Life in perspective

Brazil apparently has the best views of Iguassu Falls, but most of them lie within Argentina’s borders. One swift border crossing later, I quickly came to the decision that the Argentinian side has better views as well. Sorry Brazil, but the falls in Argentina are simply one of the most incredible natural wonders I’ve ever seen. [I've spent ages looking at that sentence, I think it's probably as grammatically correct as it's going to get.]

Quite apart from anything else, the walkways are simply insane. There is a long one out to the Devil’s Throat, and it sits right over the raging semi-circular centre of the waterfall. Reassuringly, the remains of previous walkways are still intermittently present, with rotting plaques proudly telling everyone when they were destroyed by floods. Isn’t the whole place just one big uncontrolled flood, anyway? It really does beg the question as to how the hell they were built without the aid of spaceships.

The night bus later on was reasonably full of people who may, or may not, have been transferring drugs across Brazil. Better to think they were drugs, rather than guns, I suppose. After 23 hours on two buses, we arrived in the colonial city of Paraty. The historic centre of the town (I can’t really call it a city, it’s not very big) is pedestrianised, and there was a festival going on. Lovely place, although I had no idea what the festival was in aid of. Lots of loud noises from the stage in the main square, and various parades. Shame the hotel was such a dump, but you can’t have everything.

A (thankfully short) bus trip and then a catamaran ride later, we arrived on Ihla Grande. A lovely, laid-back place, with all the restaurants on the beach and plenty of beaches to go around. Shaun had managed to get hold of some fireworks, so we prepared ourselves by drinking too much and then setting them off on the beach.

I wasn’t in the mood to do much the next day (or the following days), for reasons to be explained at the bottom of this guff. The following morning, queue for the boat back to the mainland was enlivened by the growling match between the ginger dog which took refuge between our legs, and the rabid one which emitted a constant low growl while pacing around with saliva constantly drooling from between its bared teeth. It looked like it was going to try to get onto the boat with us, but obviously decided not to. Weirdly enough, considering all the places I’ve been, that’s the first time I remember coming face to face with a dog which clearly had rabies. It was a lot less scary than I imagined.

Upon arrival in Rio de Janeiro, Emma and I had elected to go on the favela tour in the afternoon. The heavily-tattooed woman leading the tour initially gave every impression of hating every minute of it, but I warmed to her once she started talking (“if someone calls you a gringo, don’t be offended. Nobody can help the fact that you’re gringos”) and was full of useful and interesting information about the favelas. Key point being not to take photographs of anyone carrying a gun or a walkie-talkie, because they work for the drug dealers and aren’t keen on being photographed. Apart from that, pictures were welcomed by most locals, particularly the young. If a gringo takes a photo of them, then they might well become famous. That’s the logic, anyway, and it’s something I’ve heard before in other deprived areas (although not in Scotland, strangely enough – you’d think every punter in would want to be the next Susan Boyle. Or perhaps not).

The favela itself was a lot more solidly constructed than I had imagined, but that’s not saying much. If anyone finds a clear bit of ground, then they can build a house out of breezeblocks on it. Then they can sell their roof for someone else to build a breezeblock house on it, and so on until the whole building starts to lean, at which point they stop. The recent floods caused a fair few of these buildings to collapse.

The houses themselves have electricity, cable TV, and internet (all siphoned from the cables which hang down above the alleys). There are shops, and a bakery selling some of the best doughnuts you can imagine. On the other hand, the at various points the streets are literally paved with shit. The most expensive properties are at the highest altitude, because they have access to the freshest water/electricity/cable TV/internet before it starts to run out nearer the bottom. Rio de Janeiro itself is build between lots of massive rocks jutting out of the ground, so there’s no room for the favelas (or the rest of the city) to grow.

Walking through a tunnel (lined with makeshift bombs, to be detonated if the police decide to have a raid) brings you almost instantaneously into the skyscrapers and restaurants and hotels and expensive apartments, the border marked by drug dealers selling cocaine which is processed in the countryside and then brought into the favelas to be cut with other substances. Apparently a gram in the favelas will cost R$20, and in the city it’s R$50-60. Considering that everyone who enters and leaves the favelas is watched and followed by lots of young men with walkie-talkies (including us), it’s probably not a safe long-term money-making scheme.

The money from the tour, incidentally, doesn’t go to the dealers. They allow the tours because the locals like to have people looking at how they live, and it was compared and contrasted more than once to going to Beverly Hills to gawp at the rich people’s houses. Instead, most of the money goes to a daycare centre for young children, which we also visited. I don’t think the kids in nappies were drug dealers. Not yet, anyway. Most people in the favelas work in the city, as waiters and shop assistants. Only a very small percentage of them are involved in the drug trade, but that is obviously the biggest source of wealth.

That evening, we had the farewell meal for the group, most of which has spent the best part of two months together. Most people have got on really well, and I think everyone agrees that we were incredibly lucky. Most of the time, anyway. We also said goodbye to Marianne, who has guided us through her native country with enthusiasm and joy.

I went on a city tour the next day, thankfully without the pushy Israeli twats who’d been on the favela tour (although I did enjoy it when the one who looked like he spent three hours in front of the mirror every morning took a picture of himself with the favela in the background, checked the image on his camera, and then fixed his hair). Instead, there was an elderly American man. I would hate for anyone to think I’m making generalisations about Israelis or Americans here, and I have friends from both countries, but by golly some of the people you meet abroad (of any nationality) take the biscuit.

The city tour took us to Christ the Redeemer, the massive statue overlooking Rio. Well, he would overlook Rio if he wasn’t swathed in cloud and scaffolding. You could see glimpses of Christ behind the scaffold, and the tarpaulin covering His face was helpfully painted with a replica of His face. It’s almost like seeing the real thing. The American man, a rather prominently bellied fellow “from Obama-land” (i.e. Chicago), had gone down early to the meeting point because the wind and rain wasn’t to his taste. So I chatted to him, he asked where I’d been on my travels, I told him, and he replied “hmmm. The world’s in a mess right now.” I nodded in agreement. “And our president isn’t doing what he said he would, I don’t agree with him at all.” I could sense the New World Order looming in the conversation, and suddenly remembered that I needed the toilet.

He and his wife didn’t make the rendezvous the guide had arranged, although I’m not quite sure what was so difficult about “11.10am, right here”. We waited for them, but they had already gone down early. The American man wasn’t happy, and neither was his wife, although they mostly seemed unhappy with each other. I was accosted by him at various other points, and upon learning that I was a pharmacist he told me that he keeps pharmacists busy back in the States with his diabetes medication (not a surprise to me, I must admit). He spoke with the sharp-edged self-assurance of the truly ignorant for a while, before I remembered I needed the toilet again.

He had also told me that he was originally from New Yoik, with a giveaway twang. So it came as something of a surprise when we were discussing Disney World in Florida, and he informed me that they had a home in Florida before abruptly declaring that he was originally from Frankfurt, Germany.

“Really?” I asked. “To American parents, or German?” At this point I was unsure of his age, and gave him the benefit of the doubt that he might be the son of occupying American forces after World War II.

“German,” came the reply. “My father was shot by the Nazis. I left Germany in 1950, when I was ten years old. I’m seventy now. My sister was also executed by the Nazis.”

Given that the last thing I’d said was that Tigger got annoyed when I pulled his tail, I was unsure of how to continue the conversation. So I decided that stunned silence was the better part of valour, and walked away.

The tour also took in the carnival street, the cathedral, and lunch in a pretty awful all-you-can-eat Brazilian barbecue place. The farewell dinner had been in a good one, in which there is a selection of vegetables and salads for self-selection, and the waiters emerge from the kitchen every few seconds with skewers of meat which they slice bits off for you. You really could eat in these places until you explode, and you can request any cut of meat you want (if they have it, obviously). I had tried the chicken hearts previously, they’re like unpleasant chewy mushrooms.

In the afternoon, after a minibus drive past Ipanema beach and Copacabana beach, we went on the cable car up Sugarloaf mountain. This gave unrivalled views of Rio, the skyscrapers and favelas fighting for available space between the sea and beaches and the rocky mountains, like tiny pebbles magnified millions of times and dotted with trees wherever there are cracks. An incredible place, this, and a fitting end point to this particular trip. I fly home in two days.

* * * * *

I alluded earlier to not being particularly in the mood to appreciate the finer things that Brazil has to offer in the last few days. This is because after I staggered back to the hotel in Ihla Grande following the fireworks, I had a quick look at the internet and found out that my friend Nina (a.k.a. Jessie from b3ta.com) had been killed in a car crash the previous morning.

She was 26. One of the loveliest women you could meet, pretty much universally loved by everyone who met her. A real shock. All I can do here is again to offer my condolences to her family, and her partner Kerry (also one of the nicest men you could meet). They were completely right for each other, and the only consolation for their future being cut short so abruptly is that they found each other and were able to spend the last three years together.

Puts life in perspective, doesn’t it?

Eating dead things

The night train is a fun way to travel in Bolivia. It’s so horrendously bumpy that sleep isn’t much of an option, so a fully-charged mp3 player is a necessity. Not in the evening, though, because there’s a TV at the end of the carriage, and the crew thoughtfully put on a film for us (dubbed into Spanish, with English subtitles), it’s quite an old one but I’d never seen it before. “Alive”. A film about public transport which crashes in South America, and the survivors end up eating the dead.

The border crossing took a while, although it’s apparently the most corrupt border in Brazil and while all the tourists were queueing up to get passports stamped, lots of vehicles were happily being waved across. Quite what was being transported from Bolivia, who knows? Probably bags of salt. Then there was a bus journey to the heart of the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland. There were various hawks, toucans, armadillos, capybara, and caiman. Lots of caiman, swimming around or sitting next to the water.

Apparently caiman just eat fish, which was probably just as well. The accommodation was a giant wooden shed full of hammocks, at the end of a small peninsula away from the dining area of the ranch/hotel. Lovely setting, even though the quickest route for the caiman to get from one pond to the other was to saunter across our pathway. We were advised in no uncertain terms to keep the door shut. Also to give the hammock a shake before getting into it, in case any spiders decided to have a nap first.

For the afternoon’s nature walk, we were advised to wear shorts and flip-flops. Upon reaching the first small lake we had to walk through, our local guide took his off and waded in barefoot. He had trod upon a caiman a day or two previously, but obviously it was more scared of him than he was of it. Apparently one of the horses at the ranch had been given a couple of nips on its legs, and now refused to go in the water. We all survived, and got to see a couple of howler monkeys before the approaching rain meant we had to go back and have some food and drink.

