Exegesis: Relegating the author IN literary and artistic aesthetics the intentional fallacy occurs when readers or viewers use factors outside the text or visual work (such as biographical information) to evaluate its merits, rather than ignoring these “external” factors and relying solely on the textual or visual evidence of the novel, play, poem, painting, etc. to assess the work in question (what’s actually in the text and nothing outside). This key precept of the New Criticism school declares that a poem (or other work of art) does not belong to its author, it is (as stated by the term’s originators WK Wimsatt and MC Beardsley) “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it”1⃞. Authorial intention is a non-consideration in the assessment of the work. The text or work has an objective status and its meaning belongs solely to the reading or viewing public. The reader’s task in literature, advocates of New Criticism assert, is to eschew subjective or personal aspects such as the lives and psychology of authors and literary history and focus entirely on close reading and explication of the text (A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), edited by M.H. Abrams).
The intentional fallacy, elaborated in Wimsatt’s 1954 The Verbal Icon
The intentional fallacy doctrine has a corollary in the affective fallacy which adheres to the same principles. Wimsatt and Beardsley affirmed that evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader, is an erroneous way of approaching the task. Giving rein to the emotions a work of art evokes in you, negates an appreciation of “the (work’s) inherent qualities and craftsmanship” that an objective analysis permits (Prince Kumar, ‘Understand Affective Fallacy from Example’, LitforIndia, 23-Dec-2023, www.litforindia.com).
(source: cornerstoneduluth.org)
Semantic autonomy, Intentionalism, Anti-intentionalism: The intentional and affective fallacies as prescriptive “rules” of hermeneutics held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s, however this is not to say that there was no pushback from scholarly dissenters. Proponents (primarily American) of what is called “Reader-response theory” reject the claims of New Criticism of this prescribed mode of interpreting and critiquing a work of literature. Some of these objected to the fallacy’s nothing outside the text rigidity for constricting exploration of all possibilities of a work’s meanings. Critic Norman Holland frames it in a psychoanalytical context, the reader, he affirms, will react to a literary text with the same psychological responses he or she brings to events in their daily lives, ie, “the immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfil (one’s) psychological needs and desires” (‘Psychological Reader-response Theory’, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism (2016), www.literariness.org). Theorist ED Hirsch in his “Objective Interpretation” essay also took issue with the expositors of the intentional fallacy thesis, arguing that on the contrary authorial intent (intentionalism) was integral to a full understanding of the work…the only meaning that is permanent and valid is that of the author in question, the reader should confine him or herself to interpreting what the author is trying to say (E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation, 1967) .
𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔
A quite different kind of fallacious argument is the argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio). This arises when a conclusion or inference is drawn based on an absence of statements in historical documents and source materials…the argument seeks not to challenge or rebut specific things an author includes in a book or document, but is critical of the author for something they should have said but didn’t! The most common instances of the argument from silence in practice relate to biblical debates and controversies, but a contemporary classic example of a non-theological, historical nature, one generating considerable heated discourse, concerns the 13th century merchant and explorer Marco Polo and the famous book of his travels in the East.
Medieval Venezia at the time of Marco Polo (source: Bodleian Library, Oxford)
Medieval world travelogue guru?: Known by various namesincluding Description of the World (Divisament du monde), Book of the Marvels of the World, Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, or simply The Travels of Marco Polo, the book is one of the most celebrated tomes in the annals of literature dealing with the experiences of travellers to distant and unknown lands. The story, told and retold in numerous languages over centuries, presents Marco and his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo embarking on an epic road trip along the Silk Road to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Beijing). The book recounts Marco’s travels in Cathay (North China) and Manji (South China), among other Eastern lands. The consensus among most historians is that Signor Polo, despite a tendency to exaggerate and embellish the tales of his travels2⃞, did nonetheless journey to China as he claimed in the book. The publication of Did Marco Polo Go to China? by Frances Wood in 1995 controversially swam against this tide. Wood infers serious doubts about Polo’s achievements, suggesting that despite his being away from his native Italy for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century, he never reached his intended destination China. According to Wood, he got only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea where he accumulated all of his information on Chinese society and other Asian lands (his source material for the “Travels”) from picking the brains of visiting Persian merchants.
A page from the Polo travelogue
Doubting “Marco’s millions”: What made Wood so convinced that Marco Polo never visited China? Firstly, there is the book’s puzzling itinerary, it proceeds in a disjointed, incoherent fashion, is not uniformly chronological, has some odd detours and gets some geographical place names in China wrong. Then, while acknowledging The Travels of Marco Polo contains references to porcelain (from Fujian province), coal, rice-wine, paper currency and other items, Wood hones in on the fact that the Venetian traveller failed to mention certain other quintessentially Chinese things—namely the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, cormorant fishing and the practice of foot-binding—in the pages ofhis “Travels’. Wood also picks up on Polo’s failure to learn Chinese during his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom. Allied to these omissions was the absence of Polo’s3⃞ name in any official Chinese document of the period, which Wood believed, further incriminated Marco as the perpetrator of a fraud.
A crumbling section of the not-so-great wall in north China built prior to Polo’s time (photo: John Man, The Great Wall)
Wood herself is perpetrating a pattern of reasoning which is problematic by recourse to an argument from silence. As Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2010) (ISBN0-415-96219-6Routledge pp. 64–65) note, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” Academic critics have been quick to pinpoint the shortcomings and misconceptions in Wood’s argument. There are, they counter, manifestly valid reasons why Polo would not refer to the Great Wall, for one, it was largely not there in the period of his residency in China! The impressive edifice of the Great Wall as we think of it was primarily a product of the Ming Dynasty (from 1368, three-quarters of a century after the Polos’ stay)…what there was of the not-so-Great Wall prior to that was a much more modest, unprepossessing sight (“a discontinuous series of derelict, pounded earth ramparts”) (‘F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go To China?’, A Critical Appraisal byI. de Rachewiltz, http://openresearch–repository.anu.edu.au). With the matter of the Chinese penchant for tea-drinking, perhaps Polo didn’t think the topic simply sufficiently noteworthy to rate a mention4⃞. The question of the omission of foot-binding, chopsticks and Polo’s linguistic ignorance of Chinese in the travelogue can all be accounted for. China and the royal court was under Mongol control (Yuan Dynasty) in Marco’s time, accordingly Polo moved in those circles, tending not to mix with the (Han) Chinese population. and so lacked the motivation (or opportunity) to learn Chinese. Likewise, he wouldn’t have encountered many upper class Chinese women in their homes, this was the strata of society that practiced female foot-binding, not the Mongols. Again, with chopsticks, not a utensil of choice for the Mongols who Polo tended to fraternise with (Morgan, D. O. (1996). Marco Polo in China-Or Not [Review of Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by F. Wood]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(2), 221–225. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183182). As for “the Travels’” silence on fishing with cormorants, the activity was not a widespread phenomena in China during the Yuan era, confined to the remoter areas of Sichuan Province (‘Cormorant Fishing in China’, Sally Guo, China Travel (Upd. 04-April-2021), www.chinatravel.com).
MP (source: caamadi.com/de/marco-polo-in-venice)
Filtered Marco Polo – Rustichello et al: And there’s another line of thought when considerating the book’s glaring omissions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies that Frances Wood doesn’t seem to have factored into her thesis…The Travels of Marco Polo, the published book we read today, is a different beast in form and content to the original article from the late 1290s. In fact the original manuscript which Polo dictated to his amanuensis, an imaginative romance writer Rustichello de Pisa —who had licence to inject his own theatrical flourishes and flavour into Marco’s original story—was lost early on, so “the Travels” have gone on an untraceable and interminable journey through “dozens of translations of translations, none of which are necessarily accurate” (‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The True Story of a 14th-Century Bestseller’, Anna Bressanin, BBC, 09-Jan-2024, www.bbc.com). Of the 54 extant manuscripts (out of around 150 distinct copies in all languages), no two copies are entirely alike with “improvements” and edits made by each copyist and translator. We should also remember that Marco was in prison, relying on his memory to recount a multitude of events and experiences, some of which stretched back over 20 years, hardly surprising then if readers have to contend with the recollections of a not entirely reliable narrator (‘Marco Polo’s book on China omits tea, chopsticks, bound feet’, Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post, 04-Oct-2020, www.amp.scmp.com).
The Marco Polo saga has spawned a long history of film and television versions with romantic adventure taking precedence over story accuracy
Heavily redacted archives: The issue of Polo’s claim to have been an official in Kublai Khan’s service—and in particular governor of Yangzhou—was seized on by Dr Wood who pointed out that Marco’s name does not appear in any historical official Chinese archives. Rather than being necessarily proof of Marco fabricating a presence in China as Wood assumes, other factors may explain the discrepancy…no other Italian merchants known to have visited medieval China are mentioned in any Chinese sources, even the Papal envoy to the Great Khan’s court, Giovanni de Marignolli, doesn’t rate a mention (‘Marco Polo was not a swindler. He really did go to China’, Science News, 16-Apr-2012, www.sciencedaily.com). Another factor germane to this is the fact that the Ming (Han) Dynasty that succeeded the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty initiated the practice of erasing the records of earlier non-Han officials (Morgan).
(source: LibriVox)
One particularly vocal critic of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel from the University of Tübingen, produced a research paper demonstrating that Marco’s descriptions of currency, salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly in China were of a standard of accuracy and uniqueness of detail5⃞, that produces a very high level of proof that Polo had to have been in China, close to the wheels of power, to be privy to such comprehensive knowledge (www.sciencedaily.com).
Chinese salt production (source: Wellcome Images)
The “logical fallacy of weak induction”: Frances Wood’s iconoclastic book was certainly an attention-grabber, both for medieval scholars and Sinologists and for the general public, causing a furore upon its publication in 1995 and spawning several TV documentaries. China and the world of the Great Khan is a central tenet of the Marco Polo story, making it unthinkable to most scholars, almost a sacrilege, to suggest that the legendary Venetian traveller never set foot in the Middle Kingdom! The weight of the counter-argument unleashed against Wood’s thesis throws a spotlight on the hazards of trying to “treat the absence of evidence as evidence itself”, as Steven Lewis summarises the fallacious nature of the argument from silence (‘The Argument from Silence”, Steven Lewis, SES, www.ses.edu).
(image: silk–road.com)
Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995, Secker & Warburg, London)
1⃞ Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 ‘Intentional Fallacy’ essay to some extent has its antecedents in the earlier debate between CS Lewis and EMW Tillyard, published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), in which Lewis argued that an author’s own personality and biography has negligible to zero impact on the literary text, while Tillyard enunciated the contrary position: that an author’s own imagination and story can have an indelible influence on a work of literature
2⃞ and there had been doubters even in Marco’s time and later about some of his more wilder and fantastic claims, earning him the epithet Il Milione or “the Millions”) (aka “Marchus Paulo Millioni”). Wood’s particular slant on Polo’s book follows the lead of earlier German Mongolists
3⃞ who had claimed to have been an emissary in the emperor’s service
4⃞ Wood herself concedes that Rustichello may have edited out references to tea on the grounds of it being “of no interest to the general public”
The ancients, the Greeks and Romans, perceived the world of their day as one with the Mediterranean at its centre, surrounded by the conjoined land masses of Europe, Africa and Asia, comprising what the Greeks called oikouménē, the known, inhabited or inhabitable parts of the worldⓐ. This envisaged world was “a curious place where legends and reality could co-exist” [Vedran Bileta, “3 Legendary Ancient Lands: Atlantis, Thule, and the Isles of the Blessed”, The Collector, 03-Nov-2022, www.thecollector.com]. The Greeks believed that at the northernmost extremity of the existing world lay a fabled island called Thuleⓑ. The originator of this belief was 4th century BC Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseille, Fr.) who claimed to have visited and discovered Thule on a voyage beyond Britain to the northern sea and the Arctic. Pytheas introduced the idea of Thule—far distant and encompassed by drift-ice and possessed of a magical midnight sun—to the geographic imagination. Other ancient writers enthusiastically took up Pytheas’ fantastical notion, notwithstanding that the account of his journey (On the Ocean) had been lost to posterity…Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) described Thule as “the most remote of all those lands recorded”; Virgil (1st century BC) called the island Ultima Thule, (“farthermost Thule”, ie, “the end of the world”).
Thule, as Tile (1539 map) shown (with surrounding sea-monsters) as located northwest of the Orkney islands
Seeking Thule: The loss of Pytheas’ primary source text, the description of his voyage, led countless generations that followed him to speculate as to where the exact location of Thule might be. Many diverse places have been misidentified as Thule…the Romans thought it was at the very top of Scotland, in the Orkneys; Procopius (6th century AD Byzantine historian), Scandinavia; early medieval clerics located it in Ireland while both the Venerable Bede and Saxon king Alfred the Great asserted that Iceland was really Pytheas’s Thule, as did the famous 16th century cartographer Mercator. Other candidates advanced over the millennias include Greenland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland, “north of Scythia”, Smøla (Norway) and Saaremaa, an Estonian island.
Smøla island (Norway)
Other conjectures on Thule’s whereabouts have been meaninglessly vague, eg, Petrarch (14th century Italian humanist scholar): Thule lay in “the unknown regions of the far north-west”, supposedly inhabited by blue-painted residents (Roman poets Silius Italicus and Claudian), a probable conflation with the Picts of northern Britain. Thule, from as early as the 1st century AD on, “became more of an idea than an actual place, an abstract concept decoupled from the terrestrial map, simultaneously of the world and otherworldly”…an emblem of mystical isolation, liminal remoteness, a real discovered place and yet unknown” (F. Salazar, “Claiming Ultima Thule”, Hakai Magazine, 08-Sep-2020, www.hakaimagazine.com).
The Thule neighbourhood? (image: worldatlas.com)
Thule has continued to attract the interest of explorers right up to modern times. Continent-hopping scholar-explorer Sir Richard Burton visited Iceland, writing it up as the real “Thule”. Famed Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen having explored the Arctic region, produced an account of Pytheas’s ancient Arctic expedition, hypothesising that Thule was in fact a Norwegian off-shore island that the Greek voyager had identified [Nansen F., In Northern Mists, Vols I & II, (1969)]. Greenlandic-Danish explorer and Eskimologist Knud Rasmussen underlined the case for Greenland as the location by naming the trading post he founded in NW Greenland “Thule” or “New Thule” (later renamed in the Inuit language, “Qaanaaq”)ⓒ.
Thule Society, emblem
Thule Society: In the aftermath of World War 1 Thule provided stimulus of a very different kind for extreme-right racist nationalists in Germany. An emerging Munich-based secret occultist and Völkisch group named itself after Pythea’s mythical northern island. The Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft) propagated a form of virulent anti-Semitism which fed early Nazism in Bavaria, it also preached Ariosophy (an outgrowth of Theosophy), a bogus ideology preoccupied with visions of Aryan racial superiority, a key component of the later Nazis’ ideological frameworkⓓ. Out of the Thule Society came the ultranationalist Germany Workers’ Party (DAB)which in a short time transformed into the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party). A number of Thulists (eg, Hess, Frank, Rosenberg) became prominent in the Nazi leadership during the Third Reich [David Luhrssen, Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism (2012)].
Endnote: Hyperborea’s remote utopia Greek mythology throws up a parallel legend to that of Thule in the Hyperboreans. These were mythical eponymous people living in Hyperborea (hyper = “beyond”, boreas = “north wind”ⓔ). Their homeland was perpetually sunny and temperate (despite lying within a cold, frigid region), and Hyperboreans were divinely blessed with great longevity, the absense of war and good health…in other words, a utopian society [‘Hyperborea’, Theoi Project – Greek Mythology, www.theoi.com]. As with Thule, locating this paradisiacal northern land has proved elusive to pinpoint with the ancient scribes and geographers agreeing only that it lies somewhere on the other side of the Riphean Mountains (which themselves have been variously located). Homer described Hyperborea as being north of Thrace, some other classical geographers had it beyond the Black Sea, vaguely somewhere in Eurasia, perhaps in the Kazakh Steppes. Herodotus (5th century BC) had it in the vicinity of Siberia, while for Pindar (fl. 5th century BC) it was near the Danube. Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BC) identified the Hyperboreans with the Celts and Britain, Plutarch (fl. 1st century AD) , with Gaul.
Hyperborea, imagined (image: greek-mythology.org)
ⓐ which, they believed, itself was surrounded by an unbroken chain or body of water
ⓑ a belief shared by the Romans who saw Thule as the extreme edge of orbis terrarum
ⓒ from 1953 to 2023 the northernmost US Air Force base (NW Greenland) was called the Thule Air Base
ⓓ Thule was symbolically important to the right wing nationalists, a pseudo-spiritual home of Aryanism, further “proof” of the mythic origins of the “Germanic race”
The Pan-American Highway is a Goliath of roads in the Pantheon of world famous highways. The Guinness Book of Records calls it the world’s longest “motorable road”. The Pan-American Highway’s fame is such as to earn it the sobriquet of “Mother of all road trips”. This road running north/south spanning the two hemispheres of the continental Americas, stretches approximately 30,000 km from Prodhoe Bay in Alaska to its extremity at Ushuaia (Argentina) on the tip of Tierra del Fuego①. And yet its much more than a singular, linear road, it is a network of many (in some cases loosely linked) roads.
Nomenclature: although the network of roads that comprises Americas’ iconic highway is known generically as the Pan-American Highway (PAH), particular sections in different countries have their own local designations for the roadway. In Alaska it starts off as the Dalton Highway and extends south as the Alaskan Highway. When the PAH crosses the 49th Parallel you won’t find many signposts saying it but the whole US interstate highway system is designated as the “Pan-American Highway”②. In México and Central America it goes by the moniker “Inter-American Highway” (Carretera Interamericana), as well as by local network names, Federal Highway 45/190, etc. In the South American countries locals use the generic La Panamericana while the Highway is also identified by its domestic descriptor, eg, Columbia: Route 55/66, Peru: Peru Highway 1, Chile: Ruta 5, Argentina: National Route 3/7. As a general rule of thumb, according to UCF assistant professor Eric Rutkow, “the Pan-American Highway is just Highway 1 or 2 of the national system in most of South America” The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas .
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Unofficial routes
If you look at a map of the Pan-American Highway, one of the first things that stands out is that there is no one route for much of its journey. At Edmonton, Canada, the PAH forks, giving travellers the choice of an eastern route to the US via Winnipeg, bisecting America and entering México via Texas, or following the straighter route south through the Rocky Mountain states to Mexico. In South America also there are various spurs branching off from the PAH, eg, from Bogotá, Columbia to Venezuela; from Montevideo, Uruguay, up the Brazilian coast as far as São Paulo and Rio. When the PAH reaches the Chilean port of Valparaiso, it turns east and joins with Buenos Aires, from where it runs parallel to the Atlantic down through Argentine Patagonia.
𝑅𝑒𝒹𝑒𝑒𝓂𝑒𝓇 𝒯𝓊𝓃𝓃𝑒𝓁 (𝐼𝓂𝒶𝑔𝑒: 𝒲𝒾𝓀𝒾𝓂𝒶𝓅𝒾𝒶)
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Loftiest points of the PAH
The PAH winds its way through wide diversities of terrain, including many mountainous regions, which prove to be some of the most challenging parts for motorists. The highest points reached by the PAH are in Costa Rica where it rises to a height of 3,335 metres (the so-called “Summit of Death“), in Quito, Eduador’s capital, where the PAH climbs to 2,850 metres, and at the Christ the Redeemer Tunnel, a mountain pass in the Andes (linking Santiago, Chile, to Mendoza, Argentina), 3,200 metres.
Bifurcated highway
Just as the Great Wall of China took millennias to construct, the PAH was far from a rapid build, rather it evolved slowly and haltingly, stage by stage. Laredo/Nuevo Laredo (US/Méxican border) to Mexico City was the first stage completed, followed later by sections connecting Mexico to Panama and Columbia to Argentina. Also like the Great Wall, PAH remains unfinished, the Highway in its “nether regions” is not contiguous. The missing piece in the jigsaw of the road’s infrastructure is a 60-70–mile long “no man’s land” linking the southern part of Panama to the top of Columbia. It’s Spanish name is Tapón del Darién (lit. “Darién Plug”) but is better known as the Darién Gap, a narrow strip of inhospitable terrain, the severity of which has defied all attempts to construct a road through it. The saga of the Darién Gap—the “Achilles Heel” of the Americas’ super-highway—will be taken up in Part 2 of this blog, along with the US’s historic driving (pun intended) role in the development of the PAH.
𝒮𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒸𝑒: 𝓇𝑒𝓈𝑒𝒶𝓇𝒸𝒽𝑔𝒶𝓉𝑒.𝓃𝑒𝓉
𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲𓄲
① traversing 14 countries
② though Interstate 25 at Albuquerque, New Mexico, is signposted the ”Pan-American Freeway”
We live in an age fraught with concerns about security in the wider world, a symptom of which is the ongoing demand for more secure passports enhanced by ever smarter applications of technology – biometric data (eg, photographs, fingerprints and iris patterns), ePassports (embedded microprocessor chips), etc. The international passport today is a much valued and for some a lucrative commodity𝔸, but when did people first start to use passports as we understand the concept?
Passports or their document antecedents were known to exist in ancient civilisations – artwork from the Old Kingdom (ca.1,600 BC) depict Egyptian magistrates issuing identity tablets to guest workers; in the (Hebrew) Bible Judaean governor Nehemiah furnishes a subject permission to travel to the Persian Empire; Ancient Chinese bureaucrats in the Han Dynasty (fl. after 206BC) issued a form of passport (zhuan) for internal travel within the empire, necessary to move through the various counties and points of control.
Henry V
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In medieval Europe the prototype travel document emerged from a sort of gentleman’s agreement between rulers to facilitate peaceful cross-border exchanges (‘The Contentious History of the Passport’, Guilia Pines, National Geographic, 16-May-2017, www.api.nationalgeographic.com)…it provided sauf conduit, allowing an enemy safe and unobstructed ”passage in and out of a kingdom for the purpose of his negotiations”. This convention however was ad hoc, haphazard and capricious, the grantor’s ‘authority’ bestowed on the traveller might not be recognised at any point in his or her travels (Martin Lloyd, The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (2005)). The Middle Ages nonetheless did bring advances in the formulation of travel documents for extra-jurisdiction movements. Individual cities in Europe often had reciprocal arrangements where someone granted a passport-type paper in their home city could enter a city in another sovereignty for business without being required to pay its local fees (‘When were passports as we know them today first introduced?’, (Rupert Matthews), History Extra, 29-Sep-2021, www.historyextra.com). King Henry V, he of lasting Agincourt fame, authorised just such a early form of passport/visa as proof of identity for English travellers venturing to foreign lands, leading some to credit him with the introduction of the first true passport. The issuing of travelling papers sanctioned by the English Crown were enacted by parliament in the landmark Safe Conducts Act of 1414.
A ‘passport’ letter furnished by King Charles I to a overseas-bound private citizen of the crown, dating from 1636
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Before the rise of the nation-state system in 19th century Europe, large swathes of the populations of the multitudinous political entities—largely comprising serfs, slaves and indentured servants—routinely required “privately created passes or papers to legitimise their movement” (‘Papers, Please: The Invention of the Passport’, (Eric Schewe), JSTOR Daily, 17-Mar-2017, www.daily.jstor.org). Kings, lords and landowners all issued ad hoc laissez-passer of their own definition and design (Baudoin, Patsy. The American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2005): 343–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40294299). A systemic, standardised passport would not materialise until the 20th century.
It was only with the arrival of world war in 1914 that governments, motivated by security needs, turned their attention to tightening up entry requirements between the new nation-states, putting immigration quotas on the agenda (US legislators for example were eager to check the flow of immigrants into the country). Spearheaded by the newly created League of Nations (and aided by the availability of cheaper photography) a passport system began to evolve that was recognisably modern. The League in 1920 introduced a passport nicknamed “Old Blue”—specifying the size, layout and design of passports for 42 of its nations—thus establishing the first worldwide passport standards𝔹. Passports “became both standardized, mandatory travel documents and ritual tools reinforcing national identity” (Schewe).
Later the “Old Blue” passport was expanded into a 32-page booklet which included basic data about the holder such as facial characteristics, occupation and address. “Old Blue” had remarkable longevity, remaining the norm for passports until 1988 when it was superseded by a new, burgundy-coloured passport as the international standard (‘The World’s First Official Passport’, Passport Health, www.passporthealthusa.com).
(Source: WSJ Graphics)
Marc Chagall (self-portrait): one of a number of famous Nansen passport holders
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End-note: Married women travellers and the ‘stateless’ As the standardised international passport took shape, married women (unlike single women) were not admitted initially into the ranks of passport-holders in their own right, rather they were considered merely “as an anonymous add-on to their husbands’ official document”, eg, ”John Z and wife” (the wife’s public identity at the time still tied very much to that of their spouse‘s). In 1917 newly married American writer Ruth Hale’s request for a passport in her maiden name to cover the war in France was denied (‘The 1920s Women Who Fought For the Right to Travel Under Their Own Names’, (Sandra Knisely), Atlas Obscura, 27-Mar-2017, www.atlasobscura.com). Also bereft of passports in the modern-state system were those refugees who found themselves stateless in the turbulent aftermath of WWI. To address this crisis the League of Nations issued ”Nansen passports”ℂ from 1922 to 1938 to approximately 450,000 refugees. Originally intended for White Russians and Armenians (and later for Jews feeing persecution under the Nazis), the “Stateless passports” allowed their holders “to cross borders to find work, and protected them from deportation (‘The Little-Known Passport That Protected 450,000 Refugees’, (Cara Giaimo), Atlas Obscura, 07-Feb-2017, www.atlasobsura.com)𝔻.
↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝
𝔸 like the small island-states Malta and Cyprus who happily sell their citizenship to anyone who can afford it (up to US$1,000,000)
𝔹 “Old Blue” was originally written in French, just like the origin of the word ‘passport’ itself — passeport, from passer (“to pass” or “to go”) and port, meaning ‘gate’ or ‘port’
ℂ named after their promoter, Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen
𝔻 the Stateless passports didn’t of course stop the numbers of stateless refugees from continuing to escalate alarmingly…the UNHCR estimates that the global number of stateless persons is now more than 10,000,000
Everyone’s heard the story of Marco Polo, his epic journey from Venice via the Silk Road to Cathay (China) and the court of Kublai Khan, and further explorations in Southeast Asia as the Great Khan’s foreign emissary, but much less well known outside the Maghreb and the Middle East are the more impressive peregrinations—in terms of immenseness of scope and distance—of the medieval Moroccan Islamic traveller Ibn Battūta.
Marco Polo’s ‘Travels’
Battūta was born in Tangier, Morocco, into a Berber family of legal scholars about 50 years after Marco Polo’s birth. In 1325 the youthful Battūta set off alone initially with the purpose of undertaking the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, but circumstance and curiosity took the Moroccan scholar on a seemingly never-ending series of extended side trips. Over the next 29 years Battūta’s travels took him on a wide arc to the East, visiting virtually all of the Islamic lands including far-off Sumatra (in modern Indonesia). Battūta’s sense of adventure and desire to learn about distant lands led him to extend his journey far beyond Dar al-Islam (the lands of Islam) to visit Dar al-Kufr (the non-Muslim world). As an Islamic scholar Battūta’s travel to ‘infidel’ lands was legitimised by the Islamic principle of Talab al-‘ilm (“search for knowledge”) (Berman, Nina. “Questions of Context: Ibn Battuta and E. W. Bovill on Africa.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no. 2, Indiana University Press, 2003, pp. 199–205, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618304).
Battūta’s travels (Image: ORIAS – University of California, Berkeley)
Battūta’s world
Ibn Battūta’s adventure-packed travels—sometimes on foot, sometimes by sea, often for safety in the company of camel caravans—took him to the lands occupied today by 40 modern countries. Divided into two journeys, the first encompassed North Africa, Central Asia and Russia, the Middle East and Anatolia, India and South Asia, the Maldives, East Africa (down as far as modern Tanzania), Southeast Asia and China. A later, shorter journey took him into the Mali Empire and West Africa (crossing the Sahara to Niger, Timbuktu, etc) and later to Moorish-inhabited Spain.
The top three travellers in Pre-modern history – measured by distance
• Ibn Battūta (Islamic scholar and explorer) approx. 117,000 kilometres
• Zheng He (Chinese admiral and explorer) approx. 50,000 kilometres
• Marco Polo (Venetian merchant and explorer) approx. 24,000 kilometres
(‘Ibn Battuta’, Wikipedia entry; John Parker World Book Encyclopedia, 2004)
Image: www.history.com
Unreliable memoirs
Although Battūta clocked up a phenomenal amount of mileage for a traveller in the Medieval age, many modern scholars believe that Battūta did not visit all of the destinations listed on his Rihla✡ itinerary, the narrative of his journeys. Amikam Elad for instance contends that Battūta plagerised large parts of the travel narrative including the description of Battūta’s travels in Palestine from another Muslim traveller Muhammad al-‘Abduri (Elad, Amikam. “The Description of the Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa in Palestine: Is It Original?” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 2, [Cambridge University Press, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland], 1987, pp. 256–72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25212152). Doubts also exist about his visits to the city of Sana’a in Yemen, Bolghar via the Volga River and Khorasan et al. Some academics contend that in China Baṭṭūṭa only ever got as far as Quanzhou and Canton. Another false claim was that he witnessed the funeral of the Mongol Great Khan (the reality was no emperor died during Battūta‘s sojourn in China). The Moroccan storyteller borrowed liberally from hearsay evidence in the accounts of earlier Muslim explorers, and from his illustrious Venetian predecessor – the Rihla reveals many similarities in themes and commentataries to Marco Polo’s Travels.
Marco Polo, adapting to Tartar dress
Polo/Battūta overlap
Both Marco Polo and Ibn Battūta were in a sense oral historians, neither travellers penned a single word of the books they are famous for, instead dictating their travel stories to a scribe. Battūta’s tendency to rely on hearsay to describe some places he didn’t visit (eg, the Great Wall of China) mirrored the larger-than-life Venetian storyteller’s inclinations – Polo described the small island of Ceylon thus, “for its actual size, is better circumstanced than any island in the world”, despite never having set foot on Ceylonese soil (Marco’s contemporaries were well aware that “il Milione” was given to exaggeration).
Battūta/Juzayy’s ‘Rihla’
Battūta’s ghostwriter
As Ibn Battūta never kept a journal during his nearly three decades of travel, the Marinid sultan of Fez commanded him to collaborate with court poet Ibn Juzayy who wrote the manuscript of what became A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling☯ based on Baṭṭūṭa‘s recollections. The title was later shortened for convenience to the Rihla☮. The travel book has transparent shortcomings, the format is undercut by extreme chronological inconsistencies. The travelogue relies on Battūta’s memory—Morgan points out that the memory of a traveller understandably may lapse especially if the travels stretch over such a large passage of time (Morgan, D. O. “Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Mongols.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 11, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–11, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25188080).
Wives, concubines and divorce
A curious side feature of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s global footprint is the disclosure in the travelogue of various personal relationships he entered in to. Baṭṭūṭa on arriving at a new town regularly married women and took countless concubines, leaving the (divorced) wives and some of his issue as well behind when he moved on. For an observant Muslim Baṭṭūṭa includes a surprising level of sexual detail pertaining to the local women he encounters on his journeys (Singer, Rachel, ‘Love, Sex, and Marriage in Ibn Battuta’s Travels” (2019). MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference. 1. http://commons.lib.jmu.edu/madrush/2029/love/1).
Though the Rihla was in essence intended as the devotional work of a pious Islamic scholar, its real value lies in its secular insights into the world of the Middle Ages…providing descriptions of diverse and far-flung countries’ geography, personalities, politics, cultural practices, sexual mores and the natural world (‘The Longest Hajj: The Journeys of Ibn Battuta’, Douglas Bullis, Aramco World, July-August 2000, www.archive.aramco.com).
(Photo: History Extra)
In the 1350s after Ibn Battūta had finally had his fill of wanderlust and hung up his sandals for good, he settled into an altogether sedentary vocation, appointed as a Qadi (Islamic judge) in his hometown of Tangier.
(Source: Blackstone Audio Inc)
Endnote: Polo and Battūta didn’t invent fabrication and embellishment in travel writing. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century BCE)—considered both the “father of history” and the world’s ur-travel writer from—was prone to mixing in ”legends and fanciful accounts” to his Histories (Euben, Roxanne L. “LIARS, TRAVELERS, THEORISTS: HERODOTUS AND IBN BATTUTA.” Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 46–89, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t5dw.7).
————————————————————————————————————————
✡ literally the ‘Travels’
☯ the travelogue’s proper title
☮ the word Rihla strictly speaking refers to a genre of Arab literature rather than the name of the travel book (Bullis)
When the first men managed through repeated trial-and-error to get manned “flying machines” off the ground, the first women pioneers weren’t that far behind them in getting into the skies. The first woman got her flying licence (Elise Deroche in France) less than nine years after the Wright brothers made their epic 59-second ‘hop’ – see the 2017 brace of articles elsewhere on this blogsite, Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I (May 27, 2017) and Part II (May 31, 2017).
Baroness Derouche (Source: This Day in Aviation)🔺Reitsch testing the FW-61 (Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images)
While many women overcame obstacles on the way to a career as an aviatrix, those of their sex wanting to become helicopter pilots have found it even more difficult and onerous. The prospects around 1940 when the world’s first modern rotary-wing copter became fully functional looked bright enough for women. Nazi Germany’s pioneering aviatrix Hanna Reitsch was leading the way. In 1938 Reitsch☸ became the first woman to test fly a helicopter, Focke’s FW-61 helicopter, even going on to set a distance record for helicopter flight of 109km. She followed that up with the record (shared with another pilot) for being the first in the world to fly a copter in an enclosed space❇ (Sophie Jackson, Hitler’s Heroine, Hanna Reitsch (2014)).
🔺 Reitsch’s 1955 autobiography
Unfortunately, as the industry has grown since those formative days, female helicopter pilots trying to follow the trajectory of Reitsch’s stellar achievements in the air have found it much harder to penetrate the masculine preserve of the helicopter world. Today women still lag far behind in the gender stakes, in 2019 according to the Civil Aviation Authority women made up only 4.5% of the helicopter pilots in the UK, with just the single female instructor-examiner for the whole country (“International Women’s Day: ‘I’m teaching other women to fly helicopters’”, BBC, 08-Mar-2019, www.bbc.com).
(Photo: Stephanie Wallace/IMdiversity)
The statistics are hardly more encouraging in the US. The Helicopter Association International puts the number of female pilots at around 5%, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) which pointedly has no specific data on women helicopter pilots estimates the figure at a perhaps generous 7.9%. (‘How These 2 Women Became The Helicopter Pilot and Reporter Inside Skyeye’, ABC13, 11-Mar-2021, www.abc13.com). Even more concerning, the percentage of women behind the controls has been stagnant over recent decades✴.
But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.
The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).
Women in Aviation International: best strategy, targeting girls at a young age to foster the ‘bug’ for a flying career
The reasons flying has continued to be a male stronghold are many and varied. With so few women pilots—only 13 credentialed to fly helicopters by 1955—young women and girls have been bereft of visible role models and mentors to show the way. At school-level not enough effort have been made to make teenage girls aware of the opportunities there are in a flying career. The preponderance of male pilots perpetuates the “highly masculine image of aviation“, reinforcing the stereotype that the profession is “not a woman’s job” (Why There Aren’t More Female Pilots’, Katherine LaGrave, IMdiversity 08-Mar-2018, www.imdiversity.com). This in part comes back to a prevailing mentality of “Top Gun” chauvinism. Female pilots have commented on aviation still being an “old boys’ club” and the lack of support, bias and intimidation they experienced from men in the industry during their training (‘Chances Are Your Pilot Isn’t a Woman. Here’s Why’, Kimberly Perkins, Seattle Business, (nd), www.seattlebusinessmag.com). The issue of unhelpful male pilots for some women has led to another road block, the paucity of female instructors in the industry.
🔺 Ret.Col. Sally D Murphy, 1st female copter pilot in US Army
Once in the industry some women pilots have found themselves facing static career paths, the sheer lack of opportunities to attain seniority has eventually led a number of women in military and commercial aviation to prematurely leave the profession. Another criticism of the aviation industry is that it hasn’t embraced the change in work rules and conditions that other industries have…getting the work/life balance right is an issue of more importance to women who usually have to bear the brunt of child-rearing activities (‘Why are there so few women in aviation?’, Kathryn Creedy, CNN, 20-Nov-2019, www.cnn.com).
🔺 Cessna 172
Research suggests the prohibitive costs involved can be a barrier for women. Aircraft training in the US can cost up to US$150,000, add to this the soaring price of purchasing an entry-level commercial plane today…the (adjusted) price of buying a new Cessna 172 is four times greater than it was in 1960 (‘Why Are There So Few Female Pilots?, Rebecca Maksel, Air and Space, 06-Feb-2015, www.airspacemag.com).
🔺 Malaysia’s 1st female copter pilot (Photo: The Star (Mal.)
What makes the persistence of multiple barriers and obstacles blocking women from realising their professional pilot dreams maddeningly vexatious is the dilemma now facing the industry as a whole, a looming worldwide shortage of qualified pilots to take the reins of the big airliners. Some airlines like United in the US recently have flagged the introduction of quotas to increase pilot numbers for women and for minorities, but much more fundamental structural change is required before we see real progress in tackling the gender imbalance.
(Photo: PPRuNe Forums)
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☸ having already been appointed a flugkapitän (flight captain), a position till then exclusively reserved for male German pilots
❇ later Reitsch was also the first woman to fly a rocket plane
✴ numbers in the US did initially rise from the 1960s to the 1980s but have plateaued since that point (Maksel)
🈂 member #1 was appropriately enough Hanna Reitsch
Its been called a ghost town but the island’s massive concentration of iron ore under the sea⧆ exerts a powerful magnetic pull on passing ships and boats. The island of Jussarö is one of some 40,000 (and counting) islands off the coast that form Finland’s vast archipelago⌖.
The “ghost town” tag comes from the closure of the island’s iron ore mining works in 1967☯ due to a decline in the world price for the mineral (‘Jussarö’, www.en.jussaro.net) …leaving the landscape scattered with the remnants of old industrial buildings abandoned to nature.
⇑Hanneke Wrome (Image: alchetron.com)
Compass interference, a danger to shipping
The dense concentration of iron ore deposits within the island has been known to make the navigation equipment of passing vessels in the Gulf of Finland go haywire. The magnetic force emitted by the island tends to make ships malfunction and their compasses point in the wrong direction. Historically, a consequence of this has been a large incidence of marine accidents and shipwrecks in the vicinity. In 1468 the Hanseatic League cargo ship ‘Hanneke Wrome’ (or ‘Vrome’) was caught in a storm and wrecked near Jussarö island with the loss of over 200 lives and a vast quantity of expensive fabric, barrels of honey, gold coins and jewellery (‘Finland’s abandoned iron ore mine’, Abandoned Spaces, Bojan Ivanov, www.abandonedspaces.com). Perhaps the most famous shipwreck, known as “Jussarö I”, is a early 16th century ship belonging to the fleet of Swedish king, Gustav I Vasa (‘Jussarö Island’, www.visitraseborg.com). Given this hazard, Jussarö has been a haven for pilot stations and lighthouses (the island’s earliest pilot station dated from early 19th century).
⇑Sundharu lighthouse
Raseborg’s teeth “ship trap”
Several smaller islands and islets south of Jussarö collectively known as Raseborgs gaddama (Raseborg”s Teeth”) are particularly prone to shipwrecks. This area is known to have caused disturbances in navigation as early as the 17th century. In 1751 Swedish naval cartographer “Jonas Hahn was able to explain the phenomenon by the high iron content in the underwater rock formation in the area”. The Sundharu lighthouse was stationed on one of the skerries here to try to counter the danger (‘Finnish cases: Four case study areas. Case 1 – Jussarö ship trap’, www submariner-net.eu).
When the mining activity ended, Jussarö was taken over by the Finnish Defence Forces and used for military training and urban war simulation. After the army left in 2005 the island came under the administration of Metsähallitus, a state-owned authority in charge of national parks, wildlife and forestry. The main activity today is tourism with day-trippers regularly commuting from the mainland.
Postscript: The island’s 13th century footnote in history
Jussarö first gets a mention in medieval Danish documents, appearing in King Valdemar II’s Survey (or “Court Rolls”), a document compared to William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book record. The ‘Survey’ of Valdemar II of Denmark (reigned 1202–1241) was a land register of Danish settlements and their populations, c. 1231 (Nils Hybel, The Nature of Kingship c.800–c.1300: The Danish Incident , (2017)). Jussarö is included in the royal survey apparently because it was on the Danish route map (www.en.jussaro.net).
(Source: nationalparks.fi)
𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨
⧆ the largest deposits of iron ore in Finland
⌖ Jussarö itself lies within the Ekenäs Archipelago
☯ the second time iron ore mining operations had been abandoned on Jussarö, previous it was mined, sometimes using Russian prisoners, from the 1830s to 1861
All the travel and aviation pundits say commercial flying—when it does finally get airborne again—will never be the same again. There are so many imponderables and unknowns about the enigmatic future of airline travel, the cup of endless speculation nonetheless runneth over.
No one, inside the industry or out, knows when international flights will resume normal services. Like everything else it hinges on containing, and ultimately on subduing the pandemic (the “holy grail” of the vaccine?). When it does happen and things return to ‘normal’, we know it will be a ‘new’ normal…so let’s concern ourselves now with what it might look like?
What’s on the cards at airports in the future?
Airports will need to design or augment existing health and safety measures to stack up to the new requirements. Airlines will be trying to minimise the risk of human-to-human contagion, which’ll probably mean touchless check-ins and more utilisation of self-service E-ticketing machines, thermal scanning of body temperature, increasing use of biometrics. The imperative of social distancing will still be with us, airports will have to adhere to the safety edicts of keeping everyone 1.5m apart from everyone else. But will this be feasible, or even partly attainable? Airports are people magnets, people come en masse – to fly, to work, to farewell other people and to welcome others on return.
A pessimistic prognosis with very little “blue sky”Will we end up seeing airports despairingly throwing their hands up in the air and saying it’s all too much? If the prescribed public health measures include things like wiping down the handles of every piece of baggage and all the trays as they go through the scanner, that will add intolerable delays to an already tortuously long process for people at peak-travel times (‘Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad, for a Very Long Time’, (James Fallows), The Atlantic, 11-May-2020, www.theatlantic.com). The CEO of one of the world’s busiest airports, London’s Heathrow, is on record as stating that social distancing will be impossible to maintain✱ (‘COVID-19 and travel: Heathrow boss says social distancing “impossible” in airports’, (Neil Callanan), Traveller, 04-May-2020, www.traveller.com.au).
Will passengers turn up at the luggage check-in fully decked out in hazmat suits, smelling like they’ve been dipped by their heels in a vat of disinfectant? Will face masks, already in common use, gloves and even face shields, be mandatory for everyone in airports? Attaining standardised practice in these and other aspects of the changing landscape of flying, is a long way off happening.
(Source: www.theweek.in)
A Covid-19 health pass?
Strict health screening for incoming passengers at international borders in the coronavirus age is a given, but future travellers may need to present new documents along with their international passport. Flyers may need some kind of “proof of good health” to travel internationally – much like the certificate you need now to show you’ve had the required inoculations to enter certain regions prone to yellow fever, malaria, etc. Alternately, these “immunity passports” may be used to record negative coronavirus test results❅ (‘Face masks, blood tests and onboard janitors. Flying’s about to feel very different’, (Karen Gilchrist), CNBC Traveler, 17-May-2020, www.cnbc.com; ‘The era of peak travel is over’, (Sarah Khan), Vox, 22-Apr-2020, www.vox.com).
Social distancing on planes, an oxymoron?If we turn to the aircraft flights themselves, how will they work? Some of the world’s international carriers are considering removing the middle seat in jets (as a temporary move only) to enhance space between passengers⊞. Ryanair is the first carrier to outlaw toilet queues, passengers are now required to raise their hand to request a toilet visit.
Transforming seats intoanti-virus shelters
Airplane designers are exploring the possibilities of converting the present flying “sardine tins” into spaces that observe social distancing. ‘Janus’ seats are one option advocated by the Italian company Aviointeriors…a double-S shaped configuration which juxtaposes passenger seats in an opposing direction to each other. Passengers are also separated by a high transparent thermoplastic shield or screen. The company had an alternate design which retains the standard seating configuration but attaches a separating perspex screen to each seat (‘Aviointeriors proposes post-COVID-19 Janus seats’, (John Walton), Runway Girl Network, April 2020, www.runwaygirlnetwork.com). The designs are still in testing stage but one drawback is that glass dividers adds another hard surface to passenger space which may be infected by contaminated droplets. the view of Peter Harbison, CAPA Centre for Aviation chairman emeritus, is that the removal of middle seats won’t be sufficient to ensure the social distancing requirement on airplanes, that the outcome is not realistically attainable.
(Image: Aviointeriors S.p.A.)
Hermetically-sealed flying?
Clearly, the level of on-board hygiene will need to ramped up post-corona. There’s talk about having cleaners on-board during flights, to target the plane’s tactile zones such as toilet doors. One objective airlines will definitely aim for is minimalism, they’ll want to radically pare back the on-board fringe items. Touchscreen entertainment might disappear, pre-packaged meals left on seats prior to boarding to avoid contact, the end of free drinks, etc (Gilchrist).
The financial side
With all the uncertainty of what’s in store for future travel, one thing that will definitely change is the economics of travel. From the consumer side, if airlines resort to removing seats, therefore capping the passenger load of a jet, it’s hard to imagine how that will not result in a ticket price hike. IATA has estimated that with aircrafts only two-thirds full, average fares would jump up to between 43 and 54 per cent✪. Airlines have reckoned that they need to fill 77 per cent capacity of the aircraft just to break even (Gilchrist). Travel industry pundits have indicated that most leisure travellers won’t be willing to pay more if the option of affordable travel is taken away (‘Social distancing on planes during coronavirus: Middle seat won’t stay empty for long’, (Dawn Gilbertson), Traveller, 04-May-2020, www.traveller.com.au).
Some industry insiders have predicted the end of over-tourism, reasoning that for financial reasons or because of the new layers of bureaucracy required, travellers will be less inclined to travel as frequently as before the crisis, and with it will we see the demise of the jet-setting lifestyle and the addictive travel pilgrim. It may be too premature to make such a dramatic call, the 9/11 terrorist attacks put many people off international flying, but not permanently, the industry bounced back its pre-2001 level eventually, and this is an industry that employs over 10 per cent of the global workforce (Khan).
Certainly though, for the foreseeable future, tourists will probably think twice about venturing to the world’s most heavily populated destinations (Venice, Rome, Paris, New York, London, Dubrovnik, the Pyramids of Giza, the Acropolis, the Great Wall, etc.). A whole new generation of ‘agoraphobes’ may decide to avoid travelling during the peak season and seek out the less-travelled, remoter locations to holiday.
A respite from the ecological ‘footprint’ for Venezia and Plaza San Marco (Source: www.sites.middlebury.edu)
Business travel to recede?
Another matter to ponder is whether business travel will be reduced when the Covid-19 dust settles, will professionals and business folk still travel O/S to exotic locations for conferences? The lockdowns and restrictions of the last few months meant that the overwhelming majority of conferences went virtual. Administrators are no doubt discovering that they can just as meaningfully conduct business meetings by Skype or by video-conferencing, without the need for everyone to be in the same room together. If so, this may well have a negative knock-on affect for economy class tickets (which are subsidised by business and first class) (‘How Much of Airlines’ Revenue Comes From Business Travelers?’, www.investopedia.com).
╳╳✱ we have recently witnessed that once beaches have been reopened to the public, it is virtually impossible to police distance restrictions on packed beachfronts❅ Emirates have taken a different tact, trialling a rapid “10-minute” blood test at the departures gate (insiders have questioned whether this would be feasible to implement at high-volume times (Gilchrist)⊞ operators already indicating they will move to vacant middle seats include Southwestern, Delta, American and Qantas – the Australian carrier later reneged on this claiming the risk of Covid infection on an aircraft was minimal (‘Qantas passengers angered after airline reintroduces the middle seat’, 20-May-2020, www.news.com.au/)
✪ that said, some airlines may, for the immediate period, offer travellers discounted fares and deals to reignite interest in overseas travel … “struggling operators (will) incentivize flyers to return to the skies” (Gilchrist)
I think most people, outside the industry, think the answer to this question would be “not a lot”. Unfortunately for the airlines, being grounded, being not able to utilise their assets to realise revenue, is only the start of the problems. In April it was estimate by the industry researcher Cirium that there were over 16,000 commercial passenger aircraft no longer flying – around 62% (the numbers would not have decreased since then) [‘Here’s What You Do With Two-Thirds of the World’s Jets When They Can’t Fly’, (Anurag Kotoky, David Stringer & Ragini Saxena), Bloomberg, 17-Apr-2020, www.bloomberg.com]. The severity of the blow to the airline industry internationally can hardly be understated, coming soon after IATA (International Air Transport Association) predicted (in December 2019) a US$29.3bn net profit for 2020 [http://airlines.iata.org].
The norm under coronavirus: flights with a handful of passengers (Photo: Jennifer Flowers / AFAR
Put simply, while the primary income from the airlines’ raison d’être, the loss of paying passengers, dries up, the fixed costs, the invariables, don’t go away for both the airports and the airlines. Let’s take the airports first, they make look deserted when you glimpse images of them on the internet or television, but they haven’t closed down altogether, they haven’t morphed into ghost towns. Airports still have infrastructure and most still run at least a limited service of domestic flights, and on the international scene, though closed for tourism, emergency flights still happen. So, with people and the coronavirus still around, the airports need upkeep. Surface cleaning with virus and bacteria killing disinfectants, hand-sanitising stations, etc.
A Californian “desert dormitory” for grounded jets (Photo: Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images)
The immediate problem for airlines in the Covid-19 crisis is where to put the multitude of grounded jets. The optimal place, leaving other considerations aside for a minute, is determined by climate. Aircrafts on the ground, exposed to the elements for any significant length of time, will do best in a dry climate with low humidity. This places the major airlines of Eastern Asia with their wetter, steamier climes at a disadvantage. Conversely, Australia’s great interior continental deserts are a favourable location. QANTAS and some other international airlines have accordingly parked their jets in Alice Springs (Central Australia)✫. In America [‘Parking in a pandemic: Grounded planes scramble for storage space’, (Paul Sillers), CNN, 22-Mar-2020, www.cnn.com]. Similarly, in America, US airlines have sought out long-term storage facilities in the hospitable desert environments of western USA [‘What It Takes for an Airline to Ground Its Fleet Amid Coronavirus’, (Jessica Puckett), Conte Nast Traveler, 31-Mar-2020, www.cntraveler.com].
A lot of European airlines are not so lucky, forced to use the local airports in Europe where some of the runways have been decommissioned to make way for the grounded planes. Aircraft parking in some of the European hubs can also be exorbitantly expensive, charging up to US$285 an hour (although the cost varies greatly from location to location). Sometimes the remotely located (long-term) storage facilities are referred to as aircraft ‘boneyards’❈ [‘Aircraft Boneyards, MRO & Storage Facilities in Europe’, Airplane Boneyards, www.airplaneboneyards.com].
Thwarting the nesting birds (Photo: Reuters / Elijah Nouvelage)
When happens with the planes taken out of service and parked? Although not in current use, they still have to be maintained so that they are ready when the airways open up again. Planes are subjected to regular, heavy mechanical maintenance checks, the hydraulics and the flight control system needs to be finely monitored. When the aircrafts are being stored long-term, the process followed has been described as a kind of ”aeronautical embalming” (Sillers) – fluids require to be drained (to prevent rusting of the landing gear), as the jets are housed al fresco everything needs to be covered and/or protected – the engine intakes and exhaust areas, external instruments, the tyres, the windows, the entire airframe (to prevent corrosion). Maintenance staff also have to check the planes for bird-nests and incursion from insects (grilles are sometimes affixed to keep birds outs). Every two weeks the wheels need to be rotated and the batteries reconnected (Sillers; Kotoky et al). Yes, it’s true to say that aircraft maintenance and storage firms are busy at the present time.
To try to offset, at least partly, the crippling hit from of the coronavirus crisis, the loss of multi-billion dollars by the industry, some airline companies have switched their (unused) passenger jets to become freight-carriers (in addition to using their usual freighters). Scoot, for instance, in February commenced bi-weekly hauls from Singapore to Nanjing and Guangzhou transporting air cargo only. Cathay Pacific carries freight on passenger-less flights from Hong Kong to three Chinese cities∅ [‘Airplanes Without Passengers Start Coronavirus Recovery’, (Will Horton), Forbes, 10-Mar-2020, www.forbes.com].
EndNote: In March, even after extensive international flight restrictions had come into effect, a number of airlines were still undertaking their scheduled flights with zero passengers on board. One of the reasons for such a seemingly nonsensical practice was to abide with EU regulations which require the airlines to fulfil their allotments or risk losing the flight slots [‘Why Airlines Are Flying Empty Ghost Planes’, ((Caroline Delbert), Popular Mechanics 11-Mar-2020, www.popularmechanics.com].
____________________________________________________________________ ✫ north of five billion dollars’ worth of aircraft enjoy the arid air of Alice Springs Airport (from SilkAir 737s to Singapore 380s) [‘How expensive will air travel be after the Covid-19 crisis?’, (Cynthia Drescher), CNN, (14-May-2020), www.cnn.com] ❈ quite apt for housing a lot of the older, less-efficient planes, which will be retired and either be sold-off or used for parts and then scrapyarded ∅ there’s precious little upside for the airline industry at the moment, but one positive for the jets still in the air is the record low world oil prices at the present
Englishborn Fred Harvey learned the basics of good food service from a lowly station in a New York restaurant and later ran a successful cafe prior to the Civil War before entering the employ of the US railroads. Working first for the Hannibal and St Joseph Railroad and later others, Harvey was required to travel a great deal as a railroad agent. This gave him first-hand experience of how dismal railroad food and service was.
🔺 Frederick Henry Harvey (Photo: Wall Street Journal)
This was no secret to regular passengers, before Harvey came along, the railroads were serviced by local rough eateries or unscrupulous restaurant owners who would reheat the leftover dishes and serve them again as supposedly new to the next, unsuspecting train-load of hungry passengers. Some travellers wary of the dubious quality offered up, would bring their own ‘shoebox’ lunches of fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs but this didn’t prove a satisfactory alternative – after sitting in the train for a couple of days the food from home would quickly go off [‘Fred Harvey and the Harvey Girls: A Dollar, a Dream and a Dinner’, (John Koster) Historynet,www.historynet.com].
Business-savvy Harvey sensed there was a gap in the market and in 1876 he clinched a deal with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF)ⓐ to open eating houses along the railroad. The start was modest, one small lunchroom in the Topeka (Kansas) depot of the railroad. But from these modest beginnings Harvey created a thriving railway hospitality concern and more. The prototype Harvey lunchroom has been described as “the progenitor of what (Americans) think of today as a diner” [Stephen Fried, quoted in ‘Tracing the Recipes of America’s First Restaurant Empire’, (Sara Bonisteel),Epicurious,18-Jun-2013,www.epicurious.com].
🔺 Santa Fe railroad & Harvey hotels & dining stations
The beginnings of fast food
The key to Harvey’s success was quality of food and speed of delivery. Once the network of Harvey dining-rooms were established along the Santa Fe route, the operations were streamlined to work like clockwork…and they needed to. As the trains pulled into the stations Fred Harvey staff had 20, at most 30 minutes to feed 60 to 100 passengers. This required coordination between the train conductor and Harvey staff (to give the staff advanced warning of their impending arrival). To meet the short turnaround time, the waiting staff (“Harvey Girls”) utilised a unique signalling system, the waitress taking the order would send a signal to a second waitress, a cup turned upright on the saucer meant coffee, a cup facing down, tea. The second waitress could then immediately do that part of the order without having to wait for her colleague to return with the order [‘Watch the Cup, Please’, (Jann Bommerbach),True West,04-Nov-2015,www.truewestmagazine.com].
🔻 Harvey’s El Tovar Hotel, Grand Canyon
No “mean cuisine”
Harvey Houses (as they eventually came to be known) were no “Greasy Joe’s”. From the start Harvey headhunted a star head chef from back east for his first restaurant. The chef prepared top-quality cuisine for AT&SF line passengers…the food was so good that travelling salesmen and other regular travellers chose the AT&SF on that basis over rival western railroads (Koster). They were getting quality food, fresh and affordable to the middle class traveller, served on spotless Blue China with white linen tablecloths [‘Classic Harvey House recipes’, 23-Feb-2019, CBS News, www.cbsnews.com/].
Value as well as quality for money
In 1888 Fred Harvey debuted the first Fred Harvey dining-car on the Chicago to Kansas City train service. The menu for the service illustrates what a bargain it was – for the middle class—for 75¢ passengers got a mains (choice of oysters, lobster, salmon roast beef or other meats) plus dessert—often prepared by world-class chefs (Koster).
🔺 Castãneda Hotel, Las Vegas, (the ‘other’ Las Vegas – in New Mexico): the first trackside Harvey House (Image: www.castanedahotel.com]
The Harvey dining empire
How extensive was the Harvey House network? At the onset Fred Harvey promises a depot restaurant every 100 miles between Kansas and California. At the Harvey high-point there was 25 Harvey hotels, 40 sit-down dining-rooms and 55 lunchrooms on the route (Koster), and the Harvey House concept was extended to other west-bound railroads. Harvey was a natural marketer coming up with advertising campaigns like “3,000 Miles of Hospitality” to promote tourism in the region [‘Fred Harvey—Branding the Southwest (Quality Fast Food)’,www.lib.nau.edu].
The Harvey girls’ uniform: looking a bit too similar to a WWI nurse’s outfit or something you might see in a nunnery!🔻(Photo: Grand Canyon Railway and Hotel)
The Harvey Girls: Helping to civilise the “Wild West”
Because the male waiters employed by Harvey had a tendency toward drinking on the job and causing trouble in the houses, the entrepreneur in 1883 had the inspired idea of replacing them with single women (aged 18-30) shipped out from the East. The Harvey Girls (as they became known) were attired in demure, conservative feminine uniforms and required to not marry before they had completed six months of service. The women waitresses on the job set standards for cleanliness and decorum which had “a civilizing effect on the often rough customers in the territories” [‘Fred Harvey,the Harvey Houses, and the Harvey Girls’,https://abqlibrary.org/railroads/HarveyHouses]. Many Harvey Girls stayed in the West after their employment, often marrying their bachelor customers, earning the railroad restaurants the sobriquet of “Cupid on Rails”ⓑ.
