Taro's Travels

Fears, Uncertainties, and Doubts

taroso — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 07:52:00 GMT

There´s insectoid staples in the Mexican diet. I´ve not yet tried the ant eggs or a plate of whole maguey worms, but there were ground worms mixed with salt and chilli powder -- inoffensive -- at a mezcal tasting we did the other day, and there have certainly been a few worms found at the bottom of bottles in years past. And then there have been the grasshoppers. The last time that they were available was nearly a decade back on a hawker´s barrow in Patpong, Thailand, presented as part of an extensive selection of Things With Too Many Legs That Shall Not Pass My Lips. Still, if one eats and enjoy crustaceans -- and I do -- then the disquiet at the thought of eating something land-dwelling with fewer legs is really not quite rational. By the second handful of dried grasshoppers, any disquiet had more or less passed.

What is generally presented as Mexican cuisine back in Australia is more Mexican cuisine as filtered through a US interpretation -- Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex. The tacos here use a small and soft tortilla, covered in shaved grilled meats that give an effect not entirely different to what you might find in the average Turkish takeaway. There´s been quite a lot of soft white cheese over things: one slightly crumbly, perhaps like a gentle feta; another the queso Oaxaca, which is squeakier. And there´s mole, which is the generic term for regional varieties of complex spiced sauces. You might find a one containing ground pumpkin seeds -- the pipian -- or ground almonds -- the almendrado -- but the core moles so far appear to be rich and savoury chocolate sauces found poured over enchiladas or stewed with chicken. It´s been interesting, and the different varieties have been sufficiently different.

I also had some back-of-the-head idea that we might at certain times have been presented with mince that had been boiled to within an inch of its grey life together with an excessive quantity of Mexican Death Chillis, but nothing like that has yet eventuated, and the food has so far been less piquant than a proper Thai Green Curry, or a Beef Vindaloo, say. You can add some more heat with condiments, but even the red and green salsas or the whole pickled peppers tend to be more playful than punishing. And on reflection, this is something to be very grateful for when Montezuma´s Revenge takes hold.

So, I went to the doctor this morning, and he gave me a prescription for a couple of pills, and told me to avoid eggs, milk products, pork, spices, and chilli. That´s the setup for a bad joke, particularly in Mexico, where (if memory serves me correctly) I´ve yet to have a meal without one or more of those being involved.

*****

It´s struck me that the portrayals of Mexico I´ve seen have almost entirely filtered through the lens of US media, both fictional and non-fictional, and that filtering has almost universally portrayed The Mexican as a more-or-less pre-modern Other: the violent criminal; the illegal immigrant; the manual laborer; the waiter or barman.

There´s no doubt that there are serious problems with over 60000 killed in the drug “wars” in the north since 2006. 43 students have disappeared after apparently having been handed over by members of the police force to gang members. There´s significant income disparity, with a high GINI coefficient, and as in many places elsewhere there are aged beggars and children hawking souvenirs at midnight. A route change has been made owing to reports of armed robbery by those who claimed to be Zapatistas (but who may have been more Opportunistas). And then there have been the minor oddities such as road workers manually sweeping a stretch of highway with brooms, or bare-handed garbage workers picking through the rubbish in the back of their garbage truck for recyclables.

Yet it´s obvious, too, that there´s a significant prosperous middle class, with ubiquitous technology; much internal tourism; downtown areas large and modern and clean, and filled with late model cars with barely a motorbike to be seen; smooth intercity roads; a bunch of interesting architecture, and a public transport system in Mexico City that manages to move nearly double the population of Sydney each day. Sydney: please take note.

The official advice from our government is to reconsider the need to travel to a number of places in Mexico, and to exercise a high degree of caution elsewhere. I take the broad brush advice with a grain of salt. Of course there are going to be many places and times not to be, but travel routes and locations are filters in themselves. You see working class and poorer areas, but often at a distance. In many a heavily touristed central area with a high police presence, I´m probably slightly safer than when coming home late at night to my current place.

I was actually more nervous about actually getting both myself and luggage to Mexico City than getting safely from the airport to my hostel while there. For one, the flight from Sydney was with United, an airline about which a fair number of poor reviews have been written. For another, I had less than a 2.5 hour turnaround to get out through customs and immigration… and back in through customs and immigration. The occasional unpleasant report and news stories about the experiences of travellers at LAX has popped up. And then there was another UA flight to Mexico City. As it turned out, the flights were untraumatic, the stewards nice and professional enough, the transit process smooth, and the TSA staffers no different to any other customs and immigration folk.

And then there was the day of arrival: Easter Friday. I´d expected, given my perception of Mexico as a highly religious country, that things would be more or less shut down in the centre both on the Friday and the Sunday, as they are in Australia. Things were anything but. Many shops and stores were open. Crowds thronged the street (although apparently it was quieter than usual as many had left town for the holidays). Stalls displayed spanish-language novels. There were cos-players in the mall, available for photos for a fee. Various buskers performed, including one group covering translated Beatles songs. A couple of fortune teller plied their trade. As she passed a church in Centro Historico, a jogger in hot pink swerved, kissed the side of her crooked forefinger, and crossed herself. The rest of the crowd carried on.

Confessions of a Lousy Traveller

taroso — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 02:22:00 GMT

"Do you think you're a good traveller?", the Taswegian asked.

I thought for a moment. "No."

And I'm not.

I don't carry a camera to enable experiences to be shared in nice brief worth-a-thousand-word screens; I skip places I really REALLY should have seen (Wadi Rum, inside the Giza Pyramids, Simien Mountains) on the snap decision of a moment; largely stick to the easiest of routes beaten by travel guide writers; spend slabs of time doing nothing particularly useful (Gonder day 3: Wake late, walk up the hill to the Goha Hotel, eat fish and chips, do crosswords, watch the raptors circling, wander down late in the day, log onto the internet); and don't go as local as I feel somehow obligated to as a Good Traveller.

Principally, my problem is that I really don't like travelling. I think I'd go so far as to say that I actually dislike it; when they invent safe teleportation, sign me up. The disliked travelling starts with the flight out of Australia - half a day to anywhere except NZ if you're lucky, and closer to a day and a half of sleepless flights and transiting if you're not. And that's the good part. After that, there's long days and long nights of buses, trains (hint: Egypt's 1st class seats are more comfortable than the beds of the sleeper carriage), 4WDs and minibuses to look forward to.

Sure, there could be some lovely scenery on the way, and some interesting new folks to meet. True, what is a voluntarily self-inflicted once-off for those with the luxury to choose to travel is a regular fact of life for locals. But, if the minibus happens to be a local 12-seater Ethiopian one, then chances are reasonable that the bone-jarring ride will be shared with the driver, 21 or so other passengers, and an assortment of fleas.

Fleas? Oh yes. I was warned that spraying one's hotel room was a Really Good Idea, but experience has been that the fleas I've picked up have been mainly from the cramped confines of Ethopia's buses and minibuses. There have been a couple of hostels with a rat or three gnawing away in the roof, cockroaches scaling the walls after dark, and mosquitoes and flies strafing. Ideally, one wouldn't choose such a place, but it's not always possible to tell how good or bad a place is before you're actually installed. The quote unquote best hotel in Woldia, for instance had no hot water at night, no water in the morning, and a mosquito net that for some reason stopped 10 centimetres above the level of the bed. Go figure.

The fleas have been almost all acquired on the way, however. I tried slathering myself with DEET the other day, but it didn't stop them for long. Frankly, I have quite a lot of flea bites, and right about now, you should be rather glad that you don't get to share the experience with me through nice brief worth-a-thousand-word screens. Or through a large collection of itchy welts on your legs... torso... arm... right middle finger... or - somehow - palm of the left hand (dear ghod my luggage is getting bagged, fumigated, and hot-washed).

One thing about travelling, the commonality of experience allows conversations that would most likely be avoided closer to home. Such as one's collection of flea bites, the condition of one's digestion, or "What are the chances that all 5 of us at the table would have been to Tibet?", as one of the Brits posed at dinner one night. "Well, you are asking that question in Ethiopia...", I replied.

So I don't like the travelling from place to place, but what about the actual sites? Yeah, some (across the countries visited) have been wholly or partly great or good, but more have been so-so; perhaps enjoyable, but not a must or even necessarily a really should see. There's no polite way to tell a local that "Old stonework elsewhere is a lot nicer and more interesting", however, so (this might come as a surprise to some) I don't. But I sure think it often enough. And there's only so many things of a particular type I can see in close succession before it's more than enough.

So why travel at all? Well, the great bits - relatively few though they are - are really great, and often can't be approximated elsewhere; there's the opportunity to meet some interesting new folks; experience some small slivers of other ways of life; and perhaps see some lovely scenery while on the long way from one place to another. Most of all, I may be a lousy traveller, but I'm relying on my memory also being lousy. In a few months - perhaps weeks - the bad and ordinary bits will fade along with the flea bites, and the great, extraordinary, unique bits will stand out as one fantastic (or at least amusing) set of memories.

I may not like travelling, but I love remembering travelling.

Incidents from the Revolution

taroso — Sat, 5 Feb 2011 05:43:00 GMT

Wednesday, January 26, 2011
I returned to southwest Cairo after two nights in Bahariya Oasis, and as my taxi crawled up the road along the west bank of the Nile I noted the presence of a number of blue vans, with riot police inside or milling about. On Gezira - literally "the island" - there were more vans and police, and on eventually reaching Midan Tahrir, where there were even more police lined up, I finally asked why; I’d never seen anywhere near so many police in Egypt. It turned out that there had been an anti-government demonstration here on the public holiday Tuesday, and indeed several hundred people were still chanting that day on the pavement in front of KFC, catty-corner from the Mugamma.

Midan Tahrir is the major intersection of downtown Cairo. The Mugamma, monolithic home of Egyptian bureaucracy stands there, as does part of the American University in Cairo. Metro station Sadat lies beneath it. The apricot walls and dome of the Egyptian Museum are visible a block away, and just behind those can be seen the towering concrete block that is the headquarters of the National Democratic Party, who have controlled Egypt since the coup that ousted the monarchy. We slowly moved into Talaat Harb St, past more vans and more riot police including one with what looked like a metre-long shotgun. At Midan Talaat Harb, we turned into Kasr Il Nile Street - traffic on the remainder of Talaat Harb runs south from Midan Orabi - and from there made our way to the Yacoubian Building, home of the hotel.

The courier with my replacement credit card hadn't arrived yet. The telecommunications centre I knew was on Midan Tahrir on the same segment as the protest, but the protest was small so I walked down there. The riot police were blocking any entrance to the pavement, however, so I returned back up Talaat Harb. Instead I called Visa from my hotel’s phone, and discovered that the card was due to be delivered the next evening. There was some talk that the Government had curtailed the use of social media sites, but I had no problem in accessing any internet sites that night. There was also talk that an Al Jezeera journalists had been shot many times with rubber bullets.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

As I was leaving, one of the three Americans staying there said that she and her friend had caught a little tear gas late the previous night. The morning was, however, quiet: I walked down the near-deserted Talaat Harb to the near-deserted Midan Tahrir, and caught a train to El Munieb, south of Giza. From the bus station there, I caught a microbus to the Fayyum, the artificial oasis where a significant amount of Egypt's food is grown and spent the day there. In the evening, I returned to Ramses (Mubarak) the major train station in Cairo and walked down through the souk to Metro Attaba where I discovered that Cairo had a region filled with second hand bookstalls, and from there returned to my hotel. Everything seemed normal -- business as usual -- if a little quieter than usual.

My card had arrived, but when I walked down again to Midan Tahrir, the travel agent that represented Ethiopian Air had closed. The corner was devoid of protesters. At the hotel, however, the internet wasn't working - this was before midnight, earlier than reports which widely list the shutdown as being sometime on the Friday.

Friday January 28, 2011
[The exact sequence of the events of the day is as best as I can reconstruct it; I was not taking notes at the time]

The Caribbean Russian left early in the morning carrying her daypack; the bearded Japanese also left - I believe he’d a day tour booked. The internet was still down, and mobile phones had been cut off some time overnight as well to stop protests being organised. "I may need to stay another night, depending on whether I can get a ticket for tonight or not", I informed the Egyptian manager -- it was no problem, but I should come back by midday as there were likely to be protests after prayers. With the internet and mobile telephony cut off, the last major avenue of organised protest was the mosques. The agency was closed, as were many other businesses.    A shoe store was getting roller security shutters fitted.

On Adly Street, just north of the hotel, a bunch of green mats had been spread on the pavement and out onto the road, but Adly Street was almost deserted. I went down into the street. There's a juice stall opposite, and I grabbed a drink of orange there. The male American student [R.] had grabbed some McDonalds and was returning to the building. I considered it -- McDonalds was one of the few other shops open at the moment -- but decided against it. Previous Friday evenings had been busy, after all. It was a quarter to twelve and the calls to prayers went out. Normally these only last ten or fifteen minutes, but it was around 12:30pm before they stopped. A stream of around a hundred people went round into Adly street, and perhaps further. A sermon was broadcast in the middle-distance; it did not sound happy. The sermon finished. All was quiet, and eventually a loose crowd of people returned down Adly Street, and wandered up or down Talaat Harb St.

Nothing happened.

Vodaphone connections were still working, R. discovered, as he called his folks to let them know that everything was ok. Vodaphone connections stopped working. I went downstairs to see if the diner next door was open; R., who was wanting to visit the British Museum eventually, also came down. The diner wasn’t open, and nor was the one across the street. McDonalds seemed like an option, but it was closed. “I may as well walk down towards the Museum. Maybe the travel agent has opened”, said I.

We never got anywhere near there.
Things happened.

A hundred of hundred metres or so down the street a crowd marched out onto Talaat Harb and stopped facing towards us. At Champoleon St, just south of Midan Orabi, riot police massed; the High Court is on Champoleon. Getting back to the hotel ASAP, thankfully only a few metres away seemed like a Very Good Idea.   At the entrance a burly middle-aged man asked if were we journalists -- No. We didn’t need to worry, he told us, noone wanted tourists to get hurt, and the few traffic police nearby were actually security forces. This was not entirely reassuring, and we entered the Yacoubian Building and got up to the fourth floor.

Three of the hotel’s rooms on the fourth floor face out onto Talaat Harb. The sitting room at the north and the dorm at the south have balconies. Unless you lean out you are reasonably screened from the sightlines of Midan Orabi and Midan Talaat Harb, so risk appeared reasonably low to watch proceedings.

The crowd advanced towards Orabi. Most of the crowd stopped at Abdel Khalek Sarwat St, just south of the hotel. The few who advanced walked up past Adly, and at the front a lone girl in a red jacket brandished what I remember as being a sign aloft (although I have seen images of what looks like the same girl brandishing a flag), while photojournalists behind her snapped their photos.

The riot police parted to let an armoured vehicle through. A riot policeman in the hatch at the top fired teargas - it turned out the huge shotgun I saw earlier in the week was used for firing canisters. Billowing white trails arced through the air, and when they landed protestors would try to kick or throw the canisters back. They called for onions (apparently an antidote to tear gas), and from various balconies around purple onions were thrown down, and sometimes bottles of water too, most of which splattered on the ground. With all the gas being fired, and the zenith of some of the arcs being well above our level, tear gas reached our balconies. This was generally fairly dilute, and only a few times was it strong enough to force us to retreat inside. At one point a canister landed on a balcony opposite but higher than ours, and plumes of tear gas drifted down.   Later on, while we were all inside, a canister landed on the balcony of the sitting room, fumes wafting under the French doors. [Tear gas, incidently, smells something like a firecracker crossed with a burning sensation in the sinuses, and while it mainly hurts the mucous membranes it also irritates skin as well]

At various times, the crowd pushed towards Adly and at others they retreated past Sarwat. “Come down” called some of the protesters. None of us did. Security barriers were dumped in the street to stop the assault vehicle advancing. Pavers were taken from the corner at Sarwat and broken up to provide stones, which were thrown; some of the police threw the stones back -- they were armed with shields and metre-long batons, and only a few riot shotguns between them. The assault vehicle left for elsewhere. Tear gas continued to be fired.  It's possible that rubber bullets or beanbags were being fired in addition to the tear gas canisters - some of the shots had a different sound.

Someone had been injured - perhaps a direct hit by a tear gas canister. An Ambulance came down Adly and stopped in front of our building, and paramedics raced into the back-alley area opposite. Very occasionally a private vehicle would come down Adly and very quickly return back up the one-way street. At some point in the afternoon, a taxi pulled up and quickly disgorged the Japanese.

For a while there was a second front at Sarwat as another group riot police pushed into the intersection. The battles went back and forth, but eventually the crowd split. Those towards Talaat Harb went out of view, while those still up our end dissipated. A crowd of what could have been fifty plainclothes security personnel wielding sticks (and in one case a metal baseball bat) came up the street pursuing stragglers and dragging protesters out from the back-alley section, whapping them with their sticks, and arresting them. One of the arrestees appeared to be about twelve years old. An armoured vehicle drove to the doorway of a block of flats further up the street, teargas poured from every floor, and soon people were being dragged from there as well.

Talaat Harb settled right down. We all ducked downstairs, where the snack shop next to the juice shop had half-opened his roller-door, and bought food-ish items. Things started up again - there was more fighting along Sarwat, and the muzzle flash of the riot shotguns were bright in the evening darkness. Later, three Army people movers raced into Talaat Harb and down towards Midan Tahrir. The police had left, and the Army was taking over security. At times during the day, and through much of the night we watched the satellite news channels - Al Jazeera, CNN, and BBC World. These had not been able to be cut off (although very occasionally there was static on Al Jazeera and notes that the channel was scrambled). There was a lot of repetition in the footage used - a minute or so of protestors on and under the overpass at Dokki while riot police were below, an armoured vehicle hitting a protestor and another one with its door being ripped open, and so on.   And there was new news too - the headquarters of the NDP was reported to have been set on fire, looters had briefly hit the Egyptian Museum but commandos were now patrolling its halls, there was a curfew (widely ignored by the folks wandering up Talaat Harb), and the airport had been shut down.

Saturday January 29, 2011
The next day Talaat Harb was clear; I wandered down. A crowd was gathered in front of the Egyptian Museum, and a lonely fire engine poured water into the still aflame NDP headquarters. Another crowd was gathered in Midan Tahrir but had left the pavement clear. There were a couple of tanks parked off the square. The travel agency was closed; the money changers were closed; even McDonalds was closed; most everything in downtown seemed closed.

The other way on Talaat Harb and a bit of damage could be seen - some shop windows broken by stray stones or canisters (the shopkeeper opposite had spent the night outside his boarded frontage), and the liquor store deliberately broken into and its contents destroyed. Only one shop I saw had been looted - and only the contents of its front window. At Midan Orabi, the market was opening, with fruitsellers and bakers and grocery shops.

The Russian still hadn’t returned but another American turned up fresh from the airport - it was open again. A few of the guests headed to Ramses to see if they could get to Luxor; others of us headed for the airport. More military personnel could be seen on the way there.

Many flights were cancelled or delayed. There was a KLM flight up the top of the listing that had been listed as being delayed a day and a half. Curfew kicked in at 4pm, so that those who arrived afterwards were stuck in the airport. Conversely, it’s likely that not everyone managed to get to the airport. The eateries at both Terminals 1 and 3 ran out of supplies and closed very early. I booked myself on an Egypt Air flight leaving late that night from Terminal 3, but by about 10pm, nearly every Egypt Air flight, both internal and external had been cancelled. The ticket window at Terminal 3 was swamped with unhappy travellers, but I at least managed to get a refund when I returned to Terminal 1. Plan B (Ethiopian Airlines to Addis) was revealed to also have been cancelled, and plan C (Kenyan Airlines to Nairobi via Khartoum) was already boarding and its office now closed. I went with the less than ideal Plan D (Etihad to Abu Dhabi; bus to Dubai; Ethiopian Airlines to Addis), which was the only flight listed to the region until at least 11am the next day. It too was delayed, but at l(e)ast it left.

Returned Expatriates

taroso — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:14:00 GMT

[NOTE: The paragraphs below were written in mid January, well before the current crisis, but I had a lot of trouble with the shape of the posting; the solution was to excise about 3/4 of what was written, including the fifth expatriate Sayed Qutb, which will be used in a future post]

1. The Engineer

The Engineer was not optimistic about Egypt’s prospects: Too many of his compatriots lacked foresight and had too many children, and Egypt, with its current population of eighty million or so, was going to end up with significantly more, all competing for scare resources. “But look at Italy”, I ventured. “Heavily religious with large families but when the education rate rises things can change very quickly; one or two generations and the population rate plummets -- it’s now way below replacement level.”, and “My mother was one of six children; now there’s only my brother and me, and three cousins in our generation”. And look at the Engineer himself: one of eight children, but with only one of his own, so far.

He was not convinced. One in three Egyptians undertook higher education, but it was of very low quality. After he completed his degree in Egypt, he went to the UK, where he discovered that he had not been taught the things he needed to know. “Equations?”. “Everything. I had to study for another three years there to learn everything I should already know”. His voice dropped to a whisper so that those around could not easily hear: “You know what the real problem is? Corruption”.

