I'M AT: Viet Anh Hotel, Hanoi, a posh place with a computer in the room, one of the best beds I've ever slept in, and a strangely bland breakfast. Gelled minions open the doors as your jandals slap down the marble staircase. Class.
It's just like being in a pub back home - except there's no bar; no roof; no toilets; no TV; no pool table; and only one beer on tap. You perch on a seemingly made-for-infants plastic chair, screamingly coloured, and in turn perch your damp glass on a plastic table. Lights from motorbike headlights rush past whilst friendly cob salesmen grin manically whilst they rip you off.
There are no pumps and no cellar, either. Get a barrel of beer and serve it on the street, and you've got yourself a bia hoi joint. Bia hoi - "fresh beer" - is made in small local breweries, without chemicals, so it doesn't keep.
It costs 2000 dong for a glass - maybe 250ml, a bit less than half a pint. And there are 32,000 dong to the pound. It's much cheaper than water.
Ha Noi is a low-rise, chaotic place where life is lived on the narrow streets. Women carry a yoke on their shoulders with two evenly-filled baskets swinging below. Some of them dole out mangoes, bananas, rambutans; some collect rubbish, glass and plastic, to sell for scrap; and some of them carry their kitchen. They bend the knee, drop the yoke, whip out a burner, heat the broth, cut the herbs, cook the meat, and serve delicious - really great - food, in china bowls. Bun cha is a bowl of soup with cucumber and carrots diced into it into which you curve a chopstick full of mint, grilled pork, half a spring roll, rice noodles, garlic and chilli. Swish it around, it's glorious.
The other defining feature of Ha Noi are the bikes - a real river of metal. The Vietnamese are sharp, very clued up, and you wonder how much of this is due to the mental effort involved in constantly judging the fine distances needed to move past their cityfolk without peril.
Perhaps, though, at these prices, they're all just too drunk to care.
Monday 30 July 2007
Monday 2 July 2007
LAOS: Fresh taste of happiness
I'M AT Riverside Hotel, Ventiane - utmost luxury for $16 a night; Thavisouk Bungalows, Vang Vieng, which was $8 a night for fan-cooled, slightly damp place with an absolutely stunning view of the Nam (river) Song and surrounding cloudy peaks; and Muang Long Riverside, Luang Prabang, next to the Mekong, hot mahogany with its own tiled balcony and a dangerously young owner who shared a beer with us and taught me 'cheers' in Laos - "ylok ylok."
The first thing I noticed about Laos hotels was the explicit and lengthy warning about what you can and can't do in the room. No entertaining guests, cooking on the bed, or lighting your own fire.
The second was a curfew - door shut and lights out at 11.00pm. This, I thought, is not Bangkok.
Ventiane is a small city, the capital of Laos, and BeerLao is brewed here, in a semi-derelict shack 13 kilometres up the motorway. We made it to the brewery at 4pm, in time to hear the hooter go off, see beaming faces carrying discounted crates home for tea. The kind PR woman told us that the tours were well finished, but in any case gave us each a free Beerlao as the security guy sat, spat, and looked us over.
BeerLao is omnipresent, majority-owned by the Government, with a 98% market share. The yellow, green and red banners are just everywhere - they, like seemingly no other business, have paid for countless businesses, guesthouses and restaurants to have an illuminated sign outside, so their monopoly illuminates on every street in every town. Beerlao's current slogan is "Fresh Taste of Happiness", underneath a shining bottle gleaming against fields of yellow wheat. Found out today that most of the villagers in rural Laos - the vast majority of the population - brew their own rice whisky, which costs them next to nothing and slays them at 50% plus. Potent homebrew versus expensive 5% lager....this is what their marketing geezer is up against. He must, though, be a happy man watching all the tourists pay good money to freely advertise his brew on their bright t-shirts. I've paid, oh yes.
So, Ventiane contains a few other sights, none of which we had time for. Priorities.
The bus to Vang Vieng took 7 hours, and cost 25,000 kip ($2.50). Our stop there was really just to break the journey to Luang Prabang, which was another five hours up Route 13. Vang Vieng is billed in the Book as a touristy nightmare with TV bars dancing before the eyes like drunken sirens. In fact, it's a paradise - set in a valley and surrounded by high, beautiful limestone peaks.
We got a hotel outside of the main drag and spent two days of blissful peace there, eating by the river, walking past cows and chickens, through the smoke of heavy pots, and biking to a triangle of caves on a nearby island. Our caving trip was led by a game ten-year-old and really, this sort of thing would be certified and safety-checked in a more developed land - the torches were rubbish and without any prior warning we ended up neck-deep in freezing water and bouncing off dark shards on a 3km walk into a dark, slippery cave. The guide's English was limited to 'this, cave', 'watch your head!' and 'now, you tip guide.' Good fun, entirely unexpected, and worth the bone-steaming rain that soaked us on the way.
3km outside Vang Vieng is an organic farm, with its own cafe in town. They do a cracking mulberryleaf tea there. Sometimes I wonder if travel's softened me up.
From Vang Vieng we got the VIP bus to Luang Prabang. The Laos VIP buses are nothing like the Thai equivalent - they're just local buses with "VIP" crudely stencilled onto the windscreen whose only advantage is a fixed departure time, and whose great disadvantage is that you're travelling solely with other tourists - the VIP is a couple of dollars more than the local bus - so it's not so much fun. The bloody bus broke down on a high mountain pass, hot gearbox shattered on the tarmac, and we had to blag onto the local bus anyway, so it was a bit of a waste of time.
Luang Prabang is probably the most-visited place in Laos - it's a destination, rather than, like Ventiane, a necessity. The place is tiny - roads parallel the Mekong, and all of the signs are written with black ink, in the same font, on wooden signs, like the bars in Siena, or the shops on Regent Street. It's posh, for Laos, dead posh. Unfortunately this also means that it sees a lot of tourists, so parts of it are virtual tourist ghettoes, and the market is pretty overpriced, geared entirely to falang. We spent a few relaxing days, doing little, visited vats (Buddhist temples), the old Royal Palace - I layed out 50 bucks on a book by a German photographer, assigned to cover a Buddhist retreat. Beautiful pictures and a Good Thing.
Now, you have two choices in Luang Prabang - head East, in relative calm, to Phonsovan, to visit the Plain of Jars; or head North, towards Udomxay, to visit God knows what, where the buses are teased by the slightest slope, and rains tear tarmac from the mellow, cow-choked lane that runs for 400km and is the only route through the mountains. It's do or die. We chose the latter.
The first thing I noticed about Laos hotels was the explicit and lengthy warning about what you can and can't do in the room. No entertaining guests, cooking on the bed, or lighting your own fire.
The second was a curfew - door shut and lights out at 11.00pm. This, I thought, is not Bangkok.
Ventiane is a small city, the capital of Laos, and BeerLao is brewed here, in a semi-derelict shack 13 kilometres up the motorway. We made it to the brewery at 4pm, in time to hear the hooter go off, see beaming faces carrying discounted crates home for tea. The kind PR woman told us that the tours were well finished, but in any case gave us each a free Beerlao as the security guy sat, spat, and looked us over.
BeerLao is omnipresent, majority-owned by the Government, with a 98% market share. The yellow, green and red banners are just everywhere - they, like seemingly no other business, have paid for countless businesses, guesthouses and restaurants to have an illuminated sign outside, so their monopoly illuminates on every street in every town. Beerlao's current slogan is "Fresh Taste of Happiness", underneath a shining bottle gleaming against fields of yellow wheat. Found out today that most of the villagers in rural Laos - the vast majority of the population - brew their own rice whisky, which costs them next to nothing and slays them at 50% plus. Potent homebrew versus expensive 5% lager....this is what their marketing geezer is up against. He must, though, be a happy man watching all the tourists pay good money to freely advertise his brew on their bright t-shirts. I've paid, oh yes.
So, Ventiane contains a few other sights, none of which we had time for. Priorities.
The bus to Vang Vieng took 7 hours, and cost 25,000 kip ($2.50). Our stop there was really just to break the journey to Luang Prabang, which was another five hours up Route 13. Vang Vieng is billed in the Book as a touristy nightmare with TV bars dancing before the eyes like drunken sirens. In fact, it's a paradise - set in a valley and surrounded by high, beautiful limestone peaks.
We got a hotel outside of the main drag and spent two days of blissful peace there, eating by the river, walking past cows and chickens, through the smoke of heavy pots, and biking to a triangle of caves on a nearby island. Our caving trip was led by a game ten-year-old and really, this sort of thing would be certified and safety-checked in a more developed land - the torches were rubbish and without any prior warning we ended up neck-deep in freezing water and bouncing off dark shards on a 3km walk into a dark, slippery cave. The guide's English was limited to 'this, cave', 'watch your head!' and 'now, you tip guide.' Good fun, entirely unexpected, and worth the bone-steaming rain that soaked us on the way.
3km outside Vang Vieng is an organic farm, with its own cafe in town. They do a cracking mulberryleaf tea there. Sometimes I wonder if travel's softened me up.
From Vang Vieng we got the VIP bus to Luang Prabang. The Laos VIP buses are nothing like the Thai equivalent - they're just local buses with "VIP" crudely stencilled onto the windscreen whose only advantage is a fixed departure time, and whose great disadvantage is that you're travelling solely with other tourists - the VIP is a couple of dollars more than the local bus - so it's not so much fun. The bloody bus broke down on a high mountain pass, hot gearbox shattered on the tarmac, and we had to blag onto the local bus anyway, so it was a bit of a waste of time.
