as it were.

- This ceremony is followed by the formality of giving the ring, where the bride actually gets to meet the man she’s already been married to. Then follows the celebration – alcohol free, if you’re a particularly keen Muslim – and they live happily ever after. By decree.

It’s a far cry from the comparatively equal concept of western marriage, and it does seem to be heavily weighted in favour of the groom and his family, which is a bit difficult to swallow for a liberal like me. Indeed, when I read the following in the museum’s diorama display on the history of Melaka, it didn’t surprise me to see the wording that they chose to use: ‘Melaka joined Islam in 1414... and the laws and prohibitions of Islam were implemented in 1424 when Parameswara’s son, Sultan Mohammad Shah, took over after his father’s death.’ Prohibitions? After reading about marriage in the Stadhuys, this word feels particularly apt. I just hope that it’s my lack of upbringing as a Muslim that makes me raise an eyebrow or two at the difference between Malaysian marriage and western marriage; after all, you can’t judge an entire culture based on one museum display.

Other Sights of Melaka

I spent another couple of days just wandering round, thoroughly enjoying the feeling of history and cultural significance, and marvelling at the sights of modern Malaysia. I visited the Stadhuys – the Dutch-era town hall – and its museum, where I not only read a complete history of Melaka, I also discovered the correct terms for rice harvesting. You ‘thresh’ the rice to remove the grains from the mature stalks, and ‘winnowing’ is the name of the method of throwing the dried grains into the air to remove the husk. Now I can talk to any rice farmers I meet with confidence.

I climbed the main hill in Melaka to the ruins of St Paul’s Church, I checked out the Porta de Santiago (about the only relic still standing from the original Portuguese fortifications), I ate a delicious curry for lunch, I bought exotic fruits at the market, and I did all those things I enjoyed doing in Indonesia but without the hassle. I felt quite light-headed with the effortless way you can glide through the streets here, sampling the environment without losing your cool; it was utter bliss.

One of the more interesting places I visited was Bukit China in the western part of Melaka. Bukit China is a hill that’s smothered by 12,000 Chinese graves, most of which are in such a state of disrepair that it’s impossible to tell who’s buried there. Covering 25 hectares (about 62 acres) the hill not only contains huge numbers of traditional Chinese graves, with their extravagant surrounding walls and elaborate gravestones, but it also provides a good view of Melaka itself, with its famous but polluted seaways, and ancient and cramped road system. The inscriptions on the graves are interesting too, or at least those that you can make out, and some are even in Roman characters. One of them had two people’s names on it, a man and a woman, but only the man had dates next to his name; the woman’s dates were left blank, presumably because she hadn’t died yet. That would freak me out a bit; imagine seeing your own gravestone every time you visited your husband’s grave, just waiting for those dates to be filled in. Sounds like something out of A Christmas Carol.

Old Melaka, with its side streets, temples and antique shops tucked into a bend in the Melaka River, is also a delight to walk around, and it gave me a good chance to join in with a local custom: using an umbrella even though it’s not raining. Until I’ve trusted my bush hat to stop the ultra-violet from destroying the back of my neck, but an umbrella is even more effective and is rather cooler in the heat; I felt terribly English strolling round Old Melaka with my umbrella unfurled, but I’m now a convert, and it doesn’t look weird in Malaysia, because everybody’s doing it. I have to rate my brolly as the most useful travel item after my computer; don’t leave home without one.

Malaysian Politics

Written: 27 November 1997

Malaysia is not dissimilar to Indonesia and Singapore in that all these countries have long-serving, non-elected leaders who tend to stick around until they’re almost dead, before passing the reins of power onto a well-groomed deputy. There are elections here, as in Indonesia, but the National Front party, dominated by the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) majority faction, has held power continuously since independence in 1957, and the opposition has all but disappeared. Malaysia is a one-party democracy, and it doesn’t look as if this is going to change any time soon.

The current Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, has been in power since 1981, which is even more impressive when you consider that the UMNO expelled him from the party back in 1969. His deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, is much more liberal, but there’s no sign of Mahathir stepping down yet[1]. This has produced an environment where the leader does pretty much what he wants.

To the outsider, the most obvious effect of this democratic dictatorship is the proliferation of anti-western propaganda. Dr Mahathir, in his personal support of Islam, has to tread a fine line between keeping the Muslim fundamentalists happy, with their calls for a ban on alcohol, gambling, snappy dressing and having a good time, and the Chinese, who make lots of money and gamble like crazy (not to mention the fact that they eat pork, something that Islam bans). A common bond between the Islam of the Malays and the neo-Confucianism of the Chinese is a hatred of the West, even if Mahathir isn’t that keen on admitting that the Chinese are in the same boat as his own Malay people.

Of course, anti-western propaganda is often hypocritical. Singapore is a good example of a country that accepts the West and flourishes; Mahathir, however, blames almost everything on the Americans, claiming in his book The Voice of Asia that ‘western societies are riddled with single-parent families, which foster incest, with homosexuality, with cohabitation, with unrestrained avarice, with disrespect for others and, of course, rejection of religious teachings and values.’ I haven’t read anything like this since studying Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale in school; Mahathir’s vision of Asian Values, as he calls them, are that Asians are hard-working family people who are morally sound, religious and good at making money, and that the West is simply the opposite. Of course, neither of these stereotypes is accurate; stereotypes never are.

So in Malaysia, examples of Mahathir’s opinions abound, from the media to the political stage. Take this poem that was published in The New Straits Times on Wednesday 26th November 1997, on the ‘Young Times’ page, a page aimed at young people:

American-ology

by Wan Imran Wan Chik

America here, America there,

America seems to be almost everywhere,

Sticking their noses into other countries’ affairs,

Right down until your very own underwear,

’Cause they think that this whole world is theirs.

A modern country but with uncivilised people,

Infecting the world with their lifestyles and ideology,

They live without tradition or moral values, making everything look so very simple,

Invading the world through weapons of psychology,

By creating their utopia called Americanology.

‘A’ serious effect upon the Earth’s ecology,

Making fewer friends and more and more enemies,

By disrupting other countries’ peaceful economy,

Without saying ‘Excuse me!’ or ‘I owe you an apology!’

Advanced in space travel and in astronomy,

Creators of nuclear bombs and war technology,

Heroes only in movies, novels and short stories,

’Cause every last American President needs a lobotomy.

America is a hero only to fools’ eyes,

It is a villain wearing a disguise,

Plaguing the world by telling lies,

Only to be seen by leaders who are wise,

Leaders who listen to their nations’ cries.

For those who are foolish America’s price they will pay,

To become an uncivilised country but modern in every way,

By gambling their future to be modern and richer today,

As social problems would grow each and every day,

And the countries’ identity, cultural and traditional heritage would just seem to fade away,

Which is the only defence against America which has gone far astray.

Pretty full on, isn’t it? To complete the picture, Malaysia practises positive discrimination against non-Malays, which has caused considerable issues in the past. When Malaysia was first set up in 1957 following the departure of the British, it was going to be made up of Malaya (now called Peninsular Malaysia), Sabah, Sarawak, Singapore and Brunei. At the last minute Brunei pulled out to protect its oil interests, and after two years Singapore was kicked out, leaving modern Malaysia as Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak. Singapore’s leaders cite Malaysia’s discrimination against non-Malays as the reason that their country left the Federation, because Singapore refused to extend these pro-Malay policies to its people, who are mostly Chinese, not Malay.

These days Malaysia is still made up mainly of Malays, but the number of other groups – Chinese, Indians and so on – is significant; the government, however, doesn’t treat everyone equally in law. For example, non-Malays can find it difficult to go to university in Malaysia due to restrictions imposed on the number of places available to them, so gifted ‘immigrants’ often go abroad for their schooling, to places like Australia and America.

But there is no doubt that Malaysia is thriving and has managed to create a stable and forward-looking economy from a post-colonial market that consisted of rubber, tin and timber exports only. Even if its Prime Minister is rather too fond of huge building projects to satisfy his ego, there are plenty of worse regimes in the world; and after Singapore and Brunei it has the highest standard of living and most developed economy in Southeast Asia, which is impressive.

[1] In September 1998, Anwar was sacked and was put on trial on charges of corruption and committing illegal homosexual acts, for which he received a six-year jail sentence. Then, in June 1999, Anwar was put on trial for sodomy, and in July 2000 he was sentenced to a further nine years in jail. Anwar Ibrahim says he was framed, and that the whole thing was a political set-up. Whatever, it left Dr Mahathir unchallenged as Malaysia’s leader until he retired 2003, after 22 years in power.

Kuala Lumpur

Written: 30 November 1997

After exploring Melaka, I jumped on the bus for Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur is the capital of Malaysia, and in the local language the name means ‘muddy confluence’, an apt description of the two rather brown rivers that meet in the city centre. Despite the name, Kuala Lumpur is a very smart place; it’s a far cry from the large conurbations of Indonesia.

KL, as the city is affectionately known, has a population of just over one million people; this isn’t a huge figure when compared to other capital cities, but what KL lacks in size of population, it makes up for with the size of its skyscrapers. They’re everywhere, they’re huge, and they’re multiplying; wherever you look, KL is sprouting building sites that promise to make the skyline even more interesting.

The most famous of all the skyscrapers is the tallest building in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers. At 451.9m above sea level, it is a monster of chrome and glass that’s made up of two huge towers, joined by a bridge halfway up. It will, no doubt, be relegated to the second highest building in the world before long (I hear that someone is building a bigger one in Beijing), but until then it’s more impressive precisely because you know that it’s bigger than anything else. When buildings get above a certain height, they all look the same; they’re monstrously big. I just pity the poor window cleaners; it’s a job on a par with painting the Golden Gate bridge.

The other distinctive landmark is the Menara Kuala Lumpur (otherwise known as the KL Tower) whose design is not a million miles off Toronto’s CN Tower, or Sydney’s Centrepoint. At a height of 421m the Menara is no slouch either, and it has the advantage of having a 360 degree observation deck at the top, where you can look down on the minions below and the countless building projects that are hopefully going to transform KL into a modernist paradise by the Commonwealth Games next year, which Malaysia is hosting.

Monsoon Confluence

Arriving in KL on Thursday, Franco[1] and I found a place, wandered around town for a while, and ended up eating in a steam café. A steam café is not unlike a fondue, except you dip your meat into boiling water rather than oil; it’s a pleasant way to eat, there on the sidewalk, watching the world go by. And it’s a great place to be when the rain kicks in.

I’d heard that KL was susceptible to extreme rain during the monsoon season, but however many harsh storms I sit through, it always amazes me just how much water can fall from the sky in one go. As we cowered under the table’s umbrella – not the most effective shelter, it has to be said – intense black clouds rolled in, the sky ripped open with thunder and lightning, and the heavens opened. We were trapped; unable to leave the shelter of our parasol for fear of being swept away, we lowered it to gain maximum cover. It would have been OK if there hadn’t been a big pot of boiling water in the middle of the table, which filled the umbrella with steam and condensation, raising the humidity to sub-marine levels and turning the storm into an experience I’m not likely to forget.

In the meantime the road had become a river, literally. Asian city streets have very deep kerbs and open drains along the road sides, and until now it had felt more like a pedestrian inconvenience than a sensible idea, but once you see a storm hit KL, it’s suddenly obvious why the pavement is a good foot above the driving surface; the roads simply disappear as muddy water rushes down the lanes, washing everything into the city’s rivers. But then the rain suddenly stops, the humidity level drops significantly, and within ten minutes all the water has gone; it’s as if nothing ever happened. It has to be seen to be believed.

Exploring KL

The next day, with Franco occupied with his new arrival, I wandered the streets of KL alone. The scorching sun shone on streets of choking traffic and gleaming buildings, and it wasn’t long before I found myself falling for KL’s charms. It doesn’t have the insanity of Indonesia[2], but it does have a depth of character that is increasingly hard to find in slick Singapore. The Chinatown area, where I was staying, is just like any other Chinatown in the world – noisy, bustling streets with millions of shops, restaurants, stalls, people and smells – but KL has character beyond Chinatown. The buildings are the main attraction; with everything from colonial architecture (like magnificent Merdeka Square) to local (the many mosques and temples) to ultra-modern (the skyscrapers), KL is a great place to walk around. I spent two days just exploring.

Some of the things I saw were just astounding. I particularly remember a set of display boards in the Central Market where the department of transport were showing pictures of road accidents, in an attempt to show people just how dangerous it can be to drive in the crazy way that Asians do.

Sure, there were pictures of mangled cars and bikes, blood-stained windscreens and jack-knifed lorries, but the display went much further than that, indeed much further than it would in the UK. There were gory close-ups of men with crushed skulls, their brains leaking out onto the road; there were photos of bodies so horribly mangled that it was hard to believe that they were human; and there were shots of arms and legs, long parted from their bodies and ripped up like so much meat.

It was horrific, effective and shocking, but all I could think of, when faced with the picture of a man with the top half of his head spread across the white lines like meat paste, was, ‘That guy cleaned his teeth before setting out; what a futile thing to do.’ It was an odd reaction, but we all deal with reality shock in a different way, I suppose.

Another slice of real life was a display in the main tourist office showing the winners of the World Press Photographer awards. Here were pictures of war zones, famines, sports, science, people and places... a whole variety of newspaper and magazine photographs. But the pictures of collaborators being executed by rebel soldiers (of which there were a number, from all sorts of different conflicts) didn’t shock me half as much as the roadkill pictures; I suppose it’s because it’s hard to relate to war-zone death when you’re a mollycoddled westerner, but seeing road casualties is a bit too close to home. Indeed, one of the organisers came over and talked to me about the exhibition (which was in its first day), asking me what I thought about the photos and which ones I liked best, so I gave him the old spiel about the best photographs being ones that make you look at otherwise familiar sights in a different way, rather than the ones that simply report an occurrence. When he found out I was a journalist, he was pretty shocked; I suppose you don’t get too many journalists hanging out in Malaysia (immigration officers can have a thing about western journalists entering their country, especially when there’s something to hide; the solution is to put ‘computer programmer’ on your entry form instead of ‘journalist’).

KL is home to some delightful colonial architecture, and taking in the sights of Merdeka Square and the Railway Station was an exercise in inventive and flagrant British building. With minarets, towers and Moorish roofing, the area surrounding the square – where the British rulers used to play cricket – seemed oddly appropriate, with the sign announcing the coming of the Commonwealth Games fluttering in the breeze. The nearby Lake Gardens, with its muddy lake and not terribly interesting garden landscape, was pleasant enough, but the highlight had to be the National Museum, where I managed to catch a special exhibit on Infidelity. Among the interesting stories of famous cuckolds and adulterers, and graphic descriptions of punishments meted out to the guilty parties in ancient times, was this wonderful description of the Eskimos’ way of dealing with adultery. The thought of the challenge in the final sentence is particularly chilling:

In some societies, a wife’s hospitality included her sexual services. She had no right to refuse such arrangements. On the Aleutian Islands, southwest of Alaska, etiquette required that men should place their wives at the disposal of guests. Among the Eskimo and other societies that practised wife exchange and wife hospitality, the wife had no right to volunteer herself to another man. Such a liaison was adultery and the Eskimo husband would assault the lover, or challenge him to a song contest.

A song contest? Aren’t museums wonderful places...

It was a shame to leave KL, but I’m planning to return, albeit briefly, on the way back from my next destination, the tropical jungle of Taman Negara. By all accounts I’m going to be well and truly away from the rat race there, so I bought a week’s worth of food, packed my bags, and jumped on the bus bound for the biggest National Park in Malaysia.

[1] An entertaining Italian whom I met in Melaka, Franco was meeting his girlfriend off the plane the next day and was hoping to use the travelling experience to keep her off the heroin she’d been hooked on until recently. I hope it worked.

[2] I’ve started to encounter a larger diversity of travellers, now that I’m on a real backpackers’ thoroughfare, but most of the people I’ve met haven’t been to Indonesia, either because they have yet to go there, or because they’ve skipped it on the way north; and absolutely nobody I’ve met has been outside of Sumatra, Java, Bali and Lombok. On the other hand, those who have been to Indonesia and who have also travelled through Southeast Asia are quite adamant that Indonesia is the hardest and most frustrating place to travel in the area, and in the rest of Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, only India is more challenging. This reassures me quite a bit, especially after the frustrations I felt in the outer reaches of Indonesia; I hope reality bears this theory out.

Malaysia: The Rainforest

Rainforest Statistics

Written: 6 December 1997

Appreciating a jungle from the inside is a little different from reading about it, but to get you in the mood for my visit to Taman Negara, here are some interesting facts that I’ve managed to glean from museums and books about Peninsular Malaysia’s tropical rainforests:

- Although it didn’t feel like it when I walked through the rainforest, the annual rainfall in Taman Negara isn’t that big, being between 2200 and 3800mm a year (for comparison, Milford in New Zealand gets over 8000mm a year). And, surprisingly, the temperature is a pleasant and stable 26°C in the day and 22°C at night (or 72°F and 79°F for Fahrenheit fans). However, the humidity is always around 90 per cent, whatever the precipitation and temperature, and that’s why it’s so uncomfortable.

- The amount of sunshine doesn’t make that much difference to the walker; as little as two per cent of sunlight makes it through the canopy to the forest floor, which explains why I was mostly unable to use my camera on the walk. It also explains the constant temperature under the canopy; it’s like a greenhouse that doesn’t let too much heat in, or too much out.

- Malaysia seems to be ahead of even Australia when it comes to obsession with size; in KL there’s the tallest building in the world, and connecting the island of Penang to the mainland is the longest bridge in Asia. Taman Negara itself clocks in a few world-beating wonders too: it is home to the world’s largest flower, the Rafflesia, which has been known to grow up to 97cm across (3 ft) and weigh up to 9kg; the resort’s 450m canopy walkway, a hanging walkway through the top layer of the rainforest, is the world’s longest; the resident Atlas moth, with its 25cm wingspan, is one of the biggest moths in the world; there’s a 55cm stick insect in the park, and yes, you guessed it, it’s the biggest one in the world; the gaur, the largest species of wild cattle in the world, hangs around here too; and you can also find the tualang, the world’s tallest tropical tree species, clocking in at a height of 80m. And on top of these record-breakers, there are the katydids, grasshoppers, crickets and 20cm-long cicadas who are responsible for the cacophony of background screeching, surely one of the loudest noises in the world after Indonesian bus music; one of the crickets even builds itself a concave amphitheatre to amplify the sound of its wings rubbing, just in case you thought you might be able to sleep out there...

- There are between 300 and 600 Orang Asli in the park, all of them members of the Bateq tribe, the original inhabitants of the jungle. Of these, 150 are still fully nomadic, roaming within the boundaries of the park. However, it won’t be long before modern intrusion does away with this way of life, whatever the park’s authorities say; the government’s intention to improve the population’s standard of living applies to everyone, even if the people themselves might be happier in the jungle than in state housing.

- Peninsular Malaysia has one of the most biologically diverse environments on the planet. The peninsula contains over 200 species of mammals, whereas Europe, which is 80 times larger, has only 170 native species; it contains more than 1000 species of butterfly, compared to the USA’s 763 and the UK’s 68; it contains 2398 species of tree, 27 per cent of which are endemic, whereas the Netherlands, for example, only has 30 native species; it contains 7900 species of seed plants, while the UK, which is 2.3 times bigger, has only 1430 species; it contains over 600 species of bird, compared to 470 in Europe; and it contains over 250 species of reptile, including 125 species of snake (21 of which are poisonous), whereas Europe has fewer than 90; and then there are over 800 species of orchid, over 200 species of palm, 90 types of frog and 150,000 types of insect – and they keep discovering more and more.

- However, it’s amazing how just one short-sighted species can manage to threaten the existence of so much diversity. Prime Minister Mahathir’s government seems blissfully unaware of the danger that its logging programmes pose to the continued survival of this amazing diversity (or, rather, it chooses to ignore it). It’s true that most of the logging in Malaysia takes place in Sarawak in northern Borneo, but it’s a worrying fact that Malaysia is destroying its unprotected rainforests throughout the country; about 60 per cent of the country’s rainforests have been logged, and some estimates give Sarawak’s forests five to ten years before they’ve all been logged. It’s true that the logging was originally started by the British in the 1930s, and it’s also true that it’s unfair to sit on one’s ecological high-horse as a resident of a rich country, when another nation is simply trying to create wealth through exploiting its own natural resources; but some things are simply not on, such as the displacement of Sarawak’s Dayak tribes to make way for logging concessions without even so much as a nod in the direction of human rights. Whatever the politics, I was surprised to read the following in the Taman Negara Information Centre:
The threat to the rainforests... Is there anything you can do? YES! There is something very important you can do! No matter what country you come from, you can help by restricting the number of children you have. All pressures on rainforest come from one basic cause: population increase. The more people we have in the world, the more the forested land is needed for other purposes. It is as simple as that. The future of the Malaysian rainforest is up to YOU.’

I believe this requires no comment when it’s a stated government policy to increase Malaysia’s population from the current 19.5 million to 70 million by 2020.

- We’ll end with a wonderful little quote from the meditation master himself, Gautama Buddha:
The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life activity; it affords protection to all beings, offering shade even to the axe-man who destroys it.

Well said, Buddha. Let’s hope Mahathir’s Muslim Malaysia doesn’t live to regret being the axe-man.

Taman Negara

Written: 8 December 1997

Malaysian place names can be surprisingly uninspired. From Muddy Confluence I travelled to National Park; yes, Taman Negara literally means ‘Park National’, a whoppingly original name for a National Park, don’t you think? I wonder if I’ll soon be crossing the River Sungai on my way to Mt Gunung on beautiful Pulau Island...

The bus journey from KL to the jetty at Kuala Temering was fairly uneventful; I slept through most of it, thankfully. The only way to get into Taman Negara is by a three-hour boat trip up the Sungai Temering, as there are no roads, a pretty far-sighted move by the environmental department, and one of the few nods in the direction of conservation that you’ll see in modern Malaysia. On arrival I sorted out the business of a permit and booked some nights in the relevant huts, wading through reams of bureaucratically nonsensical paperwork in the process; I also rented a cooker and pot, and packed my bag. For some reason it felt heavier than normal, by a long way; I’ve been on walks much longer than six days, and I swear I didn’t need this much junk. Perhaps packing two long novels (Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Nicholas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer), a computer and lots of food was the reason, but I figured I’d need my recreation out there in the jungle...

That night I dined at Wan’s Floating Restaurant, recommended to me by an American called John whom I’d befriended in Melaka. Indeed, it proved to be the hotspot of Kuala Tahan – the home to Park HQ and the fancy Taman Negara Resort – and before long I was surrounded by chattering Germans, Dutch, Indians and locals. I talked to Wan for a bit, but something in me didn’t really want conversation; it was time I headed off into the jungle for a bit of solitude among the flora and fauna. Sod the people; I wanted Mother Nature.

And I got her. Because central Peninsular Malaysia has been free of such excitements as seismic activity, ice ages or man’s never-ending quest for wood, Taman Negara contains the oldest tropical jungle[1] in the world; it’s some 130 million years old, and it looks like it. After 130 million years the trees, vines, shrubs and undergrowth have evolved into something quite, quite different, and a whole lot nastier.

Into the Jungle

To be honest, the trek into the jungle was pure hell. I’d set my sights on the lodge at Kuala Perkai, some 28km from park headquarters, as a good place to get away from it all, and I reckoned that two days’ walking, one of 11km (staying the night in a hide called Bumbun Kumbang) and one of 17km, would be fairly acceptable. How little I knew of the rigours of hardcore tropical jungle; the first day took a little over five-and-a-half hours of hard slog, and the second a whopping nine hours.

It’s not all unpleasantries in the jungle, though. Despite the fact that the going was tough, it was a unique and quite fascinating walk. My destination – a fishing lodge on the confluence of Sungai Keniam and Sungai Perkai called Kuala Perkai (‘Perkai confluence’) – was described as an ‘isolated paradise’ by the ever-effusive John, and although I felt that was a bit of an overstatement, it certainly was pretty. Actually, now I come to think of it, he also said that it would be the perfect place for a honeymoon, but having been there, all I can say is that this might help explain why the divorce rate in John’s native country is among the highest in the western world.

The journey was not without its interesting parts. My stay in the hide[2] at Bumbun Kembang was considerably enlivened by the presence of a white cat, who had obviously decided he was living there and that was that. As I stomped up the stairs to the hide and dumped my dripping pack on the floor, the cat shot me the look of a superior being, as if to say, ‘I live here, so don’t get any ideas, buster.’

‘Yeah, well I’ve paid my five ringgit to stay here, which is more than you have, cat,’ I replied. ‘And don’t get any ideas about stealing my food in the middle of the night.’

‘Who, me?’ yawned the cat, wide-eyed and innocent. ‘I’m a cat of the jungle, my friend, and I catch my own food. So there.’

‘And no pissing in the corner, either,’ I said, noticing an unpleasantly familiar smell coming from the corner where it sat.

‘Harrumph,’ said the cat, scratching his neck and studiously turning away from me to stare out of the window as if I didn’t exist. Not surprisingly he came and went as he pleased, and I hid my food in the mattress locker, which he obviously hadn’t mastered yet.

The only tourists I saw were a young couple, fleetingly, whom I met just five minutes from the hide, and a Kuala Lumpur man called Pati who also stayed the night in Bumbun Kembang. I did come across a good example of the tourist trade at Keniam Lodge, a decent-sized collection of luxury huts and central eating areas that looked amazingly tranquil in this, the closed season. All that was left of the tourists was a menu board showing overpriced standard meals, and a sign tacked up saying, ‘Closed from 1.11.97 to 31.12.97.’ I dumped my pack, discovered flowing water in the toilets, and had a cup of tea, overlooking a picturesque bend in the Sungai Trenggan. It felt like something out of The Shining, this ghost town of a resort, normally bubbling with life but now silent and home only to spiders and piles of leaves. It was strangely moving.

The Fishing Lodge

I was soon back on the trail, getting hopelessly lost and having to ask for help from the local tribesmen, but I eventually arrived at Kuala Perkai. I spent two full days at the fishing lodge, and it rained for almost all of that time. I found myself writing a lot (luckily I’d packed my computer) and reading a lot (fortunately A Suitable Boy is a monster of a novel). My clothes and pack steadfastly refused to dry out, I ate noodles and pasta in various unexciting combinations, and it wasn’t long before I was bored out of my tiny skull.

It takes a special kind of person to really enjoy having nothing to do. Take sitting on the beach, for example; even if it’s a two-week holiday between executive stresses, I still get frustrated and bored, and end up getting drunk or going out of my mind, often at the same time. The jungle wasn’t quite as bad as the beach, but sitting on a veranda, watching the river flow by while the wildlife chorused around me, was pleasant but not exactly riveting. Despite the fact that I knew I was going to have to go through hell again, I was keen to get back on the track.

So on the Friday I hauled out from the lodge, packing my still-wet belongings into my still-damp pack, squelching into my still-sodden boots and starting off down the still-drenched track. The trek back to Bumbun Kumbang was distinctly easier the second time round; it always goes more smoothly when you’re fitter, have a lighter pack and know the route, so I arrived at the hide with plenty of daylight to spare. This was fortuitous, because when I took off my socks, there were maybe five leeches latched onto each foot, merrily sucking away. One had even managed to climb up my leg and suck where the sun doesn’t shine[3], and I needed the extra time to burn them off and tend to my wounds.

There was one more thing that drove me mad – mad enough to make me stick my earplugs in when I arrived at the hide. All day – I swear, there was no break – I had something buzzing round my left ear. I have no idea why my left ear was singled out for such attention, or what kind of buzzing insect it was, but however energetically I waved my arms around and swatted the air, I couldn’t connect with anything, and instead developed a sympathetic buzzing in my brain that kept going well after the walking had stopped. The earplugs helped, but I couldn’t help being reminded of a particularly persistent blowfly that did the same thing as I hauled my way up Katherine Gorge in Australia’s Northern Territory. My left side must smell more divine than my right... or is it the other way around for flies? Not surprisingly, the resident cat was no help at all; all he did was look me up and down, sneer and tell me, in no uncertain terms, to buzz off.

I returned to civilisation on the Saturday to find that after paying for my cooker and locker rental, I was broke. Whoops! Luckily the local glossy resort cashed a cheque for me – at a rate which had shot up considerably in my favour in the six days I’d been in the jungle due to the developing currency crisis – so it wasn’t long before I was able to kick back, relax and enjoy the jungle from a safe distance. There are no leeches in Wan’s Floating Restaurant, and I spent a very pleasant evening there with a couple from Perth whom I’d met while cashing up; we whiled away the night chatting about Kalgoorlie and Western Australia, and dreaming wistfully of the dry night air in the Australian desert.

Typically, the weather cleared up for my return, enabling me to see the moon and stars for the first time in days. I sat by the river, gazing at the constellations, and to my amazement spotted the distinctive w-shape of Cassiopeia, a constellation I hadn’t seen since October 1995. I used to know where all the various pointers in Cassiopeia led to, but all I could think of was how much I missed the sky when I couldn’t see it. Which now, of course, I could.

[1] Although Taman Negara is properly referred to as a rainforest – as in tropical rainforest, semi-tropical rainforest and temperate rainforest – I think ‘jungle’ sums it up better. The word jungle is defined in the dictionary as ‘thick, tropical forest’, and so it applies perfectly to Taman Negara. It’s probably less scientific than rainforest, but I want to emphasise how different this place is to the other rainforests I’ve explored. Taman Negara truly is a jungle.

[2] Hides are so called because they are perched high up on stilts, affording a good view of a grassy patch that wildlife seems to frequent only when nobody is in the hide. The hide at Bumbun Kembang wasn’t as pleasant as the fishing lodge, but it served its purpose as a break in the walk, and it did have a pretty view.

[3] A bit higher up and he’d have been performing a service that desperate men pay for. Walking can be such a thrill!

Walking the Rainforest

Written: 6 December 1997

Here are a few walking highlights from the place that orang-utans, tigers and elephants call home: the Malaysian rainforest of Taman Negara.

Humidity

You hear about the humidity in the tropics, but unless you’ve been deep into the jungle, you haven’t got a clue. The common perception is that humidity makes you sweat, but that’s not strictly true; humidity makes you condense.

Ten minutes into my first day’s walking I was drenched, sweat dripping off my nose and running into my eyes, stinging slightly where it had mixed with remnants of soap and shampoo from the morning ablutions. The sweat patches spread from the centre of my chest – which is permanently slightly wet in the tropics, even in cities – across my shoulders, down my back and right up into the collar line; if I’d been a well-endowed woman, I’d have been attracting some pretty lewd looks by this stage.

Every hour or so I had to stop to wring out my T-shirt and shorts, yielding about a pint of brownish water every time. Every five minutes I could squeeze my handkerchief in my pocket and it would be as wet as if I had dunked it in a river. I began to worry that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up the liquid intake at this level, but I kept on drinking at my usual pace, feeling no more thirsty than on any other walk (and indeed, I drank much less than I did in super-dry places like Katherine Gorge or Wilpena Pound). It soon became apparent that the liquid pouring off me, into my pack and down into my boots where the socks squelched noisily, was simply water in the air condensing on my skin.

As if to confirm my fears, I met a young couple who had taken the boat to one of the hides I passed on the way, just for an hour’s jungle experience. They stopped for a chat, sounded suitably impressed at my progress, and watched amazed as I wrung out the bottom of my T-shirt. ‘Have you been swimming?’ the girl asked. I just laughed.

It wasn’t so funny after two days of walking through the humidity. My crotch and armpits were so sore from the constant rubbing and sweat that I thought I’d never manage to walk again; prickly heat’s one thing, but this was more like the salt sores I got from a month on the south Pacific. It’s all part of the territory, I suppose.

Rain

This isn’t a whinge; trekking into the rain forest and moaning about the weather would be like visiting a big city and moaning about the crowds, but the rain in tropical jungle definitely deserves a mention.

You first hear it as a rustle in the treetops; it sounds like a gentle breeze. As it gets heavier it becomes obvious that this is no breeze, it’s something more tangible, but on the jungle floor nothing reaches you, except maybe the odd leaf loosened by the downpour. The only signs of rain are increased humidity, a dimming of the already dim light, the crashing of branches tumbling to the ground and the rumbling of distant thunder, sounds which aren’t too dissimilar.

But step into a gap in the jungle, where normally you would be greeted by a tantalising glimpse of the sky and a confirmation that there is still a world out there, and you’ll really notice the rain. It comes in bursts, bursts so heavy that as soon as it starts raining, the rivers begin to flow with brownish water and the mud becomes a death trap. It’s almost scary, especially when rain brings out the following nasties...

Leeches

As I have said many times before, every park has its resident pest, be it the dingo, the rat, the monkey or the sandfly, but in Taman Negara it’s the leech.

Ask most people what they fear most about the idea of hacking through the jungle, and it’s not tigers or elephants, it’s the leech, despite the fact that the first two are far more dangerous. The thought of a slug attaching itself to your skin and sucking out your blood is fairly repugnant, and before I hit the jungle, I shared that feeling. But now, having been sucked dry by all sorts of shapes and sizes of leech, I’m actually quite fond of the buggers.

Leeches are incredible beasts. Mostly active just after it rains – which is pretty much all of the time in the jungle – they look like brown-green two-inch strands of instant noodle, lurking in the undergrowth. Put your foot down for more than ten seconds, and you’re spotted; the leeches will come from all around like something out of a horror movie. A leech has a foot and a head, and both ends grip like hell; it moves around by stretching out with its head, sniffing the air in search of blood, and when it’s satisfied it knows where to go, it plonks its head down on the ground, gripping whatever it touches, and pulls its foot to its head, before attaching the foot to the ground and raising its head in search of the next step. It’s like watching a strange kind of alien slinky, and the way it holds its head in the air, sniffing, is quite eerie. When it finally reaches you and decides that it’s time to feed, the head burrows into your skin while the foot holds on, and it sits there until it fills up.

Leeches just love leather, and will rush towards your shoes when you stop for a breather; there’s something quite manic about their movements, trying to reach you before you set off again. It makes you wonder how they survive; there aren’t that many beasts in the jungle, surely? But survive they do, and they even manage to attack humans, surely one of their more demanding clients, with great success. They climb up your boots, slinking towards your socks, and once buried inside the folds of wool they’re impossible to see. And this is where they’ve got a number of options.

The first option is to go straight for the flesh, through the sock; this has the disadvantage of it being easy for the human to rip the leech off his flesh; you just pull off the sock. The second option is to climb up the leg and go for the copious exposed flesh of the shin or even the thigh, a good bet for guaranteed blood, but a little overexposed in the event that the human feels the teeth sink in and wants to burn the leech off with a match. The third option, and the most successful as far as the leech is concerned, is to bury itself down inside the sock, next to the skin, and dig in, well out of sight; the only disadvantage here is that if the human slips and the shoe presses against the skin where the leech happens to be, it’s a messy way to die.

I experienced all three methods of attack. I burned a couple off with matches; I ripped a few off by removing my sock; and I accidentally crushed a few inside my boots. I soon learned, though, that the easiest way to deal with leeches is to let the little suckers hang on; you won’t miss the blood, but best of all you won’t create a wound that refuses to stop bleeding. When they latch on, leeches inject you with an anti-coagulant, not one as irritating as the mosquito brand, but one that’s much more effective at making the blood flow. Rip a leech off, and not only does he take away a chunk of flesh in his teeth, but he’ll leave you with a bloody mess that takes maybe half an hour to stop bleeding. If you let him take his fill, then he drops off automatically, removing his teeth neatly and leaving you with a clean wound that seems to heal much more quickly. Besides, trying to pull a leech off your skin is a tricky proposition at the best of times; as soon as you remove it, it latches itself onto your finger; pull it off with the other hand, and it attaches itself to that one. It’s like trying to get rid of a long piece of extremely sticky Sellotape, except you can’t just roll it into a ball and throw it away; unlike Sellotape, leeches just don’t give up, and they never lose their stickiness.

As I plodded along the path on day 2, I got a big ’un on the front of my shin, which turned out to be a surprisingly good source for blood, judging by the amount dripping down my leg. I watched him grow from noodle-thick to maybe half the width of my little finger, and as I sat down on a log for lunch, he decided that enough was enough and dropped off into the undergrowth. I swear that if a leech could hold his stomach and burp, this one would have done so; his struggle to walk away was a painfully familiar sight, and I’m sure that he actually waddled. Well, good for him.

Ants

Ants are no big deal, right? We see them every day, milling around the garden, clearing up the detritus of nature and recycling it endlessly. Who could be scared of ants?

Well, me for a start. Sure, little ants are nothing more than a nuisance, and then only when they discover the sugar bowl, but out here in the tropical jungle, you’ve never seen anything like it. The ants are an inch and a half long, I kid you not. At this size you can tell an awful lot about an animal, and one thing that’s obvious about the rainforest ant is its attitude.

I came across one particularly big group on a five-minute break somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I sat down on the path, and this delegation of five huge ants started plodding down the tree next to me, obviously intent on finding out my business and whether I had the correct permits to be there; I could see their jaws, and it made me nervous. I was on the point of trying to sign them up for a major role in the next production of Revenge of the Mutant Mandibles when one of them waved an Equity card at me and told me to beat it; they already had a contract to star in Jaws IV and I was sitting on their set.

I buggered off pronto. There’s nothing scarier than an acting ant in one of his moods, especially when he’s chomping his grapplers at you.

Mozzies

I include the lovable mozzie in this list simply because I have to get in an anti-mosquito dig at every opportunity. Not only are the tropical mozzies plague-like in their proportions, they have the added bonus of possibly being malarial. To be honest, the chances of getting malaria in Peninsular Malaysia are incredibly slim, but where there’s a chance, there’s a chance, and it’s just another challenge to rise to.

Still, I haven’t met a mozzie who can penetrate the Dettol and baby oil mixture[1]. Unless the sweat has washed it off first, of course...

Spiders

I don’t mention spiders because they’re nasty, spindly and poisonous, and make lots of people scream and run a mile. Personally I’m more spooked by cockroaches than spiders, if only because it takes a hell of a lot more to kill a cockroach than a spider; no, spiders are included here because of their webs.

Take a spider, a perfectly good path and millions of square metres of jungle, and the chances are that the spider will string his web across the path. Perhaps the chances of catching flies there are better, but for the solo walker on an under-used path, webs are a pain. In Taman Negara, every few minutes I was pulling web off my face and brushing irate spiders off my shoulders.

Spider’s web doesn’t taste nice, isn’t nutritious, and makes having a beard a right royal pain. There is one good thing about it, though; it indicates that nobody else has been along that path recently, so at least it means you’re going to have some peace and quiet while you sit down and pull the strands out of your hair...

Kilometre Markers

These are a good thing, unless they lie. Then they are a bad thing. A very, very bad thing.

I have never had a track-based walk where progress was so slow as my walk in Taman Negara; only in the Pyke was the going tougher, and there the track had long been washed away. On a good stretch of ground – the Bada Valley, say, or Seventy-Five Mile Beach – a good average is about six kilometres in one hour, a rate I can keep up almost all day if the track is fairly flat. Add in mountains or valleys and the rate goes right down, but even then it’s not too bad; when climbing Rinjani my rate was still pretty good. In the jungle of Taman Negara, however, I was lucky to complete two kilometres in an hour.

This wouldn’t be so bad, but when the kilometre markers are set up so that one minute it’s 3.6km to your destination, and after half an hour of hard slog it’s still 3.6km, you wonder if the person putting up the signs actually bothered to do the walk himself. Add to that the fact that there are loads of ways to get lost in the jungle, and it’s a right royal botch up. It’s a good job my tracking skills are pretty good; I was able to follow John’s footprints for a lot of the way, even though they were about two weeks old. It looks like he had some pretty decent boots on, and a bloody heavy pack too...

Fallen Trees

Trees die, fall, rot and turn into topsoil; that’s the essence of the jungle, the way it constantly recycles its nutrients, and it’s the reason that fungi and insects play such an important role in the cycle of life here. But fallen trees can really get on your nerves if you’re not into eating dead wood.

Every five minutes I came upon a tree across the track. Some were easy to cross – just a stride over and onto the next one. But some of the fallen monsters were not only huge obstacles in their own right, they were half rotten, swallowing whole legs if you stood on the wrong part, and smothered in beautifully coloured and probably poisonous toadstools and mushrooms. And as for some of the insects who live inside the honeycombed trunks... yuk! Come to think of it, that’s probably how I managed to get so many leeches.

Actually, the only thing worse than a tree across the path is bamboo. Bamboo grows in huge clumps the size of a house, and with thick branches of maybe three inches across, when it falls across a path it’s like a prison. Add in the inconvenience of a backpack, and crawling through bamboo ends up like something out of It’s a Knockout. Without the prizes.

Rivers and Streams

An essential part of any ecosystem, streams are not only a wet experience, they’re muddy too. Stepping cleanly through a stream isn’t an option; on each bank the mud oozes over your ankles, threatening to suck you in further if you’re not quick enough.

This is fine after a while, because you’re so wet you no longer care about mud, water or other slimy things. But the things that really hurt about streams are the steep banks; descending is more like skiing than tramping, and ascending is as close to volcano walking as you will get in the jungle; it’s definitely one step up, two steps down. More than anything the streams were the cause of my slow progress through the jungle. Still, without them I would have died of thirst, so I can’t really complain, can I?

[1] A handy tip I picked up in Shark Bay. Take 70 per cent baby oil and 30 per cent Dettol, mix and smear on your body for the ultimate insect repellent. The sandflies stick to the baby oil and die, and the mozzies simply hate the smell of disinfectant. It worked a treat for me in Australia and New Zealand, and it beats paying a fortune for normal sprays. It’s more effective, too.

Meeting the Orang Asli

Written: 2 December 1997

It was two days into my six-day solo trek through the ancient rainforests of Taman Negara that I came across the Orang Asli. Orang means ‘man’ in its generic sense – hence ‘orang-utan’, or ‘man of the jungle’ – and the Orang Asli are the original inhabitants of the jungle. Evidence of their existence was obvious from the number of temporary shelters dotted around the place, mainly lean-tos with woven-leaf roofs that could be lowered above a sleeping body to keep out anything except horizontal rain, an unlikely occurrence in the jungle.

As I was nearing my final destination, Kuala Perkai – at least, that’s what the kilometre markers were telling me – the path suddenly disappeared into an almighty thicket. Normally this is down to a tree-fall or bamboo collapse and most of the time it’s pretty obvious where the path is supposed to go. This time it wasn’t obvious at all.

Hacking through the thicket, I felt the strange sensation that I was being watched. And sure enough, I was; there was this half-naked black man, looking on with a serious expression. I suddenly felt silly and self-conscious; here I was, a tourist with all the hiking gear, and I couldn’t find the path. I must have looked pretty stupid.

‘Hello,’ he said, and before I could believe my luck at having run into the only Orang Asli who spoke English, I remembered that ‘hello’ is the usual greeting in multi-racial Malaysia.

‘Hello,’ I replied, trying to look confident and in control. ‘Kuala Perkai?’ I asked, waving my arms around as if to say, ‘Where the hell am I?’

He pointed into the thicket, a trace of a smile on his lips, and resumed his task of chopping wood, or whatever he was up to. I noticed that although his skin was pretty much the same colour as most Malaysians – it was possibly slightly darker – his hair and face were those of the Aboriginal Australian, with a frizzy microphone of black curls, and a boxer’s nose squashed into the middle of his face. It was such a shock after seeing only brown Melanesian people in Asia that I had to stop myself from staring.

Pushing through the undergrowth, I spotted a roof. I couldn’t be there already, surely, and the sound of children shouting and laughing confused me further; the ranger had said I’d be alone out here. It took a couple of seconds for me to register that I’d stumbled into the middle of an Orang Asli settlement.

There were about five or six huts, made up of thatched-leaf walls and roofs, and dotted about were old men, women and children, scantily dressed in looped sarongs[1]. They all had the Aboriginal features I’d noticed in the woodsman, and they all looked equally surprised to see me.

‘Kuala Perkai?’ I mumbled, while they stared. The response was less than overwhelming; they had no idea what I was talking about, and faced with a village full of people gawping at me, my mind raced. Half-remembered stories of the first western explorers of the rainforests jumped into my head, and although I knew that the Orang Asli weren’t cannibals, my imagination was more than willing to ignore the facts after hours walking through the jungle. The women jabbering in a nearby hut, stirring boiling pots of water, didn’t exactly help to make me feel at home either.

‘Kuala Perkai?’ I repeated, wondering if I was pronouncing the words totally wrong. Then I heard the sweetest sound; a young man stepped forward and said, ‘Where you go?’ I could have fallen down and worshipped him, but instead I tried it again. ‘Kuala Perkai,’ I said.

‘Den you go dis way,’ he said, and started off down a path that led out of the village. The entire population of the village stood and stared as we wandered off, either because they didn’t quite know what to make of me, or because they knew exactly what to make of me and it involved diced potatoes and chopped onions. ‘Dis way to Kuala Perkai,’ my guide said.

I commented on his excellent English, and he said he ‘learn Ingerris from my boss, he Germany, he learn me Ingerris.’ Apparently an enterprising German lived at the resort, had learned the Orang Asli language, and now brought tourists to see various settlements out in the jungle. It seemed I was talking to his protégé.

‘He bring turis here, maybe five hunred in one year,’ said my guide. ‘I learn him our language, and he learn me Ingerris. Here, you go dis way, about one and half kilometre to Kuala Perkai.’

I thanked him profusely – probably too profusely given my relief at finding my initial paranoia completely unfounded – but he seemed pleased enough, and after passing the sign that said ‘Kuala Perkai 2km’, I thanked my lucky stars that soon I’d be there. And soon I was.

[1] Their sarongs had their ends sewn together to form a kind of cylinder, into which they stepped before pulling the garment over their shoulders; I saw a similar design in Tana Toraja in Sulawesi.

Malaysia: Northwest Malaysia

Cameron Highlands

Written: 12 December 1997

I left Taman Negara on the Monday morning, churning back down the river to the outside world. The only way out of the National Park was to head south again, so I headed back to Kuala Lumpur for an overnight stay and a taste of civilisation before jumping on the bus for the Cameron Highlands the following morning.

During all the bus hopping, I managed to team up with a similarly keen tramper called Charlie, a fellow Englishman who has just spend a year in New Zealand hiking almost every track in the known universe, and we combined our plans for Christmas and helped make each other’s minds up about what on earth we were going to do for the festive season...

The Cameron Highlands are in northwest Peninsular Malaysia, and they’re a prime tourist spot. Being at a height of around 1500m (4500 ft) the highlands are cool – in terms of temperature, not necessarily in terms of street-cred – and they’re a good place to get away from the tropical heat. With a temperature range of between 10 and 23°C and not a great deal of humidity, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven; the local farms reflect the climate too, with tea, various vegetables, citrus fruits, coffee and mushrooms lining the hills. It was a pleasant place to kick back, meet some other travellers after the isolation on Taman Negara, and make up some kind of plan.

Gently rolling hills, cool days, tea plantations and plenty of Indian and Malay restaurants filled our days, a pleasant way to relax in anyone’s book. On the second day we tramped into the surrounding forest, studiously avoiding anything too strenuous after the rigours of Taman Negara; in fact, on one trail we totally lost the track, and after spending half an hour trying to find where it went, we shrugged and simply turned around. Normally we’d have bush-bashed in the right magnetic direction, but even hardcore walkers like me and Charlie have to take a holiday once in a while.

The Company of Travellers

Written: 12 December 1997

Perhaps I will permit myself another slightly self-indulgent whinge here, because this thing about ‘other travellers’ is beginning to frustrate me a bit. I’ve already mentioned how inane the conversation of other travellers can be on the main travellers’ route through Southeast Asia, but I suspect it’s more my problem than theirs. The thing is, every travel-orientated conversation seems to be the same; it starts off with ‘Where have you just come from?’ swiftly followed by ‘Where are you heading?’ and ‘How long have you been travelling?’ and continues with ‘So, which countries have you visited?’ And even worse than this, once you give them the green light with that last question, some travellers get so much enjoyment listening to themselves speak that they don’t notice the eyes glazing all around them. Try this, a genuine excerpt from someone suffering from Boring Traveller Syndrome and inflicting it on anyone in earshot:

‘I’ll probably end up popping back into Singapore, to renew the Malaysian visa, if nothing else, because you get a month’s visa extension in Sarawak, but I don’t know if you need to have a full mainland visa before going into Sarawak, and of course I can go into Brunei and back into Malaysia, but then Brunei is really expensive and probably not worth more than a few days – we’re all on a budget, you know! – and there are no direct roads into Brunei from Sabah or Sarawak so you have to take the ferry, and then there’s always the question of flying from Peninsular Malaysia into Kuching in Sarawak and back from Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, which costs more if you buy the tickets in Singapore rather than Johor Bahru, which is only a few dollars on the bus over the causeway and saves you heaps, and they never ask for an onward ticket to get into Malaysia, even though you’re supposed to have one, unlike in Indonesia where they always ask you for an onward ticket, and you only get a two-month visa, which is never enough to see the whole lot, so you have to leave the country and re-enter by flying to Darwin from Timor and back into Indonesia, as long as you first get an Australian visa, which is a different matter altogether...’

This type of conversation just doesn’t interest me any more, if only because I’ve heard it so many times before, and travel logistics are only interesting when you discover them yourself en route. I’ve heard every possible story about Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia and India – or at least it feels that way – and it’s rare I find someone who makes me stop in my tracks and think, ‘Wow, this guy’s an interesting character.’ If I do, I tend to get into a conversation with them and team up for a while, as with Charlie, who is more interesting and on my wavelength than many a Kiwi Experience protégé.

But perhaps the most annoying thing is this fixation with how long you’ve been ‘on the road’. There’s an instant class system based on experience that permeates any gathering of travellers, and as travellers who’ve been at it for more than two years are pretty rare, someone like me elicits a bit of a dazed silence when I mention that I’ve done this, been there and have been going for this long. It’s a bit disconcerting, and even when I do meet someone who’s also done a lot, a sizeable number of them manage to be so smug about their achievements that they’re unbearable. These days I tend to keep quiet about what I’ve done unless someone specifically asks; the bragging backpacker is a sorry breed indeed, and perhaps that’s why I’m getting increasingly disillusioned about my fellow travellers. I’m tired of seeing smug travellers holding court in a room of relatively new backpackers, and I don’t like the fact that when I mention where I’ve been and how long I’ve been travelling, it totally bursts their balloon. It just makes me feel a bit cruel.

So I just leave them to it and keep my mouth shut. After all, this is not a bloody competition...

The Cavalier Roundhead

Written: 16 December 1997

Charlie and I boarded the ferry to Pulau Pangkor with plenty of time to spare, ready for a few days of serious relaxation. We sat together on the crowded ferry, lone white faces in a sea of Malay weekend holidaymakers (it being school holidays in this, the latter half of December), and while Charlie chatted to an English-speaking and very interesting Malay on his left, I stared out to sea, unable to hear the conversation above the cacophony of the engines. And that’s when I noticed the little boy over on the other side of the cabin.

He looked miserable, truly distraught. His mum was hugging him and stroking his hair, pulling strands of fringe off his slightly sweating forehead, and patting his hand in a show of devoted attention. The boy’s left hand gripped a handful of material, which I noticed was part of a sarong that hung around his waist; I thought he just wanted something to hold on to, but his mother kept checking his grip on the garment, making sure he held it tightly as if his life depended on it. I wondered if he’d damaged the muscles in his hand or had been treated for an infection of the joints. Whatever it was, it obviously hurt.

The boat swayed and shuddered on its half-hour trip across to the island, and during this time the young boy – who couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 – started to look more and more pained. His mother was sympathetic, but his father and another man looked more fatalistic, as if the boy’s suffering was just one of those facts of life; on the other hand, other men in the compartment looked as if they fully understood the boy’s pain, and exchanged knowing glances with each other of a type that I’ve only seen when someone gets kicked in the crotch[1]. The father and his companion toyed with a bag of capsules, probably antibiotics, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand what an ill little boy was doing on the boat, obviously in a distressed state.

Not far from land, the boy began to cry. He was obviously trying very hard to keep his feelings bottled up, but some kind of pain was hurting him badly. He lay down, putting his head in his mother’s lap while she dried his tears with a handkerchief, carefully ensuring his continued grip on his sarong. I felt extremely sorry for him; whenever he glanced at me, which was fairly often as we were sitting opposite each other, he looked almost ashamed to be suffering, but his eyes told of serious agony. He seemed to assume that I knew exactly what he was going through.

Just then Charlie leaned over. ‘You see that boy over there?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Guess what.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘He’s just been circumcised.’

I sucked in my breath, and it all clicked into place. Although I had no idea of his suffering, I knew that it would be hard to think of a more painful place to have an operation. Being male made us almost kindred spirits.

‘Looks like his local anaesthetic’s wearing off,’ continued Charlie, a veritable encyclopaedia on the subject thanks to his informative neighbour. ‘It’s a religious thing; Muslims either get the chop when they’re born, or between the ages of ten and 12. By the way, did you know that in America babies are automatically circumcised, unless the parents specify otherwise? Something to do with hygiene, you know.’

I looked over at the little boy with new-found respect, amazed at how brave he was being. He cried a little, accepted the good-natured care of his parents, and gritted his teeth. I was full of admiration; if someone had chopped my bathing cap off at the age of ten, I wouldn’t have been accepting, I’d have been bloody furious.

[1] We can’t help it. In a movie, on the footy pitch, in a pub brawl... if men see another man get whacked in the central processing unit, they universally cringe in empathy. There is no pain worse than a bruised bollock, as every sportsman will tell you.

Pulau Pangkor

Written: 16 December 1997

Where better to spend a few days taking it easy than at the beach? Normally I’d be full of smug answers – ‘up a mountain’, ‘in the pub’, ‘in bed’ or maybe even something witty – but the next logical stop after the Cameron Highlands was Pulau Pangkor, a popular little island off the west coast of northern Malaysia, and we took it. It’s a tourist spot, sure, but Charlie and I had decided to see the rest of the year out with some real relaxation before the rigours of the New Year’s travels. And where better to relax than at a beachside resort?

The bus journey was simple – getting around Malaysia is child’s play, even easier than getting around the UK – and we boarded the ferry to Pangkor with plenty of time to spare.

On the Beach

Beaches are beaches wherever you are, and Pangkor is no real exception. The water is murky, the sand is lightly dusted with litter, and the jet skis and power boats are as annoying as anywhere else, but there are some interesting differences between the little village of Teluk Nipah and similar hotspots on the Costa del Sol.

For a start, the place is totally Muslim, as is most of Malaysia. Sure, there aren’t any loud mosques blaring out the call to prayer – indeed, Malaysia is a lot quieter than Indonesia, even in the unfortunate hotels that sit next to the mosques – but every woman here wears a tudung (a scarf covering the head, also known as a hijab), and there isn’t a hot dog stall to be seen anywhere. Even on the beach the Malay tourists observe the modest values of Islam; male and female adults bathe in T-shirts and long shorts, exposing a bare minimum of bare skin, and non-swimmers laze on the beach in jeans, long-sleeved shirts and, for the women, hijabs. There are a few westerners with their slinky Speedos and suntan lotion, but they look totally out of place among the well-covered locals.

There’s also a distinct lack of alcohol in Pangkor; it’s available, but only from a few places, and then it’s only between certain hours. This is a serious bonus; it prevents the resort turning into a drunken orgy of beer-and-beach proportions, and makes the behaviour of tourists pretty acceptable, with few late nights and drunken rampages.

The fresh fish available at the restaurants along the beachfront more than makes up for the lack of beer, with the charcoal smell of ikan bakan (barbecued fish) lilting across the sea breezes, thankfully masking the smell of the choked streams meandering down to the beach from the village. If it weren’t for the savage attitude of the mosquitoes, Pangkor would be a pretty pleasant spot; it’s certainly a good spot for recharging the batteries.

Perhaps it was because of the peace and quiet, but I noticed something on Pangkor that has been driving me silently potty ever since I landed in Indonesia. The most common piece of Southeast Asian footwear is the sandal, whether it’s the professional leather-bound version, or the tacky rubber-and-plastic flip-flop; only businessmen seem to wear proper shoes. But there’s one thing about the prevalence of flip-flops that drives me stark, raving mad: Malaysians, and indeed Indonesians, drag their feet, making their flip-flops slide along the ground with a scraping noise that’s constant and infuriating, and given that most floors are concrete, the sound’s loud and grating. The problem is that once you’ve noticed it, you notice it everywhere, and much like a tap dripping at night or a window rattling on the bus, it’s torture. But, like much of Asia, you have no choice but to accept it, so I’ve learned to live with it, whether I like it or not.

At the same time, Charlie and I both discovered that we’d lost the art of conversation. After such a long time learning to make small talk, both from travelling and, in Charlie’s case, his career[1], we both felt a bit sick of making polite conversation. So we sat around, studiously ignoring everyone and exchanging glances every time someone mentioned their travels. People can be so repetitive; I know I’ll sound monotonously boring when I return home and keep saying things like, ‘Well, in India they do this...’ and ‘That’s not half as big as the spiders in Australia...’ but I didn’t think I’d ever get bored of talking about travelling. Everyone needs a break every now and then, I guess.

Another reason for our lack of interest in conversation was the collection of Time and National Geographic magazines lying around our guest house (or should I say campsite, as we stayed in an A-frame hut rather than a room). We spent hours each day devouring news and real journalism; I signed with relief as I read articles written in flowing, informational English, as opposed to the propaganda prose more common in the Southeast Asian media. Good journalism is like a lemon sorbet – refreshing, bittersweet and with a lingering aftertaste – and after the stodgy staple of pidgin-English pandering I’ve been reading in the Southeast Asian papers, this was truly a taste sensation.

Even with all this lethargy, we hadn’t lost our interest in walking, so we spent the second day plodding round the island on the one road available. We also included a bush-bash up to the top of Bukit Pangkor, the hill in the centre of the island, but unfortunately the path was overgrown and the views at the top hidden by trees, so it wasn’t one of the most successful jaunts of all time. It also included a fair amount of ripped flesh from the evil plants in the local bush, and plenty of bites from clouds of mozzies (though at least they’re malaria-free here). Whatever happened to the pledge I’d made after Taman Negara never to bash through jungle again? I guess I didn’t really mean it after all...

[1] Charlie used to work for the Ministry of Defence, under contract from GEC Marconi, so we’ve both signed the Official Secrets Act. As a result he got used to talking about his job at cocktail parties without ever saying what it was he actually did, so his small-talk skills are second to none.

Georgetown

Written: 19 December 1997

Lazing around on tropical beaches is enjoyable enough, but after a few days we decided enough was enough, and struck north from Pulau Pangkor for the island of Penang. Pulau Penang is as famous as Melaka when it comes to colonial history, due to its strategic position at the north of the Straits of Melaka, and although it’s probably best known these days as for the popular beach resorts on the island’s north coast, we didn’t come for sand, sea or surf. Nope; we came for Georgetown, the big old settlement on Penang’s northeastern coast.

Georgetown is predominantly Chinese, and as a result it buzzes with energy and an underlying layer of mania. The food is cheap and thoroughly excellent; from murtabak to thosai to strange noodle soups to curries, the quality of the available nosh is high. And then there are all the amazing buildings around town, like the crazy Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi clan house. From great food to great architecture, Georgetown is as interesting place, no doubt about it.

Murtabak in particular is worth an explanation; it’s essentially Indian pizza, and it’s quite delicious. Malaysia has some of the best Indian restaurants this side of Birmingham, and they’re much more authentic than the English interpretation, which is effectively a curry, rice and nan experience. In Malaysia, Indian restaurants are more of the banana-leaf variety, where the food is served on a banana leaf, it’s not that spicy, and you eat with your right hand (but not the left, which is considered unclean, as it’s used instead of toilet paper). If you’re wondering what to order in a Malaysian Indian, thosai (known as dosa in India) is a very thin lentil pancake, available with all sorts of fillings; roti (also known as chapati) is a different type of pancake that’s a little thicker, and is also available with various fillings; and murtabak is a thosai filled with loads of egg, chopped vegetables, spices and, if specified, meat. They all come with these amazing curry dips, and they’ve really fired me up to visit India to check out the real thing. It’s weird that sometimes the most civilised way to eat a country’s cuisine is to visit an ethnic restaurant in a more developed country; India can apparently be a bit hit and miss when it comes to food, but Malaysia and England seem to excel at Indian cuisine.

I’m slightly ashamed to say that I did precious little in Penang; Charlie and I split up to attend to various mundane housekeeping chores – buying thrill-packed items like watch batteries and steel wool, sorting out plane ticket details, and tracking down second-hand guidebooks for India – and although I visited most of the central historical sites, temples and ethnic areas, I mainly spent my time hanging round town, eating and reading and soaking up the buzz. I probably missed out on some of Penang’s best attractions, but Georgetown is a wonderful place for self-indulgence, and I lapped it up by the spadeful.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 19 December 1997

So that was Malaysia, a very different country to the one I’d conjured up in my imagination after reading the guidebook. I spent a full 25 days on the western side of Peninsular Malaysia (as the eastern coast gets very wet during the monsoon) and it was surprisingly interesting. As with Indonesia, Malaysia is a country of contradictions, but the opposing values aren’t quite as disparate as in its crazy neighbour. There are, however, some interesting observations to be made about Mahathir’s Madhouse.

Malaysia is modern, but still developing. Individuals have cars and houses, but there are still open sewers and rubbish dumps in every town, with their characteristically rancid smells; there are huge – nay, immense – skyscrapers in the capital, but beggars on every street corner; and although Malaysia’s health system is pretty good – you can drink the tap water, and malaria is rare on the mainland – it’s still got some way to go to match the West.

Malaysia is mainly Muslim, but it’s not extremist. The muezzins don’t wake you up with their wailing every morning, but the women all wear tudung (a scarf covering the head, also known as a hijab), though they don’t tend to practise full purdah; women are allowed out of the house, and don’t cover their entire faces or wear full burqas. Although the Prime Minister has a bee in his bonnet about the spoiling effects of capitalism, the general public is more interested in the spoils of capitalism; the Christmas adverts are as intense here as anywhere else on the planet, and the country grinds to a halt over the year end, even if Christ’s birthday is pretty irrelevant as a religious concept to most Malaysians. Still, business is a religion, if Singapore is anything to go by.

Malaysia has got some of the most wonderful National Parks in the world – especially in Sarawak, which I unfortunately didn’t get to, as it was monsoon season there at the time of my visit – but the ecological record of the government is pretty shoddy. Malaysia’s rainforest is the oldest in the world, but the indigenous inhabitants are being kicked out of their homes as the chainsaws do their worst; Mahathir’s plans to dam one of the biggest rivers in Sarawak and flood a large area of natural wilderness were over-budget and egotistical, until his deputy pulled the plug on it while the PM was on holiday; and there’s a major inconsistency between blaming everything on overpopulation, and wanting to increase the population by 350 per cent by 2020.

Malaysia has a wonderful bus network, but it suffers from overuse. In Indonesia there was no such thing as a full bus – there was always room for another body, chicken, whatever – but quite a few times in Malaysia I had to take a later bus because the one I wanted was fully booked. Public transport is still the choice of the masses – the motorways are pleasantly empty, and it’s not down to the toll, I’m sure – but whereas in Indonesia it’s pretty much the only option, and is therefore not bad, in Malaysia it’s slowly moving towards being the poor man’s option as cars become more and more common, and it’s starting to show.

Malaysia has a larger proportion of privately owned vehicles than in Indonesia, but that doesn’t mean the people know how to drive. Red lights are still regarded as pretty decorations rather than traffic controllers; biker gangs roar down the street, or should I say ‘phut’ down the streets, seeing as they all drive crappy little mopeds; and although there must be some kind of legislation controlling the condition of the old bangers on the roads, the amount of pollution choking out of the exhaust pipes is astounding, especially from the pink public buses in KL.

Malaysia has a language identity crisis. In Malaysia, you really don’t need to know any language except English; non-Malays (like the Chinese and Indians) speak their own languages among themselves, and English is the lingua franca for business, with Bahasa Malaysia coming in third. Indonesia, of course, was quite different, even on the main tourist trails; the English was generally very poor there, but Malaysians speak it amazingly well. If there’s one reason that Malaysia will develop into a big Southeast Asian success story, like Singapore, Taiwan and – until the recent crash – South Korea, it’s because the population speaks the international language of business. Even Mahathir speaks excellent English, despite hating those who invented it.

Malaysia purports to be a free country, but it has draconian censorship. The newspapers are full, but they’re full of irrelevant trivia and tirades against the Americans, and contain nothing at all about contentious or anti-Malaysian events; the television is distressingly tame, but most of the movies on TV and in the cinema are subtitled American flicks, and you’ve never seen so many films where they shout, ‘Forget you!’ and ‘Freaking hell!’ while mouthing something somewhat more vernacular; and if a foreign magazine happens to carry an article that criticises the government – be it Time, Newsweek or whatever – it mysteriously doesn’t appear on the newsstands that month. Funny, that.

But, despite the inherent contradictions, Malaysia is a coherent, united entity, and there’s precious little unrest or dissatisfaction among the majority. Malaysians are proud of their country, and unlike Singapore, the youth isn’t floating off nonchalantly to other countries to evade the stuffy atmosphere. It’s an easy place in which to travel, the people are very friendly without being the incessant salesmen of Indonesia, and with the currency crisis affecting the dollar rate, it’s a phenomenally cheap place to visit. I’m extremely glad I came, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be back one day.

Thailand: Island Life

The Currency Crisis

Written: 19 December 1997

We entered Thailand on Friday 19th December, heading for some Christmas cheer on the islands off the southern coast. Not only does it sound like a good spot – many travellers congregate in this area for Christmas, and it’s never nice to be alone in the festive season – but the Thai currency crisis means my dollars can buy a lot more festive spirit. Listen to this for a story of mismanagement and corruption with a distinctly Southeast Asian flavour.

Thailand’s economy is pretty screwed, along with most of the rest of Southeast Asia, but where Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines suffered from a domino effect, Thailand started the whole thing in the first place. It’s a classic case of government corruption, bad planning, a desire for instant westernisation, and a bursting economic bubble.

In the mid-1970s, the Thailand economy started to grow from its post-war Third World status, mainly thanks to Japanese aid and investment, and by the late 1980s the country had made remarkable progress, and Thailand had become one of the world’s leading rice exporters and Southeast Asia’s biggest producer of cars (from Japanese-owned factories). The dream of financial affluence was becoming a reality. In the last few years of the 1980s foreign investment skyrocketed, in the early 1990s the world discovered the Asian stock markets, and in 1993 the Thai government set up the Bangkok International Banking Facility through which companies could borrow money from abroad. This latter facility really took off, with foreign bankers more than willing to lend money to a country whose currency was tied to the US dollar (as were most Southeast Asian currencies then). As a result, between 1993 and 1996 about US$50 billion poured into the country in loans.

This money was supposed to be spent on improved roads, more modern industrial facilities, better education, AIDS awareness and so on, but none of this materialised. Instead it was spent, among other things, on building more cars and trucks (which were never bought), expensive condominiums (which were never sold), heavy industry (which failed to interest overseas investors), and private hospital beds (which were never filled). Private citizens built up huge debts on credit cards, and the Bangkok Bank of Commerce spent a fortune on propping up the currency, rather than face devaluation – money it could ill afford seeing as the government had had to bail out the bank itself to cover bad loans.

Then there’s Thailand’s amazingly corrupt governmental system; current MPs include ‘oil smugglers, alleged traffickers in drugs, investors in casino businesses, suspected traders in contraband and others involved in illegal logging and cross-border trade’, according to one economics professor. The method of getting votes is to buy them (in 1996, US$1 billion was spent on buying votes) so it’s hardly surprising that the government’s policies had less to do with improving the country than improving its individuals’ portfolios. Consider that Thailand has had 21 coups since 1932, and seven prime ministers in the last nine years, and you begin to see the instability built into the system.

All it took to bring down this house of cards was a slide in exports in 1996; soon currency traders around the world were speculating that the currency would have to loosen the tie between the Thai baht and the US dollar. The government didn’t want this to happen, so it spent a fortune on propping up the baht, but eventually the foreign debts were called in, the bubble burst and the currency was suspended.

The effect of all this on the traveller is that if you have your money in something like US dollars, then you’ll get upwards of 50 per cent more bang for your buck than before the crisis, across most of Southeast Asia. A concurrent devaluation occurred in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, because foreign investors saw similar economic set-ups in these countries and therefore similar potential risks, so they pulled their money out and the rupiah, ringgit and peso tumbled too. Only Singapore survived the crisis, because it has a much more stable government and financial system, and indeed, Singapore has been pouring aid into its neighbours, because it knows how important the local financial system is to its own economy (and how important political goodwill is).

It’s too early to see a real effect on the man in the street, but the strict economic plan imposed by the International Monetary Fund[1] (IMF) as part of its US$17 billion aid package has affected everyone; the price of fuel and food has shot up because the governments have increased taxation in an attempt to cut budget deficits. As for Thailand, the large numbers of go-go girls, poverty in the countryside and shocking traffic and health infrastructures aren’t anything new, it’s just a travesty that these issues weren’t addressed when Thailand had the money to do so.

So I might be getting lots more baht, rupiah and ringgits for my dollar, but it does make me feel slightly guilty; by simply by being paid in a different currency from the man on the street here, my money goes further. However you look at it, it feels unfair, even more so because nobody I’m likely to meet can do anything about it...

[1] The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the sister agency to the World Bank; the former helps out developing countries whose economies have gone disastrously wrong, while the latter funds development projects in the Third World. Here are a few figures to put things in perspective: Thailand is getting US$17 billion from the IMF; Indonesia about US$23 billion; South Korea maybe as much as US$60 to US$100 billion; by comparison, Mexico’s bailout three years ago cost US$48 billion. The hope is that stalling the ASEAN crisis and that in South Korea (the world’s 11th largest economy) will stop the crisis moving to Japan, which is having economic problems of its own. A Japanese crisis would hit the USA, which could trigger a global collapse, and that’s the last thing we all need. It’s all quite ironic when you consider that in 1963/64 the USA borrowed US$600 million from the IMF to bolster its own diving currency and restore investor confidence; the USA is now the largest contributor to the IMF’s funds, having donated 18 per cent of the US$200 billion reserve the IMF has to throw around. History is circular, after all.

The Thai Language

Written: 19 December 1997

The strange-looking script of Thailand’s language makes me feel as if I’m somewhere completely alien. You can get used to seeing the hieroglyphics of Chinese quickly enough, and even if you can’t understand Malay or Indonesian, at least you can read it. Thai, on the other hand, will probably always remain a mystery to me; it looks like a combination of Spirographed Russian and melted Meccano.

Luckily there are quite a few western transcriptions of the language around, such as on street signs, so idiots like me can actually read what’s written even if we still don’t understand it, but the pronunciation of these transcriptions is really confusing. Phuket, for example, is pronounced ‘Poo-ket’; yes, I thought it was pronounced ‘Fuck-it’ as well when I first saw the name, but an ‘h’ after a consonant in Thai just means breathe out, rather than radically changing the consonant as it does in English. The pronunciation rules for speaking Thai are complex because it’s a tonal language – the pitch at which you say something alters its meaning – but most travellers just learn the numbers, hello, thank you and please, and manage quite happily with sign language. With only a month in the country, that was my plan too, though I started making an in-road from day one by trying to learn my 1-2-3 and basic formalities. I rather enjoyed the challenge.

To an Englishman with an Englishman’s refined sense of toilet humour, there appears to be a pre-occupation with ablutions in the Thai language. As mentioned above, the most popular beach resort in Thailand is pronounced ‘Poo-ket’. Then there’s the national dish, fried rice, which in Thai is khao phat, pronounced ‘cow pat’. And check out the word for ‘yes’: it’s khrap. On top of that, as a politeness you should end every sentence in conversation with khrap, at least until the conversation has progressed, when you can drop it. There’s a joke in there somewhere about talking shit, but I’m not going to make it...

I feel just as confused when it comes to Thai cuisine, especially after reading the section in my phrase book on all the goodies available. Try saying phat phak bung fai daeng (morning glory vine in fried garlic and bean sauce) or plaa dak phat phet (catfish fried in fresh chilli paste and basil), especially when the menu’s in Thai script and your pronunciation is liable to bring you lightly grilled cockroach testicles braised in a sauce of lizard’s eyeballs. It’s all part of the fun, though, and if you like food that’s hot enough to burn a hole in the back of your throat, you’re unlikely to end up with anything inedible; and if it isn’t hot enough for your tastes, every table has a container of chopped chillies that are dangerous enough to be a health hazard.

I always pile loads on.

Hat Yai to Phuket

Written: 20 December 1997

Although a two-month Thai visa only costs US$10, I’m still suffering from the attitude problem that struck me in Indonesia; I really want to head over into India, and it feels like I’m just ‘doing time’ until I can hit the subcontinent.

On the other hand, after the pleasant surprise of Malaysia, I’m not going to dismiss a whole country just because somewhere else happens to have fired my imagination. Thailand is a well-known travel spot, and it’s got enough variety to keep even a fussy sod like me occupied. There are beautiful beaches, mountain areas, forests, culture, cities, cuisine... Thailand does it all pretty well, so despite my slightly grumpy disposition, I’m finding myself getting fairly interested in the whole prospect.

After the border, the first stop Charlie and I landed up in was Hat Yai, after an easy bus ride direct from Penang and across the border. Customs didn’t even bother to look at our luggage, and the automatic 30-day visa was granted without any fuss.

Hat Yai isn’t exactly attractive, so after changing some money at a wonderfully advantageous rate, we hopped onto the bus and headed east to the coast at Songkhla, a town by the beach. This was only to break up the journey; a direct trip north from Penang would have been an all-day effort, and we’d have had problems finding an open bank on our arrival, so we took in a break along the way. There were hardly any westerners in Songkhla, and it made a nice change from the international tourism of west coast Malaysia.

Southern Thailand is extremely constricted, geographically speaking. A thin peninsula joins Central Asia to Peninsular Malaysia, and although most of the peninsula is part of Thailand, Myanmar takes a pretty large chunk out of the western coast. This leaves a very thin strip for Thailand, so everyone takes pretty much the same route between Malaysia and Bangkok, with the only real choice being between heading via touristy Phuket on the west, or the less touristy but still ridiculously packed island of Ko Samui on the east. We decided Ko Samui would make a lively stop for Christmas; the beer is cheap, there are pretty beaches and there are loads of people. What more could Santa wish for?

Thai Bus Problems

The next day we struck north, aiming to get to Ko Samui in one journey. Things didn’t exactly go according to plan, however, and by the end of the day we were stuck on the wrong side of the Thai peninsula, some eight hours from our starting point and still four hours and a long ferry trip from Ko Samui. It seems that the simplicity of Malaysian transport has lulled us into a false sense of security.

Thai transport is good, but it’s good in the same way that Indonesian transport is good; there are lots of buses, but they’re not that flash. However, the Thais are even more flexible than the Indonesians in their definition of ‘truth’, so when you get on a bus and the conductor says it’s going to Surat Thani (the ferry terminal for Ko Samui) and charges you accordingly, you might be forgiven for thinking that the bus will actually go to Surat Thani... but think again, sucker! We ended up in Krabi, miles from Surat Thani, where the conductor said we could change here for Surat... except the last Surat bus for the day had already left. Connection? I don’t think so.

Perhaps it was all part of a scam, because the touts at Krabi were very keen that we go with them to stay the night in a lovely hotel they knew, and from where we could catch the Surat bus in the morning, but something about the whole thing stank, so we decided it would be better if we got back on the bus and stayed with it to Phuket, a better bet for accommodation and a bigger terminal than Krabi. And I could have sworn I saw a bus marked ‘Krabi-Surat Thani’ pulling out just as we drove off for Phuket. Thailand? Lie-land, more like.

Phuket, though, turned out OK, if only because we were there for just one night. It’s a major, major tourist spot – package holidays galore head out here during the peak seasons – and this makes survival easy, if a little uninspiring. Still, after a whole day of tarmac surfing you don’t want language barriers, and Phuket fitted the bill. The main attraction of Phuket – which is technically an island, though the bridge to the mainland is very short – is the collection of beautiful beaches where white people go red. We, however, missed out on this exciting egg-and-chips experience and only saw a snippet of Phuket town, so I’ll leave out any disparaging remarks I might have otherwise made about beached-whale tourists from the north of England, holiday reps called Gary, and disco nights down the authentic ‘Beach and Beer Glass’ British pub. I’ll save them for Ko Samui...

There was one point of interest though; on the way, at Phang-nga, we passed the beach where the action scenes of The Man with the Golden Gun were shot. That’s the James Bond film where Christopher Lee, the bad guy, builds a high-tech destructor beam on a paradise island in the middle of nowhere and threatens to destroy the world, and Roger Moore saves the day by tracking down the weapon of mass destruction and disarming it. Well, the beach off Phang-nga has a couple of surreal limestone islands where the destructor beam was filmed, and these islands reflect the surrounding landscape in microcosm. The drive up from Krabi to Phuket was simply stunning, and a pleasant bonus after the other screw-ups.

Ko Samui

Written: 5 January 1998

Sunday saw us scrabbling to get to Ko Samui in time to find a room for Christmas. The journey was long and hot, but by early evening Charlie and I were ensconced in a beach bungalow on Samui’s east coast, within earshot of the beach, and just a five-minute walk from the bustling tourist Mecca of Lamai. Ah, Christmas in paradise. Again.

Well, not quite. My previous two Christmases on the road were entirely different: the one in Australia was classic, with a family atmosphere, exquisite food and a hot climate, and the one in New Zealand was simply breathtaking, with the mountainous sunset and sunrise over the glacier, and the thrill of being miles from the nearest human beings. As a change, I thought that this Christmas I’d hit a real tourist area, if only to make sure that I wasn’t going to be alone at the festive time of year. And besides, I figured it was about time I let my hair down and partied, after the budget-consciousness of the last few months.

I felt my brain start to go soggy around the edges after maybe three or four days. The routine: I’d get up around ten and saunter down to the hotel restaurant for a breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast, served by the surly and downright grumpy old granny who ran the place. Cheered up immensely from my morning mood by seeing someone even crabbier than myself, I’d get my beach gear together and wander down to the sand, a 30-second journey from our bungalow.

Sunbathing has never really appealed to me, but for some unknown reason I became totally engrossed by this mind-numbingly insipid pastime. Perhaps it was the fact that, sitting up from my solar slumber, I would fall in love at least five times a minute as the most amazingly beautiful girls wandered up and down the waterfront (inevitably with boyfriends in tow, but hey, you just don’t look at the boyfriend). Perhaps it was the addiction of a number of excellent books, from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, through Alexandre Dumas’ classic The Three Musketeers, and on to Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before... not to mention my new purchase, a guidebook for India, a tome that makes me want to hop west more and more with each turning page.

Perhaps it was the simplicity of life after such a psychological struggle through Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia; when your day consists of wake, eat, beach, eat, beach, eat, movie, drink and sleep, the stress level is fairly low. Perhaps it was the fact that, after sporting a tramper’s tan for so long – brown forearms, legs and neck, white shoulders, torso and feet, making you look like you’re wearing white underwear when you’re actually naked – I was beginning to go brown all over, and having shaved off my on-the-road beard, I felt as young as ever. Or perhaps it was the endless fascination of the other people on the island. Most likely it was a combination of all these reasons.

Meanwhile, Ko Samui managed to excel in lots of other areas, with great food – pad thai, khao pat, red and green curries, tom yam, stir fries, great seafood, copious cold Cokes, hot chillies on the side and even baguettes – and good music (which made me quite homesick, but in the nicest possible way), lots of astoundingly cheap alcohol, loads of people out for a good time, dance clubs with no entry charge, plenty of books to read, and heaps of leisure time in which to read them. And on top of all this there was the festive season...

Christmas in the Sun

Christmas itself went with a bang. Abandoning myself to the vices early on Christmas Eve, I managed to get startlingly drunk as the evening progressed, dancing my legs down to the knees at the main nightclub while drinking 60 baht (80p) piña coladas. I eventually staggered home at 4.30am while the party continued on without me.

Christmas Day itself was a feast of Thai food and more Thai beer – this time to the performance of live rock bands, not dance DJs – and the wee hours snuck up once again before I finally wilted. Charlie, in his supporting role as a relatively sober observer, kept me company in fine feckle, especially as I must have been talking complete bollocks by midnight.

Events conspired to make our stay a longer one. After the Christmas parties had evaporated (but not the general party atmosphere), we checked out the buses to Bangkok; the first seats we could get were on 5th January. Although we could have simply taken the ferry back to the mainland and made our own way by public transport, we simply couldn’t be bothered; infused by holiday slackness, we took the easy option and decided to stay for the New Year celebrations, after booking two tickets for the 5th. Besides, I’d already decided that Thailand was going to be a fairly low-key event for me, as the Indian subcontinent is beckoning ever louder, and I’m not sure I can resist any more.

It wasn’t all sleeping and drinking, though. One day we wandered to the neighbouring beach of Chaweng, a more popular but not particularly wonderful resort area, where the rubbish piles up, the bodies are laid out on the beach like pork chops under the grill, and the night clubs are more numerous, bigger and less intimate than the ones in Lamai. I’m glad we ended up where we were.

New Year went crazy, much like Christmas, and I celebrated the coming of the year 2541 in style[1]. It was a long night involving Charlie retiring to bed soon after the New Year arrived, and me wandering around on my own, drunk as a skunk, making friends with people like Fred from Germany who kept buying me bottles of Beck’s, and the sausage vendors who cured my midnight munchies and provided me with a major chilli kick at four in the morning[2]. Stumbling in at six, you could say it was a superb celebration, though New Year’s Day wasn’t such a hoot.

But finally, we managed to break free of the addictive and hedonistic sloth of Ko Samui by jumping on the overnight Bangkok bus, which was due in the capital the next morning.

[1] The Thai calendar is based on Buddha, not Christ, so they’re 543 years ahead of the West. Presumably they won’t be celebrating the end of the millennium in 2543...

[2] Chillies get me incredibly high. I am not alone in this, as people get addicted to curries for this very reason, but give me a few dangerously hot chillies, and I’ll float off to the sky for a couple of minutes. So Thailand, with its pot of serious chillies on every restaurant table, was considerably entertaining at meal times. At least, I think it was...

Beach Bums of Thailand

Written: 5 January 1998

I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Ko Samui, but for different reasons to most of the beer-swilling lobsters around me. I enjoyed it because it reminded me exactly what it is that I don’t like about the traditional two-week beach holiday, with its incessant drinking, sitting on the beach, eating steak and chips, and inevitable sunburn in the attempt to get a tan in time for the flight home. Ever since a holiday from hell in Gran Canaria, I’ve been incredibly wary of beach resorts, but both Charlie and I looked at Ko Samui in utter horror, and revelled in it.

Where can I start to describe the anathema of Lamai? Perhaps the first shock that springs on the unwary and unassuming traveller is the standard of the tourists; for some reason, even the normally disparaging word ‘tourist’ seems too classy to apply to the clientele of Ko Samui. Everyone is either English or German, with a few minority appearances from other European nations; I do not exaggerate when I say I heard no other accents except Cockney, Mancunian, Liverpudlian and German. It was amazing.

But not as amazing as the bodies these people flaunt. I’m fairly used to seeing travellers in shorts and T-shirts, because that’s the standard dress, but very few of them have potbellies or that pale, north-European skin that reminds one of flaccid, plucked chicken. The world is different on Ko Samui; the possession of a beer belly is almost an entry requirement, and if you don’t have the requisite waistline, it’s expected that you’ll do something about it in the myriad bars scattered around. One exception to this rule is if you have a tattoo, in which case you’re instantly accepted as one of the gang; if you’re fat, pale and have a tat of a rose enshrined in barbed wire at the top of your left arm, you’re practically a deity in these parts.

But who is going to hang out with all these pasty slouches? (They’re all single, because if they were married the expense of keeping a wife and kid in TV and nappies would absorb the cost of the air fare to Thailand, and besides, the wife would rather go to Ibiza or Majorca with her friends from the housing estate, where they can all keep an eye on their erring husbands.) The answer lies in the cultural make-up of the Thais, to whom prostitution is a legal and perfectly respectable profession; many Thai women head off from their country villages into the cities to solicit for a few years (mainly in their late teens and early twenties), and return to the country when they’ve earned some money, where they are fully accepted back into society without the taboos and bigotry inherent in western society. As a result, there are plenty of willing Thai girls floating around Ko Samui for the beached whales to try to land; I’m not saying everyone is a pro – there are plenty of girls who just want to entrap a rich westerner to take them away from all this – but there are enough willing Thai girls around to ensure a high score rate for the waistline-challenged visitors.

And it’s a sorry sight. Old, balding men; young, fat drunkards; even slick dudes who could pull any white girl on the beach if they wanted to... they drive around on their rented motorbikes, Thai chick on the back, and goodness only knows what they actually do all day (well, apart from the obvious). I do know they go to restaurants and end up making very little small talk, mainly with the man talking rubbish and the Thai girl smiling sweetly, if a little falsely, at every nuance of the conversation, if such a conversation can be said to have anything as sophisticated as nuances. Then, of course, it’s back to the room for sex and an account to settle.

I don’t understand how anyone with a self-respecting streak in their cranium could act in the way that the tattoo brigade do. They live for getting pissed as farts, eating curries, and the premier league results. They cut their hair in astounding fashions that make them look even more stupid than they really are. They hate all Johnny Foreigners, unless those foreigners sell them ecstasy or draw, in which case they’re pretty damn cool. They’re sexist pigs – women are only there for one thing, and it ain’t the cooking – and two weeks on the beach getting slaughtered and dancing ’til six at the rave clubs on the beach is their idea of heaven. Wicked!

But they do manage to pull (outside of the Thai girls, that is) because there are plenty of idiot women around who have just as many mental screw-ups as their Neanderthal sexual opposites. The big difference is that a lot of the women on holiday in Ko Samui are stunning; they have bodies that defy gravity, tans that defy skin cancer, and bikinis that defy the law. But they also have brains that defy belief, and although I’m there with all the other red-blooded males gawping at the Venusian peaks on the beach, as soon as these girls open their mouths, any stirring in the nether regions deflates as quickly as if I’d thought of Thora Hird in a swimsuit (which is a useful tip for those who suffer from P.E.). From the mouths of babes idiocy flows, and although the girls might not have the tattooed chicken skin of their friends from the dangling sex, their brains are just as liquid. Thank God they get together with each other and save the rest of us from making the biggest mistake of our holidays.

The overall result is an insight into a culture – a part of western culture, I might add – that just leaves me dumbstruck. That party of Boyz from East Landahn who have been sitting next to me on the beach for the last few hours gets up to hit the bars, and leaves behind it three plastic bottles, two Fanta cans, and a scrunched up packet of cigarettes. A couple of older men, who are obviously just ancient versions of the younger love machines walking down the street, are sitting outside the 24-hour supermarket ploughing through a bag of beers, wondering why they’re single. A lone American, with a boxer’s nose, a week-old cut across his cheek and the bleary eyes of the excessively drunk, sits at the end of a bar, staring at the game of American football on the TV, by turns leaping up and shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ when his team scores a touchdown, and burying his head in his hands when the opposing team crosses the line; he’s drunk enough to have alienated the few friends he originally made in the bar, and his loneliness is both loud and painfully obvious. An old couple walks hand in hand along the road, staring at the pick-up joints and tacky rock bars with a look of slight incredulity, wondering at the youth of today and bemused but amused at the available entertainment; they’re an ocean of sanity among the craziness, and you can’t help wondering if they booked the wrong holiday by mistake. The hotel’s food and drinks menu has all the usual foodstuffs – lots of rice dishes, Chinese cooking, Thai curries, wonderful fruit drinks – and tucked away at the very end is an entry, highlighted in red, that says, ‘Magic Mushrooms, 200-300 baht,’ and they mean it, too. This place is a dream.

Even the Thai culture is totally based round tourism (of course). Hawkers stride the beach, selling kimonos, sarongs, hammocks, food and drink, and even Indian mysticism[1]. The Thai masseurs on the beach do their stuff, but the massage parlours in the conurbation manage to add a certain dimension to massage that can only be performed behind closed doors. The restaurants do western food and, if you’re lucky, a few Thai dishes, though it’s heartening to note that there are a few warung-type places around, where I ate almost exclusively. The shops sell western goods at outrageous prices – outrageous for Thailand, that is – and everywhere English reigns. Of course, this is an inevitable result of tourism, and I’m not criticising the set up in Ko Samui; it’s just that you could be anywhere in the world, not necessarily Thailand.

So, Ko Samui, you were good for Christmas and New Year; the beer was cheap, the sun shone, the beach was extremely beautiful, I got a tan, the sea was crystal clear and warm, the food was plentiful, the bungalow near the beach was pleasant enough, and there was plenty to look at. It almost makes me glad to be getting back to the stress and strain of travelling; in this respect, Ko Samui has been a complete success.

[1] A young man approached me on my first day on the beach, introducing himself as an Indian mystic from Kashmir who read palms. I told him I didn’t want to know about it, but he insisted on taking my palm and jotting down some details anyway; then when he came to the inevitable bit where he asked me to put some money in his hand to get my fortune, I told him I’d already made my fortune, but it was back at the hotel and he wasn’t getting any of it. He got the message and left. The next day, he came back, and failing to recognise me, he started with the same spiel. This time I interrupted him and told him I didn’t want my fortune told, and that I still didn’t have any money on me, and he looked rather hurt and said, ‘But I haven’t asked you for money. I tell you what, I will tell you the first name of your mother, and if I am right, you can pay me, and if not, you don’t have to.’ I told him I already knew the first name of my mother, and I didn’t need to pay someone to remind me. Faced with such irrefutable logic, his brow wrinkled and, before long, he’d wandered off down the beach, a mystified mystic. He never bothered me again.

Thailand: Bangkok and the North

Bangkok

Written: 10 January 1998

As I hooked up my computer to the public phone just off Bangkok’s Khao San Road, I noticed that everything had stopped. Despite it being 8.30am and the height of Bangkok’s morning rush hour[1], everyone on the street had suddenly stopped moving, the horns had stopped blaring, and even the most manic drivers had stopped trying to fit ten cars into the space of one. And then I realised that the national anthem was being played, and in this country where the King is revered almost to the point of deification, everyone stops and stands to attention when his signature tune is played. It’s just one amazing thing among many in this crazy city.

I first saw Bangkok some 26-and-a-half months ago – in transit on the way to Sydney – and I couldn’t believe that one day I might travel there. Looking at the flooded streets from my window seat and seeing the sprawl of Asian town planning from a safe distance above, the thought of actually being down there scared the hell out of me. Add to the mixture the somewhat scary reputation that Bangkok has in the West – drugs being planted in your baggage, sleazy sex bars[2], AIDS epidemics, economic crises and the like – and it wasn’t really surprising that I, a novice traveller, was worried. But now I’ve actually turned up in Bangkok, I’ve travelled long enough to know there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

The Khao San Road

The Khao San Road is Bangkok’s backpacker centre, and everything the traveller needs is there, from cheap accommodation to travel agents to bars. It wasn’t long before my passport was at the Indian embassy, being processed for a six-month visa, and I was the proud owner of a ticket from Bangkok to Calcutta, for the incredibly low cost of 3400 baht, or about £40, a symptom of the crashing Thai economy. Flushed with bureaucratic success, I decided to let my hair down.

On the bus from Ko Samui I’d met an Irishman called Gary, and after a long day sorting out tickets and visas, we decided to go for a beer. Now, as every self-respecting drinker knows, ‘a beer’ isn’t the singular of ‘beer’, it’s the plural, and as one bottle led to another we settled into the bliss of Bangkok. Somehow we managed to recruit another liver-pickler, a lively Scottish lass called Mo, and together we moved on to the Thailand equivalent of the Oblivion Pill: Sang Thip whisky. In my long years of research I haven’t found a spirit that manages to destroy sensibility quite as comprehensively as Sang Thip, and by 10pm we were in another world. It’s a hazy memory, but I recall taking a ride in a tuk-tuk[3] to a nightclub, where we were almost the only punters, and rather quickly taking a taxi back to bed.

The next day was a repeat performance, but without Gary this time, as he’d flown back home. Mo and I managed another bottle of Sang Thip, and ended up spending the next day recuperating, before she struck north. I’d managed to spend three days in Bangkok, and the whole thing was a debauched daze. Not surprisingly, I felt pretty rough afterwards, and that’s when the flu virus that had been incubating inside me for five days broke. God, I felt miserable, and in my incapacitated state, I calculated that since I landed in Indonesia, I have been ill on average every 14 days (and by ‘ill’ I mean diarrhoea, temperature, vomiting, flu symptoms, or a combination). This could help to explain the emotional roller-coaster ride I’ve had over the previous four months, but I wasn’t going to let it stop me checking out the more cultural side of Thailand’s capital city.

Exploring Bangkok

Bangkok is a fascinating place. The images of Thailand’s capital are all accurate; it’s heavily polluted, incredibly crowded, very noisy, amazingly sleazy and endlessly interesting. It didn’t freak me out as much as I’d thought it would, though; it is, after all, just another Asian city, and although it’s a particularly bustling version, it’s conceptually no different from Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and so on. It’s just crazier.

Against popular perception, Bangkok is a pretty clean place, at least as far as visible pollution is concerned. There’s precious little rubbish on the street, and indeed there’s a strict penalty system for dropping litter. Combine this with the Chinese obsession for sweeping outside shop fronts and watering down the pavement to keep the dust down, and the place is relatively rubbish-free; sure, there are plenty of overflowing bins around with their distinctive rotting vegetable smell, but the rubbish isn’t at floor level. It’s at nose level.

The air pollution in Bangkok has to be breathed to be believed. Every city has air pollution, thanks to the internal combustion engine, but Bangkok has turned particles-per-cubic-metre into a tangible concept. Policemen, tuk-tuk drivers and even street stall owners wear face masks as a matter of course; the Indonesian forest-fire haze didn’t reach as far north as Bangkok, but that’s because it didn’t have to – Bangkok already has a resident haze. If you’re feeling beyond help in Bangkok, don’t go to the trouble of buying a garage, a car and a hose pipe; all you need to do is sit on a sidewalk and breathe deeply, and if the fumes don’t get you, you could always try crossing the road...

In typical Asian style, Bangkok is home to millions and millions of shops. Finding what you want is another matter altogether, but walking down the streets is a lesson in pack-’em-high that the western world doesn’t even come close to. There are shops dedicated to selling metal strips, shops that sell compressors, shops that sell bulk incense, shops that sell bottled oxygen, all bang in the middle of town, tucked between the noodle restaurants and the banks. Bangkok is one big department store with millions of different departments and no air conditioning. It’s a buzz.

And dotted around the city are hundreds of wats. Wat is Thai for temple, and as far as Buddhism goes, Bangkok is a major centre for wats. Among the hundreds of wats are Wat Intharawihan with its huge golden statue of a standing Buddha; Wat Benchamabopit, a marble complex with canals, bridges and a beautiful interior; Wat Traimit, with its pure gold statue of Buddha; and the most amazing of all, Wat Pho, with its colossal statue of a reclining Buddha, where the feet are as wide as a man is high. I spent a whole day sweating round the streets of Bangkok, and although inhaling all the exhaust fumes did wonders for my sore throat, it was well worth the effort.

That night Charlie and I decided to buy tickets to Chiang Mai for the morning – after all, I had a week to kill until my flight, and the excitement of drinking in the Khao San Road was wearing thin. As if to rub in the Bangkok vibe, I received an email telling me that one of the people I’d met in Melbourne and had gone pig hunting with had died just before New Year from a heroin overdose. To say I was shocked was an understatement, and I thought Chiang Mai would be a pleasant place to get away from the bad news.

[1] Where, of course, the traffic doesn’t rush, it sits. Perhaps a better phrase for Bangkok would be ‘crush hour’, judging by the number of dents and near misses I witnessed from my phone booth cocoon.

[2] Check out this article, which I spotted in the Indian paper The Asian Age, dated 30th January 1998. It’s illuminating.

Thailand’s politicians can’t fathom the furore over the sex scandal surrounding US President Bill Clinton, with one suggesting Mr Clinton move to the Southeast Asian kingdom should he be impeached. ‘Great leaders are always very good at sex, like Cleopatra, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Mao Zedong. Mr Clinton is also a capable leader so it is normal for him to be very good at sex,’ Mr Pan Phuengsujarit, a former government spokesman, was quoted as saying in Thursday’s The Nation newspaper. ‘We know this kind of thing is normal among Thai politicians,’ he added.

Not all Thai women are as accepting of their husband’s infidelities. Last year one housewife made headlines when, after discovering her mate had a minor wife [a second wife, not strictly legal, but socially accepted], she sliced off his penis with a kitchen knife, tied it to some balloons and watched it float away. Such acts of revenge are so common that one Bangkok hospital has a special unit devoted solely to reattaching male sexual organs.

[3] A tuk-tuk is a three-wheeled taxi that’s open to the elements, and therefore provides a much more thrilling ride than a conventional taxi. Tuk-tuks are named after the noise they make with their hopelessly out-of-tune moped engines, and the pollution they churn out is simply amazing. They’re everywhere, they’re driven by shameless touts, and they’re a great way to get around the city. The fact that tuk-tuks look like golf buggies and are about as fashionable doesn’t stop the Thais fixing garish stickers and garlands to them... and why should it? It’s no worse than go-faster stripes...

Chiang Mai

Written: 15 January 1998

After an excruciating 12-hour journey, the Bangkok bus finally arrived in Chiang Mai. As with most long bus journeys, it was uncomfortable and fairly unpleasant, but luckily Charlie had discovered some sleeping pills in his travel medical kit, and they helped. Unfortunately they didn’t kick in until after the obligatory full-volume Thai-dubbed American movie – arguably the most difficult part of any long bus haul in Thailand – but armed with sleeping pills, eye shades and ear plugs, it was a bearable event. Arriving in Chiang Mai and tracking down a place to stay wasn’t exactly difficult, as the bus ticket included a free night’s accommodation in one of the many guest houses dotted around. Yes, Chiang Mai is a serious tourist trap.

Its main attraction is the trekking. I had absolutely no intention of going on an organised trek – an oxymoron in my book – but on arrival at the guest house, a thinly disguised tour-booking operation, I began to reconsider. After all, the secret to a good trek is to go with a good group, and the bunch off the bus were as good as it gets. So before I knew it, I’d booked myself on a three-day trek into the hills of northern Thailand.

The trip was quite excellent. The trekking was easy, and although it was very pleasant wandering through the paddy fields and river valleys of the north, it was nothing terribly different from central Sulawesi or any other Southeast Asian country. However, the extras made the whole expedition worth the effort: we rode on elephants for one leg, drifted down a river on a raft for another, and spent the nights in delightfully basic huts, sleeping on the floor and huddling round fires as the moon rose, our breath frosting in the cold nights of the north. Finally we drove to the top of Doi Inthanon, the highest peak in Thailand at 2565m, where a wonderful pair of wats have been built in honour of the king and queen.

Opium Dens

But the one thing that made the trek different from the normal experience was the local drug culture among the tribes. The hill tribes of northern Thailand are famous throughout the world, but not necessarily for the best reasons; they grow some of the best marijuana in the world, and the area is a major source of opium. It’s obvious why; people in northern Thailand are not rich, and if they can survive by growing drugs, then who can blame them?

Up here in the northern hills, these drugs are technically illegal, but in practice they’re decriminalised, much like marijuana is in Amsterdam[1]. Is it any wonder that the organised treks through the hills are so popular?

On the first night of the trek we watched a real live opium den in action. It was an education. The smoker lies down on his side, and the opium man lies down on his, so that they’re facing each other. The dealer then goes through a long procedure of mixing the pure opium resin with aspirin (to make it a smooth smoke) and less-refined opium, which he then grinds up in a little dish and pounds into a black paste with the consistency of Plasticine. Finally he pokes a little into the end of a pipe, and hands it over to the smoker.

As the pipe is smoked, the dealer keeps the end over a little paraffin lamp until all the opium has disappeared, and that’s it. At 20 baht a pipe (about 25p) it’s an astoundingly cheap drug, and between five and ten pipes will see most people through, depending on your size and tolerance. Is it any wonder trekking in Chiang Mai is so popular, where the mountains are high and so are the trekkers?

But even without this interesting insight into a culture that shaped the East back in the days of the Opium Wars, the trek would have been well worthwhile. I found myself wanting to explore the northern reaches of Thailand more, but my flight to Calcutta beckoned, and there I’d find a far trippier experience than any opium dream...

[1] Things have changed since I wrote this in 1997. It seems that the drugs problem in the north has been seriously tackled and a lot of work done to reduce it throughout the country. It is now totally illegal for people to smoke opium while on a trek, and although there will always be some exceptions, many of the trekking agencies have been diligent in ensuring that guides and trekkers do not get involved in opium smoking. There was also a serious case of a westerner smoking too much opium on a trek and eventually dying, which might explain the speed of the changes.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 18 January 1998

So, another country gets ticked off the list. I can’t really comment too much on Thailand; despite being here for a month, I never really left the cosy confines of the tourist trail, and I have no idea what the real Thailand is like. In places like Chiang Mai, the Khao San Road and Ko Samui, the locals are unavoidably tainted by tourism, and as a result they seem pretty miserable and offhand, and the service is terrible. But I’m absolutely convinced that this is not representative of Thais in general; they’re supposed to be incredibly friendly, and although I didn’t experience this, I didn’t exactly put any effort into exploring the real Thailand.

There is one thing that’s true, though. For me – and statistically speaking, I’m in a minority with this opinion – Thailand just doesn’t appeal. Sure, there are plenty of places to visit, but none of them really filled me with a major desire to explore, and I could have omitted Thailand from my trip without any discernible tear spillage. I’m glad I came and did what I did, but compared to Indonesia it feels tame, compared to Singapore it feels backward, and compared to Malaysia it feels downright unfriendly.

On the other hand, Thai food is delightful, the landscapes are beautiful, and there’s an interesting culture hiding behind the tourism. And it’s a perfect place to go if you want to take a break from hardcore travelling, because travel doesn’t get a lot easier than in Thailand.

India: West Bengal and Orissa

Thoughts Before Arriving

Written: 18 January 1998

I’ve been excited about the prospect of visiting India for some time now, and reading about it is only making me keener. Check out these selected facts that I gleaned from a bunch of articles in Time magazine:

- India is home to one-sixth of the world’s population, and is second only in size to China (though India is projected to overtake China in 2030).

- Five people die in traffic accidents in Delhi every day.

- Fully three-quarters of the structures in Delhi violate building standards in some way.

- Population growth is 2 per cent per year, less than half the rate it was before Nehru’s family planning programme in 1951 (which was the first one among developing nations). That’s still 18 million new mouths to feed every year, or more than half the population of Canada appearing every year in a country less than one-third of the size.

- Delhi is the world’s fourth most polluted metropolis. One report estimates that the average Delhi-wallah inhales the toxic equivalent of the smoke from 20 cigarettes every day.

- The population of India is 950 million[1]. Of these, 350 million are living below the poverty line (as many as those living in India at Independence), and 250 million are middle class.

- Of these 950 million, most are Hindus; there are over 100 million Muslims (only Indonesia and Pakistan have more), 20 million Christians, 18 million Sikhs, 7.5 million Buddhists, 4 million Jains, and lots of other minority faiths. It’s amazing that the country hasn’t succumbed to mass violence or dictatorship; indeed, the world’s largest democracy is relatively docile, outside of hotspots like Kashmir and the activities of Tamil sympathisers in the southeast.

- More than a million people in Delhi live rough in homemade squats called jhuggi bastis; some even illegally tap into the electricity supply. They endure dysentery, cholera and dengue fever, and one in ten babies born to them dies in its infancy. They struggle to eke a living as construction workers, rickshaw peddlers, street hawkers or servants.

- Delhi is full of historical buildings; there have been at least eight cities there in the last 3000 years, and some scholars say there have been up to 15. Traffic on one of New Delhi’s main thoroughfares has to swerve around the masonry slab that marks a Muslim saint’s grave; meanwhile the fairways at Delhi Golf Club have some unique hazards in the shape of royal tombs.

Is it any wonder I’ve been excited about visiting India for some time now? Compared to the indifference I felt when I read the guidebooks on Southeast Asia, India is a major draw card. As I touched down in Calcutta on the morning of January 18th 1998 I couldn’t wait. I wasn’t to be disappointed.

[1] It has since smashed through the one billion limit and is climbing all the time...

Calcutta

Written: 21 January 1998

Calcutta has an image problem. Ask most people what springs to mind when you mention the capital of West Bengal, and the images are of black holes, excessive pollution, slums, Mother Theresa and human tragedy. The guidebooks recommend that if this is your first visit to India, you shouldn’t make Calcutta your point of arrival. I can see why, but in my case it was exactly what I needed to blow the cobwebs of complacency away; it has to be the best introduction to a country I’ve ever experienced. I instantly found myself getting a buzz from travelling again...

Calcutta is a calamity of humanity. From the minute you step off the plane, it’s in your face, shocking and surprising at every turn. India strikes you hard; all your preconceptions are inadequate. I can conjure up images in my mind of slums, beggars, pollution and sheer filth, but there’s a huge difference between imagination and reality, and however well prepared you are, the real thing makes you stop and think. On the other hand, I wasn’t so much shocked as fascinated; I’ve been gradually introduced to the squalor of Asia by travelling through various degrees of the developing world, and now that I’m in the developing world, I’m finding I can handle it. I’m actually more shocked at my lack of surprise than I am by the squalor itself; I feel almost guilty to be able to accept such shocking scenes without feeling overly emotional. Such is the effect of long-term travel.

But it is true what they say: India is a different world. From the sheer mass of humans to the frenetic pace of life, it’s like nothing you have ever seen before; it’s an almost contradictory combination of rushing around like headless chickens and sitting back and doing absolutely nothing, a mix that only the Indians seem to have perfected. Calcutta is, of course, a particularly good example of Indian mayhem, and it seems it has always been this way. In 1803 Lord Valentia wrote, ‘The town of Calcutta is at present well worthy of being the seat of our Indian Government both from its size and from the magnificent buildings which decorate the part of it inhabited by Europeans. The Black Town is a complete contrast to this as well can be conceived. Its streets are narrow and dirty; the houses... resembling the cabins of the poorest class in Ireland... Chowringhee, an entire village of palaces, forms the finest views I have ever beheld in any city.’

There’s still plenty of British splendour under the pollution... and what pollution! The difference between London and Bangkok is as great as the difference between Bangkok and Calcutta, and where Bangkok’s haze hung around like a naughty schoolkid, mischievous but not necessarily a real threat, Calcutta’s should come with a government health warning. If you manage to find a spot where you can see for a short distance – on the River Hooghly or in the Maidan, for example – then, well, you can’t see for a short distance. Bridges and tall buildings appear as if they’re floating in cumulonimbus, and as for the sun, it’s a distant, hazy memory. I’ve managed to catch Calcutta in the wet, but the daily downpours don’t shift the smog, they merely add to the chaos.

Calcutta is fairly flat, so when it rains, it’s a disaster. The streets are pretty squalid anyway, but I’m surprised by the sheer amount of mud in this precipitous city. Whether they’re digging up the roads and piling up dirt on the roadside, only to have it wash all over the street, or whether it’s a slum area where bitumen is an alien concept, the mud is ubiquitous. Coupled with the rains are temperatures that reflect the time of year: Calcutta is freezing. I thank the stars that I decided to hold on to my sleeping bag, and I’m snuggling up at night while my roommate, a Frenchman called Eric whom I befriended in the airport, is freezing his proverbials off under a thin blanket.

So the roads are mud traps, the weather is shocking and the pollution solid enough to be claiming squatters’ rights, but Calcutta is a fascinating place to explore. Every road holds new thrills, and every attempt to do something fairly simple results in an experience that leaves you dumbfounded. For example, visiting the bank to change my travellers cheques took ages; I knew Indian banks were slow, and indeed I managed to get my cheques changed in a pretty efficient half-an-hour, but it’s an edifying sight watching the man fill out three or four forms, all in triplicate, and then file them round to various people for signatures, checks and goodness knows what else. The British bureaucratic legacy lives on, but in India, red tape has been transformed into an art form.

Images of Calcutta

How can you describe a mad place like Calcutta? I’ll simply pick out some of the crazier things I saw as I wandered around the streets, getting splattered in mud, cow dung and exhaust fumes:

- The driving is worse here than anywhere else I have been; Indians make Indonesians look like One Careful Woman Owners. One-way streets aren’t actually one-way, they simply mean you should be more careful about oncoming traffic, or – as most Indians seem to interpret the rules – one-way streets simply mean you should sound your horn continuously. Come to think of it, sounding your horn continuously is a prerequisite on any street, and Calcutta has to be one of the best places in the world to study the Doppler Effect; indeed, nine out of ten motorbikes have such hot-wired horns that their headlights dim when the horn goes off. Listening to the traffic is like a particularly energetic session at Crusty the Clown’s Funny Car Show: horns blare, honk, buzz, fart, whoop, rattle, ring and even screech like sirens, and behind the horns are multi-coloured rust buckets that look like they might fall apart at any moment. I’d heard that India was a circus, but I didn’t realise it was meant literally.

- There are cows all over the place, acting as natural rubbish hoovers and creating traffic havoc when they decide to sit down and chew the cud in the middle of a main thoroughfare. Cows are sacred to the Hindus – you won’t find many beef steaks in India – and they have free rein over the whole country. Hitting a cow with your car is worse karma than running over a human, so the cows are left to wander all over the place, leaving havoc in their wake. Never have the rural and urban clashed so strangely as in the rolling meadows of Calcutta.

- Homelessness is a fact of life for a huge number of Calcutta residents, and it’s simply amazing how every possible spot of land is used for makeshift tents, hard concrete beds and communal cooking collectives. Beggars tug at your clothes, looking pathetic and insisting more persistently than beggars in Southeast Asia. There are huge beggar rackets, and giving to Mother Theresa’s mission is a much better way of helping the poor, but although you can put the problem out of your mind, there’s no danger of being able to avoid it. Walking round Calcutta’s backstreets is like starring in a telethon.

- The street – indeed, any open space – is the toilet, kitchen and bedroom for lots of people. Everywhere you go there are people pissing and shitting in the middle of the road; there are people washing themselves at the public water pumps, almost naked and all soaped up, desperately trying to shift the dirt that must be so ingrained after years in the pollution; and there are people cooking their lunch right next to drains that house more germs than a biological warhead. It’s no wonder that India is disease-ridden; education about cleanliness is, well, scant.

- But, conversely, there are lots of smart middle class people in Calcutta. One must assume that tucked away in the depths of the city are reasonable housing estates, pleasant flats and relatively unpolluted areas, because the middle class is clean, pressed and eminently presentable, even if a lot of the clothes look like they’ve been rescued from a sixties retrospective fashion shoot. There’s an underground train system, of which only one north-south line is completed, but it’s efficient and relatively clean, and there are plenty of adverts around for computers, stereos and televisions, while dead dogs pile up under the hoardings, swelling up in the heat like cows on Australian highways. It’s the contrast between these different ways of life that brings the problem home; if you explore a place where everyone is poor, as would be the case in a poor village in the middle of Africa, the concept of poverty is more palatable, but when you see the incredibly poor and the comparatively well off squashed together on the same pavement, it makes the problem much more obvious, and much more unjust.

- The 450m-long Howrah Bridge, which spans the River Hooghly, is the busiest bridge in the world, and walking across it has to rate as one of the strangest experiences in Calcutta. The cars, buses and taxis are manic as they converge on the cantilevered construction, and every day 60,000 vehicles drone over the river, as well as an uncountable number of pedestrians. While I was walking over to the railway station to buy a timetable, I saw a taxi collide with a truck, losing its front offside wheel and sparking to a halt in the middle of the road. The truck kept going, the taxi passengers got out and simply hailed another taxi, and the taxi driver was left with a wrecked car and an angry bunch of crazy locals all swerving to avoid him and his taxi, none of whom thought it a good idea to stop and help. I left him to it; watching the pilgrims bathing in the river while their friends defecated just upstream from them was entertaining enough.

- Howrah Station, Calcutta’s main railway station, is incredible. It’s an imposing building housing dozens of lines, and trains run from here to every corner of the subcontinent. India’s trains are simply superb; a relic from the British Raj, the railways are masterfully run, rarely run on time but always run, and are the best way to get around this vast country. India has over 60,000km of tracks, and every day 7000 passenger trains run, carrying over 10.5 million passengers and connecting 7100 stations; not surprisingly, Indian Railways is the world’s largest single employer, with over 1.6 million staff. Howrah Station is a bustling hovel, with naked beggars sleeping in the middle of the main hallway while porters rush around shouting orders and blowing whistles for no discernible reason. Waiting for a train isn’t boring in India; it might be draining, but it’s certainly not boring.

- The railway system isn’t the only relic from the British Raj; Calcutta was the first capital of British India – Delhi didn’t take over until 1912 – and it has its fair share of pompous Victorian monuments. The most impressive is the huge Victoria Monument at the southern end of the Maidan; it’s an imposing white marble monstrosity that sums up the decadence and pomp of the British Empire in one phallic thrust. Out front is a statue of Queen Victoria during her fat-Elvis stage, and inside is a statue of the relatively unknown slim Victoria; if the second statue’s anything to go by, she was quite a looker in the early years, so perhaps Albert wasn’t such a blind bugger after all. Still, even in fat old crone mode, old Vic’s an impressive sight, presiding over a city that’s totally Indian and as far from Britain as you can possibly get.

Inside the Victoria Monument is a very good museum that explains the history of Calcutta, from its founding in 1690 by Job Charnock to the present day. I found it fascinating, and thoroughly enjoyed being bounced around the displays by the Indian tourists thronging to this piece of the Raj; Indians seem to thrive on human pinball, and if you’re a female you should be prepared for a fair amount of fondling in the process. Not for the first time I thanked the stars I was born with an appendage...

- In front of the Victoria Monument and the nearby St Paul’s Cathedral is the large grassy expanse of the Maidan. The Maidan is locally known as the Lungs of Calcutta, and it’s a very apt description; as you walk through the rubbish, cow dung and fading grass, you can almost hear it wheeze. I couldn’t help thinking of the aftermath of the Glastonbury festival, when the rubbish of a hundred thousand stoned revellers is all that remains of the year’s biggest music event, and like the aftermath of Glastonbury, there are a number of casualties curled up on the floor in the Maidan. The difference is that most Glastonbury visitors have a home to go to, and it only happens once a year; in contrast the Maidan is for real, and it’s there every day of the year.

- The Maidan is also home to a large number of sports clubs: over there is the ICI Sports Club, and tucked away in another corner is The Telegraph Sports Club. It seems amazing to have such a proliferation of health clubs in an area where jogging for half an hour will do you more damage than inhaling liquid tar, but I guess they hail from the days before exhaust fumes and chemical pollution. It’s probably safer to stay at home with a six-pack, a pizza and the remote control than to try to improve your biceps on the Maidan.

- At first glance, the Indians are a wonderfully friendly bunch, and their English is the best I’ve come across since Australia and New Zealand. Conversations can still feel a bit like a customs form – name, occupation, country of origin, length of stay, and so on – but most of the locals have enough English for you to be able to have a real conversation with them once the niceties are out of the way. This is a delightful change from Indonesia and Thailand, where the language barrier is more challenging.

- Indian attitudes are, however, baffling. If you have to do something, then reserve at least five times the amount of time that you’d need in the West; banks, shops and transport seem to happen at a snail’s pace, as if everyone’s running through glue. Once you accept this, it’s a lot of fun trying to get things done. One fellow traveller whom I met in Calcutta was trying to find an Enfield motorcycle to tour round on, and I joined him for an exploratory trip round the mechanical shops of Calcutta. One shop he visited was shut because ‘it is raining’, and another told him to come back tomorrow because ‘we can’t find the bike just yet’, despite the fact that he was already coming back from the day before. And ask an Indian whether something is true, and you’ll get a wobble of the head; the wobble can mean ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘I don’t know’, or any combination of the above. It can frustrate the hell out of you, but it’s a complete hoot if you don’t really care yourself.

- Those things you read about in Indian novels are all here, and they guarantee a fascinating time. Rickshaw-wallahs, thin and crusty, struggle along the streets, pulling their rickshaws and passengers through the detritus of the streets; it’s a hard life and many die young, but it’s a popular service, unique to Calcutta (other cities tend to go with bicycle rickshaws and auto-rickshaws). Pan-wallahs sell pan, that glorious combination of betel nut, spices and condiments, all folded up in a leaf, which you chew after a meal and eventually spit out onto the pavement to create another nosebleed stain in the dirt. Black-red teeth abound, just as in Indonesia, but here pan is quite the art form. And every street is lined with little terracotta teacups, smashed into the gutter; when you buy chai (tea) from a street vendor you get it in a little cup, which you just chuck onto the street when you’ve drunk the sweet, milky concoction. It’s hygienic, but you can’t help wondering where the terracotta ends up.

- The food is great – at least, it is in the main city. There’s dhal (spicy lentil mush), chapatis, Thums Up (which tastes like Coke with a spicy Indian kick), millions of types of curry, rice dishes, egg concoctions, breads... I was in food heaven in Calcutta. Outside the cities the food can be pretty patchy, but I thoroughly enjoyed learning exactly what Indian cuisine is all about. I’ve spent so long in England ignoring half the menu in tandoori restaurants and sticking to chicken vindaloo, pulau rice and keema nan that discovering the sheer range of Indian dishes is a hobby in itself.

- When you do a business transaction, wait until you’re handed your change before giving them your money. This is to ensure that you actually get your change; in a wonderful display of underhand capitalism, you won’t necessarily get your change without a fight, but if you refuse to pay until you already have your change, you’ve at least got a fighting chance of not being ripped off. Quite a few fixed prices and no language barrier make shopping in India much easier than dealing with the cowboys in Indonesia, but there is still plenty of scope for losing out.

- As I walked along the road, umbrella dripping and crowds converging, a local man walked past me, looked me in the eye, and through a cracked and toothless smile shouted, ‘This is India!’ I couldn’t help but agree with him. This is indeed India.

Puri

Written: 30 January 1998

Eric and I rolled into Puri on the Calcutta train on Thursday morning. The train journey was surprisingly tame; the Calcutta-Puri line is pretty efficient – we only arrived three hours late, not a bad trip – and the berths in the second-class sleeper were comfortable. Indian trains can be a real experience, but my first exposure to the system was easy and considerably less hassle than the train in Java. One girl had her pack stolen, but we’d been warned of a racket on the Puri Express, so I held tightly onto my bags until we were well into the journey, when I had time to chain them down. Theft isn’t rife in India – not compared to more touristy places like Thailand – but it happens, especially on the more popular tourist routes.

Puri was where I rediscovered my joie de vivre, a little something that I managed to mislay halfway through Indonesia and have only found occasionally since. Sitting in Raju’s Restaurant[1], a little roadside café frequented by the travelling community, I began to feel an unfamiliar ache round the eyes; I thought I might be getting ill, I hadn’t felt it for so long. Then I realised... my eyes were smiling again. For the first time in ages, I was thrilled to be on the trail. ‘This is India!’ I thought.

As the skin formed on my super-sweet milky tea, I simply sat there, taking in the sights of rural India. Puri, some 500km south of Calcutta down the eastern coast of the mainland, is a pilgrim town, one of the holiest spots in India for Hindus. As a result it’s full of weird and wonderful characters as well as hundreds of Indian tourists, and as the cows wander along the road, eating everything and crapping in the gutter, and the children play cricket in the backstreets, stoned pilgrims meander along the road, struggling through a haze of bhang.

For Puri is one of those unique spots where the use of marijuana and opium is not only legal, it’s supported by the government; there are quite a few government bhang shops dotted around the town where you can buy grass and opium, as well as bhang, an edible form of marijuana which you just swill down and enjoy. This is a major draw card for western tourists, of course, but I didn’t come across any downside to this availability; Puri is simply relaxed, and everyone seems to be silently satisfied, for some reason...

Puri is not just popular because it’s a drug-friendly pilgrim town; it also has a beach. The beach doesn’t win any prizes though; the inhabitants of the local fishing village use it as a toilet, and go for their daily squat as the sun’s coming up, leaving a lovely smell to waft down onto anyone brave enough to sunbathe. However, for the casual tourist the beach holds some wonderful conversations; the salesmen of India know their targets are captive when they’re soaking up the rays, and the sales pitches come in all shapes and sizes. There’s the man selling carvings of positions from the Kama Sutra; the massage man; the dropout selling dope, despite government regulations; the salesman for the restaurant up the road; and, of course, the stoned pilgrims. One of the latter approached us as we watched the world go by, and among the inane chatter he spouted for over twenty minutes (with no prompting from us, I might add) was this wonderful poem, which sums up India quite well, I think:

Life is good when it’s sunny; Life is good when it’s raining.

Life is good when it’s hot; Life is good when it’s cold.

Life is good when it’s day; Life is good when it’s night.

Life is good when it’s black; Life is good when it’s white.

Life is good when it’s easy; Life is good when it’s hard.

...and so on. When we asked him what was so good about life when it was raining, he replied, ‘I sleep when it’s raining.’ Monsoon time is obviously a difficult time for poets.

Non-local Locals

The traveller crowd in Puri were fun, too. Take John the Mancunian, whose wonderfully characterful accent proved the perfect tool for describing his visit to the bank. ‘So I goes into the bank, right, and hands over me fookin’ twenty pound note, like, and the bloke studies it and says, “I cannot change this, it’s mutilated”. And I says it’s not fookin’ mutilated, mate, it’s just a rip, it’s how they check for counterfeits, you know, by seeing if you can rip through the watermark, it’s standard procedure that is, you ask anybody who works for a bank in England. So I says to ’im, get the phone and I’ll ring the fookin’ Bank of England and prove it, go on, they’ll tell you it’s standard procedure, like, but he bloody wouldn’t. Fookin’ bastard.’ John turned out to be a wonderful person who loved India, despite this outburst; everyone goes through this exact same problem with money at some point in their Indian trip, and everyone reacts in the same way. It’s practically a rite of passage.

And then there was Peter, the old English electronic engineer who had been coming to Puri regularly for his holidays and proved a mine of information about the town and how to catch the local buses and trains. Add in a mix of hippies, spiritual explorers and people who defied categorisation, and staring at the travellers turned out to be just as much fun as staring at the locals.

Well, almost. There are few sights more distressing, and few sights that draw the eyes more, than beggars. The beggars in India are deformed, dirty, and really pitiful; stumps are held out for a few rupees, scabby bodies shuffle themselves through the dirt, mumbling for change, and women with flesh sagging from their bones stand around, toothlessly asking for money while you suck on another mouthful of cripspy teats. And every evening the night watchman walks along the road, blowing his policeman’s whistle and making sure the beggars don’t stray into the wrong areas; regular whistles mean there’s no problem, lots of short, sharp whistles mean something’s going on, and no whistles demonstrate exactly why the night watchman gets paid danger money. I only saw one bit of hassle while I was in Puri; an explosive Italian caused a scene in Raju’s Restaurant by insulting Raju’s brother and generally being a drunken idiot. Not surprisingly the night watchman was nowhere to be seen.

Humans aren’t the only entertainment in Puri. Along with the wandering cows are hundreds of dogs; in common with other Asian countries, dogs run wild, spreading rabies and turds, but in India the numbers go off the scale. They normally don’t bother humans – unless you’re carrying food, in which case they begin to take interest, a scary transition from studied apathy to vaguely menacing stalking – but they sure bother each other, chasing after unwelcome strays and arguing over food scraps and territorial rights. At night the noisy whining of the mosquitoes is only matched by the choruses of whooping and yelping dogs; it’s a concentrated effort that makes it sound like the dogs of Puri are auditioning for the next Disney flick as the pack of unsavoury characters that always get their comeuppance. Between the canine wailing, the crickets’ shrill chirping, the bats screaming and the early morning nattering of the locals, my earplugs have been earning their keep.

Trying to Leave Puri

The downside to Indian life hit me on the Sunday. Both Eric and I woke up during the night and threw up copiously, before spending almost all of the next day in bed, making endless hurried trips to our en suite. Obviously we’d eaten or drunk something suspect, but of course it was impossible to tell exactly what. India is a particularly unpleasant place to get gastric complications, because wherever you go people are spitting their pan in the street[2], pissing on the pavement, cooking goodness knows what in smoky barbecues, and generally not helping the situation as you stumble down the street, clutching your guts. However, by this stage in my travels I’ve become pretty philosophical about illness, so when I woke up on the Monday, feeling much better, I decided to make my plans for the next few days.

Those plans involved moving somewhere, so I strutted down to the railway station to make a booking. Indian railway booking offices are an education in chaos, and it’s a minor miracle that the bookings, once made, are reliable. I wanted to go from Puri to Warangal, and then on to Hyderabad; when you buy a ticket for a journey over 500km you are entitled to a two-day break wherever you want, and I wanted my break at Warangal. I queued at the information window, and after about ten minutes I managed to find out that, yes, this was possible, and I should fill in a reservation form and queue at the other window. This queue took only 45 minutes to evaporate – a very short wait by normal standards – but the ticket guy said I couldn’t have the ticket I wanted, and I ended up buying a ticket just to Warangal. With Indian Railways, this is par for the course; as if to rub in the almost slapstick vibe of the railways, when the phone rang in the ticket booth, the man picked up one phone and said, ‘Hello,’ but the phone kept ringing, so he picked up another phone and said, ‘Hello,’ and the phone kept ringing, and then he picked up a third phone and said, ‘Hello,’ and the phone kept ringing... and it was only when he pushed a button on the third phone that he finally got the call. If it hadn’t been for real, it would have been a comedy sketch.

That night I settled down for my last night in Puri, pleased to be making a move in the morning. The move I actually made in the morning was not quite as expected; sometime during the early hours of the morning I began to feel a little nauseous, and come 6am I was back in the bathroom, shooting copious quantities of variously digested foodstuffs from both ends of my body. Stomach cramps set in, I felt dizzy and weak, and I realised that there was no way I was going to be boarding a train that morning. Once again, sickness scuppered my plans.

By mid-morning things were no better, so I limped out into the morning light to find the manager, who was distressed to find that I had relapsed and rushed off to get me some medicine as I dashed back into the bathroom for another shot at goal. The medicine he brought looked dubious; one sachet was of oral rehydration salts, and I was pleased to note that ORS is readily available in India, after the fiasco in Rantepao; the other sachet, however, contained some unmarked pills with just a brand name on the packet, and the manager said they would work wonders. I took the salts, but figured I’d avoid the pills until I knew a bit more about my condition.

I could afford this luxury because our neighbour in the hotel, a very kind Swiss girl called Ruth, said it sounded as if I had giardia, a nasty little parasite that she’d managed to pick up some six months before. Earning canonization in the process, she offered to take one of my still-warm stool samples up to the testing station, and after I’d found a use for an empty film canister that I’m sure Kodak didn’t have in mind when they invented it, off she went, tepid package in hand. The results confirmed it: I did indeed have giardia.

Eric saved the day for the second time by going into town to collect some Secnil to kill the parasite, and at the same time he cancelled my train reservation. Meanwhile I sat in bed cursing my luck and altering my plans. Luckily my plans are specifically designed to be alterable, and instead I spent a profitable convalescence studying maps of India, weather patterns, railway timetables and my guidebook. Truth be told, I rather enjoyed it; sometimes organising a large trip is almost as fun as the trip itself. The extra days that I spent recuperating in Puri slowed me down, made me simplify my itinerary, and reminded me of my mortality, as if I needed more hints. In retrospect, this wasn’t a bad thing; I got better, very slowly, I got some letters written, and I met a fellow music lover, Danny from Israel, with whom I whiled away the hours talking music. Things could have been much, much worse, and I still managed to get to Hyderabad in the end.

[1] A wonderful establishment where the food is good, and the menu is an entertainment in itself. In true Indian style, spelling is an optional extra, and at Raju’s you can dine in true dyslexic decadence. Why not try the freshly squeezed Grage Juice while you munch on your Butter Huney Toast? A bowl of Museli in the morning is good for the soul, and the soup range is extensive: Espinach Cheese Soup, Massrum Soup and that old favourite Hot & Soup are all available. Under the heading Our Cripspy Teat you can sample the Spinch Pokara, and staying on the spinach theme there’s Spinch with Cheese and Spinch with Coconut Fry. Fish lovers adore the Tunna Stack and Lobstar by Order, and for people who like their food cold, you can check out the Chilly Chicken. And if that isn’t enough to get the taste buds rolling, you can spend hours trying to decide between the Macaroni Tomato with Cheese Sauce and the Tomato Cheese Macaroni. What a glorious place!

[2] A true Indian obsession, pan, pronounced ‘parn’, is possibly the most revolting thing I’ve ever tasted. The equivalent of the betel nut in Indonesia, pan is a combination of tobacco, betel nut, lime paste (that’s lime as in lime ash, not the fruit) and various strange spices and condiments. It’s chewed, and results in huge numbers of red-coloured stains on the pavement as people spit out their accumulated saliva and, eventually, the pan itself. It sounds foul, and indeed it is; I tried pan in Puri, and the experience lasted about five seconds before I realised it’s definitely an acquired taste. God knows who first decided to chew betel nuts, but whoever did started off an Asian craze, ‘craze’ being the operative word.

Hinduism and Indian History

Written: 25 January 1998

In appreciating India, it’s extremely handy to have a basic grounding in Indian history and the tenets of Hinduism, as there are very few places in the country that haven’t been fundamentally shaped by a combination of theological and historic events. So here’s a quick summary of Hinduism and Indian history.

The Hindu Pantheon

Hinduism has a lot of gods – it makes Christianity look positively lightweight. However most of the stories are centred round a handful of big players, and it’s worth knowing who they are.

It’s also worth noting that India’s gods look very unlike the local population (unlike in Christianity, where Jesus looks like a normal human being). In no pictures of Hindu gods will you see a moustache, except occasionally on the baddies, such as the Ramayana’s evil Lord Ravana; in India you will be hard pressed to find a man without the ratty porn-star look. Hindu gods and goddesses don’t worry about flashing their flesh around, and although they keep their nether regions and mammaries well hidden, they always show a bit of leg; in India, legs are a novelty, so much so that when I see foreigners wearing shorts, I cringe. And a number of Hindu gods are depicted with light-coloured or blue skin; most Indians are neither light-skinned nor blue, but this may explain why it is more desirable for an Indian to be born light rather than dark. Anyway, on to the gods themselves...

First up is Brahma, the Creator. His consort is Sarasvati, the Goddess of Learning, and he rides around on a white swan, carrying a musical instrument called a veena in his hands. Brahma is fairly unusual in that he has a head with four faces – one facing forwards, one facing backwards and one on each side – which represent his all-seeing presence.

Then there’s Vishnu the Preserver. His consort is Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity, and he rides around on the mythical garuda bird, carrying a conch shell and a discus. Vishnu has visited earth in nine incarnations, the first six of which were in a variety of animal and human forms. In visit seven he came down as Rama (whose consort is Sita), in visit eight he turned up as Krishna (with consorts Rahda, Rukmani, and Satyabharma), and for visit nine he was the Buddha (though Buddhists disagree with this, and that’s the main reason why the two religions split). For his tenth incarnation, Vishnu will come as Kalki, and will appear riding on a white horse.

The third main god in this trinity – which is often regarded as a representation of one omnipresent god – is Siva the Destroyer (pronounced ‘Sheeva’). His consort is Parvati, the Beautiful, and he rides around on Nandi the bull, carrying a trident. Parvati has a couple of other forms, too: Durga the Terrible, who carries ten weapons in her hands and rides a tiger, and the scary Kali, the fiercest of the gods, who demands sacrifices and wears a garland of skulls. A pleasant couple indeed.

Siva and Parvati have two important children. The first, and probably the most popular Hindu god, is Ganesh, the God of Prosperity and Wisdom, who cruises round town on a rat. Ganesh is easy to spot because he has an elephant’s head. Legend has it that Parvati asked Ganesh to guard the entrance to their home while she bathed, and while he was doing so a stranger arrived and made to enter the house. Ganesh tried to stop him and in a rage the stranger lopped off Ganesh’s head, but it turned out that the stranger was Siva, returning from a very long trip abroad, and father and son simply didn’t recognise each other. Parvati forced Siva to bring their son back to life, but he could only do so by giving him the head of the first living thing he saw, which turned out to be an elephant. Life is never easy when you’re a god, is it? Their other son is Kartikkaya, the God of War, which is perhaps not surprising when you consider his parentage.

There are a few other gods, like Hanuman the Monkey God, who crops up in the epic poem the Ramayana, and Surya the Sun God, but these are the most important personalities of Hinduism. It makes Christianity and Islam look kind of short-staffed, wouldn’t you say?

A Potted History of India

While we’re on the subject of Indian culture, here’s a quick discography of India’s various empires and civilisations. Understanding India’s past is particularly useful when visiting forts, temples and so on – history gives these buildings a wonderful dimension on top of the already breathtaking architecture.

- Indus Valley Civilisation

3300 BC – 1500 BC

One of the world’s first urban civilisations, this is when Hinduism was born.

- Aryan Empire

1500 BC – 321 BC

Aryan invaders retain Hinduism and the caste system is introduced. The rise of Buddhism starts around 500 BC, and Hinduism tries to contain it by including Buddha as one of its gods (the ninth incarnation of Vishnu).

- Mauryan Empire

321 BC – 184 BC

The Mauryan Empire reaches its peak under the great Emperor Ashoka, who converts to Buddhism in 262 BC. He builds many Buddhist rock carvings and pillars, including Sanchi. Buddhism doesn’t reach the south, which remains staunchly Hindu.

- Sunga Empire

184 BC – 70 BC

Many Buddhist cave carvings are completed.

- Various Buddhist Empires

70 BC – 319 AD

Including the Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian and Indo-Sassanid Kingdoms, and the Kuchan Empire.

- Gupta Empire

319 – 606

Known as the Classical Age. Much Buddhist art is created and buildings are erected, but towards the end of the empire Buddhism declines and Hinduism rises in popularity once again.

- The North Splits

606 – 1527

After the invasion of the White Huns, northern India splits up into lots of individual Hindu kingdoms, and is never really unified. The Muslims start to raid India from 1001, with varying degrees of success, eventually establishing the Mughal Empire in 1527.

- Sundry Empires in the South

550 – 1565

The Hindu empires of the Cholas, Pandyas, Cheras, Chalukyas, Pallavas, Hyasalas and the Vijayanagar Kingdom all flourish at various times and in various places in the south. Also a large number of localised city-based kingdoms thrive.

- Mughal Empire

1527 – 1757

The Mughals are great builders and artists, introducing Islam into India but tolerating other religions. The Taj Mahal is built between 1631 and 1653, but the power of the empire declines steadily after the death of the last major emperor in 1707.

- The Marathas

1646 – 1803

The Marathas gradually take over the weakening Mughals’ lands, defeating the Mughals in 1757, but a defeat in 1761 by Afghanistan stops their expansion, and eventually they decline and fall to the British.

- The British

1612 – 1947

First British trading post is established at Surat (Gujarat) in 1612. Others follow in Madras (1640), Bombay (1668) and Calcutta (1690). In 1803 the East India Company defeats the Marathas, leaving only the Punjab outside British control; the Punjab is taken in 1849. In 1816 the British and Nepalese reach agreement on the boundaries of Nepal following a two-year war, and mutual respect between the Gurkhas and the British prevents Nepal becoming part of the Indian Empire. In 1857 the Indian Mutiny leads to the British government winding up the East India Company and taking over India itself.

- Independent India

In 1947 India gains independence from Britain, and what we now know as Pakistan and Bangladesh are partitioned off into separate countries, among much rioting and bloodshed. The India we know today is born.

Konark

Written: 24 January 1998

Puri is a procrastinator’s paradise, but after a couple of days of finding my bearings, I decided I had to ease myself out of the restaurant-by-the-sea experience to explore the biggest tourist attraction in the area: the Sun Temple in Konark. A World Heritage site – always a good pointer, especially in India, which is home to lots of them – it’s a gorgeous sandstone building, smothered in intricate carvings in the way that most Hindu temples are. However, Konark’s carvings have a subject matter that is a world away from the seriousness of many other temples; Konark specialises in the (t)horny subject of sex.

From intricate carvings of monogamy in a whole range of positions, to polygamy with varying numbers of women, up to polyandry and a whole parade of erect penises, Konark is fascinating. Created in celebration of Surya, the Sun God, it is aligned east-west and takes the form of a huge chariot, with carved wheels down the side that double as sun clocks. Eric and I took a guide, who delighted in pointing out particularly interesting sculptures, such as the dog licking a woman in, well, yes, that way, and the man with an infected and swollen manhood all bundled up in a painful-looking bandage; he managed to impart a lot of information, despite his wonderfully heavy Indian accent[1], which made it rather hard to understand some of the more technical references to sex. Heck, it’s an ambiguous enough subject in plain English...

Konark is well worth the visit, even if there are plenty of touts chanting, ‘I show you erotic sculpture, very sexy postcards, very nice, just looking, cheap price,’ all day long. But then again, there are plenty of tourists there, mainly Indians, and where there are tourists, there are the trappings of tourism. Indeed, Indian tourists are a sight in themselves: smart[2], well dressed and polite, they seem to fail the test when it comes to respecting their historical sites. Despite the barriers stopping the crowds from approaching certain areas of the monument, there are always plenty of Indians scrabbling over the fragile sandstone; as a result the site is policed by people with whistles who blow like crazy whenever they see anyone climbing where they shouldn’t. They don’t actually do anything, but they sure do make a lot of noise...

And the bus journey there and back proves that the Indian concept of ‘full’ is equalled only by the Indonesians. Jammed on the back seat, I thanked my lucky stars that I’ve learned to control my claustrophobia. What a shame my sense of smell is still acute; having your head jammed up someone else’s armpit for an hour on a tropical bus isn’t my idea of heaven, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a Konark sculpture on the very subject...

[1] English is the lingua franca in India (often it’s the only way for two Indians from disparate areas to communicate), but it’s not so much English, more Inglish. Take the bobbling accent of the Indian living in England and make it thicker, and you end up with a wonderfully musical sound that reminds me of a muddy tide lapping against a dock pile. It might not always be easy to understand, but it’s always a joy to listen to.

[2] Middle-class Indians are exceptionally well turned out. The men have their standard shirts and trousers, which are well pressed but fairly drab, but the women are sheer celebrations of colour, with wonderful sarees, golden earrings and necklaces, bangles and ankle bracelets, and a sense of style that’s unique and effective. Their hair is always clean and tied up neatly, whether in a bun or the popular plaited ponytail, and is secured with exotic brooches, flowers or pretty hair bands. Seeing how a lot of people live in India, it’s a testament to them that they consistently manage to look so smart; it’s a delight to behold.

Travellers in India

Written: 29 January 1998

There is a depth to the travellers I have so far met in India that was glaringly absent from the hapless hackers I rubbed shoulders with in Southeast Asia. I spent plenty of time moaning about the other travellers I met when I was in Malaysia and Thailand, but for the most part India seems to have avoided the impact of the lobotomised hordes, and it’s a richer place because of it.

Take the clientele in Raju’s Restaurant, who were an interesting cross-section of the travelling society in India (though perhaps the patrons are a little more esoteric, as Puri isn’t as popular a destination as Varanasi, Agra or Goa). The general intellectual level was very good, and nobody struck me as more concerned with beer and ‘the way they do it at home’ than with slipping into the Indian way of life as smoothly as possible. All sorts of nationalities were present, and most people were old enough to be interesting, and with one delightful exception – the one which proved the rule – I found my faith in travellers fully restored. I sincerely hope this continues through my travels in the subcontinent; good travelling companions are better than good guidebooks any day.

The exception? An overweight and anaemic English girl with her Turkish boyfriend, whose relational interplay was hilarious and not a little sad. She overruled him at every turn, managing to phrase her decisions very politically in the way that only a possessive lover can get away with; ‘Shall we go and sit outside then?’ sounds innocent on paper, but when it’s expressed in a tone that brooks no argument, it’s more an order than a discussion. He acquiesced in a shameless display of weak will, and one can only assume that either she was very special in bed, or there was undercurrent in there to do with UK visas. It simply reinforced how lucky I am to have travelled unencumbered for so long.

Oh, and I nearly forgot the Blending Crowd. I’m not sure why India should breed more of these strange and faintly amusing characters than anywhere else – it’s probably a residue from the heyday of the sixties counterculture and the Beatles’ embracing of Indian religion – but there are quite a few westerners who go all out for the Indian look: sarees and bindis for the women (Indian dresses and forehead dots respectively), and kurta pyjamas and woven handbags for the men. I suppose that they think they’re blending into the local scene, but there are two glaring problems: they’ve got the wrong skin colour, and they look faintly stupid. Besides, you can’t become a Hindu, you have to be born a Hindu, so even those who go all out to follow Vishnu and Siva are kidding themselves and won’t be allowed into the temples, no matter what weird and wonderful clothes they wear. It’s a little bit sad, really, but luckily these are the minority in the travelling scene. Most people appear to be completely normal, though perhaps that’s only because they’re surrounded by madness...

Religious Tolerance

Written: 30 January 1998

After recovering from my bout of giardia, I finally boarded the overnight train heading southbound from Puri to Hyderabad. The long journey was considerably enlivened – as if it needed to be, considering the bubbling insanity of India’s trains – by a bunch of young Indian zoology students from Andhra Pradesh, of which Hyderabad is the state capital. One of them, Kiran, was particularly interesting; he was that rarest of creatures, a non-proselytising Indian Christian.

‘I have a beautiful steel guitar,’ he said, ‘made by a steel factory that was set up as a collaboration between the Germans and the Russians. When the factory closed down, they sold off many items cheaply, and I got a beautiful guitar for only 500 rupees. I was incredibly lucky; I believe it was a gift from God so I could make music and have a hobby.’

Having lost both parents at age five, he suffered from ‘many troubles’ for some time, but he discovered Jesus, and was telling me that he had read the Bible, right up to Mark’s gospel, which he was tackling now. This isn’t terribly unusual in the great scheme of things, but in India, becoming a Christian isn’t just a case of crying ‘hallelujah’ and digging Jehovah instead of Siva; it’s a case of voluntarily ostracising yourself from society. Hindus reject those of their faith who switch to another; after all, as far as they’re concerned, you’re born a Hindu and will die a Hindu, and that’s all there is to it.

‘The man in charge of the pilgrims in Puri, I was talking to him the other day,’ said Kiran. ‘He’s been unhappy for nine years now and is not finding solace in his Hinduism, so I persuaded him to think about Jesus, if he can make the change. And this friend of mine, Jaganhadha, has an uncle who changed to Christianity, but he was thrown out by his family; the uncle is now prosperous and happy, but the family is in turmoil, and Jaganhadha is thinking of turning Christian too. But it’s a hard decision, to discard your family for your beliefs. You must be sure.’

Kiran also had some interesting views on politics and colonialism, and they’re worth mentioning. From such people as these you learn much about the country you are travelling in, but the only way to really understand the place is to be born here; it’s so different from the West that it’s practically another planet.

‘We are very thankful for the British,’ he said. ‘They gave us an education system, the railways, a health system, and a democracy, even if it is very corrupt now. We have not really advanced these since the British left, so without the British, we would have nothing at all.

‘Unfortunately, our big problem is that there is much corruption in the government. If the BJP party gets in, things will be very bad for the Christians. Consider the story of the Babri Masjid[1]. It’s very difficult; I will have a Zoological degree soon, but I can only work with animals or in the wildlife service unless the government makes more jobs available in that field.’

This brings up two points: colonialism is regarded by some people as akin to philanthropy, and having a degree here restricts you to a specific career path, rather than opening up the job market as it does in the West. They’re small differences, but they’re important ones.

There is hope for India despite its problems with corruption, but it pays to be wary of policies that alienate specific groups. Politics has a way of becoming self-referential; if your party appeals to an unsavoury section of society, you should expect it to backfire on you, whether you’re in India or the West. Consider this quote from a Queenslander about Pauline Hanson, the chip-shop owner and leader of the Australian party One Nation, whose policies are heavily anti-immigration and are essentially racist (and who therefore has a worryingly large following in rural Australia, a fact not lost on countries in Southeast Asia, who regard Hanson as the devil incarnate). ‘That Pauline Hanson has a lot of good policies,’ blurts our man from Queensland[2]. ‘I reckon if she was a man, I would vote for her.’ Thus we make the bed in which we lie...

[1] A mosque in the small town of Ayodhya, in central Uttar Pradesh, the Babri Masjid was the centre of a huge controversy back in 1992. Hindus revere Ayodhya as the birthplace of Rama, the popular seventh incarnation of Vishnu, and the mosque was claimed to be standing on the site of the original Rama Temple. Hindu fundamentalists wanted to destroy the mosque and build a new Rama Temple, and the BJP, which is staunchly pro-Hindu and anti-non-Hindu, made it clear that it supported the fundamentalist viewpoint. Confrontation and rioting filled the headlines in 1992, and in December 1992 the mosque was torn down by Hindus, which led to major riots and over 200 deaths. It’s easy to see why non-Hindus fear a BJP government in the next elections.

[2] Still, Queenslanders always were at the earthier end of Australia. As they say there, ‘I have a simple deal with the croc. I don’t swim near his home, and he doesn’t drink in my pub.’

India: Andhra Pradesh

Hyderabad

Written: 4 February 1998

I took an instant shine to Hyderabad, but I’m not entirely sure why. My first impressions when I got off the train were of insanely busy traffic, a blisteringly hot climate and auto-rickshaw drivers who steadfastly refused to use their meters, but the place had something strangely enticing about it[1]. Powering from the station in Secunderabad down to Hyderabad – the two are twin cities, with about 10km between the two centres – I got the thrill of my life leaning into the curves and sucking in my breath as we narrowly avoided yet another bus seemingly hell bent on flattening us into the bitumen. I found a hotel, dumped my stuff and found a place to eat, totally thrilled to be somewhere new.

The food was excellent; for the first time I felt I was eating food that came up to the standard of Indian restaurants in England. Hyderabad is the home of biryani, the succulent dish that combines rice with all sorts of interesting fruits and vegetables, and needless to say it does it magnificently.

I also came up trumps at the railway station, managing to book exactly the ticket I wanted for Chennai (the new name for Madras), and only having to queue for about ten minutes, a time that would be respectable in Europe. I posted some letters, rang home, and all of a sudden had a whole afternoon to kill, which I did by wandering aimlessly until I reached a hill, which naturally I climbed.

I found Hyderabad spread out below my feet. In the distance were mosques, forts, and a stadium from which speeches in a strange tongue floated over the afternoon breeze. A bunch of lads who had followed me up the hill wandered over and started up a conversation, proudly telling me that there was a rally for the BJP party there that very afternoon, as part of the campaign for the forthcoming elections. That explained the masses of young men marching the streets, flying the party flag and yelping like they were at a carnival; I’d noticed them when a busload of BJP supporters had screeched past me on the main street and the boys crowded on the roof had spotted me, seemingly the only white tourist in Hyderabad, whereupon they waved and shouted until they disappeared into the melee. Hyderabad isn’t exactly a hot spot for western tourists; I only spotted one other white face in the entire week I was there, a guy called Nick whom I met in a biryani restaurant (and who would join me on a day trip to Golconda).

The Planetarium

Not only was there a great view from the top of the hill, but it also housed a planetarium and science museum, and interested to see what an Indian science museum might hold in store, I paid my 18 rupees for a combined museum and planetarium ticket and marched through the doors. It was more interesting for the people than the displays; most of the science area was given over to the sort of hands-on exhibit where you press a button, pull a lever, look through a hole and try to work out what on earth you’re supposed to be looking at, and not surprisingly the place was teeming with kids. Interestingly the adults were having just as much fun playing with the exhibits as the kids, but as soon as I walked in, things changed. Apparently a western tourist is much more fun to play with than a bunch of scientific experiments – look, the funny white man shakes your hand if you hold it out to him, what a blast! – and I spent most of the time shooing away persistent urchins, who would delightedly push the buttons and pull the levers for me, and then have the cheek to ask me for ten rupees for their efforts. The only place I got any peace was in the basement.

The basement was a bit of a surprise. Hardly anybody went down there, and despite this being a science museum, most of it had nothing to do with science at all. Apart from a number of interesting Hindu sculptures and paintings, the basement was given over to the private collection of some erstwhile benefactor, and the main bulk of the collection was made up of porcelain figures. There I was, in the depths of southeastern India, wandering through rooms full of limited edition Royal Doulton and Wedgwood, thinking that we were both strangers in a strange land. And for the first time in my life I actually enjoyed looking at porcelain figures; despite an awful lot of crud, there were some delightful pieces, including one particularly skilled set of dancing ladies from the 1930s, in which the body-hugging dresses looked so realistic and suggestive that I couldn’t quite believe that they were made from the same stuff as coffee mugs and toilets.

The basement might have been quirky, but the planetarium was even weirder. The content was fairly standard – ‘Look how these stars make up a bull,’ that sort of thing – but the voiceover, pronounced in impeccable Indian English by a professor who sounded like Dan Maskell mixed with Mahatma Gandhi, made all the difference. I sat amazed as I learned about the ‘mye-thology’ behind the constellations, the huge galaxy in ‘An-drom-ee-da’, the exploration of Mars by ‘Nay-sa’, and everybody’s favourite, old ‘Edgy Wells’ himself, who wrote a famous book about the invasion of earth by the ‘Mar-shee-yuns’. Add in the crowds of schoolkids on field trips, the poor girl two seats down from me who threw up halfway through the show (and with whom I thoroughly sympathised after Puri), and the little bastard who kept kicking the back of my seat every ten seconds, and it was a planetarium as only India knows how.

And just to rub my face in it, I lost my sunglasses during the show; they slipped out of my pocket, and I didn’t notice in the darkness. I mention this because I’ve lost six pairs in the last 12 months on the road, and this pair was my seventh. I’d even gone to the unfashionable trouble of wearing a band so they couldn’t fall off my neck, but stupidly I shoved them in my pocket, forgetting that I’ve lost every single other pair by doing the same. I might be able to cross continents, but I simply can’t hold onto a pair of sunglasses. It’s uncanny.

Museum Madness

The next day I visited the Salar Jung Museum, a huge, rambling building full of dull rooms of paintings, pottery, metalwork, jade, clothes and all the other exhibits that you expect to find in local museums, except everything was presented in a way that only Indian museums can manage. Everything looks as if it was set up in the days of the Raj and has been left exactly the same ever since, without a hint of upkeep: dust accumulates, colours fade, displays get slowly destroyed by meddling Indian tourists... it’s a sad sight, but tucked away in the bowels of this lumbering beast are some beautiful gems, such as the incredible collection of ivory carvings from all over India, and the room of ancient manuscripts in Arabic languages, detailing the holy scriptures of Islam.

The museum is also affected by the scourge of India’s tourist attractions: the Indian day tour. Mostly frequented by Indian tourists, the day tour is an incredibly cheap way of seeing huge numbers of attractions in a very short space of time, and as such I’ve avoided them like the plague. In Hyderabad, for example, one tour takes you to the Buddha Purnima, the Qutab Shahi Tombs, Golconda Fort, Salar Jung Museum, the Mecca Masjid, Charminar, the zoo, a handicrafts emporium, the planetarium and the Birla Mandir, all in one day. I took over three days to do the same, and I avoided the zoo and handicrafts emporium, thankfully.

This explains the human whirlwinds that plough through the museum at regular intervals. There I was, examining yet another collection of Royal Doulton and Wedgwood, when I was forcibly flattened against the glass case while a bus load of chattering Indian tourists flew past, scanning the exhibits without any noticeable slowing down. The next time I heard the approaching maelstrom I ducked into an alcove, escaping certain death in the same way as the bull runners in Pamplona.

I then walked south to Charminar Gate, which is shown on every packet of Charminar cigarettes, one of India’s favourite brands of filterless smokes; the catch phrase on packets of Charminar cigarettes is ‘Nothing else really satisfies’, which is true if your definition of satisfaction is coughing up a greeny every morning when you kick start your lungs. The gate itself is impressive; blocking the traffic pretty effectively, it looms over the surrounding bazaar and gives the winding backstreets a flavour of Persia, with its Islamic minarets and characteristic arches. Just up the road is the Mecca Masjid, one of the largest mosques in the world, that is said to cater for 10,000 worshippers. It is, however, far from the most impressive, and after wandering around and being stung for some baksheesh[2] by a con man who pointed out to me a particular stone that was supposed to be from Mecca itself – who knows if he was telling the truth – I scurried back to my hotel for a hot shower.

The next day I completed the collection of tourist curios on offer by wandering up to the Birla Mandir, catching a boat out to the Buddha Purnima, and lazing in the public gardens after an exhausting visit to the murky Archaeological Museum. The highlight was the Birla Mandir, also known as Sri Venkateshwara Temple; perched above the city, this modern white marble Hindu temple is simply beautiful, as it catches the sunlight and lights up the hilltop with its intricate carvings and golden tower. I felt more comfortable than usual wandering barefoot round the sacred pathways; a sign at the bottom makes it perfectly clear that this temple is open to everyone ‘regardless of race, creed or caste’, which is a nice change after the normal practice of banning non-Hindus from the inner sanctum. I even felt easy taking snapshots, while the day tour masses swamped the monument with their instamatics and herd-like pushing and shoving. Often, as a stranger in a strange culture, I feel a little anxious, conscious of my ignorance of local etiquette, but when there are lots of other Indian tourists around, I feel fine; they manage to stamp all over their own heritage so comprehensively that the polite reticence of the conscientious westerner seems almost reverential in comparison.

The Buddha Purnima is pleasant too; it’s a 17.5m-high statue of Buddha that towers above a platform in the middle of the city’s huge Hussain Sagar lake. I took a boat out to the statue and back[3], and it was easy to picture how disaster struck when the statue was being installed. The barge carrying it to the island capsized and the statue, a huge piece of stone, sunk to the bottom of the lake. Luckily a salvage team managed to bring it back up unharmed, despite a two-year sojourn in the depths, but they couldn’t bring back the eight people who’d gone down with it. It completes the tripartite of Hyderabadi religion: the Islamic Masjid Mecca, the Hindu Birla Mandir and the Buddhist Buddha Purnima.

And as for the Archaeological Museum, yet again I became the main exhibit as family after family engaged me in polite conversation about what I thought of India, what was my name, where did I come from and so on. I wonder whether all this repetitive conversation is going to drive me nuts in much the same way it did in Indonesia, but where my Indonesian conversations consisted generally of census questions and rarely strayed into conversation about Indonesia itself, Indian conversation is more like a job application form, with questions like ‘Why do you want this job? What are your good and bad points? Do you have any other comments that might affect your application?’ attached to spaciously empty white boxes. The set pieces of ‘What is your name?’ and ‘What country?’ soon give way to questions like ‘Why have you come here? What do you think of India? And do you like Indian girls?’ all of which are quite good questions if you want a conversation beyond the monosyllabic. It might still be an interviewing by numbers, but at least it’s an interview, rather than a monologue. I could get used to this...

[1] How many other places can you see a scraggly old git sitting on a dirty red rug, which he’s laid out on the pavement and covered with various yellowing sets of false teeth, a couple of mirrors on sticks and a selection of rusty and semi-sharp instruments that would put the ship’s surgeon at the Battle of Trafalgar to shame, all of which is tucked away behind a hand-scrawled sign reading ‘Teeth Dentist’? It made my root canal throb just to look at it.

[2] Baksheesh is a uniquely Indian concept. A strange combination of bribe and tip, baksheesh isn’t viewed as a luxury that only rich people can afford, it’s simply the way to get thing done. If you’re waiting at the bus stand and every bus that goes past is hopelessly crowded, slip the conductor some baksheesh and you’ll end up with a prime seat. If the train is full, some judicious baksheesh will get you a seat and, if it’s humanly possible, a berth. If you’re staying in a hotel for a few days, surreptitious use of baksheesh can ensure you always get served promptly and courteously; without, you may end up not being served at all. If you get arrested, baksheesh often works instead of an official fine. Baksheesh is an integral part of life, and although it strikes westerners as strange to have to bribe your way through life, here it’s the social norm, and you’d better get used to it. The problem is that there are plenty of people who demand baksheesh for doing nothing; the skill lies in intelligent and inoffensive discrimination.

[3] The boat departed from a recreational garden set next to the lake, which wasn’t notable so much for its landscaped gardens or amorous couples canoodling under the neem trees, but more for its rubbish bins, the first I’d seen in 16 days in India. But don’t get the impression that Hyderabad is any cleaner than any other Indian city; on the way back from my walk, I wandered past a man from the council who was trying to unblock the drains. In the West this would all be hidden behind one of those cute little stripy tents that gives the workmen enough privacy to drink as much tea as is humanly possible in the working day, but in India there’s no need for privacy; the concrete slabs that passed for manhole covers were slid to one side and the man, clad only in a short dhoti tied round his midriff, was trying to shift the blockage by sticking his leg down the hole as far as it would go and wiggling his foot. Just as I walked past he pulled out his leg, all smothered in faeces the colour of the outback and the consistency of porridge, and just down the pavement a man was pissing against the wall, under a sign declaring the nearby shop to be a pharmacy. Is it any wonder the mortality rate is so high?

Golconda

Written: 1 February 1998

After a couple of days exploring Hyderabad, I decided to head off to nearby Golconda Fort, one of the most magnificent fortress complexes in India, and some 11km west of Hyderabad. Most of the fort dates from the 16th and 17th centuries when the Qutab Shahi kings ruled the area, and just down the road are the flashy tombs where the kings and their relatives are buried.

Nick, whom I’d met in a Hyderabadi biryani restaurant, decided to join me, and a reasonably quick and astoundingly bouncy bus ride saw us to the main gate of the fort, where kids touted the services of the myriad cafés and restaurants cluttered round the entrance. After a Thums Up to shake off the effects of the bus, we paid our two rupees to get in, bought a little descriptive map of the area, and shrugging off the persistent guides who managed to speak such quick and unfathomable Inglish that it would have been a patent waste of time to take them, we stepped through the main gate and into the Golconda complex.

It took my breath away. Perhaps it’s my English heritage, but forts hold a special place in my heart, even if I haven’t actually visited many. I first noticed this when reading James Michener’s The Drifters while crossing the south Pacific, which is a distinctly castle-free part of the world; his description of the fortresses near Marrakech made me want to get off the boat and head straight for them (though, come to think of it, reading about anywhere made me want to get off that bloody boat). Golconda Fort sits astride a large hill, surrounded by semi-desert, and the buildings cover a huge area round the base of the hill. I was in heaven.

While exploring this wonderland of turrets, towers, mosques and minarets – the builders were Muslims, not surprisingly – we stumbled upon the ubiquitous gaggle of kids, who they latched onto us in time-honoured fashion. ‘Give me five rupees!’ they cried every time we so much as moved a toe.

Initially we tolerated them – hell, at first we probably even encouraged them out of politeness – but before long it started to get a bit tiring, and I had to put on my best fake-angry voice and tell them to get lost. To be honest they were quite lively and entertaining, but there’s nothing that ruins an ancient, mediaeval atmosphere as comprehensively as crazy kids.

And what an atmosphere! From the citadel at the top of the hill the scale of the fortress is apparent; inside the inner walls are the ruins of the fortress proper, and between the inner and outer walls, visible in the far-off distance, lies a still-thriving city. Over there, some kids are playing cricket in a park; to the east, there are schools and houses; in the north, you can make out some more industrial-looking buildings; and beyond lies a dry, dusty landscape that reminded me of pictures from Mars. I could imagine the king sitting on his citadel, watching the invading Mughals approaching from the horizon, kicking up clouds of dust as their horses marched ever onwards; even with the usual pack of Indian tourists milling around and defacing the property – quite literally in the case of one idiot, who was carving his name into the wall right under a sign proclaiming that what he was doing was illegal – Golconda was simply fantastic.

The Qutab Shahi Tombs

From Golconda, the Qutab Shahi Tombs are a short walk through some little villages and winding streets, with their white-washed walls, Muslim locals and stagnant open drains; I thought it felt a bit like Greece in the days before a huge influx of tourists brought money and clean streets.

The tombs themselves are an intriguing mix of the old and the new; the old buildings, domed and distinctly Islamic, soar into the cloudless sky, while the new gardens round the tombs play host to the Indian equivalent of Sunday afternoon down the park. While the bones of the kings lie dusty and long-dead in their stone sarcophagi, the locals play cricket, bouncing rubber balls off the tomb walls, and blasting loud Hindi pop music out of tinny ghetto blasters turned up to full volume.

If the kings and their kin thought they’d be resting in peace in their pleasant gardens, they couldn’t have been more wrong; if I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a bit miffed by the treatment the tombs get from the locals, although it has to be said that Hyderabad does have a very large Muslim population, more so than the national average, so perhaps they don’t mind after all.

In fact, the city is unique among southern centres in that its most common language is Urdu, rather than Hindi or a local dialect[1]; certainly, women clad in black robes with full burqas are common. And for once the burqa has a use; it doubles as a face mask, which is not a bad thing given the pollution levels in Hyderabad.

If we thought we’d be able to explore the gardens in the tranquillity normally reserved for cemeteries, we couldn’t have been more wrong. I used to have an urge – a fleeting urge to be a rock star, as most budding guitarists have at some stage – but now I’ve had quite enough. At every turn, locals flocked to us, holding out their hands and going, ‘Helloo, how yoo?’ Seemingly desperate to be shaken by the hand, they grabbed our arms, after which they’d look at their friends and grin, as if touching a foreigner was something cool and kind of kooky.

It was fun at first, but just as a can of Coke is perfect but a two-litre bottle is too much, the novelty soon wore off. Still, the locals are thoroughly friendly, they are delighted to see visitors, and a sizable number of them can hold a reasonable conversation in Inglish. That’s not so bad.

Back in Hyderabad

That night I watched the sun setting over the city from my hotel roof, noticing that hidden away up there was a large pile of empty whisky and lager bottles, most wrapped in brown paper bags, and all of them stacked in one corner of the roof. Andhra Pradesh used to be a dry state – it now has some bottle shops around, I notice – and alcohol isn’t drunk in public, so I’d obviously stumbled on a favourite supping spot for alcohol-consuming visitors. It was a good spot too; as the sun dipped below the horizon, Golconda stood out in silhouette in the distance, and the various mosques cast long shadows as their evening calls to prayer echoed out. It felt just like the Middle East.

It also felt like a good time to try some local sweets, to round off the evening; I’d already had a delicious tandoori chicken down the Punjab Restaurant, and with a fully restored appetite, I was hungry for more. So I went down to the sweet shop and asked for a 500g box of various sweets, and armed with my box of goodies, I retired to my room to write some letters and munch on this culinary experiment.

Good lord, the Indians like their sweets sweet. My first bite made my teeth ache in anticipation of decay, and they’d waved the white flag and signed a peace treaty by the time I’d tried all the different types. Most were a bit much for my tender palate – yoghurt is nice in a pot or a drink, but when your fudge tastes of yoghurt, it feels as if something’s gone wrong – but a couple were rather enjoyable, so I flagged them for future reference and tried to sleep through the sugar rush. At least that explains my dreams that night...

[1] There are 18 official languages in India, and over 1600 minor languages and dialects dotted around. This is one reason for the retention of English despite over 50 years of independence, because for two Indians from opposite ends of the country to communicate, they’ll probably have to use English. Hindi is the official language of India, but down in Tamil Nadu, for example, nobody speaks it, they all speak Tamil; indeed, most states have their own, individual language. Urdu is interesting because although it’s an Indian language that was developed in Delhi and is used as the state language of Kashmir and Jammu, it was adopted early on by the Muslims, so it’s written in the scratchy calligraphy of Perso-Arabic script and contains a number of Persian words. Another interesting one is Sanskrit, the ancient language of India; it is, I suppose, the Indian equivalent of Chaucerian English, and is the language of the Hindu Vedas. But despite all these different ways of expressing yourself, there still doesn’t seem to be any way of expressing the concepts of ‘punctuality’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘peace and quiet’ in Indian, and there probably never will be.

Hyderabadi Conversations

Written: 4 February 1998

It was with glee that I realised I’d booked my ticket from Hyderabad to Chennai a day too late; I checked the timetable and found I wasn’t due to leave until seven o’clock in the evening. Having already exhausted Hyderabad’s main attractions, I moved onto its next claim to fame, its food. According to the locals, Hyderabad invented biryani, that gorgeous combination of fragrant rice and vegetables that’s so popular in England, and even if this is stretching the truth, they’ve certainly mastered the dish. Chicken biryani never tasted so good as in Hyderabad, and I decided to spend my extra day by tracking down the best restaurant in town, the Paradise Garden Restaurant, and parking myself there for an extended lunch. God, it felt good.

But it wasn’t just excellent cuisine that my midday splash furnished me with; it also provided me with much food for thought. Seated opposite me in the distinctly middle class dining room – where most people spoke Inglish over their hors d’oeuvres, and a few even spoke English – were two well-dressed and well-pressed young men. Inevitably, as it always does in India, the census chatter gave way to the subject of money: how much did my ticket cost, did I find India cheap, what did my job pay?

‘Tell me, what would be a good wage in London?’ one of them asked.

‘Hmm. Well, I guess a decent wage would be £20,000 a year. You could live in London pretty comfortably on that, and even more comfortably if you lived outside London and commuted,’ I replied.

‘What do you earn?’

‘Hard to say, really. I’m a freelancer, so my earnings aren’t fixed. That’s the price you pay for such a pleasant lifestyle. What do you two do?’

‘We are programmers. Cobol.’

‘And you work here in Hyderabad?’

‘Yes, but we have been offered jobs abroad. We can go to London and earn £36,000 in a year there.’

I sucked in my breath; that was nearly double the salary of the job I’d quit to go travelling. ‘Wow! I’m in the wrong job...’ I said.

‘But we go to America instead, me to Kansas and my friend to New Jersey. The wage there is US$50,000 per year.’

‘I think you’ll find you’ll probably manage on that...’ I volunteered, wondering how to consolidate this with the beggars dying a slow death in the septic sewers of the city outside.

The flip side of the coin turned up in a conversation that invaded my privacy as I wandered the two hours back from the restaurant in Secunderabad. He just appeared; one minute I was enjoying a peaceful stroll past the Hussain Sagar, and the next I was answering census questions once again.

‘Where you from?’ asked the young man, who introduced himself as Rumi Siddqui. He had a clean, folded handkerchief in one hand with which he constantly wiped his lips and dabbed his unshaven chin. It was a faintly disturbing sight that was more suited to an obese and sweating man twice his age.

‘England,’ I said, not exactly keen to become embroiled in another Inglish conversation.

‘You married?’

‘Nope.’

‘You Christian?’

‘Yes, I suppose you could say that.’

‘I am Muslim. How old you?’

‘Twenty-seven. How old are you?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘And are you married?’ I asked.

‘No. But I always look after girls. You know any girls in England who want to marry an Indian? Can you bring me to your country and find me an English girl? Not many English girls come here.’

‘Er, no, I don’t think so. If an English girl wants to marry an Indian, there are plenty in England to choose from, you know. We have lots of Indians in England.’

‘I am interested in travel, like you I think. Can you help me to get to your country? When you are home, can you talk to someone to help me?’

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. You have to go through the embassies and get visas and stuff. I’m no use at all.’

‘You perhaps go home and send me a visa.’

‘I don’t think so. There’s nothing I can do. About all you can do is emigrate, or marry an English girl.’

‘Your girls at home, they are easy, no? When you ask for fuck, they give fuck?’

‘Hell, no!’ I said, a bit miffed at the turn of conversation. ‘That’s just what you think, watching all those stupid American films and soap operas. If you really want to know why English girls don’t come here alone, it’s because the locals think they’re only after one thing and keep going up to them with such subtleties as, “Do you want a fuck?” Women in the West are far from easy, take it from me.’

‘But they wear many flesh, much short clothes? Always showing off and flirting?’

‘Well, they don’t exactly wear burqas, but no, they don’t show any more flesh than the women in Singapore, for example. Besides, every Indian woman I see shows off the flesh round her waist, and women in England don’t really do that. Then again, Indian women always wear sarees down to their feet, while western women show off their legs more. Two different areas of the body, two different approaches, but no real difference. Muslim women are different, but Hindus aren’t really.’

‘But all your women have AIDS, right?’

‘Are you kidding? There’s more AIDS in Asia than there is in Europe and America. Have you ever been to Bangkok?’

‘Hmm. I hope you do not mind me talking like this about your country. I try to find out, and often I am mistaken, for which I apologise.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘You have any brothers?’

‘Yes, one brother and a sister.’

‘Ah, one brother.’

‘And a sister.’

‘Yes. A brother. What does he do?’

‘He’s a lawyer.’

‘Ah.’

‘And my sister’s a student.’

‘Your brother is a lawyer. That is good.’

‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘I have four brothers. They are all engineers and one is going to America.’

‘And do you have any sisters?’

‘Four brothers, yes.’

‘No, do you have any sisters?’

‘One sister, but she’s married. Four brothers.’

‘Four brothers. I see. And are you an engineer too?’

‘No, I start work as a motorcycle courier on Friday.’

‘Ah, so you’re going to be one of those crazy biker-men, eh!’

‘Yes. See over there, that’s traffic police headquarters. There many bad people pay big money for not having insurance or licence.’

‘I see.’

‘I have no insurance or licence either.’

‘But you’re about to become a motorcycle courier!’

‘I avoid police, then. We go in here and have tea, yes? It is good to be talking to you.’

And so, on it went. I put him right about a few more misconceptions about the West – we’re not all rich, we don’t all shoot people, we don’t all have extra-marital affairs, and we don’t all eat cows and pigs for every meal – and I politely tolerated his Islamic sexism; in return I learned a lot about Indian perceptions of the West, and I bid Rumi a warm goodbye with a promise to send him a postcard on my return. He at least deserved that, especially as he’d refused to let me pay for the tea...

Music on the Brain

Written: 4 February 1998

It was in Hyderabad that music lodged itself in my brain and refused to let go. When I go on long-distance walks I tend to get a song stuck in my head right from the start, and it keeps rattling round my cranium in time to my steps, all the way through to the end of the walk. For some reason Hyderabad kicked off the same process, and I found myself remembering snatched melodies and memories from ages past.

The most telling indication that I’ve been travelling for too long came as I was reading a new purchase, Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer, a travelogue about Asia and how its culture is being changed by the West[1]. I came across this highly accurate line: ‘If the great horror of travelling is that the foreign can come to seem drearily familiar, the happy surprise of travelling is that the familiar can come to seem wondrously exotic.’ Totally unbidden, the opening chords from the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ started up in my subconscious, so loud that I had to put the book down and listen.

The astounding thing is that, despite ‘Hotel California’ being one of the most radio-friendly and overplayed songs in the history of west coast rock, in my brain it suddenly sounded fresh. Incredible though it seems, as Don Henley sang, ‘Down a dark desert highway/Cool wind in my hair’ inside my head, it felt original, fresh, almost inventive. I couldn’t believe it; this was the musical equivalent of watching yet another repeat of the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show and finding oneself surprised when Angela Rippon pushes away the news desk and reveals not only glorious legs, but a serious talent for dance. I couldn’t believe it; indeed, the familiar was beginning to sound wondrously exotic, as the warm smell of colitas rose up through the air.

But ‘Hotel California’, alas, didn’t have the staying power to bug me for more than a few minutes, and as I watched the sun set once again over Hyderabad, I started humming the song that has been haunting me ever since I heard it again in Singapore. ‘I’m sitting in a railway station/Got a ticket for my destination,’ warbled Paul Simon. ‘On a tour of one-night stands/My suitcase and guitar at hand/And every stop is neatly planned/For a poet and a one-man band/Homeward Bound, I wish I was/Homeward Bound...’

I don’t think I’ll shift that one until I finally get home...

[1] For some reason I find some travelogues faintly depressing, because other people’s exploits always sound so much more interesting than your own. Amusing and earthy travelogues I adore, but those that detail incredible events that are unique and impossible to repeat – such as travelling in country X before country X becomes ruined by tourism, or stumbling into a piece of paradise in a country that has since been ravaged by war – make me a little sad and not a little jealous. This is annoying; I find myself falling into the trap of travel competition – ‘my trip’s better than your trip, na na na na na’ – and I hate that. Why is it so hard to appreciate that what you yourself have achieved might be fairly impressive, and that this isn’t a competition?

The Indian Film Industry

Written: 4 February 1998

At this stage it’s worth mentioning yet another incredible Indian institution: the Indian film industry. Rumi’s stereotypical image of western women had come mainly from American movies, which seem all the more lewd and free-lovin’ because most Indian movies don’t even show kissing, let alone nudity. But what Indian flicks lose in censorship, they more than make up for in sheer exuberance.

Bombay is the official centre of Indian film, so much so that the films are known as ‘Bollywood’ movies (though this is unlikely to change to ‘Mollywood’ now that Bombay has changed its name to Mumbai). Bollywood churns out twice as many films every year as Hollywood, and where the average Hollywood blockbuster clocks in at about 90 minutes, Bollywood epics run to an exhausting average of two-and-a-half hours. Each movie has at least five sing-along dance routines, and every type of film genre – action, romance, thriller, crime and musical – is packed into the celluloid equivalent of bubble and squeak.

To a westerner the films can appear a little amateurish at times, but the figures point to an industry that is far from unsuccessful. Bollywood blockbusters, of which there are more than 800 produced every year, have million-dollar budgets, produce over 100 million ticket sales every week, have huge advertising campaigns – the posters mount up on walls and telegraph poles, only to be nibbled off by passing goats and cows – and have made a lot of Bombay residents very rich indeed.

The actors, once in the big time, are made for life. The men are generally moustachioed podges who all look pretty identical, while the women are rotund and coyly flirtatious; this excess of weight denotes prosperity in much the same way it does in Polynesia. Once an actor or actress makes it, he or she will end up acting in lots of films, all at the same time; stories of actors working on over 100 films simultaneously are not uncommon, because it’s actors that sell films. Directors also spread their talents thinly; one successful director was so overbooked that he directed his movies by phone. And if an actor or actress becomes well known for a certain ‘device’, they tend to use that device in every film they star in; thus, if Ursula Andress was an Indian film star, they would find an opportunity for her to slink out of the sea in a black bikini and knife belt in every one of her movies.

The plots can also feel rather unsophisticated, at least as far as the western film critic goes. To the untrained eye (and ear) Bollywood films are formulaic, to say the least. There is a handsome hero and a beautiful heroine, normally from different classes, as well as an evil seductress and a villain. The hero has a friend, who falls in love with the seductress and manages to change her ways, and in the end good always conquers evil. Mixed into this less-than-thrilling piece of screenwriting are the sing-along pieces, which spring up with a spontaneity and inappropriateness that even Fame has trouble beating. The action scenes are never far away – fights break out so quickly you’re left wondering what sparked them off – and involve plenty of martial manoeuvres and overdubbed grunts and groans. The romantic scenes are renowned for their lack of content rather than their promiscuity; one film I heard about had two lovers embracing, about to go for a kiss, and just as the dirty deed was to be shown the scene cut to romantic orchestral overtures and a picture of the Eiffel Tower thrusting manfully into the sky. With Bollywood, you sometimes just have to use your imagination.

But it’s easy to understand the reason for such repetitiveness in theme and presentation. The audience in India must be one of the most varied and diverse cross-sections of mankind ever to go to the movies, so to get big ticket sales, you have to appeal to everyone. So there’s no sex, which would offend the more pious pundits; there are no heavy historical or mythological themes, which would annoy the revisionists; there are no specifically regional films, which would restrict the audience on geographical terms (films about the Mughals wouldn’t be popular in the deep south, since the Mughals never reached there); films about the western world would only appeal to educated people, and they don’t make up the masses; and so the common denominator is the sing-along action romance, and so you find it absolutely everywhere. Sure, there are some arty films that are successful abroad, but as they normally concentrate on poverty and real life, Indians don’t want to watch them; they want escapism at the flicks, just like the rest of us.

And, truth be told, Bollywood reflects the country itself. Colourful, noisy, brash, romantic, coy but seductive, festive and larger than life, watching an Indian movie is the next best thing to being here. It’s a poor second, though...

India: Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry

Chennai

Written: 8 February 1998

Incredible though it might seem, Chennai, the fourth biggest city in India, is almost pleasant. The traffic’s comparatively light, the slums are only moderately squalid, there aren’t that many beggars, the pollution isn’t solid enough to pose an ornithological challenge, the buses only ooze people at rush hour, and most surprisingly of all, there are underpasses. It’s quite amazing.

Well, it’s amazing after Calcutta and Hyderabad; Chennai (which was known as Madras until April 1996) is on its way to becoming an urban sprawl, but it hasn’t got there yet. OK, it’s not quite paradise – crossing the rotting Cooum River by footbridge is an exercise in breathing steadily through the mouth, and cows still manage to create traffic chaos and cow pats simultaneously – but I was expecting another full-on Indian city, and instead I found I could stroll through the traffic without the elements of luck and prayer that are so essential in other cities. And I even managed to change money at the bank instantaneously, which was a first.

But the price to pay for all this easy living is a slight twinge of boredom. It’s as if Chennai is situated beyond the event horizon of some nearby black hole; nothing seems to happen here. You can count the interesting sights on one hand, and if you’re after a good time after dark, think again; Tamil Nadu’s strict licensing laws make popping out for a beer simply depressing, with the only option being the dark subterranean permit rooms where drinkers guiltily sup their evil concoctions while looking forward to the special hangover that only Indian beer seems capable of producing[1]. I arrived in Chennai at 9.15am – astoundingly the train arrived a full five minutes early – and booked into a hotel, and by 4pm I’d seen all the sights, managed to change some money, done some window-shopping, and found myself wandering aimlessly. This was not what I expected to happen.

The Sights of Chennai

Yes, Chennai is a city without any huge attractions, despite its history as the first major British settlement (it dates from 1639). Apart from two interesting colonial building complexes, Chennai is a collection of shops, banks, rickshaws and heat, but to me it seemed to have no spirit and no soul, and the people reflected this in their manner; whereas in Hyderabad I couldn’t move for hellos and smiling waves, the people of Chennai appear to have perfected the art of staring right through you with that unnerving blank look reserved by lunatics and government politicians. I smiled happily, but the only people who smiled back were some of the educated and young middle class business-wallahs, and the school children (of course), who spotted me, surrounded me and gave me a quick lesson on how to play hooker in a scrum (for which they then tried to charge me two rupees).

Take Fort St George, one of the two colonial areas in Chennai. Its history is long – it was first used as a fort in 1653 – and the on-site museum is worth a look. But the large walled complex is now used for various government departments, such as the Secretariat and the Legislative Assembly, and when you visit you constantly feel as if you’re poking your nose into business that not only doesn’t concern you, it might land you on the wrong side of the bars. From the ominous sign that proclaims a small windowless room by the entrance to be the ‘Frisking Point’, to the Burt Reynolds look-alike guards who prowl round every corner, I felt as if I would have my camera whisked away from me and the film unceremoniously pulled off the spool as I clicked a picture of St Mary’s, the oldest surviving British church in India (built in 1678-1680) and the place where Clive of India was married. Indeed, as I walked up a flight of stone steps in the vain hope that it might afford me a more photogenic view of the tree-clad church, one of the guards whistled me down with a growl, and my heart missed a beat; I shot back down to ground level faster than you could say, ‘Bail is refused.’

Still, if I had been strong-armed into the lock up, at least I would eventually have ended up in what I found to be the liveliest spot in Chennai. The High Court building, a glorious red maze of spires and Saracenic towers that was built in 1892 and is said to be the largest judicial building in the world after the courts in London, was bustling with barristers (all in the traditional long black cloak and white two-piece tie). From the look of things plenty of locals have realised that the only way they are going to make their lives more interesting is to break the law, or failing that, to go and watch someone else get their dues in court. I can sympathise; leaving the day-glo buildings behind, I wandered through Parry’s Corner, Chennai’s equivalent of Piccadilly Circus, though nothing particularly interesting was happening; there wasn’t even a cow sitting in the middle of the road, chewing the cud and catching out the unlicensed. So I slumped back to my hotel[2] to make plans for the morrow.

And there I met Howard, a lone traveller from Manchester who declared that he was travelling round the world to find out whether or not he liked Johnny Cash’s ‘A Thing Called Love’. This is as good a reason for travelling as I have ever heard, so we teamed up to tackle Tamil Nadu: first stop, Mamallapuram.

[1] Although it’s followed closely by the hangover produced by Thailand’s Mekong whisky, a concoction that doesn’t quite turn you blind, but which tries very hard.

[2] My hotel was memorable for the grubby little signs on the wall of each room that said (and I quote exactly):

ATTENTION!

Guests Are-Advised

To be CAUTIOUS

of Strangers at Hotels Around

Who Coax you for

A Dance-Party-or-Something Like

They are Troublesome

Manager

The hotel was also memorable for the huge rats that inhabited the lower-floor bathrooms, so large that the resident cats studiously avoided the area. Some enterprising traveller had even chiselled away at the letters ‘BATHROOM’ above one particularly inviting hole to leave ‘RAT ROOM’, an accurate observation if ever there was one...

Buying Music in India

Written: 7 February 1998

In Chennai I ended up cracking under the sheer pressure of window-shopping for a day. I’d wandered into town with the intention of browsing through the shopping malls, checking out the street stalls and exploring the markets, but not necessarily to buy anything; after all, everything I buy I have to carry around, and I’ve got enough junk already.

The music shop came up and clubbed me on the back of the head before I could reach out to defend myself. ‘Cassettes’ it blurted from its windows; ‘CDs’, ‘Latest Hits’, ‘Videos’ it said; and realising that losing myself in the rows of tapes would be a good way to kill a couple of hours, I strolled in. I went in poor, and I came out rich.

Flipping over a tape to check the price, I balked. One hundred rupees for the latest Oasis album; that’s £1.60, not a lot of money. I looked further. Classic tapes were Rs75, new ones around Rs100, and even double albums crammed onto single tapes were still Rs100. I considered buying a few to be able to play on borrowed Walkmans, and then I spotted an innocent and downright cheap-looking box in the ‘Accessories’ section; an Indian copy of a Walkman, clocking in at Rs400, begged me to give it a home, and for one heady moment I realised I could have a stereo and a bunch of tapes for little more than the price of one CD in London. I chose carefully, and walked out of the shop with an excitement akin to a child’s Christmas Eve. The Walkman even had a speaker, perfect for those lazy afternoons sitting out on the veranda.

So, I’m back in the music. The range in the shop was pretty good, especially as far as classic from the 1960s and 1970s were concerned, and I walked out onto the street clutching the following albums in my mitts, ready for an afternoon of sun and song:

- The Beatles – Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

- Simon and Garfunkel – Greatest Hits

- U2 – Achtung Baby

- Pearl Jam – Vitalogy

- Oasis – Be Here Now

- Pink Floyd – The Wall

- Crowded House – Recurring Dream (Very Best Of...)

Armed with the above and a book, I managed to laze my way through Friday, and that night I ended up staying up into the wee hours with a wonderful group of other travellers, which radically altered my plans for an early Saturday departure. Madras might have been a bit mundane, but I loved every minute of it; thank goodness for other travellers in India. And when your schedule is as free as mine, changing your plans is as easy as rolling over and hitting the snooze button.

Mamallapuram

Written: 11 February 1998

After exhausting the sights of Chennai, Howard and I finally boarded the bus south to the temple beach town of Mamallapuram (previously known as Mahabalipuram, another name change in a land that is confusing enough without dithering about what to call things). Mamallapuram is best known for its rock temples and pretty little beach, but these days it’s as popular for its travellers’ scene as anything else.

The bus was incredibly packed. I had a little kid sitting on my feet (and eventually falling asleep there) while I hung onto a handrail for dear life. Luckily it was a short one-and-a-half hour journey, and the clean sea breeze of Mamallapuram was heaven as we stumbled out of the bus. We found ourselves a nice cheap hotel, and sauntered off to see the World Heritage Shore Temple on the beach.

The Shore Temple is another quite beautiful example of intricate rock carving, and even though most of the detail has been sandblasted away by the coastal weather, it manages to retain an air of mystery, even when coach loads of Indian tourists are scrambling over the walls and picnicking under the signs declaring, ‘It is forbidden to bring eatables into this site.’ Dating from the Pallava period of the late seventh century, it’s a highly photogenic place, as long as you don’t take any shots looking south down the beach, where a huge nuclear power station churns out goodness knows what into the Bay of Bengal. Unsurprisingly I chose not to go swimming in Mamallapuram, lest I be bitten by a gently glowing three-headed tuna with a PhD in Astrophysics.

Tucked away behind the town, away from the beach, is the most wonderful collection of rock-hewn caves and stand-alone temples. Palm trees soar from cracks in the huge boulders that are strewn around the area, and wandering round in the blistering heat, you come across inviting shrines with their cool interiors, huge spires denoting ancient places of worship, and mounds of steps cut into the rock. The temples are quite beautiful and are wonderful examples of Hindu rock art, and they’re uniquely different to the temples I’ve already seen in Konark and Hyderabad.

But sights aside, Mamallapuram feels like it’s been positively designed for relaxation. Beer is relatively expensive, but it’s still affordable; we couldn’t resist trying the Marco Polo Beer, which at 8.75 per cent is one of the strongest available in India, and which comes complete with the warning ‘Liquor ruins country, family, life’ emblazoned on the label (surprisingly, it didn’t say, ‘Liquor ruins country, family, life and the whole of the next day,’ though it probably should have done). The seafood is glorious and some of the safest in India, having been irradiated even before it’s caught. And on returning to our hotel at some god-awful hour, we came across a huge family gathering – argument or party, we couldn’t tell which – and ended up in conversation with this astoundingly stoned old Indian, whose eyes bled red and whose sentences weren’t remotely in the right order. It would have freaked me out if I hadn’t myself been struggling through a haze of country, family and life, and that night, drifting off to the sounds of Indian insanity down the corridor, I thought to myself once again, ‘This is India!’

And with the Rose Garden Restaurant offering a Breake Fast of Scrumbled Egg on bread, of which you could have one slice, two silces or three sileces, I felt right at home in sunny Mamallapuram.

Slowing Down

Written: 10 February 1998

India is beginning to slow me down, as if I’m walking through treacle. I’ve had schedules and plans to keep me company since I started this trip in Sydney some two-and-a-half years ago, and India’s no different, but for the first time, I’m losing interest in rushing round and ticking off everything on my list; now I seem to spend most of my planning sessions dropping things from the itinerary, rather than adding them.

It’s India, you see. The concepts of ‘mañana’, ‘whenever’ and ‘siesta’ don’t need to be spelled out here; taking however long it takes is the philosophy, and if you don’t roll with it, you’ll be run over. Buses arrive when they arrive; trains depart when they pull out; banks change cheques when they change them; beggars die when they die; cows sit down when they get tired; the electricity works when there isn’t a problem. The suited executive from the Land of the Transit Lounge would lose his mind in Indefinite India, but for the long-term traveller it affords the opportunity to glide into another timeline; if the world of the West is a well-oiled machine, India is a Heath Robinson contraption whose purpose is unclear, performance sporadic and schematics fascinating.

The places make India, the people make India, the atmosphere makes India, and rushing around from place to place only manages to change a journey of discovery into the pandemonium of those ten-sights-a-minute guided tours. This is more than a little pointless, surely? I have learned more about India and seen more amazing sights by sitting down and watching the circus pass through town than I have by zooming through the hills by bus or train. The journeys are interesting, but the destination is more so, whatever the guidebooks say about ‘getting there being 90 per cent of the experience’.

But there is a downside to all this slow living. Waiting an hour for your morning pot of coffee isn’t unusual, and getting tea instead of what you ordered is even more normal. Asking a question like ‘Is the sea always this rough?’ will get you the less than useful answer, ‘Sometimes.’ Asking whether there is a bus to the next town elicits the ambiguous, ‘It’s possible.’ And the ubiquitous head wobble can mean yes, no or maybe, depending on quite how it’s done, leaving the novice westerner flummoxed[1] and more confused than before.

Still, if you just smile at people, they grin back, dope-fuelled eyes as red as butter chicken. The Indians spend a lot of time staring into space, as do a lot of the western visitors, so it’s not hard to understand why things don’t get done. As we walked to see the Five Rathas (a lovely collection of small rock temples just outside Mamallapuram), this crazy man lurched at me, making a grab for my hat, and as I ducked to one side, he lost his balance and tumbled onto the pavement, smashing his coccyx on the concrete. He passed out there and then, but it woke me up; he was still unconscious when we went past him again. Even the police raid during our last night at the hotel was happy; we grinned aimlessly as they fired census questions at us, and they went away satisfied and probably wondering why we were smiling so much. But it worked.

So I find myself leaning into the wind, wading through the surf, crawling uphill; use whatever metaphor you like, I’m thoroughly getting into the Indian way of life, taking in their timescale, and probably losing a bit more of my western self in the process, which is no bad thing...

It’s the most intriguing and interesting time I’ve had in my life.

[1] And sometimes angry too. Howard, for example, would get quite irate with the locals, eventually culminating in a cry of, ‘I fookin’ hate fookin’ Indians, they really piss me off sometimes, they’re just fookin’ useless!’ Luckily I’ve been able to roll with it as far as it rolls, but poor old Howard did seem to get all the bad luck; while I was travelling with him he never seemed to get what he ordered in restaurants, he always got stared at (probably because he shaved his head), he always ended up in the bus seat next to the dribbling weirdo or in the ladies’ section, and not surprisingly it started to get on his nerves. As he put it, ‘Any nation who worships an elephant and a monkey must be up the bloody spout anyway.’ He still loved it, though...

Pondicherry

Written: 12 February 1998

Pondicherry threw me from the first second. Rising on the morning of our departure from Mamallapuram, we grabbed a quick two-silce Breake Fast and headed for the bus stand, where an almost empty bus was waiting, proclaiming ‘Pondy’ on the front. Empty buses don’t exist in India, but there, in front of us, was one with leg room and space for luggage, and not only was it empty, but it only took an hour and a half to do the three-and-a-half hour stretch south to Pondicherry. It quite unnerved me.

So we arrived in Pondicherry earlier than expected, still reeling from this efficient service, and wandered about the streets in a bit of a daze. Pondicherry town is part of the tiny, scattered Union Territory of Pondicherry, which contains the four little French pockets of the country that were only bequeathed to independent India in the 1950s. Pondy is supposed to be the place where France meets India, but initial impressions are of a place that’s still overwhelmingly Indian, where paint peels and the dust blows just as it does everywhere else. There’s still the fragrance of stagnant merde wafting sur le vent, and plenty of local characters qui faisent de toilette in the middle of the street; le canal through the centre of town is more like a slow trickling sewer, and le parc central plays host to plenty of characters from Les Miserables.

But after a while you notice the little things: Pondy isn’t quite Pont-de-cherie, but the French influence is still visible. The water front, though not exactly French, is not exactly Indian either; the police sport red gendarmerie caps; crumbling cathedrals hide down broad, leafy boulevards with names like Rue de Dumas and Rue de François Martin, while cafés sport names like Bar Qualithé and Le Rendezvous and sell dishes like poulet au beurre d’ail avec riz blanc; and the French area, sandwiched between le canal and la mer, is spotlessly clean, with lots of little men cleaning the streets using witches’ brooms. On the other hand, when a rickshaw driver tried his usual, ‘Hello sir, want rickshaw?’ and I replied with, «Non merci, je veux me promener. C’est un beau jour et Pondicherry est une petite ville, n’est pas?» he just looked confused and shuffled his feet.

The French influence is probably most noticeable when it comes to the availability of alcohol, as we found out when Howard and I visited the Bar Qualithé for a few beers in the company of Matthew, an American we’d met en route.

The price of beer is exceptional, even if the beer isn’t; stocks are always low in India, and we managed to drink our way through the bar’s entire stock of Kingfisher, Haywards, Black Label Lager[1] and Cannon 10000 in only four beers each. Before we knew it, last orders were called at 11pm and a drunken fight broke out between a couple of low-tolerance Indian patrons and the management; not surprisingly, the management won, as they do the world over at closing time.

The menu had looked good, too, though after we’d perused the available dishes for about half an hour, the waiter happened to mention, ‘All we have is rice and noodles, I hope that’s all right,’ which was a shame as I was dying to try the Green Piece Soup and Finger Chipes. And as we wandered home through the dark streets between the French and Indian areas, we came across a huge collection of bodies, sleeping peacefully on the pavement, in the nearby park and outside a set of gates labelled ‘Pondicherry Maternal Hospital’. On closer inspection every one of the bodies was a pregnant woman, most of whom were a lot closer to the labour pains than to the conception. That’s not the sort of thing you’d see in Paris.

Still, one thing’s definitely the same in Pondy as in France: they drive like maniacs, and often on the right-hand side of the road. Not that they’re supposed to in India...

[1] Bottles of Black Label are ominously labelled ‘The taste you grow up to’. This is, of course, only two letters off the real story.

Trichy

Written: 15 February 1998

It wasn’t tricky to get to Trichy, just time-consuming. Trichy, whose full name Tiruchirappalli is only ever used by those inside the bubble of railway bureaucracy, is an interesting and bustling town in the central south, and its sights are well worth the severe shuddering of the bus journey from Pondicherry.

Trichy’s two main attractions are the Rock Fort Temple and the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple. The first one is interesting because it’s perched on top of a huge hill of smooth stone, dominating the town centre much more convincingly than the nearby Church of Mother Lourdes (which would otherwise be the centrepiece of the town); the second is famous for its huge gopurams (the pyramid-shaped towers that form the gates into Dravidian temples) and seven sets of concentric walls, all of which are open to non-Hindus except the very last.

The Rock Fort Temple is fairly impressive, but after Golconda a rock fort has got to be pretty outstanding to merit more than a mention; the 437 numbered steps to the summit are more interesting for the groups of pilgrims and tired school children resting there than for anything else, but the view from the top is well worth the climb. Trichy lies all around with its slums and sanctuaries, its sewers and shouting salesmen, and in the distance the huge gopurams of Sri Ranganathaswamy soar above the palm trees. If it wasn’t for the inanely invasive conversations of the stoned pilgrims hanging around the inner sanctum, it would be a glorious place in which to sit and contemplate, but in India you simply can’t expect peace, so I just joined in and talked total rubbish back.

In fact, I’ve had to give up on so many promising conversations with stoned pilgrims that I have formulated a foolproof plan for dealing with these confused and confusing individuals. They say something to me and I fail to understand, so I smile and quote song lyrics back to them. They look slightly fazed, but undaunted try something else, and back flies another lyric. This can go on for quite some time, and eventually they decide you’re worse off than them, and wander off. The best thing is that they always think you’re being really sociable, and compared to the usual brush-off, I am, so as far as I’m concerned it’s a win-win approach. We both certainly come out of it happier, anyway.

Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple

Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple is another place where peace is but a distant memory. With seven concentric walls, 21 gopurams and a total area of 2.5 square kilometres, the temple shocks with its scale alone, and the fact that the biggest gopuram on the outside wall is a monstrous 73m high makes it hard to miss, and worth not missing.

Walk through this gopuram and you’ll discover a whole city crammed into the narrow streets. There are bazaars, houses, election rallies, beggars, cows, dust, sun, more gopurams, smartly dressed women, barber shops, dhoti-clad men, flies, rickshaws, loud music, buses, deafening speeches; everywhere there are people, people, people, all doing something, even if it’s just sitting on the wall, watching the world going by and spitting out half-chewed pan.

We engaged the services of a temple guide, and it turned out to be well worth the money. With it being such a huge complex you can wander around for ages without really knowing what on earth is going on, and even with a guide it’s far from clear exactly what everyone is doing with all that coconut-smashing and water-sprinkling, but at least we managed to glean some information. The complex is dedicated to Vishnu, so there are plenty of statues of deities like Rama, Krishna, Hanuman and other figures from the Ramayana, as well as characters from the legends of Vishnu’s other avatars, and everywhere seems to have a little quirk built in.

For example, there’s a niche in the wall halfway down the western side of the seventh temple, and if you shout your name there – or, more accurately, if the guide shouts an Inglish version of your name there – it echoes around the long corridor and is supposed to bring you good fortune. And there’s a little stone slab inside the sixth wall with two footprints carved into it, and five little holes in front of them; if you can put your feet on the prints, stick the five fingers of your right hand into the holes, and lean over to your left until you can see the statue at the end of the corridor, then apparently you’ll go to paradise. Having tried it, it’s probably just a way of screening out those who are too stoned from reaching nirvana... and there are plenty of people wandering aimlessly around the temple who couldn’t even manage the five-finger trick, let alone the leaning.

Take the resident fruitcake, who spotted us round the back of the sixth temple wall and decided we would be good fodder for a monologue. Staring through his one good eye, the other swirling in the murky milk of cataracts, he started an oration in Tamil that not only meant nothing to us, it meant nothing to our guide.

‘Is he mad?’ Howard asked our guide.

‘No, his mind just changed,’ the guide replied, shaking his head knowingly.

‘Too many drugs?’ I asked.

‘There are many ways to change your mind,’ replied our guide with a look in his eye that totally failed to clarify the issue.

Meanwhile the madman was warming to his theme, even as people gathered around us to laugh at his meanderings through the inner recesses of his confused mind. His monologue paused to invite discussion, so I broke in with a wave. ‘Words are flowing off like endless rain into a paper cup,’ I said in the same way I would have said, ‘Let’s do lunch next Thursday,’ and for a split second he caught my eye and seemed to understand.

But the moment of clarity disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and unfazed he continued to rant, looking me up and down while hopping from foot to foot. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘a soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust.’ For a moment Lennon’s acid insights seemed to strike a chord and he looked slightly dazed[1], but whatever he’d discovered clearly wasn’t the answer, so he looked to the ceiling and launched an angry tirade against the roof stones, which obviously bothered him a lot. ‘It’s possible,’ I replied, ‘but I am the egg man, they are the egg men, I am the walrus, goo-goo-ba-joob,’ and he snapped to a close, staring at me as if I’d just said something deeply profound. Which, of course, I had, so I wobbled my head as we left him holding up pieces of half-eaten coconut and shaking them menacingly at the sky.

The other sights of the temple are equally bemusing, from the intricately carved pillars with clever designs that look like both elephants and bulls depending on how you looked at them, to the handful of Kama Sutra carvings that have been thrown in for good measure. All around bodies are sprawled on the floor, though whether the inactivity is a result of mind-bending herbal remedies or a lack of effort, I couldn’t tell. Whatever the reality, Sri Ranganathaswamy is a blast.

Drinking in Tamil Nadu

And so was Friday night. In time-honoured fashion we elected to pop out for a quick beer after our evening meal, and this time we ended up in the Bar Paradise, a downstairs cubby-hole that had practically no lighting and where the atmosphere reeked of schoolboy rule-breaking. As I’ve mentioned before, Tamil Nadu is fairly unimpressed with the concept of alcohol (as in most of India, marijuana and alcohol have the reverse roles that they do in Europe), so they make you drink it behind firmly shuttered windows and doors, preferably underground, and definitely not after 11pm.

The three bottles of Haywards 5000 we enjoyed went straight to my head, as I haven’t been drinking regularly enough to build up any tolerance. The conversation migrated to include a local Indian called Rajiv, who proved to be an interesting and very well-spoken find. A law advocate, he was a Muslim who was in love with a Hindu girl, but the affair was proving to be almost impossible to maintain, as the scars of the 50 stitches dotted around Rajiv’s body proved. We rode back to our hotel on the back of his gorgeous Enfield, played cards for an hour or so, and he went back to his life of law and lawlessness. That’s one more intelligent and witty Indian whom religious segregation is systematically battering into the ground...

[1] This is not just an Indian phenomenon. There are plenty of westerners wandering around the continent who have spent too long in an ashram (an ashram being a retreat set up by a guru), and some of these people, though by no means all, can be a real handful. Ashram casualties come in a number of flavours, but they have one binding characteristic: they make no sense whatsoever. Most of them seem to be stuck in the sixties or seventies; indeed, a western writer I met in Chennai said that when he first travelled in India back in the seventies, people never talked about beer, backpacks or beaches, because the only topics of conversation were which guru you were going to and which ashrams you’d visited. India in the seventies was evidently full of people who wanted to have their magic pie and eat it.

Thanjavur

Written: 14 February 1998

Saturday morning’s head hurt, and I very nearly ended up slipping into a day-long lethargy of recuperation, but after a couple of minutes back in the madness of India I was raring to go. There’s no better pick-me-up than live insanity on your doorstep.

Howard and I parted company as he boarded the southbound bus from Trichy to Madurai, but I had one more mission to accomplish before following him; I wanted to check out another World Heritage site in the town of Thanjavur, an hour and a half east of Trichy. So I wandered around the bus stand, asking the grey-uniformed bus conductors where the Thanjavur bus was, and rather unusually got nothing but blank stares. I think my inability to be understood was down to the fact that Thanjavur is known to some people as Tanjore, the foreign name for the city, so armed with this handy bit of information, I managed to find the right bus.

But it didn’t actually go to Thanjavur, of course. Instead it stopped at a dusty bus terminal in the middle of nowhere, another bus ride from Thanjavur itself, but this being India I didn’t mind one bit, as friendly faces directed me first over there, then over here, then to that bus on the other side and finally to the town bus that promised to take me to the town centre. Almost unbelievably I ended up in central Thanjavur, exactly where I wanted to be; the Indian transport system really is a marvel.

My first visit was to Thanjavur Palace, a ruined and crumbling old collection of huge stone walls, ancient buildings, temples and towers. The view from the top of the bell tower was magnificent, looking right over a local cricket match, and as I wandered through the streets of the old palace I came across the first wave of the Thanjavurian Welcoming Committee. As pretty as a picture and dressed in an immaculate saree and accompanying accoutrements, there was little Priya, surely no older than eleven, but speaking perfect and polite English. We chatted, and I met some of her friends, all of them smiles with legs, and having dashed her hopes of getting a school pen or some chocolate[1], I let her try on my hat and shades, transforming her from a heartbreaker of the future into a crusty old long-term traveller in the blink of an eye. Five minutes later I was surrounded by a gaggle of gushing girls, each wanting to try out these new clothes and giggling at each other as the hat covered their eyes. It was delightful.

And the Thanjavurians continued to be amazingly friendly, even more so than the people in Hyderabad. At the World Heritage Brihadesvada Temple I stumbled into a group of young boys who insisted on having their photograph taken with me, and as I wandered round this stunning complex of Cholan architecture I fell into conversation with a man called Krishna, who happened to be a tour guide from Kerala who was over in Tamil Nadu on his holidays. He managed to smuggle me into the Hindu-only interior of the temple, where a huge Siva lingam sits, and we explored the temple together, with its towering 63m-high gopuram, a huge stone Nandi, two (live) elephants to bless the pilgrims as they enter, and stone carvings that are up there with Java’s ruins and Thailand’s Buddhist shrines.

Ambling back to the bus stand, I came across two interesting sights, the first of which was the election. With election fever running wild, it didn’t surprise me to come across the usual blaring speeches and chanting crowds, but what did surprise me was the scale of the operation in Thanjavur. Not far from the temple was a crowded arena where the speeches were being passionately made, but not content with the microphone and speakers normally employed by political speakers, the organisers had rigged up loudspeakers throughout the whole town, so wherever I walked, I could listen to the rants and raves of the local political sect. People cheered while others stood around listening and chewing, and the whole town seemed caught up in a democratic feeding frenzy, with heaving buses groaning along the street, crammed to overflowing with ecstatic supporters of some party or other shouting out their support.

And during this riot of opinions I noticed the second thing: the women of Thanjavur. Little Priya was just the embryonic version of the Tamil woman, and as the men got caught up in their games of politics and barracking, the women glided on by, gleaming in their colourful sarees, glinting nose studs and tinkling earrings. Indian women aren’t as naturally beautiful as, say, the Polynesians, but Indian ladies have a grace that’s hard to define. They seem immensely proud of their womanhood, they strive to look smart against all the odds, and where their men look relatively drab, they look radiant. Couple this with the severe beauty that a large number of the women possess, and you have an eye-catching sight that is as uniquely Indian as coconut bras are Polynesian and cowboy hats are American. India is at once a celebration of femininity and a disaster for feminism.

The coup de grace, however, was the gargantuan obesity of the articulated bus-cum-trailer that was home to a group of touring Germans. I saw them as I left the temple, advancing on all fronts towards the shoe-minding stall, cameras cocked and guidebooks unsheathed; luckily they arrived after I’d managed to soak up the atmosphere of Brihadesvada and was about to leave, so I wasn’t caught up in the stampede. However, as I hammered down the pothole-strewn road on the Trichy-bound bus, I looked to the side to see the German bus pottering along in the slow lane, and although they had nobody crushing them to death in the aisles, our Teutonic friends all looked pretty bored, to be honest. How shocking to think that clinical air-conditioned tours can even manage to suck the thrill out of India.

[1] These, among others, are the universal demands from Indian children. Adults are a bit more hopeful; they ask for visas.

I’ll Have a Limca, Please

Written: 13 February 1998

If you had been sitting in the Trichy restaurant[1] where Howard and I were attempting to eat on the evening of Friday the 13th[2], you would have heard the following conversation.

‘And to drink, sir?’

‘I’ll have a Limca, please.’

‘Sorry sir, no Limca.’

‘Do you have any Teem, then?’

‘No Teem, sorry sir.’

‘Do you have any lemon drinks at all?’

‘Just lemon soda, sir.’

‘Hmm, OK. Well, what bottled drinks do you have, then?’

‘We have Limca, Teem, Coca-Cola...’

‘Limca, eh? How about that. Yes, I think I’ll have a Limca, please...’

‘Certainly sir. With pleasure.’

It’s all part of the charm of restaurants in India. Will you get what you order? Will they manage to add up the bill correctly? And will you ever find a restaurant where they have more than two menus to share between the whole restaurant? As they say round here, it’s possible...

[1] Incidentally, this was a restaurant where you could get that old favourite Mull, Gatwany Soup, the somewhat cannibalistic-sounding Spanish with Lamb salad, the cryptic S/C/Veg Soup, the classic Chicken Maynice, the not very popular Spetish Meat Bolles, the world-famous trio of Chicken 65, Chicken 95 and Chicken 8&8, the amazing Gobi Butt Masala, and to round it off, Venilla or Straw Burry ice cream.

Many thanks to Vijai from Kochi, who emailed me with translations for some of the above. Mull, Gatwany Soup is obviously Mulligatawny Soup, and Spetish Meat Bolles is evidently something to do with meatballs, but I’d never have worked out that S/C/Veg Soup is Sweetcorn and Vegetable Soup. As for Spanish with Lamb salad, Vijai said:

It certainly sounds ominous, and I think it’s there for the exotic sound of its name; the locals don’t care what’s Spanish about it, they just like to see the word there.

And finally, Gobi Butt Masala elicited this response:

Gobi is cauliflower. Butt sounds like someone’s idea of a stupid joke, meaning nothing in Tamil

Thanks for helping out, Vijai.

Thanks also to Vinay, who left the following information about Chicken 65 in my Guestbook:

I have two versions stories regarding the origin of Chicken 65, but the most convincing one is detailed at the end.

Story 1: The story goes that an English traveller visiting Kerala in 1965 asked a chef to make this dish. The traveller expressed his contentment at the result and left, whereupon the bar staff tried the remainders, having never seen anything like it before. The result certainly was good and Chicken 65 was born, there being no other name for it.

Story 2: As legend has it, in all the kallu (country liquor) bars, the favourite ‘food fight’ is: who can eat the maximum number of chillies? It is a symbol of machoism to be able to eat the most chillies. An enterprising hotelier capitalised on this and cooked up the dish Chicken 65, denoting that 65 chillies were used for every kilogram of chicken. After this there have been many variations in the preparation but I am yet to find out if there are 95 chillies in Chicken 95. If yes, I need to visit the doc tomorrow. ;-)

And for another, equally plausible explanation, my thanks to Andrew Goh, who posted the following:

I was in Madras/Madurai in March 1995 and I asked the same question about Chicken 65. It is actually chicken who are reared to a maximum of 65 days before slaughtering so that the flesh is tender and sweet. Over here we call it spring chicken.

Surely one of these must be right... or maybe even all of them. This is India, after all.

[2] You might think that Friday the 13th might explain events in the restaurant that night, but you’d be wrong. Every day is this weird in India...

Madurai

Written: 17 February 1998

After another long bus ride from Trichy, passing some wonderful landscapes and huge rock formations on which the locals had thoughtfully painted adverts for tea bags and soap powder, I arrived in the city of Madurai, home to yet more temples and a bustling bazaar scene. Seeing as I was back on my own again, I decided to pre-empt the loneliness blues by treating myself to a few nights at a mid-range hotel, namely the US$5-a-night Hotel Aarathy. My room had a television that, after a few deft manipulations of the tuning controls, revealed MTV and CNN; it had a hot water shower; it had a balcony; and best of all it had a view over a wonderfully colourful temple across the street.

Unfortunately it was still an Indian hotel. My sheets were fairly grotty (and were never replaced, despite my requests and baksheesh), the fan had a death rattle and the speed control was stuck on gale force, there were millions of little red ants everywhere who delivered a particularly irritating bite, and the hot water was only hot when it felt like it (which wasn’t exactly a crisis in the tropical heat, but hey, I wanted my money’s worth). And even when you book into a mid-range hotel, you don’t get away from Indian intrusions; one of the things that really bugs me about Indian hotels is that you will never get an uninterrupted lie in, because at some stage in the early morning (between 7 and 8.30am usually) there will be a knock at the door, and not your usual discreet knock, more a battering. Sometimes, if you ignore it, it goes away; sometimes it’s accompanied by the cry of ‘Chai! Kaafi!’ and you can yell back a ‘No thank you!’ for a bit of peace; but my experience in the Hotel Aarathy was fairly unique and not a little confusing, if only because the rooms were equipped with phones which could have been used to call up the services on offer if I had been interested in a morning tea.

My door buzzer went off at 8.30am, which the Indians consider to be halfway through the day (after all, when you don’t have a television, bars are taboo and you can hardly afford electricity, what else is there to do at night except turn in early and, maybe, try to increase the population?). I ignored it, and it buzzed again. Realising with a sigh that my slumber was now irreparably shattered, I slipped on my sarong and stuck my head round the door. ‘Yes, what?’ I asked rather brusquely, hair sticking out like a briar bush.

‘This is the laundry man,’ said one of the two men standing in the corridor, indicating his companion. ‘He’s been here since six o’clock,’ he continued, obviously assuming that this would clarify matters. I must have looked pretty blank, because he pointed at the man behind him again and said, ‘Laundry man.’

Perhaps this was my clean sheet, at last, but I wasn’t interested. ‘No thanks, no laundry,’ I said and closed the door in their faces, infuriated that my relaxing start to the day had been shattered. So I checked out later that day and moved into a place that was less than half the price; it still had a hurricane fan but this time there were no ants. It didn’t have MTV either, but one night of Indian pop was enough to cure my TV-blues for some time.

I also bumped into Howard again and checked out Madurai’s main temple with him. Sri Meenakshi Temple is pretty huge and has a lot of towers, all painted in a beautiful rainbow of colours; the outer four towers are particularly tall – the largest is 50m high – and they are smothered in literally thousands of sculptures of Hindu deities catching the sunlight; the western gopuram alone has 1134 sculptures covering every surface. Inside, the temple is mostly undercover rather than open plan, with dark, incense-filled rooms, messy stone shrines, elephants blessing devotees and a background smell that’s hauntingly familiar. Sri Meenakshi is both beautiful and dingy, and all the more interesting for its inherent contrasts; this is going to be my last temple for a while, as I’m off to the hills for a break from the sweltering heat of the cities, and this is a high note to finish on.

All the while, the election continues to create havoc across the country. A total of 48 people have died in Coimbatore in western Tamil Nadu, in various weekend explosions and arrests, and I thank my stars that due to the staggered polling system – implemented so the security forces can travel around the country to police the voting without being too spread out – Madurai isn’t voting until next weekend. I may still end up in a voting area, though; I just hope it’s a peaceful one.

The Sound of Indian Politics

Written: 26 February 1998

The bus trip west into the hills containing the little town of Kodaikanal was predictably hair-raising. Grabbing onto any handhold I could find, I was thrown around the back seat of the bus like crockery in a marital dispute, clutching at my airborne backpack with my left foot and desperately trying to stop myself smashing into my neighbours every time the videogame-junkie driver tackled another hairpin. On the way up into the Western Ghats I noticed that above the rock-painted adverts someone had scrawled ‘Jesus never fails’; I sincerely hoped that the bus’s brakes were as reliable as the Son of God.

The first thing I noticed about Kodaikanal was the temperature. Clad in cloud and hidden from the sun, the cool air that washed around me as I stepped off the bus was as shocking as the cold dip after a sauna, and just as refreshing. I quickly fished out my sweatshirt, an item of clothing that rarely sees the light, found myself a bed in a dorm, and fell into conversation with various oddities from all over the world. The mist enveloped, the temperature dropped even further, and that night I slept the peaceful sleep of someone who has just moved from the noisy city to the silent countryside.

Peace, however, was designed to be broken, and if there is a race of tranquillity-tramplers it’s the Indians. Surely genetically hard of hearing, the Indians are one of the many Asian peoples who only buy stereos if the volume dial goes up to 11, and even in a beautiful hill station such as Kodaikanal, morning well and truly breaks under the sonic boom of India’s morning yawn.

But the most amazing noise pollution – and diesel pollution too – came from the little trucks blaring round town, playing election propaganda to anyone within a five-mile radius of their speakers. During election time these vans are as common as mud in the towns of lowland India (and that’s pretty damn common) but in Kodaikanal they were even more conspicuous because of the lack of other noise. Wandering down a pleasant country lane towards a placid lake where happy couples paddled their rowboats around like a scene from an E M Forster novel, I’d hear something different in the distant air: a cricket crowd perhaps, politely applauding a deftly cut boundary; possibly the call of a faraway bird of prey, swooping down to grab its lunch; or maybe the sound of a gardener mowing the extensive lawns of one of the ex-Raj residences dotted around. And the sound would get louder, and louder, and defying physical limits, even louder, until a battered old Ambassador would shoot into view round the corner, sporting a pair of loudspeaker horns that looked like something from an ancient gramophone, wired up to a car battery by someone who still had to learn the difference between earth, neutral and live (and who would probably soon discover it the hard way). Every time I had to cover my ears as the cacophony drove past, even drowning out the sound of the van’s incessant horn with its din.

The content of the din itself was quite something too, regardless of the volume. Apart from bellowing out recorded speeches from politicians – in Tamil, of course, so I was spared the details – these sonic buggies would play the party’s theme tunes. Now most political parties have an election tune these days – even Thatcher’s crowd did – but the Hindi concoctions that echo around the hills of India sound to the uninitiated just like normal Hindi pop[1]; it sounds seriously surreal, but it is perhaps in keeping with the way Indian politics is played out. Old Ronnie Reagan becoming President of the United States was incredible enough, but the number of Indian politicians who used to be film stars is unnerving; because they looked good on screen, the populace assumes they’ll be good in office, which is a rather brave assumption, I would suggest.

For example, southern Tamil Nadu’s favourite candidate never appeared in any publicity without sporting his Reservoir Dogs shades, so much so that the locals referred to him as the ‘Glass Man’. And the leader of the Congress(I) party, Sonia Gandhi, is Italian and doesn’t speak Hindi (though it is reported that she’s trying to learn); never mind, say the people, she looks great and she’s a Gandhi, so she must be cool. This last point isn’t as facetious as it sounds, as India’s political figures have suffered heavily from the cult of personality since Independence. The first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was followed by his daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), and after her assassination in 1984 at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards, her son Rajiv Gandhi took over. He himself was assassinated in 1989 by Tamil extremists; and along with the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic back in 1948, it makes you wonder how sensible it is to be an Indian politician with this famous surname.

Perhaps that’s why it took so much persuasion and so much time for Sonia to join the fray. Either that, or she doesn’t like shattering the peaceful world of the Indian hill station with election propaganda either...

[1] Which reminds me of a story that Howard told me. The scene: Howard and a new-found Cockney travel mate are in the back of a taxi in Goa. Cockney Man says to Taxi Driver, ‘Got any good tunes, mate?’ Taxi Driver says, ‘I have some Hindi music.’ Cockney Man says, ‘Yeah, cool, shove it on.’ Taxi Man does so, and out screeches Hindi music at full blast. ‘What the bloody hell is this?’ screams Cockney Man. ‘This isn’t bleedin’ indie music!’ What a great export for our country...

Kodaikanal

Written: 26 February 1998

Kodaikanal is a hill station. This peculiar brand of colonial creation is increasingly popular with tourists, but Kodai is still fairly embryonic as far as tourism goes; sure, there are plenty of wealthy weekenders paddling about on the lake, but there are none of the high rise hotels that have ruined similar places.

Hill stations were devised by colonialists as places to get away from the monsoon’s heat and humidity; being high up, settlements like Kodaikanal (about 2100m above sea level) don’t suffer from the crazy climates of the plains, and can support a much more European array of flowers, trees and pleasantries like mosquito-free boating lakes and forest walks. For the traveller the hill station affords an opportunity to stop sweating and take it easy for a while.

There is a downside to the weather though: it gets bloody cold, the water is freezing, and quite often you can spend the whole day shrouded in cloud, transforming walks with beautiful views into monotonous trudges through the mist. However the mix of India with the cool weather and rolling landscape more than makes up for any inconvenience; as with Indonesia’s Dieng Plateau, Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands and Thailand’s Chiang Mai, the effect of breath-condensing temperatures on the local culture goes a lot deeper than is immediately obvious from the woolly jumpers and balaclavas sported by the inhabitants.

On my second day in Kodai I moved out to Pampar Puram, a little village some 40 minutes’ walk from the town centre, a fact that rubbed itself home as I walked back from town in the pitch black of night, the country lanes swirling in impenetrable fog like something out of a Sherlock Holmes story. After the comparative luxury of the city hotel scene, living in a country farmhouse (owned by a farmer called Jerayam) was both a return to roots and a wonderful opportunity to escape the stresses of India’s urban sprawls.

The rural ruggedness of the village with its little chai shops, dirt roads and roaming cows and dogs made procrastination a very attractive deal. My plans slowly slipped away into the ether as the timescale of Pampar Puram settled in; Kodaikanal, only a few hilly kilometres away with its tourists, buses and sculptured lakeside setting, might have been on the other side of the planet for all I cared.

The walking was good. I wandered around lakes, up hills, into forests and through villages, savouring sights like the plantations of fresh-smelling Australian blue gum trees, and pretty-as-a-picture cottages with lovely British-era names like ‘Ingleby’, ‘Plymouth’, ‘Park View’, ‘Clavarack’, ‘Central House’, ‘Lakeside’ and, less romantically, ‘Bolton’. Kodaikanal doesn’t feel like India, but it’s definitely Indian, and is just another example of how amazingly diverse this country is.

Images of Kodaikanal

Of course, very little actually happened during my extended stay in Pampar Puram; that’s the whole point of taking time out to relax in a quiet haven. But just for the record, here are a few highlights of my stay in the hills:

- I met an equally laid-back Swiss traveller called Niko, and together we explored lakes, valleys, lookouts and forests, wandering aimlessly along cattle tracks and bridle paths. One particular highlight was a reservoir up in the hills where a team of Indian workers were quarrying rock right by the side of the water; we wandered past, exchanged smiles and hellos, and as we settled down for a rest in the soft pine needle beds just round the corner from the quarry, the world exploded as the dynamite the workers had been sticking into holes in the rock face went off. I guess that in India if you manage to get blown up in an explosives accident, it’s just the will of God; it probably never occurred to them to warn us about it...

- Wandering up the road to watch a local cricket match, I managed to get a ride on the back of a push bike down to the pitch and, after the match, a ride on a motorbike to the tourist spot overlooking Pillar Rocks, a place I’d been meaning to visit. This sounds like a bit of good luck, but if you’ve ever been on the back of a screaming Indian-driven Kawasaki on a hairpin road, you’ll understand just how hair-raising it is. Ashok, my courteous but reckless driver, heard my sharp intake of breath as we vulcanised our way round another corner, and shouted, ‘Cold, isn’t it!’ He totally failed to realise that my reaction had nothing to do with temperature, but more to do with the juggernaut approaching at full speed on our side of the road. And Pillar Rocks? It’s probably very pleasant when the clouds aren’t smothering the view, but all I saw was grey mist and loads of trinket shops: not exactly worth risking your life for.

- The people in the local chai shops were as friendly as they come. They taught us some choice words in Tamil (which I instantly forgot), invited us to join in their cricket matches, swapped cigarettes and stories, and pointed out the best places for us to visit. It’s just another example of the wonderful people in India, and I realised with some delight that whereas after a month in Indonesia I was ready to throttle the locals, after a month in India I’m growing to like the people more and more. And I still don’t know exactly why, ’cos they can be an infuriating bunch quite a lot of the time...

- Green Valley View is a pleasant viewpoint that’s renowned as a favourite suicide spot owing to its 2000 ft drop off; these days it seems that the only things going over the edge are empty Coke cans and chocolate wrappers, but its reputation brings in the tourists by the truckload. That still doesn’t explain the sign erected by the cliff edge, which says, ‘Mocking of ladies is punishable.’ When I visited the lookout even the group of Christian nuns who had popped in for a look were climbing over the barbed-wire wall for a better view of the scenery, so any explanation is possible. I didn’t mock anyone, just in case...

- I have discovered my favourite Indian foodstuff, bar none: Milk Bikis. These delectable treats are identical to Malted Milk biscuits back home (or ‘moo cow’ biscuits as we used to call them when I was a nipper) and they’re perfect for the midnight munchies. At Rs6.50 per packet (about 10p) they’re a cheap way to make it through the day; full marks to Britannia, the company behind the packet, many of which I consumed in Kodai.

- The election came and went, and provided me with one of the quietest days I’d yet seen. The village was dead and the town not much livelier; I had expected an explosive culmination of all the blustering and bloodletting, but instead everything closed down and kept to itself. It was slightly disappointing, but then again, in an election where the voting started in some constituencies on 15 February, and the results won’t arrive until a week into March, I suppose there’s none of the ‘incoming results’ TV coverage that’s so prevalent in western elections. I just assume that things will finally go crazy when the results are released...

- In every valley there is someone with a smile that lives on beyond their presence. Pampar Puram’s resident Happiness Guru was called Sayga and he worked on the local golf course, trimming the greens. With his black bush hat, his infectious and trippy laugh and an uncanny ability to spring out on you in the middle of nowhere and drag you off for a quick chai, he kept us smiling throughout our stay. Not for nothing did the locals refer him to as the ‘hero of Pampar Puram’.

- Sarah, a bubbling nineteen-year-old brunette from Brighton, arrived halfway through my stay and improved life in the farmhouse considerably. The three of us talked, sat round campfires, walked, cooked and slipped further into the timelessness of the hills, but surely the most momentous bonding took place when we idly started to talk about music. Niko had already declared his love for English music, particularly the gloriously acidic New Model Army, and I was still having trouble shifting Sheryl Crow’s ‘Home’ from my mind, having played it incessantly as the soundtrack to my Singapore experience; so when Sarah declared she had both a New Model Army tape and Sheryl’s latest in her bag, it seemed as if heaven itself had landed in Pampar Puram. How apt is this quote from William Styron’s classic novel Sophie’s Choice, which I happened to be reading at the time: ‘Just the availability of music alone, she said, filled her insides with a sense of delectation, as one feels just before what one knows will be a sumptuous meal.’ We feasted on the tinny sound of memories wafting from her Walkman like hungry children in a sweet shop.

- Our music couldn’t compete with the local brew, though. Throughout the election, music exploded through the village’s public announcement system every morning at 5.30am, and this I took with good grace and a set of earplugs, assuming it was all just electioneering. But the election came and went, and the music continued unabated, kicking in before even the sun had yawned itself awake; I have no idea whether this is a common event in sleepy backwaters, but it doesn’t half shatter any chance of an uninterrupted lie in.

And all we did all day was explore, taking some wonderful trips into the hilly forests, discovering waterfalls, villages and yet more happy, friendly locals. It was really hard to move on, but with my original schedule in tatters, I had to move at some point. So I eventually hauled myself out of the farmhouse and headed back down to Madurai, after some nine days of living rough in the hills...

Travellers’ Opinions of India

Written: 25 February 1998

Here are various opinions of travelling in India, given to me by people who’ve been there.

‘It’s... well, it’s... so... err...’

‘India is like going back to basics in every aspect of life.’

‘Spend the whole six months there. You won’t regret a single day.’

‘India makes you think. Constantly.’

‘...hard to explain... intense I suppose... umm...’

‘Every day you see something different that blows your mind.’

‘It’s the most infuriating, dirty, depressing place I’ve ever been. I left after two weeks and don’t ever want to go back.’

‘Every single day in India you experience every type of emotion: anger, horror, pity, joy, frustration, amazement, disgust, elation. It’s a real roller-coaster ride.’

‘...hang on... I nearly had it then...’

‘India challenges all your preconceptions of life.’

‘You’ll be dying to get on that plane out of Delhi. And two weeks later you’ll be dying to go back again.’

‘...ah sod it, you’ll just have to go yourself. It’s an enigma.’

They’re all right, in their own way. And my opinion? I love it, utterly!

Madurai

Written: 27 February 1998

It was pleasant to arrive back in Madurai after rattling down the mountain from Kodaikanal, and having to stay an extra night there owing to a lack of free berths on the overnight train to Kollam was far from a hardship. Where the farmhouse in Kodai had buckets and backyards, Madurai had hot water showers; where Kodai had boring old idly and dosa, Madurai had wonderful butter chicken and nan; where Kodai had weather so cold that my washing never dried, Madurai had enough roasting heat to drive the water from my freshly dipped clothes within two hours. And the same old guest house had the same old rooms above the same old restaurant that played the same old music, creating an atmosphere that would have been like coming home, if it hadn’t been for the lack of Howard.

But where Kodai had a dry coolness that only the mountains can provide, Madurai slathered in the humidity of approaching summer. I’d noticed the heat on my previous visit, but it hadn’t really hit me because I hadn’t yet visited anywhere cold in India (if you discount Calcutta); but after the chills of the hills, I found the steam of the plains disconcerting. It shortened my temper, and when I went for a stroll round a couple of places I hadn’t managed to see on my first stopover, the touts whom I’d previously ignored with good grace and gritted teeth managed to touch a raw nerve. One particularly insistent clothes salesman started to follow me round with his promise of cheap clothes and excellent quality, so I turned round abruptly, palms out in front of me as if to push him away, and with my nose a few scant inches from his I said as politely as I could, ‘No thank you.’ He jumped back a mile, suppressing a stifled yelp; it got him off my case, but I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. After all, he was no worse than the rickshaw-wallahs and drug pushers that I’ve been shrugging off nonchalantly in every other tourist city, and I felt ashamed that India had finally got to me, even if it was a short, sharp moment that soon passed.

India: Kerala

Kollam to Alappuzha

Written: 28 February 1998

That night I struck out on the sleeper train from Madurai to Kollam, my first destination by the Arabian Sea, which laps against the west coast of India. I was only going to Kollam to catch the backwater boat north to Alappuzha, along a particularly pleasant water route along the inland waterways of coastal Kerala, so I hopped straight from the train onto the boat, a transition eased by the willingness of the rickshaw-wallahs to take me exactly where I needed to go (where they got a generous commission, no doubt).

The state of Kerala is a thin north-south strip along the western coast of the tip of southern India, and it’s instantly got a different feel to the eastern massif of Tamil Nadu. Palm trees, a permanent fixture throughout India, have invaded Kerala in a similar fashion to Indians on a bus; there’s scarcely any space left that isn’t lightly shaded by a canopy of fronds and nuts. There’s a pleasant sea breeze in most places that helps to keep the humidity comparatively low, and with the mountains of the Western Ghats cutting Kerala off from the rest of southern India, the culture is markedly different to its neighbouring states; it’s no coincidence that just down the coast from Kollam are some of the most popular beaches in India after Goa.

The backwater boat takes advantage of the natural and man-made waterways that follow the coast from north to south, just inland from the sea. Smothered on either side by palms and rural houses, the route of the eight-hour trip is quite beautiful, if you manage to ignore the tourists. Yes, the backwater trip is a severe tourist trap, and although it’s easy to shut out the inanity of the local’s reactions, the boat I boarded had a particularly intriguing mixture of western weirdoes. There was the English geek with his NHS specs, stupid curly haircut and a talent for insipid small talk; the two Birmingham lasses who concentrated on showing off as much bare flesh as possible; the man who plugged himself into his Walkman and stayed connected and thus disconnected until we arrived... as per usual the tourists were as much of an attraction as the beauty of the surroundings.

Except that the tourists were instantly forgettable, while the scenery is the stuff of which memories are made. My long-enforced boycott of the delights of water transport (barring the Indonesian cockroach ferries) has made me forget just how pleasant coasting can be, and with absolutely no swell, a cloudless sky and a total lack of idiotic crew, it all added up to a distinctly pleasurable day. There’s an idyllic detachment that comes from having nothing to do and no control over your destination, forcing you to kick back and simply savour the experience, so I settled into my sunny seat on deck and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Still, Indian peace is, as I have already discussed, a bit of an oxymoron. Passing through the villages where the canal is lined with concrete paths, children run along the banks, easily keeping up with the boat while shouting out, ‘Have you one pen? Give me please one pen! One pen, one pen!’ and other such variations on a theme. Of course, nobody gives them a pen to start with, and their persistence – following the boat for five or ten minutes, screaming out their litany that by the end has become ‘wunpenpleezwunpengimmewunpen!’ – is either a product of fanaticism or sheer boredom; but eventually the pens start to fly of the boat and competition hots up, with the shouting only getting louder and louder as the tourists throw out more goodies. There are smiles everywhere, but I can’t help the feeling that this is a slightly false sense of socialising; the children were all grins and so were most of the adults, but plenty of men on the banks of the river looked quite fed up with our presence. And out of maybe a hundred kids, only one said thank you when he got his pen. Bless him.

Despite the obvious Indian-ness of the people, one thing that startled me was how similar the Keralan backwaters are to French Polynesia and some parts of Indonesia, such as Flores and equatorial Sulawesi.

On reflection, there can’t be too many variations available in the recipe when the ingredients are water, blue sky, palm trees, fishing, copra farming and squat huts, but it’s uncanny how much I was reminded of distant atolls and remote fishing villages. For one slightly scary split second I even felt a twinge of homesickness for those unusual days spent floating through the bowels of the Pacific, but perhaps it was simply relief at not being there, disguised as nostalgia.

Another aspect of Kerala that smacks of Polynesia is the incredible turnout of the women, despite the primitiveness of the habitat. I’ve commented before on the pristine quality of the fairer sex in India as compared to the clean but mediocre male species, but when your home is on a tiny breakwater between a waterlogged paddy field and a weed-choked canal, the vibrancy of the eye-catching sarees is even more commendable. Nothing, it seems, can dull the liveliness of the local beauties, even incredible poverty.

The boat trip ended in a picture-perfect sunset over the sleepy town of Alappuzha, where I boarded a bus north for Ernakulam, one half of the twin town of Kochi-Ernakulam. I managed to get myself a seat in the melee by the time-honoured method of passing my daypack through the window for someone to place in a vacant space, but the Brummie girls from the boat obviously hadn’t managed to slip into the Indian psyche quite as convincingly, because their laden entry into the heaving bus was accompanied by the one of the most pathetic displays of whingeing and squealing I have ever heard.

Their argument with the conductor, who quite reasonably insisted they take their packs up to the front of the bus, embarrassed me in the way that only unwanted geographical kinship can; heads turned and wobbled in disbelief as Midlands voices rose to fever pitch in an expression of frustration and futility that could only have resulted from a bad day in the heat.

So when we arrived in Ernakulam I made a break for freedom by jumping into the first available rickshaw and heading off for a hotel, but the ubiquity of the Lonely Planet meant that not only did the noisome couple book into the same hotel as me five minutes later, I also bumped into them at a nearby restaurant, where I was treated to the therapeutic retelling of the gory details of their ordeal. Is it any wonder some people find India a struggle, when simply boarding a bus becomes a major drama?

Kochi

Written: 2 March 1998

Kerala is a real melting pot, and the coastal city of Kochi is a perfect example of the cultural mishmash of India’s southwestern corner. On the way to Kochi I spotted plenty of Christian churches, which is unusual for India, and I also spotted lots of political flags smothered in hammers and sickles; Kerala was the first state in the world to freely elect a communist government, and it still has communist rulers. In Kochi itself things are even more blatant; 20 per cent of Kerala is Christian, but you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a much higher proportion.

From statues of Jesus holding out his hands in supplication to signs declaring that 5 March is ‘Stalin Remembrance Day’, Kochi feels different from the rest of India in more ways than one. Even the locals seem more friendly and relaxed than usual, and as I took the ferry from Kochi’s twin town Ernakulam across the bay to Kochi itself, I fell into conversation with a middle-aged man from Bangalore who was visiting with his girlfriend. He gleefully told me all about the three-week holiday he was on, and as the boat plied its way across the harbour mouth, the conversation flowed freely.

‘We took a lovely trip up into the hills yesterday, about 100km on the bus,’ he said.

‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘How was it?’

‘Wonderful. We walked up into the top of the hills there, and the most amazing thing was the plants. 5 ft high, they were, all growing wild in front of our very eyes.’

‘Plants? Err... yeah, right, sounds great.’

‘Yes, and they just chop the leaves off as they need and leave the rest to grow naturally.’

‘Leaves? Umm...’

‘It was great. We bought five tolas of oil for a great price.’

And then it clicked. A tola is 11.6 grams, and it’s the weight system used for selling hashish, marijuana, bhang or whatever else the locals need to maintain their red-eyed look of wonderment. My new-found friend kept talking, unconcerned by the turn our conversation had taken, and proceeded to try to persuade me that I should buy one of his tolas at the knockdown price of 400 rupees, ‘a lot less than I’ll get when I go to Goa and sell it to the tourists there,’ he said.

But I was on the ferry to catch the sights of Kochi, a difficult prospect through the haze of hash oil, so I thanked him for his kind offer and slipped into the crowds on the ferry terminal, quite happy just to get high on my surroundings.

The Backstreets of Kochi

Kochi has a wonderfully eclectic collection of Portuguese churches and backstreets with a Jewish overtone, not to mention a beach with the strangest fishing tackle you’ve ever seen; it’s a superb place to wander round on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The imposing St Francis’ Church is the oldest western church in India, with the original building dating from 1503 (by contrast, St Mary’s in Chennai is the oldest British church, dating from 1678). One Sunday, outside the church, I watched a cricket match played out under the shade of the palm trees, complete with cricket whites, a manual scoreboard and locals playing their own games of catch round the boundary, oblivious to the action on the pitch.

Meanwhile, out on the bay, the fishermen operate their Chinese fishing nets. These strange wooden constructions consist of huge nets attached to one end of a long pole that can be raised and lowered by judicious use of counter-weights and levers. The actual catch they get is pretty poor, probably due to the large numbers of container ships docking in Kochi’s busy docks, but the contraptions themselves are quite an attraction, whatever the results.

And down the road from the ferry terminal is Jewtown – yes, it’s actually called that – which was originally set up in 52 AD at the time of St Thomas the Apostle’s voyage to India. By all accounts the Portuguese, who arrived here some 500 years ago and a few hundred years after Jewtown had been founded, were quite surprised to find a Christian presence already here; they weren’t so impressed, though, with the locals’ total ignorance of the Pope. Jewtown, which is now reduced to an old synagogue and a few little backstreets crammed with craft shops and spice traders, is a picturesque and slightly unusual area, and although the number of resident Jews has reduced drastically, it still retains the feel of a suburb apart from the rest of Kochi.

It’s also home to Mattancherry Palace, a decrepit old building that contains some of the best Hindu mural paintings I have seen, depicting scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Top of the list is a cheeky little scene of Krishna, everyone’s favourite wide-boy, fondling a number of blissfully happy milk maids with his two feet and six hands, while at the same time playing the flute and getting quite a few rub-a-dub-dubs himself in return. Good old Hinduism: Christianity and Islam could learn a few things about being happy from the Hindu legends.

The Promenade

Returning to my hotel by ferry after a truly worthwhile wander around Kochi, I grabbed some supper and set out to explore Ernakulam, the main city of the two and home to the larger hotels, the biggest shops and the most insane rickshaw drivers. And to my amazement I discovered something that would be more at home in a coastal town in England than in India: Ernakulam has a promenade. Ignore, if you will, the piles of discarded packaging drifting into mounds round the tree trunks and the familiar smell of half-decomposed sewage wafting off the humid bay, and you have what is, by definition at least, a promenade. The clientele aren’t quite the Edwardian couple with parasol and pram, but what the strollers lack in aesthetics they more than make up with their numbers. Backing this aromatic concrete pathway are huge posters of Christ[1] and large tower blocks whose lobotomised architects obviously thought that the Stalin era had the art of building down to a tee; but surely the most astounding fixture on this seaside extravaganza is the bridge.

Bathed in the saffron suffusion of sodium lights, the Ernakulam walkway bridge is like something out of The Jetsons and is just as anachronistic. Made from finest concrete, with steel hawsers artistically supporting the structure’s roof, it’s a favourite spot for the locals to hang around looking cool, shooting the breeze and inhaling the heady fumes of the nearby sewers. Perhaps the popularity of the bridge has something to do with the four ice cream kiosks sitting on either side of the small canal that the bridge crosses, which themselves are protected from the outside world by huge piles of discarded ice cream tubs. But whatever the magnetism of the thing, walking across it is like running the gauntlet.

Coming from the comparative darkness of the promenade, where homely couples take their little children for a stroll to sample the fresh sea breeze, the sodium shockwave of the bridge is like turning the corner into a boy racer’s Escort with all its extra headlights on high beam. Smarting from the glare, I wandered across the centre of this space-age monstrosity in a bit of a daze, only realising when halfway across that everyone lining the bridge’s railings was staring right at me. Pausing only to make sure that there was nothing obviously wrong with my appearance, I met a few gazes head on, smiling my teeth off in a show of bravado matched only by the terminally stoned or the incredibly rich; of course, following the rules of Indian engagement to the letter, those who caught my beaming gaze smiled back with genuine glee. This is the Indian reaction to westerners: they’re delighted to be singled out of the crowd and smiled at, and a little embarrassed to have been caught ogling you in the first place. This is why I grin at absolutely everyone in India; they love it so, and the response is an instantaneously heart-warming grin that makes ecstasy look like aspirin. You’ve just got to love the locals round here...

[1] Christ gave me the spooks in Southern India. Perhaps it’s too much exposure to images like the Turin Shroud, but the pictures of Jesus smothered over Kerala made me think of graveyards at night and that incredibly disturbing glazed look on yer man’s face as he bleeds to death on the cross. Normally pictures of the Son of God are faintly comforting, even if I don’t actually worship his dad, but in Kerala I found myself preferring Krishna fondling the milk maids to the bearded distress of the crucifixion.

James Bond in India

Written: 1 March 1998

A happy coincidence saw me bump into Sarah in the Indian Coffee House, whom I’d last seen in Kodaikanal. She’d rejoined her travelling partner Lisa, and I was doubly pleased because I wasn’t that sure Kochi deserved another day of exploring, and a day loafing around with the two Brightonians felt a darn sight more interesting than photographing yet another colonial church.

Our plan for the day centred on the new James Bond film. Tomorrow Never Dies, the second James Bond with Pierce Brosnan at the helm, turned out to be a mediocre flick with jokes bordering on the smuttiness of a Carry On film[1], but the most incredible thing wasn’t so much the film as the way it was shown. I’d thought we’d be immersing myself in a dreamland of vodka martinis and action-packed scenes from the wildest reaches of chauvinistic swashbuckling, but instead we ended up with an experience of James Bond that was not exactly what Ian Fleming intended.

The cinema in India is an interactive event; people don’t sit silently through a film, they jeer and clap and yell and scream. And so with James Bond the clichés elicit a raucous response from the crowd: when Q turns up with his latest gizmos, they go wild; when the stunt at the start of the film ends up in a near-death explosion of mayhem, destruction and a skin-of-the-teeth escape by Bond, they leap about in a frenzy; and when he saves the world from certain catastrophe, they’re practically spasmodic with relief. But where the action scenes earn high praise, the one-liners totally pass them by, and more than once the only people laughing at the dialogue were the three English tourists.

But surely the main appeal of James Bond is that there’s something for nearly everyone, and in the case of India it’s easy to pinpoint the chief attraction of 007: it’s all about the wonderful vehicles that he drives. When Q unveiled his spanking new state-of-the-art BMW-cum-weapon-of-mass-destruction, the testosterone-fuelled members of the audience cheered with beery boyishness, and when Bond stole a bike as a prelude to a rooftop chase par excellence through the chaos of Saigon – yet again on a BMW, which is a surprising find in backstreet Vietnam, wouldn’t you say? – I swear I could hear them salivating on the back row (and yes, it was simple salivating rather than the more traditional back row sport; this is innocent India, remember). If westerners admire 007 for his suave and sophisticated manner, his beautiful women and his snappy dialogue, the Indians admire him for his hardware and his ability to blow up everything in sight. When westerners think of Bond, they think of beautiful curves and how attractive they are in little black dresses; when the Indians think of Bond, they think of beautiful curves and how aerodynamic they are.

But halfway through the film, just as the action was kicking in, the lights came up and there it was: an intermission. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a break in the middle of a film, and although during a three-hour Hindi epic I would think a breath of fresh air is a biological necessity (not to mention a psychological one), it rather spoils the flow of a Bond movie. And not only did everyone rush out of the theatre for a quick snack, pan or whatever, but those remaining were thrilled to see a trailer for the film Titanic, during which they cheered and clapped when Leonardo DiCaprio came on screen as if he was the tenth incarnation of Vishnu. If I’d had dreams of escapism, I was being rudely pulled back into reality, and the film wasn’t even done.

Despite the loud discussion halfway through the second reel a couple of rows behind us – which everyone joined, forgetting for a moment that they’d come to the cinema to watch a film rather than discuss the price of fish – the film managed to reach its explosive climax without a hitch. But a final surprise awaited us; as soon as the baddies got blown up, the crowd got up and started to leave, before the film had even finished. The traditional end to a James Bond film, where Bond is settling in with his latest lover while steadfastly ignoring the concerned radio crackle of HQ, is irrelevant in India. I never caught the witty retort in Tomorrow Never Dies because there was such mayhem as the crowd milled out that all the dialogue was inaudible; and then, as soon as the credits hit the screen, the projectionist killed the film dead. Talk about being shocked back into reality.

And what a reality! I swear that as we stood on the pavement blinking into the traffic, I felt as if I was back in the film, with rickshaws doing insane stunts round me, chasing invisible spies through the dangerous streets of urban India. And then I realised that India is always like that. Here, 007 would just be another mad driver in a mad country, except he’d be driving a pouting BMW.

[1] For example, Bond is screwing his attractive Danish teacher when Moneypenny rings him up on his mobile; when he eventually finds the thing and answers it, he says he’s ‘brushing up on a little Danish’, and Moneypenny tells him to pull it out pronto and save the world again with the words ‘you always were a cunning linguist, James.’ It’s an old joke and, if you ask me, a little contrived, but I guess that’s James Bond for you.

India: Karnataka

Mysore

Written: 4 March 1998

I really wanted to like Mysore, but I didn’t, not because there was anything wrong with Mysore itself, but because I was completely shattered by the nightmare bus journey from Kochi. One thing that doesn’t get more pleasant with experience is the overnight journey, and the bus that I picked for the ten-hour trip to Mysore was old, crappy and noisy, and had to bounce along some of the most pothole-ridden excuses for highways that I’ve ever seen. I was to find out later that in India, Valium is almost irresponsibly cheap and can normally be bought over the counter from any chemist with a sympathetic ear, but ignorant of this handy tip, I unfortunately managed to stay awake for every minute of the juddering journey.

Despite the miserable attitude that this lack of sleep forced on me, Mysore’s attractions were pleasant, with its huge palace, a grand hill temple and a wonderfully colourful market. Mysore Palace, a monstrosity of pomposity and the seat of the maharajas of Mysore – who still exist and, in a similar fashion to upper class inhabitants of English stately homes, still live there, albeit in a little building off the back – was quite a sight, even if I did get stung twice for baksheesh by the palace guards who insisted on pumping me with uninteresting information about the building and then demanding money in return.

I also got accosted by a man from Kerala who had whisky on his breath and a serious desire to get me to write to him from home; I found him extremely hard to shake off, despite my protestations that my favourite pastime was uninterrupted peace and quiet. Eventually the only way I could get rid of him without causing offence was to promise to write to him once I got back home, which of course I did; you should never promise to write to someone unless you actually mean it. I got my personal space back and he got his letter (though he never replied, of course; too much whisky, perhaps).

I then took a bus up Chamundi Hill to the hill temple for a view over Mysore that didn’t turn out to be that special, so I quickly glided down the 1000 steps to the bottom of the hill and went exploring the fruit ‘n’ veg market at Devaraja. Here, at last, was the character I’d heard about from other visitors to Mysore: wonderfully friendly people, amazingly vibrant piles of tika powder in all the colours of the rainbow, mounds of incense sticks and fragrant oils, heaps of vegetables of unknown origin and use, and everywhere people busily selling, buying, haggling and living life to the full. It’s worth visiting Mysore for the market alone; it almost perked me up enough to enjoy myself.

But I still found myself suffering from a downer after the bus journey, and the hotel I’d picked in my sleepy state wasn’t exactly conducive to a good night’s rest, so after just one day I found myself boarding the bus to Bangalore in search of, well, something else. In a country as big as India, there’s an easy solution to frustration: you just keep going.

So poor Mysore, it caught me at a bad time, but at least I learned my lesson. Don’t try to explore somewhere new when you can hardly keep your eyes open, or you’ll have to rely on the photographs to remind you where you’ve been. And what’s the point of that?

Bangalore

Written: 7 March 1998

Bangalore is the yuppie capital of India; certainly its streets are cleaner and its teeth brighter than any other Indian city. But despite the veneer of western capitalism, Bangalore remains a typically Indian place, proof perhaps that however hard the Cult of America tries, it will never conquer the second largest population mass in the world.

Yes, there are supermarkets, but their shelves are tiny and the goods overpriced. There are signs everywhere proclaiming, ‘We prefer Visa,’ but this turns out to be a blatant lie; find me anyone who wouldn’t rather have cold, hard cash. There are comparatively few cows blundering through the streets; I only saw a handful, though they were particularly fine specimens. There are rubbish bins, but they still overflow with rubbish, attract flies and stink like a sumo wrestler’s jockstrap. And the people are as aloof as city dwellers anywhere in the world; smiling at them produces a total blank, and apart from a handful of happy-go-lucky locals, Bangalorians seem to suffer from the dehumanisation that comes with successful capitalism.

Other similarities between Bangalore and western cities are quite apparent, but in everything the spectre of Indian insanity looms large. For example, Bangalore sports little red and green men at pedestrian crossings, but in true Indian style nobody takes a blind bit of notice of them, and they’re useless anyway; one set I saw gave you precisely four seconds of green time before reverting to red, not even enough for Linford Christie to get across. Coupled with this are the traffic police, who stand at traffic-light-controlled junctions, directing traffic by whistle; it’s as if the official line is to ignore the lights, which is exactly what happens. To be honest, crossing the road when the red light should be stopping the traffic is probably more dangerous than crossing when it’s green, because when it’s red the rickshaws are concentrating more on not hitting the traffic crossing their path than avoiding something petty like pedestrians.

Bangalore still has beggars – a particularly insistent type, too – but instead of living in lean-to tents on the high street, they sit outside shops selling genuine Ray Bans and designer clothes. Not all, though, are this street-wise; I saw my first case of elephantiasis in Bangalore, the disease that makes your limbs swell up so much that your legs look like an elephant’s; it was quite a sight, and my heart went out to the poor man.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Bangalorian rickshaw drivers use their meters, which is a first for me in India; everywhere else they steadfastly refuse to use them because they can always make more money out of a dumb tourist by quoting a crazy price and haggling it down a little, but in Bangalore it’s illegal not to use the meter, and unbelievably the drivers tend to obey. The only problem with the meter is that instead of getting worried about being ripped off for a trip that may or may not be a long way, you end up getting paranoid about whether the driver is going round and round in circles, just to up the fare. My first rickshaw driver didn’t help things; I wanted to go to a place called the Airlines Hotel on Madras Bank Road, and he started heading for the airport on Old Madras Road, which would have cost me an extra Rs50 if I hadn’t been paying attention.

In the Buff

But surely the biggest shock that awaited me in Bangalore was the availability of beef, or to be more precise, ‘buff’. The cow might be sacred but the buffalo isn’t, and perhaps a reason for the near lack of them in the city is that they’re available in burgers, pizzas, steaks and stews; it’s not that common, but there are restaurants serving buff, and I found myself drawn inexorably towards the smell of burnt bovine like a rat to the lilt of the Pied Piper. I didn’t realise how much I missed the taste of beef until I tucked into a meal of buff soup and buff pizza at one of the best Euro-Indian restaurants I’ve seen for a while. Along with this luxury, beer is freely available and is drinkable in pleasant surroundings as opposed to the prisons of Tamil Nadu, and you can find such western icons as Wimpy and KFC dotted around (though there’s no McDonald’s, yet).

Possibly as a result of this surfeit of gluttony, a sizable proportion of Bangalore’s middle-aged women are quite fat, which comes as a disappointment after the sleek beauty of the rural areas; the younger generation, however, are decked out in hip-hugging 501s and curve-enhancing mini T-shirts, with hardly a saree to be seen. It’s an intriguing sight, wandering past a huge queue full of young couples all waiting to see the sexy BMW in Tomorrow Never Dies. And in fairness, the young men of Bangalore look smart in a way that I didn’t believe Indian men could, with their designer tops and smart pressed trousers; the odd lungi makes an appearance, but for the most part the male Bangalorians look as well turned out as the national cricket team.

I decided to take advantage of the cosmopolitanism of Bangalore by developing ten rolls of film and mailing them home. Even Kodak makes no sense here, though; on the receipt I received for my deposited films was a disclaimer, which said, ‘Because days used in colour photographic materials, like other days, may change in time, neither prints nor copies will be replaced or otherwise warranted against any change in colour.’ Isn’t it sheer poetry? Whatever it means...

I also managed to track down some more excellent music – Sheryl Crow’s latest and Radiohead’s OK Computer – and as I wandered down the road towards my shabby little hotel room to try them out, I stopped dead in my tracks. Surely that couldn’t be the smell of kretek wafting down the street... but there it was, Gudang Garam for sale at the kiosk! If anything, this sums up Bangalore; to become truly stylish, you need American jeans, a German car, a British accent and Indonesian smokes. Thankfully you’ll still be an Indian, though.

The Sights of Bangalore

The sights of Bangalore aren’t that numerous, but the ones that are worth a visit are pretty impressive. Government buildings dominate the wide, tree-lined boulevards, especially the bright red monstrosity of the High Court and the modern and highly stylish Vidhana Soudha, which is home to the Secretariat and State Legislature. Above the entrance to the latter is the inscription ‘Government work is God’s work’, which might help to explain why government work involves so much bureaucracy and paperwork; the civil service is truly the home to the Holy Triplicate.

In the south of the city is a botanic garden, probably one of the best in India, and although the grass is brown and the plants wilting from a serious lack of rain, Lalbagh Garden is pretty impressive. The lakes glimmer, the trees cast their shade over the dusty lawns, countless Indians lie prostrate and motionless on the ground, and copious litter skitters down the paths in the afternoon breeze; it’s pleasant, despite the people casually throwing Pepsi cans into the undergrowth regardless of the nearby litter bins, and although it didn’t buoy my spirits like Kings Park in Perth or the gardens in Singapore, I felt at least that the work of the 18th century botanists who laid it out in the days before the British wasn’t entirely wasted.

And on my way back to the shops and shysters of the main shopping area, I came across a delightful little sign on the pavement. ‘Urinating, spitting and littering in public places will attract administrative charges,’ it said, and I couldn’t resist kneeling down to copy these priceless words down. It was only than that I noticed the smell; I must have been standing in a puddle of at least four hours of God’s work...

The Post Office

Written: 7 March 1998

There are a couple of services that even Bangalore’s yuppiedom can’t render any more ludicrous: government tours and the post office.

I decided that I wanted to try out one of those crazy break-neck Indian tours, and where better than the temple towns of Belur, Halebid and Sravanabelagola, three classic architectural sites that are apparently worth visiting, but which can take quite some time to reach by public transport? I say ‘apparently’ because I never got to see them.

I’d originally tried to book a tour from Mysore, but a lack of interest meant that the companies couldn’t guarantee the tours would go, and indeed every company I tried eventually cancelled their ‘daily’ tours due to a lack of numbers. ‘Never mind,’ I thought, ‘I’ll try in Bangalore where there are more tourists,’ and sure enough the state tourist department said they had a tour, it was going every day and yes, it would definitely leave. This, by the way, is a use of the word ‘definitely’ that doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

So I turned up at the state tourism offices at 7am on Friday morning, only to discover that I was the only person actually booked on the tour, and that it was therefore cancelled, quite within the bounds of the small print which I had read and assumed didn’t apply, seeing as I’d been told the tour would definitely be going. But there was absolutely no point in getting annoyed, so I took my refund with a good-natured shrug and walked back to my hotel; it amused me later to note that my refund was too much by Rs100, a little bit of divine justice if ever I’ve seen it.

I wasn’t that bothered, to be honest, because I’d just had ten rolls of film back from the local developing studio, most of which seemed to be pictures of temples. I was in danger of being completely templed-out, so in retrospect it was probably a good thing that the tour had fallen through, or I’d have been wading through yet more of the things...