2. The Hawker

The Hawker was deeply concerned by corruption, too: “The funds from Suez should be used for the good of all; it should belong to everybody”. As a fervent believer in Islam, with bushy black beard, white robe and skullcap, it wasn’t only the issue of institutional corruption that was on his mind, however, but corruption of body, mind, and soul as well. “The problem is secularism... and materialism”. He’d spent time working in Europe, but had returned to Egypt half a decade back in search of a simpler, purer life. And his solution to Egypt’s problems? A Caliphate: once more a single state headed by a Caliph -- one who does not seek power but nonetheless is chosen by all -- should unite the Muslim world under Sharia law.

But isn’t Denmark the country acting closest to his ideal of ensuring that funds from a country’s resources being used for the good of all, and whose citizens are the happiest, but which is particularly non-religious? And hasn’t Iran, for instance, been close to the ideal of a country governed under sharia law? Well no - “Iran is not a good example of a Muslim country” - he’s Sunni not Shi’ite.

I can’t say that I was converted. On the one hand it’s easy to agree that materialism is bad -- or at least isn’t good. On the other hand, theocracies have rarely been particularly utopian for the majority of believers, sooner or later leaders who do seek power tend to acquire the rule (with accompanying murder and/or debauchery), and (most importantly on a personal level) theocracies of any religious type have traditionally not been particularly healthy places for us disbelievers - or even for believers whose beliefs are deemed heretical, often enough.

3. The Writer

Alaa Al Aswany had to study for another 9 years after arriving in Chicago in order to earn his Masters in Dentistry at the university there. On returning to Egypt, he tried to get his first novel published. He writes (in his introduction to The Yacoubian Building):

I took the manuscript to the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO) withe the idea of submitting it for publication and completely confident that it would win their attention, and perhaps a warm welcome, because my novel, in the opinion of those who had read the manuscript was better than many the Organization had published. But there, in the Organization’s sumptuous building on the Corniche, Egypt’s corrupt cultural establishment dealt me my first shock. It turned out that it was the custom at the GEBO to divide authors into three categories. The first consisted of well known authors, and these had their works published straightaway. The second consisted of authors who came with a recommendation from someone important in the state, and their works were published too, depending on the degreeof influence of the person making the recommendation and without regard for the quality of the work or the author’s talent. The third category, which constituted the vast majority of authors, was made up of the obscure ones -- authors who were not famous and came without recommendations. These had their works referred to reading committees. The strange thing was that the members of the committees were not professors of literature but ordinary employees of the Organization -- workers in various departments , such as accounts or legal affairs -- whose bosses had wanted to flatter or reward them and had therefore put them on the committee so that they could earn extra remuneration.

4. Income

Pay for a number of government employees has been so low that many have apparently had to take on extra jobs after hours just to make ends meet. The minimum wage for Egypt’s government employees, for instance, was EGP289 (less than $2 a day) at the start of last year. In October last year this was increased significantly by court-order to EGP1200.
If the minimum wage of government workers has been woefully low, the general minimum wage was abysmal. It had been set at EGP35 a month back in 1984, and never raised until late last year, when it was increased to EGP400 -- and observance of this pay rise has not been universal. Inflation has been around 10%, and it’s not clear just how much the wage jump will affect this.

In a system with low incomes, baksheesh - payment of cash gratuities - keeps things moving. One can remain perfectly pure, for instance, in paying for use of a maintained toilet or tipping guides who’ve volunteered their services at particular archaeological sites but it’s a slippery slope. What if the guide takes one into a roped-off area, for instance? Or if one wants to see a locked tomb, but the guide/guard has the key? And how about climbing one of the pyramids at Giza? It’s not strictly allowed anymore, but is apparently still doable with sufficient payment to its guardians. Or what if the location is unambiguously okay to enter, but your voluntary guide happens to be a nice submachinegun-toting on-duty policeman? And should one fuss if a ticket seller deliberately gives a student ticket rather than an adult one, returning precisely half the difference, or shrug and move on?

5. The President

Hosni Mubarak has been President of Egypt for nearly 30 years, after an illustrious career in the Egyptian Air Force, including two and a half years spent in the Soviet Union undergoing bomber pilot training. He inherited the Presidency after the assassination of Sadat, and subsequently won four elections. He was the only candidate in the first three, but did gain 88% of the votes in the multi-candidate 2005 election, although for some reason there were suggestions of irregularities. It is not clear yet whether the 82 year old plans to run again in this year’s elections, or if his son Gamal will, or if succession won’t be along family lines. Indications are, however, that there will be no requirement for international observers to confirm that the election is free and fair. President Mubarak, his wife, and his two sons have now reportedly accumulated over USD 40 billion worth of assets, which isn’t bad going.

Travel Patterns

taroso — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:01:00 GMT

Deja Vu

I keep seeing the same backpackers. Now admittedly I sometimes appear to be mildly prosopagnosic. For some reason it took me six months or so to learn to distinguish Sophie Marceau from Catherine Zeta Jones, and the words “You look familar but I don’t... ah well it IS Canberra...” have admittedly passed my lips on more than one occasion -- in some cases more than once during the same occasion... to the same person... I think. But the same backpackers really have kept on appearing, despite us being on rather different itineraries.

The Usual Suspects

The New Zealanders - was on a daytrip with them from Amman up to the northern ruins of Jerash, Ajloun Castle, and Umm Qais. Ran into them again in front of the Monastery at Petra - they were staying at the same hostel. Ran into them again at Dahab and ended up diving Blue Hole/Canyon with them.

The Ex-Brit (now Oz) Teacher - was in the same hostel in Wadi Musa and bussed down to Aqaba. A week later we were in the same hostel in Cairo.

The Australian Teacher and her Uni student son - first saw them on the climb up to the Monastery, met them on the way to Dahab, same hostel in Cairo, a week later the same train to Aswan.

Hypothesis One

Could this be destiny? Could there be some sort of... Higher Purpose in these re-occurring meetings? Ancient wisdom decreed that the ancient sites we’ve been visiting should be laid according to precise orientations of the heavenly bodies, and it is the winter solstice period, after all. Well, I was born with both Sun and Moon under Capricorn, and Mercury in Aquarius, and those of you with an interest in astrology will realise that this is precisely why I’m so rational and non-superstitious -- and hence why this hypothesis is unacceptable. Anyway, no higher purpose has yet been made obvious.

Hypothesis Two

Could they be following me for some reason? Perhaps, but then that’s a little paranoid, those doing the following are not suspicious-looking for’ners but innocent-looking Antipodeans, and besides no-one has collapsed dying into my arms, pressing upon me a statue of an Egyptian gyrfalcon and gurgling “You must keep it safe from urgh---”. No, there have been opportunities aplenty to acquire large quantities of statuary, not to mention spices, scarves, sand sculptures, perfume, and papyrus, but I’ve been steadfast in my refusal. Furthermore, those providing the opportunities have used less of the dramatic collapse technique, and more of the “Yes? Hello? My friend? Welcome? Which country are you from? Aussie Aussie oi oi? You want statue of falcon very nice?” approach.

Hypothesis Three

Could I be following them? Now I’m not consciously doing so, but it is a fact that the nexus of all our travels was on the 18th of December in Petra, a dead city of unquiet tombs. Could one of these tombs have been unfortunately disturbed by a sextet of Antipodeans? They do say the spirits of the dead can possess the living in their sleep... but then again they also say that the positions of distant collections of rock and gas at one’s inception means something special. No, I think it’s fair to say that if I were to believe this hypothesis, it wouldn’t just be an unquiet tomb that was unfortunately disturbed.

Hypothesis Four

Speaking of Inception, perhaps we’re in a simulation of reality. Although this may sound as absurd as the previous hypotheses, the probability of this is apparently quite high - somewhere between 30% and 99%+. Simulation provides a solution to my Sophie Marceau and Catherine Zeta Jones confusion -- they really did used to be rendered with the same model. Sorry for getting a little Truman Showesque here, but what if I were never expected to actually go to the Middle-East, and hence precious simulation resources were never allocated in time to simulate it fully. This explains why the same backpackers keep on cropping up; why the same tour group appeared at the Egyptian Museum, Saqqara, and the Mosque of Sultan Hussan; why Siddig El Fadil was working as a security guard in Cairo; and why there were quite as many clothing and lighting stores in the Downtown region as there were. Limited computing resources also explains why I managed to end up staying in a building keynoted by my guidebook (but not in the context of its hostel) -- there are only so many fully simulated buildings in Sim-Cairo.

The Yacoubian Building

Sharia Talaat Harb is one of the major streets of downtown Cairo, running from the Midan Al Tahrir intersection, where stands El Mugamma, the monolithic seat of Egyptian bureaucracy, up to the eateries of Midan Orabi. Number 34 Talaat Harb is the Yacoubian building, though its entrance is easy to miss, being lined with displays of clothing from adjacent shops and looking like the entrance to another clothing shop to the casual glance; it's easy enough to inadvertently walk past it, as I did on many an occasion. Its foyer is unpromising, with well-worn marble floors, and grimy green walls. There are three separate airwells visible as you climb the dimly-lit stairs. Even on sunny days the airwells are dark and dirty, with decrepit fire escapes spiralling down from the upper floors to the littered ground. The lift, however, is charming: an ancient creaking thing of wood and glass big enough for two passengers and the doorman, who’ll close its gates properly, press its buttons, and return it to the foyer once done.

“The Yacoubian Building” is the title of a renowned modern Egyptian novel, reportedly the highest-selling Arabic novel since its release in 2002. Its author, who once had a dental surgery and whose father had an office therein, borrows the building’s name and location but nothing else, having taken care to absolutely change all the details of the building and its residents so that the novel is entirely fictional, or at least (given its subject matter) plausably deniable. The building in the book/movie/TV series is in “the high European Style”, with “balconies decorated with Greek Faces carved from stone”. The real building is Art Deco, entirely devoid of balconies, and low on decorations, with the exception of some handprints on the grimy walls of the first floor, and “N Yacoubian” set in metal Art Deco script together with a decorative design also in metal on the wall inside above the front door.

The Yacoubian building is full of suites. There’s a creator of wedding dresses on the second floor, and a respiratory doctor on the third floor, for instance. The American House hostel is split between a suite on the fourth floor, where its reception, common area, and several bedrooms are located; and a suite on the second, where the remainder of its bedrooms are to be found. There's a peddlar who appears to sleep on the first floor landing, with his goods bundled in plastic bags. The hostel comes as a great surprise given what lies outside its doors: It’s clean and bright with high ceilings, reasonably comfortable beds, clean bathrooms with decent quantities of hot water, and paintwork worth complementing the interior decorator on.

Hostels

While there are ideal attributes one looks for, pretty much everything is optional.

Clean bedding is good and having two clean sheets is even better -- a few places have provided only bottom sheet and doona -- but there’s always the option of using the sleep sheet if necessary.
Bug-free is Very Important. Given a choice between bug free but dirty and bugridden but clean... well there is no choice: use the sleep sheet and enjoy an uninterrupted non-itchy night anytime. Sometimes there isn’t a lot of choice, though, and leaving the light and fan on can cut down on problems.
Comfortable mattresses and pillows - prod and pray.
Hot water is a good thing; hot water that isn’t time and quantity limited is a bonus.
A room of one’s own can be lovely, but what’s backpacking without spending a significant percentage of nights with 3-10 of your closest friendly strangers?
Secure storage... can be unavailable.
TV in a private room is a negative -- there’s the temptation to actually use it; although TV in the common area can be ok.
Pool? Room Service? Minibar? Hah!

I Hate Tourists

They come in their coaches, with their badges labelling them as being part of group X, and their guide perhaps bearing a flag or placard to enable them to regroup when multiple groups intersect. They are a wave of movement and obstructed vision and chatter, and they look at the same things and they take the same photos. Tourists attract touts and souvenir stands. If noone bought statuary, spices, scarves, sand sculptures, papyrus, and perfume from in front of the Treasury, there wouldn’t be a stall there to damage the magic. A general rule is the fewer visitors there are, the more magic a place is.

I Pity Tourists

They come in their coaches, with their badges labelling them as being part of group X. They only have a short while to experience Ancient Site: The Good Bits Version. Their guide gives them the blurb, they snapshot snapshot snapshot, and then it’s time for them to be shepherded to the next Good Bit. They don’t have the luxury of time, of getting off the beaten path and being able to sit quietly and absorb and reflect, of being able to see things at their own pace. They don't have the luxury of saying “I like it here. What the hell, I’m going to stay a few more days”.

I Envy Tourists

They come in their coaches, with their badges labelling them as being part of group X. Their path is set; they don’t have an excess of possibilities and the paralysis of too many options. They are part of group X. They have fewer meals alone than I do.

Hypothesis Five

Independent travel used to be more difficult. Way back in the day, if you wanted to see the sights of the Middle East (and didn’t want to join an invading Army), it was generally considered a good idea to spend a couple of years learning Arabic, dress in a local fashion, dye your skin, pretend not to be European, and hope that the tribespeople would let you through their territory. There were no travellers’ cheques, ATMs or wire transfers. You carried what you could carry. There were no travel guidebooks, and above all there were no hostel booking sites.

While you can just turn up to a city, look at a ho(s)tels until you find one that suits best, it’s so much easier to do it on Hostelworld when you can rely on the experiences of those who have come before. Thousands of ho(s)tels are likely to be located in Greater Cairo (population 18 million), but only 62 ho(s)tels are listed, of which only 5 have a rating of 90% or above. As backpackers, we're looking for roughly the same things in a hostel, and of course if one is booking on an immediate-need basis then the chances of the top few hostels being booked-out during the Christmas-New Year period is high. Yeah, that’s probably the real solution.

Pattern Breaks

I don’t expect to see any of them again this trip. The New Zealanders should have been home for more than a week, the Ex-Brit should still be in Libya, and the Australians will have headed back north. I’ll be on a dahabiya (a small safari boat) with a small tour group on Lake Nasser with somewhere between Aswan High Dam and Abu Simbel until the 14th -- there’s no other way to visit most of the sites on the lake without sailing there.

A Burg Called Dahab, Egypt

taroso — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 02:20:00 GMT

Arrival

First Class on the ferry to Nuweiba is at the prow, spacious and uncrowded with a cafeteria and the opportunity to buy freshly-cooked box meals. Almost half of its passengers were backpackers, and the remainder well-heeled Jordanians and Egyptians. It is separated by a monitored glass door from the remainder of the deck where you find the Second Class seats: closely-spaced blue rows filled with locals in an array of regional clothing styles.

Bidding farewell to the pair from Amman I’d been chatting with - a Cruise Ship 3rd Officer (on his way to Cairo and thence to Alexandria port) and a Liquor Store manager (on his way to visit his family at Sohag, another 17 hours of travel away) - I exited the ferry. Nuweiba port is jammed with manually pushed cargo-laden trolleys and their handlers, but acquiring a 30 day visa was uneventful and customs x-rayed my bag and waved me through to the exit. Most of the other backpackers were also going to Dahab, so we shared a minibus there.

Boardwalk

When I first arrived in Dahab, it was a dead quiet Sunday evening. The majority of restaurants were empty, the boardwalk had few tourists on it, and there were even fewer in the shops (If I recall correctly, I noticed one in one). Go south a few hundred metres from the point at which the souk meets the boardwalk or north a kilometre or so and the place wasn’t just quiet, but dark. Monday was similarly quiet, with vacant deckchairs on private beaches during the day, and few on the boardwalk even at night.

Viewed from the boardwalk, Dahab is a tourist hell of the standard variety - restaurants mostly with pretty-much identical menus, dive shops, hostels and hotels, a few bars, and souvenir shops with pretty-much the same range as the shop two doors down. Most noticeable, in particular, is the same designs cropping up time and again on clothing, bags, towels, etc.

Follow the boardwalk far enough north, and number of restaurants on the seafront diminishes, the number of souvenir shops diminishes to zero, and a bit further on the concrete stops, there’s mostly beach, and things are kind of pretty in a bleak kind of way, with the bare brown mountains serving as backdrop to the curve of the bay. Far enough south, and the buildings stop and there’s beach and lagoon and folks flying kites. Out at sea there are a few windsurfers and kitesurfers.

Viewed from landward it’s more post-apocolyptic than touristy - bare brown mountains, scree slopes down to the plane, a frontier-town look in the middle, and on the outskirts towards the lagoon, skeleton after concrete skeleton of a things that could have been intended to be a hotels, and empty shops. I had to go to the Commercial International Bank, the only place around that could change travellers cheques, and it felt like a little island in the middle of nowhere. After half an hour or so of waiting the electricity started working again, I cashed my cheques, and walked back to the Masbat area.

Christmas

Winter is low season in Dahab, but the couple of weeks from Christmas through to the beginning of the year are a peak bump before things settle back to normal. By the end of the week things were busier: a few of the restaurants at least were full, and many of the others were reasonably busy, though there were still a few that were still struggling for customers; tourists filled the deckchairs, and day or night you had to step around strolling tourists on the boardwalk. The shops were still quiet though - apparently snow in Europe has stopped a lot of travellers from flying; it should have been much busier in a normal year.

Roast Turkey for Christmas seemed like a good idea; there were two places side by side that were offering what appeared to be near-identical choices. Unfortunately the Roast Turkey in question was not exactly done in the traditional style, being more of a semi-stew, and the Roast Vegetables were definitely Vegetables but anything but Roast. No stuffing was provided at this restaurant; the other place did have stuffing, though this had apparently been “done interestingly” with Egyptian spices. Expectations/Assumptions are dangerous.

Diving

PADI Open Water Course at Bannerfish Bay
Both Confined and Open Water classes were in the sea, and we (a Saffie was my fellow student) ended up having a bit of a swim around at the end of each session. Had one moment of sheer panic on early submersion in the first class, but apart from that and a tendency to dogpaddle from time to time no real issues. Bannerfish Bay had some fish, some stubby seagrass, but no real stretches of coral.

Fun Dive at the Lighthouse
Mounds of coral spilling down the sandy slope into deeper water. Really enjoyable dive (Real Coral!) and reasonable breath control/buoyancy management.

Deep Dive at the Canyon
Good banks of coral and ok fish. Didn’t actually swim the Canyon, which apparently requires Tec Diving experience - just dropped down to the sandpit at the start to experience depth, and then ascended out of the canyon and along the bottom. The swim back was not so good - got caught by the optical illusion where I thought I was on the same plane as the divers ahead of me, but their heads were lower than their feet, and ended up on the surface when I should have been at ~5 feet... and then getting back down to the proper level was tricky.

Drift Dive from Bells to Blue Hole
Magic dive. Amazing coral walls that disappear down into the blue depths, with lots of fish living on and around them. Kept pace/level with my buddy (really experienced diver from Jordan). Not a lot of drift noticed though. Ended with 80 bars (ie used ~120 bars), which is apparently a Good Thing. On the other hand, our instructor only used ~25 bars... Scary. While we were swimming round the wall of Blue Hole, a bunch of divers were climbing down a line from a float out in the middle, presumably to swim through the Arch at ~55m.

Underwater Naturalist at the Islands
Great site with interesting topography, and loads of varieties of coral and fish - including multiple schools of baby barracuda. Saw mouth of a clam as well -- bright purplish blue. Really lousy dive, though, as I had the wrong size boots, and my right foot in particular was a bit sore beforehand, really sore during the dive, and sore for hours afterward. Swimming was consequently really difficult, particularly as there was a canyon with strong currents to fight. On the bright side, when the current was with the direction of travel, it felt far more of a drift dive than the previous Blue Hole dive did - probably a metre every few seconds. Ended with well under 20% air, which is apparently Not Such A Good Thing.

Night Dive at the Lighthouse
Coral was not particularly brightly coloured - impression was lotsa white, with a few yellows/reds/pinks, and rare blues. Actually found Lighthouse’s coral more visually interesting in aggregate during the day because of the distance that could be seen. Achieving neutral buoyancy was tricky perhaps because water was a bit colder than it had been - was probably nearly halfway through dive before was really comfortable with the control of things. Saw a Spanish Dancer though it wasn’t dancing. Didn’t find the safety stop particularly relaxing as a lion fish kept swimming around fairly close but did bury lights momentarily to play with the bioluminescent ?plankton? in the water.

Underwater Navigation at the Lighthouse
Didn’t really see much apart from sand, a few fish, and the compass on my forearm. Compulsory, no doubt eventually useful, but not interesting. Also a little rushed - more of an overview than anything since the square I swam wasn’t (finished metres off my mark)

Exit

Finishing the final dive in the afternoon, I caught the 22:00 overnight bus to Cairo, arriving around 6:30am. This has the advantage of not losing a day in travel, but is otherwise not recommended as there were a lot of interruptions which made sleep difficult. The TV was playing Egyptian movies reasonably loudly, and every hour or so the lights would come on and someone would wake everyone up to check our passports or tickets.

Building Stories

taroso — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 02:04:00 GMT

story (noun), from Latin historia:
   1.    A narrative concerning real or fictional events;
   2.    A level of a building (mainly US; see storey);
   3.    A lie.

