South African Travel Guide: ‘Gem of the Karoo’ in a spacious mountain setting November 6, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Cape Town, Europe, Hostels, Hotels, India, London, Memorial, Museum, Rail Pass, South Africa, Tickets, Tour , 3comments
Ying in a loop of the Sundays River, beneath the distinctive dome of Spandau Kop, the old town of Graaff-Reinet is progressively being restored to the glory that earned it the title ‘Gem of the Karoo’. Another title, conferred by a Cape Town newspaper last century, was ‘Athens of the Eastern Cape‘ — a reflection of the town’s reputation as a cultural centre.
The citizens of Graaff-Reinet took some time to attain this status — the town was first no more than a straggling lane of mud huts. These nevertheless constituted one of the capital cities of the world when Graaff-Reinet declared itself an independent ‘republic’ only 10 years after being established. (more…)
Disappeared Inca Empire Supremacy CUZCO part 3 September 19, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Cairo, Cuzco, Egypt, India, Map, Sydney, Tickets, Travel Gear, Travelling Bag, Zanzibar , 2commentsAre ceques therefore astronomical? That is part, but only part, of the answer. The chroniclers relate that the Incas had observatories with windows through which they watched points on the horizon, and they also mention sets of towers at various positions along the skyline as viewed from Cuzco, which were used to indicate timings for planting various crops either at Cuzco or at higher elevations up the valley sides at key ceremonial times of year. The Spanish totally destroyed these towers, but years of brilliant archive and field detective work by Zuidema and A. F. Aveni has resulted in the positions of the former towers being identified, and the arrangement of ceques ‘on the ground’ being clarified to a great extent. (more…)
A Day in Narnia, a Night in Phang Nga continue… September 6, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Airlines, Bangkok, Germany, Hotels, Tour , 3commentsNext morning in the market, shopping for a picnic, our struggles with the phrasebook brought an English-speaking Thai to our rescue, explaining that the quail eggs we had bought were raw, but could be cooked for us in the soup cauldron wherever we took breakfast. And the performance with the nails and the knives? A thanksgiving. All those who went through the ordeal had at some time survived an accident or illness when their lives had been despaired of. In gratitude they undertook to walk the nails and climb the knives every year until they died. They spent the day chanting and dancing, and when they came to walk and climb they could be heard speaking Chinese, a language none of them could speak during the rest of the year. (more…)
A Day in Narnia, a Night in Phang Nga September 6, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Bangkok, Hotels, Tour, Trip , 3commentsOn the village green in front of the Chinese Bhuddist temple a fairground was being erected. The skeleton of a Ferris wheel loomed; shooting galleries and hoopla stalls were being knocked together.
The purpose of the structure immediately outside the temple was not so obvious. The men hammering it together had beckoned us, beaming, inviting inspection. A raised wooden runway, carpeted with the pin-sharp points of six-inch nails hammered through from the bottom, ran out 50ft and ended in a bed of nails laid on the grass. At the foot of the bed, guyed by wire ropes, a forty-rung ladder rose vertically. The rungs were steel knives, blades up. (more…)
One More Burmese Day August 31, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Asia, Europe, Forex, Hotels, Rail Pass, Singapore, Tour, Trails, Travel Gear, Travelling Bag, Trip , 3commentsAt five in the morning Rangoon shakes off sleep. Paraffin lamps cast pools of sputtering light on the wet streets. After a night of drizzle, the city murmurs as though sound, like the dust, has been cleared from the air by the rain. The lamps wheeze. In a café doorway a man slaps chapati dough on to a board, and stacks the rolled balls into ranks. A boy yawns and adjusts his lunghi. He oversees a water tank parked in the road. Water splashes from a faucet into a jerrican, and when it fills the boy sluggishly replaces it from a line of empty ones. A truck, far off, grinds gears and whines, coming slowly closer. (more…)
European Costume Flip-flops, Women and Socks August 22, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Europe, Hotels, Japan, London, Rail Pass, Restaurant, Tickets, Tokyo, Tour, Trip , 4commentsOnce Europeans had become accustomed to flip-flops, it wasn’t all that difficult to get used to mitten- shaped socks, each holding the big toe in its own little pocket and letting the other four doss down together. But the very first visitors to Japan assumed, from the local socks, that the Japanese had only two toes. And the Japanese, on the basis of the visitors’ socks, thought that Europeans had none. (more…)
My Traveling Companions two Flying Horses continue… August 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Asia, China, Europe, Hotels, India, Money, Round The World, Sightseeing, Tour, Travellers Cheque, Trip , 3commentsThere is a sweet old chestnut about the JAL jumbo mistakenly landing on a tiny nearby private airfield in smog. On that occasion three miles of slums were levelled as a pathway along which the stranded plane could be dragged back to the International Airport runway. Only from here could it be reasonably expected to take off.