Farm-to-table: “Meals by Fred Harvey”
Fred Harvey Co (FHC) entered into contracts with local purveyors to ensure fresh ingredients for his meals.Fred Harvey Co also went into the farming business itself,running it’s own dairy and cattle farms (‘Fred Harvey—Branding the Southwest (Quality Fast Food).
(Photo: www.railroadmemories.com)
Business diversification: Whisky, chocolates, gifts, etc.
With success and fame came morediversification.FHC eventually manufactured it’s own whisky,sold it’sown brand of chocolates, candy, ice cream, salad dressings, as well as take-home gifts and souvenirs to passengers.Harvey’s knack for marketing put the brand everywhere. FHC gave away cookbooks of Fred Harvey recipes (‘Branding the Southwest’).The Harvey Co, as part of the tourism package it was promoting, also entered the postcard publishing field…through the Detroit Publishing Co it produced the very popular Fred HarveyArizona ‘Phototint’ series of cards [‘Fred Harvey (entrepreneur), The Full Wiki, www.the full wiki.org/].
🔺 Menu image from the Santa Fe dining-car (Source: www.lib.nau.edu)
Menu art of the Southwest
The railroad menus of FHC are an interesting sidelight of the company,delightfully quaint in their great diversity. Many celebrated in colourful imagery the beauty of the American Southwestor the pre-United States connexions to the region of colonial Spanish missionaries and Native American tribes(see below ‘Marketing an image of the Southwest’). The menu artwork was often of a high calibre,eg, William Deane Fausett’s humorous images. Menus like the company’sLa Posadamenu were instructional–including an US warplane ID chart for US servicemen using the AT&SF rail during WWII.Therewere menus for special occasions like Mother‘sDayand special menus for kids which doubled as clown masks (‘Branding the Southwest’).
Marketing an image of the Southwest
Fred Harvey invented a new hospitality service for railway passengers, but he also invented (and marketed) a particular image of the country’s Southwest for Americans. Harvey, together with the AT&SF Railroad, changed the perception of Americans, filling the vast unknown void of savage desert with a new, “compelling regional identity for the Great Southwest of northern New Mexico and Arizona”. The Harvey corporation “appropriated and marketed the cultures of Native Americans”ⓒ presenting them as “colourful, tamed native peoples”. Harvey to a lesser extent also did a inventive reconstruction of the cultural impact of Spanish colonial and early Anglo-Celtic settlers. Weigle suggests that FMC’s commercial innovations such as the Indian Detours program (affording railroad passengers the opportunity to visit local native communities, represented a kind of ‘Disneyfication’ of the region [Weigle, Marta. “From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest.” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 45, no. 1, 1989, pp. 115-137. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/3630174. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020].
Endnote: Founder Fred died in 1901 but the business remained in the family until his grandson died in 1965. In 1968 FHC and Harvey Houses were purchased by Amfac, Inc. (an Hawaiian hospitality industry conglomerate).
🔻HarveyHouse,Seligman,Ariz.
PostScript: FH Menu dishes
Not surprisingly the FHC menus included a noticeably Latino-Mexican flavour—including Bright Angel Mexican Salisbury Steak, Guacamole Monterey, Empanadas with Vanilla Sauce, Fried Chicken Castãneda and Albondigas Soup (‘Classic Harvey House recipes’).
ⓐ the Santa Fe line ended at Needles in eastern California, where it connected with another railroad which completed the journey west to the Pacific
ⓑit is estimated that of the approximately 100,000-plus Harvey Girls in the company’s history, perhaps as much as⅕ of them stayed and settled down to married life in the West, ‘The Harvey Girls, a Slice of American History’, (updated 26-Apr-2012),www.hubpages.com
ⓒ Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, Apache and other Southwestern tribes
Having traversed the slopes of Zhângbáishān nán (Changbaishan South) and Zhângbáishān xī (Changbaishan West), it is only fitting and proper, in the best traditions of Ed (Hilary), that you should explore the other available slope at Changbai, the North Slope❅.
Zhângbáishān bêi is the most popular section of the Changbai Mountain range. Everywhere across the West slope there were buses unloading visitors, many, many visitors and (therefore) queues! Understandably, the punters were predominantly Chinese from the vast pool of internal tourists who travel from all over the country, but also discernible were pockets of South Korean tourists, including women wearing the hanbok (traditional Korean formal dress).
Before you join the hordes of people ascending the wooden staircase to get a better view of the mountain waterfalls, you might want to linger around the shop stalls long enough to sample the local “hot spring eggs” which are boiled ‘naturally’ in situ in the surrounding hot springs. After trying the eggs (also available in a range of colours), another activity that takes on the element of ritual for the secular visitors is the quasi-ceremonial washing of hands in the nearby “hand washing pool” (supposedly according to the sign posted, a very warm 42°C).
As you proceed along the wooden walkway you will see, strewn all over the ground, pock-marked water holes comprising the mountain’s naturally-heated springs. Most climbers will make for a spot on the boardwalk that will offer the best vantage for the many waterfalls cascading down from the rim of the mountains.
The waterfalls, whose origin point is the majestic strato-volcanic Changbai wonder of Tianchi lake (known in local circles as “the source of three rivers”), function as an ideal backdrop for the myriad of visitors intent on getting their full complement of selfies.
The steps to the right take you up to a quaint bridge and viewing platforms, under which the Weihe River flows down from the main waterfall which comprises a 68-metre drop from the top. Around this spot you can be guaranteed of getting the best vistas of the range and waterfalls.
After taking in the views here, you can backtrack and take the left walkway, it’s winding steps will lead you to a picturesque lake and several small but breathtaking waterfalls.
Another thing you can do here, also with an element of the ritual to it, is drink from the “sacred well”, the Yu Jiang spring. But of course, partaking of the healing waters of Changbaishan is of itself not sufficient, the authentic tourist experience necessitates visual documentation of the ritual.
While you are ‘playing’ the North Slope (as one Chinese English-language promotional blurb interestingly described it), this might also involve a trek through the wilderness down a long set of steps to explore another stretch of Changbai waters. The notice near the start of the wooden track alerting you to the fact that the proximate wilderness is the habitat of the Siberian tiger might be a salutary warning to anyone who might be foolishly tempted to wander too far off the track.
____________________________________________
❅ the East Slope is located inside North Korea (to the Koreans it is known as Paektu or Baekdu Mountain)
When I visited the eastern part of Liaoning province earlier in the year I was intrigued by the contrast between tourist-centric Dandong with its buzzing, thriving commercial activity on the Chinese side of the border, and Sinuiju, looking nondescript on the other side of the river in the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. The latter city, with no signs of human life visible from our vantage point, seemed like a moribund blimp of a town by comparison with the Chinese city.
This was nowhere more apparent that after nightfall…the luminous lights and noise of Dandong with its riverside markets, its bridges a kaleidoscopia of colours, and its countless, neon-signed restaurants (some of which are North Korean) were a world apart from the virtually pitch-dark ‘nothingness’ on the North Korean side. Gazing across at the uniform greyness, I speculated that Sinuiju could nary ever have been more inconspicuously camouflaged, even at the height of the Korean War conflict.
The ‘view’ across the Yalu ▼
My appetite whetted, I wanted to delve a bit more of the mystery of the “Hermit Kingdom”, so long cloaked in secrecy to the outside world. A subsequent boat trip up the Yalu left me little more enlightened about what life looked like across the border. Although our hire vessel got pretty close at times to the North Korean mainland, there was a bland homogeneity to what I could see…miles and miles of attractive but uninhabited hills and meadows, pockets of farmed land, the odd isolated building, a few roads, the occasional vehicle, but hardly a human to be sighted!❈
Touring Changbai County
Having planned from the start to include Changbai Mountains on my itinerary of the North-East tour, I was (mildly) hopeful that its proximity to the border might offer up new opportunities for North Korea-watching.
The Changbai border towns on the Chinese side are quite remote and relatively lightly populated (most of the internal tourists skip straight past them and make for the much vaunted mountains themselves). All along the Yalu river border between the two countries, there were no Korean border posts or guards in sight. The river itself was the only buffer (no barbed wire fences like I saw north of Dandong). It occurred to me that this un-patrolled, quite narrow and innocuous-looking waterway would not pose much of a challenge to any impoverished North Korean determined enough to escape to the Chinese side in pursuit of a better and more prosperous life. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Korean refugees clandestinely slipping across the river border and being absorbed into a community with which it already had cultural and linguistic affinities.
Having hired a Baishan taxi for the day, we visited several of these border villages on route S303. Here I got a chance to see just much Korean culture had permeated the border and river into China. At one point on the river near Maluguo Town, we stopped at a spot where some peasant farmers had laid out their bright harvest of red peppers on the wall to dry (and to sell). This was part of a little trading post peddling various little North Korean trinkets and knicknaks.
The Korean changgu, integrated into Changbai Countypublic sculpture and municipal utilities ▼▲Korean influences on Changbai County
While here, I bought some North Korean currency packaged in a passport-type folder. The value of the North Korean notes and coins (chon) amounted to over ₩1260. As it cost me only CN¥20 to buy, I figure that’s pretty indicative of how low regard the North Korean won is held in round these parts!
I found other symbols of Korean culture near the roadside stalls, some in a form that surprised – such as the local public rubbish bins, painted vividly red and green and in the shape of the changgu (a traditional Korean hour-glass shaped double drum). I didnt see any women in the street wearing hanboks (traditional, formal vibrantly-coloured Korean dresses), although I did see them being worn later at Changbai on the mountain.
Model Korean village ▼
Continuing on for a few hundred yards we stopped at Guoyuan Village, a tourist an attraction in border country which houses a model Korean village. The village consists of some basic Korean log timber dwellings, a backyard produce garden and a well. The adjoining Korean-style gardens contains a pleasant stream with an agricultural water-wheel with a scattering of sculptures. We stayed here about an hour, wandering the gardens and taking photos. Curiously the place was deserted, we were the only visitors here, no staff around either (though there was a Korean restaurant at the front of the village). Suffice it to say it was a very peaceful and serene setting and a very pleasant diversion.
Heroic scenes from Chinese history ▲
Leaving Guoyuan and driving east along the river, there are many points which you can stop at to gain excellent vantage points of North Korea. On the way to Changbaishan we paused at quite a number of such spots. At two that we stopped there were viewing platforms and towers have been specifically constructed to provide a window into the Hermit Kingdom◓. On of the wall of one these long raised viewing platform was a large sculptural composition done in bas relief form and depicting what looked like epic sagas drawn from Chinese imperial history.
Spying on the North Koreans? ▲Imitation Great Walland scenic North Korean peak ▲
On the road running parallel with the river there is a long but not very high wall designed to resemble the “Great Wall”. From the many high points along the wall you can get clear, uninterrupted views across the Yalu to the North Korean grassy peaks and farmlands. At a couple of points on the river we came upon a few villages and small industrial towns with antiquated, grimy factories and workshops. Overall it tended to look a bit drab, though there were some houses and residential blocks that were brightly painted.A pagoda-roofed border sitefor scenic views of the DPRK▼
Footnote: Yalu River border
Yalu is a Manchu word meaning “the boundary between two countries” and the river indeed represents the lion’s share of the modern border between DPRK and PRC (the other portions of the Sino-North Korean boundary comprise the Tumen River and a small slab of the Paektu/Changbai Mountain. The river is 795 km in length and contains around 205 islands, some owned by China and some owned by North Korea. At its southwestern end it empties into the Korea Bay between Dandong and Sinuiju. The Yalu is also known as the Amrok or the Amnok River.
〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣〣
❈ there was a similar outcome when I visited Hushan Tiger Mountain Great Wall, which from its highest towers you can see deep into North Korea and seemingly endless acres of pastures and meadows
◓ in fact at one of the viewing structures there were binoculars set up on tripods allowing you to zoom in on the Korean town activity(sic) just across the water
You’ve been to Changbaishanxi and have climbed the umpteen many steps there are on the west slope to get a glimpse of the famous Tianchi lake. What else is there to do, perhaps something a bit less hectic and strenuous? Well, for starters there’s a boardwalk you can do in the nature reserve not far away. A leisurely stroll along the rim of Changbai Canyon in Songjiang might be just the shot for you. The canyon walk is a perfect foil and an chance to unwind after the exertions of the “Heavenly Lake” climb.
Dating the forest ▼The canyon boardwalk takes about 40 to 50 minutes to complete, depending on how fast you want to go, how many times you want to stop and injest the atmosphere and the scenic views, take photos, etc.
The canyon cuts its way through a dense forest of ancient arboreal specimens. The raised boardwalk allows spectacular views down the 100-metre deep canyon to the river. The walk includes a couple of Indiana Jones-style swaying bridges (not quite as ‘hairy’ a crossing as in the “Lost Raiders” movie). The highlight of the canyon for me was the multitude of intriguing and unusual rock formations to be seen.
At the boardwalk end-point there’s a souvenir shop…of course there is! But refreshingly not everything on sale on site was at mark-up prices, so if are an accumulator of trip souvenirs you may just find yourself a bargain momento on the shelves.
“No Striding” sign on the boardwalk provided a good chuckle! ▼
The canyon tour doesn’t pull in the crowds that some of the other slope sites do (especially the “Heaven Lake” and the mountain waterfalls), but take it from your crowd-weary correspondent, that is indeed decidedly part of its appeal. Not being inundated by the hordes of visitors at other mountain venues, more breathing space, more elbow room, made the boardwalk a more relaxing experience and gave you the time to appreciate all the natural beauty Changbai Canyon has to offer.
Footnote: Lots of interesting giant trees to be seen on the valley walk, like the Red Pine King. I enjoyed some of the quirky signs on the boardwalk too, such as the sign proclaiming the “Love between Pine and Birch”. The “Danger No Strong Shaking” sign on the moving bridge also brought a smile to my face.
Changbaishan is not the most easily accessible scenic wonder of the PRC world. From Shenyang we had to take a VST (very slow train), a horror overnighter of a trip that I have described elsewhere✱. Our sleeper train overslept by two-and-a-half hours with the consequence that when we arrived at Baihe we were too late for the morning bus service to Changbaishan. So, we cut our losses and got a taxi to our lodgings and contented ourself on discovering the ‘delights’of the rather unprepossessing town of Baihe.
The next day we made for the town tourist centre to buy tickets to Changbaishanxi or Changbai Mountain West⍟. Our overriding objective was to see the famous Changbai Tianchi – the much touted “Heavenly Lake”. When our bus got to the car park at the foot of the Tianchi mountains we were aware from the vast crowds and lines that greeted us, that it was everybody’s overriding objective.
We had already caught glimpses of the glistering white, snow-like peaks as the bus chugged up the winding road to the tourism site. After availing ourselves of the toilets near the car park (there being no public amenities at the top of the mountain barring a single souvenir stall), we joined the thronging lines of people embarking on the climb.
From the bottom looking up, there are two walkways, on the left the down staircase and on the right the wooden up staircase. Unfortunately, for walkers going up the right-side steps, some people coming down were blissfully unaware of or simply ignored the clearly posted signs about keeping right on the way down. As a result, walkers going up regularly have to dodge and weave their way round non-conformist walkers on the wrong side. Annoying!
What was already a challenging walk up the mountain, was made more difficult by the heat of the day. Especially so for me…because of the anticipated cold of the mountains I had worn Long Johns under my jeans. This made the climb up for me very heavy-going indeed. The ascent to Heavenly Lake in high summer is not “a piece of cake”…but of course you can always stop at any point, take a breather and admire the unrelentingly beautiful vista.
A further off-putting element for a first-time climber at Changbai West is the deceptiveness of the slope. Rather than one (very) long, single “Stairway to Heaven”, the section of stairs you were struggling up would end, only to be continued by a new section. On the ascent, as we paused to take deep gulps of air, we found it difficult to gauge exactly where the top was! It was like the mountain peak was teasing us…just when we were beginning to feel relief having sighted (finally) what we thought was the summit, it would be taken away from us by the appearance of another (and another) extension of the seemingly never-ending stairway.
The one redeeming feature of this long arduous climb is that the steps are marked at five-metre intervals, so as you breathlessly drag yourself onward and upward, at least you know how far you’ve gone. But we didn’t check on the vertical distance before we embarked on the challenge of the Tianchi stairs. So this proved only of limited comfort to us seeing we had no idea how far there was still to go!
When we ultimately made it to the summit there was genuine relief to be felt. As well, there’s a congratulatory sign at the top to verify the achievement: SUMMIT! GREAT JOB! it proclaims. The sign informs walkers that they’ve reached a elevation point some 2,470 metres above sea-level, numerical confirmation of how high they’ve climbed.
For those who can’t physically manage the walk or just don’t feel like doing the ‘hard yakka”, there is the option of ascent by sedan. You can be ferried up the mountain’s infinite number of steps by a brace of hired carriers. You may even experience the momentary pleasure of imagining, just fleetingly, that you are like some distant China emperor! I did however spare a sympathetic thought for a couple of the sedan carriers I passed. There they were about two-thirds of the way up, two fairly slenderly built guys, slumped over, sprawled on the steps, the effort of transporting their rotund and corpulently-proportioned client in this stifling heat was just too much for the poor fellows.
At the summit there’s a large rectangular-shaped wooden viewing platform to gaze out on the Heavenly Lake. Almost all of the ballast was on one side of the platform, everyone with a camera or a mobile phone was jockeying for the optimal position on the the lake side to take photos and selfies from.
The utter serenity and stillness of the idyllic landscape, of this gem of nature, contrasted with the jostling and chattering of the human visitors. But it was undeniably a sight worth the trek up the mountain. Seeing Tianchi, with its pristine blue waters at the very top of such a vast mountain peak, was proof that the tag “Heavenly Lake” was not hyperbole. This picture-perfect strato-volcanic crater lake must be one of the most photographed rural lake settings in the world.
The return walk down was much less taxing on the legs than going up, a leisurely saunter requiring relatively little effort by comparison, notwithstanding the cautionary sign at the start of the downward stairway: “Many Steps / Take Care / Please Go Slowly”.
Footnote:Shuǐguàilake myth
Tianchi Heavenly Lake has a history of supposed sightings of water ‘monsters’ inhabiting the lake – dating back to 1903, a sort of a Chinese version of the famous Scottish Loch Nest Monster.
༘෴ ༘෴ ༘෴ ༘෴༘෴ ༘෴ ༘෴ ༘෴༘෴ ༘෴ ༘෴ ༘෴
✱ ‘Take the Slow Train to Baihe and (hopefully) I’ll Meet you at the Station’, (Sept 2019), http://www.7dayadventurer.com/take-the-slow-train-to-baihe-and-hopefully-ill-meet-you-at-the-station/
⍟ for tourism purposes Changbai Mountains is divided into three distinct sections, a north, a south and a west slope. Presumably the reason there is no Chinese east section is because the east part is located in the “People’s Democracy” of (North) Korea… in this part of the Baekdu Mountains, the Korean name for the lake is Cheonji
If you are touring Liaoning’s provincial capital and want a taste of Shenyang’a history, you will most probably have the no longer ‘forbidden’ (Mukden) palace on your itinerary. After doing Mukden, the Marshal Museum is your essential next stop. And conveniently its just a leisurely saunter from Gú Gōng in the middle of Shenhe District.
Chaoyang Street⇣
You’ll find Marshal Museum in Chaoyang Street, a street worthy of exploring more widely while visiting Shenyang, its variety and interest extending well beyond Marshal Museum in itself. On the day we visited the museum it wasn’t drawing the same numbers of people who were swarming all over the Imperial Palace, but it certainly was attracting a very healthy sum of interested punters in its own right.
What is today a museum was the former home of a family of prominent Dongbei warlords in the first half of the 20th century – the Zhangs, a brace of Zhangs, father and son. During China’s turbulent “warlord era” following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, Generalissimo Zhang Zuolin established a power base in the Northeast region. This was his home and after he was assassinated in 1928, his son Zhang Xueliang assumed the mantle as Dongbei warlord and Chinese strongman.
In large part because the younger Zhang lived a very long life (to 100) and there are more resources on him, the personal artefacts, possessions, photos, etc. contained within the museum puts more focus on Xueliang than on his father.
The mansion-cum-museum’s layout comprises several separate building connected by a series of courtyards. While not as lavish or large an affair as the “Puppet Emperor” Pu Yi’s palace-museum in Changchun, the Marshal Mansion exudes a powerful sense of the power players in control of Chinese’s destiny before the ascent to power of the communist rulers.
The key architecturally piece, the standout of the museum is the mansion itself. The building is Neo-Gothic in style, not mega-large but substantially large. The curious thing was that in front of the facade was what looked like a random dump of very large rocks, collected together in a large pile. I thought it an odd juxtaposition but I realise it wasn’t merely happenstance and doubtlessly it held some deep cultural and perhaps even religious significance※.
The other buildings represent a hotch-potch of different architectural styles, ranging from traditional Siheyuan buildings to South China pavilions to habitable structures blending Western and Chinese styles.
A mansion temple and more of those sacred rocks⇣
The interior displays have a predictably martial theme (befitting the military power-players the Zhang were) and there’s a section devoted to Zueliang’s exile and migration to Hawaii after his fall from grace – with lots of pictures and material.
A mic’d-up on-site tour guide⇣
One of the rooms contains an inventive and spectacular war mural which is part painting and part sculpture, depicting a full-on visualised battle scene which is graphically very effective.
Two of the outdoor exhibits which caught my eye were of a transportation kind. The museum held two of the Zhangs’ vehicles: the Zhang family sedan (a horse-drawn carriage) and a motor truck, the sign for which makes the claim to be if not China’s earliest automobile (I doubted this!), at least one of the very earliest automobiles in the country.
⇡Marshal Zhang’s accountantLike the nearby Imperial Palace, Marshal Zhang Museum makes much use of waxworks type mannequins to enhance the “historic atmosphere”. So we find different buildings ‘peopled’ by life-size dummies – the warlord’s administrators (accountants and such), his military staff and other functionaries of the mansion✦.
Next door to the Zhang museum❂ is another tiny (micro-) museum – the Shen Yang Financial Museum. Our tickets got us into this museum as well so I wasn’t sure if there was some formal nexus between the two museums.
Entry to the Marshal Zhang Mansion Museum (as of September 2019) is ¥60 adult and ¥30 concession (same fee structure as for the Mukden Palace).
Footnote: in my article on Shenyang’s Gú Gōng I mentioned the penchant Chinese officialdom have for flowery prose when it comes to public signage. Well, Marshal Mansion didn’t quite live up to the standard for tangentially romantic and imprecise language set by the Imperial Palace, but they came up with a more prosaic and down-to-earth sign for their lawns…one much more directly to the point: 远离绿草 “Move your step away from green grass”.
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※ another take on the seemingly patternless clump of rocks is that they suggest a kind of prehistoric countenance
✦ I don’t recall seeing mannequins of either Zhang among those featured at the mansion. This is in sharp contrast to the clay and wax facsimiles of Pu Yi which seem to pop up all over the Changchun palace
Tourists to the Northeast city of Shenyang looking to absorb some of the history of the place tend to head for Mukden (or Fèngtiān) Palace 奉天宫 (these days perhaps better known as Shenyang Imperial Palaceor Chényáng gùgōng)❋.
Although Shenyang’s fame resides with the only other Chinese imperial palace outside of Beijing, the old city of Shenhe has other attractions in the neighbourhood worthy of a diversion away from the palace and Shenyang Street. I have already touched on Marshal Zhang Mansion (and museum) and Chaoyang Jie (the subject of separate blog pieces).
But if you want to explore other places in Shenhe District (Shênhé Qū) celebrating Chinese history and culture, you could start just across the road from Gù Gōng. I happened upon this fairly new monument site to China’s past set in a wide plaza running from Shenyang Jie to Shengjian Lú. The monument, typically Chinese in design, comprises a busy ‘canvas’ of numerous bronze relief sculptures crammed together and mounted on to two long walls which face each other. The monument’s subject matter represents various threads drawn from China’s long and turbulent history of empire and war (no thematic shortage of martial figures on horseback with weapons) .
While you are in the immediate vicinity, if you exit the monument-laden square at the western end you’ll end up in Shengjing Road. This is another street of interest worth a saunter down it. It contains a good mix of new and older architecture.
Another interesting digression can be had by following Shenyang Jie south for several blocks. There are are some splendid examples of modern buildings borrowing from the traditional styles of Chinese architecture. Eventually you will arrive at a rather magnificent Chinese arch at a major intersection in the road. A pagoda-style structure – dwarfed by comparison – sits atop the massively proportioned arch (this human-made icon is best viewed at night when luminously lit up)$.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
❋ in the same way as tourists seeking the Shenyang ultimate shopping experience make a beeline for Middle Road (Zhōng Jiē) and its very long commercial pedestrian plaza
$ no less a triple-tunnelled arch – with a dominant central tunnel bookended by two smaller, subordinate tunnels
If you’ve been to Beijing and trekked the city’s tourist trail, you will inevitably see, et al, the Forbidden City (Zǐjìnchéng) 顾功. If you subsequently also find yourself as a visitor in the principal city of Liaoning province, Shenyang, you’re almost equally inevitably going to include the Northeast version of Beijing’s imperial gem on your “to see” list.
For some, seeing the provincial version of the Forbidden Palace with the image of the monumental original in mind, might prove somewhat of a letdown. Shenyang Imperial Palace (Gù Gōng) 顾功❋ is a mere one-twelfth the size of the fabled Forbidden Palace, yet it would be very harsh to write off Gù Gōng as a pocket edition of the Beijing prototype. The architects have condensed a great deal of real estate into the >60,000 square metres of the palace grounds at Shenyang. There are more than 300 rooms and around 20 separate courtyards in the complex.
Note: The cost of a ticket to enter the Shenyang Imperial Palace and Museum is set at parity with the nearby Marshal Zhang Mansion (60 CN¥ for adults).
Gù Gōng was built in the 1630s under the directions of Nurhachi and Abahai(the two founding emperors of the Qing Dynasty from 1644). Shenyang Palace’s layout comprises three sections, an eastern, middle and western section (this latter section was constructed by a later Qing emperor). The eastern section includes a component known as the “Ten Kings’ Pavilion” – a group of pavilions where the Qings determined imperial policy for the internal affairs of the country.
The architecture of Gù Gōng is interesting in itself. Stylistically, Gù Gōng is a blend of different building styles. The many buildings and structures comprise an architectural amalgam – among these, Han, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan styles can be readily discerned within the palace’s four walls.
The museum component of Gù Gōng includes a raft of Qing imperial art treasures. Among the items on display, direct from the Qing emperor’s pantry are many peerless examples delicate and beautifully glassware, together with enamel vases and gourds, ivory utensils. Not to forget the other such irreplaceable knickknacks from the erstwhile royal household.
Apart from visiting the palaces’s artworks and artefacts and it’s pavilions, another thing you can do at Gù Gōng, if you really want to get into the decadent spirit and sense of privilege of the Qing lifestyle, is costume hire! For not too many shekels✫ you can physically transform yourself into a Qing emperor or empress…for a few fleeting moments. Once you’ve traded your civilian garb for some over-the-top, fake imperial clobber (the colour red is non-negotiably mandatory), the vendor will snap a series of photos in various poses against an appropriate backdrop, ie, astride a mock Chinese imperial throne!
When in non-English speaking countries, I must admit I do derive a wickedly almost schadenfreude-like buzz from seeking out colourfully inaccurate but humorous attempts at rendering public signs into English (AKA ‘Chinglish’). And my experience in China over three visits is that these translation concoctions are among the most wildly unrestrained, off-the-page and imaginative going – they are almost invariably, pure gold! And I’m pleased to report that Shenyang Imperial Palace did not let me down in this regard. The pick of the palace signs was this gems adorning (or guarding) the palace lawn: “Splash tears when stepping on. After stepping grass heart-wrenching”, a very roundabout way of conveying the direct, standard message “Please keep off the grass”⚀. And yet, as mangled syntactically and grammatically as it is, you can not but admire the very idiosyncratic but nonetheless quite poetic nature of it! Very Chinese to be sure!
PostScript: Shěnyáng lù 沈阳路 and that arch!
If you make your way to Shenyang Imperial Palace from North Shenyang (Zhongjie) subway station (in Shenhe district), it’s but a short walk (less than three blocks) but one itself of interest, even before you reach the palace. At the major cross-street just down from the station exit, an imposingly massive grey archway with a terracotta pagoda roof marks the start of the street, and in a way announces that you are passing into the precinct of the palace. Upon seeing the ‘imperial’ arch the first time I reasonably but erroneously assumed it was the palace entrance itself, which is actually another two blocks further east! Aside from the symbolic arch there are several other interesting buildings in this street, again presenting a contrast of traditional and more modern Chinese building styles.Shenyang lu
⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢⇢
❋ sometimes referred to as the Mukden Palace (perhaps of archaic use now). ‘Mukden’ was the Manchu name for the city
✫ about 60 to 100 yuans depending on how regal you want to get!
⚀ in a similar bent, posted on another lawn (perhaps more abstrusely) was “Looking at flowers and plants outside the garden and laughing”
Our ultimate day in Harbin, what to do? My own leaning, on surveying the options, nudged me towards a trip to Unit 731 (AKA Detachment 731), a museum established in a multi-building complex which was used by the Japanese military and scientists to carry out heinous biological experiments on the local population during the Thirties and Forties. My travelling companion’s inclination however was for spending a less sombre and more genteel day at Tai Yang Dao (Sun Island). In the end what swayed it for Sun Island was proximity, it being a short boat distance from Central (Z.Y.) Street, compared to Unit 731 which was located in the city’s back blocks, requiring a long train trip from the centre.
We decided crossing the river by boat would be the optimal way to get to Sun Island. The other but considerably more expensive way to get to Sun Island is by cable car, which certainly provides a bird’s-eye level vantage point during the crossing (you can also get there circuitously by taxi, crossing a series of bridges). There is no charge to visit Sun Island but access to amusements, rides, activities, etc attract a charge.
The water transport to Sun Island departs from the wharves at Sidalin Park✹. Boats run pretty much continuously all day✥ to the island, so popular is the venue. Although it’s just across the Songhua River we didn’t make straight for Sun Island. The three-quarter full charter boat took a left once out in the channel and headed down the river for a view of the city south skyline behind Stalin Park down to the bridges. We also got to see some of the nearby uninhabited islands overrun by the reeds and wild grasses of the wetlands. I say ‘uninhabited’ but this is only 99 per cent factual. As we make a bee-line for 太阳岛, coming up on your left is the local branch of the men’s nude bathers’ club (fortunately, some might say for sake of aesthetically considerations, the Harbin naturalists are a discreet distance away).
As the ageing journeyman ferry chugs across the water we take videos of the approaching island and the cable cars being pulled back and forth. I remind myself that in just a few months time this trip won’t be possible…the clear aqua-turquoise surface of the river will become solid frozen with the onset of Harbin’s winter. Amusingly, we pass a line of swimmers in single file. These, older men mainly, are slowly swimming, or more accurately half swimming, half dog-paddling, their way from an island to the mainland. Each of them is carrying a rucksack of belongings attached to them by rope like an umbilical cord✧.
As the boat approaches the island wharf, one or two landmarks catch the eye from the river. The first, from a distance looks like a light-hearted sculpture of a very large white swan or is it a goose? When we got to the wharf we realised it wasn’t a pop culture artwork, but the comical masthead on a pleasure vessel for visitors (and especially children) to ride on.
The second, much more visible landmark getting the attention of the boat passengers looks like a historic European castle rising up out the treetops, something you might find on the Danube – in Budapest for instance. Once ashore, on closer inspection, it’s historical pedigree is found wanting. It is of more origin and seems to be inspired by the logo figurehead castle you see at Disneyland! The ‘castle’ turns out to be the central administrative and amenities building for the island’s commercial operations.
Getting around the island by foot is possible but it covers a large expanse of land and the attractions are quite spread out. So from the wharf we decided to use the “people mover” or the mini-bus to get-about (¥20 each). This made logistical sense but our experience was that it proved a very poor service provider. I was expecting it to operate as a flexible “hop-on, hop-off” arrangement (a lá the Big Red Bus in capital cities globally), but we were not able to hail down one of the many vehicles continually circling the park (every though we had purchased tickets). Each time we tried the bus driver refused to stop for us even when the vehicle was virtually empty (great PR Sun Island!). Apparently our ticket permitted us to use certain passenger service vehicles only (not explained at point of sale).
That said, the island park did not lack for attractions and points of interest. The various, quaint bridges around the ponds makes for nice “eye-candy”. A Russian-style village garden added to the theme park feel of Sun Island. The section containing the waterfalls and accompanying rock caves were a real highlight for photography manic-obsessives❂ (tip: the pick of the pix is an angled one capturing both the rock-face waterfalls and the big balloon in the shot).
Many of the island fixtures are well worth a close-up inspection. The mega-scale, modernist monument (a combination of white ovals and arches) near the Greenway is an interesting feature in itself. Another white structure with two storey viewing towers of the water is similar appealing in its design. I was also taken by the supersized “organic sculpture” that we stumbled upon. This creation was another popular point for visitors to mill round and snap endless selfies. The mainly green and red bird (of paradise?)◙ is entirely a floral construction in the familiar style of Jeff Koons (the gigantic floral puppy that once graced Sydney’s Circular Quay, now in Bilbao, Spain).
And if nature encounters with fauna are your bag, then Sun Island will not disappoint. You can visit a section of the park with fenced off animals of the more gentle kind like deer and caribou. Here for a fee you can pat and feed members of the Cervidae family inside an enclosure. I noticed that with the deer, familiarity brings a singular expectation on their part. Far from being reticent and shy, the creatures can sniff out a food-toting human from 60 feet.
But the one member of the animal kingdom that seems most at home on Tai Yang Dao are small rodents from the Sciuridae clan. The island abounds with the common acorn-addicted squirrel, plentiful on the ground and in the trees. So numerous they are, they have been designated their own section, “Squirrel Lake”, but you don’t need to go here to find them, they inhabit the entire wooded area of Sun Island. While walking around the island, at the back of the Russian model gardens, I spotted a ginger cat in hot pursuit of a squirrel, desperately but hopelessly trying to diminish the fleet-footed Sciuridae population by one.
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✹the return boat trip to and from Taiyangdao wharf costs 35 RMB per person and includes a “grand tour” of the riverfront
✥ well to late-ish afternoon anyway, the Pingfang attraction closes about five o’clock
✧Idon’t think they were heading for the nude men’s beach (carrying too much baggage for a start!)
❂ ie, mostly everybody on an overseas junket!
◙ it looked like a chicken to me but I’m going with the Chinese bird ofparadise which would be more emblematic
From Harbin’s tourism centro, Zhongyang Jie, you can find your way to Zhaolin Park by heading north one block. This succulently lush green park with its verdant plant life is a great place to retreat to, getting away from all the people, all the hustle and bustle of Zhongyang Street. And it’s very reachable via a short walk down Shangyou Street from Z.Y. Street.
Zhaolin Park, attractively set on a large block of public land (more than 8 hectares), is roomy yet it is also compact…it fits quite a lot of things into its space while still allowing you the freedom to roam around. What defines the essence of the park is the canal that snakes it’s way through the park and gardens. It is the thread that connects the various parts of green Zhaolin. By walking in concentric circles around the park you can acquaint yourself with the various quaint and charming bridges which cross the canal at different points.
Zhaolin Park is well resourced, little wonder then that families tend to flock there. It especially caters for the juvenile visitor. Exotic birds in large cages in one part. Several different amusements for children are contained within the park perimeter, plenty of gentle rides for the younger child. For the family as a whole, the most popular element are the paddle boats. You can hire a colourful boat and paddle a course up and down the canal.
Being on the lookout for traces of the Russian presence that once pervaded Harbin, I particularly noticed the old entrance gates and buildings on my way in and out (in Senlin and in Shangzhi streets). The structures project a distinctly Russian dome character in the design. It is refreshingly and perhap surprising to report that Zhaolin Park is adequately equipped with toilets, but if I had one quibble it is the same one I have with most many public parks. Given the constant and steady stream of visitors Zhaolin receives, it could do with a lot more seats for the punters distributed right across the park.
FN: at the peak freeze-point of the northern hemisphere (January-February each year), Zhaolin Park transforms from green to ice and snow white. It is one of the places you can take in the spectacle of ever-more imaginative ice sculptures that Harbin is internationally famous for (home of the winter Ice Festival and Ice Lantern Show)
PostScript: Name derivation
Zhaolin Park was originally called Lam Kam Road Park✽. It was renamed in the late 1940s in honour of a Chinese communist guerrilla leader and Dongbei political organiser. Li Zhaolin organised and led the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army in its resistance to the Japanese invaders in the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1946 Li was assassinated in Harbin by Kuomintang agents. Zhaolin Park can be entered from Shangzhi Street, which is named after another Northeast communist commander in the war against the Japanese, Zhao Shangzhi.
Zhongyang✽ Street (to insiders Z.Y. Street for short) proclaims itself in the elaborate, neon-lit arch that spans the start of the street. A small plaque hanging from the arch announces: 中央大街建筑艺术博物馆 -Architectural Arts Museum of Central Avenue, a tag that is a bit pretentious for what is Harbin’s high tourism pedestrian street.
The commercial hub of the street comprises restaurants, eateries, souvenir shops and hotels. The further you go down the street towards the river, the grander the buildings become. This is where many of the city centre’s older and grander Russian buildings are, including several palatial structures in the Baroque style (alas, some of these grand old mega-buildings have suffered the ignominy of being sub-divided to accommodate KFC and other fast food operators).
Although Z.Y’s Russianness can be glimpsed everywhere. Place names, shop and restaurant names for the most part are present in both Russian and Chinese. But he Russian imprint on Zhongyang is more profound than this. At many of the street’s corners you can see the Russian architectural influences in the onion domes, minarets and spires sitting atop many buildings.
With Zhongyang’s cornucopia of niteries and gift shops, the street flows with people ever-so slowly ambling up and down the old cobblestone pavements. They are present from first thing in the morning through to and beyond nightfall. But it is at night that Z.Y. Street really comes alive. The street is a thriving heartbeat, and the night beat is a musical one! The melodic sounds of old-fashioned small bands and trios can be heard all along the central thoroughfare. This recurring feature gives Harbin its nickname of Music City (although Harbinites tend to render it in English as ‘Muisic’ City). The musical highlight for me was a solo guitarist playing with great gusto from an upstairs Z.Y. balcony. This ‘muso’ who wasn’t Chinese (possibly he was Russian) was really going off, strutting his stuff for the gathering of visitors below with Jimi Hendrix-like zeal and vigour!
The evening is also the right time to explore Zhongyang Jie’s artists’ nook at the river end of the street. Around dusk every night a contingent of bohemian-looking❇ artists set up their chairs, boards, frames and utensils to drum up some passing business. The crayon-fingered artists, predominantly badly dressed males with straggly long-hair and unkempt beards, invite curious passers-by to have their portrait drawn during a short sitting. The street artists seem to do solid, steady business although there’s always a lot more watchers than there are models willing to fork out the 60-80 CH¥ plus 20 CH¥ for the plastic cylindrical container to keep it safe in. While my partner was having her likeness recreated in pencil and crayon, I checked out the ‘live’ handiwork of the other artists…some were of course better than others (although this might be a matter of taste) but I thought that the quality of drawing along the strip was consistently fairly good.
A discus throw’s distance from the artists’ niche was another, not to be missed attraction, again best visited at night. In a side lane off Z.Y., lit up like Christmas, is one of the busiest, noisiest food hutongs you are likely to experience. Stretching 100 plus metres down the lane are a long line of street food stalls (mostly selling much the same stuff, kebabs it seemed to me). The hutong produced a spectacular light show of colour and a throbbing vibe of noise from competing soundtracks and the din of the stall-holders hawking their fast food ‘delicacies’. But it was the first food stall on the corner bearing the name “Food Supermarket of Quidelia” that attracted the most attention. It was more boisterous than the others, and this was down to the antics of one particular vendor. Taking centre stage was this zany, hyperactive dude in sunglasses and conspicuously large colourful wrist beads (a bit of a fashion trend for young Chinese males). His ‘routine’ consisted of a sudden launch into corybantic dancing❅ to the pulsating street music while twirling a fan (or several fans) in a 360° arc…then seamlessly he would swap the fan for some food tongs, flip a couple of kebabs and then resume his over-the-top, campish dance performance with an undiminished degree of furibund intensity. Quite mesmerising in a WTF way!
Heading westerly up Z.Y. towards the river you will come to a heavy traffic cross-street. The town planners’ solution to this impediment to pedestrian progress was to build an underground pathway which allows those on foot to by-pass the dense vehicular traffic overhead. Known as the “Pedestrian Tunnel under Zhongyang Street”, the tunnel has the additional function of being a secure space for the city’s youth to congregate. Here, the local kids hang-out, skate-board or play ti jianzi (the popular game of foot shuttlecock that many Chinese especially in Beijing are obsessed with). A couple of passageways funnelling off from the tunnel lead to a small U-shaped shopping arcade which caters mainly for tourists.
Footnote: If you get past all of the shops and other vibrantly alive distractions that Zhongyang Street throws at you, there’s a very pleasant riverine park awaiting you at the end. The path cutting through the park provides an enjoyable stroll for those in no rush to go anywhere fast. Neat garden edge-boxes, strategically positioned trees of the Weeping Willow variant and several tasteful marble works of sculpture add to the aesthetic appeal of the park. The other feature of the park worthy of comment is the monument to those Harbinites whose lives were profoundly impacted by the 1957 flood catastrophe in Harbin (honouring both the victims and the heroes of the disaster). The monument, the Flood Memorial Tower, is augmented by a more modern structure, a large semi-circular, columned arch which, in the way popular with contemporary Chinese town planners, produces a nightly kaleidoscope of alternating colours intended to dazzle onlookers.
If ever you find yourself in Harbin, China, and can manage to tear yourself away from the great northern city’s tourist Mecca Zhongyang Pedestrian Street (AKA Central Street), you should head northeast in the direction of the old town district. Our destination, Lao Daowai (literally “Outside the old road”) on the occasion we visited Harbin, was a sprawling area on the northeastern side of Harbin, although its hard to pin down exactly where the district begins (at least it is for a Wàiguó rén passing through).
We started out in Daoli District at St Sophia Square, a pleasant open plaza about three blocks east of X.Y. Street. At one end of the square is the St Sophia monument, a large black arch and skeletal structure mimicking the shape of the church. In the shadow of the arch is an improvised amusement park where pre-school kids can be shunted round the square in a giant robotic “Star Wars clone” of a moving contraption or via some other similarly ‘cool’ vehicular means.
The landmark arch also provides a popular modern visual backdrop in good weather for newlyweds regularly seen there withphotographer in tow… invariably you will find at least happy couple all decked out in the full matrimonial outfit taking advantage of the setting to pad out their wedding videos.
The Russians are long gone from here of course but they left a host of architectural calling cards around the square. Pride of place in the plaza lies with the historic Russian cathedral (собор) Saint Sofiya. Some of the older (Russian-era) buildings in Harbin are also close to the square. Daoli’s grand buildings (such as the dome edifice inpicture 1 above) share the area with working class markets and what looks like the city’s theatre district.
Go furthernorth and further east and you will reach Lao DaoWai. Here you will find pockets of urban decay, where grand houses and apartments in the Russian era once stood, the remnants have fallen on straitened times. In one particular street I observed rows of such old faded buildings with the distinctive Russian-style roof peaks in very dismal, unloved condition. You could say, taking the glass half-full line, that it conveys character to the ‘ancient’ city-scape, but truly some of DaoWai’s residential blocks are barely habitable, and to beperhaps a bit uncharitable, little better than crumbling wrecks on the outside.
Away from the depressed, rundown part of the district, we travelled through an old warehouse sub-district which also didn’t lack for character. One factory-shop we stopped in front of didn’t appear to be open (lights off inside, no sign of life). But hovering around the doorway for a few minutes attracted the attention of the hitherto-unseen septuagenarian owner who quickly invited us in. The interior was all a bit old and dusty, but we had a glance around at the merchandise and even bought several pairs of colourful sox. The socks were extremely cheap, unfortunately after wearing them for a short time we discovered why (the quality of fabric was stretched very thin indeed).
From here we made for the Lao DaoWai riverfront. This turned out to be the most lively and fun part of the district. First up, the road leading to the water (ie, to the Songhua River) was a mishmash of different businesses in (at best) ordinary looking premises, interwoven with a number of interesting buildings and structures which make good use of traditional Chinese architectural motifs and features.
The river offered up a most pleasant diversion from the grit and grim of downtown Lao DaoWai. There is a long waterfront promenadewhich winds it’s way back southwest to the popular Zhongyang Jie area and beyond. A leisurely walk along the riverfront allowed us to take in many attractive and interesting sights. As we arrived, fishing boats were returning with what seemed quite modest and even disappointing catches. Following the lead of the locals, we went aboard one of the working vessels to investigate. All the sea seemed to yield up to these fishermen were tiny shrimp, shrimp and more shrimp, a quite miserly haul I thought for an afternoon’s net work.
Continuing our saunter down the river, what caught my eye was the pattern of wall decorations on display. At set points all the way along the Daowai waterside promenade, the local people’s council had installed a series of artworks with Chinese themes and traits. These were small murals of bas-relief metal panels painted red and depicting different aspects of Chinese culture, work and life. Much needed I thought, as they certainly brightened and enlivened what was otherwise a drab, beige, nondescript wall.
One of the high points for me was the panoramic views across Songhua River to the large forested island and the high-rise city in the distance. It was also fun to sit back observing the locals indulging in their afternoon leisure activities. Some were fishing from the shore or swimming (or maybe some of these lathering up were just washing themselves). There were plenty of Harbinites walking their dogs (French poodles seemed to be the preferred Harbin canine pet of choice). Others were just sunning themselves on the bank, unwinding and generally chilling out.Nearly halfway back to “tourism central” (Z.Y. Street), the Lao DaoWai promenade abruptly ends at a set of short, steepish steps. The riverfront path however continues eastwards through Daoli and the central area via other walkways which take you past (among other things) a landmark, upmarket riverfront hotel with a very unusual six-seater vehicle out the front and the Songhua River Bridge (below).
FN: Songhua River Bridge
This pedestrian–only bridge (although there is also a separate bicycle lane) is worth deviating off the scenic river pathway for a stroll across it. It lights up at night when its popularity reaches its zenith. The bridge is of the cable truss type, originally built by the Russians around the end of the 19th century.
We got the Changchun light rail✽ to the Puppet Emperor’s Palace train station. The palace entrance was on a wide street with a coterie of policemen guarding the gate. Tickets were acquired in the booking office/souvenir shop opposite at a cost of 70 CN¥ per head (pensioners with ID, passport, free).
Although it said on a site website that you could hire an audio guide in English for the museum, the counter staff indicated that there were none available. Unfortunately, this deficiency was felt during the tour because there was a great lack of explanatory notes in English for the exhibits as well.
For a lot of people, outside China, the tour could be a very informative one, especially if your only prior knowledge of the last emperor of the ultimate Chinese (Qing) dynasty comes, for example, from a less than impeccable historical source such as films like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.
With the use of language aids or without them, exploring the physical structures of the former Manchukuo (Manchu State) Imperial Palace provides a fascinating insight into a dark chapter of official life in Dongbei under the Japanese military occupation of the 1930s and 1940s.
‘Emperor’ Pu-Yi, his ’empress’ and the rest of the royal family lived in grand accommodation at the behest of their Japanese masters. Notwithstanding that the Pu-Yi regime was a contrived one propped up by a foreign invader and effectively wielded very little actual power itself in the region, the elaborate parts of the whole, the palatial splendour, were certainly befitting of a royal palace. Pu-Yi’s residential quarters and that of his family were definitely on the de luxe end of comfortable.
The palace layout divides into two main sections, the royal family’s area and the regime’s administrative area. This second section was larger than I had anticipated, comprising the offices and buildings allocated to the phoney emperor’s apparatus of government, his secretariat and other administrative functions.
One of the most interesting and sought-out items in the museum’s exhibits is the personal vehicle which belonged to Pu-Yi, a 5.7m long black car✪ housed in its own (garage) section of the complex. The “king-sized” vehicle is quite a rare old 1930s auto, a famous “Bubble Car” – American made by the Park Automobile Co. There’s a little souvenir annex attached to the ‘garage’ for car enthusiasts to secure a momento.
The palace contains a lot of Pu-Yi paraphernalia and minutiae, personal items like his traditional ceremonial garb, his official uniforms, his BP device and his trademark circular spectacles. Wall photos and information extracts chart the last Chinese monarch’s story from the imperial palace to incarceration to rehabilitation and life as an ordinary private citizen.
The environs of the palace buildings are well worth a ramble through. Within the grounds are gardens which are charming if (or because) they are a bit quirky. Next to this is a fish pond with a fountain and rockeries. Close by there the emperor’s swimming pool, sans water and it’s tilework is in quite a poor, dilapidated state.
The outside feature of the palace that most captured my imagination though was below it: an air-raid shelter. The increasingly paranoid puppet monarch (no doubt alarmed by the fading fortunes of Japan in the world war) had his own underground bunker constructed. The rooms in the bunkers were grimly threadbare, starkly contrasting with the lavish living quarters of the palace above.
Elsewhere there apparently used to be a tennis court and a small golf course on the grounds. To leave the palace you need to go through an inner gate which looks like the exit, but it’s not, the actual exit going from the palace to the street is further down a hill. As you walk, to your right look for the palace’s horse racetrack (still operating, there was show-jumping happening while we visited). The entire perimeter of the palace is surrounded by high concrete and brick walls.
For the historical narrative of Japan’s Manchurian Puppet-State in the Thirties and Forties, refer to my June 2019 blog entry, Manchukuo: An Instrument of Imperial Expansion for the Puppet-masters of Japan
For Pu-Yi to end up as the joker in the pack of playing cards sold at the Puppet Emperor Palace Museum would seem to many in China to be a apt footnote to his story.
︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︵︹︹
✽ light rail but still heavy security…even though we were travelling only four stations on a city subway network, we still had to submit to the body wave scanners and screening process and the baggage through the electronic detection belt
When we lobbed through the doors of a provincial Chinese hot springs hotel which bore the name “The Milky War”, I did momentarily think of the famous 1980s song by The Church. Once inside, any association with inter-galactic imagery quickly vanished. The Milky Way Hot Springs Hotel in Changchun turned out to be an empty metaphor, the hotel’s interior didn’t correspond to anything remotely resembling the stars of any Solar System I’ve seen✥.
In one sense though I found the “Milky Way” was actually “out of this world”. It was nothing like any other hotel I had encountered before. The reception area was very opulent, very large, lots of gratuitous items of an aspiring luxurious lifestyle.
But we didn’t get a chance to absorb the Milky Way extravagance because we were whisked through to a changing area where our shoes were ‘confiscated’ and replaced by flip-flops (a variation on the usual practice in China of leaving your shoes at the front door). We were instructed to divest ourselves of our street clothes (which were bagged and deposited somewhere), and given gender colour-coded pyjamas to wear inside at all times. My “Corporate Vasco de Gamas” were a greeny-yellow colour with a circular pattern (all male guests wore the identical outfit), while my partner (and all of her sex) were decked out in a matching pink number with the same pattern. Already I was feeling like I was at an institution more so than in a resort. We were also issued with a plastic wristband (also colour-coded naturally!) with an activation device which we were to use to gain entry to the “mess hall”, to open our assigned lockers in the change rooms and to redeem our shoes.
Everywhere we went in the hotel it appeared that there were surplus numbers of staff (to state the bleeding obvious, this is not a country with a labour shortage problem)…possibly this explains why we were never issued with keys or swipe cards to our room. Whenever we wanted to get in we simply went to the staff desk on our floor where there was always someone eager and ready to hot-foot it to our room and do the perfunctory necessaries.
The ritualistic and communal nature of the resort became crystal clear when it came time for ablutions. This part of my adventure at the Milky Way has most resonance with The Church’s lyrics above. The guest rooms were devoid of showers, moreover they possessed none of the necessary utensils you associate with bathrooms (toothbrushes and paste, soap, etc). Instead we were ushered downstairs (still in our “jim-jam” uniforms) and I was told by the staff member manning the booth to “follow a boy” into the male showers area where “he would take care of my requirements” (already I was experienced a degree of disquiet at the possible implications of this). My partner was led into the opposite direction presumably with the same brief. Once inside the male zone of exclusivity, the ‘boy’✧assigned to me, using a combination of gestures and minimal Chinglish, exhorted me to strip naked in the common area. Having done so he quickly bagged my pyjamas, and, much to my consternation, deposited them somewhere just out of sight. He led me to another part of the male quarters where he motioned that there were showers, shampoo, soap dispensers, body lotion, etc – immediately after which he disappeared.
As I showered slowly my mind contemplated whether I would see my boy, or more much more importantly, my clothes again. Having showered, shaved and attended to my oral care with the utensils available, I searched around for a fresh towel. Fortunately there were severalhundred of them, neatly folded and stacked in a wall recess just outside the shower cubicles. I backtracked my steps hoping to find my way back to where the attendant had hidden my jim-jams. With a stroke of luck navigating that ‘alien’ environment I was relieved to manage to locate both him and the clothes.
I quickly donned my Milky Way kit (modesty regained!), but noticed that just about all of the other male guests were very comfortable and relaxed, either strutting around the perimeters of the quarters or sitting and simply reading a newspaper – all with their tackle on full display, flapping or rocking gently in the breeze! Too relaxed I pondered! Perhaps it was my repressed Anglo-Saxon sensitivities to the fore, but I found all that prolonged open displaying of the “family jewels” a bit off-putting (that said, the thought crossed my mind that, unlike me, the Mardi Gras boys from Oxford Street back home would probably take to this environment with undisguised glee!).
In hindsight I think that all that male locker room uninhibited stuff was pretty harmless, just a bunch of testosterone-charged Chinese guys shooting the breeze together without the encumbrance of their Bonds (Chinese knock-off) briefs. Reassuringly, I didn’t spot any “raincoat deviant” types hovering around the showers while I was in the act of ablution. Although, as I was disrobing for my shower the following day my assigned boy thought it an opportune time (apparently!?!) to point out one of the other ‘boy’ attendants in the room and indicate (mainly non-verbally) just how incredibly deficient the unfortunate little guy was in the“shaging equipment” stakes. I don’t think my blank stare at the boy’s attempt at humour and the resultant sigh I emitted, registered anything with him as I waited for the slightly uncomfortable moment to pass. You can understand now why I tended not to loiter around the men’s shower area once I had taken care of the basics. “Something quite peculiar” indeed.
Our sojourn at the Milky Way hotel was calculated to take advantage of its special VIP day which it offered from time to time (we were eligible for the special deal by accumulating Milky Way bonus dockets). The big payoff was a special price (one night only) which included lunch and a feast fit for the Ming Dynasty.
So, when we got to the Milky Way dining area at 5 o’clock (a common time for Chinese to start tucking into supper), at the entrance between us and the food, there was a twenty deep block of pink and green pyjama–clad foodies already queued up for an onslaught on the “feast for an emperor“.
Once the human roadblock had dissipated, we were able to appreciatethe advice of “a friend of a friend” to go light on the lunch. I was glad for the heads-up, otherwise I would never have had the room to go full-tonk at the Gargantuan culinary extravaganza on offer. The range and quantity of foods and beverages was mind-blowing (did I mention dessert?), so we were up for seconds, thirds, etc. Did we over-indulge? You bet ya! But we did try to pull back enough so that we could sample everything on offer.
Being unfamiliar with some of the Chinese specialities on the trays, it was somewhat of a trial and error process, hit and miss as to what appealed to my taste buds. In the spirit of new dining experiences I allowed myself to taste something in a white bottle called Maotai, an alcoholic white spirits drink distilled from sorghum and Baijiu, a clear grain-based liquor❅. The famous China brew came with a stellar recommendation, but frankly to me it was impossible to get down more than a few mouthfuls. The taste was not really silky smooth, more like liquorice-flavoured sickly Raiki with a sweet and sour texture.
The next morning we made for the hot springswaterworks on level four. After the disappointment of Fengcheng’s so-called hot springs resort back in Dandong territory, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Changchun resort was the real deal. I liked the way you could hop from one tub to another until you found a temperature that suited you. We started at a warm 36°C and gradually worked our way up as ourbodies adjusted to the increased heat. But after five minutes in the 44°C pool we realised we were literally out of our comfort zone and retreated to a more tolerable temp.
Going to a ‘health’ resort – if you go there with serious ameliorative intent – is about getting into a “discomfortzone” for as long as the mortal flesh can bear it. So, after the hot tube workout we went upstairs and put ourselves through the exhaustive, draining exertions of the sauna. After the sauna had taken its pound of flesh, we retreated to our room for a rest. With the aid of a recuperative gin and tonic, we were ready to trade in our Milky Way corporation jammies for our civilian clobber, reclaim our footwear and return to the outside world.
✥ nor for that matter apparently did the song’s origins…according to Steve Kilbey the name derives not from the gravitationally-bound system of stars in the Universe but from a fashionable Amsterdam music venue, Melkweg (Dutch for “Milky Way”) he used to frequent
✧ somewhat advanced along the age spectrum of boyhood, probably about thirty, early thirties
❅ also known as ‘Moutai’, branded as “Guizhoushengrenhuaishe” (from China’s Guizhou province)
Chaoyang Street in the Imperial Palace district of Shenyang, overshadowed by the proximity of the city’s most illustrious tourist drawcard, the Gu Gong Palace itself, doesn’t get the interest it perhaps deserves. Visitors to Shenyang tend to be drawn to Gu Gong and with equal magnetic force to the “shoppers’ paradise” of the Middle Street Pedestrian Mall . But if you divert some of that time to exploring Chaoyang Street, you might happily discover some less known little treats it has to offer.
Fengtian office of Southern Manchurian Railways (131 Chaoyang Street)
It’s hard to credit that this rundown building with its faded facade and peeling paintwork, and the roof vegetation, was once the Fengtian※ office of the powerful Japanese Southern Manchurian Railway organisation, known as Mantetsu. Japanese’s control of the railways network in China’s Northeast came about after Japan defeated Russia in the 1904-05 war. The railway line, running from Harbin in the north to Port Arthur (Lüshan) in the south, was acquired by the Japanese in 1906. The premises on Chaoyang Street were clearly still occupied and padlocked from the outside (apparently currently a training centre for a children’s library system). However, the organic outgrowth of the roof resembling someone’s unkempt backyard, suggested that the property was not a candidate for the local tourist circuit.
