We’re currently in Drake Passage which, although sounds like something from a Carry On film, is actually a narrow stretch of water separating South America with Antarctica. We’d all heard terrible stories about this stretch of water as it can either be as calm as a lake (Drake Lake) or really stormy (Drake Shake). At the moment it’s not too bad, hardly lake like but could be a lot, lot worse.
We’re on our way home from having spent five days around the south Shetlands and the Antarctica Peninsula and those five days have been incredible. After dinner each night Woody gives a little summary of what we’ve been up to during the day and his short talks are usually littered with the word ‘stunning’, people started criticising his overuse of the word, but it’s difficult to sum the place up any other way. It is just breathtaking.
Our first day of officially being in Antarctica was when we reached Point Wild at Elephant Island. We took the zodiacs out for a cruise around the turbulent waters there and saw a monument to Commander Pilato Pardo of the Chilean navy who, in 1915, rescued 22 members of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition that were stranded there for 135 days living in upturned boats. I just can’t imagine what they went through as there seemed to be no visible place to land and the wind was a howling gale for us. They we there in the depths of the Antarctic winter so the ice would have been much thicker and the temperatures much lower. Our hands, feet and faces were numb from the cold after just an hour out in the zodiacs and we are here in the summer. This was also our first experience of riding the zodiacs through brash ice and skirting past glaciers and it was a brilliant feeling. The fur seals and chinstrap penguins looked at us like we were mad and as we got covered in icy, salty sea-spray I was inclined to agree with them. Apparently, we heard a few days later, one of the elderly women on another zodiac had a big panic attack out there as she was absolutely petrified of falling in the sea. I’m glad I wasn’t with her at the time because it was worrying enough but I did feel sorry for her.
The following day we headed off to Half Moon island, so called because of its crescent shape. We took a walk with Annie to a high point on the island while watching out for skuas that quite often attack walkers if they get too close to their nests. It was only when I saw how big they were that the threat seemed more serious than I’d first imagined. They are huge birds with very sharp, strong beaks and I was regretting not taking a hat out with me that day as Annie had previously mentioned that they can quite easily take a chunk of head with them if they choose to. This is the place that I also saw my first Weddell seal and managed to get a nice picture of it for the Weddell’s back home. We walked back to the boat the other way round a big hill in the middle of the island and then took a look at the chinstrap penguin colony. There were very impressive views from this island and the occasional thunderous noise where a big lump of ice had ‘calved’ from one of the glaciers to form a new iceberg. The trouble is that it’s quite hard to see this happening as the sound reaches you a few seconds after it has actually cracked off so you can often only see the ripples or waves in the water.
That afternoon, after lunch, we headed round to Deception Island which is actually a huge caldera created by a massive volcano eruption some time in Antarctica’s distant past. Many of us were on the bridge of the ship as the Captain manoeuvred us through the tricky 230m wide opening into the mouth of the caldera. Many ships have met a sticky end in this entrance as there are some spiteful rocks just 2.5m below the surface of the water on the port side. There was a brilliant air of tension in the bridge but once we were in we were all amazed at the sheer size of the space. This volcano is not extinct either and there have been recent minor eruptions and seismic activity so in theory it could have gone off at any time during our visit. The fact that you’re reading this though means that it didn’t. Obviously. We were told that there are a series of hot springs under the water in this secluded bay and that there are not many animals around as they can’t feed on the ‘cooked’ sea-life. A swim in the warm waters was recommended and many of us had our trunks and swimming costumes on underneath our waterproofs when we finally got to go on land. However, what they didn’t tell us was that the water was only about 1.5 degrees warmer than the rest of the Antarctic so was actually freezing cold! It didn’t deter some people though, mainly the younger people in the group who, I guess, had something to prove to each other. They didn’t stay in for long and dashed in and out while bravely shouting and egging each other on. That was one experience that I didn’t mind missing out on. At one end of this island is a big gap in the wall of rocks called Neptune’s Window and from here we got our first really clear view of the Antarctic Peninsular – the bit that sticks out from Earth’s most southern continent. We were really excited at that point and couldn’t wait to set foot on it.
Another evening of over-eating in the dining hall passed and we woke to the sight of Charlotte bay where we were taken out in the zodiacs for a short cruise to look at the icebergs. Many of them were immense and we felt dwarfed by them as we got closer to them and could see how much bigger they are under the water. Depending on the density of the ice, they generally only show a tenth of their mass above the water line and the remaining nine tenths is carved into the most beautiful blue crystalline shapes by the movement of the water around them and bubbles escaping from the ice. We also saw pancake ice forming on the surface of the water where small patches of ice are pushed together by the movement of wind and water to form small circular patches of slushy ice. These would eventually freeze together to make pack ice. In the afternoon we were hoping to have our very first landing on the peninsular so that we could truly say that we’d set foot on the continent of Antarctica. However, it wasn’t to be. The guides scouted the landing site but due to the thick ice it was impossible to land. We had to content ourselves with touching the rock at Spigot Point and Rich took it one step further and poked a wellied foot out of the zodiac so that he could say that he set foot on land. I don’t think it really counted but he was happy that he did it. Rather than exploring the land, we cruised around Orne Harbour in the zodiacs and explored more icebergs. We also got some good sightings of a couple of humpbacks which was a real treat. We couldn’t see them too well as they were well in the distance but we saw lots of spouting and could hear them well enough.
On our third day in Antarctica we took a trip to Port Lockroy which is one of the biggest tourist sites in the area, mainly due to the well stocked souvenir shop and fascinating museum. The museum is crammed full of items that show the history of the place and is manned during the summer by 3-4 people. There’s no heat or electricity so it must be a pretty hard life there, though they keep busy by running the shop and the post-office and counting the penguins in the colony that shares their living space. We were the last ship to visit for the season as they were packing up for the winter so they hitched a ride with us and we’ll be taking them to Ushuaia. Just next to this island is Jougla Point where there is a huge colony of gentoo penguins. Here I got a little bit annoyed with one of the guides, Axel the German, as he shouted across to me to make sure that I steer clear of the penguin chicks and that I was too close. He was hollering all this and making me feel a quite embarrassed just after I’d spent five minutes or so taking pictures of him holding his hands out to some other chicks and getting them to peck his fingers or let him stroke them. Bloody hypocrite. I laughed to myself later when I heard that one of the woman in the group who’d also got pictures of him doing it had shown it to the senior group leader who in turn had given Axel a bollocking for interfering with the penguins.
When we left Port Lockroy we sailed up the Neumayer Channel which was just stunning. It was a narrow channel enclosed in high, snow covered mountains. Large icebergs and bands of smaller ice chunks floated alongside the ship in the inky black water and looked fantastic. A small pod of Orcas swam alongside the boat, keeping a respectable distance and this was a really rare thing according to Kirsten, our animal expert. Despite the freezing wind on the upper exposed decks, the place was packed with people taking in the view and snapping away on their cameras. It was only spoilt slightly by one of the group that constantly talks into his ancient video camera and gives commentary to everything he sees. He’s a nice enough bloke but a bit of a geek making him the source of amusement to quite a few people on this ship. Last night there was a bit of a party atmosphere on the boat and some of the young clique decided it would be a good idea to stamp Simon’s face with the ship’s ink stamp so he was walking around the deck with green smudged pictures of the company logo all over his cheeks. He must have rubbed his face raw trying to get them off. Poor sod.
Our day was rounded off with a barbecue on deck which was a bit surreal. There we were tucking into sausages, ribs, steaks and burgers while decked out in as many layers as we could put on and enjoying the amazing backdrop of snowy mountains and icebergs floating by. Someone bought back a huge chunk of glacier ice to put in drinks which was a great touch.
Our final day in Antarctica turned out to be the one that I will remember most, not through any planning or design but by pure, old fashioned luck. We finally got to land on the Antarctic peninsular at Neko Harbour and after everything that we’d seen so far it was a relief to finally complete the journey. I really hate the overuse of the word journey as it seems that every reality TV program has some sort of journey or other that the punters are taking. However, this really felt like the climax of a great adventure. We’d all been working up to it for so long and having booked the trip almost 18 months ago it was nice to finally step foot in such a wonderful place. We walked around a fairly large gentoo colony and climbed up a steep hill covered in thick, compacted snow and ice. It was a bit precarious, but safe enough despite clambering along in treadless wellies. Once at the top we had the most fascinating view of Neko Harbour and could see for miles. The sun was shining on a group on mountains far in the distance and against the dark grey sky it looked stunning. We had a great view of several glaciers and one of them looked like it was teetering on the brink of calving. Huge fissures marked the edges and the crevasses were the deepest, most fantastic blue colour I’ve ever seen. Having spent a while on top of the hill, we clambered down, trying not to slip on the steep, icy path and headed to the zodiacs for a quick berg cruise before joining the boat again.
In the afternoon we sailed to paradise harbour which, on the face of it, didn’t look any more like paradise than any of the other beautiful places that we’d seen. We sailed across to the landing point in the zodiacs again and was treated to a proper landing gangway as there was an Argentinean science base there. Gentoos wandered around the place and it dawned on me that this was to be our last landing on this fantastic continent. Despite the stench of the penguins, I’m really going to miss them and their funny little ways. We walked to the top of another hill for yet more fantastic views and a final few pictures. On the way down Mary, a Scottish ex-head teacher that we’ve become friendly with, was obviously overcome with excitement as she laid on her back and tried sliding down the hill like an excited kid in her first snow. It was great to watch a normally sensible lady laugh like a drain.
On the way back to the ship, we took one last cruise around the harbour in a zodiac with Kirsten, taking in more fantastic views of the glaciers and icebergs. Shortly into the cruise we heard the sound of whales blowing so Kirsten steered us towards it. Just then we saw two Minke whales in the near distance. We stopped the engine and drifted for a little bit and seconds later one of the whales came right alongside our boat. We were all absolutely taken aback by this fantastic giant and were all shrieking with joy. As it swam round, it blew out a big blast of air from it’s breathing hole and we saw the huge plume of bubble rise to the surface of the crystal clear water. This creature was so close we could see the barnacles around its mouth and head. It then surfaced and blew again before disappearing under the calm water. There were around eight of us on that little zodiac and we were all grinning from ear to ear. I could hardly talk because of the encounter and it was one of those moments in your life when you feel more alive than you ever have done before. The second minke swam under the zodiac to join the other. After regaining our composure, we started heading for one of the huge glaciers to take a look and were distracted again by a crab eater seal. Kirsten was hugely excited as she had never seen one being so interactive before in over ten years of research. This seal was following our zodiac, popping his head out of the water and studying us and at one point even tried climbing into the boat with us. This is completely unheard of. Crab-eater seals are notoriously shy usually and there’s very little research carried out on them because they usually clear off before you can even get close to them. We finally set off to look at the glacier again and in the distance we heard one of the glaciers breaking off huge chunks of ice into the water. It sounded like a loud thunder clap but this time we managed to see the ice actually falling off rather than just hearing the sound and seeing nothing. At this point, one of the other passengers on the boat saw a huge jellyfish floating by and passing under the boat. It was massive, about the size of a big beach ball and was a brilliant orange colour with long tentacles and a what looked like a Spanish flamenco dancer’s skirt fluttering around underneath it. Beautiful.
We finally got to look at the glacier before getting a call over the radio telling us to head back to the ship. I was pretty much in a daze for the next few hours after seeing the whale and it has fulfilled one of my biggest lifetime ambitions. Later on, there was a charity auction in the bar where money was being raised for a ‘Save The Albatross’ campaign which is something that one of the guides supports. To get the bids flowing they were dishing out free champagne which was a very welcome end to an absolutely fantastic day.
The weather turned a little last night and the sea got a lot rougher on the start of our journey back to Ushuaia. I didn’t sleep very well at all but I think much of that was because of the adrenaline still running through my veins. I was a very happy man as I drifted in and out of my broken slumber.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Day 237 – 59°23’ S, 050°12’ W, South Atlantic
We eventually reached South Georgia and the temperature got noticeably colder. I’m glad I packed the thermal undies because they were essential on our excursions to land. The weather had changed quite a bit too and on reaching Possession Bay the conditions weren’t right for a landing. Instead, we headed around to Salisbury Plain in The Bay of Isles just on the North of the island. What a sight! We’d seen a few King Penguins at The Falklands, maybe six or seven, but the numbers here were astronomical. It was absolutely incredible to see around 100,000 thousand of them all at varying stages of maturity. Axel, our German bird expert, dubbed the young chicks ‘fluffies’ due to them being decked out in puffed up brown feather coats. They looked nothing like their adult parents and early explorers thought they were an entirely different species. As we moved amongst the surging penguin crowds we saw adorable displays of affection between mating couples, the male performing what’s known as his ‘advertising walk’; a sort of John Travolta swagger with surreptitious glances back to see if his ‘bird’ was following him and therefore interested. If she was attracted to him they would then start preening each other before he started getting serious and stroking her head with his beak. Eventually, if he’d wooed her enough, she would lay down looking all vulnerable yet submissive and he would jump on top of her while the going was good. Some people got pictures of this ‘penguin porn’ and happily shared it around amongst the other passengers.
The following day we had moved down to Fortuna Bay and were woken up early to the most beautiful sunrise. From the boat we looked at the view of the snow capped mountains bathed in the vivid orange glow of the rising sun and I was mesmerised. I’d woken up really grumpy that morning for some reason but that black mood soon disappeared when I saw what was waiting for us on land. We zipped across the bay in the Zodiacs and were soon on the beach to meet the welcoming committee of baby fur seals and king penguins. The fur seals were ridiculously cute and would come up to us practising being fierce but as soon as you looked at them and took a step towards them, their bravado disappeared and they retreated with a whimper. I was so tempted to steal one and put it in my rucksack but I think storing it in my cabin may have been a bit of a problem. Walking along the beach was a real joy as the sun was just beginning to appear over the mountain top as day broke and the rich, warm light flooding the place made it magical. I was in a world of my own wandering along the beach, and spent much of it walking alone and taking endless pictures of seal cubs being adorable and king penguins looking at me curiously. Despite all this beauty and apparent calm, I was reminded just how hostile this environment can be when I came across the skull of a seal pup picked clean by the scavenging birds. Further along, there were carcases of more dead seals and the occasional penguin husk. A really sad image was of a seal pup wandering up to one of the baggy dead skins and sniffing at it the way that it would greet another of its colony. It pondered for a moment before heading off to the sea for an early morning swim.
I carried on walking to the end of the beach where the others had starting congregating and got a good view of Fortuna Glacier that dominated the west side of the bay. This is where Shackelton had descended before heading to Stromness on the other side of the saddle. This was a nice place to just sit down and enjoy watching the king penguins. Again, being so inquisitive, it wasn’t long before they starting egging each other on to come and explore me and my camera. They are very considerate as this makes it easy to take some lovely photographs of them and I’ve got some fantastic shots. It helps also that the light that morning was perfect.
