A Long Way From Anywhere

Ten Things I’ve Done That You (Probably) Haven’t

2011-02-01T15:00:00.000+01:00

Aidan Doyle posted his list of ten things he had done that the rest of us (probably) haven't.

Here's my list:

Been teargassed by the Ecuadorean army
Been rescued from near-drowning by holidaying Dutch policemen in Cuba
Entered the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Zone
Been outdrunk in shots of vodka by an 84-year-old Russian babushka
Had a song composed about me and sung to me by a bunch of villagers in Sulawesi, Indonesia
Received free treatment in an Iraqi hospital
Spent the night sleeping (really!) in a brothel in the Sahel, Mali, West Africa
Found my name in the credits of popular Mac open source software
Arrived at an airport without knowing what country I was in
Pretended to be a foreigner in my own country due to acute embarrassment at forgetting which side of the road to drive on ("Sorry, I am comink from Germany. We drive on the wrong side.")

Top 7 Travel Destinations for 2010

2009-12-31T12:26:00.000+01:00

My friend Aidan and I were disappointed with the run-of-the-mill "Where to go in to 2010" travel lists in the media. We made our own. Here's mine:

Train from Western Europe to Vietnam. The journey is the destination. Challenge: how many cheap bottles of vodka can you consume during the journey.
Albania. You'll be almost sure of being the only in your group of friends who has been there.
Mongolia. Yurts, polytonal singing, so photogenic even a camera putz can take good photos there.
El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Honduras. Especially Nicaragua. Have you seen how crazy cheap the top hotels are in Nicaragua? Best hotel in the country is $100/night.
Greenland, following in the footsteps of politicians who jet there with a large entourage, to show how much they care for the environment.
Lebanon. See it while a rare period of calm lasts. Soon they'll be blowing each other up again.
Paraguay. Unspoiled by tourism. Cheap. Assured source of wacky travelogues.

Aidan pointed out that my list could be titled "least touristed places that you won't get shot in."

Here's Aidan's list:

China (big enough that once you get away from the big cities you won't
find many tourists)
Mongolia
Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, Macedonia
Greenland
Lebanon
Colombia

Kudos, Aidan, for including Colombia. My favourite travel destination. Possibly more beautiful than my homeland, New Zealand, with lots of friendly people, plenty to do and see, and it is cheap, cheap, cheap, due to an undervalued currency.

Some Great Colmbian Transport Photos

2008-09-06T13:22:00.002+02:00

These photos are full of Andean colour. The atmosphere they invoke are just one of the many things I love about Colombia.

Learning a Language While Travelling

2008-04-10T20:07:00.002+02:00

I've got a hot tip for anybody who wishes they could converse a bit with the locals when abroad. I am particularly ungifted at learning languages, yet this has worked even for me.

You'll need an iPod or some other MP3 player, and about US$30

The tip is to buy and use Pimsleur Conversational language courses. They are excellent and so well made that they are almost fun to use. Each course is 16 lessons, each 30 minutes long. No grammar, real phrases, and stuff you can use from day 1. You can get them on the web, for example Amazon.

I first tried Pimsleur's Spanish lessons while in South America. Each evening I lay on my bed in my hotel room doing the lesson. Then I would immediately go out and use a few of the words I learned with my hotel clerk or in a restaurant, or with whoever I happened to meet. After a few days I tried the phrase with a local in Colombia, "I want to eat something". I was flabbergasted when she understood perfectly what I said and then responded with an exact phrase I had also learned that day - which I could also answer. A week later I was able to go into a Colombia travel agency and buy tickets, while only speaking Spanish.

After 4 weeks of such lessons my girlfriend joined me and I felt pleased - and maybe a little smug - as her jaw drop when I got into an easy conversations in Spanish, even if they were only basic conversations.

I've since used this same technique to learn a little Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania, a spattering of Hebrew in Israel, and enough French to understand hotel and restaurant staff. It's a great feeling to achieve this, doubly so for me because I always got terrible grades in languages at school.

Particularly fun was Swahili. As a tourist in Zanzibar, for example, I was a magnet for people trying to hawk things. But when I would say in Swahili "No thank you, I am not interested", the whole interaction would change for the better. And other tourists would wonder how I got to know such a language.

Great Travel Destinations for Vegetarians

2008-04-07T17:58:00.002+02:00

Since I became a vegetarian I've travelled to some 70+ countries. Some particularly stood out for the quality of the vegie food, as well as the range and ease to find.

So here's my top 3 of countries that are highly interesting AND vegetarian-friendly:

#3: Thailand. Fresh, tasty, healthy, cheap. Just about every menu has a sizable vegie section. But I found that if I wanted something else, I could simply ask for a meat dish to be made with tofu instead of meat. The restaurants were always willing to do it.

#2: India. A high percentage of Indians are vegetarian, which makes vegie restaurants easy to find. There are just as many "veg" restaurants as there are "non-veg", and they proclaim it boldly on their outdoor signs. So many vegetarian restaurants that I thought I had died and gone to vegetarian heaven. Common is the "veg thali", a sort of sampler plate with three or four different dishes, rice, bread and salad. Away from the tourist-oriented shops I was paying less than 1 Euro for as much as I could eat, and a drink too.

#1: Israel. Probably a big surprise for most people - it certainly was for me. Any kosher restaurant or cafe will do. Part of kosher cooking is not to mix dairy products and meat products. So when you walk into a restaurant in Jerusalem, a waiter usually asks "meat or dairy". I would simply say "dairy" and I would be show to the part of the restaurant where the food has no meat - and furthermore is guaranteed to have been prepared with utensils and kitchen equipment that is never used with meat.

So why is Israel my top choice? The sheer range of cooking styles you get in a cosmopolitan land.

Photos from India and Africa

2007-05-09T21:22:00.000+02:00

After spraining my ankle on Mt Kilimanjaro followed by a couple of weeks of idyllic idleness on Zanzibar, I'm back in Germany and soon to start work in Frankfurt again. Zanzibar is a place that sounds ridiculously exotic - and it is. It's a tropical paradise that blends African, Arabian, and Indian culture. One of my favourite places I've travelled to.

Here's some Indian photos and some African photos.

Kenya: Scary Safari Stories

2007-04-12T16:56:00.000+02:00

I'm writing from a town on the lower slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. It's the highest mountain in Africa and even as I swelter in the equatorial heat, the almost-ever present clouds occasionally part, revealing a peak partly covered in snow and ice.

I spent the last week or so in Kenya, where I went on safari in the Masai Mara National Park. It's an extremely large reserve where wild African animals live in an unspoiled environment while safari vans zoom around trying to get close enough to the animals for tourists like me to stick their head out of the open roof to take photos.

Scary Safari Story #1

We were lucky enough to see three very hungry lions - one male lion and two females - hunting. They had a clever strategy, moving slowly in a v-shaped formation, with the two females somewhat ahead and to the left and right of the male. They slunk through the long, dry, brown grass, trying to trap an impala. However the impala was far too quick so the lions remained hungry.

Sometime later our safari van got a puncture, and we had to stop to replace the tyre. The driver needed our help, which meant we had to get out amidst that same long grass that camouflages hungry, hunting lions so well. The driver wasn't so happy with the whole deal and asked us - needlessly - to stay as close to the van as possible. I used the avoid-the-sharks-while-swimming-at-the-beach strategy, and made sure I was always closer to the van's open door than at least one other person. I think we set a new world record for amateur tyre-changing, and we even gave those Formula One pit-stop guys a run for their money.

Scary Safari Story #2

We slept for two nights in tents at a campsite just outside the Masai Mara national park. No fences mark out the border of the national park, only a small creek which any animal worth worrying about could easily cross. The campsite was run by a Masai guy, one of the tall, slender people who wear blankets and mutilate their earlobes into long, elastic shapes and look something like this. After the sun had set we sat around a campfire and the Masai guy told us fascinating stories about how elephants and hyenas sometimes wander through the campsite in the night while everyone is sleeping. Even a lion, he said, had been known to pass through.

Fascinating stories indeed - until I woke up at 3am in the morning with a really strong need to go to the toilet. Outside I could hear unfamiliar howling noises that resembled those hyenas I had heard from a distance earlier. I tried to go back to sleep, hoping the pressing need would go away, but of course it never does; it just gets more demanding. Eventually in desperation I got up and put on all my clothes, hoping that my trousers were permeated with special wild-animal-repelling chemicals. I opened my tent zipper just wide enough to stick my head out, terrified that a hungry lion with a taste for human meat was waiting outside my tent, ready to swipe me with a powerful claw as soon as my head appeared. But there I saw, in the middle of the campsite, the Masai guy sleeping on a deckchair next to the embers of the fire. (In the morning the Masai told us that he sleeps on the deckchair every night, to keep the hyenas away.) Seeing him gave me the confidence to quickly go outside and do what I had to do, while every rustle in the nearby bushes had adrenalin pumping through my body. I can't describe how sweet the relief was when I got back in my tent.

The next night I made sure not to drink anything for a few hours before going to bed.

Burning Bodies and Police Brutality in Filthy India

2007-03-05T09:06:00.000+01:00

I've been in India for the last week, and despite an unpleasant first impression, I've begun to see what fascinates people with India and keeps them coming back. I was on a boat on the Ganges river at sunset, here in Varanasi. If you don't know the name of this city, you've definitely seen it on TV. It's the place where the Ganges is holy and millions of India pilgrims come each year to bathe on the steps in the polluted water and wash away their sins. The Hindus believe that if you die here, you avoid having to be reincarnated and therefore achieve eternal peace.

On the boat ride I saw a dead body in the water and funeral pyres burning on the river's edge - my boatman in his broken English called them "body burn fire". Near me was a boat containing a group of orange-robed, shaven-head buddhist monks using digital cameras and video cameras. Loud and colourful religious ceremonies took place on the river bank, people were washing in the water and - yep - even drinking the holy water. Monkeys ran up the walls of temples, while 30 or 40 women in another passing boat performed a call-and-response chant. Burning candles floated around the boats. Kids on boats with their fathers flew kites. I finally started to find something intensely remarkable and enjoyable about India. Until...

...until I got off the boat and the boatman demanded twice the amount we had agreed upon beforehand. He followed me, telling me why he deserved more, until finally I stuffed the agreed amount in his hands, raised my voice and told him "finito, fertig, finished, over. go away". I think this embarrassed him in front of the people nearby and he slinked away.

India assaults all the senses. The streets are filled with stinking, rotten garbage and with holy cow dung from the holy cows that freely wander the streets. Especially in Delhi, the smell is sometimes so bad I have to hold my breath or start gagging. There is noise, always noise in India. I suspect there is a law that says drivers are compelled to use their horns at least once every minute. This traffic noise goes all day and most of the night and when it stops the stray dogs start barking. I haven't had a good night's sleep since I've been here. The thick smog sticks to the sweat on my skin, deadening my sense of touch. The delicious spicy food is even better than I expected and it has burnt out my tastebuds. And the sights I've seen in India are definitely colourful.

Yesterday was a festival called Holi. It celebrates a time when the God Vishnu caused an evil queen to be burned alive. For some reason this is celebrated by throwing coloured powder at people and water too. Before too long all the people in the street had multi-coloured faces, then multi-coloured hair, and eventually even multi-coloured clothes. Tourists are popular targets, and people who ventured out from my hotel soon returned needing a shower and a change of clothes. I chose to watch most of it from the hotel's rooftop terrace.

From the terrace I also was witness to some police brutality. A couple of police cars came up the street, stopped suddenly and with long bamboo rods the policemen started beating a guy around the head and legs. When he hit the ground they kicked him for a bit, then threw him in the back of their car. The police then started beating another guy with their bamboo rods but he pleaded with them and they let him go. It was shocking to see this firsthand.

No case of Delhi Belly so far...

Germany, Portugal, South of France, Turkey

2006-12-20T23:31:00.000+01:00

Being in Germany for the soccer World Cup was a great experience. For the first couple of weeks it was like a non-stop carnival in the streets of the cities. Strangely the German culture seemed to change a bit during the world cup, with people doing typically un-German things, being more laid-back, starting conversations with
strangers, celebrating even when they lost, the police not pulling me over when
I rode my bike through red lights right in front of them. It was a much nicer
country!

I did manage to make a couple of short trips during the European summer. First
I caught up with an Australian friend, Rob, in Portugal for a week. The most
memorable event in Portugal was when we accidentally spent an hour or so in a gay bar. Despite the overly-well dressed male customers and the music that got more camp with each track, neither of realised what type of an establishment it was until I spilt my drink on my crotch and attracted a bit of unwanted attention as I tried to
clean up the mess.

The second trip was a disillusioning long weekend spent driving along the almost mythical "South of France", visiting Marseilles, Nice, Cannes, and Monaco . The south of France turned out to consist of over-priced, over-crowded coastal cities. In Nice, for 25 euros you were allowed to sit on a little spot on the stony beach for the day, where you could admire the other people who also paid 25 euros to be wedged in shoulder-to-shoulder on a patch of gravel. Monaco was especially ugly, with
more bland concrete apartment blocks than I would have thought possible crammed
into a mountainous coastal bay. Having said that, between the towns the stark
rock formations that made up the landscape was magnificent and the water was a
remarkable azure blue.

The third and last trip I made over summer was 10 days in Turkey, I looked at old Greek and Roman ruins in biblical ex-cities, I trundled around the Gallipoli battlefields for a day with busloads of tourists from Australia and New Zealand, and I finished up in Istanbul. Istanbul is one of the most fascinating cities I've seen. There must be at least 6 cathedral-sized mosques in the city, each consisting of domes upon domes and ringed with minarets, the towers that call people to prayer five times a day. The city is half in Asia, half in Europe, with ferries constantly travelling along the coasts and backwards and forwards across the great waterway. There are a few old wooden palaces that remain from the times of the Ottoman empire, and every second street contains an old broken Ottoman-era fountain. The eating was
excellent, with some of the best vegetarian cooking I've tasted. It was the
month of Ramadan while I was there, which is when Muslims eat and drink nothing
at all during daylight, then have a big feast at night the moment the imams
officially declare that the sun has set. This created a festival atmosphere
every night. Istanbul is high on my lists of places to visit again.

2006: Year in Review

2006-12-15T23:27:00.000+01:00

A Swiss friend wrote an e-mail to me last week, saying that because she hasn't
heard from me for a while, she assumes I haven't been doing much travelling. I have managed to add a few new countries to my list this year. At the beginning of the year I hitch-hiked across the Sahara, which is just about the stupidest way to spend a month's holiday. Afterwards I recuperated in Colombia, which is just about the best way to spend a month's holiday. I got tear-gassed in Ecuador, en route to
Peru.

Compared with that the rest of the year has been rather mundane. Since May I've been working again in Frankfurt as an IT consultant. It's pretty dreary stuff,
wearing a suit everyday, working on mind-numbingly dull projects for
statisticians and economists. Not to say that all statisticians and economists
are mind-numbingly dull - one of the two good things about the job is I get to
work with interesting people from all over Europe. (The other good thing is they pay me on a regular basis).

A couple of brief and belated updates will follow soon.

Venezuela, Colombia, Peru: Photos

2006-05-14T16:06:00.000+02:00

Take a look at the photos I took this year in Venezuela, Colombia and Peru.

The Road to Timbuktu: Photos

2006-04-24T22:50:00.000+02:00

See the best of my photos from my trip to Timbuktu via Morocco, Mauritania and Mali.

Peru: Whale in the Desert

2006-04-09T16:03:00.000+02:00

I spent the last two weeks in Peru, where I saw a whale in the desert, spotted condors flying over a canyon 3 kilometres deep with ancient terraced slopes, and visited a village situated on man-made islands that float around Lake Titicaca.

The whale in the desert was one of the Nasca Lines, ancient carvings each about 100 metres long, that can't be identified from the earth. When seen from an airplane you easily spot carvings of animals, birds, and people. Why these figures were carved hundreds of years before the technology to view them existed is one of those mysteries which nutcases love. Some claim the figures were made by or for aliens.

I took a 30 minute flight to see the Nasca Lines in an airplane that has room for only 5 passengers. The first 2 minutes were fun. Then as the first figure came into sight, the pilot banked sharply so the passengers on the left could see the figure. Then he banked the other way, which allowed the other passengers to see the figure, and allowed my recently-eaten breakfast to try to escape my stomach prematurely. With each new figure came two more violent turns by the pilot, and more opportunities for my stomach to knot and twist and attempt to release its contents. I fidgeted with the white paper bag supplied for each passenger, and counted down the minutes until landing. 25 minutes left...20 minutes left...15 minutes (that's halfway!)...14 minutes (less than halfway)... 13 minutes (I hope this flight lands on time)...12 minutes (maybe it lands early)... 11 minutes (I should have stayed on the ground and watched the BBC documentary about the lines)... 10 minutes (I'm never flying again - hey, only a third to go!) and so on. When I got off the plane I involuntarily imitated the pope, kneeling and kissing the ground. I then spent the near couple of hours in my hotel room, letting my intestines unknot. By some miracle my breakfast left my stomach the normal way at the normal time.

Seeing the Nasca Lines from the sky definitely was not worth it.

Tears of Pain and Joy on the Pan American Highway

2006-04-08T12:30:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I met Anna from England, one of the most interesting travellers I've ever encountered. She was born in Austria because her parents worked there briefly, she spent five years in Saudi Arabia, is currently living in Colombia, and soon she begins a three-year stint in Ukraine. She once cruised down the Amazon River where her father had his fingertip bitten off by a piranha, recently visited New Zealand (which she loved) and when I met her, she was travelling by train through Peru's Sacred Valley of the Incas, about to walk the ancient Inca Trail through the Andes. I got talking to her when we both started gazing at the chocolate-coloured rapids flowing beside the train. She eloquently told me how she did a white-water rafting expedition on such a river a few days ago. She writes detailed accounts of all her journeys, which she illustrates with drawings of what she sees. She also speaks fluent Spanish. But what is most remarkable about Anna is that she is only 8 years old.

Of course, her adventurous parents accompany her on all these voyages!