Shenyang Huangchengli Cultural Industrial Park(129 Chaoyang Street)
Shenyang and Chaoyang Jie’s penchant for turning the ordinary and mundane into something fresh and different is ably illustrated by the makeover given this old industrial complex. Situated like the ex-Manchurian Railways depot in the 皇城社区 (Huangcheng neighbourhood), a narrow entrance lane from the street leads to a small square. A new project, still presently in the process of completion, is to transform what was a drab old industrial site into a visually more appealing urban landscape. An attractive and classy new arch adorns the entrance to the square and historically and culturally relevant murals and other artworks including elegant carved relief panels decorate the walls. A subject figuring prominently in the industrial park’s paintings is local celebrity and 1930s Dongbei martial strongman Marshal Zhang (“the younger”). The artistic facelift of the old industrial complex on Chaoyang Street is a refreshing innovation in Shenyang, but one for which the city has precedents, eg, Shenyang’s 1905 Cultural and Creative Park taps into that same artistic and aesthetic potential for transforming a depressed industrial wasteland.
Marshal Zhang Mansion (Shaoshuaifu Alley, off Chaoyang Street)
Marshal Mansion, located off Chaoyang Street, is the former residence of the “Two Zhangs”, Northeast warlords from the Chinese Republic era – father Zhang Zuolin and son Zhang Xueliang. The mansion now a museum comprises several buildings connected by courtyards. The main building, the family mansion itself, is neo-Gothic in style and is fronted by a body of large stones which have a prehistoric resemblance. The other buildings include an amalgam of different architectural styles (eg, traditional Siheyuan buildings, South China pavilions and Chinese-Western mixed styles). There’s lots of military stuff and a good collection of material and photos from the younger Zhang’s life after his fall from power and emigration to Hawaii. Other items of interest at the museum include the Zhang family carriage used to ferry the Zhang kids to school, and one of China’s very earliest motor vehicles. Admission is ¥60 adult and ¥30 concession.
From near Changchun’s central train station we waved down a cab to take us to the site of Changchun’s cinematic claim to glory in China, the Jilin province city’s pioneering film studios. Although it looked fairly close on Google Maps it took an eternity to get to the former movie site of CFS, Changchun Film Studios. Road distance in China is measured in the conventional way by metric length, but also by the number of motor vehicles they’re are between point A (where you are) and point B (where you want to go).
The setting for the film studios is an impressive one. From the street front you enter a big green park and walk up a grand, sweeping drive. At the top of the drive is the film studio complex, but before you reach the studio entrance, you have to contend with Mao Tse-tung. There he is, “the Chairman”standing erect, as he was in life, larger than the life of any one Chinese person. A gigantic, white statue of Mao, waving benignly at every human figure passing within the shadow of his massive, immovable image※.
It was quite late in the day by now but we were still keen after travelling that far, to see inside the CFS Factory/Museum. The callow youth on the turnstiles gate had other ideas…he point-blank refused us entry because it was after 4 o’clock, less than an hour till the museum closed. Unable to dissuade him, we went away disgruntled but decided to explore the outside parts of the site anyway.
This bore unexpected fruit as we discovered a nice little courtyard adjacent to the factory with an overt military touch (statues of heroic patriotic types and other martial figures, battle-green painted artillery guns, etc). The factory’s military theme is continued in the forecourt which exhibits a fighter plane of 1950s vintage.
Before leaving altogether we chanced a quick look-through of the CFS gift shop which was still open. This proved a fortuitous diversion on our part…while unenthusiastically perusing the shop’s uninspiring assortment of predictable souvenirs on the shelves we noticed a side door ajar which we took advantage of by slipping through it and into the exhibits area. Thus, through a combination of arse-lucky opportunism and devious initiative we did gain entry to the factory after all and for gratis!
The public CFS Studios display comprised a long, darkly-lit corridor which threw the lighted exhibits down one side into relief. These exhibits were a miscellany of items reflecting the film company’s past productions, the result undoubtedly of a raid on the props department and the costume wardrobes (old military weapons, uniforms and paraphernalia), old style 35mm film cameras and sound recording machines, etc.
The military theme of the factory exhibition was further underscored in the choice of film posters to display…war movies galore! The impression that CFS’ most popular movie genre was war was hard to ignore on this evidence.
Peaking inside a few of the rooms running off the main corridor revealed that the complex was still a hub for contemporary film-making. Production tech staff could be seen working on documentary and TV projects using modern technical equipment (not the antique stuff in the corridor).
Another room off the corridor held a small viewing theatre…surprisingly to me the projector was running a 1930s British B & W film starring Larry Olivier (not dubbed into Chinese and no one watching!). Elsewhere in the room there were pictures and bios of Chinese film-makers, dubbers and other behind-the-camera personnel who had made a contribution at CFS Films during its halcyon days.
The props displayed were for the most part interesting and authentic-looking (authentically old too!), but I did find the stuffed tiger mounted and encased in glass right at the end of the passageway rather incongruous and something that didn’t add to the CFS collection.
Changchun Film Studio Group Corporation (Ch: 长春电影集团公司) (to give it its formal title) was the first film production unit registered by the PRC in 1949 after the communist victory. Changchun Film Studios was chosen to fill the cinema production void left by the Japanese Manchukuo Film Association and the Northeast Film Studio. The Corporation also operates the somewhat maligned Changchun Film Theme Park elsewhere in the city.
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※ Mao’s Goliath-proportioned statue and other plaques in the park are propaganda pieces for the government commemorating the communist state’s establishment (October 1, 1949)
Very many cities in China have a Zhongshan Park 中山公园 (perhaps the most famous is Beijing’s Zhongshan Park near the Forbidden City). In honour of the Chinese Republic’s first president, Sun-Yat-sen, it became a standard practice to name public parks after the revered Dr Sun, who within China is better known by the name Sun Zhongshan.
Dalian’s Zhongshan Park is certainly one of the most chilled-out and slow-paced of the parks named in celebration of “the Father of Modern China”. Entrance to the park is from Huanghe Lu, one of Dalian’s busiest, traffic-heavy roads. Once you come under the canopy of its large trees you only need to penetrate the park’s perimeters by the smallest of distances to put the constant noise and shuffling of traffic on Huanghe behind you.
The first thing that my eyes lit on as I followed the park’s curving pathway was the rich variety of plant life in the park’s garden. It had lots of different Chinese natives but interspersed with these were some exotics like, of all things, pockets of the unforgiving prickly-pointed Mexican yucca (below). Seats, tables and and the occasional gazebo can be found within the park. I liked some of the (minimalist) sculptures too.
Of Zhongshan Park’s many patrons using the park, two groups were of most interest to me. The park’s central square bordered by neat hedges, Weeping Willows and Conifers, was the setting for numerous games of cards – people engrossed in playing cards being watched by equally engrossed onlookers. I noticed, here and elsewhere in this city, the penchant for card games by the locals (cf. the preferred pastime for Liaoning’s other principal city, Shenyang, which is checkers). The card players in the park seemed wholly serious about their games, notwithstanding the fact that no money appeared to be waged on the outcomes.
Meanwhile, diagonally across from the numerous, endless “no stakes” games of poker, or whatever the preferred Chinese card game is in this region (it wasn’t Mah-jong they were playing, I could see that!), an assembly of local seniors were hard at it constructing a commendable Sino-version of “Dad’s Army”, or so it appeared to this unenlightened Júwàirén✻. Led by a no doubt self-appointed “sergeant-major”, the mainly septuagenarian band were strenuously and loudly put through their paces in a set of vigorous military-style exercises…hup, two, hup, two stuff straight from the US military drill-book.
Footnote: I did find one slightly discordant note jarring ever so slightly with the tranquility and harmony of Zhongshan Park. Just about everywhere you walked around the park, you were made aware of its proximity. Towering over the park like a nebulous cloud was a very tall, oddly scientific-looking building…it’s edifice had a decidedly technocratic countenance to it but was a very idiosyncratic, anachronistic appearance indeed. I looked at it more closely later from outside the park, I’m not sure but it may have been a hospital(?) with a wacky space-age facade, but it looked like something out of “The Jetsons” AD2119 to me.
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✻ unlike the stereotype Dad’s Army from 1960s British television though, these didn’t seem like a bunch of aged clowns bungling their drill, generally making a hash of things and tripping over their own shoelaces…they were totally serious and dedicated trainers from the look of it
It always pays to read the small print on an overseas package tour, this is doubly critical if the small print on the brochure is solely in a language you have zero mastery of. I signed up for a Lvshunkou district history tour which turned out to be a Lvshunkou district history-lite tour.
When we got to the Lüshan/Port Arthur area, because of time constraints, we never got to see the Russian fort, the historical battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War or the Russian-Japanese prison site, let alone the site of the historic Manchurian Railway Depot. As things transpired all we were able to fit in was a whistle-stop tour of the Lüshun Museum.
First we had to join a lengthy queue to get in to the museum, a popular site (we spent 10-15 minutes in the hot late summer sun alternately admiring the elegantly attractive edifice of the museum and snapping pictures of the nearby phallic-suggestive Friendship Tower).
Once inside though, it was worth the temporary discomfort, it was a neat and compact little museum of Lüshun art history and archaeological pre-history. I was drawn to the museum’s collection of regional artefacts, ceramics, figurines, statuettes, vases, Buddhist artworks and its anthropological holdings. But what took my eye in particular were a couple of large, very ancient-looking stone writing tablets. I also took a shine to the large and very dramatic historic battle painting in one of the rooms.
Outside again, we were given enough time to use the close-by, rusty old Russian-era gun emplacements as a mood-capturing backdrop for half-a-dozen selfies. After that, we barely had time to admire the site’s well-maintained gardens before we were whisked off back to the tour bus to explore other, less historically significant parts of the district.
After a busman’s lunch (on the bus!), the next time-wasting activity on the agenda at Lǚshùn was a boat ride arranged for its own sake. We filed out of the tour bus and aboard an old boat and handed a slim satchel of sausage (prompting an instant misunderstanding: I thought the paltry offering of protein was for us to consume on the ride). The boat, carrying fifty or sixty Chinese nationals and myself, charted an oblong-shaped course, going out one side of the harbour and then returning the other thirty minutes later.
I have no notion of, nor was I enlightened as to what the purpose of the boat ride was. We were shown no notable sights or landmarks, saw nothing but empty stretches of water inhabited by other passing vessels some engaged in the same futile, unspecified mission as ourselves. All this leads me to conclude that the purpose was a nihilistic one, an existential muse on nothingness…or perhaps the real reason lay in the small portion of meat we were all given at the start. Everyone else on the boat quickly divested themselves of their piece overboard where it was gratefully snapped up by the swarming flock of seagulls which had been shadowing our boat’s course. With nothing else to do I duly followed suit. Clearly, the the boat trip was part of a supplementary feeding program for the local colony of seagulls in Lǚshùn.
In a twinkle we shape-shifted from clueless, futile wanderers in the Yellow Sea to gimlet-eyed consumers on a warehouse shopping junket. We were enticed with sparkling opals, beads and precious other gemstones. In a showroom an adolescent Chinese “Joe the Gadget Man” sales dude went through a “show and tell” routine demonstrating how either genuine the precious stones were or how expensive they, I couldn’t be sure which. The Chinese tour party seemed quite engrossed by his highly animated showy spiel, to me it was all a bit ho-humdrum. We moved to the food section of the building where we inspected rows of the dried fish delicacies and all manner of other comestibles that Chinese consumers like to stock up on in large quantities.
Our final Lǚshùn stop to waste an hour or so was the saddest experience of the day. It involved a trip to a Chinese “drive through” zoo. Not an enlightened zoo like Western Plains Zoo which places the animals’ welfare and happiness at a high premium by allowing them the distance, space and relative freedom to move – as only an open plains environment can do. No, this was more like the bad old western zoos of the 1960s which doubled down on confinement and captivity, corralling the creatures, mainly here Eurasian bears of various kinds and a few tigers, into tiny, unsanitary cages, so they could be stared at through the bars. Bored and immobile, they were pathetic sights.
The only animals given a bit of space and exercise were the zoo’s Bengal tigers and tigresses. These big cats were allowed to prowl round a dusty strip of turf, albeit a fairly restricted one. We, the humans, were permitted to take photos as we circled round the mainly listless tigers from a good, safe distance. Occasionally an attendant would throw them slabs of meat from a truck.
The last of the animals on display for the public’s enjoyment were a pair of large brown bears. Ostensibly, they were better off than their caged compatriots because they were sitting in a large pond of water. But I think that was just for the benefit of paying customers, so they can see them frolicking in a riverine environment. When the gates close for the day I suspect they get shuffled back into their 4 x 3 cages. In any case the water quality in the pond didn’t look all that flash, it looked a bit dirty, and this was not helped by visitors in the buses chucking water bottles into the pond to get the Ursus arctos to stand up so they can take better photos.
Having wasted enough time in Lǚshùn, some enjoyable, some so-so, we started back to Dalian and our digs at the ubiquitous Jinjiang Inn.
Footnote: there was one more time-waster thrown up by the tour on returning to Dalian. We stopped off at the “Dalian Bathing Beach” for a quick “Bo-peep”…the Dalian beach scene has got a bit of a reputation, sometimes described as “the Miami of Asia”. If this small beach is anything to go by, the sand quality looked decidedly more like unappealing pebbly Brighton Beach than golden sands Miami (with wall-to-wall portable beach huts replacing the British beach’s trademark reclining chairs). The park adjoining the beach was actually more interesting with its range of seaside-inspired sculptures. An on-site kiosk※ supplied all the sand buckets and shovels, inflatable toys and plastic balls any intrepid Chinese surf-adventurer might need. My attention was drawn to the large map sign and it’s list of beach regulations, most notably the rule forbidding “the removal of sand without permission” and the one discriminating against beachgoers who have various serious ailments by denying them (together with the inebriated) the right to swim at the (public) beach.
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※ the sign on the kiosk’s wall “No tea, no fun!” gives us a pointer to the type of wild, swinging beach parties the locals must get up to…absolute chai-fuelled beach-mania raves no doubt
Lǚshùn, Lüshan, Lvshunov (旅顺) – variations of nomenclature for a settlement with a long, multinational history as highly prized first-rate port and a key strategic location on the Northeast coast of Asia. For some tourists, Lǚshùn is merely a peninsula appendage to a trip to Dalian, Liaoning’s second city. Popular for visitors from China, Russia and Japan – at the crossroads of the three differing cultures – and for anyone, anywhere, interested in the modern history of the region.
But for those less interested in the story of the North Asian powers’ struggle for supremacy in Port Arthur (Lǚshùn’s former name under the Russians), there are plenty of other diversions and attractions to fill in a day in the Lǚshùn area. Crossing that spectacular, breathtaking bridge that separates Dalian from Lǚshùn, passing some impressive modern residential monoliths (obviously a lot of new estates cropping up recently), we made not for Lǚshùn’s history-soaked prison or museum…our first stop was at a submarine base at the ports with a large aged submarine in pride of place. On first sighting the displayed veteran U-boat I was initially under the misapprehension that it was a Japanese World War 2 sub left behind by the Japanese Navy or perhaps captured by the Chinese at the war’s end (a sort of spoils of war on show won from the vanquished foe).
On taking the tour through the permanently moored submarine (opened for inspection at both ends of the craft), I soon realised I was wide of the mark. This was in fact a Chinese naval submarine, a Type-033 submarine actually (which is probably quite significant detail to your average, obsessed submarine aficionado)※. And the whole enterprise, known as the Lushun Submarine Museum (established 2015), is a new feature for China (the country’s first museum to exhibit naval military culture).
The other attraction at the museum vying with the ex-service sub is a submarine simulation exhibit, a room devoted to recreating a realistic'(sic) submarine cruise. Severe looking naval servicemen man the entrance, herding waves of visitors in and out in regimented fashion. The tightly packed paying punters in the room jockey for the best posy to take pictures of the ‘demo’: comprising the virtual submarine, with its commander barking orders to his crew, steering a safe sea-course between a host of pop-up enemy frigates while notching up the odd warship ‘kill’ itself…in effect a large scale video game on a super-wide screen with all the bells and whistles, not to mention the “real-life” sound and lighting effects to conjure up the appropriate atmosphere.
After the Submarine Centre we were ready for a more hands-on 3D animation (or at least that was the view of the tour organisers). We piled out of the bus and into what ostensibly was a commercial building. Inside we were led to a room to indulge our inner-nine-year-old in a video game. We were equipped with sonic “ray guns” (or whatever the equivalent current millennial term is) and invited to pretend that we were riders on an out of control roller coaster. Our seats rocked and rolled violently tossing us to and fro…we sat there immovable, gaining what vicarious pleasure we could muster by ‘zapping’ 10,000 demons each, only to find ourselves desperately trying to dodge the infinite number of remaining malevolent dragons, zombies and other miscellaneous monsters hurtling towards us without respite. Most of the adult Chinese tourists seemed to be totally captivated by the virtual “make-believe” alternate universe, whereas for me it was, at the least, a novel, “one-off” experience, considering I am someone with no interest in ‘civilised’ computer games, let alone ever contemplated visiting a fantasy arcade venue to play games of a unrelentingly violent nature.
Gamers’ central
⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛※ the eponymous Lushunkov actually dates from 1962, not quite WWII but obviously totally antiquated by modern naval technology warfare standards
Russian Street (Russian Lu), or as it is sometimes rendered, Russian Style Street or Russian Custom Street, is a lingering reminder of the days the city of Dalian was an outpost of Moscow. Today the connexion to an erstwhile Russia is most visually embodied in this single street to the north of Shengli Qiào (Shengli Bridge), near Dalian’s Xigang district.
The start of the street is marked by (what I imagine was once a very grand but what is these days) a large, aged Russian mansion. A sign in front of it proclaims the Russian heritage, русский. Russian Street is a longish, commercial street (with a short side lane appended to it) near the city ports. Rows of stalls line up on the inside of the street in front of the bricks and mortar shop buildings. It’s a street restricted to pedestrian traffic, although this in no way hinders the bike and scooter riders and the odd delivery van with its Russian goods.
Virtually all of Russian Street’s gift shops sell more or less identical merchandise – moon cakes in highly decorative boxes, inexpensive bars of Russian chocolate (going at 10CN¥)✺, jewellery and opals, decorative lighters, toy weapons, tanks and missile launchers❂, and above all, rows and rows of the famous Matryoshka dolls (also commonly called Babushka dolls), so many that they they were almost spilling out into the street. I noticed that China’s Matryoshka dolls are more orthodox than the kind I found in Moscow, where the vendors with unbridled commercial zeal were fast at it selling all manner of variations on the dolls-within-dolls theme (Vladimir Putin dolls, Barack Obama dolls, Lady Gaga dolls, Elvis dolls, and so on ad nauseam).
Half-way down there’s a authentic Russian pectopaH (restaurant)…a lot of visitors don’t venture much further than this point and it’s a good deal less busy than than the Shengli bridge end. Russian Custom Street ends at a roundabout with a large official-looking building of state, there are a couple of small coffee shops and a number of food outlets spread out along the thoroughfare.
Russian Street in 2019 conveys what is at best a superficial nod of recognition of the Russian presence in Dalian that was at its influential height some 120 years ago. Like that other (northern) Chinese town Harbin, Russian Street, Dalian, retains a Russian feel with bi-lingual street signage, but it doesn’t quite match the sense of “Russification” which Harbin leaves visitors with.
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✺ in Dalian’s summer swelter, they are definitely of the “eat them before they melt” kind
❂ toys of a military orientation are extremely popular throughout Dongbei, a fixation I imagine which extends countrywide (a very 1960s-1970s echo of Western predilections)
The Empire of Japan occupied the of cities Dalian and Lüshan (or Lvshunkou)※ and in fact a large chunk of China’s North-East for almost the entire first-half of the 20th century. Even now, nearly seventy-five years after the Japanese were vanquished from Chinese Manchuria, travelling around the Liaodong Peninsula, you can readily find the imprint of their former presence.
A conspicuously heinous reminder of the Japanese connection with Dalian (Dairen to the Japanese) and the peninsula can be found at Port Arthur (renamed Ryojun by Japan after its victory in the 1904-05 war with Russia). Specifically this can be seen in the former Russian-built Japanese Prison (now a museum) with its “hanging wall” and other torture devices used by the Japanese Kwantung army against Chinese.
There are other threads linking Dalian to its Japanese (and of course to Russia⍟), but while in Dalian I took time to visit a part of the city with much less unsavoury and more positive connotations of the former Japanese occupancy. We took a taxi from the city centre to a fairly lengthy street called Qiqa Street, not far from the Midtown area…this street is a quaint reminder of Japanese influence and imprint on the city.
Walking along it, I can’t say that much of the architecture in this street looks particularly Japanese in appearance, although to be fair we only had time to explore the western end of the street. The street dog-legs right at one point and heads east for quite a number of blocks in Zhongshan district. However, on our abridged tour we did see a number of Japanese businesses – eateries, hairdressers, and other shops – as the presence of Japanese characters on a number of the shopfronts testify. At least one block of the street has a concentration of these shops with eateries such as the pint-sized JoJo’s Tea (light Japanese meals, run by Chinese staff).
Qiqa Lu also has several buildings unrelated to Japanese culture or cuisine including a Chinese government building and the equivocally named “Paparazzi Who’s the Murderer? This commercial entity comprises a red telephone box at the front of the premises. When you lift the receiver, a metal door to the left swings open to reveal ….? I remain ignorant as to the raison d’êtreof Paparazzi Who’s the Murderer? Is it a bar, a nightclub, is it a mystery/crime-themed theatre-restaurant? Having not ventured inside, I guess the answer will remain elusive….
From our hotel in Lianhe Road in the Shahekou district of Dalian, Xinghai Square didn’t look that far away on Google Maps. Wisely, we decided against footing it to the Square, as the taxi ride took a surprisingly long time to get there. Located south-west of Dalian CBD, Xinghai Square is a very large city ‘square’ (in fact it is circular in shape) comprising large lawns and hedged gardens, dotted with modern sculptural pieces depicting rowing, sailboarding, gymnastics and other outdoor activities.
Although a pleasant place to aimlessly wander round atany time of day (barring inclement weather), the best optics are had at night. The lights on thephalanx of modern high-rise, residential monoliths surrounding the largely parkland square provide an illuminating backdrop to it. At the water’s edge there’s a high rectangular concrete platform which is sharply raised at both ends to resemble a ski jump or perhaps an enormous skatepark. Many visitors amuse themselves by climbing the steep high ends by themselves or in tandem with their friends to catch the ocean views to the south – looking out over Xinghai Bay to thespectacularly long and modern sea bridge (Xinghaiwan Bridge) and beyond, to the Yellow Sea. Most, having carefully treaded and scrambled their way to the top of the ‘skatepark’, take the opportunity for the obligatory 25 to 30 selfies!
After nightfall most interest is concentrated on two parts of Xinghai Square. One, alongside the ‘skatepark’, is the brightly-lit amusement park and auxiliary restaurants, a collection of largely stock-standard rides and entertainments, a sort of Dalian answer to Brighton Pier (without the pier!). The other, which draws the bulk of nocturnal visitors to Xinghai Square, is the vast circular fountain and its colourful displays of vertical water propulsion which draws hundreds to witness the vivid spectacle and video-record the event on their phones. Providing audio for the spectacular waterworks show is a accompanying musical soundtrack, with a mixed bag of numbers ranging from melodic Classical Chinese pieces to international pop like Simon and Garfunkel.
But the biggest spectacle of the night was the mass exit at the immediate conclusion of the vivid colour water show. People who moments before had been quietly watching the performance were all instantly and determinedly making for the exit gates at a fast rate of knots – as if they had suddenly remembered another engagement they had! The exiting crowds scattered in such numbers that the handful of police on duty had difficulty in keeping them off the roadway. Waves and waves of them streamed out of the precinct on to Huizhan Road and into taxis and cars.
Footnote: at 110 hectares 星海广场 (Xīnghâi guângchâng) is the largest urban square in Asia. The name ‘Xinghai’ literally means “the Sea of Stars”
Before leaving Dandong altogether for the southern Liaoning Peninsula and Dalian, we took to the country for a couple of days R & R. On a recommendation we went to Fengcheng for a taste of the Dandong type of hot springs resort.
From the advanced publicity I had envisaged a Chinese version of some kind of swanky, luxurious modern resort complex surrounded by flowing meadows, undulating hills, wooded forest* and a pleasant babbling brook. Imagine my disappointment when we arrived to discover nothing resembling a health farm or even an ashram exuding the enlightenment of the Bhagavistawama.
The ‘resort’ was in the middle of the township…a dusty side-street off the main drag, it was a series of rundown, crumbling, grimy buildings not suggesting the hot springs country recuperator I was picturing on the way there.
Not a terrorist attack but a sighter of the free entertainment available from the resort’s room windowsThe rooms were equipped with a brace of hot tubs (large, deep bathtubs really) and apparently there were hot springs below the ground pumping up thermal water. I couldn’t personally verify the bona fides of the springs’ healing powers but I took it at face value. In any case, even if the medicinal therapeutic benefits lacked evidence, it was very welcome just to relax and unwind for an hour or so each day in the heated tub. On my travels in China I haven’t encountered many baths in the hotels and appartments I have stayed in.
The local hairdressers’, in better nick than the ‘resort’
Even if it didn’t measure up to my (Western) understanding of a de luxe country hot springs resort, I have to admit that it was certainly a bargain deal and tariff: three meals a day (with the owner family experiencing authentic local tucker at varying odd times), two rooms plus the hot tub facilities for ¥150 per night. Although when the plumbing burst at 3am one night and we ended up almost up to our ankles in water that may or not been from the springs, I did have some fleeting, momentary doubts about our choice. But this can happen anywhere at any time, so I passed it off as part of the experience.
Don’t get me wrong, while the resort’s surface appearance and location may not have not been exactly the ticket, and about as far from a top-of-the-range rural resort you can get, the town and surrounding countryside of Fengcheng did have a certain attraction. A sleepy little Chinese backwater hamlet during the day, takes on a lively night-time ambience with the constant blare of street music reverberating up and down the main street of the town.
Fengcheng’s natural environs (just a leisurely stroll from the built-up area) have a lot to offer in the way of walks through wilderness, viewing pleasant rivers and streams and some dazzling local fauna. All in all our brief sojourn in Fengcheng was a chill-out, low-key diversion from the urban tourist trail.
Fengcheng, Liaoning province, is about 35 miles or so north-west of the city of Dandong
Before coming to Dandong, my only exposure to China’s greatest human-made wonder was a day visit years ago to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall near Beijing. So I was interested while in Dandong in taking the opportunity to see a very different and quite remote section of this greatest of walls. I also relished the chance to experience a section of 长城 that wouldnot be maxed out with zillions of formicating tourists. Visitors often complain that seeing the Wall at the more popular sections like Mutianyu, Juyong Pass or Jiankou entails having to manoeuvre round countless numbers of slow-moving or immobile walkers, thus taking the gloss off the unique Chángchéng experience.
We toured the Hushan section (about 15km north-east of Dandong) on a warm midsummer’s day. At the entrance gates to the site (a pseudo-ancient wall edifice created to create the ambience of a historic wall structure), the process of entry was fairly seamless, our tickets, pre-arranged, were purchased on the spot and we moved through the turnstiles and were funnelled into waiting transporters. From there we were whisked off to the start-point (about 700m distance from the gate), passing ambling visitors and a large heroic sculpture positioned about half-way to the Wall’s first part. The tourist start-point contains an impressively restored main tower (the two-storey gate tower).
On the structure itself there was a steady stream of inquisitive visitors eager to climb and explore the Tiger Mountain Great Wall. Well patronised but nothing like the “Boxing Day” crowds and queues in the Beijing district Walls. The only part of the Wall where a slight bottleneck eventuated was two-thirds of the way up to the summit where we had to line up (in a fairly orderly and polite fashion for a Chinese queue) to climb a set of very steep and narrow stairs. Once past there, there wasn’t any further encumbrances impinged on a very smooth climb to the Wall’s highest point.The authorities don’t want anyone to ‘kindle’ the Great Wall
As I expected, some of the Wall’s floor surfaces were in better condition than others, but it was all still perfectly walkable. From the highest lookout point there are commanding views across the border into the uniformly wide, unpopulated fields of North Korea. The descent down from the summit is mostly very steep and winding. At the foot of the stairs on the eastern (border) side is a raised battlement area containing the relics of a couple of mounted guns that are several centuries past their use-by date.
By Great Wall standards Tiger Mountain isn’t a particular long section compared to others—distinctly short to be precise—but it still provided a reasonably testing walk in the hot summer of August even for those of reasonable solid fitness. On the descents especially, there was some steep, narrow and tricky steps requiring a careful and steady step. At the end of the walk, at the car park right on the PDRK border, there is a statue of some significance and nearby two strategically positioned refreshment outlets competing for your business. After a energy sapping morning’s climb there were many takers for a cool beverage. For those of us on an organised tour, a pick-up bus arrived within ten minutes to take us back the start-point, from where we were relayed back to the main gates by a “people mover”.
There is a row of souvenir stalls adjacent to the entrance wall building but unfortunately we were denied a chance to peruse the Wall-related merchandise as we were whisked off again back to the tour bus. If you continue past the Hushan site for a couple of kilometres on the winding Provincial Road north, there are several good vantage points on the side of the road from which to take good, unobscured long shots of the highest watchtowers on the Wall peering out from the mountain’s canopy.
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Hǔ shān chángchéng
Background: Built during the Ming Dynasty in 1469. Originally connected with the Jiumenkou Great Wall near Qinhuangdao, eastern Hebei province.1,250m of the renovated Wall is open to the public. Contains 12 watchtowers of which the 8th, a two-storey watchtower is thestand-out.
From our mid-city hotel in Dandong we took a tour upcountry following the river road (S319) into Hushanzhen and beyond. At the northern outskirts of the city we stopped for our first glimpse at the Korean side of Yalu Hé. The spot we stopped at contained a memorial to the Korean War sacrifices (two statues of heroic Chinese servicemen) and a stall hawking the usual military-themed momentos and souvenirs. The crossing point here to North Korea was fairly narrow and was marked by the barely existing remnants of an old wooden bridge (the bridge itself was long gone with a few rotting planks visible where the posts of the bridge once stood). Little could be seen on the other side, a wasteland of grasses and vast meadows.
“No man’s water”: barbed-wire borderland
At various stretches of the river road we were face-to-face with the barbed wire fence that demarcates the border between the two different communist countries. At some points the two states were separated by only about 30-40m of Yalu water (especially on the Binhai Highway stretch).
After a mandatory stop at Tiger Mountain to see the Hushan Great Wall (see separate blog), we ventured on to lunch at a pleasant roadside restaurant, one that specialises in the tourist trade, shuffling bus loads of lunching tourists in and out swiftly to capitalise on high turnover profitability.
Further up the river we stopped again at another bridge, this one with stronger historical overtones of the Korean conflict. This bridge bore some similarities with the famous Dandong Broken Bridge in that it was also a disconnected structure. From the Chinese shoreline it looked like a normal bridge, but once on it you soon realised that it jutted out only about two-thirds of the way to the opposite mainland, ending suddenly and abruptly in the middle of the Yalu river! Many, many Chinese tourists took the stroll along the length of the abridged bridge reading the Korean War information boards on the side as they went. Having reached the point where the bridge ended, it was obligatory for all to pull out phone cameras and take photos of themselves with the North Korean remote countryside as a backdrop.
In what seemed almost conspiratorial, the North Koreans on the other side had truncated their bridge in a similar manner (although what there was of it was not as long as the Chinese one). I have no notion as to why these two sides of the bridge don’t connect or why they were at some stage severed, but I’m sure there’s a back story to it, if I could avail myself of the necessary Mandarin.
The site has plenty of tourists stalls, as well as an amicable fellow dressed in Korean War era uniform with a blackened face and a rifle who provided ‘atmosphere’ for the historic site, making himself available to tourists for ‘authentic’ looking photos. Next to the bridge there was a wharf from where we took a long boat trip out into the river. The boat charted a course around the waters veering into North Korean territorial waters…we got close enough to the Korean mainland to make out farms, the occasional building, a handful of motor vehicles, but saw precious few actual North Koreans.
Our boat passed a desolate fishing boat reeling in its net in the windy waters and eventually disembarked at an another point down the river where we were entertained by an all-female music concert which included both Chinese singers in traditional costumes and a girl pop band with members dressed in a kind of retro-Sixties’ outfit. Back at the wharf we returned to the bus for the long drive back down the S319 through Kuandian County, reaching the outskirts of Dandong just in time to join the afternoon gridlock on Binjiang East Road.
Dandong in China’s North-eastern Liaoning province is 541 miles from Beijing, but only some 105 miles from Pyongyang, North Korea’s seldom seen capital. But Dandong is much, much closer to North Korean soil as a visit to the most eastern city in China’s Dong-Bei will confirm. From Dandong’s shoreline on the Yalu River, the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Korea (PDRK) is just the distance of one short bridge away.
We, like millions of Chinese visitors from other parts of the vast country, paid the admission fee (¥30 per head) to tour the bridge open to the public✹. This bridge is no ordinary bridge even by Chinese standards, the bridge is truncated on the Korean side as a result of war damage. This is the famous Yalu River Broken Bridge. Built by Imperial Japan in 1911, the half-way section of the bridge was destroyed by an American B-29 bomber during the Korean War.The bridge has been deliberately kept un-repaired since for its Cold War propaganda points-scoring (and the eastern sections of the bridge subsequently dismantled by the North Koreans).
As you walk up the stairs from the entrance, you are bombarded with another bit of transparent Chinese propaganda extolling the patriotic homeland – a stirring large multi-figure set of stern-faced statues, heroic Chinese servicemen striking an ever-vigilant pose, on the lookout for foreign “enemies of the state” (there’s also another patriotic military wall sculpture on the front (street) side of the bridge.
At night the Broken Bridge is at its most visually striking as the bridge cascading into a revolving spectrum of colours. Climbing on to the bridge itself (draped in Chinese flags) during the day allows visitors, some in guide-led tour groups, more opportunity to study the bridge’s intricacies in detail. The swing bridge signage contains detailed information explaining its unusual engineering specifics, a “Unique Horizontal-Opening Beam Bridge” (a special thrill for civil engineering tragics and graduating Lego enthusiasts alike).
The bridge was very well attended on the afternoon/evening we visited, everyone making their way to the famously truncated section of the bridge to survey the damage close-up. The end-point, with people jostling for prime position, is also the best spot to peer into the “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea, home of the colourfully unstable President Kim. Just across from here is the “ghost town” like city of Sinuiji…at night bereft of lights, and during the day scarcely little to be seen, a scattering of seeming abandoned grey old buildings, a strange orange dome-shaped structure that catches the eye and a dilapidated Ferris wheel, and precious little else. Eerily it is seemingly also bereft of observable human life. An added nationalistic touch for very many of the Chinese visitors was to snap a selfie with both the red Chinese flag and the Sinuiji “still-life” backdrop.
Of course back in Chinese Dandong you can find a North Korean presence right here. Several of the restaurants in riverside Binjang Middle Road are North Korean (run perhaps by economic refugees who had once taken the chance to hop over the Yalu at some point to find more profitable trade and opportunity on the Chinese side).
✹ there are in fact two bridges in Dandong, sitting side by side, that span the river to North Korea – the second bridge, the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge, is a traffic bridge for (a restricted number of) sanctioned vehicles making the journey to Pyongyang
(note how close Mengjiang’s eastern boundary came to China’s principal city Peking)
The Japanese military used Manchukuo as a base to gradually move piece by piece into Chinese Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, Siberia and elsewhere in China. Or as one Western observer of the day put it: “Automatically, by the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan became committed to the invasion of Mongolia”, [Lattimore, Owen. “The Phantom of Mengkukuo.” Pacific Affairs, vol. 10, no. 4, 1937, pp. 420–427. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2750626].
Demchugdongruband his Japanese advisors⇣
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Demchugdongrub, Pan-Mongolism to vassal state
In Inner Mongolia, a member of the Royal House of Chahar, Prince Demchugdongrub (Te Wang 德王), was agitating in the 1930s for Mongolian autonomy from Chiang Kai-shek’sKuomintang Republic of China. Demchugdongrub and other Mongolian nationalists harboured irredentist desires for a Pan-Mongolia (the reuniting of Inner and Outer Mongolia) [‘5. Another Manchu-kuo, the dream of the “Inner Mongolian Independence”‘, TAKESHITA, Yoshirō 1997, http://teikoku-denmo.jp/ cited in Global Security, GlobalSecurity.org)].
Mengjiang flag⇣
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Enforced mergers and shifting nomenclature
The opportunity arose with the aggressive expansion of the Japanese military into the country. Chahar and Suiyuan provinces in Inner Mongolia were taken by Japan’s Kwantung Army and its allies. With the muscle of the occupying Japanese military behind him, Demchugdongrub in 1936 was installed as the leader of a new puppet-state regime✳️, the Mongol Military Government (sometimes also called the “Mongolian Border Land”).
In 1939 South Chahar and North Shanxi provinces (both predominately Han Chinese in population✥) were added to the ‘Mongolian’ regime, now renamed the Mengjiang✼ (or Mongol) United Autonomous Government (蒙疆聯合自治政府) (Měngjiāng Liánhé Zìzhì Zhèngfǔ Mōkyō Rengō Jichi Seifu) with its capital in Kalgan (Zhāngjiākǒu) [ibid.]. On paper Prince Demchugdongrub remained Mengjiang head of state (until 1945), his main function seems to have been to give the territorial entity the countenance of legitimacy. One manifestation of Mengjiang’s Mongolian roots was Demchugdongrub’s adoption of the historic Mongolian calendar…1936, Mengjiang’s creation year, became the year 781 to associate the regime with Genghis Khan (below) and the height of power of the Mongol Empire [John Man, The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, His Heirs and the Founding of Modern China, (2015)]✧.
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MUAG becomes MAF
In 1941 Mengjiangwas rebrandedonce more, this time as the Mongolian Autonomous Federation (蒙古自治邦). At the same time the Japanese sponsored the elevation of WangZhao-ming. Wang, better known by his pen-name of Wang Jingwei, was put in charge of the Reorganised National Government of the Republic of China (中華民國國民政府) (RNGRC)❦. Wang had previously lost out to Chiang Kai-shek in a leadership struggle for control of both the KMT and the Chinese government.
Wang Jingwei, RNGRC president⇣
Wang’s defection to the Japanese was motivated by this and he envisioned his alternate government, RNGRC, would provide him with the power base within China he was seeking▣. With Wang’s appointment as “Chinese president”, Demchugdongrub’s MAF was subsumed under the Wang regime, but in practical terms the MAF was still autonomous of it, if not of the Japanese [‘Mengjiang’, (Military Wiki), www.military.wikia.org].
Mengjiang one yuan note⇣
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RNGRC a ‘toothless’ regime
The RNGRC underWang was a one-party totalitarian dictatorship, but the realityof Wang Jingwei’s regime was that it was only afforded very limited powers by it’s Japanese masters. Wang, befitting the function of a pliable puppet, was basically no more than a convenient pawn for the Japanese military to negotiate with Chiang’s government [‘Wang Jianwei regime’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1944 Wang died in Japan…his successor as president mayor of Shanghai Chen Gongbo played an equally subservient role for the Kwantung (Chen in 1946 was tried as a war criminal by the Chiang government and executed).
Mongolian flag 1945⇣▫️▫️▫️
At the end of WWII, both the Mengjiang regime of Demchugdongrub and the ‘Reorganised’ Republic of China were effortlessly swept away by the invading Soviet and Mongolian armies. The Inner Mongolian territories were returned to China (along with Chinese Manchuria) and the Soviet satellite Outer Mongolia gained independence after a national plebiscite (100% yes vote!) in late 1945 (which the USSR immediately and China later recognised).
PRTT crest⇣
PostScript: Tannu Tuva, a regional curio Mengjiang (or Mengkukuo) and Manchukuo were not the only contemporary puppet states in that region of Northeastern China/Mongolia. Nestled in between Outer Mongolia and Russian Siberia, is the tiny enclave of Tannu Tuva (1944: 170,500 sq km, Pop. 95,400)…historically this land was part of Mongolia and therefore part of a client state of the Chinese Empire. The People’s Republic of Tannu Tuva (Tьʙа Arat Respuʙlik) (1921-44) was recognised only by the USSR and Mongolia. Nominally independent but in reality anothersatellitestate of the Soviets, in late 1944 it was absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Tuvan AutonomousOblast. Today, it is the Tyva Republic, a constituent member of the post-communist Russian Federation.
(map source: www.globalsecurity.org)
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✳️ Demchugdongrub, despite his vaulting ambitions, was only ever nominally in charge of what was always transparently a Japanese-controlled puppet state
✥ exacerbating pre-existing tensions between the Mongolian and Chinese sections of the state (Lattimore, op.cit.)
✼Mengjiang 蒙 (literally ‘fierce’ or in compound form ‘dream to act’). The entity is sometimes styled Mengkukuo 蒙古國 because of its parallels with Manchukuo
✧ the Mongolian prince’s supposed autonomy was always surface deep at best…”an autonomy administered by the Japanese for the Japanese”, (ibid.)
❦ colloquially known as the“Wang Jingwei regime“
▣ Wang’s would-be government was based in the former capital Nánjīng, however the de facto capital was Shanghai
Cinesound is a name that resonates brightly in the history of Australia’s film industry – it harks back to a time when the indigenous industry still had a place of some significance in the pecking order of world cinema. The establishment of Cinesound Studios (in 1931) to make talking motion pictures, evolved out of a group of movie exhibiting companies (including Australasian Films and Union Theatres) which had coalesced into Greater Union Theatres in the Twenties.
In 1925 Australasian Films purchased a roller skating rink at 65 Ebley Street, Bondi Junction, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Australasian converted part of the premises into a film studio but maintained the skating rink as an ongoing commercial concern to help finance the studios’ film production (by day a film studio, by night a skating rink) [‘Cinesound: From roller rink to sound stage’, (Waverley Library), www.waverley.nsw.gov.au].
# 1 Studios Bondi Junction ⬇
Greater Union (henceforth GUT) was involved in all forms of the movie business – production, distribution and exhibition. The Bondi Studios made a few silent films in the late 1920s, like The Adorable Outcast and most notably The Term of His Natural Life which cost £60,000 and bombed badly at the box office [‘Cinesound Productions’, Sydney Morning Herald, 06-Aug-1934 (Trove).
Stuart F Doyle, GUT managing director, appointed former film publicist Ken G Hall as general manager of the newly formed Cinesound Productions. Two more Cinesound studio locations were opened, one at nearby Rushcutters Bay and the other at St Kilda (in Melbourne). Over an eight-year period (1932-40), with Hall at the helm as producer-director, Cinesound produced 17 feature films (16 of which were directed by Hall). The first of the sequence, On Our Selection, revolved round the adventures of one of Australian cinema’s most popular characters, Dad Rudd and his family. The film, benefiting from a new sound-recording system invented in Tasmania, was a box office triumph for Cinesound, earning £46,000 in Australia and New Zealand by the end of 1933, providing a tremendous fillip for the fledgling studios [Andrew Pike & Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, (1998)].
Studios # 1 at Bondi Junction※ provided a large interior space for film production, over 20,000 square feet…with more than 100 craftsmen on the staff, the facility was equipped to complete “all stages of production, processing and sound recording, in the preparation of topical, scenic, educational, industrial, and microscopic films” [SMH, 06-Aug-1934, loc.cit.]. Some newspapers of the day erroneously referred to the main studios as being #3 and the location as Waverley (an adjoining suburb of Bondi Junction).
Cinesound and Hall exploited On Our Selection’s popularity with a series of sequels, Grandad Rudd, Dad and Dave Come to Town and Dad Rudd, MP. Of these the ‘Dad and Dave’ entry especially proved a hit, matching the profitability of the original movie.
↗ Ken G Hall (centre) with American actress Helen Twelvetrees during filming of ‘Thoroughbred’ (photo: Mitchell Library)
Sydney’s ‘Little Hollywood’ While Ken G Hall’s cinematic canvas was unmistakably Australian (only one of the Cinesound movies was not set in Australia), his approach to film-making saw Hollywood clearly as the model. With the characteristic “spirit of a showman”✺, Hall wanted to shape Cinesound Studios in the Hollywood mould⊡…to create a “Little Hollywood” with a star system, hyped-up promotion of the studios’ movies, etc. [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].
↗ Twelvetrees outside Cinesound Studios
FT and Efftee Studios Sydney-based Cinesound’s domestic rival in the film-making caper was Melbourne’s Efftee Studios, started by theatrical entrepreneur Frank W Thring (FT) in 1930. Thring produced the first commercially-viable sound feature-length film in Australia, Diggers (1931) in collaboration with Pat Hanna. Efftee, unlike Cinesound though, had to import the optical sound system for its movies from the USA. [‘Efftee Studios’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Other notable Efftee films of the Thirties include an adaption of CJ Dennis’ The Sentimental Bloke to the screen, and several George Wallace vehicles, His Royal Highness, Harmony Row and A Ticket in Tatts. Thring’s premature death in 1935 put paid to Efftee Studios’ productions.
⬆️ Australian cinema’s long tradition of Bushranger flicks beginning with the original 1906 feature film
The outlawing of bushranger films A 1930s Cinesound project for a film based on the popular Australian novel, Robbery Under Arms was quashed as it would have transgressed the standing prohibition by the NSW government (in force since 1912), banning movies about bushrangers✪ [‘Bonuses for Films’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20-Oct-1934 (Trove); ‘Bushranger ban’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Shirley Ann Richards: Cinesound’s contract female star In accordance with Ken G Hall’s star-making approach, he fostered the career of actress Shirley Ann Richards, starring her in several of his films (It Isn’t Done, Tall Timbers, Lovers and Luggers and Dad and Dave Come to Town). Richards, Cinesound’s only star under long-term contract, later emigrated to America and had a reasonably high profile Hollywood career (under the name Ann Richards).
The Kellaway brothers and Cinesound Alec Kellaway and his more famous brother Cecil were feature players for Hall and Cinesound. Alec was a regular performer, appearing in a raft of the studio’s movies including The Broken Melody, Mr Chedworth Steps Out and several of the Dad Rudd series. South African-born Cecil Kellaway started his acting career on the Australian stage, establishing himself first as a top Australian theatre star before appearing in two Cinesound films where his performances opened studio doors in Hollywood for him…Kellaway subsequently carved out a career as a major character actor in numerous US films.
George Wallace, Aussie “king of comedy” In addition to being a prominent actor in Efftee Studios musical-comedies, George Wallace was Ken G Hall’s “go-to” favourite comic performer, starring in two late 1930s Cinesound films directed by Hall – Let George Do It and Gone to the Dogs.With the outbreak of world war Cinesound called a halt on feature film production. During the war years the studios directed all energies into making newsreels, initially covering the war against Japan and beyond that on all aspects of Australiana.
Newsreel rivalry: Cinesound Vs Movietone: the focus on newsreels by Cinesound was not a novel innovation. From its outset Cinesound produced newsreels – short documentary films containing news stories and items of topical interest – in competition with the rival Fox Movietone company. The two newsreels differed in content, Cinesound concentrated on Australian only topics while Movietone covered a mix of international and national news✤.
Newsreels in Australia prior to 1956 occupied a unique place in media and communications. Before the introduction of television, cinema-goers’ exposure to newsreels (part of the “warm-up” for the main feature) were the only images Australians saw of their land – the footage of elections, natural disasters and other such events [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.]. Thus, newsreels like the Cinesound Review, with its distinctive red kangaroo symbol, were an important source of news and current affairs, and were an integral part of the cinema program [‘Cinesound Movietone Australian Newsreels’, (ASO) (Poppy De Souza), www.aso.gov.au]✙. According to Anthony Buckley, the newsreels reflected Ken G Hall’s “pride and spirited nationalism” [Buckley, A, ‘Obituary: Ken G. Hall’, The Independent (London), 17-Feb-1994].
The studios site post-Cinesound In 1951 Cinesound sold off the Ebley Street building which became a factory manufacturing American soft drink. However, between 1956 and 1973 the building reverted to the world of visual communications, housing various film and television production companies including Ajax Films. Following that, it housed a furniture retailer. Today it is the home of a Spotlight store (fabrics and home interiors) [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].
Ken G Hall in his autobiography contended that Cinesound Productions never lost money on any feature films. Some did very well – crime drama The Silence of Dean Maitland, for instance, for an outlay of £10,000 returned takings of more than £70,000 in Australia and the UK [Graham Shirley & Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, (1989)]. One Cinesound movie however, strictly-speaking, probably did lose money…Roy Rene’s single venture into celluloid, Strike Me Lucky, in which ‘Mo’s’ humour, robbed of it’s spontaneity in live performance didn’t translate well to the big screen and was reflected in negative critical reviews and at the box office [Film Review: ‘Strike Me Lucky’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19-Nov-1934 (Trove)]. Despite Hall’s faith in the studios’ films, from 1937 there was a decline in box office returns (prompting GUT head Doyle to resign). Another (external) factor affecting Cinesound profitability occurred in 1938 with the passing of the Cinematograph Films Act in the UK…under this legislation Australian films no longer counted as local, their removal from the British quota meant a loss of market for Cinesound and other Australian movie producers [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].
The war resulted in a temporary halt to Cinesound feature films, however the studios made only one more (postwar) feature film, Smithy, a biopic about pioneering aviator Charles Kingsford Smith in 1946. Another blow to Cinesound’s future prospects at this time was a move by Rank Organisation – the British film giant purchased a controlling interest in Greater Union, preferring to use it to exhibit its own UK films in Australia [‘The first wave of Australian feature film production FROM EARLY PROMISE TO FADING HOPES’, http://afcarchive.screenaustralia.gov.au].
⬆️ ‘Smithy’ star Ron Randell later pursued a career in Hollywood
Stuart Doyle’s contribution WWII took all the impetus out of the Australian industry, there was a shortage of performers and crew due to recruitment and conscription. Stock available for film was also in short supply, what there was directed first and foremost to making propaganda and news films in support of the allies’ side. More particular to Cinesound’s challenges, the loss of MD Stuart Doyle before the war was especially telling. Film production is high cost (especially sound which proved massively more expensive) and high risk…Hall’s ability to pursue a good number of projects in the Thirties, depended on Doyle’s willingness to take a risk with Cinesound. When he departed, he was replaced by a “risk-adverse accountant who favoured real estate over film production” [ibid.].
Footnote: Cinesound Talent School The Cinesound people eventually established its own talent school for young actors. Run by George Cross and Alec Kellaway (a regular player in Cinesound movies)…offering training in “deportment, enunciation, miming, microphone technique and limbering”✥. By 1940 the school had had over 200 students including Grant Taylor, later a prominent actor in Australian movies and TV dramas [‘Cinesound Talent School, SMH, 02-Feb-1939, (Trove); Cinesound Productions’, Wiki, op.cit.].
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※ In 2002 GUT merged with Village Roadshow, these days Greater Union picture theatres go under the name ‘Event Cinemas’
✺ a trait shared by Greater Union boss Doyle ⊡ the company even closed down production at Bondi for several months in 1935 to let Hall go off to Hollywood to study American film techniques
✪ the state authorities felt that the popularity of the bushranger film genre would exert an ‘unhealthy’ influence on Australians, especially on the young, and make them more resistant to authority
✤ the two newsreel providers merged in 1970, forming the Australian Movie Magazine which folded in 1975
✙ the 1978 film drama Newsfront is a fictionalised account of newsreel makers in Australia between the late Forties and mid Fifties which includes actual newsreel footage from the period
✥ school director Kellaway’s brief was teaching dramatics and mic technique
A couple of years ago the BBC screened a television drama about the final chapter of British colonial rule called The Last Post. Set in 1965 in the southern Arabian Peninsula, the opening sequence of the show begins with some archive black-and-white footage and the current queen Elizabeth II extolling the virtues of the British protectorate of Aden as the finest exemplar of British colonial administration. The TV series’ storyline focused on the relationship dramas of a group of British Royal Military Policemen and their wives stuck in an unforgiving hell-hole of a desert outpost surrounded by largely nondescript bands of armed and hostile Arab insurgents. The Brits are shown behaving alternately badly and heroically in an alien and challenging environment (the Hadhramaut region in modern-day eastern Yemen, but actually filmed in South Africa!)
‘The Last Post’ ⇣
Brits on a very “sticky wicket”
Although the inter-personal conflicts of the main protagonists are at the forefront, The Last Post does convey a plausible sense of just how dicey a predicament the British on the ground found themselves in that political and military hotspot. It would be interesting to recount some background history of how Britain got involved in Aden and how things reached such a disastrous crescendo for the declining colonial power in the 1960s crisis.
(Source: Nafida Mohamed)
A base on the Red Sea
Britain’s decision to capture the town and port of Aden in 1839 via the agency of the British East India Co was a strategic move, all about securing up the lines of communication with Britain’s “jewel in the Empire”, India✲. Holding Aden, together with British Somaliland on the Horn of Africa, gave Britain control of the entrance to the Red Sea, this became even more critically advantageous following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 [‘A Short History of the Aden Emergency’, (Simon Innes-Robbins), IWU, (22-Jun-2018), www.iwu.org.uk]. The retention of Aden as a bunkering port facilitated the British navy’s task of ensuring a safe passage for merchant shipping from the threat of pirates between the Indian colony and the motherland [Charles Schaefer; “Selling at a Wash:” Competition and the Indian Merchant Community in Aden Crown Colony. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 1999; 19 (2): 16–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-19-2-16].Aden Settlement⇡
The securing of a stronghold in Aden also allowed the British to check rival great power expansion into the Indian Ocean (eg, from the French and the Russians). The link with British India was cemented by making the Aden Settlement a province of the Bombay presidency.
‘Adan albaldat alqadima (old town)⇣
Crown colony to federation
In 1937 the area of Aden and its immediate environs (just 192km in size) was hived off and made a colony directly ruled from Westminster. In an attempt to make the British Arabian possessions more manageable, two separate jurisdictions were established – a West Aden Protectorate and an East Aden Protectorate…from this time on Britain encountered a heightening of dissent and disruption to its rule from within the various sultanates and emirates in southern Arabia (especially from the trade union sectors of society). The British army was reinstated in Aden in 1955 and the outbreak of a general strike three years later was mishandled by Westminster.
Britain’s overriding strategy was to try to hold out against these challenges and demands as long as it could…Aden and the Red Sea was still as vital as ever to the UK’s geo-political objectives, but it was also crucial to the Empire’s commercial interests, ie, the profitability of the trade route from South Asia, maintenance of access to Middle Eastern oil reserves (including a BP refinery located at Little Aden).
FSA Flag⇡
By the late Fifties concessions were needed to quell the cries for full independence…in 1959 Britain sponsored the creation of the Federation of Arabian Emirates of the South, comprising six of the sheikhdom states. A further nine joined in 1962 and the expanded federation renamed the Federation of South Arabia (FSA). The following January (1963) Aden joined the association as the State of Aden (Arabic: Wilāyat ‘Adan) within the FSA – in all 16 states federated under UK protection⌖. The British government’s aim was to defuse the impetus of the southern peninsula Arabs while allowing Britain to continue running the states’ foreign affairs and retain it’s petroleum holdings in Aden [‘State of Aden’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org].
In 1963 Harold McMillan’s Tory government announced the decision to pull out of Aden and it’s hinterland by 1968. This was a fillip for the local nationalist opposition groups. Two preeminent rival nationalist groups emerged: the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY), both based in Aden. What began as opposition to UK colonialism evolved into a war for independence, partly inspired by Colonel Nasser’s Pan-Arabist movement. The NLF and FLOSY from 1963 fought each other for ascendency as well as fighting the British occupying forces.
Aden Emergency
As tensions rose in Aden, a grenade attack in December 1963 by insurgents intended for the British High Commissioner, triggered open conflict. A state of emergency was declared with the Arab militants engaging primarily in guerrilla activities against the British forces with part of the fighting centred around the mountainous Radfan region where local dissenting tribesmen (aided by NLF) launched raids on the British line of communications between Aden and Dhala – for this reason the Aden Emergency is sometimes also called the Radfan Uprising [Aden Emergency’, (National Army Museum), www.webcitation.org]. In 1964 the British government sent reinforcements to try to quell the insurgency…the short-lived FSA was suspended and an attempt made to reimpose colonial rule.
⇣ British patrol on Radfan Mtns
(source: UK Mail Online)
In a change of tack, NLF in late 1964 switched the point of attack, concentrating the war on Aden itself. The insurgents sought to hit home where the garrisoned British troops were…the soldiers and their families became the targets of NLF terrorist attacks – with a resultant effect on morale [ibid.].
Meshing of the Yemen Civil War
The imbroglio in the State of Aden was exacerbated with fighting spilling over into the region from the nearby civil war raging in North Yemen. Meanwhile, the British Labour government led by Harold Wilson signalled its intent to grant independence to the territory under the leadership of FLOSY, however this was vetoed by US president Lyndon Johnson who wanted to avoid an escalation of the Yemen conflict whilst the Vietnam War was raging.
Aden street riots 1967⇡
By the beginning of 1967 the focus of the Emergency fixed on the Crater district in Aden after NLF had orchestrated street riots. When units of the indigenous South Arabian Army mutinied, the British military lost control of this key district… eventually the British under a hard-line commander Lt-Col “Mad Mitch” Mitchell regained control of the perimeter. By now the Wilson government had had enough of the whole disastrous mess, announcing an earlier than planned pull-out from Aden (November 1967) – despite the fact that no clarification of the Arab leadership situation had been realised [‘Aden Emergency’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/]
By late 1967 this issue was resolved however…NLF had become the dominant group, triumphing over FLOSY with the help of the (North) Yemen federal army. As British forces were withdrawn in November, the result of NLF negotiations with the British government was that the Marxist-oriented NLF immediately took over the former protectorates of Aden and Hadhramaut, establishing the People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen [‘Federation of South Arabia’, www.unostamps.nl].NLF (South Yemen) flag⇡
It was left to a diplomat to put the best face-saving spin on it for the retreating Brits (last High Commissioner of Aden Humphrey Trevelyan): “So we left without glory but without disaster”✥. Whichever way you view it the British colonials were gone for good, more than anything else at this time the Aden episode symbolised the eclipse of Britain as an imperial power… conflict in the Yemen, however as time would show, was far, far, from being at an end.