The afternoon was a completely different matter. After lunch, the weather took a real turn as it has a habit of doing in this part of the world. We took the zodiacs to Grytviken which is an old whaling station that started business in 1904, five weeks after Larsen first landed there. It was chosen because of it’s calm location and is effectively a bay within a bay. The first thing we did was make a beeline for Shackelton’s grave where we gathered to make a toast to the great explorer. This was Woody’s idea, our tour leader, who is a bit of a Shackleton freak. The grave is set within a small whaler’s graveyard and it was his wife’s decision to have him buried in the place that he loved. We lifted our plastic cups, half full of flat Guinness, and toasted his memory during which some of the group posed for photos while draping themselves over his headstone, Guinness in hand. Very respectful, I must say. This was all carried out to the grunting and farting chorus of a small group of female elephant seals that had wiggled their way up onto the tussac grass.
The group was then given a choice of three things to do, we could either go for a walk to Brown Hill with Annie, do a photographic walk with John or just wander around exploring the old whaling station. I decided to go for John’s photographic tour of the place which turned out to be a complete washout because as soon as I got my camera out, the heaven’s opened and we were engulfed in a torrential downpour. I took refuge in the whaler’s church and took the opportunity to give the bell a ring. Nothing happened on my first tug of the rope, so I gave a slightly harder tug. Still nothing. On my third go I pulled with all my might and I thought the bell was going to be wrenched from the rafters! It clanged like there was an earthquake and I literally ducked at the thought it coming crashing down from the belfry. I slipped out of the church hoping that nobody had seen me and I think I got away with it. It would have been terrible if I’d brought the roof crashing in as it’s been standing there since 1913!
I spent the rest of my time at Grytviken wandering around the remains of the whaling station and my mood sank at the thought of the wholesale destruction of so many whales there. This was murder on an industrial scale and though I realise that attitudes were very different in those days I still found it difficult to comprehend just what a slaughter it must have been. The water in the bay ran red at the time and it’s said that the smell of whale oil still lingers in the rusting old vats that remain there. Huge cookers that rendered down the flensed blubber into oil are still pretty much intact and though the whole site is decaying into rust it is still scary to see the huge scale of the operation. Even a few of the old whaling ships remain, partially submerged and hauled up onto the banks of the bay, ironically much like their quarry from the past.
The museum was an interesting little place, full of more Shackelton memorabilia as well as various stuffed birds including a wandering albatross, some moulted seal fur and skin, the pelt of a king penguin and a four month old blue whale foetus in a jar. The gift shop didn’t have any fridge magnets so I was most disappointed that I won’t have a souvenir from there.
While I was waiting for Rich to come back from his walk with Annie to Brown Hill, I had a walk around the bay towards King Edward Point. I didn’t get all the way as it was still pelting with rain but I did see the most fantastic rainbow stretching right across the bay. It was the first time that I had seen both ends of it within my field of vision, but alas no crock of gold. Typically, the sun started to come out once we were aboard the zodiac and heading toward the ship again.
We spent the following morning at Gold Harbour and the weather was spectacularly bad. We were drenched before even getting out of the zodiacs and I didn’t even bother getting my camera out of its bag. There were more adult fur seals there and even a few big bulls. We made sure that we definitely stayed out of their way as they were very aggressive. We were warned not to get too close to them by Kirsten who suggested that if we were bitten we would be ‘leaking puss for the next three weeks’. Not a very attractive prospect so we took her advice and gave them a very wide berth. This was the first time that we’d seen male elephant seals, too and they are immense. We’d seen pictures of them in some of the presentations but until you see one up close you have absolutely no idea of their size. Kirsten reminded us that they were only adolescents and once they reached maturity they would be almost twice the length and about five times the weight. These things can reach up 3.5 tonnes and grow to 5 metres long which is about 44 times my weight and 2.5 times longer than I am tall. Truly they are giants and they have an smell to match their weight; they stink of rotting kelp and fermenting gasses which they expel noisily from both ends of their bodies. They are certainly not attractive, and even the females don’t choose them on their looks, they go by which one has the best part of the beach.
The penguins and baby seals stole the show again though, purely because they are just so amusing to watch. Needless to say, due to the very appalling weather, we didn’t stay long on that particular excursion. We queued to take the next available zodiac to the ship while the crew battled with the waves and seal cubs nipping at their boots. It took more than 24 hours to dry out my waterproofs after that little trip.
We’ve now been sailing for two days solid as we make our way to Antarctica proper. We’ve seen so much on this trip already and even as we trundle along the south Atlantic sea, battered by waves and fierce howling, frozen winds we are still seeing hundreds of birds, miles from land as well as groups of whales making their presence known by the occasional blow of air in the distance. The talks continue in the presentations rooms and our days are pretty full of things to do between the constant bouts of eating. Some people have been pretty sea sick due to the rough weather, but my pills are doing their job well and I’ve not succumbed to the evils of the weather. Mind you, each time the ship slams into a wave I keep thinking that we’ve hit one of the numerous ice bergs that we’ve seen in the distance. My symptoms are more of anxiety and an over active imagination than any reflexive stomach action. Thankfully.
The following day we had moved down to Fortuna Bay and were woken up early to the most beautiful sunrise. From the boat we looked at the view of the snow capped mountains bathed in the vivid orange glow of the rising sun and I was mesmerised. I’d woken up really grumpy that morning for some reason but that black mood soon disappeared when I saw what was waiting for us on land. We zipped across the bay in the Zodiacs and were soon on the beach to meet the welcoming committee of baby fur seals and king penguins. The fur seals were ridiculously cute and would come up to us practising being fierce but as soon as you looked at them and took a step towards them, their bravado disappeared and they retreated with a whimper. I was so tempted to steal one and put it in my rucksack but I think storing it in my cabin may have been a bit of a problem. Walking along the beach was a real joy as the sun was just beginning to appear over the mountain top as day broke and the rich, warm light flooding the place made it magical. I was in a world of my own wandering along the beach, and spent much of it walking alone and taking endless pictures of seal cubs being adorable and king penguins looking at me curiously. Despite all this beauty and apparent calm, I was reminded just how hostile this environment can be when I came across the skull of a seal pup picked clean by the scavenging birds. Further along, there were carcases of more dead seals and the occasional penguin husk. A really sad image was of a seal pup wandering up to one of the baggy dead skins and sniffing at it the way that it would greet another of its colony. It pondered for a moment before heading off to the sea for an early morning swim.
I carried on walking to the end of the beach where the others had starting congregating and got a good view of Fortuna Glacier that dominated the west side of the bay. This is where Shackelton had descended before heading to Stromness on the other side of the saddle. This was a nice place to just sit down and enjoy watching the king penguins. Again, being so inquisitive, it wasn’t long before they starting egging each other on to come and explore me and my camera. They are very considerate as this makes it easy to take some lovely photographs of them and I’ve got some fantastic shots. It helps also that the light that morning was perfect.
The afternoon was a completely different matter. After lunch, the weather took a real turn as it has a habit of doing in this part of the world. We took the zodiacs to Grytviken which is an old whaling station that started business in 1904, five weeks after Larsen first landed there. It was chosen because of it’s calm location and is effectively a bay within a bay. The first thing we did was make a beeline for Shackelton’s grave where we gathered to make a toast to the great explorer. This was Woody’s idea, our tour leader, who is a bit of a Shackleton freak. The grave is set within a small whaler’s graveyard and it was his wife’s decision to have him buried in the place that he loved. We lifted our plastic cups, half full of flat Guinness, and toasted his memory during which some of the group posed for photos while draping themselves over his headstone, Guinness in hand. Very respectful, I must say. This was all carried out to the grunting and farting chorus of a small group of female elephant seals that had wiggled their way up onto the tussac grass.
The group was then given a choice of three things to do, we could either go for a walk to Brown Hill with Annie, do a photographic walk with John or just wander around exploring the old whaling station. I decided to go for John’s photographic tour of the place which turned out to be a complete washout because as soon as I got my camera out, the heaven’s opened and we were engulfed in a torrential downpour. I took refuge in the whaler’s church and took the opportunity to give the bell a ring. Nothing happened on my first tug of the rope, so I gave a slightly harder tug. Still nothing. On my third go I pulled with all my might and I thought the bell was going to be wrenched from the rafters! It clanged like there was an earthquake and I literally ducked at the thought it coming crashing down from the belfry. I slipped out of the church hoping that nobody had seen me and I think I got away with it. It would have been terrible if I’d brought the roof crashing in as it’s been standing there since 1913!
I spent the rest of my time at Grytviken wandering around the remains of the whaling station and my mood sank at the thought of the wholesale destruction of so many whales there. This was murder on an industrial scale and though I realise that attitudes were very different in those days I still found it difficult to comprehend just what a slaughter it must have been. The water in the bay ran red at the time and it’s said that the smell of whale oil still lingers in the rusting old vats that remain there. Huge cookers that rendered down the flensed blubber into oil are still pretty much intact and though the whole site is decaying into rust it is still scary to see the huge scale of the operation. Even a few of the old whaling ships remain, partially submerged and hauled up onto the banks of the bay, ironically much like their quarry from the past.
The museum was an interesting little place, full of more Shackelton memorabilia as well as various stuffed birds including a wandering albatross, some moulted seal fur and skin, the pelt of a king penguin and a four month old blue whale foetus in a jar. The gift shop didn’t have any fridge magnets so I was most disappointed that I won’t have a souvenir from there.
While I was waiting for Rich to come back from his walk with Annie to Brown Hill, I had a walk around the bay towards King Edward Point. I didn’t get all the way as it was still pelting with rain but I did see the most fantastic rainbow stretching right across the bay. It was the first time that I had seen both ends of it within my field of vision, but alas no crock of gold. Typically, the sun started to come out once we were aboard the zodiac and heading toward the ship again.
We spent the following morning at Gold Harbour and the weather was spectacularly bad. We were drenched before even getting out of the zodiacs and I didn’t even bother getting my camera out of its bag. There were more adult fur seals there and even a few big bulls. We made sure that we definitely stayed out of their way as they were very aggressive. We were warned not to get too close to them by Kirsten who suggested that if we were bitten we would be ‘leaking puss for the next three weeks’. Not a very attractive prospect so we took her advice and gave them a very wide berth. This was the first time that we’d seen male elephant seals, too and they are immense. We’d seen pictures of them in some of the presentations but until you see one up close you have absolutely no idea of their size. Kirsten reminded us that they were only adolescents and once they reached maturity they would be almost twice the length and about five times the weight. These things can reach up 3.5 tonnes and grow to 5 metres long which is about 44 times my weight and 2.5 times longer than I am tall. Truly they are giants and they have an smell to match their weight; they stink of rotting kelp and fermenting gasses which they expel noisily from both ends of their bodies. They are certainly not attractive, and even the females don’t choose them on their looks, they go by which one has the best part of the beach.
The penguins and baby seals stole the show again though, purely because they are just so amusing to watch. Needless to say, due to the very appalling weather, we didn’t stay long on that particular excursion. We queued to take the next available zodiac to the ship while the crew battled with the waves and seal cubs nipping at their boots. It took more than 24 hours to dry out my waterproofs after that little trip.
We’ve now been sailing for two days solid as we make our way to Antarctica proper. We’ve seen so much on this trip already and even as we trundle along the south Atlantic sea, battered by waves and fierce howling, frozen winds we are still seeing hundreds of birds, miles from land as well as groups of whales making their presence known by the occasional blow of air in the distance. The talks continue in the presentations rooms and our days are pretty full of things to do between the constant bouts of eating. Some people have been pretty sea sick due to the rough weather, but my pills are doing their job well and I’ve not succumbed to the evils of the weather. Mind you, each time the ship slams into a wave I keep thinking that we’ve hit one of the numerous ice bergs that we’ve seen in the distance. My symptoms are more of anxiety and an over active imagination than any reflexive stomach action. Thankfully.
Day 232 – 53°20’ S, 42°53’ W, South Atlantic
This is our sixth day on the ship now and we’re settling into a nice little routine. Breakfast is generally at 07:30, followed by lunch at 12:30, afternoon tea with cakes and biscuits at 16:00, happy hour in the bar with snacks at 18:30 and dinner at 19:30. This is in addition to pre-breakfast coffee and tea with pastries at 06:30 and constant hot beverages throughout the day. As if that wasn’t enough, lunch is a three course feast and dinner is four or five courses depending on whether they put the cheese out or not. My trousers now feel like they’ve all shrunk and I’m having to loosen my belt by a new hole every few days. It’s terrible; I’m going to be enormous by the end of the trip and I’m frightened that if I breathe out a little too quickly I’m going to take someone’s eye out with an errant button from my straining waistband. I tried skipping lunch yesterday but inevitably I felt starving by 14:00 as my stomach was missing its [almost] hourly feed.
There are some interesting characters on the boat. On the first day, Rich and I were talking to a couple from Sevenoaks who were telling us about their previous trip to Easter Island. As Rich had been there in 2004 he had something in common with them and starting recounting his experiences and stories that he’d heard. The woman he was speaking to, Meg, a demure and diminutive old bird suddenly snapped and told Rich how juvenile the story was and immediately dismissed it all as poppycock. We excused ourselves and left her and her grinning, mahogany coloured husband to wallow in their own middle-classness. While sharing a table with her at lunchtime yesterday, Rich had another run in with her as she blithely dismissed the impact of global warming. Fortunately, the people in the cabin next to us are more down to earth. Joe, a freelance factory designer and his stepson Chris, a writer for The Times are much more easy going but prone to leaving the connecting door to our shared bathroom locked. Rich went round there last night to ask them to unlock it and was greeted by Joe, a weathered 50-something, dressed in nothing but a pair of snug-fitting briefs. He came back quite pale.
Our first stop was one of the Flakland Islands, or more specifically Carcass Island where we saw hundreds of Magellanic Penguins all huddled around busily moulting. The millions of feathers flying around and littering the ground looked like a thin covering of snow. They get really quite grumpy during this three week period as they can’t feed or drink and their little bodies are all swollen and sore by their new crop of feathers pushing out the old ones. They look really scruffy, too. After wandering around the island and the beautiful clean, white beaches we walked across the coastline to the only settlement on there which is inhabited by Rob and Lorraine McGill and a few Chileans. We were told to expect a welcoming tea but were blown away by their hospitality. Our group, nearing a hundred people, all traipsed through their house to be greeted by a dining table literally groaning under the weight of scones, cakes and biscuits. It seems that whenever they are expecting a boat to come, all the neighbouring island’s inhabitants go into some sort of baking frenzy and send trays and trays of home-cooked goodies to the McGill’s place. It’s a nice little money earner for them but they were genuinely lovely hosts as well.
