The Last (Travel) Post

As the more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed, I haven’t updated my travel ‘blog for a few weeks now. Well, the sad fact is that my travels are now over. On 6th August, Rosie and I flew back to a rainy Heathrow, and found ourselves in a country preoccupied with the misfortunes of Jordan and Peter André, the fate of a dying Libyan prisoner and the career of Stephen Fry (he seems to be everywhere at the moment).

I had planned to write some sort of round-up of our trip, or to tell you about all of the things that I’ve learned since last September. But somehow that doesn’t really feel appropriate.

So, instead, I’ll leave you with a photo of Rosie feeding a hungry heffalump, and direct those of you who are interested in film, cinema and /or the movies towards my new ‘blog at www.matineeidle.com.

Thanks for reading.

McLeod Ganj

 

Prayer wheels at the Tsug Lakhang Temple

It was getting on for quarter past two, but at the bus stand in McLeod Ganj everything had ground to a halt. A dozen or so local travellers stood around the ticket office, waiting patiently for it to re-open. We joined them, doing our best to find the back of the queue then, realising that there was no queue, slotting ourselves into the crowd as best we could.

The ticket office was closed. No sign had been put up and no blinds had been drawn, but still, there was no doubt about it: the ticket office was definitely closed. On a hard wooden table behind the counter, in full view of the waiting customers, lay the sleeping figure of the ticket wallah. His features were strangely peaceful, the only sign of movement being the occasional twitch of his moustache. Although well over fifty, his hair was bright henna red, in stark contrast to the muted greys and browns of his tiny workplace.             

Three Days in Delhi

 

Jama Masjid

Day One

“In India, everything is difficult,” says Rosie, who’s been here before. I have to admit that at first I don’t believe her. After all, I’ve survived Bangkok and I’ve survived Hanoi: how much more ‘difficult’ could Delhi be? 

By the time we leave the airport at 6 AM it’s already warm. At our taxi driver’s request, we wind down all the windows in his little car as he pulls away into the early morning traffic. As we enter Delhi the roads gradually become narrower and more chaotic. With a little honk here and a little honk there, we weave our way among rickshaws, bicycles, pedestrians, scavenging cows and tatty-looking dogs, sometimes with just an inch or two of clearance. 

The Angkor Temples and Battambang

Bayon Temple, Angkor Thom

How many pigs can you get on the back of a motorcycle? The answer, it seems, is three. At least, that’s the largest number of porkers that we saw being given a spin around the back roads of Cambodia. Recently slaughtered and stacked neatly behind the driver, their legs swayed loosely each time the vehicle went around a corner, giving the alarming impression that at any moment they might come wriggling and squealing back to life.

And it’s not just pigs either. The Cambodians, perhaps even more than the Vietnamese, love their motorbikes and use them to transport everything from sacks of rice to huge bunches of bananas to families of five. As we bussed, boated and cycled our way around the country we could only shake our heads in wonder each time one of these two-wheeled loads went past, and keep our fingers crossed that it wouldn’t tip over at the next corner. (It never did.)

Phnom Penh

Now who would live in a house like this? The King of mother-lovin' Cambodia, that's who.

One of the first things that we see in Phnom Penh, as we wander along the banks of the Tonlé Sap River, is a young boy catching sparrows. With a snare attached to a long fishing pole he stalks them through the scrubby undergrowth, just a stone’s throw from the Royal Palace. Plucking them deftly one-by-one from the ground, he imprisons them in a cage with dozens of fellow feathered friends.

At first I assume that this must be for food. There’s not much meat on a sparrow, but there do seem to be plenty of desperately poor people in Phnom Penh. But then I start to have doubts: surely that fishing pole could be put to better use in the wide, muddy river that runs through the heart of the capital?

Hué to Ho Chi Minh City

The walls of the citadel in Hué

 

In Hoi An we ate ‘white roses’ – tiny shrimp fried in thin rice paper parcels. In Saigon we had spring rolls, greasy and spicy and still-hot from the pan. In Hué a speciality was bahn xio – shrimp, beansprouts and shredded pork wrapped in a crispy, crèpe-like pancake, while in Hanoi, we ate pho bo – a spicy soup of beef and noodles – almost every day, while steering well clear of Dog Meat Alley.

Vietnamese food is like that. As you travel from town to town you find that each place has its own repertoire of signature dishes, all made with ingredients fresh from the local market.

Hanoi

Hanoi traffic

Over the last three weeks, Rosie and I have spent a lot of time in Vietnamese places beginning with the letter ‘h’: Halong Bay, Hué, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh City. But for us, Vietnam began with The Big H – the capital city Hanoi, where we landed on 28^th May.

The first thing we had to learn in Hanoi, as a matter of some urgency, was how to cross the road. ‘Mirror, signal, position, manoeuvre’; that’s what I remember from my driving lessons all those years ago. Well, in Vietnam – and in Hanoi in particular – things are slightly different. The advice given to motorists here seems to be something like: ‘honk, honk, honk, manoeuvre, then honk again, just to be on the safe side’.

There’s roughly one scooter per person in Hanoi, and at rush hour (and at other times of day for that matter) the traffic rattles along in a seemingly never-ending, chaotic stream, with scant regard for pedestrian crossings, traffic lights or any of the other niceties of Western motoring.

Broome to Perth

'The staircase to the moon', in Broome

There’s roadkill, and then there’s roadkill. Driving through Australia, Rosie and I had become used to the sight of kangaroos strewn along the roadside in various states of decomposition, but it wasn’t until we arrived in Western Australia that we saw our first roadkill cow.

Futile zig-zagging black tyre tracks led to her; a snow-white two-tonne heiffer lying docile on the verge, her stiff legs skyward. As we headed south along the Great Northern Highway, things only got worse. Every few kilometres there would be a new bovine mess, sometimes fresh and bloody and keen, and at others nothing more than bleached bones and a sun-tanned hide. At one point we had to steer around a three cow pile-up. It wasn’t pretty, I can tell you.

Coober Pedy, Sydney, The Blue Mountains and Nimbin

Somewhere over the rainbow... The mythical Land of Oz.

“I’ve been everywhere, man / I’ve been everywhere.” So sings Johnny Cash in his 1960s hit single I’ve Been Everywhere, before going on to give a list of place names that have, erm, nothing to do with the theme of this article.

But you get the general idea: since my last post, I’ve been all over the proverbial shop in the mythical land of Oz. Here’s a little summary of some of the places I’ve been and the lessons I’ve learned:

Simply Red – The Australian Centre

The Outback, yesterday

What’s big and red and covered in flies? Well, besides Sarah Fergusson the answer is of course the central Australian Outback, to which Rosie and I repaired this week after five months of living and working in Melbourne.

We first flew to Alice Springs, where we hired a gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive vehicle for a trip across the red heart of the continent. From Alice we headed west along sealed roads before, in true Fast Show style, going off-road and following the 200-odd kilometres of the Mereenie Loop track to King’s Canyon.