The Allsop Blog

Day 19. London. FIN.

2009-06-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

As a cheaper option we have to fly via Hong Kong to get to London Heathrow. Bryony meets us at the airport with a bag she kindly looked after for us.

Over breakfast she tells us a story about being cornered by a sinister 50-year old Japanese man in the alleyway leading to her building. We laugh about it until I start coughing and Bryony tells me I should be wearing a face mask.

After goodbyes we catch the flight home to Christmas, spring mattresses, mountains no higher than 1,344 metres, traffic that takes advantage of the supplied lane system, transsexuals as an oddity, birds that fly, a complete dearth of strangle muggings, recession, a relatively unfriendly populous, food that tastes and looks like it oughta, no mosquitoes, no goddam Chang, intestinal peace, very few available opportunities to haggle, friends that wear tweed, and the countdown to an American visa.

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Day 18. Kathmandu. Complaints.

2009-06-03T18:50:00.000-07:00

We’re better today, and journey out to the Patan district of Kathmandu. It has a Durbar Square almost identical to the famous one, except less crowded. There is also less traffic in Patan trying to mow you down as you walk the streets.

We go shopping for an authentic Nepalese rug. Our first port of call is the Tibetan factory. Tibetan refugees work there and we like the idea of our money going to help these displaced people. Unfortunately, we don’t like the rugs and move on to another shop. After being shown almost every rug in the shop we get it down to two, fall for a long ‘runner’, haggle, and make a deal. We are then told that the rug is a tribal design originally from Afghanistan.

Kathmandu is in mist, on a crisp, clear night, as we drive out of the city towards the airport. There is nowhere else quite like Kathmandu Airport. A small, ornately carved wooden box has a sign that says ‘Complaints’ above it. I want to take a picture, but it’s inside Departures and they might have orders to shoot (or they may take you to the president for him to personally answer the complaint - you just don’t know how things will turn out here).

Waiting at our gate, R returns from the loo boasting about its good working order, the availability of toilet paper, sinks with running water, unicorns. I eagerly dash to the gents to see if the fantastic rumours could possibly be true, and am disappointed.

In the gents, not one of the three possible lights are working. All duties have to be performed by ambient light cast from outside the room. Of the two urinals, one is hanging half off the wall. A man frantically washes his hands and lower arms in the only sink. Farewell Kathmandu, I’ll cork it until I’m in the air.

We board and, taxiing to leave, come to an abrupt stop. I wonder impatiently what the delay is, bladder at bursting point. Then the pilot’s voice comes over the tannoy: “Hello everyone. Just as we were preparing for take-off, we’ve noticed that there are some dogs on the runway. We’ll just wait for the authorities to shoo them off and we’ll be on our way.” The impatience evaporates: we’re going to miss this place.

Day 17. Kathmandu. Merry Steakmas.

2009-06-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

In the evening we feel well enough to emerge and head out to a local café. Potatoes are being cooked in the coals of a brazier, and our waiter gives one to R to try. She tries it, it’s a baked potato. The waiter acts as if it is something exotic and truly unique. He then brings me a hot compote instead of a hot chocolate. When I refuse it, he tssks at me, or at his mistake, I’m not quite sure, before heading off to replace it.

We go to a local steak house for some tasty medicine. There’s a crowd of waiters just inside the door waiting for us, their first customers, all decked out in waistcoats like a barber-shop octet waiting for their cue. The kitchen is upstairs, and signals to the main restaurant that steaks are ready by activating a speaker through which plays a plinky-plunky version of: ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’. It is a highly effective Pavlovian system.

Day 16. Kathmandu. Festering.

2009-05-29T15:37:00.001-07:00

We are still sick today and remain indoors. All we see of Nepal are the posters of the Himalayas that decorate our room.

R notes that I have started to complain about Nepal. Sickness and damp digs aside, we agree that four months is probably the right length of travel time for us. Having to re-pack your bags every few days starts to become a bit of a chore. Also, it is Christmas when we get back and my mother is a damned fine cook.

Outside our window, a woman on a roof terrace (wearing what appears to be a yellow life jacket) tends what could be the unhealthiest tomato plants on God’s earth.

Day 15. Kathmandu. Sickness descends.

2009-05-27T17:26:00.000-07:00

In the night I am sick and suffer the worst ‘gastro’ I have ever known. Where does it all come from? Weapons grade farts mar the transition of time. In the morning R manages to get us a more expensive room with a window to the outside. I develop a persistent cough that I imagine is TB.

R looks after me well, however, she too begins to succumb to the lurgy. We end up in bed together watching Seinfeld and Scrubs, arguing over who is meant to be the nurse in between dashes to the toilet.

Day 14. Pokhara-Kathmandu. West to East.

2009-05-26T11:52:00.001-07:00

Today we say farewell to the Hollyhock family and catch an early bus heading east towards Kathmandu. At roughly halfway en route to the capital we’ll decamp to go white water rafting.

There’s an enforced breakfast stop after about an hour. The driver places a reassuring rock behind the back wheels of the bus. My tea tastes of semolina sitting outside on a restaurant terrace submerged in damp mist. The bus passes through numerous broken down towns and villages enclosed within agricultural terraces. On the walls of occasional houses are large, bright ads for Tiger, Tuborg, San Miguel, and Krazy Cheese.

We are dropped off for our rafting and immediately hustled to a dark room to change into our swimming gear. There are three others in our raft, two Indians on holiday after end-of-year exams and a Chinese tourist. All are very friendly, and one of the Indians particularly chatty. His head wobbles while he listens to what you have to say, it’s reminiscent of those sunglass-wearing sunflower toys that react to music. He is amazed at the journalism in Nepal, saying, “The newspapers are only five pages long! They don’t want to know about the world! They seem so happy the way they are!”

After our rafting, we catch another bus. It’s overcrowded and, squeezed uncomfortably into the back, I feel every second of the three hour’s remaining to Kathmandu. Headlights are put on at the very, very latest possible in Nepal, and then a little after that. Winding down rough cliff-edge highways, intermittent bus services suddenly emerge out of the gloom traveling in the opposite direction (a carriage of fairy lights and half lit faces momentarily alongside). The experience is rather more like passing down into the Atlantic trench in a very crappy submarine hitting every undersea mountain along the way than descending into the Kathmandu valley.

We share a taxi back into Thamel with the two Indian rafters. The older, taciturn one muses, “These Nepalese crossed with Indians are so beautiful.” Head-wobbler laughs as he tells us that Thamel is seen by locals as the Mayfair of Kathmandu's Monopoly board.

We are staying at the Happy House hostel this time, the Old Kent Road of Thamel guesthouses. Very cheap, very damp, and apparently in league with Sai Baba. Pictures of the afro-ed guru in smiling proliferation crowd the lobby and hallways. We crash out, exhausted and feeling increasingly unwell.

Day 13. Pokhara. Molested, and paying for the privilege.

2009-05-21T17:46:00.000-07:00

After taking it easy for most of the day, I’m scouring the main drag in town for the best massage prices. A holy cow walks down the middle of the street before pausing to choke down some cardboard. I find a place a bit cheaper than the others, and resolve to return later with R.

Later, R isn’t feeling 100% and decides she’d rather sleep than get a massage. Not to be dissuaded I return to the cheap place to be led into a private room by an elderly woman. She starts haggling over price, but then one of the guys I made the original cheaper price deal with appears at the door and, without further ado, shoves her outside.

He asks me to strip. I go down to my boxers and prepare to get on the table but he is not satisfied. He gestures that I should get naked and laughs like, "oh silly foreigner". Now an official World Traveler, getting naked in a dark room with a male Nepalese masseuse with walnut-sized knuckles is no worries. Water off a duck's back. I strip, and hop quickly onto the table, feeling like one very tense duck.

The massage begins. It becomes pretty clear that he isn’t trained in any particular style other than 'general massage'. He asks me if I’m German. What the hell are these Germans into? After the shoulders he hops up onto the table and, standing above, massages my neck in a completely non-relaxing way. Surely rape is imminent.

Thankfully no rape, but while massaging my legs he sails pretty damned close to the wind on the upper thigh. Then comes: “Right, turn over.” No chance, that’s enough, I hop off and panic struggle back into my boxers. He seems dissatisfied, and charges me more than agreed. I don't argue. I pay. I flee.

At dinner, we’re again the only customers. Ravin watches Champions League football on the TV. Great ambience. After ordering, our waiter leaves the restaurant to ask neighbouring establishments for ingredients Hollyhock is evidently out of.

Lights come back on early, maybe because it’s Saturday. I polished off the rest of my trekking whiskey before dinner, and by my second beer am getting a bit tipsy. Standing up, I put the headtorch on and flash it about saying, “I’m a party! I’m a party!” R just looks at me until I sit down. “Honeymoon’s almost over,” I say.

Day 12. Annapurnas-Pokhara. Indiana Allsop and the Temple of the Skanky Honey.

2009-05-19T17:45:00.000-07:00

Wake up the next day feeling more myself but muscles hurt all over (thanks in no small part to the soggy piece of wholemeal serving as a mattress). Really looking forward to a professional Nepalese massage at the end of the trek.

Also really looking forward to a decent shower. I skip the Hotel Paradise shower when, upon discovering that the advertised hot water shower is unavailable, I watch as the owner fills up a small pan from the tap and hurries off to warm it over the fire.

The final day of the trek is blessedly downhill and passes through several small hill villages serving the path. The views change gradually from the tops of cloud-covered valleys into familiar terraced hillsides. We begin asking around for local honey (asked for as a gift from my brother). Apparently it’s particularly special honey, begotten from giant Himalayan bees. It seems scarce, and a local tells us to try at Damphus, the penultimate stop on the trail.

At Damphus it seems we’ve hit a dead end until, at a local shop, a tall man with careful movements asks us to “wait here” while he goes into the interior of his shop/house. R goes to find the toilet, leaving me to be harassed by local children. Unfazed by my unfriendly body language they approach, ask me my name, and then for sweets, then for my age, then for sweets again. After about five minutes of this the tall man returns and beckons us to the back of the house. There he has filled a jar with thick, unpurified honey and, with careful politeness, fleeces the hell out of us for skanky honey. Despite the poetic justice, the illicit nature of the transaction and (very minor) difficulty in uncovering the honey makes it feel less like a jar of raw insect excretion and instead like one of those precious glowing stones from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

We’re not sure of the exact way out of Dhampus to Phedi, and ask a goggle-eyed woman. This is a rookie traveller mistake no worthy of World Travelers such as ourselves as, when she looks in the direction of the fork we’re meant to take, we can’t work out which eye to follow. Luckily, we pick the right route. A sad-looking dog follows us for a while out of town.

After descending through a picturesque terraced village fringed with the warm orange light of late afternoon, we arrive at the road back to Pokhara. An ex-gurkha sits at the end of the long stairwell making friends with travelers and then booking them a taxi with one of his family/friends. The guide book has warned us to haggle hard with these opportunists and we do so, finally getting a decent price from the pair of local ne’er do wells running the local taxi rank (which seems to involve offering a neighbour heading into town on an errand a cut of the action to do the taxiing for them). We end up in a car belonging to a husband and wife going grocery shopping.

The wife seems drunk. She harangues her husband in a good humoured way about his fast driving but her constant jabbering in his ear gives me some cause for concern. She passes us sweets. She occasionally shouts things that sound like, “Brako! Accidento!”. The car speeds along the bottom of a great canyon, passing rapidly through a run-down town filled with people milling about in dirty clothes along the side of the pockmarked highway. An enormous orange sun, pregnant with omen, hangs fat and heavy to the port side.

We get to Pokhara without incident, but the taxi stops short of our destination. “One minute!” shouts the lady as she jumps out and wobbles quickly over to the butchers. She seems to harangue the butchers in the same way as her boyfriend, and is served quickly. Jumping back into the car carrying a large plastic-wrapped parcel she shouts, “Meat!” before cackling and celebrating noisily. The boyfriend grins broadly, nodding.

We arrive back at Hollyhock. After getting out, the drunk lady clutches Rowena’s hand through the window and says, “Welcome to Nepal!” before the car speeds away. Outside of Hollyhock, the granddad wears the grandkid in a strap across his front. Ravin smiles and welcomes us, sniffing a little. Everyone seems to have a cold here.

Day 11. Annapurnas. Valley of Death.

2009-05-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

After a restless night’s sleep, I wake, feel fatigued and feverish. R ok. Onwards. Into a huge magnificent valley and up the other side. Lady passes us on the way down carrying oranges and knitting simultaneously. Stumble down past terraced crops, groups of hill women working, gossiping, laughing, big-leafed trees pouring out shade, small girls Bollywood dancing and echoing hellos after us.

The weather is bright and beautiful. Quick dip of hot feet in river. So bloody cold feet remain cool whole way up other side as a result. See interesting bug.

Stop for lunch. Only customers. Guest house owner’s family seem very surprised to see us. Smiling fat grandma in round glasses coos to pillow-faced grandchild in flowering garden.

More onwards and a final hellish staircase to our destination, Tolka. Have agreed earlier to stop at very first guesthouse encountered for night. Turns out to be Hotel Paradise. Crash, exhausted and sick.

Day 10. Ghorepani-Ghandruk. Poon Tang.

2009-05-04T13:24:00.000-07:00

The traditional Nepalese garnish of a single black hair is perched on my cheese and mushroom omelette. After breakfast, we’re up Poon Hill again along with a stampede of others for the dawn. The climb is especially hard going first thing, and the view's better at sunset.

We head due east for the next stint of the trek, hoping for a more level trail. However, Nepal continues to be a land of sadistic stone and marble staircases. Our guidebook also seems written for super-trekkers. What should just take 2.5 hours (according to the map) turns out to be 4. R becomes increasingly skeptical of all future projections.

Stopping for lunch, we order a spring roll. What arrives is a curry pasty. Somewhere is a cookbook that has wreaked great wrongs upon the Nepalese culinary reputation.

We make good time and decide to strike out for the original stopping point of distant Ghandruk. Along the trail we surprise a troop of Langur monkeys. They make to the trees and watch us pass underneath. Unfortunately, we don’t see any of the overweight leopards as advertised at one of the rest stops.

Before arrival in Ghandruk there are two visitations: a fiery Annapurna bursts through the clouds high above our heads, and an aloof Macchepuchre presides over our destination . We enter the medieval maze of Ghandruk, the Inca Trail come alive, through yet more stairs. Terraces spill down from a village fringed with crops.

The locals walk around the stone pathways in the absolute pitch dark. A pony convoy passing through nearly crushes us, its cargo of gas cylinders banging dangerously against stone walls. Bare lightbulbs illuminate the interiors of the uniform slate-roofed cottages.

A man with ghurka heritage emerges and, finding we’re English, talks to us proudly about his army lineage. We hunt for a guidebook recommended guesthouse, but it is hard to find in the winding medieval streets with an incomplete map. Exhausted, having overstretched physically after 8 hours of trekking, my footsteps begin to stumble.

Moments from collapse we find the guesthouse. After one of the greatest showers of all time, we head downstairs to the dining room. The food takes a long time. We get talking to a group of American guys starting the trek in the other direction. They are all involved in the music industry. One does freelance lighting. We ask him what was the worst band that he’d worked with. "Dragonforce" comes the answer. Apparently all their songs are about quests.

Day 9. Ghorepani. Stairway to heaven?

2009-05-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

While breakfasting in the sunshine at Green Hill Lodge, Kiwi Andrew from Chitwan turns up on the trail with his daughter, Abbey. She’s just completed Everest Base Camp. While telling us about it over a cup of tea, one of the Green Hill family painstakingly lays out a table of jewellery, beads and tat alongside the trekking trail. According to Abbey, there was a bad batch of raksi doing the rounds up Everest Way. Some people got poisoned from what was essentially pure meths. Lucky I got the good stuff.

Andrew and Abbey head off while we finish our breakfast and agree that living on a staircase is bad for ball sports. After a few minutes underway, R asks, “How is that a holiday, going trekking for 30 days? How is that a holiday?” Following that, she is too tired to speak. Shiny indigo flies stick to our shirts. Two main types of graffiti along the trail: Maoist's hammer and sickle and hippy-ish Never Ending Peace And Love.

All of the trail today is stairs going up. The guidebook recommends caution through the rhododendron forests where mugging occasionally occurs. It must be easy pickings with the average unfit tourist.

Arrive at destination town Ghorepani. See Kiwis again at first possible rest break where we have Himalayan Rice for lunch. Like fried rice, except also with veg and pork (tapeworms). Andrew surveys the town and says, “This place sort of belongs right here. Getting closer to the Lord of the Rings.”

We hike up the final stint to the top of town and choose Superview Hotel. It is well named. Outside of our panoramic corner window, we can see the world’s seventh-highest mountain, Dhauligiri, and the Annapurna range. Dhauligiri is the St. Paul’s cathedral of black rock and ice.

We go up Poon Hill for sunset and see incredible Himalayan vistas. After dinner at the Superview gather round central fire at invite of owner. Get talking to a Canadian guy who’s good friends with his local guide. They’ve just returned from a visit to the guide’s village.

“I killed a goat,” he says to us.
“Really?”
“Well, no, I saw it being killed.”
“How’d they do it?”
“Chop! Then they threw it on the fire and used a steel cup to scrape the skin off.”

“Awesome.”

Across the circle an Irish guy mutters, “All Nepalese menus are the same.”

Day 8. Annapurnas. Please pass the nun.

2009-05-01T10:11:00.001-07:00

Up early, eat ‘Trekker’s Breakfast’, followed by long and uncomfortable bus journey to be deposited by the side of an unpromising road at the start of the Annapurna foothills. A line of ramshackle kiosks cling to the side of the road, seemingly open for business but apparently empty of goods. People see us making stupid, lost faces and point to the right. The trek begins.

We’re doing it without a guide or a porter (this route is popular and easy to follow (and we’re broke)), which, according to the tour company, will incur the disdain and displeasure of the entire country. The natives demonstrate their animosity by smiling and being friendly.

It’s the last movement in our four-month symphony, say I, buoyed to foolishness by a sudden billow of smug pretension. With a final cadenza in Kathmandu, replies R. Yes, Niles. Yes, Frasier.

The first day of trekking is a seemingly endless well-paved staircase of stone and marble slabs. A group of teenagers on a field trip overtake us in leather jackets, jeans and trainers. We feel a little over-equipped. Along the route we pass small villages made up of brightly painted guest-houses, the availability of European toilets ecstatically celebrated in adverts on wooden walls.

We stop at the Indra Guest House for lunch. Our bored hosts play with their mobiles. Occasional bursts of tinny bhangra are answered with hollers of greeting: reception clearly not so good. The guidebook tells us that salt in Nepalese is ‘nun’.

Evening falls as we reach out destination village and the recommended Green Hill Lodge. Clearly empty, we haggle the hard-nosed bitch down from £2 to £1.50 for the room. It is clean and sparse, with a relatively comfortable bed and an extraordinary view of Macchepuchre (the fish-tail mountain). To assuage out guilt, we have a huge and costly dinner. I try the local wine (raksi). It is served by the tumbler and tastes like hot, dilute vodka. And cheap too! The aftertaste is potato, the nose oblivion.

Day 7. Pokhara. Parasites, ho.

2009-04-27T12:46:00.000-07:00

In the morning, we walk down the main street to finalise the rest of the gear for our five-day Himalayan trek. The town is quiet, the Lonely Hearts evidently silenced by a series of speed-induced heart attacks. Between restaurants and bars there are a lot of small businesses connected with the mythical Yeti: Yeti Airlines, Yeti Guest House, Yeti Paints.

The peace is broken by a local man who falls in behind us. He is selecting a new ring tone. The choice comprises a hundred identical brassy Bollywood numbers. I mentally add ‘cleaver’ to the shopping list.

Periodically throughout the day we pop back to our room. This gives me the opportunity to observe the routine of the families living below us. They are poor, with breezeblocks holding their corrugated iron roofs in place.

0800: Wash children, sweep porch.
1200: Women wash themselves, wash clothes (Rowena calls me ‘invasive’ during this particular anthropological vigil)
1500: Sit in doorway, sweep porch.
1530: Someone starts a fire.
1800: Indoors and away from prying (my) eyes.

For lunch we go out and eat at a restaurant boasting ‘Certified tapeworm free pork meat’. Yikes, but it doesn’t get rid of my appetite: must be eating for two (or maybe two thousand: there’s been a lot of pork suppers). Later, I find a tick between my toes, small, red and innocuous like a tiny blood blister. Hysterically tear the bastard free. We rest. After Peru, R makes a point of being nice.

Dinner downstairs at the Holly Hock. It is so empty that there are echoes of conversation still around from last summer. We dine alone. Despite this it is 30 minutes before we are served our drinks, although they are working with one camping hob in the kitchen during blackout hour. Order the same thing off the menu to save them trouble and ensure we eat together.

We leave after pre-ordering breakfast and head into town for a drink. Small desperate owner sees us off with, “You going out? Have a good time.” His wide, white smile is the reflection of slums in purple-sashed first class windows. I don’t turn around, but I know he’s standing in the gloom of the street watching us head towards the lights. It feels like a terrible betrayal.

Day 6. Pokhara. Kidnapped.

2009-04-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

At breakfast we learn that the noises next door were animals sneaking in through an open window. Monkeys and a mongoose apparently. We’re glad to be leaving.

The bus arrives to take us to Pokhara, the traditional jumping off point for the Annapurna Himalaya. At one point during the horrendously bumpy journey I actually get thrown so high that I hit my head on the roof of the bus. Unfortunately, I am not knocked out.

Arriving, we hail a taxi. The cabbie doesn’t take us to where we want to go, and instead charmingly kidnaps us and detours to his own B&B. Politely, we look around, and then say, “take us to where we want to go”. There’s no tip for this asshole.

No one is at home for the first choice digs, so we go next door to the Holly Hock Hotel where we meet a short Nepalese man reeking of desperation. The room is clean, with great views over the lake, so we take it, along with a heartless rate reduction.

My Kathmandu cough has now developed into a full-blown cold, so we cruise the strip for pharmacies. I am offered a product called De-Cold, to be taken three times a day in conjunction with large, speckled tablets that look completely useless. The sneaking suspicion creeps over us that the twitchy man with the shyster moustache serving us is not a trained pharmacist. In turn, we ask for the instruction leaflet for De-Cold, only to be met with a shrug. Screw it, I take the De-Cold and leave the speckled tablets for some other sucker.

That night, the nearby Lonely Hearts restaurant is having its one-year anniversary of opening. While the rest of Pokhara lies muted in darkness, the result of electricity rationing, the Lonely Hearts, with its own generator, blasts out bhangra-techno as loud as possible, seemingly trying to transmit the party mood to the whole of Nepal. I consider an overdose of De-Cold, but realize that they’re probably just lemon sweets; more would just transport me even further away from Slumberland.

Day 5. Meghauli. Elephant Polo.

2009-04-09T00:53:00.000-07:00

Our final activity this morning is a nature walk. We walk through a misty swamp and see, about a hundred feet away, an enormous rhino peeking its head out from the forest. I don’t get a great shot as I’m too busy hiding behind the guide. Everyone prepares to run in zigzags.

Safari concluded, we cross the river and get in the jeep, traveling through the ‘bush’ back to the ‘highway’. On the way we pass through the broken down buildings of the small local village. Among the semi-ruined structures, children in pristine, pressed school uniform wave as we pass by.

Arriving in town, we say goodbye to Andrew and order a taxi to take us to the World Elephant Polo Championship Finals. What turns up looks like a taxi, its driver thinks it is a taxi ("Taxi?" he lies, smooth as glass), but, upon turning onto the only road leading to Meghauli airfield, home to the finals, it turns out to be a shabbily upholstered tumble dryer.

Admittedly, some blame had to fall on the cavernous potholes so prolific they suggested the presence of an insurgency determined to destroy local infrastructure. And, yes, most non-locals usually arrived by air. Ok, fine. But there was no time for excuses, standard protocol, or the delicate approach our driver was taking with his primary source of income. The finals had already started, we were late. And then he pulled over to relieve himself.

When we eventually arrive, it’s worth all the intense jiggling. The elephants trundle around noiselessly. The players have difficulty keeping track of where the ball is, and the length of the polo sticks makes it difficult to get a good hit. Consequently, it’s a slow-paced, but entertainingly surreal game to watch. An English team is playing the local Chitwan team, and from the looks of it most of the English players have been up all night drinking. They shout and curse, sweat and look very pasty. The locals, on the other hand, are as noiseless as their steeds, and win the match with consummate ease.

Around two sides of the pitch, the locals are gathered in en masse, enjoying themselves and laughing at the cursing foreigners. There’s a fairground feeling to these two sides. On the other two sides are the players seating area, with plastic chairs available for their invited guests. There’re plenty of free chairs, along with a residual sense of colonial entitlement. A lot of the players and their guests, from the Hooray strata of society, have glum faces, as if the Empire ended only yesterday. To be fair, they are also at the end of a week-long hangover and sat in the blistering Nepalese sunshine. R and I settle in and buy over priced drinks from the bar. Some jerks in polo gear, posing with gelled hair and expensive sunglasses, shoot us evils. They are ultimately too cowardly to approach our world travelers’ aura, and we continue to drink unmolested.

The night is spent at the hotel in town connected with the lodge. Our room is home to three spiders that look like scorpions without tails. They sit, perfectly still dotted about the wall, and there’s an unspoken truce between our two parties.

The shower isn’t hot, so I call the desk for advice. Run the shower for a bit, I’m told. Half an hour later, it’s still cold. A man comes to check I’ve had my hot shower. “Hot?” “No”. He takes me to another room, turns on the shower and tries to prove that it can actually get hot. “Shower: hot.” I try it. “No, it’s tepid to cold,” “No, warmer.” Is he telling me to delude myself? “No, it’s still as cold as before.” He looks disconcerted. But there’s a scheduled blackout in half an hour so either way I’m screwed. I don’t shower.

In the night, something rustles out back, outside of our window. I call out, but there is no response. The noises continue, but this time inside, in the adjacent room. All five of us lie silently in the dark, watching, listening, and praying for sleep to come and wash away the night.

Day 4. Chitwan. Tiger: back away slowly.

2009-04-07T07:12:00.001-07:00

Another elephant ride this morning, with shoes. A rhino spotted, and some barking deer. Most of my concentration during this run is to avoid the large, dew-dappled webs spread across the treetops, while also trying not to think how many we must have crashed through yesterday.

The elephants apparently won’t go in the river for a bath when it’s too cold, so instead of that classic bonding experience, we receive an ‘Elephant Briefing’. This involves sitting in a semi-circle around one of the elephants while a member of staff dolls out pachyderm factoids. The elephant smells bananas to eat, stolen from the breakfast buffet, and coaxes them from us with an inquisitive trunk endowed with a persuasively dripping tip. According to our lecturer, elephants only sweat between their toes.

R sees this as her last chance to ride an elephant mahout-style, and is duly allowed to mount. Afterwards, she says, “I was surprised nobody else wanted to do it.” Fear is a powerful de-motivator, my girl.

