News from the North

ONE DAY IN EXPATLAND 9AM Wake in luxurious, high-ceilinged expat mansion in expensive Ma'adi suburb. Drink grande cappucino. Host gives me keys to apartment, introduces me to driver, tells me car and driver are at my disposal. 9:30AM Slightly confused by situation; unaccustomed to travelling with own transport. Humbly request of driver that perhaps he could take me to pyramids at Sakkara, if it isn't too much trouble. Apologize profusely for taking up his day. 10AM Arrive Sakkara. Visit step pyramid. Hot out. 11AM Politely ask driver to stop to buy water and then go to Dashur pyramids. No water stop. Remind driver of water request. Buy water, visit Dashur pyramids. Very hot out. 1PM Ask driver for lunch recommendations. Driver recommends McDonald's. Give driver sidelong look and have him take me to Nile Hilton for lunch. Hilton pleasantly air-conditioned. Blistering heat makes exterior difficult. 3PM Have driver take me to Giza Pyramids. Look around briefly. Glimpse Sphinx ...

All credit to Moses. Nowadays Mount Sinai is a straightforward two-hour hike up a well-worn trail, but three millennia ago it must have been absolute murder. I was expecting a mob of people and was amazed to find myself absolutely alone at the summit for sunset. Amazed and grateful. Standing atop a fantasyland of jagged, pitted, striated crags and canyons, eroded by the wind into twisted coiled dragon-shapes, stained by the last crimson rays of the sun, on the very mountain where Moses, so legend has it, received the Ten Commandments -- a magical moment. I suppose I can't in good conscience leave you with the notion that I have become lone-wolf-in-the-wilderness Intrepid Man. I wasn't that alone. Not far below the summit are a half-dozen Bedouin huts/shops providing tea, Coke, chocolate, and mattress/blanket rental; two more overnighters showed up shortly after sunset; and just before dawn an Italian tour-group horde arrived. But still. In the middle of the night, unless all t...

"dude, that town is fucked up ." Sarajevo is battle-scarred. Mostar is gutted. There has been enough reconstruction that it isn't obvious at first. Stand on one of the hardly-used bridges, above the steep and beautiful ravine atop which the city perches, and it looks postcard-pretty. If you look closer you notice it's too pretty. All the buildings are new. Go a block to the west and you step into a war zone. This is where the front line was. Rows of half-collapsed heaps of gray concrete and brick, torn open by ragged misshapen gaps like Godzilla took bites out of them, punched full of bullet holes, many of them roofless, covered with dust, full of rubble and trash. Chimneys and random jagged spurs that happened to survive the tank and shellfire jut out like broken bones. Don't get me wrong. This is not a dead city. The streets are lined with parked cars, bright billboards are posted right in front of the wrecks, and every second or third lot boasts a brightly pain...

The discreet charm of the Kosovarese Parts of Kosovo are very pretty. It was exhilirating, even after an exhausting 11-hour bus ride through the Albanian outback, riding through watching dawn rise above its green misty rolling hills. Unfortunately the pretty parts do not include the towns. And definitely not the hotels. I checked into the Stalinist-concrete-block Hotel Iliria, whose terrifyingly pallid receptionist had obviously gone to Gulag charm school, and discovered that my room's "ensuite bathroom" was a cube of rotting concrete featuring a sink, a shower head, a towel ring, and a hole in the floor (to be fair the rest of the room was reasonable). And then I went down and ate breakfast with 200 Bangladeshi peacekeepers. I guess NATO-UN territories tend to have more than their share of Luis Bunuel moments. Kosovars love three things: cigarettes, ice cream, and the Internet. In a town of 150,000 there must be at least 100 establishments vending each of the latter tw...

Ancient Roman ampitheatre in Durres, Albania. Athens: an elaborate hoax? Athens. Cradle of civilization, where 2500 years ago the ancient Greeks invented democracy, philosophy, and the Olympics. Or did they? I ask you: where's the proof? Yeah, yeah, I know: "the proof's all around you! The Acropolis! The Parthenon! The Temple Of Zeus! The Olympic Stadium!" Uh-huh. I seen 'em. The Acropolis is a construction site, the Parthenon and Temple Of Zeus are covered in scaffolding, and the Olympic Stadium is flanked by a pair of enormous construction cranes. It really makes you wonder. Athens itself is a nice place, a bit of a dive, but I like dives. The Greeks very sensibly herd the vast majority of tourists into a warren of shops and cafes just below the Acropolis. The entire rest of the city is under destruction for next year's Olympiad, and the streets are labyrinthine, but fortunately it's a good place to get lost in. I like the way that glitzy shopping areas ...

