Travel reportage of the relentless kind

At the beach

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:45:24 GMT

Settling in to our resort

At Nikki's Nest we were immediately ushered in to the dining pavillion, and told to sit down and partake of the vegetarian buffet lunch (at R450). My stomach was still feeling a bit unsettled, and during the drive I'd been thinking that the only thing I really wanted was a bowl of miso soup (which I would certainly not be getting). But they did have a clear vegetable soup, an excellent substitute, and I had two bowls.

Quite a few of our fellow diners were wearing orange robes and head-coverings, our first indication that we were at an Ayurvedic resort that took its Ayurveda pretty seriously. We were given a booklet about the resort and another about the Ayurvedic services available (both in German, which was another indication about the nature of the resort), but once we got copies in English we settled down to read about the Ayurvedic treatment-process and options, both going "Ew!" at the same places (while massages did feature, enemas were more prominent, and there was also "medically controlled vomiting"). We decided we'd steer clear of all that, especially since one was forbidden, while under treatment, from doing any of the things one would normally do under 30oC with 80% humidity, such as sit under ceiling fans or in air-conditioning, or drink cooled liquids. Ceiling fans in the resort were turned off by default, and the water in the cooler was warm.

On the other hand, the setting was lovely. The resort started halfway down a hillside that went down to the beach, and from the dining pavilion we had a wonderful view of the curve of the beach, with a neat line of fishing boats. Our rooms were right at the bottom of the resort, nearest the beach. There was a temple next-door but it didn't overdo the 5 a.m. start, and we got full benefit of the noise of the sea.

Pantaloons on the beach

The day was very hot, and we waited until 5 pm before making our first visit to the beach. There were lots of sun-loungers laid out, with each resort having different-coloured stripes (doubtless standard, but I don't do beach holidays so this was all new to me). About three resorts down there was a hillside shrine with a group of boulders in front of it. One boulder had a particularly garish statue of a praying Christ on it, and on the largest boulder of all there was a young man in brightly-coloured silk pantaloons, striking poses with a scimitar. We assumed at first that he was some sad exhibitionist who just liked showing off in front of the tourists, but then I said, "I know! He's working on his Bollywood audition tape," and a few steps later we could see the far side of the boulder - where there was a film crew. It was a strong contender for the oddest situation I've ever seen: a Bollywood film being shot against a background of people praying at a tacky hillside shrine, watched by crowds of Germans who've travelled thousands of miles to get enemas. Or... an ordinary day in Kerala.

Photographic evidence

Nikki's Nest: a possible history

On the way back to Nikki's Nest we were on the lookout for restaurant signs for the other resorts, especially for non-vegetarian ones, as this seemed likely to be a good indicator of a resort that wore its Ayurveda lightly (if at all). Nikki's Nest did regain some points with us over dinner, though, when it turned out that they did a la carte in addition to the buffet (neither of us felt capable of getting R450 value out of the buffet), and that they would serve us beer. The tone of the menu was light-hearted, and suggested that Nikki's Nest had not always placed such an emphasis on Ayurveda. I suspect that some genius of a German travel-agent is behind the change, and that Kerala Connections haven't paid a visit during the current regime.

For the four days of our stay, we were the only non-Germans there. All of the signs were in were exclusively in German, and 80% of the books in the library were in German. Our fellow guests were perfectly pleasant, but they didn't attempt to speak to us - and why should they, when there were so many people around they could speak to in their own language? More importantly, we couldn't understand any of the conversations around us, which deprived us of the pleasures of speculation and bitching. It's not that the situation at NN spoiled our time at the beach, but I think we would have had an even better time if we'd been at a resort with a wider varieties of nationalities and of degrees of interest in Ayurveda.

Sunday: yoga, the village, and the posh neighbours

The next morning (Sunday), I went down to the beach just after sunrise. There was a yoga class sitting cross-legged on the beach, with a couple of members wearing hearing-protection (see photo). The surf really wasn't that loud. I returned to the beach at the same time on the next two days, but I never saw the class again.

After breakfast (good omelettes), we went for a walk up the hill into the village, which had a wonderful lavender church, and lots of coconut drying by the side of the road. People were as friendly as ever (some wishing us "Guten Morgen").

Pictures of the village

During the drive the day before, we'd seen elegant signs for the "Travancore Heritage" hotel, and this turned out to be on the far side of the village. It was built in the traditional wooden style (like the palace), and it had the ceiling fans turned on and we felt immediately at home. We sat in the lobby and had a drink and read the papers, and that was how I learned that a strike (or "hartal") was planned for Tuesday. We had been thinking of going into Trivandrum on Tuesday for gift-shopping and sightseeing, but it sounded as if the entire city was going to shut down so we changed our plan to Monday instead. We'd chosen Tuesday because Trivandrum's museums are closed on Mondays, but clearly the museums would have to wait until another visit.

There was a cliff separating the main part of the Travancore Heritage from the beach, and to get to the beach you wandered along a path down the hill, between the handsome wooden villas, and then took a lift to the bottom of the cliff, where there was more accommodation, a second swimming pool (with a bridge across it), and a bar. We were clear by this time on where we'd be staying on our next visit, though I don't think we'd have been able to afford separate rooms at the Travancore Heritage.

Pictures of the beach and of the resorts

Monday: shopping in Trivandrum

Nikki's Nest had its own car, and it collected us around nine of Monday morning. We had been thinking of getting out and taking a walk along the main road, but it was too damned hot and so we just caught glimpses of Trivandrum as we were whisked from shop to shop. It's big on Gothic architecture (spot the university town), and the other public buildings were... not boring, in the way that Keralan churches are not boring. It was busy and not remotely touristy, and definitely worth another look (on a cooler day).

We went first to a fabric shop (next to an animation college), and spent a long, happy time picking out lengths of cotton. Then to a supermarket, partly out of curiosity, partly to see if the spices were as cheap as the RG had said. They were, and I got a 100 g bag of turmeric roots for R7 (< 10p), and a bag of black semi-dried things that I thought were fish tamarind for R13.50 (fish tamarind isn't a type of tamarind, but is the sour-tasting dried peel of the mangosteen, used in many fish dishes). Then to the state-run craftwork bazaar, which had an amazing range and bargain prices (beautiful silk scarves at R350, for example).

We'd been thinking of having lunch in town but we were done with the heat, and since we'd got all we needed out of the shopping, we were happy to head home for an afternoon of reading and squirrel-spotting (with maybe a beer or two).

Pictures from Trivandrum

Beach reading

While at Nikki's Nest I first read Jan's copy of Lost in Transmission by Jonathan Harley, which is an Australian reporter's account of his time covering India, Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with almost no experience or equipment. It was extremely readable, and also where I learned that "Jhelum" is a river in Kashmir (see pictures of my Jhelum).

Next I read a collection of Indian short stories that I'd bought in Kochi; I'm afraid all I remember now is the line (from a man standing up to his neck in flood-water), "A frog urinated up my nostril and swam away." And then I spotted Midnight's Children in the library and snatched it up, and that's what I was reading on the flight home. It also mentioned the Jhelum. I confess that I haven't finished it yet. I was thoroughly enjoying it when I was in full flow, and then I took a break and when I picked it up again I'd forgotten who some of the characters were. I'm leaving it now until I've forgotten enough to enjoy reading it right from the beginning.

Pedicures and searching for cocum

Later on Monday afternoon we took a walk along the beach to the Travancore Heritage (only about 15 minutes), where Jan wanted to visit the Beauty Salon (which had been closed on Sunday) and see about booking some treatments for the next day. The salon was full of a very lively group of women from the north of India, who gave Jan advice about treatments, which they insisted would take twice the time the beautician was estimating (they were right). Then back to the beach for a gin-and-tonic at the bar, surrounded by inane conversations that we could understand. Luxury.

Jan's appointment was for 10 am on Tuesday. She took the route through the village, and I followed around 11. The village was very quiet, and this was partly the hartal, and partly because there was a funeral that day for a local man who had worked as a security guard at one of the resorts, and who had died the week before when a fire broke out in its Ayurvedic centre. We'd seen articles about the fire in the newspapers, but hadn't realised how close it was to our resort.

On her way to her appointment, Jan had been trying to buy fish tamarind, asking for it by the name Nimmy Paul had used, which was "cocum". She'd got a lot of blank looks, and "Try over there," (to get rid of her), and had finally found the man who owned the Hut of High-Range Spices, which we had seen and admired just up the road from Nikki's Nest. He'd told her more about the funeral, and had said that his wife would be at the hut in the afternoon, and would have fish tamarind (also known as cambodge).

The salon wasn't as lively as it had been the day before, though the group had dropped in, insisting it was the beautician's birthday - while she insisted it wasn't. One of the other customers was an Indian woman who lived in the UK (and who had commented to Jan on my accent when I'd called in to check on progress), and who was apparently spending the entirety of her Indian holiday at the Travancore Heritage. Jan had told her about the things we'd done, and seen her starting to wonder if she'd chosen the wrong holiday. We got the impression that most of the people at these resorts had come all the way to Kerala solely for a beach holiday (with optional enemas) - and as a non-beachie I found this fascinating and baffling.

We had lunch at the Travancore Heritage. I'd been craving fish-and-chips for several days so that's what I had, and it was stunning. We walked back through the village, where the hut was indeed open. We both bought packs of fish tamarind at R40, and it turned out that it was the same as the black stuff I'd bought in the supermarket for R13.50. I haven't opened either pack yet, though when Jan opened hers she was disconcerted by the smell of woodsmoke and decided not to risk using it in the current dish. I also got a pack of nutmace, which is very pretty but which I am so unlikely to use.

Airport tales, with spices and sports persons

Jan's ride to the airport arrived around 5 pm. I heard her laughing as they were driving away, and some eleven hours later I thought I knew why, as my driver reached back and handed me a package with a Kerala Connections ribbon - which contained packets of pepper, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves. I will not need to buy spices for some time to come.

My haul of spices (from the whole trip)

and of fabrics

Trivandrum is a tiny airport with no shops at all in the departure area. I'd saved my last R1000 in case of a departure tax or other airport emergency, and then found myself with no way of spending or changing it - or even giving it to charity. On the plus side, Trivandrum did have an Immigration Departure Card in which the list of about ten specified professions included "Sports Person" (taking its place along with Doctor, Law, Government).

The departures lounge in Doha, on the other hand, has plenty of shops, including one selling the PlayStation3. I realised that, while in India, I had not thought once about the PS3 and the place it could (should) have in my life - which I think is the perfect measure of how thorough the holiday had been as a break.

I suspect this trip makes boring reading compared with some of my other trips, since almost everything was arranged for us. No opportunity here to go to the wrong train station, or to discover how long I'll walk to find a restaurant. I wouldn't want every holiday to be so "managed", but I think it was the right choice for this one.

Final photos: all taken by Jan, including one of me!

Three days in Tamil Nadu

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 14:07:14 GMT

Madurai is the nearest city across the border in Tamil Nadu and we were going there to see its temple complex.

The drive to Madurai

We set off from Kumily around 1pm. I was expecting a long climb over the Ghats to Tamil Nadu, but just a few kilometres outside Kumily, Shibu stopped at a viewpoint over a huge plain (see picture) and said that was Tamil Nadu.

Once we were down from the hills Shibu left the car in order to register his tourist vehicle, and while we were waiting two small boys came up and pressed their face and hands to my window, and were demanding pens and caps and money, and generally being obnoxious in a way we hadn't seen once in Kerala, but which Jan remembered all too well from her business trip to Tamil Nadu. Shibu told us later that begging is illegal in Kerala, and he was very disapproving when he saw beggars elsewhere in Tamil Nadu.

TN also had bullock carts, suicidal ancient pedestrians, woven huts, outrageously overloaded trucks (loads of straw or fronds that stuck out like an Afro), and ubiquitous dust and delapidation. It also had Congress Party billboards instead of CPI, and all of these were crowded with photos of faces - always a couple of large faces, and then 10-30 smaller ones (see a modest example). Most of the photos seemed to have been chosen to give the message "Do not, under any circumstances, vote for this man." Indian aesthetic values regarding middle-aged men are very different from those of the West - but I didn't get photos of the clothing adverts that made this point most clearly to me.

A couple of the political posters had a full-length photo of a man in a Robin Hood costume, so it looked like nothing so much as a pantomime ad. A few days later, on the drive south out of Madurai, we passed a series with a guy in different cheesy costumes (sultan, cowboy, you name it), and Shibu told us that the man was a film-star. I'd read in the RG that TN had a ton of film-stars-turned-politicians, but I hadn't expected to see them campaigning in character.

The drive to Madurai was over a huge, fertile plain, with mountains behind and to each side. There was a lot to see, with many small brickworks (and a district where all of the kilns had barn-like woven roofs - see picture), and with fields of sugar-cane, sweetcorn, bananas, etc.

Settling in to the fanciest hotel of the trip

The time passed quickly and we got to Madurai around 3.30, though it then took a while to make our way through the chaos to the Taj Garden Retreat - which is on a hill overlooking the city and used to belong to the Coates cotton company. We had a huge twin room with a stunning view over the city, where we could make out at least five of the towers of the temple complex.

Pictures of and from the hotel

There was a bar, and Jan could get her long-awaited gin-and-tonic. We sat on the verandah and had been thinking of eating outside, but Jan was being bothered by mosquitos so we went to eat in the indoor restaurant. I hadn't been aware of the mosquitos but when I looked at my legs the next day I found well over 30 bites (apart from the Periyar trek, I was wearing ankle-length skirts through the entire trip). I will never again forget to spray insect repellent over my legs.

The next morning Jan had a slight stomach upset. Nothing to keep her confined to the room, but she was felling a bit weak, and not up to curry for breakfast, though she did have one of the superb fresh-cooked dosas (a paper-thin pancake). We had our breakfast on the verandah, in the company of a pair of peacocks (see picture).

A half-day tour of Madurai

Shibu collected us around nine, and we met our guide at the main gates to the hotel (where I think Shibu had spent the night in the car - oh, the guilt). The guide was a woman in a lovely sari, who spoke excellent English. We went first to the Thirumalai Nayak Palace, a masterpiece of column-based architecture (see pictures), and then to the temple complex, which is dedicated to Meenakshi (another name for Parvati) and to her husband Sundareswarar (another name for Shiva).

What to say about the temple complex? It is huge, and has a thousand things going on in its different corners. As the RG said, it is a place you could go back to day after day, for hours each time, seeing how the mix of events changes. Our guide was good , though after a while one's mind refuses to take in any more names, whether real or mythological.

Exterior shots of the complex

Interior shots (crappy but atmospheric)

The interior set contains one of my favourite pictures of the whole trip. Our guide had been telling us just a few minutes earlier that absolutely every detail around us in the temple had mythological significance, but she was some distance away when we walked past this. On some level I regret not calling her back to ask her how this bird fitted in to the pantheon, but I don't think she would have taken it well.

Slightly related... (or, at least, this seems the best time to insert this digression)... When we'd been driving through town on our arrival in Madurai, I had seen a billboard for Hillock International School, which offered "Special Training" in Abacus and in Ham Radio (among other things). It's one of the few billboards I made notes on for which I was able to find confirmation online (damn you, Milwaukee Institute), and I was struck by the fact that the Location page of their website talks about connections that the gods Kannaki and Hanuman have with the hillock - in the tones in which a British school would mention a visit by a Prime Minister. Mythological significance. It's not just everywhere, it's mandatory.

Back in the temple... As we were nearing the Meenaskshi sanctuary (where non-Hindus are not allowed), we were approached by the distraught French woman who it turned out had got separated from her party and was deep in panic. Our guide took her to the broadcasting room and made a couple of announcements over the P.A. system, and when we checked back later she had been reunited with her party. I don't think she spoke much English, so she was in a scary situation.

We left the temple around noon and our guide took us up to the roof of a huge, high-class tourist shop to get a view over the top of the complex - though Jan didn't feel up to the climb to the very top and was getting keen to go home and lie down. Our guide seemed to want us to shop but we resisted and went to find Shibu, and then spent the next 20 minutes going a single block because of a traffic jam caused by a wide truck trying to get down a narrow street. Madurai is famous for its traffic jams, but judging by the number of people who came out of shops to admire it, this must have been an especially good one. I was quite glad of it because it allowed me to photograph aspects of street-life that had previously flashed past too quickly, such as the beautifully decorated diesel tanks on trucks.

Other pictures from the morning's tour

Resting and reading

Back at the hotel we rested, ordered room service, and then rested again. I had finished the Vernor Vinge book at Mayapott but had brought it with me, wanting to leave it in a hotel library so there was some chance that someone else might read it. We'd found one of the "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" books in the library and Jan was reading that, while I was reading an old issue of Granta (I am at least two years behind in my Granta-reading).

Until we went to the bar, we hadn't realised that the day was Valentine's Day; the outdoor buffet area in front of the door had been set up with red coverings for the seat-backs. We leafed through the papers and Jan was amazed by the amount of coverage given in "The Hindu" to the Australian apology to the aboriginal people (2 articles and an editorial), and was very moved by the accounts. I was also taken by the story of a 102-year-old British man who had just emigrated to New Zealand with this 89-year-old New Zealand-born wife. He was quoted as saying, "I wouldn't want to think of myself at 105, wishing I'd emigrated to New Zealand when I was 102." The newspaper also contained the following photo-caption: "Cyclists of Maintenance Command Sports Control Board." What could that combination of words possibly mean?

I am ill and travelling to Kanyakumarai, and I tell you all about it

During the night I started to feel unwell, and was sick at one point. Getting up, I was sick again just after I'd brushed my teeth, so had a conservative breakfast of yoghurt and some fruit (and a couple of Imodium), which I brought up again just before we left our room at 8. Check-out wasn't until noon, and Jan suggested we stay so I could rest - but I felt I had nothing more to bring up and there was no guarantee I would feel better in four hours time, and I'd rather just get the ride over with and collapse at the next hotel - in Kanyakumarai, at the very tip of India.

At 9 am I had to urgently ask Shibu to pull over (we should have warned him earlier that I wasn't feeling well), and after that I was expecting that we'd have to pull over every hour, but the next time was at 12.30, just 8 km or so from Kanyakumarai - and at a time when Jan had been thinking that I'd been looking better! On the whole, I was comfortable during the ride, and profoundly grateful that I'd apparently managed to absorb an effective dose of Imodium before I'd brought up breakfast.

The landscape was flat and arid, a striking contrast to the fertile Ghat-surrounded plane west of Madurai, and the main point of interest was the construction work on a four-lane, dual-carriageway highway. There were some sections in which both carriage-ways did appear to be complete and open, but people were driving on them as if they were two separate single-carriageway roads - most disconcerting the first time that oncoming car appears. Large parts of tiny villages were being demolished to make way for the road, but in many places only the front half of the buildings had been demolished (the part in the way), and the uninhabitable gaping back half was still standing - when it really would have been more considerate to demolish the whole thing. Jan expressed concern about the effect on the villagers, but Shibu said they were compensated and rehoused.

In the last 50 km or so, we got back in view of the Ghats, and passed through a huge windfarm. There must have been thousands of turbines, stretching over at least 30 km of the road we took. Amazing.

At the Seaview Hotel, there was either a cockup with the booking or a scam (or two). The trip notes said all rooms had air-conditioning, but we were told on arrival that we had one with a/c and one without, but could upgrade that to a/c for R1000. The voucher actually said one twin non-a/c room, when we were supposed to have separate rooms (an error I hadn't spotted until the day before), but the only quibble they had with the voucher was that it said breakfast was included, and they had us paying for breakfast. Jan paid for the upgrade and humphed a bit about breakfast, but if it was a scam I forgave most of it when we saw our rooms, because they had a wonderful sea view. There are several rocky islands just off the shore, one with a huge statue and one with a temple, and I had a superb view of both so felt I could spend the day confined to bed and still "do" Kanyakumarai.

Jan got me some fruit juice and also some rehydration salts, so I spent the day rehydrating, reading my next issue of Granta (The Best of Young American Novelists issue, which was a strong collection), snoozing, making ample use of the sanitary facilities, and throwing up just once. In its way, it was quite a pleasant rest. Jan had completely recovered from her stomach upset by the time we left Madurai, and we decided our ailments were two separate incidents, but neither had a clue what might be behind each.

Delighting in seaside tat

I spent a good, uneventful night, to be woken by a phone-call at about 6.10. This appears to be a compulsory wake-up call, to give the Indian tourists from Kerala the chance to get up and see the sun rising over the ocean (the Indian Ocean), instead of setting into it as it does in Kerala (the Arabian Sea). I got up and went down to breakfast, where I found Jan getting started on a R100 continental breakfast, so I had the same.

We then went for an hour's walk around town, which was a typical seaside resort with tacky shell-based souvenirs - one stall had the sign Name will be (Carving) on tha Sea Shells - and with an aquarium, an amusement park and a wax museum, and busloads of Keralan ladies gawping at the two foreigners (because Kanyakumarai doesn't get many non-Indian visitors). It was charming (I love seaside tat), though baking hot even at 8 in the morning.

One of the things to do in Kanyakumarai is take a boat to the temple, but the RG had warned that the crossing could be rough, and what I saw from my hotel room confirmed that. Shibu, however, had seemed very keen for us to do the trip (not yet bored with the sight of white women being violently sick?), but when Jan had asked him if he was going to do it, he said, no, no, he never took boat trips on the sea. I guess he just wanted to know someone who had done it.

Pictures of the town (spot the penguin!)

Shibu spotted us heading into the hotel and was touchingly relieved to see me well. The initial plan was to leave around 10 (Nikki's Nest, our beach resort for the last four days of our holiday, was only two hours away), but we decided there was no point hanging around, and we left around 9.

Heading back to Kerala, via a last temple and palace

The region from Kanyakumarai to Nikki's Nest used to be part of Kerala, and apart from Tamil-style temples and the odd bullock-cart, felt more like Kerala than like Tamil Nadu. We stopped twice: once at a large Hanuman (monkey-god) temple with a tower likes the ones at Madurai, and then at a palace used in the 18th century by the rulers of Travencore, and run by the Keralan government even though it's in Tamil Nadu.

I didn't go into the temple (I didn't feel like removing my shoes and socks), but Jan did and said it was large (though bags weren't allowed, so it would have been difficult for us both to go in, anyway). An old man had latched onto her and insisted on acting as a guide (and was a good one), but he was most unhappy when she gave him R10 recompense and came back to ask for more. Jan later asked Shibu what would be a reasonable tip in that situation, and he said R10 was fine.

I did go into the palace, since I'd read that it was one of the few surviving examples of traditional Keralan wooden architecture on a large scale. It was wonderful, with beautiful cool spaces cleverly built to capture the slightest breeze, and with ever-changing views over roofs and into courtyards. The outside walkways were very hot and rough, though, and a real challenge to bare feet. My first few barefoot moments were so painfully hot I was surprised afterwards not to find blisters.

Pictures from the wooden palace

We got to Nikki's Nest around 12.30, thanked Shibu, gave him an R6000 tip (generous, I believe, but earned), and took at least a day to get used to the idea that we wouldn't be seeing him again.

Two days in the region of Periyar

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:09:58 GMT

Periyar is a wildlife sanctuary and tiger reserve about a three hour drive south-east of Munnar. There is a village called Thekkady inside the sanctuary, and a town called Kumily just outside the gates, and the names Periyar, Thekkady and Kumily tend to be used interchangeably in the context of wildlife tourism, which is the main reason people come to this part of Kerala (the tourism, not the name-swapping). I'll use Thekkady as a general term here; we didn't spend any time in the village, so you can be sure that no references to Thekkady are specific references.

Finding Mayapott (our guest house)

The drive through the hills was gorgeous: tea at first, then lots and lots of cardamom as we got lower (Thekkady is at 900m, compared with Munnar's 1500m). There was one spectacular view that had a huge red CPI billboard plonked in front of it, and I so wish I'd got a picture. We weren't staying in Thekkady, but at a guesthouse called Mayapott that was on a cardamom plantation that the Trip Notes described as "20 minutes drive from Thekkady".

Shibu had never been to Mayapott before and had to stop several times to ask the way. None of our previous hosts had heard of it, though they'd all known each other - Jose at Mundackal mentioned over dinner that he'd been on the phone to Anu from Philipkutty, and she had sent her regards to us. Shibu had been told to look for wooden gates, and he found some with an uninspiring property behind them. I didn't think that could be Mayapott because the brochure had shown and described an unusual stone building, and indeed when Shibu asked he was directed towards a track. We took the track, which was long and winding and surrounded by high vegetation so we couldn't get any perspective on what territory we were heading into. We passed a few people, all of whom gave us "Why on earth are you going down there?" looks. And was that because they knew there was no tourist lodging that way? Or because they knew that way led to the house of mutant cannibals?

But eventually we did reach a house, and were welcomed through an archway, and then through a door into a tall stone-built entrance hall full of stained glass. There was a huge boulder erupting from one wall - because the house had been built around the contours of the slope, and also over a river as it turned out. We had a twin room booked (this was one of the more expensive properties on the trip) but were told they didn't have one available, so they were giving us separate rooms free of charge. One was off the hall and contained more of the boulder and an outdoor bathroom with ferns, and the other was along a walkway in a separate part of the house that was built on columns. Jan suggested I have it since its colours matched my wardrobe, which I was glad of since it was light and airy (i.e. good drying conditions), and I was dangerously low on fresh underwear.

Pictures of the house and its setting

We had lunch, which was OK but lukewarm, having been brought from the kitchen building (some way along the track, I think), not cooked in the house. Partway through we were joined by a middle-aged, upper-middle-class English couple, who were friendly but had a habit of talking over one another which we didn't quite know how to deal with.

While I was settling into my room I'd heard Jan laughing, and it turned out that she'd met Shibu and the staff and the other driver just as Shibu's attention was being directed to the other wooden gate, and the main road that went right past it. No tourist vehicle ever takes the track. The strange looks were now explained!

A tour of the cardamom plantation and recovery therefrom

At 4pm the young manager took us on a plantation tour, all the way down the track (which wasn't in fact that long once you knew that it did lead somewhere). The uninspiring property we'd seen at the other end of the track was the cardamom-drying shed, with tanks that are capable of drying many thousands of kilos of pods per day (see picture).

It was a very pleasant walk down the side of a beautiful valley, with plenty to see in the way of pepper vines, forest mango trees, strangler figs, birds and, of course, cardamom undergrowth (see picture). However, the other couple kept up a constant stereo stream of inane chatter (all directed to the poor manager), and Jan and I were finding it ever more difficult to bear. After the drying-shed we all decided we'd walk back around the other side of the plantation (along the main road), and Jan and I quickly pulled far ahead, out of earshot. The route was about 3km, most of it up some steep hills, and though it was good to get some exercise, we were very glad to see the wooden gates of home and to stagger in for a shower and a beer.

The shower was uneventful for me (I had a conventional, indoor bathroom), but both Jan and the English couple had outdoor showers, and the floor of these showers at Mayapott was loose pebbles, whereas in Kochi there had been a concrete pad to stand on (see picture). This is the way to do it, since pebbles are very, very painful for tender Western feet, as Jan and the husband had discovered at about the same time. They had enormous difficulty in getting the manager to understand what the problem was - which I witnessed, as the conversation took place over beers on the verandah - but eventually he went away and came back with spare bathmats for them to stand on.

Dinner was about the same as lunch, except an odd combination of dishes (boiled vegetables!), and except that the other couple started to get dissatisfied, and then for the rest of the stay they never stopped looking for cause for complaint. This was far more wearing than any deficiencies in the food.

Into the land of the tigers (and the leeches)

Shortly after we arrived at Mayapott, Shibu had told us that we'd been booked on a 7am half-day soft trek in Periyar, and would need to leave Mayapott at 6am (the thing about Mayapott being only 20 minutes from Thekkady will only be true once the new road has been built). We gulped at this and Shibu went away and then came back and offered us the 10.30 trek, but in the meantime we'd decided that the 7am trek would give us the best chance to see wildlife. Shibu had also asked us what we wanted to do in the afternoon (boating, elephant ride, etc.), and we had decided that we wanted to do nothing.

We had breakfast of fruit and tea/coffee at 5.45 and set off in the dark. I noticed a freckling of water on the windscreen early on in the journey but didn't think much of it, but when we were about 5km from Kumily, it really started to rain. Jan had a waterproof but I didn't (we were visiting in Kerala's dry season - why would I pack a waterproof?), and even with a waterproof, a 3-hour hike in this rain would be pretty-damn miserable (and animal-free, since they have the sense to keep out of the rain). Shibu got our entrance ticket and drove us into the park, saying the rain wasn't that bad, really (but then he was going to get to stay in the car). We piled into the Visitor's Centre, along with a lot of other damp, sceptical-looking people, some of whom were apparently being asked to sign a disclaimer that they accepted that the trek might be "tedious" - possibly not the word the park authorities had been aiming for, but a good word nonetheless.

But the rain was easing and at about 7.15 Shibu led us to a hut with lots of plastic chairs, told us to sit down, and then handed us each a pair of thin canvas objects. These were our leech-proof socks, which we had to put on under our shoes, and then tie with drawstrings just under the knee. The RG had mentioned these socks, but one had hoped that in the dry season... Oh, well.

Next Shibu took us down a slope to a river, where a partially-submerged bamboo-raft rope-ferry was taking a group of people to the opposite shore (see picture). Surely not, we thought, but then the raft came back and Shibu was gesturing us on to it - and at the last moment handing me an umbrella. I never opened the umbrella, since the rain has almost entirely stopped by then. We were on the raft with two other couples (one German, one Danish), and with a man in uniform who turned out to be our guide. It was 7.30, and we still had very little idea of what was going on.

It wasn't a great trek as far as wildlife-spotting went, with no elephants or anything else coming down to the water to drink (though there was a lot of elephant dung at the water's edge). We saw black monkeys, wild boar, langurs, and bison - and one particular starving leech in hunting mode while we were sat on a rock while our guide went to scout for half an hour. It was roaming the rock (see picture), heading straight for me at one point. There were lots of birds around but our guide (who was singularly uncommunicative, anyway) ignored all birds except brahmin kites. However, it was a very pleasant walk, and apart from a few tricky water-crossings (one leech-ridden), it was far less strenuous than our plantation tour the previous day.

