Nihao and sabaidee.
[Check that out. I actually now have a "hello" linguistic reportaire reaching into the dozens, well at least 5. Sure to be useful in the years to come.]
Well, since the last trainspotter-esque note I'm off the tracks - these train puns are really going to be missed I bet - although there are some train stories still relating to the Chinese rail authorities' inability to book a connecting train anywhere.... and the past month could probably be better described as the "If it looks good, and isn't walking away from you PARTICULARLY quickly, eat it" phase of this trip. I've been chomping down on many new and unusual things (and please limit the jokes back on that comment :)
But back to where we left off....
Reached the end of the Trans-Mongolian on arrival in Beijing. Ensconsed ourselves at this palatial diplomatic pad that my friends John and Tara were occupying, and proceeded to make an enormous mess, unpacked our packs for the first time in, well, a while. After not too much of this, John and Tara announced they were taking the kids and going to Yunnan for a while (like, the period we had invited ourselves for, strange coincidence n'est pas), and could we feed the fish.
So we had a week to adjust to life with one and a half billion Chinese (who obviously don't all live in Beijing, but I think they all have relatives there and appeared to be visiting during our stay).
We walked Tiananmen Square and saw our first Olympics countdown board. Went to the Forbidden City and saw the first of what we came to recognise as a national phenomonon - the Chinese tour group kitted out in matching caps/bags/waistcoats. Explored the Temple of Mental Agility but frankly came away just as un-agile as I arrived. Headed out to the Great Wall and traversed the segment between Jinshaling and Simatai. Nearly died coming back into Beijing as the two lane road was being used as a four lane road by four equally large and stubborn trucks all heading directly for our (much tinier) taxi with our driver angrily waving his cigarette with one hand and beeping the horn with the orther, which seemed to leave no additional hands for driving..... Had a conversation with myself about not ever sitting in the front passenger seat of a Chinese taxi again.
And oh, god, the food. Oooooooh. And oooaaawwhhh again. We found the local street food vendors and had our lunch plus beer (all of which comes in the eminently sensible longneck size) for a dollar each. Visited the western supermarket as if it was a sight in its own right, going up and down the aisles squeaking excitedly at things like parmesan cheese and chocolate biscuits, and spending fifty dollars on ingredients to make pizza and caramel slice. Ate ourselves into the well-recognised asian culinary state of Food Coma with the first Peking Duck lunch. Used this to our advantage when my friend and international cat-napper Matt invited us out for Peking Duck dinner. [You just need to make sure there are some vegetables on the table.] Developed our restaurant ordering technique of "point and shoot" where we would hopefully pick out a few things from the menu and pray for a minimum of omlette-and-tomato and dishes dominated by wood-ear mushrooms.
But eventually we had to leave. Most of the fish at John and Tara's had survived our care but the day we cleaned the tanks had been kind of stressful. We got our train tickets to Xian, having worked out Tibet should come OFF the itinerary as it had temperature lows of minus 8. And headed off into the night.
When we got to Xian is was very early morning, but as the day wore on, one thing in particular became apparent. We had been pretty impressed by the lack of smog in Beijing. Well, the Chinese make have worked out how to reduce the pollution in the capital for those pesky Olympics officials, but they obviously have no such imperative for other places in the country. The smog in Xian meant you couldn't see to the end of the street and all the photos look like it's sunset. And as we travelled down through the country, east and then south for Hunan and Guanxi, there was no let up. Some places were unbearable (read: Zhangzhou, where your eyes burned and throat hurt just from the air) and some were simply bad, but there was not a single break in the smog until, a few weeks later, we crossed through into Laos.
Having adjusted somewhat to life in a life-threatening environment, we hit the Terracotta Warriors in Xian and eavsedropped on a tourgroup fraying at the seams on day 1 of their tour, due mainly, it seemed, to a deranged Hispanic gentleman who kept accusing people of hitting him on purpose (he obviously hadn't done the maths on how many people you jostle with for photo positions at the Chinese sites).
And we discovered much to our delight that the Big Goose Pagoda in Xian was THE site where the monk Tripitaka deposited the scrolls he brought back from India. Now this was a find. For those of you who didn't grow up with Monkey Magic, it may not sem exciting, but for those of you who did, we have pictures doing that whistling thing with our fingers he did to call his pink cloud-transport. And I have a little set of four terracotta figures (Tripitake, Monkey, Pigsie and Sandy) that stand in a bowl of water and then pee in unison. Best kitsch so far.
[And for the Xian food blue ribon winner.... tiny little apples the size of cherries, on a stick and then covered in clear toffee. Oh so good.]
But after Beijing and Xian we thought we would try out some of the smaller villages and see a bit of minority life. We had visions of burbling streams, little rickety house on stilts, people weaving blue cloth and carrying children in baskets. What we didn't factor in was the Chinese population (yes, yes, it's enormous, yes, yes) who when they travel, tend to travel domestically. So there's a LOT of them at any given place.
Dehang, not so long ago a little Miao village at the base of soaring limestone karsts, now has bus service that runs 3 times an hour to and from Jishou, concrete guest houses, and a tour system where groups are led around by a guide with a megaphone (soooo relaxing). And Fenguang, our next "small charming village" stop, has become so popular that all of the riverside buildings, bridges and pagodas, have been outlined in Christmas lights, in a kind of Walt Disney effect. The two days that we stayed (which were wonderful once we just embraced the insanity of it all) saw us become tourist sights in our own right, with the Chinese tourists taking pictures of us, often resulting in them taking photos of us taking photos of them....
[Fenghuang food bonanza - each evening the road off the bridge became pedestrianised as the street become one enormous food stall/grill strip. Whole fish, kebabs, vegetables. Beautiful. And there was some food "confrontation" - at the back entrances of the restaurants, the produce is waiting - alive - for someone's dinner. Chickens, some concerned looking ducks, a very nervous hedgehog, and disks and disks of honeycombs containing hundreds of little larvae-looking things. Fish and eels and catfish splashing about in, and sometimes escaping from, big buckets all over the shop.]
Anyway, by now we could barely see for the pollution and so with a final stop off at the Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces (covered in smog, oddly), we decided to make a mercy dash for Laos and, we hoped, some clear sky and air.
Bus to Guilin. Overnight train to Kunming. Overnight bus to Mohan (the bus had lines and lines of bunkbeds running down each side and the middle - you just got in, and lay down for the whole trip). And a tuk tuk from Boten at the Laos border into town at Luang Nam Tha.
Sun.
Blue sky.
And the most enormous amount of people for a guesthouse well out of town in what was a pretty small town. But the Chinese sidewalk conversation I'd had with the guesthouse guy on the phone all of a sudden made a bit more sense - "..... is possible ..... festival ..... have some noisy happening ....grrrshshs, crackle crackle."
So the boat festival was in town and we were staying at the boat landing itself. And the team they sponsored had won the races. We got swept up for a night out at the local makeshift "disco" and had to escape under cover of darkness.
Things did quieten down after that and we happily breathed in the air, went kayaking, had a cycle, ate the local food, quality tested the BeerLao (they are very very proud of their local beer here), and readjusted to the change of pace. The last couple of days up north we decided to trek. The national forest is part of a restricted ecotourism project, to try and limit the impact on the local villages and ecosystem (which would stand a far greater danger from the cataclysmic Chinese environmental disaster just over the mountains I would have thought , but then I am now somewhat scarred by that whole pollution thing....). So we fronted up with our guides and fellow trekkers, and headed off.
After a couple of hours, we crossed a wooden fence. "Now no more tigers" our guide happily announced. Escaping a marauding tiger wasn't exactly on the introductory talk and in any case that flimsy little gate didn't look like it would hold back a turkey with a half-decent sense of direction. We were somewhat preoccupied in any event with de-leeching ourselves. The leeches proved determined and the battle was on.
The following day our guides cooked lunch from the forest. Rattan (yes, not just for chairs!), banana flowers, bamboo, spice wood, forest rice, and banana leaf bowls to eat from. We saw wild galangal and tried cardamon fruit. Kept the French boys moving with constant ingestions of lao lao rice whiskey. Started winning the battle with the leeches.
After a session with the betadine (for the bites where the leeches won), and some more local food and a further quality control on the BeerLao, we headed down to Luang Prabang, the home of 34 wats and the largest concentration of novice monks in Laos. Many of the boys here enter a monestary for a time when they are young - often it is the only way they can recieve an education, and offers an alternative to a very young marriage (and in Luang Prabang at least, pleanty of opportunity to try and have conversations with Western girls "Hello! Where you from! How you like Laos!"). So it was entirely standard to see seas of the saffron coloured robes (normally topped off with complementary umbrellas to keep off the sun) drifting around the streets, zooming along on tuk-tuks, hanging out in the local internet cafe, or sneaking over the road for a couple of cigarettes.
We climbed Mount Phousi to see the sunset, checked out the silk, did some shopping. And had a late lunch at Tamarind, for the "Adventerous" Tasting Plate, which was in fact 4 plates, complete with pickled raw pork (tasty, our chef told us it was "good with beer"), deep fried buffalo skin (hair still on, "this is how the Laos prefer it"), steamed bee larvae ("tastes like chicken"), fried centipedes (when we asked if this also tastes like chicken, he looked at us like we were total idiots and said "no. tastes like centipede"), a small bird complete with head and feet, and all in all resulted in us entering into our first Laos Food Coma.
But it was great and the next day we went off for a cooking course with the chef. Amongst the dishes we were doing was a Laos salad, and he wanted to know if we would have it with buffalo, or ant eggs. The Laos are cheeky buggers a lot of the time and we were happy to see how this was going to turn out. Ant eggs. And so it was that Joy was scrambling up a tree, knocking down an ant nest, and dousing the lot in water ("This send them to sleep"). Ants and eggs went into the salad and it was put on the table with a warning "You eat now, is better. Maybe 5 minutes, the ants wake up". Sure.
Well, served us right, our salad did indeed wake up and tried to extricate itself from a very tasty chilli, banana flower and lime dressing and march off the plate. I spent most of lunch trying to subdue it.
We accidently fell headlong into a bottle of lao lao with Joy and his friend, and woke up the next day feeling somewhat the worse for wear. But we we had hit our stride with this learning caper and went off for a day of silk dying and weaving. The weavers semed to spend most of their time alternating between laughing hysterically at us and trying to be encouraging, but we were most chuffed with our little pieces and just ignored the slightly more spectacular hangings they were churning out.
So now we are in Vang Vieng, where life seems to have slowed down even more (some time soon it may have to slide to a halt altogether, the people here are VERY relaxed). Yesterday we floated down the Nam Song on big tractor inner tubes and stopped off at the island bars for some scary swinging out over the river. The day before Cecilia and I managed a cycle as for as the blue lagoon cave and had a paddle with some triffid-esque fishies.
It is warm and sunny, the food tries to escape, the coffee is OK, the drinks are cold and the air is still clear ;)
As Dave from Shrewsbury explained to me the other day, "it's serene, like".
Love to all. It's nearly Christmas and nearly time for Melbourne.
xxc
____________________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
The Year of Caroline Hits the Rails - 16 October 2007 - Beijing, China
... the wheels, the water, the trams, a few marshrutky, a traffic jam on a car ferry, a curb-mounting mongolian "private taxi", a russki jeep decked out in leopardskin print with a disco vibe, and a two-humped camel with one floppy hump. But most of all, many, many trains.
______________________________________
"OK Kirstie, we might have a bit of a problem"
"What is that?"
