Oestrogen rules!

I was going to revisit here a train trip I took from New Delhi to Agra, way back in 1980, prompted by the appallingly tragic triple train crash that's just happened in India. But of course that would be somewhat appalling too - insensitively trivialising and tone-deaf. So instead I'm going to write about war as a tourist attraction.

Today is the anniversary of D-Day, after all. And who hasn't done a tour of northern France and not been to the beaches, visited Dunkirk, been awed by the white crosses stretching away into the distance at the cemeteries, marvelled at still being able to see the remains of the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches? It's hugely sobering to see it all, stand on the edge of a bomb crater, read the info boards, and imagine the horror of it all - but it's also, be honest, fascinatingly interesting, dramatic and thus, yes, entertaining.

Wherever you (ie I) go in the world, there are wartime (and worse) 'attractions' - I honestly couldn't count the battlefields and war cemeteries I've visited, from Gallipoli to Gettysburg, Adelaide River to Bourail in New Caledonia. Plus Stalag Luft III and, even worse, Auschwitz and the Hanoi Hilton. These places have an irresistible appeal that's a weird combination of honest reverence and regret for all those lives lost and pain inflicted, and a creepy fascination for viewing the utter depths of cruelty that men (it's always men) are driven to by their overwhelming desire for power and territory.

And, though I suppose it's possible to travel the world and have holidays that don't include stuff like this, it's always there, pretty much wherever you go. The tourist industry isn't backward in pointing that out and, yes, exploiting it openly with focussed tours and suchlike. Their main customers are, of course, Baby Boomers, whose parents lived through WW2 - I wonder, once we've all shuffled off , whether younger generations will be quite so interested?

I'm guessing yes. After all, war has been a constant throughout human history, and is certainly front-and-centre right now, with the distinct possibility of others looming, despite the deservedly quite distracting threats of climate change. Do you ever wonder how different things might have been/might be if there were a bit less testosterone swirling through the people in charge around the world?

Double novelty

That’s double as in a) having a travel story printed in the paper and b) writing an entry here. I know that Covid is part of everyday life now, most people (including me) have had it, borders are all open, and overseas travel is normal again - but for various boring reasons, it isn’t for me. So my writing about travelling, both here and in the paper, is coughing up blood currently. Sigh.

When, though, I'm able to choke back my disappointment, I can still so far mine my past experiences for new(-ish) stories, and this was one, from back in 2019 when I went to France to do an Avalon cruise along the Seine. Before it began, my famil host Letitia and I did a free walking tour with Paris Greeters around the 13th arrondissement with bubbly local man Quan. It was really good. There’s no beating a local for enthusiasm. 

Of course I had to find a current link for it all, and that was Netflix’s Emily in Paris - easy to scoff at critically, but irresistible for both the crazy fashions and, of course, the gorgeous locations. Recently, the city's beauty has been marred by piles of uncollected rubbish, and rioting people protesting at - quelle horreur! - Macron's raising the retirement age from 62 to a scandalous 64. Considering that most of the world has for ages been working to at least 65, it's hard not to mock the French, especially given - it's a standard trope in Emily in Paris, so it must be true - their liberal interpretation of the 9-5 working day.

But they're French, it's Paris, so of course they get a free pass. They invented the shrug that everyone gives them, and they'll just carry on being French, and the rest of us will be content with that. National stereotypes are, like all clichés, basically true, and even when they’re not quite, we’re so accustomed to them that those are the lenses through which we see everything anyway. Good reason to travel, btw.

So, for today’s connection (which, in the best Kiwi tradition, is 2 degrees) that wink that Macron directed at the Firstborn? Definitely cool, not creepy.

Goghing... gone

Naturally, going to the Van Gogh Live show that came to Auckland recently was always going to remind me of Arles. The show is a multi-screen projection of a good selection of his paintings, from early to last, with a bit of modest animation in some of them. The screens are all around the arena, at different angles and heights, and there are several paintings projected at once, so you have to keep looking around - including on the floor (though clearly not everyone felt that responsibility).