In the afternoon we went to Saunders Island and were treated to the sight of hundreds of Magellanic, Gentoo, Rockhopper Penguins, as well as Caracaras, a few King Penguins, Black-Browed Albatrosses and King Shags. It was a fabulous sight to see the little Rockhoppers perched high up on the hillside, hundreds of metres from the sea and bounding from one stony perch to another. They were like little feathered mountain goats. We walked down to the beach on the North East side of the island and sat there a while amongst the hundreds of Gentoo Penguins. We’d only been there for ten minutes before a small group of them starting walking towards us and eyed us with more curiosity than we were paying them. It was a fantastic feeling to have them come so close without any fear and the more we pretended to ignore them, the bolder they got. They really are spectacular little creatures.
The next day we landed at Stanley which was an almost surreal experience after seeing so much of it on the TV back in 1982 during The Falklands War. There’s a very touching museum with all the usual maritime memorabilia but also a collection of photos taken by some of the locals at the actual time of the invasion. The images look as if they were taken from someone’s bedroom, peeking through the net curtains which gives the whole thing a very dark and anxious feeling. Throughout the town there are little references and monuments to the conflict and street names such as Thatcher Drive and H Jones Road serve as stark reminders to that time. The whole place exudes a feeling of gratitude towards to UK and its troops and the warm welcome provided by the people there reinforces it further.
Shortly after first arriving at Stanley we were bussed out to Gypsy Cove which is an area of coastline that’s pretty well protected now due to the large number of fenced off areas that potentially contain mines left over from the war. Of course, in fencing off those areas they are now havens for wildlife and we saw dozens of penguins enjoying the seclusion of the long white expanses of beach. Dolphins played in the kelp that drifts lazily around the shallow waters and meadow-larks competed with cormorants to find the sunniest spot. All very idyllic, I just hope the penguins don’t get heavy enough to set off a landmine though, otherwise the explosion of feathers and flippers is sure to frighten off the diverse fauna enjoying their unbroken solitude.
Stanley is a beautiful little place, and has often been described as a distillation of all things English. I can see why. Red telephone boxes still stand on the corner of the streets, little corner shops sell everything from tea-towels to pots of jam made from the local diddle-dee berries (I’m not joking) and the local airport has a daily announcement of who is flying where so there is no chance of flitting off to a neighbouring island for a discreet liaison with someone. Even the pubs serve fish and chips and chicken curry – how English could they possibly get?
We left Stanley two days ago now and have been sailing solidly since then towards South Georgia. I managed to put my back out a few days ago so I’ve been lying on the cabin floor willing the pain to go away between meals and lectures. I really thought that the sailing between places would be boring, but we’ve been thoroughly entertained by a series of talks by the staff on the ship about everything Antarctic including tube-nosed petrels, the unique odour of elephant seals and the impact that scientists are having on the environment in the area. We’ve been given very strict guidelines about the bio-security measures we need to take prior to landing on any of these islands, including sterilising our footwear and waterproofs every time we get back on the boat, hoovering our bags to remove seeds and any organic matter and brushing our clothes down with an old toilet brush to remove any traces of bird poo. However, we hear stories of how the scientists blast ice crevasses to fill them in so they can drive more easily from one place to another (thus contaminating the area with poisonous explosive residue), digging holes in the snow to use as latrines and filling boreholes with diesel fuel to stop them freezing over again. It all seems a little hypocritical to me.
We’re due to reach South Georgia by around midnight tonight. There are huge colonies of elephant seals and king penguins which I’m really quite excited about seeing – despite their rich aroma. They’re not called ‘smelly-ellies’ for nothing.
There are some interesting characters on the boat. On the first day, Rich and I were talking to a couple from Sevenoaks who were telling us about their previous trip to Easter Island. As Rich had been there in 2004 he had something in common with them and starting recounting his experiences and stories that he’d heard. The woman he was speaking to, Meg, a demure and diminutive old bird suddenly snapped and told Rich how juvenile the story was and immediately dismissed it all as poppycock. We excused ourselves and left her and her grinning, mahogany coloured husband to wallow in their own middle-classness. While sharing a table with her at lunchtime yesterday, Rich had another run in with her as she blithely dismissed the impact of global warming. Fortunately, the people in the cabin next to us are more down to earth. Joe, a freelance factory designer and his stepson Chris, a writer for The Times are much more easy going but prone to leaving the connecting door to our shared bathroom locked. Rich went round there last night to ask them to unlock it and was greeted by Joe, a weathered 50-something, dressed in nothing but a pair of snug-fitting briefs. He came back quite pale.
Our first stop was one of the Flakland Islands, or more specifically Carcass Island where we saw hundreds of Magellanic Penguins all huddled around busily moulting. The millions of feathers flying around and littering the ground looked like a thin covering of snow. They get really quite grumpy during this three week period as they can’t feed or drink and their little bodies are all swollen and sore by their new crop of feathers pushing out the old ones. They look really scruffy, too. After wandering around the island and the beautiful clean, white beaches we walked across the coastline to the only settlement on there which is inhabited by Rob and Lorraine McGill and a few Chileans. We were told to expect a welcoming tea but were blown away by their hospitality. Our group, nearing a hundred people, all traipsed through their house to be greeted by a dining table literally groaning under the weight of scones, cakes and biscuits. It seems that whenever they are expecting a boat to come, all the neighbouring island’s inhabitants go into some sort of baking frenzy and send trays and trays of home-cooked goodies to the McGill’s place. It’s a nice little money earner for them but they were genuinely lovely hosts as well.
In the afternoon we went to Saunders Island and were treated to the sight of hundreds of Magellanic, Gentoo, Rockhopper Penguins, as well as Caracaras, a few King Penguins, Black-Browed Albatrosses and King Shags. It was a fabulous sight to see the little Rockhoppers perched high up on the hillside, hundreds of metres from the sea and bounding from one stony perch to another. They were like little feathered mountain goats. We walked down to the beach on the North East side of the island and sat there a while amongst the hundreds of Gentoo Penguins. We’d only been there for ten minutes before a small group of them starting walking towards us and eyed us with more curiosity than we were paying them. It was a fantastic feeling to have them come so close without any fear and the more we pretended to ignore them, the bolder they got. They really are spectacular little creatures.
The next day we landed at Stanley which was an almost surreal experience after seeing so much of it on the TV back in 1982 during The Falklands War. There’s a very touching museum with all the usual maritime memorabilia but also a collection of photos taken by some of the locals at the actual time of the invasion. The images look as if they were taken from someone’s bedroom, peeking through the net curtains which gives the whole thing a very dark and anxious feeling. Throughout the town there are little references and monuments to the conflict and street names such as Thatcher Drive and H Jones Road serve as stark reminders to that time. The whole place exudes a feeling of gratitude towards to UK and its troops and the warm welcome provided by the people there reinforces it further.
Shortly after first arriving at Stanley we were bussed out to Gypsy Cove which is an area of coastline that’s pretty well protected now due to the large number of fenced off areas that potentially contain mines left over from the war. Of course, in fencing off those areas they are now havens for wildlife and we saw dozens of penguins enjoying the seclusion of the long white expanses of beach. Dolphins played in the kelp that drifts lazily around the shallow waters and meadow-larks competed with cormorants to find the sunniest spot. All very idyllic, I just hope the penguins don’t get heavy enough to set off a landmine though, otherwise the explosion of feathers and flippers is sure to frighten off the diverse fauna enjoying their unbroken solitude.
Stanley is a beautiful little place, and has often been described as a distillation of all things English. I can see why. Red telephone boxes still stand on the corner of the streets, little corner shops sell everything from tea-towels to pots of jam made from the local diddle-dee berries (I’m not joking) and the local airport has a daily announcement of who is flying where so there is no chance of flitting off to a neighbouring island for a discreet liaison with someone. Even the pubs serve fish and chips and chicken curry – how English could they possibly get?
We left Stanley two days ago now and have been sailing solidly since then towards South Georgia. I managed to put my back out a few days ago so I’ve been lying on the cabin floor willing the pain to go away between meals and lectures. I really thought that the sailing between places would be boring, but we’ve been thoroughly entertained by a series of talks by the staff on the ship about everything Antarctic including tube-nosed petrels, the unique odour of elephant seals and the impact that scientists are having on the environment in the area. We’ve been given very strict guidelines about the bio-security measures we need to take prior to landing on any of these islands, including sterilising our footwear and waterproofs every time we get back on the boat, hoovering our bags to remove seeds and any organic matter and brushing our clothes down with an old toilet brush to remove any traces of bird poo. However, we hear stories of how the scientists blast ice crevasses to fill them in so they can drive more easily from one place to another (thus contaminating the area with poisonous explosive residue), digging holes in the snow to use as latrines and filling boreholes with diesel fuel to stop them freezing over again. It all seems a little hypocritical to me.
We’re due to reach South Georgia by around midnight tonight. There are huge colonies of elephant seals and king penguins which I’m really quite excited about seeing – despite their rich aroma. They’re not called ‘smelly-ellies’ for nothing.
Day 227 – Ushuaia, Argentina
This entry is going to be pretty wordy I expect, given how long it’s been since I wrote the last one. We flew back from Delhi on 6 January after a fairly miserable Christmas being so far away from home and frankly more than a little tired of the difficulties that India was throwing at us.
I had mixed feelings about Delhi; on the one hand I was pleased to be back there following a brief visit in 2003 and being able to spend more time looking around and appreciating the place, and on the other I was glad that this was the last stop in India before returning home. It seems so long since we were there that my enthusiasm has waned too much to write much about it, suffice to say that we did all the usual things that are to be done in Delhi including a trip to The Red Fort, The India Gate and a day excursion down to The Taj Mahal. Now, I knew the Taj was supposed to be stunning, but I just wasn’t prepared for how amazing it really is. Despite the heavy fog hanging over the whole place, I was blown away by its beauty. In fact, in some ways the fog made it appear even more exquisitely enigmatic. I managed to get a few pictures of it but they’ll never do it justice. It’s at times like that when I realise just how incompetent a photographer I am.
The flight back home seemed to take an eternity as the thick fog blanketing Delhi was causing serious delays at the airport. I was getting worried at one point that the flight may well be cancelled but good old British Airways didn’t let us down. Once home in the icy world of Orpington the first thing I wanted to do was to have a shower but the frozen pipe put paid to that so we switched on the heating (which was thankfully still working) , only for it to defrost the pipe and flood the house while we popped down the shops for a pint of milk. What terrible timing. I was so tired I just wanted sit on the soaking wet carpet and burst into tears, perhaps wetting it a little more. However, rationality took hold and the insurance company and a local plumber were soon on the case. At least the hot water was working after all that so I could take a shower and wash the towels that we’d used for mopping up all the water from the hall, landing and stairs carpets.
The past five weeks or so have really flown by and it’s quite difficult to account for my time. However, not limiting our worldly travels to purely exotic places, we booked a week down in Cornwall and thoroughly enjoyed it. The tranquillity, the familiarity and the beauty are only three of the qualities that retain Cornwall’s firm placement in my mind as one of my favourite places in the world. The pasties are great too, particularly from the little bakery in Marazion.
Back in Orpington we were treated to beautiful scenes of snow the following week and like a kid I couldn’t wait to go out and walk in it, making every excuse I could to pop down to the shops and shuffle around in the lovely white stuff. In fact, Richard and I were squabbling with each other that one wasn’t allowed to go out into the back garden unless they told the other so as not to spoil the pristine white blanket. Pathetic I know, but there’s something quite lovely about being the first person to crunch through the snow with their Wellies on, leaving a single trail of footprints.
Home is a long way away now as we are finally in Ushuaia after more than 24 hours travelling. The flights were fairly turbulent in places which was a bit scary after the previous aircraft incidents a couple of days before. Each flight was broken into two stages too so in all there were 4 landings and 4 take-offs which added to the tension. They all went without a hitch though, as far as we knew at least. The British Airways staff were very generous with the in-flight bar and after my third little bottle of Cabernet I was fast asleep and dreaming of where we were heading. We were greeted at Ushuaia airport and whisked off to our hotel where we settled and enjoyed the late evening view for a short while before heading off to the nearest Irish pub. Who’d believe that there are actually two of these Irish pubs in Ushuaia, a small town of only a few thousand people and settling right at the end of the Earth? They didn’t do Guinness though, despite all the signs indicating otherwise.
Our first full day in Ushuaia was spent wandering around the national park; a beautiful spot dotted with streams, lakes and huge wooded areas. The lakeside walks were stunning and the clean, fresh air soon flushed out any staleness from my lungs left over from the previous day’s flights. In the evening we thought we’d try out the second of the Irish pubs but it wasn’t a patch on the first so we ended back to the one we’d started at the previous night. Beagle, the black, locally brewed beer kind of looks like Guinness but is a pale imitation. It hasn’t got the body nor the smoothness that you would expect from a pint so dark, but it’s refreshing nonetheless. At least refreshing enough for us to partake in several rounds of the stuff. The following day, our luggage was picked up from the hotel and taken to the boat while we explored Ushuaia and what it had to offer. Sadly though, the legacy of The Spanish still lives on and we hit the shops round about siesta time so most of them were closed between 12:00 and 15:00. I felt like a frustrated kid with money burning a hole in his pocket but it was probably a good thing otherwise I might have bought all sorts of things that I really don’t need. I was particularly drawn to a penguin made out of died sheepskin.
Eventually it was time to go to the meeting point in order to be put aboard our boat, The Akademic Sergey Vavilov (you’d never guess it’s Russian would you!). As we were all milling around, sizing up the other passengers that we were going to spend the next 18 days with, it felt very much like the last Royale Family Christmas Special where we were supposed to ‘mingle’ as per the timetable. Rich and I just made a beeline for the bus and firmly planted ourselves there until it was time to embark.
I have to say that I’m much more impressed with the ship than I thought I would be. The cabins are a reasonable size, at least for the two of us and the facilities are very well thought out. During ‘Mingling – Part 2’ in the ship’s bar, where vodka and cranberry cocktails were being consumed in large quantities (due to them being free), we were encouraged to wear a name badge so that the other ‘minglers’ would know who they were mingling with. I have a feeling that this journey isn’t going to be one where there’s a lot of solitude and I’ll be forced out of the cosy shell of my cabin more than I’d really like. I don’t mind though, it’s a good way of seeking out the new and weird characters that make up the rest of the manifest. In some ways, I’m looking forward to seeing them as much of the other kinds of wildlife we’ll encounter on this ‘expedition’.
I had mixed feelings about Delhi; on the one hand I was pleased to be back there following a brief visit in 2003 and being able to spend more time looking around and appreciating the place, and on the other I was glad that this was the last stop in India before returning home. It seems so long since we were there that my enthusiasm has waned too much to write much about it, suffice to say that we did all the usual things that are to be done in Delhi including a trip to The Red Fort, The India Gate and a day excursion down to The Taj Mahal. Now, I knew the Taj was supposed to be stunning, but I just wasn’t prepared for how amazing it really is. Despite the heavy fog hanging over the whole place, I was blown away by its beauty. In fact, in some ways the fog made it appear even more exquisitely enigmatic. I managed to get a few pictures of it but they’ll never do it justice. It’s at times like that when I realise just how incompetent a photographer I am.