"Well we need tickets to Vladimir and all I can see is Bladderhump, and the ticket woman appears to hate my guts anyway so we just need to ditch the whole Trans-Mongolian idea, stay in Moscow for 3 weeks and then fly to Mongolia."
"You need to learn to read Cyrillic - Bllummphurph IS Vladimir, and all ticket women growl like that. Get up there and sort it out."
___________
My friend Kirstie, already setting out on the Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Beijing, kindly agreed for me to tag along, thus neatly providing about 2/3 of the total distance I needed to get to Singapore (from where we fly home - we tried to hitch a freighter ship home, but in July, the December trade routes were already booked out...). I received detailed instructions about visas (I was busy baking, so just got a visa agent to sort them out), what to bring (forgot the insect repellant and a travel mug), and suggestions for the sorts of things we could do along the way.
And in that seemingly innocuous list lay the seeds that would eventually lead to the two of us getting all Russian as we simutaneously yelled at ticket ladies and stood our ground, comparing the restaurant cars of different trains from the Altai to the Baikal (some "express", some "fast" and some just plain local), making friends with artists, engineers [read: this is aka for Party operatives. I didn't know that till later], professional travellers, people who'd never left home, a lot of Russian guys who, upon hearing you were from Australia, would shout "Kosta Tszyu!", and, in one fun-filled evening, three strippers named Olga, Anastasia and Natasha, who invited us round to their club in Tomsk.
The thing is, lots of people do the Trans-Mongolian in a single trip, literally getting on in Moscow, getting comfy, and getting off again 6 days later in Beijing. Sometimes people jump off a few times along the way, more often than not with their onwards tickets sorted. I met a couple from London who were getting the train from London to Beijing (9 days) because he didn't like to fly. I met more than a few people who told me how brave we were to be organising our trip (and our tickets) as we went. We weren't brave. We just didn't realise how evil the Russian train system was.
Just for an example - Russia has 10 different time zones (3pm in Moscow is midnight over next to the Bering Sea). But all "national" train tickets operate on Moscow time. So you might think that getting into, say, Tomsk at 8pm is OK, whereas that is actually 8pm Moscow time, and therefore 1am local time, and so a total disaster. Conversely, leaving Tomsk at 3am is really 8am, so is perfect. My head hurt most of the time with all the converting. (Walking into train stations took on a weird Twilight Zone feel as the clocks inside were always on Moscow time too).
And then there's the ettiquiette of train travel. Everything you have, food and drink-wise, should be offered to everyone in your cabin. It is perfectly acceptable to play music on your crappy Russian mobile when other people are trying to sleep. It is also perfectly acceptable to have a shouting match every time you enter a new train, about who gets to put their luggage where. And then everyone is friends again. And you have to sit in your assigned seat. People got very anxious otherwise.
_______________________________
"Let's just go down for one vodka, I mean, we're in Russia, we should."
... [2 hours later]
(Whispered aside) "Caroline"
"Yes Miss Kirstie"
"Get me the hell out of here, we're having vodka shots with the local militia, the man next to me is called Vladimir and he's also from Vladimir, the one across from me has explained it's OK for Russian men to have affairs, and the mafia at the next table are starting to look like they might come join us."
"It's OK. These nice Austrian window extrusion experts are going to save us."
And they did.
______________________________________
So went the first serious night out on the tiles for the trip (in a Soviet monolith containing the only Chinese restaurant in town). It was followed up by more vodka in Tomsk as we held a room party for, well, the two of us. We discovered the importance of how to specify DRY red wine in Russia - after being confronted with what appeared to be weak sweet sherry. Made friends with the locals on Olkhon Island in a plastic ger bar in the middle of a deserted street. And just when we thought things might be a little quiet, crashed the ex-pat scene in Ulaanbaator (thank you Anna.....).
The highlight in terms of expanding our liquid horizons has been, without a doubt, drinking fermented horse milk, then vodka made from horse milk, then fermented horse milk with horse milk vodka mixed in (all different and uniquely scary drinks at 11 in thr morning), in the countryside in Mongolia. The amount we had to have was exacerbated by constantly losing at drinking games with our Gobi driver.
But it hasn't all been cocktails and train-induced breakdowns. In between we've seen a few sights, made a few friends.
We celebrated Moscow's 860th birthday, complete with street fairs and strong men competitions. Were introduced to the special catergory of Australians-on-tour (the just drinking kind who throw up at 4 in the morning and think going beyond Moscow and St Petersburg is wilderness adventuring. Sadly we didn't see Greg again). Saw the unreal city of Sudzal, where churches from all over Russia have been relocated, turning the entire town into an openair museum. Hit the Tatar capital of Kazan - I had to stop reading my book on Russian minority territories when the section on Kazan focussed on street gangs, but our overwhelming impression of the city was left by the TWENTY-FOUR weddings we saw in one day on the streets. We just lined up with the brides for the prize photo spots.
We stopped in at Tomsk and made friends with a wooden fringework artisan. Made the monster trek to Irkutsk with seven Irish train enthusiasts (all older middle-aged men, who would have thought...). Took the bus to Olkhon Island with the locals - including three teenagers who spent the trip lying on our legs sleeping off their night out in Irkutsk- and stayed on the shores of the world's deepest lake. Seen kremlins from Moscow to Siberia. Mourned the end of the onion-topped churches as we got closer to Mongolia. Undertook a personal tour of the Haagen Daaz outlets all along the way.
Then crossed the border into Mongolia - 11 hours after sliding to a halt on the Russian side of the border we had moved 1 1/2 kilometres, crossed into Mongolia, and witnessed the slickest smuggling operation I've ever seen (Kirstie and I politely declined to carry 4 cartons of cigarettes for the nice lady in our carriage but we did pull the blinds down for her as she shifted her wares around in between visits from customs officials and the police).
Mongolia was wonderful, friendly and very different from Russia (which is on occasion better characterised as "interesting"...). I nearly broke down in the Ulaanbaator train station when they simply sold us the tickets we wanted, for about 20% of what we thought we'd need to pay for them. The train ticket vendor looked a bit confused at our effusive thanks and demands to shake his hand.
UB was lovely. We walked around, did a couple of sights, got organised for our trip to the country. Played pool with the owner of our hostel in UB. Spent an afternoon eavesdropping on a couple of *hard-core* travellers who's conversation was a miracle of constructions with every second word being "dude" and "totally" as in ("So, dude, Cambodia totally rocks. We, like, rocked up to the border and it was pretty knarly, we had to leave our cars with the border dudes, they were totally cool, like, we made pretty good friends, you now, they were totally chilled dudes. Then we hooked up with this Polack dude at Siem Reap, he was totally awesome, took us to these totally wild places, like this one place we went, there was this, like, restaurant, this one woman, she was totally just cooking for people." "Totally.")
Then we hit the countryside for 10 days with a lady named Rosa, a guide named Naraa, and a legend of a driver named Jack. His English was limited to "Good, Jack, good", "eat, eat eat, oh, oh, oh", and "Kero" (that was me) and "Gerrl" (that was Kirstie). We made local dumplings (buuz) with a local guy so telented we forever after called him Buuz Man (I though I might lose Kirstie to the idylic countryside, after we'd seen gers being made, put up and taken down, stopped off to see a family making felt, attended a hair-cutting ceremony, and then found the Buuz Man. He was unmarried and looked mildly interested in the idea of an Australian bride.)
We saw two-humped camels. A goat travelling on a motorbike. Beautiful, beautiful horses. And yaks. Scrambled up sand dunes. Got trapped in an Indian chanting ceremony for 3 hours in Mongolia's first monastery in Khartoum. And kept stopping in at local families, who would drop whatever they were doing, sit you down, and produce tea (or, god forbid, more of that fermented horse milk). Amazingly friendly people.
We returned to UB and reunited all our best new Mongolian friends, yes, all 3 of them, the wonderful Anna from Adelaide, who had us for dinner every second night and let us cook in her kitchen and talk to her cat, and Jean-Charles and Benjamin, the two French travellers we'd met in the Gobi, where they'd joined us for a desert disco in Jack's jeep, 8 of us sqeezed in and raising the roof to Jack's one jumpy tape. So it was only fitting to say goodbye with a night of karaoke, singing I'm So Excited at 3 in the morning and getting all emotional over You Are The Sunshine of My Life (so, maybe we'd had a few drinks).
We woke 3 hours later, got to the station for our train to Beijing, and realised it was snowing. Proper, heavy, flaky snow that settled on the ground and didn't melt. I'm not sure what has happened to my general rule for this year of staying in warm places.
_____________________________
And so now we're in China, Trans-Mongolian all done. We're awash with rice and yummy food, can't read a damn thing, but can tell you at any given point in time how many days it is to the Olympics. More of that on the next email.
Some final vital bits for you budding train spotters out there:
1. We travelled 9 legs to cover the Trans Mongolian in 36 days, a total of over 8,100km, with a couple of minor detours off the traditional 7,621km train line. Changed bogies twice as the gauges change off the international standard going into Russian and, back on to international standard as you come out of Mongolia.
2. We manuvered our way through ticket offices at 6 major stations, 10 different ticket windows, worked out the electronic ticketing machines with the help of 2 Swiss guys in Kazan, returned one entire set of tickets, and rerouted in a serious way 4 times.
3. We never, ever cried inside the ticket office.
4. For god's sake take a Russian phrasebook. They love a chat and will keep talking at you in Russian for hours after you've exhausted "hello" and "thank you". It was with a phrasebook that the man on the train to Omsk told us that I need to bake more cakes for Kirstie to eat and that he would cut her throat in the night for her money because she was a lawyer. "Ha ha ha!" (in a rumbly Russian tone).
5. Best investment I ever EVER made - the Thomas Cook International Timetable. This brick covers every major train (bus, boat) in the world outside western Europe. Invaluable for deciphering the bloody Russian rail system, finding the local Action bus routes in Canberra (I kid you not), propping up table legs and swatting small rodents. I love the TC people almost as much as ...
6. ... The Man in Seat 61 - that uber-geeky but unbelievably info-packed website on every train trip in the known world (methinks). Kind of online train porn for those into that kind of thing. Put together and maintained by a British public servant who updates info on his own daily train commutes. And possibly my future husband.
______________________________________
[Finally, a segue, see I saved it to the end this time. Possibly given that this trip had a bit of a theme, I've had lots of suggestions for all sorts of OTHER themes this time round too. The Equator (going to places on or around the Equator's distance, staying at the Equator Hotels, drinking in the Equatorial bars, taking pictures next to placards of the world, having lots of *really interesting* discussions about the coriolis effect and which way the water goes round the drains, etc). The Superlatives (the biggest, highest, deepest, worst and so on). The Classic Photos (pushing over the Leaning Tower of Pisa, looking thoughful in front of The Thinker, so on, so forth). My enduring favorite - yet to be undertaken - remains the Aaron Spelling Tour (vising each locale each AS show was set in, you know, Dallas, Beverly Hills, taking a trip on the Love Boat, hanging out TJ Hooker style, taking a trip to Fantasy Island - da plane! da plane! - all from the homebase of a pink Priscilla-like bus with onboard experts for each show, finishing up with a tour of the Spelling mansion present-wrapping room). Still remains a dream....]
So anyway, from here we head down through China - Xian, err, somewhere in the south, Laos, then, umm somewhere else, and Singapore! Today we are going to find the temple of Tripitaka, so all you old Monkey Magic fans, stay tuned.
xxxc
______________________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
______________________________________
"OK Kirstie, we might have a bit of a problem"
"What is that?"
"Well we need tickets to Vladimir and all I can see is Bladderhump, and the ticket woman appears to hate my guts anyway so we just need to ditch the whole Trans-Mongolian idea, stay in Moscow for 3 weeks and then fly to Mongolia."