In the afternoon, we go on a nature walk that ends with a canoe trip. The Greek doesn’t complain. Our guide tells us, laughing, what to do in the event of us coming across a large predator. Sloth Bear: look down and make a lot of noise; Rhino: run away, in zig zags; Tiger: back away slowly, maintaining eye contact. About five steps in I’m confused about which technique to employ with what animal. Thankfully, there are only sightings of large, apparently dormant mugger crocodiles beached on the broad banks of the river.

After dinner, the Hauru Village children arrive to show us a traditional dance. We’ve seen a few of these now, and they all follow a pretty similar pared down aesthetic familiar to all former players of Cowboys and Indians. However, the Hauru wield sticks like no other. Dancing in a circle around a drummer, they each carry two sticks and clack them together in a repetitive, martial rhythm, blocking strikes to the skull, knees and hands by inches. It reminded me of fixating upon Formula One or motorbike racing on the TV, watching purely in grim anticipation of a spectacular crash.

Day 3. Kathmandu-Chitwan. Smoke and Mirrors.

2009-04-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

We’re up early for our bus to Chitwan National Park. Deep floral print carpet, the kind usually associated with old pub floors, lines the walls and ceiling of the bus. There’s what looks like a religious altar in the cab; not a hugely reassuring feature for the journey ahead.

On our way through Kathmandu, we pass a large park where people are up early and, quite incredibly, jogging without the need to stop every few steps and cough up blood. A few trees covered in dust chadors are arranged around the edge of the park and press against the fencing as if engaged in a tremendously slow escape attempt. Beneath a bridge, a stagnant river has become a giant, rubbish-strewn gutter.

After about an hour we stop by the side of the road. All the men get off and pee beside the bus. Then we’re off again. Our next stop is for lunch, and we pull into a small town. Disembarking from the bus, popcorn stands like miniature siege engines wheel forwards, desperate to divert us from the market stalls of fresh fruit beyond. The bus routes and their constant stream of tourists present an economic lifeline to the towns and villages lucky enough to be en route. At various stops along our journey, the bus idles for a few minutes as children offering fruit, sweets and newspapers surround the bus to bang, shout and hustle in search of custom. Show interest and they board, the swaggering first mates of disorderly capitalism. I buy a wafer-thin copy of the Himalayan Times from one. A front-page story recounts how a bus was torched on the East-West highway by cadres of the Madles Rastra Janatantrik Party. One sleeping passenger didn’t get out in time. I check with R: “We’re traveling North-South, right?

The bus breaks down. Five minutes with a wrench and we’re up and running. Plumes of black smoke from the ailing exhaust infiltrate through our open window. It is closed, and we’re hot again. The bus passes over structurally superb bridges that span wide, benevolent rivers of milky green. The clusters of homes perched on the small almonds of land between road and cliff are less well built. Families sit around in open porches, their worlds insulated beneath a perpetual covering of dust, exhaust and grit.

Back in Kathmandu, we were told that the conductor would tell us when to disembark for our connection to the jungle lodge. When this time comes, the conductor is cut short before he can discharge his duty by a drunk Russian sitting opposite us. After a few minutes of worry, I go and check. The bus comes to an abrupt halt. We are dumped with our bags by the side of the road and told to catch a local bus back to the pick up point. A man is assigned to wait with us. He is obtuse in response to enquiries and seems anxious to be rid of us. Pulling over one bus, he talks in Nepalese to the conductor who looks over at us, and then laughs. Anxiety levels increase. A friendly English-speaking local is found on board, and he is engaged to look after us up to our pick-up point.

We get on the local bus. It is mostly filled with vegetables and a few locals. The English-speaking Nepali man tells me my watch is telling the wrong time. It’s the third time in the country so far that I’ve been told I have the wrong time and I decide not to change it. After a long and uncomfortable half an hour, we finally get back to the pick up point and meet out connection. A jeep takes us and a couple of other tourists on a road that turns into a track heading towards our island-based lodge. We make friends with a New Zealander, Andrew, and discuss how Mystery plays a large role in the workings of the Nepalese tourist industry.

At the lodge, the manager gives us a run down of the activities for the next couple of days. A Greek lady in the group gets bolshy over the lack of a village visit. Anxious to please, the manager says we may be able to squeeze it in, instead of the canoe trip. Everybody else looks unhappy at this, we were looking forward to the canoe trip. First off though, we’re making the most of the evening and going on an elephant ride.

We sit on a platform attached to the elephant’s back while the mahout drives. Our legs project over the sides. Always wear shoes. My feet are dragged through thorny, gummy treetops, and there is the occasional, hairy moment when the elephant nearly tears my legs off going too close to a tree. Thankfully, the mahout notices before I have to scream a warning. There are three elephants in our group, and the mahouts communicate with each other using hoots and animalistic calls. A rhino is located. The mahouts form a cordon and herd the rhino towards the river. The rhino scampers away ahead of us, its robust rhino ass adorned with thick petticoats of armor all we see until the riverbank where it turns, cornered, and makes plaintiff faces back at the elephants. The mahouts laugh and celebrate.

That evening, before dinner, we listen to a presentation about the wildlife found on our island. Some 75% of snakes are not poisonous, with no King or Common Cobras on the island. “We have seen great big vipers,” says the manager, “but no cobras.” Phew. The Chitwan National Park is a home for the Bengal Tiger. Apparently, a tiger has to eat three local people before it becomes a man-eater. They can also jump clean over an elephant. These facts seem like fairy tales within the customer service and buffet meal parameters of the lodge.

At dinner, the Greek lady shows us a print out of the activities she thought we’d be doing on this trip. It quickly becomes clear she’s in the wrong lodge, about three hours west of where she should be. R counsels her to keep schtum: this is a more expensive lodge than the one she booked. The Greek lady folds her paper away and quietly tucks into her buffet supper.

Day 2. Kathmandu. Three Saddhus and a Rat.

2009-04-02T01:33:00.000-07:00

This morning, as our rickshaw is completing its three-point turn in heavy traffic, a friendly man with absolutely no fingers or thumbs waves his stumpy palms at us, smiling, real close. I assume ‘mine victim’, still blurring the lines with Cambodia, when R turns to me and asks, “Did he have leprosy?” Did not consider leprosy but now it is all I can think about.

We arrive at Durbar Square. It looks like the Kathmandu of the imagination, all carved wood, awnings, candy floss sellers. Big birds of prey wheel through the outlying high rises. Sat on a wall, a trio of Saddhus drop their conversation and react with the commercial alacrity of a Thai tuk tuk driver when I stop to take a picture, suddenly leaping down and tidying themselves up for a picture for payment. I decide not to take a picture and we move on quickly.

We try to walk back to Thamel after Durbar. The streets are mayhem. A break is called and we read about Hinduism and the caste system. The guidebook also informs us that some ethnic groups in Kathmandu are operating on calendars that either put them in the distant future or medieval times. Looking around, they’ve about got it right, I think.

A Nepali marriage plows past. There is a small brass band among a crowd of happy faces that surges into our small side road. In the center of it all, the bride, in red and gold finery, clings to her father’s back like a royal koala. The shopkeeper tells us that tradition demands that Pops carry her all the way from the ceremony to the newly weds home. In this instance, other family members crowd around the father, helping to hold the bride up with a hand here, or a shoulder there. Then a motorbike, clearly driven by a bitter divorcee, comes the other way, plowing straight down the middle of the ceremony, beeping ruthlessly.

I awake in the night to rustling noises. In the dark, we make out the silhouette of a fist-sized ball perched on our table. It is after our apple turnovers, bought in advance of our early morning bus trip to the south. Turning on the light, the rat has disappeared. “It’s one of the dirtiest cities in the world, what do you expect?” says R. Maybe chocolates on the pillows instead?

Nepal: 01/12 – 18/12. Day 1. Kathmandu.

2009-04-01T02:04:00.000-07:00

Our hotel is slap bang in the middle of Thamel, the tourist ghetto strip of Kathmandu. Which means that we can count on the nearby Third Eye Bakery delivering an easy ‘in’ into culinary life in Nepal.

The Hindu welcome of Namaste (trans: I salute the God in you) is printed along the top of the menus and punctuated with a lively exclamation mark. Along the bottom runs the English for ‘our ice is very safe’. We both order straightforward western dishes; what arrives is an interpretation fired by enthusiastic ignorance.

In Nepal, it’s as if a universal Menu was written in English by the government, covering off all popular Western foods, and then posted out to restaurants on the tourist trail without Nepalese translations of the recipes for the recipients to follow. No two interpretations of any single dish in Nepal, despite the exact printed similarity of the menu before you, will be the same.

After breakfast we head over to the bank to get out our rupees for the next ten days. Sad looking dogs stand stock still by the side of the road, balanced on last limbs. A security guard sat outside the kiosk doffs his hat as we enter. After tapping in our order, the stand free ATM machine almost needs the Heimlich Maneuver to choke out the huge wad of paper that’s brought up.

You don’t breathe in Kathmandu, you drag. It’s like living in a giant smoker’s lounge. According to the guidebook the petrol comes over the border with India and is then cut with kerosene (maybe not for the first time). The guidebook also claims that Kathmandu is surrounded by mountains, but it’s hard to make any out through the haze. My throat feels scratchy after one morning.

In the evening, with the blackout in Thamel in full effect and all the restaurants and bars still open ahead of the new Maoist government’s 10pm curfew, there’s an old world, romantic feel to the place with the candle light splashed throughout the neighbourhood. In our Newari restaurant, there’s also a candle to take to the toilet with you. Thankfully, mine’s a fresh one.

That evening we (I) taste two of the local beers. Nepal Ice: crisp, pretty tasteless. Mt. Everest: bit nutty, fuller flavour - gets my vote. We are also presented with an independent, local menu. In our patronising world traveller way, we assume that ‘buff’ and ‘skuer’ as it appears on the menu are misspelled versions of beef and skewer. In fact, buff is buffalo, common in Nepal and frequently served tungsten tough. At the table behind us a group of clandestine Nepalese are discussing 9/11 and "Bushadministration".

We round the evening off with a live band at a shisha bar. The Nepalese band are playing Sweet Child O’ Mine. Still on the beers, and with an increasingly scratchy throat, I decide to stop drinking until we reach the polo in just under a week.

Arrival farce - Kathmandu

2009-03-25T04:30:00.000-07:00

Upon entering the cabin of the Dragon Air flight, it’s immediately clear that the free upgrade play is off the cards. The eight business class seats are all filled, however we are cheered by the fact that their business class appears about on a level with a normal airline’s economy.

Of course, what we failed to understand while choosing our seats at the check-in desk, happily snatching up one of the many window seats still remaining, is that the window seats are about a third slimmer than normal economy. Couple that with being on the aisle just in front of the emergency exit, ruling out any possibility of reclining, and you have two desperate honeymooners demanding champagne. We receive it, with compliments, and look for the movie guide to find out what’s on for our five hours plus journey. Nothing is on. There are no screens. Cue long, drawn out internal scream.

Dinner arrives. A menu of gravel-filtered, gut rot red wine, chicken that tastes like fish, and a cubed ‘dessert’ of coffee mousse. I reach round for the exit handle, but realize that it would just come off in my hand…

Our flight is the final one of the night for Kathmandu airport. Admittedly, if it hadn’t had a runway, we may have been concerned that the pilot had accidentally landed outside a disused social club rather than an international airport. Inside, we gather together our various pieces of paper and join the queue for a visa whereupon we discover that there aren’t enough dollars in our wallet for the transaction.

I ask for an ATM, and am directed outside. When confronted by a guard in blue camouflage, I wave my English passport at them. It works, they smile, point their automatic weapons onwards and I eventually make my way straight out the front door and into the baying hordes of waiting taxi men.

A locked metal shutter stands between me and the ATM. Back upstairs, and this time a severe looking Nepalese woman (who we think is just angry but it turns out she can’t speak English) takes us out again, past the baying taxi hordes, and into Arrivals. There, a money exchange is closing up for the night. The severe woman and the surly money men begin a discussion. They won’t let us use our credit cards on their machines to get the money. The older one, bald and chomping on a cigar, turns to me and says, cajoling, “Go to ATM just down road. Two minutes walk.” We ask for further directions, and he responds this time with, “Just two minutes taxi, five minutes walk.” His partner chips in from the back with, “Only ten minutes taxi.” We stay put.

At this point, two young guards, who have been standing nearby, get involved. A three-way discussion heats up between the cornered money men, the severe lady, and the pleading guards. One guard offers to gets his wallet out and offers to lend us the money, but he doesn’t have enough.

The severe lady, after about ten minutes, leads us back upstairs. An agreement is reached whereby we hand in our passports to the immigration officials who, in turn, supply us with a piece of paper acting as a temporary visa. In the morning, we’ll return with the dollars.

It feels a little like we’re handing over our first born to Rumplestiltskin, except not as bad as these Rumplestiltskins aren’t malicious, prancing dwarves in yellow tights and pointy hats but rather nice Nepalese with endearing head wobbles, anxious to demonstrate the greatness of the slip of paper we have received in return. Then we enter Nepal, my third time that evening, but first time legal.

Back outside, the taxi men jostle for the last fare of the night. We can’t see the promised free connection to our pre-booked hotel among them, although some of the taxi men are trying to trick us that they are indeed the connection we’re looking for.

“What hotel are we going to, then?” I ask the scrum of loose morals before us. Names are shouted out. The right answer comes from a tall man at the back and we get into the back of his taxi.

Then a second man gets into the passenger seat. I ask who the passenger is. “It is just my brother,” replies the driver. The brother turns around and smiles gormlessly. I relax a little, and stop packing my credit cards into my sock. The taxi splutters off into the great darkness beyond the airport, and not before long the driver says, “You have big problem…” R shits herself. I return to packing my cards into my socks. But he’s referring to our visa trouble, and adds that it happens frequently, and that he is happy to lend dollars to tourists.

The taxi travels past patches of field and down thin, dark streets, the occasional blazing brazier the only illumination besides our headlights. According to the driver, this black out is a temporary one, as, with winter freezing over the river and Kathmandu depending on hydroelectricity, power is alternated around neighbourhoods. Most have power for three-hour stints in the morning and afternoons.

Incredibly, we arrive at our hotel alive and with all our possessions. Relieved beyond all reason, we agree to use the taxi man for our return trip tomorrow, and I shake his hand as if he’s come to ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage, and her choice has exceeded all my expectations.

Day 2. Hong Kong. Kowloonacy.

2009-03-24T02:04:00.000-07:00

In the morning we check in for our flight at the train station and send our luggage on in advance. It’s a great system, but anywhere other than Hong Kong and you know that your luggage would be rerouted to a fourth dimension, a domain of black matter, unending loss and dodgy movies starring Sam Neill.

Bryony (formerly known as ‘Brain’ after a formal complaint was lodged) meets us and guides us through a maze of Filipino maids gathered near the ferry dock and in greatest concentration beneath the auspices of the HSBC building. Mostly employed in a live-in capacity, the city’s public spaces act as the maids’ makeshift living room where they catch up on gossip, play cards, or sit on the ground reading magazines together.

Kowloon is a vision of an overpopulated future, a present-day snapshot of environmental scientist James Lovelock's prophesy of 'lifeboat islands'. In between the whirls and eddies of the giant super crowd engulfing the shops and market stalls on the day we visit, the odd beggar can be seen, often elderly and slumped. According to Bryony, these are the unwilling employees of a Triad operation, who round up the beggars at the end of the day and collect the day’s takings.

After some laboured browsing, we say goodbye to Bryony and begin our journey to the airport. A brief calculation later and we begin sprinting for each of our tube and train connections. While standing in one lift panting for breath, a tall Chinese man asks if we’re part of the reality show, The Amazing Race.
We manage to get to the plane, but again only because this is Hong Kong. Behind us in the queue, a middle-aged Englishman with a bright red face is talking loudly into his phone. “Guess where I’m going?” he says in rich, fruity tones, stepping onto his connection to Kathmandu. We already did… the World Elephant Polo Championships.

Day 1. Hong Kong. The city the banks built.

2009-03-18T05:03:00.000-07:00

1.
We agree to meet up with Brain at a Starbucks local to our hostel before going on a tour of Hong Kong. There’s a delay to the tour as we wait in the wrong Starbucks for about an hour. It’s an easy mistake to make: we discover later that there’s something like fourteen separate Starbucks branches within a 200 yard radius of our hostel. As Brain is usually punctilious, we leave our Starbucks, hit the crowded streets, and serendipitously run into her on a crosswalk.

First impressions of Hong Kong are that it feels like a giant mall; the city that the banks built. R asks Brain, “Won’t they eventually run out of space to build on?” Our guide shakes her head, “They’ll just flatten something and build over it. They’re good at that.”

Brain takes us up to a viewpoint above the skyscrapers. En route she tells us that Chinese people will walk into you if you don’t move out of their way.

After watching the sunset at a cemetery with views really wasted on the interred, we go back to the hostel before heading out for a night on the town. While we’re getting ready, I turn on the television in our room. Channel three is a split-screen of the CCTV cameras for our building. We watch people go up and down in the lifts, the security guard reading at the desk. Having watched Sliver too many times, I begin to worry whether channel three’s repetitive schedule is accidental or purposeful.

We end up at a bar and buy into a deal that delivers us several trays of cheap gin and tonics. I win a break dancing contest against Brain, who takes her defeat with a commendable amount of grace. The grace shown is doubly commendable given the now vanquished trays of G&Ts, and Brain’s earlier symbolic renunciation of grace after queuing up, in the stance of a feeding seal, for a gullet-full of free spirits rained down by a generous member of staff standing atop the bar.

Day 7. Cambodia - China. Hong Kong Sex Anemones.

2009-03-16T02:40:00.000-07:00

For breakfast, we sit out over Boeng Kak lake. There’s no one else around. Across the water, the city line is low with only a few skyscrapers as exclamatory indicators of development.

This platform, this morning, is the only place in Cambodia we’ve experienced (besides the Killing Fields) that is still and peaceful. Breakfast arrives, and we begin to discuss Nepal when a violent squall kicks up and rips one of the umbrellas from its concrete holding. The umbrella spins over the barrier like a dandelion seed and lands in the lake. In seconds it has disappeared, and peace has returned.

When the waiter returns with our bill, I haven’t the heart to tell him about his umbrella, nor the inclination to disrupt the precious bubble existing around this platform. Then the resident American amputee who sounds like Charles Bukowski (and I suspect of being an abandoned CIA operative) sits on his sofa and turns on the television. A report on the Mumbai terror attacks comprehensively shatters the quiet.

At the airport, all flights to Thailand are cancelled. High five. Thailand, we’ve decided, with its conniving tuk tuk men and tourism-weary Bangkok, is the equivalent of a heartless whore while Cambodia is more like a treacherous lover. Discuss.

Queuing to check our bags, we arrive at the front of the line to encounter an important looking official decked out in an elaborate uniform involving brass buttons and epaulets. His entire job seems to be to point ahead when it’s your turn to go up to the desk, a duty discharged with a certain amount of scorn, his loosened tie hinting at an openness for unfathomably pointless bribes.

On the flight to Hong Kong we find ourselves sat next to a Cambodian intellectual. He tells us about surviving the Khmer Rouge, and his memories of sleeping next to dead people while doing so. He is very calm while telling us these kinds of details. After escaping to Switzerland, he finally went to school for the first time at the age of 16 and is now an international lawyer speaking seven different languages.

He’s a very interesting guy, but is clearly keen for us to know how well he’s done; something we ascribe as an ‘up yours’ to the Khmer Rouge’s anti-intellectual programme while in power, possibly combined with straightforward egomania. R goes to the toilet and ‘kindly’ lets me scoot over towards him when she gets back. After banging on a bit about Kant he tells us that, even today, the Rule of Law doesn’t preside in Cambodia but instead the Rule of Man. Despite this, he has decided to pump his personal fortune into a scheme to improve educational standards in Cambodia called ‘Project Hope’. Despite myself, I change this to ‘Project Bankrupt’ in my head.

Our friend gets commendably passionate on this subject, but, with one sudden outburst, loses my support; in my surprise, I spill chicken chasseur on my only pair of jeans. Message delivered, he slowly droops over his dinner tray and goes on standby.

We wave goodbye to him, from a distance, at Hong Kong airport. After Cambodia, Hong Kong airport is almost sci-fi with its antiseptic steel and glass construction adorned with immaculate Christmas ornaments. The clean air is sullied by seasonal muzak.

Brain meets us in town at the terminal and helps us find some digs. Afterwards, we get some drinks at an English pub in the red light district and laugh as a tall western man across the street has some sort of running dispute with his hostess. Young Filipino girls gather in shivering groups under the eaves of dimly lit lap-dancing clubs, thin arms waving anemone-like towards drunk and indecisive sex tourists.

Day 6. Siem Reap-Phnom Penh. Dreams of the devilfish.

2009-03-13T02:30:00.000-07:00

We’re at breakfast early to catch the return express boat to Phnom Penh. I order toast, and untoasted bread arrives. I’m used to this now, and send it back. It returns, to all intents and purposes, stale.

During breakfast, I get up to use the bathroom and run into the mother of all etiquette issues. The toilet is just indoors, which means I should take off my shoes, but then I’m standing barefoot in a public lavvy?? Western values triumph.

While we wait, I check my email. There’s a message from my mother with the subject line: ‘Thailand collapsed, lucky you got out!’ High five. The bus arrives, with a luggage recreation of the bus precariously strapped to the roof. Inside, it’s Mecca-crowded. Comfort would only be available to a devilfish.

A port-lurking chancer grabs two of our bags off the bus and, instead of an unseemly struggle to retrieve them, we allow him the chance to haul them the five feet to the boat. He gets a tip of one dollar and we go to find seats. After a couple of minutes, the hairs on the back of my neck start to tingle and I glance backwards. He’s standing there, just behind me, in his oversized yellow t-shirt and baseball cap, grinning.

“Two bag, two dollar.” He shows me two of his fingers, for emphasis. With a falling pound, already blown budget, and two more countries yet to visit, I don’t capitulate, and instead give him a shortened version of the patronising speech we gave Tia two days earlier, finishing it with something like, “now be on your way, my good man”.

I sit back down, but he remains. A mental note is made not to reward him with the Ramones t-shirt. Then, with a roar as if from the Lion of Justice, the engines intervene. “Coming to Phnom Penh?” I ask him. He isn’t and, still grinning, finally abandons ship.

We arrive about midday back in the capital, and after arranging cheap digs on the side of a small lake, charter a tuk tuk to The Killing Fields. The experience is unremittingly bleak, with exhumed pits, a pile of skulls and emotional signage directing you around the various sites of inhuman atrocities. Beneath our feet, previously buried clothing has become uncovered. Rags litter the walkways. When we’re done, I go to the on-site shop and buy some fake Ray-Bans.

That evening, we visit a night market. The tuk tuk driver’s family, in their pajamas, get in with us to be with their dad. The ‘guide’book has previously informed us that some high ranking officials, earning so little from the government, have to moonlight as tuk tuk drivers in order to make enough money to live.

Day 5. Siem Reap. President Tia?

2009-03-12T00:58:00.000-07:00

At 530 in the morning we are outside our hotel. The guide meets us at the front of the hotel, on time. The only missing part of our Angkor Wat sunrise puzzle is Tia.

If the past few days had been a presidential election, then candidate Tia’s approval ratings would currently be in “freefall”. There would be a CNN chart with a line trembling along before, all of a sudden, it would plunge downwards, as if ambushed by the Red Baron. But some dwindling part of the electorate is still holding onto the belief that Tia will pull through. He’ll be like he was at the beginning: the clean-cut boy from a working class town, bright, likeable, with good ideas, before all the sleaze and particularly that unfortunate business at the convent.

Fourteen minutes late, Tia pulls up. He’s not winning any presidential elections, that’s for damn sure, but maybe there’s a future in politics for him somewhere. Somewhere like Cambodia maybe?

Angkor Wat at sunrise is a popular option despite the hideously early start. A wall of people five thick waits to catch the same, identical sunrise shot with the towers reflected. While we wait, Guide tells us his theory about Cambodia’s medieval change of state religion from Hinduism to Buddhism. Because of it, he believes, Cambodia lost a lot of territory and influence. Nobody wanted to fight anymore.

Guide proves to be a good investment (maybe he’ll get the Ramones t-shirt?) although there’s only so much he can tell us because of the extremely patchy state of Cambodia’s history past a certain point. However, when we’re back in the tuk tuk and heading towards town, he does know that Tia takes this route because, “he’s avoiding the police since he has no helmet or wing mirrors”.

Tia takes us to the Cambodian shadow puppet workshop, where they are still made in the traditional way. We’re doing research ahead of our dinner and shadow puppet show this evening. Outside of the workshop, a bloody cowhide is staked out to dry in the sun. It smells pretty rank.

Before we drop him off, Guide goes hyper-chatty giving us further insights into Cambodian life. Monks can be very un-monk-like; it’s increasingly common to find them with mobiles, cameras, and defrocking so that they can go to uni and study business. Guide also points out a popular place for Siem Reap locals to chill for the weekend. It’s a restaurant positioned over a lake. You book into one of the rooms and spend the day lounging around with a fishing rod. Then they cook what you catch at the restaurant. He also tells us that most Cambodians hate the French, and that, “Koreans are buying up my whole street!”

Guide gets a bigger tip than Tia before we say a final goodbye to both of them. I need new sunglasses and R wants to buy some presents for family so we return to the central market. At one stall, while I’m trying on what the label classifies as ‘sungulasses’, the stall’s proprietor stands near me pissing into a bag. I decide to buy from somewhere else.

The Cambodian shadow puppet show melts my cold, cynical heart that night. Despite the fact we can’t understand anything, it’s very funny, and seems to just involve each puppet whacking the other one in various confrontations, accompanied by high pitched voicing. Crossing the road to get home, high on shadow puppets and wine, we misjudge the endless stream of scooters and I nearly get R run over. A scooter stops on my foot, the driver’s face is one of shock while her passenger hops off looking concerned and asking if we’re ok. We are, and get into the hotel without incident or having broken any of the hotel’s rules including ‘Don’t buy any stone, relic, or artifact from World Heritage Site’, and ‘Do not encourage for joiner; do so at own risk’, whatever the hell that means.

Day 4. Siem Reap. Treachery.

2009-03-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

Tia picks us up with plans today to visit two of the more distant and out of the way ruins. After about half an hour, we arrive at the pink stone intricacy of Banteay Srei, the closer of the two sites. When we return to the tuk tuk following a good poke around, it is then, at this out of the way, more isolated site that Tia chooses to screw us over.

He tells us that the cost of coming to Banteay Srei is more than double our originally agreed day rate. And to go to the second, more distant site of the day would cost us nearly triple. We protest, asking how that can be since the guidebook says it’s only six kilometers from here. Tia looks comically confused and some of his other tuk tuk buddies gather around, laughing in amazement at our words. “Six kilometers?! Ha!”