Our problem had been landing at all. The hydraulic lines had burst and the wheels had to be lowered manually. (more…)
My Traveling Companions two Flying Horses August 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Airlines, Beirut, England, Europe, Hotels, India, Museum, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Tour, Trails, Trip , 3commentsWhenever I’ve been asked to take a sponsored parachute jump I’ve declined, giving the excuse ‘fear of flying’. Of free will I chose to fly to India, taking as my travelling companions a stallion and two mares, in the back of a decrepit Boeing 707 on its third time round the clock. The interior was like a dingier station on the Northern Line, complete with peeling, dripping walls. Outside, the Flying Carrot, as this airline’s cargo planes are affectionately known to the handlers at Heathrow, has peeling orange and green livery. She’ll be all right when she’s finished, said one. Finished what? (more…)
Mount Tai Shan, Five Peaks, one of the Nine Sacred Mountains of China continue… July 27, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Airlines, Cars, Destination, England, Greece, Hotels, Malaysia, Sightseeing, Sweden, Trails, Trip, Venezuela, Wales , 4commentsShortly after midnight, a monk with a lantern awoke them with the cry: ‘The Bodhisattva has appeared!’ They threw on their clothes, their teeth chattering with the cold, the excitement, or both, and they scrambled across the temple courtyard and mounted to the tower. As they entered they found themselves facing one of the windows looking out on the vastness of the space beyond. Everyone gasped in surprise — none of them was prepared for what they saw. Numerous orange spheres of light where floating ‘majestically’ through the darkness of the mountain night beyond the window. (more…)
Mount Tai Shan, Five Peaks, one of the Nine Sacred Mountains of China July 27, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Asia, Flight Schedule, Hotels, Motel, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Gear, Trip , 4commentsMount Tai Shan (WU T’AI SHAN) is oneof the Nine Sacred Mountains of China. It is situated some hundred miles southwest of Beijing. It has five main peaks which rise over a central plateau, itself about 8,000 feet (2,440m) above the North China Plain: the name Wu T’ai means Five Peaks or Terraces.
It is one of the relatively few World Heritage sites that is both a place of natural significance and a cultural site, for scattered across the plateau, perched on ridges and high up the five peaks themselves, are some 300 temples. Wu T’ai is, or was, sacred not only to the Chinese but also to the Tibetans and Mongolians. The temples originated from all three traditions of Buddhism and also Taoism, coloured with hints of earlier nature religions and their deities. The culmination of the journey for many of the pilgrims was to offer homage as they walked 1,080 times around the chorten on the mountain supposedly containing a relic of the Buddha. (It may just be an interesting coincidence, but 1,080 is one of the key numbers of various ancient, arcane traditions of numerological knowledge.) (more…)
Boating in Eire Dolmens and Blarney, feeling of plunging Water, eXhilaration Adventure continue… July 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, Air Tickets, Airlines, Asia, Cairo, Cars, China, Round The World, Sightseeing, Thailand, The Nile, Tokyo, Tour, Travel Gear, Travelling Bag, Trip, Victoria Falls , 3commentsLooking nervously over his shoulder in case the priest should hear, he scratched his head and rolled his eyes, all the time muttering that terrible word. Then suddenly he clicked his fingers and spat the word out.
“Pagans! Dere’s an old Protestant graveyard, overgrown now, you understand, up dere, by de old crossroads, as used to be dere.”
I waited patiently while he told me forty different ways to get there. Then, thanking him, I beat a hasty retreat to the sacristy door and knocked. (more…)
Aboard the Trans—Siberian Express July 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : China, Embassy, England, Moscow, Rail Pass, Restaurant, Russia, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travelling Bag, Trip , 3commentsShe started sobbing three hours before the border. The conductress tried to console her with a glass of sweet, strong tea but without much success. She remained in the long druggeted corridor, a crumpled figure in a pink dressing gown watching the forests spinning madly by. The tankard holding the glass depicted a Slavic swordsman defending a child and she held it tight as a keepsake.
