Love and death

After a morning working industriously, I took a city tour of Lima in the afternoon. It's something I've done before, but it was arranged and the only option was to wander around on my own. That's something I've done before too, blissful in my ignorance of what was actually a fairly dodgy thing to do, since I strayed well outside the affluent district of Miraflores. Having been sternly warned in Iquitos - Iquitos! - about how dangerous Lima is, I came over feeble an allowed myself to be guided by Jean Carlos.

So we started, as usual, at the Park of Love on the edge of the cliff looking down at the surf rolling in from the Pacific, and up at the microlight pilots suddenly blotting out the sunshine as they passed along the edge.  Yes, sunshine! It's unusual in Lima at this (or any) time of year - it's a grey and foggy place normally, which explains the brightly painted buildings throughout the city. It's also amazingly dry - never rains. Well, only 15mm a year, which is pretty much the same thing. The love-lock thing, by the way, seems scarcely to have started here, with just two lonely padlocks on the nearby railings.

Leaving the, frankly, ugly huge statue of two lovers, we drove past Huaca Pallaya, a very much pre-Inca pyramid of mud-brick blocks; and through San Isidro, a blatantly affluent suburb of olive-tree parks, high walls and video surveillance of the mock-Tudor and French-style homes. Then, as a contrast, past Victoria where no rules apply and you can get anything for a (low) price; and into the colonial centre.

Here are squares with fountains and statues surrounded by stately government buildings, the cathedral, churches and people, lots of people including a highly visible, if somewhat bored-looking,  security presence. San Francisco church is obligatory: cloisters, oil paintings, ornate gold-leaf altar and shrines, one of them to the Virgin Mary as a baby. Up above the altar the statue of St Francis is accompanied by a dog, an egret and a mouse, which seems pleasantly even-handed - though he also holds a skull.

Down below are plenty more in the catacombs, thousands of bodies now neatly arranged into bins of femurs, skulls and humerus, sometimes in patterns. Quite bizarre.

And that was Lima, and Peru. Tonight an 11.50pm flight takes me north to Quito.

That was never 11 days we had just then

Why yes, that was rather a long gap between posts. Mainly it was because of marketing: selling stories linked to events and dates, and though the ones I've been fully occupied writing about are marking the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic a whole month from now, and Anzac Day even further away on April 25, there's been a bit of a rush to do it because I've got some travelling coming up. On Sunday I'm being whisked off to Buenos Aires on LAN's lovely business class, and thence to Iguazu Falls, Lima (again) and then, most excitingly, Easter Island. I once reviewed a book that was set there - rather unimaginatively titled 'Easter Island' - by Jennifer Vanderbes, who had clearly done a great deal of research into ancient angiosperms that she didn't want to waste, so by the end of the book I was quite the expert (temporarily) on fossilised pollen. Never heard the term 'palynology' before? Now you have.

Then after I've been home for less than a fortnight, I'm away again, for an incredible 6 weeks this time, to Europe: partly private but mostly work, and it's going to be very busy. Fun and interesting, but busy, and tiring. It doesn't help that there are three very old animals in this house, who miss me when I'm gone, and who so far have always been here when I've got back from a trip but, one day...

So anyway, the Titanic. I keep bumping into it, so to speak - of course, in Ireland last year, when we went to Cobh which was the ship's last port of call before setting off across the Atlantic, and where there was a really good exhibition in the old railway station there. Then there was an astonishingly, not to say anally, comprehensive travelling exhibition that I came across while I was in Copenhagen, that absorbed me for the best part of two hours while rampaging Hamburg football fans laid waste to the city outside (well, almost). We'll be going to a new one at Greenwich Maritime Museum while we're in London; there are, I discovered, others in Southampton, Liverpool and Cherbourg, all Titanic sister cities that I've been to; and several in Halifax, Nova Scotia where I haven't been, but have been increasingly hankering to go to over the last few years. Lots of the recovered bodies were buried there, including one J. Dawson, who was actually James, a boiler-room hand, but that doesn't stop a steady stream of fans of Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack going there to leave red roses on the gravestone:

Adios

We've had an awful lot of this sort of thing on this trip. Not that I'm complaining: it's been great, and an absolute revelation when we were in Lima, compared with my previous visit, when I had one good meal in three weeks. I'm just sorry I have to go home now to my own cooking - night flight to Auckland looming, yay. Not.

