The Lead Line

James?

2012-01-31T01:35:00.002+11:00

A lady approached me in the cafe as I was writing and sipping coffee.

"Hello," she said. "Are you James?"

"Yes," I said. "Nice to meet you!"

My name is not James.

She sat down and rattled off anecdotes of professional sound and lighting troubles, and I nodded and laughed and said "yes" a lot. Finally she said to me: "Do you have any ideas?"

"No, I'm sorry," I said. "I'm not James."

Silence. Long, perplexed look, wheels turning. She coughed the first syllable of a laugh and then returned to the turning wheels before proffering a tentative: "but... you said your name was James."

"I thought it was," I said, and I got up and paid my bill.

Ória storm

2011-09-08T21:12:00.002+10:00

I had just finished lunch in a cafe in a grotto in Ória. I wasn't even planning to stop in Ória, but on my way to Ostuni I was enticed by the picturesque castle on the hill (and overpaid for a short and lame €5 tour in Italian of a pristinely drab restoration featuring replica chain mail and cloth hats). But the cafe in the cave at the bottom of the hill was curious and atmospheric with its low, rocky ceiling and dim lighting. A humourless waiter took my order and brought my food with solemn service, stooping in the cave like Igor serving his master.

I finished quickly. Stopping in Ória had put me behind schedule, so I had to get moving. I paid the bill and Igor crept away with my empty plates, silhouetted against the glass of the cafe door. As he climbed the steps out of the grotto—crash!—a heavy, Gothic thunderstorm struck. He stole a glance of crazed glee at me over his hunched shoulder and scurried around the corner. Trapped!

Torrents of water swept down the delta of the narrow stone lanes scoring the hillside. It culminated in a new inland sea, separating my car from me as I sheltered in this cave. I waited a bit for the storm to abate, but the thunder indicated other intentions, so at last I cast open the grotto door and fled out into the maelstrom. I was instantly soaked to the skin. Trying to keep my balance on the slippery marble paving, leaping channels and fording straits, I reached my car and dived in.

On the other side of the windshield some dark blobs with smeary lights drifted through a grey haze of pelting rain. I pressed the car forward. Driving in Italy is always a bit cat-and-mouse in dodgem cars, even when the visibility is good, and intersections are typically a case of picking your way around the other cars that are already in it. But I missed a stop sign as I entered this intersection and one of the blobs was suddenly upon me. I slammed the brakes and hydroplaned to a stop within inches of a prang. Italian drivers have a reputation of being insolent, or at least reckless, but the stereotype of Italian passions compared to Anglo stoicism is not borne out in Salentine traffic. The drivers in Salento are very courteous. As I sheepishly reversed out of his right of way, the other driver nonchalantly waved thanks to me for not actually hitting him.

Montenegrin pljeskavica

2011-09-01T00:10:00.000+10:00

Montenegro is cheap. I spent a fortune in Italy. Although Montenegro is de facto in the euro zone, its economy is not tied to the other euro zone nations; it simply adopted the euro unilaterally. This goes a small way to explaining why a half litre of beer in Montenegro costs €1.20 and three or four times that in Italy.

At a bar in Bar, I ordered an omelette. I just got off the ferry from Bari, Italy, and wanted some breakfast while waiting for the train to Podgorica. The waiter indicated in Serbian that they had no eggs. I really only ordered it because the word for omelette is omlet, one of only two words on the menu I could understand. Since the other was hamburger, I ordered that. He indicated they had no hamburgers. Off to a rollicking start, this breakfast. He recommended pljeskavica instead. "What's pljeskavica?" I asked, and he rattled off something in Serbian and made a shape with his hands. I shrugged and said, "okay." I was just hungry. When travelling, it makes things a lot easier to eat adventurously, and I'm not by nature a fussy eater. I was ready to try whatever Montenegrin cuisine had to throw at me.

The waiter brought me my pljeskavica. It was a hamburger.

Locked out

2011-08-18T13:54:00.016+10:00

A man in a uniform tapped me on the shoulder. "Are you still waiting?" he said, and pointed to the carousel. "All the luggage is out."

I can't say I was surprised. I rerouted my luggage in Istanbul so it would arrive in Sydney. The delay of my whitewater rafting trip meant I had to fly from Sarajevo, Bosnia, to rendezvous with my Istanbul flight. The Sarajevo to Istanbul leg was not included in my original itinerary, so my luggage had to be retagged for Sydney. It was my oversight—I should have explained this when I checked in in Bosnia—but I thought I resolved it when I spoke to the Turkish Airlines flight transfer desk in Istanbul. After all, both flights were with Turkish Air.

"Sir, you have two options," said the bloke at the transfer desk. "You can go out passport control"—he gestured to a deep and wide drove of bodies being herded through the barrier ropes like cattle at a feedlot—"collect your luggage from the carousel and check it onto your next flight...."

"Or?" I interrupted, already deciding on option number two.

"Or I can do it for you."

These are my options? Do I also have the choice to get my own meals on the plane? "So, you'll go out and collect my luggage, which is right now on the conveyor belt, and put it on the plane for me?"

"Yes sir. I'll take care of it myself."

"That's it? Great!" I said, pleased with this efficiency. "Teşekkür ederim!"

When I recounted this story to the lady at the lost baggage counter in Sydney, she said: "Don't believe them." She looked up lost baggage in Istanbul and, sure enough, my backpack was still there, I imagine circulating alone on a carousel in a deserted terminal. "It should get here in 48 hours."

All of this was really just a minor nuisance. After all, I was home. Except that when I got home, I realised my house keys were in my backpack.

@#$!

Stand by...

2011-08-17T17:16:00.000+10:00

What a shock to the system it is to return to "the real world" after seven weeks on the road. The Monster of Banality assaulted me with laundry, groceries and bills, and in the few frail moments of my escape I was trapped by the inexorable Tentacles of Television. This leaves me with still outstanding stories for this blog, including whitewater rafting, tendonitis, and navigating live minefields.

Stay tuned.

Injury

2011-08-03T10:18:00.001+10:00

I have had the most excruciating ache in my arm for the last two days, enough to keep me awake at night. I don’t normally take painkillers for headaches and such, but I’ve been popping Panadol to get some relief and attempt to sleep. The first night they didn’t seem to work, but I suppose without any Panadol at all it would have been worse. The only other time I was ever kept awake by pain is when I broke my wrist.

How did I do this? By holding my phone. In my room in Lecce I had to hold it against the wall to get a Wi-Fi signal, and I did emails and blogs and bookings for 45 minutes in that position. It is bizarre and ridiculous. It didn’t seem like anything at the time, but that’s what isolated pilates on one underused forearm muscle can do. I’ve been in agony.

And this just days before whitewater rafting.

Delayed broadcast

2011-08-03T10:08:00.001+10:00

I have a few more brief stories to tell, but I’m currently in Montenegro preparing to go camping and whitewater rafting for three days. Following this I make a lightning trip to Sarajevo to catch a flight to Istanbul (the rafting was delayed so I have to forgo Macedonia, Bulgaria, and even my Turkish hammam, damn it), and then I catch my flight home. I’ll round out the trip blog with all those stories (and whatever the rafting holds), but these will likely be after I get back to Sydney on August 8th.

Galatina

2011-08-03T09:55:00.001+10:00

Galatina’s Basilica di Santa Caterina has the most vivid frescoes I’ve ever seen, and for this fact alone I can’t understand why the town doesn’t draw more people. I went back twice to see them all. Galantina is a pleasant little town in its own right, but perhaps there just isn’t enough to keep tourists occupied. It is certainly quiet. So quiet, in fact, that between the hours of 12.30pm and 16.30pm it is actually closed.

I wandered within the small boundary of the old town for hours and found no one but a few stragglers. I was completely puzzled. I asked the guy at the hotel about it and he told me this is the region’s four-to-five-hour-long siesta. “It’s too hot to stay open.” I think it was about 28°C.

These hours are when I’m at my most mobile, exploring places I pass through, but everything in the small towns of Salento closes. Even the restaurants! I don’t know how people eat. Apparently they sleep. And when, starving, I find a place miraculously open at 3pm, they say lunch is over and they’re no longer serving food.

That night in Galatina I ate at one of the best restaurants on the entire trip – not because of the standard of the food, but because of the experience. I saw the sign for La Tana del Lupo in an alley near my hotel earlier in the day. When dinner time came, then, I walked straight in through the door and almost turned over tables, plates and guests. There were exactly four tables, one free, in a living room. There was a kitchen two paces away, I think there was a broom closet with a toilet in it, and that was it. There wasn’t even room for a menu. I sat down and the waiter (who is the cook’s husband) brought me bottled water and a stoppered bottle of rosé and asked me if I was very hungry or just a little. That’s the choice: apart from this, you get what you’re given. Which is wonderful southern Italian home cooking.

The living room had a vaulted ceiling, and the walls were filled with family photos, bottles of wine, pewter jugs, dried chilis, paintings, and shelves of curios and ornaments. Two families somehow fit at two of the other tables, and there was a solo bloke behind me in the corner. The animated husband moved between the tables and spoke to the diners, regaling everyone with funny stories (I assume, since everyone was laughing). He spoke a little broken English with me and I a little broken Italian with him, and then plates came: cold antipasto (pickled onions, zucchini and eggplant in olive oil, soft cheese), then hot antipasto (fritters of vegetables and a bacon-flavoured egg frittata), then handmade pasta shells in broccoli sauce (scuisito!), then veal meatballs in tomato sauce, and beef in jus. Dessert is watermelon, and then for aperitif I’m offered coffee or limoncello. I ask for the limoncello and am given a half-full corked glass bottle from the freezer of the bright yellow liquid, thick and alcoholic, and a shot glass. It would be all but impossible, especially after a litre of wine, but I could have sat and finished it if I wanted to. And all this for a flat €25. AND as I walked out the husband gave me a bottle of wine!

The Gallipoli landing

2011-08-01T07:45:00.000+10:00

I went back to my car and discovered another parking ticket. This, while other cars are parked over kerbs, on footpaths, across railroad tracks, and in shopfront windows. I don't own a car for reasons such as this. The train or the bus is mindless and stress-free. I’m going to make these tickets go away by ignoring them.

An old man past the age of retirement, who wrought what meaning he could from the remainder of his life by monitoring other people's parking, sat on a stoop in front of my ticketed car, waiting for me. He told me in Italian that there’s no parking here. “Si,” I drew out, mildly exasperated at the obviousness of the fact. The parking is in the port, he said. “Yes, I know, I know,” I said in English. You have to move your car, he said. “Look,” I said to non-understanding ears. “I’ve been ticketed. What do you want? For the carabinieri to take me out and shoot me?” You’ll get two tickets, he said. I looked at him. “Lei è polizia, si? No! So don’t bother me!” I wasn’t at all in the mood. Old prick.

Parking in Gallipoli is horrendous. Parking in shop windows and up chimneys requires a resident’s pass, and though copious free parking is provided at the port outside the island of the old city, inserting an entire car into a spot there is performing delicate keyhole surgery with a battering ram. Further out there are more car parks. These are also packed. You can find more full ones if you look, and if you keep going you can park in Lecce 20km away and walk back.

Gallipoli, Italy

2011-08-01T07:30:00.000+10:00

Italy has a Gallipoli as well, on the west coast of Puglia, and just as many Italians flock there in high season as Aussies do its Turkish namesake on Anzac Day. Arriving here in summer with no reservation is foolhardy, but I’ve done that everywhere for this entire trip and I’ve always been able to find something.

The bloke at the tourist information centre (who spoke no English) said it could be a problem when I told him I was looking for a room, but he rang around and after about five minutes a stout bloke with a waddle (who spoke no English) arrived. He led me through the winding streets to a mini-market selling vegetables and paper towels and cans of tomatoes. I thought: I’m sleeping among the produce? He passed me off to his wife behind the cash register (who spoke no English). She was a friendly lady but rattled off long Italian sentences and looked at me expectantly, even after I answered “no capisco, no parlo Italiano” every time. She plucked a bottle of water and a package of sheets from the shelf (they sell sheets?) and, smiling, led me out again through the winding streets.

Eventually I was taken to a clean and decent room with its own entrance up a flight of steps. She made the bed with the new sheets and gave me the bottle of water, all the time persisting with her rambling Italian from which I would recognise a word or two – “Street! Door! Key! Yes!” – and then we would look at each other and say, “uhh….” This went on until I was exhausted. “Thank you, shut up and goodbye!” I said and threw her down the stairs.