Each set has an accompanying quote from his letters or diary, in a handwriting font that takes a bit of effort to read, and the pace is brisk enough that it's far from a relaxing experience. It's good, though, and his paintings, especially the starry night ones, really benefit from the large-scale, super-bright treatment. It's fairly short, so I watched it twice. Overall, though, the story is sad. Poor man. He sold only one painting in his (self-shortened) lifetime. 

Regular 😀 readers will recall that I went to Arles back in - sigh - 2012, beginning a river cruise there with Uniworld along the Rhone, which finished in Lyon. Arles is where Van Gogh spent his most productive, if dramatic, years, and on a tour around that lovely, and appealingly lived-in, town, we visited a number of the scenes that he painted, most memorably the yellow Café la Nuit. 

Incidentally, the self-portrait with the bandaged ear confuses a lot of people: it was the left ear that he sliced at (possibly off) with the knife, but the picture shows his right ear bandaged, because he was painting his actual mirror image. 

Anyway, it was several days later, when fishing the next clean coffee mug out of the drawer, that I saw it was decorated with one of his swirly cypress paintings. I'd forgotten all about it - and also, where I'd bought it. So that occupied me on and off for a few more days, until the mug reappeared in the morning coffee cycle. I suddenly remembered then that I'd bought it at the National Gallery in London, where I'd gone on a Silversea cruise in - sigh - 2019. 

Shamefully, despite having lived in England for years and going to London many times, it was my first visit to the gallery - it was always one of those 'next time' things. If nothing else, recent events should have taught us not to put stuff off, don't you think? Just made that one in time.

That was a chastening lesson, but I was still quietly triumphant about having remembered where I'd bought the mug. Turns out, though, that all I had to do was turn it over.

To be not disappointed

 Although I had two pages in the Sunday Star-Times travel section all to myself yesterday, the triumph was somewhat mitigated by the cover story being about the Southern Lights flight. This is a special organised by Viva Expeditions with Air NZ, to fly from (and back to) Christchurch in a Dreamliner on a 10-hour search for the aurora australis. The plane flies in the dramatically-named stealth mode, all external lights off, internal too, so everyone's eyes can adjust and fully appreciate the aurora.

They found the lights quite quickly, and they were pretty spectacular, according to the photos and video. But - and this is a HUGE but - not according to most passengers' actual eyes. The trouble is, our eyes, and especially older eyes, aren't very good at picking up the colours, so what almost everyone saw were swirls of white - the green and pink only showed up via cameras.

Now I would have found that deeply disappointing, to put it mildly. Seeing the aurora is one of my top wants, but to pay all that money, fly all that way and only see white? Nah, Instagram has spoiled me for that. I want proper colour, end of. And if I have to go to Finland, or Norway, or Alaska for my chance to see it, well, that's just icing on the cake. Or actual ice. Whatever. Even if it turns out my eyes can't do the business, at least I've been somewhere interesting and not just been squashed into a plane for ten hours, flying from A to A.

Travel should not be about disappointment, especially when it involves world-famous spectacles or landmarks. I'm happy to report that right up there with cast-iron guarantees of satisfaction (for the locations, tourist throngs notwithstanding) are the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island's moai, the Eiffel Tower and Tower Bridge. There are lots of others. As further proof, most of those listed I've been to more than once, and been 98% thrilled to see them again. And, for today's connection, two of those - Machu Picchu and Galapagos - I visited the second time courtesy of Viva Expeditions. Thanks, Rachel.

Quatre-vingt-neuf

Since all my outlets for travel stories have closed down for the foreseeable future, I have more time on my hands than can be sensibly filled by my trusty laptop and its small pal the iPhone. So, like many people, I've been looking to use some of this lockdown to catch up with a few of the jobs that have been sitting quietly in corners, waiting patiently. For years.

Accordingly, I have finally put up, under the letterbox at the gate (yes, foreigners, that's how we do mail here in Enzed - trusted to be safe, unsupervised and unlocked, out on the street) the decorative ceramic numbers I bought five years ago in Paris. Agreed, that is a long time to have them sitting on top of the bookshelf, being regularly dusted (not). Anyway, I found some wood to set them into, carved out the inset space, stained it, glued the pieces in (hours of happy fun subsequently, picking dried glue off my fingers), grouted, and then screwed it to the fence under the letterbox. Job done (but no photo because my workmanship bears less scrutiny these days).

