"You're a Gwaiii"

MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY – 3rd February 2010

Although I briefly mentioned the stifling heat and humidity of Buenos Aries, I should have put the 40° or whatever it was in some perspective by adding that it was heat of a magnitude foreign to even this part of the world – locals were just as uncomfortable as I was (leave alone the poor gringos walking around like looking like slow-boiled lobsters). It seems that unusual weather is very much in vogue across the world – my travels alone have featured devastating monsoons arriving a month or more late in western India, days of successive sunshine in Milford Sound running the normally gushing waterfalls dry in what is supposed to be the wet season, and all the while there’s been pandemonium back home with the winter to end all winters. Man-made global warming? There are more than enough people out there willing to argue about the cause, but everyone should have a read of an excellent commentary by Gregory Petsko (HT: CJ Harris) who beautifully compares the current state of the atmosphere with the hypothetical discovery of an asteroid heading for Earth. In the latter, people aren’t going to sit around arguing whether it is a natural phenomenon or not – natural or otherwise all that matters is doing something about it. Climate change presents exactly the same situation, but sadly politicians cannot, or will not, see it so.

This quite magnificently tangential turn on an otherwise focused introduction isn’t totally irrelevant, although its scant relevance can be fairly conclusively summarised along the lines of “it pissed it down with rain yesterday in Colonia, and it is pissing it down with rain here in Montevideo right now”.

Filling in a few blanks, I spent yesterday morning wandering around Colonia del Sacramento’s historic old town – its significance rests on its geographic situation just an hour across the Río de la Plata from the Spanish stronghold of Buenos Aries, making it the perfect location for the Portuguese to set up shop (i.e. build a base to smuggle goods). The fort, named Sacramento, was built on the adjacent island, and Colonia was established in 1680 as the colony for its inhabitants (hence the name). Although it switched hands between the Spanish and Portuguese several times over the centuries that followed, it has now been Spanish for the best part of 200 years and is unique in being a Portuguese settlement in Spanish Latin America, but its real beauty – and source of its UNESCO World Heritage status – is the preservation of its history in timeless cobbled streets and century old buildings.

Overcast skies and light drizzle were a bit of a nuisance, but it was still cool to get up close and personal with old structures like the City Gates and surrounding city wall (right), as well as the still-functioning lighthouse – the latter open for tourists to climb (and inadvertently, but repeatedly, smack their heads on a stairwell ceiling that gradually decreases in height as you ascend). It wasn’t long, however, before I was back at the hostel getting my things ready for departure – fellow Pembrokians Oli and Becca were arriving in Colonia by ferry at 1.30, leaving us just enough time for a bite to eat and general catch up before I had to dash down to the bus terminal for the 2 hour ride to Montevideo.

It’s fair to say I was still carrying a bit of lethargy from “The Longest Day”, and consequently remember absolutely nothing from the bus journey – I think I was asleep before we’d started moving, and woke as we ground to a halt in the sprawling mass of Montevideo’s central bus terminal. The “Red Hostel” was found easily enough by taxi, although it seems more than probable that I was subject to a special “gringo” tariff that charged me far more than it should have been – the 90 pesos (US$5) I forked out being about double the rate indicated in the LPG. The hostel was a good show though – powerful showers with complimentary towels and free shower gel (the latter being particularly useful when you have a tendency to forget yours in hostel showers around the world on an annoying regular basis), and a good little communal area that saw me befriend a motley crew of Aussies featuring Emma from Canberra, Luke from Melbourne, and latterly Scott and Mitch from Sydney. I opened a can of worms by bringing up the rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney, and with inter-Aussie banter in full flow we all sauntered into the city centre, accompanied by Barbára, also staying in the Red Hostel, but on a one week holiday from Buenos Aries. A good quality looking establishment in Piazza Matriz saw us dismantle some fine steak and a good quantity of pilsen beer, before we moved on to a bar on Bartolmé Mitre – ground zero of Montevideo’s nightlife. Plenty of banter, plenty of beers, and a good dancing session took us well into the early hours of the morning, and it would be several hours later that I recalled a university-esque walk home involving attempts at 3-man piggy backs and the standard issue bit of roadside food (possibly in the form of a burger, though details escape me).