But I was still left with ten sets of photographs to send back home, which struck me as a pretty easy job: shove them in a jiffy bag, nip down the post office and send them off. If only it was that easy; in India there’s no such thing as a jiffy bag, and using a normal envelope is just asking for trouble, so it’s back to basics again. The solution is to nip down to the local tailor, who will stitch up your precious memories in cheap linen, which is tougher than any jiffy bag; this you can then take to the post office for mailing.

This can take forever. There’s Book Post Surface Mail, Book Post Air Mail, Registered Sea Mail, Registered Air Mail, Ordinary Surface Mail, Ordinary Air Mail and a different counter for parcels and letters (the difference between which isn’t clear), as well as a separate counter for stamps and a separate information counter for discovering which counter you need. I wanted to send a parcel (which turned out to be the kind of parcel that needed to be dealt with by the letter people), post a letter (for which I needed stamps from the stamp man before handing it in at the letter counter) and buy some aerogrammes (from yet another counter), so by the time I’d finished my business with the philatelic equivalent of the civil service I was pretty exhausted and not a little confused. But at least it was cheap and, eventually, my films made it home, so I can’t really complain.

Reflections in Bangalore

Written: 5 March 1998

Here are some random reflections, penned while sweating through the heat wave in Bangalore:

- The smarter you look in Bangalore, the more attention you attract from the touts and beggars. If I go out into the streets of the city in my smart trousers and clean shirt, I can’t believe the difference; by wearing standard western issue and being white, I am basically advertising the fact that I am rich beyond all Indian dreams, and that I should be liberated of this financial burden at all costs. Compared to the reaction when I slouch round in baggy cottons and a salt-marked three-day-old T-shirt, it’s freaky, though it might have something to do with the large number of white tourists in Bangalore, all gagging to be fleeced, and saying things like, ‘Well, it’s only three pounds in real money you know, that’s awfully cheap,’ when a fairer price is nearer 30p. There’s gold in them there hills...

- Being the smartarse with the budget has its dark side, though. I’ve often mentioned the beggars, but never my personal relationship with them, and it’s time to come clean. Until now I’ve always totally ignored the pleading children, the fingerless diseased, the sagging crones and the skateboard cripples, because I’ve told myself that it’s better to give your money to a charitable organisation like Mother Theresa than into the hands of a beggar, just in case that beggar isn’t so poor, or is working for someone else. There is, however, one big flaw in this argument; I’ve never given a bloody penny to any of these charities I pay lip service to, and it suddenly struck me that I’m simply a rich westerner who counts his rupees on a daily basis and never gives anything away. Haggling with the salesmen over what is essentially a pittance is one thing; if I end up paying ten times the real price, then so will the next tourist, and that’s not good, though it’s certainly not worth arguing over a few rupees. But not giving anything to someone who is dying in front of my eyes is simply unforgivable, and in Bangalore I suffered a complete turnaround; now, if I have change, then so does the beggar, if he or she doesn’t look too well off already.

Of course, it can be argued – quite truthfully, I might add – that this recently discovered philanthropy is nothing more than an attempt to ease my conscience, and that it has its roots in pure selfishness, and the desire to stop feeling guilty about my previous misanthropy. This is also true, but those of us who can seriously say that they give to charity with totally pure intentions are either lying or have no dark side, and I don’t believe such a human exists.

- On the subject of money, I realised the other day that my money belt – a cotton contraption that snuggles under my trousers nicely, hiding my valuables in an area guarded by instinctive intrusion paranoia – is now a part of me and I feel undressed without it. Consider this: my belt routinely contains over one year’s salary for the average Indian (about £200) in cash, plus a lot more than that in travellers cheques. Perhaps this is what they mean by a capitalist waistline...

- Jarvis Cocker once wrote a song called ‘Dogs are Everywhere’. I don’t think he was specifically thinking of India at the time, but he could well have been; I have never seen (or heard) such a pack of miscreant scoundrels as the dogs in India, and if it wasn’t for the part they play in cleaning up the rubbish off the streets, I’d say this place had a serious problem. I can hardly believe that in England, stray dogs are rounded up and put down; here, every dog is a stray, and the concept of a pet dog is as laughable as a pet swan would be in England. Chalk up the dogs as another species that will survive the nuclear holocaust, along with the cockroaches.

- I woke up this morning with what can only be described as a smoker’s cough; hacking on the congestion in my lungs, I unexpectedly brought up all the pollution I’ve inhaled. It doesn’t bother me too much, but I don’t really smoke, apart from the odd packet just to sample the local brands of cigarette, none of which I’ve particularly liked; it’s just pollution getting to me, and the head cold that has been my constant travelling companion has finally matured into full-blown Indian congestion. Roll on the clear air of the Himalayas...

- Bangalore railway station is as clean and modern as any in the West. Computer screens show the departures and arrivals, TVs show MTV on the platforms, shops sell Pepsi and coffee, and the tracks are free of cows and excess litter. And above the heads of the busy commuters hangs a sign saying, ‘To know how good your career is going to be, consult an astrologer.’ And this just over from the sign that mysteriously advises, ‘Do not entrain or detrain a moving train.’ It’s a top spot for weirdness.

- I am gathering a hefty collection of Indian addresses from people who have been interesting enough to merit a decent conversation (drunken Keralans excepted). I have one regret, though, and it is this. Back at Surabaya train station in Java I met a very sociable young man who was in the Indonesian air force, and after talking to him on the platform for a while, he wanted to swap addresses; I took his, and I gave him a false one, because at that ill-starred time I couldn’t think of anything worse than having to put up with pidgin-English letters from afar. Then on the train I sat next to a young Muslim girl who plucked up all her courage and linguistic skills to string together a conversation with me; she also asked to swap addresses, and I told her that as I had been travelling for so long I no longer had an address (an excuse I use to this day, because I don’t really want to give out my address to all and sundry) but she gave me hers anyway, entreating me to write to her, as she collected foreign stamps. She was, as I recall, from Solo.

In a fit of general malaise with the whole Indonesian thing, I screwed up both addresses and binned them. For this I feel guilty; a postcard is a tiny effort for me, but for someone in financially stricken Indonesia it would be a real treat. And as if to rub it in, I read that the first major piece of violence sparked off by the Indonesian disaster happened in Solo. It’s one of my few regrets... so whenever I get an address these days, I make sure I write as promised. It’s the least I can do, really.

- I’m slowly becoming Indian, in some ways at least. Part of it is through necessity and part of it through resignation, but I now find myself spitting in the street, urinating in public, chucking rubbish onto the roadside, eating with my hands and crossing traffic with reckless abandon. In justification, I spit because India’s pollution makes it a necessity to cough up the unpleasant, and as spitting is preferable to swallowing, I simply join the herd in this socially accepted gesture; I urinate in public because, again, it is the norm, and there simply aren’t any public toilets in India; I chuck rubbish only onto existing piles of rubbish, but I’d rather use a bin, if only there were such things (the piles act like impromptu bins anyway); I eat with my hands because there isn’t any cutlery, it’s kind of fun, it seems to make the food taste better, it’s the normal way to eat your food, and I always wash them first; and I cross the traffic with a new sixth sense that I have gradually been developing since Indonesia, because it’s not only the best way to navigate your way through a city, it’s rather entertaining at the same time, in a videogame kind of way.

However, all of these habits will disappear within two seconds of my arrival back in the West, where they have clean air, public toilets, rubbish bins, cutlery and pedestrian crossings. And there are some Indian habits I’ll never pick up, like drinking your coffee from a saucer or wobbling your head in an ambiguous way (although, if I want to get my own back on an Indian, I wobble my head when he asks me a question; ‘Which country you coming from?’ Wobble. Ha!). Deep down, I guess I’m an ingrained westerner, but it’s certainly fun to dabble in being a local.

Kama Sutra

Written: 7 March 1998

To kill a few hours before the departure of my train to Hampi, I decided to go and see an Indian movie. The one I picked, Kama Sutra, rather fortuitously turned out to be in English, and not only was it comprehensible, it was a serious film. This is perhaps because it wasn’t a typical Indian film at all, but was produced in association with the British company Channel Four films.

Kama Sutra, as the title rather subtly implies, is a love story. Like most Indian cinema, the emphasis was more on the story part than the love part, though there was quite a bit of kissing and nudity, something you wouldn’t find in a mainstream Hindi movie. I found myself transfixed; it oozed atmosphere and cinematic appeal, even if the story failed to follow up on the more intriguing sub-plots and instead stuck rather unimaginatively to the main story, a standard ‘Love Hurts’ tragedy set in 16th-century India.

But I didn’t care about the plot, because the costumes, sets and attention to detail were so good at portraying ancient India that I almost felt I recognised the place. And perched pleasantly on top of this vivid imagery was one of the most beautiful actresses I’ve ever seen in a film, a British-born Indian called Indira Varma. I wasn’t the only one who found her alluring either, as about 90 per cent of the audience was male, sitting there masticating on their pan while thinking of something far more assonant. The male actors were pretty damn perfect too, but of course I didn’t notice that.

So despite the overwhelming popularity of Bollywood, Kama Sutra shows that India can produce westernised films, albeit in cahoots with western production companies. And the soundtrack was stunning, regardless of the complete lack of any song-and-dance routines; instrumental, Indian and perfect for the film, it was full of the sort of Indian music that I’ve liked since stumbling on Ravi Shankar back in my days as a hippy.

It was quite a relief after all the sing-along insanity of normal Indian film culture...

Hampi

Written: 16 March 1998

A night-train ride northwest of Bangalore, Hampi seems to exist in a sphere of its own, a self-contained combination of timeless natural wonder and historical human impact. Here the ruins of ancient civilisations pepper the rocky landscapes while restaurants pander to the requirements of the tourist classes, and all the time the slow turbulence of the Tungabhadra River meanders along the valley floor, only months away from the raging tumescence of the monsoon.

Describing the atmosphere of Hampi is as difficult a task as describing the allure of the city lights or the hypnotic attraction of dance music, but there is no doubt in every visitor’s mind that Hampi has a special something, even if putting your finger on that something is impossible. For some it is the stark beauty of the igneous rock formations that dominate the landscape as it shivers under the heat haze of the midday sun; for others it is the different sense of time, a disconnection from the hustle and bustle of modern India – indeed, the modern world – as cows ramble past the stone steps where colourfully dressed women beat the dirt out of their washing; and for others it’s Hampi’s proximity to the beach state of Goa, resulting in the availability of luxuries like king-size cigarette papers and wonderful tourist trinkets while managing to remain an outpost of primitive culture.

Because the little town of Hampi is surrounded by one of the most extensive and varied collections of ruined buildings this side of Delphi, I decided to employ the services of a guide, a young man called Chandra who turned out to be a particularly good find. During the course of two half-day tours, he managed to transform a collection of dilapidated stone constructions into a living, breathing world of bazaars, incense, rituals, royalty, engineering genius and warring nations, a feat achieved by combining his encyclopaedic knowledge of local history with an evocative delivery, a talent unusual in someone so young. As a one-on-one guide he brought Hampi alive, recreating the scenes from 500 years ago when the Europeans were tentatively reaching out their colonial intentions towards the east, the Muslims were methodically invading India from the north, and the Vijayanagara Kingdom was thriving in the Hampi area. I normally scorn guides, but this time it turned out to be a good move.

On the other hand, touring Hampi in the incredibly sweltering afternoon sun did make me think that if I saw yet another temple, I’d probably kick it. After a while lingams and gopurams begin to look exactly like all the other lingams and gopurams you’ve ever seen, and so it was with the temples of Hampi. But this is where Hampi wins hands-down over other sites, because behind each ruined building is scenery that bewilders.

In a geological pattern echoed by the rock sculptures of central Australia, Hampi’s landscape is volcanic in origin; as the volcanic exudate cooled it cracked along vaguely orthogonal lines which, when exposed to the vagaries of weathering, wore down into piles of rounded boulders the size of houses. The resulting mountains of rocks are stacked up in gravity-defying balancing acts, with boulders seemingly about to roll down onto the town while stone slabs look as if a slight push will slice them like bread off a loaf, taking with them banana trees, coconut palms and electric cables.

Electric cables, indeed; for Hampi, while an historical tour de force, is an attraction that’s positively ripe for the milking. The number of visitors who flock to see the sights is on the increase, and simply looking at my two-year-old guidebook’s description of accommodation and restaurants shows how much has already changed. But for once the onset of the clumsy boot-heels of tourism doesn’t concern me greatly; to destroy the unique atmosphere of Hampi you would have to defile a stunningly large area of inhospitable Martian landscape, and more buildings won’t manage that. And Hampi is hardly the place where the clubs of Goa or the high-rises of the hill stations would work; the people just don’t seem to have drunk from the cup of mammon that the Goans have drained. This is, without a doubt, a godsend.

Images of Hampi

As with all fairly long stays, I happily slipped into the lifestyle. In Hampi the mañana ethos is stronger than in most places, and yet again I found my plans slipping gently away. Highlights of my lounging in Hampi follow, in no particular order:

- Have you ever heard a musical temple? Neither had I before Chandra took me to the World Heritage Vitthala Temple. Here, tapping certain stone pillars produces harmonics that can only be described as ethereal, and it’s something that’s quite impossible to imagine until you hear a tune being tapped out on a stone carving of a drum. Discovering this sort of architectural genius really makes you really think about modern life; modern man could probably build such a temple out of granite if he so desired, but it could only be achieved with the aid of computers and science, systems that the builders of Hampi couldn’t have dreamed of even in their most hallucinogenic phases. The same goes for the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the statues of Easter Island, the palaces of the Aztecs, the megaliths of the Bada Valley and so on. Do you ever get the feeling that by learning so much, we forget even more?

- Other astounding architectural wonders pointed out to me by the vivacious Chandra were a comprehensive aqueduct system for filling the city’s water tanks and bathing pools; underground temples used for secret meetings, where bats now inhabit the dank water-lined corridors while shafts of sunlight slice through the gloom; ancient water-based air conditioning on the first floor of the queen’s pad; and a refractive light trick that reflects a gopuram’s image upside down on the wall inside the temple. I could describe the fascinating history of the area and all the quirky clashes of Jainism, Hinduism and Islam that are reflected in the architecture, but plenty of better-informed scholars have written on that topic. In the case of Hampi, it’s best just to go there and see it for yourself.

- The local tribeswomen have resurrected their traditional dress in a wonderful combination of aesthetic concern and wily tourist appeal. These women, normally fairly ancient, get around in costumes that look as if they’ve smothered themselves in glue and rolled around the floor of a pantomime seamstress’s sewing room. Chunks of mirrors offset the garish pinks and purples, monstrous nose studs clash with whole families of arm bands, and all the time they’re trying to persuade you to shell out for handbags that would have made early Pink Floyd fans suck in their breath at the savage colour schemes. If Blue Peter was into fashion, this would be the result, and it’s a gloriously kitsch sight.

- Also quite aware of the deep pockets of tourists, crazy sadhus – wandering holy men who live an ascetic lifestyle – roam the streets with their wild eyes and wilder claims, and herds of wonderful postcard-selling children ply the restaurants with their excellent English and smiles that keep on shining well beyond their departure. If these little charmers are typical of the next generation of Indians, then this country’s got a rosy future.

- Why is it that just as soon as you have met some of the most warm-hearted and interesting people on your whole trip, they have to disappear into the folds of the travellers’ trail, and always too soon? In Hampi I met and waved goodbye to a whole group of great people who instantly struck a chord. Kenny, Ross, Kirsten, Mark, Leslie, Mark and Sharon... and don’t forget the locals, a collection of coyly intelligent bundles of fun who turned the whole event into one long festival of singalongs, culinary experiments and familial closeness. Maical, Lakshmi, Ali and countless others didn’t just enliven Hampi, they personified it. And, as if I need to mention it, people smile back in Hampi. Not for the first time do I find myself hoping that I’ll meet them all again, some sunny day.

- I finished reading Sophie’s Choice and I actually felt tears welling at the cataclysmic outcome of the novel. Perhaps it was the fact that I identified heavily with the narrator, but it moved me; the only other book I remember affecting me like this was a series that I read as a child, some five or six books whose names I forget and whose contents I only vaguely remember. After completing the last book and reading of the death of a character who had permeated each of the stories, I felt for the first time the icy grip of a master storyteller killing off a character who’s become almost real. Sophie’s Choice came along at a time when I was really beginning to rediscover my passion for all things literary, and if anything it has solidified my hopes to become a writer. If only I could produce the matchless prose of William Styron, I would feel I had achieved my life’s ambition...

- As if to remind me who’s the boss, another bout of vomiting and diarrhoea struck me down five days after I arrived in Hampi, taking me by surprise me after a month and a half of reasonable health. I lay knocked out in my room, writhing in a turmoil of half-remembered dreams, sweat-wrung sheets and subterranean homesick blues, hoping for nothing more than a visit from somebody. Unfortunately I twisted in solitude, feeling far more than just lonely; I felt forgotten. However, it turned out that there was no reason to feel lonely, at least as far as illness went. During my eight-day stay absolutely everyone in the group went down with something, from the mildly uncomfortable to the serious, so there’s clearly a hygiene problem in Hampi, especially at this time of year when water is scarce. (And, just like in Puri, my illness coincided with enforced vegetarianism, because Hampi is a no-meat zone on account of its religious significance; bring on the chicken, I say.)

- The sunsets in Hampi are indescribably beautiful, so I won’t.

- Try crossing a river in a coracle and you’ll never again be scared by amusement park rides. Over the river from Hampi are more restaurants and hotels, where they even serve alcohol (though I stuck to the lassi, given my illness); you reach them by entrusting your life to a wood-and-tar contraption that redefines the word ‘basic’. At night the coracles are beached by the riverside, overturned into a family of giant turtle shapes that leave behind perfect circles of fertile grass. On the other hand, entrusting your life to Charon isn’t as crazy as floating down the river in an inflatable rubber tube, which is a popular way of seeing the landscape. I would have gone, but I found watching the tourists float past from my vantage point in the riverside restaurants far more relaxing than the prospect of getting wet myself. Besides, I kept thinking that I could always do that tomorrow...

- It seems that Hampi has every type of Indian weirdness available, all crammed into one small town. There’s an ashram being built on the hills overlooking the eastern end of the bazaar; there’s a crazy palmist down by the river with orange robes, a huge beard and a little hut, who can be seen wandering around the town with his portable radio on full blast; there’s a local homeopathic doctor who will cure all your ills for Rs50, asking questions like ‘What qualities do you most admire in your friends?’ instead of ‘Now, where exactly does it hurt?’; there are restaurants serving bhang lassi by the river, and extremely strong ones too, judging by the local populace (bhang lassi is a marijuana milkshake, and is the closest thing I’ve ever found to Anthony Burgess’s ‘moloko with knives’ from A Clockwork Orange); and there are dogs, pigs, cows and chickens wandering around everywhere, eating each other’s faeces and generally having a ball. It sounds just like everywhere else I’ve been in India, doesn’t it?

And to cap it all, I was lucky enough to be in Hampi for the Holi Festival, and I can’t think of a better place to spend it...

The Holi Festival

Written: 14 March 1998

As a therapy, regression often proves effective. From the simple weekend routine of playing knock-about football with your mates, to the psychologically intriguing exploits of businessmen who dress up in nappies and suck their thumbs in oversize cots while paying a mistress a small fortune to act as their mummy, reverting back to childhood is a glorious release from having to fake an adult outlook every day. Not surprisingly the Indians are fully aware of the positive energies associated with regression, but typically they manage to make it feel far less Freudian and far more fun; and to cap it all, they’ve set aside one day a year, Holi, that’s wholly dedicated to slipping back into childhood, or at least that’s how it appears from the outside. There is a religious significance, of course, but then Christmas is a religious holiday too... apparently.

Holi is an annual holiday celebrated on the full moon in March, purportedly to say goodbye to winter and hello to warmer weather. This is why Holi is mainly a northern festival, because in the south the last thing people want is for the pleasant temperatures of winter to turn into the humid tandoori oven of summer. Hampi is a delightful exception, possibly due to the tourist influx, though the day that we celebrated the coming of hotter weather, it was scorching enough to make the balls on a brass monkey dangerous to touch. Still, as with most festivals, the original reason for celebrating Holi has all but been sidelined in favour of the festivities themselves; thus the bonfire the night before, lit as a symbol of the destruction of the evil demon Holika, isn’t so much a spiritual affair as a chance for the locals to slap on the western dance music and leap around the streets, annoying the policemen and singularly failing to light the fire until most of the spectators have drifted off to sleep. But the bonfire is only one bit of Holi; the best part is saved for the day after the full moon.

Holi is all about colour, namely colour in the hair, colour on the face, colour on your clothes, colour all over the streets and colour just about anywhere it’ll stick. The colour itself takes the form of tika powder, either thrown au naturel or added to water and squeezed from a plastic bottle; it pays to wear grotty clothes on Holi (so I simply chose randomly from my collection of sun-bleached and laundry-battered garments) because if you play with tika powder, everyone’s a winner bar the clothes.

The mayhem goes on all morning. Fuelled by copious amounts of bhang, the locals dance around to the beat of tin drums, smothering themselves and any unwary passers-by in a psychedelic dream coat of purples, blues, yellows, reds and greens, managing to attract a sizable collection of manic westerners on the way who join in with characteristic energy. Five minutes after joining the throng it doesn’t matter whether you’re white or black, because everyone is purple; a couple of hours later and clean people are not only a rarity, they’re targets. The streets run purple, buildings drip with missed shots, cars look as if they’ve been hit by multicoloured bird shit and tentatively the women of Hampi, who have sensibly hidden themselves away for the madness, come out of the woodwork, vainly trying to recognise friends and family through the layers of pigment.

And before long, half the population of Hampi is down at the ghats, scrubbing and soaping in vain as they realise that not only does tika powder stain like buggery, it doesn’t react to traditional ablution methods at all. Soap slides off skin, leaving pink splatter marks plainly visible; shampoo might add Vitamin B5 to the follicles, but it doesn’t shift the streaks. In fact the only thing that even pretends to work is rubbing with sand, physically removing layers of coloured skin, and leaving everyone exhausted but happy. It seems that one of the side effects of baptism by Holi water is a healthy glow, if you count purple, yellow, red, green and blue as healthy, which, judging by the smiles, everyone here does.

But nobody cares, and indeed it’s kind of entertaining to be slightly stained for the week after Holi; everyone knows what you’ve been up to and grins maniacally as you wander past with your pink face and green hair. It took 1977 and the Sex Pistols to bring colourful anarchy to England, and then it came with an extended middle digit; the Hindus have known about it for centuries, and it’s a darn sight more fun when it involves staining your friends (and with tika rather than spit).

And you don’t have to wear safety pins through your nose, either...

Bijapur

Written: 18 March 1998

Waving goodbye to my Hampi friends as they boarded the bus for the southbound train, I felt a strange yet familiar feeling. Yes, it was sad to be seeing newly discovered kin disappear into the evening sun, but I suddenly felt that little thrill associated with being alone again, with being independent and having to make my own decisions.

Those decisions included leaving Hampi the next day and jumping on the train to Bijapur, a major town to the north. It struck me on arrival that Bijapur feels quite a lot like Hyderabad, and a glance at the map shows that the distance between the two isn’t that great; indeed, Bijapur has a large Muslim population just like Hyderabad, which probably explains it.

Bijapur’s great attractions are architectural, specifically its Islamic architecture. Minarets, domes and echoing burial chambers all conjure up images of the Arabian Nights, with crescent moons rising in clear starry skies while camel trains stand silhouetted on the desert horizon; even the wailing of the muezzin stirs me in a strange way, even if it’s just in frustration at being woken up at 4am yet again. Whatever the western image of Islam, its atmospheric grace never ceases to amaze me.

The Golcumbaz

The Golcumbaz, for example, is astounding. A huge domed building, looking slightly ungainly but definitely impressive, the Golcumbaz’s appeal lies not so much in its impressive size and structure, but in the aural effect of its dome. The dome contains a whispering gallery, and it’s a stunner.

Climb up to the balcony inside the dome and clap your hands, and the sound gets echoed back to you ten times in an explosion of noise that borders on the spooky. Make a raspberry sound and listen to a choir of flatulence; blow a whistle and marvel at sounds that even Roger Whittaker couldn’t reproduce; sneeze and the whole world sneezes with you. But listen in silence and the true power of the Golcumbaz becomes apparent.

That is, it becomes apparent if you can manage to find silence in which to listen; after all this is India, where silence in public places is a rarity, especially given the sheer number of people in the country. But against all the odds I managed to coincide my visit to the Golcumbaz with the only time of the day when the hordes of Indian tourists were in transit between sights, and I had the whispering gallery to myself for a good five minutes. It was during this time that I discovered the true secret of the dome.

Dotted around the perimeter of the dome are eight little doorways onto the roof, each of them shaped in the traditional archway design of Islam, and through these doors waft the sounds of the city. Through one doorway the lilt of the market-wallahs selling their goods echoes tenfold on the roof; through another the rickshaw horns argue with each other in triple triplicate; yet another amplifies the warbling of the Muslim call to prayer; and over there a door catches a flock of birds as they chatter on the outside parapet, oblivious to the eavesdropper inside. The Golcumbaz is the Islamic equivalent of the mixing studio – or, to be more theistic, the Islamic equivalent of an all-seeing, all-hearing god – and for five minutes I was privileged enough to be in a studio free of Hindi pop artistes.

Of course, the silence didn’t last, and just as I reached the end of my personal repertoire of funny noises, a troupe of Indians appeared through one of the doors and proceeded to scream, clap, screech and expectorate[1] in a cacophony of sound that would have woken the ancient Islamic king buried in the cellar if he hadn’t already given up trying to rest in peace. I retreated to the comparative peace of the city streets before my eardrums suffered permanent damage.

The Incomparable Ibrahim Roza

Other beautiful buildings followed, such as the simple yet striking Jama-e-Masjid Mosque; the Asar Mahal, where kids play cricket in the nearby water tank, and I was accosted by a crazy old man who kept shouting, ‘Cumoncumon!’ as he dragged me up to the roof and insisted I take pictures of him prancing around before demanding some baksheesh; and the Citadel, which sports some beautiful ruins and pleasant parks.

But little prepared me for the sheer beauty of the Ibrahim Roza. Scorched by sunlight and surrounded by parched parks, the minarets and domes of the twin burial tombs of this astoundingly beautiful building summarise everything that is aesthetically emotive about Islamic architecture. Perfect domes are topped with crescent moons, surrounded on four corners by symmetrical minarets that manage to combine structural simplicity with intricate stonework; doorways with the distinctive pointed arch lead into cool high-ceilinged chambers, sheltering the tombs from the outside world and cutting off almost all traces of city bustle; covered walkways around the perimeters of the buildings provide a contemplative environment for a relaxing read or (if you really want to be a local) a quick snooze; and all the time there’s a background vibration of history, long marches, religious wars, scimitars, sultans and Persian love stories.

Even the small group of locals who invaded my peace did it in a respectable and almost welcome way, saying, ‘Excuse me sir, sorry to disturb you,’ before launching into a surprisingly elegant and worthwhile conversation. The concepts of Islam and modern India sometimes appear to be at loggerheads, the former being strict and regulated and the latter strictly unregulated, yet there are more Muslims in India than in most purely Muslim countries, including all of the Arab states; it also seems to be the case that Indian cities with large Muslim areas are generally more respectable and less chaotic than their Hindu counterparts. Many people would say that this is a shame, and would point to the busy insanity of India as one of its main attractions, but I beg to differ; the contrast of Islamic India with the Hindu mainstream is like a breath of fresh air that makes you appreciate both religions more. Furthermore, I just adore Islamic architecture, Islam’s evocative histories and the (comparatively) reticent politeness of Muslims. I sometimes wonder if westerners have more in common with the Muslim Indians than Hindu Indians; this might seem a strange thing to say, given the traditional gulf between the West and Islam, but when you see the different religions in action, it certainly makes you think.

Holi in Bijapur

On the other hand, there were three areas where the austere nature of Islam seemed to crumble in Bijapur. First, some places celebrate Holi not only on the full moon, but also on a few specific days afterwards, and sometimes every day of the following week. 17 March was evidently one of those days in Bijapur, and I saw plenty of people wandering around smothered in purple and silver (the favourite colours of the Bijapurians, presumably); I even managed to gain a few facial and arm stains myself, much to the glee of the local populace. One assumes that only the Hindus actually participate in the Holi celebration, but the proliferation of brightly coloured people and the ubiquitous smell of alcohol clashed vibrantly with the traditional view of an Islamic town.

Second, Bijapur was full of pigs, more so than any other Indian city I’ve visited. Muslims don’t eat pigs, but in a strange display of opposites attracting, Bijapur snorted and rummaged around in the dirt with the best of them.

But surely the biggest clash between cultures is when a foreigner like myself visits a peaceful Muslim tomb and ends up doing the Temple Tango. This dance, a common sight when white people explore temples in India, is a simple consequence of having to take off your shoes at the entrance to every temple, leaving you to enter on bare feet. This is fine in theory, but when the summer sun has been baking the stone slabs all day, it’s a bit much to bear when your feet aren’t hardened up like the local soles, and you end up hopping around from shadow to shadow, muttering ows and ouches in increasingly loud volume as the heat builds up on the balls of your feet. Of course, you have to leave your shoes outside Hindu temples as well as Muslim ones, but in a Hindu temple the Temple Tango isn’t quite so noticeable among the busily fascinating activities that seem to take place all the time. In a Muslim tomb, though, it feels rather out of place; I just hope my hopping round the Ibrahim Roza didn’t look as disrespectful as it felt.

[1] This was despite the poetic nonsense of the sign downstairs proclaiming that ‘Spitting and writting [sic] is strictly prohibited’. Chalk up another great sign in a country that excels in this lost art.

India: Maharashtra

Aurangabad

Written: 20 March 1998

It was a long transit day on the bus north from Bijapur to Aurangabad, where I’d originally planned to stay for three nights. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the sights around the city – such as the wonderful caves at Ellora and Ajanta, and the atmospheric fort at Daultabad – but in the end I was happy to move on after just two nights.

This early departure was entirely down to the place in which I stayed, rather than Aurangabad itself. Aurangabad is home to a genuine Youth Hostel, and with its fairly convenient location and extremely cheap prices (Rs20 per night, or about 30p) I went for it. I think it’s fair to say that I’ll only stay in another Youth Hostel when I have no choice; they all have the same slightly unnerving atmosphere, and although it’s hard to put my finger on the exact reason for this odd vibe, it’s been present in every one I’ve stayed in, from Australia to India.

Perhaps it was the institutional feel of the whole set-up that set my teeth on edge: lights out was at 10pm, the manager was not a ‘manager’ but a ‘warden’, there were plenty of sickly sweet Christian messages posted on the walls, and the buildings looked like something out of a 1950s hospital. But I think the real reason for my failure to enjoy Aurangabad Youth Hostel was the type of person it attracts. Calling them ‘strange’ would be a kindness.

To be fair, my experience of Youth Hostels hasn’t exactly been good anywhere. My one memory of the hostel in Perth was of one particularly depressed traveller spending a Saturday night lying in a pool of delirium having taken an overdose of Prozac; the paramedics were most courteous as they carted him off, gibbering quietly to himself.

But all Youth Hostels are home to one particular type of weirdo: the hostel networker. He or she is normally (but not always) young, is pretty shy, has travelled extensively but never outside the international network of hostels, and tends to have some kind of oddity about them, whether it’s a habit of staring blankly ahead, a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or just a lack of social normality. It’s hard to imagine them having anything in their future apart from a future career teaching Physics for the Open University.

There will also be a smattering of Japanese, a few serious Germans, a couple of headcases with tattoos and strangely cropped facial hair, and at least one resident weirdo who has been there longer than anyone can remember and who still doesn’t quite fit in.

I booked in for three nights but could only handle two. It felt like leaving school at the end of term when I finally lugged my pack out of the door and hailed a rickshaw; I even felt like playing conkers with the driver, but either he didn’t know how to play or he misunderstood me. Instead he just covered his groin with his hands, smiled nervously and shuffled me into his cab.

I couldn’t get in quick enough...

Ellora

Written: 19 March 1998

The main attractions around Aurangabad are the cave temple complexes of Ellora and Ajanta, and for them it’s worth putting up with any amount of social asphyxiation. I spent a whole day at Ellora, and it’s simply magnificent.

Television and computers must be the most destructive forces known to man, because before either of these (admittedly excellent) developments came along, man actually achieved things. The caves at Ellora are prime examples of what man can do if he doesn’t get hooked on soap operas and videogames, and instead is desperate for something else to alleviate the boring nature of his existence. Faith might move mountains, but you’ve got to have a lot more than faith if you’re going to dig entire temples out of rock faces.

Or should I say into rock faces. The temples of Ellora are as big and as impressive as any others you will see in India, but here each temple is literally made out of a single piece of stone; before the builders arrived there was a hill made of rock, but after all the whittling and chipping there stood (and still stands) a collection of complex multi-storey temples, smothered in intricate carvings, towers, statues and plenty of cool rooms for meditative reflection... all made out of one continuous piece of rock. In much the same way that sculptors take lumps of stone and tease beautiful statues out them, the builders of Ellora took an entire cliff and teased the most incredible temple complexes out of them. The scale of the achievement at Ellora is breathtaking.

There are three main collections of temples at Ellora: the Buddhist temples, built around 600 to 800 AD; the Hindu temples, built between 600 and 900 AD; and the Jain temples, built somewhere between 800 and 1000 AD. The varied styles of the 34 caves are wonderfully diverse, from the austere and peacefully meditative atmosphere of the Buddhist temples and the overwhelming grandeur and pomposity of the Hindu offerings, to the halfway house of the Jain constructions, which manage to combine aspects of the others into a uniquely different religion.

The main temple in the complex – the Kailash Temple from the Hindu period – is a masterpiece. Built by digging down vertically into the mountainside and forming the whole temple complex from the top down, it is estimated that simply quarrying the three million cubic feet of rock (about 200,000 tonnes) must have taken at least 100 years; the complex covers twice the area of the Parthenon and is 1.5 times as high; and the whole thing is literally made out of a mountain. It is, not surprisingly, a stunning sight.

Put simply, Ellora makes the mind boggle, which, one assumes, is the whole point.

Daultabad

Written: 19 March 1998

Ellora is impressive, but so is another sight around Aurangabad, the mighty Daultabad Fort. Always a sucker for a good fort, I stopped off at Daultabad on the way back from Ellora, and I wasn’t disappointed. Soaring from the desert plains is a mountain that forms the perfect natural defence, with sheer cliff walls petering out into a hilly crown that makes an excellent setting for a fortress. But even though the fort is a wonderful sight and provides great views of the surrounding desert hills, it’s the story behind Daultabad that gives it an atmosphere all of its own.

The original fortress in Daultabad was built in the 12th century AD by the Hindu rulers of the Deccan, but in 1308 it fell into the hands of the Muslims. It must have caught the eye of the conquerors because Mohammed Tughlaq, the Sultan of Delhi, decided to move his capital from Delhi to Daultabad. In a display of madness that even modern India has trouble matching, he marched his entire population 1100km south to his new city, even taking the old and unwell; not surprisingly, thousands of his subjects died on the way. Undeterred by this unfortunate experience, he eventually realised that the blistering heat of the desert wasn’t quite his cup of tea after all, because 17 years later he marched them all the way back to Delhi, again creating a severe dent in the population levels. I bet he was popular with his subjects... well, those who were left, anyway.

The fort, however, has stood the test of time remarkably well. The ruins sit atop a huge hill, surveying the land for miles around, and even with the proliferation of nattering tourists it retains its atmosphere of ancient and turbulent times, combining ancient Hindu and Islamic architecture into one gorgeous sight.

Along with Ellora, it makes Aurangabad an essential stop on the way north.

Ajanta

Written: 21 March 1998

I made a beeline north from Aurangabad as soon as I could, and stepped from the world of 1950s Christian values into what can only be described as the Twilight Zone. A three-hour journey north soon saw me and Ian, a fellow inmate at the Youth Hostel, booking into a hotel in the little town of Fardapur, a speck on the landscape that has all the atmosphere of a motorway service station.

Fardapur’s claim to fame is its proximity to the cave temples of Ajanta, but as with Aurangabad, something wasn’t right. The restaurants had menus that claimed to sell almost anything you might desire, but all they could actually manage was fried rice and soft drinks; the northbound bus out of town left at either 8am, 8.15am or 8.30am, and took either four hours, eight hours, ten hours or 12 hours, depending on who you asked (for the record, the bus left at 8.45am and the journey lasted 12.5 hours, so nobody won the sweepstake); and as we sat in our room, mysterious locals would walk past our window, staring in and mumbling weird sounds that would be more at home in a David Attenborough documentary.

Add in the birds nesting in our bathroom and flying in and out of the windows to collect food, the fan that changed its speed more often than an Indian bus driver, and the fact that we kept getting told the hotel was full as we tried to pay for another night, when it quite blatantly wasn’t, and I think you can safely say that Fardapur could be wiped out by a freak earthquake and nobody on the tourist trail would even notice. If oblivion needs to be personified, you couldn’t do better than Fardapur; where else can you see signs like the following in our hotel lobby?

ROOM CHARGE Rs150

EXTRA PARSON Rs50

Something tells me that even an extra Man of God couldn’t bring sense to the desperate situation in crumbling Fardapur...

The Ajanta Caves

Still, the Ajanta caves were worth a visit, even if they aren’t as spectacular as those at Ellora. Ajanta’s main appeal are the paintings inside the caves, which are all Buddhist; they predate the Ellora caves, having been built between 250 BC and 650 AD. Although the paintings are faded they are quite spectacular, and the cool shade offered by the caves creates a beautiful and atmospheric viewing chamber.

As an added bonus, the caves are in a pretty little setting on a bend in a river (which was, unfortunately, almost totally dried up when we visited), and we spent a couple of very pleasant hours wandering around randomly, avoiding the touts and soaking up the heat, desperately trying to put off the return to the hotel for as long as possible. Needless to say, we didn’t stay in Fardapur any longer than necessary, and soon I was on my way north to Mandu, home to yet more amazing religious architecture.

Cricket and India

Written: 22 March 1998

Everywhere you look in India, someone is playing cricket; look out of bus windows, along dusty streets, in tiny villages and big cities, and you’ll see a bunch of youngsters playing the game with rudimentary bats and branches for stumps. It’s in the blood in much the same way that football is in South America and ice hockey is in Canada[1], and wandering past the locals as they bowl polished stones at baobab-stick stumps, you can’t help wondering why cricket is such a deep obsession in India.

My theory is that it’s because cricket is no more than a sporting personification of the whole country. For a start, cricket has surely the most warped set of rules, regulations and bureaucracy of any sport. Trying to explain the rules of cricket to someone who’s never watched the sport is harder than trying to explain the unspoken rules of the English class system to a Belgian; indeed, the vast majority of non-English European travellers have no idea of the basic concepts behind the game, and even after ten minutes trying to grasp the fundamentals, they’re often no closer to the truth. Add in a scoring system with more statistics than a political manifesto and you have a numerical quagmire of proportions that can only be described as governmental.

Then there’s the nature of the game itself. Turn up halfway through a match and ask, ‘Who’s winning?’ and there’s no answer; even the most experienced cricketer can’t tell you with any amount of certainty. This is astoundingly Indian; no questions have definite answers here, it’s always ‘It’s possible’ and ‘Maybe’, and even then the actual answer can suddenly change, just like in cricket. In cricket you have to wait until the last ball has been bowled to be sure of the result, and often there’s no result at all, despite five days of play; you can have a draw even when one team has scored considerably more than the other, which seems like a contradiction, but that’s cricket. It’s not that other sports don’t have draws, it’s just that a draw in soccer is a definite equality, whereas in cricket it’s a result of not finishing the game properly.

Then there are two equally placed umpires, so they can get embroiled in an argument as to who is right, who’s the most senior umpire and so on (though thank goodness baksheesh isn’t represented in cricket – the thought of a batsman being clean bowled and then wandering up to the umpire, slipping him ten rupees, and miraculously staying in is too much to contemplate). And on the subject of authority figures, the whole uniform thing – pressed whites and collared shirts – hits an Indian nerve; everywhere you go in India there are policemen in their smart army uniforms, bus conductors wearing khaki, sadhus in their saffron robes, waiters in the Indian Coffee Houses sprouting hats that look like delicately folded napkins, and countless other well-dressed officials oiling the wheels of the machine. In India, uniforms are a very important status symbol.

Also, cricket is a team game, which represents the theoretical solidarity of a united India; but when it comes down to bowler versus batsman it’s an individual sport, which is a bit closer to the truth of an India made up of a conglomeration of states who keep mumbling about their independence while setting off bombs to make their point.

But I suppose the real reason that Indians like cricket is that it’s possible to spend days, literally, watching one game, and for a nation that spends days, literally, sitting around in chai shops shooting the breeze, cricket is perfect. As far as lazy sunny day sports go, cricket reflects the Indian vibe more than anything else, and I think that’s why you see it everywhere, from the country to the cities. Perhaps that’s why travelling in India can sometimes feel like a test match...

[1] Ken, a very friendly American whom I met in Mandu, told me about a conversation he’d once had with an Indian boy. The young sports fan was telling him how excellent India and Pakistan were at hockey; they were, in fact, world leaders, he was keen to point out. Ken, however, couldn’t get his head around this. ‘Where on earth do you find the ice?’ he asked, and for the first time in India, said Ken, he witnessed a confused silence.

India: Madhya Pradesh

Mandu

Written: 25 March 1998

After two days of long bus journeys north from Ajanta, through dusty landscapes and the transit city of Indore, I finally arrived in Mandu. I’ve been getting itchy feet while exploring the hot, dusty, flat plains of central India, and I’m beginning to dream of lofty hill stations nestling at the feet of snow-capped Himalayas, but Mandu has reminded me once and for all why the arid desert areas of India are in a world of their own. Mandu is a huge fortress built by the Muslims, a combination of two of the things that make travelling worthwhile: glorious landscapes and fantastic architecture. And when I say fantastic, I really mean it; Mandu is utterly spectacular.

I simply fell in love with the place. I’ve said it before, but I am a total sucker for the sheer beauty of cupola-topped pavilions outlined against the pure blue sky, or the peace of domed tombs breaking the savage dryness of the dusty red scrubland. Photographs only manage to capture a part of the appeal, as the context of Mandu – perched on top of a windswept cliff in the middle of the Deccan Plains – is a vital part of the ambience of the place; Mandu is a huge, crumbling collection of crumbling buildings from the 15th and 16th centuries, sitting on top of a large, flat mountain, surrounded on all sides by steep sloping sides and rugged hairpin roads. It is steeped in atmosphere and history.

With lakes, citadels, stunning views over the plains below and a friendly local population who mysteriously insist on greeting you with ‘Bye-bye’ instead of ‘Hello’, I wandered happily for hours in the blistering heat, sheltering in cool tombs, under the arches of deteriorating mosques and in the shade of the baobabs, bottle-shaped trees[1] with painfully twisted and leafless branches that look completely parched (and probably are). Despite the stiflingly hot breeze from the plains, I thrived.

Of course, there are some distinctly Indian occurrences that in the West would mar an otherwise perfect place, but here they are all part of the experience. For example, one of the more intriguing spots in Mandu is called Echo Point, so named because its position next to a steep hill creates an echo when you clap; I was unable to experience this sonic novelty, however, because right by the clapping point is a café blaring out the loudest Hindi pop music that Mandu’s erratic electricity supply can churn out, which somewhat spoils the effect.

And at Rapamuti’s Pavilion, a building whose simple design and amazing views summarise everything that is good about rock fortresses, I was accosted by four young Hindu dudes who insisted on taking photographs of me hugging them. They also asked if they could borrow my Australian bush hat (despite it being made from rudely slaughtered cow) and proceeded to pose with it for the camera, each in his turn and each with his own distinctive style. I had to suppress a smile as each of them thrust his groin out, hooked his thumbs into his jeans and managed an impersonation of the seventies that made John Travolta look chic.

But these small wrinkles in the fabric didn’t even touch the tranquillity of Mandu. When it was time to leave for Bhopal I had to tear myself away, for Mandu is up there with Bijapur’s Ibrahim Rosa, and that’s really saying something.

[1] The baobab trees look exactly like the boab trees of northern Australia, and this similarity is no coincidence, as the baobab and the boab are different species of the Adansonia genus.

Bhopal

Written: 27 March 1998

Wednesday was one of those days that makes you want to throw in the towel and bury your head under the pillow. I was trying to get from Mandu to Indore in time to catch the train to Bhopal, where I could buy an onward ticket to Gorakhpur, just south of Nepal, but almost everything that could go wrong went wrong.

It didn’t start well. The bus from Mandu to Indore arrived two hours late, missing the train to Bhopal by ten minutes, so I had to jump on another bumpy bus to Bhopal instead. This bus arrived only one hour late, giving me no more than a few minutes to rush to the reservation office at the train station, where I was lucky enough to be the last person able to book a ticket before the ‘Closed’ sign went up. I then went looking for a hotel, and after trying eight places that were full or had no single rooms, I eventually found somewhere on the ninth try, a place perhaps best summed up by my receipt, which was made out to ‘Mr Froiengner’. I collapsed, exhausted but happy to have achieved at least something in the form of my train ticket for tomorrow.

My relief was short-lived, though, as it turned out my ticket wasn’t a reservation, but simply an indication that I had been placed on the waiting list, in 23rd position to be precise. Unfortunately the ‘Closed’ sign prevented me doing anything about it – such as trying a different train, a different route or a different class – so even my rush to the reservation office had been a waste of time. Never mind; at times like these, when some people light Hamlet cigars and some people drink too much, I have a solution.

Back in the Australian outback my solution was to find the nearest mountain and climb it, but in India I have neither the necessary personal transport nor, in the central plains, any convenient mountains. However, there is another wonderful thing I can do to cheer myself up, and it can only work in India: when it all gets too much, it’s time to treat myself to a slap up meal with all the trimmings. The meal I had in Bhopal was huge, tasty, accompanied by a big, freezing bottle of beer and rounded off with a pleasantly priced bill of just £2. That’s right: £2 will buy you a monster meal here, and as I normally spend about £1 on my evening splurge, doubling the budget really is a treat. Good old India.

The next day I managed to upgrade my ticket to air-conditioned class – which meant I also got a sleeping berth – but the price was five times higher, jumping from Rs210 to Rs1001, or from just over £3 up to a comparatively whopping £16 for the 864km, 19.5 hour journey. It’s easily the longest and most expensive trip I’ve done so far in Asia, but when you consider that a 1000km bus journey in Australia costs over £50 – and that’s in a reclining bus seat rather than a berth – then even in air-conditioned class, Indian Railways is still ludicrously good value for money. Transport is always a big chunk of any travel budget, but public transport in the developing world is generally pretty cheap, particularly for visiting westerners. We really are the lucky ones.

Union Carbide

Anyway, back to Bhopal. After spending the morning visiting nearby Sanchi, eating some more wonderful food and discovering a branch of the Indian Coffee House, a wonderful chain that does simply divine masala dosa for breakfast as well as the best coffee I’ve had in India, I spent the rest of the day exploring Bhopal while waiting for the train. Before arriving in Bhopal I’d thought the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it until my guidebook reminded me of one of the most tragic stories in the history of India.

Back on the sultry winter’s evening of 3 December 1984, the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal gave the residents an early Christmas present of 15 tonnes of methyl isocyanate. This instantly deadly gas, used in the manufacture of pesticides by the American multinational, seeped out of the factory and spread through the town as people slept, killing thousands and permanently destroying the lives of countless others, ‘countless’ being the operative word here as accurate figures are hard to come by. Officially the death toll was recorded as 5000, with over half a million people having their health permanently destroyed by the disaster, but many people think that these figures are rather conservative and that the death toll is closer to 20,000.

Of course Union Carbide, being a big corporation, struck a deal with the Indian government as far as compensation was concerned, so precious little has actually appeared and helped those who lost everything, and although Bhopal is back to relative normality and Union Carbide has closed its factory and left the area, the spectre of the world’s worst ever industrial disaster looms in the past. It’s scary stuff indeed.

As for the town itself, it’s another wonderfully busy Indian city with a few mosques, temples, museums and the like. Unfortunately I was a bit too busy running around trying to find a hotel room and somewhere to eat, but that’s life on the road for you.

Bumpy Ride North

My unexpected air-conditioned two-tier sleeper journey was an eye-opener, being a step above first class and second only to the ultimate luxury, the air-conditioned first class sleeper. After extensive travel on second class sleepers – the cheapest sleeper class – AC is amazingly quiet (due to the windows being sealed) and full of little luxuries, like curtains to pull round your berth and individual reading lights. The chai men are also conspicuous by their absence, a major blessing that alone is worth paying five times the price for. Sure, the luxury of AC class is fairly illusory given the standard of my current lifestyle – in Europe these AC carriages would probably be consigned to the scrap heap and standard Indian second class would no doubt contravene a whole host of EU directives – but I found the long, long journey north simply wonderful after all the bouncy buses and rickety rickshaws of budget India.

It also gave me a chance to read my guidebook to Nepal, and I liked what I read. Not that India is getting me down – quite the opposite, in fact – but the idea of western food, some of the best trekking in the world, short distances to travel and a lack of Indian madness and mayhem all sounds like a holiday after just under three months in the heat of the south.

The only blot on the smooth landscape of air-con heaven was the sudden change in body temperature I suffered at midnight, which was followed by a good old session heaving up my previous two meals in the less than salubrious environment of the Indian Railways toilet. It’s funny how these regular bouts of sickness have simply become a sideshow to the main picture, no more than another inconvenience like putting up the mosquito net every night or taking the daily dose of vitamins and minerals; I just hope it’s not all being caused by one bug that steadfastly refuses to leave my system, or it might continue beyond past my return home.

Excluding my stomach, things went according to plan, and before I knew it I’d arrived at Gorakhpur, hopped on a bus and arrived at Sunauli, one of the few border towns with Nepal. I spent a few amusing hours wandering back and forth over the border, which nobody seemed to mind one bit, so I can now say I’ve been an illegal immigrant in Nepal; I also changed some money, booked a bus for the morning to the Himalayan town of Pokhara, and settled in to enjoy my last night in India for a month. Needless to say, I ate myself back to health in my rather pleasant hotel before hitting the sack, ready to tackle Nepal in the morning.

Sanchi

Written: 26 March 1998

Sanchi is a hill topped with some spectacular Buddhist ruins, ‘among the best in India’ according to my guidebook (which says more about the other Buddhist ruins in India than I care to know). Certainly the ruins are Buddhist and they’re reasonably interesting, but after my recent visits to the astonishing rock temples of Ellora and the deeply atmospheric Mughal fortresses of Mandu, stupas aren’t quite as thrilling. Dome-shaped and topped with strange spires that look like something out of Flash Gordon, stupas just sit there: you can’t go inside them, you can’t climb them, and although they look pleasant, so does crazy paving, and I wouldn’t cross a continent to look at a patio.

The surrounding area is peaceful – which is why the Emperor Ashoka chose it in the third century BC as a site for his Buddhist stupas – and it’s certainly a wonderful place to visit, but as for the architecture (World Heritage stuff, no less) I didn’t think it was that special. This is a pity, but perhaps it unintentionally reflects a change in my attitude towards Buddhism, something I was pretty fond of back in the bush of Australia, where I lapped up books on the stuff and even did a bit of meditation.

The problem is that Buddhism is based around the precept that life is a piece of shit, and where that idea was particularly appealing at a time of my life when I was leaving home because I wasn’t happy with things as they were, it doesn’t hold much water nowadays. I keep thinking of that famous Chinese painting called ‘The Three Masters’, where each of the inventors of the three main eastern religions – Confucius (Confucianism), Gautama Buddha (Buddhism) and Lao-Tse (Taoism) – has just dipped his finger in a vat of vinegar and stuck it in his mouth. Confucius, who believes that life should be governed by rules, regulations and a reverence of ancestors, has a sour expression, as if to say that this taste is disgusting and that something should be done about it; Buddha has a bitter expression on his face, a reflection that he believes life to be an endless cycle of suffering, escapable only by attaining enlightenment through meditation and a purity of spirit, and that the vinegary taste is just a confirmation of this attitude; and finally Lao-Tse is smiling, because he reckons life is a pretty good thing, and everything in life has its purpose, its beauty and its relevance.

From this I tend to think that Taoism is the best sounding of the lot, but I have yet to do any hardcore research and I’m not really in the mood for religious discourse at the moment; at present I’m reading the Ramayana, the mythical story of Rama, and it’s as good a read as the stories of ancient Greece or the wonderful tales of King Arthur. Then I’ve got the Arabian Nights, a perfect accompaniment to the buildings I’ve been exploring, followed by Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare, a children’s book that contains fifteen of the bard’s plays retold in shortened form for children, which is a good way of learning the plots without having to wade through the real thing. India, being the second largest publisher of English books after America and the UK, has some wonderful options, and all at knockdown prices, of course.

Vaguely related to this, I’ve developed a new sitting posture. I used to kneel whenever I sat on the ground, which is perhaps a reflection of my Christian upbringing; when I started growing my hair and reading about meditation and Buddhas, I started to sit cross-legged; and now that I’m in India I sit like the Indians, after weeks of frustrating practice.

The Indians squat down by the usual method of bending the knees and lowering your bum until it is on top of your heels, but they go a little bit further and manage the same position with the soles of their feet totally flat on the floor.

Try it: I bet you end up with your heels off the floor, with all the weight on the front ball of your feet. Well after lots of practice on, of all things, the good old squat toilet, I can now sit with my feet flat on the floor, with my bottom off the ground and with pretty reasonable balance. It’s surprisingly comfortable, and that’s why you see Indians everywhere squatting down for hours, looking at ease in a position that looks decidedly painful. So now you know...

Thoughts After Three Months

Written: 28 March 1998

So that’s the end of my first three months in India, but am I any the wiser? I’m not sure, really; all I can think of is a phrase from James Hawes’ A White Merc with Fins where the anti-heroine, Suzy, is joking about going to India for three months. In a fit of accuracy, she decides not to bother because she’ll just end up ‘losing two stone and talking shite’. Unwittingly, Hawes’ description is accurate as hell.

It’s easy to talk shite about India, if only because it’s so full of contradictions that it’s hard to be definitive about anything. On one hand I very much like the people of India, but then I think back to all the scams, lies, cons and hassles I’ve encountered over the last three months, and although Indonesia annoyed me more on that score, India is up there with the best. Then there’s the food; on one hand it’s excellent (I’ve always been very fond of curries and spices, after all) but it can be pretty depressing when all you’ve got is another bloody meal of dhal and rice again.

The health aspect, despite looking promising for a while in the far south, is terrible. I forget how many times I’ve been ill in India, and I’ve been pretty careful about my intake. And then there’s the permanent Indian head cold, the aches and pains of being crammed onto public transport for amazingly long journeys with bad suspension, the constant annoyance of mosquitoes, the dubious quality of a lot of India’s ablutions and, to cap it all, a fairly serious recurrence of the salt-sore eczema I got on the Pacific, no doubt due to the high temperatures and humidity.

But this is all part of it, of course. I’m fully aware that if I really want solid shits I can always fly home, but for some masochistic reason I’ve never entertained the idea. The reason is, of course, that I utterly, utterly love India, despite its inherent frustrations. Perhaps it is because of these very contradictions that it is so fascinating, or because its size means there is so much variety, but as soon as I ducked out of India into Nepal I felt a strange sense of loss. Don’t get me wrong, the safe tranquillity of the tourist trail in Nepal is complete bliss, but I can’t help thinking that it’s missing some spark, and I can’t wait to get back into India.

One guy I met told me that travelling anywhere else in the world after India was bound to be boring, which is why he kept coming back. I sincerely hope this isn’t true, but if it is I can understand why; India has to be the most amazingly magnetic and repellent country I’ve ever experienced. I’m already excited about coming back after my visit to Nepal, even if it means being constantly ill again. It’s worth it.

Nepal: The Himalayas

Annapurna Circuit

Written: 22 April 1998

Please note that since I walked the Annapurna Circuit in 1998, things have changed a lot. There are now roads all the way to Muktinath in the west and to Bagarchap in the east, and by all accounts this has completely changed the nature of the trek. I’ve left my writing untouched, for the sake of nostalgia if nothing else, but if you intend to walk the circuit yourself, you should be aware that it will be very different to the trek I describe here. And probably not in a good way...

Nepal freaked me out instantly, in much the same way the cool, silent night air does as you leave the rock concert, ears still ringing. Compared to the hustle and bustle of India, Nepal feels like a quiet backwater; the fact that I had to put my watch forward by exactly fifteen minutes at the border only emphasises the difference between India and the mountain kingdom to the north.

Even the long bus ride from the Indian border at Sunauli to the mountain town of Pokhara is easy, and the loud horns that are so ubiquitous in India are conspicuous by their absence. A fellow traveller told me that after India, anywhere would appear mundane, but I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing; after all, sitting in a comfy chair in front of the fire and flicking channels is pretty mundane, but after a long day trekking through the fire and ice of the real world, it’s a dream.

Indeed, trekking is my main goal in Nepal, and that’s why I headed straight for Pokhara instead of Kathmandu. The Annapurna Conservation Area to the north of Pokhara, itself in the western half of Nepal, contains some of the most dramatic trekking on the planet, and I had my sights firmly fixed on the three-week Annapurna Circuit, a circular route that crosses a very high pass (Thorung La, 5416m above sea level), trundles down the deepest gorge in the world (the 5571m-deep Kali Gandaki Gorge), and provides mountain views to stifle breath that’s already short in the high altitude of the Himalayas. After beaches, rainforests, deserts, volcanoes and glaciers, it’s time for the big cheese.

The Himalayas are, of course, huge, but reading about them is considerably different from experiencing them first-hand. On a trek like this there are not only the usual walkers’ concerns of blisters, twisted ankles, upset stomachs and sunburn, but also Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), an ailment brought on by high altitude that is fatal if unchecked, and which still claims trekkers’ lives today. On the surface, the Annapurna Circuit sounds like the biggest challenge of them all.

It isn’t all challenge, though, and this is a major part of its appeal. Unlike most of the trekking I’ve done up to this point, you don’t need to carry food because you stop in villages along the way, staying in the local hotels. This also means you don’t need to carry a tent, cooker, fuel or any of the other gear associated with self-sufficient wilderness walking, which leaves the pack pleasantly light and the accommodation comfortable. On a three-week trek this is a godsend; the thought of a pack laden with 21 days of survival gear is enough to make most people’s knees spring a leak in sympathy, mine included.

It also means that I have to reappraise my attitude towards long-distance walking. I’ve been on so many walks that require serious effort and long days to get anywhere – Taman Negara, Hollyford-Pyke and Gunung Rinjani to name but three – that I’ve developed a bit of an attitude problem. I like to go fast, to push myself, to get fit, to be first at the destination, and in Annapurna this isn’t just a waste of the ambience of the village inns and the beauty of the mountain views, it’s foolhardy. The best way to avoid AMS is to acclimatise slowly to the altitude, so zooming up the peaks is simply dumb. Altitude requires a different attitude, there’s no doubt about it.

Annapurna Statistics

The Annapurna Circuit is a loop that’s normally walked anti-clockwise; it circles round the east-west Annapurna mountain range, starting and ending at Pokhara to the south of the range. These mountains are huge; the tallest, Annapurna I, reaches 8091m (26545 ft), a height approaching that of Everest’s 8848m (29028 ft). The track doesn’t quite reach such dizzying heights, but the 202km (125 mile) walk has a fairly hefty high point at its northern tip: the Thorung La pass is 5416m (17769 ft) above sea level, just under two-thirds of Everest’s altitude. The highest I’d ever been before tackling the Annapurna track was 3726m (12224 ft) on Lombok’s Gunung Rinjani, but the Thorung La pass is nearly half as high again, and it feels like it.

The pass neatly slices the track into two halves: the section from Pokhara to Thorung Phedi, which takes you up to the eastern side of the pass; and the track from Muktinath back down to Pokhara on the western side of the pass, which is popularly known as the Jomsom Trek and is commonly walked by those unwilling to tackle the pass.

In 1993/4, 5898 walkers headed up the eastern side; in the first half of 1997, 18.1 per cent of those walkers were from the UK, 11.4 per cent from Germany, 11.3 per cent from the US and 9.7 per cent from France. Conversely, on the western side there were 15822 walkers in 1996/7, of which 13.7 per cent were from the UK, 12.7 per cent from Germany, 10.5 per cent from France and 9.2 per cent from the US. The pass sure puts people off, and because the western side is more luxurious than the east, hardly anyone just does the eastern trek, as shown by the fact that there are three times as many walkers on the Jomsom as on the Circuit.

And those walkers doing the whole Circuit will pass through 73 villages in 90 hours of walking, with 540 hotels to choose from with a total of 5218 beds. Annapurna means business.

Annapurna Trekking and AMS

‘A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all’ reads a poster in the tea shop a few days into the trail, and the total nonsense of the message seems quite in keeping with the contradictions you can see along the trail. Slashing a route through the deepest mountain valleys, the Annapurna Circuit passes through villages that used to be almost invisible, but which now sport signs in English, shops selling western luxuries, hotels with hot showers and even international telephone booths for those people who can’t resist intruding on the outside world. The Annapurna Circuit isn’t known as the Apple Pie Trail and the Coca-Cola Circuit for nothing.

This type of trekking has its ups and downs in more than just the literal sense. The impact of tourism on this erstwhile netherworld is plain to see: piles of bottles lie cracking in the searing sun, candy wrappers litter a number of the paths and the local culture is hard to separate from the service industries of hotel and restaurant. On the plus side, though, income is higher, ecological awareness is increasing, and the litter problem is nothing compared to India or Indonesia, an impressive feat when you consider the sheer number of people involved.

The Circuit also has an image problem among hardcore trekkers, who see it as more of a long stroll than a serious challenge. Trekkers who are more at home in waist-deep swamps and leech-infested tropical rainforests call it the ‘milk and honey trek’ because of all the luxuries you encounter on the way – shops, real beds, bottled water and so on – and indeed Peter, with whom I trekked in Sulawesi, described the Circuit as more of a collection of day walks than a real trek. In a sense he’s right because most of the days are fairly short in terms of time and distance, but I’m not sure I’d say that the Circuit is easy; I found the Annapurna Circuit a phenomenal challenge, though perhaps for different reasons than normal.

With such a walk one doesn’t walk alone, even if one initially sets out on a solo trek. The groups I joined kept changing as various people went at different speeds or succumbed to the demands of the trek, but the main people were great company. There were Clare and Anne, sisters from Vancouver; Jakob from Denmark; Bob from Cleveland, a veteran 13-year traveller; Sheldon from Australia; and a whole spectrum of other characters to liven the mix. Sharing walks, something I’ve tended not to do in the past, is a good thing when your nightly stops are in hotels, and I soon realised that Annapurna is made to be shared.

Another thing to share is paranoia about AMS. If you could take a man from sea level and transport him straight to the top of Everest – which, incidentally, is impossible because helicopters don’t have enough air at that height to operate – then he would sink into a coma after two minutes, and be dead after four. This is down to a combination of the lack of oxygen and the low atmospheric pressure at that height; on Thorung La, the highest point of the Circuit, the atmospheric pressure is half that of sea level, and the partial pressure of oxygen (i.e. the amount of oxygen in the air) is a third of that at sea level, as oxygen is heavier than nitrogen. The result is that without slow acclimatisation, people can die from AMS on the Annapurna Circuit, and they do, although not in high numbers (it’s about one in 30,000 trekkers).

This sort of challenge provides plenty of food for thought for trekkers whiling away the hours in their hotel restaurants. In a display of group psychosis that is rarely seen outside village knitting circles, AMS is the subject of the moment. Every other question seems to be ‘Do you have a headache? Are you on Diamox? How many acclimatisation walks have you done today?’ It would be boring if there weren’t so many conflicting opinions as to the truth behind AMS.

AMS is still a bit of a mystery, even though scientists know exactly why it happens and how to prevent it. The difficulty is that everyone seems to react differently to increased altitude; some might be able to go all the way from 300m to 5500m in a day without any symptoms, and some will die if they do the same. The guidelines are simple, though; when you get to 3000m you should only ascend 300m in each day, you should try to go on an acclimatisation walk to a higher point than your sleeping height, and at the sign of any symptoms you should stop ascending and, if they don’t go away or get worse, you must go down. Descent is the only treatment, and the recommended drug, Diamox, is only an aid to quicker acclimatisation, and is not a cure.

It’s made even trickier because the symptoms of AMS are a headache, reduced appetite, nausea, a loss of good humour, a congestive cough, and in serious AMS, ataxia (wobbly legs) and vomiting. These symptoms are fairly common on all long walks, with their exhausting days, uncomfortable beds and dubious food, so the paranoia runs rife, and with the temperatures well below freezing on the higher parts of the track, you have to wonder if your headache is from the icy blasts of wind freezing your ears off, or genuine AMS.

But still, what a beautiful place to walk...

Annapurna Circuit: Stage 1

Written: 22 April 1998

Please note that since I walked the Annapurna Circuit in 1998, things have changed a lot. There are now roads all the way to Muktinath in the west and to Bagarchap in the east, and by all accounts this has completely changed the nature of the trek. I’ve left my writing untouched, for the sake of nostalgia if nothing else, but if you intend to walk the circuit yourself, you should be aware that it will be very different to the trek I describe here. And probably not in a good way...

During the early stages of the Circuit, I was less concerned with getting AMS and more worried about an old friend. On the fourth day into the trek I felt a familiar stirring in my stomach and soon had the eggy-belch blues, and I realised that the giardia I’d first picked up in Puri had come back. Again.

So I took an emergency rest day in the small village of Bagarchap and spent the morning feeling sorry for myself, before plucking up the energy to walk up to the village of Chame, where a rickety old hospital building perches on top of a steep hill. Presumably the journey is designed to put off all but the most determined of the sick, and after struggling up the hill and explaining my predicament to the resident doctor, I was given a week’s course of metronidazole, making it three doses of strong drugs that I’ve tried on this persistent parasite; the other courses of secnidazole and metronidazole clearly didn’t do the trick.

Luckily, this dose seemed to work; it certainly stopped the worst symptoms, but it had the added side effect of knocking me out. Metronidazole is firmly in the ‘don’t operate machinery’ category, and as the week’s course lasted until after the pass, I spent a lot of the ascent in a bit of a daze, and that was on top of the lightheaded feeling that you get at altitude.

We also lost Jakob to a mysterious stomach illness, and there were plenty of other stories of people getting ill on the trek. For some reason the Annapurna area is home to a bewildering array of nasty ailments, and this is another reason why I class the trek as difficult; walking with a dodgy stomach and AMS is a bit of a nightmare. And irrespective of whether you actually get trekker’s stomach or AMS, the high altitude means you get out of breath after just a few steps and have to rest a ridiculous amount. It makes the hardcore trekkers quite depressed; hills they would normally conquer before breakfast take all morning to walk up, however strong they are at sea level. Man just wasn’t meant to fly.

But the trek is well worth all this medical trauma. From the lush lakeside town of Pokhara you travel along valleys that become increasingly steep and desolate as the altitude lowers the temperature and the treeline approaches. Every day the huge peaks of the various ranges lean closer and closer, looming over tiny settlements where houses are cobbled together out of yak dung and shaky cement. It’s an amazing part of the world.

On the Track

The sights along the way are uniquely Nepalese. Lines of grey donkeys wend their way along the thin footpaths, each decorated with garish bridles and low-toned bells, swiftly followed by wiry men wielding split sticks and yelling, ‘Ho!’ A little boy points cow eyes up at us as he points to his badly cut toe, which we dutifully clean and bandage, suggesting to him in English that he really should wear some shoes while it heals, a piece of medical advice that disappears into the language barrier.

Further along the trail is the town of Bagarchap, where a landslide destroyed the town in November 1995, taking a number of trekkers and locals with it; there are numerous memorials dotted around the town, which I explored when taking an enforced break due to my giardia outbreak. Here the locals are still rebuilding what once must have been a beautifully picturesque little town, and I spent a recuperative afternoon riveted to the veranda table watching the women carry huge baskets of stones on their heads as the men broke up massive boulders into smaller, more manageable rocks for rebuilding their porches; throughout the whole job the workers smiled, laughed and joked in a way that’s sadly absent from the western workplace.

And if you think that your backpack is a little too heavy as you scratch your way up yet another steep mountain path, Nepalese porters keep plying up and down the tracks, carrying incredibly heavy baskets on their backs, suspended only by a strap around the forehead, which means they support the whole weight with their neck muscles. I thought the porters in Indonesia were pretty impressive, but the Nepalese are even more iron willed. The amazing energy of the locals is most apparent in the hotels and footpaths that form the Annapurna Circuit. Gaping yawns in the mountains have been filled with row upon row of flat rocks to form pathways; sheer granite cliffs have been chipped away or blown up to give a clear passage; stone steps have been set into the mountain sides to ease the ascents and descents; and suspension bridges arc across steep-sided gorges from towers built from rock and cement. But the hotels are even more amazing, with their restaurants, dormitories and hot shower systems; although the food is pretty basic compared to places like Pokhara and Bangkok, it’s a refreshing change to have to live on a potato and porridge diet after such a long love-hate relationship with rice and noodles.

Actually, the impressive thing about the food isn’t so much the taste, it’s the fact that so many ingredients have to be carried in. There are no roads around the area, and yet the hotels manage to feed up to 70 hungry mouths at a time, which might not make that potato soup the most thrilling culinary experience in the cosmos, but it does deserve a round of applause. I still fantasized about steak and beer and had to make do with a lot less, but it was a lot better than the awful crud I normally cook for myself on the trail.

Another interesting result of the porters carrying everything in is that prices go up as you get further away from Pokhara. That Mars bar you paid Rs40 for in Kathmandu is Rs80 just before the pass; a cup of hot lemon from the last tea house before the pass, shivering well above the snowline, will set you back a princely Rs40 compared to Rs5 down at more atmospheric restaurants; plain rice rockets from Rs10 to Rs50, because it’s so heavy to carry; even Coke, the universal price index, leaps from Rs15 to Rs60, which sounds outrageous until you consider how far it’s had to travel.

This price change seems to mirror the trip itself; the pass is such a momentous occasion that the Circuit naturally falls into the days before the pass, and the days after the pass. As you approach the pass the prices go up, the temperature goes down, the trees shrink and eventually disappear, the snow gets closer, the air gets thinner and the landscape gets bleaker and bleaker. By the time you reach the first acclimatisation town, Manang at 3535m (11597 ft), life is getting harder; mild AMS, which affects most people at this stage, creates an ache at the base of the neck, makes breathing more difficult and walking up the street a serious exercise, and the temperature at night means sleeping is that much more unpleasant.

I found that a major portion of my AMS paranoia was taken up with a serious increase in cynicism; I began to have a major problem with walkers who weren’t in my small list of Excellent People (though, of course, I kept this to myself). The silly Canadian whose Calgary accent made my eyes roll to the ceiling and my air-starved lungs let out an exasperated sigh; the know-it-all Englishman who came up with useless idiocies such as, ‘I’ve had giardia three times and all I do is miss a meal and it goes away,’ and who earned the nickname Jesus from the other walkers, a sarcastic comment on his seeming omniscience; the Squeaky American who reminded me of that super-wet character in Police Academy; the girls from North Carolina who didn’t know the rules of chess (‘Tell me y’all, how many of these liddle pahwns do y’all start with, now?’) and who had an incredible lack of knowledge when it came to accents of the rest of the world (‘Are y’all Australian?’ ‘No, ve are from Germany’); the doped-out American college student who kept exclaiming how cool the Diamox hit was, buzzin’ fingertips ‘n’ all, man; and the insane Rasputin clone from Switzerland with his zany sense of humour[1]. They made me think of a particularly far out episode of the Twilight Zone.

But there was one thing that bound all of us together, weirdoes and cynics alike, and that was the continuing group psychosis. As I’ve already mentioned, AMS is by far the most popular subject of conversation, but other obsessions crop up with increasing regularity: the height of the current town (in dispute because every map has a different figure on it); the times for walking a certain portion of the track (also at variance, depending on your source); the quality of the food; the pros and cons of Ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory; the advantages of a genuine Gore-Tex jacket over a fake one from Kathmandu; the amazing price of a pot of coffee in that last village; the best way to treat blisters; and so on and so on. You can approach anyone on the Annapurna Circuit and enter into an instant conversation on aches, pains, drugs, food and gradients, but try to delve too deeply into politics or finances and you’ll soon find yourself drifting back to the subjects of aches, pains, drugs, food and, let’s not forget, gradients...

The local culture, tainted though it obviously is, changes markedly through the different regions too. From the touristy lower regions of the east side and the rugged wind-ravaged desolation of the northern reaches, to the holiday-home mentality of the Jomsom track on the west of the pass, it’s possible to peer into a way of life that is as authentic as Schrödinger’s cat; your very investigation changes things. The monasteries dotted around the valleys dispense Buddhist and Hindu blessings to walkers, be they Indian sadhus or Australian accountants, and although the gompas are undeniably authentic, their collections of dusty Dalai Lama pictures and meditating Buddha statues ensure a continuous tourist trade, fired up by the antics of Richard Gere and a continuing mysticism surrounding Tibet.

I was blessed in two gompas, once in Braga on the east side of the pass, and once in Muktinath just after the pass, and although it was a fascinating insight into the surreal nature of the eastern religions, I felt like I was encroaching on territory reserved for true believers. As the mumbling monk in Braga chanted mantras that sounded more like the contented sighs of an old man sitting by the fire, the prayer wheels whirled and the incense smouldered, but did the wisdom of Lord Buddha fill me with foreknowledge of the passage through the pass, for which I was receiving blessing? And did the whirling dances of the Hindu priest in Muktinath make the whole experience of puja any less theatrical? Of course not; I watched, I listened, I washed myself in the 108 taps round the temple (a guarantee that you will go to heaven, by the way), I received the forehead markings and I ate the crystalline sugar, and I left with pictures rather than puja. Even the eternal flame of Muktinath turns out to be a scientific event; natural gas escapes through a vent that’s always lit, not so much a Light that Never Goes Out as a Gas Bill that Never Gets Charged.

Over the Top

For crossing the pass I teamed up with Bob and Sheldon; the Canadian girls had forged on a day ahead, but we wanted to take our time acclimatising and stayed longer at lower altitudes. Jakob had already fallen by the wayside, but apart from that we’d managed to make a good team, and as such we’d been bouncing the paranoia off each other like a prism magnifying sunlight. By the time the altitude reached the point of AMS, I was riding high on a wave of hypochondria.

We’d done our acclimatisation walks, where you walk 200m or so higher than the place where you will sleep, thus aiding the metabolic changes that need to take place in acclimatisation (such as lowering body acid levels, which means excessive urination as the acids are flushed out; an expansion of lung volume and a deepening of lung capacity; and a loss of appetite followed by slight nausea). But nothing prepared me for the sheer panic of altitude that made my last night on the east side a nightmare to remember.

It is simply freezing up there on the side of the pass. Sunlight helps, but as soon as the sun dips below the horizon the temperature shoots below freezing. Snowfall is not uncommon, and winds whistling through the cracks are a common feature. AMS, by this stage, has become a familiar friend, the slow pale throb of white noise at the back of your head, a migraine in the making, threatening to turn into something more serious at any time; appetite has all but disappeared, and every meal time is a struggle against instinct; simply walking up a short flight of stairs is an exercise in breathing steadily and resting frequently; and dehydration from the diuretic effect of acclimatisation takes its toll, especially late at night as the symptoms get worse. On my last night before the pass, up at around 4400m in Thorung Phedi, I slipped into sheer misery.

Tossing and turning, fully clothed and stuffed into my sleeping bag, I froze my way through a dreamscape of confused and contradictory images. In glorious Technicolor I dreamed I had severe AMS and had to be taken down to the next town on the back of a donkey while the headache split my skull and I was copiously sick, despite my low food intake. I woke up in the nearest approximation to a cold sweat that you can have in sub-zero temperatures, and spent the rest of the short night dreading the crossing and dreaming of home.

We set off at 5.40am, Sheldon, Bob and I shuffling slowly through the snow onto the roof of the world. We had all popped a Diamox pill, the recommended prophylactic and treatment for AMS, and I assume it helped; we all managed to get over the top without incident (if you ignore the severe shortages of breath, a nasty headache in my case and a general malaise caused by high altitude exertion) and although the views of the top of the range and the surrounding landscapes were unique and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced – the silence on a snow-smothered summit is eerie, to say the least – the effort was severe. Was it worth it?

Of course it was. I learned what it is like to exist in an environment that makes every rule of existence seem like a vindictive headmaster’s revenge. Breathing is constantly laboured, mealtime becomes a psychological trauma, the head aches in cycles from dawn to dusk, sleep patterns are ravaged, toiletry functions become more insistently regular than after the five-beer mark, and conversation becomes truly one-track: it’s all AMS, AMS, AMS. Then there are the ailments of snow blindness (you have to wear sunglasses constantly to avoid becoming blind, literally), windburn (lips and nose beware), sunburn (the sun is distressingly close up there), muscle strain (from carrying a pack up to 5416m) and trekker’s knee (from the long, long descent). But nearly everyone makes it, and the sense of achievement is totally different from exploring rainforests or trudging deserts. When I finally collapsed in Muktinath on the west side of the path, I swore I’d never do anything like that again. I probably lied.

[1] Two of whose jokes must be saved for posterity, because it’s rare that I come across jokes so devoid of any humour that they couldn’t even raise a smile on a terminally stoned sadhu. Try out the following corker:

One day I was sitting in a shopping centre, and a fly came buzzing up to me, so I caught this fly and put it into a paper bag that I had. Then I walked around the shopping centre and went to a supermarket, where I joined the queue. When I got to the till the lady asked me, ‘What is this?’

‘It’s my fly,’ I replied!

Seriously, you were supposed to laugh! How about this blockbuster, then:

When I was young the teacher asked the class, ‘Now children, what do you want for Christmas?’ When it came to my turn, I said, ‘An elephant!’

The Taste Police have been informed.

Annapurna Circuit: Stage 2

Written: 22 April 1998

Please note that since I walked the Annapurna Circuit in 1998, things have changed a lot. There are now roads all the way to Muktinath in the west and to Bagarchap in the east, and by all accounts this has completely changed the nature of the trek. I’ve left my writing untouched, for the sake of nostalgia if nothing else, but if you intend to walk the circuit yourself, you should be aware that it will be very different to the trek I describe here. And probably not in a good way...

The western side of the Circuit is a completely different experience to the east. The track leading down from the pass, the Jomsom Trek, has high quality hotels, comparatively incredible food, a warm climate and fairly easy downhill walking. It feels a bit like arriving in paradise; I’d trekked the eastern path and I’d struggled over the pass, and when I hit the other side I reverted to character. I didn’t so much walk the Jomson Trek as travel it.

From the pilgrim town of Muktinath (where we spent two days), through Kagbeni (one day), Marpha (two days), Kalopani (one day) and Tatopani (two days), we loafed around, ate too much, drank the pleasantly priced beer and totally failed to take the walk seriously, considering the length of the challenge. My writer’s block, which had set in along with the AMS in Manang, completely failed to lift and I spent hours sitting around reading, relaxing and thinking. It was a holiday. It was luxurious. It was fattening. But it was ultimately relatively boring, and I found myself, not for the first time, wishing I was in India, back where the madness is mundane, the insanity inbred and the lunacy legendary. How strange to be surrounded by such spectacular scenery while wishing for something else.

For Nepal’s landscapes are astonishing, there’s no doubt about it. From the dizzy heights of the pass to the sheer valleys of the east side, the mountains never ceased to amaze me, with their wispy cloud vents, snow-blue peaks and sharp contrasts with the sky. But statistics, of which there are millions in Nepal, can be misleading in making the mountains sound out of this world. For example, I read the following in my guidebook as we walked through the Kali Gandaki Gorge: ‘It’s at around this point, the bend in the river between Kalopani and Larjung, that you’re at the bottom of the world’s deepest valley. The two highest peaks in the area, Dhaulagiri (8167m/26794 ft) and Annapurna I (8091m/26545 ft) are 35km (22 miles) apart on either side of the valley. You’re standing at an altitude of about 2540m/8333 ft, which is 5.5km or 3.5 miles below the summit of Dhaulagiri.’ This sounds much more interesting than it really is; the reality is that the world’s deepest gorge is a very wide valley with a couple of distant peaks on each side. Deep doesn’t mean steep, I suppose.

And then there is the help offered by the various hotels around, which is often expressed in a poetry that takes English as a second language and turns it into an art form all of its own. Take this quotation from the Kalopani Guest House Menu:

FROM GUEST HOUSE DAIRY

Kalopani is a beautiful place to be spent for short trek. This place is popularly known for spectacular Sunset view over Mt. Annapurna I & Nilgiri. You can enjoy with the changing colour of the Himalay’s. From here you can make 2.5 hours. Titi lake for splendid view of Mt. Dhaulagiri. For the peasant lovers you can visit the Dhungang Area. Kalopani Jungle has lost of wild life. For resting a day, you can visit the Bhudurtsho lake wich can cost 5 hours. From here you can organize Dhaulagiri Ice fall trek as well Dhaulagiri & Annapurna Base Camp. For more detail please contact the management.

Thank you!

I’ve left the grammar and spelling alone, as one should when transcribing such eloquent literature.

At least the hotels on the western side have good standards of food, which more than makes up for the less inspiring scenery. For example, in Tal on the eastern side, we discovered bugs in the tomato ketchup bottle; when we complained to the lady owner, she examined the bugs and said, ‘It’s OK, these clean bugs from ceiling, not dirty bugs from floor.’

On the western side, our food arrived on sizzling platters, with not a bug to be seen. This mirrored the east-west divide rather well, I thought, as I trundled on to the end of the track in Beni before boarding the bus to Pokhara.

Pokhara

Written: 29 April 1998

The return to civilisation from the Annapurna Circuit came as a shock. Burning through the last few days of the 21-day trek, Bob and I managed to arrive in Pokhara soon after experiencing the first inclement weather of the trek, which was lucky timing. Rain smattered the windscreen of the bus as we wound our way from the track end at Beni, smudging the dirt into impenetrable patterns for the driver to negotiate on the hair-raising journey through the paddies and ponds of the foothills.

I’d already reintroduced myself to the concept of the outside world when I discovered a couple of Business Week magazines in the lodge at Kalopani, our penultimate hotel stop. I was surprised how fascinating I found the articles on huge international conglomerates, turnovers, profit margins, executive pay packages and fluctuations in the mutual trust markets. I read it as a Nepalese local might read stories of Hollywood or Disneyland, with no feeling of connection or understanding but only one of incredulity; that’s what happens when you cut yourself off from the world for weeks at a time.

But after these attitude-altering shock-tactics, reality turned out to be routine, albeit an extremely enjoyable one. Bob and I booked into a quiet little hotel in northern Pokhara, the opposite end of town to where I stayed just before the trek, and the days sunk into a litany of late breakfasts, trivial jobs (writing postcards, washing clothes, booking bus tickets and so on) and far-from-strenuous five-minute walks into town. I dined with and said goodbye to friends from the track and exchanged addresses for future travels, but after a few days I realised that above all, I wanted to be back in India.

In a best man’s speech I’d made for a dear friend called Neal, one of the most crowd-pleasing lines had been, ‘Neal isn’t boring; no, Neal’s an actuary!’ (The audience had been quite, quite drunk at the time and were clearly easy to please.) This same construct works for Nepal: Nepal isn’t boring; no, Nepal’s a tourist trap. Food doesn’t tend to produce a churning in your colon; bus transport is almost comfortable; hotels are cheap, efficient and clean; showers are hot; people aren’t intrusive; and city streets are (comparatively) clean. Compared to India, Nepal is tame.

Of course, Nepal’s landscapes are far from tame, and indeed, after some time immersed in the culture, it becomes quite obvious that Nepal is still a thrilling place. It has a fascinating religious culture, with its uniquely Buddhist Hinduism and tolerant tendencies. It has a political system and a still-thriving monarchy that provide just as many corruption and scandal stories as any other Asian government. It has temples, ashrams, cows, sadhus, rickshaws, mad drivers and wonderful arts and crafts... but whatever it is that makes India so addictive is missing in Nepal, for me anyway.

That doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t plenty of mad things to see. Take this piece of advertising on the back of every box of Ball matches:

100 PER CENT SAFE SAFETY MATCHES

- Flame only eminates leaving splint

- Sticks completely put out with one puff

- No burning tips

- So no dropping on clothes etc.

Or take the countless posters of pretty houses and manicured gardens that dot the country’s restaurants and offices, carrying meaningless idioms like ‘The true use of Speech is not so much to express our Wants as to conceal them’, or ‘Financial security is the guarantee of spiritual bankruptcy’ (the latter turning up on a picture of a particularly glorious house).

Then there’s the large number of westerners in Nepal who have learned the local language and who have taken Nepalese culture into their hearts in much the same way as India’s ashram casualties have; and in that time-honoured fashion, they enter westernised restaurants and order complicated bespoke meals simply so they can get involved in a discussion with the waiter in Nepali about whether the pizza comes with oregano and whether the vegetables are fresh. They still end up ordering the burger and chips, but it sounds cool.

And the other travellers I met were of a particularly high calibre, with most of them taking time out in Nepal as a rest from the more burdensome experiences of India, overlanding from Europe, resting after China or whatever, and we swapped stories about particularly welcome visits to McDonald’s in Java, lounging on the islands of Thailand and dealing with the hassles of Asia.

But it wasn’t quite the thrill of India, and I longed to get back, so I soon bid adieu to Pokhara and took the bus to Kathmandu, as my first step towards being immersed back into the madness that I’ve learned to love.

Nepal: The Plains

Kathmandu

Written: 4 May 1998

A lone white man ambles through the square, looking lost in the way that only tourists can manage. Durbar Square is bustling, but in his mission to take in the atmosphere he’s committed the ultimate sin and the touts aren’t going to miss a trick. ‘Rickshaw, mate, cheap price’; ‘Picture? One picture?’; ‘Something to smoke...?’; ‘Money change, you make money change?’; ‘I am very good guide, sir, many things to see in Durbar Square’; ‘Just looking, sir, just looking, very good stones’. In Kathmandu, you learn to look occupied all the time if you want to avoid hassle, and he’ll learn quickly enough.

Kathmandu’s Durbar Square is a strange collision of worship and wheeler dealing. The pagodas on the scores of temples in the city’s cultural centre provide steps for people to loiter on, trading gossip and hatching deals and schemes. For the rickshaw-wallahs it’s a place to catch trade, and for the street sellers it’s a Covent Garden without licences or regulations; and as if the mayhem caused by milling crowds and street vendors isn’t enough, it’s also a busy thoroughfare for taxis, bicycles, motorcycles and porters with their huge baskets of goods, bound for some other dusty corner of the city. If Kathmandu has a heart then it’s here, the source of pulsating arteries that speed off[1] in all four directions of the compass.

My hotel was just round the corner from Durbar Square, which feels a million cultural miles away from the suburb of Thamel, even though it’s only a 15-minute walk. Thamel is to Kathmandu what Khao San is to Bangkok, what Kuta is to Bali, and what Goa is to Nepal: it’s the country’s centre for travellers. Unfortunately, with this territory comes the usual collection of restaurants, travel agencies, craft shops, email centres, touts, marijuana pedlars, good pizza and, rather disappointingly, an almost complete lack of character. I had anticipated a soul-free environment, but Thamel has all the charm of a McDonald’s; so I popped in, did what I had to do, and moved on as quickly as I could.

The Monkey Temple

Luckily the rest of the city has plenty of charm, even through the misty haze of a strange apathy that struck me as I explored. Swayambhunath Temple, colloquially known as the Monkey Temple due to its local residents, is a pleasant but not terribly surprising Nepalese temple – Buddhist stupas, Hindu shikharas and pigeons galore – but its unearthly combination of Hinduism and hawking makes it worth a visit. Besides, western tourists are such funny creature sometimes, with their inappropriate clothes, in-your-face photography and a total lack of bargaining ability, that I found watching the watchers much more interesting than yet another collection of gunk-smeared statues of the Hindu-Buddhist pantheon.

Especially interesting, though, was one particular western woman, who must have been in her mid-thirties; complete with tika marks on her forehead from a recent puja, she was leaning on the grate containing a statue of Locana, the consort of Aksobhya, one of the Dhyani buddhas who sits in the pose of subduing Mara, or resisting the temptation of the devil. Through her mumblings, I saw a look on her face that I recognised; it was the look on a child’s face when snuggling up to its mother, a blissful awareness of warmth and security.

I get that look when a particularly good Led Zeppelin riff hits the speakers, but she was getting it from a religion; this was wonderful for her, and as I watched her distant smile and lightly closed eyes, I wondered if I was missing out on something magical... but then the grungy guitar line from Whole Lotta Love started grinding through my subconscious, and I realised that I’ve got it all right here, in my head. Music is my portable religion and CDs are my icons, blasphemous though that may sound.

What a shame, though, that Kathmandu was perpetually shrouded in the pre-monsoon mist, clouding out the mountains and making the potentially spectacular views from the temples more reminiscent of Calcutta from the Howrah Bridge. People complain bitterly about Kathmandu’s pollution, and although it feels like a paragon of cleanliness after India, it’s still got a long way to go as far as air pollution goes; the face mask is as common here as it is in Bangkok.

The Suburbs

One day I walked south of Kathmandu to Patan, previously a separate city state but now effectively a suburb of the capital; the third city in the Kathmandu Valley, Bhaktapur, is a little further to the east, and was again a separate state with a separate king before the three cities were finally united in 1382 by the rulers of Kathmandu (which is why Kathmandu is the capital and not Patan or Bhaktapur). Patan has as its main attraction a huge number of temples, and it was here that I realised that I’m templed out and am finding it hard to give a hoot about the things. Imagine doing a tour of Europe where the main attraction was churches; after a couple of months you’d probably break into a cold sweat at the sight of yet another spire. For me, anything to do with Buddha, Siva, Krishna, Vishnu and the rest of the gang is, by now, just another building.

The walk back from Patan had its surprises, though. For example, the fields of marijuana plants lining the River Bagmati are a sight to behold; one minute you’re wandering along the path minding your own business, and the next minute you’re surrounded by luscious greenery, reaching well above head height and generating a distinctive smell on the breeze. I had to stop to take a picture, it was such a sight, and in the process I managed to attract the attention of one of Kathmandu’s more sociable wasters. After the inevitable small talk he gestured to the buds swaying in the breeze and asked, ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘It’s marijuana,’ I replied. ‘And I thought Calcutta was the City of Joy.’

‘It’s grass,’ he said, sniffing at my terminology with a smile in his eye. ‘Grass,’ he repeated, and turned to go; he didn’t even look back or say goodbye. Perhaps announcing that this was grass was his party piece and he’d done his bit, or perhaps he’d enjoyed the local crop just a little too much to hold a conversation longer than two minutes. I didn’t mind a bit; some conversations are dead in the water before they’re launched.

So I returned to Kathmandu, studiously walking straight past the millions of holy sites and instead marvelling at the insanity of the locals. For example, I went to an electrical shop to buy a bulb for my torch which had blown right in the middle of the previous night’s power cut; the man didn’t have the right type, and answered my ensuing question by saying that there were no other shops around who sold bulbs, and none that sold torches. He obviously didn’t get out much; four doors down was a man with bulbs and torches who sold me what I wanted without hesitation.

The next local I encountered shouted over to me, ‘Where you from? Australia?’ Now this was getting strange, as this was the third time that I’d been called an Australian that day, and I hadn’t even opened my mouth or put on my bush hat, so I walked over and asked him why he thought I was an Aussie. ‘You’ve got a beard,’ he replied, as if that was all the explanation anyone needed. It scuppered me completely, enough to motivate me to book a ticket for my next destination, Janakpur.

[1] OK, this is poetic licence, I admit. You’re just as likely to find a speeding car in Kathmandu as you are on the M25 at 5.30 on a Friday afternoon, but what the Nepalese lack in velocity they make up for with voracity, and what their rusty old cars lack in aesthetics they make up for with acoustics. As long as the accelerator’s connected and the horn works, the car is fine.

Floundering in Kathmandu

Written: 3 May 1998

In Kathmandu I floundered, suffering from a lack of motivation that I hadn’t known since Bangkok, and yet again the reason was the same: I was getting bored and wanted to get into India. My days centred round battling with the Nepalese email system, wandering aimlessly through various shady suburbs of the city, and killing time in numerous cafés with numerous novels. But I wasn’t miserable; I was far too apathetic for that.

It’s always interesting, this drifter’s equivalent of the dole; because the whole nature of travelling requires self-motivation, it falls down around your head when you lose interest. I found myself wandering through the city, not even turning my head to look at the strange sights, because to me the strange sights no longer felt strange. The dead goat rotting in the gutter was mere street clutter; the half-crazed saffron-clad madman, clutching his trident and dancing in public was, well, just another sadhu; the near misses of rickshaws were familiar pedestrian obstacles; the rampant colour of a Ganesh temple was simply another aspect of another building; and the stench of rotting rubbish was just part of the atmosphere; the hassle of the touts was but a fact of life. Nothing surprises when apathy strikes; I do, however, have three main remedies for the apathy blues, discovered after long periods of aimlessness in Asia.

Apathy Remedy Number One is to crash out in a pleasant spot with a good book, good food and good company; this is a favourite solution in India, where it’s not so much used as a treatment for apathy, but more as a treatment for exhaustion. But in Kathmandu it didn’t apply, because I’d spent my entire Pokharan sojourn crashing out, reading and eating, and I’d got pretty bored pretty quickly.

Apathy Remedy Number Two is to climb a nearby mountain, a remedy that proved especially successful in Australia; but having spent three weeks climbing some of the biggest mountains in the world, the last thing I needed was more uphill struggling.

Apathy Remedy Number Three is simply to get back on the road, where the challenges and surprises of travelling soon make apathy unwelcome and impractical. But I didn’t want to leave Kathmandu until I’d either sent my email or come up against a definite brick wall, so for the time being I was stuck where I was.

No more remedies came to mind, so I wallowed in my indifference, biding my time for the return to India. There are far worse places to be bored, after all.

Death in the Afternoon

Written: 6 May 1998

Seeing a dead body is one of the most unnerving sights on offer; whenever I think of Hobart in Tasmania, I think of two pale, bloated bodies washing up from a sunken car in the dock, trailing frothy white vomit on the black water. Worse than this is to watch someone die, to go from alive to dead in the blink of an eye, a pleasure I have yet to witness. But surely the worst sight of all must be to see someone still alive, but dying slowly and desperately in front of your very eyes, without a hope for survival; this is why fatal cancer and AIDS are so frightening, because there’s no hope. At least a bullet in the head is quick.

Halfway between Janakpur and the Nepal-India border, the bus blared its horn and swerved to the right, not unusual behaviour in this part of the world given the number of potholes and slow trucks that need to be overtaken. From my window seat on the left-hand side of the rusting vehicle I was idly staring at the passing scenery, the distant cloud-shrouded Himalayas providing a backdrop to farmers’ fields, bullocks pulling ploughs and women carrying bundles of sticks on their heads. But as the bus swerved onto the right-hand side of the road I saw what had caused the driver to punch his horn. In the middle of the eastbound carriageway, a woman was dying.

I must have had a total of two seconds to take in the scene, and initially I didn’t register quite what I was seeing; it was only an instant later, after we had left the whole scene behind, that it hit me what I had witnessed, and it smacked me in the guts like a rabbit punch. On the side of the road was a crowd of about twenty people, standing stock still in frozen amazement at the sight in front of them, nobody moving a muscle. Buses screamed by in both directions, the thought of stopping to help not even a faint flicker in the minds of the driver and conductors, and fifty yards further up the highway, children pedalled their rusty bicycles on errands for their parents, just another hot day on the plains of the Terai.

But back there on the searing tarmac lay a woman in a spreading pool of blood the colour of rusty sump oil, a victim of a hit and run. I have seen countless wrecks on the side of the road, both in the West and in the Third World, and hulking and mangled metal is disturbing, but an accepted and acceptable fact of life; what I have never seen is the human cost. The photographs of fatal car accidents that I’d seen in Kuala Lumpur had shocked me into realising the severity of road death – the butcher-like quality of the lacerated leg and the tyre-crushed cranium – but the sight of death in reality made those photographs seem pathetic.

She was still moving when we passed her. Lying in a position similar to that of the unfit man doing press-ups – legs and belly still on the ground, shoulders raised by her palms pushing on the tarmac – her arms were clawing at the bitumen in an attempt to pull herself up. But what she couldn’t see was the mutilated mass of raw meat that had once been her legs and pelvis, a sight that reminded me instantly of the death throes of water buffalo in Sulawesi, and throughout her struggles to cling onto life the crowd stared, unmoving. Two minutes up the road a flock of vultures preened itself, oblivious as yet to the potential meal slowly growing colder and less aware just down the road, and within half a second of us flashing past, the scenery was back to normal. ‘An accident?’ asked my neighbour, a friendly Christian from Janakpur. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘an accident’, thinking how inept the terminology was. An accident is when you spill milk on the kitchen floor or don’t make it to the toilet in time; it hardly applies to a lonely and painful death while the village looks on, friends frozen in fear.

I found myself trying to imagine what was going through the woman’s head. The pain would be so severe as to make a death from shock as likely as a death from loss of blood; with Nepal’s hospital facilities being almost non-existent, let alone a national health plan, there is no doubt that by the time I reached India the woman would be dead. Her frantic clawing was futile in the extreme, but what else could she do? I imagined her calling to her friends for help while they looked on in a mixture of horror and fascination; for people who have not been educated with biology lessons and horror movies, it would be amazing to actually see inside a human body, to see bones, flesh and blood. Besides, it would be the will of the gods that she was struck down, and who is the man in the street to interfere with the will of the gods?

And I felt a rush of guilt, an unfair feeling seeing as even if the bus had stopped, I could have done nothing to help. I saw a woman dying on the road from a severely crushed torso and massive haemorrhaging, and I was absolutely helpless. The same applied to her onlookers, who would have had no idea about first aid; indeed, a skilled doctor could probably have done nothing except administer painkillers and talk to the family. But I will remember that desperate scrabbling for a long time, and I have no doubt that the first memory of the eastern Terai that springs to mind will not be of happy festivals in Janakpur, but of a dying carcass on the road.

Someone once told me that the reason buses and trucks constantly use their horns in India and Nepal is that women who carry things on their heads cannot turn to see if there is anything coming, so the traffic blasts away to stop them walking across the road. Perhaps she didn’t hear the horn, or perhaps the driver didn’t bother to sound his blower; whatever, the result was another insignificant death of another peasant worker, or that’s how it would have appeared to the world at large.

It was far from insignificant to the western tourist who flashed past on his way to the border.

Janakpur

Written: 6 May 1998

My immersion back into the madness of India came earlier than expected, as Janakpur is an Indian town in all but geography. Sitting inside Nepal, just a few kilometres from the Indian border, the town is a pilgrimage site for Hindus, and is a bustling market town that feels Indian in everything from the smell to the scenery.

It was glorious walking through the mayhem again. I explored on foot, as is my wont (people rarely sidle up to you and start crazy conversations when you’re hurtling along on two wheels) and soon found myself wandering through fields, past pools and around temples, all brimming with people washing, hawking, doing laundry, carrying large bundles on their heads, and generally getting on with life. And in the middle of it all is a mighty strange sight: the Janaki Mandir.

Imagine a big palace with turrets, towers and gates that’s been dipped in white marshmallow and painted with joyous abandon in a clash of colours that Jackson Pollock would have thought garish. Although a modern building (built in 1912) this celebration of vitality denotes the spot where Sita, Rama’s wife, was born, back in the days of the Ramayana (another name for Sita is Janaki, after her father Janaka, hence the name Janakpur); round the corner is the Rama Sita Bibaha Mandir, a tacky little building that marks the spot where Rama and Sita were married, and which contains a Disney-esque collection of figures acting out the marriage ceremony. And surrounding this construction of confectionery are stalls selling everything from sarees to sweets, adding yet more colour to the scene; if I needed reminding of the rainbow quality of India, this was it.

The area outside town is delightful, too. To the northwest of the centre are three tanks, big man-made lakes with steps leading down to them (known as ghats) where people wash themselves, their clothes, their rickshaws, their cows and just about anything else that needs cleaning. It seems that these tanks are also the social equivalent of the shopping mall, for no sooner had I plonked myself down on the banks for a rest than half the population dropped by for a chat, which was no mean task given my lack of Nepali and their lack of English. Luckily a well-spoken medical student turned up to break down the barriers, and Nazir and I talked for quite some time, him telling me about the temples in the area, and me telling him that no, western women are not easy and sex isn’t a free-for-all in England. As with most towns that haven’t been tainted by tourism, the people of Janakpur were genuine, courteous and friendly.

I also managed to time my visit to coincide with the celebrations of Sita’s birthday, which of course is an excuse for a big party in the city which houses Sita’s birthplace: seven days of partying, to be precise. Tuesday 5th May was the last day of the celebrations, which explains why I kept being accosted by mumbling sadhus who would put a couple of petals into my hand, smear a mark on my forehead in red tika powder, mutter a few words in whatever language they were speaking that day, and then hold out their hands for a few rupees. It was quite entertaining, and the reaction from the locals as I walked the streets was not unlike that in Bijapur when I got stained purple by the Holi mob; I guess they don’t get too many white people in Janakpur, especially ones with tika marks.

The celebrations that night were worth the effort, too. I watched a melee of sights and sounds go past; there were crazies smothered from head to toe in tika powder, sadhus chanting mantras, bands dressed in clothes that bore a striking resemblance to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, floats carrying petal-smothered images of Rama and Sita, loudspeakers proclaiming loudly, horns blaring, bicycle bells ringing and, above all, a real sense of carnival. Everyone smiled, everyone celebrated and everyone seemed genuinely pleased to have a foreigner witnessing the scenes. What happy Hindus they were, and what a contrast to the reserved peoples of the mountains. I guess that’s what living a few kilometres from India does to you...

India: West Bengal

The Toy Train

Written: 12 May 1998

Noel Gallagher once wrote, ‘These are crazy days but they make me shine,’ and he was spot on; India is crazy, but it sure as hell is making me shine. Just one example is India’s train network, which is delightfully bonkers, and the train into Darjeeling is a case in point. There are no traffic lights on the railway line from Siliguri to Darjeeling; instead, a lone man stands in the middle of the humid jungle waving a red flag. This sums up the whole Toy Train experience rather well.

For the train from the plains up to the hill station of Darjeeling is no ordinary train; it’s a tiny steam train locally known as the Toy Train. Taking eight timetable hours to screech its way up the 80km track to the most famous tea-producing area in India, the journey is a combination of ancient technology and the seemingly archaic Indian way of doing things; for example, at one point we sat on the tracks for what felt like ages, waiting for a group of five workmen to mend the track ahead of us, which had washed away in the rains.

The name ‘steam train’ is fairly misleading, too; looking at pictures of classic locomotives belching white from their chimneys, I used to think that the train was throwing out clouds of steam, but then my science lessons taught me that it was mostly smoke from the boiler. The Toy Train to Darjeeling proves this point; as the train toils its way up the mountains, it leaves a trail of black smoke in the sky, and at every corner bits of hot coal ash waft into the carriages, covering people and packs in a fine layer of soot and pin-pricking their skin with dissipating heat.

But this doesn’t deter from a delightful journey. When I first heard the distinctive chugging of the steam engine – 4/4 time, one repeated bar of two forte treble crochets and two piano bass crotchets, played at a varying tempo depending on the gradient – I was instantly reminded of Thomas the Tank Engine and the Fat Controller, but somehow this wasn’t quite right. Thomas and his friends are huge engines, dwarfing the cute stick men as they stand statically though Ringo’s narration, but a more accurate analogy might be Ivor the Engine, as the Toy Train is, well, much more toy-like than Thomas; and although the hilly scenery around Darjeeling isn’t quite the Welsh valleys, I could almost imagine the dragons sitting on the engine and hatching their babies.

I very much doubt that Ivor came across a great deal of Indian traffic, though. The railway follows the road for the main part[1], crossing it fairly regularly, and therein lies the problem: trains have brakes that take ages to work, and Indian truck drivers don’t seem to be aware that their vehicles have brakes in the first place, so the prospect of train meeting truck on the barricade-free crossings is a real one. Add in the thrill of a narrow (2 ft) gauge train lurching and bumping its way through the undergrowth, and you have an experience that is as close to luxury train travel as Indonesian ferries are to expensive cruises.

Another thing that hardly ever happens in the books is the train running out of water, but this being India it wasn’t long before we ground to yet another halt, and this time we stayed there. In a classic engineering solution to the problem of getting a train up a severely steep hillside, the track is full of switchbacks where the train has to zigzag backwards and forwards, gradually ascending the hill by judicious use of points (each changed by a lonely old man hiding from the rain in a decrepit old brick house). It wasn’t, then, much of a surprise that after a few hours on board we’d yet again backed into a dead end and stopped.

After 15 minutes I stuck my head out of the window and tried to see why we still weren’t moving. The fact that there was no engine may have had something do with it, but nobody had thought to inform the passengers that the train had run out of water and needed to go off for a refill; we were already running late from the work on the track and it was quite obvious that we were going nowhere.

Luckily the siding was still close to the road, so along with half the train I jumped down onto the track, walked down to the road and eventually hailed a bus. The heavens opened, I got to Darjeeling before long, and that was the Toy Train experience. ‘Not to be missed’ was the guidebook’s accidentally accurate summary; ‘not to be trusted’ would perhaps have been more accurate.

Crazy days indeed.

[1] Which means you pass wonderful signs such as, ‘If you want to donate blood, do not do it on the road, donate it in the blood bank,’ ‘It is better to be 15 minutes late in this world than to be 15 minutes earlier in the next,’ and, rather worryingly, ‘Love thy neighbour... but not while driving.’ It’s a pity nobody takes a blind bit of notice.

Darjeeling

Written: 12 May 1998

Darjeeling is one of India’s most famous hill stations; it is, of course, renowned for its tea. Most of the hill stations I’ve visited – the Cameron Highlands, Kodaikanal, Dieng and so on – are situated in valleys, with a pleasant town centre surrounded by hills studded with beautiful residences. Not so Darjeeling; this hill station lives at an altitude of 2134m on a west-facing slope, which makes it easy to work out which direction you’re facing, but it also makes exploring the town feel like a workout on a step machine.

The town itself is fairly large. From above, Darjeeling looks like most Indian dwellings, with rusty tin roofs, ugly black water tanks and washing draped just about everywhere, but the slope manages to prevent the claustrophobic feeling that I normally associate with closely cropped and crowded places. Walk up the hill and you can look down on the whole town with views all the way down to the deep valley floor below, and if the weather is clear you can see the western Himalayas dominating the horizon, with Everest just visible as a deceptively diminutive peak among the closer mountains.

That’s if the weather is clear, though. Like other hill stations, the summer temperatures in Darjeeling are simply divine compared to the sweat and toil of the plains below, but the price you pay as the monsoon approaches is a lot of cloud, a fair amount of rain and a total lack of views. My hotel room, complete with balcony and the familiar stain of wet mould in the corner, would have provided me with the perfect setting for sipping tea and talking politics, but in the end all it could manage was a view reminiscent of that from a 747 flying over wintry Europe. I’d expected this, and having spent weeks surrounded by the Himalayas I wasn’t that disappointed not to be able to see the mountains, but it did make it harder to get motivated about exploring the area.

Occasional glimpses through the fog made it worthwhile, however, and I met up with a couple of very friendly Irish travellers, Chris and Martina, who proved excellent companions for exploring the hill station. The snow leopard sanctuary, which has the only breeding programme in southern Asia and the only one in the world that has had any kind of success, was well worth the hour’s walk from town; the endangered snow leopard is a superbly beautiful creature, especially the cubs, and as they gambolled round their cages we talked to the man in charge of the programme, learning as much about Asian politics as we did about snow leopards.

The grandly named Darjeeling Rangeet Valley Passenger Ropeway is another interesting attraction, not so much because the cable car is anything fantastic (though the views over the rolling fields of tea bushes are decidedly photogenic) but because the thrill of putting your life in the hands of the first ever Indian cable car really gets the adrenalin flowing. Rattling our way down the hill and back up again in a car complete with smashed window and a door you couldn’t open from the inside, we managed to complete the journey without serious incident (luckily the ropeway isn’t steam-powered).

It is, however, a good way to get below the high cloud that smothers the town at this time of year, and at last we managed to get a glimpse of the Himalayas, albeit a long way away and not the group containing Everest. For the latter we had to be content with the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute Museum, a fascinating collection of stories and memorabilia from the various Everest expeditions; the late Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two[1] to reach the top of Everest, lived in Darjeeling, and the museum he helped to set up is full of his equipment.

Then there’s the botanical garden, a pleasant green park on the sloping valley sides just below the town, which is surprising not so much for its flora and ponds but for the peace and quiet which it affords; this makes hitting the high street a serious culture shock, with its myriad shops selling Tibetan goods and cramped market backstreets heaving with cobblers, tailors, pan shops and tea vendors. Darjeeling is a holiday spot in every way, and the number of Indian tourists milling around creating fascinating chaos shows just how popular such a set-up is.

But the most important thing to do in Darjeeling is to relax with a nice pot of tea and a good view or, failing the latter, a comfortable chair. Every day that we were in Darjeeling, Chris, Martina and I found our way to Glenary’s, a reminder of the days of the Raj with its smart waiters, impeccable service, excellent food and an anachronistically high-ceilinged dining room that, in the winter, would be flickeringly lit by the roar of the fire at one end. But we didn’t need a fire, we just needed tea; not surprisingly the tea in Darjeeling is excellent, and not just because it’s served western-style. If you order chai in India, you’ll get a grubby glass filled with an incredibly milky and teeth-crunchingly sweet concoction that is made by filtering violently boiling milk through the tea-maker’s equivalent of an old sock filled with tea leaves, and after throwing it around a bit in a style faintly reminiscent of flashy bartenders – though that’s where any similarity between an Indian chai stall owner and a waistcoat-clad cocktail expert ends, believe me – he’ll present it to you with a bill for two rupees. It tastes wonderful and I’m a huge fan, but it’s nothing like tea as westerners know it.

In Darjeeling, however, you get a pot of local tea, a tea strainer, a jug of hot milk, sugar in a bowl and time to enjoy yourself. Darjeeling tea is a mild-flavoured brew compared to fiery Lapsang Suchong or the slightly sickly spices of Earl Grey – experts probably use words like ‘delicate’ and ‘subtle’ when talking about Darjeeling tea – so it’s a godsend that it’s not treated with the usual Indian courtesy; the flavour would be totally crushed if it was served through a sock.

Tea isn’t the only important part of Afternoon Tea, though; don’t forget tiffin. Immortalised by Sid James in Carry On Up The Khyber – whose sessions behind locked doors with various big-bosomed beauties of the Raj were referred to as ‘a bit of tiffin’ – the Indian word ‘tiffin’ simply means a snack, and is yet another Indian word that has found its way into everyday English[2]. Tiffin in Darjeeling means cakes and lots of them, and between the three of us we managed to build up enough fatty residue to see us through the meanest of Indian illnesses. I shan’t annoy you by mentioning the prices; suffice to say that a hoard of cakes and a couple of pots of tea came in well under £1, and that back in England I wouldn’t visit an establishment like Glenary’s without an expense account or a benefactor in tow. How the other half[3] live...

Tea Terminology

The whole subject of Darjeeling tea deserves a separate section, if only because the sheer complexity of it makes PG Tips look positively plebeian. Ready for a whole new world? Then we’ll begin.

Darjeeling tea isn’t just one type of tea, it’s a whole family of teas; talking about Darjeeling tea is a bit like saying someone speaks English, when they could be speaking Geordie, Australian, New Jersey, Inglish, Cockney and so on. And like accents, some teas have class and others just don’t.

A look at the processing method used in the Happy Valley Tea Estate in Darjeeling shows how one bush can produce five different varieties. The picked leaves are placed in long trays to a depth of about 20cm where air is blown from underneath to drive out moisture in a two-stage process, with six hours of cold air and six hours of hot; this reduces the moisture content of the green leaves from 75 per cent to 35 per cent.

The leaves then pass into a rolling machine where they are rolled and crushed for 45 minutes to bring out the juices from the cells, after which a sifter machine separates out any leaves that are too big. Fermentation is next, where the leaves are left on cold metal shelves for two to three hours to ferment in their juices, turning the colour from green to brown; they are then passed through the drying machine, a long conveyor through a furnace set to 117°C where the moisture is reduced to about 2 per cent. Finally the leaves, now ready to brew up, are sorted into categories according to leaf size, with the smaller leaves being the best quality; at the Happy Valley the teas produced are, in order of quality with the best first, Orange Pekoe, Golden Flower, Golden Supremo, Supremo and Tea Bags.

But it’s not just the drying and fermenting process that creates categories of tea, it’s also the picking method used before the leaves are processed. Tea bushes are squat little affairs, and the leaves grow upwards in a manner reminiscent of bonsai yew trees; pruning is done off the top of the tree, and each branch produces three leaves: two mature outer leaves and a younger inner leaf. The best teas come from the tips of the mature leaves (as the younger leaf has less character), and so the picking method provides another part of the categorisation method.

The very finest Darjeeling tea is called Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, which is made from the top part of the two mature leaves. Next is Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, which is a coarse-plucking tea, meaning that all three leaves are plucked to make it. Then there’s Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, which has even coarser plucking (in other words, less care is taken). There is even a further distinction; the first two teas come from ‘Chinese’ plants with their small, thin leaves and better flavour, while the third comes from ‘Assam’ plants with their thicker leaves and stronger (but less delicate) flavour.

But what does all this jargon mean? This is where it gets confusing, but basically the ‘Super Fine Tippy’ part refers to the picking method, the ‘Golden Flowery’ bit refers to which grade comes out of the final sifting machine, the ‘Orange’ denotes the colour of the tea when it is put into boiling water (orange is good and means the tea is whisky-coloured as opposed to the cheaper teas which turn the water a rum colour), and ‘Pekoe’ means that the tea flavour comes straight from the leaves rather than from an added perfume.

So you’ve decided on the type of tea you’d like to buy, but things have only just started. Within each type of tea are four broad bands denoting the time of year the tea was picked, namely First Flush, Second Flush, Rain Flush and Autumn Flush. The differences between the various flushes are as marked as the differences between vintages of wine, because tea quality is very dependent on climate; and because bushes are plucked in blocks, with one block being picked every 15-20 days, the same bushes can produce very different teas. The tea-picking season runs from March to November, and the best teas are picked in March, the so-called First Flush; if tea is plucked after or during heavy rain, then the rain will have washed the flavour juices off the leaves and the tea will have less flavour, so the best flushes are during the dry spells (hence First and Autumn Flushes are good).

Then within the flush categories are more specific details, and the quality varies surprisingly. For example, First Flush Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe from the fourth week in March retails at Rs600 per kilogram, but from the second week in March it costs Rs1100 per kilogram, nearly twice as much. It clearly pays to research the product before buying.

And in case you think you know it all before hitting the tea shop, there are countless other types of Darjeeling tea, from Bio-organic tea (when no pesticides or chemicals are used, which is true for all teas but in this case the estate has a certificate to prove it) to Green tea (which uses a different manufacturing process to the rest). That’s without even delving into other regions and all their intricacies, such as Assam from India’s northeast.

Of course the best way to buy tea is to ignore all the jargon and to go into the shop for a taste test of the product. Unfortunately your average tea shop doesn’t have four hundred pots of hot tea for you to sample, so you have to check out the leaves themselves. Take a small pile of tea in your palm, close your fist and breathe through the tea to warm it up and moisturise it slightly. You then smell it with a deep breath and make your choice.

I have to confess that all the teas I smelled seemed very much the same, even though they looked quite different, with the expensive teas looking quite fine and the cheaper ones much more burned and scrappy-looking. The man in the tea shop confided that most of the locals can’t tell the teas apart either; only those with lots of experience can. Still, it’s all in the taste when you finally brew up.

But even then the tea experience isn’t simple. Should you add milk? Should you take sugar? Well, it depends on the tea; stronger teas from the Assam plant (not to be confused with Assam tea, which is tea grown in Assam) are fine with a little milk (‘Only a drop,’ said the tea shop owner, ‘because then they are getting the real tea taste’) but the more delicate Chinese plant teas should be taken without milk. Oh, and make sure you store your tea in a metal tin, rather than plastic or glass.

So next time you settle down for a cuppa, think about what you’re drinking. It’s been through an awful lot, even before you start brewing up...

[1] Hillary and Tenzing have always kept quiet about who actually reached the top first, which is interesting. If you ask a westerner who climbed Everest first, the answer will be ‘Edmund Hillary’; ask someone from the Indian subcontinent and the emphasis will be on Tenzing Norgay. They’re both right, because nobody knows who was first except for the two who made it, and they’re not telling; there are no clues in the photos, either, as the flags flown on the summit were the Union Jack (for New Zealander Hillary), Indian (for Norgay) and Nepalese (as Everest is in Nepal).

[2] There are lots of Indian words that have made it into English. Veranda, guru, pyjamas, sandals, ganja, dungarees, shampoo, khaki, jungle, loot, monsoon, hookah, curry... all these are Indian words that we commonly use today. There are more than you think.

[3] One rich middle class Indian told me that if you have money, India is the best country in the world to live, and not just because it’s cheap. With money you can live a lifestyle that’s as good as anything you can get in the West, but your money can also buy you all the drugs you want, as much corruption as you like (by judicious use of baksheesh) and can even get you the perfect spouse and produce well-educated kids to ensure the family fortune stays as the family fortune. If money is no object in the West, you can still get anything, but if you’re caught bribing, you can do time; in India, it’s all part of the social fabric, so not only can you get away with it, you do.

India: Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh

The Power of Authority

Written: 13 May 1998

Did I mention the Toy Train? I sure did, and I thought at the time that it would be my last train story, because up until this point my experience with Indian Railways has been moderately painless. Until Siliguri, that is...

The three of us, by now thick as thieves, took the jeep down from Darjeeling to Siliguri, hoping to be able to book a train ticket to Varanasi on the overnight train. I knew that the train would almost certainly be full for that night, but having had no real problems with booking a ticket before (except for Bhopal to Gorakhpur, but that was due to Rama’s birthday) I reckoned we’d be all right for the night after.

We arrived at Siliguri’s main station, NJP, in mid-afternoon and joined the queue at the ticket counter. However, when we reached the counter we discovered that we could only buy tickets for seats there, not berths, and we should go to the other side of the station to see the Ticket Collector, who would help us. We did as we were told, but the Ticket Collector had very little English and proved pretty useless, and he just sent us back to the same queue at the ticket counter. Again the ticket counter refused to help, but a return journey to the Ticket Collector finally produced an address for Siliguri’s railway booking office. We couldn’t believe that NJP, a major station, didn’t have its own booking system, but shrugging at the madness of it all, we took a rickshaw to the booking office, a good few kilometres and a cosy ride away with all our backpacks stuffed behind us.

At the booking office I joined the queue at the Information Counter to ask about availability of berths on the train, and when I finally reached the man he told me it was well-nigh impossible to get sleepers out of NJP towards Delhi, as they were all full for days, but if I joined the ticket queue and bought a waiting list ticket for the journey I required, then I could come back and have a word with the Reservations Officer about getting in on an emergency quota. I thanked him and joined the shortest queue for tickets; inevitably this counter closed as I reached the front, so I joined the back of the only other queue, which was still waiting for its counter to open. After maybe three-quarters of an hour I got to the front of the queue, handed my reservation form over, and the man frowned. ‘For tonight?’ he said. ‘Or tomorrow,’ I replied, explaining what the man at the Information Counter had said. The ticket man disappeared, came back and asked me to wait. This I did for a quarter of an hour, after which he left the room, came back and sent me right back to the Information Counter.

The man at the Information Counter wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me again, and said I still had to get a waiting list ticket before I could get onto the emergency quota. Armed with my timetable I grilled him about availability on other trains, but all the trains were booked up for at least four days, there weren’t any first class berths available, and I really didn’t fancy an overnight bus ride through the sweaty fields of the Gangetic plain. Eventually he handed me over to the Reservations Officer, a fat man with an attitude problem, who told me exactly what I needed to do if I wanted to get onto his emergency quota. ‘Get a waiting list ticket,’ he said, smiling smugly, ‘then bring your passport and proof of money exchange, and we will see what we can do.’

I could feel him enjoying The Power, a strange opiate one feels when one knows one has complete authority over a situation, and someone without that authority wants what only you can give them. In India, coping with The Power is an essential part of survival; to get what you want you have to kowtow to sad little men who have snaked their way up the ranks of the railway company, always being polite when what you’d rather do is smash the man’s face into your right kneecap. I coped admirably, repeating in my head the anti-Power mantra, ‘I can always leave India, but this poor bugger can’t...’

Returning to the ticket queue for half an hour and five Marlboros, I finally got a waiting list ticket for the next day’s train, as today’s had already started on its journey and I couldn’t get a waiting list ticket for a train that was already on the move, could I? Then it was back to the man with The Power, and roping in Martina and her encashment certificates, we handed over our passports, sycophantically helping the bulbous idiot to decipher the calendar and work out that thirteen comes after twelve and that tomorrow comes after today; and after crawling through the dirt and kissing his boots we finally got the assurance that we would have three berths for the journey the following night, and all we had to do was turn up at the station and we’d be in the computer and on the train. I thanked him gushingly and walked off, unconvinced that he would actually prove to be of any help.

After spending the next day shopping and playing cards in the fairly nondescript boom town that is Siliguri, we turned up at the railway station on time and went to the reservations counter, where we discovered that two of us had a berth, but mysteriously the third one didn’t. This meant that I had to spend until 2.15am that night being as nice as pie to the conductor, another man who wielded The Power, in an attempt to persuade him to find me a berth on the impossibly crowded train. To his credit he did find me a place to sleep and didn’t even ask for baksheesh, but this final bending over backwards to blow sunshine up this man’s anus had washed me out, and I spent the night out like a light. When I awoke, we were well on our way to Varanasi, and all I did was plug in my Walkman and stare out of the window. It was bliss to be temporarily disconnected.

Death of the Ganges

Written: 16 May 1998

The Ganges has long been associated with life-giving properties, and amazingly, scientific studies may have found a scientific basis for the myth. Unfortunately, it might be too late, as the Ganges is highly polluted.

At Patna, a few days after celebrating the 1997 Chhath festival on the banks of the Ganges, several devotees suddenly suffered from skin eruptions, red spots and other skin irritations. Apparently it was the ‘holy dip’ in the Ganges that led to this problem; something in the water, possibly a result of indiscriminate waste disposal into the river, had triggered off this reaction.

Cynical though it may sound, such an incident was simply waiting to happen, as the rivers in India are basically treated like glorified sewers. On the one hand they are considered sacred, and on the other they are abused day in and day out by the very people that revere them. Religious ceremonies and practices that have been followed for centuries only help to spread infection, and it’s highly unlikely that things will change any time soon.

Along its 2525km-long course, the Ganges receives mostly untreated sewage from 27 major towns. The Ganges Action Plan (GAP), which is touted as the centrepiece of river cleaning policy in India, has spent more than 4.5 billion rupees on the problem, but with little concrete success. The reality is that in all the main towns situated on the banks of the Ganges, untreated and partially treated sewage still flows into the river. The sewage treatment plants lie idle for most of the day because there’s no power to run them, lots of the pumps are clogged up with plastic bags, and as an example of the lack of progress, in Patna the public toilets have been converted into offices, and the town sewage ponds serve as cricket grounds.

The waters of the Ganges have always had the strange quality of not putrefying, even after long periods of storage. Scientific studies carried out by Roorkee University in the early 1980s confirmed an age-old belief that its waters were special; the Ganges was shown to have a unique quality in that it has a remarkable self-cleansing ability, certainly better than any other river in the world. It also has a very high oxygen-retaining capacity, which explains why its waters remain fresh over long periods of storage.

Conducted between 1982 and 1984, the studies indicated that concentrations of disease-causing bacteria, which shot up at waste dumping points along the river, reduced by almost 90 per cent some 7 to 10km downstream from the dumps. As far back as 1896, E. Hanbury Hankin, a British physician, reported in the Annales de l’Institut Pasteur that cholera microbes died within three hours in Ganges water, while they continued to thrive after 48 hours in distilled water.

When such a unique and remarkable river becomes the source of skin problems, it is reflective of the river’s degradation. Essentially a ‘pipes and pumps’ scheme, the GAP is being replicated in 14 polluted rivers in the country without anyone asking whether the original GAP has worked. While sewers and sewage treatment are an absolute necessity in any town or city, mindlessly repeating an expensive and arguably unsuccessful plan is probably not the best way to tackle the situation.

It seems that some rivers, however holy, are destined to die. I sincerely hope that Mother Ganges isn’t one of them.

Varanasi

Written: 20 May 1998

Warning: This article contains some seriously disturbing photographs of dead human bodies. Please do not view them unless you are absolutely certain that you want to. If you want to read the article without pictures, I recommend you read the eBook version. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

If you had to choose one city to represent everything that is really Indian, you would probably choose Varanasi. This means it is a fascinating place; it also means it’s almost impossible to describe on paper.

The first area of Varanasi is the main business district, known as the Cantonment area. Almost every city has a Cantonment area; this was the Raj-era term for the administrative and military area of a city, and most cities retain the Cantonment name for the central part. Varanasi’s core is also its least interesting area, so let’s dispense with it quickly; if you want a train ticket or a bank, go to the Cantonment, otherwise you’re better off hanging out in the two other main areas of town.

Varanasi is built along the west bank of the Ganges, which, in an attempt to avoid the hills to the east in Bihar, turns north towards the Ghaghara River; this means that the river flows north at Varanasi, against all intuition, and Varanasi is perched on the west bank, facing into the sunrise. All along this bank is the second area of town, a long line of ghats[1] stretching for some six or seven kilometres between the famous Benares Hindu University in the south and the large railway bridge in the north. Inland from the ghats, to the west, is the third area, the old town, where things start to get really interesting. It’s the ghats and the old town that make Varanasi what it is.

Finding a Hotel

Arriving in Varanasi after a long train journey, your first experience is one of total confusion and disorientation. It is a guarantee that your rickshaw driver will totally ignore your instructions to take you to the hotel you’ve told him, and will instead stop outside a hotel which gives him a healthy commission; we just sat there and refused to budge until he started his motor up again and took us where we wanted to go.

This infuriated the hotel owner who pretended to take our snub as a comment on his hotel (‘Rooms very nice sir, just five minutes’ walk to the river, very clean’) but I’m not going to fall for a rickshaw driver’s trick this far into my Indian experience... so eventually we found ourselves dropped somewhere else entirely, though exactly where, we couldn’t work out; the rickshaw driver told us he couldn’t drive right down to the ghats (a lie, I later found out, as rickshaws ran over my toes right at the top of the steps) so we were left to fend for ourselves. It took us a long time to find what we wanted, but it was well worth the effort.

The guest house I chose, Ajay’s Guest House overlooking Rana ghat, was right on the river, and from its roof I got a bird’s eye view of the banks of the Ganges (Chris and Martina chose a slightly more luxurious hotel away from the river). What surprised me most was how one-sided Varanasi is; the east bank of the river is totally untouched by buildings, and the few shacks built by the water’s edge are temporary to say the least. The river is perhaps 200m wide in this, the pre-monsoon season, but there’s a very wide silt strip on the east bank that gets totally flooded in the monsoon, more than doubling the width of the river. It’s no wonder the east bank is unpopulated if every year you lose your house, but it still surprised me that even on the permanent part of the eastern bank, where scrubby trees line the horizon, there were no houses at all. I would soon discover why Varanasi is perched on just one bank of the river...

The Ghats

Ghats are central to life in India. As part of their religion Hindus wash regularly – the Indian version of ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ – and the ghats are the place to wash bodies, clothes, crockery and anything else that gets dirty. But as I discovered in Hampi during the tika-scrubbing of Holi, the ghats are not just communal baths, they’re the Indian equivalent of the local pub. Watching ghats through the day is instructive; they start to liven up before the sun rises, when those with early starts mingle with the particularly pious in a morning scrub to wake up the senses and rub off the smell of another hot, sweaty tropical night. The busiest time is after sunrise when everyone turns up for their morning ablutions and absolutions; kids frolic in the river, playing games with the tourist boats while their mothers start on the clothes washing and old men ponder how long it will be before they’ll be floating down the river permanently.

This is the essence of India. While the kids splash more water out of the Ganges than the monsoon puts in, a solitary man prays towards the sun, chanting Hindu prayers and scooping water up in his cupped hands, pouring the holy river out in a parabola in front of him and repeating the slow movement five or six times before he slowly turns round, holding his hands together in prayer and immersing himself fully, all the while continuing his prayers, barely audible in their monotonic whisper. Suddenly his prayer is finished, and it is as if for the first time he notices the cacophony around him, the beginning of a whole new day in India.

While the old man prays the women are bathing at another end of the ghat; in some ghats the division of men and women is so obvious it hurts the morning-sensitive eyes. One end of the ghat is covered in brown bodies, scantily clad in tightly tucked cloths tied round the midriff and leaping around like lizards on a hot tile floor, and at the other end is the shock of colourful sarees and dresses that Indian women have made their own. The reason for the division is the patriarchal society; men can strip down to briefs that would make tourists on a Thai beach do a double take, but the women have to bathe in full attire, showing nothing more than a bit of ankle and a strip round the waist. I watched women having full soapy baths without removing a stitch, the expert slipping of soap under the layers a result of ritual and acceptance of the status quo. I can’t imagine having a bath with my clothes on, and I doubt Indian men can either, but they make their women put up with it; it’s an indication of the strength of the female spirit in India that, even during the morning wash, the women manage to retain their radiance and beauty to the shame of the dawdling and gangly men. It’s also a poignant reminder that the men don’t deserve their chauvinist domination.

After the morning rush hour the ghats calm down, for the sun has come up over the horizon and is starting to make sure that everyone knows it’s summer. The stone steps begin to heat up, the hotel rooms overlooking the river flood with sunlight, forcing the occupants to get up and open their windows, and the boats start to return their sightseeing punters back to shore. The men and some of the women disappear off to their jobs in town, and the remaining women settle down to another day of cooking, cleaning, washing, looking after the kids and catching up with the gossip from next door. People still come and wash at the ghats, and pilgrims still turn up to bathe in the healing waters of the Ganges, but until the sun has crossed the sky the biggest activity on the ghats involves catching and conning tourists, and the burning of bodies at the two burning ghats.

Come late evening the men start to drift back towards the river, now shaded from the sun by the buildings at the edge of the old city. Sitting on the steps with their portable stoves and socks stuffed with cheap tea leaves, the chai vendors make a killing as men come back from work and tarry a while before the evening meal, which is being slaved over by a hard-worked wife somewhere in the bowels of the city. At this time many people take another dip to remove the scum layer gained in the searing heat of the day, the kids jumping around as if to prove that even a long, hot day in the dusty atmosphere of the city streets isn’t enough to dent their enthusiasm for life.

Finally, as the sun goes down, the ghats have their last wind, and people come out to stroll along the promenade, to catch up on any gossip they may have missed, to have another wash and just to sit and watch the world go by. Darkness falls, the lights come on, and slowly people drift off to bed – a lot of them sleeping on the ghats themselves – before Varanasi finally falls silent, if you ignore the thousands of noisily territorial dogs that plague urban India.

The Burning Ghats

Each ghat has its function beyond being a social centre. There are over one hundred ghats in Varanasi, and while some of them are crumbling and obviously not much use beyond being somewhere convenient to take a crap, most have a specific function. Five of the ghats – Asi, Dasaswamedh, Barnasangam, Panchganga and Maikarnika – are the special ghats where Hindu pilgrims must bathe each day, in that order; other ghats are where the Muslims hang out with their little skull caps; others are used by the dhobi-wallahs to thrash the clothes they’ve got to wash, made easier by the flat rocks positioned at regular intervals just in the water; yet another is for Jain worshippers, while the ascetics hang out at the Dandi ghat, no doubt discussing how long it is since they had a good meal; the Mir ghat leads to a temple for Nepalese worshippers; and others have special powers, such as the Somewar ghat which is particularly good at healing diseases. In much the same way as some prefer the Dog and Duck over the Queen’s Head, everyone in Varanasi has their local ghat, though seeing as alcohol is banned in the central town, they have to make do with a sip of the Ganges[2].

Easily the most infamous ghats are Jalsain and Harishchandra, at least as far as westerners are concerned, for these are the burning ghats where cremations take place. Varanasi isn’t just a city with lots of ghats and temples, it’s a seriously holy place, so holy in fact that dying and having your body dumped in the Ganges here is so auspicious that it’s a guaranteed way of getting to heaven. This strikes me as one of the more bizarre aspects of Hinduism; if you can get to heaven simply by dying in Varanasi and making the correct arrangements, then why care about karma and caste and working hard all your life, why not just enjoy life and make sure you die in Varanasi?

But not everybody can afford to die in Varanasi. The wood for the cremation costs money, quite a lot of it, and I was told that if someone dies in the street, the authorities wait until people have thrown enough money onto the body before they burn it; on the other hand, I was also told that there’s a dump truck that goes around collecting dead bodies, but whatever the truth, the sleeping beggars probably get a swift kick in the ribs every now and then, just to make sure they’re still with us.

I was rather paranoid about approaching the burning ghats, not so much because of the many travellers’ tales I’d heard about cons, hassles and rip-offs there, but because I felt it was none of my business. What would you think if, just as you were standing in the graveyard watching your dearly beloved being lowered into the frozen winter soil, a bunch of yelping tourists came up and started taking pictures, saying things like, ‘That’s sick, man, check out that guy’s burning hair!’ and ‘Shit, this place stinks worse than a fuckin’ butcher’s shop!’ I didn’t want to get involved.

But it’s impossible to avoid the whole scene, and despite my misgivings, I wasn’t going to miss out on seeing such a strange sight. Jalsain is the main burning ghat[3], and as the bodies are brought in by relatives on stretchers, entirely covered in garish red and gold fabrics, the clockwork efficiency of the system seems at odds with the importance of the occasion, for being cremated and scattered in the Ganges is the Hindu equivalent of being buried in Westminster Abbey. After the relatives wash the body in the Ganges for the last time, simply by dipping the covered body in the river, it is placed on top of an orderly pile of logs by the workers (untouchables, the lowest caste of all) who neatly stack more logs on top before lighting the pyre. It doesn’t take long for the fire to catch, and at any one time you can see two or three bodies burning steadily in the river breeze, giving off a smell that’s disturbingly reminiscent of a barbecue.

A typical body takes three to four hours to burn, but there’s always something left; for a woman it’s the hips, and for a man the lower back (don’t ask me why), and these are just chucked into the river for the dogs to fight over. Meanwhile the ashes are sifted by a man called the Watchman for gold and silver, which he gets to keep, and then they’re scattered on the water (or, rather, shovelled in for the river to wash away later, as there’s so much ash). The whole process is surprisingly efficient and hygienic; after all, cremation is the cleanest way to dispose of a body.

But there’s a bit of Indian logic that makes all this cleanliness irrelevant. Not everyone is burned at the ghats, oh no. Holy cows, children less than twelve years old and pregnant women are not burned because they are already considered pure (in the latter case it’s the baby who is pure) and the whole point of the fire is to cleanse the soul on its way to heaven, so cremation isn’t needed; also, lepers and people suffering from other diseases (‘People with poisons in their body’ was how one chap referred to it) are not burned, so along with the cows, children and pregnant women they’re tied to a rock, rowed out into the middle of the river and dumped overboard.

That sounds just fine, but Indian ropes being Indian ropes, these bodies soon find their way to the surface, and due to the gentleness of the current in the non-monsoon Ganges, they can hang around for quite some time before the birds and dogs finally get to them. During this time they tend to drift over to the east bank, which probably explains why there isn’t a great deal of housing there, daily dead body delivery not being up there in the estate agent’s list of desirable attributes. Taking a boat on the river, a delightful experience especially at sunrise, is a wonderful and cheap way to enjoy the ghat area, but if you’re squeamish then you may be put off your breakfast by the floating bodies with their gaping skulls picked almost clean by the birds, and the faintly familiar rib cages stacked on the east bank.

It doesn’t seem to bother the locals, though. Despite the regular parade of dead humans and bloated cows floating past, everyone still bathes and drinks at their local ghat. On top of the obvious health issues raised by bathing with the dead, there are plenty of other hygienic faux pas, such as the man bathing ten feet from another man who’s pissing in the river, all of which is enough to make you more wary of the Ganges than you are about strangers calling you ‘friend’ and salesmen who offer you their ‘best price’. This is a shame, because the Ganges in Varanasi isn’t the mud-slicked quagmire you might expect from a river that has had to struggle its way through thousands of miles of Indians using it as a moving rubbish-dump-cum-sewer[4]; in fact it’s a pleasant deep blue, and it’s only on closer inspection you see all the rubbish collected on the banks and the human detritus piled up on the eastern side.

Ram Nagar Fort

Closer inspection was what I had in mind on my penultimate day in Varanasi. I’ve wanted to take a walk along the Ganges for some time, and not just because the Ganges is so famous; it’s surprisingly elusive for such a long river, and most of the well-known cities in India have nothing to do with it. Delhi and Agra are on the Yamuna River, Calcutta is on the Hooghly, Chennai and Mumbai are miles south of the Gangetic plains, and places like Darjeeling and Kashmir are a long way from the slow march of Mother Ganga. But it’s the Ganges that everyone associates with India, and I wanted to check it out.

Setting out from my hotel, I walked south down the west bank to the rickety pontoon bridge that spans the Ganges during the dry season. One glance and you can see why it isn’t used in the monsoon; it’s got enough holes and leaks to make it a scary proposition even if the Ganges dries up. On the other side of the bridge, over on the east bank, is the Ram Nagar Fort, and being a sucker for forts, I made straight for it as the sun began to get serious.

Inside the fort – where incidentally Queen Elizabeth stayed on her visit in 1958, when I assume the place had rather more class than it does now – is a rather sad museum containing little of merit beyond an exquisite collection of intricate ivory carvings. As I breezed past the moth-eaten clothes and decrepit dust buckets that are all that remain of the Maharaja of Benares’ transport department, I fell into conversation with a well-spoken man called Ram who hailed from Andhra Pradesh. With his shaved head (apart from a tuft at the back) and tika mark he was obviously a Hindu, and he began to explain why he was in Varanasi.

‘I have just committed the bones of my mother to the Ganges,’ he said. ‘That is why I have my head shaved; the eldest son has it done as a mark of respect.’

I offered my condolences, and asked him if being buried in the Ganges meant his mother was now in heaven.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘If a person’s bones are buried in the Ganges at Varanasi or Allahabad[5] then, as long as the bones remain in the river, that person will be in heaven. And with bones, they do not float, so he or she will remain in heaven forever.

‘Many American Hindus come here to be cremated,’ he added. ‘I suppose they can easily afford the wood, but I do wonder why so many western tourists come to Varanasi. What is the attraction for them? They are not Hindus, so it can’t be for the pilgrimage.’

I didn’t tell him that it was probably the sick attraction of watching people like his mother burn, and instead waffled on about the amazing streets of the old city, the serenity of the Ganges and the multitude of cheap hotels. The only drawback was the heat, I said, which is why the number of tourists is far less in the summer.

‘It was 49 degrees here yesterday,’ said Ram, surprising me considerably as I’d managed to cope pretty well; I initially thought he meant 39 degrees, but later I was to read about a heat wave cruising northern India, pushing the temperatures into the high forties. ‘It is very hot, but it gets hotter in Andhra Pradesh, up into the fifties. Rajasthan will be hot; it is interesting that you are going there now. What is your reaction to the nuclear tests there?’

He was referring to the underground nuclear tests that the Indian government have just carried out in the Thar Desert north of Pokaran, a move which has earned the country trade sanctions and widespread criticism but which makes the point that India is prepared to defend itself against its arch-enemy, Pakistan. I told him I thought it was crazy that such a poor country should spend money on nuclear testing, but Ram’s reaction was unexpected.

‘India is not a poor country,’ he said, ‘but the Indians are a poor people. We have much corruption and terrorism here, and places like Kashmir are particularly dangerous.’

I replied that I had found people in the south to be marginally friendlier and less likely to rip you off than in the north, but he wasn’t so sure, despite my comment being a backhanded compliment to his people.

‘In the south they will argue with you,’ he said, ‘but in the north they will just cut your throat. Be careful.’

I thanked him for his advice and we parted; and having wandered around the fort to my satisfaction, I decided to walk right across town, but this time on the east bank. I wanted to see how a city could just stop at a river and not spring up on the other side, and what I saw confirmed my earlier theory.

East Bank of the Ganges

The east bank of the Ganges is a false one; dry, cracked mud stretches for a couple of hundred metres back from the water’s edge, until it reaches a gradual rise where the vegetation can survive the monsoon without being washed out. I spent the first part of my walk in this scrubland of trees, grass and severe heat, a beautiful environment that is a total anathema to anything living.

The sun beat down on my bush hat, pushing sweat out through my clothes, down the back of my daypack and into my eyes, and it wasn’t long before I wistfully thought of Noel Coward and his uncanny accuracy. I enjoyed it though, not having had a good dry scrub walk since Australia, and when I spotted the plume of blue smoke from the main burning ghat in the distance on the other side of the Ganges, I headed towards the water to get a view of the city on the opposite bank.

Crossing the mud flats to the sand banks, I nearly stumbled into a huge sand mine, filled with trucks and men digging deep into the sand. I couldn’t help wondering how this might affect all those pious Hindus up in heaven who’d died in the monsoon and whose bones had settled in the flood plain; one assumes the workmen would chuck any bones they found into the river, but imagine how annoyed you’d be if you were suddenly plucked from paradise because someone found your femur some thirty feet down. Is nothing sacred here?

It seems not. I soon reached the east bank, which slides into the murky water without ceremony or embankment, and the first thing I noticed was the smell, the familiar stench of rotting garbage and sewage, but this time with an added twinge, a sour odour of burned meat; the burning ghats were in full swing, and the wind wasn’t doing me any favours. I remembered a body that I’d seen from a morning boat trip on the river a couple of days before – an upper half of the torso only, body still swathed and the face nothing but a cleaned skull, not hollow but not covered in flesh either – and prepared myself for the worst. I wasn’t to be disappointed.

In all I came across six or seven rotting humans washed up on the shore; the uncertainty comes from my lack of expertise in biology, as one of them could have been anything. Some were simply bones, picked clean by the local dogs (who were particularly vicious and territorial, nearly attacking me as I wandered along); others were bloated like kangaroos by the side of the Australian highway, splitting open at the seams like some failed experiment in deep sea diving; one looked like a chicken wrapped in silk, floating in the tide, until I realised it must have been a baby; another one lay askew without a head, its skull six feet away catching the lapping waves and echoing the sound of the surf through its left eye; I found myself utterly detached, the reporter doing his job, and took a few photos in much the same way that a pathologist would do. After seeing someone dying in front of my very eyes on the Nepalese highway, dead bodies are nothing to me.

Just downstream from the most disgusting corpse – all I could think of was Lennon’s line ‘Yellow matter custard/Dripping from a dead dog’s eye’ – was a young man having a wash; he even drank the water, obviously enjoying the coolness of Mother Ganga on his skin. This I found more disturbing than the rictus grins behind me, and as I wandered further north towards the railway bridge, I encountered a number of other people in the water. One pair of stalwarts were dragging a huge net along the current, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘fishers of men’; three others were peeling the hide off a stunningly rotten and pungent cow that had been floating in the river for far too long and which I’d passed on the morning boat trip two days before; women crouched in huts and brewed tea; and despite this human presence, I came across yet more decaying unfortunates who were not only no longer in heaven, they were almost certainly in hell.

Unlike the dogs, the people on the east bank, though few in number, were markedly friendlier than the inhabitants of the city. I suppose when you’re surrounded by dead rich people who have been washed up from heaven, you lose a lot of your bigotries; every day you’re reminded that we are all dust in the end, whatever our status in life. Every one of them said hello, and lots of them tried to start a conversation in Hindi (though with little success); in the city all I ever got was the usual chanting of ‘Hello friend, you want cold drink/cigarettes/hotel/massage (delete as applicable)?’ ‘Hello friend’ is an especially irritating phrase; ‘Hello mister’ is simply inane and faintly amusing, and the normal ‘Hello sir’ the Indians use is polite and fine by me, but ‘Hello friend’?

This is a country where they leave their friends bobbing on the east bank for the dogs and maggots, for goodness sake. No thanks, friend.

The Old City

Yes, the ghats are quite stunning, and make for some interesting walks. But behind every great man is a great woman, and behind the craziness of the ghats is the even more intense insanity of the old city. Like all cities that grow up steadily and totally unplanned, the old city is chaos, but it’s a different sort of chaos from the more normal traffic and population clash of India’s cities; in the old city of Varanasi the streets are seldom wider than eight feet, so there are no cars or rickshaws, and there aren’t so many people. It sounds like heaven.

But of course it’s not. You can take the cars off the streets but you can’t do anything about the cows, and with Varanasi being such a holy city, it’s packed with wandering bovines. Cows, being docile beasts and fairly slow-moving, are not much of a problem as you can slide past them pretty easily, but ‘slide’ is the operative word; where there are cows there is cow shit, and if you take the number of cows in Varanasi and think how many pats they drop in your average day, you can understand why the streets of Varanasi are coated in the stuff. It helps to keep the dust down, but it means you have to keep your head down when you’re walking, especially at night.

As well as the cows, there are millions of dogs, loads of goats, plenty of rats and countless other examples of Noah’s work kicking around the backstreets, but the animals aren’t the main obstacles when you run the old city gauntlet. Shop owners entice you into their tiny hovels with a ‘Hello, you want something?’; sadhus stutter past in dulled saffron robes, some floating on bhang and some just floating naturally; push bikes click along the cobbles as the riders get off to push them, and there’s even the odd motorcycle brave enough to slosh through the shit, even though it’s probably quicker to walk; hashish sellers saunter up with their mantra of ‘Good hash, Manali hash, best quality, cheap price,’ and when you ignore them, a hopeful ‘Maybe later, sir? I see you tomorrow?’; and always there are sights to grab the eyes, things that make all the slip-sliding worthwhile.

That is, there are if you can work out how to find them. It took me a while to find out that the worst possible way of exploring the old city is to try to use a map; some places in this world are impossible to depict on paper, and Varanasi is one of them, up there with Caen (where we would always get lost on family holidays) and the jungle paths of Taman Negara. In fact the best thing to do in Varanasi is to ditch the map in the cow dung and fish out a compass; the Ganges is always east and the Cantonment is always west, so if you get really stuck you can always head for them. I spent hours wandering round the streets, discovering beautiful mosques such as the Great Mosque of Aurangzeb, Hindu temples galore, kids playing marbles in the street, urchins showering under broken pipes in the gutter, women making offerings in tiny Siva shrines, beggars napping in the shade offered by the thin streets... the whole of Indian culture lives in the streets of the old city.

At night the place is transformed, and not just because nobody can tell what they are treading in. Frequent power cuts notwithstanding, the ill-lit arteries of the heart of the city provide you with plenty to see: peering in through a half-closed door you can see a father teaching his son the tools of his pan-making trade, the child’s eyes wide with wonder in the flickering candle light; smoke billows out of a dull red glow where large pots of milk boil and men manufacture trays of sweets, silhouetted demons sweating in a man-made inferno; a man stands in front of a statue of Ganesh, the stonework almost invisible under the thick layers of red paint smeared on it, chanting a mantra and holding smouldering incense sticks in his outstretched hands; on the steps around a chai shop men sit and chat away, their sticky glasses filled with sickly tea and their plates smeared with the remains of yet another dangerous-looking Indian snack; a shop-keeper squints through his half-moon glasses at his books by the light of a kerosene lamp, adding up figures in his head and writing down totals and stock levels with an old pen; and all the time the atmosphere of Varanasi, an indefinable feeling that permeates these ancient lanes, makes it all seem worthwhile and strangely seductive, despite the obvious squalor, smell and suffering. I challenge anybody to come to Varanasi and not be moved.

(Indeed Chris, who is on his first visit to India in the capable hands of his friend, Martina, herself visiting India for her third time and Varanasi for the second, was totally bowled over by the place. He’d loved Darjeeling and had found Delhi pretty crazy, but Varanasi really did it for him. He’ll be back, no doubt about it; one month in India is never enough.)

As for what I actually did in Varanasi, well that’s the funny thing. I did almost nothing, at least as far as traditional tourism goes. Varanasi is not a tourist haven in terms of specific sights, it’s a tourist haven in terms of sitting and watching, and I did a lot of that. After I bade farewell to Chris and Martina, who only had time for a few days in the city, I managed to change rooms to a stunning balcony location overlooking the ghats. From my basic but clean room (two mattresses on the floor, fan, light bulb and shelves) I could look out of a window each way onto the ghats, and my door opened out onto a semi-circular balcony from which I could see pretty much everything. I tried in vain to keep the local monkeys out of my bed[6], I spent whole days writing on my balcony and taking showers every two hours, I wandered up and down the ghats staring at the scenes before me, and I visited temples, mosques, forts and all the other buildings that appealed.

As if it were possible, one particular night managed to sum up Varanasi, even if it could have happened anywhere. Chris and I were sitting on the guest house roof watching the Ganges ripple past the ghats, and before we knew what was happening we heard a banging and a crashing from downstairs, and a large group of people stomped up the stairs to invade the roof. There were a few westerners and the rest were Indian, and as we sat there agog, they proceeded to practise their art, that of juggling fire. In the deep blue of night, the pale three-quarter moon rising over the river in front of us, we saw a lanky Frenchman juggling burning clubs; an Indian expert spinning a six-foot-pole with both ends lit, describing neon circles in the air; and an Australian girl creating Lissajoux patterns round her head and body with burning kerosene pads attached to the ends of two chains, one held in each hand. It was a meeting of cultures via the universal language of the circus, and the Indians and westerners chatted about tricks they’d learned, how much they had to practise and where they were next meeting up for a show.

It seemed as if the circus down in the streets below had come up to the rooftop for the night. I sat amazed as the Varanasi sky burned around me, and in the morning realised that if I had to pick one place in India to recommend to people to visit, this would be it.

[1] Ghats are stone steps leading down into a river or lake; they’re also bloody slippery, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when I saw a little boy slip over just below my hotel balcony and crack the back of his head open. The Western Ghats, with a capital G, are the hills in southern India, but ghats with no capitalisation are everywhere in India. Varanasi is probably the most famous ghat city in the country, though.

[2] Though some would suggest that the Ganges has more of a kick than alcohol – it certainly has more living matter in it than real ale.

[3] Harishchandra is smaller, but it does have an electric crematorium and a resident sadhu whose penance (for goodness only knows what) is to eat bits of flesh as they roll out of the toaster. This behaviour is accepted here; the lowest of the low jobs is to deal with cremations, so the sadhu has effectively lowered himself as low as he can, like all good penitents. It makes a change from standing on your head for 12 years or going on hunger strike, or indeed any of the other sadhu penances out there.

[4] And you can see why they do use it. On the train through Bihar, one of India’s poorest and most densely populated states, I saw children bathing in pools so stagnant that I had to look twice to determine whether or not it was water. People have to wash, and if there’s a river there, they’re going to use it. It sure beats bathing in stagnant pools.

[5] Allahabad is about 100km west of Varanasi, where the Ganges meets the Yamuna.

[6] Noticing in the process that monkeys sit exactly like Indians, crouched down on flat feet (something westerners would also do if we used squat toilets). Luckily the monkeys ended up being interesting conversationalists, even if a little too temperamental and over keen to bare their teeth and lunge, so there was no repeat of Gunung Rinjani’s unpleasantness.

Death on the Platform

Written: 20 May 1998

The City of the Dead wasn’t going to let me go easily. I had booked myself on the overnight train to Gwalior, an eight-hour journey across the dusty plains of gently sweating northern India, but when I turned up at the station, my train was nowhere to be seen.

When a train is seriously late in the West, the chances are there will at least be an announcement about it, if only to avoid recrimination from a bunch of furious commuters in angry suits. In India, however, the onus is on the passenger to work out what’s going on; the electronic board that Varanasi Junction so proudly boasts proved to be useless, proclaiming at first that the train was still leaving at 1310 (despite it already being an hour later than that), and after a while unceremoniously dropping my train from its list.

So I spent the next few hours flitting between the Inquiry counter, the Assistance booth (the difference being that the latter is useless and simply refers you to the former) and the man with The Power, the Station Master. This irritatingly fat man – perhaps a reflection of his fat pay packet – had eight phones surrounding him on his cluttered desk, one of which was red and four of which had wind-up handles on their sides. I stood amazed as he dialled on one, picked up another, barked something down yet another, and finally realised that one of the receivers, which had been off the hook from the start, was the one he wanted. It took five minutes to unravel the spiralled cords, by which time he enlightened me with the words, ‘Your train is late.’ I couldn’t thank him enough, the fuckwit.

Luckily I made friends with a couple of old Australian ladies who worked for the Tasmanian AIDS Council. They guarded my bags while I ran around trying to find the missing train, and when I eventually resigned myself to sitting under the speaker, hanging on every word the computerised announcer came out with (a technological innovation that is actually fairly useful), they proved to be excellent company.

‘Look, there’s a man asleep over there, right in the middle of the platform,’ said Connie, the elder of the two and the teller of tall tales from the African continent.

‘He’s probably dead,’ joked her companion, a veteran of Asian travel. ‘After all, it’s an auspicious place to die.’

‘I don’t think the Hindus reckon on dying in Varanasi Junction,’ I pointed out, and stood up to get yet another soft drink. On my way I passed the sleeping man and stared down at his oblivious face. It took me five seconds to notice he wasn’t breathing.

‘Is this man dead?’ I asked a well-groomed Muslim who was standing nearby, staring at the man with a look of resignation.

‘Yes,’ he replied, as if answering a question about the weather.

‘Probably waiting for the Gwalior train,’ I thought, and went for my drink.

His death surprised me; the man had only appeared there fifteen minutes before, just another person in Varanasi station lying down for a kip, and now he was stiffening up right by the Thums Up[1] stall. The top pocket of his shirt was stuffed with tickets and money, none of which was missing, and people were walking past without a blink. To all intents and purposes he was asleep, just permanently.

The status quo soon shifted when someone else noticed that he wasn’t breathing. Gradually a small crowd started to appear, all conjecturing on the state of the man but not lifting a finger to do anything; I was fleetingly reminded of Nepalese highways, but unfairly, it turned out, as a contingent of railway men came and carried him away, bent fingers trailing through the thin layer of dust on the hot station floor, flies scattering in their wake.

When my train finally pulled in some five-and-a-half hours late, I considered myself lucky to have escaped Varanasi with my life. It seems that even people who aren’t expecting it come to Varanasi to die.

[1] One of my biggest worries about returning home isn’t the job market or the drudgery of the lifestyle; it’s the expense of soft drinks. Due to the searing heat I have developed quite an attachment to Coke, Mirinda, Thums Up and the rest of the gang, and I sure am gonna miss ’em. Of course the weather in England isn’t quite as thirst-inducing as in India, but I’ve got a taste for fizz and it’s going to be hard to resist. I’d better get a SodaStream...

Air Coolers

Written: 22 May 1998

One of the delights of the cheap Indian hotel is the air cooler. Much more rudimentary and therefore much more cost-effective than freon-based air conditioning, air coolers are to room cooling systems what holes in the ground are to toilets: they’re simple but effective.

In its simplest form an air cooler is just a large box with a fan on the front face, which pulls air into the box through the other three vertical sides and pushes it out of the front. The bottom is filled with water that is pumped into the top to trickle down the three remaining vertical sides, which are normally covered in a twisted plastic matting material to give maximum surface area. It’s simple: hot air is sucked into the box and passes through the trickling water, which cools it down. It works too.

The only disadvantages are the noise level (as the air needs to be sucked pretty quickly to be cooled effectively) and an increase in humidity (as the air blown out is pretty wet). But air cooling has saved my life in this heat wave that’s sweeping India, killing people with dehydration and sunstroke. It might be hot on the streets, but it’s cool inside...

Gwalior

Written: 23 May 1998

When other travellers find out that I’m planning to explore Rajasthan and Gujarat in June and July, there’s a collective sucking in of breath. The reason? The heat.

Heat sounds pretty tame on paper. ‘It will be 41°C today,’ reads the forecast and it’s just a number, but the reality is something else. The heat in pre-monsoonal India has to be felt to be believed.

My Gwalior-bound train finally pulled into town six hours late – not a bad effort by the driver, who managed to keep the train running at the right speed despite it being out of sync with the rest of India’s huge timetable – but by the time it screeched to a halt, the cabin was absolutely steaming. The seats were a burning sticky plastic, the metal struts supporting the berths were a searing and untouchable temperature, and the air was so stifling it was actually cooler to close the windows and prevent the hot country air from coming inside rather than suffer the furnace-like breeze. I made friends with a couple of young Indian blokes called Alok and Pavan[1] who helped me while away a journey made harder by a head cold and a slight temperature, and when I finally alighted I made straight for the nearest hotel, where I stood under the shower for a good half an hour.

The hotel turned out to be amazingly noisy but utterly redeemed by its position right over the local Indian Coffee House. In much the same way that McDonald’s is a homely sight when you’re stuck in the middle of a totally alien city, the Indian Coffee House is a guaranteed winner; their masala dosas have to be the best breakfast I’ve ever come across, and their coffee is so good I have to cram it all in before midday if I want any chance of a good night’s sleep. The traffic noise shook the walls of my room – which, incidentally, were almost too hot to touch, seeing as my thermometer reported the temperature inside the room as 41°C – but I had earplugs and a full belly, so I survived.

Gwalior Fort

Gwalior’s main attraction is its fortress, and what an attraction it is. Up there with Mandu, Bijapur and Golconda for beautiful Islamic atmospherics, Gwalior Fort dominates the town completely. Houses lie compressed at the foot of the steep 300 ft cliffs that make up the citadel; it’s a little like a smaller Mandu with a city at its feet. I struck out to explore the area early on Friday morning.

The heat soon made itself quite unbearable, but I’d stocked up with plenty of water, and I wandered along the city streets in the shade of a bright magenta reflective umbrella that I bought in Calcutta, but which has only really come into its own in the blistering heat of the pre-monsoon. Gwalior is only a two-hour train ride from Agra (one of the most touristy places in India) but it might as well be on the moon for all the effect westernisation has had. It was all smiles and friendliness as I sweltered my way first to the locked southern gate (where I found some impressive Ellora-esque Jain carvings) and then to the long, winding road that leads to the northeast gate. Kids shouted out, ‘Hello, how are you?’ and ran up to shake my hand, men cracked into smiles when they saw me grinning like a cat, and even the women broke down a social barrier or two to say good morning. Hardly anybody maintained a stare, and if they did it was obviously because they were freaked out by the sight of a crazy white man heading off into the 40-degree-plus midday sun with nothing but a flimsy umbrella – a perfectly understandable reaction.

Reaching the fort after a long, hard ascent, I gratefully snuck into the airy spaces of the palaces and barracks that still stand guard over the city (though the only soldiers you’ll see these days are those on day trips from the nearby garrisons). The buildings on the fort don’t all date from one period, but the ones I enjoyed the most were, predictably, from the Mughal period, with their Islamic designs and wonderful silhouettes. The biggest building, the Man Singh Palace, still has quite a bit of colour left on it, with dashes of yellow and blue tiles that would have been quite magical when new; all that remains now are hints of mosaics, though one area obviously used to be plastered with yellow ducks on a blue background, which seems more suited to a bathroom than a fortress.

I climbed up the crumbling stairs to the roof and sat down in the shade of a lone pavilion, the perfect place for keeping watch on the plains below for the tell-tale sign of an invading dust plume; here the midday sun was directly above me, but with a stiff westerly breeze burning through the pavilion, it wasn’t at all uncomfortable. I could see Gwalior town surrounding the fort complex, which contained the striking white spires of a modern Sikh gurdwara (the name for a Sikh temple), the Konark-esque twin Hindu Sasbahu Temples (dating from the 9th to 11th centuries) and the gopuram-based Teli Ka Mandir. And then I hopped down and walked round them all...

George of Gwalior

Suitably drained by my exploration of Gwalior’s magnificent fortress, I decided to spend the afternoon indoors, preferably somewhere with air conditioning or at least some fans; the Jai Vilas Palace and Museum fitted the bill perfectly. The residence of the Maharaja of Gwalior – who still lives there, although he’s converted most of his little shack into a museum – the palace is at once everything that was majestic about the Maharajas, and everything that was sickeningly decadent.

It’s obvious from the first moment you arrive. The entrance fee is an extortionate Rs100, well over the price of any other entrance fee I’ve had to pay in India, and on stepping inside it’s obvious why; faced with the unearthly cost of maintaining such a huge palace without the usual income from bullying peasants and blackmailing politicians, the aristocracy of Gwalior is clearly trying to bleed the public by legitimate means.

The Maharaja is a fat little man, as is the custom for rich Indians. Right from the first room there’s an unmistakable air of Kipling and Empire about the place, and indeed, the first thing you notice is a big, framed sign pinned on the wall listing the Maharaja’s full name, titles and all. Although I doubt this is the case, I like to think that he’s known as George to his mates, because his full title is – deep breath! – His Highness Maharaja Mukhtar-ul-Mulk, Azim-ul-Iqtidar, Rafi-ush-Shan, Wala Shikoh, Mohtasham-i-Dauran, Umdat-ul-Umara, Maharajadhiraja Alijah Hisam-us-Saltanat, Honorary Lieutenant General Sir George Jiwaji Rao Scindia Bahadur Shrinath Mansur-i-Zaman, Fidwi-i-Hazrat Malik-i-Muazzam-i-Rafi-ud-Darjat-i-Inglistan GCIS Maharaja of Gwalior. Anyone with a name like this must be slightly insane from birth, and the museum proves that not only is George insane, he’s also got impeccably bad taste.

The museum is divided up into a number of areas, each of which deals with a particular subject. Some areas are large, reflecting a subject close to George’s heart, and other areas are small, probably denoting a collection that George bought one drunken day after too many brandies and a run of successful bets on the gee-gees. For example, the euphemistically named ‘Natural History Museum’ contains a selection of animals that George and his ancestors have killed over the years, including large numbers of tigers, rhinos, leopards, crocodiles, deer, ducks, mongooses (complete with snakes), buffalos, antelopes, gazelles and, strangely enough, parrots. These are all stuffed and mounted in snapshot poses, the tigers looking mean and ready to pounce as if to underline George’s bravery in facing up to the monsters. Littering the walls are pictures of George with various other fat, rich men – including the occasional sovereign of England – all posing over prostrate carcasses and staring into the middle distance as people tended to do back in the days of primitive photography.

The rest of the museum is along similar lines. Some collections are so tacky you wonder who on earth would buy them, until you remember that George is an Indian; he obviously has a soft spot for awful watercolours with titles like ‘Her first love letter’ and ‘Joyous spring’, which celebrate a time of innocence and perfection in lovelorn Victorian England, and some of the furniture he has is simply beyond belief, such as the Italian cut-glass swing that’s proudly gathering dust in a little-visited corner of his mansion. Rounding up the rest are the Arms Gallery, which is full of big swords and guns; the Archaeological Gallery, where George seems to have stashed half of India’s Hindu stone carvings; the vehicles section, with its six litters and 14 carriages; rooms and rooms of furniture from various periods; the tapestry and rug section (which defines the term moth-eaten quite succinctly); an excellent collection of Mughal and Hindu miniature paintings; some rope from the construction of the Pyramids; a nondescript clothing section; a small and well-hidden room of erotic art, of which the only faintly erotic piece is a marble statue of a woman in cahoots with a swan; a room full of etchings from the Indian Mutiny which are exceptionally pro-British; a collection of old Urdu and Hindu manuscripts; some wonderful ivory carvings; some far from wonderful models of buildings; a Chinese gallery; and various other oddities too irrelevant to mention. To say that George’s collection is eclectic is to overstate the obvious.

All this interested me, but the best is saved until last. At the far end of the mansion are two huge rooms, one above the other, that manage to encapsulate the pomposity of the aristocracy and serve to point out that as institutions get bloated to the point of self-parody, they must surely come tumbling down. The small part of me that always wanted to go to Oxford thrilled at the sight; the rest of me wanted to scream.

The downstairs Banquet Hall is huge, with three long tables disappearing off into the distance. Lining each side of the tables I counted 24 chairs, so each table seats some 48 people; with one more at each end that’s 50 per table, giving 150 people per banquet. This isn’t so unbelievable, until you look at the splendour of each place setting, but what is beyond the pale is the train set that sits on the middle table. Looping round the perimeter of the tablecloth, the train, a silver locomotive with ‘SCANDIA’ embossed on the side, pulls four cut-glass decanters of brandy and three cut-glass bowls of cigars, so if one wants a top up one simply has to wait for the next arrival... and unlike Indian Railways, the George Express always arrives on time.

As if this isn’t opulent enough, the upstairs Durbar Hall, a huge lounge, is monstrous. The walls are white and gold with a massively arched ceiling (the gold paint used in this room is said to have weighed 58kg), and tables and chairs litter the floor like a posh hotel foyer; but the eye is not drawn by this comfortable luxury, but by the two huge chandeliers that dominate the space. Each chandelier is 12.5m high (41 feet), weighs 3.5 tonnes and carries 248 candles (or bulbs these days); when the room was constructed the engineers hung elephants from the hooks to check that they would take the weight of the chandeliers. Along with all the other lights in the room I estimated there must be some 750 candle holders in all, which must have been a nightmare for the poor soul who was in charge of keeping them alight.

It all manages to make living out of a suitcase look particularly attractive, to be honest.

Political Romp

As if this pomp and circumstance wasn’t enough to make me feel like a downtrodden member of the proletariat, when I got back to my hotel there was a right royal ruckus going on in the railway station. A band was playing, fireworks were exploding and people were milling about, so after dumping my bag, I shot straight back out for a look.

Arriving by train was a new government minister; the recently elected BJP government has just had a cabinet reshuffle, and one of the new faces is the MP from Gwalior, hence the jubilation. The old boy was coming home for a bit of a shindig.

I hung around, camera in hand, taking pictures of the band and the dancers, but when the locals saw me and my bush hat, they pulled me over and brought me right to the man himself. I didn’t really know what to do – after all, I had no idea who this guy was, he could have been the bleeding Prime Minister for all I knew – so I snapped a couple of shots of him in the name of world peace, said thanks as he posed dutifully, and went off to try to discover who had just filled up two shots of my new film. Nobody at the hotel seemed to know, or care; ‘Some kind of minister, I think,’ was all I managed to get, but at least I can now say I’ve met a genuine Indian politician.

That night I’d arranged to meet Pavan, the friend I’d made on the train. He rang to say he’d be a little late – which was good of him, as in India one expects everything to be late by default and without prior warning – so I lounged in the heat on my balcony, overlooking the fumes of east Gwalior. As I dozed off – owing to a cough mixture I’d bought that managed to knock me out cold, despite a total lack of warning on the bottle – I dreamed of flashing lights and loud, raucous music, and before you know it there it was, right in front of me: dancing, music, neon lights and a fat man on a horse with a servant holding an umbrella over his head. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, and sure enough I wasn’t dreaming; a parade of glitzy noise pollution was celebrating its way along the road in front of my hotel, stopping every few yards to have a dance and wake up the neighbours. On their heads women carried strip-lights stuck in pots, Indian men danced their hip-swinging grooves to loud band music, and a group of beautifully turned-out women stood behind, coyly glancing around. People waved up to me and wanted me to join in, but luckily Pavan turned up to rescue me in time.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself in the vegetarian restaurant across the road. Pavan had brought along his cousin Kamal and his friend Sham[2], and we spent the night exchanging cultural insights and religious concepts. Being Jains, they were an interesting bunch, not least because of their rules (strict vegetarianism, no garlic, no onions, no milk and so on; strict Jain priests even cover their mouths to prevent them from swallowing insects). The meal ended and, as is the Indian way, we didn’t sit around chatting, but instead went straight off on our separate ways. Sometimes, after a hard day, that’s the best way of all.

[1] Which mean, in Hindi, Light and Air respectively. When westerners give their kids crazy names – like Moon Unit (Frank Zappa’s daughter), Zowie Bowie (David Bowie’s son), or Peaches, Pixie and Fifi Trixibelle (Bob Geldof and Paula Yates’ daughters) – they tend to be regarded by the populace as having taken far too many drugs. India, on the other hand, is full of people called Moon, Mountain, Monsoon and so on; it’s just that hardly anybody in the West speaks Hindi, so we don’t notice. Yet again the Indians were ahead of the hippies by generations. Good for them.

[2] That’s Lotus and Black to you and me.

Agra

Written: 25 May 1998

I prepared for my arrival in Agra by clamming up and refusing to budge when the touts descended. In the event it was fine; the city’s legendary hassle factor was obviously too exhausted to brave the scorching temperatures.

Sure, the rickshaw man tried to charge me Rs30 from the station to the hotel area, though I won that argument because I knew the price was fixed at Rs15 for all rickshaws; and I made sure he dropped me off at a different hotel to the one I wanted to stay in, to avoid the scam where rickshaw drivers tell the hotel owners that it was their idea to bring you to the hotel and claim a commission that they don’t deserve (and which gets added to your bill). But that was it; sure, the shopkeepers all pleaded with me to visit their shops, and I politely refused, but the touts didn’t appear to be too bad. ‘Travelling in the off-season has its advantages,’ I thought to myself, though I didn’t realise they were simply lying in wait, waiting for me to drop my defences...

You’d never have believed it was the off-season, judging by the masses sprawling round the Taj Mahal. I arrived on a Saturday, so it was bound to be full, but even so it surprised me to see so many Indian tourists posing for photographs and wanting to include me too. I popped into the Taj for a quick look soon after I arrived, and only saw four other westerners, two of whom were friendly hippies and two of whom seemed to be having a comparatively miserable time. But it takes a lot more than crowds of tourists and unhappy westerners to spoil something like this.

I mean, it’s the Taj Mahal! It’s up there with the Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Houses of Parliament, but in one aspect it’s so much more emotive than any of these, because it was built for love. The Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631 during childbirth; heartbroken, the Emperor commissioned the construction of a huge monument which took from 1631 to 1653 to build, requiring 20,000 workers to create. The Emperor, who was later deposed by his son Aurangzeb and spent the rest of his life locked up in Agra Fort staring out at his creation, is buried under the Taj, next to his beloved wife.

Even without such a tragi-romantic story behind it, the Taj would be perfect. Its symmetry is legendary, its white marble is brilliantly reflective and the intricacy of the work on the walls is incredible; everywhere you look the marble is inlaid with semi-precious stones, forming patterns of flowers and curlicues that offset the Arabic script arching over the entrances. Inside it is cool but surprisingly light, and the acoustics are not dissimilar to those of the Golcumbaz in Bijapur, though with the maelstrom of the crowds you’re lucky to leave the mausoleum with your hearing intact, let alone able to detect echoes.

The Taj doesn’t stand alone, either. The tourist mobs rush in at the southern end of the park, snap themselves posing with the Taj in the background, walk up the garden paths to the Taj itself, snap themselves looking serious in the throng gathered round the doorway, enter, clap, scream and yell, and then go home. Nobody bothers with the flanking buildings, which makes them rather pleasant.

On each side of the searing white Taj is a red sandstone mosque; these two are mirror images of each other, although only the left one is actually used as a mosque (as the other faces the wrong way). Opposite the Taj’s main entrance, at the other end of the long ornamental garden that features in everyone’s photos, is the original entrance (through which you now exit), and lining the path between the two is a beautiful waterway in which you can see the Taj reflected, assuming it’s actually got water in it. All I got were brown leaves, but that’s only to be expected at a time of year when droughts and heat waves take centre stage.

But when all is said and done, the Taj Mahal is the Taj Mahal, and that’s why everyone’s here. It’s one of the most stunning buildings in the world, but on my first visit I felt a little underwhelmed; I’d been more moved by the lonely tombs of Bijapur, or the far pavilions of Mandu, each of which sums up the stark beauty of the Mughal Empire better than the honeymoon sweetness of the Taj. Perhaps a lifetime’s exposure to the image of the Taj Mahal manages to eradicate the element of surprise; in Australia, I’d been surprised when Uluru (Ayers Rock) turned out to be completely unlike its public image, but the Taj was exactly what I expected: I expected it to be stunning, and stunning it was, but somehow that wasn’t enough. The Taj seemed to have no mystery, and I vowed to come back at dawn the next day to see if the silence of sunrise could capture the atmosphere that I found so powerful in the less well-known Islamic monuments.

Early Morning Taj Mahal

In the end it wasn’t exactly a silence, and the gates didn’t open until 6am, well after sunrise, but the difference was staggering. Almost exclusively peopled by white tourists, the noise level inside and around the marble walls was negligible; in fact, the noisiest people were the Indian guides, who seem to have mastered the nasal whines of the railway chai men in order to cut through the background noise of modern India. The westerners milling around were, in general, quiet and courteous, even if some of them did look like they had forgotten to put their clothes on when they got up, and if only more of them had smiled I might even have liked them. Instead I wanted to shout, ‘Look around! It’s amazing! Why aren’t you happy?’

But I kept quiet, and this enabled me to test out the acoustics inside the mausoleum. They are truly wonderful; whereas the Golcumbaz echoes your noises back to you ten times, the Taj just perpetuates the sound, not so much as an echo but more as a reverberation. It goes on for seconds, turning a talking voice into a drone of feedback and the muezzin’s call into a marvel of tonal purity. Back in Melbourne, many moons ago, I discovered an album in Chris’s record collection that was recorded inside the Taj; it was a recording made in 1968 by Paul Horn, a flute player, who managed to sneak into the Taj at night with his flute, a tape recorder and, presumably, some judicious use of baksheesh. When I first listened to it, I thought the concept was gloriously exotic and wonderfully flower-power, but that morning in the echoing dome, it suddenly seemed very real, as whispering voices bounced off the domed ceiling.

The reason for the lack of early morning Indians and the resulting lack of noise is the entry-price policy. During the day the entry price is Rs15, an astounding deal to see one of the world’s greatest monuments; but for an hour-and-a-half at dawn and a couple of hours at sunset the entry price soars to Rs105, which is still a reasonable amount by western standards, but which is high enough to dissuade the masses (as was obvious when the price went down at 7.30am and the crowds piled in, shattering the peace and the contemplative atmosphere of the place). The ethics of such a policy are debatable, but there’s no doubt it’s very pleasant to be able to enjoy a more peaceful Taj than during the daytime scramble.

Indeed, I saw the policy of dissuasion in action. When I finally tracked down the ticket office through my insomniac muddle, there was a young Indian couple ahead of me, with the man speaking loudly in a complaining voice. He obviously hadn’t known there was a price difference, and was mouthing off to the ticket man in English about how you fuckers aren’t getting my money that easily and it’s disgusting what you fuckers have done – his English was pretty strong, especially in the vernacular. He refused to pay, and as he turned around to go he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t fall for this scam, it’s disgusting, they want 105 rupees before 7.30, then it’s 15, the fuckers.’ Grabbing behind him, he took a long swig from a half-empty 650ml beer bottle, breathed the fumes into my face and strolled off, dragging his sour-faced girlfriend with him.

I didn’t tell him that not only was I going to pay, I was glad to do so if it meant not having to share the Taj with him and his bottle; he was moaning about the cost of maybe two beers, and it was obvious that he wasn’t exactly poor. Sometimes the middle class in developing countries gets on my nerves; places like China, Sri Lanka and Nepal charge you the equivalent of hundreds of rupees for each monument, whatever the time of day, and sometimes I wonder if rich Indians realise how lucky they are.

So how was the Taj, after all that? It was infinitely better with fewer tourists (of course), but still not the earth-shattering experience that I’d hoped for; as with Uluru, I purposely kept my expectations low, but unlike Uluru, the Taj was everything I’d presumed it would be, but no more. It is stunningly beautiful, ravaged by tourists, eminently photogenic and definitely worth visiting at different times of the day; much like Uluru, it changes colour as the sun washes over the sky, and despite Agra’s appalling pollution, it is still radiant (though possibly not for much longer if the air quality doesn’t improve drastically). As a monument to love it is unique, though its use as a photographic background for newlyweds is somewhat clichéd.

It’s just missing that little something... perhaps a sense of mystery, or the joy associated with discovering something that few others know about. I suppose that’s the price you pay for having your photograph splashed across the covers of fifty per cent of books about India.

Exploring the Rest of Agra

I had planned to spend a total of three days in Agra, but after a hot second day avoiding the touts and visiting the city’s other main attraction, Agra Fort – a ‘must’ according to my guidebook – I decided that Agra was no longer worthy of my patronage. The hassle from the local businessmen, who had woken up since my relatively quiet arrival, was starting to drive me nuts, and India is full of places that are infinitely more interesting and infinitely more friendly.

It didn’t help that I found Agra Fort to be fairly disappointing. It’s more of a palace with fortress walls than a proper fort, and it’s not high up, looking down on the city, but is at street level on the banks of the River Yamuna; my favourite fortresses have great views and a barren beauty, but Agra Fort has neither. To be fair the most beautiful part of the fort, the Moti Masjid, isn’t open to the public, but neither are the underground dungeons, fortress walls, northern buildings or any of the roofs. Add in the crowds of jostling Indian tourists and it’s only just worth the effort; I’ve seen more impressive fortresses and more beautiful palaces, and without hordes of tourists too.

I will remember Agra Fort for one thing, though, and that’s the gang of touts who hang around at the bridge to the entrance. Agra’s hassle factor is definitely higher than normal, which isn’t a surprise when you consider how much of a tourist attraction it is, but the difference isn’t so much in the amount of attention, which you get everywhere in India, but in the way the touts operate. They’re just plain annoying and they don’t give up, even if it’s blindingly obvious that you don’t want that leather whip or wooden travel backgammon set. In the off-season they’re particularly desperate, and it’s almost embarrassing the way they beg you to buy from them.

In fact, when I capitulated and bought a bottle of water from one of the stalls, I handed over ten rupees – it was only eight rupees per bottle near my hotel – but the man wanted 12 rupees, which is actually the standard price for water. I’d been fired up by the touts though, and decided that I’d make him suffer instead, refusing to budge from ten rupees. My stubbornness earned me what the Indian thought was the ultimate insult, ‘Are you Israeli?’ referring to the Israelis’ legendary bargaining aggression and stubbornness; realising he wasn’t going to give in and that perhaps I’d overstepped the mark, I immediately coughed up two more rupees and moved on, slightly annoyed with myself that I was losing my cool because of the touts’ never-ending aggression.

On my way out of Agra Fort things got worse. One particular tout simply wouldn’t let go.

‘Hey friend, you want marble box?’

‘No.’

‘Just twenty-five rupees.’

‘No.’

‘Beautiful inlay stones, lovely box, look.’

‘No.’

‘Okay, twenty rupees.’

‘No.’

‘Marble box, like Taj Mahal, see.’

‘No.’

‘It opens, look. Fifteen rupees.’

‘No.’

‘Just looking, friend.’

‘No.’

‘Fifteen rupees, very good price, how many you take?’

‘No.’

‘I have others too, but this one very cheap price. Ten rupees.’

‘No.’

‘Ten rupees, my final offer.’

‘No.’

‘Ten rupees, please sir, please buy one box ten rupees only, please.’

‘No.’

‘Is very cheap, only ten rupees. Yes?’

‘No.’

‘Please baba...’

He only let me go because he was crushed out of the way by the woman selling leather whips (‘Leather? But you’re a Hindu!’ I said; ‘Very cheap,’ she said, ‘very good quality’) and the man with the wooden travel backgammon set (‘I also have chess set, baba’). Then the rickshaw drivers closed in, and I managed to duck out of one corner and make off down the road, while a collection of drooling and rabid touts continued to hassle what was by now an empty space.

That afternoon I made plans to get out. I’d seen the Taj, done the fort and realised that if India has an ugly side, it’s Agra.

Leaving Agra

I escaped from Agra the following day, but only after another typical tout extravaganza. The standard rickshaw price from my hotel to the bus terminal should have been Rs15 but the rickshaw-wallahs were insisting on Rs30, and although the price difference was pathetic in real terms, I felt aggrieved enough by the whole Agra scene to stand my ground. I haggled mercilessly, and eventually got it down to Rs25, hardly a victory, but something at least.

But then I discovered I could get the standard rate of Rs15 if I stopped at a shop on the way where the rickshaw driver would get a commission. ‘I’m not buying anything, though,’ I said, ‘so you won’t get any money.’

‘Yes I will,’ said the rickshaw man. ‘I get 25 rupees for every tourist I bring, even if they buy nothing.’

‘OK then, how about this,’ I said, deciding to try to get one back on the touts. ‘We go to a shop and split the commission, ten rupees for me, 15 for you, so I get to go to the station for five rupees, don’t have to buy anything, and the only person who loses is the stupid shop who pays commission to rickshaw-wallahs. Deal?’

He was cagey, but he would have agreed if I’d pushed him; I however had only been winding him up and had no intention of hanging round in a shop pretending to be interested in cheap marble carvings and tacky carpets, so I ended up paying the Rs25 fee for an uninterrupted journey to the bus. It made me understand a bit more about why Agra is such a pit, though; it’s full of people who simply want your money.

I mentioned this to the rickshaw-wallah’s boss, who had joined me in the rickshaw. He’d asked me whether I liked Agra, and I told him precisely what I thought, and he sadly agreed. ‘We are not all bad,’ he said, and I said that, to be honest, the people I’d met away from the Taj and fort had been fine. But that wasn’t the point; the touts in those areas more than made up for the smiles of the rest of the city’s population.

‘You will find the same in Jaipur,’ he said, referring to the capital of Rajasthan, where I would be heading in a few days. ‘They are very bad there too. Better you go to Gujarat, where the people are very friendly.’

I thanked him, got on the bus and whistled off to Fatehpur Sikri, an hour’s jostling bus ride away, where I was praying the touts would give it a rest. Some chance...

Fatehpur Sikri

Written: 26 May 1998

This popular day-trip destination between Agra and Jaipur is a complete contrast to the Taj Mahal; it’s a deserted city, and I absolutely loved it. Eventually.

When I read about this huge deserted city in the middle of nowhere, I pictured windswept desolation, an area of wonderful sunsets and ancient histories, a landscape of lonely citadels and cobwebbed mosques; but what I entered when I stepped off the bus was the Indian equivalent of an English seaside town in the winter, and like the English seaside in the winter, it looked like it was going to be a thoroughly depressing experience. I found myself wondering how the ruins were going to make up for the town around me, and I was more than a little concerned.

With the mercury touching the upper forties, tourists were staying away in their droves. This meant the desperation of Agra’s touts had infected the local guides, who were so eager to enlist my employment that they practically begged me for my money. I was hot, tired and unimpressed by both my hotel and the lame excuses for restaurants lining the streets, but eventually I tracked down a guide who spoke good English and who didn’t seem too pushy; the only problem was that he didn’t have a licence (‘It’s being renewed,’ he claimed), but after he promised that he could still enter the complex because everyone knew he was an official guide, I said I’d take him but he wouldn’t get one rupee if he wasn’t the best bloody guide in Fatehpur Sikri. He said I wouldn’t be disappointed. I said I’d better not be.

Of course, I was. There’s a Chinese saying, ‘We can always fool a foreigner,’ and I think that the guides in Fatehpur Sikri might have adopted it as their motto; it turned out that my guide had lied about being able to get into the whole complex, had lied about having ever been a guide, and had lied about there being no shade in the ruins (which was a major reason why I’d waited until 4pm to set off exploring, when I could have easily gone in the midday sun and relaxed in the cool shadows). I was pretty annoyed; it’s indicative of the awful nature of northern India’s tourist traps that the man was blatantly lying and knew he would be found out, but he still went on with the scam. He clearly couldn’t care less. But I could; he’d wasted my precious time.

So I ditched him and gave him Rs20 for the tour he had given me of the Jama Masjid (the mosque part of the old city that is still in use, and is freely enterable by anyone), telling him when he asked for more that he was lucky I’d given him anything at all, the lying toad.

Keeping my eyes dead ahead to make sure I didn’t attract the unwanted attention of any other guides, I went off on my own into the real ruins, and that’s when I realised that a guide was not only unnecessary, it was a downright disadvantage; old Fatehpur Sikri’s beauty lies in its silences, its hidden nooks and crannies, its feeling of Marie Celeste desertion. It has to be one of the most incredible sights I have ever witnessed.

When it was built, Fatehpur Sikri was the capital of the Mughal Empire. The Emperor Akbar started construction in 1569; he was childless and, having tried all sorts of solutions to his plight, he ended up visiting a Sufi saint, Sheikh Salim Chishti, for help. Soon a son was born and, impressed and overjoyed, he started building on the site where he met the saint. Fatehpur Sikri then became the capital of Mughal India between 1570 and 1585.

But things didn’t work out and, owing to a serious problem with the city’s water supply, the Mughals simply left Fatehpur Sikri after just 15 years and moved to Agra, where they built the fort and later the Taj Mahal. Meanwhile Fatehpur Sikri stood untouched, a complete mediaeval city of red sandstone that was left pretty much uninhabited.

The old town is still pretty much uninhabited and it’s simply marvellous. Fortresses are one thing, but Fatehpur Sikri has everything from huge central squares and exquisitely carved multi-tiered pavilions to precise gardens and amazingly detailed stone latticework, and everything is still immaculate. Wandering round the city with hardly anyone else in sight makes you feel as if you’ve been shrunk and placed into an architectural model; there’s no litter, no pollution, no animal life, no people and no hassle. The trees are perfect and regularly positioned; the buildings have divine symmetry; birds flock from spire to spire, outlined against the pale blue sky; high-domed ceilings cover cool terraces, overlooking the decidedly Romanesque central forum; and throughout it all you can picture the inhabitants living their everyday lives. I couldn’t get enough; having marvelled at the Islamic brilliance of various defensive structures throughout the realm, I was finally exploring the place where the architects lived. I felt I could have lived there myself.

Though as I watched the sun setting over the forum I was rudely reminded of where I was, not the reserved Middle East or strict Pakistan, but India. I spent the dying embers taking photos for an Indian man and his mother as they posed with typical solemnity in front of the various buildings. I couldn’t refuse, but I couldn’t help thinking that even in this show of politeness, I was being used. If anything sums up my experience so far northern India, it’s that feeling.

Later that night, the locals of Fatehpur redeemed themselves when I came across a group of them gathered round a camel. It had fallen down a sloping ditch and couldn’t get up, and they were trying to push it out. They enlisted my help, thoroughly entrancing me with their friendliness and willingness to incorporate a total foreigner into the carnival event of shifting a braying camel onto the road. I guess it’s just impossible to generalise about the people of India... though after Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, I know what I think about touts and guides, and it isn’t pretty.

Service Station Hell

Written: 26 May 1998

To get anything resembling a decent meal in depressing off-season Fatehpur Sikri, I had to walk some three kilometres out of town, beyond the old city walls. It wasn’t long before I found myself in the bowels of hell.

Indian service stations – for that is where I found the restaurant – are utterly demonic. Of course, ‘service station’ is a western term and is purely euphemistic when applied to India; there’s lots of servicing going on, but precious little station. Lining the dirty streets are garish Indian Tata trucks (the Tata company is India’s biggest local manufacturer of vehicles, among other things), painted with Sivas and lingams and beautiful country scenes that scarcely bear any relation to the heaving rust buckets they adorn; perhaps the scenes are there to remind the driver precisely what it is his truck is systematically destroying. These trucks aren’t as big as western lorries, but their sheer numbers make up for their lack of size and besides, the Indians manage to pack so much into them that they probably manage to carry as much as Australian road trains.

In an Indian service station the concept of a ramp for servicing vehicles is totally alien. Trucks with missing wheels are propped up on piles of stones; sump oil is drained onto the street where it collects in black, dangerous-looking puddles that even the cows won’t drink; engines are tested regularly, revved up to high speeds while they churn big clouds of noxious fumes out into the street (Indian trucks have their exhaust pipes out of the side, so if one passes you while you’re walking, prepare for black trousers); meanwhile truckers try to catch some sleep in their cramped cabs, somehow managing to ignore the hellish clanging going on all around. It’s a 24-hour event and at night the whole scene, only lit by headlights and the occasional fire, takes on an unearthly air as men walking in front of headlights cast huge shadows in the fume-filled air.

I walked the gauntlet and, to my amazement, found the restaurant I was looking for to be very good. Sure, the power died every five minutes and the beer wasn’t cold, but the food was excellent. But as I walked back, the beer pleasantly numbing my senses, I thought back to my experiences around the ruined city and vowed to leave early in the morning, never to return. Old Fatehpur Sikri is paradise; new Fatehpur Sikri is hell.

India: Rajasthan

Jaipur

Written: 28 May 1998

After a journey from Fatehpur Sikri that is best forgotten, I arrived in Jaipur. Like other cities in this part of India, Jaipur has a bad reputation for its rickshaw mafia, who will refuse to take you anywhere unless there’s a commission involved, but I managed to avoid this by getting dropped off at the main post office, ignoring the driver’s hotel recommendations and finding my own place.

I spent the rest of the day relaxing in the grounds of my hotel, the Evergreen, and trying to recover from yet another bout of bad guts. Overwhelmingly western in its clientele, the Evergreen seems to be a collecting point for all the weirdoes and freaks of the Rajasthan trail: dirty dreadlocks mingle with tattoos on bodies covered only by flimsy sarongs; ears display more rings than Saturn; and the talk round the breakfast table is of last night’s acid binge and how fucked up everyone was before they went to bed (and this below the sign declaring that drugs are not tolerated). I didn’t find it threatening, but it was a bit of a surprise to see such a large collection of alternative lifestylers in one place; it felt a little like Glastonbury, but without the dogs on string.

Having evacuated my unwell intestines as far as possible, I decided to tackle Jaipur. Fully aware that it is unfair to criticise a city when you’re feeling under the weather (which was itself a major concern, the heat wave continuing unabated) I went in with an open mind, and I didn’t find it as bad as I’d imagined it might be after the stresses of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. But then again I hardly left myself open for the average con man; I think I’m developing a pretty thick skin.

The Sights of Jaipur

Jaipur is a shopper’s paradise, which rules me out; given the choice between shopping for souvenirs and watching paint dry, I’d go for the paint because it’s less tiring. But that’s where Jaipur’s main tout scene hangs out, enticing tourists into carpet emporiums, jewellery shops and clothes stalls, and I simply clammed up whenever anybody mentioned buying anything. I also avoided the rickshaws and walked everywhere, mainly for the practical reason that a jittery ride in a three-wheel nightmare would have stirred up a tender colon that didn’t need any more excitement, so I found Jaipur fairly pleasant as far as the legendary touts went.

It still isn’t the most wonderful place I’ve been, but the sights are worth stopping off for, seeing as Jaipur is en route south; I wouldn’t go out of my way for them, though. Top of the heap is the Jantar Mantar, an odd collection of huge astronomical instruments built in stone by the founder of Jaipur, Maharaja Swai Jai Singh, from 1728 onwards. It’s reminiscent of those wonderful paintings of the masters of early astronomy, with their huge sundials and large azimuth-measuring machines, and even in the intense heat it conjures up plenty of night-sky images. Without some kind of guide it appears as some sort of huge children’s playground – there’s a 90 ft sundial dominating the proceedings that looks for all the world like a giant slide – so I bought a book from a local drinks stand and set off to explore.

The book proved interesting in its own right; the standard of its grammar and spelling was nothing short of appalling, and served to confuse the hell out of me despite my fairly sound grounding in basic astrophysics. The preface read as follows (with all spellings faithfully reproduced):

From long gack there is no book which can help to the tourists to understand Astronomical Instruments there self, by help of this book. One can see and understand every thing (all the instruments).

Intrigued, I read on, trying to understand the basic definitions given in the text, such as:

Equinox: The bigger circle of the ecliptic interects the bigger circle of the celestial equartor.

I was learning new and strange terms by the dozen: ‘heavely bodies’ rotated round the ‘glob’, and one instrument was useful ‘to find out the aware of the fact that, the Jaipur time is observed solar system’. I thoroughly enjoyed trying to piece together any sense from Ashok Choudhary’s epic guidebook (‘He knows English French & German languages’, according to the preface) and I hope I can pick up some of his other tomes; I idly wondered whether he’d had anything to do with the crazy commentary in the planetarium in Hyderabad...

Next to the Jantar Mantar is the City Palace and Museum, with an entry charge of Rs70 plus Rs50 for a camera, but despite this extortion it’s nothing on George’s collection in Gwalior. Palace guards witter on about irrelevancies and demand baksheesh, underemployed boutique owners try to sell you carpets and trinkets, and the only display which caught my eye was a collection of ancient astronomical books written in the scratchy Arabic script associated with Islam; but it’s not a bad place to visit, and like every other Indian museum I have ever visited, it at least provides a place for the staff to sleep. In the corner was a man snoring gently into his cupped elbow; in yet another room a man in white kurta pyjamas nodded off on his plastic chair; even those who were animated enough to punch my ticket looked like they were fighting a losing battle with drooping eyelids. The entry fee doesn’t seem to sting so much when you consider that you’re providing a useful social service for tired museum attendants.

I rounded off my wanderings with a visit to the Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, which is a classic piece of flamboyant Rajasthani architecture that looks over the main street of the old city. This garishly pink five-storey façade, from where ladies of the court used to watch the world go by, is typical of Jaipur; the old city is known as the Pink City because most of the buildings are painted pink, an unusual choice of decor and one that I found particularly intriguing. The guidebooks rave about how beautifully the pink catches the sunset, but I wasn’t that convinced – I thought it looked a little tacky, to be honest, but it’s different, and in India, that’s quite an achievement.

Street Encounter

While wandering back through the pink streets, I stopped to watch a demonstration by the Bank Workers’ Union, whose members obviously put far more effort into their rallies than they ever do behind the counter, and that’s when I fell into conversation with a local student... or that’s what he told me he was. His second question after he’d ascertained my citizenship status was more of an indication of the state of play in Jaipur than anything I’d yet encountered. It was verging on the paranoid.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Why is it that most tourists I see here don’t want to talk to Indians?’

‘Ah!’ I thought, ‘so the tourists are biting back, are they?’ I decided to be candid.

‘Because most of the people your average tourist meets here are liars, commission merchants or simply after your money,’ I said. ‘And a lot of them pretend to be students,’ I added, purposely goading him to see what the response would be. His brow darkened.

‘So you lump me together with those people, do you?’ he said. ‘I am a student; how else would I be able to speak English?’

‘Are you telling me that only students can speak English here?’ I said. ‘What about all those bloody rickshaw drivers who take you off into the middle of nowhere only to dump you at a shop that’s miles from your destination? That’s the first thing a lot of tourists get to see in Jaipur, and it makes them trust nobody.’

‘The rickshaw drivers are uneducated,’ he said. ‘They get one tourist who gives them US$100 for a ride, and they realise it’s good money to keep doing it. But why does that mean you don’t trust me?’

‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘If I come across five people who try to rip me off, of course I’m going to be cagey about the sixth. What can you expect? A small minority are ruining the whole tourist thing for the lot of you.’

‘But why should tourists be rude? We are not all alike.’

‘Listen, I can go to almost any city in India and meet wonderful people who are genuine. Why should I bother to open myself to the touts in Jaipur? I’m not short of friendly Indians to talk to, you know. The country’s full of them, but Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur... you can keep it.’

‘But you still don’t believe me. I have no shop; I work in the telephone booth here, I see many tourists, but they don’t trust me.’

‘Well, blame it on your city. It’s not my fault. And I thought you said you were a student, not a telephone booth operator...’

And off he stomped, looking pretty annoyed. He had been getting quite worked up, as if he was blaming me for the tourist attitude here, but what could I say? Jaipur deserves its fate, if you ask me; maybe the legitimate operators will do something about it, but I doubt it. Like the man said, tourists who give US$100 for a rickshaw ride really screw it up for everyone, locals and tourists alike.

The weirdness continued as I returned to the Evergreen. Poked under my door was a photocopied leaflet proclaiming that the world was being prevented from entering the New Age of Human Harmony by the Dark Forces who were installing mind control devices throughout the world in the form of televisions, microwaves, computers and newspapers. For some reason this piece of well-articulated rubbish fitted in with Jaipur’s atmosphere of paranoia; I was paranoid of every movement in my belly, the people of the city were paranoid about the tourist attitude, and the tourists were paranoid of the Dark Forces.

I decided to leave as soon as I could. The feeling was getting infectious...

The Heat Wave

At this point it’s worth talking a bit more about the heat wave. Unseasonable and unwelcome, it has already claimed 136 lives, 86 of them in Rajasthan. The highest temperature recorded in the country so far has been 49.5°C, Delhi recently had its hottest May day on record, and when I passed through Bharatpur on the way from Fatehpur Sikri to Jaipur, the mercury was hovering around 49°C (120°F).

According to the paper (which also carried news of India’s first ever sex-change operation and a severe shortage of beer in Delhi) it isn’t just the northwest suffering; Orissa[1] is sweltering in temperatures of 48°C, and Chennai is up to 43°C, some seven degrees above normal. Coupled with the humidity down south, it must be unbearable; at least Rajasthan’s heat is dry.

Is it any wonder people are going off their rockers? It sounds like the Dark Forces and their microwave brain scanners are starting to win...

It was enough to make me hit the trail for Pushkar, despite the state of my intestines.

[1] I was to read a week later of 400 heat-related deaths in Orissa alone, 100 of those in one day.

Pushkar

Written: 2 June 1998

Being ill is miserable at the best of times, but being ill on your own in a foreign country when the temperature’s pushing fifty is nightmarish. I decided I had to get out of Jaipur, despite a downturn in my condition, so I clenched my way down to Pushkar.

When you are well there is nothing quite as interesting as arriving in a new place; when you are ill there is nothing quite as depressing. My bus dropped me off in Ajmer, where I took a rickshaw across town to the bus to Pushkar. I didn’t bother to squabble with the rickshaw driver over his extortionate price of Rs20, and I told him to stop going on about taking his buggy all the way to Pushkar for Rs250, because I was taking the Rs5 bus, thank you very much. On arrival at Pushkar I grumpily told the waiting touts to get lost and headed for a hotel I’d been recommended, only 100m from the bus stand. (‘It’s at least a kilometre,’ said one boy with a push cart offering me a lift; I told him to get lost too. Being ill can make you brutal.)

Here I shut myself up in my single room (complete with air cooler, a good enough reason on its own to justify the journey south) and alternately ran to the toilet, drank rehydration salts and drifted off into disturbed waking dreams, my incredibly sore throat shaking me awake whenever I swallowed in my slumber. I abandoned all my plans, started a course of antibiotics and lay down to wait for an improvement. With serious diarrhoea that’s the only way: drink loads, squirt loads and do your time. I saw my carefully crafted plans of exploring Gujarat evaporating in smoke, but I didn’t care; in this state, all you want to do is stay put.

Luckily I had lots of books, even though one of the side effects of my illness was an inability to focus my left eye. This might have been the cough mixture – I had a mild bout of cold-like symptoms to coincide with my diarrhoea – which the man in the chemist had insisted wouldn’t make me drowsy, but which patently did. I was hungry, but alive; when I lay on my back, my stomach curved inwards towards my spine, reminding me with unnecessary clarity of TV pictures of Ethiopia.

I thought of the Bada Valley, I thought of Rantepao, I thought of Singapore, I thought of Puri, I thought of Hampi, I thought of the Bhopal-Gorakhpur train, I thought of Annapurna, and I thought that if all else failed I could write a book called Colourful Places in Which to be Ill. But as per usual it was simply a matter of willpower; I didn’t have a temperature so it wasn’t malaria, and from past experience I knew I’d be all right before a few days had disappeared. I just had to shit it out.

Lazing in Pushkar

My hotel at Pushkar, the Peacock, was quite beautiful. The rather pleasant rooms were centred round a courtyard containing a garden and a swimming pool (complete with water slide), and hotel’s supply of black tea and plain toast provided me with ample rejuvenation without me having to move more than ten feet from my room and its adjoining ablutions. I read Theroux, Forster and Stephen Hawking (my left eye having sorted itself out); I wore shorts and bare torso without feeling rude; and I vowed to do nothing until my strength was up.

All the local energy was taken up by the hotel’s population of black-faced monkeys. Bigger than any monkeys I had seen so far, the Peacock’s resident troupe were notable not so much for their mischievous shenanigans as for their effect on the staff. Monkeys would run across the lawn and up a tree, knocking something over in the process, and the staff would rush out from their habitual slumber and start to shout short, sharp admonitions into the branches. The monkeys would take not a blind bit of notice, and after a couple of minutes it was hard to tell who were the troublemakers here; certainly the staff managed to make as much noise as the simian pests, if not more.

This is a classic Indian attitude. Where the Chinese simply eat everything that moves and people like George shoot and stuff them, the stereotypical Indian either kills them for money (witness the failure of the Project Tiger protection scheme which, through corruption and poaching, has actually seen a drop in tiger population in India’s National Parks) or taunts them. In Darjeeling, the director of the snow leopard sanctuary, a division of the zoo there, said it was a conscious decision to make the snow leopard and red panda enclosures a separate area from the zoo with a separate entrance, because the treatment of the animals in the main zoo by Indian visitors would be completely destructive to the sanctuary’s aims. He didn’t hold back; he said Indians weren’t welcome in the snow leopard sanctuary, and that in general Indian attitudes towards animals were terrible. Not surprisingly it is a male problem, there being some kind of bravado involved in taunting animals; women rarely get involved, and children simply follow their parents. It seems that Indian zoos are pretty dreadful places.

But in the Peacock the monkeys always won, and the staff would give up their grunting and go back to their siesta; what can you do about an animal that can climb a tree faster than a man can run? At least it meant the monkeys weren’t vicious, for which I was grateful after my experience in Gunung Rinjani.

The hotel was almost empty (a common occurrence in this, the off-season hit by ridiculous temperatures) and the only other people in the hotel were three couples; one couple (from northern England) sat in their own spot and eyed any other visitors suspiciously when they thought nobody was looking, and the other two failed to materialise for quite a while (because they were also ill, I was to discover later). Normally this would have made me lonely or bold, but for once I was grateful for the solitude; I sat in splendid isolation, enjoying the feeling of strength ebbing back into my body. I didn’t feel good, but I felt improved, and sometimes that’s enough.

While I lounged, a thin, wiry man planted grass cuttings in the sandy lawn, worn bare by the heat and the effect of people. His spine was a series of knots, sitting prone on his back like nodules on a baby dinosaur, and he slowly and methodically dug small troughs in the sand with a sharp metal instrument, putting in lines of grass before covering them up again. It was hot where he worked, but he hardly sweated at all, something I’ve noticed among the Indians during this heat wave; while I swim in my own juices, the locals manage no more than a faint film of perspiration (unless they’re fat and middle class, in which case they seem to sweat just like us westerners). My clothes get tidemarks while the locals shine in their garish colours and beautiful sarees; I suppose that acclimatisation is unavoidable when you’re born into this kind of environment, but I still marvel at their resilience.

On my second day I met the two more sociable couples in the hotel – Michael and Rachel from New Zealand, and Mark and Philippa from England – and swapped tales of illnesses. This gave us common ground and, still failing to meet the gaze of the third mysterious couple, we spent afternoons round the pool, sipping Coke and rehydration salts and swapping travellers’ tales.

Pushkar is a classic travellers’ destination. It has ghats around a holy lake, where a large LED screen welcomes you to ‘HOLEY PUSHKAR’ and warns you not to ‘WASH CLOTH, USE SOAP OR GARGLE IN THE LAKE’. Around the lake are restaurants, shops, pilgrims, cows and, in the heat wave, precious little activity or toutish behaviour. People are pretty friendly, and they’re certainly colourful; it’s a perfect place to unwind. Strict rules cover the city and especially the ghats; Pushkar is totally vegetarian and alcohol-free, even to the extent of banning eggs, and nefarious activities like wearing shoes, showing affection and baring your torso are strictly forbidden within 30 ft of the lake. This is hardly a drawback, though, as the main activity in Pushkar during the hot season centres around the hotels and their swimming pools, where wearing skimpy bikinis or brief shorts is tolerated and provides a surprising shock to the traveller who hasn’t seen a bare thigh for weeks.

While in Pushkar I did nothing of merit except eat, sleep, celebrate the return of my appetite and drop bits from my plans. I had hoped to explore more of Gujarat, the state to the south of Rajasthan, but I’ve realised that time is running out, and if I want to visit northwest India, I’m going to have to rush it if I want to see everything I originally included on my list. In this heat, rushing is evidently bad for the health, so I’ve pruned my original plan to just those places that I really want to see, and I’ll leave it at that. It will feel much more pleasant not to be careering round like an American in Paris; I feel I can (and should) allow myself to relax.

This sounds a little dictatorial when written down, but it’s the way I travel. I’m quite hard on myself because I want to see lots of things, experience lots of different environments and be constantly stimulated. The flip side of the coin is to settle down somewhere for a few weeks and to really get into local life, and this has its advantages too; I’ve found, though, that this sort of semi-settling is much better if you have a companion, someone to share everyday life with and someone to provide conversation and justification for staying put. On your own it can be bit lonely, but constant movement and stimulation prevent this; perhaps that’s why I have seen so much and find it hard to kick back on the beach.

In fact, illness and apathy are the only things that slow me down, one being a physical limitation and the other a mental one. And as my physical limitation faded in Pushkar, so my desire to continue exploring grew. So eventually I did just that.

Udaipur

Written: 5 June 1998

Udaipur is known for its beautiful lake, its intricate palaces and its holy Hindu temples, but on arrival you could be forgiven for thinking that the locals have dumped all their chivalrous Rajput history in favour of that more modern example of suave sophistication, James Bond. Restaurants advertise video screens showing Bond movies, guidebooks allude to 007 in their descriptions, and travellers distinguish it from other palatial Rajasthani cities by the city’s new creed, for this is where Octopussy was filmed, and the locals are pretty keen to point this out.

This of course has little bearing on the real Udaipur experience. Dragging bags from an overnight bus into the twilight of 5am Udaipur, I certainly felt shaken but not stirred, and when the rickshaw drivers appeared I wished I had a licence to kill, but that was about as far as it went. For only the second time in my travels – the first being the journey from Bangkok to Chiang Mai – I thought I’d try taking sleeping pills, and the Valium I bought in Pushkar certainly did the trick, knocking me out for the entire drive down.

Unfortunately I was still in a drug-induced idiocy on arrival, and I blindly and gratefully followed an English couple whom I’d met on the bus, who guided me to a hotel where I managed to sleep off the effects of the pills. I was impressed by the power and effectiveness of the drug, but I don’t think I’ll be doing Valium again; it took a good 24 hours for me to get my eyelids back under control, and that’s scary when you don’t really know where you are.

Having shaken off the worst of my chemical slumber, I stuck my bleary head out of my hotel window and realised that my English guides had chosen well, for there, laid out in front of me, was not just another beautiful Rajasthani city, but a really special one; Udaipur is charming. Dominating the city is the ornate City Palace, and placid Lake Pichola contains two little islands, Jagmandir with its perfect domed edifice and Jagniwas with its far from ancient Lake Palace Hotel, one of the most luxurious and romantic hotels in India. The old city is hemmed in by an ancient fortified wall, and when the sun sets and the lights flicker on in the palaces, it’s a scene of picturesque perfection.

The City Palace

Of course, below this grand surface things aren’t always quite so beautiful. Take the City Palace: the current Maharana (as the rulers of Udaipur are called) still lives in one portion, which is closed to the public; two other areas have been turned into luxury hotels, so although they’re open to the likes of you and me, it’s only with the accompanying guilt/jealousy crossover that five-star hotels bring out in those unwilling or unable to fork out such riches; and the remainder makes up the museum.

One can only assume, though, that the latter is the least impressive quarter; from the outside it looks like it should be one of the most interesting palace experiences in India, but it’s not. The past masters of Udaipur obviously had excellent taste in exterior architecture – cupolas, wonderful carved towers, marble arches and so on – but incredibly odd taste in interior design. Back in Gwalior, George managed to demonstrate one side of the Indian aristocracy with his collection of frivolous idiocies, massively grandiose gestures and impressive works of art. The City Palace, however, shows another side to the aristocracy, one verging on the nouveau riche in terms of taste (if not reality). If George and his ancestors were to build their palaces in the modern age, they would be inventive and modernist in the way that the Louvre pyramids are; if the Maharajas of Udaipur were to do the same, they would be into shag-pile carpets and flock wallpaper.

The interior design feature that best sums this up is the mirrored room, and there are plenty of variations on this theme in the City Palace. Without exception they are hideous beyond measure, the architectural equivalent of shell suits. These days the mirrors are starting to go black at the corners, an inevitable consequence of humidity and a lack of maintenance, but even in their heyday they would have been tackier than the inside of a cheapskate fortune teller’s tent. As if to rub in the repugnance of the rooms, a number of the connecting corridors have marble floors and white tiled walls, bringing nothing to mind so much as a public toilet. I couldn’t believe that inside this beautiful building was such a display of appalling taste as this, and despite a few pleasant respites from this psychedelic disaster zone (such as the swimming room with wonderful views over the lake through its latticed walls) I left the palace with spots in front of my eyes and a strange desire to stare at a whitewashed wall for hours.

Luckily the streets of Udaipur are a good antidote. They’re the usual pilgrim town fare, with small winding trails leading down to weed-choked lake views, and hotels and restaurants crammed into every corner, each of them claiming that they are recommended by the Lonely Planet and mentioning, in passing, that they show Octopussy twice a day. In the peak season I can imagine central Udaipur being an absolute hellhole of white faces and people who find garish mirrored rooms tasteful, but when I was there it was dead, and much the better for it. The touts were non-existent, the streets more natural, the effect of tourism numbed by the heat. I liked the place, even if its rulers managed to offend my sense of the aesthetic.

The Monsoon Palace

In Udaipur my umbrella caused a sensation. I’ve had plenty of reactions before – mainly ones of open-mouthed amazement at the sight of a maroon umbrella of almost Indian garishness adorning a foreigner – but I’ve never experienced jealousy before. The locals wanted to examine my umbrella, to understand how the silvering worked in keeping the heat of the sun off me, and eventually they wanted to buy it; I had offers of three hundred, four hundred rupees, far more than I’d paid for it in Calcutta. I wondered why they didn’t seem to have umbrellas in Udaipur, though perhaps quality umbrellas are at a premium because the monsoon lasts for three months round these parts.

That’s why on the horizon there’s a huge ancient palace topping a mountain range; where the Lake Palace was the Maharaja’s winter abode, the Monsoon Palace was his summer hideout, commanding as it does amazing views of his domain. I fancied a stroll and set off one morning to conquer the peak.

It was an extremely long way in the ridiculous heat of this unseasonable Indian summer: five kilometres to the base of the hill and then a long series of switch-backs to the palace perched on the top. On the flat stretch of road between Udaipur and the hill I was hailed from a rickshaw and offered a free lift to just below the base of the mountain, and fully aware that this would involve some kind of sales scam, I hopped in, savouring the challenge; and indeed, my fellow passengers turned out to be art students who worked for a co-operative on the outskirts of town and which just happened to be on the road to the Monsoon Palace. I smiled sweetly, admired their pleasant work (mainly miniature paintings on silk and marble), feigned a polite interest and told them that I’d think about it on my long walk uphill and, if I wanted to buy anything, I’d pop back in on my way down. I knew this was simply procrastination and so did they, but it did mean I had time to think of a plan if I was to avoid the hard sell on the way back to town.

All thoughts of miniature paintings were soon banished by the desolation of the landscape. Udaipur is beautifully perched amid its lakes, but outside of this watery zone the scenery is arid and uninviting. I loved it; craggy hills burn in the sun, occasional trees bent crooked by the sun provide scant shade by the roadside, and tiny mud brick huts club together in settlements that must be unbearably hot. And as the heat haze shimmers above the scrubby bushes dotted on the sand, the Monsoon Palace sits above it all, elegant and strangely out of place in this desert environment.

When I finally arrived at the top I found the large green doors firmly bolted shut. This was not what I had expected; it was supposed to be open to the public, and bolted green doors are a bit of an impediment as far as exploration is concerned, but after walking for an hour and a half you grow bold, so I decided to investigate. I raised the big iron ring on the door and hammered for a bit, convinced that I could hear voices inside, and sure enough after a while a doddering old man creaked open the bolts and peered out.

‘Can I come in?’ I inquired in my best sycophantic voice, the one usually reserved for train reservation officers.

‘No,’ he said.

‘But I’ve just walked all the way from Udaipur, and it’s really hot,’ I whinged, screwing up my eyes in a pathetic attempt to look tired.

‘You’ve just walked from Udaipur?’ he said in the same way one might say, ‘You seriously like this music?’

‘OK,’ he continued, ‘you rest here for a minute, I’ll be back.’

Half an hour later I was still resting – I wasn’t going anywhere, after all – when the door opened and two flashy youths came out. They were obviously tourists, and I asked them if they’d been allowed inside.

‘Yes,’ said one of them. ‘It cost us twenty bucks.’

‘Twenty bucks?’ I cried. ‘You’re kidding!’

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Twenty whole rupees. It’s nice, though.’

‘Oh, rupees?’ I said. ‘I thought you meant American dollars...’

He just smiled. ‘No, twenty rupees. Bucks, rupees, same same.’

This was the first time I’d come across this particular Americanism, and it was odd. In their designer shades and western gear these two guys were obviously rich Indian tourists, but to call their currency ‘bucks’ seemed a little over the top. Whatever, the door was still open and another Indian was standing there about to close up, so I asked him how much to come inside. He looked me up and down and said, ‘Ten rupees. You get only half an hour, then you leave.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ I said, handing him a note before darting in the door.

The Monsoon Palace is now owned by the government, and it shows. Originally a stunningly picturesque piece of hilltop architecture, it’s now inhabited by more birds than humans, with the distinctive chalky smell of bird shit pervading every room and corridor. Plaster is peeling off the walls and remnants of coloured glass windows hint at its former Rajasthani glory, but in the end it’s just somewhere for the TV companies to stick their aerials, and the roof, from where the views of the desolate landscape are beautiful, is an eyesore of antennae supported by steel hawsers thoughtlessly cemented into the walls. One wall proclaims, ‘Navendra loves Anila,’ and another says, ‘I love you Ankita,’ and all the while the hot desert breeze ruffles through the open windows, blowing piles of old bird’s nests into the corners and flecking the remaining paint onto the floor. It’s faintly depressing; from below the place looks famously grand, but from inside it’s obviously just a shell.

I didn’t need my full half an hour, and I soon left to start the long walk down. It wasn’t long before I was sweating freely, and even under my maroon umbrella things were getting hot, but that’s when India saved the day yet again. Swooping down the road from the palace came two sparklingly clean white Ambassadors[1], and as they approached me the first one slowed down. The windows were blacked out so I couldn’t see a thing, but the heat played havoc with my imagination; I envisaged the rear window smoothly sliding down to reveal a beautiful blonde model complete with champagne on ice and an afternoon to kill, but nothing happened. I couldn’t see in and no windows slid down. It was a standoff, and I didn’t quite know what to think.

But the windscreen wasn’t blackened, so I poked my head over the bonnet and saw the Indian chauffeur gesturing me to the side door, and nodding vigorously I followed his orders; the door popped open, cold air rushed out and shocked my dripping cheeks and the two occupants in the rear seat squashed up to make room for me. In the lottery of life I’d scored another winner.

My kind saviours were three middle-aged men, dressed up in spotless white kurta pyjamas and looking like terribly important people. Their English was patchy and the chauffeur helped to translate, and between interested and heated discussions in Hindi they learned about my trip through India, my gratitude at their kind offer of a lift and how much I liked the Indian people. The car was beautifully clean, the air conditioner was a gift from heaven, and while driving through the cramped cow-ridden streets of Udaipur, I sensed the feeling of detachment that all rich Indians must feel; when you’re in a comfortable car and a chauffeur is driving, those dingy backstreets aren’t depressing, they’re a circus that you can watch but don’t have to suffer. The world becomes a movie and India becomes more than bearable, and the inquisitive stares of the locals through the blackened windows – beyond which they could see nothing but their own reflections – made me feel quite special. To my benefactors this was just a kind gesture, but to me it was a glimpse into another way of life, that of the rich Indian.

I thanked them profusely when they dropped me off in town, and they all eagerly shook my hand and wished me the best (a performance repeated by the occupants of the second limousine even though I hadn’t spoken to any of them); and all of a sudden I was back in the India I know and love, the one without air conditioning or soft suspension. I celebrated by pottering around, playing karom[2] with some locals on the street and checking out the various craft shops dotted around. But that night I experienced a side of Udaipur that can only be classed as magical.

The Lake Palace Hotel

I’d booked a table that night for dinner for three in the Lake Palace Hotel, the first hotel in the world to be built on a lake and one of the most amazing settings you could wish for; my dining partners were to be Phil and Alex, the couple I’d met on the bus, and we were to meet at 7pm at the Lake Palace ferry terminal. This gave me plenty of time to go on a cruise round the lake before my sumptuous dining experience, and I duly boarded the boat at six. If you think Udaipur is beautiful from the inside, it’s truly magnificent from the lake.

As I’ve mentioned before, Lake Pichola contains two islands, Jagniwas (which is now the Lake Palace Hotel) and Jagmandir. The tour took me round the lake, from where the City Palace really shows off its grandeur, and on to Jagmandir. Containing a picture-perfect Mughal garden with cupolas and graceful archways, the island is also home to the Jag Mandir palace, a beautifully symmetrical domed building that was said to have inspired aspects of the Taj Mahal, and which evokes a feeling of Indian perfection that would be hard to match anywhere else. The City Palace gleams through ornate lattice-work and the Lake Palace glitters behind a perfect archway, and as the sun goes down it casts an orange glow on the flock of huge bats that flies out onto the lake from the mainland, no doubt feeding on the swarms of insects coming out after the heat of the day. If one sight sums up the striking beauty of the Rajasthani aesthetic, it is Udaipur’s lake.

I was back on the Lake Palace jetty spot on seven, eagerly awaiting a culinary experience enhanced by one of the most perfect settings one could wish for. This being my birthday, I decided to ignore all concerns of budgets and exchange rates; I’ve met plenty of travellers who’ve said the expense of the Lake Palace was beyond them, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I had company lined up, I had the time and the money, and I was going to enjoy every second.

By half past seven I was beginning to wonder if one of my dinner partners had fallen ill. I’d bumped into them on their rented motorbike that afternoon and they’d got the times all correct, so what could be the problem? I thought back to the previous day, Alex’s birthday, when I had also booked a table for three and had arranged to meet them back at the hotel around four or five; but six o’clock had rolled by, then six-thirty, then seven, and I’d been kicking the walls by the time they rolled in at seven-thirty, but I just changed the booking, assuming it was a one-off. But waiting in the ferry terminal, I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one in this world who seemed to care about punctuality.

A pleasant Danish couple came and went, off for their own private romantic dinner for two, and still there was no sign of Phil and Alex; I figured it would be more pleasant to wait in the hotel bar, so I left a message with the porter and took the boat over to the hotel.

Even for someone numbed by two years of staying in hotels as part of a long-distant career, the Lake Palace Hotel is stunning. Little gardens with gambolling fountains and perfect herbaceous borders nestle between rows of white marble corridors, leading off to rooms whose sumptuousness I can but dream of; with prices starting at US$150 per night (and going much, much higher), I imagine they would indeed be special. The lobby is as perfect as a centre-page spread in Country Life and the bar is more conducive to decadent lounging than anywhere I’ve seen in India, so I settled down into a comfortable settee with a complimentary copy of Time magazine and an assurance by the Reservations Manager that everything would be fine, even if my friends were running very late.

By eight o’clock I was in danger of verging on the self-pitying. After all, the Lake Palace was one of my main reasons for visiting Udaipur in the first place, and having had the promise of conversation over dinner I was dismayed at being stood up. I felt dejected and rejected – is a phone call too much to ask when you’re over an hour late for a dinner appointment? – and in an environment like the Lake Palace, a place practically designed for couples and conversations, I felt was especially lonely. And that’s when my faith in human nature was totally restored.

Into the bar walked the Danish man I’d said hello to on the jetty. He knew I was waiting for friends, and he’d seen me tapping my heels and worrying, so he wandered over and said that if my friends weren’t turning up, I was more than welcome to join him and his girlfriend if I wanted. I could have kissed him; what a wonderful gesture. Of course, I accepted.

Brian and Lene were the perfect dinner companions. Interesting and interested, we talked our way through a sumptuous soup starter, ice-cold Kingfisher beer, a fiery chicken curry and more papads and nans than you could shake a stick at. They managed a dessert but I was bursting at the seams and settled for the decaffeinated coffee, an option I haven’t seen since Australia and which rounded off the meal perfectly. The waiters, immaculately turned out in white and red uniforms, were attentive and phenomenally polite, the quality of the spoken English was universally Oxonian, and in every way the experience lived up to my expectations. Through the glass walls of the dining room fairy lights illuminated the fountains as I paid the bill without thinking, even adding a well-earned ten per cent tip at the end.

Incidentally, halfway through the meal Phil and Alex appeared on the other side of the dining room’s glass wall, exploring the gardens. The first thing I noticed was that they hadn’t bothered to change from their everyday clothes; Phil looked untidy in shorts, thongs and ragged T-shirt, while Alex’s garb was simply plain (I had fished out my border-crossing clothes and looked pretty passable, while everyone else in the hotel looked as well turned out as you would expect in a high-class hotel). Nevertheless I waved to them to come in and eat, an hour and a half late though they were, and they acknowledged me and wandered off. That was the last I saw of them; they never came in to say hello, and they didn’t bother to tell me they’d decided not to eat there after all. I saw them the next morning, and apparently they thought it was ‘a bit too fancy, you know’. No, I didn’t know, but I held back from saying what I thought of them standing me up on my birthday, because there’s no point in wasting time on people whom you’ll never see again. Not surprisingly I didn’t exchange addresses with them, and for all I cared they could piss off back home to their world of poor manners and lack of taste. More fool them.

I did, however, exchange addresses with Brian and Lene, wishing them well for the rest of their four-week holiday in India. I reflected that out of miserable situations, good things often rise, but it taught me a lesson that I’ve learned again and again but seem unable to grasp fully: people are unreliable, and if you want something done, do it yourself. This is one of the reasons why I wonder if I’ll ever be able to travel with other people; there are so many people out that drive me nuts, and a fair few of them are travelling the world. Thank goodness that for every Phil and Alex there’s a Brian and Lene, or my faith in humanity would have evaporated a long time ago.

Oh, and just how much did this extravaganza of food and luxury cost me? I checked my bill later and found it was just under Rs700. That’s a shade over £10. Incredible, isn’t it; it makes the western excuse of ‘I can’t afford it’ as offensive as the rich Indian’s attitude at the Taj Mahal. Like I said, some people just don’t deserve to travel.

[1] The Ambassador is the most common car in India, and it’s as distinctive as a London cab.

[2] Karom is a game that’s also popular in Nepal. It’s a kind of finger pool played with draughts counters, where you flick the counters and try to knock others into pockets. It’s really entertaining to play, and it doesn’t require much effort, which is a distinct blessing in the pre-monsoonal heat.

India: Gujarat and Diu

Louis Armstrong

Written: 5 June 1998

On Friday 5th, Louis Armstrong saved the day. I had tried to get a berth on the sleeper train south from Udaipur to Ahmedabad, but all I managed was a waiting list ticket; the last time that happened was back in Siliguri, and I really didn’t fancy having to squirm my way into some idiot middle manager’s good books just to get a reservation. Even so I idly asked about the VIP quota, and was told to visit the Area Manager, who referred me back to the Ticket Inspector, who eventually referred me back to the original ticket office. I decided to stuff the railway and get the bus, and joined my final queue for a refund.

When I got to the front of the queue there was nobody at the window, but hanging out at the back reading a list of computer printouts was a big, burly black man who looked exactly like an Indian version of King Louis. He saw me looking dejected at the window, came over, looked at my ticket and said in a deep, throaty voice, ‘No problem, sir, I am on that train. You just turn up and I will find you a place.’

‘You will?’ I asked, wondering if this would turn out to be an expensive exercise.

‘I am the conductor on that train,’ he winked, and turned back to his printouts. Even if he was setting me up for a major baksheesh kick, I felt he deserved to be taken at face value, and nine hours later I was waiting on the platform, wondering if I was going to be spending the night propped up in the toilet, nodding off on someone else’s shoulder.

But Louis was a man of his word. I spotted him holding court on the platform, went over and gave him my ticket, and he said, ‘I remember, from this morning. Berth six, that coach over there, OK?’ As he said ‘OK’ he flashed me a smile, and I wondered for a fleeting moment how much this was going to cost me; I would have to pay for a conversion from waiting list to berth anyway, and it would be a perfect opportunity for rubbing thumb and forefinger together in a meaningful way. Still, I figured he would deserve it.

The train pulled out only an hour late, and I soon discovered that not only was I in a separate compartment labelled ‘Ladies Only’ with lockable doors and only six berths, but I was in there with five other passengers who’d had similar experiences; they’d had no booking but had also ended up with a berth. I told them about Louis and it turned out that he had saved us all: one westerner, two Indians by birth who had spent their whole lives abroad and were on their first visit back to their homeland, and three obviously influential Indian upper middle class family members. I felt privileged and somewhat relieved; if there was to be any baksheesh, we would all have to pay.

Ten minutes into the journey Louis appeared at the door, beaming. He sat down in an empty space and boomed, ‘No charge for these berths for you; I like to help you all.’ He then proceeded to give money – presumably change – to the middle class Indian man, and idly chatted in Urdu for a while (in which all the others were fluent, the overseas Indians having learned it from their parents). Then he asked me a few politely interested census questions in English, said he was really happy to have been of help, and left us to sleep our way to Ahmedabad.

And as I drifted off I thought to myself, what a wonderful world.

Bhavnagar

Written: 8 June 1998

‘Welcome to the city of Bhavnagar,’ said the man on the train as he hopped off, picking up his son whom he’d been trying to wake up for the last ten minutes but with little success. I’d changed trains in Ahmedabad, staying long enough only to admire the fast food joint at the station (the first I’d seen since the Wimpy in Bangalore), and had wasted no time in heading even further south. This is a new state, Gujarat, and I didn’t want my opinions to be tainted by the industrial black hole of its capital.

Bhavnagar is notable for nothing (at least, as far as the visitor to India is concerned). I decided to stay there as a base from which to visit the ship-breaking yard of Alang, some 50km to the southeast, but Bhavnagar reminded me not only of the delights of travelling in a rarely visited state in the off-season, but also of the main reason for my enjoyment of India: the people. I have come across wonderfully friendly pockets in India – Hyderabad, Thanjavur, Bijapur et al – but Bhavnagar wins hands down as the friendliest place I have been. English was almost non-existent beyond pidgin greetings, but communication doesn’t have to be in tongues; people ran up to me to shake my hand and to try to find out what I was doing here in India, children shouted out, ‘ElloElloEllo!’ for five minutes after I’d passed, and even the old men squatting on the side of the road smiled back with toothy grins as I greeted them (a rare occurrence: even in the friendliest places the older generation, those who remember British rule, tend to be too reserved or resentful to smile at foreigners). The man on the train had been the tip of an iceberg of warm generosity.

On the Saturday afternoon that I arrived, I decided to try to meet the locals. The best way to do this in India is to mind your own business, so I found my way to the central park, sat down in the shade of a tree and started reading a book. Sure enough within five minutes I had a crowd of maybe twenty young men goggling at me, gawping at the maps and pictures in my guidebook and listening in uncomprehending awe as I described my trip with hand signs and city names. After half an hour of this entertainment (tiring for me, riveting for them) I wandered over to the other side of the park, and as I was about to leave to go for a siesta, I spotted a group of old and middle-aged men under a neem tree, yelling and screaming like school children at recess. I just had to go and take a look.

They welcomed me into their group with smiles and invitations to sit down; not one of them had any English beyond the incredibly basic, but this didn’t matter. The object of their fascination was a game they seemed to call Aman Chache[1] which I will describe here in the same way that a North Carolinan might describe chess; after hours of watching I still had no idea of even the most basic rules of the game. But it was fascinating to watch...

Aman Chache (or Chopat)

Under the greenery of the neem[2] is a large square piece of sackcloth, on which is drawn a large plus-sign, each arm of which is divided into three squares across and eight squares along; three of these squares have Xs in them. There are four teams of four men each (it’s definitely a game for the boys), each team sitting or squatting along one side of the large sack cloth. Four game pieces are distributed to each team – the four team colours being red, green, black and white – with each piece made out of wood in the shape of a large, very blunt bullet. To complete the set is the shell of half a coconut and six small sea shells of the variety that are roughly oval in shape, with smooth white backs and evil slits in the other side, lined with ridges that under a magnifying glass would remind you of a shark’s mouth.

Each person takes it in turn to throw the six shells, which land jaw-side up, or smooth side up; by counting the number of jaws you get a number from one to six (so the shells do exactly the same job as a conventional die). And there my understanding of the game evaporates.

Some numbers are special, some not so special, but I couldn’t discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces are moved, sometimes not, but I couldn’t discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces are turned onto their sides, sometimes onto their heads, but I couldn’t discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces are taken, sometimes they are added to the board, but I couldn’t discern a pattern. And eventually someone wins, but even in that I couldn’t discern a pattern. ‘This an ancient Indian game,’ was how one spectator explained the rules; funnily enough this made everything quite clear.

But it wasn’t the game so much as the people who were fascinating to me. Sitting and standing round the board was the most assorted collection of Indian men you could ever hope to see. On one corner was a gaunt Muslim with his long chin beard, no moustache and white cap fitted over his short hair; he concentrated hard on the game, seeming serious but ever willing to join in the jokes and laugh along with everyone else. Opposite him was a man with such an incredibly hooked nose it made his moustache look like a furry caterpillar trapped between his upper lip and his nostrils. Just along from him was an evidently well-educated man who analysed the game, provided a running commentary on every move and tactic and, when he threw the shells, twisted his wrist in such a flourish that it didn’t really matter whether the throw was good or bad, because it looked so stylish; even taking other pieces was a display, as he smashed the piece taken with the victorious piece, sending the unfortunate one careening off into the dust.

Dotted about were four clowns who spent most of the game throwing stones at each other, pretending to get furious with each other and, on the point of throwing punches, collapsing into huge grins and belly laughs, dragging everyone else with them into their boyish humour. I imagined their conversations were along the lines of:

‘You hit me first.’

‘Didn’t.’

‘Did too, he saw it.’

‘You’re mad, mad as a monkey.’

‘Who are you calling a monkey?’

‘You, mad man.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well you’re just as crazy...’

The others kept nudging me, pointing at them and tapping the sides of their heads. Everyone loved it.

And all the while the men fished out beedis from their top pockets[3], filling the air with acrid blue smoke that added a certain mysticism to the event, a ritual only matched by the frequent chai breaks and passing round of the cold water. After four hours of this amazing entertainment I had to leave to eat something, but I would return the next day on my way back from Alang, and I would again be beckoned over, invited to sit down, plied with chai and made to feel utterly welcome once again. I sent them copies of the pictures I took – which they thrilled to, posing like adult kids – and I hope they give them as much pleasure as they did me.

Elsewhere in Bhavnagar...

When I was there, Bhavnagar had all the fun of the fair, literally. Dominating the dried-up tank in the centre of town was a large Big Wheel, flanked by lethal looking contraptions designed to fling you around at gravitational forces beyond the healthy. This was an opportunity too good to miss; a real Indian fun fair, totally free of western influence and teeming with cultural sights and sounds that would make the rides themselves almost irrelevant. I eagerly paid my Rs2 entry fee and slipped quietly into the bright lights and noise of the dangerously clanking machinery.

I didn’t last long. Each ride was Rs5 a go, so I headed straight for the boldest ride of the lot, the Big Wheel. Creaking tremulously, it started up with eight of us dotted around the huge wheel – business was not exactly booming at the fair, to be honest – and although the ride wasn’t that thrilling on paper, my heart started beating pretty fast, because there isn’t any such thing as health and safety in India. Realising that perhaps the rides weren’t quite my cup of chai, I stumbled through the exit gate into the throng.

I was followed by one of the boys off the ride. Latching on to me, he tugged at my arm and said, ‘Dollar!’ I told him to bugger off. ‘Rupees!’ he continued, and I told him to bugger off. ‘Paise!’ he ventured, and when I told him to bugger off for the third time he neatly summed up his command of the English language by sticking the needle in the groove marked ‘Dollar! Rupees! Paise!’ and following me with his stuck-record mantra cutting through the noise. I tried another ride, a seriously spinning set of two-person cars that ensured the little Indian boy who ended up in my car couldn’t avoid being flung into the spleen of the funny white man next to him. He thoroughly enjoyed himself, but I felt pretty damn queasy afterwards and went for a wander round the attractions to clear my head, still accompanied by cries of ‘Dollar! Rupees! Paise!’

The fair was small but was obviously a focus for the single young men and women of Bhavnagar; to put it bluntly, it was the Indian equivalent of the pick-up joint. Stunningly crafted costumes adorned beautiful young women as they stuck together in giggling packs, while strangely out-dated young men in teddy boy haircuts and mundane clothes adored themselves in the vain hope that the women would follow their example. But was it a vain hope? Judging by the way the girls enjoyed this primitive display of male strutting, the course of true love can obviously still run smooth even if one half of the couple has all the charisma of a latter-day Elvis.

When my head had stopped spinning and the money mantra had drifted into the background noise[4] I started off for home, but on the way I met a very friendly couple of young men on their incredibly cool moped who, after opening the conversation with the somewhat confusing ‘You want woman for sex?’ and an inquiry into whether I had any alcohol (Gujarat being a dry state), turned out to be as polite and interesting as the rest of Bhavnagar. They offered me a lift on their bike back to my hotel, which I took, and I soon found myself being paraded in front of their friends at the local Hindi tape stall, where I tactfully didn’t tell them exactly what I thought of Hindi pop, though I think they probably got the message. We all laughed, they took me back home and I fell into a deep, contented sleep.

[1] I’ve wondered for ages what on earth this game could be, and I haven’t been able to find any references to Aman Chache on the Web, but Nutan Mehta kindly contacted me via my Guestbook with the following information. ‘I am from Bhavnagar, residing in the US for the past forty-plus years,’ he writes. ‘The game you described has another name called “chopat”. “Cho” is a conjunctive like “quattro” for “four”, and “pat” is “plane” or “area”, thus “four-plane”. I think the game parcheesi is very close to chopat. The shells are known as cowry shells. I used to collect them as a boy. It’s not just a street game but was played in many homes. My grandma was crazy about it.’ Thank you so much, Nutan; I really appreciate you getting in touch, and it’s helped me track down an entry in Wikipedia on the subject, which explains the rules. That sound you can hear is the penny dropping...

[2] A fascinating and typically Indian tree, the neem is not just used for shading games of Aman Chache. Its leaves contain a mild poison that kills bacteria but doesn’t harm humans in very small doses, and as a result neem extract has been used as a kind of toothpaste in India for hundreds of years. Smearing neem on your teeth kills the bacteria that cause tooth decay, thus preserving your teeth so you can chew pan and really screw up the enamel...

[3] The Indian top pocket in the ubiquitous Indian shirt is the equivalent of bank, corner shop, handbag and personal organiser all rolled into one. Beedi packets sit next to rolls of bank notes, mixed up with addresses, tickets, receipts and normally some little sweets to suck on. It makes some men look positively Amazonian with this huge bulge on their left breast, but it’s amazing what you can fit in an Indian top pocket.

[4] Which included lots of hissing. Indians get each other’s attention by hissing instead of yelling, so every time you walk through a bazaar or a street where people want to talk to you, the air fills with ‘Tsss! Tsss!’ and you have to quell the western irritation that comes with being treated like a dog rather than a human. It’s not rude, though, it’s just another cultural difference, but it’s one that takes quite a bit of getting used to.

Alang

Written: 7 June 1998

Wrecker’s yards, where cars go to die, are sad places. With twin headlights, a grinning radiator grille and a smiling curve to the bumper, your average car looks human, whether it’s the frog-eyed bewilderment of the VW Beetle, the blockheaded bouncer look of the Volvo, the cute innocence of the Mini or the slit-eyed sophistication of the Ferrari. Stacks of rusting and half-dismantled cars look depressing because we personify them, subconsciously succumbing to images of retirement homes, mass graves and the inevitability of death. I should know; I spent plenty of time in Australia searching for bits to make my car, Oz, king of the road.

What about ships, though? With their proud bows and blunt sterns they’re hard to associate with living creatures, let alone humans. Ships are sleek and ships are always female, but despite man’s long history of glorifying and waxing lyrical about boats and the sea, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to The Old Man and the Sea, they’re less human than vessel. The only personality I associated with Zeke – the yacht in which I sailed to French Polynesia – was that of gaoler, and despite the curves of the QE II and the gushing success of Titanic, ships aren’t people, they’re machines; that’s why Herbie and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang were cars, not boats.

But try telling that to someone who visits Alang. Stretching along the west coast of the Gulf of Camray some 50km southeast of Bhavnagar, Alang is the biggest ship-breaking yard in the world, and it has to be seen to be believed. Official statistics are hard to come by where Alang is concerned, not just because of the tendency of the locals to make things up, but because Alang has been the centre of human rights issues for some time and the government is more than a little sensitive about the whole thing.

However, gleaning what information I could from the local chai shop owners, I discovered the following. Alang consists of 400 breaker’s yards (known as platforms) where somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 workers dismantle ships by hand. An average ship has 300 people working on it at any one time, who take two months to break the ship down completely. The whole complex breaks about 1500 ships per year, and when I say ‘ships’ I mean everything from supertankers and war ships to car ferries and container ships. The statistics are impressive.

Getting to Alang

Because the working conditions are appalling and safety levels are laughably non-existent, Alang is a major draw for the poor of India who are desperate for a job, any job. People from Orissa and Bihar, two of the poorest states, make up a large percentage of the workers, but there are people from everywhere from Tamil Nadu to Nepal. I was waiting for the bus in Bhavnagar on the morning of Sunday 7th June – I took the phrase ‘it’s difficult to reach by bus, so take a taxi for the day’ in my guidebook as a personal challenge, especially as there were four or five buses each way per day – and while I was trying to work out the bus timetable a sadhu wandered up to me, saffron clad and clutching a bag and a plastic container half full of what looked like month-old yoghurt. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘Alang,’ I replied. ‘To see the ships.’

‘So am I,’ he said. ‘I’m going to start work there.’

We chatted for a bit – his English was pretty good – and eventually the right bus pulled in and we hopped on. An hour and a half later we were sipping chai[1] in Alang, looking out over the platforms where the ships lay in various stages of disarray.

The word ‘platform’ when applied to Alang is a euphemism; the platforms are simply beach. When a new ship is about to be broken up, the beach in the relevant yard is totally cleaned, even down to the last nut and bolt (nothing is wasted in this recycling operation), and then the ship is driven straight at the beach at breakneck speed so that it quite literally beaches itself. This part is finely tuned and has been done so many times that the ships are rarely more than a few metres off the desired position, which is a relief when you think of what would happen if they applied Indian bus logic to beaching a supertanker.

Alang is a suitable place for such crazy antics because it has a pretty eccentric tidal system. The tide is high only twice a month, which is when the sea covers the yards and new ships are beached; then for two weeks at a time the tide recedes, leaving the ships out of the water and easy to work on. And what work it is; everything that is detachable that can be sold is removed from the inside, all the engines are gutted and removed and then the ship’s body itself is dismantled, chunk by chunk. The road into town is lined with large warehouses stacked high with doors, lathes, engine parts, beds, entire kitchen ranges, life jackets and plenty of other salvaged jetsam; you name it, if you can find it on a ship then you can buy it cheap in Alang. Most of the bits are trucked straight out to customers, but there’s plenty left over for the high street stores.

The sight of a beached ship with half its front removed is both awesome and gruesome, because despite the lack of humanity in a fully intact ship, when it’s sitting there with its guts hanging out it’s hard not to pity the poor thing. It might be pity in the sense that we pity moth-eaten teddy bears or unlucky cartoon characters, but the sheer immensity of the beasts makes such pity harrowing.

I saw destroyers losing their final battle against the blow torch and hacksaw, I saw container ships sagging into the sand as the P&O signs were pulled down, I saw roll-on roll-off ferries rolling over and dying; even without an obvious face to each ship, it was slightly funereal.

But the appeal of Alang is also scientific. The whole place is like a huge, lifelike book of cross-section drawings, a real-life lesson in how the engines fit into a supertanker, how those millions of air vents and electricity conduits mesh together inside the hull of a navy ship, and how much of a ship is crammed with gear and how much is just empty space. In the West we are familiar with yards that make ships but not those that break them, and you don’t make a ship from bow to stern, you make it in parts; the hull is built first, then the structural innards, and then the pleasantries of furnishing. In Alang it’s a horizontal destruction irrespective of what order the insides were put in, and as such it’s a unique sight.

Visit to the Ashram

I was impressed by the view from the chai shop, but what I really wanted to do was to get inside a yard and nose around; I wasn’t stupid enough to want to climb around on a half-deconstructed ship, but some close-up views would have been great. My new-found friend said there would be plenty of time to worry about getting permission from the Port Officer later; first, it was time to visit his ashram.

This was an opportunity too good to miss. I’ve managed to avoid India’s ashrams totally so far, and the thought of seeing one in such a godforsaken place as Alang was intriguing. We tootled along the road, past yard after yard and ship after ship, and soon ended up at the Siva ashram of the Gopnath Temple, a ramshackle but friendly complex surrounding yet another Hindu temple tucked away from the main coast road. Inside were other sadhus sitting cross-legged on some mats, and so we joined them.

I’ve often wondered what makes sadhus tick, and my visit to Gopnath confirmed my suspicions: they’re a bunch of stoners. The man who was introduced to me as the big cheese at Gopnath ashram was puffing away on a chillum packed with charas (that’s a pipe packed with marijuana), and as we rolled up he offered it to me.

I declined because it was obvious that Alang was going to be fascinating enough without chemical aid and I didn’t want to get memory loss, but he packed another one and passed it round the circle, everybody inhaling right down to their toes except for me and a couple of guys who were having their palms read.

Five minutes later they were buggered but very hospitable, inviting me to dinner that night (which I also declined because I’d be back in Bhavnagar) and letting me take their pictures, as long as I promised to send them copies (which I did). But I wanted to see the ships, so I said goodbye to my now inert friend, who had decided to put off his job-hunting until four o’clock (though, come to think of it, he didn’t say which day), and strolled back to the surf.

The Yards of Alang

I had previously met a few westerners who had visited Alang, and their advice had been not only to avoid taking pictures, but to leave my camera at home; unauthorised photography was not tolerated and would result in the removal of your film and undoubtedly a big baksheesh bill. I’d brought my camera anyway, and was mighty glad that I had; possibly the fact that it was Sunday made a difference, or the fact that it was high tide and the ships were being smacked by waves, but there were no workers to be seen, just a few lazing gate keepers, and quite a few of them let me in to wander among the guts of ships from all over the world. Only one of them asked for anything – two Cokes, which I didn’t bother to buy him seeing as lots of other places weren’t asking for a thing – and another bloke took a fancy to my biro (which he duly pinched) but there were no officials, no baksheesh issues and no problems with taking photos.

So I took ’em. The hotel man would later say that I had been very lucky being able to take photos – most tourists are apparently stopped and denied permission – and I would later meet a woman who had been accosted by a policeman with no badge, no gun and no proof of status except for his uniform (which looked suspiciously like a bus conductor’s) who tried to charge her for her camera. I was lucky indeed; my experience was far from negative.

The yards were surprisingly clean; I had imagined oil slicks three feet deep and piles of rusting metal clogging up the environment. In reality the sea was fairly blue (inevitably it’s not going to be mineral water round a ship breaking yard) and the beach was recognisable as sand, though I recalled that most of the objections to Alang from the international community were over working conditions rather than environmental concerns. Whatever the case, it’s a good example of western hypocrisy because the ships keep coming, whatever the issues; dozens of ships were floating offshore, waiting their turn, looking well-used and battered in the way that only old ships can. For a fleeting moment I thought of homes for the elderly and waiting for God, but only for a moment. Ships aren’t human, OK?

Cricket Among the Ships

The inhabitants of Alang are, though, and they’re also incredibly friendly. As I wandered past the yards and admired the workers’ slums leaning against each other, I smiled and got smiles back, I wobbled my head and got wobbling heads in return, and I waved and got raised palms for my trouble. And halfway back to the bus stand I came across a handful of boys playing cricket across the main road – steadfastly ignoring trucks and cycles as they turfed up the wicket – and they insisted that I join in.

I must have played for a good hour, batting and bowling my way into the history books. I was wearing my bush hat so I became ‘Shane Warne’ to the locals, and one of the boys who was a pretty good batsman became ‘Sachin Tendulkar’. We drew a crowd and I drew on skills not used since school, but eventually it drew to an end, the heat killing my energy, ruining my spin and reminding me that I had to get back to Bhavnagar before I was stuck here forever. The people might be wonderful, but Alang isn’t the sort of place you want to be stranded in.

Finally, my Bhavnagar hotel just served to underline how friendly the area is. The previous night I’d dropped my bag onto a marble table and the bloody thing had come loose from the wall, smashing on the ground and shattering; even the Rolling Stones would have been impressed by my ability to ruin a hotel room so comprehensively. I assumed the reaction would turn into a barely restrained discussion on how much I would have to pay, but what was the reaction in Bhavnagar? ‘I am sorry, sir, would you like to have a different room?’

I was gobsmacked, and hardly wanted to leave.

[1] This is a different act depending on where you are sipping it. Normally chai is served in a glass, either in a small full glass or a large half-full glass, in which case you just drink it normally. If you’re served chai in a cup and shallow saucer, you should pour the chai into the saucer and drink the chai from the saucer. Finally (and this is more common in the south) if you are served chai in a cup and deep saucer, you should pour the chai into the saucer, then pour it back into the cup, and drink from the cup; this is to mix in the sugar that’s sitting idly on the bottom, so if you don’t like your chai sweet you don’t pour it and mix it up. Oh, and ‘service tea’ is the name for the way we drink it in England, with separate milk and a teapot, but that’s service tea, not chai. Chai is to tea what McDonald’s is to haute cuisine... except chai tastes great!

Palitana

Written: 9 June 1998

So you want to build a temple? That makes sense. So you want people to come to your temple? That makes sense too. So you find a hill towering 600m above the dry scrubland of the Gujarat peninsula and stick your temple right on the top in the most inaccessible point of all, and then you build a 3000-step staircase for your flock to climb? On the surface, that appears to make no sense at all, but if you look at the world through the eyes of the Jains, it all starts to fall into place.

Jains in India number about 4.5 million, which is a relatively small number when you consider that the religion originated here at about the same time as Buddhism (500 BC). But take a trip to Palitana and you’d never know that Jainism is one of India’s minor religions, because the sheer scale of achievement on top of this hill is staggering.

If you think that intentionally building your temples in the middle of nowhere is a strange thing to do, then it would appear to be bordering on the insane to build a whole hilltop of 863 intricate temples in such a faraway place, but that’s precisely what the Jains did at Palitana, where the Place of Victory stands atop a huge hill in the plains. They did a similar job again at Junagadh, also in Gujarat, where there are 10,000 steps and even more temples, but Palitana was on my way south from Bhavnagar to Diu, so I decided to see for myself what drove these people to create so many temples in such an inaccessible location.

These were my thoughts as I dumped my bags and took a rickshaw out to the base of the steps, but whatever I was thinking about the Jains and their amazing architectural extremes, it’s almost as if their gods[1] were listening. From the second I stepped into the rickshaw to my arrival at the temple complex, it’s as if they did everything in their power to dissuade me from getting there, though perhaps they were simply demonstrating their belief that you have to put in the effort to get close to enlightenment. Whatever, as I headed out towards the hill of temples, it felt as if they were in control rather than me...

No Pain, No Gain

It started with the rain, a severe tropical downpour that flooded the streets, shot sideways into the rickshaw cab and soaked me to the skin. It stopped as I arrived, but the stone steps leading up to the temples (which are too far away to be seen from the bottom) were now like a skating rink. In an attempt not to offend the Jain religion I had left all my leather items behind, so I had no sun hat and no leather boots, just my umbrella and a pair of flimsy flip-flops. My flip-flops had absolutely no grip, especially on wet marble, which only helped to add to the fun.

Then the wind got up and decided to have a go. I barely managed to put down my umbrella in time as the few hardy trees lining the staircase bent double, clouds flew across the sky like impatient commuters on the motorway, and flicks of rain stung my eyes. Five minutes up the track and I had a throbbing headache from the wind battering my undefended ears.

As if these elemental displays weren’t enough, just before the halfway mark I felt a familiar stirring in my lower gut: diarrhoea. It would turn out to be a mild bout, lasting for only the rest of that day, but I couldn’t quite believe the timing; things were beginning to get worryingly difficult. I idly wondered what else the tirthankars would demand. Blood, perhaps?

They got blood soon after my guts started jumping about. Turning to wave at a friendly family who were sitting on the side of the stairs taking a break, I managed to stub my big toe on a marble step. The hard stone ripped a sizable hole in the end of my toe, stinging enough to elicit the mad hopping effect more normally associated with painful bangs to the head, and when the throbbing had subsided to a bearable level I saw that it was pretty nasty; a flap of skin hung loosely over a round hole, and it really hurt... and this in flip-flops, too, where all manner of grot and grime could infect the wound. I vowed to go on; smiling through adversity is a good trait in every religion, and I decided to show the tirthankars that I was worthy.

On the way I passed plenty of other struggling pilgrims[2], but they all seemed to be going downhill. Most sensible people make the ascent in the morning before the heat of the midday sun, but my schedule had seen me on a bus all morning, and I’d set off just after lunch. Those coming down, apart from saying, ‘You too late, very hot,’ all the time, were delightful, and most of them were only too happy to say hello and pass the time of day. One guy pressed Rs1.25 into my hand as he passed and said, ‘For the temple, give to temple,’ (which, of course, I did) and another waved me down for a rest and a chat. His English was as limited as his enthusiasm was unbounded.

‘Nem?’ he inquired.

‘My name’s Mark. What’s yours?’

‘Uh,’ he grunted.

‘Oh. Have you been visiting the temple?’

‘Uh.’

‘So, is it worth the climb?’

‘Uh.’

‘Ah.’

‘Uh.’

‘Um, I think I think I’ll be going up, then.’

‘Uh.’

‘Bye-bye.’

‘Bye-bye.’

His fluency was comparatively good. Most of the kids greeted me with an enthusiastic ‘Bye-bye’, much as they’d done in Mandu, while one came out with the wonderful ‘Hello-bye’ and others struggled through to ask, ‘Country name?’ But the friendliness of the Gujarati Jains shone brightly through the language barrier, and eventually I reached the top, intrigued to see what it was these kind people were worshipping.

A Whole Hill of Temples

It was worth the struggle. Jain temples are smothered with carvings in much the same way as Hindu temples, but they’re quite different on closer investigation. Hindu stone carvings of women are interesting, but the Jains make them so voluptuous they manage to convey the eroticism of Konark’s Sun Temple without any need for biological diagrams. Stone people play ancient guitars while old kings grimace through their beards and the prophets look passively happy (much like the Buddha), and the sheer impact of having so many temples crammed together in one place makes it a fascinating place to wander round, even for someone like me, who has arguably overdosed on Indian temples.

The best part about Jain temples are the idols. Sitting in the lotus position and variously smiling enigmatically or meditating heavily, Jain idols look fairly Buddhist but have one very striking feature: their eyes are made of clear and black glass that catches any stray light, making the dark interiors of the temples glow with eerie pairs of lights suspended in the black. It’s like something out of Scooby Doo, especially with all the bats that inhabit the dark recesses of every Indian temple. My lonely trek through the temples on the Place of Victory was really quite spooky at times.

After all the wonderful pilgrims and atmospheric idols, it was a bit of a shock to bump into the charge-for-camera-and-shoes scam; every template has a variation on this theme, and unfortunately Palitana is no exception. I have no objection to paying for entry into a temple, and I have no objection to paying someone to guard my shoes while I’m inside and barefoot, but at Palitana the people in charge of payment were such shifty characters that it somehow felt wrong to hand over the money to them rather than into a locked donations box. I strolled up to pay for a ticket and you could instantly tell they were going to try for more than just the Rs25 entrance fee; four fat men sat behind protective desks, exuding an attitude of ‘I’m in charge and if I can’t be bothered to let you in there’s nothing you can do about it’, and they instantly tried to squeeze things out of me.

‘You smoke?’ said the man with the shiniest moustache before I’d had a chance to speak.

‘No,’ I said, knowing full well he was after a cigarette and knowing full well that even if I had some, which I didn’t, he wasn’t going to get one. ‘Smoking is injurious to health,’ I continued, quoting the Indian government health warning stamped on every packet. ‘Do you smoke?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Then you will die young,’ I said, smiling furiously. ‘Can I have a camera permit, please?’

‘You have coins?’ he tried.

‘It’s 25 rupees for the permit,’ I said, ‘and I’ll give you one hundred. You give me 75 rupees change. No coins necessary. Here you go, 100 rupees.’

Seeing this, he uttered the war cry of every shop owner in India, irrespective of the status of their top pockets: ‘No change.’

‘Then I guess there is no money for you,’ I said and turned for the door, which immediately produced the expected result and the expected change. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Could you tell me where the donation box is?’ I asked, and they produced it for me to put the kind pilgrim’s coins in, grumbling at me as if it was a major effort to reach behind the desk for the box.

‘Honestly,’ I muttered to myself as I stomped out of the office, ‘so much for a friendly welcome.’ And perhaps this criticism of the impious placated the Jain prophets, because that second the sun broke through the clouds and stayed long enough for me to explore the main enclosure and get my money’s worth. It was amazing.