They demand to see the guidebook, and, when I hand I over, ridicule its map. Now we could have handled this, stuck to our guns, had our own faith in the guidebook’s maps not been damaged last night. R and I retrieve the worthless guidebook (Rough Guide), and head off to eat lunch while deciding how to best extricate ourselves from this quandary.

In the end, we forgo the trip to the more distant Kbal Spean. Upon hearing this Tia’s face becomes a mask of anguish and hangs his head while we deliver a calm and satisfyingly patronizing lecture about settling prices before heading out for the day. After that, we settle on a compromise rate for today’s journeys and head off.

Driving back towards Siem Reap, the roadside is lined with steaming metal woks capping clay ovens that bubble up from the ground. I break the silence and ask Tia what these are for. He pulls over, explains it’s for making sugary treats from cane, and gets us some to taste. It’s nice to have Tia back on side, but, too little too late, my friend, you ain’t getting my Ramones t-shirt now.

At our replacement site, Pre Rup, the most ancient of the temples, local children play among the ruins while their older brothers fish in an extended puddle near the car park. The day is rounded off with a visit to Ta Phrom, the monastery overwhelmed and slowly being crushed by nature. It is extremely crowded. At the entrance, a band of amputee mine victims all wearing green play a repetitive tune, smiling and occasionally shouting out for donations.

Day 3. Siem Reap. Ruination.

2009-03-10T00:57:00.000-07:00

In our room, the relatively upmarket hotel we're staying at has posted a list of rules about what is acceptable, in-house behaviour. Rule three out of eleven is ‘do not have sex with children; it’s crime’.

Tia picks us up in the morning for our first day touring the ruins of Angkor. There are some 70 temples scattered over an area of 50 square miles. Studying the map and getting tips from the guidebook, we conclude that seven should do the trick.

The journey from our hotel to the ruins is about 30 minutes. Due to our tuk tuk’s lightness and simplicity of design, by the time we arrive I have a heavily volumised, post-tuk tuk bouffant. But, hey, we’re looking at ruins, cool doesn’t really come into it.

After spending most of the day looking around the site of Angkor Thom, speculating wildly on the meaning of bas reliefs and stalking English speaking guide groups, we decide to hire a personal guide for the dramatic, crumbling climax of Angkor Wat on our third and final day.

Tia has been sleeping in a nearby bar. He greets us cheerily, and takes us back to Siem Reap. We are really starting to like Tia and his friendly style, and plot how to best tip him over the coming days. I have a fake Ramones t-shirt from Thailand that’s a touch too small and begin to imagine the bond this will cement when I hand it over as part of our final tip/farewell gift. My mind dwells on the possibility of a future in international relations.

In the evening, the guidebook map of the town center proves frustratingly inaccurate. We end up in Pub Street, as authentic as its name, having dinner at ‘Traditional Khmer Restaurant’ with tables of pale skinned tourists at every cardinal point.

Day 2. Phnom Penh-Siem Reap. Lake Tuktukgaga.

2009-03-06T02:46:00.000-08:00

It’s an early rise for our ferry up the Tonle Sap river and on to the town of Siem Reap, center of Cambodian tourism. The ferry is an express and cuts quickly up the river. In its choppy wake, the slender, overpopulated ferryboats, like stuffed pea pods, delicately navigate their commuter cargo across the river for the start of another work day.

Despite the elitist, and somewhat selfish nature of our progress upriver, the commuters wave and smile as the locals always tend to do in Cambodia; a refreshing contrast when compared to traveling up the po-faced majesty of the Thames. Although, that said, their compulsive friendliness can shatter the illusion of photographs attempting to depict the profound existential torment and exhaustion brought on by extreme poverty and the murderous legacy of the Khmer Rouge, but, there you go: can’t win ‘em all.

The Tonle Sap widens out into a huge freshwater lake, home to a population of floating villages and formerly the site of pitched sea battles between the Khmer and the Cham civilizations.
Arriving at Siem Reap, we are met by an impenetrable cloud of tuk tuk drivers waving offer signs and after our business for however long we’re intending to tour the famous Angkor ruins.

We choose Tia, a likeable Cambodian dude with a glittery baseball cap and a winning smile. His tuk tuk is one of the smallest, crappiest, and decorated with leopard skin print flourishes. After driving us to the Mandalay Hotel, we arrange a standard daily fee with him and book Tia to be our transport for the next few days.

The remains of the day are left to us to explore the center of Siem Reap. Passing through its market, we are accosted by the sound of distant retching and distracted sales girls looking up from their magazines to ask, “hello, buy… anything?”

At a local restaurant, we sit down for a late lunch of Khmer food. The local cuisine is delicious, with wonderful flavours and a marked similarity to Thai. However, they are distinct from on another in a crucial way. One is world famous, while the other has no spice.

Day 1. Phnom Penh. City or prototype collider?

2009-03-05T01:21:00.000-08:00

By daylight, Phnom Penh isn’t quite so scary. The guidebook tells us to dress well, that Cambodians wouldn’t dream of showing any skin. Stepping outside, we immediately pass a topless man and girls in short skirts that flash by sidesaddle on the backs of scooters and motorbikes.

We walk in the general direction of Wat Phnom, a route that takes us past small doses of slumbering stall attendants, old French colonial buildings, and giant portraits of smiling royalty hung like billboards advertising the joy-giving properties of wealth and pomp. Beyond this, and the dominant elements comprising the frenzied and fractious Phnom Penh universe, there is modern architecture in varying stages of decay and the overcrowded roads, the denizens of which orbit the city block system in an unceasing frenzy as if part of a messy, mass CERN collider prototype.

The constant noise and motion is exhausting, and we shelter in a French style café. The guidebook is retrieved for further insight. Apparently local people will giggle at men with earrings: a traditional treatment for an undescended testicle.

After Wat Phnom, we’re once again in the back of a tuk tuk and heading towards Toul Sleng. Having no in-depth prior knowledge of the Khmer Rouge, we are horrified and enthralled by the inconsistencies, paradoxes, confusions and titanic scale of genocide involved in the group’s period of rule. Estimates of Cambodians killed under the Khmer Rouge reach as high as a quarter of the country’s population.

The exhibition in Toul Sleng, the former school transformed into an inhuman processing center for the Killing Fields, set as it is among swaying palms and the brightly coloured neighbouring buildings provides a stark contrast to the building’s former purpose. You step inside, to a room depicting hell, and then you’re outside standing in a run-down version of a tropical holiday before, a few steps along, you re-enter hell again. Some four hours later we stumble out of the complex, completely drained and pitying all Cambodians.

After trying to walk back to the hotel, we concede defeat when we find ourselves in a dark and dodgy side road. A passing moto taxi is hailed, and we cling on for a terrifying fifteen minutes. At the end, we’re dropped about five minutes from exactly where we want to be, but are delighted to walk the final stretch.

Day 21. Bangkok-Phnom Penh. A happy finish.

2009-03-02T01:02:00.000-08:00

On the way over for what is meant to be the penultimate visit to Wall Street Tailors, we decide we won’t miss breathing in fume hell while clinging to the back of a tuk tuk.

Arriving at the shop, it’s the usual farce of the assistant grinning and the main salesman nervously telling us that the tailor is running late, and should be here in 30 minutes or so. When she eventually arrives, the tailor looks like the single most harassed design student you have ever seen. I imagine a sweatshop of full of them sat in ordered rows, their dreams of Milan in tatters, working under the cruel gaze of Mr Potato Feet. R tells her directly what she’s been telling the Tweedles for the past few days and then we leave them to finish, with an absolute deadline for delivery when we return in the early afternoon.

The time has finally arrived for our Thai massage. Lying down on the mat, and after an initial relaxing period of firm but effective stress relief, the intensity of the massage increases and I begin to feel like the last item being packed into an overstuffed suitcase by a hobbyhorse. It has hard little hooves that pound and poke. The hobbyhorse examines your head to see if any space can be found there; finding none, the hobbyhorse becomes angry, and tries to dismantle you.

In this final stage, I am reminded of a childhood game called Kneel before Zod where, by pushing down on someone’s shoulders and sticking your knee in their back, you would reprise the moment in the original Superman film when he kneels before Zod. It hurt then, and it hurts now.

They finally let us go, and we stumble back towards Wall Street. R’s masseuse was an Arthur/Martha, and she seems to have enjoyed the greater suffering for her buck. Back with the tailors, and the shirts are completed but still wrong. R tries them on and says that she looks like a “house frau”.

She’s not wrong so we start complaining and, amid the salesman’s earnest protestations, take the shirts with a discount of 500B and storm off to catch our airport shuttle bus booked through MyFriend’s Travel Agency.

The pickup is a couple of streets away and, once we’re on board, it powers up and drives back the way we’ve just come, stopping directly outside the glass fronted façade of Wall Street. Despite the tinted windows, we hunker down in our seats and watch the salesman measuring up a fresh farang. Then we drive away unnoticed; a happy finish, you might say.

On our Bangkok Air flight to Phnom Penh, the stewardess gets the oxygen mask tangled in her hair during demonstration. Upon arrival in Cambodia, a line of black quiffs and gold epaulets behind a counter are a visa assembly line for the incoming tourists.

The first, frightened impressions of Phnom Penh from the safety of the taxi are that it is like a post-apocalypse Bangkok. Massive potholes scar the roads, and small fires burn indiscriminately in the streets. Our first choice place to stay turns out to be fully booked. The nice taxi driver with the gold teeth and multiple phones takes us to our second choice, Lucky Ro, which proves unlucky for us also. Finally, he takes us to a hotel that he obviously has a deal with and they have space. I ask them for a cheap fan room. The reply is quick, and discouraging.

“Fan room, fourth floor.”

“No lift?”

Shake of the head. “A/C first floor.”

Our deadweight rucksacks lie on the floor, half across one another, like a monument to beached whales or two fabric-covered atom bombs.

“Ok, let’s see this A/C room then.”

We take the A/C room for $15. There’s a bolt on the door that says, “Please lock”. Politeness always works with me, so I do.

Day 20. Bangkok. The Pleasure Dome.

2009-02-27T00:10:00.000-08:00

This morning we return for our second and final fitting at the Wall Street tailors. My shirts are ready, and I try them on. Rowena suggests putting darts in the back, to give them that more fitted look. It’s becoming apparent that the Wall Street tailor and his gold chain wearing apprentice are having enough trouble meeting R’s demands on her own shirts, and they are anxious not to incur any further alterations. When it becomes apparent that I’m unsure of the darts proposal, they make their stand. “Come on,” they chivvy, with smiles and a challenge in their voices, “you’re the boss.” It works: hell, I am the boss, thanks guys. No darts.

R’s shirts are turning up later, and we return in the late afternoon. Arriving at the appointed time, the shirts have not yet arrived. While we wait, the nervous tailor offers us his computer to surf the internet on. R says, “Why don’t they have the real tailor in the shop, instead of the slick middle men?” She is given something of answer when the man we take to be the tailor arrives on his scooter outside of the shop. He is wearing a black shell suit, sports a greasy comb over and his sandals show off a pair of feet that resemble sweet potatoes. He also has an aggressive manner about him, and speaks only Thai.

The shirts aren’t right, again; there seems to be some major communication break down happening along the line. We agree one last fitting tomorrow, on our last day, and head off across town to meet Aik. The tuk tuks, with their Christmas light adornments, flit through the dark shapes of the traffic like little tinkerbells, or transvestite Reliant Robins. Ours flits as best it can, but the traffic is in its usual awful state. Crawling through a poor area of town, a lane has been taken out by a pile of rubbish spilling into the road. Somewhere, we pass a baby elephant walking in the road.

Drinking cocktails with Aik on the terrace of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, we describe last night’s shenanigans. “You should have called me,” is his response, “everyone knows not to go up to the second floor.” Apparently the places are designed to scam tourists (a huge shock), and, since they move around to different second floors each night, the police have difficulty apprehending anyone. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there was some reluctance to take a face banana in the course of a raid…

We watch some corporate body launch promotional fireworks on the river before Aik takes us to the decadent outside terrace of The Dome, a rooftop restaurant and bar presided over by a giant golden dome housing another luxury dinner option. Afterwards, we move onto a more relaxed bar for dinner at ground level, set out in what feels like someone’s lawn. For the first time in Thailand we drink wine, with Aik lamenting the local custom of putting ice cubes in France’s favourite tipple.

On the way home, there’s a large group of protestors camping out in a floodlit square. Aik explains about the political stalemate, that exiled former PM Thakin Shinawatra was bad for the country, and people suspected him of wanting to depose the revered Thai king. “Now his brother-in-law and cronies are in power,” says Aik. “There are protest areas like this one, which tourists visit for souvenirs. The protestors themselves chase the ministers with clappers, things like this. But these people are so thick skinned.”

Day 19. Bangkok. Patpong Ping Pong part 2

2009-02-26T00:14:00.000-08:00

We’re ready for our ping pong show and dive headlong into the sleazy embrace of The Pink Panther club. There, a fake Muay Thai fight is being held while strippers sit around in Britney Spears’ style schoolgirl outfits. The Muay Thai ends and R, with her experience in stage direction, is impressed by the rapidity of the scene change; the boxing ring is collapsed at lightning speed and replaced by flashing poles set into small round stages. The girls get up and all dance exactly the same dance, swaying together like plants in a current.

Moving on down the busy Patpong side street (which doubles as a night market) we enter another ‘establishment’ and head upstairs to be passed by a serious looking French couple saying, “don’t go in there”. Assuming they just can’t handle the weirdness, we continue on up into a dingy venue with a large stage supporting a troop of performers but no real audience to speak of. We aren’t looking for a private show, and decide to continue looking.

Anxious to cut to the chase, I suggest we check out what the furtive lamination men have to offer. R is skeptical, wondering what’s in it for them, but we throw caution to the wind and allow an agent with lupine eyes and sallow skin to lead us through an unmarked doorway that leads up to another second floor dive. Inside, a central stage dominates proceedings with onlookers sat on a continuous sofa bordering the outside of the room. It seems busy enough, and we take our seats. Two Singha beers are brought over at the exceedingly reasonable price of 100B each.

We’ve missed the ping pong, but instead have caught the banana show. Thin, disinterested younger girls in stockings and suspenders decorate the corners of the ring in swaying enclaves while inside, the main draw, a middle aged woman in socks and only the underwiring of a bra completes energetic rolls while simultaneously firing small bananas into the audience. When that comes to a close, two other stocky old ‘pros’ take the stage, with one wearing cowboy boots, and we move onto the needle show. A green, glow-in-the-dark string with long knitting needles attached at regular intervals is gingerly extracted; at full extent resembling some kind of demonic umbilical. As a final flourish, small flowers are attached to the needles. I will never look at buttercups in the same way ever again.

The gag reflex signals that our curiosity is satisfied and we’re both pretty much ready to go. However, it seems that the management are even keener for us to leave, as a waitress hovers nearby and asks us prematurely if we’re ready to see the bill. Still with our beers to finish, we shrug and say “ok”, to have a laminated bill slammed down on the table in front of us. We’re also suddenly surrounded by a group of Thais. The menu reads that the first beer is 100B, second 500B, and it’s 1000B for each show (bananas, needles makes two). I’ve already handed over the last 1000 we had, and complain loudly about these hidden costs.

The thickset Thai besides me then replies aggressively, “Do you get things free in your country? You expect to get them free here?” I’m about to enlighten him on better regarded tactics: more expensive drinks, door charge, when he continues, carried away in his tirade and pointing at R, “Maybe she should get up and dance to cover your expenses.”

His suggestion breaks the spell of intimidation and I (The Bodyguard soundtrack playing in my head) grab R’s hand and say, “ we’re leaving”. As we’re getting up, thickset Thai has his phone out and is either calling someone or pretending to call someone, but either way it feels a bit hairy until we’re out on the street and safely choking on fumes in another tuk tuk home. Safely back at the hotel, we argue over whether the banana woman was doing forward or backward rolls.

Day 19. Bangkok. Patpong Ping Pong Part 1

2009-02-25T00:09:00.000-08:00

Returning to Bangkok, there is an email waiting for me from Obama for America. It explains that the Democrats are very depleted from their historic victory, and would I please donate $30 or more for a commemorative 2008 Victory t-shirt. I make a mental note to look for a fake in Khao San.

For breakfast we head to a café over the road and are served Ritz crackers with the coffee. An old American sitting with a man who introduces himself as a Colombian drug lord both agree that R looks like Maryam D’Abo from the Living Daylights. They appear to have been drinking for some time (not to say that I disagree with the assessment).

Having decided to take advantage of the high quality tailoring at low, low prices offered in Thailand, we walk the streets and allow ourselves to be hassled into a few shops for quotes. We finally choose the least obnoxious, less aggressive Wall Street Tailors. After a good haggle, and a promise of only two fittings before the shirts will be ready, he measures us up. Half way through measuring R, he runs out of the shop to spit in the road. Returning with a sheepish look, he explains, “ I haven’t had my breakfast yet.” Business first, breakfast later, just like the real Wall Street.
That evening, R finally accedes to my repeated demands for sex shows and we jump into a tuk tuk and head towards the illicit delights of the Patpong sex borough. The guidebook describes this place as a circus, and lists a visit to Patpong as one of the ‘things to do’ in Bangkok (so I’m not just a sex tourist ok, the book made me).

Arriving there, I am immediately impressed by the strong use of alliteration: The Pussy Parlour, the Pink Panther. Drawn and furtive club agents thrust laminated events menus into our faces with ‘Girl with ping pong’ number one on a list of 25. Number 25 is ‘man and woman having full sex’.

We decide that maybe a beer or two is needed ahead of this display, and find a bar at the peaceful Siam Heritage Boutique Hotel just around the corner. Over the sound system, Desperado is played followed by “all I have to do is dream, dream, dream…” but the CD starts to skip and is turned off. Just before we’re about to leave, an older western gentleman with a bright red face, honest steel spectacles and trousers endearingly short emerges from the hotel lobby. He is escorting a young Thai woman, whose short black dress conceals a surprisingly thin waist while showing off remarkably stocky calves. They walk off calmly into the night together, arm in arm, almost genteel.

Day 18. Ko Libong. The Incredible Journey.

2009-02-20T00:57:00.000-08:00

The taxi scooters return again today for the first leg of the trip back to Bangkok. Clutching the rear passenger handles, the scooter disastrously overloaded with baggage, I prepare for the inevitable moment of destabilization and bloodletting. Out of the terror ferments a plan where I push off backwards before a crash to calmly land on my back, cushioned by my rucksack and unharmed, like an upended tortoise. With timing crucial to the plan's success, I am glad there is no requirement to test my courage and reflexes.

Back on the mainland we’re piled into a minibus for the next leg of our journey. It’s almost full up, and I share the back seat with two locals. To lighten the mood, I say hello in Thai. They smile back the same way I did during the Borat movie. The minibus journey is comfortable and relatively quick, although there is an unscheduled stop at the driver's house for her to complete some unseen chores.

At Kantang, a cockroach creeps out of my rucksack and skittles away down my arm towards a Chinese café. Where are his friends, mega-spider and medium lizard? We eagerly await their unveiling; the Incredible Journey that just won’t sell.

Before getting on the overnight service to Bangkok, we have an ice cream at the station. R learns the Thai for lime sherbert, sure to prove invaluable.

Day 17. Ko Libong. Le scooter, tres cool, non?

2009-02-19T01:36:00.000-08:00

The day of scooter hire finally arrives. After being shown the ropes, R jumps on behind me. I swerve through a hedge and then we’re out on the road!

Swerving carefully through the nearest village, we eventually come across a right turn into the wilderness that we suspect could take us to the playground of the dugong. There is a sign at the entrance apparently written in blood and Thai. “End of free recovery,” I joke, outrageously. The white sand track is long, a stretch of it is apparently used as the town’s rubbish dump. Reaching the end we discover mangroves, sea water the temperature of a warm bath, small war ready red crabs each waving one giant pincer, but no dugongs.

Next stop is a decent beach. And while it shouldn’t be too difficult to find the coast on a tiny island, a handy tip is that if you find the tsunami warning signs and go in the opposite direction to their recommendations, you’ll come up trumps. We do, and the beach is all ours, however, the fun comes to an end as a storm abruptly anchors overhead and tries to dissolve Ko

Libong. Hurrying back towards the main (and only) non dirt road on the island, we nearly come a cropper a few times on steep, deteriorating mud paths quickly transforming into effective slides. I go from amateur to pro in the dirt track scooter league, the French ‘coming of age’ insouciance forever lost.

That evening, we, for a second night running, guiltily sneak past our own resort’s perennially empty restaurant to the one next door. Its emptiness is a result of too high prices and the brothers always watching TV, talking loudly.

Additionally, next door, there are romantic huts set out along the beach line. We sit in one and watch transfixed as a line of ants, running around the roof and down the side of the romantic hut, try to carry some unidentifiable, protein packed cargo back to base. A gecko in shadow also watches, unwilling to attack in the face of such overwhelming numbers.

Stepping out backwards from the romantic hut after dinner, I forget about the low beam. The ant line momentarily freezes at the shockwave before returning to its endless, carnivorous roiling.

Our French cliché neighbours are doing a silent waltz on the path back between resorts so we divert to the beach. There, by cover of night, full grown hermit crabs, the rich bankers of their sect, emerge from the ocean floor dragging stately homes high up onto new, sandy foundations.

16. Ko Libong. The Beast with Five Fingers.

2009-02-18T00:40:00.000-08:00

Last night, the Wildlife Channel had an impromptu live broadcast from our shack. Following the cockroaches, we discovered a giant spider lurking, reminiscent of the Beast with Five Fingers, with me in the role of the wide-eyed lunatic played by Peter Lorre.

R respects spiders while I find myself unable to deal with them in a rational way, much like a little girl. We went in search of a container to catch the mega-spider humanely, but the cocky Thai youth working at our resort bounded into the shack and tried to smash the spider against the wall with his hand. The spider however, moved like rapid machine gun fire over the wall to evade death and disappeared out of one of the many cracks in our outer walls.

In the early morning, my fitful sleep was interrupted for good when a lizard about the length of my forearm tore across the roof making loud ripping noises with its clawed feet. It vanished back into the jungle after the fashion of the mega-spider, although, this said, perhaps my anxiety stems from a flaw in my territorial perception; the night’s shenanigans clearly demonstrated that this shack had been claimed by the jungle long ago. Perhaps we should save our £3.50 a night and just sleep outside, on the ground, without pretense?

Later that day, R and I are feeling adventurous and drag the Canadian canoe down to the water’s edge. We enjoyed the double kayak at Woodland, but the Canadian canoe is a much harder prospect. Especially with ambitions to paddle around the distant head to uncover a hidden beach.

Two hours each way, hands blister, and tempers fray over what is the most effective method of paddle. Occasional crabs bob past on lifeboat flotsam. There is a hidden beach, but it’s covered in crap.

We finally reach home and, exhausted, eat and crash. Despite my fatigue I cannot fall straight to sleep. If a coconut falls and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, I don’t know, because we were around. They fall, without warning, and plunge through the night with a bone splitting crack while phantom lizards and insects invade the protective canopy of the mosquito net.

15. Ko Libong. Please eat the Frenchies.

2009-02-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

The beach in front of our resort is long, thin and quite deserted. Off shore, other islands are anchored on the horizon, offering the Thai beach experience at various pitches of commercial activity.

We have French neighbours, Elsa and Contan (not sure about that last spelling), who tell us that Elsa suffered a spider bite. Apparently she put her hand through a web last night. The bite is red and puffy. She appears fine about it, nonchalant, but, deep down, I know that I’m not the only one struggling to stay in control of my bladder right now.

In the evening, we return to the village to try and eat at the local (cheap) restaurant. When we arrive, around 8pm, the restaurant looks shut, and this is confirmed at the mini-mart. They laugh at us to help us save face and we return to the resort.

Back at our shack, there are two cockroaches crawling in, over and around the bag holding the dessert course. R hates cockroaches while I respect them. But respect don't earn you a seat at my table and we throw the food, diverting our attention instead to the securely stored, locally renowned cake of Trang.

Day 14. Ko Libong. Muslim beach holiday.

2009-02-16T01:59:00.000-08:00

Departure day, and we’re up early to catch a lift off the island. To get where we want to go, Sao advises us to, “Follow the old woman to Trang”. We think the old woman is Sao’s mother, who’s travelling with us.

On the truck heading towards the dock, I’m sat next to a fellow guest who’s also leaving today. He’s Swedish, and, “spends three months of the year in Thailand and the rest in Sweden”. Next destination for him is Phuket, where he’s meeting up with his Thai wife, also Sao’s cousin. I want to believe that this is the true love that surmounts all obstacles, be they great distances, language or politics, but looking at his twitchy walrus face, age and general demeanour, he unfortunately fits ‘the profile’.

Following the old lady turns out to be a good tip, and we make it to Trang where we intend to decide on our next destination. A tuk tuk hired from the bus station delivers us directly into the hands of a tourism agent near the train station. “Where you go?” says the spider to the fly.

After some deliberation we decide upon the island of Ko Libong. Apparently they have dugongs there. It’s also a predominantly Muslim island, which might help reel in my binge drinking.

While on the minibus south, I read about Muay Thai kickboxing in the guidebook. Finishing blows in a fight are usually delivered with the elbow or the knee. A knee is a fist without weaknesses, a solid bolt of bone.

There’s an hour wait for the ferry to Ko Libong. R makes friends and is given a sack of some local, snail-like delicacy. She makes me try one, and my anguish amuses the generous locals. After this we kill time by watching a sleepy cat get teased by its owner, but the fun soon gives way to boredom and impatience. Surrounding us is the familiar sight of slack Thai faces, waiting around for something, anything, to happen when it decides to get around to happening.

We land at a fishing village and are transported by terrifying taxi scooters to the resort of Le Dugong and our beachfront bungalows. Idling along the seafront into a fishing village we are accosted by some local children and shout premiership footballers names at each other until we run dry. One asks if I’m R’s husband, and then looks downcast at the answer.

Above the beach, music blares out of a small bar, and we go to take a look. A suspected Arthur/Martha sings Thai pop karaoke while a small middle-aged man, with a number of empty rum bottles arranged in front of him, looks on in silence. We feel like wallflowers, quickly finish our beers and go in search of provisions. At the mini mart, a camp Thai kid giddily has his picture taken with us. Is this what it’s like holidaying in Iran?

13. Ko Jam. Din dins.

2009-02-12T00:38:00.000-08:00

A second sunny day. We abandon the scooter plan for beach time. Along the waterfront walks a buck toothed local casting a loose line by hand, a sack of squashed black fish testifying to his skill. From the sack a staring silver eye watches us sunbathing in wide open shock.

Poor R is again the target for wildlife. This time it’s some local variety of sandfly, and she swats at the air like a woman tormented by inner demons.

It’s our last evening on the island, and we return to the village for dinner at Ko Jum Seafood Restaurant. The village at night is a corridor of cigar smoke and shadows thrown up by televisions like glowing pearls ensconced within the open fronted houses that line the road. A rectangular block of light near the restaurant turns out to be a pool hall; silhouettes of young men sit together outside, tired and drunk, not talking.