"You need to learn to read Cyrillic - Bllummphurph IS Vladimir, and all ticket women growl like that. Get up there and sort it out."
___________
My friend Kirstie, already setting out on the Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Beijing, kindly agreed for me to tag along, thus neatly providing about 2/3 of the total distance I needed to get to Singapore (from where we fly home - we tried to hitch a freighter ship home, but in July, the December trade routes were already booked out...). I received detailed instructions about visas (I was busy baking, so just got a visa agent to sort them out), what to bring (forgot the insect repellant and a travel mug), and suggestions for the sorts of things we could do along the way.
And in that seemingly innocuous list lay the seeds that would eventually lead to the two of us getting all Russian as we simutaneously yelled at ticket ladies and stood our ground, comparing the restaurant cars of different trains from the Altai to the Baikal (some "express", some "fast" and some just plain local), making friends with artists, engineers [read: this is aka for Party operatives. I didn't know that till later], professional travellers, people who'd never left home, a lot of Russian guys who, upon hearing you were from Australia, would shout "Kosta Tszyu!", and, in one fun-filled evening, three strippers named Olga, Anastasia and Natasha, who invited us round to their club in Tomsk.
The thing is, lots of people do the Trans-Mongolian in a single trip, literally getting on in Moscow, getting comfy, and getting off again 6 days later in Beijing. Sometimes people jump off a few times along the way, more often than not with their onwards tickets sorted. I met a couple from London who were getting the train from London to Beijing (9 days) because he didn't like to fly. I met more than a few people who told me how brave we were to be organising our trip (and our tickets) as we went. We weren't brave. We just didn't realise how evil the Russian train system was.
Just for an example - Russia has 10 different time zones (3pm in Moscow is midnight over next to the Bering Sea). But all "national" train tickets operate on Moscow time. So you might think that getting into, say, Tomsk at 8pm is OK, whereas that is actually 8pm Moscow time, and therefore 1am local time, and so a total disaster. Conversely, leaving Tomsk at 3am is really 8am, so is perfect. My head hurt most of the time with all the converting. (Walking into train stations took on a weird Twilight Zone feel as the clocks inside were always on Moscow time too).
And then there's the ettiquiette of train travel. Everything you have, food and drink-wise, should be offered to everyone in your cabin. It is perfectly acceptable to play music on your crappy Russian mobile when other people are trying to sleep. It is also perfectly acceptable to have a shouting match every time you enter a new train, about who gets to put their luggage where. And then everyone is friends again. And you have to sit in your assigned seat. People got very anxious otherwise.
_______________________________
"Let's just go down for one vodka, I mean, we're in Russia, we should."
... [2 hours later]
(Whispered aside) "Caroline"
"Yes Miss Kirstie"
"Get me the hell out of here, we're having vodka shots with the local militia, the man next to me is called Vladimir and he's also from Vladimir, the one across from me has explained it's OK for Russian men to have affairs, and the mafia at the next table are starting to look like they might come join us."
"It's OK. These nice Austrian window extrusion experts are going to save us."
And they did.
______________________________________
So went the first serious night out on the tiles for the trip (in a Soviet monolith containing the only Chinese restaurant in town). It was followed up by more vodka in Tomsk as we held a room party for, well, the two of us. We discovered the importance of how to specify DRY red wine in Russia - after being confronted with what appeared to be weak sweet sherry. Made friends with the locals on Olkhon Island in a plastic ger bar in the middle of a deserted street. And just when we thought things might be a little quiet, crashed the ex-pat scene in Ulaanbaator (thank you Anna.....).
The highlight in terms of expanding our liquid horizons has been, without a doubt, drinking fermented horse milk, then vodka made from horse milk, then fermented horse milk with horse milk vodka mixed in (all different and uniquely scary drinks at 11 in thr morning), in the countryside in Mongolia. The amount we had to have was exacerbated by constantly losing at drinking games with our Gobi driver.
But it hasn't all been cocktails and train-induced breakdowns. In between we've seen a few sights, made a few friends.
We celebrated Moscow's 860th birthday, complete with street fairs and strong men competitions. Were introduced to the special catergory of Australians-on-tour (the just drinking kind who throw up at 4 in the morning and think going beyond Moscow and St Petersburg is wilderness adventuring. Sadly we didn't see Greg again). Saw the unreal city of Sudzal, where churches from all over Russia have been relocated, turning the entire town into an openair museum. Hit the Tatar capital of Kazan - I had to stop reading my book on Russian minority territories when the section on Kazan focussed on street gangs, but our overwhelming impression of the city was left by the TWENTY-FOUR weddings we saw in one day on the streets. We just lined up with the brides for the prize photo spots.
We stopped in at Tomsk and made friends with a wooden fringework artisan. Made the monster trek to Irkutsk with seven Irish train enthusiasts (all older middle-aged men, who would have thought...). Took the bus to Olkhon Island with the locals - including three teenagers who spent the trip lying on our legs sleeping off their night out in Irkutsk- and stayed on the shores of the world's deepest lake. Seen kremlins from Moscow to Siberia. Mourned the end of the onion-topped churches as we got closer to Mongolia. Undertook a personal tour of the Haagen Daaz outlets all along the way.
Then crossed the border into Mongolia - 11 hours after sliding to a halt on the Russian side of the border we had moved 1 1/2 kilometres, crossed into Mongolia, and witnessed the slickest smuggling operation I've ever seen (Kirstie and I politely declined to carry 4 cartons of cigarettes for the nice lady in our carriage but we did pull the blinds down for her as she shifted her wares around in between visits from customs officials and the police).
Mongolia was wonderful, friendly and very different from Russia (which is on occasion better characterised as "interesting"...). I nearly broke down in the Ulaanbaator train station when they simply sold us the tickets we wanted, for about 20% of what we thought we'd need to pay for them. The train ticket vendor looked a bit confused at our effusive thanks and demands to shake his hand.
UB was lovely. We walked around, did a couple of sights, got organised for our trip to the country. Played pool with the owner of our hostel in UB. Spent an afternoon eavesdropping on a couple of *hard-core* travellers who's conversation was a miracle of constructions with every second word being "dude" and "totally" as in ("So, dude, Cambodia totally rocks. We, like, rocked up to the border and it was pretty knarly, we had to leave our cars with the border dudes, they were totally cool, like, we made pretty good friends, you now, they were totally chilled dudes. Then we hooked up with this Polack dude at Siem Reap, he was totally awesome, took us to these totally wild places, like this one place we went, there was this, like, restaurant, this one woman, she was totally just cooking for people." "Totally.")
Then we hit the countryside for 10 days with a lady named Rosa, a guide named Naraa, and a legend of a driver named Jack. His English was limited to "Good, Jack, good", "eat, eat eat, oh, oh, oh", and "Kero" (that was me) and "Gerrl" (that was Kirstie). We made local dumplings (buuz) with a local guy so telented we forever after called him Buuz Man (I though I might lose Kirstie to the idylic countryside, after we'd seen gers being made, put up and taken down, stopped off to see a family making felt, attended a hair-cutting ceremony, and then found the Buuz Man. He was unmarried and looked mildly interested in the idea of an Australian bride.)
We saw two-humped camels. A goat travelling on a motorbike. Beautiful, beautiful horses. And yaks. Scrambled up sand dunes. Got trapped in an Indian chanting ceremony for 3 hours in Mongolia's first monastery in Khartoum. And kept stopping in at local families, who would drop whatever they were doing, sit you down, and produce tea (or, god forbid, more of that fermented horse milk). Amazingly friendly people.
We returned to UB and reunited all our best new Mongolian friends, yes, all 3 of them, the wonderful Anna from Adelaide, who had us for dinner every second night and let us cook in her kitchen and talk to her cat, and Jean-Charles and Benjamin, the two French travellers we'd met in the Gobi, where they'd joined us for a desert disco in Jack's jeep, 8 of us sqeezed in and raising the roof to Jack's one jumpy tape. So it was only fitting to say goodbye with a night of karaoke, singing I'm So Excited at 3 in the morning and getting all emotional over You Are The Sunshine of My Life (so, maybe we'd had a few drinks).
We woke 3 hours later, got to the station for our train to Beijing, and realised it was snowing. Proper, heavy, flaky snow that settled on the ground and didn't melt. I'm not sure what has happened to my general rule for this year of staying in warm places.
_____________________________
And so now we're in China, Trans-Mongolian all done. We're awash with rice and yummy food, can't read a damn thing, but can tell you at any given point in time how many days it is to the Olympics. More of that on the next email.
Some final vital bits for you budding train spotters out there:
1. We travelled 9 legs to cover the Trans Mongolian in 36 days, a total of over 8,100km, with a couple of minor detours off the traditional 7,621km train line. Changed bogies twice as the gauges change off the international standard going into Russian and, back on to international standard as you come out of Mongolia.
2. We manuvered our way through ticket offices at 6 major stations, 10 different ticket windows, worked out the electronic ticketing machines with the help of 2 Swiss guys in Kazan, returned one entire set of tickets, and rerouted in a serious way 4 times.
3. We never, ever cried inside the ticket office.
4. For god's sake take a Russian phrasebook. They love a chat and will keep talking at you in Russian for hours after you've exhausted "hello" and "thank you". It was with a phrasebook that the man on the train to Omsk told us that I need to bake more cakes for Kirstie to eat and that he would cut her throat in the night for her money because she was a lawyer. "Ha ha ha!" (in a rumbly Russian tone).
5. Best investment I ever EVER made - the Thomas Cook International Timetable. This brick covers every major train (bus, boat) in the world outside western Europe. Invaluable for deciphering the bloody Russian rail system, finding the local Action bus routes in Canberra (I kid you not), propping up table legs and swatting small rodents. I love the TC people almost as much as ...
6. ... The Man in Seat 61 - that uber-geeky but unbelievably info-packed website on every train trip in the known world (methinks). Kind of online train porn for those into that kind of thing. Put together and maintained by a British public servant who updates info on his own daily train commutes. And possibly my future husband.
______________________________________
[Finally, a segue, see I saved it to the end this time. Possibly given that this trip had a bit of a theme, I've had lots of suggestions for all sorts of OTHER themes this time round too. The Equator (going to places on or around the Equator's distance, staying at the Equator Hotels, drinking in the Equatorial bars, taking pictures next to placards of the world, having lots of *really interesting* discussions about the coriolis effect and which way the water goes round the drains, etc). The Superlatives (the biggest, highest, deepest, worst and so on). The Classic Photos (pushing over the Leaning Tower of Pisa, looking thoughful in front of The Thinker, so on, so forth). My enduring favorite - yet to be undertaken - remains the Aaron Spelling Tour (vising each locale each AS show was set in, you know, Dallas, Beverly Hills, taking a trip on the Love Boat, hanging out TJ Hooker style, taking a trip to Fantasy Island - da plane! da plane! - all from the homebase of a pink Priscilla-like bus with onboard experts for each show, finishing up with a tour of the Spelling mansion present-wrapping room). Still remains a dream....]
So anyway, from here we head down through China - Xian, err, somewhere in the south, Laos, then, umm somewhere else, and Singapore! Today we are going to find the temple of Tripitaka, so all you old Monkey Magic fans, stay tuned.
xxxc
______________________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Leaving London (again, I know, again) - 26 August 2007 - London, UK
Taking a cat called Trevor for a walk round the neighborhood before a curry in Croydon.
Holding an inpromptu dj-ing session on the train to Manchester when we were trapped for three hours in the August floods.