Back Down Again

The scams weren’t over for the day, though. Before long the clouds rolled back in and I rolled back down; on a clear day you might be able to see the sea from Palitana, but all I could see were puddles. It wasn’t unpleasant, though, and I took a slow horse cart back to the hotel for Rs20, handing over a pretty tatty Rs20 note at the end and wandering off.

‘No good,’ tapped a voice on my shoulder, and turning round I saw a young man holding out my battered Rs20 note; the old man who owned the tonga had obviously sent his young sidekick after me to get a better note. This is a common problem in India; notes become disgusting fairly quickly and hardly ever see the inside of a bank to get replaced, and if a note’s particularly lacerated you’ll have grave problems getting rid of it. Funnily enough you can have the most leprous note that nobody will accept, but put it inside a clear plastic sheath and staple it shut, and all of a sudden it’s fine. My Rs20 note was having more problems holding itself together than Michael Jackson, but I wasn’t in the mood for an argument, so I just said, ‘OK then,’ grabbed my note back with a smile, ducked under a horse’s head and sauntered off into the bus station to check some bus times.

That worked. Seeing your hard-earned cash disappearing into the crowd is enough to motivate even the most relaxed rickshaw driver, and sure enough the man came running after me shouting, ‘OK, OK, OK,’ and accepted the money. It felt good to win this argument for once, especially in a place like Palitana, which, the Place of Victory aside, is a fairly drab place that deserves no more mention in this travelogue.

I’ll also gloss over the journey from Palitana to Diu because this is supposed to be a family show and unnecessary swearing simply isn’t required. Unlike on the journey itself...

[1] Actually, Jainism doesn’t have deities, rather 24 prophets (known as tirthankars) who formulated a religious philosophy as opposed to a theistic system of belief. Jain temples may look quite similar to those of the Hindus, but the Jain religion is far closer to Buddhism. The statues of the tirthankars dotted round India are like huge standing Buddhas (but with more obvious bodily parts), while the temples are lively and as crammed with carvings as Hindu shrines. It’s an interesting variation on the theme.

[2] And plenty of pilgrims being carried down in pure comfort, sitting in dooli swing chairs lugged around by wiry men. Interestingly most of the people in doolis were fat, and I idly wondered whether the merit gained by a visit to the temples would be cancelled out if you paid someone else to carry you there and back. I rather hoped so, as I sweated my way up the marble slide.

Hindi Pop

Written: 19 June 1998

There is only one music cassette in use on the buses in India, and I hear it everywhere; the result is that despite several months of inserting my ear plugs whenever the bus boys crank the latest Hindi pop hits up to eleven, I still know the songs backwards (which, incidentally, improves them).

It isn’t confined to the buses, either. I hear it in shops, I hear it in buses, I hear it in rickshaws, I hear it in restaurants, and on bad nights I hear it in my sleep. It’s a compilation of Hindi pop hits of 1998 and I’m almost tempted to buy a copy simply so I can glare at it.

The Hindi pop you get on Indian buses isn’t unique in being irritating; every country in the world has some kind of music that’s designed to make the ears ache. For example, the majority of the music in Australia and New Zealand is western, and as such has good bits and appalling bits, while the tribal music of the Aborigines and Maoris is highly emotive and well worth investigating; Polynesian music is also tribal, and it’s pretty interesting until the ukulele kicks in, which it unfortunately does all too often; Indonesian music is either abysmal pop from fat Elvis clones, or intriguing traditional gamelan music that sounds like the introduction to Peter Gabriel’s San Jacinto played on an out-of-tune set of tubular bells; Singaporean music is a melting pot of its neighbours’ efforts, but it is effectively being swallowed up by rock ‘n’ roll; I can’t really remember the music in Malaysia or Thailand, but I remember one bus journey – I forget which country – where the musical accompaniment bore a scary resemblance to the sound of a cat scratching its claws down a blackboard; and Indian and Nepalese music is wonderfully diverse, with traditional tabla music, the wonderful sound of the sitar, entertaining film music, and the kind of pop music that is chirpy, bouncy and annoying in the way that happy morning people are when you’ve got a nasty hangover behind the eyes.

So is Hindi pop more irritating than any other country’s pap? It depends; I remember almost gnawing my left leg off while putting up with Indonesian pop, I remember Thai videos on buses frying my brain cells, and I’ll keep my thoughts about the ukulele to myself. Hindi music, though, is close to winning, because the voices have an amazing way of cutting through any other noise, be it the rumble of the bus or the fascinating cacophony of life in India. The women who sing Hindi pop music sound like they are on helium[1] and the men basically shout, so whatever the lyrical and compositional subtleties, it sounds to the unwary like a kind of aural warfare. Add in string sections that sound like the Eeee-Eeee-Eeee from Psycho’s shower scene, and you have a musical experience that can only be described as invasive, which is a shame, because Hindi pop[2] is everywhere in India.

On top of this, Hindi pop songs are plugged so remorselessly that even if the music weren’t so invasive, it would still get to me; there’s no kind of music in the world that can stand that sort of constant playing. Especially not Hindi Pop Hits of 1998...

[1] Often this is due to a faulty tape mechanism playing the tape too quickly; I put one of my tapes into a supposedly posh Indian tape deck, and even Sheryl Crow sounded light and shrill. I’m convinced that if the local equivalents of Andrew Eldritch’s and Janis Joplin’s 40-a-day voices ever appeared on the Indian pop scene, they would be burned at the stake for heresy in much the same way that Elvis was for his earth-shattering hip movements in the fifties.

[2] I’m not talking about Hindi film music here, because although it might sound the same to the uninitiated, Hindi film music is really rather skilled. In the films, singer-songwriters are not common, and there’s normally a composer who writes the music, a lyricist who writes the words, a group of singers who sing the songs, and the actors who mime and dance along on the screen. The composition and lyricism is in a different league to bog-standard Hindi pop, and the dancing is, without a doubt, spectacular and highly skilled, and puts western boy bands to shame. If only all Indian pop was this impressive; unfortunately, it isn’t.

Diu

Written: 14 June 1998

Diu feels like a frontier town; given both its distant and recent history, this is perhaps not surprising. Stuck out on a limb at the southernmost tip of Gujarat, the island of Diu was one of the few Portuguese colonies in India (the others being Goa and Daman). Between the 14th and 16th centuries Diu was an important trading post for the Ottoman Turks, but in 1535 the Portuguese took control on their second attempt, building a huge fort and settling in for a long old occupation. They finally left in 1961 as a result of Operation Vijay[1], in which attacks were launched by air and land on the Portuguese territories of Goa, Diu, Daman and the Anjidiv Islands. The operation was a success, and all four territories, including Diu, soon joined the Indian Union.

Diu is not part of Gujarat, however; it’s governed from Delhi in a similar way to Pondicherry (they’re both Union Territories), and this adds to the feeling of isolation. Not only is Diu geographically out in the sticks, it’s culturally different too, most noticeably in the availability of alcohol. Gujarat is a dry state – the only one left, as far as I can make out – but Diu is not only very wet, it’s very cheap (Rs30 for a 650 ml bottle of beer is not bad going).

This helps to explain the reaction of the Gujaratis I met on the way from Bhavnagar to Diu; when they found out I was heading for Diu, they asked if I had any drink with me, what was in my water bottle (water, as a matter of fact) and whether I liked to get drunk. Initially it didn’t click; ‘You go Diu? What is that you drinking?’ didn’t make any sense until I remembered the lack of alcohol in Gujarat. Then it started to irritate me, because everyone automatically assumed that because I was going to Diu, I must be an alcoholic.

This might be true for Indian visitors to Diu, as inevitably the cheap availability of booze acts as a magnet for Indian drinkers. This only serves to add to the frontier image; wandering into the bars, you’re greeted by pairs of blurred brown eyes, tinged deep yellow and hooded by sinking eyelids. At night the sound of drunken Indians singing is only matched by the sound of mangy dogs baying, often because they’ve been woken from their slumber by a pissed up Gujarati taking out his drunken frustrations on the local wildlife.

Restaurants open for breakfast are also open to Indians cracking into the local wine at 9am, while packs of westerners sit in the corner, marvelling at the alcoholic tendencies of the Gujaratis while nursing savage hangovers of their own. I even saw a man pass out in his seat at around midday and proceed to piss himself – and this in a fairly respectable place – as well as all manner of alcohol-induced fights; these were the same embarrassing displays of losing control and a desire to get paralytic that I saw in Pondicherry and French Polynesia. Westerners aren’t much better, but it still seems that although westerners tend to drink more, they don’t typically behave like this, whereas most Indians I see drinking heavily can’t resist acting the fool.

Exploring Diu

I arrived in this outpost of colonialism and clandestine consumption during the most god-awful storm I’d encountered in India[2]. The rain drove into the bus, pouring through windows without glass and leaking through rivets in the bus roof, and even my umbrella proved scant protection inside the rattle-trap. Chai shops were flooded out, the whole state suffered from a power cut, and when I arrived in Diu late in the evening I couldn’t see a thing. I wondered what on earth I’d stumbled into.

Actually I’d stumbled into a wonderful oasis of beaches, colonial buildings and cheap alcohol, and although the latter was an attraction and made for some interesting late nights back at the hotel, I found the buildings to be the most interesting part. The beaches on Diu are pretty reasonable, but with all the terrible weather and the monsoon approaching, the sea was churning brown and totally unsuitable for swimming, and even if I had fancied a bit of sunbathing, then I’d have had to put up with the locals, as to the Indians, western sunbathers are like television: they’re worth staring at for hours. If you want beach privacy, avoid India and go to Thailand.

The fortress, easily the most impressive Portuguese building in Diu, is perfect frontier material. Surrounded on three sides by severe cliffs falling into the sea and sheer walls built to withstand the biggest army the Gujaratis could muster, the earliest parts date from 1535, with a lot of the building being done between 1546 and 1650. These days it’s uncomplainingly slipping into the sea, gradually mouldering in the tropical sun that seems as alien in this distinctly European building as the Portuguese themselves must have felt. If you ended up in Diu, you really were cut off from home.

Housing underground escape channels, cisterns, the governor’s palace, a prison, barracks, state offices and churches, the fortress is a complete fortified city. Cannons litter the walls, cannon balls quietly crack in the sun, ancient stone carvings are scattered outside buildings in various states of decay, and from the turrets and bastions the view over Diu is evocative. The channel, at this turbulent time of year, is a sailor’s nightmare, with spits of shifting sands and savage currents whirling round the headland. The fortress must have been impregnable back in its heyday, and now it’s a deserted delight on the easternmost tip of the island. As fortresses go, Diu Fort is colonialism at its most paranoid.

Following the cliffs to the south of the fort, you begin to understand just how easy to defend Diu must have been. The cliffs that line the southeastern coast are savagely beautiful with their pounding breakers spewing against overhangs and eerily moulded limestone formations. I was reminded of Victoria’s coastline in Australia, but here the danger is not so much the cliffs as the sharp shelf of limestone sitting a few scant feet under the waves, waiting to smash the hulls of any invading ships. The cliffs form a natural barrier, with the double moat of the fortress a man-made equivalent. Between them they made sure that nobody got in... or out.

Diu’s Churches

The cliffs are also home to a number of large caves dug into the ground; they’re the remains of mines where the Portuguese cut out blocks of limestone with which to build their edifices. The fortress is just one of the colonial constructions on the island, most of the others being (of course) imposing houses of God. Three huge churches tower over the town’s skyline, but only one of them is still used as a place of worship, and that sparingly. Once again, it smacks of frontier colonialism.

This church, St Paul’s, is monstrous, and its state of decay is almost endearing. Still decorated lovingly with lights and statues of Christ, Mary and various members of the heavenly host, the church is attached to the local school.

I wandered in, deposited some change in the donation box (something I tend to do in foreign Christian churches, though I don’t really know why) and took a look around, and out the back I discovered one of the most interesting notices I’ve ever seen in a church: the local price list for services.

Check out some of the following fees as set by Archbishop-Patriarch Raul Nicholau Gonsalves on 1 April 1994.

Church marriage

Rs50

Church baptism

Rs20

Blessing of a new house

Rs50

Blessing of a foundation stone, small chapels or crosses, vehicles, wells, nets, stakes

Rs20

Blessing of fields, new plants, corn, invocation against noxious animals etc.

Rs10

Pealing of bells (each)

Re1

Assistance at funeral service

Rs20

Any religious service at the grave

Rs5

And tucked away at the end was this particularly Christian attitude, ‘The poor will always be exempted partially or fully from the stipulated offerings/fees.’

Upstairs in the church was the school, deserted in the late afternoon heat. At one end of a corridor was a classroom scene so perfectly colonial you could be forgiven for believing it was set up specially for tourists, as the blackboard pronounced its algebraic message over a collection of tidy wooden school desks. To find an active Christian church in a windswept corner of such a remote Indian state was completely unexpected, but isn’t that the clichéd image of colonial education? It felt as archaic and obsolete as Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial or Melaka’s Stadhuys, and just as magical.

More churches were waiting to be discovered as I headed off on a bicycle ride into the heart of the island, accompanied by a friendly Frenchman called Michel. Diu island is long and thin[3], stretching west to east for about 14km, bloating to about 4km at its waist, and managing to rise to a maximum height of 29m above sea level; it’s perfect for cycling. We explored Fudham Church (which holds one service per year, has no padre and is now a guest house inhabited by strange long-term travellers and humidity mould), Nagoa Beach (where most of the Indian holidaymakers hang out, the men swimming in their skimpy trunks and the women sheltering and sweltering in their sarees) and various rocky coves and honeymoon spots. In the high season Diu must be quite the place to be, but I was glad it was the off-season; it would be harder to imagine Diu as a frontier town with hordes of local tourists wandering around.

World Cup fever also struck as the games took off in Paris, and nursing a sore pair of buttocks from the bicycle trip[4] I settled down to lose myself in the football, not so much because I like footy but because TV is simply fascinating after so long away from it. I watched France beat South Africa – memorable because the French coach was called A Jacquet and the South African coach P Troussier – and I settled down into a lifestyle of relaxation and spirited drinking. It was frontier living at its best.

But as with all frontiers, you have to turn around and go back eventually, so on the Sunday night I boarded the night bus for Ahmedabad, starting the long haul north back towards Delhi and my flight home.

[1] For an excellent description of how Operation Vijay played out in Diu, check out Operations at Diu: The One Day War by Group Captain Kapil Bhargava (Retd), which is based on the personal recollections of Group Captain Micky Blake VrC (Retd), with input from Air Marshal Mally Wollen PVSM VM (Retd). It’s a very interesting read.

[2] I was to discover later that a cyclone had been approaching Gujarat from the south in the Arabian Sea for two or three days, and had decided to hit the mainland on the day I was travelling to Diu. It smashed the west coast of Gujarat, causing severe damage to roads, power lines, water supplies and life expectancy; in total over 1500 people would die, not as much as the official heat wave death toll of 2383, but still sizable. The cyclone would also cancel my plans to visit western Gujarat, the worst-hit area, which is fairly out of the way and challenging to travel even without the after-effects of screaming winds and flooding. It was a blessing that I was ignorant of the weather conditions when I left Palitana, or I might have not bothered with Diu at all.

Indeed, the cyclone in Gujarat was still turning up dead bodies a week after its departure, and although I’m not for one minute trying to equate the simultaneous physical deterioration of my travel possessions with such an ecological and financial disaster, it’s a coincidence that can’t be ignored.

As winds battered the west coast of Gujarat, they also battered my Palitana to Diu bus, which in turn battered my bags. Soon after my arrival in Diu my trusty old Walkman started to sound muffled, and my even trustier computer started ignoring certain keys. Armed with a Swiss Army knife and the confidence inspired by a lack of any other solutions I tackled both of them one humid afternoon.

Inside my Walkman a tiny screw had worked loose, detaching the playback head; it was the work of minutes to fix it back in, even though it still sounded terrible. My computer wasn’t so easy; designed to be as compact as possible, the Acorn Pocket Book was also designed to explode when opened up by Swiss Army knife. I’d seen the insides before, and soon tracked down a ribbon cable that had worked loose from its socket, but in the meantime I’d managed to attract a fair old crowd of Indian onlookers, all of whom were either genuinely interested, or drunk enough to find the magnetism of a crowd interesting in its own right.

Astonishingly, with the crowd leering over my shoulder, I did manage to fix my computer. I certainly deserved a drink after that...

[3] This is quite unlike the inhabitants. Tourists and locals alike, everyone in Diu when I was there was fat. Beer bellies pushed shirt buttons to physical limits, sweat broke out quickly on even the most inactive brow, and fat middle-class drinkers ploughed through bottles of whisky, wine and beer at a rate that only the obese or the dedicated can manage. People don’t come to Diu to get fat; they come here to get fatter.

[4] ‘No leak, no leak,’ said the man as I pointed out that my bike had a flat rear tyre. He pumped it full of air and promised me that it would be fine, which I didn’t believe for one second. Nine kilometres away from Diu town and my teeth were rattling in my head as all the air shot out of my back tyre. My buttocks weren’t designed to have a loosely padded razor blade inserted between the cheeks and shaken around for an hour, and they hurt. Still, what can you expect from an Indian bicycle?

Lies, Damned Lies

Written: 15 June 1998

Visitors to India can’t help but notice the Indian tendency to be economical with the truth. This is often because Indians, and Asians in general, want to please you by telling you what you want to hear, even if it’s not the truth – either that or they’re trying to sell you something, in which case their economy with the truth is simply an extension of the approach used by East London market stall owners. I’ve always found this constant fraudulence illogical enough to be bordering on the irresponsible, but the other day I realised that I’ve been doing exactly the same ever since I came across the concept of the census conversation.

From Indonesia to India I’ve had to put up with uninspiring but polite inquiries from the locals; sometimes excellent conversations ensue and sometimes they don’t, but whatever the outcome, it’s a fact of life and it’s churlish not to get involved. Like most facts of life on the road, the traveller learns to minimise hassle and maximise happiness, which in the case of pidgin parleying leads to more than a little bit of white lying. Here’s a typical conversation I had on a bus in Gujarat (where my lies are denoted by numbered footnotes):

‘Hello, which country from you?’

‘I’m from England.’

‘Ah, England, beautiful country. Which city?’

‘London[1].’

‘First time India?’

‘No, my fourth[2].’

‘You like India, eh? Is good country?’

‘Oh yes. The country is so big that the people are different everywhere you go, there’s so much variety in the landscape from mountains to deserts to beaches, the food’s amazing, the religions are so different from western ones, and the people are so friendly... I can’t get enough. I love it[3].’

‘You marry?’

‘No.’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘Yes, back in London[4].’

‘England, you play world cup football at moment. You like?’

‘Yes, it’s great[5]. But I prefer the cricket[6].’

‘Cricket, yes! Mike Atherton, Graeme Hick, good players.’

‘Not as good as Tendulkar, eh!’

‘Yes. He is best. What is profession?’

‘I am a journalist.’

‘What you write?’

‘I am a freelancer for magazines.’

‘Which magazines?’

‘Oh, various types. I used to work for the BBC[7].’

‘Ah. What is this here?’

‘A computer.’

‘How much it cost?’

‘I do not know. It was a present[8].’

‘Ah. You like this music?’

‘Er, it’s OK[9].’

‘You see any Indian films?’

‘Yes, one. Dil to Pagal Hai[10].’

‘Ah, Dil to Pagal Hai. Good’

‘Yes...’

And so on, ad nauseam... but at least they’re white lies, and it’s worth the effort just to bring a smile to the faces of the locals.

[1] I live in London for simplicity. Every Indian has heard of London, some know Birmingham, but none have heard of Staffordshire.

[2] If it’s your first visit and you happen to have fallen into a conversation with a con man, look out.

[3] This is true, but I never mention the hassles of Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, giardia, volume levels or cow shit.

[4] I have no girlfriend, but saying I have one stops them from trying to set me up with an Indian girl, or from enquiring too closely about what I think of Indian women.

[5] I couldn’t give a toss about football.

[6] And I couldn’t give a toss about cricket, either. But if you don’t like cricket in India, you might as well be a Pakistani for all the respect you get.

[7] True, I did work for the BBC, but this makes me sound like some big reporter, which I wasn’t. I only mention it to end the investigation into my past, because if you give a final answer to a question, the questions move on to a different subject.

[8] Everything I own I say is a present. If you tell the locals the real cost of a camera or computer, they’ll realise just how rich you are, which doesn’t really help anybody.

[9] Bus music is never OK, it’s always abysmal. But you can’t say that too often, because it’s needlessly offensive (a bit like the music, come to think of it).

[10] I’ve never seen any Hindi films that I can remember the titles of, but I can’t admit that either. It makes Indians happy if you say you’ve experienced, enjoyed and remembered their culture, so why not make ’em happy? I’m only returning the favour, after all...

India: Rajasthan

Mt Abu

Written: 18 June 1998

It didn’t take much persuasion for me to drop my plans to visit Bhuj and Junagadh in western Gujarat; the chaos from the cyclone has sparked fears of epidemic diseases (which are being denied by the government), but whatever the risk of cholera, there’s no doubt that the electricity, water and transport infrastructures are in all sorts of trouble, and I figure I could always come back another time. The journalist in me wants to investigate; the traveller in me never wants to see another bus ride like the last one. The traveller has won hands down.

An overnight luxury bus from Diu to Ahmedabad and another bus bound for the north[1] saw me arrive in the hill station of Mt Abu. The monsoon is doing funny things this year – it leapt from being from five days behind schedule to being ahead of schedule in just 24 hours, jumping across half the country in just one day having only dropped 45 per cent of the expected rain by this point. With this in mind, I settled in to enjoy the relatively low humidity of the 1200m-high plateau of Mt Abu.

I only stopped at Mt Abu to break up the long journey north – yet another overnight bus ride would have blown my mind – but it turned out to be one of the best moves I’ve made in a long time. Sufficiently off the tourist trail to be almost totally free of westerners, it is instead a haven for Indian tourists. Mt Abu is the honeymoon capital of Rajasthan, itself one of the most romantic states in India, and as a result it’s fascinating to someone whose concept of marriage is totally different to the Indian one.

A Marriage Made in Mt Abu

It’s obvious from the moment you step off the bus. Surrounding a small lake, just the right size for intimate boat rides at sunset, Mt Abu manages to combine a pleasantly cool temperature with a complete tourist set-up; ice cream stalls stand side by side with shops peddling sarees and Kashmiri trinkets[2], cute parks sit alongside piers hiring pedal-boats, and luxury hotels rub shoulders with cheap guest houses, all vying for a lucrative slice of the honeymoon market. And for once this tourist market is entirely Indian, and the differences between it and other more westernised tourist spots are interesting.

The first thing you notice is not just the friendliness of the people, but the way in which they are friendly. In developing countries it’s rare to feel that people are talking to you on an even keel; either they are slightly in awe of your western status, equating you with overseas luxury and the American dream, or they are middle class, in which case they tend simply to accept your existence and are interested in what you have to say, rather than fascinated by the simple fact that you’re talking. Mt Abu is overwhelmingly in the latter category; the people you meet are also tourists, on the same wavelength as you but simply in their own country rather than abroad, and as such, talking is easy. Conversation is from one tourist to another, nothing more, nothing less.

The general lack of westerners is one key to Mt Abu’s success; from an Indian point of view it must be a tourist hell, but for me it was a great place to watch the Indians at play without having to screen out the impact of western tourism. And they’re a funny bunch; no matter how long I travel round this country, I can’t get my head round the Indians on holiday. Seemingly biologically attached to each other, you never see an Indian holidaying alone; they always come in huge groups, whether with family or friends. Among Indian tourists, the universal reaction to the news that I am travelling alone is one of amazement, as if what I’m doing is slightly sacrilegious; this attitude is similar to the stereotypical Chinese and Japanese tourist, and in a similar way Indians always take tours with others instead of going it alone, they always take a guide at the attractions rather than getting a book and doing it at their own pace, and they even manage to take their honeymoons in huge groups. It’s hard to imagine that happening back home... but then again, in India the concept of sex before marriage is total anathema, so the whole marriage thing is another world to start with.

It’s a successful world though, if you throw away your preconceptions of what a marriage actually is. Indian marriages are, in the vast majority of cases, arranged; there are a few ‘love marriages’, but the fact that this category has its very own name indicates its rarity. People get married at fairly fixed times in their lives; it’s a shock to the Indians to learn that I am 27 and unmarried. The fascination with western liberalism is as universal as the Gujarati fascination with alcohol, but the desire to enjoy the fruits of western marriage is surprisingly rare; yet again the American media is an influence. Divorce is almost totally unheard of in India, but it forms a staple ingredient in hundreds of western soap operas, along with infidelity and the scourge of AIDS. Generally Indian marriages last until one of the parties dies, because the marriage starts from nothing – an arrangement for social and business reasons, not love – and develops from there. And the vast majority of marriages develop into successful ones.

Of course, you can look at it another way. Most marriages here work because the patriarchal society makes it so; the man is in charge, and he gets his way, end of story. Also, if society totally banishes and rejects divorcees, people are far less likely to get divorced; it is technically legal to divorce in India, but then again I once signed an agreement never to drive my cattle through the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which only goes to show that technical legalities are nonsense everywhere. I’ll never know how successful Indian marriage is in terms of my definition of ‘successful’, but few people here complain. I had imagined that I would meet young people pouring scorn on the idea of arranged marriages and wishing for western liberalisation, but I have yet to find someone who doesn’t equate the West with marriages failing. I can’t help wondering if they’ve got a point, with such a huge proportion of first time marriages in the West ending in divorce.

But these grisly thoughts are far from the minds of the happy couples strolling round picturesque Nakki Lake in central Mt Abu. As the sun sets over the lake, the people come out in their hundreds to have their photographs taken with the hills in the background; this being an Indian tourist spot, there are plenty of men standing around offering to take pictures for those who don’t own cameras, and film shops rent cameras by the hour. It must be a lucrative business; honeymooners are hardly going to visit Mt Abu and not want some recorded memories, even if they’re too poor to buy a camera, but you’d never see this in the West – it’d be as attractive a business proposition as a contract to sell fridges in Greenland.

And after the stroll it’s back up the hill to buy an ice cream, a saree or a .44 while the rest of the family settles in for a severely big evening meal (though, to be fair, the people in Mt Abu aren’t as half as obese as those in Diu), and then it’s off to bed for the traditional honeymoon pursuits. But I couldn’t help thinking what it must be like to have the clichéd First Night for real, for it to be a genuine consummation of marriage; if you could find a western couple for whom the First Night was also their first time, that would be pretty impressive, and besides, in our culture the thought of two people marrying without having spent time living together is, by my generation at least, frowned upon. How different these concepts that we both call marriage.

The Summer Palace

My intentions in Mt Abu were physical but somewhat less romantic; I had an aching body and wanted to do nothing strenuous for a few days. I couldn’t have picked a better spot because, according to my guidebook, there is precious little going on in Mt Abu, and that suited me fine. What I didn’t realise was that my guidebook is utterly useless when it comes to the reality of Mt Abu; it turned out to be one of the highlights of my trip.

I did indeed spend my first two days doing next to nothing, just writing letters, resting my aching toe (following my injury in Palitana), eating copious masala dosas in the local restaurants and ambling round the lake. My hotel, the Shree Ganesh, was so friendly and pleasant that I nearly forgot I was in India (especially as I had satellite TV in my room, a bonus in a room costing Rs150 a night), and I revelled in the holiday atmosphere. Doing nothing was never so much fun, but I can’t seem to do nothing for more than a day or my head explodes, so I decided that my foot would just have to suffer; Mt Abu had things to explore, and I was bloody well going to explore them.

Overlooking the lake is the Maharaja of Jaipur’s old summer palace, a mouldering old building perched on top of a sheer granite hill. I wandered up there the following morning, just for the view, and soon found myself chatting to the caretaker.

‘Want to come inside?’ he asked.

‘If it’s possible,’ I replied.

‘Why not?’ he said, and unable to think of a reason I followed him up to the roof.

‘I sleep here every night,’ he said, pointing to a beautifully constructed pavilion on the top of a tower, the highest point of the palace. Climbing to the top, I had a view of Mt Abu that was beautiful in the daytime, but which would be simply amazing at dawn and dusk.

‘You sleep here?’ I asked, unable to believe that a man with such a non-end job – looking after a building that’s used for nothing and doesn’t even see any tourists – could have such a stunning bedroom.

‘Yes, every night,’ he said, and winked. It wasn’t just the shaggy beard and George Harrison hair that made him look happy, it was his eyes. I was to come across quite a few other intensely happy people in Mt Abu.

Brahma Kumaris

One of the reasons for this is the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University, the headquarters of which are in Mt Abu. Purporting to combine all the religions of the world into one spiritual philosophy, this multinational collection of ashrams is totally funded by donations (evidently very large donations) and fills the streets of Mt Abu with white-clad people who are obviously quite at ease with life. I decided to float along to the centre’s museum where the basics of their mission are explained, just to see what the beatific smiles were all about.

It was a real groovy trip, man. Sitting alone in a theatre equipped with funky lasers and mellow soundtracks, I listened to woman with a delightfully English accent tell me that if my life was getting me down, I could solve it all by getting into meditation. I found out that if the rat race was proving a burden, I could commune with the one true God and get into real salvation. And then I began to lose track of quite what was going on.

Perhaps the problem is that my life isn’t getting me down, and the rat race is proving nothing but a distant memory, so I’m not really in the target market for Brahma Kumaris... but I still wanted to know what had made these centres spring up all over the world, providing guidance to a huge range of nationalities and creeds, so I kept listening. Unfortunately the presentation started to sink into the realm of sixties cliché, and that’s when I realised that every cliché has to start somewhere, and I’d surely found such a source. Meditation is not without merit, but it doesn’t half make some people start spouting nonsense, and the Brahma Kumaris does rather veer into this territory. I’d already met two kindly products of the university in the street who had practically begged me to drop by for a chat and to meet the only westerner currently studying there, an Australian painter called Dave; unfortunately for them, my idea of hell is something akin to being stuck in an ashram with an Australian painter called Dave, so I thanked them and made my escape. The museum displays made me feel that it had been a lucky one.

Here’s an example of what I discovered. A big sign sits in the museum, proclaiming the following:

Puzzle of Life Solved

All suffering is due to vices. Vices are due to ignorance. Ignorance can be removed by godly knowledge. Godly knowledge is imparted by God himself at the end of Iron Age (Kaliyuga). This is the end of Iron Age. Therefore, now you can attain supreme purity, peace and prosperity, which is your godfatherly birthright in the new Golden-aged world now being re-established. Now or never.

What on earth is that supposed to mean? If that one’s a little too esoteric, try this one. On another wall in the museum is the following list of entries in God’s curriculum vitae:

Who is God? Supreme father of all souls

Name: Trimurti Shiva

Form: Incorporeal point of light

Abode: Infinite divine light (Brahmlok or Paramdham)

Attributes: Purifier; Ocean of Knowledge; Bestower of Peace, Love, Happiness and Bliss; Almighty Authority

Occupation: Re-establishes one original golden-aged deity religion after destruction of numerous iron-aged degraded religions of the world

Time of Descent: Confluence (Sangam) of the end of Iron Age and beginning of Golden Age (at the end of every Kalpa – one Kalpa is 5000 years)

Whoa! So God is an incorporeal point of light, after all, and that’s what students like Dave get into when they hang out doing raja yoga in their ashrams (of which there are over 4000 in over 60 countries, incidentally). It all starts to make sense now... in a sense.

The Delwara Jain Temples

This is all different to what the Jains think; they’re more into going round naked and avoiding the accidental murder of defenceless insects (or, at least, that’s what the Digambara sect do; the less austere Shevetambara Jains wear white robes and aren’t confined to monasteries, but they still believe in the same philosophies). But irrespective of whether you think God is an incorporeal point of light, a burning bush, a man on a cross or the culmination of a philosophy of enlightenment, you have to agree that the Delwara Jain Temples in northwestern Mt Abu are quite amazing. They are, without doubt, some of the most incredible temples I have ever seen, and that includes all the Taj Mahals and Mughal tombs you can muster.

The two main temples at Delwara are the Vimal Vasahi, dating from 1031, and which took 14 years to build by 1500 artisans and 1200 labourers; and the Luna Vasahi, dating from 1230, which if anything is even more impressive than its neighbour. There are three other temples, which are pleasant but nothing on these two, and as I wandered into the complex I bought a slim guidebook and marvelled at its wonderful Inglish descriptions of the temples, wondering whether the reality could ever live up to the sales pitch.

‘The marble has yielded itself with a loving docility to fastidious chiselling,’ the book explained; ‘No description or drawing can convey an adequate expression of the great beauty and the delicately carved compositions of human beings and animal effigies of the interior of the temples which need a keen approbation,’ warbled another breathtakingly long sentence; ‘One can imagine the wonderful execution with rough and rustic instruments of those days,’ it continued; and ‘The minute chiselling and adorned motifs are unequal [sic] and matchless; the profundity of sculptured splendour is beyond fitting description,’ it chimed. With the temples inspiring such exquisitely constructed prose, I couldn’t wait to explore.

I wasn’t disappointed. Indeed, the marble carving of the Delwara Temples is, quite simply, astounding; the nearest description I can come up with is to imagine yourself miniaturised and put inside one of the most amazing ivory carvings you have ever seen, and even then it’s only an approximation. The perfection of detail is so intricate and well constructed that it is incredible to think that these carvings were being chipped out so many hundreds of years ago. The guidebook, overpoweringly effervescent though it was, turned out to be spot on.

The ceilings of the corridors surrounding the central shrines are the most amazing parts. Every square inch is covered in geometric designs, many-armed gods and goddesses from the Hindu and Jain pantheons, scenes of everyday life, excerpts from the lives of the tirthankars (the prophets of the Jain religion) and all sorts of other scenes; the sheer range of artistry is beyond imagination, and it is at this point that I have to say that to believe Delwara you have to see it. My descriptions would only serve to add verbosity to the above quotations; what can I say except, ‘The profundity of sculptured splendour is beyond fitting description...’

Interestingly the Delwara Temples are the only temples I have visited where photography is totally forbidden. There is no camera charge because there are no cameras allowed – it’s as simple as that. And for once I was pleased; not only did this save me reeling off an entire film trying to encompass the huge scale of intricacy I was witnessing, but it also saved me from discovering the hard way that it is impossible to record effectively such an immense work of art. No doubt the British archives contain some wonderful black and white pictures of the temples, but that possibility aside, the marble brilliance of Delwara lives only in the minds of those who have been there.

Unfortunately it seems impossible for some visitors to appreciate such beauty quietly. Demonstrating the exuberance that makes the Taj Mahal a cattle market and the situation in Kashmir a veritable tinder box, guides literally yell at their charges – groups of at least 50 people at a time – and shatter any atmosphere as surely as if they had stuck a jukebox in the corner and played ‘Viva Las Vegas’ on full volume. Luckily there are respites between the waves of sardine-cosy humans, but this being Mt Abu, bastion of Indian tourism, I had to take my time in order to discover the beautiful silences of the temples. Of course this exuberance has its silver lining, and I met plenty of very friendly Jains (all of whom seemed to have the same surname, Jain, in much the same way that most Sikhs are called Singh). Their smiles more than made up for any disturbance.

Shanti Shankar

Leaving the temples behind, I decided to climb a hill, as you do, and stocking up on Bisleri[3] I headed for the Shanti Shikhar, a famous meditation spot overlooking the town. My guidebook proclaimed that it was ‘not advisable to come up here alone’, so I applied my Guidebook Theorem to the situation and headed straight for the track.

Shanti Shankar provides a beautiful view over the entire plateau, and the climb helped me to work up an appetite and provided a talking point as I joined Rich[4], an American I had met at the temples, for dinner. Coincidentally another American was sitting at the next table and he soon joined us; it was then that I discovered what must surely be the biggest challenge of all time.

This second American, whose name I never discovered, was in India with a group of fellow students from the University of Chicago, effectively there to learn Hindi. I was intrigued; I hadn’t really thought whether America has any kind of cultural ties with India, though of course there are Indians living in America just as there are all over the world. But when I discovered what his purpose was in learning Hindi, I choked on my Thums Up and got what can only be described as a masala nasal experience.

When I’d stopped coughing, he continued. ‘I’m a psych student,’ he said, abbreviating the study of the brain to five succinct letters. ‘I want to learn Hindi so I can do some case studies on Indians and learn how they think and how their minds work.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; you might as well admit that your aim in life is to discover a black hole and to stick it in a glass display case on your desk. Hindi has a massive range of words that deal with emotions, some of which can only be described as thoroughly esoteric, and even without the communication challenge, the Indian psyche bears as much resemblance to the American psyche as chapatis do to hot dogs. I was full of admiration for this young man with the exuberance of youthful academia on his side, and I idly wondered if he’d ever read A Passage to India; E M Forster’s description of the relationship between Dr Aziz and Fielding, which is arguably the core of the book, is a perfect encapsulation of the social gulf between the two cultures, despite it being over sixty years old and from the Raj era. Somehow I don’t think he had, or he wouldn’t have sounded quite so confident.

Still smarting from my cola burn, I wished him well, wondering what he would discover. The thought kept me chuckling all the way to Jodhpur, a seven-hour bus ride to the north.

[1] To underline that it’s not just western tourists who get stung by travel agents and touts, I paid Rs150 for my luxury bus ticket, while one Indian tourist on the same bus paid Rs120, and another couple Rs160. If you’re open for a scam, you’ll get sucked in regardless of skin colour, it seems.

[2] Although not one but three shops, right there on the main street, sells a huge range of ancient but effective guns. No doubt they’re for shotgun weddings and quick divorces.

[3] Bisleri is to Indian mineral water what Microsoft is to computers: a big, bad corporation. Back in the days when the Indians were still cottoning on to the fact that foreigners want pure bottled water instead of dodgy tap water, Bisleri became the instant market leader. It was so ubiquitous that people in India still refer to Bisleri instead of mineral water, much as the English hoover their carpets, Americans eat jello and hippies roll joints with rizlas. But the whole empire came crashing down when it was discovered that one Bisleri bottling plant had simply been shoving untreated tap water into bottles and flogging it, and the competition seized on the opportunity; these days there are more brands of water available in India than there are people, from common brands like Yes to less common brands like Bisil, Kingfisher, Euro and Bailley. The story doesn’t end there, though; while I was in India, a spelling mistake crept into the bottle-printing machine and created a national joke; Bisleri’s slogan ‘The sweet taste of purity’ had been magically transformed into something very different. Whenever I bought Bisleri, which was as little as possible, I would now be buying ‘The sweat taste of purity’. Heads rolled, I am sure.

[4] A great name for an American travelling through the developing world, don’t you think? ‘Hello, I’m Rich,’ is possibly not the sort of thing you want to shout too loudly round these parts. Then again, someone mentioned that my name is a type of European currency, so who am I to talk?

Indian Television

Written: 15 June 1998

Hindi’s a funny old language, but it’s even funnier on Indian TV. Listening to it is like listening to any truly foreign language – the words are a mystery but the intonation is often familiar – but Hindi has the added oddity of having a large number of English words and phrases that have been adopted and incorporated as standard.

Television is a particularly good medium because the diction is fairly clear. Watching a soap opera one night on my hotel room’s TV (a rare luxury, especially if you can get anything beyond the standard terrestrial channels) I heard the following phrases in just five minutes: ‘Hello’, ‘That’s right’, ‘I’m angry’, ‘Try to understand’, ‘I am sorry, I am really very, very sorry’, ‘Murder case’ and ‘Mrs Sahid, please!’, all surrounded by unintelligible Hindi. The credits at the end were in English, and as they rolled up the screen the announcer gleefully introduced the next programme, the first in a brand new series for Indian television. It was a particularly hilarious sitcom, the subject of which was the life of an English suburban couple who decide to become self-sufficient.

That’s right, I was there to witness the introduction of India to The Good Life, taking its place among Heartbeat, Mind Your Language, ’Allo ’Allo and Are You Being Served? as classic English comedy being shown every night on Indian TV. Is it any wonder the Indian film industry is so different to the West, when Richard Briers is still considered funny? Goodness me...

Yogi and Babaji

Written: 20 June 1998

In reading the story of Yogi and Babaji, bear in mind that throughout the experience I had a song going through my head, namely Sheryl Crow’s ode to kiss-and-tell journalism, ‘The Book’. Here’s an excerpt:

Never again

Would I see your face.

You carry a pen and a paper

And no time

And no words you waste.

You’re a voyeur,

The worst kind of thief,

To take what happened to us,

To write down everything that went on

Between you and me.

Is that me? Am I being a voyeur, stealing the (possibly) good intentions of two traders to provide me with an interesting story? I don’t think I am, but judge for yourself. Personally, I don’t think the following is so much ‘kiss and tell’ as ‘get him pissed and sell’.

In my travels I’ve met plenty of locals whom I trusted implicitly. Pavan, the man I met on the train to Gwalior, is an example; we conversed on the train through politeness, he invited me out for a meal and insisted on paying, and I trusted him. I knew that his motives were pure in that he was interested in meeting me and I was interested in meeting him. Similarly I trusted Kiran, whom I met on the train from Puri to Hyderabad, because he was incredibly genuine and honest.

But my visit to Jodhpur made me reconsider this blind trust, not because I had a particularly negative experience, but because with some people – in all countries, not just in India – you should only trust them as far as you can spit. And not being a habitual pan chewer, for me this is not very far.

Yogi to the Rescue

Let me tell you a story. On my arrival in Jodhpur – the town that gives the trousers their name (though these days you’ll see more jodhpurs in Gujarat than Rajasthan, as far as I can see) – I decided to book my onward train ticket straight away, to avoid having to rely on the local Louis to save the day again. Unfortunately the computers were down in the ticket office, so I joined the ‘Tourists and Freedom Fighters’ queue for what I assumed would be a long wait.

That’s when Yogi introduced himself. Sporting a pockmarked face, a beer belly and a jaw line that can only be described as an investment paying dividends, he was instantly amiable in the same way as his cartoon namesake. He chatted away, leaving me to mutter the usual politely distant rubbish of ‘Really, how interesting, I see, is that right?’ while the computers continued to refuse to kick into gear. He told me he taught the sitar, which interested me, and I humoured him. He was pleasant enough, and claimed he didn’t meet many tourists out here in Jodhpur so he was very pleased to talk to me (though I would later discover that in the high season the Mehrangarh Fort gets 400 foreign visitors every day, a pretty high figure).

After nearly an hour of standing around waiting for the technology to catch up with the demand, a not unusual situation in India, I was visibly tiring. The bus journey from Mt Abu hadn’t been unpleasant, but seven hours on a bus is a long time whatever the road surface and Yogi could tell, so he offered to get my ticket for me. I would meet him later for a beer and some food, and I would pay him for the ticket then, and because the ticket has the price printed on it, and the price is directly related to the length of journey, it would be impossible for him to rip me off. Grudgingly I accepted; I like to do my own dirty work, but the prospect of waiting for someone to hack into a PC network while the workers all sat around on an extended chai break filled me with something short of enthusiasm, so I agreed. Yogi would come and pick me up that night, and we’d go to his brother’s place for a feed and a couple of beers.

So far so good, and indeed Yogi turned up spot on time on his moped, complete with the promised ticket. We drove to his brother’s place because it is not permitted to drink alcohol in a room devoted to teaching music (this I had heard before), and we ended up in a machine shop just round the corner from the railway station. In this shop was a ladder, and at the top of the ladder was a trap door, which Yogi unlocked and pushed back. And before you could say, ‘Open sesame!’ we were in Aladdin’s cave.

The small attic was chocka-block with, well, things. Garish Rajasthani puppets hung in one corner; shelves of metal-cast models of Ganesh, Siva, Buddha and the rest of the boys filled another; a glass-topped counter containing jewellery ran along one side; and a sign proclaiming that they preferred Visa hung next to another that said, ‘We know you are trustworthy but we are forgetful, so please pay in cash.’ Every well-honed scam-detection circuit clicked into place and I turned to Yogi and said, ‘You do know I’m not interested in buying anything, yes?’

‘You are my friend,’ he said. ‘I already tell you my brother is in the export business, but we come here to drink some beer, have some food, not to sell. If you are interested, that is one thing, but there is no pressure. I promise you. You trust me?’

If there’s one thing I do not trust it is people who ask me if I trust them (as in ‘You trust me? I trust you...’); if there is one thing guaranteed to break a friendship, it is a constant querying of the status of the friendship (as in ‘You are my friend, no?’); if there is one thing that makes me suspicious, it is someone who is paranoid (as in ‘Why you ask all these questions? I tell you there is no pressure here.’); and if there is one thing that puts me on total alert, it is someone who takes me into their shop when a large part of our earlier conversation has been about how offensive I find the shop-touts in places like Jaipur and Agra. From the moment I entered the shop, I became a man alert to every scam in the book.

The problem is that after spending two days with Yogi and his brother Babaji, I still do not know if they were genuinely friendly or just out to get something from me. Because of this uncertainty I cannot say that I ever felt friendly with the two brothers in the way that I did with Pavan, but it is quite possible that they were indeed genuine and that all my doubts were the product of a cynical mind. So see what you think...

Evening Shenanigans

That night I sat with Yogi, Babaji and a friend of theirs called, somewhat interestingly, Bob, and I never let my guard down. In a pique of pleasantry I had bought a gift with me: my collection of ten cassettes had long lost its appeal and my Walkman had never really recovered from the bus ride to Diu, so I gave my tapes and stereo to Yogi. This sounds awfully generous, but I was about to ditch them on the next traveller I could find who wanted them, because they were bulky and low fidelity brings me down. It doesn’t seem to affect the Indian aural sensibilities though (judging by the quality of, er, hi-fi here), and I figured that Yogi, as a music teacher, might appreciate the gift.

The cynic would say that this unexpected gift knocked the wind out of their prospects for selling me things; the empiricist would argue that there is no evidence for there being any kind of set-up and that my own paranoia had invented the whole thing. Whatever happened, the gift went down well. I felt contented and socially at ease as I supped on my beer.

We then came to the meal, of which we were to split the cost. No problem: with four of us, that makes it a quarter each. So how did I end up putting Rs400 into the pot and getting one beer (Rs70, fixed price) and a quarter of two dishes and a couple of nan breads, a meal I could buy in its entirety for less than Rs150? The food was good, the beer was certainly strong, but was I being ripped off? And how come only two of us, Babaji and me, were paying? This was no four-way split.

But I chipped in because they were being so pleasant, and because they assured me that the restaurant delivering the food was one of the best in Rajasthan (and just happened to be next door to the attic office). The cynic might say I was being easily milked for a few extra rupees – no, a lot of extra rupees – because they figured I might not know the real cost of food in India. The empiricist might say that the meal was indeed that price, and that being rich Brahmins (Babaji owned two cars, a house and a shop) they were used to spending large amounts of money on food, and assumed that as a westerner I would find it well within my budget.

I rolled with it. The beer was taking effect, the ambience was fascinating as my paranoia fought against my faith in the Indian people, and I didn’t feel threatened at all. But things continued to get stranger and stranger, always suggesting a scam without necessarily coming to fruition. Was I being expertly worked and was simply proving too stubborn or too poor to con, or was it all a total figment of my imagination?

The next oddity happened when Babaji read my palm. Now, telling me my stars is about as pointless as telling a Christian to have a good time in the Coliseum; I don’t believe in the signs of the Zodiac, and I only read the stars in the paper if I’ve run out of news to digest. But out of politeness I feigned interest and submitted to scrutiny.

I have to say he did a thorough job. Out came the magnifying glasses, the tables of squiggles and symbols, and the generalised predictions about my past that were either obviously culled from my earlier conversation with Yogi (I had told him I lived in Birmingham, for geographical simplicity, and Babaji pronounced that I lived in a place beginning with B, which is untrue both for London and the place I’m actually from), general enough to be true of anyone (‘You are happy’, he told me, which was pretty obvious to anyone meeting me at that point), simply wrong (Babaji told me that I trust what people say too much, and this while I was constantly thinking how little I trusted these two characters), or obviously just what I wanted to hear (he told me that in two and a half years I would go travelling for at least nine months, a safe prediction and obviously in tune with my thinking at the time, although this would also turn out not to be true). I was unconvinced, but in the spirit of forbearance that I learned on board Zeke, I made myself sound thrilled and interested. That was possibly a mistake.

My reading ended after I had discovered various uninspiring facts about myself; I was ‘lucky’, I would make a large sum of money in the very near future, I would not marry until 38 but would meet someone special soon... the usual stuff that’s designed to please and is therefore easy to believe if you are willing enough. But there was more; my lucky stone tuned out to be a star ruby and apparently I should wear it in a silver pendant shaped like a crescent moon. I don’t wear jewellery, but it just so happened that Babaji had one such pendant left, and perhaps I would like to see it.

I simply said that this was obviously a hard sell and I wasn’t even interested, and that caused sulks the like of which I hadn’t seen since my visits to primary schools in New Zealand. ‘We are doing this for you, for your good luck,’ they cried. ‘You are friend, do you not trust us?’ I said of course I did (lying my back teeth off) but that I wasn’t going to buy jewellery. ‘If you don’t buy this stone,’ said Babaji, ‘it means you do not believe in anything I have told you.’ And he let out an almighty sigh, one of resignation rather than of sorrow.

What do you do? I looked at the pendant, reiterated my stand on buying nothing, and left it at that. They shrugged, looked hurt and put the stone away. The cynic would say that this was an obvious scam, so obvious I should have been rolling around the floor in glee at having stumbled on such a rich source of stories. The empiricist would say that they genuinely believed in astrology, it being a fundamental part of Indian culture and a very serious part too, and that they were sincerely trying to help me with my luck. I simply didn’t know which was true, but the decision was easy because they were talking around Rs500 for the pendant, a figure I would consider imprudent to invest in anything except a ticket out of Jodhpur or a very good book, neither of which were available in Babaji’s shop.

You must understand that my scam-detection units were all aflutter by now, having detected a potential chink in the overt friendship exuding from the brothers. I tried not to get cynical, but whenever money was mentioned, I firmly said, ‘No.’ But the greatest scam of the lot cropped up not half an hour later, and I still don’t know if I was being cast a line or given a real offer. The cynic would say this is the hallmark of the perfect con: the conned doesn’t know he is being conned until far too late. The empiricist would say that business is business, and what Babaji told me made a kind of sense.

The Gem Scam

Some background information first. There is a classic scam operated by gem dealers, mainly in Agra and Jaipur, which makes use of the tourist’s tax-free import allowance. Tourists from most western countries can import goods up to a certain value into their own country without paying import tax (currently the amount for the UK is US$5200); this is a fact, and it makes a lot of sense when you think of tourists buying gifts and souvenirs and bringing them home. The scam involves a gem dealer asking a tourist to import some stones for him, so the dealer saves paying the import tax, a portion of which goes to the tourist; all the gem dealer needs is a deposit from the tourist to cover the cost of the gems, and he will give an assurance that the tourist will be able to contact the dealer’s partners in his home country, and they will buy the gems off him for much more than the deposit. So the tourist makes lots of money, and the dealer is happy because he makes a good sale.

Of course this is complete rubbish. The tourist effectively buys a bunch of worthless gems off the dealer, often paying amounts like US$2000 for them, and when he gets home he finds the contact details are a complete fiction and that his gems are worth a fraction of what he paid. It’s a ridiculously obvious scam and one which even the lobotomised should have trouble getting sucked into, but on my trip I met at least two suckers who had fallen for it, and the stories abound of others stupid enough to give thousands of dollars in cash to complete strangers. Then again, these are the sort of travellers who think that karma is what you get after taking a sedative, and what can you do about that?

So when Babaji mentioned my import allowance and how I could help him import gems into England tax free, I couldn’t help laughing; I now saw that the part in my horoscope about me receiving a large sum of money in the next few months was simply a lead-in to this whole tax allowance set-up. I said that this was the most famous scam of them all, and that there was no way I would ever get involved, no way at all. He said that he would actually be posting the gems to me, and that all I would have to pay would be the registered and insured postage, but I looked at him and told him that if he was a real businessman selling the stuff in England, he would pay for absolutely everything, including a cut for me. He told me I had to speculate to accumulate, and I told him to drop the subject and, no, I didn’t trust him any more. How could I?

They were horrified, or good actors. They had never heard of such a terrible scam, they said. They were shocked to hear that I thought they were out to rip me off, they said. They promised to drop the subject, they said, and after bringing it up twice more in the evening, they eventually did. The cynic might say that they realised I was too clued up for their plan to work. The empiricist might say that they really wanted to avoid paying tax and saw a way I could help; after all, Babaji was supposed to be visiting England in a few weeks’ time.

Whatever the reality, the evening ended with a ride back to my hotel (with them kindly paying for a rickshaw to take me the last part home). I had arranged to meet Yogi at the railway reservation office at noon, and after a leisurely hangover-cure breakfast, I did just that. I was intrigued by my total uncertainty about the brothers, and I figured that if I took almost no money and no passport I would be safe; I had left all my documents behind in the hotel room the night before as a precaution, and I decided to stick to this plan to avoid heavy losses if they drugged my drink or took me down a dark alley (unfortunate accidents that happen to plenty of tourists in the backstreets of this dog-eat-dog world).

The Sitar Scam

The original plan for the day had been to take the bikes out to a Rajasthani village to show me some real Indian life, but it was far too hot to hit the desert for an hour’s drive, so instead Yogi and I settled in for a beer and a chat. I learned some interesting things, such as the fact that Yogi drank Rs200-worth of beer every day, which at least provided an explanation for his Ming-vase profile; but the most intriguing thing I learned was his total lack of understanding of my finances. He seemed genuinely surprised that I was not a rich tourist, and perhaps he realised I meant it when we got onto the subject of the sitar.

After receiving my gift the previous day, Yogi had insisted that he give me a present in exchange; I was flattered. He said he wanted to give me a sitar; I was overwhelmed. This was great! A sitar! One of the most insane instruments in the world, for me? As a gift? What a champion.

But the subject of money cropped up again, this time in the guise of postage. He wanted me to pay half the postage, which sounded fair until I found out that he wanted Rs1800 for my half, or about US$45. I detected another possible scam, and so I told him I was on a really tight budget, especially this near the end of my trip, and could never afford that much money. OK, he said, we could send it by cheap sea mail, but I would still have to pay US$20. I said I simply couldn’t, and seeing an opportunity to make my feelings known, I charged in with horns down.

I told Yogi that I had paid a huge amount for the meal the night before and felt ripped off. I told him that if I had a guest in my house in England, I would not expect him or her to pay a cent, unless they felt obliged to buy a round of drinks or to bring a gift. I told him I would never continually bring up the subject of money and buying items from the shop; this I would class as unforgivably crass and rude. I told him that I was interested in astrology, but I didn’t believe, so there was no point in buying a stone for something that I went along with for the fun of it, especially if a big guilt trip was laid on me.

Eventually we reached a compromise. He would pay the postage, and when Babaji came to England a month after I was back, I would meet him and buy him a bunch of beers. This suited me fine; there I’d be on my home turf, and by then I’d also know if the sitar had actually arrived, in which case it would be only fair to buy the man more beers than even he could quaff.

The subject of the village trip then cropped up, seeing as the day was wearing on and the temperature dropping. I was interested until I heard it would cost me something like Rs200 in petrol, a ludicrous figure given the village’s proximity and the average cost of petrol; once again I felt I was being offered interesting options, but only if I was willing to pay through the nose. I decided against the trip, and instead settled for a second beer. But the prospect of another expensive evening meal loomed, and I had to do something if I wasn’t going to be swallowed up by these financial vultures.

I said I couldn’t afford another meal, and that I would eat elsewhere and meet them later for a beer. This caused the usual offended demeanour, downcast eyes and drooping jaw line, but Yogi suggested a solution; we would visit a friend of his who lived on a nearby farm (yes, a farm in the middle of a city) and eat there for nothing; all I would have to do would be to bring the family a gift of sweets, and maybe buy the man of the house a beer. This was fine by me; farmer’s families are poor, and besides, it sounded culturally intriguing. I accepted gratefully.

Meanwhile Babaji had returned, and immediately launched into the sort of psychological warfare that makes talking with certain Indians bear a striking resemblance to walking on broken glass. He asked me questions like, ‘Mark, what do you really think of me? Tell me the truth, now...’ And I answered truthfully in much the same way as I had with Yogi. So answer me this: how in hell’s name did I end up buying a tiger-eye stone from him for Rs151 (an auspicious number, I was told)? It was my lucky stone, to be worn next to my skin for good luck, and on reflection it was his apparently total conviction that this stone would be really good for me that made me fork out the money. You see many Indians with arm bands containing their lucky stones, so I suppose I thought what the hell, it’s a cultural thing, but it’s possible that I bought it partly as a token of my appreciation of his sales technique, and partly to shut him up. In the case of the latter it seemed to work, but the cynic would say I fell into the trap eventually, and that the sale had to happen sooner or later. The empiricist would say I didn’t have to buy anything, and hey, it’s a purchase with a story, isn’t it?

Urma’s Farm

That night Yogi, his farmer friend Urma and I hopped on the moped and span through the backstreets of early evening Jodhpur. This was fun; to give Yogi his dues he always drove slowly and carefully, an unusual trait in Asia, and we soon arrived at a sweet shop (where I bought a box of assorted sweets) and moved on to Urma’s house.

House is the wrong word. Imagine a small block of land, maybe 20m by 20m, stuck in the middle of a suburban sprawl. This block of land had no buildings on it save a small mud and brick hut in one corner, and tall walls of housing blocks loomed on three sides, the fourth being protected from the chaos of the street by a tall fence. Filling half of the block was a small herd of huge buffalo and a couple of cows, the buffalo attached by nose rings to stakes driven into the ground; along one side of the wall ran a roof covering large blocks of dried grass feed, one corner contained a huge pile of dried buffalo shit, patted together so that the handprints were still clearly visible, and another side held a roof under which some more buffalo sat, viewing the proceedings with a detachment only available to those who can fill their spare time by eating their last meal all over again.

It was, as promised, a milk farm in the middle of the city. Urma, his mother Rupei and his sister Nirma pottered around, wide-eyed and reduced to giggling fits by the presence of this white stranger, and when I fished out my camera and took a bunch of shots in the fading light, they posed with their buffalo like people who had never posed for a camera in their lives before (which quite possibly was the case). The instant I pointed the lens at them the smiles disappeared and they assumed the austere poses of Victorians, a sight I hadn’t seen since the pictures of Gwalior George standing over dead tigers, and it made me wonder at this universal effect of photography; in the West we are so used to pictures that we tend to relax more in front of the lens, but here it’s different. I promised to send them copies of the pictures, and made sure I did.

As the meal was being prepared – chapatis being fried in a pan over a roasting buffalo-dung fire – a goods truck pulled up and out poured a complete extended family: cousins, little children, uncles, the whole shooting match. Unintelligible conversation flew around me like smudges of mashed potato in a food fight, leaving me smiling in ignorance and wondering whether the discussion was about world politics, the state of the financial markets or the fact that the neighbour’s son had run off with the niece of the cat’s father’s milkman’s cow. I ate my plate of chapatis and fresh buffalo curd with ghee and glee, risked drinking the water (which would prove no problem) and thoroughly enjoyed the completely authentic atmosphere around me. Children marvelled at my funny language and funnier beard, old men tried their rusty English on me, and I sat on a charpoy staring at the scene as the sun disappeared and the night rolled in.

It was, as Yogi had said it would be, a cheap and thoroughly wonderful experience. We celebrated with a final beer back at the shop, but surprise, surprise, I ended up forking out to cover Yogi’s lack of financial solvency, and ended the night back at my hotel with my host owing me the princely sum of Rs85. This was not a lot of money, but this whole financial imbalance thing was beginning to wear me down.

Chance Meeting

The final chapter in this saga came the next day, my last day in Jodhpur, after I had visited the Mehrangarh Fort. Wandering back through the streets round the railway station, I saw Babaji wandering along and he spotted me straight away; Australian bush hats aren’t exactly common fare in India. We went through the usual social niceties, and then I asked him where he’d disappeared to last night. He said, ‘Oh, I was too hot, so I went home. Fancy a cold drink?’ Too right I did, so we ducked into a chai shop for a couple of bottles of Pepsi. It was good to chat, and amazingly enough Yogi chose that moment to wander into the same chai shop, just as Babaji was telling me that he was on the way to one of his factories to get a ring made for another customer who was paying Rs7000 for a star ruby set in a silver ring. This was very good business for him in the off-season, and I congratulated him on his luck.

So how the hell did I end up paying for all the drinks? Babaji said he had no change, only a Rs100 note, and before you know it I had shown him my hand and coughed up the dough. Why? This man was telling me all about his hot-shot business deals, and I was his guest, but I still paid. Am I that much of a pushover?

Finally, I arranged to meet both Yogi and Babaji at the railway station restaurant to say goodbye before I boarded my night train to Jaisalmer. I made sure I ate before I met them (to avoid any more financially draining food expenses) and turned up at the appointed time. Rather interestingly, for the first time they totally failed to turn up, leaving me sitting in the restaurant for a good two hours, free to enjoy peace of a sort. Babaji had said the lucky effect of my tiger-eye would be instant, but I didn’t realise it would be fast enough to spare me the ordeal of entertaining the Dodgy Brothers before having to board my overnight train. It’s marvellous stuff, this astrology, even if Yogi still owed me Rs85 at my time of departure, the shyster.

Incidentally, a couple of Australian guys I met in Udaipur and Diu told me that after hanging around with a group of locals for a few days, they’d needed an ‘Indian-free week’ to get over it. They were worn out by the constant social intrigues and petty offences they managed to cause, and decided to take a break. I didn’t understand what they meant at the time because all my Indian liaisons up to that point had been simply delightful, but as I got on the Jaisalmer train, I felt rather relieved to be escaping and totally understood the Aussies’ sentiments.

Needless to say neither Babaji nor the sitar actually arrived. Perhaps they ‘forgot’...

Jodhpur

Written: 20 June 1998

Jodhpur isn’t only famous for its hard-nosed businessmen, it’s also home to one of the most staggering fortresses you will ever see. The Mehrangarh Fort dominates the city, sitting atop a 125m-high cliff-edged hill that catches the rising sun beautifully.

Not only that, my hotel, a beautiful 250-year-old haveli right in the centre of the city, was a classic of its type. A haveli is a traditional Rajasthani or Gujarati building, consisting of a number of floors based round a central courtyard. Most havelis used to be mansions; these days they’re more likely to be hotels, offices or home to many families, but a good haveli manages to retain its atmosphere and makes for an interesting place to stay, especially if you can get one of the lower rooms, tucked away from the searing sun.

After spending a couple of days being entertained by Yogi and Babaji, I finally found time on my last day to visit the fort, which was my main reason for visiting Jodhpur in the first place. I was by no means the first person to visit the place; in 1899 Rudyard Kipling wrote of the fort:

The work of angels, fairies and giants... built by Titans and coloured by the morning sun... he who walks through it loses sense of being among buildings. It is as though he walked through mountain gorges...

This might sound grandiose, but Kipling doesn’t overstate the immensity of the place. Huge walls sheer straight up from the cliff edge, serrated battlements provide ample room for huge cannons and view-hungry tourists, and even though her eloquence was hardly that of Kipling’s, Jackie Kennedy managed to sum up the fort with the wonderfully hyperbolic, ‘The eighth wonder of the world!’

The Money Man

On my way through the winding streets leading up to the eighth wonder of the world, I met a man. As per usual we got talking, but it was obvious from the start that this man had done his homework even more thoroughly than most.

‘What is your country?’ he asked.

‘England,’ I replied.

‘Ah, England. Prime Minister is Tony Blair.’

‘That’s right!’

‘Before that, John Major.’

‘Spot on.’

‘Before, Margaret Thatcher. Then James Callaghan. Then...’

And on he went, reciting the last few Prime Ministers backwards as if he were a kid in a history lesson. I lost track at Thatcher; I was nine when she deposed whoever was before her, and I felt a little embarrassed to see that this guy knew more than me about British politics.

While we were talking, a little boy slid up and sat down. He looked at me and started a familiar conversation.

‘What is your country?’ he asked.

‘England,’ I replied.

‘Ah, England. Prime Minister is Tony Blair.’

‘Er, that’s right,’ I said, smelling a rat.

‘Before that, John Major. Before, Margaret Thatcher. Then James Callaghan. Then...’

‘OK, OK,’ I conceded, beaten again. I looked at the man who was beaming with pride.

‘My son,’ he said, and ruffled his boy’s hair affectionately.

‘I have a collection of money notes,’ said the boy, and when I launched into my well-rehearsed monologue of how I had no coins or notes from home because I had been away for so long, he broke in and said, ‘Just come and take a look, I don’t want to take any notes from you. Just come and look.’ And charmed by his excellent English, I padded behind him into his home.

His mother made me chai and I looked at his note collection. It was huge; ‘The biggest in Rajasthan,’ my new friend Awatar announced. There were notes from Slovenia, Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam, Argentina, America, Canada, Italy, Sweden, Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia, Singapore and plenty of other exotic locations... it was fascinating.

I asked him where on earth he had got all these notes, and he said ‘tourists’ in such a plaintive way that I found myself promising to send him a note from England, seeing as he had nothing from the UK in his collection (I hope he received the mint £1 note I sent, itself an oddity[1]). He was so pleased that I had to catch myself as he moved into scam mode.

I mentioned I was going home in July, via Amsterdam, and his face lit up. ‘Maybe you can help me,’ he said. ‘I have a friend whose mother is very ill in hospital, and needs money. He has some Dutch money, and maybe you can buy it off him for rupees.’

I asked him why he didn’t just change it at the bank, and he said that only foreigners could do that, not Indians, but I wasn’t into it at all. I didn’t know the exchange rate and he was talking about quite a large amount, so I refused and instead found him proffering two pound coins.

‘I got these from tourists,’ he said, ‘but I do not collect coins. You can use these at home; do you want to change these?’

This time I took the bait. The coins were genuine, I offered him Rs60 per coin (an offer slightly to my advantage) and he went for it. Emboldened by his success, he started jabbering away until we found ourselves on the subject of school, which was when he fished out a sealed clay pot with a coin-sized slit in it and gave me the usual blurb about collecting money to buy pens for the local school children, and would I like to donate? No, I said. He told me that Rs100 would buy five pens for the local school, which is an atrocious price for a pen (they’re not that expensive in England) and I realised that if I didn’t get out he would talk me out of all my worldly possessions and probably even more.

But what did I expect? This is Jodhpur, and the creed here is obviously salesmanship and money, as I’ve been discovering. Awatar’s note collection was evidently genuine and worth supporting, but even he couldn’t avoid the vocational calling of the genetic con artist, despite his tender age of nearly 15. It wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t even a con – everything he suggested was fair and above board, just pushy – but I was a guest in his house, drinking his chai, offering to send him something for his collection, and still he couldn’t resist trying to pull a fast one on the tourist. This is the sort of thing that leaves a slightly bad taste in my mouth, and it seems Jodhpur has made subtle deception its tour de force.

The Fortress

I finally escaped to the fortress, where the man at the gate asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, ‘Ah, England. Prime Minister is Tony Blair.’

Wandering through the main gate, the guides waiting to be hired called me over, asked me where I was from and proclaimed, ‘Ah, England. Capital is London, Prime Minister is Tony Blair.’

And when I waited to have my ticket ripped for entry into the museum, the turban-clad attendant asked me where I was from and politely told me that the Prime Minister of England was the one-and-only Mr Tony Blair.

I felt quite exhausted.

But the fortress is certainly impressive, and the museum is one of the better Maharaja’s museums around (though it still pales when compared with evidence of George of Gwalior’s kleptomania). There are beautiful palace buildings, shady courtyards, intricate stone lattice works, and trademark Rajasthani rooms filled with mirrors and coloured glass (which manage to retain an air of taste, unlike Udaipur’s efforts). However, a lot of the fortress is closed to the public, so for my Rs50 entrance ticket and Rs50 camera permit I didn’t really feel I got my money’s worth.

It was still excellent to visit, but again I felt a little aggrieved at pouring money into the Maharaja’s coffers when government-owned sites like Mandu and Bijapur charge fees between two and five rupees for unlimited access. Awatar’s father had also expressed disgust; with Indians only having to pay a Rs10 entrance fee, he felt it was unfair on foreigners when for things like train journeys and hotels there is no distinction between Indian and foreigner. I have no problem with being charged more for being a foreigner – we have more money, after all – but I’m less happy when the only people doing this are the aristocratic owners of places like Mehrangarh Fort.

There is one feature of the fort that is definitely worth paying for, though. Standing on the battlements, the wind blows over the city and up the ramparts in such a way that you can hear all the noises of the city below you, as clearly as if you were standing in the streets yourself. Aldous Huxley, in one of his more lyrical moments, wrote:

...from the bastions of the Jodhpur Fort one hears as the gods must hear from Olympus, the gods to whom each separate word uttered in the innumerably peopled world below, comes up distinct and individual to be recorded in the books of omniscience.

That’s as maybe, but what I heard from the battlements was a calamitous cacophony of chaos from crashing clutches to crowded chowks and clopping cows. I idly wondered if Huxley ever visited the Golcumbaz, as Forster did; now that is a real ear on infinity.

And it’s a darn sight cheaper, too.

[1] Many thanks to Matt Kilsby, who left the following message in my Guestbook:

I’m currently travelling around India and have found your website really helpful and bloody funny as well!

I’m currently sitting in an Internet café in some backstreet in Jodhpur (it’s all a bit of a maze, though). This morning a friend and I went up to the fort, and who should accost us on the street? ‘Prime Minister Tony Blair... etc.’ I knew what was coming next because I’d already read your section on Jodhpur. Lo and behold, out came the foreign note album and I must say that it’s a fantastic collection! I was also offered a two pound coin. Six years later the cute teenager is now a fully fledged Indian businessman.

As to the note that you sent him... there were two one-quid notes in his collection, one from Jersey and the second a Royal Bank of Scotland one. If either of those notes are yours, then they are sitting proudly in his album (can’t remember the page number unfortunately!).

Anyway, thanks again for this great site. Keep up the good work. I’m off to get lost in Jodhpur.

Thanks for letting me know, Matt. Unfortunately the note I sent to Awatar was from the Bank of England, so I suspect it got lost in the post. Ah well, someone somewhere is a pound richer...

Pigs Over Jaisalmer

Written: 26 June 1998

Having escaped from Jodhpur with my travellers cheques intact, I took the night train to Jaisalmer and found myself a delightful room inside the walls of the fantastic fortress, a perfect place for a spot of writing (it’s a great way to avoid the overpowering heat of the midday desert sun). Enjoying the strong southerly wind blowing through my window and out of my door, I was suddenly jolted upright by a loud, heartfelt screaming. It didn’t sound human, but it was obviously a distress call, amplified by the gusts as they blew headfirst into the battlements below and shot straight up into my penthouse.

I ran to my porthole and soon identified the source as a scuffle of dust clouds on the battlement slope. In Jaisalmer Fort the citadel walls stand on the top of an 80m-high sloping hill, so below the walls is a steep slope of scree that becomes vertical for its bottom 30 feet. This vertical bottom has been fortified by another wall, but there are no battlements here; if you were to be pushed off the citadel, you would fall from the battlements to the slope, roll down the hill and finally drop another 30 feet vertically down onto the plains (and no doubt plenty of marauders met their fate in exactly this way). It was from this slope that the noise was squealing.

The dust settled for a minute to show two dogs baiting a small piglet, no more than a foot-and-a-half from snout to springy tail. The dogs, one a patchwork of white and black and the other a dusty desert brown, had each got an end of the piglet and were throwing their heads to this side and that like lions ripping flesh from a wildebeest. But the piglet was still very much alive and bellowing, and running to the rescue were two boys.

Armed with slings and handfuls of stones they drove the dogs off the piglet and spent a good few minutes keeping them at bay. The dogs, however, had tasted blood, and at every opportunity they would grab the piglet and run off with it hanging from their drooling mouths, the poor thing squealing for its life. Eventually the boys managed to get between the dogs and the piglet, and began the long process of guiding their injured animal friend along the top of the lower wall, towards the gentle slope at one end that led down to the road.

It was during this slow escape that disaster struck. One of the dogs, evidently the hungriest, had run back down the slope and was tearing towards the pig. One of the boys spotted it and lobbed a well-aimed stone at the bugger’s flank, turning it away with a yelp, but the piglet hadn’t seen the sling and it panicked. It ran here and there, trusting neither dog nor human, and didn’t see the vertical drop until it ran straight into oblivion.

Right there below my room, the piglet seemed to float for a minute. Weighed down by its oversized head, it tumbled in a perfect arc, landing flat on its back after a drop of some thirty feet, raising a cloud of dust as it hit with a dull thump. The boys didn’t know what to do, and after throwing a few more rocks at the dogs in sheer frustration, they heeded the call of the injured and raced down to the roadside where the piglet lay twitching.

Hearing the shouts, a man came out of the house opposite, carrying a pail of water. His solution to the problem of a piglet with a broken back was to dump the contents of his pail over the poor beast’s head, which shocked it back to life and up into a few unsteady steps before it lay down again. But it was obviously in a terminal state, and as the man gently poured a second bucket on the body, the boys’ heads slowly bowed one by one, everyone avoiding each other’s gaze.

The piglet was dead, an insignificant death in a world where millions of animals die every year. But this one seemed poignant, because it showed the locals in a positive light; whether the piglet was a pet, an animal to be fattened and slaughtered or just an innocent caught up in a dog-eat-pig world, those boys, unsuccessful though they were, were supporting the underdog. It made a change from seeing animals being tied up and stuffed under bus seats, or worked to death in farmers’ fields, and it was good to see, despite the sad outcome.

One day all humans might be rich enough to be able to treat animals like this. And pigs might fly.

Jaisalmer

Written: 26 June 1998

Jaisalmer is right out there on the frontier with the Thar Desert. Go west from Jaisalmer for some 100km and you hit Pakistan, but by the time you get halfway there you’ll have been detained or possibly even shot; the India-Pakistan border is hardly what you would call a relaxed part of the subcontinent. It certainly makes for an interesting area.

Perhaps it was the effect of the desert heat on the population, but I found most of the Jaisalmer locals to be either plonkers of the highest degree, sex maniacs, or both. It didn’t take me long, however, to develop a defence mechanism to this potentially infuriating attitude of a town tainted by western tourism but reeling under the off-season: I just laughed at everybody. It worked, too.

I laughed at the man in the bank who claimed the foreign exchange counter was closed until the end of September, despite the fact that I had met plenty of people who had managed to change money there in the previous few days. I laughed at the man sitting in the entrance to a beautiful haveli who demanded Rs2 entrance fee, while just round the corner stood a sign saying, ‘Welcome to Patwon ki Haveli, no entry fee.’ I laughed at the man in another haveli who tried to sell me his tourist junk with the sales pitch, ‘Just buy something small, only Rs500 or Rs1000.’ I laughed at the rickshaw man who wanted to buy my hat, so I offered it to him for Rs10,000 (over ten times its western price) and he said, ‘OK, I go and get ten thousand rupees.’ I laughed at the restaurant owner who, having produced a huge menu of vegetarian food, proclaimed that he had no vegetables, couldn’t provide me with any type of Indian food, and could only manage fried rice. I laughed at the young man who threw me a peace sign from behind his mirrored shades and yelled from inside his cluster of idiot-dude friends, ‘Hey man, if you want to talk to me, have a conversation man, come over here.’ The big difference between Jaisalmer and a lot of other places was that here I was laughing at the people, not with them. Something wasn’t quite right.

There also seemed to be a fixation with sex in town, and as it seems to be a well-known fact in India that all westerners have constant sex, I came across some very strange comments. As I was walking into the fort one day, a little girl of maybe seven or eight came up to me and said, ‘You are very beautiful man, hello.’ Walking down the street with Veronique, a Belgian now living in New Zealand whom I had met on the train from Jodhpur, we were followed by a group of astoundingly ugly young men, one of whom went right up to her back and grinned to his idiot friends as he walked in sync with her, only a foot apart; I spotted it and acted the offended boyfriend, but to them it was just a game, not sexual harassment. On the bus out of Jaisalmer to Bikaner, the young conductor announced that the driver was married, slept in the same bed with his wife and had lots of sex with her, a factlet that I could have lived without knowing. And I met an American couple, Nick and Rebecca, who fuelled my theory with two stories of their own; they had been told by a local that it was important that they only had sex once a week (‘Seven days, one fuck,’ was how the locals put it, to which Nick rather swiftly replied, ‘One day, seven fucks’); and one night they ended up with a local musician inside their hotel room, simulating sex on the bed with some rather embarrassing pelvic thrusts into a nearby pillow. It was all getting rather worrisome.

But despite the procreational obsessions of what is hopefully a small minority of the locals, Jaisalmer is a beautiful city. It is dominated by a huge and wonderfully picturesque fort, certainly one of the most attractive in India, and surrounding the hill is a sandy-coloured town of winding streets and desert buildings, hiding among its twists and turns some beautiful havelis, lakes with intricate temples, and a whole menagerie of farm animals from cows to goats to pigs to dogs to human beings. The inside of the fortress is even more intensely crowded, and is therefore even more fascinating, and once you’ve learned to avoid the slippery cow pats it’s a delightfully mediaeval place to wander round.

Even if every now and then you just have to laugh.

Camel, One Previous Owner

Written: 25 June 1998

‘Ello there sir. You look like the sort of man who knows what he’s looking for, if I may say so. Let me be the first to say that you’ve come to the right place; here at Old Nick’s New and Second-Hand Camel Emporium we’ve got ’em all, from super-charged top-of-the-range ships of the desert to more affordable economy models.

Now what sort of camel were you looking for, sir? A new one perhaps? Let’s see, your baby camel starts at 3 ft tall, and all you have to do is to feed him cow’s milk until he turns into one of the strapping young lads we’ve got over there. If you’re looking for a nice adult camel, we’ve got ’em starting at Rs7000 and going all the way up to Rs20,000, depending on the strength and age of the model; I’m sure we can find something to suit your needs...

What’s that? Running costs? Well, you’ll get about 50km per day out of your average model, and all it requires in terms of daily consumables is 20kg of grass, which will cost you in the region of Rs100, and between 30 and 40 litres of water, depending on the weather. The beauty of your camel is his ability to go for a week without any water at all, so he’s great for the desert; if you don’t put any water into him for more than a week, the one-year guarantee’s null and void, but even the driest desert will have filling oases dotted about that you can get to in a week, believe you me.

Maintenance is simple; as long as you put in the food and water he’ll look after himself, chewing the cud at any available moment and parking himself for the night without a problem. We recommend you tie your camel up for the night, just as a precaution, but if you do decide to let him wander then he won’t run off, especially if you’re good and regular with the feeding. I know what you’re thinking: how on earth can something with all those joints and spindly legs not go wrong? Well, we get an average of 24 years out of each model, and I’m sure if you treat yours well he’ll give you even more years of satisfactory motoring.

See those legs? Two joints and three parts to each one, a brilliant bit of engineering, I must say. Looking from the side you’ve got your front legs on the left that bend in a Z-shape, and you’ve got your back legs on the right that bend in an S-shape, and there are specially hardened pads of skin in the right places, especially the bits that rub against the ground when the camel’s sitting. Give the ‘sit’ command and they fold up in a beautiful way, one that you wouldn’t believe possible; the camel kneels on its front knees, then folds its back legs up, and finally tucks the rest of its front legs under its belly. You won’t find a system so well designed outside of a Swiss Army knife, but try to explain it in a brochure and it’s like trying to explain how a compact umbrella works to someone who’s never seen rain.

At the bottom of your legs you’ve got your foot pads. No, they don’t need replacing either, or shoeing like your horse, and they’re good for all sorts of terrain. Look at him walking; they squash out like silicone breast implants, know what I mean sir? Beautiful work.

Not as beautiful as the face, though. Look at those lines, with the sleek, aerodynamic head and long neck for reaching all those tasty neem leaves; did I mention that you can fill up for free by letting your camel find his own food? A nice optional extra is the set of long eyelashes that give your camel that extra bit of appeal, and along with the flapping ears I have to say that almost everyone chooses this option; a camel without pretty eyes is like a donkey without a tail, wouldn’t you say so sir? What’s that? No, you don’t have to worry about your camel looking like a female; we only sell male camels for transport, because if you take a mixture of females and males out into the desert, the males will fight over the females, so we leave the females back at home, just like you do in your life, sir, if you’ll pardon my mentioning your wife. And on that subject, you don’t want to involve your camel with females without expert supervision, sir; with those legs, mating is a sight to behold, I can tell you! You just bring him in for his regular servicing as per usual and we’ll look after the rest...

No, he’s not in a bad mood, he just looks like it. Your average camel is a happy, docile beast; he just looks like he’s in a permanent sulk. It’s the lower lip, sir, hanging down like that all the time, as if something’s wrong. You look at the thing and all you can think of is Marvin the Paranoid Android or Eeyore the Donkey, but Terry Pratchett reckoned camels were the best mathematicians in the world, and Johnny Morris just loved them, so don’t judge a book by his cover, sir. Besides, if your camel does develop a bit of an attitude, tie a rope between his two front legs and let him go off into the desert with a friend, and they’ll wrestle it out of their systems. Yes, wrestle. Has to be seen to be believed! There they are like two lanky diplodocuses, wrestling. They start by crossing their necks, just like swords in a sword fight, and then the fight’s on. The idea is to hook your neck behind your opponent’s front legs, forcing him to kneel down. There’s lots of playful biting of foot pads, necks and tails, and a heck of a lot of noise, but don’t let that worry you sir, it’s quite harmless. If you don’t let them have a wrestle every now and then they might end up picking on someone else; I saw a camel try to pick up a goat in its mouth as a joke, but the goat didn’t see the funny side, if you see what I mean.

Did I mention night-time? That’s when your camel gets a lot of his cud chewing in; camels eat their food plenty of times, so don’t be put off by the night-time noise. You’ll hear farts, burps, rumbles and the regular clock-like side-to-side chewing of his huge teeth, and if you’re sleeping close by it’ll stink like a dodgy food disposal unit in a blocked sink. But after a while you’ll find it comforting, and it’ll be the nights that you’re not with your camel that you’ll have trouble sleeping.

So, can I put you down for one? Or would you like to take a test ride? There’s no manual, but it’s simplicity itself; steer with the nose-rope, and learn the commands for ‘stop’, ‘sit’, ‘stand’ and the speed controls. Easy, isn’t it sir? I just know you’re going to love it.

In fact, I’ve got one here that’s just perfect for you. One previous owner, low mileage and a personality that makes John Major look positively hyperactive. Would you care to make a deposit now, or would you like to pay cash...?

The Thar Desert

Written: 25 June 1998

A lot of people come to Jaisalmer for the amazing fortress, and plenty of them come for the wonderful desert atmosphere, but it feels as if the majority of tourists come for the camel safaris on offer.

I was no exception, but visiting during the off-season proved to be a blessing. I’d met a friendly girl called Veronique on the Jodhpur train, and we were both interested in going on a safari, so we booked and waited to see if any more tourists would turn up. They didn’t, and as a result we had a much more personal experience than we would have had in the busy season; with just the two of us, plus two guides and three camels, it felt like a real adventure as we headed off into the stifling heat of the Thar Desert.

Of the three camels, I was on Sukia, a true ship of the desert who came complete with a branded ship’s anchor on his rear flank, Veronique was on Lula, and our guides, Ali and Sagra, variously rode and pulled Gula. Ali, an only child of Muslim parents (a rarity in this country of multiple-child families) was an interesting character; very clued up and with good English, he was an excellent liaison between the older desert expert Sagra and us complete novices. He sang Urdu trail songs, showed us his tiny home village, and always looked spotless in his white shirt and lungi. Sagra, on the other hand, was a Rajasthani Hindu through and through, with his twirled moustache, bright yellow turban[1], holey shirt and well-loved dhoti. He spoke little English (most of his conversations were in the local language) and although he was a quiet man, when he spoke everyone fell silent and listened to what he had to say. The chemistry between the two was magical: the young business expert and the old man of the desert.

Veronique was no stranger to the desert either. She and her husband (who gave up his job as a journalist to study the subject of wine for a year, and is now export manager for one of New Zealand’s top wineries) had toured southern Africa together, and she’d been on other trips there too, so luckily I wasn’t in the presence of a dweeby indoors person. Not surprisingly, we clicked well. This was a good thing; life in the desert is hard. Your drinking water is always hot (which I found reminding me of good times in Australia); you sleep in the afternoon when the only thing that moves is the heat haze; the food is basic – chapatis and vegetable curry – but Sagra and Ali managed to create such variety out of so few ingredients that it was more than passable; pans are cleaned with sand and fires are made from sticks and cow pats; and you sleep on the sand dunes, a romantic idea but not quite the picnic one would expect. I thoroughly loved it.

Desert Life

As far as deserts go, the Thar is somewhere between the Sahara and the bush. There are dunes, but they don’t stretch all the way to the horizon; you can see bush beyond the dunes, but they’re large enough to get a feel for the desert. Out trip was for three days and two nights, both of which we spent sleeping under the stars, but I found I wanted to go for longer. Just like in Australia, the call of the desert is still strong.

There are enough differences between the Thar and other deserts I have visited to make it a new experience. The landscape is dry and rugged, but there is a fair amount of greenery; it isn’t spinifex, but more like small, dry bushes. Trees dot the horizon, but not just any trees; these are mushroom-shaped neem trees, with the greenery stopping in a completely horizontal line some ten feet from the ground. I wondered how the science of genetics could explain that until I saw a camel munching at the green leaves; in the world of nature there’s normally a good explanation for what at first appears to be an inexplicable wonder.

Unlike in Australia, where most of the life lives under the canopy (and is therefore very small), there is plenty of life in the Thar. I saw cows, camels, gazelles, goats, dogs, crows, beetles, lizards, desert foxes and, of course, humans, but it’s still hard to see how anything can survive here in this arid land. I asked Ali if it rained much in the monsoon, to which he replied with a wry smile, ‘It is the monsoon.’ This doesn’t stop the locals from ploughing fields ready for planting wheat, millet and camel grass, though I still fail to see how anything can grow out here; the lone woman and her child chopping at clumps of grass with a hook-back spade makes for a poignant symbol of man versus the environment. This is where India meets Africa and the frontiers of the old Wild West.

The Dunes

Perhaps the most romantic and evocative aspect of the desert is the amazing sight of the dunes. We spent two nights sleeping on their gentle slopes, an experience that is unforgettable not just for the thrill of the outdoors, but because it is far from the idyllic image it suggests. If the wind is blowing you wake up with sand in your mouth, sand in your eyes, sand in your nose, sand in your ears, sand in your hair, sand in your toes, sand in your crotch, sand in your armpits, sand in your fingernails and, after you’ve eaten, sand in your stomach. And sand isn’t the soft surface you’d expect from all that sunbathing down on the beach; sand is just hard rock in little bits, and after a few hours of tossing and turning on a dune, you find that it’s just as comfortable. But the stars are unforgettable – as are the satellites; for the first time I saw two in the sky at one time – and drifting off to sleep under the whole universe is a sight to behold. One night I woke up to see the silhouette of my camel against the starry horizon, and I couldn’t help but start; this was a scene straight out of the books of Joan Aiken (and specifically the illustrations of Jan Pienkowski), a classic silhouetted scene of the type I grew up with in my imagination, and here it was, in the flesh. After an experience like that, it’s a wonderful feeling to wake up to a cup of sweet chai and a pale blue sky, with Mercury rising as the mercury rises.

The dunes aren’t just dead piles of sand, either; they’re alive. When the morning breeze skirts the gentle slopes of the dunes, they shimmer with waves that make Hollywood’s special effects pale in comparison. It is as if the dunes are pulsating with a kind of life, much as the plains do later when the heat stirs up the air to make trees, scrub and horizon waver in the haze. The whole dune system is made up of shifting sands, an impermanent collection of tiny particles piling up, collapsing and slowly eking across the desert in the direction of the prevailing winds, and it is in this sense that the dunes are truly alive. Like the camel trains and animal herds, the dunes are desert travellers, just in a different time scale.

More than once I was reminded of Thorung La, the snow fields on top of the world. There the wind blows streams of frozen water off the peaks and into the deep blue sky, and drifts of snow pile up over ragged mountain summits in a constantly changing landscape. And like the snow of Thorung La, the sand of the Thar Desert sucks in all sound, muffling footsteps and creating a silence that is beyond a pure absence of noise; you can hear your own body pumping, wheezing and gurgling, while all around the world is in golden silence.

It might be silent when the sun is baking the land, but there’s always plenty going on. You won’t see much wildlife in the severe heat of the midday scorch, but just look down and you’ll see the evidence of the desert’s huge variety of inhabitants.

There is the Pac-Man trail of the camel, a collection of croquette-shaped green turds in its wake; winding in and out of the dune bushes are squiggly lines made by the tail of a lizard scampering over the hot sand; hopping from foot to foot between the squiggles are the forked footprints of a desert crow; back on the path are hoof marks and the characteristic pat of a cow; scampering in the opposite direction are the cloven prints of a herd of goats, littering the ground in their wake with their bubble dung; following behind are the characteristic marks of two bare-footed humans, the prints deep into the sand from the weight of the water jugs balanced on their heads; and finally there is a slight movement among all the faeces as a dung beetle rolls a camel turd over and over, literally heading towards some secret shit-hole.

Desert Villages

More obvious signs of life dominate the far horizon: villages, dotted throughout the area, are easy to spot in this flat landscape. In this part of India, some 60km from the Pakistan border, the villages are mainly mixed caste, with all the Hindu castes living together with Muslims in one place. In the middle of the desert the people are simply stunned to see you; one day I skipped the midday nap and followed Noel Coward’s advice, wandering off into the barren wasteland for an after-lunch stroll. As I emerged out of the heat haze like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter and entered a lonely four-house village in the middle of nowhere, people came out of their front doors and stared as if I was a visitor from another planet, which in a sense I was; the desert is like nowhere else on earth, an inhospitable land made bearable by the construction of mud huts and wells. Some villages have water fed to them by pipelines, some have dug very deep wells to the waterline, and some even have the water flown in by aeroplane, but whatever the source, it’s the water that provides a grip on the environment.

The buildings change as you get closer to civilisation, as does the attitude of the inhabitants. As we clomped slowly in the direction of the main road, the children became more tourist-aware, asking for pens and chocolate instead of just standing open-mouthed, and the mud huts morphed into ugly breeze-block monstrosities. Although the mud hut is much cooler than a stifling brick house, the brick house has a higher cost and therefore a higher status, so if you can afford it, you go for bricks. This attitude isn’t confined to the desert; in Europe, we look upon stately homes as the ultimate luxury accommodation, but in reality they are difficult to heat in the winter, a nightmare to clean and a pain to maintain. But stately homes have a high status, and most people living in council houses would dearly love to upgrade; it’s the same for mud-hut dwellers when they see the blocky designs of modern brick houses, even if they look to a westerner like ghetto material. Desert building work is an on-going process and is as insane as elsewhere in India; even out here the schools have walls round their grounds, though logically that seems like a waste of manpower and materials.

Towards the main road, modern life impinges. We were approached more than once by a man selling what he referred to as cold drinks, but which were, in fact, warm bottles of Pepsi, Teem and Mirinda. Pepsi has a firm grip on rural areas and Coca-Cola dominates in the cities, and it’s nowhere more obvious than in the desert, where buildings display large painted Pepsi logos on their walls, clashing with the pastel colours of the surrounding desert. But that doesn’t mean the people are modern; they marvelled at my penknife (which was much better than Sagra’s blunt effort), inflatable pillow, eye shades, compass, collapsible cutlery set, bottle holder, sunglasses and even my cheap Indonesian sandals. But just as I thought I’d discovered one part of India where the West has no influence, the clock struck twelve and a chorus of digital watches bleeped to announce the turning of the hour.

Even out here, this is still India, with all its trappings.

[1] A turban is just a piece of thin material, about 1m wide and around 5m long. As Public Enemy will tell you, it’s all in the wrapping.

Bikaner

Written: 27 June 1998

With my camel safari completed, I headed east from Jaisalmer to the town of Bikaner. I’d decided to stop here on the unavoidably convoluted way to Amritsar, and reading about it, it had sounded like a fun place to visit. In the event, Bikaner itself was overshadowed by the Karni Mata Temple in nearby Deshnok, which is one of the most astounding sights I’ve ever seen. A 30km bus ride out of town, the Karni Mata Temple is, on the face of it, just another Hindu temple, but go inside and it’s a scream. Literally.

In this country of animal worshippers, it’s obvious why some animals are holy. The cow gives milk, an incredibly useful product; the monkey makes for good stories; the elephant and tiger are wild, mighty and graceful; and the swan, garuda and others are slightly mysterious and look great in pictures and carvings. Indeed, worshipping animals has always struck me as a great way to ensure that devotees live in harmony with nature, and that’s a good thing, even if you aren’t a believer in the religion itself. But the rat has never struck me as a holy animal however hard I think about it, and that’s why Karni Mata is so intriguing.

The place is infested with rats, quite intentionally; the rats at Karni Mata are regarded as future incarnations of sadhus and mystics, which might go some way to explaining the ragged appearance of sadhus and mystics once they’re reincarnated as humans. Removing your shoes at the entrance to the temple isn’t so much a mark of respect to the Hindu faith; it’s more a test of endurance that even Indiana Jones would consider twice. Black rats scamper everywhere, crawling into holes, lapping up milk and water from bowls, nibbling at prasad (food given as offerings) and sleeping in the shade of the marble walls. At first the sight is a little disturbing, but it soon becomes apparent that the rats are more scared of you than you are of them, and the scene melts from something out of a James Herbert novel into yet another interesting cultural event.

Before setting off for the temple, I got into a conversation with some shop owners in Bikaner who told me about the temple. Brandishing a small painting of the temple’s Durga shrine, they pointed to the rats eating offerings on the steps; in the middle was a white rat, the only one, and they told me that just one white rat lived in the temple, and that it was a very special rat. If it looked at you it was very good luck, and if you touched it, it was even better. I thanked them for the information and headed off.

Imagine my amazement, then, when I wandered over to a corner of the temple where a small crowd was gathered round a pile of bricks, and discovered a white rat cowering inside the rubble. Hindus were bowing to the rat, holding their hands together in prayer and whispering to each other in excited tones. I sat around, fascinated that a rat could inspire such worship, and waited for something to happen.

Soon enough the people drifted away and the rat, sensing an escape opportunity, popped its head out and made a dash for it. I followed it slowly, tracking it down among a group of black rats, where it was trying unsuccessfully to blend into the crowd. As I ambled closer it seemed to stop, sniff the air and sense something; then it fixed its beady eyes on mine for about ten seconds before breaking contact and getting back to the business of trying to merge into the crowd. Slightly surprised to find myself excited by this symbolic event, I shuffled forward slowly, and after a few minutes of slow footwork, I managed to reach out and stroke its back. By this stage a few Hindus had followed me, ostensibly to see what the funny white man was doing (a white man among black men being as interesting as a white rat among black rats), and they soon started their prayers again. I snapped a picture and suddenly the white rat was gone, down a hole and away from the crowds.

My good luck didn’t start immediately, if it started at all. I sat down to contemplate my good fortune, and instantly the one-rupee-one-pen crowd homed in and started their litany. It was hot and I wasn’t really in the mood for this; the only sure-fire way to get rid of these kids is to pretend to lose your temper, but you can’t do that in a temple, and all I wanted was a bit of peace in which to watch the rodent seekers do their bit. Instead I ended up with a bunch of kids who understood no English and who wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer. The conversation went something like this.

‘Name?’

‘Mark.’

‘Ah, Marr. Town name?’

‘Birmingham.’

‘Ah, Burma. Father’s name?’

‘Ian.’

‘Ah, Ear. Brother’s name?’

‘Andrew.’

‘Ah, Anroo. Uncle’s name?’

‘Which one?’

‘Ah, Whichwun. Yes.’

At which point I gave up, found my shoes and the bus back to Bikaner, and went exploring the town itself. There’s only so much you can do with the one-rupee-one-pen crowd in the heat of an Indian summer...

Exploring Bikaner

As the afternoon sun sweltered its way across the sky, I found time to visit the maharaja’s fortress, and the old city bazaars with their windy streets. Unfortunately the Junagarh Fort cost a small fortune to enter, and then I could only go round in the company of a guide (who wanted baksheesh to show me all the rooms, which I paid in the vain hope that the ‘hidden’ rooms would be worth the effort, which they weren’t). The upshot was that yet again I poured money into the coffers of some fat landlord who had quite justifiably been axed from his feudal position and who was now bleeding tourists instead of serfs. Every maharaja’s palace I visit makes me love old George more and more; at least he had style.

But it wasn’t Bikaner’s fault that I didn’t enjoy myself, it was mine. Yet again I came across a town fairly untainted by tourism[1], and yet again I found wonderfully friendly people who wanted to talk, swap addresses and shake my hand. The problem was that I wasn’t in the mood; perhaps I was tired from my delayed and over-long ten-hour bus ride from Jaisalmer, or perhaps the heat of the plains is getting me down, but I felt totally uninspired and far from friendly. But you can’t inflict your moods on well-meaning and kind people, and having to keep smiling ended up as a bit of a strain. I even got invited into one particularly kind man’s hotel room where he introduced me to his son, who was sitting his medical school entrance exams in Bikaner, and of whom he was incredibly proud; he lost no opportunity in singing his son’s praises, he fed me bananas and chai, and he was eloquently fascinating. How can you be mean to people like that? I can’t, but I found my energy rapidly draining away.

I felt like you do after a miserable night’s sleep, a crappy day at work and a bad drive home, and then you have to attend a cocktail party that you don’t want to go to; the normal course of events is that you put on a brave face, and when you get home you announce to your spouse, ‘That’s the last bloody charity/school reunion/golf club party we’re going to.’ Unfortunately I have no spouse at whom to let off steam, so instead I smiled all the way onto the 1am train north.

So I think the white rat’s luck took a while to kick in. One thing’s for sure: I certainly felt ratty as I headed north to Amritsar.

[1] Though judging by the figures, Bikaner is on the up. In 1980, 1759 foreigners and 54,724 Indians visited the fort. In 1997 this had shot up to 21,809 foreigners and 158,180 Indians. It looks like Bikaner will soon change...

Nuclear Testing

Written: 27 June 1998

One of the most common questions round northern Rajasthan is, of course, ‘What do you think of the nuclear tests?’ Regardless of my personal feelings on matters nuclear – which amount to an idealistic disgust at nuclear weapons, an intellectual fascination with sub-atomic physics, and a powerful appreciation of the shocking beauty of the mushroom cloud – I always answer in the positive, saying that I think it’s fair enough that India has done its tests and that Pakistan has reacted with their own.

From a completely dispassionate viewpoint, the whole nuclear situation in the subcontinent is understandable. India and Pakistan are mortal enemies, and defence is a major concern; this issue wins elections, a fact not lost on the BJP government, which is exceedingly pro-Hindu and hence anti-Pakistan. It’s obvious why Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee decided to run the tests, and Pakistan’s reaction is utterly predictable.

Arguments about the ideological idiocy of nuclear weapons testing don’t cut much ice with the Indians, and I understand why. I also feel that the West’s reaction – sanctions and widespread condemnation – is not only misunderstanding the political situation here, but is hypocritical in the extreme. In 1995 France blew up bombs in the South Pacific, and they weren’t put under sanctions outside of the voluntary boycotts of French wine in Australia and New Zealand (the former country being the source of the uranium used in the tests in the first place). Nobody in their right mind would welcome more nuclear bombs into the world, but why alienate the country concerned when you’re penalising them for something that you’ve already done yourself?

My reaction, therefore, is this: doing the tests was fair enough, but if either country actually uses the weapons conceived, that is completely unforgivable. The Indians I meet generally agree with this, but they don’t hold back when it comes to President Clinton; I’ve met Americans who say they’re referred to as ‘the enemy’ by locals, and there’s no invective spared when Indians talk about the good old US of A. England, on the other hand, has come out of it reasonably well, though I don’t know why.

But the man in the street here has a fairly flimsy grasp on the facts. I passed through Pokaran, the site of the tests, on my way from Jaisalmer to Bikaner, and in both cities I discovered incredible ignorance. One young man in Bikaner, a medical student at the local college, claimed that the current heat wave was entirely due to the nuclear tests, and that in Jaisalmer the water had turned red because ‘atoms go into the water’ (but then again, he also told me that Hindi films were exactly like real life, so who’s to say he was sane?). This is simply uninformed and illogical, especially coming from someone who studies elementary chemistry and physics as part of his course.

So perhaps the question should not be whether the nuclear tests are a good or a bad thing, but whether Indian democracy is effective. I trust the Indians, but I’m not sure I trust their government, and despite the free press and democratic semblance, a few fat and corrupt politicians in Delhi can play with atoms, bombs and buttons to their heart’s content. That’s the concern, but I can’t very well tell that to the locals, can I?

India: Punjab

Amritsar

Written: 1 July 1998

As pupils in school history classes we barely touched upon colonialism, an amazing omission given the importance of the British Empire in the continuing arrogance of the English abroad; if we did study it, it was only to mention British successes (such as the Battle of Plassey, the explorations of Captain Cook and the glory of Hong Kong) or to paint a vivid picture of the hardships forced upon us by the conquest of the developing world (such as the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Zulu wars and the exploration of North America).

But the British abroad were hardly angels; one only has to read Orwell’s Burmese Days to see a different side to the glory of Mother England and her supposedly benign influence on her subject countries. I am constantly surprised by how biased my education was; I expect such a thing to happen in countries with oppressive and dictatorial regimes, but in Britain, the Land of Hope and Glory, the inventor of parliamentary democracy, the epitome of fairness and high morals? I’ve begun to explore the other side of the coin, and it’s an ugly story. It seems I was fed propaganda at school.

It happens everywhere: CNN isn’t neutral and unbiased, and nor is the BBC, but we like to think that they are (most people will get very heated if you question the ‘correctness’ of their news programmes). Nothing is neutral; I know this because I am a journalist, and as a journalist I know it’s practically impossible to write something that’s completely objective. But my religious education was a Christian education, and we never learned about any other religions, a major oversight that has thankfully been rectified in the modern curriculum; my history lessons were conveniently selective, even though history is supposed to teach us to learn from our mistakes; geography lessons were selective too, avoiding concepts of famine and ecology in favour of motorway names, county boundaries and the main products of Canadian territories. I know you can’t teach everything, but you can at least try to teach a balanced syllabus.

So I have been discovering another side to life through my interest in colonialism. At school I never learned anything about Malaysia or British Borneo, but their histories are fascinating, and are a good example of petty squabbling between advanced nations, irrespective of the effect on the people originally living there. Travelling through Australia and New Zealand opened up the worlds of the Aborigine and Maori to me, and Polynesia is a perfect example of colonial control that is both vindictive (nuclear testing) and beneficial (France pumping money into the country). I had to find out about this myself, and although it’s been fascinating for me, it makes my education look worryingly incomplete.

Amritsar, the spiritual capital of the Punjab, is a perfect example. The Punjab is the home of the Sikhs, the easily recognised Indians who wear turbans, grow their hair and beards long, and who have set up very successful communities in places like Birmingham and the USA. The Punjab is now a peaceful state, but this is a recent development; until the early 1990s it was dangerous to travel here, and the region’s history is a long story of armed struggle and bloodshed.

The Development of Sikhism

Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539) who was, reading between the lines, a genuine hippy. He looked at Islam and Hinduism, and although he liked certain aspects of both religions, he was a serious liberal and wholeheartedly rejected the caste system of Hinduism and the intolerance and sexism of Islam. The result was his creation of a new religion, Sikhism, which blended the good parts of Hinduism and Sufism (Islam’s mystical branch) into a religion of tolerance and universal appeal. Nine more gurus followed Nanak, each building on the faith and forming a loose nation of Sikhs in the Punjab area, the spiritual centre of which was the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

This all happened during the Mughal reign, and under the progressive Emperor Akbar and his successors, Sikhism flourished. But the last Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, was a fanatical Muslim and spent most of his time tearing down Hindu temples and building mosques – thus alienating his subjects and paving the way for the end of Muslim rule in India – and Sikhism was suddenly under fire from the ruling class. This coincided with the leadership of Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708) who turned Sikhism around, creating a militaristic and highly organised sect that vigorously defended its right to exist and which elevated the concept of martyrdom to new heights. The result was a whole population of men who were honourable, valiant and seriously tough, characteristics that, one can argue, are still predominant in modern Sikh society.

With the demise of the Mughals and the advent of the comparatively tolerant British rule, the Sikhs expanded their empire. The Golden Temple, which had a chequered history of being repeatedly captured by Muslims and being subsequently recaptured by Sikhs, stayed in Sikh hands from 1767 onwards. By 1839, under Ranjit Singh, the Sikhs ruled the Punjab, Kashmir, Ladakh, Balistan, Gilgit, Hazara and the Peshawar Valley (in other words what is now northeastern India and northern Pakistan) and had pushed the Afghans right back to the Khyber Pass. Ranjit had agreed in 1809 not to intrude on British territory, in return for being left alone by the Brits, but his successors flaunted this agreement, and in 1846 and 1849 the British fought two bloody wars with the Sikhs, eventually winning, and the Sikh empire was incorporated into British India. The Sikh culture, though, was allowed to continue unharmed, and Sikhs were included in the British army, much like the Nepalese Gurkhas.

This bloody history is an important part of Sikhism, if only because it is the reason for their distinctive appearance. Being on the move all the time, the Sikhs were unable to waste time on beautification, a stylistic nicety which has stuck: the knife, or kirpan – which is always carried and is exempted all over India in signs proclaiming, ‘No weapons allowed, except for Sikh kirpans’ – is an obvious symbol of armed struggle; and the traditional short trousers are worn instead of lungis because lungis are pretty useless if you need to run quickly over rough terrain. But surely the most impressive consequence of the Sikhs’ armed past is the long history of martyrs, all of whom are revered like latter-day saints.

The Golden Temple, being the central Sikh shrine, has a whole gallery devoted to Sikh history and its martyrs. Occupying five rooms above the northern entrance to the temple, the museum consists of paintings of the key events in the history of Sikhism, and although it starts off with some pretty mellow historical scenes, it soon gives way to the violence and bloodshed that marks this particular struggle for religious freedom.

The first sign that something is up is a painting of a man being boiled alive, closely followed by another man being sawn in half from his head down. In each case it depicts a devotee being killed in the presence of his guru, but to me it wasn’t initially clear if these pictures were showing religious persecution or an extreme test of bravery; what follows, however, puts one in no doubt that these are depictions of some of the more unpleasant ways in which Sikhs were killed by those of different religious persuasions (mainly Muslims) in a brutal attempt to convert them from their faith. There are pictures of Muslims butchering hundreds of Sikh babies, chopping off brave Sikh warriors’ heads and, following on from these religious atrocities, a depiction of the 1919 massacre of an unarmed Sikh crowd by the British.

Of course, given its location in the holiest of all Sikh shrines, the museum can’t avoid falling into the same trap as my own education. The theme throughout is the persecution of Sikhs, and although this is a well-documented part of the story of Sikhism, there are other areas of Sikh history that are perhaps more controversial. The modern era has spawned the Sikh extremist, some of whom are willing to go to terrible lengths to fight their cause. It’s a truism that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, but it is, after all, only a few years since there was peace in the Punjab, and today you still see photograph displays of Sikh extremists in bus and train stations, each of them holding a prisoner number in front of them and wearing a defiant expression. For some people, wars are never over.

But it’s hard to imagine the Punjab as a war zone. The change of scenery from Rajasthan to the Punjab is stunning; from desolate arid desert, you pass into a green and fertile land filled with fields of rice and wheat and criss-crossed by bulging rivers. The man next to me on the bus pointed out of the window and said, ‘Is like England, yes?’, and although I can’t recall many paddy fields or palm trees in sunny Staffordshire, I can see what he meant. It is pure green; the Punjab produces 22 per cent of India’s wheat and ten per cent of its rice, and it is home to the world’s biggest bicycle manufacturer, Hero Bicycles. The Sikhs are master mechanics, and are renowned for their tolerance of other cultures and religions and their friendliness. This is not the product of terrorism, surely?

The Golden Temple

It’s even harder to think of negative aspects of Sikhism when you visit the Golden Temple itself. A celebration of architecture, aesthetics, equality and piety, the Golden Temple is not only one of the most delightful temple complexes in India, with its large tank and glittering gold and white marble buildings, but it’s also one of the friendliest. In most Hindu and Muslim temples there’s a slight feeling of intrusion; as a non-Hindu you can’t go into a Hindu temple’s inner sanctum, and you might not be allowed into a mosque at all, especially if you’re female, but Sikhism makes a point of its tolerance. Anyone and everyone can visit the Golden Temple regardless of colour, caste or creed, and the four entrances surrounding the complex symbolise this freedom. It lends a relaxed atmosphere to the interior; you can go anywhere, see anything and the only ‘price’ to pay is to take off your shoes and cover your head. Would that all religions were so tolerant.

The temple itself is a stunning piece of architecture, an ancient structure rebuilt so many times after destruction and war that it combines the old and the new in a successful union. A huge square tank, filled to the brim with dark water and huge carp, is surrounded by buildings, all done out in white marble and gleaming in the sunshine. The walkway surrounding the tank is wide and, even in the direct sunlight, cool; and dotted throughout the complex are marble plaques and carved memorials to Sikhs who died in wars, Sikhs who want to be commemorated in their holiest shrine, and other plaques containing details of large donations. Every space has its value printed on it, from Rs500 to Rs50,000, and each one has a story to tell, from lists of dead soldiers to New York Sikhs announcing their departure for their heavenly abode.

In the middle of the tank is the Golden Temple itself, the Hari Mandir (literally ‘the Temple of God’). A long marble walkway leads to this square block of a building, whose lower walls are covered in inlaid flowers in patterns reminiscent of the Taj Mahal. The roof of the building, a melee of bulbous spires and domes, is totally smothered in gold, and manages to offset the marble quite beautifully in the architectural equivalent of milk and honey. It seems almost contradictory, but these garish whites and golds manage to give off a decidedly peaceful atmosphere; sitting round the edge of the lake watching the world go by is one of life’s more relaxing experiences, especially as you don’t tend to get interrupted quite as much as you do outside the temple (other visitors will of course talk to you, but they are polite in the extreme).

Throughout the day loudspeakers sound out the constant singing of the Sikhs’ bible, the Adi Grantha, and where the equivalent in a Hindu temple would probably be insanely lively, the Adi Grantha chanting is a glorious synthesis of styles. I’ve listened to plenty of Indian classical music, but I’ve rarely come across music as evocative as that in the Golden Temple; I kept thinking of Harrison’s ‘Within You and Without You’, itself a mixture of western Beatles music and classical eastern sitar. With its simple combination of keyboard, tabla and voice, I sat and listened for hours, marvelling at the complexity of a nation that can invent both wonderful classical music and infuriating pop.

The Golden Temple is a rich place, too. It’s obvious when you look into the glass donation box, where people donate their spare change to contribute to the re-gilding of the temple’s roof (most of which is being financed by donations from Birmingham’s Sikh community). In one cursory glance I saw US$50, US$20, US$10, US$5 and US$1 notes, rupees from Pakistan, £20, £10 and £5 notes, German marks, gold rings, bracelets, earrings and a whole pile of large denomination Indian rupee bills. The buildings are sparklingly clean, the restoration work goes on tirelessly, and the sense of community is tangible.

A lot of this is down to the Sikhs’ no-nonsense attitude to communal living. Pilgrims get free accommodation in a number of buildings dotted around the temple, and the communal kitchen, the Guru Ka Langar, serves free food at intervals throughout the day. Sharing showers, sharing meals and sharing dormitories makes for quite a change from a life of single hotel rooms, your own table in a restaurant and en suite bathrooms, but with the Sikhs being so friendly, I never felt embarrassment or any intrusion into my personal space while I stayed in the temple.

But even in this egalitarian society, we westerners were in an enclosure with good fans, lockable lockers, our own washing line and a guard or two at the door at all hours. Nobody could look in, so we could prance around in our underwear if we wanted, so in one important sense we weren’t really a part of the community, because we could get our seclusion whenever we wanted. But it still felt good; finding genuine peace outside is impossible for tourists, and as for sleeping outside on the concrete, even the hardiest westerner would have problems with that...

Surviving India

Written: 28 June 1998

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when visiting a country like India is to try to apply your own set of values to society. Hard though it seems to be for some westerners to believe, Indians don’t live by our rules, they live by their own, and this is probably responsible for the most discord between travellers and Indians.

It is sometimes difficult to appreciate that when you land in a new country, your own set of values is irrelevant and simply not applicable. If there is one reason why the British failed to turn India into a duplication of Victorian England, it’s because Victorian values were just not relevant to India; you might as well try to get a cricket fan interested in the footy scores. In India the things you’ll notice the most are the different personal habits, a complete lack of personal space, the flexibility of truth, the sheer volume of life, and a totally bizarre concept of taste... and after a while, you’ll start to celebrate the fact that things are not the same as back home. It’s all a part of what makes India so enduringly fascinating, but everyone who visits has to go through the confusion of throwing out their preconceptions and starting again.

It’s absolutely worth the effort, though.

Personal Habits

The difference in personal habits between India and the West can be quite obvious at times: there often seems to be no taboo about spitting, coughing, farting, burping, pissing, shitting, picking your nose or even dying in public, but if a woman even thinks about showing an ounce of bare flesh below the waist, it’s the height of indecency. When some people eat in India, they make as much noise as is humanly possible with one pair of molars and one swallowing mechanism and nobody seems to bat an eyelid, but showing any kind of man-woman affection in public is unacceptable (though men can hug and kiss men, and women can hug and kiss women). It’s quite a change from the West – in India, it’s clear that different things are acceptable.

Then there are the people who drop litter anywhere and everywhere, even if there is a bin nearby (in which case take a photo, because you won’t see many bins in India). There are those who burp loudly in public, and again nobody seems to care. You see people blowing their noses straight onto the pavement, wiping their noses on their hands, and then wiping their hands on their clothes. People chew tobacco and betel nut mixtures, and spit the red goo anywhere they like. They cough and noisily bring up phlegm before spitting it out, wherever they are. But just because this is deemed rude in the West, it doesn’t mean it’s rude in India; it’s just different.

If the strange personal habits get to you, consider this: how would you have turned out if you’d been brought up in a place like India? Probably exactly the same...

Personal Space

Personal space is a concept that has never been able to develop in India. When you have nearly one billion people rubbing shoulders in a country this size, you have two options. The first one, the western choice, is to bury yourself in your newspaper on the train, and to steadfastly ignore other humans when you’re walking along the street, creating a concept of personal space that is sacred, unbreachable and almost solid enough to touch. The apocryphal story goes that a couple was having sex on a British train in a crowded carriage of six, but everybody pretended not to notice, looking away as the shrieks of joy throbbed round the train; but when the loving couple had finished and lit up a post-coital cigarette, one of the passengers leaned forward and said, ‘Excuse me, would you mind putting that out? This is a no smoking coach.’ True or untrue, the very fact that this story is an urban myth demonstrates that the concept of personal space is ingrained into western society, and particularly British society.

But India seems to have no such concept. This manifests itself in a number of ways, but the two most obvious to the visitor are those of staring and conversation starting. Wherever you go you will be stared at, sometimes for hours, sometimes just for a short time, but each stare is penetrating, intense and profoundly unnerving. And as you sit there minding your own business, people will come right up to you, look over your shoulder and stare at what you are reading or writing, oblivious to any concerns for privacy you might have. Often they will come up and start a conversation, just like that, even if you are already talking; it’s not uncommon in Anglo-Indian conversations for the local to interrupt when he loses interest in what you’re saying, or has lost the thread through the language barrier.

You will encounter this sort of thing a lot if you’re an obvious tourist and off the beaten track, but how surprising is this? Westerners are conditioned to know about the world from international TV and holidaying abroad, but this is far from the case in poverty-stricken India. I’m sure I’d stare if I saw something as strange as a differently coloured person if I hadn’t been exposed to them through media, immigration and an ability to explore the world. Staring isn’t rude, it’s just the locals displaying an interest, but to those of us conditioned not to stare as kids, it takes some getting used to.

It’s not just personal, though. India manages to shatter any concepts of generalised privacy by blaring music at high volumes on buses, by cramming you into a bus or train until the sides are splitting, or by forcing you to piss in public through a lack of public toilets (something which is far more of a problem for women than men). I once sat on a train for hours while one man played Hindi film music at full volume on his ghetto blaster; I was cringing and inserting the ear plugs, but nobody else batted an eyelid. If they hated it, they didn’t show it, perhaps reflecting that if they’d wanted to play their own music, they could too, and criticising the young man would amount to an invasion of his privacy. Who knows? Whatever the logic, to the westerner this loud abuse of everyone else’s personal space appears invasive and amazingly rude, but when there are this many people, what other solution is there? A nation this big, full of people with British reserve, would be too depressing to contemplate...

Searching for the Truth

In India, it often appears that ‘truth’ isn’t absolute, it’s analogue: ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are just part of a whole family of truth values that include ‘It’s possible’, ‘If you like’ and the famous head wobble. No wonder tourists get confused when they travel here; even the concept of basic communication has been altered by Indian society.

For example, in Ajanta, Ian tried to find a Pepsi, and despite constant claims by various vendors that they indeed had cold Pepsi, none of them actually managed to produce one that was chilled. ‘We have Thums Up,’ they invariably said once we’d parked ourselves in their café, but Thums Up wouldn’t do for Ian; it had to be Pepsi, but just like the Indonesians and, to a lesser extent, the Thais, some Indians are more than flexible with the truth if they think they can make a sale.

This is just one example from millions. Ask for the time of a bus, and you’ll get as many different answers as there are people. Ask if something is available in a restaurant, and the answer will be ‘yes’ until you actually try to order that something. And when I think of the number of times I’ve tried to get directions and have been told simultaneously by two people that the hotel is both in that direction and in totally the opposite direction...

But it’s not that people seem to lie more than anyone else, it’s that they want to please you by telling you what you want to hear. If you want a Pepsi, they will tell you that they have one, because that is what you want to hear. If you ask if that is the direction to so-and-so, they’ll nod, because that’s what you want to hear. If you need to get to somewhere, then ‘it is possible’, because that’s what you want to hear. The fact that there’s no Pepsi, you’re going in totally the wrong way and there’s no bus for two months because of the monsoon is quite irrelevant, at least as far as the head-wobbling masses are concerned; they have no idea that you’d be much happier if they told you the truth, because to them a negative answer will annoy you (‘No, we don’t have Pepsi, sir’ ‘Damn’) so they don’t tell the exact truth in order to avoid making you unhappy. It’s their way of being kind.

So never ask, ‘Do you have Pepsi?’, instead ask, ‘What soft drinks do you have?’ Never say, ‘Is this the right way to so-and-so?’ say ‘Where is so-and-so?’ Don’t try, ‘Can I get to Indore from here?’ try ‘How do I get to Indore from here?’ If your question expects a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, beware, because the answer will almost always be ‘yes’, because that’s what the Indians think you want to hear.

As another example, Ian was sitting in a café in Mamallapuram one day, and asked for ‘one Pepsi’ in his broad Yorkshire accent. The little man ran off without blinking an eyelid, and quite a time later he came back with a Pepsi bottle, wrapped up in a napkin. Ian felt the bottle and it was really quite hot, as if it had been standing in the sun all day; when he asked what it was, the little man replied, ‘It is warm Pepsi, just like you asked.’ In his eagerness to please, the waiter hadn’t even considered the fact that nobody would ever drink warm Pepsi; he just did what he thought the tourist wanted.

On top of this, often you will ask a question that the non-English speaking Indian will not understand, and with you going, ‘Is it there? Is it there?’ and pointing, he’ll just nod because he figures that that’s what you want to hear. So what do you expect?

Of course there are plenty of dodgy salesmen around, especially in the heavily tourist-influenced areas. But are you telling me that there aren’t people out to fleece you in the West? Of course not, and it’s no different here.

India is Loud

You might be forgiven for thinking that most Indians are deaf; everything is so loud that if deafness isn’t the cause of the din, it’ll soon enough be the effect.

India has to be the noisiest country I have ever experienced. Stereos only have one volume setting – LOUD – and Hindi music without distortion simply doesn’t exist. Horns don’t just blare; they make your ears bleed. And as for the music itself, regardless of the singing, those string sections are designed to cut through any din, right to the base of the spine.

But despite the traffic noise, shouting, singing, expectorating, piercing music and out-of-tune motorcycle engines, you can’t buy earplugs in India. Indian workers use pneumatic drills without ear protection, because ear protection costs more than a replacement worker. Indian voices manage to slice through conversation without needing to shout; the men selling chai on the trains can be heard advertising their wares from three carriages away, and they’re guaranteed to wake you up every time you pull into a station. Horns don’t just shake the earth; they come in a number of different tunes that will indelibly scar your eardrums. The buses come complete with deafening Hindi music played at full volume, drowning out even the grind of the gears and the smash of the ruined shock absorbers. And a traditional game played by travellers is ‘I wonder what strange noise my room fan will make tonight?’ It’s not the best game in the world.

And asking anyone to turn the music down will earn you a look of incredulity, as if you’ve just asked the driver if he can stop using the brakes. You could say they turn a deaf ear...

A Different Taste

Indian taste is, well, different, and I’m not just talking about their pop music.

The clothes sported by so-called trendy Indians look amazingly out of date by western standards; even in the seventies these guys would have looked embarrassing. Indian role models are more like roly-poly models, with their porn-film moustaches and strangely phallic poses that they strike for the camera, and even the gods aren’t allowed to get away with austerity; the shrines you see on the taxi dashboards have flashing lights and garish silver and gold borders, a homage not only to Ganesh and Co., but to the kitsch religion of tacky plastic. India can, at times, be an aesthete’s nightmare.

But look at the women: they have impeccable taste. From gorgeous sarees and delightful hairstyles to simple but effective jewellery, Indian women shame westerners into simplicity, so perhaps it’s just the men who are responsible for making India such a wonderfully tasteless place. Whatever, it’s loads of fun; you might not want to decorate your London pad like India, but in India it somehow feels just right.

Roll With It

All these frustrations with personal habits, personal space, truth and so on are simply down to a difference in social values. Most people don’t seem to mind the spitting, noisy eating, pissing and so on because they are not brought up with Victorian values being shoved down their throats: mothers don’t scream, ‘Don’t eat with your mouth open and don’t talk with your mouth full’; society doesn’t turn up its nose if you cough up a greeny on the pavement; and policemen don’t arrest you for urinating in the street. In the West we have managed to fill ourselves with values that, on the whole, I agree with, but this is a truism; I have no choice but to agree. I have been brought up to think that eating with your mouth open is rude, and as such seeing someone masticating with abandon can’t help but annoy me; I sometimes feel jealous of the Indian who, not having been brought up with this imposed value, has no hang up about eating. The problem is mine, all mine, and it can only be isolated by going into a society where my values are all wrong.

Personal space is another huge frustration. I hate people staring at me; I cannot help but feel that it is rude. But here it isn’t rude; it’s totally acceptable to stare. Mothers don’t chide children with ‘It’s rude to stare’, often because they’re too busy staring themselves. I sit there, silently fuming as yet another urchin sits down for his own private viewing of Traveller TV, and again it is my problem; I am imposing my values on a little boy who has a totally different outlook on life. He is not being rude, but I am being quite illogical.

It took me six months in India to develop this insight, and six months to develop the tolerance to accept it not as something designed to annoy me, but as an integral and fascinating part of the Indian psyche. The tourist spots are awash with foreigners who don’t appreciate the concept of Indian values, and who flaunt their bare legs in public, hug each other outside temples and complain constantly at the habits, personal invasions and outright lies that they perceive. But that’s the key word: ‘perceive’. If your perception of India is through western eyes, you’ll never, ever understand, and not only that, life on the road will be very, very hard.

Perhaps this is why I laughed when I met the young American in Mt Abu who wanted to psychoanalyse India. To really do that, you have to be born here and to have your own personal values developed within Indian society... otherwise you’ll always be an outsider. And how can anyone expect to travel in a different culture without some culture clashes? Precisely. Celebrate the differences, rather than criticise, and you’ll fall in love with India too.

Schrödinger’s Cat

Written: 30 June 1998

One thing I find hard to tolerate in the long-term traveller is the sense of the past always being better than the present. I am constantly meeting people who harp on about how excellent Goa used to be before all the tourists arrived, and how Manali used to be just a couple of huts before the hotel builders turned up. It’s faintly depressing, and makes me wonder why on earth these people keep coming back to places that they say have been ‘destroyed’.

It’s hypocrisy of the first degree. These people lament the coming of the backpacker age, harping back to the sixties and seventies when you had to drop out of society to get on the trail; these days easy air travel and a more relaxed attitude to the concept of ‘career’ means everybody with a little bit of motivation can hit the Asian trail, even if you don’t want to hang around in an ashram and dig Ganesh. But who’s responsible for the tourist invasion? It’s the people who are at the forefront of the invasion, the vanguard of the tourist attack: the explorers. The nostalgia addicts rant at the Lonely Planet, blaming every spoiled place on their proliferation of the facts, but guess who started the Lonely Planet? Vanguard travellers...

I’ve even found myself falling into the trap. I hear people talk of Indonesia, and I project this nostalgia with comments like, ‘The Togian Islands are beautiful now, but in a couple of years they’ll be ruined’ and ‘Check out the Bada Valley, it’s undiscovered now, but soon it’ll have McDonald’s restaurants and highways.’ It’s pretty dumb because if I really cared about these places I’d keep quiet, but how can you do that? If you see something special, you automatically want to tell people about it.

And in doing so you open it up for potential destruction. But what’s the point in harping on about it? This is hardly a small world, is it?

India: Himachal Pradesh and Delhi

Dharamsala

Written: 9 July 1998

Within two hours of arriving in Dharamsala I had booked into what seemed to be the only available room in town – a depressing pigsty, to be honest – and was sitting in a café on the outskirts of town listening to an astoundingly posh English accent spout the following:

‘You know John Doe[1]? Well I definitely could have slept with him, you know. I was working in York at the Opera House, doing the Merchant of Venice, OK, and we just developed a kind of a connection, like. You know, he’s not like an old man; he’s really young at heart. Like once, yeah, he took me out in his convertible Mercedes, pulled out a spliff and I thought OK! That’s cool! He said to me, “I would like to have sex with you”, but there was no pressure, like, and it was fine with him that I didn’t want to. He phoned me all the time... yeah, completely... but he wanted to go this way and I wanted to go that, I just wasn’t interested, you know. But he’s a very attractive man, a very charming man, yeah.

‘Anyway are we going to get more spliff, or should we detox?’

The conversation went on to cover the actress’ career, how impressed she was with herself, and how awful all other actresses of stage and television are. To witness such a display of self-love in a place devoted to the destruction of the ego and the proliferation of universal compassion was not just depressing, it confirmed what I’d been told to expect.

I had been warned by Paul, a clued-up and wonderfully cynical Aussie whom I met in Amritsar, that Dharamsala is a bit of a traveller hell, but I didn’t realise it extended to include John Doe’s harem. Everywhere you go are Americans following in the footsteps of Richard Gere, looking for enlightenment, and hippies wandering around with bare torsos (an offensive thing to do in India, let alone Tibetan India), vomit-coloured baggy trousers and idiot accessories. Conversations are dotted with the yuppie mantra of ‘Oh God, really’ and continue with discussions of the wonderful properties of Buddhism and the peacefulness of meditation. Nobody seems to be caught up in the samsara of suffering here, but everyone is looking for salvation.

Talk about Tibet Inc. – Dharamsala is a total sell-out. I suppose it’s not Dharamsala’s fault, as it’s an obvious consequence of the trendy tourist invasion. One thing is certain: Dharamsala is about as far from India as I can imagine, with its combination of hill station climate, beautiful green mountains, Tibetan locals and tourist-pandering restaurants, hotels and shops. Where is the madness of India, the craziness that challenges your values, the insanity that makes the whole Indian travel experience a joy? It went the same way as Nepalese culture and Thai pride – down the tubes – and all the time young globetrotters are landing in Dharamsala, convinced that they are experiencing something genuine.

Take Contact, the local community newsletter. In its July 1998 issue (Issue 5, Volume 1) is the following piece (I have left in all spelling mistakes and grammatical niceties):

Take a piece of Dharamshala with you

Now that you have visited this hilly region, so called ‘Little Lhasa’, capital of Tibetan diaspora, you have felt the mountains and the trees, cold rivulets of Bhagsunath, the chantings of the monks, the temples, the silent images of Buddhas, chupas and apron clad people – a society on the verge transformation.

Your experience – your heart ensconsed in a bud, has loosened to a flower. You have deciphered the serene notes of the mountains and the clouds. Let not the memory fade away once back at your material world. Take along with you the audio and visual of the world you have just experienced. In your daily strife, do remember us, play the cassettes and feel the difference. You are not all alone...

[List of tapes and videos deleted]

Nice, eh; the genuine Tibetan experience in your living room, complete with stereo sound and Dolby noise reduction. Then again, this is from the same newsletter that has an article on ‘elf immolation’, and contains the following new-age bullshit in an article entitled ‘Healing in Dharamsala’ by the delightfully named Fleur Wood: ‘Looking for a spot of Spontaneous Healing, Reiki, Aura Cleansing or Past Life Therapy? Well, you’ve come to the right town.’ Reading this, my stomach began to sink.

Escape to Bhagsu

Despite being forewarned, I decided to tackle Dharamsala for two reasons. First, I’ve had enough of hot weather, and the last cool winds I remember are those of Darjeeling; and second, being about to immerse myself back into the West, I figured it would be instructive and helpful to see if I could acclimatise myself back into western values. Besides, being a sarcastic soul, I rather thought it would be entertaining to hear lots of white folk harping on about finding The Truth™.

What a shame that I couldn’t take it. Instead of being able to sit back and just laugh at all the pretension, it drove me mad. These people are incredible. It’s as if all the ashram arseholes have decided to descend on Dharamsala, but even the weirdest casualties I’ve met in the rest of India aren’t as pathetic as these Buddhist ‘dudes’, if only because someone who sticks themselves into a meditation programme for weeks in the middle of nowhere is sincere. I suspected the Dharamsala crowd might be confusing sincerity with celebrity.

Luckily I managed to get out of Dharamsala and find a room in a local family’s house in the nearby village of Bhagsu, and with its rustic simplicities, candle-lit bedrooms and genuine peace and quiet, I felt relatively removed from the serious business of posing going on in town. I wanted to spend time here, but even one night in Dharamsala itself was too much. The suburb where everyone stays is called McLeod Ganj; it is separate from Dharamsala itself, and it’s well named. If there’s one thing McLeod Ganj is full of, it’s clouds of ganja.

On the other hand, the further out you go, the further out the people become, and this can be even more disturbing; plastic ideals and trendy causes are one thing, but the real long-termers are possibly the most disturbing aspect of the whole sham. It especially worried me when I found a mirror; there I was, a long-haired beardy-weirdy, and I realised that if I met myself on the street, I’d assume I was a far-out space cadet hippy. But how can I emphasise the difference between me and some of the other long-term travellers I met in Dharamsala?

People stay in Dharamsala for weeks and often months. This is not only a result of the large number of monasteries around, but also of the easy availability of marijuana, and as a result there are quite a few people around who have lost their sense of reality. Now I’m the first to support the theory that reality is a fairly subjective concept, based more on our personal and societal value systems than a concrete specific, but on the other hand it’s not hard to tell when someone has lost a part of their mind to drug abuse. In Bhagsu there are plenty of casualties.

Very, Very Scary

The scariest was an English woman of 32 who was staying opposite me in my first village home; she was the main reason for my scooting further up the hill to find another farm cottage to hang out in. Normally sociable and interesting (if a little full of her own self-importance), Keeleigh proudly told me that she had been stoned every single day for eight years, and couldn’t remember a day she hadn’t spent smoking. As she puffed on her mixed opium-hashish joint, she changed from docile socialiser to agent provocateur. Nothing I did or said was acceptable; the fact that she had an incredible hatred of journalists and computers only managed to fuel her tangential rants against the modern world. At one stage she was trying to explain how evil computers were and how disgusting it was that people used them to communicate with each other, but I was adamant that not only are computers simply a communication medium, but they have created a new arena of language and semantics with their lack of face-to-face contact, lack of sarcasm and tonal operators, and an almost forced use of semantics over implied contextual meaning. She wasn’t having any of it.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’re reading this magazine and it’s just another communication medium. The writer is communicating things to you by printing them on paper; it’s just dead wood.’

She looked at me with the sort of look one might reserve for convicted rapists or child abusers caught in the act: sheer hatred. ‘There is no such thing as just dead wood,’ she snarled. ‘When I see wood, it is never dead, even if it is chopped down. Wood has an energy, an aura that can never die.’

This tangent was getting somewhat off the subject, but that was a characteristic of talking to Keeleigh; she had no concept of conventional argument, hardly surprising when you consider that drugs destroy the whole concept of convention. I failed to mention that she’d managed to burn quite a bit of ‘aura’ in the fire that she’d just used to make her chai, but instead tried to pull the thread back to the original argument.

‘Fair enough,’ I lied, ‘but don’t you see a computer is just a means of communicating? If you had been alive at the time of Caxton’s printing press, would you have been declaring it was heresy? Or would you approve of the ability to spread a message to the whole world?’

The look returned. ‘I cannot put my mind into that situation,’ she claimed. ‘How can I answer that?’ And turning back to her copy of Cosmopolitan she started to read the picture captions. I settled back into blissful apathy until a scream shattered the serenity.

‘Unbelievable! Just not now!’ yelled Keeleigh, turning to her friend Shayna and throwing her Cosmo onto the ground. She stomped off holding her head as if the evil nature of the whole world had been revealed to her. I glanced at the magazine; in an article about men dating women, drugging them, taking them home and raping them while they’re under the influence, was a caption talking about a man convicted for aiding and abetting such a rapist by procuring the drugs for him. He had learned how to create a suitable drug cocktail on the Internet, hence Keeleigh’s outburst.

When I saw Keeleigh again she had come down; at least, she was back to a relatively normal level. But it was too much; a symptom of Dharamsala and the long and winding road, Keeleigh represented everything I don’t like about the hippy movement. I support the liberal idealism; I enjoy the personal freedom preached by the dropouts; I think it’s good to explore religions, philosophies and your own place in your own universe; I don’t even have a problem with drugs; but taking too many drugs is just dumb, because you lose everything you want to preserve. And if there’s a magnet for the fuckwits of the long-term trail, it’s places like Dharamsala.

It’s all a bit depressing, really. The majority of tourists in Dharamsala are either short-termers looking for a conveniently packaged spiritual-solution-cum-world-saving formula, or they’re long-termers who have stayed put for too long and have begun to lose the point. I met people who had only been to Goa, Manali and Dharamsala, even after months in India. I marvelled at their staying power, before realising that a joint for breakfast every day makes such a life almost inevitable. How hollow.

Perhaps instead the seekers should heed the following section from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha:

‘When someone is seeking,’ said Siddhartha, ‘it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.’

Rain Stops Play

The monsoon finally caught up with me in Dharamsala. Wandering through the lush fields and down the Tibetan streets of McLeod Ganj and Bhagsu, the heavens would open with no warning and throw down water at a rate only unsurprising to those who go through such torrents every year. Clouds rolled in on my farmhouse, and every afternoon and evening I would retire to a safe haven to read, write and dream of going home.

I had originally planned to explore the hills round the luscious valleys, but India’s varied cornucopia of intestinal inhabitants struck one last time: giardia gas suddenly appeared, so I chugged down some Tinizadole and settled in for my body to recover, a difficult proposition when the weather’s cold and wet, the shower is freezing and the bed constantly damp. I slipped into the apathetic mode of the truly relaxed and did precious little except eat, sleep and socialise with people I met; this was my main reason for hitting the hills in the first place, after all.

It doesn’t make for a very interesting read, though, and soon enough I was heading downhill to Delhi.

[1] I’ve changed the name to avoid libelling the man in question. The person being referred to was a successful pop singer from the late 1950s/early 1960s, and that’s all I’m going to say...

The Dogs of Bhagsu

Written: 9 July 1998

Walking into Bhagsu, the suburb of Dharamsala where I was staying, I saw a sight. The three members of the local dog mafia – big, black bastards who had already terrorised the poor mutt living in our house on a number of occasions – were standing in formation, barking wildly at a cow. Two of them were standing back-to-back – though butt-to-butt is probably a better terminology for quadrupeds – and the third was baring his teeth from behind this barrier, leaping at the cow whenever it lowered its horns to charge.

I stayed to watch, silently supporting the cow; after surviving Asia, I can’t help thinking that a mass slaughter of dogs would be a sensible move. It was then I noticed that the dog’s formation wasn’t so much tactical as coital; the two dogs standing butt to butt were welded together at the base of the tail.

When dogs mate, the female grips the male’s member with her vaginal muscles, otherwise he’d have no hope of finishing the act[1]. This is a common procedure in animal mating rituals, and is all fine and dandy as long as you’ve got a nice undisturbed love nest in which to complete the process; if you’re interrupted, however, it’s a pain in the arse. These two dogs had obviously been going at it hammer and tongs in the middle of the road when the cow had decided it wanted to wander past them, and in a mouth-foaming display of territorial possession the dogs had reacted, the male leaping off his mate only to find that he was still inextricably attached.

The result was the canine equivalent of Dr Dolittle’s Push-Me-Pull-Me. What made it even more bizarre was that the third dog, another male, was obviously quite turned on by his friends’ convoluted constriction, and kept trying to mount the female with a predictable lack of success. Meanwhile the cow kept attacking, the dogs kept freaking out and scaring it away, and the poor lovers kept yelping louder and louder as their bizarre love triangle stretched parts that simply don’t stretch that far.

Finally the frustrated third dog decided he’d had enough of his friend blocking the tunnel of love and went for him with bared teeth and furious growls. This did the trick; scared shitless, the female managed to let go her fatal grip and limped off into the bushes to lick her injuries, leaving the bruised male to roll around on the ground, groaning the groan that any member of the male sex who has had his nether regions subjected to unwanted strain knows only too well. The voyeur, however, was having none of this, and decided to pursue the argument with his sexual competitor, leaping onto the poor bastard and ripping at him with bared fangs while the released lover teetered between self-pity and self-defence.

Quietly watching from nearby, the cow soon spotted that the dogs were scattered and no longer united, so it attacked. Neatly scooping up the fighting males on its horns to the sound of scared yelps and extreme confusion, it turned on the bitch and routed the canine camp. The dogs, realising their position was helpless, ran for it, and obviously determined to ram home its dominance the cow chased after them, demonstrating once and for all that the image of the cow as a fat, lazy cud-chewer is hopelessly inaccurate. Momentum managed to carry it past the dogs at one point, scaring the hell out of the already badly frightened mutts, and before you knew it the whole melee had disappeared round the corner and Bhagsu was a peaceful little hamlet once more.

Except for the muted sniggering of the local dog population, that is.

[1] When dogs feel in the mood, they first go at it ‘doggy-style’, and once the male has ejaculated, he lifts his leg up and slides around until he is butt-to-butt with the bitch (this position is known as a ‘tie’). The happy couple stay in this position for 10 to 20 minutes, during which time the bitch’s constrictor vestibuli muscles contract behind the bulbus glandis of the male’s penis, preventing withdrawal. Clearly, this is no time to pick a fight with a cow.

Delhi

Written: 15 July 1998

Delhi reflects the schizophrenia of modern India perfectly. Split into New Delhi and Old Delhi, the capital manages to sum up everything that was futile about colonialism and everything that is chaotic about the developing world.

New Delhi was the last architectural monster of the British Raj. Conceived and executed in much the same way as Canberra (and at about the same time) it has the same concrete ghost-town image of Australia’s capital and, incredibly enough for India, about the same amount of character. Huge boulevards are lined with grassy parks (with lush green meadows and virtually no cows) while toweringly pompous buildings stand at either end of the main Rajpath Road, dominating the skyline and making New Delhi look for all the world like a European city. I couldn’t believe it; New Delhi is easily the least Indian sight I’ve seen, and although it’s fascinating and grandiose, it’s totally alien to the concepts of comfort, habitation and the joy of life.

Old Delhi, however, is typically Indian, and after six months of seeing pandemonium personified it held no surprises for me. Luckily it does hold some good examples of Mughal architecture; after basing their capital first at Fatehpur Sikri and then Agra, the Mughals decided, in one last attempt at creating the perfect city, to try Delhi, and Shah Jahan started building the Red Fort and Jama Masjid soon after completing the Taj Mahal. Unfortunately his son, Aurangzeb, stole the throne and screwed the empire into the ground, so these huge monuments to the most powerful pre-British empire stand as rather lonely reminders of the proud grandeur that comes before a fall; it’s ironic that both Old Delhi and New Delhi should be full of architectural homage to arrogant failure.

The Red Fort is still impressive, but with its swarms of visitors and despicably run-down buildings, it’s not a patch on Fatehpur Sikri or (surprisingly) Agra Fort. The Jama Masjid (the Friday Mosque) is another story and still manages to impress; it’s the biggest mosque in India and feels like it, but I found the atmosphere somewhat shattered by western tour groups. Bare legs in mosques are not on, so visitors who arrive in shorts are forced to wear lungis to cover themselves, but with their money pouches and cameras belts it gives the impression of sexually excited men wandering around in bath towels; and in a display of bacterial paranoia that even the Americans couldn’t beat, one French team entered the foray wearing blue elasticated plastic hospital shoe covers, eliciting stares and belly laughs from all around. The mosque is pleasant, but the tourists are simply beyond belief.

As with Dharamsala, I did almost nothing in Delhi. I saw the sights, I got Delhi belly for a couple of days, and I prepared to fly out. I was surprised at how much I wanted to leave; after a year of knowing the date of my flight, I was geared up for it and couldn’t wait. It was by no means a reflection on India, it was more a reflection on me; I wanted to go home, rather than wanting to leave India.

So I did.

Morocco: Marrakech

Arriving in Morocco

Written: 6 June 2002

You’d think that experience would be a great aid in calming nerves, but I’m still a mass of gibbering jelly when I arrive in a new country. It might not look like it from the outside, but landing in a country at midnight when you don’t speak the language and don’t have any local currency on you scares the shit out of me. I remember landing in Bali in exactly the same state, though then I was alone and had never been outside the western world, and of course I found somewhere to stay and took it from there, one day at a time. This always happens, but for some reason this infallible evidence doesn’t make me feel any easier. I hate arriving somewhere new, but in a sense it’s the whole point of travelling. It’s a strange masochism that I’ve never got to grips with, to be honest.

But sure enough Peta and I landed at Marrakech, queued through the stamp-happy officials at the passport desk, changed some pounds into the local currency (dirham, which aren’t available outside Morocco), and caught a cab to the hotel that Peta had reserved from home. Read that again; which bit is scary? Landing? Possibly. Passport control? Nope. Catching a cab? Hardly difficult, though I had to negotiate the price in French on our arrival, which meant I had to unleash my French accent on the world, an act that makes my skin crawl in the same way that playing charades at Christmas with the family does. What about arriving at the hotel? Nope, they were politeness itself.

The only conclusion is that I am a complete wuss when it comes to arriving somewhere new. Perhaps it’s this constant requirement to confront my fears that makes travelling so rewarding? Whatever, we arrived in Marrakech easily, quickly, and without any stories to tell.

Marrakech

Written: 7 June 2002

I forget how long I’ve assumed that Marrakech represents the sleaziest, most hard-nosed end of travelling. The first time I remember reading about it was in a book by James Michener, The Drifters, in which Marrakech was portrayed as a drug-addled place in which to lose your mind among the exotic souqs and smells of the medina. Then a friend I travelled with in Asia mentioned he had travelled in Morocco, and sucked in his cheeks as he complained about the amount of hassle he’d been given practically every single day of his visit. Marrakech sounded like India, but worse.

The truth is somewhat more mundane, possibly because things have changed a lot since the days of Michener and the hippy trail, but also because Marrakech seems to have cottoned on to the fact that hassling the shit out of potential clients is not good business sense (which is more than can be said for the rest of southern Morocco). Marrakech is a clean and orderly city that reeks of the exotic, but doesn’t come close to India for hassle... or, indeed, trippiness.

Thank goodness for this, for the lingua franca of Morocco isn’t English, it’s French. The thought of trying to persuade a particularly insistent scam merchant that you don’t want to buy a carpet off him is fine when he’s at least speaking some of your native language, but when he’s jabbering on in Arabic or French, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve accidentally agreed to buy three chickens, a Berber rug and an ornamental perfume jar with detachable lid. In India I’d try quoting Beatles lyrics to those who would insist on chanting indecipherable sales mantras at me, but when you can half-understand what’s going on, but only in a schoolboy manner, it’s disconcerting. Thankfully the Marrakchis are really rather jolly and friendly, quite unlike the hassling image they seem to have.

It’s possible that the way you are treated has a lot to do with the way you present yourself. Every guidebook you read goes on about the importance of dressing appropriately, and who can blame them. In a country where T-shirts are considered underwear and bare legs and tightly clad bottoms have the sexual electricity of women’s breasts, the usual Brit-abroad vibe of shorts, flip-flops and pale flesh is the equivalent of wandering down the high street in a bikini, but this doesn’t stop some people. I can only assume that it’s these cultural ambassadors who attract the majority of Marrakech’s hassle factor, because for those of us wearing trousers, shirts and an affable smile, the locals are a delight.

I was slightly disappointed, though. There’s nothing like a calamity of humanity to wake you up after a flight, especially one that arrives in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, and Marrakech was almost too easy.

Exploring the Souqs

There are two things about Marrakech that the guidebooks can’t stop raving about: the souqs and the Djemaa el-Fna. The souqs are a good way to get out of the sun, and the Djemaa el-Fna comes into its own at night, so we spent the best part of our first full day in Morocco wandering around the former.

A souq is an undercover market, a mishmash of alleyways and shops that spill so many wares out into the narrow street that it looks like the inside of Ali Baba’s tumble dryer after a sandstorm. The souqs in Marrakech are excellent examples of their kind, and they wind on forever... or they do if you get lost, and getting lost is all part of the plan.

If, like me, you couldn’t give a toss about shopping but are more interested in immersing yourself in the cultural experience of Marrakech’s souqs, then don’t kick off your exploration halfway through the England-Argentina game. World Cup fever stretches all around the world – indeed, we saw plenty of football matches in the desert, let alone a cosmopolitan centre like Marrakech – and Morocco is close enough to Europe to be footy mad. Even working in a souq, where the hassle factor is legendary and the haggling practically physical, means nothing when the football is on, and coming out of every little shop was the roar of the televised crowd. Even the carpet sellers ignored us as we wandered through this Mecca of salesmen, their beady eyes glued to the ball instead.

It made navigating the maze of shops pretty simple, despite the fact that the souqs are completely covered, only letting the odd ray of sunlight penetrate the murky haze of incense and genie lamps. Normally, one assumes, getting from one end of Marrakech’s souqs to the other would require a deftness of foot that even Ronaldo would find difficult, but remove the obstacles of leaping salesmen and lingering crowds and it’s a piece of cake (one can only assume the other shoppers were watching at home, as the crowds were staying away in their droves). We shot through the souqs like a curling right-footer, and before you knew it we were blinking in the sunlight, wondering where it had all gone.

So we did it all again, this time from east to west, and yet again the only crowds and touts were on the TVs cunningly hidden beneath the curly toed slippers and woven hats. I’d expected exhilarating chaos and a severe test of nerves, and I found a pleasant shopping centre with lots of colourful goods and nothing to point towards the eccentricity of Africa apart from the lingering smell of drains. It felt a little, well, clinical.

One area managed to hint at the madness I’d hoped for. A small road branched left off the main drag, and pouring from it was a stench so nauseating it could mean only one thing: animals. And here we saw Morocco at its essence: men hoicked bundles of live chickens onto carts, the chickens tied by their feet into squawking clumps of ten, and sheep sat in their own stench in tiny cages the size of Japanese hotel rooms. Eggs were piled up to the ceiling and the stink was incredible, and everywhere we looked live animals were being treated as if they were dead. Unpleasant though it was to someone who’s used to having his animal cruelty hidden behind closed doors, it was reality, and it breathed.

The football-crazy souqs, bless ’em, just couldn’t compete.

The Djemaa el-Fna

The Djemaa el-Fna is famous as the cultural centre of Marrakech, and for good reason. Forming both the geographical and social centre of town, this irregular and open-plan plaza is part market, part restaurant, part theatre and part hippy festival. It’s fascinating, and really comes into its own at night, for every evening huge crowds of locals and tourists pour into the square in search of entertainment, nourishment and, for some, increasingly clever ways of extracting money from visitors.

The souqs form the northern border of the Djemaa el-Fna, and in exploring them Peta and I had wandered through the heat-crazed midday square many times. While the sun beats down the Djemaa el-Fna is relatively quiet, the sounds of the cracking tarmac only broken by the cries of the 30-odd orange juice stalls selling freshly squeezed juice for a paltry Dr2.50 a glass. It’s an interesting sight in its own right; Moroccans, as in most developing countries, tend to lump all their businesses together by what they sell, so you have the street where all the shoe polishers tout for trade, the jewellers souq, the carpenters souq, the former slave sellers souq, and so on. To a westerner, who is more used to having his shops dotted around town respectfully separate from each other, it’s bizarre, and it makes you wonder how it is that so many outwardly identical businesses manage to survive. No doubt the Moroccans think we’re insane doing it our way, too.

Besides, doing things our way would be unlikely to produce something quite like the Djemaa el-Fna at night. As the sun turns towards the horizon, rows of tables start to appear in the square, each surrounded by benches and shouting, touting chefs. It’s not long before the smoke from countless barbecues fills the square with an eerie haze, as gaslights illuminate the clouds as they drift over towards the 70m-high Koutoubia Mosque to the southwest. It looks like a well-organised battlefield, and sounds like one.

‘Bonjour monsieur, madame, you like brochettes, we have excellent saucissons, try our salade, you sit down here, best in the whole square, you remember, number 25 is the best, you come back later, we see you soon! Ah, madame, you looking hungry, you like chicken barbecue, best in square, ah yes, you sit here sir, welcome, bienvenue, bienvenue.’

We started our culinary introduction to Morocco with some snails from snail stall number one (one of five identical snail stalls all in a row), which at Dr10 a pop consisted of a hefty bowl of small snails in a soup that tasted like dishwater. The snails also tasted like dishwater, which one assumes is what snails taste like before you smother them in garlic and herbs, but most intriguingly they actually looked like snails.

Whenever I’ve had snails in a French restaurant they’ve looked like fairly amorphous blobs inside beautiful shells – indeed, the shells are re-used like crockery, and aren’t the same shells that the snails lived and died in – but in the Djemaa el-Fna the snails look like snails. They’re attached to their shells by all manner of intestinal goo, which you can only break with some deft work with a stout cocktail stick, and when you’ve pulled out the body and it’s sitting there staring at you, you realise that it really is staring: the only difference between a live snail and your meal is that your meal can’t move its two protruding stalks, but in every other aspect you’re definitely eating a snail, with all of the intestinal excitement that entails.

The main course, though, is more conventional (unless you go for the stalls that sell whole sheep’s heads, which do exactly what it says on the tin). We opted for number 25, simply because the chefs seemed to be having more fun that their neighbours, and Dr150 later we were struggling through mounds of gorgeous food, from sausages to kebabs to salad. The atmosphere, though, was the most important bit, especially when the wind changed and our meal disappeared in the barbecue smoke, an atmosphere made more surreal by the arrival of the local henna woman.

‘Hello madame, I bring you good luck,’ announced the woman from behind her litham veil, blatantly lying despite the evidence. ‘I make Berber henna tattoo for you to bring you happiness with your children.’

‘No thanks,’ said Peta. ‘That’s very kind of you, but I don’t want a henna tattoo.’

‘But it bring you very good luck,’ the henna woman continued, exercising the selective deafness that typifies the expert salesperson. ‘Here, I do a small design for you to bring you good fortune and many babies.’

And with that she flipped out her henna syringe and started doodling on the back of Peta’s hand, despite the fact that Peta was still eating.

‘Bring you wonderful luck from God,’ she warbled on. ‘Ancient Berber design, beautiful colour,’ she continued, despite the fact that it looked as if she was squirting goat shit onto Peta’s hand. ‘Small design, give you luck.’

By the time she had filled the whole of Peta’s hand with green goo, and had started on the wrist, it was pretty obvious that Peta was getting a henna tattoo whether she liked it or not, and that we were going to have to pay for it. We bartered the price down from her initial fantasy price of Dr300 to a more affordable Dr70, but whether that represents a rip-off or not I have no idea... but I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever we paid would have been high. The moral of the story? If you want to say ‘no’, say it at least ten times, and mean it every time, otherwise you’ll end up buying everything in the shop... and out of it.

But it’s fun, just like the rest of the Djemaa el-Fna. As the day wears on, the rest of the square fills up with dancers, drummers and other bizarre stalls whose purpose is as mysterious as the pricing structure, and wandering around is a pleasant way to while away the hours and your small change (even simply watching requires a small payment, but at least it’s not a tourist thing – everyone gets hit for donations, including the locals). It’s surprisingly civilised, not unlike the souqs, and it didn’t feel quite as anarchistic and on the edge as I’d hoped it would, but the ambience is unique and the evocative images delightful.

Just remember that the chances are you’ll come away from the Djemaa el-Fna with more than you bargained for, even after bargaining.

Car Rental Scam

Written: 7 June 2002

My first experience of the business mentality of Marrakech kicked in within a day. The guidebooks were quite adamant that the best way to see southern Morocco was by car (unless, of course, time is coming out of your ears, in which case public transport is often more intense), so we started hunting round for a decent deal. Anything that requires handing over your credit card for an imprint is worrying in any country, but in the developing world, where surreptitiously taking two imprints is not uncommon, it demands a leap of faith that I have a problem mustering. You simply can’t believe salespeople, and that’s true the world over.

So we thought we’d check out the hotel’s own car rental agency, because at least we’d know where to firebomb in case of extraneous charges appearing on the bill, so we parked ourselves on one of the Hotel Tazi’s sofas and started examining the car prices that they’d thoughtfully inserted below the table’s glass.

The prices looked good, so when a man in a sweeping robe waltzed over and asked us if we were interested in renting a car, we nodded.

‘Great,’ he said, ‘then please come with me. I will take you to our office.’ And like obedient little lambs we tucked in behind him as he shot out into the streets of Marrakech. Two minutes later we’d been passed to a woman in the street like a couple of batons in a relay race, and she guided us through the winding backstreets to another hotel.

Then the negotiations began, though before I’d put my brain into gear for bartering, the price for ten days’ hire had tumbled from Dr4000 to Dr3500 to Dr3300 without us saying a word.

‘But the prices in the hotel started at Dr250 per day,’ I said, ‘so ten days makes Dr2500.’

‘Ah, but that does not include insurance,’ she said, ‘and you need insurance.’

‘The sign said it did include insurance,’ said Peta.

‘No, this cannot be,’ said our host, ‘but Dr3300 is very good price. New car, not two months old, very reliable, you go all around country and I give you my mobile number in case of problem. It is good, no?’

We’d been expecting to pay more, so we agreed that it was a fair price, and could we put it on credit card?

‘Credit card has six per cent surcharge,’ said our host, ‘but you can pay by cash, credit card, how you like.’

‘Ah, we might as well get cash from the ATM,’ we said. ‘It’s cheaper that way.’

‘OK, then we have a deal,’ she said. ‘Can I take credit card for imprint?’

‘Sure,’ I said, handing over my Visa card, which she slipped under a credit card ship and rubbed over with her pen until the numbers showed through. ‘Shall we go get the money now, then?’

‘Yes, that is good,’ she said, ‘and you come back in ten minutes, pick up car and you can park next to your hotel – I know the people there.’

‘See you in fifteen,’ we said, and sauntered back to our hotel, my mouth tingling with the slight metallic taste I get whenever I’ve put my financial future in the hands of someone from the business school of hard knocks. At the hotel, though, things got interesting when we asked about where we could park the car.

‘You renting from us, yes?’ said the woman at the hotel’s car agency.

‘Yes,’ we said.

‘Four-wheel drive for tonight, yes?’ she asked.

‘No,’ we said, ‘a small car for tomorrow. We’ve just been talking to the woman about it.’

‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

‘Um... no, I guess not,’ Peta said, and handed over our rental agreement. It was as if someone had flicked a switch on the woman’s back marked ‘Roll eyes, increase blood pressure, throw hands in the air and pout, hard.’ She flung out of the room, jabbering in Arabic, and when she had composed herself she came back and started to grill us about whom we’d been speaking to, and what they looked like.

It turned out that we’d been poached from the hotel by the man in the flowing robes, and our hosts weren’t happy. So unhappy were they that they instantly offered us a much cheaper price (Dr2800 all-inclusive), which for a Moroccan business is the equivalent of them handing you the shirt off their backs. It sounded worthwhile, and the heat had put us in the mood for a bit of a contretemps with the lady from the rival firm.

Our first attempt to let her down gently didn’t work; she simply wouldn’t believe us when we said that the ATM wasn’t accepting our cards, probably because to survive in Morocco you need a sixth sense as to when people are telling porkies. So we eventually turned to the truth, perhaps an unusual step in Moroccan business practice.

‘OK, here is la verité,’ I said. ‘The man who brought us to you said he was from our hotel, but it turns out that he was lying, and when we asked at our hotel for parking details, they said that you were nothing to do with them. And that is not trustworthy business, so we do not want to do business with you. Please can I have my credit card slip back?’

‘But I am with your hotel,’ she said. ‘I have good car.’

‘OK,’ I said,’ I tell you what, let’s head on back to our hotel, and you can tell them that.’ And we stood up and walked out into the street.

‘But I have good car,’ she stammered, running after us and betraying the first glint of panic in her eyes of a potential deal fading to nothing.

‘Yes, but you just lied,’ I said, ‘so can I please have my credit card slip back. We do not have a deal.’

‘Why you not want to do business with me?’ she asked, fluttering her doe eyes at Peta, instantly turning from hardnosed businesswoman to lost and lonely six-year old child in the fraction of a second. ‘It is not my fault that the man lied.’

‘I know,’ said Peta, patting her on the shoulder. ‘It is not your fault the man lied.’

‘Then we still have a deal?’ she said, inclining her head to Peta like a child to a mother when caught red-handed stealing from the cookie jar.

‘No, we do not,’ said Peta. ‘Please return the credit card slip, and tell your friend not to steal people from hotels by lying.’

Perhaps it was the failure of her emotional approach, or perhaps she realised that the deal was simply dead, but we got the credit card slip back and ripped it up into a million little pieces. And she turned back to her hotel, tail between her legs but ready to fight another day in the cut-throat world of Marrakchi business, as we got ourselves a car from the very grateful, and much cheaper Hotel Tazi.

Morocco: Into the Hammada

Rock Men of the Hammada

Written: 8 June 2002

The next day we set off from Marrakech for southern Morocco in our pristine little Fiat Uno, which, with only 15,000km on the clock, appeared to be exactly what we’d been promised the day before. Filling up with petrol in the centre of town – where the attendant refused to accept a credit card, much to my surprise – we stopped only to change some travellers cheques before heading east out of town. On the horizon the misty shapes of huge mountains loomed, barely visible through the dusty haze, and it wasn’t long before the houses petered out and we were rolling along the right-hand side of the P31, the main road to the mountains of the High Atlas.

The drive wasn’t particularly eventful until we started climbing into the foothills, when things started taking a slightly surreal turn. The landscape was by now utterly desolate with little sign of greenery (at least when compared to the smattering of palm trees that gave Marrakech a vaguely green appeal), and the heat that beat down on the rocky hills was practically visible. This wasn’t surprising, as we were heading south towards the desert, but what caught me by surprise was the amazing number of nutters on the road, and I’m not talking about the drivers.

On the way up into the High Atlas, the local money-spinner (or otherwise) is rock, and there’s plenty of it around. Of course, I’m not talking about just any rocks, but pretty minerals you might like to adorn your front room with, and you’d think from the roadside sellers that everyone in the world wants a piece of amethyst next to the fireplace. Drive round a corner at a respectable speed, and suddenly you’re slamming on the brakes and veering left as a total fruitcake in a white jellaba cape leaps out in front of you, urgently waving for you to stop.

But is he hurt? Or has his car broken down? Or maybe his house is on fire? Nope – actually, he just wants you to stop and buy some rocks off him, and there they are, piled up on a wooden table with a hand-scrawled sign saying ‘minerales’, proudly proclaiming that he’s yet another rock salesman.

I say ‘yet another’ because by the time you’ve gone round the fifth bend, you won’t be bothering to slow down, or even to swerve, or you’ll never get anywhere. The rock men are savvy enough to know that in a contest between them and a hurtling car it won’t be the car that suffers broken bones, so they’re nimble enough to get out of the way, but it’s an amazing sight nonetheless, seeing grown men almost throwing themselves under cars for the sake of selling a simple rock or two. But when you live in a country that has 40 per cent unemployment and one in seven people living below the poverty line, survival calls for desperate measures.

Aït Benhaddou

Written: 8 June 2002

Once into the High Atlas mountains, the road weaves through eerie moonscapes that manage to combine the red hue of Australia’s Kimberley and Pilbara regions with high flat-topped valleys of rock that recall Monument Valley in the USA. The driving is hot, dusty and draining – at least, it is in June – but it’s worth it, for the High Atlas are home to the famous kasbahs and ksars of ancient Morocco[1].

Ever since hearing about the kasbahs of Morocco’s deserts, I’ve wanted to visit them. I love castles, fortresses, citadels and anything else that evokes scenes from the likes of Tales of the Arabian Nights or (in my imagination) Lord of the Rings, and if they’re in the desert, so much the better. I’m not sure why, but this combination, especially when combined with Islamic architecture, makes me go weak at the knees, as I’d found in India at places like Mandu and Jaisalmer. And just over the High Atlas, at a place called Aït Benhaddou, is the best-preserved desert ksar in Morocco. I was drawn to it like a rock seller to the sound of a car engine, and we rolled into the village after driving some 200km through the hairpin bends of the mountains.

The ksar at Aït Benhaddou is simply stunning. As the locals will gleefully tell you, it’s regularly used in adverts and films, the most famous of the latter being Orson Welles’ Sodom and Gomorrah and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; indeed, to keep its appeal for filmmakers, it’s been restored and maintained while others have crumbled into the dirt from which they were made, and the result is a truly amazing sight.

We arrived in mid-afternoon and decided to explore straight away, heading off through the village in the general direction of the ksar, which sits on the opposite side of the Oued Ounila (oued is the Arabic name for river). Within about two minutes of hitting the streets we’d picked up a little boy who insisted on being our guide, but although he was annoying (mainly because we knew he’d want money for invading our personal space), he wasn’t the biggest irritant. That honour goes to the sirocco.

The sirocco is the name given to the desert wind that blows from the Sahara, and when we visited Aït Benhaddou it was having a really good day of it, churning up the sand and hurling it down the river valley that we had to cross to get to the ksar. Imagine skydiving in an oven, with someone hovering 30m below you, throwing handfuls of sand and grit in your face every 30 seconds, and you’re close to the sirocco experience.

If you’ve ever wondered why the Berber people of the Sahara wrap their heads in scarves, leaving only a tiny gap for their eyes to peep out, then after a few minutes in the sirocco it’s bloody obvious. I doubt they sell many exfoliating creams in Morocco – standing outside does the trick quite nicely.

But it’s worth the hurt to see sights like the Aït Benhaddou ksar, which rises out of the desert like something straight out of desert folklore. Its squat towers and small-windowed buildings are exactly the same red-brown colour as the surrounding desert (not surprising as they’re made from the same stuff), and wandering the streets of the ancient citadel is like stepping back in time. It’s also surprisingly cool and an excellent shelter from the wind, which kicks back in again as you escape from the shelter of the dwellings and onto the top of the ksar.

As desert experiences go, it’s difficult to beat the feeling of sitting on top of an ancient castle, looking over the same hills, valleys and oases that the ancient Berbers would have surveyed from their fortified town. Although ksars are built from sun-dried clay and mud (known as pisé) and don’t last very long in the rain – if left untended, your average Berber ksar would be in ruins after 50 years – it makes no difference that they aren’t completely identical to the ksars of ancient times. The atmosphere is completely authentic, and as far as I’m concerned that’s the most important bit.

[1] The isolated castles and fortified towns of the desert, respectively.

Morocco, German-style

Written: 8 June 2002

As we booked into our room in the Hotel Baraka in Aït Benhaddou, an incredible sight pulled up outside the hotel, almost crushing our little Fiat Uno. Into the tearing wind of the desert rode a colossal bus pulling an equally colossal trailer, and branded onto the front in huge Teutonic lettering was a capital ‘D’. The Germans had come to the ksar.

I don’t mention the fact that they were German because I have a problem with Germans on the road. Far from it, in fact: Germans have provided me with some of the most bizarre travelling memories I have, and I love them to bits. And this bus is a case in point.

Consider the desert. It is not particularly small... or it wasn’t the last time I looked. One of the biggest challenges facing countries like Mauritania and Mali is that a large proportion of their countryside is desert, and if there’s one thing desert is, it’s hard to live in. And this means that there’s not a huge space problem; you can pretty much pitch your tent anywhere, as it were.

I only mention this because around 25 happy Germans poured out of the bus and right into our hotel, shattering the peace and clattering louder than the sirocco. ‘Are they all going to fit into the hotel?’ asked Peta of the proprietor.

‘Oh no,’ he smirked, rolling his eyes in the way that people do when confronted by buses like this, ‘they all sleep on the bus.’

The trailer held the secret. About the same size as the bus, the side peeled back to reveal 24 bedrooms, each about the size of Elvis’ coffin, all stacked up in two rows, each bedroom parallel to the trailer’s axles. With all the expanse of the desert at their disposal, the Germans were opting to coop themselves up into a huge and indescribably hell-like stack of snoring, farting and bad dreams. My jaw still aches from where it hit the floor; I’d never met people who thought that getting into the local culture meant impersonating the chickens in the Djemaa el-Fna.

Luckily they all seemed perfectly happy, even to the point of clapping along to the night’s inevitable drumming with a typically Aryan lack of timing.

Thank God for the Germans. Life would be so much duller without them.

Drâa Valley

Written: 9 June 2002

Heading south from Aït Benhaddou, the P31 passes through the wonderfully named Ouarzazate (pronounced ‘Wah-za-zat’) and plunges into a barren wasteland that still manages to play host to colourful characters jumping out of the cliff faces and into the path of the oncoming traffic.

The hairpins might be scary – especially given the propensity for Moroccan lorry drivers to drive in the middle of the road, especially around blind corners – but once the road has wheezed its way over the 1600m-high pass at Tizi n’Tinififft, you plunge into the greenery of the Drâa Valley, home to lots of kasbahs, Berber villages and palmeraies (the name given to the oasis-like farms around towns, where they grow dates, fruit and vegetables).

The Drâa is described in pretty gushing terms in most of the guidebooks on Morocco – ‘magical’ is an oft-used adjective – but in reality it’s just a pleasant valley with some pleasant sights... but nothing mind-bending. As if to rub it in, the last 172km leads you to a complete dead end, so if you decide to drive right to the end of the road at M’Hamid, you have to repeat the majority of the valley drive on the way back north. But the Drâa does have its moments, and it’s worth it just for the experience at the end of the road...

Before M’Hamid, though, there are plenty of kasbahs to meander past, lots of pretty (and not so pretty) Berber villages, and a whole cadre of boys risking permanent damage by trying to sell your speeding car a bag or two of dates.

The big problem with the kasbahs for which the Drâa is famous is that it’s almost impossible to tell which buildings are the ancient kasbahs, and which the more modern town houses, because they look identical. The Berbers make their dwellings out of mud, clay and straw, just as they have done for hundreds of years, which has the pleasing effect of making all their villages look relatively mediaeval. Unfortunately it also means that you have no idea whether you’re admiring the ramparts of some long-forgotten Berber architect, or the latest ‘Tab A into Slot B’ breeze block structure that’s simply been smothered in earth. It helps not to care, really; beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

But it does soon become a little samey, which is why it’s a strange relief to leave the most fertile section of the valley, between Agdz and Zagora, and to leap once more into the stony hammada between Zagora and M’Hamid. This is true one-horse territory, and the shock of leaving the palms behind is almost as intense as the shock of seeing yet more people trying their very hardest to sell you rocks, dates, or even both. The stony hammada is as close to hell as you can imagine (well, it is if you’re from a rainy place like England), and the mind boggles at what it must be like to grow up in a place like the hammada of southern Morocco.

The End of the Road

Perhaps the closest one can get to the desperation that lies at the end of the P31 is by visiting M’Hamid, the village that marks the end of the road, and which sits a mere 40km from the Algerian border. The old village of M’Hamid was destroyed in the 1970s by Polisario (the movement to liberate Western Sahara, the southwestern chunk of Morocco that tourists rarely visit), and a new one was built 3km further up the road, but it might as well have been destroyed last week for all the charm that M’Hamid exudes.

We pulled into the outskirts of M’Hamid and booked ourselves into the somewhat empty Carrefour des Caravanes hotel, whose welcome sign boasted a swimming pool and real Berber-tent accommodation. The swimming pool proved to be half dried-up, so our swift swim felt more like a sheep dip than anything else, but suitably refreshed we thought we’d check out the options for food in M’Hamid.

M’Hamid is a complete shit-hole. It’s probably unfair to be too harsh on a town that’s been destroyed once too often, but even if you ignore the utterly depressing architecture, the people make M’Hamid as close to hell as anyone wants to get in this life. It’s possible that it’s worse in the off-season – and June is most definitely off-season – but when we pulled in through the main archway into town, the local touts landed on our car like flies round shit.

‘You want see dunes?’ they cried. ‘Just three kilometres away, can be done in your car, no problem getting stuck, cheap price, you come with me yes, I have great camel trek, biggest dunes in Morocco, you come, yes, yes, yes?’

We tried to ignore them politely, but despite our protestations that we only wanted to wander round M’Hamid and were more interested in a cold drink than a trek into the desert, things got worse. I shook my head and told myself not to be stupid, but all I could see were hundreds of monkeys leaping out of the safari park, jumping on the car and playfully trying to bend our windscreen wipers and rip off our wing mirrors. This couldn’t be – this was M’Hamid, and they didn’t have monkeys here. It must be the desert heat.

A sharp rapping on the window brought me back to my senses, but by now it was too late. We weren’t going to open the doors in case the rabid hordes of M’Hamid managed to pull us limb from limb in their mad rush to extract tourists dollars from the tourists, so a quick slip into reverse and a sharp wheel-spin threw off all but the more persistent hangers-on, and we turned round and shot back into the main street. A quick drive down the street and back proved conclusively that M’Hamid is not only at the end of the road but also at the end of the world, and before you could say ‘camel trek’ we were heading north again, back to the shelter of our hotel.

The Dunes of M’Hamid

A couple of kilometres out of town, I spotted some sand dunes just off the road, and not wanting to admit failure in the face of Moroccan adversity, I decided we should explore. There was nobody around and the dunes were within spitting distance, so we slapped on the handbrake and hopped over onto our first Saharan dunes. They might have been small, but there were definitely dunes, and they were isolated enough for the imagination to fill in the rest.

But even here, in what felt like the middle of nowhere, M’Hamid managed to ruin things. No sooner had we scrambled up the first dune, than a young man in a London Hard Rock Café T-shirt bumped up on a moped and started following our footsteps, quite literally. Worn down by heat and utter frustration at the seemingly unending reserves of irritating touting that M’Hamid was throwing at us, we tried to talk our way into some peace and quiet. It took some ten minutes of politely refusing the offers of treks and guided drives into the desert, but eventually I grabbed his hand, shook it with a meaningful au revoir, and made it perfectly clear that he was leaving. We sauntered off, and miraculously he didn’t follow us. We had the dunes to ourselves, for now at least.

They weren’t that big, though, so after a few photos and moonwalks down the slopes, we ambled back to the car, and back into the happy embrace of our man from the Hard Rock Café, who seemed incapable of understanding the word ‘no’ until we’d spelled it out for him in burnt rubber on the road. It’s possible he managed to get away with a windscreen wiper or two; we weren’t even looking by this time.

Luckily the people at the Carrefour des Caravans were delightful, and we ate a sumptuous meal of salade marocains and tagines under the stars in a Berber tent, drinking mint tea with the proprietor while making small talk about children, weather and the pros and cons of living in the desert. By the time we retired to our bed in a genuine Berber tent next to the hotel’s own private sand dune, I thought that perhaps things weren’t so bad in M’Hamid after all.

And that’s when the local sandfly population betrayed their roots as true locals by biting the crap out of us all night, making sleep impossible and giving us hours of waking nightmares in which to ponder the delights of M’Hamid again, and again, and again, in action replay.

I can safely say that I will never again visit M’Hamid. Polisario had the right attitude, it seems.

The Hammada

Written: 10 June 2002

More eager to get out of M’Hamid than it is possible to express in words, we got up with the sun, kicked the hotel staff awake (who were asleep on mattresses in the driveway), and hit the road back into the Drâa Valley. Driving before the sun has had a chance to melt the desert is a wonderful way to appreciate the hammada without losing your marbles, and we were hoping to make it back up the Drâa and onto Route 6956, heading east towards the real Sahara, at a place called Merzouga. But this was all days away, for stretching out in front of us was some 450km of winding roads through one of the most inhospitable parts of the world you’re likely to find: the Moroccan hammada.

Hammada means ‘stony desert’, and it’s accurate: there’s a lot of desert, and there are lots of stones. Indeed, after the hard-to-refuse we’d been swerving round for the last couple of days, the hammada went one better and threw the keenest salesmen of all at us: the fossil men. It’s an ingenious way to persuade people to stop and look at perfectly normal rocks piled at the side of the road, for who knows which innocent-looking rock will contain a fossil that redefines the science of palaeontology?

I know which one: none of them. There may have been some very important finds made in Morocco in the last few decades, but you’re not telling me that the nutters leaping in front of cars on Route 6956 know anything about dinosaurs. As with all the other routes into the land of the Berbers, it’s just another way to make a living in a place so inhospitable it makes the mind boggle.

It’s quite a sight seeing people out in the hammada, to all appearances wandering through the desert with no packs, no bottles of water, and no worries. To a visitor from the cool temperate climate of north Europe, the dry heat of the hammada in June is something else. Driving through the black stony desert without air conditioning is like sitting in an industrial hair dryer with the heat turned to 11. After an hour or so you can feel the individual cells in your body start to rub together like millions of individual sand particles, as the water evaporates from your body without even having the decency to hang around as sweat for a while.

It’s like Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when he’s being dragged through the desert by the ugly one, who refuses to give him any water. Clint’s face dries and cracks, and his lips turn into clots of desiccated skin that look like they’re about to fall off his face, but it’s not until you’ve lived through a few days in the scorching dryness of the hammada that you realise exactly how dry the desert is. It’s so dry it makes you wonder how anything lives out here, let alone fanatical fossil salesmen.

The road, though, was in excellent condition, and even had carriageways in both directions for most of the trip, only slipping into single-track bitumen for two sections (if you ignore the section leaving M’Hamid, which we desperately tried to do). It was such a good road that we managed to cross the entire section south of the Jebel Sarhro mountain range before lunchtime, the handful of one-horse towns en route presenting no challenge that an experienced fossil-dodger couldn’t handle.

If we stopped in the middle of absolutely nowhere, children would spring up out of the desert and would start running towards the car, waving their hands and no doubt dreaming of what they’d buy with all the proceeds from the Big Fossil Sale of 2002, but they didn’t catch us, much to their surprise. Indeed, when Peta stopped to relieve herself behind a bush in the most desolate expanse of desert you can imagine, I wasn’t that surprised to see a man on a bicycle suddenly appear as if from nowhere, right behind Peta; I dare say he was more shocked, which felt rather good after all the madmen leaping out in front of the car all day.

It was a delightful surprise, then, to arrive in Rissani, some 380km from M’Hamid, to find the wonderful Hôtel Kasbah Asmaa, complete with a fully filled swimming pool, air conditioning, and ice-cold beer. Without a second thought we decided to take it easy for a couple of days, if only to wash the memory of M’Hamid out of our hair.

I’d still spend the next few nights dreaming of minerals, dates, fossils and hot, hot stony desert, though. It’s not something you forget in a hurry...

Morocco: The Sahara

Merzouga

Written: 12 June 2002

While lazing away the hours in Rissani, I’d been investigating the route to Merzouga, the home to the only genuine Saharan ergs in Morocco (an erg being a classic, sand dune desert). There are two roads to Merzouga, but both are relatively scary. The route from Rissani is the shorter of the two, but sections of it are pretty rough, and in a rented Fiat Uno it’s probably not in your interests to try it, unless being stranded in the middle of the desert is your cup of tea. The other route, from Erfoud, is easier to follow, but it’s still along rough dirt roads (or pistes as they’re known in Morocco) and the guidebooks are careful to sound a note of caution, while still saying that normal cars can reach Merzouga without serious problems.

Not wishing to get stuck with a stranded car in the desert, Peta and I had popped into Rissani to check out the score, only to be welcomed by the usual gaggle of young men trying desperately to sell us their guiding skills and goodness knows what else. They felt about as trustworthy as the most dodgy Moroccans do – in other words, you’d trust them as far as you can spit, which in the desiccated desert is no distance at all – so we turned around and decided to risk driving to Erfoud and them down to Merzouga.

It proved to be no scarier than the corrugated dirt roads in outback Australia, and we made it to Merzouga without any lasting damage (though the bone-shaking roads made it sound as if the car, now nicknamed Sandy, was about to fall apart in spectacular style). Things were helped by a couple of tourists we’d brought along from the hotel, Mike and Marie, who would have been very handy if we’d got stuck in sand, and provided us with enough confidence to tackle the desert and win.

The drive itself was beautiful, and after about 40 minutes of rattling and swerving round the potholes, the sand dunes of Erg Chebbi popped into view on the horizon, like a huge red mountain range in the distance. We bumped our way along the dusty dirt road straight towards the dunes, and as they got closer the red dissolved into a myriad mix of peach, ochre and brown, giving the dunes a magical look that made all the bouncing worthwhile.

Sure, we got stuck in the sand when we got to Merzouga itself, but who cares? It was the work of two minutes to push us back onto the road, and it wasn’t long before we’d found a genuine oasis at the end of the caravan route: the Ksar Sania has atmospheric double rooms set in their own desert cottages (complete with roof), and suddenly life never seemed better. The peach dunes rose from the desert a stone’s throw from our roof terrace, camels wandered around, mini-dust storms blew through town, and the peace was complete.

How I love the desert, especially when you can get a nice, cold bottle of water to keep the heat in check...

Exploring the Saharan Dunes

There isn’t a lot of water in the Sahara, and the sign in the hotel made the point pretty succinctly:

Ksar Sania

Water is very precious.

Water is necessary for life.

The desert has a serious lack of it.

It hasn’t rained since 1995.

Do not waste it.

Help us to conserve it.

Françoise and Gérard

It’s obvious just how dry it is in the desert from the speed at which your clothes dry after washing: lie your soaking towel on the roof and the scorching winds will dry it in under 15 minutes, not surprising then you consider the maximum temperature when we were in Merzouga was a whopping 48°C (and the minimum was 27°C, a respectable temperature for a midsummer’s day in England).

Your lips dry up unless you constantly apply lip salve, your skin starts to flake, and the flies will land on absolutely anything that contains even a hint of water, including tear ducts, the corners of your mouth, and any portion of visible, sweating skin. It is hot beyond words.

But that’s the point, and it would be a pretty stupid thing to complain about the heat when you’ve just crossed hours of stony desert to check out the Sahara in June. If you wanted to explore the desert in a more amenable climate, then although Merzouga hasn’t had any rain since 1995, it’s not devoid of water. Indeed, when it rains in the High Atlas, and when the snow melts, the rivers rage, creating havoc for local transport but feeding the oases with enough water to sustain life. Merzouga even boasts a lake for part of the year, and it glimmers on the horizon, attracting flamingos into the otherwise utterly inhospitable environment of the desert. As you drive along the roads of the hammada the most common road sign is the one warning of a ford in the road, sporting a car plunging through water, spraying out from under its wheels. It’s an odd thought as you rattle over river-beds that look like they’ve never seen water, let along flooding.

But without this amazing lack of rainfall you wouldn’t have the dunes, and it’s the dunes that make the Sahara. Stony desert is one thing, but after a while the beauty of the hammada begins to pale, which is why it’s such an epiphany driving to Merzouga and seeing the huge dunes of the Erg Chebbi rising up on the horizon. Located right next to the town of Merzouga, the dunes rise up 150m in huge piles of peach undulation, and if, like me, you’re unable to pass a mountain without wanting to climb it, you’re in for a treat.

Climbing sand dunes is an art, and it’s one I don’t particularly understand. Dunes are no more than huge piles of sand – indeed, in the Erg Chebbi you can see the underlying ground, and it genuinely looks like someone has simply dumped a load of peach-coloured sand straight onto the ground – but climbing huge piles of sand is no joke, especially in the baking Saharan sand. If you try to traverse the dunes, you’ll slip downhill; if you try to climb straight up, then it’s two steps up, one step down; if you climb in boots then they’ll fill with heavy sand within two minutes, but if you climb in sandals your feet will fry; your water will be as hot as tea within half an hour of setting off; and when the wind blows, as it does an awful lot in the desert, your molars fill up with sand and your eyes feel like sand pits.

Get up that dune, though, and who cares about the hurt? The landscape is like no other, because Erg Chebbi is nothing other than a peach sand mountain range. OK, so the mountains aren’t huge, but the range of textures and colours is so other-worldly that it’s trivial to trick yourself into thinking that you’re staring at a massive Martian landscape of rifts, valleys and dizzying heights. The dunes don’t go on as far as the eye can see – they’re bound on all sides by hammada – but they do extend for a number of kilometres in each direction, and it’s easy to kid yourself that you’re surrounded by sand right to the horizon and beyond.

Which is one of the points of the Sahara, I think.

The Sahara by Camel

Written: 14 June 2002

Climbing dunes is one way to explore the Sahara, but by far the best is to book your passage on one of the ships of the desert – the camel. As you drive into Merzouga over the rattling hammada, herds of camels loiter round the edges of the desert, looking dour and almost surprised to be there, and there’s no shortage of offers of camel treks from hopeful locals once you roll into town. We booked a two-day trip on our arrival, and settled in to wait for our ships to disembark.

It was at this point that the strange stirrings in my stomach reminded me that whenever I head off for a short break in sunny climes, the local bacteria always club together to welcome me to their lovely country. It happened when I visited Sumatra for a two-week holiday, and Morocco wasn’t going to be an exception, but I figured that being ill in the desert wouldn’t be that much of a problem; after all, the biggest problem with an upset intestine is finding the toilet, and when a whole dune system is available for your ablutions, it can’t be that bad. I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on a voyage through the beauty of the Sahara for want of a few unscheduled stops.

I’d forgotten about the most bizarre aspect of camel trekking, though: the awesome power of the camel’s digestion system. Camels regurgitate their cud and chew it again and again, and the size of a camel’s stomach belies the fact that it’s a huge sack of rotting grass and methane, but in the Sahara I drew the short straw, for as soon as we’d met our guide, Hamid, and mounted our camels, he tied my camel behind Peta’s and led us into the dunes. This meant that for the whole two hours into the dunes I was party to a perfect backside view of Peta’s camel crapping, pissing and farting right into my path. Add in the back-and-forth rocking of the ride that feels just like a slow-motion bucking bronco, and you’ve got all the ingredients for an intestinal cocktail thrown into the mixer. I was shaken and things stirred.

But I’m not going to let this account of the Sahara slide into obsessive musings on being ill abroad, for the desert is stunning even when your experience of the dunes is a little more intimate that you’d hope for. We rode out through the ergs (the Arabic name for sand dunes) in the direction of Algeria, and after a couple of hours of bumping and grinding our way past peach dunes while the sun sank to the horizon, we arrived at our camp for the night, tucked around the back of one of the large mountains of sand that characterise the Moroccan Sahara.

Here Hamid and the nomad who looked after the tents entertained us with tricks and half-mimed stories about the Algerians while the sun dipped below the horizons and the stars came out. The moon was no more than an Islamic crescent and had soon disappeared behind the dunes, and the sky was simply incredible; there were so many stars that the familiar constellations were impossible to pick out for someone who’s used to seeing no more than a handful of the brightest stars in the sky, and the milky way produced enough light to see by.

Hamid showed us how the nomads used the stars to navigate to Algeria, Marrakech and Timbuktu – an impressive feat considering his command of French was about as paltry as ours – and he also explained how the border with Algeria was closed and policed by soldiers, but this didn’t stop the Algerians nipping into Morocco to steal the camels for food. We could see into Algeria from our camp – it was only a few kilometres away, closer even than in M’Hamid – and it all seemed rather tranquil for such a screwed up area of the world. Then again, as Hamid said, ‘Morocco is good. Algeria is bad.’

We slept under the stars after a meal of meat and veg cooked in a tagine (which I did little more than poke at), despite the scarab beetles scurrying around the camp, who were presumably more interested in collecting camel dung than biting the tourists’ toes. It was surprisingly relaxing, and we were up with the sun for breakfast, some hard-selling from Hamid who had brought along some polished fossils just for us to barter over, and the return journey to Merzouga.

This time things had taken a turn for the worse, and all I can remember of the lolloping journey back to the hotel was a lot of clenching of teeth and other parts of my anatomy, followed by huge relief at our arrival back home. En route we crossed vehicle tracks that Hamid said were left by the Paris-Dakar rally, and despite it being the wrong time of year for the rally, one of the water pumps that supply Merzouga with water from beneath the dunes had ‘Fuck ze Paris-Dakar’ graffitied on the side in surprisingly phonetic vernacular. By this stage all I could think of was how much wind the ships of the desert had in their sails as they crossed the dunes, and it was all I could do to get back to the hotel without collapsing.

The Sahara really is something else, though...

Driving in a Sandstorm

Written: 15 June 2002

My stomach wasn’t the only place where a storm was brewing. The morning after our return to the comparative civilisation of Merzouga a sandstorm whipped up and started filling every crevice with gritty dust.

Sandstorms aren’t really storms of sand, they’re just high winds in a place where everything is perpetually covered in drifts of desert. If you had high winds in a place like Australia’s Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world, then you could have a sandstorm, but all it takes to reduce visibility to practically nothing in the Sahara is a bit of a breeze, and when the sirocco is whipping its way through the land, the chances are reasonably high that you’re going to get caught.

We got caught, no doubt about it. We’d already decided to stay an extra day to recover from the bruising that a camel trek over undulating dunes gives your thighs, but the excessive heat wasn’t helping my continuing problems with my gut, and worse still, Peta had finished her book and there’s precious little to do in the desert. We were going stir crazy, and despite the sandstorm outside and the scary prospect of driving while ill, we decided to throw caution to the driving winds and head north. It was fun.

Driving through a sandstorm is an experience, especially in a tiny Fiat Uno over corrugated roads in the scorching desert heat. On the way in we’d wondered why the roads of southern Morocco were lined with rock cairns, even those roads who had long since been paved with bitumen, but driving through the storm it became obvious: you can’t see the road at all when sand is blowing across it in snaking patterns that hide all the detail. We crawled along the road, all the time keeping a lookout for hubcaps on the side of the road (we’d lost one on the way to Merzouga, and presumed that the piste had rattled it off the car on the way in), and despite the clouds of sand pouring into the car through cracks in the doors and air vents that said they were shut but which obviously weren’t, we made it to the main road where the storm calmed down and the road stopped rattling quite so much.

We’d gone out in a blue car and came back in a peach one, but at least we’d survived. I just kept thinking of that poor, lonely hubcap, somewhere out in the blistering desert, wondering what on earth had happened. Fiat Unos just weren’t designed for desert driving, I guess...

Space Invaders

Written: 15 June 2002

Perhaps it was my fragile state on emerging from the desert, but Morocco really got to me for a couple of days after Merzouga. I’ve been in quite a few countries where I’ve been struck down by nasty stomach bugs – it’s part and parcel of travelling in the developing world, and however careful you are, you can’t really avoid being ill at some stage – and although it’s possible that my tolerance of the hassles of some places has been undermined by ill health, I’ve been incredibly ill in places which I’ve adored unconditionally (such as India), and I’ve been incredibly ill in places I haven’t warmed to as much (such as Indonesia). Morocco falls into the latter category.

Hassle is par for the course when you are an obviously rich westerner travelling in a relatively poor country, and that’s no surprise. After all, you probably have more money in your money belt than the locals earn in a year, and that’s going to cause some problems. However each country has a different type of hassle factor, and I found Morocco to be one of the most unnecessarily unpleasant.

Touts will hassle you until the ends of the earth, but if touting is taken too far then it’s self-defeating: the world is a big place, and if tourists can’t stand the hassle, there are plenty of other countries where travelling can be more pleasant. In India, for example, I found the hassle to be legendary, but it was done with such a feeling of fun about it that it was more like a daily game than a chore. Sure, some places like Agra and Fatehpur Sikri have tipped over the edge and are irritating beyond belief, but as a rule I found the hassle in India to be totally acceptable, and a part of the spirit of the place. Indonesia, on the other hand, was different. Away from the tourist areas the people were wonderfully friendly, if a little over-invasive of one’s privacy, but in the tourist spots of Java and Sumatra the touts were often unpleasant, and I found the same flavour of unpleasantness in southern Morocco.

The difference lies in respect for each other as human beings. I’d be a fool to harp on about respect when the West has effectively stomped all over developing countries for most of modern history, but the worst touts in Morocco and Indonesia obviously have absolutely no respect for tourists at all – they seem to view westerners as walking wallets, and nothing more. I can sympathise with this view, as no doubt plenty of tourists act like walking wallets, but it does make the whole exercise of exploring the country a chore, and this can’t be good for the long-term tourist industry.

Take Tinerhir, for example. Tinerhir is on the main east-west highway from Marrakech to the desert, and is the stopping-off point for exploring Todra Gorge, a huge gash in the High Atlas that’s a not unpleasant stop for the night. Tinerhir, though, is nothing special, and given the locals’ approach to tourism, I doubt that will change.

We stopped at Tinerhir for a drink and to try to track down some pharmaceutical help for my worsening intestinal problems, and as soon as we were out of the car, the touts descended. We politely told them we weren’t interested in having a guided tour and that we only wanted a drink, but shaking off Moroccan touts takes a lot more than a polite no. It takes almost forcible ‘no’s, to the point of distraction.

We did manage to get to a café, though, and sat down at a small table, hoping for peace so we could plan our next move, as the pharmacy was firmly shut, unlike my little problem. And, of course, that’s when the next tout showed up, starting off with the usual small talk.

«Bonjour, vous êtes Français?» he tried.

«Non, Angliases» we said, refusing to be drawn into too much French in the hope that he wouldn’t have much English.

«Je ne parle pas Anglais» he said, shrugging

‘What a pity’, we lied. ‘Ah well.’

«Il fait chaud» he chimed, trying for the Achilles heel of English people everywhere: the weather.

‘Um,’ we nodded unconvincingly, trying to fake it that we didn’t understand. This didn’t stop him pulling up a chair and plonking himself down at our table.

‘Is possible to make guide kasbah,’ he suggested, suddenly overcoming his lack of English. ‘Today market especial, then palmeraies, then special for eating in Hôtel Kashbah, c’est mon restaurant, yes?’

‘No thanks, we’re not interested in a guided tour,’ we repeated. ‘All we want it a drink, and then we are going up to Todra Gorge to find a hotel and to have a shower. We have been driving for five hours, you know.’

‘Oui,’ he continued, ‘but is possible to make guide to kasbah, palmeraies, market, eating, yes?’

We repeated our explanation in French, in the hope that five hours’ driving in the heat would elicit some sympathy.

‘But this hotel also has douche,’ he said, as if that would make a difference.

‘I don’t care if it has a shower,’ I said in French, ‘because I am ill and I am tired, and all I want is a rest.’ I even smiled in a slightly self-pitying way, desperately trying to appeal to the man’s human nature.

‘Yes, but is possible to make guide kasbah,’ he said, sticking to his guns. ‘I guide.’

«Non, merci» we said. «L’addition, s’il vous plaît.»

‘I order whisky Berber,’ he said, referring to the custom of drinking mint tea, during which it is impolite to drink fewer than three glasses.

‘No, thank you,’ we said, pre-empting a disaster. «C’est combien?»

And we paid the waiter to the sound of the man’s mantra, ‘Is possible to make guide to kasbah, palmeraies, market, eating, yes?’

Unfortunately it’s practically impossible to get away from this sort of conversation, which is depressingly familiar in southern Morocco (I have no idea if it is as common elsewhere, but I sincerely hope not). There are plenty of lovely people behind the touts’ tenacious approaches, but you have to go out of your way to find them; on our way north from the desert we stopped at a natural rock pool, Le Source Bleue de Meski, where a bunch of young boys started splashing us, much to the consternation of their mothers on the touchline. We didn’t mind, of course, and the women were so relieved and impressed that Peta had reacted so pleasantly to their children’s antics, that they waved her over and chatted away in basic French. They were lovely, and no doubt far more typical of Moroccans that the idiots who approach you whenever you arrive anywhere.

On the other hand, another little boy at the pool made some camels out of grass and insisted on giving them to us (despite my refusal three times), and on the way out he flagged down our car and demanded a present (so he got an old chocolate bar that had melted in the sun). Perhaps there’s a culture in some parts of Moroccan society that sees bleeding tourists of money as a solution to the country’s financial woes, but this attitude is totally destructive. I doubt I’ll bother to return to Morocco, because the hassle is so irritating, and it’s not because of the hassle, just the way it’s done.

Try as I might, I just ended up disliking most of the Moroccans I met, because they almost all end up trying to sell you something, even those who are apparently chatting to you because they want to chat. If the hard sell isn’t in your face within two seconds of the locals springing into your way, it’ll crop up soon enough: five minutes into your conversation you’ll find out that your host has a carpet shop, or runs a restaurant, or is a tour guide, or has something else that you didn’t know you wanted but won’t be able to refuse... and when you refuse, the reaction is designed to make you feel guilty. It’s hard going, and it can’t help but turn you into a cynic.

It’s counterproductive, frequently unpleasant, and gives the rest of the country a bad name... and when tourism counts for a significant amount of your country’s income, it’s pretty stupid. Perhaps this is why the authorities in Marrakech have put a lot of effort into tackling the problem of faux guides in the city centre, and the result is a refreshingly hassle-free environment, one in which one feels one can spend time and money enjoying oneself, rather than side-stepping the touts. I can only hope that this lesson extends to the rest of the country, because while Moroccan hassle might be legendary, it’s not the sort of legend that makes visitors want to come back.

And if people don’t keep coming back, then the touts have only got themselves to blame. A recent government study showed that 94 per cent of people who visit Marrakech do not return for a second time, which was what prompted the cleaning up of the city’s touts. Let’s just hope they manage to sort out the rest of the country too.

Desert Food

Written: 16 June 2002

The guidebooks will tell you that Moroccan food is excellent, and in general they are right. Marrakech is an amazing place for a feed, and by all accounts the northern cities like Fés and Meknès are excellent too. What they don’t tend to mention is that once you’re out of the cities and in the desert, you’re in for the same food all the time, especially in the off-season. It can get really wearing.

The Berbers, who inhabit southern central Morocco, are deeply proud of their food, which basically boils down to the following:

- Salade Marocaine, which consists of chopped tomatoes, onions, green peppers and cucumber, with boiled potatoes and olives if you’re in a really classy establishment.

- Tagines, which are named after the pots in which they are cooked. A typical tagine contains some kind of meat (mainly chicken or lamb) along with potatoes, carrots and a smattering of other vegetables, all cooked in the same juices.

- Brochettes, which are skewered bits of marinated meat, cooked on a barbecue.

- Harira, which is a bit like tomato soup with pulses and various other vegetables chucked in.

- Couscous, but only in theory. Couscous takes forever to cook, so unless it’s already cooked or you’re in a city, the chances are slim of finding any. Which is a pity, because it’s not bad.

- Moroccan bread, which comes in a loaf shaped like a large, flat bun, and which is handy for soaking up the soups and juices of the above.

That’s not a bad spread, but what amazed me was how totally inflexible the menus were in the desert land of the Berbers. Every hotel we stayed in, and every restaurant, provided us with the choice of tagines or brochettes, but precious little else except salad and bread. The first day it was fun, the second it was OK, the third it was a little repetitive, and by the fourth day I was dreaming of anything other than yet more tagines and brochettes. After getting sick on whichever tagine it was that blew my stomach away, I couldn’t even stand the word tagine. And as for brochettes, after a while all I wanted to do was stick the skewers into the authors of our guidebook, who couldn’t fall over themselves fast enough in proclaiming Moroccan food as some of the best on the planet.

Yes, the food in the Moroccan desert is good, but only for one meal. After that, it’s utterly, utterly boring, which is not something the guidebooks point out. Perhaps I’m missing something, but there’s a restaurant down the road from me in London where they sell top-quality Moroccan food. And guess what they sell? Salads, tagines, brochettes, harira, bread and precious little else. Except in London they’re three times the price, of course.

Ouarzazate

Written: 16 June 2002

By the time we arrived at Todra Gorge, after a long and tiring drive through the sandstorms of the south and the touts of Tinerhir, we were both feeling totally knackered. I hadn’t eaten properly for three days and was surviving on oral rehydration salts and dried biscuits, and Peta was suffering from the excessive heat of the desert. We needed a break.

This we completely failed to get. Todra Gorge is a pleasant spot en route from the east to the west, and in the 300m-high gorge there’s a natural spring, a couple of hotels and restaurants, and a respite from the touts by dint of a Dr5 entrance fee at the end of the sealed road. However all this passed us by somewhat as first me and then Peta felt hot and then slightly dizzy, before we each threw up copiously, noisily and regularly in our hotel. We managed to eat precisely nothing, and lay in sweaty sheets for a whole night, sleeping on and off for 12 hours before the sun rose on another day of hot, slightly swaying travel. Peta felt well enough to drive, but I lost my breakfast to the gorge, and we decided enough was enough, and that I needed a doctor. The only problem was that it was Sunday, and like most of the world, Morocco shuts down on the day of rest.

Our first port of call was Tinerhir, where the pharmacy was shut and the touts couldn’t seem to work out the difference between ‘doctor’ and ‘guided tour of the kasbah’. So we struck west along the P31, looking for any signs of pharmaceutical life all the way to Ouarzazate, where we’d been only a week before. Ouarzazate boasts a hospital, but even this was shut, and it took us some time to track down the only open pharmacy in town. It’s true the world over, not just Morocco, but if you’re going to be ill, the best advice is to try not to make it happen on a Sunday.

Luckily we found a supermarket that actually resembled a supermarket (though it was only a resemblance), so we were able to stock up on comfort food to ease us through our recuperation, because by this time we’d had enough of regurgitated Moroccan food to last us a lifetime. It gave us just about enough strength to get back to Marrakech, where you can live a life of western luxury, even down to the delights of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.

Which helped immensely, I have to admit...

Senegal: The West Coast

Dakar

Written: 9 October 2002

Dakar, the capital of Senegal and the first destination in my African trip, was nearly spoiled before I even got here. Peppering my guidebook’s description of Senegal are sections that make it sound as if Dakar is a lethal place, second only to the Nigerian capital Lagos in terms of crime; but despite a fair amount of looking, I can’t find the petty criminals the book is at pains to warn me about.

‘Dakar is notorious for thefts and muggings against visitors, frequently in broad daylight,’ it says in its section on the westernmost city in Africa. It goes on to describe how gangs of thieves will surround you, one of them distracting you while the others pick your pockets or unclip your money belt. Faced with this sort of description I couldn’t help but wander round on my first few days in a state of ultra-alertness, jumping at anything out of the ordinary. Of course, this being Africa, practically everything is out of the ordinary anyway, and I’ve been doing a lot of jumping.

Certainly Dakar has some worrying aspects. Most large shops and banks have at least two security guards looming in front of them and government buildings are guarded by soldiers sporting not inconsiderable firepower, but underneath this fierce exterior Dakar feels fine.

Sure, scam merchants float up from the crowds and try to pull the usual tricks – selling themselves as guides for the day, trying to flog you all sorts of junk at inflated prices, attempting to steer you towards their shops – but it doesn’t feel threatening. After a couple of days in town I feel a little ashamed that I took the guidebook at face value; I was being paranoid for no reason.

Perhaps because of this guilt, I’ve decided to explore Dakar on foot. I’m walking everywhere, only using transport to get to and from my hotel in the distant suburb of Yoff, and it’s pretty obvious that the oppressive heat is far more dangerous than the locals. Dakar is centred round the Place de l’Indépendance, home to the more insistent street-sellers, but if you head away from the centre things soon calm down to a more relaxed pace. For example, about 1km to the south of the city lies Cap Manuel, a small promontory that sports a weather-beaten red lighthouse, and in most cities a headland like this would be crammed with housing and pollution; in Dakar, however, it’s peaceful, pleasant and not remotely crowded. It’s this close combination of frenetic city centre and sleepy suburb that marks Dakar apart from most busy cities, and although there isn’t a great deal here to occupy the tourist masses – me, in other words – it’s pleasant enough.

It’s certainly not as bad as the books would have you believe...

Île de Gorée

Written: 10 October 2002

Dakar is surprising for its lack of obviously colonial architecture, but it’s more than made up for by the delights of Île de Gorée. This pretty little island sits 3km off the capital’s east shore and has more colonial atmosphere in its little toe than Dakar does in its entire hoof. It’s little wonder that Gorée is one of Senegal’s most popular tourist attractions; it’s an easy and refreshing day trip away from the sweat of the city.

If Dakar were a western city, Île de Gorée would be a millionaire’s paradise, packed with exclusive condos and signs describing exactly how rare the hired Dobermans like their calf meat. This being Senegal, though, the island manages to exude charm in a wholly run-down way, and if there are any millionaires hiding behind the bougainvillaea they’re well disguised. Gorée feels far from exclusive, and that’s all part of its attraction. Shaped like the strange ¶ character that seems to pop up whenever I use a French computer keyboard, the island is packed with a surprising amount to see, despite it being less than 300m wide at its waist and under 900m from tip to tail. As a day trip it’s simply wonderful.

The thing that strikes me most is how similar Île de Gorée feels to the islands of French Polynesia, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out why. The architecture is classic French colonialism at work, and the palm trees frame attractive balconies while glimpses of the blue sea contrast prettily with the red and blue hues of the peeling stonework. The island is beautifully faded in the way that only genuine antiques can be, and the touts are less insistent than in Dakar, adding to the atmosphere of relaxation. An old fort sits at the northern point of the island, its roof dotted with cannons in a display of colonial might that looks positively quaint these days, and from there the view of the narrow streets, pretty harbour and milling tourists is picturesque, to say the least.

Less pleasant is the island’s major draw card, La Maison des Esclaves. According to the curator, the House of Slaves was used as a port for processing slaves on the way to the Americas, and it’s an atmospheric little spot for such tales. A small door leads out from the basement onto the rocky shore of the island, and the small cell-like rooms in the ground floor are lit by solitary lanterns which pick out signs pointing to the storage rooms for male, female and child slaves. Upstairs on the first floor the rooms are large and airy, catching the sea breeze beautifully and ensuring a cool existence for the slave traders, but down below in the slaves’ quarters it’s a marked contrast. It’s hard not to be moved.

Just in case your imagination isn’t inventive enough, there are signs everywhere to prick your conscience for you. ‘Innocent children, unsmiling and crying for their mothers’ says one, while another, signed at the bottom by the curator, lays it on thick with ‘Today, those who claim that nothing happened in Auschwitz and Dachau will tomorrow be the same people who claim that nothing happened at Gorée.’ It’s powerful stuff.

The problem is that there’s considerable historical disagreement about the Maison’s actual role in the slave trade. There’s no doubt that some slaves were housed there, but whether it was used as a major shipping point for slaves is simply not known. Gorée is too small an island to support such a major trade and it doesn’t have enough water to make a good stopping-off point for masses of humans, and although the island undoubtedly saw some trading in slaves, the doorway to the Maison des Esclaves would be practically impossible to reach by boat, as it’s surrounded by rocks and has no jetty. It’s much more likely that the harbour just round the corner would have been the genuine trading point for slaves, if there was any trading at all, and visiting the house with this in mind transforms the experience from one of horror at the slave trade to one of horror at the ease by which we blindly believe what we’re told by museum displays. It’s easy to picture the Maison as a completely normal house with nothing more than storerooms in the basement, and given the shaky historical credentials of its past it’s a credit to the inventiveness of the curator that it’s such a popular destination for those seeking the roots of the slave trade. As an atmospheric attraction it rates highly, even if it’s quite possibly a fake.

But who cares whether it’s real? Gorée reeks of history, and it’s important that nobody forgets the horrors of the slave trade, even if that means stretching the truth a bit. The island is a pleasant day out from Dakar, it’s authentically colonial, and it’s well worth the 20-minute ferry ride. Besides, it’s not every day you get to play in a millionaire’s playground without any millionaires around.

Homesickness

Written: 11 October 2002

It feels like it’s taking an especially long time for me to get into this trip. The problem is that I suffer terribly from homesickness – I always have done, ever since I was little – and putting myself in a strange country with a strange language in a strange continent is a sure-fire way of bringing on that constant sinking feeling.

Homesickness aches, quite literally, just behind my solar plexus. It’s a longer-lasting version of the sudden realisation that something really important has fallen out of your pocket, and you have no idea where it is. Take this sinking feeling and roll it up into a stiff ball, and you’ve got homesickness.

I shan’t harp on about it, but it’s important to note that the first few weeks of this kind of trip are tinged with the distraction homesickness causes. Everything manages to remind me of home in some way, whether it’s music, food, possessions or people, and it can be hard to see through the haze into the fascination of the country surrounding me. But, as with all heavy knocks, time will no doubt prove to be a great healer, and soon enough I’ll start looking at home as a fond memory rather than a longing; I’ll remember the good bits and realise that I’ll be back there eventually, but first there’s a whole continent to explore.

It still amazes me how difficult it is getting over the wrench of leaving home. I remember feeling blue for the first few weeks of my last trip, but it’s so long ago I can’t recall the exact details, which is probably a sign that we all adapt eventually. I know it will get better and I know the ball will slowly unwind, but in the meantime I’m occupying myself with little things like reading my guidebook and changing my travellers cheques into the local currency, CFAs (the Communauté Financière Africaine Franc, pronounced ‘see-fay’, is the common currency of Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo, and as the African equivalent of the euro the CFA is damn useful, even if they missed the opportunity to call it the ‘afro’).

I’m also planning my route through Africa and getting regular fixes at the internet café round the corner, which charges a whopping 25p for half an hour’s access (not bad value as long as the electricity supply manages to keep up). It’s amazing how even a few words from home can make things feel better, and it won’t be long before I look back on this period with a fond nostalgia of its own. I’m making friends, I’m making plans and soon enough I’ll be making stories, and that’s when I’ll manage to switch from being a frightened little boy who doesn’t want to go back to school into the traveller I’d become by the end of my last trip in 1998. It doesn’t half hurt getting there, though.

Senegal v Nigeria

Written: 12 October 2002

I’ve never been into football, much to my annoyance. It’s a real pain being English and not being a football fan, because every Saturday, between 5 and 6 o’clock, I end up being left out while most of the country sits goggle-eyed as the results roll into the television. More importantly perhaps, football is the global language (along with the music of Bob Marley) and being fluent in football goes a long way to breaking down even the highest cultural barriers. Of course, there are exceptions – India is obsessed with cricket, and in the USA soccer is regarded as a children’s game – but in most countries football is a religion, and sometimes I wish I believed in the Beautiful Game.

Unfortunately I don’t, and I have to get my sporting kicks from other, more minority pastimes. I like cricket, though I have great trouble explaining why, and I have lots of time for darts, curling and other sports that get almost no television airplay. I used to like snooker back in the days when it was a TV novelty, but like Queen’s Greatest Hits and sweet cider I overdosed on it in my youth and now I can’t stand it. Hell, I once watched televised bridge without knowing the first thing about the game, but football just leaves me cold. However, I’m a sucker for the mob effect, and live football matches are perfect examples of people power. I’ve been to a few live matches and they’re quite different to an afternoon in front of Soccer Saturday, but nothing prepared me for how much I would enjoy watching Senegal play Nigeria in Dakar’s national stadium.

Tragedy struck Senegal on 26 September, a couple of weeks before I flew out. The ferry MV Joola, while plying its regular route along the coast between Ziguinchor in southern Senegal and Dakar in the north, hit a storm and capsized. Of the 1000 or so people on board, the vast majority drowned, including a large number of women and children; even worse, it took a whopping eight-and-a-half hours for the air-sea rescue service to notice that the Joola was in trouble, by which time most of the passengers had already met their maker. One story I heard told how one survivor held on to a piece of wood for nine hours, during which time the four other passengers holding onto the same piece of wood let go one by one, worn out by the storm battering the sea around them. It’s impossible to imagine what that would feel like; understandably, the disaster hit Senegal hard.

One positive response to the tragedy was a hurriedly scheduled friendly football match between Senegal and Nigeria, as a tribute to those who perished. I’d originally planned to head north today, but when I heard that there were still tickets available and that the stadium was only just down the road from Yoff, where I’m staying, I joined up with a small group of fans from the hotel, handed over CFA2000 for a ticket, and postponed my departure. It turned out to be an inspired piece of procrastination.

Football is indeed a universal language. As we approached the stadium it was apparent that the whole of Dakar wanted a bit of the action, and I naively assumed that the whole place would be absolute chaos. I was stunned, then, to see that everyone was queuing up in one extremely neat line, each fan standing exactly behind the man in front, never two abreast. I couldn’t believe it, and I felt a bit guilty; perhaps the lack of queuing etiquette you come across in Asia doesn’t apply to the Senegalese, or perhaps it’s a case of football being a higher authority than anything else. Whatever, we joined the back of the long but perfectly formed queue, and started shuffling forward with the rest like an orderly collection of millipede’s feet.

I’m not quite sure what happened next, but suddenly the officials herded us into a separate line to stop the ever-expanding first queue from blocking the nearby dual carriageway, and by some amazing fluke our new queue ended up being about three people long. Before anyone else noticed that we’d managed to avoid about 15 minutes of shuffling, we squeezed past the ticket inspectors, grinning madly and flashing our tickets, and a couple of minutes later we were in the stadium.

It was packed. One of the local supporters in our group told me the stadium’s capacity was 50,000, and on the other side of the pitch the stands were full, looking like a Jackson Pollock on black canvas as the yellows, reds, greens and whites of the Senegalese strip peppered the stands with colour. The simple but effective stadium terraces had about 50 rows of concrete steps all the way round the pitch, with not one seat in sight; we just sat on the concrete and waited for the entertainment to start while the crowd buzzed in anticipation.

I might know precious little about the subtleties of football, but I can recognise a friendly match when I see one. The crowd was there to watch good football, and that’s exactly what they got. Neither team was taking it too seriously, and every time a player managed a particularly skilled turn or played a trick shot, the crowd murmured its approval, whichever side had the ball. Given the swift arrangement of the fixture and the prohibitive cost of flying from Nigeria to Senegal for most Nigerians, the crowd was almost totally Senegalese, but that didn’t matter; it was the football that counted.

Surprisingly for such a musical nation the crowd didn’t sing any songs – a pity, as I’d love to know what ‘Who ate all the halal pies?’ sounds like in Senegalese – but the local drum troupe provided a constant and invigorating beat to keep the crowd going, and even the shock scoring of two Nigerian goals in the first five minutes of the second half didn’t dampen the crowd’s spirits; indeed, the Nigerians got a huge round of applause for both efforts, especially the second one which flew over the Senegalese goalie from just inside the halfway line. Everyone was into the spirit of the game, and when the entire Nigerian team dived to the ground after one of their goals, the stadium grinned from touch-line to touch-line.

I don’t know if the football was skilled but it was highly entertaining, and apart from a healthy collection of RADA-standard dives from the Senegalese and one yellow card for a late tackle, it was gentlemanly football to a man. The fact that Senegal scored 15 minutes from the end and then equalised with a couple of minutes to spare was the icing on the cake, and I was up there slapping hands with our neighbours like I’d been supporting Senegal for years. The power of the mob had me, and I wasn’t going to let on that my relationship with football hasn’t even reached first base. Somehow, out there in the crowd, that sort of technicality doesn’t matter one little bit.

Unstable Continent

Written: 13 October 2002

One of the more interesting things I’ve picked up in Dakar is the July/September 2002 edition of the BBC’s Focus on Africa, the World Service’s magazine for the region. It’s interesting not only because it contains a bunch of fascinating articles about Africa, but also because I find myself waxing nostalgic over my old job at the BBC, less than a month after I finally managed to escape the shackles of its bureaucracy. OK, it’s fair to say that less than a week after landing in Senegal I find that anything remotely British brings on a sharp intake of homesick breath, but to find a BBC-published magazine to be a source of heady nostalgia is a bit of a shock. But there it is; I find myself getting almost tearful at the Bush House address along the top of the letters page, and it’s weird.

The contents of the magazine do precious little to make me feel at home, though. Reading about Africa doesn’t dispel the feeling that this continent is in a real mess, and judging by the contents of the July/September issue, no news is good news, because pretty much every story manages to highlight another crisis in the making. Madagascar is suffering from a huge dispute between the country’s two rival presidents, each claiming that the other shouldn’t be there; war-torn Algeria is still in a mess after the country’s elections were marred by rioting and a very low turn-out; Lesotho’s election results are proving hard to swallow for the losers, and the last time this happened riots left 75 people dead; Liberia is still tearing itself apart in a bloody civil war; Sierra Leone is trying to recover from its own civil war, but it still has a long way to go; Ghana is reeling from the murder of one of its local kings, and the political effects may be wide-reaching; Angola’s civil war may be at a cease-fire, but turning this into peace is a huge challenge; Somalia is a disaster area, with the country split into four different parts, each one refusing to recognise the others’ claims to the country’s rule; elections in Mali have been criticised for being a set-up by the West, though at least there is hope the new president may be able to turn the country around; Nigeria continues its slide into civil unrest and economic oblivion, which could threaten the country’s stability; the Democratic Republic of Congo is no nearer to peace as the two sides in its long-running civil war continue to commit awful atrocities on each other; Kenya wonders whether its president will actually retire at the end of this constitutionally last term, or whether he’ll change the law to enable him to cling onto power; and the South African Rand is suffering from a 40 per cent drop in its value over the last year, which seriously affects the country’s poor as inflation rates go up.

One of the magazine’s most tragic stories has nothing to do with regional instability and everything to do with human error. Poor Mozambique recently suffered a train crash that killed about 200 people; the train, made up of both freight and passenger sections, couldn’t make it up a hill due to mechanical difficulties, so the driver de-coupled the passenger carriages, wedged rocks under their wheels and drove the freight carriages back down the hill, intending to leave the freight at Muamba station, which the train had just passed. However, the rocks slipped and the passenger carriages started rolling back down the hill, gaining speed all the time, until they smashed into the freight train, which was by this time parked in the station. Two passenger carriages were completely destroyed and buried in the cement that the freight train was carrying, instantly killing those on board.

All these happy stories appear in just one issue of Focus on Africa, and although there are also some upbeat articles about potential solutions to Africa’s problems, the emphasis is very much on the problems themselves. Indeed, this issue doesn’t even mention the recent unrest in Côte d’Ivoire because it’s only just kicked off, but you get the point. As continents go, Africa has a really tough time, and it makes you wonder what the future holds. I get the feeling that, in the short term at least, it will consist of more bad news rather than no news.

St-Louis

Written: 14 October 2002

I arrived in St-Louis with an annoying tic in my right eye and the hollow feeling of leaving familiar territory. I was only in Dakar for a few days, but already my mind, preoccupied with feeling homesick and sorry for itself, was desperately trying to put down roots, even somewhere as unpleasantly sweaty as the capital of Senegal. Now I’ve ditched the daily routine of Yoff and taken a bush taxi to the north of the country, and it feels like leaving home all over again; I guess it will take some time before being alone stops feeling so lonely.

A bush taxi, or taxi brousse in the local patois, is nothing more than an eight-seat Peugeot 504 station wagon in which each of the seven passenger seats is sold for a fixed price. Bush taxis queue up alongside the buses in most Senegalese cities and they leave when full; on a popular route like Dakar to St-Louis it doesn’t take long to sell all seven seats, and then it’s a direct drive to the destination, a much quicker proposition than the bus, though it costs about 30 to 40 per cent more. In theory the prices are fixed by the government, but in practice the touts charge you extra for any bags you might have, and the Senegalese are as cut-throat in their bargaining as you would expect, especially when it comes to fleecing stupid white men like me. I know I paid far too much for my bag – you can sense it in the way the touts look at you – but getting ripped off is all part of the learning process.

Unfortunately my window seat on the middle row proved to be a nightmare; hot, dry air gushed through the broken window at breakneck speed, constantly battering my face like an industrial-strength hairdryer, and four hours later I had no feeling in the right side of my head, my hair felt as if it was in dreadlocks, and the bottom lid of my right eye started to twitch involuntarily. By the time we arrived I felt as dried and withered as a prune.

The Beach

Thank goodness for St-Louis, then, or more accurately the wonderful strip of beach to the south of the town. This area is called L’Hydrobase because back in the 1930s it was an important refuelling stop for planes flying between Europe and South America; these days it’s home to a number of picture-perfect beach hut complexes, each of them overlooking a west-facing Atlantic beach.

I took a taxi to Hôtel l’Oasis on a whim, and I struck gold. For CFA10,000 a night (just under £10) I got my very own beach hut, big enough to house four beds, and I happily collapsed into the hammock the hotel had so thoughtfully provided in the sunset, where I introduced myself to the local sandfly population and tried not to step on the crabs scuttling along the beach. Slapping away, I idly browsed my guidebook, noting that not only was St-Louis the capital of Senegal until Dakar took over in 1958, but it’s also a UNESCO World Heritage site, an indication that it’s considered to be of global significance. I took this to be a good sign as I tucked into a delicious fish pie in the hotel’s restaurant; I couldn’t wait to get stuck into St-Louis in the morning.

What a pity that I pretty much missed the point of the place. After waking up among the itchy effects of paradise, I decided to walk into town, some 4km away from my hotel, and I was glad I did, as it enabled me to get a feel for the town’s layout. The main centre of St-Louis is built on a lozenge-shaped island in the middle of the River Senegal as it flows from north to south, parallel to the coast (the river finally meets the sea about 20km south of town); bridges link the island to the mainland to the east and to the long, thin peninsula to the west (the one that’s home to L’Hydrobase). This set-up is pretty unique and adds a definite charm to the place, and as I approached the island from the south I couldn’t wait to get stuck into the promised colonial architecture.

Surprisingly St-Louis turned out to be nothing terribly special. It isn’t a dump, but it isn’t much cop either. The peninsula to the west of the main island is home to a rancid fishing village of the type you find dotted all over the coasts of the developing world; the town centre might have plenty of balconies but it has nothing on the Mediterranean vibe of Île de Gorée (which is also a World Heritage site); and I walked through the town square, with (according to the book) its ‘air of faded elegance’, wondering whether I’d got the wrong St-Louis. Even the beach on the way up looked decidedly dodgy; I noted the rusting hulk of a beached fishing trawler on the outskirts of town, and couldn’t help wondering whether anyone here even knows who UNESCO is. Somehow I doubt it.

From the Heart

I didn’t really mind that St-Louis turned out to be a disappointment because I rather enjoyed wandering through the squalid fishing village, nodding bonjour to the locals and grinning the grin of a man who isn’t remotely fluent in the local language. Indeed, people were very friendly, so it was no surprise to be accosted by a happy-looking chap in the centre of town who introduced himself as Falou and latched onto the fact that I was English.

‘Not many Anglais visiting here,’ he said, his eyes masked by ultra-cool wraparound shades. ‘Many Français, many Belgiques, but not many Anglais. Where you from, Marc?’

‘London,’ I replied.

‘Ah, London,’ he said. ‘You know Liverpool?’

‘Sure do,’ I said.

‘You know Mr Ibra Bah?’ he asked, hopefully. ‘He lives there, he is a good friend of mine.’

‘Um, no sorry, I don’t,’ I said. ‘There are millions of people in Liverpool, you know.’

‘Ah yes,’ he nodded. ‘Anyway, it is good to be meeting an Englishman who does not care about the colour of the skin, I think, and it is good to know you think from the heart and from the head, and that you are welcome to my country.’

‘Thank you Falou,’ I said. ‘It’s great to be here, and who cares about the colour of people’s skin?’

‘We are all the same colour underneath,’ he said. ‘Please, put out your left hand. Here is a gift, from my heart and my head, not for money.’ And into my left hand he put a necklace of a simple design that I’d seen in Dakar, consisting of a shell implanted in a small block, painted in the Rastafarian colours of yellow, red, black and green.

‘I can’t take this,’ I said, automatically assuming it was going to lead to some kind of scam. ‘I really can’t.’

‘This is a present from my peoples to you, welcome in my country,’ he said, and when I continued to protest that he was too kind, he started getting annoyed. ‘I give you this, I never want money, it is the African way for visitors in my country. I leave you to explore my town, and I give you this present. If you want later I can show you my shop, but I no take money from you.’

With that he clipped the necklace round my neck and wandered back to the square, leaving me feeling a bit guilty. ‘Perhaps he’s genuine,’ I thought. ‘Things might be different in Senegal.’ And seemingly the recipient of a free necklace, I went off to explore the north end of town.

About an hour later, after an abortive attempt to get connected in the town’s less-than-reliable internet café, I bumped into Falou again, and this time he persuaded me to visit his shop. I knew I wasn’t going to buy anything, but out of politeness I went along with it and started talking about the internet café and how I’d been trying to contact my girlfriend. And that’s when I realised, with some relief, that Falou wasn’t the utterly selfless man he claimed to be.

‘You are missing your girlfriend,’ he said, ‘so you take this for her.’ He handed me a half-finished ebony carving from his stall, but again I protested and said that I wasn’t able to carry too many things around because I already had too much stuff and was planning to travel for a year, but he wouldn’t hear of it and again repeated that it was from the heart, and not for money. Again I wondered whether my cynicism was unfair; he was making it crystal clear that he wasn’t going to try to take any money off me, and he seemed genuine.

‘Tomorrow is my son’s naming ceremony,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps if you have time you can come with me, maybe we drink some African beers, and you take photos, we have a good time.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘I’m going back to Dakar tomorrow.’

‘Oh,’ he said, and put on a sad face. ‘Well, tomorrow I buy sheep for ceremony, perhaps you like to give me small money for this, from the heart and from the head, for my son? Like I give you present from the heart and from the head to take for your girlfriend.’

Aha, I thought, at last! He’d finally got to the point; of course he was being friendly for business reasons, and of course this was just an attempt to get me to buy something, albeit in a roundabout way. I had to give him credit though; he’d spun a good yarn, but I didn’t travel round Asia without learning a thing or two, and I now was on home ground. I relished the thought of running rings round him, now I knew he was just another salesman trying to squeeze money out of dumb tourists like me.

I was kind, though, and only strung him along for ten minutes or so, waxing lyrical about the heart and the head and steadfastly refusing to commit to anything other than handshakes, good wishes and pleasantries. By the time I’d finished he was thoroughly frustrated, so I took off the necklace, handed back the ebony piece, looked him in the eye and said, ‘From my heart, and from my head, thank you for the game, but I will not give you any money, you will not give me anything from your stall, and we will both be happy.’

And finally Falou looked at me as one scam merchant to another, smiled, shook my hand, and gave up. It looks like Africa is going to be just like Asia after all, and I relished the thought as I wandered back to my hotel along the fish-strewn beach, past the wreck and into the safety of my beach hut.

After all, it’s a fun game when you treat it as such, especially when there’s precious little else going on in town. And in a sense the cut and thrust of bartering is the real heritage of the developing world: people have been fleecing and bargaining for millennia, though in the West we’ve pretty much managed to eradicate it. It’s a more interesting piece of world heritage than the architecture of St-Louis, anyway.

The Language Barrier

Written: 14 October 2002

Thinking about it, Senegal is the first country I’ve been where the lingua franca between fellow travellers hasn’t been English. It’s often struck me how lucky I am to be able to speak English, not least because international travellers often speak English when they get together because that’s the language they all have in common. In Senegal, though, it’s completely different, and I get the feeling that this will be the case for all of the Francophone countries in West Africa, because the cultural mix of tourists is different.

Of all the countries in West Africa, Senegal plays host to the largest number of foreign tourists. This is due to the fact that it’s relatively safe (if you ignore the Casamance region in the south, which is off limits at the moment due to an over-zealous separatist movement), it’s not far from Europe, French speakers can survive with a minimum of fuss, the euro is easily changed, and it’s hot in November and December when Europe isn’t. This means Senegal attracts high numbers of French and Belgian tourists, with a handful of French-speaking Swiss thrown in for good measure, and their common language, for obvious reasons, is French. In the same way that the English think of Africa as Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and so on, the French think of Africa as Senegal, Morocco, Mali and the other ex-French colonies; it’s all down to colonial history and popular tourism.

The upshot is that I am a stranger among tourists here. I can manage the pleasantries in French, but I can’t eavesdrop on conversations (and therefore I can’t butt in), I can’t swap detailed travellers’ tips with other tourists, and I can’t even exchange books when I’ve read them. It’s not even that good for my French, because, just like the English, the French aren’t terribly good at including strangers in their conversations, especially English strangers, and they talk so fast I can’t understand a word.

Don’t think I’m complaining, because that would be grossly unfair. English is without a doubt the most useful travelling language there is, and outside South America and West Africa it’s the most useful communication tool there is (apart from the local banter, of course). I now understand exactly how the French feel when travelling through India, Malaysia, Australia and so on, and I now understand why there aren’t that many French travellers in those ex-English colonies. They’re all in West Africa, and quite right too; this is payback time for all the ease with which English carried me through my previous trips.

The local language is often a godsend, because somewhere in there is bound to be a word that even tourists use. For example in Wolof, the main indigenous language of Senegal, that word is toubab, which is the local term for the white man. It isn’t a particularly derogatory term, but as you wander round Senegal the kids run after you shouting, ‘Toubab! Toubab!’ followed by the obligatory «Stylo, cinq francs, bonbon» mantra (that’s French for ‘pen, five francs, sweets’, the secret to a happy life when you’re a kid). I quite like being a toubab; it makes me feel like a cross between an African tree and a rap star.

But back among the toubabs it can be bloody lonely, being the odd one out, and it makes you really appreciate anyone who can speak English. Roll on the Gambia, Ghana and East Africa, where I’ll be able to understand what on earth is going on...

Toubab Dialao

Written: 18 October 2002

When you’re travelling in the developing world, the threat of getting ill lurks beneath the surface like a cracked paving stone on a busy pavement; you know you’re going to trip, you just don’t know when. Before flying to Dakar, I put serious effort into building up my body’s natural defences, ready for the inevitable attack from Africa’s overly friendly population of local bacteria, and after four weeks of bitter-tasting Echinacea and a couple of months of Acidophilus, I felt as ready as I could be.

It’s taken precisely nine days for Africa to score the opening goal. I’ve been as careful as possible without straying into paranoia, but on my second day in St-Louis I made the mistake of ordering the hotel’s special prawn sandwich for lunch, as (according to my guidebook) it was good enough to keep me going all day. 24 hours later I realised the book was uncannily accurate.

Before I found out exactly how accurate, though, I finally accepted that St-Louis just wasn’t going to light my fire, so I hopped in a bush taxi for the picturesque spot of Toubab Dialao, a little village south of Dakar along the beach-strewn coast known as the Petite Côte. It was on the way that I realised I wasn’t alone, and that a few million local inhabitants had decided to hitch a free ride south too; judging by the gurgling in my stomach it looked like my newfound friends knew how to party, and by the time I arrived at Toubab Dialao I knew that life was about to take a turn for the worse.

By the will of Allah I managed to get a room that was right next door to the shared toilets; I wouldn’t normally regard this as bonus, but it ended up saving the day. For the whole of the afternoon and a good part of the night I suffered from my first African bout of vomiting, diarrhoea and low, low patches.

Being ill abroad sucks, but being ill abroad on your own is awful. I lay there and tried to work out what the hell I was doing in this place; so far in Senegal I’d seen precious little that had even elicited a response in me, I’d found the country to be incredibly expensive, and I was already being knocked down and kicked around the pitch by the local bacteria. Add to that the seemingly incessant pangs of homesickness and my isolation at being the only English-speaking traveller stupid enough to visit West Africa, and I think you can safely say I was feeling pretty down. I curled into a ball on my sweat-soaked bed, tried to sip water that tasted like tepid tea, and dreamed of going home to green grass, real ale, cool weather, cricket and my girlfriend.

The Peace Corps

By the next morning I had nothing more to give and no energy to give it with. I was, however, no longer throwing up, so I ventured out to explore the hotel into which I’d booked without so much as a glance the previous afternoon. It turned out to be quite wonderful; perched on the top of a small cliff above the gentle beaches of the Petite Côte, the Sobo-Badé hotel is as close to an idyllic Mediterranean hideaway as you can get in a continent that considers the beach to be nature’s own garbage disposal unit. It had comfortable chairs, it had pleasant views north to the distant skyscrapers of Dakar, and it had plain, boiled rice served with sympathy. I settled in for the recuperation period, alive but depressingly lonely, for everywhere I looked the other travellers seemed to be barking away in super-fast French. And then I heard the bass-heavy beat of a boom box and the lilt of an American accent cutting through the air, and life suddenly started to turn around.

There were three of them, two men and a woman, and I just knew they were from the USA, even before the sound hit me. The shades were either wrap-around or with wide, Navy-style lenses; the boom box pumped out rap music, pushed to a volume that wouldn’t be out of place in a Senegalese taxi; and the beer flowed like White House rhetoric. But the most surprising thing of all was that the loudest of the troupe was talking to the hotel’s staff in Wolof, the local language. I couldn’t work it out; Americans aren’t known for their command of Wolof, but there they were, classic US exports, yet speaking in tongues.

It turned out that Mark, Pete and Emily were Peace Corps workers, out in Senegal for a two-year tour of duty and taking a couple of days off to kick back on the coast. The Peace Corps is the US equivalent of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), in which people head out for a couple of years to work as volunteers in developing countries. It’s basically a Good Thing, and these guys were energetic and partying hard, but most importantly for my recovering psyche they spoke something approaching English. They invited me over for a chat and I leapt at the chance.

So it looks like Toubab Dialao is going to see me through my first bout of intestinal football with flying colours, and I’m sending up a silent prayer to whichever god happens to be floating over Senegal today. I might still be weak and I might still be uninspired with Senegal, but I’ve stopped throwing up, I can stomach plain rice, and I can now communicate with someone at a level beyond O-level French. To me, it feels like Christmas has come early, and I’m soaking up Toubab’s beach life with glee.

Senegalese Transport

Written: 19 October 2002

Wise men say that it’s not the destination that counts, it’s the journey, but obviously Senegal isn’t the preferred holiday destination of wizened old sages. Here, the journey is a complete pain in the arse.

In most parts of the developing world that I’ve had the pleasure to explore – particularly Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent – transport is cheap and nasty, but fascinating and effective. India’s trains are a marvel, catching buses and ferries round Indonesia is easy, and in most places all you need to do to get from A to B is to rock up to the bus station, smile, mention the name of your destination, and watch as the locals usher you onto the right bus. You may have to wait for a short while, but more often than not you get where you want to go, and for a very good price. Not so in Senegal.

For reasons best known by the locals and best kept to themselves, Senegalese buses only leave the station when they’re full. This might not be such a problem when you want to go from one major hub to another, but if you’re hoping to take the bus to a small village out back of beyond, you can find yourself waiting most of the day for the bus to pull out. It might be a cheap way to get around, but the problem is that it takes an absolute age before the bugger’s even started up, let alone pulling into port. If you have to link up three or four bus rides to get to where you’re going, you’re going to be drawing your pension before you get anywhere.

Another solution, the bush taxi, has a similar philosophy, though with only seven seats they theoretically take less time to fill up. The only problem is they still take ages before they leave, and in the off-season there aren’t many tourists trying to see the sights and the sights themselves are as quiet as hell, so you often end up waiting for as long as you do for the bus.

The only other option is a normal taxi, which is hugely expensive in comparison with other methods, and involves bartering in the extreme. Either Senegalese cab drivers are the world’s laziest or the world’s greediest; it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re both.

It also wouldn’t surprise me if the Senegalese for ‘no’ turns out to be «oui». It’s uncanny the number of taxi drivers I ended up bumping into who said they knew exactly where I wanted them to go, and who later turned out to know Senegal about as well as your average Icelandic fisherman. Pulling over and asking the locals for directions is par for the course and adds to the excitement, as it seems most of the locals haven’t a clue where they are either. Blank stares, scratched heads and slow, thoughtful chewing seems to be the local dialect, and I’ve seen a lot more of Senegal by taxi than I’ve paid for. I wish I could say this represents value for money, but it doesn’t.

Perhaps the worst thing about getting round Senegal is the feeling of aggression you get from taxi drivers, bush-taxi touts or bus boys. There’s none of the wide-eyed fanaticism of India, where you get swept onto your bus on a tide of smiles, head wobbles and cheers; instead it feels like Senegalese drivers regard you as an inconvenience, something that’s keeping them from doing something far more important, like sleeping or drinking tea. Trying to get round Senegal makes you feel as if you’re committing some kind of faux pas, and it’s not cheap either. If life is a journey rather than a destination, then in Senegal, life obviously sucks.

Joal-Fadiout

Written: 19 October 2002

One of the best aspects of the Peace Corps invasion of Sobo-Badé was the roundabout way in which it introduced me to Jeremy and Sarah. On the road as in normal life, people understandably tend to coalesce into groups that are bound by a common language, and my newfound Peace Corps friends soon introduced me to another American couple, who were planning to head south in the morning. I had a choice between sitting round for another day on the sun-soaked beaches of the Petite Côte, or latching on to the only moving company I could find, and the homesickness bug won; I wanted to share the road for a while, at least until I was firing on all cylinders, and Jeremy and Sarah were only too happy to let me tag along.

Our destination was a twin town called Joal-Fadiout, some way down the Senegalese coast. In Senegal it makes sense to travel in large groups because it keeps the transport costs down, but the fun part of travelling with Jeremy and Sarah is that they can’t speak a word of French, so all of a sudden I have become the group’s communications expert. I might have been feeling language-lonely over the last few days, but at least I can string a few words together; Jeremy and Sarah are having a tough time with no French, but they’re winning, and I can’t help feeling complete admiration for them, not to mention some shame at the self-pity I’ve been feeling at being isolated from other non-English-speaking travellers.

So, with the blind leading the blind, we finally managed to get to Joal, which my guidebook described as ‘interesting’. Obviously journalism isn’t an exact science, but when we visited Joal, ‘interesting’ was not the first word that sprung to mind; instead, Joal seemed to be having the urban equivalent of a Bad Hair Day. There was indeed a beach, as promised, but the sea was a worryingly black colour and the sand barely peeped out from under the rubbish; meanwhile our hotel, which the book described as having ‘soul’, had power failures, mosquitoes, birds cooped up in incredibly tiny cages, two poor pelicans locked in grotty cells in the corner of the restaurant, and rooms that made the hole in Calcutta look positively bright and breezy. I noted for future reference that ‘soul’ was possibly something I could do without during my West African sojourn, and I thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t enjoying this unique cultural experience alone.

For nothing quite brings people together like scraping the bottom of the barrel. Having exhausted the delights of the beach, making sure we kept our shoes well and truly on, the three of us sat in the hotel’s pelican-flavoured restaurant, enjoying our meal while the local insects enjoyed theirs, and reflecting that even though Joal hadn’t turned out to be as interesting and soulful as we’d been expecting, at least we could move on if we wanted to, something that the poor caged pelicans watching us eat could only dream about.

Credit must go to the local cockroaches, too. That night I put up my mosquito net and made sure I’d tucked it in carefully under the mattress, ensuring that nothing could get in overnight. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was woken up at 2am by a buzz, a thud and a gnawing suspicion that I wasn’t alone. Grabbing my torch, I shone it in the direction that my instincts told me to, and came face to face with a two-inch-long cockroach, squatting inside my net and looking at me as if to say that this was his room, and I wasn’t welcome. I couldn’t believe it; there was no gap in my net – I’d checked it twice – so I can only assume that I’d been sharing the bed with him all this time. Luckily Senegalese pillows are traditionally made from concrete, and a swift lob in the direction of my newfound friend proved that cockroaches may be tipped as the species with the best chances of surviving a nuclear holocaust, but even they can’t survive the impact of a Senegalese pillow.

Fadiout

The reason that Joal-Fadiout is on the tourist map is because Fadiout, the second half of this excitingly duplicitous town, is perched on an island that’s made almost entirely of clam shells. This, coupled with a strong Christian influence, makes Fadiout a relatively off-key destination (for Senegal at least), and even more interesting is a second clam-shell island, linked to Fadiout by a second bridge, which is home to hundreds of Christian graves, each marked by a cross and a pile of shells. In such a predominantly Muslim country this whiff of Christianity is not only bizarre, it’s positively welcoming.

Unfortunately, so are the local guides, who insist on accompanying you for every step along the rickety wooden bridge to the island, irrespective of how many times you say, «Non merci.» The island itself is, well, just an island, with a small town cramping its style and a bunch of clam shells crunching underfoot. There isn’t a great deal else to excite the senses; it has atmosphere, but most of that is provided by the decomposing rubbish that gets dumped on the island’s long-submerged beaches.

The cemetery is interesting though, if only because it’s crammed with graves, a lot of them quite recent additions. From the cemetery island’s modest hill you can see the town’s food store – a bunch of huts perched on stilts in the lake to make sure that fire can’t destroy them – and the large crucifix on the crest of the cemetery almost manages to pull off an atmosphere of colonial times gone by. It isn’t worth crossing the continent for, but it’s a pleasant escape from Joal.

By the afternoon we decided that Joal’s soul wasn’t quite soulful enough to persuade us to stay, and we made plans to head further down the Petite Côte to the beach paradise of Palmarin. Before finding a taxi, though, I stopped off at a pharmacy to buy some mouthwash to combat a mouth ulcer that was threatening to take out my entire upper jaw. The mouthwash seemed to do the trick, though I was more than a little concerned to read the following on the bottle: ‘There is a risk of seizures in young children and infants, and agitation and confusion may occur in older patients.’ I wondered if I’d accidentally bought a bottle of the local moonshine instead; perhaps that’s the elusive secret of Joal’s soul, after all...

Palmarin

Written: 20 October 2002

As soon as we got back from exploring the delights of Fadiout, Jeremy, Sarah and I tried to track down transport to Palmarin, a pleasant-sounding spot down the coast that the Lonely Planet, bless its cotton socks, describes as ‘superb’. After shitty accommodation, a squalid beach, awful humidity and an island made of shells that turned out to be little more than an island made of shells, our spirits needed lifting.

I’ve looked it up in the dictionary, and the French for ‘superb’ is superbe, or at a pinch magnifique. This rather scuppers my theory that the author of my guidebook asked the locals for a description and lost something in translation, because however poor your French, you can’t get confused about the meaning of superbe. Whatever the explanation, Palmarin isn’t superbe and it isn’t magnifique; it’s awful.

I can’t be too critical of my guidebook as the researcher would have visited Palmarin at least three years before we did and three years is a long time, but when we finally rolled up at the Campement de Palmarin – after our taxi driver took us for a number of detours on the way, none of them intentional and none of them adding anything in any way to any of our lives – I couldn’t help wondering why the guidebook had gone for ‘superb’ when ‘run-down’, ‘dirty’ or even ‘desolate’ would have been so much more accurate. And I’ve never thought of toilets that dysfunctional as being superb, but at least it was better than Joal, because the beach at Palmarin had hardly any litter. It did have a strange kind of red seaweed that made the sea look like as if there’d been a radioactive spillage nearby – and indeed there was the rusting hulk of an old fishing trawler aground just south of our section of the beach, which was a nice touch – but the beach itself was passable.

The rest of the campement was slightly worse for wear, though. The 37 huts arranged in rows behind the beach were functional but hardly luxurious, and the concrete beds we dumped our stuff on had obviously been built some time ago. The one shower that managed to produce anything other than a slight drizzle was fine, if you like showering in salt water with an appreciative audience of mosquitoes, and toilets are always much more fun when they don’t flush, but at least the proprietors were keen. It felt like we’d woken them from hibernation, which we quite possibly had as we were clearly the first tourists to stumble on the campement for some time, but they smiled, they brought us reasonably cold beers from the fridge, and they only tried to sell us boat tours a couple of times every half an hour. Things could have been much worse.

Irritatingly, a few hours later they were just that. We’d explored the beach, eaten the evening meal of chicken and chips and were looking forward to a good night’s sleep before heading further south in the morning, when we realised that our rooms weren’t actually rooms after all, they were saunas. Concrete bunkers are fine if they have fans and windows, but if they have nothing other than a couple of portholes, they’re, well, concrete bunkers. If people actually liked concrete bunkers then those bloody inner-city architects from the sixties would all be OBEs by now, but history shows that we don’t like concrete bunkers, and the architects have never been allowed to forget it. Concrete bunkers in hot, humid climates are a step beyond even tower blocks, and Palmarin’s huts are superb and magnificent examples of how concrete can be successfully used as a psychological weapon. It was a long night.

The Beautiful Coast in Danger

At breakfast the next morning – if one can call dry baguette, frozen butter and instant coffee ‘breakfast’ – I spotted a possible explanation on the wall for the dilapidated state of Palmarin. Instead of the normal posters depicting beautiful pirogue trips through luscious mangrove swamps or idyllic shots of beaches with clean, golden sands and stunning blue water, the campement’s restaurant walls sported a hand-painted montage of three beach scenes, ominously entitled La Belle Côte en Danger, 1995-2000. The top scene, captioned with the year 1995, showed a nice little beach-hut complex, with tourists splashing around in the sea, lying on the beach reading, and generally having a good time; indeed, one guy looked like he was rolling a spliff, though this was possibly an indication of the artist’s lack of hand-painting skills than a true representation of life in Palmarin, circa 1995. Even the fishing trawler was in one piece, though the fact it was in the picture at all implies it had run aground even before these halcyon days. Perhaps it doubled as an aquatic adventure playground back then; whatever, it looked like a positive addition to the scene, so rosy were the artist’s coloured spectacles. One could almost call it superbe, or at a pinch, magnifique.

The second and third paintings, though, told a very different story. They showed a sorry scene in which the fishing trawler had broken in two, the trees had blown down, the huts had been smashed and pushed into the sea, and not one tourist could be seen happily rolling on the beach. It clearly implied that some kind of natural disaster had hit the place between 1995 and 2000, which probably explained why things were a little run-down in Palmarin.

It didn’t take long to get confirmation. I decided to wander down the beach to get a photo of the beached fishing trawler, it being the nearest thing to a tourist attraction in Palmarin, and a few hundred yards south of the campement lay the ruins of a bunch of concrete huts, the same ones that were depicted in the painting in the campement’s restaurant. A large concrete disk lay smashed on the edge of the sea, once home to an idyllic seaside hut but now home only to some hardy sea-faring weeds and the rusting remains of the concrete’s reinforcements. The whole place looked thoroughly forlorn, and suddenly everything made sense.

The big storm was back in 1997, during the year of El Niño, and it not only lacerated the Belle Côte round Palmarin, it also washed away a sizeable portion of the peninsula to the south of Djiffer, some 15km south of Palmarin. Djiffer now lies at the southernmost tip of this peninsula, and an island further to the south, perched in the mouth of the River Saloum, shows where the end of the peninsula used to be. No wonder Palmarin looks so forlorn; Mother Nature really hit it hard, and that’s why it’s anything but superb.

It still doesn’t explain why they built concrete bunkers instead of beach huts, though...

Djiffer

Written: 21 October 2002

As I peeled myself out of the basting oven that the Campement de Palmarin had amusingly substituted for a proper room, I found myself wondering whether I’m going to get the hang of Senegal, or whether I’m going to float out of the other end of West Africa’s most popular tourist destination, still wondering what on earth the fuss is all about. So far I’ve been singularly uninspired by Senegal; I don’t hate it, sure, but I don’t really see the attraction either.

Djiffer hasn’t made the earth move, but it has at least hinted at the positive side of Senegal. Back in Toubab Dialao, the only other place that I’d return to, I got horribly ill and wasn’t really able to appreciate it, but Djiffer feels good... and coming after Joal and Palmarin, it feels like I’ve finally reached somewhere that’s worth all the hassle.

It was pure luck that we managed to get here without another nightmare journey, for Palmarin isn’t exactly a transport hub. We hauled our packs out onto the dirt road, found a baobab tree to shelter under, and sat down to wait for a bus, a bush taxi, or anything to get us to Djiffer, some 15km down the road. As Djiffer is perched right on the southern end of a peninsula, traffic doesn’t exactly hurtle by, but we figured something would turn up, and it did, in the shape of a genuinely friendly chap called Famara. Seeing us hanging out on the side of the road, obviously looking for a lift, Famara stopped his car, slammed it into reverse, and asked us where we were going. ‘Djiffer,’ we told him, and he told us to hop in. We offered to pay him, but he just shook his head, and off we went. We couldn’t believe it; we’d found a local who was not only happy to give us a lift for free, but who didn’t once try to sell us a tour, a wooden statue or a bag of peanuts. I’ve no doubt that this is typical Senegalese behaviour, rather than that of the touts, taxi drivers and generally grumpy salesmen who have overshadowed my visit so far.

Meanwhile Djiffer, or more accurately the Campement Pointe de Sangomar, has turned out to be wonderful (Djiffer itself is a smelly fishing village that suits its name; it looks and smells as if some local god sneezed it onto its little peninsula, and the less said about the place the better). This time the beach huts are superb, sandwiched between the sea to the west and the River Saloum to the east, and they not only have spotless en suite bathrooms and comfortable beds, they also have powerful fans and great food. I checked the Lonely Planet, which simply said it was the ‘smarter’ of the two places in town and that it was ‘popular with tour groups’, not something one would normally interpret as a compliment from an LP author, and I made a mental note not to take my guidebook at face value any more. After all, I normally treat guidebooks with a huge pinch of salt, and after Palmarin that seems like the only sensible approach to take.

I can see why the campement is popular with tour groups, though; it’s great, and I finally feel as if all the throwing up, sweaty taxis and sleepless nights are on the other side of the cusp. For the first time since leaving London, I feel as if I’m enjoying travelling again, and it feels good. And not only is the view from my bungalow beautiful, the company is impeccable; we’ve made friends with a lovely Australian guy called Chris, who is staying in the hut next to mine, and we’re just lazing in the sun, putting thoughts of the road aside for a while.

What a huge relief that is...

Foundiougne

Written: 22 October 2002

The thought of trying to get out of Djiffer – stuck there on its sandy peninsula where the River Saloum flows into the Atlantic – sat at the back of my mind like the promise of tomorrow’s hangover when the night is still young. Senegalese buses are enough to make anyone go weak at the knees, but when you’re sitting there watching the African moonlight play over a serene beach right outside your bungalow’s back door, they’re even less enticing. Luckily we found an alternative, one far more suited to the lush surroundings of the Siné-Saloum Delta.

Sandwiched between the Petite Côte to the north and the Gambia to the south sits the Siné-Saloum Delta, a mangrove swamp formed by the Saloum and Siné rivers as they merge and flow into the Atlantic. It’s a pretty area of islands, beaches, mangroves and mosquitoes, but it’s not a lot of fun if you’re a bus; there’s a car ferry some 40km upstream from Djiffer, so from our beach paradise the only bus-based option was to backtrack some way north up the coast before heading southeast to go round the delta.

However, buses aren’t the only way to get around, and the Siné-Saloum area is home to countless fishermen... and where there are fishermen there are pirogues. Your average pirogue is a long, thin canoe that’s propelled by a stuttering outboard motor and a crazy local or two, and although it’s about as far from luxurious cruising as you can get, it’s a delightful way to navigate through the mangrove swamps. Within about five minutes of wandering into the bowels of hell that was Djiffer village, we were accosted by a hopeful young piroguier called André, who did his best to persuade us that his pirogue was the only sensible way to get upstream. Given the state of the belching hulks that were apparently the only buses heading north from Djiffer, he had a point, and we haggled for a bit before settling on a deal of CFA8000 per person to get to Foundiougne, home to the car ferry and buses that would take us south towards the Gambia.

Heading Upstream

This morning the four of us – me, Jeremy, Sarah and Chris – met André on the beach at 9am sharp, ready to head on up the river. We stowed our bags in the bows, wobbled into the middle of the boat as the waves slapped the sides, and waited while the three local crewmen heaved our pirogue into the slow-moving waters of the River Saloum. The motor coughed into life, and after a few precarious tilts that threatened to scupper our trip before it had even begun, we headed off in a northeasterly direction, against the flow of the lumbering river.

It was a scorching day, tempered only by the faint breeze caused by our movement through the tranquil waters of the wide river, so who can blame the boys for wasting no time at all in smoking three fat spliffs in quick succession, while they sat steering and grinning at the back of the boat? I figured that the river was wide, the visibility good and their experience probably greater than mine at steering a pirogue to Foundiougne, so the chances were that having stoned drivers wouldn’t make any difference. I also figured that if anything was going to happen, it would be the will of Allah... and reassured by this, I relaxed into it.

The trip was uneventful and gloriously chilled out. The sun reflected off the river and torched our eyes, and three-and-a-half hours later we were frazzled, but the scenery was pleasant and the graceful feeling of gliding upstream was most relaxing. It wasn’t long before the village of Foundiougne hove into view on the banks, and we set a course for the Campement le Baobab, our chosen spot for the night. We congratulated each other; we’d managed to avoid the sardine sweatboxes that pass for buses round these parts, and we’d seen a fair bit of the Siné-Saloum Delta into the bargain.

And then André’s brother, who had taken the tiller, misjudged the riverbank totally and drove us straight into the wall of the campement, smashing a chunk of wood off the front of the pirogue and throwing the whole caboodle dangerously off-balance. The crew suddenly woke up, jolted out of their red-eyed stupor as surely as if one of them had dropped a spliff down the back of the sofa, and it was only André’s quick thinking that saved the day; he jumped onto the jetty and stuck his leg out in a karate pose, leaning out just far enough for his cousin to grab it. Slowly things stopped rocking, and we all breathed again; our landing might have been clumsy, but we’d finally arrived.

Interestingly, their rude awakening didn’t dampen our drivers’ enthusiasm for playing the cadeau game. This appears to be obligatory for anyone who delivers toubabs to their destination, and starts off with the driver insisting on being paid more than was originally agreed; it’s not couched in such rude terms, though, but takes the form of the taxi or pirogue driver asking for a cadeau (‘present’) on delivery. He might ask for a beer if you’ve just arrived somewhere that serves it, or he might just be after more money, claiming that it was a longer drive than agreed. For example, the guy who drove us from Joal to Palmarin tried to sting us for more cash when it was he who’d missed the turning and he who should have known where our hotel was, instead of driving around for kilometres trying to track it down; still, as the guys at the Palmarin campement said, these guys always ask for more, and ‘that’s just how it is.’ And travellers like me always tell them to piss off from behind a glorious smile, which is just how it is from this end...

Luckily our hosts were too stoned to play cadeau for too long, and soon we’d booked into the campement and kicked back into the laid-back vibe of Foundiougne, yet another small village sitting on the tranquil banks of the River Saloum. Indeed, Foundiougne was almost too tranquil, as we discovered when we decided that a good way to kill the afternoon would be to take a short pirogue excursion even deeper into the mangroves forests. After waiting for André and his posse to leave – we didn’t fancy crashing into mangrove forests and capsizing among the mosquitoes, to be honest – we wandered down the main street of Foundiougne and waited for the touts to make their offers. And we waited, and waited, and even when we walked down to the nerve-centre of pirogue activity, the fishing beach, and wandered around like rich toubabs with money to burn, the offers completely failed to come in.

Faced with a village where even the touts couldn’t be bothered to engage, we repaired to the bar and kicked back until the moon had risen, the mosquitoes had feasted on white man’s blood, and the effects of the sun and fresh air had kicked in. Sometimes you just have to accept that doing nothing is the right thing to do, especially when nothing’s doing...

Kaolack

Written: 23 October 2002

Unfortunately we had to hop back onto Senegalese road transport to get out of the Siné-Saloum Delta, this time to reach the junction town of Kaolack. The plan was to head south to the Gambia, the thin, finger-shaped country that juts into Senegal like an argumentative finger into the fat belly of a belligerent taxi driver, and by far the easiest way to get there was via a night’s stay in Kaolack. This makes no sense on the map – going from Foundiougne to Kaolack you’re going in the opposite direction to the Gambia – but Kaolack is the nearest transport hub, so you have to head up there in the off-season to get your Gambia-bound bush taxi.

Two bus rides later, which were notable because the bus spent a large part of the journey driving beside the road on the dirt as the dirt was in better shape than the pot-holed bitumen, we rolled up to Kaolack to find that it was totally booked out (we never did find out why). Luckily the fourth hotel we tried had rooms, so without wasting any time we booked in and I headed off to explore the only tourist attraction Kaolack has to offer, the second-largest covered market in Africa (the largest is in Marrakech).

Surprisingly, it was great. I got absolutely no hassle at all as I wandered into the musty souqs, through the meat market with its friendly population of swarming flies, into the tailors’ souq where clothes appear out of piles of material that would be cast-offs in the West, and eventually out to the odds-and-ends souq, which seems to be where old plastic bottles go to be reincarnated. It was bizarre, and it was alive in a totally different way to the Marrakech souqs; in Marrakech the little shops are for the most part pristine, highly polished to entice toubabs into their homely glow, but in Kaolack it feels as if everything’s tarnished, hidden under a layer of grime and dust that’s been accumulating for centuries. Under this veneer of grot the souqs are buzzing with real business, and tourists don’t even come into the equation; I got the odd yelp of ‘Hey, toubab’ as I surprised people in the gloom, but for the most part this was a real, working souq, and as such it felt much more authentic than in Marrakech.