In the Beginning

Once upon a time a question was asked. Perhaps it was “Why are we here?” or “How are the gods to be properly honoured?”. Or perhaps it was “Why does it rain?” or “How shall we stay dry?”. It could have been “What happens when I die?” or “How shall I be remembered when I am gone?”. Or maybe “Who is over there?” or “How can we protect ourselves?”. And an answer came to the questioner: “We were created”... “A temple”... ”Hubal sends it”... “A house”... “The afterlife”... “A mausoleum”... “Strangers”... “A fortress”...

Present and Past

Amman (when I visited it) was not a beautiful city, though it improved in the evening when less of it could be seen, and the lights came on. At best it was interesting ugly - a city of multi-story concrete buildings cascading over the steep hills and along the canyoned streets in the valleys between. Perhaps spring might prettify it, but at the moment it is a city of browns and greys. The buildings are generally brownish-white and brownish-grey and the ground is generally concrete and tile, or bare dirt - a desert city of desert colours. There are exceptions: the occasional building of reflective blue glass, some watered and maintained vegetation along the median strip of major roads, or a places where trees grow in bare earth, but the overall impression remains. It is, however, modern, clean (though at this time muddy), and non-touristy. Despite its modernity, there have been settlements here for at least ten thousand years, though few of the buildings are even half a century in age. Only a handful of its ancient structures remain standing in the Downtown area, and all are closely surrounded by the modern city.

Future?

Throughout Jordan you see what appears to be unfinished buildings. These are not buildings under construction - there are plenty of those too - but buildings with their lower story or stories occupied, and above that groves of bare rebar, perhaps springing from stubby concrete pillars, suggesting that one day another story might be completed. Other unfinished buildings abound with their upper story walled and roofed but devoid of fittings, finishings, furniture, windows, and doors, and showing no sign that things are likely to be completed anytime soon.

Fragments

Earthquakes tumbled the old places down; their stones lay upon their hills until archaeologists came to reconstruct what was. Rebuilding has only been partial however - what were covered colonnades at Jerash are an avenue of pillars now; few pillars in what were colonnades at Umm Qais still remain upright. Walls which were once covered in brightly-coloured stucco are now almost universally raw stone. Vaulted spaces might be navigable, giving a sense of what was once inhabited, but even Ajloun, the most completely restored of the castles seen, had parts of its battlements offlimits, and in Karak weathered stairs lead to impassable tunnels and reaching the highest battlements is an unsafe clamber even in dry weather. Enough is there of Shobak Castle to get an idea of the rough layout, but most of it is rubble. Even at Petra, where the carved cliff-faces are still largely intact, archaeologists have suggested that there used to be more there - pillared courts and covered buildings extending out from some of the cliffs.

The Tale of the Pharaoh.

Once upon a time, so the Jewish story goes, the Israelites led by the prophet Moses fled across the Reed Sea, and the army of the Egyptian pharaoh following them drowned as the waters returned. The story of the Israelites continues in Shemot (Exodus), but not the story of the pharaoh; the telling of that belongs instead to the Bedouin.

Pharaoh was a powerful magician, and so was not caught in the deluge. Instead he continued to pursue the fleeing Israelites. Finding that the wealth he carried slowed his pursuit, however, he used his magic and a building appeared in the cliff-face before him: stairs and pillars and rooms springing fully formed from the rock, and the facade of this building replete with carvings. At the apex of the facade he made an urn, and in this he hid his treasure and resumed his pursuit with increased speed. The place is Khaznet al-Faraoun, “The Treasury of the Pharaoh”, and in years past treasure-seekers have taken many shots at that urn, scarring a wide area around it with bullet holes, and dislodging stone but not gold. If for some reason you happened to distrust the tale, then you may choose to believe it was a tomb or a temple instead -- perhaps the temple in which Dr Henry Jones Jr, archaeology professor of Barnett College, Fairfield, New York, discovered the Holy Grail.

Once upon a time - later, but not much later - the Pharaoh found that the Israelites were still too quick for him. Only one thing was to be done: leave his daughter behind. Again he used his magic, and a magnificent building made from stone blocks sprang up in the valley there. Leaving his daughter (and perhaps servants and baggage) behind, he resumed his pursuit with increased speed. The place is Qasr al-Bint al-Faraoun, “the Place of the Pharaoh’s daughter”. If for some reason you happened to distrust this tale, however, then you may choose to believe it was a temple to Dushara, the mountain god of the Nabataeans, wherein he communed with his priests.

And not far from where the Pharaoh purportedly abandoned his daughter (was there a causal connection? Who can say) is a partially-intact stone column. This was traditionally known as Zibb al-faraoun, “The Pharoah’s Phallus”, and is so large and heavy that you might choose to be convinced of three things:

Pharaoh found the Israelites still too quick for him.
Pharaoh moved faster once he stopped lugging his zibb.
At one time, Pharaoh had used just a little too much magic on himself.

The Prototype of a Building

I don’t know if it is quite correct to call the cliff-structures at Petra “buildings”. You wouldn’t call a Bedouin tent a building, for instance. True, it has walls and a roof, but a tent has the suggestion of impermanence, even if the tent in question is permanently stationed on concrete. And the structures at Petra? Well, they have square-cut interior walls and square cut ceilings and flat floors, and are about as permanent a structure as one finds from ancient times. And yet... technically they’re manmade caves, with many such of these structures sharing the one mountainside and the rooms in all but one of them uncarved apart from niches in the walls or hollows in the floor for graves in the tombs. They’re definitely buildingesque; their facades make them look like buildings of one or more stories, with pillars and their capitals, a roofline, and so on, but such details are all purely decorative. Even the pillars of the Treasury are non-functional: one broke (and has now been replaced) but the remainder of the facade stayed exactly where it was. If the pillar had been real then the roof above it would have collapsed, as so many true roofs at other sites have when the true pillars beneath them have crumbled.

Calling the structures at Petra “caves” really doesn’t seem to do them proper justice, however. If their facades or interiors were less building-like it might be different. Is having sufficient resemblance to a building and function identical to something that is unquestionably a building sufficient to call them “buildings”? They’re not free-standing, but then neither is a specific terrace house. It’s true that their creation is subtractive rather than additive, as though the building were always there, and only waiting to be revealed by the carver, but is that enough to disqualify it? Qasr al-Bint was unquestionably a building - freestanding and stone-built - but with crumbling walls, what looks like a perilously balanced arch, and no roof, it really can’t function as a building, while so many of the other structures can and, in the case of those still being used by Petra’s remaining Bedouin, do.

Adaptation

The Treasury is magnificently carved -- its the finest of Petra’s buildings -- but for me ad-Deir, “the Monastery”, is my favourite. It’s a good hike up a mountain to get there, and its facade is not nearly as detailed as the Treasury’s is, but the scale of the thing is breathtaking. The facade of the place is nearly fifty metres high, a representation of two stories. Its doorway alone would be eight or ten metres high; it’s a doorway fit for a giant, or a god.

The Monastery is called that owing to the crosses carved on the walls, but its construction predates Christianity by several centuries - it would have been a temple originally. Petra (and for that matter [Trans]Jordan has had multiple periods of control - the Nabataeans and the pantheist Romans, and multiple strains of Christians and Muslims - and many of its ancient buildings have been repurposed multiple times. The Amphitheatre in Amman is still in use. In some cases the building may have been built and extended and maintained over a period of centuries by successive owners - a mixture of styles, integrated but not homogenous.

An Ending

From Wadi Musa, the town by Petra, I bussed down to Aqaba, Jordan’s only coastal city. It was another city of greys and browns, of partially finished buildings, of bare dirt patches, and steep surrounding mountains - though bare and dark brown, and not built upon. In the central city, however, we passed a small patch of green - a triangular park railed off with lush green grass, shady trees, and flower beds; a gardener with hose stood watering it. The bus continued on to its terminus. My fellow backpackers were staying the night in Aqaba before heading on to Israel and Cairo respectively. It was 11am. “I want to catch the ferry...”, I asked my driver. “You can’t today”, was his response.

Disappointed, I exited the bus and peered at my guidebook for Aqaba. “Ferry Terminus?” asked a nearby taxi driver. “I can catch it today?”. “Yes”. He drove me to the ticket office and then the port. I was on the 1pm boat bound for Egypt.

Long-Grazed Journey Into Night

taroso — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 07:25:00 GMT

(In which Taro begins as he hopes not to continue)

   - Gentlemen, we do not stop until nightfall.
   - What about breakfast?
   - You’ve already had it.
   - We’ve had one, yes. What about second breakfast?
   - I don’t think he knows about second breakfast, Pip.
   - What about elevenses? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper? He knows about them, doesn’t he?
   - I wouldn’t count on it.
           (from LOTR:FOTR by Jackson, Walsh, & Boyer, after Tolkien)

Brunch
For one who’d not had a lot of sleep in the previous week, what with coughing up half a lung and all, I woke relatively early on the morning of my departure. The room at my parents’ house is both light and warm, the general suburban clamour generally unfamiliar, and the blinds mean that if air is to enter the window, even more noise and light is provided. Nonetheless, after pottering about for a couple of hours, and brunching -- cereal; fruit; egg -- and pottering about a little more, I welcomed a post-prandial nap that imposed itself upon me.

First Dinner
With last-minute double-checking done -- no leaving my Visa card on the photocopier this time around, thank you very much -- we left for Sydney airport. We’d aimed to get there two hours before the flight, and managed to arrive significantly earlier thanks to the multitude of tollroads that link Sydney’s northwest and Mascot. It was past 6 by the time I’d checked in, and more than 6 hours since brunch, and I wasn’t going to happily last another few hours, so we went down to the public food hall area. The kebab stall was probably the pick of the bunch but I had a strong suspicion that I’d be eating a fair amount of Levantine cuisine shortly. Instead I went for some Asianesque food - Teriyaki Chicken and Red Curry Chicken - which my father, damning with faint praise, described as “not the worst Chinese food he’s ever had”; I ate what I could stomach.

Eye Candy
I was in seat H, and the guy in seat K had been immediately behind me in the check-in line. Our row was at the front of the compartment, so lots of leg room. “Seat J will probably also be a guy”, said Seat K, “You know why?”. I shook my head. Pessimism? Statistics?   No: apparently single guys are a good choice for stopping anyone from trying to open the exit door mid-flight. Thankfully noone attempted to open the door, and Seat J turned out to be female and shapely and revealing a surprising amount of tattooed back for someone heading off to the Middle East to see the rellies.

Second Dinner
The plane had come from Christchurch, and those who had embarked there had had their First Dinner on the Christchurch-Sydney Leg. Second Dinner for them and for me came once the flight was underway: Chicken pasta, with banana cake for afters.

Liquid Refreshment
A stop at Bangkok Airport to exchange passengers and refuel provided an opportunity to step off the plane, and walk briskly to the transit hotel two floors up, where I had a quick but nonetheless glorious shower before reboarding the plane rather happier than I’d left it.

Dinfast
Back again on flight EK419, having turned 3am Thailand time, it was time for another meal. This was labelled as “Breakfast”, but an intermediate term such as “dinfast” might be more suitable. This was a omelette with cheese, potato, mushroom and tomato. Only the cheese was part of the omelette; the remainder sat awkwardly beside the eggy concoction. I picked at it a bit, examined the flat hard croissant, and then finished off the fruit salad.

Breakfast
Dubai has not only the tallest building in the world, but also six of the top six tallest hotels. On the principle that bigger is better, perhaps, its Terminal 3 is apparently the biggest building by floor space in the world - 23 minutes’ walk from the hub after the arrival hall to the start of its gates, warned its map. I went and had an American breakfast, more for the juice and coffee included than anything else in the meal -- hold the bacon (pork) and sausage (pork)... please.

Pork in an Islamic area? Well, Dubai might be somewhat firmly Islamic, but the airport is not exactly Dubai. Earlier this year, an unmarried western couple were deported for kissing in public and fined ￡200 for drinking alcohol (and were apparently lucky to escape a flogging), but the most popular breakfasting establishment in the airport at 6am was the Ye Olde Oirish Pubbe down the way. This was pretty full, perhaps on the principle that it was 6pm somewhere, or perhaps because the tipplers were thankful for an opportunity to drink in public and have change from their ￡200.

Second Breakfast
Emirates Flight 901 was a shorter flight, with a breakfast of egg and turkey bacon. Turkey bacon? Well, let’s just say it’s no Soy Bacon, thank frob, but it’s not a strong argument either in convincing someone to give up the meat of the pig. I normally don’t sleep on flights, and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t very much tryptophan in the Turkey Bacon, but I did manage to doze for an hour or so somewhere over India.

Weight Loss Solutions
In Amman, I rid myself of over 13 kilos by leaving both backpack and daypack at the hotel, and taking just my Jordan travel book in a pocket of my coat. After a trim and shave from the barber opposite the walk up to my hotel, I had a walk round the downtown area.

First Lunch, Second Lunch
Cairo Restaurant is recommended in my guidebook; I found it literally by following my nose, as the scent of charcoalled chicken wafted up the lane. Food is prepared at ground level; its tables are upstairs. I studied the menu and tried to match its contents with the memory of the food-piled trays on display below. Chicken with potato and vegetable?... and biryani? Oh, did I want a half serve? Yes, just the one lunch would do fine; I thought it was a pick-and mix thing. But even with half-serves it was still too much, and at the the end of lunch I’d eaten no more than was left. Satiated, I walked over to see the Roman Amphitheatre in the middle of Downtown, and thence to the hilltop ruins of Jebel Al Qala’a overlooking it.

Shy Iraqi, Forward Iraqi.
The day was miserable, with fairly constant drizzle, and cold enough for breath to frost in the winter air. Having walked down to the bottom of Jebel Al Qala’a, sky darkish even though 5pm had yet to arrive, the first side street had a hole-in-the-wall with a sign advertising Iraqi Tea, Arabic Tea, Turkish Coffee, and other beverages. “Shy Iraqi”, I requested.

There was a group of 8 or so inside, finishing their beverages as I collected my tea - a heap of sugar in a tiny glass cup topped with tea. Jordanians like their tea sweet. “Where do you come from?” inquired one of the group as he stepped outside. “Ana Ostraalee”. “Every time we play you in soccer we win”. Well, that’s blunt, but fair enough -- not a lot of disputing that, and I’m not even sure which country you are.
Jordanian? Qatari? No, Iraqi; here for professional development.I’m here for tourism, not business, and definitely not as part of the Australian Army... No, I won’t be visiting Iraq this holiday... Oh, your colleague said I should come visit... but you think I should come as a tourist, and not part of the Australian Army or I’ll... “go elsewhere, eh”?

Ok...

Well, I am unlikely to be joining the Australian Army.
Or, for that matter, the Australian Soccer Team.

Evening Snack
Early evening is the time for sweets. Many are the shops around which sell their baklawa and halwa and a less familiar assortment. A shop near my hotel has throngs outside eating its kunafa from plastic plates. Kunafa involves crunchy stringy pastry on top of chewy white cheese all drenched in an evil amount of syrup. Oddly tasty, but I’m sure that there’s ever increasing chances of early onset diabetes setting in.

Third Dinner?
Jordanians have dinner quite late - after 9pm is apparently fairly standard. While this is my kind of standard dinner time, the prospect of sleep seemed like it would better fill immediate needs and so: to bed.

Ebbs and Flows

taroso — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:42:00 GMT

Beneath London's streets the water pipes leak; they were installed the century before last, and are showing their age. All across London the roadworks continue; the water pipes are being dug up and replaced. By 2010, proclaim the signs, another Victorian relic will be gone. With so many living or working in the Greater London region, standard use outstrips local supply, so fixing the pipes helps reduce the amount of water that must be pumped from elsewhere. There have been hosepipe bans to save on water use during the hot summers of recent years. Late last year, with fine irony, they even revised the legislation in preparation for this year’s summer.

It's September already, and summer is yet to really start, with its months of rain and threatened rain and intermittent sun between the stretches of grey mugginess when there should have been days of unclouded blue. The nicest day of the summer occurred the day before I arrived, I'm told; since then, the weather has been temperamental at best. By all reports it's been the most miserable summer since they started recording rainfall. There are floods across the country, and the likelihood of further flooding if more rain arrives.

With important UK cities being lowlying ports, there are dire warnings of insufficient planning for sea level rises. Recent reports suggest that the Thames flood barrier downstream from Greenwich will not be able to protect London from storm surges that may be four metres higher than the current level. The attendant at St Katharine's Pier told me that high tides were higher now than she'd seen them before. She pointed at the green algae ringing the pilings on Tower Bridge. If predictions of rises are correct then the river will be splashing the bridge's mechanical parts before too long.

Two millenia back, the Romans were growing wine grapes in the Midlands. If predictions of temperature rises are correct, then before the century's out there'll be vineyards up there again. There is always, however, the hope that the dire predictions could be wrong. After all, four decades ago climatologists were suggesting that global cooling and a return to ice age was a possibility. During the Little Ice Age four centuries ago they even held “frost fairs” on the frozen surface of the Thames in winter. The world was colder, then, and the Thames ran slower.

The river might be faster and warmer now, but using the waterways remains slow. It took Kathrine and Peter weeks to bring their 50 foot narrowboat, Iron Maiden, down from Cambridge, a journey that can be completed in three-quarters of an hour by express train. The network of canals and rivers enable inland passage from the south of England to north of York and from the Channel to the Irish Sea. I’ve taken two canal rides – a half hour waterbus up Regents Canal from the London Zoo to Little Venice, and a four hour trip on Iron Maiden up the Paddington branch of the Grand Union Canal from Greenford to Kensal Green.

Canal travel is measured in “lock miles”: add the number of locks passed through (in my case, none) to the number of miles travelled and divide by four to get a reasonable approximation of the number of hours a journey will take. Seaborne travel, on the other hand, required exactitude. While latitude - how far north or south you were - could be determined accurately using visual instruments to measure angles of sun or stars, to determine longitude – how far east or west of the Prime Meridian at Greenwich you were - required the development of extremely accurate timepieces, chronometers. In addition to displays astronomical, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich is filled with chronometers and displays of the development of accurate timekeepers. This includes the four original chronometers developed by Harrison – the three earlier ones are rather large and complex and would not be out of place cased on a mantelpiece, and the final prize-winning one is far smaller, like an oversized pocket-watch.

Even when it rains - and it did - Greenwich is pretty when you stand looking down from Observatory Hill across the northern stretch of the park to the Thames and beyond. Below the observatory lays a wide expanse of grass, and the buildings and connecting arcades of the Queen’s House and Maritime Museum. Between there and the river lie the buildings of the former Royal Naval College, now moved to Dartmouth on the south coast of England.

Sea-traffic has moved too. The wharves and quays and docks used to be the hub of Britain’s trade routes. Now the ships unload their containers further closer to the sea, and many of the landings are private: the Hilton Hotel has a liveried attendant at the gate on theirs, St Katharine’s Dock is a precinct with not only a hotel and shops, but apartments and a marina too; and what’s now Canary Wharf in the Docklands has been redeveloped as a cluster of glass-faced highrises, with trade there to challenge even the primacy of the Square Mile of the City of London. Beneath Canary Wharf’s canyoned streets lie a network of air conditioned malls, with shops selling goods brought from foreign lands, and water that’s been bottled and chilled.

Authenticity

taroso — Mon, 8 Sep 2008 03:08:00 GMT

My ability to happily suspend disbelief appears to have withered.

There's a shop stuffed with Beatles memorabilia at 231 Baker Street, and a shop dedicated to Elvis memorabilia next to that. A couple of doors further up, nestled between numbers 237 and 241-243, lie two black doors. The one on the right is the entryway to the Sherlock Holmes Museum and shop, which sells Sherlock Holmes memorabilia; the one on the left purports to be the entrance of 221B Baker St, the fictional address of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

Entering the shop, you pay your 6 pounds to be allowed upstairs. For the record, this is more expensive than:

Taking a week or two to really immerse yourself in the halls of the British Museum;
Having a pie and pint in a pub on Portobello Road after a morning's antique-gazing; or
Strolling the spaces of the Tate Modern.

The stairs are lined with a clutter of old paintings, and framed prints and photos; its rooms, two per floor, have old furniture, and cabinets cluttered with Victoriana; and its rear windows have a view of the shop's glass dome and air conditioning vents.

In the sitting room on the first floor a young blonde in a housemaid costume sat on the divan studying for her driving test, and doing her best to ignore us tourists. The letters "VR", for Victoria Regina, were hammered into one wall. Purportedly they were bulletholes but it was obvious to any amateur detective from the lack of depth and the outward fraying of the wallpaper that this was not the case.

"Sherlock Holmes's bedroom" contained a violin, and a stuffed stoat in a small diorama that hung on the wall; "Dr Watson's bedroom" contained medicines and medical instruments. Finally, on the top floor a rogue's gallery of wax figures appeared. "Perhaps it means more if you've read the books", said Kathrine, who hadn't. I had, and it really didn't.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but disappointment was probably not it. I've always liked mockumentaries and mocked-up documents, even Sherlockean ones (Infocom's The London Thames). But I didn't like the Sherlock Holmes Museum.

After about 15 minutes we escaped in search of the Tate Modern.