Post Scriptum: Failure of FSA to unite the tribal potentates
Many historians of the Aden crisis view the British construct, the Federation of South Arabia’s failure to take root as inevitable, “a hopeless misadventure almost predestined for failure” [Harrington, Craig A.”The Colonial Office and the Retreat from Aden: Great Britain in South Arabia, 1957–1967.” Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 25 no. 3, 2014, pp. 5-26. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/553185]. Many reasons have been advanced…elements within the southern tribes put loyalty to the Aden nationalist groups ahead of loyalty to the Federation, and the ingrained regional rivalries of the parts (the sultanates) did not make for a cohesive federated whole; what was imposed by London was a “Whitehall Federation” which failed to address the issues facing the southern Arabian protectorates; the creation of a modern unified state was an illusion, given it was being carved from such unpromising material (remote, traditional fiefdoms and sheikhdoms with no experience of democracy and beset by a culture of ongoing internecine conflict). For some scholars FSA’s demise can be sheeted home to a deficit of both political resolve and financial investment on the part of the colonial power – with the catastrophic outcome of Britain cutting and running, leaving the regional entity without any viable succession plan and without any prospect foreseeable for a peaceful solution – a blatant abdication of its responsibility as a protectorate [Clive Jones (2017) Aden, South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: a retrospective study in state failure and state creation, Middle Eastern Studies, 53:1, 2-5, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2016.1200031].
PPS: Condemnation by association
Moreover, as one observer put it, as the FSA remained “remained dependent on British backing, and in consequence became ineffably associated with British imperialism in an era of anti-colonial Arab nationalism” [Simon C. Smith (2017) Failure and success in state formation: British policy towards the Federation of South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Middle Eastern Studies, 53:1, 84-97, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2016.1196667].
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✲ for instance, Sir Robert Grant, the governor of Bombay, (1834-1838), argued that India could only be protected by pre-emptively seizing “places of strength” to protect GB’s Indian Ocean possessions [Britain: Gaining and Losing an Empire, 1763-1914, (Nikki Christie), (2016)]
⌖ they were Fadhi, Audhali, Beihan, Dhala, Lower Yafa, Upper Aulaqi Sheikhdom (the original six) …
Barely four kilometres south of Apia Town, just off the Cross Island Road, is Samoa’s finest residential building, Villa Vailima (1891), the home away from the (Northern) cold built by Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson (see FN below).
⌂ RLS ‘Treasure Island’ Samoan stamp
Anyone with a passing acquaintance of mainstream Western literature will have some familiarity with Stevenson’s work. Author of a host of illustrious juvenile adventure classics like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae✲, and one Gothic novella, Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, offering deep psychological insights into the human mind.
Stevenson’s voluntary exile from Britain in search of a climate less injurious to his fragile health led him to the Pacific. After sailing around the islands on an extended ‘odyssey’ (Hawaii, Gilbert and Ellice Islands, New Caledonia, Marshall Islands, etc), Stevenson (accompanied by his American wife) settled on Samoa as a hoped-for antidote to his chronic bronchial condition✥.
RLS in local politics
When Stevenson set anchor in Samoa the islands were in the midst of a civil war over succession to the Samoan throne. Behind the stand-off between rival chieftains was a three-way struggle for control between the colonial powers, Germany, the US and Britain, each of which had despatched warships to the Samoan islands to protect it’s commercial interests. While building the Vailima home RLS embroiled himself in the political conflict, taking the islanders’ side against the colonialists…so much so that he became a sort of political advisor to the indigenous factions [‘History of Samoa’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
By the conclusion of a second civil war in 1899, the colonial powers under a Tripartite Convention divided up the islands between them – Germany retained the western islands of Upolu and Savai’i, and the US got American Samoa (Britain did a trade for the Northern Solomons) [ibid.]
The Stevenson family at the Vailima homestead ⥥
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Tusitala’s kudos
Stevenson’s whole-hearted embrace of the Samoan people was reciprocated…though a palagi (white-skinned person) they afforded him a special status in Samoan society. The Samoans attributed the quality of mana (“heaven-sent” supernatural powers) to the writer. And the craft of his story-telling which he had mastered so expertly in his novels led Samoans to bestow on him the title of Tusitala, the “teller of tales” [‘Samoans Honor Adopted Son, The Teller of Tales’, (Lawrence Van Gelder], New York Times, 08-Dec-1994, www.nytimes.com]. Samoans however were nonplussed as to how RLS earned his living (being at a loss to comprehend how the activity of story-telling could amount to paid work!).
Centennary British banknote with images of RLS & Vailima ⥥
After RLS’s death of a stroke in December 1894 after decades of ill-health, his widow sold up and returned to California. Since then, Villa Vailima initially housed the German colonial administrators followed by the New Zealand ones. After decolonisation it became the residence of the Western Samoan head of state. Finally, restored to its impecable state, it was transformed into its present incarnation as the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum on the anniversary of the novelist’s death.
Recreating RLS’ treasured island haven
A visit to Villa Vailima today will discover a slendid, elegant mansion of a building. A tour will reveal the scope of the interior which includes five bedrooms, a large living room, a smoking room, a library/ study and a ballroom big enough to accommodate 100 dancers. In his time there Stevenson made several additions and extensions…I was informed by our guide that the east wing of the building was added later as separate living quarters for RLS’s mother-in-law who had come to live with them◙.
The walls of some of the Villa’s rooms were adorned with incongruous items, like the bow-and-arrow set in this bedroom⥥
RSL’s study and the smoking room are probably the highlights of the tour for several reasons…on display in the former is a bookcase full of original translations of RL Stevenson works. Even more impressive, it contains the novelist ’s original, solid wood writing desk (on which he wrote his last four novels). The pièce de résistance for me though was in the downstairs smoking room – a double fireplace had been installed (and never used!) It seems that the Scot wanted the “feel-good” reassurance of having a quintessential feature of his former Northern hemisphere life – irrespective of how incongruously impractical it seemed (and how puzzling to Stevenson’s Samoan attendants!), located in the steamy tropical climes of the South Pacific. RL’s wife Fanny had her own familiar reminder of home at the Vailima house, she had the walls of her bedroom lined with polished Californian redwood [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett et al) (2003)].
⥥ The smoking room
I was also intrigued by the contents of the spacious living room…what caught my eye immediately was this massive mega-safe in the middle of the room (too big I thought even for the XXL-proportioned Samoans to move!). The very large portrait of RLS (by Sargent?) next to it looked broodingly dark and foreboding. The guide recounted to us how Stevenson was brought into this room by his servants after he was fatally stricken out on the front lawns of the property.
Ascending Mt Vaea
It is very fitting once you’ve toured the RLS residence and learnt some of his Samoan story to take in the final chapter by making the 472m trek up Mt Vaea to glimpse the “teller of tales’” final resting place. It’s a short but a very steep climb and can get very hazardous after heavy rain (I have first-hand experience of how slippery it can get having slid right off the quagmire of a track on the return descent!). When you reach the beautiful high plateau where Stevenson’s tomb is located you will appreciate just how irenic and tranquil the setting is. The great views of the island from the top are also well worth the effort of getting there.
Footnote on ‘Vailima’: There are two interpretations of the name’s etymology – in Samoan ‘vai’ means ‘water’ so Vailima is commonly rendered as “Five Waters”, however the suffix ‘lima’ can mean ‘hand’ or ‘arm’ (as well as the number ‘five), so an alternate (literal) explanation for Vailima is “water in the hand” [Theroux, J. (1981). ‘Some Misconceptions about RLS’. The Journal of Pacific History, 16(3), 164-166. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25168472]
PostScript: RLS in Sydney
From his Samoa base Stevenson made several trips to Sydney, staying mainly at the city’s Union Club (Bent Street) and at the Oxford Club (Darlinghurst). On one visit he stopped over in Auckland where he met the former governor and premier of NZ, Sir George Grey. Stevenson occupied his time in Sydney by mainly working on various manuscripts of novels and stories (including The Wrecker, Ebb-Tide and In The South Seas)✪ [‘RLS Website’, (2018), www.robert-louis-stevenson.org].
⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝
✲ not to neglect the personal favourite “Boys Own” RLS book of my 11-year-old self, The Black Arrow ➳
✥ the choice of Samoa as home was desirable on pragmatic terms because it had a regular mail service (allowing RLS the professional author to connect with agents, editors and publishers). He was also attracted to the place because it was not too ‘civilised’ [Prof Richard Dury, ‘RLS Website’]
◙ the anecdote goes that Stevenson sent her off to Sydney for a few months and upon her return had the new wing built so he could put some (much sought-after) distance between them!
✪ these last two books plus The Wrong Box (1889) were co-written with his American stepson (S) Lloyd Osbourne
An essential part of a tour of Independent Samoa’s main island, Upolu, is a trip to Aggie Grey’s…Samoa’s historic hotel in Beach Road on the western bank of the Vaisigano River. The place is a South Pacific institution, as was its legendary eponymous founder.
Aggie Grey’s Hotel (#77) ⍗
The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).
No luck with ‘Kiwi’ spouses
The early death of Aggie’s first New Zealand husband left her without support and with four children to care for…the addictive gambling of her second husband squandered what money they had. In addition Aggie now had three more children and desperately needed to find a way to revive and consolidate her precarious financial situation.
With the advent of the Pacific War and American involvement, the resourceful and inventive Aggie eventually found the solution in 1942. She had earlier borrowed US$180 to purchase a colonial home which previously had been the “British Club”. As New Zealand’s prohibition laws were in force in Western Samoa⊡, Aggie started ‘Aggie Grey’s’ as a snack bar selling hamburgers and coffee to US servicemen on their tours of duty [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett, D Talbot & D Swaney) (4th Ed 2003)].
The Hotel, 2006 ⍐
The American GIs in the South Pacific had plenty of money to splash around on their R & R activities, but the prohibition on liquor was a hand-brake on Aggie’s capacity to grow her business. Aggie found a inventive method of circumventing the ban…although serving alcohol was illegal, Aggie got round it by dispensing “medical permit doses” of booze to the American servicemen [‘Aggie Grey: West Point Hotelier, Legend – Apia, Upolu, Samoa’, in The Samoans: A Global Family, Frederic Koehler Sutter, (1989)].
⍗Aggie Grey: on the maiden Pan Am flight from Pago Pago (American Samoa) to Sydney International Airport, 1962(photo: John Mulligan)
From a backwater-town bar to a tourist hub
Beyond the war, over the following years, Mrs Grey turned the Apia hotel from a modest “drinking club” to a 200-room international hotel (arguably vying with Suva’s Grand Pacific Hotel for the mantle of the South Pacific’s premier international hotel) [‘Memories of the incomparable Aggie Grey’, Samoa Observer, (Terry Dunleavy), 26-Apr-2016, www.samoaobserver.com].
An ‘aiga welcome
The key to this success can be found largely in Aggie’s management style – her warm interpersonal skills, authentic, convivial personality, and her innate “understanding of the human condition”. Through her personal example of showing hospitality she imbued “Aggie Grey’s” with an atmosphere of “laid back Samoan friendly fa’aaloalo” (‘respect), conveying to each guest a sense that they were ‘aiga (‘family’) [Dunleavy].
In the formative days the hotel thrived as a result of Aggie’s ability to network… forging business links with the world outside Samoa – with the management and crews of TEAL (forerunner of Air New Zealand), and in encouraging celebrity A-listers (especially from the US) to make Samoa and Abbie Grey’s a regular stopover on route to film assignments in French Polynesia [ibid.]. Accordingly, the likes of Hollywood stars Marlon Brando, Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Gary Cooper✥et al would be regular AG guests. Aggie sought to capitalise on the celebrity aura by naming each of the hotel’s fales (rooms) and bungalows after visiting movie celebs.
The Marlon Brando fale (№ 93) at AGs⍗
The hotel’s postwar success rested on a number of contributing factors. The arrival of trans-Pacific airlines (TEAL/Air NZ, Pan Am, QANTAS, then later Virgin’s Polynesian Blue) brought increasing numbers of tourists to replace the WWII servicemen. Aggie also had the right people behind her…a son with a good head for business, and a irreplaceable and devoted handiman, a “Mr Fixit” by the name of Fred Fairman, who Aggie could always rely on to keep the ‘wheels’ of the hotel running smoothly [ibid.; Sutter, loc.cit.].
Aggie Grey’s made it’s owner very wealthy…Aggie, a stalwart of the Samoan hospitality industry, continued at the hotel’s helm into her old age. In 1988 she died age 91, having long been one of the most respected members of the Apia business community.
Footnote: In December 2012 Cyclone Evan severely damaged Aggie Grey’s, closing it down for over three years. In August of the following year, management of the hotel complex, still under repairs, passed to the Sheraton’s hotel chain. Aggie Grey’s reopened in 2016, now operating under the name Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel & Bungalows. A second Aggie Grey’s complex in Upolu, Aggie Grey’s Lagoon Resort, was opened in 2005 off a coral reef in the west of the island (a joint venture between the Grey family, the governments of Samoa and New Zealand and Virgin Samoa). 🇼🇸
PostScript: Prototype for Bloody Mary?
One of the US servicemen who frequented Aggie Grey’s during the War was travel adventure author James A Michener. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific was later adapted into the hit Broadway musical South Pacific. One of it’s main characters, the loud and formidably forceful “Bloody Mary”, was widely thought to have been modelled on Aggie Grey, a comparison that didn’t endear itself to the Apia hotelier! [‘Lonely Planet’, op.cit.].
⍐‘Return to Paradise’ – Samoan film set & resources of ‘Aggie Grey’s’ 🇼🇸 (see below)
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
✲ ‘Grey’ was the surname of Aggie’s second husband from New Zealand
⊡ New Zealand administered Western Samoa as it was called at this time, under a League of Nations mandate
✥ Cooper in fact made a movie in Samoa, Return to Paradise in 1953 (pretty stock standard South Seas adventure stuff), and of course Aggie came on board to contribute to the production …Aggie Grey’s hotel providing logistical support and a base for the project’s accommodation, and the indefatigable hotelier personally supervised the catering unit for the film [Dunleavy]
❝ Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. ❞
~ Hamlet, Act IV, Scene IV.
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Some time ago I added a post on the capricious nature of international micronations (From Marginalised Malcontents to Micronation Monarchs: The Australian Experience, Nov. 2017) which focused on self-identified micro-states like Lithuania‘s whimsical Republic of Užupis (RoU) and the much-satirised, pseudo-royalty of the Hutt River Principality (HRP) in the state of WA, Australia.
This blog will concentrate on yet another creatively imagined entity, the Conch Republic (CR), a peculiarly American enclave sharing some of the traits of especially RoU (for the latter’s avant-garde artists’ collective substitute “retiree paradise” lifestyle). CR emerged from a speck of US geography to unilaterally declare itself independent of the mainland United States of America.
⇧ Key West AKA the Conch Republic (source: Worldatlas.com)
The island of Key West at the very tip of the Florida Keys archipelago, as pleasant a haven of relaxed beach lifestyle as can be imagined, is perhaps a surprising locale for a defiant act of “go it alone” separatism. Key West (Sp: Cayo Hueso), one time the home of Hemingway on his various peregrinations, is the southernmost city in the contiguous United States, a 15 square kilometre haven of golden sands, verdant palms and a balmy tropical climate with a relaxed Bahamian ambience.
How the Conch Republic was born
A chance occurrence was responsible for Key West assuming the countenance of a ‘micronation’. The seemingly prosaic but far-reaching event took place in 1982…at the time it appeared to be just a fairly hum humdrum, run-of-the-mill, everyday operation of the Federal bureaucracy. The US Border Control (BC) had imposed a roadblock and checkpoint into Key West, it was stated that Border Control’s action was intended to intercept narcotics and illegal immigrants coming into the US.
The problem for the local authority was the ongoing traffic jams and inconvenience it caused for both residents and tourists. The tipping point for the Key West City Council was that their protests went ignored and unanswered by BC and the federal authorities.
“Republic sideshow”
As things transpired, BC lifted the roadblock and removed the inspection station after a few days. For those thinking the matter would end there, the City Council has other ideas. Mayor Dennis Wardlaw took the opportunity to up the ante and under his leadership the protest continued. Key West Council initiated its own (microscopic) version of ‘1776’. The island was now the “Conch Republic” with Wardlaw retitling himself as “prime minister” of the new secessionist state. At this point an air of theatricality took over events and the whole thing turned farcical…CR “declared war” on the United States✲, it then immediately surrendered after 60 seconds and topped off the absurdity of the stunt by requesting $1bn of foreign aid from Washington!⌖
Niche marketing: Milking the ‘novelty’ for all it’s worth
Taking a leaf from the Hutt River Province et al’s book, CR launched a host of paraphernalia promoting it’s supposed autonomous status vis-a-vís the US government, eg, it designed its own flag, ‘national’ motto❂, it issued sovereign passports◘ and renamed the legal tender “Sand dollars” (while still maintaining the everyday usage of USD currency).
The “Republic of Fun”
The jocular, even flippant, nature of pronouncements by CR are reminiscent of the tone adopted by Lithuania’s Republic of Užupis (RoU). Just as RoU’s content-lite ‘constitution’ meanders into the wacky realm of vague, contradictory and meaningless absolutes, CR describes its essence as “exist(ing) as a sovereign state of mind”, a clue to the “tongue-in-cheek” nature of its stance [‘Defending the Conch Republic – From Key to Shining Key’, [www.conchrepublicmilitaryforces.com]. The goodwill ‘vibes’ and the high-spirited jokiness of the Užupis enclave has a soulmate in the Conch Republic. In CR’s info blurbs it lists its values as “Humor, Warmth and Respect”.
Matryoshka dolls syndrome: Emergence of a breakaway group
The minuscule Conch Republic plunged deeper into “comic opera” territory in 2008 when the Northern Keys area (Key Largo) splintered from CR to form the even more minute Independent Northernmost Territories of Conch Republic (INTCR).
PostScript: Benign micronations
The central authorities that CR, HRP and RoU ‘seceded’ from, have taken a pragmatic and largely laissez-faire attitude to the separatist enclaves. Recognising that the self-styled micronations have fashioned a contributory role for themselves as a “tourism booster” for their communities, and that they continue to pay their due taxes and don’t pose a threat to the centre, the provincial and federal authorities have by and large adopted a “softly-softly” approach to them – as in the Latin: Non nocere, relinqui solus (“No harm, leave alone”).
Footnote: 37th anniversary celebrations
Next month (April) CR will hold a celebration of its ‘independence’ from the US – seven days of festivities, food, music and drinking – within a recounting of the 37 years of CR’s history thrown in. Those attending the event include the Republic’s militaristic-sounding ‘High Command’, it’s ‘Founding Fathers’ and other VIPs. On the itinerary are events such as conch shell-blowing and a re-enactment of the fanciful “Great Sea Battle of 1982”, with an emphasis on…you guessed it – fun!
✲ consciously or coincidentally, the Conch Republic’s actions partly mimics the plot of the 1950s movie satire, The Mouse that Roared…a tiny “cream puff” of a country (Duchy of Fenwick) faces bankruptcy when a Californian winery produces a successful “knock-off” of the Duchy’s Pinot wine, the staple of its economy. Fenwick responds by declaring war on the USA, knowing that it’s own Medieval weaponry is no match for the American superpower and it will be totally routed. Fenwick’s rulers thus bank on becoming the beneficiaries of US aid given to a defeated enemy, à la the postwar Marshall Plan 🐁
⌖ the mock state of war scenario was briefly revisited in 1995 when the US Army Reserve held training exercises on Key West simulating the invasion of a foreign island. Unfortunately, the Army didn’t inform CR of its plans beforehand – so the Republic announced that it was engaging in ‘hostilities’ with the US ‘aggressors’
❂ “We seceded where others failed!”
◘ with the risk of unforeseen serious outcomes – the exploitation of the sense held by some that a CR passport was a legitimate travel and ID document. The FBI investigated the possibility that some of the 9/11 terrorists had purchased a CR passport [‘Conch Republic’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
We booked into Rydges Hotel in Queenstown✲, New Zealand’s capital of adventure tourism. Whitewater rafting, bungy jumping and Jet Shotovers beckoned, but as our hotel was handily situated in proximity to the wharf on picture perfect Lake Wakatipu, something more sedate – a leisurely boat trip across its glistening waters – was what took our immediate fancy.
From the Queenstown wharf we caught the vintage twin screw steamboat TSS Earnslaw❁…the journey was a complete step back in time…a slow and leisurely ride across Lake Wakatipu with the boat chugging along at a 1924 pace. No one on board much minded the pedestrian progress we were making. The only downside to the trip was trying to avoid inhaling the vessel’s toxic nasties, trying to survive the vile fumes of black smoke emitted from the steamer’s coal-fired boilers pervading the air inside the Earnslaw.
Once at Walter Peak High Country, we were immediately taken on a guided tour of the working farm. We got up close with the farm’s various livestock – Scottish Highland cattle, red deer, lambs and some adaptable llamas. My favourite critters on the farm were the “hairy coos” as they are called in Scotland. These Erse ‘Heilan’ cows, sandy-golden-tan in colour and rather soporific in nature, were a delight with their full coats of shaggy hair endearingly covering their eyes.
My highest highlight of the tour however was the demonstration of rounding up and penning a drove of sheep. This was made memorable by the antics of the leathery-faced old shepherd guy and his “Abbott and animal Costello” routine with the farm’s working border collie. The old farmer was a real joker, entertaining us with his dry commentary which bore more than a touch of the John Clarke quippery – and the same flat deadpan delivery. To start the show, he barked out instructions to the collie to tear madly all over the top paddock fetching the grazing sheep. After terrorising and cajoling the sheep into one cowering bunch, the dog efficiently corralled them into the enclosure at the south end. Then, with mission accomplished, the farmer, with comic timing and mock annoyance, remarked of the still heavily panting dog, “I don’t know why he’s so tired! I’m the one who does all the work”!
The one-liners didn’t stop when the farmer donned his “shearing kit”, the blue and red overalls of his defleecing trade, to do some serious bladework. With a couple of hand-picked Romneys, he demonstrated (with accompanying audio) how to give a sheep the “Full Monty” crew cut! I’m not sure if the sizeable cohort of Japanese tourists on hand were sufficiently au fait with ‘Kiwised’ English to get the gist of the demonstrator’s jokey spiel and all the nuances of his wry humorous asides, but they generally seemed to sense the comic implications of the situation and enthusiastically laughed accordingly.
The other stand-out feature of the visit, the afternoon tea, was held in the Colonel’s Homestead, an elegant turreted terracotta red and white building set against the impressive backdrop of the towering Walter Peak. The high tea worked a treat with very generous servings of scones and pikelets and the obligatory jam and cream, all washed down with a nice cuppa. Afterwards, a leisurely lakeside stroll through the homestead’s très picturesque English-style gardens set the seal on a great day’s outing.
Time passed at the right pace on the return journey in the Earnslaw to Rydges – the tour operator organised a traditional sing-a-long to the accompaniment of the boat’s period-piece piano. We were given a complimentary “NZ Song Book” and encouraged to join in. The songs were every bit as vintage as the 1912 vessel and only a bit cringeworthy, but hey it was all part of setting an authentic mood for a momentary step back into yesteryear.
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✲ Kiwi anecdote # 579 – No double entendres please, we’re New Zealanders! The Queenstown Rydges’ street entrance unusually is on the building’s fourth floor, owing to a bit of a ridge in the landscape where it was built. Our room was on the sixth floor. Returning to the hotel on the first night of our stay, I decided to walk up the stairs (only two flights) to our floor. Perplexingly though when I reached the top of the stairs on the fifth floor, I couldn’t see the staircase which led to the next floor, our floor! It was not where it should (logically) have been. I scouted around level 6 for a bit but weirdly the staircase couldn’t be sighted. So, puzzled, I went back to the fourth floor to ask reception. The attractive young Pakeha woman on duty responded to my query in a slightly patronising tone reserved I imagine for the utterly clueless…she said to me firmly: “Sir-r-r, we are a very normal hotel in Queenstown, we always have sux here between five and seven”. Realising that the immediate implication I had drawn from what she had said, had not for one scintilla dawned on her, I was sorely tempted but managed to restrain myself from replying, thanks very much for telling me when, all that’s missing now is where! Ba-boom!
❁ the Earnslaw briefly popped up in the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) as an Amazon River boat(sic)
Three hundred years ago this coming April, London merchant-cum-journalist Daniel Defoe published his debut novel anonymously✱ – it was to become one of the most iconic and most imitated literary works ever…it began with a title page descriptor that read in full:
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.
Once “cast on Shore by Shipwreck”, Crusoe, isolated and alone, is forced to make the best of a perilous predicament in an alien and challenging environment. His solitary, epic struggle in the face of hardships and the existence of threats from wild animals and the unknown elevates the story to mythic proportions. The myth is complete when Crusoe ultimately succeeds in conquering all impediments and fashions the island into his own “miniature Great Britain”.
A multiplicity and diversity of readingsRobinson Crusoe is a multifaceted work of fiction, viewable from a number of different perspectives. On a straightforward level its an adventure novel and a travel book (rather than a guide) tantalising the 18th century Englishman and woman with a sense of faraway “new worlds” which were still undergoing a process of discovery and exploration.
The personality of the protagonist Crusoe himself is an Everyman figure, representing a cross-spectrum of contemporary English societal types – above all he is the archetypical survivor prompting untold numbers of readers to identify with the despair of his plight and “embraced his myth of struggle, survival and triumph against all odds” [Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, Frank, K (2011)].
⍐ One of the numerous screen adaptations of the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ tale
Crusoe as “economic-imperialist” and coloniser
There is the hero of romantic, bourgeois individualism, the Englishman who turns his dire circumstance to his ultimate financial advantage. When others appear on the island (Friday, the boy slave Xury, the ‘savages’, the Spanish sailors and English mutineers), Crusoe reacts with a sensibility typical of the “natural superiority” of a coloniser and uses the others as ‘commodities’✥. James Joyce described Robinson Crusoe as the “true symbol of the British conquest”, embodying “the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit” [quoted in ‘An introduction to Robinson Crusoe’, (Stephen Sharkey), 21-Jun-2018, www.bl.uk].
A spiritual voyage
On another level Robinson Crusoe can be read as a kind of spiritual autobiography (popular in Defoe’s time). Crusoe’s journey from one exotic land to another can be seen as the “spiritual voyage” of Bunyanesque Puritan Christianity. Crusoe’s long, long sojourn on the island is a test of his faith. Being alone with infinite time on his hands he devotes himself to intense self-scrutiny, questioning the Providence that landed him in his predicament (ie, his relationship with God). Some critics have noted that Crusoe’s thought processes on the island entailed a progression from rebellion, acknowledgement of mortal sin, atonement and religious conversion [‘Robinson Crusoe Theme of Religion’, (shmoop), www.shmoop.com].
DIY Robinson Crusoe and the Conduct book
Defoe provides a very detailed description of how his hero goes about making the most of his enforced stay on the island. As Katherine Frank observes, DeFoe’s novel is the “ultimate how to book: a step-by-step guide on how to live in a particular tricky situation”, ie, a method for surviving alone on a desert island◘ [Frank, op.cit.]. On the ship and again on the island Robinson spends copious amounts of time cataloguing items and making lists of everything that comes into his head.
The novel’s preoccupation with DIY touches on something else close to Defoe’s heart, the “Conduct book”✪ (a kind of user’s guide for life in the 18th century). The self-help component in Robinson Crusoe gives a sample of the writer’s broader interest in instructional works…Defoe spilled a lot of ink in writing a series of published texts telling people how they should live their lives – with titles like The Family Instructor, The Compleat English Tradesman and The Compleat English Gentleman.
A Defoe conduct book on the Robinson Crusoe theme
Always look on the bright side of life
Defoe’s faith in the individual’s capacity for self-improvement comes through in his novels as much as in the didactic Conduct books. In Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s central character refuses to give up and submit to his fate no matter how glum his prospects look. With each new challenge he faces on the island, Crusoe time and again evokes the “power of positive thinking”…in his solitude he learns “to look more upon the bright Side of my Condition and less upon the dark Side” (Defoe imbues the protagonists of his later novels like Moll Flanders with this same positive disposition) [ibid.]. Defoe really had to be a glass half-full kind of guy to keep bouncing back from all the reversals life was lobbing on him (viz. a succession of self-inflicted, calamitous business ventures he managed to embroil himself in, doing gaol time for failure to pay his debts, etc).
PostScript: Cashing in on the “golden egg”The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was an instant commercial success with four editions printed in 1719. Defoe, always with his mind fixated on how to enrich himself, was quick to follow-up Robinson Crusoe with a sequel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in the same year, proved to be almost as much a hit with the public. The Farther Adventures (usually today called the Further Adventures) was intended to be Robinson Crusoe’s swan-song, but Defoe couldn’t resist going to the well one time too many with a third book in 1720 entitled Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick.Serious Reflections ‘bombed’ badly and the less said about it the better⊡.
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✱ it was commonplace for 18th century texts to be published either anonymously or using a pseudonym…Defoe was especially inclined to obscure textual ownership to try to cover himself when raising polemical questions [‘Anonymity in the Eighteenth Century’, (Gillian Paku), (Literature, Literary Studies – 1701 to 1800: Aug 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.37 www.oxfordhandbooks.com]
✥ Crusoe’s mercenary nature (equating with that of the money-obsessed Defoe) is best illustrated with Xury who Crusoe is happy to sell back into slavery when he is no longer required and by so doing fetch a tidy sum for himself
◘ novelist EM Forster once remarked that Robinson Crusoe reminded him of a “Boy Scout manual”
✪ Conduct books, today’s self-help guides, in Defoe’s day took the form of sermons, devotional writings, familiar letters, chapbooks and instruction manuals offering advice on social mores and manners, spiritual guidance and practical information on state and household duties, [Batchelor, Jennie. “Conduct Book”. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 July 2004
https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=216, accessed 29 December 2018.]
⊡ the Farther Adventures had the same trademark derivative framework as the original novel – Defoe borrowed heavily once again from Robert Knox’s autobiography and seems to have modelled the last part of Crusoe’s journey on a 17th century Moscow Embassy secretary’s travel journal (Moscow – Peking), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Frank, op.cit.]
“People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.”~ HG Selfridge
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Before I ever visited the UK I wasn’t at all familiar with Selfridges. I knew about Knightsbridge and Harrods and its preciously preserved pedigree all right…we’ve done that! My first time in London I was on a bus travelling (make that crawling) down Oxford Street heading towards the West End when I was enlightened as to the existence of the second-best known upmarket London department store. As the bus idled stationary I spotted a sign in front of a building that said ‘Selfridges’, my first thought, I remember, was “strange name!”…but when I think about it now I vaguely recall that I had previously heard the name Selfridges, but without inquiring further at the time I sort of formed the literal impression that it was a store as the name sounded that “sold fridges”, ie, a purveyor of domestic white goods! So when I did eventually get my beak inside the store’s doors at 400 Oxford Street I was surprised to see lines and lines of (pricey) fashion wear, shoes, accessories, skin care products, bags and more – but not one refrigerator in sight! (in its time it has apparently sold most everything!)
Even without visiting Selfridges’ flagship Oxford Street store, you may well be aware of it or of its US-born founder Harry Gordon Selfridge thanks to the recent ITV television series Mr Selfridge (first aired in 2013). The series was a period drama about the flamboyant, visionary retailer and the interactions that take place around him in his eponymous London department store✱.
A Marshall Field blueprint for LondonWisconsin-born Harry Gordon Selfridge initially earned his business ‘spurs’ working for Chicago department store Marshall Field & Company (right), this segued into him purchasing his own department store in Chicago. In hardly any time at all the mercurial Selfridge abruptly re-sold the business, making a quick profit and retired to play golf. In 1906 while holidaying in London, Selfridge sensed a new retail opening for his entrepreneurial talents in the British capital. For £400,000 he purchased land and surrounds for a novel custom-built, mega-department store in the then unfashionable, western end of Oxford Street [‘Harry Gordon Selfridge’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
“The American Invasion of London”The London press was not initially warm to the notion of the American’s incursion into the world of London commerce. The City’s daily and drapery trade press described it as an “American Invasion of London” [Lawrence]. Selfridge’s loud in tone and bombastic approach to selling the project didn’t help in endearing him to the newspapers (described in some publications as being “aggressively big in scale”). Selfridge’s efforts to make the store a reality were driven by an unwavering vision: creating a “monumental retail emporium” was in his eyes the key to elevating “the business of a merchant to the Dignity of Science” (as he grandiosely put it). Selfridge believed to achieve that, he had to construct a gigantic “technologically advanced department store”, hence the massive amount of money, time and effort he put into the project [LAWRENCE, J. (1990). ‘Steel Frame Architecture versus the London Building Regulations: Selfridges, the Ritz, and American Technology’. Construction History, 6, 23-46. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41613676].A ground-breaking, landmark modern steel-framed buildingConstruction of the Selfridge store was something of an architectural coup in itself. It won praise in its day from British building journals for its innovative construction methods…built with steel frames and reinforced concrete allowing for much narrower than usual walls, the frames permitted a far greater window area, so very large plate-glass windows could be installed (12 of which were the largest sheets of plate-glass then in the world!) – making for much more interior natural light and brightness (designed by famed US architect Daniel Burnham and associates). Originally comprising a 250′ x 175′ site, Selfridge’s had nine Otis passenger and two service lifts and six staircases. 100 separate departments were spread out over eight floors. While the physical construction of the Oxford Street store took only 12 months, Selfridge had first to overcome London City Council’s raft of objections (unprecedented size of the commercial structure, fire danger, etc). Selfridge and his engineers’ lobbying of the LCC Committee eventually resulted in the passing of two local building acts – LCC (General Powers) Acts of 1908 and 1909 – necessary for the Oxford Street project to be completed [Lawrence, ibid.]☯.
Rigid building regulations weren’t Selfridge’s only impediment to making his dream store a reality. Half-way through the project funding became a pressing issue when his partner and main backer Sam Waring, frustrated by Harry’s “grandiose and reckless approach” to the venture (Selfridge had grievously underestimated the complications of the project), withdrew his financial backing. The economic downturn in London (and in the US) at the time made alternative sources of funding a very grim prospect, and disaster was only narrowly avoided when a new backer, millionaire tea tycoon John Musker stepped in to rescue Selfridge [Gayle Soucek, Mr Selfridge in Chicago: Marshall Field’s, the Windy City and the Making of a Merchant Prince, (2015)]. After the big opening Selfridge remembered to make sure the store’s product lines included everything to do with tea-making (teapots, cups and saucers, sugar bowls, etc) [‘Selfridges: 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about the department store’, (History Extra), www.historyextra.com].
Selfridge, customer-centred strategies ahead of the curveHarry’s approach to retailing was characteristically innovative on many fronts. Selfridge placed tremendous faith in advertising, the 1909 campaign leading up to the store’s opening cost a reported $500,000 in 1909 money [‘Selfridge Dies: Ripon Lad Who Jolted Empire’, The Milwaukee Sentinel, 9-May-1947 (online fiche)] (Britain’s biggest ever ad bill to that point) and he used it imaginatively together with ingenious publicity campaigns. Selfridge was the first retailer to make popular the idea of “shopping for pleasure”, rather than it being solely a functional task undertaken for necessity (as people conceived of it prior to Harry’s advent). In-store activities and arrangements often were original and novel (eg, displaying the monoplane used by aviator Louis Blériot in the first cross-English Channel flight at Selfridge’s (1909)✜). Another interest-generating feature in the store was Logie Baird’s televisionprototype shown on display in 1925.
Those specially designed wide windows were put to optimal use, Selfridge was the first to utilise window dressing where he could show off the latest fashions and utensils in open display [‘Selfridges 7 things’, loc.cit.]. The staff at Selfridge’s Oxford Street store (initially comprising 1,400 employees) were instructed to assist customers in their purchases, not to pester or use any “hard-sell” tactics on them⊟. Harry’s philosophy was “first get them in, then to keep them there. Thereafter they would buy” (Woodhead). One of Selfridge’s more forward-thinking moves was to locate the goods where they were visible and accessible to customers all around the store’s interior (a practice he devised while at Marshall Field’s in Chicago), rather than hiding them away from sight under counters (as had been the practice in most retail stores hitherto). He also introduced the concept of the “bargain basement” to retailing, a section where shoppers could find regularly discounted commodities [‘Innovation Lessons From The World’s First Customer Experience Pioneer — Infograph’, (Blake Morgan), Forbes Magazine, 26-Jun-2017, www.forbes.com ; Lindy Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge, (2012)].
A visceral, holistic experienceSelfridge’s vision was to make the department store more than just a shop where you went to buy goods, he continued to introduce new features to Selfridges…elegant (moderately priced) restaurants, a library, reading and writing rooms and special reception rooms for French, American and ‘Colonial’ clientele. There were cookery demonstrations in the kitchenware section. All this marked a radical departure from the practices of other department stores which employed floorwalkers to ‘shoo’ people out of the store who were just hanging around and not actively engaged in buying an item! Even the store’s roof was put to productive if curious usage (a shooting range for an all-girl gun club as well as an ice rink✧) [Lawrence, loc.cit.].
The female shopper as an identified demographicSelfridge saw the role of the department store in macrocosmic terms – “the store should be a social centre, not merely a place for shopping”. Unlike the conservative establishment of the day and much of the mainstream, Selfridge endorsed the Suffragette Movement…the new store was (in part) “dedicated to woman’s service”. In a 1913 advertisement Selfridge described the store thus: Selfridge and Co: The Modern Woman’s Club-Store” [‘Suffrage Stories/Campaigning for the Vote: Selfridge’s and Suffragettes’, Woman and her Sphere, (Elizabeth Crawford), 16-May-2013,www.womanandhersphere.com; ‘Selfridge Lovers: The Secret behind our house’, www.selfridge.com]. Astute businessman that he was, Harry popularised shopping as a leisure activity specifically for women…to make it a more welcoming and conducive place for them to spend time (and money!), he displayed freshly scented floral arrangements and had open vistas in the store, he employed musicians to perform and added beauty and hair salons (Paris-inspired) and art galleries. And he introduced public restrooms for women to the store (the first time ever done!)❅[Forbes, loc.cit.].
The H.G.S. leadership style As retail magnate go, Selfridge went against the grain for his day by not being an authoritarian business leader. He was temperamentally inclined towards fairness with regard to remuneration, increasing the wages of his staff, elevating them above “wage slavery”, treating them as employees as opposed to ‘servants’ (cf. Harrods) [ibid.]…not to overstate it, Selfridges shop floor staff were still exposed to long, long hours of drudgery but they were paid a livable wage for their arduous labours. A sample of the quotes attributed to Selfridge reflect his anti-dictatorship approach to business and interpersonal relations: “The boss drives his men, the leader coaches them” ;“The boss depends on authority, the leader on good will” ; “The boss says ‘I’, the leader says ‘We'” ; “The boss inspires fear, the leader inspires enthusiasm” ; “The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown, the leader fixes the breakdown” ; etc.✥ [‘Harry Gordon Selfridge’, Wikipedia, op.cit.]
Tower follySelfridge’s thrived, prospered and grew after the Great War (the store size doubled). Things didn’t always go the Wisconsin-born retail magnate’s way however…a couple of commercial reversals suffered by Harry during the decade concerned his plans for erecting a massive tower from the building which was rejected by the LCC Committee because of excessive height, and possibly also because it would have vied with the iconic St Paul’s Cathedral for attention (a fortunate outcome perhaps as the model drawings for the tower suggest the result would have been an incongruous coupling of architectural forms and a hideous eyesore!) [Lawrence, op.cit.]. The other setback was Selfridge’s proposal for a tunnel between the store and the nearest tube station, Bond Street, the plan ultimately got kiboshed!
Harry on the downslideBy the late Twenties Selfridge & Co was at the top of its game, the name was synonym with quality merchandise and Selfridge took its place as a stellar institution on the London commercial scene. Some time after the onset of the Great Depression things started to turn badly pear-shaped for Selfridge, as for businessmen as a whole. Harry Selfridge contributed to his own decline however by persisting in his flamboyantly extravagant spending. He squandered money on his womanising ways for which he earned a certain notoriety, for instance, $4M was wasted on his dalliances and affairs such as with the Dolly Sisters (Hungarian jazz dancers) – a part of his story that the TV series was quick to focus on) [Forbes, loc.cit.. By 1940 the company owed £250,000 in taxes and Selfridge was deep in debt to the bank, forcing him to sell out and retire from the business (retaining a modest annual consultancy stipend) [‘Harry Gordon Selfridge’, Wikipedia, op.cit.; Milwaukee Sentinel, op.cit]
Selfridges’ Birmingham Bullring store ▼Selfridges post H.G.S.Selfridge & Co’s reversal of fortunes signalled a move from its circling competitors…rival department chain John Lewis & Partners acquired some of Selfridges’ provincial stores in the Forties, which was a preliminary move to John Lewis’ eventual takeover of the flagship Oxford Street store (1951). In turn John Lewis was itself acquired by the Sears Group in 1965. Its current owners, the Anglo-Canadian Galen Weston company bought Selfridges in 2003 for a reported £598M. Today the store name ‘Selfridges’ survives on the Oxford Street building, and in the three other regional branches in the counties (Trafford Centre and Exchange Square, both in Manchester, and the Bullring in Birmingham).
FN: Harry Selfridge from when he first arrived was perceived widely as a Trans-Atlantic “blow-in”, splashing his (and his wife’s) money around, vociferously determined to show the established home-grown retailers what a ‘superior’ type of modern department store looked like. Selfridge displayed a talent for polarising opinion…to his dazzled admirers he was “the Earl of Oxford Street”, the flashy Midwest American merchant was “as much a part of the sights as Big Ben” (as one columnist waxed lyrically), but to his detractors (including many of his competitors and much of the London press) he was merely a “vulgar American tradesman” or worse [Milwaukee Sentinel, loc.cit ; Woodhead, op.cit.].
PostScript: ‘Selfridges gets Sixties hipIn 1966, Selfridges, by now under Sears Holdings boss Charles Clore, recognised the youth market with a separate outlet for young women, Miss Selfridge (forming a link back to Harry Selfridge’s traditional focus on female customers). The new store in Duke Street signalled Selfridges’ wholesale embrace of the Sixties’ fashion revolution. Miss Selfridge used mannequins based on the straight line form of 1960s iconic model Twiggy and sold the latest in Mary Quant and Pierre Cardin fashions. In the early 2000s Miss Selfridge was acquired by the Arcadia Group [‘Selfridges 7 things’, op.cit.].
“The Queen of Time” AKA Ship of Commerce Statue ▼⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎
✱ described as “Downton Abbey with tills” [” ‘Mr Selfridge’: It’s ‘Downton Abbey’ with tills…”, The Telegraph, (Daphne Lockyer), 15-Dec-2012, www.telegraph.co.uk]☯ the impressive Selfridge facade, personifying power and permanence, was later complimented by the addition of a decorative Art-Deco motif – the ‘Queen of Time riding her Ship of Commerce’ (clock-statue by Gilbert Bayes)✜ around 12,000 visited the store to view the displayed history making French monoplane…no doubt plenty of these visitors also made spontaneous purchases while they were in Selfridge’s premises [Forbes, op.cit.]⊟ Selfridge possibly was quite consciously also trying to make his front-line staff as unlike Harrods’ staff – who had a reputation for ‘snootiness’ and stiff formality – as he could! [Milwaukee Sentinel, loc.cit]✧ recently the roof was again used in idiosyncratic fashion, by being turned into a “boat lake” and a “putt-putt” mini-golf course for customers❅ in return, when protesting suffragettes smashed shops windows in Oxford Street, Selfridge’s was one of the few left unscathed✥ other (very famous) attributed ‘Selfridgeisms’ are “the customer is always right” and “only xx shopping days till Christmas”
A journey to Trinidad (that’s the one in Cuba, not the one also in the Caribbean Sea which is nearly always spoken of in the same sentence as ‘Tobago’) takes you right into the heart of azúcar country. The nearby Valle de Los Ingenios (‘Valley of the Sugar Mills’) housed the vast sugar estates of the 18th-19th centuries (three score and ten sugar cane mills remain in the three-fold Sancti Spíritus valley system). Sugar, one of the staples of the Cuban economy, and enforced slavery (facilitating its economical production) was the foundation upon which Trinidad’s great colonial wealth rested.
As for getting round the perimeters of Trinidad de Cuba and seeing as much as we could in the paltry two days we were there, we hooked up with the local walking tour service. I have done a string of free city walking tours on recent trips overseas (and rarely ever come away disappointed), so it was almost an obligatory thing for me to do the Trinidad walking tour through the casco histórico! First thing to take account of was the ancient cobblestones below our feet, irregular and uneven, and we were immediately conscious of the fact that we needed to tread with care…and at the same time avoid the hordes of people on the streets! One of the visuals that stood out straightaway was the countless great examples of Spanish Colonial buildings and houses all around the centre of town.
We got a two minutes on the spot lesson from the guide about the layout of the sprawling city and outskirts, the different barrios (neighbourhoods), consejos populares (villages), etc. The far-too-many-to-count casa facades we passed were uniformly pastel in colour – cream, baby blue, mauve and pink seem the most popular choices for the houses. A treat was grabbing a peak inside some of the tiendas (shops) as we passed, the highlight being shops with wonderful Trinidadian artworks (strikingly colourful paintings and bold and bright ceramics). The guide gave hints on where to buy gifts, and where to eat and drink the local food and spirits at reasonable prices! Underscoring the old charm of Trinidad are the archaic cobblestone roads everywhere we went…I noticed something puzzling about them – every afternoon water would stream down (occasionally rush down) the valleys in the middle of the cobbled laneways and roads. I wondered where the water was coming from (run-off from the casas?) and meant to ask our guide about it but forgot to!
Plaza Mayor
If you’ve just touched down in Trinidad this is the ideal place to start from and fan out and explore the ciudad antigua. The square is the hub of the colonial old town, a place where people congregate, relax, chill out, sit and connect to wi-fi – if you are lucky (and have a stack of patience!). Restaurant choices aplenty across the other side of the square (an accompanying cool mojito obligatory with all meals). The central section of the square comprises a four-part attractive garden setting with hedges and palm trees. Enclosing the individual gardens are white fences, with another outer fence made of white wrought-iron grilles surrounding them. Decorative statuettes and vases added to the cute appeal of the plaza gardens.
On one side of Plaza Mayor is the main cathedral (Iglesia de la Santísima Trinidad AKA Parroquial Mayor), this church is next to a set of steep, archaic looking cobblestone steps that lead up to the Casa de la Musica (Music House). People enjoy al fresco dining at the top while Cuban bands play and Salsa dancers strut their stuff here in the open air.
Plaza Mayor is also a place where you’re likely to see some of Trinidad’s impromptu artists and musicians performing in the square…on one extremely hot day I saw a “living statue” in (lack of) motion, the guy was dressed in heavy, bulky religious garb, looking like he’d was doubling for Brother Cadfael or perhaps an extra in the Da Vinci Code! Everybody else was in shorts and T-shirts, I don’t know how he could stand the searing humidity, his back was a mat of perspiration through his tunic. No sign though of any relief from divine intervention coming his way in the sweltering heat, notwithstanding his appropriate ecclesiastical attire! While in the vicinity, also worth a gander, just off a side street to the square, are a few specialist museums – notably the Museo Histórico Municipal, one exhibiting colonial furnishings and another colonial architecture.
Hora de la cena
Like anywhere popular to eat in Trinidad, Restaurante San José on Maceo does a brisk night-time trade, turning over a large quantity of diners quite rapidly. Part of San José’s popularity is because of the regard its fish and shellfish are held in…confronted with the temptation to have the lobster was too great, especially as they were going for a bargin $13 CUC each (and they weren’t small crustaceans either just quietly!). Before that, a nice appetiser to warm up for the mains was the patatas dulces fritas (sweet potato fries). While you wait for your food to arrive, they’re plenty to occupy your time, such as taking in the interesting wall decorations, and always in Cuba, there is the steady throb of background, mood music.
Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba (about 250km from Havana) is another day trip highlight within reach of the capital. The name Cienfuegos literally means “One thousand fires”, whilst the beauty of its architecture has invited comparisons with Paris and other European capitals, earning itself the sobriquet La Perla del Sur (Pearl of the South).
Parque Jose Martí, forming Cienfuegos’ Plaza de Armas, is probably the most attractive and leafy of all plazas I visited in Cuba. At the park’s entrance a brace of stone lions on marble foundations stand guard. Throughout there are neatly-maintained hedges and tree-filled gardens. A walkway from the eastern edge of Parque JM leads to a long, city boulevard which reflects the influence of the first, French settlers of Cienfuegos, as does the many 19th and early 20th century grand neo-classical buildings overlooking the park, eg, the elegant, grey provincial parliamentary building with a crimson dome (Antiguo Ayuntamiento), the Tomas Terry Teatro (Theatre), the Cienfuegos Cathedral with crimson domes and the foremost French stained glass windows in all the country and the blue Ferrer Palace (see in detail below).
Other points of interest within Parque JM are a statue of the eponymous and ubiquitous hero of Cuban independence, Martí, an impressive, fawn coloured triumphal arch erected in 1902 to celebrate Cuba’s independence (diagonally across from the Ferrer building), and a crimson-domed gazebo or bandstand (note a recurring motif here: crimson appears from all the evidence to be the preferential colour of Cienfuegueros‘ when it comes to domes of buildings in the city!). The park is a great place to stroll round or just sit (plenty of shaded seating) and relax while watching the passing parade of Cienfuegueros.
N⍛ 5401, Calle 25, is the address of perhaps the most beautiful building in Cienfuegos. The Benjamin Duarte Casa de la Cultura (one of several designated casas de la cultura in the city), was originally the Palacio de Ferrer. This old villa (built 1918) is for me just about the stand-out building, aesthetics wise, although there is some stiff competition for that mantle among quite an array of neo-classical gems (special mention: Teatro Tomas Terry). The Ferrer interior unfortunately doesn’t quite match the elegant charm of the exterior, although it has attractive Italianate marble floors. The downside is that inside its all a bit tired and worn, in need of some TLC…they seemed to be undertaking some repair work on the walls when I visited it. Predominantly, the facade of the villa is a delightful pale blue colour…abutting the palace to its right is another building, fawnish-pink in colour – it seems that this was built up against the Ferrer’s side after the palace ceased to function as such.
The architectural feature that most gives Ferrer Palace its distinctive character is the cute little rooftop cupola – which is reached via by a narrow spiral staircase made of wrought-iron. From atop the Ferrer’s endearing cupola, a viewing tower (a mirador) affords you fantastic 360° views of the city and the nearby bay. A cost applies to ascend the narrow staircase (one at a time!): 1 CUC per climber).
Photo: Anton Ivanov/Freepics
Historical footnote Cienfuegos, like the not-far-away Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, has a connection with the Cold War. In September 1970 American intelligence detected that the Soviet Union was building a covert nuclear submarine base in the Bahia de Cienfuegos. The prospect of a response from the hawkish Nixon administration seemed likely with the danger of a confrontation escalating to the level of the 1962 Missile Crisis. This expected eventuality did not ensue primarily because of timing. At the same moment as the Cienfuegos episode, the US was embroiled in or focussed on other international events that were playing out, viz. the Civil War in Jordan, the election of a socialist (Allende) government in Chile (plus it had only been a matters of months prior to this that the US extended the Vietnam War into Cambodia). Nixon therefore held off on a show of force and the ‘crisis’ was defused diplomatically soon after when Secretary of State Kissinger bluffed the Soviets into discontinuing construction of the submarine base [Asaf Siniver, ‘The Nixon Administration and the Cienfuegos crisis of 1970: crisis-management or non-crisis’, Review of International Studies, 34(1), Jan 2008].
Having visited the site of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the Museum that commemorates its triumphant outcome for the Cuban people, our appetite to learn more about “The Revolution” was piqued. The city of Cienfuegos was on our itinerary and as another saga of the war to liberate Cuba from a right-wing dictatorship with US mafiosi connexions was at hand in nearby Villa Clara province, a small detour was in order.The pueblo of Santa Clara is inextricably woven into the story of Ernesto Guevara and his victory in the decisive battle of the civil war against the Batista regime. Guevara or simply ‘Che’ – the image that launched a million T-shirts, and the man who signed many more million pesos’ worth of Cuban bank notes!✱ – is proudly remembered and commonly revered, especially in this part of Cuba, as two separate Santa Clara monuments testify.
The first is in the centre of the township itself, a monument to the final victory of the war (Battle of Santa Clara, 31st December 1958) when a Cuban battalion under Comandante Che derailed a train carrying government troops, ammunition and heavy weapons, intended to reinforce Batista’s embattled army in Havana.
A portion of the captured train still sits on the site, now part of a monument to the battle which clinched victory for Castro and the Cuban rebels. In Spanish the monument is called Monumento a la Toma del Tren Blindado (literally “Monument to the Taking of the Armoured Train”)
The other tangible tribute to the legendary Cuban revolutionary líder is more personal, not far from the city is Guevara’s sombre but impressive mausoleum (Mausoleo de Ernesto Guevara). The monument was originally conceived as a memorial to the charismatic maestro guerrillero who was executed and buried in the Bolivian jungle in 1967… thirty years later the Cuban government retrieved his exhumed body and returned it to Santa Clara. The remains of Che and 29 of his fellow guerrilla fighters are interred here in a large burial vault (in area a decent sized lounge room).
The mausoleum remains a popular place to visit for tourists as well as Cubans, there were several big tourist buses and umpteen dozen cars in the parking lot when our group visited. The immediately noticeable feature of the mausoleum building which is set down on a wide patch of land is the extra-large statue of Che. Cast in bronze, it is 22 feet high and characteristically depicts Che armed and dressed in army/militia fatigues. The statue officially goes by the somewhat ‘highfalutin’ title Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex (AKA Complejo Monumental Ernesto Che Guevara).
Security around the mausoleum entrance was pretty tight, more guards than you think might be necessary hovered around the entrance portal. We all lined up and were soon ushered in by a bevy of serious-faced officials and whisked out again fairly rapidly. There was not a lot to see inside in any case, it was dimly lit and unnervingly cold. We glanced at the photos of the 30 dead comrades on the wall and spotted a few pieces of Che paraphernalia on display – such as Che’s handgun (Czechoslovakian), his water canteen and field glasses.
There’s not much else to the complex (a lot of vacant space actually) but there is a gift shop (Tienda Artex) (opportunity to get that authentic “Che in classic Guerrillero Heroico pose” T-shirt on Che’s own turf!) and a restaurante/cantina. There’s another, official looking building close to the arched entrance to the shops but I couldn’t work out what it was used for.The museum maintains a strict prohibition on the taking of photos within the burial vault, so I didn’t even give a thought to trying to sneak a quick ‘Polaroid’ (even if I had one) – the officials, all wearing the same “not happy Juan” face, gave the impression they meant business!
From rustic Viñales we did a long trek by road (some eight hours) to the province of Mantanzas, our ultimate stop was a resort spot on the south coast called Playa Larga (Eng: ‘Long Beach’). This picturesque coastal village was the scene of the explosive Cold War incident in April 1961 when a CIA-financed and US-trained force of exiles attempted to invade Castro’s Cuba from the south (Playa Larga was one of the two beaches that the mercenaries landed at✱). Courtesy of the media and publicity at the time, westerners know this area as the Bay of Pigs…in Spanish the name is Bahía de Cochinos. ‘Cochinos’ does translate to ‘pigs’, but in Cuban Spanish ‘Cochinos’ can also mean ‘triggerfish’. Given the abundance of colourful fish (including triggerfish) we saw whilst swimming in the bay (and the visible lack of pigs at the site!), the term ‘Bay of Triggerfish’ sounds infinitely more apt!
As we came off the Autopista Nacional and headed south, passing a vast area of wilderness and swampland on our right (Parque Nacional Ciénega de Zapata). A short while later we reached Boca de Guamá (Mouth of the gulf), known for its resorts and boat rides through the massive great swampy peninsula. When we got to ‘Long Beach’ we stopped near a scuba dive-and-snorkel hire kiosk where there was an entry point into the bay to swim. To get into the water we had to cross a narrow but jagged rocky shore. Halfway across the rocky ledge, the folly of not bringing rubber-soled aquatic shoes to Playa Larga became painfully apparent to me (ouch!). The Caribbean water was a beautiful turquoise colour but I found it a bit choppy for swimming (explains why there was only a couple of other people swimming there when we visited). This didn’t seem to deter the snorkellers in our group who thoroughly enjoyed plunging under to explore the delights of the bay’s coral reefs❂.
A stopover here also offers you an alternative to swimming or snorkelling in the bay. If you cross back over the coastal road, passing the dive and snorkel kiosk and head in an inland direction, the short trail through the wilderness will land you at another aqua delight of Playa Larga, a swimming-pool size natural cénote♉! After experiencing the joys of swimming in cénotes in Southern Mexico, I had been anticipating trying out a cénote in Cuba. Unfortunately two things soured the experience – the cénote (unlike the ones in Mexico) didn’t have a cavernous limestone roof and a deep well where you had to descend down a spiralling staircase – elements contributing to a large part of both the fun and the atmosphere! Also, access to the natural pool was inhibited by the existence of a razor-sharp corridor of more jagged rocks. Although the pool looked enticing I didn’t much fancy trying to negotiate the pointy edges, so, my enthusiasm dampened, I hastily turned tail and headed back to the shore.
After spending the night in a casa particular in nearby Caletón we made for Playa Girón to re-live the Cuban regime’s most treasured moment in it’s 60-year revolutionary history. The Bay of Pigs Museum (AKA Museo Girón) in casts a different light on a tense Cold War moment, one that narrowly skirted a global confrontation, to that portrayed at that time by the news medias of First World countries. The museum’s narrative recounting the Bay of Pigs incident describes a episode of national defence against US aggression and imperialism. The exhibits, the photos, letters, maps and diagrams are intended to celebrate the heroic efforts of Cubans, soldiers and civilians, in patriotically repelling the invasion of the homeland.
The surprisingly small museum (just two rooms) displays many black-and-white photos of the episode, various uniforms and medals, examples of the combat artillery, mortar guns and rifles used in the conflict, many of these weapons look like they’d have been considerably old even in 1961! Note: the taking of photos inside the BoP Museum is not permitted unless you pay a 1CUC fee up front at the entrance table.
Outside the museum entrance, there are a couple of props that add gravitas and dramatic colour to the museum’s “mission statement”. In pride of place, on display is a Hawker Sea Fury F-50 fighter plane (the type of British-manufactured aircraft purchased by Premier Castro and used by the Cuban forces in countering the invasion). To the right of the entrance are two Soviet era tanks, all weaponry associated with the 1961 event.
The work put into Museo Girón demonstrates how seriously the government took the incident – and still do! The minutely detailed story of how the Cuban government and people foiled a bungled American attempt to invade Cuba makes an unambiguous point about national memory…unencumbered by subtlety: both the citizens of Cuba and the outside world dare not forget La Victoria! and the country’s no pasarán resolve when it comes to repelling outside invaders. The museum revels in reminding visitors of a nadir reaching low point in US policy towards Cuba from the not-so-distant past which brought international disapproval and opprobrium down on the Kennedy administration and the CIA.