Litoranea & Specchia

2011-07-31T03:09:00.001+10:00

The Litoranea, a narrow and winding clifftop road on the coast bounded by stone walls that run for miles, took me down from Otranto through Porto Badisco, Castro, and on to San Maria de Leuca. The sea was steely and the sky was grey, and much of the way it rained heavily as I slalomed through roadside sprays of pink and white oleander and lush green trees, listening to Bronx River Parkway and Chris Joss. Cool.

In Leuca I tried to find a B&B recommended in my Lonely Planet, but was told by the waitress of the cafe which now occupies the building that it closed last year. However, she happened to run a B&B herself five kilometres out of town in Morciano, to which she gave me directions. Well, it was fifteen kilometres, not five, and the breeze-block town was depressing as hell, so I kept going until I hit a little town called Specchia. In the last hour of light I saw a sign for B&B Vento Solare. I rang the number and spent all my Italian enquiring if a room was available. After I concluded that it was, the conversation descended into: “Pronto.” “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” “Che? No capisco.” “Um… parla inglese?” “Dov’è lei?” Well, I found my way and found myself talking to the proprietress’ mother, who spoke no English, while I waited for the proprietress’ son to arrive, who did. She was very pleasant, but the conversation was stilted and agonisingly slow as I fumbled through my phrasebook, telling her that I’m here on holiday, that Salento is pretty, that her garden is pretty, that I am hungry. There’s nothing like necessity for learning quickly.

The next day I got a bloody €39 parking ticket in San Cesárea Terme. The municipal police in Salento prowl for tourists in the high season. I parked briefly in a lot clearly marked for parking but not for the need to purchase a ticket from the one hidden ticket machine. I was there for all of ten minutes while I was declined access to my money by a cash machine up the road.

Baia dei Turchi

2011-07-31T02:46:00.001+10:00

Just north of Otranto is the Baia dei Turchi, the Turkish Bay, with beautiful beaches concealed from the road. Sheltered from the hot sun, I entered a pleasant grove of sparse and tall pines and immediately came across a bloke in a makeshift roofless bamboo hut selling drinks and sandwiches. Next to him was another bloke in a hammock strung between two trees. After a few minutes walking the grove grows suddenly dense. I walked a worn dirt track through a tight green tunnel and emerged at a low cliff. Below me spread the long and narrow beaches, some with rows of fixed umbrellas made of dried palm fronds and others with scattered umbrellas of random colours, against turquoise water.

11

2011-07-30T05:51:00.001+10:00

Hanging a wrinkled shirt in the bathroom while you shower just results in a damp, wrinkled shirt.

The REAL top ten

2011-07-29T09:24:00.001+10:00

Allow me to let you in on a travel myth: rolling your clothes instead of folding them when you pack does not prevent wrinkles. Some travel writer just came up with this little gem to pad out a top ten list of travel tips, and it’s since become part of travel lore. Well it’s bullshit, and I am throwing down the gauntlet. I will buy a ticket to Milan to get a new shirt custom tailored for the first person to show me a shirt pulled from baggage rolled and wrinkle-free.

Here’s the real top ten travel tips:

Laundry. Fuck.
Eurail passes are a rip-off. It isn’t hard to buy a train ticket in Europe. It’s harder to buy a bloody lottery ticket. You still have to book a seat regardless. Just save your money.
Flying makes you fart. It does. The body is pressure-sealed (or your lungs would deflate) and just as your ears pop, so do your intestines. Everybody is either suppressing or releasing, which is either uncomfortable or embarrassing. And there’s nothing you can do. Just don’t eat sauerkraut or sit next to Germans.
You still need to do that laundry, and the hotel wants to charge you €4.50 for one shirt.
The next myth to be invented is the secret to stylish backpacking. I’ll preempt it: either travel with sherpas or prepare to look like a goose.
Mobile phone: use it sparingly just to book hotels and for emergencies. If you need to use it seriously, buy a pre-paid SIM card in the country you visit. And data over the air for your iPhone? Forget it. There is no affordable solution but to use Wi-Fi. Which is everywhere. Except Seville.
Your priority of transportation in Europe for comfort should be:
1. train
2. ferry
3. car
4. walk
5. dragged behind a tractor through blackberry briars and rose bushes
6. bus
Jet lagged? For crying out loud, you can put up without alcohol for 12 hours. Don’t drink on the plane. It’s a bitch for jetlag. Brits in particular are shocking for taking this as licence to get shit-faced. Drink water, all the time. And then when you arrive, don’t sleep until it’s dark. Next day: no jet lag. Voilà.
For every week, allocate half a day to doing laundry at a laundromat. Unless you’re in Greece, Turkey or southern Spain, where there are no laundromats because it’s so cheap just to drop it off and have it done.
Create a budget and stick to it. When you get back, you will have only spent triple. Be grateful.

Otranto, Italy

2011-07-29T09:10:00.004+10:00

A night ferry took me from the west coast of Greece to the heel of Italy, a country where at last I could at least fumble my way through the language. I had a a four-bed shared cabin booked (in fact, I had two; the previous one sailed while I was in Santorini), but I was the only one in it. High season in Europe is funny. It’s busy everywhere, except for little undiscovered pockets.

An eight-hour journey and a six-hour sleep got me to Brindisi at 7am, where I picked up a rental car and headed south. My first night was nearly spent in the car in Otranto, a popular destination on Puglia’s eastern coast, where six hotels turned me away. It was a Saturday and I didn’t have a reservation. I finally found a decent place with a room, the friendly Hotel Minerva, on a side street for €75. I showered and changed out of shorts and into jeans and wandered into the old town for dinner.

I was heading to a simple pizzeria by the Porta Terra which was recommended in my guidebook, but was arrested at the Piazza del Popolo by two guitarists, a female singer and some cool bossa nova. All passers-by were stopping to listen, lingering and applauding, and when a prime table was vacated just as I arrived I took it as a cue that this was where I should eat tonight. They were so good. I could have closed my eyes when they did The Girl From Ipanema and believed I was watching Antonio Carlos Jobim and João and Astrud Gilberto. The lead guitarist was a lefty, and not only did he play a right-handed guitar upside-down à la Jimi Hendrix, but it was strung upside-down as well, standard for a right-handed player, which means he deliberately learned all his chords and scales inverted! Very strange. And he was really good.

Otranto’s Spanish-built and sympathetically restored castle is today used as a gallery, where the next day I enjoyed a Salvador Dalí exhibit. I’m usually ambivalent about Dalí and the surrealist movement of the 1930s, but this was sculpture, etchings and sketches from later in his life.

Romania by proxy

2011-07-28T10:15:00.001+10:00

In Meteora I ran into a bloke from Romania. Then he got up, we exchanged addresses, and he told me his name was Neculai (Nicholas) and was also travelling alone. My Romanian is, of course, inferior par excellence, and being a gracious acquaintance I allowed him to practise entirely his English, which he learned from television. It sometimes took us forever to convey an idea but, bless him, without his efforts we would just have stared at each other. We saw two monasteries together and he encouraged me to flout the “no photography” rule until I was busted one too many times by the decent but exasperated monitor and slunk sheepishly away. He was driving across Greece in his car, which was also his kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, and parlour after dinner when he entertained me with music on his stereo and a bottle of cognac parked on the side of the road. I brought along a couple of beers and some Greek retsina, which neither of us have had before but concluded tasted like dirty hiking sock rinsewater. The cognac was lovely, though. Alexandrio, or something. Who knows. After cognac, beer and retsina, I was lucky to remember the way back to my hotel.

Delayed broadcast for your protection

2011-07-28T10:11:00.001+10:00

Running behind on the blog again, by five or six days. If anyone is friends with me on Facebook, my comments there are usually up to date, albeit brief. I also get a couple of photos up now and again.

Meteora

2011-07-28T00:23:00.001+10:00

The monasteries of Meteora in central Greece are built atop towering, sheer rocks. It's a marvel the medieval monks managed it, and it's testimony to their engineering skills. Originally 24 in number, the six monasteries that remain are well-preserved. Indeed, they are still occupied (and have surprisingly modern comforts—electricity, water, heating, and even elevators and small cable cars), though most of the week they are a tourist attraction rather than a place of contemplation. Each closes one day of the week in rotation to function as a monastery.

Busloads of tour groups would arrive and overwhelm the smaller cloisters. The larger ones absorbed them. Other tourists arrived by car, and some by public bus. Only one arrived by foot on the centuries-old stone paths winding through the forests at the foot of the towering rocks.

I visited three of the six monasteries and found exquisite frescoes in all. St. Nikolas, the smallest and least preserved, is the most charming. The main chapel has a fresco of Judgement Day with God at the top, heaven on the left, and on the right a river of fire and souls flowing down into the mouth of the devil, an enormous fanged serpentine creature.

Kastraki

2011-07-28T00:14:00.001+10:00

In Meteora, I stayed in the village of Kastraki. It has a clock tower. Some clocks play a simple melody on the quarter hour, but at 6.15pm, as I sat for an early dinner, the church bell rung just once. So at 6.30pm I expected the same. Instead, it rang for perhaps three full minutes with no melody (there is only one bell, harsh and sharp sounding) and with no discernible rhythm. It was what you'd expect to hear if you let loose in the bell tower a toddler with Herculean arms and a steel mallet. It was fast, loud, long and very annoying, and yet when I looked around at the locals whiling away the evening in the outside dining area, nobody batted an eye. This must be the demented half-hour chime of the Kastraki clock. At 6.45pm it does nothing at all, and at 7pm it simply tolls seven times.

Athens to Meteora

2011-07-24T19:31:00.000+10:00

The ferry from Santorini arrived past midnight and my train to Meteora was leaving at 8.30am. I spent eight hours in Athens. Five-and-a-half of those were in my hotel room and three of those in my hotel room bed. There was a later train, but the five-hour journey would get me into Meteora in the dark. Buses also drove the route throughout the day, but there is just no comparison to train travel.

From all that I've heard, the acropolis is about the only thing going for Athens, and in mid-July it's teeming in the humid heat with tourists. I abandoned plans to see it so that I could spend those two extra nights in Santorini, which sounds like complete folly, but, as much as I would like to stand in the agora where Socrates challenged his listeners to think, it's a decision I don't regret. I'll leave it for another trip. There is certainly reason to return to Greece.

And so at 6am, with insufficient sleep under my eyelids, I hauled myself out of bed, put away as much breakfast as my addled body could stomach, checked out of the Savoy Hotel, and was wheeled to the train station by my backpack.

The train into the shrub-studded mountains of central Greece passed through charming, unkempt rural stations, the sidings always loaded with ancient wooden cattle cars with boards missing and paint so peeled by the sun that they looked as if somebody had whittled them for tinder, feathering them with a knife so they'd take a spark. A man a few seats away gently whistled, tousling the string of prayer beads which so many Greek men carry. My carriage was less than half full, none of them tourists, all of them Greek and sharing casual comments with one another. It was a pleasant change after spending the last three weeks in major tourist spots.

We passed the only indication on my trip so far that Greece is in econominc troubles: a long stretch of modern highway half complete, a ribbon of clean new concrete spreading over compacted earth and supporting columns with sections of bridge missing, empty tunnels punched through hills, cranes standing idle, and the entire site deserted.

Leaving Santorini

2011-07-23T06:12:00.001+10:00

I was dragged away protesting by the bus from Oia and shuttled under duress to the awaiting Athens ferry. There I was treated to the strangest sight.

As the foot passengers queued to enter the gangways either side of the vehicle ramp, four men came scuttling out of the car deck. They were carrying what looked like someone on a stretcher, judging by the care with which they were handling the load, but it seemed too small and too heavy to be a person. As they approached, it came into view: strapped to a wooden pallet beneath a wet blanket was a giant sea turtle, alert and looking around with small head movements to assess the predicament he'd found himself in, which was no doubt as much a mystery to him as it was to any of us. The ferry stewards halted the queue of passengers and the turtle-burdened four conveyed the confused creature back into the ferry and disappeared up into the passenger decks. Maybe he had a first class cabin.