Seeing the sun come up walking to work through Kensington Gardens...
... and finishing work at 2:30 in the afternoon.
Narrowly avoiding a night of clubbing with one pre-op and one post-op trannie in Exeter. Followed by a night of just as narrowly avoiding the wet boxer shorts competition (eventually won, I believe, by a naked man in a paddling pool).
Working for a patissier from Normany who was obsessed with Big Brother 8 ("that Charley is SUCH a b*tch"), followed by a pastry chef ex-theatre director (specialising in the Greek Tragedies...) from Tel Aviv who engaged me in detailed discussion of kangaroo birthing (obviously too much National Geographic Channel).
Really, life outside a law firm in London is very interesting. I was nearly ready to stay.
But I couldn't take over Matt and Mark's spare room forever, I was getting close to illegal immigrant staus, my parents were getting edgy, and I strongly suspected that the glimpse of good weather we've had this month - between the floods, natch - was about to disappear right down the throat of a horrible cold winter. So with a stern lecture to the boys about who owned and would be keeping Princess Kimmie the Cat (that would be me, although Matt has stamped his little feet and pouted no end), I'm off on the Eurostar first thing Wednesday morning to begin the various train journeys that bring me to Moscow two days later.
And so it's back on the travel road - this time it's overland from London to SE Asia, and back in Melbourne in time for Christmas. Look out for emails from vodka-fuelled card games on the Trans-Mongolian, busting through borders into Myanmar (with due Buddhist detachment), some temple viewing in Laos between river tubing, or - with any luck – some serious beach time in Thailand to recover from it all.
I'm looking forward to seeing everyone back in Melbourne, and for everyone else, it'll be time you all came and visited - I'm sure I owe most of you food and drinks and beds.
And - for those of you who'd like to text or call (and really, who wouldn't??) I'll have the following new number whilst on the road. I think it gets routed through Estonia or Alpha Centauri or something slightly dodgy, so bear with it.
+372 53261088
all my love, as ever, from the year of caroline
xxc
Holding an inpromptu dj-ing session on the train to Manchester when we were trapped for three hours in the August floods.
Seeing the sun come up walking to work through Kensington Gardens...
... and finishing work at 2:30 in the afternoon.
Narrowly avoiding a night of clubbing with one pre-op and one post-op trannie in Exeter. Followed by a night of just as narrowly avoiding the wet boxer shorts competition (eventually won, I believe, by a naked man in a paddling pool).
Working for a patissier from Normany who was obsessed with Big Brother 8 ("that Charley is SUCH a b*tch"), followed by a pastry chef ex-theatre director (specialising in the Greek Tragedies...) from Tel Aviv who engaged me in detailed discussion of kangaroo birthing (obviously too much National Geographic Channel).
Really, life outside a law firm in London is very interesting. I was nearly ready to stay.
But I couldn't take over Matt and Mark's spare room forever, I was getting close to illegal immigrant staus, my parents were getting edgy, and I strongly suspected that the glimpse of good weather we've had this month - between the floods, natch - was about to disappear right down the throat of a horrible cold winter. So with a stern lecture to the boys about who owned and would be keeping Princess Kimmie the Cat (that would be me, although Matt has stamped his little feet and pouted no end), I'm off on the Eurostar first thing Wednesday morning to begin the various train journeys that bring me to Moscow two days later.
And so it's back on the travel road - this time it's overland from London to SE Asia, and back in Melbourne in time for Christmas. Look out for emails from vodka-fuelled card games on the Trans-Mongolian, busting through borders into Myanmar (with due Buddhist detachment), some temple viewing in Laos between river tubing, or - with any luck – some serious beach time in Thailand to recover from it all.
I'm looking forward to seeing everyone back in Melbourne, and for everyone else, it'll be time you all came and visited - I'm sure I owe most of you food and drinks and beds.
And - for those of you who'd like to text or call (and really, who wouldn't??) I'll have the following new number whilst on the road. I think it gets routed through Estonia or Alpha Centauri or something slightly dodgy, so bear with it.
+372 53261088
all my love, as ever, from the year of caroline
xxc
Friday, July 20, 2007
Turkey – the bird, from the Year of Caroline (it’s a fun year and it’s instalment 4 :)) - 20 July 2007 - London, UK
… turkeys and ducks and chickens and guinea fowl and geese ....
I am sitting up in my current adopted flat in London – keeping an eye on Mark and Matt who seem to have designs on abducting Miss Kimmie and sparking an international catnapping scandal – and looking directly out towards the square. At the:
Rain
Sheeting
Down
And I finally realised that it does not matter where you go in the UK and Ireland or when you go there. Take an umbrella.
And so it was when I arrived 3 months ago in Shanagarry, County Cork, Ireland. Not exactly sheeting, but the rain – sometimes proper rain, more often a misty sort of rain that seemed to hang in the air without falling – was with us on Day One, and stayed with us for the majority of the course. No wonder everything’s so freaking green.
The course was the 12 Week Certificate Course at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, and I was there in my crispy chef’s whites and kind of discouraged because I had to have a special needs-style silver star on my name tag to show I’d never made bread ? I was getting ready for 12 weeks of techniques, constant training, assessment, and living in and on the property that produces the fruit, vegetables, eggs, pork and beef for the school. I had previously grown some herbs in pots which survived when my mum came round to water them, and get a bit nervous around animals larger than the average small domestic dog. Geese also scared me when they hissed and I was just glad there were no swans around.
Now amongst the many, many, many things I learnt on the course, the one I didn’t really think about was how to pass your spare time in the country. I don’t go out a huge amount in London anyway, it was going to be lovely and restful, back to nature, so on, so forth. Well, I can tell you, you go a little bit crazy, and create soap operas around the most random things. In our case it was the animals. The love affair between the enormous black rooster and the solitary gander, and the ensuing love triangles involving chickens, other ganders, geese, and possibly a duck. The potential involvement of one of the dogs. The ongoing trials and tribulations of the chicken with half a beak (“Brokebeak”, of course, although her involvement with any of the gay love triangles was never confirmed).
In between the enthralling instalments of what the Rooster Did Next we were normally in or around the kitchens and the gardens. Over the 12 weeks each of the 45 of us:
- cooked around 170 dishes each, including 40 rounds of bread;
- rolled out 2916 layers of puff pastry;
- sat through demonstrations and explanations for more than 900 dishes;
- filled up four ring-binders worth of recipes;
- boned and skinned and carved chicken and ducks and parts of lamb and filleted fish and scooped out lobsters and crabs and worked out how to get inside a cockle and what to do once you got there;
- developed a terrifying reliance on full-fat butter and cream (according to the teachers, each student eats a pound of butter a week); and, inevitably
- were eventually unable to fit into any of our old clothes.
You got used to burns. To having little blue Band-Aids on all the time. To hanging out in chef’s whites and forgetting how unflattering they were. To ditching jewellery, nail polish and make-up. To the idea that if you feel like pizza, you start making a dough and looked out some basil in the herb garden rather than calling Dominoes. You created a sourdough starter, gave it a name, and treated it like a small child (when people went away for the weekend, you had to organise a “feeder” as in “would you mind feeding
Adam/Craig/*insert name of starter* this weekend? He’s on Day 4”).
You eventually did things as second nature that seemed entirely foreign on the first day. Whilst I can’t claim ALL of these as mastered arts yet, at last count my top 5 unexpected new skills are:
1. Milking a cow, yes a real live cow
2. Plucking a guinea fowl, yes a real dead bird
3. Hiding botched dishes in the hen’s bucket (and excess pastry and left over garnishes and …)
4. Smoking meat in a disused fridge – although I’m still not convinced on the environmental OK-edness of this one. Smoking salmon in a biscuit tin
5. Capturing escaping lobsters
So I’m off to find a wandering cow, some gamebirds, and an escaping lobster in the streets of Bayswater. The boys haven’t authorised the use of their nice new fridges for smoking and I think the biscuit tin method may result in the firemen arriving. However I am being let loose on a bakery here in London next week so we’ll see how that goes.
And now that I’m finishing up – the sun’s out. So the rule for the UK and Ireland - always take an umbrella AND your sunglasses.
xxxc
PS – Finally, finally, some vital information for anyone thinking of 3 months at Ballymaloe:
- Answer to most random final exam question - YES a woodcock is trussed with its own beak (WHO knows something like that???)
- Most unusual standard kitchen implement you’ll need to get used to – the hacksaw
- Best temperature for popping popcorn on the Playroom back right hob – 5
- RyanAir, no matter how nicely you smile, will not let you sneak in 4 full ring binders of recipes on top of their PALTRY 15 kilo maximum, most of which is already taken up by your knives, whites, and Craig the sourdough starter.
______________________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
I am sitting up in my current adopted flat in London – keeping an eye on Mark and Matt who seem to have designs on abducting Miss Kimmie and sparking an international catnapping scandal – and looking directly out towards the square. At the:
Rain
Sheeting
Down
And I finally realised that it does not matter where you go in the UK and Ireland or when you go there. Take an umbrella.
And so it was when I arrived 3 months ago in Shanagarry, County Cork, Ireland. Not exactly sheeting, but the rain – sometimes proper rain, more often a misty sort of rain that seemed to hang in the air without falling – was with us on Day One, and stayed with us for the majority of the course. No wonder everything’s so freaking green.
The course was the 12 Week Certificate Course at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, and I was there in my crispy chef’s whites and kind of discouraged because I had to have a special needs-style silver star on my name tag to show I’d never made bread ? I was getting ready for 12 weeks of techniques, constant training, assessment, and living in and on the property that produces the fruit, vegetables, eggs, pork and beef for the school. I had previously grown some herbs in pots which survived when my mum came round to water them, and get a bit nervous around animals larger than the average small domestic dog. Geese also scared me when they hissed and I was just glad there were no swans around.
Now amongst the many, many, many things I learnt on the course, the one I didn’t really think about was how to pass your spare time in the country. I don’t go out a huge amount in London anyway, it was going to be lovely and restful, back to nature, so on, so forth. Well, I can tell you, you go a little bit crazy, and create soap operas around the most random things. In our case it was the animals. The love affair between the enormous black rooster and the solitary gander, and the ensuing love triangles involving chickens, other ganders, geese, and possibly a duck. The potential involvement of one of the dogs. The ongoing trials and tribulations of the chicken with half a beak (“Brokebeak”, of course, although her involvement with any of the gay love triangles was never confirmed).
In between the enthralling instalments of what the Rooster Did Next we were normally in or around the kitchens and the gardens. Over the 12 weeks each of the 45 of us:
- cooked around 170 dishes each, including 40 rounds of bread;
- rolled out 2916 layers of puff pastry;
- sat through demonstrations and explanations for more than 900 dishes;
- filled up four ring-binders worth of recipes;
- boned and skinned and carved chicken and ducks and parts of lamb and filleted fish and scooped out lobsters and crabs and worked out how to get inside a cockle and what to do once you got there;
- developed a terrifying reliance on full-fat butter and cream (according to the teachers, each student eats a pound of butter a week); and, inevitably
- were eventually unable to fit into any of our old clothes.
You got used to burns. To having little blue Band-Aids on all the time. To hanging out in chef’s whites and forgetting how unflattering they were. To ditching jewellery, nail polish and make-up. To the idea that if you feel like pizza, you start making a dough and looked out some basil in the herb garden rather than calling Dominoes. You created a sourdough starter, gave it a name, and treated it like a small child (when people went away for the weekend, you had to organise a “feeder” as in “would you mind feeding
Adam/Craig/*insert name of starter* this weekend? He’s on Day 4”).