Luang Prabang is probably the most-visited place in Laos - it's a destination, rather than, like Ventiane, a necessity. The place is tiny - roads parallel the Mekong, and all of the signs are written with black ink, in the same font, on wooden signs, like the bars in Siena, or the shops on Regent Street. It's posh, for Laos, dead posh. Unfortunately this also means that it sees a lot of tourists, so parts of it are virtual tourist ghettoes, and the market is pretty overpriced, geared entirely to falang. We spent a few relaxing days, doing little, visited vats (Buddhist temples), the old Royal Palace - I layed out 50 bucks on a book by a German photographer, assigned to cover a Buddhist retreat. Beautiful pictures and a Good Thing.
Now, you have two choices in Luang Prabang - head East, in relative calm, to Phonsovan, to visit the Plain of Jars; or head North, towards Udomxay, to visit God knows what, where the buses are teased by the slightest slope, and rains tear tarmac from the mellow, cow-choked lane that runs for 400km and is the only route through the mountains. It's do or die. We chose the latter.
Monday 9 April 2007
SINGAPORE: Tiger balm
I'M AT: Sky Orchids Hostel, about 30 seconds away from the tube, and any number of bowls of hot noodles. Spotless and cosy, for about a fiver a night.
Singapore's a rich, steaming soup of cultures, proudly co-existing. I was to find out just how proudly some people take their culture and traditions one boozy Saturday night.
Coming from Perth, it was just great to find a genuinely exciting place again - street markets, shops, gleaming tube stations, huge food courts, torrential rain, humidity, everything plastered with advertising. There's no real centre to the city; instead, it's a number of distinct ethnic districts linked together by huge shopping malls and wide, car-filled streets.
Little India was my favourite bit. I walked around on my first night, neon signs above, dirt below, spices in the air, loads of very dark-skinned blokes from Southern India sauntering around lazily, light shirts and leather sandals. I visited the CBD - massive skyscrapers arranged round the Singapore river - Chinatown, which I didn't enjoy too much (just souvenir stalls and too-cheap reflexology), Bugis Street Market (fantastic clothes to a gabba soundtrack), Kampung Glam, the muslim bit (a gold-roofed mosque, open-walled hawker centres where blokes sat on the floor and ate together, and countless rolls of sari material) and Orchard Road, which has twenty or so BIG air-conditioned shopping malls, teeming with people on a buzzy Sunday. Looked at a few cameras, the prices 50% and 70% cheaper than back home.
Anyway, the Saturday night. Claudia, from Austria, had suggested we go out, so we gathered round the table at 7pm and had a few beers. Freddie, the hostel owner, dragged us out to a nearby bar, where we each paid 20 dollars to get four bottles of Tiger. Freddie was a Chinese guy, he'd been drinking during the afternoon. As we talked, he laughed, but gradually became a bit more incoherent. This is how it looks, I thought. He was upset earlier when a Swedish girl had asked to use his office phone, and had taken the piss a bit. Her mate was turning up later and didn't know the directions, and she took far too long. It is his business, after all, and this was a Saturday night, so he could reasonably expect some bookings. Anyway, he complained about them to us, as we sat round the red formica. He said he would fuck them down, throw them out. He said he used to be an army commander, and despite being out of shape, was big for a Chinese bloke, with a large blue centipede tattooed up his right arm. Freddie moaned and whinged and the three of us didn't know really what he was on about. Anyway, not one to back down, I just questioned him about what he was saying, as he'd lost us.
And then he turned on me.
He said he'd fuck ME down. Throw me out the next day. As he became angrier, his English mixed with his 'local language'. Fuck you down. I asked him what I'd done. Fuck me down, he said. The German girl we were with, Annete was very diplomatic, a peacemaker. We're all friends, no-one's insulting you. But just on and on - you, tomorrow, go. I went for piss, my own diplomatic move, which involved walking through the hot kitchen and into a small cubicle with a hole in the floor. Came back and he was still vexed. So we decided to leave him be, to go out on the town (where we hit a Latino bar, I left 35 dollars in change behind, which I only found out after we were practically back at the hostel, in a taxi, so we went back to the Latino bar, complained bitterly, and I finally got my dough, then another taxi home) and on the way out I nipped back to the hostel, packed my stuff, in case he went crazy and threw it all into the street. When we got back, he was long asleep, and my stuff was all still there.
I woke pretty early the next morning. And went for a piss. Saw Freddie mopping the floor, he was pasty and sweating heavily. I touched him on the shoulder - "OK?" - he smiled at me with his crooked, toothy gob - "OK". And nothing more was said about it. He asked us out again that night.
Singapore's a rich, steaming soup of cultures, proudly co-existing. I was to find out just how proudly some people take their culture and traditions one boozy Saturday night.
Coming from Perth, it was just great to find a genuinely exciting place again - street markets, shops, gleaming tube stations, huge food courts, torrential rain, humidity, everything plastered with advertising. There's no real centre to the city; instead, it's a number of distinct ethnic districts linked together by huge shopping malls and wide, car-filled streets.
Little India was my favourite bit. I walked around on my first night, neon signs above, dirt below, spices in the air, loads of very dark-skinned blokes from Southern India sauntering around lazily, light shirts and leather sandals. I visited the CBD - massive skyscrapers arranged round the Singapore river - Chinatown, which I didn't enjoy too much (just souvenir stalls and too-cheap reflexology), Bugis Street Market (fantastic clothes to a gabba soundtrack), Kampung Glam, the muslim bit (a gold-roofed mosque, open-walled hawker centres where blokes sat on the floor and ate together, and countless rolls of sari material) and Orchard Road, which has twenty or so BIG air-conditioned shopping malls, teeming with people on a buzzy Sunday. Looked at a few cameras, the prices 50% and 70% cheaper than back home.
Anyway, the Saturday night. Claudia, from Austria, had suggested we go out, so we gathered round the table at 7pm and had a few beers. Freddie, the hostel owner, dragged us out to a nearby bar, where we each paid 20 dollars to get four bottles of Tiger. Freddie was a Chinese guy, he'd been drinking during the afternoon. As we talked, he laughed, but gradually became a bit more incoherent. This is how it looks, I thought. He was upset earlier when a Swedish girl had asked to use his office phone, and had taken the piss a bit. Her mate was turning up later and didn't know the directions, and she took far too long. It is his business, after all, and this was a Saturday night, so he could reasonably expect some bookings. Anyway, he complained about them to us, as we sat round the red formica. He said he would fuck them down, throw them out. He said he used to be an army commander, and despite being out of shape, was big for a Chinese bloke, with a large blue centipede tattooed up his right arm. Freddie moaned and whinged and the three of us didn't know really what he was on about. Anyway, not one to back down, I just questioned him about what he was saying, as he'd lost us.
And then he turned on me.
He said he'd fuck ME down. Throw me out the next day. As he became angrier, his English mixed with his 'local language'. Fuck you down. I asked him what I'd done. Fuck me down, he said. The German girl we were with, Annete was very diplomatic, a peacemaker. We're all friends, no-one's insulting you. But just on and on - you, tomorrow, go. I went for piss, my own diplomatic move, which involved walking through the hot kitchen and into a small cubicle with a hole in the floor. Came back and he was still vexed. So we decided to leave him be, to go out on the town (where we hit a Latino bar, I left 35 dollars in change behind, which I only found out after we were practically back at the hostel, in a taxi, so we went back to the Latino bar, complained bitterly, and I finally got my dough, then another taxi home) and on the way out I nipped back to the hostel, packed my stuff, in case he went crazy and threw it all into the street. When we got back, he was long asleep, and my stuff was all still there.
I woke pretty early the next morning. And went for a piss. Saw Freddie mopping the floor, he was pasty and sweating heavily. I touched him on the shoulder - "OK?" - he smiled at me with his crooked, toothy gob - "OK". And nothing more was said about it. He asked us out again that night.
Saturday 10 March 2007
AUSTRALIA: 33 is a good age to dance on the roof of a jeep for the first time
I'M AT: A swag on the red, rusty sand of outback South Australia and the Northern Territory. A swag is a canvas sack with a mattress inside it and a thick waterproof bottom layer, into which you can easily slip a body, a sleeping bag, and a fly net.
On the 5th of March I took a trip with a company called Heading Bush. The trip billed itself as a 4WD safari from Adelaide to Alice Springs, going 'where the other companies can't'. I can't fault them on this - at times we were so remote that there wasn't even another vehicle for hundreds of kilometres, let alone a shop, or a coachload of coiffuered Americans.
The 8th of March was to be my 33rd birthday.
The trip took you along the old Ghan railway, which was named after the Afghan traders who first travelled the route from Adelaide to Darwin, using camels. Their camels jumped on each other's high backs an awful lot, and there are now estimated to be 200,000 roaming wild through the hot red desert. The anticipated highlight was Uluru, Ayer's Rock, which we reached on day six, but as it turned out this was far from the best thing about the trip.
This trip defies chronological record, and for one thing I've sent my map home so am not quite sure where we were at any one time. So...
THE PEOPLE
Ten days is a long time to be stuck in the back of a 4WD, sitting with your knees together and facing people who you might potentially detest. But they couldn't have been nicer. Brian, from Denmark, was my close mate for the trip - we drank together, set the fire, hiked the hikes, washed up. He was the only guy on the trip with whom I broke the cardinal taboo of discussing the other members of the trip. Piotr was a Polish guy whose English, demeanour and humour all improved as the trip continued - a very happy guy with a heart of gold. Sofia was the firestarter, a spark of life, Swedish, she also celebrated her birthday on the trip, three days after me. She bought me some sweets and I bought her some vodka. Marion, or Claudia, became Sofia's mate, and was a charming German girl who smiled and laughed a lot. Jasmin was an enthusiastic, charming, deep-thinking Austrian, who was increasingly interested in the wildlife and the countryside, and spent much time with Steve, our driver and guide. Gloria was Canadian and didnt change her t-shirt for the whole trip, nor take off her hat. To find that she was actually quite beautiful underneath that hat, as we sat in a bar together on the last night, and after a change of clothes, was a revelation. Bella and Sammy were mum and son, Germans. Bella had a very dry sense of humour and a constantly sharp perspective. Sammy played his didgeridoo a lot and annoyed people a bit when we played cards.