When all the aquatic reptiles and sea fauna carried on litters were comfortably aboard, we cattle charged up the stairs and spread through the vessel in a game of musical chairs, fastening ourselves to seats and then looking around and wondering if we should abandon this one for the really good one in the corner, chancing it, losing it, turning back and being foiled and charging up stairs to the next deck where perhaps better seats were counting down. The limited lounge areas that quickly swelled with bodies and backpacks were augmented with seating in a burger restaurant, Goody's, which attracted packs of holidaying teenagers. The only place to read a book or get any writing done was on the outside decks. Here there were plenty of seats, ingeniously designed for a Mediterranean ship to be an unbearable greenhouse: all perspex walls, plastic ceiling and airflow non-existent. Who would want fresh air on the open sea? It is clearly a clever ploy to drive you to upgrade your ticket for another €16.50 to access the cool, quiet, comfortable and civilised business class "distinguished lounge" on deck six, which is precisely what I did.

Impulse

2011-07-22T18:28:00.030+10:00

That night I reorganised my schedule for the following fortnight, an exercise which cost me €120 in abandoned bookings, and priced rooms in Oia. They averaged €220 a night. Ouch. This was going to be a hell of an expensive impulse. But, as I always reason, memories last a lifetime and the cost of things you forget.

I got lucky in the morning and found a villa with a private balcony and a luxury pool for €160. Rooms are often discounted when you turn up at the last minute. The risk, of course, is being turned away if they have no vacancy, but I was surprised to find quite a bit of availability, albeit peicemeal, in the high season.

So I had an unusual two-day vacation from my holiday, doing something I don't normally do: lounging poolside in the shade of an umbrella beneath a palm tree, reading a book and drinking beer (which, okay, I do). If I was going to do it, this was the place. A few couples and families joined me by the pool (I'm certain I was the only single person in all the Oia villas). Though we all spoke different languages there was a camaraderie of shared indulgence between us. When one couple laughed we all smiled, and there was a generous familiarity between us. I even got it, why people holiday like this.

Oia

2011-07-19T22:30:00.005+10:00

I missed the bus to Oia in the confusing Fira "bus station"—a parking lot with buses facing all directions and backing over waiting passengers—because the bus labelled "Oia" wasn't going to Oia at all. Bugger it, I thought, I'm going to rent a quad bike. Tourists zip all over the island on them and they looked like so much fun I was already tempted. And they're cheap: my excellent little hotel in Fira (San Giorgio Villas) connected me with a rental for €20 a day. It was a blast. I wound my way around the weaving, narrow road out to Oia at a top speed of 60kmh, which felt positively breakneck to me.

Fira, with its tall and narrow white-rendered stone lanes and view of the caldera, is spectacular. But Oia (pronounced "ee-ah") is breathtaking. Those photos you see of Santorini with the little blue-roofed churches in the cluster of brilliant white houses? They're all taken at Oia. Fira with its noisy clubs is party town for the kids. Oia is where the adults go.

I spotted a sign reading "Perivolas traditional houses" as I buzzed into town. That sounded like a good start. I turned off the road, parked the quad, and wandered along a stone footpath in the vividly hot Mediterranean sun. It snaked atop a tumble of whitewashed stone villas down the cliff with doors and windows of bright red or blue, past topless women and their bronzed men lounging under palms by luxury swimming pools, all overlooking the immense, sea-filled crater of the volcano far below. Oia is the kind of place that, when you see it, you abandon everything else. She is the siren of Santorini. I was so incredibly tempted to tear up my ticket to Athens for the following day and stay.

The tight barnacles of cafes, restaurants and hotels on the western point are kept supplied by men with fully-laden dollies, labouring up and down seams of long, meandering stone paths zippered together with broad steps that twist down the sea-facing cliffs, and every day trains of burdened donkeys tote the refuse all back out again.

Oia has a tenth of Fira's bustle. Here it was at the start of the high season in mid-July and it was completely chilled, except in the evening when the tourists arrived from Fira by the busload to see the famed sunset on the water. My advice to anyone visiting Santorini is to see Fira, but then get to Oia and stay there.

I did.

Greek in Japanese

2011-07-19T07:13:00.001+10:00

The bloke at the hotel recommends a few restaurants without a view of the caldera, the great volcanic crater filled with Aegean Sea, because those with a view are expensive. I appreciate that he’s trying to do me a favour, but what’s the point of coming all the way to Santorini and forgoing the view? I hunt out the most expensive restaurant I can find and order crayfish risotto with truffles and a bottle of pinot grigio.

It’s an early dinner—I didn’t have lunch, apart from a cheese pie on the ferry—and there’s only one other group on the restaurant terrace: three elderly Japanese men, all with short-brimmed drawstring cloth hats and cameras slung across T-shirts over long white spandex sleeves. They speak neither English nor Greek, yet manage in the most extraordinary way to order drinks.

“Chuwana coffee,” one says to the waiter, which rather sounds like someone’s had a lend of him.

“You want a coffee?” the waiter asks.

“Chuwana coffee,” he replies.

“D’you wanna coffee?”

“Chuwana coffee.”

“Chuwana coffee?”

“Chuwana coffee.”

Miraculously, they come in this way to an understanding that the man wants iced coffee. This waiter is good. Another orders: “iced tea, hot.”

“You want hot tea?”

“No, lemon.”

“Kampai?”

“Do you know city name?”

“This is classical Greek music.”

“What is city name?”

“My name is Sony.”

“Sony?!”

It is the most confusing conversation I’d ever eavesdropped on and yet everyone is good-natured and laughs and seems to get what they want, a round of iced coffees and teas. When they finish they rise to leave and, with much amused bewilderment, look for the waiter to pay the bill, calling: “Sony! Sony!”

Santorini (Thira)

2011-07-19T07:05:00.001+10:00

A procession of buses, rental cars, semi-trailer transport and minivans ferrying hotel passengers scales the sigma of switchbacks up the cliff face from Santorini harbour. I’m in one of the minivans. Collected from the ferry boat, I’m being taken to my hotel in Fira.

Fira is the capital of Thira, the Greek name for the island. Santorini, though predominant, is in fact the Italian name. In ancient times the capital city (acropolis) was Thira, now ruins. This all gets a little bit confusing to the non-Greek speaker, particularly as the Greek letter for F is Φ and the letter for the “th” sound is θ. It’s a good thing everybody speaks English.

I’ve been lazy with my language in Greece. So far I’ve only been to heavily touristed areas where English is the lingua franca, and there hasn’t been a need for me to consult my Greek phrasebook. Usually I make an effort anyway, but it involves learning another alphabet and, well hell, I’m also trying to learn bloody shorthand and I’ve got to give myself a break somewhere. But, in Rhodes and Santorini especially, there are more signs in English than there are in Greek. It’s abundantly clear that the industry is tourism. On the way into Fira we pass a restaurant with a sign reading: “Señor Zorba Mexican Restaurant—All you can eat BBQ ribs.” American tourism.

The Aegean

2011-07-18T19:52:00.005+10:00

I suspect it's a cliché to say it, but the colours of the Aegean waters are strikingly beautiful in their variety. It's remarkable that, if you were to dip a glass into the water at the shore and another in the middle of the vast sea, a substance of which two samples are identically transparent can vary in colour so dramatically from overlapping shades of peacock blue and turquoise at the beachside to the deep sea's lazuline cobalt at noon and purplish ultramarine at sunset.

Two hours after boarding the morning ferry to Santorini, Crete disappears. In every direction now the water meets the sky. To the west the firmament is a pale powder blue and to the east it’s almost white. Crete lies over the southern edge of the sea, betrayed only by a faint beige burst on the horizon of smog and ambient heat twisting and coiling into the sky like a daylight nebula.

Out in the middle of these two great unbroken hemispheres of blue we pass a solitary sailboat. Why does this amaze me? I’m sitting aboard a vessel which is the descendant of these very such craft which populated the Greek islands for millennia.

Crete

2011-07-18T19:52:00.003+10:00

I was only in Crete for two days, which seems very brief considering the 13-hour ferry ride to get there and the 5-hour ride to get away, but I wanted to see the remains of the Minoan civilisation. The Heraklion archaeological museum contains a Minoan collection second only to the national museum in Athens. It also, as I discovered, has been closed for five years for renovation. Lonely Planet needs to release an updated guide.

It does at least have a small but rich temporary exhibit open for €4 so I settled for what there was, which was very good. The following day was spent at the semi-reconstructed ancient Minoan palace complex of Knossos. It's just outside Heraklion and is justifiably its biggest tourist draw.

Beware of Greeks' beering gaffs

2011-07-18T19:52:00.001+10:00

Greeks can't pour beer. They don't tilt the glass. Then they stare in frustration at how a six-inch head formed and serve you half a glass of foam. In Australia they'd be tossed out of the pub by the patron.

Ablutions

2011-07-17T20:21:00.001+10:00

In Greece, the hotels insist you don’t throw your toilet paper in the toilet. On the islands so far, anyway. They provide a waste paper basket. Though I’ve had experience with septic tanks before – the reason for this practice, I assume – I’m still vaguely repulsed at the idea. The camp toilet on the Turkish relief ride was two foot-boards spanning a hole in the ground, and I somehow found that more coherent. When out of habit I mistakenly dropped a few squares of paper into my Cretan toilet I had nightmare visions of a sudden septic uprising in the middle of the night.

I’ve had a varied experience with bathing on this trip. I’ve had cold showers in the back of a caravan, swum in hot springs and splashed in cold springs, dipped in dams, squatted under hoses, squeezed into tiled cupboards masquerading as plumbing fixtures, and melted under one particularly memorable, long, hot hotel shower after two weeks in the saddle. About the only way I haven’t got wet on this trip is being soaked by rain. I think one un-sunny day it sprinkled.

The shower in my room in Crete was so small there was no room for even a shower curtain (which is probably so people don’t pull it aside and say: “hey, somebody bricked up this window”). I got in it and threw my hands up in the air when I was mugged by the faucet, and when I turned around I was startled to run into myself. The other side of the room got wet when I turned the water on, so I turned the nozzle to the wall and showered under the splashback.

Most hotel rooms provide shower gel and shampoo. Some of these wondrous bathing treacles are both. Other shampoo packets say “with conditioner.” The one in my Crete hotel room said: “with compliments.” Nonsense. I showered and shampooed and walked straight out the front door and all they said was “have a nice day.”

When I get back to Istanbul in early August, one of the last things I’m going to do in Europe is visit a Turkish hamam, for which the Ottomans were famous. There you don’t have merely an entire room to bathe in, you have three, each a different temperature. After sweating into a rubbery relaxation, you’re finished off by a pounding into submission they call a massage.

The ferry from Rhodes to Crete

2011-07-17T19:48:00.001+10:00

The ferry leaves from Akantia harbour, one of three in Rhodes Town. It is 33°C and cloudless, and semi-industrial Akantia is hot, dusty, and shadeless with trucks and freight trailers splitting the backpackers and ferry passengers on the oily road who arrive on foot. They’ve probably been told, as I have, to arrive an hour before the ferry departs, but it isn’t here and we all crowd into the little shade from the overhead sun that the ticket booths provide.

It finally arrives and everyone clambers aboard. This is going to be a thirteen-hour trip arriving at 4.30am, so I scout as peaceful a spot as I can for a few hours kip later on. Seated at the table next to me, however, is an unshaven thirty-something-old Greek bloke (Greek men all must shave with the handle end of blunt butter knives). He is talking non-stop at the top of his voice to two wordless women across the table as if they’re on a mobile phone half a continent away. His monologue is relentless. Food doesn’t stop him; he talks right through it. His voice is so obtrusive that others at tables around us stare at him. He appears to enjoy the undivided attention he must think he commands, not realising that to disregard him is like trying to ignore a jet engine while standing on the runway. I move across the lounge next to a family with a baby for some peace.

Rhodes

2011-07-16T19:21:00.001+10:00

To leave Turkey I caught a bus from Selçuk to Marmaris and a ferry to the Greek island of Rhodes, arriving in Rhodes Town on a Friday night with no hotel booking. This was a risky business—Rhodes is a very popular destination, especially on a weekend—but I was lucky and found a room for four days until I could catch the next ferry to Crete.

Rhodes is a walled medieval town, apparently the largest inhabited in Europe, and its business is commercial tourism. The main drag goes on forever with souvenirs, jewellery, up-market fashion, down-market trinkets and carpets, and is punctuated by squares filled with restaurants, cafes and bars with families and couples and groups of holidaying students. Local children zip between them all on mopeds.

