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You are viewing the most recent 25 entries.
27th February 2008
8:50pm: Seen on the drive to Kochi...
Our car was waiting for us when we got off the houseboat, and we set off on the two hour drive to Kochi, which is the second-largest city in Kerala and the state's commercial centre. It was a hugely entertaining drive, and I cursed myself for not having my notebook with me and instead recorded my finds in the book I was reading. First we drove through Alleppy, whose main industries are coir and Backwaters tourism (it likes to call itself the Venice of India). Oh! and it also contains the factory for John's umbrellas, which we saw from the car. The first ever note I took was of a truck seen in Alleppy: Good Morning Coir Mills. We went past coir mill after coir mill in the outskirts of Alleppy, and past many stalls selling coir products, with hammocks fairly prominent. As some point, I saw this sign: Saint Dymphna Strengthens Us (memorable because... well, she is so rarely remembered). About halfway, Jan spotted a modern, three-storey building with this sign: Panicker's Complex, and then a bit further on there was Panicker's Ladies Fancy. "Complex" is a common term in India for a shared office building (I can't currently think what they're called outside India), and Panicker is presumably a family name (google has just found me "Panicker's Tour and Travel" and lots of cricket-playing Panickers), but we never did figure out what a Ladies Fancy was. We passed a large billboard with a picture of a woman in a red silk cocktail dress and a man in evening-dress about to jump in a lake, with the words: Swimming in your party wear. At [Forgotten-Name] Resort, you make the rules. The notes sent by our travel agent had said that swimming pools in India have strict rules about people having to wear proper bathing costumes to enter the pool, and this resort can presumably be bribed not to care. I think you have to be very young and fairly rich to be attracted by the idea of ruining a nice frock. In the outskirts of Kochi I made a note of this URL: bethlehemmatrimonial.com - because the images on the billboard were gloriously tacky. I have just now tried it out and... it was worth remembering. And finally, just a couple of miles from the hotel: Saint Anthony's Tyre Works and Vaccinations. I swear that's what it said.
14th January 2007
8:46pm: Return to Hong Kong
We arrived at about 1.30 pm, and I promptly bought an Octopus card for C and topped up my own (an Octopus is a swipe card that can be used on almost all forms of public transport). C had been too busy with work to think much about the details of the Hong Kong holiday, and I was the one with the Rough Guide (RG) and the small starter-stock of Hong Kong dollars (HKD), and C had said earlier that she was happy to let me dictate our schedule. I'd decided we were going to get the A11 bus into town instead of the Airport Express train, because it's a fifth of the price (40 HKD cf. 200 and only takes twice as long), and I was sure that C would enjoy the ride as much as I had the last time. I was right. The weather was hazy, but sunny enough that the water and the lush vegetation looked joyous, and C could see immediately that there was more to HK than dense cityscape, but also that HK's dense cityscapes were a revelation in themselves. We got off at the right stop, and made our way to the hotel fairly easily. We were staying in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, which is opposite the Happy Valley Racecouse. It wasn't quite as central as the hotel I'd stayed in before, but the difference turned out only to be a matter of a couple of easy blocks. Our room was on the 22nd floor - which was actually only the 19th, since they omit the 13th floor for the benefit of Westerners, and the 4th and 14th for the benefit of Chinese; C took the bed by the window, which was enough to pacify my vertigo. The room was small, but well-supplied with freebies, including a selection of bottled water that was replenished every day. We didn't have a view of the racecourse (out of our price-range), but we did have a fab view of the city down to the harbour ( see photo). ( Two engineers in search of a beer )( Christmas Day with dog and two cats )
13th January 2007
11:57am: To and in Doha
The flight to Doha stops first in Bahrain (a mere half hour's flight from Doha), and for this leg of the flight I was sat next to a Bahraini teenage boy who was glowing with his excitement and relief at being on his way home. He told me that he had "screwed up" and had been sent to military school in Philadelphia, and this was his first trip home since he'd been sent away. He'd clearly been desperately homesick, and was so looking forward to the first drive he'd take and the first meal he'd have, and to being in his landscape and on his streets. There was no mention of his family in any of these plans. I was, of course, hugely curious about how exactly he'd screwed up, but decided I'd better not ask. He seemed a nice lad, and I've been hoping on his behalf that the military school burned down over the holidays. ( A day in Doha: shopping for tat and eating in luxury )
7th January 2007
5:16pm: Background to the Doha/Hong Kong trip
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) capella_fic left London for a teaching-job in Doha at the end of August, and I think by that time we'd already agreed that I'd come out and visit over Christmas, and we'd go somewhere within a direct flight of Doha. Kerala in south-west India was the first choice (for the food, just for a start), but when I started the travel-planning in mid-September I discovered that the direct flights from Doha were already fully booked. I then suggested Hong Kong to capella_fic (hereinafter referred to as C), since I'd loved the four days I'd spent there during my round-the-world trip. C was dubious at first as she imagined it to be just solid urban jungle, but I (and others) assured her it was much more varied than that and she agreed to give it a try. C had asked me to bring LemSip and freezer-bag clips, and then when the evening temperatures turned cold in Doha, she'd added "warm FLUFFY socks" to the list. I had fun getting a decent stock of LemSip, since Waitrose refuses to sell more than two packs of painkiller in a single transaction. So I shrugged, took two boxes, and then went straight next door to Boots and bought another two boxes. It gives me a warm glow to know that the nanny state cares enough to protect me from those pesky suicidal-impulses-with-a-duration-of-les s-than-a-minute. My flight to Doha was at 10.15 am on Friday the 22nd of December, and on Wednesday of that week I woke up to thick fog, with mass cancellations of flights and forecasts of days of fog to come. On the positive side, almost all of the cancellations were for short-haul flights, with long-haul flights almost unscathed, but I got rather obsessive in my checking each day on the departure of the flight number I was taking out, and the arrival of the flight number I would be getting back. Assuming that they just turned around the same aircraft, the arrival was actually the crucial event, since it's landing that's made difficult by fog, not take-off; if they could consistently get the aircraft down in 6 am fog (and it seemed they could), then that 10.15 departure should be fine. And so it was. Well, it was about an hour late, but who would quibble under the circumstances?
27th August 2005
5:44pm: A week in Buenos Aires
( Arriving )( Moving to my second hotel )( Monday: Sightseeing, Language-Shopping, and Socialising )( Tuesday: Cats, DVDs, Graciela, and Embassies )( Wednesday: Museums, Humidity, and Belly-Dancing )( Thursday: Turtles, Air Force Officers, and Homework )( Friday: Bills, Bills, and a Plateau )( Saturday: Melindas, Glass and a Last Ice-Cream )( Sunday and Monday: Leaving, and Arriving Home )
This is the last piece of actual narrative on the trip, but I think that I will do a post-trip report: highlights, lowlights, things like that. I will take questions, should you have any.
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