THE DRIVER AND GUIDE
Steve was an absolute enigma, a very complex guy. 54, born in Oodnadatta (baking hot, red sand, middle of nowehere), he was fascinating to talk to about practically any subject. He was a trained biologist and worked for the South Australia museum. He'd also been a teacher, had a son of nine years by a Portugese mother, spoke Spanish, had a wide range of great and unheard music. But he could also be stressed, pompous, pedantic, and distant. I liked him a lot.
Steve had some very bad luck on the trip. The night before we visited Uluru - which involved a 4AM start, in time for the sunrise - we'd been celebrating Sofia's birthday (terrific photo of Steve and Sofia). Steve had told us that the resort from which we accessed Uluru, Yulara, was very strict, with odd laws, especially about alcohol sales. So it was no surprise to see cops at the entrance to the Uluru National Park. What was more surprising was the fact that our jeep got stopped by the cops. And Steve was breathalysed. He failed once, so tried again. He'd drunk a fair bit of rum, and it was early morning. so he failed the second test. He got out of the jeep and a fat Aussie copper got in, and told us that he was going to have to take us back to Yulara, and that Steve would be taken to the station.
This meant no sunrise at Uluru for us, but far worse consequences for Steve.
I found out a couple of weeks later that not only had lost his licence, but that he'd been fired. He spoke at the start of the trip that this would be his last time, anyway. What at the time seemed like over-zealous policing is a sensible policy, of course, but it just felt heavy-handed, as the roads were clogged with coaches and jeeps all going the same way, to see the sunrise, so there was practically no chance of speeding, or causing harm. Eeeeeeso.
THE LANDSCAPES AND ECOSYSTEMS OF THE OUTBACK
The outback is a geniunely fascinating, beautiful, delicate and moving environment. My ignorance had anticipated a vast desert with pretty much nothing in it, but this was far from the case. We saw reptiles and snakes: goannas, thorny devils, perenties (snakelike and about 2 metres long), bearded lizards, a shingleback skink, a Western Brown snake which had been fatally wounded by another vehicle - Steve picked it up by the tail and it just went for him again, and again - this is a very dangerous animal. Birds - stupid emus, wedge-tailed eagles, bush pigeons, crows, magpies, finches, farm chickens. Mammals and marsupials - red kangaroos, stocky Euro roos, rock wallabies hiding in the stone, camels, wild horses, wild donkeys looking a damn sight healthier than their domesticated cousins - buffalo, cattle, sheep, goats. Insects and spiders - stick insects, crickets, moths, butterflies, big deadly spiders, harmless spiders called trapdoors, scorpions, centipedes, huge ants, termites. And these beasts inhabit a harsh, hot environment. Their behaviour tends to be dictated by the climate, so when it rains - and it rained more than I'd anticipate - the spiders come out and hunt on the ground to catch crickets, the crickets come out to hunt midges, and the floor teems with life.
***This is not the end of the description but just an interlude. Will write more later, particularly about my birthday, and the jeep thing...***
On the 5th of March I took a trip with a company called Heading Bush. The trip billed itself as a 4WD safari from Adelaide to Alice Springs, going 'where the other companies can't'. I can't fault them on this - at times we were so remote that there wasn't even another vehicle for hundreds of kilometres, let alone a shop, or a coachload of coiffuered Americans.
The 8th of March was to be my 33rd birthday.
The trip took you along the old Ghan railway, which was named after the Afghan traders who first travelled the route from Adelaide to Darwin, using camels. Their camels jumped on each other's high backs an awful lot, and there are now estimated to be 200,000 roaming wild through the hot red desert. The anticipated highlight was Uluru, Ayer's Rock, which we reached on day six, but as it turned out this was far from the best thing about the trip.
This trip defies chronological record, and for one thing I've sent my map home so am not quite sure where we were at any one time. So...
THE PEOPLE
Ten days is a long time to be stuck in the back of a 4WD, sitting with your knees together and facing people who you might potentially detest. But they couldn't have been nicer. Brian, from Denmark, was my close mate for the trip - we drank together, set the fire, hiked the hikes, washed up. He was the only guy on the trip with whom I broke the cardinal taboo of discussing the other members of the trip. Piotr was a Polish guy whose English, demeanour and humour all improved as the trip continued - a very happy guy with a heart of gold. Sofia was the firestarter, a spark of life, Swedish, she also celebrated her birthday on the trip, three days after me. She bought me some sweets and I bought her some vodka. Marion, or Claudia, became Sofia's mate, and was a charming German girl who smiled and laughed a lot. Jasmin was an enthusiastic, charming, deep-thinking Austrian, who was increasingly interested in the wildlife and the countryside, and spent much time with Steve, our driver and guide. Gloria was Canadian and didnt change her t-shirt for the whole trip, nor take off her hat. To find that she was actually quite beautiful underneath that hat, as we sat in a bar together on the last night, and after a change of clothes, was a revelation. Bella and Sammy were mum and son, Germans. Bella had a very dry sense of humour and a constantly sharp perspective. Sammy played his didgeridoo a lot and annoyed people a bit when we played cards.
THE DRIVER AND GUIDE
Steve was an absolute enigma, a very complex guy. 54, born in Oodnadatta (baking hot, red sand, middle of nowehere), he was fascinating to talk to about practically any subject. He was a trained biologist and worked for the South Australia museum. He'd also been a teacher, had a son of nine years by a Portugese mother, spoke Spanish, had a wide range of great and unheard music. But he could also be stressed, pompous, pedantic, and distant. I liked him a lot.
Steve had some very bad luck on the trip. The night before we visited Uluru - which involved a 4AM start, in time for the sunrise - we'd been celebrating Sofia's birthday (terrific photo of Steve and Sofia). Steve had told us that the resort from which we accessed Uluru, Yulara, was very strict, with odd laws, especially about alcohol sales. So it was no surprise to see cops at the entrance to the Uluru National Park. What was more surprising was the fact that our jeep got stopped by the cops. And Steve was breathalysed. He failed once, so tried again. He'd drunk a fair bit of rum, and it was early morning. so he failed the second test. He got out of the jeep and a fat Aussie copper got in, and told us that he was going to have to take us back to Yulara, and that Steve would be taken to the station.
This meant no sunrise at Uluru for us, but far worse consequences for Steve.
I found out a couple of weeks later that not only had lost his licence, but that he'd been fired. He spoke at the start of the trip that this would be his last time, anyway. What at the time seemed like over-zealous policing is a sensible policy, of course, but it just felt heavy-handed, as the roads were clogged with coaches and jeeps all going the same way, to see the sunrise, so there was practically no chance of speeding, or causing harm. Eeeeeeso.
THE LANDSCAPES AND ECOSYSTEMS OF THE OUTBACK
The outback is a geniunely fascinating, beautiful, delicate and moving environment. My ignorance had anticipated a vast desert with pretty much nothing in it, but this was far from the case. We saw reptiles and snakes: goannas, thorny devils, perenties (snakelike and about 2 metres long), bearded lizards, a shingleback skink, a Western Brown snake which had been fatally wounded by another vehicle - Steve picked it up by the tail and it just went for him again, and again - this is a very dangerous animal. Birds - stupid emus, wedge-tailed eagles, bush pigeons, crows, magpies, finches, farm chickens. Mammals and marsupials - red kangaroos, stocky Euro roos, rock wallabies hiding in the stone, camels, wild horses, wild donkeys looking a damn sight healthier than their domesticated cousins - buffalo, cattle, sheep, goats. Insects and spiders - stick insects, crickets, moths, butterflies, big deadly spiders, harmless spiders called trapdoors, scorpions, centipedes, huge ants, termites. And these beasts inhabit a harsh, hot environment. Their behaviour tends to be dictated by the climate, so when it rains - and it rained more than I'd anticipate - the spiders come out and hunt on the ground to catch crickets, the crickets come out to hunt midges, and the floor teems with life.
***This is not the end of the description but just an interlude. Will write more later, particularly about my birthday, and the jeep thing...***
Monday 26 February 2007
AUSTRALIA: Beautiful Tasmania
I'M AT: Tasman Backpackers, Devonport, where I lasted just one match in the pool competition - OK and absolutely teeming with carrot-pickers; Cosy Cabins YHA, spotless and set in the bush, surrounded by wallabies and possums; and Launceston Backpackers, where the seriously wearying sarcasm of the manager failed to take the sparkle off of what was a pretty decent place; a tent on the Freycinet Peninsula; and a hostel in Hobart that I fail to remember...it was pretty forgettable.
I didn't know what to expect of Tasmania as the ferry pulled into Devonport.
It had taken me ten hours by boat to get there from Melbourne. The Spirit of Tasmania II was full of beardy old men and their pencil-thin wives. One of the gents I spoke to had a sick wife, basically an invalid, and he'd come here with friends, leaving her at home to give them both a break from the intense caring. He tucked into his ship-boiled hotdog.
The journey passed uneventfully via a mushy lunch and a couple of nice, fruity Cascade beers - brewed in Tasmania - and then we arrived. From the deck it looked like half the town had turned out to greet us. The next day I figured out it was actually all the tourists in the town that had turned out, for there really is nothing to do in Devonport.
I had ten days in Tassie, and it took me almost all of one of them to get my head round the fact that Tasmania's public transport is sparse, to say the least. Infrequent scheduling - the companies make most of their money doing school runs, so it's very tricky getting buses at the weekend - meant I'd have to stay longer than I wanted to in each of the three towns I'd visit, Devonport, Launceston and Hobart, and less time in the National Parks, which was where I really wanted to be.