Gut-wrenching terror. Repeatedly hurtling towards what seem like inevitable collisions at breakneck speeds. There's only a little consolation in being surrounded by other people doing the same crazy thing. It's hard to think in the fog and confusion, with the ceaseless noise and chaos all around, but only perfect coordination and split-second timing stand between you and certain death. Yes, driving a stick shift through rush-hour Barcelona is not an experience for the faint of heart. I also went skydiving. That was fun, in retrospect. It was also fun, way fun, wowee-zowee-this-is-amazing-my-God-I'm-flying! fun, at the time. It was less fun in advance. I'd been edgy all week. It's one thing to think of skydiving "gee, that would be fun to do someday." It's quite another to actually go. "Painfully nerve-wracking" would be a best-case description of the first time you sit on an ascending aircraft, knowing in a few short minutes you will throw yo...

Notes from Down Under, part the fourth (and final) Sydney, Australia: Remembrance Day All good trips must come to an end. And so in a few short hours I will fly from springtime in Sydney to the brooding gloom of London. Yeah. (At this point the author pauses for a brief interlude of uncontrollable weeping, wailing, kicking, screaming, gnashing of teeth, wearing of sackcloth and ashes, and a Richter 9.5 fists-beating-on-the-floor tantrum.) Ahem. As I was saying. Right. Leaving Australia. Going to England. (Repeat above interlude. Calm is only restored by a tag-team combination of trauma counsellors, Zen masters, and powerful antidepressants.) At least I'm leaving on a high note. Yesterday I went out for a day of canyoning in the Blue Mountains, which was all kinds of fun. The day kicked off with a fifty-foot cliffjump into water, followed by donning a wetsuit and going crosscountry down a steep river ravine so narrow it nearly turned into a spelunking expedition. The water was abs...

Notes from Papua New Guinea, part the only Port Moresby, PNG But of course you're not really an intrepid traveller unless you're crammed into the back of a battered Japanese minibus with a dozen families and their produce and their livestock, picking your way along a stomach-churning Third World road punctuated by roadblocks where menacing drunken machete-wielding men demand a "toll" before allowing you to continue on to the rat-infested rooms-by-the-hour flophouse where you're staying. Anything more comfortable than that, and you're just a tourist. Sigh. The really sad thing is that I'm only mostly joking. So I went up to Papua New Guinea for a week, partly just to see what it's like, partly because Australia, while wonderful, seemed a little bit...tame, partly because having already been through cities and beaches and ocean and jungle, and with deserts next on the agenda, I felt like spending a little time in the one terrain Oz does not offer: mount...

Notes from Down Under, part the third Cape Tribulation, Queensland I have seen the Great Barrier Reef, up close and personal, and wow. Floating weightless amid breathtakingly gorgeous coral formations, in every colour of the rainbow, teeming with huge schools of fish of every size, and squid and stingrays and sharks and shrimps and eels and anemones and giant clams and and and and, and it all just went on, and on, and on -- and this was just at a few of the smaller dots on the overall Reef. I went on 11 dives in 51 hours, living on a boat the whole time; for a while there I thought I was growing gills. I am now officially an Advanced Open Water Scuba Diver, which may impress you -- unless you have done the same course, and know it's about as difficult as Basketweaving 101. Terrific fun though. The night dives were my favourite. Going headfirst down a towering coral wall, playing my light over the twisting alien formations -- I felt like an astronaut. And there were sharks at night,...

Notes from Down Under, part the second Byron Bay, New South Wales It is with great reluctance that I leave Byron Bay. This is the chilled-out kind of beach town where people come for a day and stay for a month, and I've been here only a week. But verily it is one of life's great truths: you can live in a giant covered wagon for only so long before it's time to move on. And so in an hour's time I'll be on a bus to Queensland and the North. Understand that I was only staying in the giant wagon because the giant teepee was full. Accomodation at the Arts Factory Lodge is a wee bit idiosyncratic. It's a good place, though, in a good town, with all kinds of things to do. In the last week I've been horseback riding, surfing, mountain biking, scuba diving (twice), and trapezing -- yes, trapezing -- and I still feel like I've been extremely lazy. In a good way. It turns out I'm not a natural surfer. After a few hours of patient training I managed to wobble ar...