It's a wicked thing to tell fibs - Sherlock Holmes in The Three Gables

Portobello Road markets, on the other hand, I would have enjoyed more had I known my antiques. I'd first read about it in Jonathan Gash's books - not that it's particularly obscure, mind you, with its arcades, shops, and stalls thronged with bargain hunters. And while I can enjoy reading books on antiques or watching antiques shows (multiple cameras were filming in the market at the time), my fundamental flaw is that I can't tell if something was made in 1987 or 1798.

Nor am I alone. "I really like that plastic comb" said Kerry. The plastic comb in question was half a foot long, and perhaps suitable for keeping a pompadour in place. Flipping over the price tag - 58 pounds - I suggested that there was a possibility it might be tortoiseshell. But it may as well have been plastic -- and I'm not so sure I could tell the difference by sight between ivory and high quality plastic or high quality plastic and jade either. Nor would I have been able to tell that the familiar white-on-blue of Wedgwood ware were available for a knock-down-price because they were made only a few years ago if it weren't for one piece kindly having its date contained within the commemorative design.

So unless you've expertise you're lost. You could, I suppose, use guidebooks but you're still vulnerable to reproductions. A number of people got fooled by an Action Comics #1 (Superman) reprint a couple of decades back, spending tens of thousands on something that was worth a dollar. Old photos and prints are also trivially reprintable. On one visit to Portobello Road, Kerry's flatmate Claire found one "original" which appeared to have been produced on a home printer.

"A bad forgery's the ultimate insult" - Lovejoy in The Vatican Rip

Even the experts at the British Museum have been known to be fooled by particularly good forgeries. Not very long ago, a trio living in a council flat managed to produce forgeries acquired in the BM, Tate Modern, and other public institutions and private collections. And every so often new forgeries are detected, with technological advances providing equipment better able to source materials and techniques used.

Just because an item is detected as a forgery doesn't mean that it necessarily gets removed from display, however. The museum's crystal skull, for instance, is known not to be Mayan, being probably 19th century (and improbably alien) in origin. Forgeries, it seems, may have sufficient relevance or context to justify their labelled public presence. Replicas too, appear throughout - there are castings of ancient carvings that present the condition things they were in before an extra century or two of damage, for instance, and a copy of the Rosetta Stone for hands-on examination.

The collection of the British Museum is wonderful. To skim it takes a full day; to really appreciate it properly and do all the talks would take a lot longer. And yet, not everyone is happy with the depth of the museum's collection. The Egyptians want the Rosetta Stone back, and the Greeks want the Elgin Marbles that once adorned the Parthenon. It was only a couple of years ago that the remains of Aboriginal Australians were finally removed from display and returned to Australia for interment.

The Elgin Marbles may have been acquired after permission was granted by the Ottoman Turks who ruled Greece at that time, and had they remained at the Parthenon they could have been further damaged, destroyed, or perhaps ended up lost to a bank vault in Switzerland or a villa in Buenos Aires. But should possession and recent history trump the rights of the native people of a colonised land to regain items of their heritage, even if those aboriginal inhabitants just happen to be European? Is promoting interest in Greek History to visitors anywhere near sufficient justification?

It makes me wonder if museums really need to display genuine items or if, in general, careful copies would suffice. If nobody but an expert can look at something that purports to be ancient and tell that it's painted plaster or resin or tea-stained wood or metal-worked crystal or plastic, and it's made with love and with great skill, then is there a need for exhibits that are aimed at educating and entertaining the public to present things that really are ancient? Is a desire to see things that were crafted millennia ago rather than indistinguishable facsimiles entirely rational? And if a replica perfect in every way were produced and you knew it was a replica, could you suspend sufficient disbelief to value the experience of it anywhere near as much as the experience of the original?

"Unbelievable" - Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In Highgate Cemetery

taroso — Tue, 2 Sep 2008 17:29:00 GMT

The granite blocks have been squared and polished. The low wrought iron fence, now gently rusting, has been set to ensure that visitors approach from the pebbled main circuit via the short flagstoned walk and not over the lawn. The graven inscription has been gilded, and the oversized head, two feet in height or more, has been cast in bronze. Roses, wrapped in crepe and plastic, sit in water in a container at the base of the monument.

It's evident that a fair few workers have toiled, united, to ensure that the grandest of graves in the eastern part of Highgate Cemetery is that of Karl Marx and the four others who share his plot.

A couple of feet behind Marx, what order there is gives way to an ever-encroaching tangle of ivy, old trees whose gnarled roots keep the earth unquiet, and brambled canes that bear blackberries the colour of old blood. Paths criss-cross the forest past gravestones with facades weathered beyond recognition, and forgotten memorials swallowed by vegetation. There are newer graves too, there, crammed into what space remains.

The western part of Highgate Cemetery, which reportedly has a horror movie feel, is inaccessible to the general public - you can only enter on tour, and all places were booked out so I've not seen it. Both sides hold a large number of ex-people who've achieved renown in their particular field, be it medicine, writing, engineering, art, or politics. And as a tourist attraction it's interesting to visit, but I wonder a little at the voyeurism of it. Isn't the concept of those Hollywood tours which allow you to eyeball where Hollywood stars live or lived a little creepy? And isn't eyeballing gravestones for amusement in what is still a working graveyard even creepier? Yet despite that I still hope to visit the western cemetery.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
Douglas Adams
Writer
1952-2001

Linear Minutiae [finally completed]

taroso — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:32:00 GMT

Behold, a reasonably unadorned chronology that will be updated from time to time for the benefit of those who for some reason enjoy this kind of thing.

Sat 29 Aug: Bus from Canberra to Sydney; Flight from Sydney to Abu Dhabi.

Bored yet?

Sun 30 Aug: Flight from Abu Dhabi to London; Train from Heathrow to Green Square and thence to West Hampstead. Bus with Ange and Kieren down to Trafalgar Square to wander around through Covent Garden, Soho, etc. Meet Kez and Fred near Oxford Cross before returning to West Hampstead. Walk up through Hampstead and to Hampstead Heath's Parliament Hill and back.

Mon 1 Sep: Decide not to take map and just wing it. Walk through part of Hampstead's West Heath to the Hill Garden at the back of Inverforth House. Come back past Jack Straw's Castle and into the East Heath. Walk up to Kenwood House. Have brunch while waiting for it to open. See lots of old artwork, much of it Dutch. Walk from there to Highgate to wander the eastern cemetery. Walk down to Highgate Gate, one of the exits of the Heath, and bus to Regent's Park. Spend 3 hours at the London Zoo before taking the watercab from there up Regent's Canal to Little Venice. Walk from there back to West Hampstead.

Tue 2 Sep: Bus to Baker St. Meet Kathrine and go to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Tube down to Waterloo and walk up Southbank to Westminster Bridge then back down to the Tate Modern. View modern art - no major installation in the main space at the moment, and the gallery with Ernst and Duchamp was closed. Meet up with Kathrine's Peter - now no longer alleged - and later Kerry and Kieren.

Wed 3 Sep: Bus to Baker St. Walk Regent's Park including Queen Mary's Gardens, then down to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, including Albert Memorial and (unentered) Kensington Palace. Back to Speaker's Corner to see Marble Arch (which I'd somehow missed the first time) then down Park Lane and across Mayfair to Regent St to bus back to West Hampstead. Train to Waterloo and thence to Lambeth North to meet Kerry.

Thu 4 Sep: The all-day whistlestop tour of the British Museum. Will need to go back.

Fri 5 Sep: Tower of London with Kathrine. Meet up with Peter and later with Kerry and Farrah for curry.

No, really, are you bored yet?

Sat 6 Sep: Portobello Road Markets with Kerry (shopping for food, window shopping for antiques). Pie and Pint in Pub. Visit Peter and Kathrine's narrow boat and cruise down from Greenford to Kensal Green.

Sun 7 Sep: Imperial War Museum, in what used to be Bedlam (a fine sense of irony?). Dinner with Ange and Keiren.

Mon 8 Sep: Buckingham Palace for Changing of the Guard; walk from there through Whitehall to see Westminster Abbey and Palace; visit the Banqueting House; continue through Chinatown and Covent Garden to St Pauls. Explore St Paul's (spectacular) before listening to Evensong.

Tue 9 Sep: Boat from Embankment to St Katharine's Dock then to Greenwich. Walk through Greenwich Village then up the hill to the Observatory. Down to Maritime Museum for an hour and a bit before closing, missing the Queen's House.

Wed 10 Sep: City walk - including through Barbican. Stand up comedy night in a pub in Islington - 2/6ths of the comics were Australians, all comics reasonably funny.

Thu 11 Sep: Cambridge for the day. Walk through the West End at night after getting back to London

Fri 12 Sep: Shop for dinner in Elephant and Castle (it was a rest day). Dinner wildly successful.

Sat 13 Sep: Train to High Wycombe before drive to High Basildon for lunch followed by visit to Basildon Park.

Sun 14 Sep: Yumcha with Kerry and Kieren before going down to Southbank to meet Kathrine and Peter to see the Thames Festival. Meet up with Kerry and later Claire, Paddy and Jess to see the fireworks over the Thames. Walk home through Graffiti Alley; most of the original stencil art has been sprayed over.

Mon 15 Sep: Train to Oxford. Wander the town in the afternoon including seeing Christ Church.

Tue 16 Sep: Oxford Castle in the morning; city tour in the afternoon.

Wed 17 Sep: Blenheim Palace.

Thu 19 Sep: Oxford to Nottingham. See Nottingham Caves in the afternoon (good, but accessed from inside ugly Broadmarsh Shopping Centre). Poker in the evening (Apparently Europe's largest dedicated poker room)

Fri 20 Sep: Visit what's left of Sherwood Forest.

Sat 21 Sep: Walks up peaks around Matlock in the Peak District.

Sun 22 Sep: Nottingham to York. Walk on the walls of old York followed by taking The Original Ghost Tour.

Mon 23 Sep: Visit Thirsk -- "Darrowby" in All Creatures Great and Small -- on a damp Market Day to see the rather good Herriot Veterinary museum.

Tue 24 Sep: Visit Goathland -- Aidensfield in Heartbeat -- to trip over the Yorkshire Moors and neighbouring farmland. One thing's for sure: with rivulets to cross, and sheep pats to avoid, and tussocks of heather to leap between, and everywhere mud mud mud, anyone who's ever thought that doing all that in white crinoline as "romantic" is right daft.

Wed 25 Sep: Up to Edinburgh.

Thu 26 Sep: Visit Stirling, walk up to the William Wallace Memorial and back followed by Stirling Castle.

Fri 26 Sep: Stroll up to King Arthur's Seat and back, then see the Castle. Yes, I do see, to have done quite a lot of walking.

Sat 27 Sep: Fly to Dublin, staying with Peter's Aunt Betty. Go down to central Dublin's Orange Light District in the evening for a couple of hours.

Sun 28 Sep: Betty takes me through via some Irish bogland to walk a short stretch of the Wicklow Way. The Irish bog is somewhat similar in appearance to the Yorkshire Moors being heavily heathered, but is different in that swathes of peat blocks have been extracted. After my first real Irish Coffee -- caffeine, sugar, alcohol, cream: it's delicious evil in a glass -- I bus to Galway.

Mon 29 Sep: Wander round Galway.

Tue 30 Sep: Ferry to Inis Oirr, the smallest of the Aran Islands -- Father Ted's "Craggy Island" -- it's wet, windswept, and very very stony. I'd intended to get a ferry to Doolin in the afternoon, but it was too wet and windswept in Doolin for the ferry to be leaving for several days, so I unexpectedly had to spend the night

Wed 1 Oct: Ferry back to Galway in time to make the late bus to do the short tour down to the Cliffs of Moher (huge, verdant, stony, wet, so very very windswept) getting off at nearby village of Doolin. Stayed at the Aille River Hostel (highly recommended!) and spent the night at the pub with a couple of Swiss travellers, who'd made several trips back to Doolin owing to its excellent live music scene.

Thu 2 Oct: bus down to Cork City, and thence to Fountainstown to meet up with bride and groom and the Canberra contingent of wedding guests -- Kerry, Minh, Naomi, Nell.

Fri 3 Oct: Turkish Shave in the morning, and a fine wedding, weather remaining great for the photos, in the afternoon. There is allegedly dancing at the reception. There's also possibly the most embarassing attempt ever by a group of Australians at failing to sing Men at Work's "Land Down Under", but fortunately the Irish Band knew lyrics and music.

Sat 4 Oct: A lazy morning and another party in the evening.

Sun 5 Oct: Road Trip with Nell and Naomi, heading up to the Ring of Kerry. We were originally going to go for Killarney, but reached the thoroughly charming Kenmare, and stopped for the night.

Mon 6 Oct: The Ring of Kerry is one of the most beautiful areas in Ireland... allegedly. We had mist, fog, cloud, rain -- near horizontal at times -- with a few patches of sun by the time we got in site of the beginning of the Dingle Peninsula. The day wasn't unmemorable, however, with a bumpy ride down a foggy track through the centre of the peninsula. Reached Killarney, smelled the dank bunkroom that the unfriendly manager of the unfriendly hostel there showed us to, and went and stayed at the 5 star hotel nearby for basically the same price once the included breakfast was taken into account

Tue 7 Oct: Said goodbye to the girls, who found the 5 star breakfast so good that they stayed another night, and bussed down to Cork City and thence to the airport.

Thu 9 Oct: After 35+ hours of travel, wherein I lost a day, I arrived back in Canberra. A couple of weeks later I unjetlagged.

When I'm 64

taroso — Sun, 4 Feb 2007 02:26:00 GMT

[written ages ago but only just released from draft]

Tired of lying in the sunshine
-- ("Time" / Pink Floyd)

I've had my April 1st entry sketched out for half a year. It was to be called "Adventures in Fiction", and in it I was to confess that I had secretly returned to Australia a scant few weeks after leaving. Having been unable to cope with Bali, and knowing that other places were even more discomfortingly alien, I'd secretly returned home to Australia where I'd spent the last 11 months hiding out in Gosford, playing computer games, programming, and mining other peoples' travelogues for material with which to construct my own, unable to confess my shame at having failed so miserably as a backpacker. But in that journal entry, still thoroughly ashamed, I was coming clean and asking forgiveness for my mendacity. And, you know, I think it would have been plausible enough to have worked. It was certainly a good rationale for why there were no photos or postcards.

The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
-- ("Time" / Pink Floyd)

So far I've travelled for 9 months, visited 11 countries (12 including a brief stopover in Colombo, Sri Lanka on the way home), missed four weddings (and thankfully no funerals), spent the tail-end of my 32nd birthday on an 20 hour train from Bhubaneswar to Chennai, and written 63 subjective entries of dubious accuracy and variable but generally increasing quality. And I'm travelled out, which I didn't think I'd be, as I blithely set out on 2006-04-23 to travel for at least 14.5 months; there was a point at which I envisaged my travels as most likely lasting until the end of this year - so twenty months or so. In hindsight, my answer to "How do you eat an elephant?" was actually "Take one very large blender and a straw...". Oh foolish foolish Taro.

You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
-- ("Time" / Pink Floyd)

Anyway, why was I travelling for that mysterious figure of 14.5+ months? Well, that was how long I had half paid leave (By the end of the 14.5 months, I would have had 7 and a bit months half-paid long service leave, and 7 and a bit months half-paid annual leave usable - leave is accrued while on leave). And why, far more importantly, am I travelled out? Basically, the periods when I enjoy new sights/sites have been getting increasingly shorter, and the periods when I can't take another monument, mausoleum, mosque, museum, mountain or monastery, are getting increasingly longer. In retrospect Kathmandu was really the tipping point. In short, I'd rather play computer games, program, and read other people's travelogues, and since that's the case I may as well be in Gosford since there's no point in travelling for the sake of travelling.
This isn't just the extended bout of food poisoning talking. I very much liked Darjeeling and Pelling, but my time in Gangtok was more inside than out (If you've spent a week in Darjeeling, then Gangtok is not particularly special - though the trip to Tsongo Lake was great). In Kolkata, wandering the inner city was pleasurable - it's far nicer a city than its reputation would have it. For some reason the phrase "Black Hole of Calcutta" has stuck, and I'd a back-of-the-mind image of wall-to-wall slums which didn't quite accord with my front-of-the-mind knowledge that it's a tech centre. Central Kolkata has some lovely old buildings including a wonderfully gothic High Court complex and the Victoria monument, wide streets, and the area of the Maidan - kilometres of grass, parks and gardens, fields, playing fields, racetrack, and (active) fort. [Yes, there's some hideous poverty on and within walking distance of the Sudder Street tourist ghetto, and elsewhere, but there's also the Park Street area, where stylishly-dressed crowds queue to enter expensive restaurants, and huge billboards everywhere with ads for the latest mobile phones, 11000 rupee digital cameras and other consumer goods and luxury items].

Closing time
You don't have to go home but you can't stay here
-- (Closing Time / Semisonic)

But I didn't go into the Indian Museum despite passing it a dozen times, nor into the Victoria Monument, the Marble Palace, or any of the other sights. I started out intending to visit a couple of other Museums one day, and never quite made it that far. And, sadly, I don't regret having missed them, and that's not good; nor is it fair to any country to travel it without sufficient enthusiasm. I like India - a few people suggested that India was a place you either love or hate - but I can't see myself being untempled out and unmuseumed out any time soon.

If it were just India, - I have been in Asia for 9 months and West Asia for 3 - I could hop a plane to Egypt or Turkey or Prague and see something rather different, but I suspect that this travellers' ennui is a general one and I don't want to get to the Pyramids, Petra, Cappadocea or Istanbul and find them Just Nice. So, Gosford it is -- or, rather, Sydney then Canberra -- and India and Asia Minor and North Africa and Europe will still be there in another couple of years, when I can take them in with fresh eyes, mind, and enthusiasm. And I don't regret that. And it means I'll see friends in Australia sooner than expected, at the cost of seeing friends in Europe later than expected.

I travelled from Kolkata to Puri (Orissa) to Chennai to Bangaloru to Palolem (Goa) to Mumbai, and since making the decision to return nearly a month back, I've not yet regretted making the decision to return. I decided in Puri that I was no longer a backpacker and no longer a traveller. I was On Holiday, and with that change in classification I was free not to do anything useful for days at a time. So I didn't. And life has been good. I've wandered a little but I've felt no obligation to really see those places properly - which would be wrong and unfair to them if I were a backpacker or a traveller, but fortunately I'm not. One of these days, when I am again, I'll see India properly.

No bird exploring in the sky
Explores as well as I
The corners of my life.
One must keep moving with the times.
-- ("A Bowler Hat" / Stephen Sondheim)

I told someone that I wasn't travelling to find myself, I was travelling to lose myself. I knew quite well who I was, and that's still (un)fortunately the case. Losing myself? Well, most of my flaws are still my flaws - and though a number have the edges knocked off them, they come through loud and clear in this journal. Still, I'm only halfway through this current journey, even if there's going to be a brief hiatus of a year or five. Anyway, that, I think, will do for the moment.

Will you still need me? Will you still read me?
When I'm 64.

Second Looks Part 1 [Posts #1-#20]

taroso — Thu, 1 Feb 2007 22:03:00 GMT

You miss things on a first look. Sometimes you miss a lot.

In Pokhara, for instance, I arrived in the mid-afternoon, headed over to North Lakeside to find a room, and then took a wander. It was pretty enough, with sun on the lake, and clouds behind the heights. Colour me blond, but I vaguely noticed that there was no snow and they didn't look so high. The next morning I went for a walk. The sky was cloudless, and there to the north behind those not-so-heights were genuine snowy mountains. Much prettier. There's a little more to Pokhara than meets the casual glance too. The tourist ghetto is on the northeast side of the lake; it's pretty enough with its bookstores, cafes, restaurants, bars, hotels, travel agents, internet cafes, money changers, trekking shops, supermarkets, houses, and practically nothing else. The central city is a few kilometres away through suburbs, and there's a few things southeast of the lake, but I didn't realise just how much of Pokhara there is until I hiked up the not-so-height of Sarankot and saw the Pokharan sprawl. It really is a fair-sized town, and the lake area is an important but relatively small part of it.

So it's time for a little journal housekeeping - things missed, shifts in perspective, sights yet unseen, events unhappened.

General

* Formatting has been corrected, though blog-bugginess has made me want to scream. It doesn't output numbered lists, for instance, despite rendering correctly in the editor.

* Spelling errors have been corrected. Some were just embarrassing - "centremetre", for instance? Some things that may be seen as errors, though, are my preferred variants (eg "eg" rather than "e.g.", "their" rather than "his or her", and "noone" rather than "no one" or "no-one"). What ever/what-ever/whatever.

* Grammatical errors have been corrected, though many probably remain. When you rewrite sentences multiple times at speed, it's easy to miss things.

* I've removed all the category tags. Trying to pigeon-hole my entries using single tags is painful. If they ever add multiple tags, and I can be bothered, I'll go through and tag things properly.

#1. Start of Tour

People who've visited Bali months after me report the same thing - Kuta is very deserted.

#2. Kuta-Ubud

I've hardly used my sleep sheet in my travels.

#3. West Ubud by Bike

One of the risks with monkeys is they are potentially rabid, so if they bite or scratch you need to go and have shots. Another is that some will snatch glasses, keys, and other things that a traveller finds it useful to retain.

#4. East Ubud by Foot

Well, apparently not risking bird flu since you can't catch it by ingestion.