It was birthday season, with Shaun, Jodie and Roy the Dutchman all celebrating advancing years over the space of a few days, so we paid to buy a lamb to be barbecued for us the following evening. This was slightly less exotic than lunch, which we had to catch ourselves. Armed with bamboo rods with a big hook on the end of a wire, we stood on a bridge and put chunks of slightly rancid-looking chicken on the end. The piranhas must love it when people go fishing, because the sudden tugging on the rod usually means that they’ve eaten the chicken and swum away. After going through about seven or eight chunks, I finally pulled the rod out to find a toothy little fish on the hook. To put it out of its misery, you have to stick your fingers in its gills and drive a knife into its brain. Easier said than done, they’re tough little bastards.

Between us all, we only caught about six piranhas, but they were gutted, cleaned and deep-fried and then served to us whole, teeth and all. I tried to pick some meat off the ribs, but there isn’t much to them. Then most of the crowd went off to do a bit of horse riding, which I passed on since I was feeling ever so slightly delicate that day. Nothing to do with the vodka the previous night, of course. So James, Shaun and I started on the beer and watched the lamb cook over a fire, while playing with Bradock the insane dog.

Bus trip to Bonito the next day, to stay in a shabby little hotel run by an extremely sour-faced caucasian man. The rumour going around for the next day or two was that he was the son of German Nazis who had fled at the end of World War II, but apparently he was Argentinian. Bonito is a small city with a thriving tourist industry, so naturally the prices for activities are incredibly high. Most of us went on a trip to a cave to see a blue lake, followed by an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch and then snorkelling down a river. The cave itself is open enough to allow sunlight to hit the water, which is astonishingly blue. Swimming used to be allowed, but not any more. There are skeletons of things like sabre-toothed tigers in there somewhere.

Snorkelling down the river was an unusual experience. After getting crammed into wetsuits, we were driven to the starting point. We went in two by two, and then just floated downstream in the current, looking at all the fish looking back at us. Very clear water, and we’d hired an underwater camera between us so were able to take lots of pictures. It seemed to take a long time to get to the finishing point, and by the time we’d got out of the wetsuits it was beer o’clock again.

On the journey back to town I saw what looked like a horse lying down and sticking its legs in the air at weird angles. It took a second to realise that it was actually an anteater. I honestly had no idea the damn things were so massive, it looked like it was bigger than the minibus. Apparently they can grow to over two metres in length, they must eat a lot of ants.

The night bus the following evening took us to Foz do Iguacu, and then we had time to sleep and/or eat breakfast before heading out to Iguassu Falls. I’ve seen a few waterfalls in my time, but these are something else. The sheer scale of them is breathtaking, as you walk along the path you keep realising that there are even more around the corner. There are a couple of walkways out over the falls, it would be interesting to find out how many people were killed trying to make them. Marianne advised us not to commit suicide by jumping into the falls, since we hadn’t been to Rio yet. There was a suicide quite recently, apparently. It would certainly be a spectacular way to go, although you would have to think that it would probably ruin your holiday.

The best views of the waterfalls are from the Brazilian side, but most of the waterfalls are in Argentina, so we’re doing a short hop across the border tomorrow. The advice for the speedboat ride is to wear clothes that you don’t mind getting slightly damp.

The biggest llama EVER

Having been spoiled by having a single room through most of Peru, I was now landed with Chris from Ausralia. Nice enough when you get talking to him, but slightly lacking in social skills. He also had a habit of turning off his hearing aid when he felt like it, much like Data the android turning off his emotion chip in Star Trek. If Chris has an emotion chip, though, it was set to “self-pitying hypochondria” most of the time. Not that I’m suggesting he’s an android, although now I think about it, that might make more sense than the theory he was human. Most of the hotels only had accessible power points in the bathrooms, and he spent a lot of his time locked in there. Perhaps he was recharging.

The group’s Scottish quotient was boosted by Colin and Emma, who made vital contributions to the pool of sick jokes that James and I had been working on. Our tour leader was a camp Peruvian called Tad, a much more laid-back character than Katy had been (perhaps a little too laid-back at times, but it’s nice to experience a different approach).

The first full day of this leg of the trip was a long bus journey to Uyuni, a basic town which exists purely because of the nearby salt flats. The next few days were to be a 4×4 trip across the flats and up to some multi-coloured lakes and volcanoes, with the first stop being a train graveyard – lots of derelict locomotives, great fun to climb into and pose on. There was an awful lot of metal just being left to decay, it seems strange that it wasn’t being recycled in some way.

The nearby village had a tiny museum advertising “the biggest llama EVER”, which was made entirely of salt – much like a lot of the buildings, bricks of salt being cut straight out of the ground and used as they were. We also had a guided tour of a salt processing plant – basically a small house where the salt is brought, heated up and then shovelled into bags.

The salt flat itself is huge, stretching off to the horizon with a mountains sticking up at various points. After trying various optical illusion photos (one person or thing in the foreground, one in the background, hilarity ensues) we drove across miles of empty salt to an island made of fossilised coral, dotted with massive cacti (some of them well over 1000 years old) – perhaps not what you expect to find at four kilometres above sea level. Sitting on the island and looking out across the surroundings, you really do feel like you’re marooned with no way of escape – until you see a car driving across the white emptiness.

The accommodation that night was made entirely of salt – walls, beds, chairs, tables, everything. Well, perhaps not the windows. Or the toilets.Thankfully there was also a small cubicle where it was possible to buy alcohol. Erik, Kim and I played poker for matchsticks (with a 10 Boliviano stake to make things interesting) while most of the rest of the group played Ring of Fire, a seemingly lethal card game with forfeits which mostly involved drinking whatever is in front of you.

Next day involved more driving, this time leaving the salt flats behind and moving on to rocky paths between the volcanoes. The rock formations got ever more otherworldly, and the drivers obligingly stopped the cars every so often for people to have a look and/or evacuate their bowels. At least in the middle of nowhere it was free, when we stopped for lunch at the “smelly lake” (sulphur, in case you were wondering) it cost five Bolivianos for the privilege. The flamingos on the smelly lake looked whiter than the pink ones on a lot of the other lakes we stopped at.

Apart from flamingos, there were plenty more vicunas and llamas wandering around. They were much more at home in the surroundings than our 4x4s, which conformed to Bolivian stereotype by being a bit shit. Our one had a huge crack across the windscreen, and some of the others had tyres which were pretty worn. Still, at least it wasn’t snowing…

After stopping at some more huge rock formations, we spent the night at a very basic hostel somewhere over 4000m. We were to get up at 4:30am for a trip to the geysers and a volcanic hot pool at just under 5000m, so I was prepared to wake up early. Not quite as early as I did, because poor old Chris was unwell, and asked Ronnie (who doesn’t sleep, as she told everyone at any available opportunity) to get Tad because he felt “really ill”. Tad was duly woken up, and Chris told him that he was dizzy and nauseous. Quite what he thought Tad was going to do about it in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is anyone’s guess. Still, a problem shared is a problem halved, and since Chris loudly shared his problem with six other people, I hope it reduced it for him.

The geysers were a bit of a damp squib, they probably would have been impressive if we could see them. There was some dissatisfaction about leaving so early in the morning that the sun hadn’t risen by the time we got there, so the only light was from the headlights of the 4x4s. It was too cloudy to see the sunrise, so it gradually got lighter as we drove up to the hot pool. Flecks of white powder came from the darkness as we drove, and it took a while to realise that this wasn’t volcanic ash but was actually snow. The hot pool itself was nice after not having had a shower for three days, but didn’t quite make up for having to get up so early in the morning.

Most of the day was spent driving to another lake and then back to Uyuni, in the deepening snow. At least our 4×4′s tyres were almost able to cope, unlike the worn slicks on some of the others, which fishtailed around on the precarious tracks. Shame one of the wipers didn’t work, or the heating – the driver and whoever was in the passenger seat had to take turns to wipe the inside of the windscreen, and it was bloody freezing for most of the day. When we got downhill and the snow turned to rain, it started dripping in through the top of the windscreen.

We had to have a change of driver when Juan couldn’t get the accelerator to behave properly. He swapped with one of the more senior drivers, who found that there was nothing wrong with it, it was just that Juan didn’t really know what he was doing. He also switched off the air-conditioning, which had been on all the time – no bloody wonder it was so cold. That’s customer service in Bolivia in a nutshell for you.

Upon leaving Uyuni on the bus the next day, I saw a signpost revealing that our next stop (Potosi, the highest city in the world, apparently) was 208km away. The fact that the journey was to take seven hours tells you what the road was like. It wasn’t even a road for most of it, just a rocky track. Lots of mountain views and rock formations to admire, if you could get your eyeballs to stop rattling long enough to see them.

Potosi is also over 4000m above sea level, so poor old Chris started feeling the effects of the altitude again and had to get a doctor out to see him, discovered that his blood pressure was slightly high – sorry, “through the roof” – and give him a questionable treatment of an injection of furosemide and five enalapril 20mg tablets to take. At least Chris was able to e-mail his doctor (who essentially told him to shut up and take his medicine) and research enalapril on the internet (“there’s an interaction with ibuprofen, so I can’t take ibuprofen”) rather than… oh, I don’t know, asking a pharmacist or something.

The two main attractions in Potosi are the mint, and the silver mine. Like most of South America, they don’t like large banknotes – the man at the counter barked “change!” at everyone as he asked for 20 Bolivianos. In his defence, it turns out that Bolivian money isn’t actually made there anymore (coins are made in Canada, notes in France). It has lots of paintings and collections of old coins, and the mule-driven machines used to press them.

To visit the mine and see where the silver comes from, first you have to buy presents for the miners – coca leaves, biscuits, their favoured tipple of 96% alcohol, dynamite… from the only shop in Bolivia where you can walk in and buy dynamite without any kind of permit. I was asked to help push a cart with a ton of dirt out of the mine – not because they needed the help, but to allow them to have a laugh at the stupid tourist. Still, can’t begrudge them that, they don’t have much of a life expectancy so they might as well get their entertainment when they can.

There is a stone statue of a devil in an alcove by the mine shaft, which we ducked in to to avoid them pushing one of the carts out. The miners give it offerings of coca leaves, sweets and alcohol – they drip the 96% stuff on his hands, feet and chunky wooden penis, then drink the rest. Our guide kept telling us that this aspect of the miners’ culture was from the Catholic religion, as imported by the Spaniards. I’m not entirely sure how giving offerings to an effigy of the devil squares with the teachings of the Pope, but I suppose the alcohol would probably ruin any latex contraceptive on the devil’s dong, so perhaps there is something in it after all.