The flight back home seemed to take an eternity as the thick fog blanketing Delhi was causing serious delays at the airport. I was getting worried at one point that the flight may well be cancelled but good old British Airways didn’t let us down. Once home in the icy world of Orpington the first thing I wanted to do was to have a shower but the frozen pipe put paid to that so we switched on the heating (which was thankfully still working) , only for it to defrost the pipe and flood the house while we popped down the shops for a pint of milk. What terrible timing. I was so tired I just wanted sit on the soaking wet carpet and burst into tears, perhaps wetting it a little more. However, rationality took hold and the insurance company and a local plumber were soon on the case. At least the hot water was working after all that so I could take a shower and wash the towels that we’d used for mopping up all the water from the hall, landing and stairs carpets.
The past five weeks or so have really flown by and it’s quite difficult to account for my time. However, not limiting our worldly travels to purely exotic places, we booked a week down in Cornwall and thoroughly enjoyed it. The tranquillity, the familiarity and the beauty are only three of the qualities that retain Cornwall’s firm placement in my mind as one of my favourite places in the world. The pasties are great too, particularly from the little bakery in Marazion.
Back in Orpington we were treated to beautiful scenes of snow the following week and like a kid I couldn’t wait to go out and walk in it, making every excuse I could to pop down to the shops and shuffle around in the lovely white stuff. In fact, Richard and I were squabbling with each other that one wasn’t allowed to go out into the back garden unless they told the other so as not to spoil the pristine white blanket. Pathetic I know, but there’s something quite lovely about being the first person to crunch through the snow with their Wellies on, leaving a single trail of footprints.
Home is a long way away now as we are finally in Ushuaia after more than 24 hours travelling. The flights were fairly turbulent in places which was a bit scary after the previous aircraft incidents a couple of days before. Each flight was broken into two stages too so in all there were 4 landings and 4 take-offs which added to the tension. They all went without a hitch though, as far as we knew at least. The British Airways staff were very generous with the in-flight bar and after my third little bottle of Cabernet I was fast asleep and dreaming of where we were heading. We were greeted at Ushuaia airport and whisked off to our hotel where we settled and enjoyed the late evening view for a short while before heading off to the nearest Irish pub. Who’d believe that there are actually two of these Irish pubs in Ushuaia, a small town of only a few thousand people and settling right at the end of the Earth? They didn’t do Guinness though, despite all the signs indicating otherwise.
Our first full day in Ushuaia was spent wandering around the national park; a beautiful spot dotted with streams, lakes and huge wooded areas. The lakeside walks were stunning and the clean, fresh air soon flushed out any staleness from my lungs left over from the previous day’s flights. In the evening we thought we’d try out the second of the Irish pubs but it wasn’t a patch on the first so we ended back to the one we’d started at the previous night. Beagle, the black, locally brewed beer kind of looks like Guinness but is a pale imitation. It hasn’t got the body nor the smoothness that you would expect from a pint so dark, but it’s refreshing nonetheless. At least refreshing enough for us to partake in several rounds of the stuff. The following day, our luggage was picked up from the hotel and taken to the boat while we explored Ushuaia and what it had to offer. Sadly though, the legacy of The Spanish still lives on and we hit the shops round about siesta time so most of them were closed between 12:00 and 15:00. I felt like a frustrated kid with money burning a hole in his pocket but it was probably a good thing otherwise I might have bought all sorts of things that I really don’t need. I was particularly drawn to a penguin made out of died sheepskin.
Eventually it was time to go to the meeting point in order to be put aboard our boat, The Akademic Sergey Vavilov (you’d never guess it’s Russian would you!). As we were all milling around, sizing up the other passengers that we were going to spend the next 18 days with, it felt very much like the last Royale Family Christmas Special where we were supposed to ‘mingle’ as per the timetable. Rich and I just made a beeline for the bus and firmly planted ourselves there until it was time to embark.
I have to say that I’m much more impressed with the ship than I thought I would be. The cabins are a reasonable size, at least for the two of us and the facilities are very well thought out. During ‘Mingling – Part 2’ in the ship’s bar, where vodka and cranberry cocktails were being consumed in large quantities (due to them being free), we were encouraged to wear a name badge so that the other ‘minglers’ would know who they were mingling with. I have a feeling that this journey isn’t going to be one where there’s a lot of solitude and I’ll be forced out of the cosy shell of my cabin more than I’d really like. I don’t mind though, it’s a good way of seeking out the new and weird characters that make up the rest of the manifest. In some ways, I’m looking forward to seeing them as much of the other kinds of wildlife we’ll encounter on this ‘expedition’.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Day 179 - New Delhi, India
It's New Year's Eve as I write this, or rather more accurately it's about 5:00 in the morning on New Year's Eve, and I'm sitting on a train waiting to go to Delhi. We've been in India for 13 days now and I still haven't decided whether I like it or not. I'd better make up my mind as we leave next week...
Walking through the filthy, dusty streets of Varanasi, in which we arrived last week, I started making a mental note of my likes and dislikes about the country to try and put things into perspective. However, while avoiding the rivers of human piss, trying not not step in piles of rotting cow shit or puddles of betel stained gob, the list was growing rapidly on the dislikes side. I gave up on that as it was making me even more depressed so I decided from then on that I was going to focus on the positives rather than the negatives.
We were in Varanasi, or Varanasty as Rich re-Christened it, for four days which was more than enough. In fact two days were plenty as it's a fairly claustrophobic city and holds little of interest other than the numerous ghats that line the Ganges river. A Ghat is a stoned step-way leading down to the water's edge that is used for a particular purpose such as bathing, laundry or cremation and each of them along the Ganges is uniquely named and varying in style. We walked along the banks of the river taking in the views when we came across the cremations area. A bloke invited us up to watch and asked us not to take photos which was fair enough. As I stood there it occurred to me just how matter of fact these deeply personal and emotional ceremonies were being carried out. An image that will probably stay with me forever is seeing a bloke pushing a half burned body back into the flames while goats wandered around the funeral pyres munching on ceremonial garlands of chrysanthemums. It was all quite surreal and to be honest made me feel pretty melancholy.
It was an education though and very interesting. Apparently it's not that unusual to be shampooing your hair or washing your smalls downstream from all this and for body parts to drift gently by as the cremated remains are placed into the Ganges regardless of whether they are completely reduced to ashes or not. Fortunately we weren't witness to that.
Along the way we encountered numerous little kids who would spend hours flying their makeshift kites in the gentle air currents. It was lovely to see something so simple giving them so much pleasure. I bet they didn't spend Christmas Day opening hundreds of pounds worth of electronic entertainment only to be bored with it by Boxing Day. Some of the kids tried selling us little candle votives to send floating down the river; apparently our karma would have been healed if we'd bought one. I wasn't sure that mine needed healing just yet so I left it.
The traffic in Varanasi was hideous, as it is in most Indian cities and I've come to the conclusion that pedestrians are the lowest in the pecking order of all traffic. It doesn't matter how clearly you make yourself seen, all vehicles will just hurtle towards you as if you are completely invisible. There are rarely any pavements to seek sanctuary on and even when they do exist they are just regarded as nice bits to ride motorbikes or auto-rickshaws on. I've lost a few pounds in weight since reaching India and I'm sure it's due to my increased adrenaline levels.
For Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we booked into the top hotel in Varanasi. It was pure heaven sleeping in a soft bed in a clean, quiet room and we didn't leave the room other than for dinner on Christmas Eve and to complain about the Internet connection packing up. The bathroom had a bewildering array of products and I was determined to use them all to get my monies worth. I bathed my skin in Indian berry bubblebath, I moisturised with rose scented cream, I shampooed with apple flavoured shampoo and dried my bum on soft, white, fluffy towels. I smelt like an exotic fruit salad afterwards but didn't care as I was properly clean for the first time in ages. How can such small pleasures make such a big difference?
Our Christmas dinner consisted of a packet of curry flavoured Nik-Naks, some processed cheese and a few Ritz style crackers. We didn't want much else after our massive dinner the previous evening plus we're on a budget you know... We spent most of the day watching Christmas telly on the Star Movies channel which was a Godsend, but there's only so much Tim Allen you can take for one day so we stopped at The Santa Clause III.
Boxing day came and we were on a train again. This time we headed for Lucknow and checked into an hotel near to the station. It was run by a complete zombie who's expression or position didn't change in two days, no matter what time of day. He also had this creepy knack of having our room key in his hand behind his back each time we returned to the hotel. He would hand it over with a sinister glint in his eye and a slight twitch of his moustache.
The sights in Lucknow were as disappointing as everywhere else; years of neglect, peeling paint, crumbling walls and pigeon crap everywhere. I really don't understand where all the money goes as they get hundreds of visitors, each paying a small fee to enter, or a large fee if you're a foreign tourist (often 20 times what the locals pay). Somebody somewhere is making a lot of money out of doing very little and it's intensely irritating to pay so much to see so little. The most annoying thing is watching so many staff sitting around doing nothing or just idly chatting amongst themselves.
While at one of the mosques, we sat down for a rest after several hours walking and this family came up and asked for a picture. I assumed she meant of them, as I've done so many times before, but then she positioned her son and daughter either side of me and snapped away on her phone's camera. She then shooed her daughter out of the way and took another photo. As she started to walk off I asked her if I could see the picture and she'd completely zoomed in on me, cutting off her son's head. I pointed this out to her and she just shrugged and giggled to her friend as they returned to the rest of their family. The daughter looked ever so disappointed at being excluded. I guess that's just another of the photo albums around the world that I'll star in!
Two days was plenty in Lucknow and we had another train to catch, this time to Amritsar. We got to the station and it was complete and utter chaos. None of the electronic information boards worked, as usual, and half of the speakers belching out confusing and garbled information had blown. We went to the advertised platform but there was no sign of the train well past its due time so we went looking for some information. I ran across to the 'information' counter to join the huge, surging crowd of others that were in front if it. No queue of course, just pandemonium. Like everyone else I tried pushing and elbowing my way to the front to ask about our train. There, behind his screen of iron bars and Perspex, sat a fat bloke chewing a pen, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair and barely bringing himself to give a toss. I was furious but powerless to do anything about it. If that was back home the bloke would have been lynched, I'm sure.
Eventually, a local family asked us where we were going and gave us the information we were after. It turns out they were going the same way and were even in the same carriage. It was a stroke of luck so we latched onto them while trying to ignore the various misshapen beggars that were demanding money from us. After a while, the father came up to us and asked us if one of us would swap our lower bunk with his wife's top bunk as she supposedly had a slipped disc and couldn't climb up. A last minute platform alteration showed us just how disabled she wasn't as she legged it up the footbridge laden with luggage. We said we'd think about it and let them know. When the train eventually came they managed to secure what they wanted without us having to swap by having a quiet word with the carriage attendant. Presumably some sort of financial encouragement was involved as that seems to be the way to get whatever you want here. So, with the family out of the way, we ended up sharing our little area of the carriage with some insects, a mouse, a travelling underwear salesman that snored a lot and two old Seikhs that spent the journey farting and belching. Presumably they were on a high-fibre vegetarian diet. Twenty one hours later, due to fog apparently, we arrived in Amritsar. After checking into The Grand Hotel, which wasn't grand at all, we took a car to go and see the border with Pakistan. Every evening at sundown they have a ceremony at the gates where the two country's flags are lowered as part of an elaborate ritual that involves much parading and puffing of chests by soldiers on both sides. It's a curious mixture of bravado, jingoism, feirce patriotism, shouting and cheering with a small dollop of restraint. It's a good show though.
After that we were driven to the Golden Temple which is a massive Siekh built structure, covered in gold and surrounded by a sacred lake. It was stunningly beautiful at night as it was all lit up. It was worth the horrendous train journey for that alone. We visited it the next day as well to see it in the daylight. There's an amazing feeling of calm in the whole area as religious men chant readings from the holy book and people queue silently to get inside the temple and make their offerings and prayers. I loved it there and the people were all so friendly. It was one of the few places where kids would speak to you without asking for anything and we could walk around without being stared at constantly. This was the best place that I think I've seen so far in India and yet we were not asked for a single rupee in return. The place was spotlessly clean, beautifully maintained and hassle free yet all of this was done on voluntary donations. It speaks volumes.
We spent last night in a great restaurant called, rather exotically, Crystal Restaurant. We'd been there earlier in the day to look at a menu to see if was worth the walk in the evening and it was a little confusing as there were two restaurants with the same name, one upstairs and one down. As we approached the doors, both of them sprang to life and competed with each other to get us in. It turns out that the original one downstairs was so popular that somebody else opened one upstairs with the same name hoping to cash in on its neighbour's success. Bloody cheek! Of course, we went to the original and the food was superb. It was one of the few places that I ate a meal at and didn't have to think about asking the hotel for spare toilet rolls when we got back.
Well, Delhi is next on the agenda and this train is a delight. We've got proper seats, a clean carriage, tea and coffee and breakfast is being served as I write this. Rich just said "If only all of Indian Railways was like this" and I couldn't agree more.
We're still running two hours late though, despite leaving on time.
Walking through the filthy, dusty streets of Varanasi, in which we arrived last week, I started making a mental note of my likes and dislikes about the country to try and put things into perspective. However, while avoiding the rivers of human piss, trying not not step in piles of rotting cow shit or puddles of betel stained gob, the list was growing rapidly on the dislikes side. I gave up on that as it was making me even more depressed so I decided from then on that I was going to focus on the positives rather than the negatives.
We were in Varanasi, or Varanasty as Rich re-Christened it, for four days which was more than enough. In fact two days were plenty as it's a fairly claustrophobic city and holds little of interest other than the numerous ghats that line the Ganges river. A Ghat is a stoned step-way leading down to the water's edge that is used for a particular purpose such as bathing, laundry or cremation and each of them along the Ganges is uniquely named and varying in style. We walked along the banks of the river taking in the views when we came across the cremations area. A bloke invited us up to watch and asked us not to take photos which was fair enough. As I stood there it occurred to me just how matter of fact these deeply personal and emotional ceremonies were being carried out. An image that will probably stay with me forever is seeing a bloke pushing a half burned body back into the flames while goats wandered around the funeral pyres munching on ceremonial garlands of chrysanthemums. It was all quite surreal and to be honest made me feel pretty melancholy.
It was an education though and very interesting. Apparently it's not that unusual to be shampooing your hair or washing your smalls downstream from all this and for body parts to drift gently by as the cremated remains are placed into the Ganges regardless of whether they are completely reduced to ashes or not. Fortunately we weren't witness to that.
Along the way we encountered numerous little kids who would spend hours flying their makeshift kites in the gentle air currents. It was lovely to see something so simple giving them so much pleasure. I bet they didn't spend Christmas Day opening hundreds of pounds worth of electronic entertainment only to be bored with it by Boxing Day. Some of the kids tried selling us little candle votives to send floating down the river; apparently our karma would have been healed if we'd bought one. I wasn't sure that mine needed healing just yet so I left it.