#5. Miscellanea [Ubud/Bali]

Perceptions of places: edited... tick; filtered... tick; verbose... big page-filling tick; possibly entirely inaccurate... tick tick tick; frequent... ~~Bingo~~Damn. No.

Photos: Well, with one exception I'm glad to say that I stuck to that resolution.

Dogs: I am still not a dog person, but I'm far less nervous around large dogs than I was, perhaps because there are so many dogs roaming free, and it's rare for them to bark, much less growl.

Language: On Java the stress patterns were a bit different to Bali.

Freezer Bags: They're highly recommended because they're soft and easy to tie. It helps if you keep your passport in one at all times, inconvenient though that is.

Extra long shorts: Surprisingly unnecessary as cargos roll up easily and allow one to Tiffin in Raffles. One pair of shorts that doubles as a swimming costume is more than sufficient.

Excessive Detail: One of the benefits of further travel has been that I have learned to filter and edit somewhat. Many details are just Too Much Information in a linear piece -- pavements in Ubud... sheeeeeesh. On the other hand, if I'd ever do a piece comparing Pavements of the World, then the information might have a place (the piece might well be horrible, but at least the information on Ubud pavements would fit well).

Extra 8 kg in pack: Extra 11 kilos in pack would be nice not to have (at last weigh, my pack plus daypack is about 23kg) but I'm a bookaholic with an at-times three a day habit and I've accumulated more clothing including a Real Towel -- those microfibre handtowels just don't do the trick. I've been loathe to throw things away because the heavy useless things (sleeping bag, sleeping mat, water filter, heavy-duty rain jacket) would also the most expensive to replace, and it's likely that they'll be necessary in future. I left winter items in Kolkata, but that was more bulk than weight. The master of travelling was Richard, whose pack was a ridiculously light 7kg (and he was getting rid of some of that by dumping winter gear).

Extra 8 kg on body: I'm down below 70kg, and while I could probably afford to lose more, so could you. One of the best weight loss tales ever is about the two-pill diet solution that was sold at the turn of the 20th century. You'd take one pill when you wanted to start losing weight, and another when you'd lost enough weight. In the first pill was a tapeworm egg, in the second was vermicide... which only goes to prove that some details are just Too Much Information even in a non-linear piece.

Salesmanship: A common opening gambit in Nepal and (to a lesser degree) in India has been "Where do you come from". It's a general enquiry, of course, but the followup for touts and beggars is generally different. Someone making conversation will normally ask how you like India or bring up cricket. Someone after something in Nepal would often attempt to give the capital and national animal. More common in India than Nepal is "Ah, I have a friend in...". You also get asked for Australian coins quite frequently. "Where do you come from?" can also used to determine how much they'll try and charge you.

Sugar: Artificially-sweetened soft drinks are extremely rare, and often need to be imported. Interestingly, in some countries such as Thailand and India they add salt to juices and lassis, which is good for rehydration even if it does taste a bit wierd.

#6. Northeast Ubud by Motorbike

There are times when riding pillion on a motorbike has been unavoidable. Sometimes this hasn't been particularly particularly wise, given the difficulty of balancing the driver, myself, and my backpack.

Incidently*, I was involved in one very minor accident in Yogyakarta, but the bike was at low speed and I was the hapless pedestrian who failed to notice the "left turn permitted on red" sign. "Look to the right, look to the left, don't look to the right again..."
[*Is there a term more appropriate than this?]

#7. 24 hours in Bedugul: Culture Shock by Nightfall

One of the very few choices I've made that I (mildly) regret was to leave Bedugul after only one day. I've made lots of other snap decisions, and they've mostly been correct decisions, but this one was made for the wrong reasons. Ah well, I can always go back sometime.

#8. Lovina: Seven words written on seven subjects

I'll never write in this style again.

#9. Bali to Java: Whistlestop tour

Buses: Moral: pack less, carry less.

Surabaya: Still the most insane traffic I've seen. Everywhere else including Bangkok and Bangalore has been a relief.

Kraton population: The figure of 25000 was probably Yogya rather than Solo

#10. Solo: Palaces and Music

I really should have picked up a CD or tape of dangdut music while I was there.

#11. Solo: Hindu Temples in the Hills

We went and visited a tea plantation in Darjeeling. The season's picking had finished the week before, but the lady in the tea house at the entrance gave us an amusing presentation of Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe tea (which only requires a couple of seconds to brew!) with lots of spiel as to why it's named as it is, how to brew it, how the leaves can be used thrice, and the different grades of Orange Pekoe.

#12. Yogyakarta: Temples and Volcano

The earthquake hit Yogyakarta a week after I left. Thousands died, but fortunately Merapi never had a major eruption (things settled down within a few months); I was told that there was the potential for Merapi to put out enough lava to reach Prambanan and the northern parts of Yogya.

#13. Yogyakarta: Batik Sellers

Did I pay the higher price for my small purchase? Oh yes, yes indeed, but I justify the extra expense as being a valuable learning experience, so it's an investment in my development as a traveller. It's psychologically interesting, by the way, how absolute price matters far less than relative price. If the price of something is X for a local and [X * (100+N)%] for a foreigner, there's an acceptable increase of N% where a particular traveller won't mind, but this is pretty much unrelated to how much the item or service would cost in one's home country (as long as it's definitely cheaper) - it's more a balance between daily budget and perceived utility. And so you see and participate in absurd and petty haggling over ridiculously small sums - have you ever gone to the wire for a saving of what you realise later is 2 cents Australian?

There are places where most tourist attractions have a gouge of somewhere between 400% and 2400%. In other words, foreigner price can be between 5 and 25 times the local price. Take the Sun Temple at Konark in Orissa, for instance. Local price is 10 rupees, foreigner price is 250 rupees. On an absolute level, it's about A$7.50, which is cheaper than the cost of entry to pretty much any major tourist attraction in Australia, and the Sun Temple is a UNESCO World Heritage site so you know it's important and magnificent and worth seeing. On a relative level, though, 250 rupees is the cost of a day's lodging and meals in neighbouring Puri, so by those standards it's pricey. And such markups are common* - 15 times for Kolkata's Indian Museum, 10 times for the interior of its Victoria Memorial. On the one hand I certainly have the capacity to pay - it just means I spend more and save less. On the other hand, if I'm rather templed out or museumed out, then a foreigner price of more than about 5 times local is a great disincentive to see yet another one, no matter how fantastic it may be.

[*India's markups for tourist attractions are fresh in the memory, but as far as I can recall only Cambodia has had markups of a similar magnitude]

#14. Miscellanea: Java

And you think you have it rough: A room of one's own, indeed a bed of one's own, is a luxury. Many hotel/hostel staff sleep in foyers and halls. The internet cafe I'm posting from has people sleeping on thin straw mats in the stairwell.

Ice Cream: It's Walls pretty much everywhere.

#15. Singapore

From talking with others, it seems that one's impression of Singapore varies depends on where one has been immediately beforehand. In other words, if you've been somewhere with cold showers, squat toilets and bedbugs it's wonderful; if you've been living the highlife in a major metropolis it's sterile

#16. Kuala Selangor: Trees and Wildlife

West Coast Malaysia has so many oil palm plantations; green and brown walls extending to the horizon. Much like pine plantatations, their foliage is so thick that the ground underneath tends to be devoid of any other vegetation since little direct sunlight penetrates. Coconut palms are far friendlier to other plants.

#17. Taman Negara: Journeys

One squirmsome thing our guide did was to allow a leech to crawl over his hands - he wasn't worried because he said that the skin was too tough for the leech to bite; he wasn't bitten. Like so many things, familiarity with leeches really seems to reduce squirmishness with them - Chok Eng, who'd grown up on the peninsular's East Coast was rather unconcerned by all the leeches at FRIM.

The service at the restaurant was so slow because they only had a single burner so could only cook one dish at a time, and we'd all ordered different things - it's a common problem for small eateries with lots of customers.

#18. Melaka: Food and Museums

The Assam prawns I had there were one of the best dishes I've ever had. I'd visit Melaka again just for them, and the fact that there are museums worth (re)visiting helps too, in particular the small architecture museum.

Alas, sometimes people who deserve excoriation in print don't get it because of potential ramifications for others - there's a minor saga from Melaka that I won't record; if you feel that you really need to know it, ask me in person.

#19. Fragments from Pulau Penang:

Fruit: At the time I thought I'd had lychees so that's what I wrote but they were actually rambutans. The two fruits taste and look similar once peeled, but the skin of a rambutan is red and spiky (but soft), while that of a lychee is rough and brown.

Flies: On east coast Malaysia and in Thailand there were lots more flies.

#20. Kuala Lumpur: Interludes with Friends and Friends of Friends

Fish Heads: I've no problem with a baked fish with the head left on, but the thought of a bowl of soup with a fish sans body sitting in it is mildly discomforting, which I realise is irrational.

Dancing: Somewhat tricky when the only shoes you have are hiking boots - clubs generally don't allow sneakers. One gains a new appreciation for the Stomp dancers.

Fun and Games

taroso — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:30:00 GMT

Carom
Carom is a cross between pool and air hockey played with a square wooden board and some discs. The object is to flick the game disc at a disc of your own colour and knock it into a corner hole. The board is coated with a layer of chalk, which keeps friction down. It's not originally a Nepalese game, but it's huge there - you see tables set up outside everywhere.

Chinese Poker
Bruce introduced us to what he called "Chinese Poker". It's a rather nice strategic card game, particularly the three player version - I played quite a bit on the bus with him and Florian. You shuffle as many packs of cards together as you want; one suffices for three players. The cards are dished out. On the first game, the player with the three of hearts plays it. Play then goes around the circle clockwise - you need to beat the previous play using the same number and type of cards, the ranking being 3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-J-Q-K-A-2-BlackJoker-RedJoker. The winner of that round gets to make the next play - sequences of 3 or more, 2 or more of a kind, or lockstepped sequences of 3 or more (eg 3,3,4,4,5,5). So to beat a play of (3,3,4,4,5,5) would require at least (4,4,5,5,6,6). The winner of the previous game gets to exchange the highest card of the loser of the previous game (ie the last player left with cards) with any card they don't need. There's also the "bomb", a set of (5, 10, K) - which automatically wins the round. Sequences can't go over the ace, ie the only thing that beats Q-K-A is a bomb. The jokers are of uneven value singularly, but can be paired. As I said, it's a rather nice strategic card game - one of the interesting things is that it can be worthwhile to lose rounds if winning them would damage the structure of your hand. It's possible to be down to one card and be locked out of the game by another player playing pairs and triples.

Collect 4
You use four cards of the same value for each player, shuffling all the cards together. The objective is to collect any set of four. One player counts down repeatedly "3-2-1-Go". On go, you pass a card anticlockwise to the next player, receiving a card from the player to your left. When you have four cards of the same value, you touch your nose. When that happens, all other players must touch their nose. Last player to touch their nose takes a penalty of some kind.
In the case of the game on the boat down the Mekong, the penalty was a pen mark on the face. This was the only time I ended up using my Wet Ones in all the months of carrying them.

Cricket

One of the major differences between West Asia and East Asia is the presence of cricket - on weekends, parks are jam-packed with games and practice, and many are cricket fans.

Foot-Juggling
There were quite a lot of games similar to hackysack around - ie, keep an object in the air without using hands. In Malaysia they used a rattan ball, or a plastic equivalent, in Indochina and China it was a weight with a badminton-shuttle-style flight, in Nepal and India there were rubber scrunchies.
Frisbee
Brett brought a frisbee, so we often had a game when our vehicles stopped for a break and elsewhere. Brett and Jeff were both excellent, performing fancy catches and fancy throws with ease. Everyone else was less so. I was fairly abysmal -- hand eye coordination Not So Good. Interestingly a lot of locals' instincts were to throw the frisbee upside down.
Sho
Sho is a three-player Tibetan counter-racing game rather like backgammon (but more complicated). The object is to get your stack of coins to the end of the course which is set by small cowrie shells (that can be shifted as required in order to expand or contract sections of the course). Just like backgammon, if a stack lands on an opponent's stack of equal or less height, it's kicked off the course. You can see a version of the rules here.
Style counts when playing Sho. Shouting, slamming the dice cup down from a great height onto the leather of the pad, scooping the dice off the yak-leather pad using inertia and the cup rather than your hand, and brushing your opponents dead counters aside are all considered good form. What's more, fiddling the dice is not only allowed, it's encouraged! Our drivers would carefully place their dice in the cup, and attempt to use inertia to keep the dice in the same orientation. Some of them were rather good at it, and would achieve multiple turns by either rolling 3s or by killing opponents' stacks. Most of our group bought sho sets in Shigatse.
Video Games
If you see a sign saying "Video Games", there's a fair chance that it'll be a dingy room filled with what in Australia are called Poker Machines - ie, gambling games.

Roads and Traffic

taroso — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:29:00 GMT

I first saw Nepali trucks (which share their style with Indian trucks) at the border town of Zhang Mu. Chinese trucks were drab and staid. A typical Nepali truck is bright and decorated to the point of garishness. Its body is painted a brownish shade of red. There's a slogan painted along the top of its windshield - something religious, probably. There's another slogan above the side window - something to raise a smile, perhaps. On top of the cab, a wooden superstructure has been erected so that extra cargo or passengers can be secured, and this displays a picture of Ganesh. Curlicues, and images of vines and flowers wind along the sideboards. On one side of the rear bumper is carefully lettered "Speed Control 40 km/h", and on the other an equally carefully lettered "Horn Please" to let you know that the driver will indicate if it's safe to pass if you honk. There may even be an eye painted at each front corner, just as a fisherman adds eyes to his boat's prow to lead him safely home.

Seatbelts are almost unused throughout much of Southeast and West Asia. Occasionally you'll find a vehicle where the driver has one, but passengers apparently don't require them. There was a long period where I'd enter a vehicle and find myself clawing over a shoulder for a non-existent belt. And the thing is, you really do miss seatbelts when the vehicle you're in is weaving in and out of traffic, or weaving its way across traffic, or even bouncing and skidding on a cliff-top dirt track in search of the nearest pothole or cliff-bottom to bring the four wheel drive to a full stop.

I'd originally intended to come down from Sikkim and head over to Assam and other northeastern states. I'd originally intended to visit Bhutan since you can do a daytrip from West Bengal's Jaigon to the Bhutanese town of Phuentsholing. Phuentsholing is an aberration. You can cross for free there provided you're out at night; to visit elsewhere in Bhutan you need to pay US$200 a day for the minimum stay of a week. Or rather you could cross for free there. In mid-December bombs went off and the border closed. So no Phuentsholing. This made the interesting bits of the northeast even less accessible without long stretches of travel. India's northeast frontier is, really, rather inaccessible for an overland traveller.

If you were to glance at a sketch map of India, you might note that one reasonably ideal route to explore the northeastern states could start from Jaigon, head to Assam, duck down to Meghalaya, and then up to Arunachal Pradesh coming down through Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, and finally Tripura. From Tripura you'd cross into Bangladesh and from Banglandesh into the southern part of West Bengal, not far from Kolkata. If you were to sit with a map of India you'd note that the main roads really don't join up like that, and you'd need to backtrack out of most of the other states into Assam. But you could still cross from Assam into Tripura and thence to Bangladesh. And then perhaps you might consider the question of permits. Access to Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram are all restricted. Some require group travel; others are apparently difficult to get any permit for. Perhaps a permit may be obtained from Guwahati in Assam. Or perhaps you'll need to duck down to Kolkata -- or perhaps even travel a week to New Delhi and back. But if you're travelling solo, then a group may not be immediately available. So perhaps it's not so essential to visit those restricted states?

But at least you could still cross from Assam into Tripura and thence to Bangladesh. From Guwahati to Tripura's capital Agartala is a gentle three hundred and fifty kilometres as the crow flies, and a somewhat longer and less gentle distance when the twists and turns of the road are taken into account: assuming no unexpected stops are required, it's a twenty-five hour travail. Any unexpected stops - and these may include tires bursting, mechanical failure, or even members of the National Liberation Front of Tripura attacking your armed convoy - could result in extended delays, even permanent ones. It may not be entirely surprising, therefore, that I decided to bypass the northeast, and head south to Kolkata instead. I do intend to visit northeastern India one day; perhaps not until after the Border Roads Organisation work their magic.

The decision to bypass the northeastern states was a snap one (though not exactly, I feel, a hasty one):
- I'd arrived back in Siliguri from Gangtok rather later than expected
- The bus to Guwahati didn't leave for another 22 hours
- Siliguri was as uninspiring a junction on the second visit as it had been on the first
- Another 22 hours in Siliguri seemed excessive
- The difficulty in getting through via Bangladesh meant that I'd likely need to backtrack to Siliguri from Assam
- To backtrack once to Siliguri was unfortunate; to backtrack twice would appear to be rather careless...
So I hopped an overnight bus to Kolkata.

After the excellence of Sikkimese roads, I was surprised at just how poor the road between Siliguri and Kolkata was. Sections and pillars of what may eventually be a dual carriage highway appeared beside our road for a little while, but within a couple of hours roadworks and construction had been left behind, and the bus was shuddering over fragmenting asphalt. A few hours of fitful dozing later, and I was roused by the sensation of falling half a foot from mid-air back onto my seat; the bus had hit a dirt track. I wondered momentarily if our driver had decided to take a shortcut before noticing three things: both sides of the road were lined with sleeping trucks, there were trucks immediately ahead of us, and there was a sign giving distances to places, including Kolkata. It seemed that our track was not just any dirt track; it was a major route.

It wasn't long before we hit a traffic jam; there was a constriction; oncoming traffic had the momentum.

We stopped.
We waited.
The oncoming traffic passed, and we continued on.
The hours passed, the roads got better, the sky grew lighter, and we arrived in Kolkata in time for breakfast.

But I've not yet told you about the crash.

We were barrelling down the highway - it was on the good patch between Siliguri and the roadworks - when we hit a truck. The truck, parked with lights off, was mostly but not entirely off the road. We were lucky: somehow the side of our bus was heavily dented and scored, but we avoided a head-on collision and there was no other damage. I don't understand just how the bus managed to get hit where it did, as it never appeared to swerve - there was just a loud bang. There was a few minutes of a lot of angry shouting between the truckdriver and the bus driver, but nothing was written down, and the bus driver returned the bus to its course, so I don't know if any further action was ever taken.

I can understand why many prefer Indian trains to Indian buses. They're faster; smoother - oh so much smoother; you can walk around; you can go to the toilet - catching a bus requires bladder control for men and extraordinary bladder control for women since their stops are infrequent and some toilet stops don't have any privacy (public urination is acceptable for males but not females); you can buy a reasonable assortment of food; you're less likely to get caught in a traffic jam or sideswipe a sleeping truck. In short, if I were to ever take a twenty-five hour trip from anywhere to anywhere I'd rather do it by train than bus.

Foreigners receive preferential treatment from Indian Rail, which has a separate booking office in major cities and sets aside blocks of seats on sleeper trains. This means that tourists only have to book a few days in advance, and may be able to avoid queuing for hours at the railway (if there's no foreigner booking office, it's worthwhile getting a travel agent to buy your ticket just to avoid the need to queue!). It does require showing your passport and paying in foreign currency (or showing a receipt). If you can't book a few days in advance, then a bus is the way to go.

The Indian trains I've taken have been second class sleeper trains: no air conditioning and no compartments -- just cubicle after cubicle with two tiers of three opposite each other and a tier of two over the main aisle, running parallel to it. They're not incredibly comfortable, but at least you can get a reasonable amount of sleep. The sleep you get on trains (and this applies to Chinese and Vietnamese ones too) is never particularly great - the beds are hardish, and you always have a mild fear that while you are sleeping someone is going to divest you of your wallet, passport, daypack, and shoes; upper berths are preferable to lower and middle ones since they're less accessible. When I got on my first Indian train (Kolkata to Puri), I was just wondering whether or not to bother cocooning my pack with my wire mesh when all the local travellers started chaining their luggage under the bottom bunks. I decided to follow their example.

Luggage is somewhat safer on an overnight bus; there are less people wandering through at all hours, and packs are generally locked away. Much as with trains, there are different classes of Indian buses - air conditioned and non-airconditioned, sleepers with flat beds of a similar quality to the trains, executive 1x1x1 where there's aisles between each seat, 2x1, and 2x2. If you're lucky your seat will recline almost fully, and the shock absorbers will bounce and sway you over rough patches. If you're unlucky you'll have no leg room, your seat will barely move back, the part you're sitting on will detach from the back, and you will feel every dimple and pebble on the way.

Of course you could fly. Planes are safer - your chances of dying in a (passenger) plane crash are minute - and they provide all the benefits of trains at a fraction of the travel time. But -- and it's a big one -- as a backpacker attempting to travel on the cheap, the cost of a plane ticket in India will cover not only the equivalent train ride, but also a week of food and accommodation. So it's lengthy trains and buses all the way, but I can cope with that.

And the Meek shall inherit Room 101

taroso — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 21:34:00 GMT

It was the nearest hotel to Pokhara's Camping Chowk and the price was too low, but I took the room anyway. If I was to return to Kathmandu the next day, having just returned from trekking, it seemed silly to lug luggage all the way to Lakeside North, only to have to lug it all the way back at sparrowfart the following morning to Central Lakeside, where the taxis loiter. So I ambled along the underpass between shops to the courtyard around which the hotel was built.