PostScript: Australia, CubaOn the way to visit Museo Playa Girón we didn’t expect to pass a sign on the road saying ‘Australia’ but that is the name of the tiny hamlet and consejo popular (People’s Council) near the Bay of Pigs Museum. The Cuban aldea Australia has no tangible connection to Australia in the Southern Hemisphere, but was named for its relationship with the original sugar factory located there (the practice at that colonial time was to name the locomotives hauling the sugar to market after the continents of the world, hence ‘Australia’). During the 1961 invasion by the US-backed rebels, Comandante en jefe Castro based his defence headquarters in the old ‘Central Australia’ sugar mill.
↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼✱ the other being in the cove named after 17th century French pirate Gilberto Girón, Playa Girón, 35km further south❂ in the bay there’s a 300m long coral wall a short swim away from the shoreline♉ a deep, natural well or sinkhole formed by surface limestone rock caving in and exposing ground water
The road from Havana to Viñales is 180km of often grinding, bumpy and gravelly surfaces. We reached Cuba’s far-western province (Pinar del Río) and closed in on Valle de Viñales, a destination well worth the three to four-hour haul. The 11km long Viñales valley is situated in remote countryside but the whole valley has a “postcard pretty” Arcadian look to it, a veritable, verdant green-belt of agrarian plenitude. Everything is lush and green, everywhere, acres and acres of tobacco fields stretching back to the mountains.
The built-up area of Viñales isn’t very “built-up” as townships go. In fact Viñales probably qualifies as no more than pueblo (village) size, it is really an aldea (hamlet) and a laid back, low-key one at that. We drove up and down the main drag, Salvador Cisneros, to get a feel of the place…sleepy and slow-paced even here. A few cars and trucks around, but mainly they were sharing the road with oxen and horses pulling carts. Small and off the pace it may be but there’s a good scattering of restaurants and bars (both alcoholic ones and Tapas ones), sufficient variety to satisfy hungry visitors. One store I spotted on Salvador, breaking a continuous line of eateries, was doing a roaring trade – it was, naturally enough, the pueblo’s rum and cigar shop! Viñales is devoid of hotels (nearest: Pinar del Río) but tourist accommodation is amply catered for through casas particulares (private guesthouses), which there are in droves. Every street in the village had its fill of brightly painted colonial wooden houses which functioned as homestays. We stayed in a very compact casa two blocks back from the village centre, it was tucked in among a row of about ten or so casas all side-by-side. From the front the houses looked cutely quaint, or quaintly cute (take your pick!), with their colourful walls and sillóns (rocking chairs) on the porches. We had a friendly pair of hosts, guajiros – as rural folk are commonly called in Cuba. . Desayunos were right up to expectations, omelette of choice, porridge with exotic fruits, tea or coffee (breakfasts in the casas all over Cuba were uniformly similarly) [see PostScript on Cuban casas].
Outside of the village the landscape is dotted with distinctive geographical features called mogotes (craggy limestone monoliths, many the size of massive boulders), which provide a fitting, ambient backdrop to the flourishing green fields covered with tobacco farms. We visited one nearby farm and did a tour on foot round the fields (another popular option for tourists in Viñales is to tour the tobacco farms on horseback)…we were taken (in meticulous detail) through the process involved in making the distinctive cylinders of rolled tobacco Cuba is famous for. Although tobacco and cigar production is the name of the game here, the plantation also engages in diversified (secondary) farming, other crops (sweet potato, beans, corn, etc) were being grown on any soil that was not already taken up with tobacco plants.We were in the drying hut being shown by the carga de mano how to smoke a cigar Cuban-style when something humorous but also quite poignant occurred. Roaming purposelessly all over the tobaco granja were these countless, mangy dogs, one of them lumbered slowly into the hut in the middle of the cigar demonstration and lay down on the floor. Unexpectedly, to my surprise the old dog started wheezing, laboriously, continuously and heavily…the tobacco farm dog, it seemed, by dint of its constant exposure to the harmful weed, had become a victim of passive smoking!
PostScript: Casa particulares
Several years ago, as part of their liberalisation initiatives, the Cuban regime gave a nod to the existence of small-scale private enterprise and specifically to permit home-owners to let out their rooms to visitors. In Viñales as elsewhere in the country this opportunity has been taken up with gusto! The bulk of the hosts seem to be older Cuban women (often the casas have names like Mirtha, Isabelita and Elisa), many of them are easily of retirement age※. This concession by the government seems to have been of double benefit to many – providing a bit of extra income to supplement their modest pensions, and at the same time there’s the social dimension of older folks making contacts…from the comfort of their own porches they are meeting the world! One host proudly showed me the various gifts she had received from guests from across the globe (and of course among them was the clichéd furry toy koala!)
From staying at quite a few casas in different parts of the island, what was crystal clear was the variance in quality between guesthouses (just like with hotels!). Quite a lot (in Havana especially) were very poky and some were offering the most basic of “no-frills” facilities. Others were roomy, well-serviced and welcoming (the host’s command of English helped with this). Generally the (front) ante-rooms were quite extravagantly arranged and decorated. Unfortunately, something that did not vary much was the water pressure, in many casas it amounted to no more than a pitiful trickle, a reminder in the plumbing if we needed it that Third World conditions were still the norm here, especially when it came to the basics!
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※ another observable pattern are homestays or casasrun by mother-and-daughter teams
Somewhere around the western end of thriving Bishop Street (Obispo) in Havana, Habana Vieja merges into Habana Centro. With Centro being within close walking distance of the Old Town, its firmly entrenched on the Havana tourist route. There’s history – Capitolio and the Museum of the Revolution, and diversity – El Barrio Chino (Chinatown), the grimy, rubbish-strewn back streets and the upmarket five-star hotels and museums. Architecturally, the buildings in Centro are a mix of the old and the new (or newer)✱. Many survive from the colonial past, including some elegant classical examples of Cuban Baroque, together with those erected during the post-Soviet era.
Paseo de Prado, the city’s main boulevard, is a good place to start exploring Centro. Down one end is the solemn and imposing Capitolio Nacional building, Cuba’s most significant political symbol which formerly housed the national capital seat of government. When we visited the building was closed for renovations, it’s famous replica “White House” dome was receiving a facelift. El Gran Teatro next door is an equally impressive vintage building. North along Prado is where all of the big international hotels are located, overlooking a verdant leafy refuge, Parque Central, a city park which is a bit short on grass but nonetheless is a good spot to chill out away from the buzz and high activity of Old Havana’s Obispo.
Prado is also where you’ll find amble evidence of something else Havana is famous for these days, its classic old American cars. Carefully restored, spotless and immaculately maintained Chevs and Dodges (pink seems the preferred colour but blue is well represented too) line up in the parking lanes next to Parque Central. Stand anywhere along Prado during the day and you’ll be able to observe a constant parade of (mainly open-top) autos zooming up and down the boulevard (many of the classic cars are available for hire to chauffeur sightseers around Havana).
If you venture from Parque Central over the Prado to the western side streets, you’ll find a very different side of Habana Centro. The grand, showcase buildings of Paseo del Prado give way to lots of decrepit old structures that look decidedly the worst for wear, many are the crumbling casas of the city’s poor. The neigbourhood here take on a much more grimy and squalid appearance, characterised by dirty, rubbish-strewn footpaths, broken sewerage, potholes, markets bustling with people, noisy street vendors, numerous roaming stray dogs and the rotting remains of food. Sanitation appears a low priority in this rundown part of Centro. Just a short distance away is Chinatown, its entrance marked by an impressive pagoda-style gate but the neighbourhood, ironically, is populated by very few residents of Chinese ancestry!
A leisurely drive along the Malecón is another “must-do” when in Havana…the route west out of the city towards Pinar del Rio will usually take you via the Malecón. The Malecón (or Avenida del Maceo) snakes its way for some seven kilometres along the city seafront, bordered by a long seawall to protect the coast and city against the often wildly crashing waves. Local convention attests that the ideal way to do the Malecón drive is in a hired classic American convertible in the afternoon…the sight of these glistening Chevys, Buicks and Cadillacs on the wide coastal stretch of road against a backdrop of the setting sun of themselves earn a place in the highlight reel of Havana’s special features, as are the views afforded of Havana’s impressive harbour (Bahia de la Habana).
The long promenade’s other attractions include the historically and strategically important Castle Morro and views across the bay to the historic San Carlos de la Cabaña fortifications on the eastern peninsula (Habana del este). Dotted all along the foreshore are bunches of fishermen trying to land a catch with their lines and nets – usually with a botella de ron (rum bottle) close at hand. When the Malecón reaches the district of Vedado you’ll likely catch sight of the odd, remaining architectural ‘eyesore’ – ugly, monolithic apartment buildings, leftover examples of the brutalist Soviet architecture that imprinted themselves on the Havana landscape from the 1960s to the 90s. The most notorious of these Malecón monstrosities is the high-rise Edificio Girón, dubbed by many Habaneros “the ugliest building in Cuba”!
Fort of St Charles (La Cabaña) Habana del este ▽
While you are in the vicinity of the Malecón, you might be curious to find out more about the sugar cane-based alcoholic beverage that Cubans are obsessed with, a visit to the Club Rum Museum (Museo del Ron) would fill in a lot of the background for you. You can find the Rum Museum on Avenida del Puerto (south of the Malecón and past the Cruise Ferry Terminal).
Footnote: Hemingway drank here…maybe?
I was intrigued to notice that there are quite a few drinking establishments in Havana (and elsewhere on the island) purporting to have been the “watering hole” of American writer Ernest Hemingway. I observed that El Floridita Bar in Monserrate Street has Hemingway’s signature and countenance as well as the inscription “Hemingway Drank Here!” plastered all over its walls⊡. It is well documented that Hemingway was a prodigious drinker of daiquiris and mojitos (amongst other things) and that Havana’s Floridita was his preferred Cuban abode when it came to downing copious amounts of its trademark daiquiri. I was kind of half-hoping though to find at least one Havana bar using a left-field marketing strategy that proclaimed loudly “Hemingway Never Drank Here!”
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✱ like the Art Deco Moderna Poesia building and the modern Parque Central Hotel which are within a three-iron of each other…though most of the Beaux-Arts, Art Noveau and Art Deco architecture is located in nearby Vedado
⊡ features imitated by the state-run Floridita Bar in Trinidad (Western Cuba)
From our landing point in Havana, we made straight for our casa in the city. Tiny room (especially for two!), all round minimalism, minimal Inglés spoken by the staff, but it was right in the heart of La Habana Vieja, the old city. Two cross-streets (most of the ‘streets’ are hardly more than lane width!) away from our guesthouse is Calle Obispo (Bishop Street), a cobblestone pedestrian thoroughfare that runs through the heart of Old Havana – we made for this place pretty much as soon as we settled our belongings in the room.
Obispo connects Parque Central (near Havana’s main street Paseo de Martí, AKA Paseo del Prado) at one end with Plaza de Armas and the waterfront at the other. A big chunk of the activity, the vibe, happens on or around this street. A real assortment of shops, giftwares and numerous eateries to choose from. There are cafés and several banks/ATMs for your dinero necessities on Obispo. Obispo is the easiest spot to pick up a bargain souvenir or memento, the “el cheapo” place to buy artesano regalo items is the small undercover handicrafts market half-way up Obispo.
To get an appreciation of the authentic cuisine of the working class, what the average Habanero eats, Varíedades Obispo (Obispo Varieties shop) is the place to visit…come here to experience eating like the assembled masses do on a permanently limited budget – simple but fresh, basic, no-frills comida and dirt cheap! Just a few shops down from Varíedades is one Obispo’s two farmacias, Drogueria Johnson. Everything about the Johnson Drugstore looks historic, from the name sombrely and impressively engraved on the stone facade outside to the types of pharmacy lines inside. It seems like a relic from 1950s La Habana that somehow survived the Revolution! The shop tends to resemble a museum in some ways – and yet it still operates daily as a pharmacy service. A novel experience for anyone who can’t remember the pharmacies of the fifties.
Obispo Street’s not a great place to hover round in if you are ochlophobic✱ – in this busy thoroughfare crowd mingling is more or less unavoidable! Busy it may be but bustling it is not! People tend to stroll up and down Obispo at a very relaxed pace, taking in the sights, sounds and smells. Obispo is certainly an odoriferous experience…the smell of fresh churros being made by vendors is a lingering olfactory delight, the ubiquitous presence of stray dogs in the street and their random “calling card” deposits however is a more malodorous experience.
On our last day in Havana there was a colourful street carnival happening right along Obispo – performers on stilts wearing vivid, silky garments and flowing robes were winding their way in a slow procession down the narrow thoroughfare as the crowds swelled around them, dancing, constant pulsating musical rhythms, everything seemed quite spontaneous and of course the locals were right into it!
Keep heading east on Calle Obispo, past the Cuban band with its musicians all decked out in white, and you’ll reach the tree-lined Plaza de Armas, an ideal spot to get away from the full-on tourist overload of Obispo. With seating all around the square it’s easy to find a calm, quiet spot shaded by large trees overhead and be surrounded by the presence of nice greenery. After you’ve rested a bit, there’s history on all sides of the plaza to see – as you enter the plaza you pass a elegant white, mansion-like building, Casa de Gobnierno y Palacio de Municipal.Capitanes Generales Palace, as it is also known, is now a museum with a grand courtyard, but at the time of the Spanish-American War (1898) this was the American Government’s administrative headquarters for the four years the US was in control of the island of Cuba. You can pick up a souvenir “Revolutionary green” military cap with obligatory red star from the hawkers constantly circling round the square – it will cost you 2-3 CUC more if you want one with the iconic image of “El Che” (Guevara) as well!.
To the immediate north of Plaza de Armas is Havana’s historic colonial bastion fort, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza (lit. “Castle of Royal Force”) complete with watchtower, moat and thick limestone walls…the fortress was built to defend against unwelcome 16th century privateers and buccaneers. Its location looks strategically sound to me, looking straight down the bay towards the open sea, but I read somewhere, in the ‘Rough Planet’ guide I think it was, that the powers-that-be in colonial times weren’t all that thrilled about where it was located (it should have been right on the water’s edge apparently) and this led to the Castillo being decommissioned earlier than intended. Since it’s military function ceased, it has been variously used as for archives and conservation, as a library, and is now the National Maritime Museum. Interestingly, the info sign on the fort entrance gate near the rusty old cannons is in two languages – Spanish and Braille!
If you hang round the Plaza long enough you are better than an “even money” bet to meet, without any effort on your part, young local women keen to make your acquaintance…they are very friendly and if you converse with them for any amount of time, you’ll discover that a surprising number of them, by coincidence, are professional dancers currently in a hiatus period work-wise. Their sociability and amiability will often extend to an abiding interest in knowing the location of your casa! Prudence and a cautionary approach is strongly recommended to visiting single tourists.
If you have managed to escape the attentions of the convivial ladies doing their utmost to supplement their meagre monthly wages, take a right at Plaza de Armas and head down Oficios, you’ll soon be at San Francisco Plaza, a large, open square bereft of shade facing the Cruise Ship Terminal (Terminal Sierra Maestra). As you enter the plaza the first item of interest immediately to your left is a modernist sculpture directly in front of the formidable looking Lonja del Comercio commercial building. This relatively recently added (2012) French-created, bronze sculpture (aptly named ‘In Conversation’) catches the eye of most visitors. I like the way the piece plays with the space of the two figures, leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps – both the physical gaps of space and what the two engrossed in dialogue might be conversing about…its an intriguing and compelling piece of public art!
Also, worthy of a peek on the opposite side of the Plaza, astride the archaic Convento de la San Francisco, is a much older, representational sculpture, a statue of the celebrated and loveable Havana vagrant ‘Cabellero de Paris’. Visitors line up here for the chance to take a ‘selfie’ with an arm round the bronze shoulder of one of the “favourite sons” of old Havana. Pedestrians tend to slowly circle around the square, taking in the sights, the buildings, the sculptures and statues, the famous fountain, the busy ferry terminal. Never far away from the wandering tourists are the souvenir hawkers, especially visible here are the ambling cigar-sellers peddling the trademark product synonymous with everything Cuban. From San Francisco Plaza head west for a sight of Plaza Vieja with its central fountain and colourful collection of arched colonial buildings in pastel blues and yellows. From here, take any street to the right and you’ll end up you back in Obispo and tourism central.
Obispo – looking toward Plaza de Armas ◮
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✱ someone with an extreme fear or dislike of crowds
Our visit to the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, AKA the Deir el-Bahri (“Northern Monastery”) was the highlight of the visit to Luxor, a happy wrap to a long day mostly spent peering into a raft of dark, underground Egyptian burial tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. From the Queen’s monastery entrance gate near the West Bank of the Nile we were ferried out to the site in “people-movers”, open transit E-vehicles. This sublime gem of a temple stands out from the others for several reasons! First of all – the fun-sounding name, we were informed by Bakr that it is correctly pronounced “Hat-cheap-suit” which is a pretty good memory device to resort to, but the quipsters in our tour party were quick to translate it into “Hot n’chicken-soup” or even more absurdly “Hot-chip’n’soup”! (in the dusty air and baking heat of the Valley, lunch was never far from our minds!). It was special too because remarkably Queen Hatshepsut was only one of two female pharaohs in Ancient Egyptian history (d.1458 BCE, 18th Dynasty). The first, Sobekneferu (d.1802 BCE, 12th Dynasty) was a more shadowy figure and a much less substantive ruler. Hatshepsut first ascended the imperial throne as co-regent with her half-brother but assumed full pharaonic powers after his death. Her reign was notable for its building projects, especially around Thebes (her crowning glory this memorial temple, Deir el-Bahri, built in Western Thebes) and for extending the kingdom’s trading links possibly as far as Punt (Eritrea) in the Horn of Africa. In the contemporary images, statues and sculptures of Hatshepsut✱, she is depicted (on her own orders) as a man, eg, the free-standing colonnade sculptures of the Queen in her showcase Thebes temple show her with a manly build and a characteristic pharaoh’s beard and attire. Lastly there is its peerless aesthetic appeal. Most of the other mortuary houses in Luxor’s valley look drab and unprepossessing by comparison. The temple is magnificently set in a natural valley against a towering backdrop of massive craggy mountains. Though upward of 3,500 years old in some ways it looks strangely modern with its ramps, two-tired terraces and the simplicity of clean, white, sharp lines of the colonnades and facade…the simplicity of the building and the way it blends into the landscape reminds me a bit of the architecture of Chicago’s Prairie School. Hatshepsut’s pet name for the temple was Djeser Djeseru (“splendour of Splendours”), in the ancient era the elegant simplicity of Deir el-Bahri was enhanced by a number of aesthetic features and elements that haven’t survived to the present day (eg, an avenue of sphinxes, fountains, lines of myrrh trees from the land of Punt) [The Rough Guide to Egypt (2007 Ed.)]. The distressing, tragic contemporary association with this sublimely beautiful monument is that it was here that 58 international tourists as well as four Egyptians were massacred by terrorists in 1997, a further 26 visitors or more were injured in the onslaught (the worst-ever terrorist atrocity involving tourists in Egypt). The terrorist group, suspected to be a splinter arm of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (Egyptian Sunni Islamist organisation)✥ entered the complex in the guise of security guards, trapping the victims inside the temple and setting on them with knives and guns. The murderers later fled and committed suicide in the surrounding hills. The largest proportion (>60%) of the murdered tourists came from Switzerland (later on Swiss intelligence ‘determined’ that Osama Bin Laden had bankrolled the operation). A direct consequent of the Luxor massacre was both a beefing up of tourist security and a drop in Egypt’s tourist numbers. Subsequent terrorist attacks elsewhere within the country has ensured the maintenance of high levels of security by the Egyptian authorities to this day.
🔼 Pharaoh and Queen, Hatshepsut
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✱ the statues of Hatshepsut that survive that is, many at the temple were predictably decimated by later male pharaohs in a chauvinist attempt to erase her from the annals of Egypt’s pharaonic ‘pantheon’
✥ although this charge has continued to be denied by al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya itself
The island containing the Temple of Philae and other significant, associated monuments from antiquity is a definite starter on the list of essential things to see when in the Nubian region of Egypt. So, after the tour guide had taken us to the Aswan High Dam to get a sighter from the bridge of the vast reservoirs of water, we made for the island✱. The temple and other monuments we were going to see were originally on Philae island, but by the 1960s the Egyptian government, concerned at the harmful effect the periodical flooding of the island was having on the monuments and its archaeological relics (a by-product of the Aswan Low Dam), decided to relocate them to a more optimal place – mirroring the story with the Abu Simbel Tow Temples and the Aswan High Dam. The nearby island of Aglika was chosen as the new site and in a logistics exercise that consumed virtually all the seventies, Philae’s temples and monuments “island-hopped” to Aglika. There was some inexplicable delay (becoming quite the norm) when we got to the wharf in getting a boat to ferry us to the new island. One of the random fellow passengers on the boat ride was perhaps the most exotic ‘apparition’ we had encountered in all our time in Egypt. I say ‘apparition’ because although she was real, so oddly and eccentrically was she decked out in extravagant garb and paraphernalia, she was totally out-of-place with everyone else in the sweltering heat of the day. The image that occurred to me when I saw her was of a kind of Egyptian “Mary Poppins”. She was covered from head to foot in multi-layers of gaily coloured clothing, fancy “Sunday-best” gloves, etc, the whole kit! Yes and of course the obligatory umbrella as well! She also looked like she could seamlessly slot into the cast of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, no problems. We were all melting in the oppressive tropical heat in our thin cotton T-shirts, shorts and sandals, so I can’t imagine how she was feeling it. As it transpired, ‘Maryam’ Poppins had an eccentric personality to match her flamboyant attire. She tried to blame us for the boat’s delay and then wanted to use us as money-changers. I couldn’t quite fathom what exactly the proverbial bee in her over-veiled bonnet was! As the boat neared the island the vision was an enchanting one, the central complex of buildings seemed to be growing out of the lush green band of trees and bushes which surround it! It was easy to spot the distinctive twin pylons of the Temple of Isis. Philae was one of the strongholds for the cult of worshipping the all-empowering Egyptian goddess. Once you set foot on the island you find its full of fascinating monuments and artefacts which reveal a rich and varied history and an assortment of diverse cultural influences. The earliest religious structures reach back to the 4th century BCE and the Pharaonic era. Others date to the Ptolemaic Kingdom (Alexander the Great’s Graeco-Egyptian successors from Ptolemy I up to Cleopatra). A number of the buildings still extant were erected under the aegis and command of Roman emperors, eg, the Kiosk of Trajan (above). Even the early century Byzantine rulers have left an imprint on Philae as did the Coptic Christians. Most impressive of all perhaps is the forecourt of the main temple with its splendid colonnaded, the courtyard is an irenic atmosphere-evoking space. Also calming and softening the setting was the afternoon sunlight filtering in between the temple’s columns and reflecting on the still waters of the river in the background. The temple’s stand-out for me remains the striking reliefs of Egyptian deities (especially) on the Second Pylon (above), sharply defined sculptures which have been exceptionally well-preserved (or restored) bearing in mind that the temple walls had been half-submerged for considerable periods when it was still located on the vulnerable Philae island. In addition to the Temple of Isis and the Kiosk of Trajan, the island contains five lesser temples, two Roman gates, the Portico of (Emperor) Augustus and the Pavilion or Vestibule of (Pharaoh) Nactanebo I. The site’s various buildings are rich in the representation of pictographic narratives…the trained eye of Egyptologist Biko drew our attention to other, unauthorised markings on the monuments – various graffiti inscriptions is left by past visitors from the Roman epoch through to the Napoleonic period…which is visual confirmation – if we needed it – that graffiti has been around for just about forever (‘How Old is Graffiti?‘, www.wonderopolis.org).
▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁✱ 8.8km south of Aswan as the Nubian Corvus flies!
The stock standard, organised tour of Egypt offered by x-plus one number of tour operators and agents typically has an itinerary which comprises Cairo, Gaza Pyramids, Saqqara, a Nile cruise, Luxor and the Valley of the Kings (and maybe Queens), and Karnak, maybe Aswan if you’re lucky and Alexandria, less likely to be included. Sinai doesn’t score a guernsey and the Temples of Abu Simbel, way down in the Nubian south close to the border with Sudan, is often only available as a cost add-on option. But worth it…if you were permitted to visit just one archaeological site in Egypt, Abu Simbel should be the one!
The trip south to Upper Nile
We left bustling, teeming Cairo and journeyed to the Giza Railway Station preceded by a short stop at the Canadian Youth Hostel for a refresher/change of clothes. There was no rush as it turned out, we twiddled our thumbs while the overnight train to Aswan waited dormant on the platform for two hours before it departed. Egyptian Railways’ so-called Abela “Sleeping Train” was on the whole relatively comfortable, but it took a torturous 13½ hours to get to Aswan, and although we had our own separate (small) compartments I got very little sleep in the night in the noisy, overcrowded carriage with the jerky motion of the train. The on-board toilets were a bit dire and the railway staff gave us something cold and rubbery to eat…though they were very polite about it. As least we fared better than the other half of our tour group, their (following) ER train broke down on route in the heat for five hours, standing still, no air con!
⇩ Tourist stalls outside entrance to Abu Simbel site
The four Ramses II statues ⇧
The next morning we had to rise and leave our Aswan hotel just after 3am to drive to Abu Simbel. It was a four-hour drive to the site and we needed to get there early enough to be in and out before the severe heat of the day hit. Our bus together with several other tour buses travelled through the desert in a convoy escorted by armed soldiers in the front and rear vehicles (a corollary of the spike in terrorist attacks on Egyptian tourist sites in recent years). We arrived at the AS monument complex at around 7am.
Leaving the car park and side-stepping through the souvenir wallahs trying to steer us towards their goods stalls, we walked along a curved access road down a slight incline. As we rounded a corner, we get our first sighting of what we had come to see. Superimposed on the cliff face of a mountain were two sets of monumental carved figures, it is an amazing spectacle that greets you, the sheer scale is jaw-dropping, breathtaking…no superlatives you can think of seem adequate at the moment. The first wonder you come to are a set of four colossal (20m high) statues representing Rameses II, the famous pharaoh of the New Kingdom (19th Dynasty), seated on his throne. The four❈ monumental figures are set in rock relief, a niche carved out of the mountain wall. Behind the tetrad of Rameses’ is a temple dedicated to the pharaoh. Further along the mountain is a companion monument to Rameses’ consort, the Temple of Queen Nefertari. One hundred metres to the right of Rameses’ monument, also built on an extended arm of the artificial hill, is the smaller Temple of (the Goddess Hathor and) Queen Nefertari. In front of the temple is a frieze comprising large sculptures of figures (Rameses and Nefertari who unusually was rendered to be of equal height to the pharaoh).
⇧ Queen Neferari Monument
Moving the monuments– the engineering marvelof a miracle
Almost as fascinating as the Abu Simbel monuments themselves is the back story of how they were forgotten, lost, re-found and then moved. Engulfed by shifting sands and lost for millennia, the temples were discovered by a Swiss orientalist, Johann-Ludwig Burckhardt, in 1813. And there they sat until the Aswan High Dam project of the 1960s…the rising levels of the Nile and the creation of Lake Nasser meant that the Abu Simbel monuments would be submerged in the river. A UN-funded salvage operation (coordinated by Swedish company Impreglio) used engineers and archaeologists from around the world and Egyptian labour⌀ to rescue the 3,200 year-old-monuments and re-position them slightly further south on higher ground that is back a bit from the rushing waters of the Nile.
How to move enormous solid objects of such colossal weight and density was the challenge facing the team. The ingenious solution was to cut the statues into manageable (up to 20-ton) blocks (some sections so delicate that handsaws had to be used) that could be then transported to the temples’ new home and there carefully reassembled. For this to succeed required absolute mathematical precision, patience and a long time…but it worked and the statues were rejoined remarkably without recourse to glue or any form of adhesive substance [‘1964-1968 Rescuing Rameses II’, Amanda Uren, http://mashable.com]
Inside the temples
Concrete domes and arched doorways were integrated into the construction of the artificial hills to create the two temples in the new location. Inside are treasury rooms, sculptures and numerous wall and column decorations in honour of Egypt’s most long-lived pharaoh. Photography within the Greater and Lesser Temples is not permitted, but packets of postcards depicting pictures of the interior treasures and of the 1960s relocation project can be purchased at the site.
We spent two hours exploring Abu Simbel but could have stayed longer, Biko however was quick to hurry us back to our mini-bus with his now familiar cry of yalla-beena! The temple site was becoming people top-heavy with new tourist buses arriving every hour, we knew that we needed to make tracks in the desert – especially if we were to avoid, as much as we could, having to travel in full tropical sun. We left happy and content that we had witnessed one of the best ancient complexes we would see. So many of Egypt’s archaeological monuments are magnificent, but very few of them can be said to match the rarefied atmosphere of Abu Simbel Tow Temples.
A note on nomenclature: The traditional speculation is that the name Abu Simbel derives from the name of the Nubian boy who guided Burckhardt (and later Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni) to the location of the lost treasure temples…regardless of this claims’ merits it should be noted that Abu Simbel literally means “Father (Abu) of the Ear of Corn”.
Footnote: Remoteness of Abu Simbel – deep in the Nubian South, around 35–50km from the Sudanese border, Abu Simbel is literally in the middle of nowhere…the location of this monumental, eponymous structure was intended as the marker signifying the southern border of Rameses II’s empire
⇧ Night viewings of the spotlighted Rameses II monument are spectacular and popular
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❈ the head and torso of one of the four Rameses lies at the feet of the statue – this was how Burckhardt found it in 1813, the fissure is thought to have been caused by an earthquake. Another point of difference within the foursome is that Rameses #4 (counting from left to right) is missing the pharaoh’s trademark shaving brush beard
⌀ the project used around 3,000 workers, cost $US42M in 1960s money and nearly five years to complete
⊡ during the project a perhaps surprising decision was made to not replace the detached head and torso of Rameses #2 in its original position, rather it was placed on the ground at the statue’s feet exactly as it was found when re-discovered in 1813
The drive from Alexandria to El Alamein was a pretty tedious affair, the M40 is a dry, dusty, monotonously homogeneous-looking road. On the right we gleaned glimpses of the sea interspersed with long lines of newish looking seaside villas and resorts (many appear unoccupied), which contrasted with a vista of unremitting desert wasteland on the left. One hundred and six kilometres of hum-humdrum tedium in fact!
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-20.jpg”> Fortress-like German military cemetery, El Alamein[/
When we got to the turnoff for the El Alamein township, we continued straight on the Marsa Matrouh Road to where the military cemeteries of the Axis powers are. Unfortunately, we drove straight past the entrance to the German war cemetery and made for the Italian War Mausoleum (Ai Caduti Italiani)…this was a disappointment for me, had I have had the choice I know which I would have chosen, it would have been fascinating to see the monuments to Rommel the “Desert Fox”, the Afrika Korps, the Wehrmacht and all the Nazi trappings. Apparently we were too constrained time-wise to visit, needing to get back to Alexandria before nightfall…either that or our guide on the El Alamein tour bought entry tickets to just one of these ossuaries and he chose the Italian one! (ummm, would have been nice to have received a heads-up of what the options were).
ref=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-21.jpg”> Italian Military Cemetery, El Alamein[/ca
All that said, it shouldn’t dissuade anyone from a visit to the Italian cemetery, it has its own charms and attractions to recommend it. At the mausoleum entrance there are tangible symbols of the Italian presence in the Western Desert during the World War, an Italian armoured tank coloured-coded to blend in with both the ground and the triple-arched portal. Aesthetically the cemetery grounds are a gorgeous scene – a beautiful orange grove and verdant green garden of rose bushes, desert flowers and palm trees on either side of a stone pathway which lead up steps to a superb mausoleum standing out against the glimmering water backdrop of the Mediterranean. As we walked slowly towards the mausoleum on its raised foundation, it felt like we were the only people within cooee of the Italian site, but it turned out we were not alone…a young Bedouin girl quietly slipped up behind us and softly but animatedly started talking to my wife. There were initial ciaos and prontos followed by a burst of fluent Italian. It took us a couple of minutes to work out what the Bedouin girl wanted as she persisted in her enquiries in Italian, but eventually we twigged – she must have thought we were Italian, perhaps visiting a relative who had been in the war. She was inviting us to take a photo with her at the mausoleum – no doubt in return for some baksheesh! As she just suddenly materialised out of nowhere, I concluded that the girl must spend her days staking herself out under the cover of the rose bushes and orange trees waiting to pounce on unsuspecting, approaching tourists.
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-22.jpg”> Interior of the Italian ossuary[/capt
Inside the white limestone mausoleum building, a high, narrow tomb, is the final resting place of more than 5,200 Italian soldiers, sailors and airmen positioned, like files in a filing cabinet, one above each other into the walls. My on-the-spot ‘guesstimation” was that up to a quarter of all those interred in the mausoleum bore no name but the singular, poignant and anonymous inscription, ‘incogniti’!
Returning from the Italian mausoleum visit, we stopped briefly at the El Alamein Military Museum. We didn’t venture inside, hanging around only long enough to pick up some lunch and an unscheduled, solo hitchhiker from Israel on his way to Libya! Bakr, our Egyptian guide, clearly uncomfortable at the arrangement, didn’t much like our giving a lift to someone Jewish (and especially an Israeli!), in an aside to me he uttered a warning that he would be trouble. Bakr however insisted that it was my call, as I was the one hiring the transport for the excursion! I didn’t feel that this solitary 65-year-old retired Israeli tourist posed a threat to our liberty or security, so I had no objections to him tagging along with us.
The next stop was the vast Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery (CWGC) which was an even more affecting sight – over 7,300 soldiers and airmen from all corners of the then British Empire✱ are buried in symmetrical formations in the sandy clay (as with the Italian ossuary, around 820 of the dead remain unidentified). The Australian section of graves stretches over a quite sizeable part of the cemetery.
Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery ▼
The memorial building, sand-blond in colour and with lavish arches, is a fitting and respectful tribute to those who fell in the desert campaign. The cost of establishing and maintaining CWGC is met by contributions from the Commonwealth countries whose soldiers took part in that theatre of war, its lawns, groves and gardens are kept in immaculate shape by a dedicated staff of Egyptian groundsmen and gardeners. After the visit to the Commonwealth graves we returned to the war museum where we dropped off the Israeli guy. As we turned the vehicle into the road that took us back to Alexandria he was last seen on the M40 getting into in some fracas with an Egyptian guard over his travel papers.
Footnote: elsewhere at El Alamein, located separately, there are two other, tiny military cemeteries commemorating combatants on different sides who lost their lives in World War II – a Greek war memorial (its portal taking the form of an ancient Greek temple) and cemetery containing the remains of that nation’s soldiers who died in the two battles of El Alamein. There is another ossuary memorial to Libyan troops who fought for Fascist Italy in the campaign. Bakr didn’t mention either of these war cemeteries and I certainly didn’t spot them on our travels.
PostScript: as I wandered off the edges of the Commonwealth Military Cemetery Bakr was quick to remind me that the vast expanses of desert was full of unpleasant surprises in the shape of unexploded land mines. These still ‘live’ explosives, estimated to number many millions all over the Western Desert, were planted during the African campaign in WWII…a strong antidote to curb anyone’s wanderlust urges (even tourists’) if ever there was one!
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✱ a number of the Free French soldiers who fought with the British are also buried in the ground of the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery
If you go to Sinai, as many European vacationers do (escaping the Northern Hemisphere winter) solely for the diving and snorkeling or to chill out on a Gulf of Suez/Red Sea or Gulf of Aqaba beach resort, you will be short-changing yourself on all that the peninsula has to offer. A trip to Mount Sinai (Jebel Musa) and Saint Catherine’s Monastery shows you another side of the Sinai tourism portfolio.
Mt Sinai is a place of contrasts. Obviously there is the spiritual dimension to Sinai, a sacred location for the three great and distinct Abrahamic religions. It is also a place that swings widely in climatic conditions, hot desert weather during the day but can be “cold as” at night, especially when your sleeping arrangements are exposed to the desert winds. We spent the night in a flimsy Bedouin camp shack, trying to sleep on what passed in the Bedouin world for ‘bedding’ – on the floor lying on a kind of stiff, itchy strip of carpet (no sheets), a pillow comprising a hard mat made of tent canvas rolled up like a newspaper that felt like it had an iron bar inside, and as a doona, a thin, coarse camel rug with more than a lingering whiff of the even-toed ungulate about it! Definitely a case of more ‘Bedouin’ than ‘bed’!!! Outside, conditions were bitterly cold, something akin to a gale-force wind was blowing and we could palpably feel it through the several gaps in the door! (clearly, the locals round here have never heard of the terms ‘doorstop’ or ‘windbreak’!)
ref=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-17.jpg”> Sunrise over Sinai[/ca
In the early morning, we dragged ourselves out of the icy bed(sic) and still half-asleep, clamoured up the mountain (approximately 3,700 rough-hewn steps worth of clamouring!✥) for the privilege of taking photos of the sunrise peaking over the imposing mountain range. On the way down again, in company with an assembled multitude of other climbers all treading carefully down the ancient, rock strewn staircase, we took shots of the harsh, sun-baked ochre-brown terrain and the ancient Mt Sinai Monastery (official name: “Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai”) which is enclosed within a fortress compound.
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-18.jpg”> Saint Cath’s [/capt
Later that morning we visited the church itself, Saint Catherine’s was packed to its 6th century AD rafters with visitors and pilgrims. The Monastery’s governors, the Greek Orthodox custodians of Saint Catherine’s permit only a narrow window of opportunity for people to visit the Monastery (it was open only three hours in the morning and all tour groups need to be accommodated within that time period!)…so there were crowds all over the compound and massive queues for the toilets✱. The main church building was pretty basic, Spartan in parts, but in the section housing (according to tradition) the relic of the cherished Saint, everything was crammed full of icons and other Orthodox paraphernalia. The feeling of being cluttered and crowded was added to by the numbers of visitors and pilgrims from everywhere all trying to soak in the holy martyr’s saintly ambience at the same time.
“http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-16.jpg”> “The Bush” in question[/captio
Saint Catherine’s is the attributed site of at least one Old Testament✧ classic mainstay, the fabled ‘Burning Bush’ of Moses. Frankly though I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary about it, a wilderness-variety bramble bush (botanically speaking a rubus sanctus apparently) but much like any other arboreal specimen in the vicinity. I’m not sure what I was expecting, I guess an instant, minor miracle was too much to hope for, but I found this glorified spectacle all a bit underwhelming. In any case we didn’t have time to dwell on its authenticity or plausibility, we were pretty much rushed through the rest of the Monastery’s curious sights and extravaganzas with the sound of our guide Biko hollering “yalla-yalla” and “yalla-beena’ constantly ringing in our ears!
Outer walls of the monastery
Later in the afternoon we visited other places of note on the coast of south-western Sinai which we were told were similarly imbued with great biblical significance, such as Ayun or Oyun Musa (Moses’ Spring⊡) where Moses is supposed to have tossed a barberry bush into bitter springs, instantly turning them into a drinkable, sweet nectar. Also near here is where, according to the Bible, he parted the Red Sea for the Israelites to cross and make good their escape from African Egypt (not quite sure about the year, although I did catch the filmed re-enactment in 1956 with Charlton Heston doing the parting!). Another well-touted highlight we visited near the village of El Tor was Hamam Musa (Moses’ Bath) or Hammam Pharaon (Pharaoh’s Bath), a series of natural hot sulfuric springs reputedly with great therapeutic benefits. Sitting in the springs, which emanate from a nearby hill and runs off into the sea, did feel vaguely invigorating, but I baulked at drinking the oily, malodorous if allegedly curative water…although I observed some more trusting souls there that certainly weren’t holding back! South Sinai done, we headed back up the coast to the Suez Canal and a more orthodox route across the Gulf of Suez via the M50!
≊≅≅≅≅≅≊≅≅≅≅≅≊≅≅≅≅≅≊≅≅≅≅≅≊≅≅≅≅≅≊≅≅≅≅≅≊≅≅≅≅≅≊≅≅≅≅≅≊
✥ some ‘ascenders’ like our travelling companions from ‘Bris-Vegas’ chose to take the camelid transport route to the top, but in their case this resulted in a unexpected, nasty altercation with the camels’ Bedouin owner who was aggrieved that they didn’t pay (what he reckoned was) the full amount for the hire of the camels (he was still hounding them for more Egyptian pounds back at ground level in the morning!)
✱ some time after our Sinai excursion, all tours of Saint Catherine’s were suspended in owing to a heightening of security issues in Egypt – fortunately this proved to be only a short-term situation which was massacring the local business, tourism is back in full swing now in South Sinai, even more so for the sun, sand and dive resorts at Dahab, Nuweiba and Sharm El-Sheikh
✧ or to use the current PC term, “the Hebrew Bible”
⊡ not to be confused with the identically named ‘Moses’ Spring’, a locality in Jordan similarly revered for its “God-given” healing waters
Many years ago I did a side excursion from Egypt’s tourism central, departing from the bustling, over-peopled Cairo to cross the Suez Canal into Asian Egypt, to the under-peopled peninsula of Sinai. To many who haven’t been there, the Sinai probably sounds like a land of extremes of climate and dry harsh, unforgiving terrain, photos of the landscape certainly convey that impression…I remember the deprivations suffered by Peter O’Toole and his boy servant as they tried to cross Sinai’s blindingly windstorm-swept desert by camel in the classic film Lawrence of Arabia). The desert is one powerful element of the land for sure, but the coastal strip on the western edge of the peninsula on the Gulf of Aqaba reveals a very different picture. Dahab midway up the Gulf is one such oasis jewel in a rugged and unyielding desert landscape.
But first we had to get there! Our mini-bus drove from Cairo to Sinai (under the narrow channel of water!), from one continent, Africa, to another, Asia. The Egyptian tour guide Biko didn’t seem to know exactly where Dahab was, and so instead of going straight down the Red Sea coast, we went right across the top, west to east, ending up at Taba✱ on the Israeli border where we found ourselves tensely eyeballing the heavily armed Jewish soldiers on the other side of the border gate in Israel’s Eilat township.
Eventually we got to Dahab, but it was a long, hot trek through kilometres and kilometres of dusty sandstone hills and wadis (valleys) – the day drive from Cairo to Dahab, following Biko’s circuitous route, took all of eight hours. It is difficult driving around the Sinai because of the sensitive security situation (close proximity to Israel and recent terrorist activity), you don’t drive very far on the peninsula before you have to stop at a military checkpoint (we had to produce our Australian passports at a number of these points).
Once we reached the township it wasn’t the end of our ordeal. Neither Biko or the driver had an address for our hotel (WTF!?!) so we kept driving around, looking for it (passing other resorts and hotels that wasn’t ours!), then we’d drive back to the main coastal road and ask the soldiers at the checkpoints where it was. Eventually Biko worked it out from the directions we were given, but I was at a loss to fathom why he didn’t just ask the first resort we came to where it was – it seemed a “no-brainer” to me that they would know where their competition in town was!
Our hotel, Miami Beach Resort, was right on the beach and boasted all the desired amenities, although annoyingly part of the hotel was still being constructed, so our auditory senses got to experience regular sessions of grinding and drilling from the machinery outside our block. The vast, ancient mountains just behind the resort did provide an exotic backdrop to the location. I didn’t care for the Dahab beach much though as it was full of gravelly stones, Peebles and small rocks right along the shoreline which was unpleasant to walk on and a bit cold, fortunately the resort had a pool. There was plenty to do including camel and horse riding up and down the beach and 4WD trips up to the mountains close by.
Dahab Dive Centre, Aqaba Gulf ▲
Dahab has a famous dive centre 10km north of the town (called the “Blue Hole”) where the clear waters and coral reefs attract lots of visitors from Europe and beyond. As our resort was a little way out of town we were able to get lifts from staff at the hotel when we needed to go somewhere. But, one thing learnt quickly is that, anywhere in Egypt, nothing is for free. If someone gives you a lift, loans you a torch, gives you a ‘gift’ of a broken-off chunk of alabaster, carries your bag 20 metres, lets you use their toilet, etc, baksheesh (an informal payment in Middle Eastern culture for some sort of service provided) is always expected!
The Masbat ▲
Dahab Town itself is a long line of ramshackle, dilapidated structures comprising restaurants, bars and souvenir shops. The town exuded a kind of dusty, laid-back hippie, off-the-beaten track, feel to it. It was impossible to walk down the seafront street (the Masbat) without being bombarded by numerous restaurant and bar touts and spruikers, each one vigorously and vociferously trying to entice you into their particular establishment (which according to every spruiker on the strip is naturally “the best in town!!!”).
There is an old Bedouin township in Dahab that predates the tourism hub that developed in the Nineties…before its tourism potential was tapped Dahab was a small, sleepy Bedouin fishing village with lots of camels, goats and sheep wandering randomly around the streets (they are still wandering the town!). I discovered that the local Bedouins, like the market workers in Cairo, are good hagglers when it comes to trading with the tourists…even the very young ones it seems are seasoned negotiators at it – such as the doggedly determined five or six-year-old Bedouin girl we encountered at a cafe on the Masbat who just wasn’t going to be bargained down by Biko for her modest offerings of beaded tribal bracelets and trinkets.
The old Crusader castle, south of Taba ▲
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✱ when we got here I tried to spot Pharaoh’s Island (Jezeirat Faurun) which is just off the coastline south of Taba. I couldn’t see it but it’s a place with an interesting history, in the 12th century it was initially a Crusader castle, then captured and rebuilt by the great Sal-ad-din as Muslim fortifications. The fortress was significantly restored several years ago and tours of the tiny island are now possible
Ft-note: experiencing the leisurely poolside lifestyle in the Dahab gulf resort, it’s hard to reconcile the evident peace and tranquility with a recent pattern of disturbing and deadly incidents. The Sinai gulf resort towns and tourists have been the target of a number of recent terrorist attacks (including Taba 2004, Sharm El-Sheikh 2005, Dahab 2006, Sharm El-Sheikh airport 2015)
An exploration of the archaeological sites of Mexíco’s Yucatán Peninsula cannot be said to be complete unless it includes a trip to Chichén-Itzá (see footnote for etymology) – essential even for those with only the barest of interest in the archaeological significance embodied in its stepped pyramids and celestial-viewing platforms…according to UNESCO Chichén-Itzá represents “one of the most important examples of (the blend of) Mayan-Toltec civilizations”. An outcome of the Toltec invasion of Yucatán (and of Chichén-Itzá) in the late 10th century is that visitors to the ruins of the city can see in the city’s ancient structures a fusion of icons and styles from the two Pre-Hispanic cultures✱.
Zona arqueología
In relation to Mérida (where we were based), Chichén-Itzá is in San Felipe Nuevo, a drive of 115km along Highway 180. Predictably for somewhere lionised as a “modern wonder of the world”, the place was brimming with tourists when we arrived. Our guide for the day, Enrique, took us through the complex’s turnstiles and we made our way from the entrance through a phalanx of clamouring vendors hawking their memorabilia merchandise. After an obligatory baños stop, we headed for the large temple in the centre of the site, the Temple of Kukulcán. “El Castillo” as it is known, is 25 metres high and decorated with carvings of plumed serpents and Toltec warriors. The pyramid was roped off to prevent visitors climbing it (the consequence of a female tourist falling to her death from it in 2006).
The Kuk
The chirping bird phenomenon
Whilst we were taking in the ambience of the eleven hundred-year-old El Castillo temple, guides leading other groups of tourists would demonstrate the acoustics of the pyramid by standing at the base of the stairway and clapping their hands loudly (we were already familiar with this stage show, having first seen the clapping trick performed at Teotihuacán on the outskirts of Mexico City). It seemed a bit gimmicky to me but some pyramid researchers and acoustical engineers apparently believe that the echo effect that this generates from the ancient structure replicates the chirping noise made by the sacred Quetzal bird (the kuk), native to Central America [‘Was Maya Pyramid Designed to Chirp Like a Bird?’ (Bijal P Trivedi)
National Geographic Today, 6-Dec-2002, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/]
Templo de Kukulcán
Measuring the scientific achievements of the Maya
Chirping Quetzals aside, the Temple of Kukulcán at the height of the Mayan empire power was salient to how Mayans lived their everyday lives and planned their future endeavours. The 365◘ step pyramid demonstrates how important astronomy was to the Maya and how remarkably accurately they were able to measure mathematically (eg, the 365-day Maya calendar devised centuries before the West!). The alignment of structures like El Castillo affirms the advanced understanding the Maya had of astronomical phenomena such as solstices and equinoxes.
El Caracol
Observing the clear blue sky
Walking around the ruins we discovered from our guide that the Maya put to use different buildings to make serious astronomical observations (without the aid of telescopes) of the sky above…the Plataforma de Venus (near the Temple of Kukulcán) is a platform used by the Maya elite to track the transit of Venus. The planet Venus was important to the Maya both theologically, as a deity (god of war), and practically, to use its movements to decide when to make raids and engage in battles with enemies. On the southern axis of the city is the Observatory or El Caracol (“the snail”), a small building with a circular viewing tower in a crumbling condition, also integral to studying planetary movements [‘ChichenItzaRuins’, www.chichenitzaruins.org].
Spot the iguana!
We spent a very liberal and leisurely amount of time wandering around the various excavated remnants of the site…off to the sides were several smaller and apparently less important temples and a couple of cénotes (unlike the others in the Peninsula we swam in, these were sans hoods, fully exposed). In another minor temple (in a poor state of repair) we were able to observe that some of the native non-human locals had made a home in the crumbling stone structure, in this case a well-camouflaged iguana (above)!
La Iglesia
An elaborate multi-layered “jigsaw puzzle” in Chichén Viejó
Of those we saw, I found La Iglesia (The Church) the most interesting building, architecturally and visually. One of the oldest buildings at Chichén-Itzá (and it looks it!), the building is oddly asymmetrical with an elaborately decorative upper part sitting incongruously atop an untidy foundation “made up of hundreds of smaller stones fit(ted) together like a huge jigsaw puzzle” [Chris Reeves, ‘La Iglesia’, American Egypt (All about Chichen Itzá and Mexico’s Mayan Yucatan), www.americanegypt.com]. The upper section is dazzlingly and elaborately decorated with bas-relief carvings comprising a composite pattern of animal symbols – armadillos, crabs, snails, tortoises (representing the four bacabs who in Maya mythology are thought to hold up the sky). The other dominant sculptural feature of La Iglesia’s facade are masks of the Rain God Chac [‘Chichén Itzá – The Church’, Mexíco Archeology, www.mexicoarcheology.com].
The Great ball court
The final highlight of the ancient city that we got to see on our visit to Chichén-Itzá was the Great (or Grand) Ball Court. The Gran cancha de pelotá, one of thirteen ball courts unearthed at Chichén-Itzá, is the best preserved and most impressive of all such ancient sports stadia in Mexíco. It is known that, from as early as 1,400 BCE, Mesoamericans played a game involving the propulsion of a rubber ball which may have incorporated features of or partly resembled football and/or handball. I will talk about what the Chichén-Itzá ball court reveals about this indigenous Mexícan game and its significance to native Pre-Columbian society in a follow-up blog.
Footnote: Nomenclature
“Chichen Itza”, a Maya word, means “at the mouth of the well of the Itza.” The Itzá were a dominant ethnic-lineage group in Yucatán’s northern peninsula. The word ‘well’ probably refers to the nearby cénote sagrado – the sacred limestone sinkhole around which the Maya city was constructed.
Chichén-Itzá vendors hard at it! Sombreros for a hot day.
❝When counterfeiting was artisanal,
It didn’t bother us much,
Now it’s become industrial,
And we’re frankly very worried❞.
~ Adrian de Flers, Comité Colbert
(An association of French couturiers and perfumers dedicated to “promoting the concept of luxury”)
⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖ ⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖⌖
Go to any of the world’s tourist hotspots today, anywhere on the international tourist trail in fact, and check out, say, the historical centre of that city and it’s inevitable that you will run into a tsunami of vendors with stalls and shops chock full of knock-offs of designer goods…everywhere you go locals flogging pirated copies of fashion label textiles, shoes, bags, electronic goods, homewares, you name it. And of course there will always be a plethora of takers among the ranks of Western tourists, eager to take advantage of the “great deals”. For some the shopping bonanza may even supersede the profoundly more meaningful chance to engage with different cultures, histories and cuisines around the globe.
The therapeutic springs of the limestone Travertines
Many shopkeepers and retailers in tourist areas no longer bother trying to conceal the faux nature of their merchandise. At the beginning of this year while in Mexico City I was strolling through the Chinatown section of town and came upon a shady looking electronics kiosk pop-up that was selling digital devices labelled as “Clon Samsung”, openly heralding the cloned nature of the product! In Turkey at a small roadside market set up on the outskirts of the famous and unique natural wonder, the Pamukkale Travertines, a prominent banner proclaims in unmissable bold, large, capitalised letters: GENUINE FAKE ROLEX WATCHES FOR SALE!✱ In the less developed world knock-offs are a way of life and a way of commerce – part of what is sometimes blandly described in official television news circles as the “informal economy”, or in old-speak, the black market!
In 2011 the president of Mexico’s Confederation of the National Chamber of Commerce, Services and Tourism stated that the yield from the sale of counterfeit consumer goods in the country each year is US$75 million, greater than the combined income earned by Mexico from oil, remittances and tourism! (and growing at an exponential rate since that date) [Cheryl Santos, ‘a look at the colors and styles of Mexico City’s bootleg fashion markets’ (7 May 2016), www.i-d.vice.com].
Resisting everything including temptation
It does seem, from the standpoint of your average “Joe or Jill” Western tourist, that the impulse to turn the overseas travel excursion into a shopping junket, the chance to replenish that flagging winter wardrobe with a raft of cut-price bargains, is increasingly the fashion de jour when O/S. Third World imitations of high quality Western merchandise are sold at a fraction of the price and increasingly look passably (or at least remotely) like the real thing. So, who doesn’t want to end up back at his or her home airport knee-deep in inexpensive knock-offs?
Who? Well, me for one! Frankly for one thing I’ve never seen the sense of collecting a whole bunch of extra garments and accessories on route that I’ll have to squeeze into my already bulging luggage and then lug around to every single hotel, coach and airport for the entire duration of the trip, it flies in the face of my simple and practical philosophy of “always travelling as light as possible”. Besides, with the “El Cheapo” stuff you’re not buying quality that’s going to last any decent amount of time!
So, I definitely don’t contribute to the slim profit-margins of the purveyors of fake consumer goods in Third World tourist traps… but souvenirs are another matter, but even there I chart a moderate course. From the first time I ventured overseas (thank you CC!), my ambitions went no further than picking up a few souvenirs or trinkets when I got the chance, something that I would in years hence associate positively with the exotic places I had visited. Occasionally I have bought a T-shirt or a cap perhaps (small items, easy to pack and carry) and of course, out of necessity a few little gifts for the people back home. For me, the odd souvenir is merely an auxiliary memento, something tangible to connect with the mass of photos I would invariably take in each place I visited.
Fridgelandia
Fridge magnet overload!
In the past I admit to having had a bit of a mania for collecting fridge magnets on my travels…yes the proverbial, ultra-kitschy humble fridge magnet! But eventually every available space on the magnetic part of our fridge got consumed, so rather than buying a bigger fridge (a real admission of fridge magnet OCD!), I simply switched to buying other small transportable items in the markets. Paintings, attachable plates and small, decorative wall satchels, easily filled the souvenir void (and eventually the lounge room walls too!)
Sometimes when on the lookout for a token souvenir or two on a trip, I did enjoy the ‘theatre’ of pitting my negotiating skills (such as they are!) against a seasoned vendor with “home ground” advantage in the markets…trying to haggle them down a few shekels did produce a momentary thrill in me. The money saved was absolutely inconsequential in the context of the relative luxury of the First World from which I come – I was simply engaging in the tourism game (when in Egypt, do as the Egyptians, etc). I’m can happily say that over the years of travelling I grew out of this self-indulgent urge to barter, that fleeting and insignificant élan I used to get has well and truly worn off.
Henpecked!
On the trail of the fabulous “pecking hens” of…Cairo, Bogotá, Cancun, Zanzibar, Kolkata, etc.
Thirty years ago a friend brought me back a gift from Columbia or Venezuela (I forget which)…I really appreciated the object’s simplicity and understated charm. It was a plain wooden toy, a little haphazardly made, in the form of a bunch♠ of pecking hens attached by string to a sort of ping-pong bat. They were made simply by (no doubt peasant) hand, unadorned, without any pretensions to being anything like factory-finished and polished to perfection. Basic but guaranteed to capture the attention of a restless two-year-old for hours. I was so taken with the pecking hens I have in turn bought them myself as gifts for friends on subsequent tours where I have seen them (Egypt, Mexico, etc)◙.
Chico Senõr Potter
Finding ‘Choló’ Potter but where is ‘Falsò’ Tintin?
Finding myself in Lima one time and jaded from having done all the main historic hotspots like the creepy monastery catacombs and Huaca Pucliana, I made for Miraflores (tourism central) and checked out the various souvenir markets. One that caught my attention was called the Indian Market (strange that it was called that, I thought the term ‘Indian’ wasn’t considered PC here any more!). The market’s stalls were packed with arts and crafts items and other merchandise like knitted “V for Vendetta” masks and knock-off T-shirts which appropriated and ‘Peruvianised’ symbols of Western popular culture (eg, ‘Cholo’ Potter working his juvenile wizardry in the Andes and that “All-Peruvian” dysfunctional family, the ‘Cholisimpsons’!).
Where is Tintin’s Inca prisoners T-shirt?
Seeing these made me think of the Tintin character…on earlier overseas trips I had discovered Tintin T-shirts which related to a number of Herge’s cartoon books about the sandy-haired boy reporter’s adventures all over the world (in China I found Tintin in Tibet and Les Adventure de Tintin, and in Turkey, Tintin in Istanbul. I knew one of the stories in the famous series was set in Peru (Tintin and the Prisoners of the Sun), so I asked some of the vendors if they had the Tintin T-shirt for Peru…this mainly met with uncomprehending expressions of bewilderment…one guy however was curious enough to quiz me about this ‘mysterious’ Tintin person. After I explained how world-famous the fictional character was and showed the stall-holder what he looked like, the guy confidently predicted that if I come back in six months time he would have the Peru Tintin T-shirt in stock. I didn’t for a moment doubt that he probably would, considering we were in Peru! And I thought, I bet he wouldn’t be concerned by the trifling matter of copyright, it would be the least of things encumbering him in making it happen!