The traffic in Varanasi was hideous, as it is in most Indian cities and I've come to the conclusion that pedestrians are the lowest in the pecking order of all traffic. It doesn't matter how clearly you make yourself seen, all vehicles will just hurtle towards you as if you are completely invisible. There are rarely any pavements to seek sanctuary on and even when they do exist they are just regarded as nice bits to ride motorbikes or auto-rickshaws on. I've lost a few pounds in weight since reaching India and I'm sure it's due to my increased adrenaline levels.
For Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we booked into the top hotel in Varanasi. It was pure heaven sleeping in a soft bed in a clean, quiet room and we didn't leave the room other than for dinner on Christmas Eve and to complain about the Internet connection packing up. The bathroom had a bewildering array of products and I was determined to use them all to get my monies worth. I bathed my skin in Indian berry bubblebath, I moisturised with rose scented cream, I shampooed with apple flavoured shampoo and dried my bum on soft, white, fluffy towels. I smelt like an exotic fruit salad afterwards but didn't care as I was properly clean for the first time in ages. How can such small pleasures make such a big difference?
Our Christmas dinner consisted of a packet of curry flavoured Nik-Naks, some processed cheese and a few Ritz style crackers. We didn't want much else after our massive dinner the previous evening plus we're on a budget you know... We spent most of the day watching Christmas telly on the Star Movies channel which was a Godsend, but there's only so much Tim Allen you can take for one day so we stopped at The Santa Clause III.
Boxing day came and we were on a train again. This time we headed for Lucknow and checked into an hotel near to the station. It was run by a complete zombie who's expression or position didn't change in two days, no matter what time of day. He also had this creepy knack of having our room key in his hand behind his back each time we returned to the hotel. He would hand it over with a sinister glint in his eye and a slight twitch of his moustache.
The sights in Lucknow were as disappointing as everywhere else; years of neglect, peeling paint, crumbling walls and pigeon crap everywhere. I really don't understand where all the money goes as they get hundreds of visitors, each paying a small fee to enter, or a large fee if you're a foreign tourist (often 20 times what the locals pay). Somebody somewhere is making a lot of money out of doing very little and it's intensely irritating to pay so much to see so little. The most annoying thing is watching so many staff sitting around doing nothing or just idly chatting amongst themselves.
While at one of the mosques, we sat down for a rest after several hours walking and this family came up and asked for a picture. I assumed she meant of them, as I've done so many times before, but then she positioned her son and daughter either side of me and snapped away on her phone's camera. She then shooed her daughter out of the way and took another photo. As she started to walk off I asked her if I could see the picture and she'd completely zoomed in on me, cutting off her son's head. I pointed this out to her and she just shrugged and giggled to her friend as they returned to the rest of their family. The daughter looked ever so disappointed at being excluded. I guess that's just another of the photo albums around the world that I'll star in!
Two days was plenty in Lucknow and we had another train to catch, this time to Amritsar. We got to the station and it was complete and utter chaos. None of the electronic information boards worked, as usual, and half of the speakers belching out confusing and garbled information had blown. We went to the advertised platform but there was no sign of the train well past its due time so we went looking for some information. I ran across to the 'information' counter to join the huge, surging crowd of others that were in front if it. No queue of course, just pandemonium. Like everyone else I tried pushing and elbowing my way to the front to ask about our train. There, behind his screen of iron bars and Perspex, sat a fat bloke chewing a pen, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair and barely bringing himself to give a toss. I was furious but powerless to do anything about it. If that was back home the bloke would have been lynched, I'm sure.
Eventually, a local family asked us where we were going and gave us the information we were after. It turns out they were going the same way and were even in the same carriage. It was a stroke of luck so we latched onto them while trying to ignore the various misshapen beggars that were demanding money from us. After a while, the father came up to us and asked us if one of us would swap our lower bunk with his wife's top bunk as she supposedly had a slipped disc and couldn't climb up. A last minute platform alteration showed us just how disabled she wasn't as she legged it up the footbridge laden with luggage. We said we'd think about it and let them know. When the train eventually came they managed to secure what they wanted without us having to swap by having a quiet word with the carriage attendant. Presumably some sort of financial encouragement was involved as that seems to be the way to get whatever you want here. So, with the family out of the way, we ended up sharing our little area of the carriage with some insects, a mouse, a travelling underwear salesman that snored a lot and two old Seikhs that spent the journey farting and belching. Presumably they were on a high-fibre vegetarian diet. Twenty one hours later, due to fog apparently, we arrived in Amritsar. After checking into The Grand Hotel, which wasn't grand at all, we took a car to go and see the border with Pakistan. Every evening at sundown they have a ceremony at the gates where the two country's flags are lowered as part of an elaborate ritual that involves much parading and puffing of chests by soldiers on both sides. It's a curious mixture of bravado, jingoism, feirce patriotism, shouting and cheering with a small dollop of restraint. It's a good show though.
After that we were driven to the Golden Temple which is a massive Siekh built structure, covered in gold and surrounded by a sacred lake. It was stunningly beautiful at night as it was all lit up. It was worth the horrendous train journey for that alone. We visited it the next day as well to see it in the daylight. There's an amazing feeling of calm in the whole area as religious men chant readings from the holy book and people queue silently to get inside the temple and make their offerings and prayers. I loved it there and the people were all so friendly. It was one of the few places where kids would speak to you without asking for anything and we could walk around without being stared at constantly. This was the best place that I think I've seen so far in India and yet we were not asked for a single rupee in return. The place was spotlessly clean, beautifully maintained and hassle free yet all of this was done on voluntary donations. It speaks volumes.
We spent last night in a great restaurant called, rather exotically, Crystal Restaurant. We'd been there earlier in the day to look at a menu to see if was worth the walk in the evening and it was a little confusing as there were two restaurants with the same name, one upstairs and one down. As we approached the doors, both of them sprang to life and competed with each other to get us in. It turns out that the original one downstairs was so popular that somebody else opened one upstairs with the same name hoping to cash in on its neighbour's success. Bloody cheek! Of course, we went to the original and the food was superb. It was one of the few places that I ate a meal at and didn't have to think about asking the hotel for spare toilet rolls when we got back.
Well, Delhi is next on the agenda and this train is a delight. We've got proper seats, a clean carriage, tea and coffee and breakfast is being served as I write this. Rich just said "If only all of Indian Railways was like this" and I couldn't agree more.
We're still running two hours late though, despite leaving on time.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Day 172 - Varanasi, India
Kathmandu sort of came and went really. It's not that difficult to imagine its hey day in the 60's and early 70's when the hippies used to hang out there as it doesn't look like much has changed. The shops are still selling loads of Indian and Nepalese art as well as an outlandish array of hippy smocks, loon pants and felt slippers shaped like mice in all sorts of psychadelic colours, but they've now branched out into fake branded hiking gear, walking poles and back copies of The Economist much to Rich's delight.
We walked around the city quite a bit and managed to see a fair amount. The closeness to Tibet was quite obvious in the number of Buddhist temples dotted around and the stupas being circumnambulated by the familiar maroon robed monks. One of the stupas was really quite impressive, set in the middle of a huge square it absolutely filled the space. The hundreds of colourful prayer flags that adorned it were vivid and bright and the gold top piece reflected the brilliant sunshine. After walking around it we decided to go to one of the many rooftop cafes for a slice of cake and a view of the Himalayas. We got the cake but no view as it was too smoggy. Instead I amused myself by listening to an old American lady having her Tibetan homework checked by her teacher. Of course, the American thought she'd done really well despite what the teacher was telling her.
We spent another day at a big Hindu temple, or rather we walked for over an hour to get to the temple only to find that non-Hindus are not allowed in. The guide book says that if you walk round the outside you can catch a glimpse of the back end of a huge golden bull. We didn't. What we did see though was a ticket office where you could pay to go in and see the rear of the temple. We paid and once we were in we found ourselves on a river bank where cremations were taking place. One of the young blokes who was touting himself as a guide told us we could take pictures but I chose not to. The grieving family at the corpses side had enough to contend with without tourists pointing their Canons and Kodaks at them. Instead, I walked along the bank to take a picture of a monkey eating one of the rice offerings but managed to get a lung full of smoke from one of the funeral pyres. It really made me gag as you can imagine so we fled to higher ground. There were plenty of other monkies there, picking at various items and climbing all over the temples. Some of them shimmied along the power lines and onto the lamp posts to have a play with the broken light bulbs but soon got bored. One of the things that I found very strange were the Saddhus. A Saddhu is someone that has given up all worldly possessions and dedicated their life to one of worship. It's a bit like being a monk except these ones are half naked and often covered head to toe in white ash for some reason. Anyway, the thing that I found weird was that although they reject all earthly possessions in the hope of reaching a higher religous state, they still charge you to take a photo of them. How does that work then?!
Between the numerous power cuts in Kathmandu we needed to book our flight to India. There are loads of little travel agents dotted around so we traipsed from one to another trying to find one at a fair price. We went into one agency run by two completely hopeless young girls who were just setting up their business. After they made lots of phone calls, searched endlessly through their one lever-arch file and tapped a lot on their computer keyboards we got the price after about 30 minutes. We gave up on those two and ended up booking it through a grubby little joint with faded posters on the walls and where they ran their computers on a generator. Photocopying our passports was the straw that broke the generators back because as soon as he pressed the copy button all the lights dimmed and the computers rebooted themselves. Despite all this, we managed to get a couple of business class tickets as that's all that were left.
The airport at Kathmandu is basic. It looks like it was designed by someone in the 50s more used to designing office canteens. Still, once through passport control we were eager to use our invitation to the hospitality area that we were given on check-in because of our business class tickets. Free drinks and snacks were beckoning us. We eagerly approached the executive lounge, invitation in hand, wondering what delights awaited us. "Excuse me sir." shouted the uniformed attendant, "Can I help you?" she continued. We explained we had the invitation and asked her where we needed to go. She pointed to a badly lit booth with a dry burger, an empty looking cheese sandwich, some pizza slices and a few little pasties. Our expectations were cruelly cut down to size when we found out that we were only entitled to one of the miserable looking pasties and a small carton of juice or a coffee, i.e the cheapest items they had to offer. This defintely wasn't British Airways!
The departure lounge was a joke. Complete chaos. They'd obviously invested in huge plasma display screens to show departure times, flight numbers, gates, etc. but forgot to employ anybody competent enough to operate them. Much of the information was either wrong or just missing so it was pure luck that we got on the right flight. The plane was nice and the extra room in business class was a welcome relief. Air India obviously has a policy of keeping on mature staff though. One of our attendants could barely stand up straight and the other had what looked like the body of Bernard Breslaw squeezed into a very tired looking sari. I won't forget that midriff in a hurry. They were both very gracious though, much more so than some of the younger ones who daren't do a thing to help you lest they bust a perfectly manicured fingernail.
Eventually we made it to Kolkata (or Calcutta as it used to be called). We caught a taxi to Hotel Crystal and all seemed well. Once in the dismal room though we decided we weren't staying there and Rich went off to find another while I stalled the rogues checking us in.
We were soon checked into the VIP International which initially seemed so much better. However, the scaffolding outside should have been a clue as to how noisy it would be. We ended up having three different rooms within the space of three nights due to the noise. The first night we moved because the room was so close to the bar that we could hear glasses chinking and the music kept us awake all night, the second night we had to put up with building work going on til 1am and on the third night it was so bad we asked to be moved again but the new room was near a bunch of Indian guys that were playing a radio til the small hours. We couldn't wait to leave. The worst thing about the whole experience was that all of the staff we spoke to on reception to sort the problems out couldn't give a damn. There was no apology, in fact the best we got was a key slung at us for another supposedly quieter room and a request for our patience during this period of renovation. Bloody cheek.
I really wanted to like Kolkata but there's not a lot to do there. The most interesting things were buildings or monuments left over from the days of the Raj such as the museum building, Victoria Memorial or Park Street Cemetary. However, these great places have lost their gloss through years of under investment and non-maintenance. In the Victoria Monument, for example, huge damp patches and pigeon crap covers the walls. In the museum it's hard to see many of the exhibits in any great detail as they are covered in a thick layer of black dust and look like they've been slung into the display cases. You're lucky if there is even a lightbulb working in order to illuminate anything through the grime. The cemetary has some interesting monuments but the grounds are badly kept and the rusty advertising hoardings detract from the sanctity of the place. Such a shame.
It's also really hard to find anything in the city as there don't appear to be any street signs so a map is pretty useless. Dodging the traffic coming from all directions is a skill you need to develop for survival so it's no surprise the people don't walk very far in the city, hence the thousands of big yellow taxis, tuk-tuks and auto-rickshaws. We took one of the taxis to the train station the day we left and, as usual, he did the trick of telling us the meter didn't work and carefully arranged his scarf over it to prevent us seeing the real price. However, at the station after trying to get 200 rupees out of us I yanked his scarf from the meter to reveal the real fare of 37 rupees. He must have thought we were born yesterday so we settled on a price of 100 after a big row that drew a small crowd. Greedy sod.
The train journey was slightly better than I thought it would be, though not a patch on the trains in Russia, China or Japan. Horrid vinyl covered seat/bed things and itchy blankets in carriages filled with noisy locals and cockroaches crawling the walls. Delightful. The carriage attendant was a right little Hitler figure who clearly loved his job when it involved chucking people out who didn't have the right ticket.
We're in Varanasi now and it's Christmas Eve. I'm going to wait until after Christmas to write any more and maybe I'll be in a more positive mood as I'm conscious that I've done nothing but moan about India so far. I'm not hating it here, in fact it's a really interesting place, but the idea of not being home for Christmas is making me homesick for the first time since travelling. At least there are only two weeks to go before coming home for a bit now we've booked our flights. Pampering ourselves for a couple of days and getting steaming drunk in a nice hotel may help relieve this. We'll see.
We walked around the city quite a bit and managed to see a fair amount. The closeness to Tibet was quite obvious in the number of Buddhist temples dotted around and the stupas being circumnambulated by the familiar maroon robed monks. One of the stupas was really quite impressive, set in the middle of a huge square it absolutely filled the space. The hundreds of colourful prayer flags that adorned it were vivid and bright and the gold top piece reflected the brilliant sunshine. After walking around it we decided to go to one of the many rooftop cafes for a slice of cake and a view of the Himalayas. We got the cake but no view as it was too smoggy. Instead I amused myself by listening to an old American lady having her Tibetan homework checked by her teacher. Of course, the American thought she'd done really well despite what the teacher was telling her.