Out of the darkness a boy on a moped beeps cheekily at a slowly crossing grandmother. Something is said to us, which I miss, and a Thai family erupts into laughter. Clearly, we were in need of some major face saving.

Sitting down in the restaurant (again, the only customers), I talk myself out of having the matchless crab meat curry and into having something new to avoid being ‘boring’. Not being boring, in this instance, unfortunately means being stupid. Lobster is offered hopefully, but I go for barbecued prawns while R takes the crab meat. When the orders arrive, all I do is look at R’s curry and salivate noisily.

R wonders about ingredients: do they just go bad? Or are resources pooled, with people running about the village scoring prawn and crab from whoever has it to hand?

The restaurant is built over the water, and on the half constructed pier beside ours three Thai dudes drink and smoke in silence. They break their group reverie only occasionally to call up phlegm with gear crunching ferocity before settling back into the warm stillness of the night.

Day 12. Ko Jam. Flying bears.

2009-02-11T00:17:00.000-08:00

I am in a bad mood today after being woken in the night by an unwanted sleeping companion. One of the resort’s dogs likes to bed down on our wooden porch seat. The canine has an active dream life, and its hard nails perpetually clack and scratch; a dog clock faithfully marking the passage of nocturnal time.

The mosquitoes have also come and taken their 20 pints in the night, despite the net. Of all the biting insects so far encountered on the trip, this Thai mosquito variety is the most lethal. Clothed in black and white stripes, they are equipped with a stealth mode and have big bites. In fact, the size of the bites indicates that they could be flying bears, but, to avoid ruining the tourism trade for Ko Jam, let's keep that little theory between ourselves.

Out of doors, in sunshine, the slapstick Germans monopolise the hammocks, giggling, tickling one another.

This evening is the festival of Loy Kratong. There’s a BBQ and later a ceremony where we push ornately decorated coconut floats into the waves. Sao whips up some papaya salad that doesn’t taste of papaya and is not the worst salad. A CD player squeezes out some tinkly music which R identifies as Richard Clayderman. “He’s global,” she says. There it is: globalisation is a bad thing.

I get talking to Po, one of the staff at the resort. He left Bangkok, fed up with the turbo hustle and, from what I can glean from his broken English and angry face, getting ripped off. I ask him about his hours at the lodge. Po laughs, a little hysterically, and says that he gets up at 0530. He then shrugs, as if to say, "and I'm still up now cooking chicken kebabs for you and the damned slapstick Germans". I smile, nod sympathetically, and grab my chicken skewer. Po can cook! Quit complaining, work faster.

At the end of the night we place our floats in the water. R and I forget to make wishes. Some traditional candlelit balloons are also let off; a couple crash almost immediately while the rest soar upwards with an inner will, to become UFOs for over-imbibing holidaymakers on some other paradise.

Day 11. Ko Jam. Village people.

2009-02-10T01:59:00.000-08:00

11.
Today we decide to make the short walk to the nearest village. To get there, we have to pass through woodland. Mosquitoes ambush us in large numbers en route and we run through the woods in a fine reprisal of the Blair Witch Project. When it’s safe to slow down and assess the damage, it appears that I have escaped unscathed while Rowena, dressed in a strappy top, has been massacred.

It’s all about R in the village as well where we discover the flip side of holidaying somewhere off the beaten track. Eyes follow R down the street; then bodies of men attached to eyes. After half an hour everyone’s settled down but we’ve also come to the end of the village.

On the way back we stop to look at the basic petrol station, and are grossed out by the quantity of flies browsing the fish market. Then these little piggies went wee, wee, ah, bastard mozzie, bastard, all the way home.

Day 10. Ko Jam. The Boy racer.

2009-02-09T00:23:00.000-08:00

10.
Ray forecasts three days of thunderstorms. I’m not sure I like Ray. It’s not raining this morning, so we speak to Sao about her suggestion of hiring a scooter to see the island. Today, Sao suggests that’s not a great idea as Ko Jam’s M1 is mud surfaced. Piffle, I say, in politest Thai, let’s give it a go. Sao then asks me whether it’s my first time driving a scooter. In the grand tradition of holidaying teenagers who get involved in road accidents during Greek island summers, I lie.

Sao then orders The Boy (as she calls him) to give me a lift on his scooter to the hire shop. We have just about reached the main road when I order The Boy to abort the mission. Up to this point he has used his feet more than the wheels. Just as we get back to Woodland, it begins to rain.

Later that afternoon, Sao asks if we wouldn’t mind using our beginner English skills for the sign of a forthcoming festival. She gives us a free bottle of Chang as a thank you. Rowena designs the sign, I drink the beer. Three other guests happen along to observe Rowena’s art work. They do a bizarre German Three Stooges act and eventually drift off towards the beach. Rowena thought they were funny, but I’m not as sold.

The clouds clear that evening. On the horizon, the sun sets over the island of Ko Phi Phi (where The Beach was filmed) with the oleaginous quality of a lava lamp.

Day 9. Ko Jam. Diet Coke tastes sweeter in Thailand

2009-02-07T00:44:00.000-08:00

9.
By the time we get up, it’s raining. We find Dawn and Brian and shelter under a gazebo for breakfast. I grapple with the complexities of Uno. Dawn has completed a small, private research program on Diet Cokes of the world and announces that they are sweeter in Thailand, mixed according to tastes and not uniform the world over.

We say goodbye to them around lunchtime as they catch a boat to the island in cloud just south of ours. That afternoon, from the balcony of our bungalow: the gentle sounds of surf, and a lagoon of waterlogged land between us and the beach.

Day 8. Ko Jam. The Americans.

2009-02-06T00:18:00.000-08:00

8.
A decision is made to leave built up Railey and head to Ko Jam; an island about which the guidebook is quite succinct signaling that it’s either a complete dive or nicely unspoilt. While ‘negotiating’ with a long tail driver, an American couple, also anxious to leave the plundering of Railey, arrive with their bags. They’re going our way, and we conspire with them not to get ripped off by the long tail driver, but end up paying him what he asks through skilled barter.

The Americans, Dawn and Brian, have a booking at a resort on the island of Ko Lanta, just south of Ko Jam. With a day or so to kill before checking in time, they’re swayed by the guidebook’s lack of description to gamble on Ko Jam as well, and with that we re-hire the same long tail driver who (as becomes clear when we attempt the return journey) rips us off again.

Ko Jam is a relatively unspoilt outpost of tourism. Although the basic tools of commercial self-promotion are in use, the locals either haven’t quite grasped all the nuances as yet, or chosen not to. A good example of this is a bright painted sign that greets us as we dock: ‘Ko Jum Seafood – one of the best in Ko Jum’.

The guidebook recommends the Woodland Lodge, so we go. The resort is positioned on the beach that runs the length of Ko Jam’s west coast, and is run by Ray from Newcastle and his Thai wife, Sao. Ray is a beer advertisers’ dream, his wardrobe solely comprising t-shirts promoting various local beer varieties.

We have dinner at an outside table, served by the Smiling Woman, as she comes to be known, and swap tales of being ripped off with Dawn and Brian. Around us, dogs, bats and crabs move about on ordered grids respectively optimised for begging, hunting, and, in the case of the crabs, seemingly endless stand offs with their own kind.

Another guest, in his own grid of quiet solitude, is a man with a goatee nursing a Singha beer. After signing the Visitor Book earlier, I suspect him to be on holiday from Munich. Rowena then gets up from her chair and does a demonstration, with explanation, of why aboriginal hunters stand on one leg. It is well received, but, secretly, I worry that we’re becoming travel bores.

Day 7. Railey. The jackass returns.

2009-02-04T00:15:00.000-08:00

Today we’re off on a sunset snorkeling trip. The hastily scribbled advertising board says we could see rays, sharks and bats the size of dogs. We’re skeptical, but it includes dinner ‘sea-gypsy style’ so it can’t be a total loss. Our group includes two Swedish families with amusing children and fathers who drink relatively heavily on deck, and James from England. At around midday, we board the boat and putter out into the midst of the misshapen limestone islands that pepper the sea like fallen clouds, arbitrarily petrified.

Our Californian guide advises us not to step on Scorpion Fish, which are invisible and deadly, and to avoid pretty Lion Fish. The snorkeling is good, and the water excitingly deep, but the visibility is relatively poor compared to French Polynesia.

As night falls, the boat pitches up on a small, deserted island. We wait for the dinner boat, racing out to meet us from shore, to complete the illusion of the life of the sea-gypsy. When it does arrive, it’s Thai green curry yet again, but yet again it tastes completely different to all the other versions we’ve tried, and they've all been excellent.

As we’re tucking in, someone notices something flying overhead. It soon transpires that there are thousands of things flying overhead; as evening falls, long strings of dog-sized fruit bats are transmitted from the islands towards the mainland in search of food. It’s amazing enough to keep the Terror at bay, although I do decide to sit down.

The final item on the itinerary involves swimming in the phosphorescence caused by phytoplankton. Beneath the curve of an island, we gawk at the aura of gentle light generated as we push through the water. Push harder, more light. In the excitement of giving the phytoplankton the hardest night’s work of their tiny lives, I thrash madly and feel my stand-in, Maori wedding ring (embossed with a design representing new beginnings) come loose, touch my foot, and fall down into the depths (probably annihilating some healthy coral along the way). The end of new beginnings and the return to the same old jackass? Upon being informed, R’s face certainly held the answer to that riddle.

On the way back in, we talk with James about the strangeness of the lady boy phenomenon (or Arthur/Marthas, as he describes them) especially in the face of national homophobia. A theory is put out that Arthur/Marthas are the acceptable face of homosexuality, seen as the return to the norm following the aberration at birth.

Day 6. Railey. Railey A.D.

2009-02-03T00:11:00.000-08:00

6.
Exploration day, and we soon learn to keep clear of the large construction site that used to be the east side. The locals have clearly decided to embrace tourism, either through necessity, a sense of inevitability or a combination of both; tying their lives to the high and low tides of seasonal demand and probably signalling the end of development in the local culture.

Further exploration along the west uncovers another, smaller beach dominated by guests housed at the isthmus' primo resort. Nice beach, shame about all the middle aged, foreign gentlemen in thongs. A necklace of coral fragments like little chicken bones marks the edge of the tiny breakers. Thais patrol the beach carrying portable bbqs in the style of Swiss milkmaids, occasionally stopping to rub their shoulders and necks.

We have lunch at Mom's Kitchen. Over my shoulder, R laughs at Thai music TV's never ending string of pop songs covering teen heartbreak. A girl knits a jumper for her boyfriend; by the end of the video, he has cheated and the jumper, unravelled.

We return to the west beach. A masseuse called Lek offers me a beach front massage which I turn down politely with a "maybe later". Later, when she returns, she looks a bit hacked off when I say "no". I laugh at Lek to help her save face.

The guidebook informs us that Railey is a hotspot for climbing bums. This is a new genre for me. I see a gang of gnarly dudes hanging out in front of a bar with some gnarly women and nod sagely. That evening the vermillion holocaust is concealed by storm clouds. The water's still warm, so we stay in the ocean until the storm comes close. As the lightning begins to fire up on the horizon, I decide it’s high time to hightail it and drag the reluctant R from the frolicking surf.

The rest of the evening’s weather is characterized by a downpour. At our resort restaurant, a film is put on. It is Babylon A.D. starring Vin Diesel, played in German with Thai subtitles. Then it is restarted in Thai with English subtitles. Finally, it is restarted a final time in English with Thai-translated English subtitles, and the volume is hiked up so as not to preclude the rest of the isthmus. Conran is missing a trick.

Day 5. Railey. The beach

2009-02-02T01:10:00.000-08:00

5.
We awake from a terrible night’s sleep with about one hour remaining until arrival in Trang, one of the jumping off points for beach holidays in the south. A Thai called Pak befriends us. He works as a chef at a French run restaurant on one of the islands, has ambitions to open his own resort some day, and is a fan of the Trang region which he sees as the unspoilt Thai holidaying experience. I ask him about the glass vial worn around his neck. “Magic,” he laughs, a little embarrassed. I laugh hard at this, to help him save face.

We part from Pak at Trang. He generously offers to drive us around the island he works on, if we choose to holiday there. Five minutes later, we have forgotten the name of his island and go to eat French toast at a hostel. The availability of French toast and the advanced English skills of the Thai we’ve met so far has allowed us a comfortable level of continuity from Bangkok. And then, “the horror, the horror”: squatting toilets; you can run, but you can’t sit.

After lunch we catch a bus to the town of Krabi; the first leg on our route to the paradise isthmus of Railey, where R has previously holidayed some seven years ago. The bus service is comfortable and satisfactory, and even slows down to allow rubber necking at a freshly flipped car by the side of the road. Two connections later, and the bow of our long tail taxi slides through the breakers of Railey West beach.

R is struck by the level of development that has occurred in her absence. We need to find a hotel, so I leave R and the bags in a bar and make my way through the alleyway leading to the east side of the isthmus, the mud flats, and the more affordable hotels. On the way, a group of construction workers halt their slow demolition of a breezeblock tower to allow me to go by. I thank them in perfect polite Thai and then accidentally wave to them as if they were animals (showing your palm to Thai people is a no no). Still a few creases left to iron out of the Chris-meister's cultural immersion.

A clean and cheap room is found in the Wa-Wa resort about halfway between west and east, and I rejoin R in the bar. Jays desperate for a flight longer than a few wing beats make pitiful cries to one another from bird cages dotted along the shoreline. Then the evening sky becomes a holocaust of vermillion and we forget all about the jays.

Bangkok. Day 4. The lurking pike.

2009-01-29T02:55:00.000-08:00

4.
We wake late to a dark sky. Down in the foyer, over the roar of the storm is a tall German shouting, “Is that normal?” over and over at the Thai desk clerk. Mr. Bean the Movie is showing on the ‘hotel’ restaurant TVs.

At breakfast we witness the ultimate trouser crime. From a TV behind where we’re sitting comes the rapid fire delivery that normally accompanies a horse race, but turning around we discover it’s a CNN report covering the US presidential elections.

More sightseeing today, with a visit to the not to miss sight in Bangkok: the Royal Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. There, R questions the heavy use of ornamental gold in line with traditional Buddhist teachings; although, upon closer inspection, the devotion is found in the detail.

We stay for a while but, despite the impressiveness of the compound, the crush of farang (Thai word for tourist) makes the holy experience feel a bit like the first day of sales in Zimbabwe.

We escape to the peaceful, seemingly endless grounds of nearby Wat Pho to check out the enormous reclining Buddha. He looks suitably chilled.

Wat Pho is also famous for being home to the greatest quantity of Buddha statures in Thailand. I smile with superiority when we overhear a tourist from Yorkshire mutter, “Sick of looking at’Buddha,” but by the end of our Wat Pho tour I am nodding sagely at R’s words of, “Someone needs to tell them you can overdo it.”

Obama wins, and I email a friend: ‘I hope he’ll stop offering me Obama bumper stickers now.’ The email doesn’t send. We meet a pair of Croat’s fresh from Cambodia, our next stop. They tell us a story about arriving in Phnom Penh and finding it hectic. They ask at their hotel where they could find some peace and quiet, a place to relax. “Their answer? Go to the Killing Fields!” I begin to worry about Cambodia.

We have a drink before leaving for the train station. A girl with her ass literally hanging out of the back of her trousers walks past with a large, wild-eyed farang. Thai street sellers stare after them, point, and laugh, generously helping them to save face.

At the station we’re played Thai pop on a large screen in the waiting arena. The walls are adorned with billboards of the king waving. I cannot tell if he is meant to be waving us goodbye, or if he is himself going on a journey.

Rowena investigates the possibility of cutting the two next weeks on the beach down to one. She reads about Chiang Mai in the north. On the surface I am agreeable, adventurous. But beneath the pineapple munching simplicity of the surface I am sabotage, treachery, the lurking pike.

There’re fans screwed into the roof of our carriage, but it’s not feeling that cool and we paid for a/c. I go to check out if we’re being screwed. Back through another carriage like ours and then… I’m in the jungle. I return to reassure Rowena that we’re in the a/c section. It’s dark when our overnight train finally leaves. We pass from the inner city and into the outlying shanty towns, where strip lights and naked bulbs seem to grow almost organically through wide open living spaces.

Bangkok. Day 3.

2009-01-28T03:54:00.000-08:00

3.
At around 6am, the orange robed monks of Bangkok do a begging tour of their favourite streets. We get up to bear witness, taking a plastic carrier bag of our left over fruit as a donation.

Watching street vendors in threadbare clothing place the Thai equivalent of a Harrods food hamper into the monks’ offering bowls, we begin to feel sheepish about our offering of young compost and decide to chuck in 100 baht instead. I go up to the next monk, a young one, who gives me a cheeky smile as I pass him the cash followed up by a wonky bow. R later reads that all Thai men complete at least a week of training to be a monk. I reconsider the cheeky smile. That money better have gone on something holy.

A bit of sightseeing afterwards, past the Democracy Monument rooted in the middle of a large roundabout. Taking up a quarter of the shop frontage looking on is a surprisingly straight-faced McDonalds. Walking on, we find ourselves befriended by a Thai teacher. How did that happen? It’s his day off, he tells us, and he’s going to see his friend.

Teacher slips under the con artist radar by putting in about ten minutes of chitchat before becoming unsettlingly earnest about what we should be seeing in the city. Teacher then takes our map, and begins writing on it. As it becomes clear that he’s a cheat (red flag: a temple we’re heading to “is closed for a Buddhist holiday”) we say, “no, thanks” and walk off. Teacher’s shouts of “stupid” and “buffalo” that chase our heels for a good 400 metres contradict the guidebook’s assertion that Thais will not get angry.

In the evening we meet Aik, an old school friend, for dinner. He takes us up Bangkok’s tallest building to the buffet on floor 78 where he selects traditional Thai dishes for us taste. Afterwards, we go up to the revolving roof on the top floor. It’s the fastest, and clankiest, revolving roof I’ve ever been on, and I’ve been on a few. Bangkok is laid out beneath, a giant, underlit circuit board in need of a good clean.

We drive to a jazz club. After we arrive and get seated, a girl in front of us starts jumping around to the music like it’s indie night. “On Sundays, this whole place is jumping up and down,” Aik informs us. To jazz? That needs to be in the guidebook.

Over beers, Aik tells us that he’ll probably settle in Thailand now. He’s happy, although explains that on the weekend, “Thais spend all their time in shopping malls. I’m used to it, I guess.” We remember traveling on the SkyTrain, noticing how stops on the line decant passengers directly into malls.

Bangkok, Day 2

2009-01-27T01:10:00.001-08:00

2. The guidebook explains to us that we have to see Chatuchat Weekend Market, so we have to. It’s enormous and seems to sell everything you could think of, like the sum total of a year’s worth of exhibitions at Earl’s Court and beyond. There are baby alligators for sale. It is also very crowded, and after a while begins to feel like a particularly well-appointed refugee camp. In order to find our way out, we have to resort to the mini-compass.

Chinatown is on our way home, so we decide to have a stroll through. It’s already late afternoon, and the floating neon monoliths of Chinese characters are aflame with greens, purples and electric reds. Food stalls clog up the side roads like bad cholesterol and, while there’s a concerted effort to find something to eat, nothing looks even vaguely familiar. Unhelpfully, English translation menus have yet to migrate to this region of Bangkok. We leave Chinatown hungry and continue the walk back towards the river and Banglamphu where we’re staying.

Night has now fallen, and the travellers are feeling weak. This can be the only explanation for the purchase of little balls of meat impaled on sticks from a road vendor. R has a taste and immediately says, “You can have the rest of mine.” Being slower (R eats like a wolf), I have one little taste, and then return for another before my taste buds register the presence of evil. What in the name of all that is good and holy? I dub thee 'Fool’s beef'. Or whatever this meat is: at once both solid and liquid, with an indescribable taste reminiscent of loss. A few minutes later we give our meat sticks to a homeless guy and finish the walk back without an appetite, anxious for the familiar embrace of Happy House.

Thailand – 31/10 – 21/11

2009-01-23T01:02:00.000-08:00

1.
We move from last night's room of necessity to cheaper digs around the corner. Known as Happy House, our basic, comfortable air/conditioned boudoir costs us £10 a night, and is situated on a cute little side street that smells, occasionally, like an open sewer. Despite all the positives, Happy House is, we discover, in a certain range of budget accommodation where the management feels the need to signpost that objects should not be thrown out of your bedroom window.

The worst ladyboy in all of Bangkok is waiting tables at our ‘hotel’ restaurant. She has bright red lipstick which contrasts vividly with the patches of dark hair proliferating on her upper lip and side burn regions. This visitation prompts us to get ‘in the know’ culturally. We learn about Thai manners, that they will laugh when embarrassed. In light of this, I reconsider the meaning behind the airport banner reading, ‘Land of Smiles’. Also, my lemonade tastes awful: the Thai put salt in their drinks, a practice which apparently has a metabolic benefit at a high temperature.

The guidebook explains that we have landed in the kingdom of a non-confrontational culture. When the Thai say no, the direct English translation is ‘not yes’. Exhausted by using my brain again after the mental lethargy of Australia, we sit down and eat for peanuts at a street stall. I celebrate our now comfortable financial situation by saying, “yes, yes” to a large, relatively expensive Singha beer.

Oz- Final day

2009-01-22T00:36:00.000-08:00

16
Of course, our leaving day is a gorgeous one with sunshine pouring out of the sky, stranding people on beaches. At the airport, R takes the last few Australian dollars to find snacks for the seven hour journey to Bangkok. A tannoy announcement about our flight startles her and she returns with dispersable aspirin. Perhaps the most poorly executed plan of her life, R is inconsolable.

So here we go again. This time we have British Airways covering a Qantas flight. The response at the sales desk is, “No space for upgrades.” And then, horror of horror, multi-focus fails for the first time. Perhaps it’s my shift to the assumptive, “Any space for an honeymoon upgrade?” rather than the usual, quite crawling, appeal to the heart pitch I usually employ?

Whatever the truth, stewardess Christine replies, “We can’t do upgrades.” I smile, she smiles. I then give a slight hiss not unlike the hiss of champagne. She turns away and we are carried off by the passenger current and deep into the hot bowels of cattle class. An old codger in gold chains sitting across the aisle begins shouting, “I think we’ve been screwed, Gus,” to his companion behind him. Today, we are all ‘Gus’.

Later, air steward Laurent discovers we’re honeymooners and in a very serious French way supplies us with two glasses of good champagne. Thank god for stereotypes!

The plane arrives at 520am on Halloween, and we pass through customs where a banner welcomes us to the ‘Land of Smiles’. As we’re quite frazzled, we take the easy option and end up paying double what we should have for a registered airport taxi to the tourist ghetto of Khao San. Cruising over a huge concrete flyover into the city, we watch as a massive electricity storm rips through the sky. The taxi passes several 7/11s and a Tesco en route, before Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands comes on the radio. I start to relax.

Oz, Days 14-15

2009-01-20T00:48:00.000-08:00

14
It’s wet again today, but as it’s our final day we’re going walking regardless. All there is to see is cloud and water dripping off the rim of your cagoule hood. We get down into the jungle where it isn’t quite so bad and occasionally pass grinning people who say things like, “You’re as crazy as us!” Four hours later we’re back in Katoomba and it’s still enveloped in mist.

Packing our things with the TV on, a news report comes up about how Crocodile Dundee has tax trouble. Mick has labeled Australian authorities, “bullies”.

We catch the 1730 train back to Sydney. The weather is miserable there too, and it makes up our mind to cut short our Australian adventure by a week (a combination of the weather and budget considerations) and head to cheapo Thailand for fun in the sun.

15
Our flight to Bangkok is with Qantas, so next stop is their office in Sydney to change our flight. As we wait, the numbers of the Australian stock market appear on a digital board in next door’s foyer; the orange, red and green numbers seem stable and calm. Our customer service advisor also remains fairly cool, even when dealing with our ticket issuer, Iberia. After hanging up the phone in frustration, he explains that changing the flight is eminently possible, but complicated by Iberia’s “archaic” systems.

Afterwards, we manage to get our old tickets for the whale boat changed to today. Taking our seats near the back, we are surrounded by a lively Indian family taking pictures, messing around, having a good time. Everyone on board is handed an info sheet, and we read that we should see either Humpback Whales or Southern Right Whales. Southern Right Whales are so called because they were seen as the ‘right’ whales to hunt (slow).

Leaving the cover of Sydney bay, the water becomes very choppy and one by one the Indians start to disappear below decks. Meanwhile, out in the cold, green waters of the Tasman Sea, a mother humpback whale and her baby start to entertain us. They are pushed very close to shore, whispers our deckhand, probably avoiding killer whales patrolling further out. With the whales leaping close to the boat I try desperately to take a decent shot, but to little avail.

In the night, I am rung by a mysterious number bearing a Bristol area code. We Google it, and the number belongs to Tauru Technologies and their Teach Yourself Welsh course. A wrong number.

Oz Days 12-13

2009-01-16T00:43:00.000-08:00

12
The Blue Mountains is for walking, so we make our way to the cliff edge path that marks the boundary between Katoomba and civilization, and the bush.

At one viewpoint stop, we pause for pictures and there’s a fumble with a lens cap. It falls, and slides slowly down the lip of the cliff and eventually over the edge, making one visible somersault, before falling towards the forest far below. “You didn’t even try to save it,” says R.
It’s true, I didn’t. And I wonder whether it was similar to the impulse she had yesterday evening, that of wanting to throw her sunglasses into the abyss of Echo Point simply to watch them fall? Perhaps I just wanted to see the lens cap fall? Why would I want that? I like my lens caps. Perhaps then it’s just because I’m shit scared of cliffs, and heights in general? Either way, I hope it didn’t hit anyone on Walkabout.

Back at the ‘hotel’ and I discover that one of my rucksack straps has developed a tear in the stitching. R suggests getting it fixed in Thailand, our next stop, where it will be super cheap. “What if they also stitch a kilo of cocaine into the lining?” comes my reply. Apparently the world and I continue to have trust issues.

After dinner, we sit down with some other guests. An Italian guy describes his laser eye surgery at length, in faltering English.

13
A cloud sits over Katoomba today, so we stay in bed and spend the morning learning about the dangers of cheap boob jobs and tummy tucks abroad. “They stamp dodgy silicone with legit brands,” we hear. Another hard news item explains that newly weds will start to take each other for granted after two years, six months and twenty-five days. I feel an anticipatory pang of guilt.

It’s our last night, so we head out to the highly recommended art deco diner, The Savoy, for a taste of ‘roo burger. When we arrive, it’s closing up. Well, I suppose that’s our fault for turning up at 7.45pm. I have trouble containing my rage until a possible replacement restaurant emerges through the misty air in the form of a cosy looking corner café.