The rest of Kaolack felt similarly tourist-free, which wasn’t surprising given the lack of attractions. But as a junction town it served its purpose, and the next day we got up early to strike south for the Gambia.

King of the Café

Written: 23 October 2002

I’d always believed that technology was one of the few international languages on this planet, along with Bob Marley and football, but when I tried to explain my plans to the woman behind the counter at the internet café in Kaolack, I realised that not only do the French have different keyboards, they have completely different terminology too.

‘I wonder if you can help me,’ I ventured in my best French, and she inclined her head in a noncommittal kind of way. ‘I’ve got a little computer here, and a connecting cable, and I’d like to hook it up to one of your PCs, copy some files across, and then email them. Is this possible?’

She looked at me as if I’d just asked her whether she sold rainbow-coloured camels, and burst into something that was once probably French, but which contained precisely no words that I could recognise. I took a deep breath, tried repeating my request, and again got nothing but utter confusion. This, I realised, was getting both of us absolutely nowhere, so I smiled at her as best I could and escaped into the road.

That evening I was at a bit of a loose end, so I thought I might as well try again. There’s something about uploading my writing that combines satisfaction and relief; once it’s on the server it’s safe, and it also means people back home can get their heads round what I’m actually doing here (something I often wonder myself). This time there was a man behind the counter, so I tried my well-rehearsed French banter on him; yet again I got little more than a furrowed brow, though at least this time he looked more interested in what I was trying to say.

‘OK, I tell you what,’ I said. ‘Can I show you what I want to do, and you can watch me do it?’

‘All right,’ he replied, introducing himself as Mustapha and pointing me towards his computer. I figured I had to get him interested on a technical level; if there’s one thing that techies love, it’s technology, and I doubted he’d seen anything quite like my pocket Palm computer before. I was right.

The first thing that blew his mind was when I wrote on the screen of my Palm; his face lit up as the word bonjour appeared in front of his eyes. The next thing that made his jaw drop was my fold-out keyboard, which he couldn’t believe; he was so impressed he called his friends over, and they all ooh-ed and ahh-ed in chorus as I unfolded it and plugged it in.

Sensing the crowd’s interest, I seized the moment by explaining in halting French that I was going to take the stuff I’d written on my foldout keyboard, copy it to Mustapha’s computer, and then put it onto the Web, so anyone could read it from anywhere in the world. They all laughed, completely caught up in the game, and clearly thinking I was mad.

‘I am keen to learn what you know,’ Mustapha said, as I started copying files from my Palm to his PC. ‘I only know about fixing computers, I don’t know about what you are doing.’

‘Well, it’s quite easy,’ I said, and started to explain how I was doing it, throwing in the odd bit of jargon that I hoped he’d recognise and generally involving him in the whole process. He loved it; I’d struck the raw techie nerve, and we were transcending cultural and language barriers.

‘Now that I’ve copied the files to your machine, I’m going to copy them to my website like this,’ I said, firing up a little window with which I could talk to my server in California. ‘See? There, they’re copying. And now... look, there they are, on the Web.’

And with that I held up my Palm screen and showed him one of the articles I’d written, and then showed him the same page on the Internet. He couldn’t believe it – as far as he was concerned I’d just performed magic, and he looked at me, looked at the screen, and laughed his head off, explaining to his friends in Wolof what I’d just done. They murmured their appreciation.

‘Can you come back tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘I’d really like you to show this to the boss.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m off to Banjul in the morning.’

‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘I’d love you to teach us how you did that. I only know how to fix computers.’

‘Well, that’s an area I know nothing about,’ I said. ‘I have no idea how these things work inside, so you’re way cleverer than me in that department.’

‘The computer I have been working on was submerged in water for a month,’ said Mustapha proudly. ‘I have just got it working after two days’ repairing work.’

‘A month underwater?’ I said. ‘Blimey, now that really is magic.’ And I shook his hand with feeling, reckoning that anyone who can resurrect a computer from that sort of treatment is pretty good at his job. From computers to old cars, the West Africans manage to keep things going well beyond the stage where they’d be thrown away in the West, and although portable computers and Internet publishing might be cool, people like Mustapha genuinely make the world go round.

What a pity, then, that the regulars at the café should find my magic more impressive than his; I guess familiarity breeds contempt.

The Gambia: The Coast

Banjul

Written: 24 October 2002

I’m a little loath to ascribe such importance to the language barrier when travelling, but it’s amazing how much difference crossing the border from Senegal into the Gambia has made. The Gambia – one of the few countries whose official name starts with ‘the’ – is a long, thin and very small country that follows the bends of the River Gambia due east from the river’s mouth on the Atlantic coast, and apart from this coastal region, the country is entirely surrounded by Senegal. From end to end the Gambia is about 300km long but it only averages 35km in width, but even more bizarre is the fact that they speak English here, as it used to be a British colony.

At the border the linguistic change is instant. In Senegal, English isn’t a great deal of use, and without at least basic French, communication is tough. But as soon as you cross into the Gambia, English takes over with an almost imperceptible transition; signs are in English, the locals speak English, and for the English-speaking traveller it instantly feels less alien and more comfortable.

The difference it makes is amazing. Within a couple of minutes of entering the Gambia I felt completely at ease, and it wasn’t long before I was joking with the Gambian touts as they tried to sell me dalasis, something I’d find hard to do in French (the dalasi is the local currency in Gambia; being an ex-British colony, it doesn’t use the CFA). When you’re speaking your native language it’s so much easier to understand subtleties of communication, and for the first time in a fortnight I feel as if I can actually talk to people. Irritating salesmen stop being annoying and become targets for a bit of banter, and I immediately feel happier and more relaxed in the Gambia than I did at any time in Senegal. I’m looking forward to exploring the place.

Capital Village

Our first destination was Banjul, capital of the Gambia, though it’s hard to believe that this compact town is actually a capital city. The Gambia is a small country but Banjul is tiny, especially by African standards, with only 50,000 inhabitants (the whole county is home to around 1.2 million people). The result is a pleasant, hassle-free city that’s clean, friendly and quite unlike large cities like Dakar.

We stayed in Banjul for one night, eating well, drinking well and feeling pretty buoyant. I was in Senegal for just two-and-a-half weeks, but that was long enough for me to find Banjul almost nostalgic, especially when I discovered that they sell Guinness Foreign Export here, a pleasant version of the black stuff that makes a welcome change from the ubiquitous lagers of Francophone Africa. Indeed, adverts for Guinness are everywhere; evidently a clever advertising executive has persuaded the West Africans that not only is Guinness good for you, but it also improves your sex drive, resulting in such slogans as ‘Guinness – The Power’ and ‘Guinness is Good for You’. Even Guinness TV adverts are an art form, based around a black James Bond figure called Michael Power, who ends up performing superhuman feats of daring and cunning while rescuing his beautiful girlfriend from the clutches of an evil gang... all while under the influence of Guinness, of course. It’s hilariously unconvincing, and as a role model Michael Power owes more to western capitalism than African tribalism, but Guinness still sells by the bucketload, so they must be doing something right.

So Banjul feels nothing like the capital city of a West African country, and it’s a huge relief. I’m not going to need my French dictionary for a while, and that feels damn good.

Bumster Trouble

Written: 26 October 2002

Speaking the official language of a foreign country doesn’t just make life easier; it also makes life more amusing, not least because you can understand the local media. As I strolled round the Gambia’s Atlantic beach resorts this morning, the headline of the local newspaper caught my eye: ‘Mass Arrest of Bumsters’ proclaimed the front page of the Sunday Observer, while inside there were plenty of other notable headlines, including ‘Football Witchcraft Palaver’, ‘Surgeons Deliver 46-year-old Foetus’ and ‘Student Surprised to See Black Hole Eat Star’. What a paper; I just had to buy it, if only to find out what a bumster was.

Touts are a basic fact of life in the tourist areas of Africa, but in the Gambia they’re infamous, not so much for their voracity as for their nickname; everyone, from newspapers to policemen, calls them ‘bumsters’, which makes it practically impossible to take them seriously. Bumsters are young, unemployed youths who hang round the beaches of the Gambia, hustling tourists and trying to make money any way they can. The Gambia has high unemployment and no welfare system, so for school dropouts it’s not easy to make ends meet, and being a bumster is an obvious temptation. Tourists are rich, stupid and easy meat, and it sure beats having to work the peanut fields for a living.

It does make wandering around the beaches challenging for visitors, though, as we found out yesterday within a few minutes of arriving in Fajara, one of the resort areas on the Atlantic coast. The taxi dropped us off at a pleasant-sounding hotel, but unfortunately it hadn’t got enough room, so we started wandering round the area, peering at the map and generally looking like little lost toubabs.

One guy latched on to us and said he knew a great place just down the road that might be suitable. The map in my guidebook seemed to bear no relationship to reality, so we figured we might as well go along with him, but by the time we decided to follow him, the word had spread. As if by magic, bumsters started materialising out of thin air.

‘Hey, how ya doin’, you wan’ room, I have good room, give you good price, where you from?’ they chanted, by now numbering eight with others homing in, seemingly appearing out of thin air from under rocks and from behind bushes. ‘This place you go, very good, we show you good place, no?’

The problem was I couldn’t take them seriously at all. One guy, a particularly ugly specimen, was wearing a red string vest and baggy shorts, and he couldn’t have looked more gay if he’d tried; given that this guy was known to everyone round here as a ‘bumster’, I had trouble keeping a straight face. Surely even the baking sun of the Gambia isn’t strong enough to make people think that red string vests are cool, is it? I idly wondered if Fajara was the seaside equivalent of Soho; these guys certainly looked sleazy enough.

‘If you want another place, I find you good place,’ the chorus continued, and meanwhile our initial guide, who was keeping quiet and seemed almost as irritated by the bum-boys as we were, led us to the hotel he’d mentioned. In we went, trailing an entourage that positively reeked of 1980s gay chic, and found a lovely apartment for four at D850 per night that sported satellite TV, air conditioning and loads of space. We took it.

However, it looked like the bumsters were still interested in hanging round with us, and they loitered outside the apartment, looking like they might start break-dancing or moon-walking at any moment. The lady renting the apartment explained that they wanted some money for their help, but we told her that apart from the initial guy they’d been nothing but a bunch of rude louts, so she told them to leave, and we slipped the guy who’d shown us the hotel a D10 note as a thank you.

Five minutes later, as we basked in the warm glow of CNN, the lady came back and said the guide was outside, and wanted a word with us. It seemed our bumster friends were proving harder to shake off than dog shit in the tread of your Doc Martens, but when Chris went to investigate he found out that our guide had been rolled by his bumster friends, and they’d stolen his D10 tip. He wanted another one, and as he seemed genuine enough we handed it over, resigned to the fact that we’d never know if this was yet another scam. Toubab tax is a funny beast...

Apart from one niggling bumster who tried to talk to Sarah and got soundly ignored by all of us, we haven’t had any more hassle from the local irritants, which is weird after yesterday’s baptism by fire. But today’s paper explains all; yesterday more than 200 bumsters were arrested by the Gambia National Guard, which was deployed in the tourist area following increased reports of hassle. According to the report the bumsters are being detained before being ‘transferred to Sapu, Jahali and Pacharr Rice Development Fields to engage in meaningful agricultural work’, which sounds pretty extreme, but at least it means that our newfound string-vested friends are probably digging paddy fields by now. Happily, the guy who showed us the hotel is still kicking around, so it seems justice has been served and the bumster threat has been eradicated from the Atlantic coast... for now, anyway.

Like 1980s gay fashion, though, I have a bad feeling that they’ll be back...

Two Days Later...

Unfortunately the effects of the police swoop on the bumster population are starting to wear off. The path from our hotel to the beach, previously a pleasant stroll through trees and past hotels to the white curve of the Kotu shoreline, has started springing ugly surprises every few paces. One particularly repugnant troll has taken up residence in the bushes by the road, and whenever any of us walk past he springs out, yelling, ‘Hey, hey, how you doing?’ Ignoring him elicits louder protestations, until you have no choice but to acknowledge him; I had my first experience of our new neighbour as I wandered down to the beach this afternoon.

‘Uh,’ I said without breaking my stride.

‘Hey, where were you yesterday?’ he asked.

‘Yesterday?’ I asked, thinking that I might be able to string him along by simply repeating the last word he said each time. Deep in my mind, a voice said, ‘Do not feed the monkeys.’ I tried to ignore it.

‘It was my wedding yesterday,’ continued the bumster. ‘Where were you?’

‘Where was I?’ I repeated, sticking to my guns.

‘Yeah. I got married.’

‘Married?’

‘Married. Why weren’t you there?’

This threw me, and for a split second I forgot all about repeating things. This perfect stranger was asking me why I hadn’t been at his wedding – this required further investigation. The voice in my head repeated its warning, but I’d been bumstered, and I heard myself engaging before my brain could step in.

‘But I don’t know you. I’ve never seen you before,’ I said.

‘Yes, from Friday, I showed you to your hotel, Golf Apartments, you remember.’

Oh god, I thought, this was probably one of those string-vested morons from the other day. ‘Sorry mate, I don’t know you,’ I said, and strode on.

‘You come and meet my wife,’ he said. ‘She’s just over here.’

‘Listen my friend,’ I lied. ‘Perhaps you should go and meet your wife, because it’s a little sad to be inviting perfect strangers round the day after your wedding. Now I don’t know you, and I’m going to the beach. Goodbye.’

‘You’re very rude,’ he said.

‘You should hear me when I’m angry,’ I said, and hit the road, only to find the guy who’d found us the hotel a few yards down the road. I thought I could trust this one; he’d been rolled by the others, for a start, and he had a happy face.

‘Hello’, he said.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘I am well,’ he said. ‘I am working over here.’

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘I am making tea’, he said, ‘but I have no sugar. Can you help me?’

‘Um, sorry, I’m clean out of sugar,’ I said.

‘Perhaps you can give me five dalasi for sugar then?’ he tried.

‘Oh really, not you as well,’ I thought, and repeated my get-out clause: ‘No thanks, I just don’t have the time. Sorry, I’m off to the beach.’

This time I ran. And to think, this was the off-season...

Fajara

Written: 27 October 2002

The thing that surprises me most about the Atlantic beach resorts of the Gambia is how unlike most beach resorts they are. When reading about them beforehand, I’d envisaged high-rise hotels, nightclubs spilling onto the beach, and fat tourists with their arses hanging out of their swimming shorts. The only one I’ve managed to find is the latter, and that only once (though it was a depressingly memorable sight).

Once we’d shaken off the bumster curse and found our home for the weekend, we decided to explore and soon discovered that the coastal resort towns of Bakau, Fajara, Kotu and Kololi, which from south to north make up the Gambia’s Atlantic tourist area, are tiny. Perhaps it’s the effect of the off-season, but these places feel nothing like beach resorts in the same way that Banjul feels nothing like a capital city. They’re far too laid-back and pleasant for that (bumsters notwithstanding).

Unable to get my head round the relatively clean streets, the lack of bumster hassle and the ease with which I can communicate with the locals, today I decided to walk 4km inland to Serekunda, which the guidebook says is the unofficial capital of the Gambia, the transport hub for the whole country, and ‘a taste of unrelenting in-your-face urban West Africa.’ It actually turned out to be a relatively docile African town, with hardly any touts, an interestingly squalid market and shops selling everything from electronics to furniture, but it wasn’t anything to write home about, and I can only assume it’s a different story in the tourist season. In October, Serekunda, like Banjul and the Atlantic resorts, is a taste of unrelenting, in-your-face, chilled-out West Africa.

Perhaps the insanity lurks just beneath the surface, waiting for the tourists to scratch it into life. Bumsters are one thing, but it seems that even officials can be patently idiotic. Yesterday morning, for example, we visited Bijilo Forest Park, a pleasant stretch of rainforest to the south that’s home to lots of tourist-tainted wildlife. The monkeys of Bijilo are fun to watch as they’re completely used to humans and don’t run away as soon as you see them, but this isn’t necessarily such a good thing; feeding monkeys in parks like this can make them dependent on the generosity of tourists, and this can lead to violent behavioural problems, which is why there are signs plastered all over the park entrance asking people not to feed the monkeys.

But this is Africa, and putting up signs doesn’t really amount to much. I saw two groups of tourists feeding the monkeys peanuts, and when we stumbled across the third bunch happily handing over the monkey’s lunch, I noticed they had an official guide with them (we’d declined the offers of a guide at the gate, figuring we could work the paths out ourselves).

‘You’re feeding the monkeys,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ the guide said gleefully. ‘The monkeys love it.’

‘But you aren’t supposed to feed the monkeys,’ Sarah said.

‘But they love it,’ he repeated. ‘Do you want to feed them?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It isn’t good for the monkeys.’

‘Are you forestry people?’ the guide asked.

‘Yeah,’ we chorused, hoping this would scare him into submission.

‘Then you should not feed the monkeys,’ he said, and turned back to his troupe of pasty toubabs, who by this stage were dangerously smothered in peanut-grabbing simians. Faced with such bizarre logic, I just shrugged my shoulders and headed back to the beach, making a mental note not to believe officials any more than bumsters.

The Gambia: Along the River Gambia

Tendaba

Written: 28 October 2002

The Atlantic coast resorts might have been pleasant, but two days into the relaxing beach lifestyle, I was already champing at the bit. CNN and BBC World take only a couple of days to go from elixir to irritant, so despite the sinking feeling that I get whenever I think about long journeys and African public transport, I persuaded myself to leave the cosy glow of our bungalow for eastern Gambia. Happily Chris decided to come with me; public transport is not only cheaper with two, it’s easier to bear. Just.

The first step – getting from our hotel to the bus station – was a fairly easy taxi ride, and by now I’ve got the hang of the buses too: you pick the one that’s going to your destination and which has got the biggest number of people in it, ignoring the touts who will try to steer you to their bus despite the fact it is completely empty. You pay for your seat (a fixed price) and for your luggage (whatever you can get them to accept), and sit and wait for the bus to fill up.

‘Fill up’ is the right phrase, because there’s always room for one more. The average Gambian minibus sits around 30 people, plus driver, screaming babies and squawking chickens, but it’s hard to be exact, as they’re not designed to take that many. If the same minibus were being used in the West, there would be the driver plus two in the front, then four rows of four people, and then two rows of two down the sides at the back. That’s a total of 22 people plus the driver, but in our minibus I counted 30 people, a driver, two babies and occasionally a tout hanging off the back on the lookout for more fares.

Not only are the buses in this part of the world crammed to bursting point, they’re also decorated with the most intriguing collection of stickers and posters. Along with the taxis, the buses have stickers plastered over the backs and sides, most of them proclaiming allegiance to a marabout brotherhood (in which case the sticker is of a guy looking suspiciously like the evil Emperor in Star Wars), or to Allah (in which case Koranic quotations are the order of the day). But a hugely popular and completely mysterious sticker is of Madonna in her ‘Material Girl’ period, bending her head back and blowing a kiss at the camera. She’s dolled up in clothing that screams ‘1980s!’ at you, and every time it’s exactly the same sticker. It’s a really common picture, and it’s faintly disturbing; religion and politics I can understand, but 1980s Madonna? Goodness only knows where that fad came from.

Whatever the logic behind the bus decorations, the Gambians more than make up for it: they’re a delightful bunch. We had to stop at six police checkpoints on the way, with everyone having to fish out their identity cards or passports before we could move on, adding five minutes to the journey for each checkpoint; the police are being particularly paranoid at the moment because the Casamance region of Senegal, which lies to the south of Gambia, is suffering from a fairly messy separatist movement and the Gambians don’t want to be blamed for harbouring terrorists. This didn’t seem to irritate the locals one bit; they just kept on smiling as the bus jolted along the road. The last third of the journey was along a road that looked like it had been carpet-bombed, and the bus bumped and ground through dusty potholes like a demented shopping trolley, and still the woman next to me cuddled her baby, breast-fed it every now and then, and smiled her sweet maternal smile. I even smiled myself, though sometimes it was hard to tell if I was smiling or grimacing from the pain of the nails that were thoughtfully protruding through the seat cushion beneath my battered bottom.

Getting to Tendaba

I’d picked Tendaba as a good-sounding spot because it’s isolated, being perched on the banks of the River Gambia some 5km north of the main road, along a dirt track. If ever anything sounded tranquil, Tendaba did, and as the bus dropped us at the village of Kwinella, at the southern end of the dirt track, things looked good. All we had to do was to get to the camp, so slinging our packs on our backs, we set off for the long haul to the river.

Not ten seconds into our jaunt we were met by Kwinella’s bumsters, who insisted that Tendaba was a really long way away, and that unless we were completely crazy, we’d be much happier if we took a donkey cart. They said they’d charge D75, and we laughed; the bus ride had only been D45, so we said we’d only pay D20. They laughed and came down to D60, and we moved up to D30, but then the bartering suddenly stopped. ‘You come talk to the man with the donkey,’ they said. ‘He make you good price.’

The man with the donkey, though, turned out to be a complete wanker. He sat there, sucking on a filter cigarette, and refused to even look at us. He spoke in Mandinka to his bumsters, who relayed the message, ‘He say D100.’ We said we’d pay D30, and the donkey man gave a shrug that said, ‘Stop wasting my time and get out of my shop,’ so we did just that, leaving him with no money, no business, and nothing to do but sit there, sucking on his filter.

It’s weird, this aspect of Senegambian bartering. In Asia there’s a definite desire to make a sale, to the point where they’ll run after you if you walk out of a bartering session in mock disgust; unless you are really hard-nosed, there’s always a price that everyone’s happy with, and it’s much more of a game to get there. In Senegal and the Gambia you’re made to feel as if you’re an inconvenience, someone who’s stopping the vendor from doing something far more important, and that unless you pay their price, you’re just being rude. There’s no feeling of the game, and it’s really wearing, especially when there are middlemen involved. Stomping off doesn’t seem to work; it seems that people round here are happy to let sales go if they can’t be bothered to haggle, even though everyone is depressingly poor. It’s odd, but if they don’t want to play the game, that’s fine; it’s their country, after all.

Despite the irritating arrogance of the donkey man, I was looking forward to Tendaba. Here we were, striking out along a 5km dirt track to a lodge on the river, and it felt good to be on the move again; I really didn’t mind a walk to get there. It was almost a shame, then, when we wandered past the local school and got accosted by children, who tried to persuade us to take their donkey carts to Tendaba; they said it would cost D75, we said we’d pay D20, they came down to D40, and we met in the middle at D30. Before we knew it we’d found transport, and our drivers introduced themselves as Yahya (17) and Abdoulie (18), both of whom were in Form 9R.

‘You come this way for donkey cart,’ said Yahya, turning off into the centre of Kwinella. On the way he bumped into his dad and we shook hands, his dad looking as confused at our English ‘hellos’ as we were at his Mandinkan ‘al be ñaading’, and after a short wander through the surprisingly clean village streets, we arrived at Yahya’s house. He showed us into his bedroom and said he’d be back in five minutes with the donkey cart.

Yahya’s bedroom was both typically teenage and totally African. The blue whitewashed walls were mostly bare, and his bed was nothing more than a concrete base with a hard, lumpy straw mattress on top, but dotted round the walls were posters and magazine cuttings that were strangely familiar. Two posters of black American rap stars proclaimed that Monica, Usher and Romeo were ‘bad boyz’ and ‘hot stars’, and that the Californian Boyz (that’s Shaggy, Snoop Dogg, Mystikal, IMx, Lil Bow Wow, Master P and Lil Romeo) were ‘fabolous’, while the Jamaican reggae star Capleton looked mean and moody next to a picture of fellow singer Luciano in a garish Ethiopian shirt. Stuck on the wall above a stack of blue UNICEF exercise books was a cutout of pop idol Gareth Gates being drooled over by two pubescent girls, with a caption proclaiming, ‘Female fans look to have their wicked way with the ex-choir boy.’ Hiding among the snippets were shots of Posh and Becks sporting tattoos in Hindi, an action poster of the Brazilian footballer Rivaldo, and beneath a clock that was stuck on 12 minutes to three was the obligatory shot of Madonna, this time in a thankfully modern pose. There wasn’t one African singer in the whole room; the US, the UK and Jamaica dominated the entire collection.

While we waited on the bed admiring Yahya’s posters, the women of the house shyly poked their heads in and giggled, shaking our hands when we beamed hello and made our best efforts to show we wouldn’t bite. They were delightfully confused as to what two toubabs were doing in Yahya’s bedroom, but we obviously provided them with a fair dose of entertainment, as they made sure everyone from the immediate neighbourhood came round to take a look. We smiled, we sweated, and we fervently prayed that Yahya wouldn’t take too long, but true to his word he was back in five minutes, and he showed us to our transport with Abdoulie in tow.

It turned out to be a bloody good job that the boys had persuaded us to hop on the cart, as it took us about an hour to rattle along the hot, dusty road to Tendaba, and although we would have made it by foot, it would have been a hard slog in the hot sun with a full backpack. As it was, for D15 each (about 45p) we had a wonderful time bouncing along the dirt track to the sound of clip-clopping donkey hooves, and by the time we rocked up at Tendaba, we were ready for a shower.

It was a bit of a shock, then, to hear those chilling words, ‘We’re sorry, we’re full.’ My heart sank; we’d got this far, and our plans lay scuppered at the bottom of the River Gambia.

Conference City

It turned out that we’d timed it badly, and Tendaba’s 150 beds were currently hosting two conferences, one a training week for Peace Corps volunteers, and the other a conference for the UN Peacekeeping Force. I couldn’t believe it; instead of arriving at an isolated paradise, we’d taken a taxi, rattled for three-and-a-half hours on a bus and bumped for an hour on a donkey cart to arrive at a bloody conference centre.

I looked at the wall, where a sign pointing to the ‘Conference Hall’ proclaimed, ‘For your dedication, devotion and development by action, we wish you a successful implementation.’ This cheered me up, as I love the way Gambian English sounds like it’s been put through a computerised translation system, but I guess my face must still have looked rather miserable, because the man behind the bar asked us to wait; thankfully he returned a few minutes later to say that the boss had said we would have somewhere to sleep, and that we should stay here for a while. I could have kissed the man; the thought of having to head back to the road was more than I could bear.

I felt a little differently two hours later, when we were still waiting for signs of activity. The Peace Corps had broken for coffee and returned to their riverside flip charts and we’d had an extremely leisurely lunch, but still there was no sign of a room. And then the man signalled us over to the bar.

‘You know that I say we are very busy,’ he said, and my heart sank into my boots again. I looked at the man’s hotel T-shirt, which amusingly boasted, ‘A million mosquitoes can’t be wrong – Tendaba Camp is fabulous!’ and figured that sleeping out under the stars could turn out to be a life-threatening experience. ‘Well... I am afraid we can only offer you one room for the night. Is this OK?’

‘Great! No problem!’ we chorused, happy that at least we’d have a bed. I’d have taken anything at that point.

The ‘one room’ turned out to be a tiny hut housing the smallest double bed on the planet and precious little else, but fixing our stiff upper lips in place, Chris and I settled in, counting our blessings that we had a room at all. It was a long haul, but we got there.

Kiang West

Written: 29 October 2002

One of the things that amazes me about West Africa is how difficult things are for independent travellers. I didn’t expect there to be any kind of backpacker infrastructure – this is the developing world, after all – but not only is getting around a pig, exploring the destinations can be a real pain too. The tourist industry here is aimed squarely at people taking tours, where companies run air-conditioned buses from the hotels to the tourist attractions and back again, but I prefer to explore on my own itinerary, if only because tours are rarely realistic for single travellers; they’re often based on having four or six people, and if you don’t have that many like-minded friends, the only way to take the tour is to pay for the empty seats yourself, and that’s expensive.

Unfortunately it’s really difficult doing it any other way, and sometimes you have no choice but to take a tour to see what you want to see. Kiang West National Park, a haven for ornithologists a few kilometres downstream from Tendaba, is one such place; the only way to get there if you don’t have your own transport is to hop in a four-wheel-drive or pirogue, but even with two of us the price was steep. We asked about walking into the park, and it seemed that this didn’t compute; all we got in the way of response was, ‘It is much better if you are taking a guide, so you do not get lost.’ Given the complete lack of maps of the area, we had no idea what to do.

Luckily this morning a safari was going out with three spare places, and after a bit of bartering the price came down an acceptable D150 per person, so after breakfast Chris and I hopped aboard a jeep with Sally from Sussex, Joan from Wales, Lamin (a boy from a local village whom Sally and Joan were taking out for the day), a driver, and our guide, the intriguingly named ‘Wicked Wild’, a nickname that he’d apparently got because of his penchant for partying.

The idea behind the safari was to track down some baboons in the National Park, but in the end what we got was a bumpy ride through the heart of the park to the River Gambia, a few minutes at a beautiful viewpoint over the river at an escarpment called Toubabkollon Point, and precious little else. The baboons proved elusive, but luckily there was far more amusement to be had in the company of strangers.

Sally and Joan fascinated me. Larger than life in more ways than one, they were prime examples of the British abroad. Sally got married just down the river from Tendaba (to a Gambian, I presume, but she never said), recently bought a house not far from Banjul, and spent her time flitting back and forth between the UK and the Gambia, working in England because there wasn’t any work to be found in the Gambia; and Joan was a well-travelled hoot, and I smiled at the thought of her crammed on a Gambian bus, chatting to all the locals. I never worked out how Lamin fitted into the picture – he seemed completely bemused by the whole thing and didn’t say a word through the whole trip – but going on safari with Joan and Sally was like going bush with the cast of Birds of a Feather.

‘Ooh, this road’s awful,’ Sally would cry, as we hit another bump. ‘They do live all primitive out here, don’t they?’

‘Gawd, I keep expectin’ natives to jump out of the bushes,’ Joan would pant, as we wandered through the bush on the way to another unsuccessful attempt to spot baboons. ‘Have we much further to go, Wicked, ma boy?’

‘Oh, look at little Lamby swatting those flies,’ Sally would say. ‘I hope he don’t fall out of the back of the jeep. He don’t ‘alf give me the worries, that one.’

And so Sally and Joan piled on the Cockney and Welsh clichés as we bounded through the beautiful bush of Kiang West. We didn’t find any baboons and only saw a few pelicans and birds, but I couldn’t care less. Instead I was lucky enough to behold a couple of real British characters in the West African bush, and they were far more interesting than the native wildlife...

Tendaba to Jangjang Bureh

Written: 30 October 2002

Tendaba Camp, for all its pleasantries, refused to let me leave gracefully. Chris decided to head west back to Banjul and I opted to head east, so after nearly two weeks in the company of others I was going to be on my own again. The thought filled me with dread, because the next leg of my journey sounded terrible. Tendaba might be a conference centre but it’s still out in the middle of bloody nowhere.

The first hurdle was to get back to the main road. We asked about transport back to Kwinella and the woman behind the bar said that it was certainly possible... but in Africa everything is deemed ‘possible’. It’s turning the ‘possible’ into the ‘definite’ that’s the real challenge, it seems.

So we got up at 6.30am, grabbed breakfast and asked the staff to arrange a lift to the road, if they would be so kind, and they wobbled their heads, grinned that special grin that’s reserved for idiots like me who think things might actually go according to some kind of schedule, and said we should wait for the driver. So we waited.

And we waited, and waited, and waited, wondering if Tendaba was the African equivalent of Hotel California and whether we’d ever get started on the trek out of conference centre hell. The staff just kept asking us to wait a little longer, and every now and then our hopes would rise a little when we’d see someone who looked like a driver, but who would turn out to be nothing of the sort. One by one the minutes slowly ticked by, and I idled time away by counting the extra hours I could have spent in bed. Eventually at 9am, as I was nodding off on the table, our lift turned up. So much for the ultra-early start we’d hoped for.

We’d heaved ourselves out of bed at the crack of dawn because Tendaba has no bus station; Kwinella, the village back on the main road, is nothing more than a spot on the main highway through the Gambia, and whereas in the West there would be a bus stop with a timetable, in Kwinella there’s precious little more than a shelter made from branches and woven sticks. If the Gambia had tumbleweed, it would blow through Kwinella like an old friend, but even the breeze sits like a dejected hitcher on the side of the road, too hot to do anything but wait.

The idea is that you stand on the side of the road and wave at every bus that goes past until one stops. There are quite a few problems with this, though; as I may have mentioned, buses only leave Gambian bus stations when they are packed to the gills, so for a bus to pick you up in a place like Kwinella, someone needs to have got off the bus before they get to you, and that space still needs to be vacant by the time the bus reaches your neck of the woods. The roads of Africa are smothered in people waving down buses – or, more accurately, people waving at full buses as they rattle past, showering them in dust – and as the first, second, third, fourth and fifth buses rolled past, indicating with a hand signal that they were already full, my heart began to sink.

Add to this the fact that I wasn’t the only person trying to get a seat on an eastbound bus – there were about four locals heading the same way – and it doesn’t take a statistician to work out that I was in for a long wait. And this was only for the first leg, to the junction town of Soma, from where I’d have to catch another bus to Jangjang Bureh, my destination. I didn’t even want to think about how long I’d have to wait in Soma for the second bus to fill up, so to pass some time I thought I’d ask one of the locals how long we’d have to wait.

‘It is very tough,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders in a manner that I’m starting to recognise as the African Way. ‘Not enough buses, too many people, it is very tough.’

Just then a bus bumped into view on the horizon, heading west, and Chris jumped up, waving at the bus for all he was worth. It slowed to a halt, and with a yelp he grabbed his bag and ran to the back of the bus. There was one space left, but even quicker than Chris a local teacher had nipped in the back door, and leaving a gaggle of dejected hopefuls standing in the middle of the road, the bus pulled out, heading for Banjul. Chris slumped back to the side of the road; this interesting queuing technique added a further dimension to the task at hand.

‘It is tough,’ repeated my friend at the bus stop. ‘Very tough.’

‘You’re not wrong there,’ I sighed, and settled in for the wait.

An hour later things were no better. The sun was getting seriously hot, baking the road and making the air shimmer in the distance. After two hours and another rattling collection of full buses, I couldn’t help wondering whether we were going to end up slinking back to Tendaba with our tails between our legs, ready to try it all over again tomorrow.

Then a bus appeared on the horizon and I leapt up, grinning in what I hoped was a reassuringly friendly manner. It slowed down, I yelled ‘Soma! Soma!’ at the top of my voice, and the driver indicated there was one space. I grabbed my bags and leapt for the back of the bus faster than a bumster at the rustle of dollar bills.

‘One for Soma?’ I asked, trying to look like the sort of person you’d really want to have on your bus. The crowd behind me tried the same trick but Allah was smiling on me, and the ticket man pointed at the spare seat and pointed at me, and I jumped on and sat down before you could say, ‘You’ve saved my life!’

Shouting goodbye to Chris, I squashed into my row, handing over D10 and thanking my lucky stars that I’d managed to escape from Tendaba. I still had some way to go to Jangjang Bureh, but the first hurdle was behind me.

Shooting Through Soma

Half an hour later the bus arrived in Soma and I hopped off, shouting ‘Jangjang Bureh’ in the hope that I’d be steered towards the next bus heading that way. A couple of likely lads tried to persuade me to hop into their totally empty minibus, but I laughed and said, ‘There are no people in this bus – I want one with people!’

‘OK, over here,’ they said. ‘One place free.’

I couldn’t believe it. There was the bus for Jangjang Bureh, and it had just one seat free, a seat with my name on it. I bought my ticket from the ticket man, squashed into the front row, and two minutes after I’d arrived in Soma I was heading east again. This was too good to be true – in the space of 50 minutes I’d gone from standing dejected on the side of the road to sitting on a bus that was going right where I wanted to go.

A couple of hours later the bus arrived at the ferry crossing from the south bank of the River Gambia to MacCarthy Island, home to the town of Jangjang Bureh. At precisely the same time a bus full of tourists pulled up at the ferry, and as they piled off their air-conditioned bus onto the tiny two-car ferry, I hauled my pack on my back and wandered among them, a smelly traveller among pressed and clean toubabs. They completely blanked me but their tour guide, a happy-looking Gambian, struck up a conversation, and we whiled away the two-minute crossing with friendly small talk. On the other side I started looking for something to take me the final 2.5km to Jangjang Bureh, but I couldn’t see anything anywhere, and I wondered what on earth I was supposed to do now that I was so close to the end.

Seeing no option, I sidled up to the tour guide and asked him if he knew of any buses to the town. ‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you a lift.’ And with that he hauled my pack into the bus and I plonked myself down among the sullen-looking collection of scrubbed tourists, wondering whether I really smelled as bad as I thought I did. Pulling into Jangjang Bureh the guide pointed me to various accommodation options, and beaming my best smile at him and his grumpy cohorts, I stepped off the bus and kissed the ground.

Phew.

Travelling Cushion

Written: 30 October 2002

Even though I’ve only been on the road for just over three weeks, I think it’s safe to say that travelling in West Africa is hard going. A Spanish guy I met in Tendaba Camp summed it up rather well: ‘I think travelling here is for masochists,’ he said. ‘If you visit once, you can put it down to accident, but if you keep coming back, you must be a little bit crazy.’ I couldn’t agree more; travelling here hurts.

The pain is both physical and mental. The physical demands are pretty obvious: buses are hellishly crowded and travelling through the heat of the day is a real test of endurance, and that’s before you consider the awful state of the roads and the hours you spend waiting for the bloody things to fill up; eating healthily is challenging, and there’s always the hidden threat of something dodgy lurking under the surface of every meal; you need to drink buckets of water throughout the day, and it needs to be clean and bacteria-free; mosquitoes are absolutely everywhere, and although malaria is the constant worry, the bites themselves itch for days and are fantastically irritating; and as if the days aren’t testing enough, it takes ages to get used to the concrete-base beds and rock-hard pillows, so getting a good night’s sleep is never guaranteed.

The mental pain is sometimes harder to bear. Travelling is an emotional roller-coaster, doubly so when you’re travelling on your own, and sometimes finding the mental strength to get up and go is a real struggle, especially when you know your journey from A to B is going to involve police checks at C, D, E, F and G, a change of bus and a two-hour wait at H, a flat tyre at I, touts flocking round you at J and K, and a bony neighbour’s elbow in your ribs as the bus ploughs through potholes at L, M, N and most of the other letters through to Z (and that’s without considering all the extra characters on those bloody French keyboards). Somehow when there are two of you it doesn’t seem half as bad, as you can wallow in the masochistic absurdity of it all; but when you’re on your own, it’s hard to do anything other than just wallow.

There are two things I find essential when trying to cope with the stress. The first – a simple psychological tool that sounds slightly obsessive but which really helps – is drawing lines on the map. After a long, bone-shattering rattle across the baking semi-desert, the first thing I do after showering off the detritus of African transport is to grab my map and draw a thick, black line along the route I’ve just taken. It’s strange how such a little thing can mean so much, but it does all sorts of things; it makes me feel as if I’ve just achieved something, it makes me proud that I’ve risen to another chunk of the challenge, and it puts the day in context with all these other black lines I’ve drawn. Sometimes the line is short and sometimes it’s long, so to make sure I get the maximum effect I carry two maps with me; one is the Michelin 953, the classic travellers’ map of northwest Africa, and the other is a locally bought map of whichever country I’m struggling through. The line on the local map is normally quite impressive and the line on the Michelin map is always minuscule, but together they work as a record of my trip, a confidence boost, and an aide-mémoire.

Ah, the Memories

Having an aide-mémoire is important because the second way I cope with difficult travelling is by building up memories. I know from previous trips that one of the most magical aspects of travelling is the wonderful store of memories it gives you, from horror stories to mind-blowing experiences. You don’t remember everything, by any means, but the mind has a delightful habit of storing the best memories at the top of the pile, and it even manages to conjure up happy memories from places where I know I was totally miserable. It’s a clever bugger, the mind.

The best thing is that these selective memories help to cushion the physical and mental stress of difficult travelling, and this cushion kicks in incredibly quickly. For example, as I write this in a delightful riverside camp by the River Gambia in Jangjang Bureh, I cast my mind back to places like Dakar and St-Louis, some three weeks away, and I remember good things about them. I remember the cosy little Via Via hotel in Yoff, the atmosphere of Île de Gorée, my first bush taxi ride, the beach huts on L’Hydrobase near St-Louis... and I think of these as good things, though my travelogue tells me I was completely bloody miserable for the whole first week. I was totally homesick, missing Peta, full of doubt, isolated by language difficulties, not terribly enamoured with either Dakar or St-Louis, and I got bitten to shit in my lovely beach hut... but my brain seems to have filtered out the bad bits. This always happens; I find myself thinking happy thoughts about all my travels, even those that I absolutely hated at the time.

But travelling is like eating loads of Christmas pudding to get the charm (or it is for me, as I’m not that big a fan of Christmas pud). You have to put in the time, and you know that there’s a chance your bowl will contain absolutely no charms at all... but it’s worth all the effort to get the bachelor’s button, the traveller’s aeroplane or the silver sixpence. So even when things are going badly, and I’m left wondering what on earth I’m doing struggling round this infuriating, frustrating and downright obstructive continent, I conjure up my memories, and it cushions the blow. I still get bus bruises on my arse, but I know that eventually it’ll all seem worth it...

London Calling

Written: 31 October 2002

It was Chris who set me off when we were still back on the Atlantic coast. I’ve never been terribly interested in the radio – DJs never seem to play the music I like, and I’ve only recently matured enough to appreciate Radio Four as something other than ‘the station my mum listens to’ – so when he announced he was going to pop into Serekunda to buy a radio, I didn’t bat an eyelid. But that was before I discovered the joys of travelling with a short-wave in your backpack.

Chris returned that afternoon, D250 lighter and 200g heavier, and sitting down with a copy of the BBC magazine Focus in Africa, he started hunting the airwaves for entertainment. Hidden behind layers of static and rhythmic washing sounds, a voice struggled through the haze with, ‘This is the BBC,’ before fading into the ether. That was enough to get me hooked; I’m not that bothered with the concept of actually listening to the World Service, but I do like the idea of spending hours trying to track down a signal from home. I’ve just spent the last year working among the multicultural staff of the World Service in Bush House, and the thought of being stranded in the middle of nowhere and being able to pick up signs of life from back home gives me a thrill. As a weapon against homesickness, it doesn’t get much better than hearing from home, even if it’s via the BBC.

Chris’ experiment was enough to persuade me into Serekunda the next day, but it was a Sunday, and all the shops were shut. I asked around and managed to find nothing but shutters under the electronics signs, but then I spotted a little shop selling TVs and fans, and wandering over I found an Indian man minding a counter full of pocket radios. At first he tried to convince me to pay D350, but I told him I was going to pay D250 because that’s what Chris had paid, and that I wanted that model just there – a multiple-band model with a digital display, alarm clock, and a natty little carrying pouch. He valiantly tried to distract me from my choice with a whole range of radios, so I politely smiled as he fished out models from the likes of SQNY, Philibs, Toshaba and countless other brands that sounded strangely familiar but which were clearly nothing to do with SONY, Philips or Toshiba. I guess the intellectual property laws in the Gambia aren’t that sophisticated – either that, or nobody’s counting – so I picked a brand that didn’t sound so blatantly illegal, and two minutes later I was the proud owner of a Techtron Japan eight-band FM/MW/SW radio. I couldn’t wait to get it home.

Having played with my new toy for the last few days, I can report that it works a treat, though sometimes the reception of the BBC is practically unlistenable. But this is half the point: struggling to hear the odd word is part of the fun of listening to the radio on the road, and trawling through the airwaves is a fun way to kill an hour or so. An added bonus is that as you move through the continent, the range of available channels changes completely, and in English-speaking countries like the Gambia, the local stations are often in English, and if you’re really lucky they’re in an English-patois hybrid that’s intelligible yet exotically African.

I doubt it’ll turn me into a radio fan back home, but having a radio is a hoot on the road. I am most definitely a convert.

Jangjang Bureh

Written: 1 November 2002

The old colonial town of Georgetown – now officially renamed Jangjang Bureh after its pre-colonial name – is a delightful spot, perched on MacCarthy Island in the middle of the River Gambia. Like St-Louis it’s the location rather than the town itself that lends the place such a pleasant ambience, and after the stress of the journey from Tendaba, ambience was exactly what I needed.

Jangjang Bureh Camp, which I plucked randomly from the book, has turned out to be a fantastic little place to stay. On the north bank of the River Gambia, a free ferry ride away from Jangjang Bureh itself, the camp has no electricity and oodles of charm. My hut is large and airy and is sheltered from the baking heat by huge trees, and as the sun sets over the river and the mosquitoes come out to party, the staff bring out kerosene lanterns to cast eerie shadows through the long night. Only one other guest shared the tranquillity on my first night, a friendly Dutchman who was cycling from Banjul, through the Gambia, into southern Senegal and back up to Dakar.

It turned out that Chris and I had spotted him a couple of days earlier, as we rumbled along on the bus from Fajara to Tendaba. ‘Look at that’, I said, pointing to the lone white guy, swerving round the potholes on his heavily laden bicycle. ‘Mad bloody toubab,’ said Chris, and although I was tempted to agree with him, the Dutchman turned out to be amazingly sane and excellent company. We happily chatted away as the river flowed gently past, its peaceful waters looking more like a lake than a river (the river drops only 10m in its 450km stretch through the Gambia, so it’s hardly a fast-flowing torrent).

As I raised my glass to wish my cycling companion a safe journey to Dakar, I suddenly realised I’d drawn the lines on my map, survived the Tendaba bus experience and landed in a lantern-lit paradise. God, it felt good.

The Freedom Tree

The next day – yesterday – I set off to explore the old colonial town of Jangjang Bureh. MacCarthy Island was bought by the British in 1823 at the request of a local king as a way of stamping out domestic slavery in the area; although slavery in British colonies was abolished in 1807, for years afterwards there were still large numbers of slaves kept in captivity, often as a result of inter-tribal rivalry. To help put an end to this, the British built a military base on MacCarthy Island called Fort George, and set it up as a place to which slaves could escape and be declared free by the colonial government.

The story goes that when the slaves arrived at the fort, they had to touch a tree in the town centre, and then their names were recorded in a register and they were deemed to be free. Unfortunately the original tree is no longer there, but a month before I arrived, on 12 September, ‘the Jangjang Bureh community held a ceremony to plant a new tree at the site, to celebrate a rebirth of our town and the freedom we all share’ (according to the brand new monument in the town centre). As I stood there admiring the Freedom Tree – or should I say the Freedom Twig, as that’s all it is at the moment – a man wandered up.

He introduced himself with some polite small talk, and pointing to a name on the monument he said, ‘That is me.’ I looked, and underneath the explanation of the tree planting ceremony was the name F M J Manka, Committee Chairman and Town Historian. It seemed I was talking to the Big Cheese, and what a lovely man he was. He explained all about the new Freedom Monument and the ongoing work in renovating Triangle Park (so called because – wait for it – it’s shaped like a triangle). It all came about through a collaboration between the Jangjang Bureh Town Development Committee (his committee), the US Peace Corps and the National Council for Arts and Culture, who built the walls round the park and helped plant a new tree. As I talked with Mr Manka a workman was laying a concrete path between the tree and a small building to the south, and Mr Manka told me that in two months’ time the garden will be full of flowers, and the building where the registrations of freed slaves took place will house a display all about the slave trade and the history of the local area. There will even be official guides to explain what was going on, and I hope it works out as planned; currently the lightning tours that most people take from the Atlantic resorts tend to whistle through town without stopping, but hopefully this development will give tourists something to stop and think about when they visit Jangjang Bureh.

Down by the Docks

It’s a different story down by the northern ferry jetty, where there’s a collection of old warehouses decaying into the river. These warehouses were built in the latter half of the 19th century, but that doesn’t stop the locals calling one of them the ‘slave house’ and trying to drum up business. A young lad sauntered up and introduced himself as Alex, and memories of the publicity stunt on Île de Gorée came flooding back; this looked like it could be fun, so I smiled and waited for him to make his move.

Alex insisted I come with him to check out the underground prisons in the slave house, and eager to see how the Gambians would compare with the Senegalese at this game, I followed him down into the basement of the strangely modern-looking house. As with Gorée, if I’d gone in there genuinely believing that this had been a slave house, it would have been pretty atmospheric, but seeing as I knew he was being economical with the truth, Alex wasn’t exactly convincing.

He warbled through stories of how men and women were tied up here and there, and were tortured in various horrible ways, and pointing to a puddle on the floor he explained how the chained slaves knelt down to drink there at high tide, the only time the puddle filled up. He lit candles and he tried his best to create an atmosphere of doom and gloom, and finally he showed me a guest book in which various visitors had written their names, along with the size of their ‘donations’ to the renovation fund. I still wasn’t convinced but I put D10 in the donation box, gave Alex D5, and told him it had been entertaining, but that I didn’t believe his stories. He looked a little surprised, but when I told him that I knew these buildings were built after the abolition of the slave trade, he faltered. He then corrected himself to say that all his stories were about the time before the abolition, and were about black men taking other black men prisoners to sell to the British, but by this stage even he realised he’d missed the boat. He half-heartedly tried to explain a bit more about the house, and offered to show me round the other buildings on the river bank, but I told him I was perfectly happy wandering round by myself, so thanks very much, it’d been fun, and I’d see him around.

It didn’t stop him shadowing me as I explored the rest of Jangjang Bureh, but the spell had been broken. I believed in the Freedom Tree and I believed Mr Manka, but I didn’t believe Alex and his slave house story. And when I looked into his eyes when we said goodbye, he knew that I knew he was making it all up. It was a nice try, though, and I had to give him ten out of ten for inventiveness. If tourists are happy to shell out hard cash for a good yarn, then it’s not my place to stop people spinning them.

Lazing on the River

Last night a tour bus rolled into the camp and filled it up with Dutch tourists, and half an hour later five people turned up whom I’d met in Tendaba (though they’d managed to get a lift from Tendaba to Soma with the UN, so they looked a little less shell-shocked than I had when I’d arrived). Although this shattered the camp’s peace, it was a welcome turn of events, as it meant I could join in with some of the tourist activities on offer.

The first event was last night’s African dancing round a fire in the camp’s back garden. Either the dance was supposed to be choreographed and the dancers were hopeless, or the dance was improvised on the spot and they were great, but whatever the truth the women dancers kept howling with laughter and collapsing into giggling fits throughout the performance. I loved it, though I drew the line at being asked to join in; I’m far too English to want to actually participate in anything like this, so I sat on the sidelines while the Dutch contingent demonstrated exactly why fat, pale women shouldn’t dance in shorts.

The second event was today’s trip up the River Gambia. I thought it might turn out to be pretty boring, but actually it was quite idyllic. The boat was large and comfortable, the scenery was tranquil and beautiful, and I found myself reminded of the backwaters in Kerala in south India, where palm trees line the still waters of the placid backwaters in a surprisingly similar way. I saw a crocodile swimming alongside the bank, monkeys leaping in the trees, eagles perched in the trees and – after we’d dropped the Dutch contingent off at a place called Sapu, from where they were taking the bus back to Banjul – we saw three hippos blowing bubbles near the bank, their cute ears sticking up out of the water as they barked their strange bark. As if the wildlife wasn’t amazing enough, I also spotted a man climbing a palm tree to drain palm wine from the top. Palm wine is a bizarre drink that proves Mother Nature is a party animal; it’s a naturally occurring liquid that’s collected by men who climb up palm trees and cut holes just below the fronds, into which they insert bottles which slowly fill up with sap. The sap is so high in sugar content that it starts to ferment naturally with yeast from the air, so by the time it’s collected it’s mildly alcoholic. As the day wears on, it gets stronger and stronger, so it’s one of the few drinks that keeps pace with you as you drink more and more throughout the day. As a result it’s lethal, and some countries even add extra yeast for an extra-special kick. It’s yet another reason to love the good old palm tree.

The river trip was a delight; the River Gambia is a wonderfully peaceful place, and without a doubt the best way to appreciate it is by boat.

One Pen, Gambian-style

Written: 1 November 2002

West Africa, India and Southeast Asia might be a long way from each other, but there is one cultural aspect that transcends geographical boundaries. I’m talking about the One Pen Brigade.

I first met the One Pen Brigade in Indonesia. As a white person wandering through Indonesia there’s no way you can blend into the background, and the local children swarm round you like baby birds at feeding time. The chorus kicks in with ‘Hello mister, hello mister!’ and once you acknowledge them with a ‘Hello’ back, it’s time for the kiddies’ mantra. ‘Satu stylo, gula-gula, rupiah,’ they chant; ‘One pen, sweets, money.’ It’s the same all over Indonesia, the result of tourists handing out pens, sweets and money in a vain attempt to redress world poverty (though if you really want to help, it’s better to give your donation directly to the local school, rather than the kids themselves).

In India the story is the same. ‘One pen, sweets, rupees,’ they chant after the initial ‘Hellos’, though it’s so quick it comes out as ‘Wunpensweerupees’. I have a vivid memory of a crowd of boys running on top of a wall alongside our boat as it sailed the Keralan backwaters; they continued to shout ‘Wunpen, wunpen, rupee, rupee’ as they ran out of wall and fell into the water, laughing and spluttering.

Similarly Senegal was home to lots of children chanting «Un stylo, bonbons, seefa,» but in the Gambia the One Pen Brigade shows a level of sophistication that’s impressive. Children come up to me, introduce themselves with the usual census questions of ‘What your name, where you from, how long in Gambia, is first time here, where you stay?’ and then move on to their own version of the One Pen conversation.

‘I am a student,’ they say.

‘Ah, that’s nice,’ I reply.

‘I do lots of writing,’ they say.

‘That’s very good,’ I reply.

‘Do you have a pen you can give me?’ they venture.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t have one on me,’ I reply.

‘Then give me five dalasi to buy a pen,’ they say.

‘Sorry, I can’t,’ I say. ‘If I give you five dalasi I’d have to give five dalasi to everyone, and I can’t do that.’

‘Then please give me a pen and five dalasi,’ they try.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have a pen to give you.’

‘Then please help me buy a football for my school,’ they say.

‘Blimey, that’s a new one,’ I say, and dissolve into good-natured back-slapping, making it quite clear that I’m happy to chat to them, but I’m not going to hand over any pens, any money, any footballs, or indeed anything else.

But good for the Gambians. I like people who add a local twist to an international game like One Pen, especially one as bizarre as asking for footballs...

Blister Bug

Written: 2 November 2002

I woke up this morning with a sore right knee and a burning sensation in my left ankle. I initially thought I’d got sunburn from the riverboat – the sun was certainly strong enough – but I’d worn long trousers and socks all day, so it couldn’t be that. On closer inspection, I found a string of blisters in a neat line along my left shin, as if someone had stubbed out four small cigarettes just above my ankle. They felt like burns too, and I found an identical collection of blisters on either side of my right knee.

I don’t know what this is, but I’ve had it before when travelling. It’s got to be some kind of biting insect, because the blisters are in patterns that can only be made by bugs of some kind, but I have no idea what causes them. They go away after three or four days, just like normal blisters, and don’t require anything other than antiseptic cream and regular washing to prevent infection, but somewhere out there in the bed linen of the world lives a bug that gives me blisters. What a bastard.

Just wait ’til I catch the bugger in the act. He’ll rue the day...

The Gambia: Crossing into Senegal

Basse Santa Su

Written: 3 November 2002

The blister bug bites I discovered on my last morning in Jangjang Bureh were just the beginning of a strangely frustrating day. I’d decided to head east to Basse Santa Su (commonly known as Basse) so I could cross the border into Senegal and then head northeast to Tambacounda to catch the train to Mali... and luckily the five other guests at the Jangjang Bureh Camp fancied a day out in Basse too. I say ‘luckily’ because travelling as a group makes things much easier in Africa, not just because the onus of the trip is spread among the whole group, but because buses and bush taxis fill up much quicker when a group of you turns up at the station. I reckoned that it would take no more than an hour and a half to get to Basse, a very short trip by African standards.

Things went wrong pretty early on. One minute we were bargaining with the taxi man to take us the 2.5km across the island to the southern ferry, and the next thing I knew the other five threw up their hands in disgust at the amount the taxi man was asking and stomped off down the road, happy to walk to the ferry rather than pay. I had a full backpack; I wasn’t terribly thrilled by the idea of walking 2.5km in the hot sun, but the others had already faded into the distance. Suddenly I’d gone from being one of many to being just one again. Great.

I managed to get to the ferry without waiting too long for the taxi to fill up, and as soon as it landed I leapt at the nearest bus tout and asked which one was heading for Basse. Surprisingly it seemed none of them were; instead I was ushered onto a bus for Basang, a junction town on the way to Basse, where I would have to change. While I sat there waiting for the off, another bus pulled up, and the rest of the group appeared off the ferry and hopped straight into the new arrival, which sped off straight away; I was to learn later that this bus was going straight to Basse, and the arrival of five people had meant it could head straight off to Basse without further delay. Meanwhile I’d already paid and was stuck on the Basang bus, waiting for the empty seats to fill up.

When we finally pulled out and I got to Basang, I had to change to a minibus and wait for an hour for enough people to come along who wanted to go from Basang to Basse. Finally the second bus left, and around two-and-a-half hours after the others had ditched me in Jangjang Bureh, I was in Basse. Typically, I bumped into the others straight away, and learned that they’d already been here for ages. Such is the power of travelling in a group, assuming it actually sticks together.

Basse

‘Never mind,’ I thought, and picked a decent-sounding hotel from the book before heading off to explore Basse. Wondering what I could find to do in the Gambia’s easternmost town, I started wandering round at random.

Basse is nothing special to look at, but the people are simply wonderful. It’s obviously a long way from the bumster areas of the Atlantic, because in Basse people are genuinely friendly and I didn’t get any hassle from anyone about anything. I even walked through the bus station without any touts grabbing me and trying to persuade me to go somewhere, which was a first for me in this part of the world. I warmed to this dusty dump instantly.

My initial impressions were proved correct as I munched through some lunch at a restaurant called Traditions, pleasantly situated on the banks of the River Gambia in the north of town. My portable palmtop computer is the ultimate ice-breaker, especially when the fold-out keyboard comes out, and as soon as I started typing in the tranquillity of the restaurant, I noticed the young waiter looking over.

‘It’s a small computer,’ I said, and showed him what I was doing. I demonstrated typing ‘My name is Mark’ on the screen, and then asked him how to spell his name, so I could type that in too. His name was Hamadi, and his friend who also wandered over for a look was called Mamoudou. They were delightful people, and apart from a quick bout of shopping and a short phone call home, I spent the whole afternoon chatting away with them. They were typically friendly Gambians (well, Mamoudou was from Guinea, but had lived in Basse for the last eight years, so the Gambian way had obviously rubbed off on him) and they were thrilled to get a reaction out of a toubab; too many tourists just ignored them, they said, and it was lovely to meet someone who was happy just to chat.

And I was happy to chat, too. The Gambians are delightful conversationalists and it was all too soon that I had to go back to my hotel for dinner, which I’d ordered for 7pm.

Beginning of the End

Things started to go wrong as soon as I got back to the inaccurately named Jem Hotel. The women who ran the establishment knocked on my door at 6.30 to apologise, but it turned out she couldn’t cook me dinner after all, because the boy who had been supposed to paint the kitchen that morning hadn’t started painting until the afternoon, and he wasn’t going to be finished until tomorrow, so the kitchen was closed. I’d ordered dinner at the hotel because I hadn’t been able to find any decent-looking restaurants in town, so this was a bit of a blow.

I had no choice, then, but to follow the concierge’s advice and to wander south out of town until I found F&B’s Restaurant, which she said might be able to serve me some food. I eventually tracked it down, well outside the town limits, in an unlit bar that was blanketed in empty bottles and a feeling of complete and utter desolation. I asked if they did food; they said they might be able to rustle up some fried chicken and chips if I wanted. There was nothing else for miles around; sure, I wanted.

The Bière la Gazelle they brought me was cold and smelled of fish, but I didn’t care; this Senegalese brew isn’t that great, but its saving grace is that it comes in a big 630ml bottle, which always helps to cushion the inevitable blow of the kind of establishment that serves it. I sucked on my beer, and when it arrived I devoured the chicken and chips so quickly I thought I’d celebrate with another beer. This time I got a Julbrew, Gambia’s finest beer, though the smell this time was of offal rather than fish.

While I ate and drank as if it was the end of the world – which was what it felt like – I noticed that F&B’s was filling up with some distinctly shady customers. I don’t have a sixth sense for these things – lack of exposure, I guess – but even I realised I’d ended up in the local knocking shop. When I went to pay, the chunky lady behind the bar was quite dismayed that I was leaving, as I’d obviously lent the place an air of respectability; I’d wondered why they’d shooed me out onto a table by the road so everyone walking past could see me enjoying my fishy Gazelle, and now I knew why. It was definitely time to go, and in my rush I didn’t notice they’d forgotten to charge me for my food. Perhaps it was for the best...

By this time it was pitch black outside, and with a shock I realised that Basse isn’t exactly flooded with mains electricity. At night the lucky shops with generators throw pools of strip-light onto the road, but most places are lit by kerosene lanterns, which makes wandering round the town a delight. It also meant my toubab status was hidden by the night, so I could stalk the streets like an invisible man – not that Basse was any hassle anyway, but it still felt refreshing not to be gawped at all the time.

Family-sized Bed

That night, as if to make sure I left Basse with only the best impressions, a family of fleas hopped out of my pillow and bit me to shreds. It was quite fascinating; at first I thought it was mosquitoes, as the fan was directly above the bed and it was impossible to put up my mosquito net. I lit a coil and tried to relax, but the sound of the hotel’s generator at the end of the block kept nudging me awake, and the bites didn’t stop, so by the time the generator was switched off at 1am and the fan died, I’d hardly slept at all.

Things didn’t change. The generator had been masking the pumping bass from a huge sound system down the road – some kind of Saturday night bop, I presume – so for the next hour I was entertained by Gambian pop music at full volume, while what I thought were mosquitoes continued to lacerate my arms. I slipped into my sleeping bag liner in a vain attempt to stop the biting, but all it did was make me sweat more. I wondered if I would ever sleep.

Luckily the plug got pulled on the nearby rave at 2am and an eerie calm descended on the town, broken only by spasmodic barking and the odd truck bombing past. To my amazement, in the gloomy silence I heard clicking in my pillow; there it was, a definite regular snapping, a sound that reminded me of the seawater shrimps you hear when you’re bunked down in the bottom of a steel-hulled yacht. In the context of my bed it sounded strangely like something... um... jumping. Yes, definitely jumping.

You’ve never seen me move so fast. Close inspection of my pillow with my torch showed that my bed had what looked like fleas. The little blighters were white and the size of pinheads, and when they bit it felt like a mild prick with a needle. I draped my sarong over the worst area and lay back, trying not to think about it too hard. Instead I idly wondered what would happen if a flea started biting me on my blister bites, and with this happy thought on the edge of my dreams I slipped into a long night of short bursts, wondering how the people of Basse could be so lovely when they were surrounded by such shit. It’s not the first time I’ve found the most wonderful people in the armpits of the Earth, and I doubt it will be the last.

Basse Santa Su to Tambacounda

Written: 3 November 2002

I wasn’t too annoyed that the fleas woke me up at the crack of dawn, because today I had to cross the border. Most travellers in Africa have a horror story or two about borders, bribes and bureaucracy, so I tend to assume that any journey that includes a border crossing will require more effort than normal. How right I turned out to be, though this time it wasn’t down to the politics.

From eastern Gambia, the geographically logical way to get into Senegal is to head south from Basse Santa Su, crossing the border south of Sabi and rattling on to the Senegalese town of Vélingara. From there a good road connects you to Tambacounda in eastern Senegal, which is where I hope to join the Dakar-Bamako train, bound for Mali. On the map it looks deceptively simple... but it would, wouldn’t it?

From Basse to Vélingara is around 25km, so at a brisk walking pace of say 5km/h, a not unreasonable speed without a heavy pack, one could theoretically cover the distance in just over five hours. If I ever have the misfortune to end up among the fleas of Basse again, I may well bear this in mind; it’d be a darn sight quicker than taking public transport.

But I didn’t know this when I got up this morning; as far as I was concerned the fleas had given me a wonderfully early start to the day, and it was barely 8am by the time I hoisted my pack onto my back and struck out for Basse’s bus station. I felt pretty confident that I’d reach Tamba in good time; the sun was shining, the people were smiling their bonjours all along the road, and I was about to change country, which always gives me a strange kind of thrill. What could possibly go wrong?

Rust Bucket

I’m glad you asked that, because one of the great things about being a writer is the therapeutic effect one gets from getting it all down on paper, and after the journey from Basse to Vélingara, a bit of therapy wouldn’t go amiss.

The first sign that things weren’t going to be that easy was when I asked the station master where the bush taxis for Vélingara could be found. He looked at me with a surprisingly un-Gambian grumpiness and said, ‘No taxis today.’

‘No taxis?’ I said.

‘No taxis’, he said, and waved me away with an almost Senegalese dismissal. But after an entire night spent partying with a pillow full of fleas, I wasn’t going to take any shit from anyone, so I asked him if there were any buses I could take.

‘Yes,’ he said, practically drowning me in information.

‘Can I buy a ticket from you, then?’ I asked, and he grudgingly wrote a ticket out for me, took D35 from my balled fist, and turned back to something far more important, namely staring into the middle distance and smoking a stubby high tar cigarette.

‘Um,’ I ventured. ‘Which bus is it, please?’

‘Uh,’ he grunted, pointing at the bus in front of him with an irritated wag of his finger.

‘What, this one?’ I said.

‘Uh,’ he said, and terminated the conversation with a withering look that barely concealed his smirk.

‘Oh shit,’ I thought as I turned to the bus. ‘This is going to hurt.’

Cars gently rusting into nothing are a common enough sight in developing countries; cars come to places like Africa to die, but first they’re flogged to within inches of their lives, and then a few inches beyond that. Most cars get stripped and their parts recycled – everything is worth something to somebody out here – but a fair number of vehicles simply grind to a halt and gasp their last gasps by the side of the road, and get left there for the sand to blast them into modern African sculptures for passing bus passengers to admire. I’d genuinely thought the bus opposite the grumpy chief was one of these vehicles, a sad little van with a history but no future, but it turned out that this rust bucket was supposed to get me across the border. I couldn’t believe it.

Not only that, it appeared as if I was the only person idiotic enough to be heading to Vélingara that day. The bus was little more than an open-sided van with plank benches down the sides, and I felt a bit silly placing my hat at the end of one of the benches to reserve my spot. My backpack looked distinctly lonely perched on top of the rust-riddled roof, and I wondered if this little beauty was ever going to fill up, let alone start.

My ticket proclaimed that I’d bought a seat on the 7.30 bus to Vélingara, but it was already 8.15 and I was the only one waiting. This didn’t bode well, so I idled away the time by changing my remaining dalasis into CFAs with a tout, buying a bottle of water, and putting a brave face on things. People slowly trickled in, each of them buying a ticket and doing a double-take at the rusting hulk they’d bought a seat in. After an hour the driver cranked open the bonnet and filled the radiator up with water, and I marvelled at the optimism being shown in the various lumps of grimy rust, held together by all sort of makeshift mechanics. One guy in the queue caught my eye as I admired the mess under the bonnet. ‘I am thinking you do not have vehicles like this in your country,’ he said with a touch of pride, and I nodded. I guess being proud of your rust buckets is a good idea; it’s that or get depressed about them, I suppose, and the first option is far more Gambian.

One by one the sarongs, bags and hats appeared on the seats, and by 9.30 the 7.30 bus was ready to depart. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad after all; I’d been expecting a much longer wait.

Room for More

Without waiting to be told twice I leapt into our trusty rust bucket, and sucked in my ribs as we crammed six people along each bench, with another passenger sitting at the front of the rear cabin, his back to the driver. Two women hopped into the front passenger seat, one of them holding a child, and I did a quick body count: we had four in the front plus 13 in the back, making 17 in total.

But it didn’t stop there. Someone else climbed in and sat on the spare tyre in the back, followed by another hopeful who sat on my feet, and three more likely lads grabbed the roof at the back and leapt on the bumper. By now we were up to 22 people inside a tiny little van, and that didn’t count the ticket boy whom I’d last seen on the roof; but at least we were ready for the off. A quick push start shocked the engine into life and sent a cloud of acrid exhaust into the back of the cabin, and like a lifetime smoker hacking the morning out of his lungs, we hit the road (though with the suspension as it was, most of the time it felt more like the road was hitting us).

I missed most of the countryside on the approach to the Gambian border post as all I could see was a bunch of crushed locals bouncing along with the potholes, but half an hour into our bumpy ride I got a chance to see what the fuss was all about, as the back wheel nuts fell off and rolled away into the desert along with the wheel. We piled out into the scorching heat and instantly ran for the shelter of the surrounding scrub, while the ticket boy went looking for the wheel and nuts. The tyre turned out to be completely flat, which had no doubt helped to loosen the nuts, so the driver rolled out the spare tyre and jacked the bus up on a log, while the other men squatted round the tyre, scratching their Islamic beards and arguing over how to fix it, as men do the world over.

Luckily the ticket boy found the nuts in the middle of the dusty road, so after a pit-stop of only 15 minutes we were ready to pack back into the bus once more. A push start later we were on our way to the Gambian border post, where we had to stop, pile out again, and get our ID cards and passports out; then it was into no-man’s land to the Senegalese border, where all the luggage had to be unstrapped, approved by customs, and the ID cards and passports handed to the Senegalese border official for stamping; and then all the luggage had to be packed onto the roof once again, ready for the final stretch to Vélingara. As border crossings go, it was really quite slick, but that’s not saying much.

All the bumping and grinding did serve a purpose, though. When I got to Vélingara and had to wait a further hour-and-a-half for the bush taxi to Tambacounda to fill up (this time there were no buses), it seemed like luxury; the bush taxi was comfortable, the road was in excellent condition, and the journey much quicker. By the time I arrived in Tamba the feeling was starting to creep back into my buttocks, and I’d made it into eastern Senegal in one piece. Which is more than can be said for the battered old bucket that got me there...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 3 November 2002

I liked the Gambia, though I can’t quite put my finger on why. There’s not a great deal to see, and there’s nothing world class in terms of attractions, but the people are delightful, the atmosphere is laid-back, and the fact that they speak English is a positive bonus for someone whose French is shaky at best.

I’m pretty hopeful for the place, too. It’s a poor country and its international debt sucks up most of its income – no surprises there, then – but it feels optimistic, and I hope this optimism reflects a bright future for the place. As far as travelling goes, Gambia is great once you ignore the awful main highway and the complete lack of a boat service along the placid River Gambia, which conspire to make it a deeply unpleasant challenge to escape from the touristy west coast without taking a sanitised tour. Back in Basse, I asked Hamadi why there wasn’t a regular passenger boat service along the river, and he told me it was because most Gambians won’t travel by boat, as a lot of them can’t swim and are afraid of water. I couldn’t believe it, given the way the river defines the very shape of the country, but perhaps the river’s crocodiles, snakes and hippos have something to do with it.

However it appears that things might change, as there are plans to resurface the worst stretch of the highway, and a regular boat service might be starting up in the tourist season. The latter is a particularly good idea; given the Gambia’s shape and the way the river wanders right through the heart of everything, decent river transport would transform the country. With places like Jangjang Bureh rediscovering their colonial past at the same time, tourism in the Gambia could really benefit.

I hope it does, because tourism that’s run by local companies can only help the economy, and that’s got to be good news for the locals. Tourism on the Atlantic coast mainly makes money for foreign companies – only 10 to 15 per cent of the Gambia’s gross national product is from tourism, which is a lot lower than the turnover should produce. The lack of pleasant public transport helps to feed this stranglehold, but given a boat service and a decent highway, independent travellers could start spending their money here in sizeable amounts, and money spent locally goes directly into the economy.

If anywhere deserves this kind of break, it’s delightful little countries like the Gambia. If it only had a Taj Mahal or a Timbuktu, it would be paradise.

Senegal: Eastern Senegal

Tambacounda

Written: 5 November 2002

I decided to get to Tambacounda with plenty of time to spare before the Wednesday train to Bamako, so I could make sure I got a seat. It’s a huge journey from Tambacounda to Bamako, the capital of Mali – it says 20 hours and 30 minutes on the timetable, but it normally takes well over a day – and I wanted to try to get a good seat, preferably in first class, so there might at least be a vague chance of some sleep.

On the off chance, I visited the train station late on Sunday afternoon and found an official-looking railway employee sitting in the chef de gare’s office. He told me I could come back tomorrow and buy tickets then, and that both first and second class tickets were available. ‘Excellent,’ I thought, and celebrated by visiting Chez Francis, the friendly pub up the road from my hotel, where cold Bière la Gazelle cost CFA600 (60p) for a huge 630ml bottle and the smiles were free. The barman, Joe, was a delightful bloke, and I figured there were far worse places to be stranded while waiting for a train.

Ticket Trouble

Tambacounda is a pleasant place, and it’s far enough off the tourist trap to be free of hassle. I was able to sit by the road, scribbling away, and nobody hassled me apart from the local beggar boys, who were more interested in my empty water bottles than giving me grief, and who were happy enough with the odd donation. My beggar policy, which I adopted from Chris the Australian, is to give something to the first beggar I see every day, and that’s it until the following day, when the first beggar gets a few pennies again. Of course, if someone comes along with an awful physical disability, or some other good reason for charity, then I break the rule, but it seems that there are only three ways to give to beggars: you either give to nobody, which is between you and your conscience; you give to everybody, which is between you and your bank manager; or you give to somebody, which is a darn sight easier if you make up a rule and stick to it. As they say, a handout a day keeps the conscience at bay...

So assuming I can get my train ticket sorted out, Tambacounda will have been a perfect place to relax while waiting for tomorrow night’s departure. But nothing is quite that simple; despite the advice I received on Sunday, I turned up at the station on Monday morning to find that it was all going to be left to chance, of course. The train is, after all, just another form of Senegalese transport.

‘Hello,’ I smiled at the man now occupying the chef de gare’s desk, a different man from the Sunday shift. ‘If it’s possible, I’d like to buy a first class ticket for the Wednesday train to Bamako.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Come this way.’ And he led me outside and handed me over to a thick-spectacled man who didn’t look as if he worked for anyone, let alone the railway. I repeated my request, wondering who on earth this guy was.

‘You cannot buy tickets today,’ he said. ‘You should come back on Wednesday morning, but I will take your name for a reservation.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Can I reserve a first class ticket?’

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘All the first class tickets are gone, I’m afraid.’

‘They’re all gone?’ I said, caught completely by surprise; if there’s one thing I know about developing countries, it’s that first class tickets never, ever sell out before the second class ones. Something didn’t add up, but there was precious little I could do, so I gave the man my name and said, ‘OK, so I’ll come back here at 9.30 on Wednesday morning, and I’ll be able to buy a ticket here?’

‘Inshallah,’ he grinned, and wobbled his head. That was the sign to give up trying; inshallah means ‘God willing’, and is the Islamic way of saying ‘don’t ask me’. It looks like Allah is firmly in control of the Senegalese railways, unlike the railway staff, so I sent up a silent prayer, hoping that he’ll smile on me on Wednesday.

Luckily Chez Francis and the local internet café proved pleasant homes for the next few days, and I kicked back, ate well, drank well, wrote reams and studied the Mali chapter in my guidebook. Joe and the lunchtime barmaid Néné kept me company and helped improve my French small talk and drinking vocabulary, I watched Senegalese TV despite understanding precious little, and I forced myself to relax.

I might have missed the subtleties of most of the news reports on the French-language channel RTS 1, but I took my entertainment from the adverts and the weather reports. One advert in particular really surprised me; Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, starts in a few days, and during this time Muslims aren’t allowed to eat or drink anything between sunrise and sunset (this is quite a sacrifice wherever you are, but even water is forbidden during sunlight, which makes Ramadan a major challenge in the African heat). It’s a period of serious austerity, so I was more than a little surprised to see that the electrical firm LG was having a big Ramadan sale: 20 per cent off all fridges, no less, with glitzy adverts proclaiming the news. The weather report was similarly weird, as it not only contained details of the weather, it also listed the tide times, the time of sunrise and sunset, and the same times for the moon, which I presume is important if you’re a devout Muslim, a devout fisherman, or both. Just to complete the picture, the temperature in Tamba today was 38°C; I found this a perfect excuse to order another beer, especially as it appeared to help with the translation.

Unfortunately relaxing isn’t something I do terribly well, even with beer and TV on tap, and by now, my last night in Tambacounda, I’m rested, settled, and thoroughly bored. I need to get moving into Mali before I start climbing the walls; I have high hopes for tomorrow’s train journey being the start of something special.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 6 November 2002

I didn’t like Senegal much when I first arrived, but this was almost entirely down to me, not the country. I was horribly homesick (and I still am, every now and then), I was horribly sick, and I seriously wondered whether I was going to be able to get into the travelling mentality again. I was rather concerned that in the four years since the end of my last bout of travelling, I’d become settled.

I’m still not entirely in my stride, but I’m getting there, and although the difficulties I had with Senegal were far more to do with acclimatisation than difficulties with the country itself, I get the feeling that Senegal still isn’t one of the world’s great travelling destinations. It’s pleasant and it’s interesting, but it’s not mind-blowing.

If you ignore the city touts and the rip-off merchants that inhabit the tourist spots, the Senegalese are lovely people. In places that aren’t on the main tourist trail, such as Tambacounda and Kaolack, the people are delightful and the hassle factor is minimal. Things are slightly crazier around Dakar and in places like St-Louis, but although I found dealing with taxi drivers a problem in the first week, things got easier the further I went from Dakar. I don’t know if this is down to less hassle the further you are from Dakar, or me getting used to dealing with the transport system, but I think it’s probably a combination of both.

If you like beaches and you speak good French, then Senegal is a great place to visit, which is probably why so many French tourists do just that. But if you’re an English-speaking independent traveller in search of amazing sights, Senegal isn’t that fantastic; it’s OK, but it’s not world class for travelling.

As a result I’ve found it a difficult place to start my trip; if I had been exploring the country with my jaw on the floor at the incredible sights and amazing culture clashes, I wouldn’t have found so much time for missing my girlfriend, missing my home and missing my old life. Senegal is a great place to relax; it’s not such a great place for providing a distraction. But I’m glad I came; the people are friendly, the music is good, the markets are fun, the beaches are pleasant, the food is inoffensive, and combined with the different flavour of life in the Gambia, it makes a good introduction to West Africa.

Still, I’m glad to be moving into Mali. No offence, Senegal, but it just sounds that much more interesting for someone like me, with my low boredom threshold. We’ll see.

Mali: The West

Tambacounda to Kayes

Written: 7 November 2002

There comes a point in every nightmare journey when things have already gone so spectacularly wrong, that you have no choice but to give in and laugh. It’s a huge relief when this happens; it means you can get on with enjoying the awfulness of the trip instead of worrying about whether you’re actually going to get anywhere.

I had it all planned, you see. I spent three days in Tambacounda waiting for the Wednesday express train to Bamako, which was due to arrive in Bamako on Thursday afternoon (though more likely Thursday evening, as the trains never run on time). This would give me Friday to get a visa for Burkina Faso, my destination after Mali, and if everything went according to plan, I’d be able to shoot out of Bamako and into the more interesting countryside at the weekend. ‘This should be fun,’ I thought to myself.

So I got myself up at the crack of dawn on Wednesday, packed and wandered up to the train station to buy a ticket for the evening train. I walked down the main street, by now a familiar sight, handing small change to the urchins and exchanging pleasantries with the proprietor of the shop where I’d bought all my water over the last few days. Yes, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I popped into the train station and headed straight for the chef de gare’s office. And there he was, true to his word, sitting out the back.

«Bonjour» I said.

«Bonjour» he replied.

‘I hope you can help me,’ I said in my chirpiest French. ‘I’d like to buy a ticket for the evening train to Bamako, if possible.’

«C’est supprimé» he said, shrugging.

I didn’t know what supprimé meant, but it rang a bell; I was sure I’d seen it crop up in a menu on one of the French computers in the local internet café, but I just couldn’t place it. Luckily I’d brought my trusty dictionary, so I fished it out, hoping for the best.

‘Supprimer, supprimer, supprimer,’ I muttered as my finger wandered down the page. ‘Ah, here we are. Supprimer, transitive verb, re holidays, bus service etc.: to cancel. Oh shit.’

It took a while to sink in, but there was no train. No train. It didn’t matter how nice I was to the chef, I wasn’t going to be able to buy a ticket, first class or otherwise. The next train wasn’t until Saturday night, and I’d go mad if I had to wait that long. I was going to have to put a brave face on it; the only alternative was a bus into Mali, and I’d heard some pretty unpleasant rumours about that particular journey.

Easy Steps

I didn’t waste any time, and after sending a quick email home with my revised plans I shot back to the hotel, grabbed my bags and took a taxi to the gare routière to see what the options were. The map made it look relatively simple; the first stage, 177km to the Senegalese border town of Kidira, was along a top-class sealed road, and from there to Kayes (pronounced ‘kh-aye’, to rhyme with ‘eye’), the first stop of any significance in Mali, was only 105km along less major roads. After Kayes the road deteriorated into dirt tracks, but apparently Kayes is connected to Bamako by a daily train service, which would mean I could still experience a West African train, something I’d rather been looking forward to.

Things started well. I got to the gare routière at 10am and found a bush taxi heading for Kidira with only three vacant spaces. I took one of them, leaving just two, and an hour later those got filled – a short wait given the time of day – and I started my trek northeast towards Mali.

As if this wasn’t lucky enough, I shared the taxi with a couple of friendly Spanish guys, Steve and Oliver, one of whom had already done the same journey, only the other way round, from Bamako into Senegal. This had to be good news; he’d know where the immigration points were, where to catch buses and so on. Things were looking up, and by the time we arrived in Kidira two hours later, I felt good. I was a stone’s throw from Mali, I was in knowledgeable and pleasant company, and the sun was shining high in a cloudless desert sky. ‘This should be fun,’ I thought to myself for the second time that day.

Welcome to Mali

On arrival in Kidira we got exit stamps from the Senegalese border guard, took a taxi across the border to the dusty town of Diboli on the Malian side, and got our entry stamps for Mali. I was pleased that my Malian visa was in order; the immigration official demanded payment of CFA1000 – which was a bribe, because you don’t have to pay anything if you already have a visa – but I couldn’t be bothered to argue, so I coughed up, got my entry stamp and wandered back to the bus station, an official visitor in Mali. And that’s when things started to go spectacularly wrong.

‘Hello, we’d like three places in a bush taxi to Kayes, please,’ I asked the chef de gare in the dusty stick shelter that is Diboli’s excuse for a station.

‘There are no bush taxis today,’ replied the chef in time-honoured fashion.

‘Um, what about this one?’ I asked, pointing to a bush taxi right next to the shelter.

‘No, there are no taxis today,’ the chef repeated. ‘You must take the bus, over there.’

I followed his finger, and there was a minibus, about the size of a large transit van, that could maybe hold 18 people. That didn’t sound too bad, so we shrugged our shoulders, coughed up CFA3000 each, and settled in to wait for it to fill up. There were already a few hardy locals in the shelter, and I hoped that the wait wouldn’t be too long; this was, after all, the only usable road border between Senegal and Mali, and the train wasn’t running until Saturday, so I had high hopes. It was one o’clock; we had the whole of the afternoon to cover the 105km to Kayes, which would be plenty of time.

By two o’clock I was a bit thirsty, so I wandered over the road to buy some water. It was cold; I was happy. Man can survive on water alone for a very long time, should the need arise. I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t need to prove the theory.

By three o’clock my stomach started to rumble, so I wandered over the road to the shop again, and bought a packet of coconut-flavoured biscuits which tasted as though they’d been sitting in the desert sun for five years. There was no ‘best before’ date on the packet; I was grateful for that, at least.

By four o’clock I was starting to get a bit sick of the view from the hard wooden bench in the bus shelter, so I decided to go for a wander round town. It took three minutes, but at least the people were friendly. Either that or they were laughing at me...

By five o’clock my arse was numb, my brain was numb, and my mind had slipped into that half-waking state when things seem neither real nor dream. If I could only summon up that feeling at will, travelling through the desert would be easy; the problem is that my mind only starts shutting down after hours of doing nothing, by which time it’s already wearing thin. It was around this point that I started visualising my plans gently floating away down the stream of life, with me stranded on the bank, powerless to do anything but watch. At least the visions were more pleasant than the reality of Diboli.

At six o’clock there was a flurry of activity as the bus boys called for our luggage and strapped it to the roof. I was disappointed to see there were no goats or sheep, but having winced in sympathy with the poor donkeys hopping round in Diboli’s afternoon heat, front legs hobbled with incredibly short lengths of rope, I guess it was for the best. Life in the desert is hard for humans, but it’s a darn sight worse for the animals.

The sun went down at a quarter past six, sinking into the dusty horizon with a beautiful silhouette effect. Desert sunsets and sunrises are something else; the sky was a bit too hazy with smoke from all the cooking fires, but we were a captive audience, and in a place like Diboli, you take all the entertainment you can get with good grace.

By seven o’clock I was getting hungry again, but luckily a woman came round selling mutton sandwiches, consisting of a bit of baguette with mutton brochettes stuffed in the middle, along with some unidentified sauce and onions. I ate two; they were manna from heaven in this town of dried biscuits, fading light and dusty lungs.

At a quarter past seven people started milling round the back of the bus, so we grabbed our bags, rushed down and managed to join the queue exactly at the back. Normally this is a bad move, as you end up with the shitty seats, but in this case it was a complete disaster; this was the most crammed bus I’ve yet seen, and we were stuck at the back, jammed against rear doors that looked like they’d fly open at any minute (in the event they only flew open twice in the whole journey, and nobody actually fell out, though it was close). The bus, a standard transit van with windows, had a hard wooden bench down each side, and another down the middle; each end was topped off by a bench too, but you couldn’t see the benches, let alone the floor, because they packed us in so tightly the only thing visible was squashed human.

To pass the time I counted the number of people. Including the babies, children and touts hanging off the back, we had 33 people jostling along in a van that would house a maximum of 16 in the West. I was dovetailed into the rear offside corner, one buttock wedged an inch higher than the other by the way the benches overlapped. In my right armpit was Oliver, and on my left was a young woman with two children, one of them a baby whom she breast-fed every now and then. But at least we were moving...

Under the Stars

Ten minutes into the journey we had to stop at the first police checkpoint, pile out, and show our passports. All those who had identity cards – i.e. the Senegalese and Malians – had to queue up in the police station to have their details recorded, and then we all crammed ourselves back into the van. By now we were getting good at it; in a squash like this you don’t give an inch, and everyone remembered exactly which postage-stamp seat was theirs.

The first tyre blew at 9.15pm, some two hours after we’d initially rolled out of Diboli, so out we piled yet again. Blown tyres are a fairly common event – I’d had one in Senegal and one in the Gambia already – but they’re slightly more fraught affairs on dusty roads where there’s precious little traffic, no light except for starlight, and no settlements. I wondered what it would be like to break down terminally in the desert; luckily I’d seen the bus boys pack a couple of spare tyres, so I knew we’d be fine.

The second tyre blew at 9.45pm, and again we flooded out onto the dusty highway. By this time I was rather getting into the stars; this being the desert, the sky was beautifully clear, and the moon was little more than a crescent, making the stars particularly brilliant. I was quite enjoying these breaks; they enabled me to get the circulation going again in my legs, which was a bonus.

The first replacement tyre lasted until 10.50pm, when a heavy lurch to the right indicated all was not well. By this stage we had our exit plan down to a tee, but this time things weren’t so rosy. We’d run out of spare tyres, and we were stranded. The only solution was for the driver to hitch a lift with a passing truck to Kayes, and to come back with some more tyres. I had no idea where we were, but nobody seemed to mind; throughout the whole thing the busload of men, women and children were delightfully upbeat, and apart from a few resigned shrugs, being stranded in the desert wasn’t going to get them down. Oh no.

While the driver thumbed down a truck, the bus boys went in search of wood. The desert air, clear and fresh after the smoky dust of Diboli, was turning cold, and I soon started shivering, but a few minutes later we had a roaring fire going on the road in front of the bus, and everyone crashed out on the dirt, jabbering away in Wolof, Bambara and French. I loved it; it was just like camping in the desert, if you ignored the occasional truck that shot past, showering us with dust. I lay down on my sarong, my daypack cushioning my head, and stared up into the stars as the party bubbled on around me.

I think I must have drifted off, because by the time the driver came back with another tyre, it was 2am. We poured water on the fire, smiled at each other and shoehorned ourselves back into the bus, heading once more for Kayes. By this time I’d given up worrying about actually getting anywhere, and decided just to enjoy the ride as much as possible; something told me the night wasn’t over yet, so I slumped against my neighbours and watched the starlit world bouncing by in the dark.

By 3.15am I was freezing. I’d been allocated the window seat, which would have been a bonus in the middle of the day but was another story in the middle of a desert night, and I only had a thin shirt to keep me from dying of cold. Then, like manna from heaven, someone turned the heating on, and my legs started warming up. Ah, it was bliss! I idly wondered why nobody had thought of this before, as it had been cold for quite some time, and then a thought occurred to me. African buses don’t have heating, and if they did it wouldn’t reach the back of a transit van packed with people, and with the sluggish logic of the wee hours it hit me that it wasn’t the heating. In a charming display of friendliness, my neighbour’s baby had just pissed all over my trousers.

In the Shit

As my watch ticked on to 4am, we finally arrived somewhere, though quite where that somewhere was, I couldn’t work out. A man opened the back of the bus and asked us to climb out, and I realised it was the customs post outside Kayes; we were close, but the fat lady hadn’t sung yet. We piled out and queued around the police station, showing our documents and smiling our most innocent smiles. And as we stood there, rubbing the sleepy dust from our eyes, our bus pulled away with all our luggage still on board.

The man next to me in the queue yelped and ran after the bus, and frazzled by the cold and the time of night, I ran after him. ‘Stop, stop,’ he yelled at the bus, and then he suddenly tripped, fell and completely disappeared. I screeched to a halt, wondering where on earth he’d gone.

I heard him yelling, somewhere down below; it turned out that in the pitch blackness he’d run straight into an open sewer. Open sewers are a common feature of the developing world, and are nothing more than water channels down the sides of the road that carry everything away to the nearest river; in the heat they’re active enough to be creating new life forms, and the one he’d fallen into was particularly big. Torches appeared, and there he was, apparently unhurt apart from a few grazes, standing knee-deep in raw sewage at the bottom of a 20-foot trough. ‘There but for the grace of God,’ I thought, and shivered with something other than the cold.

Thankfully he managed to get out, and after some more immigration time-wasting and a token unloading and loading of the luggage to satiate the custom official’s ego, we packed back into the bus and trundled along to the bus station, which we reached at 4.30am. Then it was a quick taxi ride to the train station, and I could almost smell success, as the train was due to leave for Bamako at around 7am. I might just make it to Bamako in time after all.

As if. Bounding up to the ticket booth, I smiled the smile of the terminal insomniac and asked about the train to Bamako. ‘There is no train today,’ said the chef. ‘Today is a Thursday, and there is no train on Thursday. The next one is tomorrow, on Friday morning.’

By this time, though, I wasn’t fazed. Instead I simply shrugged the shrug of the African traveller, found a flop-house to crash in, and collapsed into bed.

‘Welcome to Mali,’ I thought, as I slipped into dreams populated by buses, hot sun and – worryingly – warm, wet patches.

Kayes

Written: 8 November 2002

There isn’t a great deal to report about Kayes except it’s a dusty, distant town in the middle of nowhere which hasn’t been destroyed by the tourist trade – and that’s not surprising, as there’s not a lot going on. I spent my bonus rest day washing my clothes (which dried in under an hour in the dry desert air), writing, eating, buying train tickets, and hoping that I wasn’t going to have to spend too long out here.

I did see one thing of note, though. After I’d successfully secured our tickets for the Bamako train, Steve and Oliver suggested we hop in a taxi to visit the nearby Chutes de Felou, a scenic collection of rapids on the River Senegal some 15km from town. I had nothing better to do, so after a bit of bargaining at the taxi rank, we found ourselves bouncing once again into the outback.

It took some finding – the taxi driver didn’t realise we wanted the rapids, and stopped in the village of Felou where we had to persuade him to ask for directions and keep going – but what we found was a bizarre wonderland of water-eroded rock, forming a huge honeycomb effect across the entire width of the river.

It was frankly bizarre; we waded across a side stream towards the rapids, and found ourselves on an expanse of smooth rock, pock-marked with deep holes full of bubbling water and churning waterfalls. The river was low enough for us to be quite safe hopping around the rock, but it was high enough for the holes to be welling with dangerous-looking currents of green water. The effect of years of pounding river water was evident; the rock was as smooth as a baby’s behind. It was distinctly picturesque, and the locals seemed to agree; one by one men wandered in from the dusty savannah, stripped off and soaped themselves down, jumping into rock pools to wash off the heat of the day while the women did the same thing further downstream. As local bathrooms go, the chutes were pretty spectacular.

This was good news for Steve and Oliver, who turned out to be camera nuts. They each had cameras that bore little resemblance to mine; the picture size on each camera was professional, the negatives being 4cm by 6cm, miles bigger than my standard 35mm film; the camera manufacturers were Russian or somewhere equally scary; and they appeared to be completely manual. The two of them took such care over posing their shots, using tripods and filters and waiting for the exact moment to click the button, that my more cavalier approach of snapping relatively randomly seemed wholly inadequate. I’d exhausted my photographic patience in ten minutes, but they were still setting up shots an hour later, when we had to return to the taxi. I was impressed; this kind of photography is truly for the dedicated.

Then again, that night, as I hammered away on my keyboard in the hotel bar, they sat there doing Spanish crosswords from a book. I guess their approach to photography mirrors my approach to writing, and vice versa; whatever, it felt good to know others have similar dedication to their hobbies out here on the road.

Kayes to Bamako

Written: 8 November 2002

In retrospect, yesterday’s forced rest day was a good thing; the thought of going from the Kidira-Kayes bus journey straight onto the Kayes-Bamako train doesn’t bear thinking about, though at the time we’d have jumped onto the train if there’d been one. Thank goodness there wasn’t.

It wasn’t that the train journey from Kayes to Bamako was stressful – actually, it was great fun – but I would have spent most of it asleep if there’d been a Thursday morning train, and that would have been a shame. Taking a train trip in Mali is an experience you don’t want to miss.

I’d been told we could buy our tickets at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon for the 7.15am train on Friday morning, and sure enough there was the queue – not too long – in front of the ticket booth with the ‘Kayes-Kita-Bamako’ sign. Excellent, I thought, there’d be no pissing around with the inshallahs and head wobbles I’d been subjected to in Tambacounda. Queuing I can handle; every queue has a front, after all.

Unfortunately the touts were out in force, and they leapt at the chance to earn a buck or two. ‘All the tickets are sold out,’ they told me. ‘This ticket booth is closed for the day,’ they chimed. ‘I can buy you a ticket and you won’t have to wait,’ they said. I smiled, wobbled my head and said I was happy to queue; the one thing I had was plenty of time, and as they were hassling everyone in the queue, not just the toubabs, I figured that either the touts were talking rubbish, or nobody else in the queue was going to get a ticket either. I just ignored them, much to their consternation.

The queue, which was about 30 people long when I joined it, took one-and-a-half hours to grind its way to where I was standing, by which time the French for my order was etched in my skull. I’d offered to buy three tickets in first class for Steve, Oliver and me, as my French was supposedly better than theirs, and it couldn’t have gone more smoothly. It might have been the slowest queue on the planet, but I came out clutching three tickets for the 7.15am train, a snip at CFA12,000 a seat. Brandishing them like trophies of war, I caught the eye of one tout who had insisted the tickets were sold out, and slapped him on the back with a big smile. He laughed; being economical with the truth is one of the rules of African touting, after all.

On the Train

We got to the platform for 7am, just to make sure we didn’t miss it, and we found our seats with a minimum of fuss. The seats in first class are generously spaced with two sets of two seats across the width of the carriage, and as I settled in after the fiasco of my hat I idly wondered how long it was going to take to cover the 510km southeast to the capital of Mali. When Steve had gone from Bamako to Kayes it had taken him 12 hours, and that was after the train had sat in Bamako station for five hours past its scheduled departure time; but every journey has its own story, especially when the only thing you can say about the timetable is that it is never right.

In the event we only sat in the station for two hours before the engine tooted and the train lurched forward with a screech, and so started a long crawl through a dry, dusty landscape that would see us arrive in Bamako ten hours later at 9.15pm, a remarkably good time compared to some of the stories you hear. Steve was also an expert on the Dakar-Bamako train, for which the scheduled timetable says the train leaves Dakar at 10am on Wednesday morning and arrives in Bamako at 3.30pm on Thursday afternoon. I don’t think this has ever actually happened; Steve finally arrived in Bamako in the wee hours of Saturday morning, which made me rather relieved that I’d been unable to experience that for myself.

Unlike the express train, the local train stops at loads of places on the way, and it makes life much more interesting, because that’s when the excitement starts. When the train rolls in, the market comes to town, literally; women run up to the carriage windows with all sorts of food and drink balanced on their heads, and people spill out of the windows and doors to buy whatever they need to keep them going to the next stop. People pile off the train at every stop to stretch their legs, pray to Allah or chat to their friends, and with a blast of the horn and a screeching jolt, the train eventually pulls off again and everyone scrambles back on. It’s a hoot, watching the world go by from the comfort of a first class seat.

It’s pretty comfortable, too. Judging by the multilingual sign on the toilet door, the Bamako train once plied the rails of Europe, and the carriages feel like slightly faded but perfectly pleasant versions of trains from another generation, which is exactly what they are. My seat was properly sprung and barely ripped, the windows were smothered in dust but were all present and correct, and compared to the buses, this was luxury indeed. The ride was considerably smoother, too; the train went through some bumpy patches where we were bounced around on our leather seats like eggs on the back of a bicycle, but I was impressed by the quality of the service. And who needs punctuality when you’ve got the desert outside your window?

The landscape is fascinating, if only because it is so desolate. This is the semi-desert of the Sahel, a dry and dusty band that’s sandwiched between the Sahara to the north and the coastal rainforest of Ghana to the south, and it’s pretty harsh stuff. It’s hot, dry, dusty and remote, and its light brown hue is broken only by the occasional river that meanders through the parched landscape, leaving greenery in its wake. Villages of circular thatched huts and crumbling concrete buildings line the track, and lone farmers, wandering through their fields, stop and wave as the train rumbles past.

Another interesting sight on the way is the proliferation of bush fires. Everywhere along the route are the scars of fire, the blackened earth and broken trees poking out from under new growth. We even went through a couple of active fires, and the heat as we shot past the flames – which went right up to the edge of the track – was intense.

The one we went through after the sun had set was particularly impressive; it felt as if we were crossing the plains of Mordor, but it also showed how localised these fires are, as the area covered by the fire was quite small. It’s common practice in West Africa for farmers to start bush fires intentionally, as it kills off old vegetation and encourages new growth for cattle to graze, as well as flushing out wild animals and killing off crop-eating insects; these fires had all the hallmarks of manmade fires, much like the fires in outback Australia. Then again, judging by the number of cigarette butts that got thrown from the train into the tinder-dry scrub, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were quite a few unexpected bush fires out here, too.

There’s plenty of evidence of burning inside the train, too, but this time it’s from the engine at the front. I don’t know what kind of engine the Kayes-Bamako train uses, but it throws out clouds of black smoke every time it accelerates, and light, fluffy bits of soot float in through the windows throughout the journey, layering everything in a fine layer of black. I made the mistake of wearing my cream-coloured trousers for the journey, so it wasn’t long before I was a fetching two-tone colour, with dirty grey on the front and clean cream on the back.

But it didn’t matter; we arrived in reasonable time – despite an hour’s stop just outside Bamako to change the engine – and by 10pm I’d found a comfortable bed in a friendly mission catholique and could finally celebrate my arrival in Bamako.

A Serious Loss

Written: 8 November 2002

As I settled into my spacious seat and waited for the Kayes to Bamako train to start the long journey to the capital of Mali, I slipped into that quiet reverie you get when you’re settled in a comfortable seat and you know you don’t have to do anything for hours. I remembered the nightmare bus journey from Diboli, I thought about the heat of the desert, I wondered whether the open windows would provide much respite, and I decided I’d probably need to wear my hat when the sun was high enough to strike my side of the train. And with an icy shard of clarity I realised I had no idea where my hat was.

Ah well, you’re thinking, that’s a bit inconvenient, losing your hat like that, but you don’t know about me and my hat. My hat and I have been together through almost all of my travelling days, and I have grown so fond of the old bugger that it’s not an it, he’s a he, and he’s not just a hat, he’s my friend. We go back a long, long way, and we’ve been through a great deal together.

I first met my hat on 25 December 1995, when Laurence and Mary, my wonderful hosts in Melbourne, gave me the best Christmas present a traveller could have. Folded up inside a cotton bag bearing the name ‘The Great Australian Bush Hat in a Bag’ was a brown, leather bush hat with a spring around the inside of the wide brim. When you took it out of the bag it sprang into shape, but it was floppy enough to squash up into a little bag with no ill effects. It was perfect for my backpack-based travels, and I wore it constantly throughout Australia and New Zealand; it might be a cliché, but wherever I laid my hat, that was my home.

I was devastated, then, to find that when I pulled my hat out of my luggage after an ill-fated sailing trip across the Pacific, the salty sea air had dissolved the poor bugger’s rim, and had turned half the leather into a hard, brittle mess. There was nothing else for it; I gave my hat a burial at sea, wondering what I was going to do without him. It was like saying goodbye to a dear old friend, but at least I was going back to Australia, so I could no doubt get something else there.

In the event I found an exact duplicate in Brisbane, complete with the same cotton bag and the same moniker. I snapped him up faster than you could say ‘reincarnation’, and I was a happy man with my hat once more. We stayed glued together until I got back home in 1998, and we hit the road together every time I took a holiday. My hat – he’s a mate.

And that is why it hurt so much to realise he’d disappeared. I checked everywhere – on the floor, in my bag, under the seats – but I’m organised enough to know when something is missing, and my hat was well and truly gone. Perhaps someone had swiped him when I’d been stuffing my pack on the luggage racks? Or perhaps I’d left him at the shop when I bought my water for the trip? Whatever, I was desolate, and it showed; people thought I’d had my whole bag stolen, not just my hat, but they were genuinely sympathetic when I told them he was more of a friend than a piece of clothing. They knew what I meant.

I rushed out of the train and back to the shop, hoping that they might have seen my wide-brimmed friend, but they shook their heads. By now it was 7.30am and the train was supposed to have left at 7.15am, and I frantically looked up and down the platform, straining to see if anyone was wearing a bush hat. The panic started hardening into a sense of loss, and I realised that this was one of the worst things I could have mislaid. It’s annoying when things like cameras and sleeping bags get stolen, and it’s inconvenient when travellers cheques and passports go missing, but to lose something with such emotional value is far worse. I was never going to be able to replace my hat, and I slumped into my chair, no longer so happy at the prospect of sitting there all day. I could feel my mind settling in for a good, serious wallow.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ came a voice from behind me. Oh no, I thought, I’m really not in the mood for polite conversation with my fellow passengers, not just yet. ‘Is this yours?’ it said, and I looked round. I couldn’t believe it; a young man in a yellow shirt had found my hat, and my face must have said it all. He grinned back, handing him over, and explaining that I must have dropped him when I was boarding the train; he’d been trying to find the owner ever since, and the story of my desolation had spread through the station. I think I hugged him; I certainly shook his hand until it was about to fall off.

I raised my hat to the sky, and all around me my fellow passengers cheered. I guess people will watch any kind of soap opera while they’re waiting for their train to pull out of the station, even one with such a soppy ending.

Black Music

Written: 8 November 2002

My choice of accommodation in Bamako was ironic, given earlier events on the train. Inspired by the fires of hell outside the window of the Kayes-Bamako train, I plugged into my Walkman to soothe away the rest of the journey. For my African trip I’ve recorded five compilation tapes, each created according to a specific mood; they are Up (uplifting, happy stuff), Mellow (for those chill-out moments), Folk (hey, nonny nonny), Hard (air guitar optional) and Pot Luck (a random mix for random moods). Given the harshness of the environment, the satanic screeching of the train’s wheels and the fires raging outside, I chose Hard.

Half an hour into my foot-stomping trance I felt a tap on my shoulder; it was one of the locals who were standing in the section between carriages, along with the squawking chickens, sacks of rice and the somewhat fragrant toilet. He pointed to my headphones and wobbled his head. I couldn’t ignore him and he looked friendly, so I took off my headphones and smiled back.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello,’ he said, and we launched into the pleasantries. Mohammed was a student from Bamako, but he went to university in Casablanca in Morocco, he was a Muslim observing Ramadan, and he was really interested in music.

‘Can I have a listen?’ he asked, and I handed him the headphones. He put them on, did a double take, but slowly started to settle into the riff-laden rhythm. A couple of minutes later he was grinning madly and giving me the thumbs-up sign, but inwardly I cringed; I knew which song had just started, and I knew the vocals were about to kick in.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘Err, it’s Black Sabbath,’ I said, just as Ozzy Osbourne launched into the first verse of the Sabbath’s seminal track ‘War Pigs’:

Generals gathered in their masses

Just like witches at black masses

Evil minds that plot destruction

Sorcerers of death’s construction

‘Blah Sabbah?’ he said. ‘What is that? The name of the song?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s the name of the band. In French it would be Dimanche Noir.’

‘Ah, Dimanche Noir,’ he nodded. ‘And the song?’

‘That would be “Les Cochons de la Guerre”, I suppose,’ I said.

‘It’s good,’ he said, and tapped along as Ozzy continued:

In the fields the bodies burning

As the war machine keeps turning

Death and hatred to mankind

Poisoning their brainwashed minds

Oh Lord, yeah!

I sincerely hope he didn’t understand Ozzy’s lyrics, especially the bit that goes ‘Satan, laughing, spreads his wings’ as Tony Iommi’s guitar arpeggios down through the octaves. I doubt that listening to Black Sabbath preaching about satanic war is one of the recommended observances during Ramadan – especially given the current tensions in the Gulf – but at least Mohammed seemed to enjoy the experience, which was the main thing, I guess.

Just don’t blame me if he decides to grow his hair, paint his bedroom black and talk in monosyllables. I was only being polite...

Bamako

Written: 12 November 2002

If selective hearing has a spiritual home, it must be Bamako. Never in my life have I known such a large proportion of people who are completely unable to grasp the words, ‘No thank you, I do not want a guide for the Dogon Country, I don’t want to buy any necklaces, and I don’t want to hear any authentic African drumming.’

This is a pity, because being white and being in the capital of Mali seems to attract potential guides and jewellery sellers like a light does moths; they circle round and round and bash into you again and again, seemingly unaware of how utterly futile their actions are, but still the dance goes on.

To be fair, it’s all pretty polite stuff, and if you’re courteous but firm, most of them give up after a while and find someone else to pester... but I couldn’t believe how quickly another tout would flit into view, punting exactly the same stuff; it was so incessant that it felt as if I was the target of a slickly orchestrated military operation. One evening I was sitting in a restaurant, waiting for my poulet yassa to arrive, and no fewer than five touts slid alongside me on the bench and regaled me with photos of the Dogon area, showed off their handicrafts, or tried to persuade me that the thing I wanted more than anything was to come with them to see some – wait for it – genuine African drumming at a special performance that very night.

The biggest problem with tout fever is that you have to make a concerted effort not to turn into a complete bastard. All your senses scream, ‘Go on, tell this idiot to piss off, tell him you’re sick of being constantly hassled, and tell him that he’s putting you off ever hiring a guide, especially one as patently stupid as him – he can’t even understand the word “no”, for pity’s sake.’ But you have to hold yourself back, because they’re only trying to make a buck; Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world, and who can blame the locals for trying to suck a bit of cash out of the fabulously wealthy tourists who slope into their country, with their Rolexes, smart clothes and credit cards?

So you keep your cool, you keep saying ‘no’ politely, and you keep on resisting the urge to snarl at everyone who introduces themselves to you in the street. The chances are high that most of the strangers who start chatting to you in the street are going to try selling you something, but not everyone is a tout, and you owe it to the silent majority to keep your cool. And when you meet a Malian who isn’t trying to offload a necklace or tour, it’s a wonderful thing, if only because it’s so novel.

Touts aside, Bamako is a lovely little place. Sure, when I say ‘lovely’ I’m not using it in the rich European sense – like most cities on this planet, Bamako has piles of litter in the streets, open sewers with that authentic open sewer smell, and pollution that you can cut with a knife and which gives you a sore throat after an hour’s stroll through the city centre – but once you get used to the city atmosphere, it’s a friendly place.

It’s also nicely compact, so walking round the centre is not only a possibility, it’s a great idea. Some areas of Bamako are smothered in stalls – sometimes it feels like one big market – and some areas have wide boulevards and businesslike buildings, but there’s normally something going on that’s worth watching. The grand marché is a particularly mad old place, full of stalls, colour and touts, and the area round the River Niger is surprisingly green for such an urban setting. I loved it.

Shopping in Bamako

At times, though, it wasn’t easy, especially when shopping. I hate shopping anyway, but I really wanted to buy a map of Mali so I could draw lots of pretty lines on it as therapy for spending hours cramped into Malian buses. You’d think this would be pretty easy in the country’s capital, but you try telling that to the shopkeepers. Bookshops aren’t exactly rife in West Africa – literacy rates are low, after all – and the few you find rarely sell maps, so I eventually found myself wandering into the grand marché, where I was pounced on by first one man, then his friend, and then another guy, all of whom wanted to know what I was looking for.

‘A tourist map of Mali,’ I said, and they went into overdrive, signalling for me to wait while they busied themselves asking around. I knew this was going to end up in a commission of some kind, but when I tried to go with them in their search, they weren’t impressed. ‘You should stay here and relax,’ they said, and disappeared into the market. I figured I might as well give them a shot; I hadn’t exactly had a lot of success on my own.

The first place they took me sold huge maps of Mali, carefully painted onto what looked like animal skin. They were nice, but nothing like the tourist map I was after; I explained that I wanted a fold-up paper map of Mali, for driving and tourism, and they signalled their understanding, tried to persuade me to look around the skin shop anyway, and when I insisted that I wasn’t interested in buying anything made of animal skin, they marched me off into the market once more.

This time the stall owner proudly presented me with a glossy hardback book full of pictures of Mali, which happened to have a small map at the front. Yet again I explained that I was looking for a fold-up map of Mali, not a book, and yet again they wobbled their heads and whisked me off, deeper into the market. I was starting to wonder if maps of Mali even existed, but sure enough one of them soon came back, brandishing a map of sorts. It was a transport map of Mali, showing all the major routes in a style so outdated that I figured it would be worth buying, if only because it was so utterly pathetic. I showed a slight interest, and they smelled blood.

‘What’s the price?’ I asked.

‘For you, seventeen thousand five hundred CFA,’ said the weediest of the three, who was obviously the main negotiator. I laughed; that meant the map cost about £17.50, a huge price, even when you consider that maps aren’t as common in Mali as they are in car-dominated Europe.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.

‘Then how much you pay?’ he asked.

‘Four thousand CFA,’ I said. ‘And it’s barely worth that.’

‘Four thousand?’ he screamed. ‘That is far too low a price!’

‘Then make me a better offer,’ I said.

‘Fifteen thousand,’ he said. ‘It is a good map, look. It has Mopti, Timbuktu, Djenné, everything.’

‘Five thousand,’ I said.

‘I cannot go lower than fourteen thousand,’ he said, ‘and then I make a loss.’

‘Then we don’t have a sale,’ I said, and made to walk away. ‘We’re not even in the same ballpark here.’

‘Then you make an offer,’ he said. ‘How much you pay?’

‘Six thousand is all I would pay for this,’ I said, relishing the bargaining. This was more like it; we were actually creeping towards a price somewhere between our opening bids. I could tell he really wanted to make a sale, unlike the miserable buggers I’d tried bargaining with in Senegal. ‘Bring it on!’ I thought.

‘Twelve thousand is my final price,’ he said.

‘Seven,’ I said.

‘Eleven,’ he said.

‘Eight,’ I said.

‘Ten, and I cannot go lower than this,’ he said.

‘Nine thousand is my final offer,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I’m just not interested.’

‘I cannot go lower than ten,’ he repeated. ‘If I sell for ten, then I only make one hundred CFAs for myself, and I need to eat.’

‘And I need to buy some soap, and I can see a soap shop over there,’ I said, making for the shop. ‘I will buy it for nine thousand, final offer.’

‘Ten thousand,’ he said.

‘OK, never mind, thanks for your time,’ I said, and walked into the soap shop. One of the men, a guy called Ibrahim who hadn’t been involved in the bargaining, followed me in. ‘Uh oh,’ I thought. ‘What does he want?’ But he helped me buy the right kind of soap and a toothbrush without getting in the way, and as I came out of the shop the negotiator sidled up to me and whispered, ‘OK, nine thousand five hundred, my final offer, but don’t tell anyone.’

I knew I had him on the ropes now; he was still tumbling but I’d stuck on my price and it was only a matter of time. ‘Nine thousand, take it or leave it, your choice,’ I said, ducking into another shop, this time for washing powder, a snip at CFA100 a sachet.

‘OK, nine thousand, you take it for nine thousand,’ he said as I blinked my way back into the sunlight, laden with Omo; and seconds later I had my map of Mali. No doubt CFA9000 for a map is still a stupid price, but it felt good to be bartering properly after the strangely reticent grumpiness of Senegal; if I did get ripped off, it was worth the price just for the fun of having a good old bargain.

Meanwhile Ibrahim helped me find a shampoo shop, didn’t give me any grief when I said I was heading back to my hotel, and even refused my offer of a Coke as a thank-you for his help. This turned out to be because it was Ramadan, of course, and he couldn’t drink anything until sunset, so I gave him the price of a Coke so he could buy one later, but the point still stands; he hadn’t insisted on any remuneration. I was amazed; of all the places to find a genuinely helpful local, I’d found one in the grand marché. Allah moves in mysterious ways...

Bamako turned out not only to be a handy place for maps, soap, toothbrushes, washing powder and shampoo, it was a simple matter to pick up a visa to Burkina Faso (the next country on my list), a slightly more involved but still pretty painless affair to secure a bus ticket to Mopti, and a peaceful spot to catch some rest. If you can ignore the touts – and after a while, it becomes second nature – Bamako’s a great place.

Though just imagine how much more fun I’d have had if I’d also had a bejewelled Dogon guide drumming for my pleasure. Never mind; perhaps you can have too much of a good thing...

Saturday Night at the Movies

Written: 9 November 2002

As I wandered back to the mission catholique after a day exploring Bamako, I bumped into Steve and Oliver. They were going to the movies, so I tagged along.

The Vox cinema on Rue Bagayoko is an event in itself. Before the ticket booth opened, Oliver asked the patron if we could check out the projectors, and with glee he led us around the back, up some crooked steps, past a man boiling a teapot on a charcoal stove and into the projection room, where two monstrous projectors stood, each loaded with a massive roll of cracked and dusty celluloid. The projectionist was busy cleaning the mechanisms, an ongoing job in the dusty dryness of Mali, and he laughed throatily as we wowed at his babies and peered through the exposed frames at the tiny writing Paramount Présente.

The film we excitedly paid CFA250 to see was none other than Danger Immédiat (or, in English, Clear and Present Danger) starring Harrison Ford. We’d all already seen it, but none of us had seen it in French or in an African cinema; we’d definitely have remembered if we had.

The ticket booth opened its shutters at 9pm, and the film was due to start at 9.15, but by 9.30 there were still no signs of life except for a single bulb shedding murky light on the proceedings and some distinctly Cuban-esque music blaring from the distorted cinema speakers (Cuban music has been a major influence on West African pop music for decades; the mix of Cuban rhythms and African vibes is hypnotic, especially when blared out through completely distorted speakers, which seems to be the preferred method of broadcast). I idly wondered if we were going to have to wait for the cinema to fill up before they’d show the film, but I figured even the craziest tout couldn’t wait that long; there weren’t many people about.

To pass the time I counted seats and heads. The cheap seats, where we’d ended up without really noticing, took up the front half of the cinema, where there were ten rows of 30 hard metal seats welded into long rows. The block at the rear of the cinema, roughly the same size, was obviously for the big spenders as the seats were padded, though most of them looked as if they’d seen better days. I counted around 25 people in the front half and about 15 in the back, which meant the house was pretty far off its capacity of 600 people.

I also noticed that the screen wasn’t so much a screen as a huge whitewashed wall at one end of the room, and as my eyes got used to the gloom I saw that at the front above the screen, the cinema was open to the sky; stars twinkled through the sizeable gap at the top of the screen, and that, I realised, was how the bats had got in.

Full House

There might have been only a handful of humans willing to experience the delights of French-dubbed Harrison Ford, but there were dozens of bats cheeping round the auditorium, quite a few crickets chirping loudly under the seats, and most memorably of all, at least one rat scampering around in the gloom, tickling our feet. I also noted there were quite a few mosquitoes lurking in the dark, but before I could get too worried about them, the film coughed into life.

Despite the scratched picture and somewhat muffled sound, the film worked surprisingly well. It was dubbed in French, which meant I followed almost none of the subtle plot twists, but there was enough death and destruction to keep me going, and it was worth the effort just to see a film in which Harrison Ford, cast with a deep bass voiceover, had a lower voice than James Earl Jones, whose French counterpart was almost squeaky. It was also bizarre watching scenes set in the White House with everyone speaking French; it felt like the aftermath of a twisted world war, and I found myself feeling hugely grateful that I speak the same language as Hollywood and Rock ‘n’ Roll. French is a beautiful language, but it just doesn’t suit Harrison Ford or Elvis Presley.

Apart from a five minute segment where the sound died and was replaced by an eerie hum, and a slight re-ordering of some of the film’s scenes that hinted at an earlier mix-up on the projection room floor, the film ran smoothly, right up until a few minutes before the end. The lone light bulb came on well before the end of the film and everyone got up to leave, and the second the credits started to roll the screen went blank. I guess people in Bamako watch action films for the explosions and car chases, and once they’re over, you might as well go home.

Especially with a film where James Earl Jones sounds like his balls have yet to drop.

Mali: Along the River Niger

Mopti

Written: 14 November 2002

Poor Mopti. It has such a pleasant name, the sort you’d give to a particularly endearing floppy-eared dog or a favourite teddy bear, but the odds were stacked against it from the start. I was never going to like the place.

The problem was that I didn’t exactly turn up in Mopti in the most optimistic frame of mind. I decided to take the overnight bus from Bamako because it was by far the easiest option; as the buses are ex-European coaches with pleasantly padded seats – some of them still sporting stickers showing regions of faraway places like Germany, so they even feel European, if you ignore the driving – it’s a comfortable way to get from the nation’s capital to the nation’s centre of tourism. Unfortunately my guts decided to throw a spanner in the works, and on the morning before leaving Bamako, I encountered my second bout of African belly. It wasn’t as savage as the first one – I was nauseous but I wasn’t actually throwing up, for which I was extremely thankful – but when you’re cooped up in an overnight coach, wincing with the spasms, it doesn’t bode well for a good night’s sleep. And that’s before the constant all-night music, played at full volume, starts to hammer the outside of your skull like a particularly irritating child.

By the time I arrived in Mopti at 4am I was practically jelly, and the last thing I wanted was to have to take on the brunt of Mali’s tourist trade. Mopti is a largish town, pleasantly situated on the banks of the River Niger, but its position between the world-famous mud mosque of Djenné and the world-famous trekking area of the Dogon Country means it’s the busiest stop-off point for tourists in Mali, and as a result the touts are spectacularly keen. I thought Bamako had been a little too full of guides trying to offload their wares, but Mopti makes Bamako look like a pleasant stroll in the park.

As I stood there by the side of the road, wondering why I was having to wipe the sleep from my eyes when I hadn’t actually had any, a conveyor belt fed irritatingly ingratiating touts right to my door, dumping them so thick and fast by my feet that I felt like a guest speaker at a Star Trek convention, surrounded by unrelenting weirdoes with bad breath and no social skills. I couldn’t get my brain into gear, so I simply stared into the middle distance and ignored them with polite, vacant smiles. They could try all they liked; I wasn’t physically up to a reaction, even if I’d wanted to communicate.

Luckily sharing the bus ride with me was Brook, a friendly Canadian who was also hoping to get to Timbuktu, and while I stood there guarding the bags and peering at the touts through the soupy haze of my gunked-up eyes, he strode off to ask about transport to Timbuktu along the River Niger. The roads to Timbuktu don’t really deserve that title – they’re four-wheel-drive tracks that take a good couple of days to navigate – so the river is a much more pleasant alternative, and that was why we’d come here. We needed to find a boat.

Thanks to some sterling detective work from Brook and some pathetic dribbling noises from me, we finally worked out the choices. Cheapest at CFA10,000 per person, and easily the most primitive, was a pinasse (a large pirogue) that was heading direct to Timbuktu the next day, taking three days to float downstream along the Niger and providing sleeping accommodation on top of a bunch of rice sacks on the lower deck; next up the scale, at CFA12,500 per person, was a larger and more luxurious pinasse with a sheltered upper deck for sleeping, which was also leaving the next day, but which wasn’t direct – we’d have to change onto another pinasse in Tonka, about two-thirds of the way to Timbuktu; and finally there was the CFA19,500 public CMN ferry, where third-class accommodation was in 12-bunk dorms, meals were included, and there was even a bar, though the smell from the toilets managed to curb any pretensions to luxury the ferry might have.

Unfortunately I was too frazzled to make a decision, so avoiding the issue and the touts, I found myself a bed and nearby toilet in the local mission, and Brook headed off to do battle with the banks. I couldn’t handle Mopti without regrouping and forming a battle plan; hell, I couldn’t even handle standing up...

Decisions, Decisions

I sunk into a coma for a few hours, and it helped; after a shower, another colonic symphony and some rehydration salts, things looked a lot better. I decided I wasn’t going to be able to handle the cheaper pinasse as there simply wasn’t enough shelter from the baking Malian sun, and Brook fancied a pinasse trip over the more touristy ferry, so we took Buddha’s middle way and chose the larger pinasse. Of course, by this time the price had shot up to CFA15,000 – ‘Morning prices are different to afternoon prices’ was the irrefutable excuse offered by the man in charge of the tickets – but we’d both had enough of negotiating and just wanted something booked, so we coughed up the money, took the tickets, and prayed for a swift exit.

For Mopti is quite unrelenting. As a white person there’s nothing you can do to hide that fact that you’re a tourist and therefore fair game for the touts, and this earns you the magnetism of a lump of iron the size of Manhattan. As soon as you stretch a toe outside your hotel you’re accosted, and it absolutely doesn’t matter what you say as it will all fall on completely deaf ears. The mantra is uninventive, but at least it’s consistent:

‘You going to Dogon? I am from Dogon, I can show you the best sights. You’re not going to Dogon? Maybe later, maybe you want to book a guide for later? I am Dogon myself, I know the area very well. What? You’re going to Timbuktu? Aha, do you want a guide to Timbuktu? I am from there, I have many friends there, I can show you the best sights. Do you want to book a guide? Maybe later?’

‘You want a ticket for the bus to Bamako? Ah, OK, you’re not going to Bamako, you want a ticket for Gao, Timbuktu, Dogon? You’re going by pinasse already? But I can sell you a ticket for the bus! You want a ticket for the bus for Bamako?’

‘What are you looking for? Camera film? No problem, I show you the shop, it’s here, yes, I know you like to shop alone, but I will help you anyway. There is some film, in the shop that you were about to go into anyway. Here, let me pick it off the shelf for you and talk to the man in the shop so I can get a commission for bringing you here, even though I didn’t. By the way, do you need help breathing, or perhaps you need help eating? I can help you with everything! Whatever you want, I can get you a cheap price.’

‘You want to buy water? I can sell you twelve bottles for CFA6000 – water is very expensive in Timbuktu. If you buy a case it will save you money. Yes, it is heavy, but it is a good deal. Perhaps I bring it to you this afternoon, do we have a deal?’

‘You want a pinasse trip? Oh, you already have one, with which pinasse? What, that one? But that is not going today, and it is not going to Timbuktu; you must change. You know this? Why not change to my pinasse, over there, it is quicker and is going today. What’s that? You’d rather travel in a chicken coup? No problem, I can find you a chicken coup if you’d rather. Come this way...’

‘Where you from? England, I have many friends in England. How long in Africa? First time in Africa? First time in Mali? What’s your name? You visit Dogon? You visit Timbuktu? I have many friends in Timbuktu. You like Mopti? Ha, you joke well. Yes, there are many guides in Mopti. Is good, yes? Hello? Monsieur? Where you going?’

‘Ah, I see you are walking. Yes, you can walk this way, this way there is a market, what do you want, food, water, maybe tickets? I can get you anything. Yes, we meet before, you remember me, I help you buy film. Perhaps now I talk to you about Dogon Country. You like Dogon Country?’

It’s sad, but every tourist you see is fighting the same urge, the urge to scream ‘Just fuck off!’ at the constant barrage of intrusions, but this won’t get you anywhere. The only solution – if it can be called a solution – is to try to be polite but firm, in the hope that they’ll realise you aren’t going to give them any money, and will head off to pester someone else. But boy, it doesn’t half take it out of you, especially if you’re feeling ill to start with.

Exploring Mopti

Even if you can ignore the touts, Mopti unveils itself as a pretty grim little place. The River Niger is its saving grace as it flows gently past, flat as a pancake with gently sloping banks on either side leading up to the concrete bunkers that pass for shops and houses in these parts. It’s a busy port, and boats and pinasses smother the shore, a constant barrage of loading and unloading stirring up the mud while women do their washing by the water’s edge. A little to the south of the ferry terminal is a U-shaped harbour that’s lined with hundreds of pinasses pulled up onto the shore, making it look like the rim of a particularly dirty toilet, for there is the detritus of human cargo everywhere – dead fish rot in the sun, black plastic bags choke the waterline and the Niger turns a dirty shade of grey as it laps against the boats.

It’s interesting, though, if you can see past the ugly exterior. Boats arrive from Timbuktu laden with slabs of salt from the salt mines in the north of Mali, dug out of ancient lakes by people who live in terrible conditions that equate to slavery in all but name, and pinasses leave for the north weighed down with barrels of petrol, sacks of rice, watermelons and so many people that the lower decks sprout arms and legs like oars. It’s busy, bustling, hectic and hot, but that’s what you get when you’re perched on the Niger as it starts its bend north towards the Sahara, before curving right round through Niger and to the sea in Nigeria. Junction towns are rarely beautiful, and Mopti is no exception.

‘It’s a place to pass straight through, as quickly as possible,’ said one traveller I met in the melee. If only my food hadn’t applied exactly the same sentiment to me, I might have enjoyed Mopti a little bit more...

Mopti to Timbuktu

Written: 17 November 2002

Despite the hassle of buying anything in Mopti, Brook and I managed to book ourselves on the public pinasse to Timbuktu, leaving on the afternoon of Thursday, 14 November. It was scheduled to be a long journey; Timbuktu is famous as a remote place, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s a long, long way from anywhere.

The River Niger is the lifeblood of Mali. Its source is in Guinea, to the west of southern Mali, and the Niger enters Mali in the southwest, flows east past Bamako and Mopti, and then curves northeast to touch the southern edge of the Sahara at Korioumé (the nearest port to Timbuktu, some 15km south of the legendary town); it then curves back to the southeast past Gao and over the border into Niger, before flowing due south through Nigeria and to the sea. This huge loop makes the Niger a great way to get around Mali (especially as the roads to the Sahara are awful), and the portion between Mopti and Korioumé is a classic journey. I just had to try it.

It’s no luxury cruise, though. Your choice is between the crowded public ferry that heads downstream once a week, or the various pinasses that ply the same route every few days, carrying passengers, cargo and anything else that turns in a profit. We chose a public pinasse because it looked more interesting than the ferry, and that’s exactly how it turned out.

Pinasses are long, motorised wooden canoes that curve up at the ends and tend to boast a couple of open-sided decks, a roof, and precious little else. On a typical pinasse the bottom deck lives in the belly of the boat, raised above the bilges by horizontal struts; this is where you can find the cargo, usually sacks of rice and barrels of petrol, with passengers on the cheapest fares huddled amongst the freight. The deck above is split into a covered area towards the front of the boat, for the most expensive accommodation, and an open area towards the back, for everything else.

It’s basic stuff; the only seats are a couple of rickety park benches in the covered top deck, the toilet is a hole over the river at the back of the boat, and you sleep where you sit, on the corrugated iron deck (for the top deck) or on rice sacks (for the lower deck). Loud music blares out of the obligatory speakers day and night (yes, all night), if the breeze stops or the pinasse slows down then black engine smoke pours through the boat, people are crowded together so closely that you end up sleeping with your face in someone else’s feet, and the journey lasts for days. But once you get used to it, it’s a fantastic way to float through Mali, clocking up those kilometres while kicking back and watching the desert landscape roll by.

The River Niger is wide, brown, slow moving and serene. It carves its way through the flattest landscape you’re ever likely to see, and beyond the low banks, barren scrubland stretches all the way to the horizon. The river might be carrying a huge amount of water, but this is a seriously dry landscape, and beyond the green strip of fertility that the river supports, the land is brown, featureless and hostile. To watch it drift past from the, er, comfort of a corrugated iron deck is a constant exercise in amazement; I found it hard to believe that people manage to scrape together a living out here, and more than once I found myself thanking my lucky stars that I don’t live here. It’s a harsh place.

But lots of people do live here, as the large number of stops demonstrates. The pinasse stops constantly, dropping people off and delivering rice, butter, petrol and other necessities to the tiny villages perched on the river banks. The arrival of a pinasse is a big event round these parts, and when the captain starts to slow down and turns into the current, ready to drop the anchor, the whole village starts yelping and screaming its way down to the river to greet the new arrival. Just like on the train to Bamako, women arrive carrying goodies on their heads – drinks, peanuts, bananas and all sorts of other sustenance for the cooped-up passengers – and they wade into the water, sometimes waist-deep, to sell their wares. Meanwhile small canoes wade out to ferry passengers on and off the boat, each of them yelling out for business while kids splash round naked over by the shore. It’s a hell of a sight, and the further down the river you get, the more excited the villages seem to get. The arrival of a pinasse is like the circus coming to town, and it’s just as entertaining.

Perchance to Sleep

All this floating takes it out of you, though. The river is serene and placid and the flat landscape rolls by, unchanging and hostile, but all the time the sun beats down, roasting the air that flows through the open sides of the boat, and there’s precious little room for stretching your legs. I was jammed into a corner of the deck, sandwiched between the edge of the boat and a chain-smoking man who ploughed through his packet of Liberté cigarettes like there was no tomorrow (which, for him, there probably won’t be, because Liberté are strong, filterless, and don’t bother with things like health warnings or tar levels; it’s obvious enough from the smell that they’re going to kill you pretty quickly). He constantly brewed sweet, green tea on a little charcoal stove, coughed heartily, and smiled at me pleasantly while we tried to engage in small talk. As neighbours go I couldn’t complain, except when the wind turned to give me a lungful of Liberté.

Sleeping on corrugated iron is another challenge altogether, and throughout the trip I was incredibly grateful that I’d decided to buy four squares of foam mattress just as we left Mopti. If I arranged them in a row, then I ended up with something that approximated a bed, and I could only feel every other corrugation; Brook had a tough old time getting to sleep on the hard, ridged deck, and Sean, the only other tourist on our pinasse, looked pretty damn rough after the first night too.

It also gets cold and surprisingly damp on the River Niger at night. The sun sinks at around 6pm, and as soon as it dips below the horizon the scorching heat of the day collapses into the cool of a delightfully fresh evening, and it’s a wonderful time to be on the river. A couple of hours later, though, the humidity level shoots up and a mist appears, and the temperature drops right down; after the searing intensity of the day it’s a shock to the system, but it’s even worse when you’re sleeping on corrugated iron. I always travel with a sleeping bag, even in hot continents like Africa, and it’s times like these that make it all worthwhile; I slept fitfully in my sleeping bag on my foam mattress, and woke after our first night feeling reasonably human. Brook and Sean, shivering under their cotton sheets with only a thin reed mat between them and the metal, didn’t look quite as rested, but that’s pinasse travelling for you.

Tonka

The first night was just the beginning. Halfway through our second day we stopped at a desert town called Tonka, and the captain informed us that this was the end of the line for our pinasse and that there would be another one along in the morning to take us to Timbuktu. Meanwhile we had a day and a night to kill on our now stationary pinasse, moored in the middle of nowhere, two-thirds of the way to Timbuktu. We decided to explore Tonka; there wasn’t much else to do.

Tonka is a desolate town if ever I saw one. Its streets are wide, they’re full of drifting sand, and unusually for Africa they form a regular grid, like Milton Keynes; the buildings, meanwhile, are nondescript one-storey concrete blocks that have bolted metal doors, a colour like dirty sand, and no redeeming features whatsoever. As soon as the river drops out of sight you can imagine there being no water for miles around; it’s dry, dusty, and utterly, utterly harsh. I couldn’t believe it; Tonka is as close to hell as I ever want to get.

But the people are friendly, as is so often the case in the harsher parts of the world, and they enthusiastically greeted me and my bush hat with, ‘Bonjour American cowboy!’ It took all of five minutes to explore Tonka’s compact town centre and another ten minutes to explore the irrigated millet fields outside town, fed by the river as it pours through a set of sluice gates and into the surrounding farms. It was peaceful, it was desolate, it was in the middle of nowhere and it was starting to get a little boring. We celebrated by sitting on the boat, doing absolutely nothing.

That night we didn’t have the advantage of a breeze blowing through the pinasse, and the mosquitoes decided to join us for a bite to eat. I hung up my mosquito net and slept pretty well, but poor Sean and Brook ended up being bitten to hell as they squirmed on their corrugated beds.

Weirdly, though, they couldn’t get enough of it; they adored the slow, serene sailing down the river, they loved being cramped on a deck of corrugated iron, they found the incessant Malian pop music amusing – even at 2am – and they smiled as the mosquitoes hummed around their ears. I practically had a proper bed and the mosquitoes couldn’t get to me, but I just wasn’t that thrilled by the experience... and we still had another day to go.

On the other hand, while we were sitting admiring the sunset on our night in Tonka, the public ferry chugged into view and docked on Tonka’s concrete quay. If I’d thought our pinasse looked a bit cramped, the ferry looked like it wasn’t much fun either, with booming music shaking the water round its bows, people crowding the three decks, and a loud, throbbing engine rattling the rivets. I figured that whichever way you get to Timbuktu, it’s hard. Then again, that’s the point of trying to get to remote places; they’re remote.

Pinasse Number Two

Saturday morning awoke to a beautiful sunrise and the arrival of our second pinasse. I sat up and watched it drift into view, a mass of bodies and cargo, belching out clouds of black smoke. It looked like our first pinasse, only with more people. ‘Whoopee,’ I thought, ‘another day crammed into a corrugated chicken coup.’

But as it pulled alongside, I heard something that made me sit up straight. Out of the jabbering of the locals selling food and whatnots to the passengers, I heard an Australian voice shout out my name, and there, sandwiched on the top deck, was Chris, whom I’d left for dead on the main highway in the Gambia. I couldn’t have been happier; his cynicism matched mine perfectly, and I felt sure he’d be feeling pretty resigned about this boat trip too. I was right; he was hurting from the effects of the corrugated iron, and suddenly I had a partner in crime.

Saturday was more of the same. We floated along the river, its unchanging scenery unfolding in front of us as we stopped off at villages along the way and watched them watch us. Music blared out from the ship’s speakers, some of it excellent, some of it abhorrent. We ate rice from the kitchen – a table and some pots on the open part of the top deck – and we sat on the roof for short bursts, baking in the hot sun and marvelling at the harshness of the cloudless desert sky. We talked about our various travels since splitting up a few weeks earlier, concentrating on the nightmares because it’s more fun like that, and managed to occupy ourselves quite satisfactorily until we pulled into Korioumé at 11pm on Saturday night. At last, we’d finally arrived somewhere.

But we still weren’t at Timbuktu, and faced with a 15km journey into town and the uninspiring thought of trying to find a hotel in the dark, we asked the captain if we could sleep on board until the morning. He said that would be fine, and so started the worst night of all, with the mosquitoes attacking constantly and from all directions, leaping on any exposed skin and biting through sarongs, sheets and clothes. At least, this is what the others told me; I was smugly snug under my mosquito net, thankful that I was able to get any sleep at all while my fellow toubabs tossed and turned, smothered in itchy bites.

And so the next day we got up, hopped into a bush taxi, and arrived in Timbuktu just in time for breakfast. We’d left Mopti on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Timbuktu on Sunday morning, after three nights of fitful sleep, two days of sailing, and one day sighing with relief that I wasn’t born in Tonka. Even corrugated iron beds are preferable to the Milton Keynes of the desert.

Marmalade!

Written: 17 November 2002

Heading out into the chaos of West Africa can feel like going into battle. You might want to do something relatively simple – buying some toothpaste, checking out boat timetables or tracking down an internet café, perhaps – but in some places simply stepping outside your door is asking for trouble. Touts appear out of thin air like mischievous pixies, dancing round you like overacting extras in Les Miserables; the traffic throws clouds of noxious gas into your face, making you feel as if you’ve chain-smoked a whole packet of Liberté cigarettes; and when you finally find the shop, office or café you’re looking for, actually making the purchase can be like playing chess with a blindfold on. It’s not designed to be easy, living in the poorest area on Earth.

One survival instinct that I find useful is a rallying call, something to raise my spirits before heading out into the madness of Africa, and I’ve been on the lookout for something suitable ever since I stumbled out of the plane into the streets of Dakar. I found my answer on the pinasse from Mopti, courtesy of Sean, the Californian with whom Brook and I shared floor space, corrugations and mosquitoes on the way to Timbuktu.

Sean had come with a number of books in his bag – he’s studying at the University of Ghana in Accra, where they speak English – and as the only book I had was a lame romance novel, I was seriously relieved when he offered to lend me a book for the journey. I chose Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, a classic sixties anti-war book by one of America’s most famous satirists, someone I’ve been meaning to read for ages. I wolfed it down as the Niger floated past our pinasse.

It got us talking about war and the wisdom of approaching life with a satirical bent, and Sean told me a story that instantly struck home. Back in World War One, the story goes, a company of British soldiers was preparing to go over the top and into certain death. The situation was pointless, hopeless and unavoidable, and the soldiers knew that they were walking straight into the crosshairs of the enemy, who would mow them down to a man. They needed some way of dealing with this, and they opted for the absurd. They chose a rallying call that they would all shout as they went over the top, but they didn’t choose ‘Tally ho!’, ‘Charge!’, ‘Aaargh!’ or any other traditional battle cries. Instead, this company of British soldiers chose, as their last words on this earth, the battle cry of ‘Marmalade!’

And now, whenever I set foot outside the haven of my hotel and dive into the trenches of West Africa, I punch my fist in the air, stare the first local I see right in the eyes, and shout ‘Marmalade!’ at the top of my voice. It sets me up a treat for the battle to come.

Thank you, Sean.

Timbuktu

Written: 18 November 2002

Everybody has heard the name Timbuktu, but an amazing number of people don’t know that it’s actually a real place. Before I first went travelling and met people who’d actually been here, I didn’t know whether Timbuktu was a myth – hell, I didn’t even know where Mali was until I fished out a guidebook to Africa and started researching this trip – but one thing that everyone knows about Timbuktu is that it’s famous for being in the middle of nowhere. How right they are; Timbuktu is surrounded by lots and lots of nothing.

That’s the whole point of the place, and it’s the main appeal. Timbuktu doesn’t have anything particularly spectacular going on; it’s a hot, dusty town on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, 15km north of the River Niger and a long way from anywhere else of note, and on the surface it’s just another town with sand for streets, a bunch of khaki-brown mud buildings sweltering in the harsh desert sun, and precious little else. But the one thing it has in spades is atmosphere; after all, this is Timbuktu, and nowhere else can lay claim to that.

It’s Timbuktu’s saving grace, this sense of history. I loved it straight away, though it’s hard to say exactly why. From the second we rattled into town in the back of the bush taxi from Korioumé, I kept looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, I’m in Timbuktu!’ I wandered down the main street, past shoddy markets with hardly any goods for sale, and thought, ‘Wow, check out the markets of Timbuktu!’ I sat on the roof of my hotel, looking over the squat collection of mud buildings, dotted with nomad’s tents, and thought, ‘Wow, so this is what Timbuktu looks like!’ It felt great.

A Famous History

If Timbuktu wasn’t Timbuktu it would still be an interesting place to visit, but its fame is what makes it special. Timbuktu was once the most important trading post in the Sahara, a meeting point for caravans of camels as they carried salt, ivory, slaves, gold and untold riches along the Saharan trade route, in the days before European sea power reduced the trans-Saharan trade to a trickle. It’s still an important destination for salt from the mines in Taoudenni in northern Mali, but the days when Timbuktu was important are long gone.

Timbuktu was founded in about 1100 AD around a small oasis; tim means ‘well’ in the local language, and Bouctou was apparently the name of the woman in charge of the well, hence ‘Timbouctou’, or ‘Timbuktu’ as the Europeans transcribed it. Given its strategic position between the kingdoms of West Africa and the marketplaces of Europe, Timbuktu soon boasted a population of 100,000; it’s now back down to around 15,000, and had already dropped to this level by the time the first Europeans reached here in the early 19th century. Indeed, the legend of Timbuktu was already ancient history by the time the white man arrived.

However, these early explorers didn’t always make it home to tell the tale, perpetuating the mystique surrounding the town. The first European visitor, the Scotsman Gordon Laing, set out for Timbuktu in 1825 and arrived here on 18 August 1826, but he was killed shortly after leaving the city in September; the second visitor, the Frenchman René Caillié, reached Timbuktu on 20 April 1828 and managed to return home safely, but he only managed the journey by disguising himself as a Moor; and the third visitor, the German Heinrich Barth, took five years to get there, disguising himself as an Arab and finally reaching Timbuktu in 1853 (and he very nearly didn’t get out again). No wonder Timbuktu gained a reputation for being remote and impossible to reach, and thus became a byword for the middle of nowhere.

It’s this history of exoticism that still blows through the streets, drifting against the buildings and adding colour to the ubiquitous brown of the desert. Despite the television aerials on the houses, the internet café on the high street and the airport just outside town, it doesn’t take much imagination to travel back to the old days, and that’s the appeal.

Mosques by Moonlight

About the only buildings of note in Timbuktu are a few Sahel mosques, strange mud towers that look like huge desert hedgehogs; this distinctive type of architecture is dotted all over Mali, and the wooden spikes that cover the mosque’s conical towers enable locals to pack more mud on the surface when it starts to wear out. They’re a delightful sight, but apart from that Timbuktu doesn’t look like much.

But among the monotonous brown lies a town that pulsates. When the sun goes down and the temperature drops to the bearable, people come out into the streets and fill the markets, and the town comes alive. By the light of the full moon you can wander through the winding alleyways behind the main streets, being careful to step over the streams of raw sewage that flow from the houses, and light peeps out from half-open doors, where locals sit and work, prey, eat and chat. It’s easy to imagine that Timbuktu has hardly changed since the old days – well, apart from the advent of electricity and associated mod cons – and for this reason alone it’s a moving place.

The people are friendly, too. Sure, lots of them sidle up to you trying to sell you trinkets – mainly people from the Tuareg tribe, with their distinctive indigo turbans and light brown skin – and the kids still try the old «Donnes-moi un cadeau!» routine, but compared to Bamako or Mopti the hassle is incredibly low key, and they do take ‘no’ for an answer. Perhaps it’s the heat, which is intense, or perhaps it’s just that Timbuktu is too remote to be a Mecca for armies of young men trying their luck, but I found it a refreshingly tranquil spot.

Or perhaps it’s the effect of the surrounding desert. The land round Timbuktu isn’t full of rolling dunes – you have to head a few days’ north by camel to see the classic desert you associate with camels, mirages and oases – but it still seems to deaden the noise, the sand sucking up any sound and leaving the dry, still air in total silence. The streets are made of sand and are therefore totally quiet to walk along, and in the afternoon, when most sane people are inside cowering from the sun, Timbuktu is reverently serene.

Very little happens here as the ancient stories blow along the sandy streets, forming drifts of history against the walls. It’s the perfect place for sitting back and thinking of camel caravans, nomads drinking sweet tea in their tents, and the slow passage of the sun across the perfect blue sky. What a place.

The Waiting Game

Written: 18 November 2002

If West Africa has a national sport, it must be sitting around and waiting. I’ve spent so much of the last few weeks sitting on my arse, waiting for something to happen, that it’s practically become the raison d’être of my trip. Every day I find myself playing the waiting game, and the only way to cope with it is to adopt the local attitude that waiting is the only thing worth doing properly. If you let it get to you, you’ll go mad.

West Africa is the poorest region on Earth, but one thing the locals are rich in is time, and they sure like to spend lots of it. Everything takes time, from waiting for buses to fill to waiting for people to show up, and the concept of punctuality is completely alien. If something has a timetable associated with it, then the only thing that is certain is that the timetable contains the one time when things are guaranteed not to happen. If someone says they will meet you at a certain time, then the only thing that is certain is that they will appear some time after that time, but certainly not before, and certainly not at the appointed hour. If you order food in a restaurant, it may arrive quickly, it may arrive slowly, or it may not arrive at all. Time isn’t money here, or everyone would be rolling in it.

I guess if I’d been brought up in a continent so insanely hot as Africa, I’d take my time too. I’m sure there’s a reason for it all, but I’m still waiting...

Camel Trekking in Timbuktu

Written: 20 November 2002

I don’t know why I love camel trekking; it’s the most uncomfortable experience this side of Mali’s buses, but I thrive on camel treks. Naturally, the first thing Brook and I did on arriving in Timbuktu was to talk to the Tuareg camel trekkers outside our hotel about exploring the Sahara, and we soon settled on a three-night, four-day excursion to the surrounding area. I just can’t seem to say no to camels and deserts.

I’ve done two camel treks before – one in the Thar Desert in India and the other in Merzouga in Morocco with Peta – and each time it’s been an exercise in pain. Camels aren’t comfortable creatures to ride and the fierce heat of the desert is no joke, but there’s something endlessly appealing about lolloping through the desert on the back of such ponderous beasts, and even the sorest arse is a small price to pay for such a delightful experience.

I think it’s the desert itself that really appeals to me; camels are just the best way to get around them. Deserts are so utterly hostile they’re beautiful, and they command complete respect. You would die pretty quickly if you got caught in the middle of the desert with no water and no shade, and the very fact that you’re surviving is half the appeal. Of course it’s hot, and of course it’s uncomfortable, but that’s the whole point.

The Sahara of Timbuktu

Timbuktu isn’t really in the Sahara, it’s in the northern edge of the Sahel, the area of scrubland south of the desert itself. There’s a lot of sand around Timbuktu but it doesn’t drift into the endless rolling dunes one normally associates with the desert; instead it’s dotted with squat trees, olive-green bushes and hardy little plants that look too dry to be alive but which seem to grow quite happily in the sand. More than anything the country around Timbuktu looks like the kind of dune system you’d find behind a beach; it’s sandy, but it’s also covered in vegetation. I half expected to see the glint of the ocean over the next gentle slope; the sea may be a very, very long way away, but Timbuktu still feels like a run-down seaside town.

We met up with our guide, Ibrahim, on Monday afternoon, and as the sun sloped towards the horizon and the heat started to dissipate, he introduced us to our camel man, Barraka, and our two camels, Abza and Owrah, who smelled like wet blazers and burped and belched their way through mouthful after mouthful of regurgitated cud. I hopped onto Owrah, with Brook taking Abza, and before you could say ‘Giddy up!’ we headed out west and into the desert. From that moment I’ve been in heaven.

As I’ve said, camels aren’t the most comfortable creatures to ride, partly because their legs fold up in such bizarre ways. Each leg has two knees, making them walk like a combination of a horse and a Swiss army knife, and the consequent rocking back and forth is a great way to wear out your inner thighs. But it’s precisely this rocking motion that gives camel trekking its unique appeal, as you find yourself entering a strange meditative state that’s not unlike the hiker’s high you get when you walk for miles and miles without a break. Camels walk slowly, no quicker than humans at a sedate pace, and when you combine this rocking motion with the deadening effect of the sand sucking up all the sound around you, you get a truly relaxing calm. After the hustle of West Africa, it’s especially beautiful.

As is the desert, even if it isn’t made up of classic dunes. On the surface the desert looks practically lifeless, with the few hardy trees you see looking like casualties of a particularly harsh blight, but after a while you spot signs of life. People wander through the desert, their heads hidden beneath their turbans and the bodies smothered in flowing robes, and you soon realise that these guys live here; the distinctive domes of nomadic tents dot the horizon, big enough to house entire families and designed to keep the desert at bay; herds of goats and donkeys wander through the dry scrub, nibbling on anything edible while young boys herd them with little more than sharp sticks; strange piles of green balloons turn out to be watermelons, which the Tuareg farm on the outskirts of town; hobbled camels, their front legs tied together, stand motionless beside bushes, surveying the view; big bugs fly past with a noisy clatter, and black scarab beetles wander among the dunes, sniffing out dung for their supper; and all around on the sandy slopes of the desert floor you can see the footprints of birds, bugs and rodents, signs of life in an apparently dead environment. The Sahara, for all its harshness, is surprisingly full of life.

Base Camp

From Timbuktu we rode out into the desert and stopped at Ibrahim’s house, where we’ve set up camp. Ibrahim, his wife, his daughter and his three sons live on a square patch of desert that they’ve cleared of scrub and surrounded with a makeshift fence of dry, dead wood, made up of thick branches of spiky, thorny desert bush. In the middle of the patch lies the family’s tent, a traditional Tuareg tent that’s the same colour and shape as an immense turtle, with patterned mats blocking up the sides below the roof; apart from a separate hut for cooking, that’s their home. For our three nights out in the desert Brook and I are living on a large plastic mat draped in one corner of the compound, and that’s it; we’re camping under the stars, for our sins.

I love it. It gets fiercely cold at night and it takes a while to get used to sleeping on the sand – sand is, after all, just rock in a different form, and it’s always harder than I imagine it will be – but there’s almost a full moon that lights up the desert so we can see for miles, and the deadening silence of the sand makes it a wonderfully peaceful place to rest. We’ve been returning to Ibrahim’s home every night for a meal of rice with bits of goat, and we’re drinking water from the nearby hand-pump, miles away from the hustle and bustle of the outside world. (This is more than Ibrahim does, during daylight anyway. The Tuareg are a fiercely Islamic people, which means they respect the laws of Ramadan to the letter. Ibrahim eats and drinks nothing during daylight hours, even out here in the desert, and when we walked here on our first day, he was so weak he had to lie down for a while. I can’t imagine what it must be like to voluntarily avoid drinking water in the desert; I drank gallons of the stuff, and still the dry desert air made my throat feel like sandpaper. The Tuareg are most definitely a hardcore people.)

Each of our two full days in the desert has followed the same format. I wake up with the sun at about 6am, lie staring at the sky for a while, and finally roll out of bed, stiff but alive. Barraka brings over a breakfast of coffee and bread with apricot jam, and I wake Brook – a much sounder sleeper than me – before ploughing through breakfast and downing half a bottle of water. We then saddle up the camels, fill up our 20-litre jerry can with water from the pump, and ride for a couple of hours until about 11 o’clock, when we pick a good tree to shelter under. Barraka then makes traditional Tuareg tea – strong Chinese green tea with lots of sugar, brewed up in a small metal teapot on a wood fire and served in tiny glasses – and cooks up a lunch of spaghetti or rice in tomato sauce with bits of mutton, and we sit under the tree until four o’clock in the afternoon, when we saddle up and ride back to camp. It’s a simple little routine, and it’s just what I need; I’ve been spending the middle of the day sitting, writing, thinking and drinking copious amounts of water and tea.

The ambling trek to and from camp has turned out to be a perfect way to relax. My mind wanders, sometimes happily, sometimes morosely, but the important thing is the serenity of it all. The desert is, above everything else, peaceful, and I’ve found it a haven after the hectic pace of the last six weeks. For the first time I feel myself relaxing into the experience, and I look around at the khaki sand dunes, the olive scrubland and the light blue sky, and realise, as I always do, how much I love deserts. Perhaps this was why I decided to come to Africa; if so, it’s a bloody good reason.

What a shame it has to end tomorrow. One day, maybe, I’ll do a huge camel trek across a real desert, where the dunes reach to the horizon and beyond. That would really be something; the Timbuktu desert is beautiful, but I’m sure the classic Saharan experience, for which you need to trek for days on end, would be something else entirely. For the time being, though, the Timbuktu desert is exactly what the doctor ordered. It hasn’t quite managed to shake me out of my miserable mindset – the desert is not only a great place to pontificate, it’s a great place to brood and wallow – but it has given me something to remember. I feel I now have the first real memory of my trip, and for this small mercy I’m grateful.

Down on the Upside

Written: 18 November 2002

You might like to skip this one. It’s probably nothing more than self-indulgent pap, but I feel like I need to get it down on paper. After all, dumping one’s brain means that sometimes you write rubbish; so be it.

As I write this I’m six weeks into my trip, and I’m absolutely stunned at how difficult I’m finding travelling in West Africa. This morning I woke up with lead in my veins and an awful realisation that I was thoroughly depressed. It was actually tangible, which I wasn’t expecting.

This isn’t without precedent. I clearly remember a similar experience during my trip through the Australian outback in 1995-1996. It happened in Karijini, the idyllic gorge-filled national park in northern Western Australia, where I was as happy as I can ever remember being; I was exploring one of the most beautiful continents on the planet, it was under my own steam, at my own pace and well within my budget, and I had a huge number of amazing sights yet to come. I’d found my stride, I’d discovered just how much I like being me, I was making friends as I drove round Oz, and I didn’t want to change a thing. And then one day I woke up feeling utterly, utterly miserable, so bad that I had to force myself to get out of bed and start my exploration of the park’s northern gorges.

The thing was I had absolutely no reason to be depressed. There was nothing bugging me, nothing had changed from the day before, and yet I’d gone from grinning the grin of the terminally happy to moping around my camp, wondering why on earth I was feeling so blue. It was obvious; my brain was simply having a bad day and had somehow got its chemicals out of sync. There couldn’t be a psychological reason for my blues as there was nothing I could blame it on, and I was evidently just suffering from a mood swing that was totally beyond my control. And sure enough, by the end of the day I felt much happier, and by the next morning it was all in the past. I was back to being me again, a happy traveller and writer of copious waffle.

I’m telling you this because I desperately want to believe that the awful sinking feeling that’s hit me in Timbuktu is the same thing. I want it to be something that’s beyond my control, which occurs naturally, and which goes away quickly. But I also want to get it down on paper, because it’s also possible that it is down to something tangible, and if so it’s interesting to document it, if only so we can all have a good laugh at my expense when I’m back in the land of real ale, pies and gravy. Here are four things that might have something to do with my batch of blues... or they might not. Only time will tell.

A Soppy Interlude

First up, I might be six weeks into my trip, but I still can’t stop thinking about Peta, my girlfriend, my best friend and my soul mate. I’ve never tried to conduct a long-distance relationship before – the last time I went travelling the only long distance was between me and the merest hint of anything remotely approaching a relationship – but this time it’s different. I’ve whinged about this before and I’ll probably whinge about it again, so forgive me, but I miss my girlfriend more than I thought possible.

My morning routine goes something like this. My brain wakes up, and five minutes later I manage to slump into something resembling consciousness (I’m not one of life’s morning people, as anyone who has been unlucky enough to meet me before midday will confirm). I open one eye – my left eye – and assuming the sky hasn’t fallen in and killed half the planet, I gently pull the eyelids of my right eye apart; I have to do this because my right eye suffers from Recurrent Corneal Erosion Syndrome, which means that if I open it in the normal fashion, it hurts like buggery. (That’s just a colloquialism; I can’t vouch for its authenticity.)

I then wonder where Peta is. She’s not there in the bed next to me, so I presume she’s not round at my flat today, but I’ll probably see her later. I then root around the bed trying to find my teddy bears – hell, yes, I’m 32, I sleep with teddy bears, and I don’t give a damn – but instead of the usual suspects I find the little Snowman my sister sent me when I was in New Zealand in 1996, and the floppy little Panda that Peta made for me for this trip. And that’s when it hits me that there is no Peta in my bed, not for a whole year, and it hurts more than my Recurrent Corneal Erosion Syndrome ever does.

On bad days I realise this before I’ve gone through my morning routine, and I sit up, suddenly hit by a huge sense of distance, followed by a huge sense of pain in my right eyeball. On these days I can at least blame the welling-up in my eyes on my syndrome. I haven’t thought of a good excuse for all the other mornings.

Bring It On!

Second, I’ve been talking to lots of people about West Africa, and I have yet to find anyone who has anything really positive to say. I find plenty of people who think it’s a reasonably interesting region, and plenty of people who don’t like it at all, but I haven’t met anyone who raves about it or who would recommend it as a must-see part of the world. On the other hand I keep bumping into people who rave about Asia, especially India, and I think back to the happy times I had there, waking up every day to something else that would completely blow my mind. After six weeks in West Africa I’m still waiting for something – anything – to make my jaw drop, and I’m not alone. It seems that most people find that travelling here is difficult, tiring, expensive and devoid of life-changing experiences.

I desperately want to enjoy West Africa, and I don’t want to simply jack it in because of the vague hope that East and Southern Africa will be better (I meet plenty of people who rave about the likes of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, Botswana and so on). It’s just that after six weeks I really thought I’d have something amazing to report, and I genuinely haven’t. It’s been OK so far, but nothing to write home about, which rather neatly brings me to my third point...

Write Off

Perhaps because of the area, but perhaps not, I’m suffering from artistic apathy. I’ve set myself the target of writing a reasonable amount about my trip, and I’m meeting my target in terms of the number of words I’m writing. The only problem is that it’s not flowing, and I’m not that enamoured with what I’m churning out. I’ll keep on writing, because it’s a good discipline to do so, but I have yet to put the finishing touches to anything that I’m really proud of. So far it’s all been travel writing by numbers, and it’s not that satisfying.

I’d like to think this is because I haven’t had much to write about, and my enforced work ethic means I have no choice but to churn out the same old stuff. But I’m not so sure if this isn’t a cop-out, because plenty of writers manage to wax lyrical about places far duller than West Africa, and if I can’t pull out a bunch of interesting threads from somewhere like Mali, home to the legendary Timbuktu, then will I actually be able to produce anything from this trip other than a load of old waffle that simply gets slapped up onto my website along with all the other travel writing I’ve done?

I guess only time will well, but so far I don’t feel I’ve achieved any targets other than quantitative ones. I even scrapped an article the other day – the first version of my piece on Mopti – because it turned out to be little more than vitriol, written to exorcise the long bus journey and a lack of sleep. I sincerely hope this turns out to be a reflection on West Africa rather than me, but whatever the reason, I’m not yet inspired to write about this trip.

Loopy Pills

Finally, and here’s the really paranoid one, I’ve been talking to people about the anti-malarial pill Lariam. I’ve been taking my weekly tablet for nine weeks now, and it doesn’t affect me at all... I think.

I’ve now met three people who’ve had to stop taking Lariam because of serious side-effects, and a whole load more who’ve said they wouldn’t touch it in the first place. The three who reported side-effects each took it for a couple of months and thought they were fine, but then they started getting depressed and moody, and in one case the Lariam even caused hallucinations. I don’t really think I’m suffering from Lariam-induced mood swings, but it’s always a possibility, and I have to at least consider it.

The problem with this theory is a psychological one. When I was walking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal I noticed a kind of group psychosis that affected all the walkers above a certain altitude. Above 3000m people can start to suffer from altitude sickness, and one result is that everyone starts to believe that they’ve got the symptoms. It becomes the subject of every conversation from dawn to dusk, and people discuss the possibilities so much that it’s no wonder everyone is suddenly paranoid about headaches, cramps, breathing difficulties and so on.

The same is true of Lariam. Those who aren’t taking it suck in their breath when they hear you’re on it, as it has a fearsome reputation. Those who are taking it say they’ve found no problems so far... but they always add the ‘so far’ part. And then there are those who’ve reacted badly, and their stories simply add fuel to the fire.

Meanwhile, I have a bad day, and I worry that it might be the pills. It’s weird.

End Game

Honestly, it’s pathetic, really. The fact is that I’m only six weeks into my adventure of a lifetime, I’m on budget and on schedule, the best is definitely yet to come, and I’ve still got an entire continent to explore at my leisure. This whole trip exists because I wanted to do it, and because I decided to fly to Africa, and here I am whinging about feeling a little bit blue. What on earth do I have to be miserable about? Nothing, that’s what.

Still, I felt bloody terrible this morning, I still do, and I can’t pin down the cause. I could be feeling unimpressed with West Africa and unable to write because I’m missing Peta, and the Lariam could have nothing to do with it; I could be obsessing about missing home and unable to care about writing or travelling because the Lariam is screwing with my head; West Africa could actually be rubbish, and not distracting enough to stop me thinking about home or inspiring enough to produce good prose; it could be a combination of any of the above; or, like in Australia, I could just be suffering from a temporary glitch, one that will naturally go away. Depression doesn’t come clearly labelled with causes and effects, so I guess I might never know exactly what’s going on.

Still, if it doesn’t go away, I’ll stop taking the Lariam; if that doesn’t work, I’ll fly to Kenya as quickly as possible; and if that doesn’t work, I can always come home. God knows it’d be better than waking up again with lead in my veins.

Tuareg Tea

Written: 22 November 2002

Tea is one of the most universal of all drinks; I can’t think of a country that I’ve visited that hasn’t had some kind of tea on offer, even though sometimes it’s barely recognisable as such. Drinking tea of some kind is a global phenomenon, and the world is a better place for it.

Teapots and tea bags are common in most western countries – probably the most vexing cultural question is whether or not to put the milk in first – but throughout my travels I’ve come across local tea that’s quite, quite different to tea at home. My first seminal tea experience took place in Hong Kong back in the early 1990s, where I discovered that green tea is simply the best accompaniment to Chinese food, but it was Indonesia that gave me my first taste of a tea that I couldn’t get at home. Indonesian tea is slightly aromatic and they serve it weak, in tall glasses and in large volume. After a hot day stalking through the tropical heat of the Indonesian islands there’ll always be a flask of hot tea waiting for you outside your hotel room – even in the cheapest places – and although it’s identifiable as tea, it’s a distinctly Indonesian thing.

India is another great tea experience. Although famous for producing such subtle teas as Darjeeling and Assam, served in silver and with colonial elegance, real Indian tea – or chai – is practically unrecognisable. It’s brewed for ages by boiling up milk and sugar, and dipping what looks like an old sock into the mixture (the tea leaves, it turns out, are stashed in this sock). The tea is poured many times and from a great height throughout the brewing process, and the result is a sickly sweet, dark brown concoction that almost totally fails to quench the raging thirst that the Indian climate produces. It’s a fantastic drink, and sitting on a charpoy drinking chai with your mates is practically India’s national sport. It’s wonderful.

Tuareg Tea

Tea is huge in north Africa, too, where it has assumed a social significance that makes the English habit of taking tea at four o’clock look positively blasé. The north African tea ceremony is well known to be the oil in the cogs of commerce from Morocco to Egypt; it spread along with the Sahara’s nomadic tribes from the Berbers in the northwest to the Tuareg in the Sahara, and if you ever try to buy a carpet in a carpet shop or a pair of slippers in a souq, you’ll be offered tea. It’s an unavoidable part of life in desert Africa.

The Tuareg are particularly into their tea ceremonies, and as you wander through countries where the Tuareg proliferate, such as Mauritania, Niger and Mali, you see people brewing tea everywhere. The process goes a little bit like this:

- Take your time. If you’re in a rush, then making tea will drive you nuts. Kick back into African time – perhaps by pretending that you’re waiting for a bus to fill up – and slow down your actions. Making Tuareg tea is a ponderous, plodding process, and if you try to rush it, Allah will simply find a way of forcing you to slow down. Relax, take a deep breath, and procrastinate.

- You now need to light your charcoal burner. The best models are made from clay and consist of a shallow bowl with holes in the bottom, supported underneath by a cylindrical column with a large hole in one side. The charcoal sits in the top in the shallow bowl, so the wind can blow through the various holes to keep it red hot; stack some charcoal on the top, slap in some paper impregnated with lighter fuel, and light it up like a barbecue. If you’re in the desert and don’t have a stove, a small wood fire will suffice. There’s normally enough wood in the scrubby Sahel to start a fire; if you’re in the dunes, you’ll have to carry your own fuel.

- Wait for the coals to start glowing, while fanning the stove with a flag-shaped fan made from weaved grass. If you’re feeling efficient you can start preparing the teapot at this stage, but feel free to sit around doing nothing while the fire settles, if you prefer. There’s no rush, after all.

- Once the coals are glowing red, you need to fish out your teapot. This all-metal affair, normally painted blue, is shaped like a normal round teapot, with a long spout, a hinged lid on top and a handle at the opposite side to the spout. Put a heap of tea leaves into the pot, along with a little water, and pop it on the stove, directly onto the coals. The tea you choose depends on who you are; some people, like the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria, like mint tea, whereas the Tuareg prefer green tea. It’s up to you, really; you can even brew up a pot of each, if you want. There are no rules.

- Soon enough the water starts to boil and froth out of the teapot’s spout, and this is a sign to start brewing the tea. Fish out up to three glasses, each of them the size of a shot glass and made from thick, colourless glass, and start the concoction process. Pour water into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip this into the pot. Do this three times, put the teapot back on the coals, and if you’re looking for something else to do, rinse the glasses in water, making sure you don’t waste more water than you have to. This is the desert; water is precious.

- It won’t be long before the pot is boiling again, spurting steam out of the spout and quite possibly bubbling around the sides of the lid. Pour white sugar into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip the sugar into the pot. Fill this glass with tea from the pot, starting to pour from a low height and raising the teapot as high as you can before bringing it low again as the glass fills, and take the glass and pour it back into the teapot with a flick of the wrist. Repeat.

- And repeat. And repeat. This part of the process can go on for ages, with some tea pourers pouring and tipping 20 or 30 times to get the tea to the right strength. When you think your tea is ready, leave a little bit in the glass and taste it; if you want your tea to be stronger, or you want it sweeter, then keep on pouring or adding sugar as required.

- If, however, the tea is ready, fill the glasses with the same high-pouring action, so each glass gets a good frothy head on it, and pass them round. You should get three glasses from each pot, and it’s important that they’re all drunk; if there are two of you, pour a glass for your guest, then another one for them, and then one for yourself.

- Drink the tea in short slurping sips. It won’t be too hot to drink, as all the pouring will have cooled it down to a drinkable temperature, and before you know it, it’ll be gone. And then it’s probably time for another pot, if you have time... which you almost certainly do.

And that’s the Tuareg tea ceremony, a routine you see performed everywhere, all the time, from the side of the road to the deck of a pinasse. It’s not so much the tea as the whole ceremony that goes with it; it’s the tea drinkers’ equivalent of rolling your own cigarettes, and it’s just as satisfying.

Bloody Nora

Written: 23 November 2002

Travelling makes you stoop to new lows in a number of different ways – sleeping on corrugated iron, using toilet facilities that don’t facilitate anything, or bitterly arguing over price differences that equate to a pittance, to name but three – but one of the things that really hurts is being forced to read trash. In countries where waiting is an essential part of travel – Africa being a prime example – it’s important to have a good book to while away the hours, but if English isn’t an official language of the country you’re visiting, finding a book that you can actually read can be a real challenge.

The most obvious source of books in English is other travellers, but even then you have to bump into travellers whose primary language is English and who also happen to have a book they’d like to swap. Unfortunately this kind of exchange requires a bit of forward planning; to increase the chances of getting your hands on a decent tome, you need to carry two books – one to read and the other to swap – but they’re so heavy most people only carry the one, so they’ll only start looking for a trade once they’ve finished the book they’re reading. This all conspires to reduce the English-language book trade to a trickle in French-speaking countries like Senegal and Mali.

You may be lucky enough to stumble across a hotel that has a collection of books left behind by other travellers, and if you’re really lucky there may be one or two novels in English. I arrived in Bamako ready to part with Martin Amis’ Money, which I’d got from Chris, and there, on the shelves of the mission catholique, I spotted the spine of a book in English. It was the first English book I’d seen since the Gambia, and I leaped at the chance. Out went Money and in came The Stanislaski Brothers by ‘#1 New York Times best-selling author’ Nora Roberts.

Nora Who?

Of course it was only later, when I pulled out my new book, that I realised I’d picked up a romance novel – or, to be accurate, two romance novels in one handy package. I read the blurb on the back and realised I was about to enter a world I’d hitherto only laughed at: ‘Mikhail Stanislaski’s work-hardened hands aren’t what wealthy ice princess Sydney Hayward is accustomed to,’ it warbled, ‘till the classy beauty discovers this earthy stranger’s rare talent for Luring a Lady...’ I couldn’t bring myself to read the blurb for the second book, Convincing Alex, but I noticed it contained the phrases ‘headstrong Bess McNee’ and ‘sexy detective’, which was enough for me.

It got better. The last few pages of the book were given over to a biography of Nora Roberts – according to the Los Angeles Daily News she is a ‘word artist, painting her story and characters with vitality and verve’, and ‘with over 100 million copies of her books in print world-wide and 14 titles on the New York Times best-seller list in 1999 alone, [she] is truly a publishing phenomenon’ – but the most entertaining part was the section selling other books available in the same series. Check out these synopses:

A struggling waitress discovers she is really a rich heiress, and must enter a powerful new world of wealth and privilege on the arm of a handsome stranger...

(Honor’s Promise by Sharon Sala)

Ornery cowboy Faron Whitelaw is caught off-guard when breathtakingly beautiful Belinda Prescott proves to be more than a gold digger!

(The Cowboy and the Princess by Joan Johnston)

A beauty queen whose dreams have been dashed in a tragic twist of fate seeks shelter for her wounded spirit in the arms of a rough-edged cowboy...

(Always a Lady by Sharon Sala)

Fantastic stuff! I knew these kinds of books existed – Mills and Boon is a brand name that everyone has heard of, even if they haven’t read any of them – but I didn’t realise just how atrocious they were. I couldn’t wait to get stuck into the book itself; I could already picture the hot-blooded Mikhail melting the heart of the ice princess Sydney, and I hadn’t even got past the sales talk at the back of the book.

Feel the Romance!

The problem with me and romantic novels is that I’m not female, turning 40, overweight or single, which would appear to knock me out of the target audience for Nora Roberts’ publishing phenomenon. To enjoy The Stanislaski Brothers requires one to drop all pretensions to literature, and to regress to pre-pubescent ideals of romanticism that bear little relation to reality. Bizarrely, I found this a rather easy state of mind to slip into in Africa, perhaps because playing the Waiting Game makes the brain go soggy enough round the edges to make practically anything entertaining. The Stanislaski Brothers is one of the worst books I’ve ever read, but I loved it, and I genuinely can’t work out why.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I liked it because it was so bad, it was entertaining. I found myself folding down corners of pages that contained particularly corny lines, so I could turn back every now and then and have a good laugh. I came across wonderfully sweeping statements like this:

His hair flowed over the collar, so black, so untamed no woman alive could help but fantasize about letting her fingers dive in.

Marvellous! I love the delightfully patronising tone, and there’s more, much more as things between Mikhail and Sydney start hotting up:

On an oath, he tore his mouth from hers and buried it against her throat... Whatever slippery grip he had on control, he clamped tight now, fighting to catch his breath and hold on to his sanity.

‘Damn me to hell or take me to heaven,’ he muttered. ‘But do it now.’

But even the corniness of the entire theme behind the book – beautiful businesswoman is seduced by swarthy Ukrainian sculptor – pales into insignificance compared to the following four words, which Nora uses to paint a word story of the second time Mikhail and Sydney get it together in the bedroom. Here it is; it’s sheer poetry:

He filled. She surrounded.

Isn’t it fantastic? Any author who can make sex sound like a tree-planting ceremony is all right by me, so bless you Nora. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in ages...

Timbuktu to Gao

Written: 25 November 2002

Now that I’m on the public ferry from Timbuktu to Gao, I finally understand why the guidebooks rave about the River Niger boat trip. I spent most of the pinasse trip from Mopti to Timbuktu shifting my weight from one corrugated cheek to another while trying not to inhale high tar cigarette smoke from my neighbour’s Liberté, and although the view out of the side of the boat was pleasant, it wasn’t that exciting; on the ferry, though, it’s a completely different experience.

The difference is mainly one of luxury, though I use the term ‘luxury’ in an extremely loose way. I’ve had enough of sleeping on corrugated decks, so I splashed out on a bed in the third class cabin, which cost me marginally more than the pinasse, but which enables me to take a bunk in one of the 11-bed cabins on the lower deck. Brook, younger and obviously made of sterner stuff, has made me feel rather wimpish by opting for a fourth class ticket – deck class – which comes in at under a third of the price of the Mopti-Timbuktu pinasse, but which gives him space on the pleasantly flat top deck, without a corrugation in sight. For both of us this signals an increase in luxury level that we’re treating like Christmas; this trip is going to be fun.

Operated by the Compagnie Malienne de Navigation (CMN), the public ferry Tomboctou wouldn’t win any prizes in the West – judging by the signs in German dotted round the place, it’s from ex-European stock like the Bamako-Mopti buses – and some aspects, like the toilets, are best left unexplored, but the advantages over our pinasse are manifold. Starting from the top, there’s a large, flat roof which you can reach via a ladder, and which provides a far more stable sunset viewing platform than the pinasse’s shaky roof; the top deck is open, airy and uncrowded, containing the first class and luxury cabins, as well as a bar that sells cold beers, soft drinks and water, none of which were available on our pinasse; the second deck contains the second class cabins, which only have four bunk beds in each room, and the second class toilets; and the bottom deck is home to the engines, the cheap toilets, the showers, the third class dorms, lots of rice sacks, families sleeping on reed mats, ambling goats and chickens, and a few dark, satanic rooms that I’m worried might be the kitchens. After the chicken-coop effect of the pinasse the CMN ferry feels like a floating hotel, albeit one with a distinctively African character.

Easy Does It

Things have gone smoothly from the very start, which I really wasn’t expecting. We were told the ferry would be arriving in the old Timbuktu port of Kabala at 11am, and after just five minutes by the side of the southbound exit road from Timbuktu, we found a couple of donkey carts who were only too happy to take us to the grand bateau in time for the arrival. People waved and grinned us as we bumped along the 7km road to the port, and when we arrived I found the ticket office, asked for tickets, and managed to buy them without any arguments over the price, any discussions as to when – or whether – the boat would be leaving, or any hassle whatsoever. The ticket man was formally polite, and as I handed over the money I heard the ferry toot its horn and saw it glide into view, bang on time. I wasn’t expecting this kind of efficiency; indeed, the only thing that went remotely wrong with the whole process was the name on my ticket, ‘Mark Moxxon’, which I rather like because it makes me sound like a character from a science fiction B-movie.

I’m just not used to the luxury of a bed, a lockable cabin or proper toilets (though, to be fair, a hole into the river is preferable to proper toilets, as holes tend not to smell quite so bad). The ferry’s height over the river makes quite a difference too. On the pinasse we were only a few feet above the water, so we couldn’t see very far beyond the shoreline, especially as Mali is so flat; on the ferry, though, the top deck is about 7m above the river and the roof is even higher, so the view from my pleasantly comfortable plastic chair is stunning. This is what I missed on the pinasse when burying my aching and bored mind into Kurt Vonnegut, and although the ferry might not be such a uniquely Malian mode of transport, I vastly prefer it.

On the other hand, Mali is never very far away. On the first night of this three-day, two-night trip, I was relaxing on the top deck, watching the landscape float by, and a grinning little kid plonked himself right next to me, pulled out a pocket radio and an amplifier the size of a practice guitar amp, and started thumbing his way through the airwaves until he found the most annoyingly jabbering programme available; he turned this up to full volume, distorting the voices to hell, and smiling at me he promptly disappeared downstairs, leaving me to watch the sunset with his radio blaring white noise into my right ear. Luckily he came back before I managed to work out the best angle for kicking the whole caboodle into the river without making it too obvious that it was me, but it made the point that even on a beautiful river cruise, Africa is just on the doorstep.

The bar has an equally cavalier attitude to music, blaring out a raucous mix of hip-hop and Malian blues at such a bass-thumping volume that it makes the windows rattle in their cracked putty. I can’t work out who this is aimed at; the toubabs on board aren’t remotely interested in listening to music at such a belligerent volume, the locals seem to snooze on deck regardless of whether anything is playing, and it clears the bar quicker than the effects of real ale and curried baked beans, but it’s just possible that it’s for the benefit of the locals out there in the fields. They certainly wave a lot as we boom past.

There’s a surprisingly large number of people along the River Niger, despite the harshness of the landscape. At a number of places on the way to Gao the desert comes right up to the river, and you’re presented with the beautiful sight of yellow Saharan dunes lapping against the light green Niger, while the hot sun beats down from a cloudless blue sky.

Most of the time, though, there’s a fertile strip alongside the river, supporting bright green fields of what looks like rice or millet, with locals dotted throughout the fields, their conical hats looking positively Asian at times. Fishing pirogues ply up and down the river banks, a surprisingly large number of them punted along by young boys, and every now and then you pass isolated villages consisting of three or four mud buildings, surrounded by children yelping and screaming along with the ferry’s hip-hop. It’s a mishmash of greens, yellows, blues and browns that’s beautifully relaxing to watch rolling by, and as the ferry approaches Gao, the bright green fields to the north of the river contrast with the deep red dunes to the south in a colour scheme that’s uncannily reminiscent of the Australian outback.

I adore it, especially when the music stops vibrating my bone marrow. It might not be a luxury cruise, but compared to the pinasse it feels like the QE II, and sitting on the roof, supping a chilled Castel beer while the sun sinks into the red-green landscape, is heaven. On the pinasse I noticed that whenever the crew hopped onto the roof to pray to Allah, the whole boat would tip to one side, the pinasse joining in with a respectful nod to the creator of the universe. On the ferry the crew repeat a similar performance every night at sundown, ten of them standing and kneeling in unison in the direction of Mecca, and we sit on the roof with them, sipping beer in the manner of infidels while the ferry remains as steady as a rock. This boat is a different beast altogether; it even behaves itself at prayer time.

And despite this more normal mode of transport, I’ve at last found that feeling of being somewhere exotic; I feel as if I’m travelling, and this is the first time I’ve felt that in seven weeks of exploring West Africa. As the stars rotate round the clear night sky above the River Niger, I finally feel as if I’ve arrived in Africa. It’s about bloody time, too.

The Floating Market

Written: 25 November 2002

As the public ferry slopes into the remote town of Bamba, some 280km west of Gao on the northern tip of the River Niger’s long arc through Mali, the market literally comes to town. For concealed in the belly of the steel CMN ferry are the women and children of the Niger’s floating market.

When you board the ferry and pick your way over the piles of strange-smelling herbs and between the bulging sacks of fruit, you could be forgiven for thinking that the lower deck is total chaos. Women lie on woven mats thrown on the oily steel floor, boiling up strange looking meals, cleaning their children’s faces or stacking plastic containers into neat piles. It looks as if they’re classic fourth class passengers, roughing it out among the rattle of the engines and the smoke from the nearby kitchen, but these families live on the bottom deck for a reason; it’s their job.

I found out all about it from a cheeky little Nigerian boy, who’d moved to Ghana and then Mali as his family circumstances had slowly deteriorated, and who cheerfully sold us oranges and bananas from his stash down below. He and his adoptive family ply their way up and down the Niger on the ferry, selling fruit at all the stops, and paying their way from the proceeds, turning in a profit and therefore a living as they float between ports. As offices go, there are worse places than the belly of the Niger ferry.

The Market Arrives

As the boat judders into port, sliding in the current until it’s facing upstream, the crowds on the quay are poised, frozen like a scrum just before the ball is thrown in. There are maybe three or four hundred locals crowding on the quay, splashes of colour beside the light brown mud houses that squat round the port like ancient, weather-beaten castle turrets, dwarfed by the dunes that lead off downstream. Everything is surprisingly still, wound up with anticipation, until finally the ferry draws alongside. As soon as the first person can jump the gap between boat and quay, the levee breaks and all hell breaks loose.

A fat mama sets up shop right beneath the side of the boat, selling bags of the Ghanaian staple fufu from a big plastic bucket, and taking absolutely no shit from the people queuing up to buy her bags of doughy goo. A confused-looking boy pulls a goat on a string through the melee, the goat as tripped out by the chaos as the boy. A young woman manages to control five baskets of busy buying, one of them containing something that looks exactly like wood chips, and which rustles as she scoops it up in an old Nestlé tin and pours it into her customers’ black plastic bags; the other baskets contain onions, red chillies, dried beans and small yellow limes, the colours blurring as people throw CFA coins at her and she drops handfuls of goods into their bags.

One woman walks through the throng carrying what look like slabs of marble on her head, but they turn out to be slabs of salt, mined in the north of Mali by the Bella and Haratin tribes, who work for their Arab and Tuareg masters for a pittance, in a relationship that is slavery in all but name. The salt slabs are shot through with veins of purple and black, impurities from the beds of the ancient dried-up lakes where the salt comes from. More modern, a young girl sells plastic scoops and buckets, right next to an old woman who waves straw hats, mats and shoes around, trying to smile her way to a sale. In the distance the meat vendors lay out their cuts of prime beef in front of a block of wooden stalls, which on closer inspection turn out to be school desks.

While there’s a chance, groups of kids dash on board and run up the stairs to talk to the passengers or just wave at their friends down below, each of them dressed in something completely different; some are smart and clean, in shirts and trousers, and some are in ripped T-shirts and dirty shorts, clothes that probably started life in the West before being dumped in a charity box and being shipped out to Bamba.

Suddenly the ferry’s horn blasts once, twice, three times, and the already hectic scene changes into one of sheer pandemonium. The stall holders leap up and rush to get their buckets of merchandise stowed safely back on the lower deck, while locals try to catch last-minute bargains, handing over coins in return for hastily packaged bags of lemons, onions and dough. As the ferry starts to pull away from the quay a woman leans dangerously far over the water, managing to catch the thrown money in her bucket with expert precision. Finally the ferry drifts far enough away for the bartering to die down, and slowly people wave goodbye to the ferry for another week, while the lower deck counts the profit and gets ready for the next frantic port of call, a few hours downstream.

Gao

Written: 26 November 2002

As the ferry pulled in to Gao, the last port on the Niger that’s served by regular transport, I felt a familiar sinking feeling. After a delightfully laid-back and hassle-free three days on the ferry, it was time to plunge back into the chaos of urban West Africa. I didn’t really want to bother with it; I was thoroughly enjoying lounging on the deck, watching the world go by from a comfortably safe distance.

It didn’t help that I hadn’t heard anything particularly positive about Gao. I met one couple in Timbuktu who thought it a pretty boring place that had precious little to offer except lots of annoying touts, and the guidebook seemed to back this up, saying that apart from a mud mosque, there wasn’t a great deal to see. How wrong they both were; I loved Gao, more so because I wasn’t expecting to.

Gao used to be a fairly popular travellers’ haunt before Algeria slid into civil war; the classic trans-Saharan route through Algeria and into Mali is now only an option for those on a suicide mission, but back in the good old days of peace in northern Africa, Gao was the oasis at the end of the long haul through the desert. As oases go, it must have been a real sight for people crossing the Sahara, because the River Niger is at its most beautiful here. The huge pink dunes we passed on the ferry are visible on the horizon, and the river is wide, flat, calm and dotted with green vegetation, a lovely contrast with the light brown desert and the clear, blue sky.

But it’s Gao itself that holds the biggest surprises, as it’s African to the core. There might be a few overenthusiastic touts who latch onto anyone white, offering to guide you to restaurants, hotels, shops and buses, but once you set yourself to ‘ignore’ mode and make it clear that you don’t want to buy anything, they soon drift off to let you enjoy things. Sure, there may not be any real tourist sights, but that’s half the charm; Gao is a real African town, and that’s why it’s great.

The Tomb of Askia

However, like plants to light, tourists are drawn to tourist attractions, even if they don’t sound like much on paper, and answering the genetic call of the toubab I set out to track down the Tomb of Askia, Gao’s one claim to fame. Situated out on the northern outskirts of town, this tomb of a 16th-century ruler is a classic Sahel-style building in the shape of a pyramid, made from dark grey mud and sporting the porcupine spikes that make Sahel mosques so distinctive.

Excitingly (if you like this sort of thing) the wooden spikes on the Tomb of Askia are particularly big and bristling, giving it the air of a Sahel mosque with a few extra days’ growth, and most of the spikes are frayed and gnarled, adding a flavour of split ends to the mix. I liked the effect; it makes the tomb look different to other, neater examples of Mali mud mosques, and as an added bonus I found I could climb to the top, crouching to fit through a mud tunnel halfway up to find unspectacular but inoffensive views over the town. Somehow the Tomb of Askia manages to look unkempt, like a man waking up on a sofa after a night on the vodka, and I figure that any place where the main tourist attraction looks hung over is all right with me.

The Backstreets

If the Tomb of Askia is the after-effect of a night on the tiles, the backstreets of Gao are Alka Seltzer and strong coffee. There aren’t many pretensions to tourism in central Gao and it’s all the better for it, as the riverside market is authentically busy, swamped with interesting things to see, and is easy to walk around without constant attacks from people selling Tuareg pipes, woven carpets or treks to Dogon Country. All you get is the odd strange look and kids shouting, «Ça va, toubab?» while holding out their hands for a quick palm slap. It’s delightful.

There’s plenty to see, too, as the sandy paths criss-cross their way through the bizarre sights of Gao’s market. Salt sellers peep out from behind piles of salt slabs, looking more like purveyors of fine marble than ancient sea salt; huge stacks of dried grass are brought into the hay market by donkey, the sad little beasts practically invisible under the huge bundles strapped to their backs; entire stalls are devoted to the humble flip-flop, the preferred footwear of the modern West African, and a quick flick through the options reveals none other than a pair of McDonald’s flip-flops, no doubt created without the permission, let alone the knowledge, of the trademark owner; women bake small round pancakes in large skillets containing holes for the batter, making 20 at a time over small glowing fires; half-made pirogues and pinasses lie by the water’s edge, surrounded by piles of wood, ready to be hammered into place; and through all this chaos wander goats, goats and more goats, chewing on god-knows-what in the piles of rubbish that haven’t yet made it into the stagnantly green sewers running through town.

Away from the market lie the backstreets, providing a fantastic microcosm of African life that’s both beautiful and starkly harsh. Dotted along the river banks, sandwiched between square mud houses and the green-brown pond of the Niger, are dozens of squat tents, each of them with a little porch area that’s home to a cooking fire and the odd grass mat. On the surface it looks idyllic – the huts provide good shelter, and the porch area is always clean and freshly brushed, a marked contrast with the rubbish-strewn street – but this is prime mosquito territory, and the people living here are obviously incredibly poor, scraping together a living from whatever they can find. It’s a harrowing feeling wandering past these beautifully simple huts, your money belt stuffed with enough cash to buy an entire village of huts like this; it makes you feel guilty, but at the same time immensely thankful for what you’ve got.

In Gao, I had a lot. Not only was the town fascinating, but the campement we tracked down on the outskirts of town was great; not only were all the buildings made of mud, but so were the beds, providing a rigid but comfortable place to sleep once our hosts had added a mattress and pillow. To cap it all, in town we discovered a restaurant that did incredibly cheap and incredibly good green salads, the first greenery I’ve seen in weeks, possibly months; hell, the place even kept pet rabbits, so the lettuce must have been good. I could feel the vitamins flowing into my skin cells, it was that healthy; it was just one of many surprises in Gao, the fact that I liked the place being the least of them.

Gao to Mopti

Written: 26 November 2002

Given the distance involved, getting from Gao to Mopti turned out to be relatively easy. It took me a total of seven travelling days to get from Mopti to Gao via Timbuktu, slowly floating along the River Niger in crowded pinasses and luxurious ferries, but thankfully it only took one day to return. Brook and I hopped on the bus in the morning, leaving only one hour late, and by seven o’clock this evening I was back in Mopti, fending off the touts like I’d never left. Sure, the bus kept stopping en route to pick up passengers (after the obligatory arguments over the price and where exactly the seven bundles of hay were going to fit), and at sundown we pulled over into the desert so the Muslim contingent – the whole bus minus the toubabs, that is – could pray to the east, but compared to some of the bus journeys I’ve taken in West Africa, today’s was practically efficient.

The journey was interesting, too. Just outside Gao the bus pulled onto the ferry across the Niger and we piled out, sharing the ferry with a herd of cows, a couple of donkeys, a handful of goats and a tremendous smell, chugging slowly across the river, flat and tranquil in the shimmering heat. Back on the bus we plunged back into the desert, a desolate landscape of flat, barren plains, punctuated by wandering goats and cows who entertained themselves by playing chicken with the bus. Halfway through the trip the landscape changed into the same harsh environment I’d seen from the Kayes-Bamako train, with huge escarpments rising vertically out of the desert, flat-topped and murky in the dusty atmosphere. Here we stopped for a few minutes in the village of Hombori, where the 1155m-high rock formation of Hombori Tondo is the highest point in Mali; I just stood there marvelling at the fact that people manage to live out here in the Malian Sahel.

As bus journeys go, it was almost pleasurable, and even the connection to Mopti was trouble-free. I’d been told that the bus was going direct to Mopti, but of course it wasn’t; instead it stopped at Sévaré, a junction town some 12km from Mopti, so I sadly waved goodbye to Brook and jumped down into the darkness. Wondering how – or if – I was going to get to Mopti at this time of night, I started walking in the general direction of the gare routière, keeping an eye open for hotels in case all the taxis had given up for the night. As if answering my prayers a local man pulled up on a motorcycle, asked me where I was going, and insisted that it was far too far for me to walk, and that me and my backpack should hop on the back of his bike. He was right – it was a long way – and he dropped me off right next to a bush taxi for Mopti, asking for nothing in return except a polite merci. Touched by his kindness, I was even more surprised when the bush taxi driver let my luggage travel for free, and it wasn’t long before I was back in the mission in Mopti, where I’d spent the day before our river trip feeling far worse than I do now.

If only all transit days were that easy. Irritatingly, they’re not.

Sahel Food

Written: 28 November 2002

The reason I haven’t talked much about food in the Sahel is because it’s generally pretty nondescript – it’s not terrible, just uninspiring, and if you’re used to travelling among the beautiful smells of Asian or European food, then you’re in for a shock. The Sahel is incredibly poor, and inevitably it shows in the diet.

Once you get beyond the staple meals of rice with some kind of sauce, couscous with some kind of sauce, fried chicken and chips, and (if you’re in a posh restaurant) steak, then you should prepare yourself for disappointment, because there’s practically nothing else. Vegetables are a genuine rarity, and apart from white bread, that’s your lot; there really isn’t a great deal going on in Sahel cuisine.

This isn’t that surprising when you look at the countryside. It’s a marvel that anything grows here in the first place, but what is surprising is the lack of products that you’d think would be freely available. For example, Mali’s neighbour Côte d’Ivoire is the biggest producer of coffee in Africa and the third biggest producer in the world, but throughout the Sahel coffee is sold as instant Nescafé rather than freshly ground beans. This instant coffee is made in Côte d’Ivoire, but real coffee just doesn’t seem to exist in the Sahel.

There’s precious little in the way of dairy produce, either. The chances are that your instant coffee will be served with powdered milk, or if you’re particularly lucky, sweet condensed milk from a tin; in two months I’ve only come across one place that served real coffee with real milk, and that was a posh tourist patisserie in Mopti. You sometimes see kids selling bags of fresh milk in the street, but more often than not the only milk you’ll see is UHT milk in the shops, and even that’s not that common. Cheese is only available as triangles of processed crap, and yoghurt might make the odd appearance on a menu, but it’s mainly wishful thinking; it’s always out of stock. Yet when you drive through the desert there are always plenty of cows willing to tackle the bus head on, and beef is one of the most popular meats, along with mutton and chicken. It’s weird that milk only seems to come in tins when there are cows everywhere.

Add to this a distinct lack of greenery – apart from onions, tomatoes, potatoes, cassava, the odd bean and maybe some peanuts you’re hard pushed to find any vegetables worth writing home about – and eating in the Sahel can sometimes feel like being on an extended camping trip. You’d think that fruit would save the day; this is Africa, after all. But outside the large cities, your choice is limited to the odd bunch of bananas, green and surprisingly dry oranges, possibly some guavas in season, and small lemons... and that’s about it. I haven’t seen mangoes since Dakar and St-Louis, which is a shame as they’re a heavenly taste sensation; it’s possible that they’re simply out of season, so I could just have missed the boat, but they’re nowhere to be seen.

All of this makes the discovery of a good restaurant an experience to savour. I’m taking daily multivitamins just in case, but sometimes – as in Gao – you find a restaurant that seems to have found the only supplier of quality food this side of the Sahara. In Gao I ate genuinely succulent lettuce for the first time since arriving in Africa, and I could feel the nutrients spreading through my body like a benign drug. When you’ve reached the point when you can actually feel vitamins, you know you’re in gastronomically choppy waters.

On the Street

There are some saving graces, but they come at a price. Street food is a hoot, and if you’re willing to take your life in your hands, it breaks up the monotony of rice with sauce and mixes in lashings of atmosphere. In every town worth its salt you’ll find a bunch of dibieteries, small roadside shacks that sell meat straight from the source. Your average dibieterie consists of a mud oven – normally a grill over a wood fire – on which you’ll find racks of mutton, done to a turn, and precious little else except a roof and maybe a wooden bench. You rock up, take a pew, and ask for a certain amount of meat; CFA1000 is enough for a reasonable meal. The chef gets to work straight away, hacking the cooked mutton ribs to bits with a blunt machete and shaking salt and spices over the result. It’s normally served in brown paper, and you simply tuck in, ripping the meat from the bone with your teeth. In the classiest dibieteries you’ll also get treated to tea, but this isn’t the norm; street food is fast food, and you can be in and out in minutes, fed to the gills with wonderfully fragrant barbecued meat.

Of course, dibieteries represent the Russian roulette of African cuisine. Most of the time you’re sharing your meal with thousands of flies, attracted by the piles of raw meat that sit alongside the cooked, waiting for their turn on the barbecue; at other times you’ll be munching through your mutton, only to be stopped in your tracks by a change in the wind that brings you a heady nose of open sewer. But perhaps the most risky experience – and also the hardest to resist – is bisap. This gorgeous drink is made from water, hibiscus leaves and lots of sugar, and it’s sold by kids pretty much everywhere. It’s easy to spot; bisap is ruby red and is sold in clear plastic bags, and often it’s frozen solid, providing you with a deliciously refreshing slush-ice drink for CFA25 (about 2.5p) a bag. Bisap tastes a bit like very sweet Ribena, and it’s to die for.

Unfortunately, because it’s made from local water, this is all too often exactly what happens. Drinking the local water is the best way to get ill, but if you want to experience the delights of bisap you have to go through the initiation at some stage, and the chances are your first few bisaps will affect you in some way. One way of getting round it is to stop drinking mineral water and switch to tap water, pop down to the local dibieterie for some freshly cooked mutton, eat some unwashed guavas, and round it off with a few frozen bisaps. Then, once the after-effects have subsided, your body will be set up to repel bacteria from all four quarters.

It worked for me, anyway, and I’ve been sampling the delights of street food and drinking local water for a few weeks now. The only side effects I’ve encountered are all those vivid dreams of steamed broccoli, banana milkshakes and ham and cheese pizzas... and a nagging desire to head for the Ghanaian coast, where apparently things get a lot better.

I hope they do, anyway. If I’d wanted to look like Twiggy, I wouldn’t have bought such baggy trousers.

Djenné

Written: 29 November 2002

I had three reasons for returning to Mopti, hardly my favourite place in Mali: I wanted to extend my visa; I wanted to visit Djenné; and I wanted to work out the best way to get to Dogon Country, the famous trekking area to the southeast of Mopti. Given the amount of hassle I encountered in Mopti the last time I was lucky enough to wash up there, I didn’t relish any of these tasks.

Luckily, extending my visa was no problem. At first the policeman at the desk turned me away, asking me to come back in 20 minutes. I did just that, when he informed me that the immigration officer still wasn’t here, but I could wait if I wanted. I had nothing else to do, so I sat down in the corner next to a large pile of boxes labelled ‘Tear Gas – Highly Toxic’ and sat there with a fixed and incredibly subservient smile on my lips until the man I needed to see hobbled into view five minutes later. After some more smiling, some idle chit-chat and a couple of signatures, he stamped a week’s extension of my tourist visa into my passport, and I walked as fast as I could back to my hotel.

Next, I needed transport to Djenné. Of course, the man at the gare informed me that there were no bush taxis heading to Djenné; this is an irritating aspect of Malian transport that seems to be random – sometimes there are bush taxis, sometimes there aren’t – so I went for the other option of buying a ticket for the 20-person bus and waiting for it to fill up. Four hours later it finally pulled out of town, rattled for three hours through the dusty outback, and deposited me and my numb bottom in Djenné.

The Mud Mosque

Djenné is an incredible place. I was expecting tourists and touts galore, but I got neither. Sure, I was befriended by Assiké, a hopeful guide on the ferry across the River Bani who stuck with me until I got to my hotel, but he was pretty pleasant and I was planning to take a guide to explore the town anyway, so I humoured him, as at least he kept the other guides away. Meanwhile, Djenné appears to be totally devoid of other tourists; I saw two toubabs leaving just as I arrived, but that’s it. This is a surprise, as in Mopti I shared the mission’s dormitory with about ten other travellers, the largest number I’ve seen in one place in my whole trip. I thought the tourist season must be starting in earnest, but Djenné seems to have missed the boat.

This could be because most tourists come to Djenné on a Monday, in time for the busy market that wakes the town up after the weekend; but luckily Djenné is a lovely place at any time of the week. After tracking down the Residence Tapama, a picturesque hotel with a tranquil courtyard which I figured would be perfect for a spot of writing, I made arrangements to meet Assiké at 8am the following morning for a tour of the town, and set off for an evening stroll. I fell for the place instantly.

Djenné is perched on a small island in the middle of the River Bani – not a big river at this time of year – and it’s almost entirely made out of mud. Its main claim to fame is the massive mosque overlooking the market, the biggest mud building in the world and surely one of the most beautiful.

Because the mosque gets re-coated in mud every year, it’s in excellent condition, though as it was only built in 1905 it’s not exactly ancient. The design, though, is based on the original mosque that was built here in the 11th century, so it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to picture yourself in an ancient mud city from yesteryear.

The Djenné mosque is a classic Sahel-style building. It has the usual wooden spars sticking out of the grey-brown mud walls, but for some reason they look particularly attractive. Perhaps it’s because they’re totally neat and regular, jutting out perpendicularly, each of them almost the same length. Compared to the messy stubble effect of the mosque in Gao, the mosque in Djenné is a work of art. Most Sahel mosques look like mangy porcupines; Djenné’s looks like a neatly trimmed Mr Potato Head.

The wooden spars have a purpose other than the aesthetic, though. They’re part of the supporting wooden frame around which the mosque’s mud bricks are clustered, but they’re also useful as instant scaffolding for the month-long period each year when the mud that covers the bricks is renewed. Around 4000 people smother the spars with ladders and planks, slapping on the mixture of mud and vegetation that gives the mosque its chocolate gateau exterior. Djenné isn’t just a great sight, it’s a monument to the dedication of the locals.

Friendly People

The mosque might be spiky, but the people aren’t. I found Djenné to be the friendliest place imaginable, and wandering round the streets in the evening was completely delightful. There are tiny children everywhere, and they are astoundingly cute; I don’t know if there’s a reason for their politeness compared to other tourist destinations in Mali, but as I wandered around town the kids all shouted «Ça va toubabou?» and all but a hardy few stopped short of asking for a cadeau, the local euphemism for money. Some kids tried to persuade me to take their photos, but the vast, vast majority were simply delightful; indeed, while wandering down one street after dark, I was accosted by a group of about ten tiny kids, who insisted on dancing round me, singing a happy little tune until their mothers chased them away. It was enchanting.

The adults were equally pleasant, saying hello and steadfastly refusing to ask me about treks to Dogon Country or whether I’d like to buy any authentic Tuareg jewellery. I couldn’t believe it; sure, there were some younger men who were obviously intent on selling me their services as guides, but when I told them I’d already booked a guide for the morning they left me alone. Instead I was able to wander the winding streets alone, free to stop every now and then to marvel at the beautiful sight of mud houses silhouetted against a stunningly starry sky.

What a place...

Spiky Guide

Unfortunately Assiké turned out to be a crap guide. When morning came, gone was the upbeat sales talk of the day before, and instead I ended up with a sullen youth who sounded as if he was reciting by rote. I found him hard to understand, as his English seemed to have deteriorated considerably overnight, and the tour – which he’d said would start at 8am and last until 12.30 – kicked off at 8.30 (he arrived late) and finished at 10. To be honest, I was quite glad; sure, we popped up onto three roofs for views over the town and mosque, and we walked down a lot of winding roads, but I soon tired of his monotonous recitals and his inability to enthuse about the town, and I was glad it ended up being shorter. I didn’t learn anything that hadn’t been in the books, and to be honest I would have had a better time wandering around aimlessly on my own, so I paid him less that we’d originally agreed and didn’t bother to discuss Dogon trekking with him. There was no way I was going to take a sullen bugger like him on a week-long trek, and I figured I’d just have to look elsewhere for a Dogon guide.

Still, not even Assiké could put a dampener on Djenné. It’s got it all – an amazing centrepiece, atmospheric mud buildings, friendly people and at least one good hotel – and I loved it. Mopti could learn a thing or two from its sleepy neighbour.

Mali: Djenné and Dogon

The Best Laid Plans

Written: 30 November 2002

I’m one of life’s compulsive planners, and I’m not too proud to admit it. I travel with a computer and I’m endlessly creating fancy schedules of places I’d like to visit, all laid out in the kind of spreadsheet accuracy that would make your average flower-child traveller squirm. In a sense I run my travelling like a workplace.

This is for two reasons. The first is that I like it this way; I’ve always been tidy, as is evident from my backpack, which is home to lots of plastic bags, each containing various categories of item, from the clothes bag to the toiletries bag to the bag of maps, books, pens and camera film. It makes things fit better as well as keeping things dry (though I’ve only seen rain once since arriving in Africa, back in the Gambia), and it means I don’t have to keep pulling everything out of my bag just to find my insect spray, toothbrush or map of Mali. I know exactly where everything is, and that makes me happy.

The second reason is that when you’re travelling, you have a lot of time to kill, especially in Africa. If you add up all the time spent waiting for buses, waiting for tours, waiting for visas and waiting for banks, I reckon I spend about one week out of every four killing time. There’s a lot more waiting around in Africa than, say, Asia, and it’s good to have something constructive to do, especially if you’re like me and get bored at the drop of a hat. To stop my brain leaking out of my ears while waiting for things to happen, I spend my time planning.

Planning is basically where the fun starts. I’ve got three hefty guidebooks sitting in a bag in the bottom of my pack – one for West Africa, one for East Africa and one for Southern Africa – and although they add significant weight, it’s worth it because I can spend lots of happy hours reading about the places I hope to visit, playing with various itineraries and chopping and changing my plans at the press of a button. The only problem with all this is Africa.

After two months of juggling schedules, reading guidebooks and talking to other travellers, it’s obvious that Africa doesn’t lend itself well to careful planning. Indeed, it doesn’t lend itself well to someone with my mentality, as the concept of ‘having a plan’ seems pretty redundant here. The hardest part of my trip so far has been the growing realisation that I’ve got to change my approach if I’m to avoid a whole world of hurt. Coming to Africa with a plan is not only pointless, it’s downright frustrating.

The biggest difference between the way I think and the way Africa thinks is in timing. In Africa, the answer to the question ‘When will the bus leave?’ is ‘When it’s full.’ The answer to the question ‘When does the meeting take place?’ is ‘When everyone gets here.’ And the answer to the question ‘Is it possible to leave here tomorrow morning, travel to this place, spend a day there, then move on to here, check out this village and this park, and end up in this city before the end of the week?’ is ‘Inshallah,’ which literally means ‘God willing,’ but effectively means ‘God knows.’ Basically, things don’t run like clockwork in Africa, because that’s not how people think. Punctuality isn’t an alien concept, it’s simply irrelevant.

I’ve experienced this before, notably in India. IST, which stands for ‘Indian Standard Time’ and which refers to the single time zone that illogically covers the entire country, is locally referred to as ‘Indian Stretchable Time’ because things don’t happen to a fixed schedule. You can buy timetables for India’s amazingly huge train network, and sometimes some trains do run on time, but unlike in the West, where a late train causes mutters among commuters, in India you just wait; the train will arrive when the train arrives, and that’s how everything works.

In West Africa, though, the way time works is even more bizarre than in India, and to help it all make sense the locals have developed the amazing ability to switch themselves off while waiting for something. You often see people at the bus depots sleeping where they sit, and even when the bus departs, rattling along potholed roads like a tin barrel rolling down a hill, people manage to sleep, squashed into convoluted shapes that would prevent a pampered westerner from even contemplating forty winks. I really wish I could do that; it would make waiting so much more interesting.

But instead I plan. I read the guidebooks again and again, soaking up the background on countries I might visit, working out the best places to see in the time I have, creating mental pictures of the lines I might get to draw on my map. I know it’s pointless and I know the concept of African time will instantly render any plans I make obsolete, but I still do it. It’s like being Sisyphus rolling his boulder up to the top of the hill only to have it fall back down again.

No doubt the locals think I’m mad, which I guess makes us even.

A Financial Perspective

Written: 1 December 2002

While killing time in Mopti, waiting for my trip to Dogon Country to start, I found a haven that was perfect for reading, writing, planning and generally killing time. Its name was Bar Bozo.

Bar Bozo overlooks Mopti’s port. The port is a U-shaped mess, a clash of pirogues, pinasses, smells and colours that’s fascinating to watch from the distant comfort of a bar, as the boats unload their cargoes and women peddle fragrant dried fish in the hot sun. Sipping a cold beer in the shade while the madness of Mali unfolds in front of you is a pleasant way to spend time, and with a bottle of beer costing CFA600 (about 60p), it’s a pretty cost-effective way to spend the afternoon.

Or it is until you get a reality check. I made friends with the waiter, a lovely chap who introduced himself as Marcel Manzi from Togo. This may or may not be his real name; most people who work with tourists round here adopt a stage name that’s easy for westerners to remember, because it’s good for business to have a unique name that stands out from the millions of Mohammeds, Ibrahims and Hammadous that fill Islamic Africa. The majority pick relatively normal names – if your real name is Issa then you might call yourself Isaac, for example – but here in Mopti I’ve already met John Travolta and Omar Sharif, both of whom seem to be in a bit of a career slump. Whatever, Marcel smiled as he brought me beer after beer as the sun slowly crawled across the sky, and when the lunchtime rush of package tourists died down, we got chatting. What he had to say soon sobered me up.

Marcel moved to Bamako from Togo to pursue his studies; he wants to qualify as a mechanic, but he had to put that on hold because he ran out of money to pay for the course. To try to save up enough money to continue his education he moved to Mopti and found this job, where he’s earning CFA20,000 a month. His rent comes to CFA4000 per month, and from the remaining cash he has to pay for food, clothes, medical expenses and goodness knows what else. Saving is difficult, but it’s still his plan to go back to Bamako, as a qualified person can earn higher wages. Primary school teachers, for example, start on CFA35,000 per month, a lot more than a waiter in a restaurant.

On the surface this all sounds fine and dandy, but a bit of maths puts this in perspective. The exchange rate hovers around CFA1000 to £1, so this means that Marcel earns £20 a month (compared to a primary school teacher earning £35 a month), he pays £4 a month in rent, and he’s struggling to save for his studies. I’m sitting in Bar Bozo, drinking beer at 60p a pop and eating meals costing £2-£3 each, so in one lazy afternoon I’m blowing the equivalent of Marcel’s wages for a whole week. In my money belt I have the cash equivalent of three-and-a-half years of his salary, plus the equivalent of 23.5 years’ salary in travellers cheques.

Now consider a restaurant in England, somewhere outside London. A student waiter will probably get no more than the minimum wage, so let’s say he’s earning £5 an hour, including tips. If the restaurant is open from lunch to dinner and our waiter works all day (as Marcel does), then he probably does at least 35 hours a week, so that’s £175 a week, or £700 a month. If I walked into this restaurant with 27 years of the waiter’s salary in my money belt, I’d have just under £19,000 in my pocket.

It would be obscene, and that’s without even considering that in Mali, the waiter in a successful tourist restaurant is somewhat further up the earnings ladder than a jobbing student waiter in London. Indeed, Marcel is one of the lucky ones. He’s managed to move from his home country to Mali, he’s got a job, he’s obviously well educated and can speak French and English, and if things go according to plan, he’ll get a qualification and end up being a mechanic. This is a step above the average Malian, for whom the contents of my money belt must assume mythical proportions. As Marcel says, ‘It is very hard here.’

Fortunately, I can reach for another beer to numb the thought. Aren’t I the lucky one?

Remember Me?

Written: 1 December 2002

I might be getting paranoid, but I think I’m developing a problem with the pattern recognition part of my brain. One of the primeval abilities that are hardwired in from birth is the ability to recognise the human face, but in Africa I seem to have lost the plot. I can’t tell anyone apart.

I’m not talking about the toubabs, who are as eclectically bizarre as always, from pasty men with pale, bulging thighs peeping out from under ill-advised shorts, to steely-haired old women beaming the knowing smile of those who’ve been around a while... no, I’m talking about the locals. I just can’t seem to get a handle on them; awful though it sounds, they all look the same to me.

This is a particular problem in Mopti, where the local touts insist on introducing themselves to me in a constant stream of tours, tickets and trips. They remember me – I’m the toubab with the beard and the brown bush hat, so I’m fairly easy to spot – and they remember my name if I’ve told it to them, and all this conspires to turns a quiet wander down the street into a circus of embarrassment.

‘Hello Mark, you remember me?’ says someone who might ring a bell, or who might not – I can’t tell.

‘Um,’ I venture, recalling the Gambian bumster who got angry because I hadn’t been at his wedding. ‘Um, remind me.’

‘I’m Baba,’ he says. ‘We talked about treks this morning.’ And so we did; I spent half an hour in this guy’s office, talking to him one-on-one about Dogon treks. He’s a nice guy. He also looks a little crestfallen that I don’t remember him. Shit.

But for every Baba there’s a tit who just happened to be in the group of touts that accosted me from the bus, and who’s appointed himself as my best friend and runs up to me every time I step into the street, shouting, ‘Monsieur, monsieur, you remember me?’ And this is when it’s handy that I’m so awful with faces, because my expression shows that no, I have absolutely no idea who he is. It makes selling me a tour that much harder.

If only I could differentiate between the Babas and the bozos, I’d be much better at playing the West African game. But I just can’t...

The Right Staff

Written: 2 December 2002

It’s not compulsory to take a guide to the Dogon Country, but it’s highly recommended. Although the area where the Dogon people live can be explored independently, the Dogon don’t speak any French and there are no maps or books available to tell you where everything is, so you’re much better off with a guide.

The biggest problem is finding one. After my less than exciting experience with the uninspiring Assiké in Djenné, I learned my lesson: no guide is better than a bad guide. The challenge is knowing which ones are bad and which are good, and seeing as I find it difficult to even remember people’s faces here, I’ve got little chance of working out who’s going to make my Dogon trek something to remember.

The best advice is to find some fellow travellers who’ve already been to Dogon Country, and to follow their recommendations. I’d already had a couple of names given to me, but none of them were based in Mopti, so to secure their services I’d have to travel to places like Bankass or Bandiagara, a day’s travel from Mopti. This wasn’t a problem, but given the lack of phones in people’s houses, it would mean turning up and hoping that the recommended guide would not only be around, but would be happy to take me to the falaise for a reasonable price, something that isn’t certain when you’re travelling on your own. In a perfect world I’d find a guide in Mopti, who was recommended by fellow travellers, who was heading off on the kind of trip I wanted (say a week exploring Dogon Country), and who also had some people already booked with him, bringing the price down to a reasonable level. Given my experiences of trying to plan in Africa, I doubted very much whether I’d find such a guide.

I was wrong. In Djenné I met a lovely German couple who warmly recommended a Mopti-based guide called Mikael, and as they were coming back to Mopti at the same time as me, they showed me the restaurant where they’d met him. Unfortunately Mikael was already out on a trip with a couple of French travellers, but instead I met up with his business partner Issa and talked money. It sounds good; Mikael is leaving on Tuesday morning with a couple of Italian travellers for a week’s trek through Dogon, and the price, although a little higher than I expected, is affordable and all-inclusive. I have everything I want: a recommended guide, other people, a reasonable price and a good length of trip.

The only problem was that this was all arranged on Friday, and the trip is on Tuesday. I’m in Mopti, hardly my favourite spot in Mali, and I’ve already visited nearby Djenné, taken trips on the Niger and explored Mopti to exhaustion. I’ve had absolutely nothing to do for three days in a place that drives me mad. Back on Friday, the thought was less than enthusing, and I could feel the Lariam lurking in the background, ready to pounce on me in my boredom.

It’s worked out well, though. Forcing myself to stay in Mopti has forced me to slow down, and it’s made me adopt a more African attitude to time management. I’ve spent hours doing nothing; I’ve wandered round town, making friends with the touts instead of fighting with them; I’ve smiled lots, aware that I’m stuck in Mopti and should make the best of it, and people have started smiling back; basically, I’ve slowly but surely slipped into Mopti life, and although it isn’t the most thrilling experience in the world, it’s doing me good. After two months of rushing round West Africa like a loose hosepipe on full power, I need to chill out.

The waiting has proved to be a good thing, too. When he came back from his trip, Mikael turned out to be a lovely guy, and I felt like I could trust him from the start. I put down a deposit and he wrote out a contract, but in case he found any other people who might be interested he held onto the contract so he could show them that I’d already signed up, and in exchange he’s given me his Carte Nationale d’Identité – his passport, basically – which I’m guarding with my life. I figure that anyone who is happy to give me his identity papers in a police-happy state like Mali is OK by me, and it gives me a chance to examine a Republique du Mali identity card close up, with its slogan Un peuple, un but, une foi (‘One people, one goal, one faith’), the print of the left index finger, parental details and so on. I’ve surmised that Mikael Djiguiba was born vers 1977 (sometime around 1977) to Issiaka (his father) and Oumou (his mother), and that passport photos in Mali are as utterly banal as they are in the West. It looks like I’d found a good guide.

It doesn’t always go well, though, which is why you have to be so paranoid about finding a guide. On my first visit to Mopti, when Brook and I had been looking for transport to Timbuktu, I met a couple of Polish guys in the mission catholique who’d booked with a guide called Petit David; they were leaving the following morning, and they seemed pretty happy with their choice. Amusingly, after I signed my contract with Mikael, Petit David tried to flog me a tour to Dogon, and when I mentioned that he’d taken the two Polish guys a couple of weeks ago, his face lit up and he proudly fished out a piece of paper, hoping to persuade me to book with him on the strength of their written recommendation. Humouring him, I took a look at the letter, which went something like this:

Dear Petit David,

Here is our recommendation following our four-day trek through Dogon Country. You were an appalling guide, and we cannot recommend you in any way. You often left us alone, wandering off to god knows where, and you didn’t have any good information about the area, didn’t know anyone who lived in the villages, and worst of all, we had to pay to leave the last village ourselves, even though you had insisted that everything was included in the price.

You can expect to hear nothing but terrible opinions of your service.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ asked Petit David.

‘Priceless,’ I said. ‘On the strength of that recommendation, I can only say it’s a huge shame that I’ve already signed a contract with Mikael. I’m sure your trips are unforgettable, David! Never mind, maybe next time, eh?’

‘But I already have a couple of people going with me tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can join them if you like.’

‘No, really, thanks all the same,’ I said. ‘Have a nice trip, though.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, sloping off into the melee, ready to spring his recommendation on someone else. I briefly pitied the couple who were about to spend four days of hell with Petit David in Dogon, but then again I waited three days to make sure of my guide, and if you don’t put in the time, you’re taking your chances...

Dogon Country

Written: 7 December 2002

Mali has three major tourist attractions that earn it a reputation as one of West Africa’s best destinations. Timbuktu is famous for being famous; Djenné is famous for its mosque; and Dogon Country, or Pays Dogon as it’s known locally, is famous for its culture, its trekking, and the number of guides who will try to flog you a Dogon tour the minute you step foot in Bamako or Mopti. Luckily the home of the Dogon people is interesting enough to warrant the hype.

The appeal of Dogon Country is two-fold; people come here for the landscape and the culture. The Falaise de Bandiagara (the Bandiagara Escarpment) is a huge cliff that extends about 150km through the scrubland east of Mopti in a southwest to northeast direction. Along this escarpment are dotted the unique villages of the Dogon people, who moved to this area around 700 years ago to escape the influx of Islam into West Africa. The result is a wonderful combination of beautiful landscape and ancient culture that is perfect for exploration on foot. Dogon Country is a place for donkey tracks rather than roads; it’s an area that has managed to stay relatively untouched by tourism, and as a result it’s a considerable relief after the hassles of Bamako and Mopti. Indeed, it almost feels as if you’re not in Mali, especially as people speak Dogon instead of French. It’s highly refreshing.

Dogon Villages

The most striking images in Dogon Country are the villages perched along the escarpment. Because the Dogon were on the run from the spread of Islam, they wanted their new villages to be secure, so instead of building at the base of the cliffs or on the cliff tops, they built their villages into the cliff faces themselves. They weren’t the first to do this, though; before the Dogon arrived the previous inhabitants, the Tellem, had built their own villages into the cliffs, and the remains of these even more ancient dwellings can still be seen high up on the falaise, often 100m or so up a sheer rock face. Nobody is quite sure how the Tellem actually reached their houses, but it’s probable that the area was forested in those days, so they could have climbed trees, or they could have dropped ropes from the top of the escarpment and climbed down. Whatever, the Tellem houses add a strange mystique to an area that’s already pretty bizarre.

Both Tellem and Dogon villages are initially hard to spot. The falaise is a red-brown colour, shooting vertically out of the surrounding sandy scrubland, and the Dogon build their houses out of mud, so they blend into the background perfectly. Walking along the bottom of the escarpment, you can find yourself looking straight at a Dogon village without realising it, until your eyes pick out a regular shape here, or perhaps a thatched roof there. And then you realise the extent of these settlements; they’re impressive, not so much because of their size, but because of the way they cling to the steep slopes of the falaise, seemingly defying gravity.

Dogon dwellings are made up of two fundamental building blocks: granaries and houses. These sit around small courtyards with walls connecting the buildings, creating a cosy little environment that instantly feels like a home. Running round the courtyard will be loads of animals, from chickens to goats to donkeys, and everywhere you see women pounding millet and children mucking around in the dust, half naked and smiling in the heat.

The granaries vary from a couple of metres high to three or four metres, but they all follow the same design; they’re box-shaped, about twice as high as they are wide at the bottom, and they only have one entrance, just below the roof on one side. This is normally a small square door, maybe two feet across, and below it a wooden spar sticks out for people to grab hold of. On top of the granary is a conical thatched roof of straw, and each granary is lifted off the ground by a construction of stone legs and branches, keeping the grain store out of the reach of vermin. The walls are made of layered mud and straw, and the whole thing has a slightly comic air, not unlike a large cuckoo clock wearing a hat. And they’re everywhere; each house has at least one, and most have quite a few more, especially as women have separate grain stores to men. It’s these funny-looking granary roofs that give Dogon villages their distinctive look, so it’s fitting that grain should be such an important part of Dogon life.

Millet is the main staple that’s stored in the granaries. Millet stalks produce little round seeds that the Dogon crush up by pounding large poles into big stone bowls full of grain, separating out the chaff by pouring the crushed mixture from a height of a couple of metres, so the breeze blows the lighter husks away; this is women’s work, and the thumping of millet crushers can be heard all day in Dogon, often accompanied by gossip and the sound of children gurgling in the dirt. The flour that remains can be mixed with water to form a thick white gravy that tastes of mild starch, and this forms the staple diet of a huge number of poor Sahel dwellers. It’s not unusual to find people eating millet for breakfast, lunch and dinner, varying it between millet cream (a milk-like drink) and millet with some kind of sauce (on good days). It makes millet vitally important in Dogon life, which is why there are so many granaries around.

The houses are a bit more standard than the granaries, being made out of rocks and mud bricks that are smothered with mud on the outside. Most houses consist of a number of box-like rooms on one storey, often linked by a corridor that acts as a veranda, and the roofs are flat with a small lip round the edge to stop you falling off. Indeed, one of the delightful aspects of trekking in the Dogon is sleeping on the roof, as it can get pretty hot inside at night, with the rocks of the house storing the heat of the daytime sun and radiating it at night. You also get to wake up to the stars, which is quite an event under the clear night sky of Pays Dogon.

Dogon villages consist of more than just houses, though. The nerve centre of each village is the togu-na, a low-roofed shelter in the centre of town where the men of the village get together to chat, smoke, drink and, it seems, fall asleep. The togu-na is specially built to prevent you from standing up, as this helps prevent discussions from turning into arguments, and with the roof covered in eight layers of thatched millet stalks and the sides completely open, it’s a good place to escape from the sun. Women aren’t allowed in the togu-na, just one indication of the sexism of Dogon life; others include the widespread (though illegal) practice of female circumcision (or, to be more accurate, female genital mutilation); the law that women have to live in a separate building during menstruation as it is considered an unclean time by the men; and the fact that women seem to do most of the work.

As well as houses, granaries and togu-nas, there are plenty of mosques, churches and animist fetishes (a fetish being a stone that’s holy to followers of the ancient animist belief system of the Dogon). The Dogon are highly tolerant of different religions, and many villages are split up into different areas, one for the Muslims, one for the Catholics, and one for the animists. Although the different religions often live apart, it’s not unusual for someone to believe in multiple religions, so you may get a Catholic who’s also an animist, who prays in the church and then goes off to sacrifice a chicken at the fetish to placate the local spirits. It’s a refreshing change after the in-your-face Islam of northern Africa.

So Dogon has it all: amazing architecture, an interesting and ancient culture, beautiful landscapes and trekking paths everywhere instead of roads. How can you fail to enjoy yourself?

My Experience of Dogon

How can you fail? By being horribly ill, of course. I originally booked a seven-day trek with Mikael, and joining us for the first four days were Gian Luca and Valentina from Italy, and for the first five days Coen and Susan from Holland. However I got so ill I cut it short to five days, returning to Mopti two days early. Being ill in the baking sun of the Dogon was not pleasant; indeed, it was one of the lowest points of my trip so far, which is really saying something. Luckily towards the end things perked up a bit, not because I got better, but because I got used to it. Sometimes rolling with the punches has its own appeal, and in the end I just let Africa pound me senseless.

The first rumblings of discontent started in Mopti. I woke up on the first day of the trek, all packed and ready to head off into Dogon, and instantly had to rush to the toilet, the bottom falling out of my world in depressingly familiar fashion. There was no way I was going to cancel my trip now, not after three days of intensely boring waiting in Mopti, so I clenched my teeth, met up with the rest of the team, and jumped into the car to Djiguibombo, our starting point.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Our taxi, a Peugeot 505, tried to pass a four-wheel-drive coming the other way over a thin bridge, but the other driver refused to pull over and first the front wheel and then the rear wheel of our car slipped over the side of the metre-high concrete kerb. The whole car lurched to the right and the chassis slammed down onto the road; we weren’t going anywhere for a while. Amazingly nobody said a thing; the driver got out and looked at the car, the wheels uselessly hanging over the side of the bridge, and he simply shrugged and went off in search of rocks to prop it up. Things go wrong in Africa and there’s no point in getting stressed about it; instead we piled out into the shade of a baobab and sat down to watch.

The original plan was to jack the car up so the wheels could be pushed back onto the road, and half an hour later some progress had been made. Luckily for us, at that moment a minibus trundled into view, packed to bursting point with chickens and people, and the entire contingent simply got out and lifted our taxi back onto the road. This is probably the only advantage of having buses so full of people; we were back on the road to Djiguibombo in no time, as if nothing had happened.

On the Roof

Djiguibombo is a pleasant little Dogon village on the plateau above the escarpment, and although it pales into insignificance compared to some of the beautiful villages further along, I found it fascinating because it was the first one we’d visited. It had all the village elements described above, and it soon became apparent that I’d been right to wait for Mikael. Incredibly polite, witty, always smiling and amazingly tolerant of our inane questions, Mikael was obviously an accomplished guide. The others in the group were also delightful, and I figured that we had all the ingredients for a fantastic trek, as long as I could shift my illness. This was going to be good.

The short trek down the escarpment to our first night’s stop at Kani-Kombolé felt good too. The views from the top of the cliff were beautiful, with flat scrubland stretching to Burkina Faso in the distance, and as we wandered down the falaise we passed groups of Dogon women carrying baskets on their heads, saying hello and being warmly greeted in return. The Dogon are famous for their greetings, which seem to go on forever; a typical exchange goes something like this:

‘Ohh seh-weh mah?’ (How are you?)

‘Seh-weh.’ (I’m well.)

‘Ohh mara seh-weh mah?’ (How is your family?)

‘Seh-weh.’ (They’re well.)

‘Ohh seh-weh dege-mah?’ (How was your day?)

‘Seh-weh.’ (Good, thanks.)

‘Ohh mara seh-weh dege-mah?’ (How was your family’s day?)

‘Seh-weh.’ (Good, thanks.)

And so on. Often this greeting goes on so long that you end up shouting at the person you’re greeting, who’s now miles behind you, a dot fading into the distance yelling ‘Seh-weh’ in answer. Whatever the exchange, as you pass each other, you smile warmly. Everyone smiled on the way down to Kani-Kombolé; so did I.

I wasn’t smiling later that night, though. We settled in and ate a meal of rice and the smallest chicken in the world, and Gian Luca, Valentina and I opted for a night’s sleep on the roof, under the stars. ‘What could be more perfect?’ I thought as I lay under the stars, Orion shining on the horizon as I grimaced my way through what I hoped would be the last few muscle spasms of the night.

As the minutes ticked by, the slight breeze that had felt so pleasant when we’d settled down started picking up, and as Orion slowly glided through the sky, it began picking up handfuls of sand from the roof and throwing them in my hair. ‘Never mind,’ I thought, ‘that’s why I have a sleeping bag,’ and I snuggled down inside, trying to get comfortable on the thin mattress that lay between me and the stone roof. It seemed to work, too, as what felt like a short time later I heard the muezzin start up his 5am call to prayer at the nearby mosque, waking me from my sleepy thoughts with his nasal whining. I peeped out from under my bag, aching like fury, and took a look at the sky, just as the wind howled another handful of sand into my face.

Right at that moment I heard a frustrated Italian curse from next door and saw Gian Luca and Valentina pick up their mattresses and start the torturous process of carrying them down the rickety tree-trunk ladder to the house below. I didn’t know why they were bothering; the muezzin’s call goes out at 5am, and I figured we’d be up soon anyway, so it didn’t worry me too much that I was finding it damn near impossible to get back to sleep in the increasingly gale-force wind.

An hour later something clicked in my mind. Orion was only just overhead, which meant it couldn’t be five in the morning – it had to be earlier. I rolled over, looked at my watch, gasped as I saw it was only 3am, and was rewarded by another mouthful of sand blown at high speed right into my face. That did it. The bloody muezzin had started wailing at 2am – two bloody am! – and I hadn’t actually managed to get any sleep yet, I’d just drifted off for a few minutes before he’d woken me up. It dawned on me that I was going to have to follow my Italian friends downstairs, so I wrenched myself out of bed, clenched my muscles to prevent any appalling accidents, and somehow managed to get everything off the roof without being blown into neighbouring Burkina.

Downstairs wasn’t much better – it was hot, uncomfortable and crowded – but at least the wind was whistling outside, not in my bed. Safe in the knowledge that I’d learned my lesson when it comes to sleeping on a Dogon roof, I tried to pass out on the floor, with a modicum of success. I didn’t dream so much as hallucinate, though at least I got through to the morning in one piece.

Unwell in Dogon

Day two was agony. A typical trekking day in the Dogon consists of breakfast, followed by a quick excursion round the village you’ve stayed in, and a trek of a few kilometres to the next village, taking maybe a couple of hours and arriving at, say, 11am. You then stay there until around 3pm, exploring the village once the sun has stopped being so incredibly hot, and then fit in another couple of hours of trekking to reach your destination for the night, where you take a bucket shower, eat, and sleep. It’s not a terribly demanding schedule, but when you’re ill it’s a nightmare. We set off from Kani-Kombolé for what should have been an easy stroll along the foot of the escarpment, but the combination of an awful night’s sleep and my worsening diarrhoea meant I struggled to keep walking. By the time we reached our lunch stop at Teli, I was fading fast.

This was irritating, as Teli is a beautiful village. Up high on the escarpment are lots of old Tellem dwellings – tiny houses that look more like weird beehives, as Tellem buildings are often only a couple of feet high with single holes for windows – and the old village of Teli, only recently abandoned for a more modern bunch of houses on the plain below, is a classic Dogon collection of granaries, houses and winding paths, perched halfway up the escarpment with beautiful views of the countryside. Mikael explained various aspects of Dogon history and folklore, but I couldn’t concentrate; I was too busy making sure I didn’t ruin my trekking trousers, clenching in silent agony until we made it back to the campement, where the rest of the group ate lunch and I booked a spot in the toilet block. I felt miserable.

The walk to Endé, our stop for the night, was equally distressing, and after a delightful bucket shower under the stars and a bowl of plain rice with some pieces of unidentifiable meat, I went to bed, inside this time. I needed a good night’s sleep, and this time I was damn well going to get it.

Unfortunately the cricket that found its way into my room had other ideas. Crickets are the noisiest insects on the planet (apart, perhaps, from cicadas), and my visitor set up shop right near my head, screeching so loudly that the stone walls of my bedroom vibrated in sympathy. I turned on my torch, and he stopped; I turned it off, and he started again; my earplugs did nothing to drown out the symphony, and I was at a total loss what to do. It took half an hour of hunting through the room to track down the mud-coloured cricket on the mud-coloured wall, by which time I barely had enough energy to crush the bastard with my hiking boots. I eventually got back to sleep, but my good night’s sleep had been rudely interrupted.

Party Mood

The next morning signalled the end of Ramadan and the festival of Eid al-Fitr. Not surprisingly the end of a month of fasting is a time of great celebration, and a huge gunpowder explosion at 6am was the signal for everyone to leap out of bed and start partying. I needed a party like I needed a hole in the head, but I dutifully dragged myself out of bed and followed the crowds outside the village.

I’m glad I did. Mikael is a Muslim and we followed him into the scrub, and for the first time I saw people in Africa actually running, with streams of smartly dressed Muslims jogging along the road to an impromptu service outside the village limits. By the time we arrived two groups had gathered, one for each different Islamic sect represented in Endé, and each group sorted themselves into ranks of men, women and children, all of them facing east. I watched, fascinated, as the spiritual leader of one group brought out a loudspeaker and started chanting away, while the other group settled for an unamplified service, their holy man happy to stand under a towel held by three men. Umbrellas dotted the crowd to keep off the powerful sun, and throughout the service people continued to arrive, some running from the village and some noisily screeching up on motorbikes. It was pandemonium, quite unlike a Christian church service, and it looked more like a restless classroom at the end of term than a religious service. At one point a herd of cows threatened to run into one of the groups, but some judicious yelling and waving of sticks managed to avert disaster, though by this time it seemed as if the teacher had lost control, as everyone was jabbering away, seemingly oblivious to the chanting going on. People were obviously in the mood for a party, and after a month of abstinence, who can blame them?

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel remotely like celebrating. The morning’s walk from Endé to Yaba-Talu was an exercise in controlling my pain, and the lunch stop seemed to go on for hours – which it did. I’d assumed that stopping for four hours in the middle of every day would be perfect for a spot of writing and possibly some exploring, but how wrong I was. I was physically far too tired to head out into the midday sun, and whenever I tried to get out my computer to do a spot of writing, it was as if someone had got out a loudspeaker and announced it to the whole village. I’d set up my keyboard and the population of Mali would crowd round, staring at the screen and whispering among themselves. It made writing impossible; I’d try typing something, but you try being creative when half the planet is breathing down your neck. It’s like trying to be angry with someone who won’t stop smiling; it just doesn’t work.

Of course, who can blame them? I’d stare if I lived in a Dogon village and a white guy turned up with a fold-out computer, and I have to keep reminding myself that in Africa, staring and invading someone’s personal space is simply not rude; the problem lies with me, not with them. I remember reading a story about a journalist who lived in Africa for a while, and sometimes he’d shut his door for a bit of privacy, so he could concentrate on his latest piece. However, this didn’t have the desired effect, as the Africans with whom he lived interpreted the closed door as meaning that there was something wrong, because in Africa you simply don’t shut yourself off from other people. So shutting the door would make things worse, as everyone would keep knocking on the door to find out if everything was all right, shattering his concentration completely. I know just how he felt, but instead of getting angry, I just fold up my computer and give up on writing, opting instead for sitting and staring into space. Hell, after three days in Mopti waiting for Mikael, doing nothing for hours on end is practically second nature.

Take Me Home

As with the morning walk from Endé, the afternoon hike was a real struggle as we trudged back up the falaise to Begnimato, one of the most picturesque villages on the trek. I was seriously considering leaving Dogon Country early; I couldn’t take much more trekking with such a weak body, and I needed sleep, I needed a bed near to a toilet, and I needed time to get better, none of which was forthcoming in Begnimato.

What a pity, as Begnimato is glorious. Sitting right on top of the cliff, the views of the plains are stunning, and the village has the air of something ancient, something really quite special. It doesn’t look that different to other Dogon villages, and still consists of the same granaries, houses and togu-nas that you see throughout Dogon Country, but the way it sits there, surveying the landscape from its cliff-top command, is simply beautiful.

I was in no state to appreciate the beauty, though, and realised that on top of my physical illness, I was beginning to get depressed. I’d waited for this trek for three days and really wanted to enjoy it, and here I was spending most of my time enjoying the olfactory experience of the Dogon’s alfresco toilets (well, holes in the ground, to be more accurate). They might have had some of the most wonderful views of all the ablutions I’ve had the pleasure to use in Mali, but that was scant consolation as I ran for yet another shot at goal. I decided that there was only one thing for it; I would have to stop taking Lariam, as the combination of Lariam depression and physical illness was pushing me close to my limit. I grabbed the one pill I’d brought with me, which I was due to take that evening, and crushed it with my boots, ceremoniously scattering the powder to the winds. I figured I’d take my chances with malaria, and I instantly felt much better. It wouldn’t last.

That night my bed consisted of a paper-thin mattress thrown onto a floor that made the north face of the Eiger look flat. I woke up every half an hour to find myself slumped in the corner of the room, but some quick work with some grappling hooks and a couple of pickaxes got me back to the top, from where I could start my slow slumberous slide all over again. It was like going tobogganing in incredibly slow motion, but even that was fun and games compared to the rooster.

At 5am the local cock perched himself right outside my door and started cock-a-doodle-dooing at the top of his voice. I tried the earplugs, and they made no difference; I tried ignoring the bastard, and that made it worse; and finally I tried getting up and throwing stones at the sod, which seemed to do the trick.

Roosters, though, are obviously cleverer that they look, because he waited for 15 minutes, until I’d lulled myself back into a false sense of security, and then he started again. So I went outside and threw stones at him again, and again he retired, squawking. But sure enough, 15 minutes later he was back, this time on the roof right above my head, where I couldn’t get to him and he was totally safe; he celebrated by inviting a friend, and together the two of them serenaded me until the sun rose on my bloodshot eyes.

Back Down Again

Day four was therefore another washout, and on the walk from Begnimato to Dourou, further along the escarpment, I reached the lowest point of the trek, and arguably the lowest point of my entire African trip. I was thoroughly drained, feeling awful, bored with all the sitting around in the middle of the day, sick of the same food for every meal, and totally, totally depressed. I decided I would take the taxi back to Mopti with Gian Luca and Valentina, as they had only joined us for four days, and as I struggled my way along the top of escarpment, clenching and seriously considering flying back home and giving up on Africa, something happened. It was gradual, and I didn’t notice it at first, but it turned out to be the bottom of the curve; I had reached the most miserable point of my entire trip, and logic dictated that from here, things could only get better. I couldn’t give up now; I had given up the Lariam and it would take a few weeks to leave my system, I would soon shift my diarrhoea, and after this trek I had a whole new country to look forward to. Sure, I could fly home, but why not stick it out for a little longer, just in case?

Logic saved the day, so instead of jacking it in right away, I talked to the highly sympathetic Mikael and decided to head back the next day with Coen and Susan. I wasn’t physically going to be able to manage seven days, but five sounded about right. And from that moment on, things got better, and I stopped thinking of flying back to London... for now, anyway.

After lunch in Dourou and saying goodbye to the Italians, the four of us dropped down the escarpment to Nombori, and despite the physical strain, I actually enjoyed myself for the first time since day one. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but I got into the rhythm, savoured the views, and when we reached Nombori, I knew I’d made the right decision. The sunset over the escarpment was picture-perfect, the view from the roof of our campement was beautiful, and the people were delightful. I even got a reasonably good night’s sleep, which I couldn’t quite believe, and before I knew it we were up and about on day five, ready to return back up the escarpment to Dourou, where we would get a car back to Mopti.

A Highlight?

I was far too unwell to appreciate the Dogon Country for what it really is. At the time I hated it, but I would have hated anything in that state; in reality the Dogon is a wonderful place. The people are friendly, the landscape is awesome, and even through the haze of Lariam and diarrhoea I managed to crack the odd smile. As a rose-tinted memory, the Dogon will be a delight to revisit from the comfort of my grandad’s rocking chair.

I was, however, too weak to concentrate on the Dogon culture and all the stories that Mikael told us, which is a shame. Dogon culture is one of the most amazing aspects of the region, and things like the wonderful carved doors, the animist legends and the mysterious Tellem are fascinating to discover. I was also too ill to appreciate the kola nut, a local narcotic that the Dogon chew incessantly in the same way that the Indians chew pan; I tried one – everyone does – and it tasted like acrid, bitter radishes, not the best taste when you’re feeling ill.

I still loved Dogon Country, though. I had to reach the lowest point of my trip, and I had to talk myself down from buying the next flight back to London, but at least I got through unscathed, and from here things can only get better.

And that’s got to be a good thing.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 9 December 2002

After being thoroughly underwhelmed by Senegal, I desperately wanted to like Mali. I wanted it to amaze me on a daily basis; I wanted its landscapes to astound me; I wanted the culture to enthral me; in short, I wanted too much.

It’s hard for me to be totally honest about what I thought of Mali, because a lot of my thoughts were affected by malaria pills or illness. My initially negative experience of the River Niger was probably more to do with the fact I was recovering from a nasty bout of bacteria than a reflection on the experience itself, and I’m convinced my black mood in the desert of Timbuktu was a direct effect of the Lariam; I can’t think of any sane reason why I would feel miserable while camel trekking in such an evocative place. But I did feel miserable in Mali, and for a lot of the time, and I left the country after the lowest ebb of all, being ill in Dogon Country.

So most of my problems with Mali should be blamed on me, not the country. Mali promised some interesting places, and it delivered them. Timbuktu grew on me, and by the time I left I was thoroughly caught up in its myth and mystery; Djenné surprised me by being a delightfully friendly place, and the imposing mud mosque is even more beautiful in the flesh than it is in the countless tourist department posters you see splattered around the walls of Mali’s hotels and travel agencies; the River Niger between Timbuktu and Gao is breathtaking, and the public ferry is a wonderful way to see it; and Dogon Country, even through the haze of Lariam-influenced depression and constant rushes to the ablutions, is an amazing place, steeped in culture and history.

But, as the barman said to the horse, why the long face? I guess the problem isn’t with Mali, but a realisation that so far, West Africa hasn’t been what I expected, and I expected more. None of the countries I have visited so far has shone in the way that, say, India, Australia or Malaysia shone for me on my previous trip, and I genuinely expected that two months into my African jaunt I’d be raving about at least one place. Incredibly, I’m not; instead I’ve visited a collection of pleasant enough places that I’m pleased I’ve seen, but I wouldn’t necessarily bother to visit them again. I’d go back to India or Australia at the drop of a hat, but I won’t be coming back here.

Perhaps I should blame the language barrier? People say that you visit West Africa for the people and East Africa for the animals, but so far the only people I’ve warmed to are the Gambians, and I only spent about a week there, so even that’s pushing it. This could be down to the language barrier, as my French is easily good enough for ordering food, finding hotel rooms and getting the right bus, but stops way short of proper, involved conversation. It’s therefore impossible for me to really get to know anyone who doesn’t speak English, which restricts me to those in the tourist trade, idiotic touts, and the odd language expert – hardly a fair cross-section of the populace. So for me to say that I didn’t particularly like the Malians or the Senegalese could just be another way of me saying that my French isn’t good enough to jump the cultural barrier.

It’s also possible that the Francophone countries inherited a fair amount of ‘French-ness’ about them while the English colonies inherited a fair amount of ‘English-ness’, which would make me feel much more at home and at ease in Anglophone countries. India was a prime example of the English influence putting me at my ease; I loved the way the language worked in the Gambia in the same way I loved the way the Indians speak English, I enjoyed seeing snippets of home appear in the strange cultural mishmash of Africa, and I loved talking to the locals, even in basic English. In Francophone countries, if a conversation goes astray, I instantly assume it’s because of my French; if a conversation goes astray in an Anglophone country, it’s either down to the other person’s English, or it’s down to a cultural difference, but whatever the reason, I understand what’s going on. In French-speaking countries, I rarely do.

But I think my biggest disappointment in the Sahel countries has been the lack of anything stunning to discover; I have yet to be speechless at a building, a landscape, an event in the street or an aspect of the local culture. I’ll be astounded if this doesn’t happen in Africa, somewhere along the line. Too many people rave about this continent for it to be full of clones of Senegal and Mali; if it is, I’ll just have to find another continent for my fix.

Mali, then, is a pleasant place, but for me it’s nothing to shout about. I can’t complain, because I have come away with some good memories and some good stories, but I’m still looking for that special something that makes all this illness, all this waiting, all this hassle and all this emotional wrangling worth the effort. Mali doesn’t have that special something, but it’s still a good place to visit, and no doubt the rose-tinted spectacles of history will help me warm to it; thankfully Lariam doesn’t seem to affect my tendency to happy nostalgia.

Burkina Faso: Burkina Faso

Friendly in French

Written: 11 December 2002

I’ve written before about the difficulties of communicating in a foreign language – French, in the case of Mali and Senegal – but on the way to Ouagadougou, the capital of the Francophone Burkina Faso, I realised exactly how confusing things can get when you combine a language in which you’re not fluent, a culture in which you’re not versed, and a fundamental aspect of life at which you, basically, suck.

It started on the bus from Ouahigouya (pronounced ‘Waee-goo-yah’) to Ouagadougou (pronounced ‘Waga-doo-goo’), which I had to take after the bus from Mopti terminated unexpectedly (well, unexpectedly for me, anyway; I bet everyone else knew it was going to do that). Things were going well, and we sped along the highway at an unusually constant speed, for once not having to slow down to avoid potholes as, amazingly, there were none; I passed the time by looking out for kilometre markers for Ouagadougou, which signalled our progress in five kilometre chunks. I was happy in my own little world, staring out of the darkness into Burkina Faso, wondering where I was going to end up that night, and looking forward to drawing some nice long lines on the map.

A couple of hours into the journey we stopped at a small town, and the little girl who’d been nervously sitting next to me got off with her mum. A bunch of people jumped on instead, but I didn’t really notice the young woman who sat next to me; I was too busy counting kilometre markers and dreaming of having a nice warm shower and a clean set of clothes, but soon enough she leaned over to me and asked me in French whether I was heading to Ouagadougou.

So we made cocktail-party conversation for a few minutes, and I explained how I’m travelling for a year, that I’m heading through to Ghana, that I’ve been to Senegal, Mali and the Gambia, and that my French is pretty basic because I’m English... and so on. I’ve explained my story so many times in French that I’ve got it down to a fine art, but the problem with my French is in the comprehension; if I don’t know a word when I’m speaking then I can normally explain my way around it, but if I don’t understand a word that someone else says, I have to ask them either to repeat it so I can look it up, or to explain what they mean. The upshot is that to the untrained ear it sounds as if I’m having a really animated conversation with my neighbour on the bus, but in reality we’re spending over half the time with me either not understanding what’s going on and simply nodding, desperately hoping for a sentence I can understand and latch onto, or with me trying to understand the explanation of a particular word or phrase that’s key to the discussion. It’s better than going round not making an effort, but it’s a long way from a real conversation.

Still, Tani, my companion on the bus, seemed happy and genuinely interested in what I was saying, and although I only understood a tiny portion of what she was saying, the conversation made the journey pass quicker than counting the kilometre markers. It also turned out that Tani was staying in a hotel in the centre of town, like me, and as the bus depot was a fair old trek from the town centre, we decided to share a taxi into town for the princely sum of CFA900. The taxi dropped us off, I paid for it to save having to fumble around with finding CFA450 each in change and because Tani had kindly run the negotiation process with the taxi driver, and we went our separate ways, but not after Tani had said she’d pop round at 3pm the next day to say hello. I sleepily nodded my assent; I was more interested in hitting the sack than planning tomorrow.

Date Paranoia

The thing is, I’m hopeless at spotting when romance is in the air, and I’m incredibly shy when it comes to the mating game, and this means I rarely spot when someone is fluttering their eyelashes at me in that special way... until too late. I have no idea if Tani was just being friendly, was interested in simply chatting to a visitor to her country, or had more subtle plans of her own, but something didn’t feel right. As soon as I dumped my bag, washed off the journey and lay down to sleep, I started worrying about the next day. The thought of spending an afternoon with a pretty local girl, speaking French and suffering through a combination of language difficulties and cultural differences, scared the hell out of me, and I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps she wouldn’t turn up? Perhaps it would be fine? Perhaps we’d just grab a cup of coffee, make polite conversation and leave it at that? Maybe she’d bring a friend to soften the blow? Who knows, but the shy part of me didn’t relish finding out. I’ve always loathed the dating game; to have to go through it in French was too much to bear, even if it turned out to be just my paranoia.

Three o’clock came and went, and by four o’clock I was sagging with relief; it looked like I’d been stood up, so I just sat out in the courtyard of the Fondation Charles Dufour, the lovely little hostel I’d chosen, and chatted to the others staying there. It looked as if I was going to get out of my obligations without losing face, but then Tani walked in, and I clammed up.

Luckily it turned out that Tani knew one of the guys who worked at the fondation, so they chatted away in French while I sat there, a polite smile fixed on my face as conversation flew around me without dropping any hints as to its content. I said my pleasantries and basically did my best, but my French wasn’t good enough to know whether Tani was dropping hints or not. She kept saying she’d just been to the local salon du thé and that it was very nice, which could have been polite conversation, or it could have been a hint that we could go there for a cuppa and a natter. I had no idea what to do, so avoiding the issue completely I just sat there, grinned my nervous and slightly stupid grin, and probably looked for all the world like a nervous rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. It’s how I felt, anyway.

After a while Tani asked me what I was doing that night, and I used the excuse I’d prepared in cahoots with two English girls who were sharing the dormitory, and in whom I’d confided my concerns (because, interestingly, they had a guy supposedly visiting them the next day as well, and they felt the same way as I did). One of the girls, Lara, was ill with a throat infection, and the other, Clare, spoke no French, so I told Tani I’d offered to take Clare out to a restaurant so she wouldn’t struggle with the language on her first night in Burkina. This seemed to do the trick without causing too much offence, though Tani looked disappointed; she soon said she had to go back to her hotel to take a shower, and we said our goodbyes with a shake of the hand and an enchanté or two, and a tentative ‘À demain?’ from Tani. I replied with an inshallah and let her go, feeling utterly guilty and wholly confused. Was I being rude? I have no idea, but I felt like I’d just chucked someone. What a palaver.

I also realised that if this had been an English-speaking country, there would have been absolutely no problem. I’d have gone out for a cup of tea with her without thinking about it, because I’d have known the score... and if things had got a little weird, I’d have been able to explain all about my girlfriend (who often graduates into a fiancée or even a wife when I’m travelling, as it’s simpler that way) and I wouldn’t have felt so bad. As it was, it felt like I was playing Russian roulette in Russian, and I don’t even like vodka.

The next day Tani popped round again, but this time I shamefully hid in the dormitory while one of the girls said I wasn’t in. All I could think of was getting my Ghanaian visa and heading to a country where daily communication would be in English. Evidently my Francophone days are numbered; French might be the language of love, but I’ve never been terribly fluent in either of them...

Ouagadougou

Written: 12 December 2002

Poor old Ouagadougou, it really doesn’t stand a chance. Despite sounding like a 1970s concept album, the capital city of Burkina Faso reflects the country it represents, in that it has no serious tourist attractions; for this heinous crime it’s rarely anything other than a transit city for people travelling between Mali and Ghana. For me it was exactly that, and I expected nothing other than a few days of killing time while waiting for the legendary bureaucracy of Ghana to chug its way through my visa application.

Perhaps because I was expecting absolutely nothing, I really liked Ouaga. It doesn’t have anything particularly stunning to occupy the average visitor – there’s a big market, an ugly cathedral, a museum and that’s about it – but what it does have is a congenial atmosphere, friendly people, not too much hassle and shops absolutely everywhere. Walking round Ouaga is fascinating simply because its shops are so varied, and every few metres there’s another pile of merchandise spilling out onto the street and making the mopeds swerve.

On a walk from the Fondation Charles Dufour to the other side of town, I started jotting down a list of all the different shops I passed en route. I ran out of space after a few blocks, but what I saw was fascinating. Just round the corner from the hostel sits a quincaillerie with white porcelain toilets stacked in piles of three, propped up by bags of cement and surrounded by electric fans and plastic garden seats. A photo booth next door offers instant passport photos and film developing, despite the almost totally empty interior making it look more like the after-effects of a recession; it appears to be business as usual, though.

A block away a sign points to a shady-looking grille which apparently sells armaments, and the men sitting on the veranda shout, ‘Monsieur, monsieur, come and look at our guns!’ Bustling on past the music shop that blares out loud American rap music, there’s a man carrying a huge board of stickers sporting colourful slogans like ‘I love Jesus’, ‘Allah is the One’ and ‘Osama bin Laden’ (the latter also appears on countless T-shirts, normally with fighter planes flying over his head). Past the seed shop – which specialises in ‘vegetables, flowers, grass and plants for the tropical zone’ – sits one of the countless telecentres, offering telephone calls, faxing, photocopying and anything else they can squeeze out of their tiny booth-like cabin. Meanwhile the tyres piled high next door threaten to tumble onto the delicately stacked bicycles on the other side, as we move into a slightly more industrial zone.

If motors are your thing there’s a shop with eight massive car engines, sitting like huge metal hearts on yellow tables in the middle of the street, and next door air compressors are the dish of the day, their shiny aluminium casings polished bright in the afternoon sun. Dotted around the next corner are scores of shacks flogging electrical equipment, the TV aerials and multi-plug extension leads hanging from the awnings like sausages in a butchers’ shop, while one door along stacks of orange gas canisters bake dangerously in the midday heat alongside rolls of wire mesh, gas cookers and piles of colourful rope. One street on is the Chinese corner, with one spotless shop selling traditional Chinese remedies, another one selling neatly packaged oriental decorations, and a third mopping up the market with all those nick-nacks that you don’t know you need until you wander into the shop.

A little further up town things take on a classier air, with two supermarkets selling packaged western goods and luxuries like cheese, wine, and meat that isn’t smothered in flies, while next door an incredibly smart shop sells satellite dishes, televisions and DVD players, a stark contrast to the little boys begging with their tin-can bowls in the street. A couple of doors down lies a shop that is perfectly western in its appearance; it’s a wine shop that presents its bottles in landscaped pine-wood window dressing, and while the inside of the shop looks no smarter than an off-licence back home, it feels utterly out of place and incredibly decadent in this, the capital city of one of the world’s five poorest countries. The clothes store next door carries fashionable items that have floated down from the catwalks of Paris and Milan, passing through an African tailor en route, and this classy street rounds off with a spotless scooter showroom, the latest models posing in a shroud of flashing lights and Christmas decorations.

For Christmas is coming and the rich are getting fat, but you too can join their ranks if you buy a lottery ticket from the LONAS stalls standing on every street corner, promising prizes of millions of CFAs and entry into the glossy wine shops of this world. Given the odds, though, it’s probably better to spend your money in one of the coffee shacks around town, where super-sweet café au lait makes a wonderful accompaniment to a baguette filled with butter or mayonnaise. Alternatively the fruit stalls round the corner sell oranges, melons, guavas, bananas, papaya and a bunch of strange gourd-shaped fruits that no doubt taste as bizarre as they look.

But wander back through the stationery stores and past the colourful mattress shops with their piles of spongy foam and choices of garish covering material, and you come to the grittier end of town, outside the concrete bunker that houses the grand marché. Racked outside the market lives the sharp end of Burkina’s sales pitch. Stands sell grilled skewers of unidentified meat, which you can pick up in a length of baguette for a pittance; young boys guard ice boxes full of red, yellow and white bags of frozen drinks, sweet-tasting bisap going for a paltry CFA25 and quenching even the biggest thirst; just down the road a man presides over a collection of old Pastis bottles that now contain liquids of various shades of red and yellow, but this isn’t bisap, it’s petrol, ready to pour straight into the tanks of the motorbikes puttering round town through clouds of black exhaust. Young men with phone cards slotted into wooden holders wave them in people’s faces, hoping that their technique will earn them a sale, and past the pink lights of the video rental shop and the dry cleaners squat the ugly block-like buildings of the banks, looking down on the busy capitalism of Burkina’s commercial centre while brand names like Shell and Mobil tower over the shacks trying to scrape a living from passers-by. In their shadow a hopeful young man punts along the road carrying two fully decorated Christmas trees, the tinsel glittering in the glare from the headlights of the brand new Mercedes and shiny four-wheel-drives that cut up the home-made handcarts at the intersection.