Pictures from the trek

Adventures in Kumily, with armed guards

Back at the sock-hut, at around 10.30, we removed our socks, triple-checked our shoes inside and out for stowaway leeches, and then found Shibu and explained that we really needed something to eat, since we hadn't had a real breakfast. He took us to a KTDC hotel in the park, but breakfast was over and they were only offering sandwiches, but we had a pot of tea, which helped a bit. Shibu checked another hotel outside the park, but it wasn't serving lunch yet so we made money-changing our next priority.

Shibu dropped us off at the State Bank of Travancore, near the bus station and outside the really touristy part of town. The bank was packed and hugely confusing, and we had to take our best guess about which counter we were supposed to be at and how the queuing system worked. Jan was taking the initiative, and she got to see someone and got the appropriate form within about ten minutes. I took one look at the form and passed her my $100 and asked if she'd change it for me. As Jan said some days later, I had decided to treat the money-changing as a spectator sport. The man behind the counter seemed to be dealing with at least six customers at the same time, but Jan got her form processed in another 5 minutes, and was given a numbered token, which was for the queuing system at the separate cash window, and a few minutes later the number was called in English and we were done.

While Jan was dealing with the form, I was sitting and people-watching, and I'd been aware of a couple of customers asking a man standing by the clerk if he would pass them the forms they needed, which he did. A minute or so later I raised my gaze a bit higher and noticed that the form-hander had the other hand around a metal cylinder. He was the armed guard, holding on to the barrel of his rifle - and he was helping hand out bank forms. One of my favourite India moments.

We asked Shibu to drop us a little bit closer into town, and we'd browse and meet him near the hotel that Kerala Connections usually uses in Thekkady (Cardamom County, which was fully booked). A couple of blocks in to the walk we noticed a foreign exchange booth; it would probably have done the job in a tenth of the time, but we wouldn't have missed the State Bank for anything.

Jan spotted a stunning carpet in one shop and went in out of curiosity. By this stage of the trip we'd seen a lot of tourist shops selling necklaces in semi-precious stones, but most of the designs were too fiddly, with stones that were too small, and this shop with the carpet was the first I had seen with necklaces that were substantial enough to be compared with the lovely Indian necklaces I'd got from Jane. Jane owned a jewellery shop near Waterloo, and on Saturdays afternoons I'd go around to the shop with a couple of coffees and a couple of Krispy Kreme cinnamon-apple doughnuts, and keep her company while she worked in the stockroom. One of those Saturdays an Indian guy had walked in with a bag full of necklaces, and Jane had sorted through them in her usual efficient way, and bought about 20 (for £20 each, if I recall). I have two, which have been much admired, and I wish I'd bought more, since they were subtle but striking designs, with a lot of attention paid to the matching of stones (see picture).

Anyway... the necklaces in this shop in Kumily put the sort of emphasis on the stones that I was looking for, and the man kept on bringing out bag after bag of different stones, saying they could make anything up in 15 minutes. I was taken with the carnelian, the fluorite (a glowing transparent turquoise), and with some lovely, lovely moss agate, but they were all too long and chunky for my squat little frame. And then I finally asked a price and the tangerine carnelian was about £100, when I'd been hoping for under £20. Then he brought out some carnelian pieces in a quite different design, with several long cylinders of stone. It was shorter and much less chunky and looked very good with what I was wearing, and would also suit most of the rest of my wardrobe. It was about £80 and he said he could offer me a bargain but... I was comparing it with Jane's prices and even if I bargained him down to 75% (say), it wouldn't be a super-bargain. So I said I needed to think about it, and headed back to Jan to find her buying another lovely shawl and a beautiful painted box.

For lunch we went to Ambadi, a stylish-looking hotel, and another of Shibu's recommendations that had remarkably cheap food given the ambience. I ordered the White Rice Meal (Veg) for R50 (about 65 p) and got a large dish of Sambal (vegetable curry), a huge dish of basmati rice, a poppadom, pickles, two scoops of dry curry dishes, and jugs of two different types of yoghurt sauce. And it was delicious, as well as cheap.

Pictures from our walk around Kumily

I make my excuses and am a bad friend

Then home, and by the time we got there I was feeling a bit unwell: mildly queasy and burpy. I told Jan I was going to lie down and might skip dinner, and that's what I did. As I soon realised, I was just having a few hours of pre-menstrual malaise, but I wasn't hungry and was glad to skip dinner (for social reasons, primarily). I did feel bad about abandoning Jan to that pair but... I needed some alone-time. I finished A Fire Upon the Deep, finding a couple of pages near the end that had scorch-marks on them; Jane was a chain-smoker, and finding those marks I got such a clear image of her reading the book.

When the other couple heard that I had an upset stomach (for I did not enlighten them about the PMT), they flew into a panic about the Mayapott food. Mercifully, the dinner was immeasurably better than the other meals, piping hot, and with a huge range of good dishes. Mind you, it had started with a sweetcorn soup with a very muted flavour, as is typical of sweetcorn soup. The wife immediately started fuming about how it was like dishwater, and stage-whispered to her husband, "Look at Jan, how bravely she's tolerating it," (possibly not the exact words), while Jan was thinking, "This soup is the least of the things I am tolerating at this table."

However... they seemed sweet and sincere in their enquiries about my wellbeing at breakfast, and in their farewells, so I ended up feeling only exasperated with them, whereas the Swiss at Philipkutty seemed incapable of any kind of gracious behaviour.

Shopping, eating, and musing over Mayapott

We didn't leave until 11am, since Shibu wanted us to have lunch before we set off across the border for Madurai. We'd said we didn't want to have lunch at Mayapott (he'd asked about the place on our drive to Periyar, and we'd admitted that the food wasn't great), so he took us back to Ambadi, where this time I tried the Keralan Meal (Veg) at R30, where the only difference was that it had Keralan rice instead of basmati. I had decided overnight that I didn't care if the carnelian necklace wasn't a super-bargain - I liked it and I wanted it - so we went back to the shop before lunch, where it appeared that the guy had the necklace put aside for me. Of course in going back I was in no position to negotiate that bargain, but I'm only slightly annoyed with myself over that (see picture).

The other main crop of the area is pepper, and at many places along the roads we had seen pepper laid out to dry. For the last drive to Kumily, we'd asked Shibu to stop by one of these so we could get pictures, and a bit further along we also saw coffee (see pictures).

Mayapott was the first place of the trip that hadn't exceeded expectations, though I'm glad we got the chance to see it. The manager had said that the place can sleep ten guests, but when I placed my carefully-phrased praise of the building and surroundings in the Comment Book, it seemed that they'd actually had little custom in the three years it's been open. Most of the comments were very enthusiastic, including about the food, and I've been pondering what changes could be made to allow it to live up to its considerable potential (exasperating fellow-guests aside). I suspect it's a vanity project for the surely-millionaire couple who built it, and they don't have the experience of the business to know that their 19-year-old manager (whose only prior experience was in a huge resort) doesn't yet have the feel for what's needed to keep guests happy in a very small, isolated and expensive establishment. The staff need to spend a weekend at Olive Brook, I think.

Munnar: Mist and Tea

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:52:12 GMT

Up into the hills

Munnar is at 1500 m, in the heart of tea-growing country, and the drive gave us some spectacular views and some hair-raising moments on narrow mountain roads. It also gave us our first sight of tea fields, which are beautiful in a way I'd never expected: the bushes are dense and a bright intense green, and are all trimmed on top very strictly, but they flow over the contours of the hills (some so steep it's hard to imagine the process of planting and harvesting), and the paths between the bushes aren't at all regular. It's a lovely balance between order and randomness, for which I haven't yet found a good simile.

My attempts to capture the charm of tea fields

Olive Brook ("Republic of Nature") was a few kilometres past Munnar up a somewhat-flood-damaged, nearly-single-track road. It's surrounded by a cardamom plantation but we had to be told that the frondy, waist-high plants all around were cardamom. We'd been looking for the fruits at the top, whereas the pods are right on the ground.

An afternoon of reading, goats and mist

Olive Brook wasn't classified as a homestay but it had a similar feel to Mundackal, except that it had no fans or airconditioning, and that it had blankets on the beds. We were given an excellent lunch after we arrived, and then Jan went for a lie down while I sat on the verandah to enjoy the view across the valley and to read.

It was the first chance I'd had for a proper session with my current book: A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge. It was one of the books that Jane had left me. Well, not that book specifically, but she'd given me first pick of her books and DVDs, and I'd gone over with Roz one weekend last summer, and A Fire Upon the Deep had been one of the science fiction books that Roz had pointed out and recommended. I'd read and thoroughly enjoyed most of the others (lots of Walter Jon Williams), but had put off the Vinge book because it was nearly 600 pages and the cover blurb gave no idea whatever what the book was about. I'd made a start on the book in Kochi and found the first few pages really quite demanding, and the bombardment with new concepts continued at Munnar - but it was a thrill to be reading something so imaginative, and by the time Jan came to join me I was caught up in the momentum of the story and wanting to relay the best jokes to her.

There were a few distractions from the book, which added to the charm of an afternoon doing nothing. I had a view over the track, and I became fascinated by a truck carrying a water-tank, which went back and forth every twenty minutes. What was stopping it from delivering this sodding water-tank? Could it not find the address? Was the tank the wrong colour? Or what? I decided in the end that the tank was a professional traffic hazard, making sure that people got plenty of practice at meeting a truck on a narrow road. [It was at least a week before we realised that it must have been delivering water, not the tank.]

There was also a family of goats at a house just over the road. I first became aware of them when the mother appeared on the track, walking slowly in the direction of Olive Brook driveway, and bleating in a loud and demanding fashion. Then someone on the hill behind Olive Brook opened a gate, and three black kids came running down the driveway yelling their heads off. "Mum, Mum, Mum," - or, more likely, "Milk, Milk, Milk." They all headed back to the house, and could be seen doing goat-family-stuff for the rest of the afternoon.

See picture of goats and truck

And then there was the mist. When I first sat down to read I had a fine view across the valley, but after a couple of hours the mist came down (see picture), and it spent the rest of the afternoon alternatively lifting (just a bit), and then thickening even more. It was fun to watch, but I was glad I'd taken the advice of our Travel Notes for Munnar and brought a warm jumper.

Indian light-switches

At 7pm we were ushered into the kitchen for a free cookery demonstration (a fish curry), and then at 8pm we sat down to eat. We'd asked to eat outside, and were sat next to a lovely Swedish couple who were very keen birdwatchers. The only other guests had chosen to eat indoors; they were a young English couple and I was slightly puzzled by them, since what I could overhear of their conversation seemed stilted at best.

Then to bed, to find all the electricity switched off at 10.30. Jan later decided this must have been an accident, not Olive Brook policy. Every room in India seemed to have at least 10 switches, since there are usually lots of lights and fans, and some lights are controlled by more than one switch, though there was no detectable logic as to where the switch(es) for a particular light might be placed. It could take five minutes to figure out how to turn on the light you wanted - and sometimes you just gave up. Anyway... mistakes must happen with all these switches, and that was probably one at Olive Brook.

Reservoirs, carrots and elephants

In the morning we set off around 9 to go to Top Station, which would take us past some dams and reservoirs. It was very misty when we set out; on the track down Munnar there was a stopping place with the sign "View Point", and when we passed it, the world beyond the sign was an unbroken wall of whiteness (I wish I'd got a picture). However, the mist started clearing by the time we reached the end of the track and the rest of the day was lovely - except for the half hour we were at Top Station, when again there was nothing to see.

The drive was lovely, with the reservoirs mirror-still at the time we passed (see picture). The area is popular with tourists from northern India, and the roadside stalls were catering to them (they like carrots), while we were virtually ignored - which was refreshing.

We passed a spot where elephant rides were for sale and asked to stop on the way back to take pictures, and then a bit further along we passed a slope with lots of eucalyptus trunks, with a working elephant that looked as if it was being lined up to do some hauling. There was a man on its back, but stretched sideways over its neck instead of straddling it (see picture). I assumed he was making some adjustment to its halter, but then he slid headfirst off the elephant's neck (to be caught by his two companions), and we realised that he was incapably drunk. His friends shielded him for a while from the audience (another tourist car with two women had stopped, and we were all enjoying the show, including the two drivers), but then they just laid him on the ground and carried on up the slope with the elephant. We didn't stay to see it do any work, since what could top the drunk mahout?

More pictures of elephants from this part of the trip

More pictures of reservoirs and of Indians on holiday

Lunch, tea-making, and gawping in Munnar

We got back to Munnar around 12.30 and asked Shibu for a recommendation for a place for lunch. He took us to a very fancy-looking KTDC hotel called Tea County; we were wondering just how rich he thought we were, but the restaurant prices turned out to be extremely reasonable. There was a party of English tourists there who had invited their driver to have lunch with them, and while it was a thoughtful thing to do, Jan and I agreed, listening to the awkward conversation, that it was probably more thoughtful to leave a driver to spend his lunch-break the way he wanted.

After lunch we went to the Tea Museum, which was small but did have a working production line for Indian-style tea, known as "CTC tea", made from mature leaves that are Crushed, Torn, and Curled. The tea we get in the UK is known as "orthodox tea"; it's made from young leaves that are picked while still curled in a bud or "tip", and that are rolled in a drum for several hours but otherwise left unmolested.

We asked Shibu to drop us off in town so we could wander around for half an hour. It was a Sunday and people seemed to be very finely dressed, and there were lots of stalls of flowers for garlands and for weaving into people's hair. It's a small, rather scruffy town - if it ever was an elegant colonial hill station, those days are long gone - but it was still full of diverting Indian-style details.

A few pictures of Munnar

Something in Munnar that I didn't get a picture of was a bridge on the outskirts that had the sign Very very weak bridge. Not suitable for vehicular traffic. I liked the repetition of "very" - British signwriters just wouldn't do that (would they?).

Tourists talking and laughing!

Back at Olive Brook, we had an evening similar to the first except that we dined with a new couple: a Dutch woman and an older Italian man who both worked as tour guides in Italy. Annelies had just spent a month studying yoga on an ashram (arriving with almost no idea what to expect), and Rosario had just flown in to join her. The Swedish couple had had a very long day, with a drive to Tamil Nadu in search of the yellow-throated bulbul (which they had found). They sat indoors with another new couple (English and Irish), and we were all eight chatting and laughing and it was a great atmosphere. One of the best evenings of the trip, I would say.

The next morning the Swedish couple left early, and the remaining six of us had breakfast together. The Irish woman was a teacher, taking a whirlwind tour of Kerala during a week's half-term break. I'd overheard her the night before saying she'd fallen asleep at a Kathakali performance and I asked her about that. They'd only flown in to Kochi that morning and were exhausted. She'd fallen asleep during the makeup part of the show, and the cast noticed and were pointing her out to each other! She said there were eight performers, including musicians, so it wasn't the place we'd been. Anneliese then told us that at the ashram they'd been made to attend an entire all-night Kathakali performance, and were not allowed to leave. It had been hell, and she'd never known she could be so glad to see a demon finally disembowelled.

Oh! Before we leave for the drive south to the Periyar Wildlife Reserve... Jan was still getting up very early in the mornings and going for walks, and before breakfast the day before, just past the goat-house, she had seen a couple of giant squirrels larking around in a tree. She took a picture, which did show enough of the size and the bushiness of the tail to convince Shibu, but we didn't get another sight of them, even though we went back at the same time the next day.

One night on a rubber plantation

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:25:05 GMT

The drive to Mundackal: pots, elephants and Milwaukee

We left Kochi at about 9.30, for a drive of a couple of hours to our homestay on a rubber plantation. We took a small detour about half an hour out of town to a roadside cooking-pot stall, where Jan bought one red and one black pot. The man wanted R100 for the pair (when Nimmy had said they should be R40 each), and was unresponsive to Jan's attempts to bargain - which is irksome until you remind yourself that the difference you were trying to argue about is 25p, for two cooking pots. At each stop for the rest of the trip, Shibu insisted on unloading the pots along with Jan's suitcase, and then they'd get loaded back, untouched, when we moved on.

It was another enjoyable drive. Early on Jan commented on the various posters of elephants, and Shibu explained that it was Temple Festival season, and most of Kerala's domesticated elephants were booked for the festivals, which these posters were advertising. About an hour in we passed an enormous brickworks, and Shibu stopped so we could get out and take pictures; the people saw us up on the slope and waved to us to come further down.

I think it was at about the brickworks point that we started seeing rubber trees, with the diagonal cuts and with the little collection cup. As it turned out, we didn't have a chance to tour the plantation at the homestay, so I didn't learn more about the details of the process.

In addition to the elephant posters, I made a note of a couple of other posters we passed. One was for home furnishings: An innovative way to prove what exteriors mean to you. (I have the shell of a computer rusting away on my balcony. As a statement it's accurate, but probably not very innovative.) The other appeared to be for an educational establishment, Milwaukee Academy, with a picture of smiling people in red, white and blue uniforms; I saw the place itself in Kothamangalam (the nearest town to the homestay), but I didn't get a photo and I now can't find any sign of the place online. Why Milwaukee? I guess I will never know.

Lunch and hammocks

Mandackal Homestay ("a tranquil pleasure dome") was about 7km past Kothamangalam, up a narrow winding track with no sign. Shibu missed the track on the first pass but soon realised his mistake and turned back, saying that, "They'd changed the roads." Our hosts were Daisy and Jose, and I'm assuming that a couple of the guest rooms used to be their sons' bedrooms; one boy is at college in the US and the other is working in the north, and Daisy and Jose did say that one of the things they liked about having homestay guests was that it made the house feel full again.

There was a large party lunching when we arrived, who I think were just there for lunch-and-a-plantation-tour. After they'd left for the tour we sat down to a wonderful lunch with the other houseguests: an elderly English couple who were also travelling with Kerala Connections. They seemed very out of their depth, and possibly somewhat deaf, and it was hard to believe that they had already been in India for three weeks. One worried for them, but their driver (a friend of Shibu's) was presumably taking good care of them.

Over lunch Jose explained our options for visits to local attractions, and we decided to go to the local bird sanctuary that afternoon (once Jose had arranged a guide for us), and to make a 7 am start the next morning to see elephants from a rescue-and-training centre being taken down to the river for their daily wash. In between phone calls to guides, Jose set up a pair of hammocks on the verandah and insisted that we try them; I don't think I'd been in a hammock before and... it's not a dignified process.

Birds, some seen, some only heard

Thattekkad Bird Sanctuary was half an hour's drive away, and we arrived just before 4 pm. Our guide was Suresh, and he was accompanied by a young man who turned out to be a student guide. I think Suresh was used to serious birdwatchers (Thattekkad is one of the best bird places in India), and as Jan is maybe 25% serious and I am 0% serious, I think he found us and our slowness to spot and remember birds rather frustrating; he asked us near the start what our jobs were, and it emerged that he wasn't just making conversation, but wanted to know if we were professional naturalists, which I think gives you some idea of his typical clientele. However, I did successfully see and remember some racket-tailed drongos, a woodpecker, some golden orioles, the silhouette of an imperial pigeon, a spotted owl, and - the pride of the sanctuary - a Sri Lankan frogmouth, which was sat on a low branch among dense foliage, looking very much like a grumpy old man sunk in an armchair. I must say, Suresh and the student had the best eyesight I've ever come across. At one point Suresh pointed out a kingfigher on a wire on the other side of a lake. He'd seen it with his naked eye, and Jan and I could barely make it out with binoculars.

Every now and again Suresh would get very still and tense, and we soon learned that he was listening for approaching elephants. There are wild elephants in the sanctuary, and recently they have taken to attacking people. Suresh told us that there are people who use the sanctuary as a site for making alcohol from coconuts. They'd work up in trees (I think he said), and sometimes the elephants would dig up the stash (or rubbish?) from the bottom of the trees, and the people would set plastic sheeting alight and drop it on the elephant, and when it finally collapsed with its burns, they'd run it through with stakes. And so the local elephants were very unhappy with people. This tied in with a sub-headline in The Hindu that I'd seen at Phillipkutty, about rage attacks by elephants being on the increase.

At the very end, Suresh solved a bird mystery that had been nagging us since the first evening at Phillipkutty. From the trees behind the villa we'd heard a loud call of ahwoo, ahwoo that escalated with each repetition until it reached the point of hysteria - but we hadn't been able to see the bird that made it. It had been at the Old Harbour too, and we'd asked one of the waiters what it was; he said he knew, but didn't know the English name. We suggested the drongo, he looked doubtful, but an English couple who'd overhead said yes. However... after lunch at Mundackal I'd been looking through bird books and the drongo's call was described as aggressive, which didn't seem right. The description of the call of the Brainbeater Bird seemed promising, but the habitat was wrong. Anyway, we heard the call in the sanctuary, asked Suresh, and he said (dismissively) that it was the Asian Koel. I looked it up in the books back at Mundackal and learned that it's a type of cuckoo, and that it lays its eggs mainly in the nests of crows, and the places where we'd heard it were indeed well-supplied with crows. We heard it in many places, sometimes seeming just a few feet away, but we never managed to catch sight of one.

One hundred limes and four elephants

It was dark when we got back to Mundackal so too late for a tour of the plantation, which was a shame since they grew many things in addition to rubber, including bees. Dinner was excellent, with a lovely sour fish curry, and with superb home-made lime pickle which takes five days to make and two years to mature. Jose emailed us the recipe when we got home, and the recipe as sent calls for 100 limes!

Over dinner Jose told us more about the elephant rescue centre. The centre used to train elephants that had been trapped in pits in the wild, with two other elephants used to drag the wild elephant out of the pit, but trapping is now illegal and the centre only deals with rescues (e.g. calves that have become separated from their mothers). The centre is usually open to visitors, but two of the elephants had died recently of a virus, and so it was closed to reduce the risk of spreading the virus - but the elephants were still getting their baths. Jose talked about the strong bond that developed between mahout (handler) and elephant; apparently mahouts are notoriously heavy drinkers, and if a mahout passed out drunk in the street, the elephant would stand over him to protect him from traffic. [And I've just found a Handbook for Mahouts online.]

We left around 7.15 the next morning, and I was concerned that we were going to be late and miss the best of the washing, especially since we got trapped between two buses from rival bus companies who were engaged in some crazy competition. But in fact we timed it perfectly, parking around 8 am and just as the first elephant (a tusker) was being led down to the river. Jan took up the offer to have her photo taken touching him ("very bristly"), but I declined.

There were about 20 other tourists already waiting by the riverbank as the elephant was taken down the steps. It spent a few minutes at the water's edge having a copious crap and piss, and was then taken further out, persuaded to kneel and then to lie down on one side, and the two men then proceeded to scrub every inch with coconut husks, which they'd trim with knives from time to time, to sharpen. After about 20 minutes a female and two calves were brought down and went through the same process, though these only had one attendant each. Even further out in the river, there was a man having his morning wash, including brushing his teeth in water that was visibly enriched with elephant dung. Maybe it's good for you. It could be. I guess.

The scrub given to the elephants was amazingly thorough, and it was 9 am before the men with the tusker were done with the first side and got him to turn onto his other side, and we decided we'd probably seen the best and should get moving.

Pictures of elephants being washed

Continuing my adventures with squat toilets

Jose and Daisy had given us a packed breakfast, and Jose had insisted that we eat it in a treehouse nearby. The treehouse was in a State Forest, and we had to pay R25 each for use of the treehouse, and R10 each for entry to the park. When we got to the treehouse - at the top of cliffs overlooking a river - we found it was locked and Shibu went to get someone with a key. Meanwhile we were sat on a bench with a perfectly nice view of the river, and we started to eat our breakfast of toasted onion-omlette sandwiches and fresh pineapple, and do a bit of bird-spotting. The treehouse got unlocked and I went up with the last of the pineapple. The view wasn't that much better because the windows were small, but I was the one who got the first sight of three men punting down the river on craft made of bamboo poles lashed together - taking a very direct approach to the challenge of transporting bamboo.

The park was lovely and peaceful, but we were keen to get going and to get up into the Western Ghats and to Munnar in good time. First, however, I really needed to go to the loo. Shibu asked at the front gate about facilities, and a man came with a key and led us to a spectacularly dilapidated building. He gestured to us to wait and disappeared behind the building, while Jan said, "I think I'd be happier going behind a bush." Still, after he'd made the trip with the key it would be rude not to use the facilities, so I went nervously through the door and found a perfectly acceptable squat toilet. However... when I came out Jan offered me some antiseptic handwash, and when I held my hands out we discovered they were covered with red powder - from where I'd braced myself against the red walls of the toilet. There was a huge smear on the sleeve of my blouse, too, and some on my skirt. First priority for our place in Munnar: asking about laundry services.

Two days in Kochi

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:02:01 GMT

I would that sworn there would be takers for Saint Anthony's Tyre Works and Vaccinations in my last post. Oh well, shows you shouldn't take anything for granted.

Hotel rooms with an unusual water feature

Our hotel was in the Fort Kochi district, which is on a narrow peninsula that contains all of Kochi's tourist attractions (most of them colonial). The first draft of our itinerary had us in the huge Brunton Boatyard, but then it got changed to the Old Harbour, a recent conversion from a colonial building, and much smaller.

We had two Garden Cottages (see picture), which had doors that opened out onto the courtyard with its pond (see picture). The rooms were huge and airy, but the thing that made us gasp was the outdoor bathroom (see picture); most of the bathroom was sort-of indoors (it had a roof and everything), but the shower was in an open area that ran along the back of the cottage (and had plants and statuary as well as the shower - and also fabulous drying conditions for laundry). We were very impressed with all of it.

The local representative for the travel agency had been waiting for us when we arrived at the hotel, and he told us: that our driver (Shibu) would be our driver for the rest of the trip; and that our schedule for Kochi consisted of a cookery lesson that evening, a half-day guided tour the next morning, and a performance of traditional dance theatre the next evening. A definite change of pace from the houseboat.

Getting our bearings

By now it was nearly one and we needed lunch, so as soon as I'd done a first load of laundry we headed out for a walk along the shore. The main attraction in the immediate area was the line of Chinese fishing nets, which are huge pivoted things that take four men to operate (see picture). There were lots of fish stalls around and several restaurants that would cook fish that you brought in with you, but we weren't feeling nearly brave enough for that. We ended up eating in an Indian-and-Chinese place that the RG had said was good value; it was and the food was fine, if not a find.

After lunch we went in the other direction, past the Dutch Cemetery (locked shut) and many huge, very dilapidated colonial houses. I was very taken with a Food Court which had a big plaque listing the bigwigs who had been involved in its opening in 2004, and which was very thoroughly shut (see picture of plaque, and of the other side of the court, looking extra-shut). This might have had something to do with the fact that they'd built it in the windiest spot in Kochi.

The RG described the Parade Ground as "a piece of Surrey transported to India". I don't know where they've been in Surrey, but it was somewhere dry, dusty and featureless. However, the Parade Ground was enlivened by games of cricket and basketball, and by a practice session for a school marching band (see picture); the rhythm section was fine but the brass was atrocious, though they did improve as we watched.

On the south side of the Parade Ground we passed a shop that Jan said had been mentioned in the LP for modern Indian design. They had some lovely things, and though most were expensive, the item that caught my eye was only £7 (a fine cotton scarf with thin stripes in shades of lime green), and Jan found a bargain in the form of a blue flower bracelet (described on the receipt as a napkin holder).

I then took my loot back to the hotel and spent the afternoon working on my travel journal (an idea that Jan never ceased to find hilarious). At about 4.30 I decided I could do with a beer and wandered over to the terrace. The waiter explained that while he could serve me a beer, it would have to be discreetly because they didn't have a liquor license (few places in India do, because they are outrageously expensive), so he wouldn't bring the bottle to the table. All the beer we encountered in India was in the form of large bottles of Kingfisher which do for two glasses, and they turned out to be good at the Old Harbour at keeping track of the status of our bottle-in-progress. Jan joined me shortly and had the second half of this first bottle, and then we went to reception to wait for Shibu and our ride to the cookery lesson - though in fact there was no wait, because Shibu was always early.

The best meal of the trip

The cookery lesson was with Nimmy Paul, a well-known exponent of Keralan Christian cuisine (we saw her books in several places later in the trip). She lives in Ernakulum, the main residential and commercial area of Kochi, and a half hour drive from Fort Kochi, across two bridges.

When the door was opened to us, we found the front room full of smoke, which was disconcerting, but Nimmy explained that they always light incense in the evening to deter insects, and it soon dispersed. Her husband introduced himself as Paul, and we were confused for a long time about what the "Paul" in Nimmy's name represented. Was it in fact a "stage name", representing their joint business? Or was it her married name so his full name was "Paul Paul"? It wasn't until near the end of the trip, when I was reading Jonathan Harley's Lost in Transmission (about his experiences as a journalist in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan), that I learned that Indian men frequently go only by their surnames.

Their English was excellent and we sat and chatted. Nimmy talked about her exasperation with their teenage son, who they had sent to a Jesuit-run engineering college in the middle of nowhere, and also about how the communists have links to organised crime and about how one in particular should die in a car accident. She is quite a character.

Then we went through to the kitchen, and it turned out that Nimmy had recipe booklets prepared, so there was no need to take notes. We did a fish curry, a stir-fry of a green potato-textured vegetable, and a prawn stir-fry - and I say "we" because we got to do some of the stirring, whereas when we'd had a cookery demonstration at Philipkutty, we just watched.

We sat down with Paul and Nimmy served us five courses: a tomato soup; a platter of three starters, including the two stir-fries (and the prawns were incredibly sweet and luscious, the best I've ever had); the fish curry; a superb lamb curry in sauce with mint and almond-milk; and a platter of three desserts, including a wonderful carrot halwa. An amazing amount of work, and the combination and succession of flavours, textures and colours was superb.

The conversation was good as well. Paul was from Alleppy where his family was in the coir business. I don't think he said what he did in Kochi, but it seemed that he knew everyone, including the family at Philipkutty, the people at the next two places we'd be staying, and Das Sreedharan, the founder of the Rasa restaurants in London that gave me my first experience of Keralan food and were directly responsible for this holiday. I see that they now have a branch in Newcastle, to which shewhomust and durham_rambler have to go.

The food was all cooked in the traditional Keralan unglazed clay pots, and when Jan expressed interest, Nimmy explained the process of seasoning the pots (several days immersed in water, and then a week or more of boiling leftover meat until the earthy taste is gone). She said a pot should cost about R 40 (50p), and though Jan had doubts that she'd be able to take them into Australia (nothing soil-related is guaranteed to get through Australian quarantine), at that price it was worth a try. I don't have a gas hob, so I didn't even consider getting any.