The courtyard was rather pleasant, with lots of midday sunshine, balustraded walkways running round the perimeters of upper floors, and masses of potplants filled with flowers and greenery. The room, with bathroom attached, was 150 Rupees. 150? I know that the hotel was marginally north of Camping Chowk, but you pay that much for a night in a room without a bathroom at the top of Lakeside North. So I did a cursory spot check of the essentials: pillow ok; mattress not fantastic. Perhaps low season had struck while I was out of town? Whatever the reason, walking any more seemed an unnecessary luxury, and even though the price of the room was too low it seemed to meet the standards of acceptable squalour to which I had become accustomed. I took it.

I'd had a glance at the bathroom which contained the essentials (toilet, shower, sink, mirror, walls, floor, roof, etc.) but not a particularly long glance. Having accepted the room, I'd time to make a slightly more considered appraisal: the toilet didn't flush, but that wasn't particularly a problem since there was a bucket... three small daddy long legs had webbed a small patch above the door... and there appeared to be quite a few mosquitoes that had alighted on surfaces. I asked if there were another room; there wasn't. Given that the alternative was to pick up and move (and you know how loathe I am to do that) there was little choice but to spend a little time eradicating mosquitoes. The spiders I left untouched; punishing them for their abject failure as effective insect trappers seemed a little vaderesque, if eugenically sound.

There are about three and a half thousand species of mosquito, 150 or more of them in Nepal. My bathroom appeared to have two types. Which of Nepal's 150+ species these were is beyond the limits of year 10 biology and couldn't-care-less-ness. I hoped that neither were disease-bearing.

After twenty minutes or so of slapping and clapping, the bathroom appeared to be mosquito-free, and I inspected the bedroom. Mosquitoes clung to walls, roof, and curtains, and so another period of slapping and clapping ensued. Yes, it would have been simpler and perhaps more sensible to walk, but at that point I'd invested a lot of time in making the room mosquito free - ah, the perils of being somewhat obsessive. Two hours later, I looked up at the last two mosquitoes and left them for later. As you would know, if a job isn't worth doing, it really isn't worth doing properly, and I was bored with such mindless ~~exercise~~ violence. So I went out and did such necessary things such as eat, buy a ticket to Kathmandu, and deal with a week's backlog of email.

I returned that night. Outside my door I paused to look at those potplants on the balustraded walkway. Each had a driptray full of water; well, that explained the mosquitoes. Inside my door, it seemed that the pair I'd left had been busy breeding, which was a bit of a worry as I didn't realise that two mosquito species so obviously different could interbreed... and so quickly.

It was a long night - there's always those last few mosquitoes that only whine when the light goes off - and eventually I'd smeared most of them over hands and walls. At least, though, the room appeared to be hermetically sealed once the bathroom door was bolted, and I left the room to its insect inhabitants at sparrowfart the next morning. In the shoeboxy "Bachelor Mansions" I stayed at in Chennai, killing the swarming itinerant mosquitos was a fool's errand. The louvred windows were unsealable and had no screens, so the room would only stay clear for minutes before reinforcements arrived. Instead I huddled uncomfortably within my mosquito net.

A mosquito net is a useful bit of kit but it has a few downsides: despite being porous, it's degrees warmer under one than not; you need to hang it from something, and that's not always possible (at least without damaging walls); you need to use your bags and other belongings to create structures to raise sections of it off your skin (just hanging it leaves the net still in contact with limbs); and it appears to spontaneously grow mosquito-sized holes.

A Mosquito net isn't the only tool in the fight against sleep-disturbing mosquitoes. A fan helps if it's powerful enough, since mosquitoes are attracted by carbon dioxide, and a fan diffuses exhalations. The white noise that fans generate also help avoid the need for earplugs. Di-ethyl something something something, the insect repellent better known as DEET since noone can remember its proper name, is somewhat effective but stops working after only a few hours. I caught a 9 hour non-airconditioned bus from Chennai to Bangalore and got eaten alive by mosquitoes that appeared to be under the misapprehension that the DEET I basted myself with was some kind of appetising sauce.

I've only been bitten a few times by bedbugs, and seen them fewer, but I'm not sure if I like them any more than mosquitoes. On a balanced consideration, they're much nicer parasites: they are silent, they are rare, you can enjoy the outdoors without being harassed by them, and most importantly they are disease free. Mosquitoes kill millions with their malaria, dengue, and other diseases (many of them incurable); bedbugs are just uncomfortable. Yet, there's something extremely unpleasant about the thought of them crawling over one's sleeping form in search of a vein, and their bites remain itchier longer than those of mosquitoes.

Then there are the cockroaches and the rats, that pair supposedly poised to take over the world when the nuclear conflagration occurs. Compared with mosquitoes they appear relatively infrequently. I've actually seen relatively few cockroaches overseas: a few in rooms, a few scuttling out of drains, a few elsewhere. There may well be eateries all over that (never having completed their HACCP plan) are crawling with them, yet I've probably seen more in a comparable period in Sydney. There are rats in darkened streets, scurrying from niche to crack - the ability of a 4 cm high rat to run through a 2 cm gap is rather impressive - but not a majorly visible quantity either.

I suppose that the swarms of roaming dogs that fill so many city streets may keep the rat population suppressed; warm rat would provide a welcome respite from their usual meal of cold garbage. I don't know what's keeping the cockroaches in check; perhaps it's the surviving rats. There are predators that should be keeping mosquito numbers low, but they appear to be slacking (spiders, I'm looking at you).

Which is why, if I'm one of the lucky survivors of the nuclear conflagration, I, for one, am prepared to offer up my veins up to our new Mosquito Overlords.

The Perils of Power

taroso — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 23:15:00 GMT

That he was on holiday did not stop the UK electrical engineer from burbling enthusiatically on the dangers of electricity; the Australian sparky he was conversing at was less effusive. Their group and mine were sharing a bus back from the Mekong River to Saigon, and the ride back was filled with talk of skin resistance (drops to zero when wet), the merits of UK plugs (the ground pin is longer than the others and the shaft of the pins are insulated), what to do when you dig up electrical cables (get the hell out of the hole - supply of electricity will resume shortly) and suchlike. Most of the rest of the bus sat cringing in silent laughter, as though he'd been providing Too Much Information on something completely anorakish like twitching or trainspotting. I found it rather interesting (but then I am anorak) and having once allegedly done a year and a half of Computer/Electrical Engineering (that's what it says on the inglorious academic transcript) I was at least able to follow along and interject vaguely sensible questions.

There is no shortage of electrical dangers for a traveller to get passionate about: catenaries of loosely strung cable threatening to garotte pedestrians of average height, spliced wires in bathrooms (most duct-taped but some just twisted bare copper), strangling vines slowly wrestling poles and cables to the ground, second-storey residents drying their washing on adjacent telephone lines, or even just the general lack of ground pins on most electrical equipment.

In Sauraha, many houses had gerry-rigged connections to the power lines. This was usually just a couple of hooks strung over the upper and lower power line, perhaps attached to a piece of bamboo to keep things stabilised and easily removable. In Kolkata, there are actually signs which urge the reporting of power theft.

Compared with elsewhere, blackouts have been fairly common in West Asia. Hille (and surrounding villages) were without power owing to a landslide months earlier. Some places such as Kathmandu, Kolkata, or Pokhara, have sporadic blackouts. Come nightfall in Sauraha or Darjeeling, however, it was almost guaranteed that electricity would fail for an hour or three while demand was high. Businesses lucky enough to have back-up generators or uninterruptable power supplies could rely on them for a while (though power was not always restored in time); other places would use candles or dim battery-operated fluorescent lights.

In Rabongla the enjoyment of a room with TV and hot water (there was a negligible difference in cost between a nice-ish room, and what can only be politely described as a complete $#!+#ole) was somewhat marred by the fact that power was rarely available to light the TV or heat the water. When power was finally restored, an electrical fault soon made the use of the heater unadvisable - there was actually a jet of blue flame coming from one of the taps! I winced in anticipation as the hotel employee calmly walked across the water-soaked bathroom floor and reached for the switch. When flicking the switch had no effect on the fire, his next step was to unplug the heater.

I was a little shocked that he wasn't.

Nation/Statements

taroso — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 19:56:00 GMT

When the British colonised Australia, their culture and agriculture were imposed on a country that was in many cases unsuited for it. Seasons were six months out of phase, and the soil, climate, and weather patterns were so different, that by the end of the year, those who had come with the First Fleet were in danger of starvation. Some introduced species including rabbits, cane toads, cats, carp, lantana, and prickly pear, which all thrived in Australia, quickly had a negative effect on native species. The farming (eventually highly successful) of other introduced species such as cattle, sheep, wheat, cotton, and rice caused some longer-term problems including water shortages [agriculture contributes 3% of GDP but consumes 70% of Australia's stored water], topsoil degradation/loss, salinisation, and other ecosystem damage and destruction. Hindsight is 20/20, though; the introduction of all the species mentioned above was done with good intentions and no idea that the conditions in Australia would produce so different a result from overseas. Prior experience and habits can be very difficult to give up, after all.

So, too, with cultural traditions. Well after World War II, Australian Christmases were still thoroughly British, with Roast Dinners and Hot Pudding served in the blazing heat of Australian midsummer. Modern Australian Christmases are generally more sensible, with cold cuts of turkey and ham, seafood, salads, and room-temperature or frozen desserts followed perhaps by bushwalking or a swim, but traditional notions of Christmas still remain. Christmas cards often have the standard tropes (snowy window ledges, snow-laden trees, snowy cottages, and a fur-trimmed Santa Claus with his reindeer and sleigh) and though there are some very nice Australian Christmas carols, which reflect more of Australia than traditional snow-bound carols, those traditional snow-bound carols are as difficult to uproot from Australia as lantana. I'm not even Christian, and haven't been one in half a life, but there is a certain magic to the idea of a White Christmas, a subtle indoctrination that has taken place all my life through stories, art, music, movies, TV, and games. Prior experience and habits can be very difficult to give up, after all.

You might think of India as being a hot country (one blonde correspondent responded with great bemusement) but it borders the Himalayas in the north, and winters in its mountainous regions can be bitterly cold. It thus seemed like one of a Good Idea to head for somewhere vaguely Indian, vaguely northern, and vaguely mountainous; in other words "Darjeeling". Darjeeling is situated at about 2000 metres height in the part of West Bengal above the "Chicken's Neck" (the isthmus between Bangladesh and Nepal). It's a former British hill station, and is considered rather un-Indian in character, being cool, not particularly crowded, and having Nepali as its major language. Darjeeling does get snow but mainly in January and the state of Sikkim was more-northerly, more-mountainous, and even-more-vaguely Indian, so I went there with a couple of others who were staying there - Richard from the UK and Ronen from Israel.

Indian bureaucracy appears in need of reform. It seems to be worse, surprisingly, than that of the communist countries I've visited. For instance to get a visa to China, I collected a form at the door, filled it in, stood in line, and submitted my passport and paperwork to the clerk. That afternoon, I came back, stood in line, paid the processing fee, and got my passport complete with visa sticker back. Laotion visas could be granted at the border. Vietnam's was granted by posting things off in a registered envelope. India's required me to stand in a line to get an embassy-checking form, fill it in, stand in a line to submit it, come back three business days later, stand in line, collect the approval, stand in another line, submit my visa application form with payment, come back later, stand in line and collect my passport complete with visa sticker back.

Getting a Sikkim permit, free and now pretty much a formality, was similarly arduous. We'd intended to get it on the Thursday, but that was a strike day. The strike was not a 1980s Australian-style one where buses, trains, and government employees don't work, but otherwise life can go on as normal. This was a complete shutdown, with hardly a vehicle on the street, and every shop and restaurant closed (or in some cases "closed" if they pretended to comply but left their door enticingly ajar to attract passing starving tourists). On Friday, then, we walked a couple of kilometres to the Office of the District Magistrate to show our passports and collect a stamped application form, walked back into town to the Foreigner Registration Office to have an approval done there, and returned to the Office of the District Magistrate to have the permit finalised. Combining the roles into one office, co-locating the offices, or even shortening the process so that it starts at the FRO and only requires one visit to the ODM are not new ideas, but seem unlikely to be implemented in the near future.

A permit is required for Sikkim, as it is for a number of other northern states, because of separatist rumblings and their proximity to China, which up until last year claimed sovereignty over it. Claims of sovereignty were relinquished in return for India's recognition of Tibet as part of China; ah, realpolitik, how I do love thee. Since July this year trade has started to open up over the Nathula pass, though the region requires an extra permit to visit since it's a military area with a large contingent of goodwill stationed there in tin-roofed huts. In recent years, Sikkim has received masses of funds for public works. Everywhere you go, you see concrete slabs with project information including the budget. All over, there are bridges and roads in various states of completion (not before time, either, since the roadway of an older-model suspension bridge north of Pelling had partially collapsed). In a few years the state of Sikkim's roads should be rather impressive.

In the Nathula Pass area, the roadworks are the responsibility of the Building Road Organisation's Project Dantak, and everywhere there are signs. Some of the signs are exhortations to safe driving, which you see a lot of on the way to Darjeeling as well: "No Need for Over Speed", "Donate Blood at the Blood Bank not on the Road", "Slow Drive, Long Live", "Three Enemies of Road: Speed, Liquor and Overload", and "Speed Thrills But Kills" among others. Others promote the work done: "Faster, Higher, Further with Project Dantak", "East or West, BRO is the Best", "BRO Men Cut Through the Hills But Join the Heart". Others seem attempts at projecting an aura of confidence: "Dantak - Strengthening Relations Between Countries", "BRO - Not Only Road Builders But Nation Builders", "Kashmir to Kannyakumari India is One", and "BRO and People of Sikkim in Harmony".

I've little doubt that the development funds pouring into Sikkim is beneficial to the Sikkimese, but my favourite sign, for its wonderful if inadvertent colonialist sensibility, is "BRO - Flagbearers of Prosperity and Civilisation". So many, including China in Tibet, Spain in South America, France in Africa, the British and their descendants in North America and Australia, some even with the best of intentions, have attempted to bring prosperity and civilisation to the natives. And since I'm here, I shouldn't forget the British Raj in India, where the costs and benefits of a century of British-style prosperity and civilisation are still a matter of debate. What isn't a matter of debate, however, is that Britain bequeathed India its system of Civil (Public) Service, without which gaining a visa or a Sikkim permit might not be such an interesting use of a traveller's time.

With permit finally awarded, our first destination in Sikkim was Pelling, which has a couple of Buddhist monasteries and the ruins of one of Sikkim's capitals back when it was still an independent kingdom; though the British exercised control in Sikkim, it wasn't part of the British Raj, and has only been an Indian State for thirty years. Signs on the way to the ruins exhorted us to "Keep up the spirit. The day is yours" and "Do not get tired. Great excitement is awaiting". The ruins were pleasant for their outlook but were otherwise nothing special, being no more pleasant than Pemayangtse monastery which overlooks them. Lonely Planet, with delicate understatement, describes them as being "over-restored". Pelling is worth visiting not for its structures, though, but for its fantastic panoramic view of the five snowy peaks of Kanchendzonga, the world's third-highest mountain. From Pelling we trekked to the holy lake of Khecheopalri (not really worth visiting) and from there to the trailhead of Yuksam (again not really worth visiting unless you are trekking further). Richard and I broke the journey from Yuksam to Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, at Rabongla, staying at the Hotel Silver Fir, where inefficiency was revealed as not only a trait of government employees: finalising the bill took an hour..

I know, by the way, that a number of you have requested start taking and posting photos. To sum up my arguments against this:

* I'm lazy. If I take lots of photos I'll probably never write another word again... which may well be the reason that a number of you have requested that I start taking and posting photos. Sorry.

* Photos really do convey a different experience to text. I know that a picture is meant to be worth a thousand words, but it's the rare photo that conveys anything close to the right thousand words

* Photos taken on a cheap digital camera can achieve great results under optimal conditions but if there's any haze about, forget about getting a decent shot of (eg) that fantastic panoramic view of the five distant snowy peaks of the world's third-highest mountain.

* A camera is just another thing to get broken, stolen, lost, damaged, arrested over, etc. Life is less stressful without portable electronics.

* If you really need to see what the fantastic panoramic view of the five snowy peaks of the world's third-highest mountain looks like, either Google it for someone else's blurry digital photos, or go to Pelling and take blurry digital photos yourself.

* Prior experience and/or habits die hard.

But since it's almost New Year, and flexibility and change is a good thing, I promise that I'll post a picture Real Soon Now; it might even convey something resembling the Correct Thousand Words.

Richard and I are spending Christmas 2006 in Gangtok (Ronen having headed down to Kalimpong yesterday); I've even splurged and treated myself to a Room Of My Own with private bathroom, hot water, and cable television. There's not much here but (despite it being Just Another Day) neither of us feel like travelling on Christmas, and it's a pleasant enough town that (much like Darjeeling) spills down the hillside. The weather here is sunny with not a skerrick of snow to chill the slopes; I'm in a t-shirt today. There's a cable car ("ropeway") to ride, and a zoo, some lookouts, some temples, and the usual assortment of other things to visit. To the east of Gangtok, the Nathula pass area is but a short jeep-ride away, but tourists travel there to see Tsango (aka Chomgo) lake. If you went there now you could enjoy a swim in its waters, indulge in some bushwalking on the slopes around it, or partake in a Christmas picnic, though momos (a Tibetan/Nepali dumpling) are more readily available than delicatessen items.

Anyway, may your celebration of the winter solstice and the (re)birth of Sol Invictus, or whichever other (semi)mythical figure you happen to be worshipping this year, be a great one.

Merry Festivus to all.

And to all a very good night.

Taro of the Jungle

taroso — Tue, 5 Dec 2006 03:20:00 GMT

Sauraha, gateway to the Royal Chitwan National Park lies about eighty kilometres south-west-west of Kathmandu as the kag flies. By road it's a six hour journey. If you add a couple of hours rafting on the Trisuli River, it's a full day's journey there by the time you've waited for things to stop, start, and stop-start. The bus doesn't go all the way to Sauraha, but to Tadi Bazaar, a town on the highway a few kilometres north. From there it's a motorbike ride - either via a circuitous road route, or using a slight shortcut over footbridges which fail to inspire confidence as their planks are widely spaced and wobble, and concrete pilings from an older structure lie tumbled in the creek.

Sauraha lies on a flood plain across the Rapti River from the RCNP. With the exception of the tourist hotels and bars clustered near the river, the area consists mainly of farms. I arrived there at dusk, the air smoky, and the sun a deep red half-submerged in the grey of what I think was a band of cloud but what may have been distant treeline. It reminded me more of images of Africa than those of India. My hotel was on the Rapti, though on that first evening little could be seen from its grass-roofed cabana: a sandbar in the middle, and a dark mass beyond that. Further upstream there was beach, with more hotels and many more cabanas.

The Tharu are the native people of the region, the Terai; they migrated from the Thar desert region in India and managed to survive Chitwan's malaria-infested mosquitoes (now pretty-well eradicated) - allegedly with the aid of spicy food and raksi, an evil strain of firewater. Many still live in traditional wattle-and-daub huts, the wattles being dried elephant grass, and the daub being a mixture of cow dung and mud. Some of the women had rings through their septa and tattoos on the backs of their hands; men traditionally dressed in white, though it seems that it's done mainly for the benefit of tourists nowadays.

If you ever go to Chitwan, the Tharu cultural show is well worth a watch. There's a great courtship dance; the remainder is interestingly analogous to Morris Dancing - the performers are all male, sticks feature prominently, one of the dances featured a peacock (much as Morris Dancing has its hobby horse) and one a transvestite. The instruments used were percussive (drums, tambourines, rattles, cymbals, and the clashing sticks) but there was singing and recorded music. I suspect that the courtship dance may be non-traditional since it's the only one to feature a female dancer (who also probably played the peacock).

The region is a twitcher's paradise. Mated pairs of ruddy sheldrakes have flown in from Siberia; Nepal house martins, which pock the riverbanks with their burrows, swarm everywhere; kingfishers are fairly common, particularly the blue variety; prides of peacocks wander the grasslands; egrets and ibises flock on the sandbars; and lots of other birds were seen, though neither my guide nor I could identify them - we're not twitchers. The local bird society's office was closed when I passed so I couldn't see whether their checklist had pictures, but here's a text-only list; twitchers, have a field day.

After an hour's ride in a dugout canoe, passing a multitude of birds and one barely noticeable mugger crocodile, we disembarked and walked cross-country to the shore opposite Sauraha. Chitwan has diverse vegetation regions. There are areas where elephant grass grows taller than you, and you follow game trails hoping not to meet anything. Other places are tangles of bushes, where you walk low if following a trail, and walk lower if not. Along the rivers are tall hardwood trees, low grass, and patchy bushes. Further in, there are tall trees and trails running between thickets.