Having walked down the mine shaft, over planks of wood atop gaping chasms and taken chunks of silver and zink embedded in rock as souvenirs, Tad and our mine guide rolled some of our dynamite into balls and put them in plastic bags full of mothballs before lighting the fuses and running over to an empty space and depositing them in the ground. Sadly they didn’t make a Hollywood-style fireball, but the explosions were reasonably hefty.

The bus journey to Sucre was, thankfully, mostly on actual roads. Sucre itself is a nice city, the central area being mostly comprised of white buildings. I went on a city tour, which took us out to a castle on the outskirts before coming back to walk on the roof of a church and admire the view. Sucre’s other USP is its dinosaur footprints, and the classiest way to get to them is by taking the dino bus – a truck with wooden seats on the back, and a rubber dinosaur head on the front.

They do like dinosaurs here, there are various statues of them dotted around the town. The visitor centre has more fake dinosaurs and a viewpoint to look at the footprints, which are on a solidified mud bed which has been shifted by tectonic movements so it is now nearly vertical. Some of the footprints were destroyed in a recent landslide, but the layer revealed has more, older footprints in it. The reason for the landslide? In the valley between the visitor centre and the footprints themselves, there is a huge concrete mine and they use dynamite to excavate the ground. At least the huge mining equipment gave the footprints some sense of scale, which was essential seeing as how they were so far away that you had to squint to see them.

Nearly time to say goodbye to Bolivia now, after a short flight to Santa Cruz. The surviving members of our group have said goodbye to the ones who went back to La Paz, and hello to our new guide and the new people joining us. Sadly, I’ve lost Chris, and the other single bloke who was due to join us cancelled so I’ve got my own room back. The new people seem nice (one English, one Australian, one Dutch) and Marianne the guide is a larger-than-life Brazilian with a quick wit and a merciless sense of humour. Brazil should be fun.

Shitty Island

The Inca Trail is the traditional walk to Machu Picchu, which takes three days for tourists (although there is a race every year, and one of the porters usually wins in about 3-4 hours). There is some palaver to go through first of all, since only 500 tourists are allowed to go on it every day (which means probably triple that number of actual people when you factor in all the porters carrying every piece of food for the trek, along with all the tents).

It was to be several days of early starts, with our guide Mayra and assistant guide Enrique (“like the singer”). Flood damage is still evident, and we had to get a minibus along a semi-constructed road instead of the train – the tracks next to the river had been washed away. On the Nepal trek, we were able to take 15kg in our duffel bags to be carried by the porters, but then they didn’t have to carry anything else except their own necessities. This time around, the limit was 6kg – and when you consider that the bag itself weighs about 1.5kg, that’s not a lot of extra stuff you can take. I managed to crowbar my waterproof layers, camera, sunscreen, insect repellent, coca sweeties (which sound dodgy, but aren’t) and other essentials into my day pack, and had my water bottle hanging from my shoulder in a brightly-coloured knitted cradle with fabric straps. They sell a lot of those in the markets.

Day 1 of the trek was reasonably gentle, with time to sit and look at various Inca ruins along the way. Some of our group suffered at various points with stomach problems, probably exacerbated by altitude, and impromptu toilet stops were fairly frequent for a few folk. The trek started with a passport and ticket check, then across a newly-built bridge (to replace the previous one which was washed away in the floods). There were some steep-ish bits, but luckily my legs still remembered how to walk up hills.

We stopped for lunch in a couple of large tents, complete with tables and chairs and all the places set. There were also bowls of clean water and soap for us to wash first. I didn’t realise at first that the tents weren’t there permanently, the porters had arrived ahead of us (of course) and had put them up for us to eat lunch. Among the porters are a cook, assistant cook and a waiter, and our food was pretty tasty most of the time. Soup, various chicken dishes, bread rolls, popcorn, hot water with which to make tea/coffee/hot chocolate… considering these people race uphill for hours, carrying 30kg each on their backs, then prepare everything, it makes one realise how spoiled one is.

After lunch on the first day, there was a little more uphill to negotiate before arriving at the campsite. The campsites themselves are huge, with upwards of 20 individual plots for the different groups. The porters had set up a lot of two-man tents (they themselves slept in the dining/kitchen tents), and a man had run up from the shop with a bucket full of bottles of beer he was selling for 5 soles each (just over £1). By the time it got dark (by 8pm) everyone was pretty much ready to sleep, since the starts would be getting earlier every day.

Day 2 is the mammoth one, it’s a constant uphill trek to Dead Woman Pass (4215m above sea level). This took the entire morning, having left before 7am. The group had naturally spread out by this point, and it was lucky for those of us who were nearer the front that we got to the pass just before the rain started. For the first time in five months, I got to use my waterproof trousers! Finally justified carrying them around all this time. I had been cursing them, since most people had cheap plastic rain ponchos, but I stayed a hell of a lot drier than them. Clambering down wet rocks is fun, and I got to the campsite while it was still raining and shrouded in mist – although of course it wasn’t mist, it was a cloud.

The third day has more up-and-down hiking to do, which wasn’t so much fun for the middle-aged bloke in another group who had a heart attack and had to be carried the rest of the way by porters (we saw him being stretchered away the following day in Machu Picchu itself). There were more illnesses in our group, although thankfully nothing that serious, which gave me some opportunities to try and take pictures of the hummingbirds that pop up along the way.

Our final campsite was next to a “hotel”, which had a “bar”. The inverted commas are because it’s a shack with a filthy-looking dorm with triple or quadruple bunk beds, and the bar didn’t have any beer. To buy a drink, you had to pay the borderline insane woman in the cash office, get a ticket, take the ticket to the bar, and then wait for your drink. That evening we had a ceremony for the porters, giving them all their tips and any odds and ends people could spare. The reason for doing it that night was that most of them would be heading back first thing the next morning, running back along the railway tracks.

We were woken up at 4:30, and started walking while it was still dark – and we were still among the last of the groups to leave the campsite. The sun was getting into the swing of things when we climbed up the massive stone steps to the Sun Gate, for our first view of Machu Picchu. Or it would have been, had the valley not been completely obscured by a huge cloud. We sat at the gate and waited for the sun to rise over the mountains and clear the cloud, and Machu Picchu slowly appeared before us.

While we were twiddling our thumbs, the Bosnian-Australian couple of the group sidled off and Alijen proposed to Aida. She said yes, thankfully. (Later we discovered that the other Australian couple, Shaun and Jodie, had got engaged the previous day. I’m not sure what the porters were putting in the food, but it clearly works.) The cloud had nearly dispersed when we started walking down to Machu Picchu, and our first port of call was the cafe at the bottom for a 9am burger and to meet up with the two non-trekkers of the group, who had come up by train and bus. Then Mayra took us around the ruins and told us what various parts of it were probably used for.

Hiram Bingham, who brought Machu Picchu to the attention of the world after being told about it by a local farmer in 1911, turns out to have been consistently wrong about almost everything he said about it. Never mind, though, it’s still a massive and intricate construction. It was probably abandoned when nearly completed, when the Incas realised that it wasn’t exactly safe from earthquakes (some of the stone walls are buckled and cracked by previous tremors).

Walking up to the hut at the top gives the postcard view, and it’s worth it even if your legs have had quite enough of steps just now, thank you very much. While walking away towards the Inca Bridge, I kept turning around to see it from slightly different angles. It is a stunning sight. Mind you, several Peruvians have told me that there are plenty of other Inca ruins which are at least as impressive (if not more so), but Machu Picchu is the famous one. It sounds like Angkor Wat, which I didn’t find as impressive as some of the lesser-known temples in the jungle around it.

The Inca Bridge itself is a few logs linking a path which winds its way precariously around the mountainside. The path is an average of about a metre wide, and for most of it there is no protection from falling to certain death in the valley below. All very nice, but by this time my legs were rebelling and wanted to go down to the town below. This meant a bus journey along a winding road down the mountainside, with frequent reversing to allow uphill buses to pass. The train wasn’t until later that night, so a few beers were consumed.

We arrived back in Cusco at about 1:15am, and while some of our number were flying off to the Amazon jungle for a couple of days, most of us had a few days to relax and catch up on sleep. I got a taxi with Erik and Kim to see a few holes in the ground and some salt flats, and walked from the hotel up to Sachsayhuaman and Q’enqo (sexy woman and Kenco, if you prefer), two Inca sites within a couple of miles of Cusco. Both nice, and at least you don’t have to walk for three days to get to them.

Puno next, on the shore of Lake Titicaca – at 3812m above sea level, the highest navigable lake in the world. Apparently. Apart from the thinness of the air, you can tell how high you are by the fact that the clouds are so close – a lot of the time, they look like they’re just above the lake. We had a leisurely boat ride to an island for lunch, before a chance to jump into the lake from the top of the boat. I was first, and completely failed to come to the surface wrestling one of the metre-long frogs which apparently live there. It was nice and refreshing (i.e. bloody cold).

The evening’s accommodation was a home stay in a little village on a peninsula. I was put into a house with Ronnie and Damelza, with our new brother “Richard” (I suspect the English-sounding names are for the tourists’ benefit), four of his sisters and his dad. The youngest girl Katy is two years old, and there are four more sisters who have left home to work in various cities. The mother of the family died a year ago, and the older daughters still at home have had to adopt mothering duties to the younger ones.

The guest room was a newly-built house with three beds and a toilet, which is rather fancier than the house the family actually lives in. We made a token effort to help chop potatoes before the rain started, and we were ushered into the guest room to entertain the younger children. Dinner was vegetable soup followed by a vegetable stew, and we made some attempts at conversation with our sheets of useful phrases in the Aymara language. The family also spoke some Spanish and Richard had a few words of English. Then they dressed us in Peruvian clothing (I had a poncho and a fetching multicoloured handbag with tassles, along with a hat which was far too small for my head) and marched us down to the village hall for some dancing. The villagers danced first, and then we had to copy them. It put me in mind of nothing more than being forced to do Scottish Country Dancing in first year of high school.

After saying goodbye to our host families the next morning, the boat took us to the floating Uros islands. These artificial islands are made of floating reeds, and are quite amazing. If there is a dispute between neighbours, they can lift their anchors and move somewhere else. The islands are covered with mats of reeds which have to be constantly replenished, and have watchtowers and huts to act as homes and schools. There is a seperate island for solid human waste, which is apparently called “shitty island”. There are elaborate reed catamarans which appear to have muppets for figureheads (they’re probably supposed to be pumas, but they look like Kermit the Frog) with raised platforms for fee-paying tourists to sit on while being rowed around for half an hour.