When we had comfortably finished, Paul called for Shibu, and we were back at the hotel by nine. We found the courtyard and swimming pool all lit up, with a trio at the far side of the swimming pool playing traditional music. Just lovely.

A tour of colonial Kochi, with shopping and laundry

Our tour the next morning started at Saint Francis' Church (see picture), on the near side of the Parade Ground. It was the first European church built in India, and had been first Portuguese (it had held Vasco da Gama's corpse for a while), then Dutch, and then British, so it had an interesting range of inscriptions. I asked the guilde what the attitude was in Kerala to da Gama, since he did some appalling things (e.g. cutting off the ears of an emissary from the ruler of Cochin, and sending him back with a dog's ears sewn in place); the guide said that feelings were mixed, but didn't expand.

The next stop was in Mattancherry, a district on the east side of the peninsula. On the drive over we went past a large area with hundreds and hundreds of sheets hung out to dry. The guide told us this was a commercial laundry, and when we expressed interest he had Shibu stop and he took us inside. Domestic laundry is generally done by machine in Kochi, I think, but hotels send their linens out to commercial laundries which use traditional whack-it-against-a-rock techniques. There was a line of cubicles with men inside whacking away, and for the ironing they used charcoal-filled irons. Fascinating.

See pictures of the laundry

In Mattancherry, we went first to the Dutch Palace (a.k.a. Mattancherry Palace), which was built by the Portuguese and presented to the local Raja in 1555, and then extended later by the Dutch. It has portraits of the Rajas and items such as parasols and palaquins, and wonderful murals with scenes from Hindu mythology, which our guide explained to us very well. Photographs weren't allowed. [Ah. Wikipedia tells me that the Portuguese built it to appease the Raja after they plundered a temple nearby.]

Next, we walked the few blocks to the Paradesi Synagogue, the only synagogue still in use in Kochi. Kochi used to have a large Jewish population, but emigration (mostly to Israel) has reduced it to 13 people, in seven families. I was most taken with the blue-and-white floor tiles from China, no two of which were alike, but I have to refer you to Wikipedia for pictures, since photography was not allowed. Many things were not allowed, and the notices were all phrased along the lines of "No one is allowed to touch anything." and "No one is allowed this way." I liked the absoluteness, especially when it suggested that the prohibition applied everywhere, not just in the synagogue.

The route between the palace and the synagogue went through the spice trading district (which was also solid with tourist shops), and our guide took us into a warehouse where ginger was being loaded into sacks (see picture). Oh, the smell! It was as cooling and invigorating as air-conditioning. Jan's attention was caught by a shawl in a shop-window, and about 20 minutes later we came out with a shawl each (silk for Jan, and wool-and-silk for me). The men in the shop looked quite different from the people we'd seen elsewhere in Kerala - with light skin and faces drawn with straight lines, whereas Keralans typically have very dark skin and rounded faces. I asked the guide where the men were from, and he said Kashmir, which I should have guessed for myself.

We did a bit more browsing (our guide looked very bored, but this couldn't be a new experience for him), and I had high hopes of some stripey cheesecloth tops but they turned out to be ridiculously small. Finally we put our guide out of his misery, went back to the car, and then to the hotel. You'll gather that there isn't a huge amount to see in Kochi, but it's a likeable place.

Lunching, trying to name-drop, and being huge

For lunch we went to a North Indian place on the far side of the Parade Ground that Nimmy had recommended (after pretty-much curling her lip when we told her we'd eaten at the Indian-and-Chinese place). It was excellent. I had a thali and Jan had a huge paneer pasty, and the ambience was great: cool with high ceilings, and with colourful wall-hangings and a very friendly owner (as Nimmy had promised, though we never quite found the moment to drop her name). It was the Dal Roti on Lilly Street, and it really should be in the Rough Guide.

After lunch we dropped into a clothes shop we'd been seeing signs for around town. It had some wonderful fabrics, but again the clothes turned out to be ridiculously small. I'm generally on the small side of medium, but their Large size wouldn't even fit over my head. I remain puzzled by this, since the Indian women I was seeing around me covered the same kind of range of sizes as you'd see in London.

Again I spent the afternoon working on my journal. I was sitting outside my cottage facing the pool when I saw a flash of turquoise over the water. A kingfisher! A minute later it did another dive. And then another. I rushed next door to tell Jan - and then of course it never came back.

Baffling dance theatre (the short version)

The main form of Keralan traditional dance theatre is called Kathakali, and a full performance lasts over ten hours (performed overnight). However, Kochi has several venues that offer a greatly-shortened version for tourists, and it was one of these that we went to on the second night. We arrived at around six and found ourselves with the best seats in the house, since our travel agency had booked the entire front row.

For the first hour at most of the tourist versions you watch the actors applying their makeup, and this is an hour's work, since the Kathakali makeup is very elaborate. Cameras were flashing constantly and we wondered what bet he'd lost, but then a couple of times he deliberately held a pose while someone was up close framing a shot, and then gave a smug smile afterwards, like any old ham. After about 40 minutes a much younger actor came on, with a white collar or gutter glued around his jawline, and he sat down and finished off his makeup (which was mostly green).

When the performance started it was in two parts: an introduction to the conventions of Kathakali, and then a scene from a story. The introduction was narrated (Kathakali performers don't speak), and was demonstrated by an actor who had apparently given 35,000 performances (this was the number that Jan and I both heard), though I don't see how this is possible. He showed us the nine expressions that denote particular emotions and a few of the umpteen hand-gestures, and then acted out mini-scenes such as a swarm of bees and hunting fish. It was very skillful, though I was thinking that I was never going to remember or recognise any of it.

After the demonstration, the narrator described the scene they were going to act out for us, about a demoness who was on an errand in heaven when she saw a young heavenly nobleman and fell in love. She disguised herself as a beautiful girl and he was smitten too. She wanted them to get married immediately but he wanted her to meet his parents first, and the more she tried to use the prospect of sex to change his mind, the less he became convinced that she was a proper, marriage-worthy young girl. When he said he'd changed his mind about marriage she suggested they have sex just once, anyway, and he agreed. As they drew close she revealed herself as a demon and tried to kill him, but he had his sword ready and he disembowelled her - which seems to be how all Kathakali performances end.

The lord was played by the young green actor (a green face indicates nobility), and when he came out he was wearing an astonishing full hooped skirt, and had a near-floor-length wig. He maintained a noble, po-faced demeanour throughout, and danced on the outsides of his feet, which looked very painful. The demon was played by the older actor, and it took a real effort of will to believe that the heavenly lord was fooled by the disguise, but he did do coy extremely well. The actor who had done the demonstration wasn't part of the scene, but instead he sat at the back and sang the story, while two drummers provided the music, as they had in the first half - one of them looking spectacularly bored.

I found it impossible to follow the sequence of the scene and guess where we'd got to in the story. To me, it was 30 minutes of the same stern and coy dances in alternation. But it was fascinating, as an impressive attempt to depict a non-human world (albeit one in which parents must be met before a marriage can take place), and as a lesson in how much there is to be learned about Keralan aesthetic values.

I didn't take any photographs. I decided to wait until I understood the significance of what they were doing, and I never reached that point. Still, there are a million pictures of Kathakali online, all looking quite similar, it has to be said.

Last dinner and last morning

We got out of the performance around 8, and had dinner in the courtyard restaurant at the hotel. Jan was still getting up very early with the jet-lag, and the previous day she'd gone for a walk around 7 am and had seen a fish auction in progress by the Chinese fishing nets. So after breakfast we went out and I got to see some of the auction (see picture). We also saw a panwalla - making up betel nut concoctions wrapped in leaves, for chewing - who had a little cart with a neat row of jars. And then it was 9, and time to check out.

Seen on the drive to Kochi...

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:50:47 GMT

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.

Relaxing by and on the Backwaters

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:50:26 GMT

The Backwaters is a large system of lakes and canals that stretches for more than 100 km south of Kochi. Our travel agent had suggested that we recover from our flights with a couple of days at a homestay here, and that sounded fine to us.

Settling in amid the coconuts

The itinerary hadn't told us much about the homestay except that it was on a coconut farm, so we were taken aback when the sign to the farm led to an empty area on a riverbank. The farm was on the opposite bank, and they would be sending a boat for us. We found some shade in which to wait (it was midday, and painfully hot), and we watched a couple of women in brilliant saris beating the crap out of innocent fabric on riverside rocks a few metres away. On her business trip to India nine years ago, Jan had lost about half her clothes to Indian washing techniques, and this time she'd brought clothes that were falling apart anyway, and did not need to make it home. As I watched the assault, I whispered a promise to my nice new Rohan skirt and shirt that it would never happen to them.

After about five minutes we saw a punt pushing off from the opposite shore, and soon we could see that it contained at least five Westerners (none wearing hats!) and a lot of luggage. They clambered out, wished us a good stay, and then we and our hats were on our way to Philipkutty's Farm. The recently-widowed owner Anu and her mother-in-law Mummy were waiting to greet us, and then they led us into the main house and gave us a lovely lime and ginger drink, and Anu told us about the history of the island and of the farm. Her husband's grandfather had been involved in the building of the island and had initially planted rice, but that hadn't paid and so he'd switched very successfully to coconut. I think they've been doing homestays for about seven years, and they'd been featured in a travel magazine and a food magazine, of which I think they must have bought hundreds of copies, since they were to be found in almost every room.

Lunch was to be at one, the farm tour was at four, the sunset cruise at six, and dinner at eight. Anu showed us to our villa (see pictures) and opened up the shutters that formed the top half of each door, giving a lovely through-draft. These had to be closed each night, to keep the mosquitos out. The risk for malaria in Kerala is low, especially outside monsoon season, but as Jan said, "It only needs one."

Food, spices, sunset, and fellow-guests

Lunch was served in a pavillion near the main house. For each meal we turned up at the advertised time and were always at least ten minutes earlier than the food or any other diner, but we couldn't break ourselves of our habit. However, when the food did arrive... well, it just kept on coming. There must have been at least eight dishes for each meal, served in huge bowls that were placed on a Lazy Susan. It was all delicious though I confess that I can't now remember much about individual dishes - except for a potato dish with mustard seeds and curry leaves that we were served for our first breakfast; so simple, but such wonderful comfort food. And except for the fact that we got banana in some form of other for every single meal. There were only two other guests for lunch: a English couple in their 50s who had already been in India for about two weeks, mostly in the north, where temperatures had been below freezing. They were pleasant enough, though they were steadily to reveal their smug-and-clueless side - for example, complaining about the character of the French though it then emerged that they had bought a holiday home in France, and commiserating with a group of Dutch guests over the fact that their country had not done as much "conquering" as other European nations.

I was suffering rather with the heat and humidity (and lack of sleep), and took my thumping headache for a couple of hours sleep before the farm tour. I was a bit worried about how I was going to cope with 17 days of these conditions, but in fact I was fine by the next day. The farm covers about 50 acres, making it the largest farm on the 750 acre island, but the tour just involved a leisurely walk behind the main house. Still, we saw a lot. The main crop is coconut, but they also grow vanilla, ginger, turmeric, bananas, cinnamon, nutmeg, cocoa, citrus fruit, pepper, cloves, and a small number of beautifully flustered ducks. I hadn't realised before that turmeric and ginger are related, since I'd only ever seen turmeric in powered form, but they look similar above-ground (a spray of blade-like leaves about a foot high), and the knobbly roots look almost identical until you break into them and see the difference in colour.

Pictures from the farm tour

About halfway through the tour we were joined by a Dutch trio - a woman and two men. Again, they were pleasant enough, though the woman could be plonkingly opinionated. At breakfast the next day she put us very clear on the fact that the red jam was cherry and could be nothing else, until Anu gently described how she had made it herself out of her own red bananas; this exchange made Jan and me very happy.

The half hour of the farm tour had given me another headache, so I had another lie-down until the punt came to collect us for the sunset cruise. We went around to the west side of the island, waving at the houseboats passing in the opposite direction (presumably heading for their night's moorings), and then wedged ourselves among some water-hyacinths and watched the sun go down, while the sound of singing reached us faintly across the lake, and also the tooting of horns from traffic on a nearby bridge (in Kerala, the illusion of being "away from it all" never lasts long). It was lovely (see pictures).

Dinner was in the main house, though the family wasn't there because they'd gone to a church function in Kochi. All of the households in which we stayed were Christian, very visibly so in most cases; presumably Hindu or Muslim families wouldn't feel comfortable having Westerners stay as guests. We arrived promptly at eight but didn't get seated for dinner until nearly nine, and it wasn't a huge success as a social occasion. The English couple and the Dutch eventually found common ground with football and the iniquities of the French, while Jan and I sought entertainment in the house's geckos. At one point the English man asked me what I was making of my new Prime Minister, and it took me a few seconds to realise that he thought I was Australian - even though we'd been talking over lunch about the fact that I live just a few miles away from their son in south London. Throughout our trip, other people were to struggle with the concept of people of different nationalities travelling together.

Jan is enterprising, and I cede to a goat

And so to bed. I was aware of Jan getting up very early, feeling every second of her 5.5 hours of jet lag, and not helped by the 5 am service at the Hindu temple across the water (a temple with a rock-concert sound-system). I somehow slept through the service, woke up properly at about 7.30, and gradually decided that there was a rhythmic sound separate from that of the fan. I got up and opened the shutters, and lo it was raining - in a slow, lazy fashion. Though this wasn't what I wanted for the holiday in the long term, it was quite welcome in the short term since it had brought the temperature down, and was giving the world a misty, dreamlike look.

The rain stopped around midday but I spent most of the day reading on the verandah, watching the world float by (see photos) and looking for kingfishers. There was a kingfisher that seemed fond of the tree at the bottom of our path, but it did not want to be photographed. I got the Peter Robinson book finished (it did not improve), and treated myself to a walk past the main house, finding the path as difficult and overgrown as the Swiss men had warned. I got far enough around to see a coir-processing facility on the opposite bank (mountains of fibre), and to see and hear a houseboat under construction - but then my path was blocked by a glaring black goat. I did not want to get into a fight with a goat so I turned back and went for tea. After tea I dumped the book in the Library and took out The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, which I'd seen reviewed in the London Review of Books a few years ago, and which had sounded interesting. It was, and I must get my own copy (I passed the Philipkutty copy on to Jan).

The English couple and the Dutch people had left during the morning, and over breakfast we'd seen four new people being dropped off from a houseboat. They were two Swiss-German couples, and we met them properly at lunch. They seemed promising at first, with the men joking about how they'd been a lion and a crocodile during their walk around the perimeter of the island, but over the course of the day they emerged as very inflexible and hard to please, and they made no secret of their struggles with the idea of Philipkutty as a homestay, with communal meals at fixed times. Dinner was truly trying.

Jan was keen to get a look at the village on the other side of the water, and she went over after lunch. I was curious but... I wasn't feeling ready yet to deal with the "real" India. Jan, however, as she explained to me later, was feeling that we were being overly insulated and was impatient to start habituating herself to the aspects of India that she knew from her business trip were waiting for us (the details of which she omitted, since we were eating at the time of this conversation). The business trip was in Tamil Nadu, and in the few days that we spent there we did see cripples and beggars and had our civility severely tested by people who Refused To Go Away (small boys pressing their hands and faces against the windows of our car, hawkers touching our arms as we said no for the fiftieth time). But in Kerala there was nothing of this, and the only hazard of taking a walk in a village was fatigue from saying hello a hundred times on the way through, and then another hundred on the way back. Yes, there was plenty of poverty in evidence, but not desperation.

Anyway... Jan came back from her village trip saying that it was pretty poor and clearly didn't see many Westerners, since she had attracted a lot of attention. She'd waved to kids on the top floor as she'd walked past a school, and the news flashed around the building and a mass of hundreds of children surged out of the front door - only to stop at the invisible barrier at the gates. On another street, she had been shadowed by a group of five teenagers on the other side of the street, who spent several blocks whispering and nudging each other until finally sending a representative over to say hello. Finally he worked up to the real business: asking why she was walking down this street. She said she was just taking a walk, he looked baffled, said, "Well, okay then," and went back to his friends. She wanted to go back the next morning and see the village at another point in its daily routine, and I said I'd join her.

Leaving Philipkutty in a whirl of vanilla

However, the household was extremely busy the next morning, with a party of 14 French people coming for lunch, and with the coconut harvest starting (we got to watch), and with the two of us wanting to buy spices. I bought a bundle of 12 vanilla pods for about £4 (they would be five times that at home), and some packs of nutmeg and pepper for about 40 pence each; my luggage still smells faintly of vanilla.

Our houseboat wasn't due to collect us until 12.30, but we checked out around 11 and hung out on the verandah of the main house. Some new guests had just arrived from their houseboat: a gay couple from Australia. They were very laid-back and entertaining, and we enjoyed imagining their encounter with the Swiss. But there was our houseboat, an hour early, and minutes later we were onboard and on our way.

Philipkutty's own website

Our ordeal on the houseboat (too much beauty, diversion and food)

The houseboat had a crew of three: the captain Jose, the engineer (whose name I didn't catch), and the cook Nitin. It had two double bedrooms, each with its own bathroom including shower, a sitting-room with a dining area, and a lounging-area just behind the wheel (see pictures). We went in the direction of our sunset cruise, and then out into the main body of the lake. We saw an eagle sitting on top of a pole (probably a Brahmin Kite, actually), lots of resorts on the banks, many fishing boats (some with sails apparently made out of sacks), and several people in the water clutching long poles - who I think were diving for mussels.

I'd noticed some shorelines to the left where the lines of coconut trees were much sparser than we'd been used to. We tied up along one of these shorelines for lunch, and I discovered that the land behind the shore was occupied with rice-fields, not more tree crops - and for the rest of the trip we were firmly in rice country. There were white objects in the first rice-fields that I initially assumed were egrets, but Jan's binoculars showed them to be plastic bags tied to sticks. Nitin served us a lovely and huge lunch (see picture), we had an hour to digest, and then got going again.

We soon left the lake, and spent the afternoon on a canal-network between rice-fields, with plenty of village life to see along the banks: clothes being washed, children getting out of school, CPI flags aflutter (see pictures). At around 4 we stopped in the town of Champakulam, which has a Syrian Christian church that was established in the 5th century. The exterior was very restrained, but the interior was done in gypsy-caravan style, and in the grounds there was a grey lumpy construction - which was the first of many Lourdes grottoes that we were to see. The walk to and from the church took us past the first row of tourist-trap stores that we'd come across so far. It was interesting for the huge sacks of dried peppers, and for the notice of a strike posted outside the bank.

During the walk back Nitin took us to a woodcarving studio (St. Thomas Statuary) where they have been producing religious statues for three generations. Most of the work was in a light wood, but some were in concrete and some in teak, including one in progress that had been commissioned by a church in Canada. All would eventually be painted. The arms were all separate, lying by the body, and there was a hole in the shoulder for the pin that would hold the arm in place. I wasn't sure if I should take photos, and soon we were ushered into a salesroom full of small wooden objects, and after we'd resisted the pitch I didn't feel I could snap the emerging saints on the way out. A shame, as it was fascinating.

We emerged from the canal system onto a river, and around 6 pm we moored next to a rice-field, away from any village. There was a road and a church of the other side of the rice-field, and a water-pump a few metres away, but otherwise it was a very peaceful spot, even when another houseboat came and moored on the other side of the pump (see picture). We sat watching egrets and pond herons, and hoping for kingfishers. Jan noticed a slim, black bird with a forked tail, which was sitting on a power-line alongside the bank, and which we learned later was a drongo. And shortly after that I noticed a long, thin S shape sticking out of the water and moving along. It looked just like a snake, and Jan identified it as a Snakebird. It submerged, but then reappeared after maybe 20 seconds. We saw it several times over the next half hour, but only the neck - it never showed any part of its body above the water (see picture).

Nitin cooked us an excellent supper, but we couldn't sit out afterwards because of the insects, so we went to bed around 9. In the morning we had great luck with kingfishers on a powerline across the river (see rotten picture) - some common and some pied - and we also saw a Brahmin Kite snatch something from the water and then land on the top of a coconut tree, where it stayed for some time, mainly grooming its claws. One of the common kingfishers caught something, and then spent what seemed like the next five minutes bashing it against the powerline to make sure it was dead. Jan had earlier said that this was how kookaburras kill things; even when their prey is a sausage that they've snatched from your barbecue, they still have to give it a good tree-bashing before they'll eat it.

We set off again around 8, with breakfast of toast, egg and fruit around 8.30. Our last stop was Alleppy (a.k.a. Alappuzha), which is on a large lake at the midpoint of the Backwaters, and which is where most of the houseboat companies are based. Our company was Lakes and Lagoons, and I would use them again. One day is probably enough time on a houseboat, but it was a special day.

Arriving in India

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:39:44 GMT

The sign with my name

The flight to Kochi (a.k.a. Cochin) was full, which I had been expecting since there is a very large number of people from Kerala working in Qatar and a lot of traffic across the Arabian Sea. The flight was under four hours and we arrived just before 7 am local time. I had been expecting Kochi airport to be big and bustling, but it turned out to be a small provincial airport, and within maybe ten minutes I was through immigration and stepping out into a warm morning and scanning the signs being held up by the greeters. My name was not there, but the notes for the itinerary said to allow for a wait of up to half an hour after the scheduled arrival time, so I tried to settle down and look inconspicuous.

Jan had arrived from Melbourne late the night before and was staying in an airport hotel called Lotus 8, and the itinerary had the driver and me collecting her from the hotel for the trip to the homestay in the Backwaters, where we were to spend two nights. On paper it looked very straightforward but by 7.30 there was still no one holding my name, so I dug out my mobile phone and the list of contact numbers, and with the third number I tried got through to the owner of the local agency. He said he would make some calls and get back to me, and within a few minutes was telling me that Lotus 8 would send their bus to pick me up. About five minutes later the mini-bus cruised past and pulled in. I hurried over to it, and who should get out except Jan. She'd just happened to be passing through the lobby when someone holding a card with a rough approximation of my name had grabbed her saying, "You know this person? Come and help us identify her."

The hotel was only a few blocks away, and once there we were told that our ride to the homestay wouldn't be arriving until 10 am, but also that I'd been OKed to have breakfast in the hotel at no charge. I went to Jan's suite to freshen up, and was thrilled by the sight out of the window: Indian cows, with egrets following behind them. Jan had already had breakfast but she kept me company through my vegetable curry, and then we read the paper and then wandered down to check out at around 9.45. The car was already there, our driver Dominic came to introduce himself, and then we were off.

Indian roads: not the best way to observe colourful toilets

Over the next 17 days we sort of got used to the Indian style of driving, but if ever you see me sleeping and I'm doing this thing of tensing, flinching or leaning sideways at least twice a minute, then you can be fairly sure that I'm dreaming about being on a road-trip in India. We did a lot of overtaking, and each time it was hair-raising. The sides of the roads were full of pedestrians, frequently in groups, and you couldn't blame them for walking in the road, since there were no pavements, just rocky verges. The roads were also full of tuktuks (auto-rickshaws), which were very fond of darting over to the wrong side of the road (usually to drop off or pick up a passenger) - but then traffic as a whole acted as if lane markings were just a way of using up spare paint. Still, it mostly seemed to work, and while horns got a lot of use, it was only to inform people that you were about to overtake, and never to berate or intimidate.

Fortunately there were lots of distractions from the driving, most memorably in the form of advertising, of churches, and of sanitaryware showrooms. Most of the low walls alongside the road had advertising painted on them, and at first I assumed that this was for the business conducted in the building behind the wall, but soon realised that it was just wall-space on hire. Some of these paintings were delightful and I wish I'd got photos, but they flashed past very quickly. There was a series for septic tanks I was fond of, but my favourite was one for corrugated roofing that had a man in superhero pose holding a sheet of the stuff over his head. I saw this only twice in Kerala, and both times the painting was in a woodcut style, but I also saw it once in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, and there the style was more... hmm... Tintin-meets-cake-decoration, if you can imagine that.

There were also lots of billboards. Close to the airport there were many for glamorous-looking high-rise apartment complexes (there's a lot of development in Kochi at the moment), and Jan was very taken with those for wedding saris. Once we got off the main road the billboards were smaller, but they were to do more to keep us occupied. It was Jan who said, "There seem to be a lot of paintings of Che Guevara around here. Some a better likeness than others." I stopped looking for the ultimate portrait of a septic tank and started looking for berets, and soon said, "They've all got 'CPI' on them. 'Communist Party of India', maybe?" And then we started seeing the hammer-and-sickle and thickets of red flags and realised that "CPI" was painted on walls, lamp-posts, everywhere. Sometimes it was "CPI(M)", which we learned the next day was "Communist Party of India (Marxist)". We were flabbergasted by the level of political involvement all this implied, and asked Dominic if there was a big campaign on - apart from the 'CPI', all of the text was in Malayalam, so we couldn't guess at the issues - but he shrugged and said there was a meeting. Shortly afterwards I did spot a poster in English and it was talking about a 19th Party Congress, and we decided this must be the focus - though by the end of the holiday we'd realised why Dominic had shrugged: because the streets of Kerala are always like this.

If we'd done even a little bit of preparatory reading in our Rough Guide (me) or Lonely Planet (Jan), we wouldn't have been surprised to see Che. Kerala first elected a communist state government in 1957, and has had communist or leftist-coalition governments for about half of the time since then. I gather that the Maharajahs of Travencore who ruled southern Kerala in the 19th century had a strong tradition of social welfare, and the post-colonial governments continued this; Kerala has human development indices that are better than any other Indian state and roughly equivalent to those in the developed world (and also a hell of a lot of political arguments, strikes and marches). It's an interesting place.

I mentioned churches as a feature of the drive, and in fact these leapt out at us long before Che did. About 20% of Kerala's population is Christian, but from the number of churches around, you'd guess it was 80%. [Though you have to take into account the fact that Jan and I find it easy to recognise churches, especially when they have signs outside in English, and are much less aware of Hindu temples and mosques, especially when their signs are in Malayalam.] Kerala's Christians are almost entirely Syrian Catholics, and the church was supposedly founded in the first century by Saint Thomas (i.e. Doubting Thomas). The dominant style of church architecture is American 1950s futurist, frequently with a rocket-cone shrine in front, and a colour-scheme of peach and raspberry would count as subdued. Just amazing. The best ones flashed by before I could reach for the camera, but I do have a couple that were taken much later, when we were on foot, and that I think give the idea:

From a tiny village behind our beach resort

From Munnar, the main town in tea country

And finally: sanitaryware showrooms. For decades now, white has been the only acceptable colour for bathroom suites in the UK, but if India was ever traumatised by avocado suites in the 1970s, it has completely recovered. Near the airport, we drove past several large sanitaryware shops that had long lines of sinks and toilets on display, in all the colours of the rainbow. Oh, I so wanted to get a picture, but luck was not with me. I've found this site, which gives some indication, especially if you click on the "Colour Range" link.

By the time we saw the sign for the homestay, we knew we were really going to enjoy Kerala.

A weekend in Doha

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:32:27 GMT

An early but easy start

My flight was at 9.30 from Gatwick on the Thursday, with a 3 hour check-in. I set three different alarms for 5 am, was on the first tube at 5.28, got the 5.50 from London Bridge, and got checked in almost on the dot of 6.30. I can't remember the last time I had such an early start, and was amazed at how many other people were also on the tube and train at that time.

I was travelling for the first time with my new 35 litre backpack (my round-the-world one was 25 litres). I'd measured it at home and it seemed safely within the size-limits for carry-on, but one can't take anything for granted these days. As it turned out, no one at any check-in even raised an eyebrow at my taking it as hand luggage. It did get weighed a couple of times, but passed that, too. I keep on saying that it's 15 years since I last checked luggage, but it must be about 18 now.

I found a decent table-service place for breakfast, settled down to read, and the time passed very quickly. I was reading The Hall of a Thousand Columns by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, which was a Christmas present and is an attempt to retrace the travels in India of Ibn Battutah, a 14th century Moroccan traveller and writer. Mackintosh-Smith has lived in Yemen for many years and his perspective is more Arabic than you'd expect from a British writer; there were times when I had to simply let the sea of names wash over me, but that felt like just part of the experience.

The flight (with Qatar Airways) was only about a sixth full and had video-on-demand with a choice of at least 30 films. I can't think why I don't have a copy of Legally Blonde around the house, given that I seem to watch it whenever it's on offer.

Christine was there to meet me, exhausted because she'd played six performances that week of the school's production of Beauty and the Beast (which sounded excellent). We went to the Dasman Centre to stock up on snacks (not even taking time to admire their selection of lamps), and then went home for a chat and an early night.

Reformation and geekery

Since I helped Christine buy a decent cello bow during our Christmas trip to Hong Kong, she's become thoroughly immersed in the Doha ex-pat music scene. [What? I totally helped. I was the one who spotted the shop down the side-street.] Among other things, she's the boss cello of the Doha Community Orchestra, and that Friday (the first day of the Doha weekend), they were giving three half-hour performances as part of a charity event on the Corniche. She left at 8.30 but I hadn't fancied hanging around during the setup (the first performance wasn't until 12), so it had been arranged that I'd have a lie-in, and then the gang would take me for coffee and then to the charity event (the gang being friends of C's who I'd met before).

There had been high winds on Thursday night and C had been hoping the gig would be cancelled; the gig was open-air, and sheet-music, precision instruments, and high-velocity sand don't make a good combination. By Friday morning there was enough sand in the air to obscure the sun, but the spot on the Corniche was surprisingly sheltered from the wind and the gig went ahead. The gang and I arrived just after the start of the second performance, I was introduced to C's good friend Mark (a pianist, and easily recognised by his South African accent), and I settled down to listen - only slightly distracted by the sight of a bunch of lads bounding around on power-stilts (or whatever the generic name is).

In one of the classical pieces, I was surprised to hear successive lines of Luther's "A Safe Stronghold my God is Still", confusingly interspersed with twiddly bits. I learned afterwards that I had heard correctly, and that the piece was Mendelssohn's "Reformation Symphony". Christine (raised Catholic) was impressed that I'd recognised the lines. I'd never before thought of Luther-recognition as a sign of a Protestant upbringing, but of course it is. I was even more surprised when the performance ended with the can-can music; it seemed very risqué for Doha, but I guess they were gambling on those who would be shocked not knowing that music.