But there are also quiet lanes. On the Saturday, a hot, clear, bright blue summer day (as they all bloody are!), I sat at a foldaway table and drank bottled beer from a glass beneath an umbrella in a weed-strewn, pebble-stone lane of stone buildings rendered in a crumbling pale yellow mortar with terracotta tiled awnings and weathered wooden doors. The tourist crowds jostled just two lanes away but here the only impetus was a light breeze pushing the crumpled paper wrapper from my gyros around on my plate.

Comments

2011-07-14T19:32:00.001+10:00

Hello, readers! Some of you asked me if comments can be left on my blog entries, and some of you have left them. I love to get them, so feel free! There's a link down there somewhere...

Ways tourists make themselves look stupid

2011-07-14T07:06:00.002+10:00

THEY: wear those inflatable neck pillows made for airplane seats while they walk around in the airport.
I SAY: wear it around town. Go clubbing.

THEY: wear a backpack on their front.
I SAY: wear a full-sized expedition backpack on your front.

THEY: wear their sunglasses dropped over their mouths.
I SAY: eat.

Day of the Carpet Sellers

2011-07-14T06:40:00.001+10:00

“Rugs! Rugs!”

It was like carrying a bag of brains.

Carpets sold in Turkey are rolled and packed into a lightweight black bag that somehow every carpet seller in the country uses as a standard. When I left the shop with one in hand, all the carpet sellers who hide among the living on Istanbul street corners and footpaths swarmed and descended on me. “How much? How much?”

Other sellers can gauge how much of a sucker you are by what you bought and how much you paid, and will entice you to their own store to take a bite themselves. They all say the same things: “What are you looking for? Where are you from? How much did you pay? Let me offer you tea.”

The second one was enlightening when I realised I’d heard these same seductions before. By the third one it was boring. By the fourth one it was annoying and he wouldn’t let me be. I really wanted to get rid of this damn albatross and was desperately seeking the post office to ship it home. (Backpackers are lousy shoppers; they can’t accumulate things.) By number five I was really jack, and had run out of polite patience.

“What are you looking for?”

“Peace and quiet.”

He shambled alongside me. “Where are you from?”

“Australia.”

“Love the kangaroos. Love the koalas.”

“I’m from Canada.”

Confused pause. “Do you have a wife?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend.”

“No.”

“Ah, you are single!”

“No.”

Confused pause. “Would you like…”

I did an abrupt 180° turn but he stuck with me. “Would you like…” I managed to shake him with another 180° and fled.

The Muslim call to prayer

2011-07-14T06:34:00.001+10:00

Throughout Turkey, a Muslim but secular nation, the call to prayer can be heard several times a day from the innumerable mosques. Each regional area has a “central command” mosque which delivers the call to prayer over a network at the right minute of the day to the other mosques in the area, which then broadcast it from loudspeakers.

All the other Relief Riders commented on how beautiful they found the calls to be. I am going to beg to differ. It was very likely beautiful a hundred years ago when the call to prayer was made by the power of the haj’s lungs from the minaret, but anything broadcast by loudspeaker is instantly robbed of aesthetic quality and becomes a raucous and knife-edged racket. It’s as if there are six “fun runs” organised in your neighbourhood every day.

Black Wednesday

2011-07-10T00:10:00.007+10:00

As usual, people woke within an hour or two of sunrise, stretched their sleepy muscles around camp, and socialised a little over a breakfast table of boiled eggs, olives, fresh tomatoes and cucumber, bread and cheeses, and çay, Turkish tea, before packing up and setting out on the horses.

We rode up through the hillside cobblestones of Bayramhaci and into a spectacular narrow valley flanked by tall straw-coloured stone outcrops atop steep hills of scrub-grass. It was straight out of a John Ford western.
One of the horses, Megan, was irritated by a saddle sore and had been acting up. Riding into the last camp she kicked Alexander’s horse as a car was passing him on the road. Fortunately he’s a well-experienced rider and it was quickly under control.

But on the morning of Black Wednesday it was a different story. Megan was being ridden behind the lead rider and wrangler, Ercihan, and next to Barbara, one of three inexperienced riders on this trip. The ride was only an hour old and the horses were fresh, well-spaced and uncrowded, but halfway along the narrow valley Megan suddenly reeled and leapt without any provocation. Barb, in striking distance, tried to veer away but the cranky mare, out of control of her rider, kicked and landed a shod hoof on Barb’s shin. With an “oof” we knew she was struck.

Unable to bear weight on her leg to balance herself, she slipped out of the saddle onto the rocky trail and rolled over in pain. Ercihan and Alexander, the ride organisers, were to her in an instant. It was a sombre and worried mood in the team as she was assessed for a fractured leg. Her toes were pointing in the right direction but it looked like there was an eggplant under the skin.

Ercihan squatted atop one of the hills and rang an ambulance with his mobile phone. The rest of us dismounted and pulled our horses into the shade. When the ambulance came into his sight, he raced down the hill, swung onto his horse, and galloped back up and over the crest to intercept it and lead it to the group. Within the hour, Barb was stretchered into the ambulance and, with Alexander along, trundled down the track and whisked away.

Carpet sellers

2011-07-10T00:10:00.001+10:00

The carpet sellers in Istanbul are a plague. They’re smooth operators who will milk you for money if you aren’t on your toes. Initially it’s hard to distinguish them from regular locals who are friendly enough to say hello and help you find your way. Turks throughout the country are friendly and welcoming, but you’ll quickly come to realise that those who approach you in Istanbul will generally help you first (“What are you looking for?”), make conversation next (“Where are you from?”) and then ask you afterwards to come to their shop (“It’s very close.”) It’s at first disarming, but soon tedious and annoying.

The first one of the day got me.

At eight in the morning in Sultanahmet, the touristy part of old Istanbul between the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofia, fresh off the plane, sleep-deprived and completely unaware of the carpet-seller phenomenon, I was approached by a friendly bloke who asked me where I’m from. “Oh,” he said. “I have family in Sydney, in Liverpool.” He showed me the two entrances to the Blue Mosque (one for tourists, the other for locals) and the Sultan’s balcony, and then uttered the line I would subsequently hear more times than I could count: “I have a shop. Would you like to see it?”

I naively thought, “okay, this bloke has helped me out. The least I can do is look at his shop.” On my first day after eighteen months back on the road I forgot how wary the traveller has to be in a big city.

I’ve heard it said before that in Middle Eastern cultures it’s unlucky not to make a sale to the first customer of the day. This may be folkloric but is also a likely sales ploy (“You’re very lucky; we will give you a discount to make the sale.” The line that “you’re lucky” for one reason or another regularly pops up in the sales bargaining).

It was clear he did not intend to let me out of the shop without selling me something. I did see a rug which I commented was nice so I thought, all right, he wants to bargain but I’ll give some ridiculous price that he won’t accept. And that’s how I wound up with a US$1200-priced rug for US$400 (A$375). It seems I underestimated how vastly the prices are inflated.

The guy said afterwards that he didn’t make a profit just so he could make the first sale. Perhaps. I did apparently get a good deal, according to the other sellers who asked me the price of the carpet I was carrying.

Have we met?

2011-07-09T07:27:00.001+10:00

Writing a blog is a kind of baring of the soul. We all are chameleons of a kind: we show different sides of our personalities to different people, and we do it selectively and in a controlled way. Not so when writing a blog. My audience is everyone and anyone, and I reveal myself haphazardly. It is a freeing but forcible liberation. Perhaps that’s how it has to be.

Bathe, shave, dine and swim

2011-07-09T07:08:00.007+10:00

Everyone on the ride had their favourite campsites, and the Bayramhaci camp at the lake was popular. Ercihan, the outfitter and head horseman, told us we had no permission to swim in the dam but after a five-hour ride in the 30°C+ sun he couldn’t keep a number of us out. The water was so cool and refreshing I felt reborn.

That evening Ercihan surprised us when his friend Tenzil, a barber in Avanos, arrived at the camp with his straight razor and strong hands. Turkish barbers are also masseurs, and a Turkish barber experience is essential to know Turkey. Everyone had a shoulder, neck and head rub and the blokes had a straight razor shave, all with fragrant oils and aftershave like mango and lemon. Marc, the French Relief Riders photographer, was talked into shaving his head.

We had another beautiful dinner of fresh salads and barbecued lamb with beer and bottles of wine on a terrace with a view of the sunset over the valley lake. Though it’s only a short walk up the hill from the camp, we were driven up in one of the support vehicles, a minivan. The terrace sits above hot spring swimming pools, and after dinner we all went for a swim.

After towelling off and returning to the van we learned it wouldn’t start. We strolled back to the camp in the dark.

It was the eve of Black Wednesday.

How not to panic

2011-07-08T07:07:00.002+10:00

Backpacking is at times controlled panic. Sometimes you’re running to catch a train on time or worried you’ve missed the right bus stop, but most commonly it’s the small and frequent moments when you open your pack and can’t find your mobile phone or your journal of meticulous notes. Before rifling through your pack with adrenaline surging you have to take a deep breath and trust that you just put your passport in the wrong pocket or your wallet has sunk to the bottom. Nine times out of ten it’s there.

On the tenth time, panic.

40 years old today

2011-07-07T05:03:00.001+10:00

Hm.

Bayramhaci camp

2011-07-06T02:44:00.005+10:00

We broke camp and set out at 8.30am in the hot sun. Along the Red River we had shade, riding through farmland of wheat, squash and melons, of olives and grapes, and the rain from the days before we arrived in Cappadocia settled the dust. To get to Bayramhaci we had to ride into the hills and over the high ground outside Saridir, a steep climb into grassland and wildflowers: red poppies, white morning glory, yellow euphorbia and blue cornflowers. I sat tall in the saddle up the slopes and leaned forward, holding Kelebek’s mane.

Descending the mountain was equally steep, and I felt like Tom Burlinson in a tame version of that climactic scene in The Man From Snowy River, leaning back with one hand up for balance as my horse nosed her way down.

We arrived at camp on the shores of a dam-flooded valley lake after five hours. The hard-working outfitter’s crew had already set up the tents and lunch was under way in the kitchen of the custom-made caravan.

Via emetic

2011-07-06T02:44:00.003+10:00

I hate Turkish roads!

Here I am again on a long bus trip – five hours from Istanbul to Gallipoli – and I am feeling sick from the constant kidney-pounding turbulence. I generally travel well and never get car-sick, which should give you some insight into the state of these roads. It makes me wonder how I would ever fare in a place like India or Guatemala. Surely I’m not a travel wuss? If I’m going to call myself a travel writer I better man up.

Relief Riders: dental camps

2011-07-06T02:44:00.001+10:00

Relief Riders is bringing dental expertise to rural Cappadocian towns and villages. Medical care in Turkey is quite good, but dental is not. Announcements in the towns are played for two weeks on the radio, and word is spread through the haj, or imam, and the muhtar, the elected mayor.

We have with us one dentist from Avanos in Cappadocia who conducts screening, and at a later date the patients will travel to Avanos to receive the treatment. Our role as Relief Riders is to register the patients as they arrive, then usher them to a waiting room and call them as their turn comes.

In between we socialise with them in our broken phrase-book Turkish and hand signals. Often the children speak a bit of English. We also have an invaluable translator with us, Cihat, a young man of 25 from the Turkish-Georgian border who studied English in İzmir and spent a year in Kansas City, USA.

We set up the dental centres in clinics or municipal offices, or whatever space the muhtar finds for us. On this maiden Turkish tour our “fearless leader” Alexander, the founder, chairman and CEO of Relief Riders, wants to start out small and scale up in subsequent years. In India, where Relief Riders has been operating since 2003 and treatment such as gynaecological and opthalmic care is provided in camp, staff see 200-300 people in a day. In one record session they treated 869 people. At our first dental camp in Saridir we saw 38 patients.

Examination

2011-07-05T03:46:00.001+10:00

I wasn't in Istanbul today. I was in my cramped, windowless, internet-patchy hotel room studying for and taking my journalism subediting exam. I romanced a bottle of wine over dinner when I finished. Seems to be a favourite pastime.

Off to Gallipoli tomorrow, and a week on the Turkish coast.

Turks

2011-07-04T06:06:00.001+10:00

Turks are friendly, generous, helpful people. They are even more so in the tourist parts of Istanbul because they (i.e., the shop owners) understand better than any other Europeans that tourists equal business, though it is not so cynical as that. They still draw upon their natural hospitality.