Last time I wrote, I was stuck in Ecuador, trying to get to Quito to catch a plane but unable to, due to marauding hordes who were blockading the major roads. The day of my flight, I turned on the television in my hotel room to find that the government had declared a state of emergency and had sent in the army to clear the roads. I went to the bus station with hope, sure I could still make my flight. The bus people told me that a direct bus to Quito would leave at 1pm, just in time for my flight. However when 1pm came around, the roads were still blocked, due to a combination of the army being instructed not to hurt anyone, and the determined protesters' new tactic of throwing dynamite around.

The next morning I joined forces with Victor, a 78-year-old Swiss man, who lives in Ecuador with his child bride, an Ecuadorean woman only 40 years old. Together Victor and I decided we would get to Quito no matter what it took - me to catch my plane, and him to be with his lovesick wife. We got a bus to take us 20 kilometres, before a police blockade cut our progress short. Getting out of the bus, we befriended a couple of Ecuadorean girls for company and protection, and together the four of us walked around the blockade and began walking along the car-less Pan American Highway, through Andean villages, with a background of mountain lakes and extinct volcanoes. Many people were also walking in an attempt to get to Quito for work or study, and in numbers we resembled a refugee group fleeing a war zone. I had to carry my backpack, and as my shoulders became numb with pain, I wish I hadn't been carrying those optional extras, such as 5 novels, a guide book, sleeping bag, mosquito net, and clean underwear. I walked for a painful couple of hours, always going around the protesters' blockades, whose numbers were now dwindling. We hitched a short ride with a police transport truck, then another ride with an empty army transport truck, before reaching the final blockade.

The army was trying to get a convoy of supply vehicles through the final blockade and were using tear gas to clear protesters from the road and the nearby fields. The tear gas was effective, but with a strong wind, the tear gas blew over to us, and I learnt why tear gas is called as such. First my nose developed a burning sensation, soon followed by my mouth. Then the gas got stronger and my eyes also burned and I wept like a baby. It was extremely unpleasant and there was nothing I could do expect keep walking, weeping, and hoping to get to some cleaner air.

Some 15 more minutes of walking, I found myself within range of operating buses. I can't adequately describe the relief I felt when I realised I wouldn't need to walk any more. It was like the time when for hours you've had a desperate need to go to the toilet, but can't, and then finally get the chance to go. Nothing could be sweeter. I almost shed more tears than I did with the tear gas.

Amazingly, despite the setbacks I got to Quito in time for my rescheduled flight to Lima, Peru, arriving only 24 hours late. To cover the 100 kilometres or so, I had taken 2 taxis, 4 buses, hitched 3 rides, and walked for 2 hours.

I've spent the last two weeks in Peru, where I saw a whale in the desert, spotted condors flying over a canyon 3 kilometres deep, and visited a village situated on man-made islands that float around Lake Titicaca. If I get inspired, I'll write a detailed update in the next day or two.

Addicted to Colombia

2006-03-22T12:27:00.000+01:00

Colombia is addictive. I met many travellers there who intended to pass through quickly and ended up changing their travel plans so that they could spend much longer there. "Come for a week, stay for a month" could be the tourism department's motto. It's got to be one of the most underrated travel locations, possibly my favourite country. I didn't have the luxury to stay for months in Colombia but I everywhere I went I ended up staying longer than expected.

I reluctantly dragged myself away from Bogota, to travel by bus for 10 hours to Medellin, another big Colombian city. For safety's sake, it is recommended to only travel during daylight through Colombia, because if guerillas want to rob or kidnap people, they usually strike at night. But travelling by daylight is better anyway, because from one end of the country to the other all the countryside is spectacular. The entire journey from Bogota to Medellin was through jungle-covered mountains with ravines and rapidly-flowing rivers.

The government in recent years has been trying to ensure that the most important highways are safe, to encourage Colombians to travel again within their own country. The road to Medellin used to be very dangerous, and to make it safe, the last 100 km has soldiers stationed every 200 metres or so. For hours I could always see at least one machine-gun toting soldier in camouflages where the road meets the jungle. At first this freaked me out a bit, until I realised that because of the soldiers it is possibly one of the safest stretches of highway in all of South America.

In Medellin I only intended to stay for a couple of days, but it is such a mellow city in a spectacular natural setting in a valley in the Andes. I stayed until the last possible moment. It is near the equator, but at 1500 metres or so, the altitude-moderated climate is perfect virtually every day of the year. The locals call it the "The City of Everlasting Spring", always warm without being too hot or humid. Colombia's greatest living artist, Fernando Botero (who I had never heard of until getting here), lives in Medellin, and the city is full of his sculptures of fat things. In many of the plazas are his trademark sculptures of fat naked ladies reclining, fat men in suits, or fat conquistodors on fat horses. Really fat, completely obese, like the worst McDonalds' junkies you see in TV shows that like to reveal how fat Americans are. Along with the eternal spring and obese statues was a fantastic night life that kept me out until 4am too many times.

I finally dragged myself off for another 10 hour bus ride through more breathtaking scenery, this time to Cali. The Garden of Eden could have been in Colombia. Everywhere, everything is deep luscious shades of green, the coffee plantations, the sugar fields, the jungle on the mountains. I had intended to spend more time in Cali, the self-proclaimed salsa capital of the world and home to Colombia's best parties. However as I had a flight to catch in neighbouring Ecuador too soon, I could only stay one night, but fortunately it was a Saturday. I met up with some other travellers and went to a nightclub, only intending to stay briefly so I could leave early in the morning. I told myself, "it will not be another 4am morning"...and then I went home at 4:30am. I overslept in the morning, but somehow got to the bus station to continue the journey through... well, yet more inspiring scenery.

I stopped for the night in Popayan, an old Spanish colonial city. Nearby are many coffee plantations, and the owners of the plantations built this city a little higher where the air was cooler. All the buildings in the centre are painted gleaming white, old churches stand on hills, and the Andes provide a nice backdrop. By now I was really tired, from constant travelling and too many nights of short sleep, so I contemplated just resting for a couple of days. Unfortunately I just didn't have time, as I still had about 15 hours of travel ahead of me to reach Quito, Ecuador in time for my flight.

I tried to do the entire 12 to 15 hours of travel in one day. I set the alarm for 6am, ignored it when it went off, got up at 7am, and managed to be at the bus terminal in time for an 8am bus. I drifted in and out of sleep on the bus ride. The bus broke down twice, but I still was on target to reach Quito by midnight. The border crossing with Ecuador took some time, and then I caught another bus onwards. We were soon stopped by the military. As a backpacker who hadn't shaved for a week and who had just come from Colombia, it was no surprise that they searched my bags thoroughly. Naturally there was nothing for them to find. But then the real shock came...

I had been so worried about checking the Colombian news daily that I had ignored all Ecuadorean news. But it turns out that for more than a week, much of Ecuador has been basically shut down by protesting indigeneous people, angry at an impending Free Trade Agreement with the USA. Schools are shut, petrol and food supplies are limited, and the roads in and out of Quito are blockaded with burning tyres and drunk, angry people. I got about 100 kms from Quito and then couldn't go any further. I thought about taking a taxi to the blockades and walking past them. But locals told me that as a tall foreign-looking guy in this land of short Andean people it would be dangerous for me. So here I am now, 2 hours of travel from Quito, but stuck. My plane leaves tomorrow night, and I don't think I will make it. I'm supposed to be flying to Lima, Peru, where my girlfriend is flying from Germany to meet me, so it's a pretty bad situation. Luckily I am stuck in a nice town (whose name I forget immediately anytime I hear it) and I have English language television shows in my hotel room.

Sneaking into a Colombian Army Base

2006-03-09T12:23:00.000+01:00

I am in Bogota, the capital of Colombia. A civil war here has been running for 50 years. There's leftist guerillas in the jungle, private armies funded by businessmen, farmers, and drug lords, and the government's army. Add to that the instability caused by the cocaine industry and you get Colombia's well-deserved reputation for violence. Until recently elections and court cases often went in favour of whoever blew up the most buildings and killed the most people. Unsurprisingly there are not many tourists here.

This weekend elections are being held for the president, senate, and chamber, and so things are pretty tense. There are soldiers with machine guns and bullet-proof vests just about everywhere. From 6pm tomorrow there will be a 4 day ban on the sale of alcohol, to stop booze-induced political violence.

Despite all this, Colombia is much safer for tourists than you would think, as long as you stay out of the guerilla controlled areas in the jungle and listen to local advice. Over the last couple of years things have become far more settled, so much so that the US government website giving advice for travellers states that last year "only" 1 American citizen was kidnapped!

I did my research before coming here, and plan to stick only to safe roads and cities. My research turned out not to be very good, because the first road I tried to travel along when entering Colombia was closed, due to a bridge being blown up a few weeks ago. The detour around a small mountain range added many hours to the trip. I've decided to stay put in Bogota until after the election, insteadf of taking risks on the highways.

It's a pity Colombia has all these problems because it is a fantastic country. The mountains and coast are beautiful, it feels relaxed (or as relaxed as a country at civil war can be), and people are friendly. The day after I arrived I found myself being shouted (für die Deutsche: "to shout someone" bedeutet einladen) in a cafe by a couple of young Colombians and being invited to hang out at their place. Someone else has invited me to go travelling this weekend to a region known as the coffee zone, where the famous Colombian coffee is grown, although due to the election I won't be going.

The highlight so far in Colombia has been a city on the Caribbean coastcalled Cartegena, founded by the Spanish not long after Colombus first came this way. It is situated on an island just off the coast. and it's enormous sea walls built to keep English pirates away from the gold and silver Spain was harvesting are still in place. They surround a city of old colonial buildings with grand churches and theatres and a disused bull-fighting ring. Walking along the sea walls in the evening when a strong sea-breeze is whipping up the waves you can half imagine Spanish sailing ships are likely to appear on the horizon. If you know the Robert de Niro movie The Mission, where he is a Jesuit priest fighting for the rights of Native Americans to have souls, then you've seen this city, because it was used for scenery.

Twenty minutes walk away from the colonial centre, on an extension of the island, there is a row of resort-oriented beaches. Some people say Cartegena is the most beautiful city in South America. I haven't seen every city in South America so I don't know if it is true, but it is probably the best I have seen, especially when walking through at night.

Colombia doesn't attract your usual travellers. Notable are the people who come here simply to sample as much of the local mind-altering produce as possible, and I am not talking about caffeine. I try to stay away from them as much as possible because you can't have a conversation that makes sense with them. One of them, an idiot from Germany, tried to convince me that the former drug lord, Pablo Escobar was a good man. Pablo Escobar, who was possibly the richest and most violent criminal in history, who ordered the deaths of untold journalists, politicians and judges, as well as other people who didn't see things his way, who blew up a passenger jet in order to kill one of the passengers (who by chance actually wasn't on it: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_203), who caused Bogota to earn the title of the most violent city on earth during the 1990's, who was once estimated by Forbes magazine to be the 7th richest person in the world by controlling 80% of the world's cocaine market, who can compete with Hitler and Pol Pot as the 20th century's most evil men. The idiot German's argument was because Escobar built a couple of schools and hospitals in his home town.

One nicer person I met was Susan, a 66 year old recently retired American day care centre manager. She proudly proclaims that she ran the most liberal day centre in America, talking the children on peace marches. Sounds a bit odd to me, I think most 3 year old don't care about politics unless it involves lots of finger painting and afternoon naps.

I also met Juan, an American soldier who finished a tour of duty in Iraq only two weeks ago. He saw a lot of front-line duty, and is understandly somewhat tense at the moment. Hanging out with him challenged some of my ideas about American soldiers, because he was smart and knowledgeable and quite moderate in his views, and witty too. He joined the army as a way to obtain american citizenship. As we walked through Cartegena one night a beggar started pestering us. Juan was born in Central America and speaks fluent Spanish, so he very politely talked to the beggar and said goodbye. The beggar kept following, so Juan spoke much more sternly and told the beggar, "You are not respecting me. I like to be treated with respect. Now leave us alone." The beggar still persisted, and, well, my Spanish is pretty weak but I think what Juan said, with his chest stuck out, and only inches from the beggar's face, was, "I don't want to have to kill any more people, but if you don't leave now I will have no choice." The beggar left _very_ quickly. I chose not to ask Juan any details about the people he has killed.

892 Flavours of Venezuelan Ice Cream

2006-03-07T02:43:00.000+01:00

Spaghetti Bolognaise, Germany, Black Bean, http://www.andes.net/, Titanic, Power Rangers, Jurassic Park, Swiss Cake, Tuna - these are all flavours available in an ice cream shop in Merida, Venezuela. For 15 years the Guinness Book of Records has awarded it as having the most flavours, currently 892 but always increasing. I tried 9 different flavours (although not all on one visit!) and all of them, except Cheese, tasted good. An old Portuguese guy invents these flavours and hobbles around the shop, proudly showing honorary diplomas and photos of him with what I assume are famous Venezuelans who visit his shop.

Merida is a touristy town in the Andes, and I've been here for a couple of days. Other than the ice cream shop, the major attraction is the world's longest, highest - and probably most expensive - cable car. It starts in humid heat at 1500 metres and ends up beyond the clouds amongst patchy snow at 4700 metres. Getting up to the top and back again took me four hours. I don't have much faith in Latin American engineering feats, so I was glad to find it was French-built.

Before coming to Merida, I visited a large part of Venezuela near Brazil called La Gran Sabana. I looked up Gran in my phrase book - it means "big". And Sabana means "bedsheet". I'm not sure how it earned that name. This big bedsheet is an elevated plain some 1500 metres high, bordering the Brazil's Amazon region. It's mostly scrub land, but punctuated irregularly by isolated table top mountains that are cut off from the surrounding land and have therefore each developed their own species of plants and animals. Plenty of rivers plunge off these table top mountains, creating a smorgasbord of spectacular waterfalls, around which small areas of lush forest abound. The most famous of these waterfalls is Angel Falls, which drops almost 1000 metres, the highest waterfall in the world. I didn't see Angel Falls, because it is only accessible by an expensive plane flight, and the promotional photos I saw of it didn't look very impressive, just a thin stream of water disappearing into spray half way down. But I saw enough waterfalls to satiate my desire for several years.

The most interesting waterfall I saw was only some 30 metres high, but with some guidance over the slippery rocks I was able to walk _through_ the curtain of water into a cave that runs behind the waterfall, then after following the cave for a bit, walk back through the curtain in the middle of the river, with the strong current and the force of the falling water trying to knock me off my feet.

I'm not sure if overall I like Venezuela. Despite the scenery and the friendly people, some of the cities have a palpable sense of danger, with plenty of petty and not-so-petty crime. Rumour has it that corrupt policemen like to plant cocaine on tourists and then demand a bribe to not arrest them, and hearing about this has caused me think twice before going out at night. Which is a pity, because Venezuela has contributed more Miss World and Miss Universe winners than any other countries, and going out to night clubs is supposed to be a good way to see evidence of future potential winners.

And finally, for those of you who often complain about how expensive petrol is...you should definitely consider moving to Venezuela. It's one of the world's biggest producers of oil. At 4 cents a litre for petrol, you can fill up your tank with whatever loose change you have in your pocket. Despite this, the driver who took me and others in his Landcruiser on the Gran Sabana tour _still_ managed to run out of petrol 15 km short of a petrol station. For the sake of some 10 cents of petrol and a bit of forethought, we got stranded on the highway while our driver hitched a ride to the station and back.

The Road to Timbuktu 5: End of the Road

2006-02-04T12:29:00.000+01:00

700 years ago the king of Timbuktu passed through Cairo and other cities on his way to visit Mecca. With him were 80 camel-loads of gold. Ever since Europeans tried to reach this unknown and forbidden city, expecting a city paved with gold. There were two major problems: no European really knew where the city was, or if it even existed, and the city was banned to non-Muslims, the punishment for unwelcome visitors being death. Things heated up in the early 1800s when a French society offered an enormous cash prize to the first European to get to Timbuktu and back to Europe alive.

In 1826 Gordon Laing, a scottish man, disguised himself as a Muslim and after two years of travel through the Sahara, and sporting numerous wounds made it to Timbuktu. However soon after leaving he was hunted down and killed.

In 1828 Rene Caillie, a Frenchman, also disguised himself as a Muslim, learnt Arabic, and spent a year travelling alone through West Africa to Timbuktu. He found a poor, rundown and unimportant village, and was so disappointed that he left less than two weeks later to return to France and claim the prize.

In 2006, Steve McLeod disguised himself as a grubby backpacker, learnt nothing, and spent a month crossing the Sahara to Timbuktu. He found a drab, dusty, dirty town, inhabited by people who seem to be a cross of Arab and Black people, as well as French package tourists who had flown to Timbuktu and were staying in airconditioned hotels with televisions, and eating Italian meals at European-style restaurants. He stayed two days then returned the way he came.

I had been forewarned that Timbuktu was spectacularly unimpressive, and it's true. It used to be an important trade city of 100,000 people, located where the fertile area surrounding the Niger river meets the Sahara, where slaves and gold from West Africa passed through on their way to Asia and Europe. It had one of the most important universities in the Islamic world. But when Europeans started sailing ships around Africa and to India and the Americas, Timbuktu's trade dried up. The mud brick buildings were easily destroyed by the yearly rains and sand storms. Far more interesting today is the voyage there.

The last part of my trip to Timbuktu was via an old Landcruiser over dirt roads to the wide Niger river. Here I got on a ferry and travelled a few kilometres upstream across the river, passing fishing villages where the squat, box-like houses are made of mud-bricks, and have to be constantly repaired during the wet season. Utterly poor people living in these villages wear second-hand clothes from America and Europe, usually ripped and dirty, and greet anyone passing through with demands for food, money, pens, or biscuits. After the ferry another 10 kilometres by road took me to Timbuktu. There are plenty of aid organisations helping with food and health in Timbuktu (and all over Mali), but they seem to have created an unhealthy situation where local people assume white people hand out lots of stuff freely to anyone. So as I wandered around Timbuktu, if I dared to stand still for a minute or two, I would soon by surrounded by children and teenagers expecting stuff. It got pretty tiring pretty quickly. This happened even when I walked out of Timbuktu into the sand dunes that surround it on three sights. I don't know where they appeared from - it's like the just spring out of the sand, in their raggedy clothes, ready to annoy me.