The gang had wandered off well before the end of the last performance, and the main plan for the evening was for Christine, Mark and me to watch The Prestige in high-definition on Mark's new Playstation 3 and huge TV. Mark gave us a tour of the PS3 (very nice), then put the BluRay disc in - and got a region incompatibility error. The only other BluRay disc they'd watched had been Casino Royale, which turned out to be regionless (the region information is very well hidden on the packaging), whereas The Prestige was Region A (US) and we think his PS3 is Region B (Europe). So... we watched the first half hour of Casino Royale, which was all my brain could take of so much texture and colour, and then we spent the next two hours searching online for PS3 region hacks (there aren't any yet), then rebooting the PS3 with Yellow Dog Linux (which Mark had installed a few days before, just because he could), and then when the default media player in YDL wouldn't see the disc at all, searching online to figure out how to install VLC (the best media player ever) on YDL, hampered somewhat by our complete ignorance of Linux. To even start on the installation process we had to get connected to the internet on YDL, and we did eventually do this after Mark had realised that the ethernet cable was defective and had replaced it (this is apparently the situation with about 25% of anything electrical that one buys in Doha). By this time Christine was flagging and we called it a night, but what an enjoyable night it was. I left declaring I'd learned to steer well clear of Linux and that I certainly didn't need a PS3, and like the good friend she is, Christine managed to act as if she believed me.

Shopping, real and imaginary, and toothsome mousse

I had a dream that was unmistakeably influenced by my exposure to BluRay technology, full of hyper-real details and luminous colours. In it, Christine and I were wandering around a luxury shop, enjoying the displays of exotic goods. There was a layout of almond croissants about 3m across, where each croissant cost about £9, and at one point Christine was cutting herself sample slices from loaves of chocolate until I calculated how much each sliver must be worth. Christine was a bit freaked out when I recounted the dream, because it sounded very much like what she'd heard of the glories of the Food Hall at La Cigale, a French five-star hotel that had opened in Doha a few months earlier. Before Christmas the string quartet of which Christine is part had played at a Qatari wedding celebration (women-only) that had been catered by La Cigale, and Christine had been very impressed by the food, especially by the chocolate mousse, but she hadn't yet had occasion to visit the place. We'd had plans for me to treat us to lunch at the Ritz-Carlton, but it was looking as if we really needed to check out La Cigale.

First, however, we needed to go to the Japanese pound store, which had been one of the highlights of my previous visit. Last time I'd bought 27 items (well, Christine bought them for me), but this time I was really restrained and came away with only six, including sheets of refrigerator magnets (one of fruit and one of vegetables), and little booklets of flashcards for learning languages (I must get back to work on Finnish).

The Food Hall at La Cigale was everything that my dream had promised and more (and this could only mean, of course, that the universe was telling me that I needed to get a PS3). The main confectionery area was double-height, with hoppers of brilliantly-coloured sweets up to the ceiling. And there were 17 types of nougat, and little boxes of coloured sugar, including a blue so intense and beautiful it might almost be worth the £15 they wanted for it. For lunch we decided to have the buffet, which covered a great range of types of cuisine, including sushi, and which my credit card bill tells me was remarkably cheap for what and where it was. There was a single pot of chocolate mousse left so we snatched it and shared it, and it turned out to have a real bite to it - nothing harsh, but a solid character waiting behind the sweetness. I look forward to hearing more from Christine about the food at La Cigale.

My flight wasn't until gone midnight and the plan was to go out for an Indian buffet dinner with Mark and the gang, but at 5pm we decided that we could not do justice to another buffet, and instead we stayed on the couch, reading, watching DVDs, and nibbling on pickles. I'd finished the Ibn Batuttah book the day before and was leaving it for Christine, and had started on Friend of the Devil by Peter Robinson, a badly written detective novel whose worst bits I was enjoying reading out to Christine, and which I was looking forward to abandoning in India.

Three countries in one post

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:25:29 GMT

Last day in Hong Kong

For our last morning we decided to have the breakfast buffet in the hotel, and thus got our one-and-only sight of congee. The RG had said that the typical Chinese breakfast was a bowl of congee, which is a fairly thin porridge, with savoury things such as spring onions and barbecued pork in it. The room service breakfast menu included a Chinese option, which consisted of congee, dim sum and noodles, so we knew it would be at the buffet: and there it was, steaming away in a cauldron. It wasn't appealing (I detest porridge, anyway), but the dim sum and noodles were wonderful.

We checked out around 10 and walked to Pacific Place to buy cinema tickets for the afternoon. We'd had our eye on Happy Feet but it wasn't on at a suitable time so we went for Casino Royale instead. Then we got the MTR to the Modern Art Museum in Kowloon, where there was an exhibition of bootees made out of hair that we very much wanted to see. There was a whole roomful of bootees, and also a huge room made of hair (a huge tent, rather), and they were matched in splendour only by the pretentiousness of the commentary. [The artefacts were well worth seeing, but far better left to speak for themselves.] In the museum shop C found a poster tube (yay!) and also found presents for the gang back in Doha.

I enjoyed Casino Royale even more the second time around: it seemed tighter, or maybe my expectations were lower. We had a steak at the croque-monsieur place afterwards, then walked to the hotel and waited rather over-anxiously for the shuttle-bus to Admiralty, where we planned to get the A11 but to the airport. C only had 23.50 HKD on her Octopus card and the A11 was going to be 40 HKD, so she went into Admiralty MTR to add 20 HKD to it, and was told that the minimum top-up was 50 HKD - which wasn't worth doing and she was just going to pay cash.

The last time I left HK I'd been unable to find any bus stops for the A11, but I'd since checked the HK transport website and learned that in the Wanchai area it went on a different street coming and going, and I'd assumed it would be easy to find the stop at Admiralty. Not so. We found a stop for the E11 (a slower, local service), and after a man assured us that C would be able to take her luggage on, we stopped worrying about finding the A11. There was tons of space for luggage on the E11, the fare was only 21 HKD, and the journey took less than an hour. The E11 is our kind of bargain.

Shopping and eating, with optional gecko

The wait was painless once we'd found the Starbucks, which is tucked away on its own in the basement - very odd. Our flight was at 12.45, and it went very quickly as I slept through most of it. We arrived around 4.30 am, and had a couple of hours sleep. The gang was all back in Doha but they weren't up to meeting that day, so C and I went to LuLu's for a megashop. LuLu's Indian supermarket is a prominent feature of conversation with C, and I now see why. I got a nice short-sleeved blouse for about £4, and we bought loads of food including olives and super-lush double-cream cheese, and a box of 32 figs for about £5. About half of the items in the produce section were things I'd never heard of (snake gourds, anyone?), and it was such a shame that LuLu's doesn't allow photography. While C was picking out oranges she called me over and pointed out a gecko that was hiding among the fruit - and you know I would have made Cute Overload with that picture.

Back home we had a late snack-lunch of our purchases while watching the first three episodes of Veronica Mars Season Three; it was the first time I'd rewatched them, and they stood up very well. The figs were perfect. I love fresh figs, but in the UK they are very expensive (£1 for two, for example), and in practice they're even more expensive than that because when you cut into them about half are dried-up inside and not worth eating. I don't think there's any way of telling from the outside how a fig is going to be inside, but I would love to be wrong about that. Anyway, every one of those LuLu's figs was moist and luscious right through (and I had about six, just to be sure), and with the double-cream cheese spread on them... Ah, bliss.

Spectating, and the extreme sport of squatting

The main plan for Thursday was to go to the races in the evening (they started at 4 pm, and were free), and we met the gang in a mall near the racetrack. It's a small gang, in two parts: S, who had stayed in Doha over the holidays; and G, B and their son C, who had arrived back from Sri Lanka a couple of hours after we got back from Hong Kong. S had been cold-ridden for the last couple of days, but was fortunately finding that getting out of the apartment made her feel better rather than worse.

We got to the races around 4.30 and watched three races, which took us to about 6 pm. The races were fun and very much a family event, with an amiable atmosphere. Gambling in the risking-your-money sense is strictly illegal in Qatar, but there was a draw for some sort of prize for each race, open to those who picked the winner, and this did help give the spectators a stake in the outcome. It took me until the third race to get involved enough to name my pick (it came 3rd, I think), but I enjoyed following C's picks right from the start (she did very respectably, though didn't win a prize).

For Friday evening we were hoping to go to the Qatar Open tennis championship (where Britain's hope Andy Murray was still hanging on), and in the morning we went to the tennis club to get tickets for all the gang. The tickets were free, as I think they have been in almost every Qatar Open, but I think I remember C telling me that one year they decided to charge for the best seats - which were then left absolutely empty, which you don't want when the whole world could be watching.

We had a lovely buffet lunch at a restaurant right by the water on the Corniche. We sat outside where the view and atmosphere were amazing, though it was a bit too chilly. Then home to pack, where I decided that maybe after all I could live without Cheeky Rabbit and Cherry Bear and after this sacrifice I was able to fit everything into my carry-on luggage.

The tennis was probably only about half full (it really was very cold in the evenings), but it was great fun. The match I saw was between Ivan Ljubicic (Croatian) and Robin Soderling (Swedish), and for a while we thought it would be over in 2 sets (to Soderling) and that we'd get to see something of Andy Murray before I had to leave to get my midnight flight, but Ljubicic fought back and won in a tie-break. Tense stuff! C didn't go back to the tennis after she'd dropped me at the airport, but she did see the final the next day, and while it wasn't as close (Ljubicic beat Murray in 2 sets), it was apparently just as exciting to watch.

Two things stood out at the airport: a pair of Keralan nuns, and the physically demanding nature of the squat toilet. I saw the nuns coming out of the arrival gate, and I knew they were Keralan because the back of each headdress was embroidered with an emblem and the word "Trivandrum" (the southernmost of the two main cities in Kerala). Some time later I was on my way to the upper floor in search of a non-squat toilet, and I found the entrance to the escalator nearly blocked by the nuns. I got past and turned to look down at them, and saw that the one in front had her eyes tight shut. It's not often one gets to see an adult dealing with an escalator for the very first time.

Squat toilets. They may well be easy if you wear skirts, but if you wear trousers then they can be frightening. They're OK if there are handles on the walls on each side, so you can support yourself as you move your centre of gravity as far back as possible, or maybe if the cubicle is very narrow so you can brace yourself against the walls. But if there's no sure system for support, then you have to risk either peeing on your trousers, or losing your balance and falling back into the toilet and against the rear wall - which could result in some very nasty injuries. The cultures in which I've encountered squat toilets also have a very significant proportion of women wearing trousers, and I just don't know how they cope, especially when they get old and frail. Maybe if you grow up with it you soon take the techniques for granted, as with stepping on an escalator.

Again, I slept through most of the flight, but I was awake to see some very clear night skies over northern Europe. In most places the lights were little pin-pricks, as you'd expect, but over Belgium there were some very, very large areas of diffuse, even light. Are they... humungous greenhouses, or something? Very puzzling. Over London, I could see the neon of Picadilly Circus - a first time for me, from the air.

And then I was home.

Seeing in the New Year in Hong Kong

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:39:47 GMT

Ambitions for brunch

We'd decided to treat ourselves to the Sunday brunch at the Mandarin Oriental. It's apparently one of the best hotels in the world and I was curious to see inside, and we were due a properly extravagant meal (about £25 a head, which is fairly modest in London terms, but at least twice what we'd been spending on other meals). We got there promptly at 11 am, and though there was someone moving around in the dining room, it wasn't looking at all about to open. It turned out that there was a special New Year's Eve event on, and they weren't doing brunch.

A minor disappointment, but I checked the RG and another of its brunch listings was Dan Ryan's Chicago Bar and Grill a few blocks away in Pacific Place (where we'd had croque monsieur after Ocean Park, and where I had spotted Dan Ryan's so I knew it still existed). We got the tram there, which was our first tram trip. The HK trams really are very narrow, and you get on at the back and move your way to the front to get off and swipe your Oyster card, and that journey to the front was quite a squeeze. We had a huge breakfast and then went to see Confession of Pain in the luxurious cinema next door. The film was a Chinese cop-story-of-divided-loyalties set in Hong Kong, not entirely predictable, and with some great views of Hong Kong. The layout of the auditorious was wonderful, the seats were huge and comfortable, and the layout and finish of the toilet cubicles were what C and I imaged you'd get if you flew first class (assuming they could justify putting that much marble in the air).

I was peopled out by this point and walked home to have a beer and read, while C went to the Hong Kong Island IKEA (some distance the other side Times Square) to look for poster tube for transporting her cello bow. I had finished the medical thriller and was now on In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner. I hadn't see the film adaptation with Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette, because the trailer made it look like something played only for the cheapest and most obvious of laughs, but I'd since gathered from rozk that there was much more to it than that, and I'd decided to give the book a try. It's an excellent book. It does have some funny moments and some lovely turns of phrase, but what Weiner does particularly well is make you understand what is driving the different characters, and to make you take seriously their perspectives and their sensitivities. When these people feel pain, so do you. I'm curious to see the film now, to find out quite how much firing the designer of that trailer needs.

There were no poster tubes at the Causeway Bay IKEA, and there were hellish New Year's Eve crowds building out there. After C had recovered we went back up the hill to Happy Valley, to a Japenese grilled-food-on-sticks restaurant we'd seen the night before. It was excellent, especially the sweetcorn and the chicken livers. Afterwards we went for a coffee, and then we spotted an off-license and got a reasonably-priced bottle of sparkling wine with which to see in the New Year. And then home to read some more and to watch New Year's Eve coverage with the sound off. There were no fireworks visible from our hotel window, but otherwise it was an excellent New Year's Eve.

New Year's Day at the beach

For New Year's Day we'd decided to go to the beach: to a little village called Shek O on the south side of the island. I'd been there on my previous visit, but that had been on a gray and dismal day and I was almost the only person on the beach, and I was expecting that on a lovely, sunny New Year's Day the place would be unbearably busy - but I knew it was worth going for the bus trip alone. It turned out to be perfectly bearable. We sat and watched the people and the waves for a while, then went for a walk along the headland, and then went to an excellent Thai restaurant we'd picked from the RG. When I'd been to Shek O before, I'd had lunch at a restaurant right by the beach, but now I couldn't see any sign of that restaurant; I suspect it had been torn down to make way for a large family barbecue area.

Home for a read and a snooze, then out to Happy Valley for a coffee, back via the road on the far, posh side of the racetrack. A cocktail in the hotel lobby, and that was our last night in Hong Kong.

We read a lot

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 10:59:11 GMT

Detective novels of widely-ranging quality

We'd decided days before that Saturday was going to be a chill-out day, and by the time it arrived we were very ready for it. Around 10.30 we decided to order room-service breakfast, and when we were finally up and dressed we went to the excellent Page One bookshop in Times Square, and then spent the afternoon reading.

I'm going to take this opportunity to backtrack and talk about what I had been reading earlier on the trip. My dad had sent me The People's Act of Love by James Meek to read on the trip, saying it was quite something. I'd put it in my "to take" pile, but then decided I'd better leave it behind, because it might be a book I'd want to keep, and I prefer to travel with books I can discard along the way. Instead I took a handful of books that had been passed on to me by my friend M, and on the trip to Doha I'd read A Free Man of Colour by Barbara Hambly, which is a detective story set in New Orleans in the 1830s. It's a good detective story, but the most fascinating part of the novel is the depiction of the situation of free people of mixed race during a period of transition from French to American attitudes and customs. I left it with C in Doha, and I've since bought two others in the series.

On the flight to Hong Kong I'd started 4th of July by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro, which is the fourth in a series. It was a gripping read but with an ending that failed completely to convince. C had read another in the series and remembered that having a stupid ending too, so be warned.

Then C let me borrow her unread copy of Cross Bones by Kathy Reichs, which she'd been given by a Secret Santa at school. My mum had left a Reichs book at my place after a visit and I'd given up on it on the second page because the writing was so bad, but I wasn't in the mood for my last book of M's and I was in the mood for another detective story. The writing in Cross Bones was also hideous, but with C at hand to quote at, I found I was able to keep going. It's a first-person narrative, and the narrator is clearly Reich's alter-ego (they have exactly the same job), and the narrator is vilely, facetiously condescending to all of the rest of the world, and the other three characters in the book with whom the narrator is happy to work all turn out to have exactly the same techniques as her for being vilely, facetiously condescending to all of the rest of the world. She surely thinks that she's being cute, cool and witty, and also that she has some skill as a writer, and she is very much deluded.

The book has many, many paragraphs that are written not in sentences but in sentence fragments. It is jarring and pointless, and when C came to read the book it pissed her off even more than it had me. She also does things like, "I waistbanded the torch," (the only example I'm willing to remember), which again is jarring and pointless. And instead of saying, "and other types of animals," she says, "and other examples of the Linnean hierarchy," which wrung from C and me an identical reaction of "Oh, fuck off!" She also leaves the major mystery in the book unresolved, which is unforgiveable. I think it's based on a genuine archaeological mystery about whether a group of skeletons is that of Christ and his family and followers, but if you take something like that on and hook your reader in with it, then you have to pick a side, and not worry about whether you'll later be proved wrong.

Promise me you'll never read this book. And never, ever give it to someone in a Secret Santa scheme.

I'd finished Cross Bones on Saturday morning, and I was very ready to get to Page One and buy some books that might actually be good. I bought three, and the first one I read was Harvest by Tess Gerritsen, a medical thriller and the first novel she'd written. M had passed two of Gerritsen's books on to me some time ago. I had not enjoyed the first I'd read: The Sinner, a standard police procedural with some very clichéd thinking; but I'd loved Life Support, a standalone medical thriller. Harvest is very similar in structure to Life Support (and not dissimilar in plot), and I should probably leave a good long gap before reading another of these, but they are damn good reads.

I think C spent Saturday reading 4th of July, and finding it gripping and then stupid in much the same way as I had.

Dim sum off the map

The RG said there was a good dim sum place up the hill in Happy Valley, but in a location not covered by their map. The concierge showed us the restaurant's street on a proper map, and we headed off past the cemeteries around 7 pm. The restaurant still existed and was excellent, and we were also very taken with the Happy Valley area, which had a good local feel (i.e. as an area where people actually lived rather than just worked or visited), and also had some other promising-looking restaurants.

A day trip to Macau

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 22:14:38 GMT

Macau is a set of three tiny islands just off the Chinese mainland, and an hour to the west of Hong Kong by turbofoil. It has a population of about half a million, of whom three are my friends N and L and their young son S. I knew them in London, where we met through the late, great minitrog, but they moved to Macau about eight months ago. There's a lot of work there now for experienced project managers such as N and L, but also L is Macanese. Before I left London we'd arranged that we'd meet on Friday the 29th, at 7 pm in the Starbucks in Senate Square.

Getting to Macau

C and I got to the Macau Ferry Teminal at about 11.20 am, to discover that the earliest available sailing was at 12.45. Not a problem, since there was a mall at hand to help the time pass. C went into a chemist's to get mascara, and came out with a tale of the best bit of mangled English ever - which she had by heart, and which was to be found on mascara packaging, and which I had to go and see. Of course I did, and I took a photo for reference, so I can quote it in full. The brand is called Fibrewig and the caption is: "Happy infinite romances occur in a newborn oasis. Wink your future!" Well-spotted, C.

The weather was hazy so there wasn't much of a view during the trip, except of a DVD showing highlights of a Japanese gameshow in which children do their party tricks, such as spelling out the alphabet with their bodies, or turning their bodies into slalom-scopes (you don't want to know more than that, believe me). Although Macau and Hong Kong are both parts of China, they're separate Special Administrative Regions (SARs), and we had to go through Immigration.

Happy in Fisherman's Wharf

Once out of the terminal we wandered into the new Fisherman's Wharf development (still under construction when the RG was written), which rivals Vegas in absurd tack and which we loved to pieces. The first thing you see in an artificial volcano (see photo), which apparently erupts three times a day. There was a mock-Aztec(?) gateway to the right of the volcano, and the gateway was flanked by a pair of cobras, and the cobras were wearing Santa hats (see photo). Having seen that, I can die happy. And then there was the Roman section, with Aztec(?) touches (see photo), and the Tudor section, with humungous American Sands casino in the background (see photo), and a float that succinctly summarised the glories of Europe, with Stonehenge dwarfed by a barrel of wine (see photo).

We had lunch in a Portuguese-colonial-style hotel near Oceania and opposite the Babylon casino that is the reason for Fisherman's Wharf's existence. The hotel felt as if it had been open a matter of days, judging by the shininess of the decor and the ineptness of the staff. The food was fine, but our waiter was shaking with nerves after he'd brought C regular Coke instead of diet, and had to ask three people before he could find out what to do about the replacement. We left him a huge tip, but I do so hope he's settled down by now.

Less happy in central Macau

After lunch we headed for the centre of town, though it took us a while to get our bearings. The feeling of the streets was quite unlike Hong Kong: the look was very Latin American, there were mopeds everywhere, and pedestrian crossings appeared to be optional as far as motorists were concerned so our progress was slow but skittery. Finally we made it up to the fort, which is the main viewpoint. It was very spacious and pleasant up there, but gave rather too good a view of an expanse of squalor and neglect. There's the odd decrepit building in central Hong Kong, and I understand that there are a few grim areas to the north of Kowloon (Mongkok is the name that generally comes up), but overwhelmingly Hong Kong seems loved and cared for, whereas overwhelmingly everything in Macau that isn't a casino seems... desperate. Not shanty-town bad, but some grade of slum.

We were reluctant to head down into that after our respite at the fort but... we had to make an effort. We took a look at the facade of Sao Paolo, which is the iconic landmark for Macau and which does have nice carvings. Then we went looking for Margaret's Cafe e Natas, which we eventually found despite the RG (it's in a maze of alleyways and can't be reached directly from the main street, which would have been worth mentioning). The cuisine of Macau has elements of both Portuguese and Chinese, and the iconic dish is the nata: a sweet egg tart. We had two each and a coffee, and mellowed somewhat towards Macau as we sat and watched the world of the alleyways go by. We think we spotted Margaret, who was resplendent in a floral-patterned jump-suit; she had an air of authority, and anyway only the boss would get to wear an outfit like that to work.

Family dinner in Taipa

We found the Startbucks and then found N. N's mother, sister, niece and nephew were visiting from the UK, and the plan for the evening was to go to Taipa (the middle island, where N and co. live), and then we'd all go out to a Portuguese restaurant. We tried for at least 20 minutes to get a taxi but there were none, so in the end we squeezed onto a bus. I believe Taipa is decidedly upmarket compared with the main island, but it was dark by the time we arrived so I couldn't really judge the standard of maintenance. The food was damn good, anyway. L ordered a bunch of dishes for us to share, and my favourites were the salt cod mixed with chips, onions and olives, and the chicken curry.

N and his family had come back from Hong Kong a few hours before, having spent a couple of days sightseeing there. I think it was N's mother who said, "I think two days is really all you need for Hong Kong," and C and I blinked and made very sure not to look at each other, since we were on our sixth day and felt we'd barely scratched the surface of HK. Discussing it afterwards we decided that the options probably were more limited if you were sightseeing in a large group, especially a large group that included children; after all, it wasn't likely that all six would want to, say, spend an hour exclaiming over snacks in an suburban supermarket. We also decided that it might be a article of Macanese pride not to admit to being impressed by Hong Kong.

They all knew Margaret's, which is firmly on the tourist route, and usually full of people photographing each other eating natas. They're good, but as I said then, "It's still only an egg tart." N's niece had been repulsed by the natas (too slimy and eggy), and was really repulsed by the sight of people pausing mid-munch to have their photos taken.

On building casinos

After the meal we went to Haagen-Dazs, and then C, N and I went to the Taipa Tavern for a beer while the others went home. N and L are both working on the development of an enormous casino complex on reclaimed land between Taipa and the southernmost island of Coloane, N on the architectural side, and L on the retail side. N told us a lot about Macau casinos, and also about bamboo scaffolding.

Gambling is illegal in mainland China, and in Hong Kong the only betting allowed is on horses, so Macau is the only place in China where casinos are legal. Until 2004, a single person, billionaire Dr. Stanley Ho, had a monopoly on casino operations in Macau. N said Ho had acquired the monopoly by offering to pay 90% of all government wages (or something similar). He had mentioned earlier that Macau is one of the most corrupt places on earth - which goes some way to explaining why the visible wealth from the casinos is visibly not being used for public works. My father was stationed in Hong Kong in the early 1950s, and at the time Macau was the murder capital of south-east Asia; and in 1974 Portugal offered to give Macau back to the Chinese, and they declined because the place was a blot and an embarrasment.

Anyway... in 2000 the monopoly came to an end, and in 2004 the American-owned Sands casino opened just around the corner from the ferry terminal. N said that its profits last year were more than for all of the Vegas casinos put together, and Macau is seen as the future of gambling. The complex on which he is working (the Cotai Strip) will have at least 14 casino-hotels, and the idea is that people will fly in for gambling weekends from all over the world. Even now, gambling generates over 40% of Macau's GDP and taxes from gambling form 70% of government income.

Now, I will defend vigorously people's right to throw away their money any way they damn well choose, but I'm less comfortable with the idea of people making a living off getting other people in the state of mind where they'll stake the college fund on the turn of a card. It is nothing to be proud of, and it's fairly sickening to see a culture preening itself over the prospect of making more and more of its living in that way. I don't want to do N and L out of a job but... I hope their next clients are in a cleaner business (and I hope to god that neither N nor L finds this post, and I'm dependent on the health of the oil industry so who am I to snark?).

But now: bamboo scaffolding. C and I saw a lot of building work in progress in Hong Kong and Macau, and in every single case the scaffolding was bamboo - tied together with lengths of black plastic. C used to work in the building services area and did quite a lot of site visits, and the bamboo scaffolding freaked her out, especially after we saw that the guys at work on it were wearing just plimsolls on their feet. I don't have any photos that show clearly that the scaffolding is bamboo, but I do have examples of the scale of building for which is was used: a new and hideous casino on the main island in Macau, and a block near our hotel in HK. N's casinos are naturally using bamboo scaffolding, and he told us it has a better safety record that steel scaffolding, and that the plimsolls worn by the scaffolders actually have a gap next to the big toe, so they can grip on to the scaffolding.

Return to Hong Kong

L gave us a lift to the ferry terminal to catch our 11.45 sailing, and we got to meet S, who had come along for the ride. N got him to do his party trick (apparently a year in the teaching), which is to roar like a tiger. For relief about halfway through the ride I got C to squeak like a guinea-pig, which she does very well and which always lifts my spirits. The exact same DVD of the Japanese game show was showing on the way back, and N and his family had recognised C's description of it over dinner, because they'd had it both ways, too. As with tiger-roars, one can have too much of a good thing.

It was 1.30 by the time we got through immigration. The MTR had stopped but we got a night-bus very quickly. I think the driver was trying to tell us that we'd be cheaper taking a taxi, but we'd swiped our cards before we really understood, and it was too late. Decent of him, though. We found the definitive Quickest Route between the bus stop and our hotel, and were home around 2 pm, tired, but very glad indeed to be back in Hong Kong, which is definitely the SAR for us.

Turtles and wolf-notes and a Birthday light-show

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 16:44:17 GMT

To Ocean Park, for some retrospective swearing

The next day, Thursday the 28th, was my birthday, and we'd decided some days ago that we were going to go to Ocean Park. I'd pointed out its rollercoasters and observation tower to C when we'd been on Lamma Island, and she loves rollercoasters and I very much wanted to see the aquarium again.

We had a later start than we'd planned, and grabbed breakfast from a Krispy Kreme on the way to the tube station (strictly, the MTR station, where we got some dirty looks because you're not supposed to take food or drink on the MTR - but we didn't care, because we're heckraisers). The last time I'd gone to Ocean Park it had been a windy, overcast day in March and there was no queue for anything, but this time it was a glorious sunny day during holiday season, and you can imagine the difference. We got our tickets fairly quickly, but the queue for the buses to the park stretched halfway around the block (OK, a quarter of the way, but it was a large block). Still, it moved quickly, and we were at the park by 10.30, only half an hour after opening time.

The map said that the next dolphin and sealion show at Ocean Theatre was at 11 am, with the next not until 2.30, so we decided to head straight there to make sure of getting a seat. We thought we might have time for the Raging River ride (where I had previously been the one and only rider), but when we saw that the queue went back past the "30 minutes wait from here" market, we gave up on doing any of the rides. From Raging River one takes the escalators up past the Mine Train rollercoaster, which I'd ridden last time and which had scared me rigid. Even from the escalators you could see how the ride seemed to hang right over the water and I was muttering, "Fuck, fuck, fuck," to myself as we went past. C thought it looked fun, but when I told her it had been my first ever rollercoaster, she: a) boggled that someone could have reached the age of 41 without riding a rollercoaster; b) agreed that the Mine Train was not for a novice.

We got good seats at Ocean Theatre, with a great view of the pool, the main cluster of rides beyond, and shipping on a sparkling South China Sea, giving us plenty to admire and discuss as we waited. I think the show was exactly the same as last time, but it's a damn good show, so why change it? I didn't have my camera with me but C did, and she got a fab action shot of one of the dolphin leaps (the second-to-last picture on the page).

Next we got in the queue for the Sea Jelly Spectacular, which I think is the newest exhibit. The queue was about half an hour and we felt we got our time's-worth, but the last time we saw the queue it was at well over an hour, and really they're not that spectacular. There was no queue for the Shark Aquarium (where you walk through a tunnel with the sharks and rays swimming above you), or for the Atoll Reef aquarium, which C agreed was the best aquarium ever. It's about three stories deep, and there's a spiral ramp that takes you down so you can see how the conditions change. It was packed, but it was still easy enough to find a spot to lean on the railing and take it all in for as long as you liked. No one was pushy, and everyone went "Oooh!" whenever the big turtle swam past.

By this time we were getting hungry. We thought we'd treat ourselves to lunch in the restaurant, but it was also packed, and it was self-service which wasn't what I fancied on my birthday. So we decided to call it a day. We didn't take exactly the same route back, but struck off down a quiet path near Raging River, and so found our way to the aviary, which I hadn't visited before. It was almost deserted, and it had a great collection, including a pair of black swans who seemed to have been dealt some duff instincts when it came to the mechanics of mating (very funny). We finally left the park around 2.30, feeling we'd definitely got our money's worth.

Shopping for rosin

Back in town we lunched on croque monsieur and beer in a French cafe in Pacific Place (yet another mall, with a cinema and a good selection of restaurants), and then we got the MTR to Kowloon. C plays the cello and China is a good place to find cello-stuff cheap (along with other music-stuff), and when we'd asked K the day before about music shops in HK, she'd recommended a chain called Tom Lee and had found the address of the Kowloon branch, which apparently had the best string section. We found the shop fairly easily, and it was huge. I'm not musical, but I love specialist gadget shops of any kind, and this shop was fascinating - and also carrying a phenomenal value of inventory. Music-stuff may be relatively cheap in China, but good music-stuff is still a major investment.

The main thing that C was looking for was a good bow, ideally a carbon-fibre one. Before the salesman came over we'd been discussing exchange rates and she'd decided that her upper limit was about £100. When she said she was looking for a cheap cello bow he brought out the cheapest (Chinese, I think), for about £20. Too cheap, so he brought out the next two: a German wooden one at about £100, and an American carbon-fibre one at £200. Ah. But the German one just felt like a piece of wood in C's hand, whereas the American one felt alive (I paraphrase), and she'd read superb reviews of the American one, so sod the upper limit. She also wanted rosin (check), and she also wanted to render the crappy school cello potentially playable in public by getting a new set of strings (check) and a wolf-note suppressor (not in stock!). But he called the Sha Tin branch and they had them, and the Sha Tin branch was in the mall attached to the train station, so that should be peasy.

He was clearly puzzled as to why C was doing this kind of shopping while on holiday, and C explained that she lived in a country where there were no music shops. Without missing a beat he said, "Australia?" and we fell about and agreed afterwards that that was pretty damn impressive for making a joke in a second language. And he also suggested she buy the strings first, which would qualify her for a 10% discount for the rest, and she came out feeling she'd got a bargain.

We had about an hour and a half before we were meeting K and her husband for cocktails (also in Kowloon), so we decided to head straight for Sha Tin. The very first time I went to Sha Tin I'd been staggered to come out of the train station and see an IKEA across the road (it overturned all my assumptions about Hong Kong and about monasteries), but the IKEA mall is nothing to what you see if you stay inside the train station. Again, we found the Tom Lee shop quite easily. The gentleman who came over to serve us didn't speak much English. I was very much looking forward to seeing C try to act out "wolf-note suppressor" (sometimes "wolf-note killer"), but he called over someone with more English and no mime was necessary. Neither store sold bow-cases, so C was going to have to find a poster-tube or similar in order to protect the bow for the flight home.

A fine Birthday evening in Kowloon

Our cocktail appointment was for the penthouse bar in the Sheraton, which has wonderful views of the lights of Hong Kong Island and a very extensive cocktail menu. We thanked K for putting us on to Tom Lee, and asked for her help in finding out if the other Malaysian restaurant mentioned in the RG still existed. It did, and she booked us a table for 8.30 (it was just around the corner from the Sheraton). We discovered that K was also an Imperial College engineer, though she's chemical while C and I are mechanical (we were one year apart and met through the college's women's group). K's husband is a doctor and had been to King's College (if I recall correctly), and we were swapping London student stories when the soothing muzak stopped and was replaced by something more rhythmic along with a deep American voice that proceeded to introduce the buildings on Hong Kong Island - which waved their lasers or flashed their neon, and all no more than about ten seconds out of synchronisation. It was 8 pm, and apparently this happens every night at 8 pm. The show went on for about 15 minutes (with the voice-over only for the first few minutes), and C and I loved it, while K and Dr K shook their heads and despaired. "I wonder who has the job of coordinating all this," said C. "I don't know," said Dr K, "but he should be fired."

K and Dr K had another engagement, so they pointed us in the direction of the restaurant and headed off. The restaurant (Mrs Khan's) was in a basement but had a very pleasant modern ambiance (C recognised a lot of the furniture from IKEA). There was a time when I ate a lot of Malaysian food but I didn't recognise more than four or five dishes on the menu. We ordered mixed satay to start, and for the main course rice with crab and ginger, and Little India Curry Fried Noodles - which we ordered mainly so we could find out what the hell it was (a mixture of meats and vegetables, in a very rich sauce). It was superb, and with two beers it came to a total of about £15, which means that C got off very lightly in our long-standing tradition of buying a birthday meal for each other. It was the one place that C was making plans for us to go back to a second time, and since she was usually happy for me to dictate the schedule for the day, I think that says a lot about Mrs Khan's.

Extreme dim sum, and the void

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 16:12:42 GMT

Breakfast, shoes, and cemeteries
During my previous visit to HK, I'd had breakfast every day in the Delifrance in the small mall in the World Trade Centre building, which is by the harbour. I'd enjoyed having that little routine and I wanted to repeat it just once on this visit, so we headed there on the morning on Wednesday the 27th. Alas, that Delifrance has been replaced by a juice bar, and C and I need coffee first thing not juice, so we went to the Starbucks next door.

After breakfast C went into Sogo (a Japanese department store) to check out their selection of Clarks shoes. C has large feet and frequently finds that she has to buy men's shoes - whereas I have the opposite problem and may only find a fit in the children's section. The Clarks shoes in Sogo were ridiculously expensive, so C gave up on the idea of finding shoes in HK and we went to the racecourse to find the time of that evening's meeting. The RG said that Happy Valley usually has racing on Wednesday evenings so that was our plan for the evening, but when we eventually found the public entrance and the schedule posted beside it, we discovered that the general rule does not apply over Christmas. There had been special Boxing Day racing at Sha Tin the day before (where Sha Tin is usually weekends only), and that was the last of the racing for the year. Bum!

I knew from my previous visit that the slopes immediately to the west of the racecourse were covered with cemeteries, but we didn't get a look at them until our walk back to the hotel. We went into the first entrance we came to, thinking it would be a nice route back to the hotel, but in fact there are three separate cemeteries, with no way between them. We'd wandered in to the Parsee cemetery, which looked like a nice restful place to come and read when HK had worn us out (see photo), and the next one is Catholic, and the third is Muslim. Later I found a window on our floor of the hotel that looked out over the cemeteries, and while the photo doesn't capture the bizarreness of the location, I hope it does capture something.

Adventure with tea and eggs

Back at the hotel there was the message I'd been hoping for about our lunch plans with K - which whom I had briefly worked in London, and who had come home to HK about a year ago. She wanted to take us for dim sum in one of the most traditional tea houses in HK, and we were going to meet her by the fountain in the Landmark Mall in Central (the main business district). We decided to walk there, which took less than an hour and was fun. Central has a lot of busy roads but it also has a lot of pedestrian walkways across them (see photo), so there was more entertainment that usual in figuring out where to cross.

The tea house that K took us to did appear in the RG, but it would take a braver tourist than me to go there without a local guide. For a start: you do not wait by the entrance for the table, because it's not considered the staff's business to show you to one; instead, you look for a table that looks likely to come free, and you go and stand by it. K did the standing for us while we cowered by the till. People at a couple of other tables gestured to us to join them, but we gestured back (or tried to) that our friend was taking care of the table-thing.

We didn't have to wait very long, and then there was the next trap-for-the-novice: the tea. Via K we'd asked for jasmine tea, while K I think had green tea, and the two men with whom we were sharing the table ordered a deep-brown tea that is very traditional to have with dim sum because it supposedly... eats most of the fat for you, or something like that. We each received a medium-sized lidded bowl full of tea-leaves and a small handleless cup, and there were also two large bowls, one for each group on the table. Water was poured from a kettle into the medium-sized bowls, but this wasn't for us to drink: K immediately poured the tea from the three bowls into our large bowl, and proceeded to wash our cups, rice-bowls and chop-sticks. Fascinating! Then another round from the kettle, and we were free to start making a hellish mess pouring tea from our medium-sized bowls into our cups - not that we were the only ones making a mess.

We'd arrived around 2.15, and the lunchtime dim sum service was winding down; the restaurant was packed, but most people were ordering off the menu. There weren't many trolleys around, and the few that passed us had nothing but bird-feet, which we'd both agreed wasn't for us. After the second bird-feet trolley K got up and went to check out the other trolleys in the room, and came back with some nice pork dumplings, and then on her second trawl she came back with something that involved deep-fried fishbelly, which doesn't taste of much in itself but has a remarkably spongy texture and is good at absorbing sauces. After that K went straight for the kitchen, but after a couple more dishes we had to admit that the dim sum was over for the day, at least in that particular tea room.

K decided to take us back up the road to a restaurant that she had pointed out earlier, as one that was particularly famous for its roast goose. We went in past a sign announcing that they'd run out of goose, but that wasn't a problem because we were there for the dim sum. They didn't do trolleys in that restaurant and instead we ordered four dishes from the menu. They were all very good, but my surprise favourite was the steamed bun with goose-liver sausage; I generally find the steamed buns too stodgy and gluey, but this one was lovely and light, and the sweetness went very well with the dark, intense flavour of the sausage. But before the dim sum arrived we were served a snack-plate with half a preserved egg each and some pickled ginger, and the waiting time flew by as we boggled over the eggs (see photo); it is extraordinary how the white turns transparent as it turns brown, and how the yolk turns black (among other shades of murk), but these are not changes that make me want to put something into my mouth, and K didn't for a second expect us to (although the women at the next table made theirs vanish in no time).

Vertigo, what vertigo? (Oh, that vertigo)

Finally we were full, and pestering K to take us sight-seeing. The street with the restaurants was at the start of the Mid-Levels Escalator, which I'd never been on and was keen to ride. It's a sequence of about 13 covered escalators, each rising about 10 m. In the lower stretches it goes past lots of shops and restaurants in the trendy SoHo area (lots of tapas bars at the moment, from what we could see), and then it turns residential. It's great for looking in windows and for people-watching, and for thinking, "What must these slopes be like in monsoon season?"

We headed slowly down towards the east, on a route that demonstrated that motorway underpasses can be both dramatic and attractive (see photo) and that took us through the Botanic and Zoological Gardens (pleasant and free, but they were lying about having a jaguar). We came out near the Peak Tram Terminus around 6 pm, which was when K had to head home to Kowloon to get ready for a wedding reception. We made arrangements to meet for cocktails the next evening, and then C and I went to join the huge queue for the tram.

I'd taken the tram on my previous visit but that had been during the day, and I was keen to see the view at night. The queue moved very quickly and we were up at the Peak by about 6.30. I think the Peak Tower has been redeveloped since I was there, but also the main viewing areas were closed on my last visit because of high winds, so I definitely hadn't done the escalator ride up to the top of the Peak Tower. The escalators are glass-sided, and I was just about to follow C onto the first one when I glanced casually to my left, saw that I was poised over a 360 m black void (with the odd light twinkling to show me just how far it was down), and I immediately backed away. I can cope with heights as long as there is an opaque barrier up to waist-level, and as long as the rest of the world is being solid and reliable, but if the walls are nothing but glass and I'm on something that's moving, then my immediate reaction is one of panic, and I have to get out and take some time to come up with a plan.

After about two minutes I had it: I will not look to the left; and I got back in the line for the escalator and made it to the next level. By this time C had come down to look for me, but she heard my yells, and we were soon heading up the remaning four or five escalators together. On the viewing platform at the top, I clung to the wall at the back while C roamed around taking photos. The night-time view is stunning, and I'd make the trip again, but for a wuss like me the day-time is easier: the drop is visible and therefore limited (see photo from previous trip), whereas at night you can easily believe that it is infinite.

On each level of the escalator ride there were shops and restaurants and other entertainments, and on the next to last level there was a virtual-reality amusement arcade, full of adolescents. Why would you travel up to a viewpoint like that, only to stick your head in a helmet and fight something that doesn't exist? Well, that is adolescents for you. The last time I went on a Thames boat-trip, I went downstairs at one point to get something from the cafe, and discovered that the downstairs section was full of teenagers sitting around looking bored, staring across the room at other teenagers. As far as they were concerned, there was no view outside that cabin.

Once safely down the escalators, we wandered around looking for a place to get a drink, and discovering the extent of the Peak Galleria shopping mall. It says a lot about Hong Kong: you've got yourself two thirds of the way up a mountain and what do they have waiting for you? An enormous shopping mall. However... we passed a large shoe-shop and C spotted some Merrill shoes - a brand with which she'd had excellent experiences in the past. She went in while I went to the loo, and when I came back she was smiling the smile of someone who has found the perfect shoes, and found them cheap. While she was paying I browsed, and within seconds had spotted a really cute pair of brown ankle-boots, which they did have in my size. It hadn't occured to me before that HK would be a great place for me to buy shoes, since it's full of people who are about my size.

We had a pleasant drink in Cafe Deco, with a great table by the window for more of that stunning view. The queue for the tram was much shorter going down, and once down we headed for a cluster of restaurants that the RG showed at the end of Lockhart Road - but which all now appear to be either girly bars, or seedy pubs full of Westerners getting up the courage to go into the girly bars. We ended up eating in the Happy Foot Restaurant (or was it Giant Foot?), where what we received bore only a casual resemblance to what we'd ordered (pork and sweetcorn in my case, when I'd definitely ordered pickled cabbage with shredded pork), but it was good and cheap, and we enjoyed watching the dire costume drama on the huge TVs on the walls.

The post with the monkey

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:18:06 GMT

Food-gawping on the mainland

For Boxing Day we'd decided to try out the mainland, so we got the Star Ferry to Kowloon, then walked to the train station along the waterfront Avenue of Stars - which had the names and handprints of various Chinese actors, of whom I think we recognised only Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat. We took the train to Shueng Shui, which is as close to real mainland China as we could get without visas. The RG said it had a large food market, and we found that easily and spent a happy half hour wandering around wondering what the hell these various dried things were (current view: probably beancurd, though at the time we thought they were a fish product). We then ambled through a sequence of pleasant parks until we found a supermarket, which was very educational since many of the dried things had labels in English.

In one corner was a large section of tanks, including a tank labelled "Frogs" (though the lumpy, brooding things looked more like toads to me). The largest tank was for shrimp and the water was particularly grey and slimy-looking, and yet it had a sign saying, "Do not wash your hands in this tank." As C said, "You would have to pay me to put my hands in there!" and yet presumably people do wash there hands there, or they wouldn't have bothered to put the sign up. Maybe the hand-washers are actually shrimp-rustlers, but the management doesn't want to put that idea into people's heads.

We spent most of our time in the snack aisles, partly because we wanted snacks, but mostly because it was fascinating. Best would probably be the packs of tiny dried, sesame-covered crabs (see photo), but there is fierce competition from the packs of dried cuttlefish, the twiglet-like sticks of dried cod filled with sesame seeds, and the large, thin slices of dried conch (at least 10 cm in diameter, and a grubby brown that was almost translucent - I think you probably cooked with it rather than nibbled on it, but it was right next to the snacks). Elsewhere I was most amused by the Darlie brand toothpaste that apparently contains "spring water from France" (see photo), and came to realise that Hong Kong was not the place to buy ash-blonde hair colouring, and my hair would have to remain drab until I got back to London. We filled a shopping bag with assorted snacks and made our way back to the train station.

Return to Sha Tin: Encounter on the Steps

We didn't go all the way back to Kowloon, but just to Sha Tin, home of the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery which had been the highlight of my previous visit to Hong Kong (read account and see photos). I couldn't wait to see what C made of the monastery, but I was also keen to have Swedish meatballs in the IKEA at the bottom of the hill from the monastery, and we went there first.

There were no meatballs! I think they were doing a special Christmas menu and had taken the meatballs off temporarily. C went to another IKEA on Hong Kong Island a few days later and that had meatballs, so we probably just had bad timing in Sha Tin. I had duck instead and it was very nice, but I'd been looking forward to those meatballs as I'd been looking forward to my Malaysian curry on the first evening.

The last time I'd hunted for about two hours before finding the way up to the monastery, but this time I had the satisfaction of getting confirmation from C that the few signs were worse than useless - as I ignored them and led us straight to the start of the path. We were nearly at the main terrace when we became aware of the flurry of excitement among the people just ahead of us on the steps. There was a western man with his camera aimed at a tree, and soon we realised that the cause of all this was a monkey, as it jumped out of the tree onto the steps and started heading down. I got my camera out and got a good shot (see good shot), and when I lowered the camera I realised that the monkey was heading straight for me - or, as I discovered a split-second later, headed straight for the carrier-bag full of supermarket snacks that I was carrying. It took a swipe at the bag, making a rip in it. I yanked the bag away but it took another swipe, and by this stage it was looking anything but cute: baring sharp, yellow teeth, and with nasty red dots all around the eye area.

I think I was wondering if I could get away with kicking it when C yelled, "Just throw it something so we can get away!" A brilliant idea, which I wouldn't have thought of myself. I grabbed the first bag and threw it, and the shopping bag split wide open, spilling spring-onion crackers and chocolate Pocky and licorice peel and wasabi-flavoured squid snacks onto the steps. We snatched it all up and ran up the steps to the terrace, to the sound of Hong Kong laughter from above and below. Throwing the bag definitely did the trick with the monkey, and I hope it made itself thoroughly sick on its jumbo bag of multicoloured rice-crackers.

The carrier bag was beyond repair so we spent a few minutes stowing the bags and boxes about our persons, and had soon calmed down enough to enjoy the monastery. I don't think it had quite the impact on C that it did on me that first time (well, she wasn't wandering around in a daze going, "What the fuck?"), but she still definitely appreciated it, and she spotted some weirdnesses that I had missed before, especially many-armed weirdnesses (see photo).

We took a different set of steps down and got to IKEA-level without meeting any more monkeys. C went back into IKEA looking for bedding (for the choice of bedding in Doha is all in the "incredibly garish" range), but instead came out with four packs of energy-saving lightbulbs (the bedding was all the wrong size). And then we got the train back to Kowloon.

Looking for a Drink and a Film

By the time we got back in view of the harbour we very much fancied a drink, and we'd both heard that there was a snazzy penthouse bar in the Peninsula Hotel. We couldn't find it by ourselves, and the man we asked said the bar was on the first floor, which wasn't what we wanted in the way of view, so we headed closer to the harbour and found a Starbucks. There is a penthouse bar in the ultra-posh Peninsula Hotel but the RG says it opens at 6 pm and we'd been asking at around 5.30 pm, but it's also possible that we weren't looking snazzy enough. We took our coffees out to the harbour-front walkway, arriving just as night was falling and the neon-lit buildings of Hong Kong Island were starting to do their tricks. I didn't attempt to take any pictures, since I knew from last time that my camera wasn't up to it - though looking again at those old photos, there is one that conveys some of the impact.

After about half an hour of gawping we took the ferry back. We were in the mood for a film and the RG said there was a cinema just a block away from the ferry terminal. Not any more there isn't. Or the next-nearest cinema in its list. Or the one after that. Our last hope was the cinema in Times Square, where we arrived just as The Curse of the Golden Flower was about to start. There weren't many seats left and we found ourselves at the far left of the front row, but the severely distorted view didn't matter once the film got underway. It's a load of highly-costumed tosh featuring a spectacularly messed-up royal family and abseiling, scythe-wielding assassins, and was well worth the trek from the ferry terminal.

The film had subtitles in Chinese as well as in English, which makes sense when Mandarin and Cantonese sound completely different but are written with the same characters (the film was in Mandarin and most of the people in the audience probably spoke Cantonese). C had become fascinated by Chinese characters, which I think she'd never seen before in such concentrations. I knew the rough meaning of maybe 20 or 30 from my nearly-forgotten studies of Japanese (which took its ideograms from Chinese), but we'd agreed that we wanted to know more about how it worked (and how the hell people go about learning the more complicated characters). Our route back to the hotel went past a bookshop and we went in to look for a nice gentle guide to ideograms, but it was almost entirely Chinese books and there was almost nothing aimed at us. C did find an incredibly cheap dictionary though (one pound!), and we satisfied some of our curiosity.

We got back to the hotel around 10 pm, dined on snacks, and read our crappy detective novels. We were well-and-truly on holiday.

Return to Hong Kong

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:46:11 GMT

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

We'd decided we were going to have a sleep until the evening, and then go out to a Malaysian restaurant I'd enjoyed before for a curry and a beer. The beer was going to be a big event for C, who had sensibly decided not to drink at all while in Qatar (where drinking can only be done by hanging out with expats in unsavoury venues), and we were both simmering with anticipation - only to discover, once I'd done with getting us lost, that the restaurant had closed down. There was a Korean restaurant across the street, and since it was mentioned in the RG (though shown as being in a different street), we decided to give it a try. It was a barbecue restaurant in which each table had at least one sunken griddle built in to the table, for you to barbecue your own meat (and, if a tourist, to provide entertainment to the regulars). We went for the set meal, which got us about nine little dishes of vegetables (mostly pickled, and all delicious), and four plates of thinly-sliced pork, beef and chicken, also delicious. Oh, and we each had a lovely, lovely pint of lager. The trick with the barbecuing is apparently to keep the blackened part of the griddle covered with meat at all times; we were gently put right on our first batch, but to be honest the people at the other end of our table seemed to be letting their blackened part do what it liked.

We'd been wondering whether we'd see much signs of Christmas in Hong Kong, and I had no idea what to expect. We hadn't seen much sign during our trip to the hotel and our search for the Malaysian restaurant, but here in the Koreana restaurant all of the waitresses were wearing Santa hats and carols were coming out of the sound-system, so that answered the question. If we'd thought to pose the question in the form "Can you make money out of it?" we wouldn't have had those hours of doubt. I can let the carols wash over me but C is musical and she had a few rough moments, including "Frosty the Snowman" in particularly-nasal Chinese (and it's bad enough in English), and "Silent Night" in cat-miaows.

We headed home via a shopping area that had been part of my daily route on my previous visit, and which we found swarming with people at 9 pm on a Sunday night. It was fun to see trendy young local things strutting their stuff in a wide range of costumes - which you don't get in Doha where all the locals are dressed in either white or black desert robes - but we'd soon had too much of the crowds and headed home.

Christmas Day with dog and two cats

We'd decided to go to Lamma Island, which is a half-hour ferry ride to the south of Hong Kong Island. The island has no cars - though it does have a quarry and a power-station - and it has very much the feel of a hippy hang-out. We got the ferry to the main town, along with what felt like a significant proportion of the population of Hong Kong, and followed the path around the coast and over the hills to the other town. The weather was glorious (as it was every day of our visit), and though we got frustrated with the glacial pace of our fellow-walkers, it was a manageable frustration. I thought I'd ranted about the slowness of Hong Kong pedestrians in my account of my previous visit, but apparently not; I do remember thinking the rant, though, and there was some comfort for me in seeing that they got to C in the same way. Really, though, the island wasn't that crowded, not for a public holiday, and the two-hour stroll was very pleasant.

The town at the other end is essentially one long street full of seafood restaurants (see photo of town viewed from across the bay), and while the RG had said to choose a restaurant that seemed popular, I think we chose ours for its quietness, and because it had a table free with a nice view over the water. We were a bit nervous about ordering, because Hong Kong is very big on "choosing your meal out of the tank", for which we are both far too squeamish. So we went for a set meal again, and again were very happy with it. There was a crab and sweetcorn soup to start, then sliced-and-fried garoupa, salt-and-pepper shrimp, and scallops with chicken and mushrooms, and pineapple and melon to finish. C generously peeled my first shrimp for me (I had a traumatic shrimp-peeling experience some 20 years ago, and generally just leave them to one side), and I think she would have peeled the rest for me but that one was so good that I took myself in hand and did my own dismemberment (and shouldn't that be a line in the next Hannibal Lecter novel?). C made a Christmas Day call to her mother, and I sat evesdropping and watching a dog and two cats playing in the sun on a fishing boat, and thinking how lucky we were to be able to experience all this.

A man we assumed to be the owner came over to ask if we wanted to get the ferry back to Central (where we'd come in from, on the north side of Hong Kong island), but we said we'd also be fine with taking the ferry to Aberdeen (the nearest town to Lamma Island, on the south side of HK Island), and he went away and came back with ferry times for us. If you find yourself on Lamma Island, I strongly recommend taking your custom to the Rainbow Seafood Restaurant. The sun was setting during the ferry ride to Aberdeen (see photo), we got a bus back to Central almost immediately, and neither of us can remember how we spent the evening.

To and in Doha

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 11:57:37 GMT

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

I think it was about 11 pm by the time I got through immigration but C lives just about five minutes from the airport so in no time I was admiring her huge apartment and the outrageous gilded "empire" furniture that had come with it (which reminded me of Buenos Aires hotels of the early 1970s, whatever that reference-point might be worth to anyone else). I had got the right type of socks, but mere minutes after I had handed over the freezer-bag clips C opened a package from her mother which turned out also to contain freezer-bag clips. You have to admire the timing.

The view from C's apartment is mostly of airport, road and rubble (rubble is particularly typical of Doha), so the first thing she did the next morning was take me for a stroll along the Corniche, which has to be the most beautiful part of the city. On the map the bay looks like a perfect semi-circle, and on one side is the old part of the city, looking across at the new business district that's under frenetic construction (see photo), and the water is a luminous turquoise (see photo).

After that, I think we went directly to the Japanese pound store (strictly, the Japanese 6 riyals store), which was as wonderful as C had promised me. We spent well over an hour there, calling each other over every few minutes as we discovered something else bizarre or cool or cute or in imperfectly-translated English. When we went in I assumed I wouldn't be getting anything, but I came away with 27 items, including a bag to get them home to England with me since I wasn't going to be able to fit it all in my carry-on luggage. I haven't checked luggage in 15 years and am decidedly proud of that fact, so it's a measure of the fabulousness of my haul of Japanese tat that I was prepared to break my rule. What did I get? Well, it included a dinky set of tiny highlighter pens, a length of copper strip for repelling slugs (I have no slug problem, but the packaging included a cartoon of a weeping slug and I had to have it), and a cute wooden puzzle which claimed to be "gymnastics of the head". C led me straight to be the best bit of semi-English, that she'd discovered on a previous visit: this was on the backing-paper for a nice little picture frame, and said, "Relieved feeling with small articles grown in the fragrance of forest." Again, I had to have it.

I also had to have examples of the Cheeky Bunny and Cherry Bear line of plastic children's crockery (made of plastic, for children, you understand). I was the discoverer of Cheeky Bunny, which has the standard cutesy picture (including bluebirds but with little detectable cheekiness), and the text "Love begins like the springtime with the promise of dreams come true." Fine English but the statement is debatable, and even if it is true, what does it have to do with Cheeky Bunny? Great stuff (see photo). And then a few minutes later C discovered Cherry Bear, which was in another league entirely. The text for Cherry Bear is "Hey! Friends!!! You want to have a red cheek like me? Oh. You do? Come on... Let's enjoy Cherry together." (see photo) Granted, the bear in the picture has an apple-cheeked face, but he's also bending over his little trolley in a very spankable position and there's a world of weirdness in that text and... It's possible that C and I are a bad influence on one another.

Then we went for coffee at Villagio, Doha's newest mall, which is a mock-up of Venice and will, when completed, have a watery area with gondolas (see photo). As with the Japanese pound store, it was everything C had promised. While we were sitting and having our coffee, C saw at least two of her pupils (no acknowledgement was made on either side), and was spotted by three colleagues, who all came over to chat. Qatar (of which Doha is the capital) is indeed a small place. It has a population of about 800,000, of which only about 40% are native Qataris. I think about 50% are people from the Indian sub-continent, who generally do the manual work and have rotten pay and conditions - though presumably better than back home, which is a sobering thought - and the remainder are professionals (e.g. engineers), mostly of European stock. I believe this pattern is fairly typical of a Gulf state, but it was the first time I'd seen it in person, and the diversity makes for wonderful people-watching (and for a fascinating range of shops, of which more later).

According to the card from my camera, we then drove around a bit while I took pictures of building sites. On the way to Villagio I'd enjoyed the sight of soon-to-be-imposing structures with Greek columns (photo) and domes (photo) that were still in the stage of admitting that they were made of concrete. These structures were generally opposite compounds, which also interested me, but I couldn't get a good shot (not even of my favourite, the Beverly Gardens II). "Compound" is just the local term for a gated community, and they wouldn't look at all out of place in southern California - which makes them super-exotic to me. C says they're great if you have children since each has its own child-friendly facilities, and I can see that but... the idea of living behind a wall with a bunch of people who want to live behind a wall gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Our drive took us through the business district, where there must have been at least 20 high-rise buildings under construction, and this is apparently just the start. It's impressive even to someone who's been watching Canary Wharf fling itself up. I don't think they're going to be interesting buildings, but soon we were to the north of the business district and heading towards a pair of buildings that were possible too interesting for their own good (see photo of two and closeup of one) - they look like a freeze-frame taken during an earthquake, and the sight of them was not good for my vertigo.

But soon they were behind us and we were sauntering into the Ritz-Carlton for afternoon-tea. There were no spaces in the main dining area with its harpist, but they did find a table for us in the lobby which I think was much more interesting. It's always fun to watch the rich at play, and here we were also able to look around and think, "Who? Who would choose to spend Christmas in the Doha Ritz-Carlton?" - since really there isn't a huge amount for a visitor to do in Doha, especially not a visitor likely to scorn Japanese pound stores, yet C had learned that the hotel was booked solid for the holidays. I was thinking, "Well, what about someone who wanted to get the hell away from Christmas?" when the carol-singers trooped in. I've been in southern California over Christmas and boggled at seeing the trappings of a northern European mid-winter festival in that setting - but seeing them in Doha burnt out my boggle-circuits in an instant.

Then back to C's apartment to pack and book at 10 pm taxi to the airport (our flight was at 1 am). Booking a taxi in Qatar can be fraught, because there are no addresses. Seriously. There is no postal system as one generally understands it, and no recognised way of giving addresses. If you want to receive mail you have to get a P.O. Box. C uses the one for her school, and when I went through immigration I gave this P.O. Box as my address in Qatar. In the corridors of C's building, the frame of the door for each apartment had several little metal tags attached, each with a number of about six digits (see crappy photo). The numbers are attached by the utility companies and are the customer numbers for the household; if you have a problem you give them your number and they (presumably) pore over their maps until they spot the number and figure out where to send the van. Anyway... the taxi company knew of C's apartment building and we were fine, and the flight was fine apart from that fact that, although we checked in together, they seated us many rows apart.

Actually I'm not done on the addresses thing. There must be a good reason why Qatar is so resistant to the notion of a system of addresses, and I could rustle up a prize for the person who explains it to me. Is it a matter of maintaining their self-image of a nation of desert nomads? [Even though many of them have never in their lives been anywhere without a chauffeur.] Or do they not want to give up the option of ripping out roads whenever the hell they feel like it? If those are the reasons then fine, they're good enough, but I'd just like to know.

Background to the Doha/Hong Kong trip

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 17:16:13 GMT

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-less-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?

Last, last, last, last post

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 20:31:21 GMT

What was the best thing?

This was the first question from almost everyone, both during and after the trip, and I never really had a satisfactory answer, certainly not for "Which place was best?"

I still don't have a good answer, and I think a glossy-magazine-style Top Ten wouldn't really be me, but two things did stand out for me:

Best specific thing The meal at Green Field, the Brazilian meat restaurant in Long Beach. I had many other excellent meals - and I would fly to New York for the weekend just to get in four (maybe five?) meals at the Union Square Cafe - but Green Field was a revelation. It took something simple - plain meat without sauces - and made me feel as if I'd never tasted it before. Five months later, I still salivate at the memory.

Best general thing Travelling in countries where I didn't speak the language (including Chile and Argentina in that). It was an adventure, and the English-speaking places felt very tame in comparison, as if I was hardly in a foreign country at all.

Marks out of ten for my pre-trip decisions

Someone asked what advice I would now give my pre-trip self, and while I'm not actually going to give my decisions marks out of ten, thinking about doing so helps me break the decisions down. There's very little that I would warn my pre-trip self off, but there are things that I would consider for future trips.

Time of year to travel I wouldn't for anything have missed walking on Lake Baikal or seeing blue icebergs at the beach at Lago Grey. I suspect I saw a higher proportion of clear, bright days through travelling in off-season, I escaped punishing heat (which I find more oppressive than brutal cold), and I didn't have to cope with crowds of other tourists. I wouldn't visit my off-season places at that time of the year again, but that's because I've already enjoyed them under those conditions, and if I were to visit them again, I'd like to use the chance to see what they're like under different conditions. OK, yes, and having a few extra hours of daylight in which to see them would be nice.

Route and schedule I was pleased with the route. It might have been nice to see a bit more of Australia and New Zealand, having gone all that way. But my ticket allowed a maximum of 20 flights and four months felt like the longest I could practically leave my life in London unattended. I wouldn't do the same route again, though I am planning to retrace a lot of parts of it, in more-manageable sections of four to five weeks.

I'd already mentioned the plan to go back to Torres del Paine and Chiloé (which would obviously involve a few days in B.A.), but the day I started work on the B.A. post (the last proper post), I was suddenly hit by a surge of wanderlust (as strong as my yearning for my washing-up liquid when I was in the Falklands), and I was up until two in the morning reading the Trans-Siberian brochure. I had thumbed through it soon after I got back, but now I've got Really Quite Focused on the idea of flying to Hong Kong, taking a ten-day train trip to Beijing via Shanghai and X'ian (of terracotta warriors fame), and then taking the Trans-Manchurian to Helsinki. I do not want to do the Trans-Mongolian again since Mongolia pissed me off in too many ways, and fortunately the Trans-Manchurian allows one to get from China to Russia by skirting around the east of Mongolia. However... I'm torn between the appeal of going to places where I have some idea what to expect, and the feeling that I should be doing something really different.

Travelling alone This worked just fine for me. I don't think there was ever a time when I felt lonely, or felt the need of company for practical reasons (and I don't count the luxury of having someone to watch my bag while I nip to the loo, or to split a bottle of Chilean wine with). I'd generally rather deal with new situations on my own; I find shared dithering exhausting. On the other hand, I am really, really looking forward to sharing my discoveries in Chile and B.A. with Kerry and A when we all go to Torres del Paine, and to have people with whom to test out some nightlife. But there, you see, there will be no dithering, because I will be in a position to tell them exactly what we're going to do.

I was going to ask if there was anyone interested in coming on all or part of the train journey with me, but I think I might just have made that idea unsellable.

Amount of trip-planning I did a lot of detailed planning on the trip, because for me that's a large part of the fun, but I'm glad that not everything went exactly to plan, because that's also part of the fun. I don't think the planning got in the way of my enjoying myself once I reached the places that I'd been visiting in my imagination. How much planning I do for the next trips will probably depend on how much free time I have on my hands beforehand. I threw away my RGs for Moscow and St. Petersburg and only had a couple of photocopied pages for China and Hong Kong, so this gives me a perfect excuse to try out Lonely Planet - and maybe even to bring the books home with me, because I'll only be packing for a month.

Which leads neatly to Travelling light. Here, yeah, OK, I will give myself 10 out of 10, on both planning and execution (pretending it was a solo effort and there weren't kind people posting things home to me). Though I have to admit that I've just bought myself a larger backpack for the Torres del Paine trip (35 litres compared with 25), because this trip's day-hikes showed me the flaws in the design of the small one. If I'm going to do a ten-day hike I need a pack that has a better fit and allows airflow past my back, and I should probably allow room for a sleeping-bag. I might still get away with it as carry-on. We'll see.

Toys and gadgets The camera was obviously a necessity, rather than a toy or gadget, and I've never had a moment of wishing I'd got a different model; terrific performance for £90, I think. The MP3 player was a late decision (justified with the idea of listening to recorded books in Spanish -which I only actually did for about an hour in four months), but damn! I was glad to have it. It was a Creative Tuvo, with a capacity of just 512 MB (100 tracks or so), and while I did get fairly sick of some of those tracks, I think that's a small disadvantage for something that cheap (£90) and that small and light (think "box of matches"). I would buy another tiny head-torch to replace the one I lost on Rangitoto Island, and I'd take the same alarm clock with me. I wouldn't bother with the calculator, or the little padlock.

I never felt the need for anything else that requires batteries. I'd take a Moleskine notebook again; my A4 journal lasted me until three days before the end of the trip and is showing no signs at all of wear. And I will stock up on simple and compact travel toothbrushes like these, just as soon as they come back in stock; I'd looked all over for them before I left, but didn't find any until I got to Chicago.

I'm not sure about the money-belt... I would probably have been a lot more nervous in Russia without it, but by the time I came to ditch it (and I can't now remember where that was), I hadn't been bothering to wear it for weeks - because I'd never felt in any danger, and it was so unpleasant to wear. But if I didn't have to carry four months' worth of air tickets with me, I could probably get away with something smaller and less irksome... I dunno. I will size up designs.

Clothes I came back with hardly any of the clothes I started out with, but I think that's more or less what I'd been expecting. Correct me if I'm misremembering here. The Rohan trousers were great for their hidden pockets - if you're wearing those, you really don't need a money-belt - but they were also desperately unflattering and once I found the hemp-and-recycled-plastic jeans from patagonia in San Francisco, I only wore the Rohans when the jeans were in the wash. I'd really like a few more pairs of those jeans.

I always seemed to get rather damp when wearing my expensive Berhgaus waterproof, and I'd assumed that was because I usually had the sleeves rolled up a bit and rain was getting wicked up the inside of the sleeves during the course of the day - but then a few weeks ago it was raining when I set off for work, and I couldn't have been wearing it for more than ten minutes and my arms definitely came out damp. I tested it with a plant spray when I got home, and while the drops looked at first as if they were being resisted, within a few minutes they had soaked in and the inside was clammy. This is not what one expects for £140, and if I still had the receipt I would take the thing back to the shop. Anyone have any recommendations for a light waterproof that is genuinely waterproof?

Trip-planning, revisited There was an area where I definitely cocked up, and that was that I did not put the addresses of all of my friends into my web-based address-book for my email account. The addresses for people I was visiting, I had in three different places, but I didn't think to set things up for other people and this meant that there were some gaps in my postcard-sending that in no way reflected the contents of my thoughts. I know you're going to say I could have emailed to ask for addresses, but I have this thing that "a postcard should be a surprise!"

Was it weird to be home?

I got asked this in the first couple of days, when it was a bit weird, but by the end of the week it was as if I'd never been away. The main weird thing I remember from those two days was discovering that I'd forgotten where I keep things - and that was "things" as basic as the salt. However, on the non-weird side there were some post-return events or developments that I think are worth recording:

Volumetric changes You will not be surprised that I'd put on some weight while I was away. Exactly how much weight I don't know because I don't own a set of bathroom scales, but getting into my beloved moleskin jeans was an alarming, bulgy struggle. I went straight on to the Slimfast and managed to get back into the comfort zone fairly quickly, so didn't have to throw out all my old clothes after all. Except for my bras, because travel appears to have permanently broadened my chest. At first I was trying to play these new inches down but that didn't work so I switched to playing them up (thank you, Marks and Spencers sale). I'm told that the new volume suits me and that I look healthy ("scarcely like a Londoner at all").

The rash In the weeks before I went away I'd been getting a rash on my knuckles, which I'd assumed was connected in some way to doing the dishes. I made sure to take with me a little pot of anti-allergy cream, but the rash went away and I hardly used the cream (until I got some fierce mosquito bites in Sydney), and I forgot all about the rash. However, within a day of getting home I had the rash again, when I hadn't yet washed a single dish, and I soon located the problem in the grapefruit-and-tea-tree handwash in the bathroom. I like the fact that the return home allowed an isolation of variables that hadn't been possible when I was living my normal life.

Washing the puffy jacket I put the jacket in the wash on the first day, and it came out of the washing machine in the most pitiful state, with the feathers in each stitched compartment compacted into a sodden lump. "Oh, my God, I've killed it!" My lovely puffy jacket, that had served me so faithfully. I was a brute, a brute. But if there was nothing else I could do for it, I could at least get it dry, so I pinned it up on the balcony to get the wind (and later the sun), and to my amazement, over the course of several days, the feathers fluffed up and separated, and came to fill the compartments as they had before. Those are resilient feathers!

Now, Bridie had washed the jacket for me while I was in L.A., but I hadn't paid any attention to the process. It wasn't until I phoned Bridie the weekend after I got back that I learned that she'd had the same "Oh, my God!" experience. She'd been praying hard when she put it in the tumble-dryer, and was so relieved that she didn't have to confess to me that she'd killed my jacket.

Me and coins Before I left, I used to keep small change in the zippered compartment in my wallet, whose design wasn't the best for spotting or grasping the exact coins that one needed. When one is travelling and doesn't even know which of these strange coins is the coin one needs, the scrabbling-time becomes just embarrassing. So I soon gave up keeping any coins in my wallet and instead started keeping them in my trouser pocket so I could haul out the handful and go right into the search, and at night I would make little stacks on my bedside table, which is quite a pleasant ritual. I've kept to this approach since I got back, though my stacking-place isn't the bedside table but the top of the left-hand speaker - next to the bowl where I put my keys and my travelcard.

Spanish-be-gone While I was in Chile and Argentina, my internal voice used to speak in Spanish a lot of the time, and this got particularly strong once I was having the lessons. That stopped the instant I got home and wasn't hearing Spanish around me any more, even though I was still reading a novel in Spanish. I miss the Spanish voice and I really should get into the habit of listening to some Spanish every single day, though the Spanish TV channel in my satellite package does not seem to have got any better. They really love their variety shows: two hours of the damn stuff almost every evening (it feels like).

The English weather I arrived back to a grey, slight-chilly morning (this was two weeks from midsummer), and after a solid week of humidity in B.A., this was sheer bliss. I now appreciate the English weather as never before. It doesn't often manage the type of days to truly lift one's spirits, but it's also sparing on the type of days in which it's an effort to do anything, where you're constantly aware of the weather as a source of discomfort. And, really, that's damned useful weather to have.

A week in Buenos Aires

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 16:44:28 GMT

Arriving

When I presented my passport at the Immigration desk, the officer looked at the page with my photo and details, called over to check something with the man in the next booth, and then told me that I didn't need a stamp in my passport because, as someone born in the Falklands, I was considered Argentinian. I don't know that I'll ever rely on this new superpower of mine, but I get a kick out of having it.

The RG had warned about fake taxi drivers at the airport - they probably won't kidnap you, but they will mug you - and there were many, many warnings about this in the Arrivals area. I'd been planning on getting the bus anyway, though it didn't drop me off where the RG had said, but somewhere near the railway station. A nice guy in a cafe pointed me in the right direction to my hotel, and it was about a 20 minute walk, during which I rediscovered the defining smells of B.A.: cake-icing and leather. This took me right back to my childhood visits and was just wonderful.

The hotel I'd booked for my first night was very central: a few blocks away from Florida, the main shopping street (pronounced with an emphasis on the second syllable). I was given a huge suite with a spa-bath, which I was very pleased with for my $60, and easily managed to ignore the various signs of shabbiness at the edges. I went out for a stroll on Avenida Corrientes, which was billed in the RG as the main street for bookshops and cinemas. Actually, there are hardly any cinemas (they're in Lavalle, one street to the north), but there were umpteen theatres, and huge crowds outside some of the shows that were about to start.

I ate in a steak restaurant recommended in the RG. It was while I was looking at the menu outside the restaurant that my brain switched over properly into "converting pesos mode", and I went from "Hmm... That's more expensive than I was expecting" to "My God! that's cheap." The steak was excellent, and for dessert I ordered the dulce de leche ice-cream. Dulce de leche is a sort of caramel, about the consistency of lemon curd, and it's the sweet flavouring in Argentina. The serving of ice-cream must have been at least five scoops and halfway through I thought, "I'm not going to be able to finish this." But I took a little rest and then managed to find room (I like my ice-cream really quite melted).

On the way back to the hotel I stopped in a pharmacy and bought some hair-dye and some foam-bath. The spa-bath didn't seem to be working properly: the jets were violent and the control-knob didn't move. And the toilet was very reluctant to flush, so after that one night I was glad to have another hotel lined up. Breakfast was excellent, however: nice french bread and croissants and lots of different kinds of ham and salami and cheese. After breakfast I had a wander down Florida and bought a better white T-shirt in C&A (a down-market British chain, which I was very surprised to see in B.A.). Compared with what I remembered, Florida seemed to have lost almost all of its class and now seems more like Oxford Street, aimed entirely at teenagers, without even the saving grace of a Selfridges or a Marks and Spencers.

During my childhood visits in the 70s, there was a department store in Florida called Harrods. It had the same livery as the Harrods and enough glamour to impress ten-year-old me, and the RG talked about it later "breaking its connection with the London store" - but I now suspect that there was never any connection other than aspiration, though I can't find anyone who seems entirely sure of the facts. It had closed and reopened and was now closed again. The name "Harrods" was still on the building, but with a rather clunky light-blue logo, no hint of gold-on-olive. All more interesting, if you ask me, than having an actual branch of Harrods.

Moving to my second hotel

I checked out around midday and got the Subte (subway) to Recoleta, an affluent residential district about a mile to the north-west. I think we used to stay in a hotel in the area when we were travelling between the Falklands and the UK, and I'd decided to spend my week in an area that had more residents than tourists. I got to the hotel around 1 p.m. Check-in time wasn't until 3 p.m. but they got a room ready for me straight away, and it was just lovely. The hotel is new, and part of a chain that buys apartment buildings and renovates them (throwing in a lot of cream, black, gilt, marble, and the odd "antique"). There were six rooms per floor, arranged in groups of three: one group around the front elevator, and one group around the back elevator; it was a nice, intimate arrangement. The Park Elegance Kempinski: it's possible that there's a place in B.A. that gives even better value for $80 a night, but I don't feel any need to find out.

The hotel did have one eccentric aspect: there was an enormous tree-trunk in the middle of the dining-room, and I say a "tree-trunk" rather than a "tree" because it disappeared up through the roof. The floor-tiles around the base of the tree were steadily being lifted up, and I can't honestly say that the trunk added anything to the dining-room. I suspect that the room was added as an extension during the conversion and for some reason they couldn't cut the tree down and so built around it. From my room, I could see the roof of the dining-room, with the tree coming up through it.

Pictures relating to the hotels

After a bit of a wander around looking for lunch, I ended up in a cafe across the street from the hotel, where I had a small pizza (excellent) and a half-bottle of the house red at about 90p (and a perfectly acceptable red it was, too). In the evening I discovered the location of the nearest cinema and went to see Cruzada (Kingdom of Heaven in English), which seemed almost identical to Gladiator in many respects: early woodland battles in the snow; wise ruler with chaotic heir leaving it until the very last moment to try to hand over power to the principled-warrior hero. It worked better for me with Gladiator.

Back in the hotel I opened the Montes Alpha and ordered empanadas from Room Service (little meat pasties). The empanadas were tasty and filling and were about £2 - incredibly cheap for Room Service.

Monday: Sightseeing, Language-Shopping, and Socialising

I had a fairly early start and travelled to the Plaza de Mayo with the rush-hour crowd. The Plaza is the heart of the city in some ways and I knew I'd been there before because I remembered standing in front of the Casa Rosada, but the feel of the area wasn't familiar. I headed west along the Avenida de Mayo, stopping for a coffee in Cafe Tortoni (an 150-year-old literary hangout, with lots of pillars and mirrors, and tons of gravitas), and then made my way to a language school that was mentioned in the RG.

I was determined to have at least one proper conversation in Spanish before I left Latin America, and if that involved paying someone to keep on trying to get Spanish out of me, then so be it. I explained that I was only in town for a week but wanted some individual conversation classes, and they did have someone who would be able to give me a couple of lessons a day, starting on Tuesday. I had to do a four-page written test, in which I made mistakes that haunted me for the rest of the day, but my teacher Graciela never referred to the test directly, which was a relief. They gave me a study package with a text book, and I went back to the hotel to dump all this new and heavy stuff.

I had lunch in the hotel and then went out to see Recoleta Cemetery, which is the most amazing display of wealth in the form of monumental masonry that I've ever seen. Just astounding. I'd be wandering down a path muttering, "Look at the size of that thing!" and I'd turn the corner and there'd would be a tomb twice the size of the one I'd been boggling at. A wonderful variety of styles, and some very bold experiments in the way of statuary.

The cemetery was also full of cats, especially around the entrance. Recoleta is famous for its well-tended dogs, usually seen in the care of professional dog-walkers who may have up to ten of the beasts in tow. Every single dog I saw in B.A. was firmly leashed and firmly under human control, which was a striking contrast with Chile, where it's entirely possible that no dog has ever deigned to interact with a human. The parks in Recoleta are completely taken over by dog-walkers and their charges, so the city's stray cats are concentrated in the few places where dogs are not allowed, of which the cemetery is one.

Pictures of the Cemetery
I've made no attempt to prune the pictures. If you like cemeteries, you'll enjoy browsing here.

I took a long walk back to my hotel via the Alvear Palace Hotel, which is one of the fanciest hotels in B.A. It was the only hotel whose name I recognised and I'd been assuming that we'd stayed there at least once, but I didn't recognise the place at all. It was a pleasant walk, and I felt very much at home in Recoleta. It's an area with a lot of somewhat-baroque apartment buildings of six or seven storeys, very Parisian in feel, with the odd truly-baroque mansion or decaying convent school thrown in.

My friend Nancy called at the hotel for me at 6.30. She works a few blocks away, on a helpline for a personal-income-tax website. I'm guessing that this involves talking to a lot of very anxious people, but Nancy enjoys the work. She doesn't usually eat until 9 p.m., so we shared a small pizza to stave off my pangs of hunger, and then had a few glasses of Montes Alpha in my room until it was time to go out and have a steak. It was over the steak that I learned that it really had been Ewan McGregor behind that beard, though Nancy was really very tactful about putting me right.

Tuesday: Cats, DVDs, Graciela, and Embassies

On Tuesday morning I went to the Botanical Gardens, which is about half a mile from the hotel. The place was rather shabby and there wasn't much to see since it was winter, but it's a nice place for a stroll and it had even more stray cats than the cemetery.

Pictures from the Botanic Gardens

I walked into town for my Spanish class, looking out hard along Avenida Santa Fe for a DVD shop that Nancy said she'd seen from the bus. My plan was to buy a bunch of Argentinian films with Spanish subtitles and use these to try to tune my ear in. I found a shop called "Dromo" where the guy was very helpful in recommending good Argentinian films (in addition to Nancy's recommendations). I left B.A. with about 12 films, at very reasonable prices, but I've been in an odd frame of mind about the Spanish since I got back, and hadn't watched any of them until last weekend. I was nervous about the class with Graciela but it went well. She introduced variety (speaking entirely in Spanish), and I managed to deal with some fairly complicated issues - with long pauses and struggling sometimes but I did persist and I did get something out that approximated to what I really wanted to say.

In the evening I had dinner with Carlos and Mora, friends of my parents from the Falklands who had been very helpful when I was planning my trip. They live in Belgrano, a couple of miles out to the north west. It's an area with an impressive concentration of embassies and with some fine trees that provide blessed shade in summer, though it was dark when we arrived and I just had an impression of wide cobbled streets and high walls.

Wednesday: Museums, Humidity, and Belly-Dancing

On Wednesday morning I went to Plaza de Mayo in the centre of town, and went to the Museo de la Ciudad, which is in a former family home and is devoted to domestic life. Most of it was closed for restoration but they had a few rooms open, with displays of toys, and it was superbly done. The choice was excellent, and the commentary was intelligent and with a wry sense of humour.

Pictures from the Museum

After the museum I wandered south through San Telmo, which is one of the oldest areas of the city. It was small-town Spain in feel: mostly two-storey houses, with wraparound balconies. The RG had said it was rather rough, but I feel that a district with that many antique shops is over its rough phase. I got as far as the park that contains the National History Museum, but it was a humid day and I wasn't in the mood for a museum and just wanted to sit in a cafe - so I got the Subte to Cafe Tortoni and had a boring, stodgy mini-pizza and a refreshing beer, and drastically underestimated the distance to the language school, so arrived late and running with sweat.

After class I went to the Museo de Bellas Artes, which was just a few blocks north of the hotel. It was a good collection, with illuminating commentaries. I was most struck by a Rembrandt portrait of his sister, which was utterly brilliant - a human soul captured on canvas - and quite without pity; and also taken with a group of three very calming Corots, all country river scenes with a feeling of something held suspended: in the air, or in time.

Around 8 p.m. I went out to the restaurant in a Syrian club about six blocks away (mentioned in the RG). The cold buffet was good, the hot dishes disappointing (very poor use of spices), but the desserts and coffee made up for that. There was a woman reading coffee grounds and also a belly-dancer and terrific music accompanying the belly-dancer. The time flew by and I spent nearly three hours there, and there were still people coming in when I left. I'd asked Nancy how people coped with eating so late - I would be incoherent with hunger by that time - but I'm still looking for a proper understanding of how Argentinians manage to pace themselves through the day. As Nancy is looking for proper understanding of what on earth British people do with their long, stretching-ahead evenings, when they've got all their dining done by eight.

B.A. was a lot easier than Santiago, though, for an early eater. Most restaurants are open throughout the day, and if you need a steak at 6 p.m., you'll be able to find it without any problem. The restaurant will be almost deserted at that hour, but at least it will be open. B.A. is a great place for cafes, too, which is so useful to the tourist. After three visits to Santiago I was only just starting to suspect that it might have cafes. Somewhere. But in B.A. there are two on every block, and they'll serve you wine or coffee or pizza or a sandwich at any hour, and let you settle in for as long as you need to get geared up for more sightseeing.

Oh, and the other great thing about B.A. and food is the ice-cream. There is a significant Italian influence in B.A. and there are wonderful heladerias everywhere. The sister-in-law of a friend had spent some time in B.A. studying tango, and blamed all of her B.A. weight-gain on the ice-cream. I think Freddos is generally agreed to be the best chain, and there was one two blocks from the hotel. I think that the first time I tried them out was on Wednesday, when I had a scoop of mint-choc-chip ("menta granizada") and a scoop of dulce de leche, and after that my plans for each day had to include at least one visit to Freddos (and at least one scoop of menta granizada). I discovered when I got home that Häagen Dazs do a dulce de leche ice-cream, but it's really just vanilla ice-cream with smears of dulce de leche in it, and it's not the same at all; the B.A. version is like drowning in dulce de leche, and really, that is how I want to go.

Thursday: Turtles, Air Force Officers, and Homework

Thursday morning was horribly hot (27 C at times), and horribly humid. I'd kept the day clear of classes, with the idea of taking a day-trip to Tigre (about 30 km north of B.A., on the delta of the Parana River), but I'd rescheduled the Tigre trip to Saturday when Carlos and Mora had invited me to lunch for Thursday. In the morning I went to La Reserva, a nature reserve along the east of the city, past the docks. Entering La Reserva from the southern end involved a long walk across a dense network of busy roads (not unlike Auckland, actually), and there were moments in the heat when I thought that this was a bad idea and I should turn back. However, it started to cloud over and the walk through the reserve was very pleasant. I saw three turtles: two apparently digging holes in which to lay eggs, and the third crossing the path in front of me - very, very slowly. It was a much easier walk back into the city from the southern end - where I saw a man walking around carrying a fishing-rod and tackle-box, which seemed very odd for the centre of a city, and at lunchtime on a weekday, too.

I met Carlos and Mora for lunch at the Air Force Club. The club was very English in style, and the dining room was elegant without being intimidating. Carlos had managed to track down the Maria sisters, who had gone out together to the Falkland in the early 1970s to teach Spanish to the Falklands children. I think I'd already started at boarding school in Wales when they arrived so they never taught me in the classroom, but I did stay with them and their mother in B.A. at least once when I was passing through B.A. during school holidays, and they made a start then on teaching me Spanish. Maria-T had married an English man and they'd set up a narrow-boat company in the south-west of England, but had been let down by their partners and had left the UK and were now living in the centre of B.A. - and Carlos had got me her phone numbers from her mother. Maria-F had joined the diplomatic service and is currently based in London, and I really must email her.

After lunch I went back to the hotel and hid in my room from the humidity, having a bath and doing my Spanish homework. At about 7 p.m. I was looking for phone-call instructions in order to call Maria T when the phone rang and it was her, and we made arrangements for dinner at their apartment the next night.

Friday: Bills, Bills, and a Plateau

On Friday morning I queued for ages in an HSBC to change that troublesome $100 (which I still had), only to find out when I got to the counter that I'd been in the wrong queue and the minimum was $300 anyway. So I went to an exchange booth a few blocks down and changed it slowly but successfully. [Doing things slowly seems to be a Buenos Aires specialty, which makes sense with the humidity and the late nights, but can be frustrating for someone brought up in a bracing Calvinist atmosphere.] You can imagine my relief in getting rid of that damned bill.

Then I went to the huge supermarket around the corner from the hotel to buy a bottle of champagne for that evening. I found myself (in a 15-items-or-fewer line) behind a dopey-looking young man apparently paying some bills via the supermarket. Two of them he hadn't even bothered to take out of their plastic wrappers before handing them to the cashier, and it was a spectacularly slow process.

A scoop of melon and a scoop of raspberry from Freddos for lunch, and then to the school for my last lesson. My final certificate said I started at level Intermediate 1 and ended at the same level - but I think I did get more fluid. Hell, Graciela had decided on our first day that I was past the first textbook, and had brought in a second one for our next lesson. Does that sound like Intermediate 1 to you? Oh, well. I told Graciela I'd enjoyed our lessons, as indeed I had. I think if I'd had another month, I really would have cracked it.

I was ravenous when I got back to the hotel so had a steak in the hotel restaurant (very good and unbelievably cheap), and then I had another bath and a snooze; it was another grey, humid day, not as bad as Thursday, but still energy-sapping. The walk to Maria T's apartment took about half an hour, and we had a lovely evening. Roger is an engineer, and he works on building tourist railways, and Maria T runs a highly-regarded school - where I could also have taken language classes, as it turns out. Maybe I'll do that, when I go back for that month-that's-going-to-crack-it.

Saturday: Melindas, Glass and a Last Ice-Cream

I don't think it was ever very likely that I was actually going to go to Tigre on Saturday - my last full day in B.A. Maybe if the weather had been less grey and clammy, but it really hadn't been good sightseeing weather since Monday, and "doing nothing" and "being in range of a shower" had a lot of appeal by this point.

So what sort of nothing to do instead? Graciela had said that some friends of hers had recommended Melinda Melinda, Woody Allen's latest, and it was showing in a mall that I'd passed on the way to Maria-T's the previous night. I bought a ticket for the 12.40 show, and spent the intervening time in shopping. Since the Navimag I'd been reading a novel called Pequeñas Infamias (Little Infamies, by Carmen Posadas) that I'd bought in Portland; I'd finished it a couple of nights before and really enjoyed it (a very sly black comedy), and in the bookstore in the mall I found another of her novels. On the way to the mall I'd seen a craft-market in the process of setting up and I wandered back there to look for some presents; I'd had a vague idea of buying something in leather but couldn't find anything I was sure my friends would like, but then my eye was taken by a stall with some nice glassware, and I bought several things including a wind-chime for myself.

The film was rotten. Not agony like The Curse of the Jade Scorpon (which had me swearing off Woody Allen for life), but telling lies about human nature while presenting itself as something profound. It's framed as: a development of a particular situation as imagined by a humourist sitting at a particular dinner-table, alternated with a development of the same situation as imagined by a tragedian sitting at the same table, with the other people at the table greeting the stories as genuine, successful examples of both, whereas the "comedy" wasn't funny and the "tragedy" wasn't tragic, and all the people in both were boring, self-involved whiners with no sense of humour or powers of self-analysis - acting as if this was the first time that any human being had ever been in this situation, when it was the tenth time we'd seen it in this film alone. And it's a stupid evasion, anyway, debating about life being all tragedy or all comedy; why can't it be both? or a hundred other things in between and off to the sides? IMHO, someone who thinks it's clever to present oppositions like that is someone who's actually stopped thinking. Granted, people spend a lot of time thinking in terms of oppositions, but someone with a decent sense of perspective should remind themselves at least once in any such dinner-table conversation that there are other ways of exploring issues.

I don't think there was anything Allen could have done to make me enjoy a treatment of this basic premise, but he really pissed me off by having the gall to include a rave review of his work inside the film itself. Friend at dinner-table: "But that's such a delightful premise for a romantic comedy." Fiona: "I beg to differ." I haven't decided yet if it was worse than what Ben Elton did in Maybe Baby, where the Hugh Laurie character has been writing a film-script based on what he and his wife have been going through to try to conceive; he shows the script to a friend who says, "But this is wonderful stuff!" Well, if it's anything like the scenes between Hugh Laurie and his wife that I've just watched, then no, it isn't. I believe that Maybe Baby was based on the experiences of Ben Elton and his wife, and it shows superbly why, when you are writing about something that is particularly close to you, you must insist on having an exceptionally tough editor: you need as much help as you can get in deciding how much inherent interest your material holds for other people.

Over the last couple of days I'd got friendly with Holly, who was in the room next door. We'd made plans to go out for dinner on Saturday night, but I knew she'd gone out of town for the day and when she wasn't back by 9 p.m. I guessed she'd got delayed and went out for a steak. There was a couple in the restaurant who I recognised from the hotel, and we smiled and nodded, and when they passed my table on the way out, they stopped to chat. They were from Mexico, and they'd gone to Uruguay for the day and had an excellent time, so I put that after Tigre on the list for my next visit - because I will be back. I gather that B.A. is always humid, so if I want to do better with sightseeing I'm just going to have to learn to deal with the humidity. But then the next time I visit, I should be able to devote my entire luggage space to "clothes for a month" (say) "in Argentina" (and, oh, the luxury of not having to pack for everything from winter in Siberia to spring in L.A.!).

And this seems as good a time as any for: Pictures from various wanderings around the streets.

After the meal I called in at the Freddo, and everyone there was someone who'd served me over the last few days, and they recognised me and were so welcoming, and charged me for a small when I ordered a medium, and gave me a free dollop of melted-chocolate coating (unrequested, lest you think I was taking advantage). Believe me, I did show my appreciation, but I wish I'd told them I was leaving town the next day so they'd know exactly why my custom had ceased - but then I probably had This Week's Tourist written all over me.

I'd just finished my ice-cream when I heard Holly come in, and we went down to the restaurant and had a half-bottle of wine. Holly was from Atlanta and was just starting up a store selling hand-crafted and antique products for the garden. Someone had suggested she'd find unusual items in Argentina for great prices, and they'd been absolutely right. I bitched about Melinda Melinda and she bitched about a man she'd been dating in Atlanta who'd come to spend the previous weekend with her and revealed himself as a spoiled, needy, boorish dork, and we both bitched about the people in the third room. Well, "speculated" rather than bitched and I think there had probably been several changes of cast during my week, but Holly did tell me that there had been an American guy who'd brought a prostitute to his room one night before I arrived. The woman was doing some serious crying out and exclaiming, and eventually Holly had called room-to-room to complain about the noise (it was about 2 a.m.). The man said, "I'm sorry, is my television keeping you awake?" and Holly said, "No, but your prostitute is." The man immediately hung up, and the sounds quickly abated. Holly was good, tough fun. I don't know that we'd have much to say to one another if we met in Atlanta - where I suspect she's typically in country-club mode - but she was a welcome addition to my time in B.A. and I'm glad we managed that final drink.

Sunday and Monday: Leaving, and Arriving Home

I'd done most of my packing during Saturday, throwing quite a lot away including my shoes (I was sick of them), and both of my hats. I can't remember if I'd wittered on about my hats before, but I'm going to do it now, anyway. If you refer to the yak photo, you will see that I'm wearing a light-blue hat (that I bought in Helsinki), and underneath it I'm wearing a thin black fleece helmet-thing (that I bought in London). The helmet-thing looked ludicrous worn on its own (though the fleece was very soft and pleasant to the skin), and it was only really feasible as a liner (despite what the yak photo might suggest, I do have my pride); but the Helsinki hat turned out to have this strange tendency to creep around my head, so that ten minutes after I'd put it on, it would have crept far enough around that it was covering one of my eyes (I exaggerate, but only slightly). They'd done well enough at keeping me warm, but the world just had to contain a better solution to the head-warmth problem, and I did not feel that they'd earned a passage to London.

It was a very positive process, actually, throwing things away. There was nothing that I'd regretted having with me, and for everything that I was retiring, I felt I'd got full value out of it during my travels. And I didn't need any of these things as a reminder of the trip.

Anyway... I closed the door on Sunday morning on a room with an overflowing waste-basket. When I checked out they sent a maid up to check on the room, and she reported that I'd left a pair of shoes behind. I said I'd thrown them away - there just hadn't been room for them in the waste-basket - but the guy insisted that I sign a declaration that it was OK for the maid to throw them away. Odd, and potentially rather sinister (What could have happened in the past to make such a declaration seem necessary?), but then I'd had to fill in umpteen forms when I changed that $100 bill, so maybe this was just part of the same culture of mild bureaucratic excess. Dunno.

The hotel got me a taxi to the airport, where I encountered the confusion that I'd expected about the lack of entry stamp in my passport. The lady at the check-in desk had to go away and check, and so did the lady on passport control. They both came back with the same message that I was considered Argentinian, but these little consulations are clearly the price I have to pay for my new semi-secret super-power.

My flight was with British Airways, via Sao Paolo. It's all a blur now, except that The Pacifier with Vin Diesel was one of the films and I found it truly engaging and want to see it again. [Which isn't necessarily saying that I'd recommend it. It's possible that you have to be pretty far-gone as a Vin Diesel fan. My judgement is no longer reliable in these matters.] When the film was over I went to use the toilet, and it was a real shock to see instructions only in English, when I'd spent the last month with people whose work required them to function in at least two languages. I was heading towards a place that was set up very definitely for people like me. Where I would not stand out. Where the people I dealt with would not have to be constantly making allowances for my cluelessness. And on the one hand I felt a warm glow at the idea that such a place existed, while on the other hand I felt a kind of panic at the complacency implied by that single language. It's not that I was scared of slipping back into a rut, more that... I hadn't realised how much I'd valued the experience of being an outsider.

We touched down around 8 a.m. and I treated myself to a ride in on the Heathrow Express and had my key in the door by 10 a.m. I was just opening the door when a guy with a clipboard appeared around the corner - for I'd arrived just in time for one of Southwark Council's mandatory cockroach inspections (miss too many of them and you're running the risk that the inspectors will break down your door). And lo, I was 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.

From Chile to Argentina

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 15:25:06 GMT

Santiago checklist

I arrived in Santiago at about 5.30 on Wednesday evening and on the way to the hotel I went to the international bus station and bought a ticket on the bus across the Andes to Mendoza in Argentina, for 8.30 a.m. on the Friday. This would get me into Mendoza at about 3 p.m. and my overnight bus to B.A. was booked for 6 p.m. on the Saturday, giving me just a bit over a day in Mendoza. Not long at all, but enough to give me some idea of how long I might want to spend there on my next trip.

I hadn't bothered to make a booking in the Hotel Vegas but had no problems getting a room. It was on the first floor, not on the second with its skylight corridor, so it was a bit darker that my previous rooms - but it also had a fantastic radiator and I was able to get completely caught up with my laundry.

I went out around 7 to see what was on at the cinema, bought a ticket for the subtitled version of Episode III for 9.30 and then went to a Japanese restaurant mentioned in the RG. I had a sushi selection that was very good, and so generous on the slices of fish that it was difficult to manage them, in practial lifting-and-biting terms.

The cinema was packed and there was a round of applause at the end, which I would like to think was an expression of relief that the whole hideous thing was finally over. I know the films are partly a homage to the old serials for children's cinema matinees, which weren't exactly rich on characterisation, but that film seemed to have been made by and for people who had never seen human being interact, especially not seen them deal with any kind of complexity (such as humour). The lack of interest that it showed in ordinary, street-level existence was extraordinary - you have to have The Right Blood to be worthy of attention in these films, and the only time we see "the people" is as observers of Padme's funeral procession - and this lack of interest may (or may not) be telling for a film that's presenting its story as a battle between democracy and tyranny. On the basis of this film, one would have to question whether there would really be any difference to people between Jedi-dominance and Sith-dominance.

I should possibly also admit that I did not recognise Ewan McGregor. The facial hair was so revolting I couldn't bear to focus on his face, and the acting was so bad I assumed they'd hauled in some unknown. I persisted in this error for nearly a week, thinking how happy Ewan must have been that he hadn't signed a contract for all three films and that he'd escaped having to try to deliver those lines.

For the Thursday I had a full schedule of sight-seeing and errands. In the morning I went to the Museo de Bellas Artes, which was crammed with schoolkids there for a Rodin exhibition. The best exhibit was a work about Dante's Inferno. There were dolls with somewhat disfigured faces hung high on the walls, all dressed in bridal white and almost all of them blonde, and then there were black-and-white photos of the faces of these dolls, in which they looked truly demonic, with drawings in the background of little human figures crawling through tunnels. The exhibition was set up so that at first you only saw the photos, with not a hint of the dolls - and then when you saw the dolls they looked normal or... as if they might be fallen angels. It was a really interesting effect, though there was nothing in the commentary to suggest that the effect was deliberate.

I then got the funicular to Cerro San Christobel, which gave me some very impressive (if smog-hazed) views of the Andes and the city - though my main memory of the peak is of a crowd of obnoxious adolescents, so I didn't feel tempted to linger. I'd intended to get the funicular down and go to another of Neruda's houses, but I took a different path down from the peak and lost track of the funicular, and rather than trying to retrace my steps I decided to take the long walk down to the west which should bring me out in Barrio Alto (the posh area), where I had some shopping to do. It was a long walk down, involving many hairpin bends, and the RG didn't give me much help in knowing if I was making the right choices at junctions, but it had some great views and no teenagers, and it brought me out exactly where I wanted to be, in Los Leones.

I wasn't that bothered about missing the Neruda house - I'd enjoyed the one in Valparaíso, but I think I'd got a fair idea of his style - and I'd been wary anyway of the £2.50 entrance fee since I had a potential cash crisis. Now... back on my last day at Lago Grey, one of the receptionists had asked me if I could help her out. They'd just been given a $100 bill and they weren't able to make change for it: could I? All of my dollars were in $20s and I happily changed the bill for them. However, when I tried to change the bill at the bus station in Puerto Montt, I was told that $100 bills of that year and imprint couldn't be changed in Chile. Disconcerting but not disastrous: I changed my last four $20s and that that had got me comfortably through Chiloé and back to Santiago. However (again), when I'd tried to use an ATM on the way to the Museo that morning, it told me that my card wasn't valid for what I was trying to do (withdraw 100,000 pesos, which I'd done quite successfully in Valparaíso). Still not disastrous, but until I got to Argentina I might have to limit myself to activities I could pay for by credit card (and that's assuming all went well with Argentinian ATMs and dollar-changing).

The RG had said there was a mall at Los Leones, and I wanted to buy a new white T-shirt since the maternity one I'd bought in San Fransisco was now just too disgusting. No luck in the mall, but about a block before I'd passed a man's shop with a white "camisetta" in the window, so I went back and got a small size for £2. The Los Leones area gave me a taste of Barrio Alto, which is much more middle-class in feel than the old Downtown area where I'd been spending time. A place to find one's first-world creature comforts, sure, but if it wasn't for the Andes in the background, you wouldn't know you were in Chile at all. Oh! but I'd tried another ATM on the way to the mall and had better luck, so the cash crisis had only lasted a few hours and was really hardly worth troubling you with. But it was particularly vivid for me because of the doubt that was raised in my mind about the receptionist at Lago Grey: did she really just need smaller bills, or did she know that the $100 was a problematic bill and she was deliberately palming it off on me? I will never know.

I went back to the hotel, then had lunch in a restaurant around the corner that was mentioned in the RG. Santiago is good for cheap set lunches - especially in the area around my hotel - and in this place I got 5 courses for £2.50. After lunch I went out to buy Argentinian pesos, but the exchange bureau I'd used before didn't have any. Exchange bureaux aren't plentiful in Santiago, and it wasn't until several hours later that I passed another one - which didn't have Argentinian pesos either. So I'd just better not get peckish between the border and Mendoza.

My first sightseeing task of the afternoon was to go to Palacio Cousiño, a house build in the 19th century by a family that made its fortune in mining coal and silver. They also had a vineyard, which I think lives on in the label Cousiño-Macul. They'd hired a small army of European craftsmen and craftswomen to make parquet floors and marble staircases and embroidered curtains - and as a display of wealth and concentrated effort it was astonishing. It was also a display of good, restrained taste, though with the curtains kept closed to avoid sun-damage and the lights kept low to reduce the risk of electrical fires, the general effect was quite heavy (i.e. typically Victorian). The most appealing space was the conservatory, which, in addition to the charms of natural light, had a lovely Art Nouveau light-fitting with frosted-glass shades in different pastel colours. Inside I liked the three-sided love-seats (Seat Three for the chaperone), the cutlery made from silver from their own mines, the first ever elevator in Chile (for one person, and you sat down in it - so it was like a Stannah Stair Lift, except vertical, and with a cage around it). I was also impressed by the high standard of the paintings; there might not have been any masterpieces but they were all interesting.

The fortunes of the family had steadily declined. It had been built by a family with six children (mostly by the mother, after the father had died young), but by... 1950? there was only one member left and he put the place up for sale. The mayor bought it for the city and it was used for accommodating and entertaining distinguished guests, but in 1968 an electrical fire broke out on the first floor - two weeks before Elizabeth II was due to visit - and with only the ground floor left, it became a museum. However, since my RG was published, they've rebuilt the first floor, though they're not calling it a "restoration", merely an "indication" - though some of the soft furnishings are the original pieces, since there were some items that were away for cleaning at the time of the fire.

The palacio was to the south east of my hotel, and when I'd been in that area earlier in the month, I'd had distant glimpses of a dramatic-looking domed church that didn't seem to feature in the RG. I glimpsed it again and decided to pay it a visit on the way back to the hotel, and discovered when I got close that it was made of concrete! I think it had once had stone cladding, but that was gone from everything except of one side of one tower. The effect was fascinating but I could see why the church (of the Sacred Sacrament) was missed out of the guide books. I couldn't tell whether or not the church was still in use.

Next I went to the Museum of Colonial History in the San Fransisco church just around the corner from the hotel. Striking items: a saccharine virgin with at least 12 gilded cherubs at her feet, and with a disconnected spotlight nestling among the cherubs; and painting entitled "Christ of the Earthquakes", in which Christ was wearing a half-slip; an angel in one of the many (many, many) paintings of the life of Saint Francis who was dressed rather like a Victorian doll (i.e. very elaborate and self-conscious and vain).

And that concluded my sight-seeing mission in Santiago. It was a good, busy day.

Pictures of Santiago

This seems as good a point as any to talk about coffee bars in Santiago. I've been moaning about Nescafe in Chile, but there are in fact lots of espresso bars in downtown Santiago, and frequently while wandering around I'd get a whiff of real coffee. The problem is that these bars are not about the coffee, they're about the waitresses, who are hired for the length of their legs and their willingness to wear very short skirts and be ogled by middle-aged businessmen. "Bars piernas", they're called, or "legs bars". The RG said that women were perfectly welcome in the bars as customers but I never felt like testing that out, and neither did any other woman in town from what I could see. I discovered on my last day that there is actually a cluster of trendy coffee bars near the Museo de Bellas Artes, but I was having my cash crisis when I was in the area so I'll have to wait until next time to find out if it's real coffee they serve.

Around 8 that evening I set out for Providencia and that restaurant I'd been aiming for when I had my epic walk in Providencia back at the start of May. I got there at about 8.30 but it was still closed, so I went back to "De Cangrejo a Conejo" and had another excellent meal: of tuna carpaccio, Thai seafood curry, and figs and mascarpone. Again I walked home in a happy MP3/alcohol haze, but this time discovering the shortest route between the two restaurants - which is less than two blocks! The other restaurant was now open, and I'm guessing it opens at 9.

The bus to Mendoza

On Friday morning I was up bright and early and was at the bus station for 8 a.m. I bought water, changed my last Chilean pesos for Argentinia pesos (having finally found a bureau with Argentinian money), went to the loo... and then spent the next 20 minutes wondering when the bus was going to turn up. At 8.35 I went to enquire at the ticket office and was told that the road was closed because of snow. Way back when I started planning the trip, I'd heard that the road was sometimes closed in the winter, and when I'd gone searching for some quantification of that "sometimes", all I'd found was "for eight days in a typical winter". That didn't seem too bad, and anyway I'd be there in late autumn, not winter, so I hadn't thought, when I was buying the ticket, to ask if the bus was likely to run. Silly me. I later learned that "eight days a winter" was nonsense: it's fairly common for the road to be closed for two weeks at a time, and you can't be sure of getting through at any time of the year.

I was offered my money back or a ticket for the next day. I took the ticket, changed most of my Argentinian pesos back into Chilean pesos, and headed back to the hotel. On the way there, I realised that I should have taken the offer of a refund. I had to be in Buenos Aires by Sunday at the latest (I had a hotel and social appointments booked), I really couldn't gamble on the road being open the next morning, and I was obviously going to have to fly. I used the hotel's computer to check out my options, and decided that it was pointless trying to get to Mendoza (I'd probably only get three hours there before having to get the overnight bus to B.A.), and I should just fly straight to B.A. Saturday (the next day) would be best.

I went to the address given for Lan Chile in the RG. Their office wasn't there (though there was a Starbucks in the building, which might be useful to know) but the lady on the desk knew the correct address. Once there, I went into this spiel about how I was travelling on a One World Explorer ticket, because I was fairly sure that the terms of my ticket allowed by to buy additional flights for $75 each, but that didn't seem to make any difference and my Spanish wasn't up to arguing. [I would probably have given up in English, too, because I'm not good at insisting in these situations.] I bought a return ticket because that was $50 cheaper than a single (!), going out on the 2 p.m. flight on Saturday, and coming back two weeks later, when I would actually be in London. The price was rather more than $75, but not positively painful.

Then back to the hotel, and back into the same room. I'd completed my Santiago checklist the day before, so I spent most of the day on the hotel's computer, first booking a hotel for the Saturday night in B.A., and then making an LJ post and then uploading all my photos.

In the evening I saw the Chilean film Mi Mejor Enemigo (My Best Enemy), which was about the tensions in 1978 between Chile and Argentina about the location of the border in Patagonia. I enjoyed the film but not in the same way as the other people in the audience; they were laughing at least every minute, but those verbal jokes were passing straight over my head. There's nothing like comedy for making a person feel like an outsider!

Afterwards I went back to the Japanese restaurant where I'd had the excellent sushi on Wednesday night, although this time I ordered the shrimp tempura. A mistake. A big mistake. It tasted fine, but the batter had the consistency of a wet paper towel. I didn't know you could do that with tempura batter, and I can't shake off the suspicion that the chef had never in his life eaten genuine tempura. When the dish arrived there was a tangled lump over on one side that looked as if it might be some kind of experiment involving a baby octopus; there were tentacles in there, horribly mixed up in at sort of black netting. I'd thought the prawns were only supposed to come with vegetables, but it's possible that I'd missed the significance of some words of the Spanish description. After about ten minutes of trying to eat around the baby octopus (something for which I would never be in the right mood), I suddenly realised that the black netting was shredded spinach, and the tentacles were interstitial seepings of limp tempura batter. In order to eat the clotted lump, I had to tear it into five separate pieces with my bare hands. Again, it tasted OK, but I spent a lot of the rest of my time in the restaurant staring at the chef in a sort of horrified awe. Whatever book he learned his tempura-making from, it should be banned.

I had an unhurried journey to the airport the next morning. On the way I was thrilled to get a photograph of a shop I'd noticed when I was on my way to get the flight to Punta Arenas. That time I'd recorded the name in my notebook: "La Casa de la Gata Hidraulica" - the house of the hydraulic she-cat, I swear to god. But now I had a picture so could prove to myself that I hadn't imagined it.

At the airport all went well with my eticket, and in the duty-free shops I managed to find a bottle of the Montes Alpha Syrah (for £8). And then I was on my way to Buenos Aires, which I must have visited at least ten times in my life - between the ages of six and twelve. I had some very fond memories of B.A., and I was very much looking forward to seeing it as an adult. And that will be the next (and probably last) post.

The last week of May, in Chile

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 20:30:46 GMT

Waiting for the Navimag

This time I arrived at the erratic rock hostel to find it full, mainly with young English people who were waiting for the Navimag and who were very preoccupied with laying in a stock of cheap booze for the journey. Navimag is a company that runs several tourist cruises along the channels in the fjord territory in southern Chile, including one between Puerto Natales and Puerto Montt - hereinafter referred to as "the Navimag". The trip north takes about four days and normally runs once a week, and as soon as I learned about it I knew I had to do it. At the time I left on my trip they hadn't announced their low-season schedule, so I'd been checking in on their website once a week. It finally went up in early April, when I was in L.A., and it turned out that they only had two sailings in May, though fortunately the timing of the second sailing fit in with my other plans. Less fortunately, I got an error message when I tried to make my booking online, so it took some emails and an international fax before I got my booking made.

I'd dithered a bit about what type of cabin to book. Booking a private cabin to myself would cost $700 (it would be $1800 in high season!), whereas I could get a place in the windowless dormitories for $200. That spare $500 would be useful, but a friend soon pointed out that people frequently suffer from upset stomachs during sea-journeys, and that in those circumstances I might place quite a high value on having a toilet at my sole disposal. This was a very good point. I did read that, during the low-season, they would frequently upgrade people from the domitories to cabins, but I decided in the end it was too much of a risk and I went ahead and booked the highest grade of cabin. My hostel-mates were all booked into the dormitories, but then they were sleeping in the dorm-rooms in the hostel (or, in some cases, on the floor in the common-room). I had the only private room, and went to bed early, while the others were trying to decide what film to watch. They were a nice bunch, but I did have moments in their company of feeling very old.

I think I was the first down to breakfast on Friday morning. No one was entirely clear about procedures or times regarding the boat. Some people thought we could check in any time that afternoon and that we sailed around 9 p.m., whereas I was fairly sure that it didn't depart until 6 a.m. on Saturday morning. I will spare you the many stages in the process of enlightenment, but it turned out that one could indeed check in any time in the afternoon, which involved leaving any baggage that you wanted them to take to your room, and getting your boarding-card and meal-vouchers; and then we all had to report at 9 p.m. for boarding, and departure was indeed at 6 a.m. the next morning.

My mission for the day was: buy batteries, wine and corkscrew for the voyage, change my flight from Buenos Aires to London from the 5th of June to the 7th or later, and try to get a feel for Puerto Natales. It's a small town of about 20,000, which I think lives entirely off the tourists coming down for the Torres del Paine park. It has a lovely setting on a fjord and I had a pleasant time wandering around, but there were more signs of poverty than I'd seen elsewhere in Chile, and spending more than a day there might be a challenge. I tried to see a collection of stuffed animals that the RG had said was housed in a school but those rooms weren't open, though the inside of the school was interesting, with all the posters of religious exhortation lining the corridors.

At one point I passed a particularly sorry-looking corrugated-iron shack. I was thinking, "Jesus! Who would live there?" when a kitten came out from under the wooden steps. I knelt down and held my hand out and it was happy to have its head scritched, and after a while it insisted on walking up the arm of my puffy jacket and stomping around on the back of my neck, and at this point the door of the shack opened and two women came out. They laughed to see the kitten and then turned and walked off, and the kitten jumped down and scooted into the house. I was relieved and interested to see that the household did not seem to be in the state of desperation suggested by the outside of the shack. [And I really should set myself a date for painting the exterior woodwork of my flat, which is in a miserable state. I mean, I bought the paint for the job last summer - and a year is a little bit long to put off a task that I could easily do in a weekend.]

I'd been hoping to get a couple of bottles of the Montes Alpha Syrah, but the grocery stores in Natales didn't attempt to sell any wine over about £2 a bottle. [When I eventually found the Montes Alpha, I learned that it was about £10 a bottle, both in Chile and in the UK.] I got a couple of bottles of Syrah and some snacks and took them back to the hostel - which was now ever fuller, with addition of people (mostly young Brits) who had just come off the southbound Navimag. They said it had been a great voyage and they'd seen whales and dolphins and penguins and icebergs. I had some snacks for lunch and then went out to the Lan Chile office, but the address given in the Rough Guide (and in the Lan Chile website) did not look like any kind of airline office, but more like lawyer's office, and a very shut lawyer's office, at that. I gave up on achieving anything more in Natales, so went back to the hostel to collect my luggage and then down to the Navimag office to check in and to learn that boarding wasn't until 9 p.m.

It was then only 4 p.m. so... a proper meal of salmon, chips and beer, 40 minutes in an internet cafe with a strong Israeli theme (a flag on the wall, and Hebrew characters on my keyboard), then back to the hostel for a mug of tea and to watch "Orange County" and "Desperate Housewives". It really was very decent of the erratic rock people to let us hang around after we'd checked out. When I was paying my bill I asked what time of year they'd recommend for doing the Circuit if one didn't like crowds, and the answer was: October. The hostel can provide a guide on the trek for about $200, which seems a bargain to me. So... October 2006 I will be back to do the Circuit, and probably giving custom to erratic rock in one way or another.

Onto the Navimag

The seats in the boarding-lounge were like airplane seats and I was expecting a long wait, but at 9 p.m. on the dot we were summoned, and led down the jetty and in across the lowered RO-RO flap, and then we waited while someone set up guard rails on an industrial vehicle-lift set in the floor. We trooped onto that (there were about 40 of us), and then were slowly raised, and once we'd reached the next deck those with private rooms were directed up, and those in dormitories were directed down. In fact, everyone who'd booked into the 12-person dormitories had indeed been upgraded to 4-person dormitories, but you didn't get any choice about who you were sharing with, the dormitories didn't have windows (or heating), and there was still the same density of people per shared bathroom. So I was quite glad to be $500 poorer and to have my window, my choice of four bunks, my effective little radiator, and my ensuite toilet and shower.

I wasn't in the mood for socialising so stayed in my room drinking Syrah (very good indeed for £1.80), and went to bed around 10 p.m. There were a lot of industrial-type noises througout the night, and I did come awake to feel the ship leaving port at 6.20 a.m. I wasn't sure what time breakfast was - between 7 and 8? or between 8 and 9? and had I missed some sort of briefing by staying in my room and going to bed so early? I'd set my alarm for 7 a.m. and was down in the dining room by 7.40, to find one other person waiting. In fact, meals were announced about ten minutes before service started; I never found anyone who could actually understand the announcements, but it was easy enough to guess. There were sheets up in the corridors announcing the program for the day, but the day in question was the 6th of May (it was now the 21st), so it was clear early on that they don't bother with any of that Activities Director nonsense during the low season, and we were going to be left to entertain ourselves.

When I looked out of the rear window of the passenger lounge (also the bar, restaurant and cinema), I was startled to see that the deck over which we had walked during boarding was now crammed full with containers that were in turn crammed full with livestock. I think sheep were in the majority, but there were at least three containers of horses and some of cattle. They kept up a quiet chorus of complaint throughout the voyage, and I don't blame them. At each meal there would be two tables taken up by the Chilean guys who were with the animals, and a couple of times a day you'd see them clambering around the containers lugging bales and hoses. During the high season the company runs a boat with more passenger space and less cargo space (separate restaurant and bar!), and I'd be curious to know if they try to mix the passenger business and the livestock business then.

The meals were pretty good, much better than I'd expected. I'd read that they were very bland, and when I set off I packed a bottle of Tabasco specifically with the Navimag in mind. However, by the time I got to Sydney I decided it wasn't worth the space, and I left it in one of Ian's kitchen cupboards. I did use it, once, to liven up a glass of vodka on the trans-Siberian, and will definitely use Tabasco for that purpose again; but when I was faced with food that really needed it (in Mongolia), I just wasn't in a position to bring the bottle out. So I decided to free up the space in my luggage and see where my seasoning-priorities had settled once I actually got to Chile. Anyway, I can tell you that if you're going to do the Navimag, there's no need to bring your own bottle of chili sauce with you. It's good, tasty food: huge salmon steaks, spaghetti bolognese, lots of fruit.

It was raining on Saturday morning, and while the sun did come out a couple of times in the afternoon, there were blustery winds all day. The landscape was pleasing, but not striking enough to make me want to stay out on deck in those conditions - even for the chance to observe young British lads doggedly playing deck-chess with the wind howling around them - and I spent most of the day in my cabin reading. It was very much like a day on the trans-Siberian.

After dinner I took my bottle of wine down to the lounge and got in some people-time, talking mainly to Natalie; she was from Manchester, had studied dance as a child but decided she'd never reach the top level in ballet and had given up, but was now thinking of getting back in (though not in ballet), and would be spending several months in the US taking dance classes. There was also Benny from Idaho (who at first appeared a classic stoner but turned out to be bright and determined), who was travelling with his Canadian girlfriend Ilena; they both had lots of questions about Glasgow because they were moving there in the autumn to start a Masters program in Fine Art. There was a disco laid on, with a control-freak of a Chilean D.J. who refused to take anyone's suggestions, and when I left at 11.30 hardly anyone had tried dancing. However, I heard that the drinking carried on until the small hours.

I woke up in the middle of Saturday night with no idea whatever where I was. I thought I was outside, in a hiker's landscape, and ever after I reached out and felt the wall and then my shoulder-bag, it was still several seconds before I sorted everything out. A great relief, though, to realise that there was a toilet just a few feet away, and I wasn't going to have to go and find a suitable tree to squat behind.

Sunday morning started misty, but the sun soon broke through, giving some lovely romantic effects, and it was much less windy than Saturday. I spent most of the morning out on deck with my MP3 player for company. At about 2.30 we came out of the channels into the open Pacific - an event about which we had been warned by the previous set of passengers - and the boat started pitching and rolling, enough to make the wastebasket in my bathroom slide across the floor. I had a couple of seasickness pills with me that Jill had given me in preparation for the harbour cruise in Akaroa (two months earlier, in New Zealand), and I decided I'd better take those. I felt slightly unsettled (farty and burpy rather than queasy), and at about 3.30 I decided I'd better remove myself from the sight of the ship's movements and went down to my cabin to snooze and read. But I had no hesitation about eating supper, unlike about half the passengers, and it was interesting that there were no bottles of wine on the table that evening. I learned afterwards that some people had been violently ill.

Shortly before dinner I'd finished the Uruguayan novel I'd been reading for the last month. I wasn't going to keep the novel, but I wanted to note down the unfamiliar words I'd been underlining on my way through. I tried using my bed as a desk but my legs went to sleep, so I took my books and my cup of wine down to the lounge and worked with "The Shining" playing in the background. At some points the roll of the ship was so severe that my plastic chair skidded backwards by a few inches.

I think the movement was easing by the time I went to bed around 11 p.m., and when I woke up after an excellent night's sleep, we were back in the channels and all was calm. I wonder if I would have been OK even if I hadn't taken the pills, but that's an experiment I'd prefer to save for a much shorter voyage.

Monday was a lovely clear day, without even the early mist. I spent a lot of it on the terrace with my MP3 player, watching the landscape and the chess matches and the yoga classes (with all participants in several layers of clothing, including hats and gloves). The wine and D.J. were out again that evening (our last), and I got talking to Marek, who'd got sick of being a building supervisor in Portland, Oregon, and had been working as a volunteer on a ranch in Argentina (he'd come to Chile mainly to renew his Argentinian visa). Benny and I were also talking to a Chilean lad who works as a guide in the park during the summer and travels in the winter. He used to work mainly as a trekking guide, but now does ice-walking and ice-caving and kayaking. He and his colleague got some sponsorship from the North Face and were going to drop in on the North Face offices when they were in Santiago. I'd actually passed the North Face building when I was walking my feet off looking for the Crab-to-Rabbit restaurant: I was idly looking up at the brightly-lit third-floor window in this upper-class residential street, and I thought, "Huh! That looks like someone on a climbing wall." And it kept looking like that as I got closer, and then I saw the North Face logo and all was clear. The lads on the ship hadn't been to the office before; I was able to tell them that it was in Providencia but not much more since I'd been thoroughly lost at the time.

We arrived in Puerto Montt around 2 a.m., and the night was then full of the sound of the crew at work, and of someone with a torch going through all of the steerage cabins apparently looking for someone. Breakfast was at 7.30 and disembarkation-via-lift at about 8.20. We had to carry all our own luggage off and most people had a huge rucksack on their back and a daysack on their front (much gratifying amazement over my tiny pack), and as we were walking up the RO-RO ramp we looked like a troop-landing; I wish I could have got a photo, but it would have been inconsiderate (and dorky) to have stopped dead in the middle of that stream. I think at least ten people were hoping to catch the 8.30 bus to Bariloche in Argentina; four jumped into the one taxi that was waiting at the Navimag terminal but I somehow doubt that they made it in time, which would have been frustrating since the next bus wasn't until 3 p.m.

And that was the Navimag experience. I'm glad I did it but I don't feel any need to do it again. If you're travelling as a single person, it's expensive for what you get, even in low season. The landscape is lovely, but it's lovely in the same way for the entire voyage, and I just can't extract that much value from four days of fjords. We didn't see any whales or dolphins or penguins or icebergs (well, I believe a few people saw whales and dolphins, but they were always gone by the time I rushed over to that side of the ship), so my memories of sights and events outside the ship are only of mild prettiness, and all my vivid memories are of conditions inside the ship. It was an interesting experience for someone who hasn't spent much time with backpackers - and by no means irksome - but there have to be cheaper ways of hanging out for four days with a bunch of backpackers.

Pictures of Backpackers and Fjords

What to do in Puerto Montt?

We'd arrived in Puerto Montt on Tuesday morning, but my flight to Santiago wasn't until Friday. I'd read that the Navimag could be delayed by several days, so I'd made the flight bookings to leave myself plenty of time. I wasn't in the mood to hang around Puerto Montt until Friday; I was feeling very close to my limit for absorbing new experiences, and I'd also somehow neglected to bring with me the RG section on Puerto Montt, and I really didn't want to tackle the place entirely on my own. So the plan was to get out of Puerto Montt as soon as possible. I walked to the bus station, had a failure of understanding or observation regarding the 9 a.m. airport bus (and the next wasn't until 10.30), but was soon invited to share a taxi to the airport and was there by 9.30. All flights for the day were full but I managed to get on the 3.35 flight for the next day. I asked about changing my flight from Buenos Aires to London, but it didn't look good.

So... I had a night to spend in Puerto Montt - which was going to be a chore from what I'd seen so far. The airport didn't have any information on hotels though I did get a city map and other tourist brochures, and my plan when I got onto the airport bus was to go to the tourist information centre in town. However, during the journey into town I was reminded by a map in one of the brochures that the island of Chiloé is an easy distance from Puerto Montt (see map). I was genuinely interested in seeing Chiloé since it's featured to great effect in the Swamp Thing comic, and indeed the reason I first read Chatwin's In Patagonia was because I'd heard it was the source for the deliciously chilling details about the island's brujeria (a society of male witches). I had brought with me the RG section on Chiloé, and a skim of this suggested that the capital of Castro would be the best place to spend my one night - assuming that the morning bus schedules would allow me to get back in time to catch my flight.

I got back to the bus station at about 10.45 and there was a bus to Castro at 11.15. Perfect! The journey took about three and a half hours including a half-hour ferry ride, with the film The Pianist playing en route (in competition with the radio, which I guess you can do when the film is subtitled). The film didn't start in the beginning, but presumably at the last point at which the DVD had been stopped - but this didn't seem to bother anybody. A couple of times a message scrolled across the screen saying that this copy was for purposes of prize-assessment only, and mustn't be used for public display. I wonder which festival it had strayed from.

Chiloé was very green and gently-undulating, with loads of trees including eucalypts, which I hadn't expected at all. The scenery along the main road wasn't spectacular but it was very, very pleasant, and at times it reminded me of Australia, and at others of Wales, and at others of Scotland. Castro was delightful: built on steep hills in fjord-land, with lots of fish-scale wooden houses that reminded me of Irkutsk, with many houses and restaurants built on stilts right over the water, and with a compact but bustling centre with a very high standard of shop, including a hypermarket where the meat-counter had entire pigs' heads! When I'd mentioned Chiloé to people during my trip, they'd usually shaken their heads and said it was very poor, but from what I saw it was exceptionally prosperous and well-maintained by Chilean standards. It also had some pleasant-looking pubs (rather German in styling), which was something I hadn't seen elsewhere in Chile.

Chiloé looked like the least likely place in the world to produce legends of witch-cults, but apparently the islanders really do have a preoccupation with witchcraft. The Chilean lady from whom I took conversation lessons in London had grown up on Chiloé, and she said that whenever the topic came up people would say, "Well, of course I don't believe in it myself," and then quickly glance around the room trying to guess how many witches had overheard them. Castro is the third-oldest city in Chile (founded in 1567) and it was the base for a major Jesuit mission, but Chiloé was unusual in South America for the degree of mixing between the Spanish and the indigenous population (they lived side-by-side, doing the same type of work), and this probably explains a lot of the myths and the mysteries of Chiloé. I never asked about the brujeria when I was there, but I might on my next visit.

Once off the bus, I made for a B&B a few blocks from the bus station, which the RG had recommended for its views, warm welcome, and internet access. The first two were correct, but they'd got rid of the internet access because the kids had spent all their time chatting online instead of studying ("chatear" - to chat online). I got settled in around 3 pm then went out for a walk along the shore and within a few minutes I had seen a seal. The first stilt-restaurant I passed was still open (sometimes one is very glad that Chileans lunch and dine so late), and I had a huge and delicious crab-steak cooked in butter, with a salad and a beer and it was all less than £5.

I managed to see the main features of the town before nightfall. It got very hazy in the last hour but I think that was because of the quantities of wood-smoke pouring out of the tin chimneys of the wooden houses (and, in one area, dung-smoke - I am fairly sure). After a roam around the hypermarket I spent about an hour and a half in an internet place booking my overnight bus from Mendoza to Buenos Aires (B.A.) and my week's hotel in B.A. I had a look in the cathedral, which was entirely wood-panelled and very spacious and calming, but there was a service in progress so I couldn't explore. Wooden jesuit churches are the other thing that Chiloé is famous for; there are over a hundred, of which 16 are on UNESCO's World Heritage List, though the cathedral was the only one I had time to visit.

By this time it was about 8 pm and without gloves or the puffy jacket I was uncomfortably cold, so I gave up on the notion of a beer in a German-style pub and went back to the B&B, where I spent the rest of the evening watching TV with the mother and grandmother of the household. They were very hospitable (the grandmother in particular) and invited me to coffee and yoghurt-and-muesli. We watch "Rancho VIP", the Chilean equivalent of "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here" ("VIP" is pronounced like "whip" with a German accent, not "vee-eye-pee"), and then "Las Brujas", a soap-opera/drama about witches (!) set in upper-class Santiago. Or they might not actually have been witches, just difficult women; the grandmother asked me at one point if I understood what the people were saying in the TV programs, and I had to admit that I didn't, not really. "Though more every time," which was true.

The grandmother got ever more concerned that I'd be cold in the front-room-with-view that I'd chosen, and she ended up filling me a hot-water bottle. Oh, the luxury! It was a very rainy and windy night and I didn't have the soundest of sleeps, but I was toasty-warm. I had a roll-and-jam and Nescafe for breakfast (the standard Chilean breakfast) and then hauled myself up the steep hill to get the 9 am bus.

I really liked Chiloé - it hit the right notes for me, over and over. I'd like to go back for a week, to see more of the wooden churches and some of the smaller towns, and to see the beaches of the National Park on the west coast. I asked in the B&B if October was a good time to visit and was told yes, so after I've done the Circuit in Torres del Paine, I'm planning on recovering with a week in Chiloé. I was very glad that I hadn't been able to get that flight straight out of Puerto Montt, and to see that my capacity for enjoying new places wasn't quite exhausted.

Pictures of Castro

Mid-May in Chile

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 17:28:34 GMT

Back in Punta Arenas

While I was in the Falklands I'd dithered about trying another hostel in Punta Arenas, because I'd felt a bit... stranded in the B&B I'd stayed in on the way out. But in the end I decided to stick with somewhere where I at least knew what to expect. I got to the B&B around 7 pm, and the door was opened, not by the tall German guy I was expecting, but by an American guy with a shaved head (mostly shaved - there was a little pigtail at the back). This turned out to be Bill, who was looking after the boys while the parents were out. He was wearing a T-shirt for the erratic rock hostel in Puerto Natales, and I asked him about the T-shirt because I was booked in to that hostel for the next night. Bill is in fact one of the owners; he'd come to town for a party with some other people from Natales, and he offered me a ride back with them on Sunday. I was very glad I'd decided to stay at the B&B again.

Soon the house was full to overflowing with partygoers and babysitting grandparents, and I snuck out to the restaurant where I'd met Peter the previous Saturday. The elderly woman at the next table had been on the flight; I asked her if she'd liked the Falklands, and she told me she'd lived there for 30 years. She was from Uruguay, and she'd married a man who worked on the Darwin - the ship that used to do the monthly run between Uruguay and the Falklands. She'd moved to the Falklands permanenty in 1976 (the year my family left), and though her husband had died 15 years ago, she'd stayed.

I ordered a steak with peppercorns and a red-wine sauce ("old-fashioned style", according to the menu), and with pureed carrots, and I would have to say that none of those ingredients really did each other any favours. For dessert I had the "triple flavour" creme brulee (lemon, blueberry and... er... vanilla?), and it was presented as three separate pots, but with a swirl of bruleed sugar balanced on top of the three pots, with the pots themseves all bare and mushy. It was tasty enough, but odd.

In the morning I got up and had breakfast at about 9, and the others gradually got up with their hangovers. Around 11 we left to go on a sightseeing trip to Fuerte Bulnes, about 30 miles to the south (the opposite direction to Natales). Fuerte Bulnes is the site of the first Chilean settlement in Patagonia (founded in 1843). The founders soon decided it wasn't a great location after all and they moved north to Punta Arenas, but in 1943 the site was declared a national monument and a reconstruction was built, complete with chapel, prison and turf-walled buildings. The site might have had drawbacks in practical terms, but it is beautiful: the fort is on a promontory, with a wonderful sweeping coastline and with mountains in the background. No one else was taking pictures though and my desire to appear cool and non-touristy got the better of my desire to record the impressive views.

We went back to a fork in the road and took the other branch until the road ran out - and that was the point of taking that branch: to be able to say we'd been as far south as you can get by road in Patagonia. We were still all being dead cool about it, but there was a certain glow of satisfaction. Obviously we had no option but to head north, and I wish I'd overcome my hangups about photography and coolness by the time we got back to the fork in the road, because the chances are not good that I'll ever have another chance to photograph the geographical mid-point of Chile.

The mid-point? When I'd just said that the fork in the road was nearly as far south as you could get? Yes, because they're counting the Chilean slice of Antarctica, as the map on the marker-post makes clear. We (the British) should follow this example, and erect a post at the spot in the Atlantic that marks the north-south midpoint of British territory.

We got back to the B&B around 4.30, all starving, and Sebastian (German host for the B&B) and Michelle (German girlfriend of Bill) got volunteered to make vegetarian pasta for everyone. At some point during the day I'd asked Bill and Michelle how I could get to Hosteria Lago Grey, which was the hotel that I'd booked for three nights inside the Torres del Paine national park. The hotel is over on the west side of the park, and the regular buses from Puerto Natales don't go that far west. I'd heard that there were shuttle buses inside the park, but it turned out that they don't run in low season, and neither do the regular buses (a fact that someone really should mention to the Rough Guide). Bill said that my only way of getting to the hotel would be to take one of the guided day-tours - which always go by the hotel on the way to showing people Lago Grey and its glacier - and arrange for the tour to pick me up three days later. Bill did a bunch of phoning around and eventually got me booked on a "Full Paine" day tour, with a 7.30 pickup the next morning.

We eventually left Punta Arenas at about 8 pm, and arrived at Natales around 11 pm after a rather dull ride in the dark. The hostel also does equipment-hire so I picked out a pair of thick gloves and the smallest pair of hiking boots they had (about a 37/38, when I take a 36, but they were OK if I wore both pairs of socks). I'd booked a private room but the household's two children were sleeping in it, so I was put in one of the bunkrooms; the hostel was officially closed and I was the only customer that night, but they said they were still having people coming through most days. The bunkroom was warm but noisy (there seemed to be a disco next door), and at about 7 am Rebecca-from-San-Francisco gave me a wake-up call and scrambled some eggs for me - and then we settled in to wait for the tour-bus.

Into the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine

The park is probably the main tourist attraction in southern Chile, and I suspect that every travel brochure is required by law to contain a picture of the park. My LJ icon is a picture of the park: it's the formation known as Los Cuernos (the horns), though at the time I cropped the picture I thought those peaks were called Las Torres (the towers) - but I eventually learned that Las Torres is another set of peaks, taller and more sheer than Los Cuernos. I'd first seen the park in a framed poster I'd bought to fill up the walls in my flat in Edinburgh; the picture was labelled simply "Patagonia" and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it, or risk forgetting that a mountain could in fact look like a knife-blade. When I first started planning the trip I was only thinking of going in for a day-tour, but then decided to stay a few nights and do some proper walking.

The bus arrived about half an hour late; I'd been getting a little bit anxious, wondering if the booking had gone through properly. It turned out that the scheduled bus for the day had refused to start in the cold weather, so they'd had to get another one fuelled and ready. It's about a two hour drive to the park, if you go straight there, but we stopped first at the Milodon Cave. The cave is about 200 m deep and 30 m high; it used to be occupied by mudstone ("lutite", the leaflet said), but that was eroded away by wave-action on a lake associated with a glacier. Humans have lived in it from time to time, and also, apparently, the odd milodon (a giant sloth that went extinct about 20,000 years ago). Some milodon bone fragments and skin were found in the cave in the 1890s, and one of the people who found them was Charlie Milward, great-uncle of Bruce Chatwin and star of Chatwin's In Patagonia, which I'd re-read last August. The cave was mostly damp and dark (and the plaster model of the milodon at the entrance was truly tacky), but I was glad to have seen it and the setting was gorgeous: autumnal trees in the foreground and snow-capped mountains in the background, but with so little in the midground that it looked artificial, like a filmset.

After we left the cave we still had about an hour until we entered the park, though about half an hour of that was a stop at a gift-shop in a tiny little town just outside the park. And a good fifteen minutes of that was an Ecuadorian woman whose disregard for timekeeping was to cause our guide some frustration. Once we were in the park we immediately saw guanacos, and then grey foxes - though the foxes were a bit of a cheat since they were six cubs that had been reared at one of the entrance-huts after their mother had died. Unfortunately the views of the lakes and mountains were rather disappointing because of low cloud. The guide said there was usually low cloud in the morning but in summer the high winds would typically blow it away by afternoon, but in the winter the weather was much more stable so they didn't get the winds, and it was a week since Las Torres had last been visible. We stopped at a couple of viewpoints and admired green lakes and waterfalls and more autumnal colours, but the mountains... They were not really pulling their weight, spectacle-wise.

Maybe it's now time for a map. We'd entered to the north of Lago Sarmiento, and had headed west and south to the Administration centre, and then north-west towards Hosteria Lago Grey. We were supposed to be having lunch at a hut near the hotel, but the weather just wasn't right for a picnic, so we were turned loose in the bar and restaurant of the hotel. I checked in without any problems, and saw that another woman from the group was checking in too. After I'd dumped my stuff I went to the dining room, where the other woman was already seated. She invited me over and we discovered that we were both staying for three nights. She was Sara, a Mexican economist working for the Mexican central bank, and her English was superb.

After lunch we (the group) went for a walk on the beach at the foot of Lago Grey, where we could see lots of strangely-shaped, bright-blue icebergs (témpanos), and just about see the end of Glacier Grey (it's about 12 km away). The water of the lake is grey, and the contrast with the blue icebergs was very beautiful. The weather had cleared, and we could see the two main bodies of rock: on the left the near-triangle of Paine Grande (a normal-looking mountain), and on the right the south-west side of the complicated, bristling fortress that contains Los Cuernos and Las Torres (and also The Leaf and The Sword and The Shark's Fin, and other improbable shapes that are all pieces of granite that have been exposed by glacier action). I couldn't see Las Torres at all (they're over at the north side of the fortress), and the view of Los Cuernos wasn't at all the one I knew from the pictures, but it was fascinating. Los Cuernos have a cap of black sedimentary rock still left on top of the beige of the granite, and I think this has stopped them from being worn away to round-edged slivers like Las Torres. The granite has a very aggressive presence with Los Cuernos; seen from Lago Grey, the left-most Cuerno (Cuerno Norte) really did look like a medieval fortification. I was very happy with Lago Grey, and very happy to be spending three nights there.

Pictures of Los Cuernos, seen from the beach at Lago Grey

The tour bus left around 3.30, which gave us our clue about when we'd get picked up on Thursday. There was a slideshow scheduled for 7.30 on the various guided excursions available, and I filled in the time having a bath and doing lots of washing; the room had two good radiators, and I was now someone who got genuinely excited about good drying conditions. The slideshow was, of course, a sales-pitch, and Sara had apparently decided we were going to do all our excursions together, which was fine by me. We were the only new guests who had checked in that day (to make maybe a total of ten people), and it made sense to keep each other company. We were both keen to do the boat-trip to the glacier but that required a minimum of four people so we'd have to wait and see if more people arrived the next day; Sara was a bit pissed off because she'd bought a package that included the boat trip, and there'd been no mention then of a minimum of four. With that option put on hold we decided (with a minimum of fuss) to do the 5 km walk up to the north-west to Cascade Rio Pingo (a small waterfall). We had dinner together, ordered our packed lunches, and then retired early for a 7 am breakfast and 8 am start.

Tuesday: to Cascada Rio Pingo

Our guide was Eduardo, who had introduced himself the night before and told us to take a change of clothes wrapped in a plastic bag. We set off a bit late, but still before the sun appeared over the mountains, and the entire morning was very frosty. The ground was frozen and the path was quite slippery underfoot, especially over the wooden bridges, but the day was bright and the walk was lovely. For the first hour or so we were out in the open with views across to Paine Grande, but then we entered the woods and saw little but snow-covered trees. We didn't make it to Cascada Pingo, but Eduardo found a good lookout point for us to stop and have lunch, with views of Rio Pingo winding through a valley, with Cerro Zapata in the background (the cerro is off to the west, not shown on the map). If we'd had more daylight we could have made it to the cascada, but the available walking-time is short at that time of year, which is a shame because in many ways it's a great time to visit: no crowds, cheap prices, your chances of clear weather are much better than in summer, and you will not encounter winds that will blow you off your feet (and that is not an exaggeration about the summer winds).

On the way up I was wearing the puffy jacket, both hats, and both pairs of gloves, and I got badly overheated and started sweating. I soon shed the thicker gloves, but the thinner ones were uncomfortably damp, so when we got to our first resting spot (a tiny little waterfall), I hung the damp gloves from the left pocket of my trousers to give them a chance to dry off. Seconds after we moved off, I checked that pocket and found only one glove, but when I went back to look for it, there was no sign. A bit odd, but not a major problem. When we stopped for lunch I took off the puffy jacket and changed to my New Zealand cardigan and my waterproof jacket, which kept me at a much better temperature and was also more effective at stopping the melting snow from the trees from falling down the back of my neck. Shortly after we'd started on our way back, Eduardo stopped, held up a scrap of black saying, "Is this yours?" and indeed it was the lost glove - at least an hour's walk from the tiny little waterfall. It must have got stuck somewhere on my person - on velcro? - and finally dropped off. Even more odd, but now I didn't have to buy new gloves when I got back to Puerto Natales.

The landscape had warmed up considerably during our walk out, and on the way back there was very little snow on the trees and the ground and bridges weren't slippery underfoot, but there were now some patches that were very, very muddy indeed. My trousers got filthy: wet and muddy up to the knees and beyond, and when I washed them in my bath, I was aghast at the sediment that was left behind. But those radiators really were excellent and the trousers were dry in hours. The underfloor hearing in the bathroom was pretty damn good, too. There was nothing obviously demanding in the walk (my point of comparison is the Grand Canyon trail in the Blue Mountains), but I was aching in many, many places afterwards, and rather grateful that we hadn't gone as far as the cascada. In the last hour, I was getting a troublesome pain in my left hip-joint, which was a new experience for me. Maybe it was an effect of the borrowed hiking boots? Having a heavier pack than usual? Or just me getting old.

At the evening's slide-show there were five new people, and they'd all signed up for the boat ride, so we were OK for that for the next morning. Eduardo then showed a National Geographic documentary about an English photographer who spent two years puma-watching in the park. The photographer managed to gain the trust of one puma, so much that she was willing to go to sleep in his presence, but when he first turned up she seemed truly unnerved by him. There were several scenes in which he described her as "shaking with fear". I was taken aback by that, wanting to say, "But you're a big-cat predator. Everyone else is afraid of you." But maybe it doesn't feel like that when you're trying to make a living in a territory that can support thousands of guanacos, but only a few dozen puma (I'm guessing on numbers). You're not living off the fat of the land, you're scraping by in the margins. Interesting. The film also had a scene of ducks on a frozen pond in a high wind, being driven along sideways and falling over frequently - pure comedy gold.

Wednesday: Glacier Grey

Over breakfast Sara and I got chatting to Peter, another lone traveller, who had arrived the night before. He runs a garage just to the north of Swindon (my family used to live just to the west of Swindon) and was travelling for a month in Peru and Chile.

We walked to the beach, then a dinghy took us to the boat, and then it was about an hour to the glacier. I'd been assuming that we were all seven going on a hour's walk to a viewpoint above the glacier, but when we got to the glacier only Sara, Peter and I were herded towards the dinghy with Fabian (the hotel's other guide), and it was actually a four hour walk we were going to do. I was rather dismayed by this at first as my hip was still hurting, but I didn't say anything - not through stoicism but because I didn't want to let on how little attention I'd been paying while the others were planning the day - and my hip soon eased up and the walk was great: lovely weather, and amazing views over the glacier and also up the granite slopes of the mountain next to Paine Grande. Fabian was much less solicitous as a guide than Eduardo had been: I don't think he ever asked us if we were doing OK (whereas Eduardo had asked every few minutes, it seemed), and he didn't pause to see how we were doing during the tricky bits, but just forged ahead - except for one river-crossing where the bridge had become unuseable, and it wasn't at all obvious which was the best route ahead. On the way back he called a 15 minute break for us at a viewpoint just past the river, and then he went back and we heard the sound of boulders being shifted around as he mended the trail.

Shortly after we got going again, we encountered a group of about ten other hikers. I think they were from the Hotel Explora, which is on Lago Pehoé and is the only other hotel in the park that's open year-round. The Explora costs about $1,000 a day (Hosteria Lago Grey was less than $100), and it caters entirely to people who have bought packages (e.g. five-days at $5,000, which I believe is the minimum). So... whenever you meet someone who's staying at the Explora, you know they've got that kind of money to spare. We all got the dinghy back to the boat, which now contained a different group, of about 20 people, and must have been on its afternoon run. We were taken up close to an iceberg - I reached out and touched it - and nearly as impressive as the intense blue colour was the film of water constantly running down it. That iceberg was silent, but there'd been one near the pickup point that had been making quiet drumming noises in time with the waves, like a very, very subdued steel band.

We saw a chunk falling off the edge of the glacier, but from a distance so it was just a crashing sound and a cloud of white. Peter and I had heard a similar sound during our walk and had insisted to Fabian that it was too abrupt to be an aeroplane, and that second fall suggested that we'd been right. We sailed along the northern front of the glacier, which had a fairly regular, ordered structure, then past the island that sits in the middle - which was completely covered in ice just 80 years ago and is still unvegetated in the lower half. During this part of the cruise they served us each a Pisco Sour with a chunk of glacier ice, which I thought was a lovely touch.

The southern front was more chaotic, since the land was slightly convex around it and so the glacier was pushing in upon itself from each side. The weather was glorious, with beautiful cloud formations, and on the trip back I must have put my camera away ten times thinking, "OK. That's the last photo," and then the landscape would present another surprising, compelling aspect and I'd haul the camera out again. I asked Fabian if this was the most photographed glacier in the world and he just laughed, but now I'm wondering which one actually is. Fabian had said that in the summer there can be 150 people lunching in the hotel, and the boats are completely full. Sara asked if there would be 150 people on a walk, and just one guide for all those people; he said yes to both questions, but I think he must have misunderstood them.

It was an amazing trip, and I'd recommend it to anyone. I found it really hard to get my head around the idea that the glacier and icebergs would still be there, doing exactly the same things, looking exactly as dramatic and picturesque, even if there were no people there to admire them. Again, the low season is the best time to visit, because the icebergs stay blue for longer: in the summer the higher temperatures and the winds speed up the process of relieving the pressures in the ice and introducing air into it, and the icebergs turn white a matter of days after falling off the glacier. It normally takes an iceberg a week to drift down the lake to the beach, so you never see blue icebergs at the beach in summer.

Pictures from the Glacier Trip

In the evening there was a photography talk. I asked Sara if she wanted to share a bottle of wine, and I chose a Syrah because the wine list said it had a taste of leather, which sounded interesting. I'd been finding Chilean reds too smooth for me - very smooth reds actually make me feel slightly queasy - but this one had a goatiness and a bite to it that is exactly what I'm looking for in a red wine. I made a note of the name (Montes Alpha), and vowed to get some more before I left Chile.

We discussed plans for a half-day excursion for the next day (our last day), where the discussion centred on two options: going to the point on the southern shore of Lago Nordenskjold that gave the classic view of Los Cuernos (which would involve an hour's drive and an hour's walk each way), and going to a lookout point on Cerro Ferrier, just above the hotel, which was acknowledged to be a very tough walk, but apparently gave wonderful views over the entire park. We were feeling wimpy and we really wanted to see Los Cuernos so it wasn't a long discussion, and then Peter came over and we persuaded him to join us on the walk, even though he'd had a good view of Los Cuernos on his way in. We had dinner together and more wine, and I woke up with quite a hangover.

Thursday: Los Cuernos and Las Torres

Our guide was Eduardo. The weather was quite overcast during the drive and most of the walk and Eduardo was cursing the skies, but just as we arrived at the lookout point ("mirador", in Spanish) the clouds lifted enough that we could see the peaks of two of the three Cuernos, and they were every bit as fascinating as I'd hoped, especially with the clouds and the light shifting constantly. From this angle we could also see that the eastern side of Paine Grande is covered by a huge glacier (Ventisquero Francés), which runs down to Valle Francés. [As I understand it, a ventisquero is a glacier that isn't connected to an ice-sheet.] From the view you get of Paine Grande from Lago Grey, there's no hint whatever of this major feature on the other side of the mountain, and I finally understood why it's worth doing the week-long walk called the Circuit that goes around the entire Paine Massif: because the massif is so complex that it rewards viewing from many different angles.

Pictures from the trip to Los Cuernos

We got back to the hotel around 1.15 and had lunch, with Sara and me scanning the beach rather anxiously for signs that the group from our tour company had arrived. In fact, they arrived promptly at 3.30, though in a smaller bus that made for quite a cramped, uncomfortable ride back. The evening was gloriously clear, and there was an angle (once we were about half an hour outside the park) from which we could actually see Las Torres. There was no stopping for pictures, so I'll have to show you someone else's - and that picture was not taken from a half-hour outside the park, but from near the base of Las Torres, which involves a half-day's walk up a valley. A trek to the base of Las Torres was one of the excursions on offer, but it would have taken about 12 hours, and when Fabio showed us some pictures from a recent trek and every one was of snow-climbing, Sara and I just laughed and asked what was next on the list. Las Torres have been climbed (first by Don Whillans and Chris Bonnington in 1963), but apparently Los Cuernos are more difficult. The vertical granite is easy (in Bonnington terms); the problems come when you reach the sedimentary cap. Apparently.

So I left the park thinking seriously about when I was going to come back and do the Circuit. It can't really be done in the winter because the route is usually blocked by snow (John Garner Pass above Glacier Gray is the worst), and the days are too short for the walking involved. A wimp like myself would also need the services of the refugios that are spaced at a day's walk along the route, and that provide lodging and food so you don't have to carry a tent and a week's supplies - and the refugios are all closed out of season. So the question is then: which is the least-worst time of the high-season in which to do the Circuit? And how much help is a wimp like me going to need? But those are questions for another day.

Other pictures from the park - mostly from the tour on the way in, and of non-Cuernos aspects of the last day