It certainly was a crying matter. The birch forests of Siberia, so upright, so elegant in autumn, had been broken by this winter campaign. Brought into perfect arcs by wind and snow, the younger birches littered the track-side like ribs and tusks while the old and brittle, unable to bow before the onslaught, rose into the air like splintered spines. (more…)
Please to make a Hotel Reservation July 23, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, Beach Resorts, Destination, Flight Schedule, Hostels, Hotels, India, Lodges, Motel, Passport, Tickets, Tour , 3comments“Excuse me, do you speak English?” “Oh yes, certainly.”
“I want to reserve three seats on a train from Calcutta to Patna.” “Please?”
“I want to reserve . . .”
“Where are you wanting to go?” “Patna.”
“Have you a reservation?”
“No. That is what I want.” “Please you wait over there.”
“I want to go during the day so that we can all see the countryside.” (more…)
Not Memsahib July 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, Airlines, Beach Resorts, Cars, Destination, Europe, Flight Schedule, Hotels, India, Lodges, London, Motel, Museum, Oceanarium, Planetarium, Rail Pass, Restaurant, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Trip , 3commentsEvery time I heard the word memsahib I wanted to take an ice-pick to the user. I’d gone on the Hindu trail clutching my libertarianism to my bosom, a cosy cocoon from which I could rationalise and contain the INDIAshrieks from the inferno — not that Dante, I’m sure, ever went to Calcutta. Very right-on. Very arm’s-length. But keep your liberal sensibilities Gandhi-pure? Emerge unscathed? Forget it.
Sympathy, empathy, had long since given way to simmering hysteria, cringing shame and a seething, at times uncontrollable rage which was generalised in its target but oh so localised in its pain. It wasn’t even a consolingly righteous anger at the pulverising poverty, the callousness of caste or the stalinisation of women — more a deep-seated disgust and hatred welling up from deep down and spewing out over all humanity, most of all myself . . . Well, OK, you try and make sense of the matchstick people of Madhya Pradesh, the execrable excrement of Bombay and Dehli, the obscene opulence of Jaipur jewellers, the blinding, vivid hues of Rajasthani women’s skirts — and all of it sinking in one great ubiquitous quicksand of suffocating, strangulating bureaucracy. (more…)
Springtime for Czechoslovakia July 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Czech Republic, Europe, Hotels, Insurance, Moscow, Museum, Prague, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Clinic, Trip, Vietnam , 5commentsIrena lived in a late-Seventies block of flats on the edge of town, half a mile from the Russian barracks, part of an ugly outer-urban sprawl. After buying me lunch in a new concrete hotel called, romantically, The Interflora, she drove me back at high Skoda speed through the centre of town — choke full out, engine howling in second gear as we skidded across wet cobblestones, clipping kerbs and narrowly avoiding the numerous potholes and dug-up sections where slow attempts were being made to repair the water mains, shattered by the minus-twenty-five February temperatures. The only vehicles Irena took any notice of were the thin double trams, locked inscrutably into their own system, clanging their way up and down the narrow streets making unmistakable tram noises. Saturday afternoon shoppers shared the pavements with soldiers in iron-grey overcoats wandering about in twos and threes.
“You can tell the difference by their boots,” Irena told me before I’d had a chance to ask the question. Some of the Russian soldiers (pull-on boots, no laces) looked Mongolian and very young. (more…)
Hindu Trail Clutching my Libertarianism to my Bosom, Not Memsahib July 9, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Europe, India, London, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travelling Bag, Trip , 3commentsEvery time I heard the word memsahib I wanted to take an ice-pick to the user. I’d gone on the Hindu trail clutching my libertarianism to my bosom, a cosy cocoon from which I could rationalise and contain the shrieks from the inferno — not that Dante, I’m sure, ever went to Calcutta. Very right-on. Very arm’s-length. But keep your liberal sensibilities Gandhi-pure? Emerge unscathed? Forget it.