We spent another day at a big Hindu temple, or rather we walked for over an hour to get to the temple only to find that non-Hindus are not allowed in. The guide book says that if you walk round the outside you can catch a glimpse of the back end of a huge golden bull. We didn't. What we did see though was a ticket office where you could pay to go in and see the rear of the temple. We paid and once we were in we found ourselves on a river bank where cremations were taking place. One of the young blokes who was touting himself as a guide told us we could take pictures but I chose not to. The grieving family at the corpses side had enough to contend with without tourists pointing their Canons and Kodaks at them. Instead, I walked along the bank to take a picture of a monkey eating one of the rice offerings but managed to get a lung full of smoke from one of the funeral pyres. It really made me gag as you can imagine so we fled to higher ground. There were plenty of other monkies there, picking at various items and climbing all over the temples. Some of them shimmied along the power lines and onto the lamp posts to have a play with the broken light bulbs but soon got bored. One of the things that I found very strange were the Saddhus. A Saddhu is someone that has given up all worldly possessions and dedicated their life to one of worship. It's a bit like being a monk except these ones are half naked and often covered head to toe in white ash for some reason. Anyway, the thing that I found weird was that although they reject all earthly possessions in the hope of reaching a higher religous state, they still charge you to take a photo of them. How does that work then?!
Between the numerous power cuts in Kathmandu we needed to book our flight to India. There are loads of little travel agents dotted around so we traipsed from one to another trying to find one at a fair price. We went into one agency run by two completely hopeless young girls who were just setting up their business. After they made lots of phone calls, searched endlessly through their one lever-arch file and tapped a lot on their computer keyboards we got the price after about 30 minutes. We gave up on those two and ended up booking it through a grubby little joint with faded posters on the walls and where they ran their computers on a generator. Photocopying our passports was the straw that broke the generators back because as soon as he pressed the copy button all the lights dimmed and the computers rebooted themselves. Despite all this, we managed to get a couple of business class tickets as that's all that were left.
The airport at Kathmandu is basic. It looks like it was designed by someone in the 50s more used to designing office canteens. Still, once through passport control we were eager to use our invitation to the hospitality area that we were given on check-in because of our business class tickets. Free drinks and snacks were beckoning us. We eagerly approached the executive lounge, invitation in hand, wondering what delights awaited us. "Excuse me sir." shouted the uniformed attendant, "Can I help you?" she continued. We explained we had the invitation and asked her where we needed to go. She pointed to a badly lit booth with a dry burger, an empty looking cheese sandwich, some pizza slices and a few little pasties. Our expectations were cruelly cut down to size when we found out that we were only entitled to one of the miserable looking pasties and a small carton of juice or a coffee, i.e the cheapest items they had to offer. This defintely wasn't British Airways!
The departure lounge was a joke. Complete chaos. They'd obviously invested in huge plasma display screens to show departure times, flight numbers, gates, etc. but forgot to employ anybody competent enough to operate them. Much of the information was either wrong or just missing so it was pure luck that we got on the right flight. The plane was nice and the extra room in business class was a welcome relief. Air India obviously has a policy of keeping on mature staff though. One of our attendants could barely stand up straight and the other had what looked like the body of Bernard Breslaw squeezed into a very tired looking sari. I won't forget that midriff in a hurry. They were both very gracious though, much more so than some of the younger ones who daren't do a thing to help you lest they bust a perfectly manicured fingernail.
Eventually we made it to Kolkata (or Calcutta as it used to be called). We caught a taxi to Hotel Crystal and all seemed well. Once in the dismal room though we decided we weren't staying there and Rich went off to find another while I stalled the rogues checking us in.
We were soon checked into the VIP International which initially seemed so much better. However, the scaffolding outside should have been a clue as to how noisy it would be. We ended up having three different rooms within the space of three nights due to the noise. The first night we moved because the room was so close to the bar that we could hear glasses chinking and the music kept us awake all night, the second night we had to put up with building work going on til 1am and on the third night it was so bad we asked to be moved again but the new room was near a bunch of Indian guys that were playing a radio til the small hours. We couldn't wait to leave. The worst thing about the whole experience was that all of the staff we spoke to on reception to sort the problems out couldn't give a damn. There was no apology, in fact the best we got was a key slung at us for another supposedly quieter room and a request for our patience during this period of renovation. Bloody cheek.
I really wanted to like Kolkata but there's not a lot to do there. The most interesting things were buildings or monuments left over from the days of the Raj such as the museum building, Victoria Memorial or Park Street Cemetary. However, these great places have lost their gloss through years of under investment and non-maintenance. In the Victoria Monument, for example, huge damp patches and pigeon crap covers the walls. In the museum it's hard to see many of the exhibits in any great detail as they are covered in a thick layer of black dust and look like they've been slung into the display cases. You're lucky if there is even a lightbulb working in order to illuminate anything through the grime. The cemetary has some interesting monuments but the grounds are badly kept and the rusty advertising hoardings detract from the sanctity of the place. Such a shame.
It's also really hard to find anything in the city as there don't appear to be any street signs so a map is pretty useless. Dodging the traffic coming from all directions is a skill you need to develop for survival so it's no surprise the people don't walk very far in the city, hence the thousands of big yellow taxis, tuk-tuks and auto-rickshaws. We took one of the taxis to the train station the day we left and, as usual, he did the trick of telling us the meter didn't work and carefully arranged his scarf over it to prevent us seeing the real price. However, at the station after trying to get 200 rupees out of us I yanked his scarf from the meter to reveal the real fare of 37 rupees. He must have thought we were born yesterday so we settled on a price of 100 after a big row that drew a small crowd. Greedy sod.
The train journey was slightly better than I thought it would be, though not a patch on the trains in Russia, China or Japan. Horrid vinyl covered seat/bed things and itchy blankets in carriages filled with noisy locals and cockroaches crawling the walls. Delightful. The carriage attendant was a right little Hitler figure who clearly loved his job when it involved chucking people out who didn't have the right ticket.
We're in Varanasi now and it's Christmas Eve. I'm going to wait until after Christmas to write any more and maybe I'll be in a more positive mood as I'm conscious that I've done nothing but moan about India so far. I'm not hating it here, in fact it's a really interesting place, but the idea of not being home for Christmas is making me homesick for the first time since travelling. At least there are only two weeks to go before coming home for a bit now we've booked our flights. Pampering ourselves for a couple of days and getting steaming drunk in a nice hotel may help relieve this. We'll see.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Day 164 - Kathmandu, Nepal
Everything that I'd ever imagined about Tibet was brought to life while we were in Lhasa. The weather was icy cold but the sun shone in a cloudless, blue sky, Buddhist monks wandered the streets in their crimson robes and the smell of incense permeated everything. It was a thoroughly magical place.
After the first night there we had breakfast on the rooftop restaurant which had a fantastic view of the sun rising over the mountains that surround Lhasa as well as The Potala which is the winter palace of The Dalai Lama. It sounds idyllic but actually it was bitterly cold and we sat there shivering despite having thick coats on. Expecting a nice cooked breakfast we were encouraged by the sounds of cooking coming from the kitchen and the brilliant flashes of yellow light quickly followed by a "Whoosh" as whatever was being fried burst into flames. We were then presented with some cooked potato and chillies, a couple of cremated eggs and a huge pile of crispy bacon. It looked OK but by the time they'd bought it the short distance from the kitchen to the table it was stone cold. The only thing that stayed warm was the toast but it filled a gap.
This set us up for a bracing walk down to The Potala and what surprised me was the sheer number of pilgrims following their daily walk around the Kora. There was a complete mixture of
people, old and young and some of them were even prostrating themselves along the entire route. The Potala is build upon a huge lump of rock that dominates the West end of Lhasa and walking up the stairs to reach the palace is quite tough, especially when short of breath from the high altitude but it's worth the effort. The inside walls and ceilings are all painted in brilliant yellows, reds, blues and greens and in the bright, clear light of winter the colours just glow. Each of the chapels and tombs are adorned with Buddhas and lit by burning yak butter, filling the air with a comforting yet slightly sickly aroma. The light from the buttery candles made the gold covered tombs shine and the flickering of the light enhanced the serene feeling that filled the place. The only thing that spoiled it were the shocking charges the monks were imposing for taking pictures inside the place. It was outrageous so we didn't bother.
We continued wandering around Lhasa for a couple of days taking in all it had to offer. The Jokhang Temple was stunning, especially the climb onto the roof where you could get a good view of the square below and see the worshippers doing their thing. The Renpoche Monastery was also a real treat, though I couldn't help feeling a little guilty when our guide, Sambhu, started hammering on a closed temple door only for it to be opened by a weary looking monk that eventually let us in. It wasn't the monk I felt sorry for, but the other locals that had the door firmly shut in their faces after we'd entered. I guess we did pay a lot for the ticket though and the locals get in for free.
Regardless of how much I loved Lhasa, there was definitely an air of tension in the city. Guarding all the little alleyways leading into the old town were dozens of Chinese soldiers armed with guns ready to fire rubber bullets at anyone that posed a threat to the peace. As well as those, soldiers and police strutted around with big wooden batons which must have antagonised the Tibetans even further.
One thing about Sambhu was that he loved his sweet tea. In the first place he took us to we sat down next to a group of very excitable Tibetan women who were obviously very curious about us. Rich delighted them by taking pictures of them which generated shrieks of laughter. The next time we had tea, in a Buddhist nunnery, I though I'd take some pictures of the other customers myself. This wasn't appreciated so gratefully and the old woman that I was pointing my camera at held her thumb to her throat and slid it across from one side to the other and looked at me with a "just you dare" sort of look. I put my camera down and avoided anymore eye contact with anyone.
After our couple of days in
Lhasa, we were then driven to Gyantse. On the way there I was stunned to see a man standing in a field, surrounded by sheep with his trousers down. All sorts of things went through my head but I'm sure there was a perfectly rational explanation. The town is small with a big monastery and the best thing there was the Kumbum which is a huge stupa with 77 chapels built into it and apparently 10000 murals. I somehow doubt that number but there were an awful lot of paintings and statues to see. Needless to say, we didn't stop to look at them all but what we did see was very impressive. There's also a great view of Gyantse from the top.
To kill some time we had a little walk around the town before settling down for the evening. It
was a very grim place, partly due to the thick, sandy dust that coated everything but mainly due to the trio of dead dogs we saw lying in the park with their teeth exposed and 'snarling' in almost comic fashion. One of the best views in the town was that of the Old Fort at the top of the hill. It could be viewed from 'dead dog park' but the Chinese authorities, in their infinite wisdom, decided to stick a great big, ugly monument in front if it which really spoilt the otherwise pleasant viewing spot. Typical and arrogant.
The toilets in Tibet are possibly the worst we've seen to date. Often they are just a hole in the ground with a couple of planks suspended over it forming somewhere to stand. Other times there is no hole, it's just a platform suspended over the side of a hill. In all cases they stink to high heaven and even the locals must hate them because on many occasions we saw men just urinating anywhere on the street in exactly the same way a badly trained dog might do. It's apparently not that unusual for long skirted women just to squat down in the road and relieve themselves either. I suppose the skirt retains some sense of dignity. This wasn't just limited to adults either; I couldn't understand why so many kids were wandering around with the seam in the backs of their trousers split open, but I guess as it's so cold they could just stop what they were doing, do their business then continue their games without the hassle of nappies or getting undressed. It sort of makes sense, but still just seems wrong. Thinking about it, maybe the sheep farmer I saw on the way was just emptying his bladder...
After Gyantse, we drove to Shigatse which is the second largest town in Tibet. On arrival, Rich and I had a walk around the town again to see what it had to offer. Butchery is obviously a big thing here with yak and goat heads in big demand given the number of them we saw for sale. I asked Sambhu about them who told me that they are a big delicacy and quite delicious once all the hair has been singed off and then cooked (the head, not the hair). He doesn't like it though - can't imagine why. The main attraction here is the Tashilhunpo Monastery and it's a real beauty. It's a huge site and has traditionally been the seat of the Panchen Lama, probably the second most important person in Bhuddism after the Dalai Lama. One of the highlights here was seeing the young monks gathering in their ceremonial robes of crimson and yellow, getting ready to go and pray. Most of them were no older than about 15 and were behaving like naughty school children until an older monk bought them into line. Once they started chanting it was great to see, then they all filed off into an assembly hall to continue their prayers. All that was left were dozens of pairs of crimson boots that the boys had shed before leaving.
The next day was really exciting, after a breakfast of cold oily cabbage, raw oily potatoes and warm greasy spam, we continued our drive along the Friendship Highway to Everest Base Camp. It was a long drive, but I loved every moment of it, even seeing a man on his motorbike with a skinned, slaughtered sheep riding pillion. The scenery was absolutely beautiful and our first glimpse of Mount Everest bought a huge grin to both of our faces. Continuing along the
Gyatso-La Pass bought quick increases in altitude as we wound our way up and over mountain ranges. The views of the Himalayas were breathtaking.
Eventually, we reached Everest Base Camp and were blown away by the clear, unadulterated view of Mt. Everest or Mt. Chomolangma as the Chinese call it. We couldn't have had a clearer day and we were the only ones there! I was expecting the base camp to be full of tents housing groups of intrepid explorers and their Sherpas all decked out in Gore-tex hiking gear and clasping oxygen masks to their faces. It was nothing like that, there was a grotty toilet block, a couple if deserted tin huts, lots of prayer flags and a view to die for. We clambered up the hill to get a better view and at this point I tied a string of prayer flags to the others already fluttering in the freezing air. That was in memory of my Dad as he'd loved to have known I had been there.
Eventually, we tore ourselves away and drove to Old Tingri to stay the night. We were due to stay at the Rongphu Monastery which is quite close to the base camp but were told that it would be too cold as they have no heating there. A terrifying drive followed where we didn't stick to any road in the conventional sense, but followed a rough dirt path usually used for trekking. We were worried that night was closing in at this point and thinking that if anything had happened to the car we'd have been stuffed because nobody was around for miles. The car, at one point, lurched up an icy hill and then started wheel spinning before the engine cut out. The driver, looking slightly worried, switched off the ignition then let the car roll back down the hill. We heard a big crunch at which point Sambhu and the driver got out, looked at each other anxiously then looked at the front wheels. After a minute of so, they got back in the car and started the engine and we were on our way. Next, we found ourselves on a huge sheet of ice confronted with a deep but narrow river to cross. I looked out the window and could see the flow of water under the thin ice that our 4x4 was now parked on. I closed my eyes while the driver slowly backed up to find another route across. We made it, but it was getting dark at this point and the next trial was traversing the side of a hill on a very fragile, narrow dirt track with a sheer drop on one side. Rich looked petrified when I glanced across at him but, again, we made it. Each small settlement we saw in the distance we hoped was Tingri and the third one turned out to be the right one.
What a huge relief.
Tingri turned out to be no better than the Rongphu. The first guesthouse we arrived at looked quite cosy as we sat by the stove and sipped weak tea. We'd just started to look at the menu when the Sambhu got up and declared that we weren't staying there. There was a very strange atmosphere and I don't know what was going on but we were bundled back in the jeep and drove next door to the neighbouring guesthouse. All very strange. We were shown our 'room' and our hearts sank. It was rotten. I'd seen cleaner stables and it was dark and freezing. The only heat and light came from a 40 watt light bulb that got progressively dimmer as the evening wore on. After having some very dubious looking 'chicken' curry and veg momos, Sambhu told me that we may encounter some problems on the road the next day as they are resurfacing it and it doesn't open until 8pm. I thought he might be exaggerating and tried not to think too much about it. I slept in all my clothes that night, trying to keep warm in a sleeping bag, tightly wrapped in a smelly damp quilt and grubby blanket. We couldn't wait to leave the next day. There was no chance of a shower as the corrugated iron 'door' was locked for the winter and I had to hold my breath as I used the stinking toilet before we left.
