Darrell vs The World

The five films I'm most looking forward to

2011-07-17T21:58:00.004+10:00

There's not much in the cinemas at this time of year that interests me a lot, maybe because I'm becoming a bit of a snob. The Oscar cycle means that most studio features by big name directors are held back until the end of the calendar year, which leaves a bit of a drought of great studio films mid-year, with some notable exceptions (foreign and indie films included).

But here are the five films I'm most highly anticipating:

5. The Ides of March - directed by and starring George Clooney, who showed he is a very capable director with Good Night, and Good Luck, as an aspiring Democratic presidential candidate - sounds a bit West Wingish. Coming late 2011.

4. J.Edgar - this biopic is in the very capable hands of the legendary Clint Eastwood, and will star DiCaprio outside of his familiar Scorcese territory. Late 2011.

3. Moneyball - a comedy-drama about a baseball miracle story, written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing and Social Network fame, and starring Brad Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jonah Hill. Late 2011.

2. The Dark Knight Rises - Christopher Nolan's last Batman film had a terrific ending that has set up what is sure to excite film buffs and blockbuster buffs alike. Still shrouded in mystery. July 2012.

1. Django Unchained - only Quentin Tarantino could promise a film more exciting than Nolan's next offering - a revenge tale set in America's Deep South starring Jamie Foxx as a vengeful slave. Possibly also starring DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson and sure to be amazing in every way possible. Late 2012.

I didn't include the Coen brothers' next film because its name and core details haven't been announced yet, but it would probably slot in at #4 otherwise.

Now to wait!

Ben Folds live in Canberra - review

2011-05-12T21:05:00.000+10:00

I've been a big Ben Folds fan for a couple of years now - I've got pretty much everything he's recorded, even the obscure stuff. Which is why last night's concert at Canberra's Royal Theatre was so satisfying: Folds doesn't build his set around his big radio hits - in fact, Brick and Rockin' the Suburbs, perhaps his two most mainstream hits, were nowhere to be heard, not even in the encore. It was a night for the fans, who know and appreciate his clever and cheeky while poetic lyrics and his powerful piano solos. He paused before Effington to explain the Lydian mode; he reminded us that he was about to play a song in F -"that's one flat, everyone." His unique nerdy style went down great with his audience, young nerdy guys and their young nerdy girlfriends, and young nerdier guys who are so nerdy they don't even have girlfriends (like yours truly).

It was an intimate concert - he got up and took requests, sending his band offstage to revert back to the solo-piano style which no one in the world does better. He even played Emaline, an obscure song from an obscure album, and he was genuinely pleased when someone requested it. He got Kate Miller-Heidke, the support act, up for three songs- she marched in during Songs of Love at just the right moment, bringing her bizarre pop-opera voice seamlessly into the Folds universe, with its French horn player, dishevelled multi-percussionist, and piano stool which was hardly sat on.

Of course he played Rock this Bitch, a song that changes every show, and whose lyrics and chords are made up on the fly. He played the rare "fake" version of The Bitch Went Nuts (which I think is better than the "real" version), which retains only the hook line, half-rapping to a funk groove. And a Kesha cover made up the trifecta of brand new tunes that even die-hard fans like me hadn't heard.

He'll never fill stadiums, because his music is too creative, unconventional and dorky for them. And he's actually such an accomplished pianist that it would be great just to see him play if he had a sore throat and couldn't sing. But lucky he could last night, because it was by far the best concert I've ever been to.

Ode to the Brazilian mumbler

2010-12-26T06:49:00.003+11:00

It's Christmas day in Ouro Prêto, Brazil, a peaceful colonial town set amongst lush green hills. I've been fortunate to have met heaps of English speaking (and some Portuguese-speaking) travellers here to spend Christmas with; I'd been experiencing my fair share of solitude, so it has been good to re-establish human contact.

I have met a few people here and there - a very eccentric Frenchman (whose name I forgot, so I decided to call him Jean-Claude) who travels with only a tiny daypack, alternating between two very smelly T-shirts, and has no greater plan other than to go fishing at every opportunity possible, fighting the fierce and relentless world with his extremely laid back attitude. He and Guillermo, a Spaniard (also not his real name) provided some welcome company for me in Posadas, Argentina, although they snored in symphony in the dorm room, while Jean-Claude complemented the melody line with some incoherent French mumbling as he slept.

Crossing into Brazil, a few things changed. Softer toilet paper, higher prices, fruitier breakfasts and of course a different language. I hoped I'd be able to pick up Portuguese where I left off in Mozambique a year ago, but the accent is very different here and I've struggled to understand people, although I'm slowly gaining ground. One problem is that young shop assistants in particular seem to mumble an awful lot, even when I ask them to repeat themselves. Then they laugh at me. The one positive thing I get from this is that I realise now that this happened very rarely in my final weeks in Argentina - while my Portuguese is still getting there, my Spanish reached a reasonably comfortable level without me fully realising it. Having said that, I have had a few substantial conversations with Brazilians in their language, once they could see that they needed to speak slowly for my benefit. And it's a beautiful language.

Crossed the border at the grand Iguazu Falls - a great sight, particularly on the Brazilian side as a platform took me out into the middle of the falls, with water everywhere (sorry, my description isn't very vivid. Let me assure you it was cool). São Paolo is a city almost as big as all of Australia - helicopters ferry rich executives between meetings as the traffic is terrible, skyscrapers stretch on forever, there is a mall dedicated entirely to hip-hop garb - hats, shoes, CDs, just a one-stop shop for all your gangster needs. They also have half-Asians there, so I blended in quite well.

I've got less than a week to go now, as I've brought my flights forward to be home earlier to prepare for my interstate move. I go to Rio de Janeiro tonight, for the big finale, and I have been constantly re-gluing my sandals back together, and hoping they will last me the last five days. Steep cobblestone streets really give ageing footwear a good workout.

Solitude and the River Plate

2010-12-14T07:49:00.002+11:00

Since returning from Patagonia, I've been exploring Buenos Aires, as well as nearby Uruguay, before heading northwards towards Brazil. I'm currently in Resistencia, an obscure city that doesn't offer much except for a good place to break up the journey.

Perhaps I've configured my itinerary badly, as I find myself too often sitting around waiting a full day in a dead-end town for a bus. I don't like the idea of super-long bus journeys as I have real trouble sleeping, but is the answer to travel this slowly? I was telling some Resistencia locals on a long distance bus that the reason I was going to visit their town was to break up my journey; they then told me they were on day three of a 60 hour bus trip from the far south to the far north of Argentina. I can't fathom that. Seasoned travellers (you know the type: smelly, shirtless, bearded) will tell you 60 hours is easy. I don't really care though - I prefer to sleep in a bed when I'm on holiday.

I haven't had a meaningful conversation in English for a week. I've spoken lots of Spanish, but it's not the same. Try going a week without being able to really express yourself to another person whom you know fully understands what you are saying. The solitude can be great, but sometimes it does my head in. I always made a big deal about being an introvert, but I think that I really desire human contact, and in a mutually fluent language, too.

I have met people though - a number of Spanish-speaking travellers, as well as being stuck seated in the middle of a big family with lots of young kids on yesterday's 12-hour bus. I didn't really speak to them until I saw the little boy trying to open a packet of mayonnaise - I said to the girl next to me, "I don't think that's such a good idea," as I was closest to the kid. She took it off him, and he burst into tears, and stayed that way for fifteen minutes. But I knew I had done the right thing. I got to talk to the family after that, and they were fascinated to hear where I was from.

The obsession in this part of Argentina and Uruguay is a green tea called mate. Locals drink it from a gourd of mashed up leaves through a straw, and refill water from a thermos. You see them carrying thermoses under their arms everywhere - seems like a bit of a burden just for a drink, to lug this thing around all day. But it's huge here, and a guy offered me some, and it was nothing special, but there's obviously something I'm missing, because they love it.

Montevideo, Uruguay's capital, was cool. It was like Havana in Cuba - crumbling facades, Art Deco buildings and a long sea wall. And a big peach fair. Just heaps and heaps of peaches, plus peach jam, peach juice, displays on peaches and their relevance to the Uruguayan economy, etc.

Buenos Aires is a big city, and hard to get one's head around. There are superrich neighbourhoods (I visited a luxury homewares mall where they sell designer toilet seats) but the poverty is so visible, even without straying into the poor neighbourhoods. Mothers and children hunt through garbage bags on major pedestrian streets as the rich walk by; little girls are selling stickers and tissues on the metro to anyone who will have pity.

At the same time, some sights are marvellous. The city has a big obelisk in the middle of a 8-lane-each-way road, and to just watch the city buzzing here at dusk is unbelievable. So many people, cars, billboards, everything. No one bothers you because everyone is too busy getting on with their own life. In contrast, the tourist-oriented Caminito section of the Boca neighbourhood is a nightmare. It's over-exploited by people out to make money out of tourists (and who can blame them?) but it feels so tacky, so manufactured, and the tourist is the centre of attention there, and can't escape the constant hassling.

I didn't really get to meet any local people unfortunately, but I got a mixed view. The bus terminal is full of people unwilling to help you navigate its terrible design, while in the rain you can expect to be dodging umbrella prongs and to be forced to step into puddles to make way for everyone. But at the same time I saw generosity - amidst the bustle of the metro, a young man intercepted a blind man from walking into a wall, put his arm around him, and asked him where he wanted to go, ready to guide him in any direction.

That's enough for now, I think.

The wind

2010-12-03T04:20:00.002+11:00

OK, so I'm travelling again. And I feel mixed about it, because I think I've travelled too much. I feel really privileged to be in a position to go on this trip, but I've already been so privileged to go on so many trips in the last few years that I don't really deserve to go overseas again so soon, and to such an extravagant destination as South America for the second time, especially given that most people in the world will never have the opportunity to visit perhaps even one foreign country, and here I am travelling in every spare moment.

So it's hard justifying the extravagance of this trip just by saying "I've got a job next year so I can afford it." I just feel that I'm going over the top now. In my last spare summer before my move to Canberra I've chosen to leave for overseas yet again, for the second Christmas in a row, this time not even for development internships but just for fun. So that's what I've been grappling with.

Asides from that, it's been pretty good.

Started in Buenos Aires, which is one big, loud, polluted, busy city. More on it later, as I'm going back there after I finish Patagonia. I travelled with my friend Amy from uni and her partner Al for the first week, and now they have gone further south to Tierra del Fuego, while I'll return to the north.

I met up with an old friend, Wladimir from SKIP Peru, who now lives in BA, and I reckon I spoke a year's worth of Spanish in a day, which left me exhausted, but I was pleased that I could keep talking. Whether what I said made sense or not, I don't know! Speaking Spanish again has been fun, but I am constantly embarrassing myself in public by using words wrongly, not understanding basic questions, and so on. It'll be worse when I hit Brazil later this month and try my basic Mozambican Portuguese on the Brazilians...

I've been in Patagonia, in the far south of the continent, for the past week or so, and it's been fantastic. This whole region has a mystical feel to it, with endless landscapes, sheep grazing peacefully in windswept meadows in front of snow-capped mountains, where the trees are on 45 degree angles permanently due to the fierce, super fierce, winds. The sun sets at about 10pm, which is a bit hard to grasp; stray dogs wander the streets and bark at passing cars; the locals eat lots of ice cream, in the coldest place I've ever been. The wind is the most noticeable thing here, though. That and the mind boggling scenery. I've gotten to the point where I'm even a bit over snow capped peaks, I've seen so many. Oh, and the parking inspectors. They seem to be on every street corner here in Punta Arenas, Chile. It's insane.

Was originally going to hike for five days in the famous Torres del Paine National Park, then changed it to one day when I decided I wasn't fit enough, it would cost too much, I hurt my knee, and I was generally too lazy. But the one day turned into two hours, when the wind was so fierce that everyone going up the cliff turned back, except for a few brave souls (nutters) who crawled up, despite the gravel being blown in their faces and the risk of being blown right off the cliff.

So, essentially, wind. It's all about wind.

How to make a film in a language you don't speak

2010-02-25T22:35:00.004+11:00

I thought I should write one last blog, mainly because the previous one isn't a nice place to end, with its description of the shooting I witnessed.

No need for an update on that business - I'm fine and feel really comfortable, and I visited the site of the incident a few times before I left South Africa, and had no odd feelings.

I'll finish my 2009-10 trip blogs with a brief account of the film I made with Justice and Women in the final week of my internship in Kwa-Zulu Natal. You can see it here or at the bottom of the entry.

Yanguye High School is plagued by violence, and it has become a pretty bad environment for learning and feeling safe. So JAW's plan was to allow youth to speak on film about their thoughts about what is happening at the school, and what they see as the sources of the violence, and what can be done about it.

We wanted a fair representation of different types of students, not just the types who would normally volunteer to come to a workshop about violence at school, so we set up a little role play where our youth team acted out a scenario. A boy and a girl are attacked by another guy who throws a rock at the boy. What does the boy do? Students were asked to write their name and put it in box A, B or C based on their likely response: fighting, walking away or reporting it to a teacher. Then we selected an equal number of students randomly from each of the three boxes to be part of our workshop, the final stage of which was interviews with some students one on one.

One of the students randomly selected was a student who, days before, had been expelled by a traditional council for threatening to shoot the principal. He was allowed back to school, and features at the end of the film.

The workshop was run entirely in Zulu, and I technically was the lead facilitator without knowing what was being said. But it worked, somehow, and we got footage out of it, which I then got translation help with. And some lovely songs as well. It was then a case of quickly editing it together before the internship was over.

One issue was that I wanted to get kids to speak outdoors, in front of the hills and houses of Yanguye, but I didn't realise the camera microphone couldn't handle the wind. As a result, some interviews can't be heard but they have been 'double-subtitled' in both English and Zulu.

As for some concluding remarks about the 3.5 month trip, I learned an awful lot, and I was challenged an awful lot, with all sorts of things I've gone into in earlier entries. I went into the internships sure that I wanted a career in aid and development work. Now I'm not so sure, having learned about how it actually works and the realities of the industry. Coupled with a renewed passion in filmmaking, I doubt that I will be following the aid career path in 2011, and I may well decide to study film.

The journey of working out what I actually like and what I want to do isn't finished (and it never will, I'm guessing), but I think I took a few big steps over the summer, and will look back on the trip as a difficult one but a profoundly important one in my self-formation.

Here's the film:

Why I needed to see a psychologist in South Africa

2010-02-09T23:37:00.000+11:00

Since my last blog, a few things have happened, mostly building up to making the documentary about youth and violence that we hope to complete by next week. I’m only here for a week and a half more, so we have to move quickly to get it done, but I’m confident we will.

There was one incident, though, which deserves a blog entry of its own, and I’d like to share it with you, but at the same time let you know that I’m feeling totally fine and there is no need to be concerned about me.

Last Friday, I witnessed a fatal shooting in a supermarket carpark.

There are some areas in South Africa where you can sense the dodginess - there’s something about the way people are dressed, about the loitering young men, the rubbish around the place, and general disorder. Such areas are the kind of places I’ve learned to spot since being mugged in one back on Christmas Eve, and the places that I stay clear of generally when I can help it.

Melmoth is a small town where the organisation I am working with bases its community office. It’s not the kind of place a tourist would come to - there’s not much there to see, and a lot of the town has that dodgy feel to it. The supermarket has that feel, and with my fellow interns we joked about its seediness and the fact that we felt our car would be broken into, or that we would be mugged.

On Friday afternoon, after work, Jenny, the manager of JAW, and I were at the supermarket, and just about to drive out of the carpark when we heard a single gunshot. I wouldn’t have realised it was a gunshot if it weren’t for the scattering, panicking crowd, and for the black man who fell to the ground in the carpark driveway.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; it was exactly like a scene in a movie. We all know what a murder looks like from seeing them over and over on TV, but no one ever thinks they will see it happen in real life. We didn’t see the killer, and he must have disappeared fairly quickly, as most of the people around didn’t take long before they went to take a closer look at the victim.

Before the crowd formed, I saw the man’s face, as he writhed in pain. I didn’t see his wound- just the look on his face. A woman came up beside him and started crying uncontrollably - the look on her face was unforgettable. It reminded me of a photo I’ve seen of when a schoolboy called Hector Pieterson was shot in Soweto in the 1970s during apartheid - his sister‘s face is almost hauntingly similar. Words can’t describe the grief and sorrow on her face - a loved one whose life has been taken away in a flash. I didn’t know any more about the victim, the woman or the killer. But they were all human.

I only worried about my own life for a split second - perhaps it was because there was only one gunshot, and perhaps because the crowd formed quite soon, which suggested the locals were confident the gunman was both gone and not after anyone except the one he had hit. I was worried about my general safety though, and stayed in the car while Jenny called the police. I didn’t think of doing so - I guess nothing like that crossed my mind, except for shock to see that a man had been shot down in front of me.

The formation of the huge, equally shocked crowd proved that while South Africa is violent, it’s not so violent that people have become completely desensitised to murder. People are still human enough to see the loss of life as a big thing, even a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world. At the same time, there are some people whose lack of love or moral sense disgusts me - a minibus taxi driver viciously honked at the crowd to get out of his way, so that he could exit the carpark. It didn’t seem to matter to him, or another driver who followed, nearly hitting a woman on the way out, that a man had just been shot dead - there were simply more important things going on in their lives.

Jenny got out of the car to see if there was any way she could help. Helping the man was the last thing on my mind - perhaps because of my fear that I would be next if I got too close, and also because in a moment of shock and fear, I think such feelings slip away unless you are somewhat prepared. That’s perhaps why most people stood around doing nothing, rather than calling the police or seeing what they could do to help. We’re simply not built to respond to that kind of thing, and I don’t blame people for standing by doing nothing, or running away. Jenny returned to the car quickly, resigned. She didn’t have to even say the words - the look on her face told me the poor man was dead.

We left the scene, as the crowd grew bigger and the police arrived. As we drove back to our B&B I was in shock, and couldn’t say a word for quite some time. It took me a few hours just to think it over, but I was surprised when I was able to engage in normal conversation by dinner time.

I’m surprised, a few days on, looking back and saying that while seeing the shooting was one of the most shocking moments of my life, I think I’ve dealt with it quite well. I haven’t broken down about it or exhibited any of the symptoms the psychologist told me were common as a result of trauma. I’m aware that something might come later on, and that these things can be triggered by something. Both Monash and Oxfam have been quick to support me and offer counselling and even an early flight home. I declined the earlier flight. I didn’t think I needed the counselling, but Oxfam booked it for me as something they do for any volunteer who witnesses something like that. And I think it was good, because it enabled me to explore how I have responded to the incident, and it’s prepared me for what may come later on.

The psychologist said I had done pretty well in coping with it, perhaps due to the way I think things through and also because I see myself as detached from the kind of environment where it happened. If it happened at home, it might have been a totally different story, but the fact that I already saw this supermarket carpark as a dodgy area perhaps mentally prepared me to be able to deal with things that may have happened. It’s also perhaps the fact that I’ve been mugged at knifepoint in this country and that I’ve read and heard so much about crime here, that have prepared me for such an incident. I don’t think anything can prepare you for the shock of seeing a man get shot about 15-20m from you, but I think my reaction would have been more emotional if it had happened in an area where I feel safe, like back home.