You eventually did things as second nature that seemed entirely foreign on the first day. Whilst I can’t claim ALL of these as mastered arts yet, at last count my top 5 unexpected new skills are:
1. Milking a cow, yes a real live cow
2. Plucking a guinea fowl, yes a real dead bird
3. Hiding botched dishes in the hen’s bucket (and excess pastry and left over garnishes and …)
4. Smoking meat in a disused fridge – although I’m still not convinced on the environmental OK-edness of this one. Smoking salmon in a biscuit tin
5. Capturing escaping lobsters
So I’m off to find a wandering cow, some gamebirds, and an escaping lobster in the streets of Bayswater. The boys haven’t authorised the use of their nice new fridges for smoking and I think the biscuit tin method may result in the firemen arriving. However I am being let loose on a bakery here in London next week so we’ll see how that goes.
And now that I’m finishing up – the sun’s out. So the rule for the UK and Ireland - always take an umbrella AND your sunglasses.
xxxc
PS – Finally, finally, some vital information for anyone thinking of 3 months at Ballymaloe:
- Answer to most random final exam question - YES a woodcock is trussed with its own beak (WHO knows something like that???)
- Most unusual standard kitchen implement you’ll need to get used to – the hacksaw
- Best temperature for popping popcorn on the Playroom back right hob – 5
- RyanAir, no matter how nicely you smile, will not let you sneak in 4 full ring binders of recipes on top of their PALTRY 15 kilo maximum, most of which is already taken up by your knives, whites, and Craig the sourdough starter.
______________________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
Turkey… yes the country - 20 July 2007 - London, UK
... re turkeys for your dining pleasure please see next email.
I know it has been a while between messages and I think it is probably time to get myself sorted on a blog instead of email... but I have only just mastered facebook. I hope everyone's well.
TURKEY - A FAMILY TRIP
Many, many, months ago (well, three) I threw myself onto the Heathrow express train from Paddington, settled in and later in the day was stepping off into Istanbul’s International Ataturk Airport. Interesting. I remember my old uni flatmate Kylie studying Ataturk for one of her history units. Obviously an important guy if he has an airport named after him. At this point I was chugging through Istanbul on my way to my parents and our flat for that week the European side of the Bosporus, and trying to work out what I did know about Turkey.
Not much.
Fortunately the phone rang with my parents demanding to know where I was. The taxi driver certainly wasn’t going to tell me so I muttered something about bridges and tulips and traffic jams and went “grrrsssh grrrssssh signal breaking up” – my normal way of breaking off a parental conversation where I was being asked questions with no reasonable answer. I mean, really, I was pretty certain I was in Istanbul. I didn’t have any information beyond that.
[Fast forward 5 days]
I LOVED ISTANBUL.
... top 5 city without a doubt. You can walk around on your own without being nervous, the food and drink were great, you could get ferries all along the Bosporus, the cab drivers were insane, the people were amazingly friendly and intensely nationalistic, and it
had that great mix of country-market-you-can-buy-everything and haggle for it too (people just keep asking me “How can I spend your money?”), and then the designer shops and glam hotels that were straight out of Mr and Mrs Smiths. I would move there in a flash very happily.
... it was all helped by the best guide in the world – Pinar. Particularly when I discovered that dad’s request in doing the *very gruelling* itinerary was to arrange the visits chronologically – so we kicked off with Byzantium, moved onto the Ottoman, and so on. It says a lot for my general knowledge that I only realised this last week.
... very suspiciously, I went along carpet shopping – and then wholeheartedly embraced the Turkish retail tradition of having to accept every time coffee is offered. The nice man offered, I said yes. I finished, he offered again, I said yes. I smiled, he smiled. They were thunderingly impressed by my grasp of Turkish – “az” - it seemed to mean I wanted a little sugar. It all went swimmingly, I had coffee and the parents concentrated on rugs.
... a memorable rollercoaster ride through the city with the Kurdish taxidriver. Never knew his name, every question he answered with “I am Kurd!”. Ok, good. Then he would randomly ask “You know Bin Ladin?”. Well, of him, of course….. Then “Bush… he is terrorist.” Dad fielded those ones.
... the end of my tan in the Turkish baths. I was lying on the big hot stone platform and Helga (or whatever the Turkish equivalent is) came stomping over with flesh shaking like there was a menagerie of small animals in there trying to escape and wearing a pair
of black knickers and that was it. I was a little scared and so I just lay whimpering quietly as she scrubbed away at my tan and briskly slapped me each time she wanted me to roll over. I ended up squeaky clean and significantly paler and am still a little
traumatised.
GRAND AND MAGNIFICENT TRAVELLING
... the family headed off to do a guided tour from Ankara back to Istanbul - the Grand Turkey Tour. WithMagnificent Travel & Tourism. If I ever have a business I want it to be grand and magnificent too (I was a little disappointed there was no “unique” or
“super-exceptional” tours on offer at the time) so I thought this was a good sign of Mr Nihat’s belief in his team.
... the Mausoleum of Ataturk (Ankara), he of the international airport and generally-recognised founder of modern Turkey. He reformed the alphabet, the system of names, got on with the roads, recognized women’s rights, and in theory at least established Turkey as a secular society. Now this last seems to be getting a real bashing at the moment but all in all a mammoth job. I was quietly impressed and pleased for him that his picture seemed to be on every poster, tea towel and flag in Turkey.
... [Just as an interesting aside that probably belongs in the next email – a pretty unlikely and certainly unsubstantiated but fun story about the Turks (the Ottomans in those days) and the croissant – the summer of 1683 and the city of Vienna is under siege. The Ottoman Empire has asked that the Hapsburg city to surrender, and the leaders have told the Turks to bugger off home. The Turks are, as you would expect, unhappy and set about laying siege to the city. One way they planned to infiltrate the city was
to set off explosions underneath the city walls – and a plan they began to implement by digging tunnels to set the explosions in. Unfortunately for them, a baker, working in his basement during the siege, heard the noise of the digging, alerted the authorities, and thus foiled the evil plan. The baker, being something of a marketing genius, and not one to miss an opportunity, created a pastry in the shape of a crescent, the symbol of the Ottoman empire. It became a local traditional to serve this crescent-shaped delight with coffee, and a century later, when the Viennese princess Marie Antoinette married the French King Louis XVI, she insisted that the bakers in Paris learn how to make it. Over the years, the French bakers added butter and yeast to the mix (as they tend to do with most things), and the croissant (meaning 'crescent') as we know it was born.]
... anyway, back to Turkey and the Evans Road Trip.
... finally got up in a hot air balloon (having been held back by mist first in Kenya and then again in Cappadocia one morning) – I was determined to get up the next morning – and it was great. Mum even went up although she stayed squarely in the middle of the basket at all times.
.... Capadoccia and the underground cities, the fairy chimneys, and many, many, many rock chapels.
... I met the Australian bikers in Cappadocia too. A huge hairy bearded man came to my aid when trying to access the local wifi network. It transpired he was from Queanbeyan (of course) and on a bike tour with about 30 other Australian bikers. He was also writing a trip journal for a motorcycle magazine back home and was travelling with the magazine’s resident teddy bear as travel and photo muse (and making friends with other Turkish stuffed animals – people would apparently produce their own teddy or piglet or whatnot so that could be photographed with BikerBear).
... the Whirling Dervishes. I’d seen the Sudanese version of this in Khartoum, I was really interested to see what they would be like in Konya. Very formal, almost like a concert, and without the Sudanese feeling of a community event, lots of chatter, a healthy marketplace going next door. And I got in trouble for wanting to take a picture.
... I saw – I kid you not - the antique box which supposedly contains Mohammed's beard. Apparently these kind of relics were brought back to Turkey from the Middle East by Ottoman Sultans to preserve them from fundamentalist Islamic sects who were out to destroy the “idolatrous” Mohammed relics. I read that the museum also has a reliquary, which supposedly houses one of Mohammed's teeth. The poor man must be spread all over the place.
... hitting the Mediterranean coast was beautiful. There were lots of truly spectacular ruins along the way and I have the photos, but really, I was ready for out of that bus and onto the foreshore. Not for long. Hell, we had an itinerary and a timetable to stick to. Perge. Aspendos. Manavgat... an afternoon at the travertine pools at Pamukkale – with hundreds of determined tourists walking up the salt pools in their bare feet. Aphrodisias. Ephesus. Pergamum. The old medical centre at Asclepion. Stopped in at Troy. The horse was long gone.
"THOSE HEROES THAT SHED THEIR BLOOD AND LOST THEIR LIVES... YOU ARE NOW LYING IN THE SOIL OF A FRIENDLY COUNTRY..."
But the most amazing sites were on the last day – and that was our visit over the Dardanelles to Gallipoli. We were there just a few days before Anzac Day, so Lone Pine and Anzac Cove were being set up with hundreds of rows of seating for the ceremonies. But obviously people just come and go on the day, as there were very few other visitors when we were there. We did bump into a couple of lovely guys from the Australian Federal Police who were along to make sure everything was going to run smoothly that week, and who offered advice on what to see – “The Nek? Why would you want to go there? If I was you, mate, if you want to see a bunker, your best bet is to go along the road towards the New Zealand Memorial and just before it on the right, …. “ and so on. Our local guide was a bit taken aback.
And the cemeteries were unbelievably moving. Just row on row of stone plaques, looking out to sea, or sitting up on ridges, it was the only indication in such a peaceful place that there had ever been a war. I wasn’t sure what it would be like on Anzac Day, with the roads clogged and busloads of people trying to get in and out, and decided I’d probably have hated it. If you’re going to go, I say go when it’s quiet.
[Note - Gallipoli is also home to my prize of “Best Interactive Information Centre” for Turkey, teeny little flashing lights and everything.]
Then back to Istanbul, back to Ataturk’s airport, and back to London. For less than a day and then I was off again, to learn about turkey the bird, and how to make those pastries shaped like half the Turkish flag (and lots more).
xxc
__________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
I know it has been a while between messages and I think it is probably time to get myself sorted on a blog instead of email... but I have only just mastered facebook. I hope everyone's well.
TURKEY - A FAMILY TRIP
Many, many, months ago (well, three) I threw myself onto the Heathrow express train from Paddington, settled in and later in the day was stepping off into Istanbul’s International Ataturk Airport. Interesting. I remember my old uni flatmate Kylie studying Ataturk for one of her history units. Obviously an important guy if he has an airport named after him. At this point I was chugging through Istanbul on my way to my parents and our flat for that week the European side of the Bosporus, and trying to work out what I did know about Turkey.
Not much.
Fortunately the phone rang with my parents demanding to know where I was. The taxi driver certainly wasn’t going to tell me so I muttered something about bridges and tulips and traffic jams and went “grrrsssh grrrssssh signal breaking up” – my normal way of breaking off a parental conversation where I was being asked questions with no reasonable answer. I mean, really, I was pretty certain I was in Istanbul. I didn’t have any information beyond that.
[Fast forward 5 days]
I LOVED ISTANBUL.
... top 5 city without a doubt. You can walk around on your own without being nervous, the food and drink were great, you could get ferries all along the Bosporus, the cab drivers were insane, the people were amazingly friendly and intensely nationalistic, and it
had that great mix of country-market-you-can-buy-everything and haggle for it too (people just keep asking me “How can I spend your money?”), and then the designer shops and glam hotels that were straight out of Mr and Mrs Smiths. I would move there in a flash very happily.
... it was all helped by the best guide in the world – Pinar. Particularly when I discovered that dad’s request in doing the *very gruelling* itinerary was to arrange the visits chronologically – so we kicked off with Byzantium, moved onto the Ottoman, and so on. It says a lot for my general knowledge that I only realised this last week.