The main attraction in Timbuktu is the tourist office, where a small man with enormous glasses crouches over a desk and his almost dry inkpad. He gives Timbuktu stamps in the passports of anyone passing through, which ultimately turns out to be the number one reason people give for going there.

The Road to Timbuktu 4: Meeting Mali's Ladies of the Night

2006-01-29T12:28:00.000+01:00

There are two routes from Nouakchott, Mauritania to Bamako, Mali. The best route follows a good road southwards to Dakar, Senegal, after which a 3 day comfortable train trip eastwards completes the journey. The hard route heads directly eastward by road through the desert for 1000 kms, stopping for some 30 or so police and military checkpoints, each manned by someone asking for a "gift", before turning southwards for 500 kms over unpaved bumpy, sandy roads, where breakdowns are common and the heat is relentless. As I didn't have a visa for Senegal I took the hard route. It was a gruelling 4 days of travel to Bamako, the capital of Mali. Timbuktu is in Mali and all things going well I will be there in a few days.

I hitched a ride with a French man who was transporting an old French van to Mali to sell it. An American girl and her Canadian boyfriend also rode in the same van. The driver was born in the Ivory Coast, and he was almost a perfect blend of African and European. He knew how to use the perfect combination of humour, deception, and argument to avoid giving "gifts" at the checkpoints. He helped us negotiate good deals on accommodation and money changing. And despite the hassles, the heat, the breakdowns, and getting the car stuck in sand, he never lost his cool.

The four day drive had some fascinating scenery and transitions, which partly made up for the difficult drive. The first two days was through pure desert and the villages were far apart. People were predominantly Moors, Arab-looking desert dwellers. Men wore light blue robes with white scarves wrapped around their head, while women each elegantly wore a single piece of bright cloth, from neck to ankle, and which also covered their hair. They used a loose end of the cloth to hide their mouths when they talked to me. As we turned southwards, the desert gradually turned into Savannah and then light forest. We started seeing black Africans in greater numbers, until by the time we crossed the border into Mali, all the villagers were completely black. Women wore bright patterned dresses with matching material used for a kind of hat. A piece of material wrapped around their back and tied to their chest might carry a sleeping baby like a backpack. Women collecting water from the local well balanced their water container on their heads as they walked easily along the roads.

On the first day of the trip we drove until to midnight, so we saw the desert come alive at dusk. Groups of men in the desert all face Mecca and make their sunset prayers. Camels and goats are herded up and driven without warning across the dark road, leading to a lot of roadkill. The villages, composed of small rectangular windowless clay huts, lifeless during the day, have their doors thrown open, animals are cooked on fires by the roadside, adults recline under canvas coverings, and children run around, enjoying the chance to hassle tourists stopping for an evening meal. We stopped for the night nowhere in particular, so I got out my sleeping bag and slept coiled around the van seats with both the doors open and a cool breeze blowing through.

Things didn't go well on the third day. The road was so bad we only drove 100kms, getting stuck in sand, often going only at walking pace, over bone crunching roads. We stopped in a town where we heard there was a nice hotel with showers but when we checked it out it was full. It was already getting late, almost 11pm, so we gladly took a bare concrete room with one thin ragged mattress at the next place we tried, to share between three people.

If I wasn't so tired I would have noticed earlier that there were a few women wearing particularly revealing clothing hanging out in the courtyard of the "hotel" - and one particularly unfriendly man. If I wasn't so tired I would have wondered why the women greeted us so flirtatiously. If I wasn't so tired I would have been certain what this place was when one woman stopped me as I passed by and said in nonsense English, "You may sleep me?" But when the same woman came in our room, and in French told the French-speaking American that she would sleep with us, four in the room, the penny dropped. With some trouble we explained that, no, we would only sleep three in this room and she must sleep elsewhere. Sure, travel is a time for new experiences, but a foursome with a Malian prostitute is not high on my list of things to do before I die.

Hopefully my next entry will be from Timbuktu.

The Road to Timbuktu 3: Slovenians with Big Potatoes

2006-01-24T12:27:00.000+01:00

I'm in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. It is a dusty, dirty, poor place where goats wander the streets amongst the cars, everything happens at a slow pace, and the only thing to do is find the quickest way to leave. A border dispute in the 1960's between Mauritania and Senegal was resolved badly, leaving the Mauritanians without a capital so they built this one quickly. It's a dirt-poor (but sand-rich) country that mostly consists of the Sahara. The only foreigners here are aid workers, oil company employees, and a handful of travellers who foolishly thought crossing the Sahara overland would be a good choice for a trip.

In the south of Morocco, where I last wrote, I met up with two Slovenian guys who had decided on a whim one cold Slovenian afternoon to do the Sahara crossing, and early the next day took a flight to Morocco and hightailed it southward. I also met a Japanese guy who has travelled by ferry, train and bus from Japan to China, through Mongolia, Russia, Europe, to here. None of us had much idea about how we were going to find our way into and across Mauritania, where to stay, or how much to pay. None of us could speak Arabic or French, the two main languages around here. But the Slovenians told me a Slovenian saying: "The dumbest farmer has the biggest potatoes". I had no idea what that meant, so they explained that it means that somehow things go well for the ones who least deserve it.

We set off together and well, we had very big potatoes in an area where things can get very difficult for travellers. A Mauritanian guy gave us a lift in the back of his van on the 8 hour trip to the Mauritanian border and beyond. The van was way beyond being in usable condition and we expected to have a breakdown and get stuck in the desert. But we only had one tyre blow out, the repairs took half an hour and we got across the border 30 minutes before it closed for the night, which could have left us camping in the desert close to nowhere. Once we were across the border safely the driver and his wife were so happy to be back in their poor, hot, desert country they broke out into loud African song and started dancing while we drove past the car wrecks and abandoned pieces of less successful journeys.

Early the next day we found a driver with a reasonably good car prepared to take us onwards for the next 500 kms to Nouakchott, where I am now. My potatoes are still big - a couple of hours after arriving yesterday I found a couple of French guys, a Canadian, and an American going in my direction inland along the hopefully well-named "Route of Hope", and leaving in an hour or so from now. It's going to be the toughest part of my journey and will take three or four days until I am in a city worthy of the name, by which time I will be out of the Sahara.

The Sahara doesn't often look much like the postcard pictures and the scenery from "The English Patient". It has a surprising amount of variety. Sometimes it has lots of sparse shrubs, 100 kms later it might turn into a flat and barren sea of sand, then perhaps for 200 kms eroded rock formations dominate. Only sometimes do the classic yellow dunes make an appearance. Large herds of camels occasionally appear, or a solitary robed person can be seen walking from nowhere to nowhere. But mostly there is nothing to see, no activity except for a handful of drivers going along the only sealed road that crosses the Sahara from north to south.

The Road to Timbuktu 2: The Country That Doesn't Exist

2006-01-21T12:26:00.000+01:00

Since I last wrote I visited Marrakesh, one of Morocco's major drawcards, where plenty of rich French people come to hibernate for the winter. Like the Medina or Old City in Fez I described last email there is also a Medina in Marrakesh, which has a large central square where in the evening all sorts of entertainment takes place - dancing monkeys and snake charmers, child acrobats somersaulting and landing on each other's shoulders and crazy guys rolling back and forwards, impromptu drama shows and drum bands playing desert music.

I stayed in a hotel in Marrakesh modelled on a typical Moroccan home. Amongst the madness and chaos, it was a refuge, and now I see how Moroccans can live in the Medina without having nervous breakdowns. I followed instructions that led me through an archway, down a narrow lane, and around the corner to the entrance, which turns sharply and leads to a beautiful and private courtyard, unable to be seen from outside. The walls and floor are decorated in dark blue and white patterned tiles, the floor is covered in rugs and where there are no rugs, there are low divan-style sofas, covered in cushions. The courtyard is covered and only lets in low lighting, as do ornate but dim lamps. It feels like a harem, although unfortunately it lacked beautiful women massaging my feet and feeding me grapes. Bedrooms on two levels come off the courtyard in every direction, which are also decorated a la Arabian Nights.

I left Marrakesh intending to start the long, long journey south through the desert to Mauritania, but due to overbooked buses, I got stuck for two days in a resort town where old Germans, Scandinavians, and Brits come for a week or two of sunshine. Being in such a place after the real Moroccan cities was a bit surreal. As soon as a bus was available heading south I got on it, on an epic sleepless 24 hour bus journey to a place not worth knowing about in the Western Sahara, called Dakhla.

I had a two hour wait between buses and got talking to a couple of locals. They asked me where I was from, then made a point of saying they are not Moroccan. They are from Western Sahara. The problem is, there is no such country. It was a Spanish possession until they handed it over in 1970's. But Spain neglected to say whom they were handing it over to. Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania all claimed it, and a lot of the people actually living there, desert nomads I think, claimed independence. So what's the logical thing to do with a huge chunk of empty desert that people can't agree over? Fill in with landmines, of course. So this is an area where you stick to the road. Fortunately there is no reason to leave the road, because it is just endless repetitive desert. Although there is no official resolution, it is controlled by Morocco. Over the last 500 kilometres I lost count of how many police checkpoints we went through where as the only foreigner on the bus, I had to trundle off, get my passport details recorded, and board again, to the annoyance of the other passengers.

Whereas people in the north of Morocco tend to wear robes with pointed hoods that remind me of some costumes from the original Star Wars movie, here some people go for the Lawrence of Arabia look, white-ish robes with white linen scarves coiled around their head then draped around their necks and over their shoulders, with that tough-guy hard defiant stare.

All things going well, tomorrow I'll cover the last 350 kms to the Mauritanian border.

The Road to Timbuktu 1: Oceans of Blood

2006-01-16T12:23:00.000+01:00

It's been a bad week for sheep in Morocco. I'll tell you why in a moment.

A couple of years ago while gazing over maps, dreaming of places to visit, I noticed that I could reach Timbuktu from Europe by travelling overland (and over sea), passing through Spain and Morocco. I made a note to myself to actually do the journey someday. Well, now I am on the way.

I started from Spain, where I took a ferry past Gibraltar, over the 20-odd kilometres to Africa. From the ferry I could see Europe in one direction and Africa in the other, and I was quite disappointed that both continents looked identical. I don't know what I was expecting...churches and castles on one side, elephants and giraffes on the other?

Upon arriving in Morocco I hightailed it down to Fes, one of Morocco's major tourist drawcards. The centre of Fes (and every Moroccan city) is the Medina, the old city, an enormous maze of narrow streets too small for cars, contained within giant walls, where thousands of people - and the occasional animal - crowd and press together, pushing you whatever way. This area, only a couple of kilometres across contains 400,000 people and it seems like every one of them has something to sell. Many women wear hair- or head-coverings, and many men wear brown gowns with pointy hoods. Streets are lined with stalls selling aromatic spices, fresh fruit, dried fruits and nuts, ceramics, carpets, carpets, carpets, sheep, and all sorts of clothing and trinkets you can think of. There are no straight streets, and from the moment I entered through one of the dozen main entrances, I was lost, at the mercy of street urchins to guide me to the nearest gate. There is no way to tell whether going down a crooked lane will lead to a dead end or a major road. I felt like a rat in a giant science experiment, and failing miserably at finding the cheese and the path out.

I loitered on a street so narrow I could touch both walls with my outstretched arms, working out whether I had already seen this street, and whether the ceramic shop I was standing outside was different from any of the others I had already seen, when a man tugged at my sleeved, and said in French "Attention, attention". I thought he was yet another person trying to sell me stuff I didn't want, so I ignored him. Suddenly he grabbed me harder and threw me into the shop, just in time to avoid the sorry-looking donkey, loaded with gas bottles, and coming down the street at a mean pace. After that experience I paid more attention to people's warnings.

The travel literature likes to say how the medina in Fes is a medieval city, unchanged in centuries. I'm no expert on medieval cities but I am pretty sure they didn't have electricity, internet cafes, bootleg CDs for sale, men sitting inside their shops watching European football on TV, and Wham's greatest hits blasting out of apartments.

Plenty of sheep were being sold all around the Medina, wherever the paths were wide enough, because a big Islamic festival was about to happen. For this festival people travel from all over the country to be with their families, and then together the family slaughters a sheep to celebrate...something...I don't know really. The day before the festival there was sheep bleating all day. The next day, a sinister silence... As I have long believed, the family that slaughters together, stays together.

During the day of the sheep massacre I travelled to Rabat, the capital of Morocco. When I walked through Rabat's Medina in the afternoon, the gristly remains of the sheep could be seen. Teenage boys were grilling sheeps' heads on improptu fires, in preparation of stewing the heads to make a Moroccan traditional dish. Piles of bloody sheep fleeces were stacked along the street. I had to be careful not to slip on blood.

On my stomach's behalf, I soon left the Medina and went down to the ocean. Unfortunately I chose the place where the city's sewerage enters the ocean. Around the sewerage pipe a large area of water was a strange pink, which I guess was from the gallons of sheep's blood. Nearby a brave - or foolish - man was surfing, ignoring the unsanitary conditions.

Amazingly the medinas don't smell, and the next day everything was scrubbed clean, all garbage removed, and any trace of sheep and blood had disappeared. Except that the restaurants had lots of sheep dishes on the menu.

Balkans: Marble Palaces and Blown Up Buildings

2005-10-09T22:45:00.000+02:00

I took a recent trip to what used to be Yugoslavia, and is now five different countries, and could be seven soon, if Montenegro and Kosovo get what they want. Not many of the places I visited are likely to become major tourist attractions too soon - land mines in the countryside and war-destroyed houses in the main streets tend not to be too popular. But there were some real surprises, places that I had never heard of but went to anyway that turned out to be gems.

We started inland a bit, in Ljubljana and Zagreb, both typical middle European places, like you might find in Austria or Germany. But then we took a four hour train ride over the mountains, past bombed-out and deserted farmhouses and villages, into the clouds and out again, to arrive on the Adriatic coast, in a city called Split. Suddenly everything had changed, from the dark, drab Art Nouveau buildings in gloomy Zagreb, to Split's dazzling marble in the bright sunshine, more like Italy or Greece or Spain.

The main attraction in Split is the retirement home of a Roman emperor, who built a colossal fortified palace, all of marble, surrounded by giant walls, and right on the seashore. After the Roman empire fell apart some invaders turned the palace into a small town, where the corridors became tiny streets of marble, the palace gardens became piazzas, and the rooms were converted into tiny shops and homes. It's still like this today.

Further along the coast is Croatia's pride and glory, Dubrovnik. This is a fortified city that was an independent city state for hundreds of years, always withstanding invasion. Living under enlightened leaders while all the rest of Europe was mired in feudalism, even in the 1300's they had a public retirement home, slavery was abolished, torture was forbidden, there were schools and a public health service. Nowadays it has fallen to modern invaders: it's on the itinerary of every Mediterranean cruise ship so its piazzas and streets-cum-staircases are too overcrowded with tourists.

We crossed the border into Bosnia and Hercegovina, to a town called Mostar which marks the limit of how far the Turkish Muslims invaded Europe. Today it's a city that's half Christian, half Muslim, so there are mosques and churches everywhere fighting for attention. It had a arched stone bridge connecting to the two sections of town over a deep river, symbolic of the supposed inter-ethnic harmony in the city with the most mixed marriages in the country but unfortunately it got blown up for fun during the wars.

It isn't Muslim life as you expect it in Mostar though - we took a quick look at a mosque, and a girl inside offered to give us a tour and tell us about her religion. Dressed conservatively with a headscarf, you're thinking? No way, this girl was ready for a night at the disco. She wore tight clothing - and not much of it at that - as she wandered inside and outside the mosque, which broke a few misconceptions for me. She told me that Mostar is the western-most Islamic city, in both the geographic sense and the cultural sense.

There were some things in Mostar that were very depressing. It was home to some of the worst fighting in the Balkan wars in the mid 1990's, wars which, no matter how much I listened and read, I couldn't quite make sense of. Serbians fought a joint Bosnian and Croatian army, then the Bosnians and Croatians went at each other. All sorts of awful stories, like snipers killing old people going about their shopping, and 10 year olds being amongst a crowd that received a grenade or two in their midst. Lots of people died pretty quickly and there wasn't enough cemeteries, so they turned parks and gardens into new cemeteries all over the place. In one cemetery in the centre of town every grave stone was marked with the year of death: 1993. In another, everybody died in 1994.

Next stop was Sarajevo, home to the Winter Olympics in the 1980's, and under siege for 3 years in the 1990's. The outer parts of Sarajevo have plenty of big ugly concrete apartment blocks, with the added feature of the occasional missing wall or roof where it was hit with a shell. Most of the inner city has been built and restored, but one notable blotch on the skyline is the totally destroyed parliament building. Somebody told me they are waiting for some aid money before they build it. Sarajevo has a good cosmopolitan feel to it, probably partly due to their being so many aid workers and UN peace keepers in town. It also has a infamous history of violence: here in 1914 the heir to the Austrian empire Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by a Serbian hothead anarchist, which ignited World War One.

From here the trip went downhill quickly. Our bus broke down in a non-existent, run-down and unpronounceable country called Republika Srpska, turning what promised to be an 8 hour ride in a fume-filled bus with a special technology designed to amplify every bump and pothole severalfold into something much worse. The destination of the bus ride was Belgrade, in Serbia-Montenegro. With the aftermath of the bus ride and the weather - rain came down in torrents the entire time I was there - the word Belgrade now conjures up very dark images for me.

We ended the trip in a Macedonian town called Ohrid. It sounded pretty nice in the guidebook, but was better than that. It's a peaceful old town with quiet streets, on a lake with a view to Albania on the other side. It spent time over the years as a Roman city, Byzantine, Turkish, Yugoslavian, and now Macedonian, and there is a little bit of all of this today. It's exactly halfway between nowhere and nowhere, so the only tourists who venture there are local ones, and the occasional idiot who didn't realise that there is a reason why nobody makes the effort to spend their holidays trudging through the more remote parts of the former Yugoslavia. It's got the Mosques-and-Churches-together thing happening, and people around Ohrid didn't get involved in the war so there's no bullet holes and grenade scars in the streets and walls like there were in the other towns we passed through.