I’m going back to Melmoth tomorrow. I don’t feel scared about it, or any more scared than I do about going anywhere in this country. When I walk in the streets now, I am wary about being mugged, as I’ve always been, but I don’t fear that I’ll see another shooting. To me I see it as an isolated incident - there was surely a background to the shooting which I don’t know or understand - perhaps linked into some bigger crime. The supermarket wasn’t one of the areas that white people and foreigners should never go to - sure it was dodgier than some areas, but not so dodgy that people should avoid it. I think it was more a case of an incident that could have happened anywhere happening there, and in front of me.

Maybe something will trigger me in a month’s time when I’m back home, and I’ll get flashbacks. But I don’t think it will, and neither did my psychologist, not because I’m strong, or that I’m too macho to cry or to get shaken up, but maybe just because of the way my thought processes work and the way I rationalise things. I hardly thought about the shooting over the weekend or afterwards, except when people asked me about it. I haven’t played any violent computer games since it happened, and I don’t know if something might happen to me when I do. But I don’t think so.

I also have to admit that the victim and the poor girl haven’t crossed my mind much since Friday. Maybe because of my detachment from the situation. I think that if I had had any emotional connections to them it would be a completely different story. But it was like I just got a little window into a distant, foreign world that I don’t understand and never will, and saw into the lives of people I will never know, just for the brief moment where I saw the agony on the man’s face and the distress on the woman’s. I don’t even know if she was his sister, or his partner, or friend. I just know that to feel pain like what she felt would arguably be as awful as being the one who was shot.

Please don’t worry about me - I have had a good session with a psychologist and we are both confident that I am doing fine.

KwaZulubalooza

2010-02-01T20:36:00.001+11:00

I’m now three weeks into the Monash-Oxfam internship program in the South African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, with another three weeks to go. I’m based in the city of Pietermaritzburg, and working with Oxfam’s partner organisation Justice and Women (JAW), a small NGO that works to transform power relations and gender injustice in rural and urban settings here, through HIV/AIDS support groups, an Access to Justice program, particularly for victims of abuse, and a youth program.

I’ve been assigned to the youth team, who work in local schools in the rural community of Yanguye to try and encourage dialogue about gender, power and HIV/AIDS. I’ll be training the team in basic filmmaking skills and making a short movie with them and the youth of the high school to encourage debate about schoolyard violence (which is quite severe at this school) and its sources. That’s exciting for me, because the more I think about it, the more I want to shift from my pursuit of a career in straight aid work, to a career in film. So I think this might be right up my alley.

A big part of JAW’s work is raising up leaders from the community – most of its staff are from the Yanguye community and JAW invests a lot in their development. Many of them don’t speak fantastic English yet, and of course I don’t speak Zulu, so it’s sometimes a challenge to convey meaning. Last week we helped to facilitate a three-day workshop for staff to reflect on their own growth over the last two years – there was also a considerable amount of tai chi, which was something I wouldn’t have expected in most larger NGOs.

In Pietermaritzburg I live in a nice guesthouse with four Monash girls, all older, also doing the internship – I got the single room being the only guy, but they use it as the communal pantry as well. We cook in turns, but I don’t really cook, I just help, because I don’t really know how to cook creatively. But I’m learning. It’s a pleasant life, and nice to be able to share our intern experiences with each other – so different from doing it alone in much rougher conditions back in Mozambique. Working hours have been short, so it’s almost like a holiday sometimes – good food, a nice house, nice housemates and a film project.

I’ll talk now about some of the issues going on here that make it hard to have a positive outlook when I stop thinking about my own life and start thinking of the community we work with. First there’s a thing called lobola – it is a payment from a man to his bride’s family, to marry her. If a man is too poor to afford it, he can’t get married, and is seen by the community as a child, no matter how old he is. If a wife is beaten and abused by her husband, her parents often won’t let her divorce him because they don’t want to have to pay back the lobola. Men often feel they own women because they’ve paid for them – this seems to be a likely contributing factor to the high amount of abuse within marriage. Children not born under the lobola agreement are cast out, but women are forced to have children before the lobola is paid to prove their fertility.

There are many outcast children, and so many AIDS orphans. And even worse, children who can’t show their parents’ ID cards to the Department of Home Affairs can’t get an ID card of their own, and can’t access any government support. These kids are stuck in limbo, and many kill themselves because of the injustice of the system.

Next let’s talk about teachers – they are often drunk, often they don’t rock up to class, often they beat students or sleep with them. Add to this the fact that schools pay parents blackmail money to keep quiet about teachers’ crimes against students; this gives parents an incentive to get their kids beaten up by their teachers.

The issue of violence is seen as a wider, endemic problem here in South Africa so closely tied to poverty. In the school, and in the community more generally, people get jealous if someone has something better – better clothes, or they can speak English better, or those who got to participate as ‘change agents’ in last year’s JAW youth program. And when something has something good – better than everyone else – it must be destroyed. There’s awful violence in this community – stabbing, stoning, rape - the kids have guns. I haven’t seen any of this – I’ve just been told by community members and JAW staff, but it makes me feel like the problem is too big and too tied into culture and circumstances for anything to ever change.

Hanging over this all is HIV/AIDS. And I’m not even going to go into it in any detail, because I fear I’ll get too depressed talking about all this mess at once.

In summary, I’m doing great, but this community isn’t.

Between the internships

2010-01-08T16:59:00.002+11:00

I finished at CARE Mozambique just before Christmas, and I’m starting with Oxfam in South Africa on the 11th of January. I’ve travelled a bit in between, but rather than listing exactly where I went and what I did I’ll just mention a few things of note.

The first event of note was being mugged at knifepoint in the mid sized South African city of Nelspruit (no, Microsoft Word, Nelspruit, not Newsprint). After walking around carefree around even dodgy-looking places in Mozambique, I guess I was a bit more confident about safety, and on my first day back in SA (Christmas Eve) I was walking down a busy street at 9am when three guys surrounded me, held the knife to my throat (didn’t hurt me luckily), emptied my pockets and told me menacingly never to come to that part of town again. White South Africans later confirmed to me that that area of the town is not for white people, ever. What a country.

I was treated with a bundle of Christmas kindness, though, when a man called Jono who worked in a phone shop I visited to buy a new phone helped me to sort out everything, drove me around to fix things up, then took me to the town I was planning to go to the next day, as he was heading that way to visit family for Christmas.

I ended up spending way too much money on activities, tours and criminals in South Africa and had to cut my spending, eating nothing but peanut butter and bread for breakfast and lunch for four days straight while in pretty, mountainous Swaziland.

Unable to justify the ridiculous price of a tour in Johannesburg, I went to the shopping mall to see the film Invictus about Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) and the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and how Mandela used it politically to work towards bringing South Africa together after apartheid. It was a great film, and afterwards, while I know very well that South Africa is a long way away from racial harmony, it was so magical to walk out into that mall and see white, black, coloured and Asian shoppers everywhere - a place where no racial group would feel out of place (although the divide between rich and poor in SA is another story).

I flew to Livingstone, Zambia to visit Victoria Falls - they are really spectacular as you would expect. I was hassled by a few Zimbabwean souvenir sellers who had climbed over the park fence and accosted me while I was alone - I was quite scared I would get mugged again the way they were talking to me, so I paid $10 for a copper bracelet I wasn’t interested in at all. The Zambian curio sellers outside the park gate try a different method - a friendlier but deeply manipulative strategy I’m surprised I haven’t seen elsewhere in the world. These guys flatter you with their knowledge of your country, rattling off Prime Ministers’ names way back to Malcolm Fraser; they try to establish a rapport with you before even talking about their stalls; they ask you to sit down, and when you refuse they insist, saying it’s part of their culture for guests to sit down (very clever ploy); and when the deal is done they hand the souvenir to another nearby seller to wrap it for you, and while he wraps it extremely slowly, he invites you to look at his own store.

I saw the obligatory wildlife in Botswana, being charged at by a couple of hippos which was nice (once we knew we were safe). I did the tour with two obnoxious Danish couples who kept asking questions like how much elephants’ tusks weighed, and denying they were an endangered species because they wanted to hunt them.

Trying not to spend much more, I am spending my final days in the backpackers in Zambia not doing activities but trying to do some reading and writing (a new short film concept…) before meeting Monash Uni people on Sunday for the next internship.

Bob Dylan sometimes says it all for me.

2009-12-23T17:42:00.001+11:00

And when it's time for leaving Mozambique,
To say goodbye to sand and sea,
You turn around to take a final peek
And you see why it's so unique to be
Among the lovely people living free
Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.

-Bob Dylan, 1975

Things to smile about in Mozambique

2009-12-21T17:44:00.002+11:00

I'm sorry that my blogs here have so far been a bit depressing. Either I've been complaining about comfort, or bureaucracy, or lamenting the poverty and social problems here. I feel it's time to devote an entire entry to the things that make me smile in Mozambique. My work is largely complete and I have my passport back safely. While I've enjoyed my time here all along, I suppose that various high-stress events (and if you know me, you'll know that most events are high-stress events) have made it onto paper ahead of the small, nicer things. So here we go.

1. I saw a wedding party go past this morning. It was three Hilux-style pickup trucks. The first was full of women in the back singing beautifully. In the second, the bride and groom stood, and the third had some other people, also singing, but a different song to the first car as they were far enough behind for them not to be synchronised.

2. You see a lot of locals on the street wearing Australian clothes. I've seen Kmart staff T-shirts, AFL team tops (a few years out of date), a Melbourne Uni rugby top, and various other things. I think the story is that they're donated second hand clothes, but they end up in the markets. I tell them where their clothes are from, but they don't seem that interested.

3. I got Rickrolled in my second week in Vilankulos, but I don't think the people who Rickrolled me knew they did. Out of all the wonderful English-language music that exists, the genre Mozambicans seem to have taken to the most is 80s synth pop, and Rick was a feature on one illegal mix CD one of the drivers had picked up.

4. I haven't seen a lot of TV here, but at a CARE camp one evening we were watching TV, and it seemed like the sound was muted, so about four guys each took their turn to bang the TV on the side a few times, then gave up. I then had a go, fiddling with the mute buttons on both remotes, then gave up. So they called the resident technology expert of the camp, who proceeded to bang the TV a few more times. I think he got it working.

5. One of the projects CARE has been working on has been to set up an intermediary in one of the towns who buys goats from villages then sells them to buyers who come from the cities. A sale was set up one afternoon, and we drove over with the buyers in the back of the pick-up, and this guy was nowhere to be found. We waited two hours, then gave up, then encountered him on the road back. He had the cheesiest of grins on his face, which prevented me from being annoyed at him for standing us up, because the look on his face basically said, "I have absolutely no idea what's going on or supposed to be happening, but it's really nice to see you!"

6. At the cattle fairs, there are inevitably cattle breaking free of the flimsy wooden pens, and galloping off into the bush, followed by a trail of young boys brandishing sticks and yelling after it.

7. I have a knack for being stuck next to fat ladies in small vehicles for long journeys. One of them, who was drunk, asked me to marry her in slurring Portuguese, then spilt beer on my foot. The driver gave me his crusty handkerchief to wipe it clean.

8. There's a town called Mabote, where CARE bases a lot of its rural work. I like to call it The End of the World As We Know It- it has electricity from 6.30pm to 9.30pm only, it has no running water as far as I know, no sealed roads, and the street is lined with peculiar Wild-West style buildings painted bright yellow by the major telco, Mcel, who sponsors buildings in the same way a company sponsors a soccer team- it just paints its logo all over the outside walls. It's such an unappealing place that it's funny.

9. One thing Mabote can pride itself on is the fact that it has the most stunning view of the stars after dark. With no electric light at all in town, the night sky is clear and beautiful.

10. There's an old lady beggar who comes by the place I stay some mornings. She stands outside, and the staff bring her a bread roll. She doesn't say anything when she receives it; she just holds up her fist, clenched, somehow expressing thanks and solidarity in a more powerful and warm way than words could.

Stuck inside of chapa with the passport blues again

2009-12-14T18:11:00.003+11:00

Informal public transport in Mozambique is an experience. I’m sure if you’ve travelled in other ‘developing countries’ you already get the idea. Minibuses don’t leave on schedule; they don’t even leave when full, they leave when they’re above capacity. They are the arteries and veins of the bloodstream of the informal economy – traders pack in their wares, including the obligatory live chickens. The buses – chapas, they’re called here – occasionally race one another at full speed on long stretches of highway, that is, when there aren’t potholes. When there are, chapas tend to prefer to drive on the dirt path next to the road instead. At crossroads towns, dozens of desperate vendors rush up to each new vehicle and wave their goods into the windows to the passengers. I saw one old lady attack a boy who I think was on her ‘turf’, selling stuff in her area.

The most tragic thing is perhaps this huge number of young kids working on the streets selling little things for little income. These kids should be in school, but I suppose that either with parents who need them to work for extra household income, or with no parents at all, they are forced to work. To put it into perspective, imagine sad-faced Australian primary-aged kids lingering on the streets of your home suburb trying to sell you phone credit, or soft drinks, or bread, especially during school hours. Very few Mozambicans finish high school, and of those that do, many do so much later in life, in their 30s. School fees are expensive relative to income, and there is a nationwide textbook shortage. For me, poverty is most simply defined as lacking the chance to achieve your full potential.

When my colleagues at CARE, or the staff at my guesthouse, or my Portuguese teacher question me about how things are in Australia in comparison to here, I almost feel guilty for living in a comparatively perfect state, where the government provides a safety net for the needy, where education is free, accessible and universal, where children play and read instead of working on the streets. Sure, Australia is not perfect, but compared to Mozambique, it is, in terms of government-provided services.

Speaking of government, my sole personal concern right now is my passport, which remains in the provincial capital and has been there for a week, waiting for a signature from some director which will formalise my visa renewal – why can’t the lady behind the desk just sign it – what’s the difference? The inefficient bureaucratic practices are pushing me to my limits, and it worries me especially as my flight out of Mozambique is just over a week away. We can say “this is Africa” with a chuckle all we like, but not when it concerns the single most valuable document we possess.

This, like most of the others, has been a bleak entry, and I’m sorry to those who are reading and want to read something nice. I have been enjoying my time here overall, excited by what I am learning, and interested in the sporadic work I am getting done with CARE. And when I sit at a seaside restaurant at dusk, to see the sun gently set as I gaze over the Indian Ocean, I’m reminded that there are beautiful things about this place.

Being worthwhile

2009-12-07T19:22:00.001+11:00

My greatest challenge here now is not the climate, or the power outages or the language. It’s the constant niggling that makes me need to feel that this whole thing has been worthwhile: that I’ve achieved something, or I’ve contributed, or it’s been worth my time, money and energy to be here and volunteer for six weeks.

Early on I declared to myself that it was wholly unrealistic to expect that I would achieve something every day here; I decided that this would be a success if I did something of value every week. So far, so good. Now, in week four, I find myself struggling to know what I will be doing this week, if anything at all. And this makes part of me shudder, and feel really miserable.

But I need to look at the bigger picture. Six weeks on a development internship is a ridiculously short time. Volunteers come here for two years and say that the first year is for working out what’s going on and the second year for actually doing work. And working in a new environment in a culture so different from my own, it is unreasonable to think that I can be anywhere near as productive as I want to be in this tiny timeframe.

I knew before I came that I wouldn’t make a real difference to this organisation – no unskilled, inexperienced university student could expect to in just six weeks. But I hoped I’d be learning things constantly about development, and NGOs, and Mozambique, all the time, and that I’d be busy, working on all sorts of little things. But even when I do have worthwhile work to do, it runs out quickly, and I ask around for what to do next, and there’s nothing.

I realise that I need to look at it from the managers’ points of view. When I was working with the Global Poverty Project campaign back home I sometimes had two or three interns assigned to help me out. Sometimes I could give them jobs that didn’t really need to be done; sometimes I could give them the most painful menial tasks imaginable, and a lot of the time I was clueless as to what to do with them. And we were working in English, and they were more skilled than me in many ways. So what can I expect, working in an unfamiliar country with an unfamiliar language on a project totally unlike anything I’ve really experienced?

Realistically, given that I’ve already worked on three livestock data analyses and identified a number of inefficiencies in the way the system works, I’ve already contributed to a very reasonable level given my position. And I think I should understand that even if I go through entire weeks where I do nothing of value, I’m still learning just by being here, and I’m learning that to be valuable in this kind of work you need to stick around a lot longer.

To finish on a more positive note, I won a bottle of wine in a raffle at a primary children’s musical at the local centre for rich white expatriate children, which I found myself at thanks to the guesthouse owner inviting me. I don’t really drink wine, and I would hardly drink it alone anyway, so it’ll make a nice gift for someone when I leave. It’s already got a nice little bow on it, so I can just leave that on and make it look like I made an effort.

A seaside pace

2009-12-02T17:17:00.002+11:00

I’ve been in Mozambique for three weeks, and I leave Mozambique in three weeks. But things are not awful, as my earliest blog reported. Sure, it’s sometimes not as comfortable as I want it to be, but overall, things are good. And I could probably stay here a lot longer if I had a longer time frame to work with.

Vilankulos is honestly a great place to be based for an African internship. It’s by the sea – that alluring Indian Ocean, central to romantic ideals about Mozambique with its fishermen, its beaches and exotic bird and marine life – I went snorkelling on Sunday for the first time- it was pretty cool. There are allegedly lots of dugongs here. I haven’t seen (or heard) any, though. I look out the office window from my Excel spreadsheet, and see palm trees gently blowing in the wind. I eat a banana at 6:30am as I walk to the ATM – on the way, the city streets are already lively and busy with the stereotypical “African” suspects – women carrying stuff on their heads etc. When it rains, it rains for four days; in the afternoon, the fishermen tout freshly-caught metre-long fish at the major intersections; there are rusted shipwrecks beached down by the jetty, and when the tide goes out, the locals walk out on the sand around the temporarily-beached dhow boats.

I’ve been able to get a much better idea of what I’m doing here. The end aim is to help rural criadores (herders and farmers of livestock) to earn a good and stable income. To ensure they can, they need buyers from urban areas to regularly buy the animals. My job is to look at the situation from the buyers’ perspective and see if it is financially viable, and sustainable. Because if it isn’t working for buyers, it leaves the criadores stuck with no income source.

My role involves data collection in the field about prices and logistics, then doing a study back at the office to crunch the numbers. When I collect data, I ask the questions in bad Portuguese, and a field agent translates it into the local language. That’s right; I speak much better Portuguese than a lot of rural Mozambicans (I’m taking lessons now, as well, and growing in confidence). One problem, however, was conveying the idea of opportunity cost in Portuguese, and then getting it translated to the local language. Opportunity cost is a concept difficult to grasp even as a first-year economics student – to get accurate figures on the income sacrificed by doing another activity is hard with rural Mozambicans, but central to finding out whether their activities are ultimately profitable.

My main concern over the past couple of weeks has been worrying I will not have enough work to do, and that I will run out of things to keep me occupied. Right now I’ve got work to do, and I don’t know how long it will last, but I feel I don’t need to work at a frenetic pace with German efficiency – on the field trips, there’s so much time allocated for relaxing, and people seem to be much more casual about work here – so I think I’ll try to work at a seaside pace- a tropical pace. I’ll get work done, but I don’t need to rush it. I’m in Mozambique, after all.

Development is a 4WD with a motorbike, a goat and firewood in the back.