Notes from Down Under, part the first Sydney, New South Wales So it's just as pleasant a city as everyone had said; green, gorgeous, relaxed, stunning waterfront views absolutely everywhere, populated by people who are almost pathologically friendly. When you walk into a store in Sydney, people ask you "How you going then?" and not in the robotic drone of a Wal-Mart greeter. I'm not even sure all of these grinning greetings came from store employees and not fellow-shoppers. Whoever they are, they genuinely want to know how you're going and how they can help. Naturally with my New York/London/Toronto reflexes I blanch and back away quickly, muttering something about "just looking," but I hope to soon overcome this reflex and establish communication with the natives. Flew in with Singapore Airlines, and I'd like to give them a shout-out for being The Greatest Airline On (or, more to the point, above) The Planet. Your own little screen with video, audio...

SEAsiaupdate While trekking in Nepal I met a wise South African who said to me: "Backpackers and package tourists are getting more and more alike - package tourists are becoming more adventurous, and backpackers are following standard trails." Nowhere is this more apparent than Thailand and Malaysia, which teem with sunburnt Europeans lugging backpacks from one clutch of beachfront guesthouses to another. But the intrepid traveller who goes off the backpacker trail can still find remote, exotic destinations away from banana shakes and beach parties. Or so I hear. But at present I'm not feeling the least bit intrepid. On the contrary I'm growing very fond of banana shakes, and the beaches remain gorgeous even if they are crowded, and...OK, so I've had a very lazy few weeks. Is that so wrong? I finally got around to getting my PADI open-water scuba certification, just finished a couple of days ago. You may be thinking "aha, you haven't been that lazy after...

Indiaupdate II Calcutta, amazingly, was exactly how I imagined India to be before I arrived. A huge sea of crumbling concrete blocks dotted by fading mausoleums of the Raj. Long rows of street stlls selling chapati-and-curry in banana-leaf plates, chai in disposable clay cups, pyramids of sweets and fruits, cigarettes and drinks. Lots of beggars but not the feeding-frenzy swarms that I'd feared. Dangerously lean men pulling bored housewives around on India's last fleet of hand-drawn rickshaws - I haven't seen a Westerner on one and don't expect to. Buddhist monks videotaping their visit to the Victoria Monument. OK, so I never imagined that last one. Hammer-and-sickle signs spraypainted next to government slogans (to their credit, the Russians did give Calcutta a very impressive metro system, even if it's only one line.) Lean, feral dogs prowling the overgrown ruins of cemeteries and abandoned temples. Giggling hordes of schoolgirls in uniform pouring out of school....

Nepalupdate II I just returned from Nepal to India, and the latter country is beginning to grow on me. Like a cancer. I'm beginning to realize that if you treat India as a game where the object is to perform activities in the least efficient manner possible, it makes a lot more sense. For example, changing money or buying a train ticket: go to wicket 1, push your way past the line, spend ten minutes with the man behind the wicket trying to understand one another, get form A, copy details from passport onto form A, get sent to wicket 2, find out that even though wicket 2 is open they're not dealing with your request for another half an hour, wait twenty minutes, discover long line at wicket 2 where requests are now being dealt with, push way into line (my size advantage over the locals is extremely helpful), produce form A and passport, watch man behind wicket 2 copy details from passport and discard form A unread, give money/check to man behind wicket 2, receive form B, get s...

Nepalupdate I I have completed my trek round the Annapurna Circuit, and have picked up some new souvenirs en route; an impressive collection of blisters and a pair of seriously aching knees. While fantastic fun it turned out to be much harder work than I expected (perhaps the fact that I was walking up and down the highest mountains in the world should have been a hint.) The first day in particular was a wake-up call; first I nearly got run off a ridge by a runaway mule train, then I ended the day with a steep heartbreaker climb up a ridge which resulted in blisters on both heels. Fortunately they only bother me when going uphill, which I did for the next nine days. It is amazing how much the altitude changes things. Started off amid rice paddies and palm trees, then climbed up through cornfields and apple orchards, then to rocky scrubland and desert, up up up and more up. It's easy to see how Buddhism took root here; when you've climbed 200m up and then look around and rea...