Getting all the bus connections to work was like a Krypton Factor-type logic problem. I had to ask the squint-eyed woman in the visitor office to verify that I hadn't been maddened by timetables, but in fact she was full of good advice and booked it all for me. Should have gone straight there, really. She said she was jealous of my trip, and I told her to chuck it all in and join me. She squinted back at me.
So, my time in Devonport sank without trace, and I happily hopped onto the Tassielink bus from there to Cradle Village, which is just a few kilometres from the entrance to Cradle Mountain National Park, an alpine glory full of peaks and tarns and lakes and cairns. it's here that the Overland Track starts (it finishes in Lake St Clair National Park, 80km away) but I'd already decided I couldn't be arsed to carry six days worth of food and camping stuff on my back, so opted for day walks.
Cradle Mountain's a great place to be. The parks folk put on a free shuttle bus, operating twelve hours each day, which takes you to various huts and centres in the park. You can walk as little or as much as you want. I went for much. So on day one, I got the bus to the Visitor Centre inside the park and stomped along a 9km boardwalk through she-oak and eucalyptus forests, at the end of which I got my first sight of the Cradle Mountain range, jutting menacingly. I also walked round Dove Lake, which was very popular - overloaded with folk, really. But understandably so. You can drive to the car park and instantly relax into a scene of great beauty. It's a popular place.
I got the bus back after about five hours walking, and it was then that I saw the fire marshals, checking out the evacuation plans of the place I was staying. Mount Remus was burning and the village was under threat. It was all pretty worrying, moreso when you spend a couple of days in a place and get to appreciate the friendliness of the park and hostel staff. Their livelihoods are at risk. On the day I left, the fire was burning so badly that most of the longer walks in the park were closed, including the walk I did just the day before, on day two - up Cradle Mountain itself.
Day two started fairly early, with an 8AM bus to Ronny Creek. From here, a decent track took me up to Crater Lake and to Marion's Lookout, at about a thousand metres, from where you could see all the vast ripples of land, with water sitting in the folds. I got to Kitchen Hut at 11AM and started the climb up Cradle Mountain, which is steep, and had me and loads of others pausing for breath and dragging ourselves across massive boulders, squinting in the sun to try and follow the daubed red paint showing us the way. It's just like being on the beach, I told myself, just like climbing rocks on the beach. But of course it wasn't. So, pretty freaked, and sweating, I arrived at the summit, failed to enjoy it up there, and hurried back down.
It was only on the Face Track, which skirts the bottom of the mountains, that I really got into it. The views down into deep blue lakes, across dry forests, were dramatic, and the path ground its way up and down over itchy rock. I saw my first snake - and shortly after, my second - on this bit of the walk, which was pretty overgrown. Turned out they were Tiger snakes, which, like the other two snakes on Tasmania, are deeply venomous, only moreso. They lived up to their reputation as being shy, though, and made for the leaves as I strode on.
And then, via the Twisted Lakes and over Mount Hudson, next to Hudson Lake, the walk was done, at Lake Dove car park, it had taken about six hours - very beautiful. That night I cooked pasta in the secret kitchen I found, in another building, which was handy as ours had been overrun by a tour group.
So, with news that the Cradle Mountain Summit track had now been closed, and feeling for the Geordie bloke I'd given my map to the night before, who was so eager to get up the thing, I left the place and journeyed to Launceston, which has one big natural attraction - Cataract Gorge. I went to the Gorge twice - the second time at dusk, where it had turned from the idyllic swimming-hole paradise that it had been during the day, into a dervish of bugs and drunks - and then spent the next day doing laundry and sitting in the park reading, watched the macaques in their enclosure, just one of the lazy days you can't avoid.
I had reason to save my energy, though, because a 30km overnight trip round the Freycinet Peninsula was next. The Freycinet droops like a drop of wax off of the East Coast of Tasmania, and is home to Wineglass Bay, which to me looked as though it had been lifted from a St Lucia tourist brochure, so golden and gorgeous it seemed.
Tassielink picked me and the inevitable German couple (German tourists are as numerous as Brits in Australia and when you meet them speak with the same weariness at constantly meeting their own countryfolk, despite being thousands of miles from home) from the station and ferried us, under grey skies with drizzle promised, to the Coles Bay Turnoff. From here we jumped into a small air-conditioned thing and went to Coles Bay itself. I'd planned on getting a 3pm shuttle into the park, giving me a few hours to dump my gear and hire camping equipment to take with me - but as it happened, they gave me a life much earlier, so I had more time to hike. They didn't charge me, either. Good people.
The first day, then, takes about four hours to get to the Cooks Beach campsite. From grey came shine and it was in glorious colour that I hit Hazards Beach, the first taste of this beautiful, beautiful place. Tanned bodies swam and I squinted to make out a gorgeous green island sitting a kilometre or so off the beach. I sat and ate a couple of pittas with a big grin on my face.
And from there I headed into a wilderness of bush, overgrown, thick with bark and tumble - saw two snakes, the second a much larger animal than I'd seen before. It was dark green, saw me approaching, stayed where it was and made a threatening gesture. For the first time, a snake had failed to take off like a scalded cat into the undergrowth. I waited, and sweated, and my heart pounded. It moved, so slowly, baqck across the path, facing me for a time, and then into the undergrowth on my left. Walking past, I could imagine it just feet from my bare legs. In there. Flicking its tongue at the human.
It left me alone, and I walked without taking my eyes off the path, onward to Cooks Beach - past a group of three stoned Aussies, who were walking the opposite way. They offered me a toke but quite frankly I'm not the best at tent-erecting, and attempting it stoned, using unfamiliar gear, just didn't appeal. I could easily see myself spending the first two hours at the campsite looking at the instructions dreamily. Maybe eating a a fork or two of pasta. Gazing at the stuff again. Wondering if I needed a piss or not. Getting stuff out, getting it wrong, panicking, nightfall - death. So I turned them down.
As it was, it was simplicity itself, so I settled in, had a wine, walked out to look down the empty beach, saw clouds over the sunset, went back into my sanctuary, put the stereo on, ate my cold dinner and slept, huge ants walking over the inner sheet. There was a heavy storm, casting pink lightning into the night air, but by and large it stayed where it was, across the foaming ocean, and we just had a light shower. In the morning it was calm as I ate a gentle breakfast, listening to the frupp frupp frupp of the resident wallaby's tongue as it licked rainwater off my flysheet, two small paws clawing gently at the fabric.
I didn't know what to expect of Tasmania as the ferry pulled into Devonport.
It had taken me ten hours by boat to get there from Melbourne. The Spirit of Tasmania II was full of beardy old men and their pencil-thin wives. One of the gents I spoke to had a sick wife, basically an invalid, and he'd come here with friends, leaving her at home to give them both a break from the intense caring. He tucked into his ship-boiled hotdog.
The journey passed uneventfully via a mushy lunch and a couple of nice, fruity Cascade beers - brewed in Tasmania - and then we arrived. From the deck it looked like half the town had turned out to greet us. The next day I figured out it was actually all the tourists in the town that had turned out, for there really is nothing to do in Devonport.
I had ten days in Tassie, and it took me almost all of one of them to get my head round the fact that Tasmania's public transport is sparse, to say the least. Infrequent scheduling - the companies make most of their money doing school runs, so it's very tricky getting buses at the weekend - meant I'd have to stay longer than I wanted to in each of the three towns I'd visit, Devonport, Launceston and Hobart, and less time in the National Parks, which was where I really wanted to be.
Getting all the bus connections to work was like a Krypton Factor-type logic problem. I had to ask the squint-eyed woman in the visitor office to verify that I hadn't been maddened by timetables, but in fact she was full of good advice and booked it all for me. Should have gone straight there, really. She said she was jealous of my trip, and I told her to chuck it all in and join me. She squinted back at me.
So, my time in Devonport sank without trace, and I happily hopped onto the Tassielink bus from there to Cradle Village, which is just a few kilometres from the entrance to Cradle Mountain National Park, an alpine glory full of peaks and tarns and lakes and cairns. it's here that the Overland Track starts (it finishes in Lake St Clair National Park, 80km away) but I'd already decided I couldn't be arsed to carry six days worth of food and camping stuff on my back, so opted for day walks.
Cradle Mountain's a great place to be. The parks folk put on a free shuttle bus, operating twelve hours each day, which takes you to various huts and centres in the park. You can walk as little or as much as you want. I went for much. So on day one, I got the bus to the Visitor Centre inside the park and stomped along a 9km boardwalk through she-oak and eucalyptus forests, at the end of which I got my first sight of the Cradle Mountain range, jutting menacingly. I also walked round Dove Lake, which was very popular - overloaded with folk, really. But understandably so. You can drive to the car park and instantly relax into a scene of great beauty. It's a popular place.
I got the bus back after about five hours walking, and it was then that I saw the fire marshals, checking out the evacuation plans of the place I was staying. Mount Remus was burning and the village was under threat. It was all pretty worrying, moreso when you spend a couple of days in a place and get to appreciate the friendliness of the park and hostel staff. Their livelihoods are at risk. On the day I left, the fire was burning so badly that most of the longer walks in the park were closed, including the walk I did just the day before, on day two - up Cradle Mountain itself.
Day two started fairly early, with an 8AM bus to Ronny Creek. From here, a decent track took me up to Crater Lake and to Marion's Lookout, at about a thousand metres, from where you could see all the vast ripples of land, with water sitting in the folds. I got to Kitchen Hut at 11AM and started the climb up Cradle Mountain, which is steep, and had me and loads of others pausing for breath and dragging ourselves across massive boulders, squinting in the sun to try and follow the daubed red paint showing us the way. It's just like being on the beach, I told myself, just like climbing rocks on the beach. But of course it wasn't. So, pretty freaked, and sweating, I arrived at the summit, failed to enjoy it up there, and hurried back down.