2009-11-21T17:36:00.002+11:00

First off, things are getting better here. I’m getting used to the climate here, and I’ve realised that the hot days alternate with cool, wet days that are quite pleasant for me (but a bit cold for the locals). Power cuts have happened less often than I thought they would, my panic surrounding mosquitoes has subsided to a healthy level and I’m waking up at a more regular hour. In all, things are going OK, although there is still an animal in my ceiling.

This week I went on my first NGO-funded overnight field trip to do a bit of field research about the logistics of buying and selling goats and cattle in rural Mozambique. Pretty obscure stuff. I know very little about livestock, or Mozambique, or anything for that matter, but I’ve been assigned to the task of doing an economic analysis of prices, buying and selling, the impacts of diseases like bovine tuberculosis and other factors affecting the livestock game here, so that CARE can hopefully improve the way it approaches livestock assistance projects on the ground.

My Portuguese is really awful, and the short stay I have here means that even if I take lessons I will still need English translation for nearly everything in the field, which makes me feel pretty useless at times. I know the feeling of being in a meeting, or sitting at dinner, with people in full flight in German or Spanish while I would struggle to capture the meaning of anything even with a few years training in the language. With Portuguese I have no formal training- it’s similar to Spanish so I have worked out the patterns in many ways, but still my ability to converse in this language is ridiculously basic. I wish I could speak a language fluently- maybe if I had stuck to just one language rather than switching between them I would be able to by now.

In the field, in a little known district of a little known province of a little known country of (dare I say) a little known continent, I started to collect info on prices and livestock health, mostly through a translator, except on the occasions that I was impressed by English-speaking locals, of which there are surprisingly many. At the office now, I have put it all together into a neat spreadsheet, but there’s lots more to do, and I expect it will take time to reach any conclusions here, and by the time I do it will be about time to leave. Such is the nature of a short term stay of an Australian uni student who only speaks poor-tuguese and knows nothing about agriculture. I don’t know what will happen next week – I need a lot of guidance with this stuff, as you’d imagine, but I hope I’ll continue to be able to contribute in small ways.

The trip into the bush was really nice. At one point a small-scale farmer was showing us his herd of goats by the roadside. (He also has a pet monkey tied up by rope. Local kids pull the rope and laugh at it.) The sun was setting, and the grassland countryside was so charming with its baobab trees mingling with coconut palms. The 4WD was sitting up by the side of the road, against a grand backdrop of endless sky, the music of Queen from the car’s speakers adding in a peculiar way to the scene’s grandeur. The light was fading and the breeze calm; it was beautiful.

On the way back from Nova Mambone, the town where we spent the night, we accumulated in the back of the vehicle a motorbike, two women who wanted a lift, a goat (alive, bound and yelping) and some firewood from a roadside stall. When we stopped there, the children stood dumbfounded as they stared at me for the entire ten minute period we were there. It was if they were staring at a ghost; in a way, I guess they were.

Mozambique - first impressions

2009-11-15T20:43:00.007+11:00

Most of the following blog entry was written while in a state of discomfort a few nights ago when the power was out, I was under the mosquito net and sweating like a pig. There are many great things about Mozambique, and there is so much charm to the place. I’m still going to publish this because it captures part of my mindset here, while by no means all of it. Stay tuned to hear stories on the brighter side.

I have now been in the small Mozambican town of Vilankulo for just three and a half days. And so far I have faced challenges to my comfort that have really pushed me to my own limits.

The climate here is devastatingly hot, with a harsh sun and drenching humidity. It’s really bad, all day long, but particularly around lunchtime. The worst bit is that apparently it gets much worse in the next two months.
The constant high risk of malaria makes the night times even more stressful than the daytimes. While it is much cooler outdoors than indoors at night, staying in the open is so dangerous given this is a high risk zone. I am on malaria tablets, I use repellent, and I sleep under a net, and I can’t think of anything except mosquitos.
That’s not true: I also think of the other things we lack. Like regular electricity. The whole town suffers power outages regularly- so far in three nights here, two nights have been majorly interrupted by power cuts. This is OK during the day, but at night with no light and no fan, I can neither sit around nor go to sleep. Mosquitoes + climate + no power = challenging evenings.
I have more to complain about. Because of the time zones here, Mozambique gets bright at 4.30am and dark by 6.30pm. The whole country is in the wrong time zone, and this means I have been waking three hours before breakfast is served, and going to sleep immediately after dinner as the combination of 1, 2,3 and 4 means that there is little else to do once night falls.
Water is also scarce here. Running water is elusive, unless a building has its own supply, but even this is a problem sometimes eg the first place I stayed had a full tank on the roof but none of the water was flowing into taps. This is a problem in a country where the climate and the dusty roads (the whole city is just sand roads) mean that I’m filthy all day and need a good wash, and all that’s available sometimes is a bucket.
There’s no public transport in this town and it is really spread out, so it takes a long time to walk around, plus you shouldn’t really be out after dark for long, for safety and malarial reasons.
There’s some kind of animal living in my roof, burrowing through. It sounds like at any point the whole roof will cave in and some kind of exotic Mozambican squirrel will fall onto my bed.
Of course the water is not drinkable, but I’m used to that one.
I just heard the animal in my ceiling again. I’m told the power will come back on soon, and I hope so because being the comfort freak I am, I don’t think I can sleep until my fan is back on.

All this paints a bleak picture of this place. It’s all tied to the fact that Mozambique is really poor. The strong infrastructure that we have in Australia we really take for granted and assume that that is the norm. It’s not. In the real world, people can’t afford to provide reliable water and electricity; diseases that don’t exist in our country are serious fatal risks. It makes me feel so privileged to live where I live. And I hope that all people fortunate to have been born into the wonderful country that is Australia consider it an amazing privilege.

Things will pick up here, I’m sure. Once I get used to these things, it should be OK. My internship is still a bit sketchy but it looks like the organisation has a project for me that I can hopefully contribute to meaningfully.

To be fair, Mozambique is going OK. This was written in a state of extreme stress. I'm actually doing fine.

Is this still importing to Facebook?

2009-11-14T02:56:00.002+11:00

Just a test... is this still importing automatically to Facebook?

For more, go to www.darrelldarrelldarrell.blogspot.com

Just quickly, Mozambique is overwhelming. I'll write something in the next couple of days to capture what's going on here.

On the verge of the complete unknown

2009-11-11T02:40:00.003+11:00

"In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular."
-Binyavanga Wainaina

I used the above quote in a recent essay about how writers love to generalise about Africa. I'm not sure how it's going to relate to this blog entry, but I just like it so I decided I'd start it, and this trip, with it.

This trip will take me first to Mozambique to work as an intern in an area I'm still not entirely sure of, followed by another internship in South Africa about which the details are still vague but I know that it will be related to HIV/AIDS awareness. I will keep you posted once I figure out what I really am doing in Africa. That is, if I ever figure it out. Aid and development is a big and confusing game, and they say the more you know, the more you realise how little you know.

My blogs for previous trips have been ridiculously long and probably not so readable, so I am going to try this time around to write shorter, but more regularly, trying to stick to just 1-2 ideas per blog entry rather than 45-50. (If you prefer long and epic blogs, there's always KevInAfrica).

I'm at Singapore airport, waiting for a 2.30am flight to Johannesburg, and the place is empty enough to inspire some deep reflecting. Alternatively, the wide open floors would be great to play cricket on.

I'm trying to think of something profound and thoughtful to write, but nothing is coming. So let me leave you with a joke. This one's from my Uncle Rodney in Singapore. He didn't tell it this time around, but he did last time.

There was a big competition for smart university students from around the world. In the end there were students left from Oxford, Harvard, Monash University, and the National University of Singapore. They were completely tied, so they needed to somehow do a tiebreaker to determine the smartest.

The examiner came up with a question.

First he asked the Oxford student, "What is the fastest thing?"
The Oxford student said, "A thought. It comes quicker than anything else"

He asked the Harvard student, "What is the fastest thing?"
The Harvard student said, "A blink. It's completely involuntary; it just happens before you even know it is happening."

The Monash Uni (or any distinguished Australian uni) student was next.
"Light," she said, "nothing moves faster than light!"

Up stepped the National University of Singapore student to answer the same question.
"The fastest thing, ah," he said, "is diahorrea. When it comes, ah, no time to think, no time to blink, no time to turn on light!"

That had nothing to do with Africa. I'll leave it there and I promise the next entry will be more substantial.

Father and son

2009-10-10T17:50:00.004+11:00

Inspired by cheap airfares, and encouraged by my dad, Cliff, to join him in his travels, earlier this year I booked flights to Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia via Kuala Lumpur for a short ten day mid semester excursion. Knowing my father's curious and sometimes frustrating ways of doing things, people close to me questioned my decision to travel with him, especially given my reputation as an easily frustrated young man.

I am pleased to report that the Sumatra trip was largely successful; Dad and I were able to travel together surprisingly well, or at least to a workable level. In big cities we would go our separate ways - his style is to be guided around, and then to explore museums at the pace of a handicapped snail, while I like to explore the guts of a city (and in some of these Indonesian cities the guts really were as disgusting as real guts) in a free sort of way, starting and stopping where I please. When we were in rural areas or in the outdoors, and this was most of the time, we stuck together, and I patiently waited as he followed me up walking tracks, asking questions of guides who could not really understand what he was getting at.

My dad loves to ask questions and, if given the opportunity, will do so indefinitely. No conversation is ever over while he is a part of it. Mostly his questions to guides concerned the culture, history, flora and fauna of the areas we were in, but occasionally he neglected to take into account the guides' low levels of English into account and launched into complicated but irrelevant questions that he had to explain and rephrase a number of times to a puzzled Sumatran until I elbowed him and told him to forget about it. For example he tried to convey the concept of Australia being 'down under' to an Indonesian guy, then asked if Indonesians consider themselves 'down under' as well.

His appetite for knowledge is matched only by his appetite for food. He would order two to three times the reasonable amount of food, and would confuse waiters when they brought two dishes, placed one in front of me and one in front of him, then I would push mine to his side. Dad has a particular fondness for drinking tea by the jug rather than by the cup, and when he ordered tea he tried to request a pot of tea with his meal, but the waiters were unfamiliar with this word (I'm embarrassed to say that neither of us made a massive effort on the Bahasa Indonesia front) but he kept trying. Seeing that this would never work, I just told the waiter to bring two cups of tea. When one waiter did (and let me come back to this particular waiter in a moment) and I pushed mine across the table to Dad's side and explained that both cups of tea were for him, I think I blew his mind. It was like nothing he had ever seen, and I'm sure something he will tell his grandchildren about: the strange white man who was only one man, but ate and drank as if he were two.

This waiter, in a town called Bukit Lawang, was an Indonesian carbon copy of Fawlty Towers' Manuel. It took Dad about ten minutes to order breakfast from him, because I think both of them kept complicating something that was actually quite simple. In the end, he got it horribly wrong, but I told Dad not to try to fix it up or we might have been sitting there until lunchtime.

Dad wasn't satisfied with my ten day break and actually got to Indonesia ten days before me. He explored places sitting on the back of motorcycles, and was in Padang, the now earthquake-devastated city, just a week before it was hit severely by the earthquake. Scary stuff - it was the closest we had been to a major natural disaster (bushfires excluded). I had arranged to meet him at Medan airport. The way I entered the country really set it up as a surreal experience. I left Kuala Lumpur at midday and got to Medan at 11.55.

We really were thrust into the vibe of the island as we boarded a dodgy looking bus to take us straight out of the big city to Bukit Lawang. The bus was blaring Indonesian pop tunes at max volume and as we started rolling out of the bus terminal with only a couple of other passengers I knew it was too good to be true: the bus stopped at a busy street corner for the next forty-five minutes as it filled up. It was earth-meltingly humid and particularly in the poorly ventilated bus it was an uncomfortable experience. It was interesting, however, to watch street scenes around us, like entire families with two or three kids and two parents all on one motorcycle, none of them with helmets of course. As we drove along, little kids lined the road to shoot at us with their toy guns - I don't know if it's because we're white (or half-white), or if they just like shooting at buses.

The purpose of going to Bukit Lawang was to do a jungle trek, and to see orang-utans in the wild, and while we succeeded in seeing quite a few, I felt that these orang-utans were almost semi-domesticated. I know very well that people aren't supposed to feed them, but when our porter summoned them with a banana, I was too excited not to comply and experience the buzz of one of them plucking the fruit right from my palm with its long black fingers. It was incredible to see it so close up.

We had dinner with two solo travellers also staying at the lodge, a Danish guy and a Dutch guy. It was a particular funny scene (for me) as the Dutch guy lamented damaging his camera with a broken water bottle in his backpack, while the Danish guy showed little pity or sensitivity, saying that things have more 'soul' when you damage them, and 'you know what I say, you live, you learn, you crash, you burn!' I think Dad didn't see the tension between these two and continued to just ask both of them lots of questions.

Berastagi, a much cooler mountain town, was effectively Peru in Asia. The markets, the street vibe, the hills in the distance, the colour of the locals' skin. It was like a pleasant nostalgic journey, without having to go back to South America. The difference, I think, is that strangers seem to be friendlier in Indonesia, and happier to help out, or practise their English. I asked a guy the best way to walk to a certain hill, and he just grabbed his motorbike and told me to jump on. He didn't want any money, or anything else, he was just happy to go for a ride.

I loved browsing the markets- not the tourist markets, whose merchandise was mostly unoriginal and unappealing (like Peru and southern Africa there are far too many sellers all selling exactly the same thing, right next to each other) but the local markets, where I came across a goldmine of bad English T-shirts that made no sense at all or just seemed to have English words for the novelty of English words like "VARIOUS GAS STATIONS" and "New summer lastimes have arrived!"

The big selling point of Berastagi is that it is close to a couple of spectacular volcanoes. We climbed the smaller of the two, Gunung Sibayak, with a short, mustachioed guide called Barus, whom Dad called Bruce, who was pretty useless with local information and with helping Dad up the hard bits, but was likable somehow. The hike began while it was overcast and drizzling, and it got worse as we made our way up. For a while it was like we were walking on the moon, with the white rocks everywhere. I'm no vulcanologist, but there was a big yellow rock spurting out yellow smoke, and heat, and it was making sound too. It was cool. We made it to the crater, and Barus wanted to take us down again, but we insisted that we continue to walk a bit further up. It was a great decision, because by the time we had reached one peak, the haze had cleared and we had a stunning view not only of the crater but of the valley below. The scenic beauty of this volcano simply couldn't be captured on my camera. And so in a way I could say that scenic beauty is more beautiful than (physical) human beauty, because physical human beauty can at least be partially captured on film. You can look at a photo of a good looking person that someone shows you, and say, 'Yes, I agree that that person is every bit as good looking as you say they are' but if someone raves about an amazing valley, then shows you the photo, you might say 'yeah, it's OK,' but in reality, it wasn't just OK, it was amazing. The sheer depth of it can't be conveyed in a photo.

Danau Toba was our last major stop on the North Sumatran circuit. It's a huge volcanic crater lake, and it's really beautiful, with a big island in the middle. It used to be a major tourist attraction, but I think many tourists have been scared away from Indonesia by terrorism and government warnings, and the place is pretty much empty. There are dozens of hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops, and just a handful of foreigners. Nevertheless, this is where English teachers send their students to practice English and seek out native speakers. Being a rare sight (yes, a tourist in a tourist town!), I was mobbed by a pack of students who asked me lots of questions then got me to fill in their forms to prove they had met a native speaker. We had to fill in the topic of conversation, and I noticed that the person they had spoken to before me had written on each of their forms that the topic he had spoken with them about had been 'burning plastic' - still haven't got to the bottom of that one.

I wanted to have a go at hiring a motorbike, particularly with lax road rules and the calm, lazy atmosphere of the island where traffic was nothing like the nightmare of Medan. I had a go on a normal motorbike, but was a bit scared I'd stuff up the gears and crash into someone's house, so I opted for an automatic motor scooter instead. A guy called Gerry helped me out and gave me lessons before letting me go for a ride around the island. It was really beautiful. I didn't have any trouble, but I had to slow down for chickens, buffalo, dogs and small children. I got into the Indonesian spirit of honking at everyone and everything, which was fun, and now I'm a bit sad that we don't do it when we drive back home.

We finished after a week back in Medan, which has a certain elusive, disgusting charm. The pavements are riddled with potholes, and it's difficult to walk, and near impossible to cross the road. I started crossing a road, and I got caught on a median strip waiting for endless traffic in two lanes to end. I soon realised I was stranded there for good, so I hailed a motorbike rickshaw in the lane I was trying to cross, which stopped traffic in one lane, got into it, and told him to take me to the other side of the street. My Indonesian was good enough to bargain with these guys for the cost of a ride. I met Dad at the hotel for dinner, but he had brought back two young women wanting to practise their English, as he's too polite to say no. So we talked to them for about an hour, and they ended up bringing up lots of strange topics, such as one of their friends' fathers' bisexuality.

We finished in Kuala Lumpur, and to me it was similar to Singapore, but with a better skyline, a much worse public transport system (not terrible, just poor connections between the lines), and more stressful malls (I nearly died in one of the mega-plazas trying to find the food court, trying to fight through the bright lights and thousands of stores).

It won't be long before I travel again. I'm doing a couple of internships this summer, one with CARE in Mozambique and one with Oxfam in South Africa. So I'll be leaving again in a month. I feel like I travel way too much. Much more than I deserve to.

South Africa Backstage Pass: Learning Lowveld

2009-02-11T06:43:00.001+11:00

South Africa Backstage Pass: Learning Lowveld

There's so much to say about my field study trip in Mpumalanga, South Africa. And I have to write up my journal for an assessment for the subject, so I don't think this will be as comprehensive a blog as my usual ones. Instead, I think I'll focus on a few key thoughts and events to give the gist of what the trip was all about.

The unit is composed of a 2 and a half week study trip in the Nkomazi region of Mpumalanga province. We had numerous lectures from guests who were each knowledgeable in their field and informed about the issues and challenges the region faces in terms of development. We did lots of excursions to explore our massive case study on the ground, and we engaged with communities, schools and various groups.

We were based in the small town of Hectorspruit, pretty isolated and off the beaten track. We stayed at a bizarre Wild West-esque Afrikaaner pseudo-resort, where the pool gave people ear infections, the dinner ladies taught us to speak Swati and where stuffed giraffes, hippos and plenty of buffalo greeted us menacingly. A bird spoke Afrikaans from it's cage; another sang the tune from James Bond's Goldfinger. We were ably accompanied around the lowveld (the region we were in- low altitude, grassland, high humidity) by three drivers, each with a distinct driving character. One was slow and steady, ever cautious and shy, but the only one who got pulled up for speeding. Another was young, full of energy, and liked to put the pedal to the metal. Finally there was a father figure, a guiding force who passed on his knowledge of the veld and its wildlife while catalysing the 'J-massive', an elite breakaway group brought together by the fact they were in his bus. We enjoyed coming across African wildlife at Kruger National Park, but for me it was the chance sightings on other occasions, such as giraffes by the side of the road, or the pack of 20 hippos in the river when we went to learn about river flow measurement methods on a strictly academic excursion. Spotting wildlife was a big deal, and Andy claimed it was the 1/16th Aboriginal in him that gave him the edge over the rest of us when it came to seeing elephants or wildebeest in the distance.