A quick cup of tea heated up on the stove fuelled by yak dung and we hit the road to Zhangmu, the Tibetan/Nepali border. I didn't look back but I just managed to catch sight of one of the numerous stray dogs, whose back legs had given out, shuffling itself along using it's front legs and dragging it's arse along the ground with its back legs tucked forward like some pathetic impression of a gymnast. It was pitiful.
A few hours into our journey and we reached a town called Nyalam. The driver hopped out with Sambhu at the checkpoint and then informed us that the road is indeed closed and we were not allowed to pass until 8pm that evening. Even the bribe of a packet Tibetan fags couldn't persuade the gatekeeper. It was 1pm at this point so we decided to stop for lunch and decide what to do. Sambhu suggested that we start walking and he and the driver would catch us up when they could. It was 30km to Zhangmu so we were a little apprehensive about starting the walk along a largely unmade road with the possibility of it getting dark before seeing the car again. However, we bit the bullet and set off. It was not a choice we regretted as the scenery was absolutely breathtaking. It was all downhill so not too tiring and we passed numerous waterfalls, some of them frozen,
tree lined valleys and gushing streams. We walked for five and a half hours and made the entire 30km. Absolutely knackered, we sat on a rock as it got dark around us and waited for the car. It arrived fifteen minutes later and soon after we were taken to our final Tibetan hotel. It was another bitter disappointment. Firstly, despite asking for a twin room we were put in a dormatory with five filthy looking beds lined up around a cold stark room. There were no showers which was a real blow as we were cold and caked in dust from the long walk and the toilet was a hideous squat type toilet with no light. The only hot water was delivered by thermos flask and we had to wash in a washing up bowl in the corner of the room. Neither of us could be bothered to go out for food so we just climbed into our beds and fell fast asleep. That was until Sambhu, obviously relieved at safely delivering us to our final destination, came back to the hotel rip-roaringly drunk and shouting at the top of his Tibetan voice. God knows what he was saying but the driver was obviously trying to calm him down. Eventually peace returned and we all slept through til the next morning.
Sambhu looked really rough, and a little embarrassed the next day. I told him that he sounded like he'd enjoyed himself the previous night and I'm sure he squirmed a little. Ha ha ha...
We made it through the border to Nepal and I was glad that we were heading to a decent hotel after the previous two tough nights. After the usual struggle to get a taxi for a decent fixed price we were shown to a car that looked like it wouldn't make it to the end of the road, let alone more than 100km to Kathmandu. Rich and I kicked the dilapidated back wheel and looked at the driver suspiciously. We were told there was a spare wheel and it was OK. Reluctantly we got into the car. Two hours later the driver stopped at a puncture repair place and got the attendant to stick yet another patch over the knackered inner tube of the bald spare wheel. It was farcical but turned out to be very prophetic as an hour later the back wheel that we'd regarded with such suspicion got a puncture and had to be replaced with the even more knackered looking spare.
Luckily, we made it to Kathmandu and checked into a decent hotel. Only one major snag with this though, the electricity is switched off for several hours a day in Kathmandu as there is not enough to go around. I'm sitting here in the hotel room writing this in dim, flickering light, powered by the hotel's generator. With a bit of luck, the power may come back on at 8.30pm. Or it may not...
Who know's?
After the first night there we had breakfast on the rooftop restaurant which had a fantastic view of the sun rising over the mountains that surround Lhasa as well as The Potala which is the winter palace of The Dalai Lama. It sounds idyllic but actually it was bitterly cold and we sat there shivering despite having thick coats on. Expecting a nice cooked breakfast we were encouraged by the sounds of cooking coming from the kitchen and the brilliant flashes of yellow light quickly followed by a "Whoosh" as whatever was being fried burst into flames. We were then presented with some cooked potato and chillies, a couple of cremated eggs and a huge pile of crispy bacon. It looked OK but by the time they'd bought it the short distance from the kitchen to the table it was stone cold. The only thing that stayed warm was the toast but it filled a gap.
This set us up for a bracing walk down to The Potala and what surprised me was the sheer number of pilgrims following their daily walk around the Kora. There was a complete mixture of
people, old and young and some of them were even prostrating themselves along the entire route. The Potala is build upon a huge lump of rock that dominates the West end of Lhasa and walking up the stairs to reach the palace is quite tough, especially when short of breath from the high altitude but it's worth the effort. The inside walls and ceilings are all painted in brilliant yellows, reds, blues and greens and in the bright, clear light of winter the colours just glow. Each of the chapels and tombs are adorned with Buddhas and lit by burning yak butter, filling the air with a comforting yet slightly sickly aroma. The light from the buttery candles made the gold covered tombs shine and the flickering of the light enhanced the serene feeling that filled the place. The only thing that spoiled it were the shocking charges the monks were imposing for taking pictures inside the place. It was outrageous so we didn't bother.
We continued wandering around Lhasa for a couple of days taking in all it had to offer. The Jokhang Temple was stunning, especially the climb onto the roof where you could get a good view of the square below and see the worshippers doing their thing. The Renpoche Monastery was also a real treat, though I couldn't help feeling a little guilty when our guide, Sambhu, started hammering on a closed temple door only for it to be opened by a weary looking monk that eventually let us in. It wasn't the monk I felt sorry for, but the other locals that had the door firmly shut in their faces after we'd entered. I guess we did pay a lot for the ticket though and the locals get in for free.
Regardless of how much I loved Lhasa, there was definitely an air of tension in the city. Guarding all the little alleyways leading into the old town were dozens of Chinese soldiers armed with guns ready to fire rubber bullets at anyone that posed a threat to the peace. As well as those, soldiers and police strutted around with big wooden batons which must have antagonised the Tibetans even further.One thing about Sambhu was that he loved his sweet tea. In the first place he took us to we sat down next to a group of very excitable Tibetan women who were obviously very curious about us. Rich delighted them by taking pictures of them which generated shrieks of laughter. The next time we had tea, in a Buddhist nunnery, I though I'd take some pictures of the other customers myself. This wasn't appreciated so gratefully and the old woman that I was pointing my camera at held her thumb to her throat and slid it across from one side to the other and looked at me with a "just you dare" sort of look. I put my camera down and avoided anymore eye contact with anyone.
After our couple of days in
Lhasa, we were then driven to Gyantse. On the way there I was stunned to see a man standing in a field, surrounded by sheep with his trousers down. All sorts of things went through my head but I'm sure there was a perfectly rational explanation. The town is small with a big monastery and the best thing there was the Kumbum which is a huge stupa with 77 chapels built into it and apparently 10000 murals. I somehow doubt that number but there were an awful lot of paintings and statues to see. Needless to say, we didn't stop to look at them all but what we did see was very impressive. There's also a great view of Gyantse from the top.To kill some time we had a little walk around the town before settling down for the evening. It
was a very grim place, partly due to the thick, sandy dust that coated everything but mainly due to the trio of dead dogs we saw lying in the park with their teeth exposed and 'snarling' in almost comic fashion. One of the best views in the town was that of the Old Fort at the top of the hill. It could be viewed from 'dead dog park' but the Chinese authorities, in their infinite wisdom, decided to stick a great big, ugly monument in front if it which really spoilt the otherwise pleasant viewing spot. Typical and arrogant.The toilets in Tibet are possibly the worst we've seen to date. Often they are just a hole in the ground with a couple of planks suspended over it forming somewhere to stand. Other times there is no hole, it's just a platform suspended over the side of a hill. In all cases they stink to high heaven and even the locals must hate them because on many occasions we saw men just urinating anywhere on the street in exactly the same way a badly trained dog might do. It's apparently not that unusual for long skirted women just to squat down in the road and relieve themselves either. I suppose the skirt retains some sense of dignity. This wasn't just limited to adults either; I couldn't understand why so many kids were wandering around with the seam in the backs of their trousers split open, but I guess as it's so cold they could just stop what they were doing, do their business then continue their games without the hassle of nappies or getting undressed. It sort of makes sense, but still just seems wrong. Thinking about it, maybe the sheep farmer I saw on the way was just emptying his bladder...
After Gyantse, we drove to Shigatse which is the second largest town in Tibet. On arrival, Rich and I had a walk around the town again to see what it had to offer. Butchery is obviously a big thing here with yak and goat heads in big demand given the number of them we saw for sale. I asked Sambhu about them who told me that they are a big delicacy and quite delicious once all the hair has been singed off and then cooked (the head, not the hair). He doesn't like it though - can't imagine why. The main attraction here is the Tashilhunpo Monastery and it's a real beauty. It's a huge site and has traditionally been the seat of the Panchen Lama, probably the second most important person in Bhuddism after the Dalai Lama. One of the highlights here was seeing the young monks gathering in their ceremonial robes of crimson and yellow, getting ready to go and pray. Most of them were no older than about 15 and were behaving like naughty school children until an older monk bought them into line. Once they started chanting it was great to see, then they all filed off into an assembly hall to continue their prayers. All that was left were dozens of pairs of crimson boots that the boys had shed before leaving.The next day was really exciting, after a breakfast of cold oily cabbage, raw oily potatoes and warm greasy spam, we continued our drive along the Friendship Highway to Everest Base Camp. It was a long drive, but I loved every moment of it, even seeing a man on his motorbike with a skinned, slaughtered sheep riding pillion. The scenery was absolutely beautiful and our first glimpse of Mount Everest bought a huge grin to both of our faces. Continuing along the
Gyatso-La Pass bought quick increases in altitude as we wound our way up and over mountain ranges. The views of the Himalayas were breathtaking.
Eventually, we reached Everest Base Camp and were blown away by the clear, unadulterated view of Mt. Everest or Mt. Chomolangma as the Chinese call it. We couldn't have had a clearer day and we were the only ones there! I was expecting the base camp to be full of tents housing groups of intrepid explorers and their Sherpas all decked out in Gore-tex hiking gear and clasping oxygen masks to their faces. It was nothing like that, there was a grotty toilet block, a couple if deserted tin huts, lots of prayer flags and a view to die for. We clambered up the hill to get a better view and at this point I tied a string of prayer flags to the others already fluttering in the freezing air. That was in memory of my Dad as he'd loved to have known I had been there.Eventually, we tore ourselves away and drove to Old Tingri to stay the night. We were due to stay at the Rongphu Monastery which is quite close to the base camp but were told that it would be too cold as they have no heating there. A terrifying drive followed where we didn't stick to any road in the conventional sense, but followed a rough dirt path usually used for trekking. We were worried that night was closing in at this point and thinking that if anything had happened to the car we'd have been stuffed because nobody was around for miles. The car, at one point, lurched up an icy hill and then started wheel spinning before the engine cut out. The driver, looking slightly worried, switched off the ignition then let the car roll back down the hill. We heard a big crunch at which point Sambhu and the driver got out, looked at each other anxiously then looked at the front wheels. After a minute of so, they got back in the car and started the engine and we were on our way. Next, we found ourselves on a huge sheet of ice confronted with a deep but narrow river to cross. I looked out the window and could see the flow of water under the thin ice that our 4x4 was now parked on. I closed my eyes while the driver slowly backed up to find another route across. We made it, but it was getting dark at this point and the next trial was traversing the side of a hill on a very fragile, narrow dirt track with a sheer drop on one side. Rich looked petrified when I glanced across at him but, again, we made it. Each small settlement we saw in the distance we hoped was Tingri and the third one turned out to be the right one.
What a huge relief.
Tingri turned out to be no better than the Rongphu. The first guesthouse we arrived at looked quite cosy as we sat by the stove and sipped weak tea. We'd just started to look at the menu when the Sambhu got up and declared that we weren't staying there. There was a very strange atmosphere and I don't know what was going on but we were bundled back in the jeep and drove next door to the neighbouring guesthouse. All very strange. We were shown our 'room' and our hearts sank. It was rotten. I'd seen cleaner stables and it was dark and freezing. The only heat and light came from a 40 watt light bulb that got progressively dimmer as the evening wore on. After having some very dubious looking 'chicken' curry and veg momos, Sambhu told me that we may encounter some problems on the road the next day as they are resurfacing it and it doesn't open until 8pm. I thought he might be exaggerating and tried not to think too much about it. I slept in all my clothes that night, trying to keep warm in a sleeping bag, tightly wrapped in a smelly damp quilt and grubby blanket. We couldn't wait to leave the next day. There was no chance of a shower as the corrugated iron 'door' was locked for the winter and I had to hold my breath as I used the stinking toilet before we left.
A quick cup of tea heated up on the stove fuelled by yak dung and we hit the road to Zhangmu, the Tibetan/Nepali border. I didn't look back but I just managed to catch sight of one of the numerous stray dogs, whose back legs had given out, shuffling itself along using it's front legs and dragging it's arse along the ground with its back legs tucked forward like some pathetic impression of a gymnast. It was pitiful.
A few hours into our journey and we reached a town called Nyalam. The driver hopped out with Sambhu at the checkpoint and then informed us that the road is indeed closed and we were not allowed to pass until 8pm that evening. Even the bribe of a packet Tibetan fags couldn't persuade the gatekeeper. It was 1pm at this point so we decided to stop for lunch and decide what to do. Sambhu suggested that we start walking and he and the driver would catch us up when they could. It was 30km to Zhangmu so we were a little apprehensive about starting the walk along a largely unmade road with the possibility of it getting dark before seeing the car again. However, we bit the bullet and set off. It was not a choice we regretted as the scenery was absolutely breathtaking. It was all downhill so not too tiring and we passed numerous waterfalls, some of them frozen,
tree lined valleys and gushing streams. We walked for five and a half hours and made the entire 30km. Absolutely knackered, we sat on a rock as it got dark around us and waited for the car. It arrived fifteen minutes later and soon after we were taken to our final Tibetan hotel. It was another bitter disappointment. Firstly, despite asking for a twin room we were put in a dormatory with five filthy looking beds lined up around a cold stark room. There were no showers which was a real blow as we were cold and caked in dust from the long walk and the toilet was a hideous squat type toilet with no light. The only hot water was delivered by thermos flask and we had to wash in a washing up bowl in the corner of the room. Neither of us could be bothered to go out for food so we just climbed into our beds and fell fast asleep. That was until Sambhu, obviously relieved at safely delivering us to our final destination, came back to the hotel rip-roaringly drunk and shouting at the top of his Tibetan voice. God knows what he was saying but the driver was obviously trying to calm him down. Eventually peace returned and we all slept through til the next morning.Sambhu looked really rough, and a little embarrassed the next day. I told him that he sounded like he'd enjoyed himself the previous night and I'm sure he squirmed a little. Ha ha ha...