One more night in Puno, and then a trip to the Bolivian border. Kim had bought a few packets of salt from the salt flats, and I wondered about the logistics of carrying several clear plastic bags of white powder across the border, but the crossing was uneventful. We had to leave the bus to go through Peruvian immigration and then walk across the border to Bolivian immigration before getting re-embarking. It would have been ridiculously easy to just walk across the border and get back on the bus without going through either set of customs, but then you wouldn’t get the relevant stamps in your passport (and of course it would make leaving Bolivia a little tricky).

Lunch was in Copacabana, and set the standard for Bolivian food by being cheap, extremely slow to come and pretty awful. Then another bus ride to a ferry port, with the humans getting one small launch and the bus being transported across the lake on a precarious floating platform. All the buses being ferried across were perched at alarming angles, looking like they were about to disappear into the water with all our luggage. Luckily, they didn’t.

La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, and although everyone is reasonably used to the altitude by now, the pollution makes it harder to breathe. The city is located in a valley, and the elevation ranges from 3000m to 4100m. The next stage of the trip through Bolivia loses a couple of people and gains some new ones – I now have a roommate, having been lucky enough to get a single room so far.

We had our last dinner in a French restaurant, and my meal conformed to previous experience by taking a lot longer to appear than everyone else’s (even those who had ordered the same thing). After that, a few of us went to a bar in a nearby backpacker’s hostel before ending up in the “Hard Rock Cafe” (which isn’t a Hard Rock Cafe at all). Hangovers all round today, great preparation for the next leg of the trip to the Uyuni salt flats…

Harry Potter and the Sauce of Pepper

After spending some of the day wandering around Lima in a jet-lagged daze, it was time to meet the travelling companions for this part of the South America trip. There are fifteen of us, and apart from me they’re mostly Australian with a few English people and a couple of Canadians thrown in for good measure. Hello Emma, Sadie, Shawn, Jodie, James, Ruth, Damelza, Ronnie, Alijen, Aida, Eric, Kim, Michaela and Bec. Again, I’m the only lone male on this trip, so I get a single room by default. Life is tough sometimes.

Our leader for this part of the trip is a lady called Katy (pronounced “Catty”), and after the initial briefing some of us went for a few drinks. The local currency is the sol (plural: soles), although the US dollar is also used. After three months in Japan and Australia, beer is wonderfully cheap again. Actually going to a bar/restaurant is fraught with hassle, though, as representatives from each establishment try to lure you in with offers of free drinks. Once sitting outside with a beer, we were then pestered by a small child looking for change and a travelling percussionist who treated us to some thumping noises before pestering us for change.

People drive on the right in Peru, and it’s the first time I’ve had to look the wrong way before crossing the road since I was in Germany a couple of years ago. At least the driving is relatively sane, there’s a fair amount of honking and swerving and crazy manouevres but it’s not nearly as mad as Vietnam. Or France, for that matter. Our transport was a local bus to Pisco the following afternoon, which took about four hours. Katy warned us to keep our small backpacks on our laps, not in the overhead compartments or even under the seats. I was sitting next to her on the bus, and she told me that she had put her bag under her seat on one previous journey, and discovered that someone had somehow managed to crawl under the seat and slice the back of it, making off with money (although failing to dislodge her laptop).

Pisco is home to the Pisco sour, Peru’s national cocktail. Naturally these had to be tried that evening, although the fact that it takes about half an hour for them to be made is a natural limiter for how many one can drink. Not that there was much chance of that, with an early start for a visit to the Ballestas islands the next morning. The islands are inhabited by birds and sea lions, about 40 minutes from Pisco by speedboat. I was sitting right at the back, being gassed by fumes from the twin outboard motors, and wasn’t able to hear anything that Jesus said. Perhaps I should clarify that Jesus gave the running commentary from the front of the boat, although he’s a tiny man so I’m amazed he could see over the sides.

About a kilometre away from the main island, there was some relief from the engine fumes – they were drowned out by the smell of ammonia from all the guano. There are a lot of birds there, and they have yet to invent any form of sewerage system. Jesus explained what the different types were, in English and Spanish, but he was inaudible where I was sitting. There were plenty of Humbolt’s Penguins, along with various gulls, gannets, terns, skuas and sea lions.

By the late morning, we set off on a minibus to visit a Pisco distillery. It’s made with grapes, which used to be trampled into mush by foot, but is no longer prepared by this method because of the amount of foot sweat that ended up in it. Except, that is, for a festival once a year when it’s made by the traditional method. The cheerful bloke at the distillery explained the different parts of the process, then sat us down to sample the different types. Pisco itself is between 38% and 45% alcohol, and it is then sold in various different forms – the pseudo-Bailey’s proving most popular.

After consuming so much free alcohol on an empty stomach, we had lunch before going sand-boarding. I’ve done this before in New Zealand and Fiji, but neither of those involved a 15-minute white-knuckle ride across the dunes in a sand buggy. The coastal areas of Peru are incredibly barren, vast stretches of it are grey dust with no plant life to be seen. There is also a fair amount of sand, and plenty of options for tourists to go sliding down it on surf boards.

Nasca next, or Nazca – it seems to be spelled whichever way you like. On the way out to a pre-Inca cemetary in the desert, we saw Cerro Blanco rising above the mountains. It’s claimed to be the biggest sand dune in the world, at over 2000 metres high. Apparently you can go sandboarding down that too, although the walk up it wouldn’t be much fun. The cemetary itself has a bunch of submerged graves, which were discovered by gravediggers nearly 40 years ago. They took anything valuable, but left a lot of the mummies where they were. There are sun-bleached human bones and skulls littering the ground, and the dry atmosphere has preserved everything well.

The only way to see the famous Nazca lines is by air – light aircraft being a convenient method of transport. One of them apparently crashed recently, but they’ve tightened up their safety procedures since. There was a warning sign on the control panel of the Cessna 210-5 saying “No acrobatic measures, including spins, approved” – so that’s all right, then. There were four passengers (including me) and two pilots, one of whom told us what we could see below the wing. The plane banked over the famous lines so the people on one side could see them, before turning around and going back the other way. Some of the more travel-sickness-prone passengers didn’t cope too well with that.

The lines themselves are astonishing, although some of them don’t necessarily look much like what they’re supposed to. The fact that they were created by people who couldn’t see them is still puzzling, not least because of the picture of the “astronaut” on the side of a hill. Some people hold them to be ancient runways for spaceships, although surely if alien civilisations could travel the vast distances of interstellar space then they’d be able to find a parking space without having to navigate by pictures on the ground – especially since they’re mostly animals, rather than helpful directions to the nearest service station.

After the local bus and minibus, expectations weren’t high for the night bus to Arequipa. To our delight, it turned out to be pretty luxurious double-decker (with free wi-fi – although it didn’t work for long), and most of us managed to get some sleep despite what seemed to be excessively fast cornering by the driver. The road itself, although invisible through the curtains and in the darkness, had a rocky cliff face on one side and a sheer drop on the other. While half-asleep, I could feel my ears popping as we climbed.

At 3am, there was a hefty crunch, and the bus continued for a short distance before stopping. While turning a corner too fast, the top of the right hand side had scraped against a rock, which shattered most of the windows. Thankfully nobody was injured, although we were stopped in an unsafe area so had to continue for another 15 minutes or so while the remains of the windows disintegrated onto the seats. Upon reaching a layby, we all piled out of the bus while the next step was decided upon. Since a replacement bus would be hard to come by in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, the driver and his assistant poked out the last bits of shattered glass and we all then piled back on to continue the journey. It did get a little colder after that, but it wasn’t as stuffy, and the driver took the corners at more sensible speeds.

By 7am we had changed buses for the final part of the journey, and arrived in Arequipa needing sleep. The next day we had a coach trip to Chivay, passing through the mountains and stopping at a pass at 4910m (the highest point I trekked to in Nepal was just over 4000m). To combat altitude sickness, it’s recommended to chew coca leaves. No idea if they work, but the coca candies were altogether nicer. There was plenty of fluffy wildlife on display – llamas, alpacas and vicunas. They are all insanely cute. And, as I discovered at lunch time, alpacas are also very tasty. I also tried the guinea pig, but it was pretty awful. Apparently Cusco is the best place to eat guinea pig, because they’re grilled rather than fried. I might still give it a miss.

The locals have cottoned on to the fact that tourists all ooooh and aaaah at alpacas, and young girls in traditional dress walk around with baby alpacas to pose for photos. Katy strongly urged us not to give money for this, but to give them crackers or some non-sweet food instead. One girl of about 5 or 6 took her alpaca up to the bus, but those of us who were there didn’t have anything to give her. Her name was Norma. James asked her in Spanish what her alpaca’s name was. “Harry Potter”, came the reply.

There was a short walk up a nearby hill in the afternoon, to see more tombs (and human bones lying around) before a trip to the nearby hot spring baths. They weren’t massively hot, but it was big enough to swim in and you could order a drink from the pool, so I wasn’t complaining.

There was some traditional music and dancing at the restaurant later on, as I ate one of Harry Potter’s friends in pepper sauce. The first dance (accompanied by a Peruvian band with bass guitar, drums, ukelele-type-thing and pan pipes) was strangely reminiscent of Scottish country dancing. This odd familiarity was destroyed by the next dance, which involved the bloke grimacing under a two-foot-high hat decorated with metal plates with coins on strings bashing against them, while the woman had a life-size plastic baby doll strapped to her back.

Colca Canyon was the following morning’s amusement, which is claimed to be the deepest canyon in the world. It’s more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, which (as I discovered at King’s Canyon) isn’t actually a canyon at all, it’s a gorge. Still paying attention at the back? There will be an exam later. After a short walk along the edge, we arrived at a viewpoint to look out for Andean condors. Four condors obliged by soaring up the canyon on thermals, and with a wingspan of around (or more than) three metres they are difficult to mistake for anything else.

Hopefully everyone should be acclimatised to the altitude now, in preparation for the Inca trail. We may need to stock up on coca sweeties though.

One… two… FREEDOM!!!1!

There are four train services run by Great Southern Rail, and only three of them were covered by my rail pass – those three being the Indian Pacific (Perth – Kalgoorlie – Adelaide – Sydney), the Ghan (Adelaide – Alice Springs – Darwin) and the Overland (Adelaide – Melbourne). There is another mysterious service mentioned on their literature, though, the Southern Spirit (Brisbane – Sydney – Melbourne – Adelaide – Alice Springs). I had often wondered about that one, and why I couldn’t get on one of those trains. Then I found out the answer – it’s a new service aimed at the discerning traveller, and it is basically a horrendously expensive luxury rail tour which takes at least two weeks. On top of that, it only seems to run about twice a year. It doesn’t even have the Red carriages that plebs like me use.