It was only on the Face Track, which skirts the bottom of the mountains, that I really got into it. The views down into deep blue lakes, across dry forests, were dramatic, and the path ground its way up and down over itchy rock. I saw my first snake - and shortly after, my second - on this bit of the walk, which was pretty overgrown. Turned out they were Tiger snakes, which, like the other two snakes on Tasmania, are deeply venomous, only moreso. They lived up to their reputation as being shy, though, and made for the leaves as I strode on.
And then, via the Twisted Lakes and over Mount Hudson, next to Hudson Lake, the walk was done, at Lake Dove car park, it had taken about six hours - very beautiful. That night I cooked pasta in the secret kitchen I found, in another building, which was handy as ours had been overrun by a tour group.
So, with news that the Cradle Mountain Summit track had now been closed, and feeling for the Geordie bloke I'd given my map to the night before, who was so eager to get up the thing, I left the place and journeyed to Launceston, which has one big natural attraction - Cataract Gorge. I went to the Gorge twice - the second time at dusk, where it had turned from the idyllic swimming-hole paradise that it had been during the day, into a dervish of bugs and drunks - and then spent the next day doing laundry and sitting in the park reading, watched the macaques in their enclosure, just one of the lazy days you can't avoid.
I had reason to save my energy, though, because a 30km overnight trip round the Freycinet Peninsula was next. The Freycinet droops like a drop of wax off of the East Coast of Tasmania, and is home to Wineglass Bay, which to me looked as though it had been lifted from a St Lucia tourist brochure, so golden and gorgeous it seemed.
Tassielink picked me and the inevitable German couple (German tourists are as numerous as Brits in Australia and when you meet them speak with the same weariness at constantly meeting their own countryfolk, despite being thousands of miles from home) from the station and ferried us, under grey skies with drizzle promised, to the Coles Bay Turnoff. From here we jumped into a small air-conditioned thing and went to Coles Bay itself. I'd planned on getting a 3pm shuttle into the park, giving me a few hours to dump my gear and hire camping equipment to take with me - but as it happened, they gave me a life much earlier, so I had more time to hike. They didn't charge me, either. Good people.
The first day, then, takes about four hours to get to the Cooks Beach campsite. From grey came shine and it was in glorious colour that I hit Hazards Beach, the first taste of this beautiful, beautiful place. Tanned bodies swam and I squinted to make out a gorgeous green island sitting a kilometre or so off the beach. I sat and ate a couple of pittas with a big grin on my face.
And from there I headed into a wilderness of bush, overgrown, thick with bark and tumble - saw two snakes, the second a much larger animal than I'd seen before. It was dark green, saw me approaching, stayed where it was and made a threatening gesture. For the first time, a snake had failed to take off like a scalded cat into the undergrowth. I waited, and sweated, and my heart pounded. It moved, so slowly, baqck across the path, facing me for a time, and then into the undergrowth on my left. Walking past, I could imagine it just feet from my bare legs. In there. Flicking its tongue at the human.
It left me alone, and I walked without taking my eyes off the path, onward to Cooks Beach - past a group of three stoned Aussies, who were walking the opposite way. They offered me a toke but quite frankly I'm not the best at tent-erecting, and attempting it stoned, using unfamiliar gear, just didn't appeal. I could easily see myself spending the first two hours at the campsite looking at the instructions dreamily. Maybe eating a a fork or two of pasta. Gazing at the stuff again. Wondering if I needed a piss or not. Getting stuff out, getting it wrong, panicking, nightfall - death. So I turned them down.
As it was, it was simplicity itself, so I settled in, had a wine, walked out to look down the empty beach, saw clouds over the sunset, went back into my sanctuary, put the stereo on, ate my cold dinner and slept, huge ants walking over the inner sheet. There was a heavy storm, casting pink lightning into the night air, but by and large it stayed where it was, across the foaming ocean, and we just had a light shower. In the morning it was calm as I ate a gentle breakfast, listening to the frupp frupp frupp of the resident wallaby's tongue as it licked rainwater off my flysheet, two small paws clawing gently at the fabric.
Thursday 15 February 2007
AUSTRALIA: From Melbourne to Melbourne
I'M AT: Port Campbell YHA, a nice gaff with big rooms, good beds, barbeque area plagued with hungry flies.
The Great Ocean Road is pretty famous, I guess, one of the best drives in the world. Lacking transport, I had to decide which of the many tours I wanted to book onto. Many of them take you to Adelaide, which was where I wanted to go next, so this would have made sense. But there was something about Todd's brochure that intrigued me.
Ride Tours take you to the far end of the Great Ocean Road and drive back along it, over two days. This is unique, and to the group's smug satisfaction meant that we had most of the viewpoints, beaches and sights to ourselves, uncluttered by all the other tour groups, who start at the Melbourne end.
It's a great trip. Todd was brilliant, efficient and funny, relaxed, a brilliant bloke. Got to wish him all the best. www.ridetours.com.au And we saw loads of stuff - koalas sleeping in the trees; kangaroos bouncing across a manicured golf course; kangaroos again, in the bush; a sleeping emu - and this was all before we started on the actual road.
The Great Ocean Road was built by returning soldiers, much of it hacked out of the cliffs, as dynamite was impractical. It twists its way past limestone stacks, the most famous (although not the most beautiful) are the Twelve Apostles, and we had a really truly spectacular sunset whilst we were there. There are many other stacks and rock formations - London Bridge, Loch Ard Gorge, the Bay of Martyrs (were we swam in the cool blue ocean) and the Bay of Islands. It's a beautiful and relaxing trip, all the better for having an entertaining and knowledgeable bloke leading the tour. And we even, somehow, managed to do something very unusual for groups of backpackers - got truly hammered at a small pub in Port Campbell, from where I made a drunken phone call.
Great trip. I couldn't meet up with Kenny and Leonie and Liz and the rest of the group at the free Twenty20 game the following Sunday, though. Tasmania beckoned.
The Great Ocean Road is pretty famous, I guess, one of the best drives in the world. Lacking transport, I had to decide which of the many tours I wanted to book onto. Many of them take you to Adelaide, which was where I wanted to go next, so this would have made sense. But there was something about Todd's brochure that intrigued me.
Ride Tours take you to the far end of the Great Ocean Road and drive back along it, over two days. This is unique, and to the group's smug satisfaction meant that we had most of the viewpoints, beaches and sights to ourselves, uncluttered by all the other tour groups, who start at the Melbourne end.
It's a great trip. Todd was brilliant, efficient and funny, relaxed, a brilliant bloke. Got to wish him all the best. www.ridetours.com.au And we saw loads of stuff - koalas sleeping in the trees; kangaroos bouncing across a manicured golf course; kangaroos again, in the bush; a sleeping emu - and this was all before we started on the actual road.
The Great Ocean Road was built by returning soldiers, much of it hacked out of the cliffs, as dynamite was impractical. It twists its way past limestone stacks, the most famous (although not the most beautiful) are the Twelve Apostles, and we had a really truly spectacular sunset whilst we were there. There are many other stacks and rock formations - London Bridge, Loch Ard Gorge, the Bay of Martyrs (were we swam in the cool blue ocean) and the Bay of Islands. It's a beautiful and relaxing trip, all the better for having an entertaining and knowledgeable bloke leading the tour. And we even, somehow, managed to do something very unusual for groups of backpackers - got truly hammered at a small pub in Port Campbell, from where I made a drunken phone call.
Great trip. I couldn't meet up with Kenny and Leonie and Liz and the rest of the group at the free Twenty20 game the following Sunday, though. Tasmania beckoned.
Tuesday 13 February 2007
AUSTRALIA: Mucking about in Melbourne
I'M AT: Melbourne Connection, a strange place, friendly enough, but where the kitchen's closed at 10pm (so you can't get at your cold beers after a night at the cinema) and you're not apparently able to drink anyway, despite there not being an in-house bar or fridge with beers for sale. Apart from that, and the high turnover (much rustling in the mornings before check-out), it was OK.
You could get stuck in Melbourne for years on end, I'm sure, ligging from gig to flick to party to cup final.
In the few days I was there, I managed to see England beat Australia at cricket (a defeat from which, as I write, the Aussies still haven't recovered); go to a huge beach party in high winds, saw loads of rrrrrrrrawk bands hammering their fretboards; saw five films (Last King of Scotland, Volver, I'm Your Man, The Good Shepherd and Notes on a Scandal, all of which were pretty good - Scandal was beautifully evil, Last King was compelling. Good Shepherd was a bit slow.); ate at noodle bars and curry trucks and fast food courts and stuff; walked in the Dandenong ranges, and saw my first wild animal, an echidna, which lumbered past spinily; went to Melbourne Zoo, where unfortunately the alien tigers are given great prominence than the native platypi; and so on.
It's a place of high-rise, where trams rattle through the streets, cars are forced to do strange u-turns into red lights to turn right, where the river Yarra runs gently through, fit groups of rowers gouging a channel in the shape of the coxswain's call. The biggest casino in Australia is here. I didn't go.
And there seemed no reason to leave, until I saw my bank balance. Beers here are 6 or 7 dollars a pint - London Prices (three quid-ish) - and you can burn, burn, burn your cash without even really trying. The same amount would buy a bed and a good meal in Bolivia.
It was this madness that made me spend a further 150 dollars on a two-day tour that would bring me right back to where I started - albeit via the Great Oean Road.
You could get stuck in Melbourne for years on end, I'm sure, ligging from gig to flick to party to cup final.