0nly a fiver! Not worth the effort to copy!
Brother, can you knock me up a $100 note?
Lima is one of my favourite cities for counterfeiters. The first time I went into the city centre I was puzzled why there was so many backyard style, old-fashioned printing presses, especially concentrated it seemed in one particular street that runs off Plaza San Martin. It all made more sense when I found out some time later (when back home) that Lima was “the centre of the universe” when it comes to the meticulous painstaking, serious art of counterfeiting – particularly adept at churning out fake US$100 bills, known locally as a “Peruvian note”. Peru tourist tip stating the “bleeding obvious”: check your change very, very carefully!
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PostScript: Dodgy Juliaca – from brand piracy to smuggling
The epidemic proportions of counterfeiting is bad enough, then there’s out-and-out robbery! Standing in the woefully small and threadbare Aeropuerto Juliaca one day (southern Peru), I observed how many Peruvians, catching the domestic flight to Lima (and points further north), were checking in TV sets and computer hardware as luggage. On board one guy in the seat across the aisle from me had a new 33″ LED flat-screen (in its box) which he had brought with him as carry-on luggage…somehow he managed to jemmy it into the overhead compartment! He, like so many other Limeños, had made the 1,680 km round trip to Juliaca and back to buy consumer goods at a price you wouldn’t dream about getting them for in Lima.
The reason why Juliaca lures (long-distance) shoppers in droves is that the dusty, smoggy southern city is the hub of a prosperous smuggling trade…every year over a billion dollars worth of illicit goods including cocaine and other substances, gold, cigarettes, petrol, clothing, home and electronic appliances reaches Juliava predominantly via Lake Titicaca border with neighbouring Bolivia.
Simple unpretentious craftsmanship from the developing world
✱ at least these bootleggers get credit for candidly exhibiting a sense of humour, a self-effacing one moreover
♠ a peep, a brood?
◙ a second Columbian second gift from my friend was similarly imbued with charmingly simple inventiveness – a Velcro cloth- clown with a weighted head allowing it to tumble head over apex down a sofa whilst clinging to the material
Our last day at Mérida was more or less entirely given over to exploring a local geological feature in the region that Yucatán is world-famous for – the cénote✳ (Pron: say-NO-tay). Cénotes are natural pits, large sinkholes in the ground formed when limestone bedrock on the surface collapses exposing groundwater underneath. The ones we visited on that day were subterranean, deep down below ground level in cave formations in sites sheltered by overhanging cliff-faces. The cénotes in Southern Mexico are very popular with divers and snorkellers and the more accessible ones usually require the payment of an entry fee (from about 50 to 100 Pesos each). To get into the water at many cénotes you need to make a steep descent on rickety old ladders, although not all cenotes are sunk deep into the earth’s surface…some other cénotes like the one we saw in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba are located just below the ground and just look like natural pools surrounded by worryingly jagged rocky ledges.
Guía José conducts a cartography class in the field!
It was a decent old drive to reach our first Yucatán cénote, it was located in a place called Tecoh, quite remote, dry-parched and harsh land, real sagebrush territory! Our sociable guide for the day, José, laid down a map of the Peninsula on the ground and explained a bit of the cénote story. The ancient Maya people apparently used the cénotes for both practical and religious purposes. In a landscape (Yucatán) with hardly any rivers to speak of and quite few lakes, the cénotes provided a much-needed source of fresh water. The Maya also used them, it is believed, for sacrificial offerings sometimes. José’s finger traced a circuitous line around much of the map, pointing out the location of cénotes which seemed to be dotted all over the place. After we had swam in the first cénote I asked José who clearly relished the whole cénote experience if he had swam in every cenote in the state. José chuckled and indicated that there was over 2,000 cénotes all over the Peninsula, and he might need another 20-30 years to reach that target!◊
The roof of something deep, dark & delightful…
Cénote Dive-and-Snorkle
The ladder going down to the water-level was a concentric spiralling contraption of wooden steps which were in far from mint condition (words like flimsy and haphazard come to mind), necessitating that we made sure we trod fairly cautiously on each rung. At the bottom was a pretty primitively constructed wooden platform with only a small recess in the wall of the cave where we crammed our clothes and bags into every possible crevice.
Being a hesitant auto-immerser in any deposit of water greater in scope than a domestic bathtub, an aquatic prevaricator who can hold his own and delay with the best of them, I coaxed and eased myself with glacial speed into the seemingly bottomless, blue-turquoise chasm. The water was a little cool at first but I soon accustomed to it. The water quality looked pristine despite it being in constant by visitors, I was attracted by the appearance of a myriad of tiny colourful fish visibly close to the surface. The pool looked very deep…José speculated at least forty metres deep. Above us small birds flitted around the cave, dipping and diving in and out of several holes in the roof that have formed over the millenniums. The light emanating from the holes through tufts of vegetation provided a kind of natural spotlight projecting on to the water, giving the entire cavern a magical glow.
The beautiful azure water!
After a half-hour or so’s frolicking in the cénote Jose coaxed us out with the promise of a visit to an even more spectacular cénote that was only a short distance away at Carretera tecoh-telchaquillo. To get to the second cénote site we had to travel on more bumpy dirt roads, passing through several gates taking us onto different land-holdings. As we approached each closed gate, two small chicos (boys) that José had brought on the trip, would alight on a signal from the driver and scamper up and open the gate for the mini-bus◘.
Aquanauts of an ancient cénote!
An idyllic natural swimming hole full of picturesque delights
Cénote número dos managed to meet the high expectations of Jose’s extravagant rhetoric, and then some! It was a wider, deeper cave and the pool had a considerably more expansive mass of water. When we got to the cliff overlooking the cénote there was already a quartet of scuba-divers equipped with underwater cameras foraging around below the surface (“Japanese tourists”, they looked like to me). The drop from the top to the base platform was longer than the first cénote but glad to say the ladder was in better state with one long, straight descent to a three-quarter way platform and then a shorter ladder to a lower platform where you enter the water. José as usual wasted no time in shedding his T-shirt and thongs and diving into the sparkling abyss, following swiftly by the two boys. With everyone else quickly into the water, I paused briefly to take a few shots of the vast cavern and its water-treading occupants, before doing likewise. The pool was many metres deep (hence the presence of the scuba-divers), so once in I treaded water for a bit before swimming out to the middle of the water where someone had helpfully anchored a red buoy to the bedrock floor.
With one arm securely clasping the floatation device I took a breather, and while I was there I was able to have a good look around the cavern roof above. Bright beams of light from the limestone roof illuminated the water surface like a spotlight and made it possible to make out the presence of a few hibernating Mexican bats suspended from various nooks and niches of the craggy rock. Our guide pointed out that the walls of the cave accommodated a host of other small creatures like iguanas and spiders. I liked how there were lots of long, long vines growing over the edge of the cliff and cascading down almost to the water✥…the vines looked sturdy but I wondered if they were strong enough for any daredevil adventurer brave (or stupid) enough to swing off them from the roof into the water?
A gate-opening chico & the word of Señor Jesuchristo
Community lunch with the family
The fee for the cénotes excursion included lunch in the casa of a local family that José took us to in nearby Pixyá. When we got there the niños were still hanging round so I wondered if this was José’s lugar. A number of the humble dwellings on that street had the identical message in Spanish painted on the front walls – a quote from Señor Jesuchristo (Ro. 6:23), something about paying fish when you die in order to ensure eternal life (my idiomatic interpretation anyway!).
A typical Yucatán Sunday spread!
As small livestock wandered around the yard inquisitively, we were guided to our seats at a long, outdoor table under a covered awning. José and the dama of the house brought out the food, in no time we were tucking into a delicious meal of meats (mainly pollo) and a smorgasbord of vegetable dishes. José produced jugs of a home-made lemon or limonáda drink to compliment the midday meal. The authentic, community “Sunday lunch” with the family capped off the day of subterranean cénote adventures to a tee!
Setting out again from Pixyá in José’s mini-bus, we bounced along the dusty dirt road towards Mérida, the further we went the better, and therefore the smoother, the road surface got. Back in town, having developed a craving for hot choc drinks after some early disappointing coffee experiences on the tour, I sought out a late afternoon caliente chocolate at the Italian Coffee Company (this seems to be a sizeable franchise business chain in different parts of Mexico, noticed they had several shops around where we stayed in Puebla).
Being our last night in Mérida, Hector took us to one of the liveliest and most crowded nightspots he knew in Mérida City Centre, Le Negrita Cantina (corner of Calles 49 and 62). We got a sensory dose of typically pulsating Mérida night-life here…wall-to-wall people seated cramped close together munching burritos (my non-appearing cerveza seemed to have been redirected back to the brewery – in a nearby town!) in an enclosed firetrap, wait-staff constantly circling round the tables with trays of margaritas, sangritas and micheladas looking for homes. Couldn’t really hear ourselves speak with the din going on, but the exciting buzz of the non-stop musical band and the dancing was great to experience!
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✳ the word derives from ts’onot, used by the low-land Yucatec Maya to refer to any location with accessible groundwater
◊ possibly José was being conservative with even that formidable number – other estimates (eg, www.aquaworld.com.mx) place the number of cénotes in the Yucatán Pen at in excess of 5,000
◘ the two small children doing the leg-work, I presumed, were José’s own niños
✥ some of the hanging vines in cénotes resemble the icicle-like stalactites often seen in caves
Mérida historico centre: Lucas de Gálvez market – the large mauve square next to the Post Office
The museums ticked off my list, the late afternoon/evening was freed up to explore more of the city. I had noticed on a tourist map of Mérida there were city markets somewhere on the south side of the green zócalo. I thought these might be worthwhile checking out. As I walked down Calle 56 towards the markets (named Mercado Lucas de Gálvez), I noticed how the streets were getting dirtier, the shops more basic and down-market and there were more pedestrians competing for space on the footpaths, and the people I passed tended to be not dressed in their best clobber to put it mildly! This was definitely not the big end of town, as we understand this term.
TripAdvisor pinpoints the address of Lucas de Gálvez market as being the corner of 56T Street and 67 Street, but when you are there its hard to, a) work out where it precisely starts, and b) gauge how big it actually is. I had in fact walked into the precinct of the markets without being aware I was in it! The markets seem to have spilled out of the original building or buildings into stalls lining the adjoining streets. I entered the markets building proper near where there were several stalls on a corner selling cheap clone versions of well-known American backpacks for paltry amounts, as little as MXN50 (less than AUD4)!
That well-known international fashion label “Tonny Halfmaker”!Market Carnicería: Butchers’ fresh!
Multi-markets, Carnicerías, pescaderías, etc
Inside the markets it was a huge area and way too many vendor stalls to ever get your head around❈. There was row after row of narrow alleys stretching the length of the building, the whole place was pretty gritty and grimy (much like a market!) The market was divided into several separate sections including clothing and shoes, bags, fruit and veg, meat and fish, food seasonings, pots and baskets, records, etc. I didn’t fancy the look of the raw meat hanging up all day and the fish lying round, wasn’t sure about the refrigeration situation or the hygiene…if I had to cook in Mérida especially in summer, I’d think twice about getting my supplies of carne, pollo, jamon and pescado from this outlet. Outside in Calle 56T there were lines of street stalls flogging the standard souvenir stuff, and on the other side of the road the markets seemed to continue in another building✦…I noticed in this part that one whole aisle comprised mainly hairdressers’ shops. So many of the leather goods, merchandise and materials of any sort were “knock-offs”, transparently unlicensed Third World clones of famous First World brand name products.
The markets were of course abuzz with people coming and going every which way, these were locals mainly it seemed. I didn’t spot many overseas tourists while I was there, just swarming bunches of Meridians with that characteristic Mexican build, squat and solid forms busily stocking up on the weekly groceries, or perhaps there to find a special gift, some trinkets, or more practically, invest in a new pair of budget-priced shoes or a new pair of ‘threads’.
Lucas de Gálvez (continued!)
Feeling a bit peckish I scouted out the most reasonably clean looking of the markets’ food outlets and settled on a small snack to eat (some battered, fried zucchini croquette-shaped morsel) and a soda. After wolfing the food down I enjoyably wasted the best part of an hour roaming up and down every single aisle in the enormous market. I concluded that I had ‘done’ Mercado Lucas de Gálvez…all there was to see of the city’s famous central markets I has seen – or so I thought! Spotting an open doorway on the northern side of the building I exited through it into a narrow lane. To my surprise, I discovered another market building separated by the narrow lane-way, this one bustling with every bit as much commercial activity as the first!
Mercado especialidades: religioso y joyería
I ventured inside to find…more of the same merchandise, but also something a little different too. It was missing the comestibles, the meats, the fruits and vegetables and such of the first building, but it had a whole sub-section on items of religiosity, objects of (need I specify it?…Catholic) veneration and worship, some of it quite garish and kitschy stuff. Fortifying my atheistic senses against such a holy and pious assault on their sensibilities, I promptly quickstepped my way past its tempting arrays of ecclesiastical delights and necessities to explore what other merchandise the market had to offer. Away from the section catering for the fashionably devotional, a lot of the market seemed to be given over to yet more cloned items of clothing and accessories.
Joyeríasgalore!
I noticed that this section of the markets had more jewellery shops (joyerías) than the first building, each alley had at least one or two jewellers in it, displaying signs proclaiming their silver and gold carat wares…Joyería Lorena Oro, Oro y Plata, Joyería Anael, and so on.
My appetite for mega-markets well and truly satisfied, I stumbled out of the northern end of Lucas de Gálvez into the cooler night air. I made for Calle 60 which would take me back in the direction of my hotel. Halfway down Calle 60, not far from the Catedral Mayor I found a nice little corner restaurant, lively but not too crowded. The food was good quality if a little more expensive than the more modestly appointed eateries in ‘Marketland’. I tried a different type of tortilla dish, accompanied by the obligatory cerveza. A succulent postre put the finishing touches to the meal. An unexpected bonus about eight as I was tucking into my comida was the appearance of a three-piece musical group. As they had set up within touching distance of my table, I couldn’t miss hearing any of the standard Latino numbers that the female singer with an opera diva’s physique performed (including The Girl from Ipanema and a retinue of well-worn Mexican classics).
PostScript: Mérida street grid, confusion by numbers – Calle Sensenta y Seis where are you?
The original town planners of modern Mérida probably thought they were doing the sensible thing, arranging the city streets in numerical order to make it easy to navigate around and avoid getting lost in a sprawling metropolitan centre₪. It certainly makes sense…on paper. But when I tried to chart my way back to our hotel in Calle 66 after dinner, I discovered there was a gap between the theory and the practice! Setting off in a northerly direction my intention was turn at each intersection I came to and then head west until I reached Calle 66…simple! The flaw in the plan as it turned out was that the numbered streets didn’t run consistently, I’d find myself say passing Calle 54 and expecting to be at Calle 56 at the next cross-street but finding I was at Calle 58…Calle 56 with mathematical illogic had just disappeared! So I ended up in this increasingly frustrating “merry-go-round” situation going from street A to street B back to A again¤ (it also didn’t help that a lot of the street were quite dark and not all the corners had street signs!)
I had the presence of mind to bring the hotel’s business card with me but this proved of very limited value because the card, incredulously, had neither its address nor a street map pinpointing its location printed on it! I stopped a young local guy in the street and asked for assistance. The politely spoken Mexican boy didn’t know the hotel but kindly offered to ring the hotel for me so they could give me directions (my phone plan didn’t function in Mexico). But just to add insult to injury, the staff at the hotel were not answering the phone, even though he redialed the numbers several times! After another half-an-hour’s wandering around, through trial-and-error I eventually lucked-in and stumbled upon Calle 66 and the hotel, overcome by a feeling of both being relieved and pissed-off!
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❈ although I did later read that Lucas de Gálvez covered an area of 156,000 square feet and over 2,000 vendors operated at the markets
✦ on second thoughts it occurred to me later that this was conceivably an altogether separate market to Lucas de Gálvez on the other side of 56T
₪ the streets running east to west are named by odd numbers, starting at uno, tres, cinco, siete and so on…the streets running north to south are numbered by even numbers, dos, cuatro, seis, ocho, etc
¤ this asymmetrical formation replicates itself all over the supposed simplified grid pattern of the city! For instance, it starts off as it should sequentially, Calle 19 next to Calle 17 next to Calle 15, then instead of Calle 13 being next in sequence, we inexplicably have Calle 63E! (numbers and letters adds an extra layer of bewildering complexity to the task of finding your way round!) Calle 127 is initially on the west of Calle 129 and then it ends and restarts on the east of it! Calle 28, without changing its direction, suddenly becomes Calle 49, and so on. Now maybe all this criss-crossing, number-jumping imbroglio is perfectly fathomable to your average, local Méridian, but to state the bleeding obvious it was ultra-confusing for someone spending only 48 hours in the city!
Leaving Palenque meant another all-night bus journey, this time to Mérida. The earlier overnighter, from Oaxaca to San Cristóbal, had been a bit of a “horror trip” for me – one long unpleasant ride, both draining and tedious. This time, as we wheeled our luggage along the uneven pebbly road surface to the La Cañada bus depot, I was feeling much more sanguine about the bus trip ahead. Mérida was only 480-odd kilometres and (hopefully) no more than nine hours away, The road in Yucatán especially Highway 190D was better than in Chiapas and we were going away from the hills of western Chiapas where the threat such as it was to vehicles from the Zapatista rebels seemed to be concentrated. It also felt reassuring that this time I wouldn’t be doing the long bus trek on my Patmalone.
Mérida: town “planning” by numbers!
On this occasion the overnighter did go smoothly and incident free, arriving at our new hotel in Mérida in just over nine hours. After a bistro breakfast of eggs and pancakes the only thing to do was slip on the joggers for an exploratory walk around the new territory. In terms of acreage I discovered that Mérida was quite a big place. After initially traipsing too far the wrong way away from Centro and finding f-all apart from a host of big international hotels, I doubled-back towards the historical quarter. Being short on the MXN folding stuff I spent much of the morning searching the local money-changers for the best deal before settling for a hole-in-the-wall tienda in Calle 55 that was offering 18-something for the USD*.
“Lovers’ double-handlers” – for Amantes gigantes!
The cambio de dinero was next to a cute little park called Parque de Santa Lucia. Here whilst buying some lunch I spotted for the first time a unique and endearing feature of the city’s parks…Meridians were big on these quaint “double-handler” seats or as someone described them to me, “the lovers’ seats the colour of white doves”💕: two U-shaped seats joined and facing each other to form a reversed ‘S’, so that the couple were diagonally positioned at a slight angle to one another. I later found theses distinctive seats elsewhere, especially in Plaza Grande.
Pasaje de la Revolucion
Scouting round the pueblo Viejo, the old town still has lots of wonderfully grand and dazzlingly elegant large colonial buildings, many with recent face-lifts it seems. As always in the Hispanic-speaking world the focal point of the city’s buzz was around the zócalo, the evergreen Plaza Grande, AKA Plaza De la Independencia (sometimes also known as Pasaje de la Revolucion)☿. On the cathedral side of the Plaza a line of brightly decorated horses and carts stood round waiting to catch the eye of visitors attracted by the prospect of a romantic, twilight carriage ride around antiguo Mérida. The carriage route includes a slow jog along the famous Paseo de Montejo (more of the Montejos below) which is lined with 19th century mansions.
Casa Monteja: stamping on the subjugated natives!
Museo Casa de Mantejo: The colonial boot-print
Museums are high on many visitors’ “to see” list in Mérida City and Plaza Grande is an ideal place to start a quest of the city’s history…and Mérida has lots of visible history, dating from 1542 – just 50 years after Columbus’s mis-discovery of India(sic). Museo Casa de Mantejo, directly opposite the zócalo on the south side was my first stop on the history trail. The 470 year-old mansion at № 506 Calle 63 is beautifully renovated inside with classy period furnishings, but it is Casa Mantejo’s facade that makes it most distinctive and most talked about. The Montejo family (the conquerors of Yucatán) started building the house immediately after the city was founded (it was completed in 1549) and it wears its ancient lineage in the weathered (albeit recently patched-up) character of the facade⊙. The unusual sculptural ornamentation surrounding the entrance is what marks it out for comment…two Spanish conquistadors armed with halberds stand – literally – on top of the heads of smaller figures, that of crushed down native Americans. The complete lack of subtlety of the carvings are a stark symbol of the absolute colonial power imbalance in force between the old and the new communities during that era. An odd assortment of other decorative symbols adorn the friezes of the entrance and the two front windows, including cherubs, monsters and demons.
Montejo courtyard
Special mention should be given to the interior courtyard of Casa Montejo. The austere fawn and white balcony walls of the mansion look out on to an attractive and tranquil setting – a central courtyard consisting of a series of fountains with a knob-ended cross design and native plants and bushes nestling round them.
Olimpio Cultural Center
Olimpo Cultural Center, Calle 61 x 62, Centro
I checked out two other museums also adjoining the Plaza Principal square. Heading back north from Casa Montejo I passed a couple of Dairy Queen stores catering for Mexican sweet tooths (DQs are almost as prevalent a sight in many Mexico cities as Oxxo stores) and came to a long, modern white building on the corner. This building, looking a bit like a beautiful but sterile government office building, had a lengthy corridor leading to an interior central courtyard that had a simple elegance in its all-white layout. Before I got to see the courtyard’s contents, a lethargic and apathetic looking official at the front desk made me sign-in to a visitors’ book (same as with Casa Montejo)❃. Upon entering the circular courtyard there wasn’t much to see other than space, freshly polished white and grey marble floor…and space! There was also nobody else there visiting at the time, so I was the only one looking at what was essentially blank space. This was not entirely true…inside the impressive arches of the patio were a scattering of exhibits of small colourful but unexceptional paintings, the sort you’d see in a community art centre or in a school exhibition…the abundance of unencumbered space reminded me, on a vastly smaller scale of course, of the famous Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and with even fewer exhibits than Bilbao!✧
Courtyard of Museo Fernando GPM
The Ateneo Peninsular building, Calle 58 x 60, Pasaje de la Revolucion, Centro
The third of the museums fronting the verdant zócalo – all of them gratis si se carga 🙂 – that I visited is on the cathedral side of the Plaza. Museo Fernando Garcia Ponce Macay is housed in a 16th century, light grey neoclassical building that bears the name “Ateneo Peninsular” chiselled into its facade. The Museo which specialises in modern and contemporary art is contained within a part of the complex that historically held an executive function, the Governor’s Palace. After you sign in at Security and stand in the courtyard’s decorative garden, you can get a glimpse of what is the best reason to visit Museo Fernando GPC. On the lime green and white walls of the first-floor balcony are murals that are part of the museum’s permanent exhibition.
Ateneo Peninsular, next toEl CatedralCastro’s ‘Conquista’
PostScript: Mérida and the Muralistas
The murals at Museo FGPC and the other enormous paintings of the same scale on display (strictly speaking not murals because they were not painted directly on to the wall) are part of a Mexican Muralistas tradition, and of course instantly reminded me of the great history murals of Diego Rivera that I saw in Mexico City. And like Rivera and the other Muralistas, the artist responsible for them, Fernando Castro Pachero, upheld the ethos that art should be publicly available, not restricted to the exclusive domain of rich private collectors. Castro’s mural works in the museum exhibit the very distinctive style of the artist – sombre and sparing choice of colours, monotone contrasting of dark and light, sketchily pencil drawn outlines of figures. The paintings of the battle scenes convey an almost claustrophobic intensity in the proximity of each side of combatants.
In a long, rectangular room of the former palace you can find the bulk of the Castro artworks on display, all painted between 1973 and 1975. Thematically similar to Rivera as well, the canvasses depict scenes from turbulent and bloody episodes of Mexico’s history – eg, the Conquesta, the Caste War, the 1860s overthrow of the imposed emperor Maximilian I, Gonzalo Guerrero (credited with parenting the first mestizo in Mexico). The Castro murals are well worth a look, especially as you won’t need to part with any pesos to view them!
Plaza De la Independencia (Zócalo)
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* after Oaxaca I had given up on banks as a source for Mexican currency…one frustrating, totally wasted morning in Oaxaca I tramping all over the joint, trying Scotia, Santander and even the non-Mexican HSBC, none of them would exchange my USD, all ridiculously insisting I had to open an account first?!?
☿ Mérida’s zócalo was one of the most picturesque public spaces we saw in Mexico, a veritable oasis of green palms, bushy trees and ferns erupting as it were out of a concrete foundation
⊙ in architectural terms Casa de Montejo is a civic Renaissance building in the Spanish Plateresco style
❃ entry to all three Mérida museums I visited was free of charge
✧ with more information acquired after my visit I would happily concede my first impressions didn’t do the OCC full justice…there is a little more to it than the sparse scattering of unexceptional paintings – the building contained a planetarium, showed films and had a beautiful outdoor arched balcony with checkerboard floors (not open when I made my visit)
The highlight of a visit to Palanque is a 15 minute trip out-of-town to the nearby Mayan ruins (Palenque National Park) which dates back to AD 600 or thereabouts. Our minibus unloaded us just past a sign saying: Carreteria a Palenque – Zona Archaeológica. This UNESCO heritage site is what put tiny Palenque on the international tourism map! We met our local guide for the day at the National Park’s entry turnstiles, stacks of people were already visiting the site when we got there around half-nine in the morning (Lonely Planet’s ‘Guessimation’ of over 1,000 visitors to the park on an average day seemed feasible).
The site map
The Palenque archeological site comprises an indeterminate number of temples within what was in its day a large Maya city with a plain on one side, a dense jungle on the other and the Rio Usumacinta running right through the middle of it. Before we hit the temple trail, Rafa our guide, who clearly knew his Mayan archaeology and antiquity, gave us a quick overview of the city using a cloth map affixed to a tent wall for illustration. Apparently Palenque’s original name was Lakamha (Meaning “Big Water”) – don’t think I quite got the significance of this name(?) unless it was a reference to the river which, not particularly noticeable today, may have been more significant in the time of the Maya. Like Teotihuacan on the outskirts of Mexico City, another indigenous civilisation occupied the site, predating the Mayans by maybe the best part of a millennium.
Temple bas-reliefTemple reliefs
Once we started exploring the site Rafa explained that most of what survived of the pyramids, what we could see still, was the work of the 8th century Maya king, K’inich Janaab Pakal, AKA Pakal the Great. Pakal’s long reign oversaw a major building program for the city. Probably the pick of the temples we saw was the one known as the Temple of the Inscriptions…the intact panels of the structure, which Rafa explained the significance of to us, contained important Maya pictorial inscriptions – these are a kind of ideogram, a single picture which equates with a word or an idea or a number. These symbols (adopted from the Olmec people by the Maya) put together formed a text. On the temples some of these glyphs (hieroglyphic characters painted on the walls) survive, although the Spanish Catholics destroyed a lot of them! The unique Mayan numbering system is also in evidence❈.
Temple of the Crosses
We did the obligatory adrenalin-driven thing that tourists do: sprinted up the steps of the nearest pyramid. Once at the top, nothing much to see, we proceeded more cautiously and slowly back down the narrow and slightly crumbling steps (themselves a mosaic of unevenly cut stone squares). It wasn’t permitted however to climb up the Temple of Inscriptions) opposite which some 80 feet above the ground held Pakal’s mausoleum. Rafa showed us some of the practical functions of the temples, for example the plumbing, as well as explaining the religious ones. Palenque is not as high and imposing as Teotihuacan’s “Sun and Moon” pyramids, but loses nothing in the decorative stakes. This is especially evident in the four edifices enclosing the rectangular square of the smaller Temples of the Crosses which boast elaborate, bas-relief carvings and sinewy interior chambers. At certain points Mayan relics lay around the grounds☀.
A city of temples under cover of jungle
We had some free time to spend scaling one or two of the less formidable pyramids before tiring of this novelty. As we followed Rafa back to the entrance, we swiftly and adroitly swerved past lines of souvenir vendors loudly hawking their wares on the pathway. Outside, the group regathered and were shepherded by Rafa towards a nearby trail heading into a denser part of the jungle. I mentioned above that the temples of Palenque were of indeterminate number. The reason for this is that virtually the entire ancient city of Palenque was swallowed up by the jungle some time after the Mayan inhabitants left the area (circa AD 800). What what we could see and explore was the small portion that had been discovered and unearthed to this point!
Rafa blending in to nature – at one with cedars & sapodilla
An ecosystem of diverse biodiversity
Rafa took us deep into a high evergreen forest along a path called Sendero Moiépa, pointing out different aspects of the biodiversity bank. The Palenque National Park was made up of 996 tropical species of flora and fauna…around us were millennium-old trees, red cedar, mahogany, kapok and sapodilla, as well as camedor palms including the threatened fishtail palm xate.
As we trekked along the muddy, sloping trail through ancient streams with fossilised shells, passing vines and unfamiliar plants, Rafa educated us as to the kinds of fauna that the jungle was home to…in all there were 353 species of birds – we caught glimpses of only the relatively easy-to-spot red-crowned parrots, unfortunately the very hard-to-spot toucans with their facility for changing the colour of their beaks to regulate heat were keeping their distance as usual. Another group of residents – the howler monkeys – were audible in full voice though not visible to us (presumably they were dangling high up in the canopy at safe distance but aware of the strange human visitors on the ground). Also not seen were the even more elusive ocelots, nor did we manage to see any of the 71 species of reptiles and amphibians including the very venomous pit viper, the Bothrops asper, which happily in this instance was giving us a welcome wide birth!
The temple, liberated from La Jungla!
After about 30 minutes of hiking we reached our main objective, a peak on top of which the skeletal ruins of a Maya temple was peering out of the jungle. This until recently hidden temple was discovered by local archaeologists. Rafa explained that tests had indicated there were undoubtedly many more temples buried under the jungle still to be unearthed.
Before heading back out of the Palenque jungle, Rafa invited us to explore an underground entrance point largely concealed by a rock ledge. Most of us took the challenge to climb down into the hole which led into a short, very tight and damp tunnel which came out at a shallow stream of water. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be looking for in the tunnel, a rare, fossilised Palaeolithic Age Mexican marsupial perhaps…it was too dark to see much of anything in the tunnel in any case!
Human “pack mules” doing the hard yakka…”Aspro, anyone?”
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❈ Mayan maths were extremely accurate in calculating the calendar year at 365.2425 days, anticipating the much later European estimate of 365.2522
☀ when the archaeologists dug up Palenque they discovered small objects called censers lying round the Temples of the Crosses in particular. These are mainly brazing bowls made of ceramic used for making Mayan offerings to the gods
Towards dusk we reached the township of Palenque, our next stay-over on our journey to the easternmost tip of Mexico. The first thing we noticed in the area known as La Cañada was this giant native figure propped up against a tourism building (Carretera Catazaja Tramo Central Tuxtla). The massive sculpture took on a slightly menacing appearance to me, like someone you’d expect to find engaging in bloodthirsty, ritualistic Mayan human sacrifices.
H. XibalbaHotel decoration
Arriving at our lodgings (Hotel Xibalba) we found ourselves assigned to a separate section 100 metres down the road from the main reception area. The architecture of our dwelling was unusual, almost avant-garde, it certainly caught the eye…a small, sandy-coloured, two-level building with an A-frame shape, a design replicated in the shape of the large, outward-facing windows which gave the structure a very airy feel. The doors to each of the sixteen rooms conformed to this sloping pyramid pattern. The grounds surrounding the entrance to the sleeping quarters were tastefully decorated with authentic looking native sculptural pieces. The accommodation annex looked like it was a recent addition to Hotel Xibalba.
That night we acted on Hector’s dinner recommendation, leaving the Xibalba we ambled up Calle Merle Greene❉, past several cantinas and restaurants with picturesque displays of pot-planted flowers under their awnings. Around the bend we came to La Hector’s dining choice for the night. We partook of a nice seafood meal with a bit more medicinal Mexican cerveza thrown in. At the end of the dinner while things were winding up, the guy who ran the restaurant, a German expat, came over and engaged us in some small talk…he was quite a garrulous character, speaking in fluent English, he seemed very comfortable and relaxed, and exuded an almost a weary air of familiarity about all things Palenque (I surmised that he had been domiciled in Mexico for quite some time). After leaving the restaurant Eric and I slowly inched our way back to the hotel, taking in both the night air of this small town and of course the mandatory ice confectionary at the local “7/11” style store.
The next day my roommate Pétros and I decided to check out the old part of Palenque which wad down the road over a weathered, rusty bridge. This was definitely the poor part of town, as we walked I saw very few international tourists checking out this part of Palenque (too far away from the fancy tourist restaurants perhaps?). The faces we did see in the street were mostly indigenous ones – these are largely Ch’ol people (of Mayan descent)۞.
The shops were uniformly low-brow – no frills discount shops, cheap, grimy eateries and grocery stores. Lonely Planet gives Modern Palenque town very short shrift indeed – “sweaty, humdrum…without much appeal except as a jumping-off point for the ruins” [Mexico: Palenque, www.lonelyplanet.com]. No hyperbole here I’m afraid, compared to the “jawdropping jungle ruins” the town itself has precious little to recommend itself.
Silent Howler
The wilderness of la jungla is palpably close however. On the return walk back to the hotel, crossing the river heavily camouflaged with overgrown vegetation (in reality a barely trickling stream), I half expected to catch, if not a sight, the sound of local howler monkeys emerging from the forest scrounging round for food in the town (it had been reported that deforestation in the area was driving them into the city). Unfortunately none of the Alouatta critters put in an appearance during our walk, couldn’t even hear a murmur of their famous vocalising from far off in the jungle. Nor did we get a glimpse of that other local jungle resident, the jaguar. But the following day we’d be in the Palenque jungle itself, I thought, who knows, maybe we’d be a shot at spotting one of these fabled jaguares – but not too close of course!
Footnote:
Some perhaps less photogenic people are known to have been uncharitably labelled with the disparaging sobriquet of ‘Dishhead’…in La Cañada near the “Big Maya” mega-figure as you head back onto Highway 189, I noticed this modernist style street sculpture in the middle of the roundabout, which (art being open to all manner of individual and idiosyncratic interpretation) I like to call “Head in dish-man”, literally. That’s what it looked like to me anyway!
𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧
❉ our street, so named for famous American artist and archaeologist, Merle Greene Robertson, who developed a technique of “life-size rubbings” which preserved a visual record of much of the Pre-Columbian Maya art in Palenque and elsewhere in Mesoamerica
۞ I didn’t know this statistically at the time of visiting but Palenque is the poorest city in the state of Chiapas. When I came across this snippet later, it clearly tallied with the empirical evidence of what we had observed –- the shops generally rundown and grimy, some of the local people were a bit on the scruffy side, the ingrained dirt and refuse on the streets
The following morning we said goodbye to Casa Margarita and San Cristóbal and set out in a north-easterly direction for our next base Palenque which is close to the Mexican city eponymously known for its celebrated hot condiment, Tabasco.
Tope
By tope to Palenque
For the journey we “mini-sized” down from a full bus to a mini-van. The 212 kilometre trip on Federal Highway 186/199 took us, with two breaks, well over six hours, and introduced me to a new Spanish word, tope. The road was full of topes! About every 100m or so (it seemed that short a distance anyway!) the driver would bring the mini-van to almost a total halt and then ease it ever so slowly over a speed bump in the road. Some of the topes were in fact giant mounds of pavement! At time-to-time we’d see a highway sign that said ‘Tope’ (with or without a black-on-yellow diagram of three parallel humps), occasionally the sign said ‘reductor de velocidad‘. Either way the warning to motorists was clear, another ridge in the road surface coming up, so slow down again. The ridiculous frequency of the appearance of these topes made for a taxing, tedious slow drive.
Ocosingo, a brief respite from the bump and grind
We covered almost half the distance in this stop-go fashion before, to our great relief, we turned off Highway 186 at Ocosingo for (what time-wise was) brunch. The tour guide choose a little outdoor eatery perched up on a small bluff with a delightful view of the lush and verdant valley. Unfortunately, to put it plainly, the food didn’t come close to matching the view, it was pretty ordinary fare. The eatery was buffet style and every time you went to add something to your plate or get a new course, a little guy who looked like he was running the place would annoyingly rush over and ask what you wanted (I think he was, overzealously, keeping a check in case you snaffled anything additional to what you had requested when placing your order).
Banner site map
We left the gastronomically forgettable Parador Turístico Selva Maya and returned to our tope highway. About three-quarters of the way to Palenque we turned off on a side road to the right and followed the narrow road for two to three kilometres till we reached one of Chiapas State’s top tourist magnets, Agua Azul (Blue Water)…although as my blog heading indicates, the water of the (Xanil) River and its series of waterfalls are distinctly turquoise on colour, suggesting that the attraction much more accurately have been named Agua Turquesa❈.
Cascada las Golandrinas
Cascadas de Agua Azul: waterworks and wall-to-wall tourist stalls
The mini-van dropped us off at the entrance, near all the food outlets selling an array of paper-plated dishes including cocos fritos, empanadas and papas y frijoles. We made our way to the waterfalls’ viewing platform to witness at close hand the sheer volume of water spewing down the mountains from multiple waterfalls◘. The waterfalls here are made up of two sections, the more easterly one was smaller but comprised a series of large steps down which the rushing torrents flowed into the large pool of water at the base. Further down in a narrower stretch of the river the falls’ power had dissipated a bit allowing some locals to wade out with the aid of a rope strung across the water.
Thatched souvenir tienda huts
The topography of the Agua Azul site made viewing of the waterfalls more accessible…visitors are able to ascend up a hill parallel to the contour of the falls and gain different vantage points of the wildly gushing waters. The only drawback to this was that the pathway up was lined by untold number of tourism tienda huts, so on the walk up (and back!) we were pestered by hawkers either flogging their Agua Azul souvenirs or trying to entice us in for a meal – going up and back I became totally proficient at anticipating their predictable pitch and would hop in with a preemptive, firmly spoken No comida! (No meal!) to cut them off!✥
The falls’ steps
I asked two of the Americans on the Intrepid tour, Louisvillians Shirley and Phil, if the tourist hotspot had changed much since they had been there 36 years earlier. Unsurprisingly, over such a gap in time, they said the whole thing had grown exponentially. Most of the development since they had visited involved the vast spread of souvenir and food shops which had occupied only a minute proportion of the Agua Azul site in 1981.
Waterfalls in the jungle
Agua Azul is surrounded by dense jungle terrain, providing a bit of a foretaste of the jungle-engulfed archaeological site we were due to visit at Palenque the following day. When I got tired of taking photos of different points of the waterfalls, I spent the reminder of our two hours at Agua Azul strolling along the edge of the water looking at the riverine botanical features, I found it was the best place to dodge the tiresomely persistent souvenir sellers.
It was a relief to get back on the mini-bus again, but I managed to do so after running the gauntlet through a cordon of more over-zealous hawkers, this time a group of young girls gaily and colourfully attired in indigenous garb who had surrounded our bus and were clamouring for us to buy their local snacks. We settled down on-board for the 70km drive (over yet more topes!) to Palenque and our hotel for the next two nights.
𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁𐰁❈ clearly though with tourism being the name of the game I would readily concede that Agua Blue has a much more romantic and appealing ring than Agua Turquoise!
◘ as impressive as the volume was, I was surprised to discover that the 8.2 magnitude earthquake in September 2017 (only three months before our visit) had adversely affected the course of the river, causing the water level to drop alarmingly
✥ I should admit that my resolve to resist the souvenir buying impulse did fail, resulting in the purchase of three decorative wall pouches…I regretted it immediately as it involved me in a frustrating episode of trying to barter down the local seller, frustrating because she possessed neither a skerrick of English or a calculator!
Slated down on the tour itinerary for Day 2 at San Cristóbal was an afternoon side trip to Chamula, a regional cabecera (headtown) famous for a most unusual and unorthodox Christian church. Chamula’s location is just over 10 km from the township where we were staying, but given the state of the link road and other contingencies it ended up taking us the best part of an hour’s driving to reach the town.
First-hand encounter with the ‘Conflicto de Chiapas’
The ‘contingencies’ included having to deal with unofficial roadblocks on the highway. Chiapas State is base to the Zapatistas (officially Zapatista Army of National Liberation – EZLN), a small, left-wing political/ militia group resisting the authority of the central government in Mexico*. As we approached the outskirts of Chamula our mini-bus came to a fairly abrupt halt with half-a-dozen or more vehicles banked up in front of us. A group of Zapatistas or their rural trade union affiliates had blocked access into the town, draping banners across the road stating the protesters’ current, specific beef with the unsympathetic government (Hector had earlier warned us of the prospect of this and there had been recent reports in the media of buses being hijacked by the Zapatistas!).
The bus idled for several minutes as we gradually inched our way up to the blockade. The roadblock party looked a bit fierce and daunting to us, like they really meant business, even Hector seemed a bit tense. For several minutes the driver and Hector exchanged words with each other and with the protesters, while we in the back tried to figure out what was going on. As the conversation proceeded, the workers’ sternness dissipated and relations gradually became more cordial…it all ended harmoniously with smiles all round after our driver deposited an indeterminate amount of pesos in the workers’ “contribution fund bucket”. The protesters obviously satisfied themselves that we had exhibited sufficient simpatía (empathy) with their cause as we were permitted to continue through the roadblock without further delay!
Having made our way safely to the township, we make our way to the zócalo, passing streets lined with souvenir and food stalls. The main square itself was chock-a-block with the usual array of items to entice souvenir hunters. I thought that the way the fruit sellers stacked oranges and other citrus fruits in rows to form a pyramid effect was pretty nifty. We passed through an open gate separating the zócalo from an enclosed forecourt…this forecourt led us to what is the main event in Chamula, Iglesias de San Juan (Church of St John).
http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image-1.jpg”> San Juan Basilica[/caption
San Juan Chamula church: a very loose association with Catholic traditions
We stood round in the courtyard taking photos of San Juan Bautista, by no means a structure monumental in scale but attractive with it’s white facade and green, blue and golden-orange trim. Before we went inside Hector reiterated his earlier message about the required etiquette. Photographs of the interior were a definite no-no! The population of Chumula, being overwhelmingly indigenous (95% Tzotzil Maya people) are devoutly conservative and apparently not even keen on being photographed themselves, let alone their sacred place of worship. Crossing over the church’s threshold and glancing down the nave towards the altar, I could see we were in a very unusual church. There was no pews, at different points local parishioners sat on the floor intoning mantras over lighted candles in shallow bowls. These candles were lit all over the church floorspace, thousands of them. I can see that the rituals being performed were not likely to be recognisably Catholic ones, some of the worshippers were accompanied by shamans and curanderos (indigenous medicine men)✦. Also everywhere on the ground were green branches and leaves of the pine needle tree. My instant impression on seeing such strange interior church decor was to ponder on just how much of a total fire trap this place was!
Stepping my way carefully past the carpet of pine needles and the rows of candles I observed that the icons on display represented a blend between the pre-Conquest Mayan customs and the orthodox traditions of Spanish Catholicism (images of Mayan gods and Catholic saints adorned the walls side-by-side). We noticed that among the reverent icons on display, the eponymous San Juan (St John the Baptist) of course took pride of place in the church. Another curious feature of the interior near the altar was a series of long, draped sheets affixed to the walls and roof forming an inverted V shape.
(Foto: iStock) //www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image-7.jpg”> El Iglesias
Iglesias de San Juan, although a startling departure from ecclesiastical orthodoxy, is not unique among churches in the Americas (I recall seeing one or two composite religion churches in Peru), the synthesis of Catholic and indigenous religions, the bending of Catholic traditions to accommodate native belief systems in the Chamula cathedral was as starkly defined as any I could imagine.
A little bit of street art and a lot of identical Chiapas native bird bags
After several minutes of shuffling up and down the nave, I made my exit, as did the others progressively. Outside, we had been allocated about 45 minutes of free time to leisurely explore the square. The markets had been going full-tilt to then but were just about to taper off for the day. Time enough for some rapid gift-buying (six tiendas in a row all selling the same woven carry bags with the identical Mexican Redhead Parrot design!).
After the[/caption]After the presents were taken care of, I had time to veer off the zócalo and explore a nearby side street…what caught my attention in particular in this street were two shop fronts, about 40 metres apart from each other. Both these tiendas were men’s hairdressers coincidently (peluquerias)! Painted on the walls were cute, comical depictions of young Mexicanos dudes with haircuts which were sort of fashionable – though the hair styles looked like they were modelled more on Elvis and 60s rockers than on anything 21st century contemporary! The other hard-to-forget (and less delightful) memory from my free-time roaming was a pitiful sight – a mother and toddler standing in the market, holding captive a pathetically forlorn looking turkey, it’s torso enveloped in a garbage bag and feet tethered with a piece of rope. More sobering Third World realities.
By the time we left Chamula (late afternoon) it was starting to get cooler – a pointer to the town’s highland location (altitude 7,200 feet!) We arrived back at Casa Margarita with time to relax before dinner. I took in the splendid hacienda-like ambience of the hotel’s outdoor central courtyard before venturing out to do some restaurant hunting and catch some of the town’s night-time sights I hadn’t yet discovered – like this modern SC administrative building.
PostScript: Los Mexicanos – making a virtue of symbolic protest, an end in itself?
The episode with the roadblock staged by the pueblos ordinario of Chiapas reinforced for me a peculiarity of the Mexican character I had noticed elsewhere on my travels in this land – rhetoric and ideology aside, the Zapatistas (and the impoverished and aggrieved agrarian workers who support them) know in their heart of hearts that they, with all the will in the world, are NOT going to overthrow the iniquitous national government (as they envisage it to be). But, and this seems to be intrinsically ingrained in the mindset of the Mexican peasantry after centuries of being on the receiving end of high-handed authoritarianism, the people collectively will always make as much noise and commotion as they possibly can to protest any perceived injustice perpetrated by the state…just for the symbolic right to do it, and irrespective of how futile their actions might be in trying to prompt real and profound change in society. It is as if the mere act of protesting itself is a wholly gratifying, as well as a cathartic, experience for the Mexican masses.
I would hasten to add that this trait is by no means peculiar to Mexicans, I have personally observed similar purely symbolic protests in places like Lima in Peru, but I wonder if it might a particularly Hispanic and Latin American characteristic?
* poor, primarily indigenous, Mexican farmers are the backbone of the Zapatista movement, with the roots of the disharmony traceable back to the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s and the failure from that point on of the historic party of power in Mexico, PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), to deliver on promised land reforms
✦ there was none of the really weird (to foreign Western eyes anyway) goings-on while we were visiting, but I learned later that the church was famously notorious for rituals aimed at ridding families of “malicious spirits”. This often involves the slaughtering of chickens over the candles and the consumption of Coca-Cola and a local ‘moonshine’ known as pox
San Cristóbal de las Casas is a lively town full of consumer and tourist options like the famous, so-called “Yellow Cathedral”❈ in the zócalo (town square). At night San Cristóbal’s tempo picks up with evening diners and drinkers frequenting the numerous restaurants and bars on the streets that criss-cross the zócalo. Also providing spontaneous public entertainment on those same streets were various three and four-piece bands of buskers. This was especially the case in our hotel’s street, Calle Real de Guadalupe, one of the town’s most lively pedestrian thoroughfares.
Zócalo: “Euro Bungy”
At around nightfall the entire zócalo itself became market centro as street traders carefully arranged their goods on blankets on the ground (the prices, the merchandise on sale and the sellers all had a homogeneity about them!). In one corner of the zócalo near the cathedral, small children attached to ropes were being rapidly and worryingly flung high up into the air by a large mechanised contraption that had the meaningless words “Euro Bungy” emblazoned on its side.
The highlight of our first full day in San Cristóbal was a trip to a massive Mexican “grand canyon” north of Chiapa del Corzo. The canyon, known as Cañón del Sumidero, was observable by taking a speedboat ride down the Grijalva River which flows through the canyon. When we got to the river-side pier about mid-morning it was a hub of activity. We were assisted in donning life jackets and directed along one of several short wharves which (oddly) have boats permanently attached to them. From here we crossed onto our assigned speedboat itself and set off downstream.
Early on, we passed under a bridge before heading towards the canyon…the course of the river comprised long, straight stretches punctuated by several bends of up to 90 degrees in angle. The boat’s pilot would gun the vessel down the river at full throttle for a few hundred metres, then cut the engine at different spots to allow us a photo op and to take in particular features of the canyon. Occasionally he offered commentary – in Spanish only! While he nattered on we contented ourselves with taking in the scenery…and there was plenty of that to see – misty waterfalls and verdant vegetation growing off the cliff-faces which at certain parts of the canyon extended up vertical walls over 1,000 metres high! One moss-covered botanical species on the cliffs we saw was the gorgeous Arbol de Navidad (Christmas Tree).
Mossy vegetation & Navidad on the canyon wallsArboreal simians in the canopy
The evident wildlife was abundant – birds of various kinds including herons, egrets, some kinds of cormorants and vultures. I was intrigued by the distinctive flying pattern of one group of white birds which had formed itself into a squadron of 10 to 15 flyers. They were flying very low and in the same direction and parallel with our speeding boat, almost skimming the water as they went. In the water itself were more exotic creatures, notably a number of crocodiles who spent most of their time sunning themselves on the river bank. We were also fortunate to spot high up in the forest canopy a couple of spider monkeys (not quite enough for a troop)✦.
The canyon was an awe-inspiring sight, and when the boat paused to take in the surrounds, a serene and irenic atmosphere could be felt. Unfortunately there was one spoiler, a real downside to the idyllic setting as a result of the over-exploitation of this tourist hotspot¤. The incursion of mass tourism onto what were once pristine waters brought with it an influx of garbage and other disposable refuse which was summarily cast off into the river by unthinking and uncaring litterbugs. Inevitable yes, but it was the sheer quantity that came as a shocking sight for us…in many parts (including the habitat of the crocs) it had concentrated into grossly unsightly, rubbish-strewn pockets of water.
At one little rocky outcrop on the side of the canyon, the pilot steered our boat slowly into a small craggy alcove which up above eye-level was a tiny cave containing a local Catholic shrine of some kind. Our Hispanic-speaking pilot, I’m fairly confident would have mentioned the significant of it or the particular saint in question at the time (at least I think that was what he was saying). But of course the boat trip deal didn’t come with an efficient translator, so that morsel of information remained, like most things associated with religion, a mystery to us Anglophones.
The boat went as far at it could up the Rio Grijalva – the end point was when the river came to a dam wall at the northern end where there’s a hydroelectric power station. From this turnaround point, in contrast to the leisurely pace of the outward leg, the boat powered back to the jetty on the return leg without halting. The whole trip took us somewhere between two and two-and-half hours to complete, I guesstimated the distance covered was about 13 kilometres.
Back at the pier on dry land, the speedboat traffic was now busier than in the morning (it was now about one or two o’clock in the afternoon). Lots of people were fastening their orange life jackets and jumping into the waiting boats…someone should alert the crocs of the imminent arrival of yet another dump of unwanted human cast-offs.
Throughly trashed crocodile [photo courtesy E Greschman]
The Zócalo and points south
There was time, once back at San Cristóbal DLC, for another wander before dinner through the shop-strewn streets of the city centre. I began my exploration from the Zócalo…San Cristóbal’s main square is not the biggest you’d ever see in Mexico but it contains a lot of pleasant greenery and a good supply of bench seats to put your feet and watch the locals. My attention though was drawn towards one particular toy being hawked in the square, a cute, colourful, thin lizard-like creature given to bouncing around the pavement in a series of sharp jerky motions (a sure winner with the ankle-biter brigade!).
Specialist agricultural produce-growers market
Leaving the Zócalo I headed south past Portal and followed one street to where it terminated near Domínguez Street in a tall earth-hued old church. In front of it I found a more specialised kind of market that the usual touristy ones in the Centro. It was housed in a large marquee with a banner labelled Red de Productóres Chiapanecos. On sale inside the market was all manner of agricultural produce from the surrounding Chiapas region (exotic fruit jams and vegetables mainly but also decorations, clothing items, utensils and so on).
Not sure about the fare at this restaurant but the doorman was a bit of a head-turner!
___________________________________________________________
❈ the cathedral is actually part golden-yellow and part reddish-orange in colour
✦ Ocelots are known to inhabit the adjoining forest although we didn’t manage to spot a cat of any size or description during the cruise
¤ I calculated that at one point there was at least 11 other tourist boats on our stretch of the river alone – and just the one solitary municipio vessel making a seemingly futile effort to dredge up the mess
When it came time to say despedida to Oaxaca, I did so one hour earlier than the rest of my Intrepid group. The reason? There had been a stuff-up with the bus transport bookings – someone had reserved one too few seats on the San Cristóbal coach trip – Hector (our guide) had nervously approached me on our final night at Oaxaca Casa Arnel, asking for a huge favour as he put it, would I please, please, volunteer to travel “Napoleon Solo” (a lame example of faux Cockney rhyming slang probably only fathomable to aficionados of 1960s television spy dramas) on the bus leaving at 8pm, rather than the scheduled one for the tour departing at Nine? The dilemma was clearly causing the affable ‘ector much angst. Standing there on my doorstep he seemed visibly distressed… he explained he had earlier asked two of the young punks in the group but they had “alpha-boy bonded” with each other and refused outright to be separated even for one night (how touching!) Hector’s gratitude overflowed when I answered his request in the affirmative! In fact I had no hesitation in agreeing to take the early coach. I was as happy to leave at eight, it was only one hour difference when all is said and done.
Oaxaca: this wasn’t the overnight bus to Chiapas but given how long the trip took, it might well have been!
My only one concern (prior to departure) was that now I was riding on my ‘patma’ I would need to have all my wits about me. Several days before the overnight trip to San Cristóbal de las Casas Hector had reminded us of the warnings issued by Intrepid which featured in the tour itinerary – they stressed that there were inherent dangers posed by overnight bus journey between Mexican cities…to quote directly from the Intrepid travellers’ guide about the handiwork of petty thieves who sneak on board long-distance, inter-city night buses at stop points along the way: “These opportunistic individuals are not only an annoyance, they are also unfortunately extremely talented. They wait for passengers to be asleep to skilfully search through carry-on luggage in search of cameras, money and credit cards”.
So, with this reiterated warning resounding in my ears, I freely admit I was feeling a bit apprehensive about what might befall me without any travelling companions to watch my back. Hector walked me down to the coach terminus in Oaxaca and issued me with directions on what to do on arrival at the tour’s next destination. After a short wait we were called to board the Chiapas bus, upon finding my allocated seat at the back of the autobus I discovered a pleasant and unexpected surprise…Hector had cautioned that the bus would be ‘chock-a-block’ full all the way, but au contraire I found that I had the luxury of an empty seat next to me! With the baggage quickly loaded in the under seats’ stowaway (and my all-important bag number slip secured in my top pocket), it was not long before we were away. It was now about 20:00 hours and fully dark. The extra room to stretch out was good fortune indeed on what was promising to be a very long, boring and testing solo overnight ride. After ferreting out my airline eye mask from my hand luggage, I made sure that I had affixed my bag securely to my person for the whole journey.
Actually it was in this bus, an ADO autobus, that we trekked from Oax to San Cristo
I settled back for the long haul on Highway 185D…the bus, an ADO (one of Mexico’s most popular autobus fleets) did live up to the advanced publicity, it was comfortable, well-fitted out, air con, on-board toilet, TV screens, if not quite being the cutting edge latest in luxury road travel (I’d still rank the Inka Express trip on the Ruta del Sol from Cusco to Puno (Southern Peru) as número uno). Starting off from the Oaxaca terminal, I had entertained the thought of trying to get some shut-eye✲ on the trip but the strategically placed and glaringly distracting television screens put paid to that notion. Resigning myself to the reality, I glanced fitfully for several minutes at the screen which was showing, appropriately enough, a Spanish-language movie.
Cantinflas in his most famous role as Passepartout
On the road with Cantinflas
When I eventually twigged to the fact that it was a biopic of Cantinflas, I overcame my hitherto disinterest and started to watch the film. It was hardly a great movie but I did learn a lot about Cantinflas that I was unaware of…firstly I had forgotten that he was in fact Mexican and not Spanish (which explains why it was featuring on this inter-city Mexican road trip). Ninety-five percent of the world’s audience-goers who have ever actually heard of Cantinflas would associate him with his role as Passepartout in the universally well-known Hollywood movie Around the World in Eighty Days. But what the biopic brought home to me was just how important and instrumental – and versatile – a figure he was to Mexican cinema and to the country’s entertainment industry generally…I was aware of Cantinflas the beloved actor and comedian, but what the movie revealed was the other strings Cantinflas had to his bow, he was also a writer, producer and singer, certainly credentials to be celebrated as (one of) Mexico’s foremost entertainment “Renaissance Men”.
According to Hector the trip to San Cristóbal from Oaxaca was about nine to nine-and-half hours (covering a distance of 600 km). At about 12:30 in the morning the coach pulled over in complete darkness near some all-night street stalls. Nothing was said by the driver (no passenger announcement) but he got off, lit a fag and was soon joined by a couple of the Mexican passengers (I was the sole non-Mexican or if you like the token gringo on the coach!). After about 15 minutes everyone re-boarded and we set off again. I was puzzled at the reason for our stop but thought to myself that at least this was roughly half-way to San Cristóbal, so we had some sort of milestone on the long trek into the night!
Unscheduled stop on Highway 185D
Most of the next part of the trip to Santo Domingo Tehuantepec was uneventful, too dark to see anything outside and sleepless, I passed the time by groping round in the dark of the interior trying to find items in my bag and continually re-positioning my back on the seat support so as to ease any pressure on my dodgy L2. There was the one event/non-event on this leg of the drive…we stopped at some kind of official bus check-point or way-station, the engine was turned off and the interior remained in total darkness – again there was no on-board announcement. Although this went on for a while I wasn’t perturbed, I assumed that they were just doing a mandatory spot check of the vehicle or such, and in a short time we’d be back on the road. But the delay went on and on, still no word from the driver, still in darkness. Occasionally, the silence was punctuated by a loud, whirring noise on one side of the bus. After about an (unexplained) hour of sitting around, the bus engine was suddenly switched on and we resumed the trip. I found out later that they were changing one or some of the tyres…updating of passengers is obviously not part of customer service on ADO buses, we were figuratively – as well as literally – kept in the dark all the time!
By now we were at the lowest longitudinal point in Mexico that we were to get, the Pacific Ocean could be viewed to our right perhaps just a couple of hundred metres away…that is if it weren’t for the fact that it was still pitch-dark and the middle of the night! We swapped highways and were now free-wheeling down 190D, deep into the heartland of Chiapis, Mexico’s southern-most state.