And there aren’t many places where you’ll get a man running up to you, eager and enthusiastic, shouting «Allo mon ami, ça va?» as if he’s got the bargain you’ve been waiting for all your life... only to try to sell you a moped. London’s used-car salesmen could learn a thing or two from the Burkinabe salesman, and that’s really saying something.

Civilisation

But Ouaga isn’t just about shops and shopping, it’s about the incredible conflict between Burkina Faso being amazingly poor, and the quality of life in its capital for the casual visitor. After the big city shocks of Dakar and Bamako, Ouagadougou is a clean, ordered, polite and downright civilised city, perhaps best summed up by the fact that the city’s grid-based road intersections are all controlled by traffic lights... and they’re actually obeyed. This is highly unusual for West Africa, and makes wandering round the city possible without the constant game of hit-or-miss that normally characterises the African pedestrian experience.

Another welcome surprise after the dour food of Mali was the Restaurant Sindabad, a Lebanese restaurant which sounded good in the book and which turned out to be absolute heaven in reality. My first visit was with the two English girls who were also staying at the fondation, and who’d spent a couple of months in Ghana before heading to Mali; we spent the night swapping tips over a feast. I couldn’t resist and ordered the hamburger special, and I was amazed when a genuine hamburger arrived in a big bun, with fries, coleslaw and pickles on the side. It tasted just like a real burger should, and I washed it down with a beautifully cold bottle of So.b.bra, Burkina’s local brew that’s pronounced as it’s spelt (i.e. ‘So-bee-brah’). The restaurant was dimly lit by quaint little lights in wicker lampshades, and the thatched walls and copious trees and plants made it feel more like a travellers’ haunt in Bali or Thailand, rather than a Lebanese shack in the capital of land-locked Burkina Faso. The prices were good (after Senegal and Mali, anyway), and we were so enthralled by the ambience and food that we went back the following night to celebrate Republic Day.

Republic Day

Republic Day, which falls on 11 December, is a national holiday to celebrate the day in 1958 when the French territory of Upper Volta voted to become an autonomous state, paving the way for independence in 1960. Even though there have been plenty of political upheavals in Burkina since those heady days, Republic Day is still Burkina’s principal holiday and the capital parties hard.

The most noticeable effect of Republic Day, apart from all the official buildings like banks and embassies being shut, is the large amount of drinking that goes on. Senegal and Mali are pretty Islamic in their approach to life, and although they’re far from strict when it comes to alcohol, you don’t tend to see people drinking in public – most pubs are hidden away from the street, and although large signs advertising Flag, Castel and Guinness hang outside, you don’t often get to see the infidels actually consuming alcohol. I remember getting a Coke one morning from the bottle-shop warehouse on the river front in Mopti, and as Brook and I stood there sipping what was to be our last cold drink before four days of corrugated hell on the public pinasse, a man came in, handed some cash to the proprietor, mumbled something under his breath, took the bottle that was handed to him and stood behind a stack of crates. I could still see him, and although it was 10am and Ramadan, he cracked open the chilled bottle of Castel and necked it in two or three long chugs. A swift burp later he dropped the bottle innocently into a crate of empties and strode out into the street, whistling. This struck me as odd, not so much because of the obvious alcohol problem this implied, but because you just don’t see that much public drinking in the Sahel, at least not compared to the West. But there are alcoholics in West Africa just as there are alcoholics the world over, it’s just that in Islamic Africa, they hide well.

But Burkina’s capital doesn’t seem to care about spilling its parties onto the street. Just around the corner from the fondation, in an unlikely position sandwiched between the city’s Christian cemetery and the disappointingly ugly city cathedral, lies Rue Joseph Badoua, which is home to all sorts of shady looking bars with glowing neon lights, blaring music and dimly lit tables cluttered with empty bottles. This is where the hardcore come to drink, and from the early hours of Republic Day the bars are full of people knocking back bottles of beer, spirits and probably some strange local brews as well. Mopeds lined up in front of the bars promise some interesting driving later in the day and this infectious celebration seems to permeate the rest of the city, though elsewhere there isn’t quite as much overt decadence in sight. It was even enough to persuade me to have a couple of big beers at the Sindabad that night, quite a luxury for your average budget traveller.

And that was Ouagadougou. Perhaps it’s precisely because tourists shoot straight through that it hasn’t developed an attitude problem towards the white man; indeed, in Ouaga I saw more white people driving around than in any other place I’ve yet visited, and I met people from the UN Development Programme and wandered past what looked like a large UNICEF building, so perhaps the white invasion here has been aid-based instead of tourist-based. Whatever the reason, I thoroughly liked Ouaga and found it to be an easy-going and relaxing city, and after the turgid boredom of waiting around in Mopti, it was a relief to be enjoying my time in a town full of nothing to do.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 13 December 2002

I don’t really have any deep thoughts on leaving Burkina Faso, considering I didn’t even have the decency to explore it. Like the vast majority of travellers I simply wandered in from Mali, grabbed a visa for Ghana and shot out on the first bus south. How rude of me; this is an entire country we’re talking about, and I couldn’t even be bothered to give it the time of day.

But don’t blame Burkina for this; blame the fact that I’m not a natural French speaker, and now that I’m within the gravitational pull of Ghana – an Anglophone country that consistently gets the thumbs up from travellers who’ve been there – I can’t resist. I want to spend Christmas on the beach with people who speak English, and that’s both a physical and social impossibility in land-locked French-speaking Burkina Faso; besides, Ghana is astoundingly Christian while Burkina isn’t, so it has to be the better bet for the biggest Christian festival of all. But language and religion are just two factors; I need a holiday, and it sounds like Ghana can provide me with one.

Of the incredibly short amount of time I spent in Burkina Faso, I already have great memories, not because anything particularly spectacular happened, but because Burkina feels so different to Mali, and in a good way. Senegal and Mali felt – to me – a little unwelcoming, but Burkina (or to be more precise, Ouagadougou) is full of friendly people who don’t treat visitors like walking wallets. I fell into a routine of breakfasting in the coffee shops, lunching on fruit and dining in style, and my days were punctuated by visits to the reasonably priced internet cafés, hassle-free visa applications, and sitting round reading in the shady courtyard of the fondation. I didn’t do anything memorable, but I already feel as if my Christmas holiday has begun.

A possible explanation for this stark difference between Burkina and the Sahel is in the country’s history. From independence in 1960 to the last of a long line of coups in 1983, Upper Volta, as the country was then known, suffered from dictators, military coups, strikes, corruption and economic meltdown – a pretty typical African story, really. But in 1983 Captain Thomas Sankara seized power, renamed the country Burkina Faso (which means ‘Land of the Incorruptible’ in the country’s two major languages) and started rooting out corruption. His socialist policies and charismatic leadership turned the tide and Burkina started improving, but most important of all he managed to make the people proud of their country, and it’s this that shines through. It felt as if the Burkinabe wanted me to enjoy my visit to their country; it felt as if the Malians and the Senegalese simply wanted me to pay for my visit to theirs.

Despite being assassinated in 1987 – like all good socialists Sankara alienated the country’s fat cats and was eventually overthrown himself – it’s Sankara’s legacy that Ouagadougou has such a wonderfully clean and ordered vibe, covered with a happily African veneer of madness and chaos that prevents it from being remotely boring or dour. For example, at one point Sankara decided that Ouaga needed sprucing up, so he ordered that all the houses on the principal routes should be painted white, and he knocked down the old market and built the current one, which was arguably not a good move, as the new one is a horrible concrete monstrosity, but at least he was trying. He cared about the capital, and it shows.

I was so impressed with Ouaga’s laid-back atmosphere that I briefly considered hopping on the bus to visit Bobo-Dioulasso in western Burkina – probably the closest thing to a tourist area in the country – but in the end the thought of good food by the sea prevailed, and I booked a ticket on the direct bus from Ouaga to Kumasi, in central Ghana. The direct bus only runs twice a week; it seemed a crime to miss it, and I can always come back to Burkina if I miss speaking French.

It’s a big ‘if’, but there are worse places to come back to. Our relationship was short, but I enjoyed my brief flirtation with Burkina, much to my relief.

Ghana: Central Ghana

The Struggle into Ghana

Written: 15 December 2002

I sometimes wonder if this travelogue is in danger of turning into nothing more than a detailed examination of being ill in exotic locations, because for the last couple of weeks, that’s all it’s felt like. At least in India I was granted a couple of weeks’ respite between illnesses, but in West Africa things have degraded after a promising start, what with the Lariam, the homesickness and various bouts of intestinal hockey. In my defence, a good travelogue must report the trip faithfully, but feel free to skip this one if you’re sick and tired of the sick and tired.

While waiting for my visa in Ouagadougou, I was all geared up for Ghana. The number of people I met in Mali and Burkina who’d come from Ghana was considerable, and except for one solitary Norwegian girl, who didn’t strike me as the kind of person who would enjoy anything, the reports were utterly enthusiastic. Although the consensus was that there wasn’t a great deal to see in Ghana, the laid-back locals and ease of travelling sounded like a major respite after the effort of the Sahel.

I was thoroughly excited, then, to be hopping on the direct bus from Ouagadougou to Kumasi, Ghana’s second city. I’d decided that my main aim for the next week was to get to the beach on the southern coast of Ghana, a delightful sounding spot that I reckoned would be perfect for Christmas, but the prospect of an overnight bus journey all the way to Accra was just a little too much in one go, so I decided to opt for a stopover in Kumasi; the 8.30am Ouaga bus was due to arrive in Kumasi around 8.30pm, which sounded much more manageable than turning up in the wee hours of the morning.

Of course, nothing’s ever that straightforward. Getting up at the crack of dawn to report to the bus station for 6.30am, I shook the sleep from my head to find that – surprise, surprise – I’d picked up yet another stomach problem. I couldn’t believe it; I had only managed to shift my Dogon bug a couple of days earlier, and here I was again, gnawing on leather every few minutes and looking forward to a long journey of clenching, sweating and praying. There was nothing for it, though; I needed to get to Ghana to save my sanity, so I put a brave face on it and grabbed a taxi to the gare routière.

The journey was thankfully uneventful, except for an unscheduled four-hour stop at the Burkina-Ghana border because someone’s customs papers weren’t properly filled in, and by 12.30am I finally arrived in Kumasi, pale but in one piece. Following the guidebook like a bear with no brain I plucked the first choice from the hotel section – the Presbyterian Guesthouse, known locally as the Presby – and discovered that they were full, but I could sleep on the balcony if I wanted. I wanted; the thought of a shower and a toilet was too much to resist, and at 1.30am I finally settled into my first night in Ghana, sweating under my mosquito net on the wooden balcony of an ancient colonial-style building. ‘Things could be a lot worse,’ I figured as I rolled over into a fitful sleep.

Trying Hard to Smile

By 5am they were a lot worse. I woke up feeling terrible, and ten minutes later I just knew I was going to be sick. It wasn’t long before I was bringing up nothing but acrid yellow bile, and wondering what I’d done to deserve yet another bout of illness so soon after the last one. If you’d tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a flight ticket home, I’d have grabbed it faster than you could say ‘Bleearghh!’

The next day I felt a little better and managed some breakfast and a short walk around Kumasi, but although things were improving, I ran out of energy pretty quickly and took refuge in an internet café down the road from the Presby. This turned out to be a bad move; instead of writing the happy emails of someone in a new and exciting country, I wrote the emails of someone who would rather be back home in England, away from nasty bacteria and the humidity of the tropics. Instantly regretting sending anything at all, I decided the only way to cheer myself up was to eat something really special, especially now that I had my appetite back and the diarrhoea appeared to have stopped, so I headed off to Vic Baboo’s Restaurant in town and ordered their curry special.

What was I thinking? Curry? I must have been out of my mind – by this stage I quite possibly was – and although the food was excellent, I only managed to eat half of it before the cold sweats signalled a problem. I hobbled back to the Presby for an early night, and found myself suffering a whole new game; I had serious issues with gas.

My stomach was hard, firm and felt like a shaken bottle of pop, and as the night wore slowly on, the burping started. These weren’t little, friendly burps, they were explosions of cyclonic proportions, and every time I rolled over I could feel the next bubble of acidic gas making its way up my oesophagus and into the stuffy night air. And just in case I thought I was going to be able to sleep my way through it, cramps hit my lower abdomen and my guts turned to water. I was back in the shit again.

So here I am, spending Sunday trying to recover, drinking bottled water and eating bananas, the best friend of the ill traveller. I still can’t believe just how cruel West Africa is turning out to be; I haven’t been taking any chances with food and water since the Dogon – no scary street meat or bisap, much to my irritation – but here I am, losing weight rapidly and thoroughly fed up with being ill. But worst of all I’m gutted, because it’s in serious danger of ruining my trip. In this sort of state it’s practically impossible to think of anything else except going home, where I can eat food without worrying about dying, I don’t have to take strange drugs to avoid tropical diseases, and I can be with my girlfriend. This isn’t why I went travelling; I’m supposed to be having such a fantastic time that I don’t want to go home.

So I’m giving Africa until after Christmas to persuade me to stay, or I may end up coming home early. So far, West Africa really hasn’t been worth the physical effort it’s taken out of me; I’m at the end of my tether, and if you don’t have your health, it’s impossible to enjoy travelling. What a pity it’s turning out this way, but there you go.

Come on Ghana, you can do it!

Kumasi

Written: 16 December 2002

Despite the awful state of my mind and body I find myself liking Kumasi. Instantly it feels completely different to Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso, and that’s refreshing, even if the weather isn’t; for the first time in ages the sky is cloudy, the air is humid, and I can feel the threat of a downpour in the air, even if the chances of it actually raining are pretty slim. After so long in the dry Sahel I’ve almost forgotten what moisture feels like, and here it is, dripping off me in bed; it isn’t pleasant but it’s different, and a change is as good as a rest.

The humidity also explains the amazing amount of greenery in Kumasi. Back in Tamale, the last major city I passed through on the way south, the feeling was still one of dry scrubland, but here in Kumasi I find myself looking out from the balcony of the Presbyterian Guesthouse over green grass, palm trees and lush, tropical growth. At last I’ve managed to escape the harshness of the desert for more genuinely tropical Africa, and it feels good.

To add to the tropical flavour, I drifted off to sleep on my first night in Ghana to the sound of a gospel choir singing in perfect harmony. It felt a little weird that it was 2am and the choir was still singing, but that’s one thing about Ghana; the Christian church is everywhere and everything, in the same way that Allah is everywhere in the Muslim countries. You don’t have the muezzin waking you up in the morning, you have the sounds of evangelical ministers proclaiming that the Lord cometh, and everywhere the shops and buses have Biblical names and inscriptions instead of Islamic ones.

Another difference between Kumasi and the countries of the Sahel is that Kumasi feels considerably better off. Ghana is a richer country than either Mali or Burkina Faso and it’s noticeable: the streets are in much better condition, the sewers are covered more often than they’re open, there’s a lot less litter and everything just feels that much more civilised. It’s especially odd because Ghana is a lot cheaper than the countries I’ve already visited; this is because the cedi – the currency of Ghana, whose name comes from sedee, the Akan word for cowrie shell, one of the original forms of currency in the area – has taken a real pounding on the exchange markets recently, bringing down prices for visitors and pushing up inflation for the locals. This is obviously not a good thing, but for the traveller it does mean things are more affordable, a pleasant surprise after the expensive CFA countries.

As for Kumasi itself, I only managed to visit the Military Museum, where I couldn’t really concentrate on being a tourist; instead I came home early and sat recuperating in the wonderful wooden-balconied Presby. I managed a visit to an internet café, a trip to the pharmacist to stock up on the anti-malarial drug Doxycycline (which I am now taking instead of Lariam), and I made a few phone calls to sort out my plans for the next few days, but I didn’t really explore properly; most of the time I was being ill in true West African style

Malingering Malian

I do remember one thing, though, and that’s just how pleasant it is to be able to speak English to the locals. It transforms things, and although it means I can’t feign a lack of language skills to get rid of the touts, it removes a layer of stress that’s been with me since the start of my trip (my short break in the Gambia notwithstanding). The touts in Kumasi aren’t as bad as they are in places like Mopti or Bamako, but there are still some annoying little buggers who insist on following me round while trying to foist ugly jewellery on me, and one of these neatly sums up my issues with the Francophone countries. I was standing in the queue for the cash machine at Barclays Bank, and a guy joined the queue behind me, waiting his turn. He struck up conversation in French, and conditioned by my time in the Sahel, I replied in French and discovered that he was from Goa in Mali. He seemed friendly enough, but once I’d used the cash machine he followed me from the bank without using it himself.

‘Where are you going now?’ he asked, in French.

‘Why do you ask?’ I replied.

‘I’d like to help you,’ he said.

‘I’m fine, thanks, I’m just going to get some breakfast,’ I replied.

‘I can show you lots of good places,’ he said, ‘and then maybe I can show you my work, my friend.’

And then the penny dropped: he was a tout from bloody Mali, who just wanted to flog me something. I wasn’t amused; I’d assumed he’d been in the queue for the cash machine to withdraw his money, not mine.

‘Listen, I’m only going to say this once,’ I said, in French. ‘I’ve come to Ghana because I’m tired of speaking French, so from this moment on I’m only going to speak in English, and I’m going to ignore anything you say that’s in French. And just for the record, I do not want to buy anything, I do not want a guide, and I don’t need showing round. OK?’

Of course, this hasn’t stopped him following me for the last few days, constantly trying to show me his jewellery and insisting on speaking in French, which I pretend not to understand. I’ve found out that a number of other tourists who are also staying at the Presby have been hassled by the same Malian, and he’s driving them mad, hanging round the gates and being insistent to the point of rudeness. The fact that the most annoying person in Kumasi is from Mali and not Ghana demonstrates a fundamental difference between the two places; I’m sure Ghanaian touts are just as irritating, but something tells me the Francophone countries produce a different class of salesman to the Anglophone ones. I look forward to testing this theory, especially now I have enough French to tell them exactly how disinterested I am in cheap jewellery and guided tours. I just pity the poor sod who tries to sell me a trek to Dogon Country in Ghana; they’ll rue the day.

The Road to Jesus

Written: 16 December 2002

Taking the bus from Kumasi to Accra is a religious experience, and I’m not talking about praying to get there in one piece. If the Sahel is obsessed with Allah and Mohammed, then Ghana is obsessed with Jesus and the Bible, and its obsession is a very public one; Ghanaian Christianity is like American Evangelism with all the fake sincerity stripped away, and it’s so powerful it pervades every single aspect of society. In Ghana there are twice as many Christians as Muslims, with the Christians mainly in the south and the Muslims in the north, and as you burn south along the Kumasi-Accra highway and into the heart of Christian Ghana it’s like having your own personal baptism. Welcome to Jesus, Ghanaian-style.

I brushed against Ghanaian Christianity in Kumasi; I drifted off to sleep and woke up again to the sounds of gospel singing, exuberant preachers and congregations in which everyone was actually singing, a novel concept after the lacklustre and somewhat threadbare flocks you come across in England. But it’s in everyday conversation with the Ghanaians that you realise just how important Jesus is round here, as I found out on the Sunday morning before leaving Kumasi. I felt so terrible I asked the concierge at the Presby if it would be possible to see a doctor, thinking this wouldn’t be a problem in a major city like Kumasi.

‘Ooh,’ he said, sucking his teeth. ‘No, that would not be possible, as they are all at church at the moment. Maybe you can see a doctor tonight, but not now.’

‘What, there are no doctors at all on Sunday mornings?’ I asked, amazed.

He just smiled an understanding smile. ‘I pray that you will get better,’ he said, and that was the end of that. I guess the moral of the story is that if you get sick on Sunday morning, prayer is your best option.

But the full impact of Ghana’s obsession with Christianity hit me on the Kumasi-Accra bus. It was dark when I arrived in central Ghana a few days ago, but today the bus left Kumasi at noon, and the full glory of God was there for me to behold, right by the road. There’s the odd mosque or Hindu school en route, but the vast majority of Ghana’s roadside signs point to churches or shops, and it doesn’t take a theologian to conclude that Ghana is completely Jesus crazy.

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Ghana’s church names are relatively staid, though the lack of repetition between names is surprising; in England most churches are named after saints, but not so in Ghana. The Redeemer’s Victory Church sits down the road from the New Testament Christian Centre, just along from the Apostolic Church of God and the Miracle Temple, which are opposite the Voice of Christ Church and the New Church Study Centre. You’ll rarely see two churches with the same name, but even the church names pale into insignificance compared to the shops. Oh my.

In Ghana, you just ain’t cooking with gas unless your shop has Biblical connections, and as the bus bounced along the road, I read every shop name religiously, because they really have to be seen to be believed. The ‘Opener of Closed Doors’ Hair Salon promises to change your life with a snip of the scissors, while ‘God Will Provide’ Engineering Supplies no doubt use that as their excuse for non-delivery. The ‘Jesus Never Fails’ Chop House (a ‘chop house’ being a basic Ghanaian restaurant) looks like it’s fed far more than five thousand, while the ‘In God We Trust’ Communication Centre sounds like a ready-made excuse for being cut off. The ‘God is Able’ Chemical Store sells the products of a modern atheistic science, while it’s unlikely that the ‘Joy of Peace’ Hotel provides anything of the sort. Similarly the ‘Paradise’ Spot (a ‘spot’ being a pub) sits on the edge of a busily polluted highway, and the ‘More Grace’ Estate could do with exactly that.

Some shops, meanwhile, are happy to plunder the Good Lord’s book for awful puns, with the ‘Staff of Life’ Bakery, the ‘Healing Hands’ Clinic and the ‘Almighty’ Cold Store making the most of the theme. Others just sound bizarre: ‘Thy Will Be Done’ Snacks and ‘God is King’ Brakes are just about acceptable, but when you start getting too keen, you end up with mouthfuls like ‘The Lord is My Light’ Beauty Salon and the ‘God is My Redeemer’ Fashion Store, while it’s anyone’s guess what’s for sale at ‘Father’s Love’ Enterprises.

As we shot along the highway, I searched in vain for the ‘Jesus Saves’ Bank and the ‘Burning Bush’ STD Clinic, but the only thing I could find that came close was the ubiquitous and blatantly untrue Guinness slogan, ‘Guinness Brings Out the Power in You’. I guess alcohol is one of those things you just can’t sell with the Son of God.

Off the Road

The buses and trucks that ply Ghana’s highways don’t escape quotation fever either. They too are plastered with Christian epithets, like ‘Go With God’, ‘In God We Trust’, ‘Jesus Never Fails’ and ‘Perseverance’, but in the 255km journey from Kumasi to Accra we came across three serious crashes, two involving overturned trucks and one involving a minibus that had ploughed a 20m-long furrow straight into a field of banana trees, proving that the Son of God may never fail, but ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ brake pads can. One wonders if the drivers were running on Guinness power; it would explain a lot about driving standards in Ghana.

For this very reason I chose to go to Accra in an STC bus, as I’d been told that STC drivers don’t try to overtake on blind corners. I was in good company; the bus was full of obviously well-off Ghanaians, as was evident from their pressed clothes and smart luggage, a complete lack of chickens and goats, and good English. But the most obvious indication of their status was the large number of mobile phones, which kept ringing and ringing as if there was no tomorrow. Ghana is still at the stage where having a mobile phone is a serious deal, so people let them ring a little longer than is strictly necessarily so others can see that they have one; they then shout into the mouthpiece so everyone can hear their conversation, however banal, and they haven’t yet tired of testing out all the ring tones one by one, just so everybody can see how rich they are. It’s intensely irritating, but that’s progress for you.

It will be interesting to see if the power of Jesus is strong enough to take on the growing lure of consumerism and win. Given the nationwide levels of addiction to Christianity in Ghana, my money’s on the Son of God; the side with the best ad agency will win in the end, and Jesus is already off to a flying start.

The Cedi Shuffle

Written: 16 December 2002

Like most of the rest of the world, the economy in Ghana has been suffering recently, a situation not helped by the continuing escalation of violence in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. The results are the typical macro-economic effects that seem to be controlled by invisible forces, such as high inflation rates, high government debt and a currency that’s lost an incredible amount on the exchange markets. I don’t even pretend to understand these things; I’m not convinced that those in power do either.

The most palpable effect of the economic downturn is the falling value of Ghana’s currency, the cedi, on the foreign exchange markets. Ghana is not a member of the CFA union so it doesn’t benefit from the euro-like propping up of the exchange rate that you see in places like Mali and Senegal, and recent economic stresses have pushed the cedi into free-fall. A couple of years ago there were around 8000 cedi to the pound; now it’s around 13,000, which is great news if you’re a traveller with pounds in your pocket, but awful news if you’re a Ghanaian trying to save his cedis.

Normally this wouldn’t be worth writing about, except to mention that for visitors, things are a lot cheaper in Ghana than they are in places like Mali; everything costs less, from accommodation to food, and even though a lot of hotels quote their prices in dollars so that the cedi price rides along with the exchange rate, it’s still a completely different experience to the Sahel. You don’t worry about whether you can afford that extra beer or dessert; the answer is always a happily gluttonous ‘Yes!’, and it’s quite liberating. The problem is that until this morning, the largest note in Ghana was the 5000 cedi note.

Let’s put this into perspective. This means that the highest value note is worth about 38p, with the two smaller notes being worth about 15p (2000 cedis) and 7.5p (1000 cedis); the coins aren’t even worth considering, with the largest one being just under 4p, and the smallest being less than half a penny. This is all very well on paper, but when you try changing your travellers cheques, it all hits home. I decided to change some money in Kumasi, ready to hit the capital and the coast, so I fished out three slim £100 cheques and headed down to Barclays before they opened at 8.30am on Monday morning.

It might look like a normal Barclays Bank from the outside, and the counters might be all polished and the seats arranged in the same enticing way that they might be in London, but when the doors open at the Kumasi branch of Barclays, that’s where the similarity ends. There are two doors into the bank, one on each side of the counters, and at 8.30am two security men go to the doors, signal to each other, and open up at precisely the same time. And through both doors pour the hordes of Kumasi, ready to do battle with the bankers.

I couldn’t believe it; I stood there bewildered as the stampede of locals rushed round me like torrential rain down a dry creek bed, and two seconds after the doors opened, there were huge queues snaking round the room from all of the cashier points. If I wanted to change my cheques it was going to be a long wait, so I asked one of the employees which queue I should join and he smiled and pointed me upstairs.

Thank goodness; the queue was only one deep at the foreign exchange desk, and ten minutes later I’d managed to change my £300 into cedis. For my three cheques I got a wad of nearly 800 notes – that’s around four inches of cedis – and this demonstrates the real problem of Ghanaian money; you need a bag to carry it in. The banks know this, and they hand you your money in a black plastic bag so you don’t look too conspicuous. Imagine £300 in notes of 38p; it’s quite a sight.

The National Museum in Accra dramatically demonstrates the slide of the cedi in its display of Ghanaian currencies through the years. The cedi was launched in 1965, when the largest note was the rare and valuable 100 cedi note, though the one cedi note was the cornerstone of the economy. By 1984 the bank had started issuing 200 cedi notes, but as the economic slowdown of the 1980s kicked in, higher notes of 500 cedis and 1000 cedis appeared in 1986 and 1991. The 5000 cedi note appeared in the 1990s, and it’s only today that the bank has got around to releasing 10,000 and 20,000 cedi notes. For Ghanaians, who are used to carrying huge wads of notes around in their top pockets, it’s a big relief, even though with 20,000 cedi notes, £300 would require some 200-odd notes, still a fair amount when it takes just 15 in England (and that’s ignoring the £50 note). I tried to get my money in 20,000 cedi denominations, but as they were only launched this morning, the lady behind the counter could only smile and say, ‘Everyone wants the new notes; I can only give you some.’ I managed to save perhaps half a centimetre by getting 500,000 cedis in 20,000 notes; it barely made any difference.

As a result of the large amount of paper you need to carry round to survive in Ghana, the locals have developed a serious skill when it comes to counting notes. Every Ghanaian you meet can count a pile of money in two seconds flat, holding the notes in the left hand and flicking them off with the right, faster than the eye can see. Every transaction is always checked on both sides, not because people don’t trust each other, but because it’s so easy to make a mistake with such a large number of notes. In Ghana, everyone does the cedi shuffle.

Ghana: Accra and Kokrobite

The Auditor-General

Written: 19 December 2002

It started off with a short email message from my brother. ‘Have got details of Eddie’s uncle in Ghana,’ it said, and gave a telephone number. ‘Uncle’s name is Mr Osei Tutu Prempeh, and he says he knew of Jimmy Moxon. He was Attorney-General of Ghana, so treat with due respect.’

This was enough for me. One of my aims of visiting Ghana is to find out about Jimmy Moxon, the only white man ever to be made a genuine African chief; as the Moxon clan isn’t exactly extensive there’s a marginal possibility that Jimmy and I are related in some utterly distant manner, but even without such a tenuous link, his story is worth investigation. But irrespective of my mission, one of the best things about travelling is meeting the locals, and what better way than to be introduced to the uncle of a friend of my brother’s? So clutching a Ghana Telecom phone card in my slightly shaking palm, I dialled the number I’d been given from one of the sweatboxes in Kumasi’s telecom centre.

‘Oh, hello there,’ I said in the obsequious accent my telephone phobia forces me to adopt when phoning complete strangers. ‘Is that the house of Mr Osei Tutu Prempeh?’

‘Yes, it is,’ said a female voice at the other end.

‘Um, you don’t know me,’ I continued, ‘but my name is Mark Moxon and I’m rather hoping that Mr Prempeh’s nephew Kwesi has talked to him about me. I’m visiting Ghana for a couple of months, and I’d very much like to say hello.’

‘Ah, certainly, just hold on for a minute Mr Moxon,’ she said. ‘Let me get Uncle OT for you.’

After a pause, Mr Prempeh came on the line.’ Hello, Mr Moxon?’ he said.

‘Hello, Mr Prempeh,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘Very well,’ he replied. ‘So you are in Ghana and you are looking for information on Jimmy Moxon?’

‘I sure am,’ I said.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘I am in Kumasi,’ I said, ‘but I’m hoping to come down to Accra in the next few days.’

‘Then you must come to see us,’ he said, and with that I entered the world of the Prempehs. What a world it would turn out to be.

From Bus to Back Seat

The moment I arrived in Accra, I was whisked off and mollycoddled in a way I haven’t seen since my days of staying with millionaire ex-pats in Spain. If there’s one thing about Africa it’s that when you have something, you make sure you hold onto it, and from the moment I stepped off the Kumasi STC bus in Accra, I left the world of the dishevelled backpacker and entered the world of the global statesman, even though I didn’t know it at the time. All I had in my head was the title ‘Attorney-General’ as I dialled Mr Prempeh’s house from Accra State Transport station, the nerves of the lone traveller in a strange country fluttering in my stomach.

When Mr Prempeh came to the phone I offered to take a taxi to his house, but the tone in his voice implied that he’d much rather send his driver to pick me up; as I had no idea where anything was in Accra, this sounded just fine and dandy to me, especially after the tropical plastic seats of the public bus. I waited in the bus terminal, watching Ghanaian television and savouring the still-novel pleasure of being able to understand what the newsreader was saying, and half an hour later three men walked up to me, the one at the front offering me his hand with a beaming smile.

‘Mr Moxon?’ he said. ‘I am Osei Tutu Prempeh. Welcome to Accra.’

‘Hello Mr Prempeh,’ I said, ‘I’m delighted to be here,’ and with the formalities over we walked over to his Range Rover, his driver carrying my luggage. Mr Prempeh and I sat in the back seats while the driver eased us into the chaotic Accran traffic that had delayed my bus, and the air conditioning got to work on evaporating the stickiness on the back of my shirt and trousers, making me shiver slightly, a rather pleasant feeling after the city heat. While I settled in for the ride we made polite small talk, and I explained all about my trip through Africa and my interest in Jimmy Moxon. Mr Prempeh is a slightly rounded man, sporting a short, white, moustache-free beard that conspires with his closely cropped haircut to give his face a particularly friendly air, and he sat back in his seat and talked in his Ghanaian accent about the BBC, his nephew and the traffic in Accra. The conversation was polite, reserved and formal, so I got my excuses in early.

‘I have to apologise for the state of my wardrobe,’ I said, thinking of my crinkled linen trousers mustering in the bottom of my backpack, and the stretched T-shirt that had started out black, but which was now more the colour of café au lait. ‘I’ve been travelling for over two months through the desert, and these are my only smart clothes.’ And they were; I was wearing a crinkle-free shirt, cunningly coloured with a brown checker pattern to disguise the dirt that no doubt hid under the design, and grey polyester trousers, bought for their ability to survive the harshest packing regime without creasing. These were my best border-crossing clothes; I hoped they would do.

‘Ha!’ laughed Mr Prempeh. ‘Of course, I understand, it is not easy to travel like you are. You have to travel light; there is no need to apologise.’

I sighed my relief. Perhaps I was going to be able to remain a traveller in the land of the air-conditioned Range Rover.

Prempeh Towers

It wasn’t long before we arrived at Mr Prempeh’s house, deep in the affluent suburbs of the Airport Residential Area. Accra is evidently still at the developmental stage where it is a positive bonus to be within hailing distance of the airport, and there is an obvious difference between the sprawling chaos of central Accra and the wide boulevards of the airport surrounds, where large houses stand back from the street, guarded by night watchmen and menacing dogs. As the gates swung open to the Prempeh house, I noticed rolls of evil-looking razor wire along the tops of the surrounding walls; obviously nobody in this neighbourhood takes any chances with their property.

And who can blame them? Accra might be one of the safer African capitals, at least compared to places like Lagos and Dakar, but you don’t risk everything for want of adequate security. Mr Prempeh was quite adamant; Accra was no place for me to go walking round on my own, and while I was here my security was his concern. I nodded my approval, trying to hide the fact that I was champing at the bit to head off into Accra in my crinkled trousers and sweat-stained bush hat. ‘Ah well, when in Rome,’ I thought, and prepared to be a dutiful guest.

Walking through the front door was like walking into a box of chocolates. A large dresser separating the lounge from the dining room was packed to the gills with brass pots, cups, jugs and scales, cut glass, white ceramic figures and china plates that made it look like the land of milk and honey. The light in the middle of the ceiling was a glass chandelier of brass and frosted glass, reflecting light off the polished tiled-wood ceiling and onto rows of photos of Mr and Mrs Prempeh and family, propped up above the curtain rails around the inside of the room.

A hi-fi drooled out intensely easy-listening Muzak in the background, and dotted round the room I could see five, maybe six fluffy teddy bears, along with a huge foot-and-a-half high teddy bear card on the table, proclaiming, ‘To a special couple, Merry Christmas.’ And sitting on the couch, beaming her welcoming and larger-than-life smile, was Mrs Prempeh.

‘Hello Mr Moxon,’ she said. ‘Please come in.’

And so we chatted while I drank the customary glass of water before moving onto the equally customary soft drink (or, in my case, a beer, to help me slip into cocktail-party mode; thankfully Mrs Prempeh also had a beer, so I wasn’t making a faux pas as I might have been had I asked for a beer in a Muslim household). We talked about families, girlfriends, travelling and so on, and when they found out that I was born on a Saturday, they christened me Kwame; everyone in Ghana is very aware of which day of the week they were born on, and they get a specific name depending on that day. The Saturday name is Kwame, so I became Kwame Mark. Soon enough, though, we got to the subject that other travellers in Ghana had warned me would crop up sooner or later.

‘So, Mark, I have one question for you that I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ said Mrs Prempeh.

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Fire away.’

‘Are you a Christian?’ she asked.

Uh-oh, I thought, what’s the best answer here? In some countries it’s a legal obligation for citizens to believe in God – it doesn’t matter which god, just as long as you believe in one of them – and if you turn up as a visitor and say you’re an atheist or an agnostic, then this is often interpreted as meaning you are a communist; it’s not a particularly recommended move. I don’t think it’s quite as formal in Ghana, but given the massive influence of Jesus on the shop-naming industry and the ubiquitous use of the phrase ‘God willing’ among Ghanaians, I reckon it’s a safe bet to assume that atheists and agnostics are regarded as pretty strange beasts. I decided to play it cool.

‘I was baptised into the Church of England,’ I said, truthfully. ‘And I pray every now and then – probably not as much as I should, but I definitely pray.’ After all, I thought, I’d spent most of the journey from Ouaga to Kumasi praying for a smooth ride and no accidents, and I reckoned that should count for something.

‘That is good,’ said Mrs Prempeh, satisfied. ‘If you let Jesus into your life then he rewards you so much, and it’s so important to pray. I have a prayer book I can give you to help with your praying; I’ll look for it later.’

‘You’re too kind,’ I said, bowling myself over with accuracy. ‘Thank you.’ And that, it seemed, was that.

It also turned out that Mr Prempeh hadn’t been the Attorney-General of Ghana, he’d been the Auditor-General of Ghana, which made me much more comfortable; I’ve never really been into law but I can understand numbers and accounting, and I have a much better idea of what an Auditor-General does than an Attorney-General. Accounts need auditing, whether you’re a small company or a government, and the Auditor-General is basically in charge of auditing Ghana’s public accounts, but as I was to discover, that only scratches the surface of Mr Prempeh’s life story.

The Auditor-General

I wasn’t prepared for the extent of Mr Prempeh’s achievements, or for the amazing modesty he constantly displays. Over the course of my visit I’ve managed to prise the details of his exploits out of him, but I’ve had to ask the right questions; some people who have achieved a lot in life take no more than a gentle prod before they launch into long, pompous speeches about the dizzy heights they’ve reached and just how important they are, but Mr Prempeh has been, from the start, a congenial host who doesn’t let on about anything unless I ask him about it. The fact that everyone in the house, from house maid to family, calls him ‘Daddy’ only made my discoveries of his past all the more amazing.

Born in Kumasi on 20 April, 1937, Osei Tutu Prempeh got an A-level in Science in 1954 with the intention of joining the medical profession; back in 1954 most people didn’t take A-levels, let alone those in Africa, so this was no mean feat in itself. However what he calls his ‘burning desire to serve my country and be of service to mankind’ persuaded him to join the Audit Department, who were looking for promising young men to join its ranks, so in December 1955 he signed up with the colonial civil service and started to climb the ladder to the top.

In the July 1961 professional auditing exams the 24-year-old Osei Tutu Prempeh came top in the entire country, gaining him the official title of Auditor, from which he progressed over the next 28-and-a-half years through Senior Auditor, Principal Auditor, Assistant Director, Director of Audit and Deputy Auditor-General to reach the top as Auditor-General in January 1990. Ascending the ranks in the Ghanaian Audit Department isn’t easy; every year there are confidential assessments on all staff in the service, and when vacancies appear the best candidates are picked depending on these assessments, so when Mr Prempeh says ‘I worked my way up’ he means it quite literally. While working at the Audit Department Mr Prempeh attended various courses in accounting and auditing, including a year’s course at Strathclyde University, and numerous courses in Miami. Given his performance in the Auditor exams, it’s not surprising that his rise through the ranks was one of the fastest ever within the service. Of course, he deflects all this with typical modesty.

‘I got there by God’s grace,’ he says, ‘and hard work and a lot of sacrifice. I’ve spent a lot of time being lonely in hotels, away from my wife – I remember one time when the woman at immigration took my passport and looked through it, and she said: “Mr Prempeh, does your wife ever see you?” “Well, we talk on the telephone a lot,” I said, but the point was well made.’

Getting to the top might take a lot of hard work, but staying there is even tougher. The responsibility is huge; in December 1999 the National Audit Office had 1510 staff, with the Auditor-General being in charge of all of them, and the main responsibility of the department (and hence the Auditor-General) is, according to the Ghanaian constitution, to audit and report on ‘the public accounts of Ghana and of all public offices, including the courts, the central and local government administration, of the Universities and public institutions of like nature, [and] of any public corporation or other body or organisation established by an Act of Parliament.’ This essentially means compiling 14 annual reports for the Ghana government covering audits of all public ministries, departments, agencies and institutes, as well as all private companies with government investment; that’s an awful lot of auditing.

It’s even more impressive when you consider that when Mr Prempeh became Auditor-General in 1990, audit reports on the public accounts of Ghana were ten years behind schedule. Imagine that; the accounts of an entire country hadn’t been audited for the last ten years, something that is practically unheard of in the West. As a non-political post, the Auditor-General is independent of the often tumultuous political process, which meant that Mr Prempeh was able to criticise the government in his reports; this could be regarded as a dangerous occupation in Africa, but it seemed to work.

‘I was tough on the government,’ says Mr Prempeh, ‘but the truth and objectivity of my reports won through.’

It’s probably this objectivity, plus the fact that he was called on by the government to serve on no less than 11 committees and commissions (receiving letters of commendation for all of them) that helped push Osei Tutu Prempeh from the civil service in Ghana onto the international stage.

The United Nations

So far I’d been impressed enough with meeting the retired Auditor-General of Ghana, but over dinner on my first night in Ghana, I was bowled over. It turned out in casual conversation that not only had Mr Prempeh been Ghana’s Auditor-General from 1990 to his retirement in 2001, but he also served on the United Nations’ Board of Auditors from June 1990 to June 2000, the longest-serving individual since its inception in 1948.

Not only that, he chaired the three-person board for five of those years, which meant that he was effectively the man in charge of UN auditing during that time. The Board of Auditors comprises three Auditors-General (or equivalents) from member countries, and the auditing of all UN activities, programmes and funds across the world gets split between these three people, with the chairman managing the process. It’s a hell of a responsibility, but one at which Mr Prempeh obviously excelled.

I say this not because I know anything about international auditing, but because the United Nations voted on it. Every three years the General Assembly votes on whether it is satisfied with the performance of each of the three members of the Board of Auditors. If any aren’t satisfactory then they are replaced by someone from another country, but in his ten years of being Auditor-General of Ghana, Mr Prempeh was voted to remain as a member of the UN Board of Auditors three times on the trot, more than anyone else in the history of the organisation; Colombia holds the record for the longest term for a country, but Mr Prempeh holds the individual record, and when he retired, Ghana handed over its mandate to South Africa. In layman’s terms, this means that the United Nations thinks Osei Prempeh is a top-class auditor.

Just to add to the titles, Mr Prempeh was also a member and, for part of the time, the Vice-Chairman of the UN Panel of External Auditors, the Specialised Agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the mouthful that comprises auditors from all around the UN, including places like the World Health Organisation, the World Food Organisation, UNESCO and so on. And to cap it all, he was personally invited by Sir John Bourn, the Auditor-General of the UK, to join him together with the Auditor-General of France to serve on a pilot advisory scheme to the World Bank – the Multilateral Audit Advisory Group – which proved so successful that all three were made full consultants to the World Bank in July 1999.

His standing in the UN was so highly rated that when he suggested that the 40th session of the UN Panel of External Auditors, the Specialised Agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency should be held in Accra in December 1999, the panel members unanimously agreed.

‘You are young and adventurous, Mark, and Africa doesn’t hold any fears for you,’ said Mr Prempeh. ‘It’s a different story for a panel of auditors, working from offices in New York, but they all said it was a great idea. This was the first time the session had been held in Africa, and it was a tremendous success, one of the best ever. The Auditors from the UK, Canada, France, the Philippines, Switzerland, Germany and South Africa all attended – plus Ghana, of course – and it was very memorable. They all came round my house and had a great time!’

As a result of his work, in December 1999 Mr Prempeh was given a Millennium Excellence Award for being an ‘Outstanding Statesman’, an award from the nation that was presented by the President. I ended up holding the award back in the Prempeh home; it wasn’t some wimpy gold-painted plastic trophy, but a classy-looking glass, wood and granite monster that weighed a ton. He also received a medal; quite right, too.

But out of all his achievements, Mr Prempeh is most proud of one that probably only means a lot to those who know the details about governmental auditing. It certainly sounds impressive.

‘I am most proud of what I managed to do for my country, internally, along with enhancing the image of Ghana on the international stage’ he says. ‘My work brought about enhanced transparency and accountability in the finances in the country, and this helped to get financing in from bodies like the World Bank. To culminate it all I was able to get a bill of mine passed by the government as Act 584, which incorporated the Audit Office’s role in the constitution, and extended the reports for which the service is responsible to include forensic, environmental and comprehensive auditing. So I managed to update the mandates for Ghana’s audit service to be up there with those of other countries, and the act became law on 10 October, 2000. I retired in October 2001 but stopped working in April 2001, as I had six months’ leave to take, so this is my legacy.’

And as if to rub it in, for the year ending 2001 his department was voted the ‘Best Auditor-General Service in Africa’; the award was collected by his successor, but it referred to the work done by the department under Mr Prempeh. That’s not bad for a self-made man.

A Right Royal Welcome

It was after a day of driving round the suburbs of Accra, with me effectively interviewing Mr Prempeh while trying not to slip too much into the traditional journalist-interviewee mode, that we settled down to a cup of tea to unwind in the tropical heat. The air conditioning was on and Mr Prempeh had peeled off his shirt to reveal a classic ‘man relaxing in his own house’ white vest underneath, and we were talking about his travels around the globe as an employee of the UN.

‘So, how many languages do you speak apart from English?’ I asked.

‘Ooh, a tiny bit of Italian,’ he said, ‘and some French, but it needs a lot of work. But that’s about it.’

‘Though you speak Ga as well,’ I said, referring to the local language used mainly in the area round Accra.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I speak Twi too, as I am originally from Kumasi, and that is what they speak there.’

‘Ah, Kumasi,’ I said, ‘the home of the Ashanti tribe.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Prempeh. ‘Did you know I am a member of the Ashanti Royal Family?’

‘You are?’ I said, genuinely impressed.

‘My grandfather was King Prempeh I,’ he said, and my jaw dropped open. King Prempeh I is a legend in Ghana; he was exiled by the British in 1900 when the Ashanti rebellion was finally put down, and after initially being sent to Cape Coast he was exiled to Sierra Leone. However the Ashanti faithful were so keen to visit their king to pay homage that they walked all the way along the coasts of Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia to get to Sierra Leone, so the British finally moved him and his entourage to the Seychelles, where they stayed until the British let them return in 1924.

‘My father could speak the language of the Seychelles,’ says Mr Prempeh. ‘He was born there, while in exile.’

The bloodline of the Ashanti royal family runs through the maternal side, so the eldest son of the king’s sister becomes the next king. If the bloodline had run through the paternal side, then Mr Prempeh’s brother would be king; as it is, it makes him the second cousin of the late King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II, which is pretty impressive in anyone’s book. My genealogy isn’t good enough to work out his relationship to the current king, King Osei Tutu II, but I would think that the king’s uncle is Mr Prempeh’s second cousin. Or something like that, anyway.

‘I have the name of two Asantehenes combined,’ says Mr Prempeh, the Asantehene being the name for the king of the Ashantis. ‘The first king of Ashanti was King Osei Tutu – he became king when the Golden Stool came down from the heavens – and King Prempeh I was my grandfather. My daughter’s name – Nana Afua Kobi Serwa Ampim Prempeh – is the same as that of the Queen Mother, bar the Prempeh part, so she really loves her. Names are important; all my children have royal names.’

And so I found out that not only have I been staying in the house of the retired Auditor-General of Ghana, I’ve also been staying in the house of the longest-serving member of the United Nations Board of Auditors, who also happens to be a member of the Ashanti Royal Family. As Godfrey, Mr Prempeh’s current chauffeur, said to me when we got chatting in Mr Prempeh’s Range Rover, ‘He’s a very great man.’ You’re not wrong there, Godfrey.

Conversations with Daddy

Mr Prempeh and I have spent a lot of time talking, mainly because the Range Rover has developed some problems and his concerned advice is that I shouldn’t go into Accra without a guide at the very least, as some of the capital’s taxi drivers and touts are less than scrupulous and might try to harass me. I’ve heard that Accra is one of the safest capitals in West Africa, but local knowledge is always worth taking and I’m not going to argue with my host, so I’ve accepted that the best thing to do is to wait for the Range Rover to be fixed, and then we can see Accra properly. In the meantime I’ve been spending my days lounging round the house, writing, reading and slipping into the relaxed lifestyle of the retired elder statesman. I figure that it’s good for me; after multiple illnesses on the way to Accra, recuperation is the key, and the Prempehs are certainly feeding me well and looking after me in fine style.

The day starts off with Mr Prempeh’s daily routine, which I’ve been only too happy to join.

‘I have a morning ritual,’ explained Mr Prempeh on my first morning in his house. ‘I make myself a cup of tea and eat some fresh fruit out on the veranda, as we are now. Then I mix some bird seed with a little rice, like this, and then go outside into the garden. Here, come with me.’

I followed, dutifully, as we wandered out onto the front drive and into the shadow of one of the magnificent palm trees towering over the drive.

‘I love my trees,’ said Mr Prempeh, ‘and I often pray under this one.’ Saying this, Mr Prempeh closed his eyes and muttered some words under his breath, followed by ‘Amen’. Turning to me, he winked. ‘By the time you leave us, Mark, you will be a devout Christian.’

I smiled, wondering if even the miracle worker Himself could work a miracle that formidable, and then watched fascinated as Mr Prempeh re-enacted the parable of the sower in his front drive.

‘First of all I call the birds with a whistle, and they respond. Then I throw the seed in the same places every day,’ he said as he scattered the seed on the stony ground of the drive. ‘And every day the birds eat the seeds in the order I throw them. It’s incredible.’

We settled back down on the veranda, where Mr Prempeh started brewing the tea.

‘The tea is all part of the ritual,’ he said. ‘I can’t cook at all, but I can make tea, so that’s my job: I make tea.’

Pouring three cups of tea, he added unsweetened condensed milk and sugar, as is the Ghanaian way.

‘I make my wife a cup of tea every morning and bring it to her personally,’ he explained. ‘She likes that. And then I settle down to watch the birds come to eat the seed. I love it when they all flutter up into the air and slowly settle down again, every time someone moves. They’re mainly bush doves; they have the shape of a dove, but have a grey-purple colour, not white, and there are some smaller, red birds too.’

And saying that, the birds landed on the Prempeh’s drive, 30 or 40 bush doves pecking at the seeds and jumping at any sign of activity. Slowly they pecked their way along the drive, past the gleaming Range Rover that Godfrey had just finished polishing, and round to the door of Lady Pam’s Salon, the popular hairdressing and stylist business that Mrs Prempeh runs from the corner of the Prempeh compound.

‘We have another business too,’ said Mr Prempeh, following my gaze. ‘There is my wife’s salon, and we also have a business that hires out everything you need for a party – tables, chairs, lights, cutlery and so on – and it’s all stored round the back of the house. When I designed the house, I didn’t just plan for places like the prayer room, the video room, the dining room and so on, I donated a corner of the compound to my wife’s business. It’s important to have different ways of supporting yourself; nothing is ever certain, and it’s only by God’s grace that we are here.’

‘So how did you meet your wife, Mr Prempeh?’ I asked.

‘How did I meet my wife?’ he smiled. ‘I will do a deal with you; if you first tell me how you met your girlfriend, I will tell you how I met my wife.’

‘OK, it’s a deal,’ I said, and went on to explain my side of the bargain, trying to avoid getting too dewy-eyed with homesickness (though not entirely succeeding).

Then Mr Prempeh launched into his story. He lost his first wife in childbirth, during the birth of their fifth child (the child survived), and this obviously blew a hole in his life. Some time afterwards he had to go to school to pick up his children, but he arrived a little early and the school hadn’t yet closed, so he parked the car and sat in it, quietly waiting.

‘Then a girlfriend of mine – just a friend, you understand – came walking by, and she said: “Hey OT” – I am Osei Tutu, you see, which becomes OT – “Hey OT, why are you sitting there in the car all quiet?” So I said to her: “Have you not heard of my circumstances?” and she said: “No”, so I told her.

‘A short while later the same friend came round to visit me and happened to bring another friend with her, as this friend of hers had lost her husband also. Now when you have lost someone you don’t want to think about anyone else, but when I met this woman my heart started going boom-boom! boom-boom! and I thought: “What is happening here?” Soon afterwards she became my wife.

‘God works in mysterious ways: I was sad from my loss and she was sad from her loss, but together we are happy.’

It’s Mrs Prempeh (or ‘Mammy’, as everyone calls her) who’s responsible for the cuddly toys throughout the house (‘My wife,’ sighs Mr Prempeh, raising his eyes to the heavens while being obviously touched by the soppiness of the whole thing). Together they have seven children; there are the five children from Mr Prempeh’s previous marriage, and together Mammy and Daddy have had three children (though tragically one of them died). Most of the children are living abroad, but the house is far from empty; their daughter Nana Kobi still lives at home when she’s not at university in England, friends and relatives are always popping round, and on top of this there are the staff, from the house help to the chauffeur to the watchman.

But that’s not all. Mr Prempeh was very keen to show me round the gardens, and round the back of the house, past a rusting car, are, surprisingly, poultry batteries for up to 300 birds.

‘There is just one white turkey here at the moment,’ said Mr Prempeh, pointing at the solitary bird ducking under the low-hanging lights that, one hopes, keep chickens happy in cages like this. ‘We also have a live sheep over there, but the main thing is I like to grow plants that give you something you can eat. So I have a coconut tree in the front, as well as palm trees, paw-paw trees, oranges, plantains, mangoes and pears, and I just love to eat their fruit fresh from the tree.’

As we climbed onto the top of the house to survey the grounds from above, I could hear the yapping guard dogs out the back, and a solitary cat wandered by, mewing nervously round the grounds. I asked if Mr Prempeh had any other cats; I’m rather fond of them, and most of the cats I’ve seen in the Sahel have been scraggly little things, but this one looked well fed.

‘We used to have four,’ he said, ‘but the neighbours eat cats and three of them have gone. They set traps for them using meat and lines, and they catch them and eat them. So now he is the only one left, and he is a bit lonely.

‘Anyway, here is the roof, where I go walking every morning. My wife and I used to go for a walk along the road and back every morning, but since the President moved in round the corner, there are too many fast-driving commuters on the road and it’s not safe. So now Mammy takes the drive and I take the roof, and we walk up and down for 20 minutes to get our exercise.’

The morning routine also includes meditation and prayer, in the special prayer room opposite Mr Prempeh’s bedroom, and a session catching up on the news on CNN and the BBC.

‘I never travel anywhere without my short-wave radio and my Bible,’ Mr Prempeh told me. ‘Then I am never short of a companion.’

I asked Mr Prempeh what his memories of travelling were, and he went through a whole lifetime’s travels, covering more countries than I could place on the map; his work has taken him to a lot of Europe, Africa and North America, plus far-flung places like China, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Israel, Cyprus, Syria, Mexico, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and more. But one thing really sticks in his mind from his travels.

‘The view from the plane is incredible,’ he recalls. ‘When you settle into your seat and the sun rises slowly over the horizon, it’s just amazing. The colours are stunning, just beautiful, all orange and red. It’s unbelievable.’

This sort of memory has obviously been earned. Hard work is a central theme of Mr Prempeh’s story, and it’s evident from the friendly advice he hands out.

‘My advice to you, Mark, is “all-out”,’ he said to me as we sat down in the garden with a beer one evening. ‘Whatever you do in life, go all-out and put your best efforts in.’

‘What, like no pain, no gain?’ I asked.

‘Exactly,’ said Mr Prempeh. ‘That is it. When you write your book, Mark, perhaps you will write a chapter about me, and put that in.’

Sure thing, Mr Prempeh. There you go.

Accra

Written: 20 December 2002

Because the Prempehs’ car was having some mechanical problems, my plans to explore Accra were rather severely curtailed. Mr Prempeh suggested that I explore the capital in the company of one of his drivers, but with the car unavailable things kept getting delayed.

My first tantalising glimpse of Accra was in the dark on the way from the bus station to the Prempehs’ house, but my first experience of Accra in daylight was a chauffeur-driven trip to the internet café and back. It soon became apparent that where I’m staying is completely different to central Accra, with its pollution, traffic and amiable chaos; the Airport Residential Area is to Accra what Kensington is to London, and the streets are wide, clean, empty and dotted with travel agents, internet cafés, well-stocked shops, medical clinics and embassies sporting palm trees and well-watered lawns. I marvelled at it, but like all relatively modern residential areas, it has yet to develop any soul. Suburbia is a great place to live; it’s not such a great place to hang out.

But hanging out was all I was able to do, so when Mr Prempeh suggested a drive on Tuesday afternoon, I was definitely up for it. It was only to deliver some papers and to have a couple of meetings with people over the repair work on the car, but we brushed against the capital’s ring road and I sensed that feeling of compacted humanity that makes African and Asian cities so fascinating to visit. From the comfort of an air-conditioned Range Rover places like Accra take on a wholly different aspect – being able to explore without breaking into profuse sweat every few steps is a luxury that’s hard to beat – and more than once it hit me that this is why the houses in the Airport Residential Area have razor wire and guard dogs; once you’ve settled into the padded seats of chauffeured transport, you don’t want to go back to sweating your way along the dusty streets of the city.

Nice Plot

By Wednesday the car was behaving better but was still not perfect, so instead of exploring Accra we spent the afternoon driving to a plot of land which Kwesi, my brother’s friend, has bought. It’s in a suburb called East Legon, not far from the University of Ghana, and Mr Prempeh proudly showed me the vista from the plot.

‘The airport is just over there,’ he pointed out. ‘This is great, because Kwesi loves planes, and we’re going to build a balcony facing the flight path, so when the planes go past he can watch them.’

It’s odd, the thought of someone actually wanting to watch the planes fly past – most people in Hounslow would rather the planes just buggered off and left them alone – but in all the time we plodded around Eddie and Nick’s plot, not one plane flew past. The flight path in Accra isn’t perceived as a Bad Thing; living close to the airport is seen as a positive benefit, and East Legon, in sight of the airport, is a very desirable address indeed.

‘At the moment the plot has just been levelled,’ said Mr Prempeh, showing me where the bulldozers had done their work. ‘We need to remove some old foundations of a building that was here before, but we’re nearly ready to start building.’

‘How long will it take?’ I asked.

‘That depends on how fast the cash flows in from England,’ he said. Of course, I thought – that’s how people build in Africa. They buy everything one bit at a time when they can afford it, rather than saving up and buying everything in one go, which is the norm in England. The main reason is cash flow; property and buildings are good investments in times of economic stress, so buildings go up in stages, often with long rest periods between. Half-built shells of buildings are incredibly common in West Africa, the steel rods from the concrete reinforcements sticking up into the sky like rusty lightning conductors.

But Nick and Eddie’s plot of land is a little dream. Give it a few years and the surrounding concrete shells will transform themselves into razor-wired fortresses of the rich and famous, and East Legon will be a paradise of suburban luxury. Even given the shakiness of the Ghanaian economic situation, it’s easy to see why you might want to buy a plot of land in Ghana. A few kilometres from the bustling heart of Accra, you can live in a cocoon of luxury, complete with your very own guard dogs, night watchmen and chauffeur-driven car. After the cramped life of London, it’s another world.

Accra, Finally

On the way back from Eddie’s plot Mr Prempeh took me round the grounds of the University of Accra and his old school Achimota School, the best school in the country, and at last I got a taste of something historic. Here were colonial-era buildings, extended and expanded over the years to accommodate more and more students, and the administration blocks and old school houses were beautiful. It only made me want to visit Accra even more, and finally, on Thursday, I got my chance.

This time the problem wasn’t with the Range Rover, which was humming along nicely, but with the lack of a driver. Godfrey had taken the day off, so as a compromise one of the house staff took me to the taxi rank round the corner from the house and found me a respectable taxi driver to take me into town. As long as I rang the Prempehs from time to time during the day to say I was safe, everyone would be happy, so I hopped in the taxi and felt the happy glow of being free to explore what I liked, when I liked.

Accra is a sprawling place, but it’s easy enough to explore on foot if you’ve got plenty of time. I asked the taxi driver to drop me at Independence Square, a huge open-air parade ground by the sea that smacks of post-colonial presidential rule; a massive concrete arch dominates the parade ground’s empty concrete stadia, while Independence Arch stands alongside in the middle of a nearby roundabout, celebrating Ghana’s independence in 1957. I wasn’t too bothered by the square itself, though it was a bizarre sight as the wind blew black plastic bags through the dusty expanse of the parade ground, but I did want to see the sea. Accra is a coastal city and I hadn’t seen the sea since the Gambia, and just behind Independence Square the Atlantic Ocean laps against the beach, alternately dumping and washing away streams of litter and refuse. It’s not the most pleasant beach experience on the planet (though the hundreds of school children leaping into the water didn’t seem to care) but I felt a sense of achievement at having reached water again; Mali had felt a long, long way from the sea.

Just along the coast from Independence Square lies the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, a tasteful homage to Ghana’s first President, who was ousted in the mid-1960s and spent the rest of his life in exile in Guinea. Nkrumah is going through a bit of a renaissance in Ghana, and his impressive mausoleum sits in green gardens round which parties of jabbering school kids wander; meanwhile, tucked away at the back, behind the mausoleum and the posed statue of Dr Nkrumah looking every inch the leader, is a museum to the first President’s life. It’s an eye-opener.

The museum doesn’t contain a great deal, but what it does contain are lots of photographs of Dr Nkrumah with some of the most famous people of the 20th century. I wandered through the photos, stunned at how many of the century’s most iconic people were pictured shaking hands with the founder of modern Ghana. There was Jawarharlal Nehru, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, John F Kennedy, Sir Alec Hume, Queen Elizabeth II, Harold Macmillan, Pope Pius XII, President Nasser of Egypt, and countless leaders of countries like Malaya, Sri Lanka, Niger and Nigeria. I was impressed; as a tribute to Nkrumah, these photos are about as good as you can get.

After the peace of the Memorial Garden I plunged into the chaos of James Town, the run-down area of town that juts out on a small peninsula in southern Accra. At last I’d found a real piece of Africa among the posh suburbs and impressive monuments, for here the streets are packed with people, playing drums, shopping in markets and generally ambling round town in the way everyone does in the tropical heat. Little children waved ‘Hello obruni’ and I waved back; in Ghana obruni is the equivalent of toubab, and you hear it everywhere, especially in places like James Town. Right down at the water’s edge an old lighthouse looks over a squalid jetty that juts out into the sea, right next to James Fort, which is now a nasty-looking prison; it oozes atmosphere, and it’s a world apart from the Airport Residential Area, as the piles of rubbish and half-crumbling shacks demonstrate. I remembered a couple of English girls I’d met who were living in James Town, and they described their address as ‘past the lake of human shit and next to the goat market.’ That sums it up rather well; it’s a great place to explore.

North of James Town lies the main market in town, and just walking through the melee took an hour. Everything spills out onto the street – hawkers, pedestrians, stalls, you name it – and it’s a colourful chaos where you can buy practically anything. I’m not that fussed by the shopping aspect of markets as I rarely buy anything and I’m an incredibly lazy negotiator, but wandering through a market like Accra’s is an experience in itself, if only because of the tide of humanity that sweeps you along, dodging the traffic and ducking to avoid the huge bundles that the women carry on their heads. I thought it was great; this was the Accra I’d been looking for, and I was glad I wasn’t experiencing it through the air-conditioned window of a car. Besides, the people of Accra are friendly in a way you don’t associate with big cities, and I was only hassled once in the whole day’s wandering. After Dakar and Bamako, that’s a serious luxury, shit or no shit.

Kokrobite

Written: 21 December 2002

When I mentioned to the Prempehs that I wanted to stay in Kokrobite (pronounced ‘Cock-rah-bee-tee’) for Christmas, I’m sure I got a funny look; I also mentioned it on the phone to Kwesi when he rang up his aunt and uncle for a chat, and he just laughed. I couldn’t understand why; all the way down through Mali and Burkina Faso I bumped into people who’d come the other way from Ghana, and whenever I mentioned that I was heading down to the Ghanaian coast for Christmas, people kept recommending Big Milly’s Backyard in Kokrobite. How can you ignore travellers’ advice like that?

Yesterday I took a taxi all the way from Accra to Kokrobite, because Mr Prempeh said he would feel happier knowing I’d arrived safely, but that was where my Accran luxury stopped and a new kind stepped in: the luxury of the beachside travellers’ joint. Kokrobite is a small village right by the sea, and hidden in its suburbs and right on the beach is Big Milly’s Backyard. Started in 1995 by an English woman called Wendy and her Ghanaian partner Seto, Big Milly’s (or Wendy’s Place as it’s also known) is a simple block of land behind the beach, maybe 100m wide and three times that deep, that’s dotted with tall coconut palms, squat palm trees, bushes and trees. Hidden among the copious greenery are lots of pretty little thatched huts, some bucket-shower blocks, a bar, a chill-out area, a couple of viewing towers and a restaurant overlooking the beach, and it’s all delightfully clean and pleasant. It’s got just what I need to kick back and relax: everything I buy is bought on account, which I’ll settle when I leave, so I don’t have to carry money around and there’s never an excuse for not going to the bar; there’s a live band every Saturday night, and over the Christmas period you apparently can’t move for drummers, bands and dancers; the food is quite, quite excellent and very good value; and down on the beach there’s a friendly bunch of Rastafarians, where those who want to can get stoned on the local grass for an absolute pittance. As a recipe for relaxation it’s pretty excellent, and as a recipe for hedonism it’s pretty damn good too; perhaps that’s why the Prempehs gave me that funny look.

I’m going to do nothing for days and days except sit, read, write, eat, drink and meet people. I need a break from travelling, I need to feed myself back up after being ill from Dogon to Kumasi, and I need company; happily, I’m finding all of these in Kokrobite. I’ve already met some wonderful people, I’m relaxed enough to get my head together, and I hope that this will help reignite the travelling spark that went out, ooh, back in Senegal.

There’ll probably be precious little to say about my time in Kokrobite, and that, I guess, is the whole point of the place. How wonderful it is to be able to stop thinking for a week or so, while the sea laps against the beach, echoing off yet another bottle of ice-cold beer.

It makes Mopti feel a long, long way away.

Turtle Wars

Written: 22 December 2002

‘Oh man, it’s really sick,’ said one of the girls as she plonked down into one of the deckchairs in the bar at Big Milly’s Backyard. ‘There’s a turtle on its back on the beach, and it’s all bleeding. It’s horrible.’

Unfortunately this isn’t an uncommon occurrence in Kokrobite. From August to March the beach is a nesting site for sea turtles, and although turtles are a protected species and it’s illegal to harm them, it doesn’t stop man and turtle clashing in a bloody mess. The sign outside Big Milly’s might say ‘Turtle Nesting Site: Keep the beach clean, don’t collect their eggs, kill them or trap them’, but if you’re a local fisherman, you’re going to be far more concerned with the survival of man than the survival of the turtle.

Turtles suffocate when they’re turned on their backs, as their heavy intestines crush their lungs into the top of the shell, slowly killing them; with this as motivation, it didn’t take long for Wendy to drum up a team of young, strapping lads to wander down the beach, turn the beast over and carry it back into the sea. ‘But don’t bring any valuables with you,’ she warned. ‘Things might get a bit heated.’

The relationship between the obrunis of Big Milly’s and the fishermen of the local village isn’t that good, though I never found out why. You’re warned not to take anything onto the beach – even a towel – or it may well get stolen, and most obrunis hardly ever leave the safe haven of Milly’s compound, but the fishing village is quite a long way down the beach, so interaction is minimal. When it happens, though, it’s electric.

Some ten minutes down the beach we found a large group of locals crowded round a massive six-foot-long leatherback turtle, one of the rarest turtles in the area. A few obrunis were already there and had managed to flip the turtle back over, but it just sat there on the sand, weakly flicking its flippers, unable to push itself back down the beach. The obrunis were arguing with the locals; there was a problem.

The story, according to the fisherman who was shouting the loudest, was that this turtle had got stuck in his net, ruining it in the process, and that he was going to kill it and sell it to pay for the damage done to his livelihood. Wendy, an old hand in these discussions, asked to see the broken net, but all the fisherman could come up with was an ancient bundle of rope that had obviously been sitting on the beach for months. There was something fishy going on here, and when the fisherman demanded a fee of 10,000 cedis to put the turtle back into the sea – theoretically as compensation for his net – culture clash set in. It was pretty obvious by this stage that the turtle had crawled up the beach to lay its eggs, and the fisherman had seen the opportunity to flip it over, either to kill it and eat it, or to use it as a bargaining chip with the bleeding-heart obrunis who would no doubt wander down from the local hotel. The broken net was obviously a cover story.

Unfortunately for the fisherman the obruni posse outnumbered the locals, and slowly but surely the burliest white men started dragging the turtle towards the sea. At one point the fisherman and his mates tried pushing the turtle back up the beach in a sick tug-of-war, with the turtle flopping sadly in the middle of it all, but by now most of the locals were arguing to put the turtle back in, and some swift and not-too-serious fisticuffs saw the fisherman give up his prize, though not without a lot of shouting. Ten minutes later the turtle reached the sea and slowly lumbered off into the deep, its egg-laying mission scuppered for now; the only evidence of anything untoward was the gaggle of arguing humans back on the beach, where the more evangelically ecological obrunis had decided to ride back to Big Milly’s on their ideological high horses, dispensing conservationist wisdom to everyone en route.

The problem with slagging off the locals for their lack of ecology is that to them, turtles are fair game. Out here, if you catch something then you own it, and the concept of ecological conservation is not only completely unheard of, it’s totally inapplicable. It might technically be illegal to kill turtles in Kokrobite, but the policing isn’t heavy, and when you’re a poor fisherman trying to make ends meet, it’s a case of the turtle’s survival or yours. Nothing here is black and white; we were altruistically saving the life of an endangered species, a worthy cause indeed, but to the fisherman we were interfering in his life. My sympathy for him faltered when he started trying to charge us for putting the turtle back in the sea – that’s exploitation, plain and simple – but it’s a good example of how futile it is to try to apply western morals to the African way of life.

I guess the only way to tackle it is to shrug your shoulders, try not to offend too many people, and just drag the turtle back into the sea. And then you have to accept that it will keep on happening until the local fishermen of Ghana are as rich as we are; then they too can afford the luxury of looking at things from the animal’s perspective. We have a long, long way to go before conservation becomes an option for the whole world.

Trucked Off

Written: 23 December 2002

One afternoon, as I was lazing in a beach hut on Kokrobite Beach, the trucks rolled into town, and from the instant they started disgorging their sweaty contents, I was fascinated. For these trucks weren’t just any trucks, they were trans-African tourist trucks, and they blew my mind.

Every year a large number of trucks leave London to drive all the way to Cape Town, taking around nine months to snake through Europe and West Africa before crossing through Sudan into Ethiopia and Kenya, and then down the well-travelled route to South Africa. It’s a fantastic way to see the continent, and it removes all the hassle and expense associated with doing it yourself on public transport, but there’s no doubt that most independent travellers look at these buses and wince. It’s not hard to see why.

Imagine being stuck in something like the big, blue Truck Africa behemoth that rolled into Big Milly’s Backyard a few days before Christmas. 29 people (including the guide and driver) spilled out of this big blue beast, and for three days I watched them go about their business with the same fascination I reserve for those displays they have in museums, where ants live in a nest squashed between glass panels. These people live in each other’s hair, sharing the cooking and cleaning duties, camping in closely pitched dome tents and rattling for long periods along the roads of Africa, all crammed together in the back. In a group that big you’re bound to get some friction, and the politics of the whole situation kept me spellbound like a soap opera.

The second truck was a smaller, redder affair, carrying only 19 people, but they were equally interesting. I talked to quite a few people from this bus, and it turned out that things hadn’t been going too smoothly within the group and there’d been quite a few stand-up rows, so much so that some people were about to leave the bus early to fly home. The big blue truck seemed much more relaxed, and this sums up the gamble you take when you jump on a trans-African trip; if you get a good group of people, it must be a magical experience, but being cooped up in a truck for nine months of hell with a bunch of people whom you can’t stand... well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

I was lucky enough to have a couple from one of the trucks staying in the room next to mine; they were obviously sick of sleeping in dome tents, and opted instead for the luxury of a bed during their Kokrobite stay. I was pleased that they’d gone for this option, because they would sit in their room, the door carelessly open, and talk for hours about how irritating so-and-so was, and how the guy who snored really badly never pulled his weight around the camp. I had no idea who anyone was, and I only caught the odd phrase as the sea breeze changed direction to blow their conversation my way, but it was as vitriolic and analytical as the worst office politics. It was brilliant.

Truck Life

I only watched the trucks and talked to the participants, so there was no way in which I could really experience what it must be like to be cocooned on a trans-African truck for so long, but there’s no doubting that they’re part of a slick operation. The trucks themselves are monstrous, with huge tyres, copious spares on the back and engines that shake the ground in a way that means business. The 19-person red truck was pretty basic, with the back cabin covered by a domed tarpaulin and precious little else, but the blue truck was a step up in luxury (though it also held ten more people, so perhaps ‘luxury’ is the wrong word). It had two floors, one in the rear and the other just behind the top of the front cabin, though whether this created any more space, I don’t know; everyone seemed pretty crammed in when they arrived. Both trucks were smothered with lockable compartments containing all sorts of things like tents, cutlery, cooking utensils, the herb rack and so on, and by this stage the entire crew knew where everything was; trucks obviously have routines.

Something else they have along with routines are rotas, and while the truckers were relaxing in the bar, there would be a steady stream of people wandering over, saying things like, ‘Mike, is it your turn to chop the tomatoes? We’re ready for you now.’ I guess that’s the only way to run what is effectively a self-sufficient crew that cooks for itself, sets up its own camp and has to look after itself in environments that are often a long way away from the luxury of Kokrobite; these trucks may provide a safe haven and a less immersed travelling experience than going alone, but they still make an impressive journey through some of the harshest environments on the planet, and that’s no mean feat. The price is having to behave like a bunch of mature schoolchildren on a school trip, a price that quite a few people are obviously happy to pay.

It would drive me completely insane, though, to be stuck on a bus with the same people for months. I’d end up escaping from yet another idiotic neighbourly comment by jumping off in some backwater, which would make the whole thing rather pointless; but sometimes, when I’m feeling lonely, feeling ill or just suffering from a lack of drive, taking a truck across Africa sounds like the perfect way to travel. Someone else takes care of the itinerary for you, someone else sorts out the visas for you, the pre-pay nature of the journey makes it easy to budget, and you’re never on your own. I’d never survive on a trans-African truck, but sometimes I quite fancy a few days on one, just for the experience.

Truck Off

Sadly the trucks only stopped in Kokrobite for a few days, and they soon raised anchor and floated off down the coast for Christmas. I’d rather enjoyed talking to the truckers, but possibly more interesting was the attitude of the other guests at Big Milly’s towards them.

For example, the overland clique – those who have their own transport and are driving overland through Africa – looked on the trucks with utter derision, praying that they’d leave for Christmas and stop making the place feel so darn touristy. It’s interesting, but overlanders often fall into the ‘holier than thou’ trap, possibly because having your own transport is the ultimate way to explore. I often wish I had a Land Rover to explore Africa with; public transport is so bloody awful and restrictive that a car is a genuine advantage, and it’s a painful experience to listen to your average overlander rattle on about all the amazing places they’ve visited (all of which, of course, you can only reach with your own transport). Their cliquishness is actually a good thing sometimes; it keeps them away from me, with my far less impressive itinerary.

On the other extreme the VSO volunteers I met in Kokrobite were fascinated and thought the trucks were a wonderful idea. Then again, most of the VSO contingent had been stuck in rural northern Ghana for the last year or two, and after an experience like that, a trans-African truck must appear as awe-inspiring as a supermarket, a decent pizza or an ice-cold beer. Judging by the merry way they all guzzled their way through the luxuries of life in Big Milly’s backyard, being out in the sticks with the VSO is a far harsher life than a trans-African truck journey.

I tend to go for the latter opinion – I quite like the trucks – though I’d never apply to go on a truck myself; you can be all snobbish about how easy life is in a truck, and that it’s not real travelling, but who cares? At least the truckers are seeing Africa, and most of them seemed pretty happy to me. Still, travellers can be a snobbish lot, and trans-Africa trucks come pretty low down the imagined hierarchy, somewhere above package tourists, but way below backpackers and overlanders. They’re damn entertaining, though; I thoroughly enjoyed watching the soap opera.

A Change of Heart

Written: 23 December 2002

I’d been really hoping that a Christmas break in Kokrobite would recharge my physical and mental batteries, which would in turn unearth the travelling spark that I’ve always had on my previous trips. What I didn’t realise is that I’d have lots of time to sink myself deeper and deeper into the emotional hole I’ve been digging for myself since leaving home.

When I arrived here, Kokrobite was full of people, but because most of them were from the trans-Africa trucks, and most of the rest of the residents were couples or groups of some kind, I still felt pretty lonely. I made some friends, but a lot of the time I was free to relax by myself, which meant I was able to sit and stew on just how much I miss Peta. Even when great things happened – such as sitting on the beach with a group of friendly people, listening to impromptu drum concerts in the moonlight – I couldn’t think of anything except how great it would be to be sharing this with my girlfriend. I tried to write, and found that for the first time in ages, it felt like work, not pleasure. I went swimming in the sea, and discovered how boring it is without someone to splash. I sat in my room listening to the World Service, and every time they read out the postal address – Bush House, London, England – I instinctively thought of home. Instead of relaxing in paradise by the sea, I was driving myself nuts. There were no two ways about it; I was lovesick, and Christmas was only going to make it worse.

Salvation came in the form of John, Rowena and Mike, who had driven from England in a Land Rover, and who proved to be excellent company. We chatted away in the bar at Big Milly’s, and it turned out that Mike, a Canadian traveller who’d joined up with John and Rowena in Morocco, was looking for someone to team up with after Christmas to explore the Ghanaian coast, at exactly the time I was planning to head there myself. This sounded like a plan; I could relax until after Christmas, and then try to get back into the travelling lark before flying out of Ghana in February. Perhaps things would take off after the festive season.

The next morning I grabbed some breakfast and bumped into John and Mike, who were getting ready to leave for another spot down the coast.

‘It’s paradise over in Busua, Mark,’ said John, and proceeded to describe a perfect beach, with an idyllic island not far off shore that was ideal for snorkelling. He described a place not unlike Big Milly’s, but which was even more secluded and a great spot for Christmas. Basically, he sold it to me, and then added, ‘You can come along if you like. It’d be fun.’

I weighed it up for about a minute, and figured that if I went with them then I’d have good company for Christmas, I’d have someone to travel with after the festive season had ended, and I’d get to see some of the coast in a vehicle that would get me off the beaten track. It sounded great; I said I’d just check that it was OK with the hotel management if I left early, as I’d booked in for a whole week. I was suddenly part of a new group, and it felt good.

Paying the bill was no problem, and I wandered over to John’s truck and told them I’d be 15 minutes, as I had to pack. ‘No problem,’ said John. ‘We’ve got some things to do here anyway, so there’s no rush.’

But I wanted to get on the road again, now I’d been all fired up, so I ran back to my room and started packing. I hadn’t been expecting to leave so soon so my stuff was all over the place, but packing is my speciality, and 15 minutes later I’d shoehorned everything into my pack and dragged it out into the sun. Blinking, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn, as John’s Land Rover had disappeared; but no, that was where they’d been parked, and they were nowhere to be seen. I was a bit stumped; where were they?

I wandered over to the bar to see if they were waiting at the gate, and one of the guys behind the bar said, ‘Hey Mark, where have you been?’

‘I’ve been packing,’ I said. ‘Have John and Rowena gone?’

‘Yes, they just left,’ he said. ‘They were running round the camp looking for you, but then they just left.’

‘They left already?’ I was stunned. ‘But I’ve checked out of my room and they said they’d wait for me. Why didn’t they come and find me?’

‘They didn’t know which room you were in,’ he said. ‘They tried to find out, but couldn’t find you.’

And with that I realised that the chance of grabbing a great Christmas down the coast had just left without me, fairly inexplicably. I felt completely and utterly rejected, the last thing I needed in my state.

A Moment of Clarity

I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to the office, got my room back along with commiserations from the sympathetic staff, and plonked my bag back on the bed. I figured I’d go back to my original plan for the day – trying to ring home before Christmas, when the telecentres would all be closed – so I wandered into the village and tried to call my parents and Peta. It took two hours and two telecentres to get absolutely nowhere (the lines were constantly engaged), so by lunchtime I was back in my room, wondering which god I’d managed to offend this time.

So I pulled out my pictures of Peta and settled down for a good, long cry. It didn’t fix anything but it sure made me feel better, and it made me realise that unless something truly spectacular and unexpected happened in the next few days, I was going to be returning to Accra, buying a flight to London, and aborting this awful, solitary nightmare for my old life. I’d hoped – and expected – that travelling alone would be as good an experience as it used to be. I now realise that however good the travelling, I just can’t handle being alone. I want my girlfriend here, and as I can’t have that, I want to be where my girlfriend is. My priorities have changed; travelling comes second to Peta, and until I can combine the two, I’d rather be at home with her.

At least my time in Kokrobite helped me realise this, once and for all. There’s no doubt in my mind that back in the desert the Lariam affected me in a very palpable way, but underlying the chemical effect was this growing realisation that I can’t do solo travel any more; it just hurts too much. It took a place like Kokrobite, and the awful feeling of being rejected and alone, to make me realise just how little I’ve enjoyed travelling this time round.

The upshot is that I’ve decided to come home. In my original plan I needed to fly from Accra to Nairobi to cross over to the East African leg of my journey, but instead I’m going to fly from Accra to London, and take it from there. I can easily buy a flight to Nairobi to continue my trip, but whether I will depends on what happens back home. Making that decision has taken two-and-a-half months of soul-searching and scraping the bottom of the barrel, but after that length of time travelling, I know the root cause of all my angst. I’m in love and I want to be back home with Peta.

It’s the surprise of this realisation that is the strangest part. I have always thought of myself as a traveller rather than anything else, and I’ve always viewed my fly-by-night careers as a means to an end, that end being saving up for my next trip. I’ve felt like this since I started really getting into travelling back in 1995, and I’ve always had this trip to Africa as my goal. Now I’m actually on it, and I hate it and want to come home. I’m reeling from the shock; suddenly I’ve found that one of the cornerstones of my life is shaky.

On the other hand, as I keep telling myself, I’d rather be in the situation where I’m lovesick and pining for my girlfriend than being the single guy I was for the three years of my last trip. My days of year-long solo trips might be over for now, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop travelling. I don’t think you ever really do.

But first I need to come home and sort out my priorities. Perhaps I’ll look on this day as the moment I finally realised I’m putting down roots. If so, I hope the above doesn’t sound as corny then as it does right now.

Rastafarian Christmas

Written: 25 December 2002

The person with whom I clicked over Christmas was Lukas, a Swiss guy whom I met in the bar at Big Milly’s, and with whom I shared a passionate disappointment in Francophone West Africa. By the time I turned up at Kokrobite, Lukas had already been hanging around for a month, learning the drums in the nearby Academy of African Music and Arts; he was staying in the village with a friend, and he gave me a link, however tenuous, with the world outside the walls of Big Milly’s. There’s no doubt that a visit to Big Milly’s is completely unrepresentative of Ghana as a whole (though it certainly accentuates the positives, such as the friendly people) but as I’d hardly left the compound since arriving, except to make phone calls and buy water, anything that helped me pretend that I was still actually travelling was a bonus.

So on Christmas Eve, as I was sitting on the beach with Lukas and the Rastafarian drummers who pound continually just outside Big Milly’s, I was delighted to be invited to Christmas lunch at Lukas’s friend’s place.

‘Mark will join us too,’ said Lukas to his mate. ‘Mark, I’d like you to meet my friend Holy – it’s his place where I’m staying.’

‘Hello Holy,’ I said. ‘Cool name.’

‘It’s short for Holy Positive,’ said Holy.

‘Holy Positive,’ I said. ‘Nice one. It’d be an honour to come to Christmas lunch with you.’

‘Rastafari[1],’ said Holy, and took a big drag on his fat joint. ‘We see you tomorrow, man.’

‘You sure will,’ I said, and so began my first Rastafarian Christmas.

Late Lunch

I met Lukas on the beach around midday on Christmas Day, and we sat round and soaked up some drumming while Christmas happened lazily around us. Beach Christmases are strange beasts; it never feels like Christmas when the sun is baking down and the sea is breaking on the sand, but it does feel like a particularly good excuse for a party, and people wandered the beach with piña coladas in hand, sporting Santa hats and sun tans and doing absolutely nothing wherever possible. As Christmas venues go, the beach is never going to be quite the same as home, but there’s a lot to be said for waking up on Christmas Day and plunging into a warm Atlantic Ocean.

Around one o’clock we decided to wander over to Holy’s place to see what the plan was. Remember that this is Rastafarian Africa, where plans take on a whole new meaning; planning in Africa is pretty damn difficult (some might say futile) but planning in Rastafarian Africa is a complete mystery, so we went via another friend’s house, Kojo’s place, to see if anyone else was there. Kojo’s place is a kind of meeting place in the village, a tiny shop tucked behind the banana trees that’s normally got something happening, and that’s where we tracked down Kingdom, another Rasta who was going to Holy’s for lunch.

‘Hey Kingdom,’ said Lukas.

‘Rastafari,’ said Kingdom, and we all shook hands in the funky Ghanaian manner; you shake hands normally, and as you pull your hands away, you take the other person’s index finger between your index finger and thumb and click your fingers. They do this in Burkina Faso too, but you don’t get it in the Sahel countries and it’s not the sort of thing you’d use in high society in Accra; it suits the beach perfectly, though.

We sat around for a bit, watching progress on the building work that Kojo was having done in his back garden – and which was coming along nicely, even on Christmas Day – and after Kingdom had bought some herbs and spices for the Christmas lunch, we wandered over to Holy’s place.

Things take their time in the land of the Rastas, and instead of the normal frenetic activity you associate with kitchens at Christmas, there was a lot of lounging around to do. The sun was high in the sky; what better excuse for some drumming, some relaxing reggae in the background, and some slow, Rastafarian conversation? Absolutely.

Rastas in Ghana speak in a wonderful patois, and their philosophy on life is truly something to behold. No doubt influenced by the copious amounts of marijuana they smoke – a Rasta breakfast consists of two mangoes and two joints, as all-night revellers on the beach discover if they’re still conscious the next morning – the Rastas of Kokrobite are friendly, happy and utterly, utterly out there. Their philosophy is hard to pin down through the haze, but when Holy sat up on the beach one night and slapped away a mosquito, he summed up the Rasta’s chilled out view on life perfectly.

‘I don’t understand mosquitoes,’ he said, in as exasperated a voice as your average Rasta can muster (that’s not very exasperated, but bear with me). ‘They just don’t want us to feel free.’

Rastafarian timekeeping is equally trippy, in that it doesn’t seem to exist. The most popular phrase you’ll hear round the beach is the Ghanaian staple ‘I go and come’, which means that the person is just off somewhere, and will return at some unspecified time in the future. In Kokrobite everyone is constantly going and coming, which could explain why nobody is in the right place at the right time; indeed, having a right place and a right time is a concept that’s peculiar to the westerner, and it certainly doesn’t appear to exist in the Rasta’s hazy lifestyle. It affects everyone, not just the Rastas; when the drumming band failed to turn up to play on the evening of Boxing Day – their car broke down and they tried to fix it instead of taking a taxi to the venue – the guy behind the bar simply said with a shrug, ‘The band is a bit delayed. They’ll be coming tomorrow.’

So it was absolutely no surprise to see that lunch was going to take some time, and it seemed right; in a Rasta Christmas things take as long as they take, and that’s the point. It’s the complete opposite to Christmas back home, when the cooking is all meticulously planned to deliver a huge meal, bang on time; I think Holy lit a fire around three o’clock to boil the rice, but that was just a nod in the general direction of meal preparation. Indeed, this hint of activity seemed like the perfect excuse for a swim, so Lukas and I headed back to the beach with a ‘We go and come’, and ten minutes later we were back in the bar at Big Milly’s, relaxing with a drink just to make sure things took their proper course.

Just then Kingdom wandered in, so while Lukas splashed around in the sea, I sat with Kingdom on the beach with the drummers, marvelling at how the Rastas could keep on smoking joint after joint and still remain compus mentis. Their stamina is truly born of excess; most of the obruni smokers roll joints from half tobacco and half grass, but not the Rastas, oh no. A pure grass joint is the only joint a Rasta knows, and they knock ’em out at a fierce rate; it’s a wonder they manage to achieve anything, if indeed they do.

But we were going to achieve something, so around five o’clock we wandered back to Holy’s, ready for some action. This consisted of sitting around in Holy’s garden, watching the dogs playing with the chickens, and kicking back as the pots boiled on the kerosene stove. Holy and Kingdom proved to be truly lovely people, and the time flew by until lunch was ready at half-past-six, by which stage my appetite had grown, shrunk, and grown again. I was starving.

And what a feast it was. I never worked out the name for the dish we had – it was only referred to as ‘something special’ during the afternoon – but it was delicious. We had rice balls (sticky rice compacted into a tough ball which you scoop up with your fingers and dip into the sauce) with a thick spicy tomato soup containing fish and meat. It sounds simple, but the taste was absolutely heavenly and I scoffed down a whole bowl with appreciative grunts. The meal might have been over in ten minutes, a pittance compared to the average four-course Christmas lunch back home, but it was, as they say round here, sweet.

Back to the VSOs

Full up and rested, Lukas and I decided to head back to Big Milly’s, where a reggae band was going to be playing; Holy and Kingdom said they’d wander down later – there’s no rush, remember – but now we’d lined our stomachs we were up for some Christmas revelry. What I’d forgotten, though, was that I’d also booked dinner at Big Milly’s, so five minutes after I walked through the gate, I was whisked off to my place at the table, ready for my second Christmas meal of the evening.

The second meal was a more traditional western affair, if you ignore the fact that we were eating by the light of kerosene lanterns under the palm trees. I amazed myself by continuing to eat handsomely, and ploughed through chicken, potatoes, vegetables and gravy like there was no tomorrow. I shared a table with the group of VSO volunteers who were all down from northern Ghana, and I think their utter enjoyment at eating food that wasn’t rurally Ghanaian rubbed off on me; I didn’t leave a thing on my plate, and when dessert came round (Christmas pudding and baked bananas in custard) I managed not only my plate, but my neighbour’s too. Gluttony, I decided, was my Christmas creed, and I threw myself into the hedonism of the Kokrobite Christmas with glee.

I have no idea how long the reggae band played for; I have no idea how many Guinnesses I drank, but seeing as Guinness in Ghana is 7.5 per cent alcohol, it was probably far too many; I can’t really remember what time I finally went to bed; but what I do remember is that I had a great time. The party went on pretty much all the way through to the end of Boxing Day, and ended up with a group of die-hards sitting in one of the towers overlooking the beach, drinking beer and singing songs along to an acoustic guitar that Ben, one of the VSOs, had brought along.

‘I’d like to dedicate this song to Ghana,’ said Ben, as we broke into another round of drinks. ‘It sums it up rather well.’ And with that he started playing ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ by Del Amitri:

And nothing ever happens

Nothing happens at all

The needle returns to the start of the song

And we all sing along like before

And we’ll all be lonely tonight

And lonely tomorrow

So it seems that the life of a Rasta is pretty similar to the life of a VSO in the far north. Nothing ever happens... and, generally, it’s a wholly positive thing.

[1] Pronounced ‘Rasta-far-eye’, with the emphasis on the ‘eye’.

Kakum

Written: 29 December 2002

Lazing in paradise for a couple of weeks is all very well if you can switch your brain off, kick back and do nothing without going stir crazy. I’ve never been very good at relaxing on the beach, though; there’s a constant danger of me becoming bored, and being bored is the worst affliction I can think of outside of being employed, so when Lukas started planning an overnight trip along the coast with Susie, a friendly German girl whom I’d met in Kumasi and who turned up at Big Milly’s for the festive season, I was all ears.

Unfortunately, planning when you’re lazing is a challenging process and procrastination is the order of the day, so it was no surprise to find ourselves sitting round after breakfast on Saturday, 28 December, totally unable to decide on what we should do. The broad plan was to head west along the coast to the town of Cape Coast, from where we could take a bus north to Kakum National Park, home to Ghana’s biggest remaining tract of tropical rainforest. The problem was deciding when to go, and it was only the fact that Susie had to visit somewhere else on Monday that persuaded us to get off our backsides and head out that very day.

Ideally, when trying to get around West Africa, it’s a good idea to leave early in the morning; because it gets so hot in the middle of the day, things tend to slow down a bit as the day wears on, and catching transport is slightly harder. Still, after over a week of inactivity I figured that any movement was a good idea, so I booked out of Big Milly’s for the night, shoved some essentials in my daypack, and met up with the other two at Kokrobite tro-tro station at one o’clock, ready to head back into the reality of Ghana.

Ghanaian transport falls into three categories: taxis, big buses, and tro-tros, the latter encapsulating everything that isn’t a taxi or a big bus, from minibuses to the kinds of back-breaking nightmares that I grew to loathe in Mali. Catching a tro-tro from Kokrobite to the main coastal road was no problem, but standing by the side of the road, yelling ‘Cape Coast’ at every passing tro-tro, yielded nothing but shakes of the head; I don’t know whether it was because we were too late in the day, or whether tro-tros that go that far along the coast are few and far between or always full, but we ended up having to take one tro-tro to a halfway point which didn’t appear on any of my maps, and then another one to Cape Coast. I’d been dreading this decision; in Mali and Senegal, things always went horribly wrong when I had to break my journeys up, as sitting round waiting for buses to fill in the Sahel is one of the staple occupations of the public transport traveller, but to my delight Ghana proved to be far more suited to the policy of leaving when full.

For a start, once we’d given up looking for direct tro-tros to Cape Coast, we simply hopped on the next one that came along, which took a wait of five minutes. Once that bus dropped us off in wherever-it-was and we found our way to the tro-tro park for Cape Coast, it was only another ten minutes before the next one came along and filled up, and we were off within a few minutes. This was too easy; indeed, the only irritation was the way everyone rushed at the tro-tro in one huge crush when it pulled in, necessitating scrum tactics I didn’t have to use in the Sahel. Sure, our late departure meant that we arrived in Cape Coast after the last tro-tro to Kakum had departed, but taxis in Ghana are relatively cheap, so we simply took one straight to Abrafo, the little village that lies 1km outside the park gates.

Incredibly we’d gone from dithering round the late-morning breakfast table to supper in Kakum, and it hadn’t been a strain. Even the tro-tros had been relatively comfortable; OK, you still have to wedge yourself in, but compared to the wooden benches of the north, it’s child’s play. It’s no wonder they call Ghana a perfect introduction to Africa; if getting round is always this much easier than in the Sahel, I’m in for a treat.

A Walk in the Park

The tourist rest house in which we found ourselves was, I presume, rather pleasant, but as we arrived after dark and the rest house had no electricity (it had light switches, yes, but no lights), I couldn’t really tell. There was, however, a little girl whose business sense was truly staggering to behold, and as she showed us to our room and explained the dinner and drink options, I found myself once again thinking just how wonderful it is to be able to talk to the Ghanaians, not only because English is the official language, but because they are such delightful people. Her charm worked; we decided to eat there and then, and settled down outside in the flicker of a kerosene lantern.

Here we met Ama, a Canadian aid worker who was also here to explore the park, and sitting next to her was a guide from the park itself. We’d been recommended to do an early morning walk through the forest to beat the rush of tourists; Kakum is open from 8am, but by prior arrangement you can enter the park earlier in the company of a guide, and that’s supposed to be the best time to search for animals. All four of us wanted to do such a walk, and our guide explained that a two-hour walk would be best; this would give us enough time to track down some wildlife, and afterwards we could head off to the park’s world-famous canopy walkway for sunrise. This all sounded excellent.

Or it did until we sat down to work out the logistics. If we wanted to be at the walkway for 6am, then we’d have to start walking at 4am, which meant leaving the rest house at 3.30am, which would mean getting up at about 3.15am. As this was the kind of time I’d been going to bed since slipping into the hedonism of Kokrobite I was a little nervous that I’d end up getting no sleep at all, but you don’t trek along the coast just to sleep through the experience, so we went for it. A 3.15am wake-up call it was, then.

I hate mornings; I think I always have, though in reality it probably only started kicking in when I became a teenager and discovered the delicious feeling of waking up early and rolling right back to sleep again, safe in the knowledge that you don’t have to get up if you don’t want to. Mornings physically hurt my head and it takes at least an hour for me to gain any semblance of civility, so when we got up at 3.15am, I still had quite a few hours to go before I could be called human. Luckily I wasn’t alone; we were uniformly silent as we trudged the half-hour road to the park entrance.

Despite the sludge of missed sleep clogging up my mind, I loved that little walk. Under a half-crescent moon we padded our way through the village, avoiding chickens and enjoying the solitude, and as we left civilisation behind and the road entered the forest, it felt beautiful. It was humid – Kakum has 90 per cent humidity for most of the year – but it wasn’t hot, and the slight chill in the air was beautifully refreshing after the sun-baked journey of the day before. It was almost a shame to arrive at the rainforest proper; the breeze died, the humidity shot up even further and we lost sight of the moon and stars, but we’d come to see Kakum, and see it we would.

Or that’s what I’d assumed would happen. In reality our trek through Kakum National Park was a complete waste of time, and although it’s arguable that my morning head would have made a walk through the Garden of Eden a miserable experience, I was pretty damn disappointed by the two-hour trudge through the rainforest. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the guide’s torch gave up the ghost after an hour and he had to borrow Susie’s much smaller torch, but the real problem was the lack of animals and the profusion of less pleasant forest life. Here’s what we saw in our two hours:

- A Mouse. Our first taste of the wildlife of Kakum was a tiny three-inch mouse that sat on a branch over the path. The guide shone his torch on it just before it scampered off, and Lukas noted, ‘Well, if we don’t see anything else, at least we’ve seen something.’ He didn’t mean to be prophetic; this was only ten minutes into the trek, and our hopes were still high.

- A Blur. This we got to see quite early on. Our guide stopped in his tracks, shone his torch into the bush where some leaves were rattling, and said, ‘Can you see the bush baby?’ None of us could; by the time we looked there was nothing but the blur of moving branches, but it got our hopes up. Unfortunately, this was the last animal activity we would see for two hours...

- Ants. The way you search for wildlife in the dark – or the way our guide did it, anyway – is to walk for a bit, stop, and cast your torch around you, searching the trees for the reflective eyes of bush babies and monkeys. About half an hour into our walk we stopped for the umpteenth time, and ten seconds later we all started slapping our legs in unison. It took a while for our addled brains to register what was going on, but it went something like this:

‘Damn mosquitoes are biting through my socks. Ouch!’

‘Shit, there are millions of them. Ow!’

‘Bloody hell, they’re running up my leg. Bugger, that hurts!’

‘Shit, they’re in my pants. How the hell...’

‘Oh my god! They’re ants!’

It would have been amusing if these ants hadn’t been so vicious.

We’d obviously stepped into a whole jamboree of evil biting ants, and it felt as if someone was stabbing hypodermic needles into my feet, legs and, worryingly, my groin. We jumped around like an accident in a drawing-pin factory, no longer caring about being quiet, and instead slapping away at the armies in our clothes. We staggered along the path and away from the nest, but it took ages to kill off the attackers, and even then individual ants found refuge in the folds of my trousers, poised to give me painful bites every few minutes for the next half-an-hour or so. Poor Ama was nearly in tears; she had an ant phobia, and suddenly exploring the rainforest in the dark didn’t feel like such a fun adventure.

- Moths. There was one more flurry of activity on the walk, when we walked into a bunch of moths, resting on the bushes by the path. Attracted by our torches they fluttered into us, banging off our foreheads and generally scaring the shit out of us, but luckily moths don’t bite. They were big buggers, though, with four-inch wingspans and sullen, brown fur coats, and I was less than delighted by the thought of head-butting moths the size of small birds in a pitch-black rainforest. Still, it was activity, so I shouldn’t complain.

On our way through the rest of the forest we got attacked by ants again, and from that moment things started to really scrape the bottom of the barrel (though, luckily, we avoided a third bout of bites when the guide spotted a huge two-inch-thick line of ants marching across the path; we’d obviously trodden on similar lines before, and it was easy to see how a simple footfall could produce a hundred or so irate ants swarming up your legs). There were no animals to be seen, we all itched like crazy and we were tired, so it was a definite pleasure to get to six o’clock, when our guide plonked himself down on a bench and said, ‘That was terrible. No animals.’ This was pretty much the only thing he’d said on the entire trek – apart from ‘Look, a mouse,’ ‘Can you see the bush baby?’ ‘They’re ants,’ and ‘Ah, moths’ – and although I couldn’t fault his accuracy, it would have helped if at least one of our party had been enthusiastic about the walk, especially the one who was being paid. But never mind; we’d reached the canopy walkway, and things were about to get a whole lot better.

In the Canopy

Kakum’s canopy walkway is famous throughout Ghana, and for good reason. Constructed with overseas help in 1995, this 350m-long string of seven suspended rope-ways through the rainforest canopy is unique in Africa, and is a great way to see the rainforest from above. I’ve walked through a lot of rainforests in my time, from temperate to tropical, but I’ve never walked through the canopy, and it’s a wonderful way to view the greenery. It’s also a good way to appreciate just how high the tallest trees are; the walkway is around 30 to 40m high and the trees still tower above you, and although it seems pretty safe as you bounce along high above the ground (which you can’t see for rainforest canopy), it’s definitely no place for those with vertigo or suicidal tendencies.

As we’d hoped, the sun rose while we were on the walkway, appearing gradually some distance above the horizon, peeping through the haze that envelops southern Ghana at this time of year (the haze is drummed up by the harmattan, a strong seasonal wind that blows down from the north, bringing with it copious amounts of dust from the Sahara). There was some frenetic activity in the trees some distance ahead of us, but by the time we got there, we found another group of visitors who’d managed to scare whatever it was away; it had been a troupe of monkeys swinging through the trees, according to the other group, who by a strange twist of fate turned out to be the inhabitants of the big red truck that had visited Big Milly’s before Christmas. Ghana is a small place; or, more accurately, Ghana has a small number of well-visited tourist traps, and the canopy walk at Kakum is one of them.

But it’s easy to see why. Perhaps it was just a reaction to the two hours of ant-ridden hell, but I loved the canopy walk. It must be a totally different experience in the middle of the day, when it’s crammed with the 250 to 300 visitors it attracts on an average day, but at 6am it’s a delightful place, and being that high up in a rainforest canopy is a real treat.

But by 7am it was all over, and Kakum’s unwritten policy of getting ’em in quick and getting ’em out again kicked in. Because the park is very much focussed on herding people round the walkway quickly, they charge you on a per hour basis for both the canopy and the walks, and this fee system doesn’t encourage relaxed exploration of the forest. With this in mind we set off on the return journey to Big Milly’s for rest, recuperation, and – after a very long sleep – New Year’s Eve on the beach.

Down the Den

Written: 31 December 2002

While wandering around town on the afternoon before New Year’s Eve, Lukas and I decided to stop off at Kojo’s place for a Coke and a laze in the shade. What I hadn’t realised was that Kojo’s shop doesn’t just sell the usual range of corner-shop goodies, like soap powder and cold Cokes; in fact the biggest bit of Kojo’s business comes from selling marijuana to the extended Rastafarian family around Kokrobite, and judging by the number of people we saw floating through his place on New Year’s Eve, stocking up with herbal essence makes for good business.

Tucked away behind a useful camouflage of palm trees some distance from the main road, we reached Kojo’s place only to find that it was deserted apart from the loud music blaring out from the obligatory hi-fi. At first it appeared that Kojo might not be in, until someone appeared and signalled that Kojo was ‘in the bushes’, pointing to a path beside the house; and sure enough, down the end of the path was a shady hollow, and there was Kojo, sitting on a bench, beavering away. It appeared we’d arrived just as he was preparing a new batch of grass for sale, ready for the rush of festive clients.

Kojo’s bush den is nothing more than a path that crosses a river bed, creating a natural hollow that’s utterly invisible from outside. This is a good thing, as plonked in front of Kojo as he sat straddling one end of a wooden bench were two large pieces of brown paper, each home to a huge cone-shaped pile of grass some 25cm across at the base. My jaw dropped; I’d never seen so much marijuana in one place before, but Kojo sat there as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be happily preparing the new batch for sale, which of course, for him, it was.

We ordered a Coke and sat down, happy to watch proceedings; we weren’t going anywhere, and Kojo’s hollow was nice and shady, but equally fascinating was Kojo’s preparation routine. The piles of grass were pretty roughly chopped up, not finely enough to be sold, so Kojo would grab a fistful of the pungent herb, roll it into a tight sausage shape, and holding it in his left hand he’d snip the exposed end with scissors, chopping the sausage into finely cut grass. He’d repeat this four or five times until he had a pile of decent saleable herb, and then the packing would begin.

Grass in Kokrobite is sold in little packets, each designed to be enough for one joint (well, a Rasta-standard pure grass joint anyway; the non-Rastas whom I talked to said that a normal wrap is easily enough for two European-strength joints). Kojo sat there packing the grass into 1000 cedi packs (about 7.5p), taking a very generous pinch of grass and placing it on a cigarette paper on top of a square of brown paper; he’d then start as if to roll a joint, but would pinch the ends, fold them together and twist them, creating a one-joint pack that comes in its own cigarette paper for instant rolling satisfaction. For people who roll pure grass joints, it’s a perfectly simple and very cheap way to buy your weed, which could explain why so many people in Kokrobite do it.

Come and Go

As we sat there watching Kojo chopping up his wares, pausing only to pull out the seeds, which he popped into his mouth and chomped with a loud crunching sound, life in the den started to take off. Despite being nothing more than a path through a river bed, Kojo’s place is a busy little crossroads, and as the afternoon drifted along, the number of people who popped in to buy packets of grass or smoke a joint was staggering. At one point Lukas caught my eye and commented on how busy it was; I looked around and there must have been ten people sitting round, rolling, smoking or just shooting the breeze.

It was fascinating. As I sat there in the background, pulling on my Coke and settling in, conversation flowed around me, flitting between Ghanaian English and the local language to such an extent that I often couldn’t tell which language was being used; the Ghanaian accent can be ferociously hard to understand and the local languages often incorporate a lot of English words (particularly the numbers), so you can find yourself gently bubbling along with someone else’s conversation, only picking up the odd word, before it dawns on you that someone’s just asked you a question in English.

‘Pardon?’ I said to the man with the white beard who’d arrived a few minutes earlier, and who’d bought one of Kojo’s 1000 cedi packets, rolled it up straight away and lit it in a cloud of acrid smoke.

‘Where are you from?’ he repeated.

‘England,’ I said. ‘London.’

‘Ah England, that is good,’ he said. ‘You are most welcome to Ghana.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It is a lovely place.’

‘Yah, it is good that you come to see Africa,’ he said. ‘We have many English visitors here, and lots from Europe, and it is good that you come to see how we live in Africa.’

‘It is not like the Arabs,’ piped up one of the others in the den, a young Rasta who was, against all the odds, managing to balance himself on the balls of his feet despite the effects of the huge joint he’d just put out.

‘The Arabs?’ I said.

‘Yeah, the Arabs,’ he continued. ‘When you crash your car, the Arabs they cry for the car, not for you. It is not good.’

‘It is true,’ said the older man. ‘Arabs they come here and they stay in the Novotel and get into air-conditioned cars, and they never come round to places like this. They never see how we really live. People who visit Africa to see how we really live are very welcome; it is great to see you here.’

‘And it’s great to be here,’ I said, meaning it. Kojo’s den might have been one of the dodgier parts of town, but there’s no doubt that everyone who floated into the river bed was peaceful, friendly and ridiculously chilled out. Of course, a lot of that was down to the quality of Kojo’s wares, but as a place to hang out, chatting to the locals as 2002 packed up its bags and headed for the door, it was hard to beat.

It also helped explain the ponderous nature of the inhabitants of Kokrobite; ‘just in from the mountains’, Kojo’s latest stash would be gone before too long, and the chopping and packaging process would have to start all over again. Business is good, when you’re the grass man in a Rastafarian village by the sea...

Drink in a Bag

Written: 1 January 2003

One of the things you get used to pretty quickly in West Africa is the art of drinking from a bag. In the West our drinks are always sold in bottles, boxes or cans, but in West Africa commercial soft drinks are sold in thick glass bottles which are sent back to the producer for re-use, and cans are a real rarity, often imported from South Africa and sold at a premium. However most non-corporate drinks are sold in bags, and sooner or later you just have to try one.

In Mali, bisap was the bag-based drink I bought the most. A sweet, red hibiscus tea sold in frozen bags by children everywhere, bisap was how I learned how to drink from a bag. The bags are made of thin stretchy plastic that miraculously manages to survive the battering it gets from being touted round the bus stops and backstreets of the desert, and once you’ve got the knack, it’s wonderfully easy to drink. The first time you try it, things are guaranteed to go wrong, but practice makes perfect and bisap is a cheap way to learn.

The most popular way to drink from a bag is to nip a hole in one corner; drinking bags are shaped like standard freezer bags, so when they’re filled to the brim with liquid and tied up at the top, you end up with two corners to choose from. Biting a small hole allows you to squeeze the drink out into your mouth, but the secret isn’t just to suck or to squeeze, it’s to suck and squeeze; if you just squeeze then the chances are your drink will spill down the bag and all over your shirt, and if you just suck then the bag collapses and you can’t suck any more. A judicious balance of the two is the secret, and the locals are so experienced they even manage to move onto the next level, squeezing the drink out of the bag in an arc that lands right in the mouth. I tried this once, and I still feel guilty about getting the bisap vendor bang in the eye.

It’s also important not to make your hole too big. If you do, the bisap rushes out before you can drink it, and you’ll get nothing more than a cold, red beard for your pains. Still, even the locals spill their bisap occasionally, and it’s better to have sucked and lost than never to have sucked at all. Indeed, if you want to graduate to drinking hot coffee from a bag, then it’s a good idea to practice on something cold first; making a mistake with a scalding beverage is not recommended.

Bagged Water

In Ghana the bag drink takes on a whole new significance, as even the water is sold in bags. In Senegal and Mali bagged water is very much available, but most of the time it’s sold in unmarked bags that could contain anything from river water to tap water, a real risk for the uninitiated traveller’s stomach. This means you’re stuck with buying bottles of mineral water (or, in some bigger cities, cheaper bags of mineral water) which pushes up the daily cost a lot; a bottle of water in the desert will set you back around CFA1000, or just under £1, which is fair enough when you consider it’s mineral water and this is the desert, but given the amount of water you have to drink in the heat, it’s a significant cost. In Ghana, though, it’s a different story.

Sure, you can still buy bottles of mineral water (though at half the price of Mali) and unmarked bags of chilled but dodgy water (known as ‘iced water’), but absolutely everywhere on every street you will find either someone with an ice box, or a child with a basket on their head, stuffed with chilled bags of purified water. ‘Ice water, pure water,’ the kids cry (though it sounds more like ‘Aieece-wata-peeya-wata!’) and for the princely sum of 200 cedi (a shade under 2p) you too can be the proud owner of a 500ml bag of pure, bacteria-free water. It’s not mineral water – it’s just normal water that’s been filtered and treated with ultraviolet light or ozone – but it’s cheap, it’s safe, and it’s wonderfully refreshing necking a bag of cold water in the tropical heat.

The bags themselves are interesting too. Printed with the brand name, the chemical composition of the water and some marketing blurb about how wonderful it is to drink purified water, these square sachets of see-through plastic are full to the brim with water, making the bags feel like chilled silicone breast implants. Indeed, there’s something decidedly symbolic about the whole thing; everywhere you look there are Ghanaians suckling on corners of these little bags, and once you’ve tried it, you can see that there’s something deep-seated in the comfort that it brings. I’m no psychologist, but I’m sure Freud would have had something to say about the bag drinkers of West Africa.

Indeed, I have a theory. One of the things that hit me about crossing the border into Ghana is how few people smoke here; not only is smoking not that common, but it’s frowned upon, especially among women. I asked Mr Prempeh why this was, and he said that when the economy took a bashing in the early 1980s people stopped buying cigarettes because they were too expensive, but that doesn’t explain how they managed to keep smoking in the much poorer Sahel countries like Mali and Burkina, where it’s practically compulsory. Sure, the influence of French culture is one reason for the popularity of smoking in Mali – they smoke a lot in France, after all – but it seems that in Ghana, something else has replaced the urge to smoke.

My theory is that bagged water is Ghana’s addiction. In the Sahel cigarettes are everywhere, and whenever the bus stops you see plenty of people with cigarette packets stacked on their heads; in Ghana, bags of water appear on every street corner, and my theory is that because bags of water are so cheap, and because everyone uses them all the time for cooking and drinking, they’ve replaced cigarettes as a way of getting comfort. And that’s where Freud comes in; there’s something curiously relaxing about suckling on bagged water, and where in Mali you’d see people dragging on a Dunhill, in Ghana you’re more likely to see people necking purified water.

It’s a nice theory, but I doubt it holds much aieece-wata-peeya-wata...

Ghana: Along the South Coast

Cape Coast

Written: 4 January 2003

Unlikely as it might have seemed a few days ago, yesterday I finally got myself motivated to leave Kokrobite and head west to explore Ghana’s historic coastline. I tempered the strain of my departure by promising myself that I’d pop back for a night before returning to Accra, but if I hadn’t made a break for it quickly, I’d have been in danger of sinking deep into holiday-induced lethargy, which probably would have eaten up all my remaining time in West Africa. Kokrobite was the perfect stop for the festive season, but you can have too much of a good thing.

Having already done the journey to Cape Coast once (on the way to Kakum) it was a breeze doing it all over again, and by mid-afternoon I found myself booked into a cheap hotel in town with time to kill. Cape Coast’s attractions are the kind that deserve unhurried attention, so I decided to devote the whole of today to being a tourist, and simply spent yesterday afternoon wandering around, getting a feel for the place.

The thing that struck me most about Cape Coast was just how incredibly hassle-free and friendly the place is. Bear in mind that apart from some hurriedly curtailed activity in Kumasi and a day in Accra, I’ve not been anywhere terribly Ghanaian; Kokrobite village might have been in Ghana, but I don’t think the Rastas’ view on life is typical of the whole country, so in a sense Cape Coast was my first experience of exploring a typical Ghanaian town. Because of this I was stunned by the complete lack of intrusion as I wandered round town; in the Sahel I would have been mobbed by kids asking for cadeaux or touts trying to flog me tours of the local area, but during an entire afternoon wandering round Cape Coast I was accosted only twice, and both times the hassle was polite, benign and, after my training in Mali, amazingly easy to brush off. And not only was there practically no hassle or staring, but people were actively pleasant, smiling at me and asking ‘How are you?’ all the time. It was such a massive transition from the Sahel that I didn’t quite know how to react, so instead I just smiled back, which seemed to work.

Indeed, the only negative thing I can think of was the astounding humidity, which made moving round town an exercise in swimming rather than walking. It’s no exaggeration to say that I wandered into the restaurant for my evening meal looking like someone had dumped a bucket of water on my head, and even having a shower made precious little difference; down on the tropical Ghanaian coast getting dry is an impossibility, but it’s a small price to pay for such friendly people. Your clothes might dry instantly in Mali, but I know where I’d rather be.

Cape Coast Castle

Cape Coast’s main attraction is the stunning Cape Coast Castle, a World Heritage site that genuinely deserves the accolade. In nearly three months in West Africa I haven’t seen anything that remotely compares to Cape Coast Castle; it’s the first place I’ve visited here that compares to the colonial remnants in places like Malaysia and India, and I lapped it up.

I’ve always been a sucker for historical remains from colonial days, and Cape Coast initially reminded me of the Portuguese fortress on the island of Diu, off the west coast of India. Both castles preside over the pounding waves, both have rows of cannons lined up and aiming at an imaginary enemy, and both have the same faded air of colonialism and the futility of global empire building. But that’s where the similarity ends, for while Diu was a distant and lonely outpost of a colonial power that had long since lost its influence and where nothing much happened apart from the odd invasion from the locals, Cape Coast Castle was the nerve centre of British colonial rule in the Gold Coast (the colonial name for Ghana) and, more importantly, it was one of the biggest trading posts in that most abhorrent of all cargoes, slaves.

Yesterday I skirted the outside of the fort, but from the outside Cape Coast Castle is pretty unprepossessing; it sits on the coast like a squat, friendless building that slowly peels its white paint into the streets below, and it doesn’t look as impressive as you might expect a World Heritage coastal fort to look. It doesn’t sit on top of a cliff surveying its domain, it doesn’t have fairy-tale turrets and big towers looming over the town, and it doesn’t have anything exciting like a moat, but once you walk through the front door and pay your entrance fee the atmosphere starts to build. It’s subtle at first, but after a while you realise that this place has seen some serious history, and a lot of it is highly disturbing.

A Short History of Cape Coast Castle

The first thing I visited in Cape Coast Castle was the excellent museum housed in one of the castle wings. As I’ve already mentioned, Cape Coast Castle is a UNESCO World Heritage site, as are the two forts in neighbouring Elmina, and a lot of effort has been invested in justifying this accolade. The museum is just one of the results; the excellent guided tours are another, and ongoing restoration work (complete with its own museum) is a sign that its World Heritage status is being taken seriously. I spent hours in the museum – indeed, I had to be wrenched away to attend my guided tour, after which I returned to finish lapping up every detail about the castle – and without a doubt it’s the best museum I’ve yet seen in West Africa. OK, this isn’t necessarily saying much, but I found out a lot about the history of Cape Coast Castle, and it fascinated me.

The origins of the castle are obscure. The name Cape Coast comes from the Portuguese cabo corso (‘short cape’), and it’s known that from the 1480s the Portuguese came here to trade with the Fetu tribe, who at that time lived along the coast between Cape Coast and Elmina. In 1482 the Portuguese built a fortified trading post at Elmina – the first European building in sub-Saharan Africa – but it wasn’t long before other European nations had sniffed the scent of big profits, and during the 1600s and 1700s a varied collection of forts and trading posts appeared. In total, 60 forts lie along Ghana’s 300-mile stretch of coast, although the vast majority have crumbled into nothing and quite a few of those remaining are off-limits to the public; for example, Ussher Fort and James Fort in Accra are now prisons, and Osu Fort, also in Accra, is the seat of the Ghanaian government and you’re not even allowed to take pictures of it.

Given this level of activity, it was only a matter of time before the colonial powers started attacking each other’s castles. Forts changed hands seemingly every few years, and Cape Coast was no exception; in 1637 the Dutch attacked and captured nearby Elmina, which up to that point was the centre of Portuguese activity in West Africa. This ended Portuguese influence in the area, so by default the Dutch controlled Cape Coast. In 1650 the King of the Fetu granted permission to an English sea-captain to build on the cape, and in the same year he also granted the same permission to Henry Caerlof, a Swiss man who had previously worked for the Dutch and who sailed under the Swedish flag. By 1655 a house had been built on the cape, and over the coming years it was enlarged using slave labour into Carolusburg Fort, named after the then Swedish king. This fort was captured and enlarged by the Danish in 1657, and after a few more shuffles of power the English got their hands on it 1664, just in time for the Anglo-Dutch war of 1664-1668.

My favourite story of the Anglo-Dutch war concerns Fort Kormantin in Abanze, 32km east of Cape Coast (incidentally, this is the fort where Louis Armstrong claimed his ancestors had been sent from when enslaved). Fort Kormantin was built by the Dutch in 1598, but the English captured it and rebuilt it in 1645, naming it Fort York and thereby creating the first English settlement along this coastline. In 1664, over in the Americas, the English captured New Amsterdam and renamed it New York, so as a metaphorical V-sign to the English, the Dutch captured Fort York in 1665 and renamed it Fort Amsterdam.

Cape Coast, however, remained an English fort throughout the war, became the centre of English administration of the Gold Coast until the capital moved to Accra in 1877, and only changed hands again at Ghana’s independence in 1957. Cape Coast was most definitely the daddy of all Ghana’s forts.

The Slave Trade

So far all I’ve talked about is the history of the colonial powers fighting over tracts of land in faraway West Africa, but the thing that makes Cape Coast such a harrowing place is its role in the slave trade. So much has been written about the slave trade that I doubt I can throw any new light on this shameful episode in human history, but a potted history wouldn’t go amiss.

The slave trade was operating well before Europeans started building slave forts along the West African coast. Indeed, slaves had been bought and sold along the trans-Saharan trade route since pre-Roman times, and with the expansion of Islam in the eighth century, things really started taking off; each year from around 800 AD to the 1600s, between 5000 and 10,000 slaves were exported from the African continent, mainly via North Africa, the Red Sea, and the East African coast.

The smell of gold brought the Europeans into contact with West Africa, and between the 1480s and the 1590s the Portuguese made huge amounts of money from trading gold. However this wasn’t enough, so to increase their profits they moved into the already-thriving slave trade, and between 1485 and 1540 some 12,000 slaves were imported by the Portuguese and sold to gold merchants from places as far away as Mali. Thus the Europeans got their first taste of the profits that could be made from the sale of humans, a taste that wouldn’t turn sour until the 19th century.

With increased European presence in West Africa, the slave trade started to escalate. It wasn’t long before a triangular trade system was in place, with ships leaving Europe for West Africa stocked up with textiles, metal, guns, rum, tobacco, ceramics and beads. In West Africa these goods would be traded for gold, ivory, pepper and slaves before heading for the New World, where the slaves would be sold to work on the plantations, in exchange for sugar, cotton and tobacco. Each ship might have taken between 18 months and three years to complete the journey, but the profits to be made at each stage were well worth the investment in ship and crew, and the European powers started building their empires on slave labour.

African slaves were captured in a number of different ways, but the most common was for the Europeans to encourage inter-tribal wars. These would produce prisoners of war on each side, who could then be sold to the Europeans in exchange for goods like guns; these arms could then be used to capture even more neighbouring tribesmen. Another way of turning a profit was for tribes to sell their criminals to the Europeans, an eerie precursor of the English policy of shipping convicts out to America and Australia, but however the slaves got captured they would end up somewhere like Cape Coast, ready to be shipped to the Americas.

Cape Coast Castle has slave dungeons that make the cubbyholes on Île de Gorée look like the storage cupboards they probably are. Around 1000 male slaves and 500 female slaves would be stored in the castle at any one time, and most of them would be locked up in the dungeon for six to 12 weeks, waiting for the slave ships to dock. They would be allowed out for fresh air two or three times a week, but apart from that they were imprisoned in dark, dank dungeons that would have been utterly disgusting. The dungeons today are empty, echoing chambers that barely hint at what they would have been like with hundreds of slaves crammed in there, but with only a handful of barred windows to let in the breeze and a rough channel down the middle of the cells to carry away urine and faeces, it would have been repugnant.

Conditions on the slave traders’ ships were even worse, as depicted in that famous plan drawing showing slaves crammed into every nook and cranny of a ship, genuinely as close as sardines in a can. It’s futile to even attempt to imagine what it was like to be wrenched from your home and family, dragged to Cape Coast Castle and left to rot for two or three months in the dungeon, before being jammed into a slave ship where between a quarter and a half of the slaves would die before reaching the Americas. Even assuming you survived the trip, you then had to contend with living the life of a slave, forever exiled from your home.

Estimates of the number of slaves transported from Africa vary from 12 million to 25 million – one estimate says that in 1700, at the height of the slave trade, more than 650,000 slaves were exported in that year alone – but whatever the numbers, they’re huge, and most of these slaves came from West Africa and the Congo-Angola region. The trade started in the 1500s and over the next 300 years they were shipped out in what has become known as the African Diaspora, with one-third ending up in Brazil, one-third in the Caribbean islands and the rest throughout the Americas. The slave trade did not completely end until the 1870s, though Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, signalling an end to Cape Coast’s role in transporting slaves.

The numbers are interesting but hard to imagine; they’re just too big. Indeed, the most effective display I saw in the Cape Coast museum was an innocent little poster that proclaimed a forthcoming sale of slaves; it was so weird, I copied it down:

To Be Sold & Let

By Public Auction,

On Monday the 18th of May, 1829,

Under the Trees.

For Sale,

The Three Following

SLAVES,

Viz.

Hannibal, about 30 Years old, an excellent

House Servant, of good Character.

William, about 35 Years old, a Labourer.

Nancy, an excellent House Servant and Nurse.

The Men belonging to “Leech’s” Estate,

and the Woman to Mrs D Smit.

Also for Sale, at Eleven o’Clock,

Fine Rice, Gram, Paddy, Books, Muslins,

Needles, Pins, Ribbons &c. &c.

The bit that really hits me is the section at the end; I think it sums up the inhumanity of the slave trade rather well, but not by talking about numbers, or being crammed into dungeons in remote castles, or the nightmare of being shoehorned into a ship so tightly that you can’t sit up, with the faeces and vomit of the people above dripping down on you as you lie there in the dark. The notice above, to me, denotes the real human tragedy of the slave trade; back then it was socially acceptable and indeed normal to think of your fellow man not as a human being, but as an object to be sold at the same time as rice, books, muslins and needles. Thankfully most of the world has moved on and human rights are now centre stage; one sincerely hopes the human race will never print posters like this again.

Touring the Castle

There’s no doubt that the highlights of Cape Coast Castle are the museum and the dungeons, but there are plenty of other historical touches that bring the place to life. One of the more life-affirming is the fact that when the British abolished slavery they walled up the entrance of the tunnel that leads from the male dungeon to the beach where the slave ships would drop anchor; not only this, the Fante tribe have turned this walled section into a shrine to their local gods, because there used to be a shrine on the site of Cape Coast Castle before the Europeans stuck their oars in, and it’s now back in operation, smothered in animal skins, wine, schnapps, bowls, cloths and various other bits and bobs. Meanwhile the tunnel to the beach was converted by the British into a cistern for fresh water, a huge improvement on the previous use; it’s good to see a guilty conscience being put to good use...

The castle itself is a delight too, and it’s in good condition, despite the peeling white paint that makes it look like an obruni wilting in the tropical humidity. The fort went to seed a bit under British rule, especially after the capital was moved to Accra, and by 1960 it was home only to the town’s main post office, the law courts, the port’s customs house, and a prison in one wing of the fort. In the 1960s the post office and law courts moved out of the castle grounds and into the town; then, in 1962, Cape Coast port was closed to international shipping, and the customs house was closed and became derelict (it was demolished in 1996). Finally, in 1993 the prison was closed, well after the public had started to visit the fort; this was no doubt because the tour through the governor’s quarters accidentally enabled nosy foreigners to see first-hand what it’s like in a Ghanaian prison.

The big change came in 1979 when the fort was listed as a World Heritage site, and in 1989 the present renovation was started, with big strides being made throughout 1991. Looking at the photos, the paint has faded and peeled since that renovation, but the results are still spectacular. Cape Coast reeks of atmosphere, with its battlements stocked with rows of black cannons; the piles of cannon balls ready to be hurled 3km at enemy ships; the nasty little cell in the corner of the courtyard where slaves who tried to escape or revolt were locked up until they simply died of starvation; and the comparatively luxurious quarters for the British governors with their lovely views along the coast.

I spent hours soaking up the atmosphere in my atmospherically soaking clothes, and that was before I’d even thought about the other forts Cape Coast has to offer.

Fort William and Fort Victoria

I figured I might as well visit the two other forts in Cape Coast, even though they’re completely eclipsed by Cape Coast Castle. They’re nothing special but I like walking, and as these two forts are both perched on the tops of hills, I gave in to the male compulsion to conquer every peak, no matter how small. In Cape Coast Castle there are two turrets on opposite ends of the battlements that look out directly at the two other forts; this is because the two smaller forts functioned as look-out posts that could signal the main castle in case of invasion from the sea. These glimpses were just enough to whet my appetite, so off I went.

Fort William was built in 1820 and was converted into a lighthouse when Cape Coast was a busy port; unfortunately it no longer functions as a lighthouse due to the rather glaring lack of a light, but it’s now a home for people who work in the castle and a friendly local let me in to climb to the top for some wonderful views of the town. The atmosphere was somewhat tempered by the faded colours of the washing that they’d draped over the cannons, but at a stretch I could imagine a lonely scout on duty up here, sighting an invasion force out in the Gulf of Guinea and hurriedly lighting his lamp to signal the castle.

Fort Victoria was even more lonely and consisted of nothing more than a round wall with a small square turret in the middle. Being stuck out here on guard duty would be seriously boring, but at least the view was pleasant, and there was even a small breeze to remind me just how utterly sweaty I’d become. And with that thought, I returned to my hotel, happy to have experienced the power of historical Cape Coast.

Elmina

Written: 5 January 2003

A short distance west of Cape Coast is yet another perfect example of Ghana’s coastal fortifications; Elmina boasts not one but two World Heritage forts, and after the moving experience of visiting Cape Coast Castle I didn’t waste any time in hopping in a shared taxi for a day trip to Elmina.

Elmina is a lovely little town, curved around the back of a large south-facing crescent bay that gradually rises into a series of small hills behind the town. At the western end of the bay the tides have formed a long, thin lagoon that initially runs parallel to the shoreline, forming the town’s fishing harbour before emptying north into what is now a collection of salt-making plants called Benya Lagoon; meanwhile, the fishing harbour forms a rocky peninsula to the south that’s a perfect spot for St George’s Castle, the main attraction in Elmina.

As if this wasn’t enough, on top of a hill on the northern side of the fishing harbour, bang in the middle of town, sits Fort St Jago, its white walls and red tiled roofs more reminiscent of a Mediterranean villa than a colonial castle. The composition of Elmina is perfect, with the two castles eyeing each other up across town while the fishing port bustles along underneath. It really is picture postcard stuff.

St George’s Castle

By far the bigger of the two fortifications, St George’s Castle is also the older, and the one that’s most geared up for tourism. As at Cape Coast the castle contains an informative museum, though interestingly the museum at St George’s hardly mentions slavery at all, and doesn’t go into great detail about the castle itself, instead concentrating on the local people and their way of life. If you only visited Elmina and didn’t have time to explore Cape Coast too, you could be forgiven for thinking that St George’s Castle was hardly involved in the slave trade at all. You would, however, be wrong; as with Cape Coast, the history of St George’s makes pretty ugly reading.

The story starts back in 1482, when the Portuguese explorer Captain Diego d’Azambuja sought permission from King Kwamena Ansah of the local Edina tribe to build a fort in his territory. The resulting fort was called São Jorge da Mina (St George of the Mine), and the first buildings were started on 20 January, 1482, making what is now known as St George’s Castle the oldest major stone structure to be erected by Europeans in the tropics; at the same time the Portuguese corrupted the name Edina to el mina, or ‘the mine’, referring to the many gold mines in the area (the local name for the town is still Edina, but its official name remains Elmina).

During the first year of construction São Jorge was visited by Christopher Columbus, ten years before his famous voyage to the Americas, and the castle was developed further with funding from the King of Portugal. Soon São Jorge housed between 40 and 60 paid officials of the Royal Court and was home to a Christian primary school; the castle also performed conversions, though not always with great success, as this quote from the museum display so eloquently puts it:

In the 1570s, Augustinian monks embarked on [the] evangelization of Elmina. The Augustinian evangelization suddenly ended when the monks were killed.

Undeterred, the Portuguese built a Franciscan church on what is now St Jago’s Hill and dedicated it to St George, in the process building the first Christian church in Ghana and the first known Christian church in Africa outside Ethiopia. A walled town developed around the castle and by the early 1600s it was a self-governing city state, ruled by the Edina chief, his elders and the Portuguese governor of St George’s Castle.

By 1700 the population had grown to over 12,000, but well before then things started to hot up on the Ghanaian coast. Initially the Portuguese were the only Europeans in the area, trading from their centres at Elmina and Axim and making a handsome profit, but by the start of the 1600s the Dutch had set up a commercial centre at Mori, 20km east of Elmina. This was a pretty low key affair, but the Dutch were obviously interested in expanding, because in 1596 they launched their first attack on Elmina; they tried to capture the castle from the sea, but to no avail.

Shocked by the attack, the Portuguese decided their little chapel on St Jago’s Hill was no longer safe, so the following year they built a replacement inside the walls of St George’s Castle and left the old chapel to crumble. The Dutch attacked again in 1625, and again their naval assault was repelled, but the next time the Dutch tried to take Elmina they changed tack. Their third attack, starting on 22 August, 1637, consisted of a three-day bombardment of St George’s Castle from the partial ruins of the chapel, which the Dutch had surreptitiously occupied with help from the locals. Faced with a siege from the perfect vantage point of St Jago’s Hill, the Portuguese surrendered, leaving the Dutch to occupy the castle.

Unimpressed with the thought of worshipping in the Catholic church the Portuguese had built inside St George’s Castle, the Dutch converted the church into a large trading hall and built their own Protestant church within the castle walls. They also repaired the damage they’d inflicted during the castle’s capture, added more accommodation, paved the Great Court and improved the castle’s defences; the Dutch were to remain in possession of Elmina and St George’s Castle until 1872, when they sold it to the British to concentrate on their more lucrative interests in Indonesia.

But until that point Elmina itself was pretty lucrative, for like Cape Coast Castle along the coast, St George’s Castle was a trading post for slaves for the New World. As with Cape Coast Castle the whitewashed walls look positively radiant in the hazy tropical sun, and St George’s Castle is arguably even more picturesque than the behemoth of Cape Coast; it doesn’t have the broad, open vista of the ocean that Cape Coast does, but it has tall, shady courtyards, it has lovely ramparts studded with turreted towers, it has a moat (though it’s now dry), and the view over to picturesque Fort St Jago is enchanting. It’s hard to imagine that, like Cape Coast, St George’s Castle saw human degradation reach its lowest point.

The slave dungeons in St George’s Castle aren’t remotely as large as those under Cape Coast – where Cape Coast could hold 1000 men and 500 women, St George’s could only hold about 100 men and 100 women – but they’re still distressing. Instead of being below floor level, as the Cape Coast dungeons are, the women’s dungeon opens out into one of the castle’s tall courtyards. Around the top of one end of this courtyard is a balcony that formed part of the officers’ quarters, and according to the excellent guide I hired to take me round the castle, this is where the officers would stand and order the female slaves to be hauled out and paraded in the courtyard below. They’d study the slaves, and if they liked the look of any, they’d have them sent up the stairs, where they’d whisk them off and rape them, just in time for tea.

Slaves would be held in the dungeons for between one and three months, waiting for a slaver ship to turn up. When one arrived they’d be led down a dank corridor to the ‘Door of No Return’, a one-person-wide slot in the castle wall through which they would stumble, chained and manacled, blinking in the sunlight while looking for the last time on their homeland. Between a quarter and a half of them would die on board ship, a fate comparable with that reserved for any slaves who rebelled while in St George’s; those unfortunates would be locked up in a small, airless prison just off the Great Court, where they would be left to die of thirst and starvation. The idea was to inflict maximum pain on slaves who revolted, to act as a deterrent; whether it worked or not I have no idea, but the skull and crossbones over the door is, at the very least, unsubtle.

Fort St Jago

As you wander round St George’s Castle, one of the more delightful aspects is the way its twin, Fort St Jago, keeps flitting into view through the windows and turrets. Perched on top of a small hill across the fishing harbour from St George’s Castle, Fort St Jago is small and perfectly formed. In keeping with its pleasant aspect, it doesn’t share the dark secrets of its bigger brother, for while the Portuguese and the Dutch herded slaves through St George’s as quickly as they could, Fort St Jago simply sat there, looking down on the travesty below without comment.

When the Dutch captured St George’s Castle by bombarding it from St Jago Hill, they realised that they would have to retain possession of the hill if they weren’t to lose their new acquisition to the same trick. With this in mind, in 1666 they built Fort Coenraadsburg on the ruins of the Portuguese chapel, to act as a military barracks for protection of the town, which was booming with the burgeoning trade in locally mined gold and locally captured slaves.

The Dutch would occupy Elmina town and the two forts for 235 years, until the British, keen to control the whole Gold Coast so they could add it to their growing empire, attacked first in 1871, and then again in 1872. It’s surprising that this hadn’t happened before – on a clear day you can see Cape Coast Castle from Elmina, which must have been really irritating for the empire-mad Victorians – but it turned out that the Dutch weren’t remotely interested in defending this distant outpost, especially as the trade in slaves and gold had long since dried up. So, to avoid a long, hard struggle to a foregone conclusion, the Dutch wisely sold Elmina to the British for a small sum and sailed off to concentrate on their more profitable colonies in Indonesia.

Under the British St George’s Castle became a colonial police academy, and it remained an academy after Ghana’s independence until it was finally declared a national monument in 1972. However, after the departure of the Dutch, Fort St Jago passed through a number of strange incarnations over the years. It started its new life as a guesthouse and then morphed into a leprosy hospital (until a permanent hospital could be built in town) and then a prison (again, until a prison could be built elsewhere) before returning to life as a guesthouse. In 1986 the government closed the guesthouse and started promoting the fort as a piece of Ghana’s heritage, but surprisingly the guide on the fort door told me that plans are still afoot to convert it back into a guesthouse; it’s just money that’s the problem. Given that Fort St Jago is a World Heritage site it seems a little odd that it might end up being a guesthouse again, but for once I can see the logic. The fort would make a perfect place to stay.

For a start, the rooms are huge and airy, and given a reasonable amount of work they’d be wonderfully atmospheric. The old chapel would make a great suite and the officers’ rooms would be perfect for a dormitory, while the tower would be the ideal spot for a candlelight dinner as the sun sinks into the shoreline. Meanwhile the courtyard would be a great spot for sitting and reading, sheltered from the hot afternoon sun by the shadow of the entrance hall and lit at night by the lovely Victorian-era streetlight in the middle of the yard.

But it would be the stupendous views from the fort’s rooms that would be the real selling point. From the southern walls the view of St George’s Castle is beautiful and you can clearly see the grassy patch where the old town of Elmina used to be, before the British bombarded it in 1873, forcing the town to up sticks and move across to the other side of the lagoon; now it’s a pleasant grassy park next to the castle and behind the bustling fish market. You can see the lagoon in its entirety, stretching west through the fishing harbour before emptying into the flat, criss-crossed expanse of Benya Lagoon; during its journey it forms the basis for both the town’s main economies, fishing and salt-making. And all the while the palm-fringed Ghanaian coast stretches east and west, looking a lot cleaner and more beautiful from this distance than close up, when the flotsam and jetsam of modern African life is all too obvious.

The view north is less stunning, but it’s more interesting because you get to watch the town bubble along beneath you. A red Catholic church dominates Elmina from a hill to the north, while bang in the middle of town is a striking Methodist church; finally a Presbyterian church to the northeast is a vivid reminder that Ghana is home to a staggering number of different brands of Christianity.

Around Elmina

From the fort you can also spot one or two posubans, their concrete decorations cracking in the sun. Posubans are buildings that are peculiar to the Ghanaian coastal region, and peculiar is the right word; they might be utterly Ghanaian in concept, but disappointingly they look like they could be from anywhere in the world... anywhere with a bizarre taste for tacky decoration, that is.

Each posuban belongs to an Asafo company. The Asafo companies were originally Akan military groups who were devoted to the defence of the state (the Akan people make up about 44 per cent of Ghana’s population and are based around Kumasi, with the Ashanti tribe being the most influential members of the Akan). The name Asafo comes from the local words sa (war) and fo (people), but although Asafo companies are no longer particularly military, they do exert political influence through their involvement in the selection and enstoolment of new chiefs (Ashanti chiefs don’t sit on thrones, they sit on stools, hence they are ‘enstooled’). The Asafo companies’ civic duties include working on sanitation projects, road-building, policing, firefighting and community entertainment, so in a sense they’re like a Rotary Club with clout; and each company also has its own posuban, which acts as a religious shrine and a gathering place for meetings and rituals, not unlike a clubhouse.

This is all well and good, but it doesn’t explain why posubans are decorated with a thankfully unique type of concrete sculpture. In Elmina I saw posubans with concrete ships on their roofs, crumbling figures depicting Adam and Eve, and plenty of unintentional representations of concrete cancer in action. I suppose they looked quite fun, and each sculpture does have a story attached to it (which you can discover by talking to the Asafo members, if you are happy to pay for the privilege) but I get the feeling that the posubans in Elmina aren’t the best on the coast, and I couldn’t help feeling that they were just plain ugly.

So I explored Elmina by foot, wandering from the castle and the fort to the Dutch cemetery, which was originally built in 1806 on the shore of the bay before being moved to the current site at the foot of St Joseph’s Hill. It was atmospheric, but by this stage I’d started to notice an increased amount of hassle from the locals. In no way was it anything like the battering you get in the Sahel, but instead of the relatively happy vibe of Cape Coast, every chirpy ‘hello’ I heard in Elmina quickly lapsed into a demand for pens, money, school books, my address or something equally unfortunate.

One tout asked me my name as I entered St George’s Castle, and when I left the castle he’d written ‘To Mark From Tony’ on a seashell, which he wanted to give to me as a present. That was a pleasant surprise, except he then started hounding me for a present in return, preferably some money, and it soon became obvious that this was simply another way of selling me a shell with my name on it, which I really didn’t want. I ended up handing it back to him, much to his dismay, but it summed up Elmina’s hassle factor; compared to Mali it’s practically invisible, but compared to Cape Coast it’s as irritating as the posubans are tacky.

The upshot was that instead of spending the whole day exploring Elmina, I hopped into a shared taxi and headed back to Cape Coast, just in time to visit a spot for lunch (a spot being a Ghanaian drinking hole – it was the only place I could find that was serving food on a Sunday). A couple of minutes after sitting down I noticed that there was a distinct smell of petrol coming from the floor, and sure enough the ground was smeared with an oily sheen.

‘Is this petrol down here?’ I asked the guy in charge, straining to be heard over the thumping music that all spots are morally obliged to pump out.

‘No, it’s diesel,’ he said. ‘I put it down because it is very dusty here, and if dust lands on diesel it sticks. Clever, eh?’

Tactfully I didn’t answer, but even though the oil fumes made my fried chicken taste somewhat mechanical, I was happy to be back in the Cape. Elmina’s touts have a long way to go before they’re up to Malian standards, but it would be awful if, in ten years’ time, visitors just think of it as a pretty place that’s spoiled by the hassle. It could happen, but I hope not; Elmina is a really special place.

The Prempeh Room

Written: 5 January 2003

If I hadn’t been told of the existence of the Prempeh Room I would never have spotted it, but thanks to an off-the-cuff comment by Mr Prempeh back in Accra, I knew what to look for. And so I discovered that St George’s Castle has a link to the Prempeh family, which helped make a fascinating castle even more enthralling.

First, some background history. During the 17th century the influence and power of the Kumasi-based Ashanti tribe grew considerably, mainly due to their interests in the burgeoning trade in gold and slaves. Before long the Ashanti nation decided it wanted to cut out the middleman in its transactions with the Europeans, and through an alliance between the Ashanti, the Edina and the Dutch, Elmina was picked as the main port for Ashanti trading.

This wasn’t the end of Ashanti ambitions, and an attempt in 1807 by the Ashantis to invade Cape Coast didn’t quite work out as planned, as the Fante tribe in Cape Coast formed an alliance with the British against the Edina-Ashanti-Dutch trio. In 1873 the Ashantis got their revenge when they marched south and defeated the Fante, but in retaliation the British marched north, invading the Ashanti homeland and capturing Kumasi. This led to the 1874 Treaty of Fomena, which forced the Ashantis to pay a war indemnity in gold to the British and to give up all claims to Elmina.

In 1888 the British confirmed the installation of a new Asantehene, the king of the Ashantis. Kwaku Dua III, also known as Nana Akwasi Agyeman Prempeh I, was enstooled on 28 March at the age of 16. King Prempeh I was Mr Prempeh’s grandfather, and as I stood there in the museum at St George’s Castle, studying the large picture of Prempeh I on display, I could genuinely see the likeness. This was fun.

But why is there a picture of Mr Prempeh’s grandfather in St George’s Castle in the first place? The story goes that in 1894 the British were getting worried that the Ashantis might want to try to revive their erstwhile empire, and they were concerned that the Ashantis might do this by siding with the French or the Germans, who at that time controlled the countries surrounding the Gold Coast; the French were in the Ivory Coast to the west and Upper Volta to the north, and the Germans were in Togoland to the east. To help prevent this, the British asked the Asantehene – Mr Prempeh’s grandfather – to accept British protection, to install a British Resident in Kumasi and to receive official payment for himself and his chiefs. In April 1895 the Ashanti Union sent a delegation of over 300 people to Britain to discuss the issue, but while they were in transit Governor William Maxwell issued an ultimatum demanding that King Prempeh accept a British Resident immediately, and that he pay a war indemnity of 50,000oz in gold, dating back to 1873.

King Prempeh promised to pay part of the indemnity immediately and the rest in instalments, but this gesture was too late; on 20 January 1896 the British arrested him, along with his father, his mother, his brother, two close relatives, some paramount chiefs and some military captains, and had them exiled to St George’s Castle in Elmina. The room in which the king was held is now called the Prempeh Room, and it sits right on top of the southeastern corner of the castle, an unassuming white block that’s balanced by a similar room on the southwestern corner of the battlements.

Unfortunately, structural damage to the castle means that the Prempeh Room is currently closed to the public, but I could still see it across the courtyard, concrete evidence of the role of the Prempehs in Ghana’s colourful history. From here Mr Prempeh’s grandfather was first exiled to Freetown in Sierra Leone, and then to the Seychelles; it wasn’t until 1924 that he finally returned home to Kumasi.

It might pale into insignificance compared to the suffering of the crowds of slaves who passed through St George’s Castle on the way to the New World, but looking at the lonely Prempeh Room, you can imagine the awful realisation that must have hung heavy on the king’s shoulders. Exile is a terrible thing, whether you’re being exiled to the Seychelles or to the plantations of the Americas, and being exiled as a king must be a difficult cross to bear.

Thankfully, Mr Prempeh’s grandfather lived to return home, unlike the poor souls who were shipped out from the dungeons, three floors below. For them, an anonymous death was as good as it got; at least Prempeh I got his stool back.

Nzulezo

Written: 7 January 2003

After double-dosing on the slave forts of Cape Coast and Elmina, I decided my best strategy for exploring the Ghanaian coast was to head as far west as the attractions would take me, and then slowly make my way back east, back towards Accra. This would require a reasonably hard day’s travelling from Cape Coast to the village of Nzulezo, near the border with Côte d’Ivoire, but I figured it would be worth the effort; Nzulezo doesn’t appear on any of my maps and is conspicuously absent from my guidebook, but I’d heard that it was home to a village entirely built on stilts, and this sounded weird enough for me. After the fantastic but touristy World Heritage forts of the central coast, I fancied getting off the beaten track a bit.

It was therefore highly inconvenient that I should be sitting in the egg and bread stall round the corner from my Cape Coast hotel, all geared up to spend the day travelling into the nether regions, when my stomach suddenly started cramping up. I’d just taken my daily dose of Doxycycline and one of the side effects is a slightly squiffy stomach, but this built up into something altogether more unpleasant, and with the deft leap of the well-practised I jumped out of the stall and ran over to the mercifully clean open sewer, where I spent the next five minutes heaving up fluorescent green bile.

It’s an indication of my general level of health in Africa that I simply finished the job, blew my nose, washed my mouth out with purified water and sat right back down again to see if I could finish off the remains of my breakfast. Indeed, I was so determined to head west that I practically psyched myself better, and after necking a replacement Doxycycline and drinking a few bags of water, I hopped on the bus for the junction town of Takoradi.

It’s also an indication of how good Ghana’s transport can be that I only had to wait for an hour and a half for the Takoradi-Beyin minibus to fill up and trundle on its way. Beyin is a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, well off the main road, and in the Sahel I would have been waiting for hours, but for some reason there just seem to be more people wanting to travel in Ghana, and by mid-afternoon I found myself in Beyin, sweating my way along the dirt track that passes for Beyin’s main road. My short illness had passed as swiftly as it had appeared, and now my mission was to find the office of the Ghana Wildlife Service, who, I’d been told, would sort me out with transport to the stilt village.

Magical Mystery Tour

It took me a little time to find the office, not because I was heading in the wrong direction, but because the sign outside the building – the last building in town, of course – actually read ‘Amansuri Conservation and Integrated Development (ACID) Project’, with ‘Ghana Wildlife Service’ scribbled in tiny letters underneath. I had no idea what ACID was all about, but it seemed like a good excuse for a truly awful pun.

‘Hello,’ I said to the four smiling men in the office. ‘Am I in the right place to find out about Nzulezo?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ they said.

‘So this is where I can sort out transport to the village?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ they replied. ‘We go by canoe.’

‘Is it anything to do with the ACID project?’ I asked.

‘Yes, that is correct,’ one of them said. ‘It’s part of the conservation project. We do a lot of things, like working with locals so they do not kill animals, conserving the marine turtle along the coast, setting up bird-watching tours for tourists, doing canoeing trips to the stilt village, organising trips to look at plants and animals, and so on.’

‘That’s a really worthy cause,’ I said. ‘And can I stay in the village too?’

‘Yes, there is a guesthouse,’ he said.

‘Sounds good,’ I said, trying not to grin. ‘Then I’d like to sign up for one ACID trip to the stilt village, please.’

‘OK,’ said the man, while I giggled to myself slightly pathetically; I guess that’s what long-term travelling does to your sense of humour...

The Canoe Trip

Unwittingly I hit the nail bang on the head; visiting Nzulezo was indeed a trippy experience. Once I handed over my money I was introduced to a young man called Evans, who was to be my guide. Strangely enough this turned out to be his real name, despite sounding ridiculously Victorian; the only Ghanaian name he had was Kojo, as he’d been born on a Monday, so Evans it was. I felt like I’d signed up for a flag-waving British expedition deep into the interior as Evans led me down the road and into a huge, flat field full of grass.

‘We walk this way to the boat,’ he said, and I looked around, confused. All I could see was a mass of knee-high grass stretching into the distance, with a dirt path leading straight into the heart of it.

‘Do we have to walk far?’ I asked, wondering where we were heading.

‘No, it is just here,’ he replied, and as he spoke we rounded a corner in the path and suddenly I understood; the grass was the lagoon, and the path dipped into dark water where ten shallow canoes sat, bumping in the breeze. Wading between the boats, the clay-like black mud oozing between my toes, we soon reached a canoe called The Amansuri and hopped in.

‘It is maybe one hour to the village by boat,’ said Evans, and although he overestimated considerably, it was quite a trip. Poling from the back like a Venetian gondolier, he pushed us along a cleared path through the grass like a kind of tropical icebreaker, and we drifted pleasantly through the light green meadow, stirring up the dark brown water as it reflected mottled images of white water lilies, steel blue sky and the dark greenish brown of the palm trees lining the lagoon.

‘These are raffia trees all around us,’ said Evans, following my gaze. He went on to explain that the villagers get palm wine from the raffia tree, which they then distil to make an utterly lethal drink called akpeteshie. (‘You can try it if you like,’ said Evans, ‘but we guides are not allowed to drink while we’re doing tours; if we drink we get suspension.’ I figured I’d better not tempt fate after my experience at breakfast.) Meanwhile the tree’s bushy fronds are used to make roofs and the thick, round branches make up the village’s stilts, the main structures of the houses, the walls and the walkways. Not only that, they also make fish traps out of raffia; it’s truly the building block of life out in Nzulezo.

‘The village people do three things,’ said Evans. ‘They distil akpeteshie, they farm the land about three or four kilometres from the village, and they fish in the lagoon. The fish come to spawn here in the grass, so there is no fishing here, but there is much fishing in the open lake.’

‘Is it deep here?’ I asked, looking at the jet black water as it lapped round our boat like a lake of flat Guinness.

‘No, it is not deep,’ he said, pushing his pole in to a depth of about two feet. ‘In the wet season the river is very high, and the grass is completely covered, but now the water level is going down and it’s only about halfway up the grass.’

Like most wetlands the Amansuri Lagoon is home to plenty of aquatic and bird life, though to an ornithological philistine like me the wildlife makes for little more than an impressive-sounding list of names. Evans pointed out a few cattle egrets, an African yellow pied wagtail, a European swift and the rusty-red great African jacana, much to my polite indifference. Unfortunately we didn’t see a great heron or the catchily named lily trotter, who apparently also inhabit the area, and neither did we see any monkeys in the short stretch of rainforest that we cut through.

‘We have black and white colubus monkeys here,’ said Evans, ‘and the moana monkey too.’ But my attention was elsewhere, for all of a sudden we broke free of the grassland and there was the lagoon, a huge flat expanse of water stretching out to distant, raffia-studded shores. Evans ditched his pole and started paddling, pointing to the left-hand bank of the lagoon. I followed his finger and saw a smudge in the distance.

‘The stilt village,’ said Evans. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

‘Excellent,’ I thought. ‘This should be interesting.’

The Stilt Village

The first thing that struck me about the stilt village was that the tall poles that stick vertically out of each house made the place look like a balding porcupine. The second thing that struck me, as we drifted closer, was that each of these poles had a surprisingly familiar object stuck on the end; that’s because these poles are in fact TV aerials.

‘Do they have electricity here?’ I asked Evans in a surprised voice.

‘Yes, but everything runs off car batteries,’ he replied. ‘The villagers have to take them to Eikwe to charge them up, or sometimes to Takoradi.’

I’d passed through both Takoradi and Eikwe on the way, and the thought of having to lug a bunch of car batteries all that way just to get electricity was something I wouldn’t relish, but obviously it doesn’t bother the locals too much, as the throbbing bass of about five hi-fis, all set to volume 11, greeted us as we paddled towards the village.

As we got closer and the music got louder it became apparent that the stilt village is exactly that; each house stands on a network of thick poles, driven into the lagoon’s bed, with about five feet between the water level and the houses’ floors. At first the houses look as if they are made from corrugated iron, but as we reached the village it became clear that practically everything – apart from the odd tin roof – is made from raffia. Raffia poles look a little like bamboo, and the walls and the floors are made from row upon row of tightly bound raffia stalks, each about two inches in diameter. Some houses are a natural light grey colour, but most are painted yellow, blue, green or brown, with some of them tastefully done up with a two-tone effect, and it was towards one of these structures – a blue-yellow hut – that we paddled.

‘Here is the guesthouse,’ said Evans, pointing to a sign saying ‘Nzulezo Homestay’ that reflected perfectly in the oil-black water. ‘Nice place,’ I said as we docked.

The Nzulezo Homestay is indeed delightful. It consists of a main stilt building with a large veranda and a couple of rooms off the back, plus a separate building containing three rooms, linked by a walkway. I was given the middle room, a nice little affair that had a door that was designed for pygmies (I banged my head almost every time I entered) and wallpaper that had, in a previous incarnation, been a catalogue for an Italian hypermarket that appeared to sell clothes, food, drink, kitchenware, plants, shoes, stationery, umbrellas, luggage and, usefully, chainsaws.

Meanwhile, out on the veranda, I was introduced to Daniel, the proprietor, who handed me the visitors’ book to sign; during the last year around 70 people have stayed in the Nzulezo Homestay, making it one of the less-visited hotels in the region, but that hasn’t stopped the local authority from printing a sign entitled ‘Tourist Ethics’ that Daniel has proudly stuck on the wall inside the veranda. I figured I might as well take a look before we went exploring the village, in case I accidentally committed a terrible faux pas in passing. Starting from the top, I soon came across the following:

Visitors are to put on waterproof footwear and come along with raincoats.

‘Eh? I’m supposed to wear waterproofs?’ I asked Daniel.

‘That’s just for the rainy season,’ he said. ‘It’s OK now.’

‘Ah,’ I said, and continued reading:

Visitors to the stilt village are to wear life jackets. This [sic] will be provided at the visitors centre.

‘Um, I never got a life jacket,’ I said. ‘Should I have one?’

‘You can swim?’ asked Evans.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but I’d really rather not swim here; I’m scared of dark water.’

‘Then it is best you don’t fall in, but you don’t need a life jacket,’ said Evans, and that was that.

Back at the notice, I reached the section entitled ‘Socio-Cultural/Safety Ethics’:

Do not make any provocative or mocking statements when you get to the stilt village.

Do not stand up in the canoe.

Do not make noise in the wetland.

Making love openly at the beach or any of the communities is prohibited.

‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘Are you telling me that you’ve got a problem with people making love on the beach here?’

‘A long time ago, yes,’ said Evans, and I could only assume that back then, the beach was different; these days it seems to be used more for sanitation than procreation, but that’s progress, I guess.

Satisfied that I was unlikely to breach the tourist code, we set off to explore the village. Home to about 500 people, Nzulezo is long and thin, based around a straight main ‘road’ that was recently rebuilt using thick planks of wood rather than raffia, which wears out pretty quickly; the building work was done by Raleigh International, who sent three groups over to work on this and other eco-tourism projects in the area. Houses line the sparklingly new main road, and raffia paths shoot off at right angles between the houses, leading to kitchens that are purposely built away from the houses to prevent the risk of fire. Halfway down the main road is a classroom full of wooden desks, which doubles as a church on Sundays, and at the end of the village, past the chief’s house and two more classrooms, is a dank-looking pond that apparently evaporates in the dry season, providing a football pitch for the kids. And there are kids everywhere, running around with no clothes on, screaming and shouting and totally failing to fall into the lagoon. Evidently the final prohibition in the tourist code doesn’t apply to the locals, and quite right too; what else is there to do at night in an isolated stilt village in the middle of nowhere?

I assumed that sleeping would be a prime occupation in such a backwater, but my hopes that the stilt village would be a tranquil little place to spend the night were rudely dashed by the music I’d heard on arrival. As the night wore on and I retired to my Italian hypermarket to get some rest, the hi-fis continued to do battle, sending ripples through the black water and up the stilts that held my bed aloft. Water is a pretty good conductor of sound, as any scuba diver will tell you, and as I lay there in bed, trying to block the loud thumping out of my mind, I heard the sound of rain pattering down on my raffia roof.

‘Rain!’ I cried, and leapt out of bed; having only seen rain once since leaving home – ages ago in the Gambia – I couldn’t wait to see it, especially on such a black lagoon as this. I flung open my window and stuck my head out, but all I could see were the stars blinking through the haze, reflecting in an undisturbed lake. I listened again, and there it was; the patter of tiny raindrops, but outside it was just another balmy Ghanaian night. And then suddenly the hairs on my neck stood to attention and I realised that I wasn’t hearing the patter of tiny raindrops but the patter of tiny feet, for under the adverts for Italian wine and wellington boots were hundreds of little cockroaches, chewing away at the wood and digging little homes for themselves. I reached for my torch and switched it on, and sure enough the room shifted as hundreds of little brown bodies scurried back into the lingerie section. I wasn’t alone.

‘Bloody hell, now I know what hippies mean by a bad trip,’ I mumbled as I unrolled my mosquito net and tried to sleep among the sound of cockroaches nibbling in time to the Ghanaian music that throbbed through the oily lagoon.

The Migration

As I lay there trying to con myself that it really was raining outside and that the cockroaches were nothing more than the product of a fertile imagination, I thought about a story Evans had told me about why the Nzulezo people lived on stilts. I’d pointed to a rectangular raffia box on stilts just outside the village, and Evans had told me it was a shrine to the gods of the river and that it was all part of the story of the migration.

Some 600 years ago a group of people were hounded from their homes in the Lake Chad area and they fled south on foot. Following their snail god (I guess it was a slow journey) they settled in various places throughout what is now Ghana, but their enemies kept finding them. After a long journey they finally reached the mouth of the River Amansuri, which still feeds the lagoon today. Their snail god started swimming up the river, so they cut down a bunch of raffia trees and made rafts, one per family, and eventually settled in a place called Pinea, on the opposite side of the lagoon to where Nzulezo is today; this is where they first built a village using stilts, because there was simply no land for them to build conventional houses on.

Originally there were 45 chiefs who led the people, but despite building their kitchens separately from the houses, the village kept burning down, until all but one of the chiefs had given up and moved on to what is now Côte d’Ivoire; this chief’s name was Takarika. One day an elder from the village, a man called Mogae, went fishing on the other side of the lagoon, and he noticed that the wind blew less on that side, so there would be less risk of the kitchen fires being caught by the wind and destroying the village. Takarika therefore moved his whole tribe across the lagoon and built the new village of Nzulezo.

Meanwhile the villagers’ old enemies finally caught up with them and were determined to sort them out once and for all. However the gods of the river changed the water into land, which enticed the enemy to advance towards the village, and when they were in the middle of the lagoon, the gods turned it back into water and they all drowned. Apparently this all happened on a Thursday, so on Thursdays nobody goes fishing. Also once a year, on a specific Monday, sacrifices of sheep and fowl are made at the raffia shrine to honour the river gods, and because of this nobody is allowed to fish before 4pm on Mondays. I guess everyone needs a weekend, whatever your religion.

The underlying message of this story is that the villagers built their village on stilts, miles away from the nearest land, because they wanted peace. It wasn’t for the fishing and it obviously wasn’t for the farming, it was because here they were safe from their enemies and they could live in peace.

At least, this is the reason that Evans gave me when I asked him why the villagers lived on water. As modern technology thumped a heavy bass-line through the lagoon towards my cockroach-infested raffia bedroom, I presumed that for the followers of the river gods, the times they are a-changin’.

Fort Apollonia

Early the next morning, after a fitful night’s sleep and a quick breakfast, Evans and I paddled back to Beyin, stopping only to say hello to the fishermen and to admire the little catfish they were pulling from their nets. Perhaps it was because I was tired, but Evans was starting to get on my nerves; I ended up having to pay for his accommodation and meal, which wouldn’t have been a problem if someone had mentioned beforehand that it was all going to end up on my bill, and he then scribbled his address on a piece of paper and handed it to me, saying, ‘Here is my address, so you can send me copies of your photos. Oh, and you can give me my tip now.’

‘Yeah,’ I thought, ‘here’s a tip. How about learning to say “please” instead of being a presumptive little bastard?’ But I still handed him some cedis, and once he’d gone I unceremoniously dumped his address in the first bin I came to, which happened to be outside Fort Apollonia, Beyin’s other tourist attraction.

According to the animated caretaker I tracked down, Fort Apollonia was built by the British in 1768, which makes it the most modern fort along the coast. In a bizarre turn of events the British gave it to the Dutch in 1820, but it wasn’t long before the Dutch decided to leave West Africa; however the British were concerned that the Dutch would hand the fort to their allies, the Ashanti, instead of handing it back to the British, so during the British-Ashanti war the British bombarded it and took it back by force.

It’s now home to a basic guesthouse, a couple of incredibly gloomy slave dungeons and the ubiquitous mouldy white walls that all Ghana’s coastal forts seem to have. But it wasn’t home to much else, so having exhausted Beyin’s attractions, I sat down on the side of the road and waited for transport east to Axim.

Axim

Written: 8 January 2003

I wanted to visit Axim ever since I read that not only is it home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the whole of Ghana, but the town also boasts Fort St Anthony, ‘one of the most impressive forts in Ghana’ according to the guidebook. After a stuttered but easy journey from Beyin, consisting of a tro-tro, two shared taxis and a private taxi, I discovered that the first part was absolutely spot on; following the guidebook’s advice I took a bungalow at the Axim Beach Hotel and settled into a life of luxury to recoup on the sleep that had eluded me in the stilt village.

The Axim Beach Hotel is a little paradise, perched on a high cliff overlooking the majestically sweeping Awangazule Beach as it curves off to the southeast. My beautifully appointed self-contained bungalow was a serious improvement on the cockroach-infested hypermarket of the night before, and with two huge double beds to jump around on, I was in heaven. Sure, the room cost me 150,000 cedis a night, some three times the price of my room in Kokrobite and ten times the price of the guesthouse in Kakum, but a little bit of maths soon justified the expense; my beach paradise was costing me a little over £11 a night, a pittance for such a treat.

To shake the remnants of Nzulezo from my mind, I took a stroll along the beach, an uninhabited curve that’s lined with palm trees, an inland lagoon and coconut palms that look like they’ve been attacked by low-flying planes. All along this stretch of the coast the coconuts are suffering from a blight that kills the trees, making all the leaves fall off and leaving nothing but tall, thin trunks; thankfully Awangazule Beach has an awful lot of greenery besides the coconut palms and it’s still a lovely stretch of beach to wander along. The sea is vicious here, but I’ve never been one for swimming in the sea, so with a huge sigh of relaxation I settled in for my first day of doing nothing since leaving Kokrobite.

Fort St Anthony

The second boast in the guidebook turned out to be a little overenthusiastic, though I think some of my disappointment in Fort St Anthony was down to an overdose of coastal forts. After a few tours you realise that every fort has the same collection of stories, and while the dates might change, the experience is pretty much the same. For example, Fort St Anthony has male and female dungeons, and of course the colonial officers – in this case the Portuguese and the Dutch – would pick out the prettiest female slaves and rape them; it has officers’ quarters and rooms for the governor; it has lots of blackened cannons pointing out to sea; it has a large cistern, fed by rainwater; and it has a caretaker who will take you round for a small fee (or, in my case, a caretaker who will deputise his young son to do the job). It’s not quite true to say that once you’ve seen one fort you’ve seen them all, but after a while you stop noticing the slave dungeons and the mouldy whitewashed battlements and you start noticing the little oddities that differentiate each fort.

Fort St Anthony, the second oldest fort in Ghana after St George’s in Elmina, is home to the biggest flock of vultures that I’ve ever seen. Perched in rows on the roof of the castle, which was completed in 1515 by the Portuguese, these huge birds swoop majestically in loops round the turrets, landing on the battlements and adding an eerie poignancy to the dismal atmosphere of the slave dungeons. The Dutch captured the fort in 1642 and traded slaves on a small scale until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807; the three dungeons – for men, women and children – only held about 25 slaves each, but by the time the Dutch sold the fort to the British the vultures had moved on to dead goats instead of dead slaves.

The young boy who took me round spoke so quickly and with such a hurried accent that I kept having to ask him to repeat himself, but after showing me what he claimed was the first clock in Ghana, he took me to the euphemistically named guesthouse where his baby sister, who’d been balanced on her brother’s hip throughout the tour, filled her nappies with a stench from hell, thus speeding up the boy’s presentation to the point where I didn’t understand a single word. But it didn’t really matter, because the guesthouse – two totally empty rooms with not even a mattress for those bold enough to sleep here – was full of a particular kind of junk that fascinates me; it was teeming with the detritus of bureaucracy.

Before opening up as a tourist attraction, Fort St Anthony was an office of the Ghana Education Board, and while moving out someone had obviously decided to take a whole box of paperwork and throw it on the floor. I was fascinated, and once the guide had stumbled his way through the rest of the tour and headed off to clean up his sister, I returned to the guesthouse to pick my way through the papers. There was all sorts of fascinating rubbish there: a 1998 Ghanaian languages syllabus for primary schools; a completed form from the annual school census of 1998/9; a copy of a 1971 University of London Examination Board certificate for a Mr Ebenezer Christian Andoh of Takoradi, who managed to get passes at O-Level in economics, geography and religious knowledge; a hand-written letter, dated 1987, from a hopeful applicant for a job as a teacher in a primary school; essays from a secondary school exam dated 25 September 1992, the subject of which was teenage pregnancy; and strewn all around the room were flat files, crumpled carbon papers and piles of letters.

I spent a good half an hour poking through the remains of what was once someone’s job, before noticing something intriguing pinned to the door under the sign saying ‘General Office’. Someone had taken a piece of cardboard and drawn an eight-segment pie chart on it, under a heading saying ‘Movement Chart’. Each of the segments had something written in it, and pinned to the centre was a little paper arrow that you could turn to point to one of the segments. The options were ‘Out’, ‘Break’, ‘Travel to Accra Headquarters’, ‘Messages to Institutions’, ‘To: Regional Office’, ‘Closed Work’, ‘Waite’ [sic], and ‘To Main Office’, each neatly written in biro.

The arrow was pointing to ‘Break’, which, given the state of the office, I felt was a little too optimistic, even by Ghanaian standards. Taking one more look round the bleak interior of the ex-Ghana Education Board, I moved the arrow to ‘Closed Work’ and shuffled out of the door, leaving Fort St Anthony to the vultures.

Busua

Written: 10 January 2003

It wasn’t Busua’s fault that I didn’t like the place. Located between Axim and Takoradi along the western half of the Ghanaian coast, Busua boasts a beautiful beach, a colonial fort in neighbouring Dixcove, safe swimming, and a chance to kick back once again from the rigours of African life. Unfortunately I left Axim with a familiar gurgling in my stomach, and by the time I got to Busua, exhausted from another buttock-clenching bounce along the roads of Ghana, I had no idea whether I wanted to relax on the beach or kick the local dogs.

One thing was for certain, though; I wasn’t in the mood for tout hassle, vacant staff, cliquey company and grumbling thunder, all of which Busua happily provided within two minutes of my arrival. The Alaska Beach Club, a collection of picturesque huts right on the beach, looked at first like another Big Milly’s, but without a compound wall between it and the beach it was nothing but a haven for schoolboy touts and people trying to sell me water, biscuits and kayak trips. The biggest irritation was the proliferation of guides who were desperately willing to take me over the headland to visit the crumbling Fort Metal Cross in Dixcove; the 15-minute path between Busua and Dixcove is notorious for muggings and it’s wise to take a local with you as the thieves don’t want anyone there who can recognise them. This is all fine and good – though the development of a lucrative guiding business doesn’t exactly motivate the community to stamp out the muggings themselves – but when I realised that everyone I met on the beach was eventually going to try to get me to take them as a guide, it got horribly wearing.

Meanwhile the skies clouded up and were, like me, making ominous rumbling sounds, and as the only other people on the beach were travellers from the two large trans-Africa trucks parked in the Alaska’s grounds, I felt quite alone; they stuck to their own groups, leaving me and James Michener alone with the touts.

This unexpectedly disappointing vibe brought on a serious epiphany, right there on the beach. I’ve been wondering for a while how I’m going to feel when I go home, and whether I’m actually going to fly out to Kenya after a short break at home. Back on the beach, I managed to boil it all down into two questions.

The first was ‘What do you really want to do now?’ and the answer is an emphatic ‘I want to go home.’ I’ve been toying with the idea of spending a few more weeks in Ghana, exploring the Volta region and the north, but on the beach in Busua I realised that actually I want to go home, I’m just too scared to admit it to myself after planning this year-long trip for the last four years. So there and then I decided that when I got back to Accra I’d buy the first available flight home, and with this decision came massive relief; for the first time I realised that my trip is effectively over.

The second question was ‘What do you really want to do when you get back?’ and the seemingly contradictory answer is that I still want to go travelling. I’ve spent the last four years building up to a year on the road, but the last four months have changed my mind... and still I want to explore, despite the terrible homesickness. And then it struck me, in a moment of clarity: plenty of people travel in the UK, but I’ve never bothered to explore it. I know bucket-loads about Australia, India, New Zealand, Mali and all sorts of other exotic countries, but I know nothing about the UK, and if I want to continue travelling but still be close to home, then why not travel while staying close to home? What a simple solution.

So Busua’s sweeping beach and its colonial fort didn’t get a visit from me because I’ve now got another plan. Instead of visiting Fort Metal Cross I got up at the crack of dawn the next day and practically ran out of town, glad to be away from the touts, the salespeople and the cliquey truckers, and even happier to be heading back to Accra and its airport.

Indeed, I was so happy with my newfound direction that I stopped off at Kokrobite for three days, just in time to catch Lukas as he hit the road again after six weeks learning the drums. The leaving bash at his place was a delight, and with him moving on and me planning a different kind of trip, it felt like a good way to close my chapter on West Africa. And not only that, I also met Paul and Hannah, a lovely couple whom I’d originally met in the Gambia, and we swapped by-now-familiar stories of just how awful Mali can be, and what a demonic pit from hell Mopti really is. It felt good, but even more amusing was them reminding me of an off-the-cuff comment I’d made to them back in Jangjang Bureh.

‘You remember back in the Gambia when we asked you why you’d chosen to travel through West Africa?’ said Hannah. ‘And you said: “You know, I’ve been asking myself the same question recently.” Well, we’ve been telling people all along the trail about that, and you were spot on, you know.’

So despite the hassles of Busua and my plan to leave Ghana earlier than expected, I feel good. I’m not alone in thinking West Africa is a disappointment, I’ve survived the hardest travelling I’ve ever had to tackle, and I actually want to go home, and for a positive reason. How can I complain about that?

Visiting Jimmy Moxon

Written: 16 January 2003

It was on Christmas Day back in 1998 that I first heard about Jimmy Moxon, the Gentleman Chief of Ghana. The family was gathered around the dining room table, tucking into another legendary turkey lunch, when the subject strayed onto my recent travels. This led naturally to the plans for my next trip, and when I mentioned that I hoped to travel to Africa one day, my Dad said, ‘You should try to visit Jimmy Moxon while you’re out there. He’s a genuine African chief, you know.’

I didn’t really believe him at the time, but when I started planning my trip to West Africa I remembered what he’d said and asked him if he’d been pulling my leg.

‘Nope, it’s all true,’ he replied, and pulled out a collection of magazines from the Moxon Society that showed a white man clad in the garish regalia of an African chief. From that moment I decided that when I got to Ghana I’d just have to find out more; there aren’t that many Moxons on this planet, and there certainly aren’t many African chiefs among them.

The Gentleman Chief

Jimmy Moxon is an intriguing figure from Ghana’s colourful history, and although I had precious little information to go on, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a bit of journalism. The story, as far as I know it, is that Jimmy moved to Ghana to work for the colonial civil service during World War II and stayed on after the war to become a District Commissioner; when independence came in 1957 he was persuaded to stay on by President Nkrumah, who appointed him as his Orwellian-sounding Minister for Information. When Jimmy retired in 1963 he was made a genuine African chief, one of a tiny number of white men ever to be officially gazetted as such. There have been quite a few honorary chiefs in Africa, like Shirley Temple Black and Isaac Hayes, but I only know of two non-Africans who became real chiefs: Jimmy Moxon was one, and the other was the American Lloyd Shirer (who become Maligu-Naa of the Dagumba tribe, or ‘Chief of the Preparations’). Jimmy died in 1999 and is buried in the grounds of his old home just a few miles north of Accra, and seeing as I was in the area, it seemed like a good idea to ask around for pointers.

As luck would have it, Mr Prempeh gave me my first lead. When I mentioned Jimmy Moxon and the fact that I was looking for information on him and his life, Mr Prempeh said he had not only met Jimmy himself on a number of occasions, but that an old school friend of his just happened to live in the house next door to Jimmy’s. Meanwhile, back in Kokrobite, I met a couple of lovely people on the beach who gave me further pointers, saying that Jimmy’s old house was OK to visit and someone was living on the site who could probably show me round. It seemed like the perfect excuse for a bit of exploring, so on Thursday, 16 January, Mr Prempeh and I hopped into his car and headed off into the hills.

The hills north of Accra have long been a haven for those wanting to escape from the rigours of city life, and as soon as you cross the police barrier on the northern outskirts of the city, it’s obvious why. The Akuapem Hills rise straight out of the coastal plains on which Accra squats, and once you pass the city limits you can see that these hills are a wonderful haven of greenery, unspoilt views and the kind of drifting breeze that makes air conditioning unnecessary. It’s true that suburban Accra is itself surprisingly green, sprinkled with vacant plots of land overgrown with wild grasses and tortured bushes, but outside the city border there’s a definite switch; instead of being a mass of buildings with a smattering of greenery, the landscape becomes a mass of greenery with a smattering of buildings, and five minutes after the barrier it’s hard to believe you’re still within spitting distance of Accra.

As with hill stations throughout the world, the Akuapem Hills have long provided a retreat for the rich and famous; as you wind up the switchback road from the Accran plains, trying not to look down as yet another tro-tro tears past you with the driver riding its worn brakes through the hairpins, you pass the peaceful presidential compound that Nkrumah built as an escape from the rigours of politics down in the capital. With its concrete buildings peeling in the sun it’s now little more than a faded memory of what it used to be, but thankfully there are plans to do it up; the hills are home to some of the most wonderfully extravagant hideaways and currently the presidential retreat is one of the less pleasant examples as you wind up the road, though it does give an appropriate historical context to Jimmy’s home turf.

The Akuapem Hills are best known for the botanical gardens at Aburi, but we had a different destination in mind. Jimmy’s old house is in Kitase, a small village just north of the presidential retreat, and after enlisting the help of one of the staff from the house of Mr Prempeh’s friend (who, unfortunately, wasn’t in) we followed his directions and drove slowly up a steep grassy drive, past a couple of houses where the locals gleefully pointed us further uphill. We finally arrived at the top of a drive that you wouldn’t like to attempt in a normal car, and there, at the top of the long and winding road, was Jimmy’s domain.

My first impression of Jimmy’s place was that it feels just like a botanical garden; everywhere is lusciously green, without a hint of concrete, gravel or tarmac. After Accra it was utterly delightful, and we hopped out of the Range Rover to see a sprightly man walking up the drive towards us.

‘Hello,’ we said, and introduced ourselves, apologising for turning up unannounced. When I came to shake the man’s hand, I told him my name and his eyes lit up.

‘Moxon, like Mr Jimmy Moxon?’ he asked, eyes wide.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’m a Moxon too. I hope it’s all right to pay a visit to Jimmy’s house.’

‘Ah!’ he cried, grinning from ear to ear. ‘It’s wonderful – you are very welcome.’ And with that I met the wonderful Frank Eliott Apaw, Jimmy’s caretaker and cook who looked after Jimmy for 30 years in both Accra and Kitase. It was immediately evident that Frank really loved Jimmy; when he spoke about his late master he smiled with his eyes in the way that the Ghanaians do when excited, and with a jump in his step Frank insisted on taking us on a tour of the grounds.

As Jimmy’s domain stretches over the side of a steep hill, it is split into two levels, the upper level at the top of a steep cliff and the lower level at the foot of that cliff. The steep grass drive we climbed to reach Jimmy’s house winds round to the right of the cliff, while a couple of stone staircases wind up the cliff, one following the drive and the other joining the two levels on the left. On top of the cliff are two houses; looking up from the lower level, Jimmy’s house is on the right-hand end of the cliff, and the house of the new owners, Mr and Mrs Hans Roth, is on the left-hand side. Behind the houses the garden slopes away from the cliff towards the neighbours, and it was into this garden that Frank led us, an excited spring in his step.

‘Here is Mr Moxon’s grave,’ he said, steering us to a small garden next to Jimmy’s house. ‘You are the first Moxon to visit here since the funeral; I’m really thrilled.’

‘So am I,’ I said, and I meant it, for Jimmy’s grave is a delightful resting place. Set in a well-tended oval-shaped bed of tropical plants, the grave itself is a square paved area, connected to the lawn by a short path. Behind the paving is a lovely rectangular pillar that carries a plaque with the dates of Jimmy’s life, and his epitaph ‘A loyal son of the empire and a true son of Ghana’, but what grabs the attention is the beautiful sculpted head set into the pillar. Even though I’ve only seen photographs of Jimmy – alas, he died before I managed to pester him in his hillside retreat – the effigy captures the mix of reminiscences I’ve heard from his friends. At first glance the sculpture conveys a great sense of authority and honour – the hallmarks of a loyal son of the empire – but on closer inspection there’s a definite twinkle in the eye, and it’s obvious that with the slightest excuse this face would crack a smile; indeed, this sculpture really is of a true son of Ghana.

The Gardens

Africa is littered with colonial graveyards that echo with the indignity of being left for Mother Nature to reclaim, but Jimmy’s garden is not one of them. A sloping lawn of thick-leaved tropical grass weaves through a collection of trees and plants that hide the neighbouring houses so effectively you could be forgiven for thinking you’re totally isolated, and just down from Jimmy’s grave sits a tall, thin tree that might not be the most physically significant tree in the garden, but is easily the best-known.

‘This is an important tree,’ said Frank. ‘Make sure you get out your camera – this is the onyasse, the silk cotton tree. You know about the silk cotton tree?’

‘I sure do,’ I said and snapped away. When Jimmy was enstooled as a sub-chief, or Ankobea, of the Adonten Division of Akuapem in 1963, his official title was Nana Kofi Obonyaa, Odikra of Onyasse; the last part means ‘chief of the area between the cliff and the silk cotton tree’, which perfectly describes the place where Jimmy built his house and where he is now buried. Silk cotton trees are beautiful things, their trunks sloping outwards at the base into fins that, in an unkempt environment like a rainforest, harbour all sorts of exotic quagmires of mosses and ferns. Jimmy’s silk cotton tree, however, harbours little except the roots of a good story, much the same as his house.

Jimmy’s house is as modest as the views are fantastic. It’s a long, rectangular bungalow, simply constructed and decidedly unfussy, and although the rooms are empty and there’s an air of retirement about the place, it’s not hard to imagine daily life chez Moxon. Approaching the house from the silk cotton tree, you pass a flat area where a sign hangs proclaiming this to be a palm wine bar; as party venues go, it’s hard to imagine anything more conducive than a barbecue on a beautiful lawn, shaded by exotic trees, with palm wine – the most natural alcoholic drink known to man – being served by the heady glassful.

But up past the entertainment area is where you’re hit by the real charm of life in a hill station. Attached to the left-hand end of the house there’s a small semicircular lawn that commands breathtaking views of the sweeping Akuapem Hills. This lawn is the ahinfie, or the chief’s palace, and a couple of thin columns at the apex of the semicircle provide the official entrance to Jimmy’s domain. It’s on this lawn that Chief Moxon would perform his duties.

‘Mr Moxon would sit here from teatime to sunset every day,’ said Frank. ‘This is where he would meet with people, talk with the other chiefs, or just sit and work.’

As I stood there soaking up the views and thinking what a wonderful place this would be for a spot of quiet writing, I noticed something odd in the veranda wall along the side of the house. Set into the brickwork I could see three vertical rods, and on each of these rods were two rounded shapes; I squatted down to take a closer look and noticed that the shapes rotated on the poles.

‘What on earth are these?’ I asked Frank. ‘They look like fat Tibetan prayer wheels.’

‘Ha, no, they are not prayer wheels,’ said Frank. ‘Do you know about the Black Pot Restaurant?’

‘Sure,’ I replied. Frank was talking about the two restaurants Jimmy opened in Accra; they specialised in African cuisine but unfortunately went out of business in the 1970s due to chronic food shortages.

‘Well, these are the original black pots from the restaurant,’ said Frank. ‘I was the head chef there, you know.’

‘You were?’ I said.

‘Yes, I was,’ said Frank, proudly.

‘Then Jimmy must have eaten well,’ I said, ‘having you as his cook,’ and Frank smiled as he took me along the side of the house, pointing out the different rooms. This one used to be the office, that one the kitchen, and this one the main room, each of them now empty and gathering dust. At the back of the house is a locked door that was once a room for the house staff, and faint chalk writing is still visible along the middle of the door: ‘God is good all the time’ it says in true Ghanaian style.

The Lower Level

Peering over the edge of the cliff and down a crumbling set of stone steps, I spotted a dried-up swimming pool and started to walk down to it, but Frank yelled that the steps weren’t safe and that we should walk down the grass drive to the lower level. But first he pointed proudly to the bungalow at the far end of the lower level’s lawn.

‘That is my house,’ he said. ‘Mr Moxon gave it to me, and that is where I live with my family.’

‘It’s lovely,’ I said, meaning it; Frank’s house is on the edge of a huge lawn, and like the garden on the upper level, the number of trees and bushes has to be seen to be believed.

‘Let’s go take a look,’ said Frank, and we trundled off down the drive to check out his house. Originally from the Volta Region in eastern Ghana, Frank spent 22 years working for Jimmy in Accra before Jimmy persuaded him to move to Kitase in 1990. Things weren’t quite as comfortable back then, and the evidence is strewn around the lower level, most notably in the form of a rusting and comically tiny caravan, which Jimmy bought in England back in 1983 and which served as his home while construction work continued. Not only was the accommodation pretty basic to start with, the site had no access to water, and water was brought from off-site throughout Jimmy’s time; now Mr Roth has dug a well in the garden to provide running water for everyone and the caravan is nothing more than a memory of distant times.

It is obvious that not only is Frank proud of his home, he’s also proud to have been associated with Jimmy Moxon.

‘I named my daughter Moxon Sarah Apaw as a mark of respect to Mr Moxon,’ he said as he handed me a couple of greeting cards sporting a colour photograph of Jimmy in his chief’s regalia. I’m not surprised at Frank’s loyalty; during my visit to Ghana I’ve met quite a few people who knew Jimmy, and every single one of them has been full of praise for a man who was without a doubt one of the genuine characters of post-war Ghana.

Pouring Petrol on the Flames

Written: 17 January 2003

Ghana’s economy has taken a bit of a battering over the last few years, but I still wasn’t prepared for the shock that the government unleashed on the population this morning. Today the price of a gallon of petrol has increased from 10,500 cedis to a whopping 20,000 cedis, just like that. That’s an increase of over 90 per cent overnight.

The main reason for the increase is depressingly simple. The state-run Tema Oil Refinery, Ghana’s main refinery, is in debt to the tune of 4.5 trillion cedis (that’s 4,500,000,000,000 cedis, or around £330 million) and the debt is getting bigger all the time. Official explanations of this huge debt are vague, to say the least, but the words ‘corruption’ and ‘inefficiency’ crop up throughout Ghana’s top-selling daily newspaper, the Daily Graphic, and at least one important official has been sacked as a result.

Other factors behind the price hike include the rising price of crude oil due to the Iraqi crisis and the strikes in Venezuela, and the large fall in the value of the cedi against the dollar, which is used to set the global price for oil. However, one thing’s for sure: doubling the price of petrol, diesel, kerosene and other petroleum products is guaranteed to increase the cost of pretty much everything else, from obvious things like transport to less obvious things like food. On top of this there were long queues at the petrol stations before the price hikes, not just because the government had intimated it would have to increase prices, but because some unscrupulous petrol stations pretended that they’d run dry, while secretly hoarding the cheaper petrol until they could sell it at the higher price after the rise. With the public desperate to fill their tanks before the change, it all added up to a nightmare at the pumps before the price moved an inch.

I don’t know enough about Ghanaian politics to know whether price hikes like this are common, but electricity prices were increased by 60 per cent last year, after low rainfall reduced output from the Lake Volta hydroelectric plant at Akosombo. I hope this isn’t an indication that Ghana is starting to fall apart; if it is, it’s a demonstration that, unfair though it is, war, weather and world economic downturns affect developing countries the most.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 19 January 2003

Throughout West Africa I’ve met people doing a similar journey to mine, but in the opposite direction. In Mali I met lots of people who came from Ghana via Burkina Faso, and the one consistent impression I got from them was that Ghana is by far the most relaxed and easygoing country in the region. Within a few seconds of crossing the Ghanaian border, I knew they were right; here people smile, joke and laugh in a way that they simply don’t in Senegal and Mali. And for someone whose French is adequate but not fluent, the joy I felt on hearing English again was palpable.

Irritatingly I lost my drive in Ghana, not because of Ghana, but because I finally realised I need to go home; I therefore failed to explore Ghana in great detail, instead concentrating on the coast west of Accra, where I lazed on the beach and hid from the hassles of Africa. But even though I haven’t seen as much of Ghana as I have of Mali, Senegal and so on, I’ve fallen in love with the place; Ghana is a perfect place for travelling, and as an introduction to African travel, it’s hard to beat.

This is strange, because although Ghana has some wonderful tourist attractions, it isn’t reeling in world-famous destinations. Mali has the global brand of Timbuktu, but Ghana doesn’t have an equivalent; Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast and Elmina are all great places, but none of them are household names. But to look at Ghana in terms of tourist attractions is a mistake, because the real stars of Ghana are the people.

They say that you visit West Africa for the people and East Africa for the animals, and when it comes to Ghana, this is spot on. I found the Ghanaians to be wonderfully friendly without the in-your-face annoyance of the Sahel countries; indeed, the most irritating tout I met in Ghana turned out to be a Malian, which sums up the difference rather well. Although Ghana has a few irritating hustlers, notably around the castle at Elmina, it really is possible to walk around the country without being mobbed. It’s delightful.

Not only are the people great, but Ghanaian food is good and plentiful. The view from the bus as you approach Kumasi from the north might hold a clue as to why; after the desolate dryness of the desert, southern Ghana is a veritable Garden of Eden, with greenery absolutely everywhere. From the road you can see food growing on the trees, and it’s instantly obvious that this is a much more comfortable environment than the desert. Sure, Ghana at this time of year still reaps the benefits of the wet season and I’m sure it’s a different story in the dry season, but at the moment southern Ghana is luscious and so is the food. Staples like fufu, kenkey and banku might not be to everyone’s taste, but the sauces that they come with are great, especially if you like spicy food. I’ve ended up regaining all the weight that I lost in the Sahel, and I’ve been ill far less in Ghana than up north; I actually feel well again, and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.

So Ghana has at last provided me with a taste of West Africa that I actually like. I found travelling in Senegal and Mali difficult, and the pain was not worth the gain; in Ghana, however, there’s been no pain at all, and I have gained a lot. I’ve loved being in Ghana, and the only reason I’m cutting my journey short is because going home is the right thing for me to do; it is not a comment on this delightful country. As Neil Diamond once wrote:

Being lost

Is worth the coming home

In the Sahel, I definitely felt lost. In Ghana I didn’t, but by the time I found myself I knew I had to go home, and even the lovely Ghanaians couldn’t change my mind.

They came close, though.

Cyprus: Central Cyprus

Pafos

Written: 19 February 2003

As a place to start and finish our tour of Cyprus, Pafos was an excellent choice, quite a relief as I’d only bought flights to Pafos because everywhere else was sold out. Pafos seems to have managed a balance between package tourism and historical interest that you simply don’t find in places like Larnaka and Agia Napa, and because of this it’s a great introduction to Cyprus.

Pafos repays a bit of investigation, though, because a cursory glance at its harbour won’t reveal all its charm, even though the harbour is one of the more pleasant tourist havens on the island. Where Larnaka’s promenade is bordering on the tacky and Agia Napa doesn’t pretend to be anything else, Pafos is still rather charming, with its old fort perched at the end of the harbour wall and lots of pretty little fishing boats anchored around the cove. OK, so the shops lining the harbour sell the usual tourist rubbish – I’ve never really gone for novelty pottery ashtrays or T-shirts with slogans that weren’t funny the first time round – and the restaurant we wandered past was unbelievably trying to entice us in by playing David bloody Essex on its hi-fi, but despite some amazing accidents of modern architecture that are worth visiting in their own right, it’s the ancient ruins of Nea Pafos that are the real draw-card.

Magical Mosaics

Out on the headland just behind the harbour, Pafos has its very own World Heritage site, and it’s absolutely stunning. Even compared to the much-touted Kourion, which the guidebooks tend to gush over in more lavish detail, the ancient site of Nea Pafos is amazing, and I vastly preferred it to Cyprus’s other archaeological treats.

The main attraction of Nea Pafos is the collection of Roman mosaics that lay undiscovered under the headland until a farmer accidentally found them with his plough back in 1962. Since then archaeologists have been slowly unearthing the most amazingly detailed mosaics, along with the ruins of the magnificent buildings that used to house them. The art of the mosaic isn’t something that’s ever lit my fire before, but when you’re faced with huge stretches of patterned artwork that turns out to be made from surprisingly large chunks of glass of rock, it’s hard not to be impressed.

It’s useful to have some kind of guidebook when exploring the ruins of Pafos, as explanatory signs are limited to the names given by the diggers to the various houses that have been found (the House of Dionysos contains lots of mosaics on the subject of wine and partying, the House of Theseus has a fantastic one of the minotaur and its maze, and so on).

But throw in an amphitheatre, a mediaeval Lusignan fortress, a modern lighthouse, and the windswept vista of Pafos’ headland, fortunately protected from development by the potential of more archaeological discoveries under its grassy hills, and you’ve got a fantastic spot for an afternoon’s exploration.

On the other hand, I presume the summer months would be less kind to casual wandering round the ruins. When we sauntered out to check out the mosaics, the wind picked up and the rain started spattering in a way that would become depressingly familiar over the next two weeks, and apart from a few hardy souls and a few complaining children, dragged out by parents who must have been regretting the decision, we had the place to ourselves. No doubt in the package season Nea Pafos is completely chocka-block with tourists, which would change the experience somewhat. Not that this should be an excuse for avoiding the headland, but I’d pack lots of water and take a sun hat; for us, though, it was Gore-Tex jackets and gloves, followed by a thawing meal of suckling pig by the fire in the unadventurously named but very tasty Mediterranean Tavern, back in the middle of town.

As a place to start our exploration of Cyprus, Pafos did the trick nicely.

Troodos

Written: 20 February 2003

If there’s one thing you mustn’t do when shacked up in an isolated and empty hotel in the middle of a snowstorm, it’s to think about The Shining. Make sure you don’t think back to the chilling moment when the little boy rides his tricycle round the corner and sees the ghosts of the two twins at the end of the corridor, or that painfully narrow escape the terrified wife makes through the too-small bathroom window away from the mad axe-wielding of Jack Nicholson. Oh no, don’t think about it, or the chances are you’ll end up scared out of your wits...

OK, so the manager at the Jubilee Hotel in Troodos[1] turned out to be really lovely, and he ran a great little hotel without even a hint of ancient Indian burial sites about it, but imagination is a powerful thing. Driving up from Pafos we’d scoffed at the guidebook’s insistence that we’d be able to go skiing on nearby Mt Olympos, and as the road signs counted down the distance to Troodos towards the 10km mark, there wasn’t even a hint of snow, let alone isolation.

And then suddenly, as we turned a corner on the winding main road over the Troodos mountains, snowflakes started falling from the grey sky, and within ten minutes there was snow drifting along the side of the roads, settling on the trees and getting heavier and heavier until the visibility was absolutely terrible. By the time we reached Troodos, I was driving as slowly as I could get away with, because with absolutely no warning at all, we’d driven bang into a blizzard.

This, apparently, is relatively common on the mountains of Cyprus, though perhaps not to the degree we would end up enjoying. The snow line on Cyprus is tangible, and once you’ve seen it, it’s easy to understand how, given the right weather conditions, you can be skiing in the morning and lazing on the beach in the afternoon. Pafos had been full of people wearing shorts and wandering along the seafront in T-shirts, but here, 1700m above sea level, we were in a winter wonderland. Through the driving snow we could make out pine trees frosted with heavy layers of snow, their needles and trunks looking jet black in the surrounding glare. Troodos village, if it can be called that, is nothing more than a main road flanked by a handful of small cafés, a post office, a sculptured park containing swings and seesaws for the coaches of package tourists that swarm here in the summer, two hotels and a Youth Hostel. And, of course, the more central hotel had closed down through lack of business and was almost invisible behind mounds of packed snow thrown up by the snow ploughs, and the Youth Hostel only opened in the summer, so this left only one option for accommodation, the Jubilee Hotel, out to the north of town along the less-used road towards the summit of Mt Olympos.

On checking in, we asked the manager about the chances of us getting our bog-standard two-wheel-drive car up to the top of Mt Olympos, and he shrugged and said the only thing we could do was give it a go, so throwing caution to the wind in the way all drivers of hired vehicles are morally obliged to do, we slid our way up the short road to the Cyprus Ski Federation hut, not far from the top of the mountain. It was a little late in the day for skiing – instead we entertained ourselves with a little sledding back down in the village – but happy that we now knew where to go to ski, we settled in for a solitary night in the Jubilee.

The first thing that caught our attention was a terrible smell from the room next door. In Cyprus you often find your room is attached to the next door room by a double door, which can only provide a through passage if both doors are opened; through a small gap under this door leaked an utterly putrid smell that, I assured myself, had absolutely nothing to do with the word ‘decomposing’. This wasn’t a horror movie, and that’s exactly what I told Peta, who shot me a glance that made it clear in no uncertain terms that if I mentioned The Shining once more, she’d be the one wielding the bloody axe. Luckily the manager tracked down the smell to the drains next door, and while we went in search of food he aired the room and made things much more bearable.

The kitchens in the Jubilee weren’t open that night (not surprisingly, as we were the lone tenants), so the only option for food was the snug little Fereos Park restaurant back down in the village. Deciding that driving through the snow after dark was probably a bad idea, we trudged through the blustering blizzard down into town, where the restaurant’s gas-fired stove and chilled beer helped wash down a more than passable mixed kebab while the snow levels outside continued to rise. Walking back, the part of the road that had been cleared by a snow plough only an hour or so before was an inch deep in fresh snow, and all the while more snow tumbled out of the sky, dulling our crunchy footsteps and blanketing the mountains in complete silence.

When we got back to the hotel, the only signs of life were the barman, his assistant, and a solitary local propping up the bar; true, none of them appeared to be the ghosts of past caretakers, but just in case they had a hidden agenda involving wood-chopping equipment, we sneaked downstairs for a quick game of pool in the deserted basement, while the storm continued to batter the hotel. Throughout the night shutters banged and the wind howled and whistled, leaving us to lie wide-eyed in our wonderfully heated room, desperately trying to persuade ourselves that the squeaking sounds outside were the hinges, and not those of an axe being sharpened.

The next morning the snow had stopped, but so had all activity. The police said that even four-wheel-drives were having problems getting up to the ski slopes, and we had to abandon our plans to go skiing, at least for a day or two, and with heavy hearts we decided to head downhill to Kakopetria, below the snow line. And at least our hire car entered into the spirit of things; smothered in deep drifts of snow that hid almost all signs of bodywork from view, I’m sure his headlights glinted a maniacally frozen Jack Nicholson grin as we dug him out with the hotel’s shovel.

Or was that Christine..?

[1] Known as Troödhos before the name change. Troodos is supposedly pronounced ‘Tro-o-dos’, though I never heard anyone refer to it as anything but ‘Troo-dos’.

Kakopetria

Written: 21 February 2003

After the exertions of digging the car out of the Troodos snow, we realised that the only way to cope with the unexpected weather Cyprus was throwing at us was to relax. The problem with relaxing in wintry Cyprus is that the beaches, the normal route for holiday makers looking for somewhere to crash out, are far too cold and windswept to be comfortable, and the sea is distinctly Arctic. Cyprus does excel, though, in cosy little hotels with real fires, and as luck would have it we stumbled on a real gem in Kakopetria, a short drive north of Troodos on the Nicosia road.

Kakopetria means ‘wicked rock pile’ in Greek, and driving round the town’s twisting one-way system is a good way to appreciate why. A river runs through the centre of town, chopping it into three steep-sided parts, with the old town perched precariously on a ridge between the two arms of the cold mountain stream; this gives the place a certain charm, especially when the nearby mountains are smothered in clouds and the wind whistles through the valleys as sharp as pine needles. Following the advice of our guidebook, we drove in ever-decreasing circles round the streets, eventually landing up at the Linos Inn, bang in the middle of the middle of the old part of town.

We instantly fell in love with the Linos. Being the only tourists mad enough to be exploring the Troodos Mountains at this time of year, we had the place to ourselves, and on booking in the manager gave us a choice of a room with a normal bath, a room with a one-person Jacuzzi, or a room with a two-person Jacuzzi. This was too good to be true; out here, in the middle of nowhere, we’d stumbled on somewhere that not only felt wonderfully toasty, it had Jacuzzis. Not surprisingly, we went for the latter, pushing the boat out at a respectable C£55 per night.

The rooms turned out to be full of antique furniture, from iron-framed four-poster beds to tables that turned out to be authentic Singer sewing machine tables, complete with foot pedals for operating the now-removed machines. From the balcony at the back of the room the warren of Kakopetria’s old town lay sandwiched between the two rivers, and in the distance the mountains grumbled and the smell of wood smoke drifted in on the breeze. We might not have been able to hit the slopes that day, but that was no reason not to get stuck into a healthy dose of après-ski.

Around Town

Kakopetria’s old town is long and thin, following its main road (well, a one-car wide track) along the top of a ridge while the river tumbles away down a deep gorge to one side. It’s a beautiful place that has been saved from the idiocies of the coastal developers by a preservation order, but like the vast majority of places in the south of Cyprus, the old town is littered with tumbledown buildings that have been left to rot, while the other buildings have obviously had serious amounts of investment lavished on them in an attempt to preserve the historical style of Cyprus’s old settlements.

On closer inspection the crumbling buildings turn out to have dates and initials scribbled on the door frames, indicating that they are owned by Turkish Cypriots who were forced to flee their homes to escape to north Cyprus; the Cypriot government has ensured that Turkish-owned property is kept for them to return to once the political atmosphere is more conducive, a compliment that hasn’t been repaid on the north, where Greek Cypriot property has simply been seized. It does mean, though, that places like Kakopetria can’t fully restore their old quarters while Cyprus is split, a situation that unintentionally adds to the atmosphere.

Meanwhile some of the crumbling buildings are marked not with the details of their temporarily estranged owners, but with signs saying ‘EOKA’, the name of the pro-Greece terrorist movement that was so key in splitting up the island in the first place; I couldn’t work out whether these buildings had housed EOKA members hiding from the authorities, or whether their current state of decay was down to past EOKA activity, but it added spice to an already delicious old town centre. Indeed, completing the picture, Kakopetria is full of concrete water cisterns emblazoned with ‘ER 1955’, evidence that the British, for whom the EOKA was a huge thorn in the side, did at least leave one useful legacy in Kakopetria – running water.

But although Kakopetria is a beautiful mountain town, and the history is visible all around, it was the Linos Inn that was the highlight. The downstairs restaurant, home to a lovely log fire and some wonderfully fresh trout from the trout farm down the road, was the perfect place[1] to shelter from the howling February wind, and after a jug of village wine and a Jacuzzi, even the chilling weather of Troodos felt like a distant memory.

It quite put us in the mood for the morning’s improvement in the weather, which opened up an opportunity for skiing on Mt Olympos after all. If only they could move the Linos Inn to Troodos, then Cyprus would have a skiing holiday experience to rival the best of the Alps. If you ignore the quality of the ski runs, that is...

[1] Thanks to Karen H for sending me an update on the Linos Inn, though I’m sad to report that it’s not exactly positive. ‘After reading your report, we decided to have a meal at the Linos Taverna,’ writes Karen. ‘What a disappointment! We were virtually ignored and had the poorest service since our arrival in Cyprus. Our food was mediocre at best and we couldn’t wait to depart.’ She goes on to say that she and her husband stayed and ate at the Mill House Hotel during their January 2007 visit to Kakopetria, where they felt ‘pampered and welcome’ in comparison. Here’s hoping the Linos Inn manages to get back to the high standards of 2003; it really was a lovely place when we visited.

Mt Olympos

Written: 21 February 2003

It has to rate as one of the strangest places to find a ski run, but Mt Olympos[1], the highest point on Cyprus, boasts not one but four pistes, along with three T-bar ski lifts, a ski school, a shop hiring out skis and boots, a restaurant, and even its very own club, the Cyprus Ski Federation. Nobody comes to Cyprus specifically to ski, but if you’re here at the right time of year and fancy a quick slalom in between the island’s more traditional sights, it’s certainly a unique place in which to strap on the skis.

Comparing Mt Olympos with the Alps is a bit like comparing Manchester United with the Sunday League team from the Fox and Hounds, but because of this there’s no room for ski snobbery on the gentle slopes of Cyprus; this means it’s a great place for people like me who haven’t been brought up in a country where learning to ski by the age of five is seen as normal (along with learning to drink sensibly by the age of ten, something the English also fail to grasp). I doubt anyone in the Alpine skiing circuit boasts about the time they conquered the daredevil slopes of Cyprus, but this isn’t the point; skiing on Cyprus is a hoot, not a lifestyle for the rich, famous and expensively clad.

By the time we finally got to the Cyprus Ski Federation hut – after the effects of the previous two days’ snow storms had been cleared away and cars were again able to claw their way up the access road – it appeared that we weren’t the only ones planning to slide down the Olympic slopes. After the Shining-esque isolation of our stay in Troodos it was a considerable relief to see other human beings braving the snow line, and although this meant the only skis available to rent were prehistoric straight behemoths that looked like they hadn’t been waxed since the Byzantine era, it made queuing for the Sun Valley ski lift much more sociable. People come to Mt Olympos for one thing – fun – and that’s what makes it much less daunting to those of us for whom being on the piste is strictly a Saturday night event.

It makes it highly cost-effective too. For your C£7 half-day ski pass you get access to all four runs, though when we visited one of the lifts wasn’t running, restricting us to three pistes, and as two of those were on the other side of the summit to the ski hut, we didn’t venture off the beginners’ slope of Sun Valley. Then again, I was perfectly happy to spend the afternoon falling on my face on the easy run, and from the top of the Sun Valley T-bar I had the perfect opportunity to survey the British Sovereign Base on the top of Mt Olympos.

The Mt Olympos on Cyprus isn’t the home of the gods of Greek mythology – that’s Mt Olympos in Greece, after which Cyprus’s peak is named – but it is home to an all-seeing, all-hearing golf ball that does whatever it is that oversized golf balls do at 1952m above sea level (I believe it’s an RAF radar dome, but as the peak of Mt Olympos is out of bounds to anyone not conditioned to react to someone screaming ‘Shee-un!’ at the top of their voice, I can’t confirm that). The peak of Mt Olympos is home to one of three corners of Cyprus that are forever England – the others being the Akrotiri and Dhekelia Sovereign Bases – and from the top of the ski run it looks like the result of a particularly perverted ice cream fantasy. As ski settings go, it’s all rather fun.

We only had a couple of hours in which to admire the British Army’s balls before the clouds descended and the wind picked up, forcing us to retreat into the cosy little restaurant next to the Ski Federation hut, but by that stage the novelty of a single 200m piste was beginning to wear off, and the thought of hauling ourselves over to the runs on the other side of the mountain was just a little too much. There was absolutely no way I could complain, though; with the total cost for half a day’s skiing and equipment hire coming to less than C£25, it was amazing value for money, and to top it all, the snow was surprisingly good, with lightly compacted powder covering the pistes, and some pleasant off-piste skiing to the side of the main run.

As a totally bizarre thing to do, skiing on a Mediterranean island, especially one so close to Africa, is hard to beat. If you happen to be in Cyprus between January and March and the snowfall is good enough, I can’t recommend it enough as a fun diversion for a day or two. I wouldn’t come specially to Cyprus for a skiing holiday, though; it isn’t the Alps, which of course is all part of the charm.

[1] Known before the name change as Mt Olympus, or by its nickname Chionistra, which means ‘snow pack’ or, more appropriately, ‘chilblain’.

War Zone Accommodation

Written: 22 February 2003

We arrived in South Nicosia in the middle of the most miserable rainstorm we’d seen since landing in Cyprus. The clouds that had smothered Mt Olympos in snow had decided to lurk around for a few more days, and whereas the storm was beautiful and entertaining above the snow line, it was downright depressing in the central plains. I was determined not to let this get to me, though; my research had painted such a bleak picture of the political state of Nicosia that it would have been easy to let the rain dampen my spirits, and although Nicosia would turn out to be one of my personal highlights of Cyprus, our first hurdle turned out to be rather high. I’m referring to our home from home in Nicosia, Tony’s Bed and Breakfast.

Nicosia’s lack of tourist industry is on one hand a blessing, and on the other hand a pain. The lack of tourists creates an atmosphere in which it is easier to appreciate the seriousness of the political situation in Cyprus, but by the same token it makes finding good quality but affordable accommodation surprisingly hard; we ended up picking Tony’s place because the other options in the book all sounded like the kind of hotels that only expense-account businessmen would enjoy. Indeed, the old man in the glass-fronted booth at the entrance to Tony’s was all smiles when we staggered into the shelter of his hotel, and even though he asked us to pay up front for both nights before we’d had a chance to go upstairs, I didn’t smell a rat. After all, C£26 per night sounded OK for a bed right in the centre of the capital city.

The first thing that went wrong was the electricity key fob. Almost all Cypriot hotel rooms have a small slot just inside the door into which you push your room’s metal key fob; this turns on the electricity, and ensures that when you leave you room, you can’t accidentally leave the lights on. It’s a good idea with ecologically sound roots, but like most technical gizmos, it’s a nightmare when things don’t work properly. I shoved the key fob into Room 20’s slot, and nothing happened. I tried again: zilch. It was pitch black and bloody freezing, and for the next five minutes the only thing we could see was our breath frosting in the sliver of light coming in from the hall, while I wiggled the fob and prayed for light. I began to wonder whether they’d forgotten to turn on the supply, and popped down to the old man to ask him what the problem was.

‘Ah, I wondered if you’d know what to do,’ he said. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’ And hobbling up the stairs he smiled at me with a grin that would haunt me for the next two days. It was the grin of a man being polite while quite obviously thinking I was a complete prat.

‘I’ve already tried putting in the fob,’ I ventured.

‘Heh, yes,’ he said, and flashed me a knowing look that meant, ‘I have just totally ignored what you have said, or perhaps I have simply not understood you, but whatever the case, I am right and you are wrong and guess who wears the trousers in this establishment? Exactly. Now wait while I show you what to do, you ignoramus.’

It therefore gave me no end of pleasure to see him brandish the key fob and plunge it into the slot, only to have absolutely nothing happen. ‘I tried that,’ I said, ‘and I had the same problem. It doesn’t work.’

This earned me another look that felt older than history itself, and pretending that I hadn’t spoken, he started wiggling the fob. I thought about telling him that I’d also tried doing that, but I figured that we’d already paid for two nights in advance, and the last thing I needed was an enemy living downstairs. And then, after a few minutes of wobbling and twisting, the lights suddenly flashed on, and the old man looked at me as if to say, ‘See? It works! You fool! All you had to do was push it in the slot! Bloody idiot...’ And with that he shuffled down the stairs, back to his glass booth, leaving us to look around at our home for the next two days.

The first thing we spotted was a stand-alone gas heater, the kind that has a gas cylinder in the back and four ceramic heating panels on the front. Seeing that Peta was starting to turn blue round the edges, I pushed down the gas knob, twisted it to spark the ignition flame on the front, and sat back to enjoy the sight of precisely nothing happening. It turned out that there wasn’t a gas cylinder in the back, just a hose that disappeared into the wall, so I turned the tap on the hose and tried again; nope, there was definitely no gas coming into the heater, and this was the only visible means of heating the room. I looked at Peta and she looked at me; there was nothing else for it except to ask the old man how we heated the room. Already scarred by his withering looks, I decided it was Peta’s turn to fetch him up, and retreated into the bathroom.

This time the old man thought he’d spice up his utter disdain with a bit of good old-fashioned sexism, and as he demonstrated exactly how to light the fire, he told Peta, ‘You push this down like this and you twist this. Your man will know how to do it. You should ask him.’

‘He already tried,’ said Peta, obviously made of sterner stuff than me. ‘It doesn’t work. You do it. It’s cold.’

Of course the old man couldn’t get it working either, so instead he fished out the remote control for the ageing air conditioning unit on the wall, and pressed a few buttons. ‘This will heat the room,’ he said in a tone that didn’t encourage a response, and stomped back down the stairs. In a sense he was right; it did heat the room, so long as you could levitate and sleep right in front of the air vent as it dribbled tepid air like an asthmatic smoker trying to blow out the candles on his last ever birthday cake. The rest of the room remained absolutely bloody freezing until our eventual escape from Tony’s two days later; thankfully they supplied blankets.

Luckily we would warm to Nicosia in a way that Tony’s place never did, and in retrospect the room’s worrying smell of gas and the pathetic hot water supply helped put us in the right mood for contemplating the city’s turbulent past. Nicosia may not be a war zone any more, but Tony’s Bed and Breakfast sure felt like one, and as a place to sleep after a day exploring the shell-shocked metropolis outside, it was, in its own way, utterly Nicosian[1].

[1] Thanks to George the Cypriot and Samantha, who both posted to my Guestbook with explanations for the quality of Tony’s B&B. ‘Excuse me for being rude,’ George writes, ‘but I could not help myself in letting you know that Tony’s bed and breakfast is a famous “prostitute hotel”, that is a place where men bring prostitutes for some discreet moments. ;-) No wonder the old man was surprised to see you!’ Thanks George; that sound you can hear is the penny dropping. On a more positive note, Samantha writes, ‘I read your review about Tony B&B and I had to send you this message, because it’s unfair to talk about Tony when you’re not aware of the whole story. So let me tell you about Tony and please make sure to have this message seen to everyone on the web. Tony B&B was created by Mr Tony, a really special man, who worked very hard through the year to make the Tony B&B one of the best hotels in Nicosia and it was the best, best service, clean shine everything, friendly faces, impossible in world to say, what a lovely place this was. After 2000 Mr Tony went really ill and couldn’t work any more, it was then when he had to rent his hotel to others, and it was then when all became as you describe it. As I honestly know, this bad situation will not be for long. By 2012, Tony B&B will beacame for once more and for ever the perfect hotel in town. So it’s unfair to make it all black when we dont know the story. Tony B&B is going to be the best, by the real owners!!! It will be a place you will adore.’ Let’s hope so, because Nicosia deserves a decent, local-run hotel.

Nicosia

Written: 22 February 2003

Things have changed in Nicosia. Not long after I visited the capital of Cyprus the border guards started letting people across the Green Line. This means that an awful lot of this article is now out of date, and if I visit Cyprus again – and I hope I do – I’ll update it. Until then, here’s a story from the days before the Green Line came down.

There are many unique aspects to Nicosia[1], but to the casual visitor one of the most obvious differences between the capital of Cyprus and the settlements on the coast is just how little impact tourism has had here. Not many package tourists make their way into the centre of Cyprus to explore the island’s landlocked capital, and a quick glance at the history of Cyprus tells you why: Nicosia is the last remaining divided city in the world, now that the likes of Berlin and Beirut have broken down their barriers, and whatever your reason for visiting, you simply can’t avoid the fact that Nicosia is a city that has been split into two completely separate halves, with the two halves barely communicating. It makes the place utterly fascinating.

The fascination of Nicosia is not only the physical division of the city into South Nicosia (in Cyprus) and North Nicosia (in the Turkey-occupied northern part of the island), but the fact that locals can’t cross the borders. Most foreign tourists are allowed to go from South Nicosia to North Nicosia, as long as they make sure they’re back in Cyprus by 5pm, but nobody except for a handful of officials are allowed to cross from north to south; meanwhile, locals aren’t allowed to cross in either direction, and neither are tourists with Greek or Armenian surnames, even if they’re not Greek, as the Turks simply won’t let them in. The result is a genuinely sealed border, creating a city that is totally split into two separate halves; the fact that, at points, you feel you could push your hand through the barricades and shake the hand of the people on the other side only adds to the surreal nature of Cyprus’s capital.

Eating Out in South Nicosia

As our lodgings were about as comfortable as the inside of a fridge, we decided the only thing for it was to wrap up warm and start exploring the Friday night experience of downtown Nicosia; so, armed with a map and a hint in the guidebook that the best restaurants could be found in the northeastern section of South Nicosia, we struck out. We were staying right in the middle of the large pedestrianised section of the city, and heading towards the bright lights we stumbled towards the shopping street of Lidras, where we’d spotted various well-known brand names such as Marks and Spencer and the Body Shop, surely signs of some kind of activity. This was six o’clock on a Friday night, and there was the street, all lit up like it was Christmas, and from where we stood we could see... precisely nobody. It was completely deserted, and not for the first time in Nicosia, I was totally wrong-footed.

As we wandered down the road, things got weirder. Occasionally, out of the corner of my eye, I’d see what I thought was the blur of movement, but however fast I turned my head, I wouldn’t actually see anyone. Streets ducked off to either side of Lidras, disappearing into darkness after a few metres, and as we headed north through the eerie silence, we approached the Green Line for the first time.

The Green Line is the barrier that divides Nicosia into two, and despite its flimsy-sounding name it’s a genuine barrier, not unlike the Berlin Wall. It’s made up of the Turkish and Greek lines, with a buffer zone between that’s controlled by the UN, and sometimes the buffer zone is so thin that you realise that those buildings just through there, the ones sporting a red and white Turkish flag, are actually in northern Cyprus. As we innocently ambled north, looking for signs of life, suddenly out of the dark loomed a barrier blocking off the end of Nicosia’s prime shopping street, and in the murky street lights we could make out an armed soldier standing guard under the blue and white flag of Cyprus, ready to stop us trying to scale the walls into Turkey-occupied Nicosia. Coming so soon after the familiar sights of Woolworths and Toni & Guy, it felt like turning a corner in London and bumping into a tank. It was utterly bizarre.

But this was just the start of it. Map in hand and woolly hats firmly jammed on, we started weaving east through the streets of Nicosia city centre, and still nobody appeared. The odd car screeched through the thin streets, and every now and then we’d wander past a building with an open door and a housewife sitting inside, flicking idly through a magazine, but it felt like a ghost town. Even the sudden realisation that the housewives were sitting under red lights and had their doors open despite the cold didn’t explain why nobody was around; most of the red light districts I’ve pointed and stared at in other cities were positively bustling, but Nicosia was really quite eerie in its silence.

We wandered past buildings that looked as if they’d had bombs dropped on them – which they quite possibly had, of course – and as they gently crumbled back into the mud and bricks from which they’d been made, light flickered from welding torches in rows of workshops. At last there were signs of life, but even the sight of men crowded round lathes in their workshops didn’t look terribly promising; it felt as if we’d stumbled on an industrial zone rather than the restaurant strip, even though we were near Famagusta Gate, supposedly the best place for restaurants in South Nicosia. By this stage I was seriously wondering whether Nicosia was the only place on earth where people didn’t bother to eat, but then, as luck would have it, I spotted polished stainless steel shelves through a crumbling wooden door in an otherwise shabby-looking street. The style of the shelves rang bells, and those bells sounded like food.

‘Do you think it’s a restaurant?’ I asked Peta.

‘God knows,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t look like one, but it’s not like we’ve seen anything else. Let’s have a look.’

As we walked into the empty courtyard through the door, a kindly woman waved hello, and we wandered over. ‘Is this a restaurant?’ asked Peta, and she beamed back with a ‘Yes’ and explained that it didn’t open until eight o’clock. This was music to our ears, and she went on to explain that the menu was different every day and was based round what they’d bought from the market that day. I couldn’t believe it; after wandering through the most desolate city streets I’d ever seen, we’d accidentally stumbled on a mouth-watering Cypriot restaurant where they not only spoke fantastic English, but they obviously knew how to cook. It looked like Nicosia was going to be more than deserted streets and dysfunctional hotels after all.

In the end, the meal turned out to be something really special. By nine o’clock the restaurant, the Aegean on Ektoros Street, was packed to the gills with trendy locals, and the meze that the friendly maitre d’ created for us was superb. It was interesting to note the Turkish influence on the food, despite the extremely pro-Greek posters adorning the walls; among the dishes in our meze was imam bayaldi, a mixture of aubergine, tomato and onion, which, it is said, was once given to a Turkish prince who swooned with delight on eating it, and bulgur wheat, a kind of cracked wheat that’s a staple in Turkey.

The Aegean was also a good place for watching the people of South Nicosia, as it quickly filled up with trendy young locals, sporting designer handbags and a talent for continuous cigarette smoking. On one table the group of ten diners purposely rearranged themselves to have the women down one end of the table and the men on the other, something you’d rarely see in London, and adding to the strange flavour of the night, it turned out that the woman who had first explained the menu to us had lived in Kentish Town for years, one of the waiters was originally from Canterbury, and another of the restaurant’s extended family used to live a stone’s throw from where I used to live in West London. It was all very strange, but that, it seemed, was Nicosia all over.

Crossing into North Nicosia

The strangest experience was yet to come. It’s impossible to wander round Nicosia without bumping into the Green Line quite regularly, and even though crossing into northern Cyprus isn’t something the Greek Cypriots really want you to do – it’s not quite seen as endorsing the Turkish occupation, but they would rather you didn’t cross, as that does imply a kind of acceptance of the status quo – it’s almost impossible to resist. Tantalising glances of Turkish flags beyond the buffer zone naturally make you curious as to what it’s like on the other side, and the unmissable minarets of the mosques in North Nicosia are far too tempting for the curious tourist to resist. Being weak, we just had to see if the grass was greener over the Green Line.

The Green Line has been in existence since Christmas Day in 1963, when fighting between the Turkish and Greek communities of newly independent Cyprus resulted in the self-imposed partition of the city into two halves. The UK brokered a cease-fire between the two sides, and the Green Line, named after the green line drawn on a map by a British officer to show the division between the Greeks and Turks, came into being. Since then the barrier has grown from the odd overturned bed and oil drum into a genuine barrier, with a UN-controlled buffer zone that ensures the two sides don’t meet. There’s only one way to cross the Green Line, through the checkpoint at Ledra Palace, and that’s where we headed on the morning of Saturday, 22 February.

Previously we’d only witnessed the Green Line as home to a collection of blue and white sentry posts, with a few flags fluttering over crumbling buildings and empty streets, but as we approached Pafos Gate and turned left to head towards Ledra Palace, the reality of the Green Line hit home. Signs banning photography were tacked to the sandbagged remains of an old building, wracked by the decay of decades and still pockmarked with bullet holes and shell blasts. In the blink of an eye we’d wandered from a relatively normal city centre, where signs enticed us to enjoy Polynesian Cuisine or the delights of yet another tacky nightclub, to something that looked exactly like a war zone. All the colours had long since evaporated; this building, right there on the main road in from the west, had the hue of trenches and the texture of decay. The sign proclaiming ’UN Buffer Zone, No Parking’ seemed rather redundant; you would think that nobody in their right mind would park a car in an apparent battlefield, right under the nose of a blue and white Cypriot sentry post, but I guess familiarity breeds a sense of ease that a visitor can’t have. As if to emphasise the point, right there, in the middle of all the mouldering chaos, sits the still-functioning Holy Cross Catholic Church, forcing the Green Line to take a detour round its back buttresses; it’s these constant contrasts – working church, desolate war zone – that make Nicosia so surreal.

Walking on to the checkpoint was, for me, an exercise in increasing paranoia. I found myself wishing there were at least some signs saying ‘Keep Out!’ but the road up to the Cypriot checkpoint was unnerving precisely because it was a totally normal road, just one with bales of barbed wire pulled aside to let pedestrians and cars through. Not that many vehicles were taking this route, though; the odd black and white UN Land Rover would burn through, heading for the UN headquarters in the buffer zone, but it really felt as if we were walking out of the safe haven of South Nicosia and into a dead zone where anything could happen. Nobody ran out to tell us to turn around and nobody pointed a gun our way, but the atmosphere was suddenly thick with the weight of nearby firepower – in an area like this, the tension might be under the surface, but it’s still there, and it quite clearly isn’t a place for civilians. Even before you reach the Green Line, you know it’s not the kind of place you take lightly.

But we soldiered on, eventually spotting a café full of dark-clothed men drinking coffee, with a large building opposite on which hung posters, slogans and graffiti protesting about what the Greek Cypriots insist is the illegal occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkey. A group of about ten black-clad women sat in silent protest at the loss of their loved ones, not pestering us in any way but just sitting there, letting their presence make the point that, in crossing into North Nicosia, they felt we were effectively acknowledging the legitimacy of what they viewed as a military occupation of their island.

In the event, crossing the Green Line was simplicity itself. We handed over our passports to the man at the Greek-Cypriot immigration post, and he simply scribbled our names in his book, warned us to be back by 5pm, and waved us on into the no man’s land of the UN buffer zone. There was no critical stare, no grilling, and not even a raised eyebrow; as border crossings go, it was a breeze.

The UN buffer zone, though, is harrowing. After walking through a concrete wall chicane – there to stop people joy-riding through the border as well as providing a useful surface for blown-up pictures of Greek Cypriots being battered to death by Turkish police – you enter a 100m-wide zone that can only be described as utterly bizarre. Before the Greek-Cypriot border post there are plenty of buildings with the scars of war still plainly visible, but once you’re in the buffer zone you can really appreciate the seriousness of the unrest that kicked off in 1964. Almost all the buildings carry some kind of battle scar, whether it’s a beautiful mansion with overgrown gardens hiding a shower of bullet holes in the sandstone, or the Ledra Palace Hotel, previously Nicosia’s largest hotel and now the headquarters of the UN in Cyprus, which has an amazing array of bullet holes sprinkled between its balconies, as well as a graphic collection of mortar explosions, where you can clearly see the scars from flying debris etched into the side of the building, radiating from the explosions of yesteryear.

The buffer zone is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, but just as you start getting used to the destruction all around, the weirdest sight of all appears: there, on the right, just after the UN headquarters, is a shop selling T-shirts, and it’s still open. T-shirts for sale hang up in its dusty but functional windows, and although nobody seemed to be around when we sauntered past, it looked for all the world as if it was business as usual. Meanwhile, across the road, a relatively new sign announced a car hire shop, and there, in the distance, a huge sign proclaimed, ‘Welcome to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’. After the sensory overload of the lonely walk through the battlefield of 1964, the whole thing was utterly bizarre.

Getting into northern Cyprus was as easy as leaving the south; the policemen typed our details into a computer and sent us upstairs to get a visa, where a woman wrote out a visa form, smiled, and we were in. As long as we got back by 5pm, it looked like our visit to North Nicosia was going to be a breeze.

North Nicosia

Exploring South Nicosia and continually bumping into the Green Line makes you appreciate the physical division of Nicosia, but only by crossing the buffer zone into North Nicosia can you appreciate the social division. Nicosia is a genuinely divided city, and while it’s easy to see that the two halves are a part of the same city, they feel remarkably different from each other. Architecturally there are obvious similarities – of the eleven Venetian bastions in the circular city walls, five are in South Nicosia, five are in North Nicosia, and one lies in the buffer zone – but culturally the differences are obvious. If you imagine taking two twins and separated them at birth, with one growing up in Greece and the other in Turkey, then you won’t be far off understanding why Nicosia is a tale of two cities.

Some differences are instantly visible. North Nicosia has absolutely no Greek lettering anywhere, instead using the Turkish alphabet, with its Roman letters littered with cedillas, circumflexes and umlauts; the currency is the Turkish lira, which, when we visited, had a rate of 2,550,000 lira per UK pound, a world apart from the C£0.85 per UK pound of South Nicosia; the people look Turkish, with darker skin and leaner features than the distinctly Greek look of the south; and instead of churches peppering the streets, mosques are everywhere, their minarets instantly making North Nicosia feel more like the Middle East than the Mediterranean.

But perhaps the most obvious difference is the attitude of the people towards tourists. Southern Cyprus has grown used to tourists, and as a result you can wander round the south without a second glance from the locals; people are lovely in the South, and are more than happy to stop for a chat or help you out with directions, but southern Cyprus is content to leave tourists to their own devices. North Nicosia is different, and it’s instantly apparent in the way that kids run after you and wave ‘hello’, or the way that people in shops are obviously delighted that you’ve wandered in to their establishment. This is no doubt a reflection on the lack of tourism in the north, as opposed to differences in hospitality, but it makes a visit to the north particularly delightful. The people really are wonderful.

As far as tourism is concerned, the sights of North Nicosia are on a par with those in South Nicosia, and both sides have put a lot of effort into building up attractions for foreign visitors. The difference, of course, is that while South Nicosia gets a small but steady trickle of tourists, North Nicosia really struggles to pull anyone in, so when you wander into an old building that’s been restored as a museum, the woman at the counter will be genuinely delighted to see someone coming in. This concurrent development of amenities is one consequence of the Nicosia Master Plan, which coordinates key development work across the two halves, but you can’t help feeling impressed by the efforts on the Turkish side; they’ve done a great job, but with practically no tourists. It means visiting the tourist spots of northern Cyprus feels less like following the tour guide’s red umbrella, and more like discovering a charming little side street all on your own. If the latter is your scene, then North Nicosia is a great spot.

Each half of Nicosia is perfectly sized for easy exploration on foot, and even after one of Club Med’s spinning-round-a-pole drinking games, you’d be hard pressed to lose your sense of direction. Dominating the centre of North Nicosia, and conveniently close to the Green Line (assuming the muezzin’s broadcasts are designed to irritate the Orthodox Greek Cypriots to the south), is the Djami Selimiye, an old cathedral dating from the 13th century that had two gargantuan 50m-high minarets added by the Ottomans. It’s now a hugely symbolic sight, with the minarets looking very much as if they’ve been stuck onto a Christian cathedral, and wherever you are in the city – north or south – you can see it poking above the houses.

Minarets are definitely the fashion in North Nicosia, and throughout the Turkish half of the city they point towards the sky, some ancient, some defiantly modern. Within a few minutes’ walk of the Belediye Pazari – the covered market that sells meat, vegetables, Turkish sweets and some half-hearted tourist trinkets – are perhaps ten beautiful minareted mosques, a number of them clearly visible from the other side of the Green Line, which backs right onto the southern wall of the market. In comparison there’s just one functioning mosque in South Nicosia, and, not surprisingly, there are far more churches in the south than the north. It’s as if neither of the two halves of Nicosia are in themselves complete, but they add up to make a whole.

All this was food for thought as we asked the incredibly friendly proprietor of a randomly chosen kebab house what he would recommend for lunch. Hugely overweight and with a larger-than-life personality to match, it was good to see someone who blatantly ate far too much of his produce, and after a delicious lunch of various types of kebab, he plied us with complimentary Turkish coffee as business boomed. The most popular order of the day was a complete roast chicken, vertically sliced open from tip to tail and stuffed with a mixture of rice and vermicelli; the number of people who turned up at the door and left with a wrapped-up rice-stuffed roast chicken was impressive, and I could only assume that this was a traditional Saturday night meal for those too busy to cook.

Just north of the kebab shop the streets snaked between buildings that looked as if they’d seen far better days. Some buildings, like the Büyük Han (a mediaeval travellers’ inn), have been restored over the years as funds have allowed, and in the main square near the Djami Selimiye a bunch of smiling workmen in baggy Turkish trousers were chipping away at an old building, gradually restoring it to its former glory. If and when the tourist industry picks up in North Nicosia (which realistically will only happen if the two halves of Cyprus are united once again) then these restorations will no doubt bring in the visitors, but away from the main attractions North Nicosia is as war torn as its southern neighbour, and is arguably in an even more dilapidated state. These crumbling buildings, though, exude character, and where South Nicosia’s architecture has flirted just a little too much with modern concrete as a panacea for its war wounds, North Nicosia feels older, more run down, and therefore a bit less spoilt.

Nicosia is a city that’s had a tough time, and the constant reminders of conflict have a funny effect on the mind. Despite the utterly charming people and the tangible sense of history surrounding you, you can’t help feeling that the city is precariously balanced. As we wandered through the northern part of North Nicosia, ambling randomly with the mosque’s minarets as our guide, three little children burst out of a side street, each of them brandishing a plastic gun, and for a moment my heart leapt into my mouth. After a whole day of seeing armed soldiers policing the buffer zone, and a noticeable amount of camouflage clothing on both sides of the border, my instant reaction was one of panic, irrational though it seemed afterwards. I wouldn’t think twice about kids with toy guns at home, but Nicosia, for all its wonders, had me on edge.

That’s probably why the old man who wandered up to us and tried one of the oldest cons in the book didn’t get anything other than polite smiles and knowing nods from us. Starting with some flattery about how much he loved the English, he then told us he was supposed to be flying to Manchester, but that last night someone had stolen his money and his tickets from under his pillow. Perhaps we could lend him some money, and give him our address, and when he got to England he could reimburse us? Perhaps not, we replied nicely, but with his threadbare suit and his false teeth that didn’t quite fit, I admired him for trying; there can’t be many tourists wandering North Nicosia who are ripe for the picking. Besides, this was the only con man we encountered on our entire visit to Cyprus, and a few minutes earlier in north Nicosia I’d seen a man run after a fellow Nicosian to hand him a wad of money he’d dropped on the pavement. Cyprus really does seem to be free of the kind of tourist hassle you encounter with irritating frequency in other parts of the world, and that’s a blessing.

Perhaps it was because of this false sense of security that I decided to buy a can of Coca-Cola in North Nicosia. You are expressly forbidden to bring items bought in North Nicosia back into the southern half – the customs men at the Greek Cypriot border confiscate anything you buy from the Turkish side – but I felt the Coke situation summed up the insanity of the Cypriot split, and I wanted a souvenir to take home. The main Coke factory for southern Cyprus is in Nicosia, and Cypriot Coke cans list their ingredients, not surprisingly, in Greek. However, if you buy a can of Coke in North Nicosia, literally a stone’s throw from the southern half, you find it lists its ingredients in Turkish, and has been imported all the way from Istanbul. This, to me, sums up the division of Nicosia rather well.

Happily, the border guards on the way back didn’t even look at us, and simply smiled as we handed over our passports, got ticked off the lists, and walked through the dead zone and back into South Nicosia. It was only after I unpacked my bag that I realised what I’d achieved; I’d just illegally managed to smuggle 330g of Coke from Turkey to Cyprus – not to mention the other 330g that I’d ingested at lunchtime – and I didn’t even break into a sweat. Midnight Express, eat your heart out.

And as if to rub in the strangeness of the Nicosian divide, as we walked away from the Greek Cypriot immigration post, we spotted a group of Turkish Cypriots standing on the top of the Venetian battlements, waving down to us through a wire fence. We hadn’t realised this before, but Roccas Bastion, the section of battlements just east of the main road to the Ledra Palace Hotel, is part of North Nicosia and not the buffer zone, and here the two sides can wave and talk with only about 10m of height and a wire fence separating them. We waved back cheerily, and one of the men yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Peace!’ to which we replied, ‘Yeah, peace!’ while flicking him the peace V-sign. Everyone joined in, and everyone smiled; and this, more than anything, supported the view I’d read and heard many times, that the division of Cyprus may have started out as a self-imposed apartheid, but the split continues to exist because it suits the politicians. Judging by the pro-unity demonstrations on both sides of the line, perhaps it’s just a matter of time before the last divided city becomes one.

South Nicosia

After North Nicosia, with its distinct lack of tourism, South Nicosia felt unavoidably less adventurous. The tourist quarter of Laïki Geitonia, recently rejuvenated by extensive pedestrianising and the opening of myriad tourist-friendly restaurants, lacked the soul of either North Nicosia or the Famagusta Gate area of South Nicosia, but after a long day exploring both sides of the Green Line, it was a perfect place in which to relax with a pint of Keo, Cyprus’s own beer.

As far as the casual tourist is concerned, South Nicosia has one further advantage over the north. On the eleventh floor of the tower block above Woolworths is an observation deck from which you can see the whole, undivided Nicosia, and from there the Green Line is only visible if you know where to look (at which point the defiant flags of Cyprus and Turkey and the mouldering buildings trapped in the buffer zone suddenly become painfully obvious). The sights of Nicosia are labelled and an audio-visual display explains the history of Nicosia, surprisingly refusing to dwell on the separation of the city in anything other than cursory detail. As with all observation decks, it’s a fantastic way to see the city.

But unlike most other observation decks, the binoculars are attached to just one side, the north-facing side, for this is one of the few places where the citizens of Cyprus can peer into the other half of the island (Deryneia being the chief alternative). And as if to emphasise the gulf that separates these two neighbouring cities, the Turks have painted a huge Turkish flag on the mountains to the north of Nicosia that’s totally unmissable from the observation deck. The people of North Nicosia might make the V-sign of peace to their southern neighbours, but their politicians evidently prefer a totally different kind of two-fingered gesture.

[1] Since the introduction of the new transliteration scheme, Nicosia has been known as Lefkosia. However the internationally accepted name for the capital is still Nicosia, with Lefkosia reserved for road signs in Cyprus, so for this article I’m using the old name.

Cyprus: The South

Agia Napa

Written: 23 February 2003

It didn’t matter to us that Agia Napa[1] is stuck right out on the remote southeast coast of Cyprus, a long way from anywhere else, and neither did it bother us that we’d chosen the coldest and wettest February on record to visit it. We didn’t care because we weren’t coming to Agia Napa to lie on the beach, get bombed and embarrass ourselves in a pool of vomit; instead, we were going there to see others do it. If there’s one thing Agia Napa has, it’s a reputation for utter hedonism, and where hedonism thrives, hilarity is sure to follow.

Unfortunately, February isn’t the greatest time to be visiting Agia Napa in search of nightlife; indeed, it’s a terrible time to be searching for any kind of life in Cyprus’s clubbing Mecca, because out of season Agia Napa has more in common with wintry Blackpool than larging it in the Med. In fact, it’s downright turgid, and is all the more fascinating for it; wandering around the ancient ruins of Pafos and Kourion, you find yourself picturing the scene with the ruins brought to life, full of Romans and Greeks worshipping their gods and gorging themselves at legendary banquets... and wandering around off-season Agia Napa, you find yourself picturing the scene overrun with thousands of pissed teenagers, worshipping at the altars of McDonald’s, Stella and Pasha.

The scene I managed to imagine looked pretty good, to be honest. OK, you’re not going to enjoy Agia Napa unless you’re on a mission to pull, dance, drink, sunbathe and stay up all night, but assuming that’s your bag, Agia Napa looks like a pretty pleasant place to do it. The bay curves round beautifully, facing south into the sun, and if you manage to get a room at one of the monstrous hotels lining the beach, life couldn’t be simpler; you can fall out of bed and practically land on the beach, and once you’ve got your spot for the day, it’s no more than a stone’s throw to the largest collection of bars, restaurants and ATMs on Cyprus. Language is no problem, either; Agia Napa doesn’t bother with that irritating Greek alphabet that you see all over Cyprus, and instead sticks to plain old English, the international language of the beach resort. You may see writing that looks like Greek, but on closer inspection it’s nothing other than stylised runic English, written to look like Greek, but still inviting you in English to eat in Zorba the Greek’s Restaurant, where you can choose from a massive menu that contains the usual favourites of egg, chips and burgers, along with just three Greek dishes, kleftiko, halloumi and, of course, kebab.

Chill-out Zone

If the summer is Agia Napa’s Saturday night, then the winter is most definitely its Sunday morning. The whole place is asleep, and although there are signs of life, they’re hard to spot, and they’re a mile away from the foreign tourist trade. Agia Napa in the off-season is definitely a chill-out zone, sometimes literally.

When we visited, the appalling weather we’d been enjoying throughout our visit to Cyprus continued to bluster and freeze. The crescent beach, no doubt normally obscured by the bodies of thousands of lightly fried tourists, was utterly deserted, except for a forlorn cat who mewled pathetically from the shelter of a solitary plastic sun lounger; meanwhile the sea, surprisingly a pleasant light blue colour despite the grey skies, bashed into the harbour wall, lightly soaking the two huge pleasure yachts, the Party Cruise and the Napa King, that were moored up, biding their time for the coming tourist season. In the main pedestrianised street, the signs above the closed bars reflected in the rain-flecked puddles, proclaiming that not only could you enjoy the bar’s happy hour, satellite sport, fast food and late night music, but that EastEnders would be shown on a full-screen TV. And even though the shutters were closed, the Queen Vic bar across the road looked just as enticing as Albert Square’s favourite watering hole, and just as lively. The latter’s reference was amazingly apt; as we wandered round the dormant streets of Agia Napa, it felt as unreal as a soap opera, and it didn’t feel like a genuine clubbers’ resort, it felt like a theme park, designed to give you the full clubbing holiday experience, all under one roof. Agia Napa, even in the off-season, feels like a parody of itself.

Amazingly, though, there were other human beings stumbling through the rain, though closer inspection of them and their cars showed them not to be foreign tourists, but Cypriot ones. Latching on to the signs of life like penguins huddling together in an Antarctic storm, Peta and I splashed our way to the Markos Restaurant right on the waterfront, no doubt a heaving mass of sun-cream-sticky plastic chairs in the summer, but now a friendly, cosy-looking restaurant that sported a healthy-looking number of clients and a roaring fire in the corner. Despite the list of available beers, which betrayed an obvious swing to north European mass tourism – John Smith’s, Stella, Guinness, Heineken, Becks, Budweiser, Sol, Carlsberg and Fosters were on offer, but no Cypriot beers – the Markos was full of Cypriots, tucking into their Sunday lunches and obviously enjoying their rainy day out in Agia Napa. Unfortunately the fish we ordered was as tasteless as the modern architecture smothering the resort, and the projection TV showing Home and Away with Greek subtitles rather took the edge off any atmosphere the Markos might have mustered, but even though the average age of Agia Napa’s winter clientele was at least double that of the summer, the place was still raving, in its own little way.

Come Down

I presume that driving north out of Agia Napa is something that few visitors bother to do; if they do, then they probably get as hopelessly lost as we did, and although I like a nice drive along the beach, it can get a little boring if you can’t actually see the coast for hotels, fast food joints, and some stunning examples of why the architects who designed Cyprus’s premier resort should be forced to explain themselves. Luckily we did end up eventually reaching the little town of Deryneia, some 10km north of Agia Napa, and I’m very glad we did.

It’s interesting that Deryneia should be so close to Agia Napa, the chosen destination for holidaymakers who are only interested in the local culture if it wears a miniskirt and can down five double vodkas without chucking a whitey. 10km is not far, but Deryneia is right on the border with Turkey-occupied Northern Cyprus, and as with Nicosia, it’s an amazing place to contemplate the fundamental divisions that split Cyprus in two.

As we drove into Deryneia, the weather seemed to get even bleaker, and by the time we pulled into the car park at the Cultural Centre for Occupied Ammochostos, the wind chill was utterly harrowing. Climbing the stairs onto the roof of the Cultural Centre was challenging, but it was worth it, for in the distance, blurred by the rain, was the abandoned suburb of Varosha, a symbol of how utterly devastating the partition of Cyprus has been.

By the mid-1960s, the town of Famagusta (now known to Greek Cypriots as Ammochostos) was one of Cyprus’s most popular tourist destinations; Agia Napa was still just a little fishing village with a cute monastery, but Famagusta was a boom town, with hotels popping up all along the beautiful east coast of Cyprus, catering for the slowly increasing number of package tourists visiting the island. However Famagusta had traditionally been a stronghold for Turkish Cypriots, and throughout the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, the town suffered from a smorgasbord of Greek-Turkish tension. Finally, during the Greek coup and consequent Turkish invasion of 1974, Famagusta was the scene of serious fighting between Turkey and the Greek Cypriots, and although Famagusta is now in the Turkey-occupied north of Cyprus, the southern suburb of Varosha falls inside the UN-controlled buffer zone. The result is a whole section of the city that is uninhabited, and which looks exactly as it did when the ceasefire came into effect on 16 August 1974.

From the roof of the Cultural Centre in Deryneia, you can see Varosha, just beyond a few green fields that mark the border between Cyprus and the occupied north. It’s utterly eerie; Varosha is a ghost town, and with binoculars you can look at the remains of the 33 abandoned hotels lining the coast, crumbling slowly while rusting cranes still stand alongside buildings that were half built when everything kicked off back in 1974, and which remain in the same state today. Battered windmills gently turn in the dead zone, almost all of their sails missing, and it’s easy to kid yourself that you’re witnessing the aftermath of some horrible industrial disaster, or the effects of a nuclear winter. Varosha looks like something out of a particularly bleak episode of Doctor Who, especially on a windy day with the rain lashing down on this forgotten corner of Cyprus.

It’s no wonder mass tourism doesn’t venture this far north, really. Deryneia represents a hard dose of reality while Agia Napa represents utter escapism, and it’s no coincidence that the latter is by far the biggest draw-card in Cyprus, while most visitors blissfully ignore the Green Line. The politics of Cyprus is hardly the stuff of which happy holidays are made, though for those with an eye on history rather than hedonism, its effects are more profound than any number of peach schnapps chasers.

[1] Before the government changed the names of places in Cyprus, Agia Napa was written Ayia Napa, which is the way most tour operators write it, the way most dance compilations write it, and the way you say it. Agia is pronounced ‘Aye-ee-ah’ and is Greek for saint, ironically enough given Agia Napa’s image.

Larnaka

Written: 24 February 2003

I really wanted to like Larnaka[1], mainly because we were stuck there for two days praying for the weather to improve, but despite my good intentions, I really couldn’t get into it. Larnaka, for me, represented everything bad about the tourist bulldozer that seems to be steaming through Cyprus, obliterating everything Cypriot in its path and replacing it with some of the worst aspects of Britain’s seaside towns. For one awful moment, I thought I’d washed up on the south coast of Spain, despite the continuing drizzle.

No doubt the weather didn’t help, and I’m sure that a beautiful sunny day would light up the pleasant seaside promenade and make it a pretty little place. Larnaka isn’t ugly, even in the rain; the beach is a pretty little spot, although the sand is a rather putrid green at this time of year, and the marina is nice enough. But the thing that really gets me down isn’t what Larnaka looks like, it’s just how utterly un-Cypriot the town has become, and how it’s managed to turn itself into a plastic, soulless place that could be absolutely anywhere. You really don’t feel you’re in Cyprus, and it’s a real shame.

The problem is the proliferation of shops and restaurants that redefine the term ‘bland’. Setting off to find a nice Greek restaurant in which to while away the evening, we wandered through town, past rows and rows of north European clothes shops, all completely generic and selling exactly the same goods that you find at home. This, of course, is absolutely great if you want to go shopping, and the fact that Larnaka has graduated into a seriously impressive commercial centre is no doubt good for the local economy, and is certainly not a bad thing in itself. However, tucked among these shops we could find precisely no hint of anything local; Larnaka has been utterly overrun by bland brand names, and while it seems right and proper for this to happen to somewhere like Agia Napa, where everything is sacrificed on the altar of the package tourist and nobody pretends that they’re looking for a cultural experience, it seems a real shame to have it happen to a historical port like Larnaka.

While Larnaka has a history going back thousands of years, stretching from ancient times through to its importance as a major Ottoman city, the modern seafront only continues the depressing theme of blandification The restaurants that line the promenade are uniformly based round junk food, with only the occasional expensive and unwelcoming foray into more sophisticated cuisine punctuating the neon lights. In one 50m stretch lurk the attractions of McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut, while this wall of cholesterol is glued together by less well-known restaurants sporting helpful clapper boards containing photographs of the food on offer that even manage to make bottles of beer look cheap and unappetising. If you don’t fancy pizza, burgers, all-day breakfasts or kebabs, then you’re seriously stuffed in Larnaka. As the leaflet outside the seafront’s Alexander Pizzeria proudly boasts, it’s the ‘right place for coffee time, cocktail time, beer time, sweet and dessert time, breakfast time, lunch time and dinner time.’ And that’s precisely the problem; I love burgers like the next man[2], but not for every meal, and despite exploring the town for a good hour, we couldn’t find anything except junk food, junk food and more junk food.

Not surprisingly, we didn’t dilly-dally more than one night in Larnaka; it really wasn’t my cup of full-cream, three-heaped-teaspoon tea.

[1] Known as Larnaca before the name change.

[2] OK, possibly not like the next man in Larnaka, who is probably an overweight, pasty-skinned bloater who hobbles around with the aid of a walking stick and who jokes about his beer belly being ‘an investment’. I’m serious; the number of fat tourists with consequent mobility problems in off-season Cyprus is staggering, not unlike them.

Kourion

Written: 25 February 2003

Tuesday 25th awoke to weather that mirrored the inside of my head after the evening’s drinking at Perry’s; one minute it was dark and blustery, and the next minute the clouds had lifted and the sun was peeking through, but it couldn’t make up its mind what to do. Nor could we, but we figured we might as well drive over to the ruins of Kourion, even if we risked getting caught in another snow storm.

The reason for our caution was that the ancient city of Kourion was built on a massively exposed headland overlooking the southern coast of Cyprus, and it’s not the kind of place you want to be stuck if the weather turns; but fortune favours the brave, so we set out along the winding coast road, ready for an archaeological experience that the guidebooks uniformly raved about.

To get us in the mood, we tuned the radio in to BFBS Radio One, the premier channel of the British Forces Broadcasting Service. Kourion is inside the perimeter of the Akrotiri Sovereign Base, one of the three parts of Cyprus that the British kept as part of the independence deal in 1960, and although these areas are technically British soil, and military soil at that, you can merrily drive across the bases without fear of having a gun poked into your stomach. Not only that, but the British broadcast radio programmes to keep their armed employees happy during their leisure time, and BFBS Radio churns out the usual happy-clappy entertainment that you get on most pop music channels back home, but with dedications going out to soldiers and their families, and announcements about fun social activities happening in the various bases. It’s like normal radio, but then again it’s not; I got the feeling that ringing in to request a medley of Give Peace a Chance, War (What is it Good For?), Billy Don’t Be a Hero and Seasons in the Sun would be met by the same stony lack of humour that you get from airport security staff when cracking a wise one about the bomb in your bag.

Despite having my spirits lifted by the BFBS, Kourion unfortunately turned out to be less fascinating than I’d hoped, though not because of inclement weather; luckily the sun actually came out as we explored the ruins, but even this couldn’t shake the feeling that whereas Pafos is home to some stunningly preserved works of true genius, Kourion suffered so much destruction in the earthquake of 365 AD that it’s only of interest to the experts. What’s left is genuinely ruined, and it’s made worse where the archaeologists have tried to reconstruct what they thought was there; columns that clearly don’t match each other have been placed in rows that don’t work, some small sections have been stuck together so they look practically brand new, and what is left sometimes feels more like the aftermath of a modern developmental disaster than an ancient city (though, given the history of rebuilding in Kourion, it’s a little unfair to expect anything else). Here, more than anywhere, I would say that visiting with either a human guide or a dedicated guidebook is better than aimlessly wandering through the wind armed with only a few pages from a guidebook to Cyprus, but even without an expert in tow it’s worth the detour... it’s just not as impressive as Pafos.

Kolossi Castle, just down the road, is a much more intact piece of architecture, but it’s a lot more modern too, having been initially built by the knights of the Crusades back in 1210, with various collapses and restorations ever since. It’s basically a three-storey castle keep, bleakly empty inside but atmospheric nonetheless, and you can climb to the top for a nice little view over the surrounding land. It’s nothing mind-blowing, but it’s strangely appropriate given the proximity of the heart of the Akrotiri base, a set of giant-sized antennae that are all pointed at the Middle East, and under which you can drive but not stop. Photographs in this area are also a no-no, as is any kind of exploration on foot, which is a shame because the salt lake to the north of the military town is apparently a haven for migratory birds, and at this time of year is home to flocks of flamingos, a bird I’ve long wanted to see. Unfortunately I thought it a little risky to be flipping out the binoculars right under the British listening post for the Gulf, so I couldn’t confirm whether those white dots on the lake actually were flamingo.

I like to think they were, though.

Cyprus: The North

Pissouri

Written: 26 February 2003

From Larnaka, the drive east towards Lemesos was quick and featureless in the way that motorway drives often are, but it perked up our spirits immeasurably, because for the first time since the start of our holiday, the sun came out and stayed out. Even in February a week without seeing the sun is unusual in Cyprus, but as people never tired of telling us, we’d managed to pick the wettest and coldest February on record to explore the island, a fact that had wormed its way into my subconscious like a precocious child screaming, ‘I told you so!’ On the way I idly wondered if Pissouri would live up to its name; I didn’t realise it would excel.

However, just past Lemesos the clouds started piling up in the west, and we decided to shelve our plans to visit the archaeological site of Kourion for the next day, just in case the clouds turned into rain. We needn’t have worried, because these clouds weren’t rain clouds. They were snow clouds.

Snow at 1700m in the Troodos Mountains is one thing, but snow in a village that looks out over the coastal plains of southern Cyprus is another thing altogether. As we drove up the hill to the little town of Pissouri, the heavens opened and Christmas descended, the thick flakes landing on the car and having the cheek to settle there. To add insult to injury, everything in the small village of Pissouri seemed to be shut; we tracked down one hotel, but it was completely dead, and even though there were people in the second one, that too was shut for the winter. Meanwhile the snow leaked through the hole in my walking boots, the wind blew flakes up my nose, and the one-way system made it a considerable challenge to follow the directions we’d been given to a hotel that might be brave enough to be open at this time of year.

Luckily the Pissouriana Hotel was not only open, it was centrally heated, warmly lit, and apparently had a fantastic view over its swimming pool to the plains below, though we could see nothing except grey mist. Snow lay on the sun loungers out by the pool, and the lady behind the bar said she’d been living here for nine years, and she’d never seen it snow in Pissouri before. ‘We’ve been out taking pictures,’ she said as she handed us the keys.

‘Well, it is the coldest and wettest February on record,’ I pointed out before she managed to get in there.

‘And it was so lovely last year,’ she sighed after us, as we shuffled up to our room to thaw out.

Put Another Vine on the Fire

By evening the snow was still pounding down, smothering the cars and trees in a fine layer of powder that had absolutely no right to be there, so Peta decided we should pick a restaurant not by whether it had good food, but by whether it had smoke coming out of its chimney. As luck would have it this strategy bagged us an evening in a restaurant that had both.

Perry’s Restaurant, owned and run by the friendly local chap in the restaurant’s name, was as cosy as it’s possible to be in a country that builds its buildings for hot weather. Despite the thin windows and cold tiled floor, Perry had built a massive fireplace into the wall of his restaurant, and throughout the evening he piled on twisted bits of vine that crackled and spat, and gently roared into the kind of embers that keep the chilliest nights at bay. Apparently there is a surfeit of wine in Cyprus and it’s forcing the price down too low, so the government is currently subsidising farmers to pull up their vines and keep goats instead; therefore we decided to send a small but heartfelt thank you to the government for the resulting surfeit of fire fodder, by ploughing through a couple of bottles of local plonk to keep the night at bay.

Meanwhile, locals drifted in and out of Perry’s, no doubt attracted by the smoke piling out of the chimney and the increasingly boisterous conversation bubbling away behind the steamed windows. One particularly charismatic chap called Stavros said he’d lived in this area for nigh on 46 years, and he’d never seen it snow here before, which probably explained why the rest of the locals kept leaping out of the restaurant and jumping around in the snow as if they’d never seen the stuff before. I think at this point someone else chipped in that it was the coldest and wettest February on record, but by this time Perry had plied us with so much complimentary brandy that I was way past caring. Besides, there’s nothing quite like good food, good wine, good brandy and a good vine fire to blow the weather blues away.

