The only shiny things in the loo were the cockroaches

While the planet either burns up or gets washed away, depending on which bit of it you're living on, it's nice to look back - way back - to gentler times. I'm currently writing about river cruises in Europe, on the Rhone, Rhine, Seine and Danube, and trying to rank them. Impossible, of course. They have lots in common, and each has its particular delights, so you really can't go wrong.

I wrote here a wee while ago that my first cruise was in Fiji - but it wasn't at all, I now remember. Leaving aside, for obvious reasons, my voyages between NZ and the UK back in 1957, the first time I travelled anywhere on a boat - apart from the Interislander ferry here - was in 1980, on the Irrawaddy in Burma/Myanmar. 

It was part of the Big Trip, back to England from NZ in 1980, and we started the cruise at Mandalay. We'd got there from Rangoon/Yangon on a battered old Fokker full of odd seats, and spent the day exploring what was then a quiet, sprawling city full of trishaws, pony carts and freely grazing cattle and sheep. We wandered around the grounds of the palace, encountering a snake and lots of lizards, and climbed, bare-footed as per custom, up the 1729 steps to the top of Mandalay Hill. Tourism was still a novelty then, and so were we, to the locals - only fair, really, though it got a bit tiring having people constantly offering to buy my watch, and asking if I had pens, cosmetics or clothes to sell.

We visited the big and beautiful pagoda, went to a market to buy mosquito coils - not the simple transaction you might expect - and then visited Amarapura, including temples, innumerable Buddhas, various handicraft workshops, and U Bein's picturesque bridge.

The ferry to Pagan/Bagan left that night, and we were really taken aback by what we'd let ourselves in for: lower deck packed with baskets of produce, upper deck like a scene from Exodus - not an inch of free space, people crammed in everywhere. Even our little "first-class" bow cabin had only four bare wooden bunks and a toilet heaving with cockroaches.

We and an Italian couple spent the night easing from one aching hip to another, woken at 4am when two more couples - German and American - came into the cabin, and the boat finally set off with loud shrieking from the hooter above our cabin. The others slept lay on the floor and table. 

The following day was a repeated pattern of gliding slowly down the super-wide, shallow river, periodically easing sideways to the bank to put ashore/take on passengers. Snack sellers came on board too, but we restricted ourselves to bananas and mangoes - oddly, not tempted by the fried grasshoppers wrapped in leaves so popular with the locals. A monk came on board at one stage and was seated in our cabin with great reverence.

The boat eventually stopped for the night well upstream of where we'd expected to go ashore, but with the help of a Burmese teacher on board who spoke English, six of us tourists splashed out on hiring a private boat for the exorbitant sum of $55. We were taken to it through the village on a pony cart, and caused a sensation, hordes of kids rushing up to shake our hands. After a 90 minute cruise further down the river, we came ashore again, got into another cart, drawn by a bad-tempered pony who had thought his working day was over, and crept through Pagan's moonlit temples to, finally, a lodging with a proper bed.

Uniworld, it definitely wasn't. But memorable, for sure... (Read more here.)

Feedback!

Thank you again for the awesome spread in the SST, as well as the article online. We had a really busy day at BFC, which we can definitely attribute to the exposure. 

It's rare to get feedback in my job - for me, anyway. You get sent somewhere, have the experience, write up the notes and then the story, edit the photos, send it all off, wait for publication, and then wait some more for payment. And meanwhile you're on to the next thing. It's always good to see the story in print, but it's really rare to get any response to it, other than an occasional bit of nit-picking in the comments online from people who have nothing better to do.

So it was a delight to get the above email from the Marketing Manager at the focus of my last story, and know that people not only read the story, but were inspired by it to visit the location.

I'm also pleased, because I know they'll have a good time. I certainly did. Butterfly Creek, out near Auckland Airport, has been there for almost 20 years, but it was ages since I'd last visited, so I was happy to go again. I was even happier to see it's got bigger and better since then - it's a kind of hands-on zoo-cum-amusement park, and heavily into conservation. It's not huge, but that means it's easy to get up close to the animals they do have, and I got to have some special encounters.

I poked bits of shrimp and octopus through wire to five very eager and cute little otters, put food down for three hungry meercats in their very artistically decorated enclosure, gave boiled chicken bits and squirmy moth larvae to two tiny cotton-top tamarins, and got sneered at by a very superior - but genuinely magnificent - green iguana. I loved it all, going behind the scenes and getting so close. 

I was fascinated to study the giant weta, and even the tarantula was genuinely magnificent, though non-keepers aren't trusted to hold them, because of unpredictable reactions on the visitor's part - fair enough. I wouldn't be able to guarantee not suddenly jerking in reaction, and dropping the spider. I did touch her, though, which was a first (the only other tarantula I've got close to was a stray one that turned up on the spare bed in my room at a sheep station in South Australia, which my host's daughter turned into a large smear on the bedspread before I even had a proper look at it, thus depriving me of years of detailed nightmares).