More fun with ADO
At the ADO station at Tuxtla Gutiérrez (at least I think that was where we were!) more passengers got off 🙂 unfortunately a greater number of new one ones got on 🙁 … much worse, I had to surrender my adjoining (spare) seat to one of the new passengers, a Mexican guy with the build of a Sumo wrestler¤ (built like a proverbial “brick house” as they say in the Antipodes). The guy consumed so much horizontal space that his swollen, “Michelin Man” sized left arm spilled haphazardly over onto my side of the arm rest, forcing me to bend my right arm at a 45 degree angle and keep it in that fixed, uncomfortable position for the rest of the journey!
Chiapas & the road to SC
Chiapa del Corzo: salida frustrado!
Chiapa del Corzo looked like a very major bus station, many of the bus passengers got off and several got on. This was where I got confused! I knew from the itinerary that we were going to the state of Chiapas, but perhaps distracted by my aching right arm I somehow thought this was my destination point (momentarily forgetting I was going to San Cristóbal, the following stop). With some very considerable effort on my part and virtually no assistance from the slumbering immovable object next to me, I half-squeezed, half-climbed over Mr Sumo, and made for the door.
When I tried to retrieve my luggage though, the guy in charge of distributing the baggage, to my surprise, refused to hand over my case despite my waving the correct luggage receipt in his face. My entreaties fell on deaf ears as he dismissively waved me away. With my frustration rising, I tried to appeal to the nearest bus station officials but no one seemed to understand (there might as well have been a “No Inglés spoken here” sign) or made any attempt to resolve my issue. Finally, one of the uniformed staff motioned to me to return to my bus, which I reluctantly did. Not relishing the prospect of getting back into my allocated seat by vaulting over Mr Sumo, I sat down in one of the empty seats, hoping it wasn’t the seat of any of the still boarding passengers. But no sooner did I do this when Murphy’s Law raised its head – a Mexican couple immediately turned up to claim the seats and I was forced to retreat further back in the bus. Fortunately the new seat I perched myself on didn’t have a claimant and we duly set off for San Cristobal.
Whilst I was at Chiapa del Corzo I surmised that San Cristóbal de las Casas was quite close, but as things transpired it was still a good 40 minutes or so on the bus. As we drew closer to the destination, crossing bridges and rivers, I had to concede that I owed a measure of gratitude to the ADO employees back at Corzo who, though abrupt in tone, stopped me from trying to exit at the wrong bus station.
Casa Margarita’s courtyard
Once we had reached the San Cristóbal bus station I felt a sense of relief, even though I still had to negotiate my short taxi trip to our hotel and the chance that some local taxi con man might try to play the universal game of “lets rip off the naive tourist”. I gave the first driver on the rank the hotel card and the 50 Pecos note Hector had given me for the fare and everything (for a pleasant change) went seamlessly. In just a few minutes we were at Hotel Casa Margarita. I waited a few minutes in the hotel’s charming hacienda style courtyard…the staff on duty (two callow boys both looking about 15-16), who clearly weren’t expecting me, differed round a bit, offering me self-serve coffee in the foyer. I was determined to get my room key and in my exhausted state simply crash ASAP! Only when I reminded them, and a more adult-looking staff member who had popped up, that I had been given the assurance that when I arrived I would be able to get straight to my room, they relinquished their prevarications and showed me to the room.
Footnote:
It was 7am when I got out onto the street in San Cristóbal, 2,200 metres above sea-level, it was quite chilly. The advertised nine-and-half hour bus journey had taken eleven hours all up – thanks to the tyre problems and other, unspecified random tardiness. But I consoled myself that at least I had avoided the fate of less fortunate past passengers on this overnight trek who had apparently been fleeced of their personal belongings.
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✲ I say “shut-eye” rather than sleep because sleep, that rare commodity was out of the question. Every journey I have ever taken on a mobile transporter of any description (air, rail, road, even water) I have found myself constitutionally incapable of sleeping, no matter how tired or sleep-deprived I am!
¤ if he wasn’t a Mexican Sumo wrestler (unlikely), then perhaps he was one of those Lucha Libre wrestlers I had seen in CDMX. A ex-one though because he looked like I imagined retired luchadores look like when they stop training and their previously tautly contained centre of gravity spreads all points east and west!
One of the trade-offs you face on an overseas tour with budgetary and time constraints conspiring against you, is deciding which optional ‘highlights’ you take up and which you pass on…in an un-ideal world there’s just never enough time to do all of them, as enticingly exotic as they probably all sound! As our Intrepid (‘Basic Explorer’) tour was trying to cover a large chunk of central and southern Mexico within a short time span, just over two weeks tops, we, like all tourists, were constantly making these choices at every new town or region we came to.
In order to see the limestone pools of Hierve El Agua and the Mitlá remnants, we had to forgo a trip to Monte Albán. I didn’t think much of this at the time, but after doing a bit of retrospective research I came to the conclusion that it would have been nice to see this high point of Zapotec civilisation whilst in the general vicinity✳. Still, “mustn’t grumble” as the English are wont to say, in hindsight looking at the tour as a whole we chalked up plenty of visits to historic stepped pyramid sites to get a real representative insight into this most Mexican phenomena, and of course the downside of journeying off to Monte Albán would have meant missing out on Mexico’s Travertines…it was in the end, to put a philosophical take on it, a case of swings and roundabouts.
Textiles tienda
Returning to Oaxaca late in the day after the long trek on bumpy roads to Mitlá, we had two more stops to make. The first was to a family ‘backyard’ textiles business where we were shown a demonstration of how the Mexican garments, shawls and other colourful items of apparel (all the stuff you see in countless market stalls all over the country) were manufactured. The machinery used in the family business was decidedly not state-of-the-art, rather it looked very Third World tech and, when demonstrated quite tricky to master, requiring a lot of time, patience and persistence. Worth it though if the calibre of the finished products on display in the ‘showroom’ were anything to go by, especially the dazzling, woven wall rugs. The price tags seemed a bit over-the-top explaining why no one in the group, though quick to show interest, were in a rush to buy (thankfully there was no pressure forthcoming from the owner on us to buy💢). I’m sure the serious, potential buyers in the showroom wrote themselves mental notes to do a comparative (and you can bet advantageous) price checks on the wall rugs once they hit the city markets!
Textiles sideshow: Chihuahua a-go-go!It’d be true to say that I found the textiles plant visit less than captivating…then again, to put it in context, it was more interesting to me than a perfume factory I once visited in Switzerland, but that is saying precious little!). However the visit was saved from descending into a tedious, total time-waste “better spent doing something else” by the antics of the family’s pet dog. I discovered the dog, a characteristically Mexican black-and-white Chihuahua, out the back in the casa’s courtyard. The minuscule, over-excitable canine kept frantically trying to mount the legs of one of the older American ladies in our party. Just as I was about to try to capture its hilarious behaviour on video, the family’s two human ankle-biters (two little <5 year-old girls) turned up and armed with a thin tree branch suddenly starting chasing the harassed Chihuahua from one side of the outdoor courtyard to the other…what with the pursued Chihuahua (or should that be Chi-wow-wah?) hareing around crazily it proved very hard indeed to catch it on the video…all that could be made out on the film was a small, black flash with a very low centre of gravity streaking around the courtyard like an Exocet missile! Riotously funny though!
The agave piña – a long, long road to fruitionWith the approach of nightfall looming we turned off the Oaxaca highway into a mezcal distillery in the town of San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya¤. To state what will soon become bleedingly obvious this proved to be the most popular stop of the day! The distillery was set up for tastings just like a regional winery. Before we got to sample the eagerly anticipated local drink though, the distillery honcho walked us through the manufacturing process which is a very, very protracted and complicated one…first the root, the piña, is extracted from the agave after the plant had been grown for about eight years! We were shown a big, eight foot deep earth pit where in the next stage of the process the workers bake the piñas under smoking logs and rocks before removing them to be fermented for a further 5-15 days. After this the fermented by-product gets bunged into a clay brick still to be distilled using heated firewood. When it reaches its purest form (which is called blanco), the aging process in oak then begins…Phew!!! Incredibly time- and labour-intensive process eh?
Start of a satisfying tasting experience
Mainlining on free mezcalThis info on the craft of mezcal-making, interesting as it was, was only a preamble to the day’s main event, the mezcal tasting itself. As we lined the distillery’s bar and listened to the amicable and nuggety bartender-cum-sales guy explain the different types of mezcal whilst cracking jokes, everyone was getting in the mood to taste this most iconic of Mexican drinks. My earlier, tentative tasting of mezcal in Mexico City had left me uncomfortably imagining that this was how drain cleaner might taste. As had happened on that occasion we were again offered salt (or as a substitute paprika powder this time) which you add to a slice of lemon to ameliorate the unpalatable effects of the potent concoction. I managed to down, with a suitably grimaced facial expression, two sizeable snaps-size glasses of the undiluted, bitter-sour drink. This second exposure to this lethal 110-proof beverage clinched it for me – the best way of softening the harsh and abrasive taste of mezcal, I concluded, was not salt and lemon, but rather simply to abstain from drinking it at all!⌽
At this stage I was happy to call it quits on the tastings…that was until our jolly-joker of a host introduced us to something new, a range of Cremea de Maguey (Maguey was the traditional name given by the indigenous population prior to the Spanish invasion to the libation derived from the agave. Agave is still called maguey in some quarters). These mixed drinks were much more to my liking – the hard liquor’s bitter taste, softened and sweetened by the addition of cream flavoured with a host of natural ingredients, transformed it into a drink of “amber nectar”. I tried the avocado, the mango, the lime, the coconut, the pino, various assorted berries, chocolate (but passed on the coffee)…I lost count of how many different, velvety cream mezcals I sampled over the next half-hour, the sum of which of which never succeeded in getting me even close to a state of inebriation◘.
My errant pourer: So many mezcal creams & so little time!
The only concern was the young woman serving my drinks – in her haste to satisfy the frenzied, Bacchanalian demand of so many willing tasters, she kept pouring the portions of maguey way too quickly – with the result that the silky-tasting liquid often as not ended up on my hand and forearm rather than in the intended receptacle! Still, as I hadn’t forked out a single Peco for the innumerable shots of mezcal I had consumed, I could hardly complain, could I?
Observing the other convivial tasters at the bar I realised that I was not “Robinson Crusoe” in my preference for the more palatable mezcal cream mixers. Aside from a hard-core handful (mostly Yanks and Brits) who had clearly already made a happy acquaintance with the classic Mexican beverage and kept plying the pure form of tongue-numbing, straight mezcal down their throats, it was a real winner! Everyone else in the group was sampling every available variant of Cremea de Maguey on the bar at a fast rate of knots!
A short time later the tastings came to an end, prompting some in the group to cough up some hard cash to stock up on the product to ward off any possible effects of an attack of MDS✦. Very soon we were back on Highway 190 completing the short, 21 kilometre bus journey back to our Oaxaca hotel. With the intoxicating spirit of ‘mezcalmania’ fuelling a sense of collective bon homie, the “happy hour” mood continued on the bus with nonstop banter and badinage being exchanged on the way home.
Fortification for the bus trip back…
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✳ Monte Albán’s great tourist appeal lies in how the local Amerindians turned a 1,500 foot high hill into a series of pyramids, terraces, dams, canals and artificial mounds
💢 so refreshingly at arm’s length to the merciless “take-no-prisoners” approach of rug and carpet salesmen I had previously experienced in Egypt and Turkey¤ Oaxaca (State) abounds with mezcal producers, it’s the pivotal hub of Mexico’s mezcal industry (although the plant itself is grown in many regions of the country)
⌽ its interesting that experts and devotees of mezcal tend to describe the drink in its pure form as having a smoky taste as its most distinctive characteristic…all I can say is to my less sophisticated palate what came through was the ‘burning’ sensation rather than the smoky one!◘ the cream mezcals tasted a little like Bailey’s Irish Cream but more variable and infinitely nicer!
✦ Mezcal Deprivation Syndrome – quite common in these parts of Mexico they tell me, though fortunately not infectious 😉
On the last day and-a-half of our stay in Oaxaca we had an opportunity to visit some of the region’s best-loved tourist highlights. First on the itinerary was a visit to the state’s mineral springs known as Hierve El Agua. To travel to this spot which draws many tourists we had to take the busy western highway, passing the fabled tree of Santa María del Tule which we had visited the day before.
The valley view – bereft of any blots on the landscape, ie, peacock imitating musclemen!
We arrived at the famous springs town of San Lorenzo Albarrados after one-and-a-half hours and 62km on the road. Parking in a cliff-top car park above the springs themselves, we first took in an attractive panoramic view of the valley…the view was apparently too inspirational for one of our party, Tansel, a gormless young zennial weightlifter from London who wandered down to the edge. Once there this alpha-male contemporary “Arnold Schwarzenegger” couldn’t resist the chance to shed his shirt and strike up a series of highly stylised topless poses against a backdrop of rolling hills and valleys. As the bearded Tansel (who bore a passing resemblance to Hercules as seen in those atrocious Italian sixties “sword and sandals” movies) enthusiastically flexed his overdeveloped pecs and shoulders, another member of the group who he had demographically aligned himself with on the trip, a tall slim model-proportioned millennial girl named Kimberley obliging snapped away with her iPhone. It made for an amusing albeit almost surreal spectacle on the rock.
With Tansel’s penchant for self-indulgent preening sufficiently satisfied (and most importantly captured on camera) the group got down to business, commencing its descent to Hierve El Agua. We set off down a winding bush trail, at about two-thirds of the journey the trail forked presenting you with two options, left, a short cut to the springs down a sharp, rough track, or straight ahead, a longer, more circuitous trail close to the cliff edge thus offering the prospect of spectacular views of the valley and springs.
In a hurry to get to the springs I took the short cut but regretted it later after sensing some missed vistas from the scenic route especially of the limestone ‘waterfalls’. After emerging from the bush the approach to Hierve El Agua✳ itself is via a 60m-wide rock platform which ends abruptly on the edge of a daunting precipice. The platform comprises several shallow natural infinity pools including two artificial ones provided for visitors to swim in (staff pump water to the tourist-magnet pools from the springs).
Mexico’s calcified kale (‘castle’)
Nearby there’s a visitors’ change room. There were already several Swedish and Japanese tourists in the larger pool and a number of our tour group were keen to join them, not necessarily to immerse themselves in the allegedly healing springs but to cool off on what was an un-wintery warm day in southern Mexico. I had come to the springs with swimmers and towel originally planning on a dip, but immediately I got a close look at the water, I decided that I wouldn’t be joining in on the auto-immersion. The bathing springs were turquoise-green in colour (high mineral concentration? chemicals?)…already obsessed with bugs in the food, I wondered about bugs in the water, what put me off was its unprepossessing appearance, a question of water quality, it was far from pristine, it didn’t look clean to me (evidence of massive overuse?).
Oaxaca’s travertine terraces
Oaxaca’s own, home-grown travertine marvel
The terraced pools were gorgeous but the real natural wonder was below on the cliff face itself, there were waves of white or off-white coloured rock formations which ‘cascaded’ down the face of the cliff, giving this geological phenomenon the thrilling illusion of a waterfall! Known to the locals as cascada chica), in effect it could be described as a “petrified waterfall”, the formations are calcified, the same geological process that produced the world-famous Pamukkale Travertines in south-western Turkey (see also FN below). In both locations the naturally-generated hot springs, with carbonated minerals in the water, are thought to have therapeutic qualities for anyone bathing in the pools✦.
Complex of Mitla’s Columns
Mitlá – centre of Zapotec culture
After exploring Hierve El Agua we moved on to Mitlá which is 44km from Oaxaca de Juárez. The ruins at Mitlá are those of what was once an indigenous religious settlement for the Zapotec people (at one point this site was also under Mixtec control). The core of the buildings, parts of which are surprisingly well-preserved considering their age, is known as the Columns Group and within the Columns is the inner core, El Palacio Conaculta-Inah, which is both the archaeological and the architectural highlight of Mitla.
El Palacio’s intricate fretwork frieze
In pride of place, centrally located, is the Palace…this structure is a stand-out of Pre-Columbian architecture because of the quality of its fretwork (a mosaic of interlaced decorative design). The various tombs, panels, friezes and even whole walls of the Columns are adorned with elaborately carved, distinctive geometric designs in intricate detail. We followed our local guide as he took us on a tour of the Columns’ ruins – which went from the high point of the Palace Courtyard to narrow subterranean tunnels leading to darkly lit, underground tombs (which proved a very tight fit for even the smallest member of our entourage!)
FN: Hierve El Agua and Pamukkale are unique in nature as two instances of the world’s few remaining travertine formations – a consolidation of solidified limestone deposits forming from terraced mineral springs^. Hierve El Agua is admittedly minuscule in scope compared to the breathtaking and mesmerising blue and white appearance of Pamukkale’s vast terraced pools, but this petrified ‘waterfall’ encased in rock is a mightily impressive sight in its own right.
Another point of difference between the two was distinctly olfactory – visiting the “cotton castle” of Pamukkale, it was nigh-on impossible not to be affected (if not overcome) by the overpowering smell of sulphur in the air, it was everywhere! El Agua’s sulphur deposits by contrast didn’t exude that same invasive hold over our sense of smell (thankfully!).
✳ Spanish, translated literally as “the water boils”
✦ The pools’ platform ledge is not the prime vantage-point to view the calcified waterfalls, the optimal view is below, further down the valley
^ Interestingly a locale near Rotorua in New Zealand was once a member of Turkey and Mexico’s exclusive “travertines club”, being similarly geologically endowed…NZ’s own travertine rock formation in the geyser-rich North Island was destroyed in 1886 by a massive cataclysmic event of nature – the eruption of nearby Mt Tarawera [‘The Lost Pink and White Terraces of Lake Rotomahana’, (by Kaushik), Amusing Planet, (2015/09), www.amusingplanet.com]
After a two-night stay at the San Angel the tour group said goodbye to Puebla straight after breakfast. My chico correspondent Jose Carlos wasn’t around to farewell us but when our taxis arrived I made sure that I had packed his new residential details as Jose the Antony Beevor fan (infinitely preferable to being a Justin Bieber fan) was moving to an outer part of Puebla city in January.
The taxis dropped us at the inter-city coach terminal and we soon got going on our long trek to Oaxaca (some 340-odd kilometres) which, with several stops for sightseeing, lunch, toilet breaks, etc, took us more than five hours to complete. Fortunately the coach was well equipped with air-con and comfortable reclining seats – which made the off-highway part of the journey more tolerable.
Oaxaca – Hidelgo
Oaxaca (pronounced “wáh’haká”) gives its name to both the city and the state in this southern province of Mexico. The city itself which we got to about four in the afternoon is quite sizeable. As we reached our hotel (Casa Arnel), the wall of a cafe directly opposite caught my notice, it was attractively decorated with brightly painted murals depicting the characteristic Mexican motif of skeletons dancing with death. Our hotel rooms overlooked a delightful exterior courtyard comprising a dense, lush greenery brim full of native Mexican plants and shrubs.
‘Michael Jackson’ in attendance at Alameda Carnival
Casa Arnel was handily located in Jalatlaco on Hidalgo, close to the town centre with its plentiful choices of very reasonably priced comida options✱. Before dining though, we did a spot of sightseeing of Oaxaca nightlife…there was the standard Mexican Zócalo of course overlooking the city’s principal cathedral. From here we walked back to a large park called Alameda de León. By day Alameda is a busy market where you can buy, among other things, the colourful native blankets and shawls from descendants of the area’s indigenous peoples (Zapotec and Mixtec ‘Indians’)…at night it transformed into a Luna Park style carnival with rides and shooting galleries taking over the park.
By now it was cena-time, so accompanied by Eric, a softly-spoken southern American academic in the group, I had dinner at one particular budget-priced caterería/cantina in the street our hotel was in. We returned to the same joint the next morning for breakfast and then attempted to complete the trifecta by coming back for lunch three hours later, but ran foul of the famous Mexican institution of siesta!. Entering the now familiar cafe at around 12:30 I noticed that, though open, it was unusually dim and dark inside, in fact bereft of any sign of activity. When we eventfully attracted the attention of staff in the kitchen we were ushered to a seat. We attempted to order from the menu but nothing we asked for seemed to be available! Unimpressed by the scant morsels offered up by a callow, underage youth of a waiter, we pushed back our chairs and took our business and appetite somewhere else.
We headed back to the Zócalo to find a place with a decent lunch selection…reflecting on what had transpired at the cafe, it was clear to me that we had turned up during the afternoon siesta, the locals obviously knew that, that’s why it was empty (unlike the last two times we were there!). But because we were there, they obviously didn’t want to turn away the tourist dollar, so their scheme was to cobble together anything, maybe leftovers (who knows what!) and fob us off with that. Another valuable lesson learnt: don’t enter a Mexican eatery during siesta time! I stored it up alongside strictly avoiding any salad in prepared meals at Mexican restaurants!
Árbor of Sánta María
The tree of trees!
The first scheduled day trip from Oaxaca took us to the small town of El Tule to see its amazing natural wonder, a tree which is at least 1,500-years-old and possibly as much as 2,000-years-old. El Árbor del Tule, located inside a gated churchyard, dwarfs the two churches on either side of it! The Montezuma Cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) has the tag of being “the stoutest tree in the world”, boasting a world-record girth of 11.62m in diameter! Stats aside, it’s massive appearance is what leaves you amazed…a spectacularly gnarled trunk and branches which twists and turns in every conceivable direction – it’s simply the widest of gnarled bark living entities imaginable! (take note of the fence sign in front of the tree which is oddly incongruous).
The church & the topiaries of Sánta María
When you’ve finished marvelling at the El Tule tree, it’s worth taking the circuit walk around the enclosed gardens which contain many quirky sculptural features, of mainly cute animals (some made of metal but most of the creative creature sculptures are topiaries).
Not much else to see in Sánta Mária del Tule, from here its about a 20 minute drive back to the Oaxaca town centre.
PostScript: a cultural gulf across the Pacific?
After rejecting the “siesta lunch” American Eric and I finally settled on a place we agreed looked suitable in the crowded Zócalo. With ever an eye on a bargain comida we picked the three-course almuerzo especial (dirt cheap!). The service seemed pretty prompt, we received and consumed courses one and two swiftly, then we waited…and waited, 25 minutes, no third course (the dessert). We resolved after a few more minutes of no show and disinterest from the waitress, to query its inordinate delay with her as she was scurrying to and fro from table to table. I was about to put the direct question to her (with a typically Australian lack of “beating around the bush”…”Where is our dessert?!?”) when Eric in his ultra-polite southern gentlemanly way suggested a more culturally sensitive approach was the way to go. He beckoned her over and in Spanish politely asked her a (to my mind) wholly understated question: “Is everything okay?”. To which the short, stout waitress merely intoned “Si!” and immediately scurried off in the direction of another table! When she finally darted back our way again, with firm encouragement from me Eric rephrased the question, managing this time to include the sentence dónde es nuestra postres? (or something approximating that in Spanish) and hey presto two minutes later the said desserts made a welcome appearance at our table (underwhelmingly cod-ordinary postres they turned out to be I must say!) The amusing exchange reinforced for me the other wide cultural gulf, the one separating two very different sets of English-speakers on either side of the Pacific!
El Zócalo
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✱ catering for desayuno, almuerzo y cena (breakfast lunch and dinner). A peculiar trait of Oaxama, as of everywhere in this country, is that the locals largely eat the same maize-based food irrespective of whether its their morning meal, their noon or night one!
Next on the itinerary was Puebla, two to three hours drive from the national capital (depending very much on the vicissitudes of CDMX district traffic), the scene of one of Mexico’s most recent and all-too frequent earthquakes (September 2017). Puebla has long thought of itself as the country’s second city (although in pure population terms one and probably two other Mexican cities would be slotted in between it and the “market leader” Mexico City), and it has long frustratingly striven to free itself from its demeaning tourist tag as a Mexico City day trip.
Highway 190 going south-east from Mexico City takes you to Puebla, a journey of around 140km❈. I must admit that before we went there I had never heard of Puebla, and I was surprised, or at least intrigued, a tad intrigued anyway, to discover (according to the tourism info blurb at least) that it was Mexico’s second largest city! And I was even more fascinated (yawn!) to discover it was the BEST city in all the country. ‘Best’ is an absolute descriptor and one subject to being variously evaluated by the use of different criteria.
This peerless assessment of Puebla’s ‘bestness’ was supplied by Hector, our 24-year-old, fresh-faced tour leader who just happened to be a native of that same city. Hector is a recent law graduate from the University of Puebla – you guessed it…the BEST university in all of Mexico! (I refrained from asking Hector if it was also the BEST law school in the country as well, I figured that one was pretty much so indelibly inked in that it could with full confidence be safely left unsaid!).
Soda drinks dispenser machine, Puebla style!
Hector’s unchecked enthusiasm for his hometown (which some, unkind people elsewhere might view in a harsh light as compensatory jealousy of the sprawling, dominant metropolis of Mexico City) was something I found nonetheless quite endearing…good to think that parochialism, the provincialism of the less significant periphery, is an always dependable constant in society and in life. I’m convinced that the elimination of provincialism as we know it, along with that of self-interest (in fact the two are synonyms for each other in this context) would surely be clear and ultimate confirmation that western civilisation (indeed all civilisation) was doomed, irrevocably on it’s last legs!
When we hit the city outskirts late in the afternoon we thought our hotel would be close by. Instead it took a tortuously drawn-out period of time to get to it thanks to it being peak time (ie, crawl time for Puebla autos!), traffic was banking up along all the main thoroughfares. After passing half-a-dozen or more hotels that looked like our prospective hotel (not that we knew what it looked like!), we arrived at the Hotel San Angel as nightfall was fast approaching. Outside it looked pretty drab but inside the hotel, the layout, furnishings and stylish central courtyard gave it a very faded appearance of old-fashioned charm.
As we were booking in and being allocated our room numbers, our receptionist, a pleasant young guy with very adequate command of English, made a politely worded request which surprised me. He asked in a most respectful tone if any of us had any spare currency from our countries he might have as he collected them for his kids. Fair enough I thought for him to ask but it didn’t really register any apparent response from the group.
Later on when I came back down to reception to hand in the room key before doing an exploratory walk around Puebla I engaged the reception guy in conversation. We exchanged introductions, his name turned out to be Jose Carlos…as we talked I noticed that under his smart suit and freshly pressed business shirt, a very bright T-shirt was protruding which I found an amusing incongruity. What really got my eye though was the book he had on the counter which he was obviously reading when he wasn’t assisting guests. It was one of Antony Beavor’s war histories, from memory I think it might have been Stalingrad. Having read some of Beavor’s well researched and written military works and posed a question to the author in person at the Cremorne Orpheum when he gave a book talk a number of years ago, I was intrigued by Jose Carlos’s choice of reading material, and even more surprised to find the book was in English! J-C explained his twin interest in war books (especially Beavor’s, he told me he had read other ones by him) and in the earnest pursuit of learning several foreign languages.
El Catedral viewed from the lit-up Zocalo
The hotel was close to all the visitor focal points, the Zocalo (quite small but decked out in a Christmas display of brightly lit arches), the main cathedral, the municipal palace, Oficinas de Turismo, museums and so on. Next door to the Zocola and massively dwarfing it, is Puebla Cathedral. With its twin-towering edifice and fortress-like structure which takes up the whole block between 16 de Septiembre and 2 Sur, it is the largest church in all of Mexico, an honour that you probably think would have resided with Mexico City itself!
When I returned home later that evening after dinner I stopped off at reception where the ever-smiling and likeable Jose Carlos was still on duty and studiously ploughing through Stalingrad. I got José to jot down his address for me, promising to send him a sample of the numerous stock of international bank notes and coins which had been laying dormant accumulating dust in my house for years.
The following morning I passed on the option to visit the nearby Pyramide Tepanapa (apparently the world’s largest pyramid by volume, surpassing Cheops in Giza)✦. In its place I did the afternoon option trip to Cholula – not out of any great desire to go there specifically, but partly because it was only 10 km by coach from Puebla, minimal disruption and inconvenience being the deciding factor! And thus it came to be, Cholula did not rise above it’s very modest expectations – it had nothing exceptional to recommend it, sightseeing-wise, that stood it out from any other average tourist destinations.
To save our visit from being a complete fizzer, Hector shepherded us towards the nearest restaurante/ cantina for a little culinary cultural fix. The diversion proved worthwhile as we got to taste Cholula’s most famous Mestizo local dish, mole poblano…this was basically a curious culinary concoction which looked like chocolate sauce, but didn’t taste like it! Rather, it was a spicy-sweet, sienna-coloured sauce containing spices, a variety of nuts and fruits, which you pour over mains, especially chicken. It wasn’t bad, certainly different, and the lashings of sangria which we washed the mole poblano dishes down with, helped as well.
PostScript: Museo de Artesanias – more a shop than a museum?
On our second and last night in Puebla I happened upon a quiet little, rather specialised, museum tucked away on a corner directly opposite the people-infested Zocalo. The few display cases inside showed a cross-sample of Mexican handcrafts and arts with displays of alfareria (pottery), sombreros (headware), etc. The sign at the entrance, “Museo-Tienda” was a hint prompting the question that quickly formed in my head: was this really just a shop masquerading as a museum? There seemed to be more merchandise, various crafted items for sale (especially women’s garments, bags and purses), than exhibits mounted behind glass! Given that entrance to the museum-cum-shop was free (fairly uncommon in museum-obsessed Mexico), it should come as no shock that everything on sale was a bit on the pricey side!
Tienda more than Museo?
Footnote: Puebla has something else to recommend itself – the best pasteleria I encountered in the whole Mexican tour (with real chocolate!)…on Calle 16 September opposite the all-overshadowing Catedral.
Pasteleria deluxe!
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❈ the countryside between the two cities was fairly nondescript, probably the only really memorable sight was a couple of not extinct (still smouldering in fact!) volcanos. We stopped several times to get photos of them but never ever got closer than about 500m from them – an overly conservatively safe distance I thought!
✦ having already trampled been all over Teotihuacán and with Chichen Itza et al still to come, I thought it prudent to minimise the chances of contracting POS (Pyramid Overload Syndrome) during the tour! /span>
After a couple of nights staying at the Metropol I heard through the tour grapevine that we were changing hotels for the rest of our stay in the Mexican capital. I got this unofficially, second-hand, from my travelling companions because my Intrepid travel agent had neglected to inform me of this switch…she was too busy off on another holiday of her own! (she did contact me several days after the move mentioning that I was probably already at the new hotel by now! – very helpful indeed…thanks for coming, duh!).
The new hotel, the Hotel Geneve was in a part of the capital known as the “Pink Zone” (Zona Rosa). The check-in was unfortunately far from seamless…a process needlessly prolonged because the front of house staff (or perhaps it was Intrepid itself) transposed all of our names on their tour list (Chinese nomenclature style!) and kept telling us they had no bookings for us! A state of inertia and confusion that was mercifully ended when Hector, our guide for the Mexico tour, turned up and was able to bring light and clarity to the situation (no points for perceptiveness on the part of the staff, being incapable of figuring out by themselves that they had our names there in front of their eyes all along, just in the wrong order!).
Lindy memorabilia
As is my wont, after dumping my bags in my room I went on a bit of reconnoitre of the hotel’s immediate environs but found it a bit drap and pedestrian (we were now a long way from the city centre and the tourist precinct). I used most of my free time before the tour introductory meeting and dinner exploring the common areas of the hotel itself. The Hotel Geneve has quite a history in itself, famous in Mexico for its “who’s who” inventory of international guests that have graced its rooms over the decades. The hotel has an appearance of being a tad past its prime now, but the management has assiduously made a concerted effort to preserve that rich history in the memory of visitors and guests. Just beyond the reception area there are a series of exhibits in the foyer, mainly in glass cabinets, displaying a miscellany of pre-war items associated with the Geneve…this ranges from the old uniforms worn by the porters to early 20th century relics of luggage bags and some colourful old city maps which would fully engage the curiosity of a dedicated cartographer!
‘Viva Zapata!’
Also decorating the foyer are several glass-encased displays reminding us of the past stays at the hotel of famous international guests. The stand-outs of these were probably one honouring the American aviator and polemical, authoritarian public figure in pre-war US politics, Charles Lindbergh (an exhibit entitled “Lindy’s Post”), together with another celebrating Marlon Brando’s stay at the Geneve in the early ’50s. The actor was resident at the hotel whilst filming the story of the legendary Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata (Viva Zapata!) on location. Other equally famous hotel guests during its nearly 100 years to get a mention in the Geneve’s annals include Winston Churchill (the Geneve was apparently one of Winnie’s fave away-from-home stays), Marilyn Monroe and opera singer Maria Callas, plus a host of Mexican luminaries, no doubt famous to every Mexican but nondescript names to me.
Hotel Geneve: foyer study
The real highlight to me though was located in the rear of the foyer section…management has given it a retro makeover so that it resembles a 1930s/40s fashionable, upper class gentleman’s drawing-room/study with an extensive in-wall library, period furniture and large landscape period paintings. The setting had a very stylised look to – the sort of thing I could easily visualise in a typical English country estate mansion. Very landed gentry English in fact…no doubt about it, Winnie would have felt totally at home here in his silk dressing gown, comfy slippers, cosy open fire, a copy of The Times in hand and a tray filled with his favourite after-dinner beverages.
The Zona Rosa district where the Geneve is located is something of an Asian restaurant hub…by walking either north or south to the nearest cross-streets I was able to find a host of eating outlets which gave me a wide choice of Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Indian. One of the bonuses of travelling through Mexico was a chance to taste authentic Mexican cuisine (rather than the dreadful Tex-Mex abominations that masquerade as food in Australian and American eateries), however the availability of Asian options this night provided a welcome respite from the gastronomical onslaught of all those corn tortillas breakfast, lunch and dinner!
On the way back to the hotel the sight of a delicious pasteleria (cake shop) teased my sweet tooth and weakening, I popped in for a little after-dinner treat. Inside the shop there was a young uniformed female attendant behind the counter on which was a glass cabinet with various postres (deserts) and large tarta. I looked around and saw what I was after, pastels (small cupcakes) and pan de dulce (sweet bread) in rows of bins in the middle of the shop. I noticed though that there were nether tongs to pick out my selection with nor any small paper bags around to put them in. I wavered round hesitantly for several seconds before the attendant beckoned me over and gave me a small square of clear plastic (like a strip of cling wrap). While I stared at the piece of plastic wondering what I was supposed to do with it, she made a fist and simulated a snatching hand motion. I picked out an enticing small cake and following her example enclosed it in the plastic sheet and placed it on the counter. The attendant picked it up and in one rapid, wrapping motion, twirled the plastic around the cup cake until it formed a tightly knit bundle and handed it back to me. Ingeniously simple…tong-free, bag-free handling!
Pastries, cakes and sweet breads are an essential culmination of any Mexican lunch! I appreciated this even more after my farewell lunch in Mexico City – I went to the extremely popular La Casa de Tono opposite my hotel where I had a workman-like quesadilla (no better than that!), washed down with a local Indio drink. As I was finishing the mayor comida, a waiter lugging a wooden display box full of pan dulces and pastels asked if I wanted to have one…I declined his offer but a short while later changed my mind – only to discover that they had all been snaffled up by the lunchtime punters within 10 minutes! Those Mexiqueños sure do love their sweet treats.
Modelo Especial
A word on Mexican cervezasBefore coming to Mexico I associated Mexican beer exclusively with the extremely popular and well-known Corona cerveza (although since returning I have seen Dos Equis (XX) in Sydney bottle shops as well). Over there I discovered two things about Mexi-beer, the industry is dominated by just two producers, Grupo Modelo (who make the best-selling export Corona) and FEMSA; and the preference among locals is not for pale lagers like Corona but for dark beers. During the tour I road-tested most of the local dark brews. Modelo, Indio, Leon, Bohemia, Noche Buena (the Christmas beer!), Tecate, Estrella, in fact all well-known Mexican brands have a negra (dark) beer. My own preference though was for the Modelo Especial, an excellent (no negra) pilsener brew.
For the artistically and culturally-inclined no trip to Mexico City is complete without a taste of its monumental art. Regrettably, due to a combination of a double-booking in the tour itinerary and the distance from our hotel, I wasn’t able to fit in a visit to the Frida Kahlo Museum during my few days in the capital…its location in Coyoacán (“place of coyotes”) was down in the southern afueras of the city. I had hoped to redeem the omission on my return to Mexico City after our stint in Cuba, however I found myself doubly thwarted as my only full return day in the capital was on a Monday (the day of the week all museums, in this city with the most number of museums in the world, is closed!✱).
Stairway triptych on the Conquista
Having missed out on seeing Frida’s brightly azure casa made me more determined to at the very least take in a truly representative sample of her partner Diego Rivera’s public and very political art. Before the trip I had promised myself to try to get a glimpse of Rivera’s famous mural at the University of Mexico, but I gave that up when I discovered it was located a bit too far away in the opposite direction. As a compromise (but a very good compromise as it turned out) we opted to stay around Centro and make for the Zócalo, the mayor square of CDMX. On one side of the Zócalo sits the imposing fortress-like Palacio Nacional where visitors can view Rivera’s great “History of Mexico” mural series. Palacio Nacional or the grounds on which it lies in Cuauhtémoc has been the seat of power in Mexico since the Aztec Empire.
Palacio jardens
Entrance into the National Palace was free but queues coupled with heavy security held things up and made the process a bit of an obstacle course. Passports had to be shown and tourism police were en mass at the entrance and liberally sprinkled all over the complex. To reach the colonnaded central courtyard of Constitution Square✥ we first passed through a spectacular and varied Mexican desert garden, a botanical bonanza full of agaves, cacti, yuccas and other hardy desert plants intersected by circular and diagonal pathways.
The murals took up huge slabs of wall space on the first floor of the palace, each mural depicted different phases of Mexican history starting with a scene from life in Pre-Columbian indigenous society. Rivera’s murals are all about social commentary, especially articulating the attitude of the conquerors towards the indígena peoples after contact – the mistreatment and abuses exacted on the Aztecs and other Meso-American Indians. One of the politically committed Rivera’s societal concerns in the mural project was to express through his art a counter-view to the prevailing European perception at the time which tended to wholesale denigrate the mestizo and native populations.
On the staircase between the ground floor and the second floor a very large mural is devoted to Rivera’s take on 20th century Mexico, his summary of society in the first-third of the century…the vast canvas is peopled by an eclectic mix of historical characters with portraits of his beloved Frida, Mexican political figures, American capitalists like Rockefeller, powerful revolutionary warlords Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and in accord with the artist’s communist allegiances, Karl Marx. This panel is in fact part of a ‘triptych’ of murals which on the stairway – the other monumental sections, reaching up to the ceiling almost, convey the ferocity of Cortes’ assault on the Mexica and the indigenous determined attempts to resist the Conquistadors.
The history murals are a very large body of work undertaken on a massive scale, a monumental project which took Rivera around six years (ca 1929-35)…the murals were intended to encompass all four open corridors of the square building but he never found the time to complete it. There are other large-scale panel paintings by Rivera (does he ever do small-scale?) on the third floor of the building, but the mural depiction of Mexico’s course of history from pre-Hispanic period through the Conquista up to the 20th century are the principal attractions of this magnet for tourists wanting to experience more of CDMX’s distinctive cultural ethos.
On our way out we popped into a side wing of the palace which houses the chamber of the Parliamentary Assemblies, a vacant spatial entity whose sanitised condition and sombre burgundy, claret and vermillion colours give it a feeling of sterility. Revisiting the Mexico jardines on route to the exit for a final glance and picture we noticed some unofficial residents of the palace, a couple of sleek looking cats who, unperturbed by our presence, seemed very much at home in the garden grounds.
⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤✱ missing out on the Kahlo house also meant I missed the house (now also a museum) of Leon Trotsky just a block away (where he was assassinated on the orders of his rival communist leader Stalin in 1940)✥ this open courtyard with a central fountain, from which the Diego Rivera murals look down from the second floor balcony, is a favourite place for visitors to the palace to take selfies against a backdrop of elegant white arched columns
HAVING viewed the excavated ruins of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (Templo Mayor) in Centro Historico, razed by the Conquistadors under Hernán Cortés in 1521 in order to build what became the Spaniards’ capital of New Spain, Mexico City❈, the following day we took an excursion to Teotihuacán to see a preserved and restored native city which longpredates the Aztec capital.
It was a longish drive from central Mexico City as Teotihuacán is situated about 40km to the north-east. A few hundred metres before we got to the Pyramids (or ‘Piramides’ as it was written on highway signposts), the well-paved highway road morphed into an uneven, roughly cobble-stoned path in keeping with the ancient site of Pre-Columbian civilisation. Teotihuacán was as touristy as I imagined it would be (ie, totally!) but such a spectacular vista into a pre-modern past that was well worth the effort of traipsing several kilometres all over the vast site. It was even worth the effort of having to put up with an extremely annoying battalion of souvenir sellers at every turn. They tested our patience though especially with one particularly annoying habit of theirs…as we walked from one temple to another, every single time we got within cooee of a new group of hawkers camped strategically on the edge of a monument, one or more of them would commence to blow for all their worth on little jaguar whistles emitting a noise approximating the growl of a member of the big cat family! By the 12th time this happened I was experiencing the sort of visceral tremor one gets when someone very deliberately and slowly drags a fingernail down a blackboard! My instinct was to get past and away from them ASAP…unfortunately this wasn’t possible as in the echo chamber of that wide valley the sounds made by the jaguar imitators reverberated all over the site.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/image-23.jpg”> The ubiquitous in-your-face hawkers all over the site! [/
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/F19F0B48-9E07-4761-A252-268F3F2E4B37.jpeg”> Templo El Luna[/
Teotihuacán was so well-preserved (or restored) that the layout of the city at its height could be easily reimagined⊙. Dominating the complex of buildings were two great temples, the Pyramids of the Moon and the Sun, bisecting them is a central roadway known as the Avenue of the Dead. Nearby is a third, smaller and less impressive pyramid, the Temple of Quetzacoatl. Passing this temple our learned guide couldn’t resist the temptation to demonstrate what I later discovered through its repetition was a standard tourist guide manoeuvre at Mexican archaeological sites: clapping loudly adjacent to the pyramid to trigger an echoing effect.
Climbing to the very top of the steep Moon and Sun pyramids was no walk in the park (although the vertical rail made the ascent less onerous). The narrowness and condition of the ancient steps made them tricky to climb up but the taller El Sol could be broken down into several stages rather than the one long, sharp lineal climb of El Luna. Once at the top though we were rewarded with a 360° panorama of the surrounding valley from fantastic vantage points. While we gazed into the distance our guide explained the mathematical dimension of the temple complex: Teotihuacan was laid out according to geometric and symbolic principles. The two pyramids were intentionally positioned by the indigenous inhabitants in such a way to be aligned astronomically with each other.
Back at ground level we visited a more recent archaeological discovery on the city’s outskirts. This much smaller temple had suffered more wholesale damage than “Sol and Luna” and was in the slow and painstaking process of being extensively restored to something resembling its former state and symmetry.
The heat of the midday sun (quite a shock to our system after the distinctly cool weather of Mexico City) was sapping our energies so we trudged laboriously back to the car park, stopping first at the gift shop where we didn’t loiter once we got a sighter of its heftily over-priced items. Outdoors, sampling the range of choices and much more favourably prices of the souvenir stalls, I picked up a little memento of Teotihuacán, a five centimetre-high black graphite ‘replica’ pyramid with Aztec hieroglyphics…I use the term replica incredibly loosely as the model bore no resemblance to any of the ancient, stepped pyramids we had just visited, save for it having a square base and four triangular sloping sides in a very stylised sort of way.
PostScript: The bus trip back to Mexico City was largely uneventful, a chance to rest our fully extended hamstrings after the strenuous Piramides climbs. Two-thirds of the way back we passed a hill that framed a pleasant picture, dotted as it was with a kaleidoscope of different coloured houses. An amusing ‘encounter’ on the return journey momentarily left me spooked!: as the traffic banked up on the road into Centro I looked across at a vehicle in the adjoining lane and noticed what I initially believed was a corpse with a limp leg dangling off the end of a flat-back truck (see the apposite photo)…in reality it was merely a still very much alive but tuckered-out worker taking the opportunity for an early afternoon siesta on a level if not especially comfortable surface!¤
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❈ as the Spanish conquerors of Peru under Pizarro did in the city of Cuzco a decade or so after Cortés
⊙ the original inhabitants of Teotihuacan prior to the Aztecs (Nahautl-speaking people but of uncertain ethnicity) disappeared suddenly from the region ca 600-700 AD
¤ and quite dangerous too given the traffic in motion all around…where I ask were the highway police to pull the offending truck over and charge the thoughtless miscreant with leg protrusion! Another reminder, as if it was ever needed, that we were experiencing Third World realities
After the rollicking good time we had on the previous night’s Urban Adventures tour of the capital (‘Turismo Mexico City 1: A Taste of the Capitalino Nightlife, Mezcal, Mariachis and Luchadores’) we decided the best way to catch more city highlights on our last full day in Mexico City would be to do the free city walking tour run by Estacion Mexico✼. We followed the tourist brochure’s instructions to look for a large pink umbrella…upon arriving at the designated meeting spot outside Catedral Metropolitana (AKA Catedral Mayor), despite the crowds milling round the cathedral, sure enough we were able to pick out the walk guide Mar, both from the pink umbrella she was brandishing and from her pink Estacion T-shirt with the upper case words “MAKE MEXICO GREAT AGAIN!” cheekily emblazoned on the back. Mar turned out to be a young “glass ¾-full” architectural student with a passion for the city’s heritage architecture which became readily evident as the tour progressed.
Cuba Street fashions
The walking route comprised a roughly rectangular course, fanning out from Centro and exploring the northern and western colonias (neighbourhoods) of Cuauhtémoc, the delegacíon (borough) which encompasses the oldest parts of the city, then circling back to Av Madero. Mar took us on a broad sweep of Cuauhtémoc including some of the less well-known back streets off the main drag of Turismo Centro…in Calle Donceles, away from the shiny, glossy 21st century shops of the city commercial hub, we saw a street with antiquated books (and bookshops) and an old theatre whose facade retained only a modicum of its past glory; in Calle República de Cuba we encountered a small shopping block which specialised in over-elaborate, ridiculous-looking bustle style ball dresses¤. Mar valued-added along the way…recounting various historical snippets, anecdotes and folklore about her city, a real insider’s perspective of the town which really enhanced our appreciation of Mexico City’s uniqueness.
Palacio Postal
One of the absolute stand-out sights architecturally we were indeed fortunate to see was Palacio De Correos De Mexico on the Eje Central. Also known as Correos Mayor (the Main Post Office), Italian-designed (same architect/engineer as the nearby, magnificent Pallacio de Bellas Artes) and built in the Spanish Renaissance Revival style with many eclectic features…but it’s Correos Mayor’s interior that is the real gem. Pride of place is the exquisite central stairway (laterial staris) with its two gilded ramps converging in sweeping fashion on the landing. By now means in the staircase’s shade is the building’s sublime elevator, a gorgeous feature which blends harmoniously with the interior’s gold-encased bars of the service windows. The bronze and iron window frames also set off nicely against the marble floor.
Palace of Fine Arts: Mexico City’s cultural hub and finest building. Constructed over 30 year period interrupted by the Mexican Revolution and CDMXs notorious soft soil issues (Designer: Adamo Boari)
The free walking tour wound up in the western end of Madero in Historico Centro at an early 18th century church (San Francisco) opposite the House of Tiles, another unique CDMX building (the end of a good five hours spent!). We thanked the ever enthusiastic Mar for her vibe, expert knowledge and insights into an enormous city we had only barely scratched the surface of…I’m sure she appreciated the positive feedback and the glowing affirmation of the tour’s merits more than the small quantity of pesos we were more than happy to hand over as a parting token of our thanks.
Entrance to Church of San Francisco in Av Madero
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✼ I first heard about free walking tours when I was in Lima several years ago but it wasn’t until I was in Warsaw in 2015 that I really took advantage of this far-sighted tourism initiative and went on three or four city tours led by the local Warszawa legend Pse (this may be self-evidently obvious but its the skill of the actual tour leader in getting across the spirit and ethos of the place in only a few hours of contact time that really makes the experience memorable especially for first-time visitors)
¤ these utterly impractical dresses, shaped like grotesquely swollen vases, look like something Cinderella would wear, but I’d like to see some Mexican Señorina Cindy drive around the narrow streets in one of Mexico’s minuscule clone smart cars wearing this!
Having really enjoyed my first organised tour around the city markets and food outlets I opted to follow it up with one or two other city tours in the couple of days we had left in the capital. First, Urban Adventures’ night walking tour. We met up at six with our guide for the night, a relaxed, amiable guy with the unhispanic-sounding name of Milton, at a small design museum just down from the Zócalo. Milton took us first to nearby Cinco de Mayo (5th of May Street), a street notable for its restaurants, cantinas and drinking houses with names like Pata Negra, Sálon Corona and La Popular.
Cinco de Mayo
We stopped outside a fairly upmarket- looking establishment with velvet curtains and shimmering chandeliers called La Opera Bar whilst Milton explained the story of its particular fame. During the 1910s when Mexico was gripped by revolutionary fervour, the cantina had been the scene of a celebrated meeting between revolutionary bandit leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. At La Opera bar, Villa and Zapata, Mexico’s two powerful warlords got together to discuss their plans to carve up the strife-racked country. Villa immortalised the occasion by shooting a hole through the bar’s ceiling which is still visible today. Another more recent celebrity who frequented La Opera as a favourite watering hole was Columbian expat and literature Nobel laureate Gabriel Gárcia Marquez.
The tour then took us to Avenida Juárez and an elevator ride to the top of Mexico City’s tallest building, Torre Latinoamericanos, where we sipped cool cocktails (I had a frozen strawberry margarita) whilst admiring the 360° views of Mexico City from Level 37. Over drinks Milton talked about his environmental work for Greenpeace and mentioned that Mexico City had an ongoing major water problem (he hinted that one of the more affluent areas of the city has some sort of monopolisation of potable water which affects supply to the rest of CDMX!).
Dali-surreal piece
Back down at ground level, we strolled through the small garden park next door, the area had been given over to a public exhibition of 23 bronze sculptures by Spanish surrealist painter and celebrity oddball Salvador Dali. The famed Catalonian artist’s most famous/notorious paintings of warped clocks, burning giraffes and women with implanted drawers were on display as sculptural representations in a nice garden setting. Rejoining Calle Francisco I Madero I ask Milton about the various guys I have seen on the street wearing military style uniforms, playing organ grinders (sans monkeys!) and asking for money. Milton says it’s an old tradition of the city dating back to around the 1930s when ex-army officers were given permission to do this, and it became an established convention. It’s so widespread that it seems to me that this is another variant of begging so common in the city, but with a bit more structure and embellishment to it.
Two mariachis looking for their instruments?
The next chapter of our tour linked up mariachi bands, cantinas, tequila and mezcal. We sampled some of the legendary hard liquor made from the agave plant to the accompaniment of raucous mariachi bands…in between songs Milton explained how a lot of the city’s many, many mariachi groups work. The mariachis congregate around Garibaldi Plaza, musical bands comprising violins, trumpets and guitars,who play randomly for people who turn up to hear them so as to hire a group for an upcoming wedding, party, etc. The musicians are effectively auditioning for jobs in the plaza! Mariachi band members are usually distinguished by their charro style dress (upmarket garb of Mexican horsemen), usually but not always in white, tight-fitting outfits with the broad-brimmed sombreros.
Upstairs after the tequila and mezcal sampling we explored a little Tequilia y Mezcal Museo/Tienda, finding out about the complex process of making these drinks (involving several stages of fermentation and distillation). The museum highlight for me was the staggeringly immense range of tequila and mezcal bottles and containers on display (characteristically the Mexican fatalistic obsession with skulls and the symbolising of death comes through strongly in the design of drinking vessels).
Trios match
We topped the evening off with a bit of a cross-country hike via the Mexico City Metro…travelling on a uniquely colour-coded network of lines following Milton as he went confusingly from the Pink Line following an alternate colour line that took us to a separate platform in the opposite direction, so that we eventually about 10pm reached Arena Mexico across town in time to catch the last few bouts of Mexico’s other national obsession, professional masked wrestling. Known in Mexico as Lucha Libre (Sp. “Free fight”), this took place in a huge, cavernous old stadium. The dyed-in-the-wool, rusted-on Lucha Libre-obsessed fans (just about everyone else here!) cheered on their masked favourites…the most popular type of contests are trios contests (three-man tag teams). However I was more intrigued with the reactions of the fans themselves, their unrestrained enthusiasms for their heroes and equally unchecked abuse for the luchadors (wrestlers) assigned to be villains. They all just seem to buy it, 100 per cent! Most venom and opprobrium on the night was reserved for a luchador called Sam Adonis, introduced to the crowd as an American (interestingly “US Sam” at the end of the bout grabbed the microphone and harangued the crowd in fluent Spanish for a full five minutes!)
We made a slightly premature exit from Arena Mexico – nothing was spoiled, we weren’t psychic but somehow we sensed the “good guys” would triumph in the deciding third fall (tres caídas) – to avoid the end-of-night rush. Back at Colonial Doctores station, clutching our cheap souvenir luchador mask, we boarded one of CDMX’s strange box-shaped carriages for another zig-zagging journey on the Metro to Centro. When we alighted at our nearest Metro station, the obliging and ever affable Milton walked us back to our hotel near the Almeida Park.
Venturing outside of our hotel in Calle Luis Moya, the first thing that struck me about Mexico City was how cold it was. It was night and winter time but I somehow supposed its proximity to the Equinox meant the climate would generally be fairly consistently tropical✼. Certainly, the attire of the Mexiqueños I saw on the street indicated that the locals themselves clearly felt the cold – puffer jackets, coats, scarfs, beanies and (always) long trousers were the fashion de jour.
The universal adoption of long trousers by the locals puzzled me a bit, it seems that Mexicans, even the youth, don’t tend to wear long pants – it isn’t the done thing culturally in the country apparently even in the stifling temperatures of summer. This immediately marked me out for all to spot as 100 per cent gringo tourist…I wore shorts most of the time, a Hungarian military style cap and either an Hawaiian shirt or a T-shirt. A hasty examination of the contents of my luggage revealed that I was well short on warm clothing, I had only brought one pair of long trousers (and these were lightweight Italian-designed jeans) and one warm pullover. I had the distinct feeling that my normal policy of minimal packing was going to backfire on this trip.
When I got out and about for my first exploratory saunter around the central part of Mexico City, I quickly became familiar with a characteristic of the city’s urban terrain, footpaths were consistently uneven, there were often large holes where concrete had broken up and been left unrepaired so long that people tended to use them as impromptu garbage bins! Walking on darkly-lit streets after nightfall proved hazardous…a couple of times I nearly came crashing to earth (actually concrete) when walking from a step onto thin air, not expecting the long, unseen (and unseeable) drop below to the ground. An added potential pitfall for pedestrians was the unevenness of steps, descending a series of small steps to suddenly find a large one meant you had to keep your wits about you at all times. Even on what you assumed was level ground you had to be wary, the pathway had a tendency to undulate all over alarmingly – this was probably the result of two related factors: the fairly regular seismic activity that CDMX was prone to✥, and the fact that the city, built as it was on a large lake, was slowly but inexorably sinking!
Crossing the road at intersections with significant car traffic proved challenging. The safest and wisest approach was to follow the locals, but you still had to be decisive whenever you set out to cross, Mexican motorists were uncompromising in their lack of restraint in using their horns at the slightest suggestion that pedestrians were taking liberties with the lights.
Being close to the old historical centre of the city my perambulations soon took me via the long pedestrian plaza of Francisco I Madero to the Zócalo. The Zócalo is very much the city’s hub. Easily spotted from the start of Madero by its steepling Christmas tree, the Zócalo is CDMX’s main square with a somewhat incongruous ice-skating rink on its perimeter. On one side is a line of grand government buildings including the National Palace, to the other is Mexico City’s main Cathedral. Just one block away from the Zócalo (= plinth) is the unearthed foundations of the Templo Mayor, In pre-Spanish times this was the principal ceremonial centre of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. In recent history the square has been the favourite venue for political protests (eg, 1968 university students opposed to police oppression, Zapatistas, etc).
I had a succulent meal of cacti
Given the limited time we’d be in the capital we reckoned that signing on for a series of city tours was the best way to get to the heart of what Mexico City was about. The first day tour (of food and markets) was one offered by Urban Adventures. The food quest took us to the big central markets Mercado Abelardo L Rodríguez where we, wisely having skipped breakfast at the hotel, sampled the authentic diet of the masses. We started with different flavoured corn tortillas (vanilla maize tortillas a bit strange and challenging to the palate!) and later some delicious mixed tamales for lunch. The markets revealed a comida smorgasbord of idiosyncratically Mexican foodstuffs – from an exotic mix of spices and peppers to white corn to edible cactus leaves.
The massive, sprawling Rodríguez markets also does a sideline (very large sideline in fact!) in flowers and it was here that I discovered that the ubiquitous poinsettia plant (Euphoria pulcherrima, a Christmas favourite with its striking red and green foliage) though indigenous to Mexico was named after a Gringo from North of the Border! (1820s US minister to Mexico and botanist Joel R Poinsett).
Although I didn’t really appreciate it when I signed up for the trip to Mexico, a chance to taste real Mex-food rather than the bastardised and vastly inferior Tex-Mex substitute offered up in the West, was one of the best reasons to visit Mexico. Only then and there on the ground in Mexico can you evaluate its national cuisine properly and confirm among other things that the old Billy Connolly joke, thought funny and clever, is stereotypical and essentially wrong₪.
An interesting side excursion took us across town on a rickety old public bus crowded with locals. Like I had noticed in parts of Peru four years earlier, formal bus stops per sé didn’t exist, the people here also just somehow knew, from precedent and habit I guess, where to wait…the bus would duly stop at regular points on the journey to load and unload passengers. What I wasn’t expecting on the bus was the various hawkers who would get on the bus, travel a few stops without paying the conductor, and launch into a full-blown sales spiel for various products. One such Mexican “Joe the Gadget Man” who caught our eye (couldn’t but be aware of him!) was this chubby, perspiring guy who prowled up and down the aisle loudly proclaiming with speed-gun rapidity the virtues of some kind of ‘medicinal’ marijuana (in small green-topped tins labelled ‘Mariguanol’). Having made two, three quick sales within a short distance (to my great surprise) he promptly dismounted the bus to await the next ride. Our guide Pancho told us that many Mexicans believe in the healing powers of ‘grass’ for muscular ailments and the like.