And all the time, I was remembering that Saturday afternoon trip on the Metro to the architecturally extravagant BHV - Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville - where I browsed happily round the basement DIY section, choosing the numbers. It's a department store, established in 1852, that I now wish I had explored more thoroughly but (all together now) I was short on time. So I just bought 89c with appropriate forget-me-not surrounds, and went upstairs again to emerge in the busy square in front of the Town Hall, in all its even more elaborate glory. I wandered past it to the banks of the Seine, and along to l'Île St Louis where people were picnicking on rugs by the river drinking champagne from glass flutes; and a dog was having a swim. At the tip of the island I got the classic view of Notre Dame on l'Île de la Cité - of course, now it looks sadly so different, after that terrible fire - and then crossed the Pont St-Louis to battle with the crowds thronging the square in front of the cathedral. That's where all French roads are measured from, did you know?

And then I took the Metro back to my hotel to meet up with the rest of my group - or tried to, anyway. I had to have several goes at finding it, and in the end was enormously grateful to Letitia who was in charge of us, who had very sensibly drawn our attention that morning to the features of the hotel's exterior. Truly, I would probably have wandered for hours if she hadn't. And then we all assembled in the foyer to be taken to our ship, Avalon's Tapestry II, for a glorious 8-day glide along the Seine to Normandy, and back. It was a lovely, lovely cruise, in every way - one of the best. Hopefully, I'll remember that, every time I see 89c.

Notre Dame du Monde

I happened to wake very early this morning, and reached out, of course, for my phone, to find out what had happened overnight. And learned that something awful was still happening, in fact - the fire in Notre Dame had only just taken hold, and I was getting tweets and newsflashes that updated me almost instantly with every new, and horrifying, stage of the inferno. I saw that beautiful lacy wooden spire tip, drop and disappear into the flames. I saw the roof collapse. I saw the flames leaping high from the body of the cathedral, and the smoke billowing around the bell towers. And I watched as Parisians stood across the river, and sang hymns together facing the fire still burning in their beautiful old cathedral.

Then I had to write a piece about it for Stuff, so I looked up my old notebooks, delved deep into my photo files, even looked at actual photos dating back to 1978 when I visited Paris for the first time. Enough memory came back for 600 words' worth, and I sent it off, and it was uploaded straight away, in a time-sensitive process that gave me a tiny inkling of how my life might have been as a real journalist. Except, the editor cut the first sentence that - of course - I thought introduced the main idea of the piece. Maybe, though, she just doesn't know French - or reckons the readers don't.

'Notre Dame: the name says it all' was how it should have begun. The point I was hoping to make was that a fire in a cathedral in a country on the other side of the world isn't the remote and irrelevant event that that description implies. The grand buildings of the world belong to us all, enrich us all, whether (ideally) we get to see them in person, or not. They're all ours - Notre Dame, Westminster, the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, the Capitol, the Blue Mosque and all the very many others we are so lucky to have scattered all over the planet. Whatever our nationality, our culture, even our religion, or lack of it, these buildings are part of our heritage as members of homo sapiens (not actually so sure about the sapiens bit these days). We can all recognise the beauty and stateliness of these buildings, and the impressiveness of their design, construction and decoration. We can all take simple human pride in their existence, wherever they are. And we should all be sad when they are damaged. 

Notre Dame has not been destroyed, thank goodness. It will be back, eventually, and look just as good. It's heart-breaking to see it now, and so sad that the fire happened at all, through probably what will turn out to be sheer carelessness or stupidity. But we haven't lost it. 

This photo was something else that didn't make it into the story: too frivolous, perhaps? It makes me hope that the day is not too distant when people can play with the cathedral like this again.