Stepping through the door, we are met by a group of waiters and waitresses in unusual sack cloth uniforms. The men have long, unkempt beards while the women haven’t made any sort of effort whatsoever. The café interior, while a warm and welcome contrast to the soggy atmosphere of the street, is almost unbearably twee and probably best described as ‘hobbit homosexual’ with tables snuggling inside wooden boughs; except this isn’t a tree, we saw that outside, it’s a concrete building.

Menus are handed to us by a young waitress with a bright smile and healthy, iron wool scrubbed cheek blush. The header tells us that this place is called the Common Ground Café. There are essentially two main meal possibilities: the chicken or the fish. The waitress returns, takes our order, then bubbles over and asks us if we’re English, tells us she and her father are from Devon (she squats lower, gets comfy), that she’s visiting her granny, that… (here I switch off and slip into nodding auto pilot, leaving any required constructive responses to R).

When the chatterbox finally leaves to relay our order, I notice literature in a stand by the door. I retrieve some and read the top: Twelve Tribes Freepaper. Yes, it’s a cult run restaurant. The pages of the freepaper suggest the following conclusions: that they all live together, grow beards, dance like fools (no PlayStation) and have a gay old time. And they’re recruiting.

While I wouldn’t recommend the Common Ground Café if you’re feeling emotionally vulnerable, I can say that both of its mains, the chicken and the fish, were very competently cooked. They also do great salsa. However, the service was joke.

Oz, Days 10-11

2009-01-14T00:39:00.000-08:00

10
Crazy with sun lust, we plan to enjoy more beach time in distant Manly. The guidebook describes Manly as laid back, with its own unique vibe, chilled.

It’s Sunday, and it’s rammed. Moods degenerate further when a thin sheet of stratus dilutes the heat. All around, different nationalities complain in their mother tongues, perhaps direct translations of our own: “Fuck this.” We get up and begin the long journey back to Circular Quay.
11
Today marks the return to the previous exploratory nature of the trip. We are leaving Sydney, which, quite frankly, has forsaken us, and training it towards the nearby Blue Mountains, into THE BUSH to go WALKABOUT.

At Sydney Central, we clamber onto one train before being ordered off onto another train. “Some trains have undergone multiple changes,” we are told, “these problems are beyond are control”. Act of God stuff; He does hate the railways. Now Sydney is really reminding me of London.

On the way to Katoomba, our Blue Mountains stop, we call in at Muru Mittigar, the Aboriginal Cultural Center in Penrith. With the sobering realization that my sum cultural knowledge of Australia is compiled from Crocodile Dundee One and Two, we stump up for the cultural equivalent of ‘the works’ and are assigned Eric to learn us good in the ancient ways of his people.

The Aboriginal people are the longest continuous living culture in the world, he tells us. Also, the Aboriginal flag was designed in ’79 by a guy called Harold Thomas, with the black representing the Aborigines, the red for the earth and the yellow for the sun. Another flag, representing the Torres Strait Islanders in the north, is blue, green and black with a funny, white shape in the middle. “Do you know what that shape in the middle is?” Eric asks his earnest students. “Kangaroo’s behind!”

Next, Eric teaches us about the didgeridoo. I have a go, but R cannot as the evil spirits will overwhelm her, like they do in heavy traffic. It’s all rounded off with a boomerang lesson. Much heavier boomerangs were originally designed to take out a kangaroo’s leg. We throw one round a bit of parkland out the back and Eric tries to catch it on his head. I throw it into a tree and that’s the end of the tour.

Eric finds us a lift back to the train station with the local artist, John, and a younger, very large and chatty fellow employee from the Muru Mittigar. “Australia must be favourites for the rugby league,” he tells us, “especially with England (population roughly 61 million) only beating Papua New Guinea (population roughly 6 million) by ten points!” I change the subject quickly to 'must see' sights. They recommend the Sydney harbour Aboriginal boat tour, adding that the land upon which the Sydney Opera House sits is very sacred for their people.

Somehow, the conversation moves onto how the Pacific islanders living in Penrith and around like to get into fights with the locals. Why?

“Don’t really know, they just go around in big groups,” says the young guy. “Then you get revenge attacks, y’know? Out in the bad areas we live in, right, John?”

“It’s not so bad where I live!” John replies with a laugh.

We catch the end of school train which the schoolchildren fill like an obnoxious gas. The train runs smoothly on past dusty woodland capable of handling possums, while distant, sandy brown ridges outside the window hint at the vastness of Australia, glimpsed like a poorly concealed secret in gaps between the tree line.

Destination Katoomba turns out to be an oasis of art deco architecture. After dumping our stuff at the Katoomba Mountain Lodge, we head out and watch sunset from Echo Point in awe. Afterwards, it's time for dinner. The dining room at our 'hotel' has been taken over for the owner’s daughter’s birthday. There’s a whole crowd of small people, and they sing Happy Birthday in English and Chinese. It is a godawful racket to endure while cooking.

Oz, Days 7-9

2009-01-13T00:50:00.000-08:00

7
The financial crisis starts to hit Australia. Headlines read: Families put holidays on hold; Families cut back on Christmas; Workers fear mass sackings.

To avoid all the bad news we catch a bus and return somewhat unimaginatively to Darling Harbour. Second time around it still isn’t very interesting, although the promise of Batman - The Dark Knight playing at the Imax is a good one. It isn’t showing that day, but the ticket girl tells us that it’s incredible the film’s still on at all, considering how long it’s been out.

Afterwards we stop by Circular Quay and book tickets for a whale watching cruise on Saturday morning.

8
The weather is slightly better today so we head towards the Botanic Gardens. Two teenage girls on the bus are having a discussion about how one smashed her car up. The girl who crashed has red hair and dresses like a dancer from a Kid Rock video. Her friend has a speech impediment from her braces.

“Can’t believe the bumper fell off,” she says.
“Yeah, windscreen smashed.”
“I could’ve stabbed you I was so angry.”
“Why? It’s my car.”
“That bruise on your leg…”

We get to the park, but the weather becomes worse and, after forming a huddle similar to penguins enduring winter in Antarctica, we retreat. It’s warmer inside an arcade of boutique shops with delicately bulging windows attempting to snare you into one expensive mistake. Lunchtime, and we try to learn some Thai over beers as well as send a few emails. At the cafe, the code to use the wireless service is Sunshine. The Russian waitress laughs. What a hoot.

Near our lodgings is the club that helped inspire the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. We turn up in the evening hoping for a Priscilla show but the place looks run down, shut up, and the till guy from the garage opposite confirms that it’s been closed for about two years. Instead we end up at a Kelly’s Irish Bar on King’s Road. First floor is live music while ground floor is karaoke.

The live music is good until the so-called better bands enter the line-up and they’re slick, surf rock awful. We head downstairs where a middle-aged man murders Smells Like Teen Spirit in truly excruciating fashion. It’s like listening to the track on a Walkman when the batteries are dying while simultaneously having your ears rubbed with gravel. The host applauds him at the end, shouts out his name like he’s Spartacus and we have to leave. Meanwhile, down in his grave, Kurt Cobain continues to back flip.

(picture courtesy of Magnum's Bryony Taylor)

9
Damned hangover! We have missed the whale boat. Ahab would not be best pleased.

However, Sydney looks like Australia again and the sun is high and I am a lizard looking for a rock. A ferry is caught and a stake marked out on Camp Cove looking out into Watson’s Bay. The water is also in need of more sun, it’s freezing and we splash quickly in and quickly out (a satisfying turn of events following the bull sharks in the bay news story) to our towels and books. While pausing for mental breath after the first few paragraphs of Gravity’s Rainbow, I notice, respectfully, that women go topless sunbathing in Sydney.

Catching the last ferry back to Circular Quay, we change into snappier duds and eat fish and chips on the journey into town. Bars seem scarce, the commercial light hogged high up in the canopy by the tall, closely planted office blocks. A rotating bar is found on top of one tower and, with 45 minutes until we’ve completed a revolution of the skyline, the cheapest bottle of Pinot Noir on the overpriced menu is selected: Tin Cow, like drinking a dying Walkman while having your tonsils rubbed with gravel. The views were better.

(Photo credit: Bee Taylor)

Oz, days 4-6

2009-01-12T01:30:00.000-08:00

4
After another lazy morning we make our way again towards Circular Quay. Stopping at a waterfront bar to plan the day’s touring, we sit in between a table of two gay men comfortably bitching about how “she despises me” while besides them a table of sales types share a story about a food fight.

A walk is plotted towards Darling Harbour and we make our way, passing by ballerinas practicing on the dockside and beneath the shadows of office blocks; vertical grids of glass and steel dividing the inner city from the bay side. Darling Harbour is a touch touristy and disappointing when we arrive in the early evening, and we stop for some French fries and wine before waiting for the ride back to Newtown.

The bus takes us along a flyover that cleaves the city’s sky scraping perimeter and bowls down a shooting gallery of bright, gigantic corporate brands. Multi-hued particles of brand light clatter and wash against our windows. A reminder in blue neon jumps off a skyscraper: Cosco.

5
We wake up to another overcast day and stay in bed, hoping it’ll clear. It doesn’t, effectively cancelling the lazing/bronzing plans for the day and forcing us into the enigmatic, intellectual embrace of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

The first floor we visit is host to ‘V1DEO LOG1C’ showcasing the work of six Australian video artists. We squint as Eugenis Raskopoulos, in her work entitled ‘Weak as piss’, stands before us, pees down her leg, before writing democracy in urine with her toe. Brave. We move on to baffle at John Conomos’ Autumn Song, which the photocopied info sheet tells us is about John growing up ’under neon’ in a suburban milk bar in Sydney. And we laugh mightily at Phillip Brophy’s Evaporated Music 1 where the artist replaces the sound track from well known music videos with amusing sound effects. Phil Collins never sounded so good…

Frightened we’re going insane, a descent is made to the Yinka Shonibare solo exhibition (picture above by Thribble) on floor 3. Yinka’s all about African identity, European colonialism and class structures, says the guide (more or less). There’re a lot of mannequins in Dutch wax period dress arranged in clever ways. One exhibit has mannequins arranged around a room in various sexual positions, with travelling baggage littered in and about. I ho, ho, ho at a threesome and point. Later, Yinka, in a video discussing the show, explains that the threesome piece is about how people on holiday feel they can behave outrageously. As for his threesome, he adds wisely that, “As long as you’re in period dress, it doesn’t seem so bad.”

Outside, the weather hasn’t improved. Gulls with livid feet and livid beaks fire piercing cries at lunching office workers until they relinquish crumbs.

In the evening we visit The Vanguard for an Elliot Smith tribute night put on by local musicians. Rowena asks me about how Elliot Smith died, and I’m not quite sure, stabbed himself in the heart with an axe, I think. The gig itself was just like a wake, with everyone speaking over the top, although, admittedly, the cream of Sydney seemed pretty hit and miss.

6
As the advert goes: ‘So where the bloody hell are ya?’. Well, that would be in our room, watching The Simpsons and waiting for the rain to go away. It is the coldest October day in Sydney for 30 years.

At a reasonable hour I go to buy wine. Counting out the change slowly, the man behind the till helps by saying, “remember, Libby’s on the five”.

Australia - Day 3

2009-01-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

3
We manage to get up before noon and struggle onto a bus heading towards Circular Quay, Sydney’s transport hub. A pair of middle aged lesbians decked out like the Blues Brothers get crabby when we invade their bus space.

Circular Quay is the center point for comings and goings around Sydney bay and home to the bristling opera house. A didgeridoo vibrates through the air, juxtaposed against totemic office blocks and green and yellow ferries endlessly to-ing, fro-ing.

Then a techno beat kicks in on the aborigine performer’s CD player, and the juxtaposition is dissolved into an unpopular haze of memories involving the worst parts of live music festivals. An enormous, luxury cruise ship is docked in the quay, nearly dwarfing the harbour bridge. It has a poetic name: The Rhapsody of the Seas. Wheezing out the name over the top of techno didge could make a dance chart number one.

We poke about the opera house for a while, noting with some wonder that it is many and not just one, and that the Swedish tiles, close up, are looking a bit dated. Afterwards, we head over to Bondi. It’s a sunny Sunday, and the squat crescent of sand is heavily over populated.

At the work out section, heavily over muscled men take up valuable space unnecessarily, while also damaging the chilled out Aussie surf stereotype. However, according to the guidebook, there is no such thing as a stereotypical Aussie. To underline the point, we pass four surfers bowing to Mecca behind a nearby metal container.

After a ferry ride through the generously beautiful evening of Sydney bay, dinner is sought in Balmein. With a number of options available, we are coaxed away from an apparently popular restaurant by the friendly repartee of a moustachioed Aussie working for a neighbouring establishment. Despite our addition to the tables, the restaurant remains practically abandoned and our waiters circle like spirits at a séance, desperate to be heard, to be seen.

“They need more customers,” says R. With beautiful timing, the waiter chooses this moment to interject with a Christmas joke. The details of the joke escape me, but the punch line is a play on the word ‘carols’, and involves the moustachioed waiter pulling a pair of lady’s thongs out of his pocket, dangling them above the table, waggling his eyebrows lasciviously, and announcing that, “They’re Carol’s!”. For crying out loud, man, it’s October…

Australia (photos mostly lost so will be fleshed out by a selection of amusing signs encountered throughout the trip)

2009-01-07T10:07:00.000-08:00

1
One of the first thing’s we note, landing in Sydney, is that there are more people in this city than in the whole of New Zealand.

In the airport, we try to contact the guidebook recommended guest house and are told that it’s all full up. A second choice is selected, but dialling the number supplied takes us through to a guest house different to the one we were trying to call. Repeating the process, we once again get The Globe in King’s Cross (the area for ’party people’ according to the guidebook) and decide, what the hell, let’s roll the dice, and book in for the night.

While waiting for the airport shuttle bus named Destiny, we discover to our horror that there is no free wireless in Sydney Airport. Perhaps not as progressive as previously believed…

The shuttle arrives and we’re packed into the front seat next to the young Chinese driver. It’s Friday rush hour, and the polished office blocks, bars spilling out onto the street and, most of all, the traffic reminds us a lot of central London. And, despite rush hour being a daily phenomenon in the working week, our driver starts going absolutely nuts. We hit another queue of traffic and he graduates from murmurs of displeasure to convulsions and smacking his forehead. While conserving energy for his next fit, he fills time making forlorn, heart-rending gestures at the clear road running the other way. The fitting starts again, accompanied sometimes with aimless honking. Finally, he articulates his inner voice while gripping his head, and says to nobody in particular, “If I was a taxi I would be earning a lot more money”.

Looking at his identification badge, his name amusingly enough appears to be Go. Additionally, when he had the photo taken, presumably at the beginning of his employment, he had a tidy side parting. Now, Go sports a mohawk.

Go foments a plan while stalled in traffic to cut some corners. He calls out to the Scottish couple at the back that, “Swissotel just a short walk, drop you here, ok?” The Scots aren’t budging, “No way, pal,” comes the response, “we’re staying with you.” Laughter from the rear. Go mutters defensively, “I don’t mind, is for sake of others,” before belting out a three second salvo of honking fury. Rowena eventually tires of being jabbed in the ribs by Go’s violent gear changes, and we move to the back section of the bus after the Scots are dropped at the Swissotel. A good half hour later, Go reaches his last stop and drops us off at the Globe. On the way I am pleased to see that Sydney has a monorail. Perhaps more progressive than previously thought…

A few hours at the Globe informs us that we made the wrong roll of the dice. Next door to us, the machine gun, monotonous (English) laugh of the adjoining party people cuts through my evening reverie. If you had to put faces to diseases, you could begin in the hallways of the Globe. Out of the window, our view of Sydney is blocked by an engorged McDonalds sign and the ornate blue and pink neon of ‘Show Girls’.

Nearby, a dull tannoy can be heard over which a man’s voice is calling out what sounds like bingo, but I know, in my heart of hearts, is not. Roy Orbison’s A Love So Beautiful starts to flutter out of our travel speakers, the notes emerging fairly-like to do good works, and I invite Kings Cross to lay its head on my shoulder and cry it all out. The tannoy thuds, the neon races. Rowena comes back from the bathroom and comments, “This’ll put us in the mood for going out, won’t it?” There’s a trace of sarcasm about the girl at times. Roy goes off, we go out.

Kings Cross turns out to be like London’s Soho in miniature. We like it, but the pestilent population of the Globe has made up our minds to find a new hostel forthwith.

2
A morning of reconnaissance completed, and we settle on the Billabong Gardens in Newtown. The pictures on the website look superb, it’s guidebook confirmed, and it has a pool.

Upon arrival, we are made aware of the truth that digital photos held in the ether of the internet do not fade, while film and Billabong Gardens, when exposed to air, degrade. However, unlike the Globe, they do not rot.

We head out and make a cursory examination of edgy Newtown and more preppy Glebe. The guidebook points to Newtown’s ‘subcultures’ (gay people), in evidence with the high proportion (compared to London streets) of happy lesbian couples we pass on the street.

Glebe is having road works. Rowena gets her legs waxed, and learns from her beautician that Australia, along with California, has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. The beautician tells stories of teenagers coming in for treatments bearing skin grafts following pre to early teen melanomas.

New Zealand (the dramatic concluding part)

2008-11-25T03:50:00.000-08:00

14
I begin the day by scalding my foot with boiling water. The pain is assuaged by a breakfast of Vogel’s take on New Zealand S.C.R.O.G.G.I.N (Sultanas.Chocolate.Raisins.Orange peel.Ginger.Glucose.Imagination.Nuts), unfortunately mixed with Pam’s Muesli. Pam’s is the worst muesli, but multipurpose as animal seed. S.C.R.O.G.G.I.N is meant to give you get up and go, while all Pam’s does is deliver a heap of fibre and fills your stomach with sadness. Blending the two means you get up and go off.

Pam’s almost certainly contributed to my later intractability when Rowena wants to discuss Fiordland. She’s worried we won’t have time. “Let’s talk later,” I say, working on the principle that if I delay and delay, we’ll eventually be delayed into Fiordland and there‘ll be no need to talk.

Nearing Queenstown, we pull into boutiquey Arrowtown. There we stop in a photographer’s gallery hung with beautiful moments in the life of the New Zealand landscape. In one image, a waterfall seems to fire like a power hose out of a wall of black rock. “Where’s this,” I ask the chatty shop keep. “Fiordland,” she replies. The mood in the shop changes, and we leave.

Shortly after, we’re in Queenstown. The guide book says Queenstown is only a middle sized town, but because of all the thrill seeking activity going on, it has the buzz of a big city. We see people, which is more than can be said for a lot of the town’s previous to Queenstown.

We sit down in a pub with views through to an ice bar and I realise the Talk has followed us in and is making a beeline for the table. Instead of launching straight into an argument, we pretend we're rational and instead present agendas for the remaining time on the South Island. Mine is fairly predictable, with driving taking up 95% of the time. Unfortunately, as I calculate distances and time, I realise that my plan is madness, this is Pam’s gone to the brain, this must stop.

I let the door to Fiordland slam shut, and look into the ice bar next door drawing on the scene in the Superman II for strength, when Kal-el returns to his ice boudoir to try to reverse becoming a dumdum. Then Rowena says we could just go to the airport and try to extend our time in New Zealand? Duh, of course; the one crystal left intact.

In high humour, we return to the van where I cannot find the keys. Peering in the side window, the gods are laughing now, there it is safely secured within. I rage against the universe.

We ring a number and a couple of guys turn up in a tow truck. They both hop out, and one gets to work on the passenger side with a long metal ruler, the other on the driver’s side with an airbag tucked in the gap betwixt door and van. “We’re having a race,” explains Airbag. Airbag wins and the keys are freed for a quick $100. Another unexpected dent to the budget.

15
Momentous morning arrives and with it comes the last of the Pam’s, which trickles from the box with a prolonged death rattle. We get to the airport, park, the Qantas desk is unattended, Rowena does a little shopping, I nervously try to tap into free internet, Rowena calls me over for a second opinion, I skulk over nervously watching wife and desk, the latter is suddenly manned, we run over and change the flight; it’s that easy. The mighty door swings open and inside is light and music and little else as I really don’t know what to expect from Fiordland except black rocks and a lot of rain. I think it was the name more than anything…

Returning to Queensland we’ve booked in enough time to take a day to chill out. A compromise day, if you will. Another compromise is made when we buy a head torch. It’s something I’d been
resisting, as I think people wearing them look stupid; miners excluded.

Finding a local free paper, I flip through it, read something about Queensland being highly ranked in a recent poll about violence, and also come across a Bob Dylan quote. “Being noticed can be a burden,” says the great man. “Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”

Driving in the van is becoming a burden. Stupid people stop and agree/disagree with what it says, discuss whether it’s funny or not. They scowl, or occasionally laugh. It brings me a little bit closer to understanding what it is to be a former reality TV show contestant.

Later, while cooking, I discover the worth of the head torch. You can see what you’re cooking without having to hold a torch under your chin. It also makes you a human lighthouse and able to mete out swift, blinding justice if there is complaints about burnt food. Before we turn in, I make a stupid suggestion that we should hike up a small hill to see the sunset tomorrow. An alarm is set for five.

16
At five, I suggest the idea was a stupid one, that we should leave it, but Rowena is resolute. The fiery third eye of the human lighthouse creates a false dawn for many startled woodland dwellers as we, fully S.C.R.O.G.G.I.Ned to the max, power up the hill. Dawn dawns, I take a lot of pictures while Rowena gets cold, and we head back down.

On the way, a sign is revealed to us besides the path. On it is a picture of a photogenic blonde lady with an industrial sized pair of clippers aimed at a tree. She’s smiling. Next to her, is text concerning the Wild Conifers or, as they’re labelled on the info-board, the PEST TREE. Apparently another eco-intruder, no doubt in cahoots with the hawks, possums and probably the Japanese whaling fleet, the PEST TREE sends forth it’s symbiotic fungus to ruin the soil for all but the PEST TREE before invading.

Nifty, but the DOC has declarde a cease-Wild Conifer. On the way down, we agree that if the DOC was to follow the logic of its remit to the bitter end, it should eradicate all human life on the island along with the various outlaw plants and animals, before turning the gun on itself just after handing the reins of government to the flightless birds.

We begin the drive to Fiordland. Queenstown is relatively close to Milford Sound as the crow flies, but the crow’s been eating the DOC’s green carrots so all those on wheels need to drive a huge U. However, the scenery more than makes up for this inconvenience.

Sitting on a nice lake near the entrance to Fiordland is Te Anua, a town of wide avenues with rivers of boredom running though it. A gang of kids scamper around surfing from one river to another. Parking up amid a flurry of dirty looks, we go to get a coffee, avoiding the enticingly named ‘Sandfly Café‘.

In the Mountain Scene newspaper, a letter reads: ‘we need to look beneath the violence statistics and take it on the chin. We need stay at home Mums.’ Behind me locals discuss an attempted robbery at the small supermarket. “A cop was down there with finger printing gear.” They’re still talking about it as we finish our coffee and leave.

There’s a jewellery store on the main street so we pop in on the lookout for replacement wedding rings. A 3.2 tonne boulder of nephrite jade proudly blocks the door. Apparently it was airlifted into the shop and is the second largest on display in NZ. “You are most welcome to touch our rock….,” coos the shining sign of pride. We touch the rock, and I buy a new ring displaying a Maori symbol for growth and new beginnings.

As we leave the shop, Rowena eyes the ring doubtfully, saying, “Do you think people will be able to tell that you’re married with that, or just think you’re a cool surfer?” “Married, of course,” replies the cool surfer.

On our way our of town, the kids fire a hose at us and celebrate the soaking of the van before a-scampering away to the next adventure and, eventually, heavy drug abuse.

At the entrance to Fiordland there is no heavy oak door embossed with iron, but there are vertical mountain faces and moss hanging off everything like green party string. I photograph everything with gusto, and spot a great photo waiting to be taken a little way over a small field. Half way to where I need to take the shot, I realise that the pretty red tusset grass hides a bog. Sandflies mass. After much careful bog trotting, I finally miscalculate and my flip flop sinks into what can only be described as an orange mank bush (later, I discover this has already been inaccurately named the Cushion Plant).

There is some panicking and cries of horror, but I ultimately forgive Fiordland later, while eating barbequed fish and drinking a nice Martinborough white. Then sandflies gather, and we flee into the van.
17
Our boat into Milford Sound is at 8am. Up early, we careen through the mist, past avalanche warnings, to plunge into the raw hewn rock and total blackout of the Homer Tunnel.

“This is a little bit Lord of the Rings,“ says I, geekily. Rowena then does a short reprisal of the encounter with the Balrog, nicely timed for Gandalf’s line of “Fly you fools” just before we pop out the other side into more mist and mountains and snow.

Arriving in good time at Milford Sound jetty, I scamper over to take a first look at the world famous sight. From behind me, a less enthusiastic cohort. “Yeah, low lying cloud, yeah, vertical rock, yeah seen it all yesterday,” quoth Rowena, for it is she. “Right now I need the toilet too much to care.”

The cruise more than lives up to expectations, Milford Sound is indeed, ‘sound’, and is another great wedding present. Afterwards we return to the car park and find the battery dead, with the lights switched to ‘guilty‘.

We rope a few, kind people into trying to help but either the angle of the dangle or the length of jump cable is all wrong. At the local café, we find that the band of Argentines in charge have a portable battery charger ready to help. For a fee. We’re their third this morning. Apparently the Homer tunnel’s to blame, with drivers forgetting to turn off the lights afterwards, distracted by all the Norse gods leaping about the place.

We drive off and decide to cook lunch in the car park designated for The Chasm. A signs says not to feed the kea parrot, a creature I’ve been keen to see. It’s the world’s only Alpine parrot, apparently. Unhappily, it readily appears, doing a fine impression of Danny De Vito’s Penguin as it hops from car to coach begging noisily for food. We watch the scavenger with pity, ponder man’s profound influence on his surroundings, before returning focus to lunch.

Unfortunately, the kea‘s focus becomes the same as ours. Two hobble horribly over. We shoo. They sneak. Suddenly, one is on the roof, then another, there, behind the rear wheel. “Bastard’s after the bacon!” Their approach is silent, stealthy, then, when uncovered, they release the ‘Keeeeeeaaaaaaa’ banshee cry they’re obviously named for.

Shooing turns to near violent gestures, threats, perhaps a wild kick (obviously that could never connect) and finally they hobble off to a new arrival pulling up in the car park. In fact, it’s a pincer movement, and in a flash of green and scaly legs, the big one’s got all 250 grams of our delicious butter in it’s grasping, lascivious beak and is trying to take flight. I give chase. It somehow manages flight and disappears into a nearby tree, where it probably nestles the butter among stolen hubcaps. Cue impotent fist shaking at tree. Outwitted or dumbwitted, a bit of both, and we lunch in the van as kea continue to siege. Later, the mastermind returns with buttered beak, worm tongue flicking out again and again, dark eyes mocking, ever mocking…

“Only Alpine parrot,” I mutter, “only chav parrot.”

Having let down the human race, we go for a decent length walk and buoy our spirits by jump starting someone caught out by the Homer Tunnel going the other way.