My Balkan photos are here: http://flickr.com/photos/smcleod/sets/1120735/

The Danube Trail

2005-08-30T22:36:00.000+02:00

Even before I came to Europe a couple of years ago, I had planned to do a bit of long-distance cycling while I was here. I finally got around to doing all the preparation such a trip needs, and for 9 days I rode my bicycle along the Danube river, starting at its alleged source somewhere in the Black Forest, and ending up in Austria. I slept (almost) every night in a tent. I almost had to cancel the trip just after I started. I had got myself a good bike, and shoved a tent, a sleeping bag, and a couple of changes of clothes on the back. Less than 1 kilometre into the trip the back of my bike fell apart, strewing bits of luggage and nuts, bolts,and screws all over the street. Luckily the local bike shop did a good job of fixing it quickly, and the next morning I started again.

The Danube bike path is supposed to be one of the best bike rides in Europe, and even better, it's mostly pretty flat. I rode through Bavaria, and it seemed that every few kilometres there was an old castle, cathedral, medieval village, or memorial on the river bank. I even saw people walking down the street wearing lederhosen (the German leather trousers), and some Julie Andrews-style dresses. It turned out that in the nearby town there was a sort of mini-Octoberfest going on. Well I say mini, but that's a relative term. I checked it out in the evening, and it was an enormous weeklong festival with thousands of people, plenty of beer drinking, carnival rides, and German oompah bands. And Australians. It seems wherever you go in the world, you'll run into Australians. I heard this unmistakable Aussie twang amongst all the German, tracked down the source, and got talking to an older guy from country Victoria who was being dragged around little-known parts of Germany by a German woman.

It was easy just to ride and ride and ride until I had had enough for the day, then find a nearby camping ground. The biggest problem was with the Bavarian food - not so bad if you like schnitzel, but for a vegetarian it was pretty rough. One restaurant I went to had about 20 different types of schnitzel on the menu, and nothing else. I asked if they had ANYTHING without meat in it, and they brought me out a couple of lettuce leaves, with some tomatoes and radishes. Not exactly the energy food you need for a full day's biking. After that I stuck to pizzerias.

Photos are here: http://flickr.com/photos/smcleod/sets/820932/

Japanese Daze

2005-04-09T18:09:00.000+02:00

I'm back in Germany after enjoying a week in Japan as the last leg of my journey.

I spent the first couple of days in Japan bewildered and confused. I was lost amongst Tokyo's 50 million inhabitants, with their complex Japanese etiquette, the indecipherable Japanese writing, and the underground railway to navigate which, with 450 stations, must surely be the world's biggest underground railway. These all conspired against me, making me always look perplexed and not really sure where I was going or what I was doing. Luckily Japanese people tend to be extremely polite and helpful. Unluckily Japanese people tend to speak bad English or no English whatsoever so their polite helpfulness was often less than useful.

Things started badly. Here are detailed instructions for how not to begin a Japanese holiday - as I learnt from bitter experience:

Arrive at Tokyo's airport on a Saturday evening, without Japanese money, a guidebook or any accommodation booked.
Wander around the airport looking for an ATM only to discover that Japanese ATM's typically don't except foreign cards.
After finally finding a special ATM for foreigners, wander around the airport again, this time looking for a bookstore that sells Japan guidebooks
Buy an overpriced guidebook, open to the Tokyo accommodation section and read: "Flying into Tokyo, particularly at night, without accommodation lined up can be nightmarish.
Proceed to call every bugdet hotel listed in the guidebook to discover that the guidebook's comment was an understatement.
While contemplating sleeping overnight in the airport, stumble upon the Tourist Information desk just as the clerk is locking up for the night.
Plead to the Tourist Information clerk to give some information about finding a hotel before she leaves.
Gratefully accept list of hotels from clerk, return to telephone, make seven more calls to finally find a hotel that has a spare room.
Begin stage 2 of the nightmare: the 2 hour late night journey on a total of 3 trains to the hotel.

Ah, but it was all good fun, this is what independent travel is all about - being unprepared and winging it as you go. It almost always works out, and when it doesn't you are left with a good story to tell.

When I got to my hotel and checked in, I was dying to have a quick bite to eat then sleep like I had never slept before. I opened the door to my room and thought I had gone to the wrong room. It looked like a small storeroom without a bed and with a pile of blankets on the floor. Then I realised, that the room WAS the bed. The floor was covered with a couple of Japanese mats, and I just had to roll out the blankets and sleep directly on them.

Next stop was the local convenience store. These stores, such as 7-11's and Circle K's, are on every corner in Japan. There is one convenience store for every 400 inhabitants and in my opinion that's the rate they should be found at everywhere around the world. They are so prevalent that a friend of mine living in Japan gave me directions to her apartment according to convenience stores. "Go past the Family Mart, walk one block further to the 7-11, then turn right at the Circle K". Amongst all the junk food are Japanese novelties such as heated cans of ultra-sweet coffee and tasty pre-prepared meals that you simply take home, throw in the microwave for a couple of minutes, and eat. The problem was, the meals were all labelled only in Japanese so I had little idea what contents were in most of them. For the adventurous that wouldn't be a problem, but as a vegetarian, I spent 15 minutes staring at the various foodstuffs, almost weeping with frustrated hunger, before concluding that for the duration of my Japanese visit I was going to have to shelve the vegetarian thing and act like a normal human being instead.

After a couple of days, I used the bullet train to escape from Tokyo to a slightly less hectic part of Japan - the cities of Osaka and Kyoto. I have a friend living in each of these cities and with their guiding and translating I snapped out of my Japanese daze. Aidan from Australia lives in Osaka where - with the help of hand puppets - he teaches Japanese people how to speak English. Fortunately he left the hand puppet at home when we went out in Osaka. Osaka is a good example of one common image of Japan - the city at night ablaze with neon signs in every street, from ground level to the seventh floor. Toei from Thailand is studying in Kyoto, which offers a very different but equally common image of Japan - golden pagodas, elegant gardens, and shrines and temples. It is also home to Monkey Mountain where, in contrast to normal zoos, the humans are put in cages while the monkeys on the outside look through the bars.

I experienced a couple of personal firsts in Japan: high-tech toilet seats and singing karaoke. When in Rome... Japan is the land of the high-tech, and amongst all their fancy gadgets, the toilet seats impressed me the most. The high-tech toilet seat came to my sudden attention when I sat down and discovered that the seat was heated. Next to the seat was a complicated console with 6 buttons and 3 dials, all labelled only in Japanese except one button that read "Powerful Deodorizer". I was curious to find out just how much power the deodorizer had so I start pressing buttons and turning dials, but nothing seemed to happen. The wisest move of mine in all of Japan was to stop playing with the console until I was standing up, next to, but not in front of the toilet. I was determined to work out how to make this contraption do something and so I kept pushing buttons in various combinations when suddenly I got it. A thin pipe rose out of the toilet and started sending a stream of water 2 metres in the air, saturating the door, but luckily not me. As the floor started flooding I found the magic button to stop the impromptu water fountain and retract the pipe. I left the toilet as quickly and quietly as I could, acting as if the lake on the bathroom had nothing to do with me.

The less said about my karaoke experience the better. But I guess I have to say at least something now... Karaoke in Japan, as far as I can tell, usually takes place in private booths designed only for a small group of people, which you pay for by the half-hour. A friend and I holed up in one of these booths, with our own karaoke machine and about 20 billion songs to choose from. The booths have clear glass windows in the door, which I am told is to stop people using the private booths for other private non-karaoke activities. Before coming to Japan I did have a life-long resolution never to take part in karaoke. I have changed it now, to never do karaoke outside of Japan. Believe me, it is for the sake of my personal dignity and the sake of the people within earshot.

I'm keen to get back to Japan sometime soon. Almost everything I did and saw in Japan was somehow strange or exotic. I could have written pages and pages for each day I was there. Unfortunately reality has hit me again, the travelling is over for now, and as of Monday I join the world of wage-slaves again.

Chile: I'm Not the Messiah

2005-03-19T00:41:00.000+01:00

Last time I wrote I had just managed to sneak out of Bolivia on a 3am bus into Chile. I heard afterwards that the protests increased, the president of Bolivia unsuccessfully tried to resign, and that leaving La Paz got harder. It seems like I got out just in time. I suspect the llamas were behind the protests, deliberately trying to ruin my travel plans.

Once the bus crossed the Bolivian/Chilean border it was already daylight, and I got the chance to see what must be just about the most desolate landscape on the planet. Chile is on the western side of the Andes, and the rain clouds get trapped on the eastern side. That means it doesn't rain in northern Chile. I really mean that, it is not just exaggeration. They tell me they have some wispy clouds in the sky about 5 days in every year, and it rains about once every ten years. Somewhere nearby is officially the driest spot on the planet.

Imagine a nice landscape of green rolling hills. Now remove from your imagination the trees and the bushes. Get rid of the people, the animals, and the birds in the sky. Then remove the grass and anything else living, so that what remains is just barren, lifeless, brown hills, like mining slag heaps. That's northern Chile, and that was the scenery for hour after hour. I slept most of the time sleeping, waking about once an hour to look out the window and wonder if we had even moved. The landscape continued like this right to the coastal city of Arica, where I got mistaken for Jesus, a gay, drug-addicted Jesus.

Arica is a port town in the very northern tip of Chile. It has beautiful beaches on the Pacific Ocean, with surfing and white sand and lots of beach space for everybody. Pretty much like Australian beaches. However the town is part of the desolate landscape I described above, everything brown and barren, with those slag heap-style hills coming right up to the city's edge.

I sat in an outdoor cafe in Arica, chatting with an Australian guy and a German girl about the tedious scenery. A Chilean woman sitting on a bench nearby summoned the German girl over and told her in Spanish that she had been searching all her life for Jesus of Nazareth, and pointing to me, told her that she had found him, that she was certain I was him. The German girl politely informed her that I wasn't the messiah, that I was just a tourist. The German girl came back to our table and told us about this revelation, so we did the only thing we could - we started mocking the situation, and made jokes about ordering some water for me to turn into a fine Cabernet Sauvignon.

The Chilean woman could see this from her bench, realised that maybe I wasn't Jesus after all, and needed to inform me. She walked up to me, and started waving her handbag at me and with her finger pointed right in my face launched into a tirade, telling me how everything became bad in Chile when I arrived. She was highly agitated and seemed to be on the verge of violence. The Australian guy spoke better Spanish than me and tried to calm her down, but she quickly put him in his place and berated onwards.

Soon the waiter tried to move her out, but she wasn't having it. A policeman passing by joined the effort with a "Excuse me, can you leave the cafe?", but she answered quickly with a stern "I am talking, now go away", and the policeman skulked off to a safe distance. By now the whole cafe was watching this impromptu theatre, pedestrians were gathered around in a circle, and people were watching from upstairs balconies.

Nothing would stop her, and I was expecting her to hit me at any moment. Her accusations against me were getting wilder and wilder. She pointed to the Australian guy and called him my boyfriend, told me I was homosexual, and she mimed shooting up in her arm and told me that I was a junkie. By now this had been going on for 15 minutes and she had run out of words to throw at me. She suddenly stopped, turned around and walked off, leaving me - and everybody else in the cafe - stunned.

The next day I bought a delicious cream-filled donut - and got my first crook stomach for 2 years as a result. I don't know if it was somehow a curse related to my crazy Chilean friend, but it ruined the rest of my time to Chile. I was bedridden, unable to do anything much except watch American TV in my hotel room. Like magic my stomach got better the moment I got on the plane out of Chile to New Zealand. This was merciful because it was a 13 hour flight.

I've spent the last week in Christchurch, New Zealand visiting my family. I had the strange experience of being a foreigner in my own country. Christchurch is a very small city and is nice enough, but it really can't compete with the charms of Latin America and the culture and heritage of Europe.

I'm about to catch a plane to Melbourne, before heading to Tokyo on the way back to Germany.

Danger in Bolivia

2005-03-08T22:05:00.000+01:00

There are some things you shouldn't tell your mother you are going to do until you have done them, like joining the Taliban, getting a tattoo, or mountain-biking down The World's Most Dangerous Road. The Taliban rejected my application, and I am not brave enough to get a tattoo, so a few days ago I did the mountain-biking expedition in Bolivia.

Sixteen of us plus some guides started at the top of a barren mountain pass at 4700 metres, where an icy wind was coming over the snow and making our fingers go numb. A few hours later we had ridden 64 kilometres and descended down to 1700 metres (a total descent of 3 kilometres) into lush jungle in the mountains. Most of the time the supposedly two-way road was unpaved, barely wide enough for one vehicle, and with a drop of a few hundred metres over the side awaiting those who lost concentration. The biggest danger was from the scenery. We were warned at the beginning to ignore the scenery while riding, because there was a story of a guy who was admiring the views and rode straight over the edge.

To make The World's Most Dangerous Road even more dangerous, we were riding at the tail end of the rainy season, so we spent a good hour riding through torrents of rain, turning parts of the road into mud that flicked up and covered our bodies and our faces. There had been a mud slide that morning which bulldozers were already mending but which still gave us more challenge than we needed.

At the end of the road I loitered in Coroico, a small town located in the jungle and the mountains, for a couple of days.

Some days before the bike-ride I visited a town called Copacabana on Lake Titicaca. The town has nothing to do with the song, I think. Lake Titicaca is variously labelled "The World's Highest Lake" or "The World's Highest Navigable Lake", but neither of these titles are true, which makes its claim to fame as plain as La Paz's: "A Lake". However it is interesting to see an enormous lake at almost 4000 metres. The thin air does magical diffusing stuff to the light so that sunrise and sunset are particularly impressive. Well, I can vouch for the sunset but seeing the sunrise would involve doing what I consider to be one of the worst tortures known to the human race - getting up early.

On Lake Titicaca is an island, Isla del Sol, or Island of the Sun. This is where the gods of the Incas are supposed to have originated. I met up with a guy called Kashmir from Kanada, and we hiked from one end of the island to the other, a good 3 hours walk, always with great views towards either Bolivia or Peru. During the walk I found another reason to hate llamas. A Bolivian kid with snot all over his face blocked the path with his tethered-up llama, and wanted to charge us money so that we could take photos of his llama. I patted the llama's dirty, matted, thick wool and he reciprocated by trying to eat my shoe. It is not a shoe that I have any special sentimentality for, but nevertheless I didn't want it eaten. I pulled back, which started the llama-Steve war. He was determined not to let me cross the path, turning his back towards me and trying to kick me. Kashmir from Kanada and the enterprising Bolivian kid with snot all over his face both tried to distract the llama so I could cross but he wasn't having it. I had to clamber over the fields until I was well past him before I could get back on the path.

I spent more time than intended in Bolivia. I had a bus ticket booked to take me to Chile, but on the day before I was supposed to leave protesters blocked the roads in and out of the bus terminals with tires and rubbish. No-one was getting in and no-one was getting out. I could do nothing but pass the time, until I got word that a bus was daring to leave at 3am in the morning when the protesters were distracted with sleep or something. So I made it to Chile, where I am now.

High Altitude Bolivian Crime and Sickness

2005-02-28T22:07:00.000+01:00

There's often a sameness when travelling - I feel like I'm seeing the same cities, beaches, or wilderness I've already seen. That is definitely not the case for Bolivia. I've been in Bolivia for a couple of weeks, seen some unique stuff, and been the victim of bad health and of crime.

I left Salta in the north of Argentina to travel into Bolivia by bus. I expected just another tedious seven hour bus trip, and had a book ready with which to kill time. However the book remained unopened because almost from the moment the trip started I was ogling out the windows at strange multi-coloured rock formations. It looked like someone with an enormous paintbrush and some rainbow paint had swirled patterns onto the rocky hills. The road was in a river valley that got narrower the further we travelled. An old train line also ran through the valley, but it was obviously disused because every now and then 50 metres or so of the track was missing where the river had caused erosion. The closer we got to Bolivia the more spectacular the rock formations got and the faster the muddy water flowed. At one point on the Bolivian side two rivers met, one with chocolate-coloured water, the other with black water. The two colours at first flowed alongside each other then mingled and merged. The road went up and up and up and by the end we were at approximately 4000 metres above sea level.

It's amazing the sudden difference the moment you cross the border from Argentina to Bolvia. At the border I had to get off the modern, well-maintained Argentinean bus, walk along the paved roads, then cross a bridge into Bolivia, where the road became packed dirt. The Bolivian bus that continued the journey was an old thing that ratttled and shook and seemed unlikely to run for much longer. On the Argentine side people are outgoing, friendly, elegant, modern and service-oriented. Immediately across the border I was harrassed by snotty-faced children begging for money and lollies. I went into a Bolivian restaurant where everyone ate quitely and looked down at the floor. I asked the waitress for a menu, but she didn't have one. She wouldn't tell me what was available, I just had to look at what other people were eating to work it out.

My first stop in Bolivia was in a town called Tupiza. This is supposedly where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lived their last days before being executed for trying to steal a Bolivian payroll. It is an apt setting for their wild west story, because the mountains all around Tupiza look just like the red rocks you see in a Western movie.

In Tupiza I departed on a 4 day tour by Toyota Landcruiser with a few other travellers, a driver and a guide/cook. The tour was on Bolivia's Altiplano, which I guess means "high plain". We were in the Andes, at an altitude of between 3000 metres and 5000 metres for the trip, but as the name suggests the land was mostly flat.

Despite the altitude the weather was usually pretty good - light clothes during the day but really cold at night. We saw some many unusual things on the tour, such as the world's highest geyser field (at almost 5000 metres). There were old decrepit villages with mud-brick houses, half of which are empty and falling apart, located on wind-blown mountainous desert and which get my nomination for Worst Place in the World to Grow Up. No trees, nothing green, nothing but the occasional llama to provide entertainment. Oh yeah, llamas, we saw a lot of them. Up close they look like a cross between a sheep and a camel. They are incredibly stupid too. They are scared of cars, and their way of handling this fear is to wait by the side of the road until our jeep was almost next to them, then suddenly run, not away, but directly in front of the jeep to the other side of the road. Fortunately our driver knew to expect this behaviour and managed not to kill any of these pathetic creatures.