In the few days I was there, I managed to see England beat Australia at cricket (a defeat from which, as I write, the Aussies still haven't recovered); go to a huge beach party in high winds, saw loads of rrrrrrrrawk bands hammering their fretboards; saw five films (Last King of Scotland, Volver, I'm Your Man, The Good Shepherd and Notes on a Scandal, all of which were pretty good - Scandal was beautifully evil, Last King was compelling. Good Shepherd was a bit slow.); ate at noodle bars and curry trucks and fast food courts and stuff; walked in the Dandenong ranges, and saw my first wild animal, an echidna, which lumbered past spinily; went to Melbourne Zoo, where unfortunately the alien tigers are given great prominence than the native platypi; and so on.
It's a place of high-rise, where trams rattle through the streets, cars are forced to do strange u-turns into red lights to turn right, where the river Yarra runs gently through, fit groups of rowers gouging a channel in the shape of the coxswain's call. The biggest casino in Australia is here. I didn't go.
And there seemed no reason to leave, until I saw my bank balance. Beers here are 6 or 7 dollars a pint - London Prices (three quid-ish) - and you can burn, burn, burn your cash without even really trying. The same amount would buy a bed and a good meal in Bolivia.
It was this madness that made me spend a further 150 dollars on a two-day tour that would bring me right back to where I started - albeit via the Great Oean Road.
Wednesday 7 February 2007
AUSTRALIA: Eng. (270) won by 14 runs
I"M AT: The Pink House, which is a place you should never go to should you need ask for a taxi to take you there, especially one driven by a large and glaringly heterosexual gentleman.
So, I'm in Sydney for just one full day, and I've done the touristy thing - walked round the Botanical Gardens to the Opera House - which is tiled, white and grey, and really scaly up close, but as mesmerising as it looks in the photos - walked round Farm Cove to Circular Quay, got a ferry out to North Shore then walked back over the Harbour Bridge, sat in a park for a bit, decided not to go into the Museum of Australia cos it was too expensive, walked to the Anzac Memorial and took pictures of a statue of an Unknown Soldier crucified by his own sword, made by a guy who served at the Somme, and then walked into Chinatown, where I am now, and where I intend to feed my face.
And later I'm going to Manly Beach for a walk, maybe in the rain, cos it's just started to thunder.
So what can I say so far other than there are millions of tourists here, it's very hot (much hotter than New Zealand), it's full of young fit folk, and there are skyscrapers and stuff. I'm sure you're thanking me right now for such insight.
I'm off to Melbourne tomorrow to watch England take on the Aussies, in the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which holds 120,000 people and will therefore be the largest stadium I've ever been to. It was the venue where England first played Australia in a Test match, too. And quite frankly I'm more excited than is healthy.
But it looked until last night that it'd be Aus v New Zealand, and in the last fortnight I've joked with the folk I've met that I'd be there as an honorary Kiwi for the day. Christ, I should imagine they'll be feeling ruined with disappointment right now. As chance would have it I was watching last night's decider in the Empire Bar, near the hostel, with a Kiwi, a bloke from Christchurch in fact, from where I'd just flown, and he couldn't have been any nicer. Even when, fuelled by Victoria Bitter, I started cheering at every dot ball.
Garry mate; I'm sorry. But it was a Pom with the ticket, so it's only right and proper that the Poms are, against the odds, playing. COME ON!
So, I'm in Sydney for just one full day, and I've done the touristy thing - walked round the Botanical Gardens to the Opera House - which is tiled, white and grey, and really scaly up close, but as mesmerising as it looks in the photos - walked round Farm Cove to Circular Quay, got a ferry out to North Shore then walked back over the Harbour Bridge, sat in a park for a bit, decided not to go into the Museum of Australia cos it was too expensive, walked to the Anzac Memorial and took pictures of a statue of an Unknown Soldier crucified by his own sword, made by a guy who served at the Somme, and then walked into Chinatown, where I am now, and where I intend to feed my face.
And later I'm going to Manly Beach for a walk, maybe in the rain, cos it's just started to thunder.
So what can I say so far other than there are millions of tourists here, it's very hot (much hotter than New Zealand), it's full of young fit folk, and there are skyscrapers and stuff. I'm sure you're thanking me right now for such insight.
I'm off to Melbourne tomorrow to watch England take on the Aussies, in the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which holds 120,000 people and will therefore be the largest stadium I've ever been to. It was the venue where England first played Australia in a Test match, too. And quite frankly I'm more excited than is healthy.
But it looked until last night that it'd be Aus v New Zealand, and in the last fortnight I've joked with the folk I've met that I'd be there as an honorary Kiwi for the day. Christ, I should imagine they'll be feeling ruined with disappointment right now. As chance would have it I was watching last night's decider in the Empire Bar, near the hostel, with a Kiwi, a bloke from Christchurch in fact, from where I'd just flown, and he couldn't have been any nicer. Even when, fuelled by Victoria Bitter, I started cheering at every dot ball.
Garry mate; I'm sorry. But it was a Pom with the ticket, so it's only right and proper that the Poms are, against the odds, playing. COME ON!
Friday 2 February 2007
NEW ZEALAND: Top five day hikes so far
1. LAGUNA 69 (6 hrs) - Huaraz, Peru 2. CERRO FITZ ROY (8 hrs) - El Chalten, Patagonia, Argentina 3. TORRES DEL PAINE, DAY ONE (8 hrs) - Parque Nacionál Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile 4. ROB ROY TRACK (3.5 hrs) - Wanaka, New Zealand 5. TONGARIRO CROSSING (6 hrs) - Tongariro National Park, New Zealand |
Wednesday 24 January 2007
NEW ZEALAND: The Luxmore Grunt
I'M AT: Te Anau YHA, replete with a real stroke of luck, as the room is just amazing, part of a shared house with its own garden, modern, beautiful and peaceful - AND the guy undercharged me, so I'm not paying any more than I would have done for a dusty dorm.
The Kepler Track is one of New Zealand's nine Great Walks.
The Great Walks pass spectacular scenery, but can get full up with trampers, meaning overnight accommodation is tricky to come by. This fact, combined with my unwillingness to drag a sleeping bag and stove up a thousand metres of mud and bracken, lead me to attempt just a one-day walk, via water taxi, up to Mount Luxmore.
The Kiwis here organise a couple of races each year - the Kepler Challenge, during which entrants race round the whole track in less than four hours (bear in mind that the DOC recommend taking several DAYS to do this hike); and the Luxmore Grunt, where competitors just race up to Mount Luxmore and back. It takes them under two hours. I've got pretty fit doing all this hiking, but it still took about six hours there and back, and we didn't quite get all the way up to the summit, as we ran out of time.
The only thing I can offer in defence of my pride is that the racers probably don't stop to take quite as many photos as me.
Anyway. A description. The first couple of hours is a steady, steep climb from Brod Bay beach, menaced by sandflies, up into a beech forest. From the branches hang delicate strands of Old Man's Beard, a lime-green moss that dangles in sharp contrast to the deeper green of the beech leaves. This kind of forest is typical of Southland, which is a Very Wet Place, covered in lush green from the pines and podocarps. The keas enjoy themselves, dancing amongst the trailmix that hikers leave behind. The Dept of Conservation (DOC) ensures that the track is uniformly excellent, scattering grey gravel over mud puddles, and building small bridges over torrential channels. I've developed a massive respect for the work of the DOC here. Fair play gentlemen!
So, after you emerge from the treeline, at a thousand metres or so, wiping sweat from the eyes, you're hit with previously-conceealed views of lakes Te Anau and Manapouri, deep pools of blue. Boats touring the lakes look absolutely tiny, rippling the reflections of the massive Kepler Mountain Range with their shimmering wakes. And you cross the alpine landscape, mercifully level, to reach Luxmore Hut, where sweet water drips from chrome taps.
A side trip - and the hardest bit of the Grunt, I should imagine - takes you to the summit of the Mount, about four hundred metres higher than the hut. And whilst this isn't high enough for the altitude to affect you, your ears pop, and your eyes pop, and your legs snap, and your lens crackles. And you thank God that you bought the same wide-angled camera to replace the one you lost in Nelson, as it eats views of the blue-black mountains.
From there, it's down, down, down, back to the flying devils of the beach, back through the forest which, strangely, seems to take longer on the way back, even though you're coasting by now, and bounding down, tops of the thighs burning.
On the way back, the proud and friendly guy driving the water taxi told us in friendly detail all about the races, and it was easy to ignore the moss-like hairs tumbling out of his friendly snout. And then he offered to ferry us back for free the next day, at the same time, if we wanted to go to the beach for the afternoon, as I guess we seemed friendly to him, too.
But today, the thought of walking on tired legs drove me instead to sit down in here and limit the punishment only to the tips of my typing fingers.
The Kepler Track is one of New Zealand's nine Great Walks.
The Great Walks pass spectacular scenery, but can get full up with trampers, meaning overnight accommodation is tricky to come by. This fact, combined with my unwillingness to drag a sleeping bag and stove up a thousand metres of mud and bracken, lead me to attempt just a one-day walk, via water taxi, up to Mount Luxmore.
The Kiwis here organise a couple of races each year - the Kepler Challenge, during which entrants race round the whole track in less than four hours (bear in mind that the DOC recommend taking several DAYS to do this hike); and the Luxmore Grunt, where competitors just race up to Mount Luxmore and back. It takes them under two hours. I've got pretty fit doing all this hiking, but it still took about six hours there and back, and we didn't quite get all the way up to the summit, as we ran out of time.
The only thing I can offer in defence of my pride is that the racers probably don't stop to take quite as many photos as me.
Anyway. A description. The first couple of hours is a steady, steep climb from Brod Bay beach, menaced by sandflies, up into a beech forest. From the branches hang delicate strands of Old Man's Beard, a lime-green moss that dangles in sharp contrast to the deeper green of the beech leaves. This kind of forest is typical of Southland, which is a Very Wet Place, covered in lush green from the pines and podocarps. The keas enjoy themselves, dancing amongst the trailmix that hikers leave behind. The Dept of Conservation (DOC) ensures that the track is uniformly excellent, scattering grey gravel over mud puddles, and building small bridges over torrential channels. I've developed a massive respect for the work of the DOC here. Fair play gentlemen!