We made it through the border to Nepal and I was glad that we were heading to a decent hotel after the previous two tough nights. After the usual struggle to get a taxi for a decent fixed price we were shown to a car that looked like it wouldn't make it to the end of the road, let alone more than 100km to Kathmandu. Rich and I kicked the dilapidated back wheel and looked at the driver suspiciously. We were told there was a spare wheel and it was OK. Reluctantly we got into the car. Two hours later the driver stopped at a puncture repair place and got the attendant to stick yet another patch over the knackered inner tube of the bald spare wheel. It was farcical but turned out to be very prophetic as an hour later the back wheel that we'd regarded with such suspicion got a puncture and had to be replaced with the even more knackered looking spare.
Luckily, we made it to Kathmandu and checked into a decent hotel. Only one major snag with this though, the electricity is switched off for several hours a day in Kathmandu as there is not enough to go around. I'm sitting here in the hotel room writing this in dim, flickering light, powered by the hotel's generator. With a bit of luck, the power may come back on at 8.30pm. Or it may not...
Who know's?
Monday, December 08, 2008
Day 156 - Lhasa, Tibet
Saturday 6 December.
The trip to the panda breeding centre was really good. We arrived there just about feeding time so we got so see them languidly tucking into some delicious looking bamboo. (Excuse my use of the word "languidly" but I know my mate Jack will appreciate it.) The weather, as usual in Chengdu, was a horribly overcast and misty day, the air thick with the output from countless industrial districts and so the light wasn't that good for photographing these brilliant animals. It was great fun watching them though as they reclined on their more than ample arses and delicately stripped the more tender bamboo leaves from the branches. Some of them seemed painfully shy and appeared to be deliberately avoiding our camera lenses. It was much like that old Kit-Kat advert where the bloke waits hours for the pandas to do something and as soon as he turns his back to "have a break, have a Kit-Kat" the panda starts swishing around on a pair of roller skates and doing acrobatics. I bet they did that to us, too. The best thing about the visit was seeing the baby pandas. Only a couple of months old they were about the size of large teddy-bears and infinitely cuter. One of them, my favourite, just layed flat on its stomach with its arms and legs splayed out like one of those animal skin rugs. It only got slightly animated when another of its furry friends clumsily fell onto it. They were absolutely adorable but we weren't allowed to take photos of those. It turns out that you could pay ¥100, if you felt so inclined, to have your picture taken holding one of the little cuties. Shameless racketeering, but not that unusual.
The next day we took a trip to Leshan to see the giant Buddha. The guesthouse we were staying at runs trips there but it costs about 60 quid to hire a car for the day. Probably feasible in a big group to share the cost but we fancied going it alone. We took the long distance bus to Leshan then a local bus to the Buddha. It was a bit of an adventure as travelling by bus in China always is but we made it there. We even managed to book a little boat trip to go and see it
from the river where you get a fantastic view of it in all its giant glory, plus you get to see the two guardians either side of it which you can't see from the land. Starting in AD 713, the Buddha took over 91 years to build and is carved out of the cliff face. It is 71m high (over 210ft) and its ears alone are 7m long. It is very, very impressive. We climbed down the steps to look up at it from his toenails and it just dwarfs everything around it. A Buddhist monk called Haitong started the building process, originally thinking that the Buddha would calm the rapid waters and protect the fishermen from the dangerous currents of the nearby river. It worked, not from any divine influence, but from the sheer amount of rubble, rock and silt that was dumped into the river, filling the hollows and therefore calming the turbulent water. It's a miracle!
All in all, our full day trip including transport and entrance fees cost about half of what the guesthouse's tour would've cost. Plus it was more fun. Bargain.
On Friday we just faffed around Chengdu for a bit visiting the monastery and various tombs and temples. The monastery was a lovely place to see, monks scurried around urgently, sweet smelling incense filled the air and worshippers said their prayers in front of the numerous images of Buddha. It was so calm and serene, a great place to escape the depression of the ugly, grey city. The only disappointing part of the place was the little garden out the back, or more
specifically the "free life pond" which was the main feature. It consisted of a large pool, green with thick algae and numerous dead fish floating around in it. Even the turtles seemed afraid to wallow in it as most of them were trying to escape onto a nearby island. The ones that weren't fleeing the murky mire looked suspiciously inactive. I think maybe the name was translated incorrectly and should have been "free of life pond". It was pretty stagnant.
Our last meal in Chengdu was a local, Sichuan speciality called Hotpot. Now, to most of us, this conjures up cosy images of Betty Turpin dishing up a Lancastrian confection of lamb chops, carrots and onions stewed under a thick layer of sliced potatoes. No such luck. This particularly fiery potion was a huge vat of dark oil infused with chillies, peppercorns, chillies, garlic, chillies, ginger, chillies, lemon grass and more chillies. This fearsome cauldron was then placed over a gas burner in the middle of our table where it bubbled and boiled scarily in front of us. We then dipped slivers of raw pork, beef, potatoes and dumplings into it where it fizzed and cooked within econds. The first taste was like holding a blowtorch to your tongue, but once your mouth was sufficiently numbed from the Sichuan chilli's effect, it became quite delicious. The idea was to dip the oily cooked morsels onto a further bowl of sesame oil infused with garlic (more than I would use in a dish for 8 people!!), coriander, salt, sugar, vinegar and oyster sauce. There was loads of food and we couldn't eat it all, particularly since it was so greasy but I think it's more of a novelty than a gastronomic delight. More so for the staff in that they had a couple of useless Westerners in their restaurant who didn't have a clue. At one point we had six members of the crew fussing over us, letting out squeals of delight each time I tried fishing out a slippery dumpling with my chopsticks and failed. Miserably.
Back at the hotel we were happy to recieve our permits for Tibet and collect our luggage ready for the train. I sat down on the sofa while we waited for our transport and one of the two kittens that had been wandering around the restaurant came and parked himself on my lap. It was really cold so neither of us complained about sharing our warmth with each other though I think the scrawny little kitten got the better deal.
We'd been shopping earlier to stock up on snacks and instant noodles for the journey. Groaning under the weight of our booty, we were then presented with a big bag of fruit and biscuits for the trip by Sim, the owner of the guesthouse. A really nice touch.
It's Saturday afternoon now and we've been on the train to Lhasa for 16 hours already. Only another 29 hours to go. We're now at the point where 2 days on a train is barely an inconvenience, it's more of a chance to rest and catch up on some reading.
Sunday 7 December.
About 40 hours have passed now and we've ascended to 4560m above sea level. So far, only mild symptoms of altitude sickness are affecting us; runny noses, slight dizziness and shortage of breath, etc. The true test will be when we reach Lhasa and have to carry our heavy rucksacks for any distance. It was a little bit worrying when the train's carriage attendant knocked on the door last night and issued us each with oxygen canulas to plug into the O2 supply. Donning it
made me look like someone out of one those Government commercials warning of the risks of smoking. Speaking of which, though these carriages are supposed to be non-smoking it doesn't seem to stop the locals. I just hope they're not using their oxygen at the same time
otherwise the there'll be a terrible mess.
20:29
Arrived safely in Lhasa and our guide met us outside the station, they used to be able to go right to the platform and meet their punters, but not any more. He seems a nice enough chap, speaks good English without an American accent and is not one if these wide-boy tour guides like a lot of them.
We went for a meal tonight in a local restaurant. Rich thought he'd be adventurous and order some Tibetan stuff but hated it and went hungry instead. I enjoyed my yak momos and tenthuk though!
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Day 150 - Chengdu, China
Seventeen hours on that last train, followed by five hours on a bus and then two more subsequent bus rides and we made it to Dali. Struggling onto packed local transport with a huge backpack and no clue where you're going is not for the feint hearted, we could barely move on the bus and the best you can hope for is to be carried along towards the exit door by the ripple of other people clamouring to get on or off. Somehow though, we made it and it was worth the hassle. Dali is a beautiful little town located in the Yunnan province of China and it nestles in a wide valley between two huge mountain ranges. On the first night we were both pretty exhausted from the travelling so headed to the nearest and most decent looking restaurant. It was the first time that either of us had really felt cold since starting this leg of the travelling so we were sitting there in jumpers and coats while the restaurant staff lit a little stove to heat up the place. It was really cosy. We sat by the window watching the world go by and it was nice to see that the town had retained a sense of the traditional in that many of the locals were dressed in very traditional clothing. While I was staring out of the window, two of the richly dressed women wandered by and started signalling to me. I then realised that they were asking me if I wanted to buy hashish! I was quite shocked as they weren't young either, these were respectable looking, middle aged women. Their costume must have been some sort of calling card because almost everyone that offered us drugs was dressed like this. I suppose it makes it easy to sniff out that stuff if you're into it but they were so blatant about it, they even tried selling it to us when there was a police car cruising behind them.
The mountains are pretty scenic around this area and one of the days here we took a cable car up to one of the lower peaks. It only cost a few quid and it was one of the best cable car rides that I've been on. A slow, twenty minute cruise over the tree tops took us as far up the mountain as we could have walked in two hours and there we were dropped off at a convenient point to follow the trail to the downward cable car. Eleven and a half Kilometres we walked and it took us a little over two and a half hours; the guide book says to allow four and a half so we obviously walk fast. A student sort of latched onto us at the end of the walk and we thought we would never get rid of him. He obviously wanted to practice his English on us, as so often happens here, but fortunately we managed to ditch him once we descended from the mountain. We did see him again in Dali but he was scooting off to somewhere else and luckily didn't have time to talk other than to wish us well on our travels. He was another one of those weird Asian types that insisted on having his picture taken with us. I'm wondering just how many photo albums around the world that I'm going to appear in now as it always seems to happen wherever we stop.
We booked a bus from Dali to go to Lijiang which was a three hour nightmare because of the bad Chinese television that they insisted on showing plus two brain-dead, bleach-headed Chinese girls that stank of the previous nights booze and chattered like two demented parakeets for the whole journey. At one point they both lit up cigarettes (on this non-smoking bus) and the driver yelled something at them at which point they both scurried to the back of the bus and started devouring a big bag of monkey nuts. I chuckled to myself when one of them, obviously after over-indulging, took herself to the loo and started honking up. There's justice. She was very quiet when she came back out and she didn't look half as cocky as she had earlier.
Lijiang is another wonderful place. The actual city is pretty big and not that attractive, but the old town is a real treat. It's all no higher than two stories and very traditional to look at. Much of it was destroyed in an earthquake quite recently and was rebuilt, but it was all done very sympathetically and, for a Chinese place, it's quite tasteful. Wandering around the old town you're pretty much guaranteed to get lost as it's a rambling maze of cobbled streets criss-crossed by small waterways and streams. Rich was ill for most of the time we were there so I spent the first day wandering around the town myself and trying to suss out a decent place to eat that evening. The next day we took a walk to The Black Dragon Pool Park which is supposedly THE place to go and take photos of the snow mountain reflecting in the lake's clear waters. However, the sky was really cloudy that day so we didn't see any mountain. Shame for Rich, but at least I got to see it the previous day. As Rich was feeling a little better by Sunday we decided to book a trip to Tiger Leaping Gorge, well, we couldn't come to this part of China and not see it. The drive there was by minibus and I think both of us were feeling a little nervous after our previous near-encounter with a cliff edge, but the driver turned out to be pretty good and kept to the speed limits most of the time. The morning was quite cloudy and overcast again and so the drive there was pretty bleak. The only real colour that we saw were huge bunches of chilli peppers and corn cobs drying in the cool air. We got to the gorge and after a fairly decent lunch we managed to walk 
along the path that had been blasted out of the side of the mountain. It was a good few kilometres, but by this time the sun was shining and there was a fantastic blue sky against which the white rock of the mountain stood in stark contrast. Apparently, the gorge got it's name by an old story that a tiger once leapt across the rapidly flowing river firstly by jumping onto a big boulder and then across to the other side. It must have been a pretty impressive tiger to have managed that. The drive back was even more spectacular as we got a great view of the snowy mountains which are the highest peak of the gorge and since the sky was so blue it made the yellowing leaves on the trees and the red of the earth stand out to brilliant effect. It was a riot of primary colours and showed the countryside at its best.
We're now in Chengdu after having caught a flight from Lijiang and it's a pretty grim place. The whole place is covered in a thick coating of grime and the air is thick with a polluted fog that makes everything look grey. 
We went for a walk this afternoon and the only interesting things I saw were strings of sausages hanging from the same line as someone's washing effectively being 'smoked' in the fuggy air. We got a bit depressed that we have to stay here until at least Friday (4 days) until we can head to Tibet. We spent the morning booking our trip to Tibet and, since the riots back in April, it has now become even more restrictive to foreigners than ever before. We knew that one of the rules of going to Tibet is that you have to join a tour, which can consist of only one person if necessary, and once you've got your permit to enter you could pretty much abandon that tour and travel fairly independently. That's not the case now. You still have to join a tour, but as well as that you have to employ a guide to accompany you throughout your stay in Tibet. This makes things really expensive as well as restrictive because you also have to provide a full itinerary which the guide will follow. We've got a couple of days booked in Lhasa and will be taking the train there from Chengdu so we can try and acclimatise to the altitude. If either of us gets ill though, I'm not sure what we'll do; I guess we'll just have to take some of this dodgy Chinese medicine and plough on with the schedule hoping for the best.
Tomorrow we're planning on going to the giant panda breeding centre which should be pretty good. Luckily we've missed the 'falling in love period' when the park closes to give the pandas a little privacy, but I'm hoping to see lots of little baby ones.
We've been in China for about two weeks now and though I've really enjoyed it, I am looking forward to moving on to somewhere else. China has some amazing places to see but there are some things that I won't miss. Firstly, everything in China is REALLY LOUD. People shout all the time, especially on their mobile phones. Their mobile phones always ring at the loudest level possible and for some reason the people just stare blankly at the screen for ages before answering it. Bus horns are loud enough to shake you out of your skin and since they use them incessantly on busy roads your nerves are frazzled by the time you've reached your destination. The worst thing though is the spitting. Chinese men in particular, but not exclusively, love to spit. It's not just a gentle ejection of a little bit of spittle to clear one's throat, but a full gut-wrenching, nasal passage clearing, lung-straining hoik that is loud enough to warn ships at sea in heavy fog. It's disgusting and they do it all the time. Even on our flight here to Chengdu, all you could hear over the droning of the engines was this constant gobbing and rattling as their abandoned load hit the bottom of their sick bags. Utterly vile.
This guesthouse that we're staying in is probably the most backpacker style place that we've been in since all of the travelling. It's fairly basic but comfortable and the helpfulness of the staff more than makes up for its lack of style. The only worry that I have is that when coming up the stairs there are big blobs of plaster missing and cracks in the walls exposing shattered brickwork. Beneath this is a sign telling us not to worry about it, it's just damage caused by the last earthquake and they're not going to get it repaired as there are still aftershocks going on. If you don't hear from me again, you may find me under a pile of rubble where Sim's Cosy Guesthouse once stood.
Bye for now!
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