"You won't be feeding the crocodile," they told me, and again, there was no disappointment on my part. Perfectly happy to watch from a distance as Goldie leapt up half out of the water to chomp down on a dangled fish frame.

I spent ages at Butterfly Creek, enjoying the animals and trying to get a good shot of a huge blue morpho butterfly. They import the chrysalises regularly from the Philippines and Costa Rice, and I saw them carefully unpacking a shipment and hanging each chrysalis from racks in an incubator. The staff were all friendly, and very dedicated - plus, Paul had an excellent line in quotable quotes, which I appreciated and exploited. "He looks at you like you're worm spit, eh?" was my favourite, about the disdainful Diego, the iguana.

There's easily a dayful of fun to be had at Butterfly Creek, including huge noisy dinosaurs, ponies to pat, wild eels to observe, invisible kiwi to try to spot in the dark, and highly-recommended egg sandwiches to eat. Go, if you can. You won't regret it.

So long ago and so far away. Psy.

It's likely that, in an attempt to leave you feeling slightly less gloomy at the end of today's inevitably depressing news, the presenters will have drawn to your attention the fact that it's the ten-year anniversary of the release of 'Gangnam Style'. The YouTube views are up to 4 billion, so there's no doubt at all that you now have that catchy tune buzzing in your head, and can see Psy bouncing along to the rhythm, wrists inexplicably crossed.

The song was an instant hit, so it was no surprise to come across a huge, golden statue of those hands when I did a quick trip to Seoul in 2019. It was towards the end of my visit there, courtesy of Air NZ, who were about to start flying that route, and we'd done all the proper stuff - culture, architecture, national dress, all sorts of wonderful food, history, even a trip to the DMZ. We were finally let loose and I spent the last afternoon doing something authentically Korean - after visiting a reptile café (lizards, tortoises and snakes in cages and enclosures, more of a  pet shop-cum-coffee bar, no handling going on), prowling round a shopping mall, and getting a taste of K-pop.

The Starfield Mall - in the Gangnam district - is both huge and beautifully presented, full of tempting shops (including Uniqlo, yay!), a 16-screen cinema, an aquarium, an atrium public library with a grand piano, a gorgeous coloured glass artwork, and a stage across which a series of K-pop groups paraded in a free concert.

The big statue was outside, near a food truck called Luxury Bear - after my tour that morning through a busy food alley, where there were live eels in tanks and octopus hanging from hooks, I was wary, but it turns out they just do pizza. Then I had to go to the airport to fly home, after too short a time in Seoul - there's a lot to see and enjoy there. Would go again. One day.

Maiden voyage - well, cruise

A couple of posts ago, I was marvelling at reviving a trip I did back in 2014 to Kakadu in the Northern Territory, for a recent story. Well, today I beat that, with a story published about a Captain Cook cruise I did in Fiji way, way back in 2005. That even predated my note-taking routine - I did take a notebook, duly labelled, but was dismayed to find, when researching for this (requested) story, that I wrote nothing in it. Tch - amateur!

So, thank you again, internet, for enabling both reconstruction and updating. I did remember the trip pretty well too - it was my first-ever cruise, and I was sucked straight in, and came home hoping that I would go on another one day. If I'd known then that there were 20 more lying ahead of me, eight of them in the luxurious embrace of Silversea, and including such diverse destinations as Alaska, China, Turkey, Norway, the Amazon, Galapagos, Ireland and, best of all, Antarctica, my mind would have been blown, truly.

I'm not sure now that I would rush to go on another - still too Covid-nervous not to remember the Petri-dish phenomenon - but I certainly feel lucky to have been on so many, and most of them so very, very good.

2005, though - that means little Lusi will be 22 now. She was the cute 5 year-old new entrant who showed me so proudly around her bare-bones school on one of the remote Yasawa Islands. Though it was the holidays, the kids all came to school to welcome us sunburnt strangers from that fancy white ship out in the bay, and sang songs to us that included 'The Wheels on the Bus' - on an island that had no buses, or cars, or probably even much in the way of wheels. I wonder what Lusi is doing now?

Reluctant record

There are some horribly big numbers out there right now: the US recently reached the chilling milestone of one million Covid deaths, and there've been over 6 million world-wide. Not long ago NZ scored a million cases since the start of the pandemic - one fifth of the population - and then today we finally, inevitably, not only reached but surpassed 1000 deaths from/with Covid - 90% of them people aged 60+. It's pretty scary how fast that last number shot up after Omicron arrived, because back in only February, we still had just 55 deaths overall since the start of this whole sorry business, and there were long periods with no deaths reported at all. Things have changed so quickly.