We were warned about lots of things in South Africa. Most of us were taking our regular malaria medicine and applying mosquito repellent like Vegemite eaters apply Vegemite to toast. The crime situation was made clear, especially at the uni's campus in Johannesburg. Don't walk alone outside the campus- don't walk at all after 4pm (armed muggers hide in the long grass)- don't wear a watch. The houses in Johannesburg and in Hectorspruit told the grim tale of security issues in South Africa. High barbed wire fences, packs of huge barking dogs, electric fences for some. But it seemed to me that danger in South Africa is confined largely to specific areas at specific times, and that one must just exercise caution while travelling.

In our lectures, most of which were spent sitting in dirt or on concrete floors, we learned about the incredibly complex background that accompanies issues of South African development. The scars of apartheid, forced removals, discriminatory policies across the board, neglect in education and so on are felt very strongly today. Some blacks have become rich and successful post apartheid, but a glance at living conditions in the city townships and former homeland villages, as well as any statistics sheet, shows that standards of living are hugely unequal and that serious poverty is very much part of today's South Africa. Every issue we tackled related to race, whether officially (eg 40% of water allocation goes to black-owned projects) or unofficially (we visited poor schools, and of course everyone in the school was black). Land reform and restitution cropped up as a constant issue- displaced communities are claiming their land back, and we accompanied a group for a walk through a game reserve they are in the process of reclaiming. It had been 20 years since some of them had visited the land, and apparently it was thanks to the presence of a big overseas group (us) that the ranger with a gun (needed to shoot the lions if they attacked us- they didn't) deemed it worthwhile to let the pilgrimage go ahead.

We saw success stories, such as the high school which is way ahead of other rural black schools thanks to its charismatic and inspired principal who continues to bug the department of Education until he gets the funding he needs. On the other hand we saw projects with a long way to go before they could succeed, as well as projects that had almost totally failed due to issues with leadership, internal politics, and conflicting motivation. A medicinal plant project was set up in the interests of conservation and was a great idea, but it had heartbreakingly fallen apart after a chain of tragic events. We were told not to expect success after success in development- failures are inevitable at times.

Poverty is so serious in South Africa, but even worse in Mozambique. We crossed the border for a day into Maputo, and the severity of poverty was clear from the moment we cleared the border post. Run down shacks lined the dirt by the highway, and the city was neglected and buildings were in various states of decay. Mozambique is the kind of country I look at and shake my head, not knowing where to start. Ravaged by a civil war (the country suffered as a result of the selfish interests of other much larger powers- the tragic story of so many countries in disarray today) it is one of the poorest nations on Earth, and I have no idea how to build up a country where nearly everyone is in extreme poverty. Having said, that the city had a certain charm that we just couldn't put our finger on, and felt relaxed and unthreatening. We had fun roaming around, buying fake watches and thongs, and taking arthouse photos in the overgrown jungle of a botanical gardens.

I learned an awful lot about the issues tied to development on this trip- it is incredibly complex and there are no easy solutions. But I'm glad my eyes have been widened slightly, and now I'm more committed than ever to do what I can to make a difference where I can, in the short and long term.

"And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. " Nelson Mandela

Hong Kong and Macau

2009-01-21T19:59:00.000+11:00

Hong Kong is an intense city - it's so alive and fast-moving, and there's so much going on that it is overwhelming at times. Yet in this small Chinese territory there is still the opportunity to relax and get away from the crowds, the concrete jungle, and the neon presence in the ever-busy streets.

I am experiencing Hong Kong (or 'vibe city' as it has been dubbed by my Hong Kong adviser, Mr. D. Mu) as part of a stopover that had to happen. I could have taken the much quicker flight from Sydney to Johannesburg, but I thought it might be worth it to take a detour via South China (look at a map- it's totally not on the way at all) given the difference in price was negligible. It was one of the best decisions of my life, and as a result I strongly encourage to y'all that you ALWAYS take advantage of stopover cities to get out of the airport and have a brief look at another side of the world. I had a few opportunities to do so on my 2008 trip, and I was never disappointed.

Flying into Hong Kong was exciting and left me with my mouth gaping, an expression which would be found on my face many times more while in Vibe City. Through the mist I saw rugged mountainous green islands leading up to the skyscraper forest of Victoria Harbour- it looked a bit like photos I've seen of Rio de Janiero.

Vibe City has many sides, and continues to surprise around every corner. The city's biggest attraction is surely its skyline, by day or by night. I queued up with the masses to take a look at the city from the famous Victoria Peak at night- the skyscrapers line the harbour on both sides and it's just like nothing you've seen before. I found it difficult just to admire it with my eyes- when I see such an amazing sight, I often go straight for the camera and try to capture it. But some things just can't be captured on film, and it is better just to take it in with my eyes and not worry so much about a photo. In the past I've looked back on a travel experience and realised I basically viewed the whole thing through the lens only- I have to remember to just stand back and appreciate things sometimes. Hong Kong's skyscrapers not only stand around and look good; they dance. Every night there is a light show where cheesy 80s music plays and the buildings emit beams all over the place and flash different colours in time with the music. It's incredibly tacky, but it seems appropriate in this city of excess and extravagance. Even in the busiest areas, though, it can be seen that there are different levels of Hong Kong living- in some districts the flashy shops are beside crumbing apartment blocks that have seen better days. Hong Kong is a city of capitalism and materialism, and, with all cities, there is another side that isn’t as well off.

The rail system (called the MTR) is a world leader, and a model for how every city should do public transport. It's so efficient and clean and regular- the stations are well set out so you always know which direction to go in (except for one time I found myself walking against the tide, dodging fast-moving commuters with no tolerance for Australian subway troublemakers.) The stations are pretty full-on and well equipped. There are jewellery stores, clothes stores, free internet access (it is slow admittedly) and I even saw a mobile phone charger station once. The signposting in the stations and also the streets is fantastic for someone who doesn't know where they're going. Other cities should learn lessons from this city as an example of how to cater to tourists. The MTR stations have tonnes of exits, but there is a description of which exit will take you to which locations, which helps a lot given the size of some of these stations.

The streets are full of energy and character- huge billboards in Chinese form a canopy over the constantly rushing pedestrians- at night it is especially magical. At times it is really intense. I popped my head out in the Mong Kok district and was totally overwhelmed by the scores of people buzzing around- I didn’t know where to go, so I went straight back to the MTR. It was so packed with people that I couldn’t fully cross the street- there were too many people on the other side that I was momentarily stuck on the street as I tried to find a gap to squeeze into.

The street markets are great to wander around in. There are food markets selling traditional stuff and day to day stuff, huge electronics markets (I bought some headphones which don’t work) and more touristy markets for souvenir stuff. There’s one bird market filled with cages with whistling little birds which is awfully charming in an old school Asia sort of way. I wasn’t expecting this, but bargaining in markets seems so much easier here than it was in South America- normally when I name a lower price, I expect a bit of haggling. But in some of these markets, I would name a price and they would agree straight away.

English is widespread, so it isn't an issue to travel here without Cantonese, but I feel guilty speaking English here unlike in Singapore, because it's not the first language. I wanted to learn some Cantonese phrases (I already know the absolute basics of Mandarin thanks to 5+ years of Chinese school- the rest has vanished) but I didn't know where to begin, and I found myself just falling back into the trap of speaking the same old language I speak everywhere. I felt a bit ashamed to be able only to speak English, so when I bought stuff I sometimes just stayed completely silent so that the shopkeeper could assume I was a Cantonese speaker who didn't like to speak much rather than an ignorant tourist. I'm a bit silly when it comes to language and travel- I guess I just like the idea of adapting and fitting in, so I feel I'm a failure if I have to speak my own language. At one point I almost missed a stop on the train because I didn't want to have to say 'Excuse me' in English and I didn't know how to in Cantonese.

Hong Kong has lots of little things which contribute to its vibe. There are scores of migrant worker ladies (Filipina and Indonesian I think) who set up picnic rugs in underpasses and eat together, listen to boom boxes and just seem to have these endless parties. Kowloon Park was buzzing on the Sunday I visited with thousands of these workers, dancing, singing and just having fun. It was fun to just be part of the party- it seemed to lighten up a sometimes serious city. The parks are filled with tai chi practisers- calmly going through their motions with an imposing backdrop of skyscrapers and mountains. Heaps of people on the streets wear face masks- I think that if you have a cold, you are expected to walk around with one- Hong Kong is serious about health and I think with things like SARS and avian flu still a concern people are taking it very seriously.

The food here is great, and I've done my best to try some different stuff here. I hated myself for having McDonalds on the first night- it's such a cop-out and really a waste of a meal when you're in such a food capital of the world. Since then I've tried lots of different things, including dim sum by myself today. The guy at the restaurant couldn't believe I was going for yum cha for one ("Why so lonely?") but it was something I couldn't leave Hong Kong without doing.

Without a doubt my most peculiar experience in Hong Kong came in the Pao Galleries, part of the Art Centre. I was having a look at some modern art when a young man told me he was a volunteer/artist and asked me what I thought of it. He ushered me into a video room and told me to take a look at the screen and try to 'integrate' myself into the movie, and totally relax. He went on to use the word 'relax' a lot. After telling me to uncross my arms and breathe slowly, he reached out and took my hand and gently led it up so I was touching my nose, then told me to bring it down slowly. I didn't know what he was doing, but I was curious and in no rush, so I played along. He started to massage pressure points in my hands, then got me to sit down and he continued this massage thing while telling me to keep watching the film (which was just arthouse meaningless stuff, some of which was appropriate for this massage, and some which was just very weird) and to relax. It seemed like, as odd a place this was to be doing this massage, he actually seemed to know what he was doing, so I let him continue, and he gradually did more types of this pressure massage, including massaging my bare feet with his (now I know what you are all thinking, but this was not at all sexual- and I have no doubt that he had no dirty intentions- this was the kind of serious Chinese massage people would pay for normally; I was just getting it from a stranger I had met in an art gallery!) I didn’t know why he was doing this, and why here of all places, but it was a very interesting experience and I didn’t feel threatened by him, just a bit confused. I think that if I had been prepared for it, I would have really found it much more relaxing than I did.

Hong Kong’s Outlying Islands were a great contrast to the busy city centre. I half climbed Lantau Peak (yeah, weak effort I know) which allowed me to enjoy really nice views over the island, totally green and without a building in sight, except for the tacky tourist village nearby. I wandered around the sleepy village Mui Wo, which is filled with bikes and fishermen. Cheung Chau was my sunset stop, and I hired a bike to roar around the island (and I nearly hit plenty of pedestrians) and enjoy the cool breeze and watch the locals wander around at a refreshingly slow pace compared to the MTR stations in town. Men played hakky-sack, children rode their bikes home from school, tables were set ready for yum cha, the sampans bobbed up and down in the harbour. Cheung Chau was at peace and so was I.

I took the opportunity to check out Macau, the former Portuguese colony reachable by ferry. It is a thoroughly bizarre place- it’s the only place in China where casinos are legal and, as a result, there are billions of them, lining the main drags and lit up at night. There’s a park with a huge man made volcano, a Chinese temple and a Roman amphitheatre- it’s the first thing you see as you approach the city by ferry, and I felt a bit let down that the huge things I could faintly see as I arrived were just casino gimmicks. The inner city has more charm, thanks to its colonial buildings and winding streets, through which a stream of mopeds constantly flows. I took a ride on a bus down south to one of the islands Coloane (which has ceased to be an island because so much land has been reclaimed to develop more, you guessed it, casinos) which has noticeably more charm and is quite sleepy and relaxed, a far cry from the bustling casino strip.

So I have been kept interested for the past few days for my Asian city break. Hong Kong and Macau have excited me and I am thoroughly pleased that I chose to make this stopover. I leave for Johannesburg tonight, and then the real trip begins!

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=61638&l=109fd&id=629670868

Back on the road

2009-01-16T13:12:00.002+11:00

This post marks the continuation of 'Darrell vs the World'
This trip will be entitled Part 2: Just Take The Money!*

*this is a joke which is becoming old fast, and involves me holding out my wallet, begging for a threatening person to just take it and spare me. This trip will be called Just Take The Money! in this blog for the following reasons:

1. South Africa is renowned as a country with a particularly high rate of crime- one in which I should not show my wallet in public, let alone hold it in someone's face while mocking them. It means I will have to stop being so cocky, and start to be a smart traveller. I hope I've picked up these skills in South America, but in doing so I've become a bit more cocky, so I have to watch myself.

2. This trip is of particular importance to me as a student of international development. I expect to learn a lot about the dynamics of regional development in South Africa on different scales, and I hope to gain an insight into some of the kinds of things that are necessary for development to really work in the short and long terms. Development is not an easy game, and one in which any of the players involved could not simply make a big donation and say 'Just take the money!' and expect that everything will be rosy.

3. This trip has been, and will continue to be, expensive. It is hard for me to justify spending a large amount of money on anything, given the extreme poverty that exists in the world and the hideous living conditions of some of our fellow human beings. How can we possibly spend thousands of dollars on international travel when people starve and die of curable diseases? It is something that is hard to reconcile. But I hope that I can at least somewhat justify the trip in saying that it is an investment rather than an expense. On my last trip I expanded my understanding of the world and the challenges it faces, and I hope I can do so even more this time around. So I could make a donation to Oxfam, and say 'Just take the money!' ridden with guilt of having more money than I need, or I could spend the money on something that will increase my understanding of poverty and its possible solutions, and hope that I can help more in the long term. Sure, that doesn't fully justify it, and I can't pretend I'm going to save the world one day as a result, but hopefully the trip can be more meaningful given that it has a real purpose and is not simply a getaway.

So what am I doing? I'll be spending four days in Hong Kong on a stopover before meeting a Monash University group in Johannesburg for the start of the third-year geography unit Field Studies in Regional Sustainability. We'll be doing a lot of excursions around the Mpumalanga lowveld, learning about all aspects of regional development and environmental management, then we will be doing presentations and assignments about all that in Semester 1. After the end of the field trip I'll be travelling Han Solo from Cape Town to Pretoria over two weeks (too short for such a spectacular journey) to see a bit more of South Africa. I'll be back on February 23, in time for a few days rest before uni begins.

It should be an exciting trip, and I think it's the right time for some travel. I'm a bit exhausted at the moment by a number of things, so a new world experience would fit right in just about now.

I hope to post a few entries for the upcoming trip to share my thoughts. I really appreciated that a number of my close friends (and even some of my not-so-close friends and even my enemies) read and enjoyed my last trip's blogs. So that has encouraged me to continue to blog it up.

A shift in mindset

2008-11-03T19:55:00.002+11:00

OK, here's the first of the non-travel related blog entries.

I've noticed more and more that the uni student mentality around this time of year is one of "x days to go till I'm free!" And when exams are finished, it becomes "x years to go till I'm free!" Back when we were in school, we tortured ourselves with study with the attitude in the back of our minds, "when exams are done, I'm free forever! Sure, uni's next, but that's no big deal. You only have to pass!"

When I work over the summer, it's often "x days till I'm back to uni and out of here!" When I'm back at uni, it's "x weeks until I'm finished again!" When I was saving for my trip, it was "x weeks till I leave!" When I was homesick and killing time in an obscure Peruvian city it was a (more fervent than ever) "x weeks till I'm home!" Basically, it seems that for nearly everything that is happening, we want it to be over.

When we finish our degrees, does it get any easier? Is that what we're hanging out for? Full time work; a family; endless commitments; responsibility? I doubt life is going to get any easier. And then what? "x years till retirement!" I know some people think in this way; the plan is to work long hours in a not-so-fun but high-paying job so that you can have a luxurious retirement.

I think my attitude and this attitude isn't ideal. The way life is, I don't think it's very constructive to be constantly anticipating the end of what we're doing. If it's holidays and retirement that we look forward to, and everything else is a drag, are we suggesting that we really can't stand our lives at all and are trying to escape what we have gotten ourselves into? (By the way, it's not too late to get out of what we've got ourselves into... in most cases)

I think it's better to try and enjoy life exactly where it is: in its perpetual imperfect state. Life's never going to be perfect, so why yearn for the pot of gold at the end of the exam rainbow when you can try to have a bite of it right now? I'd like to try and appreciate life at all moments, not just those between semesters. It might mean slowing down the pace of life a bit, but let's face it, what's all the hurry for? Let me add that I haven't by any means perfected the art of embracing the imperfection of life; I'm just proposing an idea that I'd like to put into practice.

Not only for religious reasons, I take Sundays off from study. It's a weekly safe haven that no one can break into. No matter how many assignments I have, or even if I have an exam the next day, that day is for whatever I see fit. Before I start preaching the benefits of it, though, I must add that it can create the situation "x days till Sunday!" which is again just as unconstructive as all the other ones. I still like the concept though, because it tells the world "whatever you've got for me, it can wait until later."

So how to approach the ever-demanding world? In a balanced fashion, I suppose. Some things don't need to be taken so seriously.
And some things do, like poverty and the environment. More on that later.

The Whirlwind Finale

2008-07-05T15:10:00.001+10:00

During my time at SKIP, I planned in eager anticipation what was to be a legendary ten day “whirlwind finale” that would take me to as many new places in as short a time as possible, from the door of the SKIP house right back to my home back in Melbourne. Not everything planned happened as a result of a couple of things, but it was nevertheless a great finish to a great trip, and I spent a bit of time doing what I had not done before, which was just chilling out.

After farewelling the SKIP gang in a hurry, I took a luxury overnight bus (not wanting to take risks with dodgy buses again after the theft in Ecuador – plus a luxury bus in Peru for nine hours is just AUD$28) to the mountain city of Huaraz, which is renowned as a backpackers’ and trekkers’ mecca. It’s easy to see why just standing anywhere in the city. The place has the most spectacular snow-capped mountain range, the Cordillera Blanca, standing to one side of the otherwise modest city. From the rooftop of my hotel I could see the tallest mountain in Peru, the 6768m Huascaran.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fully enjoy Huaraz and its surroundings to the max, as I must have eaten something a little dodgy on my final day in Trujillo and was sick for most of my time in Huaraz, spending days just reading and generally taking it easy while the mountains beckoned. I enjoyed the hotel breakfasts including the comical fact that I would make my order clear eg fried eggs and tea, and then the waiter would immediately repeat back to me “scrambled eggs and coffee, right?”. This happened every day, but the eventual meal on my plate was always right.

By the third day I was just well enough to go on a fantastic day hike to a beautiful blue lake just known as Laguna 69, situated at the foot of a series of snow capped mountains. The trek took us through cattle-inhabited meadows (my eyes had to continue to switch between admiring the beautiful mountains above and avoiding stepping in the cow waste on the ground in front of me) up past small waterfalls and then up, where it was snowing lightly, to a track that passed between majestic white peaks. The whole trip was soured by the difficult journey back to Huaraz. We had been promised private transportation the whole way, and we got it on the way to the trek (save for a porter with a high pitched voice that we picked up along the way) but on the way back we realized no car would be coming to pick us up and we were to wait for the local buses that passed through the region already packed with passengers. We spent about an our cramped into one small bus, then waited in the rain for another one and then I was crammed into a corner with some guy who fell asleep in my direction, and I spent the whole journey with a scowl on my face as I looked out of the window and looked forward to leaving Peru. I was very irritated at the lying company (they are called Galaxia Expeditions for any of you looking to trek in Huaraz) but knew that, unlike in Australia, I would have little power to demand my money back or any sort of compensation, so I didn’t bother complaining.