Indiaupdate I Less than a week here and the First World already seems like a distant memory. Particularly here in Varanasi, the city of Shiva, which feels about three times older than God - there isn't a building that isn't crumbling, and it's not so much a city as a honeycomb of narrow, twisting cobblestoned streets stuffed full of stalls, cows, and people. A bit like a Moroccan medina. Except for the cows. I already hardly notice them any more. In a little while I guess they'll be all but invisible to me like they seem to be to everyone else. The Ganges is in flood, so you can't walk along the riverside ghats (fleets of steps) to watch the bathing, the cremations, etc. Navigation through the streets is necessary (well, "navigation" isn't really the right word, since you lose all sense of direction in about thirty seconds. "Random walk" is probably a better phrase.) Apparently if you die in Varanasi, your body is washed in the Ganges, and y...

The "what a long strange trip it's been" entry. (And I'm not even a Grateful Dead fan.) Sarah McLachlan on the in-flight: cool. I feel...I don't know _what_ I feel. Other than turbulence (several kinds, he echoed). Flattened affect. Maybe Africa forces serenity as a survival mechanism. I have no dramatic philosophical conclusions to draw from the last six months. I'd hate to cheapen them to a few scrawled lines even if I could. Let's just say: I'm more who I want to be than I was when I began. Suppose I should fill in the details of the last few days. They will be sparse: a kind of cumulative literary exhaustion has set in. And I'm tired, too. A long, lazy nothing day in Windhoek, that was Thursday the 3rd. Friday, off to Cape Town, a gleaming blue luxury double-decker Intercape bus through raw wild Namibia. Chilled and sleep-stupid at the border crossing. Woke to green plains and jagged escarpments of South Africa. Shane & Maggie got on at Kee...

OK, so I'm actually in the Sardinia Cafe, but was just in the GG, and it seems like a cooler byline. Sipping Tafel beer. Good stuff. Ex-German colonies have their good points. Beers I recall: San Miguel, Flag, Castel, Brakina, Bock Solibra, Star, Export 33, Mutzig, King, Castle, Zambezi, Bohlinger's, Windhoek, Tafel, Lion. Much to report: >3000 km through Namibia's desert wastelands in the last week. Last Tuesday, long ride from Vic Falls. Rode w/ Jason & Liz & 3 local hitchers. Spent all of 2 hours in Botswana: passed through Chobe National Park and saw hordes of elephants. Then through the fairly lush, river-striped Caprivi Strip, parallelling the Angola border. Trouble struck 20K out of Divundu when the combie (VW van) developed a massive oil leak. Got a tow from a 16-wheeler(!) to town, and when the problem proved unquickfixable, a further 200K to Rundu, where we ate a fantastic meal and crashed in a tent outside the roadside gas station/supermarket/takeaway/...

Zambia: been there, done that. In one day no less. Here in the adrenaline-cum-tacky-tourism capital of Africa, I make preparations to leave. On Wed. 19th, had dinner with George & Amalia and went thru old pictures & brief family tree in old family Bible: found both, surprisingly, fascinating. Hopped on night train and plans for an early night were torpedoed by a many-beer drinking session w/Jim the world-weary Aussie & Tom the flamboyantly-gay fellow-countryman. Woke, somewhat hung over, to a lazy day in Bulawayo: saw a movie (US MARSHALS), wrote postcards, ate venison pie, drank real coffee, visited the railway museum. Night train to Vic Falls, where plans for an early night were torpedoed by a many-beer drinking session w/Sebastian the Brit and Mike the Dutchman. Woke, came to Hitch Haven - here - and dropped stuff, headed out to town and promptly booked a bungee jump. A nervous hour later, was on the Zambezi Bridge, looking down spectacular Batoka Gorge, attached to a gi...

Waiting for the forex teller, maiming time. Ack. Thpbbt. I've really let this journal slip. Fortunately, it's been a fairly memorable ten days. Fade out fade in: a Harare cybercafe, checking mail, waiting on long delays. Changed money at Manica Travel, the Amex reps, instead of Barclays. Old Rhodesian society, as recently witnessed, is...strange. Rachael's comment about the seaweed tossed up by the highest wave is fitting. A mixture of 18th century aristocracy (estates, servants, rigid class structure), 19th century colonialism (surprise) (hunting trophies, tales of wild travel, "natives" comments) and 20th century angst (they are the last of a dying breed, their world is slipping away, and they know it). Decorative tusks and an elephant-foot stool. Tales of Mozambican motorcycles towing bicycles and of the arms dealer next door. High rollers at the Leopard Rock Casino. A ride on a berry-towing tractor. Vast hardwood stands and lush green hills. Overgrown stairs, ...