Sympathy, empathy, had long since given way to simmering hysteria, cringing shame and a seething, at times uncontrollable rage which was generalised in its target but oh so localised in its pain. It wasn’t even a consolingly righteous anger at the pulverising poverty, the callousness of caste or the stalinisation of women — more a deep-seated disgust and hatred welling up from deep down and spewing out over all humanity, most of all myself . . . Well, OK, you try and make sense of the matchstick people of Madhya Pradesh, the execrable excrement of Bombay and Dehli, the obscene opulence of Jaipur jewellers, the blinding, vivid hues of Rajasthani women’s skirts — and all of it sinking in one great ubiquitous quicksand of suffocating, strangulating bureaucracy. (more…)
A Fair Show, happy Travelers Diaries July 6, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Aquarium, Cars, Cash, China, Destination, Dolphinarium, Ireland, Library, Museum, Restaurant, Round The World, Tour , 3commentsThrough Leinster and Munster, along Connaught lanes and highways there’s a movement. Brazenly on verges, tucked behind hedges, parked in laybys there are caravans. Not tourists but the homes of the Irish Travellers, the Tinkers. Herds of their horses hold up the traffic. Greys, chestnuts, roans, bays and the especial pride, the batty mares: great coloured, patched horses, piebald and skewbald, hooves swathed in shaggy hair. They’re all heading along roads which lead to the nub, the October fair, Ballinasloe. A convergence for horses and horsemanship, dealing and drinking, exchanging news and the “crack”. “You’ll never see as many horses together as you will at Ballinasloe. Once Seamus McGinty rode down the high street at the head of sixty, his sons as outriders flanking their wealth.” (more…)
Asian Beijing Travel and Finest Art Exhibition Tour continue… July 5, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, China, Flight Schedule, Hotels, Restaurant, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Travel Gear , 3commentsThe harsh fluorescent light made us blink. Yuhang’s wife, a frail looking girl wearing a floral shirt and black trousers, looked startled. She spoke no English, but shook our hands and smiled shyly. The room was about thirteen feet square. The walls and ceiling were white, the uncovered concrete floor was painted maroon. Opposite, a window stared like an unlidded eye into the night. The window wall was almost entirely occupied by a large double bed with a pink candlewick counterpane. Down the centre of the room was a long table covered with felt, and at one end of this was a collection of paintbrushes and ready-mixed pigments in ceramic jars. Along the wall with the door in it stood an enormous yellow-and-black tartan settee. The fourth wall was filled by a wooden dresser, behind whose sliding glass doors could be seen various personal items — photographs, a spray of plastic flowers and a toy panda. There was just room for a Chinese-sized person to squeeze between the furniture. We sat on the settee. We saw no sign of heating or air conditioning, nor cooking and washing facilities, which we assumed must be communal. Paints on scraps of paper, vibrant with colour and life, brightened the walls. (more…)
Asian Beijing Travel and Finest Art Exhibition Tour July 5, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Australia, China, Europe, Hotels, Japan, Restaurant, Tour, Travelling Bag, USA , 3commentsThe tourist coaches disgorge their contents into the forecourt of the Jinling Hotel, Nanjing. The colours and shapes of middle-class Europe, America, Japan, Australia, stream through plate glass doors and stand in dazed clusters among their luggage, whilst tour leaders completeyet another set of check-in formalities.
Polished chrome and marble reflect luxuriant indoor gardens. A pianist’s vacuous tinkling drifts from the intercommunication system. It could be the foyer of an international hotel anywhere in the world.
Outside, late autumn sunshine filters through the industrial haze. A complex of fountains makes dark splashes on patterned paving. The white-painted concrete fence marks a boundary, on the far side of which the other China, in sober-suited rows, peers with impassive curiosity at this world within their world, as we stand before cages at a zoo. We are aware of another China. It flows past endlessly on jangling bicycles; it smiles from doorways and factory workbenches when we are shown round. (more…)
Meal in India; Travelling Across Indian Crazy Kumbh; it could happen only in India July 3, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, Airlines, Cars, Destination, Europe, Flight Schedule, India, Restaurant, Travel Insurance, USA , 5commentsInevitably Melas such as this also drag the weird, wonderful and absolutely berserk out of the Indian woodwork, and that night they all seemed to have appeared in Hardwar (apart from the infamous and lusty Bhagwan Rajneesh, holed up somewhere in Uruguay). There were the magicians; the Yogis; the jugglers; the preachers; the Hari Krishna devotees (looking more at home if no less limp than they do wandering down Oxford Street); and, perhaps the craziest of all, the Sadhus. Many of these supposed spiritual pioneers of Hinduism were sitting in large groups smoking their chillums (pipes) filled with marijuana, which they held high above their heads, and which were no doubt taking these holy men even higher. The Mahatma condemned this sort of hollow spirituality saying, “These men were born only to enjoy the good things in life”. However, this couldn’t be said about some of the “Naga” Sadhus who, standing near the river, painfully demonstrated their rejection of desire by piercing their penises and hanging rocks from their genitals. This extraordinary self-mutilation didn’t even merit a free radio. Maybe they should have kept their lingams in their lunghi? (more…)