Polis

Written: 28 February 2003

Driving north along the coast from Pafos to Polis was delightful, and for the first time in our trip we witnessed people sunbathing, in a pretty little spot called Coral Bay. If the weather was going to be pleasant, then I had high hopes for our planned hike round the Akamas Peninsula, just west of the town of Polis. I was getting a little tired of only being able to explore Cyprus with the bent back of the man who can’t use his umbrella because it’s too windy; some sunshine-soaked wandering was long overdue.

Polis is a pretty little place, even if its picturesque square is surrounded by buildings whose concrete lines defy even the most optimistic architectural fan. It’s obviously somewhere that closes down in the off-season, as only the fourth hotel we tried was open, and when we wandered around town to find somewhere to eat, the desperate tone of the lady who tried to persuade us to eat at her Chinese restaurant was enough to scare us off. But we weren’t here for sweet and sour pork; we were here to explore one of the last remaining wildernesses on Cyprus.

The Akamas Peninsula

Of course, we woke up the next morning to rain, and as we drove west towards the peninsula, the frustrating prospect of yet another day in the driving rain irritated me almost as much as the dangerously idiotic bravado of the boy racers who make up a noticeable proportion of Cyprus’s drivers. While four-wheel-drive after four-wheel-drive overtook me on blind corners, we headed west for the Baths of Aphrodite, a tourist attraction on the coach-tour circuit that nonetheless signals the start of a number of walking tracks through the unspoilt Akamas Peninsula.

Miraculously the weather cleared up as we arrived at the baths, themselves nothing more than a small pool and dripping waterfall, even if swimming there is supposed to bring you eternal life (which, I guess, is why it’s forbidden, as that would only provide another excuse for the locals to drive like maniacs). From the baths two nature trails lead along well-marked routes into the heart of the peninsula, and if you’re lucky enough to catch them on a clear day, they’re beautiful.

We decided to spend the day walking the Aphrodite Trail, as it climbs to the top of the highest point of the peninsula, the 370m-high Moutti tis Sotiras; the other route, the Adonis Trail, heads into the south of the peninsula and is apparently also beautiful, but for me the views from the peak were hard to top. The walking is easy enough, and after spending the first half of the walk admiring the views east over Polis and Chrysochou Bay, you suddenly come to the top of the mountain, and there, laid out before you, is the view west, its relatively unscarred bays and forest providing a stunning highlight before the descent back to the baths.

I say ‘relatively’ unscarred, because the Akamas Peninsula isn’t totally devoid of human influence, and if things take the course they appear to be taking, it might not be a wilderness for long. Currently most of the peninsula is a British Army firing range, which might sound like a disaster for such a beautiful stretch of land, but in this case it’s the lesser of two evils; having destroyed Agia Napa, Lemesos and Larnaka, and with Pafos treading the thin line between tourism and taste, Cyprus’s hotel developers are rubbing their hands at the thought of developing Akamas into their latest concrete disaster area. However they can’t do that while there’s a chance of ordnance hitting their customers, and there’s also pressure on the government to declare Akamas a National Park, but it looks like the influence of fat politicians may well spoil the party, especially now that the first hotels have actually started appearing. The five-star Anassa Hotel, part-owned by an ex-Foreign Minister who was forced to resign under a cloud of scandal, managed to secure planning permission despite the government’s apparent plan to keep the peninsula free of development, and it looks like this might be just the start. Yet again, it looks like the Cypriot tourist community is happy to cut off its nose despite its face; let’s just hope that if they decide to go for the tourist dollar rather than the National Park route, they don’t fill it with the kind of pap that litters the rest of the island.

Cypriot Architecture

Written: 1 March 2003

In his book Journey into Cyprus, which follows the author on a three-month journey through the pre-invasion Cyprus of 1972, Colin Thubron wrote the following:

[The Cypriot] is entering in thousands that trough – of how many generations? – between peasant honesty and urban refinement. ‘To be civilised,’ a Nicosia friend told me, ‘our people must first be vulgar. It is the bridge between simplicity and culture.’

If this was the case back in 1972, then judging by the healthy prosperity of southern Cyprus today, it’s probably fair to say that a fair chunk of those thousands of Cypriots who started their journey to urban refinement have reached it. The thing that depresses me, as Cyprus gears up for potential inclusion in the European Union, is that the scars of that period of vulgarity are still there for all to see. I’m talking about the appalling state of Cypriot architecture from the 1960s onwards.

Concrete is a modern cancer that seems to have developed a taste for previously beautiful sun-drenched islands, and Cyprus suffers from the blight of grey box-like buildings in the same way that the Greek islands do. Even the most picturesque villages in the Troodos mountains are spoiled by a suburban sprawl of utterly unimaginative concrete bunkers, and although new, richer developments may well be moving away from the ghetto-esque mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s, it’s a shame that Cyprus couldn’t have sold its soul to tourism without bearing the scars pretty much everywhere. Even Nicosia, which hasn’t been able to call itself a tourist destination since 1964, suffers from insensitive concrete development, though perhaps it’s churlish to complain about the quality of redevelopment in a war zone; however it is, I think, fair game to lament the loss of traditional Cypriot stone architecture in the face of yet more concrete.

Another apparently negative aspect of Cypriot architecture, though, is more commendable on closer inspection. Even those developments that manage to capture a pleasant white-and-red villa style tend to come attached to rows of ugly water tanks, sitting on their roofs like industrial experiments gone wrong.

It would be easy to criticise this unpleasant trait as unfortunate, except each of these tanks is attached to a solar panel that heats the water in the Cypriot sun, thus saving a small fortune in electricity. It still looks awful, especially on rows and rows of apartments, but it’s a trade-off that is worth the sacrifice.

Simply Irresistible

There is a positive side to all this mindless development, though, and that’s its comedy value. If for a moment you can forget just how sad it is to see such a pretty island being dumped on by the tackiest designers on the planet, there’s a lot of hilarity to be found while wandering round the tourist areas of Cyprus.

The two best spots I found for tacky architecture were Agia Napa and Pafos, though the former does it on a far larger scale than the latter. Agia Napa’s tacky buildings are too numerous to list, but special mention must go to the Acropolis Restaurant, a few kilometres west on the main coast road out of town. This restaurant has a bar area outside that’s modelled on – you guessed it – the Acropolis, and for your delectation you can sit on authentically fake lumps of ancient civilisations, assuming such woeful treatment of Greece’s past doesn’t give you indigestion.

Top of the pile, though, has to be the Roman Hotel in Pafos, and its sister hotel, the imaginatively named Roman II Hotel. These two behemoths, situated delightfully close to the ruins of Nea Pafos, are truly amazing, decked out as they are with Greco-Roman frescos on every wall (including those in the gym!), fake statues and bits of authentic ruin kicking about everywhere, and a collection of vases and pots that makes the British Museum look positively bare. Indeed, the hotel’s leaflets (which you can and should pick up from reception as a memento of your visit) have this to say, in English, German and, strangely, Russian:

Once inside the Roman Hotel, you will be stunned, as you are immersed in centuries of Greek history and mythology. Resembling a Greek palace, the museum-like interior has to be seen to be believed.

A Roman Hotel that’s designed to look like a Greek palace? That’s just the start. I genuinely recommend a visit if you’re in town, as it’s the funniest thing you’ll see all week (until then, feast your eyes on their website). Only after seeing it in the flesh will you appreciate that the guy who wrote the leaflet had a masterful way with sarcasm. At least, I hope he did; I really was stunned, and it really did have to be seen to be believed. Hell, my eyes are still hurting...

Place Names in Cyprus

Written: 2 March 2003

With Cyprus being so bitterly divided, it comes as no surprise to find that a bit of geographical revisionism has been going on. This is particularly prevalent in the north, where all Greek writing has been obliterated from signposts, and place names have officially been changed to reflect the Turkish occupation of that part of the island. It means that places in northern Cyprus can have a number of different names, depending on whom you ask.

In the south the place names haven’t changed, but things are just as confusing for foreigners, as the southern part of the island uses the Greek alphabet, which doesn’t have an exact transliteration into the Roman alphabet at the best of times (for example the letter γ is sometimes like a ‘y’ and sometimes like a ‘g’, and the letter π is often a ‘p’ but also, at times, a ‘b’). To make things even more confusing, the Cypriot government adopted an EU-recommended transliteration scheme in 1994 that totally changed the way Cypriot place names are written in the Roman alphabet. By all accounts the Cypriots themselves aren’t terribly impressed with the new versions, even though their road signs have almost all changed to the new scheme; however, foreigners really have a problem with the new system, as the previous names were relatively phonetic, unlike the new ones.

One good example is Agia Napa, which was known as Ayia Napa before 1994 (and that’s how you pronounce it, as the γ after the Α in Αγια is pronounced as a ‘y’ in this case). Another cracker is Lefkosia, which used to be known as Nicosia; in this case those behind the change felt that Nicosia was a hangover from British rule (despite the fact that the name was adopted by the Lusignans), so the change to the Greek version of Lefkosia wasn’t so much to do with transliteration as nationalism.

So what’s a writer to do? Well, I started writing these articles with a modern map in front of me, and therefore I’ve ended up using the new versions, even though most UK tour operators, Friends of the Earth, some guidebook publishers and a number of important international organisations have decided to ignore the new scheme and stick to the old versions. The only place where I use the old version in preference is in the article on Nicosia, because nobody I’ve met uses the new version, and the internationally accepted name for the city is still Nicosia. Where possible I’ve pointed out the previous spelling in a footnote, but that’s about as much as anyone can do without including the old name in brackets every time, and that would make it unreadable.

Still, Cyprus isn’t the first country with variable spelling, and it won’t be the last, so it’s not worth getting in a strop...

A Brief History of Cyprus

Written: 3 March 2003

Writing a brief history of Cyprus is challenging, if only because there’s so much of it. When writing about Cyprus in The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron said:

History in this island is almost too profuse. It gives one a sort of mental indigestion.

This was written back in 1937, before the shit really hit the fan, so I hope this short history doesn’t prove too indigestible, or too brief.

- Prehistoric Period

8000 BC – 2300 BC

Ancient settlements from this period have been found in Choiokoitia and Sotira, where copper production develops and ceramics are produced.

- Bronze Age

2300 BC – 1050 BC

This period is characterised by trade with Egypt and Syria, the introduction of a Cypro-Minoan script (still not deciphered), and the first fortifications in places like Kition in modern-day Larnaka.

- Iron Age

1050 BC – 750 BC

This is a bit of a dark age, with Cyprus being cut off from the rest of the world for a couple of centuries. Also known as the Geometric Age after the designs on contemporary pottery.

- Archaic Period

750 BC – 475 BC

Apart from a few decades of Assyrian rule, Cyprus flourishes as an independent state, the last time Cyprus is both united and independent until the 20th century.

- Classic Period

475 BC – 325 BC

Cyprus becomes a Persian naval base, and Cyprus gets involved in the struggle between Persia and Greece, which will characterise the island’s tug-of-war position for the rest of its history.

- Hellenistic Period

325 BC – 294 BC

Cyprus becomes a province of Greece after siding with Alexander the Great against the Persians.

- Ptolemic Period

294 BC – 58 BC

After Alexander’s death, Cyprus is witness to a brief civil war in which Ptolemy I of Egypt prevails. Egyptian rule is relatively peaceful and prosperous.

- Roman Empire

58 BC – 395 AD

In 58 BC Cyprus becomes a province of the Roman Empire, during which time the mosaics of Pafos are built, and Christianity comes to the island.

- Early Byzantine Period

395 – 647

Ruled from Constantinople as part of the Empire’s Byzantium area, many Christian basilicas are built after a number of earthquakes decimate the island’s Roman cities.

- Arab Rule

648 – 963

Under the Arab-Byzantine treaty, the island accepts Muslims and remains demilitarised. However, Arab rule is based on raping and pillaging the island, and during this time many religious icons are hidden in caves to avoid not only the Arabs, but also the iconoclasts, who believe in the destruction of all religious iconography.

- Middle Byzantine Period

963 – 1184

Byzantine Emperor Nikiphorous II Phokas drives the Muslims out of Cyprus, leading to two centuries of relative calm and prosperity.

- The Crusaders

1184 – 1192

In 1184 the greedy and cruel Isaac Komnenos seizes power and breaks from Constantinople, but in 1191 Richard the Lionheart takes Cyprus after his sister and fiancée are nearly taken hostage there. After plundering the island, Richard sells the island to the Knights Templar and continues crusading, and they then sell it to a minor French noble and crusader, Guy de Lusignan.

- Lusignan Rule

1192 – 1489

Descendants of Lusignan rule the island and marry into European royal families, signalling a decadent ruling class while the Greek Orthodox population bides its time. A war with Genoa in 1373 seriously weakens the Lusignans’ position, and when King Kames II marries a Venetian royal in 1472 and then dies, it paves the way for the Venetians to force an abdication of the last Lusignan.

- Venetian Rule

1489 – 1571

Byzantine painting flourishes under the Venetian Republic, but Venetian rule is seen as even more oppressive than the Lusignans, and in 1562 a popular uprising helped weakens the Venetians. Egypt falls to the Ottoman Empire in 1517, surrounding Cyprus on three sides with Turkish rule, and when the inevitable Ottoman invasion comes in 1570, Cyprus only holds out for a few months.

- Ottoman Rule

1571 – 1878

Ottoman rule tolerates both Muslim and Christian beliefs, but Cyprus becomes one of the worst ruled and most neglected parts of the Ottoman Empire. The people suffer under huge taxes, and regular rebellions ensue. In 1878 the Anglo-Turkish Convention is signed, in which Turkey hands over administrative and occupation rights on Cyprus to the British, in return for the British helping to stop the Russian advance on Istanbul the year before.

- British Rule

1878 – 1960

The Cypriots hope that the British will do the same with Cyprus as they did with the Ionian islands – hand them over to Greece, in other words – but instead the British formally annexe Cyprus in 1914, and alongside a reasonable governmental system, they impose crippling taxes on the population, partly due to the wording of the Anglo-Turkish Convention, which precludes Britain from spending too much on Cypriot development. In the 1930s, calls for enosis (union with Greece) reach fever pitch, resulting in the first of many civil disturbances. After World War II an offer from the British for limited self-rule is rejected by supporters of enosis, and by 1950 Archbishop Makarios III calls a referendum that shows 96 per cent of Greek Cypriots support enosis; however the Turkish minority (18 per cent of the population) are strongly opposed to union with Greece, and combined with a little ‘divide and conquer’ politics by the British, this sets the scene for arguments between Britain, Greece and Turkey on the issue. In 1954 EOKA (National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) is formed by Makarios and General George Grivas, and starts a campaign to oust the British and bring about enosis. The British arrest and deport Makarios, but the British finally accept the concept of independence ‘in principle’ and he returns in 1957. In 1958 the TMT (Turkish Resistance Organisation) is founded to counter EOKA activity, and a bomb in June 1958 outside the Turkish press office in Nicosia (later shown to have been planted by the TMT) sparks off Cyprus’s first intercommunal riots. After the riots are quelled and EOKA and TMT sign a truce, the British finally hand over control of the island on 16 August 1960, apart from three sovereign bases, which remain British. Archbishop Makarios is installed as the first President, and as part of the constitution Britain, Turkey and Greece are appointed as guarantors of peace in independent Cyprus, and Grivas leaves for Greece in disgust at Makarios’ sell-out of the enosis cause.

- Early Independence

1960 – 1964

Peaceful independence proves impossible under the constitution drawn up as part of the independence process, and Makarios’ proposal of thirteen amendments, which remove the power accorded by the constitution to the minority Turkish Cypriots, is met with disdain from Turkey. On 21 December 1963, shots are exchanged between Greek-Cypriot police and a Turkish-Cypriot motorist, and within hours EOKA and TMT are back in action. Chaos strikes the capital Nicosia, and a UK-brokered cease-fire on Christmas Day brings the Green Line into being. The UN is brought in to maintain the peace.

- Self-imposed Segregation

1964 – 1974

Although this period is relatively stable, the Turkish-Cypriots maintain their own self-contained areas of the island, preferring to live in enclaves that are separated from the Greek-Cypriot majority, the division in Nicosia being a prime example. In 1971 Grivas slips back into Cyprus and forms EOKA-B with support from Greece’s military junta, but he dies in January 1974 while still in hiding. Makarios writes to the Greek junta asking them to remove their EOKA-B troops, but in response the junta authorises the overthrow of Makarios, installing their own puppet President, Nikos Sampson. This gives Turkey an excuse to invade the island, in their role as guarantor of peace, and Cyprus becomes the battlefield for EOKA-B and Greek forces on one side, and the Turkish army on the other. The whole affair topples the Greek junta from power, and at the UN-brokered cease-fire on 16 August 1974 the island remains split between Turkey in the north and Cyprus in the south. Makarios is reinstalled as President, and the blueprint for the current situation in Cyprus is set.

- A Split Country

1974 onwards

Despite periodic pressure from the UN, Cyprus remains split in two. The south experiences a massive boom in tourism, while the north fares less well. Pressure to unify before joining the EU brings about unification demonstrations in Nicosia in 2003, but nobody really knows what will happen.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 3 March 2003

I liked Cyprus, though for different reasons than I was expecting to. I’m not a great beach worshipper, so visiting in late February sounded perfect, but as luck would have it (and as everyone kept reminding us) we picked the coldest and wettest February on record to explore the island. It’s worth bearing this in mind when reading my travelogue; Kourion in the summer would be a totally different experience to Kourion in the winter, I’m sure.

Luckily my personal highlights didn’t depend on the weather too much, and the most interesting ones – Nicosia and skiing on Mt Olympos – were positively enhanced by the bad weather, the first by increased atmospherics, and the latter by increased amounts of powdery snow. Nicosia really has to be seen to be believed, and while crossing into North Nicosia might not be approved by the Greek Cypriots of the south, it’s highly recommended, if only because the North Nicosians are so amazingly friendly.

Indeed, it’s the people who really make Cyprus a great place, along with the mountains, the beaches, the World Heritage ruins, the few remaining wilderness areas and the politics. The mosaics in Pafos shouldn’t be missed, and nor should the view into northern Cyprus from Deryneia, and if you’re not around in the ski season, walking the trails around Mt Olympos would be a great way to spend the day (as is exploring the Akamas Peninsula). The food’s not bad, either, even if there’s a bit too much of a tendency towards chips, though be warned that you’ll be hard pressed to find anything edible in off-season spots like Larnaka.

Would I go back, though? Possibly, but after two weeks driving round the southern half of the island, I feel that I’ve pretty much covered it. Of course, there’s always more to see – for some reason I couldn’t get excited about the World Heritage churches of the Troodos Mountains, possibly because the thought of tracking down the key-holder in the driving rain was more than I could bear – but Cyprus isn’t that big, and it’s easy to cover it all in a rushed week or a leisurely fortnight. This is part of its charm, of course; with a hire car, it’s perfect for exploring, especially if you’re from a country that drives on the left, like the UK. It’s also worth pointing out that Cyprus is not a cheap place to visit; in the winter the prices do take a dive, but places also close, and by all accounts Cyprus in the summer is just a bit too crowded and a bit too hot. Still, it depends what you’re going there for, I guess; if you’re off to Agia Napa to pull, it’s not much use if there’s nobody there.

In other words, Cyprus is a great place for a holiday. It’s not necessarily a great place for mind-blowing travelling, but then again it doesn’t pretend to be. If you’ve got the money, give it a try.

Cuba: Havana and the Bay of Pigs

Heaving on a Jet Plane

Written: 5 March 2005

I can only assume it was karma of some sort. Perhaps it was a payback for all those times I’ve sat on the sofa watching people on reality TV suffering at the hands of the airlines and thought, ‘Well, what do you expect when you turn up ten minutes before take-off?’ Despite all the travelling I’ve done and all the air miles I’ve put in, I’ve never been one of those unlucky people whose holidays have been derailed before they’ve even begun. I’ve never had to sleep in an airport, and I’ve never experienced the shambolic sight of an airline trying to deal with an angry horde of bitter holidaymakers... until now. At last, I’ve joined the club.

I’d planned it all so carefully, too. Ever since a balmy night in 1997 when I landed in Indonesia in the middle of the night with no local currency, no words of the local language, no accommodation booked and absolutely no idea what I was doing, I’ve tried to avoid landing in a brand new country without at least some kind of safety net. The Internet is a godsend; before leaving London I’d booked three nights in a hotel with a few mouse clicks and spent precious lunch hours hunting around for a civilised flight to Havana. I carefully tiptoed around the cheaper end of the schedules, where Iberia cheerfully rules the airwaves with a whole bag of flights that guarantee the maximum amount of jet lag, and instead I went for Air France, whose main Saturday flight from Paris lands at Havana’s José Martí International Airport at a convenient six thirty in the evening. ‘Perfect,’ I thought, and turned my attention to more important matters, such as tracking down my well-worn copy of The Old Man and the Sea.

Technical Difficulties

I’ve written many a story about terrible journeys in dilapidated African trucks, belching Indian buses and Indonesian sardine cans, and how, when the pain barrier is a dim and distant memory and things take yet another turn for the worse, there’s always an element of, ‘Well, you get what you pay for.’ When it costs threepence for the miniscule corner of a wooden bench in a beaten-up old tin can that looks like it runs on luck, homemade spare parts and prayer, it’s a bit rich to complain when the wheels fall off and you don’t get to your destination until halfway through the next day. Besides, there’s always something interesting in transport disasters, not least the reaction of the locals, who mostly just shrug their shoulders and spark up another cigarette. Travel disasters in the developing world are a part of travelling, and they often make for great stories.

If only it was like that when companies like Air France get hit with the stupid stick. Without wanting to dwell on the details – particularly as my brain has already started filing away the memories in the box marked ‘utterly pointless waste of time’ – Air France managed to keep me and an entire Boeing 747 of passengers profoundly irritated for a whole day, and not once did I think, ‘Well, you get what you pay for.’

It started at about 11.30am, when we arrived in Paris to catch the 1.30pm connecting flight to Havana. ‘I’m afraid the departure of flight AF474 has been delayed until 1800,’ said the robotic girl at the Air France transfer desk, ‘but here is a meal voucher for 15 euros, which you can present at any of the restaurants in the departure lounge.’

‘Fair enough,’ I thought, and Peta and I wandered up into the departure lounge, took a minute to soak up the atmosphere, and sagged into quiet desperation as we realised that Terminal 2A at Charles de Gaulle Airport is the aviation equivalent of velour. It’s tasteless, shabby, dated and the French should be thoroughly ashamed of it. I was most impressed by the dirty fabric seats littering the foyer, whose headrests were stained with the dandruff and grease of decades of unwashed heads in transit; I also marvelled at the grumpy restaurant – the only one in the whole departure lounge, I should add – that single-handedly managed to destroy France’s claims to be the culinary kings of Europe; I amused myself by admiring the disgusting concrete grot that passes for architecture in Paris’s international airport; but most of all I was deeply proud of the way the mostly French passengers kicked off at the Air France staff, shouting at them, stomping their feet, clapping in solidarity at the incompetence of their hosts, and forcing the bewildered customer service girls at the check-in desk to bring the police in to keep the peace. The check-in time slipped from 1715 to 1745 to 1815 to 1845 amid fears that the technical difficulties might ground the plane entirely, but finally we got on board, only to sit there for another two hours while we refuelled, waited for air traffic control to grant us a slot, ran the engines for 15 minutes to de-ice them, waited half an hour for another slot, aborted one take-off halfway along the runway because of ‘technical problems’, and finally got into the air. People cheered; it was sarcasm at its finest.

Luckily there were no screaming babies in the vicinity and we managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep, and apart from one poor man a few rows back who lost his supper in a particularly noisy reaction to turbulence over the east coast of the USA, we landed in one piece at Havana just seven hours late. It was hard to keep smiling as we waited for over an hour for the immigration authorities to stamp our passports, but after changing some cash into Cuban pesos convertibles and grabbing a taxi at the exit, we arrived at the Hotel Deauville at 3am, some 22 hours since the alarm clock had gone off back in London.

It’s one way to get over jet lag, I suppose; we slept like babies all the way through to morning, when we were greeted by warm sunlight, the sound of the sea breaking against the city walls, and the bustling chatter of a city about to celebrate carnival. It’s funny how airline incompetence doesn’t seem so important after a few hours in the Cuban sunshine...

Havana

Written: 6 March 2005

There’s a reason why life classes at art school don’t involve young female models stripping off to reveal perfectly toned bodies and porcelain skin, and it’s not just because art school students don’t deserve that sort of luck; it’s because the drooping body of your average pensioner is far more interesting than the image of youthful perfection that fills entire shelves of the modern newsagent. Perfect bodies are everywhere, but men’s glossies have more to do with titillation than beauty, because beauty isn’t just about appearance, it’s also about character. That’s one reason why Havana is such a beautiful city; it might be slowly crumbling into the sea, but that’s one of the things that makes it so appealing.

Architecturally speaking, Havana is like a gracious old woman sitting by the sea, staring out through crinkled eyes at the deep blue waves of the Florida Straits. Look into her eyes and there’s a youthful twinkle in there, almost an air of mischief, because behind the crumbling façade, Havana is sexy, hip and gorgeous. One day Havana will undoubtedly get a facelift and some of the magic will be gone; right now, though, Havana is a glorious synthesis of the very old and the very new, and it’s thrilling.

Along the Malecón

It’s along the Malecón that Havana’s architecture really shines. The Malecón is the coastal road that hugs the shoreline of northern Havana, and to say that it’s an atmospheric place for a stroll is an understatement. While waves burst along the shore, sprinkling the unwary with the smell of brine and deep sea fishing, an intriguing array of buildings line the road like individual works of art. The majority of them appear to be losing their battle with the corrosive sea air, and this is what makes the Malecón so wonderful, because nature has taken these old buildings and stripped away all their pretensions, leaving the bones behind in an enticing state of disrepair.

It’s this fragility that gives each of the buildings its own, distinct character. You can see the different layers of colour used over the years as the salt air strips away the paint, leaving nothing more than a glimpse into the grandeur that was Havana in its pre-revolution decadence. Delicately carved balustrades peer out from behind patches of hastily applied concrete, giving the impression of a row of houses propped up by large, grey sticking plasters. Some buildings defy the laws of physics, leaning on their neighbours like old men after too many tots of rum, glancing with resignation at the holes of rubble further down the strip where less fortunate friends have finally collapsed.

But these buildings are a long way from being unloved, for even the most skeletal are home to families peeking out from behind row after row of colourful washing, fluttering in the sea breeze. As you stroll along the Malecón, squinting under a turquoise sky, it’s possible to look right through most of the buildings to the streets behind, where streaks of yellow and blue turn out to be taxis and cars that themselves have managed to defy the corrosive effects of the last 60 years.

Havana is indeed like a step back in time, and it’s a delight, though one wonders how long it can last. It’s perfectly understandable that the people of Havana should want to modernise their city and rebuild for the future, and quite right too; I just hope they manage to modernise it in a way that retains its unique character. There’s a big difference between youthful beauty and the fakery of plastic surgery, and it would be a shame to see Havana go from timeless classic to architectural Botox when the money finally starts to pour in. Thankfully, that time appears to be some way off, and even more thankfully, the Cubans appear to adore the architecture they have. And who can blame them?

The Cigar Scam

Every city has its scam, and Havana’s is – not surprisingly – centred round cigars. Within an hour of leaving our hotel on our first morning in the Havana sunlight, we had our first run-in with Cuba’s jineteros, so-called because like jockeys, they ride on tourists’ backs.

‘Hello, where are you from?’ is the normal introductory line, and instantly our eyebrows rose. It’s the same in every culture where tourists are rich and it’s more lucrative for young men to try to wangle a few dollars out of the unwary than to get a proper job. It’s the same in the Gambia, Morocco, Mali, India... pretty much anywhere in the developing world, in fact, but the way the scams are played varies wildly. Happily, the jineteros of Cuba are cuddly teddy bears compared to the bloodsuckers of Morocco and Mali; they manage to combine the relaxed attitude of the Gambia’s bumsters with the broad grins of India’s scam merchants, perhaps because their basic needs – food, shelter and clothing – are provided for by the state. Scamming tourists is not a matter of life or death here, it’s all about standard of living; our jinetero had smart jeans, a clean black T-shirt, wrap-around mirrored shades and excellent English. He deserved a fair hearing, so we let him prattle on.

‘My name is Fernando,’ said Fernando, shaking our hands with a grin. ‘So, are you from London?’

We nodded, and he launched into his well-rehearsed story of how his brother lives in New Cross in London, and how he applied for a visa to go to England but was refused, and how wonderful London sounds, and so on and so forth. To give Fernando his dues, he came across as charming, witty and impossible to shake off, so we resigned ourselves to having a tour guide for our stroll along the Malecón.

‘Today is carnival,’ he said, stating the obvious. We’d been woken up by the sounds of bands loosening up in the morning sun, the booming of loudspeakers from garish floats, and the excited chatter of swirling groups of children dressed in ridiculously colourful costumes. ‘It is the day for the children,’ said Fernando, and as we headed further west along the seafront in the direction of Havana’s iconic Hotel Nacional, the crowds filled out and the melee gradually morphed into a static line of dancers warming up on the tarmac. At the head stood a posse of bikers who turned out to be none other than the local police, and two minutes later they roared their engines, slammed on their horns and took off, closely followed by a couple of small floats sporting colourful characters from Cuba’s past, and four horse-drawn carriages decked out with glittering decorations. And that’s where the whole thing ground to a halt.

Out of politeness we waited for a good ten minutes while distorted salsa music pumped out of a shiny blue truck further back down the line and the crowd milled around expectantly, but with the combined effects of jet lag and a midday sun that was proving much hotter than we’d expected, we told Fernando we were going back to the hotel to get my hat and turned to say goodbye. As if; Fernando hadn’t even managed to mention the true motivation behind his befriending us, and it would be rude not to give him at least a chance.

So, a little further back towards our hotel, we sighed a slightly unsurprised ‘yes’ to his suggestion that we pop into a bar on the Malecón to sample Cuba’s most ubiquitous cocktail, the mojito. There’s no way to fight the local tourist tout tax, especially if you don’t yet know how the game is played, and how much can go wrong in a bar in the middle of a carnival? Precisely.

Mojitos are delicious, even at 11am on a Sunday with the tense muscles of jet lag creaking in your neck. Take a generous sprinkling of sugar and add the juice of half a lime and some scrunched up mint leaves, mix it up, pour on a stiff measure of light dry rum and add soda water and ice... and serve with a straw. ‘The secret of a good mojito is to stir it well,’ said Fernando, whirring his straw round his drink like a man possessed, and he was right. The combination of sugary lime and teeth-tingling rum is delightful, particularly when served with the most essential ingredient of all: the sun flickering off the deep, blue sea.

‘This is my friend Julio,’ said Fernando, turning towards a man on the next table who smiled at us and offered us a cigarette.

‘No thanks, we don’t smoke,’ said Peta, sucking on her mojito.

‘Ah, but you like cigars, no?’ said Fernando. ‘In Cuba we have the best cigars in the world.’

‘Not really,’ I lied, sensing that this was the hard sell. ‘Actually, it’s pretty hard to smoke a cigar in England now. You try lighting up a cigar in a restaurant in London, and they’ll throw you out.’

This wasn’t what Fernando wanted to hear, so he engaged the selective hearing so beloved of shifty salesmen and pressed on.

‘I work in a cigar factory,’ he said. ‘Romeo y Julieta in Pinar del Río. I am the tour guide there. Perhaps you have heard of it?’

‘My dad used to smoke Romeo y Julieta cigars,’ said Peta.

‘Ah, then you want to buy cigars for your father!’ announced Julio, exhaling a cloud of blue cigarette smoke. ‘But you don’t want to buy cigars from a shop, shop is very expensive and no good.’

‘Actually, I don’t want to buy cigars from anywhere,’ said Peta. ‘He gave up.’

‘Yes, but I can give you great deal, said Fernando. ‘You pay fifty, eighty dollars for one cigar in shop, I can get you excellent deal. You come to my house.’

‘But we don’t want to buy any cigars, thanks,’ I said. ‘We don’t smoke. No me gusta fumar.’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I will just show you a box, and you can try a cigar and your wife can try a panatella. You can just try. I tell you they are good, better than in the shop.’

And with that Julio stood up and said, ‘I go to get you a box,’ and with a wink he shot across the bar and into an alleyway.

‘Listen Fernando,’ said Peta, touching his arm and looking him straight in the eye. ‘I know this is how you make your money, and that is fine. But we are not going to buy any cigars, today or tomorrow, and it doesn’t matter how good they are. We do not want any cigars, OK?’

Suddenly Fernando knew he’d lost the sale, and he stood up and called Julio back, his face a picture as his male bravado wrestled with his being firmly told by a woman that he wasn’t going to get anywhere. ‘OK,’ he shrugged. ‘You understand, this is how I make my money.’

‘We know,’ I said, ‘and you have been very good company. We’ll pay for your mojito and you can head off into the crowd to look for people who might want to buy your cigars. Without you we might never have tried a mojito, and they’re delicious.’

And with that, we shook both their hands, smiled and left them to scout out for other potential jockey fodder. If only all the touts of the world were this pleasant, life would be a lot easier.

The Fag Lady

The Malecón might be one of the most intriguing parts of Havana, but the most beautiful has to be Habana Vieja, or Old Havana. Habana Vieja takes up the eastern half of the city centre, sandwiched between Bahía de la Habana on the right and the delightfully dilapidated housing of Centro on the left. As the name suggests, Habana Vieja is where the really old buildings can be found; the whole area is crammed with old plazas and winding streets, and simply wandering around is a treat for the senses.

It isn’t just because of the atmospheric squares such as Plaza de Armas, Plaza San Francisco and La Plaza Vieja, where pretty cafés spill out onto cobbled stones beneath the colonial towers of Spanish-era cathedrals; it isn’t just because the streets are lined with houses whose crumbling beauty is as stately as it is sad; and it isn’t just because the smell of cigar smoke hangs in the air, masking the subtle odour of drains and the acrid fumes from the buses that roar around the towering dome of the Capitolio. Habana Vieja is a delight because at every turn you can look into the buildings and get a quick glimpse of what life is like in the capital of Cuba, and every building is different. One barred window hides an ornate staircase whose paintwork is a sedimentary history of the ironwork’s colours over the years; in another a family sits around their living room, hiding from the midday sun and gently rocking the afternoon away; yet another is home to a man whose face is almost entirely made up of crinkles, and who appears to be living in a skip, surrounded by what looks like rubbish, but which to him is home. In cold countries, life is lived behind closed doors, because the temperature is too low to leave anything open; in Habana Vieja, the windows have no glass and the shutters are open all the way through to the shaded yards out the back. Washing flutters in a gentle breeze, dogs wander in and out of houses like trusted neighbours in times gone by, and music pours out of windows, doors and basements with the distinctive hip-swinging beat of música Cubana. It’s a heady mix.

One of the most enduring images of Havana, though, is the proliferation of ancient cars, and there are few better places to see the 1950s Cadillacs and Fords of Cuba than outside the Capitolio. This building, constructed between 1929 and 1932 by the dictator Machado, is a pretty convincing copy of the Capitol in Washington DC, and it’s an incongruous sight in a country whose relationship with the USA is far from comfortable. It was built in an attempt to suck up to the US at a time when American money was starting to drift towards Cuba; prohibition was kicking in back in the States, and the less salubrious elements of American society – the Mafia, in particular – were looking to make money elsewhere, and Cuba was a prime target. This emblem of Cuba’s past is now home to the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the National Library of Science and Technology, and it’s a focal point for the wonderful cars of Havana, which sit outside in photogenic poses that it’s hard not to fall in love with.

But central Havana is much more than just cars and Capitolios, and taking a breather in Parque Central is a wonderful way to soak it all up. We took a seat on the southern side of the park – our bench only had two slats missing, which made it positively luxurious compared to its neighbours – and watched as buses zoomed past, looking like the bastard offspring of long-distance trucks and Portakabins. Old men wobbled past on bicycles with no brakes or gears, families wandered along the sidewalk, towing children in various states of tantrum, and the young women of Havana sauntered past in clothes designed with the sole purpose of celebrating the posterior.

Next to us on the bench sat an old lady holding a packet of cigarettes and a bag, and while Havana whirled around us, she sat as still as a statue, gazing into space. I didn’t take a great deal of notice of her until a man came up to her and spoke some hurried Spanish, and she opened her bag, pulled out a loaf of white bread with the end nibbled off, fished around in her bag for a white plastic bag, untied the handles and pulled out an unopened packet of cigarettes. The man gave her some money, which she put into her bag, and ten seconds later the bread was back in the top and the old lady had gone back to being just another observer of the Capitolio’s bustle.

Five minutes later another man came by, and this time the old lady pulled out the loaf of bread, untied the white plastic bag and fished around for a newspaper. He nodded and said a few words, and she pulled out four more copies of the same paper, checking the dates on the front. Again the man paid up, tipped his hat and left the old woman to reassemble her bag, all the time keeping a watchful eye on surroundings.

‘Perhaps she’s peddling decadent cigarettes and capitalist propaganda,’ said Peta. ‘Who would suspect a little old lady of that?’

And with that we left her and her black market shopping bag and wandered back to our hotel for a siesta.

Tourist Tours

Back at the hotel, we arranged to hire a car for ten days from the man at the Havanautos desk, and that night we treated ourselves to a very pleasant meal in an Italian restaurant just off the Plaza de Armas. As if to stock up on extravagant tourist attractions before hitting the trail, we decided to go home via El Floridita, the bar where Ernest Hemingway drank far too many cocktails in the years when he lived in Cuba. The bar is roundly lambasted by the guidebooks as a rip-off and a tourist trap, but there’s a great deal of fun to be had in tourist traps like these, and we decided to brave it.

El Floridita is amazing, mainly because it’s such a strange place. It’s a shrine to Hemingway, with a life-sized bronze statue of the great man propping up the left-hand end of the bar, and with the cocktails retailing at $6 each – about twice the price of a normal Havana bar – and waiters wearing wide-lapelled red jackets and the kind of haughty expressions that mean you’d rather chew gravel than give them a tip, it’s designed to be an exclusive joint. But sit there for more than a few minutes, and the cracks begin to show. First up, a lady pops out of a side door every five minutes, dressed in a white skirt and jacket, and she proceeds to pester each table in turn, holding up a selection of Ernest Hemingway T-shirts and saying, ‘You want T-shirt, Hemingway T-shirt?’

As if this isn’t enough, every few minutes the door opens and in troops a gaggle of tourists in inappropriate multi-pocketed shorts with a whole Christmas tree of camera lenses hanging round their necks, nervously glancing round for directions from their guides. ‘Over here,’ grin their hosts, pointing towards the statue, and suddenly the flashbulbs go off in a cacophony of red-eye prevention, following which the whole gang turns around and heads back out of the door. For the unfortunate souls who thought it might be fun to have a daiquirí at the same end of the bar as the Hemingway statue, it’s a blinding experience; for the rest of the tourists in the bar – and you only get tourists here, plus a handful of local guides who know only too well how to wring the dollars from their charges – it’s a strange experience, watching the tourists as they roll in and out like people on a Hemingway-themed amusement park ride. It’s frankly bizarre, but then again, so is El Floridita.

Thankfully El Floridita is far from representative of Havana, even if its cocktails really are rather good. Trust Hemingway to get that part right...

Driving in Cuba

Written: 8 March 2005

Welcome to the most amazing video game release of the year! Take on the challenge of navigating[1] without any road signs! See if you can steer round the hitchers, carts, bicycles and vultures! And don’t let those pesky police get the better of you in this crazy, real-life driving drama! Welcome to Gran Turismo, Cuban-style – don’t forget to fasten your seat belts!

Yes, driving in Cuba is like being in a particularly surreal video game, and once you get used to it, it’s just as enjoyable. We started our road trip by getting hopelessly lost on our way out of Havana, which is not surprising given that we went wrong within a few hundred metres of leaving our hotel. We’d hoped to go through the tunnel under the Bahía de La Habana and onto the ring road, where we hoped to join the Autopista Nacional – the A1 – to take us all the way to the Bay of Pigs, some 200km to the southeast. Instead we enjoyed an unexpected tour of Havana’s extensive docks and ended up in suburbia, where we stopped three times to ask where we could find the autopista, with varying amounts of success. Eventually we happened on a junction with a major, three-lane road, and fishing out our compass (an essential tool for navigating in Cuba) we turned left, heading for the east.

The autopista is like a strange netherworld, populated by characters that you wouldn’t believe if they weren’t in front of your very eyes. There is almost no traffic on this wide, three-lane motorway, but when you do happen across an obstacle, it’s either an ancient 1950s American car, full to overflowing with bouncing locals; a tractor, carrying hay in the opposite direction to the traffic; a big, black vulture picking at something unidentifiable in the middle of the road; or another rental car, which you can spot because it’s the only one that looks like it’s from this millennium. Adding in a little spice are the young men standing in the fast lane – yes, the fast lane – holding out long strings of onions and motioning for you to slow down, and large numbers of hopeful hitchhikers standing in the slow lane, optimistically thumbing each vehicle down for a lift (as the public transport system is so stretched in Cuba, hitchhiking is the mainstay for most of the population). Finally, there are the potholes, which are there to make sure you don’t fall asleep in the long stretches between life forms. It’s a gas.

There are also service stations along the way, if that’s what you can call the shacks dotted along the side. We stopped at a comparatively grand one that obviously catered for tourists, judging by the postcards, CDs and wooden carvings for sale in the shop. We bought a ham and cheese sandwich each – which proved to be pretty good given the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere – and washed it down with freshly squeezed orange juice, a common theme of roadside stops throughout Cuba. A lame straight-to-TV American cop film blurted out of a distorted television while the odd car shot by outside, and that, it seemed, was the sum of activity on the autopista.

Off the motorway things are made considerably more interesting by a continuing lack of signposts, even larger numbers of tractors, hitchhikers every few metres, and bicycle rickshaws (known as bici-taxis) absolutely everywhere. Bicycles carrying a minimum of two people weave in and out of the side of the road, and you have to give way to them, because with more than two million bicycles in Cuba, they own the road. The potholes get deeper and navigating by compass is the only way to go, and if you’re lucky – like we were – you may even get flagged down by a policeman. Ironically he fined us for running a stop sign, which we found rather surprising since the last road sign we’d seen had been at Heathrow... or at least we think he fined us, as he simply took our rental agreement and scribbled on it. We will, no doubt, end up paying a little extra when we hand our car in later, but such is life.

This did throw us a bit, though, because amongst the large population of hitchhikers in Cuba, there are quite a few police. One of the talents of driving in Cuba is deciphering their hand signals; sometimes the police might be flagging you down for a lift, and sometimes they’re flagging you down to give you a ticket. We never really worked out which, so we just kept driving, hoping for the best and looking out in vain for signposts.

It gets my vote for game of the month, anyway...

[1] If you’re planning to use a sat nav in Cuba, then I can highly recommend the Cuba GPS map from the guys at GPS TravelMaps (and they have a great range of maps for other Caribbean and central American destinations too). However, do bear in mind that it’s illegal to bring a GPS into Cuba, and if they find one in your luggage, they’ll confiscate it and you’ll have to reclaim it again on leaving the country... so be warned!

Playa Girón

Written: 8 March 2005

The plan had been quite simple. We’d hoped to drive to Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs, book into a casa particular and chill out in this historic spot for a few days while planning the rest of our jaunt round Cuba. Of course, things didn’t quite turn out like that...

Casas particulares are Cuba’s equivalent to the British bed and breakfast; they’re rooms in private homes that are rented out to tourists, but this being Cuba, there are quite a few restrictions. Only those licensed to do so can put up foreigners in their houses and there are strict penalties for those who break the rules, and each house can only rent out up to two rooms. Playa Girón has quite a few casas particulares as the Bay of Pigs is a rather famous place, and we figured we’d work out how to find them when we got there.

Luckily casas particulares are pretty easy to spot. They all have a distinctive sign stuck on the outside that’s not unlike the international sign for a Youth Hostel, and this year’s sign is in green (the licence has to be renewed each year, so although there were other places with red and blue signs, it was only the green ones that still meant business). We simply screeched to a halt outside one of these signs and went inside to ask about accommodation.

‘I’m afraid we’re full,’ said the owner of the first one, ‘but let me ring around to see if anyone else has room.’

‘Thanks very much,’ we said as he dialled a number on his roaming telephone and started speaking super-fast Spanish down the receiver.

‘I’m afraid everywhere is full,’ he said after a while, and shrugged his shoulders sympathetically. ‘We have many tourists at the moment. There is always the hotel.’

We thanked him and drove off to another casa particular, only to hear the same story there. Another casa owner kindly offered to take us down to a neighbour of his who might have vacancies, but we still had no luck; all the casas in Playa Girón were full.

‘Maybe tomorrow?’ said the casa owner, and we wobbled our heads and said, ‘Maybe,’ thanking him for his kind help. And so it was with slightly sunken hearts that we jumped back in the car and headed towards the beach and the Hotel Playa Girón.

Hotel Hell

The casa owners had been, to a tee, smiling, helpful and genuinely sorry that they couldn’t find us somewhere to stay. The grumpy, fat trollop behind the reception desk at the hotel couldn’t have been more of a contrast; when we asked her if she had any rooms, she looked us up and down with clear disdain, put on her most condescending voice and said, ‘I need your passports and $70 in cash.’ Seeing no option I pulled out 70 pesos convertibles, popped them on the desk with our passports, and tried to smile as politely as I could while the old dragon huffed and puffed and grudgingly filled out the forms for our arrival.

‘It is all-inclusive,’ she spat, and indicated that we should hold out our hands.

‘I’m sorry?’ I said, and she repeated the gesture for us to hold out our hands. And that’s when I beheld the true depths of our despair, for she fished out two plastic tags, wrapped one round each of our wrists, and tagged us like chickens in a supermarket.

I swear she enjoyed doing that, the calloused old hag, and my heart slipped so far into my boots that my breath caught in my throat. ‘What on earth have we got into here?’ I thought as she handed over the keys for hut 106a and pointed where it was on the map of the hotel complex. How little I knew...

Our apartment was right on the edge of the complex, a fair walk from the pool and bar complex at the centre of the hotel. It was OK, I guess; it had noisy air conditioning that we avoided like the plague, a scalding shower that pumped out slightly salty water that left us feeling just as sticky as we’d been when we rolled into town, and it was home to a friendly collection of bright green lizards who looked as startled by our arrival as we were by them. We dumped our bags, jumped into our swimming gear and headed back to civilisation.

The first and only positive point of our entire stay was when we realised that ‘all-inclusive’ included the bar as well. Sure, the beer was served in tiny plastic cups with a huge head, and the cocktails – a choice of just four because there was no pineapple juice – tasted as if they’d been created with a SodaStream and a complete lack of imagination, but we’d already paid for them and we soaked up a few as fellow guests wandered around the pool, all of them looking slightly dazed. I sensed a slight air of panic and disappointment in the air, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason. And then Peta pointed to the beach, and it suddenly all made sense. This, after all, was the site of one of the most infamous cock-ups in American history, and what we saw on the beach fitted in perfectly.

An Historical Location

The Bay of Pigs invasion is one of those stories that makes your heart sink at the stupidity of man. When Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba on 1 January 1959, after a long guerrilla campaign to oust the dictator Batista, the US decided it wasn’t happy having a left-wing neighbour so close to the US mainland, so in 1961 Kennedy cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba, and on 14 April 1961 an invasion fleet set out from Nicaragua, consisting of 1400 Cuban émigrés, trained by the CIA in Guatemala and Miami, along with ships from the US Navy acting as escorts. On 15 April, while the invasion fleet was on its way, planes from the Nicaraguan air force bombed Cuba’s airfields with the aim of disabling the Cuban air force before the fleet arrived. Seven men were killed in these raids, and at the airmen’s funeral the next day Castro announced that Cuba was a socialist state, effectively putting up a solid middle finger to the incoming invasion.

The flotilla landed at Playa Girón and Playa Larga in the Bahía del Cochinos (the Bay of Pigs) on 17 April, but the Cuban air force attacked the flotilla and stranded the invading army, who were slowly picked off one by one until they surrendered three days later, with 200 dead. 11 invading planes were shot down and 1197 men from the invasion force were taken captive, to be repatriated to the USA in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine. It’s said that President Kennedy was so horrified at this turn of events that he decided to avoid a massive political fallout by calling on the USA to land on the moon by the end of the decade; whether this is true is debatable, but there’s no doubt that the whole Bay of Pigs escapade was an almighty cock-up, and ever since then the relationship between the USA and Cuba has been decidedly frosty.

Now, it’s not unusual for hotel complexes in the developing world to be walled in; the idea is to keep out any unwanted elements, thus protecting the guests from touts, petty thieves and assorted conmen. Surrounding the Hotel Playa Girón in a huge arc, therefore, is a battered old concrete wall, cutting a bite-shaped semi-circle out of the coastline and preventing anyone from entering or leaving except through the guarded gate on the way into the complex. This isn’t strange in itself, but the Hotel Playa Girón takes things a little further than having a simple perimeter wall. They really mean business.

For not only is there the semi-circular wall cutting the hotel off from Cuba, but there’s another wall along the rocky coastline on either side of the beach. This, I presume, is to stop the resort from eroding into the sea, because this part of the world is prone to hurricanes, and indeed, the last hurricane to hit these parts, back in 2002, did considerable damage. Judging by the desolate hotel grounds, things still aren’t quite back to normal.

But the designers of the Hotel Playa Girón were obviously not content with simply closing off the perimeter and the rocky coast, because some mad fool has built a concrete wall across the mouth of the pleasant crescent-shaped beach, only 50m or so off shore. This means that when you sit there on the beach, all you can see dead ahead is a wall of mouldering concrete grot, stained with green streaks and crumbling gently into the sea. I idly wondered if the locals were worried that someone else might try to invade the beach and these were their defences. If so, they’ve surely succeeded in deflecting future attacks; it’s hard to see why anyone would want to reclaim this small part of holiday hell.

The sense of idiotic desperation that the wall personified managed to pervade the whole complex. The all-inclusive food was at best depressing and grey, and at worst inedible; the free bar continued to serve up plastic cups of watery beer and cocktails that came in different colours but which all tasted of cheap rum and sugary soda; and the evening’s entertainment consisted of a nervous cabaret band playing ill-advised rock ‘n’ roll covers, a surprisingly large number of songs that all sounded exactly like ‘La Bamba’, and a set of schmaltzy western ballads that really didn’t improve under a heavy Spanish accent. We were trapped in a holiday camp disaster zone, and I felt so depressed I couldn’t even see the humour in the groups of tourists from Basingstoke doing their own unique interpretation of salsa dancing. We downed as much all-inclusive alcohol as we could stomach and went to bed, wondering if this was going to be just one typical night in a very, very long holiday from hell.

The next morning we got up, pushed the free breakfast around our plates until finally giving up on it, and decided to make a break for it. Thankfully the world outside the exclusion zone would turn out to be as wonderful as the Hotel Playa Girón was awful, and we didn’t even need a wristband to get in.

Cuba: Central Cuba

Trinidad

Written: 12 March 2005

Trinidad oozes charm, which made it a perfect antidote to the disaster zone of Playa Girón. This time we drove straight into the centre of town, got lost, pulled up by the side of the road to try to work out a strategy for finding accommodation, and a man came out of a nearby casa particular, knocked on the window and asked whether we’d like to see his habitaciónes. We liked what we saw, and so we ended up staying with José and Daisy on Valle Maceo for three very pleasant nights.

In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that we found a casa particular so quickly, because Trinidad has over 300 of them. What did surprise me was that we managed to find one so easily in such a convenient spot, a stone’s throw from the main centre of town; being a UNESCO World Heritage area, Trinidad is a serious tourist draw and is the most visited town in Cuba, which means there are plenty of jineteros only too happy to show you to their favourite casa (or, to be more accurate, the casa that pays them the highest commission). Luckily we’d been nabbed by the owner, José, and it worked out a treat.

Not only did we have a pleasantly cool room in a pretty Trinidad home, but the food that Daisy cooked for us each morning and evening was superb. The main complaint people have about holidaying Cuba is that the food is awful, and if your main source of nutrition is the kind of all-inclusive pap that we’d suffered in Playa Girón, I can see why. Instead of grey, lifeless mush, Daisy fed us with the likes of tender chicken, homemade chips, fresh salad, seafood fried in garlic, succulent pork, and plenty of the national dish, congrís, consisting of perfect rice with red beans. It’s amazing what a difference a good feed makes, and Daisy’s spreads really made that difference.

Historic Trinidad

Not only was our casa particular a vast improvement on the previous night’s hovel, but so was Trinidad itself. It’s easy to see why UNESCO gives it a big thumbs up, as Trinidad is a beautifully preserved example of colonial Spanish architecture, and if you can squint your eyes and mentally block out the large number of tourists milling around the old town centre, it’s easy to imagine that you’re back in a time when old men were old men and their donkeys were more than just photo opportunities for tourist hordes.

The old town centres on Plaza Mayor and its square of white-painted wrought ironwork, tiled walkways and cobbled courtyard. The square is dominated by a grand church, the Iglesia Parroquial de la Santísima Trinidad, which at night sports a neon cross on the top, and surrounding the square are ancient buildings with ornate balconies and shady porches. The square has been considerably cleaned up for the tourists and it feels slightly unused and clinical – not helped by the anti-tout police who guard it night and day – but take a look down the side streets leading in all directions, and it’s hard not to fall for Trinidad’s charms.

With its winding cobbled streets and hardly any signs of modernisation beyond the electrification of the town’s old lampposts, Trinidad is perfect for exploration by foot. Everywhere there are doorways leading to leafy courtyards, which house everything from restaurants and museums to accommodation and tacky tourist shops, and if your idea of heaven is supping a cocktail at a table overlooking a picture-perfect colonial square while a talented Cuban band plays traditional music for your personal entertainment, this is the place for you.

Beauty is Skin Deep

At first we couldn’t resist it; we headed straight for the Plaza Mayor and walked up the wide stone stairway to the east of the Iglesia, taking a seat at one of the white metal tables in the Casa de la Música and returning the waiter’s beaming smile with the order of a Cristal beer and a mojito. I was a little surprised when they brought me my beer in the form of a can and a small, thin plastic cup, as this was clearly the prime tourist drinking spot in Trinidad, but this wouldn’t be the last time that Cuba appeared to be missing a tourist trick. The clientele were exclusively tourists, and I get the feeling that you could charge more than $1 for a beer if you served it in a glass, bought some parasols for the tables and improved the quality of your cocktails. Even in this bar in the centre of Cuba’s most visited city, the corners feel cut.

This may have something to do with the fact that Cubans find it practically impossible to leave their country, so their exposure to the world outside is practically non-existent. We spoke to a local who explained how hard it was for Cubans to break out of the local scene; with an average wage of around $13 a month and a transport system that is so overburdened that hitchhiking is an officially organised solution, he said it was pretty much beyond the average person’s reach to get to Havana, let alone abroad. If you add in the fact that to get a passport your average Cuban will need an official invitation from a foreign embassy, then it’s fair to say that for most Cubans, their only exposure to foreign cultures is through the tourists that turn up on their shores. When you consider that most tourists roll up on organised package tours where all-inclusive and pre-paid are the rules rather than the exception, it’s little wonder that world-class spots like Trinidad serve lame mojitos and canned beer in plastic at knockdown prices.

Of course, this doesn’t stop the tour buses rolling in and the bars filling up, but it does smear a veneer of plastic fakery over the whole Trinidad experience. Once our relief at escaping from the Bay of Pigs had washed over us and drifted into the realm of 3am nightmares and holiday horror stories, it soon became apparent that finding the real soul of Trinidad would be more difficult than it first seemed.

Loud Cuban Bands

We tried valiantly to scratch the surface of Trinidad, but ultimately we failed (unless, of course, Trinidad is little more than a tourist shell, which I don’t really believe, and don’t want to). We spent the first night doing the tourist thing and hanging out in the Casa de la Música, which filled up as the evening progressed until the steps were heaving with crowds of tourists watching the traditional Cuban band halfway down the steps. Despite the perfect setting and the undeniably upbeat music, the atmosphere was a long way from the thumping party vibe portrayed so enticingly in the Bacardi adverts. The crowd clapped politely between each song and hired dancers shook their hips in front of the band, but there was little engagement between the audience and the musicians; this was all about getting that Kodak moment and saying you’d been there. People were nursing their plastic cocktails rather than throwing them back, and I could see people mentally ticking the box marked ‘Evening spent watching salsa band in historic colonial square.’ We left them to it when we couldn’t handle any more drinks, which didn’t take too long.

Irritatingly, the other bars in town felt distressingly similar. Some managed to serve their cocktails in glasses, though the beer always came in a can and plastic cup, and the entertainment always followed the same theme. Each bar consisted of tables facing a stage, on which a band or a dance troupe would strut their stuff. The biggest problem was that the volume was so loud, it killed any chance of an atmosphere starting up; instead, you had a bunch of tourists sitting there, unable to communicate with each other, while entertainment of variable quality blared from the stage. The odd Cuban or South American dancer would kick off in the corner, but the truth was that the entertainment took over each bar completely, which is a bit boring when it’s yet another salsa band playing yet another collection of songs that sound like they’re being played by yet another salsa band. I like Cuban music and have a fair amount in my collection at home, but that doesn’t mean I like it to be the only option, 24/7.

It’s also a prohibitive dancing style for those of us who don’t know how to salsa (i.e. the vast majority of tourists). If you have a band on stage and professional dancers out front pretending to be the audience, then you’re never going to persuade the uncoordinated tourist hordes to jump up onto their two left feet and get into the groove. If only the bands involved themselves in the audience a little more, it might make a difference, but as it is the bar scene in Trinidad is all about loud cabaret and little ambience, with no middle ground. There’s room there for a quieter, more romantic bar where drinkers can communicate, with the sweet sounds of Cuba drifting through the sultry tropical air and quality cocktails available in genuine glasses... but perhaps it takes someone who’s been outside of Cuba to think like that?

Burning Beach

Instead, we spent our evenings talking with José and Daisy’s son, Manuel, who spoke better English than we did Spanish and who was a delight to talk to. While talking about the area, we asked Manuel if there were any beaches nearby that he could recommend, and he said there were two. La Boca, the nearest, was where the locals went, while the tourists went to Playa Ancón, along the end of a 4km sand spit to the south of Trinidad. ‘Ancón is just too hard for us to get to,’ he said, ‘so instead we take the bicycle to La Boca. But not often.’ Playa Ancón is 14km from Trinidad; when public transport is non-existent and only the rich have cars, it’s a very small world indeed.

Besides, Playa Ancón is very much a tourist beach, with a couple of hefty tourist hotels behind the beach and plenty of pale bodies lightly toasting in the sun, their all-inclusive bracelets leaving white rings in their otherwise perfect tans. I don’t do beach holidays terribly well – I blame my low boredom threshold – but even I can appreciate the appeal of tranquil, light blue waves lapping gently against white sandy beaches, and we parked the car in the Hotel Ancón, rented a couple of sun loungers under the beach umbrellas for a dollar each a day, and relaxed. Apart from half an hour’s snorkelling with gear that didn’t fit – during which we discovered there was absolutely nothing to see within swimming distance (the reefs, which are apparently very good, are really only reachable via dive boat) – we stayed put, eating pizza from the men who walked up and down the beach and moving only to stop parts of our bodies from going numb.

Ever since I burned the skin behind my knees in Gran Canaria, blistering them to buggery and forcing me to spend two miserable days lying on my front in the hotel, I’ve been rather cautious on the beach. I hid religiously in the shade of our thatched beach umbrella while Peta basted in the sun, which made it all the more annoying that I got really quite seared. I’d clean forgotten about the power of the reflected sun, and facing south towards the sea, just a few yards away, proved to be fatal. I spent the next few days wincing and feeling decidedly hot, and it was scant comfort that Peta, too, was burned red. The Cuban sun, even in March, is no laughing matter.

Quite unlike the sight of tagged, overweight tourists taking exercise classes on the beach, which I’m sure will never cease to entertain me...

The Man in the Red Hat

Written: 13 March 2005

‘Where are you going after Trinidad?’ asked Daisy.

‘We’re off to Camagüey,’ I said.

‘I know a good casa in Camagüey,’ she said, and so began our hop from casa to casa, which would last for the rest of our trip. Once you’re on the casa treadmill, it’s easy to stay on it; the only downside of being passed from casa to casa is a subtle commission charge that the owners will add to the price, and which will be sent back to the casa owner who made the recommendations in the first place. In a sense this is a bit of a scam, and if I was travelling on a budget I’d politely refuse the recommendations and find my own lodgings, but when you’ve only got a couple of weeks in Cuba and you’re looking for an easy life, it’s the most relaxing way to find a place to stay.

It didn’t sound so simple when Manuel sat down with a hand-drawn map and explained where we should go. His map was little more than a straight line from left to right, with six marks denoting something we’d come across on the way into Camagüey.

‘Here is the main road into Camagüey,’ said Manuel. ‘You will come into the city here, and go past the punto de control amarillo. Here will be men in yellow trousers; you should take no notice of them. Then you will come to a puente – what is puente in English?’

I looked it up. ‘Bridge,’ I said, and Manuel continued.

‘OK, so you go over the bridge, and past the Hospital Materno. Then you will come to the Hospital Aneologico and there will be a man outside with a red hat and white trousers. You should talk to him about finding your casa. After him is a rotunda and another puente, but you need to find the man in the red hat.’

‘Oh,’ we said, wondering how on earth this was going to work. ‘Thanks very much.’ And off we went.

As we came into Camagüey, this is what happened.

‘Look, we’re in Camagüey, there’s the sign.’

‘Right, where’s that map?’

‘In the glove compartment.’

‘OK, so what’s the first thing we’re looking for?

‘The punto de control.’

‘And what did he say about that?’

‘I don’t know. Something about trousers?’

‘Oh. Did he mean those guys over there in yellow suits?’

‘No, that’s a bus stop, isn’t it?’

‘Looks like it. OK, punto, punto...’

‘Then there’s a bridge.’

‘Hang on, we’re still looking for the punto. Perhaps we have to get through the outer suburbs first?’

‘Sounds likely. Oh look, there’s a hospital! Hospital... Gynaecologico. We’re looking for the Hospital Materno, then the Hospital Aneologico. No mention of the Gynaecologico anywhere.’

‘Probably on a bit.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hang on, the road’s forking. Did he say anything about the road forking?’

‘No.’

‘Ah shit. We’re lost already. And someone’s blaring their bloody horn at me.’

‘Can you pull over?’

‘I’ll just get through this roundabout system. Hang on.’

‘How about here, by that man in the white trousers?’

‘What the one waving the red hat?’

‘Bloody hell, it’s the man in the red hat. Slow down!’

And Peta wound down her window, waved at the man in the red hat, and that’s how we met Ricardo from our casa. We couldn’t quite believe it; Manuel’s directions had, against all the odds, worked.

Who would have thought it?

Camagüey

Written: 15 March 2005

The casa of Ricardo and Gladys was as delightful and friendly as that of José and Daisy. The Cubans are such welcoming people, and Gladys’s evening meals of pork, chicken and top quality home cooking were simply delicious. Without a doubt, eating in private houses is the way to go.

But Camagüey itself was slightly disappointing, probably because our hopes had been raised to fever pitch by the write-up in the Lonely Planet. ‘Camagüey enchants on sight,’ it said. ‘This is one of those places that hijacks your itinerary.’ If the author had gushed any more we’d have been swimming for it, but we were taken in with her stories of beautiful plazas and the town’s tinajónes, large clay pots that used to be used for storing water in droughts, but which now pop up in courtyards throughout the town for purely aesthetic purposes. It’s easy to sympathise with this method of storing water; one group of Canadian tourists we bumped into in town said they liked Cuba, but that there simply wasn’t enough water. They’d been staying in hotels rather than casas particulares, and water can be a real problem; Manuel in Trinidad said it hadn’t rained for a year (though that very night the heavens opened and an almighty tropical storm dumped its load on top of us) and Ricardo confirmed the same story (though he didn’t believe us about the rainstorm in Trinidad, so perhaps there’s an element of bravado in the suffering too). Water is delivered by tractor to many houses in the cities, but luckily our casa had a borehole in the garden with a hand-pump, so we never ran out.

Anyway, legend has it that those who drink from tinajónes will fall in love with Camagüey and will return again and again, though I prefer the alternative version of the story that says that any man who is offered water by a maiden from a tinajón must accept the drink, but if he does he will fall in love with her and will never leave. With stories like this in the background, Camagüey sounded delightful; in the end it didn’t quite live up to the hype, though it was pleasant enough.

I’ve often found this problem with guidebooks. To use a guidebook successfully you have to get to know how the author thinks, particularly with Lonely Planet guides, which tend to be more opinionated than others (incidentally, we also took the Footprint Guide to Cuba, which was better in almost all respects). Some Lonely Planets have been excellent (India and Australia spring to mind), some have been adequate (such as Malaysia and Nepal) and some totally out of kilter with my own approach to life (like West Africa and Indonesia), and it seems the Lonely Planet Guide to Cuba falls into the latter category. It doesn’t help that it’s littered with annoying American phrases and spelling – I don’t ‘haul ass’ or ‘kick it’ a great deal, and all the other Lonely Planets I’ve bought in England have bothered to put the ‘u’ into ‘colour’ – but all that is window dressing compared to the facts. Camagüey might be a pleasant enough place to visit, but I really can’t understand how the author of the Lonely Planet Guide to Cuba fell in love with it so much.

Presumably she drank from a tinajón or two during her visit...

Plazas and Casas

Camagüey does have its charms, though, even if it wasn’t quite enough to hijack our itinerary. Its main draw card for tourists is the proliferation of plazas dotted throughout the city, some of which are rather pleasant and some of which are completely forgettable. We spent a very hot morning and afternoon wandering round the best of them, taking a long break at lunch in a pretty little restaurant which emptied of tourists as soon as we arrived, only to be replaced by what I can only assume were local girls having photographic makeovers.

In the shaded courtyard that kept the worst of the sun from burning holes in our heads, first a pretty brunette and then a slightly less fortunate blonde spent half an hour posing by various tinajónes and streetlights while a photographer snapped away with the girl’s family looking on. If the mothers were anything to go by, it was a wise move to try to capture their daughters’ beauty on film before the effects of gravity and high-fat food started to win, and we had a ringside view of proceedings. Some things are the same the world over, and given the unease with which the girls staggered around in high heels and thick make-up, adolescence is just as confusing in Cuba as it is elsewhere, though as it’s normal to get married here at around 20, perhaps some aspects of adolescence live a little shorter than they do in the West.

The plazas of Camagüey also, at times, suffer from rather too much make-up. The prettiest of the lot, Plaza Carmen, has a charming church at one end, newly painted and patched-up houses, a lovely little restaurant that charges tourist prices that are quite a shock after the rest of town, and a collection of life-size clay statues of people going about their business, from the old man pushing a cart full of water jugs and a couple canoodling on a bench, to another man reading the newspaper and three women sitting on chairs and catching up on the gossip. There are some nice touches: there’s a fourth, empty chair in the middle of the old women where tourists can scarcely resist the photo opportunity, and the cuddling couple sits at one end of a bench, inviting visitors to become art imitating art, but despite this obvious attempt to create an enticing and picturesque square, I found it a little clinical. Everything was just a little too neat, and a little too clean; Cuba isn’t like that, and the people living in the renovated houses round the square looked a little out of place after the chaotic bustle of the nearby suburban ramshackle.

The other squares vary. Plaza de los Trabajadores is mostly a car park for tourist cars and buses, though the pink-coloured Nuestra Señora de la Merced church is an impressively dominating structure; Plaza Maceo is a forgettable junction square; Parque Ignacio Agramonte is grand and sits picturesquely under the towering Santa Iglesia Catedral; Plaza del Cristo is hot and dry and home to lots of dust and boisterous kids playing baseball with sticks and stones, though it’s worth visiting for the necropolis behind the church of Santa Cristo del Buen Viaje, where the graves and mausoleums are fascinating; and Parque Martí is livened only by the reconstruction of the modern neo-gothic church of El Sagrado Corazón de Jesus. There are many squares, but not many great ones.

Pros and Cons

One of the biggest problems with Camagüey’s squares is that they’re empty, turning them into ovens at midday and giving you nowhere to pause. It’s almost as if they have been designed to concentrate the heat; trees would transform them into oases, but trees just aren’t the thing round here (though not because of a lack of water, as palms thrive happily all over Cuba). Some of the squares, such as the Plaza San Juan de Dios, have cafés with tables outside, but this is the exception, and even in San Juan it was far too hot to sit outside in the shimmering cobbles, so we ducked inside and sat out the back. Cuba excels in hidden little restaurants in pretty backyard settings, but this means the squares themselves are rarely places to enjoy; this is not the country for sitting in squares, sipping a coffee and watching the world go by. The world is generally inside, sweltering, and I can only assume that things get worse in the summer.

Even in the evening, things don’t liven up much. We’d read in both our guidebooks about the celebrated Noche Camagüey, in which the main road through town, the República, is cordoned off and plays host to stalls purveying food, alcohol, music and a good time; this, said the guidebooks, happened every single Saturday, so we dutifully hung around town, waiting for things to kick off. And we waited, and waited, and waited, until we finally asked our waitress whether anything was going to happen later. She looked completely blank and didn’t know anything about any night market along the República; it seems that the Noche Camagüey is either a thing of the past, or a figment of the guidebook authors’ imaginations.

There was one saving grace, though, and that was the central Plaza de la Solidaridad. If it wasn’t for the ancient brickwork of the Nuestra Señora de la Soledad church peeking out from under layers of flaking plaster, this square would be little more than a traffic junction, but tucked around behind the high walls of the church is a lovely little bar restaurant where we gladly hid from the sun along with plenty of other tourists.

It wasn’t just a spot for tourists, though, because it turned out to be a great place to watch Camagüey’s prostitutes in action. Prostitution used to be one of the big draws of Cuba in the pre-revolution days of excess, and although it all but disappeared after 1959, when Cuba was effectively off the tourist trail, prostitution has made a bit of a comeback in recent years. If you’re a single man (or, indeed a single woman) wandering round Havana at night, you’ll not be short of offers, and it’s the same in Camagüey. The number of distinctly mediocre westerners to be seen out with gorgeous, short-skirted Cuban girls is surprisingly large, and the dollar restaurants of Camagüey are a good place to see them sharing an awkward meal in which they discover they have nothing in common save a desire for something the other one has got. It’s tinged with more than a little sadness on both sides, but that’s business.

You have to know it’s there to spot it, though, and I’m sure plenty of visitors float through Cuba without even noticing the pros in action. Cuban women dress to impress whatever their profession, and short skirts and tight tops are de rigeur for those who can (and often for those who can’t, rather unfortunately). The men do the same, with tight trousers and pec-hugging tops, and the overall effect is of a country in love with wiggling hips, long legs, sexy dancing and flirting as a way of life. Waitresses in the smartest restaurants wear white shirts, black waistcoats, neatly tied hair, tiny miniskirts and long stockings, a look that in a city like London would edge onto the tarty, but which looks nothing other than smart in Cuba.

However, the pros do go one step further and sport the shortest skirts, the tightest tops, the glossiest lipstick and the longest hair. But they’re easy to spot because they’re not bubbling over with the joie de vivre that characterises most Cuban woman when they walk down the street; it’s hard to explain why, but it’s not hard to spot the tarts from amongst the vicars, especially after a few afternoons spent hiding from the sun in the central plazas of Camagüey.

Música de la Casa

Written: 15 March 2005

Cuba is world famous for its music, and rightly so. Everywhere you walk in Cuba, music pours out of the buildings, whether it’s the sound of a live band serenading tourists in the Casa de la Música, the booming bass of a hi-fi pounding out rumba down a back street, or the tinkling of a piano from behind shutters in the suburbs of Camagüey. Music is in the blood of the Cubans, whether it’s salsa, son, timba, danzón or cha cha cha, and it makes travelling through the island a pleasantly aural experience.

What you don’t hear so much is western music, which is a delight after travelling through other, more tourist-influenced societies. There are two universal languages on this planet, and you come across both of them in spades throughout most of the known world; they are, of course, Bob Marley and football (or, if you’re a Norteamericano or Australian, soccer). In Cuba, though, neither of these is apparent, which is a particular surprise given that one of Cuba’s closest neighbours is Jamaica. Instead of Cuban boys kicking a football round the back streets of their home town, you’ll find them practising their baseball swings with sticks for bats and rocks for balls; and instead of yet another plug of ‘Jamming’ and ‘I Shot the Sheriff’, Cuba hops to the beat of its own unique music.

The exception seems to be in the casa particular, where western music has seeped into their CD collections in a strange and rather unpleasant form. Music from the 1980s has found its spiritual home in Cuba, and our first two casas entertained us with a nostalgic trawl through the depths of 1980s pop, interspersed with local music that sounded all the fresher for being sandwiched between Phil Collins’s ‘Another Day in Paradise’ and Bryan Adams’s ‘Everything I Do (I Do it for You)’. Toto’s ‘Africa’ is acceptable enough, but I will forever remember sitting in Trinidad, listening to those housewives’ favourites Chris de Burgh and George Michael; yes, I’m talking about ‘Lady in Red’ and ‘Careless Whisper’, which made my bones creak and my teeth ache. My only hope is that they played this music in a mistaken attempt to put on something they thought we would like. Following it with the Scorpions and their candles-in-the-air ballad ‘Wind of Change’ was, surely, a mistake even our hosts couldn’t have made out of politeness.

The doorbell in our Camagüey casa was little better. Every time anyone came to visit – and in Cuba, that’s every few minutes – the doorbell played out a plinky-plonky electronic tune, varying from ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’, ‘Frère Jacques’, ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘There’s No Place Like Home’, to ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ and ‘Clementine’. At times it felt like the inside of an ice cream van rather than the suburbs of Cuba.

But the prize for the most amazing use of western music came on our penultimate morning in Camagüey, when we were sitting in the back yard of our casa, tying to summon up the energy to go out into the midday sun for lunch. The cleaning lady was mopping the kitchen floor, humming merrily to herself, when the opening chords from Procul Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ rang out of the hi-fi in the front room. But instead of skipping the light fandango, the sound of Spanish lyrics floated out across the porch, and the cleaning lady filled her lungs and sang her little heart out, her mop slopping on the tiles in time to the music.

It looks as if, even in the land of salsa, the oldies are sometimes the best.

Cuba: The Northern Cayos

Cayo Santa María

Written: 17 March 2005

To the north of the Cuban mainland are some of the most idyllic spots on the entire island – the cayos of Cuba. Cayos are coral islands, which in English we call ‘cays’ or ‘keys’; hence we have the Florida Keys strung out southwest from the Florida coast, not a million miles from Cuba itself.

The cayos are being developed for tourism at a frantic pace, so it probably won’t be long before they’re home to the kind of sprawling hotel complexes you associate with Varadero, the package holiday peninsula to the east of Havana. At the moment development is still gathering pace, and there are still some deserted beaches to be found, but it’s obvious that the government wants to squeeze as many tourist dollars out of its northern assets as it can; I just hope that in doing so, they don’t manage to spoil what makes them so special in the first place.

Driving on Water

Getting to the cayos off the northern coast is a surreal experience, not least because you can drive there. In a fairly obvious plan to make the cayos easy to reach for tourists and their dollars, the Cuban government has built a series of huge roads across the sea, joining the likes of Cayo Coco, Cayo Romano and Cayo Santa María to the mainland.

The road from Remedios to Cayo Santa María is a good example; known as El Pedraplén, this 48km causeway joins the mainland to three cayos and is a delight to drive. The road stretches out into the blue ocean, perched on top of a long wall of stone, and at times you genuinely feel you’re driving on water; it takes quite a while for the first signs of land to appear on the horizon, small pockets of green mangroves that slowly turn into larger islands of trees and shallow wetland. The first cayo you drive through, Cayo Herradura, is uninhabited and a picturesque mishmash of tropical mangrove forest and hidden inlets, which would be a delight to canoe round. It doesn’t last long, though, and soon enough there’s another stretch of shiny blue ocean before the road reaches the second island, Cayo Las Brujas, and it’s here that the first signs of life are apparent.

Cayo Las Brujas is easily the most beautiful cayo out of the three, despite being home to the resort’s airport and a large, modern petrol station. But it’s the pretty beach at Villas Las Brujas that steals the show, managing to combine the best of tourism with the best of nature. Villas Las Brujas is a complex with 24 individual bungalows tucked onto a small headland at the west end of a wonderful little beach. A restaurant on the end of the headland discreetly looks over the golden sand, and apart from a handful of sun loungers and thatched beach umbrellas below the restaurant, the beach is pure, untouched and spotlessly clean.

We spent a whole day soaking up the rays at Villas Las Brujas, this time wearing sun cream. It’s a place of beautiful tropical colours, best enjoyed on a beach towel under one of the palm trees along the back of the beach. The blue sky up above is peppered with small white clouds that drift eastwards, and if you sit there and look at them long enough it’s possible to see them boiling away into space under the hot sun. A half-moon sits lazily on its side, looking like the top of a bald man’s head[1] peering out from behind the wispy clouds.

Gently move your eyes down to the horizon and the sky becomes turquoise, turning a hazy grey as it meets the sea from the slight humidity hanging above the tropical ocean. The sea itself is a deep blue on the horizon, a stark contrast to the light blue sky, but as your eyes drift down towards the shore, the peaceful waters turn greener and greener, until the shallow waters lapping the beach are a light emerald against the bright, cream-coloured sand and the olive green fringe of palm fronds at the back. It’s a picture, it really is.

It’s also home to some intriguing people. When we visited Villas Las Brujas there were no children, hardly any young people, some astoundingly fat sunbathers, and one token in-it-for-the-money couple, consisting of a pasty, middle-aged computer nerd and a gorgeous dark-skinned supermodel who whispered sweet nothings in his ear in a way that had more to with professionalism than passion.

There were also no Cubans, which is not surprising when you remember that there’s a passport control point at the start of El Pedraplén. For reasons I can only speculate about, the Cuban government doesn’t allow Cubans onto the cayos here; they’re turned back before they even leave land, and only employees of the hotels or workmen can cross the mini-border. It feels rather unfair, but it does mean the beaches are completely free of touts, which is a relief to anyone who’s suffered on a tourist beach in somewhere like Bali.

The Dark Side of Paradise

The third cayo along El Pedraplén is Santa María, and this is where you get a real sense of Cuba gearing up for hardcore tourism. The guidebooks mentioned a couple of large, all-inclusive hotels, so we thought we’d take their advice and head instead for the ‘utterly deserted’ Playa Ensenachos, which, according to the Footprint guide, is ‘deliberately being left wild and there are no hotels or facilities.’ Unfortunately things are moving fast on Cayo Santa María, because Playa Ensenachos is now a mass of huge cranes, concrete shells and signs declaring that there’s going to be an almighty resort opening there in the not-too-distant future. It looks as if the environmental plans of the past have already been swept away on a wave of construction.

This is probably the biggest threat to the cayos, and yet it’s unstoppable, at least while people like you and me continue to lust after such tropical idylls. When El Pedraplén was finished in 1996 after seven years of building work, it represented a vast improvement on the earlier causeway to Cayo Coco, which was finished in 1986 with no bridges at all, thus effectively damming the sea, cutting off water flow in the bay and splitting the wildlife populations in two. It’s not known how disastrous this will prove to the environment, but the nutrient levels in the water around Cayo Coco have taken a serious beating and things are unlikely to get better. There are lots of bridges in El Pedraplén, so water and wildlife can circulate, but plans for Cayo Santa María include 10,000 hotel rooms and ever-increasing numbers of tourists, so things have got to change.

We did manage to find a deserted beach, though, at the far eastern end of the cayo. Playa Perla Blancha might be devoid of development, but instead it’s home to a large and varied collection of jetsam, ranging from tangled fishing nets and perishing Styrofoam blocks to faded oil canisters and broken plastic crates. The sandfly population is epic and the sharp volcanic rocks on the approach to the beach are lethal, but the sea was as pure as ever and it was good to see Cayo Santa María in its natural state. Something tells me it won’t be like this for very long, though...

[1] In the tropics – and Cuba is just in the tropics, with the Tropic of Cancer a handful of miles to the north – the moon is turned on its side, unlike in the cooler climes, where it waxes and wanes from side to side. This is exactly the sort of useless information that makes lying on the beach so relaxing...

Remedios

Written: 18 March 2005

From Camagüey we had to start heading back west towards Havana, and we chose as our halfway point the colonial town of Remedios, from which we figured we could visit both the coral islands off the north coast and the revolutionary city of Santa Clara to the south. It turned out to be a good plan, but for slightly different reasons that we’d first anticipated.

It happens at some point in almost every trip I make abroad, and this time it happened on the way to Remedios. I hung on as long as I could, but about two thirds of the way there I had to ask Peta to pull over, and I threw up copiously, noisily and with immense relief. That night I reacquainted myself with the deep green colour of stomach bile, and sank into a restless sleep with a slight temperature of 100.2°F.

This scuppered any plans we had for doing anything serious, so instead we opted for quiet evenings in Remedios and days spent lapping up the sea on the coral islands to the north. It turned out to be an excellent decision.

The Two Churches of Remedios

Remedios is lovely. It’s not a world-class tourist attraction and it’s not particularly big, but this is one of the reasons why it’s so charming. The main square is a great place to walk at night because everyone is so pleasant; there’s practically no hassle, everyone seems pleased to see you, and nobody tries to sell you bici-taxi tours of the city or evening meals in the restaurant of their choice. Hell, nobody even tries to sell you cigars...

If anywhere deserves the luck that befell the town in 1944, it’s Remedios. The story goes that a Cuban millionaire called Eutimio Falla Bonet traced his family tree back to nearby Santa Clara, and found that one of his ancestors had been a founding member of the city. The founders of Santa Clara moved there from Remedios on 15 July 1689, which meant that Bonet’s ancestor must have come from Remedios, and indeed he found records in the church on the square that confirmed his ancestor had been born there. He was so taken with Remedios that he spent $1 million renovating the church containing the records, the Iglesia San Juan Bautista de Remedios, as well as the main square sitting below its tower. The results of the 1944-1953 renovation are still striking; the church is as good as new and the spacious park in the middle of the plaza is a delight, with a pretty cupola in the middle where children play, and there are plenty of cool, stone seats for the locals to sit on and natter.

Meanwhile, on the north side of the square sits the town’s other church, the less fortunate Iglesia Buen Viaje. Remedios is the only town in Cuba with two churches on its main square, but the Iglesia Buen Viaje is mouldering, leaking and closed until repairs can be made. It makes Remedios a strange reminder of the fate of Cuba; on one side is a gleaming beacon of successful capitalism, while on the other is a faded and peeling reminder that life in Cuba isn’t easy.

Another reminder of past glories was our wonderful casa particular, an 18th century colonial house where the shutters were three inches thick, the front room dominated by a beautiful spiral staircase, and the food presented with spectacular flair; I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much carved fruit in my life. It was a delight.

The only fly in the ointment was the last night, when we ordered fish, a dish that the Cubans fail completely to understand. Given that it’s a tropical island, it’s a real surprise to find that Cubans don’t eat fish; a government initiative to persuade people to eat this renewable and highly nutritious food source failed completely and Cubans simply don’t eat things that come out of the sea. Instead they save things like lobster and prawns for tourists, who think they’ve landed in heaven when they can get a sumptuous plate of succulent lobster for under $5. Fish, however, is a complete disaster in Cuba; whenever we braved fish on the menu, it either came overcooked, smothered in garlic, mashed up into a paste like cat food, or an unhappy combination of all three. My advice is to stick to the shellfish; it doesn’t matter how many crenellated guavas and perfectly round papaya balls appear alongside it, fish in Cuba is an unmitigated disaster, even in a place as welcoming as Remedios.

Santa Clara

Written: 18 March 2005

Most tourists visit the city of Santa Clara for one thing, and we were no exception. Handily positioned right by the ring road is the resting place of the most famous guerrilla of them all, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and it’s a superb place to visit.

Che Guevara is an icon, and you’ll see his picture everywhere in Cuba, alongside less famous revolutionary characters like José Martí and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes; in comparison you see almost no images of Fidel Castro, who prefers to avoid the cult of personality in favour of dead revolutionaries. The image that turned Che into the doyenne of student bedsits the world over was taken by the photographer Korda in 1960, at the funeral of the victims of an explosion on board a French freighter in Havana harbour. Widely regarded as a CIA-backed terrorist attack, the explosion infuriated and saddened Cuba, and the picture showing the emotions on Che’s face as he surveys the crowd is a study in capturing the moment.

The monument to Che is equally moving. Centre stage is a huge bronze statue of Che carrying a machine gun, and he’s flanked by rectangular plinths containing words of wisdom from the revolution, the text of the letter he sent to Castro when he left Cuba in 1965, and scenes from the fight for Santa Clara in 1959, in which Che took the town in what is regarded as the decisive victory of the revolution.

Below the monument, hidden away from the searing sun, is an excellent museum that tells the story of Che’s life, along with a surprisingly large number of personal items, from an early drawing book and school reports through to guns, asthma inhalers and revolutionary uniforms. There are loads of photos, and the most striking thing is what a stunningly handsome man Che Guevara was. His eyes smile with a passion that’s infectious, and he even manages to make the straggly beard he wore in the jungle look cool. Whether he’s puffing on a cigar, sipping coffee or posing with a machine gun, Che Guevara looks the part, and you come out of the museum with the same feeling you get when you play the Beatles’ back catalogue; deep down, everybody wants to be John Lennon or Che Guevara, and Santa Clara is Che’s Strawberry Fields[1].

Next to the museum is the mausoleum where the remains of Che are buried, along with a number of the men who were with him on that fateful day in Bolivia, when the CIA finally got their man. Che had been on their hit list ever since the 1959 revolution, where the young Argentinean led the guerrilla army’s second column to victory. As a politician he fared less well; he was seen as the revolution’s second leader, after Fidel, but his laudable championing of the underdog in his speeches didn’t translate into being a good politician, and his stints as president of the National Bank and Minister of Industry proved fairly disastrous for the economy. Disillusioned by politics and the increasing reliance of Cuba on the USSR, Che left Cuba in 1965 and went to the Congo, where he joined a failed rebellion before moving to Bolivia in 1966 to set up his own guerrilla troop in the jungle. Unfortunately the US didn’t take too kindly to him calling for ‘two, three, many Vietnams’ in the jungles of Central America, and on 8 October 1967 the Bolivian army captured him in an operation coordinated by the CIA. After consulting with military leaders in La Paz and Washington DC, the Bolivians shot Che in front of US advisors; his last words were reportedly, ‘I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, you are only going to kill a man.’ 30 years later his remains were sent back to Cuba, and were reburied in Santa Clara.

The mausoleum is tastefully done, with plaques of all those in Che’s Bolivian guerrilla column (most of whom are also buried there) and an eternal flame lit by Castro in 1997. It doesn’t matter what your political leanings are; this shrine is a fitting tribute to a man whose ideals were strong, and who remains an inspirational and enigmatic figure to this day. After visiting Santa Clara, it’s easy to see why Cuba is crazy for Che. He’s the closest thing to revolutionary royalty there is.

[1] Interestingly, the Beatles and Cuba didn’t get on at first; the Fab Four’s music was banned throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and a whole generation had to get their rock ‘n’ roll fix from listening to foreign radio (the radio that got past the jamming technology employed by the government, that is). Things are different now; a taxi driver in Havana told us that when he becomes a millionaire, he’s going to visit Liverpool, because that’s where the Beatles came from. An American friend had sent him the entire Beatles CD collection, which was such a joy because he’d grown up adoring the Beatles, but hadn’t been able to buy their music in Cuba. As if to emphasise this change of heart, in December 2000 Castro inaugurated a new park in Havana, Parque John Lennon, which contains a bronze statue of the erstwhile Beatle and the following lyrics etched on the ground: Dirás que soy un soñador, pero no soy el único (‘You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one’). It’s clearly a considerable about-face, but even communist dictators can’t hold back something as powerful as the Beatles.

A Funny Sort of Socialism

Written: 19 March 2005

Cuba has to be one of the most famous communist countries still going, not least because it’s a continual thorn in the side of the US government. But you could be forgiven for thinking that Cuba has cast off its Leninist-Marxist approach to life and gone all capitalist, because the signs of socialism are surprisingly subtle.

Certainly Cuba feels nothing like the old Eastern bloc; there are few grey, monolithic concrete structures, and although there are featureless housing estates dotted throughout the suburbs of some of the cities and towns, housing in the main seems to be in older, more stylish accommodation, which might be crumbling before your very eyes, but which is a far cry from the rabbit hutches of the Soviet state. Sure, along the roadside you’ll see plenty of communist slogans like ¡Hasta la victoria siempre! (‘Until victory always!’ or ‘Struggle towards victory forever!’) and Un mejor mundo es posible (‘A better world is possible’), but Fidel has clearly avoided a Stalinist cult of personality. It feels as if he’s a genuinely popular guy anyway, and the feeling is more one of a commune rather than communism.

Confusing the situation further is the dual economy, which Fidel reluctantly introduced in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The considerable aid that the Soviets had been sending to Cuba dried up – money that the Russians are still trying to get back, which seems a bit churlish – and given the continuing US trade embargo, Fidel had no choice but to start propping up his slowly crumbling economic foundations by planting the seeds of capitalism... and like climbing ivy, capitalism is slowly infiltrating all the cracks in the economy, shoring it up at the expense of pure socialism.

Two Currencies

The dual economy is pretty explicit, because Cuba has two very different currencies. The national currency of Cuba is the peso Cubana, and this is what state workers are paid in. There are around 27 Cuban pesos to the US dollar, meaning the average wage is about $13 a month. The welfare state means that all Cubans have access to basic food via a ration system, and they have excellent state education, one of the best health services in the world, and no illiteracy, so although it might sound like almost no money, it buys you a higher standard of living than it would in a lot of other countries. In terms of social policy, Cuba has got a large number of things very right, from a lack of crime to fair standards of living for all. It’s something that the Cubans should be extremely proud of.

The socialist state might be an impressive and highly laudable achievement, but Cuban pesos won’t buy you any luxuries; shops that sell in the local currency are pretty sad affairs, and while you won’t starve on the ration system, you’ll hardly enjoy the culinary variety of rice, sugar, oil, pasta and beans. This is where the second currency comes in, the peso convertible, which has a much higher value of one convertible peso to one US dollar (though, amusingly, if you try to change US dollars into convertible pesos, the Cuban government will charge you a 10% fee, which only applies to those changing US dollars; those changing pounds or euros can change at the full rate). The tourist industry runs on convertible pesos, and as a visitor you’ll find it pretty difficult to spend more than a handful of Cuban pesos; it’s all convertible pesos, so much so that the currency sign for pesos is the $ sign. Indeed, until November 2004, the US dollar was legal currency in Cuba with one US dollar being the equivalent to one convertible peso; as a result of George Bush’s increased nationalism and a hardening of his stance on Cuba, however, Castro banned the dollar from Cuba, reverting instead to the convertible peso.

Cubans can own convertible pesos and can open dollar bank accounts, though the majority don’t bother with the latter, apparently because they don’t want the government knowing about their finances. This has the effect of creating a class system inside the socialist states, made up of those who have convertible pesos (those who are ‘in the dollar market’, as it’s still called), and those who don’t. People who work with tourists can rake in the convertible pesos, while state doctors are still paid in Cuban pesos; as a result you find doctors and lawyers quitting their jobs to work as waiters, because there’s more money in it. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s hard to see how tourism can be introduced without it creating such an imbalance.

Money in the House

Owners of casas particulares are a case in point. Camagüey has a large dollar-based department store in the centre of town, where lockable fridge-freezers retail for about $600, about the same price as in London. Our casa had a brand new fridge-freezer in the kitchen, just like the ones in the shop; they also had two TVs, a hi-fi, air conditioning and even a regular cleaner. There’s clearly money to be made in renting out your rooms.

The government isn’t totally unaware of what’s going on, though. In Trinidad, Manuel explained that the licence to rent out a single room in a casa costs $210 a month, payable even if the room isn’t let; if two rooms are let (the maximum allowed in one house), then the licence costs $420. Given that the average night in a casa, including evening meal and breakfast, is around $35-40 for two people, it means there’s money to be made if you’re successful, but the tourist season isn’t year-round, so casa owners have to do their sums carefully. There are plenty of houses around with out-of-date casa signs stuck on the outside – the colour of the sign denoting a licensed casa changes every year – so it’s obviously not a cash cow for everyone.

Another restriction on casa owners is that only those directly involved in running the casa can live there; people with other tourist-related jobs aren’t allowed to stay, which is why Manuel had just moved out of his parents’ house and in with his mother-in-law[1] down the street. But those taking the gamble and going for the dollar market can reap the rewards; they can, effectively, become Cuban capitalists. It’s a funny sort of socialism...

[1] In a country where the plural of the word for ‘wife’ – esposas – means ‘handcuffs’, this was no mean sacrifice. Then again, the plant that we call ‘mother-in-law’s tongue’ on account of its sharp leaves is called ‘grandmother’s tongue’ in Cuba, so perhaps things are a little different under communism, after all.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 19 March 2005

Cuba took a very long time to grow on me, but by the time it was time to leave, I’d grown rather fond of the place.

Cuba’s greatest asset is its people. They are simply wonderful; they’re always eager to have a conversation, they’re unfailingly polite and pleased to see you, and even the touts – who are few and far between compared to most countries – are a delight. If you politely tell them that no, you don’t want to buy a cigar, they apologise for interrupting you and go back to hovering on the street corner; you don’t find that in places like Morocco and Mali.

Cuba is also one of the safest places I’ve ever visited; we never felt threatened, even when wandering through the seediest parts of town, and the number of security guards and police on show in tourist spots is reassuring (and no doubt partly responsible for the small number of touts). It’s also amazingly clean, even in the cities; sure, the sewers might pong a little on a hot day, but it’s no worse than the fragrant waft of the Thames after a dry spell, and the streets themselves are generally devoid of litter.

The biggest criticism you hear about holidaying in Cuba – that the food is terrible – is also unfair. Sure, if you stay in an all-inclusive hotel or eat mainly in restaurants, then you’re going to have a tough time finding high quality food, but if you stay in casas particulares you’re in for a treat (just as long as you don’t order fish). It’s a little harder to find shops that sell anything useful, so you can get caught short in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat except a limp ham sandwich from a shady-looking restaurant, but with a bit of planning you’ll never go hungry... and there’s always fruit, which Cuba does extremely well (I couldn’t tear Peta away from the guava juice, which was so creamy it was like a cross between a melted sorbet and raspberries and cream).

It’s not all joy and light, though. If you eat in restaurants then you must check your bill before you pay it, and check your change too; in tourist hangouts it’s common practice to slip an extra drink or two on the bill, or to give change for a $10 note when you’ve paid with $20. Whenever this happened – and it happened a lot – I simply looked resigned and noisily left no tip, but with the imbalance of the dollar market, it’s understandable why people try it on.

You’ll find the odd tout or beggar who takes the piss, too. Beggars aren’t that common, but you’ll come across them every now and then. Some are, of course, genuine, but some have worked out that scamming tourists is more profitable than work. One guy in Remedios, of all places, hung round our car, and when he saw us coming he quickly ran a dirty cloth over the bonnet and asked us for money for cleaning it. I gave him some loose change one morning as I got into the car, and instead of looking pleased, he actually looked offended, holding it in his palm and making annoyed noises. He thrust a postcard in my face that read, ‘I am deaf and dumb. Please give your consideration for me cleaning your car.’ On the other side of the postcard was a picture of a 2 peso convertible note, and I looked at him in astonishment. I tried a quick bit of mental arithmetic: if the average wage is $13 a month and he was asking for $2, then given that the average UK wage is £25,000 per annum, that means he was asking for the equivalent of £320. If someone smeared dirt on your bumper in London and then demanded £320 for their efforts, they’d end up in hospital; I simply shook my head in disbelief and wound up my window, narrowly missing the cheeky little beggar’s fingers.

I found the bars a bit disappointing too, with their consistently loud music killing the atmosphere. Sure, if you’re lucky enough to find a bar where things are kicking off then the music is all part of it, but we failed to find anything worth the effort outside of the capital. Tellingly, our favourite bar of the whole trip was a quiet little affair on the square in Remedios, where they played precisely no music and you could sit outside, soaking up the sound of the locals gossiping and promenading in the town square. Salsa is one thing, but ambience is another.

But these are niggles, because for every touting tramp and noisy bar there’s a whole bunch of smiling Cubans ready to make your day. The best thing you can do before visiting Cuba is to learn a bit of Spanish, because then you can enjoy the real thrill of Cuba: the Cubans. They’re worth the journey alone.

India: Kerala

The High Commission

Written: 15 February 2007

I hadn’t expected my second visit to India to start a month before I flew there, but it did, and in true Indian style. Welcome to the wonderful world of the Indian High Commission in London.

Getting a tourist visa can be one of the great hurdles of modern travelling, as anyone who has tried to travel through Africa will tell you. Some countries insist on reams of paperwork, backed up with an entire album of photographs, before they’ll even consider letting you darken their door, where some don’t even bother to look up from their newspapers as you wander through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ channel, but so far on my travels I can’t remember actively enjoying the visa process before. For my first trip to India, I didn’t get the six-month visa myself, as the Thai travel agent from whom I bought my flight to Calcutta offered a visa service at a very reasonable fee; perhaps, if I had, I’d have wondered just what I was letting myself in for.

They say that the ground on which an embassy stands is considered to be a part of that embassy’s country, and while this might legally be the case, it’s still only conceptual. The Indian High Commission in Aldwych is surely the exception, because from the moment you step through the door to the moment you emerge, three hours later, clutching your passport and your aching sides, you feel not only have you just been transported directly into the madness of India, but also that you nearly didn’t get back. It’s a hoot, and I highly recommend the Indian visa process as a thoroughly realistic introduction to the insanity that makes India such a great destination.

The Queue

It starts off with the queue, which snakes out of the High Commission’s visa application door, across India Place, onto the curve of Aldwych, past the front door of India House, past the front door of the BBC World Service, and if you’re lucky enough to witness a really healthy queue, all the way to the back doors of Australia House. Luckily this part of the visa process is most definitely on British soil, so the queue is orderly, tidy and almost smug in the knowledge that, despite the sight of people stretching out as far as the eye can see, everyone is perfectly happy to stand in line, waiting for things to move along. Sure, there’s the odd person who joins the end and can’t quite believe that this really is the queue for tourist visas, but any frustrations are short-lived, because even out here, the helpless resignation one feels when confronted with Indian bureaucracy starts to creep in. Happily, it’s also where the fun starts.

At 8.35am I joined the queue outside the main entrance to the BBC’s Bush House – where, incidentally, I worked for two years before escaping to West Africa – and instantly made some friends. Behind me was a charming Sikh gentleman from Gravesend whose eyes smiled whenever he spoke of Amritsar, and behind him was a delightful Indian man from Harrow, who turned out to be an expert on the Indian visa process, having stood in this very queue more times than he could accurately remember. They had both moved to England at different times in the 1960s but had gone back to their homeland on many occasions since, and we idled away the time talking about India and how much we loved the place, despite – or, perhaps, because of – the kind of madness that we were about to jump into.

It might have been the entertaining conversation, but despite the immense length of the queue, we made swift progress, and by 9.20am we’d shuffled back past the BBC, past the entrance to India House, past a smaller queue that my new friend from Harrow told me was for enquiries about Indian passports rather than tourist visas, into India Place and up to a small window by the back door of the High Commission. This was where the first cracks started to appear in the neat queuing system that everyone had, by this time, grown rather accustomed to.

‘Yes,’ said the man on the other side of the tiny window that separates Indian territory from the logic of London. It sounded more like a statement than a question.

‘Um, yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m here to get two tourist visas for India. Hopefully, anyway.’

The man picked up two yellow tickets from a pile, spun them through the small well under the window, and flicked his hand sideways towards the entrance. And with that, I had my tickets for one of the most amazing thrill rides you can find on diplomatic soil, so I took a deep breath and jumped in feet first.

The Crowd

The tickets the man had given me – one for each passport – contained two numbers, D6 and D7, and said that my applications would be processed between 10.30am and 11.00am. They didn’t say quite how this process would occur, but my friends and I followed the queue upstairs and into a doorway, where the madness of what would be our home for the next few hours revealed itself. For on the other side of this doorway was what can only be described as bedlam.

‘Please move forward!’ came a shout from the bottom of the stairs, but the queue was stuck, and nobody quite knew what to do. The security guard from the back door stomped up the stairs, looked at me standing in the doorway and pointed inside. ‘Go that way, inside,’ he said, and the slight semblance of order onto which we’d been clinging fell apart as the queue disintegrated and we shuffled bang into a group of people who were crowding round a small window, right next to the entrance.

‘35, 56, 57, 68!’ yelled a woman’s voice through a crackling loudspeaker above the window, in the kind of tone that sounds like the back of a hand thwacking you out of a childhood reverie. ‘45, 46, 55!’ it continued, while crowds buffeted us about like driftwood on the Ganges.

‘This way,’ said my Sikh friend, and pointed into the corner, where our neighbour from Harrow was trying to squeeze away from the chaos. We climbed behind a row of seats that was full of people but kept the pressure of the growing crowd off us, and once on the other side of this barrier we managed to get a little breathing space as well as a good view of the room.

It was absolute madness. There were rows of plastic seats, all full, with people standing shoulder to shoulder in the aisles and in big clumps in front of the row of six counters along the side of the room. At the other end of the room, another four counters seemed to be even more crowded, and all the while the crush by the entrance teemed with people arriving from the outside, only to be met with the kind of crowd you associate more with last orders on a Friday night.

‘We have to wait for the number over there,’ said the man from Harrow, pointing to a decrepit indicator in the far corner of the room. Along the top were five letters, A to E, with the letter B lit up, and underneath was the number 60. It buzzed, and the number flipped over to 61.

‘What number are you?’ I asked the Sikh.

‘D3, D4 and D5,’ he replied. ‘Some time to go, then.’

‘Yeah,’ I thought, calculating that with 99 numbers per letter, we had just over 140 people in front of us in the queue. I glanced up at the clock on the wall, which said five past four, and idly wondering why they’d set the clocks to show Indian time, I asked the man from Harrow how long he normally had to wait.

‘It varies,’ he said. ‘An hour, maybe?’

And so we waited while the numbers ticked slowly by, the crowds got thicker and the bemusement on people’s faces slowly turned to amazement that this bizarre place was, indeed, the queue for Indian tourist visas.

To the Counter

On the way in, I’d noticed a dull ache in my stomach that I vaguely recognised, but it wasn’t until I was being buffeted around by the crowd that I realised I was trying hard not to laugh. The sides of my mouth involuntarily twitched upwards, and a familiar feeling from my last visit to India crept up on me. There’s a wonderful release that occurs when you realise the path of least resistance is the only sane option, and once you decide to float along the river instead of trying to swim upstream, life suddenly makes much more sense.

‘It’s a game,’ pointed out my friend from Harrow, and I couldn’t help agreeing as the counter clicked round from B99 to C01 and we let out a little cheer. Time goes so much faster when you’re having fun, and at times the counter seemed to be racing along; partly this was because each number represents one application form – so if someone has five passports, one for each member of a family, then the counter jumps forward five places once they’ve been processed – but mainly it was because I’d moved on from thinking about deadlines and processes, and now viewed the whole system as an entertaining whole, much like a Heath Robinson contraption or an Escher painting. As the numbers climbed towards D6, we got more and more excited, like children in the queue for the biggest ride at Disneyland.

When the counter reached C90, we starting edging forward towards the chaos of the counters, and as soon as it flipped over to D01 – again, accompanied by a little cheer – we headed for the front line. I glanced at the clock, which still stubbornly insisted that it was five past four, and then at my watch, which said 10.45am. We’d been waiting for our numbers to come up for nearly an hour and a half, and suddenly the pressure was on.

It turned out that the crowds milling around the counters were mainly people still engulfed in their own private stakeout of the number counter, people who had tried to queue up at the counters only to be told in no uncertain terms that they had to wait for their number to come up, and that they should ‘take a seat’ (this said with no hint of irony). The lady who was manning the counter nearest the entrance had obviously been chosen for her ability to take no shit off anyone, because people kept asking her what on earth they were supposed to do, and she was clearly growing tired of having to tell them to wait their turn. She’d even put up a sign on her counter saying ‘No Enquiries’, but this didn’t stop people asking her what was going on, and it didn’t stop her staring at them with a look that would wither limbs, before shouting at them to ‘take a seat and wait for your number to come up.’ I figured I’d take my chances with the next-door booth, whose proprietor seemed a lot cooler.

Unfortunately he also turned out to be a lot slower than his manic neighbour, and it didn’t help that the queuing system at the counters involved the traditional Indian method of pushing in from all directions and completely failing to observe any kind of order. Luckily the individuals concerned managed to cling on to some sense of decorum, and a very kind man let me go in front of him because my queue number was before his, and the official behind the counter took my forms, photographs, passports and money, and started tapping into a computer.

A couple of minutes later he handed me two printed receipts and said, ‘One hour,’ and left it at that. Luckily I knew what he was talking about; he meant than in about an hour, my number would be called out by the woman whose loudspeaker had greeted us on the way in, and in theory I’d then get my passports back, custom-fitted with Indian tourist visas. I smiled my thanks, took a last breath and dived back into the melee, heading back to the corner where we’d watched the numbers flipping past.

Mission Accomplished

The minutes continued to tick by, even though the clock on the wall still insisted that it was five past four. The crowds grew and shrank, and the parade of confused and bewildered visa-seekers continued to pour into the room, all of them going through exactly the same process that I’d gone through an hour-and-a-half before. People scribbled on visa forms – I was very glad I’d downloaded my forms from the High Commission’s website and filled them in at home – and others joined the small queue at the first counter, only to get yelled at to ‘take a seat.’ It appeared to be mayhem, but underlying the mayhem, there was clearly a method at work, even if the method felt more like madness.

Of course, this is a fantastic idea. What better way to prepare potential visitors for the daily fascination that is India than to subject them to the Indian visa process? I can’t think of anything more effective than to take a bunch of people off the streets of London, crowd them into a dusty and slightly weather-beaten room with a broken clock on the wall, expose them to a mysteriously bureaucratic system that ticks along in its own way but is never explained to anyone trying to follow it, and all the while bombard them with cryptic number counters, loudspeakers shouting out random digits, and counter staff whose advice is to take a seat in a room where seats are as rare as hen’s teeth. The staff must be very proud, because in one fell swoop they’ve managed to crystallise everything about India that makes it what it is – it’s bonkers and brilliant at the same time, much like the mother country.

I was so happy in my little daze, watching the Indian visa machine at work, that I almost missed the loudspeaker shouting out my numbers. I glanced at the clock – it was still five past four – and tried to push my way through the crowd of people blocking the counter where the loudspeaker yelled, ‘D6, D7!’ The crowd parted, I handed my receipts to the lady, she checked through three piles of passports before finding mine, and a few seconds later she handed over my passports, complete with the tourist visas I needed (which I was careful to check before leaving the building). I waved at the man from Harrow and headed down the stairs, pushing my way through the crowd of people who were just starting their own personal visa vigil. My watch said 11.35am, exactly three hours since I’d joined the queue outside the BBC, and with that I slipped outside and back into London.

Outside I bumped into my Sikh friend, who was also checking his passports, and as we shook hands, we smiled with the camaraderie of those who have just survived a major onslaught. Somehow, as I walked to the tube station, the world didn’t seem quite as bright as it had inside the dingy High Commission, but deep in my stomach I could feel the ache of India waiting to burst out, and I realised that even though I still had a month to go, my trip to the subcontinent had already started.

Falling into Place

Written: 11 March 2007

It’s a wonder that I ever manage to leave the comforts of home, because if there’s one thing that travelling does, it’s scare the hell out of me. No matter that I spent six months travelling round India back in 1998; the thought of leaving home and heading out into a totally different culture really gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Presumably, though, this is all part of the attraction; it’s like a really scary ride at the amusement park. Deep down I know that flying out to pastures new is no big deal, because I’ve done it so many times, but that doesn’t stop some strangely devious part of my brain from getting paranoid. Peta has been banging on about wanting to visit India as long as I’ve known her, and now that we’ve finally got it together to visit my favourite country on the planet, I’m scared. People say, ‘Where are you staying?’ and I reply, ‘I don’t know,’ because it’s true: I’ve booked a flight, and that’s it. There’s nothing booked, there’s nothing planned, I’ve only got a vague idea of where we might want to visit, and when you mention this to others, they look at you as if you’re mad. ‘Ah,’ says Peta, ‘but it’s OK, because Mark is looking after all of that,’ and I smile confidently, relying on the fact that ten years ago I would have been fine with this, so perhaps I can still wing it.

Of course, it always turns out OK in the end, particularly in India. We’ve just flown to Trivandrum in Kerala, right at the southern tip of India, stopping off on the way for a couple of hours in Muscat, the capital of Oman. Muscat International Airport sports a Costa Coffee, a Papa John’s pizza joint, a Dairy Queen burger stall, a duty free shop, and practically no exotica to hint that this is the Middle East rather than the Edgware Road. Indeed, the only thrill of the whole journey was following the route of our plane on the screen in the back of the seat in front, as it flew along the western border of Iran towards the Gulf of Arabia, skirting the Iraqi border, just a stone’s throw from Baghdad and Basra. I looked out of my south-facing window and figured that as it was a clear night, then technically some of the light from the troubles in Iraq might make it to our plane, but as all I could see was an inky blackness with the odd lone sodium light peppering the dark, even my paranoia couldn’t claim to be flying over a war zone.

So we landed at Trivandrum airport at 6.30am on Sunday morning, flew through immigration, picked up our backpacks from the screeching luggage carousel, walked through customs, changed some traveller’s cheques at the Thomas Cook counter, booked a fixed-price taxi for the train station at the fixed-price taxi counter, arrived at the station, joined a queue of two people, bought two tickets for the express train to Varkala, wandered through to the platform, bought some water and settled back to wait for the 8.10am train.

And as if this wasn’t easy enough, we then got talking to a very friendly young man who was on his way to visit his grandmother, and who was taking the same train as us and would be happy to show us where to go. A 90-year old man also sparked up a conversation with us, though knowing no English he spoke through the young man, saying how excited he was to talk to us, and how he remembered the British and how different things were in this modern world. We smiled and made small talk through the haze of jet lag, and I felt rather stupid at having felt anything other than complete confidence that things would work out in the end.

Because, after all, that’s the point of India. The travelling is easy when you don’t really have a plan and don’t really have an itinerary. We fancied heading to the beach for a few days, just to get over the stress of travelling halfway round the planet, and before we knew it we’d arrived at Varkala train station, taken a taxi to Varkala beach, found a spare room in the Kerala Bamboo house (the first place we tried), and fallen into a deep sleep to the sound of crashing surf.

And how easy was that? Exactly... but it still won’t stop me feeling just as nervous the next time I jet off to pastures new, with nothing planned and no idea what I’m doing. Perhaps that’s why I keep doing it, in the end.

Varkala

Written: 13 March 2007

If you’re looking for a peaceful beach experience that has yet to be completely spoiled by mass tourism, then Varkala is a little piece of heaven. I loved it; sure, it’s a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of the real India, but this means it’s a great place to relax, get away from it all and recover from a long flight. Evidently I’m not the only person who thinks so, because Varkala is, basically, white (or, to be more accurate, salmon pink), and the only cultural experience you’re likely to get is from bumping into fellow Europeans. Still, it’s a great place to do it, and the locals are completely charming, and not just because that’s the best way to relax their customers into spending a few more days chilling out in the restaurants, shops and guest houses that make up Varkala.

Varkala consists of a crescent-shaped beach, backed by a steep cliff, and it’s along the top of this cliff that most of the action happens. There’s a promenade along the precipice edge – though as you get the odd taxi or rickshaw bombing along the path, horns blaring, I suppose it doubles as a road – and behind the promenade is Varkala village (though as Varkala town is actually 2km away to the southwest, perhaps ‘Varkala tourist village’ is a better name). Most of the accommodation is tucked away in the backstreets behind the promenade, as the sea views have mostly been pinched by the bars and restaurants that line the cliff edge, looking over the beach below and staring west into the sunset.

For me, sitting in a cliff-top bar and sipping cold lemon sodas is one of life’s great pleasures, but I’m more than happy to leave the surf to those who enjoy it. It’s not a crowded beach – at least, not in the shoulder season of mid-March – but because the sea off Varkala has an evil rip-tide that can (and does) carry people off to a watery grave, you are only supposed to swim between the red flags on the beach. This concentrates the action into the centre of the beach, and has the added attraction of turning the officials who man the red flags into an entertainment all of their own. Give a man a whistle, and just like a five-year old, he can’t help blowing it, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the beach is home to a mad crowd of ravers, as the constant peeping of whistles travels up the cliff on the sea breeze.

Perhaps this is because, in India, rules don’t really seem to be rules, they’re more like guidelines (at least, this is how it appears to those of us who are passengers in the rickshaw of Indian life, where driving on the left seems to be more of an option than an obligation). The more the officials peep their warnings, the more the people ignore them, until the level of whistling reaches such a fever pitch and the dancing of the officials gets so animated that eventually the wayward swimmers notice that yes, they mean me, and they move back inside the red flags, accompanied by a gentle but temporary lull in the whistling. And so the cycle begins again, like the bizarre ritual it is.

Decisions, Decisions

The most challenging part of waking up in Varkala is trying to decide what to do with the day. Perhaps an afternoon at the beach? Or maybe a morning spent wandering around the tie-dyed boutiques, looking for bargains on kaftans and slippers? Or even a day guzzling seafood in front of the dazzling Arabian Sea? Ah, the decision is difficult, but Varkala is the kind of place where time stretches out and you end up spending days doing what feels like almost nothing.

But what a pleasant place in which to do almost nothing. Whiling away the hours with a fresh mango juice in one hand and a book in the other is one of life’s little luxuries, particularly as hints of India still manage to creep into the otherwise rather global atmosphere of Varkala’s travelling scene. For example, it’s hard not to smile at old favourites, like the wonderful use of English on restaurant menus. The best menu we found was at the Sun Rise Restaurant – a misnomer in itself, as the restaurant, like all those in Varkala, faces west and therefore can never see the sun rise – which proudly serves Chicken Merry Land, the popular pasta dish Spagathy, that favourite of the beach the Sandwitch, a choice of Fired or Plane rice, and a dish for which people will presumably be back, Lobster Termindor. And as if this isn’t enticing enough, you can round off your evening meal with a cocktail or two, though I have to wonder how many people order the Salty Dog, the Bledy Merry, the Agg Nog, or the particularly fetching Gin Jizz. Happily the Sun Rise, which looks over North End Cliff and has a fine view of the beach, is actually a great spot for a feed, and the uppumavu and banana we had for breakfast – uppumavu being a kind of spicy semolina – was great. Add in the fact that you can see schools of dolphins jumping out of the distant waves while brightly painted fishing boats head south in search of the day’s catch, not to mention the sight of sperm whales migrating north, their dark shadows slowly moving from left to right in the near distance, and you have a seaside spot that’s hard to resist.

The day’s catch is an important part of evening life in Varkala, as the sun set brings to life one of Varkala’s charms – the seafood. Walking along the cliff top in the early evening is an adventure in visual fishing, as the restaurants lay out the catch of the day in an attempt to lure you in. Huge marlin and swordfish lie alongside red snapper, tuna, butterfish, pomfret and barracuda, all surrounded by king prawns – large and small – and squid. Most of the fish really is as fresh as they say, with the bright eyes and clean skin of recently netted fish, rather than the milky, sunken eyes and slimy, ammonia-tinged skin of the fish that has seen better days. You pick your fish and decide how you would like it cooked – in the tandoor with fine Keralan spices, or simply cooked in butter and garlic – and take a seat overlooking the waves, with the sun setting in the distance.

It’s delightful, sipping a beer while waiting for your fish, and when it comes, it’s utterly divine; the calamari we had at the Sun Rise was absolutely the best calamari I’ve ever tasted, cooked as it was in wonderfully light, tempura-style batter that brought out the flavour of the meat. It melted in the mouth, which is something you can’t often say about calamari in England.

The freshness of the catch is plain to see as the sun goes down, as the horizon darkens to reveal strings of distant lights, flickering in and out as the fishing boats they’re swinging from rise and fall with the swell. If you’re lucky enough to experience a power cut while you’re eating – something that is relatively common, judging by the slick way in which candles appear out of nowhere within seconds of the lights dimming and giving out – then it looks for all the world as if the stars have fallen from the sky and landed on the sea, lighting up the waves like distant, floating lanterns.

And before you know it, that’s another day gone in paradise, and the next day it’s another difficult choice between swimming in the warm sea, soaking up the sun on the beach, drinking lemon sodas in the cliff-top breeze, and watching dolphins and sperm whales swim through the ocean from which tonight’s meal has only just been plucked. As a way to kick off a holiday in a totally relaxing and unchallenging way, Varkala hits the spot perfectly.

Hippy Heaven

Written: 13 March 2007

If you sit in a cliff-top café in Varkala, close your eyes and let your mind drift, then it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to drift off to Indonesia, Ghana, Thailand, or any of a whole host of travellers’ haunts the world over. The sea breeze is warm and keeps you cool as you shelter from the hot afternoon sun; the surf crashes onto the beach below; the sound of trance music throbs gently from speakers sitting on the sandy floor of the bar; and contented travellers wander past in their little huddles, showing off far more flesh than is considered polite in the country outside. But it doesn’t matter here, because in the same way that major cities have a Little India, a Chinatown and a Latin quarter, most countries have at least one Hippy Haven, where westerners can drift in and kick back, well away from the pressures of life on the road.

Hippy Havens are a natural part of the life cycle of tourism, and Varkala is a good example of a Hippy Haven that’s about halfway through its life span. Broadly speaking, travelling spots go through a fairly predictable set of stages. The first stage is anonymity, where you only find out about the charms of a particular beach or village by word of mouth; next, the locals cotton on to the fact that there might be some business to be done here, and the odd tea shop or restaurant starts up, possibly with some rooms by the beach, or even some basic huts on the edges of the sand; soon enough, the man from the Lonely Planet hears about the place from some particularly chatty travellers, and notes it down as a possible attraction for those en route, but gives it little more than a tiny mention; as travellers discover it for themselves and the number of guest houses and restaurants grows, the guidebooks give it a bit more of a write-up, and more and more people take the detour; eventually it’s a big enough draw to warrant a map, by which time it’s fair to say that we’ve got a genuine Hippy Haven on our hands; and the next stage is that things start growing out of all proportion, the concrete hotels start to spring up, package tours start creeping in at the corners, and before long your Hippy Haven has become a Proper Destination, and most of the attractions of the original solitary bay have been lost in the process.

Varkala is probably a shade past the cusp of being a perfect Hippy Haven. It has enough guest houses and restaurants to enable visitors to cut themselves off completely from the harsh reality of travelling in India, and it is utterly beguiling because of it, but at the southern end of the beach there are ominously permanent concrete structures creeping up, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see Varkala turning into a genuine brochure destination over the next few years, losing a good deal of its charm as it does so.

Right now, though, Varkala is a classic, template-based travellers’ haunt. It has a pretty little beach where the locals seem to tolerate bikini-clad women with a reasonable lack of leering, and the touts, such as they are, are mild-mannered and happy to take no for an answer, as they try to sell you bongos, maps of India and magnetic stones that make the sound of a cicada as you throw them up in the air. The bars lining the top of the cliff are – at the northern end – distinctly bohemian in their approach, with colourfully decorated bamboo shelters overlooking the Arabian Sea, their coloured light bulbs and mandala throws practically insisting that you sit down, kick back and take a big hit on the sea breeze. It’s the Buddha Bar, it’s the Café del Mar, and it’s exactly the kind of safe, alternative lifestyle that these days every self-respecting twenty-something should have on their CV. Hell, there is even dope here, and the gentle waft of marijuana smoke is as much a part of the atmosphere as tandoori fish, or the waft of the increasingly polluted cliff slopes, with their growing collections of empty bottles, plastic bags and yelping dogs.

So Varkala is completely generic, and as Peta and I lapped up the delightful atmosphere, the lovely seafood and the gentle thump of the trance, we could have been anywhere. What a great way to ease one’s jet-lagged mind into the prospect of exploring India; bravo for the Hippy Havens out there, even if they’re sometimes rather hard to tell apart.

The Shirt off My Back

Written: 13 March 2007

Some people were born to shop. I, on the other hand, shudder every time Christmas comes round, not to mention the January sales, the Easter sales, the summer sales and the autumn price drops. The only reason I still haven’t run screaming from the building is the Internet, without which I would still be wearing the same pair of socks I went to school in. I hate shopping and shopping hates me, and frankly we’re both stubborn enough not to want to rock the status quo.

But you try buying hot weather clothes in London in February. Jumpers, no problem; thick jeans, come this way, sir; thermal underwear, here, there and everywhere. But super-lightweight cotton trousers and breezy short-sleeved tops are understandably in short supply as the wind howls down Oxford Street, and the outdoor shops of South Kensington and Covent Garden are only useful if you want your trousers to have more zips and pockets than a fetishist’s weekend outfit. The solution? Buy your holiday clothes in the summer, which unfortunately requires the kind of planning that is rather at odds with the cold sweat that falls over me as I wander into clothes shops. I buy my clothes either when the last batch has reached the point of no return, or when my girlfriend starts dropping hints. No prizes for guessing which comes first. (‘Men,’ I can hear her sigh, and she is, of course, totally right, except she’s as allergic to shopping as I am, so I can’t even play the ‘hopeless male’ card.)

Luckily for the visitor to India, there is a solution that is not only guaranteed to save you money, but opens up a whole new world, that of shopping in the developing world. With my finely honed and pathological fear of shopping, I’ve managed to travel the world quite successfully without filling my home with trinkets from abroad; I justify this to myself with the mantra ‘take only photographs, leave only footprints,’ but I know that the main reason I don’t flock to markets or haggle in carpet shops is because it scares the hell out of me. I might be able to climb volcanoes and sail oceans, but I can’t shop. Happily I’ve just had my hand forced by the complete lack of suitably tropical attire in my backpack, and I am now the proud owner of a set of Indian clothes of dubious sartorial qualities, but high quality stitching. Oh, and they’re thin and airy, not unlike their new owner.

Suits Me

It’s hard to travel through India without spotting Indian tailors hard at work, sitting in the fronts of their shops, pedalling their cast-iron sewing machines into a frenzy among piles of colourful material. If you’re at all clothes-minded, this must be like heaven, but for those of us whose travelling clothes have long sleeves purely to keep the mosquitoes from biting, and whose trousers are dirt-coloured so they don’t show the dirt, those precious weaves of cream, ochre and crimson look less like an Aladdin’s cave and more like the warning colours on the belly of a particularly poisonous frog. So it was with some trepidation that Peta and I set out to scout out the tailors of Varkala, in search of trousers, shirts and, above all, a painless shopping experience.

As with most things in India, it would have been a breeze with hindsight, but even with a level of ignorance matching that of a modern-day celebrity, we managed to buy what we wanted, and without feeling too used. The first tailor we popped into was run by a very softly spoken chap, who asked us how he could help.

‘Well, I’m looking for a pair of trousers and a shirt,’ I said. ‘Collarless, like this one over here.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘let us look at the material. How about this one, it is good in the heat. You know it is getting very hot now, today it is, I am thinking, 37 degrees, but in April it gets to... oh, let me see, 45, I am reading in the newspaper. You want a good, thin material, like this one.’

‘Yeah, that’s not bad,’ I ventured. ‘I quite like this pattern here, on the cream one.’

‘That is good, sir,’ said the shopkeeper, pulling down a shirt from the rack above his head. ‘Let me show you the stitching we do, it is very high quality indeed, very important for keeping clothes a long time. Here, look at this seam, this is very good double-stitching, and here we make sure we make this part very strong to avoid wear. Is this the kind of thing you are looking for?’

‘Yes, it does look good,’ I said, drawing on my long experience of tailoring standards and stitching methods.

‘Then we measure you,’ he said, beckoning over an old man from the back of the shop, who had been busily cutting lengths of cloth with a huge pair of scissors. Out came the measuring tape, and the old man called out numbers in Malayalam as he measured me in places I’d never been measured before.

‘Do you want a tighter fit than this shirt?’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Or loose might be better for hot weather? And do you want three buttons at the top here? It will look good.’

‘Um, yeah, sounds good,’ I thought, feeling that helpless ache in the pit of the stomach that the big fish gets when he feels the first tug on the line. And before I’d had time to breathe the old man had also measured me up for a pair of trousers, I’d picked out a particularly fetching shade of dark green cotton to make them from, and that seemed to be that. Now, I assumed, we’d start haggling.

Unfortunately, I’d ignored the first rule of bargaining, which is first to try to work out what a fair price is, so you know vaguely where to aim. I had absolutely no idea at all how much shirts and trousers might cost, and not only that, I was starting to reach that point I reach in every shop where I’d rather gnaw my fingers off than extend the experience any further. Luckily, shopkeepers know how to deal with this particular ailment: they go in for the kill.

‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘They will be ready at 8pm tonight, and the cost for one pair of trousers and one shirt will be... 750 for the shirt and 950 for the trousers, which comes to 1700 rupees.’

‘Ah,’ I said, trying desperately to remember how this bargaining lark works. ‘I’m looking to pay about 1000 rupees,’ and with that I realised I’d got things slightly wrong, because you’re supposed to offer about one-third of the original asking price, rather than two-thirds, and now I was going to pay the price. ‘I should have said 600, I should have said 600,’ I thought, as the shopkeeper sucked in his breath at my price, presumably to make me feel better, as I’m sure he already knew he’d make a killing.

‘I can do a special discount for you,’ he said. ‘I can do 1500.’

‘1200,’ I said, wondering where this was going to end.

‘1450,’ he said. ‘It is a fair price.’

‘1300,’ I said. ‘It is the end of the season for you, and it’s a good price.’

‘OK, 1300,’ he said, and we shook on it, both of us smiling, but only one of us with a glint in his eye. I’d walked into the shop simply to try to find out what sort of price clothes might cost, and I’d already done a deal. ‘What a muppet,’ I thought, but a little voice in my head reminded me that yes, this might not be the best price, but I could afford it, and it meant I’d have some clothes to wear, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel glum. And hey, perhaps it was a fair price after all? Who knows...

A Second Attempt

I could probably have relaxed a bit more if we still hadn’t got Peta’s clothes to buy. She hadn’t seen any suitable fabrics in the first shop, so we wandered down the road, popping into a couple of shops that sold clothes, but they didn’t appear to have a tailor in tow and their clothes were completely the wrong size, so they were short visits. A little further on, though, we were accosted by a man who tried to gain our trust by putting on the worst imitation of an English accent that I’ve heard in a long time, and instead of warning us off, we found ourselves drawn in by, of all things, a man clad in a dhoti saying, ‘Lovely jubbly,’ in an utterly banal voice. What were we thinking?

Not very clearly, it seems, as although we were supposed to be shopping for Peta, it only took ten seconds before the man was measuring me up for another shirt and another pair of trousers, while Peta stood by, saying that, yes, that blue wasn’t bad, but no, that brown was totally wrong. By the time we moved on to her wardrobe, I’d apparently agreed to buy another two shirts and a pair of trousers, all for an as-yet-undisclosed sum.

‘So, that’s two shirts for you and one trousers,’ the shopkeeper said, after going through a number of fabrics with Peta and deciding on how she wanted her clothes to be cut. ‘And for you, madam, two shirts and two trousers.’

‘Actually, I think I’ll only have one shirt,’ I said, desperately trying to sound in control. ‘In the white,’ I ventured. ‘Yes, the white.’

‘OK,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘that is a total of two shirts and two trousers for you, and one shirt and one trousers for you, so six in total, so that is a price of 3800 rupees. Ready tomorrow evening.’

‘I’ll give you 2000,’ I said, again failing to go for one-third of the asking price, but confident that I could at least get better value for money than in my last feeble attempt.

‘3300,’ said the man. ‘It is a fair price.’

‘2500,’ I said, wondering if that was too much of a leap, and realising too late that if I thought it was, then it probably was.

‘3000, my final offer,’ he said.

‘Let’s make it 2700,’ I said. ‘We are buying a lot from you, after all.’

‘OK, 2700,’ he said, and we shook on it.

And was I ripped off? I have no idea, but the second man turned out to be 50% cheaper than the first, though the second man hadn’t been quite so proud of his stitching. Only time will tell whether either of them is better than the other, and whether either of them represent value for money, but at least we now have some summer clothes, and right now I am absolutely delighted with them, if only because I won’t have to buy any more for some time to come.

And hey, it’s not as if I ever come out of a bargaining session feeling as if I was ever in control... which just shows that some people are born to shop, some people are born to sell, and some people don’t know they’re born at all.

That’ll be me, then.

Lagging Behind

Written: 14 March 2007

It’s a major stroke of luck that I have a lazy streak as wide as the grin on an Indian salesman’s face. It means that although I love planning my travels and enjoy poring over guidebooks and maps, when it comes to actually making a decision and booking anything in advance, I’m a total ditherer and tend to avoid the issue until I’m faced with an ultimatum. In the case of this two-and-a-half week visit to India, this meant that I booked a return flight to Trivandrum... and precisely nothing else. I figured we could make it up as we went along, as that’s what I managed to do quite happily for six months back in 1998.

This turned out to be a very good move, because I’m finding it hard to acclimatise to the heat and the time zone, but luckily we’re sitting in a friendly beach resort where we don’t even have to crawl out of bed if we don’t want to. The combination of hot weather and jet lag has completely sapped my energy, and if I had to plan another trip to the tropics, I’d totally fail to plan anything in exactly the same way again.

Things are made worse by the fact that we flew here from England. India is five-and-a-half hours ahead of GMT, which means we’re lying awake at night until the wee hours and fighting to get out of bed before lunch. Add in temperatures in the high 30s and a humidity level that is tempered by the sea breezes but still manages to feel like the inside of a long-distance walker’s leather boots after a long day, and I’m starting to feel like I’m on a particularly harsh detox regime, lying each night in damp sheets, dreams peppered with images of suffocation and mild panic.

It isn’t helped by India’s casual attitude to noise pollution. I’d forgotten how oblivious the locals are to noise, and as a result the thumping bass of the nearby bar’s trance music rattles through the small hours of the night while crickets screech and fans swish above. This morning wins the prize for the most cacophonous wake-up call, not because of the distorted muezzin’s call to prayer that blasted through the still morning air at 5.30am and again at 5.45am, but because of the effect it had on the local wildlife. Shocked into life like the rest of us, the local crow population – who are large, very black and have the same sullen behavioural problems as the dysfunctional seagulls of English seaside towns – thought they’d fight back with their own call to prayer, and for a good hour they screeched and screamed and yelled at each other, sounding for all the world like a theatre full of children, all laughing along with the funny man in the panto in that slightly over-zealous way that only five-year-olds can muster.

But none of this is a shock, and I have to keep reminding myself that this is actually India Lite, and has practically no relation to the hard, dusty and utterly rewarding travel experience I had nine years ago. In fact, I know that in a few days, when we’ve done a little more travelling and stayed in a few urban centres, I’ll look back on our nights in the Kerala Bamboo House with great fondness. After all, who remembers the sleepless nights when you’ve got such enjoyable days in between? Precisely...

Blowing the Budget

Written: 14 March 2007

There is one habit from my previous trip to India that I am finding hard to break. When I last visited, it was towards the end of a three-year jaunt around Australia, Oceania and Asia, most of it funded by money I had earned en route. One of the effects of travelling for so long is that you learn to budget mercilessly, because each penny you save translates into more time on the road.

It’s a simple equation, and it makes it easy to slip into a pretty mercenary attitude to budgeting. I stayed in the cheapest hotels, and was quite happy to live with the noisy fans, suspect linen and friendly cockroaches; I ate in street restaurants that served the most delicious food and charged a pittance for the pleasure; I avoided buying tickets for the more expensive air-conditioned sleeper trains and instead went for plain old second class; and I rarely drank alcohol, bargained hard with rickshaw drivers, and avoided organised tours whenever I could do it myself. It made me happy, and my average expenditure on food, accommodation, transport and entrance fees came to a whopping Rs250 a day, or – at the then rate of 50 rupees to the pound – about £5 a day.

This time I’m on holiday and I have my partner in tow, but the ingrained budgeting of nine years ago is still there, laying on the guilt every time I reach for the wallet. Frankly, this time round it’s annoying, because I’ve already experienced low-end India (and loved it), and I now want to experience mid- and top-end India, if only because I don’t want to be single when this is over. Add in a rise in the exchange rate – £1 is now worth Rs85 – and thing get even more difficult. A stunning meal of freshly fried calamari, followed by a whole butterfish with rice and vegetables, plus four 650ml bottles of Kingfisher beer, comes to Rs985, and I haven’t even mentioned the sea view and delightfully friendly service. That’s just over £12, for two, which is really something when you’re used to London prices, and yet as I peel off two Rs500 notes, and add another Rs50 for a tip (a distinctly optional affair in India, but something that is always appreciated and, in this case, richly deserved), I can’t help thinking that I’m peeling off four days’ budget for just one meal.

This is plainly stupid, because this time I’m on holiday, and my old daily budget is little more than an historical side note. Hell, as we walked back to our room in Varkala the other night, we walked past a fellow traveller using her laptop on the porch of her bamboo hut, which just goes to show how times have changed. But I guess long-term travelling can have long-term effects, and sometimes you have to consciously shake them off, so wish me luck as I bravely get through my therapy by having, oh, OK, just two more beers, and maybe another one of those fine cocktails, thank you very much.

Perhaps I could get used to non-budget travel after all...

Beer, What Beer?

Written: 14 March 2007

Not every restaurant in Varkala has a licence to sell alcohol, but that doesn’t seem to discourage them from doing so, and it’s one of Varkala’s more amusing traits. ‘We also have beer, yes,’ is a common enough introduction to the menu, at least at those restaurants whose menus completely fail to mention alcohol. At restaurants such as this, the waiter is only too happy to bring you a bottle of slightly chilled Kingfisher, though depending on how jittery the restaurant owner is feeling, it might either be served in a glass, or if there’s been some recent interest from the authorities in the illicit selling of alcohol, you might get a large ceramic mug with a big handle that’s large enough to hold half a bottle and a generous head.

‘Please,’ says the waiter as he delivers your beer, ‘in case of police,’ and with that he puts the bottle on the floor by the side of your table, winking at you conspiratorially.

This is all fine and dandy, until the police actually come a-calling. We were enjoying an under-the-table beer at one of the sea view restaurants in Varkala one evening, when a policeman wandered past and started talking to the Tibetan shopkeeper below, his neatly pressed khaki uniform with its black shoulder braid looking even more authoritarian when surrounded by the slapdash lungis and dhotis of the local businessmen. The wave of gentle apprehension that swept through the restaurant was visible, the diners exchanging looks and wondering what was going to happen next.

‘Police,’ whispered the waiter, stating the obvious as three more khaki-clad heavies wandered down the path.

‘So what do we do?’ asked Peta. ‘Do we drink all our beer? Or pretend that we brought it in ourselves?’

‘Maybe they will not come up,’ said the waiter, surprising us with a big grin. Meanwhile the police chief waved up to the restaurant and the owner, an old man in a particularly well-loved dhoti, wandered down and started talking to the policeman’s shoulder braid, avoiding the officer’s eyes and looking for all the world like a naughty five-year-old who’s hoping his mother won’t find the empty cookie jar.

‘They came last week,’ whispered the waiter, ‘and gave us a warning.’

‘Ah,’ said Peta. ‘So what happens if they find the beer this time?’

‘Then it is bad trouble for the owner,’ he said. ‘Legal trouble. But look, they are leaving.’

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘But they will be back in half an hour,’ he smiled, appearing to enjoy the conspiracy. ‘We must be careful.’

And off he went, returning a few minutes later with two ceramic mugs, into which he poured the rest of our bottles, taking the bottles away and hiding them out of sight of any prying officials. No matter that exactly the same ceramic mugs are used to hide beer by all the unlicensed restaurants along the strip, or that they’re much more suited to hot chocolate than the kind of drink you would have with your evening meal, because evidently it doesn’t take that much effort to satisfy the police. When you consider that illicit beer appears on the bill as ‘pop’ – albeit pop that costs Rs80 a bottle, some five or six times the price of a bottle of Coke – and that those restaurants who break the law would surely have a rather incriminating stash of empty Kingfisher bottles out the back, let alone a profit margin that wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny, the conclusion has to be that the police know it’s happening and tolerate it to some extent. Presumably they give out the odd warning and maybe come down hard on those who step out of line, and they probably also take the odd bit of baksheesh to make sure the machine of commerce remains well oiled, while still looking fierce when walking around town.

Whatever the reality, it’s clear that there’s a balance that benefits the restaurant, the tourist and, somehow, the police, as in some places the pretence wears pretty thin. Despite their warning, the restaurant in which we were enjoying our ceramic beers proudly sported Kingfisher tablecloths and Kingfisher ashtrays, and the glasses we’d been using before switching to the hot chocolate mugs were emblazoned with the Kingfisher Strong logo. You can almost picture the scene, with a red-faced policeman saying, ‘Are you selling beer here?’ while the restaurateur looks at the ceiling, whistling nonchalantly and trying to push a box of brightly coloured Kingfisher merchandise under the table with one foot.

But hey, this is India, where the rules are so flexible they can sometimes appear bent, and if it means you can drink a cold beer while the sun goes down, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing after all. Cheers!

Cash Card Crisis

Written: 15 March 2007

Sometimes I make a really piss-poor traveller, you know. Hot weather makes me irritable and lethargic, especially when it’s humid; if I don’t get a good night’s sleep, I get irritable and lethargic; I get ill at the drop of a hat, which makes me irritable and lethargic; and I suffer from regular bouts of homesickness, which would probably make me irritable and lethargic if it wasn’t too busy wallowing in self-pity. On most short trips, this homesickness peaks around day three or four, and it happens regardless of what I’m doing – it even kicks in on skiing holidays, which is frankly bizarre. It’s a wonder I manage to leave home at all, to be honest.

Being day four of our south Indian jaunt, today was destined to be a disaster from the outset. Throughout our stay in Varkala, the combination of heat, humidity, noisy all-night bars, 5.30am calls to prayer and ear-splitting dawn choruses from the local crows has ensured that we’ve had pretty much no sleep since landing in India, and considering that we came straight off an overnight flight, we’re both suffering from the effects of sleep deprivation. It’s slightly worse today as we decided to get up early this morning to catch the train to Kollam, so we’re even more bleary-eyed than we’ve been all week. On top of this, I stupidly forgot to put on any sun tan lotion the other day when we went for a swim in the sea, and despite it being only a short dip, my shoulders are red raw and the pain kicks in every time I turn over on the sandpaper sacks that our hotel has substituted for pillows. In fact, you could say I’m irritable and lethargic, which is at least true to form for this stage of the holiday.

It snowballed today, too. This morning I wasn’t really concentrating when I booked our tickets for the train to Kollam, and we ended up in third class, jammed up in the sardine tin that is non-sleeper train travel. It was only a short journey and our fellow passengers were smiley and charming, but in this sort of mood, sleeper class is a much more sensible option. Luckily we fell out of Kollam station and into a travel agency who had a highly recommended houseboat available for the next four days, so sensing a silver lining and the chance to while away our exhaustion on the tranquil Keralan backwaters, we booked our places and headed off to the ATM in a rickshaw to withdraw the necessary funds, with the travel agent in tow.

Credit and debit cards are the way to travel these days. When I was last in India there were no ATMs to speak of, and the only way to carry your cash was as traveller’s cheques or foreign currency, both of which took hours to change at the bank. These days you just need to flash your plastic at one of the many ATMs around, and it’s all done in a matter of seconds... or that’s the theory, anyway.

I thought I’d covered all the bases in bringing both a Barclays Connect card (a Visa-branded debit card) and a NatWest Mastercard, so I fished out my Connect card and tried it in the HDFC bank’s ATM, just round the corner from the agency, keying in my PIN and asking for the maximum withdrawal amount of Rs25,000. ‘System error,’ the screen flashed helpfully, ‘it has not been possible to complete this transaction.’ Oh well, I thought, let’s try the Mastercard, and keyed in my PIN again. The machine spat this card out even more quickly than the first one.

I tried again, but to no avail, and the man standing outside the ATM started impatiently banging on the window, so I went back outside and told the travel agent that I was having problems. He looked like a child whose balloon has just been burst, but gainfully he suggested we try the Federal Bank ATM up the road, a short hop in the rickshaw through Kollam’s hectic traffic.

‘Transaction declined,’ it beeped, rejecting both my cards again. ‘Contact bank, code 068,’ it continued, cryptically.

All-too-familiar pangs of panic started to well up in the pit of my stomach, as the thought of being stranded in India with no access to money sunk in. ‘Shit, what do we do now?’ I asked Peta, and she suggested we pop back to the bags to try her credit card.

‘To the ICICI Bank,’ the travel agent told the rickshaw driver, trying to sound positive. ‘And go via the office,’ he said, and so we headed out for our final attempt at securing funds for the houseboat. My cards both failed again – so much for third time lucky – and the official from inside the bank could only offer a head wobble and the helpful observation that ‘perhaps it is the card, or perhaps it is the ATM,’ which I couldn’t deny, but which didn’t exactly help matters. And then, with palpable relief, Peta’s First Direct Visa card hit the jackpot and out rolled Rs25,000 in crisp Rs500 notes, enough to pay for our Rs16,000 houseboat trip, and to see us through for a few days afterwards. Thank goodness for girlfriends; men might be useful for some things, but saving the day evidently isn’t one of them.

Postscript

In Kochi, things would get rather worse, as even Peta’s cards would stop working. It appears that these days, most banks will freak out if you try to process a transaction from countries like India or China, and they will freeze all overseas activity there and then. Barclays and NatWest had done just that with my cards, and First Direct decided that as withdrawing money in Kollam was not in Peta’s normal routine, they’d better freeze both her credit and debit cards.

Luckily she was able to ring them up and they switched them back on there and then, but clearly there is a golden rule when travelling abroad with cash cards, and that’s not only to tell your bank where you’re going, but to make sure you’ve also got a way of contacting them in case anything goes wrong. Ah well, you live and learn...

The Keralan Backwaters

Written: 17 March 2007

I first travelled the Keralan backwaters back in 1998, when I took the tourist cruise from Kollam to Alappuzha, and I loved it. The serene waterways that lie just a stone’s throw from the sea are relaxing, smothered in coconut palms and perfect for unwinding. Given my complete lack of ability to acclimatise to India’s heat and noise without throwing a tantrum, the backwaters seemed like the perfect place to relax for a few days.

We hadn’t meant to jump straight onto a boat, but India being India, things just fell into place (well, apart from some hiccups with my credit card, but let’s leave that for another time). We took the train from Varkala to Kollam, fell into a rickshaw to the DTPC tourist information centre and started talking to a man about houseboats. He didn’t have anything available until Saturday, which was far too far off, but he sent us round the corner to the office of the Visit Kerala representative, who produced photographs of a houseboat and a book full of glowing handwritten reviews from travellers dating from 2005 (‘The current book is on the boat,’ claimed the agent), and said the boat was available now to hire for as long as we wanted. We said we’d like three days, and he suggested an all-inclusive itinerary, costing Rs16,000 for three nights and four days, going from Kollam to a quiet halfway point on the first day, then to Alappuzha on the second day, and then around Alappuzha for the third day and night, ending in Alappuzha at the end of the trip. It sounded good, we checked out the boat and liked the look of it, and then I tried to bargain, which completely failed to work as he had ‘already given you my very best price.’ Too tired to argue, we paid up and headed for the boat.

Ah, the Keralan backwaters. They live in a time zone of their own, and although our trip from Kollam to Alappuzha followed the same route as the ferry I took back in 1998, there’s something wonderfully relaxing and, dare I say it, decadent about doing it in your own boat, with the smells of cooking wafting up from the back of the boat while you sit in the shade of the veranda like kings and queens of the river. It’s delightful, and even though it took a while to seep into my pores, it eventually took my black mood, tied it up in a bag, dropped in a big, heavy rock, and threw it mewling and whingeing into the luscious green waters of the backwater canals.

I should point out that, given the price difference – Rs300 for the tourist cruise, compared to a houseboat being of the most expensive attractions in India – the tourist ferry comes out of it very well. For the first two days of our trip, I saw nothing that I didn’t see back in 1998, if you ignore the new developments that have sprung up in the meantime (such as the construction work surrounding a couple of huge bridges that will one day join the outer land spit to the mainland). But I remember the tourist cruise being, well, rather touristy and a bit too busy, and if you’re a couple looking for a romantic interlude, or you’re a large party who would rather hang out with each other in privacy, then a houseboat is absolutely the way to go.

Great Expectations

Our boat, the Thamanna (or Expectation), was run by a three-man crew of smiling but relatively silent chaps, who ran the boat with the kind of relaxed efficiency that comes from working as a team for a long time. Anil, the chef, would prove to be a magician with food; Shaji, the engineer, charmed us with his smile; and Retheesh, who steered the boat, was quiet and slightly more aloof, perhaps because he was the new boy, having worked on the boat for just one year (the others were old hands, judging by the comments in the onboard visitors’ books). They kept themselves to themselves, hovering around enough to make sure we were perfectly happy and to have little chats now and then, but without ever feeling clingy or invasive. Indeed, I wouldn’t have minded if they had been more chatty, but perhaps on the backwaters, leaving the tourists to mind their own business is a sensible move.

For the backwaters are a drifter’s delight, and it started from the very first day, when we set off from Kollam in the hot, early afternoon sun. As soon as we left the mooring, just round the corner from Kollam’s somewhat fragrant abattoir, the breeze through the front deck blew away all memories of crowded trains and hot, sticky city centres, and just like that we reached the second largest lake in the backwaters, Lake Ashtamudi, whose waters stretch out into the distance, deep and green all the way to its palm-strewn fringes.

Soon after crossing the lake, we tied up to a pole in the middle of the channel, and out came lunch, the first of many spreads that we would both marvel over (I’m not ashamed to say that we took photos of our meals before ploughing into them – they really were that well presented, and they tasted as good as they looked). Our first lunch consisted of fat-grained south Indian rice, dhal, diced green banana, green beans, cabbage, soya beans and two whole fishes, which Anil said had come from the lake we’d just crossed. Whatever their origin, they tasted delightful, and each of the dishes was presented in its own red terracotta bowl, with its own unique recipe and mixture of herbs and spices. Indian cooking has a reputation for being fiery and spicy, but when it’s done well – as it was on our houseboat – you can taste the individual spices, and the sum of the parts adds up to an inspiring taste of its own. Each of Anil’s terracotta bowls was worthy of an ovation, and we did them justice as best we could (though each meal was so large, even two hungry mouths could only dent the mounds of food we were presented with, though I’m sure nothing went to waste).

After a short siesta to see out the hottest part of the day, we resumed our drift northwards, passing houses that lined the canal on both sides. One of the strongest memories of my previous visit to the backwaters was the insanity of the children, who would run along the banks, shouting, ‘One pen! One Pen! Give me one pen, please!’ in the hope that we would copy the hordes of tourists who throw pens at the locals, thus making things worse (the official advice is not to hand out pens to children, but to give them to a local school instead; throwing pens off your boat only encourages the children to yell, ‘One pen! One pen!’ every time they see a white person, which doesn’t achieve anything). One child was so enthralled by his mantra that he kept running along the side of the bank, leaping along the tops of the concrete stumps until they ran out and so did he, his legs wildly pumping the air as he fell, still screaming, into the river; he kept shouting as he surfaced, determined to get his reward, though I think on this occasion his efforts were in vain.

The ‘one pen’ brigade are still in evidence some nine years later, but it feels to me as if they have calmed down in the intervening years (though perhaps this is because they save their biggest efforts for the tourist cruise, as the odds are better, and don’t pester houseboats quite as much). Instead, the happy smiling of the locals is the most common sight, and people waved gleefully as we chugged past, happily waving back. All this waving and the smiling appears to be completely genuine on their part (it definitely was on our part), and the women and children reacted brilliantly when Peta said hello, something they were less keen to do with a solitary male all those years ago.

As the afternoon wore on, we sailed past a mineral factory and fishing boats moored on the shores, and the cantilevered Chinese fishing nets for which the area is famous. We finally arrived in the small village of Alumkadavu at about 5.30pm, where we pulled up by the Green Channel hotel – all but empty in this, the shoulder season – and Shaji said we were more than welcome to explore the village, if we wanted. And, of course, we jumped at the chance.

Again, this is something that you don’t get from the tourist cruise, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. We wandered randomly through the village, along its main road with all manner of shops crowding the sides, from the ironmongers, the saree shop and the men’s tailors, to the rope shop, the chemists, various food shops and, oddly enough, a shop selling western-style toilets. A lone television sat in a shop window showing Tom and Jerry battling it out in space, and children and old men sat around on the dusty ground, engrossed. Further on a line of auto-rickshaws gleamed in the afternoon light, their owners waiting for a fare, and all around people stared at us, some returning our smiles, and some just staring.

We took a right turn at a T-junction for no particular reason, and were soon overtaken by a small boy of about ten on a rather impressive bicycle. It had tinsel around the wheel hubs and the shiniest seat you’ve ever seen, and he slowed down as he went past.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ we chimed. ‘How are you?’

‘I am well,’ he replied. ‘What are you doing?’

‘We are just walking,’ we said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am just riding my bicycle,’ he said, and waved as he rode off. And that, we thought, was that.

A little further down the road the same boy popped out from nowhere and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Hello’, we said.

‘This is where I live,’ he said, pointing to a small house just off the road. ‘Would you like to come in?’

How could we refuse? So we wandered in and perched on the edge of the front porch, while our newfound friend said his name was Renju Bhavan, and introduced us to his mother, father and grandmother. We made brief and rather stilted conversation while slowly other boys wandered in, all giggling and hiding behind their hands. They let us take their pictures, insisting I appear in at least one of them, and while Renju went inside to write down his address so we could send him the prints, Peta went to talk to a group of girls who had gathered next door, and got taken off to see their home while I sat there, smiling and bobbling my head as if to say, ‘I’m happy to be in your home, even if I can’t speak a word of your language and you can’t speak a word of mine.’

Before long Renju emerged with a pen and his school book, and decided that it might be quicker if he dictated his address to me to write down, so I jotted it down as best I could, and he then asked me for my autograph, which Peta and I both gave him. This opened the floodgates – everyone produced their own school books, which we dutifully filled with our signatures and, in Peta’s case, a smiley face that went down particularly well, and after a few more photos and promises that we would send them copies as soon as we got home, we floated back to our boat, the smiles and happy waves of the locals of Alumkadavu a reminder of how genuinely friendly and open the locals of rural Kerala are.

And that evening we ploughed into a feast of masala chicken, rice and spiced aubergine, reflecting how it’s always the unscripted parts of the trip that produce the best memories.

To Alappuzha

Unfortunately, our first night on the houseboat proved to be rather less tranquil than we’d hoped it would be. The noise of a small engine (or possibly a large transformer) throbbed throughout the night just beyond our bedroom wall, and although we started the night lying in our cabin with the mosquito net coiled up above our heads, I woke up in the wee hours with itches that turned to scratches, and we had to spend the rest of the night huddled in the still air under the net. After finally dropping into a troubled sleep around three o’clock, we both woke to the shock of the muezzin’s call at 5.30am, after which the local Hindu temple decided to play catch-up with a woofer-blasting rendition of its own that went on all the way to breakfast, accompanied by loud, sharp bangs that we would later discover were firecrackers. Apparently our first full day on the backwaters happened to be a Hindu festival, and nobody sleeps when there are colourful gods to be celebrated.

So day two started in a haze of exhaustion, brought on by yet another difficult night adjusting to the heat and the noise of India. It can take the body up to two weeks to acclimatise to this kind of heat, and six nights in, neither of us had managed anything approaching a proper night’s sleep. Thank goodness we were on a houseboat, then, because there is absolutely nothing to do except kick back and relax.

Giving up on our sweat-drenched bed, we spent the early hours of the morning watching the village wake up. Just in front of us the river taxi man punted his canoe back and forth between the banks, ferrying people and bicycles between the main village and the houses on the opposite bank. Back and forth he went, sometimes carrying sedate clutches of colourfully clad women, and other times carrying groups of men who seemed to be able to talk without drawing breath. Meanwhile, we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on the front deck, consisting of masala eggs, nests of rice noodles, baked plantain and sweet tea. At dawn the air had been completely still, made hazy by the smoke from the morning fires, but over breakfast the air slowly cleared, the humidity of the early morning replaced by a feeling of impending high temperatures as the sun felt its way towards our houseboat. Setting off for the day’s cruise not only brought something else to look at, but a welcome breeze that made life bearable once more.

After an hour on the backwaters, heading north along a wide canal surrounded by thick coconut forests, we stopped briefly at the Matha Amrithanandamayi Mission, where about 2000 people live and follow the teachings of one of India’s few female gurus. Known as Amma (‘mother’), she is best known for her darshan (or her ‘blessing’), when she hugs thousands of people, one after the other, in long sessions that can go on all night. We wandered round, feeling slightly self-conscious, as this is one of the more popular ashrams for westerners, and there were plenty of white faces, decked out in the simple clothes of ashram devotees. They looked happy enough, though looking at the tall, pink tower blocks which house the throng, I knew that this wasn’t for me. I like the bad things in life too much to become an ashram devotee, though if I ever feel tempted, a hugging guru is probably the way I’d go.

A little further on along the backwaters, we pulled up to a wooden pile in the middle of the canal, surrounded on both sides by thick jungle and the sound of Hindu celebrations. Firecrackers cracked, drums drummed, and it felt for all the world like the build-up to a cannibal scene out of an H Rider Haggard novel. We idly fantasised that we were being fattened up for the exotic celebrations, because lunch was truly something. Little bowls held masala prawns, beetroot with yoghurt, a lovely spinach dish, sambar, ladyfinger, beans, rice and crunchy poppadoms, and we polished off as much as we could to the tune of a cold beer while the drums thumped out a tune to aid the digestion.

After a siesta we struck north, and soon sunk back into a set of smaller waterways with picturesque houses dotted along the banks. People waved and smiled, with only a minority of the children shouting, ‘Please give me one pen,’ and after a short chug we pulled in to the banks and were whisked off to see the locals making rope from coconut fibres. This rope is made from coconuts that are submerged in water for three months, which makes it easier to separate the nut from the fibrous shell. The fibres (known as ‘coir’) are separated out into huge piles of thick, hair-like strands, each only a few inches long, and the ladies who make the rope weave the coir using a simple contraption that spins four large needle-like hooks along their axes (these days these machines are electric, though they used to be hand-cranked before the arrival of electricity). They attach a few strands to each needle and twist it to form a short rope, and then two of them take two ropes each, one in each hand, and walk backwards, away from the machine, feeding more strands into the twisted fibres and creating a thin string as they go. After 10m or so, they stop and join the ropes they’re holding in each hand together, thus creating two loops, and they attach these to a similar machine at that end that twists each pair of strands into two lengths of twisted-pair rope. Considering that these ropes are made by simply twisting short strands of coconut fibre together, they are incredibly strong, and the ladies reckoned they could produce 25 to 35kg of rope a day, no mean feat in this weather.

It’s a skilled job, too, as became quite clear when we tried our hand at making a short length of rope. It isn’t easy to feed small strands into a twisting rope without losing the momentum, but the ladies of Kerala make it look like a breeze. Hats off to them, I must say.

As you approach the Alappuzha end of the backwaters, there’s a sense that the waterside developments are, well, slightly more developed than their equivalents down towards Kollam. Although most of the houses are still small and modest, the number of larger houses increases, and you get the feeling that there’s a bit more prosperity at this end of the waters. The landscape changes too, moving from the coconut forests of Kollam to a more open, agricultural layout, with large, flat paddy fields stretching out beyond the banks of the backwater. The paddy fields are separated from the canal by long, thin strips of land, with the occasional irrigation gate providing a means of flooding the paddy fields at the start of the growing cycle, when rice needs to grow in shallow water. Water pumps and large plastic pipes allow the farmers to pump the paddy fields dry, so that by the time the rice is ready to harvest, the fields are no longer waterlogged.

Rice growing is much in evidence in the northern backwaters, with canoes plying the water, bursting with huge piles of harvested rice, ready to head over to the threshing site where the rice grains are separated from the grassy stems. But there’s an awful lot more going on than just rice growing, for this is still a bustling place where people live. Boys dive into the water as your houseboat floats past, racing to see if they can reach the boat before it passes (it’s futile with petrol-driven boats like this, but it’s the taking part that counts); women bathe by the banks, coyly clad in their sarees, while men bathe further downstream in just their lungis; further along, a group of boat builders is working on the skeleton of a new boat, its curves reminiscent of a ripe banana or a sultan’s moustache; boys play cricket under the palm trees, yelling ‘how is that’ amid a torrent of Malayalam; men squat on their haunches in circles under the shady trees, embroiled in heated discussion while women walk past in pairs, their bright clothes looking immaculate in the bright sunshine; the thwack-thwack of wet cloth on stone fills the air as the women of the house stand knee-deep in the water, doing the washing in the time-honoured way of smashing wet clothes on flat washing stones; lone canoes paddled by wiry old men pass larger boats weighted down to the waterline with piles of sand, collected in the morning by men with baskets, diving down to the bed of the canal; a solitary tantrum rings out, the intonation of both mother and child instantly familiar to anyone who has children of a certain age; river taxis punt from bank to bank, some carrying bicycles, and some carrying women hiding from the sun under their umbrellas; the shrill sound of a saw rings out from a riverside saw mill, where logs are bundled onto the back of a waiting truck; women bend over in rice paddies, scything ripe rice into bundles that the men carry away on their heads; and a man in a small canoe makes ‘oo-ee’ and ‘kak-kak’ sounds as he herds a large flock of ducks from one side of the canal to another. Life on a houseboat might be lazy, but all around you can see the quiet pace of life unfolding before your very eyes.

And that night, as we dropped anchor in a quiet stretch of the river just south of Alappuzha, we finally managed to get a good night’s sleep, after a week of trying. At last, we felt human...

Romantic Cruising

Life on a houseboat soon becomes quite mantra-like. Breakfast starts the day, lunch punctuates it, and dinner rounds it off, and in the middle there are more drifting sights and chances to doze off as the sun climbs through the sky. The scenery around Alappuzha is almost entirely flat and made up of paddy fields, and as such is lacks some of the charm of the winding coconut forests of the south, but by this stage it doesn’t really matter, as everything plods along in the manner to which it has become accustomed. People are just as friendly and are always happy to smile and wave, and although the evidence of labour is right there in front of you, rather than tucked away behind the palm trees, the atmosphere is still just as relaxed. The sun is hot, the breeze is welcome, and the pace of life is delightful. ‘A perfect spot for a bit of romance,’ you might think, as you flick through the visitors’ book and read the comments of couple after couple after couple.

Well... yes and no. There’s no denying that life on a houseboat is romantic, in a kind of ‘just the two of us on a boat in the middle of a palm-encrusted tropical paradise’ kind of way... except that reality isn’t quite that simple. It’s so hot and so humid that you break a sweat just by standing up, let alone standing to attention; meanwhile there are three burly men manning the boat, and although Anil, Shaji and Retheesh were terribly respectful of our privacy, these boats aren’t exactly huge and the walls aren’t exactly thick; or if you think a quick spot of fun in the middle of the night is a good idea, then beware the silent canoes that paddle past, just feet from your open bedroom windows, their candles and torches lighting up the inside of your room in glorious, high-definition night vision for everyone to enjoy, while the stench of ingrained fish wafts in on the still night air; and even if you close the curtains or decide the fishermen can get stuffed, you try getting romantic under a mosquito net without catching it with your feet and ending up like two dolphins in a tuna net. Luckily, what you do get are bottled memories that you can take away with you, ready to be cracked open on cold evenings at home and savoured in front of the log fire, far away from the crowded melee of modern India. Or that’s my plan, anyway...

The only stop we made on day three was the village of Champakulam, 18km from Alappuzha and home to the Kalloorkad St Mary’s Forane Church, which was founded in the fifth century AD, but now uses modern technology to get its own back on the local mosques and Hindu temples. When we visited, the loudest sound system this side of Mecca was blasting out a Christian service, and the church was jammed with a congregation that spilt out into the church grounds, men standing on the left of the church and women on the right. The service was clearly Christian, but the words were in the local language and the pace of the service was definitely Indian, bearing about as much relation to staid English church services as do the happy-clappy churches of Ghana. And although I’m used to mosques ruining the peace of the wee hours and Hindu temples being as noisy as the country of their origin, it’s a shock to hear Christians before you see them. But who can blame them in a country where even the religions have to shout to be heard?

Our final evening passed like the others before – quietly and pleasantly – and all too soon morning had broken and, like the first morning, we arrived back into the chaos of India in the form of Alappuzha. After tipping the crew and saying goodbye, we hopped into a rickshaw to the bus station, caught the bus to Ernakulam, jumped on the ferry to Fort Cochin, found a room in a very pleasant homestay, and lay down for a bit of peace... though, truth be told, there are few places in India as peaceful as the backwaters, and that’s all part of their charm. What a place.

The Beer Shop

Written: 15 March 2007

The sun sank slowly behind the palm trees separating the backwaters from the Arabian Sea, the evening meal on board our houseboat was a sublime mix of chicken in Keralan spices, aubergine chutney, chapatis and large-grained rice, and as we sat on the prow of the boat, watching fireflies wink past and enjoying the rare treat of a peaceful evening in India, Peta said,’ Do you fancy a beer, then?’

‘Sure,’ I said, and wandered down the end of the boat to ask Anil, the chef, whether we could have a bottle of Kingfisher.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘We do not have any beer on board.’

‘Oh,’ I said, momentarily taken aback. I thought back to when we’d booked our trip. ‘The price includes everything, including food and water,’ said the man from the Visit Kerala travel agency. ‘Except for beer and sodas, which are extra,’ he continued, as we peeled off Rs16,000 in cash and slapped it down on the counter. This seemed perfectly reasonable, but unfortunately he had omitted one small detail – that we would have to provide the beers and sodas ourselves – although thinking back he had asked, ‘Would you like a beer?’ when we were sitting in the rickshaw, waiting to head off to the ATM. At the time I’d just thought he was being polite; clearly he was asking whether I’d like to stock up with beer for the trip...

‘The hotel may have some,’ said Anil, pointing to the hotel alongside which we were tied. ‘But it will be Rs100 a bottle.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said, and Anil stepped onto the jetty and headed for the hotel. Five minutes later he came back and said, ‘I’m afraid they do not have any beer,’ which I perhaps should have seen coming, seeing as the hotel was called the Green Channel and looked as if it hadn’t had anything to declare for months.

‘If you want beer,’ continued Anil, ‘there is a place you can go not far from here that sells it. You can go with Retheesh in a rickshaw if you want.’

‘Why not?’ I said, and Peta and I dutifully put on our shoes and followed Retheesh back through the village to the rickshaw stand at the top of town.

‘Not far from here’ meant a 15-minute rickshaw ride through pitch blackness, playing chicken with oncoming traffic, potholes and pedestrians who were invisible until scared out of the road by the driver’s incessant horn. As the minutes rattled by, the road became more and more urban, until we hit the main drag of a busy, bustling city, lit by the garish lights of shops, petrol stations, hotels, restaurants and, just over there on the left-hand side of the road, a small warehouse with a truck parked outside, unloading its cargo of cardboard boxes via the heads of a couple of wiry porters. This, it seemed, was the bottle shop in Karunagapally.

Retheesh indicated that we should follow him, and much to the amusement of the rickshaw driver, we disappeared into the chaos. After stepping around a couple of heated conversations and threading between the porters, who had boxes of bottles stacked on their heads and cried out, ‘Hey! Hey!’ as they sliced purposefully through the crowd, we entered the bottle shop and stepped right into the seedy end of the Keralan alcohol trade.

20 Green Bottles

Behind a counter at the end of a dirty, dimly lit, concrete room was utter mayhem. A crowd of men stood three deep at the counter, every single one of them yelling and jostling for position. At the left end of the counter a man took money off people in exchange for a receipt, and along the rest of the counter the customers waved their receipts until another man brought them their alcohol. Retheesh turned to me and asked how many bottles would I like.

‘Um,’ I said, trying to work out how much beer we’d want for a three-night, four-day trip, including a few beers for the crew, while all around locals stared at me as if I’d just teleported in from another planet. ‘Uh... 20?’ I said, wondering whether this was remotely close to the right figure. Retheesh sucked in his breath, smiled a conspiratorial smile and dived into the chaos.

A minute later he resurfaced, saying, ‘That will be Rs900,’ which I dutifully peeled off, noting with some glee that at Rs45 a bottle, this was as cheap as beer gets in Kerala (the bottles have ‘Rs44’ emblazoned on their labels, so we were clearly getting the local price, a bit of a first for this trip). Retheesh again disappeared into the crowd, and I stood back to wait while Peta hid near the entrance, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible (not an easy task for a fair-haired white woman in a dodgy bottle shop in urban Kerala, it has to be said).

While we waited, men flocked in and out of the shop, noisily changing their money for receipts and their receipts for bottles. They were all buying single bottles, mainly of brown spirits that looked like whisky or rum, and to a man they looked sheepish and guilty once they had their prizes, most of them tucking them away in their underwear before leaving the shop without meeting anyone’s eye. Clearly, with their mission accomplished, the next step was to get themselves and their precious cargo out of the shop as quickly as possible, so they could get on with the serious business of getting drunk.

While I was waiting, a man with bloodshot eyes indicated to me that I should be waiting in line at the other end of the counter, and he seemed to be getting more and more insistent when Retheesh came back with Rs100 change, and two boxes of rattling bottles appeared on the counter, moving over the heads of the throng like crowd-surfers at a punk rock gig. One of them landed in the arms of our rickshaw driver, who must have followed us in for the entertainment value, and Retheesh grabbed the other one and headed for the door, grinning wildly as the other drinkers looked at our stash in the same way that men stare at an unattainable woman as she and her curves walk past.

The journey back was punctuated only by a brief visit to a petrol station, where a banner proclaimed that January had been ‘oil and gas month’ and that ‘using oil is your right, conserving oil is your duty.’ Rickshaw drivers caught sight of us in the back of our rickshaw and smiled and waved, and with us smiling and waving back, we hit the road once more, the rickshaw clinking and clunking at every bump in the road. As we approached the village, at the end of another hair-raising 15-minute joy-ride through the suburbs, we had to try to stop the bottles from rattling quite so loudly as we drove down the main street and past the mosque of this evidently dry part of Kerala.

And with that, we finally got our beer under the stars, and boy, did it taste good. As it says on the label, ‘Kingfisher, India’s best selling Premium Lager Beer, is a rare pleasure.’ Round here, that sums things up pretty accurately...

Kochi

Written: 20 March 2007

Now that I come to think of it, the last time I was in Kochi I spent a day wandering around the sights of Fort Cochin on the northern end of Kochi island, and another day killing time in Ernakulam, eating in the Indian Coffee House and enjoying a James Bond movie in the company of the locals. I didn’t hang around, and two days was probably one too many. I’m glad to say that, nine years later, Kochi is still the kind of place that forces you to kick back and relax.

I say ‘glad’ because India is currently suffering from a heatwave, and when India suffers, I suffer along with it. According to the very friendly man in the Dal Roti restaurant in Lilly Street, Kerala is currently five degrees hotter than it should be, and even the locals are finding it a bit much. ‘It is like April temperatures in March,’ he said, and boy, I can believe it. As I write this, sheltering from the midday heat in the covered veranda of our homestay, I’m literally dripping with sweat, and all I’m doing is moving my fingers.

It’s doubly hard, because for both of us, Kochi rocks. Unfortunately it also rolls, pitches, lurks and yaws, because even though it’s 48 hours since we hopped off the houseboat, the whole planet feels completely unsteady under our feet. I really thought that the backwaters would have left us by now, but the humidity seems to be perpetuating our sense of giddiness, and the thwack-thwack of fans everywhere adds to the constant feeling of movement. Perhaps we will get back home to find that southern India has officially turned to jelly in the heat; it certainly feels like it has, anyway.

So we’ve been hiding from the heat, and I’ve been desperately trying to stem my natural impulse, which is to don my bush hat, pop open the umbrella, and go walking in the midday sun. The dogs aren’t bothering, so perhaps, just this once, Englishmen shouldn’t either.

The Beach Front

Instead of trying to brave the daytime, we decided to wait until the sun had dipped before venturing out into Fort Cochin. It appeared that we weren’t alone, for Sunday night is clearly promenade night in Kochi.

The island of Fort Cochin is the quiet, touristy cousin to Ernakulam’s crazy city vibe, and it’s where everyone goes for a romantic seaside stroll before the evening meal. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone, because the beach promenade is absolutely teeming with visitors, almost all of them Indian. As a result, it’s a great place to explore, though perhaps not from a romantic perspective.

Let’s not beat around the bush; the seaside in Fort Cochin is pretty squalid. The sea is grey, but not in the way that it’s grey in England; in Fort Cochin the sea is grey in the same way that the water in the open sewers around town is grey. The foam is grey where the waves break against the rocks; the sand is grey on the two small beaches that litter the promenade; and the slime that clings to the rocks is the kind of radioactive green-grey that makes your immune system wince. On top of that, the grassy patches behind the promenade are completely smothered in litter, from plastic bottles to wrappers from the ice cream stalls that do a roaring trade in the tropical heat, and the nearby beaches are a disaster zone, smothered with bits of polystyrene, old flip-flops and the garbage equivalent of the hair from the bathroom plug-hole. It’s not exactly paradise, though I guess that’s all part of being at the entrance to a busy port.

Happily the locals crowding the shore are way more colourful than the seas of grey water and sun-bleached rubbish, and elbowing your way through the crowds is a fun way to reach the main drag in Fort Cochin itself, where fishermen demonstrate their Chinese fishing nets and sell fresh fish that you can eat in the restaurants set up right next to the seafront. It’s atmospheric and fun, though I am assured that this is one place where being a white woman attracts the kind of opportunistic cop-a-feel local that us men simply don’t come across. Perhaps romance is possible on the seafront after all...

Top-end Kochi

For our first evening meal in Kochi, we decided that eating fish plucked from a quagmire was perhaps a treat best saved for another night, and decided instead to follow a recommendation we’d been given to try an evening meal at the Brunton Boatyard, the poshest hotel in Fort Cochin. We’ve thus far been happily staying in mid-range homestays and guest houses – a serious step up from my budget level travelling of nine years ago, but still a long way off the standard of international western hotel chains – and I’ve been delighted at what you get for your money. From something in the region of Rs1000 to Rs1500, you get lovely double rooms in period houses, with en suite bathrooms, comfortable beds and a complete lack of cockroaches. However, you also bump into the lower end of the travelling class that gives us all a bad name. I’m talking about those who still seem to think there’s a British Empire, and treat the natives like subjects.

I witnessed a typical example in the bar at the Brunton Boatyard, where a pasty-faced Englishman with a pinched nose was arguing with the barman over the price of a drink. Clearly the man had ordered one drink and had got another, and he was refusing to pay the higher cost of the drink he’d had, and insisted on paying for what he had ordered. ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ you think, and you’re right, but it wasn’t the fact that the man was complaining that shocked me, but the completely rude way in which he was doing it. He refused to make eye contact with the barman, and just talked at him, rather than engaging in any kind of two-way conversation. ‘That is what I ordered, so that is what I am paying for, and that is that,’ he said, pomposity visibly ballooning in his upper chest like an elephant seal fighting for territory in the mating season. The barman looked furious, but he simply accepted with good grace, walking over to serve me, where I waited to pay my drinks bill. I tipped him heavily, by way of apology for my fellow countryman’s utter lack of breeding.

This wasn’t the first contretemps we saw in Kochi. A couple of days later our hotel manager could be seen effing and blinding at a rickshaw as it pulled away from the front door, the white arm of one of our fellow guests protruding from the back. The hotel owner was threatening to call the police, and although I have no idea what the problem was, the man in the rickshaw had been treating the hotel staff with an all-too-familiar disdain that I found as disconcerting as that in the Brunton bar. It seems incomprehensible to me that a hotel owner in a predominantly white tourist area would kick off such a public display of hatred without some kind of justification, and although I’m clearly guilty of jumping to conclusions here, there’s a pattern of behaviour in mid- and top-end range accommodation that you very rarely see when you’re travelling at the budget end (perhaps because budget travellers’ expectations are lower, or perhaps because those who hate the locals don’t want to live with them, and that’s all part of the charm of living in a Rs50-a-night fleapit).

I don’t know if there’s any connection, but only the other month a British tourist was found murdered in Mumbai, purportedly because he had asked a woman where he could find somewhere to sleep, and the locals had interpreted this as a come on and had sorted him out (though the man had time to leave a message on his parents’ answer-phone saying that he feared for his life, so the argument obviously simmered for some time). One can’t help feeling that there is more to this story than meets the eye, and Kochi provided us with lots of fuel to add to the speculative fire.

But I digress, as we had yet to enjoy our meal at the Brunton Boatyard, and after drinks in the outside bar – a set of tables by the waterfront that was caged in on all sides, presumably to stop birds from swooping in and stealing the expensive hors d’oeuvres off the menu – we were shown to our table on the Seafood Terrace, a pleasant balcony overlooking the ferry terminal. The service was very attentive and the fish chowder made a pleasant starter, but as we waited for our main course, first one, then two, and then three or four large raindrops landed on the stone floor, each of them evaporating within two seconds of landing.

The diners all looked up at the same time, wondering what was going to happen if it rained; the only shelter was provided by a set of washing-line wires strung above our heads – again, to stop birds from swooping down and making off with the seafood platter – and as more drops started to fall, the lady on the next table asked the waiter, ‘It’s raining – what do we do?’

‘It is not raining,’ said the waiter, as droplets fell with increasing attitude onto his head.

‘Yes, it is,’ she said.

‘It will be fine,’ said the waiter, but clearly even his optimism couldn’t save the day, for suddenly the taps turned on and a serious tropical downpour hit the Seafood Terrace, throwing everyone into a state of amused panic. The waiters seemed caught completely off-guard and initially huddled together under the awning near the door to the terrace, before realising that perhaps they should be doing something, namely rescuing people’s meals and moving them inside.

Unfortunately the inside of the restaurant was full, and as the terrace diners filed inside, the maître d’ looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights, as all his careful table planning went up in smoke. Luckily he managed to save his reservations system by channelling us all down into the bar, where we sat out the rest of our meal to the tune of air-conditioning and irritatingly piped chill-out music in the form of Enigma, Germany’s contribution to the art of lift music.

The main course – the seafood platter – turned out to be very disappointing. Compared to the amazing fish in Varkala and the wonderfully homey cooking of the houseboat, this was bland, anonymous and utterly forgettable. The fact that it cost four times as much as a meal overlooking the sunset of Varkala only added to the irritation, but this is where I have to grab myself and remember that I’m not in the target market for posh hotel restaurants, so perhaps I just shouldn’t frequent them. I like earthy eating holes and I don’t aspire to haute cuisine, which is possibly why I spent most of my previous Indian trip rushing to the toilet and drinking oral rehydration salts. I can imagine that if I wasn’t much of a traveller and I’d arrived at the Brunton Boatyard straight from an air-conditioned coach, then the strange sounds of the world outside would freak me out, and the thought of going down the waterfront to buy a fish from a fisherman and have it barbecued in front of me... well, it would scare me in a way that a fairly amorphous hotel restaurant experience wouldn’t. Luckily I know enough about India to know that the world outside the hotel window is far from scary, but then again I don’t believe there’s still a British Empire, and I spend most of my time in India smiling, rather than sour-faced.

So we tipped the waiters handsomely, wobbled our heads to them as we left, and ducked out into the now-clear night air once again to soak up the post-thunderstorm atmosphere of the world outside the hotel.

Exploring Kochi

The following day we visited the same tourist attractions that I’d seen nine years before, braving the heat to visit Jewtown and Mattancherry Palace, as well as the area round Princess Street, which has blossomed into a completely backpacker-oriented part of town. There are loads of tourists in Kochi, and they continue to pile in in their air-conditioned coaches, looking slightly worn out and rather oppressed by it all; one wonders if Coachy would be a better name for this part of town, as yet another dark-windowed coach empties its pale occupants into the sun, blinking and looking rather dazed. Luckily the backpacker scene has its advantages, and one of them is that there in the middle of Burgher Street is a little piece of Hampstead, perfectly preserved in every detail. I’m talking about the Kashi Art Café, which the Lonely Planet calls ‘something of an institution.’

It’s an oasis, is the Kashi, and if you ignore the hot weather, it’s easy to transport yourself home, because it’s a classic bohemian coffee bar from head to toe. The chill-out music is direct from Europe; the customers dress in what the locals consider underwear, but we consider to be shorts and tight T-shirts that leave little to the imagination; laptop computers are much in evidence, as is the hallowed Lonely Planet; the menu serves lattes and filter coffee served in a cafetière; and people chat away on their mobile phones, sipping pineapple juice and swapping travellers’ tales.

And that sums up Fort Cochin, really. It doesn’t feel like India, it feels almost continental, and as a result it’s not quite as exciting as other more Indian destinations in Kerala. Happily there are pockets of excellence, and we fell in love with the aforementioned Dal Roti restaurant, which served excellent north Indian food in a quiet backstreet some distance from the main drag. Then again, the proprietor speaks perfect English, lived in London for six years, used to own a house in Epping, and returns there twice a year, so even here, you get the feeling that Fort Cochin is a world away from the hustle and bustle of India.

Still, that’s half the appeal, I suppose, and as a place to wilt from the heatwave, it hit the spot. We sat around soaking up lime sodas by the dozen, we went to a kathakali performance – an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours – and we recharged our batteries, ready for the next journey. Mission accomplished, then...

Munnar

Written: 22 March 2007

Ah, that’s better. The oppression of India’s mini-heatwave has been really grinding me down, and like the British before us, we’ve taken refuge in a hill station. Munnar, which the British Raj made their southern capital in summer, is 1500m above sea level, and like all India’s hill stations, it lets you function. The novelty is palpable.

Munnar is clearly taking off as a tourist destination – both Indian and foreign – because the outskirts of town are under construction to a considerable degree. High-rise blocks are propped up by hundreds of straight pieces of scaffolding, while whole gangs of workmen drill, mix, bang and blast, slowly filling the concrete skeletons with red brick walls and grey concrete plaster. Unfortunately, we followed the advice in the Lonely Planet and started looking for a homestay to the south of the main town centre, only to end up in a hotel that was perfectly pleasant, but which turned out to be stuck in the middle of nowhere and a long walk from town. ‘Never mind,’ we thought, and fired up with the energy of those who have just escaped the heat of the plains, we strolled into town, ate in the bazaar, walked back to the hotel and decided we’d celebrate the ambient temperatures with a beer. And that’s when things started to go a bit wrong.

When we tried to find the hotel bar, we discovered they didn’t have one, and so we took the concierge’s advice and hopped into an auto-rickshaw for the Hotel Isaac’s Residency, home to the only bar in town. I’d forgotten how amazing the bars are in southern India; indeed, I’d forgotten just how frowned upon alcohol consumption is in general, and the bar at the Residency is a good example of why south Indian bars don’t win any prizes for hospitality and ambience. Worst of all, I’d had the nerve to bring along a woman, and as we slunk into the dimly lit room and sat down, a palpable wave of bemusement ran through the all-male crowd.

Keralans go to bars to get drunk; they go there to consume a drug, and any pretensions to socialising over a beer after work would go straight out of the window, if the bars had any. I thought at first that the drinkers propping up the bar were diluting their large measures of whisky with a surprisingly large amount of water, but they were actually mixing it with a clear liquid that calls itself brandy, but is clearly a local interpretation of the genre that has nothing to do with its European origins. People were clearly getting drunk, and quickly, and in this atmosphere we tried to order a Kingfisher and a Kingfisher Strong from the waiter, so we could compare the two different varieties of India’s premium lager.

The waiter looked pretty confused, and he brought over the Kingfisher Strong first, and I tried it; it wasn’t bad. Peta waited patiently for her beer, but it didn’t materialise, while the frenetic buying at the bar – which reminded me of the London Stock Exchange on a busy day – continued on apace. Eventually we realised that he wasn’t going to bring a beer, so I called him over and asked him for another Kingfisher, pointing to Peta. He looked horrified, but went to get the beer anyway, clearly unused to serving women in any shape or form.

The striking thing was just how naughty everyone looked. I say ‘naughty’ because that’s exactly what it was; they were like schoolboys breaking the rules, hoping that nobody would see them. Huddles of conspirators hid in the dim light, while a handful of solitary drinkers downed glass after glass of whisky, slowly sinking into their chairs in defeat. One young man at the table opposite us tried to pull his collar up when an older man came in and stared at him in total disapproval; the young man eventually went over to the older man and tried to undo whatever offence he had caused by being there, but the man wasn’t having any of it, and however much the boy nudged him as if to say it was all right, the old man kept a straight face, utterly offended.

Funnily enough, we didn’t savour our beers. Instead we drank them down fairly sharply, and figured that this was probably why I hadn’t drunk much beer on my last visit. Somehow, making alcohol a thing of shame makes it taste rather bitter. It’s perhaps no wonder that the locals drink to get drunk, because goodness knows there’s no other reason to go out for a beer here.

Around Munnar

I forgot to mention that we hired a car and driver in Kochi to get us around for the next five days. After all, this is supposed to be a holiday, and spending hours and hours on bumpy Indian buses is a luxury only those with time on their hands can afford, so we’ve spent Rs6500 on a gleaming white Ambassador Classic, a very friendly driver called Sajeeve, and an itinerary from Kochi to Munnar, then on to Periyar and Kovalam. It’s a great way to get around, even if it does reek slightly of decadence.

The best thing about having your own car is being able to decide exactly where you want to go, and when. On our only full day in Munnar, we decided to head over to Top Station, a point on the border between Tamil Nadu and Kerala that offers spectacular views over the Western Ghats, the mountains that separate Kerala from its western neighbour. This sounded exciting enough, but we hadn’t realised that the journey there would be so beautiful.

The area round Munnar is absolutely stunning. This area is famous for having some of the highest altitude tea plantations in the world, and once you leave the overactive and slightly dingy town centre, the hills open up and the beauty of the High Ranges becomes apparent. And what a delight it is...

Most of the reason is tea. Tea was introduced to India from China in 1780, and large-scale planting had taken off by the mid-1830s, after the discovery of the Assam tea plant in 1823. Cultivation in central Travancore (as Munnar used to be known) started in 1875, and the High Ranges were cultivated in 1878, leading to the tea estates we see today. Because tea leaves are picked from the tops of tea bushes, the bushes quickly assume a squat stature and a flat top, giving the fields the appearance of a perfectly assembled jigsaw. Tea bushes are a beautifully deep green, and there are paths between the bushes where the tea pickers ply their trade, so it’s as if the hills have turned into huge, complex tennis balls, albeit tennis balls smothered with meticulously manicured topiaries. Or, to cut the description to a minimum, the hills around Munnar are simply gorgeous.

The beauty is enhanced by a collection of reservoirs, which the road to Top Station winds past in an increasing state of disrepair. These reservoirs form part of a hydro-electric system that provides tourists the opportunity to take pedalos out onto the water, and afterwards to shout at the tops of their voices at a place called Echo Point, so called because – you guessed it – the reservoir shore echoes back whatever you care to yell at it. This being India, you don’t have to try it out yourself, as there are plenty of noisy tourists about who can shout louder and longer than you’ll ever manage. Yes, this is the land of the Indian tourist, and it’s all the more fun because of it.

Indeed, the only problem with getting to Top Station is the road, which clearly gets a pounding in the monsoon. They’re currently resurfacing parts of it, which means you get to drive right through the middle of the whole process, dodging workmen and veering round turning trucks. In the West we can only glance at roadworks from the other side of an invasion of orange cones, but in India you get to participate. At one point, a JCB digger politely stopped dropping rocks onto the road ahead of us, just in time to stop the stones bouncing off the bonnet; at a contra-flow, manned by men with red and green flags, buses and four-wheel-drives with attitude overtook us by driving on the part-surfaced road, only pulling in when faced with stationary road-laying equipment in their path; and all along the sides men and women toiled in the hot sun, smashing rocks with hammers, sending sharp shards into the side of the car and doubtless into their companion’s shins. It’s a hard life, out there on the highways of India.

But the effort is worth it, as Top Station does indeed provide wonderful views of the Western Ghats, even if they’re a little hazy at this time of the year. And best of all, you get to repeat the journey on the way back; the tea plantations, reservoirs and roadworks are just as wonderful second time round.

We ended our tour of Munnar with a visit to the Tata Tea Museum, a slightly uninspiring introduction to the tea-making process that takes you through the various stages in an accent so heavy that most of it gets lost in translation. Happily the process turns out to be the same in Munnar as it is in Darjeeling, with the raw tea leaves being dried by having air blown through them, before being rolled and chopped by what’s called a CTC (Crushing, Tearing and Curling) machine. The goo is then oxidised – or fermented, to use a more common term – where the tea turns brown (green tea is not fermented, so it stays green). It then passes through a machine called a Ball Breaker, whose function I couldn’t quite understand, and finally the tea is dried in a hot air stove before being sifted into a range of sizes, from powder to leafy (the powder making stronger tea than leafy tea). It takes 4kg of leaves to make 1kg of tea, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is that.

Hill Spices

We’d been so uninspired by the location of our first hotel, that we tracked down a second one for our second night. Perched on top of a hill next to the Mount Carmel Church, bang in the centre of town, the Kaippallil Homestay was much more our kind of thing. Our room had a balcony overlooking Munnar, the homestay served ice-cold beer with no guilt attached, and the rooms were cheaper – you can’t say fairer than that.

It was also a very short walk from the homestay to the centre of town, which meant Peta could buy a large bag of he spices for which the area is famous. As she picked out bags of cardamon, vanilla, white and black pepper, mace, mustard seeds and cinnamon, the young man behind the counter looked up and his eyes widened.

‘Last night,’ he said, pointing his thumb at his mouth, looking slightly guilty. ‘Last night, you were in the bar.’

‘That’s right,’ said Peta. It was the youngster who’d had the run in with the older man. ‘I remember you.’

‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘I was getting in trouble.’

‘Who was that man?’ asked Peta. ‘Was it your dad?’

‘Father, no,’ he said. ‘Uncle. Not pleased to see me there.’

‘Ha,’ I said. ‘But he was in there too, so he couldn’t really have a go, could he?’

‘I’m not supposed to,’ said our young friend, grinning conspiratorially as he handed us our bag of spices. And with that, we headed off to the Rapsy Restaurant, which proudly proclaimed on the sign outside:

Customers from 43 countries... Amiably taken care... Moreover astoundingly pleased... Their ecstasy is... Just with quality, not with looks.

Luckily, Munnar excels on both quality and looks. What a delightful place to take a break from the Indian heat.

Periyar

Written: 24 March 2007

Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary is a funny old place. Yes, it might be one of the few places on earth where you can theoretically see tigers – though with only about 35 tigers in a 777km^2 park, your chances are slimmer than slim – but it’s also faintly depressing, particularly at the moment, because the veneer of tourism is so thick you have to dig quite deep to get away from it all. Luckily, when you do, Periyar is a delight.

First impressions are pretty awful, because most of the accommodation and restaurant action happens in the nearby village of Kumily, which is a forgettable slew of Kashmiri trinket shops, expensive resort hotels and unloved traveller hotels. The atmosphere, while still reasonably friendly and easy-going, is a world away from somewhere like Munnar, which is clearly a working town that happens to be popular with tourists; Kumily exists purely to service the nearby wildlife sanctuary and the tourists that flock here, and it feels like it. Walking the streets is an exercise in being as polite as possible to the incessant chants of, ‘Hello, where you from, come into my shop, just looking, good price, you come back later maybe, yes see you, thank you,’ all choreographed to head wobbling and ‘No thanks’ from the passing tourists. At this time of year, as the shoulder season slides into the off-season, the hassle is fairly mild and the shopkeepers are happy to take ‘no’ for an answer, but after an entire street has tried to entice you into their shop to check out their Kashmiri emporium of amazing pashminas and multi-armed statues of the Hindu pantheon, it makes you wonder what it’s like in the high season, when tourists pile into the park in their air-conditioned coaches.

After a long, four-and-a-half hour journey from Munnar, we were fairly exhausted from bumping around in the back of the Ambassador, so we headed for the Coffee Inn, which the Lonely Planet gives a gushing review, managing to squeeze the words ‘lovely’, ‘friendly’, ‘comfortable’, ‘laid-back’, ‘peaceful’, ‘great’ and ‘delicious’ into just one paragraph of description. Unfortunately the Coffee Inn turned out to be a faded, faintly tacky place with a building site above it, where the owner has obviously decided to build the Coffee Inn Hotel, thus missing the point of the original inn’s appeal by a country mile. Having met the owner, this doesn’t surprise me, as he was a pretty grumpy bugger when we arrived, showing us to a hut down the road with all the shoe-dragging enthusiasm of a bored nine-year-old. Tired, we checked in anyway, happy just to have somewhere to dump our bags.

Kumily has a lot more to offer than backpacker haunts that have lost their sparkle, though. As we had an afternoon to kill, we thought we’d wander round the posh hotels in town to see if any of them were worth eating in (we’d grabbed a snack in the Coffee Inn, and it had turned out to have mediocre food and incredibly slow service, the latter not remotely mitigated by the sign saying, ‘Please do not shout at the chef; good food takes time to make,’ particularly as there was only a handful of other people in the place when we ate). We started with the Spice Village, which feels for all the world like a package holiday venue, with an uninspiring buffet restaurant, polite but slightly bewildered staff, an air of concrete hidden beneath the palm-tree exterior, and an astonishing price tag of US$210 per night for a double room (at least the Coffee Inn is honestly priced, at Rs400 for a double, or around US$9 per night). Our next stop was the Taj Garden, a really lovely wooden hotel set in delightful gardens, with a price tag of US$169 a night for a room and a restaurant that looks utterly wonderful; and our final visit was to the Tree Top Hotel, which has pleasant doubles at Rs2500 a night and a great little restaurant selling the usual Indian favourites, like Butter Chicken, Chicken 65, Chilly Chicken and all the other stalwarts of hearty restaurants throughout the land. It seems that in Kumily, it pays to shop around, as accommodation can be extortionate while being far less interesting than the competition.

So that night we ate in the Taj Garden, which proved to be a wonderful place for a romantic tropical dinner, and slunk back to our crusty little hut, safe in the knowledge that if it turned out to be a mosquito-infested noise-fest, we could always up-sticks and move across the road to the comparatively luxurious Tree Top.

The Wildlife Sanctuary

Kumily is one thing, but the wildlife sanctuary at Periyar is another thing altogether. Kumily has the feeling of a place that is feeding off the tourist dollar, and you can see the effects in the more impressive hotel developments and some of the shops; one shop, Red Frog, is so beautifully presented that it looks as if it’s been beamed straight in from the King’s Road, with its large plate-glass windows, arty displays and modern lighting. It looks rather out of place in an Indian street, surrounded by rickshaws and stray dogs, but it would look even stranger if it moved 3km south into the wildlife reserve, because if there’s one thing Periyar is, it’s faded.

This is so often the case with government-run institutions, and Periyar is a great example. The buildings were no doubt impressive when they were first built, but now they’re covered in the black mould that afflicts so many of India’s concrete blocks, and it’s lucky that the complex that makes up the park headquarters is relatively small. The nearby hotel, the Aranya Nivas, fares slightly better than the rather limp information office and bedraggled restaurant, but apart from a stand of rabid rickshaw drivers, a small office for the park rangers, and a concrete jetty just down the hill on the lake, that’s the entire complex. This wouldn’t be a problem, except you’re not allowed beyond the edges of the park HQ and precious little happens in the headquarters itself. It’s a bit of a disappointment when you first arrive, really.

But dig a little deeper, and all is not lost. For those with only a day or so to spare, there are two options: you can hop on one of the many ferries that ply the lake at 9.30am, 11.30am, 2pm and 4pm; or you can take a three-hour nature walk in the company of one of the park’s rangers, who are from the indigenous tribe. We arrived a little later than we’d originally planned, as the 6am alarm we’d set made no friends at all and quickly got slapped into silence, a few extra hours’ sleep easily winning out against the recommendation that wildlife is more active in the morning (homo sapiens excluded, presumably). We’d thought that this would scupper our chances of joining a nature walk, as it was a Saturday and we assumed the hordes would have snapped up the available places, but as we sauntered into the park at 10am, idly wondering what we could do, a ranger called Shajimon popped up and asked us if we were interested in a nature walk.

‘Yes, that sounds great,’ we said.

‘There is one leaving at 11 o’clock,’ said Shaji. ‘Would you like to join it?’

‘Excellent,’ we said, and gladly filled in the form in which we absolved the park of any liability should we be ripped to pieces by tigers or stomped on by elephants. ‘So, are you busy at the moment?’ we asked.

‘You are the first walkers today,’ said Shaji, looking a bit crestfallen. ‘It is the quiet season, and very hot.’

‘Ah,’ we said. ‘Well, we’re certainly up for it,’ and with that Shaji started talking about the park, and how the hot weather had driven the animals deeper into the jungle than normal, in order to seek shelter, and how the level of the lake was really low, because the amount of water flowing down the river was less than in the past. The lake certainly seemed parched, looking like an ancient bath with dried-on stains up the sides and a sad-looking pool of water in the middle, an ambience which wasn’t helped much by the unloved boats pulled up the banks, listing on their sides as nature took her toll.

To kill time before our walk, we took a short walk about the headquarters, enjoying the sign that declared the park rules to anyone bored enough to read them (i.e. us). It told us in no uncertain terms that:

Tourists to a national park/sanctuary ‘should not’:

- Take any pete inside the park/sanctuary

- Honk unnessarily

- Should or bease or chase wild animals

- Organic merry making like camp-fires within the park/sanctuary

Just to make sure we got the message, it listed a whole set of rules, including the ominous Rule 7:

Leaving litters; smoking; consumption of ALCOHOL; illegal entry of vehicles; blowing horns; playing music systems; parking outside the parking zone; feeding, teasing, disturbing wild animals; bringing pet animals; unauthorized trekking and picnicking; firearms, wildlife traps, poisons substances; breaching in the lawful directions of the park, staff in the protected area are prohibited under section 33 of Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and the violation is punishable with a fine of not less than Rs1000.

Or, to put it another way, Periyar is not supposed to be like the rest of India, though that doesn’t seem to stop it from trying. There’s a laudable ‘no plastics’ policy in place in the park, and it’s noticeably tidier than most Indian settlements, but lurking beneath the surface, it’s still India. The sign saying ‘No plastics as they are non-biodegradable’ is right next to the park shop, which happily sells plastic bottles of water, and there are still one or two plastic bottles floating in the lake, ready to cause a painful death to the wildlife, so I guess the plastic ban isn’t perfect. But it’s good to see them trying; this is a wildlife reserve, after all.

The Nature Walk

Our walk turned out the be an excellent way to experience the park. The three of us set off into the forest, crunching the dried leaves underfoot and weaving our way along thin paths until the noise of the small number of local but vocal tourists back at park headquarters had disappeared into the distance. Every few minutes Shaji stopped and motioned us to be quiet, and he’d stand still, looking into the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that had alerted him. Even though it was the middle of the day, when most of the animals are sensibly hiding from the heat of the sun, he managed to spot a fair amount of wildlife, and each time he was full of information.

The first bit of wildlife we spotted was the blur of a mouse deer’s arse as it shot off into the bush, alerted to our approach by the crackle of the leafy undergrowth beneath our boots. A little later Peta spotted movement in the tree-tops, which turned out to be a macaque monkey, dropping through the canopy. A distinctive rustling in the distance turned out to be a large monitor lizard, which we stalked for a few minutes before it ran off into the distance, crashing through the brittle undergrowth in an attempt to escape the clutch of tourism. We also scared off a larger deer, which we saw running up the opposite side of a valley, and on a couple of occasions we came across jungle fowl rooting amongst the leaves, quite oblivious to us handing the binoculars to each other and marvelling over the colours of their bright head ruffles.

We also bumped into skinks hiding among the detritus; termites devouring an entire tree, hidden beneath the bark which, when pulled off, revealed thousands of tiny ant-like creatures, chomping on the wood; a tiny lizard, the length of my thumbnail and as thin as a thread, living among the termites and enjoying their company for breakfast, lunch and dinner; wild boar, bathing in a mud pool at the end of a long opening in the trees; giant squirrels lazing in the tree-tops, their big, black, bushy tails hanging down into the still air; and we saw huge bee and wasp nests way up in the highest trees, with pegs going all the way up the trunks so the locals could raid the bee’s honey store using smoke and long poles. And every few yards butterflies flitted past us in the heat haze, and birds flew past in the canopy above, the woodpeckers knocking out their distinctive calls on nearby tree trunks while white-bellied blue flycatchers, endemic to the area, sat in the branches, minding their own business while we watched from afar.

Of course, one lives in hope of seeing a big animal, like a tiger or elephant, but even though this is the part of the world that inspired Kipling’s characters in The Jungle Book, the chances of you bumping into such rare animals is practically zero (though Shaji insisted that it does happen, and that last Christmas Eve a party on the nature walk did see a tiger, which only helped to increase the sense of anticipation). The closest we got was a tree with an old set of scratches at head height, and one large, fresh gash at the bottom, with two smaller but equally fresh gashes at the top,

‘These are tiger claws,’ said Shaji indicating the scratches. ‘This is very old now, but these new ones are elephant. The bottom one is the foot, and the top one is the tusk.’

And just around the corner was a tree with a set of claw scratches leading up the tree.

‘And these are leopard marks,’ said Shaji. ‘Climbing the tree.’

So although we didn’t see them, we did manage to see where Shere Khan had sharpened his claws, where Colonel Hathi had cleaned his tusks, and where Bagheera had climbed a tree and sat there, wondering what to do with Mowgli. With a little imagination, Periyar stopped being a dilapidated tourist attraction and came alive, if only for three hours.

The Head of the Family

As we’d decided to devote an entire day to exploring Periyar, we thought we’d go with the flow and book a seat on the last ferry of the day, the 4pm departure, when we would have the best chance of seeing any wildlife peeking out of the forest as the sun headed for home. After a quick snack in the snack bar – where the only food available was dosa, so we opted for... well, dosa, then – and swatting off a clearly idiotic rickshaw man who asked me whether I wanted a rickshaw just as I was about to sit down to eat lunch, we wandered over to the ticket office and asked the man for a ticket on the top deck of the KTDC boat.

‘It is full,’ he said. ‘But I can open it for you,’ he smiled, removing the ‘Full’ sign from above the hole in the ticket booth. ‘You have come a long way, after all.’

I thanked him profusely and handed over the money, surprised that this ghost town of a park should have a fully booked ferry on its hands, and we headed down to the park office to wait. I thought I’d kill time by buying a photography permit for the boat, and in the process I discovered that there are in fact two different places selling boat tickets, the KTDC (or Kerala Tourism Development Corporation) and the park authority, who run totally separate boats, all at the same time.

As 3.30pm approached, tourists started coming out of the woodwork like termites from a tree, as coach-load after coach-load stopped at the car park a few hundred yards back towards Kumily, spilling their noisy occupants into the park. Periyar shocked itself from comatose into life in the space of a few minutes, and slowly the crowds milled down to the waterfront, some of us having the luck to be going from the nearby jetty, and others having to walk a good few hundred yards along the lake shore to their waiting boats.

In the end, five different ferries set off at 4pm from five different jetties, though not after a fair amount of jostling and queue chaos. India is no fan of the orderly queue, and for those of us who have queueing ingrained into our genes, it’s always a difficult concept to get our heads round. As if the barging approach to getting on a boat wasn’t challenging enough, our ferry – clearly the most touristy of the five – was host to one of my favourite Indian eccentricities, that of the Family Patriarch.

Middle-class Indian families on tour are fascinating, particularly if they contain a grandad. Men are the undisputed champions of Indian family life – as far as they’re concerned, anyway – and the chance to lead your family from the front is too much to resist for some Indian grandads. Ignoring the long queue of western and local tourists winding up the jetty, a grey-haired man walked down to the end of the jetty, holding his hand up and saying, ‘This way, come down this way all of you,’ beckoning to his family as if they were VIPs on a state visit. The family followed him down, and started positioning themselves in various tactical locations, so that when the ferry docked, they could leap on board, rush upstairs and reserve the front two rows of the upstairs deck for their entourage, simply by the Indian expedient of throwing a handbag or a piece of clothing on the seats they wanted. This, apparently, is viewed as a much fairer system than, say, letting those who’ve waited longest take first pick.

Of course, this kind of behaviour is like a red rag to a bull for those of us who worship at the altar of queueing etiquette, and as we’d actually been at the front of the queue – through sheer boredom at waiting so long, rather than by design – we decided to take on the patriarch’s family at their own game, and lined ourselves up for the kill. As the ferry docked, it became apparent that the aft door was going to be for those with upstairs tickets, and the patriarch broke ranks and ran to the back of the boat, yelling, ‘We are in the wrong place, it is over here!’

Peta and I spotted it and ran, years of London tube commuting paying dividends as the patriarch’s family scrambled for the aft gate, elbowing their way past any unfortunate souls caught in the way. ‘Come on, over here!’ screamed the patriarch, punching his way towards the front while trying to make sure his family were in the best possible position to get on the boat first.

Amusingly, Peta was there first, and as the gate opened, she shot up the stairs and I handed her the ticket, jammed as I was behind a particularly feisty couple of women from the patriarchal entourage whose elbows were a little too sharp for me to take on unprotected. And so, with a little bit of territorial jostling at the top caused by one of the girls plonking her handbag on the seat next to Peta and refusing to let me sit there – a situation resolved by me picking up the handbag and sitting down anyway, with Peta staring at the clearly furious girl and saying, ‘Absolutely no way!’ in a tone that broke through all international barriers – we managed to hold our own while the chaos of the patriarch’s family settled down around us to enjoy a gentle cruise round Periyar Lake.

Wildlife Spotting

When the British created the Periyar game reserve, they wanted to create a lake that would attract big game whose brains they could then blow out before retiring for tea and tiffin. They achieved this in 1895 by building the Mullaperiyar Dam, blocking up the Periyar River and flooding the valleys to create the 26km^2 lake we still see today. An interesting side effect of this is that the trees that were already there are, well, still there, sticking up from the lake bed, as dead as doornails but still resolutely clinging on to the lake bed. This makes Periyar Lake feel both beautiful and slightly eerie, as the ferry winds its way between these long-dead trees. Birds nest in the stark branches, a beautiful and tranquil sight as you sit there on the top deck, looking out for wildlife on the shores.

Well, it would be tranquil if this wasn’t India, for the tourist ferry round Periyar is one of the noisiest events this side of the muezzin’s call. We were particularly lucky to have the patriarch screaming out at every opportunity, pointing out wildlife he could see.

‘Look over, there, a bison!’ he yelled, and his whole family stood up, straining to see what was in fact a wild boar.

‘Wow, amazing, it is a hippopotamus!’ he screamed, and his family lurched to the side of the boat, only to find a distant deer.

‘Look, there, there, elephant!’ he cried, pointing to a big, grey blob that, with the advantage of youthful eyesight, I could clearly see was a rock.

His family seemed not to notice that the head of their family was a blind idiot, and busied themselves by talking loudly to each other about how amazing their new digital cameras were, taking shot after shot of themselves while wildlife hid on the shores, scared by the cacophony on board. When the elephants finally slid into view, catching the patriarch by surprise as he fiddled with his zoom lens, he yelled to his son, ‘Quick, quick, take their photograph,’ and jumped right in front of his son’s camera, grinning like a cat while trying not to get in the way of the distant beasts. Presumably a shot of a grinning fool with an out-of-focus blur in the distance is the correct way to record big game for posterity, as they all followed suit, more interested in snapping themselves than anything else.

This rigmarole continued as we spotted extremely distant elephant, bison, deer and boar, but after 40 minutes of floating through the previously serene landscape of Periyar, the family behind us started to tire of photographing themselves and decided that fidgeting would be much more fun. The woman behind Peta started rustling her unopened crisp packet, the man behind me started tapping an irritating rhythm on his camera box, and they all started gossiping about everything from the weather to what the people on the other boats were wearing. They were still talking incessantly as we docked, after an hour and a half of cruising round the lake shore.

Thank goodness we’d gone on the nature walk, or we’d have left thinking that Periyar was a complete waste of time. Happily it wasn’t, and we came away having enjoyed plenty of Indian wildlife, some of it even from the animal kingdom.

Ringing the Changes

Written: 26 March 2007

I first visited India some nine years ago, and a lot has changed since then. India is developing fast, and it seems to be doing so without selling out its culture too much, which is a huge relief, because it’s the culture and the people that make India such a phenomenal destination. Here, in no particular order, are the things I’ve noticed that are completely different to 1998:

- Mobile phones are everywhere, and don’t you know it. India is still at the stage where having a mobile phone is a considerable status symbol, so people let their phones ring as long as they can get away with it, so everyone knows that, yes, you’ve got a phone and you’re not afraid to use it. There’s also a complete lack of phone etiquette; you can be merrily talking to someone when their phone goes off, and without any comment or apology, they’ll answer it and head off into a completely different conversation, oblivious to you. I even had this with a tout who was trying to sell me a room – he’d started the conversation but got sidelined into a phone chat, but he still insisted I stay talking to him, the fool. Even in the Malabar House, one of the poshest restaurants in Kochi where two men sat cross-legged, one playing the tabla and the other playing the violin as if it was a cello, the curse of the mobile phone struck. As the sweet music lilted through the still night air, I could have sworn that the bleep of a mobile phone cut into the amplified sound... but then it disappeared again, only to appear again a few bars later. Judging by the slightly guilty looks on the violinist’s face, his phone was going off, but skilled musician that he was, he’d simply altered the raga he was playing to fit in with the ring tone until it finally stopped. Hats off to his virtuosity, but I’m not sure classical Indian music should really have that much in common with Nokia’s signature tune...

- ATMs are also everywhere, and so are people using them. When I last travelled in India, getting money out of a bank was an all-day affair, but now it’s quick, easy and often air conditioned. Indeed, the march of electronics is not confined to the banks: conductors on state buses now have electronic ticket machines that whirr out a printed ticket, along with your point of departure and destination, and most train stations now have computers that can book tickets instantly, something that was in its infancy ten years ago, and crashed as often as it worked. It all makes life a lot easier, I must say.

- India has gone crazy for energy-efficient light bulbs, and even in the most dilapidated shacks you’ll see the complex squiggles of fluorescent tube-based bulbs. This is impressive, especially when you consider it was only a couple of weeks ago that the EU decided to phase out the traditional light bulb in favour of energy-saving devices. On this, India is well ahead of the game.

- Travellers in India seem younger and more technological than ever before, though perhaps this is more an indication that I’m ten years older and middle age is approaching. That said, in the space of two weeks, we saw three travellers with full laptop computers, sitting there in traveller cafés or outside their bamboo huts, uploading pictures from their digital cameras or checking their email. When I set off in 1995 with a palmtop computer, a modem and an acoustic coupler, people thought I was a spy; these days, the mandala-covered paper diary has been replaced by mobile technology and blogging. I wonder what’s next...

But despite the changes, India remains, at its core, the same entrancing country that it was in 1998, with the same attractive qualities and the same irritations. It will be interesting to see how things develop, as India’s global influence gets ever stronger and her economy grows. Getting on an international flight out of India provides an insight into the challenges India faces in integrating into the world stage without losing her identity; whereas flights in Europe or North America are fairly reserved affairs, flights out of India are a chaos of coughing, snorting, hawking, sniffing, belching, sneezing and barging, and you only notice it because this is an aeroplane, where this sort of behaviour is generally regarded as impolite. In India itself, the incredible noises of its inhabitants are insignificant compared to the cacophony of culture that surrounds you at every turn, and it’s only when the West bumps up against the wonderful madness of India that you notice just how different it really is.

And long may it continue. Where the cultures of southeast Asia are in danger of disappearing in the face of increasing tourism, and the whole world wants Coca-Cola, fridges and MTV, India is still unique, and shows no signs of stopping. Bravo.

Kovalam

Written: 27 March 2007

Kovalam has something of an image problem, at least among backpackers, who think it’s far too touristy and is probably best left to people who like egg and chips for dinner and their culture packaged up and delivered along with a rep. This is rather unfair, because although Kovalam does have a slight air of package holiday about it, it’s still a charming little place with much to recommend, particularly if you’re looking for a restful and stress-free spot for a few days before moving on elsewhere.

It was good timing for us, too, because Peta announced as we left Munnar that the Coffee Inn would be the last budget place we were going to stay in, and that was that. Apparently she took exception to the carpet being sticky enough for her to lift it up off the floor along with her foot, and the large spider we discovered in the bed on arrival didn’t earn me too many brownie points either, so I hung up my travelling boots and decided we should take a look round a number of places in Kovalam before picking the one that Peta was happiest with. After wandering along the sea front and checking out four hotels with swimming pools, we plumped for the Hotel Sea Face at the southern end of Hawah Beach. It was easily the most expensive hotel we looked at, but the extra money was worth it, as the decidedly non-sticky air-conditioned room had a balcony that looked directly over the hotel pool, which itself looked directly over the beach and into the sunset. Boxes ticked, we settled in for some relaxation before our flight a couple of days later.

Kovalam consists of two beaches, the aforementioned Hawah Beach at the northern end, and Lighthouse Beach to the south. The two beaches join up seamlessly – although there’s a rocky promontory between the two, the seafront promenade doesn’t even stop to check its footing as you walk from one beach to the other – but there’s a distinct difference between the southern end of Lighthouse Beach and the developments where the two beaches join. If I had to guess, I’d say that development in Kovalam started at the southern end of Lighthouse Beach, because this is where things look most faded. As you move north, things get bigger, cleaner and rather classier.

Don’t get the impression that Kovalam is a huge beach development, though, because it isn’t. There aren’t any high-rise hotels and the two beaches are pretty small, and although things are obviously developing, it isn’t the rampant builders’ yard you might be expecting if you read the guidebooks. Instead, it’s a bit like Varkala, but with more comfortable accommodation and without a cliff separating you from the beach. The biggest difference, though, is in the clientele, because where Varkala is full of twenty-somethings and hippies, Kovalam appeals to the kind of traveller for whom Speedos weren’t a good idea when they first wore them in the 1970s, and most definitely still aren’t. It’s a resort for empty-nesters, and perhaps the most noticeable thing is that a large proportion of the tourists are fat. Varkala, in contrast, was full of bright young things, sporting the latest size zero hippy fashions, but Kovalam doesn’t win any prizes for good looks; beer bellies are de rigeur, debatable sartorial taste is par for the course, and proof that gravity always wins is all around... but on the upside, you also don’t get to overhear conversations between gap-year travellers who think they know everything there is to know about the world without having actually experienced it.

This more mature atmosphere also means the toilets are cleaner, the food is slightly more expensive, and the touts are just that little bit more insistent. Oh, and when we’d checked into our hotel, we discovered that it was home to Thomas Cook’s very own Kovalam rep, a cheery girl called Lorraine who popped round every morning to check that her guests were having a good time, and to ask whether they wanted to go on the elephant ride this Tuesday, or to pop down to the southern tip of India this Friday. Perhaps that’s why the toilets are so clean; if so, then thank you Thomas Cook, because you’ve helped make Kovalam a great place to get away from the reality of India, and after a couple of weeks in the heat of Kerala, that’s something I really appreciate. And no, I’m not being sarcastic.

Beach Fishing

One of the unexpected benefits of staying at the Hotel Sea Face was that the pool overlooked the beach, which meant we were treated each morning to the sight of the fishermen dragging in their catch. As entertainment goes, it was even good enough to clear the grumpy cobwebs from my morning mind, which is really saying something.

The fishermen practise beach fishing, a method that is used the world over; they even do it in parts of northeast Scotland still, though in the West it’s long since been replaced by more efficient mechanised fishing. The concept is the same wherever you are, though. The first stage is to load up a boat with a large, mouth-shaped fishing net, with two long ropes attached to the sides of the mouth. Once the net is coiled up neatly, it’s time to launch the boat from the beach by pushing it into the sea as the waves break on the shore. The boats at Kovalam are paddle-powered, the oars ending in circles rather than the long, tapered faces of a canoeing oar, and presumably this gives them quite a bit of leverage, as once the boats catch the tide, they’re off with a cry and a yelp and an impressive kick of speed.

Once afloat, the fishermen throw the ends of the two ropes to those waiting on shore, and the boat heads straight out to sea, laying one rope to port and one to starboard, and dropping the net in once the rope has run out. As the ropes have white polystyrene floats attached every 10m or so, this creates a large arc of rope into the sea, with the two ends held in the safe hands of the fishermen on the beach, and a mouth-shaped net at the furthest tip of the arc, all reaching a good couple of hundred metres out into the bay.

This is where the long haul starts, with 15 men on each rope, standing some 20m apart. They slowly haul the rope up the beach by walking backwards, one step with every beat of the chant they sing. The man at the end of the rope lays down his part of the rope in a neat coil and walks down the beach to the head of the line, picking up the rope and starting all over again. It’s like a very slow millipede, gently clawing the two ropes towards the beach to the sound of a fishing song whose words may be in Malayalam, but whose meaning is universal. It’s the sound of men working together, and it doesn’t take long before the arc shrinks and the net starts to take hold.

When the arc is close to the beach, four men leap into the water in a line across the mouth of the net, jumping around and slapping the waves with their forearms, driving the fish deep into the net. Slowly the tempo of the fishing song rises, until you can see the light brown of the net itself rising from the waves like a cloud from the deep. The last few hauls are careful – the whole process takes a good hour, so it’s important not to let the fish get away – and eventually the net reaches the sand, where the men wash the sand away with the lapping waves and crowd around to examine the catch.

Actually, it’s a disappointment. The net is so fine that it catches everything in its path, from miniscule minnows the length of a little finger to larger fish the length of a forearm, but given the amount of time and effort, it seems a paltry catch, and one that surely can’t do the marine environment that much good – I may not be a marine biologist, but even I know it’s not a good idea to kill off shoals of baby fish in order to catch ten or 20 larger ones.

But this doesn’t seem to bother the fishermen, who untie the ropes, shake out the nets and lay them out to dry on the beach, while another boat, net coiled, sets off into the surf to drag the sea a little further along the bay. Later, the fishermen will coil up their nets and ropes and stow them in their fishing boats, pulled up on the beach, and in time-honoured tradition they’ll lie down in the shade under the bow to see out the hottest part of the day, dreaming of the ones that got away.

As spectacles in India go, this has to be one of the more relaxing ones on offer, particularly when sampled over tropical breakfast. Long may it continue...

On the Beach

Kovalam, however, isn’t notorious for its fishermen, but for the gangs of young men who stroll along the beach, desperate to catch a glimpse of pale, western flesh. My first exposure to this was in Kochi, when I popped out early one morning to take a picture of the beach, or, to be more accurate, a picture of the amazing amount of rubbish strewn along the sand.

‘Hello, morning,’ said a voice from behind me as I snapped away. ‘Where you from?’

‘England,’ I said, turning around to find a couple of young men doing star jumps, fully clothed. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Kochi,’ said the shorter of the two. ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a journalist,’ I said, realising too late that perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, seeing as I was taking pictures of how shitty their local beach was. ‘I’m not working now, though, this is a holiday. I’m just taking pictures of your lovely beach.’

‘It is fantastic,’ he said, with absolutely no hint of irony. ‘Where have you been in India?’

‘Let’s see, we started in Varkala,’ I started, ‘and...’

‘Varkala,’ he interrupted. ‘It is good, Varkala?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s very nice.’

‘Lots of western women there?’ he said, a glint in his eye.

‘Um, yes, it’s pretty crowded,’ I said.

‘Many women to see?’ he said, making the universal sign of the bosom with a sly grin. His companion stood there silently, grinning like a schoolboy.

‘Well, yes, I suppose there are lots of women there,’ I said, sighing at the direction the conversation was going.

‘And they fuck, yes?’ he said.

‘I don’t think so, no,’ I said, trying to look as disapproving as I could. ‘You’re not one of these people who goes round staring at western women on the beach, are you?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

‘Well, you do know that staring at western women is no way to pull, don’t you?’ I said. ‘You have to be nice to women, kind and polite, or you’ve got no chance.’

‘Oh, I am kind and polite,’ he said, ‘but my friend here is an angry man. Last time, in Kovalam, he went up to one woman and said, “Do you want sex?” just like that. He is crazy.’

Judging by his friend’s grin, he had a point. ‘That’s not very nice,’ I said.

‘So we are going to Varkala this weekend,’ he said, repeating his impression of a busty siren. ‘To find lovely women.’

‘Well, be nice to them,’ I said, ‘or they’ll just think you’re idiots.’

‘I will be,’ he said. ‘I am not sure about my friend, though. He is an angry man!’

And with that I bid them goodbye and went back to photographing their ‘fantastic’ beach, while they did star jumps on the promenade and grinned at each other at the thought of their impending trip to stare at the girls of Varkala. Visiting Kovalam, it’s easy to see how men like this get their kicks from the beach, because like all good beach destinations, the bikini is queen. Or it is for western women, who soak up the rays in the skimpiest attire, sometimes without first consulting the Bumper Book of Taste.

Kovalam is also a popular spot for proper Indian tourists, especially on a Sunday when both beaches are heaving with locals, but when Indian women go swimming, they do so in full attire, making sure they don’t show off any more parts of their body than they do in the high street. It’s bizarre: on one hand you have bikinis that seem to disappear at certain angles, and on the other you have sarees in the surf. If the latter is what Indian men are used to, it’s no wonder they come to Kovalam with their tongues hanging out.

But it can get annoying, as can the touts, who waltz along the beach front, trying to persuade you that, yes, your life really isn’t complete without a map of India and a packet of counterfeit cigarettes. In most places a quick shake of the head is enough to put the touts off – Varkala was particularly laid-back, I thought – but in Kovalam they are much more insistent, though they still have a long, long way to go before they can appear on the same bill as the touts of Morocco. More irritating are the stares you get when you wander round in a bikini, a problem that I can’t confirm first-hand, but which was fairly apparent by the way gangs of ten or 15 young Indians would walk in front of a bikini bather on a sun lounger, their heads turning left in a precision movement that would have a Sergeant Major wiping a proud tear from his eye. Let’s be honest, every single person on the beach enjoys looking at the beautiful people – both male and female – who grace the sand, but there’s a difference between peeking from behind one’s sunglasses, and standing there as a group, gawping like 14-year-olds. There used to be a sign on the beach at Goa that said, ‘Easing oneself in public is strictly forbidden,’ and one wonders whether such a sign will one day be necessary in Kovalam, as the number of lechers increases.

Even escaping to your hotel pool is no guarantee of privacy. On our second day in Kovalam we decided to relax by the pool, with me typing up a few notes in the shade of a cocktail umbrella while Peta lay on a sun lounger, catching the rays. While I was lost in my own little world, hammering away on my fold-out keyboard, Peta was getting increasingly frustrated with an Indian guest at the hotel, whom we’d seen for the last couple of days sitting on his own, ploughing through bottles of Royal Challenge beer and smoking cigarette after cigarette. In order to walk from the bar to the toilet, he had to walk past the pool, and each time he did so, he would stare at Peta’s chest like a pubescent schoolboy sneaking a peek at the top shelf in the newsagents. After a few such toilet breaks, Peta decided to confront him.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, putting on her politest voice. ‘Would you please stop staring at my chest every time you walk past? I consider it to be extremely rude.’

‘Ah, um,’ said the man, looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights. ‘I wasn’t staring at you, I was staring at your book. It looks really interesting.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Peta, switching to a voice with steel barbs. ‘Well, just stop it.’

He still kept sneaking glances, until Peta came over to me, and I started staring back at him. And then, incredibly, out came a woman with a young child, who turned out to be his wife, and we wondered how she felt, knowing that her husband had come to Kovalam to drink beer on his own and ogle at the women in the hotel. I wondered idly whether he was the kind of man who would ease himself on the beach, but figured he was just a common-or-garden wanker.

That said, if you develop a reasonably thick skin and practise the art of saying ‘No’ to the touts, Kovalam is a pleasant spot to soak up the sun, and it’s a good place to relax. After all, even the touts in India have a smiley side, something you really can’t say about every country.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 28 March 2007

Yet again, India managed to tug at the sides of my mouth and make me smile, even though I took forever to acclimatise and spent most of the 18 days of this visit feeling sorry for myself. The homesickness kicked in big time on the backwaters, the humidity and heat totally drained me in Kochi, and the effects of budget travel wore us down in Periyar, but despite all this, India refused to tolerate my bad mood and jumped around, tugging at my shirt sleeves as if to say, ‘Don’t be glum – look at what fun life is!’

So yet again, India has charmed me, and I’m delighted to say that she’s also charmed Peta. Tired of hearing me harping on about what a fantastic time I had travelling round India in 1998, she persuaded me to organise this little batch of exploration, and even though Kerala is almost an India Lite, with its easy travelling, coastal paradise and fairly advanced tourist facilities, it’s proved to be a good taster of what India has to offer. She wants to go back, which is an endorsement that places like Morocco completely failed to win.

As for me, I didn’t create the kind of itinerary that I would typically go for. I love crazy Hindu temples, serene Islamic architecture, desert fortresses, holy cities and long train journeys, none of which figure in a typical journey round Kerala. As a result it took me a while to get into this trip, because the subtle joys of houseboating, beaches, hill stations and wildlife parks are... well, a little more feminine than thrusting Dravidian gopurams and dead bodies in the Ganges. But eventually Kerala won me over, and I’m glad we took the slow option.

As Peta kept pointing out, this was a holiday, not long-term travelling, and there’s a big difference. Luckily, India is such an amazing destination, she can cater for holidaymakers just as well as budget travellers. I have no doubt that we’ll be back, again and again. That’s what happens when you fall in love...

Mexico: The Yucatán

About Time Too

Written: 30 October 2013

Forgive me Father, it’s been... well, far too long to keep count, but it’s certainly been a while since I did any travel writing. If you’re talking about proper, no holds barred, tell the grandchildren-type travelling, then I guess we’ve got to go back more than a decade to when I found myself sheltering in Ghana after being ground down and beaten by West Africa; and my last travel writing of any kind was over six years ago, when Peta and I spent a couple of weeks exploring Kerala in southern India. To say that I’m rusty is an understatement.

So this new project is all a bit of a shock. Sure, we’ve talked about going travelling for a while, because that’s what you do when you’re stuck inside on the sofa, huddled up in front of the fire while the winds howl through the telephone wires outside. ‘We could be on a beach right now,’ you can’t help pointing out. ‘Look, the weather app says it’s 37 degrees in India, and we’ve got to tackle the bloody Tube in the morning.’ And life goes on, as it should.

But we’ve finally managed to convert words into action, and we’re now staring into the abyss of a year travelling through Central and South America, starting in Mexico and finishing in Brazil a year later. Today is our first full day in the tropics after yesterday’s 20-hour marathon from London to Playa del Carmen, and the warm tropical winds here on the eastern shores of the Yucatán Peninsula are starting to blow away the cobwebs of six hours of jet lag. The sun is out, the mercury is brushing 30 degrees, the humidity is solid enough to spread on toast and the white sandy beaches are therapeutically soft.

But don’t get excited, because this isn’t yet anything like travelling; truth be told, we’re on holiday at the moment, easing ourselves gently into the travelling mood. This isn’t an indulgence, it’s essential; I had no idea that ditching your workaday life in your mid-forties (for me) and mid-fifties (for Peta) would be quite as much of a shock as it’s been – particularly the last four weeks – and we need to take a breath before doing, well, anything. On our last night in London we popped round to my brother’s for a farewell supper, and it’s fair to say that by that point we both looked like death warmed up. This followed on from a concentrated few weeks of packing up all our worldly goods and sticking them in storage, saying a permanent goodbye to our rented home of seven years, sorting out the reams of paperwork associated with changing addresses and putting my contractor company to sleep, and randomly bursting into tears every time I realised I was doing something for the last time. Hell, I even started welling up when I packed the dishwasher for the last time, and they weren’t tears of joy. Uprooting yourselves when you’ve really grown into a place is harder than you think; those roots wrap themselves into every nook and cranny, and it’s inevitable that it will hurt when you yank them all out.

But looking through my toes at the blue horizon of the Caribbean Sea as it slips into azure and turquoise waters just off a white sandy beach... well, it’s amazing how quickly it all starts to make sense. Yesterday, as months of build-up collided with 20 hours of transit and a six-hour time difference, I could feel the panic rising like hot mercury in my lungs; today, that chilled bottle of Sol tastes like the future, and the future tastes good.

We might not have started travelling yet, but we’ve certainly started something, and that’s enough for now. It might be a long way to Rio and the road will no doubt have plenty of ups and downs, but at least we’re on our way. And about time too...

Man Down!

Written: 31 October 2013

Jumping feet first into planetary exploration is a scary proposition at the best of times, but most travellers soon develop their own coping strategies. I’ve tried war cries, running up mountains, treating myself and opting out, but perhaps one of the most effective has been to pack the right kit.

You see, it doesn’t take long for the contents of your pack to become your friends. For example, I’ve travelled with the same Balinese sarong for 15 years and we’ve been through some really tough times together (I’m sure I paid over the odds for it in Kuta, but I still got my money’s worth); I’m still using the same waterproof document wallets that I took on my first trip in 1995, and they’re stained with ink and dirt from six continents, just like me; and although it’s on its third incarnation, the Australian bush hat I’m wearing contains the same guiding spirit as the one I received as a Christmas gift in Melbourne in 1995. They’re perhaps less of a mental crutch now that I’m no longer travelling solo, but there’s no doubt that some of my travelling possessions are psychologically important.

One of my favourites over the years has been my water filter. I bought my first one in 1997 in Queensland just before I headed off to Southeast Asia, and although I didn’t use it all the time, it gave me the freedom to head off anywhere without worrying about where to find drinking water. It could filter out all known viruses and bacteria using no more than elbow grease, and I loved it, only retiring it after six years once the cracks literally began to show. In preparation for this trip, I was at work, checking out the price of a new filter online, when the guy sitting opposite me casually mentioned that he’d once seen someone purify water simply by shining a torch at it for a minute. I didn’t believe him at first, but a quick internet search led me to the Steripen website, and a whole new world of possibilities suddenly opened up.

The Steripen, which comes in a handful of models that all work on the same principle, is essentially an ultraviolet light that you dip into a bottle of suspect water for about 90 seconds. The UV doesn’t kill the bacteria or viruses, but instead it scrambles their DNA, so they can’t reproduce; this makes the water safe to drink, all in 90 seconds. Compared to 20 minutes for sterilising tablets and a fair amount of pumping effort for a water filter, this sounded almost too good to be true, so I worked out that the best model for me was the £50 Steripen Traveler and clicked ‘Buy’ without a second thought, added some high power rechargeable batteries and a charger to the pot, and settled back to wait for the postman.

When it popped through the door, I immediately tested it on a litre of tap water, and sure enough the little light came on and shut off 90 seconds later, leaving sterilised water in its wake. It was amazing; this little gadget suddenly meant we could safely drink tap water for our entire trip, as the UV lamp is good for 3000 treatments, which easily covers a year’s worth of travelling. Sorted!

Except it hasn’t quite turned out that way. The first thing I did when we arrived in Mexico was to fish out my Steripen and test it out on the local water. I pressed the button, immersed the light in the water, and... hey, that’s not right, the lamp isn’t coming on and the LED’s gone red, not green. So out it comes and goes back in for another try after I’ve dried off the contacts, and this time the LED starts flashing a message: three red flashes followed by one green flash. Hang on, there’s a little manual here that tells me what that means... let’s see, three red then one green... oh. ‘Lamp failure; replace lamp,’ it says, and no matter how many times I try, it does the same thing.

So what might have been one of the coolest and most useful travelling items I’ve ever had has turned out to be completely and utterly useless before we’ve even got started. It definitely worked in the UK and it definitely doesn’t work now, and there’s nothing I can do because the only people who can fix the UV lamp are the manufacturer or a ‘licensed technician’, neither of whom hang out in Mexico. I carefully carried it in my hand luggage from London, but presumably it died somewhere in transit, from a severe case of manufacturing mediocrity.

So there you go: the Steripen Traveler. It clearly can’t travel, and it’s now Mexican landfill, less than an hour after our arrival. We’ll just have to enjoy the fun of drinking bottled water for a year, and in the meantime I’m kicking myself for not buying a replacement for my good old water filter. We had some good times, and now I feel like an erring husband who’s gone off with the secretary, only to find that it just isn’t the same as life with the wife.

Sorry, water filter. I miss you, and so do sarong and bush hat...

Playa del Carmen

Written: 1 November 2013

As a gentle introduction to a long trip, Playa del Carmen fits the bill nicely, though you could argue that we haven’t actually started travelling yet. For the centre of Playa, much like its northern neighbour Cancún, is pretty un-Mexican, despite the unmistakable lilt of mariachi bands that floats through the thick, humid air.

It’s obvious from the minute you arrive. After landing at Cancún airport, where I had my bags searched by a friendly customs official who seemed more interested in flicking through the books that I’d packed than rifling through the year’s worth of malaria drugs I’d stashed in the side pockets, we hopped on the ADO bus to Playa. About an hour later we pulled into the bus terminal in the southern end of town, where we blinked our way through heavy 1am eyelids into the 7pm twilight of Avenida Quinta (Fifth Avenue), the pedestrianised road that runs parallel to the coast, forming the backbone of Playa’s social scene. Tired but functioning, we decided to walk to our hotel, some 20 minutes along the road and past all the restaurants, nightclubs and shops that Playa has to offer.

Over the years Playa has ballooned from a small fishing town into an international tourist destination, and as you walk north along Avenida Quinta, it’s like walking through a potted history of Playa’s development into one of Mexico’s hottest holiday spots. The town stretches out along a lovely north-south beach of golden sand and blue-green sea, and Avenida Quinta heads north, parallel to the beach, starting at the attractive and sparklingly white Nuestra Señora del Carmen Catholic Church, which was originally built in 1960 but was recently remodelled into a charming church that’s all the stranger for being surrounded by such unholy racketeering. For crowding round the church are rows and rows of cramped shops selling tacky tourist wares and tickets to the ferry to the island of Cozumel, and just to make sure you know that they’re there, each of them seems to have its own dedicated team of announcers.

‘¡Hola amigo!’ they shout. ‘Best shop, I have the real silver, you can take it in the sea and everything. Come in, yes you, over here, I see you.’

At first you can’t help reacting; despite the crowds, the touts have an unerring ability to project their voices straight at you, picking you out from the crowd, so that you just seem to know that they’re talking directly to you. ‘Hey, Mr Australian, over here!’ they shouted at me, and even though I’m not Australian and wasn’t wearing my bush hat, I knew they meant me. ‘Hey, over here, I’m a nice guy,’ they continued as I gently ignored them, but that didn’t work. ‘Hey, Mr Lennon, I see you, you want tours?’ they blabbed, and once I’d made the mistake of acknowledging them, I just knew they’d shout out the same thing every time I walked past. So I am now Mr John Lennon of Australia, I apparently walk so fast that I’m going to get a speeding ticket, and no, I still don’t want to buy a tour or any of the real silver that I can take in the sea and everything. Still, at least we’ve worked out our relationship; they hassle me and I ignore them, and to be honest the level of hassle is extremely polite and pretty tame compared to some parts of the world, so we’re even.

After a few blocks, the shops start to feel less cramped and the side streets open up a bit, letting the breeze in and calming the touts down somewhat. After seven blocks, when Calle 14 crosses Avenue 5, there’s a dip in the road and suddenly things smarten up, and the tacky trinket shops give way to jewellery shops, designer shopping malls and restaurants that aspire to fine dining. Here, when you peruse a menu, the touts will gently guide you through what’s on offer without sounding forceful, and some will even pop out and offer you a bite of parmigiano and a sip of Mexican zinfandel while you look through the menus. It’s a different level of salesmanship altogether, and as you continue north the restaurants get bigger, more relaxed and more sophisticated, before the strip finally peters out around Calle 40 into future developments and hotel foyers.

The tourists change as you mooch along the road, too. Down at Calle 2, bright young things sport tourniquet-tight denim hotpants that are so ergonomic you can tell whether or not the camel has cleaned under its toe nails, but further north it’s more about flowing beach dresses and gentle promenading. The dividing line seems to be Calle 12, home to the town’s legendary nightclub scene, though I can’t speak from experience, as jet lag has been sending us into a coma well before that part of town starts jumping.

Down on the Beach

Talking of jet lag, Playa’s beach is a perfect spot to unwind through the time zones. As with Avenue 5, the beach changes as you move north, morphing from a wide and more public beach down near the ferry terminal, into a more beach-club-based affair further north. You can tell how far north you are by the quality of the sun-loungers, which become less tatty as the prices rise and the bars become more sophisticated.

Another sure-fire way of telling where you are is in the price of the massages that get pushed at you from every corner, which seems to increase the further away you get from the ferry; the sales pitch is far less rabid than on the main street, but the patter is the same. It’s certainly a pretty good spot for relaxation, with the waves lapping against the boats just off the beach, while pelicans and frigate birds hover overhead, so you can hardly blame then for trying.

Sure, the peace gets shattered every now and then by planes flying at low altitude along the beach, and some of the beach bars have a fairly liberal attitude to their volume settings, but Playa’s beach clubs are perfect spots to kick back and drift off while the scorching tropical sun melts your bones into the sun loungers. There are far worse places to see in the start of a year on the road.

Day of the Dead

Written: 2 November 2013

The Day of the Dead is a three-day Mexican festival that starts on 31 October and lasts for three days. On the surface it might appear that El Día de Muertos is nothing more than a stretched out Halloween, but the two festivals are fundamentally different: while Halloween celebrates everything that is scary about death, the Day of the Dead is about getting together with family and friends to remember loved ones who have passed on, and to send up a prayer for them. As a result, the Day of the Dead is much more of a festival and a celebration than the rather darker and more gothic Halloween.

We were lucky enough to arrive in Mexico just in time for the festivities. As we stepped groggily off the bus in Playa del Carmen, we were greeted by shops and restaurants sporting smiling skulls and skeletons dangling from the awnings, though we were a bit too concerned with our own personal take on the day of the dead, after 20 hours of non-stop transit. It was only as we warmed to our surroundings that we started to see references to the impending celebrations absolutely everywhere, and the difference with Halloween is obvious: the Day of the Dead is all about welcoming in the spirits of loved ones whom you haven’t seen since last year’s celebration, while Halloween is more obsessed with malevolent spirits who are out to get you. The streets are lined with colourful altars strewn with flowers, food, paper decorations, glittering skulls and even beer bottles, and even the ubiquitous skulls and skeletons have a slightly cartoonish air to them, like Jack Frost in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. There’s an impressive sand sculpture down on the beach of an entire skeletal family, but this isn’t about scaring people, it’s about having fun.

The first evening, All Hallows Eve, is all about the children inviting the spirits of dead children to visit, and in Playa del Carmen this takes the form of families promenading down Avenue 5 and showing off their children’s wonderful Halloween costumes. There are skeletons, witches, corpse brides and all manner of ghosts and ghouls walking along the street, though our particular favourite was a tiny toddler dressed up in a pumpkin costume that was so big his hands and feet only just made it out through the orange skin, as if the pumpkin had fallen out of a tree onto his head and swallowed him almost whole. The children all carry little pumpkin-shaped bags that they hold out, looking for sweets from passers-by, so Peta grabbed a handful of one-peso sweets from a shop and handed them out in exchange for photographs; it was a trade that went down well.

Day two, All Saints Day, is when the adult spirits come to visit, and day three, All Souls Day, is when families decorate the graves of their loved ones. Each evening the children continue to bounce along the main drag in their costumes, politely pestering the tourists at their restaurant tables, though by the third evening it does rather reach the point where the novelty has worn off. And then it’s all over for another year, and the spirits retreat back to where they came from, while life in the realm of the living gets slowly back to normal.

Panic in Paradise

Written: 2 November 2013

I’ve written before about how scared I am of travelling, and it’s probably down to the fact that I’m intrinsically unsuited to this way of life. Peta pointed it out the other day in worryingly accurate detail: I get seriously homesick and always have, my stomach is sensitive to the slightest hint of microbial activity, my brain melts in the tropical heat, I have a painful lower back problem that’s triggered by carrying a backpack, my favourite place in the world is our sofa by the fire, and I burn in the sun even when I cower away under an umbrella. On paper, I’m the last person you’d expect to see on the road.

This comes to a head at the start of every trip, and in particular when the plane lands. My mind starts to whizz and whirr, imagining the worst possible things that can happen. We won’t be able to find anywhere to stay; we’ll get into the wrong taxi at the airport and will end up in the middle of nowhere; our bags will go missing; we’ll be slammed in the face by the language barrier and unconcerned locals; the list goes on. It never turns out that way of course, but for some reason, this time things have really hit the fan, because I’ve been getting serious panic attacks ever since we started packing up the house a couple of weeks ago, and they have only just gone away (though thankfully I’m now through the other end and ready to start exploring).

It makes sense, in a way, because as I’ve already mentioned, we really put ourselves through the wringer in the month before we left on this trip. I thought it would be nice having a month off before hitting the road; it would be a chance to learn some Spanish and to relax before packing up the house and hopping on the plane. But in the end it nearly broke us; after seven amazingly happy years in our rented cottage in Ealing, the emotional wrench of packing the whole lot up and leaving the house forever proved too much, especially when combined with a diary groaning under the pressure of seeing practically everyone we know before we hit the road. It feels churlish to complain about the stresses of what on the surface appears to be a year-long holiday, but I never again want to go through a month like that.

It really hit me on the first night of the Day of the Dead, the three-day-long Halloween-esque celebration that the Mexicans throw themselves into with characteristic gusto. As families wandered down the main drag in Playa del Carmen dressed as pumpkins, brides, skeletons, witches and zombies, I felt the panic rising in my chest and had a full-blown panic attack, right there in the street. Peta saved the day by guiding me to a cold beer and a quiet table just down a side street, but there is no doubt that the combined stresses of October, the oppressive humidity and the jet lag have fried my brain. I’m not a rootless young man any more and I clearly can’t cope with the physical and emotional strain in the same way that I used to. It was all a bit of a shock, to be honest.

A doctor would probably have prescribed a nice long holiday to get over it. The trouble is, it was a year-long holiday that was the main cause of the problem; the panicking part of me freaked out and got scared witless about the next year, and it was totally illogical. Deep inside I know that this year will end up being excellent and legendary, and that we’ll look back on my initial panicking in Playa with raised eyebrows and a shrug, but at the time it felt like we’d just tipped over the top edge of the roller-coaster, and my stomach shot into my mouth and stayed there for about three days.

I guess that’s one of the points of changing your life, but I can’t believe it freaked me out so much. Everyone said to us before we left, ‘I bet you must be excited.’ Truth be told, we weren’t excited, we were unnerved, but it makes it all the sweeter now that we’re ready to hit our stride and the panic has subsided. If that was the illness, bring on the cure!

Cozumel

Written: 2 November 2013

To be fair, we didn’t even try to do Cozumel justice. Mexico’s biggest island is world famous for its scuba diving and snorkelling, but we figured we’d take it easy and simply pop over for a day trip on the ferry from Playa del Carmen, as there’s no point in rushing things when you’ve got so much time to do it in. Besides, a trip on the ferry sounded like fun, and it turned out to be a better idea than another day on the beach, as the weather suddenly switched from the pure blue skies and 30 degree humidity of the early morning, to a mid-morning of overcast and ominously thundery skies.

Of course, it chose to do this just as the ferry set off on the 45-minute crossing. We’d grabbed a seat on deck at the back of the ferry, where Peta struck up a conversation with a very friendly local family whose matriarch insisted on smilingly talking to us in Spanish, despite us obviously failing to understand a word (our Spanish is basic, to say the least, but we’re learning something new every day, particularly in the area of optimistic sign language). Luckily one of her daughters spoke French, having spent eight months living there, so we spent the first half of the journey chatting in basic French while the mother kept jabbering on in animated Spanish, punctuated by loud laughs and giggling fits.

The torrential downpour struck us without much warning, though perhaps we should have taken more notice of the bruised skies hurling towards us as we boarded the ferry. Peta and I retreated under cover while the hardier locals braved it out for another ten minutes before they too ran laughing and screaming under the awnings. The rain kept pummelling the sea until we eventually bobbed into Cozumel harbour, and after a quick dash from the open-air gang-plank into the terminal building, we stood there wiping the drops from our eyes while torrents of water flowed down the main drag in San Miguel de Cozumel, the main town on the island. We’d long since abandoned any plans to go sightseeing around the island, and figured we would head for the only bona fide tourist attraction in San Miguel, the Museo de la Isla. The only problem was getting there, as the roads were now little more than fast-flowing rivers.

It was certainly entertaining, river-hopping along the sea front from traffic island to traffic island, while taxis ploughed through the rapids, pushing wave fronts in front of them and over the shoes of the befuddled tourists in the taxi queue. We eventually reached the museum and drip-dried ourselves among a number of interesting exhibits about Cozumel’s history and underwater coral kingdoms, while the storm slowly abated, leaving a steaming Cozumel behind to be explored. We headed into the backstreets for our first meal in a proper, local Mexican restaurant, where we stumbled through the menu in our faltering Spanish and enjoyed a lovely meal for a pittance, and at last it felt as if we’d actually started travelling, albeit in a rather minor way.

We even made friends in the main square with an American couple who’d seen us in the restaurant and thought it worth mentioning, as not many tourists made it that far off the main plaza. They told us all about the diving in the area and pointed us in the direction of a pretty decent coffee joint so we could stock up on caffeine before braving the return journey to Playa. And after bumping into the giggling family of locals once again in the main square, we smiled our way back on the ferry, happy to have made our first excursion of the trip. After all, you have to start somewhere, and start we have...

Diving Rain

Written: 7 November 2013

When I first tried to sell the idea of this trip to Peta, it’s just possible that I might have mentioned the tropics a little bit too much, because if there’s one thing she hates, it’s cold weather. ‘How do you fancy a year in the tropics?’ I’d say. ‘Don’t worry, we can skip southern Chile and Argentina, let’s just stick to, you know, all those tropical paradises. The ones with all that warm, tropical weather. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Being tropical and toasty all the time? Anyway, turn the fire up, would you, it’s freezing out there...’

And it does sound good, but there’s one thing about tropical weather that I didn’t press home, and that’s how insanely wet it is. The tropics are hot and steamy for a reason: it rains biblically. If you want hot and dry, you need the desert zones of Africa or Asia, but you probably want to steer clear of the blustery end of the hurricane season in the Caribbean, because when it rains, it absolutely buckets down.

‘Never mind,’ we thought as the first few sunny days of our trip sank into dark skies and thunderstorms so severe that they turned roads into rivers and hopeful restaurant owners into resigned hermits. ‘We’re going to be on a scuba course when the weather turns sour,’ and indeed we were, though Mexico’s stubbornly wet season would turn out to be too wet, even for scuba. Which I didn’t even think was possible...

Learning to Dive... Again

Learning to scuba dive in the azure Caribbean Sea was another carrot I dangled in front of Peta, though to be honest I think I probably had her at, ‘How do you fancy a whole year of tropical weather?’ So before leaving home we tracked down a reputable dive operator who offered the PADI Open Water course and booked a place for Peta; in the end we chose a company called Dive Mex based on their excellent ratings, and they turned out to be a good choice. We also booked me on a refresher course, as it’s been some 16 years since I last did a scuba dive, and despite owning my own dust-laden scuba gear (which we didn’t bring because there’s no way we’re lugging that around), I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about diving.

The first day of the course consisted of a long afternoon in the pool, but the driving rains from the night before were so heavy that one pool was closed because there was too much water, and the backup pool was so full of water from the surrounding roofs that visibility was about a foot. This would have freaked me out if I was scuba diving for the first time, as it took me a good two days to get through the PADI course’s three pool dives when I learned to dive back in New Zealand; I’ve always been scared by water, so I had a whole suitcase of phobias to overcome when I did it, though thanks to a patient instructor in a one-on-one environment, I got through it in the end. Not so Peta, who used to go snorkelling for hours at a time when she was a kid; she burned her way through the exercises, from breathing underwater to clearing flooded masks, and all this in a swimming pool with the visibility of lemon barley water. By the end, when we’d stirred up the bottom sediment into a whirl of milky mess, we couldn’t make out the instructors at all, but if you can learn to dive in murky water then the sea is going to be a breeze, so the instructors happily signed her off. Rain didn’t quite stop play, but it was a close call.

Unfortunately the next day it was genuinely too wet to scuba dive, as the crazy weather had stirred up the sea into a tidal frenzy that was too much for the dive boats, so with a ban on all diving in place for the next 24 hours, we finished off the written exams (or rather Peta did, as I’d already ticked those boxes back in 1997) and waited for her first sea dive the following day.

Peta, of course, did brilliantly. We set off in a small dive boat with another group who were doing the nitrox course (nitrox allows you to stay underwater longer, but you need special training to use it safely), and after they rolled backwards off the boat into their dive, we bumped our way along the coast to our dive spot, where Peta managed all her practical exercises with ease (‘You’re a natural,’ said her instructor for the day, which was patently true).

I didn’t fare quite so well. I’ve always had a tumultuous relationship with the sea, not least because of the long-term seasickness I suffered when I sailed non-stop to French Polynesia back in 1997. These days the problem is partly pavlovian: I know I get seasick, so I start to worry about it, and because seasickness is all in the mind, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I deal with this by studiously avoiding the sea unless it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s a bit hard to avoid dive boats if you want to go diving, and given that over the next few months we’re skirting round one of the top areas for diving on the planet, it’s an issue that’s at least worth trying to tackle.

By the time we got to the dive site, I was having to concentrate on the horizon a little to avidly; we’d dithered about for some time while dropping off the nitrox gang, and the exhaust fumes from the boat’s twin engines had blown up my nose and directly into the memory centre of my brain, where the peculiarly nautical smell of marine diesel brought back memories of me cowering in the bottom of an ocean-going yacht, sobbing uncontrollably after hurling my dinner over the side yet again. Luckily a quick and effective way to stop seasickness in its tracks is to get into the sea, so I scrambled into my scuba gear as quickly as my trembling muscles would allow, and we all sank gently into the tropical seas.

All of a sudden the scuba took over, and my brain was too occupied with the mind-bending experience of breathing underwater, equalising your ears every few seconds, drifting with the current, controlling your breathing to rise up and down over the reef, and all the other aspects of scuba that are freakish at first, but which soon become second nature. I did have a bit of a moment where I burped some 30 feet down and it turned out to contain a little bit more of my breakfast than I’d anticipated, but even that didn’t bring on the seasickness; I just removed my regulator, spat it all out and popped it back in as if nothing had happened. ‘Like a pro,’ I thought as we headed back to the surface.

Ah, the surface. As my head broke into the sunlight, the fumes from the engine blew into my face, and boom, up came coffee and orange juice in a brown slick that propelled me to the front bow, where I had one more heave before feeling well enough to get back on the boat. There I threw myself over the side and emptied my guts with the nonchalant air of the well-practised professional. ‘God, are you OK?’ asked the instructor, surprised at how violent my breakfast was proving to be, and I just smiled and said I was fine. Hell, there was nothing left, so I figured we might as well head off for the second dive, which Peta passed with flying colours and an iron stomach.

Back on dry land I sank into a funk of dehydration and severe weakness that finally passed after an hour of gingerly supping Coke and nibbling on salty cheese biscuits. Peta, it turned out, didn’t get off without her own injuries; at the end of her first dive she’d come out with blood streaming down her left forearm, and by the end of the second dive her whole arm had come up in little red welts that felt like she’d had a fight with a kettle and lost. We fled to the hotel to nurse our wounds, and as we relaxed into the stability of Mother Earth, the sore throat that had been nagging me since the pool dives – which I’d assumed was a simple result of breathing dry tank air and sleeping with the air-conditioning on – broke into a full-on head cold that blocked my nose and effectively put my scuba career on hold, as you can’t dive with congestion (with a blocked nose it isn’t possible to equalise the pressure in your ears as you descend, which can lead to excruciating pain and pretty serious damage to your ear canal).

So I spent the next day playing hide and seek with the thunderstorms on the beach while Peta successfully finished off her final two sea dives, where she earned a big thumbs up from the instructor for using the same amount of air as he did, which is no mean feat as most novice divers (me included) plough through the air far more quickly than seasoned professionals. That said, she also came back looking like she’d been in a fight with a creature from the depths: her welted arm still hurts, caused, it turns out, by brushing against some all but invisible fire weed on the guide rope on the way down to our first dive; she has bruises on her chin and shoulder from a face-plant into the boat when it unexpectedly hit a wave; there are a couple of evil-looking rope burns on her forearm, and a painful bruise on the underside of her foot from a bizarre ladder-related accident when climbing back into the boat; her right ear is swollen and suffering from a painful case of swimmer’s ear; and she has a small but bright red bruise on her elbow from when she had to remove her scuba kit during one of the exercises and the tank hit her. She may have been first in her class of one, but she had to fight her way to the top, and she’s got the scars to prove it.

We’re now both ready to go diving in the Caribbean, though, and after seasickness, painful welts, congested sinuses and rain stopping play, I suspect that things can only get better. This is the tropics, after all, and I made a promise, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed...

Making the First Move

Written: 9 November 2013

Making the first move is always a bit scary, whether you’re travelling or trying to meet your future wife, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. After ten days of being on holiday in Playa del Carmen, which we spent getting over jet lag, learning to dive and trying to acclimatise to the tropical fug, we finally decided to hit the road for the first bit of real travelling on this trip.

As this was our first step into the unknown for a very long time, we took it very slowly, particularly as Peta’s bout of swimmer’s ear is really getting on her nerves (though it’s now under attack from some Mexican antibiotic ear drops, so its days are numbered). Just down the coast from Playa is the town of Tulum, which is home to some famous Mayan ruins perched right there on the shore, so we thought we’d give ourselves an easy checklist for the day: get out of Playa, get to Tulum, find somewhere to stay and pat ourselves on the back, leaving the ruins themselves for the following day.

I’m not doing that well at acclimatising to the thick blanket of tropical air that smothers this part of the world, so while tossing and turning in damp sheets last night, I got myself in a bit of a nervous twitch about leaving the cocoon of our Playa hotel, even though deep down I knew there was nothing to worry about. In the event the hardest thing about getting started was packing everything up again after a week and a half of slouching in our room, but we managed to get it together and checked out of the hotel at a reasonable hour, before taking a slow stroll down Avenue Quinta towards the bus station, weighed down by full packs and scorching sunshine.

By this point we’d simply started ignoring the touts, who’d been getting on our nerves for a good week or so; some of them had started turning a bit nasty, I felt, which is rarely a good trait in successful salesmen, and indeed, they hadn’t been remotely successful, because our reactions had morphed from politely saying ‘No gracias, no quiero comprar un sombrero’ (‘No thanks, I don’t want to buy a sombrero’) to us glaring at them as they tried to claim that hey, they’d already met us and didn’t we remember them (they hadn’t and we didn’t) and would we like a ferry ticket to Cozumel (no, we wouldn’t) and why were we ignoring them (so we stopped ignoring them and told the muppets where they could stick it).

So it was a relief to turn into Calle 2 and up to the colectivo stand, away from the imbeciles on main street. We’d decided to go local and try getting a shared taxi instead of the bus, as this is how the locals tend to get around. Colectivos are the spiritual cousins of Indonesia’s bemos and West Africa’s bush taxis; they are small minibuses that wait around until they fill up with passengers, and then they head off to their destination, dropping people off as they go and picking more people up en route. In Indonesia the bemos are an exercise in wide-eyed madness, with the ticket boys screaming out the destination at anyone and everyone as passengers pile on top of each other, while the driving skills make your eyes pop out on stalks, and not just from the G-forces. The West African bush taxi, on the other hand, can take hours to fill up, and may only make it a few minutes into the journey before the first tyre blows, followed by the second, and eventually followed by the whole thing careering off the road altogether.

Mexican colectivos, though, are amazingly civilised (or they are in the Yucatán, anyway). Instead of sharing our minibus with the world and his wife and his chicken and his goat, we enjoyed an air-conditioned ride in a smoothly running, almost new vehicle, with one person per comfortable seat, gentle opera on the music system and an almost instant departure: we simply walked up to the colectivo stand, said ‘Tulum’ when the man looked at us, and followed his finger when he pointed out two empty seats in an almost full minibus. During the 45-minute journey a few people yelled out when they reached their stop – colectivos will stop anywhere, you just have to shout – and then the driver slammed on the brakes as hard as he could, throwing everyone into the back of the seat in front, but that was about as adventurous as the driving got. Sure, the journey from Playa to Tulum is a simple straight line down the highway, so perhaps it isn’t the best route for the driver to show off his video-game skills, but I was still impressed at how safe it all felt. We will, no doubt, look back on this journey with dewy-eyed fondness once we’ve been through the ringer of Latin American chicken-bus journeys, but for now it’s a rather civilised thumbs up.

We arrived in Tulum to find that the hotel we’d earmarked in the guidebook had moved a few blocks along the road, and after a rather hot and sticky walk we also found out that they were full, but there were plenty of other hotels along the main road in Tulum, so we picked another from the book that was nearby, found a nice little room for 500 pesos a night (about £25) and dumped our bags. ‘Mission accomplished,’ we thought, and settled down to do pretty much nothing for the rest of the day, while Peta’s ears healed up and I silently celebrated leaping over the first psychological barrier of our trip. It might only be a short 45-minute journey, but we have demonstrated that we can independently move from one place to another, and that’s essentially all you need to do if you want to travel from Mexico to Brazil in a year – you just have to keep doing it.