I witnessed a couple of displays of almost-there professionalism in my final days in Peru. One case was the expensive bus that took me from Huaraz back to Lima, Peru’s capital. The bus had hostesses dressed like air hostesses and played movies that were actually legal copies (a rarity in Peru) but the music playing before the bus began was a horribly skipping CD that indicated they still had a bit of work to do. Another example was the banks with their electronic ticket system for waiting to be served. It made me think of the banks as really modern and professional, until I handed the teller money to change down to smaller notes, and she forgot how much I gave her and asked me to reconfirm it. On the bus, I enjoyed the Peruvian highland scenery one last time, gliding through a magnificent canyon, and then reached the all too familiar drab scenes of desert cities as we got to the final stretch of the journey.

In Lima I struggled to replace my stolen cheap Bolivian handicrafts (especially my prized $1.50 scarf) with similar ones at reasonable prices. I spent a couple of hours navigating the labyrinth of identical stores and women reeling off the same line: “Pase, amigo, qué está buscando?” (Come in, friend, what are you looking for?) In the end I started telling them what I was looking for, which stopped most of them from bugging me. (“I need a black scarf, not too long, not to wide, llama design, not too expensive”) I got one eventually, but it was $10 and not as nice as the Bolivian one.

In Lima I tried to join a tour to see the San Francisco Monastery which has a basement network of catacombs, but I accidentally ended up walking with a charter group who was about to get on a bus before the guide politely asked me if I was on the tour, so I felt like a bit of an idiot, but it was completely her fault because she walked into the monastery lobby and said “Ok, we’re going now!” to everyone. The other thing I did in Lima was to go with a paragliding instructor on a tandem flight over the cliffs and parks of Miraflores (Lima’s famous rich suburb) which was really fun and nice to feel like I was flying, although due to the wind we could really only circle in one area. Finding I had ran out of things to do (it was my second time in Lima) I did what I hadn’t done for my whole trip and sat down with a coffee and read a book in a café, which was actually a good idea and I probably should have done a bit more of it earlier rather than traveling as fast as I possibly could for the previous four months. It was soon time to leave Peru, and I found myself frustrated again at the airport when I had to throw away my $0.40 bottle of water to pass security then my only option was to buy one for $1.75, which I no longer had enough Peruvian money for. Daylight robbery!

The next day I was in Santiago, Chile’s big and busy capital for my final city adventure. I had planned an overnight trip to nearby Mendoza, Argentina but after being sick and getting more annoyed with long buses I decided I would give it a miss and spend more time chilling in Chile (pun admittedly intended). I think I made the right decision, really enjoying Santiago and its surrounds. The main shopping streets of the city are very European and you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a major Western city and not in South America. The city has an efficient underground metro system, although at peak hour it is a nightmare to get onto a train. Music plays from speakers on the street, international fast food chains smile reassuringly, busy passers by are carrying shopping bags and coffee. The main square was full of street performers attracting large crowds: I tried to watch a couple of comedy acts but found my three months of Spanish language immersion were not helping me at all.

The Chilean fast food specialty is called the ‘completo’ which is just a fancy hot dog which I enjoyed apart from the fact that I realized many of them feature avocado as a main element, which is one of my blacklisted foods. I climbed up a couple of urban mountains, the very pretty Cerro Santa Lucia with a great sunset view of the city, although the whole park was full of local couples making out and giggling, which is a theme of public parks in South America. The following day I visited the taller Cerro San Cristobal, including its zoo with animals hanging out in spectacular locations overlooking the city. I got the funicular (an outdoor elevator) up the hill to the peak where one of the most spectacular churches in the world sat, with a view of the city, the mountains, and a huge statue of the Virgin Mary overlooking not only the pews but the whole city as well. Santiago is infamous for being very polluted and the thick grey layer of smog was visible from above.

I visited two smaller coastal cities just a short bus ride from Santiago. The first was the glitzy Vina del Mar, a beach city with condos, casinos and the kind of place which would be a good setting for a heist movie, as long as it was set in summer. One of the highlights was a moai (Easter Island giant sculpture) that sat in front of one of the museums. I then made my way down to the more interesting and slightly rougher Valparaiso, a colourful city with houses built up hills surrounding a big port. I visited some cool flea markets and antique markets for some old Chilean souvenirs and a vinyl copy of Jesus Christ Superstar in Spanish. The city is full of ascensores (more outdoor elevators) that creak as they deliver passengers up the very steep hills and into the artsy neighbourhoods with great views and murals.

On my flight to Auckland I got little sleep as I had expected, then hung around the airport for a few hours waiting for my delayed flight back home, which finally dropped me into my old city two hours late, my musical instruments having survived customs. A group of friends greeted me alongside my family which was great and we all had a nice glass of milk back home.

So I’m very much home now and surprised not to feel post trip blues at the moment or any feeling of Melbourne being weird after being in South America for three months and away from home for four and a half altogether. Maybe it’s because I have a big list of things to do before uni starts in just over a week. Probably I’ll need more time for reflection before I can make any worthwhile final remarks. But I can say that I had an awesome time overseas and that there is no doubt that when I begin saving money again soon it will all be going towards the next big trip.

Thanks to the people who have read these blogs and I hope you have enjoyed them. It was a good trip.

Photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=31567&l=a45e8&id=629670868
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=19880&l=37c9c&id=629670868

Mud stoves, border crossings, Simon and Garfunkel and one last call of "Vámonos!"

2008-06-23T08:00:00.002+10:00

Photos:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=25411&l=c4496&id=629670868

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28707&l=a5e56&id=629670868

SKIP (Supporting Kids in Peru) volunteer work continued for me in June, as well as a couple of trips to break it up. I apologise that this blog is not as long as the last one, for those of you who love a comprehensive entry.

I continued going on visits with the economic development team in the very poor district of Alto Trujillo. There were some interesting cases. One woman had 10 soles ($4) left to repay on her loan which was unpaid since November, but she had paid on time and on schedule up to then. We visited her often, trying to get to the bottom of it, not understanding what the problem was. Every time we ran into her (which wasn´t often) she promised money later that week, but it never happened, until one afternoon when Brook, in charge of the program, bumped into her and she almost seemed to have had enough of this game and coughed it up. It´s not so much about SKIP getting its money back as teaching the loan recipients to be responsible and understand the way credit works.

There are some really interesting loan cases that I´d love to tell you about but for various reasons they are not up here on this blog so ask me about them later.

Our cocina (stove) project continued with mixed momentum. We crushed up an old demo stove at the SKIP office and rebuilt it by turning it into a mud mixture, but it didn't end up as we had hoped and cracked badly in the sun. So we arranged a meeting with a guy who makes mud bricks for a living to show us how to get the mix right, but he never showed and we couldn't track him down (this is a common frustration in Peru, a country where things don't run on time and a lot of the people seem almost to be proud of this as part of the character of this land). We got together a gang of eager mothers and they re-reconstructed the stove, getting their hands in the mud and slopping it all over the place, but making a stove that looked better than the one we foreigners had made. Next week the mothers, in small groups, will construct stoves in their own homes, which should be a good step in a healthier and more efficient cooking life for them and their families.

For my own contribution to the economic development program, I continued a research project into how to implement a micro-business training program for our loan recipients. SKIP is hoping to start classes soon, once they can get hold of some teachers (university students looking for community service hours look to be a likely bet) and curriculum (which will most likely be self-authored). I won't be around to see how it turns out, but I really hope that they are a success because some basic business education could really be of assistance to the business owners in this community so that they can expand and hopefully enjoy a higher standard of living as a result of higher profits. I also discussed with the other guys a possible reform of our loan system, which currently has no interest but a one-off fixed fee. Looking at the lateness of everyone´s repayments, we can see they have no incentive to pay quickly, so we are changing the system to one which will encourage them to pay on time, so they learn something about how finance works. We´ll be offering incentives for paying on time and a second level incentive for people who at least pay something every fortnight, so they don´t just stop altogether if a small problem comes along.

Probably the most fun I had in my second month at SKIP was joining Robert, an English volunteer, in his English lessons to sing some songs with the kids. The song ¨El Condor Pasa¨ is a traditional tune here and Simon and Garfunkel made it famous by adding lyrics to it. We translated the lyrics to Spanish and then taught it to the kids as a fun activity for Robert´s farewell week. He played guitar and I got the chance to play my charango, the mini Peruvian guitar. We wrote the lyrics on the board and the kids sang along enthusiastically, which made it a lot of fun. One thing that impressed me was that when we sang a Spanish translation of ¨Leaving on a Jet Plane¨ which Robert and Joseph (an Irish volunteer) had taught them the previous week they could all still remember the chorus perfectly and sung along really loudly. Participating in the grade six classes at local schools was an experience. They are huge with up to forty screaming kids and a teacher who seems to be indifferent. Just like at home, there were the boys with gelled hair and too-cool-for-school attitudes slumped in their chairs in the back row. We conducted a quiz with English-Spanish translations and some basic general knowledge, and cheating was rife. Kids pulled out their exercise books, ran across the room to check other teams´answers and changed the marks we had written on the page. One cunning strategy when we asked them ¨Name three countries that speak English¨ they would call me over casually (they beckon with the back of their hand, which just looks stupid to me) and ask me which country I was from. Some would fill in the gaps with the answers after being marked, then come back to claim the marks. I noticed they spelled English words weirdly such as thankyou as ¨zengui¨. I noticed later in an English workbook that there were phonetic spellings for Spanish speakers that were more troublesome than useful, teaching them to speak in blatantly strong accents and not encouraging them to pronounce words the correct way, or at least the United States way. When Robert said his final farewells to some of the classes, they swamped him with hugs and kisses. Walking through the schoolyard with our guitars and with a trail of kids, we felt like rock stars. Admittedly I was sick of it all after teaching the same class eight times in a week- I don´t know how real teachers do it!

Something which I didn´t like about these schools was that there are kind of prefects in these grade six classes, but with more authority, a military style sash and a little baton which they bang on the tables of fellow classmates who are not doing their work. I was appalled that kids of such a young age are given authority like this over their peers and they go around, not doing any work themselves, just ordering their classmates around. One boy in particular was clearly corrupted by his power and had become a dictator of sorts, really treating the other students as dirt. Having said that, we did teach at one class where these mini-prefects were the class clowns and just hit each other on the head with their sticks, and this class was absolute mayhem and wouldn´t pay attention to us.

More about Peruvian traffic (see last blog). There don´t seem to be a lot of enforceable road rules, but as a result of this drivers are perhaps more alert and don´t take for granted that someone will give way to them. In this ´´organised chaos´´ an Australian driver would surely get hit within minutes (just as a Peruvian driver would cause an accident in Melbourne almost immediately) but they seem to understand each others´impatience, desire to sneak through and disregard for politeness and things seem to work OK. It seems to me that Trujillo has the loudest traffic of anywhere in Peru. I can´t walk or stand on a pavement without being honked at by every taxi, bus and colectivo (fixed route taxi) that passes, trying to attract a fare. They don´t seem to get it that when you aren´t looking at the street you are generally not looking for a ride. A lot of the horns are novelty horns and even police sirens, so it ends up being incredibly noisy. A Peruvian driver in Australia would probably not get out of the way of a police car or ambulance: they would just assume the sound was coming from an impatient taxi.

My travels on weekends (that invariably were stretched to long weekends) continued and I was lucky to witness some of the brilliance north of Trujillo. To celebrate the end of my first month at SKIP, I went for a five day trip to southern Ecuador. After lingering for a couple of hours in the hostile, dusty, mosquito ridden and peculiarly camp border city of Tumbes, I made my way to Guayaquil, Ecuador's biggest city, a pleasant modern but T-shirt-drenchingly humid place where iguanas roam leafy city parks by the dozen and commericalism rules the busy streets. The busy La Bahia market sells everything, and there are even guys who walk around the market with a small dog under each arm trying to flog them to passers by. I then visited a smaller and quieter mountain city Cuenca, full of markets with roasted pigs (the entire pig, head and all- they just cut bits out of the side as people ordered pork). It was a bit anti-tourist with tour agencies and museums closed Saturday afternoons and Sundays, which was the entire time I was there unfortunately, so I spent my time walking by the rushing river, watched people do their thing in a city plaza. Kids drank from the fountain (they don't have the same fear of tap water as we tourists do, and their stomachs are probably used to it too), a Latin crooner sang from a stage to a very small crowd, and little boys tried to sell lollies. I notice there are a lot of children working here, and it is so sad to see that these tiny guys are presumably forced to go and sell stuff and shine shoes to make extra money for themselves or their families. No child should be deprived their childhood and have to go and work so young. The look on their face as they offer you lollies for a couple of cents is tragic and ridden with desperation.

I struggled with buses the whole way there and back. I couldn't sleep on the night buses because I couldn't get my optimum sleep angle in a chair. Once in Ecuador, the buses let on dozens of food sellers relentlessly peddling their wares - it was an exhausting affair and it became more so as some decided that before they walked down the aisle with their basket of biscuits, Coke bottle and plastic cups, or stack of illegal DVDs they would stand at the front and give a description of all sorts of things. I couldn't understand their fast Spanish, and in this case I was glad because I was just trying to find some peace and quiet. A lot of the buses are badly designed so that some passengers have control of two windows and others have control of none and have to deal with the stuffiness and can enjoy air only when the other passengers feel so inclined, and inevitably they never do. On top of this, some buses had windows on the right that opened but not on the left, and no air con to make up for this. When I had had enough of Ecuadorian buses, we stopped at the Ecuadorian immigration post and the driver told us to get out. I knew that these buses often drove off and dropped off passengers at the border town who didn't want to cross into Peru but presumably just linger at the dirty border town, so I asked the conductor if the bus would wait for us first. He said yes, so I left my overnight bag and my jacket in the overhead rack, and went down to get my passport stamped, at which point the bus drove off. Knowing the dodginess of border towns and the fact that this crossing is notorious for being the worst in South America, I feared losing my stuff and I did, returning to the bus half an hour later to see an empty space where they had sat. The conductor was unsympathetic and wouldn't take the blame and I knew there was nothing I could do but try my best to get over my loss, which I fortunately have now. I didn't lose my items of utmost importance, but I lost my diary of the previous month, lots of awesome Ecuador souvenirs and more than half of my clothes, which was frustrating. I let my guard down a bit after having nothing stolen for three and a half months (except for a bottle of hand sanitiser on the Inca Trail) and I guess I felt safer and more trusting of the others on the bus.

My final trip from Trujillo as a base was to the remote mountain city of Chachapoyas, located in an area passed by far fewer tourists than the south of Peru, but offering an exciting set of sights nonetheless. Again buses frustrated me: the 12 hour bus stopped regularly for no particular reason and once for half an hour, letting on a whole school group who were loud and faffed around with their bags for ages. A girl sat next to me with about eight bags, so it was a mission climbing over them all to get to the bathroom, which was predictably below-par. Once I got to the peaceful mountain city things were better, though. I took a tour bus down a bumpy road to the mountain citadel of Kuélap, located on the top of a mountain with beautiful valley views, with huge stone walls and overgrown with jungly vegetation, giving it an awesome 'lost-city' vibe. It felt wild and undiscovered: as many foreigners visit Kuélap in a year as visit Machu Picchu in two days in high season. I also visited the dead-quiet mountain town of Huancas, parked by a spectacular canyon where a caught a glimpse of a brilliant rainbow just to put the icing on the cake.

It was nice to spend time with the kids who come to the SKIP office in the afternoon to do their homework. One boy who does remedial classes at the office calls me ¨Profesor Christopher¨ (my middle name) or ¨Yawul¨, not being able to pronounce my name. He comments every day that I am wearing a different pair of glasses, but I assure him they are the same. On my final day at the office the kids were especially nice, drawing up cards for me thanking me for my time, even though I didn´t actually work much with them. It was such a pleasant surprise and nice gift to end my time at SKIP, and I will treasure those cards. On top of that, Doña Vicky, the lady who cooks lunch for the volunteers each day, remembered what I had told her my favourite dish was, and cooked it for me as another gift for my final day.

My time at SKIP was certainly memorable and an experience I will never forget. I made great friends there and enjoyed living and getting to know a foreign country and trying to speak its language. When I settle back into my course with double majors of Economics and Spanish I certainly won´t look at it as a wasted semester academically, as I have learned so much in a real world sense. Now I have just a handful of days before I leave South America and return to home, which I am really looking forward to. I´m currently in the mountain city of Huaraz, then I leave Peru from Lima and visit a couple of cities in Chile and Argentina before flying out on June 30 and (somehow not existing anywhere on July 1) coming home on July 2. I´m looking forward to a mug of fresh full cream milk, to a pie at Paul´s and to catching up with the people I love.

Getting to know Peru (and its monotone mandarin men).

2008-05-28T00:05:00.001+10:00

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=25411&l=c4496&id=629670868

As April rolled to a close, I prepared to begin a new chapter of my trip, the longest one: one which I had expected to be the most valuable to me in the long term and the one which would give me the most insights and teach me the most lessons. After two and a half months of traveling continuously, spending no more than 7 nights in any city, I was to spend seven weeks in Trujillo, Peru participating in a volunteer program with Supporting Kids in Peru (http://www.skipperu.org/)

Leaving exciting Lima behind, I took a day bus up through the unspectacular Peruvian northern desert towards my new home. On the way the bus provided a game of bingo, the prize for winning which was a return ticket. I didn´t win.

SKIP works in an outer district of Trujillo called El Porvenir, a desert settlement surrounded by rugged mountains that you can rarely see as it is mostly overcast. My first walk through it, and its newer adjoining area Alto Trujillo, took me a bit by surprise. I knew, by definition of the job, that this was a poor area, but I don´t think I had been ready to experience it up close. The area has different grades of poverty, one could say. The area where the SKIP office (that has asbestos roofing!) is has asphalt roads (mostly) and electricity and water sometimes. Further up the hill it is just sand with no proper streets and adobe houses. Once you get to the edge of the city it is a very basic slum where the houses are reed constructions with some walls made of cardboard or rice bags. They are essentially huts in the sand with no electricity or running water. 150,000 people live in this area but SKIP, a small organisation, works with just 157 families right now. There is enormous need here. People come to settle here in the desert outskirts of Peru´s third largest city, moving from the jungle or mountains for opportunities. I personally wouldn´t choose to move here- the conditions prohibit growing crops or raising livestock, but perhaps these people have little choice and just need to go to the city.

As part of the economic development job and other little things I have visited a number of the homes in Alto Trujillo. While these ones have electricity (and the wires above are strung together very dangerously) and proper brick walls, the floor is just dirt, the walls are crumbling on the inside, flies are everywhere and many of them smell quite awful. The team is currently working on a new initiative to replace the very unhealthy smoky stoves with no form of ventilation with a new, easy to build, cheap stove that is more energy efficient and also gets rid of smoke with a chimney. It has been hard in the past to convince the families that this is both healthier and more efficient than the basic fire-under-a-brick stoves they are using, but we are hoping people will be interested in them this time around.

I´ve been told stories by the other volunteers of the extremity of the situation for some: there are juvenile delinquents around who will slit a throat for AUD$0.40, there are people who rummage through and sell medical waste, there are people who earn less in 3 days than what I earn in an hour. The SKIP vest is considered a symbol of immunity that protects otherwise vulnerable rich foreigners in a rough neighbourhood- people know SKIP volunteers are working for good in the community. It is unsafe to bring my camera out to capture what it is like out here, and I face another dilemma. If I take it out while wearing my SKIP vest, I am safe for the minute but it reveals to the community that people wearing these vests have valuable items on them, endangering my colleagues and future SKIP people. If I take off my vest to take the photos, I am not as safe myself. So my camera stays inside the bag now.