As a photographer I'm pleased at how open Turks are to having their photo taken. I generally ask first, and the answer ranges from a shrugging "of course, why not?" to welcoming eagerness.

Most refreshing of all is that there are no hang-ups about shooting kids. The innocence of children makes them great subjects, but in the West (outside Europe, anyway) there is a paranoid politically-correct protectiveness. Once, on a shooting excursion in Sydney's Hyde Park, a group of photography students and I were accosted by a father whose children, some hundred metres away, happened to fall in the range of our lenses. We were so taken aback and uncomprehending that he thought we were an organised group of voyeur paedophiles that nobody had the wherewithal to tell him to go fuck himself before he disappeared.

Buses

2011-07-02T07:27:00.003+10:00

I hate buses, but I heard that the ones in Turkey are good. Sure they are. But the roads drive you insane.

I caught a bus from Nevşehir to Ankara (the ride having ended yesterday), a four-plus-hour trip, and it was like a mini-airplane: seating is allocated and ushered, there’s a toilet on board, the reclining seats have televisions, and a steward serves water, tea or coffee, and cake. Very civilised.

The road, however, is far from polished. It is re-patched instead of resurfaced and there is literally constant turbulence. I have to sit in my horse-riding posture or the convulsions of the seat kill my kidneys. The idea of a drink holder on my seat tray is absurd – my hot tea roils like it’s boiling. It doesn’t exactly make writing easy, either! I’m trying to recall travelling on a worse highway. 200km of this gets old fast.

A special entry for all my Relief Rider friends

2011-07-02T07:27:00.001+10:00

Farewell my friends! I’ve just been dropped at the bus station and am on my own for the first time since meeting you all two weeks ago. I’m so sad to have said goodbye to everyone, but so pleased to have made such good friends. I am suddenly missing you, but the end of one adventure marks the beginning of another.

You’ll see, of course, that I’m quite behind on my ride updates (come on Ercihan – hot showers in camp are all well and good, but where’s the Wi-Fi?!) All subsequent RRI posts are dedicated to you all.

Whirling

2011-06-30T00:45:00.001+10:00

After the balloon flight we got under way on the ride proper, I on my dappled grey mare Kelebek, all of we dozen or so riding in a line behind the head horseman Ercihan.

After several hours, a large square fort made of stone and flying the Turkish flag came into view as we rode up a grassy hill. We were approaching a 13th-century stone Karavansaray – a caravan outpost – on the Silk Road, just as traders would have done hundreds of years ago. We tied the horses up outside the eight-metre-high walls, walked through the tall gate into a large open courtyard with a central fountain, and then into the dark belly of the Karavansaray. It is like a cathedral inside with a cruciform plan and a domed apex. It was built in the style of the Siena school of architecture, which seems unlikely in Turkey, but this is the route along which all travelled between Italy and Asia for centuries.

In the centre of the dim church we were quietly seated around a square floor. One by one, five musicians and five dancers, each in a black cloak and a tall beige fez, entered the square, bowed to the audience, and seated themselves on the floor. These are the sufis. An eleventh wore a white fez and sat at the head of the group.

One of the musicians stood and sang Arabic chants in beguiling oriental scales, and then another played a breathy and moving melody on the ney, a Turkish flute. Another ney played and the other musicians then joined on drums, a zither-like stringed instrument called a kanun, and an oud which is similar to a lute.

The five dancers rose and walked slowly around the square, bowing to one another repeatedly before removing their black cloaks to reveal white robes beneath. Slowly they began to spin. They moved around the square floor to find their positions – four at the corners and one in the centre. As they spun faster their floor-length robes bloomed and they raised their arms with open hands, one above their heads in receiving and the other outstretched in giving. The whirling dervishes spin in the same spot to induce a trance. White Fez would walk onto the floor to rotate them and, still spinning, they would change positions, one moving to the centre and the others rotating corners. This spinning to the music and rotating positions would go on for ten minutes before they would pause and stand stock-still, not wobbling or dizzy, and then they would begin again. Some of the sufis had their eyes half open but fixed, never flickering, while others had theirs closed, intuiting their positions on the floor. For forty-five minutes this went on with precision, and never did they stumble.

At last they finish dancing and seat themselves on the floor again, and White Fez sings a sermon. Though it is in Arabic, it is surprisingly moving.

Sufism is not a religion. It is a way of living. It is a culture or a sprituality, but there is no institution, no tenets, and no hierarchy. Sufis are free, liberated intellectuals, philosophers, and they search for a way to find yourself. The whirling dervishes are the most formulated example of this, but Sufism is about finding your own way.

Photos

2011-06-28T18:13:00.002+10:00

I've uploaded a few photos to my Facebook account. Any of my Facebook friends will be able to see them, but I think you can also access them here.

Flying

2011-06-28T17:47:00.001+10:00

On the morning of our second ride, we went for a hot air balloon flight. This was meant to be scheduled later in the itinerary, but there was a backlog of balloon passengers due to terrible rains just before we arrived, and it was the only time the balloon company could guarantee us a slot. We were all up for it, but it made for a very long day. Our wake-up call was at 4.20am, not that a wake-up call was necessary – our first night in Cappadocia was spent in a cave hotel in Avanos situated next to a mosque which, at 4am, trumpets prayers loud enough to reach the whole town.

Early morning is the only time you can go ballooning because of the rising air as the sun hits the cold ground. It takes about an hour to get the balloons inflated, and then 20 people pile into the basket and we’re off.

The flight took us over serrated towers of stone and into valleys where we were surrounded by caves dug into the tufa rock. We went up into the high mist dissolving in the sun and floated with perhaps 40 other balloons.

The Ride

2011-06-25T23:59:00.001+10:00

This is how it works.

We set out in the morning on horseback and ride four to six hours along trails through grasslands and hills, along rivers and over mountains. The Cappadocian landscape is dry, dusty and scrubby grassland (I believe it is classed as desert), and is not dissimilar to country New South Wales except that it is more rocky and hilly.

When we arrive at our designated campsite for the day, our support truck is already there with the outfitter’s crew setting up camp. They pitch a dozen tents with foam mattresses and sleeping bags, and hang oil lanterns outside each. These guys work hard to make camping easy for us. The truck is a mobile kitchen and shower, complete with hot water and decent pressure. Unbelievable! It’s bespoke-built by the Turkish outfitter, Ercihan. There’s power on board for recharging camera batteries and laptops, and a table seating ten folds down from the side of the truck under an awning. I’ve done a lot of camping, and this is really luxurious compared to boiling a billy on the fire and jumping in a river to wash.

The food is fantastic. We are eating so well. Last night was tender and juicy chicken barbecued over the coals next to the campfire, the night before that was barbecued lamb, and before that was trout with garlic, lemon and rosemary. There’s cucumber and tomato salad, yogourt, olives, and always plenty of bread, and it’s all cooked and cleaned up for us by the crew. Then we typically finish the night around the campfire drinking beer and wine and raki, known as “lion’s milk,” an aniseed-tasting clear liqueur that turns opaque white when cut with water.

Disconnected!

2011-06-25T23:57:00.001+10:00

My apologies to my readership. I’ve been in rural Turkey without internet access and have been completely unable to update my blog. I bought a SIM card from Turkcell with a data package so that I could ‘tweet’ to Twitter and do the occasional blog update, but I haven’t been able to get the damn thing to work.

So you’re only reading this and any following entries because I managed to find Wi-Fi in a town somewhere for my laptop. As I write I’m encamped in a tent surrounded by little more than trees, wind, river and horses.

First ride

2011-06-18T18:43:00.001+10:00

Friday afternoon we took our first ride. It was only an hour, a short ride out and back to the ranch, so that we can release all our built-up nervous anticipation of a fortnight ride, and to get acquainted with our horses and their dynamic together, and our own dynamic as a group. We are riding English. I’m pleased with my horse, Kelebek. She’s smart, sweet-mannered and sensitive. She hardly needs any leg; I can steer her just with neck rein and shifting my weight. Towards the end of the ride she slipped, or was bitten by a horsefly and startled, or something. Her rear leg buckled and she swung her head sharply around to the left and half-collapsed. It was all in a split-second and was the kind of situation where a rider can come off a horse, but I was pleased to be told by one of the other riders that I was “a natural” for staying on.

Avanos

2011-06-18T18:23:00.001+10:00

On the afternoon of my arrival, the team of us stopped into an open-air market in the small town of Avanos, where we are staying before we commence on the ride proper. In all my travels, I have never been to a more authentic place than that market.

Avanos is off the tourist circuit. No tourists come here, which means the locals have no tourism hangover, no cynicism of travellers. These are townsfolk in rural Turkey simply buying their food at the dusty market. There are bright red tomatoes – some torn open so you can see their quality – yellow melons, pale green squashes, strawberries, two kinds of cherries, cucumbers, corn, beans, on and on, all straight from the farms of Cappadocia. Row after row of fresh produce gives way, oddly, to shoes. Hundreds of kinds of shoes. Then sacks of rustic orange and turmeric yellow spices, nuts, seeds, sheafs of dried herbs and tea. Leatherwork. Toys. Barrows of twisted, glazed breads.

But the most memorable part is the people. They are mildly curious about the presence of a tourist, but they go about their business with polite indifference. They smile when you say merhaba – hello – and are happy to oblige when I ask to take their photo (by smiling and shaking the camera at them with raised eyebrows – such is the sophistication of my Turkish). And the children are hilarious. There’s no learned trepidation over strangers, here; they are wholly children, cheeky and innocent. One little boy stopped and smiled at the white guy with the camera gear and I snapped his photo before he ran off. Two precocious eight-year-old girls spoke English very well and playfully posed for photos by our group. It was a really lovely, authentic thing.

Alright, I’m going!

2011-06-18T17:26:00.001+10:00

Observations from the Sydney airport…

I’ve been a little wistful lately about leaving, but when I tried to dawdle through the Sydney airport I was abused with bad adult contemporary saxophone à la Kenny G from the loudspeakers as if the city was driving me out. I am going on record to say it is my most hated genre of music. How is it that saxophone can be simultaneously so John-Coltrane-good and so Kenny-G-bad?

Meet the team

2011-06-18T17:25:00.001+10:00

I arrived in Nevşehir on Friday morning and met everyone who will be on the ride. There are a dozen of us in total, five of whom are the organising team. Of the rest of us, four have limited experience on a horse, so I’m feeling a lot better about being a total novice.

We’ve been getting acquainted with each other and the group is already gelling well, an important thing when you’re going to be camping and riding together for two weeks. We’re a mixed bag: there’s a 28-year-old ex-US Navy student, a sculptor and painter, a documentary film-maker, a retiree who’s been swimming her way through the Mediterranean, and a veterinarian turned venture capitalist.

The ride organiser, Alexander, is a character. He and his mate Marc, the team photographer, play off each other with their jokes. Marc’s a Frenchman; Alexander is American, and speaks four languages. The others in the organising team are from the ranch supplying the horses – Ercihan, the Turkish ranch owner, and two ride leaders: South African Susan and Brit Alex.

Noise pollution

2011-06-18T11:42:00.003+10:00

When you get an electrician out to fix your faulty kitchen light, he doesn't provide a commentary on the gauge of wire he is using or what size amp fuse he'll break the circuit with. You trust that you hired a qualified technician and he knows what he's doing, and he shuts up and gets on with it.

So why do aircraft pilots insist on giving us updates on the altitude and cruising speed and temperature and head wind and tail wind? Yes? We're in the air, right? You can tell me when we get there, and I'll probably already have a good idea of that anyway.

Damn it!

2011-06-18T11:42:00.001+10:00

I'm so stupid. I had a beautiful pocket knife which was a gift. For my flight to Nevşehir to meet the Relief Riders, I forgot to pack it in my check-in luggage and it was confiscated! I'm so unhappy about it.

G'day! F*** you.

2011-06-17T05:29:00.013+10:00

I must be careful about hand signals. One of the first things I did on arriving in Istanbul was give a thumbs-up (one thumb, that is -- Aussie for "good") to the shuttle bus driver collecting me from the airport. In Greece and some Middle East countries (between which two regions Turkey sits) it means "fuck you." Istanbul is cosmopolitan enough for it to be safe, but I have to get out of the habit while I'm travelling. The other Aussie favourite, the forefinger-and-thumb circle for OK, would call a Greek a poofter.