This morning was a bit of a struggle, but I managed to wake up early enough to scoff down a good portion of free breakfast (something I’d failed to do in Colonia after getting woken by the staff at 11 in order to check out) – fresh fruit and strong coffee went down an absolute treat. The Aussie lads had departed (Scott and Mitch) or were in the process of departing (Luke), but myself, Barbara and another girl (from Spain, but living in Chile) made plans to hit the city’s beach before checking out the town in the afternoon. We made it approximately 25 steps to the beach before noticing a mammoth dark cloud coming our way, so went back inside and sacked off beach gear in favour of some culture in the Ciudad Vieja (Old City). It doesn’t take a genius to immediately notice all sorts of similarities to Europe, both architecturally and culturally, but while I would assume such imperatorial traits are found across most Latin American cities, what is interesting here is the extent and significance of Italian stylistic influence – buildings like the Teatro Solis would be more at home in Florence than Madrid. The Plaza Independiente is Montevideo’s most famous spot and the central focal point of the city, with the prancing statue of national hero José Artigas dominating the square (right) in front of the striking height of Palacio Salvo which, at 26 stories, was once South America’s tallest building. At the west end of the square is the Puerta de la Cuidadela (Gateway of the City), and seemed like a perfect place to Back the Bid...





Getting a coffee and a bite to eat turned out to be a bittersweet experience – the cute upstairs cafe we found had an interior that simply resonated with artistic style and contemporary chic... but the food and drink provided by the one-woman operation was both terrible and expensive in equal measure. More culture was in store though, with the city’s historical museum the next stop. Featuring the usual array of colonial and indigenous bits and pieces, its highlights in my eyes were its extensive and seriously impressive collection of oil paintings depicting scenes from colonial battles between European powers and other equally evocative imagery. The Museo Torres García, our next stop, offered art of a different kind in the form of the works of Montividean Joaquín Torres García. Known for abstract and cubist pieces, the displays follow his life as an artist: a circle around one gallery room takes you step by step from portraits of a most conventional form right the way though to lines and dots and “make what you will of this” shapes. I’m not particularly big on art, but I’m definitely a huge fan of Torres García – the fact that the sculpture on the right produced one of those “this really speaks to me” moments that I’m usually the first to parody says it all.

It wasn’t long before the heavens well and truly opened, and when it hadn’t ceased after some more substantial food on the Bartolmé Mitre we decided to cut our losses and grab a taxi home. However, rain in Uruguay is rare enough to bring things to a relative standstill when it begins – so getting a taxi immediately became next-to-impossible. After half an hour and getting ourselves thoroughly drenched first, we were on our way – now there’s time for a shower before dinner with Oli and Becca (who’ve followed 24 hours behind me to Montevideo and, just like in Colonia, appear to have brought crappy weather with them) and 8.15pm reporting time for my 9pm overnight bus to Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Pro Backpacking

BYRON BAY, NEW SOUTH WALES - 3rd January 2010

"Feral" is a word that is not commonly used in the day-to-day vocabulary of an Englishman. In contrast, the Aussies love the word and talk of "feral shoppers" in malls on Boxing Day, "feral traffic" around Melbourne at rush hour, and "feral people" in the scummier suburbs of the city. After my experiences of the last 20 hours or so, I'd offer the following additions:

• Feral like Greyhound coach queues. My Greyhound from Melbourne to Sydney left half an hour late due to incompetent organisation (they decided to swap buses and bays for no reason), but as we arrived on time I figured it was a one off and ignored it. However, a quite remarkable feat was achieved outside Sydney's Central Station last night, as I arrived at 6.30pm for my 7pm coach to Byron Bay to find the best part of 300 backpackers sprawled around in every direction around 3 waiting Greyhound coaches. There were no signs on any coach (or indeed anywhere whatsoever), no announcements, and certainly no order to the queuing system. I've heard rumours that the word "queue" doesn't actually exist in Australia*, but what I faced here was, organisationally, more akin to a baggage reclaim in Bombay circa 1992 than the supposedly "highly developed" tourist industry of an economically advanced country. The Greyhound Method was to queuing for the first coach (no one told us about this - we figured it out by asking around), and once at the front of the queue checking if our name was on the driver's passenger manifest. If not, queue for the second bus. If not again, the third. And if you weren't on there (which was the case for several) you were, apparently, going to be on one of the 2 buses that were arriving at 7.30pm. Absolute shitshow.
  