... very suspiciously, I went along carpet shopping – and then wholeheartedly embraced the Turkish retail tradition of having to accept every time coffee is offered. The nice man offered, I said yes. I finished, he offered again, I said yes. I smiled, he smiled. They were thunderingly impressed by my grasp of Turkish – “az” - it seemed to mean I wanted a little sugar. It all went swimmingly, I had coffee and the parents concentrated on rugs.
... a memorable rollercoaster ride through the city with the Kurdish taxidriver. Never knew his name, every question he answered with “I am Kurd!”. Ok, good. Then he would randomly ask “You know Bin Ladin?”. Well, of him, of course….. Then “Bush… he is terrorist.” Dad fielded those ones.
... the end of my tan in the Turkish baths. I was lying on the big hot stone platform and Helga (or whatever the Turkish equivalent is) came stomping over with flesh shaking like there was a menagerie of small animals in there trying to escape and wearing a pair
of black knickers and that was it. I was a little scared and so I just lay whimpering quietly as she scrubbed away at my tan and briskly slapped me each time she wanted me to roll over. I ended up squeaky clean and significantly paler and am still a little
traumatised.
GRAND AND MAGNIFICENT TRAVELLING
... the family headed off to do a guided tour from Ankara back to Istanbul - the Grand Turkey Tour. WithMagnificent Travel & Tourism. If I ever have a business I want it to be grand and magnificent too (I was a little disappointed there was no “unique” or
“super-exceptional” tours on offer at the time) so I thought this was a good sign of Mr Nihat’s belief in his team.
... the Mausoleum of Ataturk (Ankara), he of the international airport and generally-recognised founder of modern Turkey. He reformed the alphabet, the system of names, got on with the roads, recognized women’s rights, and in theory at least established Turkey as a secular society. Now this last seems to be getting a real bashing at the moment but all in all a mammoth job. I was quietly impressed and pleased for him that his picture seemed to be on every poster, tea towel and flag in Turkey.
... [Just as an interesting aside that probably belongs in the next email – a pretty unlikely and certainly unsubstantiated but fun story about the Turks (the Ottomans in those days) and the croissant – the summer of 1683 and the city of Vienna is under siege. The Ottoman Empire has asked that the Hapsburg city to surrender, and the leaders have told the Turks to bugger off home. The Turks are, as you would expect, unhappy and set about laying siege to the city. One way they planned to infiltrate the city was
to set off explosions underneath the city walls – and a plan they began to implement by digging tunnels to set the explosions in. Unfortunately for them, a baker, working in his basement during the siege, heard the noise of the digging, alerted the authorities, and thus foiled the evil plan. The baker, being something of a marketing genius, and not one to miss an opportunity, created a pastry in the shape of a crescent, the symbol of the Ottoman empire. It became a local traditional to serve this crescent-shaped delight with coffee, and a century later, when the Viennese princess Marie Antoinette married the French King Louis XVI, she insisted that the bakers in Paris learn how to make it. Over the years, the French bakers added butter and yeast to the mix (as they tend to do with most things), and the croissant (meaning 'crescent') as we know it was born.]
... anyway, back to Turkey and the Evans Road Trip.
... finally got up in a hot air balloon (having been held back by mist first in Kenya and then again in Cappadocia one morning) – I was determined to get up the next morning – and it was great. Mum even went up although she stayed squarely in the middle of the basket at all times.
.... Capadoccia and the underground cities, the fairy chimneys, and many, many, many rock chapels.
... I met the Australian bikers in Cappadocia too. A huge hairy bearded man came to my aid when trying to access the local wifi network. It transpired he was from Queanbeyan (of course) and on a bike tour with about 30 other Australian bikers. He was also writing a trip journal for a motorcycle magazine back home and was travelling with the magazine’s resident teddy bear as travel and photo muse (and making friends with other Turkish stuffed animals – people would apparently produce their own teddy or piglet or whatnot so that could be photographed with BikerBear).
... the Whirling Dervishes. I’d seen the Sudanese version of this in Khartoum, I was really interested to see what they would be like in Konya. Very formal, almost like a concert, and without the Sudanese feeling of a community event, lots of chatter, a healthy marketplace going next door. And I got in trouble for wanting to take a picture.
... I saw – I kid you not - the antique box which supposedly contains Mohammed's beard. Apparently these kind of relics were brought back to Turkey from the Middle East by Ottoman Sultans to preserve them from fundamentalist Islamic sects who were out to destroy the “idolatrous” Mohammed relics. I read that the museum also has a reliquary, which supposedly houses one of Mohammed's teeth. The poor man must be spread all over the place.
... hitting the Mediterranean coast was beautiful. There were lots of truly spectacular ruins along the way and I have the photos, but really, I was ready for out of that bus and onto the foreshore. Not for long. Hell, we had an itinerary and a timetable to stick to. Perge. Aspendos. Manavgat... an afternoon at the travertine pools at Pamukkale – with hundreds of determined tourists walking up the salt pools in their bare feet. Aphrodisias. Ephesus. Pergamum. The old medical centre at Asclepion. Stopped in at Troy. The horse was long gone.
"THOSE HEROES THAT SHED THEIR BLOOD AND LOST THEIR LIVES... YOU ARE NOW LYING IN THE SOIL OF A FRIENDLY COUNTRY..."
But the most amazing sites were on the last day – and that was our visit over the Dardanelles to Gallipoli. We were there just a few days before Anzac Day, so Lone Pine and Anzac Cove were being set up with hundreds of rows of seating for the ceremonies. But obviously people just come and go on the day, as there were very few other visitors when we were there. We did bump into a couple of lovely guys from the Australian Federal Police who were along to make sure everything was going to run smoothly that week, and who offered advice on what to see – “The Nek? Why would you want to go there? If I was you, mate, if you want to see a bunker, your best bet is to go along the road towards the New Zealand Memorial and just before it on the right, …. “ and so on. Our local guide was a bit taken aback.
And the cemeteries were unbelievably moving. Just row on row of stone plaques, looking out to sea, or sitting up on ridges, it was the only indication in such a peaceful place that there had ever been a war. I wasn’t sure what it would be like on Anzac Day, with the roads clogged and busloads of people trying to get in and out, and decided I’d probably have hated it. If you’re going to go, I say go when it’s quiet.
[Note - Gallipoli is also home to my prize of “Best Interactive Information Centre” for Turkey, teeny little flashing lights and everything.]
Then back to Istanbul, back to Ataturk’s airport, and back to London. For less than a day and then I was off again, to learn about turkey the bird, and how to make those pastries shaped like half the Turkish flag (and lots more).
xxc
__________________________
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Bulls and hippos and dolphins - 5 April 2007 - London, UK
Welcome back to the Year of Caroline (yes, stop panicking, you can resume breathing :))
We did not get kidnapped in Ethiopia, I am fairly sure I haven't contracted malaria, no one went manically postal on the truck despite 11 weeks of day-in-day-out contact, and we all avoided being eaten by lions, chomped by hippos or taken out by a particularly vicious maribou stork (I kid you not, we saw one eat a flamingo, very nasty indeed). The mere act of managing to get back to London, all limbs intact, is, I think, my parents' definition of a successful trip to Africa.
Thank you to everyone for your notes and well wishes and warnings along the way. I should also take this group opportunity to generally advise that NO I have not as yet hooked up with a local sheik or prince or dictator, or a gorgeous and rich but somehow tormented world wanderer. And to bounce back some of the responses that made me laugh out loud in the tin shack internet cafes along the way....
"hey, good to hear that you haven't gone Kurtz-like mad somewhere in deepest, darkest Africa requiring me to hop on a boat to come and find you, popping hallucingens and fighting tigers all the way. the horror... the horror... the horror..."
"What the hell were you doing at a wedding singing I Will Survive?"
"Sounds like on helluva trip... It sure beats the office on a Friday afternoon... So you find me tired old and envious... Via con dios."
"No real news here so all I will say is:
a. thank goodness you are alive!
b. We will see you in London...;
c. In doing so, we are soooo looking forward to the trip photos; [note from caroline - such liars :)] and
d. Thank goodness you are alive!"
Anyway, after the last update from Bahir Dar, we spent a little more time in town there, and then continued down through Ethiopia to Addis Ababa. En route we had the first solid downpour of rain we'd encountered all trip, ironically enough in a town with no running water (or any still water as far as we could tell) - the only way through the evening was to eat early, drink all the hotel's wine, and conclude the evening sloshing across a flooded courtyard being shouted at in an enourmously cheery fashion by a half naked Dutch man on the second balcony (yes Joop, I'm talking about YOU).
Addis was a trip changeover city - like Khartoum we lost some passengers and gained some new ones, and whilst I had arrived saying loudly that I was going to pull out all the stops and actually make it to a museum, we only managed to make it as far as the Hilton, ostensibly for a swim and a hot shower, and then never even made it into the pool. It was, however, the best 85 birr shower I've ever had (around one million beers could make a bucket of lukewarm tap water seem like a great shower, but really, it was just terrific....). Addis was also a city of wonderful Italian food - those 15 cent macchiatos just kept on appearing - which was enough to make me reconsider my views on the ethics of European, or at least Italian, colonialisation/invasion of African states. With the benefit of historical hindsight Mussolini may have been a generally bad guy but he did bring the coffee, the pizza, and a really fabulous fettucine with a cream truffle sauce, to Addis, and so all up I was a happy girl. On the more socially aware side, Addis was also our first real taste of overt poverty of the limbless, eyeless, lying down on the street with your child, hands-out begging type. And on a scale that makes you wonder how it can ever be dealt with.
Once we had settled in Harry from Oxford (bless him he was just 19), Damien from Newcastle, Simon from the UK and Clyde from Bermuda, we were off out of the city again. And so we drove on to Lakes Shala-Abaya, and all of a sudden the acacia trees were everywhere, the ostriches and flamigoes were out, and it felt like the true African Africa of books and movies (the Out of Africa soundtrack got a real playing for the next few weeks). With the advent of Harry as a new card player, we also branched out into poker-for-money. It is fair to say I will never make my fortune gambling, and at 100 birr down (particularly impressive when you're playing with one-birr notes) I declared myself destitute and stropped off to bed. [I also lost at Monopoly. But Justin and I won at Team Trivial Pursuit, which I think just demonstrates the overall dominance of intelligence over chance :)]
And so the south of Ethiopia continued on with treks up in the Bale mountains, finally seeing a Simean wolf, the group trying to eat an entire (burnt) sheep for dinner one night, the inpromtou WWF/sumo wresting match outside Archers Post, Julia and I being charged by a bull at lunch one day ("just stay still Caroline, you'll be fine"...), swimming in the hot spring pool near Shashemene followed by full body contact cards and Matt finding the sambuca, our first game park at Nechisar with hordes of zebra, having to guard our dinner from the babboons at Arba Minch, and then the 3 days of Ethiopian tribes and searing heat in and around Turmi. The village visits were an experience. And on any other trip, they would have been the highlight of the area. However, this trip, we also got to see the jumping of the bulls, which was such a bizarre experience that pretty much everything else paled in comparison.