Turkish Airlines

2011-06-17T05:24:00.006+10:00

Wow. Turkish Airlines hands out ear plugs, eye masks and in-flight socks to the passengers. Who does that anymore? Clearly nobody, as I just got excited over ear plugs, eye masks and in-flight socks. Shame their seats are garish turquoise and they make their stewardesses wear frumpy tunics.

Half chaps and jodhpurs

2011-06-09T17:46:00.037+10:00

Well, this is going to be interesting.

Just picked up some riding gear for the trip: a helmet (mandatory) and some half chaps—zippered gaitors that fit snug around the calves. I told the bloke at the shop I was going on a two-week horse riding trek and am a complete beginner. His face said it all: "You sucker city slicker. You're in for a world of hurt."

I told the bloke I just wanted the cheapest. This ride is getting more and more expensive (fellow city slickers, don't take up riding if you're saving for a house). The organiser of the ride suggested bringing jodhpurs (tights for horseback, like bike pants), but I told the bloke at the shop I hoped to just get away with jeans. "An hour in the saddle—fine," he said. "All day riding for two weeks? You're going to lose all the hairs on the inside of your legs, saddle sores, ingrown hairs... mate, you will be ready to trade your eye-teeth for jodhpurs."

Maybe he was motivated to make a sale, or maybe he just wanted to see me in tight pants (this is where I mention the bloke was gay), but I was convinced. Or afraid. Anyway, I bought the jodhpurs.

Quanti giorni manca?

2011-06-09T01:05:00.000+10:00

II have been inspired to go to Italy. It wasn't on my original itinerary, but from northern Greece to Puglia it's quite close. Anyway, my itinerary was so focussed on Eastern Europe that I was needing some Romance. Italy will do nicely. I've deliberately left my plans open, so maybe I'll drop Romania (which was in question anyway for time) and do southern Italy properly. Why not? Lecce. Napoli. And Pompeii! It's an adventure.

First lesson

2011-05-20T01:17:00.000+10:00

When I signed up for the horse riding trek, I told the organiser I was a beginner. Only later did he realise what I meant by that.

"Uh... you better get some lessons," he said.

So, Sunday was my first ride. It was just around the ring, but the instructor said she was very impressed. Years of correct posture and yoga paid dividends and I was trotting comfortably in no time at all. Next week I'll get up to cantering, and in a few weeks' time I'm planning a weekend trail ride and camp.

But for now, I'm getting very well acquainted with some new muscles.

Relief

2011-05-18T00:57:00.003+10:00

A few years ago I read about a charity organisation called Relief Riders, which transports medical supplies and expertise into rural areas of India on horseback. It's funded as a horse riding trek for adventurous travellers looking for something different. Paying guests volunteer to assist setting up the medical tents and register the villagers, and the medical supplies are subsidised by the cost of the tour. I didn't have plans to visit India, but always thought if I did I would do the relief ride.

This year Relief Riders announced they will for the first time be riding in Turkey. General medical care is much better in Turkey than it is in rural India but dental services are lacking. The relief ride will provide dental treatment in villages in the dramatic region of Cappadocia where, as luck would have it, I was already heading. Kismet? So I've signed on. The ride is from 17-30 June and visits the spectacular volcanic landscape of "fairy chimneys" (known in the US as hoodoos), tall spires of stone into which the Turkish locals fashioned houses from carved caves centuries ago.

I probably should mention that I don't know how to ride a horse.

Europe 2011

2011-05-15T11:15:00.001+10:00

The Lead Line is stirring from slumber below deck as Europe returns on the horizon.

This year, beginning in mid-June, the feature country and starting point will be Turkey. After three weeks of horseback trekking, Roman ruins and dental surgery, I'll move onto finding Atlantis in the Greek islands, whitewater rafting in one of the world's deepest canyons in Montenegro, and discovering what there is to discover in Romania and Bulgaria.

Vivid

2010-06-17T01:57:00.009+10:00

The Vivid Sydney Festival, a new annual event for the city, is a celebration of light and music that features a new guest curator every year. Last year, the inaugural festival boasted godfather of ambient music Brian Eno; this year, it's husband and wife team, Lou Reed (what a step down) and Laurie Anderson. Throughout the month of music performances and art installations, major buildings in the city are splashed with rotating shades and shapes of light, and the white sails of the iconic Opera House are used as a blank canvas for projecting storeys-tall images.

On Saturday, I took my camera to Campbell's Cove to shoot a free performance on the harbour called "Fire Water," a cross-cultural combination of Aboriginal smoke ceremony and Bollywood-inspired dance interpreting the wreck of the Sydney Cove. In 1797, the merchant ship sailed from Calcutta and sank off the coast of Tasmania. The performance culminated with the arrival in the cove of a ghostly tall ship so fully rigged with ethereal blue and magenta lights as to seem constructed of light itself.

Festivities continued around the corner in The Rocks, the old historical part of Sydney, with the open-air night markets. Beneath the undulating tent peaks I strolled between stalls selling smooth wooden bowls of redgum and coolibah, hip fashion and jewellery from Paris, tapered candles in pinks and oranges, framed photographs and rich-smelling specialty chocolates. At the end of the stalls, a flamenco performance broke out.

A troupe from the local dance school El Duende Flamenco, led by a handsome Chinese woman in a fuschia frock and overseen by a Spanish matron, tapped, clapped and twirled to live flamenco guitar. Half a dozen women in full-length frilled dresses with fans and castanets spun, flickered and clacked. A man in a round, broad-rimmed hat and cumberbund clicked his heels, and a little girl of nine or ten stole the show when she fanned her dress and pleated her fan in a flamboyant solo.

The explosion of colours in the dresses and the lights were a photographer's candy store. Check out some of my shots.

Photos: Montenegro

2010-03-15T00:59:00.004+11:00

Montenegro 2009

I was going to do these photos in order, but I got bored with Bruges so jumped straight to Montenegro.

Damn bug.

2010-03-10T00:56:00.002+11:00

It is almost four months since I returned to Sydney. In that time I haven't at all started to think about my next trip, which I expect will be in 2011.

The next trip always begins with a spark. A shot in a film, or something I read in a book or see on television. Suddenly, my interest is piqued in a place.

Today I saw, on TV, Petra, Jordan. Zap.

Continued delay.

2010-02-24T20:50:00.002+11:00

Stand by.

Photos update

2010-01-25T00:05:00.000+11:00

I've been working my way through all my photos of Germany, and have gradually been adding them to my Germany folder. I've finished now, so if you haven't clicked that link below for a while, there might be some new things in there.

On to Bruges, next. It's a bit slow going, I admit, but I've been trying to work on some articles as well.

Photos: Germany

2010-01-04T02:31:00.000+11:00

Germany 2009

Lack of Evidence

2009-12-20T22:57:00.000+11:00

Yes, I know. After five weeks I've still not posted any photos. Rest assured, they're coming; I've been working on it. I needed first to nail down the software for my photography workflow, since the digital darkroom requires a lot of organisation. I decided on Adobe Lightroom. I also have been trying to recover the shots of the bullfight from the corrupted card; unfortunately, no luck as yet.

Once my additional 1GB RAM and new solid state, lightning fast hard drive arrive, progress should also be faster.

I have selected several favourite shots, so will post something shortly to keep the bored amused.

The End

2009-11-15T11:50:00.001+11:00

And now, the end of the 2009 European odyssey.

I am expecting the inevitable question: “Happy to be home?” If it has to be yes or no, then it’s no. I could keep going. I would love to keep going. Constant travelling is a little taxing, but I haven’t reached exhaustion.

Nevertheless, it will be a relief not to think about language anymore, to speak fluently and be understood.

All things end. But this is only the end of the second chapter. Good travel has three phases: the first is planning, when the possibilities excite and the anticipation builds; the second is execution, the trip itself, when plans come to fruition or lead in unexpected directions.

Now begins the synopsis. Trawling through nine thousand photographs. Developing. Discarding. Revisiting notes and blog entries, and assembling articles. Digging out an old brochure to check the name of that church in Portugal, or a receipt to report the cost of a beer in Seville. And beginning work on my next book of photography.

Over the coming months, as I select and develop my best photos, I will post them online. Updates to this blog will be less frequent than they have been during the trip, but check back now and again to see what new photos are available.

Language

2009-11-15T11:46:00.001+11:00

In major cities, it’s easy to get by with English. Too easy. Speaking foreign languages is one of the joys of travel. Too many English-speaking tourists turn up in Venice or Paris and speak English. You can't. That's cheating. Aussies are as guilty of this as Americans or the Brits. You’ve got to make an effort.

But the effort does become draining, and the language barrier is isolating. Spaniards are reticent to speak anything other than Spanish, and in provincial Andalucía you won’t get much else. Luckily, my basis in French gets me by with Spanish, and it is probably my favourite language to try to speak.

In Bruges, English is so widely spoken it could be considered a second language after their Flemish Dutch (the national language of French is equally well-spoken, though pride is at stake due to wars with France).

Portugal and England share the oldest alliance in history, and English is widespread in urban areas of Portugal. It is sporadic in rural areas. The elderly, urban or rural, don't speak it at all.

My biggest surprise was Croatia, which easily has the most widespread English of all the countries I toured. It is taught to children in school from young, and the standard is high. This was a bit of a relief, because I have no knowledge of any Slavic language. I was out of luck when I found that just over the border in Montenegro, English is not spoken at all, and I had to depend on my Croatian phrase book (for sensitive cultural and political reasons, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian are all officially different languages, but linguistically they are close dialects of the same language).

When I reached France, it was with a mixture of comfort and trepidation. I actually speak a little bit of French, so I could have simple conversations. But I also know enough grammar to know I’m getting my conjugation wrong or that I don’t know which participle to use.

Remembrance Day at Villers-Bretonneux

2009-11-15T11:39:00.002+11:00

On 25 April 1918, at a cost of over 1,200 of their lives, Australian soldiers repulsed a German force apparently ten times their number at Villers-Bretonneux, the last point of defence before Paris on the Western Front. The citizens of this little town declared their eternal gratitude to these men in a moving speech by the mayor. The primary school, rebuilt with money raised by schoolchildren from Victoria—called the Victorian School—has emblazoned above its blackboards, “N’oublions jamais l’Australie”—we will never forget Australia. And they never have; ANZAC Day is observed religiously to this day. They dub the town l’Australie en Picardie, and it has been called by Australians the Gallipoli of the Western Front.
Remembrance Day, once known as Armistice Day, the last day of “the Great War,” is a national holiday in France. This and the last day of The Second World War are of great importance to the French, as so much of their soil was battleground. On November 11th, we visited the Australian National Memorial outside Villers-Bretonneux. Several groups of Aussies trod softly past the sombre rows of graves either side of the French and Australian flags to reach the tall, white tower flanked by two chapels and a memorial wall engraved with the names of the Australian fallen in the battles of the First World War. While we were there a French family with three young ones also paid their respects, the parents gently reprimanding the children when they became too boisterous. We gave them little koala bears.

Parisian Cinemas

2009-11-15T11:06:00.003+11:00

One of the things I really like about Paris is the number of little cinemas, mostly in the Latin Quarter, which play classic films. Just around the corner from our hotel were playing two films by Sergio Leone, one of my favourite directors: the well-known Clint Eastwood flick “For a Few Dollars More,” and the not-so-well-known “A Fistful of Dynamite” (a.k.a. “Duck, You Sucker,” and a few other confusing titles).

It was very cool to immerse myself in a late screening of “Dollars” on the big screen. Another cinema was playing several Hitchcock films. In 1998, I came across one filmhouse which had been playing Casablanca continuously for many years, but I wasn’t able to find it this time.

Paris

2009-11-15T10:53:00.001+11:00

Mai Li and I spent the final week of my trip in Paris, where it was averaging 8° or 9° Celsius. It seems such a short time since I was being scorched by the 40°C Andalusian sun.

We kept warm with plenty of walking. Paris is made for it. The famed city planner Baron Haussman laid out broad boulevardes in the 19th century, though not for the enjoyment by the pedestrian masses but rather to suppress them; the narrow medieval bottlenecks they replaced prevented soldiers from effectively responding to the riots which led to the French Revolution.

The Promenade Plantée, a garden footpath slicing through the Bastille elevated on arches, was originally a railway after Napoleon III approved a right of way through the city. Today it is a favourite spot for locals to jog or stroll. We walked half of its four-kilometre length.