18
After Fiordland, all that is left to us in New Zealand is to wend our way back up to Christchurch to catch our Australia bound flight.

At a small town supermarket along the way, where a quick appraisal of the receipt afterwards confirms a diet of meat, sweets, and wine, the one armed teller man notices my camera and cheekily asks whether I intend to take a picture of the service. Quick as a flash, I come back with “depends how good it is”. It’s a good land to practice your comebacks in, ol’ NZ, filled with cheeky, good humoured types, even the ones with really bad injuries.

I don’t take a picture in the end, but we were both joking. Some magazines draw our attention with headlines concerning Wills being torn between the love of two women (subhead: ‘Kate’s fury‘). Rowena takes a peek and it turns out that the other woman is Princess Beatrice! Driving away, we agree Beatrice and Eugenie have their father’s face and mother’s features.

On the east coast, on our way to the natural wonder of the Otago Peninsula, we stop in Dunedin. The guidebook tells us that Dunedin is the Celtic for Edinburgh. In the car park, we pass two old ladies who, in tartan skirts and manner, really could have been two old Scottish ladies.

The Dunedin information site tells us that we can’t see the albatrosses on the Otago Peninsula as they’re in the middle of mating season. We drive out there anyway, and are surprised at how built up the peninsula turns out to be. An albatross, either to young for mating or simply homosexual, deigns to buzz us a few times, so I stand out in the freezing cold trying to get the perfect gay albatross picture, whatever that is. Realising I now have quite a large collection of bird pictures, I start to worry that I’m becoming a twitcher.

Looking for a place to sleep, we drive past the tragedy of a possum reeling from a clip with a four by four and park up besides a salt marsh. Sheep haunt the nearby hills with pessimistic bleating.

19
The morning exposes the with salt marsh’s shoreline. Lined with organic gunk that looks like tights entangled with used prophylactics, it’s an important reminder that nature also does ugly.
While brushing my teeth, I watch a tiny bird valiantly defending its nest from a pair of harrier hawks. I’m happy for the hawks. They’ve stolen the keys to hawk heaven. Then Rowena makes a comment about one of us having a trampy smell. It’s not her. Time for a shower.

Along the coast we stop and are amazed by the Moeraki boulders, before continuing on to Oamaru. We want to see the blue penguin colony there, but there’s a barricade in the way which charging $20 for access to the ‘viewing platform‘. At the information site, we‘re told sympathetically that, yes, it seems steep, but don’t worry, “all the money goes back into the colony”. However, we are told that it’s free to go see the rare yellow eyebrowed penguin (my name for them), also nearby,

20
Oamaru is the best town in all New Zealand. And it has the Whitestone cheese factory. We watch cheese being made and then spend time eating some. It is very good cheese. Very good indeeeeeeeed.

A kind old lady helps us choose cheese at the counter to take away. We get up to leave, but Rowena needs a comfort break, so I stand waiting by the door. Unfortunately, I am wearing shorts big for me (much needed belt being currently borrowed by aforementioned Rowena) and they start to fall down. Instead of sitting, I clutch wildly at falling crotch and cheese.

The intensity on my face, and my very public position by the door hints at some unmentionable, private pleasure. The old lady passes me picking up plates. She looks up, the kind crinkles in her farewell smile falling to the floor. I clutch my way out of Whitestone and wait for Rowena in the van.

After Oamaru, we put together a menu of lesser sights and set forth. First is the Elephant rocks, where Azlan gets slaughtered, which we rate highly. Near to the rocks, some set makers are busy recreating Bethlehem. After that is a whale fossil set into a hill side. Sounds kind of cool, but after a long drive into nowhere, we discover a site worse that hateful Tophouse. However, out spirits are raised by the nearby Maori cave drawings, although the hilarious terribleness of the drawings (only some 200 years old) does make me glance doubtingly at my new, ‘cool’ wedding ring.

We arrive in Christchurch at rush hour, avoid the four or five cars with ease, and drive out to the road trip‘s final resting place. Nobody honks, but a group of people (possibly cheese fetishists) gather under cover of night in a nearby field before leaving about an hour later.

21
The next day is dropping off van day, and we wash and vacuum the van as according to contract. When we take it to the Wicked depot, the lady inspecting the van takes a look inside and says, “You have to wash and vacuum the van, y’know?” We just have, we reply. “Oh sorry,” she says, and that’s that.

There’s a free bus, which comes every twenty minutes, and which will get us underway to the airport. As we arrive at the stop, miraculously, so does the bus, drifting towards us from down the street. Then some guy in a baseball cap, who moments ago was sitting quietly with us at the stop, jumps up and starts swearing at the driver who swings away and misses out the stop. We sit back down, wait twenty minutes for the next one, and are soon on a flight bound for Sydney.

New Zealand (part two)

2008-11-20T01:29:00.000-08:00

7
We travel away from Martinborough in the morning, following the main road we thought we should have taken yesterday. It is only mildly less twisty but with far more traffic; it’s easier getting at the Holy Grail than Martinborough.

Approaching Wellington, arranged in tidy piles of modern architecture curving around a broad waterfront on a bright cloudless day, we are impressed and look forward to its groovy café scene which the guide book enthusiastically promotes. On the outskirts, I am aided by an Australian truck driver in fathoming the automatic petrol pump pay system. Like two monkeys on typewriters, we finally find the right arrangement that reads like Shakespeare and the payment processes. During this we have a chat, and I ask him what he thinks of New Zealand. “Nice part of the world,” is his answer. “Too far from the equator though.”

We have some time in town before our ferry over to the South Island and decide to divide that between the Te Papa museum and a groovy café (mainly for internet purposes). Incredibly, we cannot find free internet in a café in New Zealand’s capital city. Free internet is de rigeur in Peru, even in lowliest, roofless, ringworm infested backpackers. An angry diatribe is prompted on what makes a country first or third world. Five minutes later I get my breath back and we go on to the museum.

At Te Papa, Maori for ’Our Place’ and the information centre for all things Kiwi, we head quickly for the earthquake simulator that Tim ’n Barb from the jungle told us to check out. We wait in a mock up living room with a few other people for the chaos to kick in. Rowena advises me to hold onto the rail, which I do. The ensuing earthquake demonstration is to the Richter Scale what Wimpey’s is to fast food. Small, unfrightened children run through the demonstration playing touch.

I release the rail and we leave, walking past a life sized reproduction of the Moa, the largest of New Zealand’s flightless birds, and the most extinct. I feel a passing affinity with the Moa model, posed sympathetically in a demonstration of existential dismay: profound disappointment shining in its lightless eyes and an eternal, silent squawk exuding from a long and slender throat.

We board the ferry and go to the top deck upon entering the Queen Charlotte Sound. The clement weather has extended over both islands, and tourists substitute taking pictures of the sound for taking it in. Arriving in the small port of Picton, we ask around at boat tour companies for information on what they do, and if they know where we can find the Maori cruise company who apparently spin yarns while cooking up a BBQ (guide book recommended).

Nobody knows anything until the last company asked. The girl behind the desk, despite there being oversupply along the waterfront for tour business, practically sells them over her own company. Later we talk to a fellow employee of hers, the son of the person running the Maori guide company. He doesn’t sell it as strongly as the girl working for the other company, so we give it a miss.

That night, we find a (safely off the road) photogenic vantage point above a sound and watch the sun setting. Throughout the night, passers by honk to wake us, their motivation a mystery to be wondered at during under exposed moments of wakefulness before falling back asleep until the next one.

8
On day eight, we manage to put our hiking boots on and complete our first walk. Part of the Queen Charlotte track, we choose a fairly unsatisfying section of the path involving going up and then back down again, but with great views at the top. Some middle aged women power walk past us each way and I resolve that the next walk will be impossibly difficult.

Pinballing back down the wiggly roads of the Queen Charlotte sound, a bottle comes loose from the crate of Speights and the van fills up with the smell of beer. It’s highly inappropriate as we’re heading to wine country.

In Renwick, the heart of the Marlborough wine region, surrounded by umpteen wineries big and small and nowhere near as difficult to get to as the Holy Martingrail, we do have trouble finding a camping spot. There isn‘t one. The sweet, rheumy eyed lady running the haberdashery and moonlighting as the local tourist information centre suggests parking up behind the local pub. In fact, it’s a sports bar and it’s Friday night. Rheumy eyes, I’d rather stay in your shop surrounded by knitted woollen creatures and knick knacks joining you in going insane than park up in the controversy van awaiting a-whoopin’ from a gang of good ol‘ boys at kicking out time.

We eventually find a lonesome, dustbowl of a road leading into the hills, have a BBQ marinated in road grit and pass out from sheer bliss. Around 2am a car drives past and honks.

9
The morning is dreary with cloud, but bright with promise. Scheduled in for today is our Marlborough region wine tour; as many vineyards as we can manage in one day. Yesterday, having seen the close proximity of vineyards to Renwick on a map, we decided to eschew the guided minibus tour in favour of bicycles.

Today, cycling into the driving rain and finding the distances from map to reality excruciatingly longer than anticipated, we’re bowed but unbroken. Then, a few vineyards on, we’re pretty drunk and everything is great.

After a wine tasting, multi-course lunch at Wairau River’s restaurant, we cross the road to find a jolly South African serving up at the Nautilus winery.

Talking to him are two well refreshed Welsh girls. “It has just become too dangerous,” he is saying to them, “and it’s a nice part of the world here, you know?” We start talking to the Welsh girls and later arrange to meet up with them at their hotel after our last vineyard.

Which is called Huia. We agree the wine there is fairly decent, but unremarkable, although there is an interesting guy behind the counter. He is telling us about the Huia that the wine is named after, a now extinct bird, the black and white feathers of which used to be worn in Maori chief’s headdresses.

“Then when the Duke of Wellington saw this, he put some in his hat. And then all the English wanted Huia feathers,” he says. We nod earnestly and look sad. “Unfortunately back then, the Victorian’s idea of conservation was stuffing animals and putting them in museums,” he continues.

We leave Huia and meet up with the Welsh girls. They’ve both been living in Wellington for about two years and while they really like New Zealand - the people, the landscape - they have some gripes. Incredibly, one is about the weather. Another is Wellington’s theatrical scene.

A: “Wellington, it’s meant to be the cultural centre of NZ. Been to a few plays, it’s so am-dram.”
B: “She’s so picky.”
A: “No, it’s just really bad.”
A: “And the journalism here is terrible.” Throws down the Sunday papers in disgust.
A: “And their wooden houses are bloody freezing.”
B (works in the medical profession ): “The doctors are aware that they’re not up to the standard of the rest of the world. They have a real chip. They just don’t get the training.”

The restaurant owner gets pulled into a discussion about the forthcoming elections. While he won’t be drawn on who’ll he actually vote for, he doesn’t sound keen on the incumbent Labour party. “Great social initiatives,” he says, “but we need to energise the economy.”

We say goodbye to the Welsh and return to the backpackers we’re staying at. There, two girls are eating dinner with one talking at her friend about Joe, how he enhanced her life, how they text so much and never manage to meet up. On the couch, a German father and son sit in silence. Ah, the rich traveller tapestry of the backpacker experience.

10
In the morning before we leave to head south, I walk over to the local bakery for croissants. Unfortunately for us, they exclusively produce vast quantities of savoury pies.

Driving into the Southern Alps, we pass a sign advertising Tophouse, an historical destination. It’s quite a large, new-ish looking brown sign, so we decide ‘what the hey’ and divert towards it. At Tophouse, we find nothing but a reportedly open café with no sign of life, and pass only two homes after five minutes of driving in the same direction.

Confusingly, the numbers on the houses are respectively 38 and then 123, suggesting an area congested with life, which Tophouse clearly isn’t. With apparently nothing further to offer than more servings of bafflement, we curse time wasting Tophouse and return to our original route. Pointing the way is a sign spray painted with a protest message about New Zealand poisoning its own countryside.

An exercise stop is scheduled in at Nelson Lakes, and we choose a short, easy walk called the Peninsula Nature Walk. Our heavy walking boots are again completely unnecessary. Along the sides of the walk are poorly concealed possum traps and official warnings about a poison in this area called 1080.

Back at the start point, some light is shed on the traps and spray painted sign. Possums, introduced from Australia (along with harrier hawks), are threatening the indigenous New Zealand trees which they find very tasty. Therefore, the Department of Conservation has launched an offensive against the eco-intruders. Some examples of the victim trees are shown, and we sympathise that they are quite pretty, as trees go.

Our next stop is the Pancake Rocks on the West Coast. The best time to be there is at high tide, which means we’re going to have to hurry across the fairly sizeable stretch of land in between. Rowena tells me she is generally on board with my wacky races agenda, but expresses reservations about the way we’re approaching the road trip.

She believes we should take time to enjoy the places we stop at along the way. My idea of a road trip is quick visits, take a few pictures and clock up the most sights and miles possible. I add that this approach is essential in my mind, if we’re to squeeze in Fiordland in the far south.

Heading into the Southern Alps, the highway intertwines with the burgeoning, Colgate blue/green Buller River as it powers to the coast over its white pebble bed, picking up tributaries along the way. Rowena reads a bit from the guide book about a Maori story involving two volcanoes that were illicitly in love, before their secret affair was uncovered and one of the cheat volcanoes self-exiled ’himself’ somewhere else. For shame, volcano, for shame…

Despite keeping the dial wavering dangerously around the speed limit (100kmph) for the whole journey, we miss our timing for the high tide at the Pancake Rocks. However the wild West Coast drive proves itself a more significant sight, easing any disappointment. We pull into the coastal town of Hokitika for the night with the distant snow capped line of Arthur’s Pass peaks glowing in the distance. It starts to feel a lot colder.

After abandoning one remote sleeping sight for fear of murderers, we find an isolated road near town and accidentally pull into a bog. After a fair bit of wheel spinning, brow sweat, and name calling (Chris to van) we get free and, incredibly, despite being in the most public parking place yet, we are unmolested by mischievous night honking. And murderers.

11
The morning is spent walking around Hokitika, the jade capital of New Zealand. Miraculously there’s a café offering free internet, but the connection doesn’t work - cue angry tirade. Post rage, we browse the many jewellery shops looking for my replacement wedding ring. The hunt is cut short in Hokitika when I conclude that, “green isn’t my colour".

A bit further south from Hokitika is the town of Ross, one of the real success stories of New Zealand’s gold prospecting era. The town wears its history with pride, even in the cold, wet weather we arrive in, although the Ross prison mock up is a mockery of a mock up. An old couple with cold white faces are trying out the gold panning ($10 a go) behind the visitor centre. After we leave, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush is put on while I mentally score the brownie credits added to the Fiordland agenda.

We enter Tai Poutini National Park later in the day (the Lake District on a steroid diet) and wonder at the very individual personalities of the various national parks that make up the South Island; much like the states of the USA, just with sheep instead of people. Our attention is also drawn to the tightly packed contours at Tai Poutini’s heart, our end point for today, where, enfolded within, are the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. We also note the height of Mount Cook, the South Island’s highest point. Cook just scrapes through 1,000 metres, leading us to let out a series of smug chuckles. We have become altitude snobs. It is the lamest of snobberies.

After booking in for tomorrow’s heli-hiking which may or may not be on, we’re told, since the weather’s been so bad, we head for nearby Gillespie’s Beach where a free DOC camp site awaits us. There, we walk into a holocaust of a sunset - Apocalypse force winds, crashing surf of a beautiful, and ironically jade sea, and the beach heavily littered with the bleached and battered remains of trees - an enigma endemic to the western coast of New Zealand.

Later we go back, after dinner, under stars and an intermittent moon. Everything on the beach is still now, except the long, luminous lip of the surf marking the even respiration of the Tasman Sea.

12
The next morning is a grey and rainy one, and we drive over to Franz Josef to find out whether the helicopter will go up this morning. It won’t. The two other people waiting for the news look downcast, but their faces are so craggy it could be relief. We’re ok about it, and rebook for tomorrow. For Rowena it means more time in this location, and for me the brownie-points operated, iron clad oak door leading to Fiordland opens that little chink further.

We agree that this must be like waiting for the weather to clear before ascending Everest, and decamp to a café in base camp Fox. Everything in Franz Josef and Fox is ‘glacier, glacier, glacier’, two settlements of people completely in thrall to long chains of compacting ice. If that rings anybody’s bell, The Plateau Café in Fox is for sale (apparently successful and in profit).

In the afternoon, we drive to Lake Matheson, with the guidebook promising a mirror like reflection of the Mount Cook range. Rowena points our a particularly stocky bull along the way. Noticing stocky animals along the new Zealand roadside is becoming her raison d’etre.

Lake Matheson reflects the danger of hype, and very little else. We’re not too hard on it though as conditions aren’t exactly perfect.

13
The diminutive Mount Cook and friends are crowned with dawn gold on this, our third day in the region. We rise early and bomb towards check in. Some of the flightless birds on the island haven‘t evolved past lie-ins and I almost bring an attack of 1080 on the van with a couple of near misses on Kiwi cousins who don’t hear me shouting: “Watch out Nature!”

Conditions are perfect, the helicopter is cleared to go. It takes us and a small group of fellow hikers up over the Franz Josef which is laid out beneath us like a long white tongue. We land about half way up the glacier and are introduced to our guide, AJ. While we search for ice caves, AJ tells us that the glacier is here because the region gets so much rain; last year no less that 243 days of it. Glacier facts exhausted, AJ tells us instead his adventures with Horse, a fellow guide who dropped him in a glacial pool on the Franz Josef as part of his guide hazing.

After a couple of hours on the ice saying, “Woah” and “Awesome”, we reluctantly wait for our ride home.

As we’re waiting, an English guy from the other group is sprawling all over the place while rolling up a large snowball. His friends are looking away. When it’s big enough, AJ challenges him to lift it. He tries and fails twice. It’s excruciating.

We leave Tai Poutini and continue the drive south. There’s a stop at Knight’s Point where the guidebook says it’s common to see whales, but we only see some seals having a bask. Further south, the guidebook, speaking through Rowena, announces that we have entered the Aspiring National Park, or Willow (the film, not the tree) country. We stop at an impossibly blue river near Wild Billy Falls, but are chased away by the inevitable perfect storm of biting sand flies.

A fine place to stop is discovered next to Lake Wanaka, and we watch the sun setting over the landscape. Looking out at the rugged, sterile mountains covered in evergreens turning temporary autumn reds and yellows, I can’t help but think that it’s a shame there aren’t any larger, indigenous predators roaming about the place. Flightless birds are sweet, but ridiculous, they defeat the whole point of evolving into a bird in the first place. And have you ever heard of a swimless fish? Ludicrous.

New Zealand 28 Sept - 17 Oct

2008-11-19T22:43:00.000-08:00

1
On the flight over we are handed immigration cards. They are multi-coloured, threateningly complex, subversive: yes answers are coloured red while no answers are coloured green. New Zealand wants to know if we’re packing anything that’s going to do in the flightless birds. There is anxiety over an unopened box of cous cous.

Later, bio-security confiscates an orange and releases us into Auckland. It’s not long until midnight, so we’ve booked into the nearby Jet Park Hotel. A shuttle bus gathers us, and a number of other late arrivals, to drop at a list of hotels. We cross the same, significant looking bridge twice, going different ways, without anyone being dropped off. There is laughter at first, followed by mutinous sounds after about 30 minutes with no drop offs. The driver is questioned, but it is water off a duck’s back: he laughs and chatters ambiguously. Soon we arrive at the missed first stop, the lost hotel. It is none other than the Jet Park Hotel. We disembark from a minibus silent except for the sound of shooting daggers.

The hotel has a booking for Allsop. For yesterday. Crossing the date line has soundly defeated my limited logic skills. A more expensive room is taken out of necessity.

Later, Rowena can’t sleep because of the noise from the minibar. In order to turn it off, the fridge has to be manoeuvred out of its holding. During the operation, the minibar’s door slides open and a tiny bottle of Sauvignon Blanc falls out and christens the floor.

2
In the morning we take a taxi over to Wicked Campers, offering the cheapest camper vans Google could find. The company’s niche is to have ‘Wicked’ humour graffiti over their adapted people carriers. Our van is sprayed with a cartoon which on one size poses the question, “Do you know that every time you fart you lose 0.001% of your brain?” Walk around to the other side, our cartoon character has “declarde (sic) a Cease-Fart”. Get stuck behind us in traffic, and you will learn that, ‘Behind every great man is a fart‘.

We read through the contract. The insurance for the van is suspended if we drive on unsealed roads. There is no toilet or shower on board, and only a cool box for the supplies. Later on, Rowena will begin a small love affair with zip lock bags.

I receive a quick reminder of how to drive automatic, am handed the van’s one and only key, and we begin the two week road trip with a meek acceleration. With no route decided (just a general agreement that the lion’s share of two weeks be spent roaming the South Island) we decide to tack north to the Coromandel Peninsula and Hot Water Beach, recommended by Barb and Tim from the jungle (new residents of Palmerston North, about which John Cleese once said, “If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick").

Out of Auckland, we quickly pass into rural land of the Welshest green. Hills have the abrupt contours of mountains. We pass a medley of signs electioneering for various political parties, as well as several anti-abortion messages in the corners of fields ruled by clapperboard houses. “Adopt don’t abort”, says one, while a cartoon seal in another says, “Don’t kill human babies”. After reading a report about 86% of the public being opposed to the ban on physical punishment (positioned next to a picture of Paul Newman in a cowboy hat) it becomes clear that New Zealand kids piss their parents off, but they don’t want to see them dead.

On the way, Rowena reads from the guide book. The country has a population of just over four million (sheep population of 16 million). For a lot of its history, New Zealand has been involved in wars of varying types.

Our enthusiasm at the territory stretching out before us is ignored in concert by the sun and our appetites, and it isn’t long before we make camp up an unsealed road overlooking a wide bay of rough water. We make pasta and it is good.

3
At 5:35 in the morning my mobile buzzes with a text from MOMS MOBILE:

Tsunami warning. Move to high ground now.
Earthquake at island ne of n. island of new zealand.
7.3big.

Turning on the radio, it’s a while before further information is forthcoming. Finally, the last story on one station tells us that the earthquake was somewhere between Tonga and NZ and that there will be no official warnings released besides that of Chris’ mother.

The sun rises over the undevastated beauty of the peninsula, and we continue our trip. Fences scamper over the green hills following indecisive routes in the style of a child's ride train track. Militant cliffs reliably wear treeline crewcuts. Used to driving a manual, I try second gear while going up a hill and accidentally throw the van into reverse at speed. There is a lot of unnecessary screaming.

We need to wait for low tide to get the most out of Hot Water Beach, and visit the enticingly named Cathedral Cove first to kill time. There’s a film crew at the cove, and a girl waits for tourists to move out of shot before her dramatic running scene. The drama is killed a bit for me by her poor running ability.

We leave and head over to Hot Water Beach, where I miss a turning and divert into a private road to about face. During the three point turn, I reverse into a Private Property sign. We drive over to the nearby café and park. A man in a snug XXL blue t-shirt, black sunglasses, and a blue hat is approaching the van. I go out to meet him. “Hey bro,” he says. “you broke that sign over there.”

Broke? Surely I only tipped it. We walk over to the very broken sign. On the way, Big Blue tells me, “that’s Mr Wolfe’s property, bro“, that “he’s lived here for donkey years”, “he’ll need a new piece of timber, bro, reckon $50, you can leave it with Stephanie at the shop”.

After lunch, I go to see Stephanie and explain the predicament. “Oh get out of here, I reckon, who cares?” says Stephanie. The large man in the blue shirt, perhaps?

“Oh him, he’s just holidaying here. Leave it, he’s (Mr. Wolfe’s) got loads of money!” The boy Stephanie works with wants a look at the sign post so we walk down to the incident site. He wanders around, makes the sign even wonkier than before, then adds: “Looks stolen anyway. Just leave it up against that tree and leave it. He’s got loads of money.”

We go down to Hot Water Beach where a gaggle of bathers have dug themselves a series of baths connected by channels. Hot spring water comes up through the sand. With our hired shovel we dig a shallow claim and lie in the tepid water, satisfied and unsatisfied, scheming better channels through to the prime spots inhabited by soaking early birds. During one exploratory foray I scald the underside of my feet and almost cry.

Returning to the car park, I decide to leave my email address for Stephanie to pass on. She rolls her eyes and sticks it into the till. As we leave, we pass Big Blue who waves.

Driving south fast, we sacrifice a scheduled stop at sulphuric Rotorua in favour of more time near the volcano better known as Mount Doom. There’s a famous hike there, and as we’re in New Zealand, beloved of hikers and their ilk, it seems important that we put in some foot miles.

On the way we pass through the area that wore the mask of Hobbiton for the Lord of the Rings movies. The local town’s information site is a convincing hobbit home, and there’s a hobbit home wall mural nearby. As the trip continues, I begin to wonder if the council sanctioned wall murals, common in many New Zealand towns, are really adverts for people passing through, or in fact wishing walls for the local community.

4
Mount Doom forms part of a region favoured by the north island ski crowd. As we arrive, the sky is clear and the chain of volcanoes in plain site, except for Doom’s famous cone which is tousley with cloud.
By the time we’ve parked, had lunch and are ready to walk, the temperature has plummeted and the sky begins calling icy spit down upon our heads. I whine, we cancel the famous walk, and continue the drive south.

At a stop for petrol, the smiling lady behind the till asks about the van. I say it’s the cheapest we could find, that we don’t like it. “Well, you won’t have trouble finding it in the car park,” she says brightly, before handing back the change.

5
Passing through more towns on our way south feels like passing through the Wild West without the teeth. The good sheriff has won out over the tobacco spitting, dentally challenged bad hombres leaving behind only upstanding citizens with nice smiles and clean, humble shop fronts lining Main Street like the paddles in an old fashioned cash register display.

Outside of one of the towns we pass a sign that reads ‘Gallery of Dolls - closed for refurbishment'. Harrier hawks hover low above the roadside beating long, slow wing beats with all the time in the world. They are so confident, so close to the car, you can almost see the exultation in their long distance eyes.

6
Having done so little in the north island, and astutely remembering that we like wine, a snap decision is made to journey to small town Martinborough, home to a large number of boutique wineries. A short cut as twisty, turny, and as surprisingly lengthy as the human colon is taken. We arrive early afternoon and find a nearby campsite to allow me to make the most of 'tasting’ at cellar doors.

Martinborough has a picture postcard prettiness that raises it aesthetically above the other small towns so far encountered. The local butcher asks us about where we’ve been. “But you missed the best bit - the Bay of Islands!” We are soon to learn that everyone has an opinion on where we should be going in New Zealand.

We walk to two different wineries before closing time. At one, Ata Rangi, the nice Scottish lady tells us that money from the proceeds of their rough, bottom shelf pinot noir we’re struggling to keep down goes towards saving New Zealand’s indigenous trees. “And if you’re cold, buy some possum wool clothing, helps the cause and very warm,” she adds, a little brutally.