A word about the rail pass, for anyone who’s interested – in theory, it’s great. In practice, not so much. Train journeys must be booked in advance, and if you’re not sure what’s going to happen tomorrow then this isn’t ideal. Nothing that a bit of forward planning can’t sort out, mind you, but then when you do try to book them a long time in advance, you might come up against a hurdle which isn’t mentioned in the brochure…

I had phoned Great Southern Rail from the car park at the “Twelve” Apostles to book a seat from Melbourne to Adelaide and thence Adelaide to Sydney. (You have to carefully time your phone calls to coincide with Adelaide office hours, not ideal on a continent with at least three different time zones.) I was told that there were seats available on both trains, and then during the conversation the helpful lady said “oh, is it a Rail Explorer pass you have? I’m sorry, that train is fully booked.” I guess that only a certain number of seats on each train are allocated to people with rail passes, then.

There are, of course, many advantages to this method of travel across Australia. Train journeys are great, and looking out of the window at the vast expanses of incredibly varied countryside (and wildlife) never gets dull. On the other hand, you have to contend with the choice of information and music that is piped into the carriage against your will. Inbetween jaw-droppingly awful selections of wailing whiny pop music and Australian country ‘n’ western music (if you’ve never heard it, it manages to be even worse than it sounds like it would be) are interviews with ordinary Australians about life in different places.

The music is too loud – although nothing that some good earphones and carefully-chosen angry shouty music can’t fix – and the information segments are too quiet. On my final Indian Pacific segment from Adelaide to Sydney, I was sitting directly underneat the loudspeaker, and could just about hear it. I got up to get a cup of water from the dispenser about two metres away from where I was sitting, and I coudn’t hear it anymore.

Anyway, I got the Overland from Melbourne to Adelaide, and stayed there one final night. Annie’s Place in Adelaide gave me flashbacks by playing the same music that Annie’s Place in Alice Springs had on repeat in the bar – some sort of Starbucks-endorsed acoustic compilation abomination, I think. At least one of the girls working in the Alice Springs branch hijacked the music and put on some decent stuff at any available opportunity.

The final leg of the great train journey was Adelaide to Sydney, meaning that the only part I missed was Alice Springs – Darwin on the Ghan (and that was only because the train tracks were washed away by the floods). It stopped at Broken Hill for a couple of hours, allowing passengers to wander around the town. Unfortunately it was Good Friday, so almost everything was closed. At least there were some intriguing street names (Bromide Street, Sulphide Street, Oxide Street) and an incongruous memorial to the band on the Titanic which was apparently erected because of the town’s links with… er… music. Or something. Also, Subway was open so I was able to have some food that was better than the indigestion-inducing microwaved snacks that pass for “food” on the train.

I also had a chance to overhear a conversation between two Australians who were sitting behind me. Well, I say “had a chance”, I really mean “had no choice”.  The older one with no teeth discussed his legal woes, which stemmed from renting a room in the house of someone who was taking videos of the bedroom this bloke and his missus were using. In retaliation, he stole a lot of this bloke’s stuff and sold it at Cash Converters. Unfortunately for him, he also made hundreds of threatening phone calls to the guy’s answering machine, which were then reported to the police. He got probation and community service, the terms of both of which he subsequently broke, but confidently asserted that since he hadn’t been back in 10 years then it should be OK by now.

His incredibly camp young hippy friend (dreadlocks, of course) sympathised with his plight inbetween musing on the best way to separate the codeine from paracetamol in co-codamol tablets, and “thinking you could dose someone’s contact lenses with acid without them knowing”. The older guy talked about his woes about having his doctor cut off his supply of dihydrocodeine because he was selling them, and that he could have continued to get them had he got them daily and supervised in a pharmacy. Ah, it’s just like being back in Dundee.

I was also spoken at by a self-professed street performer, who was wandering around the dining car speaking to anyone who would listen – or, in my case, clearly didn’t want to. He told me about his Scottish friend who is also a street performer, and has a skit where he counts in different languages. When he gets to Scotland, he goes “one… two… FREEDOM!”

“Hilarious,” I said.

“Really?” the street performer replied.

“No,” I clarified. I’m not sure if it was this or the “keep talking to me and I will kill you” stare I was giving him that compelled him to bugger off shortly after this exchange. He tapped me on the arm and tried to talk to me the next day while I was buying breakfast, for all the world as if I was his best friend. I just ignored him.

The train wound its way through the Blue Mountains, treating us to some amazing morning views through the windows, and then to Sydney. For the first time since leaving the UK, I was staying in a place I’d been to before – in actual fact, staying in the same hostel. It hasn’t changed at all, although it seems smaller. On the Saturday night I met up with a few folk who post on the b3ta messageboard from Australia (hello gronkpan, k3b/-\b and Colonel Boris), and went to a Korean barbecue place for dinner. And then prepared for the longest day of travelling so far…

Monday the 5th of April started early, I got up and got the train to the airport (there is a shuttle bus which is slightly cheaper, but probably a less pleasant journey). My connecting flight to Buenos Aires was delayed by over an hour, but this didn’t worry me too much – mainly because the next flight to Lima left eight hours after I was due to arrive in Argentina.

Thanks to the international date line, I was due to take off at 10:30am, fly for over 13 hours and then land at 10:50am the same day. In that 20 minutes, I managed to get a small amount of sleep and watch three and a half films: Avatar (I failed to see it in 3D, and decided to watch it on the tiny screen to see if it’s as amazing as people say it is without the 3D effects. Verdict: impressive, but James Cameron really should let someone else polish his scripts); The Men Who Stare At Goats (amusing, and thank goodness Ewan McGregor didn’t try to imitate Jon Ronson’s voice); Inglourious Basterds (which I’d seen before, but just wanted to see the “bongiorno” scene again); and The Hurt Locker (which I didn’t see all of because it was time to land, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Avatar).

I then spent eight hours wandering around Buenos Aires airport, trying to stay awake. On arrival, I had to give my details and baggage claim number to a representative of  Lan Chile, despite my luggage already having been checked through to Lima. This was so they could make sure they got it. Despite this less-than-confidence-inspiring requirement, my bag did indeed arrive in Lima on the same flight as me. Then the next potential hurdle had to be averted – the Quantas woman in Sydney had told me that if I didn’t already have a flight ticket from Peru then I’d have to buy one on the spot or be deported immediately. I’m flying from Brazil, not Peru. She said that should probably be OK then. She was talking out of her arse, there was no problem. Anyway, I had recently read about the amount of money the country lost every day while Machu Picchu was closed, so they’re hardly going to want to get rid of tourists before they’ve had a chance to spend any money.

I’ve just worked out that (apart from a couple of brief naps on the planes, which can’t have amounted to more than an hour or two) I was awake for about 33 hours yesterday. No wonder I’m tired.

The uncertain number of Apostles

After collecting Lizzie the car, first port of call was the nearest electical shop to get a cable to connect my mp3 player to the stereo (and also a newsagent to buy a map, but this was of secondary importance). Thus armed against disorientation and Australian radio, I set off to Eden.

Calling somewhere Eden could be considered to be tempting fate somewhat, but it turned out to be a lovely  place. It’s set on a peninsula sticking out of the south-east of Australia, and has a long beach which was being battered by choppy waves when I had a look. Since there was a backpackers hostel there, I decided to stay overnight in Eden rather than try my luck somewhere in the middle of nowhere later on. One of the other guests was travelling with a toy monkey who has his own Facebook page, so I felt slightly less mad for having given Hedrin Bear his own profile a few days earlier.

Eden is also home to the killer whale museum, a small but fascinating place to spend an hour or two. Pride of place is the skeleton of Old Tom, leader of a pod of orcas who swam into port to alert the whalers that there were whales around, and then led them to their quarry. Once harpooned, the whalers would allow the orcas to eat their tongues and lips before dragging them back to harvest the blubber and oil. This co-operation between man and orca has never been documented anywhere else in the world. Tom was found washed up on the beach, local opinion being that he came home to die, and after that no other orcas took his place and the co-operation ended. Of course, Australia is now an anti-whaling nation. Strangely enough, I didn’t notice any whaling museums being advertised when I was in Japan – or any mention of whaling, for that matter. It’s almost as if they don’t want to remind foreign tourists about it.

I spent a lot of the next day driving, having decided to swing past Wilsons Promentary on my way to Melbourne. It’s a national park on a peninsula to the south, and by the time I was approaching it it was time to find somewhere to sleep. After a few aborted attempts in Yarrow (everywhere was either full or looked pretty dodgy) I eventually found somewhere in a small town called Foster. The nearby chippie did garlic chicken balls and a portion of chips which would burst a horse. That’s something I’ve noticed about Australia, when you ask for a portion of chips they just keep shovelling the damn things until you have at least twice as many as you’d ever eat.

It was a grey, drizzly morning when I drove down to the peninsula. There was a bush fire last year, and most of the trees are blackened by the fires – but still alive, and sprouting new growth. Fires are an essential part of life here, many plants only release their seeds when exposed to extreme heat. The undergrowth was destroyed, but has sprouted back by now. Since the sky was the same colour as the sand underfoot, it was a stunning sight – all black, green and grey. The only other splashes of colour were occasional bright red globules of hardened sap on the tree trunks.

I walked up to Mount Bishop (from the Lilly Pilly Gully car park) to see the view from the top – nice, but obscured by cloud and drizzle – then started driving again. The aim was to find somewhere near the start of the Great Ocean Road and stay there for a couple of nights, but I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to negotiate Melbourne from one end to the other during the late-afternoon rush hour.

Melbourne is a huge city for its population – instead of being built upwards like most cities, it has just spread out over the years and the suburbs cover a huge area. The road went from the Australian standard of single lanes (with occasional short overtaking lanes) to two, then four and five lane motorways. This is all very well and good, but when Bruce and Sheila are used to driving their ute 300km down a dirt track to the nearest shop, they aren’t going to have a clue how to deal with a road like that. Standard Australian driving on large motorways seems to be: find a lane and stick to it, then go as fast or as slow as you like. Undertaking was as common as overtaking.

The traffic got thicker nearer the city centre, and when it looked like I was approaching a toll road I diverted onto another highway through the city and found myself heading west, more by luck than by judgement. I escaped Melbourne unscathed, arrived in Geelong (about 70km west of Melbourne) at 5:30-ish and decided to base myself there for the Great Ocean Road drive, since it was starting to get late and I hadn’t booked any accommodation.