So, after you emerge from the treeline, at a thousand metres or so, wiping sweat from the eyes, you're hit with previously-conceealed views of lakes Te Anau and Manapouri, deep pools of blue. Boats touring the lakes look absolutely tiny, rippling the reflections of the massive Kepler Mountain Range with their shimmering wakes. And you cross the alpine landscape, mercifully level, to reach Luxmore Hut, where sweet water drips from chrome taps.
A side trip - and the hardest bit of the Grunt, I should imagine - takes you to the summit of the Mount, about four hundred metres higher than the hut. And whilst this isn't high enough for the altitude to affect you, your ears pop, and your eyes pop, and your legs snap, and your lens crackles. And you thank God that you bought the same wide-angled camera to replace the one you lost in Nelson, as it eats views of the blue-black mountains.
From there, it's down, down, down, back to the flying devils of the beach, back through the forest which, strangely, seems to take longer on the way back, even though you're coasting by now, and bounding down, tops of the thighs burning.
On the way back, the proud and friendly guy driving the water taxi told us in friendly detail all about the races, and it was easy to ignore the moss-like hairs tumbling out of his friendly snout. And then he offered to ferry us back for free the next day, at the same time, if we wanted to go to the beach for the afternoon, as I guess we seemed friendly to him, too.
But today, the thought of walking on tired legs drove me instead to sit down in here and limit the punishment only to the tips of my typing fingers.
Friday 19 January 2007
NEW ZEALAND: Deep inside the cold animal
I'M AT: Rainforest Retreat, Franz Josef Village, where they seem to have used all the wooden slats off the bottom of the bunks to make the walls, and where pushbutton showers are a luxury; and Matterhorn South, Wanaka, which is alpine-style and pretty cool - all the cooler for having the number two seed in Saturday's triathlon staying there.
So, there are something like 180 glaciers growing or shrinking their way down and up the mountains they call the Southern Alps. I walked on one of them, and to another, and the latter was cheaper, warmer and far better.
The Franz Josef Glacier is named after a Hapsburg Emperor, and is currently growing by roughly one metre a day. It's a dirty slab of white pinched between some sharp steeps, and for 130 dollars you can get yourself nice and cold and wet walking up it. The guiding company were excellent, very well organised, and distributed our little bags with iron claws on them, for strapping onto the boot. And from there we were off, slushing up a staircase that had to be iceaxed clean frequently, to give us a nice surface on which to grip.
Regular iceaxeing was a big part of the day, as it goes, and it's not often you can say that. Our guide Blair was all surfer-dude and wielded his big iceaxe like a bear, tearing new flats for us to traverse. And we got in a lot of walking, up over ledges, holding onto ropes, and down the sides of ice slides, edging our way and falling heavily on each foot to prevent slipping. I almost came a cropper at one point, spreadeagled above a churning potion of cold, but, thanks to the kind shove of an Israeli gentleman, who became increasingly obsessed with his iceaxe as the day went on, I escaped with only the dramatic whoosh of collapsing ice below me.
So, the ice is a deep, rich blue up the glacier, far different to the rock-strewn muck of the lower slopes. And we had to squeeze through a very, very tight corridor to progress, a squeeze which took ages, and left us wet and shivering. So we had a nibble of lunch, and eventually the feeling was welcomed back into the toes.
Overall, we walked for about 5 hours on the ice, up and down and through and round, and came back down a different path, to the side, and then onto rock, and then down, down again, through corridors, a maze of ice, and then we were done. It was interesting to see the churn of ice that close, and certainly different, but at the final count not all that enthralling.
Near Wanaka, though - in Mount Aspiring National Park, a place of deep, stunning, lush, wonder - there's a much less well-known beast, the Rob Roy Glacier, named, at a guess, after Rob Roy. And to get to it you need to walk through a thick forest of beech, by the rush and splash of the meltwater river. Now and again, through the trees, you glimpse a snicket of white, and all around are butterflies, and dandelions, and moths, and a parrot called a kea, with its thick green neck, cheeky, would nick your food, like a flying monkey.
After about an hour of the walk, the view opens up and you see the stunning, heartbreaking sight of the glacier, high up on the mountain, its terminal face hundreds of feet above, in a broad valley of meadow and rock, scree and pine. All down the wet rock opposite tumble waterfalls of melt, and now and again, the rumble of a collapsing cave, deep inside the cold animal.
The scale is immense, and the glacier is curled and cracked, linen white and pastel blue, and speckled by dappled shadow.
It's one of the best hikes I've ever done, and to crown it all, I was shuttled there and back by a clearly quite-mad Kiwi called Brenda, who interrupted the niceties of gentle conversation with a long monologue about her troubled teenage years, her lies, and her redemption in Wanaka.
She's one cold animal that this soul won't be melting.
So, there are something like 180 glaciers growing or shrinking their way down and up the mountains they call the Southern Alps. I walked on one of them, and to another, and the latter was cheaper, warmer and far better.
The Franz Josef Glacier is named after a Hapsburg Emperor, and is currently growing by roughly one metre a day. It's a dirty slab of white pinched between some sharp steeps, and for 130 dollars you can get yourself nice and cold and wet walking up it. The guiding company were excellent, very well organised, and distributed our little bags with iron claws on them, for strapping onto the boot. And from there we were off, slushing up a staircase that had to be iceaxed clean frequently, to give us a nice surface on which to grip.
Regular iceaxeing was a big part of the day, as it goes, and it's not often you can say that. Our guide Blair was all surfer-dude and wielded his big iceaxe like a bear, tearing new flats for us to traverse. And we got in a lot of walking, up over ledges, holding onto ropes, and down the sides of ice slides, edging our way and falling heavily on each foot to prevent slipping. I almost came a cropper at one point, spreadeagled above a churning potion of cold, but, thanks to the kind shove of an Israeli gentleman, who became increasingly obsessed with his iceaxe as the day went on, I escaped with only the dramatic whoosh of collapsing ice below me.
So, the ice is a deep, rich blue up the glacier, far different to the rock-strewn muck of the lower slopes. And we had to squeeze through a very, very tight corridor to progress, a squeeze which took ages, and left us wet and shivering. So we had a nibble of lunch, and eventually the feeling was welcomed back into the toes.
Overall, we walked for about 5 hours on the ice, up and down and through and round, and came back down a different path, to the side, and then onto rock, and then down, down again, through corridors, a maze of ice, and then we were done. It was interesting to see the churn of ice that close, and certainly different, but at the final count not all that enthralling.
Near Wanaka, though - in Mount Aspiring National Park, a place of deep, stunning, lush, wonder - there's a much less well-known beast, the Rob Roy Glacier, named, at a guess, after Rob Roy. And to get to it you need to walk through a thick forest of beech, by the rush and splash of the meltwater river. Now and again, through the trees, you glimpse a snicket of white, and all around are butterflies, and dandelions, and moths, and a parrot called a kea, with its thick green neck, cheeky, would nick your food, like a flying monkey.
After about an hour of the walk, the view opens up and you see the stunning, heartbreaking sight of the glacier, high up on the mountain, its terminal face hundreds of feet above, in a broad valley of meadow and rock, scree and pine. All down the wet rock opposite tumble waterfalls of melt, and now and again, the rumble of a collapsing cave, deep inside the cold animal.
The scale is immense, and the glacier is curled and cracked, linen white and pastel blue, and speckled by dappled shadow.
It's one of the best hikes I've ever done, and to crown it all, I was shuttled there and back by a clearly quite-mad Kiwi called Brenda, who interrupted the niceties of gentle conversation with a long monologue about her troubled teenage years, her lies, and her redemption in Wanaka.
She's one cold animal that this soul won't be melting.
Sunday 14 January 2007
NEW ZEALAND: Crafty
I'M AT: Brian and Ann's pad in Nelson; then the All Nations Pub in Barrytown, with should really be called All Nations Pub Town, cos there's nothing else there; and two places in Hokitika, Jade capital of New Zealand - Stumpers Bar where I got a single room to get a decent kip, which somehow I managed after only two bottles of wine; and Mountain Jade Hostel, which was streaming with nibbly children.
Travelling makes you do stuff that you probably wouldn't consider doing back home.
The Nelson Bonecarver, Stephan, a naturalised German, had a great reputation, so I decided to trouble Brian and Anna for another night in their gaff so I could go to the workshop (I made them a lasagne in lieu of rent.) And what a great decision it was. Let's set aside the fact that the pendant sitting around my neck now is very simple and pretty uninspired (although people seem to like it). That's my end of the bargain. Stephan's job was simply to be everything you can ask for in a teacher - patient, inspirational, methodical, disciplined and charming.
So with hacksaw and grinder and drill and sandpaper and polishing wheel, wearing sweaty goggles, we, a group of six (three Germans, a really nice English guy already wearing a handmade bone chimp who made a prancing horse for his niece, and an American Rabbi, who stained his bone qaballah with tea to give it the look of something that Methuselah might have worn) gave form to our paper designs. And the sun shone, we had lunch together, and Stephan taught us how to drill and carve and rub, and his process was great - we should take it step by step and let the carving evolve, rather than trying to draw a perfect pendant and slacishly follow it. And it was on this basis that I decided not to drill into the thing.
Stephan also told us about the Maori traditions underlying our work, and gave us each a bag and poem desribing the shapes each of us had chosen. Mine was the koru, the spiral, symbolising regrowth and change. This was all great news, because to me it looked like a mushroom.