I saw a hog deer, which saw me and bolted. There was evidence of something (possibly a tiger) leaving tiger-paw-shaped pawprints around the river, some digging around the base of a tree which my guide identified as being a sloth bear hunting for termites, and the footprints and droppings of what may have been a passing one-horned rhinoceros. And there are other species to be found in the park: the elusive Pangolins (a scaled anteater), Gharials (a long-snouted crocodile), Fishing Cats, and Hyaenas were all to be seen appearing in drawings in the Visitors' Centre, but not in the flesh. Most species in the park are nocturnal and there are 932 square kilometres of wilderness, so it's not entirely surprising that it's rare to see many of the creatures on a morning tour, particularly given that some of them are uncommon if not endangered - there's only a hundred and something tigers, for instance.

~~Cynic~~ Realist that I am, I did start wondering how long it would be before enterprising locals somewhere in the world set up a nature park with no animals in it to steal their livestock and produce. Every morning before tourists would arrive, they'd go in with their special shoes, a spade, and some shaped patties of processed vegetation. Every so often, someone wearing a tiger suit would pop up momentarily, which would cause great excitement; even more so if the nature park were in Africa, say, or on O'Connor Ridge in Canberra.

As we waited for the dugout canoe to ferry us back to Sauraha, I we saw an elephant standing in a field on that side of the river. It wasn't one of the exciting dangerous wild ones, though, but a privately owned domesticated one. In the afternoon we visited the Elephant Breeding Centre, a rather depressing place, where adult and juvenile elephants stood around each with a foot chained to a post while the few baby elephants were unchained but herded to remain near their mothers. The babies are all sired by wild bull elephants; their mothers were transferred from elephant rides to forced labour at the age of 20 or so.

Early on a foggy third morning, three Nepali tourists and I squashed into a wooden howdah atop an elephant. It was a poorly behaved elephant, frequently attempting to turn when it wasn't meant to, and occasionally bolting. The mahout would flail at the top of its skull with his cane, and when that failed to work would unhook his iron goad and prick it until it was approximately cooperative. I was grateful that the elephant never decided that the easiest way to deal with the annoyances above was to roll over.

Riding on an elephant has a certain image of glamour. The reality is that it's uncomfortable because elephants move one foot at a time so the howdah - hard, wooden, and cramped - is constantly rolling. In addition, you may hit branches - there are lots of them at such a height, and if someone pushes one out of the way incorrectly, a branch (some of which are thorny) may spring back with force. Spider webs criss-cross paths. Elbows from fellow passengers can be a problem. Still, on an elephant, you're safe from attack, they're speedy and manoeuvrable, and they can go where vehicles cannot. They're really the only way to travel.

My riding companions had a lot to say, and said it at length. Perhaps wild animals don't run away when people on an elephant chatter away; we saw one deer, seated and unmoving in frozen stillness. And then everybody stopped talking for a while, which was very nice. We saw peacocks waddling, and other birds flew by.

Suddenly a call rang out, musical tones breaking the relative silence. The tourist seated behind me had a lengthy conversation on his mobile phone. It was a busy morning for him -- over the next hour and a half he answered and made several more calls. I restrained myself from reintroducing trophy hunting to the area.

Just when I was wondering if this was going to be as unsuccessful a safari as the day before - a deer and some birds are nice, and all, but they're not really so special - we crossed over a river and saw a distant rhino.

Everyone was volubly excited. Rhinos have terrible eyesight, but their hearing is excellent; this one turned and bolted. Our elephant headed at pace around one way through tourist-high branches; another elephant went the other way. Eventually the rhino was cornered against thick bushes and we had a good period of up-close rhino viewing. Nearby, we came across another pair - a mother and cub - both lying down and unwilling to even move!

I was very lucky. Others who went riding that morning saw no rhinos at all, and I not only saw those three but another one later that day, standing in the water at 20000 lakes (being dry season, the number was off by a factor of a thousand). No tigers appeared, unfortunately, but I guess that's an incentive to return.

Avatars

taroso — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 02:48:00 GMT

Shakyamuni Buddha, he who was Prince Gautama, and Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, current King of Nepal, have more in common than just royal blood and birth within Nepali borders: both are seen by Hindus as being incarnations of Vishnu. Avatar or not, however, Gyanendra may be the last king of Nepal. In recent months most of his powers have been removed, a delineation has been made between what is considered his private property and what is considered to belong to the nation, a government commission has found him responsible for the death of protesters, he no longer has immunity from prosecution, there's a fair chance he will be charged with something once the government works out how to do it legally, the Nepali Maoists (who were once elected to power) will soon take a sizeable chunk of legislative power again, and most of the non-Maoists aren't mad about the king either.

King Gyanendra came to the throne unexpectedly when his nephew allegedly killed a large number of family members including his brother Birendra, and then perhaps shot himself; conspiracy theories abound. Gyanendra managed to make himself really unpopular by suspending Parliament and returning Nepal to a state of absolute monarchy. Back in Aprilthere were strikes and protests, which forced him to reinstate Parliament and led to the current situation. As in Tibet, where photos of the tenth Panchen Lama are more common than those of the eleventh Panchen Lama, in Nepal it is Gyanendra's predecessor, King Birendra whose portrait is more often on display. In short, well may we say "God Save the Queen", but there's a fair chance that nothing will save the Kingdom.

In better times for royalty, the Kathmandu Valley had not one but three kingdoms, Kathmandu, Patan, and Bakhtipur, formed when a king split his kingdom among his three sons, though which of these were Vishnu's avatar I couldn't say. Being kings, each had a Durbar (palace) Square - Patan's is an hour's walk south of Kathmandu's in Lalitpur, part of greater Kathmandu, and Bhaktipur's is an hour's bus ride. "Square" is a poor translation, though, since none of them are: Kathmandu's, in particular, is more a ragged "C" shape running around the imposing white Hanuman Dhoka Durbar. On the periphery of that square opposite the southwestern corner of the palace lies another palace, that of the Kumari, the "Living Goddess", avatar of Teleju/Durga.

"Have you seen the Kumari?" asked a prospective guide, "It's a special festival today". That last bit, by the way, is toutspeak for "It happens everyday". "Later", I said, waving him off. He continued his pitching with "You need to have someone call her", which was probably true as I'd ducked in earlier and there wasn't a Kumari in sight. Later, I returned there, passing between the two painted lion statues, where an aged peddlar fans her stack of pictures, through the front door doorway, and into the low vestibule which opens onto the palace courtyard.

There were tourists-in-waiting when I arrived but their accompanying guide had no luck in summoning the Kumari and they soon departed. Muffled voices emanated from the top floor windows - they were open and screen-less. The roof beams in that top floor room were glossy, and from time to time, against the red glow of what I presumed to be a curtain, I could see the reflection of a dark shape moving. Perhaps the Kumari?

The Kumari is a limited incarnation: she's selected when young according to strict criteria, including favourable animal sacrifices, and is still young when her tenure finishes at puberty, the divinity passing to another girl.

"No entrance for foreigners", said a sign on the far wall. Yelling and clattering, a boy of about ten came running down unseen stairs, burst out the door next to the sign, raced across the sunken courtyard and continued out through to Durbar Square. A servant's child? A playmate? A brother? Several minutes later he retraced his route with similar haste and clamour. After a few minutes of relative quiet he ran down once more to the courtyard; one hand clutching an inflated ball, the other a hackysack. He kicked each around briefly before returning upstairs. Time passed.

The palace is a compact three storey building, with its footprint reduced by its public courtyard. It's brick, with stone carvings, carved wooden window lattices, and an excess of pigeons. The windows on the upper floor were without lattices. Much of the tiled courtyard is sunken, leaving a walkway around the edge. In that sunken area lie three structures surrounded by iron frames. The central shrine has a vine growing over its frame; the other two, asymmetrical in position, appear to be convex plates. All are plastered with tikka.

Tourists filtered in and out of the courtyard in dribs and drabs, gazing hopefully at the empty frames on the upper floor, before leaving disappointed. A trio of middle-aged Australians hung around for nearly ten minutes, with the bearded one, dissatisfied with merely watching and waiting, calling out for the Kumari to reveal herself. The windows remained empty, and they too left in search of more dependable attractions.

What may have been servants appeared from time to time: a mustachioed male in his mid-thirties clomping down the stairs and crossing to unlock and pass through a padlocked door; a younger male, pausing mid-sprint to acquire some tikka from one of the metal plates; a middle-aged woman shaking what looked like a yellow towel by the upper-left window.

The courtyard started to fill up again, and three of those arriving were Indians. One of them pulled a digital camera from his jacket pocket. Their guide warned that the courtyard could be photographed, but the Kumari shouldn't be. Another of the signs on the wall stated as much: "Taking photographs of Kumari strictly forbidden". A tourist entered the building, refusing the peddlar's entreaties to buy a snapshot of the Kumari in full regalia.

As we waited, I wondered if the guide would be successful, or if the Kumari would remain a fragmentary experience: a title, a location, voices, reflected traces, frozen images, servants, and the boy; defined more by absence and expectation.

The guide said he would see if he could negotiate for the Kumari to appear, and entered the building through the forbidden doorway. The boy appeared at an upper window, ball still in hand, and paused there staring at us. He was joined by a slightly older girl, bespectacled and all in black, who seated herself at the far right of the tableau. Perhaps it was she that was the dark shape whose reflection moved on the overhead beams.

A girl with heavily-kohled eyes and wearing a red dress and pillbox hat which reminded me of a stewardess's uniform of forty years past ran to the middle window and leaned out: at last, the Kumari! A glance down later, and she turned and ran out of sight. The Indians pushed some notes into the donation box. The tourists drained out. I put my notebook away and followed them. She'd appeared, but my experience was still fragmentary: A title, the location, voices, reflected traces, frozen images, servants, the running boy, the bespectacled girl, and a flicker of the Kumari.

When Snacks Attack

taroso — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 15:54:00 GMT

I seem to be on the "Eat Whatever the Hell You Feel Like Diet" and it's not appearing to be doing me major harm. An essential part of this diet is the ingestion of a balanced quantity of junk food. Two classes of this might, perhaps, be distinguished: travelling and stationary.

Travelling junk food is prepared for an extended period on rail or road with irregular or non-existent meals. Here, a trip to the local supermarket is in order, and this can be an adventure in itself as when you can't understand what's written on packets choosing snacks can be a matter of pot luck. It's not necessarily obvious what things taste like, and even when - with Western Expectations - things have an "obvious" taste, there's no guarantee that things made by Eastern Manufacturers will match it. There have been biscuits that were simultaneously both sweet and savoury, jellies whose gelatine may have been yak-derived, and dried fruit that's been pickled, salted, or even just dried differently from fruit in Australia. Under such circumstances it can sometimes be safer to seek familiar items.

A jar of Peanut Butter found in the supermarket at Chongqing was thus a welcome discovery. There were, perhaps, too many peanuts to eat in China (there have been quite a few meals where fried peanuts were one of the main dishes) but peanut butter was nice and safe; a reasonable accompaniment for plain crackers on a long train journey. A third of a jar of peanut butter later I was peanut-buttered-out but I kept the jar until Pokhara, on the theory that I'd eventually become unpeanut-buttered-out. By the time that I was, minuscule ants had managed to traverse the threads of the lid and invade the jar.

I once wrote that whenever I get down, I give thanks that I don't have a peanut allergy. Somewhat exaggerated but true - it gives perspective, peanuts being present in so much cooking. By coincidence two members of the Tibet trip have peanut allergies (thankfully mild), which meant they had to select their dishes carefully while in China - Chengdu is in the heart of Szechuan, after all.

Stationary junk food, on the other hand, can provide a way to recentre and connect to the past after an overload of new or unusual flavours, whether as a meal or snack. For instance after weeks of noodle soups, stir fries, or rice dishes, pizzas or burgers can come as a welcome return to some measure of the familiar. I've written once before, for instance, about really wanting some properly-done roast chicken with all the trimmings. Western junk food should not necessarily be thought of as worse nutritionally than more local cuisine, though. In travelling, there are periods where you'll eat days if not weeks of oil-drenched stir-fried dish upon oil-drenched deep-fried dish upon oil-soaked soup - for safety if nothing else. Under such circumstances pancakes, pizzas, burgers, and other slightly-less oily comestibles can come as gastronomic relief.

Fortunately most places which cater for western tourists cater for western tourists. For instance Leisha's in Langmusi did excellent food with fine vegetable burgers and plate-sized yak burgers too large for all but the most rapacious of eaters (those who finish get their name posted but may yak). As with so many places, what's on their menu doesn't necessarily meet expectations, however: their apple pies were very good but essentially turnovers, and their chocolate brownies not so very good but essentially chocolate-chip cookies. Worse, though, is where the junk food is done badly. Dal bhat is the nutritious and filling staple while trekking from lodge to lodge in Nepal. After five straight days of it I was ready for a veggie pizza. I got a veggie and salt pizza and was back on the dal bhat the next night.

On the snack front, Saigonese creme caramels were wonderful, I dislike Tim Tams but was glad nonetheless to see snack-sized packs in Indonesia, and practically never drink Coke or Fanta of any variety in Australia but there have been a couple of days when it's been practically intravenous. Speaking of fizzy drinks, when I ordered a soda water on my first night in Indonesia it came in a Fanta-branded bottle. I also discovered rust stains around the mouth of the bottle, so left it untasted. Glass bottles are recycled over and over, and it takes a while to get used to the rust. Plastic water bottles in Nepal have a "Crush after Using" advisory on their label to prevent them from being reused; it seems that otherwise there's a risk of them being refilled and sold. But I digress; back to snacks.

Chocolate in Asia is often of poor quality. Often sugar is higher than cocoa solids, and in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia, palm oil is used, which gives quite a noticeably different flavour. Dark chocolate seems to be distinguished more by colour than anything else: 20 or 30 percent is common, and if you find anything above 50%, it's almost certainly European. One particularly unpurchased and untasted brand of dark chocolate in China used "Cocoa Butter Substitute", also known as "vegetable oil", to augment its 5% cocoa solids.

Nepali chocolate, mostly imported from India, has something new: artificial flavouring in the chocolate. I don't think that there are sufficient words to accurately describe how vile and chemical Nepali KitKats are. Good chocolate, by the way, is close to being a necessity while trekking - a nice little energy boost while at altitude. I took a couple of blocks of 75%, but many make do with Snickers and Mars bars, which are available at a premium at every lodge.

Zhang Mu was the last place we stayed in China; a border town whose shops had familiar-looking junk food brought over from Nepal. After we'd changed money and eaten, Colin still had some spare yuan so he decided to treat us to Real Chocolate. There was no question about which one we'd choose. "Toblerone", said Japp; "Toblerone" said Julia; "Toblerone" said I. "Four Toblerones", said Colin, and the shopkeeper passed over four bars of milk chocolaty sweetness. A shop or three up the hill we discovered that there were dark chocolate Toblerones to be had in Zhang Mu. Colin went over to try to negotiate a swap while I tried to refrain from laughing hysterically at his chutzpah. It was not entirely surprising that the shopkeeper refused to take him up on his offer but "It was worth a try", he said and, to be fair, it was.

The prospect of real chocolate, or at least more-real chocolate than we'd had in a month or more, was enough to give us a temporally-displaced sugar rush. "Zhhhhhhhhhm", said Japp, brandishing his bar. "...Zhhhhhhhm", said I, making the connection, and we mock-duelled our way from the street into the hotel lobby, getting some odd looks from those present. There's a distinct possibility that the phrase "Help me Tobler One. You're my only hope." was uttered. What can I say? One has to revel in one's immaturity while one can.

Language and Culture

taroso — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 23:46:00 GMT

One advantage of trekking with my guide Shyam was that I could pick up a little - and I do mean a little - Nepali while on trail, thus putting my 8 year Linguistics degree to some minor use (well, we also had a brief Tibetan lesson in Lhasa, but it was brief). I'm a language dilettante, unfortunately. In formal study I've a year of High School Latin, two years of HS French, two years of HS Japanese, a year of Uni Spanish, plus a semester of analysis of Buginese. Just enough to be incompetent in all, and have them all blend into a near-useless mental melange. Fortunately I still have a tenuous grasp on English, the Lingua Franca of our modern world.

English has a lot of words; it was well over half a million at last count (not by me, thankfully) with all its inflections ["I wug, you wugged, she wugs, they are wugging"], derivational morphemes ["un-" + "wug" + "-able" => "unwuggable"], and imports from other languages. One of my two favourite words - purely for euphony - is the loan word schadenfreude, the meaning of which happens to be lovely in its unloveliness too. And English is fluid in its semantics when members of a group or subculture develop their own shared meaning for common words - witness the evolution of different words for "good": "swell", "funky", "bad", "wicked", "cool", "hot" etc.

So it was that "whatever" in our group came to mean "twelvish". We'd twelve passengers plus a group leader, and at times a local guide and one or more driver, so when Brett would checks that we were all present, the count would end up as something like "One... Two... Three... Whatever". In Intrepid Tour Leader parlance a "passenger" ("pax" for short) is a member of a tour. In some cases, terms were old but some passengers weren't aware of them - "FIGJAM" and "dag", for instance. "Dag", by the way, is one of twenty Australian terms to be added to the MSWord dictionary in the next update - it's really that important to Australian culture! I was surprised, though, that "bonza" and "ridgy-didge" - a favourite saying of X.'s along with "stone the crows" and "Rafferty's rules" - were so popular. I thought "bonza"/"bonzer" died out half a century back.

A couple of months ago my mum sent an email, the body of which was "One thing I noticed - you use -----------ish a lot". I responded "Yup. It's because I like to be precisish when I write. [I also like paradox!]. -ish forms provide a nice level of nuance with less syllables than 'approximately' or 'roughly'. Partially it's because a lot of my writing (as I've written to you before) is conversational in style, and I use -ish forms in speech". I'm very pleased to report that -ish words were frequently used on tour by myself and others.

It's one of the perils of travelling that you do see x hundred monuments, y thousand museums, and z million religious buildings. I've written in previous entries that I've been "templed out". Our last major monastery in Tibet was at Sakya but when we arrived it was closed for the lunch period, and to enter the buildings we would have had to have waited a few hours. "Are you all monasteried out?", inquired Brett. We were. We so were. So instead we wandered the grounds, and had an enjoyable time doing so; Sakya remains one of my favourite monasteries. I should add that I get un-templed out every time I go to a new region and the style of temple changes. I also expect to get throughly churched-out, castled-out, and galleried-out in Europe, but that's not such a bad thing.

"According to Chambers Dictionary (2003), which is the primary reference, only nine of the answers to the clues are real words defined as in their clues. The rest have been arrived at by false scholaritude, whimse, hyperfeminism, poeticisation, up-to-dating, incorrect retroformation, etceterums." - Preamble to Listener Crossword 3889, "Neologification", by 'Waterloo']

There were coined terms too, including "fauxriginal" and "passiongers". We've seen a lot of fauxriginal items for sale at markets and stalls. Nepal is home to nearly as many counterfeit books as Vietnam, watches guaranteed to fall apart are readily available, and knock-offs of The North Face trekking gear, collectively known as "The North Fake" fill the trekking shops. Passengers who hooked up were, logically, "passiongers".

While vaguely on the subject, the dating section of the Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook was educational. Apparently "Never mind, I'll do it myself" is a suitably handy phrase to know, and itinerant banjo players in search of a good time may find success with "You look like my cousin". Pride is a deadly sin and all, but I'm very fond of the fact that when one of my fellow passengers said to another "I'll always think of you as the sister I never had", I could but add "I'll always think of you as the cousin I never... had".

Sometimes a coined term is just so right that its meaning is evident the moment you hear it. May I present for your amusement "packwash". If you don't find its meaning so evident, you may have always had regular access to a washing machine. Packwashing is when you store dirty clothes long enough for them to become cleanish enough to be reworn.

"Remember you can wear your underwear 4 times without washing: forwards, backwards, inside out forwards, inside out backwards." -- "Not the Sunscreen Song", by John Safran

But what I ask is "Is there any need for neologification when English already has such a rich and untapped vocabulary?". There are roughly a hundred and ninety thousand words in the UK Advanced Cryptic Dictionary wordlist - perhaps under forty thousand once inflections, plurals, proper nouns, and phrases are omitted. When you've ten thousand pages of bad writing to complete, that's not so many new words per page. A doable task, then; a kind of large-scale long-term game of Bingo. If I really need to, my last page of bad writing may well cover my visit to Dublin and homage James Joyce. It will be by far the least readable thing either of us have written. Once upon a time,so it's said, James Joyce was sitting disconsolate in his study when a friend dropped by. "I've only written seven words today", Joyce told him. "But James", reassured his friend, "Seven words is a good day for you". "Yes," wailed Joyce, "But I don't know which order they go in". But I digress.

Is there really a need for neologification when current English is flexible enough to make any number of groanworthy but topical puns?

X: I Say I Say I Say. Why is Little Miss Muffet like Saddam Hussein?
Y: Both their surnames have a U as the second letter, an E as the fifth letter, and a double on the second and third letters.
(*crickets chirp and a tumbleweed blows across the stage*)
X: There was a pun in that?
Y: Er... they both tried to tuffet alone?
(*silence as the drummer attempts to rimshot and misses*)
X: Interesting exploration on how elastic the lower boundaries of wit are, but have another crack at it.
Y: Er... They both had curds in their whey?
(*rimshot muffled by the gentle splatter of tinned tomatoes hitting bone*)
X: Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here all week, and unless the cleaners work overtime so will Y.