Rumbling and rambling

The earthquake chaos continues in Kaikoura and Wellington: now upgraded to 7.8, and followed by more than 1500 aftershocks, it's caused massive damage to roads and buildings, the land and the coast, and it's all a bit exhausting to think about, with our long experience of Christchurch's travails still so fresh in our memories.

So here's a less weighty connection: tucked behind all the dramatic stuff in the paper today is a report about the auction of a notebook of sketches found in Arles that it's claimed belonged to Van Gogh. Now, I've been to Arles, and on my tour there visiting the sites of some of his most famous paintings - which still today look just as they do on the canvas - the guide mentioned that Gauguin, who stayed with Vincent for 9 weeks in the city, tried to help with Van Gogh's mental instability. Not a great success, if true - he ended up being threatened with the knife that Vincent famously used soon afterwards to cut off part of his ear (which he didn't actually give to a prostitute). 

Then, while in Tahiti recently I learned that, like so many (male) producers of the world's most valued pieces of art and literature, Gauguin was also not someone you'd want to share even a lift with. Nasty piece of work, actually, violent and - our circle-island tour guide of Tahiti Nui, Dave, was perfectly candid about this - a paedophile, who not only took advantage of young girls wherever he went, but generously shared his syphilis with them. Those paintings of tropical maidens that we're so familiar with look innocent enough, but the reality was far from that. There is a Gauguin Museum on the route, but it's undergoing renovations right now, so instead we spent time in the nearby Vaipahi Gardens. Much more soothing to the spirit.

Keep travelling

We're living in dispiriting times. Watching the news, reading the paper, they're a real downer these days. What I find makes it worse is the idea behind this blog, Only Connect (thanks, EM) so that when people get mown down on the Promenade des Anglais, or a bomb explodes outside the Blue Mosque, or policemen get shot in Louisiana, I don't just read the words and see the pictures on the screen, I can smell the air and feel the sun on my skin. I know that those people running along the road in panic, or lying bleeding on the ground, or suddenly dead, are people just like me, tourists visiting somewhere they liked the look of, to have a good time and discover new things; or are people who simply live there, doing their jobs, going home at the end of the day to their families, their cats, their homes. Or not.

It's a good thing, I think, to see them as actual people, to be able to identify with them and feel their fear and outrage; not just more faceless victims.We really do need to think that way, hard and tiring though it can be in the face of such a relentless onslaught of horrors everywhere around the world. Sympathy and empathy: those are important but rarely mentioned benefits of travel. That's why we shouldn't cop out and stay at home. Go wherever you fancy. Don't cross Turkey off your list. Doing that would not only mean you're depriving yourself of seeing a beautiful, friendly, interesting country unlike any other; but it also means all those people who depend on tourism for their living - like my Insight Vacations Tour Director, Barcin, who keeps posting hopeful photos of lovely places on Instagram - are victimised too. None of us can let terrorism win.*

*Or even random acts of violence, such as the cinema shooting that I've just been reminded happened a year ago in Lafayette, which I've been describing as a friendly, safe-feeling place in my stories about it. Which it is, of course.

14 Juillet: Laissez les bon temps rouler!*

C'est aujourd'hui le quatorze juillet et je viens d'être en Louisiane où ils parlent français. That's not just the odd word, like grand or beaucoup flung into an otherwise English sentence, though that happens all the time; or titles for places like Salle de Danse and Presbytère; or even joke French like Geaux Cajuns! or Buy Leauxcal.

No, there are actual Americans who've lived there all their lives, who speak French naturally and as their first language; which is kind of chastening for those of us who take a bit of comfort from what we thought was the fact that being monoglot in an English-speaking country is the default position. Well, it probably is, actually - but when you come across these effortlessly bilingual people, as you certainly will in Louisiana, it's hard not to be envious.

Of course, here in particular it's celebrated as a point of difference, since the locals like to vaunt their separation from the rest of the US both historically - "We're 80 years older," I was told several times - and culturally. Both the Cajuns (descended from the French settlers evicted by the British from Acadia, now Nova Scotia) and the Creoles (locally-born of settler stock originating from Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, including native Americans and both slaves and free people of colour, all intermingled) spoke and still use French. Sadly, since its use was forbidden (and punished) in schools after the Constitution of 1921, it's declined as a first language and now it's only the elderly who speak it fluently. Like Wallace here, at Johnson's Boucanière, who greeted us all in French as we arrived on our Cajun Food Tour to try their very tasty Sausage and Tasso with Sauce Piquante.