This experience inspired me to make another bone carving in Barrytown, but unfortunately the guy only had half a day with us, so it felt a bit rushed, and he wasn't so into the spiritual side of things. As it happened, though, my carving was more visually complete.
It didn't end there. I also made a pendant out of jade, or greenstone, as they call it here. This was also great. Steve from the Solomon Islands watched over me and an Estonian perfectionist called Hanus as we made the greenstone milky with cuts. The design this time was a fishhook. I saw something similar to the one I'd done hanging up in the shop out front, priced at 210 NZ dollars. The whole workshop, a good, long day, including materials, had only cost me 90 dollars, and I'd made it. Me.
And it was clearly Me that made my knife, also made in Barrytown over the course of a day that involved heating steel until it glowed red, bashing it into shape on an anvil, cutting, gluing, pinning and shaping a handle, then grinding, polishing and sanding the blade. My misfortune here was that I didn't listen too well during the bash bash bit so my knife is really quite unelegant. Steve - another Steve - told me it was far more useful this way, and that, typically, you could hammer nails in all day with it. Next to the scimitars and bowie knives that the others had made, it looked like a dog's dinner. Great day though. And they had a giant swing that took four people to pull on a rope to prime, and a wooden wall for hurling axes into, and some moonshine made of sugar, water and yeast that sat in a silver still until we'd polished off the bottle Seve had put by for us. They had a dog, too. Two dogs in fact, although one was quite mysterious and didn't come out oo much; and a cat and some ducks. Oh, and cockateels. I got a lift on the back of Hamish's truck, stood to salute the passers-by with my non-grasping hand as we sped up the highway.
That's it for now, though. So don't worry too much about suspiciously pendant-shaped packages arriving around the time of your birthday.
Travelling makes you do stuff that you probably wouldn't consider doing back home.
The Nelson Bonecarver, Stephan, a naturalised German, had a great reputation, so I decided to trouble Brian and Anna for another night in their gaff so I could go to the workshop (I made them a lasagne in lieu of rent.) And what a great decision it was. Let's set aside the fact that the pendant sitting around my neck now is very simple and pretty uninspired (although people seem to like it). That's my end of the bargain. Stephan's job was simply to be everything you can ask for in a teacher - patient, inspirational, methodical, disciplined and charming.
So with hacksaw and grinder and drill and sandpaper and polishing wheel, wearing sweaty goggles, we, a group of six (three Germans, a really nice English guy already wearing a handmade bone chimp who made a prancing horse for his niece, and an American Rabbi, who stained his bone qaballah with tea to give it the look of something that Methuselah might have worn) gave form to our paper designs. And the sun shone, we had lunch together, and Stephan taught us how to drill and carve and rub, and his process was great - we should take it step by step and let the carving evolve, rather than trying to draw a perfect pendant and slacishly follow it. And it was on this basis that I decided not to drill into the thing.
Stephan also told us about the Maori traditions underlying our work, and gave us each a bag and poem desribing the shapes each of us had chosen. Mine was the koru, the spiral, symbolising regrowth and change. This was all great news, because to me it looked like a mushroom.
This experience inspired me to make another bone carving in Barrytown, but unfortunately the guy only had half a day with us, so it felt a bit rushed, and he wasn't so into the spiritual side of things. As it happened, though, my carving was more visually complete.
It didn't end there. I also made a pendant out of jade, or greenstone, as they call it here. This was also great. Steve from the Solomon Islands watched over me and an Estonian perfectionist called Hanus as we made the greenstone milky with cuts. The design this time was a fishhook. I saw something similar to the one I'd done hanging up in the shop out front, priced at 210 NZ dollars. The whole workshop, a good, long day, including materials, had only cost me 90 dollars, and I'd made it. Me.
And it was clearly Me that made my knife, also made in Barrytown over the course of a day that involved heating steel until it glowed red, bashing it into shape on an anvil, cutting, gluing, pinning and shaping a handle, then grinding, polishing and sanding the blade. My misfortune here was that I didn't listen too well during the bash bash bit so my knife is really quite unelegant. Steve - another Steve - told me it was far more useful this way, and that, typically, you could hammer nails in all day with it. Next to the scimitars and bowie knives that the others had made, it looked like a dog's dinner. Great day though. And they had a giant swing that took four people to pull on a rope to prime, and a wooden wall for hurling axes into, and some moonshine made of sugar, water and yeast that sat in a silver still until we'd polished off the bottle Seve had put by for us. They had a dog, too. Two dogs in fact, although one was quite mysterious and didn't come out oo much; and a cat and some ducks. Oh, and cockateels. I got a lift on the back of Hamish's truck, stood to salute the passers-by with my non-grasping hand as we sped up the highway.
That's it for now, though. So don't worry too much about suspiciously pendant-shaped packages arriving around the time of your birthday.
Sunday 7 January 2007
NEW ZEALAND: Dave and Jo and Lily and Brian and Anna and Jaia
I'M AT: Dave and Jo's place in Levin, a town reminiscent of scenes at the start of Blue Velvet - white picket fences, smiling children, with something dark and sinister lurking underneath the surface. That'll be the immense chocolate cake that we had to bury, then. AND, Brian and Anna's place, in Nelson, the sunniest place in New Zealand, surrounded by forested hills, with a river running through it that looked a LOT more tempting than even the drinking water back home.
Well, in some ways it's not fair, or polite, to lump my comments about two beautiful families into one post. But on the other, their lives share a lot of common ground.
Dave and Jo did an awful lot of research, and, I should think, spent an awful lot of money moving out here. It's a gamble, albeit a calculated one, that certainly looks like it's paying off - they're blissfully contented and happy, and pleased and eager to explore their new home. They took the coincidence of my arrival to try out a couple of walks in the local forests, and we had fun walking through the streaming mud. And, a very proud moment for me, one that perhaps Jo and Dave don't realise quite how priviledged I felt to be part of, was when I was given Lily in her sling to carry through the forest for the walk back. I felt really ridiculously proud and content, and I could concentrate on her, and look after her. I was with the Hattams for New Year, so we drank to 2007 with a bottle of toasty bubbles, and tried our best not to miss the chimes of Big Ben too much.
Brian and Anna, on the other hand, are really here by accident. Jaia was a surprise that arrived when the trees they were picking were pouring with apples, and since then they've both had to adjust very, very quickly to having a baby. But they, too, seem also blissfully happy, and this is in spite of Jaia's attempts to scream like she's being knifed every five minutes. They've made a conscious decision to carry on exploring the country, where Jaia and work will allow, and Anna went kayaking and jetboating with Jaia and her visiting sister, Lisa, in the short time that I was with them all.
Whilst they were doing so, Brian, Jaia and me scooted off to the Nelson Lakes NP, and we walked the wee thing up over dusty mud and tree roots, and she was quiet, so quiet all afternoon. The Nelson Lakes, accessed from the tiny town of St Alda, are very beautiful - grantie bulks heaving down into turquoise waters. Brian told me all about their time in New Zealand as we walked.
Jaia's eight months younger than Lily, and it's apparent to me that babies don't become interesting until they start reacting to you, start smiling and saying stuff. Jaia's too young to do that right now. I should imagine that there's a peaceable time, when they're around 12 to 18 months, and before they can properly articulate demands, when everything's sweet and golden and beautiful. Both families have this to look forward to.
And, despite being aware of the fact that this post is not very amusing, or deep, or interesting, I really do wish them all the bloody best, they're all such positive and happy people, and they deserve all the luck in the world.
But remember, lads, to spare a bit of time for the Guinness, eh? I won't always be there to remind you to raise a glass now and again.
Well, in some ways it's not fair, or polite, to lump my comments about two beautiful families into one post. But on the other, their lives share a lot of common ground.
Dave and Jo did an awful lot of research, and, I should think, spent an awful lot of money moving out here. It's a gamble, albeit a calculated one, that certainly looks like it's paying off - they're blissfully contented and happy, and pleased and eager to explore their new home. They took the coincidence of my arrival to try out a couple of walks in the local forests, and we had fun walking through the streaming mud. And, a very proud moment for me, one that perhaps Jo and Dave don't realise quite how priviledged I felt to be part of, was when I was given Lily in her sling to carry through the forest for the walk back. I felt really ridiculously proud and content, and I could concentrate on her, and look after her. I was with the Hattams for New Year, so we drank to 2007 with a bottle of toasty bubbles, and tried our best not to miss the chimes of Big Ben too much.
Brian and Anna, on the other hand, are really here by accident. Jaia was a surprise that arrived when the trees they were picking were pouring with apples, and since then they've both had to adjust very, very quickly to having a baby. But they, too, seem also blissfully happy, and this is in spite of Jaia's attempts to scream like she's being knifed every five minutes. They've made a conscious decision to carry on exploring the country, where Jaia and work will allow, and Anna went kayaking and jetboating with Jaia and her visiting sister, Lisa, in the short time that I was with them all.
Whilst they were doing so, Brian, Jaia and me scooted off to the Nelson Lakes NP, and we walked the wee thing up over dusty mud and tree roots, and she was quiet, so quiet all afternoon. The Nelson Lakes, accessed from the tiny town of St Alda, are very beautiful - grantie bulks heaving down into turquoise waters. Brian told me all about their time in New Zealand as we walked.
Jaia's eight months younger than Lily, and it's apparent to me that babies don't become interesting until they start reacting to you, start smiling and saying stuff. Jaia's too young to do that right now. I should imagine that there's a peaceable time, when they're around 12 to 18 months, and before they can properly articulate demands, when everything's sweet and golden and beautiful. Both families have this to look forward to.
And, despite being aware of the fact that this post is not very amusing, or deep, or interesting, I really do wish them all the bloody best, they're all such positive and happy people, and they deserve all the luck in the world.
But remember, lads, to spare a bit of time for the Guinness, eh? I won't always be there to remind you to raise a glass now and again.
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