At well above 4000 metres we took a dip in what must be one of the world's highest hotsprings, 30-something degree water, with a view to a lake populated by pink flamingoes, and a backdrop of 6000 metre high Andes mountains that make up the Chile-Bolivian border.

Warning: bad gag coming

Our guide: "That mountain is a volcano and the middle of it is Chile"
English guy: "I thought the middle of a volcano would be hot"

It is the rainy season at the moment in Bolivia. Some of the roads we travelled down were river beds, and being the rainy season those roads became rivers that we had to drive through. On the first day we got stuck in a river, the jeep unable to power its way out. We all had to climb out through the window, Dukes of Hazzard style, climb over the bonnet, stand in the icy water and push the front of the car while the driver revved it in reverse. After half an hour or so we got the car out but we had all lost feeling in our feet. After that there was an air of tension in the car any time we had to pass through a river.

The finale of the trip was the "Salar de Uyuni", a giant salt plain 200 kilometres across. Due to the rain the entire salt plain was flooded with about 5 centimetres of water creating a perfect mirror. The sky and clouds blended seamlessly into the reflected image on the horizon, making it appear that there was no horizon. Birds flying just above the surface of the water had a perfect reflection underneath, making it unclear as to which bird was flying and which was the reflection. Mountain peaks that appeared in the distance looked disconcertingly like floating rocks.

The high altitude causes lots of people health problems. Our highest point reached was higher than Mount Cook or Mont Blanc and twice as high as Mount Koscioszko. There is not so much oxygen in these reaches and even basic activities like brushing my teeth left my short of breath for a few minutes. The night after we peaked at over 5000 metres I had some problems. I had congested nasal passages, the air was thin, and we stayed in a windy plain with dusty air. I seemed to always to be struggling to breath properly. Before I went to bed I read a detailed explanation of altitude sickness and all the bad things it can do, and how the only good cure is to go much lower much quicker. Proving that reading leads to bad ideas and should be banned, I think the book put suggestions into my head that I was in real trouble.

At 1am I was having a nice dream that it was daylight, we were piling into the jeep, and heading downhill quickly to where the air was more breathable. I woke up to find that none of it was true and my breathing was still hard. At this point the lack of oxygen made me do strange things. I don't remember all of it, but it involved panic, walking up and down the corridor and heading outside and back inside, in flimsy clothes although the night air was very cold. I woke up everybody in the building and came to my senses when they were trying to wrap me in a blanket, calm me down, and bring me back inside from the doorway where I was. Once I calmed down I realised I was deathly cold.

Here was where the guide earned a generous tip. First he made me a brew of coca leaves and some other strange herbs which is supposed to fight the effects of altitude sickness. Then he made some hot water bottles out of empty coke bottles and lined my bed with them. Then finally he did something I didn't expect. He got into my little bed, sleeping top-and-tail, to use his body heat to keep me warm. Normally I wouldn't be so keen on a guy hopping into bed with me, but I was in no condition to complain. So girls, if you want to get a Bolivian man into bed, go up to a really high altitude and freak out in the middle of the night.

At slightly lower altitudes things were much better, and I decided to stay on in Bolivia.

Next stop was La Paz, the supposed World's Highest Capital City at 3800 metres, except that it is not the official capital of Bolivia, not the world's highest city, and therefore its claim to fame is reduced to City. Nevertheless it is breathtaking in two ways. Figuratively breathtaking as you arrive by bus, up to the edge of the canyon in which La Paz is located and through the sparse Eucalyptus trees you can see the city creeping up the slopes of the canyon, with highrise buildings in the bottom of the valley, and the occasional snowy peak providing additional scenery. Literally breathtaking because in addition to the thin air the streets of La Paz are the steepest I have seen, so that simply walking a block uphill leaves you panting and gasping.

On the bus into La Paz a team of scamsters stole my backpack. There was nothing irreplaceable in it and it was insured, so at first I wasn't too worried. At fact I admired how smooth the criminals were, how they distracted me with a friendly-seeming old man who tried to show me something out the window while others made my backpack vanish. I only got angry when I went to have a shower that night and remembered I had no towel. Then I wished death and disease on the criminals and their families. If you have to replace stolen clothing La Paz is the place to do because the ultra-steep streets are lined with people hawking ultra-cheap clothing and general supplies.

I had to report the stolen backpack at the tourist police, which is located outside the main football (soccer) stadium in La Paz. It turned out that a game was starting in 30 minutes between two of Bolivia's best teams, so I bought a ticket from an old lady for 1 euro, and achieved one of my aims for this trip, to watch a Latin American football game.

Iguazu Falls

2005-02-14T22:08:00.000+01:00

Where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet are Iguazu Falls. These are not the biggest waterfalls in the world, nor the tallest, but located in the jungle in two national parks, some say they are the most spectacular.

It is possible to travel the 18 hour journey from Buenos Aires to Iguazu by luxury bus. Seats that recline into completely horizontal beds, movies, food served at your seat - all in all, similar to an airplane. It is possible...or so I am told. I wanted to pass through Uruguay on the way to Iguazu, so instead of that one luxury bus journey I experienced 3 days of travel hell involving one boat, four buses, dealing with border guards at a backwater border crossing who were mystified by my New Zealand passport, missed connections, getting stranded until 1:30am in Hicksville, and riding overnight on a heavily air-conditioned bus while wearing only shorts and t-shirt and sitting next to Fat Albert himself, who oozed over and under and around the armrest into my seat, leaving me to huddle next to the window without a moment's sleep all night.

My whinging doesn't stop there. When I arrived in Iguazu late one afternoon I rested for a night in a hotel then tried to catch the local bus to the falls in the morning. It is a 20 minute journey, but I made it last an hour and a half. I caught the bus from the wrong side of the road, got off where everybody else got off assuming we were at the falls, then searched the streets asking bystanders in pidgin Spanish "Where are the waterfalls?" When I was told it was a long way away (about 15 kilometres, I found out later) I demanded specific step-by-step instructions as to how to walk there. People tended to back off slowly at this stage, suspecting that I was slightly unhinged. It was only when I found an English-speaking man with unlimitedf patience that I realised I needed to take another bus back in the direction I came from.

When I got to the entrance to the falls, I was asking myself whether it was worth the trouble to have come here. Why didn't I just stay in Buenos Aires? It was nice there. Finding that foreigners were charged three times as much as locals to get into the national park containing the waterfalls made me even grumpier. I don't think I would have made good company at the time.

I walked through the jungle, listening to the distant roar of the falls get louder and louder, and at the moment when the falls first came into view my mood immediately changed. I forgot I was tired and hot. I forgot that I hated the world and especially bus companies.

Iguazu Falls is one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen. The edge of the falls is a giant crescent shape, and the water breaks up into 275 separate streams each plunging separately up to 72 metres over the edge along three kilometres. One main stream contains so much water and drops so violently that it creates a cloud of mist completely blocking the view at the bottom. The viewing paths weave in and out of the jungle, and the views seem to be better each time you come out of the jungle. Meanwhile exotic animals I didn't recognise roam along the path. I later found out they are called coatis. Death-defying herons wade in the water at the top of the falls only metres from the water drops. A walkway over the river ends in a viewing platform directly over the main stream of water. The travel hell was definitely worth it.

The best part of the falls was not viewing it. It was the high-speed boat ride into the falls. This starts a couple of kilometres downstream from the falls. We were warned that we would get wet so we should put our valuables and cameras into plastic bags. I thought "wet" meant a few drops of water. Actually we got as wet as if we had jumped off the boat into the water. The boat stopped first in a place where we could take photos safely. Then after putting cameras away we travelled up the gorge past little streams falling from the top of the falls right into the whirlpools, currents and waves created by the major stream. The mist was so thick we couldn't see, and afterwards I wandered how the boatdriver could drive blind. Finally we went back weaving in and out of waterfalls that fell directly on our heads.

After the troubles getting to Iguazu I was in no hurry to leave, so I stayed in town for three days. To pass time, I crossed over the border to Brazil for the day, and saw the waterfalls again, this time from the Brazilian side. Just as good, also in a national park, but the perspective it offers is more panoramic rather than up-close.

Buenos Aires, Argentina: Tango, Evita and Feisty Pride

2005-02-10T20:59:00.000+01:00

There is a story in the brothels of Buenos Aires...

I've been in Argentina for the last couple of weeks. I asked an Argentinian girl in Buenos Aires to tell me something about her country. She replied instantly, "We are good at everything." Except humility, perhaps...as well as economic management, political stability, andaccepting military defeat. To explain:

in 2002 Argentina's economy crashed and the Argentinian peso lost 70% of it's value almost overnight, turning it from the most expensive country in Latin America into a budget traveller's paradise, but makinga lot of Argentinians suddenly poor
after the economic crisis Argentina had five presidents in as many weeks
Argentina invaded the UK-owned Falkland Islands in 1982, but were soon kicked out again by the British military. However a big billboard greets arrivals at the Brazil/Argentina border boldlyproclaiming "The Falklands are Argentinian"

Buenos Aires is a city I liked instantly. Strangely, I felt quite at home, and it was only after a few days that I realised this is because it is quite similar to Melbourne, Australia, where I lived for 10 years, with its wide tree-lined boulevards, lots of grand old buildings from the 1800's, a thriving cafe culture, a number of interesting and varied neighbourhoods, and a pervading sense of style. Like in Melbourne, I always had a nagging feeling that my clothes were not quite fashionable enough.

One thing Buenos Aires has that Melbourne doesn't (or anywhere else for that matter) is the tango. This style of dance originated in the waiting rooms of brothels frequented by immigrants in what was once Buenos Aires' port. Nowadays it is performed in cabarets and cafes for tourists, on popular streets on the weekends, and in milongas, which are regular events where tango dancers come to hone their skills. I learnt some tango steps a few years ago and I was looking forward to seeing it in its home. However what I saw in Buenos was nothing like what I learnt. What I knew as tango was rigid, precise, and danced to a strict tempo, like it was designed by the Swiss military. What I saw in Buenos Aires was emotional, sensual, always with a sense of sad longing. Partners danced while caressing in a passionate embrace, as if they
never wanted to let go of each other again. For me it was like thinking all my life that "food" meant "McDonalds", then discovering Italian cuisine was how good food could be.

I visited a tango milonga one night, which took place upstairs in a dusty old community theatre. 20-year-old girls in slinky black dresses and high heels danced with 70-year-old men who dressed as if in an earlier age, in dapper brown suits with matching hats. I was there with another traveller, both of us in jeans and t-shirts, so we discreetly went to a back table where we still had a good view of the dance floor. A man on one side of the room would stand up at the same time as a woman on the other side, to meet on the dance floor and do their stuff. I could never quite work out how they had agreed to dance together without speaking first. Either they have ESP or a milonga has unwritten rules about body language that are used to request a dance.

At 8:30pm on July 26, 1952 an event happened that shook the world - the death at age 33 from cancer of Eva Peron, aka Evita of "Don't Cry for me, Argentina" fame. Well, according to the Evita Museum it shook the world. I took Spanish lessons for a week in Buenos Aires and my Spanish teacher offered to take me to the Evita Musuem after class one day. It wasn't exactly high on the list of what I wanted to do in the city, but I took up her offer. Evita was a movie star who married the president of Argentina, and later tried to become vice-president. Today there are many things in Argentina named after Evita, including streets, schools, hospitals, and even a small city. A popular tourist destination is Evita's tomb in the city cemetery.

The Evita Museum was more a propagandistic shrine than a museum, portraying Evita as somewhere between Mahatma Ghandi and Jesus Christ. My teacher was telling me some saucy facts about Evita not mentioned in the musuem's displays. A guard heard one of those stories and told my teacher to stop, saying that all that was needed to know was written on the walls. At this point I saw a display of that legendary Argentinian temper, as my teacher spent the rest of the afternoon ranting that "since 1982 we are not a dictatorship. He can't tell me not to say things. I am so mad with him. I am so mad."

Argentinians are truly creatures of the night. Restaurants become busy after 11pm, bars and night clubs kick off at 1am or 2am, and people only head home as the sun rises. On arriving late in a town one Saturday night, I went to a restaurant at midnight to find whole families there, including young children happily running around. I can't work out when people get their sleep, because shops open early in the morning and close late at night. Whenever I told my Spanish teacher I was tired, she would chastise me with a Spanish phrase that translates as "in Buenos Aires there is no sleep."

Buenos Aires, Argentina

2005-02-01T15:33:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine noted that Buenos Aires is often called the Paris of South America. He then added that this was an injustice - Paris doesn't have the Tango. I have to add to that. Unlike Paris, Buenos Aires is full of people who are warm to foreigners and who spontaneously help me to learn more Spanish. It also has an unbeatable nightlife. I complained to my Spanish teacher here that I needed to spend the afternoon sleeping. She looked a little shocked then told me, "Steve, in Buenos Aires there is no time for sleeping."

Leaving the Buenos Aires airport I momentarily felt I was back in Europe. The people and the streets both look European. It is a beautiful, big, and interesting city. Once one of the richest places on the planet, the wealth of former days is still plainly visible in the heart of the Buenos Airies.

Mexico City: Huge but Invisible

2005-01-27T17:33:00.000+01:00

I am in Mexico City, the biggest city on Earth by some measures, with more than 20 million inhabitants. Outside my hostel is a street market. This market seems to stretch indefinitely along the road. You can walk for 2 hours along the street and the market never ceases.

Yet the city is partly invisible. This is because the air is heavily polluted. The city lies on a high plateau surrounded by mountains and volcanoes that trap the emissions of the traffic of this mega-city, ensuring that the size of the city is obscured. The Mexicans claim that the mountains are there but I can't see them, only a cloudy, smoggy horizon.

I am staying two minutes walk from the "Zocalo" or main plaza, which is one of the largest city squares in the world. There is always something interesting and noisy going on in the Zocalo. There are people dressed in Aztec garb dancing in a circle to thumping drums. There are people protesting against various federal and regional governments. There are the ubiquitous Mexican street markets, tourists ogling the sights, students loitering, and once a day the flag changing ceremony. Passing through the Zocalo is always an adventure, dodging the traffic that runs around the outside of the Zocalo, refusing the pleas of the stall owners, and being confronted with legless beggars. There is Mexican music, Mexican smells, and Mexican sights.

Mexico: Hat Hair and Witch Doctors in the Mexican Mountains

2005-01-20T01:14:00.000+01:00

I am suffering from hat hair at the moment, that hairstyle you get when you spend most of the day wearing a woollen hat because of the cold weather. I'm used to hat hair but I didn't expect to suffer from it in Mexico. A major motivation for being in Mexico at this time is so that I would avoid the European winter.

On entering Mexico we at first stuck to the Caribbean coast, enjoying the sun, sea and sand. We went to Tulum, a small town with a backpacker-driver economy, which has a long stretch of postcard perfect beach with wooden cabins tastefully placed along the beach and beach-side bars every kilometre or so. Even better than the beach were some Mayan ruins, also called Tulum, which are perched on a clifftop right on the edge of the sea. The combination of old stone temples and houses adjacent to the bright blue Caribbean waters is not bad at all.

From Tulum we made a brief foray inland to Chichen Itza, more Mayan ruins in the jungle. The centrepiece of Chichen Itza is a stepped-sided pyramid with a hole in the top through which the sun shines twice a year and making a shadow that looks just like a 50 metre serpent that slithers over the pyramid as the sun rises. Or so they say. It happens in March and September so I couldn't see first-hand proof. In the Mayan heyday it was a place of regular human sacrifice, as were all old Mayan centre. One particular Mayan method of sacrifice, which I called the Temple of Doom method, was for four priests to bend a victim's back over a stone altar while the high priest pulled out the living victim's heart. Apparently it helped the priest to communicate with the gods. A brochure claimed that the temples at Chichen Itza have engravings showing this happening but I couldn't find them.

Now completely full of Mayan ruins, I vowed to avoid them for the rest of my trip. We visited Merida and Campeche, a couple of towns where real modern-day Mexican life takes place, rather than just catering for tourists. We weren't really keenly interested in visiting these towns, we were simply postponing a 12 hour overnight bus journey into the mountains.

Having finally made the bus trip, I am in San Cristobal de las Casas. This is a beautiful old Spanish colonial town, 2100 metres above sea level. It is supposed to be warmish in the day and cold at night. Unfortunately we caught a cold snap, so it is cold in the day and freezing in the night. So cold that we had to visit the local market to buy scarves and gloves. It seems almost every gringo here has been caught unaware by the cold, because they are all wearing the Mayan woollen hat with bright patterns and earflaps, available in bulk at the local market.

Yesterday I made a daytrip to a nearby village called San Juan Chemula. This village has a bizarre church. From the outside the church looks like a typical colonial style Catholic church. But the priest was kicked out of the town 35 years ago and the church was taken over by the religious practices of the indigenous people. Instead of seats the inside of the church is covered with pine needles, thousands of burning candles and bright ribbons. The interior walls of the church are lined with various totems to represent traditional Mayan beliefs, with "positive energy" symbols on the north wall and "negative energy" symbols on the south wall. Doors, altars and windows are aligned to welcome the rising sun (the sign of life) and shut out the setting sun (the sign of death).

Local witch doctors sit on the floor and perform ceremonies to heal sick people using dying chickens and soft drinks, particularly Coca-Cola, Fanta, and Sprite. Apparently the burping caused by soft drinks helps expel sickness or evil. I watched a witch doctor coat a man with some combination of greasy, slimy ingredients.

I was fortunate enough to visit San Juan Chemula during a week long ceremony to honour Saint something-or-other, who is nominally the patron saint of the church, but has been reinterpreted to represent a Mayan god. Streams of people dressed in white and black sheepskin coats marched into the church accompanied by Mariachi musicians. They all carried large bunches of flowers and incense, sang and bowed their heads, and listen while the Mariachis blasted their off-key trumpets and strummed their guitars for 30 seconds at a time.

Tonight I am catching another overnight bus, this time hopefully to a place where hat hair is only a distant memory.

Guatemala: Country of the Small

2005-01-14T01:10:00.000+01:00

On New Year's Day I travelled to Antigua, Guatemala. This is a small and beautiful city. Damn beautiful. Every building in the city are old Spanish colonial-style buildings and it is ringed with extinct, perfectly cone-shaped volcanoes. However after admiring the beauty there wasn't actually much to do there, so I soon continued on to Panajachel.