• Feral like tourism in Byron Bay. The way Byron, right, is described by some travellers and even by the LPG ("congratulations, you've reached the promised land") leaves you wanting to place a tidy wager on it being the location of the Second Coming... and if size of audience is Jesus' criteria, it wouldn't be a bad shout. Early yesterday evening I had a quick browse around to try and book some accomodation overnight here, and soon discovered that there is, quite literally, not a single free bed in the town. At any price (bar one at $240). With absolutely no hope of a Sydney-style last minute accomodation get-out clause, I just booked myself a night Greyhound to Brisbane with accomodation less of an issue up there. But not everyone did the same, and arrival in Byron early this morning revealed wandering clumps of backpackers ambling from hostel to hostel desperately searching for a bed. Further walking revealed streets full of cars with passed out peeps in the back, and even the odd corpse kotching on a bench. I have no idea what the offical population of this place is supposed to be, but at this moment in time - with another 3 Greyhounds full arriving first thing tomorrow, I'd say that figure is off the mark by a factor of 10.
  


• Feral like the Cape Byron Walking Trail. The last 3 months has involved some pretty serious walking - the jungle-clad ascent to Matheran, 10km tour of Singapore with Billy, and rain-soaked mission around Albert Park being just a few. I always thought it'd take something special to top Kuala Lumpur though - non-stop walking for 10 hours on the back of no sleep is not ideal preparation for the cross-country gradients and sapping humidity of the Bukit Ninas Rainforest in the middle of the city. Then came this morning...
  
  
  About 20 minutes walk out of the main Byron Bay town centre begins a 4km trail through the Cape Byron Coastal Rainforest (see above) to the historic lighthouse at the summit, and back round via the Easternmost Point of Mainland Australia and the beaches on the northern shore of the cape. All well and good, except that as I set off on my way I was (almost inevitably) greeted by a phenomenal rainstorm and was dripping wet within about 2 minutes. Bags and clothes stored in a locker, the only option was to lose the t-shirt and pretend I was in the sea. All well and good, except that being in the sea doesn't involve stomping in soaking boots through soaking mulchy footpaths and up hundreds of muddy, mucky steps though the dense forest. Even a highly trained athlete like yours truly felt pretty shattered by the time I reached the top, but the Sun came out just as I came across a couple of chicas enjoying a spectacular lookout (see right). All well and good, but the emergence of the blazing Australian summer Sun, on the back of torrential rain, when you're surrounded by rainforest, produces thermal humidity like nothing I've experienced in India, Malaysia or anywhere. Between gorgeous relief from a periodic coastal breeze, your body is engulfed in an all-encompassing heat that is much like the wall of heat that used to greet passengers disembarking their aeroplanes in India before airconditioned walkways... but more potent. Oh, and I got bitten my a leech (for the second time on my travels - I forgot to mention it happening with Kyemala on the ascent to the summit of Anigundi Coffee Estate).

Feral as times may have been, taking the rough with the smooth is all part of the fun, and the latter in particular was a top class experience - and the soaking state of my clothing was rectified with half an hour of blazing beach sunshine. Things are gonna get a whole lot more feral for the next 10 days though - 5 more overnight bus trips are needed to cram in 3 days safari around Fraser Island and 3 days on a catamaran over the Great Barrier Reef. Photos are unlikely to appear for ages... sit tight!

* apparently they just call them "lines of people"

Soaked in Pole Position

MELBOURNE, VICTORIA - 18th December 2009

After various gold-mining, paddle-steamer boating and gliding escapades up in the bush, it was back down to Melbourne on Wednesday to catch a bit of the city-life action. Yesterday (Thursday) saw me head into Melbourne's city centre (or "CBD" as they call it here) for the first time and take in a few of the city's tourist traps.

Things began when I jumped off the train at Flinders Street Station, which boasts a striking outer facade featuring a copper dome and frontage that more than matches the much heralded forecourt of St Pancras in London. The golden sandstone of the station is set off beautifully by the red limestone of St Paul's Cathedral that sits diagonally opposite the main passenger entrance/exit. Sadly, both these buildings are now adjacent to Federation Square - an ultramodern development featuring a congregating are flanked by various buildings whose architecture is described (in the LPG) as "a riotous explosion of steel, glass and abstract geometry". I'm not particularly critical when it comes to buildings - it's usually a case of "Roof? Check. Walls? Check. Job done" - but Federation Square I could not stand. If it was the centrepiece of a Star Wars Convention, it'd probably be quite fitting... but putting it smack opposite one of Melbourne's finest turn-of-the-century pieces of architecture is, frankly, akin to constructing a giant mobile phone mast and planting in the middle of Christ Church's Tom Quad.