Another transformed right of way is the Canal Saint-Martin, controlled by a series of locks and once a highway for transporting food and other goods on barges. It is now used for tourist boats. A long stretch of it has been enclosed and covered with gardens, and a film on the history of the canal is projected onto the brick walls of the tunnel from the boat. This and one or two locks are the most interesting; the rest of the two-and-a-half hour trip is frankly a little boring.

Gouffre de Padirac

2009-11-13T01:43:00.001+11:00

The Gouffre de Padirac (Padirac Chasm) is a navigable underground river in the Lot départment, east of the Dordogne. It begins at the bottom of a a 75-metre deep sinkhole, a huge cylindrical shaft which was once a cave before the ceiling fell in eons ago to leave a massive lightwell almost half its height across. Three separate lifts and a scaffolding of metal stairs have been built against the walls to reach the floor of the chasm.

It was drizzling on the drive there. It had been raining for days, so we were carrying umbrellas and rain jackets. By the time we parked the car the rain stopped , but Mai Li asked if we should bring the umbrellas.

"Pff," I mocked. "We're going underground. It doesn't rain underground."

Indeed it does.

After wending us through corridors of limestone on a subterranean passage of water coloured jade with silt, our guide moored the flat-bottomed boat and led us up the corkscrewing ballroom stairway of the enormous Grand Dôme. Water fell more heavily than the showers outside from the nearly 100-metre ceiling into the Lac de la Pluie, the Lake of Rain, below us, soaking us on the way down.

The 60-metre tall stalactite called the Grande Pendoloque, the Great Pendant, dips down to just two metres above the surface of the lake. Limestone formations congealed over millennia on the cavern’s tiers look genuinely organic, like broad mushrooms or a Chinese Juniper bonsai, and in the pools that collect on the cascading plateaux smooth natural weirs form, curving so artistically that we debated over whether it was man-made.

The cave complex is vast. Two journeys by boat, long passages by foot and hundreds of stairs represent only a tiny fraction which is open to the public.

Transportation

2009-11-11T11:16:00.001+11:00

After a month of ferries, trains and buses through Italy, Croatia and Montenegro, it was nice to pick up a car again upon reaching France – happily another diesel, though unluckily another Ford. Cars offer freedom and comfort, and are essential for visiting small towns. The downside is driving in European cities. It is a trial. They are also the most expensive travel option, though there are some ways to mitigate the cost. Diesel is a cheaper fuel than petrol and more economical. You'll fill the tank less frequently, and for less. Pre-booked packages through travel agencies will always be a better deal than a walk-in rental, which is extortion (I don't even want to admit how much it cost me to rent that car in Andalucia). A good, cheap agency I used several times is Holiday Autos. Driveaway Holidays was also good. And I never buy the additional insurance. The rental companies just sell this to make money, and there is already sufficient coverage on the car.

Trains are great no-brainers—you get on, you get off, and in between you read, nap, and stroll around while somebody else does all the driving. European trains are comfortable, the system is efficient, and the high speed network is growing all the time. Overnight trains are even better if you're travelling a long enough distance; the extra cost for a cabin is comparable to a hotel room you'd have to rent anyway, and you save time travelling while you're asleep. But outside the more major destinations the regional lines can be time-consuming and tedious.

Intercity buses are often fast, frequent, and potentially the cheapest option, but are my least favoured because, like a plane, you’re restricted to your seat. More than three hours sitting in one place gets uncomfortable, especially if the passenger beside you hasn't showered.

Ferries are a novelty and have even more space to walk around than trains, but are slow, can be pricey, and make limited stops. And, of course, you need a great bloody body of water. But again, they make good travelling hotel rooms.

Any metro within a European city is often cheap and convenient. I love Madrid's modern and extensive network. The Paris and London metros are also justifiably well-regarded. And the aged but character-filled Budapest metro also deserves mention.

Trams are even better because you can sightsee en route. Both Prague's and Lisbon's excellent and extensive tram systems are over a hundred years old, but run both modern rolling stock as well as older, charming carriages. Meanwhile, Seville’s brand new tram "network" is so limited with its single line that it almost makes the Sydney monorail look useful (almost).

My favourite method of transportation? Hands down, on foot. I am a walker. While transport is slow, you are always in control, never miss a stop, and see more of the city than any other way. It's also free.

The Dordogne

2009-11-09T11:17:00.000+11:00

Three hours west of Lyon by train I picked up another car and arrived in the Dordogne départment of France in the full of Autumn. I haven't had a Northern Autumn in over ten years, and the Périgord Noir county and the Vézère Valley is wooded with oak forests. The countryside is orange, brown, yellow and red and threaded with bermed, winding roads, perfect for driving a stick shift. I'm soon slaloming through falling showers of oak leaves. I've driven into my Windows desktop wallpaper.

It is also home to the medieval city of Sarlat-la-Canéda, a preserved and restored living representation of 14th-century France. I based myself in an apartment here for a week. A few days later Mai Li arrived to besiege chateaux, spelunk caves, and indulge in fois gras and confit du canard before idling away the last week of this odyssey in Paris.

The day Mai Li arrived, it rained for the first time in the region for six months. Scattered Autumn showers pestered every day thereafter, but were a cakewalk after the Adriatic vortex.

Where there is Man there is art, and where there is art there is graffiti

2009-11-05T10:16:00.001+11:00

The Vézère Valley in the Dordogne region of France is littered with limestone caves, 25 of which are decorated with paintings estimated to be up to 20,000 years old, the earliest known example of painting. The most famous of these is the Lascaux complex of caves, discovered in 1940 by some boys looking for their dog (actually, it was discovered by the dog himself, Robot, who had fallen in). Comprising nearly 2,000 figures, primarily of horses but also of stags, bison, and aurochs (ancestors of modern cattle), it has been dubbed "the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory" and includes the famous Painted Gallery and the Great Hall of the Bulls.

The only other polychromatic paintings discovered in the valley are in the Font-de-Gaume cave, depicting bison and horses again but also mammoths and, the principle food source of the time, reindeer. The best known images from this cave are a frieze of five bison and "the sexual parade of the reindeer," where a stag is smelling the head of a kneeling doe. The natural contours of the cave walls were exploited to emphasise the hump of a bison or the belly of a horse. (Photography is disallowed, so here's a picture from a government website.) Sadly, yet again this is artwork defaced by graffiti, this time from the 19th century, where bison paintings at the fore of the cave have had names carved into them. It's difficult to excuse, but it has to be said that the paintings had not been scientifically observed at the time and there was no comprehension of their age or significance.

Another site, Grotte de Rouffignac, is sometimes called "the cave of a hundred mammoths." An electric train takes visitors into a ten-kilometre deep complex of painted mammoths, horses, ibex, and even rhinoceros. I hugely regret that I missed this. On 30 October, I set out late to see both Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac, but had to wait for over an hour at Font-de-Gaume because they limit the size of the tours. This is understandable; when Lascaux was discovered there was no such limitation, and the change in air quality from 1,200 visitors a day caused the development of a green fungus, la malaise vert, and a white calcite crystal, la malaise blanc, to damage the paintings. This in turn led Lascaux to first limit numbers of visitors, and then to close permanently in 1963. Indeed, there is suggestion that this may happen with Font-de-Gaume; the tour guide showed us an example of a white fungus growing on the wall. The only way to appreciate Lascaux today is to visit "Lascaux II," an impressive centimetre by centimetre three-dimensional reproduction of the cave built into the hillside beside the original, with the paintings exactly reproduced using the same pigmentation and techniques. Of course, knowing it is a facsimile unavoidably detracts from the awe, and the experience becomes a slightly carnivalesque appreciation of the facsimile itself. Nevertheless, it is sympathetically and tastefully executed. But with the delay at Font-de-Gaume and the closing for the season of Grotte de Rouffignac on 01 November, it was too late to return another day.

Nazi war crimes

2009-11-04T11:21:00.001+11:00

In 1944, in the Limousin region of France, was a small village of about 670 people called Oradour-sur-Glane. On June 10, it ceased to exist. The village and all but twenty-odd survivors were wiped out by a German Waffen-SS company en route to intercept the Allied advance following the D-Day landings at Normandy. All the men were rounded up into barns and machine-gunned, and the women and children were corralled into the church, which was then set alight. The town was then razed.

Today, the Village Martyr has been preserved exactly as it was left that day as a memorial to the victims and the atrocities of war. A rusted car is parked in the street beside the single disused tram line, power poles still supporting snapped, coiling cables. Deformed bicycles and Singer sewing machines are strewn inside the collapsing stone shells of houses. On the tiled floor of a broken boucherie lays the prostrate scale on which the family's evening meals were once weighed by the butcher for the village wives and mothers. Even with the visiting tourists, the streets have an eerie quiet.

There is some debate over the exact circumstances of the massacre, but it appears that the battalion commander, Adolf Diekmann, believing the kidnapped German Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe was being held by the French Resistance in the town, exceeded his orders to take 30 hostages and instead ordered the population be exterminated as a "just retaliation." Though his actions prompted protests within the German army, including from Field Marshall Rommel, Diekmann and much of the company which had committed the massacre were never tried; they were killed in action shortly afterward in the Battle of Normandy.

Lyon

2009-11-01T10:12:00.000+11:00

My rule of thumb when travelling is to stay in the old part of town. By definition it is the most historical, so typically has the highest density of things to see when you walk out of your hotel door. The average cost of a room is slightly higher, but in almost all European cities cheap accommodation can still be found in the centre. This remains true of Vieux Lyon, "old Lyon," where the cheap rooms are in bed and breakfasts and auberges, but despite that mid-October is well out of the July-August peak season, all ten or so of the B&Bs I rang were full. Mai Li and I had similar difficulty finding vacancy when we were in Lyon in April 2007. Despite it being France's third largest city, there must simply be a dearth of accommodation in the old part of town, which would explain the high prices of the hotels, but after three-and-a-half hours of faffing around just to find a bloody place to stay I relented and threw €135 a night at the Collège Hotel. Included in that was free wi-fi, water and Coke from the refrigerator in the hall. I don't even drink Coke, but that night a drank my bloody money's worth.

Torino

2009-10-27T11:42:00.000+11:00

En route to Lyon I stopped into Turin to break up the seven-hour journey. Why aren't there more tourists in Turin? It is a charming, spacious city, not unlike Paris at first glance, with broad boulevards, beautiful architecture—from medieval fortresses to grand belle epoque buildings—miles of colonnaded arcades, and a comprehensive tram network. Maybe it was just that I was there on a Sunday, but it's also peacefully quiet; no traffic jams or swarms of people. And like I say, no tourists.

High water and fresco vandals

2009-10-27T11:32:00.003+11:00

I experienced the acqua alta—high water—in Venice after all, and I'm glad I did. Having occurred for hundreds of years, it is a quintessential part of life there. It is not a result of rising sea levels (though this will severely exacerbate it). Of course, it was nowhere near the magnitude of the 1966 floods, but locals were wearing their colourful gumboots (Venice is the place to shop if you're a fashion-conscious pig farmer), wading obliviously through six inches of water in the lower-lying areas. More commonly it was less than an inch, most places were in fact dry, and the water table dropped again with an hour.

For four nights in Venice I lost track of the days, like I had taken a vacation from my holiday. The city feels unmoved by the passage of time, like it is still its own republic, separate from Italy, the rest of the world, and modernity. It's a strangely affecting place and, in all my travels through Eastern and Western Europe, incomparable.

So when I arrived in Verona, only an hour away, I was rather too bedazzled to fairly assess one of Italy's prettiest little cities. That it was raining again dampened my enthusiasm, too, but the second day was beautifully clear and sunny, a cool, Autumn day (as in fact, they all have been since), and I discovered the stunning Romanesque Basilica of San Zeno. If you remember your Shakespeare you'll know that Friar Lawrence married Romeo and Juliet in the crypt (looking on would have been the preserved body of Zeno who died in 380 AD). Also preserved are superb frescoes, dozens of them, dating back to the 12th century. They are still brilliant and in large sections intact, despite being damaged by time, war (Allied bombing), and 18th-century snot-nosed brats—there is a great deal of graffiti, often dated, etched into the plaster. The architecture of the building is reknowned, with a beautifully decorated ship's keel ceiling as well as a stunning facade. Apparently. It was masked by—that's right—scaffolding for restoration work, rendering it unsuitable for shooting. At least the scaffolding screens were sympathetically painted with the facade's likeness.