Panajachel is a small village on a lake in the mountains, again ringed with volcanoes. Like Antigua it is beautiful. Damn beautiful. Like Antigua there wasn't actually much to do except admire the beauty. A large group of aging Americans hippies live here, still with long hair and beards and tie-dyed t-shirts, although the long hair and beards are very grey and the t-shirts cover big paunches.

Both Antigua and Panajachel are populated with midgets. Little people. Adults who are easily mistaken for children. I had to kneel down to talk with the hotel staff. They are Mayans, people who already populated that part of the world long before Christopher Columbus and his colonising cronies came sailing in. I guess they must all start smoking really young and it stunts their growth. The women wear bright, multicoloured, woven clothing, just like you would see in a National Geographic magazine. But they don't wear this for the tourists - it actually is how they dress every day.

Next stop was a town called Flores, which is on a small island in a lake, connected to the land by a causeway. The lake is surrounded by jungle, and there was no need to use an alarm clock in the morning. The combined squawking and chattering of a plethora of jungle birds and animals denied anyone the possibility of sleep. I think it is the first time I have enjoyed having my morning sleep disturbed since Saturday morning cartoons as a kid.

Unlike Antigua and Panajachel there definitely was something to do in Flores. Nearby are the ruins of the Mayan city of Tikal, which consists of a number of temples, pyramids, and other structures in the middle of the rainforest. Monkeys swing between the trees, iguanas scurry across the paths, and toucans sit around with their brightly-coloured beaks, doing toucan things and thinking toucan thoughts. You can climb up the tallest temple, which I did. I sat on the top of the pyramid, which took me above the rainforest canopy. The canopy is punctuated by other temples and is a serene view.

Belize: Swimming with Sharks in the Caribbean

2005-01-14T01:05:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I did one of the most frightening things I have done in my life. I'll get to that in a moment...

After Guatemala, I made a brief visit to Belize, a small country nestled between Mexico, Guatemala, and the Caribbean with only 250,000 inhabitants. Whereas its neighbours speak Spanish, Belize is officially English-speaking, although most people speak Creole, which is only sort of like the English I know. "Hello" is "Aye Mon", God is "Jah", and "He owns the boat" is "him is wid de boat". In a cafe I talked to a local guy for half an hour, but I barely understood a word. I think he said something about music being good for the soul, and other profound things.

I spent all my time in Belize on Caye Caulker, a sandy island a few kilometres long and only 500 metres across. This is a super-relaxed place. Going without shoes is the norm, the floors in the restaurants are sand, and nobody goes anywhere fast. I don't think anybody could die on this island from a heart attack. It is what your favourite holiday island would be like if it was run by Jamaicans. I stayed in a cabin on the beach, with a perfect sunrise each morning over the sea outside my bedroom window. The only noises at night were from the waves and the wind, which I think is the best way to sleep soundly.

On the last day in Belize I went on a snorkelling trip from Caye Caulker. We were promised that we would see sharks and sting rays. After we snorkelled a bit the boat took us to another location called "Shark-Ray Alley". Here the guide threw some fish overboard, and suddenly sharks were swarming around the boat. The guide assured us that it was safe to go in the water, that these sharks were of a type that wouldn't attack a human, and that the sting rays in the water would only sting if we stepped on them. I knew that if I tried to think rationally about it, I would never get in the water, so remembering that the people in Venezuela had called me "very dangerous", I jumped straight in. Maybe 8 sharks and 3 sting rays were only metres away, and I was both terrified and exhilarated at the same time. I didn't completely throw caution to the wind, because I made sure that at least one other swimmer was always closer to the sharks than me. Try as I could, I couldn't concentrate on details, because I was always on the edge of fear. After we got out of the water people were asking each other, "did you see the eyes on the rays? Did you see the teeth on the shark", and I hadn't noticed any such things. I guess my travel insurance policy wouldn't have covered mutilation after intentionally diving into a pack of sharks.

Caracas, Venezuela: A Dangerous New Year's Eve

2005-01-04T20:41:00.000+01:00

The best thing about Caracas is leaving. Sounds trite, but it is only by taking a bus somewhere else that you find yourself high on the mountains surrounding Caracas and able to get a view of the spectacular natural location of the city. It is in a long valley in steep jungle-covered mountains, but it is so built up with skyscrapers that you get no sense of this from the streets of Caracas.

I stayed in the heart of the historic part of Caracas, overlooking the central Plaza Bolivar. Unfortunately the historic centre consisted of 6 or so historic buildings and lots of tall and modern buildings that are completely unnoteworthy. Every now and then you get a glimpse through the buildings of the mountains and realise the grand location of the city.

I was in Caracas for New Year and expected the streets to be filled with Latin revellers, especially in Plaza Bolivar. But Caracas has a reputation amongst its citizens as very dangerous, and so nobody goes out at night. I was repeatedly getting warned by locals in the street, on the metro, and around that it was "muy peligroso" or very dangerous.

My girlfriend and I ventured out on the street at 11pm, hoping to find at least some place interesting to see in the New Year. Every bar and restaurant was shut - and had been since 6pm - and only a few people were on the street, who continued to warn us that it was "muy peligroso".

The only life we found was from a group of security guards on our street who I guess had to work that night and had brought their families with them so that they could celebrate together. They eagerly invited us to join them, gave us some drinks, then attempted to get us to dance with them. They laughed a lot watching these clumsy gringos dance, but it was good natured. When midnight came, they all gave us a hug and a kiss, then warned us again that it was "muy peligroso" as we went back to our hotel for the night,

Egypt: The Pyramids

2005-01-02T20:10:00.000+01:00

It seems that almost everyone who goes to visit the pyramids finds themselves stung by a scam of some sort. For example:

Two Danish guys told me how they intended to take a bus to the pyramids, but on walking outside of their hotel were greeted by a Egyptian who offered them a taxi ride to the pyramids for a pittance, so they took the offer. From that point on they lost control of their itinerary, ending up at a camel stables in the desert far from the pyramids, where the taxi driver dropped them off and refused to let them back in the car. Instead they had to pay exorbitant prices for a camel ride to the pyramids.
Two Australians were offered the chance by their taxi driver to see the "Papyrus Musuem", something they "shouldn't miss" in Egypt. Of course it was no museum but a crappy souvenir shop where they found themselves buying coloured perfumed oils that they didn't want, and which after struggling to carry with them around Egpyt for a week realised were worthless junk and finally threw them away.

Amazingly I got there unscammed, although that could be because I went there with someone who was making a second visit. Equally amazingly, the taxi driver who took us there didn't seem to know where or what the pyramids were, even when we pointed to a picture of them on the front of my guidebook. These are ancient, enormous, world-famous things on the edge of his city, something every tourist to Egypt comes to see, and he needed to ask an English-speaking policemen where the pyramids were.

When I first saw the pyramids they seemed quite small and I was unimpressed. I found that was because I was much further away from them than I realised - in the desert there is nothing to gain a sense of perspective against. They are actually enormous and imposing when seen up close. The sides are not sloped as they appear, but are actually made up of lots of enormous recangular stones, each almost person-height. It is possible to go through tunnels made for dwarves inside one of the pyramids too.

James, the guy I went there with, wanted to climb one of the pyramids, which these days is illegal. But the guards get paid a pittance, so they are always open to bribes to look the other way. Naturally it would be wrong to bribe someone and I would never normally do that, but it was the peer pressure thing again. I swear that in Egypt if someone said to me, "Hey Steve, have a cigarette - it will make you look really cool", I would have started smoking.

James found the right guy to handle the bribes, and we found that the further up you wanted to go, the more you had to pay, because more guards could see and would need to be paid off. They negotiated a price of 30 Egyptian pounds (4 euros, AUD$6). I said I wouldn't go up, and so the bribe-taker said it would only be 20 pounds for me. James had already paid 30 pounds and wasn't pleased with this. The bribe-taker explained by saying about me, "he is very poor. I can see it in his face." A bargain like that couldn't be given up, so up the pyramid I went.

Egypt: Mt Sinai

2005-01-02T20:06:00.000+01:00

I heard that climbing up Mt Sinai to watch sunrise was pretty good. But then I heard the bad parts: walking up a mountain in the dark, really cold at the top, and super-religious Nigerian pilgrims screaming crazily at dawn. I came to Egypt to escape cold, so I went up in the daytime to watch sunset instead.

The trip started like all good Egyptian travel stories - with the tourists getting fleeced. The day before I had booked a seat on a bus to Mt Sinai, to leave at 8am sharp, I was told. "Sharp" in Egypt usually means within a couple of hours, but I took the command at face value, and at 8am I was sitting on the mini-bus with 3 other Australians waiting to go. At 8:30am the driver came back and announced that there was a "little problem". That problem was that he wouldn't take us unless we paid double what we had agreed on. With a bit of haggling we barely made a dent in his demands, but we all wanted to go and had planned to leave the general region the next morning so we went ahead. I fumed on the hour-long bus ride as we passed through numerous military checkpoints, including a dreary United Nations peacekeeping outpost in the desert.

At Mt Sinai we had two choices for climbing: up the easy low-gradient path used by camels and most tourists, or up the 3750 Steps of Repentance, carved out by a monk as a life-long obsession. I didn't want to go this way, it seemed unnecessarily hard but the other three Aussies were gung-ho and so I bowed in to the peer pressure to go up that way. The steps were like the mountain crossing in Lord of the Rings, minus the blizzard, and were a tough climb.

Mt Sinai is where Moses is supposed to have received the 10 commandments. Halfway up one of the guys told us that actually no-one knows where THE Mt Sinai is, and that a monk decided that this was the right mountain, some 2000 years after the days of Moses. So as a tourist and religious destination it is a total fraud, but the scenery still made the climb worthwhile.

We arrived at the top two hours before sunset and so had to wait in ice-cold winds. We were joined at various times by some Dutch guys, a French family, and a retired Canadian couple heading to Namibia where they were going to spend six months huntin' and fishin'. Eventually all gave up waiting because of the cold, and only another Aussie and myself waited long enough to get the sunset photos.

Egypt Photos

2004-12-27T10:35:00.000+01:00

Here's a link to the best of my Egypt photos: http://flickr.com/photos/73223167@N00/tags/egypt/

Egypt: Near Death on the Nile

2004-12-22T13:17:00.000+01:00

Prices in Egypt are almost always flexible. Ask the price of a hotel room three times before signing in and on the third time it magically drops. One of the fun games in Egypt is to compare what you paid for something with other tourists. Sometimes you find you paid double for a day tour what the guy in the next seat paid - and sometimes half. Almost everything has to be haggled over - taxi rides, chocolate bars, river trips, bananas, falafels, souvenirs, and bribes to guards so that you can climb pyramids while they turn a blind eye.

I love Egypt and hate Egypt at the same time. Usually the hate part is a bit stronger than the love part. The best things get spoilt by enthusiastic touts trying to separate me from my money for things I don't want, like visits to the "Papyrus Museum" (read: tacky souvenir shop). Walking along the Nile at sunset in Aswan, a town in southern Egypt should be a sublimely perfect experience. The rich colours - the dark blue of the Nile, the lush green vegetation on the opposite shore, the yellow dunes and hills behind that, the cloudless light blue sky, and the white sails of the feluccas (canvas-sailed boats) as they silently glide across the river contrast sharply with each other. Ruining this, however, are the touts with their incessant questioning: "Welcome to Egypt, my friend. Where are you from? Where are you going? Take a felucca ride? Good price for you. Why not?" and so it goes on, one tout starting up as soon as I shake off the previous one.

I finally did book a two night felucca trip sailing down the Nile. I teamed up with a French Canadian guy, and we interrogated several felucca captains to find the best price and boat. We eventually found a captain we both liked, and extracted a promise from him that he would indeed be our captain, that our boat would be the "Prince of Love", that our fellow passengers were all girls from Sweden and England and that we would depart at 10am the next morning.

The next morning...we turned up at the departure point at 10am to find the boat had changed, our captain was replaced with a guy in his teens with an even younger assistant captain, the passengers were all male and mostly Australian and we didn't leave until 1:30pm. Then we sailed for half an hour to the police checkpoint on the river at the northern edge of town and and waited until 4:30pm until someone described only as the "big, fat man" could sign our police registration forms allowing us to continue down the river. Luckily someone had a deck of cards handy.

When we did get going it was superb. The boat zig-zagged into the wind down the river for several hours until we moored for the night. We slept on the deck, surrounded by canvas walls put up for the night. By lifting the canvas I could stick my head out and gaze at the billions of stars in the clear sky. At dawn the next day we set sail again, doing nothing but taking it easy all day.

That night we moored alongside another felucca, went ashore, and had a campfire. The crew from both feluccas were Nubians and they tried to teach us some Nubian songs before singing atonal versions of Bob Marley standards. Time passed, all the passengers headed to bed, and we left the crew at the campfire to polish off their bottle of vodka. I should add at this stage that they also smoked a lot of marijuana that day during the sailing.

I got up early the next morning to watch the sunrise while everybody else slept. The assistant captain soon staggered up, clearly nursing a killer hangover, and tried to set us sailing for the day. I helped him pull in the gangplank and as we started to drift down the river he climbed up the rigging to unfurl the sails. I could see he was in no state for it, and scared he might fall I chose to turn away and watch the river. My reverie was disturbed by two noises: a "whoosh" followed quickly by a "thwack". The poor kid had done exactly what I had predicted and fallen onto the deck. He had smashed up his face, teeth broken and sticking through his bottom lip, and wasn't moving too well.

Showing how good I am in an emergency, I stared helplessly for a while before yelling, "What do I do? What do I do?" One of the passengers had some ambulance experience so he got up, barked orders, and did all that first-aid stuff you learn in school but don't remember when you need it.

The boat was freely drifting down the Nile at this stage, right in the path of oncoming cruise ships. The captain got up, looked around, and strangely, started cooking breakfast, leaving us, the passengers to pray that the ships would avoid us. He wouldn't put us to shore, and acted like nothing had happened, certainly not this his colleague might never walk again. After cooking breakfast he then did the unfurling himself and took us to our intended final destination, a couple of hours downstream. When we jumped ashore immediately and fetched help, he complained that we had made a lot of trouble for him.

There is a police convoy system in southern Egypt, which means that tourists have to travel by road between towns in a convoy of vehicles with a police escort at certain times. Official-looking people told us that we had to leave on the convoy, so we left our poor Nubian friend behind. I am curious to know his fate, but I probably never will.

Egypt: Three Countries in One

2004-12-22T11:43:00.000+01:00

I started my Egyptian journey into the southern tourist drawcard towns. Life seems pretty basic there, there's not much sign of moneyed people, and I think every women I saw wore some sort of headscarf or veil.

After a week or so I arrived in Cairo and felt I had arrived in a new country. Now amongst all the old, battered cars were luxury European models. Billboards advertised useless but expensive consumer goods, mobile phone company adverts abounded, and a significant portion of women went out in public with their head uncovered. Although Cairo is clearly very poor, there are people here who live another live, a live of Western levels of consumerism.

The third country is Alexandria. The French influence is palpable, with the French Riviera feel, people answering "Merci" instead of "Shokran", the patisseries, and a relaxed Mediterranean feel.

El Alamein, Egypt: Telepathic Travelling

2004-12-20T17:32:00.000+01:00

Today I took a bus along Egypt's Mediterranean Coast to El Alamein, site of a decisive World War Two battle between Germany and the Allies. The battle has particular significance to me because my grandfather, while serving in the New Zealand army, was captured in this battle by the Germans, thus beginning three years of POW life.

El Alamein itself is barely worth mentioning. The village was small and nondescript. The Military Museum at El Alamein is pretty ordinary too. However the Commonwealth War cemetery moved me. As I walked into the most orderly and clean place I have seen in Egypt, except perhaps the Bibliotheca Alexandria, a soldier asked me what country I was from. I answered New Zealand, and he showed me to the New Zealand section. Row upon row of Kiwi graves are here. It seemed so...stupid that these young guys died in battle where the desert meets the sea in North Africa, so far away from the cities and towns where they grew up. I had the preconception that soldiers are mostly 18 or 19, but the age of each soldier was shown and they tended to be between 25 and 40 at the time they died.

The bus ride was around 100 kilometres, and once we left Alexandria almost the entire coastline was built up with holiday villages, resorts for rich Egyptians I guess. As it is now winter in Egypt, these were all completely empty and closed, together with the restaurants, fast food outlets, and shops they contain. It looked like an abandoned city.

The bus dropped me off on the side of the highway, a 10 minute walk from the museum. I realised that I had no idea how to get a bus back to Alexandria when I was finished. This bothered me somewhat during my visit. When I had finished and was walking back to the highway, I figured I would just wait by the side of the highway and try to flag down nice looking buses. If all else failed, the fact that I am a tourist with money to spend made me feel confident that someone would soon enough help me spend that money on a fare to Alexandria.

I needn't have worried. Before I even made it to the highway a mini-van driver must have sensed my thoughts and stopped on the highway when he saw me walking down the intersecting road. The ride I was worried about finding was actually there waiting for me! A quick piece of negotiation and I had a ride back for a third of the bus fare on the way there. If only all travelling was so easy.

Alexandria, Egypt: Backpacking in Style

2004-12-19T12:05:00.000+01:00

In Alexandria I feel I can live the way rich people do in the French Riviera - but on a backpacker's budget. Waking up to a view through my French windows over the Mediterranean, I sauntered downstairs and across the road to a cafe that reminds me of the opulence of cafes in Vienna, but again with that vital price difference. For a couple of Euros I had a big and tasty breakfast with a horde of waiters and waitresses swarming around me.

Well, it is not entirely the way rich people holiday, because they probably have running water in their bathroom when they go for a shower. Now I realise why the room was so cheap and why the manager wanted me to pay in advance. This had made me suspicious so I agreed only to one day's payment. This morning after breakfast I found another hotel with equally impressive views in an equally impressive period building, but this time with the promise of hot water.

The lifts in both building were those old metal cages with wooden doors that you open manually. The lift rises within the spiralling staircase.