When coming down from Everest Base Camp, I was surprised to find that yoghurt tasted absolutely disgusting to me. Twice I ordered it, and twice I was unable to eat it. It was purely a personal reaction, though, as others tried it and had no problem with it. I don't know why it happened. In Nepal, yoghurt in Nepal is often called "curd", but since it's a rather solid yoghurt, the name is accurate enough. Tibetan yoghurt was similar, though generally more yakky in flavour. Yoghurt in a lot of other countries has mainly been of the drinking variety. I don't quite understand how you can have Acidophilus in yoghurt that's been treated so that its bottles are stored at room temperature, but I'm still alive. Drinking yoghurt is now fresher as lassis, common enough in Tibet, are even more common in Nepal with its heavy Indian influence.

While in Lhasa we visited the Braille without Borders School, which is targetted at teaching and training the young so that they can live and work independently, which is something that Tibetan blind generally weren't able to before the arrival of the organisation since Tibet's Buddhist society saw the blind as having warranted it as a result of actions in past lives. There are a lot of older sightless as well (due to both heredity and as a result of eye disease) who don't attend the school in Lhasa. For them, the organisation has a farm near Shigatse, where (among other things) cheese is produced. This is real cheese, too, not the Chinese processed plastic or yak-chalk normally seen in Tibet. They've a foreign expert in to assist with the cheesemaking, and there was talk of mozzarella being produced - whether from yak-stock, or whether from buffalo or beefalo (which are common in Nepal but not Tibet) I don't know. It's not like yak milk can't be made into good cheese as it's available in Nepal.

By-the-by, have you ever noticed that the blind dress much better than I do? If so, then you're not one of those sartorially-snappy unsighted people. But I micallef.

micallef (verb): to pursue a question, usually rhetorical, to its logically hideous conclusion.

Thank you. I'll be here all year.

Those Two Certainties

taroso — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:10:00 GMT

It was time to get my pre-trip shots, and my doctor had spent quite a lot of time in Nepal [she has credits for the Health section in a few Lonely Planets, but not, ironically, the Nepal 6th edition, which is what I have]. October or November? "It's lovely that time of year", she said, and so it is. And - there had been just a little insurrection around that time - what of the Maoists? "Oh the Maoists aren't too bad. They'll demand money but they'll give you a receipt."

Excuse me? Did I hear correctly? I did.

Somewhat bewildered, I mentioned this to Brett. He dug around in his folder of TourLeaderDocuments and pulled out one of those fabled receipts. He'd once had a group baled up by a Maoist checkpoint but had managed to beat the price down from a thousand rupees each to a hundred rupees each. On the next trip he used this receipt to avoid paying anything. This was reassuring: I now knew that our leader had the stones to safeguard our budgets from members of an armed group involved in a civil war that had killed over thirteen thousand people. None of these thirteen something thousand dead were tourists, though; noone in Nepal wants to kill the golden goose of tourism, though tourism is only just starting to recover after taking a bruising in recent years. The worst that's happened lately, so rumour has it, is that an anti-communist Polish trekker was beaten up and wounded for refusing to pay.

On our first morning in Nepal, driving down to Dhulikhel from the Chinese border, the bus was stopped briefly at a piece of cord across the road by some villagers - kids, really. The bus driver hurled some abuse at them in Nepali - a refusal to pay, I'm guessing - and drove on. Not long after that we stopped at a more authoritative checkpoint with a red flag and genuine Maoists. Brett got out, showed the receipt, and after some discussion we were waved through with our wallet, bus, and skin intact. They're not meant to be extorting tourists any more - their nominal leader, Chairman Prachanda, has said that they're not, but you get the feeling from reading the newspapers here that the Maoists are a conglomeration of smaller organisations each with their own slightly competing ideas about how things should really work.

It's ceasefire time at the moment, which means that the soldiers manning the sandbagged bunkers with their garlands of barbed and razor wire can relax. Such bunkers feature at government checkpoints and around public buildings and structures, the Maoists having targetted them for bombings before. The Maoists control most of the country, though, including the trekking routes. The government presence on the Annapurna Sanctuary trek is limited to a couple of Tourist Registration Certificate desks - the former checkpoint at Doban, for instance, has been abandoned.

I paid the government their 2000 Rupee fee to be allowed to enter the Annapurna Conservation Area, though this was never checked. According to my guide Shyam those travelling by taxi are stopped, but we went by public bus. At Landruk, at the tail of the first day we encountered a Maoist checkpoint. There were no weapons on sight, and apart from the Maoist operating it and his non-descript offsider there didn't seem to be anyone other Maoists around. He was polite; I was surly but restrained. There are certain things it's good to be known for doing first in Nepal such as climbing Everest, but I'm afraid that I lacked the stones to safeguard my budget from members of an armed group that had yet to kill a tourist. He was, by the way, the most Maoist-looking figure I've yet seen in Nepal, being black-clad with glasses (which few Nepalis wear) and sporting a black goatee (a fair number of Nepali males are mustachioed but I don't think I've seen another with a beard).

I was allowed to pay the Maoist Tourist Tax so I did, and was issued a receipt. It's a glossy blue and white rectangle, issued by the "Tamuwan Autonomous Republic People's Government" for the sum of a hundred Rupees a day; 700 Rs in total. Shyam said that it's better than it used to be: a 1500 Rupee flat fee no matter how long the trek.

Under section 102.6 of The Australian Anti-Terrorism Act 2005, it is an offence to provide funds to a terrorist organisation but fortunately the Australian Government doesn't consider the Communist Party of Nepal a terrorist organisation. As of May this year neither does the Nepali Government. Americans visiting Nepal may be in for problems, however. The headline of today's edition of the Kathmandu Post reads "Maoists to remain on US terrorist list", and as the US State Department lists the CPN as a Terrorist Organization under the Terrorist Exclusion List of the Immigration and Nationality Act and under Executive Order 13224, it's technically illegal for US citizens to contribute funds... for instance to pay the tourism tax. For that matter the laws probably apply to foreign backpackers too.

At Birethanti yesterday, on the last day of trekking, I showed my TRC and got signed out by the government worker seated at an open-air desk. Beside him were three Maoists whose desk sat under a red canopy. Whether "Maoist" is quite the right word, though, is another matter as the troika's middle figure was badged with a shiny red Lenin silhouette, and a picture of Lenin was affixed to one of the poles. I showed my receipt, and Shyam and I continued on to the bus.

Unfortunately I believe that in most cases it's not trekkers who are really affected by the tourist tax but the Nepali guides and porters whose baksheesh is affected. I provided Shyam with a breakdown at the end:

Budget: 14000 (PM 6/11/06 to AM 13/11/06)
Costs/Fees: -5850
Food/Water/Accommodation: -5805 [I ate quite a bit of Dal Bhat...]
Transport: -310
Maoist Tourist Tax: -700
Total Spent: -12665
Total Remaining: 1335
Tip (Rounded): 1400

Dhanyabad! [thank you]

Annapurna Sanctuary

taroso — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:25:00 GMT

Zero

"I'm not going to pay someone ten dollars per day to walk in front of me", said my neighbour Sandrine. She lives in a mountainous region in France, and is ~~to the fact~~ au fait with trekking and orienteering. I don't know how far she managed to get as the recently-introduced Trekking Registration Certificate (TRC) requirement means that independent guide-free trekking is supposedly dead, which is a problem if you like your space and alone-time. Jeff and Liz, for instance, ended up quitting their Annapurna Circuit trek because of it. I, on the other hand, have done one multi-day trek since 1990 and since solo travellers are liable to violent robbery on a couple of stretches and I'm lazy enough to let someone port my pack, a guide-cum-porter was not unwelcome.

Back before getting to Nepal, indeed back before leaving Australia, I had the idea that I would do the Annapurna Circuit. Once I actually arrived in Nepal, it didn't seem like such a great idea for a few reasons. Firstly, inertia and laziness kicked in -- I'd been on the grind of tours for over two months, and the last thing I felt like was another three weeks of movement. Secondly, I'd been in Tibet, and had minor altitude related problems there -- actually needing to walk and risk altitude-related problems while walking over 5000 metre passes didn't seem fun. Thirdly, the landscape of the middle of the Annapurna Circuit seemed to be high and barren and similar to Tibet -- I'd had enough treeless desert for a while. Fourthly, I wasn't sure of my general fitness -- I've had one multi-day trek (the three days in Tiger Leaping Gorge) since 1990. Fifthly, I wasn't sure whether three weeks of trekking would pall -- after a week, for instance.

While Alain, Florian, and Steve had bookings for the Annapurna Circuit trek and joined up with other groups as our tour finished, therefore, I hung around Kathmandu doing very little, then travelled over to Pokhara and did... more, but still very little. And, after two or three weeks of not doing, and being at last ready to do at least some trekking, I found myself a tour agency and chose the Annapurna Sanctuary trek, which is commonly known as "the ABC trek" since it goes to the Annapurna Base Camp. It's a nice easy trek, normally taking ten to twelve days including Ghorepani (Poon Hill), so my guide Shyam and I did it in six and a bit days. Though we did walk quickly, this is really not as impressive as it may sound since Shyam was carrying about ten kilos more than I was, and I'd retained my altitude conditioning from Tibet so we didn't need minor ascents in order to acclimatise.

Day 1: Phedi to Landruk

If you had to, you could guess what "Phedi" means from its sound and its location. Just like the root in "pedal" and "impede" it means "foot". More properly it's "Dhampus Phedi" since it's the bottom of Dhampus village, though Dhampus proper takes over an hour to reach. The bus from Pokhara dropped Shyam and I at Phedi, which is basically just a small row of roadside eateries across the road from what I thought at the the time were rather a lot of stairs.

We climbed stairs and we climbed slope and we climbed stairs again. It's farming country, it was harvest time, and the trail wound upward through fields of crops and stubble. At the main village area of Dhampus, lodge upon lodge crowds the way. The farms give way to forest. The trail runs down to water and then back up. The forest gives way to farms and then to forest again as the trail runs down to water. At about 4 that afternoon, we arrived at Landruk. It's yet another farming village (perhaps easier to appreciate from a distance so you can see just how many houses there are, as the buildings on the trail are mainly lodges), and sits upslope on the eastern side of the Modi Khola, the river Modi. Over the river but higher up sits the village of Ghandruk.

I suppose I should write a little bit about the carrying situation, and this is as bad a place as any. My backpack was maybe 9 kilos, and Shyam's pack 5 or 6; I was carrying 4 kilos or so in my daypack and could have carried my pack. Having a professional carry it meant that we could travel at a quicker pace (which was set by Shyam). Also...

*drumroll*

...I'm lazy -- please trust me on this, if only so I never need to type it again! It was, believe it or not, a light load for a porter; we passed a lot of them on the trail. Trains of mules or ponies are used on the main routes, but for many lodges, porters are the way to get food and other necessities there. Those porters bear a ridiculous weight using their neck muscles: a strap goes around their forehead and is attached to a basket, container, or other object. We passed one lad who was toting a metal water cylinder which was not only higher than him, but a metre and a half in diameter. Worst off weightwise, I think, were the porters for the package tours. Customarily they'd carry two full backpacks or more (I'd really winnowed out my excess, leaving much in Pokhara). Others would carry tents and twenty litre water canisters. Others would carry baskets piled high with supplies. I really don't envy the porters their job.

Day 2: Landruk to Bamboo

From Landruk the track led down to New Bridge, with its shiny new metal bridge, then up to Jhinu. We could have headed down to the hot springs there, but instead continued further up and down to where we could cross the river for Chhomrong, the last major village of the area; there's a school there, and homes, farmland too, and (as you would expect) lodges and shops. So: lunch at Chhomrong, down the hill, up the hill, Sinuwa.

Sinuwa is an odd village. The section of Sinuwa nearest to Chhomrong, for all that it's across a river and on a different hill, is really part of Chhomrong, being still permanent settlement with farmed terraces carved down the hillside. Far Sinuwa is a cluster of lodges only open during the trekking season, as all lodges from this point forward are. Separating the two is an hour or so of uninhabited unfarmed forest.

A sign warned of the perils of landslides. As if to illustrate, not five minutes afterwards there was a clatter uphill and a few rocks bounced down. This was not, fortunately, the result of a landslide, but just the dislodgements of sheep forcing a path through the bushes. Further along, landslips were evident. On a shady corner of the path there had been a shrine dedicated to the god of the area, but only the waist-high petal-covered fragment of a larger structure remained; the rest had spilled down the slope in a litter of stones. A bell was attached to what was left and Shyam rang it thrice before we carried on.

"German Bakery", said the sign outside our lodge at Bamboo, and a glass case displayed pastries and pies. We'd arrived just on dusk after a long day, and it was an odd remnant of civilisation in so rustic a setting. The water was solar-heated but the evening air wasn't, so I shivered my way through a shower in the dim confines of the concrete shower room. The dining room had a kerosene lamp for light and a kerosene burner under the table to warm it; the bedroom had a thin quick-burning white candle for light and warmth.

Day 3: Bamboo to Machhapuchhre Base Camp (MBC)

Even though November is the dry season, the path on the lower reaches between Sinuwa and Dovan was soft, with frequent creeklets cutting it. In parts, the creeklet was the path. You could see why trekking Nepal during the monsoon season would be unpleasant, since during those wet months trekkers also have leeches to contend with.

Bamboo was a fit name for the area: there was a lot of it around there. Oddly, I saw far more bamboo on the ABC trek than I did in China. You have certain expectations, and one of mine was that I'd at least visit some vast whispering forests of centuries-old bamboo in China. Instead I only saw one small stand in the wild (Tiger Leaping Gorge), and the only largish quantities seen were planted in the Panda Park in Chengdu. There's a variety of bamboo up on Nepali slopes, including one or two which are very grasslike and look like they could do with a mow [bamboo is, of course, a grass, but you don't always think of it as such], and one which, because of the angle of its leaves, gives the impression that someone has stuck bits of praying mantises to thin dowel. Nepal is so green compared with Tibet - just a few hundred metres in height makes so much difference, though the rain patterns in the Annapurna region probably help a lot too.

Machhapuchhre translates as "Fishtail", the reason being that the sides of its face curve inward with reasonable symmetry so that lower down it's narrower than its flattish top. and the best place to see the symmetry on the ABC trek is between Deorali and MBC, where the mountain can be viewed front-on. Before and after there, the view of its face is oblique and its the appearance of the "fishtail" is skewed and less obvious. Owing to the height the area is fairly barren, with low brown grass. The branches of the last of the trees were leafless and dripping with moss. It's the worst stretch for landslides: a treeless valley bounded by cliffs, with chunks of rock embedded in the path and bouldered channels to clamber over. It's safe in November, said Shyam, but earlier in the year it's very dangerous, and you always need to keep an ear out for the groan of an avalanche and move quickly.

Machhapuchhre is a sacred mountain which has never been summitted and where climbing is banned so "Machhapuchhre Base Camp" is a bit of a misnomer, but we stopped at a lodge there for lunch anyway. In its dining room were two Canadians who were dining before they headed down-mountain in the hope of reaching Dovan. The daughter of one had died a couple of years back. The other, a friend and colleague, had been vacationing in Nepal at the time she died, and had built a cairn up at ABC in her memory. They'd gone up that morning to add new prayer flags to it.

Shyam and I had been intending to head up to ABC after lunch (it's only an hour or two away), but while we were eating the weather turned nasty. Cloud rolled up the valley, and before long there was wind, rain, horizontal sleet, and flurries of snowflakes. The snow didn't stick this far down but it was still freezing, so cold that our breath fogged the dining-room's air. By the time the weather cleared it was later afternoon, so we overnighted there.

Day 4: MBC to ABC to MBC to Sinuwa

We started day four in the pre-dawn light with a walk up to ABC. It was the first time on the trek that the altitude had hit me. With the packs left behind at MBC, and I still with my daypack, Shyam now walked faster than I did, and I was puffed. Above MBC the terrain continued to be barren, with frost-brittled grass, rocks and boulders, and what was left of the day-before's snow. The stream was iced-over.

As you arrive at ABC, Annapurna South is on your left, and on your right is a ridge. The ridge overlooks a huge dark glacier-scoured strip perhaps a hundred metres or more wide and half that in depth. The Canadian's daughter hadn't died in Nepal, but hundreds of others have while attempting to summit its peaks. Many have died on Annapurna, and there are lots of cairns on the ridge. There's a more permanent monument there for Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian climber who died a nearly a decade ago trying to climb Annapurna I. The monument's plaque includes a lovely quote as his epitaph: "Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion".

But the Annapurna Sanctuary does resemble a stadium, arena, or amphitheatre, with its the panorama of snowcapped mountain against sky almost all around, only broken by the brown dirt of one hill, perhaps 20 of 360 degrees. We walked up along the ridge to where we could see the frozen glacial lake and a small waterfall of snow-melt, and then down across a depression where enough snow had settled that it made a satisfying crunch underfoot as we crossed.

After breakfast, we returned to MBC, where a centimetre of ice on top of the bathroom's water bucket made cleanliness an unnecessary luxury. We descended quickly as coming down from altitude gives a rush since your blood gets saturated with oxygen. Tea at Deorali, where a Victorian with fears for the integrity of her legs had remained behind while her group ascended. Late lunch at Dovan, where the threat of bad weather never eventuated. Through Bamboo in the late afternoon, where the lodge proprietress said "Stay".

I waved a hand at the sky and smiled "The day is still young", though to be honest, the day with its minor wrinkles concealed by fading light was not as young as I blithely suggested. We finally arrived at Sinuwa in the gloom of evening. It was perhaps far too long a day, but at Sinuwa there was electricity and really hot water.

Day 5: Sinuwa to Deorali (near Ghorepani)

It was another long day and the oxygen had worn off. From Far Sinuwa to Near Sinuwa and down to the bridge where Chhomrong was far more intimidating a climb up than it had been on our outward journey, we went. From Chhomrong our route was different to the way we'd come the first time. Instead of returning down to the river, we followed the hill round. An eagle hunted the skies. Something small, brown and sinuous with a white ruff around its face scampered out, looked up, and disappeared over the side of the trail. It was a thief of chickens and eggs, said Shyam, but not a snake killer, so it wasn't a mongoose. Maoist grafitti appeared on the occasional building.

The farms were scattered, the groups of tourists passing the other way were frequent. We left the farmland below us as the track climbed through forest. Shyam made a warning cry as we passed through, and a troupe of monkeys retreated watchfully. We skimmed through Tadapani at the top of the ridge - it's customary for those coming from Ghorepani to stop there, as there's quite a lot of uphills between the two - but we continued down to the bridge and then back up again. Halfway up the hill, another guide-cum-porter strode down the hill past us, his Sydneysider hobbling twenty paces behind. "I'm not a Nepali. I'm not a Nepali", she moaned.

Up to the hilltop with its pair of lodges, we travelled, and down to the base of the ravine where more lodges huddled, we trudged, and upstream past a small and rudimentary hydroelectric station and up stairs and up slopes, we travailed, and so we came at last to Deorali.

Day 6: Deorali to Ghorepani to Hille

"Deorali" means "pass", and there are (unsurprisingly) more than one of them in Nepal. In other words, this one was not the same village as the Deorali near MBC. One of the standard activities of the ABC trek is to climb Poon Hill before dawn so that you can watch the sun rise over lots of mountains, but it would have been near-impossible to reach Ghorepani on day 5, so we spent dawn on the lesser-known Gurung Hill Tower instead. Gurung Hill is above the lodges at Deorali, but is only 15 minutes' climb, rather than the hour that the top of Poon Hill takes in the dark from Ghorepani. The view is a touch different but you still see peaks in the Dhaulagiri range, Annapurnas South and I-IV, Machhapuchhre, Himalchuli, etc. It has an excellent vista on the eastern hemisphere; the view westward is blocked by a ridge.

After breakfast we left Deorali, climbing through rhododendron forests (supposedly lovely in March but flowerless now) and along the bamboo-lined ridge to a point above Ghorepani. Cloud covered the heights while we were there, so instead of climbing Poon Hill we just descended and headed through Ghorepani and along the trail to Nangathanti and Banthanti. From Banthanti, we had miles of the most painful stairs I've ever experienced to clamber down. Shyam had no trouble as he strode down them. I hobbled forty paces behind him, whimpering "I'm not a Nepali. I'm not a Nepali".

An hour from the bridge at the bottom of the hill (fifteen minutes under normal non-sheep-and-goat-herding-obstructed travel) we were in the aptly named village of Hille. For a village so close to towns, I was surprised that there was no electricity, but was told that a landslide earlier in the year had killed several people and wiped out buildings including the hydroelectric plant for the area. The government was unlikely to repair it while the Maoists had control over the area.

Day 7: Hille to Nayapol

An night's rest did wonders for my legs - I was back up to speed for the final hour and a half. At Nayapol we caught the bus for the two hour ride back to Pokhara. Miraculously it was an express service so an hour later we were back in Pokhara, and by midday we were at Camping Chowk in central Lakeside.

Verdict: Highly recommended guide, route, and tour company. Highly non-recommended schedule.