So that’s one small step in the bag; only another hundred or so to go, though first we’ve got some Mayan ruins to explore...

Tulum Pueblo

Written: 10 November 2013

I have discovered the first place in Mexico that I really don’t like, and its name is Tulum Pueblo. It’s important not to confuse Tulum Pueblo – a drawn-out town along the main coastal highway of the state of Quintana Roo – with the ancient Mayan ruins of Tulum Ruinas or the area of hotels along Tulum Beach, as the three different Tulums are quite separate from each other and are only connected by taxi rides. We came to the area for the coastal ruins, which are spectacular, and we thought Tulum Pueblo would make a decent base, as it has more affordable hotels and restaurants than Tulum Beach.

Things started well. We arrived and found a hotel, and Peta took a siesta to help rest her swimmer’s ear while I pottered around and did a little writing. The hotel, L’Hotelito on the main drag, was charming, and our room had powerful but silent fans, mosquito nets and pretty decor overlooking a green and lush courtyard, and I started to relax after our early start from Playa del Carmen. Sure, there were some strange noises coming from the main road, where cars kept driving up and down with blaring loudspeakers that sounded eerily like the off-world adverts in Blade Runner, and when an almighty thunderstorm clapped itself into constant and insistent rain just after the sun went down, it did start to feel slightly off-kilter, just like Philip K Dick’s dystopian novel that inspired the film... but hey, even when we discovered two sets of earplugs in the complimentary toiletries kit and a big bag of weed in the bedside drawer, we didn’t suspect anything untoward was up. Why would you?

So we went out for an evening stroll, where we watched the locals playing football and basketball before settling in for an Italian meal on the main drag. We made friends with a white-haired German on the next table called Johannes, who looked uncannily like Rutger Hauer, and later on in the evening a seriously stoned and drunk American strolled by, sloshing a glass of beer in his hand as he locked eyes on Johannes and declared that he looked exactly like a picture of an Italian film star on the hotel wall behind us, before slouching off down the road into his own personal oblivion. The fact that the American had the same pinched face as JF Sebastian, the Blade Runner character who has premature ageing due to Methuselah Syndrome, was surely just a coincidence, but these constant flashbacks to Ridley Scott’s finest were starting to get strange.

The restaurant kindly plied us with complimentary tequila after the meal, which fuelled more pleasant conversation with Johannes, and by ten o’clock we were starting to fade, so we bade him goodnight and headed off into the night, where the bars along the main drag were just starting to turn up their music, even though they didn’t have any customers yet. It all looked a bit forlorn, to be honest, not unlike the futuristic netherworld of Los Angeles, 2019.

Half an hour after putting out the lights, all hell broke loose in our room. The noise of the bars from the main drag had been fairly loud when we turned in, so we finally understood what the earplugs were for, but it wasn’t too bad until the band in the club right next door plugged in and started playing the loudest set of exuberant salsa music you’ve ever heard. Peta and I literally had to shout to each other to be heard, and the set continued without taking a breath until 3am, at which point the noise from another club at the end of the block took over and continued to pound until 5am. That’s when the behemoth trucks that pound the coastal highway started up, shaking the hotel walls as they roared past into the dawn light. Peta managed to get some sleep; I, however, stayed awake through every single beat, and I’m still shaking. My earplugs didn’t stand a chance; the repetitive ding, ding, ding of the inevitable cow bell went on for hours, drilling into my mind and wiring my eyes wide open until the dawn broke. If androids dream of electric sheep, I figured, then they were a darn sight luckier than I’d been, having to put up with the endless industrial strength of the neighbours just the other side of what felt like a very thin wall. The club, it turned out, was called Curandero, and it peddles ‘live music and DJ beats every week’ in ‘one of the hottest spots after the sun goes down’, according to the Tulum Living website. It also has ‘open wall windows’ that keep ‘the dance floor cool while party goers dance the night away’; perhaps that’s why it felt like we were trying to sleep in the middle of a nightclub, because effectively, we were.

Bad Italian Coffee

The next morning the Italian owners of the hotel managed to serve lukewarm and astonishingly insipid coffee without the hint of a smile – a sure sign that these citizens of a country obsessed with quality coffee had given up hope of ever leading a normal life with such a wretched noise next door every weekend – so we checked out and wandered away from the main road to find a quieter hotel that we hoped would withstand the aural armageddon that was apparently going to be repeated on Sunday night. We dumped our bags and turned back to our original plan for the day, to visit the comparatively wonderful Tulum Ruinas.

After enjoying the atmospherics of the coastal Mayan ruins, we grabbed lunch on the main road, where the wide-eyed American from the night before had set up shop with his dog, where he was trying to persuade visiting tourists to buy him a beer, or failing that, to give him some money because apparently his dog was ill and he couldn’t afford to buy him any antibiotics (though the dog was, of course, fine, it had just been trained to lie down and look docile). His feeble patter didn’t work on the pasty collection of white people in the restaurant, who seemed to mainly consist of twenty-something Australian girls who were smothered in huge and frightening tattoos that they would absolutely loathe in ten years’ time. We didn’t hang around long enough to see if it worked on anyone; instead we left him to keep on supping at his ceramic mug of moonshine, or whatever it was that he sipped in the tell-tale style of the alcoholic.

(On the subject of tattoos, I’ve been amazed at the number and size of tattoos on the westerners that I’ve seen in this part of Mexico. Every now and then you see a tattoo that’s not too bad, but the vast majority look like they’ve been done by people practising to be tattoo artists, and with some way to go until they graduate. It’s a bit unnerving, to be honest, seeing this bizarre desire to turn oneself into a complete tit; it reminded me of the depressing westerners I saw in Thailand, and that is not a good thing, believe me.)

Tears of a Clown

After another wet and humid night that felt like armageddon had come – made much more bearable by the new hotel we were in, which was a lot quieter and more pleasant – we booked a ticket on the midday bus for our next destination, Valladolid, and settled into a restaurant on the main drag for a Mexican omelette and a coffee. And it was here that something happened that sums up Tulum Pueblo perfectly.

There we were, minding our own business, when an American woman, who must have been about sixty, wandered along the street wearing clown make-up and dragging along a dog who was also dolled up in weird face paint. She interrupted our meal to introduce herself as a clown with a mariachi dog, and would we like to hear the dog sing for us? I just raised my eyebrows and looked down at my omelette with a sigh, but she locked eyes with Peta and started telling us depressingly lame jokes with the dejected air of someone who is going through the motions to an audience who doesn’t care (which was pretty much spot on). Eventually we pointed out that no, we didn’t fancy any more jokes thank you, and when she asked whether we’d be interested in seeing the dog sing and, oh, by the way, whether we could perhaps come up with five or ten pesos for her performance, we said we’d rather not hear that, thank you, and I coughed up ten pesos just to get some peace (I didn’t have five pesos, or it would have been less). She said thank you and moved along, dragging the dog behind her in her search for more tourists to trap.

Tulum: it’s where screwed-up white people go to beg for pesos from other white people, and that’s about as appealing as it sounds. Never mind, the guidebooks describe Valladolid as having ‘quiet streets and pastel walls’; I’ll take that over dystopia any day.

Tulum Ruinas

Written: 10 November 2013

In contrast to the dire and depressing nearby town of the same name, the Mayan ruins of Tulum are an utter delight. Their main attraction isn’t the architecture as such (though that’s pretty good) but the deeply atmospheric location, perched on top of a cliff overlooking the blue Caribbean Sea.

Of course, being a picturesque ruin near the most tourist-friendly corner of the Yucatán Peninsula has its disadvantages, and the large number of tourists can seem a little cattle-like, especially at the weekend. But the mark of a good attraction is whether you can still lose yourself in the moment while surrounded by hordes of cameras and crowds, and we found it pretty easy at the Tulum ruins. It’s great.

The ruins date from the 13th to the 15th century, and although they are roped off and a fair distance from the walkways, you still get a good feeling for the layout of this important port town, which was only abandoned some 70 years after the Spanish arrived in Central America. The most impressive building, which is perched right on the cliff and dominates the site, is the Castillo, from where you can walk down a wooden staircase to a lovely little beach. When we visited on a Sunday, the beach was pretty busy; one interesting side effect is that this must be one of the only archaeological sites on the planet where young girls wander through the ancient ruins wearing nothing but bikinis, posing on the cliff-tops and the beaches in that hip-thrusting way that the Latin Americans have made their own.

The views from the Castillo across to other buildings – particularly the Templo del Dios Viento, which lies on the other side of a beach that’s closed to tourists due to the turtles who use it to hatch their eggs – are as pretty as postcards, so it’s no surprise that the outlooks are rammed with couples pulling selfies and young men photographing their posing other halves with ancient Maya in the background. Instead of ruining the ruins, I thought it all rather fun and surprisingly apt; the temples of Tulum were dedicated to the worship of the setting sun (which is why most of the building entrances face west) and there’s nothing more romantic than holding hands as the daylight gently sinks into the sunset. Sure, brazenly Brazilian bikinis were probably pretty rare in the days of ancient Maya, but in some sense, the same worship still goes on today in these pretty ruins by the sea.

Valladolid

Written: 12 November 2013

It’s a cliché for a reason, but everything looks better in the sunshine. Soon after our arrival in Valladolid, an old Spanish colonial town a couple of hours’ drive west of Tulum, the by-now-familiar clouds rolled in and the heavy tropical rains kicked in, just as we’d headed out to explore the main plaza. Luckily the Spanish built their plazas with colonnades around the outside, so we dashed under cover as the plaza flooded in seconds, and the traffic started driving wakes against the pavement like over-zealous motorboats by the beach.

This didn’t exactly help us fall in love with Valladolid, as it’s getting a bit tiresome having to duck into yet another restaurant for yet another cup of coffee while the storms blow themselves out. Everything is wet all the time and everyone cowers indoors while their thunder gods get things out of their system, and as we poked our heads out into the gloom once the torrents had dried into a light drizzle, it really felt like a Monday afternoon. According to the people who live here, this year has been wetter than normal, and it feels like it; walking around Valladolid in the gloomy rain, you can’t help noticing the black mould that’s reclaiming the whitewashed walls as its own. Everything’s getting a bit damp and rotten, even the architecture.

Thank goodness for the sun, then, which came out the next day and managed to keep shining until well into the afternoon, giving us the opportunity to wander round Valladolid in a much more amenable atmosphere. We’d decided to take a rest day before tackling the area’s main attraction, the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá, and it was such a relief not to have to spend it cooped up inside, especially as Valladolid is a charming place to explore on foot. When the rains disappear, roads lined by hitherto cowering doorways open up to show a whole world of shops and human activity tucked away in the thick-walled colonial buildings; when shuttered up, the roads are a bit claustrophobic, with their high but very thin pavements (they’re high to stop the buildings from flooding in the tropical rain, of course), but once the weather improves, things look up.

Once the sun puts his hat on, the shutters come up and lo and behold, there’s humanity to see in all its glory, whether it’s the weird shop that sells TVs, computers, mobile phones and, of course, motorbikes all in the same display; or the large number of chemists with their drugs stacked up to the ceiling behind their counters, and the small doctor’s surgeries whose waiting rooms sport cheap plastic chairs, peeling paint and little else; or even the tiny restaurants that specialise in chicken dishes, or tacos, or things that you probably have to be Mexican to understand. In the sun, you can peer into the buildings of Valladolid, and all of a sudden it’s that much more interesting.

Off to Church

The town centre is clustered round the airy green space of the main plaza, and in particular the Parque Francisco Cantón Rosado. This luscious park contains a surprisingly large number of loveseats, where two stone seats face towards each other but offset to the side, much like business class sleeper seats on modern aeroplanes. If you wander through the park at night, it’s easy to see why they’re there, for this is where couples come to canoodle, no doubt to get away from prying family eyes.

Overlooking the square, like the beady eyes of the mother-in-law, is the two-towered Cathedral de San Gervasio, which in keeping with the overall vibe of the town has trees growing out of the top of the towers, themselves (like the rest of the town) slowly mouldering into black in the oppressive humidity. It’s charming, and this is probably why the main square in Valladolid is one of those must-see stops on those godawful coach trips that plague the touristy north of the Yucatán Peninsula, and in the afternoon the square clogs up with two or three air-conditioned buses at a time, each of them spilling out their pasty tour groups into the church; in the rain, the tourists all carry the same pink-themed umbrella of the tour company, making the exodus look more like a works outing from Willy Wonka’s factory than a cultural exploration of Mexico’s colonial religious history.

Inside the church, in time-honoured style, donation boxes ask for help in maintaining the church roof, though the gory and bleeding nature of the Christ effigies that they use to leverage Catholic guilt in the visitors are a bit of a shock to those, like me, who learned their religion from the rather more liberal Church of England. There are beggars in the church doorway too, which on first sight looks like one of those tired old scams from Tulum, but I saw the same beggars plying their trade in the morning in the food hall across the square, and the locals all gave money to them as they passed by the tables, so I suspect they’re the real deal (and shame on me for thinking otherwise, I thought guiltily).

We also ate well in Valladolid. On our first evening we ate at an atmospheric restaurant called Conato 1910, which was tucked away in the backstreets, away from the plaza; the building used to be used by revolutionaries as a meeting place back in the early 20th century, and the decor was suitably ancient. The food was excellent – in particular, the guacamole was the best that Peta had ever tasted – and simply wandering through the streets at night, by now bone dry after the day’s soaking, was a delight.

The other place with great food couldn’t have been more different; for breakfast we wandered over to the food hall just off the square, where a busy little food stall sold an amazing range of breakfast and lunch dishes for a pittance. We went up to the counter, where a huge man sat, waiting to write down the orders; I put on my best Spanish accent to order coffee, fruit juice and huevos a la Mexicana (that’s scrambled eggs with chicken, tomatoes, onions and peppers), and Peta had a huge fruit bowl with yoghurt and granola, and we took a numbered ticket from the man and sat back to listen out for our order number, 15, or quince (pronounced ‘keen-say’) as they say round these parts. Amazingly we did manage to recognise our order number being announced through the melee, and I wandered up to the counter to fetch a huge feast of Mexican delight that came to exactly 101 pesos, or just under a fiver. It made the ridiculous prices in Playa del Carmen look as offensive as Playa’s touts, which is saying something.

So we might not have done a lot in Valladolid, but it was just what we needed. With the fiasco in Tulum, we were starting to get a bit sick of moving hotel every night, and a rest day in lovely Valladolid was just what the doctor ordered.

With this Ring

Written: 12 November 2013

There are some parts of the world that take their religious morals really seriously, and although the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico isn’t one of them, there are some countries in Central America where you have to be careful not to cause offence... and we’re planning to visit some of them.

Consider the case of 19-year-old Glenda Xiomara Cruz in El Salvador, who went to hospital with abdominal pains and severe bleeding back in October 2012. It turned out she was having a miscarriage, but she didn’t even know she was pregnant, as her menstrual cycle and her weight were practically unchanged and she’d had a negative pregnancy test six months before. She lost the baby, and four days later she was charged with the murder of her unborn child; abortion is illegal in El Salvador, and the legal system in a number of central American countries – including El Salvador and, surprisingly, Mexico – is that you are guilty until proven innocent, so it’s easy for the authorities to believe claims that miscarriages are intentionally induced when they aren’t, and there’s not a lot the defendant can do about it (in this case, it was claims by Cruz’s abusive ex-husband that swayed the judges). Cruz started a ten-year sentence for murder last month. Welcome to Central America.

With this in mind, we’ve been looking for wedding rings, so that we don’t accidentally offend any overly zealous sensibilities when booking into hotel rooms with double beds. We left our proper rings back in England, as the combined value of them comes to around twice the per capita gross domestic product for El Salvador, according to the 2012 IMF figures; translated into western figures, this would be the equivalent of walking around London with £57,000 of bling on your fingers, but in a country with a rather more liberal attitude to taking what you want without worrying about the niceties. That’s probably asking for trouble, so we left them at home.

We first tried to get cheap wedding rings in Argos back in London, but we’d left it too late as they didn’t have anything in our sizes (interestingly, we met a girl at the same counter who was buying a wedding ring for exactly the same purpose; perhaps it’s travellers who buy wedding rings from Argos, as I’ve often wondered who does). We also looked around in Playa del Carmen, but they don’t sell cheap tat, they sell expensive tat, and they claim that everything is ‘the real silver’ when it’s clearly not. Hallmarking is a technology that has yet to reach the touts of Mexico, so after trawling through a few shops, we figured we’d do better elsewhere.

We weren’t expecting to find the answer to our prayers in Valladolid, but we did. There in the foyer of the Hotel Zaci – Zaci being the ancient Mayan name for the town before the Spanish wrestled it from their hands – was a small display of books and jewellery, and there, at one end, was a collection of bone rings that looked pretty wedding-shaped, and which were retailing at the princely sum of 15 pesos each, or just over 70p. We tried them on and they fitted, and the woman couldn’t believe her ears when we said I’d like to buy one for my wife and, yes, one for me too.

And so we’ve effectively renewed our vows under Mayan skies, and we can both stop absently feeling the ring fingers on our left hands, wondering where our lovely little bands of platinum have gone. They’re back, and although the surrogates are just a little cheaper than the originals, they’re still completely priceless to us.

Chichén Itzá

Written: 13 November 2013

There are some people on the travelling circuit who grumble about Chichén Itzá, usually because it annoys them that it’s one of the most popular tourist sites in Mexico, and they’re the kind of people who just don’t do populism, man; or perhaps they’re travelling on a tight budget, and they complain about the price of a ticket, which at 182 pesos (about £9) is considerably more than, say, Tulum’s 57 pesos (though it’s hardly a big ask for such a world-class site). But there’s a reason why 1.2 million people visit the ruins of this ancient Mayan city each year, and that’s because it’s amazing. And even if you don’t like crowds, I wouldn’t worry, because it’s such a big site that it’s easy to look past the hordes of tour groups and Mayan hawkers, and just enjoy staring at the magnificent architecture instead.

We kicked off our exploration of the many Mayan ruins of this part of the world with the gentle coastal site of Tulum, but where Tulum is all about the location and less about the architecture, Chichén Itzá is definitely about the buildings. They date from the second century AD to around 1200 AD, and after the site was abandoned in 1224, it lay in ruins, slowly mouldering under the encroaching forest until the hacienda containing the ancient city was bought at the beginning of the 20th century by Edward Thompson, a Harvard professor, for a whopping 750 pesos (that’s about £35). He started excavating and exploring, and the result is one of the New7Wonders Foundation’s ‘New Seven Wonders of the World’, if you’re the kind of person who likes internationally compiled and hugely subjective lists (the others being the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Christ the Redeemer in Rio, the Colosseum in Rome, Machu Picchu and Petra, in case you were wondering).

But before you get to see anything, you have to negotiate the insanely busy entrance hall, which is made all the more complicated by the fact that you have to buy two separate tickets from two separate booths – one for the federal government and another for the state agency that administers the site – so that’s two separate queues that are kept moving at a snail’s pace by two separate teams of equally dozy ticket sellers; at the state agency booth, the man serving me kept staring at his phone throughout our transaction, which meant he had to feel around for the change like a blind man, which only added to the sense of apathy. But once we got our tickets and joined a third queue to get through the gates, we were in, and boy, is it worth the Mexican bureaucracy.

Pyramids, Ball Games and Skulls

After a short walk along a path that’s lined with Mayan stands selling all manner of tourist tack, from models of Mayan pyramids to skull masks, the first building looms up in front of you, and it’s absolutely immense. El Castillo – which is what the Spanish called the Pyramid of Kukulcán – is a 25m-high pyramid with steps up each of the four sides, though unfortunately you aren’t allowed to climb them. It dominates a large grassy expanse with a number of other large buildings dotted around the edges, most of which had ritual or administrative uses in the life of the ancient city, not unlike the centre of a modern town. It’s an atmospheric sight, but there’s a lot more to Chichén Itzá than the much-photographed central area, where the biggest groups of tourists gather round their guides in the shade of the few trees that dot the perimeter.

Not far from the pyramid is the Great Ball Court, where the ancient Mayans used to play the Mesoamerican ballgame. The rules of the game aren’t known, but a modern version of the game is played that bears a resemblance to racquetball, and the court at Chichén Itzá is one of eight such courts in the ancient city; the game was clearly an important part of Mayan life. For modern visitors, the most intriguing aspect of the court is that you can stand at opposite ends of the arena and have a normal conversation, despite being some 135m away from each other; Peta and I tried it width-wise as it was a bit too crowded to test a length-wise conversation, and sure enough we could easily hear each other talking at a normal conversational level. It’s clever stuff.

Next door is the Platform of the Skulls, which was used to display the decapitated heads of sacrificial victims; the fact that it’s smothered in carvings of skulls and eagles tearing the hearts from men’s chests is a bit of a giveaway. After the skulls there’s a shady path that’s lined with yet more Mayan hawker stands, where they claim that everything is either ‘a dollar’ or ‘almost free’, though that’s clearly just a tactic to get you looking and negotiating; to be honest, the hawking is pretty tame, and they don’t pester you beyond simply announcing their existence, which is a relief. Anyway, the path peters out at the Sacred Cenote, a huge hole in the ground with a murky lake at the bottom, where excavations have turned up lots of human bones from the unlucky people who were cast into the cenote as human sacrifices (the cenote was supposed to be the entrance to the underworld, and it’s pretty easy to see why when you peer down into the 35m-deep hole).

Back in the main square, you come across the Temple of the Warriors and the Group of the Thousand Columns, where rows and rows of carved columns stretch into the distance. These columns once had a roof over them, which would have made for an impressive building, but now all that’s left are the columns, gently mouldering into the surrounding jungle. It’s a shame that you can’t climb to the top of these buildings, as by all accounts most of the good carvings can be found up there, but I guess you can’t have 1.2 million people a year pounding away at these already fragile structures.

More paths and more hawkers take you past the High Priest’s Grave (another pyramid) to El Caracol (‘the snail’), which looks for all the world like a tumble-down astronomical observatory; indeed, it turns out that the doors in the domed structure lined up with certain stars at specific times of the year, so it was a kind of observatory after all, and from the dome priests would announce when to plant and harvest crops, as well as times for celebrations and religious rituals.

The final clump of buildings, just past the observatory, is the Nunnery, so named because the conquering Spanish thought it looked like a European convent; it’s now thought to have been a place where Mayan royalty lived, and the carvings on the smaller buildings next door to the imposing 20m-high nunnery are exquisite. And just past them is Akab-Dzib, where the oldest ruins on site can be found, dating from the second century AD... and that’s pretty much the core of the Chichén Itzá experience.

Wandering Around

Chichén Itzá is packed with history and archaeological detail, absolutely everywhere you look. El Castillo, for example, is not only an impressive building that hides within its shell an even older pyramid dating from 800 AD; but the building’s design also represents the Mayan calendar, with four stairways of 91 steps each, plus the platform at the top giving 365, the number of days in a year... and each face of the pyramid has 52 flat panels, which correspond to the 52 years in the Mayan calendar... and each of the nine levels is divided in two by the staircase, giving 18 separate terraces that correspond to the 18 months of the Mayan year (each of them 20 days long). Oh, and at the equinoxes, the sunlight shines through the steps to show an illusion of a moving serpent on the staircase. It’s fascinating stuff.

But you can get bogged down in all this detail, avidly turning the pages in your guidebook to reveal yet another fact about yet another building, but I found that the best way to enjoy it was just to wander through the site, thinking that a thousand years ago, this was a bustling city, with high priests, human sacrifices, markets, and at the height of its fame, some 90,000 inhabitants going about their daily lives. The jungle might have reclaimed most of the original 30km^2 city, but what’s left is impressive and moving, and if you can’t see the beauty for the crowds, then you’re really missing the point.

Even with the endless stalls of Mayan chess sets and model Castillos, and group after group after group of sweating tourists with glazed looks and video cameras, Chichén Itzá is astounding. Just imagine what it would have been like a hundred years ago, when the whole thing lay buried under the canopy of an overgrown hacienda. Now that would have really been something...

Hotel Illness

Written: 14 November 2013

I’ve stayed in some pretty screwed-up places in my time, but I think I may have just discovered one of the scariest. When I say ‘scary’ I’m not talking about high crime rates, or ghosts stalking the corridors, or even 24-hour piped Justin Bieber, all of which would be pretty hard to handle. I’m talking about insanity, madness and an atmosphere so eerie it could give The Shining a run for its money.

To be fair, we were warned, but we figured it would be interesting to take a punt. ‘You will either love this wacky place or find it disquieting,’ says the Lonely Planet of the Hotel Trinidad Galleria, and when we first walked into the lobby, we figured it could be fun. The proprietor is a collector, of sorts, and the hotel is crammed with – how shall I put it – eclectic objets d’art, from paintings to modern sculpture to endless piles of bric-a-brac. It’s a rambling place with corridors and rooms and hallways and outdoor patios galore, and every single nook and cranny is home to something... well, something intriguing. That’s ‘intriguing’ as in, ‘Would you like to lie on the couch and tell me about it? Let’s start with your mother...’

It was only after we’d checked in and paid for the night that I started to look more closely at things, and frankly, this place has seen better days. The objets d’art are dusty, mouldy and faded, and the entire hotel is coated in the creeping black mould that this part of Mexico seems to exude like ectoplasm. And then you start looking at the exhibits in even more detail, and my god, it’s like a glimpse into the brain of Salvador Dali’s evil twin. By the swimming pool, itself a walled-in and drab affair that you wouldn’t touch with your little toe, there’s a whole collection of evil-looking busts on the wall – the kind that, in the film world, would come with a fast zoom shot over the opening bars of Carmina Burana – and what can only be described as dream-catchers with rat skins stretched across them. And look, on the wall next to them is an iron face mask that looks like a torture device, and next to it... hang on, that is a torture device, or at the very least it’s a rusty man-trap with evil-looking teeth.

In the corridor is a modern artwork made up of parts of shop dummies, with dislocated arms and headless torsos swirling in a mess of red, white and blue paint. Then there’s a statue of a woman brandishing a sword and shield in a most unwelcoming way, and another statue that stares into your soul from empty eye sockets. And on top of a column in an overgrown and object-strewn courtyard in the middle of the hotel is a bust of a man that’s painted blood red for no apparent reason other than to send a shiver down your spine as you gingerly walk towards the back of the hotel, down the damp corridor, past the fish tank where fish miraculously seem to survive among the rotting leaves, and along the mould-blackened back passage to your room, where the shower has just three working needle-thin nozzles – yes, three, I counted them twice – and a toilet that makes an eerie drip, drip, drip sound that goes on for ages after you flush it.

As if this weren’t welcoming enough, there are rules posted up absolutely everywhere. Some of them are ancient and some more modern – our room’s rules said we were only allowed to use radios between certain hours, which is fair enough, except the wording made it sound like the latest in cutting-edge technology, which I suppose it was compared to the rusting gramophone in the corridor – but some make absolutely no sense at all. Rule number 8, in particular, made us think: ‘In case of death, the autority [sic] will be notified,’ it says, though rule number 9 clearly tries to prevent this unfortunate turn of events by stating that, ‘The hotel will rescind the rooming contract and will request the vacancy of the room if a guest has any contagious sickness or illness.’ Presumably insanity is not classed as contagious, though after spending a night in the Hotel Trinidad Galleria, I’m not so sure.

And everywhere feels and smells damp, a sense that was only compounded by the fact that, yet again, the heavens opened when we checked in and the rain just kept on pouring down, only clearing up while we were away eating our evening meal. This is a theme that we’re discovering in Mexico; the country is so wet and humid and rain-soaked that, frankly, it’s like living inside someone’s sock. As the initial relief of dropping our bags on the bed started to wear off, I realised that yes, that smell was dark, dank, musty and rotten, and the Black Crowes took over from Carmina Burana in my head. ‘This room smells like Hotel Illness,’ they sang, and that’s when I realised that perhaps we’d made a mistake in choosing the wacky option after all.

Temporary Respite

I perhaps should have spotted the subliminally frightening effect that the hotel was having on us a bit earlier, but it really hit home when we’d gone for a short wander around Mérida, grabbed an evening meal and ended up in the Parque Santa Lucia, a pretty little plaza just down the road from our hotel where a Mexican band were tuning up for a free concert, something that the cultural city of Mérida is famous for. Unfortunately the rain had drenched the seats in the plaza, so we stood there a bit stymied by what to do – sit in a puddle and wait for the band to start, or go into a bar and possibly miss a bit of Mexican culture – but as soon as the band struck the first chords, we exchanged glances and headed straight into the bar for a beer. It was a cacophony of instruments detuned by the humidity, and frankly a cold beer in an air-conditioned bar sounded rather more enjoyable.

What a good move that turned out to be. The bar was unashamedly western and looked over a kitchen where the glowing fire of a pizza oven lit up the busy chefs putting together dishes for the clientele outside in the plaza. Above the kitchen was a huge TV showing American football from the NFL, and finally, we weren’t damp. The draught beer was tasty, the ambience was modern and cosy, and I realised that I really wasn’t relishing going back into our depressing and downright scary mental hospital of a hotel room. So I grabbed another beer and Peta had a glass of Argentinian wine, and we enjoyed pretending that we weren’t in Mexico, just for a while.

That night, I found it hard to go to sleep; the atmosphere in the hotel gave me the shits. What we hadn’t realised was that it had given Peta the very same thing, and at 3am she leapt out of bed and ran for the ablutions, feeling nauseous and faint before exploding in the classic travelling manner. The toilet drip, drip, dripped through the rest of the night as she tossed and turned through multiple visits, and by morning she was completely washed out. We’d eaten exactly the same things the day before, and it was highly unlikely to be the glass of wine, but when Peta went to clean her teeth and turned on the tap, out splattered a whole lungful of black goo into the stained basin. ‘Ah, I did my teeth in that last night,’ she said, and suddenly it made sense. Hotel Illness was living up to its name.

Just to kick us when we were down, the included breakfast was one of the most depressing I’ve ever had, consisting of cold toast and a cup of instant coffee that was presented in a chipped and stained mug without milk, but with faded plastic containers for powered milk and sugar. Powdered milk? Really? (It turns out that the Mayans aren’t big on drinking milk; they prefer yoghurt, so I guess I’ll be drinking my coffee black from now on.) The staff looked as shell-shocked as we did, and as soon as breakfast was done we headed round the corner, found a lovely hotel run by a very friendly family, and splurged out on their most expensive room so we could dry out, get better and take stock.

Our New Golden Rule

Accommodation-wise, things haven’t gone so well recently. We’ve stayed in three places since hitting the road – Tulum, Valladolid and Mérida – and in two out of three places we’ve had to abandon our hotel after one night. This is untenable, wearing and downright distressing, and we’ve realised that if we don’t improve the quality of our hotel rooms, we’re going to end up coming home early, which would be stupid (I’d rather spend twice as much and travel happily for half as long, than spend less and get sick). So we’re going to check out more rooms before deciding which to take, we’re going to go with our gut instincts and walk out of a hotel if it doesn’t feel right, and we’re going to spend more on our accommodation if that’s what it takes. There’s no sense in being so budget conscious that we end up staying in places that make us depressed and ill; this is supposed to be fun, not fatal.

So the question is: would we be happy to stay put in our room all day if, say, it rained all day? If the answer is ‘yes’, then we’ll take it; if it’s ‘no’, then it’s not good enough. Hopefully that will prevent Hotel Illness from spreading.

Mérida

Written: 16 November 2013

Mérida is a pleasant place in which to look after someone who’s not very well... or it is once you’ve left your terrible hotel behind and booked into a charming little spot like the Álvarez Family Guesthouse on Calle 62. Peta stayed in bed all day on our first full day in town; we did try to pop out to Parque Santa Lucía, one block from the hotel, where we thought a nice gentle orange juice in the shady colonnades would help bring some colour back into her cheeks, but a couple of sips down she suddenly went pale and announced she would have to lie down, right now, so while she gently collapsed on the plaza’s sun-warmed steps, I paid the bill and mentally ripped up any plans we had for exploring the rest of the Yucatán. When Montezuma’s revenge strikes, you have absolutely no choice but to stay where you are and sit it out (or something similar-sounding, anyway).

To be honest, this isn’t the end of the world, because the only other destinations I’d earmarked for this neck of the woods were Campeche, a colonial town on the west coast of Yucatán, and Uxmal, another world-class Mayan ruin. Although they both sound excellent, I think we’re probably going to have our fill of Spanish colonial architecture and Mayan ruins on this trip – much as I expect us to be heartily sick of corn-, tomato- and cheese-based food before too long – so it looks like Mérida will be our last destination of note in Mexico. We’d like to head back to Cozumel to do some diving, as it’s supposed to be amazing, and there may be time for a visit to a cenote or two, but with the wind taken out of our sails, I suspect we’ll be heading to Belize slightly sooner than planned.

So while Peta lay in bed, making a slow but steady recovery from the shock of Hotel Illness’s tap-borne bacteria, I headed off into town to stock up on the usual suspects when it comes to curing the runs: bottled water, bananas, plain biscuits and natural yoghurt. Luckily the market area of Mérida has a couple of supermarkets, so it didn’t take long to stock the fridge with weapons of mass bacterial destruction, and with Peta safely tucked up in bed – the best place to be when you’re little more than an empty shell – I set off to explore the centre of town.

Museums and Plazas

The main attractions in Mérida are its plazas and its museums. Mérida is the capital of Yucatán, both administratively and culturally, and even a quick wander around the centre is a treat, especially if you like colonial architecture as much as I do. The main centre of town is the Plaza Grande, which contains a pleasant public park from where you can survey the surrounding buildings, of which the biggest and most impressive is the Cathedral de San Ildefonso, whose twin 42m-high towers dominate the eastern side of the plaza. The cathedral dates from 1598 and is the oldest cathedral in Mesoamerica – that’s the area of Central America stretching from central Mexico down to the northwest border of Costa Rica, where a number of culturally related agrarian civilisations flourished before the Spanish came and did all their high-handed rearranging. Symbolically, the cathedral was built on the site of an old Mayan temple, and stones from the temple were incorporated into the new building, as was the case for a number of other colonial buildings in central Mérida; a block north of the Plaza Grande, for example, is the Iglesia de Jesús, and in the church’s western wall there are two blocks that still bear Mayan carvings.

At the southern end of the plaza is the ancient-looking Casa de Montejo, which dates from 1549 when it was the home of the conquistador Francisco de Montejo y León, who founded colonial Mérida in 1542; it’s now a museum of art. Along the northern side of the square is the Palacio de Gobierno (Governor’s Palace), which contains some impressive mural paintings, while the western edge is dominated by the red tower of the Palacio Municipal (City Hall), which pokes above the trees in the park and contrasts delightfully with the green trees and blue skies (well, it does if you’re lucky with the weather). The best way to soak it all up is to simply plonk yourself on a seat in the park and watch the people roll by. If the sun is shining, as it was when I wandered down there, it’s a hive of gentle activity; wait for it to rain, though, and it’s suddenly a ghost town.

The city’s founder also gives his name to the Paseo de Motejo, a wide, tree-lined avenue some seven blocks to the northeast of the plaza, which Peta and I visited on our first afternoon in Mérida, before things started going wrong. The buildings along that road are really rather wonderful, though they’re not as old as those in the historical centre; the Paseo de Motejo was built at the turn of the 20th century, when Mérida was doing exceptionally well from the local production of henequén, a rope that’s made from the agave cactus of the same name. Indeed, for a short spell around the start of the 20th century, Mérida was said to have more millionaires than any other city in the world, and looking at the buildings on the Paseo de Motejo, you can clearly see what they did with all that cash.

There are lots of museums in Mérida, but it’s perhaps no surprise that the museum that everyone recommends most highly is on Paseo de Motejo. What a pity, then, that when we visited the Museo Regional de Antropoligía, we found that it didn’t contain any of the Mayan historical exhibits we’d been told were well worth the effort, but instead found it full of photographs of the various Mayan ruins in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, and only a handful of Mayan artefacts. Apparently the exhibits have all moved up the road to the new Gran Museo del Mundo Maya, but they don’t tell you that at the Museo Regional de Antropoligía, and they’re still more than happy to take your money at the door. Thanks guys.

But, to be honest, Peta wasn’t up for any more exploration and I was quite happy to sit around the hotel all day, enjoying the feeling of not having to pack up the bags and go hunting for a new hotel. So although we didn’t do Mérida justice, it turned out to be a pleasant spot for a bit of recuperation, and perhaps this will help us to slow down and take things slightly easier. After all, that’s how the locals cope with this weather, and they should know...

Five Day Rule

Written: 18 November 2013

To be honest, things haven’t really been going to plan on this trip so far, and it’s starting to get to us.

First up, both of us have been suffering from niggling but annoying health problems. Two days in, I suddenly got terrible cramps in my left forearm that lasted for a good four days, and which literally made it a pain to type; I then got hit by a really violent bout of seasickness on the first sea dive, followed almost instantly by an insistent head cold that prevented me from diving the next day (and which is still making me cough annoyingly). I’m also a daily target for clouds of mosquitoes and sandflies – unlike Peta, whom they seem to ignore – and I have an entire Braille library of stories to tell from insect bites on my ankles and arms. Peta, meanwhile, picked up my cold just after she’d qualified as a diver, and she’s only just getting rid of it; she had a serious migraine visual that knocked her out when we got to Valladolid; and did I mention the two days in bed in Mérida recovering from classic traveller’s tummy? None of this is serious, but it is pretty wearing.

Second, the weather has been astonishingly oppressive. Even Peta, who loves hot weather, is finding the daily downpours and unremitting dampness of Mexico a bit draining, and I’m all over the place. My mind seems to stop working in hot climates, like an over-clocked processor in a badly ventilated computer, and I stream with sweat every time I do so much as lift a finger. The last time this happened was in a heatwave in Kerala, when we had to hide from the midday sun; this time it’s the afternoon and evening humidity that’s the problem, so it’s a lot harder to avoid.

Third, we’ve managed to pick some truly dreadful hotels so far: we had the noisiest hotel in the world in Tulum, and the scariest hotel in the world in Mérida, and the effects of bad hotels last for days. The others have been OK, but it really doesn’t help you fall in love with a country when you keep having to pack up your bags within a day of arriving somewhere, just because we said, ‘Yes, we’ll take it,’ instead of looking the hotelier in the eye and saying, ‘Oh, come on.’

The Five Day Rule

Clearly, one way to try to solve these problems is to stop rushing around. When I look at the kind of travelling I did in my 20s and 30s, I see a madman on the loose; every day I’d be moving on, visiting this place, dashing off to that place, never staying anywhere for very long. This is what you do when you’re young; heck, it’s almost a metaphor for youth in the first place. But when you reach 40, things suddenly get harder, and rushing round in the oppressive heat and staying in hotels with concrete beds gets quite a bit harder. You get backache, you risk twisting yourself into oblivion if you pick up your backpack at the wrong angle, you take a lot longer to recover from illness, and you basically have no choice but to take it more slowly than those half your age.

It doesn’t help that the guidebooks all come with suggested itineraries, and they too are aimed at the young; they race along at the pace that I used to go when I was full of youthful vigour. I’ve been looking at those itineraries for months and, without thinking, I loosely based our planned schedule on them, but it turns out they’re just not for us; if we try to get around that fast, we’ll be coming home before you can say ‘NHS’, and that would be a terrible waste of a year off.

So, we’ve come up with a rule that we’re going to try travelling by, and it’s this: we’re going to try spending five full days in each of the places we travel to. This means that we’re going to have to pick decent destinations with enough going on in the vicinity to keep us occupied for that long, or places that simply have a pleasant atmosphere, so that sitting around and watching the world go by is enjoyable on its own. It’s a simple rule, and it should stop us trying to rush around while also encouraging us to stop and smell the roses (something I didn’t do enough of when I was a young traveller).

Practically speaking, this means that if we’re thinking of spending 30 days in a country, then that would mean choosing five destinations with five days in each, with a day’s travelling between them. It’s only a rule of thumb, and obviously it will sometimes take more than a day to get between these prime destinations, and there will be places that are worth visiting en route without staying a long time, but the basic approach still stands: we need to pick fewer places and spend more time in them.

This backpacking lark is a young person’s game, and I think we have to become seasoned travellers instead: you don’t gulp down a fine wine, you sip it, and that’s what we’re going to do. It’ll be good for me, I suspect, in more ways than one.

Cenote Diving

Written: 19 November 2013

‘Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, DARK WATER! ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, NOOO!’ is how it normally goes when I’m faced with my nemesis. I’ve long had a phobia about murky depths, and a phobia it most definitely is, because it even affects me in the bath. I kid you not; if I’m in the bath and someone turns the light out, I completely freak – that’s a phobia, no doubt about it. Peta once brought along a selection of scented candles on a skiing holiday so we could have some nice, romantic candlelit baths after a hard day on the slopes. It didn’t end well; I don’t tend to relax when screaming.

So the thought of coming back from Mérida to Playa del Carmen to go scuba diving in a cenote wasn’t exactly top of my list, but cenote diving is one of the unique experiences of this part of Mexico, and it would be silly not to at least try it. A cenote (pronounced ‘seh-no-tay’, from the Mayan for ‘water-filled cavern’) is a flooded limestone sinkhole that’s formed when the roof collapses on an underground river. Being made of limestone, this part of the Yucatán is riddled with underground lakes and rivers formed by rainwater seeping through the ground, and this porous geology has created a collection of some 6000 cenotes, surrounded by forest and connected to each other by endless miles of flooded caves and river systems, most of which is still unexplored.

The most accessible cenotes aren’t quite so mysterious, and every dive operator in the area promotes cenote diving alongside the more traditional reef dives off the island of Cozumel, so when we turned up in Playa, fresh from the five-hour bus ride from Mérida, and found we couldn’t get space on a Cozumel dive for a couple of days, we figured we’d try a cenote dive in the meantime. So we signed up with Dive Mex, the people who’d taught Peta to dive, and rolled up the next day to meet our guide, Dario, and another paying customer, an affable American from Oregon called Roger, who’d been diving since the 1970s.

Dive One: Kukulkan

Now, bear two things in mind. First, this was Peta’s first real dive following her course; sure, as part of the PADI Open Water course you have to do four dives in open water (in her case, the sea), but these are part of the course rather than independent dives, so this was Peta’s very first dive as a qualified scuba diver. And second, I’m deeply phobic about dark water, I get claustrophobia, and I hate large cavernous spaces, like aircraft hangers. It turns out that cenote diving needs you to be in control of your buoyancy – one of those skills in scuba that takes time to learn, much like stability on a bike – and it also consists of a lot of enclosed, dark water and, um, cavernous spaces. As a team, we couldn’t have been less suited to cenote diving.

The first dive didn’t go well, it must be said. Dario, a middle-aged Italian man who thought (and probably wished) he was a lot younger and more handsome than he actually was, drove us out to the Chac Mool cenote, on the way south to Tulum. Here, in the shade of the forest, he talked us through the two dives we’d do and showed us the dark and menacing-looking cenote entrances – one called Kukulkan and the other called the Little Brother – before taking off his groovy yellow aviator sunglasses, stripping to the waist, sucking in his chest like Val Kilmer in that famously homoerotic locker room scene in Top Gun, pulling on his wetsuit, and jumping into the cenote entrance, which at this point was little more than a rock pool. We struggled into our suits in the heat and waddled down to the entrance with our tanks on our backs, and there was Dario, trying to rush us into the pool. ‘Come on, jump in,’ he shouted, while we flapped about on the side, trying to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything vital.

Cenotes in Mexico can be busy places with lots of divers, so there’s an element of crowding that the guides obviously want to avoid, but rushing a total novice and a diver with a phobia is going to end badly. When we were doing our buoyancy checks to ensure we had the right amount of weight strapped to our waists – you let the air out of your jacket and sink into the water, breathing normally, and when you have the correct weight your eyes should be level with the water – I had a panic attack at the dark water beneath me, and had to tell Dario to go and check someone else first, while I calmed down. He looked at me in the way that Italian men do when they encounter a member of the male sex who might be showing feelings – it isn’t an enjoyable look to be on the other end of – and went to help Peta while I spluttered around and tried to calm myself down.

‘It’s OK,’ I thought. ‘We’re only qualified as open water divers, so we’ll always have open water above our heads, so if it gets too scary, we can just go straight up. It’ll be fine.’

And so once Peta’s weights were sorted out, and I’d calmed down enough to breath underwater – well, to gulp air in short, panicky bursts, if I’m going to be honest – we set off on our first cenote dive.

Closed Water

If you look at the PADI website, then it talks a bit about cavern diving. Flooded caves have two zones: the cavern zone is the area where you can still see the cave entrance, and you’re no more than 40m down (the limit for decompression diving); if you get into trouble, you can cover your torch and can see where to swim to. The cave zone, meanwhile, is cut off from the outside world, and you can’t see daylight, so you need proper equipment and training to go this far. If you’re a cavern diver and you veer into the cave area, you risk your life; just to clarify our minds, it turns out that two Brazilian honeymooners and their guide died in Chac Mool in April 2012 when they went past the safe limit (through they were the first divers to die from human error in this area since the early 1990s, so it is a pretty safe thing to do).

If you want to go diving in caverns, then PADI has a course for that (they have a course for everything, being a money-making machine). Once you’ve got your Open Water, you can move on up through Adventure Diver and into Advanced Open Water Diver, and then you can take the speciality Cavern Diver course, to teach you all about diving in caverns. By this point you’ll have learned how to control your buoyancy so you can make the fine movements up and down that you need when negotiating underwater caves; you’ll also have learned about the special safety procedures you need, how to navigate through cave systems, how to use underwater torches and reels, and so on. It’s pretty involved.

They don’t teach you any of these things in the Open Water course, but that doesn’t seem to bother the Mexican diving community, because Dario seemed perfectly happy to take a total novice and a phobic into Chac Mool without so much as a pause for breath. It was only when Peta’s buoyancy spun totally out of control that he started to wonder whether this was a good idea, and like all strutting Italian men, he started to get impatiently annoyed, which only made things worse. He tried to signal to Peta what she should do to correct her spinning, but following his instructions only seemed to make things worse, and after ten minutes or so we surfaced. Here he decided that criticism would be a more effective way of helping Peta out, rather than gentle kindness, so Peta and I swam out of the cenote and stomped back up to the truck, while Dario took Roger off to see the depths of the cenote.

It turned out that Peta had kept rolling over onto her sides, which tends to be a sign that the weights aren’t equally distributed around the belt; Dario had been telling her to fix this by inflating her jacket, which only made things worse, so while Dario and Roger explored Kukulkan, we had a bit of a team talk.

‘I really don’t like that Dario guy,’ confided Peta. ‘He’s just not a very nice person.’

‘Ignore him, then,’ I said. ‘We’ll get the weights right, and you just concentrate on getting your buoyancy right.’

‘Well, at least you did OK,’ she said, and that’s when I realised I’d been so distracted by Peta’s problems, that I’d practically forgotten we were in a cave. In dark water. In an enclosed space. With lots of rock above us and, at times, hardly any daylight at all. The thought made me shudder.

Happily, when Roger and Dario came back for lunch, Roger – who was a very experienced diver and specialised in consuming minute amounts of air by staying amazingly calm and being really efficient with his movements – was kindness personified and talked Peta through how she could make her buoyancy work better. ‘Oh, and I don’t think he’s right,’ he said when Dario had gone to get our sandwiches for lunch. ‘I don’t think your problem is bad buoyancy control; I think your weights are off-balance.’

So when we went back for dive two, we made sure the weights were properly distributed, and hey, guess what? We dived like experts who’d been doing it for years. Well, we did compared to the first dive, anyway...

Dive Two: The Little Brother

So, what’s it like, diving in a cenote? Well, if you have a phobia of dark water and enclosed spaces, then this is about as close to hell as you can get. Now that I wasn’t distracted by other things, my entire second dive was little more than a controlled underwater panic attack, but once I realised that I wasn’t imminently going to die, I applied the same state of mind that I had when walking through utterly petrifying Tunnel Creek in northern Australia, or my first night dive on the Great Barrier Reef. I just stopped thinking about it and crushed any thoughts that might set me off.

For cenote diving is cave diving, for all intents and purposes, and my initial thoughts of always having open water above me were way off the mark. Dario gave each of us a torch, because at times you are swimming through pitch black caverns of deep, dark water, and you have no idea where the outside world is. Most of the dive through the Little Brother cenote was like this, and above our heads was the cavern roof – no air, just the roof – so when I did screw things up and pressed the wrong button, I’d shoot up and crash my head on solid rock. You learn to watch your control in places like this, especially when you spill out into a wonderland of stalactites and stalagmites that you have to thread through gently, trying not to get snagged on anything. At times it’s like flying, because the water is so clear that it’s easy to pretend that there’s nothing but air beneath you (though as soon as I thought that, I suppressed it immediately; that way vertigo lies).

It didn’t help that Dario had given me the only torch that kept conking out. In fact, this was my second torch; the first one he’d given me had a broken strap, so it almost immediately fell off my wrist and I had to dive down and pick it out of the rocks near the entrance. The second torch died in one of the blackest parts of the cave, so there I was, trying not to panic as I smacked the torch back into a dim flicker, while Dario and Peta, who were ahead of me, slipped into the distance in their own personal bubble of light. Luckily Dario had a third torch, which he gave me later on when he saw me struggling, but that one had such a crappy beam that it was almost not worth bothering.

This became apparent when we surfaced in an air dome at the top of the cavern, where there’s about a metre or two of air between the dark water and the cavern roof. Lit only by divers’ torches, this is an eerie place where tree roots dangle down from the rock into the water, and spiders crawl on the roof among strange hair-like webs. The air is breathable because there’s a hole that connects it to the outside world, but it doesn’t feel connected to anything; it feels like the bowels of hell.

Oh, and just in case you thought that a functioning torch is all you need to find your way through a cenote, it isn’t. There are areas throughout the cavern where lighter fresh water sits above heavier sea water, and where the two types of water met, you get what’s called a halocline, and visibility reduces instantly from perfectly clear to mere centimetres. The effect is a little like looking down a kaleidoscope, or if you’re a migraine sufferer, it’s like the kind of visual effect you get when a migraine is kicking in, except covering your whole field of vision. It’s freaky to see the divers just in front of you disappear in a cloud of psychedelia, as if swimming through a pitch black cavern weren’t trippy enough.

But we made it back, having managed to follow the entire prescribed route through the Little Brother cenote, and it was only when we blinked our way out of the water and into the sunlight that I could look at Peta and finally admit that yes, I was underwater, in the dark, in a cave, and just about holding it together.

So I’m glad we dived a cenote, but like sailing the Pacific, once was enough for me. I’d much rather dive over picturesque reefs with the sun beaming down through the azure sea, where there’s life and the big, blue sky above me. There’s no life in the cenotes, apart from a few tiny fish at the entrance, and it’s easy to see why the Mayans thought the cenotes were the entrances to the underworld. Deep down, it is the underworld, and frankly, I’m much happier up here in the light.

Diving in Cozumel

Written: 21 November 2013

Finally, we’ve discovered something truly world class in Mexico. Yes, I know that Chichén Itzá is a World Heritage site, and it is impressive, but somehow it pales into comparison compared to the coral reefs off the island of Cozumel. When I think of Mexico, I’ll remember the madness of the cenote diving and I’ll think of those picturesque ruins at Tulum, but the highlight will definitely be diving in Cozumel.

We almost didn’t manage to get out to the island, as the boats need a minimum complement of divers before they’ll set sail, and not enough people were interested in diving on the day after our cenote dive. But if we waited an extra day, then there would be enough bookings to guarantee the boat, so we put our names down with Dive Mex and sat back to soak up the beach vibe in Playa del Carmen for one last day while waiting for the diving trip. Truth be told I was getting a bit sick of Playa by this point, but I guess that’s what happens in two-dimensional holiday spots with their inflated prices, boorish touts and limited imagination; it felt a bit like we were circling a black hole and I desperately wanted to attain escape velocity instead of spending yet another day doing nothing on the beach, but it was worth waiting in the end, because the diving in Cozumel is absolutely amazing.

Palancar Caves

Luckily for me and my seasickness, the dive boat we took from the harbour in Cozumel was large and uncrowded compared to the tiny speedboat that threw me around on Peta’s first sea dive. Designed for a maximum of 18 divers, we had exactly half that number pottering about on board, plus three guides. Our guide, Marcel from Dive Mex, who had helped teach Peta, was looking after us and Kelly and Gretchen, a really friendly middle-aged couple from near Salt Lake City in Utah who were celebrating their honeymoon in style. Happily for Peta, it turned out that Kelly had learned to dive a couple of days before and had only done a couple of sea dives off Playa since qualifying, so Peta and he had done exactly the same number of dives, while Gretchen had done about 20 dives, the same number as me. After Dario’s impatience in the cenote, this meant that we’d all be at the same level, and nobody would be tutting if we lost our buoyancy or gulped through our air in record time.

The first dive was in the Palancar Caves, a section of the reef made up of large coral outcrops, threaded through by a maze of sand-bottomed channels. Although we’d swum alongside coral on the sea dives off Playa, this was a whole different world, and it instantly brought back happy memories of the astonishing colours and life of my dives on the Great Barrier Reef. Everywhere we looked there were brightly coloured fish, lobsters poking their antennae out of their hidey-holes, psychedelic brain-shaped and fan-shaped and stacked coral formations... compared to the short attention span of life in Playa del Carmen, the reefs of Cozumel manage to pack so much interesting life into such a condensed area that you don’t quite know where to look. We saw a turtle gracefully swimming underwater, we saw large grouper gliding round the coral, and even the other divers exploring the reef were an impressive sight, if only because it showed how great the visibility was.

Peta adored it. For a couple of years now, she’s been playing a videogame on the Wii called Endless Ocean (and its sequel, Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep), and in it you get to be a scuba guide, taking customers on serene trips through dive sites that are faithfully modelled on the real thing. She’s been pointing out different sea life and swimming with the virtual wildlife for some time now – it’s a perfect wind-down from work – but to do it for real is another thing altogether.

For me, it reminded me of how much scuba diving is like flying. When you dive properly, you control your height in the water by breathing; inhale deeply, and you’ll rise up a bit, and breathe out and you’ll fall. For larger ascents and descents you also use your buoyancy jacket, but for rises and falls of two or three metres, it’s all in the breathing. Of course, when you breathe in or out, it takes a few second for your buoyancy to adjust, so it’s a bit like steering a boat or driving on ice, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it feels like you’re gliding through air, gently ‘thinking’ your way up and down through the undulating coral corridors.

This skill takes time to develop, so Peta stayed a little higher than me and further away from the coral, but she had no problems staying close by; she’d had a baptism of fire in the cenote, where losing your buoyancy is a lot more dangerous in such a confined space, and she got the hang of reef diving straight away. Unfortunately our diving partners weren’t having quite so much luck, and Kelly was going through the fear that I experienced when I learned to scuba dive; coming from the open vistas of Utah, where he’s a cowboy in his spare time, the claustrophobia of a scuba mask and the pressure of deep water on the face nearly proved too much, but after a quick emergency ascent while the rest of us stayed with another guide, he eventually joined us again and we set off through the corridors, with Peta and I gracefully gliding through the canyons while Kelly and Gretchen bounced along in a slightly more creative manner.

It was a lovely dive, and after surfacing we took the boat to the shores of southwest Cozumel, pulled up by a small pier with a handful of other dive boats, and ate lunch with paradise on the doorstep and the sun beaming from a pure blue sky. The only fly in the ointment was that we’d left the cameras at home, as we’d assumed incorrectly that the dive boat would be a liability for technology like that, but never mind; we just drank in the beautiful curves of the beach with our eyes instead.

Paso del Cedral

We were dropped off a little too early for our second dive and had to swim over a fairly flat bit of light coral growth to reach the real deal, but even that was enjoyable, as I used it to see how close I could get to the coral without touching it, something you don’t really want to practise on fully formed and ancient coral reefs. This time the coral was in shallower water and wasn’t as towering, but I tend to prefer this kind of diving; deep channels are fascinating and fun, but when you dive in shallower reefs, your air lasts longer (as it’s delivered at a lower pressure), you get better colours (as there’s more sunlight) and it’s easier to equalise the pressure in your ears and mask (really deep dives can sometimes feel a little suffocating).

Again we saw lots of wildlife and intricate coral formations, and apart from a small hiccup when Kelly lost buoyancy control and tumbled into the reef tank first, requiring Marcel to grab him by the tank valve to stop him ploughing a furrow into the coral, we managed a longer dive that was arguably more enjoyable than the first. I felt for Kelly, as getting the hang of that buoyancy thing is probably the hardest thing about learning to scuba dive, though I’m happy to report that it’s like learning to ride a bike, and even though it’s 16 years since I last did any scuba, that feeling of effortlessly gliding through the ocean is clearly something you don’t lose. It seems that Peta’s skin-diving sessions as a kid have given her an innate feeling for ocean gliding; either that, or Endless Ocean is an untapped educational tool that PADI should consider endorsing.

So these two dives have done the trick, and we’ve now caught the scuba bug. This is convenient, as we’re in one of the planet’s diving hotspots, and we’re planning to travel south through even more of them. Next up are the northern cayes of Belize, where the diving is supposed to be spectacular, and after a detour inland through Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, we again come to spectacular Caribbean diving in the islands of northern Honduras. There’s also some diving further along the Caribbean coast in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia, but the best is in the northern Caribbean... and that’s where we are.

That’s pretty handy, then. I think we could get used to this...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 22 November 2013

Yeah... Mexico. To be honest, it hasn’t really worked out for us here, though how much of this is down to Mexico and how much is down to things like illness and homesickness is up for debate. Whatever the reasons, we’re moving on to Belize, and we’re both utterly delighted with the prospect.

Of course, we haven’t really given Mexico much of a chance, so any whinges I might have are pretty unfair. We spent the first couple of weeks acclimatising in the tourist central of Playa del Carmen, which is about as Mexican as Ko Samui is Thai, and I don’t think you can count Tulum as particularly Mexican either. Mérida and Valladolid were much more authentic, but by that point it was probably too late, as I wasn’t really focussing on Mexico any more by then. When I planned this trip, I included Mexico in the itinerary as it’s a logical place to fly to from London, but the countries I’m really interested in are places like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. People rave about these places; sure, lots of people are complimentary about Mexico too, but have I ever had anyone light up when I’ve mentioned Mexico, and tell me that I’m about to have the best time of my life? No, I haven’t, but I’ve been deluged with tips and hearty thumbs up from people who’ve travelled deeper into Central and South America, and I can’t help thinking there must be a good reason for that.

And it rained – boy, did it rain. Every day, massive downpours made Mexico smell like old socks, adding to the black mould that seems to have a lethal grip on the buildings round here. Is this Mexico’s fault, that it’s wetter than usual for the time of year? Of course not.

And the food? That really didn’t work for us either. It didn’t take long for us to start getting a bit jaded about having to eat Mexican food again. ‘No! How can you say that?’ I hear fans of Mexico shout, and in particular those who say Yucateco food is the best in the whole of Mexico; well, I like burritos and tacos like the next man, but it’s a boring cuisine, and every restaurant seems to sell exactly the same stuff. And then there’s the fish; it seems that the Mexicans, like their close neighbours the Cubans, seem to have it in for fish, treating it with such a bludgeoning lack of subtlety that it’s criminal... and this on the Caribbean coast! I can’t wait to find somewhere that plucks fresh fish from the azure waters and just cooks it there on the beach, serving it up with some rice and a smile. That would make me a lot happier than another corn-based tortilla-wrapped cheese-tomato mush.

So it’s pretty clear that Mexico didn’t motivate us a great deal, but one of the great things about travelling is that if you don’t like somewhere, you can and should move on. I don’t think we particularly fell for the charms of the Yucatán, so it’s clearly time to strike south for Belize. Just writing that down makes me feel more positive about this trip, so it’s definitely the right move; moving on always is...

Belize: The Caribbean

Playa del Carmen to Caye Caulker

Written: 22 November 2013

To be honest, I didn’t have a clue how far we were going to get when we set off from Playa del Carmen in the general direction of Belize. I’d promised Peta that eventually we’d end up on the reportedly laid-back paradise island of Caye Caulker (pronounced ‘key corker’), but that it might take a few long journeys to get there. I had visions of being trapped in dusty Mexican border towns, or stuck in a fleapit hotel room in Belize’s infamously earthy capital city, waiting for a ferry to the northern islands; but I kept these visions to myself as we trudged to the bus station in Playa to catch the 7.20am bus for the border town of Chetumal.

The bus journey was uneventful, though as with all the first class buses in Mexico, we had to sit through a Spanish-language version of yet another Hollywood blockbuster (I can’t even remember what the film was, and it was only a few hours ago, it was that engaging). On the way the heavens opened and the rain lashed against the windows so hard that even the windscreen wipers could hardly clear a view through the onslaught, though it did clear enough for us to see an overturned lorry that had jack-knifed onto the verge, ploughing a dark brown furrow into the surrounding forest where a pickup crane was trying to drag it into an upright position. The rain continued on and off all the way south to the border town of Chetumal, where we arrived in the bus terminal just a little before midday.

I knew that from Chetumal, there were apparently some boat services plying their trade to the northern cayes in Belize (cayes being low, sandy islands that form on top of coral reefs). But I didn’t realise that they’d have a little kiosk in the bus station, where they sold tickets on the ferry to Caye Caulker via Ambergris Caye (pronounced ‘am-bur-grease key’), departing from the port at 3pm, in plenty of time for us to catch. Even better, the man at the desk spoke good English and I had just enough pesos in my wallet to grab two tickets to Caye Caulker, and suddenly things were looking up; it looked as if we weren’t going to have to go via Belize City after all, or make an overnight stop at Ambergris Caye. The man even wrote down the name of the ferry terminal in Spanish on the back of the ticket, so we could grab a taxi there by simply asking for muelle fiscal (or ‘local pier’). This was all a bit too easy.

I had just enough Mexican money left in my wallet to grab a taxi, and as we pulled out of the bus terminal and shuddered off in the direction of the ferry, the heavens opened once more and water poured from the sky. The little Mexican driver squinted over his half-moon spectacles through windows that steamed up within seconds, and with one hand on the wheel and the other smearing the condensation into dirty streaks with a woefully inadequate cloth, he drove us through the streets of Chetumal, screeching to a halt at junctions where nobody seemed to know who had right of way, let alone who was coming straight at them out of the murk. Within minutes the roads had become canals and our taxi rode its own bow wave towards the port, though quite where the port began and Chetumal ended was no longer clear, and eventually we pulled up at a kerbside where a sign claimed that on the other side of a miniature lake was the office of the San Pedro Belize Express.

The taxi driver looked around at the steamy windows as the humidity in the cab rose past condensation point, pulled on a tired sweater and opened his door a fraction to see how deep the water was, and his expression said it all; we were effectively at sea, and he indicated that perhaps we should wait to see if the water was going to go down. This was kind of him, as he could have simply turfed us out at our destination, but after five minutes we figured that the rain wasn’t going to give up and we were going to have to brave the storm surge, so we paid him his 50 pesos, jumped out into the ankle-deep torrent, grabbed our backpacks from the boot and sloshed our way to the pavement, where the water was only slightly shallower, but at least there was a small wall with a ledge that we could perch on while we got our bearings.

Luckily the water taxi office was open, so we put on our packs and jumped through the lake with giant astronaut-size leaps, eventually collapsing through the door to find a small group of other equally soaked travellers drying off in the relative shelter of the office. We were greeted by the friendly Belizean staff in Caribbean English, and it felt like we’d been rescued by Noah as I handed over our passports and the tickets we’d bought, and started filling in the immigration and customs forms for our entry into Belize.

Unfortunately, Mexico had one last curveball to throw at us before we could escape. As a UK citizen you don’t need a visa to enter Mexico, and instead you get a little card inserted into your passport that’s effectively a tourist visa, allowing you to stay for your allotted time. What they don’t tell you – at least, not on the way in – is that this tourist visa is not free, and actually costs 295 pesos. Some airlines include the cost of this visa in their ticket price and some don’t, so when you exit the country by land, you either have to prove that your air ticket into the country included the Mexican tourist visa charge, or you have to cough up 295 pesos in cash. The irritating thing is that in these modern days of e-tickets for flights, it isn’t possible to prove from your standard air ticket email that you’ve already paid the visa fee as part of the ticket; instead you have to ask your airline or travel agent to send you a breakdown of all the taxes that are included in your ticket, so you can show this to the Mexican border police.

Our air ticket receipt said ‘all taxes included’, but that isn’t enough; if it doesn’t specifically mention the Mexican tourist visa fee, you have to pay, and the border guards have bigger guns and twitchier moustaches than most tourists, so you do what they say. So I had to wade out of the water taxi office, hop across the flooded but still busy dual carriageway like a renegade videogame character from the 1980s, and take out another fistful of pesos to hand over to the border police. Oh, and there was another 65 pesos of ‘port tax’ that we each had to pay as well, just for good measure, but after smiling through the whole thing with the good grace that you need to show to the man wielding The Power, we had our passports stamped and we were ready to go.

Out of the Frying Pan

Luckily the rain dried up soon after we’d jumped through all the fiery hoops of Mexican bureaucracy, and at about 2.30pm we were called over to a little 50-seater speedboat that was tucked away at the end of the pier. The crew laid out our luggage in a line on the dock while an army truck pulled up beside us and a group of burly Mexican soldiers jumped out with guns at the ready and casually cordoned us off at the end of the pier, and then they asked us to drop our hand luggage into a second line on the dock while one of the soldiers brought out a sniffer dog to go through everything. Up the line, down the line, back again and in and out went the dog, stopping every now and then to have a good poke around, though the only bit of drama was when an American we’d been chatting to pulled out his camera to snap the dog, and one of the soldiers cut him dead with an authoritative, ‘Señor, no!’ So, having passed the final test to exit Mexico, we climbed into the bowels of the boat and took our seats for the 90-minute ride to San Pedro on Ambergris Caye.

The journey was surprisingly smooth and fast, and by 5.30pm we’d arrived in Ambergris Caye, where we queued up for immigration on a ramshackle wooden pier and passed through customs with Caribbean smiles and happy hello’s rather than the grimaces and gracias’s of the Mexican border. This is perhaps not surprising, as Ambergris Caye is a bone fide Caribbean paradise island; the islanders claim that the caye was the subject of Madonna’s 1987 song ‘La Isla Bonita’, which I’ve always thought is her best song until she matured into a proper artist with 1997’s Ray of Light. Whether or not this is true is open to debate – the song name-checks San Pedro, which is the little town where we went through customs and immigration – but it hardly matters, because when the Queen of Pop sings ‘Tropical the island breeze, all of nature wild and free, this is where I long to be, La Isla Bonita’, you’re with her all the way, irrespective of the facts.

Unfortunately this is still the tropics, and as we waited for everyone to pass through customs, the sky started rumbling and flashing in the distance. For those of us going on to Caye Caulker this wasn’t such a good omen, as we still had another 30-minute boat journey south, right into the eye of the storm. As if on cue the sun dropped beneath the horizon in mere minutes, as it does when you’re only 18 degrees north of the equator, and as we left port in the dark the first rains kicked in, forcing the crew to jump into the passenger cabin and batten down the hatches, while thunder clapped overhead. The boat windows were tinted a deep yellow, which was quite pleasant on the way over in the afternoon sunshine, but in the dark it meant that we were effectively cooped up in a small, claustrophobic cabin that jumped around as it smacked into the storm waves, and every few minutes the cabin would light up with hellish lightning flashes that left their spidery imprints on the backs of our eyes. It was so easy to imagine that we were crossing the Styx into hell that I instantly banished all thoughts of the afterlife to the back of my mind and went into the happy place that I built while sailing the south Pacific when we hit a storm in the roaring forties. Frankly, it was a relief to step out onto the dock at Caye Caulker and into torrential rain that instantly soaked me to the skin and turned my backpack into the subject of its own Olympic weightlifting category.

So we stood there, dripping wet, in the dark, on the end of a pier, on an island in a country we’d never visited before, with no accommodation booked, and no idea what to do. I was beginning to regret promising a Caribbean paradise to Peta as we stumbled onto the beach and into the path of a group of drunk American tourists.

‘You look like you’re dressed for Seattle,’ said a slightly worse-for-wear man, wearing a T-shirt, shorts and a grin. ‘Where you from?’

‘London, England,’ we said, adding the country because there are apparently 20 cities called London in America, and the accent isn’t always enough for two and two to get it together in the beer-addled brain of a holidaying college boy.

‘Woah, then you should be used to this,’ he said, laughing a little too hard at his own joke. ‘Doesn’t matter though, this is paradise, even if it’s raining. It’s better than Ambergris, Ambergris is all stuck up, you’ll be good here, loads of bars, go for it, it’s fuckin’ paradise, man! You go for it, London. Fuck yeah!’

And he stumbled off into the dark with his friends while we staggered up to the main road to try to find a hotel, weighed down by sodden packs and twelve hours of being on the move.

Adrian to the Rescue

There aren’t any vehicles of note on Caye Caulker, but there are lots of golf buggies that are used for everything from taxis to tours, and within a few minutes of arriving at the main drag, we flagged one down.

‘Hello, how you doing?’ said a booming voice that oozed friendliness and warmth. ‘Welcome to paradise. I must apologise for the weather, but sometimes it rains in paradise too. Now where are you good folks going?’

So we climbed into his golf buggy and told him we were looking for a hotel, and we showed him the shortlist we’d made from the places listed in the guidebook.

‘Let me just pick up a box from the dock,’ said the taxi man, ‘and I’ll ring a few of those for you, to see if they have spaces.’ And after skidding down to the dock where a singing Rasta wandered past the buggy, proclaiming that Jah was good, the taxi man, who introduced himself as Adrian, started working his way through the list. One by one we found out that they were fully booked, or only had rooms for US$200 a night, a lot more than we’d been expecting to pay. He finally reached the last one on the list, which was just round the corner, so he spun away into the night and pulled up outside De Real Macaw Guesthouse, which appeared to be near to the shore in the northern part of the island (though in the darkness and pelting rain it was hard to see anything at all).

‘We can manage three nights,’ said the smiling lady in the hotel, and showed us three rooms that fit our budget perfectly; we picked the best room with a veranda overlooking what we were assured was the beach, gave Adrian US$5 for his help, and followed the lady’s directions to the Rainbow Grill and Bar, where we drank Belikin Beer and ate fish fillets that were simply and properly cooked, rather than being smothered in tomatoes, cheese and chipotle and cremated in the Mexican manner.

‘God, this tastes good,’ said Peta as the nutrients flooded into our systems.

‘It tastes like paradise,’ I said, clinking her bottle with mine.

And the next day, as the sun rose in clear skies and shone on the beach outside our veranda, we realised that the drunk American was right, Adrian was right, and yes, we were right. Caye Caulker is indeed a little bit of paradise, and it was worth all the hellish storms to get here...

Caye Caulker

Written: 23 November 2013

The unofficial motto of Caye Caulker, one of the many small, sandy islands off the north coast of Belize, is ‘Go Slow’, and it’s obvious from the moment you step off the ferry that this little corner of the Caribbean Sea dances to its own relaxed rhythm. The traffic here is all about golf buggies, bicycles and pedestrians, rather than cars, lorries and buses, and there are no traffic jams to speak of; the Rastas that look after the handful of trinket stalls along the northern beach are so laid back that their sales pitches are hard to tell from genuine greetings; and even the nightlife winds down at a civilised hour, so the nights are refreshingly quiet under the starry skies of the tropical moon. Caye Caulker is, without a doubt, a little slice of paradise, managing to retain a charm that its busier and more popular neighbour, Ambergris Caye, is in danger of losing with its busier roads and larger hotels.

People come to Caye Caulker to kick back, and after the long journey from Mexico, that’s exactly what we did. The torrential rain that we’d dragged ourselves through on arrival soon subsided, and although most days we still saw the odd sharp downpour, the sun came out in style, drying out our mouldy clothes and blowing a fresh, dry breeze through our hair. While Mexico seems to be full of claustrophobic buildings with rising damp, black mould and worryingly dank smells, Caye Caulker’s buildings are light and airy, and even though it rains here with the same biblical determination as the rest of the region, the architecture is built to cope. The roofs over the wooden verandas don’t leak, in stark contrast to the leaky restaurant in Tulum; the sea breezes soon blow away any mustiness from the well-ventilated rooms, unlike the heavy dampness of the hemmed-in hotels of Playa del Carmen; and, more importantly, the insides of the buildings are lit up by the sunny smiles of the locals, which prevents the rot setting in.

In short, in Caye Caulker it’s a pleasure to be in the tropics, which is something I never felt in steamy Mexico.

Paradise Found

Caye Caulker is a tiny sand island, perched on top of a reef. This kind of island is called a caye (pronounced ‘key’), and most cayes are fairly small; Caye Caulker is one of the smallest, at only five miles long and a mile wide. The island is split in two by a water channel called the Split, which the islanders dug out after the storm surge from the 1961 Hurricane Hattie cut across the island and created a small breach. The Split is now a wide channel that cuts across the island from east to west: north of the Split the island is almost uninhabited and is smothered in mangroves and forest, though parcels of land are currently up for sale in the windows of the local estate agents, so you can expect the northern half to change rapidly in the coming years; meanwhile the southern half is home to the island’s main settlement, which consists of three parallel roads – known as Front Street, Middle Street and Back Street, though they do have more formal names that nobody seems to use – each of them lined with relaxed restaurants, small shops, diving and snorkelling operations, and locals cycling gently along the streets, saying hello to each other in lilting Caribbean accents as they gently weave left and right to avoid the dips in the road where the puddles form after the rains. The language here is English, but even if you didn’t understand a word – which is quite often the case, as the English spoken here is as much Creole as it is Commonwealth – you’d still know that the vibe was relaxed; it’s all in the intonation.

We happily settled in to a routine of leisurely breakfasts, relaxing days and long evenings. Not much happens in Caye Caulker, which is the point; for excitement there are diving trips to the reefs off the island and nearby Ambergris Caye, as well as the famous Great Blue Hole of Belize, further out in the Caribbean. But on Caulker itself the busiest spot is the bar at the Split, where travellers congregate to sunbathe and drink Belikin beer and cocktails on a boardwalk by the water, while Jay-Z pumps out of the speakers (back in the 1980s and 1990s, the international languages of travel were Bob Marley and football, but now hip-hop seems to have taken on the soundtrack duties, while football continues its reign as the world’s cultural Esperanto). As lunchtime approaches, locals set up oil-drum barbecues along the northern beach, where they cook chicken, lobster, fish and conch, sending mouthwatering smells down the road to pull in the unwary; and as the afternoon siesta drifts into the early evening, people head out into the town, such as it is, to check out the restaurants. As if in answer to our prayers, some of them even display the catch of the day outside – wiggling lobsters and clear-eyed snapper, all of them ready to jump straight onto the barbecue – and you simply pick the size of fish or crustacean that you fancy, and sit back with a Belizean beer while the smell of your dinner wafts enticingly on the sea breeze.

Even the beer in Belize is delightfully simple. The main brewer is Belikin, and their main brews are standard Belikin beer at 4.8%, and Belikin stout at 6.5%; these two use the same bottle, so you can only tell your poison by holding the bottle up to the light and looking at the colour of the contents. They also do a light beer called Lighthouse and a maltier premium beer, but for me, the light and dark, as they’re known, tick all the boxes: light for thirst, and dark for the kick. I love stout in hot countries – I got a taste for it in Ghana – and Belize has got it sorted.

And don’t forget the cake lady, who sells delightful homemade cakes from her hand-pulled cart every afternoon along the seafront; or the fruit stalls with perfect bananas and succulent pineapples; or the fresh fruit juice stalls, or the bakery in Middle Street, or the amazing ‘fry jacks’, light profiterole-like fried dough pockets that are a marriage made in breakfast heaven when combined with pureed beans and habanero sauce, or with jam and butter for a sweeter kick. After the stodgy and fibre-deficient food of the Yucatán, Belizean fare is pure paradise.

Paradise Lost

There is, though, a slight crack in the façade, and every now and then real life spills through. Pretty much every day, we saw someone somewhere lose it. One night we had a Rasta lying on the beach outside our window, smashed out of his brains on weed and local rum, calling out bizarre non-sequitur obscenities into the night before passing out in a haze of red, rolling eyes; another night one of the Chinese men from the local supermarket made a phone call in the middle of the street in which he completely lost it and shouted piercingly scary Chinese threats into the handset for a good ten minutes, while his business partner tried to coax him away from the red mist and back to sanity; another night one of the other shopkeepers had a stand-up row with a sloppily dressed local whom he’d kicked out of the shop, following it up with, ‘Come back here now you coward and let’s sort out this man to man, you fucking scum, you don’t come round here no more, I sort you out good and proper’; and then there was the black guy shouting, ‘I’m not racialist or anything, but it’s like you’re a monkey and I’m a gorilla.’ It’s like lying under a picture-perfect palm tree and hearing the faint creaks and rustles from the fronds above that indicate a coconut might fall down at any minute, breaking the tension and possibly someone’s face, too.

And peppered around this background noise of locals losing their cool with each other, there are noisy gaggles of Australian girls peddling the late-night streets with their astonishingly piercing shrieks; there are monged-out twenty-somethings from Oregon at the food stalls who make you realise that no, South Park isn’t a satirical show, it’s a documentary; and there are plenty of slightly lost travellers wandering around, like the young English guy who cornered us in the ATM and grilled us in a panicky voice about the best approach to changing money at the Guatemalan border (‘I don’t know, can’t you see I’m using the bloody cash machine?’ was my gruff response, as the ATM booth is neither the time nor the place to corner other people, unless you’re a thief). Caye Caulker is a classic stop on the Gringo Trail, the classic travellers’ route that stretches from Mexico to Panama, and at times you can feel you’re stuck in gap year hell; still, the next step along the road for Caulker is a full-blown tourist industry, and the Gringo Trail is a minor fate compared to that...

But despite these cracks around the edges, the charms of the Caribbean win out every time, and Caye Caulker is, for now, a little bit of paradise. One hopes that for this part of the world, everything continues to go slow, including the inevitable change into a more popular and less charming destination. Enjoy it while you can, because this won’t be a quiet corner for long.

Diving in Ambergris Caye

Written: 25 November 2013

The diving off the northern cayes of the Belize is world class, so it didn’t take much persuasion for us to book a two-dive trip to the reefs off Ambergris Caye, just to the north of Caye Caulker. Our dive operator chose two of the classic locations off the southeast corner of Ambergris – Esmeralda Canyons and Cypress Canyons – and after waiting for a tropical downpour to clear away, we set off on the 30-minute dash to the reefs off Ambergris.

The local blurb speaks highly of the sites (of course). Esmeralda is ‘one of the top dive sites’ and ‘abounds with tropical fish’; at Cypress, meanwhile, ‘schools of yellowtail, grey, black and red snapper swim among these beautiful coral formations’. In the end, though, we were both pretty underwhelmed by the poor state of the coral and the small amount of wildlife. The problem is that we’ve only just come away from diving in Cozumel, which is in a totally different league to Ambergris; where Cozumel’s reefs absolutely teem with life, literally everywhere you look, the reefs in Ambergris look a bit tired and battered, and although there are fish and lobster and the odd ray (which we didn’t see, but another group did), they are far fewer in number than in Cozumel, and we couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.

It didn’t help that we were sharing the boat with a fairly irritating bunch of divers, who ranged from a total novice on his very first post-qualification dive who seemed to know everything there was to know about diving already, to a bragging Frenchman who proved that diving can be a bit of a twat magnet sometimes (it turned out he lived in Tulum; that made sense). The on-board conversation was an endless one-upmanship of who’d dived the most amazing international dive sites and which one was better than the rest, and Peta and I just exchanged glances and let them get on with it; I’m too grizzled a traveller to get involved in that kind of conversation, so we just looked out to sea while the novice banged on about how amazing the diving was (though he’d never dived anywhere else, so couldn’t compare), and the Frenchman puffed up in self-admiration as he talked authoritatively about cenote dives, Polynesia, the Great Barrier Reef, and all the other sites that, yes, I’ve also dived. The irony is that he’d been in the same group as us on the Ambergris reef, and he’d been the one smashing the reef with his fins in his queue-barging attempts to photograph the coral up close; perhaps that’s why the reef round here looks so pre-loved.

There were some good moments, though. On the first dive in Esmeralda, we saw a huge, green moray eel near the start at 21m down, and throughout the rest of the dive we were visited by nurse sharks, who are friendly and harmless but distinctly shark-shaped, so every few minutes I’d glance down and think ‘Shark!’ before realising that, actually, the world wasn’t about to end after all. Peta particularly enjoyed swimming with sharks, as the sights that the guide was pointing out weren’t that inspiring; as she said after the dive, if she wanted to see a lobster she could go to any aquarium, but swimming with sharks? That’s not something you do every day.

In the second dive in Cypress Canyons, we got to swim single file through an 8m-long and fairly claustrophobic tunnel through the reef which would have freaked me out if I hadn’t already quashed that phobia back in the cenotes. But the overall feeling was of a dive site that pales in comparison with Cozumel, and a dive boat full of slightly annoying people who were a little too keen to tell the world about themselves, without first checking whether they had anything interesting to say.

But this isn’t the only dive we’re planning to do in Belize, so hopefully things will get better...

Travelling by Internet

Written: 28 November 2013

I’m going to sound like a bit of an old-timer here, but wow, the Internet has really changed travelling compared to 18 years ago. I didn’t notice the effect so much when I visited West Africa in 2002, because that’s a pretty poor part of the world and the Internet was still a bit of a novelty then, but here in the touristy parts of Central America there’s wi-fi absolutely everywhere, and the effect on the travelling community is huge.

Of course, this isn’t the first big change that travelling has been through. The first wave of what we now call backpackers came along in the 1960s and 1970s, when people started dropping out of society and hitting the hippy trail from Europe through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and India, and on to Southeast Asia. This led to an explosion of travel guidebooks, in particular the now ubiquitous Lonely Planet, and with the advent of cheaper air travel, people taking ‘gap years’ were everywhere by the 1980s, to the point where going travelling became a pretty standard thing for young people to do. And now the landscape is changing again, as the old paper-based guidebooks give way to the Internet as the go-to source for travelling information.

Peta and I straddle the first two eras of travel. Ask Peta about travelling through the Greek islands in the early 1980s, or riding a motorcycle through iron-curtain-era Yugoslavia, and it’s a pretty different story to modern travelling. The Greek islands didn’t have phones, and if the weather blew up, the ports would close, so you had to time your departures carefully if you wanted to make a connection on land. You just turned up on the islands and asked around for places to stay; there were no guidebooks, you just asked people where to go.

When I travelled in the mid-1990s, the guidebook was well established, but the Internet was in its infancy: only geeks had email addresses, and only cutting-edge technology companies had websites. I took an Internet-savvy computer with me on my travels, and nobody knew what it was for; I used to explain it away as a portable fax machine, as that’s what people could understand (and, indeed, that’s how I would send my writing to my family, as that was the only technology they’d have access to). Like all other travellers, I’d turn up somewhere and use the guidebook to find suitable accommodation, or if that was full, I’d just start asking around. Other travellers were mines of information, and we’d swap hotel details and ferry timetables like they were a tradable currency. And as for reading books... well, they really were valuable commodities, particularly in non-English-speaking countries.

But these days everything travel-related is online, and everyone seems to be connected, all of the time. TripAdvisor has become the go-to website for finding accommodation, Facebook is how we all communicate with people back home, and every other person seems to be a bloody travel blogger. Instead of getting off the bus and idly wandering to the nearest OK-sounding hotel in the guidebook, travellers now go online in advance, search through hundreds of options, read through other travellers’ ratings (often from just a few days ago), and if they like what they see they can even click on the ‘Book’ button and pay for their stay in advance. It’s a complete change-around from just ten years ago, when you could only access your email in Internet cafés and wi-fi was still pretty rare outside of the West.

Information Overload

For me, this is all a bit of a culture shock. Back when I learned to travel, I’d spend ages poring over the guidebooks, and soaking up every bit of information I could lay my hands on, from hand-copied maps to route suggestions, and I played with my itinerary for hours, wondering where I should go. I trained myself to soak up information like a sponge, mull it over and make a decision, and this worked really well when information was relatively scant. But in the Internet era, the sheer volume of data literally makes me panic and I get information overload. I can’t cope; my brain insists on reading everything, and when faced with having to make a decision, it simply freaks out and freezes. It’s most inconvenient, and I find I can only look at TripAdvisor for a few minutes before the red mist descends and I have to go and lie down.

Luckily Peta is much more adept at filtering out the reams of crud that you find on the Internet, so we’re playing to our strengths. I’m good at planning interesting routes through countries, sorting out the finances, and documenting where we’ve been; and Peta is good at finding places to stay and eat. It’s a classic male-female split, and it seems to be working.

And there is one huge advantage of being connected on the road that even I have to admit is a life-saver. On my previous travels, I’d have to carry my memories with me, and the prospect of having my bag stolen was a constant worry. Most travellers back then would have some kind of paper notebook in which they’d jot down their thoughts, and any photos we took would be on film. I remember travelling through India in 1998 with about 20 exposed films tucked away in my pack, worrying constantly whether they’d get waterlogged on the bus roof, or baked in the hot sun, or infested with ants, all before I’d had a chance to develop them. I’d also back up my writing to a chunky flash memory card, which was about half the size of a packet of ten cigarettes, and I’d hide it in my money belt, so if someone stole my computer, at least they wouldn’t get my writing. I’d email my jottings home when I could find a connection, but that wasn’t that often, and I could never email the photos home.

Luckily I made it through both my big trips in the 1990s and 2000s without having anything stolen, and by the time we went to India again in 2007, everyone had started going digital, and I remember being surprised about the number of laptops I saw in the guest houses. These days there are iPhones and laptops everywhere you look, and wi-fi is an essential aspect of the modern travel circuit, so at the end of most days I’m able to back up my writing and photos to my website. Although it would be a major pain to have my MacBook stolen, as I wouldn’t be able to write any more until I found a replacement, at least I shouldn’t lose any memories (and I’m still backing up to a USB stick which I keep in my money belt, just to be doubly sure – old habits die hard).

So although I might find it hard to cope with the information overload of modern online travel, there is at least a silver lining. Though part of me can’t help wondering if the less popular travel destinations of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua will bring back the good old days, when less was – for me at least – more.

The Great Blue Hole

Written: 29 November 2013

‘Oooh, are you planning to dive the Blue Hole?’ people ask when you tell them you’re going diving in Belize.

‘What, that massive hole full of deep, dark water and sharks?’ I reply. ‘Are you kidding? No thanks. I’m much happier diving on nice shallow reefs.’

And that’s that. Except things don’t always turn out the way you planned, so yeah, we ended up extending our stay in Caye Caulker just to dive Belize’s Great Blue Hole, even though that was the last thing we thought would happen when we arrived in paradise. Ah well, all good plans are made to be broken...

The Lure of Lighthouse Reef

The problem is that Belize is supposed to be one of the most amazing diving destinations in the world, but we were really disappointed by our trip to the reefs off Ambergris Caye. It just felt a bit drab compared to the astonishing colour and sea life off Cozumel in Mexico, so we thought we’d book a trip to one of the more distant reefs off Belize, ideally somewhere like Turneffe Island, which has a good reputation, or even Lighthouse Reef, which surrounds the Blue Hole.

The thing is that everyone comes to Belize to dive the Blue Hole, so that’s where the focus is. We put our names down for a trip to Turneffe, but when the time came there weren’t enough people to justify a boat; on the other hand, that day’s Blue Hole trip was fully booked. ‘What else do you have?’ we asked, and they said we could go out to the local reefs again if we wanted, which we didn’t, but that the Blue Hole trip was the only other one that they knew would have enough customers to guarantee. And so we thought about it over dinner and figured that, hey, the Blue Hole trip consists of three dives, only one of which is the Blue Hole, and as the other two dives – Half Moon Wall and the Aquarium, both in Lighthouse Reef – are supposed to be absolutely world class and literally some of the best reef dives on the planet, then perhaps we should do the trip anyway. After all, we could always skip the Blue Hole dive itself, if we didn’t fancy deep, dark, shark-infested waters.

So we booked onto the Blue Hole trip for a couple of days later, and settled back to read more about this intriguing dive. And as we read more, and more, and more, it became apparent that, hell, you’ve got to try it. It might not always be enjoyable and it might not be something you ever want to repeat, but if I could get over my various phobias to conquer cenote diving and come away with some really amazing memories, then surely conquering the daddy of all deep water dives would be worth doing.

After all, the Blue Hole is pretty unique in the dive world. It’s a deep dive to the margins of safe no-decompression diving, and it’s important to go into it with the right mindset. This isn’t paradise diving through a tropical aquarium, it’s a descent into the watery bowels of the earth. The Great Blue Hole is a collapsed cave in the middle of the turquoise waters of Lighthouse Reef, forming a perfect 300m-wide circle of dark blue water that’s 124m deep and looks for all the world like a menacing black pupil in the middle of a turquoise iris of reef. Its image is the tourist brochure cover for Belize, and it’s a national icon; it’s OK to go diving in Belize and skip the Blue Hole, but to go to the Blue Hole and not dive it? That would be a little strange.

It’s also on every diver’s list of dives you must do before you die, which is ironic because people do indeed die here (another reason why we didn’t really fancy doing it). A lot of the Blue Hole’s appeal to divers is that it’s at the limits of safe recreational diving, and at its full depth it’s a dive for experienced divers only, specifically those with the Advanced Open Water qualification; Open Water divers like me and Peta can go down to 30m, while advanced divers can go a bit further to 40m, which is as deep as you’re supposed to go without specialist equipment. Because it’s at the limits of safe diving, the hole has a bit of a reputation, though people who do have accidents here tend to be cave divers going way deeper than recreational divers, or people having heart attacks or suffering from equipment failure, neither of which are issues with the Blue Hole as such. That said, there’s definitely a feeling of trepidation for people heading out to the Blue Hole, and it is a deep dive, so the element of danger attracts people from all over the world who are keen to take on the challenge.

So you have to take it slow, and with respect. You can come a cropper here if your equipment is faulty; when you reach 40m, there’s still another 84m of water between you and the bottom of the Blue Hole, so if your buoyancy jacket fails to inflate properly, you can end up plummeting down to the bottom, where you will inevitably die. If you choose a dodgy operator who sends groups to the Blue Hole that are too large, then if two people get into difficulties, the guide can help one, but the other might get into trouble unnoticed. And if your buddy and you aren’t communicating, then you might not notice that your buddy has succumbed to nitrogen narcosis, which can affect divers at 40m, and which in extreme cases can send you completely do-lally, to the extent where you might think it’s a good idea to remove your regulator and try breathing the sea water. If your buddy is keeping an eye on you, then they can head this off by getting you to concentrate on something, like your gauges, which can help focus your mind through the narcosis.

In other words, you don’t muck about in the Great Blue Hole. It’s safe if you’re a safe diver, and dangerous if you’re not.

Geology of the Great Blue Hole

For a lot of people, the dive in the Great Blue Hole is the least interesting of the three dives you do on Lighthouse Reef; in fact, it’s often a major disappointment. It’s dark, it’s blue, there’s practically no life, and because you get through your air much more quickly at depth, it’s a short dive, at around 20 to 25 minutes. But knowing a bit about how the Blue Hole formed makes it all the more impressive, because it isn’t just a hole in the sea, it’s a geological monster.

Like the cenotes in Mexico, the Blue Hole is a karst-eroded sinkhole; in other words, it started out life millions of years ago as a huge chamber in an underground cave system that was eroded from the limestone by acidic water seeping into the ground (‘karst’ being the name given to this kind of geological formation). An earthquake caused the cave ceiling to collapse, and at the same time it tilted the ground through an angle of 12°, so the sides of what is now the Blue Hole don’t go straight up and down, they form overhangs. Stalactites continued to form after the earthquake, so some stalactites are at an angle of 12° while others are straight up and down, and some even change halfway, with the top part at an angle and the bottom vertical.

Some time after the cave collapsed, the Great Ice Age ended and sea levels slowly rose, flooding the Blue Hole in stages. As a result the sides of the Blue Hole were eroded at different levels at different times, carving shelves and ledges into the sides of the sinkhole. The deeper dive takes you down the overhanging sides of the cave to the top of a cave entrance that’s smothered in huge stalactites and stalagmites, and then it’s back up again into the light; the shallower dive, which we did, reaches the stalactites at the top of the cave entrance. In both cases the dive is straight up and down, but if you tell yourself that you’re in a gargantuan cavern from a prehistoric cave system that was smashed by a massive earthquake and flooded by meltwater from the ice age... well, the scale of it all is slightly more impressive than your average cenote.

Inclement Weather

As seems to be a theme with our trip so far, the weather had other ideas. We booked onto the dive for the day after next, giving us a day to rest after our trip to the Ambergris reef, and we turned in early the night before, as the boat leaves Caye Caulker at 6am to get to Lighthouse Reef before the other boats. All fired up for the dive in the morning, we lay there unable to believe our ears as the winds started blowing, and then gusting, and then howling through the phone lines, before a huge tropical storm hit and lashed the island with horizontal rain and screaming winds. The rain stopped sometime in the night but the winds kept on blowing, and it was with a heavy heart that we fell out of bed at 5am, packed up for the dive and plodded down to the dive shop, where we knew they’d simply turn us around and say sorry, no, this is just too dangerous to go out in. And that’s exactly what they did, so we went back to bed, helpless in the face of the tail end of this particularly persistent hurricane season.

By this time we’d got ourselves pretty excited about the prospect of diving the Blue Hole, so after a few hours’ sleep and a leisurely breakfast, we decided it would be worth extending our stay by a day to go on the next Blue Hole trip, which was scheduled for two days later. The winds died down and the sun eventually poked through the clouds, and we spent the day walking to the southern tip of the caye and back, along churned-up paths that went past the hotels in the southern part of the town, before skirting the edge of the airstrip and passing a number of lonely-looking houses that had seen better days. It felt a bit spooky down the southern end of Caye Caulker, I have to say; the theme from Deliverance kept going through my mind as we stumbled across houses that looked abandoned, unloved and, in quite a few cases, unfinished. The paradise dream doesn’t always turn out as you planned, and anyone considering building a luxury holiday home on a remote Caribbean island would do well to visit southern Caye Caulker on the day after a tropical storm. Paradise, it ain’t.

So that night, for the second time, we went down to the dive shop to set up our equipment, and the weather seemed to be cooperating this time. Imagine how we felt, then, as the winds picked up during the night, howling a gale all the way through to the morning, when the alarm went off at 5am and I knew, for a fact, that they were going to cancel again and we weren’t going to be able to dive the Blue Hole after all. ‘What a let-down,’ I thought as we bent our way through the winds to discover that... bloody hell, they were planning to go. Really, in this wind?

‘It should clear up later,’ they said, and a bit dazed after a night of lying there and assuming that we’d simply have another day to kill, we found ourselves bouncing through the surf, on the way to Lighthouse Reef.

Diving the Great Blue Hole

The journey out there was hell. The boat smashed through the swell, soaking those of us who sat at the back in an attempt to stave off seasickness, and by the time we pulled into Lighthouse Reef, some two hours later, I was shivering. Shivering? In the tropics? None of us on the boat could quite believe it, but yes, we were all absolutely freezing as the driving winds chilled us to the bone.

Despite the early hour, it was a blessed relief to get into the water, which was warm and tropical and Caribbean, even though the skies were cloudy and the water wasn’t the pretty azure blue you see in the brochures. But the Blue Hole was obviously a lot bluer than its surroundings, and from the boat we could see the perfectly round edge of the reef that surrounds the hole, so we still knew we were somewhere special.

I wasn’t expecting it, but when I jumped off the dive boat in the middle of what I thought was the Blue Hole, the water was quite shallow. Inside the 300m-wide circle of coral the sides gently slope towards the middle of the circle, like a huge funnel, and then suddenly, wham! At about 15m down the sandy slope suddenly ends and drops vertically down into a huge blue hole of nothingness. Unfortunately for us the storm had whipped up the surrounding seas and there was a fair amount of silt floating around in the water, so the visibility wasn’t as clear as it normally is, but the immensity of the deep blue chasm under our feet was impressive. As I floated off the edge of the lip and out into nothingness, it felt a bit like the first time I bungee jumped, but instead of the world rushing past me in a calamity of falling, I just hovered there, slowly drifting down the outer wall, which I kept in front of me to avoid getting disorientated.

The outer wall is, frankly, a bit spooky. After the coral reef at the top, it’s relatively dead, though not completely; I felt I was slowly sinking down into the oesophagus of some immense sea creature, with its ridges and bumps and slightly furry algae growths swaying in the gentle current. After the battering of the boat trip, the dark blue was incredibly quiet and tranquil, eerie even, as we descended to 24m before checking that everyone was OK. We then dropped to 30m and swam around a huge stalactite hanging off the sloping sides of the cave, before gently floating into the deep blue away from the sides.

Unfortunately there weren’t any sharks when we did our dive; they tend to go deeper when the weather isn’t so pleasant, and with the visibility being fairly mediocre, it was hard to look deeper into the hole to see if they were there. Nobody got any nitrogen narcosis either, which was disappointing for some of the deeper divers, who’d really fancied knowing what all the fuss was about; in the end it was a fairly uneventful dive, but for me, with my ingrained fear of deep, dark water, it was an exercise in slightly wide-eyed wonder at the fact that I was doing it at all. Amazingly I didn’t guzzle my air, unlike one of the other divers, who ran so low on air that he had to buddy-breathe the dive master’s air on his safety stop; I coped fine, and for me, that was the truly immense thing about the Blue Hole.

Though I have to say that diving into a pitch black cenote with rock above your head, a failing torch and a grumpy Italian dive master... well, that’s a hell of a lot scarier than a deep hole in the middle of the sea. I’m just impressed that I can compare the two dives from my own experience; I never thought that I’d be able to do that.

Diving in Lighthouse Reef

The weather didn’t only make the journey to the Blue Hole hell, not to mention scaring away the sharks and silting up the visibility, but it also screwed up the diving at Half Moon Wall and the Aquarium, the other two sites that we were due to dive. The original plan had the second dive straight after the Blue Hole, after which we would tie up at Half Moon Caye Natural Monument for lunch, and then head out for the third dive before returning home. Instead, the team decided to wait a bit for the second dive to see if the visibility would improve, so we dropped anchor at Half Moon Caye after the first dive, and waited to see how things panned out.

Even though the wind was blowing a gale and all the palm trees on this small caye were bent double in the wind, it was a charming stop, not least because the small forest provided shelter and – ahh, that’s better! – some respite from the constant gale. Half Moon Caye is also home to a bird sanctuary and a lookout post from where you can see flocks of red-footed boobies nesting in the tops of the ziricote trees; these birds spend most of their lives at sea and only come to land to breed, so this is a rare opportunity to see the birds up close. However, to an ornithological philistine like me, the frigate birds are much more impressive, with their huge, puffy red gular pouches that they inflate to impressive sizes during courtship. Even if you’re not a bird lover, the lookout is a great vantage point, though as it can only hold eight people at a time, you can’t spend all day there, even if it is wonderfully sheltered up there in the canopy.

But eventually we had to get back to the boat for the second and third dives, which were now going to be at Long Caye Wall and the Lion’s Den, on the leeward side of the reef where the atoll had protected the coral from the main swell. The second dive was good, and compared to the rather sad reefs off Ambergris Caye there was plenty of life and lots of coral. It still didn’t quite compare to Cozumel, but it isn’t really fair to compare them directly, as the sun shone on calm seas in Cozumel, while we had dark skies and ocean swells at Lighthouse Reef. This was followed by lunch on the boat just outside the Half Moon reef, where the winds spun us round in circles as we ate tepid chicken curry and drank sugary pop. I hate eating on pitching boats, and by the third dive I was struggling to see the funny side. I also found that, after a couple of reef dives of 45 minutes and 50 minutes, I was getting a little bored; yes, more coral, and yes, more fish, and yes, look, there’s a lobster, and yes, OK, a drummer fish. But I’m getting cold, my eyes are starting to sting from the salt, I’m getting tired, it’s pretty dark down here, and we’ve got a bloody long boat ride back again after this, which is going to suck. I wasn’t miserable, but I was having to try hard to stay interested, which says it all, really.

On the way back to Caye Caulker, I just spent every available moment staring at the horizon while the other divers merrily talked about where they’d travelled, where they’d dived, what they were going to do next, and plenty of other small talk that I couldn’t even focus on. And the journey back, which was longer and bumpier as this time we were heading into the wind, even managed to drain the younger and more vigorous members of the team, who were all looking totally worn out by the time we docked.

So, that was the Great Blue Hole. I wasn’t expecting it, because most people don’t seem to feel this way, but for me the dive in the Blue Hole was by far and away the highlight of the whole day. It was 25 minutes of floating around in the deep blue of space, not seeing any life, not seeing any sharks, just seeing the odd stalactite and precious little else... but for some reason that’s the memory that will stay with me, rather than the freezing winds, the dreadful swell, the mediocre visibility and the slightly underwhelming reef diving. Funny, that.

Belize: The West

San Ignacio

Written: 3 December 2013

It took a while for us to warm to the charms of San Ignacio, because first impressions last. We got there in the end, but it was a bit of a long road... literally.

It didn’t help that we tackled the long journey from Caye Caulker to San Ignacio the day after our dive trip the Blue Hole, which had completely wiped us out (though in a good way). It started with the water taxi from Caye Caulker to Belize City, which bumped along through the swell, adding sore patches to our sore patches, and the taxi across town to the bus station was pretty rickety and the suspension in the tired old cab had seen far better days, but the most painful part of the whole trip was the music in the bus from Belize City to San Ignacio.

It’s a funny thing about developing countries, but their stereos only seem to have one volume setting, and that setting is at least two notches higher than the speakers can cope with. Whether you’re in Indonesia or India, Burkina Faso or Belize, the driver is in charge of the music, and he wants you to sit there and listen, so he turns it up to full volume and takes no prisoners, whether it’s Southeast Asian pop music, a Hindi film soundtrack or, in the case of the bus out west from Belize City, country and western music of the most dreadful kind.

It didn’t help that someone else on the bus had brought along their own boom box and was determined to entertain the packed bus with their own mega-mix of Belizean beats, which led to a face-off between the driver and the DJ passenger, with each of them upping the volume until the bus driver comprehensively won with his ear-bursting rendition of Waylon Jennings’s ‘Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys’. Despite this initial win by the driver, the passenger was biding his time, because when things calmed down a bit with some gentler Dolly Parton, he wacked up his ragga beats and took on the driver without flinching, until the latter discovered that his speakers could indeed take just a little more, and turning up Charley Pride’s ‘Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger’, he sent the pretender packing with vibrations that rocked the bus even more than the potholes on the Western Highway.

After an hour of aural tennis, Peta had a serious headache and I’d had enough of banal lyrics about cheatin’ women and gamblin’ men, and when Billy Ray Cyrus’s ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ started up, that pretty much summed up how I felt. Luckily we soon reached Belmopan, the capital of Belize, where most of the passengers got off (including the defeated DJ) and the music switched to insanely loud 1980s power ballads, which was perhaps not the improvement I’d hoped for. As Jennifer Rush screamed about ‘The Power of Love’ and we bumped our way in the direction of the Guatemalan border, the heavens opened, spitting rain through a broken window and directly into my face, so at least you couldn’t see my tears.

Black and Blue

After our stressful arrival in the torrential darkness of Caye Caulker, we didn’t fancy splashing around in the rain trying to find a hotel again, so we booked a hotel in advance in San Ignacio. This turned out to be a very good idea, and soon enough the rain had stopped and I was perched on the balcony of the Casa Blanca Hotel, watching the world go by below from the safety of a bottle of Belikin Stout. It was really rather peaceful after two and a half hours of the soundtrack from hell.

So the sudden loud shouts from up the street were a bit of a shock, wrenching me out of my reverie as a lanky black man ran down the street, shouting angry words in Creole and throwing his long arms up in the air in the universal language of fired-up testosterone. He stood on the road opposite the hotel, looking up the hill and shouting, until he calmed down a bit and started loitering with intent instead. He was tetchy, jumping from foot to foot, and clearly wound up; the man at the table selling trinkets by the side of the road suddenly looked extremely busy with his bracelets and necklaces, as the angry black man paced around like a panther patrolling his territorial boundaries.

After about five minutes of this, I heard a muffled shouting from up the hill, and the black man yelled, ‘ You want some? You come on, then,’ in a deep bass voice. There were higher-pitched shouts from up the hill, and again he threw his hands up to the sky. Looking behind him, he saw something in a dark side alley and ducked in for a second or two, before coming out shouting.

‘Come on then!’ he yelled, turning up the hill. ‘Let’s go. Right now!’

‘Yeah, you want some, nigger?’ came a Chinese voice from up the road, and three pumped-up Chinese men started running down towards the black man, one of them in the front shouting and pointing. The black man had his right hand tucked behind his back, and as he headed up the street, I could see he’d grabbed a short bit of wood from the alley.

They met in the middle of the street, the Chinese man putting up both fists and trying a side kick, and the black man dodging and biding his time before feinting with his left hand and springing the surprise from his right, smacking the Chinese man on his forearm. A mother and daughter stood frozen on the pavement and cars ground to a halt as the pair traded kicks and punches. And then the black man brought his right hand down and smacked the Chinese man hard on the side of the head, sending him spinning between two parked cars and down onto the pavement on the other side of the road.

‘You want some of this too?’ he yelled at one of the other Chinese men, who put up his hands and turned to run. The third Chinese man stood still by his downed friend, unsure what to do as the black man jumped back onto the first Chinese man and smashed him a couple more times in the face before running off down the road, stopping to yell incomprehensible threats at the now totally shell-shocked Chinese. The first Chinese man got up and put a hand to his face, which was gushing blood from a mashed-up nose, and he and his friends stood there, totally confused as the black man shrugged his shoulders aggressively, turned casually away from the scene, lobbed the bit of wood back into the side street and sauntered off as if nothing had happened, while the Chinese men limped back up the street, looking at each other in confusion.

Welcome to San Ignacio. I guess the blacks and Chinese don’t get on here, either.

Ruins and Caves

We’d shacked up at San Ignacio in order to visit Actun Tunichil Muknal cave and the Mayan ruins at Caracol, both a couple of hours’ drive out of town, but San Ignacio itself has its own set of ruins that are well worth the 30-minute walk out of town. Known as Cahal Pech – Mayan for ‘Place of Ticks’, which was the name given to the site by the archaeologists who excavated it in the 1950s – it’s one of the oldest recognisably Mayan sites in the Belize River valley, dating from around 1200 BC (though it was abandoned in about 900 AD). It was home to an elite Mayan family, and its location on top of a hill above present-day San Ignacio is palatial indeed; most of the buildings date from the end of the occupation, between 600 and 800 AD, but because they’re in a crumbling state with gnarly trees growing out of the stonework, it feels a lot more ancient.

But the best thing about the site is that it’s relatively quiet. Sure, small buses of tour groups spill through during the day, but it’s off the main tourist trail, and it’s easy to shake off the groups of slow-moving Russians and Americans as they follow their tour guides round the site, and if you wait for a few minutes, you’ll soon have the site to yourself again. You can pretty much clamber anywhere you like, and the view of the forest canopy from the top of the biggest pyramid, some 25m up, is atmospheric (though you can’t quite see out of the forest to the surrounding hills, which is a shame, as the views are lovely on the walk up to the visitor centre).

San Ignacio also has some great street food in the form of small stalls along Burns Avenue, where you can pick up some local favourites for a pittance. We munched on panades, which are crispy fried corn pancakes stuffed with a spicy chicken filling and served with grated onion and cheese, three of which will cost you a whopping one Belizean dollar, or about 10p each; we ate tostadas, which are deep-fried tortillas piled high with cheese, onions, beans, sour cream and salsa for a massive 75 Belizean cents each (or 25p); and fried tacos, which are rolled up soft tacos, stuffed with meat and deep fried before being smothered in onions, sour cream and salsa, also 75 Belizean cents each (or 25p). Lunch for two for a couple of quid, including a large Coke and a place to sit on the side of the road... that’s got to be worth a go.

San Ignacio is also home to a large market, which we caught the tail end of on the Saturday we arrived, though it was closing up at the time; and it’s also near to the confluence of the Macal River and the Mopan River, which is where the Belize River starts. We also fell in love with the restaurants, in particular a Mayan restaurant called Ko-Ox Han-Nah (‘Let’s Go Eat’ in Mayan), which served consistently excellent food at good prices. Finally, after the disappointing food of Mexico, and the slightly monotonous fish-based restaurant fare of Caye Caulker, we’ve found some food that’s worth writing about. Well done San Ignacio, you came good in the end.

Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave

Written: 2 December 2013

Really, how could I resist? The chance to explore a remote flooded cave system, stuffed with ancient Mayan artefacts and the skeletons of sacrificed women and children, deep in the rainforest... isn’t that what everyone dreams of? Of being Indiana Jones for day?

Frankly, no, it isn’t. I hate caves, I get claustrophobia, I don’t like dark water, and I can live without bats flying round my head and cold water dripping onto my face from ancient stalactites, however pretty they are. I have nightmares about caves; Indiana Jones, I am not (although I do have the hat).

But, as with the Blue Hole, it seemed churlish to come all this way without visiting Actun Tunichil Muknal cave, especially as none other than National Geographic in its book ‘Sacred Places of a Lifetime’ rates it at number one in its list of Top Ten Sacred Caves. And hey, if I can scuba dive in a completely flooded cave and survive, surely I could try a bit of spelunking and survive. I mean, it’s only claustrophobia...

Into the Forest

You have to take a tour if you want to visit Actun Tunichil Muknal (which is Mayan for ‘Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre’). This is not only because it’s a delicate archaeological site that would be trampled into oblivion by unfettered tourism, but also because it’s a hell of a trek to get to the archaeology in the first place. When you sign up for a tour there are some simple rules: first, no cameras are allowed anywhere in the nature reserve that contains the cave, ever since a tourist dropped his camera on a 1000-year-old skull and smashed a hole in it; second, you need to bring a set of clothes that you don’t mind getting completely wet (though not beach gear, as that wouldn’t be respectful enough for this sacred site); and third, you need to bring a pair of socks, so you can walk around the archaeology without stomping it into pieces with your shoes, or leaving oils from your feet that will mess with the natural flow of water over the delicate surfaces.

These rules tend to put off your typical ten-sites-in-a-day, air-conditioned coach tourists, putting this attraction in the ‘adventurous’ category. And adventurous it is, too. After an hour’s drive from San Ignacio, half of which is along incredibly juddering dirt roads, you reach the entrance to Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve, where the park warden sticks his head in the van and tells you not to touch anything, not to use cameras, and to listen to everything that the guide says you must do. And he smiles a happy smile, wishes you a good day, and off you go into the small car park next to the park office.

This is where the fun starts. Grabbing nothing except a caving helmet with attached head torch and a bottle of water, you slip into your set of wet clothes and set off through the jungle on a 45-minute trek (though not after your guide has warned you to keep an eye out for snakes). The first river that you have to wade across, Roaring Creek, is cold and waist deep, and at maybe 20m across it’s a bit of a shock to the system at 8.30am. The second river – Roaring Creek again – is even faster-flowing and even colder, though by the third one – yes, you guessed it, it’s Roaring Creek for a third time – things are still a bit numb, so it isn’t quite as uncomfortable. At the small shelter near the entrance to the cave you leave your water bottle stashed away in the eaves, and then it’s off to the hourglass-shaped cave entrance, which is dark, flooded and distinctly uninviting when you’re already shivering from the river crossings. The ancient Mayans believed that Actun Tunichil Muknal was the entrance to the underworld, and the locals still call it Xibalba (pronounced ‘Shi-bal-ba’), after the name for the Mayan underworld. It’s not hard to see why.

Our guide, Orlando, was a charming Mayan with kind eyes and a patient soul, and it was his smile that got me swimming across the first pool of dark water and onto a rock where we all crouched down, peering nervously into the shadows beyond. From that point on it was single file, passing messages down the line like ‘watch your knees on that rock there’ or ‘don’t smack your head on this’. We walked through a fast-flowing river, heading upstream through small tunnels and into large chambers with bats flying around our heads, before ducking under stalactites and rock flows that glittered in our torch light; and all the time we walked through waist-deep water, trying to feel our way through the rocky riverbed without twisting an ankle or bashing a knee on anything sharp.

Every few minutes, Orlando would wait for the group to bunch up and would show us something interesting; he pointed out sparkling rock formations, he showed us black deposits of manganese and white deposits of calcium, and he even demonstrated how one of the rock flows looked like a wedding dress seen from behind on a particularly shapely bride. And then he got us all to stand waist-deep in the flowing river before making us turn off all our torches. Yes, absolutely every one of them; it suddenly became completely pitch black, deep inside a cave in the bowels of the earth, while he told us we were in the Stelae Chamber, and how the Mayans had carved two of the rocks here into special shapes. One was in the shape of the obsidian blade that they used for bloodletting, and the other in the shape of a maize cob, or if you’re feeling fanciful, a sting ray’s spine, which they also used for bloodletting; apparently the Mayans would use blades and spines to cut the tongue, or the foreskin of the penis, or even cutting off a fingertip, and they’d offer the resulting blood to the gods.

And then Orlando turned on his torch and shone it on a rock that, yes, did indeed look like a sting ray’s spine, and the shadows it cast on the dark water and cavern walls danced all around me, pointing at me and saying, ‘Ha! Dark water! You’re standing in dark water! It looks just like blood!’ I suddenly felt as if my spine was indeed made of sting ray, and I had to think happy thoughts until he let us all turn our lights back on and we headed further into the cave, distracting me from my first panic attack of the trip.

There were some tight squeezes, too, where we had to turn our bodies side on, sink chin-deep into the water one at a time, and twist through the small tunnels to get through to the other side, with water churning around our necks. When you’re in a line, there’s not much you can do except swallow hard and go for it; this is how you conquer phobias, by confronting them, and that’s exactly what I had to do. I thought of nothing and didn’t dwell on thoughts of miles of rock above my head, or the closeness of one’s breath when you’re passing through a tiny gap that you have to turn to pass through, or the possibility of jamming one’s helmet into the tiny gap above the water line that’s surely smaller than your head, getting stuck and never being able to move again... but eventually we reached the half-mile point where the rest of the three-mile river system disappears off into the mountains. There are no more archaeological artefacts upstream from here, and instead the good stuff is in the prehistoric chambers above the river. And so the climbing begins.

Crystal Skeletons

There are no guide ropes, no ladders, no man-made hand-holds or steps in Actun Tunichil Muknal; there’s nothing modern at all save for some red tape on the ground that shows where the artefacts are, so climbing the almost vertical wall of slippery rock into the upper caves is no mean feat. You’re wet, you’re slippery, you’re cold and you’re tired, but you have to put your right foot here, your left hand there, swing your left foot round here, twist your body through 90 degrees, and pull yourself up with your hands to get onto the small ledge at the top. It’s amazing that more people don’t slip and injure themselves seriously; one rather suspects that it’s only a matter of time before the cave claims its first modern victims, but for now it’s all about the ancient victims in the caves above, and they’re definitely worth the risk.

At the top of the climb you have to take off your shoes and put on your socks, and from this point on the air is still and smells dank and musty, a heady mix when you combine it with the overpowering smell of tourist’s armpit. It’s the same claustrophobia you get on a packed day on the London Underground as your guide points out the first artefacts, broken pots that are half buried in the cave’s sandy floor, left untouched since the Mayans smashed them on the ground sometime towards the end of the classical period, between 700 and 900 AD. He also casually mentions that this is the spot where a fellow guide was trapped for ten hours when a flash flood hit the river below and it rose to block the exit. ‘Oh, and he had guests with him,’ he adds with a wink, and suddenly it’s all a bit too real.

And then it’s a squeeze through a small opening in the rock, before wham! The cave opens up into a huge cavern, littered with broken pottery and old fireplaces, while large flowstone formations crown the roof high above your head. There’s a sequence of five chambers, each more impressive than the one before, and it isn’t long before you’re staring at your first skeleton, with the skull sticking out of the cave floor, the femurs to one side, and the rib cage visible in a jumble of backbone. The upper caves used to flood and the water moved the bones from their original resting place, where the Mayans sacrificed their offering to the rain god, Chac, smashing the poor soul on the side of the head before ripping open the rib cage, pulling out the heart and sticking it on the fire. They believed that the smoke from the burning heart would please the rain god and the droughts that eventually brought about the fall of the Mayan civilisation would recede, but all that’s left are the bones of the sacrificed and the stories of the guides, told deep underground just inches away from the sacrificial skeletons.

There are 14 skeletons in all in the cave, ranging from a one-year-old to adults (though you only get to see a handful of them). Some of the skulls have flattened foreheads, which the Mayans used to think was beautiful; they would bind a plank of wood to a child’s head and leave it there until the forehead was flattened, and they would also force the child to look at its nose for weeks on end, eventually making the child cross-eyed. Finally, they would stick jade teeth into their mouths, leading to a flat-headed, cross-eyed, jade-mouthed look that doesn’t sound as appealing to modern ears as it presumably did to the ancient Mayans. One poor child even had his arms bound before being killed; he’s the one with a tourist-inflicted hole in his head, which only adds insult to injury.

But the queen of all the skeletons is the Crystal Maiden, a 20-year-old woman who lies on her back at the end of the cave system. She’s been there so long that her bones have calcified, giving her a crystalline and slightly puffed-up appearance; it’s hard to tell where the cave floor ends and she begins, as she glares at you from her 1000-year resting place. This, you remember, is the Mayan underworld, and staring into the sockets of the Crystal Maiden, it’s hard to suppress the subterranean shiver that shoots down your sting-ray spine.

Into the Light

Of course, you now have to go back out the way you came in, and climbing down the slippery rocks is even harder than climbing up. Luckily you’re going with the river flow this time, so the river sections aren’t so bad, and it isn’t long before the daylight blinks in your eyes and you have to swim back across to the cave entrance. Oh, and you then have to do the 45-minute trek again, wading across Roaring Creek three more times before collapsing into a juddering bus that shakes all the cave water out of your ears before dumping you back in San Ignacio for a well-earned bottle of stout.

It’s a proper caving adventure and isn’t for the faint-hearted, but it’s worth it to stare into the depths of the Mayan underworld. If that doesn’t make you appreciate the sunshine, I don’t know what will.

Caracol

Written: 4 December 2013

The journey to Caracol, Belize’s most impressive Mayan ruins, used to be one of the most intrepid four-wheel-drive journeys you could take in this part of the world. Tucked away in the thick rainforest near the Guatemalan border in a remote corner of western Belize, the ruins were discovered by chance in 1937 by a wandering horseman called Rosa Mai, who was out looking for mahogany and cedar; the remains of this once bustling metropolis had lain undisturbed in the rainforest for 1000 years, ever since the Mayans had abandoned the city following an extended drought. Although the British and Americans surveyed the site and took a few choice finds for their own museums, the site – which was by this point buried beneath a millennium of rainforest growth – was only excavated properly from the early 1980s on. For those who managed the journey in those early days, it was a proper wilderness trek, and it’s no picnic even today.

It’s compounded by the fact that the 52-mile drive from San Ignacio passes though some pretty lawless country, and there have been attacks in past years on tourist trips by bandits popping over from Guatemala. There is now a British Army base in the area that provides a daily escort to and from the ruins, departing from their base in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve at 9.30am and returning at 2pm, and since the British presence the attacks have stopped, but this is still not an area to be sniffed at. So even though the road is better than it was – it’s still for four-wheel-drives only, but you can drive it in two to three hours rather than two to three days – Caracol remains a remote ruin that is visited by relatively few tourists.

After the energetic Indiana Jones saga of the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave, we figured that visiting Mayan ruins in a remote rainforest would be comparatively relaxing, so we booked a trip with the same company in San Ignacio and set off with our tour guide for the day – an affable and knowledgeable local called Diego – and three other tourists, plus the driver, in a 15-seater four-wheel-drive bus. The skies were pure blue, the seats were comfortable, and as we strapped in I had a good feeling about the world. I love ruins, and these sounded pretty amazing.

End of Transmission

The drive to Caracol passes through the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, and I have to say I fell in love with the place. As you drive south from San Ignacio and into the reserve, the landscape is all tropical rainforest, like most of the rest of the country, but after you pass through the reserve entrance, the vegetation suddenly changes, and within a couple of minutes the dark canopy of Belize’s secondary rainforest is gone and the pine forest starts. This sudden change isn’t due to altitude – though the reserve is at a refreshingly higher altitude than the sweatier plains below – but to a change in soil composition. The ground in the Mountain Pine Ridge area is a deep red from the large amount of iron oxide in the soil, and this increased acidity means that traditional rainforest can’t grow, and instead only a handful of plant species can survive, including two species of pine and a small number of scrub plants, such as fire grass.

This mix means that fire plays an important part in the lifecycle round these parts, and every year bush fires ravage the area when the sap in the dry pine cones catches fire and all the scrub burns back to charred earth, only to start growing again. The pine trees, meanwhile, survive the onslaught with their tall fire-resistant trunks, so you end up with these two tiers of vegetation – tall pine and low scrub – living far apart and yet in harmony with each other.

As we drove, it struck me that I was falling for the lonesome pines of the Mountain Pine Ridge because this part of the world looks just like the Australian outback (surely no coincidence, seeing as the outback also lives according to a bushfire cycle). The red soil, blue sky and green scrubland is such a beautiful colour combination, and the silhouettes of the pine trees against the sunlight are stunning. I’ve spent many happy days walking through this kind of landscape, and with the bad road and the remoteness of the whole area, it brought back a lot of good memories. The drive was a delight.

We soon arrived at the army base, where we turned off to visit Río Frio Cave, a large cavern that the Mayans used for shelter (though they didn’t use it for anything ceremonial, as it’s open at two ends and they only used completely enclosed caves for ceremonies, as they needed the darkness to represent the underworld). It was a nice enough detour, but I couldn’t help noticing that we turned away from the army base at 9.20am, just as the convoy was preparing to leave, so by the time we got back to the base, the convoy was gone.

It didn’t really matter, as joining the convoy is optional, so we signed in with the officers at the checkpoint and set off on the worst section of the road, crunching our way through a really churned up section that took a few attempts to clear. This was obviously going to be a bumpy ride – Diego told us the roads had only just reopened after some of the heaviest October rains in years – so we held on tight as the pine forest petered out and changed back into tropical rainforest.

It was perhaps 45 minutes from the army base that things started to go wrong. For the last few miles to Caracol the road is sealed – a bit of a surprise after so many miles of gear-grinding madness – and as we rolled along at a good speed, with Caracol in our sights, we reached a small hill and inexplicably started to slow down. The driver, who on some of the gnarlier parts of the churned-up road had earned quite a few cheers, started over-revving the engine in a slightly unnerving way, and despite his enthusiastic punching of the accelerator pedal, we slowly and surely ground to a halt. Thick rubbery smoke started pouring out from the front wheel arches, and the driver shrugged, pulled on the handbrake and jumped out, followed closely by Diego. They looked under the front of the bus, muttered to each other and glanced up at us, just as the acrid stench of Serious Mechanical Failure seeped into the air-conditioned cabin.

‘Um, the transmission has run out of oil,’ said the driver, poking his head into the bus in a cloud of smoke. ‘It looks like we broke a pipe back there, and all the oil has run out.’

‘Ah,’ we sighed, and jumped out of the bus to take in our surroundings while Diego and the driver wandered down the road to confer in private. We were in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between the army base and Caracol, and the bus was completely dead.

‘So here’s the plan,’ said Diego, returning alone from his conference with the driver. ‘We saw some workmen a few miles back, so the driver has gone to talk to them to ask whether we can use their pickup truck to get us to Caracol. And then we can call for another bus to come and pick us up.’

So we sat down and waited on the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, in bandit country, without an army escort, and without any idea how long we’d be there. And it was at that point that Peta looked down and spotted something metallic in the undergrowth.

‘What’s that?’ I asked as she picked it up.

‘It looks like a bullet casing,’ she said. ‘Look there’s another. And another. Wow, there are loads of them. Loads of bullets. Everywhere.’

Which really helped the minutes slip by as we waited to see who would get to us first, the workmen or the bandits.

The Ruins

Amazingly, half an hour later a flatbed truck puttered into view, and thanking our lucky stars we grabbed all our stuff and jumped into the back. That last 20 minutes along the road was a hoot; having the wind blowing through your hair is so much more enjoyable than the savage air conditioning that drivers in hot countries insist on turning up to full, and it felt surprisingly apt to be turning up to such a remote site in the back of a flatbed truck.

And what a site! Caracol is such an atmospheric place, and in parts it’s hard to tell where the ruins stop and the rainforest begins. This was once one of the biggest and most powerful of all the Mayan cities, and the parts that you can see as a visitor are just a small fraction of the whole site, which at its peak was home to about 150,000 people, more than twice the current population of Belize City.

Not only that, but Caracol is home to what is still Belize’s tallest building, even though it’s over 1400 years old and is buried in the depths of the jungle. At an imposing 43m high – considerably higher than the 25m height of the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá – the Caana (‘sky palace’) is a three-tiered pyramid that dominates the main plaza, and the views from the summit, over the rainforest canopy to the distant hills in the south of Belize, are absolutely thrilling. They alone are worth the long, arduous journey from civilisation.

And all the while there are practically no people here; we only saw a couple of other tourists in the entire day, and it was a privilege to be able to climb over the ruins while howler monkeys screeched and keel-billed toucans flew through the treetops. One day the Belizeans will upgrade the entire road to bitumen, and then Caracol will become Belize’s Chichén Itzá; for now, though, it’s the preserve of the lucky few who make the effort to grind through the mud and climb to the top of Belize’s first, and only, skyscraper.

There are, of course, plenty of other buildings and plazas at Caracol, as well as plenty of stelae, the tall stone monuments on which the Mayans carved pictures of rulers, conquered enemies and bloodletting ceremonies, along with the glyphs that give us so much information about their long-lost empire. There are ball courts, tombs, living quarters and altars, as well as countless piles of rubble that are still smothered in 1000 years of rainforest. Excavations still go on each year; Caracol has plenty more secrets hidden away under the strangler figs and moss carpets, and it’s hard not to feel like an explorer as you wander under the canopy, in the shadow of the Mayan empire.

Back Home

On the tour Diego had turned out to be a genuinely likeable and knowledgeable guide, though even his enthusiasm started to flag when we came back to the visitor centre, well after the army convoy had returned to base, to find that our replacement bus hadn’t yet arrived. We were stranded until it did, so we sat and listened to the noises of the jungle as the sun slowly moved across the sky, until finally, at 4pm, a tiny Toyota RAV4 pulled into the car park.

‘That can’t be it,’ we thought, ‘there aren’t enough seats,’ but sure enough this was the only vehicle they’d managed to rustle up, so we had to bunch up with three on the backseat, two on the passenger seat, and Diego standing on the back bumper, hanging off by the tips of his fingers.

We dropped Diego off at the still-stricken bus, which by this point had been joined by a land cruiser and a tow rope, and then we started the long, slow haul back through the mud. This was a much slower and scrappier affair in the small Toyota than it had been in the rather meatier bus, but there was one massive bonus to all this delay: as we passed through the pine forest once again, after a quick rest stop at the Rio On Pools, the sun dropped below the trees and lit up the sky in a stunning sunset, the black silhouettes of the pines outlined against an airbrushed sky of blues, yellows and reds, while a crescent moon with clear earthshine appeared next to a bright Jupiter and a beautifully clear Orion’s Belt that sparkled like jade teeth in the smile of a Mayan princess.

Yes, we were absolutely exhausted when we got back, but I’m so glad the bus broke down. It turned an adventure into an event, and it was – as they say round here without even rolling their eyes – un-Belizeable.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 5 December 2013

Belize was just what we needed after the damp squib of Mexico. There’s no language barrier, they have beautiful Caribbean islands, there’s some excellent food, and they’ve got some very impressive sights. We were also lucky with the weather in the end; yes, it was a bit blowy in the islands at times and as a result the Great Blue Hole wasn’t as great as it might have been, but overall we loved it.

It isn’t all perfect in paradise, of course. Belize is not a particularly cheap place to travel, and there is still an undercurrent of angry drunkenness that flares up every now and then. Belize City, in particular, is a bit of a sleazy dump, though it’s a fun city to take a cab ride through, as it’s a sleazy dump with character. But cities in this part of the world are often pretty grim, and settling back on a tropical island with a cold beer or two is what it’s all about, especially when the local brew is so drinkable.

And the sights? They’re world class, but still have a feeling of being fairly undiscovered. There are amazing Mayan ruins that are so remote that the journey is as exciting as the destination, and caves with 1000-year-old skeletons where you really feel like Indiana Jones as you crawl through the caverns. And that’s on top of the relaxed paradise islands where time goes slowly, just as it should do.

So thank you Belize, you’ve recharged our batteries after a bit of a false start, and we’re now ready to tackle Guatemala. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Guatemala: The North

Flores

Written: 8 December 2013

Flores is the traditional first stop for travellers on their way from western Belize into Guatemala, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a small island off the southern shore of Lake Petén Itzá that’s joined to the mainland by a short causeway, and its winding cobbled streets and easy-going tourist vibe make it an excellent place to relax... so that’s exactly what we did.

We came in by colectivo from the Belizean border, which was a rather more crushed affair than the posh colectivos in the Yucatán, with five people squashed onto our three-seat row in the traditional manner of developing countries the world over. After taking a taxi from the bus station onto the island – or should I say tuk-tuk, as the taxis round here are identical to Thailand’s classic moped-taxi – we wandered around, looking for a place to stay. As we walked around the streets, cars drove past with terrible engine troubles; they kept backfiring in the most astonishing way, every few minutes. It was most odd.

But despite the noise, we soon found a room overlooking the lake in a pleasant hotel that was almost totally empty; we saw one set of guests in our entire four-night stay, and breakfast in the morning had a slightly eerie, post-apocalyptic feeling to it, as we sat alone in the large restaurant, wondering what the rest of the world knew that we didn’t. The atmosphere wasn’t helped by the breakfast itself, which was a typically tedious egg-and-tomato-salsa type affair, with black coffee and limp toast, and although the hotel had a swimming pool, it was full of so much chlorine that you’d only consider dipping your toes in it if you were trying to cure athlete’s foot. Still, it had a nice terrace where absolutely nobody else was trying to hog the sun loungers, and our corner room had brilliant views across the lake to the small village of San Miguel, so we were happy enough.

For it’s the lake setting that’s the real attraction here. The island, which you can walk around in 20 minutes, has a pleasant promenade all the way round the shoreline, and although the water level in the lake is currently a bit higher than normal following the huge storms of late October, only a small part of the walkway is flooded (and that part is shallow enough to be a haven for thousands of madly wriggling tadpoles, so it’s still an interesting part of the promenade experience).

Inland from the island shore, pretty cobbled streets rise steeply up to the hilltop centre of the island, which is dominated by a white church and a small park. Here the islanders have erected a massive Christmas tree, which looks slightly surreal next to the palm trees of the plaza, but it’s a reminder that round here, the festive season is really important; we’re now back into the ex-Spanish colonies after our brief visit to Belize, and the Catholic faith is strong round these parts.

But it isn’t European Catholicism, it’s distinctly Central American, and one of the best examples hit town a couple of days after we did. We’d assumed that the bangs on our arrival were down to badly tuned Central American engines, but it turned out we were wrong; it wasn’t the traffic making the bangs, but the build-up to the Quema del Diablo festival (Spanish for ‘Burning of the Devil’). This festival signals the beginning of preparations for the festive season, and starts with locals giving their homes a spring clean and piling the rubbish out in the street. Because they believe that the devil lurks in dark places like dirty corners of houses, behind the sofa and in piles of rubbish, this symbolises them cleaning the bad spirits out of their houses. As 6pm approaches on the 7th of December, they light the piles of rubbish, and often they’ll throw an effigy of the devil on top, just to make sure that he’s good and gone. There’s also a lot of firework action, and Chinese firecrackers are all the rage. Sometimes the devil effigy is stuffed with the things and pretty much explodes the pile of rubbish, scattering it among the cobblestones, which is exactly what happened to one burning devil we saw in the Flores backstreets; they just kept throwing on more firecrackers until there was nothing left of the Prince of Darkness except a burning pair of shoes.

The festivities continue with street parties. Homes and restaurants set up stalls on the street, where they sell local favourites like pastel boracho (rum-soaked sponge cake), bollitos de platano (plantain dumplings) and tamalitos de elote (corn tamales). There’s loud music from blaring speakers, dancing in the street and, down by the waterfront, an old-timer marimba band playing the most godawful music you have ever encountered; I swear that it was indistinguishable from plinky-plonky videogame music from the 1980s, and it went on for hours. Still, if what you need to banish the devil is the spiritual opposite of the Rolling Stones, then so be it.

But what I don’t get is how the fireworks keep on going, and going, and going. These aren’t fireworks in the western tradition, they’re just about noise, and while I can understand the appeal of Chinese firecrackers, I’m less convinced by those that simply explode in a massive bang, with no discernible point to them other than to induce coronary arrest through sonic assault. We’d thought the cars were backfiring, but no, it seems that the devil can only be flushed out using noise terrorism, because that night, the bangs went on through dinner and all the way to midnight. At least they didn’t go on all night... but they did start up again at 3.45am, when someone thought it would be fun to let off one of the loudest bangers every five minutes until 5am. And every time they did, they set off car alarms (yes, they were that loud), and then the local dogs took it as a personal attack and started barking at each other, and then the local cockerels started up, cock-a-doodle-doing insanely until eventually they sorted it all out between themselves, before the next bang kicked off the whole cacophony once more.

And this went on all through the wee hours, in a small village on a picturesque island in the middle of a lake, and that, I don’t understand, because surely almost everyone was in bed by then. Every bang, I thought I heard a crowd clapping and cheering... but it just turned out to be the dogs starting up and the cockerels kicking off, and I realised that it must be a small group of firework nutters who were committed to making sure nobody got any sleep, including us poor devils.

Apart from jumping out of our skin every time the firecrackers went off, we did precious little, as Peta wasn’t feeling too well and the weather was a bit hot to go far. We did manage to take a boat over to San Miguel where we visited Tayazal, an old Mayan ruin that had some good views over the lake; this was where the people of Chichén Itzá fled to after being forced out of Mexico in the mid-15th century, and they survived here until the Spanish conquered them in 1697, by which point they were the last remaining independent Mayan state. These days there’s not a lot to see except some pyramid-shaped mounds of overgrown rubble and some rather weatherbeaten stelae, but the views are worth the sweaty climb through the mosquito-infested forest.

But we mostly lounged around, reading books and drinking beer in hippy-themed lakeside bars, enjoying watching the people swimming in the lake in front of us. At this time of year, the high water levels in the lake cover the main boating quays in a couple of inches of water, hiding them from view but giving the swimmers concrete pathways just under the waterline that they use to walk out into the lake, before diving off into nothingness; it makes it look like they can all walk on water, which presumably proves that the devil has indeed been flushed out of Flores.

Now if only they’d stop letting off those military-grade explosions, we can start enjoying the festive season without jumping out of our skin every five minutes...

Tikal

Written: 9 December 2013

There’s a strong argument that Tikal is the most impressive of all the Mayan sites in Central America. At a whopping 65m, the site’s tallest building – the inspiringly named Temple IV – is the second-tallest pre-Colombian structure in the western hemisphere, second only to the 70m-high La Danta in El Mirador (which is also in Guatemala but requires a difficult five-day jungle trek to reach, so it’s for die-hard fans only). Temple IV at Tikal is half as tall again as the main pyramid at Caracol, and it’s no surprise that the sunrise tour to Tikal, where you climb to the top of Temple IV to watch the sun rise over the Gran Plaza, is a popular jaunt.

But to get to the sunrise from Flores you have to leave at 3am, and frankly we’re too old and morning-averse for that sort of nonsense, so instead we decided to go for the sunset tour that leaves Flores at a much more civilised 1pm. We made the right decision, because this morning the skies were moody and looking for a fight, but the sun soon chased the clouds away and by lunchtime the sky was a beautiful blue with nothing but an innocent-looking collection of small, white puffy clouds.

This was a good thing, because in the end the tour part of our tour was fairly forgettable, especially compared to the high quality of the guidance we got from Diego in Caracol. I guess all tours of Mayan sites have to start with the same basic information about the development of the Mayan empire, the succession of kings, the way new pyramids were built on top of the old ones and so on, but that was pretty much all we got in Tikal, whereas Diego went into things a lot more deeply and a lot more enthusiastically. There was nothing wrong with the Tikal tour, but it paled into insignificance compared to the architecture, whereas Diego’s tour managed to bring the architecture to life. There’s quite a difference, but without taking the Tikal tour we wouldn’t have had such a long day in the park, and we also wouldn’t have enjoyed such a brilliant end to the day, so in the end it was worth it.

Like Caracol but unlike, say, Chichén Itzá, Tikal is still smothered in rainforest, and although the major plazas have been cleared and there are wide roads connecting the main temple complexes, these pass through rainforest that’s lain relatively untouched since the Mayans abandoned the site around 900 AD. Tikal, then, hides its beauty under a bushel. Even when you get to climb a pyramid or a temple – the difference being that pyramids have four staircases and flat tops while temples have one staircase and a temple building on top – you don’t get to see much beyond the top of the rainforest canopy and a few of the taller structures poking above the trees. The large panoramic model of the site in the visitor centre shows how the ancient city fitted together, but when you wander round the site today, it’s like walking between a series of disconnected buildings that only fit together when you get above the trees.

This manages to be both atmospheric and slightly disappointing at the same time. While Caracol’s remoteness makes the jungle-clad nature of the site really magical, with Tikal it’s somehow less satisfying, though that’s hardly Tikal’s fault; it’s a much more popular and accessible site, after all, so it’s hard to feel adventurous. But where Caracol’s ruins are fairly untouched and you can stomp all over them with free rein, Tikal’s ruins are smothered in signs telling you not to sit here, not to climb up there, not to write on the walls and generally to stay back and admire them from a distance. And when you come to climb those that you are allowed to climb, most of them have their main stone steps closed, and instead you ascend via safe and sturdy wooden staircases tacked onto the side of the building, which is certainly more efficient than schlepping up blocky stone steps to the top, but it’s also a lot less fun.

Also, the largest temple of the lot is completely hidden behind the rainforest; you just can’t see it. They are currently working to restore the stone steps on the front, but you can only really see the summit poking through the treetops. Much more interesting is the Gran Plaza, where the 44m-high Temple I and 38m-high Temple II face off across a wide grassy expanse, with an impressive hill of buildings called the Acrópolis del Norte (North Acropolis) along the third side of the plaza. You are allowed to climb up the acropolis, where more than 12 temples sit crumbling in the sunlight, and the views down over the Gran Plaza are wonderful. You can’t climb Temple I any more, and Temple II’s wooden stairs were closed when we visited, but for me, wandering around the acropolis was the highlight of exploring Tikal.

As the sun sank slowly towards the horizon, we visited the twin pyramids of Complejo Q (Complex Q), which we climbed for tantalising views of the top of Temple I to the southwest; the Acrópolis Central (Central Acropolis), on the south side of the Gran Plaza, which has lots of small rooms and was probably a residential palace for Tikal’s nobles; El Mundo Perdido (the Lost World), where a number of large pyramids sit crumbling among the forest; and Temple III, which is still smothered in rainforest and shows what the buildings looked like when modern archaeologists first started analysing the site in 1848. But for the big event, the sunrise, we headed for the biggest of the lot, Temple IV.

As I mentioned, you can’t see a lot of Temple IV from the ground, and the climb up the staircase is shrouded in forest canopy, but when you burst out onto the summit of the temple, the view is astounding. Forest covers the land as far as you can see, and there in the distance, from left to right, you can see the tops of Temples I and II poking out into the sunlight, followed by the impressive summit of Temple III, then the tip of Temple V just visible behind a hill, and finally the flat top of the main pyramid in El Mundo Perdido. It’s impressive, to say the least, and as the view from the summit is due east, you can understand why the sunrise tour is so popular; watching rosy-fingered dawn throw its beams over this lot would be something else, if mornings are your thing.

Of course, facing east isn’t much use if you’re here to see the sunset, but unfortunately the western face of Temple IV is currently closed for maintenance, as unlike the solid steps of the eastern face, the west-facing side consists of little other than a walkway around a summit that’s made of slippery, moss-covered rocks whose steps have long since been worn away. A man with a large gun guards the wooden fence to stop visitors jumping over and risking certain death to see the sunset, but this is Guatemala, and it only takes a bribe of Q10 (about 80p) per person to sidestep the bureaucracy and get a chance to climb up the scaffolding for a wonderful view west over the treetops.

So, of course, we snuck round the side of the summit and climbed up into the scaffolding – well, I did, while Peta stuck to the walkway, from where you can still see the sunset – and it was superb. The sun slowly sank to the horizon, appearing from behind the clouds to give us a beautiful show while spider and howler monkeys swung through the treetops beneath us. True, there are no large Mayan ruins to the west of Temple IV, so the scenery was all about landscape rather than mankind, but that doesn’t matter. I’d trade a 3am start from Flores for the luscious reds of a Temple IV sunset any day.

The only drawback of watching the sunset from the top of Tikal is that you have to walk back to the entrance in the pitch black, picking your way through all the tree roots and holes in the snake-infested road with the incredible cacophony of the forest at night ringing in your ears. It’s made considerably more enjoyable by the fireflies who dance under the trees like magical fairy lanterns, and despite us not bringing a torch, this was Peta’s favourite part of the trip; the rainforest at night is really something to behold, even if you can’t see it. Luckily we were able to follow in the footsteps of a kindly American who’d come equipped with a smartphone, and we eventually got back to the van a good 45 minutes after those who’d taken the transport-only option. For that extra 45 minutes among the fireflies, and the know-how to bribe the guard at the top of the temple, the extra fee for the tour was worth every penny.

But I have to say that, if I had to choose between Tikal and Caracol, I’d choose Caracol. Its main pyramid might not be as big as Tikal’s temples, and you might not be allowed to stay for the sunrise or sunset, but it’s more atmospheric. Tikal’s a very close second, though, and it’s still not to be missed; it’s just that in the world of Mayan ruins, size isn’t everything.

Río Dulce

Written: 13 December 2013

When you’re heading south from Flores towards the highlands around Guatemala City and Antigua, you have a choice of two routes. The most popular choice is to head through the centre of the country to take in the picturesque swimming holes and caves of Semuc Champey, which is generally regarded as one of the most beautiful places in Guatemala; the other is to head down the eastern flank of the country to visit the Río Dulce, or ‘Sweet River’, where you can take a beautiful and oft-recommended boat trip out to the Caribbean coast and the Garifuna settlement of Lívingston. Here, the culture is unique in Guatemala as it doesn’t have a road connection to the rest of the country, so although it was a bit of a toss-up between the two routes, in the end we figured we’d try out Río Dulce rather than Semuc Champey, as it feels like we’ve seen enough caves and swimming holes to last a lifetime.

It turned out to be a good choice, because the area around the Río Dulce is quite beautiful. Or, at least we think it’s beautiful, because for most of our visit it was hidden behind vertical sheets of rain and low cloud, but even with the depressing weather that continues to dog our every move, the rainforest was delightful (and hey, it’s a rainforest, so what did we expect?). We also lucked out on our choice of accommodation; we stayed at the Hotel Kangaroo, which is a short boat ride from the main settlement of Fronteras (which everyone calls Río Dulce rather than Fronteras, even though Río Dulce is the name of the river – confused yet?). Tucked away in the fringes of the rainforest on a quiet tributary of the main river, it’s run by a proper Australian bloke called Gary (known to the locals as ‘Kangaroo’) who’s a brilliant source of information on what you can do in the area. His other half, Graciela, who hails from Mexico, runs a mean kitchen making Mexican food that tastes fresh and enticing – which is a lot more than can be said for the Mexican food we failed to enjoy in Mexico – and all this is in a charming wooden hotel that Gary built himself after he moved to Guatemala some seven years ago. We were happy to let him tell us what we should be seeing in the area, and he did a great job; it was a relief to hand over the planning reins to someone else for a change.

Castles and hot waterfalls

On our first day we took a kayak across the river to an old colonial fort, El Castillo de San Felipe, from where you can see the expanse of Lake Izabal stretching out to the west. I love old colonial forts, and this one, which dates from 1652, is wonderfully atmospheric, despite being rebuilt in 1956 from ruins. With turrets, dungeons, battlements, cannons, faded white walls, red tile roofs and great views, it ticks all the boxes that I’m looking for in a colonial fort, and despite being a quick trip to get us in the mood, it was, for me, the highlight of our trip to Río Dulce, probably because it was the only time that the weather held off long enough for us to actually see anything.

The next day we took a colectivo along the northern shore of the lake to Finca El Paraíso, a ranch that’s home to a hot waterfall flowing into a cool river in the rainforest. There are rock pools at the top of the waterfall containing steaming hot water, where you can relax under the canopy while rubbing volcanic mud into your pores, and there’s even a small cave at the foot of the falls that you can duck into for a quick sauna, though as the roof is only about a foot above the waterline, it’s less of a sauna and more of a steam-cleaner for your head; still, it’s an enjoyable way to clear out the sinuses, while fish nip at your extremities in the eerily yellow water. The great thing about the waterfall is that it’s even enjoyable in the rain, which is a good job because while we were there the heavens opened and the rain set in with a vengeance.

We should perhaps have taken a bit more notice, because our next colectivo stop along the road, El Boquerón, was a complete washout. This river canyon is apparently well worth exploring, so we happily paid the entrance fee and hired a man to take us upstream, but he stopped at the first set of rocks after about five minutes of paddling, pointing to a set of rapids and saying that the rain had made it impassable from this point. He pulled up to a rock and we clambered about ten feet further so we could see the rapids for ourselves, but the whole point of the boat trip is to reach a small beach a bit further on, where you can jump out of the boat and explore the canyon on foot; instead the trip was over before it started and was a total waste of time and money, and as if to rub it in, the rain suddenly switched from heavy to torrential, soaking us to the skin as we shivered in the front of the exposed canoe. The man rowed us back as the downpour continued, and although as soon as we jumped back onto the shore it lessened a bit, it still left us feeling cold, wet and fed up, which is pretty much how we felt all the way back to Fronteras on the colectivo.

Up the Río Dulce to Lívingston

That night the downpour didn’t just settle in, it started applying for residency, which was a bit annoying as we’d saved the best trip until our last day; the guidebooks rave about the boat trip up the Río Dulce to Lívingston, and we simply had to give it a go now that we were here. The boats that take you downriver are actually colectivos that stop off at a few touristy spots on the way, though most of the people on our boat turned out to be tourists rather than locals. Most notably, one of the other passengers was a classic long-haired and bearded hippy, who had wonderfully colourful trousers, a sleeveless T-shirt sporting an amazing print of a native American, and the most astonishing body odour that I’ve ever sat downwind from. There were four rows of seats in the boat, with two or three people in each row, and we’d ended up at the back; the hippy was right in front of us, and every time he raised his arms to take a picture, the smell that hit us was so intense it made us cough. It was quite mind-blowing.

As a result, there was a silver lining to the dreadful set of clouds that rolled in as soon as we started out east towards the coast. As we entered the waters of El Golfete, the wide part of the Río Dulce to the east of Fronteras town, the rain started getting serious and the boat started picking up speed, blowing the stair rods under the boat’s small tarpaulin roof and straight into our faces. This was a bit too much for the hippy, whose body was optimistically exposed to the elements, so he asked the driver if he could climb to the front of the boat to pull out a rug. As he clambered from row to row, each of the rows he passed collapsed in coughing fits until he reached the front, where he stood for ages trying to open up his pack, the scent of his armpits dousing the entire boat in noxious fumes. When he finally pulled out his rug and sat down at the front with his arms down by his sides, the whole boat gave out a collective sigh of relief. The poor girl on the front row must have wondered what had hit her.

Annoyingly, the weather continued to be appalling all the way to Lívingston, so we couldn’t see the shores of the lake, and when we entered La Cueva de la Vaca, the steep-sided gorge just short of our destination, the sides were smothered in fog and the wildlife that is normally there for all the world to see was hiding from the onslaught. It was a damp way to reach the Caribbean coast, where we sat for ten minutes, drifting in the middle of the river, while the young boy who was driving our boat starting panicking because he’d run out of petrol; a quick phone call to his boss revealed that all he had to do was pull the engine hose out of one petrol can and stick it into the one on the other side of the cabin, so sheepishly he did just that and off we set again, disaster averted.

We had three hours to explore Lívingston before the return journey, so we plodded around town, making the most of a short break in the weather to check out the two streets that make up this small coastal town; I was surprised how touristy the main road was, because one of the appeals of Lívingston is its remote and cut-off nature, but I guess it’s on the tourist trail, and you can’t be both remote and popular. After a quick poke around, we jumped into a restaurant to avoid the next burst of rain and to sample the famous local dish tapado, which is a coconut and coriander soup with shrimps, a whole crab and a whole dried fish dropped unceremoniously into the top. It tasted all right, I suppose, but the soup was just like any other coconut curry soup I’ve tasted, and the seafood and fish elements took so much effort to dissect with our fingers and teeth that I rather failed to see the appeal. Still, this is what you’re supposed to eat when you’re in Lívingston, so eat it we did, and having ticked off the boxes while wondering what the fuss was all about, we jumped back into the boat as the clouds parted a little and some blue sky started to tentatively poke its way through the grey.

On the way back we at least got to see what we’d completely missed the first time round, and I have to say that this ‘must-see’ is probably only worth the effort in gorgeous weather, when it would indeed be a pleasant ride. The gorge has seemingly vertical walls of rainforest on either side, which is diverting for a while, and the lake has some enjoyable forested shores, but it’s not that scintillating. It’s a pleasant journey, but no more, and if you’re already wet and the weather isn’t beautiful, it can get pretty cold in the back of the boat. The lake is huge, too, and by the end we were wishing the journey away, particularly as we’d managed to pick up an eastern European woman who was travelling with her two daughters, and who started talking loudly to her kin the minute she joined the boat in Lívingston, and managed to talk continuously and without pausing for breath for the entire hour-and-a-half journey to Río Dulce. It was an astonishing feat, and the silence that enveloped us when she was finally dropped off at one of the marinas was pure bliss. I’m just thankful that I couldn’t understand a word she said; her daughters looked long-suffering and just as bored as us.

It says a lot that my main memories of the boat trip were a smelly hippy and a chatterbox mother. Never mind, the Hotel Kangaroo was a great place to relax, and in the end the choice to visit Río Dolce over Semuc Champey was the right one. Even before our visit to the swamp, we were a bit tired of swimming in rock pools and wading through half-flooded caves, but after being rained on for so long, the thought of going through that again makes us shudder. It’s clearly time to get out of the wetlands and head for dry land.

The Sun Dog

Written: 12 December 2013

Fronteras, the small town at the western end of the Río Dulce river that joins Lake Izabal to the Caribbean Sea, is well named. We found this out one rainy afternoon, after jumping off the colectivo from our failed visit to the canyon at El Boquerón.

The Sun Dog is the place to go to get a lift to the Hotel Kangaroo; you just rock up to the bar and ask them to call the hotel, and after a short wait the Kangaroo boat zooms into view to whisk you off to your hut in the swamp. We figured we’d grab something to eat before calling for our lift, so we settled down at one end of the row of bar stools that look out onto the harbour, savouring the fact that there was finally a roof over our heads so we could at least try to get dry. At the other end of the row of bar stools was a black man with a laptop, a couple of grizzled-looking white guys with well-worn baseball caps, leathery skin and four-day stubble, and a stocky American with blue eyes and cropped hair.

That’s when the old guy sauntered into the bar and sat down next to Peta, to a noisy greeting from the blue-eyed man. Straight away he fished out a bag of weed from his pocket and pulled a couple of generous pinches onto the table, where he started separating the grass from the dried stalks and breaking the buds up into smaller bits. Then out came the papers, and a few seconds later he’d sparked up and blown out a big cloud of grey smoke, instantly filling the bar with the astoundingly strong smell of powerful marijuana.

Passing the joint to his blue-eyed friend, he smiled over at us as we nursed our beers and tried to dry out. They seemed friendly enough as we wondered whether to say hello, but then a young man who’d been drinking nearby came over and asked the old guy whether there was anywhere round here that he could buy some weed, and the old guy replied, ‘Sure, you can buy some off me if you like.’

‘You picked the right guy to ask,’ said the blue-eyed man as the old guy asked, ‘How much do you want? This much?’ And he piled up a few generous pinches of grass on the bar and pushed it towards the young man, who said, ‘Yeah, that’s great – how much is that?’

‘Twenty quetzales should do’, said the old man, and the deal was done with a wink and a smile for just over £1.50. And so it turned out that we’d accidentally sat next to the local drug dealer, and his chosen medium for advertising his services was smoke signals – great, big clouds of it.

It then started getting a lot weirder. The blue-eyed man soon struck up a conversation with us and tried to get us interested in taking a trip out to see the real locals, the Mayans, out in the jungle, as apparently their friend on the laptop was working for an NGO that ran expeditions to take medicine to the locals, and they all worked for him. For a fee they were taking tourists along to see how the locals really lived, as part of educating tourists and making a few bob for the NGO; amazingly, this turned out to be a genuine offer – we checked out their website later on, and yes, that’s exactly what the NGO was all about – but at the time we just assumed it was some kind of scam, so we politely said that sounded interesting but, well, you know... and then our food arrived and they left us to eat as they turned back to their conversation.

After we’d finished eating, we met another of the Sun Dog’s locals. He hobbled in, said hello to the old guy, and started going on about how his leg was really giving him gyp and that he really could do with a little help managing the pain. He then handed the old man some money in exchange for, well, something we couldn’t see, and then he sat down next to Peta and instantly started talking straight at her like there was no time like the present. He’d apparently landed on his leg in a motorbike accident – while almost stationary, believe it or not – and he was down here recuperating because it was cheaper to live in Guatemala than in the USA. He’d just got back from Miami where he’d stocked up on his medicines, and he was just hanging out, waiting to get better.

The problem was, he wasn’t right in the head, though quite how, we couldn’t tell. He rabbited on, jumping from topic to topic, with slightly wild eyes and a strong element of fidgeting and nervousness. It seemed pretty obvious he was on something pretty strong, and he kept mentioning people stealing bags, having to watch your pockets round here, and various other things that started making us a bit paranoid. Perhaps the clouds of acrid smoke wafting across the bar were beginning to affect us, but it all started to feel a bit close for comfort, so we asked the barman to call the Hotel Kangaroo and kept an eye on our stuff.

And then, as if the characters couldn’t get any stranger, a middle-aged man pulled up to the harbour in a speedboat, looking scarily like the bastard blonde child of a moustachioed Tom Selleck from Magnum PI, all dressed up in the flowery shirts of Hawaii Five-O; hell, he looked like Keith Lemon, and this without any hint of irony. Meanwhile his wife was blonde and busty, wearing tight, bright pink and looking like she was losing the war with gravity, and it suddenly felt like we had the whole set: the government boys, the drug dealer, the drug addict and now the exotic, fly-by-wire narcotic cops. And us, sitting in the middle, wondering what was going on.

Thank god the hotel boat pulled up a couple of minutes later, and we jumped on board and headed for the safety of the swamp. When the characters you meet in the bar are so clichéd that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s wafting in on the local air, it’s hard not to get a little paranoid. This is quite literally frontier-land, after all...

Dampened Enthusiasm

Written: 15 December 2013

You only really notice something when it’s gone, and now that we’re in the highlands of Guatemala, at a pleasant 1500m above sea level, we can finally feel free of the astonishing dampness that has been hanging round our heads since we stepped off the plane in Mexico in October. For the first time in seven weeks, I don’t feel like I’m slowly dissolving.

It hasn’t just been the humidity, which is a fact of life in the tropics, but it’s the continuing rain. I’m not going to pretend that it shouldn’t be raining at all – this is a lush and tropical part of the world, so it’d be pretty churlish to complain that there’s rain in the rainforest – but it turns out we’ve been really unlucky with the weather. And when you spend most of your time outside, as you do when travelling, then when the weather refuses to play ball, it makes life that much harder. Wherever we go we hear the locals saying that the rain has been really heavy this year and that it isn’t normally this wet in December, and all the guidebooks insist that the best time to visit Central America is between November and March, so it’s just plain old bad luck that things have been wetter than we were expecting. The problem is, this bad luck is now in danger of turning this trip into a health hazard.

Green Fur

Our first inkling that things were getting serious was back in San Ignacio in Belize, when we returned to our hotel from our expedition to the remote jungle ruins of Caracol, and started packing our bags ready for an early departure the following morning. Peta tipped her stuff out onto the bed, ready for the regular challenge of trying to squash it all into her backpack, when she recoiled with an animated, ‘Urgh!’ I assumed she’d found a dead cockroach or something equally tropical, but no, she’d found her leather belt, which uncoiled to reveal a thick coating of green fur. ‘It’s mouldy,’ she said, and had to wash it off before repacking it.

More worrying – to me, anyway – was that my trusty Australian bush hat, with whom I’ve shared quite a few traumas over the years, was also covered in green fur, and he’d just been sitting on the side rather than being stuffed into the bottom of a backpack. It seemed that the tropical steam of western Belize was attacking anything animal-based, and we’re animal-based too, so we were clearly next. Unaware of the dangers lurking ahead, we packed up and cleared out, heading for what we hoped would be a rather drier Guatemala.

Flores was indeed slightly better, with only the odd passing thunderstorm to dodge, but perhaps our biggest mistake was in Río Dulce, where we booked into what was effectively a glorified garden shed in a swamp at the Hotel Kangaroo. It was here that we settled in for some of the heaviest rain of our trip so far: it rained when we went to visit the hot springs of Finca Paradíso, it rained when we visited the gorge of El Boquerón, and it rained when we took the ‘must-see’ boat trip from Río Dulce to Lívingston. We took all this wet misery in our stride, but even we were struggling to smile through the adversity when the storm hit on our penultimate night, because boy, did it hit hard.

To be fair, the Hotel Kangaroo was a great spot, and we loved our little swamp hut. The tin roof was fun, the swamp underneath the bedroom was entertaining, and going to sleep to the sound of the chirping rainforest was a delight; hell, even when Peta found a long-dead and desiccated frog in the bed, it wasn’t a problem, it was all part of the fun. But a tin-roofed hut isn’t the best place to be during an almighty, all-night tropical downpour, and the noise level was astounding; we had to shout above the cacophony of the rain smashing down on the bare metal roof, and we slept fitfully until 4am, when the first drips started to appear. The tin was still managing to keep the water out, but somehow the wooden beams holding it up had started getting sodden, and drips formed in two lines across the whole span of the bedroom. Peta had one drip directly above her head and I had another directly above mine, and unknown to us the laptop had its own drip, as did our backpacks and our towels. After a few drips woke us up from our troubled restlessness, we switched on the lights and rescued as much as we could from the onslaught – luckily nothing was damaged, and the laptop was in its neoprene cover, so that was a lucky escape – but the damage to our energy levels was already done.

By the time we woke up the next morning, it was too late. Peta had developed a bit of a cough in Flores, and coughs tend to be a bit stubborn round these parts, but after our dousing in the swamp it developed into full-blown bronchitis (and having suffered from a lot of bronchitis as a child, Peta knows when she’s got bronchitis rather than a normal cough). It turns out that staying in a swamp in an open-air tin-roofed shed with holes for windows isn’t the best thing for an asthmatic with bronchitis, so we got ourselves ready for another move, this time to Antigua, which the weather forecast insisted was sunny, dry, cool and full of healing mountain air.

So we started packing, ready for the morning departure, and guess what? Peta’s belt was again covered in green fur, and my bush hat was looking pretty green around the gills too, with nasty patches of fluffy mould making itself quite at home all around the inside rim. This time we just stuffed them in our packs and jumped onto the southbound bus, running scared for the drier heights of the Guatemalan highlands without so much as a backward glance.

Drier Times

Of course, it rained as we took the long bus ride to Antigua. I say ‘of course’ because we seem to have had pretty bad luck when it comes to travelling in the rain. The first real washout was when we travelled from Mexico to Belize and arrived in the dark in the most torrential downpour you’ve ever seen, soaked to the skin. Our next journey, from Caye Caulker to San Ignacio, was a total washout too, and of course I managed to sit just downwind from the only broken window on the bus. The man sitting next to the window tried to shut it a couple of times but it kept falling down, so he gave up, probably because he was relatively dry; instead, the rain poured straight into my face and down my front, soaking me alone amongst my neighbours. Then it rained again when we travelled from Flores to Río Dulce, and I thought we’d be safe in our hermetically sealed first-class bus, but there was a hole in the sill at the bottom of our window where the water started pooling, and it wasn’t long before it had turned into a cauldron of rainwater that spat huge drops right into my lap. I plugged it up with a screwed-up biscuit wrapper, though it wasn’t entirely successful, and I arrived at the other end with a large and rather suggestive damp patch on my trousers. I’m clearly not good at staying dry on our longer journeys.

So when it started raining as we pulled into Antigua, I just shrugged and gave up. The weather forecast had been for sun with a few clouds, and with no rain at all for the next seven days; when we arrived and I refreshed the forecast, the next few days had miraculously changed to clouds and rain. Our first meal in Antigua that night, which we took in a lovely garden out the back of a sumptuous Indian restaurant, was rained off as another torrential downpour came down on me and my chicken madras, sending the waiters out in a scurry of activity that ended with us having to finish our meal inside, wondering whether we were ever going to be able to shake off this ridiculous weather. ‘You’ll be fine in Antigua,’ the other travellers had said back in the Kangaroo. ‘There’s loads of sunshine there.’ Hmm.

But, to be fair, Antigua is still really dry compared to the swamps and rainforests, and when we arrived and unzipped our packs, the stench and funk of seven weeks of humidity flowed out into the room like a malevolent sea fog. We stuffed all our clothes into a bag, keeping just one set of our driest clothes to wear, and banished the swamp-fest to the hotel’s laundry service; and the next day the sun managed to come out for a while, so we put all our leather goods in the sunlight, so the ultraviolet would kill off the mould spores that were still trying to take over.

And now that’s all done and we have our clothes back, cleaned and dried, it feels good. The breeze here in Antigua is dry, even when it’s overcast, and when you go to bed it doesn’t feel like you’re climbing into a clubber’s discarded sock. The trench foot that I’ve been suffering from for a couple of weeks is steadily drying out, and Peta’s bronchitis is slowly improving, though that may also be down to the medicine that we just bought from the chemist, which includes as one of its ingredients a vasco-dilator that is apparently a banned Class C drug in the UK, and which athletes use as a performance-enhancing drug; Peta’s very impressed with it, anyway, and is now convinced she has the lung capacity of Mo Farah.

So we’ve escaped from the fug of the lowlands and can finally take a deep, if congested breath... and relax. Now all we need is for the clouds to disperse so we can actually see the volcanoes that Antigua is famed for, and we’ll be on top of the world, both figuratively and literally. We’ll see.

Guatemala: The South

Antigua

Written: 17 December 2013

To be honest, I thought it was all going to be about the volcanoes. I mean, every photo you see of Antigua – one of Guatemala’s most popular and most photographed tourist destinations – has in the background the most wonderful volcanic cone, but this weather is simply not interested in playing ball. The second after we’d pulled into town and checked into our hotel, I ran up onto the roof to see what the fuss was all about, but all I could see was low-lying cloud and the base of what may or may not have been a volcano. It felt a bit like going on the London Eye in a pea-souper; I was a bit gutted, to be honest.

But it turns out there is a lot more to Antigua than volcanoes, and I needn’t have worried. After our dousing in the rainforest we just needed a rest, and Antigua is the perfect place for sitting around and recuperating. It’s a cosmopolitan town with shops, restaurants, a very pretty central square, and all the luxuries you dream of as a middle-class tourist stuck in the rainforest, whether it’s coffee shops or organic supermarkets or decent wi-fi. And all this is wrapped up in lovely colonial architecture that’s still enjoyably faded round the edges.

The best parts of Antigua aren’t that obvious at first glance, because as with most Spanish colonial towns, there’s not a lot to see on the streets, particularly when things slow down around lunchtime. The narrow, raised pavements and cobbled road surfaces are a bit of a pain to navigate, and nothing spills out into the street, so when you first look around town it all seems a bit quiet. But as you walk along and peer into the doorways, a whole world opens up of picturesque garden courtyards, delightful open-air restaurants and sweet little shopping enclaves that you can’t resist exploring. Antigua might be a pretty town on the outside, but on the inside it’s utterly charming.

We revelled in all this luxury. We ate Indian and Western food, studiously avoiding anything Mexican or Guatemalan, because, frankly, we’re getting a bit tired of corn-based fare. We drank in bars where ex-pats roamed and English was the lingua franca. And we did precious little for a couple of days, except potter around town, enjoying the clean, dry mountain air. Sometimes you want to explore a country’s culture and sample everything that’s on offer, and sometimes you just want home comforts; in Antigua, we unselfconsciously went for the latter.

We also sat for ages in the pretty main plaza, Parque Central, watching the world go by while Mayan women in their colourful clothes tried to sell us scarves and friendship bracelets, and little boys ran around with shoe-shining kits and boxes of chewing gum. The locals are friendly and it isn’t a hard sell, and they always move on when you smile and say ‘No gracias’, which is sensible because Antigua is full of middle-class whites and Central American tourists who wouldn’t take kindly to hardcore touts. Clearly tourism is a very important part of Antigua’s modern role – being declared a World Heritage site in 1976 certainly helped with that – but this doesn’t feel like a Mayan Disneyland, it just feels like a pleasant and culturally intriguing part of the world. Antigua is famous for its schools that teach Spanish to foreigners, and I’d worried that it was going to be annoyingly western and full of irritating hipster-types, just out of ‘uni’ and seeing the world on mummy and daddy’s bank balance, but actually it was full of older, middle-class couples strolling around the colonnades and soaking up the atmosphere in the classy restaurants and enticing shops.

On our second day in town we did manage to get motivated enough to take a taxi to Cerro de la Cruz, a small park on a hill overlooking the town that sports a large concrete cross and fantastic views across town. Unfortunately Volcán de Agua, the huge volcano that sits just to the south of Antigua and which features in all the tourist brochures, was still shrouded in cloud so the views weren’t quite as dramatic as they could have been, and we could only see the bottom slopes of the other two volcanoes in the vicinity, Acetenango and Volcán de Fuego. But the walk down the hill back into town was still very enjoyable, and we passed lots of ruined churches from the old colonial days, when Antigua was the capital of Spanish-controlled Guatemala and had a whopping 38 churches dotted around the streets. It held this title from 1543 to 1776, when the region’s earthquakes finally forced the Spanish to move the capital to what is now Guatemala City. This is why Antigua has its name; before 1776, it was known by the rather ridiculous title of ‘La Muy Noble y Muy Leal Cuidad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Goathemalan’ or ‘The Very Noble and Very Loyal City of Saint James of the Knights of Guatemala’, but when the capital moved, it was renamed ‘La Antigua Guatemala’ (‘Old Guatemala’), or just Antigua for short.

So we ended up staying in town for three nights, a little longer than we’d originally planned, and it was a delight. Sadly, the clouds didn’t budge from the tops of the volcanoes for one minute; I even got up at dawn one day and went on the hotel roof, just in case, but it was as cloudy as ever, so all we got to see of the fabled cones were the lower flanks. I had vaguely toyed with the idea of climbing Volcán de Agua, the closest peak to town, which you can do reasonably easily in a day, but it’s no fun walking for hours through freezing cloud if there’s no chance of a view at the end of it, so I parked that idea and settled for another latte instead. Oh, and one of those rather delicious banana and raisin cakes too, if you don’t mind.

Mmm, we did enjoy Antigua...

Lago de Atitlán

Written: 23 December 2013

There are three main aspects to the personality of Lago de Atitlán, the large volcanic lake that’s about three hours’ drive west of Antigua. First there’s the astounding landscape, which is truly world class; then there’s the Mayan culture, which is all around you in the colourful clothes and smiling faces of the locals; and finally there’s the tourism, which is relatively unsophisticated but which is growing all the time. These three personalities rub shoulders in what seems to me to be a slightly irritated tolerance of each other, and although I absolutely fell in love with the landscape, I’m not sure I entirely fell for the charms of the other two.

And what a landscape! Lago de Atitlán is essentially a huge flooded volcanic crater, formed by a gargantuan explosion some 85,000 years ago that threw 72 cubic miles of ash out as far as Florida and Ecuador. So much material was expelled that the volcano effectively collapsed on itself, leaving a crater some 18km across at its widest point. This hole is now full of water, forming a 300m-deep lake that’s surrounded by the steep, forested slopes of the crater rim, and towering above the lake are three distinct and classically shaped volcanic cones: Volcán Atitlán forms part of the southern crater rim, while Volcán San Pedro and Volcán Tolimán stick out into the lake, on the western and southern shores respectively. San Pedro is dormant and Tolimán hasn’t erupted in modern times, but Atitlán last erupted in 1853 and remains active. It all adds to the thrill of being inside a volcano, and every now and then you can hear deep rumbles through the earth from volcanoes further along the chain (notably Volcán Fuego, which is between Antigua and Lago de Atitlán and which spews out smoke and ash relatively often).

The drive from the Antigua road down into the crater is impressive, to say the least. Steep switchback roads plummet down the crater rim, giving you amazing views across the grey-blue waters of the lake and towards the volcanic cones in the distance. To add to the thrill, some of the lonelier roads around the lake have been (and, every now and then, still are) home to bandits who hold up buses and rob walkers, so the advice is to check on the situation before venturing out alone, and to walk with a guide unless you’re absolutely certain it’s safe. It’s all part of the fun, I guess.

San Pedro La Laguna

It’s no surprise to find that one of the major appeals of Lago de Atitlán is to sit there gawping at the scenery, so we chose a hotel that let us do exactly that. There are quite a few villages dotted around the lake shore, each of them with a different atmosphere, and we followed the traveller herd and chose to stay in San Pedro La Laguna on the western shore. Peta – who is now in charge of finding our accommodation after I realised it was stressing me out too much – picked the Hotel Mikaso because it sounded like one of the better hotels in town, and she chose well, for the Mikaso has what must be one of the best views of the lake in the whole of San Pedro. Stuck out on a little peninsula at the eastern edge of town, its terrace has a 270-degree view of the lake looking east, with the three volcano cones to the south and the huge expanse of the lake just laid out in front of you. It enjoys a stunning sunset vista, and we spent many a long hour on the terrace, soaking up the views in the rather luxurious hot tub that sits right on the edge of the action.

It also helped that when we arrived, we were practically the only people in the hotel. It’s weird, but even though Christmas is only a few days away, Guatemala has been really quiet throughout our visit (if you ignore the constant barrage of thermonuclear firework explosions that have punctuated every single day since we first experienced them in Flores). For the first few days we saw just one other couple in the hotel, and we had the whole place to ourselves (though it did start to fill up towards the end of our stay, so there is life out there somewhere).

This may have been down to the weather, which was pretty ropey when we arrived. Lago de Atitlán is an exposed part of the world, and when the wind blows, it really goes for it; as soon as we arrived at the hotel, we dropped our bags and went up to the top floor for a quick beer in the in the hotel’s dimly lit conservatory restaurant, where the very friendly boy behind the counter sprang into life and lit us a log fire, while the winds rattled the window panes like something out of The Shining. That night, and the night after, the noise of the lake waters crashing against the hotel was bordering on the scary, especially as our room had a lake view on two sides, and the waves were crashing straight into our balcony and, at times, splashing the windows with foam. I idly wondered whether everyone else knew something that we didn’t, and the view from our balcony really didn’t help set my mind at ease.

You see, the problem with Lago de Atitlán is that the lake shore is somewhat fickle, and in recent years the water level has risen considerably, consuming a number of lakeside properties. These lonely buildings still stand just off the side of the lake, with waves crashing through their shattered downstairs windows and black tide marks rising up their whitewashed walls. There is much debate as the exact cause of the lake’s changeable nature; some say that soil wash-off from deforestation has clogged up the lake’s natural overflow fissures, while others blame a massive bloom of cyanobacteria in 2009 which covered the lake in a nasty brown goo, up to a metre deep in parts.

Whatever the real reason, the Mayans already knew about the lake’s temperamental nature, as they chose to build their settlements high up on the lake’s shores; with hindsight, the owners of the now submerged properties around the lake shore should probably have taken more notice of the locals when they spoke of the lake levels rising and falling on a 50- or 70-year cycle. But it’s not really that surprising that nobody listened, because the scale of the rise is astounding: it’s risen some 5m since 2009 and it’s still clawing away at the waterfront real estate. A sobering thought is the recent archaeological discovery of a site called Samabaj, a Mayan ceremonial site dating from more than 2000 years ago that contains various stone pots, sculptures, stelae and, tellingly, five stone docks. It’s now 35m underwater, which just shows how much the lake level has changed since then.

So as we lay there in bed, with the wind rattling the windows and the waves smashing against our veranda, I tried not to think of the submerged buildings right next door to our hotel. I didn’t entirely succeed.

Man and Lake

The landscape is, therefore, one of the biggest draw cards around here, and it’s easy to see why. Luckily the winds calmed down after a couple of days and the sky turned a pure blue, and we took this opportunity to rush up to the top of the crater rim for sunrise, a trip that completely blew us away. But another big attraction of the lake is the collection of different towns and villages dotted around the shoreline, all of which are connected by boat, and this is perhaps where I fell out of love with Atitlán a little.

Because of the Mayan’s sensible approach to building their settlements, all the villages are bipolar in nature: the Mayans have their part up the hill, and the tourists have their part down on the shoreline. This manages to separate the two cultures pretty effectively, so although you get to see lots of beautifully dressed Mayans wandering around town and on the launches that ply their trade between the settlements, the only ones you tend to meet are those involved in the tourist trade somehow. Those working in the hotels and restaurants are friendly but no longer terribly Mayan, so the only traditional Mayans you meet are those who pop down the hill to tourist-ville to try to sell you something, mostly (it seems) banana bread, which women carry on their heads throughout the day, ready to interrupt you at every opportunity to see if you want to buy any.

The problem is, they don’t seem to apply any intelligence to the process, and if you stand somewhere busy, such as the main road leading up from the dock in San Pedro, then within five minutes the same woman will ask you five times whether you want to buy any banana bread. It would help if it was an animated process, but you can hear the defeat in their voices; it’s almost deadpan, the way they recite their endless litany of ‘¿Pan de banano?’ while looking up at you with slightly hurt eyes, as you try to remain polite with your worn-out responses of ‘No gracias’ and ‘Mas tarde’. At first it’s all a bit cute, smiling at the locals as they understandably try to make a living, but it really starts to wear thin, and you can see some visitors really struggling – and sometimes failing – to keep their cool.

Add in the young boys selling popcorn, the men selling cashew nuts and the inevitable crowds of shoe-shine boys, and it all gets to be a bit of a drag... but when you find out that they let the sellers into the bars and restaurants, so your evening soiree is constantly interrupted by requests to buy banana bread – when I’m eating, for pity’s sake! – then the divide between the Mayan communities up the slope and the westerners at the bottom is only made greater.

The problem is only compounded by the annoying nature of the tourists here, at least those in San Pedro and its neighbour across the water, San Marcos La Laguna. The pervading vibe is one of earth-loving, tofu-eating flower children trying to align their chakras and purge their energy centres, but to me it felt ever so slightly self-indulgent, especially as so many of the participants seem to be just out of ‘uni’ and seem to have magically come across enough money to buy a nice long holiday in a yoga retreat by the shores of the lake, without having had to work for it first. Sure, there’s a quite entertaining collection of older hippies who seem more genuine and a bit more frazzled by the darker side of the counterculture, but the talk in the vegetarian-friendly cafés is all about healing crystals and aura enhancement and – I kid you not – how important it is to make sure your pillows are organic, seeing how you spend so much time right next to them.

Now I’m a bit of a hippy at heart – I often have long hair and I like the idealism of the whole sixties thing – but I’m a modern, post-punk hippy who thinks Never Mind the Bollocks is a masterpiece, and I can’t be doing with the rather spoilt side of the younger tune-in, drop-out crowd. Spending time outside of normal society is fine once you’ve put enough into society to be able to opt out of it in the first place, but opting out before you’ve even tried to make a contribution because you think you’re ‘just too creative to do the rat race’ is a bit irritating to those of us who’ve held down a job for longer than a summer holiday. The villages round Lago de Atitlán reek of this slightly indulgent version of the hippy ideal, and I really didn’t like it much; when you find yourself wanting to grab most of the other tourists by the shoulders and shake some responsibility into them, it’s probably not a good sign.

Around the Lake

Knowing that San Pedro isn’t the be all and end all of lake culture, we spent a couple of days exploring the various towns and villages round the lake, and they’re an interesting bunch. San Pedro, where we stayed, is apparently the party town around the lake, but all we could find were a couple of small bars where people tended to hang out without a great deal of enthusiasm, and two music venues in the main drag that made us glad we hadn’t stayed at that end of town. The eastern end of town is laid out along lots of small, winding pathways that are just wide enough to fit a tuk-tuk down, and off these pathways are some cute restaurants, some with pretty gardens but most with slightly drab and weatherbeaten courtyards with plastic tables and dubious music. It’s fun and laid back, but it’s easy to wear out the best venues within a couple of days.

Nearby San Marcos is the most extreme hippy hangout, but it keeps most of its treasures behind closed doors; we wandered along the two thin tracks that join the lake to the Mayan village centre, but everything seemed to be shut. This is the home of the quietest retreats, so perhaps the tranquillity should have come as no surprise, but while we thought it would make a pleasant day trip, we gave up looking for the pulse after an hour or so of wandering.

Across the lake is the main tourist centre of Panajachel, which I rather liked, perhaps because it’s the only settlement that unashamedly makes the most of the shoreline. It’s pretty tourist-oriented, with lots of large restaurants overlooking the lake shore, and a whole fleet of tacky party boats pulled up in the harbour, blasting out music at full volume, whether the town wants to hear it or not. You wouldn’t necessarily want to stay here, as it’s a bit tacky, but at least it’s unpretentious and you know where you stand. Walking through the restaurants is an exercise in batting away all the over-keen waiters in their white shirts and black trousers, each of whom seems to have the best restaurant and, despite the evidence, the finest menu, but there are some great little barbecue shacks in the middle of the mayhem selling street food, and they have the same great view over the harbour and towards the volcanoes, and the food is wonderful.

Panajachel might be the most hectic of the lake’s towns, but the biggest is Santiago Atitlán. Probably the most Mayan of the towns, the nerve centre is a good walk up the hill, past lots of shops selling tourist trinkets and colourful Mayan textiles, where the main market clogs up the backstreets around the 16th-century church, which dominates the hill. It’s a pleasant place for stroll, if you ignore the kids setting off firecrackers in the church square, though compared to the other villages it’s a bit of a pig to get to and from, and we had to wait for a fair amount of time for the launch to fill up, both going to and from Santiago.

So that’s Lago de Atitlán, the lake that Aldous Huxley wrote is like Lake Como but ‘with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing.’ Geographically speaking, Huxley was spot on: Atitlán is so beautiful that you can spend days just sitting there, reading a book or poking a laptop, looking up every now and then to drink in the vista. The weather might be a bit ropey at times – we experienced two days of severe winds, two days of perfect blue skies, and two days of fog, which obscured a lot of the beauty of the crater rim – but in all of these climates the lake still shone through as a stunning place to be.

But when it comes to mankind, I feel a little let down. The towns are not beautiful in any sense of the word – the Mayan parts are all breeze block and dust, while the tourist parts are cramped and a bit faded – and astonishingly the settlements seem to ignore the lake itself, choosing instead to wind along thin footpaths between claustrophobic buildings, almost hiding away from the lake shore. It’s possible that this is because the lake has consumed all attempts at promenades or lakeside verandas, but it does mean that the only way to enjoy the star attraction is by picking the right hotel, or by spending your time on the boat taxis.

To be honest, a small and hidden part of me hopes that the water levels will keep rising slowly, quietly washing away the irritating tourist towns while leaving the Mayans to their own devices, so nature can reclaim the slopes and Lake Atitlán can escape its seemingly inevitable future of unsympathetic tourist development. If, in the process, we lose a few crystal healers, I can probably live with that.

Up the Indian’s Nose

Written: 20 December 2013

From San Pedro La Laguna on the western shores of Lake Atitlán, there are two popular day trips that every self-respecting walker should consider if they’re in the area. The first, and most popular, is a jaunt up to the crater rim, to a spot called the Indian’s Nose, so-called because the shape of the crater from San Pedro looks like the profile of an Indian lying on his back, and the highest point is the Indian’s nose. The second is a four-hour climb up Volcán San Pedro, which looms over the town of the same name.

I quite fancied doing both, but we thought we’d start with the easier of the two, the Indian’s Nose, as there’s no way I’m ever going to persuade Peta to stomp uphill for four hours straight. The only catch is that the trip up the Nose is a sunrise trip, and that means getting up at 3am to leave the hotel at 3.30am; it wasn’t a pretty sight as we stumbled out of bed and into the hotel foyer, to discover that the couple in the next door room – a blonde girl and a Rasta from Austin, Texas – were also coming along.

Our guide bounced into the hotel on time and full of beans, and we set off on foot to catch the bus to the foot of the Nose. It was dark and totally silent, apart from the odd dog bark and the gentle lapping of the lake, but as we walked up the steep hill into central San Pedro, we heard an almighty rumble from the direction of Antigua.

‘That’s a volcano somewhere,’ said our guide. ‘Nothing to worry about. It’s outside the lake.’

‘Ah, OK,’ we said.

‘It happens a lot,’ he said. ‘An eruption somewhere. No big problem, tranquilo, tranquilo.’

And so we plodded on up the hill, getting ready to climb to the top of the rim of a massive volcanic crater, while the spine of Guatemala rumbled in the distance.

The Chicken Bus

The first leg of our journey was by chicken bus. The chicken bus is a Central American staple, and although a lot of travellers use the much more comfortable and more efficient tourist shuttles to get between the main attractions, sometimes you have no choice but to hop on the chicken bus. Depending on who you talk to, they are either called chicken buses because everyone uses them, even the local livestock, or because they cram passengers in like chickens in a factory; both versions are accurate. The buses are mostly old American school buses, painted in garish colours and rebuilt to last forever; quite how much of the original bus remains is up for debate, but as with most developing nations the world over, nothing ever gets thrown away, and the chicken bus is a perfect example. Hailing from an era when being environmentally friendly simply meant smiling at everyone around you, the chicken bus is a reminder of how the other half live, and travel.

The seats on a chicken bus are probably the right size for the local Mayans, but for westerners they’re a tight squeeze; you have to jam your knees into the back of the seat in front if you’re going to have a chance of fitting, and both Peta and I are pretty small, so goodness only knows how six-footers cope. Originally the seat rows were designed for, ooh, two adults or three kids, but when the bus fills up, as it inevitably does, you can squeeze a good three or four people onto one row, particularly when the central aisle gets rammed and physically pushes each row into a smaller space.

We joined the bus as it started off, so there were only a handful of people on it, but within 20 minutes it was astonishingly full. According to our guide, it was fuller than normal because everyone was heading off to the market in Xela to do their Christmas shopping, and this meant that Peta and I shared our row with another woman and a little girl, who were being crushed into us by a man with a large backpack and an older man who seemed intent on squeezing his body into every single gap that appeared, no matter how small. I had the window seat, which I’d thought would be fun, but as the bus started on the switchbacks heading up to Santa Clara La Laguna, I realised I was on the outside of the bends, so every single turn of the road meant Peta and I had to put up with the combined weight of our row of four, the two men wedged into the aisle, and the other row of four on the other side. Thankfully it was still dark so I couldn’t actually see over the edge of the road, but as brick dust from the road blew clouds through the holes in the bus’s chassis, I could just about make out the lights down below... a long way below.

I managed to stave off the claustrophobia for most of the journey, but when we lurched to one side in a particularly violent turn, crushing the wind out of Peta and squeezing my entire body so that I could no longer move my limbs, I lost it and the panic swirled in. I tried calm breathing and thinking happy thoughts, but it was only because I was completely jammed into my seat that I didn’t leap up and rush for the exit. The last 15 minutes were utter hell, as Peta and I both tried to push back the weight of the bus while trying to smile at the locals who seemed fairly used to the whole thing.

Finally we arrived at the bend in the road where the path to the top of the Indian’s Nose starts, and our guide stood up, looked back at us and nodded. Then all hell broke loose, as the old man realised that we were getting off and decided that he was going to have our seats, come hell or high water. Unfortunately there was a woman with a couple of children across the aisle who had exactly the same idea, so as we forced ourselves to stand up in the crush, thereby giving a little ground at our end of the seat, the man and the women both jammed into the end of the seat, plugging up the way out and creating total gridlock. Neither of them was giving an inch, and while I lost the plot and started screaming, ‘I need to get out of here now!’ and Peta said to the old man and the woman, ‘I can’t move, you’ve got to move back!’, the old man and the woman decided to start yelling at each other while the poor woman and child in our row cowered under the crushing force of six people jammed into a row of seats designed for two.

Luckily the couple from Texas were on the row in front of us, so as they slid out, I took my chance and dived headfirst over the back of the seats in front, landing face first in the row in front while other locals slid towards me, keen to fill up the gaps. I think I screamed at them until they backed off – it’s all a little hazy at this point, to be honest – and luckily they pulled away to let me through, giving Peta the chance to do her own salmon leap out of the increasingly dangerous mush of old man, woman and child that had once been our row. I swear as we stumbled out of the bus and into the dirt road, the bus gave a popping sound before rattling off into the dust clouds of the moonlit switchbacks.

Up the Nose

The walk up to the top of the high Indian’s Nose is fairly steep, but it’s not too difficult. Peta did really well, considering that she’s just come out of a batch of bronchitis, has asthma, gets triggered by cold, damp air (like the cold, damp air of the Guatemalan mountains), is afraid of heights, and (I have permission to say) is no longer a spring chicken. She stoically soldiered on to the top, stopping only for a few rests, and it wasn’t long before we’d passed the first lookout post, and had scaled to the very top of the mountain.

At about 2230m above sea level and some 620m above San Pedro, the views over the lake are absolutely breathtaking (to put this in context, the Nose is about the same height above the lake surface as the top of the world’s second-tallest building, the Shanghai Tower, is above Shanghai). It’s dark when you arrive, but the moon lights up the lake and you can see the lights of all the settlements around the shoreline, and the stars are exceptionally clear. As the glow from the approaching sun slowly brightens, you can start to see east along the line of volcanoes that runs from Lago de Atitlán towards El Salvador. There are the peaks around the lake (San Pedro, Atitlán and Tolimán) and just past them are the peaks around Antigua (Actenango, Fuego and Agua), followed by Pacaya in the far distance. I was delighted to finally be able to see all the Antiguan peaks; I’d spotted Agua and Actenango from the lake the day before when the winds had died down and the skies cleared, but you can’t see Fuego from San Pedro, as it’s hidden behind Atitlán.

Most amazingly, Fuego decided to put on a bit of a show for us, and every 15 minutes or so it sent out a cloud of ash that spurted from the side of the summit and formed eerie smoke rings in the dawn sky. The sunlight spread slowly up the sky, forming haloes around the triangular peaks and lighting up the night sky behind us, turning the deep blue into turquoise and tangerine before finally bursting through into the most glorious sunrise. Almost instantly the cool humid air started to warm up, and our guide pulled out a flask of coffee and we celebrated the new day in style.

I don’t think we quite managed to celebrate it in as much style as our walking companions, who had climbed to the top of the rickety wooden structure on top of the Nose, which Peta had sensibly declined to scale. Up on top they fished out some kind of screw-top container and took a couple of big sniffs, offering one to the guide as the Rasta nattered away with him in Spanish. A few more sniffs later, and suddenly it was all giggles and guffaws as the rays of sunlight flooded the landscape below. I’m not sure what was they were sniffing, but they certainly seemed more than a small wooden staircase higher than us.

This was a bit of a shame, as the two-hour walk back down to the hill was spectacular, and it would have been more enjoyable if the rest of the crew hadn’t been mashed and collapsing in giggling fits. Drugs are pretty common on the travelling circuit, so it’s not exactly a surprise when people you meet turn out to be a little bit augmented, but when you’re not on them and they are, it can’t help putting up a bit of a barrier. So although we smiled at each other lots and we nodded sagely so they would know everything was fine, we weren’t in the same head space, and that was a bit of a drag; we would much rather have had someone to share the walk with, rather than leaving them to have their own trip.

No matter, though, because the views soon took over from any social unease. The route back down from the Nose follows the outside of the crater rim through fields of dried-up corn, before eventually reaching the rim itself to more spectacular views across to the volcanoes. It then dips down into the forested slopes, following a thin path that’s at times only a foot wide, with vertical drops down one side and slippery soil underfoot. I’m a bit of a mountain goat so I was in my element, but Peta was having to dig deep and not look down, though she coped admirably while the Rasta and his girlfriend hooted and hollered their way down the slopes, stopping every now and then for more sniffs and seemingly unhampered by whatever it was that was floating their boat.

We dropped down through coffee plantations and past farmers hacking at the dry undergrowth with machetes, and every now and then the forest canopy would clear to perfectly picturesque views of the lake. It was a long two hours that was hard on the knees, but eventually we dropped down into the village of San Juan La Laguna, from where it was a quick tuk-tuk ride back to base.

Not surprisingly, at 43 I’m not as physically strong as I used to be, and as we soaked our bones in the Mikaso’s veranda hot tub, with the Indian’s Nose looking down on us from the distant rim, I figured that perhaps I’d leave the four-hour ascent up San Pedro for another lifetime. I might not have been on the same level as our Rasta companion and his girlfriend, but one trip up the Nose was plenty high enough for me. Goodness only knows how lousy they felt afterwards...

Monterrico

Written: 27 December 2013

This should be a quick one, because this part of our trip has absolutely nothing to do with travelling. For Christmas this year, we’ve unashamedly jumped off the traveller bandwagon and booked into a life of five-star luxury in Monterrico, where we’re spending five blissful days in a traveller-free bubble on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. As a result we’ve done precious little, and it’s been wonderful, because sometimes even the most world-weary, road-hardened travellers have to hang up their boots for a while and take it easy, particularly when those travellers are starting to get on a bit.

Even being kind, Guatemala’s idea of a decent bed is pushing the boundaries of sanity (and exactly the same can be said of Belize and Mexico). We’ve been staying in mid-range places for the most part – a considerable step up from my days of budget travel – and even though mid-range hotel rooms tend to boast private bathrooms, often come with supplies of shampoo, soap and toilet paper, and normally have in-room televisions showing completely dreadful Latin American cable TV, they still tend to fail in the most important aspect of all: the bed. The mattresses are often lumpy and too hard, and some of them are so saggy that they make it seem as if you’re sleeping on a hillside. And as for the pillows... well, if you imagine trying to sleep on a pile of foam chunks that feels like it’s having a fight with itself, then you’ve a vague idea of what your typical Guatemalan pillow is like. None of this adds up to a particularly restful slumber, and I haven’t even mentioned the cockerels at dawn, the dogs barking out their territories in the middle of the night, the endless firecrackers, the nightclubs, and that new favourite of the developing world, the early morning circular saw.

So for the entire festive period we’ve thrown the budget out of the window and gone upmarket, first by spending Christmas in the sumptuous Dos Mundos Resort in Monterrico, and then by spending New Year in the Westin Camino Real Hotel in Guatemala City. Bed-wise the excitement appears to peak in the latter, as the Camino Real proudly provides guests with what it calls the ‘Heavenly® Bed’, but the luxury has started right here in Monterrico: despite being on concrete, the beds are comfortable, level, lump-free and, most amazingly, equipped with what we in the West would call pillows, rather than sacks of angrily ripped-up cast-off foam chunks. It’s bliss, and it’s all wrapped up in a lovely little chalet with a veranda overlooking luscious lawns and a friendly bat who lives in the thatch and who chirps us to sleep at night. I keep having to shake my head to see if it’s real rather than a mirage in the distant heat haze.

The food, too, is wonderful. The only way we could get a room at the Dos Mundos was to go half board, and it was a bit of a risk, as the hotel has an Italian chef and most of the Italian restaurants we’ve been to in Central America have been fairly liberal with their interpretation of one of the world’s best cuisines. We needn’t have worried, though, as the pasta is perfectly cooked and the sauces are sumptuous; hell, even the wine is good, and it’s all served up in the restaurant right by the beach, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Talking of the beach, it’s all black sand round here, as this is a volcanic region (you can also find black sand beaches in volcanic regions like Tenerife, Hawaii and Iceland). Black sand beaches can be a bit tortuous to sunbathe on, as the sand gets incredibly hot in the tropical sun, radiating heat back up at you like an oven. If you forget to wear sandals as you run down the beach towards the midday sea, you’re at serious risk of leaving the soles of your feet behind on the sand; black sand is dangerous stuff. The Pacific round here is also pretty feisty, with a mean rip-tide that claims lives each year; the sound of the surf crashing into the beach is impressively deep, and I keep having to remind myself it’s the ocean, rather than a distant volcanic eruption.

Luckily, being five-star, we don’t have to worry about black sand or the rip tides, because the Dos Mundos has a beautiful infinity pool overlooking the beach, which catches the sun setting over the ocean without minor irritations like burning soles or the danger of drowning. It also has a second pool just outside our chalet, which doubles as a fountain at night with playful jets of water splashing about under the clear starry sky. Oh, and I should also mention that at this time of the year, the weather in Monterrico is blue-sky perfect, with hardly a wisp of cloud and temperatures in the early 30s all day, every day; apart from a bit of a breeze on the first couple of days, it’s been tranquil, hot and luxurious. It really is a little slice of paradise, and despite it being Christmas, it hasn’t been busy (though it seems to be filling up a bit more for New Year). Monterrico is, perhaps, one of Guatemala’s best-kept secrets... for now, at least.

Turtles and Mangroves

It hasn’t all been lazing about, though. To our credit, we did manage to get off our sun loungers long enough to walk into Monterrico village, which is about 15 minutes’ walk along the beach from Dos Mundos (or a much easier ten minutes’ walk along the main road if you opt for the less scenic route). Monterrico itself is functional rather than beautiful, with a few shops and restaurants and a rabid collection of licensed tour guides who jump on new arrivals and try to sell them tours of the nearby mangroves, or get them to sponsor a turtle in the nearby turtle sanctuary. Instead, Monterrico is all about the beach, and the hotels look out over the black sand, some of them basic, some of them slightly nicer, but none quite as luxurious as Dos Mundos.

We ignored the touts when we visited Monterrico, but we did end up sponsoring five turtles from the nearby sanctuary, as it gave us a chance to handle real live baby turtles, and that’s got to be worth a few bob. For Q10 per turtle (about 80p), the sanctuary will let you release their babies into the sea. They bring a bucket of baby turtles to the hotel just before sunset, line you up on the beach, hand out the number of turtles that you’ve sponsored, and you get to let them go and watch them crawl down the beach to the sea. They’re completely black, from head to toe, they feel as if they’re made of rubber, and they’re as cute as can be as they blindly wander downhill to the sea before being caught by a wave and swept off to their new life in the ocean.

Oh, and we took a tour through the mangroves too, which was a pleasant way to spend an hour, being punted gently through the maze of waterways that thread through the region’s mangrove swamps. The best time to go is dawn, as that’s when the wildlife is most active, but one dawn start a year is enough for us, so instead we settled for a 3pm punt, and very enjoyable it was too, if you ignore the rabid clouds of mosquitoes that wanted to make friends with us.

But mostly we’ve been doing nothing, which is the point of relaxing in a hotel. In fact, the biggest problem by far is that it’s going to be difficult to go back to mid-range hotels once the festive season is over; we could really get a taste for this...

Living in the Eighties

Written: 28 December 2013

Dear Guatemala,

Look, I know we’ve been together for a while now, and yeah, it’s been good, but we’ve really got to talk.

You see, it’s the music. I don’t know how to break it to you, but Phil Collins just isn’t cool. And nor is Bonnie Tyler. Hell, none of the stuff you play in your bars is cool, and it’s so not-cool that I don’t think we can stay together any more. We’re not living in the eighties any more, you know, and you just don’t have the same excuse as Cuba.

It’s not you, it’s me. Everyone else seems OK with the fact that your taste in music is in arrested development, but I just can’t see the funny side. Hell, even the ex-pats are into it; back in the Hotel Kangaroo, Gary played endless DVDs of 1980s big-hair soft-rock bands in his bar, and when we asked him about it, he said that the boys in town sold these DVDs for a pittance... and he presumably thought that made it all right to inflict the likes of Foreigner (‘I Want to Know What Love Is’) and Van Halen (‘Jump’) on his bemused guests, night after night. And then we were in what seemed like a really cool American blues bar in Antigua, and suddenly on comes Cyndi Lauper (‘Time After Time’), swiftly followed by Kenny Loggins (‘Dangerzone’), and nobody bats an eyelid, even though the bar was full of tattooed biker-types whom I thought would know better. Thankfully they switched to Exile-era Rolling Stones before I had to leave, but don’t think I wasn’t listening, because I was.

And on the bus into Antigua, on comes the radio, and it’s all about the greatest hits of the eighties, with the likes of Toto (‘Africa’), Roxette (‘It Must Have Been Love’) and even 1980s Abba (‘The Winner Takes It All’). Or how about the American-style pizza joint in Guatemala City who serenaded us with Eurythmics (‘Here Comes the Rain Again’), Roxy Music (‘More Than This’), Irene Cara (‘Flashdance’), Julian Lennon (‘Much Too Late for Goodbyes’) and Talk Talk (‘It’s My Life’). And not to mention the Irish restaurant in San Pedro, which not only insisted on playing Phil Collins’s Greatest Hits throughout lunch (‘Easy Lover’ anyone?), but followed it up with a medley of more eighties dross, including Jennifer Rush (‘The Power of Love’), which I last heard just a few weeks ago on a bus in Belize. You don’t forget that kind of thing in a hurry.

But the line was well and truly crossed when we were relaxing round the pool in five-star luxury in Monterrico, and one of the guests got out his Android phone and started playing some music (because listening to other people’s music pumped through the tinny speakers of a smartphone is what we all love to do when relaxing round the pool, naturally). And what did he play? Something from this millennium, perhaps, or even something from the last quarter of a century? Not quite. He only played Lionel Ritchie’s gut-wrenchingly awful ‘Say You, Say Me’, loud and proud, and then to make matters worse, he had the nerve to sing along, half-heartedly and out of tune. And this guy wasn’t single, he was there with his other half, who seemed OK with all of this!

So I’m sorry, Guatemala, but we’re through. Or, to put it in terms you might understand, ‘Once upon a time I was falling in love, but now I’m only falling apart.’ I’m sure you understand...

Guatemala City

Written: 2 January 2014

It seemed like a good idea on paper, to spend New Year’s Eve in the capital city of Guatemala, a country that’s known for its party spirit and firework-fuelled celebrations. After all, as the new year creeps round the globe, capital cities everywhere party until dawn, from Sydney to Beijing to London to Rio de Janeiro. It surely wasn’t much of a leap to expect Guatemala City to follow suit, at least a little bit.

So we asked the man at the hotel reception desk where would be the best place to celebrate the start of 2014, and he looked at us with a completely straight face and said, ‘Antigua.’

‘No, we meant here, in Guatemala City’, we said.

‘Antigua has great new year celebrations,’ he repeated as if reading the answer from a cue card. ‘You should go there.’

‘But we’re not in Antigua,’ we pointed out. ‘What happens here?’

‘Everything pretty much shuts down,’ he said in an unnecessarily robotic voice. ‘They close for the afternoon of 31 December, and reopen on 2 January. But there’s a big party in Antigua.’

‘OK, well, perhaps we could book a nice restaurant instead?’ we asked.

‘No problem, you can ask the concierge,’ he replied, so we went over to the concierge’s desk.

‘Hello,’ we said. ‘Could you help us book a nice restaurant for New Year’s Eve? Something romantic and classy, maybe a bit of fine dining? Just as long as it’s not Mexican.’

‘Yes, I can help with that,’ said the immaculately coiffured woman behind the desk. ‘How about our Italian restaurant here in the hotel? It is one of the best in Guatemala City.’

‘That sounds good,’ we replied, as we’d heard the hotel restaurant was great. ‘Could you book us a table for, say, 8pm?’

‘Certainly,’ she said, picking up a phone and dialling the restaurant.

It was when her face dropped that we suspected there might be a bit of a problem.

‘Um, our restaurant is shut tonight,’ she said, sounding genuinely surprised. ‘We do have a special meal in the café on 1 January; is that any good? We’ve got turkey.’

‘No, not really, we’re looking for something on New Year’s Eve,’ we said. ‘Can you suggest anything else?’

‘Let me ring round and find out,’ she said, and we left it with her.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when she rang later to say that the only open restaurant that she’d been able to find closed at 6pm, and was that any good? No, we said, it wasn’t, and we put down the phone, faced with the realisation that Guatemala City is clearly not the place to be for New Year’s Eve. Perhaps 2014 wasn’t going to start with a bang after all.

Zone Wars

You see, the problem is that Guatemala City is split into zones, and those zones might as well be separate cities. The capital city of Guatemala is famous for its criminal gangs, drug violence and regular appearances in those top ten lists of the most dangerous cities in the world, and this is indeed true: some zones of Guatemala City, particularly Zones 3, 6, 18, and 21, are seriously criminal, and if you venture in there toting a fancy camera, white skin and a vacuous expression, you will almost certainly be mugged, and probably a lot worse. Guatemala City is, for a lot of people, synonymous with violent gang crime, but there are places you can stay that are relatively safe.

One such area is Zone 10, where the fancy hotels are. We managed to book a room at one of Zone 10’s top hotels, the Westin Camino Real, for six nights, completely free, because we had a stack of loyalty points from a previous holiday that we discovered we could use there (and if we didn’t use them in the next couple of months, they would expire, so we figured we had nothing to lose). It sounded perfect: a classy hotel, a capital city, and New Year’s Eve in the tropics; what could possibly go wrong?

After all, Zone 10 is the place to be if you’re a tourist. You can walk around this part of town in the daytime without worrying too much about pickpockets or knife-wielding robbers, and even at night it’s not too dangerous (though it isn’t completely safe, like any capital city after dark). The problem is that while violent crime may have been removed from Zone 10, it has been replaced by a different type of crime, that of being incredibly dull. Zone 10 is pleasant enough, with wide boulevards and lots of trees, but it doesn’t win any prizes for excitement, with its quiet restaurants and relatively empty streets, and soon after booking in we’d explored enough of Zone 10 to know that it was fairly devoid of life.

Zone 1 is better, as we discovered when we headed up there in the daytime on New Year’s Eve. This is the historical centre of Guatemala City, and there are some interesting buildings around the main plaza, Parque Central, as well as the hectic and extremely packed shopping street of 6th Avenue, which leads south from Parque Central to the claustrophobic market stalls around Plaza Barrios. It was rammed and looked quite lively, and we didn’t see any other tourists in four hours of exploring, which was fairly intimidating; no doubt New Year’s Eve kicks off round here nicely, but the advice is not to go there after dark as it’s full of pickpockets and muggers, so we rolled back down south to Zone 10, which by this stage had practically gone to bed.

That afternoon, we figured we might as well pop out to do a quick round of the area, just in case anything was still open. We’d resigned ourself to an evening of sitting in the hotel, ordering room service and drinking in front of the TV, but as we wandered, we spotted one sign that was still lit, in a little basement opposite the moribund Holiday Inn. As we wandered over, we saw it said ‘Shakespeare’s Pub’ in red neon, which sounded intriguing. ‘What the hell,’ we thought, and slipped down the steps into the twilight of a dark room, where a solitary couple sat propping up the bar, and a young barman fiddled with a computer behind the counter. It was 4.30pm, and it looked like the end of the world.

Of course, we ended up staying there until 1.30am, drinking far too much strong, dark beer and meeting the most glorious collection of ex-pats, who were seemingly as confused as we were by the complete lack of life on New Year’s Eve. There were Violeta and Earl, she a middle-aged Guatemalan and he an 80-year-old American, both now hailing from Miami; she could talk the hind legs off a horse and kept the conversation flowing all evening, while Earl threw in pithy comments from a lifetime of experience. There was the couple who had come in to drown their sorrows, because they’d just buried the husband’s father that morning. There was a moody German called Baron, who looked exactly like the old man from the film Up, and who stared into his beer with a determination that would have been unnerving if we hadn’t had it pointed out to us that he was like that all the time. And behind the bar was James, a witty 20-something from America who’d lived in Guatemala City for years, had studied classical music and now played in a punk band while working in bars to pay the rent; and the American owner, Val, a Doctor Who fan whose stories of the gritty end of life in Guatemala City made my neck hair stand on end.

Later on, a couple of Koreans came into the bar, and one of them came over for a chat. I’m not sure how it happened, as the details are hazy, but he started singing opera at the bar before trying to chat up Peta in halting English, while Violeta waved at me from behind his back, pointing to Peta and mouthing, ‘Look at what he’s doing!’

‘It’s OK, Peta can handle herself,’ I mouthed back, and sat back to watch as the disparate cultures of America, Korea, England, Germany and Guatemala bounced off each other in a muddle of alcohol.

It all ended with group hugs at midnight, more beers, more tall stories and, eventually, a drunken stagger one block south to the hotel. We didn’t plan it, but New Year’s Eve in Guatemala City was indeed legendary, just not in the way we’d been expecting.

Heavenly Bed

We didn’t do much else in Guatemala City. We’d tried to visit some of the tourist attractions the previous Sunday, but even though there’s a special Sunday bus for tourists that takes you round the main attractions, such as the zoo and the museums, we failed to find that bus, and besides, most of the attractions are closed on Sundays, so it all seemed a bit pointless.

And Guatemala City isn’t suitable for just wandering around, or even taking the bus. There are three safe bus routes, operated by the TransMetro company with their distinctive green buses; these are safe because the stations are guarded by men with big guns, and the buses run in their own lanes and only pick up passengers from the stations, so it’s much harder for dodgy characters to jump on board. These green buses connect Zone 1 and Zone 10, Zone 1 and the main bus terminal, and southern Zone 1 with northern Zone 1, but that’s it. To explore any other part of the city you either have to take a taxi or a red bus, and the red buses are asking for trouble. Since 2007, over 900 bus drivers have been killed by the drug gangs, who extort the bus companies by threatening to kill their drivers if the companies don’t make regular payments. Although the gangs don’t specifically target passengers, they do sometimes get caught in the crossfire, and as the gangs have recently resorted to blowing buses up to make their point, the red buses are effectively no-go areas for those looking for safety... and that’s without even mentioning the standard pickpocketing and thievery that goes on, quite apart from the gang violence.

So we decided to spend most of our time relaxing in Zone 10, which is a world away from the realities of the city. It’s perhaps best summed up by the Westin company’s signature Heavenly Bed, which our room proudly boasted. The Heavenly Bed includes what the blurb calls ‘Ten Layers of Pure Comfort’, which includes:

- 13” pillow top mattress with 8 3/4” box spring

- Two feather and down pillows

- Two hypo-allergenic pillows

- Boudoir pillow and cover

- Duvet cover with an overstuffed polyester insert

- Down blanket

- Bed skirt

- Top sheet

- Decorative sheet

- Bottom sheet

- Pillow cases

After all the rock-hard beds that we’ve failed to enjoy in Guatemala’s cheaper hotels, it was a bit like sleeping in a cloud, and we were so impressed that I followed the web link in the blurb to discover that they sell the Heavenly Bed online. The Kingsize bed we were luxuriating in – the cheapest of the three levels of Heavenly Bed that the company sells – will set you back a princely US$3788, and we could well believe it.

Meanwhile, the bus drivers out in Guatemala City take home an average of $38 a day. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that our bed was worth just under five months’ pay for the average red bus driver, who risks being murdered every time he takes to the road, and that’s ignoring the crazy driving, the safety issues of maintaining ancient buses that are crammed to the rafters with passengers, and the heavy pollution that the buses belch.

After reading that, we perhaps didn’t sleep quite as soundly as before. Welcome to Guatemala City...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 2 January 2014

Guatemala has some great sights, there’s no doubt about it. It has some of the best Mayan ruins in the world, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, amazing volcanoes, atmospheric colonial architecture, glorious beaches, wild rainforest... the list goes on. It also has a comprehensive system of tourist shuttles to shuffle you between the main sights, as well as the crazy chicken bus system for other destinations. On paper, Guatemala is a great place to visit.

That’s probably why there’s such a large number of 20-somethings plying the well-worn route between Tikal and Antigua, and west towards Lago de Atitlán and the highlands. Generally this tourist route – part of the popular Gringo Trail – is safe, and although you have to be careful not to head out on hikes in certain areas without guides, it’s easy travelling. However, the advice from governments and locals alike is not to stray off this well-beaten track, because there are still bandits out there in the countryside, and you do risk being robbed or worse. Sure, some travellers ignore this advice and head off there anyway, and they post to the Internet to say that they have no idea what all the fuss is about, but the advice still stands, and it serves to constrain the majority of travellers to this standard route.

The result is that travelling through Guatemala is a bit like being back at university. I have a friend who calls these people the ‘gap-yahs’, and he’s right; the road here is full of children who are just out of ‘uni’ and spending mummy and daddy’s money on their trip of a lifetime, and although there’s nothing wrong with that, it can get a bit wearing when you’re not the same age. It’s a rare 21-year-old who has an opinion that’s worth listening to, because at that age we think we know everything but haven’t yet discovered that we in fact know nothing; as a result the other travellers in this part of the world make me feel old, and not a little grumpy, though as a bonus, they also make me appreciate what’s good about being old.

So perhaps I warmed to the locals? To be honest, I found them a bit too aloof, and despite me smiling at them as much as I could, that didn’t seem to work as well as I’d hoped. Perhaps the locals are a bit jaded by the tourist trail and are starting to see tourists as walking wallets; perhaps they’re busy dealing with the massive issues their country faces, and having lots of rich kiddies wandering around is hard to take; or perhaps I’ve been spoilt by the likes of Ghana and India, where the locals are so warm and friendly that everywhere else is bound to appear slightly grumpy in comparison. But whatever the reason, I didn’t particularly fall for the Guatemalans, and they didn’t particularly fall for me. Indeed, it reminded me of Indonesia, where I also failed to connect with the locals, despite learning their language and trying really hard to be friendly; on top of this, physically Indonesia bears a striking resemblance to Guatemala, with its lakes and volcanoes and utterly forgettable breeze-block architecture surrounded by lush rainforest, and everywhere I turned, I could kid myself that I was back in Indonesia. The upshot is that if you love Indonesia, you’ll love Guatemala... and the opposite also applies.

So Guatemala was OK, but not as life-changing as the stream of travellers coming the other way implied would be the case. There are some great sights and it’s easy travelling, but I suspect I’m looking for something different, something a bit more engaging. Hopefully El Salvador and Nicaragua will be slightly further from the tourist trail and a little less like Hampstead or Putney; we’ll see.

El Salvador: The West

Love at First Sight

Written: 2 January 2014

We fell for El Salvador within about five minutes of arriving. We’d booked tickets on the luxury bus from Guatemala City to San Salvador, but because we didn’t fancy going from one urban sprawl straight to another, we asked them to drop us off in Santa Ana, El Salvador’s second-largest city. Here we thought we might try to climb a few volcanoes or visit a few country towns, as we’d heard good things about the western half of the country.

True to their word the Guatemalans did just that, leaving us and our backpacks at a service station in the middle of nowhere, somewhere near Santa Ana, and with absolutely no advice on what to do other than a brusque adios and a screeching of tyres as the bus disappeared in the direction of the Salvadoran capital. This wasn’t quite what we’d expected – we assumed we’d at least be dropped off at a bus station – but there we were, blinking in the hot sun, still dazed from an early morning start from Guatemala, in a completely new country... and a country with a reputation.

For El Salvador has a dark and violent past that continues to haunt the country. The civil war that raged from 1979 to 1992 is only really familiar to me as the inspiration for U2’s most politically charged song, ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’, whose lyrics criticise the USA’s intervention in the war. The Carter and Reagan administrations supported the right-wing government in their war of terror against the left-wing guerrillas, thus prolonging the war with no perceivable gain; indeed, the right-wing government issued a formal apology in January 2010 for their role in past atrocities, thus effectively proving that the USA were funding the Bad Guys. So when Bono sings:

And he’s peeling off those dollar bills

Slapping them down

One hundred!

Two hundred!

And I can see those fighter planes...

he’s talking about Ronald Reagan, while The Edge’s guitar channels the sound of a brutal civil war through distorted slide guitar that sounds for all the world like bombs smashing into the women and children of rural El Salvador. And even though the war ended more than 20 years ago, El Salvador still has the second-highest murder rate in the world, and its gang culture is among the most feared on the planet.

So I wasn’t particularly thrilled to find us stranded on a ring road somewhere in El Salvador, without a clue where we were, with six-string munitions crashing down in the back of my mind.

Lovely El Salvador

I needn’t have worried. We soon spotted a road sign that said ‘Santa Ana Centro’ and set off down the road, and when we stopped after a few minutes because it didn’t look as if this road was leading anywhere useful, a middle-aged lady came out of a nearby building and said, in perfect English, ‘Can I help you at all?’

‘Oh, yes please,’ we said, ‘We’re trying to get to Santa Ana and our bus has just dropped us off here. Which way is it?’

‘Well, you’re heading in the right direction,’ she said, ‘but it’s too far to walk. You need a bus.’

‘Can we get one here?’ we asked.

‘Yes, no problem,’ she said. ‘If you cut through that side road you come to the main road, and every bus there goes to Santa Ana, so just wave for one. I’m not sure where in Santa Ana they will drop you, but you can ask them.’

‘Thank you so much,’ we said. ‘And your English is amazing!’

‘Thank you,’ she smiled, ‘I’m glad I could help.’ And with that she waved us on our way.

A couple of minutes later we’d flagged down a bus, paid the grinning bus boy 25 US cents each – handily the Salvadoran currency is the US dollar, which is also the currency most travellers use for their emergency cash – and we were on our way to Santa Ana. Ten minutes down the road, I spotted a road number that was pretty close to the hostel we’d booked, and when I looked around to see if I could see any other signs to show me where we were, the driver caught my eye, smiled and said, ‘Where are you going, buddy?’, so I said the next stop would be good and we hopped out into the street. A short walk later we’d booked into the Casa Verde Hostel and were sitting there, sipping cold water and gently perspiring under the pure blue Salvadoran sky, while Carlos, the beaming hostel owner, told us our room would be ready in a few minutes, and we were to make ourselves at home.

El Salvador might have a dark past, but the people here smile naturally... and they smile with their eyes in a way that is instantly disarming and charming. They’re so helpful to strangers and so welcoming to visitors, and as first impressions go, it doesn’t get much better than this. I have a good feeling about this country...

Santa Ana

Written: 6 January 2014

Santa Ana doesn’t have a lot in terms of tourist attractions, but that isn’t the point. Its main appeal for visitors is its handy location for visiting the nearby volcanoes and the Ruta de las Flores, but the city – the second largest in El Salvador with 180,000 inhabitants – does have a lot of charm.

We discovered this when wandering around the plazas and markets of the grid-based centre of the city. The biggest draw card is the lovely little main square with its bandstand, tall trees and impressive buildings, in particular the white neo-Gothic cathedral in the northeastern corner, and the ornate green-and-white Teatro de Santa Ana on the northern side of the square. The plaza is a hangout for the locals, particularly in the afternoon when Salvadorans traditionally break for coffee and cake, and their smiles makes it a pleasure to wander around. The pervading attitude is probably best summed up by the reaction of the police officer in the park when I tried to take a picture of the plaza’s Christmas tree by which he was standing. Instead of grimacing at me and waggling a finger, which is the normal reaction of authority figures in gun-toting regimes the world over, he instead grinned at Peta when she pointed at the tree, and he happily backed away so he wouldn’t get in shot. He was all smiles and waves as I clicked away; even the policemen are welcoming in El Salvador.

In the city’s other square, a few blocks to the west of the main plaza, we were accosted by another smiling local, who introduced himself with a handshake and a cheery, ‘Hello, how are you?’ In stilted but very eager English, he introduced himself – though I won’t mention his name, because I wouldn’t want him to suffer any repercussions for what he went on to say – and he explained he was a Christian, and went on to talk about his country, expressing his love for visitors from abroad, his love for Jesus Christ, and his life as a student. He just wanted a chat, so we stood and talked for a good 15 minutes, of which a good ten minutes was spent trying to decipher each other’s sign language; but he was charming and really wanted to try out his English, so it was easy to keep on talking. And then he started getting a bit more serious.

‘But the Bad Boys, they run my country now,’ he said. ‘They do not care, they do not have faith in Jesus Christ.’

And with that his eyes welled up, and he started talking about how impossible it was to get a job, despite having graduated, and how the Salvadoran gangs were ruining the country. He kept comparing his country to the situation in Europe after the war, and we kept pointing out that time is a great healer, and Europe was a good example. He didn’t sound convinced; the Bad Boys were clearly a big problem for his country, and we found it hard to reconcile his very real assessment of the future with the lovely, smiling people all around us.

After Dark

That night, though, it all became a bit more real. When darkness falls in Santa Ana, the city totally shuts down, and it’s eerie. The streets go from bustling and friendly to utterly, utterly dead in the space of an hour, and by the time the sun has set, all the shops are shuttered up, the streets are deserted, and an eerie tension seems to settle on the city. The advice from locals and foreign governments alike is not to venture out after dark on foot, but to take taxis instead, because it’s at night that the Bad Boys roam. I did pop out one night to buy some water from the petrol station a few blocks from the hostel, as I needed a couple of bottles for our planned volcano climb, and it was totally bizarre; as I strode purposely to the shop, I heard loud kissing sounds from the prostitutes standing in the shadows of the darkened doorways, got waved at in a less than friendly way by a couple of shady characters hanging out on the street corners, and had to step over two totally comatose bodies on the pavements (at least, I assume they were comatose rather than dead; it’s hard to tell when you have no intention of stopping). It was only when I got back to the hostel with $1.20’s worth of water that I realised I’d just wandered into the backstreets of an El Salvadoran city after dark with $100 in cash in my back pocket, which I’d completely forgotten to leave in the hostel. In terms of stupidity, that’s quite high; I won’t be doing that again.

Come dawn, though, the rest of the city wakes up with a chorus of loud chicken buses and distant cockerels, and the streets spring back into life. Market stalls magically unwind from the shuttered side streets and the city breathes easy after another night, and it’s hard to remember the dark atmosphere of the night before. The Bad Boys, it seems, are nocturnal, so for the duration of our visit to El Salvador, we’ll probably be staying in a lot after dark. Luckily, in Santa Anna at least, the Casa Verde proved to be a home from home, with an interesting selection of travellers, a lovely courtyard, cold beer, a nearby supermarket, and a very friendly manager who helped us arrange our excursions to the volcanoes and local sights. I just have to remember not to be lulled into a false sense of security again, as this is clearly a pretty serious part of the world.

A Night on the Town

Despite the city shutting down at night, we thought it would be nice to go out for an evening meal on the Saturday, and Carlos kindly recommended a restaurant, the Taberna de Capitan, and said he’d drive us there and back. The streets were completely dark and devoid of life, apart from a few people gathered round the few lit doors that we saw, and the restaurant was a lot further than we’d anticipated from the map, so it was a good job we had a lift. When we arrived at the restaurant, the guard on the door wandered over with his sub-machine gun casually but firmly in place, and Carlos told him to look after us and that we’d be asking the waiters to ring him later to pick us up again. The guard smiled at both of us and ushered us in with a flick of the muzzle, and we walked in the front door and into a totally different environment.

It really does all go on behind closed doors at night. The restaurant was just like a classy seafood joint in a safe American town, and all the clientele were smartly dressed and tucking into seafood and beer with gusto. We picked a nice quiet table in the centre of the three main sections, ordered some drinks and food, and settled in to enjoy the evening as more and more smartly dressed socialites arrived. Unfortunately, as we polished off our starters, a slick-looking man with a ponytail wandered over to the corner just opposite us, where I noticed two huge Peavey loudspeaker stacks that I hadn’t spotted on the way in. He plugged in his laptop, pushed some buttons and twisted a few knobs, and the next thing you know all hell broke lost in the form of ear-twistingly loud Latin American music. Not only that, he started singing along, gently turning up the volume after each verse until it was too loud for us to hold a conversation, and he then turned on a set of disco lights that blinded everyone within shouting distance.

The other diners seemed quite happy with this – indeed, the tables in our section soon filled up with parties eager to sing along to the latest hits – but it was all a bit much for us as we’d only just finished climbing a volcano, so we retired to the bar, where they were playing their own music in competition to the singer, while the televisions dotted around the restaurant stubbornly continued to show the Brazil-France World Cup quarter final from 1986. It was all a bit of a shock after the eerie silence of the streets outside, so we paid up and Carlos came to pick us up and take us back to the comparative tranquillity of the hostel.

Perhaps El Salvador isn’t going to be so quiet at night after all...

Parque Nacional Los Volcanes

Written: 4 January 2014

El Salvador’s tallest peak, Volcán de Santa Ana, is not far from the city of the same name, and you can climb it as a day trip from Santa Ana. I really love climbing volcanoes – I got a taste for it in New Zealand and cemented our relationship in Indonesia – and although the jaunt up the Indian’s Nose in Guatemala was pleasant, it wasn’t a proper volcano climb, as it only scaled a wide crater rim rather than a volcanic peak. With a summit of 2381m above sea level, Volcán de Santa Ana, which is known in the local dialect as Ilamatepec, is the real deal, and it isn’t alone.

Santa Ana is just one of the three peaks in the Parque Nacional Los Volcanes, the others being Cerro Verde (2030m) and Volcán Izalco (1910m). Cerro Verde is extinct and last erupted 2500 years ago, and its summit is home to the park’s visitor centre, from where you can see the smoking cinder cone of Izalco, the youngest volcano of the three. It appeared in 1770, which is very recent history in volcanic terms, and erupted pretty much constantly until 1967, since which is has been relatively quiet. Santa Ana, meanwhile, is by far the largest of the three, with four craters and an eruption history that goes right up to 2005, when the volcano spat rocks the size of cars a distance of 1.5km from the cone.

How could I possibly resist climbing that?

On the Buses

We were joined on our excursion by three other incumbents at the Casa Verde – a young and energetic Swiss man called Chris, and a lovely couple from Italy called Pamela and Matteo – with whom we’d also team up to visit the Ruta de las Flores. This made life a lot easier, as all three of them spoke fluent Spanish, though to be honest the Salvadorans are so helpful that even we seem to be able to cope with the confusion brought about by our lame Spanish. We walked down to the bus station, bought tickets for 70 cents each, and hopped on the 248 chicken bus that goes from Santa Ana all the way to the national park (El Salvador’s buses all have route numbers on them, as well as the start and end points in garish lettering on the front and back, so once you know the number or the route you want, it’s surprisingly easy to find your bus).

Compared to the bus up the Indian’s Nose, this chicken bus was positively spacious, and two hours of bone-rattling later, past lovely views of distant volcanoes and the blue waters of Lago de Coatepeque, we pulled into the car park on top of Cerro Verde, grabbed a coffee, and signed up for the trek to the summit. As it was a Saturday, there were quite a few local tourists joining us on the trek, and the team that set off to conquer Santa Ana was about 30 strong, while another equally large team set off to tackle Izalco. You can’t trek on these volcanoes independently because there are bandits around these parts; instead you have to join one of the 11am guided walks, which come complete with gun-toting policemen to deter the thieves. Since they started sending guns up with the tourists there have been no attacks, so it’s quite safe to do the trek, but there’s a certain added frisson to walking up an active volcano with policemen carrying guns.

All this comes cheaply, too. We paid US$3 a head to get into the park, then US$1 for the guide, then US$1 to cross the private estate of Casa Cristal in the saddle between Cerro Verde and Santa Ana, and US$6 for the police escort... so that’s a total of US$11 per head for a four-hour walk to the top of the world. It’s worth every cent.

To the Top

I’ve climbed quite a few volcanoes in my time, and Santa Ana is definitely one of the good ones. The route goes from the car park and up to the forested peak of Cero Verde, before descending down 1300 steps to Casa Cristal on the saddle between Cerro Verde and Santa Ana. Then the ascent up Santa Ana begins, initially through pretty forest along a relatively gentle rise, before the forest peters out soon after you pass a viewpoint. Here the greenery gives way to the most amazing landscape of rocks, scrubland and maguey plants (or Agave americana). These plants are astonishing, with luscious, cactus-like leaves that are covered in sharp spines, and huge flower stalks that rise up to 8m from the plant, topped with lovely yellow flowers; there’s an added poignancy to the flowers, as the maguey only flowers once, at the end of its life, so every flower stalk represents the last gasp of this strange-looking plant.

Eventually even the maguey plants disappear as you reach the crater rim, and pow! The path reaches the edge of the crater, and this huge expanse suddenly opens up before you, the sheer crater walls dropping down to a crater lake of astonishing turquoise. Evil steam bubbles from the cauldron and drifts across the sulphurous surface of the lake, which is 300m deep; as soon as I saw it, it reminded me of the amazing blue lake at Keli Mutu in Indonesia, and when I got the photos back I was impressed by how similar they look:

But Santa Ana scores over Keli Mutu because the views from the peak are stunning. The volcanoes of El Salvador spread out to the west on the other side of Lago de Coatepeque, while the Pacific Ocean gleams to the south and the perfect cone of Izalco fumes gently next to Cerro Verde. You can look back on the route of the whole two-hour walk while staring out at travels yet to come, and all the time the crater lake bubbles away in the background, inducing vertigo and awe in equal amounts. As a place for munching on lunch at the top of the world, it’s hard to beat.

The only drawback is that after the descent back down to the saddle, you have to climb back up those 1300 steps to get to the car park and the two-hour chicken bus ride back to Santa Ana. At this point I should give a big shout out to Peta, who managed the entire four-hour walk with only a few pauses for breath, unlike a couple of other members of the group who found to their cost that gravity tends to win when you’re obese. They fell back through the line of walkers as we started the ascent up Santa Ana, and eventually had to turn back with one of the policemen before we reached the scrubland; on our descent we found them scoffing ice creams by the police hut, which probably says a lot more about modern life than I care to venture.

They certainly missed out. Climbing Santa Ana has arguably become the first major highlight of our trip so far; I thought I’d be saying that far earlier than two months in, but this trip has clearly taken a while to get going. Now, though, I think it’s getting into its stride, and all it took were smiling locals, amazing landscapes and the odd volcanic peak. Not much to ask, really...

Ruta de las Flores

Written: 5 January 2014

The Ruta de las Flores is a road in eastern El Salvador that’s home to pretty towns and villages, coffee plantations, volcanic scenery, lots of greenery, and some of the weirdest food that I’ve ever eaten. It’s a delightful part of the world.

We’d wondered how we were going to tackle the Ruta, because it isn’t a single destination and seems tailor-made for visitors with cars. Luckily, it turns out that there’s a chicken bus, number 284, that goes up and down the Ruta every ten minutes or so, so all you need to do is get onto the Ruta somehow, and the rest is easy. Carlos, the proprietor at the Casa Verde Hostel in Santa Ana, set us on our way, and the five of us – Peta and I plus Pamela, Matteo and Chris – wandered down to the main bus station in Santa Ana to catch the 9.30am bus to Juayúa (pronounced ‘Wha-yoo-wah’), our first destination on the Ruta. The only problem with the main bus station in Santa Ana is that it’s in the middle of the market zone, so when the bus eventually left the station at 9.45am, it took a good half an hour to get through the busy stalls and onto the main road, but after some entertaining rattling and bouncing to the ubiquitous 1980s soundtrack, we arrived in Juayúa at 11am, ready for the famous weekend food fair.

Juayúa

Juayúa is a lovely little town with a pretty main plaza and a busy market tucked away in the streets behind the church. The food fair is strung along one side of the plaza and consists of lots of different stalls selling all sorts of enticing food, from steaks and corn on the cob to more exotic fare like whole frogs, though when we asked one man about where we could buy iguana, one of the more infamous foods available at the food fair, he told us that it was no longer available as it’s a protected species; they did sell fox, though, which presumably isn’t.

The people were very friendly, smiling back at us at every turn, and even the local bare-chested nutter was entertaining and told us he didn’t want any money from us, though that was the only part of his bonkers Spanish that we understood. Strangely enough, when we popped into the public toilets off the main plaza, there were two young men in there changing into women’s clothing, but with all the smiling going on it all just seemed like the fun of the fair.

As it was a bit early for lunch we settled for a delicious iced coffee, and we sat and watched the fun in the main plaza as people milled around trying out the food and generally having fun. It was a good start to our trip down the Ruta de las Flores, but the best was yet to come.

Ataco

The real deal was further down the road in Ataco, which Carlos had recommended we spend time in as it’s a more typical Salvadoran experience than the fairly touristy Juayúa. He was absolutely spot on, and it was well worth the effort of the 40-minute chicken bus ride, via the quiet town of Apaneca and past yet more coffee plantations, volcanoes and fincas.

Ataco is clearly yet to be discovered by western tourism, as we were the only white faces in the whole town. People literally stopped and waved at us, from small children to old women on the backs of trucks, and we were made to feel so welcome it was unreal. The food fair in the main plaza felt a lot bigger, too, though this was perhaps because it was all in one lump, rather than being tucked away down the thinner streets of Juayúa.

We managed to get a table in the busy throng and ordered a plate of typical Salvadoran food from one of the stalls, which consisted of round ball-like sausages, chicken wings, a beef skewer, avocado, rice, tomato salsa and some fairly forgettable tortillas that were like thick, dry pancakes. This was all delicious, but the coup de grâce was when Peta spotted the stand selling frogs and iguanas, so we bought a whole grilled frog and two iguana eggs, while Matteo went for the iguana meat, which he shared around.

Frog is, well, frog, and it tastes a bit like gamey chicken, though this didn’t come as much of a surprise, as we live next door to France, where frog’s legs are a delicacy. However, I’d never tried frog torso until Ataco; the meat is the same as on the legs, but there’s hardly any of it, so it’s no surprise that the French stick to the legs.

The iguana eggs, though, were a surprise, as they’re delicious; the egg shell is rubbery, like a thin but tough balloon, so you bite a hole in one end and squash the contents into your mouth. The egg itself tastes a bit like the yolk of a duck’s egg, and there’s no white; if you hard-boiled a duck egg, removed the white, mashed up the yolk with a fork and squished it into a small balloon, then that’s pretty much what iguana eggs are like. They’re surprisingly good.

As for the iguana meat, it was served in such a strong-tasting green sauce that it was pretty difficult to determine what the meat actually tasted like, but after sucking the sauce off, it turned out to taste... well, a bit meaty, really. The ribs are tiny and like fish bones, and there isn’t a lot of meat to be had, but it wasn’t at all unpleasant. And luckily, it turns out that iguanas aren’t a protected species; it is, in fact, a booming export market in Mexico, El Salvador and Puerto Rico, and in the latter it’s being used as a way of controlling the reptile’s exploding population. So there’s no reason not to get stuck in... and I definitely recommend the eggs.

It was well worth the effort of the long and crowded double chicken bus journey from Ataco to Ahuachapán and on to Santa Ana, where we collapsed into a very welcome rest day at the Casa Verde. Now where else can I get hold of some of those iguana eggs? I wonder...

El Salvador: The East

Suchitoto

Written: 10 January 2014

If you’re looking for a poster child for the progress that El Salvador has made since the end of the civil war, then Suchitoto is a pretty good choice. The town has long been regarded as the country’s cultural capital, and even today its influence is felt far and wide. In recent times, the town’s recycling system has spread across the country, so you now see separate bins for plastic, aluminium and organic material everywhere; and Suchitoto’s women’s groups are helping to nudge the country along the long road to equality, as can be seen in the stencils sprayed on many of the town’s buildings that declare, ‘In this house we want a life free from violence against women.’

Perhaps this strong cultural identity is one of the reasons that Suchitoto manages to take the legendary Salvadoran friendliness to new levels, because unlike Santa Ana, the town doesn’t shut down at night. Instead children play in the streets after dark and locals sit outside their houses, barbecuing meat and soaking up the still, night air. As you walk around town, everyone says hello, from the family next door to the gun-toting security guards, and you get the feeling that they’re genuinely pleased to see you. Comparatively few visitors make it to this part of northern El Salvador, so the town doesn’t suffer from tourist fatigue, but even so the locals go out of their way to be welcoming, and it’s such a delight.

Suchitoto is lovely from an architectural viewpoint, too. The town is laid out in the familiar colonial style, with a pretty main plaza, Parque Centenario, that’s surrounded by shady colonnades and an impressive white church dominating the eastern edge (though the church itself dates from after independence, so it’s in the colonial style, rather than actually being colonial). Unlike a lot of squares we’ve seen, the park in the middle of the square is fairly open plan and you can see across from one side to the other, so it’s a perfect spot for people-watching.

This is particularly true when the pupuseria on the southern edge of the plaza starts up for the day. Pupusas are a peculiarly Salvadoran delicacy, and I’m astonished they haven’t caught on across the continent, as they’re absolutely delicious. They’re a bit like thick tortillas that are made from either rice or maize – we much prefer the rice version – and they’re stuffed with a generous helping of beans (frijoles), cheese (queso), pork (chicharrón) or a combination of all three (revuelta), before being grilled on a hotplate that’s lightly brushed in lard. As a hearty breakfast or a late afternoon snack, they’re hard to beat, and the pupusas on the main plaza in Suchitoto were the best we tasted anywhere in El Salvador... and that’s saying something, as they’re a consistently good snack wherever you go in the country.

Cerron Grande Reservoir

To get to Suchitoto from Santa Ana, we teamed up with Pamela and Matteo, with whom we’d climbed Volcán de Santa Ana and explored the Ruta de las Flores. As Italians they could speak excellent Spanish – the languages are so similar that it’s easy to pick up one if you already know the other – so not only did we have some excellent company for our visit, but we also had translators in tow, and that always makes life easier. The journey wasn’t that straightforward, as we had to take a bus from Suchitoto to the west terminal in San Salvador, then another bus across the capital to the east terminal, and then another from the east terminal to Suchitoto; but even with our very basic Spanish, it wouldn’t have been difficult to do on our own, as the people in the bus stations are so helpful and only too happy to guide you to the correct bus. But it certainly made the whole thing far less stressful, knowing that we were travelling with people who could communicate with the locals in their own language if things got too confusing; in all, it was a delight to be travelling with our Italian friends.

It also helped that the proprietor of our hostel in Suchitoto was a friendly American who was only too happy to tell us about the local attractions. For us, two options stood out: first, there was the hike into the hills around town to visit sites from the civil war; and second, there was the boat trip on the huge man-made Cerron Grande Reservoir that’s about 1km from town. We figured we’d wander down to the reservoir to see what the fuss was all about, as it was too late in the day to book a civil war walk.

When I’d looked at the weather forecast for Suchitoto the day before, I’d noticed the little orange warning flag in my phone’s weather forecast, but to be honest, I didn’t really take it in. So when we hopped on the minibus that runs down to the lake and wandered through the small tourist complex to the lake shore, it was a bit of a surprise to be battered by gusts of wind that blew foam from the crashing waves right into our faces. This was clearly not boating weather, though the boatman who was still optimistically selling boat tours promised that it would be better tomorrow. Still, we figured we’d seen enough for one day, and after waiting for the return bus for more than an hour, we retired for a pupusa and to plan the next day.

Luckily the boatman turned out to be right, and after spending the morning booking a civil war trek for the next day, we headed down to the lake shore once more to see what we could find. There are two options for exploring the lake: the first, and most expensive, is to hire a boat for a few hours, which takes you to the various attractions round the lake from islands and waterfalls to the dam itself; and the second is to hop on the car ferry to San Francisco Lempa, which costs just one dollar. The water was still a little choppy, so we went for the car ferry, as the thought of a whole afternoon on a pitching boat wasn’t that appealing.

We chose well, as the car ferry is a delightful way to cross the reservoir, with its amazing views of distant volcanoes, a nice sedate pace – it takes about half an hour for the crossing – and the added bonus of 1980s music pumping out of the speakers as you drift across to the eastern shore of the lake. And San Francisco Lempa proved to be a beautiful little village, with an attractive square at the top of a steep hill, more friendly locals and some great views east towards Volcán Santa Ana.

It was baking hot, though, so after exploring the village centre, we stopped in the shade of the main square’s colonnades for an ice cream, and as we sat there slurping our exotic fruit lollies – I still have no idea what flavour mine was, though it was certainly tasty – the church bells tolled slowly and in a strangely sad manner, and after a few minutes a funeral procession walked past, with the coffin in the back of a black, gleaming hearse that led a group of mourners into the square. The mourners all took shelter in one corner of the square as the hearse drove slowly round the edge of the plaza, before it headed off downhill at walking pace, with the hearse driver waving at us with an enthusiastic grin that looked slightly out of place among the rather more sedate throng following the coffin.

On the way back, we took a private launch back to Suchitoto, as with four passengers it costs practically the same as the ferry but can do the journey in just a few minutes. That night, those pupusas tasted even better than usual...

Cerro de Guazapa

Written: 9 January 2014

We really enjoyed teaming up with Pamela and Matteo for our visit to Suchitoto. They were great company and easy travelling companions, and for us, they opened up whole new doors of exploration, because Pamela really wanted to go on a civil war hike in the hills around town, and unlike us, she had the Spanish skills to make it happen. I’m not sure we’d have persevered quite so hard on our own, but thanks to our Italian friends, we were lucky enough to enjoy one of the highlights of our trip to El Salvador.

The reason is that, if you’re an English speaker, it isn’t that easy to book a civil war trip in Suchitoto, and it’s even harder to understand the trip once you’re on it. Happily undeterred by the language barrier, Pamela and Matteo started with the tourist information office on the main plaza, where we stood in the background while the man told them in fluid Spanish that there were three companies offering tours, though only one of them, the Asociacíon Cooperativa El Pacayal, had an office in town, and that was a good 30-minute walk south from the centre. The man recommended that we visit them in person to tailor our tours, and no, they couldn’t ring on our behalf; hell, they didn’t seem to be able to do anything on our behalf, so we decided we might as well walk to the cooperative, as we didn’t have anything better to do that morning.

It was a bit of a slog through the hot mid-morning streets of Suchitoto to the cooperative office, where we met a moustachioed man in a hair net who was busy cooking in the kitchen. He said yes, he could offer us a tour in the hills, from a couple of hours to six hours, depending on how much we wanted to see and how many questions we asked. As the tour would only be in Spanish, Pamela offered to translate for us, which was extremely kind of her, so we eagerly signed up for a four-hour walk the following morning, leaving the main plaza at 7am.

The Civil War

That evening, I sat down in our hotel and read up about the civil war in El Salvador. I already knew that it had been a serious humanitarian crisis and an utterly terrible war, but I wasn’t prepared for the scale of the war’s brutality and the sheer senselessness of the whole thing. There has been plenty written on the subject of the war and I’m not going to try to add to it, but it helps to have a little bit of context when you’re talking about what happened in the hills around Suchitoto.

The civil war officially lasted from 1979 to 1992, though the violence started at least a year earlier in Suchitoto. Like most civil wars in this part of the world, it was sparked off by a massive inequality between the minority rich, who owned most of the land and took all the profits, and the majority poor, who worked the land and lived in terrible poverty; this is a common setup in ex-colonies, and Central America is no exception. A peasant uprising in 1932 was brutally crushed by the military dictatorship of the time, and from that point on a series of military coups ensured that the army controlled the country with an iron fist, keeping the rich elite in power while crushing any resistance from the people.

In 1979, yet another military coup gave power to a junta that promised far-reaching reforms, but when these failed to appear, it led to five opposition parties uniting and forming a military wing, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which was named after the martyred leader of the 1932 uprising. In March 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was an outspoken critic of the government, was gunned down while saying mass, and this escalated the existing struggle between the FMLN and the right-wing government into full-blown civil war. The government’s approach was to attack its own people, as it believed that the enemy were guerrillas who were hiding out among the general population; as a result they started systematically massacring their own citizens, most notably in El Mozote in 1981, where government troops killed more than 700 men, women and children.

All this activity didn’t go unnoticed by the US government, who had watched with mounting concern as the corrupt right-wing government of neighbouring Nicaragua fell to the socialist Sandinista revolution of 1979. Worried that communism was spreading through the region, the Reagan administration pumped millions of dollars into the El Salvador military, training them up in counter-insurgency and arming them to the teeth. When the Salvadoran government took that training and started slaughtering their own civilians, the Americans initially denied that these massacres were happening, and then started urging the Salvadoran government to rein things back.

In response, the government created death squads who would roam the country and murder suspected leftists, but as they did all this in civilian clothes, the government simply denied that they were behind it. The death squads would even warn their potential victims, by sending them invitations to their own funerals or overtly threatening them, and eventually yet another victim would simply disappear, sometimes turning up mutilated on the street corner, but often never to be seen again. In the first five years of the war alone, 40,000 civilians were killed by the government; by the end of the war, casualties were estimated at 75,000, with some one million of the five million population being driven from their homes by the violence, and by the government’s scorched-earth policy of destroying entire communities with fire.

In 1989 the violence escalated to the capital, San Salvador, and things kept getting worse until the UN finally managed to broker a peace deal in January 1992, which has held firm ever since. The FMLN is now a mainstream political party, it won the last election in 2009, and it’s currently campaigning to win the election that is slated for February 2014; the right-wing government, for their part, has apologised for its abuse of power during the civil war, and the Salvadoran economy is now one of the strongest in Central America, with the highest minimum wage in the region. It seems that after such a brutal and harrowing civil war, nobody wants to go back to the old days, even if the country is politically still split between right and left. These days the fight is a purely political one, and the war is becoming an ever more distant memory.

Cerro de Guazapa

Back in Suchitoto, the man from the cooperative turned up at the main plaza the following morning and introduced himself as Nelson, and we were soon bouncing along in the back of his rusty, bald-tyred car, heading out of town towards the dry hills to the west. We pulled into a dirt track and walked past fields to an abandoned building in the middle of millet and maize fields, and that’s when the tour really started, because on closer inspection it turned out that the building’s roof was missing and there were bullet holes sprayed liberally over the outside plasterwork.

It turned out that this house had once belonged to the President of El Salvador, and was a popular summer retreat because of its sweeping views over the surrounding terrain. Because of these views it was occupied by the FMLN during the war, but government troops stationed on the nearby hills would keep an eye out for smoke or signs of activity, and would radio in their positions so the fighter planes could swoop in and drop their bombs and incendiary devices. Eventually the government took out the building, and its remains still stand today, mouldering in the sun.

From there we hopped back in the car and drove to Nelson’s house, where his eight-year-old son, also called Nelson but known to everyone as Nelsito, joined us. A budding guide in his own right, Nelsito was full of smiles and eight-year-old innocence, and his presence would make our walk up the hill even more poignant, though we didn’t realise it yet.

From Nelson’s place we drove to the base of Cerro de Guazapa, the extinct and wooded volcano that we would be exploring for the rest of the day. It started out with a gentle climb through fields of sugar cane, which Nelson cut for us to taste, before we ducked into the forested slopes and passed a bomb crater and the ruins of houses, almost entirely reclaimed by the forest. We stopped for a rest by the shattered remains of a church that the government had bombed in the war, and where four women and two children had been killed; two small wooden crosses stood nearby in remembrance. ‘I lost my parents in the war,’ said Nelson, and the woods suddenly felt a little quieter.

Just up the hill, Nelson showed us what looked like three rabbit holes, one after the other in the side of the road. In fact, these tiny hollowed-out holes in the earth were bomb shelters, and when the planes started to come in, the people would hide underground, five people crammed into each small, coffin-shaped cave. If the bombs hit, it wouldn’t save you, but it might help if the target was some way off.

This was getting interesting, but it was when we reached the ruins of a school that things took an unexpected turn. Just downhill from the foundations of the school buildings, Nelson pointed to the remains of a trench, and explained that this trench went round the top of the whole hill, and that this was the front line against the government troops; the men patrolled the line, he said, and behind the line were all the women and children. To cross the line meant certain death: nobody came in, and nobody left, and it was like this for 13 years.

‘And this was my school,’ said Nelson, and the penny suddenly dropped. That meant that Nelson himself was trapped on this hill for the duration of the civil war, unable to leave because he would have been shot on sight by the government troops surrounding Guazapa. He hadn’t mentioned it until this point, but our guide was a genuine survivor of the civil war; his gentle voice and the way he played with his son seemed out of place with the stories he would tell us, but that made it feel all the more real.

Further up the hill we came across an old washbasin in the middle of a small clearing, next to some low foundations that Nelson sat down on. Nelsito picked up a stick and started poking a dead frog in the washbasin while we perched around on old blocks of concrete, and that’s when Nelson dropped the bombshell.

‘This was my house,’ he said. ‘This is where I lived with my family for the 13 years of the civil war.’

And so the stories started to come out. Nelson was nine when the war started, just one year older than Nelsito, who by this point had started snoring gently against the side of the washbasin; he was 20 when the war finished, and he spent the whole war trapped on Cerro de Guazapa, surrounded by government troops who would kill anyone they saw leaving the hill. There were about 2000 people living on the hill before the siege started; nobody lives on the hill any more, as the memories are too painful.

It had all started when the local landowner and chief of the right-wing Nationalist Democratic Organization (ORDEN), Fabian Ventura, started killing farmers on his land. He would drive around in his car, order his driver to stop when he saw a local farmer walking along the road, and he’d say to the farmer, ‘Quick! Run! Or we will shoot you.’ And so the farmer would run, and Ventura would shoot him in the back. If it was a woman, they would rape her first, before making her run and shooting her too. He killed more than 600 people this way.

All the time, Ventura told the government that he had a problem with communist guerrillas in the area, and that he needed money to defend his land. So the government sent money, which Ventura used to buy arms to kill even more farmers. He simply stole what little the farmers had and abused his position, and all the time he got more money from the government.

This behaviour forced the farmers to defend themselves. There was a small number of leftist guerrillas in the Guazapa area, perhaps 15 or 20 among the population of 2000, but Ventura decided that the whole hill was teeming with communists, so he surrounded the area and killed anyone who went in or came out. The farmers were, at first, completely helpless, but they soon learned guerrilla skills from the small number of activists among them, and so the unrest started in Guazapa, which acted as the spark in the tinder box that led to the 12-year civil war.

‘One man, just one man,’ said Nelson, shaking his head.

‘And what happened to him?’ asked Peta.

‘They got him and killed him in 1980,’ said Nelson. ‘They pulled his body out of the house where he died and put him on display so everyone knew he was dead. But by then it was too late.’

With that, we stood up and hiked a short distance to a waterfall, which is where the women and children sheltered every day, while the men defended their territory. It was dark and damp and no place for children to grow up, but it was relatively safe, and it was where Nelson spent his formative years. Nelsito seemed unconcerned and was more interested in taking photos of the tour with his Blackberry; time is a great healer, it seems.

For the rest of the walk we left the site of the siege, and simply enjoyed trekking through the forest, stopping to admire coffee trees, waterholes, the hole in the ground that functioned as the settlement’s sole drop toilet, and finally a long and painfully cobbled road that took us back down to the car. We’d managed about five hours on the hill, and we were exhausted; I found it impossible to imagine spending 13 years there, surrounded by an enemy who at any point might shoot you or rape your wife.

That night, the warm smiles and kind eyes of Suchitoto seemed a particularly long way away from the brutality of Cerro de Guzapa, and yet it’s only a few miles and 20 years ago. Welcome to El Salvador, where the memories of a typical eight-year-old have changed from the brutality of Nelson’s era to the carefree childhood of Nelsito. That’s progress; long may it continue.

El Salvador: On the Coast

Playa El Tunco

Written: 14 January 2014

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Playa El Tunco, the surfing beach on El Salvador’s western Pacific Coast. The beach is pretty enough and has an interesting rock formation just off the shore that gives a certain balance to the millions of photos that you can’t help snapping as the sun sets off the beach; it isn’t terribly big, so it’s easy to wander around on foot; there’s hardly any traffic and a ticketed entry system is enforced at the weekends to keep things manageable; and most of the time there are more Salvadoran tourists than western travellers pounding the streets, so it doesn’t feel too overrun with devotees of the Lonely Planet.

But there is one thing that sets El Tunco apart from everywhere else that we’ve visited in El Salvador, and that’s the strange effect that it has on the locals. For some reason, the locals in El Tunco aren’t the beaming and delightful bunch that we’ve enjoyed meeting in the likes of Santa Ana and Suchitoto; instead, the locals of El Tunco appear slightly wary of visitors. It’s most unnerving.

Happily, if you put in the time and go out of your way to smile and say buenas dias to them, most of them revert to type pretty quickly. But their initial reaction with foreigners is much more aloof and, at times, bordering on the surly, and while we got used to the Guatemalans reacting in this way, it’s a shock to see the Salvadorans doing it. I worry that here, in El Tunco, we’re witnessing the thin end of the tourist wedge starting to puncture El Salvador’s charm; if so, it’s a real shame.

Surfin’ USA

That said, El Tunco has its moments. It’s pleasant to enjoy a cold beer on the beach as the sun sets, though the food is a lot better further back, away from the beach; it’s fun to watch the surfers trying out the breaks, though as a lot of them are surfing for the first time, you end up watching more wipeouts than runs; and it’s fascinating to see so many fat people, which is something you don’t see so much in the poorer countryside. El Tunco is where the local rich go for a break, and they clearly eat a lot more than the poorer farmers.

There’s also a stream of travellers who are pounding the Gringo Trail, as El Tunco is arguably the main stop-off for the trail in El Salvador (the other being Santa Ana, though there are plenty of travellers for whom El Tunco is the only Salvadoran experience they have). As a result there are a few surly hawkers around who try to sell you necklaces and textiles, and there’s a lady who walks around in the morning and evening, tooting an irritating clown-horn as she tries to sell you banana cake. It doesn’t really help you fall for the place.

But we did meet some nice Americans who were over here on holiday, and we did enjoy relaxing after pounding the hills round Suchitoto, so it wasn’t all bad. And a short chicken bus ride away is the port town of La Libertad, which has a great fish market strung out along a pier, enough life to make it a worthwhile day trip, and a secret stash of Salvadoran smiles that they hand out for free. As an antidote to the slightly tarnished locals of El Tunco, it does the trick nicely.

Playa Esteron

Written: 19 January 2014

Playa Esteron, on the eastern coast of El Salvador near the border with Nicaragua, is everything we’d hoped Playa El Tunco would be but wasn’t. The beach is an absolute gem, stretching out into the distance like a salt flat while gentle surf breaks into long lines of speckled foam. The sand, while still slightly grey, is a lot more golden than the black sand further west, and every photograph you take along the beach is an exercise in perspective and vanishing points. It’s utterly charming.

And not only is it charming, but it’s almost completely deserted. The nearest settlement, El Cuco, is about 3km west along the beach, and apart from a few houses and restaurants in the dunes behind the beach, Esteron is quiet, sleepy and generally ignored by the younger backpacker set, who tend to skip eastern El Salvador in favour of getting into Nicaragua in one long shuttle journey from El Tunco to León. After the slightly irritating beer crowds of El Tunco, this was a major blessing, and we easily fell under its spell, spending long days lazing in the sun, walking along the soft sandy beach, reading holiday novels in swaying hammocks, trying out surfing for the first time, and drinking piña coladas under perfect blue skies. For a few days, we did nothing but live the easy life.

This was made even easier by the hotel we stayed in, which consisted of a beachside collection of huts and rooms, a small bar, a restaurant, and an emphasis on wildlife conservation. La Tortuga Verde (‘The Green Turtle’) is run by an American ex-surfer called Tom Pollak, who has started making a name for himself as a turtle conservationist. The problem with El Salvador, as with many countries where turtles nest, is that the locals just love eating turtle eggs, so they prowl the beaches at night, looking for turtles dragging themselves up the beach to lay eggs. When they find one, they wait for her to dig a hole and finish laying, and then they pick the turtle up, move her to one side, and simply pluck the whole clutch of eggs, one by one, from the elbow-deep hole. Meanwhile, the turtle, who goes into a bit of a trance while laying, starts to flick sand backwards over what she thinks is her brood, and when she thinks it’s covered, she heads back to the sea, completely unaware that her offspring is now top of the menu.

It’s a mammoth task to stop a tradition that’s an embedded part of a country’s culture, so in an attempt to stop the turtles becoming extinct, Tom offers to buy the eggs from anyone who collects them, and then plants them in a hole in the hotel grounds. When they hatch, happy residents get to release them into the sea, so it’s a win-win situation; the locals make money from harvesting eggs, the turtles get to hatch, and the residents of Tom’s hotel get to be involved in turtle conservation.

January is not the season for turtles laying eggs, but we lucked out. One night, when we were sitting out by the beach enjoying a late night beer, Tom ran out, shouting that there was a turtle on the beach, and when we looked, there she was, right in front of the hotel and just a few yards from where we’d been drinking. As our small group of tourists arrived with our torches and cameras, the turtle was flicking sand pointlessly while the hotel’s nightwatchman pulled eggs from a large hole in the beach. I assumed that the nightwatchman had spotted the turtle and was doing a good deed before the poachers came along, but no; it turned out that the nightwatchman was stealing the eggs and had been trying to keep the whole process hidden from Tom, but when he didn’t come when called, Tom got suspicious and spotted him digging out the eggs. So Tom had to negotiate a deal to buy the eggs from his own member of staff, as otherwise they’d have disappeared into the pot. It just goes to show, when even the turtle man’s staff are happier to eat the eggs than preserve them, you’ve got a real uphill battle on your hands.