This might have been a mistake, because Geelong is a dump – a surprisingly large city with precisely no redeeming features. Having failed to find any cheap places to stay while driving around (plenty of motels, but I was looking for a hostel since I figured there was a decent chance of finding a passenger or two to do the Great Ocean Road and split fuel costs with) so I had my evening meal in McDonalds and made use of their free wi-fi. The only hostel in Geelong is a hotel in town which is more well-known as a bar and live music venue and advertises “backpacker-style accommodation”.

I asked at the bar if they had a dorm bed available for two nights, and the young lady scrutinised an almost entirely empty ledger for a minute or two before confirming that they did. Many hostels have a key deposit (usually $10 or $20) which is returned when you check out. This place had a bond for the room, which was either my passport or $100. Call me sentimental, but I have a strange attachment to my passport and decided to go for the cash option. First, though, I asked what time they opened for check-out in the morning. “About ten o’clock” was the answer. I said that this wouldn’t work, because I’d be leaving at about 7am on the Friday. She promised to get back to me the next day with a solution to this little problem.

The dorm room had two other blokes in it – Australian, middle-aged, one of them snoring with what sounded like a combination of lung problems that would have felled a lesser man. They had both been there for a while, and the room reeked. I opened the window to let some air in, and went down to the TV lounge and dining room (above the pub). Two French girls had checked in just after me, and were responding to the standard of accommodation with espressions of disbelief – probably similar to the one on my face. I abandoned the idea of recruiting any passengers for the drive the next day, they were the only candidates and they weren’t interested in speaking English to anyone. To be honest, I can’t say I blamed them.

I watched A Current Affair with one of my dorm-mates, and the main story was the star of a sitcom in the 70s whose female co-star had just publicly accused him of touching her up during filming of the show, when she was about nine years old.  I have mentioned A Current Affair before, it makes Brass Eye look like Panorama (although the dear old BBC have been doing their best to do this as well in recent years, but I digress). It’s tabloid TV that treats its audience as if it has an IQ under 80, and it’s distressingly popular.

While teasing the audience with all the sick and shocking allegations that numerous women had come out of the woodwork to make against this man, my roommate opined that somebody should “shoot the c***”. Now if these allegations are true, I’d probably agree. Since at the moment they are unproven allegations, surely it would be better to find out if they’re true first, rather than just a bunch of gossip-hungry ACA viewers desperate for attention and a fat pay cheque from the tabloids for their possibly made-up stories? It’s hypocritical titillation dressed up as news, and it’s sickening. At least the UK’s “news” outlets haven’t quite descended to this level, although it’s a close run thing.

Anyway, I left early the next morning to drive out to the Great Ocean Road. I stopped in Torquay for breakfast, and had a look at the beaches there. Australia certainly has a lot of beaches, and many of them seem to be quite nice. No time to go for a swim though, there was a lot of kilometres to cover. Soon after Torquay, the Great Ocean Road started properly, with a wooden arch over the road and a few statues and plaques. I had no idea of the history – it was built as a memorial to people from Victoria who had served in the first world war. The Great Ocean Road trust was founded in 1917 to build the road and provide employment for 3000 returned servicemen.

Now more than 1.2 million vehicles pass under the arch every year, to see the landscapes, seascapes, national parks and nature reserves and savour “one of the most beautiful ocean drives in the world”. It was a hot day, and air was hazy in the morning before it cleared up in the afternoon. The road itself… well, it’s pretty good. I’ve driven on more exciting roads, but it is a very long road next to the sea – except for the bits which go through the jungle, which seems to be about half of it. Never mind, though, the sections on the coast are great fun, with plenty of places to park and see the view while an Israeli family in a camper van parks behind you and blocks you in.

I took a slight detour to Cape Otway to climb the lighthouse. I had to wait near the top until the class of schoolchildren were finished being spoken to by their teacher and then filed down the spiral staircase, and enjoyed the look of slight panic on the face of the one who had tried to spit on me from the top a couple of minutes earlier. Again, the view from the lighthouse was rather obscured by the haze, but it’s probably wonderful on a clear day. I resisted the temptation to spit on the schoolchildren from the top.

There is a plaque near the lighthouse commemorating Frederick Valentich, a 20-year-old pilot who disappeared over the Bass Straight while flying from Melbourne to King Island on 21/10/78. His last recorded words before his radio cut off at 7:12pm were “that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again, and it is not an aircraft…” No trace of him or his Cessna VH-DSJ were ever found.

On the way back to rejoin the Great Ocean Road I stopped near a collection of parked cars and gawping humans. I had seen them on the way to the lighthouse, and guessed that they were looking at koalas. Indeed they were, and I was able to get a good look at a few of them hanging around in branches and not moving. They do seem to be living the good life.

I had an early-afternoon lunch in Port Cambpell from the unfriendliest fish & chip shop I’ve ever encountered, then started back to visit Loch Ard Gorge. The gorge is cut into sandstone by the sea, and is named after a ship which was wrecked there. It’s very pretty, and I would happily have spent time visiting more of the area but the afternoon was wearing on so I continued towards the Twelve Apostles. There aren’t actually twelve of them, but never mind. The Apostles are limestone columns jutting from the sea – like the Old Man of Hoy, but more numerous and less sturdy (two of them have been destroyed by erosion in the last five years, although one of them apparently wasn’t considered to be an Apostle). Very impressive, but I didn’t bother trying to count them – to be honest, it’s not at all clear what’s supposed to be an Apostle and what isn’t.

After that, the long drive back along the road to Geelong. Still a stunning drive, but being stuck behind people going 20km/h below the speed limit (with very few overtaking lanes) does get a bit wearing. There was a band playing in the venue directly below my bedroom (until about 3am, apparently, although I still managed to sleep through it). After a couple of pointed enquiries, the staff kindly gave me my $100 back in the evening so I could check out early and get my car back to Melbourne for 10am.

Negotiating the morning rush hour on the Friday of the Grand Prix weekend proved not as stressful as I had anticipated – the traffic slowed down in a few places, but I managed to find my way to the rental place with over an hour to spare. After watching some of the practice sessions on the TV (and hearing the cars from a couple of miles away – they are astonishingly loud) I went out in the evening to meet up with Sylvia, Libby and Maeve from Tasmania (not from Tasmania, etc.) and a few other folk to have drink or three.

I had to change hostel in the morning, accommodation being a bit of a pain in the arse on Grand Prix weekend (and with the International Flower and Garden Show and Comedy Festival also running). That evening the Irish girls invited us to see an Irish comedian, by the very Irish name of David O’Doherty. He had some very funny bits in his show, and some very meh bits. Entertaining, though. I nearly didn’t get to see him though, if I’d kept waiting for my trout from the cafe/restaurant in Federation Square then I’d probably still be there now. Never mind, they took it off the bill – not that we could tell, because they gave us someone else’s bill. It was less than ours, so we paid it anyway. Normally I would never do such a thing, but the level of customer service they had shown justified it.

Sunday was Grand Prix day, and also time to move into my next temporary accommodation – cousin Julie and Mark’s place. Julie took me to Queen Victoria market to look at all the tacky tourist nonsense, before heading home via the supermarket and bottle shop with a lamb chop and a load of beer and wine. Mark cooked a wonderful lamb roast, despite his disappointment at Mark Webber failing to win yet another Aussie GP. Never mind, there’s always next year.

Your eyes are precious

I arrived in Tasmania trying to stop singing the theme song to the Looney Tunes cartoon under my breath, and almost succeeded.  Tasmania is known as being more like Scotland or New Zealand than the rest of Australia, and indeed it is very green and hilly. I was treated to some drizzle on the first night, which made a nice change to the abrupt tropical downpoars of Darwin.

Hobart airport is, of course, nowhere near Hobart itself. After nearly half an hour on a shuttle bus, I was deposited outside the Pickled Frog backpackers – easily identified because the whole building has been painted green. It also has its own cheap bar, and cheap wi-fi (when it works).

After looking into options for travelling around, I decided pretty quickly that the best way to do it is by car. There are tours, but they’re extortionate, and I’ve done quite enough tours already in the last couple of weeks. I got talking to Sylvia, a retired social worker from Durham, one of the other guests in the hostel. She had arranged to hire a car for a week, and I booked the passenger seat for a couple of days before I was due to fly back to the mainland.

I had a wander around Hobart for the rest of the day and planned the itinerary (up the east coast to Freycinet National Park and the Bay of Fires, before dumping me in Launceston on Thursday afternoon to get the bus back to Hobart). By the time I met Sylvia again in the evening, she had filled another seat in the car with Sang from Canada. We sampled a few of the local Cascade brewery’s finest, before retiring to get a good night’s sleep, and escape from the insane Italian woman who had clearly spent far more of her 40-odd years under a sunbed than was advisable, and dressed like a fashion-conscious twenty-something slapper.

When the morning arrived, Sang trailed her bags to the Pickled Frog from the hostel she was staying in, and Sylvia and I got a taxi to the car hire place. The first problem was that her booking had been lost in the ether – she had the receipt from the tourist information centre where she booked it, but Peter at the car hire company had apparently neglected to make a note of it. And there were no more cars available. So off we trailed to another street full of rental places, and secured a two-door Toyota something. I’m not big on car types, but it was red.

The car stereo had an input for a headphone connecter to an mp3 player, but none of us had the relevant cable. So it was radio all the way, which made for a fun journey. We got the important business of naming the car out of the way early on – it had the letters B, B and Q in the registration, so we named her Shrimpie in honour of the old “throw another shrimp on the barbie” cliche and the Australian habit of shortening words to one syllable and adding “ie” or “o” on the end.

Roads in Tasmania are rarely straight, and frequently uphill. Dear little Shrimpie did her best, but her engine can’t have been much bigger than 1L and I found myself offering her encouragement and patting the dashboard as she struggled to get to the top in second or third gear.

Sylvia was doing all the driving, since I was abandoning the journey the next day and Sang doesn’t drive. It seems that hire cars always have the opposite gearbox to what you want – Sylvia favours automatics, and Shrimpie was a manual. Any time I’ve hired a car, I’ve been landed with an automatic when I’d much rather be in control of what gear I’m in. The roads reminded me of New Zealand a few years ago, when I owned the Mitsubishi Galant for six weeks – nice car, but you really don’t want an automatic on those kind of roads. You go down a short incline, the car panics and shifts you into a low gear and the engine suddenly starts screaming.

We stopped for lunch in a small town, the name of which escapes me, and had some local fish and chips from a van before visiting the landscaped gardens and driving on to Freycinet National Park. It was an overcast day, so the view of Wineglass Bay probably wasn’t as spectacular as it could have been, but it was still a wonderful sight after climbing the hill for 45-odd minutes to look at it.