So, this is the deal as I understand it. Shortly before a male in the Hamer tribe is able to get married, they undergo a ceremony where their female relatives (but not the wife-to-be, unless she's also a relative I guess) dance, sing, toot horns, and work themselves up into somewhat of a frenzy. They are whipped untill blood runs on their back and arms and ash is rubbed into the wounds to make them scar. Obviously this is a bit violent to watch and takes a bit of internal ethical questioning, but the next bit is amazing. The males then all get painted up and then wrangle a dozen or so huge bulls into a line, side by side, with one guy hanging onto dear life to the horns, and another guy hanging equally grimly onto the tail. Then Male of the Day, completely naked, has to take a running jump onto the first bull, run across the backs of all of the rest of bulls without falling off, then, as a reward for doing that successfully, turns around, and does it again. Three. More. Times. Wierdest shit ever.
And then all of a sudden - more than a month after getting to Ethiopia - it was time to hit the border and cross into Kenya. So at Konzo we had lots of coffees just in case. Julia and I had a liquid dinner of Gouder wine and sparkling water for old times sake. Matt was beaten by a 9 year old at table tennis. Zoe washed her cornrows in anticipation of being able to take them out (thank god). Harry found two rats in his room. It had been a great country.
The north of Kenya was a little like the wild west. Whilst the border crossing itself was the easiest yet - you could have walked over into Kenya and back again a few times before anyone asked you what you were up to - getting out of Moyale and down through the northern part of the country was a little trickier. Being bandit territory and in the grip of a pretty savage drought, you had to travel either in armed convoy, or with armed guards on the truck. So we were joined by a couple of guards, we weren't allowed to stop for lunch (enter stage left Julia and Caroline cutting vegetables with sharp kitchen knives whilst truck bounces along at speed), and in our next stop, Marsabit, we weren't allowed out of the complex. Unacceptable until security went and fetched us a case of beer.
The last week of overlanding was a procession of game parks at Samburu, Nanyuki, Nakuru and Naivasha (elephants, giraffes, monkeys, baboons, water buffallo, antelope of all description, lions, hyenas), Julia, Matt and I jumping into the flash resort pool at Samburu in our underwear, acacia thorn injuries all round, a glimpse of Mt Kenya, being paddled round the tiny lake at Nanyuki in a boat whilst balancing a g&t and then trying out the adult-sized whirly-gig, an evening trading trivia with a group of precocious schoolkids and then debating the benefits (or otherwise) of marriage with their teachers, a very energetic 80s party complete with crimped hair, leggings, purple eye shadow and tie-died ensembles, and then a follow up evening of sangria and building human pyramids.
We finally headed off towards Nairobi and the truck group disbanded. We had some final drinks and tears and a very unsatisfactory evening of ten pin bowling (the lanes were nowhere near as forgiving as Khartoum's had been...). Julia and I then spent an efficient morning with the travel agent, and after hyperventilating a little over the smoking credit card I spoke with mum who gave me her normal eminently sensible advice - "just book whatever you feel like doing, darling".
So we flew out to Governors Camp in Maasai Mara and saw game park-ing from the privileged side - coffee in your [huge, luxurious, permanent] tent brought in before the first game drive; personal waiters, drink waiters, tent attendants, drivers.... Hippos coming right up out of the river to the bar for the evening g&t hour (and thus began the legend of hippo shouting).... Animals EVERYWHERE.... Tom-from-the-army saluting us every time we arrived or left camp. Stuff overlanding, I liked this kind of travel ;)
So then Julia and I waved a final goodbye to our overlanding friends Matt and Justin (who by that time thought we were mad stalkers who'd turn up in gorilla suits on their next Ugandan segment) and jumped across to Lamu for 2 weeks on the beach. To a resort called Kizingo, which was absolutely amazing. Mary Jo, Louis, Ant, Martin, and Gemma (who between them run things very merrily) were generally used to people who came on 3 night breaks and stayed to themselves, venturing out for sunsets, dolphin rides and walks on the beach. Julia and I stayed for 14 days, made friends with the neighbours, and extended our hippo shouting to underwater dolphin shouting (normally resulting in me choking on my snorkel and sort of snorting salt water in a truly glamorous fashion). And we drank all the red wine. If it wasn't for that flight to Istanbul tomorrow morning, we might never have left banda one....
So, finally (it's a long email, I know) - all my love to everyone! For those of you travelling, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. For everyone else - please come play! As for me, two weeks in Turkey and then 12 weeks in Ireland to come.... So for all you UK/Europe people, don't be shy about popping across to Cork for a visit. And I look forward to hearing everyone's news in the meantime :)
xxx C
We did not get kidnapped in Ethiopia, I am fairly sure I haven't contracted malaria, no one went manically postal on the truck despite 11 weeks of day-in-day-out contact, and we all avoided being eaten by lions, chomped by hippos or taken out by a particularly vicious maribou stork (I kid you not, we saw one eat a flamingo, very nasty indeed). The mere act of managing to get back to London, all limbs intact, is, I think, my parents' definition of a successful trip to Africa.
Thank you to everyone for your notes and well wishes and warnings along the way. I should also take this group opportunity to generally advise that NO I have not as yet hooked up with a local sheik or prince or dictator, or a gorgeous and rich but somehow tormented world wanderer. And to bounce back some of the responses that made me laugh out loud in the tin shack internet cafes along the way....
"hey, good to hear that you haven't gone Kurtz-like mad somewhere in deepest, darkest Africa requiring me to hop on a boat to come and find you, popping hallucingens and fighting tigers all the way. the horror... the horror... the horror..."
"What the hell were you doing at a wedding singing I Will Survive?"
"Sounds like on helluva trip... It sure beats the office on a Friday afternoon... So you find me tired old and envious... Via con dios."
"No real news here so all I will say is:
a. thank goodness you are alive!
b. We will see you in London...;
c. In doing so, we are soooo looking forward to the trip photos; [note from caroline - such liars :)] and
d. Thank goodness you are alive!"
Anyway, after the last update from Bahir Dar, we spent a little more time in town there, and then continued down through Ethiopia to Addis Ababa. En route we had the first solid downpour of rain we'd encountered all trip, ironically enough in a town with no running water (or any still water as far as we could tell) - the only way through the evening was to eat early, drink all the hotel's wine, and conclude the evening sloshing across a flooded courtyard being shouted at in an enourmously cheery fashion by a half naked Dutch man on the second balcony (yes Joop, I'm talking about YOU).
Addis was a trip changeover city - like Khartoum we lost some passengers and gained some new ones, and whilst I had arrived saying loudly that I was going to pull out all the stops and actually make it to a museum, we only managed to make it as far as the Hilton, ostensibly for a swim and a hot shower, and then never even made it into the pool. It was, however, the best 85 birr shower I've ever had (around one million beers could make a bucket of lukewarm tap water seem like a great shower, but really, it was just terrific....). Addis was also a city of wonderful Italian food - those 15 cent macchiatos just kept on appearing - which was enough to make me reconsider my views on the ethics of European, or at least Italian, colonialisation/invasion of African states. With the benefit of historical hindsight Mussolini may have been a generally bad guy but he did bring the coffee, the pizza, and a really fabulous fettucine with a cream truffle sauce, to Addis, and so all up I was a happy girl. On the more socially aware side, Addis was also our first real taste of overt poverty of the limbless, eyeless, lying down on the street with your child, hands-out begging type. And on a scale that makes you wonder how it can ever be dealt with.
Once we had settled in Harry from Oxford (bless him he was just 19), Damien from Newcastle, Simon from the UK and Clyde from Bermuda, we were off out of the city again. And so we drove on to Lakes Shala-Abaya, and all of a sudden the acacia trees were everywhere, the ostriches and flamigoes were out, and it felt like the true African Africa of books and movies (the Out of Africa soundtrack got a real playing for the next few weeks). With the advent of Harry as a new card player, we also branched out into poker-for-money. It is fair to say I will never make my fortune gambling, and at 100 birr down (particularly impressive when you're playing with one-birr notes) I declared myself destitute and stropped off to bed. [I also lost at Monopoly. But Justin and I won at Team Trivial Pursuit, which I think just demonstrates the overall dominance of intelligence over chance :)]
And so the south of Ethiopia continued on with treks up in the Bale mountains, finally seeing a Simean wolf, the group trying to eat an entire (burnt) sheep for dinner one night, the inpromtou WWF/sumo wresting match outside Archers Post, Julia and I being charged by a bull at lunch one day ("just stay still Caroline, you'll be fine"...), swimming in the hot spring pool near Shashemene followed by full body contact cards and Matt finding the sambuca, our first game park at Nechisar with hordes of zebra, having to guard our dinner from the babboons at Arba Minch, and then the 3 days of Ethiopian tribes and searing heat in and around Turmi. The village visits were an experience. And on any other trip, they would have been the highlight of the area. However, this trip, we also got to see the jumping of the bulls, which was such a bizarre experience that pretty much everything else paled in comparison.
So, this is the deal as I understand it. Shortly before a male in the Hamer tribe is able to get married, they undergo a ceremony where their female relatives (but not the wife-to-be, unless she's also a relative I guess) dance, sing, toot horns, and work themselves up into somewhat of a frenzy. They are whipped untill blood runs on their back and arms and ash is rubbed into the wounds to make them scar. Obviously this is a bit violent to watch and takes a bit of internal ethical questioning, but the next bit is amazing. The males then all get painted up and then wrangle a dozen or so huge bulls into a line, side by side, with one guy hanging onto dear life to the horns, and another guy hanging equally grimly onto the tail. Then Male of the Day, completely naked, has to take a running jump onto the first bull, run across the backs of all of the rest of bulls without falling off, then, as a reward for doing that successfully, turns around, and does it again. Three. More. Times. Wierdest shit ever.
And then all of a sudden - more than a month after getting to Ethiopia - it was time to hit the border and cross into Kenya. So at Konzo we had lots of coffees just in case. Julia and I had a liquid dinner of Gouder wine and sparkling water for old times sake. Matt was beaten by a 9 year old at table tennis. Zoe washed her cornrows in anticipation of being able to take them out (thank god). Harry found two rats in his room. It had been a great country.
The north of Kenya was a little like the wild west. Whilst the border crossing itself was the easiest yet - you could have walked over into Kenya and back again a few times before anyone asked you what you were up to - getting out of Moyale and down through the northern part of the country was a little trickier. Being bandit territory and in the grip of a pretty savage drought, you had to travel either in armed convoy, or with armed guards on the truck. So we were joined by a couple of guards, we weren't allowed to stop for lunch (enter stage left Julia and Caroline cutting vegetables with sharp kitchen knives whilst truck bounces along at speed), and in our next stop, Marsabit, we weren't allowed out of the complex. Unacceptable until security went and fetched us a case of beer.
The last week of overlanding was a procession of game parks at Samburu, Nanyuki, Nakuru and Naivasha (elephants, giraffes, monkeys, baboons, water buffallo, antelope of all description, lions, hyenas), Julia, Matt and I jumping into the flash resort pool at Samburu in our underwear, acacia thorn injuries all round, a glimpse of Mt Kenya, being paddled round the tiny lake at Nanyuki in a boat whilst balancing a g&t and then trying out the adult-sized whirly-gig, an evening trading trivia with a group of precocious schoolkids and then debating the benefits (or otherwise) of marriage with their teachers, a very energetic 80s party complete with crimped hair, leggings, purple eye shadow and tie-died ensembles, and then a follow up evening of sangria and building human pyramids.
We finally headed off towards Nairobi and the truck group disbanded. We had some final drinks and tears and a very unsatisfactory evening of ten pin bowling (the lanes were nowhere near as forgiving as Khartoum's had been...). Julia and I then spent an efficient morning with the travel agent, and after hyperventilating a little over the smoking credit card I spoke with mum who gave me her normal eminently sensible advice - "just book whatever you feel like doing, darling".