Tom also saved a pelican while we were there. He took a boat out to the gulf islands off the coast where El Salvador and Nicaragua meet, fully expecting to find a pelican somewhere out there with broken wings, as this is a common problem with these birds; they crash into the sea to catch fish, and it’s not unknown for them to damage themselves in the process. A pelican with a broken wing is a pelican who will slowly starve to death, so periodically Tom goes out to look for damaged birds, and brings them back to the hotel to feed them and nurse them back to health. The pelican he brought back was actually missing half a wing, so it couldn’t ever return to the wild, so the hotel now has a permanent resident in the form of Sam, the one-winged pelican.

Yes, Esteron really is a paradise; it has a perfect beach, endless sunshine and a feel-good environmental angle, and when you take the 45-minute walk up to El Cuco, where the locals come to party at the weekend, the crowds and litter are a bit of a shock. Long may Esteron retain its remote and charming character.

The Madcap Laughs

Unfortunately, I’m not sure it will for much longer. Tom, who sounds utterly amazing on paper, is what you might euphemistically call a ‘character’. He has what he calls a TV show on an El Salvador cable channel, for which he films the turtle eggs being planted into his turtle sanctuary, as well as the releasing of the babies into the ocean. For this he dons a strange, green, mad-hatter’s hat, grabs a fuzzy microphone, and launches into the campest and most bizarre showbiz cameo role that I’ve ever seen performed on a tropical beach. His Spanish comes out with an utterly American accent, and his exuberance is... well, you know what American-style TV is like. I guess that publicity is publicity, even if it is just a home-made, hand-held-camera show for a tiny cable channel, but if I was trying to persuade the locals not to eat turtle eggs, I’m not sure I’d go for the ‘insane foreigner’ approach. Even the hotel’s residents, whom he ropes into each filming session, getting them to announce their names and countries into the camera, look utterly bewildered by it all. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at a typical show on YouTube.

But then Tom is a ‘character’. When you first meet him, he comes across as utterly camp, but one of the residents at the hotel when we were there was a young Russian girl, half his age, who used to be his girlfriend, so one assumes he just sounds that way; his public persona, though, is a strange hybrid of drag queen meets spoilt child. Within five minutes of meeting you, he makes the point (sometimes more than once) that the hotel is not run for profit – apart from the rooms and the restaurant, he adds quietly – and that he owns lots of property in downtown New York and is utterly loaded; he also boasts about having bought property all along the shore at Esteron, and is proud to take you on a tour round the Tortuga Verde, where there’s quite a lot of building work going on as he adds more rooms and facilities. And although he insists that the whole operation simply exists to give jobs to the locals – and he says he pays his employees more than they would otherwise get, which is great – it’s a bit hard to reconcile these landed-gentry boasts with the eco-friendly hippie image that he likes to portray. You can’t help feeling that you’re stuck in the middle of a rich kid’s vanity project, and that didn’t help us warm to our gregarious host, whatever his eco-credentials.

So despite this being paradise, it can be a bit odd at times, and talking to the other guests, we weren’t the only ones feeling a bit weirded out by it all. Luckily, all you have to do is park yourself on the edge of the beach, crack open another bottle of Golden beer and drink in the astonishing sunset view, and all of a sudden the day-glo tinge of turtle madness evaporates in the face of nature at its most beautiful. And hey, if the self-indulgence helps to save the wildlife while providing well-paid jobs for the locals, then fair enough. There are far worse crimes than being odd.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 20 January 2014

We loved El Salvador, no doubt about it. It’s hard not to love a country where the people are so charming, the history so astonishing, and the landscape so beguiling, and after our rather damp experiences in Guatemala and Mexico, we lapped it up.

The food is better, too. We loved papusas in the same way that we loved fry jacks in Belize, and like fry jacks, they’re unique to just one country, astonishingly. We also drooled at the luscious produce in the supermarkets in places like Santa Ana and La Libertad, which were as well stocked and clean and bright as supermarkets back home. Food is an important part of the travelling experience, and after weeks and weeks of tortillas, beans, cheese and constipation, El Salvador provided sweet relief in more ways than one.

But the main thing we loved about El Salvador was the people. They are utterly delightful and their ready smiles make any language barrier irrelevant. Old women on the buses would take great delight in Peta’s abilities with her backpack, which she can now don in the middle of a crowded chicken bus as it screeches round crazy corners and slams on the brakes. Adults and children would wave at us with genuine warmth as we walked through their villages, and even those people whose lives were carved out in the horror of civil war have gentle souls and an astonishing lack of bitterness. The soul of El Salvador is alive and well, and as long as it can handle the inevitable rise of tourism that you can see in the busier beach resorts, it feels as if the future is very bright.

I originally planned a couple of weeks here, expecting us to shoot through in ten days or so. In the end we spent just under three weeks and found it hard to leave. What a delightful country.

Nicaragua: The West

Playa Esteron to León

Written: 20 January 2014

There are quite a few ways to get from El Salvador to Nicaragua. The cheapest, and the slowest, is to take multiple chicken buses, first to the border of El Salvador and Honduras, then across the southern tip of Honduras to the border with Nicaragua, and then from the Nicaraguan border to your destination. You do meet people who have done this, and it’s... well, it’s an experience. We even met someone who witnessed one of the Nicaragua-bound chicken buses roll off the road, as it had so much luggage on the roof that it couldn’t cope with the way the driver was throwing it around the road. Miraculously nobody died, but we chose not to go by chicken bus.

You can also take the slightly more luxurious pullman bus service, which at least keeps the same bus all the way into Nicaragua. It also squeezes fewer people into the vehicle, and even fewer chickens. But there are plenty of stories of pullman buses being held up at the Honduran borders for three hours or more, as immigration officials check every single passport in bureaucratic detail, just to make the point that they’re in charge. We chose not to go by pullman bus.

There’s also a handy tourist shuttle that goes from Playa El Tunco to León in ten hours straight, and because it’s a smaller shuttle bus, it’s reasonably quick and provides a door-to-door service. This is the most popular approach and we could have picked it up at Playa Esteron, but it does mean being stuck in a small bus with a bunch of school-age backpackers for an entire day, which is something that, frankly, we could do without at our age. We chose not to go by tourist shuttle.

Luckily there is another route that skips Honduras altogether. It avoids buses and shuttles, it takes you off the well-worn backpacker trail, it has wonderful views all the way, it’s quicker, and I can’t recommend it enough: it’s the boat from La Unión in eastern El Salvador to Potosí in western Nicaragua, crossing via the picturesque Golfo de Fonseca. We chose to go this way, and what a good idea that turned out to be.

Across the Great Divide

Frankly, I’m surprised that this isn’t the most popular way of getting into Nicaragua, though I suspect that it’s because the Lonely Planet implies that it’s a relatively unreliable route and isn’t the cheapest method. True, your plans can be scuppered by bad weather, but it’s not that expensive for what you get; La Tortuga Verde in Playa Esteron provides a complete service from the hotel to the launch, and the more people there are, the cheaper it gets. There were four other people who were interested in taking the boat – Neil and Bronwyn, a friendly couple from Australia whose company we’d very much enjoyed at the hotel, and a couple of quiet Scottish girls – so the price dropped to US$65 per person, which we thought compared pretty favourably with the US$45 per person price of the tourist shuttle. This would get us all the way to Potosí, from where we’d probably have to take a couple of chicken buses to get to León, our destination for the day.

It couldn’t have been easier. The hardest part was getting up at 6am, because the winds were playing up and they wanted us to get an early start on the crossing. We’d met a couple from Manchester who had come the other way, and they’d been holed up in Potosí for a couple of days as the port had been shut while strong winds ravaged the gulf, but part of the Tortuga Verde deal is that if the boat is delayed, you get to stay in the hotel for free until it goes, so we weren’t too worried. In the end everything went swimmingly.

The hotel’s pickup took us to the sweltering port of La Unión, where we went through immigration and grabbed our last pupusas for the foreseeable future, and a few minutes later we wandered down to the end of the pier and hopped on the launch. We’d heard that you have to wade through disgusting sewage-packed mud to get to the boat – so the advice is to pay someone to carry you across for a dollar – but the tide must have been in as the boat came all the way to the dock. For the first time ever in Central America, the crew made us wear lifejackets, and with a flick of the rudder we turned and headed southeast, towards a horizon studded with distant volcanoes and the pure blue of a cloudless sky.

The first half of the trip was delightful. Neil had been worried about taking the boat as he gets terribly seasick, but the water was as flat as a pupusa and the islands of the gulf slipped by smoothly. To our left was Honduras, to our right El Salvador, and ahead Nicaragua, and we passed small fishing launches, tiny villages, pelicans flying low above the waves, and at one point a friendly dolphin who swam past and flashed his dorsal fin at us in the sparkling sunlight. It was quite dreamy, and Neil was coping fine.

It was a different story when we reached the Nicaraguan mainland about an hour-and-a-half into the two-and-a-half hour crossing. We skirted the northeastern coast of the Cosigüina Peninsula to reach Potosí, and because the wind was also coming from the northeast, we had to sail across a proper surfing swell. The captain killed the speed before he killed us, and we lurched from side to side like schoolchildren in a fairground ride while I stared at the horizon and Neil relied on the travel sickness pills he’d taken before we left. In the end we both survived fine, but we did get soaked by the salty spray of the Golfo de Fonseca, and it was pretty tiring holding on for such a long time as we rode the bucking bronco into Nicaragua.

At last the pier at Potosí came into view, though as it’s a huge affair that towers from the beach and is only suitable for large ships, we had to pull up onto the beach. The pier was crowded with a group of tourists, but this didn’t faze the crew, who were clearly experts at parking the boat in choppy surf; it didn’t take them long to drop anchor out in the surf and to back the boat up onto the beach, where we jumped off into the sand, grabbed our bags and walked up to the dusty and bedraggled immigration office. We got our passports stamped, paid the visa fee, and discovered that the group of tourists on the pier were waiting to take the same boat back the other way... and what do you know, they’d arrived by tourist shuttle, and that shuttle was sitting there, empty and about to head back to León.

So we negotiated a good price for a direct lift to León – US$7 per person – and settled back in comfortable air-conditioning with soft seats and an entire seat row each. For a mere US$27 extra per person, we’d managed to trade ten hours of tourist-shuttle hell with two hectic border crossings, for a beautiful boat trip with one sleepy border crossing and a spacious León-bound shuttle all to ourselves. We did indeed choose well; what a great way to arrive in a brand new country.

León

Written: 23 January 2014

Bloody hell, León is hot. Sure, it’s a dry heat without a hint of moisture in the air, but the sun beats down without mercy and the breezes are hairdryer-hot, and as you walk around the colonial streets of Nicaragua’s capital of political intellectualism and poetry, you can practically hear the walls panting. How anyone manages to survive in this furnace of a city, I don’t know, but any plans we’d made soon evaporated in the stifling heat as even mad dogs and Englishmen waved the white flag and ducked inside for a cold drink.

The main plaza of Parque Central seems to be the proverbial top shelf of this fan-assisted oven of a city, despite a handful of trees and a wide open space that you would assume would be light and airy. Instead the sun pounds down on some wonderful colonial architecture, from the faded grey-white of the Basílica de la Ascuncíon cathedral – the largest in Central America – to the clean Spanish lines of the orange Bishop’s Palace. Indeed, there’s excellent architecture all over the city, from the magnificent churches and museums to the crumbling colonial houses that pepper the streets. If it wasn’t so damn hot, this would be an urban walker’s paradise.

We managed to explore a reasonable amount of the city centre before succumbing to the heat. The highlight was a trip up to the roof of the cathedral, from where you can see across the whole city and to the stunning volcanic peaks beyond, but this is no ordinary roof terrace. For 50 córdobas per person, a slightly glum girl takes you up a series of winding staircases to the top of the building, where she points across a curved roof to a small tower with a balcony. The only problem is that you have to tightrope-walk along the apex of the curved roof, which falls away to either side and into what looks like oblivion (though there are wide gutters on either side, so you probably wouldn’t fall to your death if you slipped... probably). For anyone who gets vertigo – like Peta, for example – this is the ultimate test, particularly as there’s only one way back from the tower: the way you came. Health and safety has yet to reach this part of the world, and doing it in the head-spin of the stifling heat of the city centre only adds to the thrill.

Luckily León is also home to lots of enticing restaurants and bars for when the heat gets too much. Indeed, the Parque Central is one of the few plazas we’ve come across with a restaurant that spills out into the square, rather than huddling beneath the dark colonnades. And even though the backstreets have the usual thin, high pavements that you find in most Spanish colonial towns, which tend to prevent life from spilling out into the streets, it’s easy to wander along and look inside the shops and bars, because instead of hiding everything in the distant courtyards you find in places like Antigua, they instead have high ceilings and large windows to let the air in, so you can see what’s going on from the outside.

This means you can also look out from beneath the whirring fans of your chosen hidey-hole, making people watching not only possible, but fun. And there’s a lot going on in the streets of León, especially when the sun fades away to leave the colourful walls radiating heat like the world’s biggest storage heater. On our first night, we holed up in a restaurant and watched an astonishingly drunk man stagger from bar to bar, taking one step forward and two sideways in his attempts to find his way into the karaoke joint on the opposite corner. The staff patiently turned him around and pushed him on his way, but after staggering away, he’d eventually turn around and fall back through the doorway, until the staff fished out a large stick which they used to poke him away, gently the first two times, but slightly more suggestively as he failed to take the hint.

After being turned away for the umpteenth time, the drunkard noisily threw a beer bottle at the waiters, missing by some distance, and turned his attention towards the restaurant where we were enjoying some of the spiciest chicken wings in the world. Unfazed by the traffic whirling through the junction between us, he staggered in the front door and came right up to our table, which was just inside the front door of the restaurant. He grunted drunken nothings into the spaces above our heads and pointed noisily at our plate of wings before a waiter ran over and whisked him back out again, apologising profusely as we smiled that it was fine and not to worry, that this was life and what can you do? Luckily a man walked past the door with a tray of street food balanced on his head, no doubt heading for the excellent food market round the back of the cathedral, and the drunkard locked his sights on this new target and staggered off towards the man and into the depths of the hot night. We would see him the next day collapsed in a doorway in the main plaza, dead to the world like the dogs panting in the meagre shade of the nearby trees.

We’d had plans to explore more of León, and had considered taking a bus to the ruins of the first attempt to build the city, which were buried in ash from nearby Volcán Momotombo in 1610. But we just couldn’t function in the heat, and the fans in our hostel room served only to recycle the stifling air, sucking the moisture from our skin and shrinking our brains until they rattled inside our skulls like desiccated walnuts. We did manage an excursion to climb Volcán Telica, which was well worth the effort, but we spent most of the time hiding indoors, mainlining cold fruit smoothies and iced water while planning our escape to Estelí, in the much colder northwest of Nicaragua.

It was even too hot for Peta. Need I say more?

Volcán Telica

Written: 22 January 2014

If you like volcanoes, as I do, and you like walking, as I do, then it’s hard to visit the area around León without climbing at least one of the peaks in the nearby Maribios chain. The problem is choosing which one, as there are an awful lot of volcanoes along the spine of southern Nicaragua.

Most travellers tend to head for 726m-high Cerro Negro, a small but relatively new cone that only appeared in 1850, and which is almost pure volcanic ash; as such it is a popular venue for the new sport of volcano surfing, where you ride a modified snowboard down the steep slopes of an active volcano, getting volcanic ash in every orifice, if reports are to be believed. We’d talked to people who’d done it and they weren’t that impressed, comparing it unfavourably with boarding down snow and sand, so it was an easy choice for us to avoid the hordes and instead head for the 1061m-high Volcán Telica, some 30km north of León. The attraction here is that you get to peer into the crater of a still active volcano and look at the hot, glowing lava at the bottom. Count me in!

We set off in the afternoon as part of a group of eight, and getting there was a journey in itself. Four of us sat on the back of the flat-bed truck (with the other four inside), and after whizzing along the highway with the hot wind in our faces, we turned off onto a dirt road and the fun really began. My back isn’t too good these days, and after a few minutes of bumping and grinding along the dirt track, I realised that the rickety wooden benches down the side of the truck weren’t going to give me the support I needed, so I stood up and looked the track full in the face. Eventually we all stood up, and had to duck and dive in unison as we ploughed along an increasingly potholed road beneath low-hanging branches that kept us on our toes. It was a thrilling ride, and by the time we arrived at the road end, halfway up the volcano’s slopes, my hair looked like an advert for gravity-defying hair gel and I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face.

The 40-minute walk up the northern slope of the volcano is relatively easy, and we stopped a lot as the heat from the sinking sun was still fierce, so it didn’t take us long to reach the crater rim. You can see smoke billowing from the summit from miles away, but I hadn’t been expecting the roar of jet engines that hits you as you approach the knife-edge of the crater. As you slowly sidle up to the lip of the crater, a 700m-wide vista opens up beneath you, shrouded in sulphuric clouds of noxious gas that pump up from the 120m-deep chasm beneath your curled toes. It’s an exercise in barely controlled insanity to creep towards the edge, and although the clouds hide the bulk of the crater, the immensity is breathtaking – quite literally when the wind changes and the sulphuric stench of the bowels of the earth blows up into your face.

Awestruck by the crater, we walked east to a viewpoint from where you can look all the way along the east-west Maribios chain of volcanoes, some of them still active, some of them quietly reclaimed by greenery, but all of them serenely beautiful in the dusk light. For the sunset we stomped over to the southern slopes, where the southern plains of Nicaragua open up beneath your feet, with the Pacific Ocean glowing in the distant sunlight as a small horde of tourists appears out of nowhere to share the sight of the sun sinking into the sea.

On the way back to the car we visited the crater rim again, this time on the southern edge, and peered into the depths of the volcano, the jet engine noise as strong as ever. But this time, with the sun down and the stars beginning to poke their way through the night sky, the heart of the volcano glows a hellish red, and you can make out the hot holes through which the clouds of gas howl. It’s unnerving to be perched on the thin lip of such a massive crater with certain death lurking below; this is not a place to linger for a long time.

As we wound our way by torchlight back down the way we came, the stars put on a beautiful show, and under their warm glow we climbed up into the back of the truck, ready for the journey home. This time the stand-up drive was even more thrilling, heading down a dark desert highway, the cool wind in my hair, the warm smell of volcanoes rising up through the air... and ducking the branches as they jumped out of the darkness. And when we arrived in León, the driver took us to our individual hotels, so we got a fascinating tour of the town at night from the back of a flat-bed truck, where light spilled out into the streets from the pool halls, bars, restaurants and shops, lighting up the locals as León shook off the heat of the day and started gearing up for a night on the town, while we went home to sink into a well-earned and very cold bottle of beer.

Estelí

Written: 26 January 2014

It’s weird, but sometimes when you’re travelling, you end up in places that through no fault of their own, you simply don’t like. First impressions count for a lot in this game, and by the time we’d stepped off the bus from León and taken a short taxi ride to our hostel, Peta had decided that the northwestern town of Estelí just wasn’t for her. There wasn’t anything tangible that she could put her finger on, but she really didn’t like it; it scared her and gave her the heebie-jeebies from the instant we hit the main highway that runs along the eastern edge of town.

It only got worse when we checked into the Sonati hostel and found that they’d mislaid our booking, could only give us two nights instead of the three we’d asked for, and that we’d be spending those nights in a dark and depressing room with just one window that looked out onto an internal corridor lit with strip lights. Too tired to argue, we dumped our bags and wondered what on earth we’d done wrong.

Of course, none of this was Estelí’s fault. It isn’t a pretty place, that’s for sure, and its streets are fairly gritty, with broken pavements, lots of dust, some fairly drab architecture and not a lot to attract the average visitor... but it’s not a tourist town, it’s a working class stronghold full of farmers and socialists, so it’s a bit unfair to expect it to be particularly attractive. And yes, the locals have a tendency to stare at you a little too much, and even if you smile at them, most of the time they don’t return the compliment... but then again they weren’t exactly grinning from ear to ear in León, so it’s probably just that we’ve been spoilt by the incredible friendliness of the Salvadorans, after which most places would appear a bit dour (not least our home city of London, which is famously cranky). And OK, the main traveller enclave near the Luna hostel is a bit irritatingly tofu, if you know what I mean – the fact that the tourist agency there is called Tree Huggers says it all, really – but it’s all about community programmes and cooperatives round here, so it’s obviously going to feel a bit ‘mwah-mwah’ and self-righteous at times. Just because it attracts irritating people, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.

But in the end we were quite pleased the hostel had lost our reservation, because we didn’t fancy hanging round any longer than necessary. After assessing the situation, we quickly booked a day tour to the nearby canyon in Somoto for the following morning, went out for a disappointing meal at a recommended Cuban restaurant – where the food was astonishingly tasteless, and therefore a pretty authentic version of Cuban cuisine, in our experience – and decided we’d hit the road the day after the canyon visit and head for Matagalpa, which sounded rather nicer.

To its credit, Estelí did come up trumps on our final night. Our hostel turned out to be as awful as we’d feared; it was like sleeping in a hospital, and the echoing corridors, astonishing traffic noise, endless dogs barking and grotty kitchen – which came complete with cats rifling through the litter bins and cockroaches running across the work-tops – really got to us. So it was a massive surprise that the restaurant we picked for our second and last night, the strangely named Pullaso’s Ole, turned out to be the best steak restaurant we’ve visited on this trip, by absolutely miles. Steak is big business in Central America, sandwiched as it is between the United States and Argentina, two countries that are obsessed with a decent cut of beef, but so far, the steaks have been decidedly disappointing. We had a pretty good one in León, but Pullaso’s Ole really pulled out all the stops, and the meat was beautifully cooked and simply excellent, and washed down by a glass of house red that was spectacular.

It was a bit too late in the day for us to start falling in love with Estelí, but it was good to leave with at least one positive memory.

Cañón de Somoto

Written: 25 January 2014

When you travel through Central America, you notice certain themes recurring. Perhaps if I list what we’ve visited on our trip so far, you’ll see what I mean: so far it’s been beach, diving, Mayan ruin, colonial town, Mayan ruin, colonial town, cave diving, diving, beach, diving, diving, Mayan ruin, cave, Mayan ruin, colonial town, Mayan ruin, waterfall, lake, colonial town, lake, volcano, beach, capital city, colonial town, volcano, colonial town, colonial town, lake, ex-war zone, beach, beach, colonial town and volcano. Or, to reduce that to a list of unique experiences, in almost exactly three months of travel, we’ve visited just ten types of location, as follows:

- Colonial towns (8)

- Beaches (5)

- Diving (5)

- Mayan ruins (5)

- Lakes (3)

- Volcanoes (3)

- Caves (2)

- Capital cities (1)

- Ex-war zones (1)

- Waterfalls (1)

You can perhaps understand, then, why it’s a thrill to come across something that isn’t a colonial town, or a beach, or a Mayan ruin, or any of the other types of attraction that we’ve been enjoying in Central America. Welcome to Cañon de Somoto (Somoto Canyon), which according to the guidebooks is an ‘unmissable experience’, but even more importantly, is not on the list above.

Enjoy the Silence

‘Unmissable’ is perhaps a generous billing, but the 4km trek through Cañon de Somoto is certainly a fun way to spend the day. Most people arrange their trip in Estelí, as Somoto town is pretty small, so the day starts with a couple of hours crammed on the chicken bus to Somoto, followed by another chicken bus journey to the canyon itself (which is just off the Pan-American Highway). We were met off the first bus by a tall local called Henry, whose family runs the most recommended guide company in the canyon area, and he took us to his family home just next door to the park entrance, where I swapped my hiking boots for a pair of Henry’s wet shoes (Peta already has a pair of water-friendly trainers) and put on a life jacket. And so our group of some 16 tourists set off west along the main road on foot, carrying nothing other than cameras, water bottles and a sense of anticipation.

Or, I think there was a sense of anticipation, because our group was a bit strange, to be honest, and I never worked out what any of them were thinking. It’s a common complaint these days that younger travellers don’t seem to talk to each other as much as they used to, which most people seem to blame on the internet and the advent of the smart phone; it’s certainly true that when they gather together in hostels, younger travellers tend to fish out their iPhones and instantly sink into Facebook, which does make starting up a traditional sound-based conversation a bit tricky. Whether or not this is true, our group was notable in its inability to generate any kind of group bonding, and even though we tried smiling at people and starting basic conversations, they all fizzled out pretty quickly (if they ever started at all) and the whole day passed without anyone so much as breaking the ice. It was most odd; even the oldest couple in the group – two French ladies of an age that was tricky to determine due to their addictions to plastic surgery and cigarettes, but which clearly exceeded our own – didn’t want to talk, probably because we were English. We even switched to French out of politeness, but that didn’t work, so we gave up and joined the sullen silence that pervaded the group.

Luckily our two local guides were much more friendly, so we chatted to them instead as we walked the 2km to the canyon entrance, while the younger crowd shot ahead in their silent competition to be the first to get to wherever we were going. The canyon is slowly being carved out by the River Coco, the longest river in Central America, though as this is where the river starts, the first section of the canyon is relatively tame. We started by walking through ankle-deep water through the first hundred metres or so, treading carefully because it’s easy to twist an ankle when you can’t see the rocks beneath the water, and yelping every time the water level reached the height of the crown jewels.

Soon enough the river gets too deep to wade through, so we literally took the plunge into the surprisingly cold water as the sides of the canyon rose higher and got closer together. At its highest point, halfway through the hour-and-a-half scramble through the canyon, the walls soar some 100m into the air but are only 5m apart, and the tops of the cliffs are dizzyingly coated in a carpet of orchids. At this time of year they’re like little green spiders clinging to the cliff, but when they bloom with their vibrant blue flowers, it is, according to our guides, a spectacular sight.

Walking Back

The journey continues with more floating, more rock scrambling, and at one point an obligatory jump from the side of a waterfall into the deep water below; you can choose the height of your jump, from 1m up to 8m – Peta went for 4m, while 5m was enough for me – and after that thrill there’s an optional 10m jump (which Peta and I both declined). Meanwhile, the guides show off by jumping from a 20m-high ledge into the deep water, a height that is now forbidden to tourists after a German visitor, acting alone and without a guide, broke his back after misjudging the 20m jump. One of our group misjudged the 10m jump and ended up with a backside the colour of sunset, though at least his back was intact.

Eventually the canyon starts to widen again and it’s back to the rock-hopping, before the route comes out at a small pebble beach where two rowing boats ply their trade, ferrying tourists in and out of the canyon. By this point we were shivering quite freely and had completely numb fingers, so it was a delight to throw off the life jackets and wring out the T-shirts while the sun baked our heads on the short boat ride to the eastern canyon entrance. Indeed, the 45-minute walk back to Henry’s house was an exercise in pins and needles as feeling slowly came back into our limbs, though the views were lovely as we forded the Coco a couple of times and walked back the park’s main entrance.

Lunch at Henry’s house was an oddly silent affair, and even the hair-raising ride back to Somoto in the back of a flat-bed truck and the scramble to grab tickets for the express bus to Estelí failed to spark any meaningful communication within the group. So before we knew it we were back in Estelí – not our favourite place in the world, it has to be said – and while we were glad that we’d explored Cañon de Somoto, we were even more glad to be heading east the next morning. And hey, that’s one more type of experience for the list: canyoning... tick!

Matagalpa

Written: 29 January 2014

Matagalpa is a pleasant spot. Green mountains rise around the edge of town, hiding their tops in low clouds and making the town feel as if it’s being cuddled by the landscape, and the main square is leafy, open and, as per usual, dominated by a huge white cathedral. There’s a coffee museum, there are loads of cafés selling the local brew, and there are even some really good restaurants; indeed, the Italian restaurant in a small side-road just behind our hotel serves up a genuinely delicious pizza, cooked properly in the Italian style rather than the more common and more depressing (failed) attempts at American pizza that we’ve had to get used to throughout Central America. This is a first; thank you, La Vita é Bella.

We didn’t do a lot except wander round town and go on a coffee tour and a chocolate tour. We did try a local Nicaraguan restaurant called a ‘steam table’, which I’d hoped would be like the steam cafés in Kuala Lumpur, but which turned out to be nothing more than a dull, factory-style canteen selling food that genuinely tasted like it had been beamed here straight from a 1970s school. There was no steam to be found anywhere, but they did sell an utterly disgusting drink, which the menu simply referred to as naranjilla refresco natural (‘natural orange drink’), and which we both found to be completely undrinkable; it tasted like sour milk with a fake orange flavour, and made both of us wince every time we sipped it (which we stopped doing after a while). We shan’t be darkening the doorway of any more steam tables, that’s for sure.

But the biggest surprise was my camera. Back in Lago de Atitlán in Guatemala, my camera developed a bit of a problem: a big bit of fluff managed to find its way into the lens, so every time I zoomed in to a certain level, I got a big black splodge at the top of the picture. I soon learned to zoom out slightly and to crop the resulting photo on my Mac – so you shouldn’t see the fluff in any of the photos on this site – and when I accidentally dropped the camera a couple of days later up the Indian’s Nose, the bit of fluff jumped over to the left-hand side of the photo, where it’s been lodged ever since.

I’d given up on ever getting this problem fixed, but I didn’t realise that the coffee farmers of Matagalpa have a latent talent for fixing cameras. When we’d finished our tour of the coffee plantation and went back to the farmer’s house for lunch, I left my fleece on the outside wall with my camera wrapped up in it, and went inside to eat. As I sat down, I noticed out the corner of my eye that the matriarch had gone outside, picked up my fleece and was heading back to the house with it tucked under her arm. As she walked nonchalantly across the concrete patio, my brain sluggishly started to form the thought, ‘Hang on, my camera’s inside my fleece, and she doesn’t know it... noooo!’, and sure enough, I soon heard the sickening crunch of delicate electronics hitting concrete from a height of a metre or so.

‘Ah,’ I thought, and kept quiet as the matriarch picked up my camera, shrugged and quietly put it and my fleece onto a chair just inside the door, presumably hoping nobody would notice.

I assumed that my camera would be completely dead, but no, far from it. Not only is my camera still working perfectly, but the bit of fluff has completely gone, knocked into some dark corner of the camera’s innards by the concrete floor. So a big thanks to you, the farming community of La Corona, for fixing my camera. I now know where to come when it goes wrong next time...

From Bean to Cup

Written: 28 January 2014

I remember visiting Darjeeling during my trip to India back in 1998, not just because of the wonderful views and mountain air (which were excellent and a welcome change from the sweaty plains of the subcontinent), but because it was my first introduction to the way that tea is made. Up to that point I’d been perfectly happy with a good old cup of builder’s tea, but as soon as I discovered the delights of Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, I was hooked. Ever since then I’ve looked out for and enjoyed good quality tea (though that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a nice cup of PG Tips, of course; I’m no tea snob).

After visiting Matagalpa, I think the same thing might happen with coffee, because this is one of the four main centres along the Nicaraguan Ruta de Café (the others being Jinotega, Estelí and San Raphael del Norte). Nicaragua is the 12th biggest coffee producer in the world and is known for producing high quality coffee, so we eagerly booked ourselves on a day-long coffee plantation tour through Matagalpa Tours (who provide English-speaking guides, a bit of a must with our dodgy Spanish). The following morning we were picked up by our guide, José, and our driver, Juan Ramon, and we headed off through the light rain to the coffee-growing community of La Corona, and into a whole new world of coffee appreciation.

Growing Coffee

The little settlement of La Corona, a few miles to the northeast of Matagalpa, is home to a cooperative of small coffee farms, and we bumped our way along dirt tracks to visit one of them and to learn about how coffee is grown. There we met Karla, one of the six children (five daughters and a son) of the farm owners, who themselves had met while picking coffee. Karla talked us through the process of growing coffee, with José interpreting, and it turns out that an awful lot of effort goes in to producing your morning brew, from the bean all the way to the cup.

Coffee plants in Nicaragua are grown from specially selected coffee beans of the arabica strain (of the two main strains of coffee, arabica and robusta, this is the higher quality strain). Beans destined for the nursery are picked from the middle section of the coffee plant, and from the middle part of the branches in that section. They are picked when they are ripe, at which point they look like red berries (they’re called ‘cherries’ at this point); if you peel off the skin, which is not unlike thick grape skin, then there’s a clear pulp underneath that’s not unlike the inside of a firm grape, or a lychee. Inside the pulp you can fine two identical coffee beans, which look a bit like slime-covered peanuts. You can peel ripe beans and suck off the pulp, and it tastes sweet, though there’s no hint of any coffee flavour at this point. There is caffeine, though, so sucking coffee cherries is a mild stimulant that pickers will use to keep them going through the day.

To get beans that are suitable for growing, 100 beans from the same plant are put in water, and if more than five beans float, then all that plant’s beans are rejected. Otherwise the pulp is carefully removed from each bean and the beans are left to ferment, which removes the rest of the pulp, and they’re then washed, dried and stored for up to four months before being germinated and planted. When the seedlings are a couple of inches high – at which point they are called ‘matches’ because the bean casings get pushed up to the top of the seedlings, like a match head – they are removed from the soil, and only those with single roots are kept. These are then planted and watered, and after three or four years the resulting plants are mature enough to start producing their own coffee beans.

Interestingly, the better coffee plantations in Nicaragua look more like forests than fields of crops. Karla’s farm grows coffee that thrives in shade, so they also plant bananas, cocoa and other tall trees to provide shelter from the sun. This also provides a secondary crop for the farmer, as well as producing a higher quality coffee (shade-dwelling coffee plants tend to produce lower yields than those grown in full sunshine, though the coffee is better). They also recycle the water that’s used to wash the beans, they only use organic pesticides, and they reuse all the by-products of the farming process; these are just some examples of what farmers have to do to get accredited by the schemes that ensure higher prices for their crop, such as the Rainforest Alliance, Starbucks, UTZ or Fair Trade.

Harvesting the Beans

Coffee plants are harvested once a year, though the plants flower two or three times a year. Each flower produces one cherry, and all the cherries have to be picked, even if they aren’t good enough to be used, as otherwise the flowers won’t regrow. Ideally coffee cherries are picked when they are ripe and red, as these are easiest to process, though cherries can also be picked when they are green; the taste isn’t affected, but green cherries have to go through an extra fermentation process before the skin can be removed.

On the farm we visited, the cherries are picked by hand, using a twisting motion that leaves the stem behind, ready to flower again. Workers strap woven baskets to their stomachs and drop the berries in as they pick them; they get paid 30 córdobas per basket (about 70p), and an average worker will fill five or six baskets a day (though some manage up to 12, while others only manage two or three). They work an eight-hour shift and get paid twice a month for the amount they’ve picked, and when they’re not picking cherries, they’re sorting them out into red and green, and picking out any dead or diseased cherries. It’s a hard life for little reward.

Once picked, the cherries are put through a four-step process (in the ‘wet mill’) to produce a coffee bean that’s suitable for the next stage (the ‘dry mill’). First, they are put into water where bad cherries float to the surface and are discarded; next, they are fed into a de-pulping machine that strips off the outer skin (which is then used for fertiliser); then they are pumped into fermentation vats, where they ferment until the pulp is dissolved; and finally, the beans are washed thoroughly in a special channel which not only removes the fermented pulp, but also separates the beans according to quality: the best quality beans are heavier and therefore don’t wash away so easily, while the lower quality beans are lighter and wash away first.

These bags of fermented coffee beans, which stink to high heaven, are then sold to an agent, who sells them to the dry mill to prepare for export. The farmer might sell a bag – which contains four buckets – for US$50, which the agent sells on for US$200, and which the dry mill exports for US$1000. The farmers are clearly not the winners in this game, which is one of the reasons Fair Trade exists, to ensure that the farmers at least get a relatively fair price.

Dry Roast

After a pleasant lunch on the coffee farm, we drove back through Matagalpa to visit a dry mill. You see these dry mills all along the main roads in this part of Nicaragua; they are huge, flat, open spaces with coffee beans covering every flat surface, as far as the eye can see. The dry mill that we visited, Beneficio Los Piños, has four distinct areas of drying beans: the best quality beans are in the hybrid area, where speciality strains dry on their own concrete patio; then the first quality beans cover a larger concrete area, drying in carefully raked rows directly on the concrete; just below that is the second quality area, where the yellow beans dry on large plastic sheets on concrete patios; and finally there’s the lowest quality area, where dark brown piles of damaged beans and dried cherry skins steam away on plastic sheets on grass.

The difference between the different qualities of beans is striking. The hybrid and first quality beans are all perfectly formed, with the classic coffee bean shape and a uniformly light yellow colour; the second quality beans are a little smaller and a bit more misshapen, and the piles contain quite a few damaged beans; and finally the lowest quality pile contains a handful of mangled beans (which go to make instant coffee) and bean husks (which the Nicaraguans use for their own coffee, as this is the only way to make it affordable for the locals).

The final part of the dry mill process is to remove the thin layer of yellow skin from the bean (known as the ‘parchment’), and to dry the bean even further until it is ready for exporting. This is done by machine, first by a gargantuan rotating drum that has hot air blown through it; the beans are fed into this drum and bounce around for 24 hours, which dries the parchment and reduces the humidity in the bean right down. Next the beans are fed onto a vibrating conveyor belt that removes the now-dry parchment and separates it from the beans, and finally the beans are sorted into different sizes, and then by colour (which is done electronically, though this used to be done by hand).

The beans are then ready to export. Nicaragua doesn’t export roasted beans, as the aroma gets lost in transit, but luckily for us, Beneficio Los Piños has its own on-site laboratory where they test the quality of the beans. The only way to do this is to drink coffee made from those beans, so after touring the factory, we stepped into the small laboratory and into the wonderful smell of roasting coffee.

The chief tester, Alexander, showed us how it’s done. He spends his days gathering samples of beans from the concrete flats, drying them himself and removing the parchment. He then roasts the beans in a small roasting oven, grinds them up in the grinder, puts the results in the bottom of a white cup, pours on hot water, and waits. He has a round table in the lab that rotates like a table in a Chinese restaurant, so on busy days he will lay out lots of samples, spinning them round to compare tastes. For us, he just picked out one sample, and demonstrated how you first break the froth on top to let out the aroma, bending down close to the cup to get the full effect. Once the aroma has been noted, you scoop off the froth and discard it, wash your mouth out with hot water, and then take a spoonful of coffee and suck it through pursed lips with a loud whooshing sound, before swilling it around and spitting it out into the bucket under the table.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘You can taste the chocolate notes in there. Give it a go.’

To be fair, I couldn’t taste the chocolate notes, but the coffee certainly tasted good, even though my attempts to emulate Alexander’s whooshing noise ended up sounding more like a pig with a head cold.

And with that we hopped back in the car and went back to the hotel, swearing never again to drink instant coffee.

The Chocolate Factory

Written: 29 January 2014

Apart from coffee, the other thing apart that Matagalpa grows in the luscious hills around town is cocoa, and where there’s cocoa, there’s chocolate. To be honest, Nicaragua isn’t particularly famous for its chocolate, and while the locals do eat and drink it, it’s pretty grim stuff for those of us who are more used to organic chocolate with lots of cocoa content. Local Nicaraguan chocolate is more about sugar than cocoa, and it’s pretty disappointing.

There is one place in Matagalpa that bucks this trend, though: El Castillo del Cacao. This small, Dutch-owned factory makes just 700 bars every two days, all by hand, and it prides itself in using 100% organic ingredients and in producing what we would consider proper chocolate. It also does tours; how could we resist?

The tours at the factory itself are only in Spanish, so we booked a morning tour through Matagalpa Tours, the same people who ran our coffee tour, so it was no surprise to find that our hosts were yet again José and Juan Ramon. José brought the same caffeinated enthusiasm to chocolate that he’d brought to coffee the day before, and in a couple of hours at El Castillo we learned all about how to make chocolate from the raw ingredients. Here’s how it works.

From Bean to Bar

Like coffee, chocolate starts off as a raw bean, this time the cocoa bean. Cocoa beans grow in large pods that tend to bud off the trunk of the cocoa tree, and when they’re ripe, the pods are harvested and cracked open to reveal lots of cocoa beans, all surrounded by a pulp. The beans are left to ferment in a long, wooden trough, which dries out the pulp, but unlike coffee beans they aren’t washed, but are instead laid straight out to dry in the sun.

Once dried, the beans are ready to head to the chocolate factory, where they are roasted for two hours at 150°C, and sampled every 15 minutes. José took us into the roasting room, and even though the oven wasn’t operating at the time, the smell of roasted cocoa was divine; indeed, there were some roasted beans still in the tray, and they tasted delicious.

After roasting the beans are left to cool for two hours, and then they are ground by hand using ancient-looking grinding stones made from volcanic rock. This separates the bean’s skin (the parchment) from the bean itself, and this mixture of crushed bean and skin is put into a machine that separates the two by blowing air through the mixture; the heavier seeds fall down while the parchment is blown away. They used to do this by hand, in the same way that rice is winnowed by hand in places like Indonesia, but the machine is much more efficient.

The parchment goes off to make fertiliser – though the owner is experimenting with making a chocolate tea from it, which could be interesting – and the beans are then put into the grinder, four times. The first two times the beans are ground into powder, but for the third and fourth grindings, it turns into a liquid as the oil stored in the beans gets released. Some factories extract the oil and sell it separately, adding fats like butter or milk to take its place, but at El Castillo they are proud of the fact that they leave the oil in the chocolate, as it means their product contains just two ingredients: cocoa and sugar.

Talking of sugar, the next stage is to finely grind the chocolate up with organic cane sugar for two hours. The machine that does this is a round drum, full of liquid chocolate that looks hypnotic and smells divine; this is the river of chocolate from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in miniature, and José fished out a couple of short wooden sticks so we could have a taste. At this stage you can still detect the sugar granules in the mix, but it’s definitely recognisable as chocolate.

If we thought the sugar mixer was hypnotic to watch, it was nothing compared to the flavour mixer. This is where they mix in the other ingredients, such as rum, cashew nuts, orange peel, more sugar, coffee, or more cocoa seeds (or ‘nibs’ as they’re called if used as a raw ingredient). The mixer combines a rotating flywheel, a chocolate spout and a trough full of rich, dark goo that gently turns into itself like a chocolate lava flow. At this stage the chocolate is even finer, and it tastes divine.

Once the ingredients are thoroughly mixed in – again, after two hours in the mixer – the chocolate is poured into moulds and put on a vibrating shelf that knocks all the air out of the mixture, so that the final bars will be structurally sound. Then it’s into the fridge for – you guessed it – two hours for the chocolate to set, and the final product is packaged by hand into a heat-sealed foil wrapper with a paper label.

The result is a chocolate bar that’s clearly hand-made. The texture is still slightly unrefined – you can feel the granules of cocoa and sugar on your tongue as it melts – but the taste is clean and simple enough for you to taste the individual ingredients of cocoa, sugar and (in the unflavoured versions) absolutely nothing else.

It also goes rather well with local Matagalpan coffee, as we discovered at the end of the tour. Interestingly, this chocolate doesn’t sell to Nicaraguans, as it’s too expensive; the growing process is complicated and difficult, so cocoa beans sell for a premium, and that’s why local chocolate is so low in cocoa content. Chocolate bars with 50% or 75% cocoa content are far too expensive for the locals to buy, at US$1 for a standard-size bar, so the only market for El Castillo’s products are the tourists that visit Matagalpa, and who shop in the few outlets that stock their products. This is, quite literally, a cottage industry, with the chocolate being produced in a small breeze-block building behind the owner’s house. They are trying to get accredited so they can start to sell their chocolate abroad, but for now this is a purely Nicaraguan industry (apart from one outlet in neighbouring Honduras).

If Nicaraguan chocolate takes over the world, then this is where it started...

Granada

Written: 3 February 2014

Granada, the most popular tourist attraction in Nicaragua, is a very strange place. On the surface it’s a picture-perfect colonial town on the shores of Lago de Nicaragua, with cathedrals silhouetted against pure blue skies, horse-drawn carriages plying the streets, and plenty of restaurants and watering holes. As far as tourism is concerned, Granada ticks all the boxes.

It isn’t all smiles, though. Sit down for a beer in one of the bars along the tourist enclave of Calle La Calzada and look around, and you’ll see child labour, hard drinking, prostitution and thievery, all threading their nefarious ways through the oblivious American tourists. The 2003 travel book 1000 Places to See Before You Die says of Granada:

Lack of tourism has helped keep both Nicaragua’s natural environment and its heritage intact. Nowhere is this more evident than in Granada.

I rather suspect that in today’s Granada, the complete opposite is true, as a tide of tourism rolls into the city and encourages a side of Nicaragua that is considerably less appealing than the tourist board would have you believe.

Personality Disorder

Granada is physically attractive, there’s no doubt about it. The Parque Central is utterly charming, and is the cleanest and crispest colonial plaza I’ve seen in the whole region; squint as the sun sets, and you could easily kid yourself that you’re in Spain rather than the poorest country in Central America. As with most colonial towns, it’s all about the churches and the plazas, and Granada has plenty of options, from the crumbling Iglesia de la Merced (whose tower you can climb for a classic view over the city) to the sparklingly clean white-and-earth tones of the cathedral’s new paint job. You can’t help clicking your camera every time you turn a corner, and there are lots of corners in this grid-based city.

It was hot when we visited, too hot for us to explore on foot, so we took an hour’s ride in a horse-drawn carriage to see all the main sights. They are delightful. We then walked down to the lake shore and explored the rather downtrodden Centro Turistico park to the southeast of town, and yes, if you ignore the tired tourist park with its ugly restaurants and piles of litter, it is all very pretty. We also met up with Pamela and Matteo, whom we’d last seen in Suchitoto in El Salvador; they’d gone on to Honduras and the Bay Islands, but the weather had been terrible and they found Honduras to be scary and dangerous, so they’d come back to Nicaragua and got in touch when they reached Granada. We teamed up with them to go on an hour-long boat ride to Las Isletas, a collection of hundreds of beautiful islands to the south of town, where millionaires’ houses perch on the rocks that were thrown from the nearby Volcán Mombacho that dominates the skyline to the south. Yes, physically, Granada does the job; it is an attractive place, no doubt about it.

But it’s the personality of the city that’s the problem. Yes, the buildings are lovely, but it’s hard to warm to the locals here, and after a few days, we just found it wearing. Take a seat at one of the tables in the main tourist drag, and you’ll be subjected to a constant stream of jaded men, women and children trying to sell you anything from hammocks to cigarettes; it’s polite to say ‘No, gracias’, but it soon becomes a chore that neither party enjoy. Sit there for long enough, and a group of children will come along and perform La Gigantona, which involves extremely loud drumming; a 3m-tall costume of a women with a young man inside, twirling and jiggling up the street; a child in a squat costume with a large head who spins round and round; and after the drumming has stopped, a gaggle of disinterested children coming up and asking for money. The first time you see it, it’s quite good fun; after it’s gone past for the fiftieth time and totally disrupted your evening, it’s harder to be charitable, especially as the children stay up late at night to perform this endless tourist cash-trap, and end up handing the money over to a Fagin-esque figure who, out of the glare of the main tourist trade, berates them for not dancing properly, and drives them on to keep dancing, way past any sensible bed time for a child. It’s all a bit unsavoury.

Then there’s the guy who will befriend you in the park by the lake, ask you where you’re from and how long you’ve been here, before brazenly saying, ‘Give me money,’ in a tone of voice that says, without ambiguity, that you are nothing more to him than a walking wallet. Or the child who sits down at your table and asks you for money, telling you that he has no parents and sleeps rough in the square, despite clear evidence to the contrary in the shape of his perfectly washed and ironed clothes, clean hair and good shoes. Or the scarred and battered man who points to your friend’s cigarette packet and says, ‘Give me one,’ and when you politely shake your head, he says, ‘I am Honduran, give me a cigarette or I will cut you, I will see you and I will cut you, give me one now,’ before the waiter idly standing a few feet away finally comes over and pushes him away. Or how about the guy in the backwards baseball cap who tries to steal your wallet by bumping into you and slipping his fingers into your trouser pocket; when he tried it on me, he discovered that I always close my pocket with two interlocked safety pins for just this eventuality – he wasn’t pleased and spun round after bumping into me, brazenly giving me the evil eye and shouting at me, rather than just slipping into the crowd like a more intelligent thief would do.

Or how about the poor American boy we met in the bank, who that morning had arrived from the north of the country; on the bus into Managua he’d been befriended by a lovely old woman and her daughter-in-law, who had said that they were going on to Granada and were being picked up by her son and husband, so would he like a lift into town? And as soon as he got in the car, the old woman sat on his lap while her son pulled out a knife, held it to his throat, got him to reveal his pin number and hand over his cash and cards, and then cleaned out his bank account. The moral of the story? Trust absolutely nobody round here.

It isn’t just about touts and thieves, though; it’s the little things, which would normally be minor inconveniences, but which come thick and fast in this town. Like the park attendant who, seeing that we were sitting on a bench in an almost empty park, stopped on his bike, picked up a nearby sprinkler, and stuck it in the ground right in front of our bench, so we had to get up and move. Or the lady at our hotel, who seemed genetically unable to crack a smile, despite our very best efforts to be nice. Or the waitress at the coffee shop who, when we asked, said that yes, the iced coffee came with milk, which it then didn’t, and when we pointed out that she’d said it came with milk, she just looked at us with forlorn stupidity and said, ‘Oh, yes, sorry,’ before saying that they didn’t have any milk anyway, and still asking for a tip.

Or how about the American restaurant owner who asked us how our meal was, and when we said that it had been nice but the curry had been far too hot to eat, he sat there and noisily blamed his staff for being useless and not knowing how to cook, shrugging and saying, ‘Well, this is Nicaragua.’ Meanwhile, he just sat outside the restaurant, chatting with his friends and totally failing to do anything like, say, training his staff properly.

But the most unsavoury moment came as we sat in the tourist street, enjoying a beer with Pamela and Matteo while the Superbowl final erupted on televisions all along the road. A seriously drunk tourist, who could hardly stand up he was so battered, kept staggering after one of the street urchins, bending down to joke with him and putting his arm on his shoulder in a manner that instantly set alarm bells ringing in the paedo-paranoid psyches of us watching westerners. Nobody said anything until another of the local touts, who seemed to be unable to speak, saw what was happening and warned the drunkard off the little boy, using the power of sign language to make it clear that this was not OK. The mute tried to explain to the barmen that something dodgy was going on, but they seemed uninterested, and it was only his persistence that eventually put the drunkard off trying to make friends with the boy. I guess there are plenty more fish in the sea, when there are children on the streets and money in the sex tourist’s pocket.

So Granada may once have been a place where Nicaragua’s lack of tourism kept the natural environment and its heritage intact, but I’m not sure that’s the case any more. For me, the beauty of Granada really is only skin deep.

Nicaragua: The Caribbean

Flying to the Corn Islands

Written: 4 February 2014

There are two ways to get from central Nicaragua to the Corn Islands, the tiny pair of idyllic Caribbean hideouts that live some 70km off the eastern coast of the mainland.

The first option is to take the chicken bus from Managua to El Rama, which is supposed to take five hours for an express bus, but which almost always takes longer. You then need to get onto a boat to Bluefields, which can take up to seven hours (though there are faster express services if you time it right).

Then you probably need to wait a day or two for the next boat to Big Corn Island, which should take somewhere around six hours, though we met a girl who’d spent twice that on a boat journey from hell where even the locals started praying for deliverance from the monster waves. This journey is the stuff of legend, and we met a Frenchman in León who said it took him five days of travelling to get from Managua to Big Corn, by which time he had to turn around and go straight back, as he’d used up all the time he had left in just getting there.

The second option is to fly, which takes about an hour and 20 minutes. Not surprisingly, we chose this option, as indeed did the Frenchman on his return journey. Sometimes less is more, especially when you’re talking about time that you could be spending on a Caribbean beach.

Island Air

Even with the flight option, it still sounded like a bit of an effort, having to deviate miles from our planned route south to Costa Rica just to visit a couple of islands, but we needed a bit of a break from the unpleasant hassles of Granada, so we thought we might as well see what was involved. In the end, it was relatively easy to arrange a quick side-trip to paradise; I bought two return flights from the La Costeña website with no more than a few clicks, I booked an airport taxi through our hotel in Granada, and Peta managed to make a couple of hotel reservations on Little Corn Island that would see us through our visit. All we needed to do now was to get there in one piece.

The first step was easy, and the taxi picked us up from our Granada hotel on time and whisked us away to Managua airport in just under 45 minutes (though with the taxi radio tuned to disco hits of the 1970s, it felt rather longer, particularly when the Bee Gees segment kicked in). In the domestic terminal – a small building to the right of the main international terminal at Managua – we handed over our passports and checked in our bags, but before he gave us our boarding passes, the man behind the counter pointed to the scales and said, ‘OK, now can you please get on there?’ So we jumped onto the scales ourselves, one at a time, clutching our hand luggage and trying not to look at the readout (three months on a Central American diet of cheese and beans is no way to get thinner, I can tell you).

The reason that they weigh absolutely everything on the flight to the Corn Islands, passengers included, is that the planes are tiny; they only have 14 seats and one propellor, so that’s just four rows of three passengers, plus the pilot and co-pilot. You might be able to get away with averaging out the weight of the passengers on a jet plane, but when you’re flying across a country in a tube that’s no bigger than a small minibus, size matters, and it’s this size that makes the experience so unique.

Flying as a passenger in a 14-seater plane is like being shrunk, digitised and injected straight into a flight simulator on your PC. There’s no partition between you and the pilot, and you can see out of every window, including the front, as well as being able to look at every dial and screen in the pilot’s dashboard. We were the last to board the plane, and there were only two seats left, one at the back and one right at the front; Peta kindly sent me up front, so I had the same view of the flight as the co-pilot, though without the groovy aviation sunglasses that our Nicaraguan crew were proudly modelling.

It was amazing, all the way from the juddering take-off right through to the landing on Big Corn Island. When you’re in a small plane, you really feel the clouds flying past you at 9400 ft, and the 360° views are astonishing. Not long into the flight the captain flicked on the auto-pilot and settled back with his newspaper, but although it was just another day in the office for him, I was riveted for the whole 80-minute flight. I particularly enjoyed watching Big Corn slowly appear out of the ocean towards the end of the flight, gradually morphing from a green stain on the horizon to an island with buildings and beaches; and then, as the plane banked to the left, there was the obvious straight line of the runway along the backbone of the island, which grew larger and larger until, there we were, aiming for the centre line as houses flew past on either side. The landing was smooth and applauded, and before long we’d pulled into the airport, grabbed our bags and hopped into a taxi to the harbour, still buzzing from the flight.

The Public Panga

Big Corn Island is a proper Caribbean island, but Little Corn Island is a proper Caribbean paradise, so we decided to head straight for the smaller island. The only way to get across the 12km divide between the two islands is by public panga – a panga being a large, open speedboat with powerful engines and a liberal attitude to passenger comfort – and we’d heard some nasty horror stories about the panga and rough seas, which worried me a bit with my propensity for seasickness. Luckily the weather was pretty pleasant as we took our seats among the 40 other passengers on board and put on our life jackets.

We’d paid a dollar tip to the boat man to get good seats – which he said were in the middle of the boat – but as if to show that there was nothing to worry about, two of the crewmen stood proudly on the very front of the panga, holding on to ropes attached to the bow as the engines revved up and we shot out from the protection of the harbour, past the coral reef and out into the ocean swell. As we ploughed through the waves, we did take off a few times and those sitting at the back of the panga got soaked while those at the front left their seats every time we hit a big wave, but compared to the trip in windy weather, we all got off lightly.

We were met at the pier on the western shore of Little Corn by a crowd of locals, some there to meet passengers with bookings, some there to find accommodation for passengers without bookings, and some just there to see who’d arrived. Among the crowd was a man from our hotel who was cheerily waving a sign with our names on it, and after he put our bags in a wheelbarrow, we followed him along a forest path through the middle of the island, as he took us to the eastern shore. And then, after ten minutes of weaving through the palm trees, we heard lapping waves, and the corn-blue Caribbean opened up in front of us on the other side of a pure golden beach, and suddenly all the effort made sense.

That first piña colada tasted really special, I can tell you...

Little Corn Island

Written: 14 February 2014

We unashamedly fell off the budget bandwagon in Little Corn Island, and it was absolute bliss. So far on this trip we’ve had one splurge – Christmas on the beach in Guatemala – but we’ve generally stuck to a reasonable budget, because if you spend too much when travelling, you tend to get pushed away from the very culture that you’ve come to experience. But after three months of eating fairly dreadful local food, getting numb limbs on hard mattresses, wincing as the chicken bus goes over yet another pothole, and lying there, wide-eyed as the early-morning dog-and-cockerel dawn chorus starts up yet again, we figured we needed a bit of a holiday.

And Little Corn Island is about as perfect a holiday destination as you’re going to find anywhere. Lying 12km to the northeast of Big Corn Island, which itself is 70km off Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, Little Corn Island is billed as being like the Caribbean from 50 years ago, and it’s easy to understand why. At just 1.1 square miles, Little Corn has no roads or vehicles – not even golf carts – and there’s no more than a handful of concrete footpaths where locals push hand-carts and wheelbarrows as transport. There’s only intermittent electricity, with the village generator working from 2pm to 5am each day, and as it’s been known to break down for three weeks at a time, you can’t rely on it (which is why the better hotels have their own generators for backup power). There’s no airport, so everyone has to come in by boat from Big Corn Island, and if the weather is playing up, you can get stranded for days. It’s properly remote.

The island has just one small village with about 1000 inhabitants, with about another 300 tourists in residence at any one time; tourism is now the island’s main economy, having taken over from lobster fishing. There are no poisonous snakes or spiders on the island, though there are still plenty that look like they might be. The most common language is English, and the island’s name is officially Little Corn Island (rather than Isla Pequeña del Maíz), because the islands were British between 1655 and 1894, and when they then became part of Nicaragua, they were immediately leased to the USA. It was only in 1971 that they finally became fully Nicaraguan and the result is that the Corn Islands feel far more Caribbean than Nicaraguan, and for English-speaking visitors, there’s no language barrier, which is a wonderful relief after the mainland.

There’s a large baseball stadium surrounded by forest in the middle of the island, which you can reach via the footpath from the village to the north of the island; it’s a bit of a surprise, given the small size of the community, but they do like their baseball here in Nicaragua. The highest point of the island, at 38m above sea level, is home to a communications tower, and next to it is a small lighthouse tower that you can climb up for a 360° view of the whole island. Outside the main village there’s a smattering of low-key hotels dotted round the northern and eastern shores... and the rest of the island is made up of tropical forest, golden-sand beaches, corn-blue lagoons, palm trees and lots and lots of sunshine. Little Corn Island ticks all the boxes for a remote island paradise, and then some.

Five Stars and Counting

We split our stay between two places, the first on Cocal Beach halfway up the eastern shore of the island, and the second at Otto Beach in the middle of the northern shore. The trade winds tend to blow from the northeast round here, so the village and harbour are tucked away on the more sheltered western side, and while this means the boats are protected from the onslaught of the hurricane season – which last hit here in 2009, when the eye of Hurricane Ida passed right over the island – it does mean that the village gets hot and humid while the northern and eastern coasts are much fresher. Given how much I hate hot and humid weather, we happily fled the village scene and parked ourselves on the breezy beach for the duration.

It helped that the eastern shore is home to the number two hotel on the island, while the northern shore is home to the number one hotel. It also helped that the number two hotel, the lovely Little Corn Beach and Bungalows, could only fit us in for our first three nights (and then only because of a last-minute cancellation), so we did the maths and took them up on their offer, while booking the following week with the Yemaya Hotel and Spa, the island’s top spot.

It was unashamed luxury. The only cabin they had available at Little Corn Beach and Bungalows was their best one – what a shame! – and it was lovely, with a huge and extremely soft kingsize bed, a view out onto Cocal Beach through the gently waving palm trees, and a pleasant restaurant nearby that served ice-cold beer, lobster, fish, steak and decent wine. We did precious little except sit and enjoy the view, with the odd wander along the picturesque beaches or through the forest and into the village. We absolutely loved it.

Yemaya, though, took things to a whole new level. Back when we first started going on holiday together, Peta and I would spend our holidays travelling, visiting places like Cuba, India, Morocco and so on. Over the next few years, my job intensified to the point where I needed to go on holiday to rest, and travelling for two weeks is hardly restful, so we graduated to five-star holidays on the beach in places like Mauritius and Malaysia (none of which I wrote about, because there’s precious little to say when you’re lazing on the beach, sipping cocktails and snoozing in the sunshine). Once you’ve tasted the high life, it never leaves you, so when Yemaya called out with its promise of five-star luxury on a paradise Caribbean island, just as we needed a haven from the travelling circuit of Central America, we just couldn’t resist.

God, it was worth it. Yemaya is made up of 16 luxurious boutique cabins, with properly hot showers (our first since Santa Ana in El Salvador), delightful beds, a perfect beach a few steps from a lovely veranda, and an attention to detail that simply doesn’t exist at the budget and mid-range levels. We slipped rather too easily back into the velvet glove of five-star living, happily ditching the shitty diet of Central America for wonderful curries and fresh fish dishes, and switching to cocktails and European beer instead of yet another bottle of Nicaraguan lager. We wandered along the beaches, which are absolutely picture-postcard perfect at the northern end of the island, and snorkelled on the reef that comes right up to the beach in front of the hotel.

We did a scuba dive, where we swam through huge shoals of fish, saw a monster moray eel and marvelled at a grumpy-looking stone fish (though we only managed the one dive because we both went down with a mild dose of Delhi belly, which forced us to kick back and do nothing for a while... though the snorkelling was so excellent that we didn’t really feel the need to dive again anyway). And we just sat there and soaked up the endless panorama of pure turquoise seas, lapping waves, gentle island breezes and golden beaches.

Basically, we stopped travelling for 11 days and instead had a holiday. Boy, did we need it; getting back onto the road is going to be a bit of a shock after such a blissful interlude in paradise.

Nicaragua: The South

Granada to Isla de Ometepe

Written: 17 February 2014

We’d heard some pretty nasty things about the twice-weekly public ferry from Granada to Isla de Ometepe, and to be honest, I was a bit scared. Lago de Nicaragua, the huge freshwater lake that the ferry crosses to get to the island, is famous for its strong winds, and as any sailor knows, strong winds mean big waves. And big waves and passenger ferries do not mix well, particularly when I’m on them.

It didn’t help that when we returned to Granada after our wonderful visit to Little Corn Island, we accidentally picked a hotel room with a sloping bed and a nasty line in mosquitoes, which came as a bit of a surprise as we’d decided to book a better hotel than we normally do, to help with the come-down from a week of five-star living. After we complained the following morning, with our hair sticking up like members of The Cure, the hotel kindly moved us into a different property for our second night, where we enjoyed life in our own self-contained apartment, overlooking a pool from a delightful veranda. But the damage was done: we were exhausted from a whole night of rolling into the middle of the bed and trying not to scratch too much, and on top of this, Peta had contracted a bout of swimmer’s ear from our one scuba dive on Little Corn, and the antibiotic drops were taking their time to kick in. To say we weren’t on top form is an understatement.

But we decided we’d give the ferry a go anyway, because we figured it could go either way; if we were lucky, it would be an enjoyable four-hour ferry journey across a volcano-studded lake, and if we weren’t, it would be a long fight against seasickness, because when the lake plays up, it really plays up. The advice we’d been given was to stay away from the windows, because when it’s rough, even they can’t keep the lake out of the cabin. And as for seasickness... well, they don’t allow anyone to drink alcohol on board, which says it all, really. So I stocked up on seasickness tablets and crossed my fingers, sending up a prayer for calm weather the next morning.

Two Deckchairs, Please

It turns out that the secret to enjoying the ferry trip from Granada to Ometepe is to hire a deckchair. There are two levels on the ferry – first class is on the upper deck, while second class is on the lower deck – and as foreigners are only allowed to buy first class tickets, you have a choice between the open deck at the back, or the air-conditioned cabin that comes complete with padded benches and a blaring television that simply won’t shut up. If it’s a nice day then the open deck is much more enticing, and if you get in there quick, you can hire a deckchair for the entire journey for just over a dollar.

It’s a great idea because Lago de Nicaragua is the largest lake in Central America, so not only is it big enough to feel like the sea, it’s also big enough to act like the sea. The winds around these parts tend to be easterlies or northeasterlies, so you have a choice: the port side will be sheltered from the sun but will bear the brunt of the wind, while the starboard side will be more sheltered but will also catch the hot, afternoon sun. We hired two deckchairs and the man stuck them on the starboard side, towards the back of the deck, and so the die were cast; we’d see later whether or not we’d lucked out.

But first we had to get going. It is supposed to take four hours to sail from Granada, at the western tip of the lake, to Isla de Ometepe, about halfway along the southwestern shore, with the ferry leaving at 2pm and arriving at 6pm, just as it’s going dark. This isn’t as quick as the standard way of getting from Granada to Ometepe – which involves an hour-and-a-half in the chicken bus to Rivas, a short taxi ride to San Jorge, and an hour’s ferry crossing to Ometepe – but the Granada ferry is rather more civilised, as it doesn’t involve the chicken bus. It does get as packed as the chicken bus, though, and they really ram the passengers on; first class is all bodies and bags, so goodness only knows what second class is like, but when you’ve got yourself a deckchair, you can just sit there and watch the world go by.

We didn’t quite leave on time, finally pulling out of Granada half an hour later than scheduled, but we’d already started snoozing, so it didn’t really matter. The skies were pure blue, the wind was fairly steady but not as strong as it could have been, and we sat there for the next five hours as Granada receded into the distance and the twin peaks of Ometepe’s distant volcanoes slowly grew larger on the horizon. The sun was fierce, but my chair was just behind one of the ferry’s chimneys, so I managed to stay happily shaded while Peta’s chair got the sunshine that she wanted. It was blissful.

Unfortunately it wasn’t so blissful for those on the port side of the deck. They enjoyed a smug couple of hours as the sun cooked the starboard side while they were sheltered, but as we headed out into the middle of the lake, the wind picked up and the swell started rolling. And suddenly, wham! The bow hit a big wave and five seconds later there was a crashing sound followed by lots of high-pitched shrieks, as half of Lago de Nicaragua splashed over the port side and rained down on the port-side passengers. Suddenly there was panic as water gushed across the metal decks, soaking all the bags that were on the open deck (ours were inside) and washing over those who hadn’t been lucky enough to snag a deckchair and who were sitting on the bare deck.

It wasn’t remotely chaotic where we were sitting. At one point I had to pick up my bag when I saw some water heading our way, but I had plenty of time to hang it on the back of the deckchair and go back to contemplating the wonderful view of Ometepe. And when the next splash hit, and the entire row of deckchairs on the port side got drenched so much that they gave up and went inside, we didn’t get splashed one little bit. Oh, and we got to enjoy a glorious sunset too. I guess the starboard side was indeed the right choice...

We also lucked out when we finally pulled into the dock at Altagracia. We’d booked one night in the Hotel Central, which then promptly filled up with a group of American cyclists who were also on the ferry, so those who hadn’t booked ahead ended up in the Hotel Castillo, which had absolutely terrible reviews on TripAdvisor. The Hotel Central was, in comparison, a lovely little spot, and it did a mean grilled chicken and served cold beers, which went down a little too well that evening.

And, I realised as I sipped my third Victoria, I hadn’t felt seasick once. What a great way to get to Ometepe...

Isla de Ometepe

Written: 19 February 2014

After spending so long lounging around on Little Corn Island, we weren’t sure about the wisdom of visiting another island so soon, but I’m so glad we did. Isla de Ometepe, the world’s largest freshwater island that sits about halfway along the southern edge of Lago de Nicaragua, is a stunningly beautiful place – particularly if you like volcanoes, as I do – and although we didn’t stay for long, it was well worth the detour on our way south to the border with Costa Rica.

The island’s beauty lies in its skyline; shaped like a figure of eight turned anti-clockwise through 45°, the island is made up of two huge volcanoes that are joined by a saddle of sand, all of which is smothered in lush green vegetation. The volcanoes are quite different in character: the larger of the two, 1610m-high Volcán Concepción, is one of the most perfect volcanic cones that I’ve ever seen, while 1394m-high Volcán Maderas looks more like the remains of a cosmic hard-boiled egg after the teaspoon has done its worst. And because the two volcanoes sit facing each other across the saddle of sand, with Concepción to the northwest and Maderas to the southeast, you get wonderful and ever-changing views of the peaks as you move around the island. It’s breathtaking, as long as the clouds are being kind (which, for our visit, they were for the most part).

To be fair, we didn’t do a great deal of exploring. After our night in Altagracia, we decamped to a very pleasant little hotel on Playa Santa Domingo, the beach along the northeastern edge of the sand saddle that joins the two volcanoes. The food in the hotel restaurant was organic and refreshingly un-Nicaraguan, and we happily collapsed into the hammocks overlooking the bay. The only drawback is that it’s extremely windswept on the northern side of the island, with the trade winds pounding across Lago de Nicaragua and straight into the beach, but the scenery is stunning and hardly any of the beach is developed, with just a handful of small hotels along the northern section and practically nothing at the southern end.

Walking along the beach is an enjoyable way to spend the day; from the southern end of the curved bay there are wonderful views of Concepción, while the northern section has Maderas as a backdrop, and all the while the waves pound into the black sand beach, driven by the steady breeze. Because of the reliable wind, this is a popular spot for kitesurfing, and their colourful sails ride up and down the lively surf; meanwhile, because Ometepe is a very rural area, farmers drive their cattle down to the lake to drink, and horses live at the southern end of the beach, ready to take visitors on beach rides. It’s a strange mix of slow traditional farming and high-octane modern sport, all in the shadow of that perfect cone and its binary companion.

For our last day on the island, we took a kayak up the Rio Istiam, a small river (or, more accurately, a river-shaped mangrove swamp) that almost cuts the island in two across the southern end of the sand saddle. Our guide was keen to show us the vibrant birdlife, alligators and turtles living in the swamp, and he did a good job, but I kept getting distracted as we’d paddle round another corner in the river and bang! There’s another picture-postcard view of Concepción’s cone, or another delightful skyline dominated by the jagged peaks of Maderas. These are the days when you’re thankful for digital cameras; Ometepe is such a pretty island you just can’t stop framing the views and clicking that button. What a lovely way to end our Nicaraguan journey...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 19 February 2014

As we’ve travelled south through Central America, we’ve asked people coming the other way what they’ve thought of the countries they’ve visited, and there’s a surprising consistency to their opinions. Costa Rica gets summed up as being expensive and touristy, but great for wildlife and outdoor sports; El Salvador is always described as incredibly friendly, but fairly light on big attractions; and when people talk about Guatemala they tend to talk about the other travellers they met there, and oh yes, did you go to Tikal and wasn’t it simply amazing? But it’s Nicaragua that gets the pithiest response. Everyone, and I mean everyone, uses exactly the same phrase for Nicaragua; they shrug and say ‘well, it’s cheap.’ It’s not exactly the most ringing endorsement you’ve ever heard.

The thing is, it’s not a bad way to sum up the country. Nicaragua has the lowest prices in the region for travellers, a direct consequence of it being the poorest country in Central America; the Nicaraguan córdoba has been steadily devaluing against the dollar for some time, and this helps to bring prices down for foreign visitors. The only exception we found was the price of tours, which are kept high because the target market can afford it; our day-long coffee tour cost US$140 for the two of us, which is pretty much a European price. We were happy to pay that, but when your hotel room is costing you just US$15 a night for a double room with en suite bathroom, it certainly stands out. Meanwhile transport is very cheap, accommodation is very cheap, food is very cheap, and that’s always welcome for the traveller with a finite budget.

On the other hand, it’s also cheap as in ‘cheap and nasty’. The food is pretty rubbish; the transport is noisy, uncomfortable and polluting; the beds are hard; and the country is clearly poor, with open sewers in the cities, holes in the pavements, dust absolutely everywhere, and in places like Granada, lots of beggars and people who simply demand that you give them money. I don’t have a problem with any of this – these are all facts of life in poor countries – but it means that while Nicaragua might be cheap, you tend to get what you pay for.

As for the sights, there are some great ones – we loved Little Corn Island and Isla de Ometepe – but most of the other places we visited were less enticing. The colonial city of León is worth a look even though it’s as hot as hell, but we found Granada’s seedy tourism a bit too much to bear; the canyoning in Somoto is quite entertaining but is probably not worth the long journey north; and the coffee and chocolate tours around Matagalpa are mildly diverting, but not exactly life-changing. Most of the time, when balancing the effort/reward equation, we found that the amount of effort often outweighed the reward... for us, anyway.

So it’s a bit of a challenge travelling in Nicaragua, which is not much of a surprise, but it would be a lot easier to ride the ups and downs if the people were cheerier. Unfortunately the Nicaraguans seem to be a bit cheesed off with life; they’re not a terribly smiley people, and they don’t seem to want you in their country. There are exceptions of course, but the nice people we met were almost always involved in the tourist industry, whether tour guides or hotel staff, so they had a vested interest in being friendly. Outside of the tourist bubble, the people are often genuinely arsey. I lost count of the number of times that I went into a shop and politely asked for something, only to have the grumpy woman behind the counter stare at me as if I’d sworn at her; then eventually she’d turn around, shuffle to the back of the shop, dragging her feet like a grumpy teenager, and when she’d return she’d throw the product on the counter with an almost audible sigh of irritation, as if I’d gravely insulted her by the mere act of trying to offer her money in exchange for her goods. This approach to customer service – which we in the West would call an ‘attitude problem’ – seems to apply to everything, from restaurants to taxis, and although you soon get used to it, it doesn’t exactly help you fall for the locals’ charms; indeed, there simply don’t appear to be any to fall for.

But then you remember that Nicaragua is incredibly poor and that the Nicaraguans have plenty to be grumpy about. And you shrug your shoulders and thank your lucky stars that purely by an accident of birth, you’re able to visit this country... and you’re able to leave it, too.

Or, to put it another way, ‘Well, it’s cheap.’

Costa Rica: Costa Rica

Culture Shock

Written: 20 February 2014

Crossing the border from Nicaragua into Costa Rica is a fascinating exercise in ‘spot the difference’. This is not surprising, as Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America, while Costa Rica is one of the richest; it comes out top in ‘quality of life’ measurements such as life expectancy, education, child mortality, crime prevention and so on, though Panama actually has a bigger economy because of the canal. As a result, the change when you head east is astounding.

While Nicaragua is dusty, pot-holed and rubbish-strewn, Costa Rica is landscaped and clean; in Nicaragua, farm-life spills out onto the street, while Costa Rica’s cows are neatly hemmed into fenced fields; Nicaragua’s cars are rust-buckets that drag their hind-quarters in the dirt, while Costa Rican cars look shiny and new; in Nicaragua, the roads are lined with shacks that are only kept upright by luck, while Costa Rica’s housing is clean, modern and architecturally stable; and while Nicaragua’s people are clad in clothes that reflect the rural and earthy way of life there, Costa Ricans sport sunglasses, tight jeans and a sense of fashion that is decidedly Western. It’s a total shock.

It made the taxi ride from the Nicaraguan border a slightly surreal experience, not least because the taxi driver seemed to be more interested in driving carefully and avoiding collisions than in overtaking on blind corners or ramming cows off the road. There weren’t any holes in the road to swerve round, or chicken buses heading straight for us, and even the policeman at the single checkpoint we passed through was dressed up in modern police gear, though one suspects that the police round here are still the last people you should call when there’s a problem.

And when we checked into our hotel in Liberia, the first major city after the border, it really hit home. We’d teamed up with Paul and Jenn, a friendly couple from Manchester whom we’d met on Little Corn Island, and they’d suggested a hotel that had good online reviews and a swimming pool, but what the website hadn’t managed to get across was the location. It turned out to be on a busy junction on the main highway just out of town, which wasn’t ideal, but it did mean that we were literally next door to a gleaming tower of modern American living in the shape of a huge McDonalds. Over the road was a Burger King and in the hotel were lots of pasty American tourists... and that’s where the culture shock started to make sense, for Costa Rica is not really a travelling destination, it’s a tourist destination, and there’s a definite difference.

I wonder whether it will turn out to be too much of a shock after the dusty trail through Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua...

Monteverde

Written: 23 February 2014

More often than not, recommendations from other travellers are like gold dust, and they completely transform your experience. Sometimes, however, they just don’t work out, and in Monteverde, one of Costa Rica’s main tourist attractions, things didn’t quite go as planned.

It all sounded great on paper. Monteverde is home to Costa Rica’s richest cloud forest – that’s rainforest that lives in a semi-permanent cloud layer, formed by moisture-laden Pacific air being pushed up by the continental divide – and this humidity creates a unique forest environment that’s teeming with wildlife. Back in Rio Dulce in Guatemala, we’d met an Australian couple who had raved about Monteverde and had recommended Selvatura Park as the best place to see the cloud forest, and we’d been looking forward to it ever since.

Paul and Jenn had decided to hire a car for their trip and they kindly offered us a lift to Monteverde and on to La Fortuna, and the drive up from Liberia was spectacular. Costa Rica has been called the Switzerland of Central America, and it’s easy to see why; as you climb up from the hot plains of western Costa Rica and into the hills, it’s easy to persuade yourself that you’re in Europe, with all the pretty chalets and steep farmed slopes. The last hour to Monteverde is along a dirt road, which makes for a bumpy but atmospheric ride, and it wasn’t long before we’d arrived in Santa Elena, the main settlement in Monteverde, and checked into the hotel that Paul had booked online from Liberia.

Except it turned out that the room we’d booked didn’t actually exist; the hotel manager said that they were having a problem with one of their online agencies and this was the fourth time that week that they’d oversold rooms in the hotel, but he said he’d booked a couple of rooms for us in a nearby hotel. It all felt a little dodgy, to be honest, and none of us quite believed what he said, but we didn’t have much choice and ended up moving to a rather dingy hotel off the main drag, with the promise of being moved back to our original hotel for our last night.

Into the Cloud Forest

Undaunted, the following morning we all headed off to Selvatura Park to check out the cloud forest first-hand, and we were all in pretty high spirits as we hopped into the shuttle bus that picked us up from the hotel. The bus was full of elderly Americans on two-week holidays – who were sociable but completely out of sync with the kind of trip we’ve been on – so perhaps we should have spotted the warning signs from the start, because in the end Selvatura Park turned out to be a huge disappointment.

Now, if you’ve just hopped on a plane from a snowbound New York and spilled out into Selvatura Park, then it’s going to blow your mind. There’s a concrete forest walkway that meanders through the rainforest, crossing a number of high suspension bridges that take you high over the forest canopy, and after the shock of the American winter, it’s bound to be a thrill simply to be in the tropics. And then there’s a hummingbird garden where artificial flowers attract hummingbirds of all colours and sizes, where you can sit and simply watch these stunning creatures hovering, right in front of your face.

In hindsight, it’s no wonder the Australians were so enthusiastic in their recommendation, because they started their Central American journey in Costa Rica, and this was one of the first things they saw. But if you’ve just spent four months travelling through Central America, or you’ve seen a lot of rainforests in other parts of the world, then the cloud forest in Selvatura is a pretty dull place. There’s absolutely no wildlife to be seen, which is not surprising when you consider the hordes of noisy tourists who pile through the walkway every day, and the forest is just not that amazing. We all started off with high hopes, but towards the end of the walk we were more interested in our conversations than looking at the forest, which was a shame, especially as the walk cost US$30 per person. Even the hummingbird garden, which had an additional entrance fee of US$5, was slightly disappointing; the hummingbirds were pleasant, but it was hard to concentrate with all the groups of noisy Americans that burst their way into the concrete garden and stood there talking loudly about their hotel rooms and how excited they were about their itineraries.

Rather unimpressed by the cost and the overly touristy experience of Selvatura, we booked on a night walk at our hotel, and were taken on a three-and-a-half hour walk around the hotel grounds by an animated local called Sergio. Unfortunately this didn’t help to lift our mood, as we saw very little wildlife, and the walk ended up dragging on and on into the night, way past the point where we were still interested. We did see a tarantula in its hole, which was great, and we saw the odd pair of reflecting animal eyes up in the canopy, but overall it was a bit disappointing after the reports we’d heard about Costa Rica being so full of life that it practically jumps out at you all the time. Perhaps it was a quiet night, but by the end of day one in Monteverde, we were all feeling a little cheated.

So the next day we went for something completely touristy in the shape of a SkyTrek zipline trip through the rainforest canopy (there a lots of zipline companies out there, but we chose SkyTrek as they seemed to have the highest lines and the safest equipment). This was more like it, though as Peta is scared of heights, she wasn’t quite so keen, especially when we had to take a cable car up to the top of the continental divide before climbing a metal tower in buffeting winds and serious mists. She managed to hang on in quiet desperation before she was hooked onto the wire that shot her across a deep valley to the tower on the opposite side, and even though she had to endure a total of nine ziplines, with the highest 100m above the forest and the biggest a whopping 750m in length, she managed to get through to the end. I enjoyed it a bit more than she did, and while I’m not sure it’s an experience either of us will rush to repeat, it was good to be trying something new.

Meanwhile, Santa Elena was starting to wear us down. The biggest problem was the food; the restaurants are overpriced (prices are similar to London, one of the most expensive cities on the planet) and the food is pretty lame. We tried spending more and simply got poncier food that still wasn’t terribly good, and we tried spending less and just didn’t get anywhere. We felt a bit ripped off by our hotel, because when we moved into the rooms we’d originally booked online, they were so much better than the ones in the other hotel, which simply rubbed our noses in the fact that for two nights, we hadn’t got what we’d originally booked. And everywhere the prices seem to creep up, whether it was the annoying tendency for restaurants to show prices that don’t include tax or service charges, so it’s hard to work out what the price will actually be; or the way the tourist attractions have tiered price lists, so although you get quoted a price for your visit, it turns out that it doesn’t include everything shown in the glossy brochure, and you end up having to fork out more dollars to do the things that you assumed were included.

But if you’re a tourist here on a short holiday, none of this is a problem, it’s only a problem if you’re used to travelling through countries that have similar attractions, but less of a tourist machine wrapped around them. Unfortunately, we’ve already seen a lot of what Monteverde has to offer in other countries on our trip, and then without a glut of American tourists clogging up the viewing platforms, so in the end it was hard not to feel a bit let down by Monteverde’s rampant tourism and inflated prices.

La Fortuna

Written: 25 February 2014

In La Fortuna, the tourist town at the foot of Volcán Arenal, the wheels completely came off our Costa Rican journey. We were already a bit jaded by our disappointing experience in Monteverde, but by the time we arrived in La Fortuna, we really needed a day off to take stock of our plans.

The problem is us, not Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a perfect holiday destination if you have a couple of weeks to spend in Central America, as it’s got it all. It’s got rainforests, it’s got wildlife, it’s got volcanoes, it’s got beaches, it’s got turtles, it’s got mangrove swamps, and it’s got lots going for it, but the problem is we’ve already seen plenty of all that on our journey so far, and when I sat down to plan our next move after La Fortuna, I just couldn’t get enthused by any of it. And we figured that while we could spend a small fortune exploring Costa Rica, it just didn’t feel that appealing to be paying European prices to see things that, to be honest, we’re getting a little tired of. And then I realised that shooting through Costa Rica would give us more time on Colombia, which people universally rave about, and the die was cast.

So we failed to explore the sights of La Fortuna, which include volcano walks – though not to the top of Arenal, which is off-limits – and a whole collection of hot springs, from the free local springs to resorts that cost hundreds of dollars a day. Instead we booked a flight from San José to the Bocas del Toro archipelago in Panama, and made plans to take the bus to the capital the following morning. It just felt like the right thing to do, and as soon as we’d bought our flight tickets and booked a place in Bocas, the weight lifted from our collective shoulders as we realised we were going to be out of Costa Rica within a few days. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut.

Unfortunately, staying in La Fortuna for a couple of days only helped to reinforce our decision, as the food is mediocre and the prices are high, and the town itself is a charmless tourist hole strung out along a highway. The big drawcard is Arenal, which used to spew hot lava from its summit, drawing in tourists by the busload; unfortunately the lava stopped flowing in 2010, so for those of us who’ve seen more volcanoes than we can stomach, it no longer has any special appeal, though when the cone pops out of its shroud of cloud, it’s still an impressive sight. But it wasn’t impressive enough to make us hang around, so after a couple of nights we said goodbye to Paul and Jenn with a disappointing meal in a disappointing restaurant, and hopped on the bus for the capital of Costa Rica, San José, to make good our escape.

San José

Written: 28 February 2014

The capital of Costa Rica is an interesting place, though perhaps not in terms of the tourist attractions. It does have some good museums that are worth visiting – we popped into the Museum of Gold and it was a worthy diversion – and the Plaza de la Cultura is quite good fun with its pigeons and people-watching, but the part that we enjoyed most was checking out the huge variety of hookers on every street corner in the area round our hotel, while avoiding the eyes of the shifty characters hanging round there at night.

We’d hastily booked a flight to the Bocos del Toro archipelago in Panama as part of our escape plan, but that still left us with a couple of days to kill in the capital. The food is better here than in the tourist areas of Monteverde and La Fortuna, so at least we were able to eat reasonably well and without feeling as ripped off as we did in the cloud forest, but to be honest our hearts weren’t really in it any more, so we didn’t do a great deal other than wander round and kill time.

A bonus was that we managed to meet up with Neil and Bronwyn, whom we’d originally met in Playa Esteron in El Salvador and again in Granada in Nicaragua, and we enjoyed a few drinks and an evening meal in the main shopping street in central San José. It was interesting to talk to them about their perspective, as on their first visit they hadn’t been overly impressed with parts of Costa Rica either, though they had found that hiring a car meant you could avoid the more touristy areas and discover the more enjoyable parts of the country. But we were already committed to our flight, and on our ninth day in Costa Rica, we hopped in a taxi at 6.30am, checked in at the airport, and ran like the wind for Panama without so much as a backward glance.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 28 February 2014

We didn’t do Costa Rica justice, there’s no doubt about it. It isn’t Costa Rica’s fault, but a lot of travellers spend less time here than they’d originally planned, as it’s an expensive place that stands out among its neighbours as a massive tourist hole. In the end, we were no exception.

It wasn’t the expense that got to us, but the lack of value for money. We felt ripped off all the time in Costa Rica, because we’ve seen similar things in other countries, but without the high price tags and without the crowds of tourists. Costa Rica is a great destination if you’re on a short holiday, but it isn’t so great if you’re travelling through the whole of Central America, and it had the astonishing effect of making us nostalgic for Nicaragua, which we’d left only a few days before with a sense of relief.

Our frustration lasted to the end. At the airport in San José, you have to pay a departure tax in cash, which we knew about, but we assumed we’d pay at the check-in desk. There were no signs anywhere telling us what to do, so we queued for the check-in, only to find that we had to pay the tax at the other end of the airport first, and then check in. So we dragged our bags to the snaking queue at the other end of the airport, where we had to pay US$29 each in cash, and dragged them back to the check-in, thinking all the time that this is Costa Rica in a nutshell: extra charges pop up everywhere that are inconvenient and not insignificant. By the time we finally got onto our flight, which was delayed because the airline ‘had a lot of planes going today’, we were itching to leave.

But it would be churlish to blame Costa Rica for all this. It is what it is, and in the end we just weren’t in the mood for a long trip in an overpriced tourist destination. I’d originally planned a month here; instead we managed nine days, and we decided to leave after just five. That’s the good thing about travelling; if you don’t like where you are, you can always move on, and that’s precisely what we did... and without an ounce of regret.

Panama: Mainland Panama

Bocas del Toro

Written: 5 March 2014

There are two main types of Caribbean island, as far as I can make out. The first is the classic desert island, with its golden sand beaches, coral reefs just off the shore, corn-blue seas and palm trees dangling over the water; we’ve already enjoyed that particular vibe on Caye Caulker in Belize and Little Corn Island in Nicaragua. The second type is the rainforest and mangrove island, where it’s more about trees, biodiversity and greenery rather than paradise picture postcard shots; it’s this second type that we’ve been enjoying in the Bocos del Toro archipelago.

The difference was apparent from the moment we arrived. We flew in from San José in a 20-seater, two-prop plane, and although it wasn’t half as much fun as the 12-seater we took to Little Corn, it was still a lot more enjoyable than being in a bigger plane, and we had good views of the islands as we approached. But instead of turquoise waters and long stretches of gleaming sand, the waters were deep blue, the skies were dark grey and the islands were completely smothered in thick green forest, and after we landed and got through customs and immigration, the heavens opened and a tropical downpour smudged the taxi driver’s windscreen into a muddy mess.

‘Welcome to paradise!’ he said as he cheerfully talked on his mobile while swerving through the island traffic one-handed. ‘Sorry about the weather – it won’t last long.’

And it didn’t, though we did have to wait for it to clear so we could take a water taxi over to Isla Bastimentos, where we’d booked in for five days of rest and recuperation after our whirlwind tour of Costa Rica.

The Islands of Bocas

There are six main islands in the Bocas archipelago, among a scattering of tiny islets, but only three of them have any sizeable facilities for tourism. The main one, Isla Colón, contains the airport and Bocas del Toro town, and it’s a predictably boisterous seaside town with lots of booming music, a mushrooming party hostel scene, a large number of restaurants, and plenty of traffic; our visit to the islands coincided with carnival season, which stretches all across South and Central America (though it’s most famous in Brazil, of course), and Bocas town joins the party with gusto, which only adds to the noise and drunkenness levels in town. It’s a fun place to visit, and it was interesting watching the drunks trying to beat the crap out of each other in the main park, but I’m glad we didn’t end up staying there, as it’s hardly a restful spot. That said, the restaurants that stick out into the ocean on stilts are pleasant venues for a spot of lunch, and the island does have some quieter beaches away from the town, but the best part of Bocas town is leaving it behind on a water taxi and heading to its more peaceful neighbours.

Right next to Colón is Isla Carenero, which is a quieter affair that contains a number of classier hotels and restaurants, though if you end up in one that looks across to Bocas town, which is only about 100m away, then you’ll still end up enjoying the heavy bass of the party until the wee hours (water is an excellent conductor of reggae beats, as I discovered in a stilt village in Ghana). In comparison, the eastern shore has a bit of a beach and is nice and peaceful, though it also has quite a few friendly sandflies.

The furthest island with any sizeable community is Isla Bastimentos, which is a ten-minute boat ride from Bocas town, and not surprisingly it’s the quietest and most Caribbean of all three islands. There’s no traffic here at all, just a concrete pavement through the centre of Old Bank, the main settlement on the island, and we booked into a jungle cabin at the nattily named Beverly’s Hill hotel and kicked back to do serious amounts of nothing while we washed Costa Rica out of our hair and settled into some proper Panamanian living.

We did manage to do some things while on the islands, though I can’t remotely pretend that we explored them to their full potential, because we didn’t. There is good diving and snorkelling round here, though we didn’t try it, and there’s also sailing, fishing and, of course, swimming, though we didn’t try any of that either. We did, however, manage to walk to the beach, which took more than an hour of wandering through the rainforest, creeping over tree roots and side-stepping mud-holes on the winding path from the main drag in Bastimentos to Wizard Beach on the other side of the island. The locals told us it would take either 20 minutes, 30 minutes or 45 minutes, depending on who you asked, but we did get lost a couple of times, so it’s hard to tell who was right.

In the end, Wizard Beach turned out to be remote (though not remote enough to be particularly tourist-free) and to have a certain rugged charm about it, though it’s nowhere near as charming as the beaches on Little Corn, which are picture-postcard material. It doesn’t help that there are signs along the beach warning you of the lethal rip tide that can suck you under and drown you if you don’t know how to get out of it properly (for the record, if you get caught in a rip tide, you should swim parallel to the shore until you’re out of the tide, and you mustn’t struggle or try to swim against the flow; if you try to swim into the shore, against the rip tide, you will simply wear yourself out until you drown). After such a long journey through the humid forest, tackling the pounding waves of Wizard Beach just wasn’t that appealing, so we turned round and walked back to town again, where we went back to doing nothing for a few days.

Luckily the hosts of Beverly’s Hill made for excellent company. Simon, an ex-punk from England, and his Colombian wife Sandra and nine-year-old daughter Naomi, look after six rooms in three wooden chalets in a little rainforest enclave just up the hill from the main path in Old Bank. It’s hot and humid and you have to share your life with the wildlife, but we loved it; at one point we had a bird fly straight through our room, in one window and out of the other, and the garden was alive with thumb-sized red frogs, the signature animal of the Bocas archipelago.

We went to sleep to the endless drone of the rainforest’s insect population, and we slept like the dead and had long lie-ins, which is something we haven’t been able to do for months. Central America tends to get up incredibly early, and can’t help making a hell of a racket when it does, but in Bastimentos, with its lack of traffic and motivation, we slept straight through to double figures without thinking twice about it. It probably helped that we joined Simon and Sandra for a couple of late evenings for a few snifters on their veranda, where we gently sank into talk about life in the tropics and how it compares to life in England; it was all very relaxing after the preceding couple of weeks of relatively hectic travel.

We were sad to leave, but by the time we did, we’d got Costa Rica well and truly out of our systems, and we were ready to start our long journey east along the winding road of Panama, heading slowly to the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City and the journey on to Colombia.

Boquete

Written: 8 March 2014

Boquete is a pretty little mountain town in northwest Panama that used to be famous for coffee-growing and vegetable farms, but in 2001 the American Association of Retired Persons named it as the fourth best place in the world to spend your retirement, and since then it’s seen a notable influx of American retirees and a blossoming of gated communities, golf courses and retirement bungalows. As you dodder around town, you can see the effect – there are, indeed, lots of old white people here – though there are still plenty of locals around, so it still feels pretty Panamanian.

I suspect that the retirement atmosphere rubbed off on us, though, because as soon as we stumbled out of the tourist shuttle that brought us all the way from Bocas, we felt our motivation evaporate as surely as if someone had shoved pipes in our mouths and popped slippers on our feet. For the tourist, Boquete is all about coffee tours, canopy walks, ziplines, volcano hikes, bird-watching and white-water rafting, but the rivers are too dry for rafting at the moment, we’re not twitchers, and we’ve had our fill of everything else on the list, so we simply kicked back and settled in for a quick bout of home comforts and empty days.

It helped that we’d booked into a B&B that was not only a fair distance out of town, in the neighbouring district of Alto Boquete, but it was also a very laid-back home run by a relaxed German who let us use his extensive kitchen in his suburban bungalow. Our room was cosy and only had one small window, so we weren’t woken up by the sunlight, and being so far out of town meant that there was absolutely no noise at all, not even the barking of dogs or the morning screech of the cockerels. We slept like the dead, which seemed rather appropriate.

We did manage to go for a short walk around town, but that ended prematurely when a pretty garden we had hoped to visit, which the owner had opened to the public, turned out to be permanently closed, as the owner has now passed away and his son isn’t interested in having the public poking their noses into his back yard; one hopes that he will now take down the sign above the entrance that says, ‘Mi jardín es su jardín’ (‘My garden is your garden’), as this is clearly no longer the case. So instead we booked on a Jeep tour of the surrounding area and spent an afternoon being driven to the various viewpoints and waterfalls that draw walkers to Boquete. The hills round here are pretty steep and there’s a lot of climbing and descending if you choose to walk – as, judging by the number of hikers we passed in the Jeep, a lot of people do – but going by Jeep is so much more... refined for people our age. After all, I’ve got a bad back and I’m not getting any younger, you know.

So in the end we enjoyed the home cooking and relaxation aspects of Boquete more than we did the outdoor activities, which was probably a bit of a cop out given all the bright young travellers setting off for day-long walks into the hills. Sometimes, though, when you’ve been travelling for four months straight, you just don’t have the energy you had at the start, and when you’re in the retirement capital of Central America, somehow you don’t feel so bad about slowing down...

Just Passing Through

Written: 9 March 2014

Junction towns rarely get a mention in travelogues, and if they do, they’re generally just footnotes. Even in the guidebooks, towns without obvious tourist attractions get short shrift, and it’s pretty clear that the authors don’t spend much time hanging round there... like everyone else on the trail, it seems.

But junction towns have one huge advantage for the weary traveller, and it’s this: when you reach a junction town, you can do whatever you want without feeling remotely guilty, and that’s a really novel feeling on the road. When you visit a normal travellers’ destination, there’s usually a reason why it’s a travellers’ destination, whether it’s the hiking, or the beaches, or the architecture, or the local culture, or whatever it is that makes this place worth exploring rather than, say, just spending your time lying in bed or drinking beer in the bar next to your hotel. And this means that if you do spend your time lying in bed or drinking beer in the bar next to your hotel, then you feel guilty, because you should be hiking, or exploring the beach, or checking out the architecture, or soaking up the local culture, or whatever it is that makes this place worth exploring rather than, say, just spending your time lying in bed or drinking beer in the bar next to your hotel.

But the junction town, which only gets one-and-a-half columns in the country guidebook and no mention at all in the region guidebook, doesn’t suffer from any touristic pretensions. This means that you can rock up at the bus stop, pick any hotel that takes your fancy, and go and do what the hell you like – such as, say, spending your time lying in bed or drinking beer in the bar next to your hotel – safe in the knowledge that you won’t bump into any irritating know-it-alls down the trail who’ll say, ‘What, you went there and you didn’t see X and Y? Oh, they were the most amazing things ever! Really, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen them...’

God bless the junction town. It’s the perfect place to get away from the travelling for a while.

Santiago to the Rescue

Our choice of junction town in Panama was Santiago. Panama is a famously long and thin country that’s broadly in the shape of an elongated S rotated anti-clockwise through 90°, and the Pan-American Highway, which passes all the way through Central America like the brown intestinal line in a prawn, follows the southern edge of that S from Costa Rica in the west to Darien in the east. (Here it grinds to a halt and doesn’t start up again until Turbo in Colombia, which is the only break in the journey from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; the Panama-Colombia border is no longer open, unless you’re a member of a drug cartel.) If you’re travelling through Panama then you can’t avoid the Pan-American, but while there are plenty of attractions on the coast of Panama and up in the northern hills, there are precious few on the Pan-American itself, particularly in the western half.

So if, like us, you’re trying to get from western Panama to Panama City and you want to visit, say, the pretty coastline of the Peninsula de Azuero, then you’re either going to have a very, very long day on the buses, or you’re going to have to take a break somewhere convenient like Santiago, the capital city of the state of Veraguas. And that’s why we found ourselves staying in a hotel right next to the Pan-American Highway, sandwiched between McDonald’s and KFC, and opposite a noisy and grotty little drinking hole called La Candela Viva (‘The Live Candle’).

To be honest, it was brilliant. When we arrived in Santiago after four hours on the bus, we originally followed the advice in the Lonely Planet, which recommended a disgusting dive quite a way out of town where the young receptionist was so miserable it looked like she’d had a stroke, but I took one look at the room and told Peta I’d rather walk back to the highway in the blinding heat of the afternoon sun than stay there... so that’s what we did. Five minutes later we’d taken a cab to the Hotel San David, much nearer the centre of town, and booked into a lovely little room off a pretty little garden; so, safe in the knowledge that we had a room for the night, we hit the town.

We didn’t get far, because La Candela Viva was directly opposite the hotel, and it looked so grungy we couldn’t pass it up. The chairs were plastic, the clientele were seriously drunk, and the traffic on the Pan-American shot past so fast that it made the bottles rattle, but it was just 75 cents for an ice-cold bottle of beer, the service was efficient and the local characters were fascinating, so we settled in for one, two, three, four... well, a number of beers, and watched the locals drink their way through mountains of local lager before getting into their cars, directly under the sign saying ‘Don’t drink and drive’. And all the while excruciatingly loud Panamanian folk music poured out of a speaker above the entrance, pounding the dusty courtyard where we sat with one accordion-based song after another, drowning out the paralytic dribbling of the zonked group of locals in the corner until they too squashed themselves into a car and pulled out into the motorway traffic with an over-revving of the engine and a crunching of the clutch.

Once night fell and the moon came out, we hopped back over the highway and into the hotel, and had an excellent steak meal in the hotel restaurant, neatly sidestepping the neighbouring lure of the golden arches and the mighty colonel, and then it was off to bed for a genuinely silent night, miles away from the busy road. We’d done nothing except arrive, find a hotel, drink beer and eat food, and we revelled in it without a hint of guilt that we should be doing something more worthy. Sometimes the junction town is just what you need, and Santiago was the right place at the right time. Right on!

Pedasí

Written: 12 March 2014

The Peninsula de Azuero sticks out of the southern coast of Panama like a panting dog’s tongue, and perched at the southeastern tip of this parched peninsula is the pretty town of Pedasí. This oasis of quaint restaurants and little guesthouses is a good base for exploring the many beaches in the area, but there is one big problem with Pedasí: it’s been discovered by a small army of North American, European and Israeli ex-pats, and where ex-pats go, ex-pat culture soon follows, and it’s rarely a good thing.

There are two main types of ex-pat. The first slips into the local culture like a hand in a glove, to the extent that you don’t really think of them as ex-pats at all. They learn the local language, make friends with their neighbours and effectively move in and settle down, leaving their cultural preconceptions at the door. Most communities will still regard this type of ex-pat as a foreigner – white skin is a bit of a giveaway in countries like Panama – but the key aspect here is integration; they’re not so much ex-pats as foreign locals.

The second type brings their culture with them and steadfastly holds onto it, wrapping themselves in the blanket of home comforts and regarding the locals with a lofty and detached air. Particularly noticeable are the crowds of American ex-pats who seem to clog up whole areas of Costa Rica and Panama, bringing with them their four-wheel-drives, their golf courses, their awful food, their shouty voices and their world view that places America very firmly at the centre of everything. It feels as if Pedasí is on the verge of being taken over by this second type of ex-pat, and it will be a shame when the balance finally leans too far towards the invasion.

Our hotel was a prime example. The American owner only bought the hotel in May last year, and on our first night, as we sipped a beer under the awnings of his attractive hotel, he sat down and held court with us and a wine-guzzling couple from Holland. He told us, without pausing for breath, how he’d escaped the rat race, sold his million-dollar house in Hawaii and bought the hotel – though he still had a couple of other houses in America, naturally – and how he had nearly finished building his dream house here in Pedasí, and how he was setting up a local school so his son would get a decent education, and how the hotel wasn’t about making a profit but was simply there to fund his family’s costs (which must be fairly huge as it’s the most expensive hotel in Pedasí), and how it was all about ditching the stress of work and creating a new life... and basically he did that ex-pat thing where they simply talk about themselves and how bloody fantastic their life is, without realising that not everyone is as interested in them as they are. It’s one of the most boring things in the world, listening to ex-pats drone on about why life is so much better here than it was back home, and we just sat there in silence while he pounded us with his prepared speech... a speech we heard him repeating at breakfast the following day to another trapped couple.

But it’s easy to see why this is an attractive destination for immigrants from faraway lands. The beaches are long and windswept, and almost completely undeveloped; there is good diving and fishing not far off the coast; the local Panamanians are kind and foreigner-friendly; and Pedasí has a supermarket, a handful of restaurants and lots of small business opportunities that are ripe for foreign ownership, but without any big developments to spoil the area’s character. It still feels reasonably Panamanian, and locals sit out in front of their houses at night and smile hello as you wander past, but the number of foreign accents about town is telling, and it won’t be this way for long. This is fast becoming the kind of town where people pull up in their four-wheel-drives, park them right in front of the restaurant where you’re trying to enjoy an evening meal, and leave the engines running for half an hour while they go off and do their chores, just so they can keep the air-conditioner going; this happened so many times in Pedasí that in the end I was too worn down to be irritated by the constant clouds of diesel exhaust and hot air.

Still, we enjoyed the nearby beach, which was totally empty and devoid of any kind of development – foreign or local – and the cycle ride we took down to the coast was very pleasant, even if this part of the world is so dry that the air seems to suck all the life out of you, leaving you no more than a desiccated husk by the end of the day. Which, come to think of it, is not unlike the effect of having to listen to an ex-pat droning on about how wonderful they are and how much better life is here than it is back home...

Panama City

Written: 15 March 2014

To be honest, Central America isn’t the best place to go for world-class cities. Most of the region’s capitals are dirty, crime-ridden dumps that are have very little to attract the average traveller: Belize City, Guatemala City, San Salvador, Managua and even San José are all places whose mothers would have trouble loving them, let alone complete strangers. And even if their edginess is interesting in its own right, you rarely find yourself wanting to hang around for too long.

And then, pow! After four-and-a-half months on the road in Central America, Panama City hits us in the face with its beautiful skyline, its sophisticated restaurant scene, its bona fide world-class attractions and its friendly people. We stayed in the financial district, purely because that’s where we found a good deal on a decent place to stay, and simply wandering out of the hotel and weaving through the skyscrapers was a massive culture shock... and one I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ve always loved modern cityscapes, and Panama City ticks all the boxes. It’s a great place.

The Panama Canal

When I was a nipper, my favourite palindrome was all about this part of the world (ignore, for the moment, if you will that being a nipper and having a favourite palindrome is gut-wrenchingly nerdy... but yeah, I guess that was me). Here it is in all of its ‘reads the same backwards as it does forwards’ glory:

A man, a plan, a canal... Panama!

It’s genius, and not just because it neatly sums up how one of the world’s greatest feats of engineering came about. The French started building a canal in 1881, but disease wiped out the workforce and the engineering challenges proved too much, so the company behind the project failed. The Americans took over the project in 1904, and the canal opened a decade later on 15 August 1914, mainly due to the drive of Major George Washington Goethals, who was appointed chief engineer in 1907. This man took the original plan and built the canal, and it’s still an amazing piece of engineering.

We caught our first glimpse of the canal on the way into Panama City from Pedasí; our bus passed over the Bridge of the Americas, which crosses the bay at the Pacific end of the canal, but although we got to see lots of huge cranes and a few ships, we couldn’t really see the canal proper. The easiest way to get up close to the canal is to visit Miraflores Locks, a modern visitor centre that overlooks a large set of locks at the Pacific end of the canal; so the following morning we took a taxi to Miraflores, to watch huge cargo ships passing through the locks from balconies that are right next to the action.

It’s an impressive sight, there’s no doubt about it, but I have to admit to being more overawed by the skyscrapers in the financial district of the city. Somehow it’s difficult to appreciate the scale of the twin locks at Miraflores, even though the ships have tiny men on them to lend a sense of scale. I grew up by the Trent and Mersey canal and there were a couple of locks just beyond the back of our garden, and watching the ships passing through Miraflores felt strangely similar to watching tiny narrowboats pass through the hand-winched locks at home. I’d expected to be blown away by the sheer scale of the operation, but in the end it didn’t really feel that astounding; that said, it’s still a great way to spend the afternoon, watching all these monster ships drifting through the gates, and it’s well worth the US$15 entrance fee (though the museum and 3D cinema show are really dire; trust me, you’ll learn a lot more from Wikipedia about the canal than you ever will from the Miraflores visitor centre).

Cinta Costera and Casco Viejo

The canal might be a unique attraction – and it’s definitely the main draw card for the crowds of foreign visitors who flock to the city each year – but for me it pales into insignificance compared to the beauty of walking around Panama City. Yes, there are large parts of the city that are poor and decaying and full of crime – this is still Central America, after all – but as a visitor you can simply avoid those places, and instead you can wander freely and safely along the waterfront, enjoying amazing views all the way.

This is due in no small part to the recent creation of the Cinta Costera (the ‘coastal belt’), a strip of parkland that hugs the southern shoreline of the city centre, all the way from the financial centre in the east to Casco Viejo (the historic centre) in the west. Eager to give it a go, we set off from our hotel and wandered down to the shore, passing clusters of dizzyingly tall skyscrapers and dodging the hectic traffic, before following the Cinta Costera all the way from the modern part of the city to the old centre.

I absolutely adored this walk. As you wander through the tropical heat, heading away from the financial centre, the skyscrapers slowly recede behind you and the bay gently curves into photograph after photograph of skylines, harbours, palm trees and meandering pathways through manicured gardens. All the while the red tiled roofs and old church towers of Casco Viejo grow closer and closer in front of you, until you reach the fishing port and the edges of the old town, where you can shelter from the sun in the thin, winding streets and shady squares of this pleasant part of the city.

It took us a leisurely hour-and-a-half to follow the bay, with lots of stops to rehydrate and hide from the midday sun, and all the while huge container ships sat in lines on the horizon to our left, waiting for their turn to pass through the canal, while to our right the city pulsated with its endless traffic and heat-haze hovering over the harsh concrete pavements. It might be stiflingly hot and a little too young to have grown enough shade, but the Cinta Costera still feels like an oasis, pinched between the city and the sea. It’s a wonderful place to spend the day.

Panamá Viejo

At the western end of the Cinta Costera is the historic centre of Panama, Casco Viejo, which was settled in 1671. However, the original Panama City was founded by the Spanish some 8km to the east on 15 August 1519, where it flourished until it was sacked by the pirate Henry Morgan. Now known as Panamá Viejo, the remains of the original city are in ruins, but they make for an engaging visit nonetheless.

Panamá Viejo (or, as it was known back then, plain old Panamá) was the first European settlement on the Pacific, and all the gold and silver that the Spanish brought from the mines in Peru flowed through here. These riches would cross the country via El Camino Real de Panamá (‘the Royal Road of Panama’), the colonial-era equivalent of the Panama Canal, which followed various waterways from Panamá to Portobelo on the Caribbean coast. From there it would be taken to Spain to feed the colonial economy, so it’s not hard to see why Panamá was an important and strategic port for the Spanish.

All this ended in 1671, when the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan led a group of 1400 men across the country to take Panamá, and due to some pretty useless strategising from the Spanish, he managed to take the city, and it consequently burned to the ground (though it isn’t clear which side started the fire). Morgan’s attack violated a new peace treaty that had been signed between England and Spain, so he was arrested and sent back to England, where he pointed out that he’d had no idea that a treaty had been signed, as he’d been away on the high seas at the time. So instead of being punished as a pirate, Charles II knighted him and sent him off to Jamaica to be Lieutenant Governor – not a bad result for Morgan, really.

Meanwhile, Panamá was in ruins, so the Spanish built a new city to the west that was easier to defend, and this became modern-day Panama City; this time they built a wall around it, hence the name Casco Viejo, which means ‘old compound’. Most of the remains of Panamá Viejo were built over or were used as building materials, but in 1976 the area was designated as a protected site, and today you can wander through the skeleton of the original city, climbing up to the top of the city cathedral’s tower for great views over the whole area. It’s well worth a couple of hours of your time, though the mosquitoes were astonishingly vicious when we visited, so we got out of there quicker than a fleeing conquistador, and happily settled back into the lap of luxury in the centre of town.

And that’s one of the great things about Panama City. It has historical sites, it has engineering marvels and it has modern skyscrapers, but best of all it has easy living, with its high-quality restaurants, comfortable hotels and friendly residents. After such a long time on the budget trail through Central America, that’s what we really wanted – a taste of city luxury – and in Panama City, for the first time in a Central American capital, that’s exactly what we got...

The Taxi Scam

Written: 15 March 2014

So Panama City is a little gem on the Pacific coast, with its ancient sites, lovely walks, impressive skyline and modern engineering marvels. It’s an easy place to recommend, but there is one thing I’ve got to mention, and that’s the taxi drivers.

Panama City’s taxi drivers don’t use meters, which isn’t much of a surprise, as they don’t really go in for metered travel in this part of the world (even in San José in Costa Rica, where they are supposed to use meters by law, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a taxi driver who’s happy to do so). This means you have to do what you have to do everywhere, and that’s to negotiate your fare, preferably before you get into the cab. It’s a bit difficult to know how much you should be paying, of course, and asking the taxi driver to come up with a figure is like sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on your backside and inviting him to take aim, but eventually you get a feeling for how much taxis cost, and generally you end up paying a reasonable fare.

This is true for most of the taxis in Panama City, but not all of them. Sometimes I would suggest a fare to a taxi driver, and they would look at me with genuine irritation as if I was completely wasting their time, shout ‘Pah!’ and drive off with a violently dismissive wave of the hand; I would then try exactly the same price on the next cabbie, and he’d happily accept my suggested price – perhaps negotiating a tiny bit more, but not a lot – and would drive us there with a smile. I have no idea what I was doing wrong with the first taxi, and I still don’t have a clue why some of the taxi drivers treated me so rudely. It was disconcerting, to say the least, but perhaps this is normal behaviour round here; if so, it’s a bit of a shock after the friendliness in the rest of the country.

And then at popular tourist sights, outside the bigger hotels, and in the taxi rank at the main bus station, there are taxi drivers who will only take you if you pay them four or five times the going rate, and they will laugh in your face – often quite violently – when you suggest the correct fare to them. So you simply wander round the corner or wait for a taxi to drive up from the street, and they’ll take you for the correct fare and without all this unnecessary attitude.

I’ve been finding this two-tier system astonishingly wearing, not least because these are the first arseholes that we’ve met on our entire Panamanian trip, and here they are, right in the heart of the capital, and right in the places where visitors to this country are most vulnerable. I don’t really mind taxi drivers trying to charge tourists more – it happens the world over, and you get used to it, even expect it – but to treat customers with such a lack of respect simply because they open negotiations with a reasonable price for a taxi ride... well, that’s not acceptable behaviour anywhere, full stop.

Luckily, Panama City is such an amazing place that even these greedy fuckwits can’t spoil it. One day the city will mature to the point where they also realise that this behaviour is unacceptable, and they will stamp it out; until then, don’t let these idiots take your money, because they don’t deserve it. They certainly didn’t get any of mine.

Panama: The San Blas Archipelago

All Aboard The Black Dragonfly

Written: 16 March 2014

For travellers heading south through Central America and into South America, there is one big obstacle: the Panama-Colombia border. If you keep on driving south through Panama down the Pan-American Highway, then you’ll eventually get stopped by a very big man with a very big gun, and trust me, you don’t want that to happen.

It hasn’t always been this way. When Panama gained independence from Spain in 1821 it immediately joined Simón Bolívar’s confederation of Gran Colombia, which comprised modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. When this dissolved just ten years later, Panama stayed as a province of Colombia, which remained the case until 1903, when Panama declared itself an independent nation.

These days, Panama and Colombia are definitely not part of the same country; they’re not even part of the same region, as Panama is positively Central American while Colombia is definitely South American. This division is highlighted by the lack of a land crossing between the two countries; the result feels like the border equivalent of a messy divorce. The Pan-American Highway manages to struggle all the way to Yaviza in Panama’s eastern Darien province, but that’s where it stops, because the border area is a no-go area unless you’re a drug trafficker or a soldier trying to catch drug traffickers. So for the average traveller, the only options for getting from Panama to Colombia are to fly, or to go by boat.

Flying is, obviously, the easy option, but the advantage of taking a boat is that most of them go via the San Blas Archipelago, which is one of the most beautiful parts of Panama. Lying off the northeast of the country, the San Blas islands are strung out along 200km of shore, all the way from El Porvenir in the west to the Colombian border in the east. The area is unique because although it’s part of Panama, it’s run by the indigenous inhabitants, the Kuna, as an autonomous region, which has been the case ever since a rebellion in 1925; the Kuna even send a representative to the country’s National Assembly, uniquely among Panama’s indigenous groups. This autonomy means that the Kuna live their own lives here in the San Blas, with their own language and their own economy – which is mainly based on bartering with visiting sailors – and their own distinctive clothes and art-forms. You can fly to some of the 400-odd islands in the San Blas, though as the Kuna only inhabit about 40 of them, by far the best way to see the archipelago is by boat.

So the attraction of taking a boat to Colombia is clear: you get to explore a Caribbean island paradise with a unique indigenous culture, which you otherwise wouldn’t get to see. And that’s why we found ourselves considering the boat trip, despite what we’d heard.

Not All Plain Sailing

The first people we’d talked to about the crossing to Colombia were Neil and Bronwyn when we first met them in Playa Esteron back in El Salvador. Bronwyn did this very trip a couple of years ago with their daughter Stephanie, though Neil had flown, as he’s really prone to seasickness. This would turn out to be an excellent decision on his part, as Bronwyn’s tales of the crossing to Colombia were horrific. The ocean passage east from the San Blas to Cartagena is against the direction of the prevailing wind, and as any sailor will tell you, this means a pretty bumpy ride, and although Bronwyn wasn’t seasick herself, she was pretty much the only person who pulled through unscathed. Everyone was sick, the sea was scarily rough, and the passage was a complete nightmare; and as if the terrible weather wasn’t enough, it turned out that the last time the captain had done this trip was the previous year, when her husband had been in charge. He’d died of a heart attack during that voyage and she’d had to finish the trip in sole charge of the yacht, and after a period of grieving, she’d decided to continue the family business on her own. This was her first full voyage in charge, and she’d filled the boat to bursting with hard-drinking backpackers, only to have them all turn green around the gills once they’d passed through the San Blas and turned east, directly into the ocean swell of the Caribbean Sea.

Now, me and yachts, we have a bit of history. Back in 1997, three of us sailed a 36ft sloop halfway across the Pacific from New Zealand to French Polynesia, and I got so seasick – and stayed so seasick – that the captain declared he’d never seen anything like it. The first leg – a non-stop 28-day bash down into the strong winds of the roaring forties and up towards the Gambier Islands – saw the captain and the chef fall out to the point where they were only speaking through me, and as I was spending most of my time on deck throwing up, conversation ran a little dry. When we reached the Gambiers after the initial 3000 nautical mile leg, the chef jumped ship, leaving just me and the captain to sail the last 1000 nautical miles through the Tuamotu Archipelago to Tahiti, where I escaped onto a plane bound for Australia. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, and I made a promise to myself that I would never board a yacht again.

But despite Bronwyn’s tales of hell, I didn’t rule it out, because of something Neil said. ‘It’s one of the last real adventures left,’ he pointed out one evening in Granada, and that was when I knew I was going to have to face my demons, because if there’s something I can’t resist, it’s an adventure. We were clearly going to have to sail from Panama to Colombia, and all we had to do was to find a decent boat to take us.

The Black Dragonfly

There are quite a few websites selling places on the so-called ‘backpacker boats’ that sail between Panama and Colombia. Some of them are better than others, but the good ones let you search by date for boats that are heading in the right direction at the right time, so that’s exactly what we did.

The results were varied, to say the least. The cheapest option, at about US$350 per person, seemed to be some kind of motorboat that takes you through the islands, dropping you off at night to sleep in hammocks or tents. Judging by the blurb, you needed to be able to drink your body weight in beer to qualify for this budget-backpacker experience, so that one got the chop pretty quickly.

Then, at around US$450 to US$550 per person, were a few yachts and a couple of catamarans, where you sleep on board and actually have a sailing trip on a proper boat, rather than a lift in a fancy water taxi. We searched for reviews of the various boats and captains, and again they all seemed to cram as many people on board as possible, fill them with beer, and encourage late-night partying by taking group shots of them all throwing shaka signs at the camera, beer cans in hand. We read one review where a girl had been horrified to find that the berth she’d booked was actually a space on the table in the dining room, rather than a bed; it seems that there are a lot of captains for whom profit is the bottom line, even if it means not having enough life jackets to go round.

And then we spotted a slightly more expensive trip, at US$700 per person, that specifically said it wasn’t a party boat. The Black Dragonfly, said the blurb, is a beautiful teak-lined Formosa yacht, with gourmet food, a maximum of seven passengers, no late-night partying and a very experienced captain. And it was leaving from Portobelo for Colombia on 18 March, just around the time that we were hoping to go, and there were still some spaces left.

We didn’t click on it right away. First, we let the idea sink in. ‘Do you really want to go?’ I asked Peta.

‘I’m happy to go if you’re happy to go,’ she replied, tactfully.

‘But I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There’s an ocean passage involved. And I know what that actually means.’

‘It’s up to you,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to decide for you. It has to be your decision.’

So I sat there frozen, genuinely unable to decide. That ocean passage to French Polynesia was one of the lowest points in my life, and yet it’s also one of my most interesting stories. Could I bear to set foot on a sailing yacht again? Or could I live with the decision to skip what might be the trip of a lifetime, if not for me, for Peta? I didn’t know what to do...

Science to the Rescue

Decisions like this are often made easier by research, so we both started hunting round the net for inspiration. What could we do to prevent me getting seasick? Drugs, perhaps, or a special diet? And would the size of the yacht be relevant, seeing as The Black Dragonfly was listed as a 50ft ketch, and my Pacific nightmare had been in a 36ft sloop? And as we searched the web for clues, Peta stumbled across a conversation on a yacht design forum about which types of boat were best for preventing motion sickness, and someone had posted to the conversation, talking about the Motion Comfort Ratio formula.

This clever mathematical formula, which was formulated by boat designer Ted Brewer, takes factors such as the boat’s length, beam and weight, and comes up with a number that should, in theory, show how comfortable a ride you’ll get in that yacht. The poster had gone through more than 1000 types of yacht and calculated their ratios, including that for a 50ft Formosa, the same type as The Black Dragonfly. The higher the number, the more stable the ride, and the Formosa 50 came in with a score of 52.48. As I scanned the list of all the other makes and sizes of yachts out there, it was obvious that most of them scored in the 30s, with a handful in the 40s, but only a tiny number managed to reach the 50s. In his list of scores, the Formosa 50 had the fifth best Motion Comfort Ratio overall, and was only 2.25 points off the top spot (which, incidentally, was taken by the Herreshoff Walrus with a score of 54.75). There, clear as day, science was telling me that The Black Dragonfly was one of the best possible yachts for this crossing, and that was the clincher.

So after letting the decision settle in over a couple of beers in our hotel in San José, I fired up the laptop and booked a passage for two on The Black Dragonfly. And then I collapsed in exhaustion, literally shaking at the thought that, once more, I’d be sailing across an ocean in a yacht.

Portobelo

Written: 18 March 2014

The bus ride from the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City to the grungy port town of Portobelo is a bit of a shock, to be honest. It’s been a while since we took a proper chicken bus, and I’d forgotten just how much of an assault on the senses they can be; the last one we found ourselves on was back in Nicaragua, because for some unfathomable reason Costa Rica and Panama seem to be doing all they can to phase them out and replace them with modern buses. But the process isn’t complete in Panama and you do still see multicoloured school buses grinding their way around some parts of the country, so when we stepped off the air-conditioned coach that had whisked us from the capital to the northern port of Colón and mentioned to the bus station boys that we wanted to continue on to Portobelo, they pushed us up the steps of the nearest bus and we burst into the psychedelic and ear-shattering world of the Central American chicken bus for the first time in two months.

We managed to squeeze into a seat – with Peta’s knees jammed up into her stomach, as the wheel arch took up all the space underneath the seat – but it soon filled to bursting point, and after bouncing along the coastal road for an hour and a half with painfully loud rap music serenading us at every turn, we finally arrived in Portobelo with cramped legs and aching ears. And then the rain started, which didn’t exactly help, because it turns out Portobelo is a pretty ugly place, especially compared to the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City.

There’s a sludgy river dribbling through the centre of town that bubbles and squelches as it sends out clouds of acrid stench, and the buildings seem to be suffering from the same kind of black mould that afflicts Mexico, but even more depressing was the fact that when we arrived on a Monday, everything was shut. In particular, none of Portobelo’s grotty-looking restaurants appeared to be open, and the strangely distracted lady at our hotel said our best bet was a restaurant that was some way back along the road to Colón, which we could probably walk to if we were feeling adventurous. It wasn’t looking good, but luckily we chanced upon Captain Jack’s hostel, where they served a mean burger and cold beer to the few backpackers who’d washed up on Portobelo’s shores, despite it being the day of rest for everyone else.

Captain Jack’s hostel exists because there are two good reasons for travellers to visit Portobelo, even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface. The first, and most astonishing, is that Portobelo is actually a World Heritage site, and it has a long and interesting history, dating back to its founding in 1597. When the Spanish ruled this part of the world, the gold and silver that came up from South America and through Panama City was transported across the country to Portobelo, from where it was put on ships bound for Spain. Portobelo grew into the most important port in the New World and became a tempting target for Spain’s enemies, and a number of forts were built around the harbour, some of which still survive today. These forts are Portobelo’s saving grace, because if there’s something I love, it’s an old colonial fort, and Fuerte San Jerónimo and Fuerte Santiago, which are easily accessed by foot from town, are pretty atmospheric. Their turrets now look out on yachts anchored in the calm bay rather than enemy warships, but there are still some original cannons aiming out to sea, and they’re well worth a visit.

Even better is Mirador Perú, a viewpoint at the top of a steep staircase that has a commanding vista over the harbour. When the sun finally broke through the clouds the following morning, we enjoyed a lazy day perched on the old ruins halfway up the hill, watching the yachts in the harbour drifting in that synchronised dance that they weave when the wind changes and they all slowly turn to face the same direction. Portobelo almost looks pleasant from this distant outlook; the smell of the sludgy river in town doesn’t quite make it this far.

The second reason to visit Portobelo – and the reason why we’d rolled up on its shores – is that this is one of the ports where you can catch a sailboat to Colombia. And so it was that after a day of killing time in this distant backwater, we boarded The Black Dragonfly for our own, slightly more modern adventure on the high seas.

Portobelo to San Blas

Written: 19 March 2014

After we’d booked our passage and paid a deposit, we didn’t hear anything further until a week before the departure date, when the Norwegian captain of The Black Dragonfly, Jan Kåre Stenberg, got in touch to confirm the final details. We were to meet at the westernmost pier in Portobelo at 10am on 18 March, and he listed the items we should bring, specifically highlighting the need for seasickness pills. My stomach lurched at the thought; all of a sudden the trip was real, and not just a date sometime in the future. I replied to the captain to say we were looking forward to the trip, and we set out into the depths of Panama City to buy the best seasickness pills that money could buy.

If you search the web, it says that the best seasickness pills contain Hyocine, while the next best pills are antihistamines, so we asked the pharmacist if he had any Hyocine, specifically to treat seasickness. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this is Hyocine,’ so we paid up the US$25 fee and went back to the hotel room to search the web for further details on what we’d just bought (which you must always do when buying medicine in the developing world – you never know quite what they’re going to sell you). It turned out that he had indeed sold us Hyocine, but unfortunately it was a slightly different Hyocine compound to the one that’s used to treat seasickness; we needed Hyocine Hydrobromide, but instead we’d been sold Hyocine Butylbromide, which would have been perfect if we’d needed to quell cramps brought on by irritable bowel syndrome, but which was totally useless for motion sickness.

Back out on in the city streets, the next four pharmacists said they didn’t have Hyocine, but they did stock Gravol, an antihistamine that I’d used on the ferry from Granada to Isla Ometepe; it had worked, but it had make me pretty drowsy as a side effect. Still, after exhausting all the options in the neighbourhood, we figured Gravol was better than nothing, so we bought a box of one hundred for US$18, ticked it off the list and went back to enjoying the luxury of Panama’s capital.

Another Day in Port

So the morning of 18 March saw us stomping down to the westernmost pier in Portobelo, pills in hand, and as prepared as we were ever going to be for a sailing trip against the wind and against my better judgement. We met four others waiting at the pier for the same boat, and after saying hello and finding out that they were all German-speaking Swiss – not a bad choice for sailing companions, because if there’s one thing you want on board an ocean-going yacht, it’s people who aren’t going to start a war – we all stood to attention as a small dinghy powered across the harbour with a blond-haired man at the engine.

‘Hello, I’m Captain Jan,’ he said as he climbed onto the pier. ‘Are you here for The Black Dragonfly?’

‘Yes,’ we all chimed.

‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid I must tell you there’s a slight change of plan, for which I am sorry. Our windlass has broken so we won’t be leaving until four o’clock this afternoon, which I know is disappointing, but instead of sailing to Isla Grande today and anchoring there, we’re going to sail overnight straight to the San Blas, so you’ll actually get more time in the San Blas. I hope this is OK, and I’m sorry for the change of plan, but we have rigged up a manual system, and it just means we need to leave a little later than planned.’

And I thought, ‘OK, calm down, we’re not leaving until later, which sucks because you’re all fired up for a day of sailing, but listen to this man. He sounds like a captain. He’s obviously in charge of his yacht, you can tell from the way he’s talking. OK, so his windlass is broken, but that’s only the motor that pulls up the anchor, it’s not an important part of the actual sailing. Listen to him now, he’s going on about how comfort and safety are his top priorities: that’s a good sign. Besides, remember when our windlass broke in Amanu and we had to haul the anchor up by hand for the rest of the trip? It happens, it’s yachting, and it’s OK; he sounds like he knows what he’s doing, and he’s being honest with us about what’s going on. This isn’t a backpacker boat captain, he’s a proper sailor, and he’s doing the right thing. This is a good sign...’

So although we had to spend an extra day kicking around in Portobelo, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because when we finally boarded The Black Dragonfly that afternoon and started settling into life on board, I felt good about it. I knew that this type of yacht was one of the best possible vessels for preventing seasickness; the captain was clearly putting safety ahead of schedules; there were just six passengers in total; and when we were introduced to Holly, the other crew member, it turned out that not only was she a smiling and very friendly Bostonian with lots of experience of working culinary magic in the cramped environment of a ship’s galley, but she was also a fully qualified captain in her own right. And to top it all off, they put the two of us in the aft cabin, right at the back of the boat, which is the most stable part of any yacht, and the best cabin for preventing seasickness, as the back of a yacht doesn’t bounce half as much as the bow, where the other two cabins were.

‘This might turn out to be an enjoyable experience yet,’ I thought as we settled in to meet our travelling companions for the San Blas.

Getting to Know the Crew

On a yacht, you get to know people pretty fast; there’s nowhere to hide, particularly when all the passengers are up on deck and finding their sea legs. This was particularly true on The Black Dragonfly as we sailed out of Portobelo, bound for the San Blas archipelago.

We’d started to get to know each other when we’d taken the dinghy over to the yacht that morning. Even though our departure was delayed, we’d taken the dinghy over to the yacht in the morning and stowed our gear, and we’d all ended up chatting around the ship’s table in the sumptuous teak cabin below deck.

Our captain, Jan, was a real find. His love of sailing was palpable; he’d sailed The Black Dragonfly over from his home country of Norway, where he’d bought her, and he’d got to know her inside out by sailing her across the North Sea, through a nasty storm in the English Channel, and across the Atlantic. As he said, more than once, ‘I know my boat,’ and that’s exactly what I wanted to hear. He’d been sailing since he was a boy, and with two Atlantic crossings under his belt, two yachts in Cartagena, somewhere between 15 and 20 successful Panama-Colombia crossings, a Yachtmaster Ocean qualification, and goodness-only-knows how many thousands of nautical miles of sailing experience, he made me feel totally at ease, and I was incredibly grateful for that.

Second-in-command but completely in charge of life below deck, Holly was not only our cook, but as a qualified captain in her own right, she’d be sharing the sailing with Jan. With six years’ experience working on superyachts – yachts that are bigger than 79ft and often much bigger, which effectively means millionaire owners and very high standards – she’d met Jan while they were both on the Yachtmaster course, and not only had they fallen for each other and become an item, she’d also realised that there was more to life than working on expensive yachts, so they’d decided to combine work and pleasure by running The Black Dragonfly charters as a team. It turned out that his was their first official trip working together (though Jan’s been doing the trip with other crew members for a few years now), and after a trial run through the San Blas with Jan’s family, they were really keen to make sure that everything went smoothly (broken windlass notwithstanding).

Making up the rest of the passenger list were the four German-speaking Swiss that we’d met on the pier. All of them in their twenties: Marco and Stephan had been travelling together through Central America for some time, while Reto and Cordelia had arrived in Panama City just a week before, at the start of an open-ended trip around the world. None of them had done any sailing before, and they didn’t quite know what to expect, so I just kept quiet. I figured they’d find out soon enough.

Into the Ocean

After the introductions, we settled down on deck to eat our first meal on board. When the advert had said that the food was gourmet, they weren’t wrong; I’ve cooked in a galley and I know how difficult it is, but that first meal of chicken with onion and mushroom sauce, salad with balsamic dressing and perfectly cooked rice, was delicious.

As we savoured Holly’s cooking and the sun slowly set at the mouth of Portobelo harbour, Jan talked about the plans for the trip and the safety aspects of the journey; stay behind the wheel when in the open ocean, wear life jackets at night if you go on deck, only smoke at the back of the boat so you’re downwind from everyone else, that sort of thing. And I grilled him about the stability of the boat, as that was preying on my mind.

‘Oh, she’s stable,’ he said. ‘She’s 25 tons in all, and she’s got a nine-ton keel underneath, so it isn’t possible to turn her over – if she leans over too far, the keel just pulls her back. She’s a very safe boat, made from fibreglass this thick,’ he continued, pulling his thumb and first finger wide apart. ‘Back when she was built in the eighties they didn’t know how strong fibreglass was, so they made it extra think to be sure. There’s no way the hull can be breached.’

Once the meal was over, we were introduced to Jan’s manual override system for the broken windlass, and I finally understood the reason for the change of schedule. ‘I was this close to cancelling the whole trip when the windlass broke,’ he said, ‘but I managed to rig up this system, and it works. It’s more effort than using a windlass, so we’ve decided not to sail to Isla Grande, which was to be our first stop, as it has a deep anchorage. Instead we’ll sail straight for the San Blas overnight, and drop anchor in El Porvenir, which isn’t too deep, and clear immigration there; I tried to clear you through immigration here this morning, but apparently the man is “out on an emergency”, which probably means it was someone’s birthday party last night. Anyway, does anyone fancy helping me with the anchor, so we can get underway?’

Three pairs of twenty-something Swiss hands shot up – the boys, naturally – and they set to work with Jan’s quick fix. It was beautiful in its simplicity, and worked a treat. Holly stood on the bow, and started by attaching a rope with a carabiner to the anchor chain. Jan and the boys wrapped this rope round a winch in the cockpit and pulled it, bringing a length of the anchor chain up on deck. When the rope ran out, Holly attached a hook on a short, fixed rope to the anchor chain at the bow, then Jan loosened the winch rope so the bow hook took the strain, and he passed the carabiner up to the bow so the whole process could start again.

It worked like a charm, and would continue to do so throughout the trip. I took Holly’s place for the next attempt, and by the end of the San Blas, the whole process worked like clockwork. ‘It’s a lot faster than the windlass,’ Jan declared, and the windlass issue was solved and the crew bonded, all in one fell swoop. That’s clever captaincy for you...

Shaky Start

That night we sailed the first leg from Portobelo to the island of El Porvenir, which is the capital of San Blas and home to the immigration post where we had our passports stamped and officially left Panama. The weather was being kind and the swell was only about 1 or 2m, so the short overnight passage of about 50 nautical miles was relatively comfortable, at least as far as ocean swells go. This was helped in no small way by the captain’s constant fine-tuning of the sails; every now and then, Jan would grab the winch handle and trim the sails, changing the angle of tack in ways that were unfathomable to us landlubbers, but we could certainly feel the benefit as things suddenly got a lot more comfortable. He did this throughout the night as we headed northeast from Portobelo and into the Caribbean Sea, before turning east to go round the Panamanian mainland so we could drop down into the Gulf of San Blas, and most of the journey was overnight, with Jan and Holly taking it in turns to sail. I was worried that this – our first proper bit of ocean sailing – would set off my seasickness, but I’d been taking the tablets for at least a day before we hit the sea, and although I felt a bit uneasy, I felt OK. I was pretty stunned, particularly as the boat was leaning pretty heavily to starboard to catch the northerly breeze.

The others on board weren’t quite as comfortable – though they probably felt a bit better once they’d been sick, if my experience is anything to go by – and they elected to spend the night on deck, rather than go below, where the constant movement and the serious tilt are a major trigger for seasickness. Marco summed it up pretty well when he said he was feeling absolutely fine until he went downstairs to fetch his fleece and visit the head (the ship’s toilet), and that’s when it all turned; he suddenly started feeling ill and from that point on, the journey was pretty hard work. He hadn’t taken any pills – contrary to the explicit advice of the captain – and just assumed that he’d be fine, but that isn’t how sailing works; instead, he spent the whole night either on deck or snatching snippets of sleep on the sofa just below deck. Reto and Cordelia were similarly affected and looked pale and unhappy, and out of the passengers, only Stephan and Peta seemed totally unconcerned by the boat’s movement.

I was worried about going below deck, but in the end it was fine. As we yawned our way towards our cabin, I simply got down into our cosy double bed as quickly as I could, and lay down, trying not to think about things too much. After a short burst of feeling a bit weird, Peta just got on with it and soon discovered that she’s completely fine on board a sailing yacht, and before long we’d fallen asleep, lulled by the gentle rolling of the boat in the ocean waves, and suddenly it was morning, and we were anchored just off El Porvenir, with the first passage under our belts.

‘Ugh, that was a rough passage,’ said Cordelia as we blinked our way into the morning light above deck.

‘Blimey, that wasn’t rough, love,’ I thought, though I kept it to myself. Perhaps, after all my paranoia, I wasn’t going to be the one suffering on this voyage; I’d been mentally preparing for a nightmare of hard tacking and severe ocean swells, but I thought it all looked rather pleasant out there as we tucked into breakfast and listened to Jan telling us about the plan for the day. Our mission: to sail to the Cayos Holandeses, the northernmost point of the San Blas archipelago, where paradise would really start.

San Blas (Cayos Holandeses)

Written: 20 March 2014

El Porvenir might be the capital of the San Blas archipelago, but it’s not exactly the most beautiful place in the world; the island is home to an airstrip, a museum, an immigration office and a handful of buildings, and just next door is another island that is so crammed full of houses that they practically spill off the edges and into the ocean. It certainly isn’t one of the idyllic islands that the San Blas is famous for, so although we’d gone to sleep in the ocean swell and had woken up anchored in the San Blas archipelago, as Jan had promised we would, we weren’t in paradise quite yet.

It took four hours of gentle sailing to reach Cayos Holandeses, passing a string of tiny islands on the way, each of them sprouting so many palm trees that from a distance they looked for all the world like upturned scrubbing brushes floating on the waves. Some of them had little huts tucked away beneath the palm fronds, while others were completely deserted, but they were charming, and the only thing missing was sunshine and beautiful blue skies. Unfortunately the weather was rather overcast and a little grey, though this mercifully meant we were comfortable on deck, rather than being burned by the equatorial midday sun. The sailing, too, was easy, because the San Blas is far calmer than the open waters of the Caribbean Sea, as it’s sheltered from the ocean swell by all the islands and reefs that fill the Gulf of San Blas.

Even with overcast skies, the Cayos Holandeses are a slice of paradise. It is, however, not an undiscovered paradise, as we found when we pulled into Swimming Pool anchorage, where we’d hoped to drop anchor for a couple of days. This anchorage, which sits between the islands of Morodup and Banedup, is famous for having wonderfully clear water, and the local Kuna take great pride in keeping the islands tidy and litter-free; Morodup is known by yachties as Barbecue Island, as it’s a perfect spot for a barbie with its luscious golf-course grass, and sand that’s regularly swept clean by the locals. Unfortunately the anchorage was absolutely rammed with yachts when we arrived, and when Jan took The Black Dragonfly into the middle of the throng, he soon realised that it just wasn’t going to be safe to drop anchor this close to all these other boats. ‘We need another plan,’ he said as he swung around and headed back out the way we’d come; apparently at this time of year, quite a few yachts apply to go through the Panama Canal, but as boats are often given passage times a couple of weeks from their application date, quite a few of them decide to spend those weeks moored up in a paradise like Swimming Pool anchorage.

Luckily, just southwest of Morodup and Banedup, Jan found two more tiny little islands where he figured he could drop the anchor, and after some deft manoeuvring, The Black Dragonfly lay anchored in an idyllic sheltered spot, with no other yachts in sight. We had two pristine and totally uninhabited islands to explore, both of them within swimming distance (for strong swimmers like Marco and Stephan, anyway), and after we’d enjoyed a sumptuous tandoori chicken salad on deck, we piled into the dinghy and visited the southernmost island, which we walked around in a handful of minutes, snapping away at the perfect postcard pictures that seem to spring up at every corner when palm trees meet tropical beach.

Night Lights

That night, as we sat on deck after a hearty dinner of beef fajitas, enjoying a gin and tonic in the perfect isolation of our own private anchorage, the ocean put on a show that was completely unexpected. I first came across marine phosphorescence when I sailed the Pacific; sometimes, at night, the yacht’s wake would leave an eerie blue glow in the water, and you could generate a glow yourself by stirring up the water, perhaps by throwing a line into the sea, or by answering the call of nature over the side of the boat. It helped to pass the long hours on night watch, looking for phosphorescence, which is caused by blooms of billions of bioluminescent phytoplankton which produce light when they’re disturbed (which scientists think is a defence mechanism, as nobody wants to eat anything that glows).

But the phosphorescence that we saw over the side of the yacht on our first night in the San Blas was much more sophisticated than a simple glowing wake. In the water we could see alien lifeforms swimming in loops and arcs, leaving bright blue trails of light behind them in psychedelic patterns reminiscent of the spiral imprints left by ancient shells in fossil beds in the desert. They spun and curled beneath us like neon lights in a screensaver, but if we shone a torch on them, the lights disappeared and they looked like nothing more than small fish, flitting around in the torchlight. It seemed that the normal sea life round these parts was swimming through a cloud of bioluminescence, and all we were seeing was the glowing wake left by the darting passage of a fish, or the looping curves of an underwater worm corkscrewing through the shallows. At one time there must have been 40 or 50 glowing Catherine wheels of light around the boat, looking for all the world like stars reflecting in a busy sea, even though the sky was completely overcast. It was simply beautiful, and the display went on for a good hour before slipping gently back into the night.

Exploring the Holandeses

The next day we decided to explore our new neighbourhood, so Peta and I took the yellow plastic kayak that was strapped to the front deck of the yacht, and paddled round our northernmost neighbour. By this time the wind was picking up a bit and the skies were starting to darken, so the first trip against the wind and round the first corner was fairly choppy and involved a few light rain showers, but even in the rain there’s still something perfect about kayaking round a desert island, while the beautiful curves of a 50ft ketch home in and out of view, with palm trees and pristine beaches as their backdrop. We pulled up onto the end of the island and had a quick poke around our very own island paradise, before heading back to The Black Dragonfly to grab our snorkelling gear.

Almost all of the islands in the San Blas have their own underwater reef systems, and indeed it’s these reef systems that create the islands in the first place, as the reefs eventually grow large enough to start silting up with sand, until they eventually stick up above the waves where vegetation can take hold. The best way to explore an island’s reef system is to work out where the current is coming from, and to start swimming into the current; in this way, if you get tired, you can easily drift back to where you started, rather than being carried further and further away from safety. Luckily, this meant we could jump out of the yacht and swim straight over to the island to reach the perfect starting point for an exploration of the reef jutting out of the eastern shore; so Peta and I spent an enjoyable hour floating through the coral canyons, spotting plenty of fish and lots of different formations, from coral fans to brain coral to big stacks of yellow fins. Even though the light wasn’t perfect, it was very enjoyable.

That afternoon, after a lovely lunch of frittata with beetroot salad – I’m sorry to keep mentioning the food, but it really was exceptional – Jan took us in the dinghy to the southern island for a snorkelling trip, where there were plenty of fish just off the pristine beach at the western tip of the island. Our original plan had been to build a fire on that beach and have a bit of a beach party, but the clouds had gathered during the afternoon and they soon put a dampener on that idea, so after the snorkelling we all piled into the dinghy for an exploration of the channels and islands to the west of Swimming Pool anchorage. The islands are all slightly different in character and it’s hard not to keep on taking photographs at every turn. There was one palm tree, hanging over the water, which was particularly photogenic... and which, it turned out, was the perfect height for those so inclined to climb up and hang off upside down, though we settled for having our picture taken while standing underneath.

Further along the island was a group of yacht captains who’d popped over from Swimming Pool anchorage, which was just next door, and while we curled our toes in the sand and took in the view of all the anchored yachts turning in the breeze together, the captains started comparing boat sizes in the way that males the world over are genetically obliged to do. Luckily the rain had other ideas and it soon forced us all back into our respective dinghies, and before long we were back in our 50ft Formosa, enjoying a perfectly cooked meal of salmon fillets in sundried tomatoes, with pasta and fresh green asparagus spears.

But we couldn’t stay here forever, and the conversation soon drifted to the plans for tomorrow, which would involve a short hop south and east to Cayos Coco Banderos, the last stop before the ocean crossing to Colombia.

San Blas (Cayos Coco Banderos)

Written: 22 March 2014

I thought that the Cayos Holandeses were pretty beautiful, but the best was yet to come. Unfortunately, as day four of our trip dawned, the weather that had arrived the night before started to pick up even more (as Jan had warned us it would), and as we dropped anchor and headed south for a two-hour sail towards Cayos Coco Banderos, the seas began to swell. Switzerland is not known for its maritime expertise, so the 3m swell that greeted us was cause for whoops and yells from the rest of the passengers, but Jan and I looked each other in the eye and muttered, ‘Ha, this isn’t a big swell.’ Just in case, I kept my eyes on the horizon and told myself that I’ve been through far worse, which seemed to keep the seasickness at bay.

The increased swell was indicative of a change in the weather, and Jan tactfully pointed out that this didn’t bode terribly well for the ocean crossing to Colombia, which was slated for the following day. We turned east around the western Cayos Coco Banderos, passing to the south of these pretty islands, one of which is known as ‘one-palm island’ because – you guessed it – it’s a desert island with just one palm. The only problem is that in an attempt to stop one-palm island from being washed into the sea, the Kuna have planted a small collection of other palms on the island, so the solitary palm is solitary no more, and instead it has a row of midget palms beside it, like a proud father palm taking his brood for a morning stroll... into the wind, in this case.

We were originally going to drop anchor at the western Cayos Coco Banderos, but a few of us had mentioned that we were really interested in seeing some of the local Kuna people and buying some molas, the colourful textiles that they sell to passing sailors. Ever open to tailoring the trip to suit the passengers, Jan suggested that instead we continue on to the eastern Cayos Coco Banderos, where there’s an inhabited island where molas are on the menu.

What a great move that turned out to be; the eastern Cayos Coco Banderos are an absolute paradise, and they would soon turn into the undisputed highlight of the trip.

The Plate Incident

Jan dropped anchor in the middle of a cluster of three small, palm-fringed islands, one of which had a small thatched hut on it (though it would turn out that this was just a shelter, rather than a full-time Kuna house). There were a few other yachts sharing the shelter, but it wasn’t crowded, which was a relief after finding Swimming Pool anchorage so full. To the north was the inhabited Kuna island, with a handful of larger huts under the trees, and to the northwest was a tiny island with just two palm trees, which we promptly named ‘two-palm island’. It was an idyllic spot.

To get us in the mood for lunch we swam to the nearby island and back, but any pretensions I had of being a good swimmer went out of the window when Holly accidentally dropped a plate out of the galley window. Jan leapt into action, throwing on a mask and fins, and after taking a few deep breaths, he dived off the side and disappeared into the deep blue water. We waited, and waited, and waited, and eventually we heard a splash on the other side of the boat, and there was Jan, plate in hand. The depth gauge read 12.6m; there’s no way I could skin dive down to that depth, and on the way up he’d even had time to rescue a coin that had fallen out of his pocket on the way down. Jan is a fully qualified divemaster, so this kind of thing is pretty everyday to him; to a landlubber like me who has problems duck diving from the surface to a couple of metres down, it’s impressive stuff.

Soon after that we enjoyed the first of many visits by the local Kuna who lived on the island to the north. They sold us beer at a very reasonable US$15 for 24 cans, which went straight into the ice box, and they asked whether we could charge up their mobile phone, which Jan happily agreed to; it’s always good to keep in the good books of the locals when you sail through here so regularly. During our visit they would pop over every now and then to try to sell us fish and more beer, because apart from making and selling molas, bartering with visiting captains is their main source of income.

Two-palm Island

That afternoon, we were stranded on our very own desert island. Two-palm island is just 40 paces long and 32 paces wide, and with one large palm and a smaller, rather battered companion in the middle of the island and precious little else to see – except for the usual collection of flotsam and jetson that you find on absolutely every island in the world – it felt more like a clichéd comic-book desert island than reality. So Jan dropped us off there for an afternoon of snorkelling and relaxing, because we just couldn’t resist.

The current out here nearer to the ocean was pretty strong and Peta wasn’t up for a snorkel anyway, so she sat under the palm tree and read while the rest of us headed off to snorkel round the island. The visibility wasn’t as clear as it had been for the last few days, as the winds were picking up and the sky was bruising, but we spotted a large nurse shark sitting on the bottom, directly below us, and the coral was pretty interesting at the eastern tip of the island. But by far the most entertaining part was being able to photograph ourselves, alone on a tiny spit of sand in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, with water all around and waves never more than a stone’s throw in any direction. It was bizarre and splendid in its isolation, and the mouldering wreck of a large cargo boat on the nearby reef only helped to underline just how fragile I felt, perched on such a tiny dot on the map.

That night, Holly cooked us old clothes, and they tasted divine. Ropa vieja (‘old clothes’) is a traditional Cuban dish made from slow-cooked beef in a tomato-based sauce, and apparently it was what they gave the sailors when they came back from their sea voyages, with them all still dressed up in their old clothes (sailors the world over tend to have a fairly liberal attitude towards clean clothes, as I can attest). There are various other stories about how the dish got its name, but this felt like the most suitable one as we sat there under darkening skies, wondering what the ocean passage was going to be like.

Change of Plan

Luckily, Jan’s main aim on this trip was to make it comfortable and safe for the passengers, and he’d been keeping a close eye on the weather. He contacted his father in Norway to ask him to check out the weather forecast online, as the one Jan was using was by now a week old, and it turned out that the wind was going to pick up even more overnight; although it would calm down the following day, this would mean that the waves would be really bumpy for the ocean crossing, as it takes at least half a day for the waves to calm down once the wind has died. It wasn’t looking good for the open ocean crossing to Cartagena (which was always going to be the hard bit of this trip anyway).

So Jan announced that, instead, we’d have another day in the Cayos Coco Banderos, because this was a lovely anchorage and it made no sense to bash our way through an ocean swell if it was going to calm down the following day. This was great news; rough ocean passages are absolutely no fun at all, and I’d been trying to keep a lid on my feelings, but to be totally honest I was dreading a 40-hour crossing in high winds. But now we had another day to relax, and instead we’d be weighing anchor at 4pm the next day, effectively extending the trip to a seven-day, six-night excursion, with four full days in the San Blas Islands. What a bargain!

That night, as the winds blew outside and the rain squalled around us, we opted to while away the hours by watching one of Jan’s DVDs. There were some technical issues, as Jan’s TV had taken a hit on his Atlantic crossing, when the boat had been leaning hard to port and a wave had broken over the starboard side and into the cabin right where the TV sat. This had turned the bottom strip of the screen into a strange mess of colours and shapes, which looked for all the world like a Jackson Pollock-influenced channel ident, but it was when the bottom third of the screen suddenly went blank and refused to come back that we realised it was going to be a bit of a challenge watching Blood Diamond, the movie that a show of hands had democratically chosen. Still, we managed to piece the plot together from the top two-thirds of the movie, and as we watched Leonardo DiCaprio strut his South African stuff on the (very) small screen, I realised that this was the first film we’d watched in months – since leaving for this trip, in fact. It was a pleasure just to forget about travelling for a couple of hours and sink into Hollywood, if only for the novelty.

Another Day in Paradise

Our bonus day, day five, turned out to be the best of the lot. The winds calmed down, just as Jan had said they would, and the sun came out, so finally the islands came out in resplendent turquoise under blue skies, and we got the paradise photographs that we all wanted. We happily spent the morning snorkelling around the nearest island to our anchorage and exploring the deserted island to the west of us, and then in the afternoon we took the dinghy to the Kuna’s island to check out their molas.

Molas are hand-stitched textiles that are made up of multiple layers, with the layers cut back to create a three-dimensional effect. The subjects are mainly things that the Kuna see in their everyday life – birds, fish, aquatic scenes – or just pretty geometric patterns, and the colours they use are vibrant and joyous. As a memento of a visit to the San Blas, molas are pretty perfect, as they squish into a backpack easily, they’re hard to damage, and they look lovely when put into a frame and hung on the wall back home. I told Peta how many dollars we had to spend, and she spent every single one of them on three lovely molas and a pretty headband, all of them made in the same layered manner.

But even more interesting than the molas were the Kuna women who were selling them. The Kunas wear traditional dress – or, at least, the women do, as the men seem to be happy in the standard trouser-and-shirt uniform – and it’s a wonderful splash of colour and design. They wear hundreds of colourful bracelets on their shins that together look like multicoloured socks, and their skirts and blouses are vibrantly coloured, with molas worn on the front and back of their tops (mola literally means ‘blouse’ in the Kuna language). Add in colourful head scarves and more bracelets on the forearms, and the effect is distinct and invigorating, particularly when you add in their ready smiles.

All good things must come to an end, though, and after we’d explored the Kunas’ perfect paradise island and soaked up our last bit of San Blas sunshine, we returned to The Black Dragonfly to stow all our belongings and get ready for the ocean passage to Cartagena, some 200 nautical miles away in distant Colombia.

San Blas to Cartagena

Written: 24 March 2014

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I do not like ocean passages. Back in 1997, after crossing half the Pacific from New Zealand to the Gambier Islands, I wrote, ‘I don’t regret going. I’ll just never get on an ocean-going yacht again.’ And here I am, on an ocean-going yacht again. What the hell just happened?

Well, the appeal of a trip through the amazing San Blas islands just happened, and the fact is that this time round, I’m not a member of the crew, I’m a passenger. And I’m also drugged up to the gills on the maximum possible dose of seasickness tablets, which I didn’t take in French Polynesia, and I’m also fully aware that it’s when you go below deck that things can start to go wrong, so I’m staying up top as much as I can.

It went well, I have to say, and I didn’t expect to be writing that at the end of this particular journey. The seasickness tablets really worked, and although I still felt pretty uneasy through most of the trip – an ocean-going yacht is not a natural environment for me, however hard I try to think otherwise – I managed to get through it without once heaving over the side. Compared to the weeks of seasickness I endured on the Pacific, it’s been a holiday, and I still can’t quite believe that I escaped unharmed.

It helped that Peta found her sea legs quickly, because that meant at least one of us was able to cope with life on board. It’s always difficult at first, getting used to a yacht’s movements on the ocean, but by the end of the ocean passage she was happily moving about downstairs, without a hint of green about the gills. I had a feeling that she would cope well, as she’s always been fine when everyone else around her has been succumbing to la mal de mer, but you never know until you try it.

A huge factor was that Captain Jan did his best to keep the voyage as smooth as possible, and he did a great job, especially when you consider what the swell could have been. The wind comes from the northeast and we were heading east, so for this last leg across the ocean we were sailing into the wind and into the swell, which is far from the most comfortable approach, but the swell was less than it would have been a day ago, and we made good time. And Holly had prepared all the meals in advance, designing them to fit into bowls that we could eat easily on a heavily leaning yacht, and which could be easily digested and were gentle on the stomach. She even prepared plain rice for anyone who was feeling a bit rough; this turned out to be a great idea, and a surprisingly popular option with some of the more fragile passengers...

But even with this relatively easy sailing, it’s still a huge shock to find out just how difficult life on board the ocean can be. When people look at yachts and imagine the sailing life, they think of being moored in the marina at Monte Carlo, sipping champagne on deck, or dropping anchor amongst the turquoise delights of sheltered coral islands. Most yachties don’t even experience proper ocean crossings, but that’s where the real sailing is, and it’s impossible to imagine what it’s like: you really have to be there.

Take a beautiful yacht like The Black Dragonfly, with all its teak decking and picturesque rigging, and tilt it to one side by something like 30 or 40 degrees. Now take your tilted yacht in both hands and rock it from side to side while bouncing it up and down and tilting it backwards and forwards along the bow line. And now imagine being stuck inside this pretty little yacht for a full night, a full day and another full night, and you’re getting close to the experience of crossing the Caribbean Sea from San Blas to Colombia.

But it’s the sheer amount of effort involved that takes you by surprise. Take a simple task like going to the toilet, and it turns into an epic adventure that will leave your head reeling, and possibly your guts. Just walking down stairs and along a corridor is a lesson in balance that leaves you breathless; trying to sit on a toilet at a 30° angle is seriously hard, and then you find that your body doesn’t like doing its stuff at that angle... and there’s nothing you can do except wait, while the room spins around you and the force of the bow hitting the waves pushes you down into the seat before lifting you up like the crest of a roller-coaster. It leaves you completely drained, in more ways than one.

And what about going to bed? We slept in the aft cabin, where the double bed has the pillows right at the back of the boat and your feet pointing towards the bow, but when the boat is tilted over to starboard at such a steep angle, you can’t sleep like that or the person on the port side will simply crash down into the person on the starboard side. So you have to sleep with your head to port and your feet to starboard, effectively standing up to go to sleep as the world crashes around you. We tried to sleep like that, but we both independently discovered that the best way to cope is to give in to gravity, and each of us curled up at what had become the foot of the bed, in a scrunched up foetal position that took most of the sting out of the boat’s bouncing.

Stretch out this constant strain on your muscles over 40-odd hours, and it gets a bit wearing. It was astounding, then, that we both got a good night’s sleep on the first night, and an even better one on the second night when Jan sailed us into the lee of Isla Barú, some 190 nautical miles from the San Blas and just off the coast to the south of Cartagena. He dropped the anchor in the wee hours and we spent the rest of the night in deep sleep. In the end, we survived well.

The others weren’t so lucky. Cordelia was the first to lose it, pretty soon after we hit the ocean swell, and she sat at the back of the boat, being sick over the side, before going back downstairs where she stayed ever since, avoiding the whole issue by sleeping in her bunk. Marco also lost it over the side pretty early on, and spent the trip eating plain rice and lying on deck, his face wrapped up in a T-shirt to stop the sun from burning. Reto felt really queasy from the off and discovered that standing on the aft deck, holding on to the rear mast, was the best option; he refused to go downstairs, even to check on Cordelia, because he knew that if he went down there, he’d lose grip on his ability to keep food down (and it would turn out he was right). Indeed, the only person (apart from Peta) who coped well was Stephan, who was completely at ease, happily smoking, eating, reading books and generally going about things as if he was on land. Some people just have natural sea legs.

After the ocean passage, the final push up the coast, past the Islas del Rosario and into Cartagena through the Bocachica entrance, was child’s play in comparison. We had to avoid some huge vessels as we joined the shipping lane into port, and there were dolphins jumping in the bay as we sailed in, and tweeting birds landed on the spreaders to welcome us to land. The skyscrapers of the new part of Cartagena faded into view on the horizon, and it wasn’t long before we’d docked and jumped onto land, even though it would still be swaying in our heads for days to come.

And as we hopped off the deck and walked into Colombia, I turned and saw Jan and Holly hugging each other, their first proper Panamanian charter on The Black Dragonfly in the bag. You deserved that moment, guys, because you did an excellent job, and coming from me and my phobias of the sea, that’s praise indeed. It really was an excellent trip... one of the last real adventures, indeed.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 24 March 2014

In the end, we loved Panama. After our early exit from Costa Rica, we landed in the northwest without much of a plan and without any expectations, but Panama has turned out to be one long story of pleasant places, nice people, good food and, to top it off, a bona fide adventure on the high seas. What’s not to like?

True, the sights of Panama are rather more low key than, say, Guatemala or Nicaragua. Bocas del Toro is a pleasant spot, but we’ve visited much more beautiful Caribbean islands on this trip; Boquete is enjoyable, but there’s nothing particularly astonishing there; we didn’t fall for Pedasí in the way we’d hoped we would, but the area is certainly pretty enough to warrant a detour; and the Panama Canal, while utterly unique and a must-see, wasn’t quite as astounding as I’d thought it would be. Only the San Blas archipelago, with its strings of tiny palm-fringed islands, stood out for me as totally unique, and it’s arguably the least Panamanian sight on the list, as the Kuna are effectively an independent nation.

But that’s missing the point of Panama. It’s a mature and relatively well-developed country that’s easy to travel round, but it doesn’t suffer from the rip-off nature of Costa Rica, and this means that simply travelling round the country is a pleasure. You can easily find good food here, which is such a relief after the dreadful cuisine we’ve had to endure on most of our Central American journey, and Panama City was wonderfully cosmopolitan and a welcome sight for those of us who like modern cities. Panamanian public transport is modern (if you ignore the chicken buses that are being phased out) and is good value for money (if you ignore the taxi scammers in the capital), and the shape of the country means you don’t need to backtrack too much to take in the sights.

As a coda to our trip through Central America, Panama did the trick nicely. It’s not one of those countries that I’ll be raving about for years to come, but I’ve come away with some lovely memories, and that’s a darn sight more than I can say about some of the countries I’ve visited.

Colombia: The Caribbean Coast

Cartagena

Written: 31 March 2014

We were both utterly exhausted by the ocean crossing from Panama, and it rather took the wind out of our sails as we stumbled off the deck of The Black Dragonfly and into the hot colonial port of Cartagena. It didn’t help that the heat in Cartagena was utterly stifling, giving León a run for its money as the hottest place we’ve been on this trip, and it really didn’t help that both of us were struck by land-sickness, with the solid ground swelling and swaying around us like the ocean.

I was also emotionally drained, as all the tension I’d built up in the run-up to the voyage spilled over into a bout of lethargy and listlessness that I simply couldn’t do anything about. I found myself in a new part of the world – South America! – and I just couldn’t get motivated at all. So we knuckled down to do pretty much nothing until the fog cleared, the rooms stopped spinning, and we could come up with a decent plan for exploring Colombia. It would take about a week in all, but luckily Cartagena turned out to be a perfect place for procrastination.

Arguably the most beautiful colonial town in the Americas, Cartagena de Indias (to give the city its full name) is a tale of two halves. The Old Town, which covers the districts of El Centro and San Diego, is surrounded by a huge fortified wall that the Spanish built to keep out invaders, and inside the wall is a maze of narrow streets and atmospheric plazas that are crammed with restaurants, boutique hotels, shops and churches. Coming from Central America, the first thing that strikes you is how clean it all is, but that’s because the Old Town has been restored and gentrified into one of the most popular tourist attractions in Colombia.

It’s a place for aimless wandering, but there is one problem: the gentrified streets now tread a fine line between characterful and clinical, and for me, it just manages to overstep the line. Yes, the architecture is wonderful, but the shops are all about ultra-modern designer clothes, the restaurants are all about ultra-smart modern cuisine, the bars are all about ultra-cool cosmopolitanism, the hotels are all about ultra-chic boutiques and spas, and the atmosphere is one of a European city with the Colombian influence swept away in a tide of Benetton and Prada. Scratch the surface of the Old Town and you will find gorgeous buildings and a palpable history, but you’ll also find that in terms of character and soul, its beauty is only skin deep, having been exfoliated and pampered just a little too much.

But head east, passing beneath the picture-postcard clock tower of Puerta del Reloj and across to the other side of the Parque del Centenario, and there you’ll find the Outer City, where things get a lot more earthy. The suburb of Getsemaní still teems with real Colombian life, and its squares fill with local life in the evenings while the walls crumble and the streets bubble with characters. Not that long ago Getsemaní was a no-go area for tourists, as it was home to the red light district and lots of casual criminals, but it’s now pretty safe for visitors, and indeed, most of the city’s budget accommodation can be found there. We explored the Old Town, but we settled into the Outer City, and that’s where we finally shook off our nautical exhaustion and started to take stock of where we’d landed.

With our energy levels on the rise, we even managed to visit one bona fide tourist attraction: the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas. This immense fort is just outside the wall around the Outer City, to the east of Getsemaní, and it’s one of the most formidable colonial fortresses that the Spanish ever built. The views over Cartagena are stunning and worth the entrance fee alone, but the fort is also home to a labyrinth of underground tunnels, some of which are open to the public, and which provide you with an eerie and claustrophobic way to escape from the baking sun outside.

But even this short foray into the outside world nearly proved too much; it’s hard to overstate just how fierce the equatorial sun is at this time of year, and it’s no surprise that the locals simply hide from the midday skies, choosing to cram their day into the early morning and late evening, when they come out into the streets in their hundreds, promenading around the bars of the Old Town or eating street food in the plazas of the Outer City. So our stay in Colombia’s premier colonial city degenerated into daytimes spent relaxing and hiding from the outside world, and evenings spent in restaurants and bars, including a very enjoyable evening with Jan and Holly from The Black Dragonfly at a rather special Argentinian restaurant in the Old Town.

It might not have been terribly good for our waistlines, but sometimes you just have to go with your gut instincts, so we simply waited until we felt we were ready to step into the rest of Colombia. It took a good week for the land to stop swaying and for a plan to start forming in our heads, but eventually we recovered enough to hop on a bus heading east along the Caribbean coast to Santa Marta, South America’s oldest surviving city.

The Song Remains the Same

Written: 1 April 2014

It’s a curse sometimes, being into music. I envy people who can walk into a pub and not notice what’s playing, because for me there is no such thing as background music. Even if it’s so quiet that I have to strain to catch the melody, my brain actively seeks out the day’s soundtrack, analyses it, files it away and, worst of all, judges it.

The problem is that most people don’t seem to understand just how important music can be in setting the tone of an environment. If the proprietor picks the wrong soundtrack for a venue, it can seriously affect the mood of the place; it’s most obvious in nightclubs, of course, when putting on the wrong track can clear the dance floor, but in restaurants and pubs the effect is the same, it’s just more subtle. People won’t even know why they don’t fancy returning to a restaurant, and what they don’t realise is that it’s down to the owner’s casual misuse of, say, James Blunt or Justin Bieber. There should be warning stickers; in my head, there are.

But this is South America, where surely this kind of musical naivety could never happen. Music flows in the blood of these people, whether it’s Argentinian tango, Brazilian samba, Colombian salsa or Andean folk music, and there’s a booming music scene in the southern half of the American continent that we tend not to notice in the UK, mainly because of the language barrier, but also because so many of us still think that music began with The Beatles. And as you travel around, you do come across lots of different musical varieties, from the squeezebox-influenced folk here in Colombia to the bizarre marimba music of Guatemala, and although not all of it is good, it’s always interesting to hear new types of local music.

All of which makes it even more unfathomable that most of the time, there appear to be just two songs in this part of the world. Every bar you go into, every radio station you tune into, every chicken bus you get onto and every Android phone that gets played in public, seems hardwired to play Marc Anthony’s ‘Vivir Mi Vida’ or Romeo Santos’s ‘Propuesta Indecente’, and nothing else. Some bars will play these two songs four or five times in one evening, and their infectious melodies get burnt in your subconscious and force you into submission. ‘Ah well,’ I thought, ‘at least they’re local to this part of the world,’ but no! It turns out that both Marc Anthony and Romeo Santos hail from New York... so the biggest songs in Central and South America aren’t even from this part of the continent.

Never mind, you think, because surely if you check into a nice five-star hotel or head out to a gourmet restaurant, then they won’t be playing the same old hits... and you’d be right. But incredibly, all the classy joints that we’ve visited – and I genuinely mean all of them – have their own two artists that they can’t help plugging remorselessly. From the beachside paradises of Monterrico and Little Corn Island all the way to the nice Italian restaurant we found in Cartagena, they all play either Jack Johnson – the surfing acoustic troubadour from Hawaii – or a collection of sultry cover songs sung by silk-voiced women over gentle lift music. It’s always the same collection of covers, and I’ve finally worked out what it is; it’s a whole series of albums called Relaxing Bossa Lounge and it contains coffee-table versions of songs like ‘You’re Beautiful’, ‘Fields of Gold’ and ‘How Deep Is Your Love?’, as well as late-night-lounge versions of rockers like ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Beat It’. Most incredibly of all, though, are the bossa nova covers of ‘Creep’, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Paradise City’, which manage to suck so much life out the originals that they sound positively huggable. It is mind-boggling in its banality, and it crops up with such monotonous regularity that I can even predict which song is coming next. The album’s tagline is ‘Unforgettable famous songs in bossa nova’, and they’re right; I can’t seem to forget it, no matter how hard I try.

At least the repetitive nature of public music in this part of the world has had a positive effect on my opinion of the local folk music. It might be pretty formulaic and so accordion-heavy that it sounds like something from pre-war France, but at least it isn’t Marc Anthony, Romeo Santos, Jack Johnson or Relaxing Bossa Lounge, and for that alone it gets a big thumbs up from me.

Santa Marta

Written: 2 April 2014

Santa Marta is a four-hour bus ride along the coast from Cartagena, and like its colonial neighbour to the west, it’s a city of two halves. This time, though, the earthy part is a lot more visible, and it makes for an interesting mix.

Most travellers shoot straight through Santa Marta and head on to the backpacker Mecca of Taganga, just 7km to the north, so Santa Marta is more of a playground for Colombian holidaymakers. The southern half of town is cosmopolitan and has some pleasant shaded plazas with expensive restaurants and bars, and there’s a marina full of gleaming yachts, a small crescent-shaped beach, and a pedestrian-friendly waterfront from which you can enjoy the sun setting into the Caribbean Sea. On paper, it’s great.

It’s still great in practice, but perhaps not for the reasons you’ll see in the brochure, because while the southern half of town is a great spot, the northern half is a great eyesore, and simply turning your head in that direction is a lesson in why estate agents are always banging on about location, location, location. For while there’s a sandy beach along the southern end of the waterfront, there’s a massive sea port along the northern end, where monstrous container ships drop anchor and load up their cargo under the mechanical gaze of huge cranes and towering storage silos.

Even if you try to ignore the industrial side of town and keep your eyes dead ahead on the gentle surf of the holiday beach, the side effects of the port are hard to miss. On the surface, the beach appears to be a pleasant crescent where local holidaymakers happily swim, but if you look more carefully, there’s a strange stain along the high-tide mark that looks suspiciously like an industrial by-product, and the seaweed that clogs the first couple of metres of sea is dark, red and almost algae-like in its sludgy character. The water is murky and has a slightly green tinge to it, and there’s a distinctive and familiar smell of rotting organic matter that wafts along the breeze from cracks in the promenade.

But despite this slightly unfortunate clash of beauty and beast, Santa Marta is still a great place to visit. The restaurants are slightly overpriced and, as with so many places in this part of the world, you shouldn’t choose to arrive on a Monday, as everything seems to close, but the people-watching is unsurpassed and there are plenty of bars and restaurants where you can simply sink into a beer and watch the world amble by. It’s as hot as hell here, just as it is in Cartagena, but that’s all part of the experience; this is Colombia and Santa Marta is a Colombian city, and for that alone it’s an easy place to like.

Taganga

Written: 2 April 2014

Within five minutes of stepping foot in Taganga, I’d been offered something to smoke, not once, not twice, but three times. Of course, having long hair and a beard means I’m an immediate target for the local drug dealers wherever I roam, but still, I think this is a record for this particular trip. And it sums up Taganga pretty well, for this is a massively popular stop on the Gringo Trail for backpackers who come to relax in the sun and party at night, all, of course, fuelled by plenty of t’ganja.

But it’s really, really hot at the moment, and I’m not sure we picked the best time to visit, because it’s not only hot, but it’s incredibly dry. Colombia is about to see the weather break into the second rainy season, and you can feel the build-up as you swelter your way from shelter to shade to shelter again. The wind picks up in the afternoon and it blows hard and dry, and while Cartagena and Santa Marta manage to channel this desiccating tornado down pleasant streets and into the trees that line the plazas, Taganga chooses to funnel the wind down the mountains and straight into town, where it blows up clouds of hot, dry dust that choke the seafront and line everything in a fine, sticky powder.

This wouldn’t be a problem if Taganga was a pretty fishing village, but it’s more than a pretty fishing village; it’s a pretty ruined fishing village. Set on a pleasantly curving bay that looks west into the Caribbean Sea with some wonderfully pretty hills on either side, Taganga has a nice little beach at the southern end of the bay, and an unremitting homage to concrete in the middle and northern parts. Someone obviously thought that it would be attractive to build a concrete waterfront dotted with concrete kiosks and concrete steps down to the beach, but when the sun can melt plastic and the wind blows in clouds of dust, concrete is not your friend, and the result is that Taganga is hot, dry and as colourless as a sepia photograph of a brown paper bag.

The northern end of the bay is peppered with lots of atmospherically rotting fishing boats, but the concrete kiosks in this part of town are untouched by commercial aspirations and seem to do nothing other than provide shelter to a motley crew of beggars and dogs. Things do improve nearer the centre of the waterfront where some of the kiosks sell food and beer, and by the time you reach the beach the party scene is set, with a string of monster nightclubs overlooking the sea and setting the tone for the wee hours. But the food prices on the waterfront are the same as the prices in the plazas in Santa Marta, and at this time of year it’s an unrelenting place to watch the sun go down; our beer bottles blew over, the wind was so strong, and if I hadn’t remembered to bring my biker’s head scarf, I’d have been in all sorts of trouble.

So in the end we took shelter in a taxi back to Santa Marta, and figured we’d leave Taganga to the dealers and backpackers. The beach is pleasant and the sea is much cleaner than it is in industrial Santa Marta, but that concrete waterfront is a bit too much like a pizza stone for my taste. No wonder everyone here sleeps all day and only comes out at night...

Ciudad Perdida

Written: 8 April 2014

The trek to Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City of the Tayronas, has reached a fairly legendary status on the travelling circuit, and for good reason. It’s a difficult multiple-day trek through tough terrain in northern Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, and after days of slogging through the jungle, you end up at the stunning medieval ruins of the Lost City, where the lush tropical rainforest reveals one of the most beautiful and atmospheric archaeological sites that I’ve ever seen. This trek is being called the new Inca Trail and the Lost City the new Machu Picchu, and for once this isn’t overblown marketing.

On top of the physical challenge of getting there, the Lost City has a bit of a dubious history. Founded around 800 AD, some 650 years before Machu Picchu, the bulk of the city was built between the 11th and 14th centuries and was home to at least 2000 people; however, it was abandoned soon after the Spanish arrived, and the site remained hidden by the jungle until it was rediscovered in 1972, when a group of local treasure hunters – or guaqueros (grave robbers) as they were known – happened upon a set of stone steps leading up from the banks of the Río Buritaca. Word of the discovery spread among other groups of guaqueros, and soon enough fighting broke out between rival gangs, all of them trying to get hold of the gold and stone artefacts that were buried inside the site’s circular structures. In 1976 the government sent in troops to stop the fighting and the Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia sent in an archaeological expedition, and they spent the next six years clearing the rainforest from the site and reconstructing the ancient city, while continuing to dodge bullets from guaqueros who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

But the story doesn’t end there. This part of Colombia used to be a hotbed of guerrilla activity, not least because it was a major producer of coca, the raw ingredient that’s used to produce cocaine, and back in 2003 a group of eight foreign walkers was kidnapped by the left-wing National Liberation Army while walking to Ciudad Perdida, and they were held captive in the jungle for three months before finally being released. I remember this happening because we knew one of the kidnapped tourists – he’d been the boyfriend of a co-worker during our dot-com days – and this made it all seem rather real. The area is now supposed to be safe, as the government removed all the paramilitaries from the area in 2008, though the UK government’s travel advice says to make sure that your tour company knows what it’s doing, because although there is a strong military presence in the area and nobody has been kidnapped since, it still pays to be careful.

So you have the perfect storm: a difficult slog through tropical rainforest to the ancient ruins of a lost civilisation, through an area with a tinge of modern-day intrigue and danger. It’s no wonder that this trek is so attractive to travellers, and for once you should believe the hype: it’s an amazing walk... but only if you do it right. This is the Gringo Trail, after all, and there are plenty of people who don’t listen to advice, so while we enjoyed our walk, there were plenty of casualties along the way among those who’d bitten off more than they could chew. You can choose how fast to do the walk, from four, five or six days, and we chose five days; this turned out to be a good choice, as the four-day option is only for masochists or the super-fit. And Peta, for whom this was her first ever multiple-day hike, did a better job of tackling the jungle than people half her age; you don’t only need to be physically fit, you need to be mentally strong, because this is no walk in the park.

Five Go Walking

The only way you can do the walk to Ciudad Perdida is as part of a guided group – independent walking is not allowed for security reasons – and we lucked out with our walking companions. As with all group tours, there’s an element of risk that you’ll end up in a group of idiots, but we were not only lucky with the people in our group, but with the size. Some of the groups we encountered on the trek had 14 people in them, but we were just four: the two of us plus a Canadian couple. Oliver and Emily were both 23, both from Montreal, and being Canadians they were both genuinely good people (or, as you might say if you’re from round those parts, they were super-nice). They wanted to take their time on the walk, as we did, and they wanted to enjoy the walking experience rather than treat it as a backpacker party; as we did the walk, the four of us would look on in horror as some of the other groups noisily high-fived each other while necking beer and comparing tattoos. We were lucky, no doubt about it.

We were also lucky in our guide, Antonio. When we turned up at the Expotur office, we were initially introduced to a guide called Wilson, who spoke English and who seemed pretty good, but as we sat in the back of the van taking us from Santa Marta to the trailhead at the village of Machete, Wilson announced that he had to go to hospital, so instead Antonio would be taking us. We were initially a bit annoyed to discover that Antonio couldn’t speak English, but he would turn out to be a real find, not least because he’s a stunningly good cook; he told us he spends nine months of each year guiding groups in Ciudad Perdida, but during the three quietest months, when the rain lashes down, he works as the cook in a ranch. Eating well is such an important part of walking, and Antonio’s food was head and shoulders above that of the other groups, who looked on in envy. And even more amazingly, both Peta and I, with our limited Spanish, understood almost every word that Antonio said; he obviously spoke slowly and clearly for our benefit, and the language barrier simply evaporated.

Day 1: Machete to Alojamiento de Alfredo (8.4km)

It’s about an hour and a half by van from Santa Marta to the trailhead in the small village of Machete, so our trek started off with lunch in Machete at the end of a bumpy and grinding drive south from the coast at Tayrona. Although we were keen to get walking, it made sense to hide from the midday sun and to set off later in the afternoon, though as we tucked into piles of ham, cheese and salad sandwiches, the clouds rolled in and hid most of the sunlight anyway. A larger group turned up as we munched away, though as they were doing the faster four-day option we wouldn’t see them again until they passed us on their way back; still, we could see straight away that having a small group was a big advantage, as everything in the larger group seemed to take ages, from serving lunch to getting ready to walk.

After lunch we set off on the trail, passing a happy group who were just completing their walk. ‘It’s amazing,’ they said, ‘you’re in for a real treat,’ and with that we stomped off down the dusty road out of Machete and north towards the hills.

It was incredibly dry and dusty from the very first step. When researching this walk, I’d read all about terribly muddy conditions and difficult river crossings, but every step we took kicked up fine, light dust, and when we reached our first river, it was terribly sedate and easy to cross on the smooth, round stepping stones that someone had kindly laid out for us. This theme of dry conditions and gentle rivers would stick with us to the end; completely by chance, it turns out that this is one of the best times to do the trek to Ciudad Perdida, as the rain hasn’t started yet (it generally arrives in April, but we haven’t seen any yet). In the rainy season the fine dust turns into epic amounts of mud and the rivers run dangerously high, but in April, the balance is just right for easy walking and good swimming, even if it is a little dusty.

We confirmed this after half an hour, when we arrived at our first swimming hole, threw off our packs and jumped into the crystal-clear waters. Small fish came and nibbled at our extremities and we washed the dust out of our hair, glad of the break from the humidity that had already soaked my T-shirt from back to front. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was the calm before the storm, because that first half hour’s walking was completely trivial compared to what came next: our first ascent. At the end of the walk, on day five, we would take a dip in the very same swimming hole after a long and brutal seven-hour slog in astonishing 45° heat, and I remember looking at the groups just starting out, being lulled into a false sense of security by the sedate wander along the riverbank to this first refreshing swimming break. ‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ I remember thinking, ‘because this is where it starts to hurt.’

I digress, though, because back at the swimming hole, we still had absolutely no idea what was coming next. The swim was refreshing, but all that went out of the window as we headed upstream, crossed to the opposite bank and started the first major climb of the trek. At this point in the walk the path disappears into a series of steep switchbacks that are carved deep into the chalky rock, and at each turn the path is coated in a thick layer of fine dust that settles on your pack, sticks to your sweaty T-shirt and turns your boots whiter than a pair of miller’s wellies. Luckily as we tackled the ascent the sun was still hiding behind a thick layer of clouds, so it wasn’t as hot as it could have been, but we still had to stop at almost every corner to catch our breath. Luckily the views were getting better and better as we climbed, which was an incentive to keep on plodding.

This was where we set the walking pattern for our entire trek. Peta and I would set off at a regular and comfortable pace, while Oliver and Emily would either fall back after finding something particularly interesting to explore, or head out in front with the enviable energy of 23-year-olds; meanwhile Antonio would disappear to do his own thing and would pop up at just the right moment later on the path, complete with a stack of watermelon slices or a chocolate fix or a slice of cheese. It suited us perfectly, as it meant we effectively did the entire walk on our own, with the two of us plodding along at our own pace while our guide did just the right amount of guiding. We had two friendly group members to bump into every now and then, to swap war stories and talk about the trek, and then we had the trail to ourselves until the next pit-stop. We loved it; we felt like we were exploring, rather than tagging along in a large tourist group.

This approach also made the difficult parts slightly more bearable. The first steep slope seemed to go on forever – it actually went from 200m above sea level to 600m above sea level – but there wasn’t any pressure to go too fast, which we would have had in a bigger group or with a more insistent guide. We hit the slope just before 3pm and reached the end of the steepest section an hour and a half later; this included a very welcome watermelon break after 45 minutes, but apart from that it was a proper workout, which we tackled at our own speed. It was to be the first of many.

The reward for such a steep climb was a wonderful view over the foothills of the Sierra Nevada; at this point in the walk there isn’t a lot of tree cover, and you can see for miles. The whole area is farmed by the local campesinos, and it wasn’t long ago that this part of the world was used for growing coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine; these days you can see the remains of the coca fields that were destroyed by the government as part of the recent effort to stamp out Colombia’s cocaine trade, and these days the farmers are turning to cocoa and coffee as more acceptable cash crops (although coca is still legally grown in smaller quantities, as it remains an important part of the indigenous people’s culture).

It was at this point that we saw our first casualties of the walk. Two mules passed us in the opposite direction, led by a couple of locals, and what they carried spoke volumes. The first mule was weighed down by a burly young man whose face was covered in what looked like the bubonic plague, but which were presumably infected insect bites; he looked completely shattered and hid behind a pair of shades as he refused to meet our eyes or respond to our hellos. I couldn’t work out whether he was mortified to be doing the walk of shame or was just shattered by his experience in the jungle, but clearly he’d suffered some terrible fate up there in the Lost City, because he looked completely broken. And then, a couple of minutes behind him, the other mule carried an equally burly young man, this time sporting a thousand-yard stare so intense that he looked like he’d just come back from a tour of duty in ‘Nam. He also totally failed to acknowledge us and looked like he just wanted to get down off this damn mountain; we couldn’t help wondering what was out there that could make two young men look so totally frazzled.

Undeterred, we wandered along the top of a thin ridge that led from the 600m-high summit, passing a small camp called Alojamiento de Adán where a whole row of hammocks sat overlooking the hills. There are various camps along the route – alojamientos means ‘lodge’ in Spanish – and different groups are allocated to different ones depending on their itineraries and group sizes. They are all of a surprisingly high standard, with running water and cold showers, as well as electricity in some of the earlier camps; sleeping is either in hammocks, beds or tents, depending on which camp you stay in, and you sleep under a roof but with open sides, so you really know you’re sleeping in the great outdoors.

We still had a little way to go to our camp for the night, Alojamiento de Alfredo. That ‘little way’ was down yet another really steep slope, this time dropping down to 450m through yet more deep gashes in the chalky soil. The striking part about this section is the way the bedrock changes colour, from a chalky white at the top, through a deep outback red halfway down, and all the way to a light brown at the bottom. After the big climb it was a relief to be walking downhill and we made light work of the descent, even though it was fairly steep; on the final day, this section would prove to be one of the hardest parts of the entire walk, but the path seemed fairly innocuous as we dropped down into a small collection of hammock-toting camps at the bottom of the valley, crossed a pleasant stream on another set of stepping stones, and climbed a short distance to our stop for the night.

That night we slept in hammocks, with just four of us in a hammock camp designed to house about 50 people. I’d never actually slept in a hammock before, and I’m still not sure that I have, but it was interesting to try; it feels a bit like trying to sleep in an aeroplane, as you can’t turn over onto your front and no matter how hard you shuffle about, there are always some parts of you where the blood supply gets cut off. An added bonus was that the mosquitoes, which hadn’t been at all bad on the walk in, realised that while they couldn’t get through the mosquito nets draped over each hammock, they could get at me through the hammock itself, which was fairly thin and stretched tight by my body weight. So throughout the night I was kept alert by little pinches of mosquito all along my back, and come the wee hours the temperature dropped and my nether regions froze until I realised that wrapping a blanket around my entire body solved both problems, at the risk of causing mild claustrophobia. To be honest, I was glad when dawn broke and we could get on with the walking.

Day 2: Alojamiento de Alfredo to Alojamiento Tezhúmake (7.3km)

The second day started with a huge breakfast, during which we were visited by a friendly parrot who clearly knew that tourists are a soft touch when it comes to handing out food. It was a leisurely start as we only had about four hours of walking to do and the whole day to do it in, but we were still on the trail by 9.30am, as the sun gets you up early when you’re sleeping in a shelter that’s little more than a roof over a hammock. This time the ascent started straight away, with a climb through more farmland from the camp at 450m, and as yesterday’s clouds had disappeared overnight, the walk was noticeably hotter than the day before. Soon we could see a line of deep green up ahead which promised shelter from the unforgiving sunshine, and sure enough it turned out to be the beginning of the rainforest, taking over from the farms we’d been passing through until this point. From this point until the Lost City we would be surrounded by trees, and we were glad to switch the beating sun for shelter, albeit with higher humidity.

The trail didn’t stop climbing, though, and at 10.30am we reached the top at about 730m above sea level. By this stage we were both starting to feel the effects in our legs, and as if reading our minds, Antonio pointed to a pile of sticks on the summit that looked like they might be a suitable solution; a couple of minutes later Peta and I had a stick each, and the next day we’d both pick up a second stick, which saved a lot of stress on our knees, though it did make us look like a couple of lost skiers. The sartorial trade-off was worth it, though; using walking poles reduces stress on the knees by about 40 per cent, which is worth looking a bit stupid for.

One of the things you learn early on about the trek to Ciuded Perdida is that what goes up must come down, so as soon as we crested the forested hill, we started a very long trek down again, right back down to 400m, where we joined the Río Buritaca, the river that flows past the Lost City. The views on the descent were spectacular, and peering through the canopy we could see huge distant mountain tops, deep valleys and the odd farm perched on the steep hillsides. It was a long hike, but the reward at the bottom was the best so far; a short side-trail from Alojamiento de Wiwa took us to an utterly luxurious swimming hole that we had completely to ourselves for an hour and a half. Oliver and Emily entertained themselves by jumping from a high ledge into the clear green water, while Antonio back-flipped from even higher up and we settled on a sun-drenched rock and lazily watched them boil off their excess energy.

It was when we started reassembling for the next bit of the journey that we realised we weren’t quite alone, for this part of the world is home to a large number of ravenous ticks. I felt a couple of nips around my knee supports and spotted what looked like tiny spiders trying to burrow into my skin, and Oliver and Antonio soon found their own collection of bloodsuckers trying to bite their legs. The girls, meanwhile, didn’t seem to have any problems at all; presumably ticks like the smell of man more than the scent of woman, but as soon as we set off they disappeared. Indeed, this was as bad as the insects got on our trip; we’d read stories of terrible clouds of ravenous mosquitoes along the trail, but it seems that these only appear after the rains hit, so once again it turned out we’d chosen a good time to go.

It took us about an hour to walk along the riverbank from the swimming hole to our stop for the night at Alojamiento Tezhúmake. On the way we passed our first indigenous village, Mutanzhi, where the Kogi tribe still live in round mud huts with thatched roofs. The most striking thing about the Kogi are their clothes; because they cultivate cotton, they all wear white garments that stand out really clearly amongst the many greens of the rainforest. The children wear knee-length smocks, the men wear long shirts and long trousers, and the women wear short sarong-like skirts, while the footwear of choice seems to be the good old wellington boot, which is both waterproof for river crossings and sturdy for rocky paths. As we walked further into the jungle we would see a lot more Kogi; they look like indigenous Indians rather than the more common mestizos that you see in South America – a mestizo being a person of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage – and they wear their black hair long, for both women and men. They tend to be fairly immune to greetings and stare at you as you walk past, but that’s hardly surprising, as we must appear pretty strange to them with our backpacks and sunglasses and walking boots, while they still live in huts and travel by mule.

Then again, some of them are very friendly, such as six-year-old Ari who lives with his parents at Alojamiento Tezhúmake, our camp for the night. He joined us in our stretching exercises that afternoon and we taught him to play pat-a-cake, and although he didn’t like talking much, we communicated on a different level, using the power of facial expressions, silly noises and broad smiles. He was a charmer, no doubt about it.

And Ari’s dad had an ice box full of ice-cold beer, which went down very well after we’d had a quick dip in the river. It also went down very well with the large group who arrived later in the day from the opposite direction; they’d just visited the Lost City, and their loud drinking went on until 10pm, by which time we’d collapsed into bed, this time on bunk beds with mosquito nets overlooking the river, whose white noise gently lulled us to sleep after another long day of fresh air and excellent hiking.

Day 3: Alojamiento Tezhúmake to Alojamiento El Paraíso (6.6km)

Why on earth the proprietor of Alojamiento Tezhúmake decided to start cleaning the camp at 3am is beyond me, but he did and it woke me up along with half the camp, who then decided to visit the ablutions in a long parade of bright head torches that seemed to go on forever. There’s no electricity this far into the forest, so everyone comes equipped with head torches, but the problem with head torches is that you naturally look around you while wearing them, so when people decide to visit the ablutions in the middle of the night, it’s as if the world is suddenly full of mobile lighthouses. That’s fine at 10pm when people are going to sleep, but at 3am it lights up the quiet forest like a nightclub, and it took me quite a while to go back to sleep.

So it was fairly annoying to be woken at 5am by the other group’s guide, wanting to know whether or not I was on the four-day trek, who were making an early start; I wasn’t and stuck in my earplugs while the other group noisily got themselves up and shouted to each other over their breakfast, and suddenly it was 6am and Antonio got us up for our own breakfast. We’d all suffered a bit from the insanely active wee hours in the camp, and it didn’t help that yet again the day started with an immense climb.

We set off at 8am and followed the river along a thin path that hugged the steep sides of the river canyon – and which tested Peta’s vertigo to breaking point – and at 8.30am we crossed the Buritaca on a small suspension bridge and started to climb. It was a long way up from 450m to 820m above sea level, and we passed an indigenous hut that contained a press for crushing sugar cane and extracting the sugar solution, before eventually reaching a small shop at Koskunguena an hour and a quarter later, where Antonio plied us with wonderfully fresh pineapple and bananas. The views on the way were spectacular, when the canopy cleared to let us peek through, but even when we were enclosed by the jungle, there was so much to see, from monstrous bamboo clusters to huge banana plants hanging over the path.

The most spectacular view of all, though, was just down the hill from the shop, where the forest suddenly disappeared and the entire valley opened up in front of us. Over there to the right was a perfectly poised thatched Kogi hut with a stunning vista behind it, while ahead lay the rolling hills of the Sierra Nevada, smothered in forest. It was a bit of a shock to break out into the harsh sunlight after so long hidden away in the depths of the forest, but we needn’t have worried, because soon enough we were heading back down the valley for another 100m descent, where the path started following the Buritaca valley once again.

All the while the jungle grew wilder and more picturesque with every turn. We passed gentle streams with beautiful little pools that we wished we could whisk away into our bathrooms at home; we wandered under the blackened and burned-out skeletal remains of a huge tree that an indigenous child had accidentally set alight the year before; we walked through forests of yet more immense banana plants, which seemed to get more and more surreal as we got deeper into the forest; and all the while the views up through the canopy revealed steep-sided valleys crowded with trees, and a lovely blue sky somewhere up there in the distance. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly gorgeous.

After an hour or so of following the river valley, going up and down along the rainforest route high above the river, we eventually descended and had to cross the river. This time we had to ford it without the benefit of stepping stones, which I’d been looking forward to, as the walk to the Lost City has a reputation for difficult river crossings. Disappointingly the first crossing was only shin-deep, and the second crossing about five minutes later didn’t quite reach our knees, so in the end it was a bit of a let-down. I’d bought a cheap pair of plastic sandals in Santa Marta for this very part of the trek, and although it made it easier to stomp across the river without worrying about stepping on anything dodgy, I could have done it barefoot; presumably the legends about difficult river crossings are confined to the rainy season.

Half an hour later we reached our stop for the day. Alojamiento El Paraíso is the final camp before the Lost City, and is perched on a pretty bend in the Buritaca River that makes for yet another pleasant spot to cool off after the day’s exertions. It was wonderfully peaceful when we arrived, just in time for lunch, and the small group who were resting in the main shelter soon pulled on their packs and left, as they’d just spent the morning at the Lost City, just 1km from the camp, and were now heading back. We lazed around in hammocks and even had time to wash our T-shirts, which were starting to smell pretty badly after being soaking wet for three days straight, but just as we were slipping into a peaceful afternoon snooze, the big group arrived.

It was carnage. There were about 24 of them, made up of two groups who were sharing the same four-day schedule, and they arrived with stories of women dissolving into tears on the trail, and grown men having their own breakdowns en route. Those who had made it to the camp in good time were fine – one American dude was so convinced that he was Rambo that he walked around bare-chested for the whole evening, so he was clearly lapping up the jungle life – but soon enough the rest of the group started arriving in dribs and drabs, and while the first arrivals had been tired but fired up, the stragglers were in all sorts of trouble. The four-day option for this trek combines into one day what we’d split up into days two and three, and this marathon 14km slog had completely destroyed those who had thought they were coming along for a pleasant jaunt, but instead had actually signed up for the hardcore option.

‘I cannot understand how anyone would ever enjoy this,’ moaned one slightly overweight American girl as she collapsed on the lodge’s steps, a stunned look on her face. ‘I am completely mentally distressed by this. I just don’t know how to cope. I absolutely hate it.’

So it would have been particularly galling for these exhausted walkers to see what Antonio’s kitchen magic served up to our small group that night. While the other group tucked into huge plates of rice and chicken – no bad meal when you’re on the trail, it has to be said – we waited while Antonio beavered away in the kitchen. The others looked over as we sat there, with us getting hungrier and hungrier as they ploughed through their plates, and when Antonio eventually served up, everyone was wondering what was coming. It was spectacular: a huge, freshly cooked, savoury pancake stuffed with chicken, beef and vegetables, all smothered in a delicious white sauce, and arguably one of the best meals we’ve had on our entire trip through Central America. Here we were, 1km from the Lost City and eating like gourmands while the exhausted remnants of the four-day group looked on and salivated. Antonio truly was a genius in the kitchen, and that night we slept like pampered royalty, surrounded by the exhausted snoring of those on the quick trip.

Day 4: Alojamiento El Paraíso to Ciudad Perdida (1km), Ciudad Perdida to Alojamiento Tezhúmake (7.6km)

This was the big day, the day of our visit to the Lost City, so we were up at 6am and out on the trail by 7am. It’s a rocky half-hour walk from the camp to the entrance to the Lost City, along an even more precarious riverside path than the day before; at times we had to rock-climb our way along the ledge, trying not to look down at the river some 100m below.

Soon enough we reached the bottom of the stone staircase to the Lost City, which starts on the banks of the Buritaca and takes you from about 950m above sea level up to the city at an altitude of 1160m. This steep climb is up an ancient staircase of 1200 stone steps, some of them large and some of them tiny, though because it was so dry, at least they weren’t too slippery (it would be a pretty different story in the wet season). The secret is to take it slow and steady, and half an hour later we reached the entrance to the city itself, and the first of the hundreds of round stone structures that make up Ciudad Perdida.

Thankfully, after all this effort, the Lost City turned out to be absolutely stunning. The city itself consists of some 169 terraces spread over about two square kilometres, built along the top of a north-south ridge, with the terraces getting higher and higher as you head south from the city entrance. These terraces are covered in low circular stone platforms, where wooden huts once stood. The site is split up into four different areas that are criss-crossed by a network of stone paths, and as you walk through the site from La Gallera through to Eje Central, and then down into Piedras and back through El Canal, the whole city slowly unfolds in front of you, with glimpses of higher terraces teasing you through the trees ahead.

The money shot is when you reach the big grassy platform in Eje Central and the forest canopy suddenly disappears, leaving you with an utterly breathtaking view over heavily forested valleys on both sides of the ridge where the city sits; to the south of you the sequence of stepped terraces continues along the ridge and up the hill ahead of you, each of them home to more circular platforms. It’s hard not to feel giddy as you stand there, with the hot breeze in your face and the whole world beneath your feet, as for the first time you get to see exactly how the city is laid out along the spine of the Sierra Nevada. I know it’s a cliché, but photographs don’t really do it justice; you really do have to be there to feel the power of the city as it stretches along the ridge like the proverbial stairway to heaven.

Of course, the view from the top of the hill is the most impressive, as you look back at the string of circular platforms. They appear to be suspended in the sky, like huge lily pads floating above the surrounding forest, and even with the ludicrous screeches of the large group of Americans who’d arrived there ahead of us, it wasn’t hard to lose ourselves in the view. Sure, I had to wait while Rambo stopped posing on the summit so I could take some pictures without having to Photoshop him out later, and yes, there was a particularly annoying Chilean couple who spent ages taking photos of each other in stupid yoga poses, studiously ignoring the rest of us asking them if they would mind hiding for a moment so we could get at least one shot of the terraces without them in it. But after we popped into the ranger’s hut for a cold beer while the American contingent ran riot outside, they eventually packed up and headed off, and the site quietened right down, leaving just the four of us to enjoy the serenity of the site for a few minutes of complete peace.

It was wonderful. With nothing breaking the silence except the distant cries of howler monkeys and musical bird song, we sat and lapped up the atmosphere. When we finally moved on from the main part of the city, I was the last to leave, but before I followed the others back into the jungle, I stopped and took a few seconds to take in my surroundings. For a short moment I had an entire Lost City all to myself – if you ignore the soldiers at the top of the hill – and I took a deep breath, looked up to the skies, stuck my arms out and did a little spin, just like Julie Andrews in the opening credits of The Sound of Music.

But it wasn’t over, for Antonio then led us through the more overgrown districts of Piedras and El Canal, where he gave us a couple of coca leaves to suck on as we wandered through vine-strewn ruins that reminded me of the wonderful jungle ruins in Caracol in Belize. The coca leaves were all part of the experience, because the Kogi tribe still take coca as part of their traditional way of life, and they are still allowed to grow the plant, for personal use. They heat up the leaves with hot rocks to dry them out, and they then chew them with a powder made from ground-up seashells, as the alkali in the seashells reacts with the coca to produce the alkaloid that makes cocaine such a big seller. We stuck to plain old raw leaves, which are about as strong as coffee (and, to be honest, fairly imperceptible when you’ve just drunk an ice-cold beer on an empty stomach after hiking up 1200 stone steps in the tropical heat). Still, it was nice to be chewing the leaf as we explored the rest of the city, if only because it felt ever so slightly dangerous and exotic.

All things must pass, though, and after four hours of exploring the site, we started back down the steps to the river, and retraced the path back to the camp. It was at this point, with impeccable timing, that the battery on my camera, which I’d been carefully conserving, finally ran out, leaving me free to do the rest of the walk without worrying about taking pictures. As the return journey to Machete is along the same path and you end up staying in the same camps, this was no hardship; in fact, I loved the freedom of not being able to take photos, as sometimes having a camera can feel a bit like an obligation. I had my pictures of the walk already, and it felt good to have it in the bag.

After a quick swim at Alojamiento El Paraíso, we had another excellent lunch, consisting of a huge mound of sausages, eggs, rice and lentils. This time it proved too much for one of the Americans, who asked Antonio, ‘That looks good, how do I get one of those?’

‘You don’t,’ said Antonio. ‘These are for my group only.’

‘Oh man,’ said the American, and sat down to the meal of comparatively uninspiring spaghetti that his group were having.

And with that we hit the trail, slowly retracing our steps back to Alojamiento Tezhúmake, some three hours away. We found it an enjoyable walk, despite being tired from our early start and the long exploration of the city, but not everyone we met was so happy. At one point we came across a young Australian man who was hobbling his way down to the crossing of the Buritaca, and it turned out he’d twisted his ankle on the way back from the Lost City. But instead of sticking it in the cold waters of the river, he kept on walking, grimacing in pain, and we bumped into him again five minutes down the trail, where he was literally screaming whenever he put his weight on it.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked as we walked past him.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he said, despite clear evidence to the contrary; his ankle was hugely swollen and he looked like he was in all sorts of trouble.

‘Would you like some painkillers?’ I asked.

‘No thanks, I’m not taking anything,’ he replied. ‘I’m OK.’

‘Well, you’re clearly not OK,’ I thought, but he obviously wasn’t into taking advice from a couple of old people, so we left him to it. Later in the day, he was led past on a mule by a Kogi man and a couple of Kogi kids; he was far too big for the poor animal, but if you injure yourself out here, that’s the only way out, as there are no roads, just the Kogi and their mules. We would meet him a few more times on the way out; I’m sure he was thrilled by the prospect.

We also passed the stragglers from the American group, who’d left the last camp half an hour before us. They looked pretty beaten; the girl who’d been having the breakdown the night before was sobbing quietly as she slowly shuffled one foot in front of the other. In contrast, her boyfriend overcompensated with a very cheery response to our smiling hellos, and who can blame him? We were surely witnessing either the end of that relationship, or a redefinition of it; that’s how bad things can get when you bite off more than you can chew.

Meanwhile another American, this time a middle-aged guy with a paunch and a very red face, sat down heavily at the shop on the top of the hill and loudly sighed, ‘I ache everywhere: my feet, my legs, my back, absolutely everywhere. This is hell.’ Even our group wasn’t immune; as we downed a bottle of Coke at the shop and caught our breath, Oliver revealed that he’d tripped over near the start of the walk and landed awkwardly on his knee, so Emily was having to carry their shared backpack and progress was painfully slower than normal. She was also suffering, as she’d had a nasty headache that morning at the Lost City, probably from dehydration, and she still wasn’t feeling that good.

It seemed that people were dropping like flies around us as we took our time on the long descent back to Alojamiento Tezhúmake. I idly wondered when it would be our turn, with just one more day to go.

Day 5: Alojamiento Tezhúmake to Machete (15.7km)

The hardest part of the entire trek turned out to be the final day, which combined the first two days of the walk into one long day, but walked in the opposite direction. On paper this didn’t sound too bad, as overall the walk would be downhill, but every hill you climb on the way in becomes a descent on the way out, and every descent becomes a climb, so our final day had two huge climbs and two long descents. This would have been a difficult walk on its own – even though, by this point, we were much fitter than when we’d started and had the added advantage of knowing what to expect – but just to make it a real challenge, the sun came out and started baking us as soon as we emerged from the forest, even though we’d set off before 7am and it was still early, so it was clearly going to be a hot day.

It was particularly bad on the second half of the walk, when we did day one in reverse. The multicoloured chalk gashes that we’d rolled down at the end of the first day turned into a superheated slog up 150m of oven-hot ascent. It was absolutely brutal – that was the one word that everyone we spoke to used, even the hardcore walkers we met – with temperatures in the shade of 45°C and baking hot sun reflecting off the chalk walls. Even Antonio thought it was too hot; he had a thermometer in his pack, and when he fished it out and saw the temperature, he whistled and said, ‘Mucho calor,’ which was putting it mildly. We staggered on, stopping in every shady patch, and eventually we reached the top of the final descent that would take us back down to the river and to Machete.

That descent felt endless. The fine dust that had coated us on the way up made for treacherous conditions underfoot, and even with our sticks, something was bound to happen, and it did. Halfway down the steep hillside, Peta stumbled on a rock and fell heavily onto her knees and wrists, twisting her ankle under herself as she fell.

As the dust settled, we did a sanity check. Did anything hurt? How was her ankle? What about her wrists? Slowly she stood up, gently testing the ankle, and thankfully it wasn’t badly sprained. She had a small cut on one knee and a graze on the other, so I washed them off with the remains of our water while she checked herself for serious injuries. Amazingly, there were none; her ankle was a little sore but basically all right, her cuts weren’t deep, and her wrists were fine apart from some bruising on the left one where she’d taken the weight of her body. It was a very lucky escape.

So we took it even more slowly than before on the way down, and when we finally reached the swimming hole where we’d stopped on day one, we threw off our stinking T-shirts and jumped in, safe in the knowledge that the trailhead was only 20 minutes away along a gentle river valley. And we looked at the group who were packing up after their first swim in the waterhole, getting ready to tackle the trail, and remembered how we’d felt on that first day, totally unaware of what was in store. This group had big backpacks and huge camera bags... and they were about to head out into the full sun, which we’d managed to miss on our first day.

‘Good luck,’ I thought. ‘You’ll need it.’ And with that we finished off the last part of the walk, downed a celebratory cold beer in Machete over lunch, thanked Antonio with a well-deserved tip, and headed back to Santa Marta to stick everything we’d carried into the wash, including ourselves.

If you’re thinking of doing the trek to the Lost City yourself, then I’ve put together some walking tips that you might find useful.

Walking Tips for Ciudad Perdida

Written: 8 April 2014

If you’re thinking of doing the trek to Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City, there are lots of things you can do to make it an enjoyable experience, rather than a nightmare. We saw people break down in tears because they’d underestimated the challenge, and we saw three injured people being carried out of the jungle on mules. You can avoid this happening to you by doing some research, and by being realistic; if you bite off more than you can chew, the jungle will break you, but if you pitch it right, you’ll love it.

Choose the Right Number of Days

Not everyone understands how challenging it is to walk through the searing humidity of the tropical rainforest, so the trek to Ciudad Perdida has gained a fearsome reputation among travellers. You have to book the walk through one of five companies in the area – we went through Expotur – and when you book, they offer you three options: a four-day hike, a five-day hike, or a six-day hike.

Most people go for four days, but most people shouldn’t, because the four-day option involves some very long hiking days indeed. We saw people on the four-day walk crying from exhaustion, and stories flew down the trail of grown men breaking down after hours on the trail, the tropical heat and difficult terrain breaking down even the hardiest of egos. Yes, some people have the mental and physical strength to enjoy four days of trekking – if you’re an experienced trekker, you’ll know your limits – but we saw people on the four-day option for whom this was their first multiple-day trek, and their eyes said it all.

We chose the five-day option, and it was just right for us, though the last day was possibly a bit too long, so I’d definitely consider the six-day option. Given that all the options are the same price – indeed, the longer options are effectively cheaper, as you get more meals and more nights in the jungle for the same money – it’s easy to recommend the longer treks over the four-day dash. The walk is exactly the same for everyone, but if you take longer, you give yourself time to enjoy yourself more.

Choose the Right Time of Year

We’d heard stories of ravenous mosquitoes, endless mud and dangerous river crossings, but none of these turned out to be true for our walk. This is because it was dry when we did the walk, and had been for some time, so it’s important to pick the right time of year for your walk.

If you want an insanely difficult walk with rough river crossings, muddy paths and clouds of mosquitoes, then go in the rainy season, which starts around April/May and goes through to November, with the heaviest rains in October. If you want to enjoy yourself, then the driest time is from mid-December to early April.

Take As Little As Possible

You have to carry everything yourself, and you really don’t want to make the mistake of taking too much. This is what I took, and it felt it was about right, even though I didn’t use a lot of it (you only need muscle sprain cream if you sprain a muscle, for example, but if you do it’s a life saver).

- Hiking clothes (long swimming shorts, T-shirt, knee supports, hiking socks, walking boots, sandals): Because it was so dry, I only needed one pair of hiking socks in the end, though I did take spares; in the wet season, you’ll really appreciate a dry pair of socks every day. The sandals are for river crossings and for wearing in camp.

- Camp clothes (long trousers, long-sleeved top, dry socks, underwear): I also slept in these in the hammock on day one, as it got surprisingly cold in the wee hours, though I didn’t need to do this in the beds.

- Silk sleeping bag liner: The beds and blankets are reasonably clean, but they are a bit musty, so a sleeping bag liner is a good option.

- Buff head scarf: This was lighter than a hat, but a hat would do; you don’t need it in the rainforest, but you’ll need head cover for the first day and a half, as the sun is brutal.

- Handkerchief: I sweated like a trooper, and having a handkerchief on hand to wipe my face was a real lifesaver. I highly recommend it.

- Insect repellent: You want to pack at least one bottle; you might not get clouds of insects (we were lucky and hardly saw any), but you might, and a decent repellent will keep you sane.

- Bite cream, antihistamine tablets: Even without clouds of mosquitoes, there are still some kicking around, and there are also plenty of ticks, so bite cream or antihistamine tablets are a good idea.

- Antiseptic cream, plasters (Band Aids): In case you get blisters or cut yourself.

- Antifungal cream: It’s hot and humid out there and you’re sharing showers, so Athlete’s Foot is a real threat. You can buy a combined antiseptic and antifungal cream in Colombia – indeed, it’s hard to buy them separately – so this might be the way to go.

- Painkillers, ibuprofen gel: I have a dodgy back, so ibuprofen gel is useful, though even for fit walkers, having some anti-inflammatories is a good idea in case you injure yourself.

- Toilet paper: Some camps have toilet paper but some don’t, and although your guide will probably be able to fish some out, it’s a good idea to pack your own.

- Diarrhoea drugs: If you have to walk but you’ve got the runs, then you’ll be damn glad you packed these.

- Sunscreen: The first day and a half can be brutally sunny, so you’ll want sunscreen, but don’t take too much as you don’t need it in the rainforest.

- Toothbrush, toothpaste: Assuming you have standards, that is.

- Soap: For showering. You don’t need to bother with shampoo, unless you’re really vain; trust me, everyone is going to look pretty dodgy after days on the trail, and soap works on hair too.

- Tweezers: Handy if you get a splinter, sit on a thorn bush or need to pull out ticks.

- Ear plugs: Essential for blocking out the noise of snorers and other groups getting up at the crack of dawn when you don’t have to.

- Eye shades: You’re sleeping outside, so if you want a lie-in, eye shades are useful. Also good for blocking out the glare of other people’s head torches in the middle of the night.

- Inflatable pillow: You will need a pillow of some kind, even if it’s a bundle of clothes; the final camp had no pillows at all, and a pillow makes a big difference when sleeping in a hammock.

- Comb: Because you’re worth it.

- Small towel: This will never dry properly, so make sure it’s small, but it’s useful for towelling off after swimming, and in particular for drying your feet; damp feet blister more easily. Travel towels are an option here.

- Penknife: I didn’t need this, but I can never seem to go trekking without one.

- Sewing kit: Just in case anything rips.

- Head torch: There’s no electricity after the first camp, so a torch of some kind is essential. Don’t forget to check that the batteries are strong.

- Camera: Make sure it’s fully charged and has lots of space for pictures; you won’t be able to charge it on the walk, though you may get lucky on the first night, as our camp did have electricity. Best not to rely on it, though.

- Money: Beer and soft drinks are available at all the evening stops and sometimes during the day; drinks were COP4000 at the first camp and COP5000 after that, and they were pure luxury. You won’t need money for anything else.

- 1.5-litre water bottle: You might be able to get away with a one-litre bottle per person, but I always like to walk with plenty of water; our walking companions ran out of water a couple of times, and that’s not a good idea in this heat.

- A couple of plastic bags: I kept my dry clothes in one bag and my toiletries in the other, and just shoved any wet things straight into the pack, so they would have a better chance of drying off.

- Walking poles: If you have walking poles, definitely bring them, otherwise you can pick up sticks as you walk. They grow on trees, after all.

Drink Lots of Water

Seriously, drink as much as you can. I poured water down my throat and it simply flowed straight out me. You know when Jerry slams Tom in the iron maiden, and he gets out, drinks and leaks like a sieve? That was me. If you get dehydrated, you will suffer, and there is so much free drinking water available along the trek that you don’t need to worry, you just need a good-sized water bottle. Look for the blue barrels with agua potable on them and get stuck in; this is boiled and cooled water, so it’s perfectly safe to drink and tastes good.

It’s also a good idea to go swimming whenever there is an opportunity. The swimming holes are delightful all the way along the route, and cooling off in the river will fire you up for the next bout of walking, while reducing the smell. You’ll see what I mean when you do the walk; this is not a trek for the hygienically fussy.

Walk Slowly

Some people like to walk fast – I do, sometimes – but there is so much to see on this walk that rushing is not only going to tire you out, it’s practically a crime. Most people seem to agree that while the Lost City is interesting, it’s actually the trek that they enjoy the most, so you should take the time to look around you when you’re walking. It’s not a race.

Personally, I fell head-over-heels for the Lost City and I loved the trek just as much, so it was a win-win situation, but we took our time while walking, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the whole thing was enjoyable. Whichever part you end up liking the most, I can’t recommend it enough.

Flying Through Colombia

Written: 15 April 2014

Once we got back from our five-day trek to the Lost City, we collapsed into our boutique hotel in downtown Santa Marta, and never really got up again. The weather was incredibly oppressive and the humidity finally gave way to rain – excellent timing given that we’d only just left the rainforest – but when I sat down to plan our next move away from the mind-bending Caribbean climate, I just couldn’t decide what to do.

The challenge is that Colombia is a very large country with a lot of places that sound worth visiting, but connecting them up in a sensible manner is difficult, especially if you have a finite amount of time and don’t get along too well with really long bus journeys. From the Caribbean coast, there are two main routes you can take: you can either head down the eastern side of the country towards Bogotá, or you can go down the centre towards Medellín, but in both cases the distances are huge. The problem is that the bus journey from Santa Marta to Medellín takes a whopping 15 hours, and it’s an even more mind-boggling 18 hours to Bogotá, though at least with the latter there are some places of interest on the way (though the first one is still a good nine hours from Santa Marta). Whichever way you look at it, that’s a lot of bus time.

Luckily, it turns out that internal flights in Colombia can be incredibly cheap, especially if you hunt through the Avianca website for last-minute deals (Avianca being the national carrier of Colombia). All you need to do is feel a little exhausted from exploring the rainforest, and have your credit card and an internet connection to hand, and all of a sudden you can find yourself holidaying rather than travelling. It turns out that it’s a mere 70-minute flight from the Caribbean coast to Medellín, and when I looked at the dates that we thought we might want to travel, I found that we could fly from Cartagena for just £18 each. Sure, that would mean taking a four-hour shuttle from Santa Marta to Cartagena before hopping on the plane, but that’s still a lot better than 15 hours on the bus. Even better, I found that if we then wanted to fly from Medellín to Bogotá, that would take us just 45 minutes instead of nine hours on the bus, and we could do that for just £28 each.

So we’ve ditched all those long bus journeys for flights, and our transport is now completely booked up to the end of our six-month trip, which ends in Bogotá in a couple of weeks. Yes, I know it’s a bit slack and it does mean we’re going to miss all the places in between, but after fighting our way through Central America, sailing across the Caribbean and rediscovering the Lost City, I think we’ve earned the right to take it easy in Colombia. And I’ll have a gin and tonic with my in-flight peanuts, thank you very much.

Colombia: Central Colombia

Medellín

Written: 17 April 2014

Just in case you were wondering, I can vouch that Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, is a great place in which to feel absolutely terrible. If your insides have turned to jelly and you’ve got an itchy rash that you can’t quite explain, then Medellín is a nice, comfortable place in which to get better.

For one thing, it has a pleasant climate; after the oven-like temperatures of Santa Marta and Cartagena, the perpetual spring climate of mountainous Medellín comes as a huge relief. It also has lots of restaurants covering all sorts of international cuisine, from Japanese to Peruvian to Thai to Argentinian to... well, possibly even Colombian, though with so many tempting options in the posh area of El Poblado, where we holed up, we didn’t exactly go hunting for local cuisine. Oh, and Medellín has plenty of comfortable yet affordable hotels, particularly in the business district to the south of the centre, where there are even plenty of vacancies in Semana Santa (Holy Week), which is an extremely busy holiday in Catholic South America.

So if you wake up one morning, glance at each other and realise that you’ve both been struck down by something nasty, then Medellín is a good place to be. Just tuck yourselves up in bed, stick on the cable TV and give us a shout when you’re better, because if there’s one thing you can’t do when you’re travelling and you get ill, it’s travelling.

Exploring Medellín

It was a shame that we got hit by the lurgy in Medellín, but you can’t choose when you get ill, so we simply extended our stay and took our time while I drew a thick black line through all the things I’d pencilled in for the area. Bang went the Pablo Escobar tour, which was a shame as it’s supposed to be a fascinating insight into the bad old days when, under Escobar’s underground rule, Medellín was the cocaine and murder capital of the world; out went our planned day trip to the huge granite monolith at El Piedra del Peñol, which you can climb for amazing views of the surrounding countryside; and we waved goodbye to the long walks that I’d hoped we’d enjoy in the pleasant forests of Parque Arví, just out of town. Most annoying of all, we’d met a really friendly Englishman in Santa Marta called Patrick, who’s lived in Colombia for a decade and has a pad in the countryside near Medellín, and he’d invited us to Sunday lunch at his house; but there was no way we were going to make it, and given that he has a nine-month-old baby who could probably live without being infected with a mystery illness, we sent in our apologies and hunkered down with the cold sweats instead.

But eventually we got well enough to get out of the hotel zone and see some of the city, mainly thanks to the city’s excellent Metro. Our first tentative excursion was to the Jardín Botánico (botanical gardens) in northern Medellín, where the sun obligingly shone for us as we slowly wandered through the grounds of this pretty landscaped park. Given that it’s surrounded by the city and is free to all visitors, it’s a surprisingly rural experience, with huge iguanas climbing the trees and some intriguing buildings, including a butterfly house and an orchid garden that’s tucked away under a huge wooden structure made up of towering hexagons. We had to keep stopping to catch our breath and hide from the hot sun, but there was plenty of shade and lots of people-watching on offer, so it was a good start.

Later on in our recuperative week, we visited the Plazoleta de las Esculturas and the adjoining Museo de Antioquia. Also known as Plaza Botero, this square contains 23 bronze sculptures by Fernando Botero, who is arguably South America’s most famous contemporary artist; hailing from Medellín, Botero’s style of sculpture and painting depicts people with exaggerated proportions, so his women are astonishingly voluptuous and his men are rounded and stocky. If you imagine taking a character from a Beryl Cook painting and inflating it with a bicycle pump, then you’re not far off the look of a Botero, and they have the same playful but satirical air of Beryl Cook’s work. Not surprisingly, they make excellent public sculptures, and the Plazoleta de las Esculturas is a great place to wander round.

It’s also a great place for people-watching, not least because Colombia is the spiritual home of plastic surgery, and in particular the butt implant (or, to give the procedure its correct title, buttock augmentation). The proliferation of the butt-job in Medellín turns the Plazoleta de las Esculturas into a classic example of life imitating art, because while Botero’s sculptured women have huge, voluptuous buttocks that defy gravity, so do an awful lot of the people in the plaza. Playing ‘real or fake’ is one of life’s pleasures in this part of the world, and Plaza Botero is easily one of the best places to play it.

At the western edge of the plaza is the oldest museum in Medellín, the Museo de Antioquia; while it might not sound like it to English-speaking ears, this is a museum of modern art (Antioquia is the name of the Colombian department, of which Medellín is the capital). Modern art museums are always fascinating, not just because some of the art can be good, but because even when it appears to be rubbish, there’s always fun to be had reading the explanatory notes that the museums provide. We’ve had endless fun traipsing round London’s Tate Modern, trying to understand what on earth some of the descriptions are talking about, but in the Museo de Antioquia it’s even more challenging, because the notes are in Spanish. One artist was so tortured that he came across as a real-life version of Brian from Spaced, with his three-screen full-room video installation showing him first writhing around half-naked and tied to a goat, then hand-wrestling a crab, and finally lying in a canoe with a large fish flopping on his crotch. The Spanish explanation of what this all meant didn’t really help unravel the mystery of the installation, though I’m not sure our Español is quite up to explaining self-flagellatory hipster art.

Our final expedition in town was to Parque Arví, which you can reach via the Metro’s cable car L. We chose a rather busy day to go exploring, and while queueing for the cable car, we discovered that the Colombians perhaps don’t have the same attitude to personal space as we English do. If you have a backpack on, then the person behind you will keep on bumping into that pack, so much so that you start to get paranoid that they’re rifling through it; so you switch the pack to your front, only to discover that the next stage is for the person behind to spoon you, right there in the queue. It’s as if the entire city is up for a kind of super-intimate conga-line approach to queueing, and it came as a bit of a surprise as we waited for our turn in the cable car, sandwiched between the friendly locals.

In the end, Parque Arví wasn’t really right for us, as it’s full of activities that aren’t suitable for those recuperating from illness; there are lots of walking trails on offer, but the nearest one to the cable car starts a steep 1km walk from the terminal, so it’s not a good option for those looking for a gentle stroll. We thought we’d enjoy a picnic at the top, but there’s precious little at the cable car terminus except lots of other people looking a bit lost and wondering where they can eat their sandwiches; there is a small lawn, but it’s right by the vents to the composting toilet, so it’s hardly prime real estate for potential picnickers. It’s a bit of a missed opportunity, to be honest, but luckily the cable car journey itself is worth the effort, especially when it goes over the outer suburbs of the city, and you can peer down on the grittier parts of town from the safety of your little plastic bubble.

Oh, and if you’re lucky, you too can get stuck in a cabin for the 15-minute return journey, with a man and his girlfriend and his phone playing super-irritating Spanish-language R&B. It’s one of life’s great pleasures, being unable to get away from someone else’s awful music, and the Metro’s cable car L is a great place to do it. I was tempted to grab his phone and perform a buttock augmentation right there and then, but to be honest, this is not the country – or the city – to try that sort of thing, so we left him to it and instead enjoyed our last night in Medellín with some Japanese cuisine and an early night, ready for our flight to Bogotá in the morning.

The Medellín Metro

Written: 17 April 2014

We weren’t terribly well in Medellín, but we still managed to see a fair amount of the city, albeit gently and without a great deal of energy. This was mainly down to the fact that Medellín has a wonderful metro that makes getting around a doddle, so even those recuperating from a mystery illness can hobble round the main sights without having to cram into a public bus or spend a fortune on taxis.

First opened in 1995, the Medellín Metro is small, with only two lines (A and B) and three cable cars (J, K and L), but because Medellín is stretched out along a north-south valley, this manages to cover all the main tourist attractions without the complexity of most city metros. Line A follows the course of the Medellín River along the valley, and as the railway is carried through the city centre on viaducts that pass well above the heads of the crowds below, it’s a brilliant way to see the city from above, passing churches at roof height and letting you peer into office buildings and down into the plazas as you safely slip through the centre.

The trade-off for this convenience is that the city is carved up by the huge elevated tracks and monstrous concrete columns that lift the Metro above the streets, and some of the city’s plazas have been completely redefined by the development; for example, the eastern end of Plazoleta de las Esculturas, probably Medellín’s most famous square, is now chopped off by the curved Metro line that brushes right past the chequerboard frontage of the Palacio de la Cultura Rafael Uribe Uribe. As a result you can hardly see that side of the palace at all and have to duck under the Metro to see it in all its glory, though I have to say I quite like the way the Metro merges with the city; I’ve always enjoyed seeing the new and the old mixed up like this, and although the Metro is a fairly blunt example, it does give Medellín a slightly futuristic feel, even if it’s a future that feels ever-so-slightly like it was designed back in the concrete heyday of the 1960s.

This clash of old and new extends to the ticketing system, which seems a little unsure whether it’s retro or modern; when buying two single tickets, we either got given two paper tickets, two credit-card-sized smart cards, or a single smart card between us, depending on where we bought them. Getting two tickets was fine, but the single smart card, which comes loaded up with two tickets on one card, is a deeply confusing beast; it seems that if there is more than one credit on your card, then you have to wave it at the ticket barrier to get through, but if there is just one credit, then you have to stick it in a slot so the barrier can retain it. This is all well and good, but there’s no way of telling how many credits you have on the card just by looking at it, so you end up with people waving their cards and being refused entry, even though they do indeed have a valid ticket, and then panicking and wondering what to do next. Presumably that’s why there are so many staff by the ticket barriers, helping out all the bemused travellers.

Oh, and once you’re on the move, you’ll find that the Metro map is only posted in the most inaccessible part of the car and the text on the map is tiny, so if you get on the train and aren’t sure where you should be getting off, you have to squish your way through the carriage and squint at the map. But these criticisms are splitting hairs, because the Metro is a brilliant idea that is well executed, and it makes exploring Medellín a pleasure rather than a chore.

Bogotá

Written: 27 April 2014

On paper, Bogotá doesn’t sound terribly appealing. For a start, the sprawling capital of Colombia sits at a heady 2600m above sea level, which means the weather is surprisingly cold and wet, despite being less than five degrees from the Equator. Then there’s the graffiti that’s scrawled pretty much everywhere in the centre of town, which is a subtle hint that there are areas of town that you should absolutely avoid, some of them quite central. Then the locals warn you never to flag down taxis in the street but to pre-book them instead, as there are fake taxi drivers out there who will pick you up, lock the doors, pull out a knife and take you and your credit card on an expensive tour of the local cash machines. And the Transmilenio public transport system groans under the weight of the morning and evening rush hours, with queues winding their way out of the stations while commuters press their noses up against the bus windows. On the surface, it doesn’t sound like it’s much fun.

But it is. A lot of this is down to the Colombians, who are such good-natured and stylish people that everyday urban challenges just don’t turn out to be a big deal. Even on the one day that we accidentally ended up crushed into a Transmilenio bus at the beginning of the evening rush hour, the locals kept their cool and simply got on with the business of getting home; compare this to the insanity of rush hour in somewhere like India, and it’s another world. And yes, at this time of year it is cold and rains almost every day, but there are plenty of museums and restaurants where you can hide from the weather. They’re also making big strides in making the city safer, with a noticeable army and police presence in the centre of town and a smartphone app that lets you book taxis safely with the click of a button. And even the graffiti isn’t that bad, if you look closely, as there are some genuine works of art out there (though there’s still a lot of messy tagging around, which is much harder to appreciate).

It also helps if you stay in the north of the city, because the further north you go from the centre, the more pleasant the city becomes. We lucked out with our choice of lodgings; the India Chez Moi Hotel is a great place in a pleasant part of town, where it’s all wide pavements, grassy spaces, middle-class locals, fancy skyscrapers and decent supermarkets. The wonderful Indian family that runs the hotel made us authentic home-cooked Indian meals during our stay, which, after six months of Central American food, was utter bliss. We settled into suburban life and took in the sights of the city at a sedate pace; Bogatá was the last destination on our six-month trip and when we arrived in town we were still recovering from being ill in Medellín, so we decided to take things slowly.

Exploring Bogotá

Luckily the India Chez Moi Hotel was just a short walk from the Transmilenio, which made it really easy for us to get into central Bogotá. As you would expect from the capital city of such a vibrant country, there’s plenty to see in town, although we did keep getting caught in rain showers when we ventured into the city streets, some of them amazingly heavy (this part of the world has a second rainy season in April and May to complement the more usual October-November rainy season, and we’re bang in the middle of it). As a result we didn’t manage to explore as much of the city centre as we otherwise would have, but what we saw was enjoyable.

As far as tourism goes, the heart of the city is the large Plaza de Bolívar, which is surrounded by a mix of different building styles, from the neo-classical Catedral Primada and the colonial Sagrario Chapel, to the classical Greek style of the Capitolio Nacional and the French-influenced mayor’s office. When we visited the square for the second time the cathedral was holding a memorial service for the famous Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, who died on 17 April. The square was full of big screens showing the service, and as we stood there watching the service, not one but two people tried to interview us about Márquez and what we thought about him. To be honest, I’ve not yet read any of his books, which is a minor crime for a traveller visiting Colombia, but we smiled and said nice things about him, because he’s an absolute hero in his native Colombia.

From the square we wandered through the government buildings to the south of the plaza, smiling at the soldiers who checked our bags at the various checkpoints, because that’s what you do when someone younger than your children points to your bag while carrying a massive gun; happily they smiled back. We then wheeled round to the east to explore La Candelaria, the old colonial quarter with its steep cobbled streets and clusters of museums, churches and theatres. Unfortunately this is when the rain hit, turning the street into a river, so we ducked into a restaurant and enjoyed a typical Colombian meal of soup, fish and plantain, while the heavens washed away the people and left us blinking in the post-deluge brightness.

Luckily this area is home to plenty of museums, so we managed to avoid the daily rains by spending hours shuffling round the Museo del Oro (the gold museum) and the Museo Botero (a museum devoted to the artist Botero, whose sculptures we’d admired in Medellín). Unfortunately, both museums suffer from the same problem: they’re too much of a good thing. The Museo del Oro’s collection contains more than 34,000 gold pieces and 20,000 other objects from 13 pre-Hispanic societies, and although not all of these are on display at the same time, it sometimes feels as if they are; as you go from room to room, all of them stuffed with so many gold objects, it does start to feel a bit repetitive after a while. Perhaps it was because we visited the museum of gold in San José not that long ago, but by the time we reached the end of the exhibition – in which a huge glut of gold artefacts are displayed in a round room to the sound of tribal chanting and a flickering light show that makes toddlers cry – we were a bit tired of gold. Indeed, from early on, Peta was more interested in the ceramic pots on display and I was more interested in watching the locals, who seem to be more obsessed with taking phone pictures of the displays than actually looking at them.

Meanwhile, the Museo de Botero contains a number of rooms dedicated to works of art by Fernando Botero, the artist whose sculptures of buxom women and animals fill the Plazoleta de las Esculturas in Medellín. We liked those sculptures, but a whole museum packed full of his paintings proved too much; Botero appears to be a bit of a one-trick pony, and his paintings of inflated people and endless still-lifes of fruit and food became deeply repetitive after a couple of rooms. Luckily the collection was peppered with rooms dedicated to non-Botero works of art, and they were worth the effort, but we left the Botero museum with the same fatigue as we’d left the gold museum. It was a bit of a shame really, though the balance was redressed on the way to the Transmilenio, when we witnessed the filming of a Colombian hidden camera show in which a man dressed up like a piece of broccoli crept up to a man eating a burger and stole it off him, offering him a piece of broccoli in return. Cue hilarious irritation on the part of the burger-eating man, followed by a chase scene and eventually the big hidden-camera reveal. It wasn’t art, but it was more entertaining than a lot of the works we’d seen that afternoon.

You couldn’t say the view from the 3152m-high peak of Cerro de Monserrate was boring, either. Bogotá is built on a wide plain, the Sabana de Bogotá, which is surrounded by mountains, and the peak of Monserrate, which dominates the eastern edge of downtown, is home to a church that you can see from pretty much everywhere in the city centre. The hardcore can walk up the 1500 steps to the peak, some 600m above the city, but we opted for the cable car instead. The views from the top over the 1700 square kilometre sprawl of the city are absolutely stunning; with a population of nearly 8 million, Bogotá is a massive place, but you have to see it from above to understand just how big it is. The summit is so high that you can watch the rain showers swooping into the city across the plains, and it’s even high enough for people to suffer from altitude sickness when they visit.

The view from Monserrate is deeply impressive, but it was trumped by our last excursion of our visit to Colombia. The family at the India Chez Moi Hotel were wonderful throughout our stay, and for our last Saturday night in the country, Akbar – the son of the hotel’s wonderful matriarch Sundara, and the brother of the charming Ila, who manages the hotel with her friendly French husband Olivier – invited us out for a trip up towards La Calera with his friend Katherine. The road that winds up the mountains towards this small village boasts a small parking spot where couples and young people come for a hot cup of canelazo, a sugar cane drink that’s flavoured with cinnamon and optionally a spirit. But it isn’t the drink that attracts the locals, it’s the stunning night view over Bogotá.

As we sat there sipping our drinks – canelazo with spirits, naturally, as it was cold up there – huge fireworks flashed in the distance (‘It’s Children’s Day,’ explained Akhbar), huge flashes of lightning lit up the clouds to the north, a stack of jet planes slowly glided their way into El Dorado Airport, and all around the blazing cityscape disappeared off into the distance. It’s no wonder that this is a popular spot in Bogotá’s weekend calendar, and as the last major excursion in our visit to Colombia, it felt particularly appropriate, as we looked down on everywhere we’d visited in the previous week and marvelled at the endless suburbs of this, the beating heart of this vibrant country.

The Bogotá Transmilenio

Written: 27 April 2014

The Transmilenio is Bogotá’s answer to the Medellín Metro, and while it isn’t as elegant and efficient as a proper metropolitan railway, it does a pretty good job of shifting people round the capital. Instead of using trains, the Transmilenio runs on buses that have dedicated lanes down the centre of Bogotá’s main roads, and most of the time this means that the buses run smoothly (though they still have to stop at traffic lights and can get a bit stuck in particularly heavy traffic, so it isn’t perfect).

Unfortunately, the Transmilenio is an almost unfathomable system for newcomers. There are 12 lines and 150 stations served by up to 1400 buses, and most buses don’t stop at all the stations on each line. There are maps in the stations that show which stations each bus stops at, but there’s a real knack to working out which buses go where. One clue is in the bus number; bus B174, for example, will terminate at a stop on line B, but you’ll have to look at the map to find out where it actually goes. The buses have little displays inside them that show the names of the next two stations, but there are no maps inside the buses, so once you’re on board, it all starts to feel like a bit of a gamble. Luckily the Bogotans are lovely and will point you in the right direction, but when the digital display isn’t working (which was the case for at least two of our journeys), it’s all a bit random. The secret is to use the online planner in advance to work out exactly which buses you need; winging it is not for the faint-hearted.

Random is a good word for the stations, too. They’re like long, thin bus stops with glass walls on either side that separate you from the buses that whizz past, and you simply look for your bus number above one of the glass doors and wait there for the bus to arrive. In theory the doors slide open when the bus pulls up, but sometimes the doors fail to open (so locals have become adept at wrenching them open themselves), and sometimes the doors open to reveal nothing but an empty and treacherous highway. There are digital displays in the stations that show which buses are arriving and when, and more than once the doors slid open at the allotted time, even though there was no bus there, and the displays updated as if the bus had been and gone. There are clearly ghosts in the Transmilenio machine.

But despite the slightly overcomplicated feeling of the Transmilenio, there’s no doubt that when it works, it works really well. And as an added bonus, you get to see the Bogotans up close, from businessmen and students all the way to in-bus buskers and people coming on board to sell you incense sticks. It’s a real cultural melting pot, and because it’s above ground, you get to look at the streets of Bogotá from the comfort of your bus seat (or, more often than not, from your standing-room-only spot in the aisle). We certainly wouldn’t have been able to explore Bogotá so easily without it.

Zipaquirá

Written: 23 April 2014

Seeing as our Bogotá hotel was just down the Transmilenio from the Portal del Norte terminus, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to visit the attractive historic town of Zipaquirá, and in particular its amazing salt cathedral. A 40-minute bus ride from the terminus, Zipaquirá is the most popular day trip from the capital, and it’s absolutely worth the effort.

For starters, Zipaquirá town has a lovely historic centre with cathedrals, squares and shopping streets. The bus from Bogotá drops you off on the other side of town to the salt cathedral, but it’s an enjoyable 15-minute walk through town to the entrance to the cathedral complex. The only problem is that because this is a pilgrimage site, there’s also a long walk uphill to the cathedral, following a white line painted on the steps. I suppose you could take a taxi, but that would be cheating.

There are only three salt cathedrals in the world – the other two are in Poland – so a trip to Zipaquirá is a pretty unique experience, even for seasoned travellers. The first salt cathedral here, which was opened to the public in 1954, had its origins in a sanctuary that the salt miners built for their own use back in the 1930s, but the cathedral was on a much grander scale, with a central nave that was 120m long and 20m high. Unfortunately, as it was carved out of an existing mine, it became unsafe and was closed to the public in 1990. In 1991, the government paid for a new cathedral to be built, 200ft beneath the first cathedral, and it opened in 1995 after some 250,000 tons of salt had been removed from the mine shafts that already existed there.

When I first read about the salt cathedral at Zipaquirá, I naively imagined cavernous white rooms full of carvings in pure white salt, but salt cathedrals aren’t like that at all. Salt is locked away in halite rocks that are incredibly hard, and the miners have to blast them away with dynamite and drill them out with huge machines; indeed, the rock is so hard that the tunnels they dig don’t need beams to support them – they just need monitoring in case chunks of the roof flake off – so what you get in the salt cathedral is bare rock all around you. The rock is actually dark grey, so your average salt cathedral feels more like a stone cathedral, and the salt part is almost incidental (though you do see salt stalactites hanging from the roof in places, and if you lick the walls, they taste salty). I was faintly disappointed when we entered the mine and discovered that it wasn’t a dazzling white, but my disappointment didn’t last.

Because even though it wasn’t what I was expecting, it was incredible. It starts with a walkway down into the cathedral that is lined with sculptures representing the 14 Stations of the Cross, which tell the story of Jesus’s crucifixion. These sculptures are modern and symbolic – Jesus is represented by a cross and kneeling stones represent other people – and while some are small and intimate, some of them open onto massive chambers left from the mining operations, all of them lit in an eerie manner that sent shivers down my spine (I don’t like large, dark, enclosed spaces, so they triggered my phobia perfectly).

Luckily we’d joined an English-language tour of the cathedral, and although the tour guide sounded like a cheesy American salesman channelled through a home computer voice synthesizer from the early 1980s, he did explain what the sculptures meant. It also meant we were in a large group of American tourists and, strangely, a group of French speakers who insisted on talking non-stop amongst themselves throughout the entire tour, so any shudders I felt at being underground and near such huge chambers were tempered by the irritating nature of the tour group. If I were a Christian and not surrounded by gibbering foreigners, I would find this part of the cathedral pretty powerful.

But the Stations of the Cross are nothing compared to the cathedral itself, which you reach by passing under a huge lit dome and down a short corridor. Suddenly a balcony opens up and there, in front of you, is a monstrous chamber, 75m long and 18m high; this is the central nave of the cathedral, which has three naves in total. At the far end is a huge illuminated cross, and overlooking the pews of the cathedral below is a carving of an angel blowing a trumpet. It’s like being inside a cathedral, but instead of being a building, the chamber is deep underground and is carved out of solid rock.

You access the cathedral by taking one of three staircases and walking beneath the gaze of a statue of St Michael the Archangel, which is lit from below and manages to look worryingly like a weeping angel from Doctor Who. And then you enter the cathedral proper, and the immensity of the three naves hits you. The first nave contains a nativity scene set into a recess in the side wall, and it’s made up of stone sculptures by the same Italian sculptor as St Michael and the other angels in the cathedral. At the far end of the nave there’s a font and a salt waterfall spilling from the top of the end wall; the flowing white of the waterfall is made from salt crystals that flow down the wall over time, as there is a very small dribble of water through the rock here that crystallises the salt from the rock.

The middle nave is the one you see from the balcony, and it turns out that the huge cross at the far end is in fact hollowed out of the rock and is illuminated from inside; from the balcony the cross looks solid, but it’s a clever optical illusion. There’s a sculpture of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in which the sculptors have inexplicably made Adam and God touch, and there are four immense columns of stone carved from the walls that represent the writers of the four gospels. Finally, the third nave is reasonably empty and our guide skipped it entirely, presumably because next on the list was the commercial centre.

It’s odd, the commercial centre. Here you are in a cathedral – a real one, where they do weddings and baptisms – and just off the main drag is a large and tacky row of shops selling salt-stone crosses, models of pre-Columbian statues, jewellery, popcorn, coffee and tourist trinkets, and although there’s an interesting little man-made pool whose waters are so still that they act like a mirror, the rest of the commercial centre is so overtly commercial that it feels a bit weird after the Stations of the Cross and the powerful architecture of the cathedral. But I guess this is one of Colombia’s top tourist attractions, and you might as well reap what you sow.

Luckily the tackiness of the commercial centre is easy to avoid, and as the way out of the complex is back the way you came, you get a chance to enjoy the sights and sounds without the distractions of a noisy tour group and an overenthusiastic guide. Even second time round, it’s an amazing place, and is well worth a visit.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 28 April 2014

Colombia is an easy country to like. Not only does it have a large variety of great attractions, but the people are genuinely friendly; other passengers strike up conversations with you on the Transmilenio, and if you ask strangers for directions or help, they’re really happy to help. Even with the language barrier, the Colombians are a delight, and that on its own would be enough to make this country worth visiting. Add in the Caribbean beaches, the colonial towns, the cosmopolitan cities and the sights you won’t see anywhere else in the continent, and you’re onto a winner.

In fact, the only bad thing about travelling in Colombia is that it’s a pretty big country and it can take hours to get from one place to another; that said, there’s a good transport network and flights are cheap, so it’s not as bad as it could be, but it does mean you have to be picky about what you can cram into your visit. We bottled it in the end and flew everywhere, and after we got ill in Medellín we ground to a halt and stopped even contemplating places that were off the beaten track, but even with the relatively limited itinerary that we ended up with, there was plenty to see.

So for us, Colombia represented not only the end of our six-month trip through Central America, but also a tantalising glimpse of what travelling through South America could be like. In particular, the five-day trek to the Lost City was absolutely wonderful, and surely we now have to put the Inca Trail on our to-do list; indeed, with so many sights missed on this visit to Colombia, there’s a strong argument for coming back for a second helping, and that’s not something I’ve said a lot – if at all – on this trip. That, alone, speaks volumes; Colombia is a great country, and it’s been a very positive way to end this long journey from Mexico to South America.

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from www.moxon.net/ebooks, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Australia: New South Wales

Sydney

Sydney to Melbourne

Australia: Victoria

Melbourne

An English View of Australia

The Pig Hunt

Lawbreaker

Australia: Tasmania

Dock of the Bay

Hobart

Cygnet

Bicheno

Launceston

George Town

Launceston to Port Arthur

Australia: Victoria

Session Musicians

Buying a Car

Australian Greetings

Great Ocean Road

The Grampians

Australia: South Australia

Mt Gambier

The Coorong

Adelaide

World’s End

Flinders Ranges

Australia: Western Australia

Nullarbor Desert

Esperance

Albany

Pemberton

Cape Leeuwin

Drop Bears

Kalgoorlie

Rottnest Island

Perth

The Baby Ward

Drive-through Heaven

Nambung (Pinnacles Desert)

Top-up, Sir?

Kalbarri

Shark Bay

Carnarvon

Coral Bay

Cape Range

Nanutarra Roadhouse

Karijini (Hammersley Range)

Start of the Breakdown

Millstream-Chichester

Cleaverville Beach

Pilbara Bushwalk

Port Hedland

Broome

The Kimberley

Kununurra

Purnululu (Bungle Bungles)

Australia: Northern Territory

Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge)

Kakadu

Darwin

Litchfield

Elsey

Travelling Possessions

Daly Waters

Alice Springs

MacDonnell Ranges (Western)

MacDonnell Ranges (Eastern)

Watarrka (King’s Canyon)

Uluru-Kata Tjuta (Ayers Rock)

Australia: South Australia & Victoria

Coober Pedy

Selling a Car

Melbourne

New Zealand: North Island

Auckland

Whangarei

Rangitoto

Finding Wheels

Wellington

Low Patch

New Zealand: South Island

Down the Casino

Christchurch

Dunedin

Southern Scenic Route (East)

Christchurch

Peel Forest

Twizel

Mt Cook

A Glacial Christmas

Queenstown

Kepler Track

Lake Ponderings

Hollyford-Pyke Route

Bush Bastards

Milford

Southern Scenic Route (West)

Queenstown

Routeburn-Greenstone Track

West Coast (South Island)

Arthur’s Pass

Christchurch

Nelson

New Zealand: North Island

Catchpool Valley

Taranaki

Tongariro

Taupo

Mahia Beach

Coromandel

Whangarei

Northland

Submarine Car

Kiwi Trivia

Learning to Dive

French Polynesia: New Zealand to Polynesia

Anatomy of a Yacht

Sailing to French Polynesia

The Strange World of Sailing

French Polynesia: The Gambier Islands

Gambier Islands

Gambier Islands (Mangareva)

The Sociability of Yachties

Cooking on Board

Rikitea Harbour

Gambier Islands (Southeast)

Gambier Islands (East)

French Polynesia: Heading for Tahiti

Man vs Cyclone Kelly

Amanu

Amanu Street Scene

Makemo

Escape from the Yacht

Tahiti

Bushwalking in Tahiti

Australia: Queensland

Brisbane

Cairns

Feeling Old in Cairns

Great Barrier Reef

Hinchinbrook Island

Townsville

Magnetic Island

Fraser Island

Noosa

Familiarity Breeds

Thoughts on Leaving

Indonesia: Bali

Kuta

Balinese Public Transport

Learning Bahasa Indonesia

Ubud

Curse of the 60-day Visa

Types of Traveller

Indonesia: Lombok

Ampenan

Gunung Rinjani

Indonesian Peace and Quiet

Indonesia: Sumbawa and Flores

Sumbawa

Labuanbajo

How to Survive Indonesia

Bajawa

Indonesian Habits

Moni

Loneliness on the Road

Indonesia: Sulawesi

Maumere to Ujung Pandang

Ujung Pandang

Bada Valley

Togian Islands

Wild Mood Swings

Poso

The Torajan People

Rantepao

A Torajan Funeral

Unwell in Tana Toraja

Indonesia: Java

Ujung Pandang to Surabaya

Surabaya to Yogyakarta

McDonald’s, Indonesian Style

Yogyakarta

Borobudur

Prambanan

Dieng Plateau

Thoughts on Leaving

Singapore: Singapore

Singapore City

A Day at the Golf Course

Malaysia: Southern Malaysia

Pre-Malaysian Apathy

Melaka

Malaysian Politics

Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia: The Rainforest

Rainforest Statistics

Taman Negara

Walking the Rainforest

Meeting the Orang Asli

Malaysia: Northwest Malaysia

Cameron Highlands

The Company of Travellers

The Cavalier Roundhead

Pulau Pangkor

Georgetown

Thoughts on Leaving

Thailand: Island Life

The Currency Crisis

The Thai Language

Hat Yai to Phuket

Ko Samui

Beach Bums of Thailand

Thailand: Bangkok and the North

Bangkok

Chiang Mai

Thoughts on Leaving

India: West Bengal and Orissa

Thoughts Before Arriving

Calcutta

Puri

Hinduism and Indian History

Konark

Travellers in India

Religious Tolerance

India: Andhra Pradesh

Hyderabad

Golconda

Hyderabadi Conversations

Music on the Brain

The Indian Film Industry

India: Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry

Chennai

Buying Music in India

Mamallapuram

Slowing Down

Pondicherry

Trichy

Thanjavur

I’ll Have a Limca, Please

Madurai

The Sound of Indian Politics

Kodaikanal

Travellers’ Opinions of India

Madurai

India: Kerala

Kollam to Alappuzha

Kochi

James Bond in India

India: Karnataka

Mysore

Bangalore

The Post Office

Reflections in Bangalore

Kama Sutra

Hampi

The Holi Festival

Bijapur

India: Maharashtra

Aurangabad

Ellora

Daultabad

Ajanta

Cricket and India

India: Madhya Pradesh

Mandu

Bhopal

Sanchi

Thoughts After Three Months

Nepal: The Himalayas

Annapurna Circuit

Annapurna Circuit: Stage 1

Annapurna Circuit: Stage 2

Pokhara

Nepal: The Plains

Kathmandu

Floundering in Kathmandu

Death in the Afternoon

Janakpur

India: West Bengal

The Toy Train

Darjeeling

India: Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh

The Power of Authority

Death of the Ganges

Varanasi

Death on the Platform

Air Coolers

Gwalior

Agra

Fatehpur Sikri

Service Station Hell

India: Rajasthan

Jaipur

Pushkar

Udaipur

India: Gujarat and Diu

Louis Armstrong

Bhavnagar

Alang

Palitana

Hindi Pop

Diu

Lies, Damned Lies

India: Rajasthan

Mt Abu

Indian Television

Yogi and Babaji

Jodhpur

Pigs Over Jaisalmer

Jaisalmer

Camel, One Previous Owner

The Thar Desert

Bikaner

Nuclear Testing

India: Punjab

Amritsar

Surviving India

Schrödinger’s Cat

India: Himachal Pradesh and Delhi

Dharamsala

The Dogs of Bhagsu

Delhi

Morocco: Marrakech

Arriving in Morocco

Marrakech

Car Rental Scam

Morocco: Into the Hammada

Rock Men of the Hammada

Aït Benhaddou

Morocco, German-style

Drâa Valley

The Hammada

Morocco: The Sahara

Merzouga

The Sahara by Camel

Driving in a Sandstorm

Space Invaders

Desert Food

Ouarzazate

Senegal: The West Coast

Dakar

Île de Gorée

Homesickness

Senegal v Nigeria

Unstable Continent

St-Louis

The Language Barrier

Toubab Dialao

Senegalese Transport

Joal-Fadiout

Palmarin

Djiffer

Foundiougne

Kaolack

King of the Café

The Gambia: The Coast

Banjul

Bumster Trouble

Fajara

The Gambia: Along the River Gambia

Tendaba

Kiang West

Tendaba to Jangjang Bureh

Travelling Cushion

London Calling

Jangjang Bureh

One Pen, Gambian-style

Blister Bug

The Gambia: Crossing into Senegal

Basse Santa Su

Basse Santa Su to Tambacounda

Thoughts on Leaving

Senegal: Eastern Senegal

Tambacounda

Thoughts on Leaving

Mali: The West

Tambacounda to Kayes

Kayes

Kayes to Bamako

A Serious Loss

Black Music

Bamako

Saturday Night at the Movies

Mali: Along the River Niger

Mopti

Mopti to Timbuktu

Marmalade!

Timbuktu

The Waiting Game

Camel Trekking in Timbuktu

Down on the Upside

Tuareg Tea

Bloody Nora

Timbuktu to Gao

The Floating Market

Gao

Gao to Mopti

Sahel Food

Djenné

Mali: Djenné and Dogon

The Best Laid Plans

A Financial Perspective

Remember Me?

The Right Staff

Dogon Country

Thoughts on Leaving

Burkina Faso: Burkina Faso

Friendly in French

Ouagadougou

Thoughts on Leaving

Ghana: Central Ghana

The Struggle into Ghana

Kumasi

The Road to Jesus

The Cedi Shuffle

Ghana: Accra and Kokrobite

The Auditor-General

Accra

Kokrobite

Turtle Wars

Trucked Off

A Change of Heart

Rastafarian Christmas

Kakum

Down the Den

Drink in a Bag

Ghana: Along the South Coast

Cape Coast

Elmina

The Prempeh Room

Nzulezo

Axim

Busua

Visiting Jimmy Moxon

Pouring Petrol on the Flames

Thoughts on Leaving

Cyprus: Central Cyprus

Pafos

Troodos

Kakopetria

Mt Olympos

War Zone Accommodation

Nicosia

Cyprus: The South

Agia Napa

Larnaka

Kourion

Cyprus: The North

Pissouri

Polis

Cypriot Architecture

Place Names in Cyprus

A Brief History of Cyprus

Thoughts on Leaving

Cuba: Havana and the Bay of Pigs

Heaving on a Jet Plane

Havana

Driving in Cuba

Playa Girón

Cuba: Central Cuba

Trinidad

The Man in the Red Hat

Camagüey

Música de la Casa

Cuba: The Northern Cayos

Cayo Santa María

Remedios

Santa Clara

A Funny Sort of Socialism

Thoughts on Leaving

India: Kerala

The High Commission

Falling into Place

Varkala

Hippy Heaven

The Shirt off My Back

Lagging Behind

Blowing the Budget

Beer, What Beer?

Cash Card Crisis

The Keralan Backwaters

The Beer Shop

Kochi

Munnar

Periyar

Ringing the Changes

Kovalam

Thoughts on Leaving

Mexico: The Yucatán

About Time Too

Man Down!

Playa del Carmen

Day of the Dead

Panic in Paradise

Cozumel

Diving Rain

Making the First Move

Tulum Pueblo

Tulum Ruinas

Valladolid

With this Ring

Chichén Itzá

Hotel Illness

Mérida

Five Day Rule

Cenote Diving

Diving in Cozumel

Thoughts on Leaving

Belize: The Caribbean

Playa del Carmen to Caye Caulker

Caye Caulker

Diving in Ambergris Caye

Travelling by Internet

The Great Blue Hole

Belize: The West

San Ignacio

Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave

Caracol

Thoughts on Leaving

Guatemala: The North

Flores

Tikal

Río Dulce

The Sun Dog

Dampened Enthusiasm

Guatemala: The South

Antigua

Lago de Atitlán

Up the Indian’s Nose

Monterrico

Living in the Eighties

Guatemala City

Thoughts on Leaving

El Salvador: The West

Love at First Sight

Santa Ana

Parque Nacional Los Volcanes

Ruta de las Flores

El Salvador: The East

Suchitoto

Cerro de Guazapa

El Salvador: On the Coast

Playa El Tunco

Playa Esteron

Thoughts on Leaving

Nicaragua: The West

Playa Esteron to León

León

Volcán Telica

Estelí

Cañón de Somoto

Matagalpa

From Bean to Cup

The Chocolate Factory

Granada

Nicaragua: The Caribbean

Flying to the Corn Islands

Little Corn Island

Nicaragua: The South

Granada to Isla de Ometepe

Isla de Ometepe

Thoughts on Leaving

Costa Rica: Costa Rica

Culture Shock

Monteverde

La Fortuna

San José

Thoughts on Leaving

Panama: Mainland Panama

Bocas del Toro

Boquete

Just Passing Through

Pedasí

Panama City

The Taxi Scam

Panama: The San Blas Archipelago

All Aboard The Black Dragonfly

Portobelo

Portobelo to San Blas

San Blas (Cayos Holandeses)

San Blas (Cayos Coco Banderos)

San Blas to Cartagena

Thoughts on Leaving

Colombia: The Caribbean Coast

Cartagena

The Song Remains the Same

Santa Marta

Taganga

Ciudad Perdida

Walking Tips for Ciudad Perdida

Flying Through Colombia

Colombia: Central Colombia

Medellín

The Medellín Metro

Bogotá

The Bogotá Transmilenio

Zipaquirá

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading