Fran's grand tour

Can you tell where we are, yet?

2007-06-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

FLickr might give you a large clue as to our current whereabouts. Due to unforseen financial circumstances we have altered our itinerary, and have added another country to our world trip. With three, or maybe four weeks to go before I'm due back at work, we've flown to this extremely exotic and lovely land to spend the last of our freedom days and hopefully not many of our remaining pennies.

Can you guess where we are, not wishing to sound too muck like an episode of Playshcool. It's summer, and the rains have come. We had a huge thunder storm this afternoon. The rainfall was tropical in volume and the sky was almost inky with pressure and violence. I lay in our room and tried to count the seconds between flashes of white light and the sound of the sky splitting open but there were no seconds to count. The storm raged right over my head for half an hour. Then stopped. It is now sunny. Although a storm will no doubt come again tomorrow afternoon. It's fiesta time here and the locals are all off to some sort of pagan dance party. It always rains for them.

Oh, where are we?

some things about Mexico

2007-05-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

Noise

Mexican life is loud. Music comes from every shop, every house, every taxi. It´s not unusual to see massive sound systems in supermarkets, corner shops, hairdressers and particularly in pharmacies. The pharmacies of San Cristobal de las Casas give the local nightclubs a run for their money as dusk descends and they crank up the banda music. They even put on a light display and there is a guy permanently stationed outside, dancing in a huge foam costume in the sun. People shout at one another over the racket and cars have to honk especially loudly to warn pedestrians bewildered by conflicting dance tunes. When you visit the mayan sites, the guides like to demonstrate the amazing ancient acoustics by making more racket, giving ostentatious displays of clapping, and Mexican tourists warm to the idea and bellow to their infirm, grounded relatives from the tops of the temples. Take a video of us standing still on top of this pile of rubble, mama. It´ll make great viewing back for the folks back home. Merida was quite possibly the noisiest city on earth, the hubbub amplified by the cavernous avenues, great corridors conducting sound, and the cobbled streets.

Mexican conversations
There is a definite pattern to the conversations I have had in Mexico. Most of these have been with taxi drivers or men who have fallen into step with me walking down some city street. This seems to be how my interlocuters have approached things:
Establish nationality
Establish level of Spanish comprehension
Establish suitable level of appreciation for present location
Discuss linguistic ineptitude of Anglophone visitors and importance of having a go at the beautiful, and widely spoken Spanish language
Issue proposal of marriage
Issue proposal of polygamous marriage
Optional - congratulate Dan on his general good fortune
Obtain assurance of Meso-American cultural superiority
Proceed with business of selling hammock/poncho/garishly coloured sombrero

Mexican pavements
Lethal death traps. A way of keeping the population at reasonable levels. Obviously not working in Mexico City but if they can get rid of a few flip-flop wearing tourists, then all to the good. Sometimes, if you stand at the edge of the pavement at a crossroads, on the part that slopes to the road, you slide all the way into the gutter. As it´s now officially the rainy season, the situation has reached one of constant peril. All our shoes are useless in the face of the greasy, slick marbled walkways. We cling to each other as we stagger around the towns, hoping if we fall, we´ll land in a friendly fruit stall and not in the great, suspiciously grey lakes the streets have become.
And the pavements are so uneven, so narrow, so full of junk and rubble and stray, unsightly animals. Do you look at the exotic Mexican buildings, or keep your eyes to your feet? Last week we saw a dead kitten on the pavement, laid out as if sleeping, drying out in the sun.

The wildlife
I´ll start with the exotic. Iguanas. I´m not a huge fan of reptiles but can cope with lizards if they are small and not touching my feet. Have positively affectionate feelings towards geckos, they made good companions in South East Asia. I appreciate the iguana, it is a strange and fine creature. They do like to hang out near ruins, nonchalantly creeping out the tourists. At the Mayan ruins at Uzmal, there are more iguanas than tourists, or so you´d like to think. More iguanas than the plastic bottles left behind by the tourists. They lie in the sun, stick themselves to the trunks of trees, sit on the temple steps, and skitter about when the tourists come near. They move as if they´re trying to make everyone around them laugh, opposite front and back leg off the ground at the same time and then a quick change and for a second, it seems like they´re completely airborne. You might come across the end of a tail, sticking out of a crack in a temple wall. Sometimes it will have an owner as the discarded ones dry quicky in the sun. So much bigger is man and so much scarier than an iguana. But my instinct tells me otherwise and I wouldn´t hesitate to use Dan as a ladder if one came too near me. He said he saw one as long as his arm, and as fat as the burritos we ate in San Francisco. I wasn´t looking, but I practised my bunny hop to make sure I could perform the piggy back when the time came. In Tulum, they´ve the biggest iguanas of all the ruinas or so I overheard someone say at breakfast one day.

For something more domestic, there are dogs, in great numbers. Mainly mangy, flea-ridden creatures, all destined to be harbingers of rabid doom in weeks to come. All exhausted by life in Mexican cities and so seen in various states of collapse in the middle of the road, under cars, on roofs. Those that are not exhausted are all evil rotweiler/doberman/dog of hell crosses, guarding private places with all their might, and certainly, every last bit of bark. All these dogs follow me. We´ve regularly tried to outwalk a mangy mutt, but they always reappear, lurking nearby, stopping by our bench to lick their nether regions or sniffing at the backs of our ankles at a bus stop.

Chamula

2007-05-20T15:20:00.000-07:00

It can be tough being a woman if you come from San Juan de Chamula. So said our guide during our tour of the village, one of the most distinctive indigenous villages outside San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.

When you´re very young you get taught the basic womanly tasks you´ll need to be a good daughter and a good wife, like how to make tortillas, how to make your highly distinctive costume, how to make copies of your highly distinctive costume to sell to the tourists that come to Chamula to look at you. You wear this costume as soon as you can walk, the black woollen skirt as thick and rough as a sheep´s hide, and the shiny, embroidered blouse that all the foreign ladies covet. You also learn how to weave brightly coloured ribbons in your hair. Your brothers might be tearing around the village in jeans, t-shirts, like their fathers, but women keep to the traditions of dress, and some make their livelihoods out of this.

When you reach puberty, your parents might start to barter with other parents for a good marriage. A man in the village might like you, but instead of approaching you and courting you, instead of allowing for the tedious business of love, his parents make an offer. If it´s good, you are sold. There is no marriage in Chamula, even though devotion to traditional catholicism as it is called is a pre-requisite for living here. Traditional catholicism in these parts is unlike the incense and hail mary stuff in the rest of the Catholic world. The great church in town rarely sees ceremony other than baptism, there are no priests, no pews, no sacred spaces off limts to worshippers. People come at all times of the day to clear a space amongst the pine needles that cover the floor, and light candles to heal their sick. The church is a hospital and people will come here before they consult doctors. They consult healers instead who pray with them, and who use chickens or eggs to cure their clients. Every worshipper has a bottle of something fizzy with them, often Coca Cola. Burping is pretty holy here, and you can burp out your sins much more effectively with Coke than with the blue corn water people used to use. Those that embrace new religions, or no religion, are thrown out of the village. The women that wear woollen shirts in San Cristobal have most likely been expelled from Chamula as followers of evangelical protestanism - not protestantism as such, just not Chamula´s way of doing things.

It´s important to marry early and provide children. As you reach your late twenties you are considered old, too old for family life. It´s also presumably politic for you to keep tabs on your man, to make sure he´s not lacking much. Polygamy is rife in the village, according to our guide, who does not come from Chamula. It was positively encouraged by the Spanish when they arrived those few centuries ago. Faced with a small, weak population, and thus a potentially weak position politically in Chiapas, they brought women from the capital and from Oaxaca to marry with themselves, and what was left of the local men who hadn´t succumbed to the diseases the Spanish brought with them. If a man wanted more than one wife, then so be it; all the better to repopulate the region. These customs have since fallen out of favour in the region, everywhere but in Chamula. Our guide was adamant the other villages were open-minded. In Chamula people are closed, he said. It is an oasis of convoluted religious practices, social protocols and entirely a law unto itself. The police, the militia, so evident Chiapas have no presence here. The village authorities only just about tolerate outsiders, particularly tourists. Presumably it is too lucrative not to bear them for a while. All tourists must leave the village at six, though. They can´t stay the night here.

If your husband does take an interest in another woman, you might be forced to leave with your children and fend for yourself. This you do by relying on those skills that mothers pass preciously on to their daughters. Cooking, embroidery, making tourist tat to sell in San Cristobal. Your children pound the pavement all day and long into the evening, selling woven belts, zapatista dolls, bags and blouses and sometimes chewing gum and corn on the cob. Industry starts young. Back in the village the men do their thing in their jeans and cowboy hats.

To prove that Chamula is not like any other village, we were taken to Zincantan, a few kms away. Here, a local family showed us round their home, made us some tortillas whilst our guide plied us with the local moonshine. Thus emollified, we were then invited to shop in their back yard and take pictures of the cute children for a few pesos. It was hard to resist - a touch of the Angelina Jolie´s again - and this is one of the results:

Oaxaca

2007-05-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

We`ve been in Oaxaca for five days. It`s a gentle, beautiful city. After Mexico City, it`s been a huge relief. There`s obviously something bewitching about the pace of life, or the vivacious, familial atmosphere. Maybe they put something in the tlayudas, the pizza-like tortilla meals you get here - delicious and cheap. Some people say if you eat a few chapulines, or chilli grasshoppers, a local speciality, you`ll lose your heart to the city. We haven´t tried them yet. We`ve heard so many stories of people who came for a week and stayed for six months, people who come back year after year. It`s a big hit with aged Americans, deeply proprietorial and sniffy about backpackers, and Californians in particular who come a little further south than over the border to escape their winter. If we weren`t running out of money, I`d stay here for a while. We could take Spanish lessons in the morning, read or write in our hotel courtyard in the heat of the afternoon, and mooch around the town in the evening, eating prickly pear ice cream. We`re leaving tomorrow. But I want to come back already.

******

My Spanish is experiencing some technical difficulties. I still automatically add Italian prepositions and exclamations to the confusion of everyone. I can`t remember much in the way of verb conjugation, although I´m good with grammatical terminolgy which seems important to me but infuriates Dan. We`ve had a few heated discussions about it and he puts it down to years of formal language learning on my part which has made me inflexible and precious about grammar. He is mostly right. Lecturing Dan on the uses of the preterite and subjunctive tenses might make me feel clever but it doesn`t allow the lady in the local laundry to understand me when I`m making basic, polite inquiries about my washed knickers.

My most sophisticated conversation so far has been with a man in the the Museo de las culturas de Oaxaca. He accosted me in a corridor and embarked on an intense discussion about the richness of Mexican history and culture. I was cornered, but I launched a few randomly remembered preterites and a good deal of Italian vocab at him and we sustained an odd little verbal battle for about 40 minutes.

He spoke minimal English and I spoke minimal Spanish and yet we managed to cover some heavy topics such as comparisons between the ancient Maya and Aztec civilisations and the Romans and the Greeks. But do you have anything like this where you are from, he kept asking me, sweeping his arms to indicate just about everything and anything that enfolded us. The craftmanship and the great cities and the civilasations, I suppose this is what he meant, although he wasn`t specific. He wasn`t satisfied until I`d expressed my incredulity at Mexico`s general fabulousness. No we don`t have anything like this at home. I´ve never seen a zapotec death mask encrusted with a million mosaic pieces of mother and pearl and jade. The civilisations of ancient Britain didn`t, as a general rule, sacrifice hundreds of specially prepared men, women and children to appease their gods, until the steps of the temples and the streets ran red, until the cities stank of death, as London stinks of the tube or drains. We don`t, in short, have Mexico at home. But it`s what you can`t say in those situations that kills you. No, I`ve never seen any of this, but what I have seen and what I do know and all those stories of where I come from, you cannot begin to imagine as I cannot to begin to imagine yours. And so he was the proud Mexican and I was the incredulous foreigner.

He was wearing his work clothes, with the word Bimbo embroidered above his breast pocket. This was distracting. He had a warm, if unsettling smile. I wondered vaguely about his motives in talking to this clearly incoherant foreign woman, trying to give hime the benefit of the doubt. I didn´t want to believe he was just another man interested in my fair skin. So I tried a few times to talk about mi marido to draw some boundaries, Dan having been permanently elevated for the duration of our Mexican stay to the position of husband. This didn´t seem to register, even when I prefaced ever scentence with `mi marido` like some demented stepford wife. Even when Dan crept about in the background, eyeing me pointedly, he carried on with his questioning. But did you ever see the like, do you have all this where you are from? Well, no. This unending, disconcerting, but intriguing form of social interaction, no, I don`t often get the pleasure of this at home.

****

Yesterday, the teachers marched in the centre of town. This was the cause of much trepidation for citizens and for tourists alike. Ever since we decided to come here, last year, we`ve been following the local political situation closely. In the way that we seem to be jinxing every place we visit on this trip (leaving variously, several typhoons, a bush fire, a city riot, two coups, great floods, and even a bombing in our wake) Oaxaca descended into civil unrest shortly after we decided to visit last May. The annual teachers strike coincided with contested national elections and led to several months of barricades and protests and riots with a few molotv cocktails thrown in. It was an unfortunate situation, a tragic situation when you come and fall in love with Oaxaca, and almost impossible to imagine walking these lovely streets full of strolling families. If you look past the prettily painted houses of the centre, you see the town is covered in graffiti, hastily painted over here and there. The night before the demo, handmade posters appeared near the zocalo - Think of Oaxaca, don`t destroy her - Long Live Liberty - the anarchist A. A group of women had been seen carrying placards urging demonstrators to be gentle with the city. We decided to visit the local ruinas the day of the march, to avoid any trouble. When we got back to town, we saw the same strolling families, eating ice cream, cakes, nothing much going in. The march had been and gone. A crowd had mustered and a few men with megaphones had urged them to sing and shout a little but nothing much materialised. A little shuffling of feet, a few half-hearted choruses of a rousing hymn. The cops and the military personnel hidden in side streets so as not to frighted the people. They spent the morning lazing in their open backed trucks in the sun, eating yoghurt, chatting. No big stories to tell of being trapped in a warring provincial city. A huge relief for us, obviously, but then we often think we`re the centre of the universe, when in fact we have no business doing so. A bigger relief for Oaxaca.

my ears are bleeding

2007-05-09T18:17:00.000-07:00

how quickly love turns to indifference. or maybe something stronger. All that talk of loving this city and speaking Spanish and all the history. what a day we`ve had in Mexico City. I`m writing this from the youth hostel round the corner from our hotel and there is a band playing hardcore, thrash/death/hellfire and damnation metal so loudly I can feel the base in my belly. i`m not sure if I can think properly. I can`t hear anything but a short mexican guy screaming from the depths of his poor tortured and surely doomed soul. It`s a fitting end to our third, and hopefully last day in Mexico City.

It`s not that we haven`t had fun, seen many wonderful things and eaten some good food. It`s just the low level irritations of walking in the late afternoon downpours in slippery flipflops, never knowing where you`re going and hating looking at your map in public, being on constant pickpocket watch or bandidos watch, rationalised the advice of hysterical, paranoid American tourists we meet, and most irritatingly, ignoring the incessant calls of guapa, chica, linda, bonita and all the leering and pushing and groping that goes with it. The guide books say you should never stay for too long here. You need to come up for air every now and then. And I am looking forward to catching that bus to Oaxaca tomorrow morning because I am sick of being stared at because I am blonde, and only because I`m blonde and this fact making me every man`s property. The friend we are with is even more blonde than me and the attention she is getting, from everyone, even the policemen, is quite impressive. I knew it would be like this, but come on! The most well-dressed, respectable metro passenger turns into a disrespectful animal in a full carriage. What would their mothers, their sisters and their daughters say?

Tomorrow will be a better day no doubt. Not that today hasn`t had its good moments. We`ve been to the Anthropology museum, a megolithic temple to mesoamerican history. The collection is stunning, the interpretation comprehensive, even for non-Spanish speakers. We went to the ancient city of Teotihuacan yesterday, so today`s trip was appropriate. And the museum itself was pretty handsome. The waitress in the cafe was a surly miss but we`ll overlook that. It was a brilliant way to spend an afternoon and I could now tell the difference between a Mayan and an Aztec in the unlikely event of meeting one. Also got a taste of the temple visits to come.

We also had a good taco outside before the mammouth four-hour visit. We`d ski`pped lunch yesterday and there was nearly a Dan mutiny, so the taco was a winning move today. Changing our tickets at American Airlines this morning was also painless and free, although we managed to get a dinner invitation too from a very amourous fellow customer just by standing in the queue. Dan`s presence doesn`t seem to dissuade the attention. You`ve got to admire some of these men for their audacity and their doggedness.

According to a very friendly policeman we met today, Oaxaca is perfectly safe to visit now, despite the advice of an American teacher at our hotel who said it would be peligroso despite any concrete evidence of this. This teacher led a group of his teenager students into a red light district yesterday evening and was surprised to find a bit of bother there. I`m not sure about his powers of judgement. He spends a lot of time smoking in the hotel lobby in a dodgy cowboy hat.

So, bye bye big bad city.

Spanish lessons

2007-05-07T16:45:00.001-07:00

We landed in Mexico City late last night. Another one of those delicious cultural jolts. All the stories of the big, bad megatropolis with its shanties and pollution and bandidos - you anticipate something wonderously terrifying. So far, it´s been big, it´s been busy, but it´s been good. It´s been a new experience to walk down streets that feel as if they have layers of history under the very earth- certainly true of the Zocalo , the central square with the cathedral built on the Spanish-made ruins of an Aztec temple. After Auckland, Sydney, LA, this sense of history is comforting.

But really, it´s all about language. For most of our trip, English has been the default language. We tried to speak a bit of Thai, Cambodian and Vietnamese but struggled with pronunciation and script etc. Didn´t get much past thank you, that´s was delicious. Here, English is not the lingua franca and people do not immediately launch into our language to make it easier for us. Why should they? Doesn´t most of the world speak Spanish anyway? most of the US does surely? And it´s amazing how far a 13 year-old GCSE in Spanish can take you. Especially, if you´re fired up by rescuing damsels at the airport and raging about lack on in-flight entertainment and refreshments.

LA international confiscated our precious water and Mexicana denied us drink for the first hour and a half of the flight. Then they lost the bag of a lovely girl called Brigid. Maybe it´s still in LA. Maybe it´s gone back to Fiji. The guy on the helpline had no more information. Brigid has no clothes. But in the way of these things, these crises diverted us from the more minor concern of getting into Mexico City without begin robbed or conned by the malicious taxi touts everyone had warned us about. And I got to speak the first extended bit of Spanish I{ve spoken since the GCSE. And I remembered how wonderful it is to try to speak another language even if you are perhaps a little rusty and speak more of a Franco Italian hybrid. The taxi driver was my first test, and I manageds to negotiate some kind of deal to get us to two hotels without further stranding Brigid in the big city. A minor vitory, but I went to bed with a ridiculous sense of achievement. I´ve achieved little other than a good suntan for about five months. Sometimes, active participation in the most banal activities beats a trip to a famous museum for entertainment.

I can´t tell you how happy this makes me, to try a bit of another language. It looks like we won{t be able to afford Spanish classes in Oaxaca so I´m taking my linguistic kicks where I can get them.

escape from the antipodes

2007-05-04T23:39:00.000-07:00

We did it. we left New Zealand. And with our dignity more or less in tact. It was only gracious that we should leave with a little bit of sobbing and a lot more regret. We've been looked after so well by everyone, overstaying our welcome just about everywhere. We extended our two months to three and still, I don't think it was enough for Dan. We're still hatching far-fetched plans to get back some day.

It's been a warm and fuzzy few months, and a little bit productive too with a wagon painted and some stories written and those aforementioned ludicrous schemes. I never thought I'd find myself at home in New Zealand. I was convinced I was an old european and would starve for lack of culture or camembert. I thought I couldn't live without cheese and museums. That the petrol heads and sheep shearers and exiled European hippies of my overactive imagination would make the place hostile. Who was I kidding? It's difficult to express how important it was for us to go there, after the many years of Dan telling NZ stories, showing photos of friends. I was nervous about meeting everyone, about seeing these mythical places from Dan's past. Have I said this before? It was a bit of a preoccupation. But when I did meet everyone, I could see how terrible it was for Dan to have left ten years in between visits. On our last day at Old Man Mountain, we walked to the river, the river that ran past our bedroom and couldn't quite believe we'd made it there, and couldn't quite believe we were just about to leave.

The most painful thing that travelling gives you is a sore heart. You leave little bits of yourself here and there. I wonder if you can ever stay in one spot, contentedly, wholly so, having so enjoyed living in another place. Or several other places. I'm obviously completely obsessed with France as I spent all those years there as an impressionable teenager. Dan's obsessed with NZ. Not sure there's an obvious compromise there. I'm a little bit obsessed with NZ now. Are we obsessed with London anymore? Goodness knows how we'll feel when we get back. But, we are coming back. That's one thing settled.

So. We're in the final phase. After NZ, Fiji, and then San Fran (where we are now) and then Mexico. We spent last week recovering from the strain of leaving NZ loved ones on a Fijian beach. My first tropical paradise island with white sand and acqua seas and frangipani flowers in your hair. I celebrated the event by learning to snorkel. A minor miracle as I have always been under the illusion I couldn't breathe through my mouth without breathing through my nose as well. I am also secretly terrified of being in the sea with all its creatures. I have to swim with shoes on if I can't see the bottom.

My first snorkel was no doubt the classic first snorkel/dive experience where even the smallest fish look like jewels and you're pointing at everything that moves. I was so enchanted I forgot to be frightened of the neverending expanse of big blue and the fact that the jewel like fish might swim at me. The next few dives were brief, just long enough to see cuttlefish, parrot fish, angel fish and a giant clam before I panicked and headed for the shore. Someone mentioned the presence of a black tipped reef shark in the bay. Perfectly friendly, but perfectly shark-like. And we sometimes saw rays leaping out of the sea in the evenings. Someone said they only leap out of the water if something is chasing them. I wasn't comforted by this. But beauty and fear equals a sublime experience and that is definitely how I feel about snorkelling. Perhaps it's how I feel about travelling.

d-I-V-O-R-C-E

2007-03-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

Marvellous. I was idling away a few mins on the computer, waiting for flckr to upload photos and found this reference to myself on http://www.karybrown.com/?q=node/11 :

***
Fran Hortop divorced her husband because he spent too much time playing World of Warcraft.

“Without the normal rigmarole of social interaction...he can whoop it up…without ever having to physically shake hands." Hortop said on her blog, Confessions of a Video Game Widow. "It’s like playing action men all over again. Did action man have a girlfriend? He most certainly did not. You have now become obsolete."
***

I love it. She writes with such authority, the writer of this piece. Married and divorced without any knowledge on my part. Dan thinks it's hilarious. I wrote this article for Bintmagazine.com about two years ago bemoaning the lot of the videogame widow. It was supposed to be funny. Obviously, I'm not good at funny and the irony was too heavily veiled. My first divorce!

Volcanic action

2007-03-26T21:28:00.000-07:00

Just done the Tongariro Crossing and feeling very pleased about it. We have t-shirts to prove it too, and a funny-looking certificate courtesy of the lodge that arranged transport and food. The Tongariro Crossing is known as one of the best day walks to the New Zealanders who are so fond of walking. It involved 7 hours of walking, scrambling and low-level climbing in the hot autumn sun through the gap between Mount Tongariro and Ngauruhoe and round Tongariro's middle. This is proof of our presence on the mountainside, a picture of Quintin, Nick and Amani mid-trek:

We walked up and down the mountain range nose-to-nose with about 2000 other hikers but this did not tarnish the experience. Ngauruhoe is a stunning, near perfect volcano shape and streaked with beautiful black and red scoria. Tongariro blew its top off completely many, many years ago and you can tramp through its craters - red rock or filled with turquoise and emerald mineral lakes - before descending past the solidified remains of previous lava flows into the bush. We got a few scrapes, swollen limbs, blisters and stupid Lord of the Rings photos but I think we all loved it. A good way to celebrate Nick's birthday. And a pretty spectacular way to introduce Amani to hiking, although maybe not quite as spectacular as the swollen hand she was sporting at the end of the day. Here's me and Amani before our first big ascent. We are smiling and happy but we've yet to see the state of the track ahead:

I've never been to a truly volvanic place before and it's an odd feeling walking through such a sublime, alien landscape. There's evidence of geological change everywhere in this region of Taupo (pronounced Toe-paw in Maori - we've been getting lessons from Dan), but I had no idea how constantly this environment is changing now with landslides, road washouts, river swells, mini-eruptions, new hot water springs occuring here and there as the great tectonic plates shift under the earth.

Ruapehu, the big man of the three volcanos in the range at about 2700m, last erupted in the mid nineties. Just a week ago, the latest and long awaited lahar slid its way down the mountainside bringing its torrent of mud and slime. The last lahar in 1953 took out a local railway bridge just as the Christmas Eve train was crossing and 150 people were killed. Police have been stationed in the area for two years, unable to move more than ten minutes from the predicted sight of this last lahar to manage any catastophe caused by its occurence. They did not want a repeat of the Tangiwai Bridge disaster, one of the most remembered disasters in New Zealand's history along with the eruption in the l880s of Mount Tarawera which buried one village and swallowed two others entirely. The lahar seems to have done exactly what it was predicted to do which greatly pleased all the scientists involved in the contingency management programme. The day after our great trek, aching and whimpering a little, we went to visit the memorial to the 1953 disaster at the Tangiwai railway bridge. The lahar had blasted through this site, as if it was retracing the steps of its ancestor lahar. It had covered the area with grey silt and muck, obscuring picnic benches set up for visiting tourists and covering the monument itself although this has been given a swift clean by locals. Here's a picture:

Dan keeps joking that we need a little earthquake or two to get the full New Zealand experience. We missed one in Aukland a few weeks ago and on Tarkaka Hill in the South Island where friends Sara and Garret live. I'd quite like to keep my experiences of spectacular geological activity to the simulations and exhibits we've seen at the museums in Rotorua, Wairoa (the buried village site) and at Te Papa in Wellington. Excellent museums every one of them and more than enough of a taste of geological meltdown for me. And I aboslutely do not need to see an eruption. This is how I like my geothermal attractions, relatively tranquil and beautiful:

More photos, of course, on flickr....

Dante's rehabilitation

2007-03-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

By the way, Dante doesn't seem to have been as 'ugly' as he is made out to be according to an article I read in an Australian newspaper. His nose might not have been all that big. Perhaps someone did a CSI-type facial reconstruction for him and found out we'd been too cruel all these years to think of him as less of a looker. All those rather severe statues of him, like the one I went and prayed to in Verona for my First in Paradiso studies in my final year, might not be accurate. The article suggested he might not have been so scary, so stern. Perhaps I could refer them to a passage or two of Inferno to change their minds? I always thought he looked handsome as he was.

anenome pulsatilla

2007-03-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

Nadia is trying to establish our homeopathic remedies.

I've been reading a very interesting book by one of the great homeopathic practitioners (whose name escapes me so that makes it a useless recommendation), an Indian guy who has spent much of his life studying and practicing and developing homeopathy. He's lucid, he details a lifetime's hard research with much conviction and he has occasional lapses into the kind of philopsophising that reminds me of when I studied Dante at college with a wonderful Dr of Italian who pronounced love 'lurve'and made us all feel like it was the most important word in the world. Smitten then, am I, as anyone who reminds me of the old hook-nosed Italian and indeed, Dr Took, gets my attention.

So apart from the obvious and unhelpfully devisive comments about homeopathy being wonderful as it is a holistic approach to wellbeing rather than a symptom-based scatter gun approach like useless conventional Western medicine (pah!), finding one's homepathic remedy it seems, is the key to a more balanced and productive approach to life. Disease, to the homeopath, is both a means of protecting the body in times of great trauma and a barrier to living out one's full potential. So, for example, it may well have been a matter of survival for me at some point in my life (or at some point before - this is one of the trickier concepts) to be overly anxious, converting anxiety into physical symptoms like migraine and stomach pains and being pathologically reserved, in order to combat a particular issue, but that state of play has proved too irrestible for me and has become a pattern that has affected everything I do, everything I feel and everything I think ever since. My remedy will deal with this root cause and will unblock my system (emotional, & physical etc) and I'll be fully functioning to the best of my body's ability.

Whatever you may think of alternatives to allopathic medicine, it is at least worth giving certain things a try if you are, as we are currently, spending lots of time in the company of a very learned and indeed persuasive advocate of one of those therapies who is willing to heal you for free. Indeed, I have been more than willing to talk expansively about myself for several hours and take a few potions here and there if it leads to a brighter me emerging. Particularly if those potions are mainly vodka with the tiniest percentage of the active ingredient in them. This allows homeopaths to give people remedies such as arsenic to cure things like stomach upsets as there is virtually no arsenic left in the remedy. this also allows opponents to refute homeopathy as a phantom form of healing. My Indian guy admits he doesn't understand why potentisation (the act of diluting a substance until it's barely there and also agitating it in a certain way to 'release the energy') works either, but his patient success rate proves it does.

Homeopaths potentise all sorts of weird and wonderful things, animals, rare Amazonian spiders, the sun, the moon - a great source of excitement for critics too no doubt. The calendular cream you use for cuts, the nux vomica for seasickness, the arnica for bruising is all homeopathic and it seems, as effective as potions and lotions that come over the counter at Boots. Goodness knows if it will work. I have every faith in Nadia and it is hard not respect her expertise even if I may not be able to understand or define it. Perhaps the power to 'heal' just comes from her. Would this be in any way more inexplicable. She listens, is calm, practical and very responsive. All the things a regular doctor hasn't time for in your alloted five-minutes with them. I want to have faith in homeopathy as it seems like such a beautiful set of ideas. But then, i've only read the first few chapters of my book. I am being open-minded. Give me the placebo if it makes me feel better. So far, Nadia has identified that I am probably a plant (sensitive etc) and that I may well be a wind anenome. For a week after taking the first dose i slept better and was relatively anxiety free. Then we started our epic car journey and the insomnia and constant need to cross my fingers whilst travelling returned. Is the remedy wearing off? Is there some sort of cosmic force-field in the Honda Integra that stops it working? Did I lie too much in my interview with Nadia? Are hypochondriacs perversly immune to homeopathy?

Meanwhile, Dan has received something for the deteriorating state of his guts. (Lawrence may have some idea of what I am talking about as he has shared a room with him). He also got stung on the leg by something nasty one night and received several remedies for that. Guts are still an issue, possibly worse (is this a case of got to hit rock bottom before you start to get better again?) and the bite/sting only got better after turning ugly and red and agonising. For one exciting/horrifying moment we thought it might be a white-tailed spider bite. This beast is Australian and poisonous and is creeping into NZ. A friend of friend was bitten and the skin on his leg started to fall off until he was hospitalised. Thankfully, Dan's skin is still intact.

2007-03-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

We bought a car. I'm not going to talk about it much at the moment as car ownership is not an easy ride - forgive the pun. Culprit number one is the dodgy clutch which causes us to stall occassionally. To Dan, who is driving as I am a useless 32 year old who can't, this is a constant underlying fear even though it has only really happened at traffic lights in one-horse NZ tows and in supermarket carparks and so is not really a life-threatening issue. Oh, and it's a bit of a concern when trying to park in a very small parking spot, say, in the backlot of an inner city hostel. If you've seen the Austin Powers movie where he does a 250 point turn in a corridor you might have some idea of the spectacle we made in Auckland last week. I personally know the clutch is tricky after the two driving lessons Dan gave me in the Old Man Mountain orchard. An interesting way to pick fruit. Don't be alarmed, though. It's a 100% safe way of travelling and significantly cheaper than getting the bus. We bought the metal beast for 300 pounds and we'll hopefully sell it for the same. It seemed too much of a bargain to put aside. Isn't it alarming how quickly you can jettison your environmental ethics for a cheaper ride? We are intermittently ashamed of ourselves. George '3 allotments' Monbiot would scoff at our half-heartedness. We've vowed not to travel by plane for the next five years to make it up to George and the planet (we've just got to jet half way round the world first). Have also vowed that next trip to New Zealand will be undertaken entirely without the aid of air transport. Making plans for the great adventure of 2013 already. Should anyone want to join us on this epic journey, start saving now.

We made a relatively epic journey from the South Island to the northern part of the North Island this week - three days in the car with our dodgy stereo. This was a little too intense for our 1987 Honda Integra (not yet old enough to be a classic car and certainly not pretty enough), and for the driver and navigator. Some good landscape sped by - Mount Ngauruhoe (or Mount Doom for LOTR afficionados) and the Rangipo Desert that stretches from the shadow at its feet across the middle of the the North Island. We've been hiding in the bush for weeks with the manuka trees and the sandflies, so it was wonderful to see this strange expansive New Zealand landscape and all the evidence of impending geological meltdown. We may or may not go to Rotorua to see the bubbling mud springs and other thermal spectaculars. It costs $50 to get near the bubble and trouble and those in the know have told us of similar natural marvels elsewhere that are, goodness, free. Even flashpackers have to stick to their budget and we've just decided to go to San Francisco for a week and will need the cash for that and a week in relative luxury in Fiji - coup permitting. Maybe the yanks will have a coup too and we could get a prize or something for visiting three countries undergoing some sort of military junta situation. We must be careful what we wish for.

fx

heaven - sandflies = old man mountain

2007-02-27T17:13:00.000-08:00

No postings for a while as we've been overcome spiritually by rural bliss and metaphorically by convulvulous (sp? gardeners?) and sandflies. We're currently living at Two Rivers Cotttage down the lane from the Yellow House at Old Man Mountain in the South Island. All sounds v story book and it's certainly a place where a Good Life fantasy can take hold. We've moved out of Nadia's house after a lovely week of hanging out with the family and cats and the random people that often turn up magically around teatime.(Nadia is Dan's v good friend and surrogate NZ mother. She is an amazing cook and a homeopath and is a bit of a magnet to anyone within reach with an empty belly or an ailment or emotional trauma).

We've moved to the hut that Dan stayed in when he first came to New Zealand in the 90s. It sits on the bank of the Buller River at the point where it joins the Maruia with old man mountain visible in the distance - the rock formation that gives this place its name. It's the kind of place you can spend a day doing not much, a little gazing around you, a little gentle consideration of your circumstances, a little dozing. Dan made the bed that we're sleeping in and you can see little bits of him here and there in the wall carvings or doodles that decorate the kitchen.

We wake after nine and have tea and homemade granola which gives us the energy to climb the steep hill to the neighbours house and back again. After the walk, Dan wanders off to hammer nails, dig holes or some other manly pursuit and I go back to the hut to write short stories about South London teenagers and The Paris Book (now capitalised, as still troublesome). Some afternoons I help Dan pick fruit so we can earn our keep. We're also painting Nadia's wagon. These activities are punctuated by a series of short breaks for tea and cake and a bit of a chat with whoever has dropped in. Last week we met the oddest American who had come to NZ to meet the trees and was hitching through the Buller Gorge. He'd met some cool trees up north, and was trying to find some wise Maori dudes to talk herbs. He had a push me pull me effect on us - tired hippy expressions, his head full of fetid dredlocks but the bluest eyes. Dinner is at Nadia's and after a film or a fire we stumble down the lane again in the dark to the hut.

One word of caution or complaint, one little blot on this bucolic landscape: sandflies. I have been bitten in every corner of my body, in every place you can be bitten and in places that you surely should not be bitten too. Mosquitos are nothing to these tiny black evil jaws with wings. They like it in the morning before you've had time to find your socks or in the gloom of the evening, they like it just before it rains and just after, they like it by the river, they like it on a farm that's slightly overgrown with convulvolous (sp?), they like foreigners' blood. Cook called them sandfies, although they are really some sort of other nasty fly. His men took one look at the swarms and having forgotten their deet, scarpered from somewhere or other round here, they just got on the boat and went somewhere else. But we're here all the same. They are the reason we will probably not stay here forever, the reason we'll probably come home in July.

Jude and Roger get wed

2007-02-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

This is the main reason for our journey north east, a wedding at Mokau - for Jude and Roger. A happy occasion for two very lovely people.

A sign of a good wedding is not very many photos - too much fun to be had eating and drinking and having good conversations with people you've never seen in your life. Happily, we have only three or four shots of the wedding (the important one being the photo you see above).

Other good signs? Tears, Dan dancing, extensive and heartfelt speeches, spontaneous speeches that make you cry all over again, hangovers, campfire singing, swapping addresses, drunken conversations about your own wedding (whether it's happened or might one day happen). Having never met either bride or groom before, I was a little surprised to find myself weeping heartily during the ceremony. But it was irresistible - a good weep comes easily for me, but this was as intimate and lovely as any wedding I've been to and so I cried till the mascara ran down my right cheek. It stayed there all nght long.

There were a few good moments that weren't according to plan like when the local Maori kids were caught thieving from some of the guests tents and Karlos sped off to chase them down or when Roger's wedding fire crept a little too close to the eucalyptus tree. These occasions have to be marked with both good and dangerous moments, it's what Garp might call pre-disastered, it augurs very well.

It was a very good day out.

Spaceship Road Trip

2007-02-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

This is our spaceship Nasa.

This is the camper van that took us travelling through New Zealand's Northlands from Auckland to the tip of the island at Cape Reinga, then east to Bay of Islands and finally, Jude and Roger's wedding at Mokau.

Dan was our handsome and indefatiguable driver and I was navigator, cook, en-route provider of water and chocolate and chief music maker. We only got lost twice and neither of those occasions were truly due to my incompetence - just small hitches in an otherwise perfectly executed driving experience.

After weeks in strange hotels, hostels, friends' homes and on loving sister's floors, it was an exciting proposition, a home of our own and the freedom that goes with it. Freedom to sing Simon and Garfunkel out loud with broken voices, to adorn our home with drying underwear (must be careful not to drive off with the brown underpants hanging from the wing mirror) and to cook up our weird and wonderful cravings.

Here I am making pasta at Kai Iwi lakes campsite. Kai Iwi means food of the people and our leek, mushroom and creme fraiche spirali - a dish that would be just passable at home - is transformed into something approaching delicious by these lakeside circumstances.

Dan is just out of view drinking red wine ("we'll only have one bottle tonight, love, as I've got to drive lots tomorrow") and there's a man called Steve just further out of view playing guitar. Later on Steve invites us to join a group of Irish campers and we listen to him singing Simon and Garfunkel songs, his own voice slowly breaking and faltering as he polishes off his box of red Velluto classico. The camp guardian joins us for a song, but he's too shy to either sing or play, and another camper brings her recorder but it's a bit flat and so she does a bit of random harmonising. It's one of those lovely evenings that just hangs on the brink of something hilarious and ridiculous and every time I feel like ruining it with my cynical heart and sniggering I concentrate on the stars above me and the buzzing of the mosquitos. After our second bottle of red wine ("we'll set off later tomorrow after a reviving swim"), we crawl to our spaceship and spend our first night. Awkward sleeper that I am, I sleep more soundly than I've done in weeks, despite the fact that I am bedding down in the back of a people carrier and everytime I roll over I roll into either Dan or the back seatbelt bracket.

The Irish kids wake up the next morning freaked out and freezing. Four of them, three girls and a guy, in one very small two-man tent (much to the delight of guitar man Steve who reads rude things into this), and still cold. Some Blair Witch branch-cracking action occured in the night too, although that might have been the kids in the next camp catching a stupid possum in their possum trap. That's camping in tents for you. People Carriers are the way forward. Just look at the view through our sun roof:

The next morning, not at all hungover from our redwine singalong, we swam in the lake which was clear and warm and with a ridged, rippled bottom that felt good underfoot.

Bye bye Australia...

2007-01-29T00:54:00.000-08:00

hello New Zealand. hello newlook, pithy blog entries. Flew in yesterday morning. Swapped searing heat, water shortage and sunburn for brooding sky and a night of storms. Auckland is a funny place with barely anyone on the streets and itäs riddled with volcanoes - have been assured Mum that they are not active. Tomorrow we take possesion of our spaceship - a people carrier with mattress in the back masquerading as a camper van - and head to the Northlands to see the beaches and the most northerly point of the land, Cape Reinga. We've stocked up on CDs so I can sing us all the way there (oh Dan, you lucky thing) and have even got a few DVDs to stave off the movie cravings not satisfied by a trip to see ridiculous, misanthropic Babel this afternoon (although we did find a House of the Dead games machine in the multiplex and spent a happy five mins shooting zombies until we were both eaten). See you the on the other side....

Happy Xmas posting

2007-01-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

Think something's gone wrong here and the Xmas posting got lost. Back up on the site now. I know it's a bit late, but if you want to read my slightly tipsy Boxing Day message, then it's a few posts back. Called Happy Christmas.

to make this post a little more interesting, here are some photos and eventually, a link to the site where more photos are stashed.

this is a random picture of the restaurant at the guesthouse in Mui Ne in Vietnam where we stayed the week before Christmas. Forgot to take Xmas tree photo on Ko Tao.

This is another photo of us on beach on Boxing day (a few hours before cocktails at Whitening - very good daiquiris), just to give you an idea of the kind of Xmas we had. we're in silhouette (how do you spell this word, is it like cacaouette?), mercifully, so you can't see too much of me in my tiny Khao San Rd bikini. You can see the warm, clear sea behind where we had our Boxing Day swim

and this is a photo of danny just minutes before we got on the boat to take us back to the mainland. one worried man:

if you haven't seen our photo site, go to www.dether.com and follow the link to the flickr site.

Happy New Year

2007-01-10T15:48:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve

Arrived safely in Sydney and spent New Year's Eve with Dan's beautiful sister in Manly. Here we are just before midnight, full of wine, cocktails wishing everyone a Happy New Year. The New Year Fireworks are just about to explode all over the city and Dan and I are just about to realise that Sydney is famous for its fireworks, something that had escaped us entirely, there not being a movie about the subject or anything. It will take me another two weeks to realise why they make such a fuss about New Year here. Although I am bright enough to know that new year will hit me before it hits mum and dad, affecting the timing of my yearly NYE telephone call, I am too dim to realise it will hit me and Sydney before most of the world - hence the enormous expense for son et lumiere and thus making it the most conceptually significant New Year I will see in for some time. I missed this fact entirely. We also missed Manly's fireworks - too busy talking and drinking champagne in Rachel's clifftop flat. We watched the big midnight event on a tiny television screen at a house party the other side of Manly Beach, so technically, missed them too. Fireworks are not my thing, so I wasn't overly disappointed. It was my first hot New Year's Eve, and my first upside down New Year's Eve. I didn't miss the sub-zero tramp home through litter-strewn South London, the taxi-rank scrum, or the greyness of a hungover British New Year's Day.

We spent much of our first few weeks in Australia in Manly. Manly's called Manly, allegedly, because of all the big blokes that were found there when the colonialists first arrived. You have to suck your stomach in just to walk to the corner shop, so contemporary Manly men are continuing the beefcake tradition. It's near Shelly beach, so called because of all the shells found there. I thought that as there is a Byron up the NSW coast and a Bronte in East Sydney that the Australians were a very literary bunch - Shelly Beach was a living ode to the poet. But it seems the person who discovered Shelly all those years ago was a straightforward type and he no doubt got to the beach long before the poet Shelly donned his frilly shirt and pulled out his quill. I can't be sure. My Australian history is shoddy despite hours spent at the Museum of Sydney.

Anyway, this pragmatic namer of places set the tone for the nation. No time to hang around inventing fancy names for things, make it clear make it brief and she'll be right. It also follows that all other important words and names shall be short, with the exception of those that end in and o or a y sound (Danno, Franno, tinny, dunny, barbie). There are signs preparing you for this linguistic peculiarity at the airport. When I arrived this made me bridle, as if I had any right to be precious about the English language; I'm brutalising it as a type with bad spelling and grammar and awkward phrasing. Snobs law. Of course, these signs are supposed to be funny, even unfunny me saw that eventually. It would be patronising to call this simplicity refreshing and it would be a lie as it's not as if I was finely tuned in to the linguistic peculiarities of Vietnam or Cambodia. It was all I could manage to learn hello, thank you and that's delicious - and I've a degree in languages. It's just that this familiarity with the language seems quintessentially Australian. We watched Kenny tonight, a big Australian cinema hit about a man who works for a portaloo company. Kenny speaks with such colourful phrases - broad and vivid and precisely the kind of free, plain-speaking this particular snob never learns in any language. It took me ages to learn the good bad words in French and Italian. This is probably why I can never remember jokes either. (Small aside: Kenny is a great film. Funny and touching and lots of poo jokes. Even I laughed).

Back to my simplicity rant. Just down the coast from Manly is North Head, the northerly spit of land that forms part of the entrance to Sydney Harbour. In Sydney Harbour, you'll find the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge, aka the coat hanger, which is currently illuminated by a coat hanger-shaped light display at night. It's the bridge's diamond jubilee, and so the coathanger display segues into another display in the shape of ... a diamond. It's a useless installation that undermines the city's reputation for light extravaganzas, as evidenced by the world's best firework display on NYE, but it's rather apt. Australia is a straighforward place, a Ronseal place. And consequently - Lawrence and Mum, you've been v perceptive - maybe not a place that inspires too much in the way of blogging. Not anyway, in someone who tends to blog like a diary and is most verbose when things are less rosy. Life is so laid back here, there's no need to reflect too much on what you see and do, you just do it.

What Sydney has that's worth writing home about

(I look v goofy in this pic but don't the Es look a handsome bunch?)

There's sun, good food and an abundance of healthy people, (many of whom insist on maintaining fitness in the midday sun which is extemely tiring to witness), some intriguing art deco architecture and more importantly, some wonderful human reminders of home. This is how Sydey has distinguished itself so far, as the place where we got back in touch with family and friends. It's been especially fun to wander round this ostensibly foreign city and meet good people from back home. Most of Dan's family is here (with notable and missed expeptions - and another big Hortop-shaped gap), a good proportion of Winchester ( we bumped into some friends of Dan's ma and Pa just the day before yesterday), and it was amazing to run into my wonderful friend Laura in the middle of a sunny Sydney street last week after all those years of chattering in Development's kitchen or in the Research Office at the NHM.

We've spent some lovely days with Rach walking the coast, and have had some gargantuan discussions with her which will fuel a lot of thinking over the coming months. We met up with Nicola and Ivan, last seen in the back garden of our old house in Tulse Hill on Dan's 30th birthday. We've had several happy Etherington days fuelled by wine and good food and the odd museum fix. Dan's Mum and Dad have been so generous, and deserve special mention in the blog, not only putting us up at the Shangri La - well beyond our usual hotel standards - but also feeding us up after all that terrible starvation in Asia, and, perhaps most graciously, looking on politiely when we reach for the digitial camera for the umpteenth time to illustrate another traveller's tale. (Thanks to my Mum and Dad for the second night in Shangri-la which we used wisely, staying up late to watch Father Ted on UKTV and stockpiling complimentary toiletries for the ongoing journey). The view from our room in the Shangri la looked like this. 27th floor. I tried not to think of Steve McQueen in The Towering Inferno.

We're now staying with Laura, who has given us the most amazing welcome, allowing us to commandeer her beautiful home, her cooker (in exchange for a white chocolate and banana cake and a chocolate mousse), her washing machine, her computer, and her (or rather her husband Ed's) games consoles. Dan's presently luxuriating in front of a large television, making a huge racket and you'd honestly think he'd just discovered America or something, such is his excitement. This alone represents unbelievable kindness and I think Laura has a cheerleader for life now in Dan.

Best I stop this entry before I get too tired and emotional - have noticed a preponderance of breathy, upbeat adjectives - very jolly for me, not too fascinating for you. One side effect of all this warmth and connection is that it's induced a lot of thinking about home which could easily lead to a huge bout of homesickness if not kept in check, and again, not good reading for all those back at home who may or may not wish to be given leave to do what they please for 8 months. Felt a bit gloomy the day before yesterday - somewhat inexplicably as it was sunny, we were off to see some video art at the Museum of Contemporary art, and I'd just eaten Dan's body weight in cooked breakfast. It's perverse that seeing everyone here reminds you that you'll be off on your own again soon - so much for carpe diem, although arguably, this whole trip is a huge excercise in carpe diem. You think you can handle 8 months gadding about, being spontaneous, seeing new things every day, with only your Dick Whittington at North Face stick and hanky, and your long-legged sidekick for company, but sometimes you just want to be at home, in a pub with friends, on the sofa with Mum or in bed with two furry, purring beast who don't know the meaning of a lie-in. I'm not so gloomy now. In a few minutes, we're going to walk round Lavender Bay, across the Harbour Bridge into a gleaming city with no other purpose than to be open-eyed, open-minded - if I can prise Dan away from the X-Box.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

2007-01-08T16:31:00.000-08:00

I found The Shining so frightening when I first saw it that it made me jump up and down on the arm of the sofa. I couldn't sit still to watch it, couldn't look, had to look, couldn't listen. Nicholson's axe splintering the bathroom door; the sound of the son's tricycle in the hotel's coridoors, rolling on wood, then rug, then wood; the snow storm and the chase through the maze; the freaky girl twins in their matching frocks at the top of the stairs, The Overlook Hotel, isolated, grand and sick at heart, the source and guardian of all the misery that Jack unlocks as he tries to write his novel.

Imagine how spooky, then, to find yourself sleeping in The Overlook Hotel. Not the original, that's in Colorado, but a similarly grand and isolated place on the edge of the massive Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains. A friend of Rachel's, a lovely, tipsy girl called Lauren, had raved about the place on New Year's Eve, and shown a picture of its belle epoque lounge. After weeks of low rent guesthouses with their bedbugs, condemned air conditioning units and dust drifts under the bed, this posh hotel called to us. All work and no play makes Dan and Fran a dull boy and girl. We'll skip the obvious inappropriateness of this quote for our situation and cut to the underlying message which is: Live a little! Spend your precious pennies on a night at the Grand Mercure Hydro Electric! Lastminute.com sealed the deal. We got three nights with breakfast for a bargain 180 pounds. how easily you adjust to suit your wants. 180 would get us ten night accomodation in Asia, at the very least.

So this is how we came to be wandering the near-empty corridors of the Hydro Majestic, perched on the edge of a great chasm of forest and bush. We took pictures of the spooky bath chairs, remnants of the hotel's spa past.
We played pool in the deserted lounge, laughter echoing, Fran losing, Dan winning and texting at the same time. We looked over the crumbling hotel balustrades into the forest and thought of the bush fires that tore through the area several years ago, and that were tearing through forest only a few kilometres up the road a few weeks before our visit. We had high tea in a neat parlour, where all the guests whispered to one another, afraid to break the rather atmostpheric silence that accompanied the stunning blue views. We shook along with everyone and everything else when the train came through the town, blowing its horn to scare beasts of the imagination off the tracks. We thought of all the scary movies this place brought to mind, and tried not to think of them when we turned the lights off at night. It was shabby, you couldn't get a beer in the bar after 8.30pm as all the staff had gone home, and much of the building was closed, but it was a place full of character. Hard to find in these parts, it seems, where every other guesthouse in Katoomba resembles The Bates Motel. Not sure my love of movies could induce me to spend the night in one of these places.

Let's go to the movies

2006-12-28T21:15:00.001-08:00

We've been dying to go to the cinema for weeks now. Before we came, I had grand plans that we'd visit a cinema in every town we went to and make a geek's log of every location.

It all started going wrong in Mumbai, when after a hot midday trek round Colaba, we could only find the new Bond movie at the Regal. It's an iconic cinema and all, marooned in the middle of one of those impossibly anarchic Mumbai roundabouts but Dan had seen the film, didn't think much of it, and my appreciation of Bond movies only stretches to the theme tunes. (Nancy Sinatra singing You Only Live Twice is my favourite, followed by Burly Chassis singing Goldfinger, should anyone be interested. Trivia mentioned in an effort to lighten the tone of often too-serious blog).

We went on another random mission south of the Colaba causeway on our last afternoon in India, to find an art deco movie palace that some guidebook had promised was unmissable. Guidebook lying again as we only found internet cafes and mobile phone shops. A visit to Mumbai and no Bollywood, not even a little Hollywood? Dereliction of duty, surely.

From then on we only managed one little cinema jaunt in Singapore - to see the Sony cartoon Open Season in a shiny multiplex off Orchard Road. Have little recollection of the movie itself - it was fun and silly and satisfied our craving. The audience - mostly under tens from the sounds of things - had a high old time and squealed and guffawed so much some of them had to break off from their mobile phone conversations. A good afternoon out - thanks to Nick and Caroline for being brilliant hosts and taking us poor movie starved creatures to get a well-needed fix.

We've made do with countless low grade American movies since then courtesy of hotel satelite tv and luxury tour bus DVDs all the way from Bangkok to Hanoi. It's been a blur of Vin Diesel and Kate Hudson, studied ditsy, schmaltz and no-brained action. We watched a totally senseless Xmas flick with Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen at the end of a really long day in Hanoi just before Xmas Eve to get us in the festive spirit. Neither of us had the energy to reach for the off button so we watched the actors hurtle to career oblivion (surely, if there's any justice in the world?), our humbug rising exponentially.

Our most recent bus ride back from the island of Ko Tao to Bangkok provided us with a new viewing experience. From our luxury reclining seats in their prime location over the engine, we could barely hear the dialogue from the monitor half way down the aisle. This made viewing You, Me and Dupree somewhat problematic, but that may well have been a blessing. I slept through a similarly audio-challenged showing of The Pink Panther, waking up in time to witness only the end of Steve Martin's on screen humiliation.

This all sets the scene for yesterday when we ventured into Bangkok's shopping district and from the Skytrain, spotted the bright and shiny holy grail, at the top of the brand new mall-to-end-all-malls Central World Plaza - a cinema! Only 11.30 in the morning so by our reckoning, time for one, if not two films, shopping, food and back home to Banglamphu all in time for a goodbye Asia beer. Dan was practically dizzy with excitement, and once I'd been fed, I let myself succumb to the sweet idea of a movie in the middle of the day. First up was Eragon, one of those fantasy adventure movies where rash young heroes and skinny young heroines do battle with hammy old thesps and all the budget goes on dodgy SFX and sweeping helicopter shots of lush forest and mountainside. But it was blissful to sit in the high tech cineplex - only open for a day or two, and to curl up in our two seater sofa seat in the air-conditioned cool and watch a proper movie on a big screen.

It was so blissful, we did it all over again two hours later. This time, we tried a big rococo cinema, with swirling carpets and complicated plaster cornicing where they were showing A Night at the Museum. Another enjoyable yarn, particularly for someone who's spent a few evenings stalking round a supposedly empty natural history museum, and watched again from a big two-person sofa. Before both movies, we experienced some of the Thai people's unconditional devotion to their king when we were all expected to stand during a romantic montage of images illustrating his benevolent reign. Everyone does it, assuming reverent attitudes until the very last bars of the rousing Thai music. In this state of patriotic bliss, ear ringing from all that rousing noise and eyes misting over, you settle with your popcorn and coca cola, ready to believe anything that's shown before you.

It was a good day for the movies and we were so happy with our lot that we managed to stave off our daily 3 o'clock row until at least 7pm. When we got home, we watched Lords of War on HBO - food for thought but far too heavy for this blog, although I've made a mental note to treat all the gun runners I come across in future with extreme caution.

Happy Christmas!

2006-12-26T05:57:00.000-08:00

Ko Tao - Xmas 2006

It's technically boxing day, but am still full of Xmas spirit and several beers, a strawberry daiquiri and a mojito. We've had a lovely, strange Christmas, exploring Ko Tao, trying to a find a beach for some sunbathing and eating lots of good, expensive food. We've given ourselves three days grace from the budget which we're undoubtedly tripling by the day. Our resort is practically the most expensive on the island. I feel like an interloper in all this supposed luxury and Dan is determined to prove it isn't value for money. We get free jasmine tea every afternoon which wins me over every day, despite the fact that there is no hot water. We've spent lots of time being peaceful, then ruining it by talking nonsense, looking at the sea, singing Fairy Tale of New York on Xmas eve on our balcony (Dan was a reluctant Shane Mcgowan, I was a very enthusiastic Kirsty Macoll)

The resort is called Sensi Paradise Resort, and paradise was hard won after the two-hour infernal journey to the island by jet cat. The gulf of Thailand is swimming in excess water at the moment after a late monsoon and the typhoon that hit the Phillipines recently. A funny little man warned us about the swell in Bangkok (i've really got to avoid these presagers of doom that make a beeline for us as we're about to embark on big journeys). We watched the dawn break from the pier on the mainland and saw the most beautiful, calm pink sea. Within minutes of setting off the wretched catamaran was bouncing around like a fairground ride. Worse than the Mexican hat, or even the waltzers, but with the same insistant fear of certain death. I thought I could cope.

They played a movie - the senstively chosen Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift - to distract us from our purgatory at sea and I tried to concentrate on the high speed races. Then the men on board started to vomit (it's always the men first, it really is) and whimper and moan. I can cope, I've been on more Brittany Ferry rides than Judith Chalmers and I have earned my sea legs in mamouth maritime drinking parties on several French exchanges - I was feeling almost cocky. Then I looked at Dan, who looked back with such terror and gripped my hand in the same way I grip his when I'm on a plane. We were a pitch and roll away from becoming a shark's breakfast. It took two hours more pitching, rolling, smashing waves, horizon corkscrewing in and out of focus and Dan joining in with the Mexican wave of sickness (that he so vividly describes) for us to reach the island shore. Paradise is hard won, I can tell you. And no amount of free jasmine tea in the afternoon or Christmas song-singing will take away the nagging thought that to get back to the mainland, and oh one day, home, we'll have to get on that devil's craft and give ourselves up to the gulf of Thailand once more.

But it is amazing what a daiquiri does for the soul and the bravery it endows. The more unlikely it seems that we'll get home (the daiquiri also responsible for outlandish thoughts) the more lovely home seems and everybody in it. Rang Mum yesterday and got a really strong rush for it and would have swapped the beach and the warm sea for a rainy Exeter Christmas in a second. Another daiquiri might sort that out. I do hope everyone's, healthy and happy, that family and friends don't miss us too much, that all the babies about to be born will be as beautiful and lovely as their mothers, that little brothers in the company of bearded men look after themselves and get home safely. Happy Christmas and Happy New Year!!

I shop therefore I am

2006-12-21T02:27:00.000-08:00

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/138/325917494_6cd314bd71.jpg?v=0

Ripping through our cash at an alarming rate. Most of our money goes on food, but a growing amount is being diverted to feed the shopping habit we're both developing. Even Dan, who spends most of his life espousing monk-like values of spartan living has been shopping up a storm. His prize purchase is foulest pair of underpants imaginable - chocolate brown airtex horrors that induce him to dance around singing the lambada whenever he wears them. He thinks they are hilarious. I think they could lead to some sort of common law divorce.

It's hard not to shop when you sleep yards from one of the busiest shopping districts in Ha Noi. I am trying not to succumb but every two metres there's a silk shop or an ethnic bag shop or a man selling Chinese stamps on the roadside, and all for such little money... Dan spent 15 whole dollars on shoes today and I had to catch up (having only spent 5 dollars so far in Ha Noi on a fetching pair of fake Nike sports sandals) and bought a beautiful pleated silk skirt. I'm kidding myself that as everything is significantly cheaper here, I can legitimately spend a fortune on things i don't need. I was so proud that i managed to reduce my packing to the minimun and now I'm ruining this lean backpacker lifestyle with all the extra fripperies I'm collecting on the way.

Hoi An, pictured above, was the ultimate destination for all-consuming tourists. We've talked to so many people who have loved this coastal merchant town and it's a little jewel, preserve under the auspices of UNESCO's benificent World Heritage Site umbrella, but I suspect the endless opportunities for consumption of one kind or another go some way to making these happy memories. We arrived at 6am one rainy morning, and by 4pm we'd ordered four shirts and a pair of sandals, eaten three meals and had more beer than we've had in weeks. The following day was much the same. Other tourists staggered through the streets under the weight of their purchases, pursued by touts and street vendors, dizzy with the thrill of all this attention. I might try and take some photos of the Hoi An purchases (maybe not the brown underpants). We liked it so much, we even made a plan to come back for Dan's 40th and get married here. But don't get too excited. We were a little tipsy from afternoon drinking and had just clinched a particularly good deal at the market and were a little drunk with the excitement.

2006-12-19T19:16:00.000-08:00

Ha Noi looks like Paris to me. Everywhere we been to looks like somewhere I've been to before. Phnom Penh looked like a French resort on the Atlantic Coast. Mui Ne felt like Minorca. Mumbai nights felt like humid Roman nights and our hotel in Colaba was exactly like the one we stayed in near the Termini station.

I think this is a coping mechanism, so I feel comfortable wherever I am. Yes there are many many strange and wonderful differences to discover, but often its the similarities, or the not-quite similarities which strike you the most and unsettle you. Christmas trees in bright sunlight. BBC World and not BBC One - that sort of thing. Sweet lipton tea with milk rather than milky Earl Grey. You're bolstered by all your preconceptions to face the exotic and the weird ways of other places but are less prepared to see some things as they are at home with all the self-evaluation and sometimes criticism that this leads to. I've walked past a basket full of jumping, skinned frogs in a Phnom Penh market, and felt horrifed, yes, but with a sense of recognition or confirmation of my elaborate imaginings of foreign cultures. But still I can't help myself seeing familiar landscapes everywhere. We rode through some amazing Vietnamese deserts last week and we thought of spaghetti westerns and fake Mexican landscapes.

And then there's the holiday mentality I've developed, the languid, reflexive attitude of the drifting backpacker whose only concerns are how much do I have to pay and when can I eat. Or the habits I've rediscovered from childhood holidays like always having coca cola from the bottle with a straw, or reading a book as the defaul daily activity. My skin has that dry, tanned holiday quality and every night I marvel at the tan lines on my toes, on my wrist where my watch sits. My hair is turning yellow in the sun, I wash it less and less as it becomes strawlike, unruly.

I would like to say that I'm travelling with a healthy dose of the qualities that made great travellers and philosophers of men like Montaigne, for whom travel was an ongoing excercise in understanding not just the other worlds you travel through, but your own, seeing yourself in the faces of other peoples. This is not the case. I can't wait to read a copy of Heat magazine, am obsessed with finally getting a tan (not working, at all) and my biggest daily preoccupation (other than the primeval search for cheap food) is where are all the pretty clothes I can buy today. I've succumbed to that awful navel-gazing attutide of those who have little to do with their day but walk and look and consume. I'm having a wonderful time drifting in this way, don't get me wrong, and am more than happy to wander through the streets of Ha Noi in search of another shop/restaurant/museum with the lovely memory of Paris stalking me like a shadow. We'll see what Ha Noi has to offer and if in ten years time I'll wander through the streets of Paris and see this city instead.

Lush Cambodian countryside

2006-12-12T03:48:00.000-08:00

This photo was taken driving back from the last of the temples we visited near Siem Reap. Our tuk-tuk driver Baby had just rescued a couple of distressed tourists who we found on the roadside. They'd hired electric bikes to visit the site and had run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. With the girl's bike strapped to the front of the tuk-tuk carriage and her man riding along beside us, grabbing hold of the tuk-tuk's armature, using its momentum to keep him going, we made our way back to town. The road was typically pot-holed, packed with impatient motor cyclists, van drivers, luxury car and coach dirvers, and the cops would have had Baby's hide had they caught him with the extra load. But we made it back to town without too much in the way of frayed nerves.

We missed the sunset, but we drove so slowly I got some great pictures of the paddy fields in late afternoon. We were making our way back to town just as the workers were making their way home for dinner. Vans passed us full of men and women in conical hats, grubby from a day in the fields. A crocodile of bicycles passed us, all piled with grasses.

People were lighting fires for the evening in front of their homes. Much of life is spent outdoors in these villages. Many houses are built on stilts, even the new frou-frou affairs of the newly rich, the ones with the finials and gaudy paint. Sleeping quarters are well above ground level to keep people dry when it rains, when the rivers burst their banks, and when the deltas flood. But cooking and sitting and working takes place in the open air, often by the roadside. It's easy for passing tourists in tuk-tuks to be nosy.

Cambodian epiphany

2006-12-10T01:45:00.000-08:00

The journey from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia was always going to be interesting. Siem Reap is the nearest town to the Angkor temples, and if there's one thing you do in Cambodia, it's the Angkor temples. We bought a ticket from our Bangkok guesthouse for a bus to the Thai border with Cambodia then onward transport to Siem Reap. 12 hours on the road, and from all the reports we'd heard, it would be a bumpy road in terrible transport.

So, we boarded our luxury coach at 7.30am on Thursday feeling extremely clever. The sun was bright and everything felt exotic and worthwhile, even crawling through the busy morning streets. we pushed on through Thai countryside, taking advantage of those smooth Thai roads, until Aranyaprathet, the border town on the Thai side. Decanted into a pick-up truck (pick up trucks are a typical way of getting from the border to Siem Reap), we were then taken to a roadside cafe whilst others in our group got visas. Phew! no 6 hour pick-up journey for clever us! an hour of hanging around in the heat then back in the pick-up for the border crossing.

Having never crossed a land border on foot before, this was pretty entertaining. Feeling like evacuees, we followed our guides - a sequence of interchangeable busy men - to Thai immigration. Then came the weird litter-strewn hinterland between the two countries, where people live in eye-watering poverty just yards from huge duty free malls and casinos. On to Cambodian border control where there was much precise stamping of passports and photos, another session in front of a tiny spy cam, some nodding and thank yous. Then through to our first Cambodian bustop, where we watched our group re-assemble and the busy men marked us with and a sequence of coloured stickers to divide and subdivide us for the ongoing journey. Some hours later, Dan and I were selected for a special bus with a few others, under the aimiable watch of our man Luonn and we were driven across a wild-west landscape to the bus station in Poipet, the Cambodian border town. There, our chariot awaited, our transport for the 150km journey to Siem Reap, a tiny blue bus, dusty, rickety and from the seventies if not before; air-conditioned, just.

It was a bone-shaking journey but I enjoyed it more than any of the bus journeys I've taken before. The road to Siem Reap is shocking - a dirt track, littered with huge potholes, that you negotiate at not much more than 20 miles an hour. The vehicles that thump along everyday - the rubbish buses dwarfed by the huge 4x4s that ply the road - kick up a thick red dust that gets under your skin, under your tongue, in your luggage. The rumour is the airlines that run planes into Siem Reap have paid the local authorities not to improve this road to encourage tourists to visit by plane. It does seem particularly peverse when you finally enter Siem Reap and see lot upon lot of luxury hotel, glitzy behemoths of prosperity, and many many more under construction, that the investment should not have reached the road to the border. But air tourists miss the opportunity to cut through the villages, the paddy fields, to see the families that line the roadside, and to stop at the road-side cafes and run the gauntlet of the many, many children that swarm around the tourist buses asking for coins from England. They also miss Luonn, the super guide with an irrepresible line in monkey jokes and a determination to practice his English on all foreign tourists, be they English themselves or indeed, Swedish or German.

You do a lot of this journey after dark. Some spurious sources have suggested that the boys who run the buses eke out the journey to ensure you arrive shattered and in the dark in Siem Reap. You'll be much more likely to take a room in their best friend's guesthouse this way, even though there is a high probability you'll be sleeping with bugs and there's no hot water. But an evening journey affords you a glimpse of the local people cooking dinner, and kicking back in the evening as you creep past. You get a beautiful sunset on the way. And for those used to Western skies, lurid and orange with light pollution, it gives you the chance to see more stars than you could imagine in an inky black expanse that is terrifying when the sun disappears.

As we bumped through the night, we saw a storm to our east, raging behind a big plume of cloud, concentrating its force in this one area. The lightning lit the sky with amazing violence and great forks hit the earth every few seconds, but the full might of the storm was hidden from us by that plume of cloud. We heard no thunder at all. We followed this strange storm for several hours with the plume of cloud slowly dissipating, stretching out to form a dragon-shape with the yellow full moon as an eye, and the storm still raging in its tail.

We arrived in Siem Reap at eleven. Sure enough, Luonn did have a friend with a guesthouse, conveniently situated in a small industrial estate to the north of the town. There were no bed bugs, so we had to sleep on our own, and no hot water either. But, this didn't seem to matter as it was a welcoming place and you could drink cheap beer and practice English and Cambodian for ever with your new friends. And this is where we met Baby, our Tuk-Tuk driver, who took us round the temples over the next few days.

It was a long, day, but a good day. Cambodia is a surprsing place - beautiful and incredibly sad. The violence of its past, and it's a very recent past, and the obvious repercussions - the ongoing poverty, the weird demographics, land mine victims all over the place - is like a huge gash running through everything, through so much kindness, and happiness and so much natural beauty. It's a like a big ugly monster in the corner, you want to ask everyone about it, but you don't want to break the spell. We're going to the Foreigh Correspondants Club bar now to mull it all over.

fx

Mumbai

2006-12-01T04:09:00.000-08:00

Back to the city. We're prepared for a bit of a bumpy ride after the slow pace of Kerala. Things get off to an edgy start when two fellow air passengers warn us to take care in the city and to on no account get on the public transport system. Great, a taxi it is! There's been lots of disturbance in the city and elsewhere in the last few days with rioting from some parts of the region's Dalit populations (dalit is the more pc term for untouchable) in the slum areas. Something to do with the defacement of a statue by supporters of one political faction or another. difficult to work out what exactly has happened and the BBC is keeping quiet about it. Two train carriages were incinerated by an angry mob and a line of women from one of the slums brought one of the expressways to a standstill. The morning paper reports that they were still wearing their nightclothes, as if this is more shocking than the burning down of railway property, with railway customers presumably not long gone from the premises.

Out hotel is in Colaba, more or less the tip of Mumbai and the other side of town from the airport. Naturally, this scares the living daylights out of me and i scour the crowd at Mumbai airport for signs of terror and confusion. No signs of either but then maybe they all live north of Mumbai. At the pre-paid taxi rank I scrutinise the man at the desk for signs that our trip south of the airport might be dangerous. He barely looks at us, bored to the point of misanthropy, but he charges us 750 rupees (we'd expected 350) - the extra 400 must be danger money for the taxi driver. Why didn't we stay another night in sleepy, fluffy tourist friendly Kerala and cut out the big, bad city? The man who walks us to the taxi seems a bit nervy, walks us up to a 4x4 taxi complete with bull bars or whatever they are. is it that bad in downtown mumbai? But we walk past to a cab with blackened back windows and get in ready for the ordeal.

Of course, we sail through Mumbai with not a rioter or a protesting lady in her nightdress in sight. And I'm not disappointed, oh no,not at all. Just embarrassed all over again by my lily-livered constitution. A few minor squabbles with the cab driver who tries to make us pay all over again for the cab, then gets totally lost, can't find the hotel at all, not even the main road in Colaba, and then scrapes the cab's undercarriage on the curb when he eventually does make it to Bentley's Hotel.

the prawns, not the pasties, wot dun it, missus (old hortop family joke)

2006-11-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

is this the offensive river-beast that caused three young (-ish) westerners to hurtle to digestive hell and back on the night of the 22nd November? Is this the young man whose penchant for washing dishes in the river caused same young (-ish) westerners to turn their pretty little cabins into fetid sick holes? No. This is the sweet doctor of necessity with a good line in curative salty lime drinks and the magic smelling lemon (you sniff it and you feel less sick). whom we didn't tip. I know it was reasonable of us not to tip after being resolutely poisoned by the ship's crew, but i feel very guilty when I remember how kind he was. So, although this is a photo test, this is also a little apology. And the prawns were good, I believe, although I was unable to taste them.

I hate technology!!!!

2006-11-27T22:49:00.000-08:00

can't get the damned blogger site to upload pictures. managed it perfectly well when i was in England but everything looks different now. i hate having to ask Dan to help as if I'd never even looked at a computer before but what he does to his blog bears absolutely no resemblance to what I seem to need to do to mine - namely, utter all manner of mystical incantations and perform other unknown forms of jiggery pokery so that it will miraculously work. I HAVE photos, yes I do, of the trip so far, with some particularly memorable ones of the Kathakali dance performance we saw on Sunday night. Have a look at Dan's flickr. The picture of Lord Vishnu (diguised as the terrifying cat monster), playing a hideous game of cats cradle with his enemy's guts is my favourite. Too much text on a blog is tiring, i've decided. I'll work out this image uploading thing if it kills me

Heart of Darkness

2006-11-25T06:36:00.000-08:00

The big day out.
Wednesday, we ventured out of tourist town to the north to meet Robin and Rowan for our backwater tour. After a bit of research, we found a taxi driver willing to fleece us a little less for the treat of driving us at breakneck pace to Alleppey. We hit the four-hour, the girls gossiping in the back and Dan making small attempts at mollifying conversation in the front. I had naively hoped we'd see a bit of Kerala's countryside on the way - a bit of the green and wonderful God's Own Country the Keralans advertise, but the road cut its way through village after town after village, each one full of activity. And so Kovalam became, Trivandrum, became Kollam, linked by a mad procession of beeping taxis and tuc tucs until we reached Alleppey. Far more interesting however, to see this urban sprawl than my imagined countryside and if I had been awake enough I would have written a list of all the things, big and small that struck me. It's such a good way to see a place and try and understand a little of what happens there, from the window of a car - sorry to promote this evil polluting way of getting around. We passed mosques at call-to-prayer time, temples, and churches; schools at the begining of the day with neatly dressed kids carrying huge back packs (Kerala's literacy rate is super good) We saw kingfishers and dogs and skinny cows with their young and fried bats on electricity power cables. Lots of adverts for the imminent arrival of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the big holy man from the north with the sparkling eyes. An elephant on the back of a truck, on his way to work, I suppose

So glad we chose Mr Pappachan's four wheel drive (another eco-no-no), when we reached Alleppey, despite his unique approach to customer relations. The road to Puppali, the backwater village where Robin and Rowan were waiting with our rice boat, was full of potholes. Mr Pappachan had previously demonstrated the excellent suspension of his vehicle by rocking the car furiously at a petrol station with the three of us still inside. Good entertainment for the petrol station attendants and a chance for us to see him smile for the first time.

The rice boat trip was memorable. The backwaters are a unique part of the land - for better description of the paddy fields and the communities that live there see Dan's blog. The boat we hired was spacious and came with a full crew and plentiful meals thrown in. We lounged around on the top deck in the sun and spied on the locals as we floated past. You're in that very odd predicament of wanting to simulaneously resist or succumb to the indolent, easy life of those who have things done for them. All feels very 19th century which again is something of a predicament. The modern twist is provided by the camera as you take photos of women washing, cleaning their teeth, carrying fish, on their way to church. (lots of cright wihte chruches in this area which was settled centuries ago by Syrian christians). We floated past a group of men burning some interesting piles of matter under a temple shaped structure. A funeral pyre? The men chatted with each other easily, talked on mobile phones. One of us took a photo.

We had a lovely lunch. Fish and dal and beetroot curry. The men cooked up a feast and then snoozed it off in the kitchen in the afternoon. We then went to the prawn market - one man and his wife and a vat full of huge, blue-veined tiger prawns fished from the rivers. For our tea.

Tea never came for us, of course. (see Dan's blog for more technicolour description). Instead, a memorably feverish night in our rice boat bedroom, delirious conversations with Dan, mournful trips upstairs to spend some precious minutes in the company of Robin and Rowan, lots of lime juice and salt from our boat boy doctors. The most effective travellers de-tox. I only call this entry Heart of Darkness as that's all i could think of at 5.30am when the local temple alarm clock began - amazing how far one man and a microphone can spread the word - and I'd been vomitting for 12 hours straight. But, the sunlight on the far shore was beautiful and I could just about see a woman starting the endless cycle of washing. A fushia pink sari against the green of the bush. And then I felt bad for thinking of horrific journeys up fetid unknown rivers, as this really was a lovely place.

Sticky Kerala

2006-11-21T08:46:00.000-08:00

Fourth day of the big adventure and second day of blog. It's taking me a while to acclimatise to travelling, India, the heat, the endless hordes of staring men, lack of cats (of my own) and am finding it difficult to process everything. Dan is also at my shoulder proof-reading everything (oh, the joys of emailing in a weirdo hotel foyer) and this is somewhat interrupting my otherwise florid prose-style! Kerala is hot and sticky, this much I know. I'm completely paranoid about offending the local people so am constantly attached to my shawl which is also hot and sticky. We had a lovely poolside morning, however, and I managed to burn some flesh in my bikini, so all is not lost. This afternoon we wandered around the paddy fields (superannuated but very pretty swamps) and tomorrow we're going to Alleppey for an overnight boat trip around Kerala's backwaters. We can see the sea from our balcony. So a very watery theme to this week. We are also having at least three showers a day. Oh this is fascinating stuff. I hope to be able to write something clever about this holiday before long. Once I've shaken the look and the attitude of a startled rabbit then I'm sure writing about it will not be the frightening business it seems to be at the moment.

not sure if this is allowed in a blog, but love to all and miss you lots. you know who you are

fx

2006-10-31T05:01:00.000-08:00

A day and a half to go before Dan and I leave on the grand tour. Chaos is subsiding around us, my rucksack is only a few more unpackings away from being ready to go and I'm just about coming round to the idea that we're leaving. Not forever, but leaving all the same.

Have had a wonderful time saying goodbye to everyone. Going away is almost purely worth it for that experience - particularly the vigorous drunken hugs! I did dissappoint Hannah, Matt and Stef by not staying out dancing till 5am last night. I bitterly regret it now. We could have gone to Boujis and spent all my travel savings and Danny would have been so pleased! A missed opportunity. But more dancing to come, I'm sure, in more exotic locations.

This is as exiting as the blog gets so far. Hoping for some real stories to tell soon, in a matter of hours...

2006-10-30T15:57:00.000-08:00

let's see if i can upload a photo from flickr like someone who knows how...

2006-10-30T15:31:00.000-08:00

Picture test