Thankfully, Fed Square is pretty much a one off, and moving around the city's various precincts provides a nice blend of everything from historic arcades, shopping havens (of absolutely no interest to me), sporting stadia (the Sports Precinct features the MCG, the Rod Laver Tennis Arena, and 1956 Olympic Park), theatres and parkland. The Victoria State Parliament is one of the most stand-out buildings around, though this is for its sheer scale rather than its uniqueness - there are no shortage of Parliament-type buildings around the world that follow the same classical formula of stone structure, Greek order columns, pediment on top...

However, one of the more poignant features of Melbourne is its Shrine of Remembrance, constructed atop of a hill directly south of centre of town in such a way that anyone looking south down Swanston Street/St. Kilda's Road will see the Shrine towering above the road below (as illustrated in the postcard, right, from the 1960s). The Shrine was constructed in the early 1930s as a memorial for Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) soldiers lost in the Great War - particularly in Gallipoli, but has subsequently developed to commemorate those lost in the Second World War, and subsequent conflicts involving Australian servicemen from Vietnam to Iraq. What makes it unique, however, versus its contemporaries around the world, is not so much its impressive architecture as the town planning that has gone into its location - Melbourne has been developed so as to make this Shrine the focal point of the city; a status augmented by the tree-lined approach and surrounding parkland where each tree commemorates a particular battalion.

Anyway, the weather had left much to be desired all day - we'd gone from a 38 degree scorcher on Wednesday to a full day of English overcast skies and light drizzle. I was right at home with the drizzle, but somewhere south of the Shrine the rain started to pick leaving me more than a little damp. However, I'd already set my mental GPS on to Albert Park - the large expanse of land featuring a rather large lake in the middle (that hosted the rowing regattas in the 1956 Olympics) and, of much greater interest to me, the streets around the lake that make up the racetrack for Melbourne's annual Formula 1 Grand Prix.

In what turned out to be a slightly ill-advised decision, I decided to start walking around the circuit (all 6km of it), all the while having to picture the circuit from TV or PlayStation games to try and figure out where I was. Much like Monaco, the road used in Melbourne is just public road the rest of the year, and without all the barriers and gravel traps and grandstands surrounding the roads it's like a different world. Nevertheless, I was suitably excited seeing Turn 3 - the site of this spectacular Martin Brundle crash in 1996:



More exciting still was the start-finish straight, which apparently becomes a big car park! I managed to snag a couple of photos from the grid (the painted starting grid boxes still visible from last March) looking down to the first corner, and even managed to wander up to the podium above the pit lane and pretended (read: imagined) spraying a load of champagne around. (Photos of this, and everything else, will all appear in a few days time...)

At this stage I was almost exactly half way around the circuit, on the other side of the lake and therefore as far away as I could possibly be from Flinders Street and my return train journey. So it is no surprise that it was then that it proceeded to absolutely piss it down with rain for the next hour or so as I trudged 5km round the rest of the track and up to the station on the bank of the Yarra River. And sure enough, arriving at the Yarra, out came the Sun. Sod's law.

Rain, rain, go away...?

As has been previously mentioned, after a dry, humid and all-round stuffy first 24 hours, my arrival in India saw greeted with some seriously mega rainfall, with dire consequences for all forms of transport.

Northern Karnataka - immediately south of Mumbai - does not usually experience heavy monsoon rainfall as it is largely on top of a plateau by the Western Ghats. On this occasion, however, it bore the brunt of a massive late summer monsoon, wreaking havoc in the region and resulting the closure of Goa's international airport, the suspension of long-distance rail services down the west coast, and the closure of the main highway linking the southern states with Mumbai.

My uncle, taking an overnight coach from Mangalore (in southern Karnataka) to Mumbai to meet me, basically raced the storms - his coach was unable to return to Mangalore as 4 landslides closed the highway just minutes after they had passed them.

The floods from the rains have caused untold damage and several deaths... but represent one of India's annual ironies - without such heavy rain, the suffering in a few months would probably have been a lot worse.

The day I arrived in India, the headlines in the media concerned the "worst drought in Mumbai since 1972" - a summer of failing monsoons had left the lakes that provide the city with water more than 30% below on required water levels as the monsoon season drew to a close. With next-to-no rain falling between November and May, an urban area the magnitude of Greater Mumbai requires all four of its feeder lakes to be overflowing come the close of the monsoons; the massive failure to do so brought fears of a shocking lack of water next summer.

So while the downpours brought suffering to Karnataka, as those same rains headed further north they brought untold relief to Mumbai's 15+ million inhabitants. Some sort of pun involving clouds, silver-lining, etc., can probably be inserted here.