El Porvenir has its character like all of the places I´ve visited, but it is linked to its poverty and defined by it, which makes it a character that I hope will not last forever, unlike the character of other places that sit on more firm economic ground. Men with tired looks on their faces push wheeled fruit carts around the streets with a megaphone listing the fruits available in a monotone. ¨Mandarina, mandarina, mandarina...¨ is the familiar voice of a desperate but exhausted city struggling to get by day by day. El Porvenir is defined by its desert - after doing visits I empty my socks of sand. The SKIP office has a sand-pit for the kids, but it is in fact just a non-concreted area. Stray dogs bark viciously (some of them look diseased) and some parade around on the flat roofs of homes and shops. Mothers with smoke-dirtied faces nurse their small children while men carry big bundle of branches on their backs as they walk through the sand. As is the custom, the kids rush up and kiss me on the cheek when they see me and shake my hand (although I´m a bit concerned of the hygiene of that) and they seem to be quite excited about life despite their poverty. Maybe it´s because they don´t know any other life.

My official role has been as a volunteer in SKIP´s economic development program, but I have done a range of odd jobs in between, getting to experience more of how a small-time NGO operates in a country like Peru. I´ve been asked to take English workshops with a minute´s notice, teaching the basics to a small bunch of primary school kids who are enthusiastic one minute and are running out of the classroom the next, possibly returning twenty minutes later. I decided one day to go through the numbers from 11 to 20 in detail because one of them kept calling nineteen ¨noventeen¨ and one invariably skipped fifteen when counting as quickly as possible to show off. I also led in broken Spanish a class about Australia and its differences to Peru. I ended up not only telling the kids about my country but theirs too. From poor families, they don´t have the chance to see other parts of their country and they were surprised when I told them there are people in Peru who speak Quechua instead of Spanish. Trujillo is just half an hour from a nice beach, but most of these kids have never seen the sea- the cost is prohibitive. (SKIP operates surfing classes now for some of the older kids who now can see the sea and experience it in a wild and wacky way I doubt they could have imagined before.)

I´ve done plenty of odd jobs. I´ve blown up dozens of Mother´s Day balloons in the shape of lovehearts; I taught a girl an A chord on the guitar but she ran off when I told her there were more chords she could learn; I´ve barred kids from entering unauthorised areas at the subsequent Mother´s Day celebration we organised for the seldom-honoured mothers of El Porvenir. I´ve played with and supervised kids, and helped at the homework club SKIP runs, helping kids with English, maths and (inexplicably!) Spanish, then tried to regulate use of the see-saw when kids were arguing about whose turn it was, but it didn´t work, so I let it return to anarchy. A foreigner like me with little language skill has very limited ability to control a pack of Peruvian kids. I´ve also been a bodyguard effectively, accompanying other volunteers to meetings I couldn´t understand and had no role in, just because it is unsafe for one volunteer to walk the streets alone. I´ve helped to translate things from English to Spanish for the newsletter and presentations, but I never received the verdict of how accurate they were, as someone with very limited Spanish skills and only one year of grammar lessons. I´ve done some menial office work, which I´m happy to do because it means I am helping in a practical way, even though it´s not glamorous hands on work. Volunteering isn´t really glamorous like the pictures in the brochures. If you want to be useful, chances are you´ll be sitting at a desk somewhere.

SKIP´s economic development program is quite an exciting endeavour, and is small even for a micro-credit program, which by definition is by small to start with. Microfinance is an increasingly popular method of helping the poor to climb out of poverty in a sustainable way, and it is valuable as an economics student to see it up close and watch how it works on a local level. Families come to us for small loans (from $40 to $120AUD- loans too small for a regular bank to bother with) to help them start or expand small businesses selling things in the community. They then pay back in installments to SKIP at a mutually agreed frequency, with no interest but a small fee. Part of the job involves interviewing the clients who wish to obtain a loan (my usefulness here is limited as my Spanish is) and then chasing up the loans and visiting the families in their homes, establishing a friendly working relationship. In a way we´re a bit like friendly debt collectors who try to work out why someone hasn´t paid or is avoiding us, but in reality there´s nothing we will do if they can´t or won´t pay us back: we are an NGO, not a bank. But we keep visiting the people whose debts are essentially written off as bad, because if we stop they will tell their friends that SKIP gives out free money and others will stop repaying.

There are some interesting loan cases in this community. One lady has trouble selling because there are about ten cooks at the market who sell the same food. One lady was denied a loan to start a milkbar from her house because there were six milkbars in her street already. Some of them need business guidance to set up something that will work. This lady finally decided she wanted to sell a special type of soup in the market, and we arranged a volunteer taste test to assess whether she could show us she was reliable and loan-worthy. But when we rocked up to her home she was nowhere to be seen and to date she hasn´t come back to the office. Unlike a more official financial institution SKIP tries its best to give loans out but we won´t do so until we have a certain level of confidence in a person.

Lacking the Spanish ability to do this job without help, I am trying to help the program in other ways. They are planning to begin training courses and classes for our micro-entrepreneurs to better equip them for business, so I am currently spending some time researching how other similar organisations have conducted such courses and what sort of curriculum we can deliver. I will be gone by the time the classes begin, but volunteers here are like building blocks, working on what the previous volunteers have left to achieve a greater goal. Some business owners here operate at a loss because they don´t separate their home money from their business money or don´t keep records, not knowing how much they are making.

It has been a tough language experience for me. I go to a number of the SKIP meetings which are all conducted in Spanish and, while I am slowly picking up more each time, it is really difficult for me to follow proceedings. I am not bad at understanding the people I know when they speak Spanish to me but I have no chance at understanding the speedy, blurry language that the families in El Porvenir speak. It helps that most of the volunteers at the office are Peruvian university students who speak only Spanish to me, and slow down to my pace. I have gained a lot of experience in conversational speaking, but my ability to understand people talking around me is still weak. Sometimes it feels like the blur is slowly becoming a language; other times it feels hopeless as I sit there understanding almost nothing of an exchange.

Living in the SKIP house in Trujillo has been a new experience, like everything else here. We don´t live in El Porvenir but close to the Trujillo centre in a nicer area. I have nine housemates, mostly in their twenties, from the USA, UK, France and Peru. It is rare to see them all at once, because people are all doing different work, coming and going at different times. It´s not like on the Budget tour where the whole group eats dinner together at 7.30 each night: there is a chance I will see some housemates for just two minutes a day, and some not at all. The water system is a little dodgy and water has to be pumped up with a very loud machine at least once a day. It normally turns on automatically, inevitably when I am trying to hear someone talk. They call Trujillo the city of eternal spring but it´s not like that right now - the sun doesn´t shine all that much and it is mostly overcast, but the temperature is nice T-shirt weather for most of the day. It gets cold at about 6, and occasionally very cold.

Transport in Trujillo is exciting and a lot of fun. To get around we often squeeze as many volunteers as possible into a taxi, with up to two in the front passenger seat, five in the back and up to three in the boot (of a station wagon). The drivers don´t raise an eyebrow when they see a pack of people this size hailing a taxi- it´s commonplace here. The common sketch of numerous clowns piling out of a tiny car simply wouldn´t be funny to the people here- it is real life. Emergency police pull up taxis regularly (they are not even traffic police, this is not their job!) on minor offences to get bribe money. When a taxi driver gets pulled up, the first thing he reaches for is his change tray. Funnily, the police officer won´t glance twice at the nine people piled precariously into the car - he doesn´t care about our safety, he´s just out for a quick buck. The other fun way to travel is in a combi minivan, which doesn´t leave the terminal until it is full, so it is sometimes a bit of a wait. I marvelled at these earlier in Bolivia but now I ride in them, cramped up with my head against the ceiling, with a lady taking all her various goods to the market on one side, some kind of crops on the floor, Latin music blaring from the radio and the conductor yelling the stops out the side, then sprinting to checkpoints to deposit a record of the time of arrival in a box before sprinting through a crazy intersection to jump back onto the bus just in time. Various food sellers board the bus, push their wares, then are let off down the road (this happens on the big long distance buses too!) This is South America at its most vivid. A woman lost her mobile phone on the bus and started accusing the other passengers of stealing it, pushing and shaking some of them. I was glad she didn´t touch me: maybe it was because as the innocent-looking tourist I couldn´t possibly have had the know-how of how to pickpocket a Peruvian in her own country.

The streets are mad here- most roads have no lane markings so they are sometimes one lane, sometimes two and sometimes three. I don´t think drivers pay much attention to indicators, being impatient, but I think people realised at some point that some kind of signalling system is needed, so most drivers stick their hand out the window in a ¨I´m coming through!¨ sort of way when they want to change lanes, which has effectively replaced the indicator. So it would just make sense for drivers to all use their indicators and pay attention to those of others, but this is Peru and things work in a roundabout sort of way.

Food here is not bad, and generally good value. I enjoy going to the restaurant next door to the house called ´Como en Casa´ which translates to ´Just like home´ and it is, with generous servings of rice, beans, salad and a bit of meat and a glass of juice for 4 soles, which is $1.60. It´s far cheaper to eat at one of these set menu restuarants than to cook for one person, buying supplies at the local supermarket. If I bought in bulk from the street market, maybe not, but why cook when dinner is that cheap and is on the table 3 minutes (yes, I timed it) after you order? The other volunteers don´t like it so much due to its lack of variety so I have experienced a few other places with them. There is a restaurant with great salad and chips but the meat is always a gamble as about half of the dishes are mostly bone and the other half have good meat. I got the bone. I tried an alternative cheap dinner one day and found myself staring at a chicken´s foot in my soup, which put me off quite a bit. I took my glasses off so I didn´t have to look at the foot as I ate but as I drank more soup the foot was more and more uncovered. James, another volunteer, recommended a place for its great fruit salad, but it turned out he had never tried it but had just seen it in the window and it was basically an insane concoction of as many fruits as possible that didn´t complement each other, almost as if the owner was competing against another restaurant´s fruit salad by just proving he could make one with more fruit. I spent half an hour trying to open a packet of ham from the supermarket marked ¨easy open¨ which was clearly not easy.

I haven´t just been sticking to the house and office though; I´ve taken advantage of my good position on Peru´s northern coast to see some of the sites that most tourists that visit Peru don´t make it to. Trujillo almost rivals Cusco in terms of the number of archeological sites that surround it, and although they can´t match Machu Picchu, they have been somewhat impressive. The Huaca de la Luna is a desert pyramid being excavated and it has numerous coloured friezes on its walls depicting a ferocious decapitating god that takes the shape of various animals. With Robert, another volunteer, I visited the peculiar Museo Cassinelli, which looks more like a museum storeroom than a museum, in a small dank room under a gas station, housing a surprisingly impressive collection of ancient Peruvian artifacts squeezed in side by side.

With the other volunteers I climbed Cerro Cabras, the imposing mountain that stands over Alto Trujillo. It was not marked out with a clear path and the latter stages involved both hands and feet in a rough upwards scramble that made the Inca Trail look like a piece of cake. Half an hour from Trujillo in the other direction is the touristy beach of Huanchaco, which features fishermen who travel in unique reed boats, the same type that has been used for thousands of years. It is nice just to walk down the beach and look at the boats drying in the sand and the fishermen emptying their nets of fish as the surfers attempt to ride the apparently good waves in the background.

I went to Cajamarca, a pleasant Andean city that brought me nice flashbacks to Cusco. It was great as the scenery on the bus changed from the drab desert to the lush green mountains and valleys that I had missed since settling in Trujillo. I finally tried the Peruvian specialty cuy (guinea pig) after a month in the country, and it didn´t really impress me with its tough skin and taste not far from chicken. An old lady poked me in the neck with her stick when I was in an Internet cafe, asking for money, which I thought was inappropriate behaviour even for a desperate beggar. (Living here I´ve been thinking about my beggar policy- is my behaviour of ignoring them consistent with my wider goal of working in poverty alleviation? How can I justify not giving a coin to an old lady who clearly can´t work and has probably been left behind by her society?)

My most recent trip was to Chiclayo, a bustling city with a witches market (but you can´t stop to look or you get accosted by the eager sellers trying to sell their weird herbal concoctions) and a musuem that is of a European standard rather than a Latin American standard. I got a colectivo (shared fixed route taxi) to the musuem in Lambayeque and I felt sorry for the colectivo tout who spent all day outside the dingy garage yelling ¨Lambayeque!¨"to passers by, trying to fill the cars. Words always sound weird when you say them too much; I wonder how weird Lambayeque must sound after you´ve been yelling it for eight hours.

I have under a month left here now, and I can´t wait to go home. Before I leave Trujillo I am taking trips to Ecuador and to Chachapoyas, then finishing in late June with a whirlwind ten day trip that will take me via the mountains near Huaraz back to Lima, then to Chile and Argentina for a rushed four days before I return to Melbourne on July 2. I expect I will learn a lot more in my remaining few weeks here, and I am looking forward to the traveling that will break it up.

Thanks if you managed to read this whole blog; I´m pretty sure it´s my longest yet. I really appreciate the feedback I´ve been getting about the blogs from those of you who are interested in them; it means I am more excited about writing them!

Packaged Peru - Now with Inca Cola and Papas Fritas

2008-04-30T11:52:00.002+10:00

Photos part 1 http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=24075&l=b99e5&id=629670868
Part 2 http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=25411&l=c6eb0&id=629670868

If you break down my itinerary, the second most time spent in a country is Germany with 10 nights. The first is Peru with about 75. And what a place to spend a bulk of a trip! It offers amazing mountains, a rugged and beautiful coast, centuries of history of civilization after civilization and all sorts of other stuff I'll enthusiastically outline below. I continued my Budget Expeditions trip from La Paz, Bolivia, finishing in Peru's bustling capital, Lima. A month ago I flew from Lima (where I was in transit) to La Paz in under two hours. It took me a month to get back to Lima by road, with some of the most amazing stops along the way.

In some ways Peru is quite similar to Bolivia. The traditional dress that many of the women on the street wear is very similar, the handicrafts in the shops and the food in the restaurants are essentially the same (but way more expensive) and the scenery still consists of stunning mountain ranges. Unlike Bolivia I am staying in Peru for a reasonable amount of time - two and a half months. This is where I will volunteer in economic development and I am happy to say that this seems to be a beautiful country to be a part of for a longer stay.

The first stop on our tour through Peru was enough to sweep me right off my feet straight away. We visited a series of islands on the huge high altitude Lake Titicaca that were like other worlds, separated by that body of water from the mainland and modern society. The Uros islands are fascinating man made creations of reed that need to be regularly replenished otherwise they will rot away. Tiny villages exist with little ducks running around, women in traditional dress who speak little or no Spanish (they speak the indigenous language Aymara- it is weird to be on a holiday where Spanish learning is a main goal and to be told I can´t speak it here). Everything is made of reed - the houses, the boats (which are incredibly slow), the island itself.

We then ventured further into the lake to visit Amantaní Island, which was less primitive but still very basic. Women harvest the crops by hand and carry them around in massive bags on their backs; we ate rice and potatoes at a low table over a dusty floor in a small hut with a fire with which our local host prepared our food (and ate a bigger serving herself than mine and my friend´s combined. We were too nice to ask for more, but Ian complained about it for the next three weeks). We played soccer at 4000m above sea level and I was totally exhausted within five seconds of beginning to run. Of course the locals had no trouble at all with their massive Andean lungs. We dressed up in ponchos and went to a traditional dance night, but both the music and the dancing were quite repetitive. The musicians played the same songs over and over again, and the dancing was mind-numbingly boring with a pattern of left arm forward, right arm forward, etc etc. With no light pollution, the night sky was stunningly clear and the stars shone brightly and I found myself looking at it for quite some time, captured by its brilliance.

Visiting Amantaní makes me reconsider how international economic development must work. The people live simple lives and are poor, but to bring them Western industrial development would ruin the uniqueness and authenticity of their culture. I am also very doubtful that the residents desire a busy city-style life - what development needs to achieve is improvement of the living standards of the poor while not infringing on their way of life.

After Lake Titicaca we arrived in Cusco, the capital of the famous Incan empire. Cusco´s buildings are particularly interesting because the colonial buildings are built upon the foundations of the Incan temples the Spanish conquistadors razed when invading the city. Incan brickwork is fascinating because no mortar was used, just perfectly cut stones that fit together, although often in jagged and uneven blocks. Cusco´s star attraction is one such stone with 12 edges (it´s so famous it is carved into each Cusqueña beer bottle). Cusco is a real tourist place, being located so close to Machu Picchu and being quite interesting in its own right. Tourists get hassled for massages, to buy paintings, handicrafts and to go on tours at every street corner.

From Cusco we visited the Sacred Valley, full of impressive archeological sites including the imposing fortress at Ollantaytambo, a small town in the most stunning of locations, amongst impressive mountains, some of which have rocks that resemble faces. (Seeing things in cliffs was a favourite hobby of the Incas but often you have to stretch your imagination to see them). After that we began the Inca Trail, a four day hike that culminated at the well known lost city of Machu Picchu.

The Inca Trail is a real luxury trek in nearly every way. Trekkers just carry a normal daypack while local porters carry 25kg loads and easily make it to each camp well before us so that all the tents are up and the food (which is phenomenal) is prepared before we roll in. One feels ashamed when the porters give us a round of applause after each day of trekking - we do very little; it is the porters who deserve a standing ovation at every moment. Their work ethic and character should be an example to us all. They are humble, shy but friendly and helpful at all hours of the long day, going beyond the call of reasonable duty with hot drinks first thing in the morning even before we have left our tent, waiting with paper towels to dry our hands before meals, and a friendly smile when you would think they would have no energy for one. They do their job without a fuss while we complain about the steepness of a hill or the smell of the toilets - we can all learn something from the way they operate. It was nice to have a greeting and farewell (with song) ceremony for the porters - the acknowledgement of them as real people rather than poor local labourers is really refreshing.

The walk itself was the most amazing experience of my trip so far. Mountain ranges, valleys, waterfalls, rainforests, swamp lands and rivers make for brilliant scenery the whole way. It´s the kind of scenery a photo can´t do justice to. Only standing there in the valley and looking around in awe can allow you to fully capture its beauty. When we reached the 4200m Dead Woman´s Pass the feeling was so exhilarating and as if we were on top of the world, having conquered the steepest incline of the walk. For me it was the two hour descent in the rain that followed that was the hardest part of the walk. My knees and stomach cried out for me to stop, but there was a camp to reach and another porter prepared lunch waiting for me.

The archeological sites along the way are like a series of appetisers and soups before the main course of Machu Picchu. Many of the ruins were quite impressive mini cities in amazing locations, quite well preserved in parts. The final day was exciting - waking at 4, we waited eagerly for the checkpoint to open before walking quickly towards the Sun Gate where we would get our first view of the city. The pace was frantic knowing we had walked for three days and we were just minutes away. The sense of achievement when we climbed the last set of steps to finally see it was fabulous and unforgettable.

The city itself was far more stunning than I had imagined. Its location is amazing - perched on a mountain in a brilliant valley. Llamas grazed in the open area in the middle of the city surrounded by ancient city walls and watchtowers. The sun shone bright - too bright, in fact. It was a scorcher, and a beautiful day to take photos of this ancient treasure.