I am writing from the Bibliotheca Alexandria, better known as the Library at Alexandria. Naturally it is not the library from antiquity, that was pretty much wiped off the map 1500 years ago or so. This is the new version, opened in 2004, and it is amazing to see. It's not in the same league as the Pyramids and Pharaoh Tombs, but it is still impressive, inside and out. I don't have the words to do it justice, so I won't try.

Alexandria, Egypt: Islamic Internetting

2004-12-18T18:15:00.000+01:00

Alexandria offers a respite from the hassles of the tourist spots in Egypt. There's not really much to see here, and therefore I don't have to put up with people offering me things I don't want everytime I walk down the street, which happens in Cairo, Aswan, Luxor, and Dahab.

Here is a good reason to come to Alexandria. I have a hotel room in a belle epoque building, with enormous window-doors (is that what they call a French window) opening onto a terrace from where I can gaze over the Mediterannean Sea...and for 30 Egyptian pounds (4 Euros, AUD$6).

I am writing this in an Internet cafe, where in the seat next to me is a women covered from head to toe in black, including the head covering with only a slit for the eyes. This is not too common in Egypt - most women have only a colourful scarf covering their hair, leaving their face visible, and in Cairo and Alexandria many women have no head covering at all. I can furtively glance at what the woman next to me is doing, and she seems to be writing e-mails in both English and Arabic, and gazing at many photos of war scenes, more or less as the media would show from Iraq.

Malta: Country-sized Summer Resort

2004-08-17T21:15:00.000+02:00

A couple of weeks after Italy I met up with another Australian friend
for a week in Malta. Malta is also a comically small nation, made up of
a couple of Mediterranean islands. To borrow my friend's description it
seemed more like a tourist resort than a country. Unexpectedly a large
contigent of the visitors we met were students from Eastern Europe who
had come to Malta to take English lessons and have a summer party, not
necessarily in that order. A girl from Slovakia said to me, "I am here
for a holiday. For my parents I say that I am here to learn English."

Malta has the oldest human-built stone structures on the planet, 1000
years older than Stonehenge or the pyramids. We spent several hours
getting to the oldest of them all, on the island of Gozo (home to Gozo
journalists), and found that their age was really the only significant
thing about them. They were simply piles of variously shaped rocks,
making a crude shelter of some sort. Those stone-age people learnt a lot
about how to build to impress by the time they got around to making the
pyramids.

San Marino: Country with a View

2004-08-17T21:14:00.000+02:00

I've managed to make a couple of trips over the European summer. The
first was 10 days in Italy and San Marino with my German girlfriend. I
was keen to visit San Marino, one of the world's smallest countries. It
has only 35,000 people, a total area equivalent to a few Melbourne
suburbs, and may as well be part of Italy as it is surrounded by Italy,
and the people speak and eat and look Italian. It is normally a day-trip
destination where the tourists arrive by the busload in the morning,
walk the steep old streets, have some lunch, get their passports stamped
at the tourist centre, and buy some tacky "tax-free" junk, that seemed
to me to be more expensive than regular tax-included prices elsewhere.
Because we arrived on the last bus in for the day, we stayed overnight
and it worked out well. Because people don't normally stay overnight,
the accommodation was cheap. San Marino is mostly a fortified city on a
mountain surrounded by lower land, so every room has a great view. In
the evening we sat on our terrace looking out in one direction to the
Apennines, the mountains which run down Italy's length like a spine, and
in the other direction to the Adriatic Sea. From our terrace we could
watch the locals, young and old, make their evening "passagiata", the
Italian tradition where everybody comes out in the cool late evening
air, strolling up and down the streets chatting, flirting, joking. Soon
after a crossbow tournament took place, all the contestants and judges
dressed in renaissance garb. It was colourful, kitsch, and amateurish,
but what interested me was that this was something they did for
themselves, not for tourists because almost all the tourists had gone in
the afternoon.

Next we went to Florence where I met up with an Australian friend.
Together we walked "la cinque terra", a coastal hiking path connecting 5
villages built on steep hills leading down to the water that allegedly
have maintained traditional lifestyles. Rubbish. It was tourist central.
The walk was good, lots of great scenery, especially as you come around
a bend and see a village in across the next cove. But the villages,
especially the last one we saw seemed to be inhabited only by tourists
save for the shopkeepers. The only tradition I saw was the worldwide
tradition of welcoming the tourist dollar no matter what the cost. We
went for a swim to watch off the sweat and dirt and found ourselves
swimming with fishscales discarded by fisherman, which was less than
pleasant.

For the rest of our Italian trip we used Naples as a base for a few
days. From here we saw Pompeii and Herculaneum which is another ancient
Roman city, like Pompeii buried by Vesuvius but much smaller and better
preserved. The summer heat and smog in Naples was relentless, so the
idea of seeing the ancient water ducts under the city was attractive
especially when the advert said "It's cool underground so you will need
to bring a sweater". We were joined up with a group of German schoolkids
for a guided tour. The tour was in Italian-style English ("Disa waza
builta by...") so the Germans didn't understand much. They got bored and
started acting like bored schoolkids, talking and giggling, tempting me
to test how deep the shafts were by pushing one or two over the edge.

Naples is interesting to see after you have travelled too much. It is
chaotic, crowded, congested, and sort of feels more like a South East
Asian city than a Western European city. In the old part of town people
live in 10 square metre apartments. The streets are lined with hawkers
and vegetable markets that appear wherever the owner feels like. Washing
hangs between buildings over the narrow streets that appear to be
pedestrian-only until motorbikes and small cars come racing through
giving you only a second or two's warning to jump out of the way. There
seems to be little planning with the buildings which are built around
each other and on each other wherever there is room. The city is at the
same time a Catholic stronghold - in one quarter, the "Spanish Quarter",
there are 35 churches in a 2 square kilometre block - and an organised
crime stronghold - the Camorra, the Naples version of the Mafia, has
50,000 members. Even the name of the city is paradoxical - it derives
from Greek for "new city", yet it is anything but new, as it was
established by the ancient Greeks on top of an even older city.

Scandinavia Month Part 2

2004-06-19T21:12:00.000+02:00

Two weeks after visiting Denmark and Sweden I completed the Scandinavian trifecta by flying to Norway for a four-day weekend. I often tell people
that my homeland New Zealand is the most beautiful country in the world.
After visiting Norway I’m not so sure. It’s the fjords. I know that
sounds clichéd but they were simply stunning, almost indescribably so.

The highlight of my Norway trip was the day-long “Norway in a Nutshell”
tour. With one ticket I got to:
• take a train ride past lakes and into the mountains, with a
photographic-opportunity-stop next to a glacier.
• take another train down a step incline past nymph-infested
waterfalls. (The nymph part is true, something they do for the tourists).
• take a boat ride through the peaceful fjords, which are long,
narrow inlets carved out of the mountains by glaciers in times past and
now surrounded by cliffs that descend from 500 metres above sea level
straight down to 1000 metres below sea level.
• take a bus ride from a village at the end of a fjord up to the
mountains, the ride offering ever more scenic views back to the village
as the road ascends.
• pay exorbitant prices. To complete the experience of “Norway in a
Nutshell”, the ticket is expensive, like everything is Norway, so I
could only afford to eat dodgy falafel sandwiches during my trip.

Norway was a poor country until the 1970’s and was reliant on American
aid to maintain what living standards they had. The things that make the
country beautiful - mountains, glaciers, and fjords – don’t provide for
good farm land. However in the 1970’s enormous oil reserves were found
in Norway’s waters and as a result Norway is the 2nd richest country in
the world (per person), and therefore one of the most expensive
countries for tourists. I don’t think I will visit Norway again until a
long lost uncle dies and leaves me his fortune.

Oslo is the capital of Norway but Bergen, the second biggest city, was
much nicer. It was 20 degrees in the city centre near the sea yet
mountains partly surrounding Bergen still had snow. From near the centre
of Bergen I took a 10 minute “funicular” train ride up the mountain to a
forest and spent the afternoon hiking. With the long Nordic summer days,
it was still light at 11pm and the sky was already brightening again at
1:30am.

I took a night train from Bergen back to Oslo, intending to sleep
through the journey. However I got seduced by the Norwegian scenery
again. The train passed through the snowy mountains and the full moon
hung low over the mountain tops giving everything an eerie glow. I spent
a good part of the trip staring, staring, staring out the window, even
though I was tired enough to fall sleep the moment I laid down.

Naturally Denmark and Norway play the Viking card a bit. Both countries
claim to be THE home of the Vikings. Both countries have 1000 year old
Viking longships in museums. Both countries sell tacky tourist hats with
Viking horns. After meeting the friendly people in Scandinavia I find it
hard to believe that their Viking ancestors raped and plundered all over
Europe for 300 years.

Scandinavia Month Part 1

2004-06-19T21:11:00.000+02:00

I’m at home with my windows open to let in the cool air of a German
summer evening. Every now and then I hear a human roar sounding from the
pubs and cafés in my neighbourhood. The European soccer championships
are being held this month in Portugal and as I write Holland is playing
Czech Republic. The roaring I hear occurs whenever a goal is scored. To
say that Germany is soccer-mad at the moment is an understatement. The
evidence:

I was away for business this week and hence ate in restaurants the last
two nights. In both restaurants the waiters were more interested in the
soccer action on the big screen TVs than they were in serving food. I
innocently asked a waiter the score of a game I missed and got more than
I wanted. He told me the result, as well as his analysis of every game
played so far and a prediction of who would win and why. He wanted to
continue with stories from the previous European soccer championships,
but I reminded him that he hadn’t actually taken my order yet.

Now to the topic of my e-mail: In the last month I made two long weekend
trips to Scandinavia. The first was by overnight train to Denmark.
Stepping off the train in Copenhagen, a harbour city on an island, I got
an immediate feeling that I would like this place. I could taste the
fresh sea air that you don’t find in Germany. The people were naturally
warm and friendly. And there were free bicycles for tourists to use all
over the city. You simply put in a coin and the bike lock is released,
then you return it to a special stand and the coin is returned.

Before long I noticed Australian flags in the streets alongside Danish
flags. I found this mysterious until I heard that the next weekend some
Tasmanian woman would be marrying the Prince of Denmark. I guess this
was big news Down Under but it hadn’t hit the German headlines. All of
Denmark was keen on Australia. While I was there the Aussie band
Powderfinger performed in the “Rock and Royal” concert, a sailing race
was held on the harbour between Denmark and Australia, and the Danish
brewery Carlsberg was selling a special commemorative Royal Wedding beer
made from Tasmanian hops and Danish malt.

In Copenhagen I visited an unusual suburb called Christiania. In the
70’s a group of free-lovin’ artistic hippies started squatting in a
deserted army barracks in Christiania, and declared it to be an
independent country with its own rules. Those rules, as far as I could
tell, were centred on regular – no, continuous smoking of marijuana.
There were plenty of men with grey pony-tails openly smoking and
marijuana was openly sold in the cafés. Over the years the residents
have grown in number, shrunk in short-time memory capacity, and
experienced occasional violent conflicts with the Danish government and
police force. I wandered right through this suburb and after fighting my
way through the initial dense fog of sweet smelling smoke I found many
houses in a small forest near the water, still a part of this squatters’
kingdom, on what must among the best real estate in Copenhagen.

Later I took a train to Elsinore, a town and castle where Shakespeare’s
Hamlet is set, about an hour north of Copenhagen. The castle is on the
water’s edge and many locals were using the castle grounds for fishing.
The castle itself was unremarkable but for the view across the water to
some mountainous land that I figured had to be Sweden. The idea of
SEEING a country and not VISITING it was killing me so I headed to the
ferry terminal and made an impromptu visit to the Swedish city
Helsingborg, bought myself some dinner and an ice-cream, then took
another ferry back. The whole Swedish episode, including travelling
time, lasted about 2 hours.

Cologne Germany: Life in Germany

2004-04-09T21:10:00.000+02:00

While picking bits of cheese from my clothing that got stuck there a result of a cooking accident this evening, I realised it's been a while since I wrote an update on what I have been doing. I haven't really been travelling since Christmas so I haven't felt like there was anything to write about. But actually with the weekend trips and other things I have already been to Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and Spain this year. There is something to be said for this European life, even with the relentless winter weather.

A couple of trivial things about German life first:

It is illegal to move house in Germany on Good Friday, as well as on two other days throughout the year. One must be very quiet on such a day. I have no idea how they punish transgressors.
When I jaywalk or ride my bike 10 cm outside of the bike lane I usually get a stern lecture from a nearby German. Now I jaywalk not to save time but to see the way older Germans get red faced and wave their umbrellas at me when it happens.
I was talking with a German yesterday about the genocide in Rwanda 10 years ago, and I suggested in some ways it was worse than the Holocaust. Ouch! Mistake! I was told that such a comment in Germany is considered antisemitic. They seem to be quite touchy on the subject. It makes sense, I guess.

In January I made a weekend visit to a Belgian city variously called Bruge, Bruges, and Brugge. It was very picturesque in a rather dull Belgian way. It was a thriving medieval trading city whose river port unexpectedly silted up so development stopped. Today the medieval buildings remain in a renovated form and canals encircle and crisscross the city. It's nice to look at but there isn't really much to do except buy Belgian chocolate.

In early February I went to Sound of Music territory in Austria to visit an Aussie friend who lives there. He lives and works in a small village on an alpine lake that was actually used in the filming of The Sound of Music. We were joined by two British guys we met in the Baltic countries last year, a little backpackers reunion. We went to one of the three local pubs in the evening and found a traditional dress party going on. It was full of people in their twenties wearing lederhosen and felt hats and dirndls (think Julie Andrews), an accordion band provided the entertainment, and I even convinced someone to do a demonstration of yodelling. It is one of the few times I have seen people in traditional dress when they weren't just doing it for the tourists. It was also the coldest weekend of the Austrian weekend, with temperatures not even getting close to zero. I think we had a maximum of minus 12 degrees and a minimum of minus 30 degrees, but my brain was so numb I don't quite recall. Sounds awful but the sky was perfect in the daytime so it made for some great photos as we visited the towns in the area. I don't understand the physics of it, but the cold was making steam come off a lake where a snow-draped village is more or less carved into the mountainside. This village is my nomination for Worst Place to Live - it is on the north side of a steep mountain so it doesn't get any sun for the entire winter.

In late February I was itching for some warm weather so I made a trip to South Europe where it is usually a bit warmer. Spain is well known for being warm, right? So I went to Spain's Basque region on the Atlantic coast near the French border. Somehow, like Austria, I was there in the coldest week of the Spanish winter. The weather varied between rain, snow, hail, and thunderstorms. The main Spain-France highway crossing was completely snowed in as well as hundreds of villages. I almost got stuck in Pamplona because of the snow. Pamplona is the place where they have the famous "Running of the Bulls" each year in July, an event where lots of drunk Americans join the Basque men in running through the narrow streets while being chased by angry, frightened and very heavy bulls. Nothing like that when I was there, just snow.

Bilbao, the Basque capital, is a city I liked a lot. It stretches along a river in a valley to the ocean and was a rundown, depressed small industrial city until a decade ago. It has been remarkably transformed into a place worth visiting. It has the Guggenheim museum on the riverbank, a titanium clad building built a few years ago that was designed to resemble a something between a fish and a ship. The museum building itself is even more interesting than the modern art inside and has become a landmark. Up and down the river old areas are becoming shiny and new.

I enjoyed the Spanish trip a lot, despite the snow. The food was great and affordable, especially compared to German food and I gorged myself on tapas and Spanish omelettes. People were friendly and helpful too.

In March my company sent me to Zurich for a week. I didn't get much time for sightseeing though. My hotel was 100 metres from where I worked during the day, so actually I could have been anywhere in the world for much of the time. I've been working for an entire 5 weeks now, although it's been mostly free time, because the project they want me to work on is not ready to start. It is a bit boring, but I am getting paid for the waiting time so I have no complaints. It gives me plenty of time to plan my next trips.

That's all for now. It's 10 minutes to midnight, and tomorrow is Good Friday. I've got to stop typing because the clicking noise might disturb the neighbours.

Bamboo Rafting in the Thai Jungle

2003-10-16T22:59:00.000+02:00

Funny how you romanticise your homeland when you travel. I was looking forward to coming back to Melbourne for a short time and riding my bike almost daily in the pleasant Melbourne spring. Somehow I forgot that the words "pleasant", "Melbourne", and "spring" can only be connected in a sarcastic tone. I am currently taking shelter from the enduring rain.

Well, enough complaining, and enough about the weather. I arrived in Melbourne a few days ago after two superb weeks in Thailand. I began with a three day jungle trek in Thailand's northwest with a group that consisted mostly of Canadians. The trek included walking, elephant riding, climbing up a limestone-encrusted cascading waterfall, staying with small hill tribe villages, rafting on flimsy bamboo rafts, playing cards late at night by candlelight, and trying to elude malaria-carrying mosquitos. The rafting was particularly fun. I think the rafts were designed to disintegrate easily. One of the Canadians did his best to help, diving off his raft swimming over to ours, undoing the flax that held the raft together, and leaving me stretched across the raft, trying desperately to hold all the planks together. And all because I "accidentally" pushed him into the water.

The highlight of the trek was the presence of Marc, a 42 year old French Canadian waiter from Quebec. With facial hair in a fashion last popular with the Habsburg emperors of Austria and a fair bit of extra weight, he looked like he wasn't going to be a good addition to a group of backpackers doing a reasonably strenuous trek. But everybody's opinion of him changed when it turned out the only things he had in his backpack for the three days were Werthers Originals sweets, bottles of whisky, and a Bruce Lee headband. Really, what more does one need for a jungle trek? He also had an uncanny ability to procure a guitar no matter where we were and sing rock and roll classics in a strong French accent.

After the trek I quickly headed to the other end of Thailand, so I could witness firsthand the Full Moon Beach Party I had heard so much about from other travellers. Held each month on the night of the full moon (obviously!) on an island beach, thousands of people come in boat after boat from all around the island and neighbouring islands and spend the night dancing by the light of the moon. Entertainment is provided by a dozen DJ's, fire throwers, unusual fireworks, and very drunk English guys who don't realise they are getting picked up by Thai transvestites until it is all too late. The party doesn't stop until well after sunrise, and it was quite a sight to look around at 7am at a beach still seething with people dancing in the early daylight.