Tahiti (part two)

2008-11-05T00:37:00.000-08:00

7
Another wedding present to be realised in Moorea is going horse riding around the mountainous interior of the island. It’s raining the morning we book it for, but decide not to cancel and wait stoically beneath a palm for our pick up. Half an hour past pick up time and my spirits rise. We head over to the front desk at Mark’s Place, where we made the booking, and ask whether the horse riding is cancelled on rainy days. The reply is yes, of course.

Of course.

The rain clears about midday, and Mark gives us a lift in his pick up to a nearby beach. Ahead of us, scared crabs scuttle, up end and submerge like sinking ocean liners into holes along both sides of the road.

Mark is an ageing surfer originally from Idaho, and an evangelist for the Moorean way of life. “No income tax, no council tax, only island in the world without any overhead power cables, all below ground,” he tells us. “Tried every island in the Pacific before settling on this one. It’s the best. Been here for 28 years. All the time only see the same people. Local people own the land, it’s all about the locals here. Sometimes a French person will turn up, stay for a few years, but they always leave. They miss granny’s chicken dinners on Sunday, man.” He drops us off and says goodbye without calling us any names.

8
The sun is out today, and we are duly picked up for the horse riding. Two other honeymooning couples join us. One couple is French, dressed all in white, and expert horse riders. One of them, it transpires, is a horse instructor. While the rest of us are led slowly along the path, we catch flashes of them in the distance, hair flying, at gallop.

Although it is only my second time on a horse, I am put onto the lazy horse and handed a stick. It’s not in me to keep the lazy horse in check, and I am quickly transplanted to an obedient, but hungry horse. Moorea is a slumbering volcano, and we ride slowly around the internal green crater past spiky orchards. This area is now the pineapple growing centre of French Polynesia. There are also a lot of tall pine trees, and a hounds tooth check of sunlight and shade filters across the shaded parts of the path.

A small pack of dogs belonging to the riding school accompany us. They saunter along, occasionally dart forward, kill small birds, and at one point antagonise another dog of leviathan proportions. I had expected to be thrown, and accept the inevitable. Hungry horse, however, keeps it together and the dog of Damocles is eventually led away by his chain.

On the way back from horse riding, we return to our beach from yesterday, and discover an AXA flag pinned to the sign. A corporate jolly has occupied the beach with a force of about forty pale Belgians. We go in search of a marae, the old sites of worship. It’s a gratifyingly simple, three tier construction of basalt and coral boulders, and, compared to the complex buildings fulfilling a similar purpose in Peru, it’s pretty clear which ancient civilisation was having more fun.

That night we go to The Tiki Village, a local theatre and restaurant, to see some traditional dancing. The show starts at 8, so already I’m worried about falling asleep before the production even begins. A man in a loincloth picks us up in a minibus. One the journey over we listen to hip hop.

On the way into the theatre, we pass a wall’s worth of black and white prints of Tahitian girls. Around 90% are topless. No one goes topless in the dancing. There is a storyline to the proceedings, quite hard to follow, but I decipher that a prince is looking for a princess. He doesn’t want the older lady who dances for him. He and his buddies go to another island where there are women fishing and/or engaged in vigorous hip aerobics. They find a girl hiding in a giant oyster shell wearing a black motorcycle helmet and a grass skirt. She’ll do.

Throughout, some of the dancers appear to be doing some improvised chatting to one another, some unchoreographed laughs. Rowena makes the accurate observation that a few look stupefied, perhaps new recruits, perhaps stoned. There is a dramatic fire dancing scene, originally a Samoan art, where the dancers go crazy with burning sticks and various low level gymnastics. At several points, the sticks are dropped at crucial points. It still looks awesome, and I probably enjoyed it more for the screw ups, but the laid back element, now familiar to us after a few days on the island, means these guys probably won’t be following in the footsteps of the West End friendly, Shaolin monks.

9
Today we left Mark’s Place and made our way to the Sofitel. There are no regrets. Golf buggies run up and down the resort’s wood planked walkways, carrying bags and room service. A glass of pineapple juice and necklaces of flowers are endowed upon us. We walk out to our over-sea bungalow. Plumbing attached to the oversea bungalows fires waste back at the have nots residing on the shore. From our balcony you can see Tahiti crowned in cloud.

A black t-shirt and orange sarong, advertising the Sofitel, are delivered to our room as honeymoon gifts. Couples drift up and down the hotel beach. There are a lot of girls in orange sarongs. The panorama looks a bit like a Sandals ad crossed with a progressive Buddhist temple.

We repeat the snorkel, slow moving, lazing routine but in luxurious surroundings. A passing sadness: now that it has started, there has to be an end.

10
On the second day we wait for a wide expanse of blue to arrive book ended by bubbling cumulus. Rowena underestimates the sun and gets burned pink. The snorkelling is incredible with my favourite fish, based on name, appearance and behaviour, being the Convict Surgeonfish. Out in the bay, there are whoops from the boat as the worst water-skier finally finds his feet for a few seconds.
11
Just as we check out it starts raining. We catch the ferry back to Papeete and go to the airport. Surely an upgrade is inevitable on Tahiti. We are referred to the local area manager of Air New Zealand who, with his tucked in polo shirt and iron grey moustache, listens to our plea with evident distaste. We fly economy to New Zealand, but get some champagne from the camp middle-aged air stewards.

Tahiti 17/09 - 27/09

2008-11-04T04:43:00.000-08:00

1
We fail to get any upgrades on the first leg to Papeete via Santiago. Heading through to the connecting gate, an airline sales agent informs us that there is still space in business class if we want to pay to upgrade. I try again for the freebie, to no avail. Then I try a joke, “What about romance?” but it comes out a bit shouty and I sound like I’ve just been dumped. The agent hangs his head.

The rest of the flight, with a stopover at Easter Island, is a movie marathon. We land before I can watch the end of Don’t Mess With the Zohan, but there are no regrets. Passing into Papeete’s terminal late at night, some stalwarts of the Tahitian tourism industry, necks ringed with flowers and jowls, burst into pleasant ukelele strumming. The music cuts out when everyone has passed through to customs.

2
Having landed near midnight, we get our first views of paradise from our B&B’s veranda in Papeete’s backstreets. The air is fragrant, the free muesli - delicious, the sky - overcast. Happy white flowers sit on our place settings.

We have split our ten days in Tahiti between three different venues. The first, situated on Tahiti proper, is staying for a couple of days at a peaceful resort located in a palm grove and accessible only by boat. The second is a cheap hostel on the neighbouring island of Moorea, promised as “the island paradise you’ve always dreamed of” by the guide book. The third is two nights at the ultra luxurious Moorea Sofitel, part paid for as a wedding gift from friends.

Our robotic Swiss host, Ben, advises that we head down to the tourism advice centre, found on the waterfront, for travel tips to the first venue. Five minutes he says, and we trust him, as robots are known for being good with figures. However, he failed to factor in that we are carrying a back breaking amount of luggage, which stretches the journey out to a full fifteen minutes. We stagger past dirty shop fronts before hitting the coast hugging main boulevard. Irregular stacks of sludge coloured shipping containers forming an industrial graphic equaliser of the horizon. Beyond it, a small power boat, overloaded with naked flesh, heads out to sea belching black fumes back at the land.

Broken, we arrive at the wonderfully air-conditioned tourism centre. The helpful lady in the cool blue flower patterned uniform tells us that taxis are prohibitively expensive. That the bus to our first venue will take 3.5 hours, that these buses are infrequent, and with this much luggage there is no guarantee you will be allowed on the next one. My pain centre radios in something urgent about my right shoulder, and Rowena and I, in a relationship record, unanimously decide to dump venue number one and head straight over to Moorea. Accessible only by boat, well… so’s the Isle of Man.

The helpful lady offers to ring in our cancellation. The man on the other end, so friendly and laid back when I originally made the booking in stuttering Franglais, tells her angrily, “There is nothing for them here anyway.” He hangs up. Our friend looks put out. Behind her ear, the little white flower wears a shocked expression, open mouthed.

We book somewhere to stay near our second planned venue, and catch the ferry after a four hour wait in a local bar. The bus takes us and our luggage onto a full, rush hour service and we drive around the coast desperately watching out for any sign of our stop. I make the premature observation that French Polynesians seem happier than Peruvians. “That’s because they’re richer,” says Rowena. A local water skiing instructor chats with us, and helps us find our stop.

When we arrive, it is near dark. The tide is low, and strange, rough circles interrupt the glassy surface of the lagoon. Local birdlife gives off Stygian croaks. I am not overwhelmed by paradise so far, but our bungalow is right on the beach which is some recompense.

3
We are awoken early by cockerels. After talking to other travellers, it becomes clear that within the ring of reef orbiting the island there is an inner circle of male chicken. Apparently, every morning, we can look forward to a cock-a-doodle carousel that gallops repeatedly around the island until some unfathomable satisfaction is achieved. These are not glad tidings.

But then we spend some time outside, in the sunshine. There is a long, thin, yellow beach, coconuts fallen and falling, locals engaged in slow moving activities. Human life is well spaced out while interesting fishes proliferate. A routine begins of lying about, snorkelling, and walking very slowly.

The sun sets. We watch it drinking wine. Midway through, the tree besides us expels a tornado of flying ants. They get caught up in near lights, and shadowy geckos move in for the feast. Eventually, they sheer volume of insects drive us inside but it doesn’t really matter. We have entered a stupor that stays with us for the majority of our time here.

4
We wake, pack slowly, and wait to catch the bus to Mark’s Place Moorea, our second pre-booked venue. There is some relaxed anxiety. A couple of Scottish girls on a round the world trip tell us that a girl they met had a bad time at Mark’s. She felt she’d been lied to about the room. While getting a refund off Mark, he had verbally abused her, called her a “virus” and a “germ”.

Mark’s Place is great. We get a weirdly designed little bungalow with exotic curtains. The main light fixture gives off a buttery luminescence. Combined with the sun setting at 6ish, no night life in paradise, and home made cocktails, we struggle to stay up past 8pm for our entire stay in French Polynesia.

5
Mark’s Place hires out canoes. We get a two man and drag it down the short road to the beach. The wheels on our canoe cart roll over broken mosaics of crab shell decorating the tarmac in china blue and white.

We canoe out and marvel down at the clarity and purity of the water within the reef’s boundaries. It’s fun, until we find ourselves in the centre of a maze of coral. The utmost is done to extricate ourselves without damaging the slow growing underwater ecosystem. Schools of pretty little fish flee from the thrashing paddles, probably screaming.

6
Today we hire bikes. Battered Renaults and scooters occasionally share the road. Cycling around the island, we touch the beginning of what the book describes as the built up area in the north. Joke.

I read an advertorial in The Tahiti Beach Press. Entitled ‘Moorea’s “funky” Aito Restaurant’, the piece is essentially an interview with “boozy” Corsican Jean-Baptiste Cipriani. He first arrived on Tahiti in 1967.

“All the Tahitian girls wanted a white baby,“ says Jean-Baptiste. “They didn’t want love - they just wanted a baby. They would dance with me and after a few minutes they would ask me to make a baby for them. So we would leave the nightclub and go down on the beach. My record was nine “wives” in one night.”

16/09 - Cusco to Lima (Return to the Terrordrome)

2008-10-31T23:04:00.000-07:00

We have an early flight to Lima and land with no fewer than 16 hours remaining until our flight to Tahiti, via Santiago and Easter Island. Despite the prospect of imprisoning ourselves in the airport Starbucks for a little over an entire day, I am keen to stay within the civilised confines of the airport and not to venture out into the Terrordrome, or, as the locals naively call it: Lima.

Rowena talks me down however, pointing out that with a day’s worth of flying ahead of us a good night’s rest is essential to avoid some form of breakdown. Breakdowns are all in a day’s work for me, but I humour the new wife and exit the airport with my spider sense going haywire.

We catch a taxi into town, having selected a guidebook recommended hostel bang in the centre, and are distracted from the medieval ruination and apparent lawlessness of the city suburbs by our friendly, chatty driver man. Along the way it turns out that he’s a big fan of Bon Jovi’s Tico Torres.

The centre of Lima turns out to be beautiful, with old, gussied up colonial buildings filling out the streets with baroque colour. After dumping our bags, we take a walk through the main square and feel at peace amid the exquisitely lit historical buildings and plaza benches peppered with couples of all ages. We walk hand in hand, enjoyng the warm breeze and stepping calmly through the invisible firing lines of the machine guns and heavy machine guns positioned before the imperious presidential palace, looking for a bar with an address that seems to have been swallowed up by its own neighbourhood.

We both sleep well until the early morning, when our taxi arrives to take us back to the airport. Travelling again through the suburbs made serene under the concealment of night, we could simply have been passing through a dodgy part of London, or even Bristol at a push. Then we stop at a light and a lunatic wearing a beard and a stare is standing on the sidewalk. I tell Rowena to lock her door and hunker down in the seat. The light changes to green.

Inca Trail (part two)

2008-10-29T00:55:00.000-07:00

3
At breakfast, Sally appears wearing glasses for the first time. One of her eyes appears to have gummed up and her face has the appearance of plucked chicken skin. Her other eye is watery. I remember Boxer being led away in Animal Farm. Terri tries to include Sally in the group small talk at one stage, an effort which is brusquely returned. The break with polite etiquette sends a small tremor through the group.

We head out, Hubert continues in his attempts to educate us about the local flora. He sets the scene for later in the walk, talking about the famous orchids of Peru, their great beauty and variety, and how we can expect to see them in the lush jungle awaiting us at the end of today. Before then, Hubert occasionally calls the group to a halt beside some other gamely colourful plants along the trail, teaches us their names and natures, before adding dismissively, “But this is only a flower, not an orchid.”

Yesterday, we saw no Inca ruins, only the ruins of modern day hikers. Today, on this, the longest day of walking, we see six ruins, each interesting and incredible for their own particular roles in Incan history and photogenic geographical situations. In between, the walk wavers gently up and down near the tops of increasingly green mountains familiar from the backgrounds of Machu Picchu postcards.

Rowena hobbles along it all, happy until the final stretch of staircase where the spell of enjoyment is as quickly severed as the switching on of lights in a nightclub. Before we begin the descent, Will preps us. “This section is often called ’the gringo killer’. But, don’t worry, mes amigos, there are only about 200 or so steps.” This is at odds with the guide book’s count of 1,000 steps. Both, we discover, are grossly underestimated.

Post gringo killer, there is a fork. Right is the shortcut down to the camp. Left is a longer path via a ruin called Intipata. We take the long way round (‘we’ve come this far’ goes the logic, flying in the face of the argument presented by Rowena’s increasingly convincing turn as Herr Flick) and Intipata, free to us to explore alone and unhindered, is filled with ghosts. Grass imitates wheat in the disused terraces. After everything, we rate the experience of Intipata above Machu Picchu.

Back at camp, spirits are high. The end is in sight. Perhaps as important to this general bonhomie are the hot showers, toilets with seats and the promise of a lodge that serves beer.

When we get to the bar it is as empty as Intipata. Hollow Cusquenya bottles form small, brown glass miniatures of Stone Henge above ageless white garden furniture (possibly original Incan). In the pay kiosk, two sphinx-like women await custom while cigarette smoke flows from their mouths, over their shoulders and back into the unimaginable depths of the kitchen in sinewy, unbroken cords. This is the deadest bar in the world.

At dinner, I ask Pam how her group came to be on the Inca Trail. “Well, it was funny,” she says. “I read about it in this person’s obituary and, completely independently, Sally read an article in Time. We rang each other up and said, ‘We’ve got to do this!‘ And here we are!” I cast a glance down the table at our attendant Incan mummy, the remains of what we once called ‘Sally’, before returning Pam’s smile.

After dinner, and a discussion of tomorrow’s plans, Hubert mentions that now would be a good time for us to discuss the porters’ tips. We’re all prepared for this from our preparation pack from Peru Treks. Hubert follows on with an impassioned speech about the plight of the porters, the ‘los campesinos’, or farmer stock that they are, and about the extreme rich/poor divide alive and well in his homeland.

The group is then left alone in the tent to decide on the size of the tip. The Americans are over generous, the Canadians earnest, the English embarrassed, while what Ellie is thinking is a mystery for all time. After it’s all thrashed out (including the guide tips with Hubert earning six times a porter’s share) chatterbox Lydia is selected to hand over the tips personally to the line up of porters.

The groups assemble facing each other as they did on the second morning. Before Lydia has a chance to hand out the goods, Hubert breaks into another speech, reiterating the plight of the ‘los campesinos‘, the terrible rich/poor divide, the unfairness, the noble struggle. This speech is better than the first, guilt clouds the mountain as the tourists think of all the clap-ins, three course meals, cosy two man tents set up and ready on arrival, the forgetting of most of their names; but there’s no adding to the pot now and Lydia duly hands round the dough.

4
Macchu Picchu morning is early, damned early, with a wake up call at 4am. And without tea poured into your tent hatch. For other, keener groups, however, the wake up call is even earlier to ensure they are at the head of the queue for entering the site. Hubert is cynical about this approach, pointing out that the checkpoint doesn’t let people through until 530am anyway. That the employees working there on site be in Macchu Picchu before anyone. That we can overtake the early birds on the final stretch. Dumbasses. Hubert for president.

After the checkpoint has let us through, our group melts into the stream of excited hikers all pushing hard through the last phase. Beyond the edge of the path there is nothing but cloud and the odd impression of a treetop, but sunrise is still in an hour or so, and the cloud rushes up past us into the sky in an optimistic, Raiders of the Lost Ark final scene kind of way.

The cloud does lift, but only on the wrong side of the mountain. We push through the Sun Gate, the outer perimeter of the complex, and down into the white out. Hubert and Will occasionally stop the group along the way for some time delaying tactics clearly aimed at letting the skies clear before we get to the main draw.

When we do finally arrive, the ruins are taking shape, blue sky is starting to push through, and it‘s all worked out perfectly. Macchu Picchu is huge, and cascades over both sides of the mountain on which it sits with cliff face terracing surely only ever useful for producing crops of the heebie jeebies. Llamas saunter about all over the place. And then, after we’ve spent about half an hour enjoying the spectacle with the other hard toiling Inca Trailers, the doors open and an erosive torrent of tourists begins that will now not let up until closing time.

Also at Macchu Picchu today is a Bollywood film crew. Scantily clad actresses parade about the place, really adding to the authenticity of the experience. Hubert has also changed into dapper slacks and a nice shirt for this, the main event, and guides us through the early history of Macchu Picchu’s discovery by Hiram Bingham, his narrative interspersed with distant snippets of bhangra.

Will, younger and with less responsibility today, has his shining eyes glued to the cinematic action, his Australian girlfriend momentarily forgotten. When the lead actress makes an appearance, Will grabs Hubert during his next pause and speaks urgently into his ear. Lydia the languages student turns to me with a translation of what Will said: “She’s an orchid among flowers.”

Midway through the tour we pose for another group shot. Pam does the splits. Some passing Japanese tourists stop to laugh at us.

Moment immortalised, Hubert then shows us up to a large stone sun dial crucial for the inhabitants of the town in keeping a handle on their calendar. “They study the sun and the earth, the Incas,” adds Hubert, “they were very astronomic guys.”

He then goes on to explain that the sculpted stone no longer operates as well as it used to. A heavy tripod, used in a Cusquenya beer ad that was filmed at the site, toppled over and chipped a piece off the sun dial. “No longer does the stone indicate the New Year and Winter Solstice on the eye of the Guinea Pig stone,” says Hubert, sadly.

The tour comes to a close, and we all arrange to meet at the nearby town for lunch later in the day. Rowena and I wander the ruins, understanding some and baffled by most. We hijack tour groups for a while, but, by midday, with the unrelenting sun, ankle-high haze of biting insects, dust devils and whistling guards that would have made great extras in the original Invasion of the Bodysnatchers starring Donald Sutherland, we decide we’ve drunk our fill of magnificent Macchu Picchu and catch the bus.

At lunch, Terri gamely takes down everyone’s emails while Rob lies beside her pale and inert. He’s got diarrhoea. The group is then presented with certificates of completion from Peru Treks, presented by Hubert, while a lady turns up and tries to sell photos of ourselves on the trail, apparently taken on the sly by the guides. Following the ceremony we say goodbye to our guides, Bob presents his hiking sticks to Hubert as a gift, before we all pile onto the train that will take us to the bus that will deliver us to our hotels back in Cusco.

Our seat tickets put us opposite a couple who have completed a different trek over the same time. Their tales of inedible dinners and dodgy guiding highlight the professionalism of our own company. We get on, and all drink some Cusquenyas while they tell us about moving to Norway.

“People there are really nice,” says the man, a Croat, “but it is strange. It is all surface. And I was on the train, and these two women get on and sit at different ends of the carriage. Then, at one point, the older one gets up, speaks to the other, hands over some food, and goes back to her seat. Turns out they were mother and daughter!” We agree it sounds weird, but inwardly I wonder if it is as weird as moving to Norway, land of death metal and darkness, in the first place.

Instead of dropping us at our individual digs in town, we all get dropped en masse in the central plaza. Everyone in the group is half asleep as they disembark, and I only say proper goodbyes to Brad, and the now seriously hairy Molly, before heading back to the hotel. Slightly ahead of us, Lydia is finally quiet and propped up exhausted on brother Ben’s shoulder. He guides her along the dark, misted street and I lose sight of them as they turn a corner.

Inca Trail - 12/09 - 15/09

2008-10-26T03:38:00.001-07:00

1
Majestic, historic, restricted Inca Trail, book six months in advance or else, not bloody cheap Inca Trail starts, as with everything in Peru, with a wake up call in the wee, small hours. Our bus swerves through the purple and black of early morning Cusco streets, filling up dribs and drabs with the members of our group for the next few days.

Among them are strange Ellie from El Salvador, now living in Florida, on the cusp of forty with the character of an excitable eight year old; maths graduate turned IT industry employee, Ben, and his sister, Lydia, a languages student finishing off a year in South America; Rob, a former hippie now turned respectable control freak with a Blackberry and an interest in woodwork, and his sweet, Canadian wife, Terri. Joining us and these is one big group of friends and family centred around Illinois: tall Bob, possibly suffering from early Parkinson’s who bonds with Terri over their children’s hyperactivity, his wife, Maria, wisecracking ER nurse Pam, silent Steve and suffering Sally, their kid, Molly the bionic super hiker, and her diminutive boyfriend and environmental clean up man, Brad.

The bus takes us out of Cusco and through the Sacred Valley towards Ollaytaytambo, near where the trek begins. Music while we’re trying to sleep includes work from Tears for Fears, Huey Lewis and the News, Counting Crows, Four Non Blondes, Boston, Bon Jovi, and The Verve. Wonderwall by Oasis causes an argument at the front of the bus. It’s switched off at the end of the second verse and we’re left in silence until the Four Non Blondes starts up again.

Unable to get to sleep, I take a look around. From what I can see, the start of what is known as the Sacred Valley is primarily sacred to the Peruvian agricultural industry: all tidily bound parcels of brown and yellow land interlocking with one another until the vertical horizon of dark mountains which surrounds everything.

We reach the mountains and head over a pass. A winding descent begins towards the town of Urubamba placed central in the dark corridor of a valley we’ve entered. As if it has something to prove, the landscape is really putting on a show. A sun that has been up for about an hour has still not quite cleared the tall, ragged peaks into which low flying clouds crash, discombobulate, and reform, and the creamy dawn sunshine unrolls up the long valley floor in ever widening strips. I gawk, Rowena sleeps.

The sunlight soon refocuses into a huge beam of concentrated light that would have any eastward glancing Urubambans (?) reaching for their wraparounds. Additionally, Urubamba, at this time, in this light, could be the Lost City of Gold and not a poor tourist stopover town on the way to bigger and better Inca sites.

As a more every day kind of morning takes hold in the sky and the town’s apotheosis subsides, I feel a bit guilty for not remembering to wake Rowena in the event of pretty scenery. Then What If God Was One of Us? comes on the stereo and some of the Peruvians up front start humming.

Hubert, our 28 year old lead guide for the hike, stands up to address the party. In jeans jacket, flipped up collar and the Peruvian interpretation of a fedora, he tells us that they “will take care of everything and you will have a great time”. His speech is punctuated with sombre sounding, mob-friendly “mes amigos”.

We arrive at the start of the hike (Kilometre 82) go through an official check point, marvel at the enormous queue of porters bowing under even more enormous packs of our stuff, and start hiking. It’s a dry, dusty trail, and the turquoise Urubamba river running energetically alongside makes me wonder if it’s possible to wade to Machu Picchu instead.

Hubert calls rests at fairly regular intervals. At the first, we all introduce each other by shouting out our names, where we’ve come from, and why we’re on the trail. Good humoured Pam from Illinois, who gets diarrhoea on the second day, says that she read about the Inca Trail in an obituary in the local paper. Rowena jokes that I made her. Her response comes on the coattails of a talk from Hubert to mes amigos about positive thinking, and our leader momentarily frowns at the possibly negative sentiments involved in her reasoning.

Hubert then shows us the trumpet flower, growing in a garden by the trailside, and explains that it is a powerful hallucinogen. Rob nods vigorously and Terri looks a little embarrassed. Later along the walk, he tells me that he tried it in Guatemala back in his hippie days. “They had a cauldron of the stuff at this party. I came at the end, and everybody told me to have a cup. Of course, all the ends were in there. I tripped out for three days, picking spiders out of the air, things like this apparently.”

At the next rest, I throw caution to the wind and try a lurid pink drink (chicha) sold trailside out of a bucket. It comes in a plastic pint glass that the soundless old lady dips in a second bucket before filling from the first bucket and passing over. As I return to the group with evidence of my traveller savvy, I glance back and notice that the old lady has sat down. Another customer then hands her back a plastic pint glass they’ve finished and she’s up again and looking for business.

I try not to think about the international catalogue of germs that have stopped over on the rim of my pint glass and warm towards my group when they all want to be adventurous with me and have a taste. I am the soul of easy generosity, a stance reinforced by the fact that non-alcoholic chicha is the worst of drinks.

An afternoon of walking complete, past some incredible, distant ruins, we make camp. When I say we, I mean, of course, our private army of 21 porters who forge ahead carrying the tents, the tables, the cooking equipment and food, the gas canisters, all the baggage we don’t want to carry, and everything else. On average they walk twice as fast as the tourists.

As with the stop earlier for lunch, the porters form a line and applaud your arrival as if you’ve just single-handedly saved the local school from closure. The initial embarrassment overcome, I begin to lap it up in the later days.

Afternoon tea is then served, with Hubert delivering a sombre explanation of when to have, and not to have, certain teas in the selection (“No black tea before bedtime. The Camomile or the Anise, yes. The black tea, mes amigos, no before bedtime.”) This is followed shortly by a three course dinner. The lunches are also three course, and breakfast offers a choice of a hot and/or a cold option. This diet adds credence to traveller gossip that the Inca Trail toilets were running with “rivers of shit“.