But they're trying to revive it. I hope they succeed. Bonne chance!

* Yes, this is not correct French - but it's Louisiana French, and they use this sentence all the time, so ne t'en fais pas.

Oh yes, also, people died...

It's a hot and humid morning, the sea beyond my window is sparkling blue dotted with white boats, mirrored by a blue sky dotted with fluffy clouds, the cicadas are buzzing down in the bush, the kakas are swooping along the valley which echoes with their harsh pterodactyl-like cry (you can't prove that comparison wrong) and I'm sitting here looking at a list of unpublished stories from last year, cursing terrorists. And the weather.

There are a couple about beleagured Paris, one about the sweet and unique little Pet Cemetery out in the suburbs, and another about exploring the 13th arrondissement with boundlessly enthusiastic local man Quan. There's another set in Turkey, a country of rich history, magnificent architecture, striking scenery, delicious food and friendly people but horrendously hostile neighbours, and one specifically about Istanbul where I stayed in a cute little hotel a minute up the hill from the Hippodrome with its - it was then, anyway - remarkably new-looking Egyptian Obelisk of Theodosius where ten unsuspecting tourists were recently killed in a suicide explosion. Yet another tells about cruising the Greek Islands, in the waters where desperate refugees keep drowning trying to escape their ruined homeland.

There are others about the north of England - Yorkshire, Cumbria - which are currently due for another onslaught of wild weather, still sodden and crumbling as they are after the torrential rain and flooding that made Christmas a misery for those unfortunate enough to live by a river or on a floodplain. I've got one story set in Western Australia, where raging fires have consumed huge areas of bush, plus the homes built in it, almost as bad as the terrible conflagrations on the opposite side of the continent.

In all these locations I met nice people who depend on tourism for their livelihood, who are proud and enthusiastic about their bits of the planet and want to share them with visitors. I'm also pretty keen for my stories to be published, to repay my hosts with publicity, and also to reap a few pence (no exaggeration, sadly) for my work. But that's not going to happen while these places are, for one reason or another, in turmoil - editors, unfortunately, tend to play it safe rather than take a stand.

So maybe it's just as well that, South Africa in August apart, my horizons for this year are currently relentlessly domestic. There's a Grand Tour coming up, hitting all the visitor must-sees for New Zealand. Hopefully there will be nothing more dramatic en route than the mountains, lakes and fiords - but who knows, in these turbulent times? Watch this space.

There's no beating buckwheat

Who needs to go to Rouen? When you can get an equally good galette at the Little Frog Cafe in Oneroa, here on Waiheke Island, at the other end of the world? Today's was so good, in fact, that I ate most of it before I thought of taking the photo (sorry). In Rouen last year, I was much more focused (again, sorry) on taking photos, since I was working, so here you have my fried egg galette from there in all its untouched glory:

The chips and salad were there because it was lunchtime, not breakfast - but you knew that, by the cider, I hope. Both hot and crisp and nutty, tasting so much healthier than their pale and flabby crepe cousin. Not that I would turn one of them down, either...

On the other hand, although there is a surprisingly good sprinkling of French people on the island (as well as more Argentinians than you could shake a stick at), and a couple of genuinely French cafes, I must admit that Waiheke is a bit light on the colourful half-timbered houses that run riot in Rouen. You can't move for them in Normandy. The city's got a pretty fancy cathedral too; and I loved their clock.

And though the Ostend market on a Saturday here has got some good stuff (including yet another Frenchman, making crepes) they don't sell all those lovely Camemberts, and great slabs of yellow butter to ask for a chunk of, like they've got at their daily market. The history's pretty interesting, too, starring Joan of Arc but with plenty more besides.

No, galettes notwithstanding, I'm afraid there's no getting round it: travel is an essential part of the well-rounded life.