The not-so-happy-go-lucky-anymore traveller

2009-10-27T09:48:00.003+11:00

For my last night in Venice, I decided to indulge myself and spend a night on the Grand Canal. This was too wet and unsolid so I decided to spend a night beside the Grand Canal instead.

On the morning of this last night I moved across town from my old hotel in the pouring rain, carrying my camera bag and harnessed to a heavy backpack under a nylon poncho, a bit like wearing a circus big top, squeezing through narrow people-dammed passages barbed with umbrellas. I was interrupted by some university student with, "Excuse me, sir, will you sign a petition? It's in English. It's against drugs."

"No," I said, irritated. "I take drugs."

How to find a Bird in Space

2009-10-23T10:38:00.002+11:00

The layout of Venice, evolved over a thousand years, was unplanned and has grown organically by the needs of the city, the district, and each street itself, resulting in numerous short, narrow medieval lanes that dog-leg and reticulate between canals and campos. There are umpteen ways to get from here to there, yet surprisingly, it is not that easy to get lost. Heading in the general direction of somewhere will get you there, guided by signs tacked to the buildings pointing to Rialto, San Marco, or Alla Ferrovia, and a glance at a map now and again is enough.

I found my way to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection today, which includes a number of Picassos (I don't care much for Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Vieux Marc, but I do like On the Beach), Jackson Pollocks (meh), Salvador Dalís (pff), and three of my favourite pieces of sculpture in one place, which I was very excited to see: Giacometti's Standing Woman, his Piazza, and Brancusi's Bird in Space. Standing Woman is about four feet tall (130cm), but I was very surprised that the figures in Piazza are only about eight inches tall (20cm). Things look so different in books.

The problem with taking a 12-week holiday

2009-10-23T10:17:00.000+11:00

... is that you start to think about how it's ending soon when there are four weeks left—when many people begin their holiday.

Mind your bocconcini

2009-10-23T09:47:00.002+11:00

I found a cheap place to eat in Venice, an otherwise very expensive city, where the quality of the food is still good. It’s self-serve, like a cafeteria, but the atmosphere is still cozy and it’s become my regular place for dinner. On the table they have complimentary wine, which sounds very nice but is the worst wine I've ever had. It's thick and tastes like olive oil.

The second night I was there, I picked up a plate of pasta fresco al pomodoro and a bowl of salad. The salad had greens, tomatoes, olives and bocconcini, those delicious little balls of mozzarella. I sat down and ate half before it occurred to me that there wasn’t any salad dressing, so I went to the salad bar and picked up some olive oil and balsamic vinegar. When I got back to the table and started eating again, I noticed there was no more bocconcini. I thought there was more. I went up to the cash register and said, “Mi scusi… er, when I got up from the table, someone ate all the bocconcini out of my salad.” Though the lady seemed to speak English well, it was obviously not perfect as she asked me to repeat myself, which I did.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You want more bocconcini?”

“No,” I said. “I want justice.”

This prompted the manager’s appearance. Now we were getting somewhere. I explained the problem to him, but after some confused arguing we didn’t seem to get anywhere at all. He actually asked me to leave!

“I’m the victim here!” I said, and stood my ground. This only resulted in the carabinieri, the military police whom I’ve heard are best avoided, so when they grabbed me by the arm—I didn’t know what else to do—I screamed, “rape!”

That sorted things out.

How to shoot

2009-10-22T07:18:00.002+11:00

The explosion of digital photography has put a little camera in every tourist’s hands. Thirty years ago cameras would not have been so prevalent because you had to know how to use one. Today, they are almost completely automatic.

Here’s a tip for my readership: the correct stance for taking a photograph is to put your feet together, bend your knees and stick your bum out, lean forward with the camera held at arm’s length, and grimace.

This must appear in the manual, as most tourists seem to know it.

Wow.

2009-10-22T07:16:00.001+11:00

Venice is fantastic. I don’t know where to begin.

The 1500-year old city is vast—when you wander the sprawling sestieri (districts), it just keeps going—yet it never feels bigger than a large town. And there is not a single modern building in sight.

Venice is a tourist’s feast. The canals are as picturesque as you have been led to believe, and are never clichéd. The art is such sumptuous gluttony that another Tintoretto invokes an offhand, “oh, more paintings.” And the shopping (for those inclined) is comparable to Paris (both in scale and price).

Yes, Venice is expensive. The average price of a simple trattoria meal is €20. I was fortunate to find accommodation in a resedenzia for €50 per night—a simple room with no breakfast—because it is off season, and that is as cheap as you’ll find.

Visiting in the off season is the way to go. There are still plenty of tourists, but they don’t overpower the city as they do in peak season. Trying to pilot the narrow streets swollen to bursting with mile after mile of people is an arduous way to relax, as Mai Li and I found in Florence one year when we unwittingly arrived on a long weekend.

After catching a vaporetto, a public ferry, down the length of the Grand Canal the first morning of my arrival, I spent the entire day in Piazza San Marco. I took some furtive photography—disallowed—of the dazzling golden mosaic-tiled ceiling of the Basilica San Marco, now the cathedral of Venice but which for 700 years of gobsmacking opulence was the private chapel of the doge (duke and elected head of state).

I depleted the next three hours spending not enough time wandering the warren of rooms in the doge’s palace, the seat of the Venetian government. The walls and ceilings of every room are filled with paintings by Veronese, Tintoretto, and Titian, culminating in the cavernous Sala del Maggior Consiglio (Grand Council Hall) which hosts Tintoretto’s Paradiso, one of the world’s largest oil paintings. It is a mindboggling experience. One room that did stand out for me was the Chamber of the Magistrato alle Leggi, which, to my surprise, is today used to exhibit several works by Hieronymus Bosch.

Whew!

2009-10-21T20:30:00.000+11:00

I caught the bus back from Montenegro to Dubrovnik, in the south of Croatia, then caught the ferry up the Adriatic Sea to Rijeka in the north, a 22-hour trip. I booked a cabin for the night, a simple room with two bunks and a bathroom with sink and toilet; no window (an outside cabin costs more). From Rijeka I had originally intended to stay a night in Rovinj or Poreč in Istria and catch a fast catamaran to Venice, but the service stopped running in early October. Poreč has some remarkably well-preserved Byzantine mosaics which I was disappointed to miss. So, instead, I had to kill seven hours in Rijeka, a pleasant-enough-but-not-terribly-interesting town, waiting for a bus to Trieste, from which I boarded a train to Venice. Which is where I shall stay put for a while!

Kotor

2009-10-21T20:19:00.001+11:00

The old Venetian walled town of Kotor is much more interesting than the similarly sized old Venetian walled town of Budva. Bounded by the Bay of Kotor, the Škurda River, and Mount Lovćen—the “black mountain” that gave the nation its name—it is arguably more beautiful, and with a permanent residential populace it feels more authentic. Pick-up-sticks-like marble streets open into numerous little plazas for drinking coffee at the cafes, and at only four hectares (ten acres) in size, it is easy to get both lost and found. I didn’t get time to climb the thousand-odd stairs which run up the mountain on the city walls to a fortress overlooking the turquoise Adriatic fjord on which the city sits. For 400 years the city fell under the control of Venice, hence the appearance around town of the winged lion of St Mark and the variety of Renaissance palazzos.

Interestingly enough, there was an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about Kotor just the other day. Click here.

Black mountain, black lung

2009-10-19T19:30:00.000+11:00

I met one Montenegrin who didn’t smoke. He was Australian.

At a café on the beach in Budva, when the waiter asked if I needed an ashtray and I said no, he was momentarily stunned. Then he walked away and said, “Good for you.”

Stari Bar

2009-10-19T19:20:00.001+11:00

Stari Bar—“old Bar”—is four kilometres away from Bar, an uninteresting port city on Montenegro's south coast. The once populous ancient city is today four hectares of vine-shrouded ruins and piles of stones, a consequence of war and earthquakes, but numerous buildings, already being used to host small concerts and events, are being restored in an effort to develop the site as a historic tourist destination. Those buildings completed are impressive, including an 18th-century Turkish bath house, a Renaissance palazzo and a mediaeval church. Already very pretty in its wild state, it is easy to see what a beautiful drawcard it will become, though with evidence of Illyrian settlement dating from 800 BC the several sites being offhandedly worked with shovels and wheelbarrows raise questions about how much archaeological oversight there is.

I was fortunate to get a lift for the 45-minute drive from Budva with the owner of the hotel where I was staying. I clambered around the peaceful ruins for four hours, between thick flowering bushes alive with clouds of ecstatic bees, and, lulled by the sound of the river in the valley below, napped on the stone wall of the citadel overlooking wild pomegranate trees and a stone terraced olive grove at the foot of the diagonally-tilted, striated limestone mountain.

Border control

2009-10-19T19:08:00.000+11:00

There were only a dozen or so souls on the 3PM bus from Dubrovnik to Podgorice, the capital of Montenegro. I was getting off at Budva, the centre of the action on the Montenegrin coast in peak season. In October, though, stripped of its tourist gloss under gray skies, it is somewhat bleak (as noted in my previous entry).

At the Croatian-Montenegrin border, a policeman boards the bus and collects passports from each of the passengers. He takes them into the border control office to stamp them and then gives them back to the bus driver, who returns them to the owners, a bit of a random process of sometimes checking photos and other times actually passing off the responsibility of distribution to another passenger. The bus travels two minutes up the road, stops at another border check, and we do the same routine all over again. Why? Old bureaucratic communist habit? And what is in between these two stops? No man’s land?

Budva, Montenegro

2009-10-18T07:14:00.000+11:00

There is a certain look of desolation in Montenegro's off season which exposes the communist 1970s Tito hangover it still can't shake. The promenade to Budva's Stari Grad, the old town in the centre of the Montenegrin Adriatic coast, is bounded by impermanent single-storey aluminium and concrete shops and weed-strewn lots. The pedestrianised street is paved with concrete blocks, and a cracked basketball court next to a fibreglass waterslide held up by rusted scaffolding is used as a go-kart circuit. Half the shops and most of the bars, tacky ones in the shape of pirate ships between palm trees and dead neon signs, are closed due to the off season. "Fisherman's Pub" is decorated with the typical pastiche of hanging lifesavers, floats and fishing nets. Though trite, these are used and faded objects taken from actual fishing boats; it's an authenticity that deserved recognition thirty years ago but which is now an eastern bloc curiosity.

Past all this, moored next to the walls of Stari Grad is a bank of expensive cruisers. Inside the old town of 17th-century walls it's suddenly upmarket with expensive watches and jewellery, cafes and restaurants... yet it's a bit like a shopping mall. There are almost no residences. Compare this to Split, Dubrovnik, and Kotor, further north on the Montenegrin coast, where the character difference is distinct; they are still residential towns, and there is a life buzzing around the tourists.

Apparently, Budva in the summer high season of July and August is a different thing entirely. The swarms of bikini-clad girls and crazy nightlife every night are enough to distract one from, well, everything else (including perhaps a good night's sleep).

The winter jacket is out

2009-10-17T06:45:00.000+11:00

In one day, the Adriatic coast went from Indian summer to early winter. Eight degrees has fallen from the thermometer and the wind has taken off a couple more. Though the rain has moved on, the temperature hasn't climbed above 14°C in three days, and considering that I'm only going north now, I better get used to it. All of Europe is under an Arctic chill.

Chamber music

2009-10-17T06:43:00.002+11:00

I won't bore you with the details of the makeshift raft, disappearing coastlines, and invoking Poseidon himself to escape the maelstrom, but there was afterwards a moment of peace when I was able to see the Sorkočević Quartet perform by candlelight in Dubrovnik's tiny Church of St Saviour (an odd name, as I thought there was only one saviour in Christianity, and that he hardly needed to be canonised).

The orchestra, comprised of flute, violin, piano and contrabass viola, performed:

Handel's "Largo"
Albinoni's Trio Sonata
Sorkočević's Symphony No. 4
Overture to Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro"
Beethoven's "Coriolan Overture"
Overture to Rossini's "Italian in Algiers"

They also performed an encore, which piece they announced but the name of which I didn't catch.

The atmosphere was intimate—there wouldn't have been more than fifty people in the audience, already more than half the little chapel's capacity—and the sound was warm and clear. The small plan and high ceiling of the church are perfect for the acoustics of chamber music. My favourite was the Cariolan Overture, which they performed with the dynamic sympathy required for Beethoven. I thanked them afterwards for a wonderful concert.