So we flew out to Governors Camp in Maasai Mara and saw game park-ing from the privileged side - coffee in your [huge, luxurious, permanent] tent brought in before the first game drive; personal waiters, drink waiters, tent attendants, drivers.... Hippos coming right up out of the river to the bar for the evening g&t hour (and thus began the legend of hippo shouting).... Animals EVERYWHERE.... Tom-from-the-army saluting us every time we arrived or left camp. Stuff overlanding, I liked this kind of travel ;)
So then Julia and I waved a final goodbye to our overlanding friends Matt and Justin (who by that time thought we were mad stalkers who'd turn up in gorilla suits on their next Ugandan segment) and jumped across to Lamu for 2 weeks on the beach. To a resort called Kizingo, which was absolutely amazing. Mary Jo, Louis, Ant, Martin, and Gemma (who between them run things very merrily) were generally used to people who came on 3 night breaks and stayed to themselves, venturing out for sunsets, dolphin rides and walks on the beach. Julia and I stayed for 14 days, made friends with the neighbours, and extended our hippo shouting to underwater dolphin shouting (normally resulting in me choking on my snorkel and sort of snorting salt water in a truly glamorous fashion). And we drank all the red wine. If it wasn't for that flight to Istanbul tomorrow morning, we might never have left banda one....
So, finally (it's a long email, I know) - all my love to everyone! For those of you travelling, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. For everyone else - please come play! As for me, two weeks in Turkey and then 12 weeks in Ireland to come.... So for all you UK/Europe people, don't be shy about popping across to Cork for a visit. And I look forward to hearing everyone's news in the meantime :)
xxx C
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Long and quite self-satisfied email below - 15 February 2007 – Bahir Dar, Ethiopia
Helllllllllllllllllllllllllllo all
Year of Caroline update time for you all. 3 o'clock this morning saw me dancing in a tin shed "bar" in Ethiopia with a group of overlanders and teenage prositutes (the whole ladies of the night concept being an accepted form of supplementing the pocket money here...) to a random remix of John Denver's Country Road and trying to keep track of where my beer was, shortly before the bar fight started and we wandered home. So obviously a little tired but makes it the perfect day for emailing.
Having left London safely on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, I celebrated the new year in the obligatory chaos of Cairo traffic. I met up with the group I'd be travelling with for the next few months and we spent a few days in Cairo doing the sights and sizing each other up - even after a couple of days it's amazing how a group organises itself, on this trip it seemed to be mainly along the early-to-bed-early-to-rise contingent versus the doona-over-head-denial-of-6am-starts group, and no prizes for guessing where I was on that split. Of course at that stage we hadn't launched into that true demonstration of character and bastion of the ultimately unhinged, the multiple consecutive nights of bush camping, but more on that later.
[Slight segue, the lady looking after the email here has just popped her head in to see if I need lunch or coffee. At $1 an hour of mail and 15 cents a coffee, I now love this country and may never leave :)]
OK, so before you all stop reading, the trip has been wonderful. We've moved through the more muslim, middle-eastern influenced regions of Egypt and Sudan, through into Ethiopia, where the various christian religions are more predominant, you can wear tanks tops and skirts without starting a street riot, and I have high hopes of crispy pork-related products in the near future to go on my avocado and chicken sandwiches.
[Coffee has just arrived, one thing I didn't realise until we got to Ethiopia was the depth of the Italian influence here, in a country where there's no ATMs and the email works sproadically, the mobiles rarely connect and buildings remain unfinished for decades, every 5 feet there seems to be another Italian espresso machine whooshing away.]
Egypt was a mix of those ubiquitous sights that make you think you've wandered directly into the set of Death on the Nile (Giza, Luxor, Abu Simbel) and less-known western desert routes (where some of the antiquities sites looked suspiciously like they'd been touched up with the Dulux the previous week, and culminating in being at the celebrations of a Bedouin wedding where the girls were asked to sing a song as a present and the only one we all knew the words to were "I Will Survive"... Hopefully the bride never needs it translated). We stayed at a Bob Marley hotel in Luxor and caught a felucca to Aswan, rode donkeys to the Valley of the Kings, and caught a plane to Abu Simbel from Aswan's truly optimistically titled International Airport.
Sudan was like moving into a different world. We all bundled onto the once-a-week ferry from Aswan that allows you to cross the border, and preceeded to spent the rest of that day sitting in port no doubt waiting for the last shipment of chickens or twinkies or consumer durables to arrive. We were in the "first" class cabins for the trip, easily distinguished from second class which was more of a grab-a-space-on-the-floor-or-deck, which had the feel of arriving in the New World from potato famine Ireland, clinging to all earthly belongings and wrapped in blankets. Then the customs control in Sudan itself was another adventure, and then our truck was late coming in on its own ferry.... and dealing with all this whilst realising Sudan is a totally dry country.
But the time in Sudan was amazing. We drove through the northern desert for 8 days and met some of the friendliest and most generous people I have ever come across. People with next to nothing who want nothing more than to share it with you. An area of basically no water which led to 8 days of not washing my hair and having rivers of mud run off me when we finally got to a shower at Khartoum. Sadly that shower also took about 80% of what I had thought was quite a fetching tan. Historical sites that rival Egypt's (the pyramids at Meroe being the most extraordinary), but where we were generally the only people there, and could wander up, down, in and out of places at will. The Sufi whirling dervishes in Khartoum [Kath, Jens, Tash and Sarah - they really did whirl.]. The first modern shopping centre we'd seen, where in one late-night visit I took out 2 out of 3 ten pin bowling matches with my friends on the truck (Justin would claim he had the highest single score but I won the most games, so....).
Crossing over from Sudan to Ethiopia was another experience. We drove over a little rickety bridge and all of a sudden people were selling beer (having a drink before 12 was the only right and proper thing to do in such circumstances), children were selling gum by the stick and asking for pens, and trees appeared out of nowhere. And Ethiopia has been a constant surprise. We have seen wonderful sites - the St Georges Church at Lalibela moved Joop and I to jump up and down in a slightly hysterical fashion, as if we were the first ones to ever stumble across it :) We've been in beautiful places - the Simien Mountains were as dramatic as a place as I ever seen and the walk straight up to over 4300m was literally breathtaking (in fact I hadn't had any breath for quite a while by the time I got to the top). We've been to local football games, hung out in the town pool halls, found the "Starbucks" in Mekele, and gone out dancing in tin shed clubs where the only English language music seems to be Shania Twain and Shakira is on every second song. And where they play John Denver remixes.
So I hope you're all well and apologise for the group email, but hope to hear back with any news you have. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up with those of you in London before I head off to Turkey in early April, and for everyone else, it's only a matter of time before I track you down to inflict my trip photos.
All my love xxx C
Year of Caroline update time for you all. 3 o'clock this morning saw me dancing in a tin shed "bar" in Ethiopia with a group of overlanders and teenage prositutes (the whole ladies of the night concept being an accepted form of supplementing the pocket money here...) to a random remix of John Denver's Country Road and trying to keep track of where my beer was, shortly before the bar fight started and we wandered home. So obviously a little tired but makes it the perfect day for emailing.
Having left London safely on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, I celebrated the new year in the obligatory chaos of Cairo traffic. I met up with the group I'd be travelling with for the next few months and we spent a few days in Cairo doing the sights and sizing each other up - even after a couple of days it's amazing how a group organises itself, on this trip it seemed to be mainly along the early-to-bed-early-to-rise contingent versus the doona-over-head-denial-of-6am-starts group, and no prizes for guessing where I was on that split. Of course at that stage we hadn't launched into that true demonstration of character and bastion of the ultimately unhinged, the multiple consecutive nights of bush camping, but more on that later.
[Slight segue, the lady looking after the email here has just popped her head in to see if I need lunch or coffee. At $1 an hour of mail and 15 cents a coffee, I now love this country and may never leave :)]
OK, so before you all stop reading, the trip has been wonderful. We've moved through the more muslim, middle-eastern influenced regions of Egypt and Sudan, through into Ethiopia, where the various christian religions are more predominant, you can wear tanks tops and skirts without starting a street riot, and I have high hopes of crispy pork-related products in the near future to go on my avocado and chicken sandwiches.
[Coffee has just arrived, one thing I didn't realise until we got to Ethiopia was the depth of the Italian influence here, in a country where there's no ATMs and the email works sproadically, the mobiles rarely connect and buildings remain unfinished for decades, every 5 feet there seems to be another Italian espresso machine whooshing away.]
Egypt was a mix of those ubiquitous sights that make you think you've wandered directly into the set of Death on the Nile (Giza, Luxor, Abu Simbel) and less-known western desert routes (where some of the antiquities sites looked suspiciously like they'd been touched up with the Dulux the previous week, and culminating in being at the celebrations of a Bedouin wedding where the girls were asked to sing a song as a present and the only one we all knew the words to were "I Will Survive"... Hopefully the bride never needs it translated). We stayed at a Bob Marley hotel in Luxor and caught a felucca to Aswan, rode donkeys to the Valley of the Kings, and caught a plane to Abu Simbel from Aswan's truly optimistically titled International Airport.
Sudan was like moving into a different world. We all bundled onto the once-a-week ferry from Aswan that allows you to cross the border, and preceeded to spent the rest of that day sitting in port no doubt waiting for the last shipment of chickens or twinkies or consumer durables to arrive. We were in the "first" class cabins for the trip, easily distinguished from second class which was more of a grab-a-space-on-the-floor-or-deck, which had the feel of arriving in the New World from potato famine Ireland, clinging to all earthly belongings and wrapped in blankets. Then the customs control in Sudan itself was another adventure, and then our truck was late coming in on its own ferry.... and dealing with all this whilst realising Sudan is a totally dry country.
But the time in Sudan was amazing. We drove through the northern desert for 8 days and met some of the friendliest and most generous people I have ever come across. People with next to nothing who want nothing more than to share it with you. An area of basically no water which led to 8 days of not washing my hair and having rivers of mud run off me when we finally got to a shower at Khartoum. Sadly that shower also took about 80% of what I had thought was quite a fetching tan. Historical sites that rival Egypt's (the pyramids at Meroe being the most extraordinary), but where we were generally the only people there, and could wander up, down, in and out of places at will. The Sufi whirling dervishes in Khartoum [Kath, Jens, Tash and Sarah - they really did whirl.]. The first modern shopping centre we'd seen, where in one late-night visit I took out 2 out of 3 ten pin bowling matches with my friends on the truck (Justin would claim he had the highest single score but I won the most games, so....).
Crossing over from Sudan to Ethiopia was another experience. We drove over a little rickety bridge and all of a sudden people were selling beer (having a drink before 12 was the only right and proper thing to do in such circumstances), children were selling gum by the stick and asking for pens, and trees appeared out of nowhere. And Ethiopia has been a constant surprise. We have seen wonderful sites - the St Georges Church at Lalibela moved Joop and I to jump up and down in a slightly hysterical fashion, as if we were the first ones to ever stumble across it :) We've been in beautiful places - the Simien Mountains were as dramatic as a place as I ever seen and the walk straight up to over 4300m was literally breathtaking (in fact I hadn't had any breath for quite a while by the time I got to the top). We've been to local football games, hung out in the town pool halls, found the "Starbucks" in Mekele, and gone out dancing in tin shed clubs where the only English language music seems to be Shania Twain and Shakira is on every second song. And where they play John Denver remixes.
So I hope you're all well and apologise for the group email, but hope to hear back with any news you have. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up with those of you in London before I head off to Turkey in early April, and for everyone else, it's only a matter of time before I track you down to inflict my trip photos.
All my love xxx C
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