After the full moon beach party I was ready for a few days of relaxation, so I travelled to Bottle Beach, an isolated beach only accessible by boat. I stayed in a simple bungalow on the beach, and I snorkelled, read, talked, ate, swam, and slept until it was finally time to race to Bangkok to catch a plane to Australia.

The single best thing about Thailand for me was the massages. For prices ranging between $4 and $10 Australian, you get an hour long brutal treatment, seemingly based on the assumption that your body is made of clay. Your spine makes cracking noises at times, the massager treads on your back, and afterwards you may have various amounts of bruising. Well it hurts a bit, but it feels so good everybody goes back for more.

Now I am staying in Melbourne for a couple of weeks before heading straight back to Thailand en route to Europe again

Scotland: Into The Maelstrom

2003-09-23T23:18:00.000+02:00

OK, for those of you planning a European trip in the next year or two, I have an exercise. Make a list of the places you want to visit. Then at the very top, write "Edinburgh". Warning: in the next paragraph I wax lyrical.

Before I came to Scotland I did my typical pre-travel reading - browsing the guidebooks and reading a novel or two set in Scotland. A couple of times I read the claim that Edinburgh is "Northern Europe's most beautiful city" or "one of Europe's most beautiful cities". Well, you can read that about almost any city, so I was a bit doubtful. However it is entirely true. Land that was once volcanic has produced a series of rocky scarps and outcrops, now built over with Renaissance and Victorian buildings. In the very centre is Edinburgh castle, standing on a bluff with only one way up, a street called The Royal Mile. It seems that everywhere you look, every street you pass, there are still more beautiful buildings that combine in a consistent way. From the high points you can see the sun shine over Leith, the Edinburgh port town a few miles away.

When I travel I sometimes arrive in a city which instantly makes me think "This is a place I could live". For example, Budapest with its cafes and thermal baths, or Berlin with its cosmopolitan atmosphere. Edinburgh has been added to that list. On the negative side:
a) because all the buildings are made out of a dark grey stone I imagine it could be a very grim place to spend the Scottish winter.
b) many Scottish people have an accent "so thick you could carve it". I often have conversations with shopkeepers, etc, where I could be talking to a Mongolian for all I know. That is, a kilt-wearing Mongolian with pasty white skin who while riding horseback took a wrong turn in outer Siberia and found himself in Edinburgh, and decided to stay despite haggis and other appalling examples of the local cuisine. The shopkeeper sounds vaguely English, so I just nod agreeably, hoping that it is appropriate, and I haven't agreed to allow my intestines to be used for the next batch of haggis.

Yesterday I made a visit to the world's third largest naturally formed whirlpool, or maelstrom. Due to a combination of geographic and tidal features that I won't bother describing, the ocean waters of the west coast of Scotland produce in the gulf of Corryvreckan a constant bubbling, boiling, tempestous area with standing waves and a maelstrom. We travelled there in a rigid inflatable boat with 10 other brave hearts to see seals, exotic sea life (they work in exotic dance clubs at night), wild deer, abandoned island houses, and finally the maelstrom. Unfortunately there was a strong swell, which (a) made it difficult for my breakfast to stay in my stomach and (b) made the whirlpool not so visibly potent.

Today I am in Fort William in the Highlands of Scotland. Last night was extremely cold, so I wasn't too surprised to look out the window during breakfast to find the first snowfalls of the season have covered some nearby hills.

A Wee Highland Trip

2003-09-16T22:36:00.000+02:00

Off the west coast of Scotland are some islands known as The Hebrides or The Western Isles. Some ancestors of mine came from The Isle of Harris, the outermost of the inhabited islands in The Hebrides, so I made a little pilgrimage there. It's an ancient land with a small population, rapidly shrinking - in numbers, not in height. As far as I know they are still as tall as they were 10 years ago, but they are 20% fewer. The land is inhospitable, not suited to modern farming, the weather is shockingly terrible, and conservation bodies block any attempt at creating new industries. I had a feeling of being at the edge of the world. When I mentioned this to a particularly intelligent local, he pointed out that in the days before cars, trains, and planes dominated transport, the region was often visited by ships on their way from Europe to North America, and in those days definitely wasn't at the ends of the earth.

As we arrived by ferry, I thought I was seeing the surface of the moon. Although it was stark and inhospitable, the scenery was quite captivating. The entire Harris part of the Isle is dominated by such rounded rocky outcrops, and was filmed by Stanley Kubrick as the surface of Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. As we drove through the island, I could see that the rocks hid many small lochs and waterfalls, and allowed small patches of grass and shrubs to grow, although barely a single tree. The road was shared with sheep, grazing where they could, who used the rocks to hide from the persistent gusty winds and sleeting rain. Surprisingly there are some beautiful, white, sandy beaches on the western side with excellent surf.

I found the place on the sea that according to locals was probably the small property where my great-grandfather lived. Unfortunately due to erosion over the years, the place is now not so much on the sea as it is under the sea. My dream of finding a seaside property that I could claim on behalf of my family was literally washed away.

The entire island was once owned and controlled by the "Macleod of Macleod" clan, and hence even today, people with the surname McLeods and Macleods make up a large part of the population. It was a bit odd travelling around a place where every fourth business and landmark had my name. Macleod Hotel, McLeods Transport, The Stone of Macleod, and the tomb of the Chieftan Alexander Macleod were just a few.

I had the chance to see some ancient stone circles and monoliths, of which the afore-mentioned Stone of Macleod was one. The island, and indeed much of Scotland has many of these Stonehenge-like structures. They consist of massive slabs of stone arranged in patterns based on the seasons, the sun, and the moon. These were mostly built about 4500 to 5000 years ago by ancient Celts, for reasons unknown although many theories exist. In one small patch of the neighbouring island there were 3 stone circles within 5 miles. The effort to build these in non-mechanical days would have been enormous, and it seems some were built over a period of several hundred years. The biggest mystery to me is this: 5000 years ago, when the earth's population was so small and there was so much space, why would people choose to live in such a cold and wet place instead of on the Mediterranean or in the Caribbean?

Another thought: People say that the world would be better without television, because then more people would be outside doing things. But consider the ancient Celts. They had no television, and all they could think to do was cart enormous slabs of stone around the countryside.

Lord Leverhulme, the man who owned the Unilever soap company which made him very rich, once bought the entire island, and had a number of crackpot schemes to stimulate the island's economy. All failed. One such scheme involved turning a town with practically no sea access into a ocean-going fishing industry. Another scheming person, from Germany, tried to launch the world's first rocket-delivered mail service in the area.

After visiting the island, I stayed a night in a castle in the Highlands, now used as a youth hostel. When the owner died in the mid 20th century, it was donated to the Scottish Youth Hostel Association. The halls are lined with statues and artwork donated with the castle, there are grand staircases, a watch-tower, and even a secret passage, opened by turning the base of a particular statue. I ate dinner in a pub 15 minutes walk away, reached by walking through the fields, down country lanes, and over a footbridge. The way back in the dark could have been hard, but the castle was illuminated on its hilltop, which as a beacon, is a pretty hard thing to miss.

Baffled in Bulgaria

2003-04-30T22:50:00.000+02:00

I finished my first Eastern Europe trip with a visit to a country named after a wise old Womble, Bulgaria.

Bulgaria was the perfect ending to end my trip. Monasteries in the mountains, skiing till the end of April only 30 minutes travel from the center of the capital city, Roman ruins, European architecture heavily influenced by 500 years of Turkish rule, and best of all, locals who are both friendly AND not out to get tourist's money.

However not all was good. Before I tell you more, let me get some things of my chest. Amongst the bad and the ugly is an overt presence of so-called "Mafia", that is, organised criminals who feed off corruption and control a lot of the nightlife. The average income in Bulgaria is USD$400 per month, so when you see a sleek black Mercedes driven by a young guy, chances are his wealth is based on violence and crime. You don't get in the way of these guys. I met fellow travellers who had innocently found themselves in the path of such a person, and suddenly they were lifted up and thrust aside by thugs wearing dark suits. Thugs wearing dark suits...where I come from they are called consultants :-)

Also among the bad in Bulgaria...heard of the Cyrillic alphabet? As far as I can tell it is a means to leave the foreigner always lost and confounded. As used in Russia, it has backwards R´s and N´s, H´s pronounced as N´s, B´s pronounced as V´s, and strange letters I had never seen before. It makes finding streets and hotels a game of chance. In a perfect world every country would have English as its national language, use the Latin alphabet, and sell my favourite chocolate biscuits from home in every cornerstore.

My first stop in Bulgaria was a city called Veliko Turnovo. I decided to stop here simply to break up a long train journey from Romania. I'm glad I did. It was once the capital of Bulgaria, before the Turks invaded in the 15th century. For a short time after arriving it seemed to be just an annoying city with hills everywhere, leaving me exhausted as I tried to find accommodation. Until...as I turned a corner, a gap between the houses revealed a view of a deep green valley, a river looping around a giant monument to Bulgarian independence that gets lit up at night, and castles and churches on the mountain tops. In another direction is a view of a great canyon.

Next stop was Plovdiv, an ancient Roman city built on three hills, and hence in Latin called "Three Hills". Quite a brilliant piece of naming, that. Plovdiv has a 2000 year old Roman theatre used for performances throughout the summer. Surprisingly nobody knew of its existence in the middle of town until a freak landslide in the 1970's revealed it. Plovdiv is one of those European towns where the old centre is a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Getting lost is easy; finding a specific museum or attraction is difficult. So one has no choice but to stop for delicious Bulgarian coffee every hour or so. No choice at all...

In Plovdiv I met Ivan. Ivan surpised me, because normally when a local acts overly friendly to me when travelling, I immediately suspect ulterior motives - like robbery. To get out of the rain I ventured into a pub and ordered a drink. Ivan is the pub owner and was sitting nearby. He speaks English, so when he realised I was an English speaker he introduced himself. He said only about once a year does a native English speaker come into his pub. Before I knew it he was paying for my drinks, and he took me out to dinner in an old Russian reading room, now a restaurant. He invited me to join him and his wife the next day, to see the land around Plovdiv.

In Sofia, the capital city, I again found such friendliness. I met with three Kiwi girls for dinner on April 26th, celebrating Anzac Day a little late. In the restaurant the young Bulgarians at the next table began talking to us, then invited us first to an Easter midnight celebration that night, and then to a party. A young couple at the party appointed themselves as my guides for the rest of my stay in Bulgaria. They drove me to see the Rila Monastery, an ancient monastery in the mountains that helped kept Bulgarian language, culture, customs, and religion alive throughout 500 years of Turkish rule. They took me to museums and translated the cryptic Cyrillic alphabet for me. They took me to scenic chairlifts, and even escorted me to the train station when it was time to leave. As far as I could tell, their motivation for this remarkable friendliness was sheer pride in their country, and the chance to share it with a visitor.

Something unique to Bulgaria when compared to other Eastern European lands is that the Bulgarians are still warm towards Russia. Where other countries have removed all Soviet-era memorials, Bulgaria shows them with pride. Streets and suburbs are named after celebrated Russians. In the 1870's Russia fought to free Bulgaria from the Turks. Russia lost 200,000 soldiers, which I suspect equated to about 1 Russian death for every 5-10 Bulgarian citizens at the time. It was an enormous toll, and the Bulgarians are still grateful.

Having completed my Eastern European trip, I think the region is a hidden gem. Like France, Italy, or Spain, there are ancient ruins, castles and cathedrals, breathtaking landscapes, skiing, mediterranean beaches, and more. Unlike France, Italy, or Spain, the cities and beaches are not overrun with tourists, and the costs of travel are half or less.

_{Footnote: What´s a Womble? A British children´s TV show that was popular in New Zealand when I was very young. See here for more details: http://womble.designwest.com/womble_intro.html}

Romania: Rebuffed at the Border

2003-04-10T23:04:00.000+02:00

I am surprised at how much the culture and personality of European nations change as you cross borders. Hungarians tend to be very reserved, unlikely to talk conversationally with a stranger, although they are exceedingly polite and helpful. Their neighbours in Croatia, however, tend to be gregarious. I discovered this myself when travelling from Hungary to Croatia. Despite spending two weeks in Hungary I only once engaged a Hungarian in general conversation. At the Hungarian-Croatian border I got off the Hungarian train, and got on the Croatian train. Before I even sat down, a Croatian guy in his early 20's started talking to me. We spent the train journey comparing Australian life to Croatian life, and discussing the 1990's warring between the Balkan states. He pointed out sites where battles had taken place and where villages had been destroyed, then walked me around the city of Osijek showing me how every street still had at least one building with pock marks from gunfire and grenades. Finally he helped me find a place to stay and we went to a pub for some pizza.

I am currently in Romania, the land of Dracula and Transylvania, and of horse-drawn carts that share the highways with communist-era cars and modern Mercedes. Getting here proved to be difficult, as I will explain.

I caught a train from Budapest to Romania, under the impression that with my New Zealand passport I could buy a visa at the border. What gave me that impression? My Lonely Planet travel guide, the official Romanian tourism web site, and an independent web site that specialises in visa information. However the law was changed last July, so that now Kiwis and Australians need visas purchased in advance from an embassy or consulate. The Romanians neglected to tell the New Zealand and Australian governments about this rather important change of law.

After travelling for four and a half hours I reached the border, only to be escorted off the train by gun-toting border guards. At the border I had to wait on the side of the train tracks until a train passed that could return me to Budapest, on another four and a half hour journey. Strangely enough I didn't mind too much. You see, I was sharing my train compartment with two travellers, an American man and his Ukrainian wife, who I was about ready to throw out the train window. They talked non-stop; when I tried to read, they still talked to me, about the weather, Hungarians, the Iraq war, American politics, and how beautiful East Slovakia is (they repeated this about 738 times on the train journey). They also insisted on talking to Hungarians who didn't understand English, in very loud pidgin English. So it was sweet relief to have to leave the train. Otherwise I would have had no choice but to do very bad things to them.

The border guards were not hostile - in fact, like most Romanians, they were quite friendly. As I am travelling on my New Zealand passport, one of the guards started asking me about Jonah Lomu, the star NZ rugby player. Another noted my surname is the same as the main character from the Highlander movies, and started miming sword fights, resulting in the pretend sword being driven into my stomach. Strangely this Highlander connection happens to me often in Europe. I introduce myself as Steve McLeod and get the immediate response, "of the clan McLeod", especially from border guards.

I had a frustrating few days back in Budapest trying to obtain a Romanian visa. At the Romanian consulate in Budapest bureaucracy is very much alive. I needed all sorts of documents, some of which involved painful international phone calls, and wandering all over Budapest. I will spare you the details, but frustratingly, when I went to the consulate to pick up my visa, I handed over all the required documents, to find that the consulate official didn't even glance at the documents - he simply put the visa in my passport based on me claiming they were the right documents. Fortunately I met some laid-back Americans and an English girl who helped me pass the time while going through this charade.

I almost gave up on Romania with the visa troubles, but I am glad I didn't. It has already become a highlight of the trip, as I describe elsewhere.

Finally a quick run down on where I have been lately:

Croatia, where I visited Osijek and Zagreb, and went hiking in the mountains where the last of the winter snow is melting away. In Zagred I was told that having an Australian passport meant I could charge a willing Croatian girl US$10,000 for a marriage of convenience.
Slovenia, where rollerblading is the national religion. In Ljubljana, the capital city, most streets have a lane reserved for cyclists and rollerbladers. I also travelled through kilometres of underground caves here.
Czech Republic, where I visited Prague, Kutna Hora, Cesky Krumlov, and Brno. Through a chance encounter on a bus I found myself invited to stay at the home of Czechs in Brno. I also explored old silver mines underneath Kutna Hora.
Slovakia, where I climbed a wind-swept hill where a ruined castle looks across the Danube to Austria. This castle stood for hundreds of years and helped repel the Turks in medieval times as they fought for central Europe. Finally Napolean came along and blew it up because it was a symbol of Slovakian nationalism.

A Perfect Cuban Night

2003-02-16T23:13:00.000+01:00

I had an excellent time in Cuba. It was every bit as good as I expected it to be. The old colonial buildings, often crumbling into ruin, the Cuban music and salsa dancing in every bar and in the plazas, the old American 1950's cars left from before the revolution, and the warmth and colour of the people. The highlight was the music and dance.

A group I was travelling with went to a bar in Trinidad. This is a town with well-preserved Spanish colonial architecture, and a reputation for good Cuba music. The bar was in a courtyard, with the stars shining through a ceiling of vines. We went to the bar to see a show featuring Cuban music and dancing. Unfortunately the power to the town went down just as we walked into the bar. But never mind, within minutes candles appeared, torches came out, and we found our way to a table. As we were the only customers at that stage, the band left their electronic equipment behind, formed a semicircle in front of our table, and gave us a personal performance using only acoustic instruments. They were a bunch of middle-aged and old men, in clothing that has seen better days, but masters of their music. For 45 minutes they performed song after song. When they finally stopped, loud applause filled the bar - the music was so absorbing, I hadn't noticed that the bar had steadily filled while they performed.

That performance characterises the Cubans' ability to persevere, make do with what they have, and continue their lives despite Cuba's constant economic and infrastructure problems. A 40-year economic blockade by their closest neighbour, USA, and the loss of Russian support when the USSR fell apart means that life is tough in Cuba. And yet there is a sense of liveliness in the Cubans missing from much wealthier nations. For example, when I went to a government-run money changing shop, a popular song came on the radio. All the staff, while still serving the customers, started to sway their hips and sing along to the music. I almost expected them to start drinking rum and give an impromptu salsa dancing performance. Nevertheless I got my money changed with no mistakes made.

One negative thing about Cuba was that in the biggest cities there is almost constant hustling by guys trying to sell cigars, advice, and women. Prostitution is a big problem in Cuba, exacerbated by some middle-aged white men who seem to travel to Cuba simply for that reason. When the official average monthly income is only about USD$10/month, the money that can be made hustling foreigners is just too alluring for some.