After a few days rest in Cusco we went to Arequipa, Peru´s second biggest city. It´s most famous attraction is the huge mini-town of the Santa Catalina Convent separated by its imposing walls from the outside world. We were lucky to visit this monastery, which used to separate hundreds of nuns from the world and still isolates a few, at night when it was candlelit and dripping with atmosphere. It was incredibly eerie and had a sacred yet simple feel to it. Wandering around at night when there were few tourists was an experience, checking out the destroyed stairwells that appeared to lead only to the night sky, the low doorways into humble living quarters and the neat courtyards with fruit trees.

From Arequipa we also visited Colca Canyon, which is much deeper than the Grand Canyon in the United States to see massive condors just gliding around. Apparantly you need a bit of luck to see them properly, and we were very fortunate to have it, seeing a number of the majestic birds close up and swooping right past you. A couple of days later we took our turn to be the condors, flying over the mindboggling Nazca Lines, a series of massive ancient patterns in the desert which can only be seen from the air, which prompts the questions 'How did they draw them?' and perhaps more interestingly 'Why did they draw them?'. My father told me about them when I was young so it was particularly interesting for me to check them out for myself and just be stupefied. The plane journey was especially fun because my stomach felt like jelly afterwards and I almost created some Nazca lines of my own on the floor of the aircraft.

When we had thought we had seen all Peru had to offer with its mountains, valleys, beaches, canyons, colonial cities, Incan ruins, indigenous islands and lines in the ground, we arrived at Huacachina, a small palm-tree filled oasis surrounded by mountainous sand dunes, which we scaled and descended in a rollercoaster-style with a dune buggy and then got a chance to slide down on sandboards at stunning speeds. The guide at the top was yelling for us to keep our feet in the sand to brake, while our driver yelled from the bottom for us to keep them in the air for speed. Screaming and laughing were not a good idea, resulting in a mouthful of sand. We camped that night in the middle of the dunes, far from anything, with just a toilet tent and a few Pisco sours (a local drink) to finish our trip together.

The final stop was Lima, Peru´s massive and bustling capital, twice the size of Melbourne and with traffic ten times as hectic. It came as a shock to arrive at such a modern city after weeks in quieter and less developed areas of Peru and Bolivia. Lima has skyscrapers aplenty and a cool, chic population. You don't see ladies in indigenous dress as is the norm in La Paz, Bolivia's capital; rather there are people driving new cars and acting pretty much as citizens of a big Western city. Miraflores is the affluent district here, and by the sea it boasts shopping malls and restaurants that you would mistake for being in Melbourne or Singapore. Although I haven't seen them though, I know that Lima is a city of contrasts, with a huge slum population outside of the affluent centre.

Which brings me to my next two months in Peru. I've been treated to a tourist-friendly welcome to Peru's most stunning attractions. I've enjoyed comfort with my tour group and I've been sheltered from the heart of this country, instead just taking in the amazing and beautiful sights and leaving before the realities seep under the doorways of our clean and sheltered hotel rooms. Now I am going up to Trujillo for my volunteer placement where I expect I will see quite a bit of the poverty that is an unfortunate reality and an important part of Peru's real situation.

What I've done over the last few weeks is known as the Gringo Trail - it's a tried and true tourist route and who can blame anyone who does it - it´s thrill after thrill and each one is different and unique from the previous one. Sure, I felt incredibly touristy all the way and I stuck to an organised group and ate at tourist restaurants. But the brilliance of the sites we visited was so great it outweighed the commercialism of the trail - I would have difficulty drawing a line elsewhere in the world to travel for a month by road and not be more satisfied with the range of experiences. Peru is brilliant - I highly recommend it.

Best of Bolivia

2008-04-10T06:56:00.001+10:00

Photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=22998&l=58bd6&id=629670868

When people imagine their dream holiday destinations, I doubt that Bolivia is high on many lists. Probably there are quite a few Australians who don't even know where Bolivia is. And the obscurity of it adds to its excitement. To be fair, it is still quite popular with tourists, especially the areas I have visited, and I have ironically visited it in a more touristy way than all the far more tourist-heavy places I have been so far.Bolivia is smack bang in the middle of South America and it definitely feels like I am deeply immersed into the continent in which I will spend the rest of my trip. Llamas mill around by the side of the road once you get out of the city, stunning mountains surround the ridiculously high altitude cities, markets rule the streets, minivans cough out huge clouds of black smoke as they climb steep hills, and there is a little bin in the cubicle for your toilet paper, which is rarely supplied.To complete the range of possible ways to travel, I am doing Bolivia and Peru with a tour group (Budget Expeditions) after travelling with family (Singapore), a friend (Europe) and alone (Cuba etc). I was afraid I would become a package tourist with no personality but there is plenty of freedom and choice on this trip and it's more fun to have some people to share the experience with.My first stop was Bolivia's biggest city, La Paz, which I must say is one of the most exciting and spectacular places I have been. The city is famous for being about 3500m above sea level, so it has the honour of being one of few cities that can give you a headache just from walking around. I got a bit of mild altitude sickness on my first day exploring the city and climbing up its steep roads, but after a while I managed to adjust. The city is in a massive valley (it's like a big cauldron) surrounded by spectacular mountains on every side, some snow-capped. Everywhere you stand you can see the houses perched up hillsides leading up to the peaks. I got in trouble for taking a photo near a prison and the guard wouldn't buy my story that I was simply taking a photo of the view. La Paz's citizens may just not realise how incredibly unique this city is. The city is really bustling and alive: little minivans speed around the place; they are the most popular form of public transport here. They each have two staff: a driver and a person who yells the stops out of the window to attract more customers. Some of the zebra crossings are patrolled by people in zebra suits who dance as you cross (see the photos). The police have a strong presence here: all banks are guarded by policemen with huge shotguns and I often saw big police groups at the sites of demonstrations. All week the central post office in La Paz has been closed due to a strike- it seems to be a popular way to get a message across here. A lot of the women here wear traditional dress- little bowler hats, multi coloured ponchos and carry a baby slung across the back. Shoeshine boys wear fatigues and black ski masks, possibly to cover their faces as they are ashamed of the work they are forced to do to pay for their education (this is what I read). There is a market called the Witches' Market that sells all sorts of weird things like llama foetuses, preserved toads and armadillos etc which are supposed to be for good luck in various situations.

La Paz's bloodstream seems to be in its markets that are like the veins that connect all sorts of landmarks. I know that to find my hotel from the main square all I have to do is follow the stalls. It's fun to bargain here- I feel a sense of achievement even when I knock 1 boliviano off the price (about 15 cents) of a bottle of water (and one has to buy a lot of bottled water here: not only because of the altitude but the tap water is not to be trusted). I'm starting to get good at it, walking out when they don't give me something for AUD$0.50 rather than $1 that you would pay $15 for back home and then being called back. Now I've got far too much stuff and have to send it home, including a noughts and crosses game but with little condors and llamas.La Paz is a really cheap place to do everything- your dollar goes a very long way here. With the Budget group I've been eating at nice restaurants every night for under $4-5 AUD including drinks. If you want something cheaper, the chicken places on every corner will give you a complete meal for about $1.50 although they seem a little more suspect in terms of hygeine. So far llama has been my favourite food here (yes, they eat it) and rice is a big fixture here which is good because I grew up on it.The second place we visited was the spectacularly surreal Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world. It is an expanse of white that just seems to go on forever and up against the clear blue sky and distant mountains makes a great place for photos, particularly perspective ones eg people standing on other peoples' shoulders etc. (see photos) In the middle of the Salar (ie the middle of nowhere) there is an island covered with cacti and other weird stuff and just seems to be the most peculiar little place I've ever seen. In Uyuni we also visited the 'Extreme Fun Pub' (the name was too good to resist) which is famous for its trick glasses with holes in the sides and its floor made of sand. The roads in this part of the world leave a little to be desired- I was regretting eating a big breakfast when we started bumping along through the mountains: the view was spectacular but the actual journey is not very pleasant (reminds me of Italian trains- see blog 3 if you can be bothered). We also visited the old mine city of Potosi, where millions of workers died from the terrible conditions in the silver mines and many still do. We did the tour with another much bigger Budget group and I have never felt so touristy, wearing a bright yellow suit and parading through the streets buying from the markets what we were told to buy by the guides (supposedly gifts for the miners but the guide took his fair share of cigarettes from the tourists to smoke himself) so that the miners treated us like big dumb yellow freebie machines. It was admittedly fun to crawl around and slide through the mud to get through. At the end we saw a live dynamite exhibition which still made us jump even though we knew exactly what to expect when it went off.

I´ve really enjoyed my week and a half in Bolivia. It truly should be high on people's ideal vacation lists- stunning scenery everywhere, exciting culture, amazing natural wonders, nice cheap food and the added bonus of getting sick just by arriving here. It's a treat for the eyes, and it's got plenty of lookouts just to admire the uniqueness of this place.

It´s not long before I finish here and then cross into Peru for two and a half months. I'll still be sightseeing with this bunch for the rest of April (to see famous places like Machu Picchu and the Nazca lines) before settling down in northern Peru for my volunteer placement. I still haven't reached halfway into my trip, which sometimes feels tiring and at other times pleases me that I've still got so much to see and do. The world is great.

¡Oh, Havana!

2008-03-30T11:05:00.001+11:00

Photos at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=22725&l=18a35&id=629670868

Cuba, Costa Rica

In Monty Python they always used to say "And now for something completely different" and then follow through on that promise. My trip is like a big Monty Python movie where John Cleese is sitting behind every customs gate, around every corner, floating down every city waterway. Nowhere has this been more true than when I walked out of my front door in Old Havana to greet the morning city street the day after I flew in from Madrid. I arrived at night (complete with taxi driver jumping out of the car, pulling off the windscreen wiper on his side, replacing it with the one from the other side and continuing in the rain) and couldn´t see much of Cuba's charm as I arrived at my casa particular (bed and breakfast lodging).

The tableau that greeted me as I stepped out struck me and confirmed my hopes that Cuba was going to be an amazingly different place. On paper it probably doesn't sound particularly stunning, but to me it was opening a door on a different, distant world where time seems to move slower and many of the Western world's regularities are absent. It was colorful. Banana-selling old men sat patiently on the sidewalk as women walked with their children with no shoes down the road. 1950s American cars chugged past (due to the US embargo there are still many classic cars on the streets here that would only be found in a museum in other countries), shirtless old men stood on their balconies and just surveyed the morning scene (but not with the same excitement as me), people sat in the back of two seat bicycle taxis going so slowly you could walk faster. Cuba was alive but, as I was to discover, alive in a very different way to Australia and the West. I joined a game of bottle cap baseball on the street with a group of enthusiastic little kids who were happy for me to join in. I wanted to buy them a ball but, like many things, it was impossible for me to find in the sparse shops. They were excited about playing nonetheless.

Old school fortresses and lighthouses overlook the city's bay, and the city is guarded from the sea by the Malecon, a long concrete wall that seems to stretch on forever. There is a big Revolution Museum which is just a big Fidel Castro ego trip- it contains artefacts like the sewing machine that one of his comrades' mums used to tailor Fidel's shirt. I visited the city museum where an over-enthusiastic guide proceeded to try and hold my hand and tell me which paintings she liked and which ones she didn't. The Plaza de la Revolucion is a massive square with a very socialist feel to it - grey, empty, lacking in colour. There is a massive mural of Che (the one you see on all the T-shirts, although no Cubans wear Che shirts) on a government building and a wide open square which gets packed when the president makes his mass-inspiring speeches.

Cuba is packed with tourists, particularly Havana and Trinidad. It makes you feel you haven't really discovered something so special after all, as it is an increasingly popular traveller's destination. The music houses are packed out with them, which makes you feel less like you are listening in on real Cuban music (which is of course one of the main attractions of this country) and more like another Package Experience drone. The music in these places was really great and nice to enjoy alongside a cheap Cuban meal, but it lacked authenticity. There were locals who came off the street just to dance though, including old men and women moving in ways I didn't know old men and women could. My best music experience came when I was wandering around in Trinidad and found myself in a smaller square where a band was practicing for a festival. They were really good, and between songs the maraca player came and introduced himself to me, the only spectator, and invited me to come and sit in their little circle as they played. Without a doubt they were the best band I encountered in Cuba, and I was lucky just to stumble across them by keeping my ears peeled.

Cuba doesn't have pedestrian lights; the cars move quite slowly (in the city at least) so it's no big deal. I broke the door at an internet cafe - it's not my fault they take the doorknob off when they close the door leaving you grasping at nothing like an idiot. (not all Cuban doors are like this) Cuba doesn't have McDonalds' or Coca-Cola due to the embargo. The nearest thing to fast food is a cheap place called El Rápido, but there's nothing rapid about the service. It's hot in Cuba: I got flashbacks to Singapore in the tropical heat and the mind-numbing humidity.

Cuba's economy is odd: tourists must use the convertible peso (CUC) which is about the same value as a US dollar, but locals use the local currency, the peso, which is worth one twenty-fifth of the CUC. This means a peso is valueless in real world terms, but you can buy something for $2 CUC if you're a tourist and $2 CUP if you're a Cuban. So if you can get your hands on the local currency you will have a Very Cheap Trip. I'm not sure how this economy works, and I'd like to do some research into it at some point.

Aside from the big city Havana I visited two smaller cities - the charming tourist trap of Trinidad, and the fairly crappy Cienfuegos. Trinidad is a very quiet place save for the tourists. The inner city, surrounded my mountains, is UNESCO Heritage listed and the coloured houses are still bright and charming. I had trouble sleeping there because of some stupid rooster who cock-a-doodle-dooed from about 3am onwards outside my window. Cienfuegos was a nice place to catch a brilliantly mellow sunset by the sparkling bay (it felt perfectly Caribbean as the houses facing the bay turned yellow, then orange, then red), but aside from that there is little of interest. In all of these Cuban cities, once you stray past the heritage centre you are in a semi-slum environment and it really is very poor. Cienfuegos was notably full of Revolution propaganda praising the government, but if that´s what equality and liberty look like, count me out. In Cuba you are grateful for having eyes and ears, but not a nose. The smell of poverty is quite strong around here- stacks of rubbish on the streets, poor sewerage systems, animal waste everywhere.

On my final day I attempted an ambitious (for me) bike ride to Playas del Este, a series of beaches about 15km from Havana. I didn´t consider that I hadn't ridden a bike seriously for years (apart from the pleasant rumble through Pulau Ubin) and I had an enormous amount of trouble on the numerous uphill slopes. It didn't help that I had to be back at the hire centre by 4.30 to pick up my passport which I was forced to leave as identification. My ultimatum was: keep pedalling or miss your flight to Costa Rica! I made it but it was a scary and painful ride when you add helplessly hoping that I was going in the right direction. The beach itself was OK, but surely not worth the pain and worry.

Cuba was a good place to improve my Spanish as the casa owners I stayed with spoke very little English. The people were generally patient with me when I tried to pull together a sentence and they spoke slowly to me, not devilishly quickly as they do to each other. I was impressed with most of the white tourists I saw, all speaking Spanish too, not just walking up to places presuming people understood English. A surprising number of people do, including the touts who hang around to try to get you to go into places. There were a few people who spoke to me in Spanish without the aim of getting my money, however I had a couple of good chats with musicians on the local scene and a pleasant talk with a guy who cycled alongside me part of the way to Playas del Este. I feel I'm gaining in skill and confidence with every conversation although one weird meeting was with a security guard of a satellite station on the top of a hill that overlooked Trinidad. He showed me around and pointed out the valleys and explained stuff to me in simple Spanish and even took some photos with me with the mountains behind me. He then offered me a mango, so we sat and ate it up outside the station, but then he asked me for my watch, which was a little strange, so I said goodbye after that. It was a good mango though!

After the busy week in Cuba it was back to the real world, arriving in San Jose, Costa Rica for a quick 2 day stopover before moving on to South America. The difference between Cuba and Costa Rica was amazing. After the spartan time capsule in the Caribbean I was whisked back into the capitalist world. San Jose is very US-influenced I think. It was almost comforting to see McDonalds and Coke again - I´ve grown up with them by my side and the week in Cuba was strangely unnerving. There are lots of big ugly buildings, shops everywhere selling everything (I managed to buy an obscure camera cable I had lost) and the streets are just overflowing with people, as well as these big cow statues dressed up in weird colours everywhere. It seems a very fast, high-energy place, but that might be because I am only spending two nights here. I had lunch in one of the big markets where meals came down on a mini elevator from the floor above and the orders were yelled up by a lady with an extremely loud and shrill voice. It was a totally bustling, busy place with none of the laid back mood of Havana, where some people sit on their doorsteps all day just watching life in the street.

There´s not too much tourist-wise to do in San Jose so I caught a bus up to Volcan Poás, one of Costa Rica´s many active volcanoes. It wasn´t spurting lava (although there are some in this country which are doing so right now) but it was letting off all sorts of gases and the smell of sulphur was too overpowering after a while. I hoped to catch a look at some of Costa Rica´s famous wildlife but all I saw were a couple of little birds and one squirrel who turned and fled once some other loud walker came up the path.

My first gawp at Latin America has been envigorating. Cuba was a phenomenal experience just in how it is different to the rest of the world. Costa Rica was an example of one of Latin America´s slightly more developed countries, although admittedly I saw very little of it. Now I fly into South America where I will stay for the remainder of my trip. First I go on a 4 week camping tour in Bolivia and Peru (and I hope it is not too touristy now, I was getting the hang of doing it all myself) and then my 2 month volunteer placement in economic development in Trujillo, Peru. I expect Mr. Cleese is clearing his throat ready to say it again...

Euro Scramble Part 2

2008-03-21T06:33:00.000+11:00

Germany, Italy, France, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Spain

The second half of my European trip has been fast-moving, allowing little opportunity for reflection. I´ve powered through a host of major cities and some minor ones too and have emerged on the final evening of this sector of my trip with many observations, but I understand that I can´t be too quick to jump to any conclusion about any country or city from a 2 or 3 day trip there. The world is far too complex and multi-layered to judge a nation or its people on how one tourist-friendly city appeared in a weekend. What I can do is talk about my experiences and what I think I´ve got out of my few weeks getting a taste of Europe.

One could call it a Euro-sampler. I had a brief whiff of each city and then I was either back to home base (Freiburg, Germany) or straight onto the next one. It was exciting and didn´t allow me much time to get bored. I found that without a local to point out the secrets of a city, there was only so much I could do before I had felt I had seen everything. The big three things emphasised in tourist guides are art, architecture and history. I think if you have a genuine interest in at least one of these areas you could spend a long time as a tourist in any of these European cities. But as someone who only has a passing interest in them and gets sick of cathedral after cathedral or museum after museum quickly the surface appeal of these cities is one and a half days max. (Especially when every city has a section of its museum devoted entirely to Egyptian stuff. It seems Egypt just had too many artifacts and offloaded them to the suckers in Milan, Copenhagen, Paris, Dublin and Madrid.) Of course if you can get the inside tip on a city (eg Singapore for me) you can spend a lot longer there and get so much more out of it. Having said that there is still enormous value in short city breaks and I assure you that they are a blast.

Milan was my first stop after a day´s rest in Freiburg after the Northern Europe trip. The train trip was both the best and worst in my life. The scenery through the Swiss alps was breathtaking the entire way and almost swept me off my seat. As if the steep snow-capped mountains and deep valleys weren´t enough, the south of Switzerland and the north of Italy added little villages perched upon the mountains with little rustic roofs and very pretty lakes all around. The train itself was a bit of a dump; the toilet was a direct passage to the train tracks below, which came as a surprise in Europe. The lights just turned on and off at random so it was almost as if the Italian train company was purposely making the inside of the train bad so that we wouldn´t all die of shock from the magnificent scenery.

The people of Italy came across as passionate and more emotional than those in Germany and other countries. (take note of disclaimer at start before getting annoyed with any generalisations). I saw a guy yelling at street vendors and turning all their tables over, then looking for some other vendor to attack. (It was like Jesus throwing the money lenders´ tables in the temple over, except I didn´t know what this guy was saying because I don´t speak Italian. More on that later. Speaking of money lenders, I felt like turning some tables over myself when I saw the massive souvenir shop operating inside Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. House of God or den of thieves?) I got yelled at myself in Milan, twice in fact. The first occasion was inside the post office where I went to post some postcards and found myself in the wrong queue. When I tried to find out which queue to go into, the woman told me quite aggressively in Italian. When I didn´t understand what she was saying and tried my luck at asking in Spanish (the languages are similar in some ways) and then English she was yelling at me at the top of her voice and then refused to talk to me. About an hour later I neglected to close a door in a museum and was yelled at again, at which point I realised I didn´t know how to say sorry in Italian so I slinked off sheepishly.

I didn´t get to see Da Vinci´s The Last Supper because you have to book months in advance and this trip was planned a week before I left because I noticed I had some space in my itinerary (I did the same with Paris) and I reckon that if I had asked the guy there one more question I would have been yelled a third time. He probably spends his whole day telling stupid tourists like me that it´s sold out and only has so much patience. The view from the top of the cathedral was quite nice though. The other great thing was that I noticed a big crowd chanting so I asked in my pseudo-Italian language (Spanish + English + words of Italian badly pronounced + made up words) at newsagents until I worked out who was playing football and where. I went to the San Siro, the home of Italian football and watched Inter v Reggia from the highest seat in the house. I enjoyed my Milan trip not because it came across as a beautiful or friendly city but because it was exciting, unpredictable and spontaneous. It was also my first solo voyage.

I feared missing my Paris train altogether because of the widespread German train strikes but in the end most were called off (they heard I was travelling and didn´t want to get badmouthed in this blog) and I got there in time to sprint through the Louvre and see the big names (it was closed the next day, my only real day in Paris). I really like these European metro systems- they´re fast, regular, efficient and complete with buskers. The French metro had an accordian based band who came onto the trains to the delight of tourists and to the disgust of the locals who didn´t like their peace disturbed by this gimmick. I loved it though- in my stereotype-friendly mind there´s nothing more synonymous with France than an accordian. I stayed in Montmarte, a famous area with a brilliant city view and lots of expensive creperies. It was in Paris that I realised how much I had already spent in Europe, so I made an effort to do it cheaply. I ate my dinner from supermarkets and washed my clothes in the sink and walked all over the city rather than catching the metro. I succeeded, but my taste buds and feet weren´t happy with me. (My wallet was.) Paris came across to me as more of a city for couples than single poor travellers. Montmarte was full of energy at night and the lights of Paris were very nice, but without much money and noone to share a crepe with I went to sleep early.

I rejoined Julian in Freiburg and we got a flight to Dublin, Ireland. We were quite taken aback by how much everything costed and we could really only afford home made ham sandwiches for lunch and hamburgers and chips for dinner every day. We even started making multiple purchases at the supermarket to get more buy-one-get-one-free Big Mac shop a dockets. That´s how expensive it was. We still made an effort to visit a genuine Irish pub, and found ourselves in a little joint in Dun Laoghaire (pronounced Dun Leary, don´t ask me why) where the barman was over 80 and nearly all the customers were too. We chilled out there though, and it felt more real than the tourist pubs in the city centre, although they had traditional Irish music, which I found myself enjoying a lot.

I must say that from my very short Dublin trip it appears that it is very thin on genuine tourist attractions, even on the St Patrick´s Day weekend which was when we were there by coincidence. Lonely Planet lists the city´s number one attraction as a book in a university, so that sums it up for me anyway. The Guinness Storehouse has a city viewing point at the top, but it´s not that useful as the city doesn´t look particularly nice from above (or from street level for that matter). I enjoyed the musical pub tour we did (very touristy) and the night of Dublin improv comedy (we hung out with Finnish guys from our hostel room but we never got their names), but I think I´d need a local to show me what is really good about this city. I don´t want to write it off, but it´s charm probably lies within.

We found Belfast in Northern Ireland more interesting, mainly because of the West Belfast-Shankill area which is filled with murals sympathising with the freedom fighters/terrorists of the factions during The Troubles. The West Belfast (Catholic) area had placards with slogans like Brits Out Not Sell Out and anti English language graffiti (translated ironically into English as well as Irish). The Shankill (Protestant) area is full of Union Jacks and pro-British murals. The whole area was fascinating and reminded me of Berlin´s East Side Gallery (a part of the old wall) except that the ESG is full of peaceful murals while these ones are still somewhat hostile given they celebrate the acts of people who killed civilians. Fortunately it is stable at present, but as long as these murals remain, it can´t be said that Northern Ireland is a wholly harmonious place (my observation only, I don´t really know much about the conflict). One more thing with Belfast- I found it easier to understand people in shops in Germany, Spain and even Italy speaking their own language than the lady at the fish and chip shop in Northern Ireland speaking English.

The highlight of Ireland for me was not a big city, but a small coastal peninsula north of Dublin called Howth. Rolling hills surround the little town and its cute little harbour; lighthouses are scattered around and the cliff walks are stunning. It was another gift that while we spent rainy days in the two cities we had a brilliant clear day for walking around this very natural place. Perhaps the only thing that prevents it from being another Pulau Ubin (see blog 1) is that it is packed with tourists- it´s too nice to be kept a secret. Once someone cottons on to the fact that somewhere is nice, there is the danger of it becoming inundated.

Just when I´d almost had enough of Europe for the time being, Madrid came and warmed me up, both on the outside with its comparatively pleasant temperature and inside with the brilliant tapas and bocadillas at affordable prices. A welcome change after cold and expensive Ireland. Madrid is particularly significant on this trip for a couple of reasons: it is the start of my real solo journey (I farewelled Julian in Dublin) and it is all Spanish from here. I spend the next 3 and a half months in Spanish speaking countries. Í got the chance to work on it early by meeting Juan Pablo from Chile with whom I went to Segovia, a very nice historical city with an amazing Roman aqueduct constructed without any mortar. I spoke to him in Spanish and he spoke to me in English because it worked out easiest that way. It will take me quite some time to understand this language at a reasonable level but I am looking forward to the challenge and the fun. Madrid is a nice city without as many famous attractions except for the art galleries, most of which I avoided. It is fantastically green though and filled with GOOD city parks. The highlight is Parque del Buen Retiro, with a lake that people row around in circles just for the fun of it

Europe is a diverse place. The countries that are so close together have vastly different cultures, languages, people, and the cities have different vibes. They all seem to share something though- a common identity as Europeans while being able to maintain their priceless national and ethnic identitites. The Euro helps this, I think. You can use the same currency in an Irish pub, a French creperie, a Spanish tapas bar and a German bratwurst stand. The numberplates too. I love this continent and while I´m ready to move on to Latin America now (I fly to Cuba tomorrow) I can¨t wait to come back soon.

Euro Scramble: Part 1.

2008-03-09T08:04:00.001+11:00

Germany, Denmark, Sweden

My photo albums:
Europe: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=20885&l=1212a&id=629670868
Singapore: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=20884&l=045b6&id=629670868
Paul's Pies: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=19880&l=3d65b&id=629670868

After a big final meal with the family in Singapore, it was time for the mega flight to Frankfurt, Germany to start the second leg of my journey. I realised that it's near impossible for me to sleep on a plane; on the thirteen hour journey I managed two or three half hour blocks of sleep while wriggling around trying to emulate my normal sleeping position on the seat, which was horribly unsuccessful. However by some inexplicable stroke of good fortune I managed to almost completely give jet lag the slip and settle into German time quite easily.

Good luck has been a theme of the first leg of my Euroscramble. The very second we arrived at Copenhagen's Amalienborg Palace, the changing of the guard procession began. The very day we visited the Karstadt store in Hamburg, so did actor Ewan McGregor for a cologne publicity stunt (although I haven't seen any of his films, I couldn't help but be swept up in the excited crowd, trying to get a nice close up Ewanshot for my photo collection). Missing the turn off to Bremen on the Autobahn meant that we visited the obscure city of Brunsbüttel, surely one of the highlights of my journey so far (more on that in a minute). In Copenhagen we vowed to go into the next food outlet on the street once a storm started to chase us down, and found ourselves at a taco buffet house which was priced reasonably (especially for the amount we ate) in the city where a cheap eat is elusive. And on my last evening on Copenhagen, the choice to visit a different art gallery uptown taking a half hour detour left me on the streets in time to catch my first snowflakes falling gently onto my little Melburnian head.

I've been travelling with Julian, my former partner from our 2004 school exchange. Brunsbüttel was especially great because we picked a city at random off the map once we had missed the turnoff we wanted. We knew nothing about the place, and (as it turned out later) neither does any travel guide. It's a city on the mouth of the Elbe river, close to the North Sea. The sunset down at the mouth of the river was spectacular and made up for the long walk through the mud to get there. Once we had arrived we tried walking down past the lock where the ships pass through, but a man started yelling at us that we were trespassing and we weren't allowed in that area. He warned us of a fine, so we decided the easiest way to evade it would be to plead ignorance and pretend we didn't understand German and that we were just stupid English tourists. (Of course Julian understood everything he said but the stupid non-German speaking tourist act was only partially a lie for me.) By another stroke of luck this guy (whom we dubbed Heinz) didn't speak a word of English so he was stuck as to what he should do with us. As we gesticulated and pretended not to understand he gave up and ended up giving us directions to somewhere else, which of course we accepted without letting on we knew what he was saying, pronouncing the German word for thankyou poorly before leaving. We nearly got found out as he saw us leaving the area in a car with a German numberplate; he looked confused for a second, but we were gone.

Language comprehension has been a big theme for me so far; most of the time I have tried to speak in German and avoid English where possible. Sometimes, however, it feels like a bit of a silly game: I request something in German and struggle through a dialogue with whoever it is I'm buying something from while we both know that we both speak English and this all could be a lot easier. But every time I speak English I feel dirty; it's like it's all too hard for me and I have to retreat to tourist mode, feeling ashamed that my five years of German study have still left me in an inadequate position to understand the blurry train station announcements or some requests made to me. Between Hamburg and Copenhagen we spent two nights with one of Julian's friends in the north of the country. I sat with them as they talked and joked, able to understand what was being said only when I concentrated hard. One lapse of concentration would cause me to miss vital topic words and I would slip back into total ignorance. It was hard to offer anything to conversation even when I knew exactly what was being said; I would construct the sentence in my head, making sure the verbs were where they were supposed to be, and then I would realise the conversation had already moved onto the next topic, leaving me sitting there with a gramatically correct and possibly somewhat intelligent but now redundant comment having missed the train of thought, now waiting on the East Richmond of mind platforms for a train that would now never come. In Denmark and in Sweden (where we spent just a morning) it was completely different: we knew that everyone spoke stunning English, so we didn't bother pretending we knew their languages, we just assumed they would be happy to speak our dirty one-size-fits-all language with them. Fortunately they were and this meant we left Scandinavia still not knowing how to say please or thank you.

Hamburg was diverse. We went from the filthy (a walk down the infamous Reeperbahn at night, hassled by beggars, touts and prostitutes) to the filthy rich (a cruise past the mansions on the Alster river). We chilled out at a tiny little pub in the Portuguese district where young men played chess and the manager was a cuddly little man.

Copenhagen's most interesting district was surely Christiania, a hippy colony sitting autonomously in the middle of the city. It's a dirty, run-down mess where drugs are sold and everyone seems to be caught in the 60's, but not in the charming way that Pulau Ubin is (see first blog) but in a pathetic kids-who-never-grew-up sort of way. Unlike the welcoming Ubin, Christiania was hostile. Huge 'No Foto' signs were everywhere, dogs fought with each other while drunk men laughed at them, the people on the streets looked like they might be on drugs and possibly dangerous. It was an exciting experience, especially just a short walk from the royal palace and castles, but not the most pleasant. We finished our first night in the city at a small blues bar where an African funk-rock act belted out a few rhythm-heavy songs; it felt like we had found a little piece of the real Copenhagen, a place where the locals go to escape the cold and embrace the heartbeat of the city. The taste of Copenhagen is surely the Bøfsandwich, a fat sloppy piece of meat slammed between lightly toasted buns. It's cheap unlike most food in Copenhagen, but best of all you get to say 'Bøf' when you order it. In the end we just kept buying them because we wanted any excuse to say 'Bøf'. We noticed the Bøf doesn't seem to affect the weight of the Copenhagers; maybe it's because it's a cycle mad city. Everyone rides around and all roads have generous bike lanes. Everyone is very good looking in Copenhagen, and even more so in the tiny area of Sweden we visited.

Northern Europe is very windy; you feel like there's a block of ice permanently held up against your face. The locals don't feel it as much: Julian's friend Phillip was still able to look respectable in his light jumper when strutting into Flensburg fashion stores from the cold streets. I was the antithesis of fashion with my massive jacket on, pockets stuffed with scarf, camera and other things and wearing hiking boots. I read TOURIST all over.

Part 2 of my Euro scramble is more intense than Part 1 and involves a bit of solo travel. Right now I'm alone in Milan - a city where I've been yelled at in a post office (in Italian), seen a sculpture by Michelangelo, climbed a small metropolitan mountain and seen world class soccer just by chance. More about that later. I now scramble to Paris, Dublin, Belfast and Madrid before crossing the Atlantic. It's going to be an exciting couple of weeks.

Singapore Sunrise

2008-02-24T01:24:00.001+11:00

I'm starting a blog to record my overseas thoughts. I'll probably write once or twice a fortnight, and I expect these entries to be long. Most people won't be interested in reading all of this, and who could blame them? But for those of you who are excited about the kinds of things that interest me, I hope you enjoy reading these little summaries on what I've done, seen, observed and felt on my extravagant world trip.

Singapore sunrise.

Singapore/Malaysia. Feb 16 to 23.

Singapore has continued to surprise me even when I thought this humble island state had no more to offer in terms of diversity, natural beauty and cultural brilliance. What some perceive as a high tech fast moving business and shopping capital has far more layers once one scratches beneath its clean and tourist-friendly surface. The old-school island off its coast, Pulau Ubin, remains my favourite place on earth (the challenge I've set to the rest of the world is for some place to better it) with its old style huts surrounded by palm trees and tranquil lagoons. One can't think about the troubles of the everyday busy universe when gliding by bicycle under the canopy of tropical forest with the breeze coolly caressing the face. The old men sit at their bicycle hire stalls, patiently waiting for a customer, but apparently not fazed by anything. This idyllic paradise is a time capsule; it remains undeveloped unlike the rest of Singapore and the people move slowly. Nothing matters except for the sun and the local coconut juice; it's a place where you feel grateful to be alive.

I've had trouble sleeping. It can't be the jet lag: Melbourne is only three hours ahead of Singapore. It's more likely that I can't contain my excitement of being overseas again, this time for a while. When I talk to the young people here, they are astonished to hear that university students in Australia have the opportunity to take a semester off. They graduate from junior college after slaving away for years, only to be rewarded with two hard years in the national service, hiking long trails with loads on their back far heavier than the backpack I'm carrying around the world. My older cousins couldn't join me for dinner; they work until 9:30 each night. The youth speak Singlish at a lightning pace back and forth across the table. They order drinks in Mandarin or Hokkien and then revert to their highly tonal accent peppered with 'lah' and 'ah' at the end of each sentence. I can't help but want to talk the same way, but of course when I do, they just laugh at me.

I've been staying with my grandmother and extended family at the beautiful historical Joo Chiat Place, a street lined with terrace houses and small time kopi tiam, or coffee shops that serve you the most stunning noodles with a generous dose of chilli at any time of day for just $2.50. The locals come in every day for their breakfast and they methodically distribute the chilli through their noodles, man and wife synchronised perfectly in their movements. This is a Singapore ritual, and I feel privileged to spend my days sitting here, in an authentic corner shop, enjoying my noodles and being stunned by the street scenes they surely take for granted. Bangadeshi workers collect their breakfast, a dark drink served in a plastic bag, before heading to the construction sites where they slave away to maintain Singapore's fast paced development, transported from site to site in the backs of open-backed lorries on the expressway where indicators are seldom used and small motorbikes daringly zip in and out of traffic. The pedestrian lights tell you how many seconds you have left to cross; it's a world away from Pulau Ubin with its single street where bicycles amble through the town centre at their own pace.

The humidity blasts you as you step from the plane and from the air conditioned shopping malls. I bargained with a camera salesman for a new case, and when unsatisfied, I told him so and was immediately snubbed by him. At John 3:16 Photo Supplies in the multi storey Funan Centre filled with only IT stores it was a different story. The salesman bowed to me humbly as I told him I would buy the camera case, adding a new dimension to customer service. One shopping mall is full of Thai massage places; the ladies enquire "Massage, sir?" as I pass and I shake my head politely a dozen times before reaching the ground level. Little India's markets are different again; fruit stalls decorate the streets and Bollywood music blasts from the Indian DVD stores and I almost feel that if I were in India, it would be a bit like this. The roti prata is stunning and as I finish my plate I yearn for more, but know that I should take it easy in preparation for another humid nature walk.

Singapore is a tropical gem; who would have thought that just half an hour from the city centre we can encounter monitor lizards just a metre from us, sunning themselves lazily on the paths of the Sunggei Buloh Wetland Reserve, before spotting us and scampering down into the water. Monkeys line the street leading towards one reservoir; we don't get out of the car as they are apparently quite aggressive, but we see them close up, just watching us eagerly, hoping for a feed. We cycle along East Coast Park as the sun sets; we see the freight ships lined up and lit up, and steer around the rollerbladers and joggers at dusk.

The island is not without its tourist attractions. Haw Par Villa is a delightfully camp theme park of Chinese mythology where models of deer dressed as humans are shown acting out moral lessons and one can walk through the Ten Courts of Hell cavern that gorily depicts the punishment for various sins, such as being thrown into a valley of knives for misuse of food. I was given a one on one tour of a Chinese museum for just $5 including a lengthy anecdote about how Levi Strauss came up with the idea of jeans, which I am still struggling to connect with the tales of Chinese migrants.

I took a day trip to Melaka in Malaysia for something different again, and saw the city's Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese squares in close proximity to one another. Trishaw drivers crowd around the tour group hoping someone wants a ride. We had lunch at a big hotel there, and I couldn't help but feel like some kind of white colonialist pig sitting there eating as humble Malay waiters filled up my glass of water without me having to ask. Blue and green flags line the streets; Malaysia goes to the polls in a couple of weeks, and campaigning is fierce. The old Portuguese fortress looks more like something I would see in Havana, but this is South East Asia, continuing to pull rabbits from its bottomless hat. The checkpoint back into Singapore is huge and like a mini airport. Security is tight as people smuggle cigarettes across the border to undercut the highly taxed tobacco in Singapore.

A week after getting here I've seen so much. Now I'm swapping my shorts and little hat for a scarf and massive jacket as I hit the mean streets of Germany.