After dinner, Hubert delivers a talk on Incan history. There is palpable resentment in his portrayal of the Spanish. We learn that Inca means ‘attractive person’. As he talks, the only light in the tent, unstable and gas operated, takes us from near darkness to supernova, then back again. Porters rush in and fiddle with the controls. Throughout, Hubert maintains his concentration and narrative flow, pausing during his unfolding of history only to add one of a thousand “mes amigos”.

Story time complete, we step outside and head for the tents. Camping in the Andes on a clear night is like being surrounded by the sharp, high walled ruins of a darker night, the roof of which has been punched through leaving a bright solar system ceiling picked out in perfect detail high above. I have drunk Anise, and sleep well with apparently good digestive benefits to look forward to in the morning. Unlike Pam.

2
Tea is brought to our tents before dawn and we are given half an hour to be up for breakfast. In the meal tent, Maria reports that she didn’t sleep a wink. She heard wild dogs. Her immaculate make-up hides the damage. Sat next to her, Sally is still looking ok at this point, although she, and Pam, are quieter than yesterday.

After breakfast, our porters assemble into a crescent of colourful knitwear caps and introduce themselves. One by one they jump out of line and tell us their name, the name of their village, and their age. Thankfully, Cilla Black remains in retirement. One or two speak in English, and the rest in equal parts Spanish or Quechuan while Hubert translates. Their ages range from 18 to 47 and I remember three names. The tourists then reciprocate, at the end of which both groups applaud each other and we start the ascent.

The second day on the Inca Trail is the hardest of the four days, or the most “challenging”, as Hubert would have it. You awake at an altitude of 3100m and ascend through cloud forest and out the other side up to a 4200m high pass, the highest point on the hike, all before lunch (although there are substantial elevenses about half way up). Also half way up is the last chance to buy local treats from indigenous mountain sellers. We seize upon this opportunity and purchase a Mars Bar that Rowena later proclaims “the most delicious" she has ever tasted.

The final stretch before the pass is a long and uneven stairway. Progress slows in the thinning air, tired people rest every few steps and desperate altitude sufferers scour the barren landscape with urgent ocular appeals for some small miracle of cover behind which symptoms can, with dignity, be vented. Sunlight falls in glass sheets and slides down the upright incivility of the silk grassed mountainsides. Black, doorless cathedrals of rock and ice crest cloudy summits.

And all along this stretch you can see the pass, the finishing line, and there the tiny silhouettes of those already at the zenith waiting to pick up the ticker tape for another parade of tired claps. I pack cocoa leaves into my cheeks and wheeze my way up where I find, among others, Ben looking cold. He’s been there for about half an hour, apparently having floated up on a cloud of inexhaustible logic.

After a brief rest, we begin the descent to the next camp. Rowena’s knee goes funny. Second in command guide Will lends her his carbon steel hiking sticks and she picks her way down gamely. We arrive, have lunch, and everybody passes out in their tents. It’s 3pm.

The group regathers briefly for dinner. Except Sally. In the night, cloud envelopes the campsite completely. Deeply resented trips to the toilet block navigate the streets of Victorian London and pass the frosted outlines of another tour group’s sentinel porters, their vibrant hats picking out a constellation of kaleidoscopes through the mist.

World Affairs

2008-10-20T17:43:00.000-07:00

Crap Showers

Two examples of the rule that showerhead complexity is inversely proportional to showerhead effectiveness.

Example 1: Sydney hostel.

The hinges had gone, and the shower, following adjustment, would return to this position with a satisfied sigh. Good for cleaning lower back.

Example 2: Lima hostel.

The settings on the Lorenzetti Maxi Shower do nothing. Intermittent dribble produced at all positions. The wire attaching shower head to wall emits sparks. Maxi power.

Cusco 08/09 - 11/09

2008-10-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

1
As it’s Peruvian tradition, we get up in the middle of the night and leave the jungle for a few days of acclimatising in Cusco ahead of the Inca Trail. After landing, we argue over whether the sway we feel is altitude sickness or sea legs. Later on Rowena feels sick, from which I conclude that she has the sickness and I have the legs.

2
Despite mental and physical fatigue from all the early starts, we struggle out to the Inca Museum to understand more before the hike.

The museum is highly regarded by the guide book (and later by me) as, with very few English explanations dotted around the exhibits, the onus is on the imagination and personal hunch to fathom the Incan civilisation and the mystery of their existence. As such, we move swiftly through the museum with an air of certainty and intellectual illumination that is the envy of other attendant archaeological window shoppers.

In one room there are a lot of small pots with amusing little faces; especially good is the work of the long dead K’illki tribe. I chuckle fondly before the display as if I knew them personally and maybe had great japes with them last weekend until the thin air forces me to stop and cling to the wall for support. Later there are mummies, and also elongated skulls of a kind that I recognise from the latest Indiana Jones movie.

Crucially, one placard is also in English, explaining that nobody knows exactly where the Incans came from. Then Rowena takes ill with minor altitude sickness and we hightail it back to the hostel, missing out on the Inca musical instrument exhibit.

Later Rowena finds a tick and I almost divorce her. We rest.

Rowena is worried about the tick so we go online for reassurance. Wikipedia tells us that ticks pass on all sorts of diseases. I reel off a list. Pliny the Elder is quoted in the article as saying ticks are grim. He’s not wrong.

3
The hostel we’re staying at plays pan pipe versions of Bob Marley and Lionel Richie into the large glass covered courtyard where you eat breakfast. This version of water torture breaks Rowena, who makes an enfeebled plea to nobody to have the Richard Clayderman CD, played once in the duration of our stay, put on instead. I am not suffering from bite induced tick dementia, but if I was I might almost have agreed. Almost.

Rowena feels better after taking some pills and we head out to register with Peru Treks, the local company we’ve signed on to do the Inca Trail with. At their office, we are welcomed by a stocky Peruvian with a wide smile and gold teeth who manages to be simultaneously extremely welcoming and extremely terrifying. Final payment is passed over in a huge wedge of dollars which Goldmouth counts slowly and silently. It is correct, Goldmouth smiles like a slot machine paying out, and I know we’re going to get out of here alive.

4
This morning Rowena feels only half dead, so we decide to get out to the Sacred Valley and check out Pisac, one of the major, local Inca sites. The local bus takes us slowly on a road that climbs up above Cusco, the driver incautiously drinking in a view which I can’t enjoy because I’m watching the driver. Rowena enjoys the view. After about an hour, we reach dusty Pisac town, where the white canopies of its famous tourist market stretch across the centre of town and up its tributary roads like the dusty web of an old spider proficient in using mass produced Peruvian keepsakes as lures.

Business, however, is slow today, as evidenced by the joking trader who tiptoes over to his sleeping neighbour’s stall and says in an American accent, “Is this real Incan?” There is laughter as the slumberer jerks awake.

Originally, our plan was to hike the 90 minutes up to the lofty ruins of Pisac, but after standing before the start of the trail, looking up the mountain and feeling the weight of the Andes sun on our heads, we take a taxi. The original plan, before Rowena fell ill, was to possible take in the Sacred Valley in a day. Maybe two at a pinch. When our taxi arrives at the start of the Pisac complex, we observe the ruins sprawling over both sides of the mountaintop and concede that we didn’t do our research.

At around twenty to six, burned, bruised, but alive, we make it off the mountain labyrinth that is the Pisac ruins and wait for the last bus back to Cusco. A street kebab seller has pitched nearby and we buy two sticks of spicy chicken topped with potato. This, we agree, is the ‘real deal’. Then the meat draws an interesting variety of local strays that form a salivating nimbus around us. Leaderless, they don’t attack. The idyllic peace of the moment is destroyed by two buses arriving simultaneously at our stop, their conductors jumping from the open doors and shouting, “Cusco! Cusco!” in the same way American soldiers shout “Evac!” in movie scenes involving ambushes by the VC.

Being a bus conductor in Peru is rock and roll. Usually youngish men in their early twenties, they jump from decelerating buses and herd waiting passengers aboard in the short stopping window of the driver’s whimsy like wolves competing in sheepdog trials, before catching the accelerating bus door with one hand and calmly surfing the steps until the next, high adrenaline pick up.

On our bus home, our conductor gets his mojo hampered by the crush of people on their way home. The only seat I find is at the front above the engine, and the rapidly rising temperature of the steel plate between me and the motor begins to threaten my ability to breed. The conductor notices my discomfort and hands me a rug. This provides only momentary respite, and I welcome the opportunity to give up my seat to an old lady with a crutch.

In town, near the final stop, the driver pulls away without the conductor. The heavy door swings loose, coming very close to annihilating a number of pedestrians. A passenger informs the driver, with the body language and tone of voice usually reserved for teary-eyed lunatics waving guns. The driver pulls over, the conductor catches up, and we get dropped off. What a rush... hour.

Amazon 03/09 - 08/09

2008-10-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

1
The taxi picks us up at 630am. Our flight isn’t for about four hours, but a general strike over a rise in Cusco bus fares means that taxis dare only take business up to 630am. On the way to the airport our taxi tails an unofficial looking blue pickup overloaded with squinting riot police. Excited, our young driver harangues the lawmen with a few cheeky beeps and calls in the revolution. His radio responds with a crackly whoop.

Flying towards the jungle outpost of Puerto Maldonado, long fingers of cloud extend from the Amazon basin and intertwine with the brown knuckles of the Andes. Soon there is only white until, slowly, the cloud breaks apart and there is blanket green, broken only by thick coils of brown river endlessly spooling through seemingly stagnant routes. There is terrible turbulence, and the hilarious irony of my fight or flight response brings me no comfort.

When we land we are met by Alan, our guide, who’s born and raised in Puerto Maldonado. He’s friendly, about 20, and dressed like a surfer. We have a package over five days grandly entitled ‘The Jungle Expedition’ intended to learn us good about the jungle and its animal inhabitants. We are joined on the boat taking us to the lodge by a package group who have toured the enormity of Peru at breakneck speed. They have been flown in for two days at the lodge. When we arrive, one girl complains that there’s no pool. Evening falls, and the garden becomes a blackboard over which fireflies chalk slow, short sine waves in ectoplasm green.

Activity that night: night hike. I see things from nightmares. To add a bit of levity to the proceedings, Alan shows us the ‘Erotic Palm’ also known as the Belly Palm. The high roots break off and leave a ruff of flaccid stumps around the base of the tree. I feel predatory eyes appraising us as we dissolve into polite laughter at this jungle japery.

Humidity de jour: 40%
Animal de jour: King Toad
Tree de jour: Erotic Palm

2
Activities: Get up at 5am to go see giant otters at play in oxbow lake. Alan almost killed by seasonally late falling brazil nut. At the lake, the otters don’t play ball. See stink birds instead. Alan points at a palm overhanging the water and explains that it is the Water Palm. Its nuts are charged with female hormone, he adds, and have been eaten by the locals for years. “That’s why there are so many gays in Puerto Maldonado,” Alan laughs.

Later I review my world beating animal pictures and concede that jungle photography is hard.

In the evening our group of two is fleshed out by a contingent of Aussies and a Spanish couple. Introductions out of the way we board a boat and spot caimans floating in the water. They’re shy and small. Terror is supplied by the unsteadiness of the boat. The fight or flight reaction, again, demonstrates its limitations.

Humidity de jour: 98% (ridiculous)
Animal de jour: Spectacled Caiman
Tree de jour: Quinine

3
Activities: 7am boat upriver to the Tambopata tributary. Pass gold diggers mining the river. Stop for five star camping with own cook. Go for eventful hike and later swim in river’s strong current. Nothing swims up anywhere it shouldn’t but start leaking little trickles of blood from eyes and ears half an hour after getting out of water. Just kidding Mom. Uneventful night hike (momentary possum only evidence of world renowned biodiversity).

Humidity de jour: 49%
Animal de jour: Brown Capuchin Monkey
Tree de jour: Pulp Wood

4
Activities: up at 5am to leave for parrot and macaw clay lick which is main reason for camp. Guides late, suspected hungover. Perch on cliff edge and wait for parrots to gather en masse, relax, and then start licking cliffs to get their bit of clay.

The macaws come for a lick post parrot as there’s a jungle pecking order. They want to see if the parrots get munched before they even deign to come down from their lofty outposts. The parrots are understandably skittish, but, just as they are just starting to relax, ass numbing hours into our vigil, an approaching boat engine puts the frighteners on them and they piss off in a squawking, whirling donut of rainbow feathered terror. A broad selection of international curses are hissed beneath breath. The process begins again.

During the interminable wait, Australian Tim tells me about the book he wrote based around how Polynesia was populated by canoefuls of Chinese and Taiwanese. “I built suspense through the cannibal angle. They didn’t know if these islands were inhabited. They could land on a seemingly uninhabited island and cannibals would be there.”

Humidity de jour: 75%
Animal de jour: Macaw
Tree de jour: Walking Palm

5
Activities: chilling out. Extra day off the itinerary. Slept in until a Rip Van Winkley 730! Join extra activity of visiting local dwelling. Alan asks Rowena about our visit to the Colca Canyon and looks sad when she tells him it’s beautiful. He’s never left Puerto Maldonado. In the afternoon, locals descend on the lodge’s football pitch and have a Sunday free for all. Decide the jungle is a lot less wild than TV makes out. Spend the evening drinking beer on our veranda and searching treetops with torch for elusive night monkey. Night monkey stays true to form.

Humidity de jour: 59%
Animal de jour: Macaw
Tree de jour: Balsa Tree (huge)

Cusco - 02/09

2008-10-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

1
We stop over in Cusco, former capital of the Incas and a city reportedly built in the shape of a puma, before a morning flight to our Amazonian jungle lodge. It’s hard to see any of the famed puma resemblance from the street map, but that’s a minor quibble with the Principle Inca I’m happy to let lie. The city is cradled high in the Andes, similar to Quito, surrounded by peaks and without most of the Ecuadorian capitol’s urban sprawl.

In the Muse café high on one side of the valley in the San Blas quarter , we read that Cusco is bombarded with more UV light that any other city in the world. Across from us, a landslide of brown buildings with red tile roofs cascade haphazardly down the valley towards the central plateau, the monotony of colour is occasionally broken by rebellious spots of sky blue wall and flashes of sun off tiny metal chassis.

That evening, down in the main square, the Plaza de Armas, there are gringos everywhere, glowing like white gold in the diminishing light. A local kid of no more than eight years comes up to me tailed by a silent, slightly bigger friend. The kid has excellent English, and calls out to me, “Hey Brian, great to see you, remember me from the discotheque?” Brian sounds like a paedophile and it sounds that I might look like Brian, but realise quickly, with some relief, that it’s a simple icebreaker to try to sell me gaudy, knitted finger puppets. “No gracias,” I reply. Then the unexpected retort: “Why not?” Why would I not want to buy a finger puppet? I cannot give him an answer and we hurry away.

2008-09-23T15:02:00.001-07:00

2
In the morning Nestor brings breakfast to our room. We watch some dubbed Friends and try fresh papaya juice for the first time. Papaya is the worst fruit.

On our way out, a kindly old lady gives us a receipt for the room. Heading back to the airport to decide our route to Arequipa, Nestor informs us that the 12 hour bus journey we had been intending to take has expanded to 18 hours because of new security measures. “The thieves, they come on board with knives and guns, and take everything. Even your clothes, if you’re wearing nice clothes. I got on a bus recently, didn’t know where to put my credit card!”

We catch the 1330 flight to Arequipa.

PERU - Lima 29.08

2008-09-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

1
Before arriving in Lima at around midnight, I win a linguistic tussle with Rowena. The name of the airport we are heading to is pronounced WhoreHey Chavez, and not GeorHey Chavez as she suggests. My Spanish speaking ancestry party down in their various Catholic and Methodist Valhallas. The triumph overshadows earlier anxieties until touchdown which, with a jolt, returns my mental focus to warnings of Peruvian strangle muggings and stories of smashed airport taxi windows and close calls.

We have pre-booked our room for the night online and are duly met by friendly Nestor and his non-English speaking colleague, Daisy. A series of incidents then occur to shake my faith in Nestor. We are charged seven dollars for the pick up, a huge sum for the five minute taxi journey and not a pre-arranged amount. The drive takes us through a surprisingly lively airport ghetto suburb, but then again it is Friday night. The roofs of the gaudily painted buildings are broad and uneven like piano keys held at different heights, beneath which groups of men sit in circles before open doorways; in one apparently listening to a solo harp recital.

The hostel is in a square where a raucous party is being held at a neighbouring address. Because of the broad range of ages apparently in attendance, I take it to be a wedding. Nestor laughs at this suggestion and gives no further clarification. As we pull up, the bright red hostel with its proud flagpole is an encouraging sign. Nestor cannot give me change for a ten.

I pay at the desk for one night and we are shown to our room. The corridors are devoid of light and life. The room itself is over endowed with two double beds and a single. After dropping our bags we go downstairs to find Nestor speaking quietly on the telephone. My imagination, already alert, goes into overdrive. Nestor finishes his call to the armed robbers and tell us that we cannot receive a receipt because “the lady who gives the receipts is not available”.

Back in the room, I have a dramatic loss of faith in mankind, Nestor specifically, and barricade the door with the heavier of our two spare beds, my rucksack, and then a further spare bed. We turn out the lights. A couple upstairs begin to have sex. Throughout the night and the early morning, the ‘wedding’ and the couple compete to outdo each other in the noise and longevity categories.

2008-09-22T12:58:00.000-07:00

4
Our final day I wait to check the internet before leaving our hotel. The American girl before me essentially phlegms all over the mouse and keyboard and, despite pulling my sleeves over my hands, sickness cannot be far away. We meet my cousin and her husband at the successful South American chain Crepes and Waffles for lunch before leaving. They tell us more about the corruption endemic to Ecuador, the enormous potholes that could take out a car if you don’t swerve quickly enough on the main motorway out of Guayaquil and the begging for medical aid that occurs on its hard shoulder - people on stretchers hooked up to drips without the necessary funds to maintain their required course of treatment.

After lunch, we head to the tourist ghetto new town for a drink before our flight. The door to a windowless building spills out revellers into the 3pm sunlight while inside the music keeps beating. So here’s the life.

At the airport, waiting to board for destination Lima, I’m sad to go. We’ve started to get a feel for the Ecuadorians, despite the language barrier, and started to like them. Then we go to the airport eaterie, where the atmospheric chemistry is 90% grease, 9% CO2 and 1% oxygen, and through the haze I thoughtlessly gulp down a burger con queso. The move throws me into digestive purgatory and all further emotional response is suspended while my remaining energies are redirected toward survival.

2008-09-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

3
On our penultimate afternoon, we hunt out new tastes in the various local delicacies. A fast lesson learnt is to never ever eat Ecuadorian quesadillas unless, of course, you delight in the taste of decay.

For lunch, we buy a selection of South American pasties (empanadas) and join the populous in their favourite pastime of sitting around in the park. Caught up in the wild experimentation, I impulse buy a side order of what turns out to be donut dough from a man proffering enticingly patterned red paper bags on a wooden tray.

This transaction attracts a woman enthusiastically selling bags of fingernails. With heavy hearts we turn her down and move off in search of our white whale - locally prepared candied peanuts that the guide book has been slavering over. The cocksure South American youth in the cut off black t-shirt and tinted quiff hands over the local specialty with a knowing smile. I try one, smile back and nod: peanut M&Ms.

2008-09-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

2
In Quito there is a road known as Sucre. It is the haunt of the dangerous and the lunatic. At the bottom of Sucre is our hotel.

At the top is the Old Town, the thing worth seeing in Quito. The first UNESCO World Heritage Site, something which appears to mean that a thing of beauty needs protecting from its own people, is a grand bowling alley of colonial Spanish and religious architecture. Up and down the streets between the world’s heritage stream souped up, battered black Honda Accords blaring 80s music out of rolled down windows. South America loves cock rock.

Quito’s Old Town cathedral count is only outnumbered by police, who dress like they’re the military (members of the military dress and walk like yet to be toppled dictators), and employees of the shoe shine industry of Ecuador. No ageism here, six years old and up can apply. The shoeshine children, wide eyed apparitions with blackened faces who appear out of nowhere, gesture at your feet while making pitiful noises. Walking through the main square where their density is greatest can feel like a casting call for the South American version of Oliver. Wearing flip flops is no guarantee of peace.

We manage two cathedrals as there’s very little else to do in the Old Town but demonstrate or chill in the park and get your shoes buffed. The first is fairly unexceptional besides the rickety floorboards that make you feel as though you’re on board a Spanish galleon and for the fact that it pipes pop music into the devout ears of its flock. Later on we ‘hit’ La Compañía; the cathedral of Catholic bling inlaid with seven tonnes of gold leaf. With the child labour outside, the glowing gold pride of the interior makes us a bit queasy, but we jollied up at the large oil paint portrayal of hell to the right of the front door.

In the evening, on the way back to the hotel, a Sucre denizen keeps pace besides us and shouts at the apple he’s whittling with a knife. I pull Rowena in close, keeping her firmly between me and the madman, and up the pace back to the hotel.

Quito, Ecuador - 26/09 - 29/09

2008-09-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

1
It’s our honeymoon, so we’re going to get upgraded and drink champagne filtered through my discarded compression socks. First leg on the round the world upgrade is strictly speaking two legs: a short hop to Madrid from Heathrow, then a 10 hour period of extended purgatory for the uneasy flyer suspended, for the most part, above the gargantuan maw of the Atlantic salivating furiously for Iberia flight 6463 and it’s mortal cargo.

We are not upgraded for the first part but we do fly on a plane named Peniscola which is some solace to me but not really for Rowena. On board I read a complimentary copy of The Times through 4am fresh eyes. Beneath a colour photo of a psychedelic grasshopper a caption tells me that the bedbug, once confined to cramped unsanitary conditions, is found increasingly in buses, trains and planes.

Queuing for the connecting flight at Madrid we are introduced to our first glimpse of the citizenry of Ecuador. A child weeps dramatically against an alabaster column while his mother nonchalantly photographs him from different angles. She has toxic orange sprigs of hair and a very loose blouse as if ready for an emergency feed at any time. Preceding us in the queue a middle aged woman wears a turquoise and white striped trouser suit and accessorises it right down to her long, glittering toenails. She looks like an umpire for some exotic national sport. Ecuador could be fun.

I try again with the honeymoon routine and come across pretty desperate. In fact, I sound like I‘m lying. We wait expectantly for the upgrade but at the sound of the engines and the sight of the dividing curtains between the haves and have-nots swishing closed, our hopes are consumed whole. Then, with lunch, we are both anointed with 20cl bottles of Jaume Serra Cava, Brut Mature, 11.5% volume. Our union is validated.

We land during rush hour. No one tries to kidnap Rowena as we leave the airport which I take as an auspicious omen. In the taxi speeding towards our digs in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Quito’s Old Town, we shudder through the petrol thick air of Quito’s new town traffic. Exotic sights such as an Ecuadorian Xerox copy centre and an Ecuadorian karaoke bar slotted in between rotting Ecuadorian tower blocks fill our travellers’ hearts with something like wonder. Like wondering what the hell there is to see in Quito.

Peru - Arequipa 30.08 - 01.09

2008-09-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

1
An encirclement of arid brown volcanoes surrounds the airport. Arequipa is remote, bustling, supporting an ever widening urban sprawl and infested with tiny yellow taxis that frenzy about the streets. All drivers seem to spurn the use of mirrors, instead preferring a game of traffic Marco Polo involving a reliance on incessant use of the horn.

The first night we have steak and chips at a guide book recommended restaurant on the main square. Rowena tells me not to risk my life if we’re kidnapped by bandits. I help her finish her steak.

2
We’re picked up at 3am for our one day excursion to Colca Canyon. We need to get there early to see the condors. The guide book reports that Colca is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon but not as deep as nearby Cotahuasi Canyon. It is also 200km from Arequipa in a crammed minibus. Our guide introduces herself and the driver, Juan. She tells us now is the time to sleep.

Fat chance. For four hours the shaking minibus imitates a shuttle on re-entry. Silent, implacable Juan in his red Nike cap swerves around the pitted roads like a man stoically enduring multiple seizures, avoiding the worst pot-holes and saving us from a possible burst tyre but banishing Sleep to a far away land to have a long dinner with Comfort and Sufficient Leg Room. Twice Juan stops the minibus. Bandits appear at the windows in my mind and my heart rate rockets. Juan returns, stretches, and we continue upon our vibrating way.

When the sun comes up we find we are driving through a vast expanse of de-saturated colours and dust; a river far below the road etches a glittering line of wild optimism through the middle of the bone dry terraced valley that leads to Colca. The guide tries to add colour to the view with a mirage of history and factoids including the average weight of the Alpaca (75-80 kilos). Fatigue resists any further learning on my part. Behind me the toddler vomits. About five minutes later his grandmother also vomits.

On the way to Colca are a repetitious series of isolated towns comprised of concrete, corrugated iron, glowing white churches and dancing children. The children do not dance because of a spontaneous group joy. In between the towns their mothers intermittently appear on the side of the road, leathery sentries besides mountains of multi-coloured wool products that disappear in the dust clouds left behind by the fast moving convoy of tourist minibuses.

When we arrive, Colca Canyon is suitably deep and impressive, while a couple of condors wheeling about the sky give weight to the viewing point’s name of Cruz del Condor. Rowena looks into the canyon, the second deepest above sea level, and remarks that it’s just a big valley really isn’t it. We stay for an hour and 15 minutes while the condors cruise overhead eyeing us like American spy drones.

On the way home I grow used to the smell of sick while looking out at the desiccated terraces arranged like a painter’s palette left in the sun and wonder why they made such a go of it. Juan gets us back home without incident.

3
The next morning is Monday and it makes itself known. An obstacle in the street that runs beneath our window blocks the tiny taxis whose many shrill horns join in barber shop disharmony. Rowena manages to keep sleeping. I sit on the sun terrace beneath an umbrella and stare out at the silent volcanoes.

My lack of sleep demands coffee so we head to a couple of cafes in the grand Spanish square of archways, palms and cathedral that is the hub of Arequipa. We watch two marching protests rile the traffic, their motivations a riddle of Spanish on sky blue banners. Riot police languidly prowl the periphery with tear gas guns and plastic shields. I project and imagine that they riot against the poverty of bog roll in Arequipan cafes, a local malaise that I have just discovered to my constipated fury. It’s something of an anti-climax when things remain peaceful.

Before leaving for the 12 hour bus ride to Cusco and the Amazon, we tour the local market. Rowena finally finds some passion fruit and buys two; one each. I watch her eagerly dig her thumb into the thick jaundiced skin. After making a hole which puts me in mind of a sucking wound, she offers me a sluck and after a taste of the bitter gloop inside I promise to share my passion fruit also. All of it.

In the market's ceramic tiled meat aisle a man with a hatchet takes out some ancestral rage on a large hunk of flesh and bone. Besides him hangs a frigid yellow waterfall of chicken skin, each overlapping one another like the Grimm brothers’ idea of a patchwork quilt.

Rowena says something about it being good that the Peruvians are presented with the full reality of dealing with and cooking meat through displays such as this. I say nothing in the pause where I usually agree, before Rowena adds quietly that she’s happy she’s English. We head for the exit.