We left Easter Island early this morning and arrived mid-afternoon Santiago time, just about the right timing, South American-wise, for lunch at a winery outside the city. Matetic, it was called, and it also has a beautiful hacienda on the estate, where you can stay in 100+ year-old rooms that are so restful and elegant your heart slows down the moment you step over the threshold. What a lovely weekend that would be: a day poking around in pretty Valparaiso on the coast, maybe, then some wine-tasting before stopping in at La Cosana for dinner at the antique dining table and more of Matatic's red stuff. Or white, of course.

I always feel a fraud doing wine-tastings, having once confused chardonnay with cabernet on the wine list, to my great humiliation, and have been confident in the past only of being able to tell white from red in the glass. But I've learned with horror on this trip that there's such a thing as white cabernet, so now I've lost my nerve completely. But as long as you don't ask me any questions about it, I'll happily knock back a glass, thanks.

La pluma di mia tia esta en la tabla

It's like the Tower of Babel in here. Up the front there are two language assistants teaching Japanese: Watashi wa, ohayoo gozai masu, sayonara Sugiyama sensei... Alongside me there are girls chatting in Korean, Mandarin and English; and here am I in the corner of the classroom, officially supervising but actually struggling to revise some basic Spanish: Permiso, puedo sacar una foto?

Before I went to Peru last year, I went to night school, did Linguaphone and other courses at home, worked through a textbook the Spanish teacher here at school gave me, and swotted up the Lonely Planet phrase book that told me how to say I'm high, and Easy, tiger! So when I got there, I could read all the signs, understand when the guide's friend was being disparaging about us (Are they trekkers or just tourists?) and even have some simple conversations with local people. It was great, I felt connected to my surroundings, and I couldn't understand why no-one else on the tour had bothered to learn even the most elementary things.

But now I know: I've been busy lately, and my trip to Ecuador is suddenly next week, and what Spanish I knew seems to have evaporated. So here I am, scrabbling to revise, at the same time (right now) as learning to write a post here on my new iPhone, so that when I'm away this can be the proper Travel Blog I intended it to be. I don't know which is harder.

>>> It was when I passed a pair of policemen patrolling the footpath in leather boots laced to the knee and double gun holsters, each with a Rottweiler on the end of a chain, and they looked surprised to see me, that I seriously rethought my plan. I had already begun to wonder how far it really was to Lima’s famous Gold Museum: on paper it hadn’t seemed a great distance, but then again, it’s a city of nine million, and hotel tourist maps are not always as particular as they should be about boring things like scale.

This was certainly a lived-in area — lived-out might be a better description, to judge by all the eating, working, sleeping, playing, laughing and shouting going on around me. I had noticed the increase in volume as soon as I crossed over the expressway from the neat tourist precinct of Miraflores: lots more noise, plus more litter, more traffic and many more people, all of them looking so much more at home on the footpath than I was currently feeling.

I cursed once again the false economy that had made me leave my trusty — but heavy — Lonely Planet guide at home. I did, however, remember its advice not to flap open a map in public in case I made myself conspicuous to predators. Apparently, a fair-haired, fair-skinned woman, on her own, wearing sensible shoes and an anxious expression would be completely invisible in a crowd of Peruvians right up to the moment that she unfolded her Globetrotter. Yeah, as they say, right.

One person who had already noticed me was a private security guard on duty outside a shop. In my best night-school Spanish, I asked him how far it was to the museum, and could I walk there. It was well-practised tourist vocabulary, and came out so fluently that Miguel responded with several rapid paragraphs in which only “no, no, muy peligroso” were recognisable. Never mind the ‘very’, at this stage just ‘dangerous’ was all I needed to hear, and I decided to turn back — but Miguel had some questions of his own. Once he had established that my husband was back in New Zealand I had just enough time, while he scribbled out his phone number, to remember the name of a different hotel from mine to tell him when he asked. Which he did, naturally: not for nothing is machismo a Spanish word...

[Pub NZ Herald 19/5/09]

Trying to look busy here while the painter does the window frames...

It seems rude to pick up my laptop and decamp when the light is suddenly blotted out by a man in overalls and baseball cap looming outside the window; but it's impossible to work while he's doing just that over my right shoulder. Also there's the smell. He's putting oil-based gloss on the joinery and it's pretty powerful. But he's getting on quickly, hoping to have the soffit (I'm down with all this jargon now - eaves? Pshaw! Amateur) done by the end of the week; so that means time is running out for choosing the colour of the walls.

I'm afraid that after interior flings with lolly pink, aubergine, orange and butter yellow, I'm going to come over all Anglo-Saxon and plump for something boringly sludge-like for the outside: calling it Tea or Quarter Biscotti or Half Haystack doesn't help to make me feel adventurous, Resene. I wish I could break free of this convention and give the painter, who is a lovely man but very depressed about having been in this job for 30 years, the excitement of applying something vivid. How his eyes would surely brighten, given the chance to slap on Blue Lagoon, Tamarillo or Bright Sun!

He should live in Valparaiso, or Quito, or Lima, or on Reunion Island, or in the Cooks: they paint their houses such fabulously gaudy colours there: lime green, lemon yellow, pink and orange. And turquoise: most popular of all, everywhere. I wonder why that is?

It's the hardest colour to describe in an original manner in a lagoon story, that's for sure. I once even took colour charts to Aitutaki to help me: "...the colour of the water is Mint Tulip deepening into Riptide with a band of Curious Blue under an Oxymoron sky..." Poetry!

2012, wrapped up

The most remarkable thing about this year is that I didn't go to Australia. (I'm still feeling that I've used Oz up - although I'd be happy to be proved wrong. Anyone listening? Kimberley cruise, Kakadu, Maria Island, WA for the wildflower season...?) 

I did pass through, though, a number of times, on my way to more distant destinations; but my first travels this year were domestic, first to old favourite Waiheke Island, just across the harbour but in another zone entirely, ambience-wise. Beautiful, relaxing and laid-back, it never fails to please - even when the weather disappoints.

The weather gave us the runaround for the next trip, too: doing the Crater Lake walk on Ruapehu with the daughters - but after driving down there through thunder, lightning and torrential rain, the day of our ascent to and traverse along that precipitous crater rim was one of glorious sunshine that showed off the turquoise of the lake to great effect, while the cloud that came to swirl around beneath us made us feel like gods, on top of the world in both senses.

My Pavlovian addiction to checking my emails dozens of times a day was reinforced by an invitation popping up there in February to go on a LAN tour of South America. It was a wonderful circuit in a small but jolly group through Santiago to Buenos Aires, to the literally over-the-top spectacle of Iguassu Falls, to Lima where the food was a revelation, and then to Easter Island, which was very special and totally worth foregoing the Travcom/Cathay Pacific Media Awards (in which I was only Runner-Up, so, pft).

In April I began my longest trip yet, flying Etihad to Abu Dhabi, where the Grand Mosque was astonishing, though I could really have done without the sweaty nylon robe I had to wear. Next stop was France, for a glorious, fabulous cruise up the Rhone from Arles to Lyon and finishing at Chalon-sur-Saone. I do so love a river cruise, and Uniworld's River Royale was just perfect, with the best staff ever.


Then it was England for a wedding and old friends, and another cruise that didn't go so well, when I managed to dislocate my shoulder leaping off a boat in the Norfolk Broads. Ouch. But I soldiered on, fortunately joining an Insight coach tour of Eastern Europe for the next 3 weeks where I was very well looked after. It was all about history, war and architecture, subjects which would have bored me rigid in my youth, but which now I find deeply interesting. It helped too that on the way to starting the tour in Budapest, we'd called in at Zagan in Poland to visit the site of Stalag Luft III where my father had been a prisoner, which was a moving experience as well as being fascinating.




Home again after 5 weeks away, I was anchored to the sofa for the next three months, writing, writing, writing with a cat at each side and a dog at my feet. I popped down to Christchurch for a look at my sadly shaken hometown, and was both horrified and inspired by what I saw - the vast empty spaces, blowing with dust, and the cracks in everything; but also the optimistic spirit of the people I met, and their bright plans for the future.

September saw the start of another flurry of travel, beginning with flying with Emirates to Dubai again, where I went up to the 124th floor of the Burj Khalifa, and on to Portugal for a scant 5 days mostly in the province of Alentejo where I loved the fortified hilltop villages, the gnarled olive trees, the sheep with bells on and the friendly people; but hated the food-focused itinerary and unprofessional behaviour of one of the small party.




Back home for one night, I was away again next day for a week of glorious relaxation in the Cook Islands, purely a holiday of lying about, sleeping in the sun (not recommended: the sunburn was epic and I still bear the unsightly tan-marks) and doing very little of anything. Stand-out was the day spent cruising on and wallowing in the WMBL (world's most beautiful lagoon) at Aitutaki - just perfect, in every way.

Then, four days later, I was off to North Viet Nam in another group which was lots of fun. We had a brilliant guide, Duke, who took us from Hanoi up into Ha Giang province for a homestay, a day's trekking through the paddy fields and villages, and a long drive into the Dong Van Karst Geopark, which was just brilliant: spectacular peaks, cute kids, colourful villages and a mind-blowing road. The traffic throughout was fascinating - even in Ha Long Bay out on the water amongst those absurdly picturesque islands.



After a fun day out on the train down to Matamata for a look at the obsessive detail of Hobbiton, the year finished back on the sofa with, sadly, just the one cat now at my side. I've had 49 stories accepted for publication, about half of those in the NZ Herald, as well as writing around 30 blog entries for Air France and others for the Yahoo! website. I've been to lunches and dinners and a cooking class, learned how to take the top off a champagne bottle with a sabre, had massages, ridden a camel and a Segway, eaten insects as well as fabulous meals, and been given a huge and beautiful bouquet for my services to Australian tourism, having had over 100 stories published about that immense country. Ironic, or what?

It's been a good year and I've been to some amazing places, met lots of lovely people and written masses of stories (if you're interested in reading some of them, click on the links over there to the right). It's been busy, and tiring sometimes, but I've loved it and am looking forward to more of the, er, different: Alaska, maybe? Africa? Who knows - can't wait to find out. Watch this space!

Travelling with Pollyanna

I've been reading a pile of submissions to a travel writing competition that I'm judging for a writers' group and, as an English teacher trained in the mid-'70s, I have to say that all those "Of course, they didn't teach grammar in those days" comments we've been getting ever since were misdirected. Most of these hopefuls are ladies in their 60s and 70s, at school when the syllabus was much more prescriptive and yet - the dangling participles! The missing main verbs! Mixed tenses! Random Capital Letters! Swarms, of commas, and exclamation marks!!!

It's great that they're trying, I know, and all of them have something to say that's worth reading, but it's a hard row for my inner pedant to hoe, and I now have great sympathy for the travel editor of the NZ Herald, who says he gets 300 unsolicited submissions a week. Most of them would be like these ones, I'm guessing: either What I Did on My Holidays or Listen to this Funny/Scary/Horrifying Anecdote from my trip twenty years ago. Diverting enough, but not really travel stories.

And so many of them have wasted material: an attempted mugging on the Trans-Siberian dismissed in a couple of sentences, while there are paragraphs about tinned fish and hard-boiled eggs; getting trapped in a gondola on Mt Etna in a high wind ditto, with all the attention given to finding their hotel. What were they thinking?

It seems obvious to me that to draw and keep the reader's attention, you choose the most exciting/funny/scary moment of a trip and build the story around that. From a travel writing perspective, the more a trip goes wrong, absolutely the better (as long as you actually survive to tell the tale). So getting lost in Lima, dropping my camera down a scree slope on Skye, having jewellery snatched in Santiago? All gifts.

"Harold's Horror" - actually, mine

Today I'm doing something a bit different (I wish that word were spelled 'diggerent' - it would save me such a lot of backspacing) - proofreading the manuscript of a book for someone. He's a published New Age-y type writer, but in this book he's trying a diggerent approach, conveying his philosophy through a story.

Unfortunately - or actually, probably not - so far (Ch 6) he seems to have got so caught up in his Boy's Own Adventure set in the Amazonian jungle that the getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings aspect is scarcely mentioned. He's having much more fun with betrayal by the faithful Indian guide, having to kill an injured mule, a dramatic river crossing and the interpretation of the ancient treasure map. It's horrendous twaddle, and the only way I can get through it is to laugh at it and be really firm with myself about only fixing the spelling (Smith and Western revolver, due drops) and punctuation, and not to edit the writing ("You 'betcha'," Jonathan uttered) - he hired me as a proofreader only, after all.

At least I have some connection with the Amazon side of it, having spent three nights up the Tambopata in Peru. It was a bit unnerving, wildlife-wise, but felt wonderfully intrepid, even though it was well-trodden tourist territory. (The girls I met in a Lima cafe who'd just got back from three weeks with a shaman in the real jungle, taking a powerful hallucinogenic drug for spiritual enlightenment were the real adventurers, but that's another story - one that I wish I were proofreading instead of this bilge.) (The following is my bilge.)

>>> The business end of the snake was already inside a hole in the bank but enough of it was still sliding across the path, shiny black in the torchlight, to make me to wonder why I had thought a few days in Peruvian Amazonia would be a good idea. I hadn’t yet even reached the jungle lodge where, I had been told, my room had only three walls: the fourth left open to enable what the brochure enthusiastically termed ‘interaction’ between me and the environment. Two fat striped flying insects had started interacting with me within moments of my stepping onto the tarmac at Puerto Maldonado airport, something unseen had leapt out of the water and touched my hand as it rested on the gunwales of the longboat that had taken us three hours up the wide brown Tambopata River, I had just stepped over a tree root being used as an overpass by a stream of giant ants, and now there was a snake. “Welcome to Refugio Amazonas,” said Luis without irony...

[Pub. The Listener 11/6/11]

Amazon Adventure begins...

Yesterday and today were travel days: flight to Cusco, night in Lima, flight to Iquitos deep in the Amazon jungle. It was goodbye to the grey of the Pacific and the brown of Peru’s coastal strip, the steep hills scribbled with zigzag roads joining the little settlements.

Then came the white of the Andes, peaks sticking up through the clouds remarkably high and pointy, glaciers thick between them. Finally, there was the green of the jungle, a dense and unbroken mat with only the river system winding through it in a complicated tangle of bends and ox-bow lakes, muddy brown or silver, depending on the light shafting through the piled-up clouds.

Iquitos is a city of half a million people, and, amazingly, it’s an Atlantic port, but all I saw was a shanty town of tin roofs and thatch, palms and trees, tuk-tuks and wandering kids. We drove for an hour and a half and fetched up in the dark at Nauta, where we were efficiently loaded onto the Delfin II, our home for the next five days.

It’s a 16-suite river boat, all varnished wood, airy space, solicitous white-uniformed staff and thoughtful touches; and if the dinner tonight is any indication, there’s a lot to look forward to even without all the wildlife that we’ll be up early tomorrow to kayak amongst.

From all sides now

Today was all about the Iguassu waterfalls, which we've now seen from the air, from the water, from the Brazilian side and the Argentinian side. The helicopter view would have been terrific, had I not been sitting at the back in the middle with a column in front of me, a large man with an iPad on one side and a keen photographer on the other - if you do it, it's sauve qui peut: race for the front seat. Because these falls are so spectacular, you mustn't miss any of them. (Thank goodness for live view on my camera - it got a better view than I was able to.)

We drove back to the Argentinian side to walk right along the edge of the falls on a metal walkway with huge catfish lurking below and delicate butterflies floating above, and it was amazing to see so much water pouring and roaring over the drop. But it's not just spectacular: it's pretty too, with fresh green grasses growing on rocks in the river, flowering plants on the islands, and the butterflies. It helped, too, that after two days of cloud and rain, today was brilliantly sunny, with rainbows everywhere. (When it's a full moon, you can go out at night to see the falls under moonlight with moonbows.)

And then it was time to pack up again without really enjoying our lovely hotel with its inviting pool and wandering coati and pretty rooms and all, sigh. So tonight I'm in another fancy hotel, in Lima, and it's 1am here, which means 3am in Brazil, and I still have my homework to do, sorting out my afternoon activities for tomorrow. "Think about it overnight," suggested Johanna, without apparent irony.