Late in the afternoon, the in-car entertainment was Star FM, a local radio station based in St Helens. Listening to it gave me the feeling that I was in The Shining, and we were driving up to the Overlook Hotel. None of the songs played were recorded after 1946, and they were interspersed by the DJ reading out promotional messages from the station’s sponsors – local businesses who were plugging their current bargains. Unfortunately the DJ couldn’t read and speak at the same time, and stumbled over the adverts in a jaw-dropping manner. My favourite advert, though, was pre-recorded by the business owner. It was for a local optician, and finished with the immortal words “your eyes are precious – after all, the movie of your life story is shot through your eyes.”

Our stop for the night was St Helens, in a backpacker place run by a slightly odd bloke. It was St Patrick’s Day, and there were three Irish girls in the dorm as well, so we all decamped to what passed for the local pub for drinks. One of the girls had persuaded them to bedeck the place with green decorations and a couple of leprechauns, and the music had a bit of an Irish bent – well, they played a couple of U2 songs, anyway. Later on a local woman started singing Johnny Cash songs accompanied by a bloke on guitar. When I say “singing”, I mean “howling like a stricken wombat”. The closest comparison that came to mind was Margherita Pracatan, who was featured on Clive James’ TV show in the early 1990s, and nobody else knew who I was talking about.

Our table was joined by a staring-eyed local drunk, who periodically tried to join in the conversation only to be hampered by being approximately five seconds late with his comments and being so pissed that nobody understood a word he said. Shortly after he sat down (opposite me), he vomited all over his crotch, then got up to get another drink. The staff continued to serve him all night, and when the girls commented that it must be illegal to serve someone so drunk, he made one of his few coherent interjections with “this is Tasmania”. (His other coherent interjection was when the subject of conspiracy theories was raised, and he informed all present that the CIA was behind the 9/11 attacks.)

With some hangovers bigger than others, the next day Shrimpie took us to the Bay of Fires. It was very nice, but to be honest I don’t remember too much about it because I’d stayed up drinking with the Irish sisters. The rocks had a lot of red bits on them, I think.That’s not why it’s called the Bay of Fires, though, it was because the first explorers saw lots of fires lit by Aboriginals when they sailed past.

There was much more driving during the day, since the windy roads take so long to travel along. We went up and down hills, and through primordial-looking forests with massive ferns lining the road. I wouldn’t have been shocked to see a brontosaurus wandering into the road in front of us. An unexpected highlight was the small town of Derby’s Tin Mine Museum, which had a surprisingly high-tech widescreen show telling the story of the disaster when the dam burst and flooded the town (and the mine).

Upon arriving in Launceston, it was time for me to bid farewell to Shrimpie, Sylvia and Sang. I wished them luck and got the coach back to the Pickled Frog before heading to the airport for my plane back to Canberra the next day.

I was picked up at the airport by Katherine, one of the staff at Campbell Pharmacy. This particular pharmacy belongs to Andrew, my housemate in Bournemouth sometime in the last century. I spent the afternoon visiting the Anzac memorial and museum. I arrived late and couldn’t see much of the museum, but it closed with a lament played by a piper in full Scottish regalia. I did speak to him beforehand and asked what tartan his kilt was, but he didn’t understand my accent.

Saturday afternoon’s fun was a visit to Cockington Village, a hilariously tacky miniature town which is right off the “so bad it’s good” scale. Half of it is British-themed, and the models are commendably well made – even if the plaques beside it trumpet information along the lines of thatched cottages being commonplace throughout Britain. The other half is international, and has replicas of buildings from around the world.

On Sunday, Andrew drove us to Jervis Bay to go dolphin watching. The town of Amity – sorry, I mean Huskisson – was our base, and we arrived in good time despite at least 30km of the main road consisting of gravel. Just like New Zealand again. Other people on the boat told us that it was a great day for seeing dolphins, we saw a lot of them swimming up to the boat and playing alongside us. I mentioned to Andrew that it would be impossible to get a shot of one of them jumping out of the water because you would need to be pointing the camera in the right place and happen to press the button at exactly the right time. Shortly after that, I got a total fluke picture of one jumping out of the water.

We also paid a quick visit to a few other attractions further south, culminating in a visit to Wreck Bay to see the wrecked lighthouse (hmm, wonder why there are so many wrecks there?). The visit was delayed by the snake slithering across the path in front of us, we decided to give it right of way.

Having planned to make my way back to Melbourne next weekend, all I had to do was work out how. I had a half-hearted look at Greyhound bus prices, although I’d rather slit my own wrists than sit in one of those again. The best way seemed to be to hire a car, and then I could do the Great Ocean Road as well. So I hired another Toyota something  for the next four days (registration ends in LZE, so she has to be Lizzie).

It’s a manual, thank God.

Thinking outside the box

After recovering from the Friday night following the three preceding days, most of the Uluru/Kings Canyon group had gone off to new destinations at some point on the Saturday. I was left twiddling my thumbs and waiting for another early start on the Sunday, to start a six-day tour up to Darwin and around Kakadu National Park. It was either that or try and get booked onto the once-weekly train, if the tracks had been repaired.

So at 5am I got up and ready to be picked up by the next bus, on which the driver/guide was also called Jess. Must be a common name for tour guides in this part of the world. It must be said that the journey between Alice Springs and Katherine does contain an awful lot of not much, but such is the life when traversing a continent. A lot of the group on the bus seemed to have already travelled together, but Jess initiated a “speed-dating” system whereby everyone sat next to someone they hadn’t spoken to and talked to them until she sounded the horn. There was the usual mix of German and Dutch (both outnumbered by the Danes, unusually), Maltese, Portugese, Canadian [coincidentally, Nicole was one of the Canadian girls on the Ghan I mentioned in this nonsense a couple of weeks ago], Welsh, English… I think that covers everyone, apologies if I’ve missed any out.

During these initial conversations, Alison (English) warned me that Fred*, the man from Malta (who has lived in Melbourne for decades), was a little bit… strange. Nice guy, but tells everyone about energy and beliefs and his healing abilities and so on. I said that it might not be an idea for me to speak to him while I was sleep-deprived and in a bad mood. I did, however, talk to him on the bus. He’s a man somewhere in his 50s, wears long sleeves and trousers all the time (all the better to discourage mosquitos) and has a multi-coloured handkerchief draped over his bald head, held in place by a mesh baseball cap. When he talks to you, he has a nervous twitch and blinks his eyes in an exaggerated manner as he stares into your soul.

The Devil’s Marbles are massive almost-spherical granite baubles sitting on the ground and each other, dyed red (like much of the rock in Australia) by the iron oxide in the sand. Quite otherworldly things. Some of them have cracked open like massive eggs. I don’t want to think about what hatched from them. Anyway, Fred asked Jess if they were the same kind of rock as Uluru. Jess didn’t know, but I’d already read the information boards and was able to tell him that they were in fact made of granite.

To make conversation with my Maltese friend, I casually mentioned that granite is slightly more radioactive than many other rocks, and that Aberdeen in Scotland (the city of my forebears and my further education) has a lot of granite buildings and consequently has a higher level of background radiation than other places in the UK.

“There’s radiation? Oh, so there are a lot of problems, then, isn’t it?” he replied.

“No, it’s just background radiation. There is radiation everywhere, there’s just slightly more of it in Aberdeen.”

“Or is that what they tell you because they want to keep the business?”

So there you have it, Aberdeen City Council is the nexus of a vast conspiracy to deny the existence of damaging radiation in order to promote business. For God’s sake, nobody tell any of the oil companies. Or Donald Trump.

That evening, we stayed in permanent tents. Fairly hefty constructions with a metal frame and wooden floor, with heavy beds in them. The campsite had a dining room and kitchen with electricity, so we ate and had a few beers on the verandah and watched the rain approaching in the distance, huge curtains of falling water coloured bright red by the sunset. The lightning and thunder started soon after the sun disappeared. When the rain arrived at the camp, it was accompanied by a single huge gust of wind which blew over the tent two along from mine (and partially destroyed the tent next to mine).

During the shower, Fred and I discussed some things. He’s big on the power of belief, and if you believe in anything strongly enough then it will come true. Also that we live on a planet of abundance, that animals want to be eaten, and that people should be able to do whatever they want. He rarely eats in the evenings. Like a lot of people who continually try and force their bizarre beliefs on others, he hates organised religion for doing the same – although in his case, he also blames it for polluting human minds with the concept of guilt, which is an artificial emotion.

I argued that there seemed to be a need for the concept of guilt, to prevent people doing something which would be detrimental to the survival of their tribe/species/whatever. I was in a bad mood and couldn’t be bothered with all this bullshit, and surprised myself with how extreme and confrontational my example was – I said that if (purely hypothetically) I decided I wanted to kill him, his philosophy meant that I could do just that and should feel no guilt afterwards. To his credit, he took it in good spirit, but said something woolly about the conventions of the tribe, or something, and that if I did indeed kill him then he was obviously attracting this energy and he deserved it.

After this, our conversation moved to his efforts in the last couple of years to convert water into fuel by separating the hydrogen and oxygen. I was intrigued by how he was attempting to do this, and mentioned the first law of thermodynamics – broadly, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to the other; if you burn hydrogen it combines with oxygen to create water and releases a lot of energy. If you want to reverse this process, you need to put an equal amount of energy back in.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “you have to throw all that away and think outside the box.”

As far as I could tell, his efforts to turn water into fuel had not been successful. Even if they had been, however, he would probably have been murdered by scientists who wanted to keep his breakthrough secret. I questioned the way he apparently embraces selective ignorance as a virtue (why blithely discard one of the basic laws of physics, and yet still happily accept that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen rather than magic pixie dust?) but his answer to that is that we humans instinctively know the truth, and science distracts from it. He used to be able to make people numb by holding his hands over their flesh, but apparently he lost that ability a few years ago for some reason.

I resolved not to get into any more discussions of that nature with him. And to be fair, we did get on fine when I shut him down any time he tried to raise the subject of his beliefs with me. I just kept telling him I wasn’t in the mood for a debate.

Our other entertaining stops involved a short stay in Daly Waters, the fastest growing town in Australia. Its population has increased by 50% in the last six months, three more people moved there. There’s a pub, the Northern Territory’s first international airport (from WWII) and the old jail. One of the nine locals gave us a tour, beer in hand. He also showed us a couple of bower bird nests. One of the birds favoured green glass to attract women, the other nest was deserted but had a silver colour scheme. Girls like emeralds, I guess.

We also had a chance to swim in a hot spring, which was at the end of a ten-minute walk through a forest full of bats. Hundreds of thousands of bats. That was another thing which was quite special to walk through, although they were accompanied by hundreds of thousands of mosquitos, and the hot spring itself was colder than the water from the cold taps in that part of the world.