So, even though we’ve also scored another big number - 95% eligible population double-vaxxed, plus over half so far also boosted, it feels a bit dodgy that the border, already now open to lots of countries, will reopen to everyone from the end of July. Of course the tourism industry is desperate for that to happen, and my travel writer colleagues, sick and tired of dredging up old material, and competing with each other for local stories, are already heading off overseas, despite flight uncertainty and general infection risks.

It certainly is tempting, seeing their photos of overseas destinations looking so adorably and excitingly foreign. I’d love to go. Maybe, since the experts are gloomily predicting another five years of all this, we should just lump Covid in with all the other risks and uncertainties that give travel its addictive frisson? 

Who, where and what

While I was otherwise occupied, my brain drifted off this morning and dredged up Mnangagwa from ages ago. I'm guessing it was prompted by reading about Ncuti Gatwa being selected as the next Doctor Who, which is causing exactly the sort of kerfuffle you might expect. Mnangagwa, though definitely sounding familiar, I had to Google to identify - and, of course, it's Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is President of Zimbabwe.

Having read the name three times now, you too will have it filed away in your memory recesses ready for when that question pops up in your next game of Trivial Pursuit. Which is entirely why I learnt it in the first place, since over the last dozen years or so, the only time I've played TP has been on cruises, and more often than not it was on a Silversea cruise with Moss Hills as quizmaster. Moss, though looking and sounding proper Home Counties, was born and brought up in Zimbabwe, so it was a reasonable expectation that one of his questions might at some point be about the president. (Sadly, though, never.)

We came across Moss on three separate cruises with Silversea, and always enjoyed his work as Cruise Director, organising and presenting the entertainment programme, and being approachable and sociable around the ship. In all those interactions, though, he never mentioned this major life event which, for no obvious reason, has had him popping up recently in various media including a BBC podcast that I've been following for ages.

Turns out, in 1991, back when he was a long-haired guitarist on board the Greek liner Oceanos, he ended up supervising the evacuation of the ship when it was sinking off the coast of southern Africa in a big storm. It's a terrific story, and he comes out of it deservedly well, putting himself in real danger as, in the absence of the ship's officers who had commandeered the first lifeboat and blithely saved themselves, he and the other entertainers helped guests into the other lifeboats and lowered them into the sea. Then the ship listed too far for that so, after managing to contact help, Moss supervised loading passengers into rescue helicopters. He and his wife were the last to leave the ship, which then sank. No lives were lost, thanks to him, plus the other entertainers who included a magician. The ship's captain and senior officers were later found guilty of 'negligence'.

It doesn't take much effort to work out why Moss never mentioned this adventure while we were all sailing the high seas in a cruise ship. But since you're no doubt sitting safely at home, you can read all about it here and here.

Up right out back

 All hail the internet! It was way back in 2014 when I did this trip to Kakadu in the Northern Territory, but it was easy to check up on the facts before I submitted this story in response to a request for Australian material. It was a bit of a shame then that, having written and sent in six assorted stories, the bubble with our neighbour burst again, and they had to be filed away. But at least I was paid, in advance! Which is rare, very rare... Now though, finally, the borders are open again, and this story has finally seen the light of day.

So I look forward to seeing the others, about Ningaloo, and the Bibbulmun, and Rottnest, Broome and the Stuart Highway, in the coming weeks. I do enjoy remembering those colourful trips and, as ever, hope that the stories will prompt Kiwis to break away from their boring Melbourne-Sydney-Gold Coast mindset, and explore other bits of Australia, especially the amazing Outback.

It's kind of a shame that 'The Tourist' on HBO Max isn't as gripping as it should be, given its Outback setting, and its cast; because it might otherwise intrigue some viewers enough to make them want to get a taste of that location. Never mind, though: season 2 of Tim Minchin's 'Upright' is about to be filmed. Season 1 was about a journey across the Nullabor Plain heading to Perth, and it was glorious - not even just for the scenery, either. It's a funny, sad and original story and, of course, has excellent music, notably for me 'Carry You', sung over the final credits by Missy Higgins. 

The song starts with a mention of fish and chips on Perth's Cottesloe beach, where I went to do a story about their annual sculpture exhibition. I really enjoyed it, and not just because I got, for the first and only time ever, a per diem - what a thrill! But the exhibition was great too, and it was the perfect place to stage it, along that gorgeous beach.

Connections? Well, Cottesloe’s sculpture exhibition is on again right now; plus Sculpture on the Gulf is currently running here on Waiheke, which I've written about, of course. And I did go to see Tim Minchin last year, performing at the Civic, a theatre I've also written about, of course. Upright S2 is going to be filmed in Queensland, but I have faith that Tim will break away from the boring bits and take us viewers into less familiar, but far more spectacular, locations. Can't wait.