There was a boat cruise up Katherine Gorge, and thanks to all the recent rain it had plenty of seasonal waterfalls which only exist for a short time every year. The gorge itself is stunning, the sheer rock walls interrupted by mini-rainforests surviving in their own microclimate in the gaps. The rains hadn’t been as bad as they were in 1998, when the town of Katherine was under several metres of water and was taken over by man-eating salt-water crocodiles. Having passed through Katherine, I can only imagine that was an improvement.

After the boat cruise, we had lunch next to a swimming pool. Fred and I had a discussion about body parts – it started when I said that if a crocodile ate my legs, I’d have them replaced by kangaroo legs and would be able to win gold at the Olympic hurdles. He asked if there was any other animal body part I would like, and I answered that yes, there was: the nictating membrane, the transparent eyelid some animals have which enables them to protect their eyes and see underwater. Fred told me that if I believed in it strongly enough, I could evolve and grow them in my lifetime. I replied that I used to believe I could do things like that when I was a small child, but then I grew up, and that perhaps my mind had been corrupted by the adult world.

After lunch, Fred approached me. “You know what you said about how you used to believe things like that as a child?” Yes, I replied. “That’s how I want to think. Like a child.” There was a deep sadness in his eyes. I can’t help but think that something horrible has happened to him. It would explain a lot.

In the afternoon we stopped at Adelaide Waters, and met Charlie. Charlie is the water buffalo that Michael J “Crocodile” Dundee tamed in the road in the first film. He was a pet in the pub, and the tradition was that if anyone bought a beer, they had to buy one for Charlie as well, and he would down it in a fraction of a second. Eventually, for some reason, the alcoholic buffalo died. He was frozen and shipped to America to be stuffed. When he was defrosted, all his hair fell out, and had to be replaced at a cost of $10 000. When he was returned to sit on the bar in Adelaide Waters, his horns got in the way of the fans on the ceiling, so the locals cut the lower parts off his legs and stitched his feet onto his knee stumps. He seems happy now.

I didn’t see much of Darwin itself, we arrived in the evening and left early the next morning. There was time for a few drinks and a free meal, and some stupid games for the benefit of the tourists. I volunteered for one, along with a couple of locals and Nicole, Alison and Louise (Welsh) from the bus. It turned out to be a “so you think you can dance” competition, and everyone had about 30 seconds of a particular style of music to dance to. The winner would be chosen by the cheers of everyone else in the pub. I was given 50′s/60′s pop, and for reasons I still can’t fathom, I won. Two jugs of beer, though, not to be sniffed at.

We had a relatively leisurely start the next morning, meeting the bus at 6:20am. Most of the group was the same, although we lost a few people and gained some – including a Dutch couple, an Australian couple, and Fred’s wife. I had been looking forward to meeting her, having come to the conclusion that Fred is actually quite a sweet bloke. They spent most of the next couple of days bickering with each other.

The guide for this leg of the journey was not, in fact, called Jess. It wasn’t even a woman! It was a Kiwi named Carl. We went to Litchfield National Park and jumped in and out of rock pools for a couple of hours, before going for a crocodile cruise. This involved sitting in a boat while the driver dangled a hunk of meat on a stick for salt water crocodiles to leap out of the water and grab. These things can fair jump, they propel themselves out of the water with such force that well over half their body is pointing upwards above the surface, with a huge pair of gaping jaws at the business end. The warning about not sticking your arm over the side of the boat was heeded by all.

The next two days were spent in Kakadu National Park, visiting rock art sites and playing in more rock pools and waterfalls. Kakadu has a lot of plains and rocky hills with a variety of flora and fauna to see/hear, and is quite wonderful. Motorcar falls was the highlight for me, a clear pool with handholds in the waterfall. It’s possible to climb into the rushing water and sit or stand in the waterfall, and I spent most of the time trying to get higher up.

In the afternoon we went to a smaller rock pool with a little waterfall, and I tried to get close to it but didn’t think it was possible. At that point, Carl swam up and said “hey, are the snakes still there?” Apparently he’d climbed in behind the waterfall the previous week, and then a German guy had done the same, and then a Dutch girl had followed. She then jumped out screaming that there were two snakes behind the waterfall. “It’s OK, they’re about a metre away from you,” Carl reassured me. Getting behind the waterfall involved lying down on the rock, reaching through to grab any handhold you could find and pulling yourself in. I was a little reluctant to go grabbing around blindly, but eventually did so (and so did quite a few others in our group, I’m not claiming to be especially brave or anything). There was indeed a crack in the rock with a couple of dozy snakes lying there, very close to where I was standing. I decided to leave them to it.

After that, a long drive back to Darwin (via Adelaide Springs again, to say hello to Charlie) and a late flight for me. I have managed to beat my Australia travel plans back into shape after the pain with the trains, but it did mean that I had to get from one end of the continent to the other reasonably quickly.

I had arranged to meet Lilly and Beth (who I’d gone to the Ghibli museum in Tokyo with) in Canberra the following day, and got a cheap flight on the Friday night. Lilly’s mum and dad kindly put me up on the sofa bed, and I took full advantage of their hospitality to sleep for twelve hours straight. I also had a chance to see Lilly and her dad performing with their big band (she on keyboards, he on saxophone) in a soundcheck for a corporate do in the Hyatt hotel. On the Sunday, we went to the Moon Rock cafe to eat a microwaved sausage roll and see some big satellite dishes before heading to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, where we saw a platypus – a rare sighting, not one that had occurred to me to put on my list of “Australian animals to see in the wild” but a nice one to cross off.

All I need to see in the wild now is a koala and a wombat, and I think I’ve got the full set.

* Fred is not his real name, by the way. I only changed it on here because we didn’t exchange contact details, and he has no idea I’m talking about him on the internet.

The Jolly Swagpeople

Of course, one of the big problems with the current weather in the northern parts of Australia is that it doesn’t half disrupt travel when the desert is suddenly submerged in water. The rail lines between Alice Springs and Darwin were to be out of commission for at least a week, having been washed away in three places. I therefore decided to book myself onto a tour to go to Kings Canyon, Uluru (Ayers Rock), and Kata Tjuta, and another tour afterwards to go up towards Katherine, Darwin and Kakadu National Park.

I had heard a lot about Alice Springs, from people who had been here and people who hadn’t. It seems to have a reputation as a bit of a rough place, with stories about gangs of drunk Aboriginals intimidating people after dark. To be honest, it doesn’t seem much different to a lot of other places I’ve been in Australia, and it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as rough as Carnarvon. My experience might depend on being male and not short, though, plenty of other people had stories about being intimidated after dark.

The hostel had its own three-day tour of Uluru etc., which seemed to follow exactly the same itinerary as most of the other tours but was cheaper. It was to be the first early start of many in the coming week and a half, getting up at 5am to check out and have some free breakfast of toast and coffee. The bus was ready to leave just after 6am, our driver/guide being a 23-year-old called Jess. After driving for a while, our first stop was a camel farm. A few of the passengers elected to go up and down the paddock on the back of a camel, but I had another coffee instead and cursed all the flies buzzing around my head (and everything else).

After the camel farm, we stopped at a petrol station where I bought an attractive green hat with a fly net hanging down from the brim. This would prove to be the best $15 I ever spent, the flies would only get thicker and more keen on flying into one’s face as the journey wore on.

At one point, Jess stopped the bus and ran back to pick up a thorny devil from the middle of the road. The spiky red-and-black lizard tolerated us gawping at it and prodding its sharp bits before it was released back into the wild.

Kings Canyon next, and Jess told us some of the geological background and took us for a walk to the Garden of Eden. The canyon is breathtaking, and the Garden of Eden is a pool in the middle where one can swim and be surprised by stupid birds. I also startled a baby goanna when I climbed out and nearly put my hand on it – at least it wasn’t a snake.

Upon reaching camp for the night, we gathered firewood and laid our swags around the blaze while the food heated up on a stove. Swag bags, incidentally, are leathery outer sleeping bags which are too short for anyone over six feet tall. The fire was the entertainment for the evening, “bush TV” – the most dramatic bits were the grasshoppers and moths which constantly emerged from the darkness to make suicide runs into the bright flames.

We had stopped at a bottle shop to stock up on beer, and I had also brought a bottle of cheap whisky. With the help of Sophie (English), Carolin (German) and Juan Jose (Colombian-American) it didn’t survive past the first night. I may have been insistent that there was no point in leaving a small amount left in the bottle, though.

The toilet facilities at the camp were extensive – walk away from the camp and find a quiet spot. There was a shovel for any solid deposits to be buried, and if the shovel wasn’t there then it meant that the toilet was engaged.

Another early start the next morning, to visit Kata Tjuta and go on the Valley of the Winds walk. Kata Tjuta is a large protrusion of sandstone sticking out of the desert, but unlike Uluru it is separated into lots of hills. Some magnificent views, and plenty of ochre lying around for us to mix with water and paint multicoloured designs on ourselves.

It was damned hot, though, and the flies were out in force. Carolin and I discussed how best to deal with them, and settled on a plan to use the ants to crawl into the ears of and eat the brain of the Fly Man (a.k.a. Dr Tripod, who controls all the flies) – from there, we would use the flies to conquer, paving the way for world domination with our armies of animals. We discussed the plan in great detail, right down to which animals would read the TV news and weather (parrots and baby alpacas respectively). Perhaps you had to be there.

After a swim in the campsite swimming pool (there were also facilities like actual toilets, and powered illumination, although we were still sleeping under the stars) we went off for a quick walk around part of Uluru before watching the sun set on it. It really is a massive piece of sandstone, with various marks in it which have Aboriginal legends describing how they came about. During the sunset the rock changed colour from orange to red to brown. We visited the cultural centre the following morning, after watching the sun rise over it (yep, another early start) and then walked the rest of the way. The flies were out in force again, the ants having apparently mutinied.

Incidentally, there is still a climbing path up Uluru. The Aboriginal owners of the land prefer you not to climb it – it is sacred to them, and they feel responsible if anyone is injured or killed on the climb, and mourn them like their own family. I figured it would be insensitive to do it, and also Jess had made it clear that if anyone felt that they had to climb it, then they could make an informed choice to do so and then walk back to Alice Springs.

In the end, we all made it back on the bus, and returned to the hostel for a hot shower, a cheap meal and lots of alcohol. This would be my last chance to have a lie-in for another week, as you will find out in the next exciting instalment, which I can’t be bothered to type up just now. I’m going to sleep instead. Goodnight everybody.