Tarta temptation
When we too alighted the bus, Pancho took us to a couple of other shops which showed that the Mexiqueños’ love affair with food extended well beyond the merely savoury. These popular patisserie shops are often known locally as Dulcerías (essentially candy stores), where sweet-toothed Mexicans can buy all manner of sickly-sweet indulgences in pastels (cakes), tartas (tarts) and postres (deserts). Dulces de leche (caramel-tasting milk candies) and rompope (an eggnog concoction dipped in rum) are two of the Mexican comestibles much in demand. One famous shop (Ideal Pasteleria) we visited specialised in huge celebration cakes – signs on the tall and lavishly decorated cakes for birthdays and such occasions included the weight of the cake in kilos! This is practical information indeed allowing prospective purchasers to work out what size cake was needed to match the anticipated number of guests at the upcoming party/celebration! And of course, as our travels were to enlighten us, no decent restaurante in Mexico would fail to include at the very least pan dulce (sweet bread) or more likely an elaborate array of pastels on its menu!
A 50kg cake – perfectly fitting the bill for a king-sized party!
PostScript: Whither Chocolaté in Mexico?
For a country whose indigenous people gave the world the cocoa bean and therefore chocolate, Mexicans surprisingly tend not to eat slabs of chocolate as the rest of the world do…their cocoa preference is decidedly for chocolate caliente (hot chocolate drinks). Even confectionary sold in the sweets aisle labelled as chocolate is usually wafer biscuits with icing rather than the real thing.
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✼ had I done my prep homework a bit better, the significance of Mexico City’s location atop a standard elevation of 2,250 metres, should have provided me with a few salient clues in this direction
✥ uncomfortable as this news was at the time, one day after I had paid for the Mexico trip, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake tore up part of the city
₪ “the thing about Mexican food is that its all the same, they just fold it differently!”
Getting to the land of corn tortillas and agave plants via American Airlines meant 12-13 hours in the air plus a tortuous three to four hour stopover at LAX. The dragged-out 16 hour total journey, such as it was, meant that it was of little solace to me that we reached our ultimate destination, Benito Juárez International Airport, around 3 o’clock (only four hours later than we had left Sydney on the same day – courtesy of flying ‘backwards’ across the International Dateline!) The process of connecting to a flight to Mexico via the US had already proved a taxing exercise with an unexpected and costly twist even before I had left Kingsford Smith.
My frustrations began with several fruitless attempts to secure a boarding pass through AA’s Sydney electronic ticketing system. An airline official intervened at this point advising me that I needed to obtain something called an ESTA* before I could proceed with my trip. This was news to me as my travel agent hadn’t mentioned this requirement to me during the preparations for my Central American tour. Arggh, bad start! The official directed me to a nearby Flight Centre office where I obtained the ESTA (at a moderate cost of $US14 – $A18.95) only to discover the sting imposed by Flight Centre who ripped me off to the tune of an additional $45 just to photocopy the single sheet document!
Being well and truly monetarily stitched up by Flight Centre was only the first travesty or inconvenience I had to endure in order to progress through US territorial jurisdiction successfully (but no means unscathed). By the time I had hit the tarmac at Tom Bradley International Terminal in LA my mind was confused as a result of a US Customs and Borders inflight video…the guy in the video was offering me, it seemed, two choices of entry to the US. In my jumbled head I had been still trying to come to grips with the significance of ESTA, and now he was rabbiting on about something called APC…and what was this Global Entry whatsamajazz thingy he mentioned as well?).
In the arrivals terminal, feelings of bewilderment as a consequence of an overload of Customs bureaucratic jargon was exacerbated by chaotic scenes of passengers streaming this way and that way from one end of the terminal to the other…airport officials were shuffling arriving passengers through never-ending lines like rudderless cattle through shutes✥. Why was it, I pondered frustratingly, that all these people were emptying off planes at the same time?). After several false starts and blind alleys (wrong queue, wrong forms … miss-a-turn, go back to the end of the other queue, do not pass Go! etc) I eventually worked out what queue I should be in and what documents I needed or didn’t need to fill out.
Even after I had got past the electronic interrogator with its game of 20 questions, the whole boarding process continued on and on with no apparent end in sight – positively labyrinthine I concluded! Collecting and reassigning my luggage was followed by mandatory de-belting and de-shoeing at the insistence of Customs Nazis barking orders and commands with Third Reich-like zeal (OK, yes American customs officers have no monopoly on bluntness or lack of manners…but they are certainly world-class in that department if my two horror stretches through the LAX maze is anything to go by!).
Finally free of electronic conveyor belts and scanners for a second time, I took some brief respite from the airport obstacle course by momentarily stepping outside the terminal long enough to get a sighter of the LA smog together with an accompanying olfactory dose of LA air before darting off to the departure gate for my connecting flight to Mexico.
Mercifully the second leg on AA2546 – from LA to Mexico City – was a much shorter and thus more tolerable experience, one fortified by an opportunity to sample the local Mexican cervezas…the aircraft however only carried Corona (which I was already familiar with being widely available in Australia) but I was to discover more and varied brands upon arrival in Mexico.
Yeah, sure!
FootNote: On the ESTA form Customs and Border Protection heralds its new program called Automated Passport Control with a boast that it “expedites the entry process for eligible Visa Waiver Program international travelers”… umm, if that was fast-tracking, then I wouldn’t want to see it in operation on a slow day when someone had thrown a gigantic spanner into the works!
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* “Electronic System for Travel Authorization” – a visa waiver necessary to travel to/through the USA in this age of world-wide terrorism vigilance
✥ I can’t help but wonder what that cinematic cynical observer of modernity Jacques Tati would have made of the LAX spectacle of countless waves of humanity in the automatonic thrall of a Dalek-like army of little machines
If you ever take an international flight to South America and happen to stop over in Santiago, Chile with a spare day or two and find you are not much enamoured of what’s on offer in the less than pulsating capital, a trip to picturesque Valparaíso would be just the tonic! To escape Santiago’s grimy greyness … and its multi-millions of stray, mangy dogs, take a trip on Route 68 115km north-west to Valparaíso and Region V.
Valparaíso, or ‘Valpo’ for short, today has a faded, glamour but stacks of aesthetic character – with a higgedly-piggedly, chaotic pattern of brightly coloured houses, “a heap … a bunch of crazy houses” as poet Pablo Neruda described them, and numerous run-down/falling-down Victorian mansions (conversely on a cautionary note, the city these days also has a criminal underbelly including endemic petty crime and prostitution). Remnants of the city’s former glory and especially its quaint charm remain however: the old and rickety ascensores (inclined motorised lifts, called funiculars elsewhere) transport passengers up and down Valparaíso’s steep, undulating hills, from atop the cerros visitors enjoy sweeping views across the bay and the ports. It’s a city awash with the most brilliant murals on the walls of houses and commercial buildings which themselves exude colour and character.
Valaparaíso’s “salad days” were in the 19th century, during this period it was a world-class port on the Europe to California shipping route. A combination of the devastating 1906 earthquake and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 signified the rapid commercial decline of Valparaíso, once known as the “Jewel of the Pacific”. This small city on the eastern edge of the Pacific 11,326km from Sydney might seem an odd place for a turn-of-the-century Australian prime minister to be born◙, but in 1867 one such future PM was born there (also see Postscript). His name at birth was Johann Cristian Tunck. Tunck’s father was Chilean of German stock whilst his mother was born in New Zealand of Irish ancestry. After his Chilean father disappeared early on, his mother remarried, changing the child’s name to John Christian Watson.
Later on Watson perpetuated a myth as to the truth of his origins which sustained itself throughout his political life. The name John Christian Watson emphasised his supposed ‘Scotchness’ and concealed an inconvenient, alien background. If his non-Britishness have been known, Watson’s eligibility for public office would have been imperilled (Australian politicians were required to be subjects of the Crown)[1].
(Photo: NRMA)
Tanck (the future J Christian Watson) grew up in the South Island of New Zealand, he trained as a compositor and worked for provincial newspapers such as the North Otago Times and the Oamaru Mail. Through these workplaces Watson had his first contacts with labour politics, joining the Typographers’ Union and the NZ Land League. Finding himself unemployed in his late teens prompted him to migrate to Sydney and peripatetic employment with local newspapers until moving to the Australian Star, a paper with a protectionist bent which matched his own economic thinking. As in NZ Watson found a path into the New South Wales Trades and Labour Council (TLC) via the Typographical Association of NSW[2].
Rising quickly through the official labour ranks Watson became both president of the TLC and chairman of the Labor Party (only recently established as the Labor Electoral League) by age 25. Watson served as a member of the colonial parliament of NSW, representing rural Young, and his star continued to ascend after the Commonwealth came into being on 1 January 1901. A few months after Federation, still closer to 30 than 40, Watson was chosen as the first parliamentary leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
Early Federal Australian politics entailed a three-way tussle between Watson’s ALP, the Protectionist Party led by Deakin and the Free Trade Party under Reid. Watson’s ascension to the prime minister-ship in 1904 was a novel occurrence: (the ALP was the) first national, labour-based government in the world; Watson at 37, the youngest-ever Australian PM[3]. The advent of Watson’s “workers'” government was met with cynicism and hostility as it challenged the hitherto standard notion that the working class were capable of assuming the mantle of government and succeeding. It didn’t as it eventuated succeed, surviving not quite four months before Watson found his government’s position untenable and was edged out of power¤ … but this was more to do with the nature of the Watson government, a minority one, than the quality or performance. Basically it couldn’t muster the numbers in parliament to continue governing and the governor-general appointed George Reid to the PM-ship in August 1904[4].
Watson’s political ideology:
In the terminology of 2016 filtered through the media’s lens, Chris Watson would be called “right-wing Labor”. Pro-protectionist (much closer to the position of his friend Deakin than to that of Reid and his Free Traders), a staunch advocate of the White Australia Policy, committed to gradual, industrial change in the working conditions and wages of the working man (hence his constant championing of Arbitration and Conciliation reform whilst PM). On the enduring question of the ALP and socialism, Watson, a moderate and mediator by temperament, eschewed a revolutionary approach, seeing himself rather as a proponent of “evolutionary (Christian) socialism”[5]. At his core Watson was no ideologue, he was far from being a fan of the later, quasi-messianic NSW Labor leader Jack Lang and his style of politics. Not a fuzzy idealist either, Watson was a thorough-going pragmatist (albeit a well-liked one), ever happy to do deals and compromise with the Free Trade Party and especially the Protectionists to try to retain Labor’s hold on power.
Labor front runner from Double Bay with Van Dyke beard
The almost universally highly regarded Watson held on to the leadership for a few more years[6] but in 1910, at around the time his successor Andrew Fisher was forming the first Federal Labor government to rule in its own right, Watson was leaving parliament. One reason for this decision was to spend more time with his wife, the other was purely financial, MPs in those days were not handsomely remunerated. Watson’s early business ventures were unsuccessful, eg, investing in a South African gold mine, land speculation at Sutherland in the southern districts of Sydney. More stable income was to be had when he became a director of a wool and textile enterprise – he was able to put his prestige as an ex-PM and his political connections to good use as a lobbyist for the business[7].
Into WWI Watson continued to play a behind-the-scenes role in the ALP, allying himself with the new Labor leader and PM, William Morris Hughes. The 1916 Conscription debate, saw both Hughes and Watson on the wrong side of the argument … calling for the introduction of compulsory military service by Australians in the war, a stand bitterly opposed by the great bulk of the Party (also decisively rejected by the public at large in two referendums). In the internecine conflict Hughes factionalised the ALP, defecting in 1917 to form a new (non-Labor) party, the Nationalists and holding on the prime minister-ship. Watson joined Hughes in the new party (both he and Watson were expelled from the ALP for their actions). Watson spent the last part of the war enthusiastically trying to get a soldier settlers’ scheme for returned Great War veterans off the ground[8].
In the 1920s Watson played a leading role in establishing and guiding the NRMA (National Roads and Motorists Association), and in the formation of Yellow Cabs (taxi service), and in the 1930s, AMPOL (Australian Motorists Petrol Company), all of which illustrate the former PM’s interest in motor transport. One of his other interests, cricket, led to him being appointed a trustee of the Sydney Cricket Ground in Australia[9].
Chris Watson’s life journey took him from obscure and somewhat clandestine origins in Chile to a printing apprenticeship in Dunedin, NZ, to labour politics in Sydney and ultimately to the highest political office in Australia during the formative years of Federation. His brief stint in the top job (a mere 15 weeks) and early retirement at 42 from representative politics, leaves him as one of the lesser known PMs but one that nonetheless played a pioneering role in Labor leadership and in the shaping of Australia’s national identity.
Watson’s trajectory after 1916, if you were to be critical, could be seen as one in which he abandoned labour for the business world, and for the party of big business, the Nationalists (a choice of nationalism over social democracy it could be described) … clearly why, despite his achievements, he has never quite made it into the Pantheon of ALP political heroes.
Valpo view
Postscript:
When I undertook my day trip to Valparaíso, our tour guide, Adrián, who was equipped with excellent English and organisational skills, informed me of this little feature he incorporated into his tours. If he was taking an Australian group of tourists (as with my one on that particular day), he would tailor his commentary of the places we visit to include a sprinkling of references to Australia (or say to Mexico or Italian, etc whatever the case may be). Such as pointing out the concentrations of imported Eucalyptus Globulus among the indigenous trees in the Andean valley. When we got to the city of the Porteños I casually asked the knowledgable guide if he was aware that an Australian prime minister was actually born right there in Valparaíso. Adrián, clearly someone interested in the wider world, was surprised, even doubting of such a claim. “No, really?!?” he inquired disbelievingly (how could this have escaped the meticulous Adrián!). Immediately he googled it on his iPhone and gleefully confirmed that I was right! Chuffed at picking up such a handy little revelatory fact, he added with a boyish enthusiasm that he would mention it to his next group of Aussie tourists. I laughed and replied, “Don’t worry, even though they come from there, they won’t have heard of Watson either“!
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❈ a superfluous distinction of course given that as far as is known, short of a forensic examination of Hansard, Watson was almost certainly the only Australian political figure to be born in Valparaíso
◙ all other Australian prime ministers born outside Australia came from the British Isles
¤ the specific trigger for the government’s downfall was Watson’s failure to secure a double dissolution from the Gov-Gen.
[1] the Scottish myth was sustained throughout Watson’s political career, eg, the (Sydney) Bulletin lavished praise on him when he became the government’s treasurer in 1904 – concluding that “public finances are in safe Caledonian hands”, The Bulletin, 28 April 1904, cited in J Hawkins, ‘Chris Watson: Australia’s second Treasurer’, The Treasury: Australian Government, (Economic Roundup – Winter 2007), www.archive.treasury.gov.au
[2] B Nairn, ‘Watson, John Christian (Chris) (1867-1941)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 12, (MUP), 1990
[3] at the same point in time the British Labour Party (BLP) had precisely four MPs out of a total of 670 in the House of Commons, and the first BLP UK government didn’t occur until the 1930s, R McMullin, ‘First in the World: Australia’s Watson Labor Government’, Department of Parliamentary Services, (2005), www.aph.gov.au/
[4] ibid. Reid’s term, similarly, was one of only 11 months … Watson’s and Reid’s terms were characteristic of the early Commonwealth governments – minority rule, composite, multi-party based governments and (consequently) short-lived
[5] Hawkins, op.cit.
[6] Even when he was PM or Leader of the Opposition, Watson was still highly responsive to his local constituents in Bland (and later South Sydney) and worked tirelessly to address their “grass roots” needs, ‘Chris Watson’ (Australian Prime Ministers), Museum of Australian Democracy, www.primeministers.moadoph.gov.au
[7] A Grassby & S Ordoñez, John Watson, (1999)
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid.
On our last day in the United Arab Emirates our tour guide took us on an afternoon drive for a spot of dune-buggy “rally driving” in the sandhills. Well, that was the pretext for the decision to first head for the hinter-hills … desert dwellers with SUVs?
Desert City
Actually, when we got to the designer desert track we spent an hour or so hot-footing it up-and-down in 4WD land rovers. The first time our Emirati driver drove over the edge of a steep ‘wave’ of sand and the vehicle dropped straight down, it did feel pretty ‘hairy’ … but it was all quite safe as the 4WDs were equipped with roll bars and the drivers kept completing the same circuit countless times till we got rather bored with it. We then stopped on a sand ridge and admired the sunset for a while.
After the desert romp we went to a camel park and Bedouin fort camp … I wondered if this was a “fair dinkum” Bedouin encampment or if it had been slightly sanitised or ‘Disneyfied’ for tourists. Seeing the old wooden walls of the fortification though, did manage to conjure up a sense of the Beau Gestes for me!
Those visitors that didn’t want to do the camel ride (speaking personally, I had sated my taste for camel rides striding high atop a collection of even-toed ungulates in Egypt on an earlier occasion), went for a combined dinner and show. The eating conditions were pretty rudimentary (one tick for authenticity at least!) – we were seated on large sand-filled cushions which were resting on ancient-looking strips of carpet bleached dry of colour by endless exposure to the harsh sun … however I would concede that the meal was quite good (falafel & kebab roll) except for the rather tasteless penne.
The show itself was only of short duration – the main part was a bearded male dancer in a colourful, traditional costume, a Arab tunic and a sort of umbrella dress (come to think of it he looked a bit like Max Klinger from Mash, or at least he seemed to share the TV character’s wardrobe tastes!).
The dancer twirled around in circles – in one direction – ever more frenetically. He did this for so long I thought he would surely have to unwind in the opposite direction for the equivalent amount of time before he would be able to regain his balance! … but he was OK. Halfway through his twirling performance his whole outfit lit up like New Year’s Eve … at this point for some reason, randomly, the idea of suicide bombers came into my mind – maybe it was the way he was self-activating the light show (ie, himself) by repeatedly flicking a switch on and off! Fortunately for all the show ended peacefully and we eventually returned to our more comfortable beds in the hotel.
Upon arriving at our Dubai hotel, the Mecure Gold, I tried to exchange some of my money for the local currency, but I couldn’t interest the next-door Islamic Bank on Al Mina Rd in my AUDs. They directed me to another bank “five minutes” down the street but after walking for more that five minutes in the extreme midday heat and not spotting any banking establishments lurking amongst the sand, I gave up, retreating back to the hotel and decided to wait till later in the day when we made the trip into Downtown Dubai.
Mall & Burj
At the supersize Dubai Mall we found a money exchanger just inside the entrance. The woman inside the glass booth thinking I was trying to change USDs at first offered me AED2.63 to the $ but when I clarified that I had AUDs she offered 2.65 (to my surprise!). I gratefully and swiftly accepted lest she realise her error (a very rare victory over the money changers!). Equipped with my enhanced sum of dirhams I found we could only shop, not eat or drink (alcohol) in public, ie the Mall was public … Ramadan was still going on!
Dubai Mall or “Sandy Malldom” (an apt metaphor for Dubai in its entirety), is a massive place, numerous elongated passageways crisscrossing each other all over. The Mall is a tourist epicentre of course – “The Diver” waterfall fountains, an Airbus simulator, Arab-themed village, etc. The thing that gets most attention though in the Mall (unless you’re a terminal shopaholic) is the Aquarium. Interestingly one side of the Aquarium is fully visible from outside through a huge glass wall facing the passageways on several levels … so you don’t actually need to pay and go inside to see unless you want to experience the special features – eg, tank dive with the sharks, etc.
All manner of piscean life can be viewed from the transparent wall – sharks, hammer-heads, stingrays and multifarious smaller fish. We saw scuba divers swimming among the sea creatures, cleaning the gigantic pool with long blue hoses. The neoprene-clad divers were getting unnerving dead-eye stares from the sharks. Hopefully for their sake the human “Creepy-crawleys” do their work AFTER the members of the lamniade family have been fed!
Whilst we were in Downtown Dubai we plunged into high tourism mode by taking in the obligatory Burj (Tower) Khalifa, at 829m (give or take a half-metre) the world’s highest skyscraper/human-made structure.
We did the standard thing, paid to go up to the Observation Deck, Level 124. If you want a higher view you can go up to the top viewing deck at Level 148 (out of 163 levels all up) – which will cost you about AED350.
View from Level 124But level 124 was high enough for us, the view from there was like looking at a space age city – vast modern buildings and vast intersecting arterial freeways, surrounded by an ocean of sand – made to look all the more Sci-Fi by a constant haze circling around the periphery. The waterworks of the Dubai Fountain was a spectacular hydro-sight from above. Back on ground level the Burj has an interesting info display on the history of the building’s construction, charting it stage-by-stage and metre-by-metre.
D. Museum
This small museum is a former fort (Al Fahidi), which was founded in 1787 and is the oldest surviving building in Dubai. I especially liked the various exhibits, dioramas depicting everyday life in the desert … mannequins of artisans, merchants & vendors at work. The series of black-and-white period pictures from the 1930s onwards, are a good indicator of how Dubai has grown & developed since its days as a modest village settlement.
The fort is square-shaped & towered, in the open courtyard are some aged cannons and a summer hut composed of palm fronds (known as an Arish). On display both outside and inside the walls are dhows (traditional boats). The museum provides a good grab of local history amidst all the newness of Dubai.
The fort-cum-museum is very close to the city’s principal waterway, Dubai Khor (or Dubai Creek). We went on a traditional water taxi (abra) ride on the Creek … more of the old contrasting with the new! From near the fort we churned over to another part of the city (historically the creek has been viewed as splitting Dubai into two section – Deira and Bur).
On a conservation note for Dubai, the end of the creek has a waterbird and wildlife sanctuary. The abra is a pretty basic, old form of watercraft but it got us across the creek reasonably quickly so we could spend plenty of time visiting the network of street and arcade vendors alongside the creek.
PostScript: The City’s back-story:
Sheikhs from the Al Maktoum Dynasty (hailing from the dominant Bani Yas clan), have ruled Dubai since 1833, taking the title of Emir of Dubai. Before 1971 Dubai was part of the Trucial (treaty) States, a group of Arab Gulf states under a British Protectorate (governed via British India). Unlike other parts of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai was late in discovering its oil bonanza (1966), but on the back of it, the city since that time has transformed itself into a economic powerhouse❈ and a model of modernisation, if not exactly liberalism.
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❈ according to Business Insider Australia, UAE is the third richest country in the world (2016) with a GDP per capita of $57,744
A significant part of Budapest’s special appeal and charm lies in its plethora of natural hot springs. The “City of Spas” boasts something in the vicinity of 120 therapeutic baths … signifying a rich history of centuries of hydro-treatment and leisure for its citizens. Many of the thermal baths are a legacy of the Ottoman occupation. Király (King), Rudas and Csárzár (Veli Bej) were built as Turkish baths and still operate as such today.
The Széchenyi Medicinal Baths are the largest in Europe and one of the continent’s most famous thermal pool complexes with a history dating back over 100 years. It reminded me of the old Ramsgate Baths 50 years ago, but with a liberal measure of grandeur and style about it✦. This place really brings the punters in, all ages and types. It is open every day of the year and I reckon some locals do come every day! Its function and importance to the average Budapester is more analogous with that of the democratic beach in Summer in an Australian coastal fringe city.
Széchenyi is very large … and crowded. It is hot, a landscape of cement and water littered with people either sunbathing or standing round in small groups in pools. Many pools in fact! Three large outdoor pools plus 15 smaller indoor thermal ones all up. The configuration of the outdoor pools is a conventional rectangular pool in the middle, bookended by two half-circular ones.
I liked the Baths’ architecture a lot – grand, very ornate with arched columns with the complex as a whole set in the middle of a pleasant city park which the baths share with a circus and an amusement park. On the left side of the pool, near the Pepsi sign, groups of older men, half-immersed in water, were busying themselves attentively in games of chess.
The water was warm to quite hot in parts, up to 38°! It was very refreshing and relaxing, especially when you perch yourself for a while under one of the water spouts in the shadow of classical sculptures. But I couldn’t stay in the open for long though … too many people, far too hot and the poolside areas lacked for shaded spots.
One avenue of escape from the heat and potential sunburn was to venture inside to one of the smaller (also crowded) thermal pools where the water temperature was a more tolerable 27°. The locker system in place in the Baths seemed haphazard, rows of lockers up and down different alleys and different floors. It was very antiquated, looked like it was designed in 1913, annoyingly cumbersome and detracted a bit from the experience. When you pay to enter they give you a plastic armband to access the locker (and your gear), the object is to try not to lose it during the water-bound activities.
It was good to experience the environment of a typical Budapest thermal spring, even if I found the aesthetics of the baths more rewarding than the actual swimming, or more accurately, wading.
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✦ the Széchenyi building complex has been variously described – from: looking like a Baroque palace to a “wedding cake” building.
Staying on the Buda side of Budapest (at the Mercure) meant we had only a short walk up the hill to take in the views of Budapest from high up. Prominent on Várhegy (Castle Hill) as it is known is St Matthias Church where the kings of Hungary were crowned … just across the square from here is an imposing viewing terrace complete with towers overlooking the Danube.
Fisherman’s Bastion
Originally there was a fortification here that was part of the city castle walls manned in the Middle Ages by city fishermen, who following a 13th century raid from a Mongolian army, were responsible for keeping watch on invaders (hence the name “Fisherman’s Bastion”). The present, silver/white coloured structure has a Medieval appearance but is actually Neo-Gothic (dating only from the end of the 19th century). The impression it conveys is that of a fairytale castle, like something improbable you’d find in Disneyland (some visitors have noted the similarity to it of the Walt Disney logo). The staircase has interesting old wall relief-sculptures worthy of examination. Access to the terrace is free of charge but if you want to go up to the turrets for higher views there is a fee. Below the parapet the land drops away sharply into a pleasant park close to the river. The castle viewed by night, when all lit up, is at its spectacular best!
The commercial side
Whilst we were visiting the Bastion we went downstairs into the narrow, damp, aged basement and had a viewing of a doco recounting the history of Hungary. It was very informative, especially the story of “The White Stag”, a Hungarian creation myth about how twins, Hanor and Magor, founded the Hungarian nation by accident whilst out hunting the aforementioned white stag. The stag suddenly disappeared and the two hunters found themselves in a strange land where they met, kidnapped and married two Sarmatian princesses – thus uniting three peoples – the Huns, the Magyars & the Alans. The film was an enjoyable and educational diversion.
On our first full day in Budapest we did the drive-round on the “Big Bus”, giving visitors a concise snapshot of the scope and size of Budapest. One of the things you’ll easily notice from the top deck of the bus is the contrasting physical difference between the hillier Buda side (especially around the Castle District) and its expanse of parklands and the larger Pest side with its mainly flat contours. The commercial hub of the city is concisely encapsulated within Pest.
Parliament
We did the combined bus/boat trip with a cruise down the Danube later on. The river cruise was the standout part of the city tour. It was ideal to take in the views on either side, lots of grand architectural sights (eg, the London-influenced Parliament building, the Disneylandish Fisherman’s Bastion, etc). Many of Budapest’s most impressive buildings are clearly visible from the river. The experience of cruising along the Danube here is superior to the equivalent cruise in Vienna (or for that matter to doing a river cruise in Prague).
The free walking tour was at least equally valuable in yielding insights into Budapest. Our 25-y-o guide was very helpful, took us to many of the attractions the Pest district has to offer. Vaci Utia, the main boulevard was basically an invitation for indulgent mega-shopping for gifts and souvenirs – coupled with countless rows of seating for outdoor eating. Of course we sampled the local sweet specialities like the apple strudel (there was a bit of a Viennese feel to the pastry shops and both places seem to be “sweet tooth” zones).
The architecture in Vaci was an interesting mix of old buildings with some ultra-new glass monoliths. We went past the famous (sic) MacDonalds’ fast food place … unremarkable looking but famous, our guide informed us, because it was the first one to open ANYWHERE in the Eastern Bloc. Such was the novelty of Maccas at that time (late 1980s) it was apparently THE place to be seen in Budapest. When it opened diners actually had to make reservations to eat there, and when they did, they turned up in their finest clobber!⌖
Buda Funicular
The walking tour ended near the famous Chain Bridge (Széchenyi Lánchíd) and we walked over to the Buda side past the bridge’s ‘protective’ lions. This presented the opportunity to take a swift ride up the steep castle hill in the city’s funicular (Budavári Sikló), which reminded me of my experience ascending and descending Chile’s ascensores in Valparaíso.
Another mega-shopping place is the Grand Markets … old, multi-level hangar or gigantic barn-like structure, with merchandise ranging from fruit and veg, fish to clothing and accessories. Budapest has its own version of Aldi (Hofer) and more surprisingly a branch of the South African supermarket giant, SPAR!
I noticed that the local ‘fuzz’ wear cute if slightly ludicrous little red berets … to be honest though I doubt if the experiences of Syrian asylum seekers in 2016 found them to be at all ‘cute’.
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⌖ the guide in recounting this anecdote added that because the opening of the first MacDonalds preceded by a short time the tumultuous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, locals like to refer to the events thus: “the Golden Arches went up before the Hammer and Sickle was torn down” (a statement with lots of symbolic resonance given the weighty extent to which Budapest and other former Eastern Bloc cities have been westernised and commercialised in the period since).
One of the tourism high points and cultural gems on a visit to the Austrian capital is the Spanish Riding School (Spanische Hofreitschule) with its history of over 450 years of continuous operation. The white show-horses are bred in Piber (Western Styrian region of Austria). In Vienna they perform in the Winter Riding School at the Hofburg Wien.
The Lipizzaners with a brace of Napoleons
We didn’t catch the famous horsey show but we managed to spot them in their exercising yard prancing up and down. Whilst we were there the Lipizzaners (as the Spanish horses are known) were taken out for a canter through the cobblestone streets of the plaza. There was a brief moment of excitement when one of the white stallions did a runner, giving its handler the slip and tried to gallop off in pursuit of free range, riderless freedom. Its liberty was short-lived however as it was quickly reined in. The riders in the military outfits must feel a bit like Napoleon, parading about on slick steeds wearing their bicornes (loopy-looking two-cornered hats). Here’s hoping the practice doesn’t lead to a complex!
Another, very different (street) ‘school’ in Vienna, devoid of the glamour of show-horses but with the same ‘professional’ levels of dedication and expertise, is the ignoble art of pick-pocketing. The part of Vienna we stayed at, Westbahnhof, was obviously not the “old moneyed”, elité part of Austria’s capital. Quite the reverse, it was pretty scabrous and untouristy, clearly a migrant area. The entrance to the Westbahnhof train station which was sporting a new modernist facade (somewhat brutalist in taste) was a bit of a magnet for unsavoury types, assorted crazies and dodgy guys milling round it, as well as the standard gypsy beggars. Westbahnhof was also well fixed for grimy lowbrow Turkish eateries.
I was returning to the city centre having already been in earlier in the day and seen Stephansdom (St Stephan’s Cathedral) with its distinctive-patterned mosaic tiled roof; the Stephansplatz, densely populated with Mozart-themed totes flogging tickets to The Marriage of Figaro outside the subway exit, and on the other side of the square, lined up on the street, a row of fiakers (gaily decorated, horse-drawn hire carriages).
I boarded the U-Bahn for the journey to Stephansplatz. Standing up for the short distance (five stops) I suspiciously cast my eyes round the carriage which was sparsely populated. Just the single, odd, scruffy character five metres across the carriage. Just before we reached the Stephansplatz station, the guy darted back past into the heart of the carriage, I thought nothing of it at the time. I exited the train. As I walked along the platform I had a vague sense of passengers following behind me. As I passed a garbage bin I heard the noise of a clanging of metal-on-metal, but again, it didn’t occur to me that there was anything untoward happening.
Wien West U-bahn
Up the top of the station stairs I once again sidestepped my way through the strategically placed Mozart hawkers and paused to take a photo of the fiaker horses against a backdrop of Stephansdom. I reached for my Samsung but it wasn’t there! Incredulous that I couldn’t find it, I checked and doubled checked all of my pockets, but to no avail. I proceeded to search my carry bag compartment-by-compartment … same result! I remembered clearly I had it on the train, I had glanced at it on the way to my destination and had returned it in clear sight of all in the carriage to my side pocket (in hindsight, the fateful error!).
I caught the train back to Westbahnhof, retracing the course of the journey in my mind to try to fathom where exactly I parted company with my digital device. All I could be sure of is that it happened somewhere betwixt leaving the train and climbing the escalator – a deft, invisible hand, a blink of an eye and like magic it disappeared from my pocket. I truly didn’t feel a thing!
Back at the hotel I spent a frustrating several hours trying unsuccessfully both online and by phone to contact my mobile data supplier back in Australia. By the time I got through to the hotline they had just closed their service for that day … that meant another seven hours wait till 6am East Coast Australian time to try again.
Although holding zero hope for the recovery of my Samsung, for insurance purposes I decided to report the theft to the local constabulary. The inspector on duty had heard it all before, all too often! He explained how the thieves operate, in teams distracting the mark’s attention, sometimes using attractive young women, etc., universal formula really. I didn’t bother to read the police report of the incident the inspector gave me until I returned home, not realising till that time … it was of course written in German!
Our coach took the M3 expressway from Budapest to Bratislava. Most of the roadway between the two Central European capitals was a vista of seemingly endless fields of Van Gogh-like sunflowers. When we got to the Slovakian border we were able to seamlessly cross over thanks to both countries being EU signees of the Schengen Agreement … no vehicle stops, no passport checks, etc. Fast-forward just six months, there would no such easy passage for Syrian asylum seekers trying to make it to refugee-friendly Germany.
We parked up the hill near the tramlines and walked down the ancient looking steps to the Town. Old Bratislava was composed of a “rabbit warren” of roughly cobbled lanes and narrow streets leading directly or less directly to the town square. The first thing that caught my eye (near the under-road tunnel) was a smoking salon, decked out with comfy chairs much like a cafe (actually it might be characterised as a “smoking cafe with coffee optional”). I was bit surprised to find this establishment here, only because I’d heard from a Slovak acquaintance in Australia that smoking parlour shops had been outlawed in Slovakian cities, but here it was, couples happily chugging away at the weed in relaxing surroundings. Mind you, they were lots of other public places anyway that you could freely smoke anywhere in the town (so a shop specialising in smoking seemed a bit superfluous to this outsider!).
a small city with street after street packed with outdoor beer taverns
It was very hot on the day we visited (about 35-36 degrees), so most of the locals were content to sit round drinking their pivo of choice in the numerous bars (vyčapy) all over the old town. One of the cobblestone street in particular was a kind of “booze bingers’ alley”, wall-to-wall liquor swilling outlets strung out along a dark, dingy bar strip.
One especially popular bar (called, what else? … “the Dubliner”) had the right idea in the heat, it had affixed a sprinkler system of sorts to the underside of the shop awning allowing the sweltering patrons the relief of jets of soft droplets of water whilst they were imbibing. Budapest had a similar thing … a number of Váci utca restaurants were equipped with fans blowing gentle mists of cold vapour (perfumed?) on to diners.
Cultural pointer: Beer drinking du jour is the norm in Bratislava – and cheaper than H2o I found out! … when finally we were driven inside one of the bars by the unrelenting heat, the spring water I ordered cost me €1.80 whereas the half-litre of beer my companions both had cost them a mere €1.20 each!?!
From Bratislava’s central square, tourists can explore the town on a dinky toy train (in keeping with the ‘Lilliputian’ scale of the Slovakian capital). Many of Bratislava’s public buildings seemed a little tired, in need of a facelift or a paint job – or both.
Among the locals, especially the younger women, I noticed a high percentage of blonds (very much in line with what I observed in the Czech Republic). Amusingly one stopped me in the street to ask me, in animated Slovakian, for directions! I am getting used to being mistook for a local but it still bemuses me why.
Bratislavsky Hrad from Staré Mêsto
On the north side of the Danube (about 15 minutes walk from the Old Town) is what is probably the city’s most impressive historic structure, the formidable Bratislava Castle (Bratislavsky hrad). The original castle dates from the early 10th century and has passed through the hands of Moravian, Hungarian, Czech and Slovakian rulers. Its historical strategic importance lies in its elevated location on the fringe of the vast Carpathian Mountains.
Footnote: Tiny Slovakia cf. Even Tinier Slovenia
We visitors to Europe from the other side of the world tend to get these two small Central/Southern European republics mixed up so often. Which is understandable※※ but still unfortunate…I imagine this misidentification might annoy the Slovaks and Slovenes somewhat, considering that the recent history of both peoples, achieving independence after decades of being consigned to positions of secondary importance in their respective former, larger multi-ethnic states (just don’t go to one or both of these countries and repeat this common confusion to the locals!)
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※※ the similarity of the Slovenian 🇸🇮 and Slovak 🇸🇰 flags doesn’t help (Australia and New Zealand have the same issue)
“Czechy Crumbly”, well not exactly, but that’s what I thought the name of this place sounded like when I first heard it was on the itinerary of our trip to the Czech Republic. This small town 170km south of the Czech capital isn’t exactly crumbling but it is very old … and exceedingly picturesque. The combination of its beauty, charm and size has led many visitors to describe it as a miniature version of Prague.
CK: Zámek Krummau
The 13th century Gothic castle (Zámek), on the left bank of the Vltava River, is the magnet for most visitors to Český Krumlov (or Krumlaw). The castle is a long complex of buildings (40+), courtyards (5!) & 10ha of Baroque gardens, its entirety stretches from a lower point near an old part of the city (Latran) through the Red Gate up to the upper castle. As you would imagine with a grand structure so historically significant, the castle has the customary UNESCO accreditation.
Most visitors pay to clamber up the 162 steps of the Castle Tower staircase to glimpse the commanding, 360 degree-views of CK. Gazing east across the river you can see the orangey-yellow terracotta roofs of the Inner Town (Centrum). The Inner Town sits on a curved nub of land which follows the contours of the winding river and offers a smorgasbord of quaint medieval buildings.
Below the walkway and the Castle Tower (Zámez Čnít), between the first and second courtyards, there is a bear moat with a few remaining brown bears prowling solemnly around its confines. Bears have been kept here since the days in which the city was ruled by the House of Rožmberk (Rosenberg)(Rožmberk Castle itself is some 25km south of CK).
Cloak Bridge
One of the most distinctive architectural features which connects the Upper Castle with the Castle Theatre is the Cloak Bridge which has apartments and a viewing platform resting on huge, stone arched foundations resembling viaducts.
Centrum has lots of cobblestoned back lanes full of cafés and bars, but something also worth visiting is the museum dedicated to the Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele whose edgy, controversial figurative works earned him the ire of the socially conservative burghers of Český Krumlov during the two years he lived in the city (just before WWI).
CK – the rivers runs through it!
CK is a pleasant, picture postcard sort of place, stocked to the rafters with tourist trade wares. The Vltava which looked more like a stream than a river where we were, apparently has rafting listed among its visitor activities. Judging by how still and tranquil the water was, unless its about “slo-mo” rafting, the serious stuff must be a long way downstream from the city weir.
The historic street of Nerudova in the Lesser Quarter used to be part of the “Royal Way” (Královská cesta), the traditional route taken by Bohemian kings to their palace coronations. Today, this is the hilly route taken by countless tourists from the Charles Bridge to reach Prague Castle. It’s a steep walk for sure up Nerudova ulice, a winding cobblestone street, but it wasn’t as taxing a walk as we had been forewarned it would be, especially as you can stop at regular intervals to look at the many points of interest on the way.
Nerudova contains many impressive historic buildings, grand houses, hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and foreign embassies to see. A unique feature of the street is that all of the historic buildings have a distinguishing name and symbol attached to their facade (this feature predates the actual numbering of houses in the street).
Pražsky Castle
Pražsky Hrad (Prague Castle) is no miniature palace, the whole site stretches out for a distance of some 570m or so in length. In fact the Guinness Book of Records ranks it as the world’s largest palace. The castle’s lofty location is undoubtedly its prime asset. The castle offers great views of Malá Strana and particularly of the eastern part of Hradčany. The whole complex, surrounded by extensive gardens, contains in addition to the 9th century castle, two cathedrals (St Vitus and St George), a riding school, Queen’s Summer Palace and a Treasury holding King Wenceslas’ Crown Jewels and other treasures (Prague’s equivalent to the Tower of London).
The large palace forecourt is the place to be if you want to catch the changing of the guard with its bright greyish-blue uniforms (during the summer months on the hour: 0700-2000). Currently the castle/palace is the presidential residence of the Czech Republic.
Hrad steps
The whole area around Castle Hill, Pražsky Hrad and the other historic buildings like Lobkowiczky Palác on the hill is known as Hradčany. The core of this district is the Castle complex and its series of courtyards and gardens. The elevated location of Hradčany affords views back across the Vltava River to the Old and New Towns of Prague. There are two sets of old stairways leading to and from Castle Hill … coming down via old Zámecke schody, even though there are over 200 large steps to descend is much easier than the cobblestoned walk up!
The Gothic style Charles Bridge over the Vltava River connects the Old Town (Stare Mêsto) with the Lesser Town (Malá Strana) and Hradčany (Prague Castle). It’s construction, the Stone Bridge, was begun by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in 1357. It’s a wide bridge (nearly 10 metres wide from wall-to-wall) but it needs to be considering the ongoing pedestrian congestion on it.
During the day a constant phalanx of sightseers can be observed moving over it at snail pace – or not moving at all which it seems at times! Strewn all along the balustrade on either side at regular intervals are statues of saints (30 in all). So liberally adorned with statues is the bridge that you’d think they’d have found room to include the patron saint of bridge traffic himself! The locals’ favourite statue is St John of Nepomuk – the done thing if you are Czech is to rub the figure’s limbs as you pass it for good luck (just like the Moscovites religiously do in the underground metro stations in the Russian capital).
The old cobbled road bridge is full of street vendors selling food or more commonly souvenirs (small paintings and drawings of Prague city scenes are popular items but also other crafty trinkets). The bridge is also a favourite haunt for various musicians who ply their trade in the hope of attracting the generosity of appreciative tourists. As we crossed one particular lively folk band caught our eye, they were an eclectic, motley crew – dressed like gypsies doubling as extras from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, complete with bongo drums and Scottish bagpipes.
Old Town Bridge Tower
Ancient looking towers bookend either end of Karlüv most … on the Lesser Town side the tower has the sole remaining remnant of the original Romanesque (Judith’s) bridge. On the Stare Mêsto side stands by far the most famous of Prague towers – the Old Town Bridge Tower is a magnificent Gothic structure although it looks its age, blackened by damage by 17th century Swedish marauders.
Medical advice for anyone suffering badly from ochlophobia: to avoid the “football stadium” crowds on the Charles Bridge you need to visit early AM or after nightfall.
After our coach deposited us at the central railway station we followed the tramlines from it by foot along Masarykova which took us through the middle of historic Brno. Masarykova connected with a very big square called Zelny trh, which was pretty threadbare with people the day that we visited. There was just a few stall-holders set up in the middle, selling flowers and some fruit and veg, far from the hive of activity we encountered in Prague and Bratislava. The market, known in English as the Cabbage (or Green) Market, seemed to be undergoing some kind of refurbishment as there were metal fences erected cordoning off part of Zelny trh.
Looking around the wide open square I noticed there were lots of these cute little three-wheel yellow ‘taxis’ darting all over the place … they looked like cramped smart cars on bicycle wheels. There was a number of fine historic buildings to see, especially the Dietrichstein Palace, the Hotel Grandeeza & some churches. I understand that under the square though, there is much more of interest, a big underground labyrinth with cellars which historically Moravians have stored food and aged wine (Brno’s favourite alcoholic beverage). I would have liked to explore this subterranean realm but unfortunately this ‘whirlwind’ tour of Brno didn’t allow for it.
One of the star attractions in the square is Stará Radnice (Old Town Hall), one of if not the most historic of Brno structures (dating from c. 1240). The Town Hall is famous for its structural deformity, a distinctly bent middle pinnacle on the Gothic portal of the facade (a city legend has it that the designer of the building deliberately added this skew-whiff feature because the town officials reneged on the fee for the work). Another associated legend with the Town Hall is the legend of the Brno ‘Dragon’ – which is actually a crocodile attached to the ceiling! (Cz: Krokodyl).
We ventured into the Moravian Museum (Moravské zemské muzeum) but didn’t feel the urge to look at yet more paleontological and archaeological exhibits (BTDT), so we found a little offshoot section the Dietrichstein Palace where we could have morning tea refreshments. This place, called the Air Café and Bar, was good for coffee and brunch (it was 10:30-ish and although the cafe had a good selection of cocktails we thought it was too early to ask for the “breakfast wines” menu!).
WWII nostalgia?
Aside from the cocktails, what got my attention in the cafe was its World War II theme. The walls were adorned with a colourful display of Czech WWII pilot paraphernalia. There were war propaganda posters, old b&w photos of aircraft and crew, with the RAF and Churchill also prominently displayed … I was reminded to some extent of the interior of the Eagle pub in Cambridge which is redolent of the British and American pilots who frequented it during the War, however the Air Café was much more chock full of WWII and more specifically Battle of Britain memorabilia – in a way the Café is a Czechoslovakian homage, not just to Czech WWII fighter pilots, but to the whole Battle of Britain. Well worth a visit.
Mêniń Town Gate
We spent our remaining brief time in Brno wandering around the streets and lanes off Masarykova. To the east of the wide Freedom Square is the Mênín Gate (Mênínska Brána), another equally historic remnant, the only surviving gate of the Old City. It’s also the only fragment of the system of historic city walls that remains. The Gate is now an archaeological museum.
All in all the thing that struck me about Brno was that it was a pretty low impact town, tourist wise … or maybe it was just because it was Tuesday.
Before coming to Wieliczka on the outskirts of Kraków in Southern Poland, my idea of what it might be like in a salt mine was informed largely by Hollywood and the Cold War. Hollywood – didn’t Ben-Hur (AKA Chuck Heston) start his working life in the service of the Roman Emperor as a lowly salt miner on starvation wages? I remember it was about the dreariest part of the whole film! Cold War – all those Western jokes inspired by Gulag life in the Soviet Union about political prisoners being sent to a Siberian salt mine by the Bolsheviks, real gallows humour but with a distinctively sobering edge to it when you realise it really happened. So, taking a tour down a salt mine didn’t sound like fun – cold, dark, dank, claustrophobically tight for space, suffocatingly discomforting. But Wieliczka turned out to be a fascinating place to visit!
From the top we had to descend down a narrow wooden staircase over 35 flights of stairs (fortunately you don’t have to return via this route as there are lifts that take you up). Once at the operational level you discover that part of the erstwhile salt mine is actually a huge sculpture palace/museum … the older pieces were carved out of the natural rock by miners, the newer ones by contemporary artists. Many of the salt sculptures have a religious theme (the Last Supper, Pope John-Paul II).
The underground tour, 327m below the surface, goes for three kilometres and it looks like there a lot of space down there, not as cramped as I imagined it would be. Whilst doing the tour though it is hard to appreciate just how big the mine is (287m long in fact!). The tourist route (there is also a pilgrims’ route and a miners’ route) takes us a tiny fraction of the mine’s entirety. At various points of the mine passageway there are dozens of sculptures of historical and mythological figures and an underground lake too.
The mine’s highlight is its four magnificent salt chapels (Wieliczka has been characterised as a vast underground salt cathedral!). Even the impressive chandeliers in the chapels are made from salt. It’s amazing to reflect that Kopalnia soli Wieliczka yielded the everyday commodity of table salt from the 13th century continuously till 2007 when it ceased production. Whilst you are undertaking the tour you might want to hold off on buying any of the salt mine souvenirs at the underground kiosk. The stalls outside sell most of the same momentos for less than half the price (even the shop at the exit at ground level is cheaper than the kiosk).
“Graduation Tower“
Outside the salt mine is an attractive park setting, and across from the park is the Graduation Tower, a fortress like structure 22.5m high which is a pointer to the fact that Wieliczka was a spa town in the 19th century. People visit the Tower separately (apparently) to inhale brine for relief from respiratory ailments. The salt mine is a UNESCO Heritage Site and is reachable by bus or car from the city of Kraków.
Whilst I was anticipating my upcoming trip to Poland with much relish, as to Eastern Europe as a whole, the prospect of visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau site wasn’t one I was looking forward to. I wasn’t at all keen on visiting the former Nazi concentration camp … maybe I have been fed on too much of a vicarious experience courtesy of the SBS network’s televisual obsession (so it appears at times) with all things to do the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II!
To me it was an unappetising and gruesome prospect … but it was after all an option – it was my choice. In the end a combination of firm encouragement from my young Catholic Polish friend and the fact that we were going to be close to the site once in Kraków itself (75km west of the city), I decided to do it, reasoning that going all the way to Southern Poland and not including it in the itinerary seemed like something I might regret later. Incidentally, some Polish people told me that nothing raises the blood pressure of Poles like hearing Auschwitz-Birkenau described as a ‘Polish’ concentration camp, as some non-Polish tourists have occasionally and very erroneously done. To Poles it was always and unequivocally a German or Nazi concentration camp – which happens to be located within the borders of present-day Poland!
Today, Auschwitz is a much-visited museum and a memorial to the victims of the Third Reich. There was a crowded, chaotic scene at the entrance, long lines of tourists queuing up. Eventually we got inside the building after making it past the bag checks and scanning of the heavy security screening at the gate. It was an eerie feeling walking through those notorious, infamous gates of Auschwitz I (notwithstanding that the ominous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” we passed under is only a replica of the original one which was stolen in 2009). The incongruity of the scene was very stark, very apparent – constant streams of people milling all over the onetime prison, going from block to block, in a place that otherwise was just so barren, desolate and abandoned!
Auschwitz was a harrowing experience but one in hindsight I wouldn’t have wanted to have missed. The various barracks were full of unforgettable sights …. grim but also very, very poignant stuff, from the zoo-sized glass display cabinets of hair (incredibly, a vast room of scalps!), countless labelled but abandoned suitcases, artificial limbs, shoes, including children’s (two large rooms of shoes both 30m long x 12m wide). Each block has a thematic element (“Prisoners’ Life”, “Material Evidence of Crime”, etc).
A room full of discarded footwear
Also displayed throughout the blocks are an amazing amount of official, incarceration documentation (Nazi reports on inmates, medical treatments/punishments, etc). This really was a surprise to me, that such a minutiae of official, day-to-day documents had been preserved. My preconceived notion would have been that such incriminating material for the Nazis would have been destroyed. I can only deduce that the sudden, rapid advance on the territory by the Soviet Red Army in 1945 caught the occupying German Army out and it hastily fled Poland before it had time to dispose of all the evidence.
From the street it still looks like what it was in 1945, a small factory in an out-of-the-way industrial part of South Kraków. Inside Oskar Schlinder’s “Factory of Enamelled Vessels” (Fabryka Schindlera), it is more than a tribute to the heroic efforts of Schlinder, the factory-cum-museum is a recreation of Jewish life in Kraków in WWII under the Nazi Occupation.
Wartime streetcar
An elderly Jewish volunteer guided us through a “rabbit warren” of narrow corridors and rooms which conveyed what the experience of Polish Jews living under the Third Reich must have been like in a city known by the German, Krakau during WWII. She showed us the museum’s permanent exhibition (entitled “Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945”) which recreates the conditions and deprivations of Jewish residents of the city. Film screenings and interactive exhibits help to convey the experience.
Impress machine & Swastika floor design
Among the interactives I liked the impress device which lets you stamp time-line cards which mark significant moments in the Occupation. The sense of oppression is underscored by the swastika floor design and by the other Nazi iconography on the walls (exceedingly uncomfortable feeling!). There were also displays of uniforms, a tank, a tram, even a hair salon, etc. The tour also gave us a feel for what the living conditions of the Jewish factory workers were like (crowded!).
Schlinder’s Desk
The final section of the factory visited is the office and desk of Schlinder himself (and that of his personal secretary with her aged typewriter still in place on the table). Oskar’s office still contains his own, original desk, a sturdy wooden one in the same working state in was in 1945. Behind it is a wartime map of Europe. Opposite the desk is the striking exhibit they call the “Survivors’ Arc”, a glass tower full of tin pots, a stark reminder of what the enslaved labourers were there to produce.
The elderly lady guide was excellent, very informative … in the meticulous care she took in presenting the tour you could see how important, personally, the museum was to her in preserving the memory of what happened.
The road that goes south from St Florian’s Gate (Brama Floriańska) to the main plaza and then east through Ul. Grodzka to Wawel Palace bisects the historic centre of Kraków. In monarchical times in Poland this was the “Royal Road” (Via Regia), the traditional route followed in the ceremony for the coronation of Polish kings. The Old Town is a roughly cone-shaped area of central Kraków encircled by an attractive narrow green strip known as Planty Park (or just ‘Planty’ to locals). Before the greening of Planty this was the location for the Medieval city’s fortified walls and moat.
Most tourist activity in the Old Town revolves around the immense Rynek Glówny (the Main Square) and Grodzka street which runs off it. This central square is the heart of Krakow’s Stare Miasto (Old Town). It encompasses a massive area, around 40,000m in size. Right in the middle in a dominant position is an oblong-shaped building, tremendously large in itself – the Neo-Gothic Cloth Hall (Pol: Sukiennice). Historically a major centre for trade in textiles, today there are various commercial enterprises at street level and upstairs a Polish art museum. In the Gallery tourists can find rows of stalls selling the usual souvenir wares.
Main Square
Aside from the monolithic Cloth Hall building in the centre of the Main Square, there are other impressive buildings around the plaza, one of the more intriguing is St Mary’s Basilica, famous for its wooden altarpiece. What got my attention however was St Mary’s facade, an unusual double tower, unusual because of the disparity between the two spires in height and appearance. The bases of the towers are pretty much identical but one spire is much shorter and has a different design, a real curio piece! On the other side of the Cloth Hall is the Town Hall Tower – its views across the city are worth the small entrance fee. Once a prison the Tower is the only part of the Town Hall to survive the demolition of the building in the 19th century. When visiting Kraków it’s more or less obligatory to take in Grodzka, one the most historic streets in the city (good for sighting churches, restaurants, cafés, lively street entertainers).
Cloth Hall
Rynek Glówny is a great spot to casually wander round looking at the passing human cavalcade. Many street performers (in clown costumes, on stilts, etc) operate in the Square and in the adjoining Grodkza street which connects back to Wawel Castle. Almost continuously through the day and evening, elegant horse-drawn carriages stream past the plaza ferrying sightseers around the Old Town. Around the edges of two sides of Rynek square there are a dazzlingly large grouping of outdoor restaurants arranged in an L-shape. Too many restaurants to choose from, but in reality most of them have much the same menu! Despite that we spent an inordinate amount of time checking out 20 different eateries before settling on one which provided us with a nice variety of typical Polish dishes washed down with several Tyskies.
By following the long Ul Grodkza and turning right you will find your way to Wawel Royal Castle, set up high on the hillside above the Vistula River which defends its southern flank. Legend has it that a fire-breathing dragon (a Smok) guards its walls. There is a bronze statue of the mythical Smok next to the River which people hover round waiting for it to unleash a burst of fire which it does at irregular intervals. The castle hill also contains a series of caves known as the Dragon’s Lair (Smocza Jama).
Zamec Courtyard
The castle/palace is a Renaissance structure with other architectural features incorporated (predominantly Romanesque and Gothic). From Podzamcze street you get a good view of the castle’s impressive defensive walls (Bastion) and the Tower of Sigismund Vasa. You enter the castle complex from a sloping road through a series of archway gates. At the top the castle wall forms part of an ensemble of buildings together with Wawel Cathedral and smaller surrounding chapels. Once the residence of the occupying Austrian Army and later the Nazi Governor-General, Wawel Palace is now a museum with state apartments, works of art and a Crown Treasury and Armoury to visit. The Royal Castle as a whole is an impressive structure but the stand-out visual feature of the complex is the spectacular, majestic, arcaded central Courtyard.
The town of Częstochowa is situated in southern Poland, in the Silesian region. Jasnogórski (Pol = “Bright Hill” or “Bright Mount”) is a Pauline monastery, a shrine to the Virgin Mary which Catholic pilgrims flock to (the collective noun for a gathering of pilgrims is apparently ‘flock’ but I like the sound of a ‘drove’ of pilgrims – or – also very applicable here, a ‘busload’ of pilgrims).
The Jasna Góra complex at Częstochowa, viewed as a whole, looks like a fortified city with its formidable walls engulfing the ecclesiastical buildings. We walked from the large carpark through the archway bearing the elaborate crest enscribed with the words of Pope John Paul II’s motto (“Totus Tuus”). Many, many visitors, mainly tour groups of pilgrims were streaming through its gates.
We made our way past an ancient-looking water troth to “The Chapel of Our Lady” and its adjoining Baroque interior Bazylika (basilica). We went into the Chapel to catch a glimpse of the Black Madonna picture but there was a big crowd of transfixed onlookers milling around and so we couldn’t get too close. The black-faced Madonna painting, which the faithful consider to be ‘miraculous’, gets wheeled out for public display at certain times of the week.
Basilica Noir Madonna
Personally I found it the spectacle a bit unappetising, far too much pious, self-serving “god-bothering” going on for my taste. Old Chinese saying: when in Rome, avoid drunk, one-eyed motorist gunning it in reverse through a zebra crossing … so fearing that I might break out in a bad case of devotional hives I quickly retreated through the back gate to escape the monastery.
Religo-market
After taking in some basic but inexpensive food at one of the unpretentious eateries located in the garden park behind the monastery, I explored the nearby street. In it there was, side-by-side, two long lines of souvenir stalls selling religious momentos of the Black Madonna and other Catholic luminaries. A few of the stalls also had children’s toys loosely based on this theme … I noticed a child’s plastic Crusader sword & shield set – this is certainly the place for crusaders!
One part of the Jasna Góra complex I would say is definitely worth a look is the Arsenal with its various items of historic interest. A great many of the exhibits in the Arsenal are gifts from European monarchs and rulers of past centuries, those from the Magyars of Hungary include Turkish weapons captured in the decisive 1683 Battle of Vienna, a seminal moment in early modern European history.
Częstochowa is also remembered for other things of a more lamentable nature in history. There is a plaque not far from the monastery which commemorates the massacre of a large group of Polish Jews in the town by the German army at the very start of WWII.
Rynek Starego Miasta, the Old Town Market Place, is the historic hub of the city. The square is over 700 years old, dating from more or less when Warsaw was first founded. It’s a great spot to eat at the many restaurants in the open square (or in the adjoining ancient laneways), taste some real Polish food enjoyed with a popular local lubricant such as a Tyskie or a Żywiec, whilst admiring the old 4 and 5-story buildings that surround the square. Or you can just wander through it, looking at the drawings for sale or at other historic points of interests.
Staré Miasto itself, the Old Town, is mostly a rebuilt Medieval town, created anew out of the ashes of World War destruction. The squares and alleyways are full of restored multi-story buildings, once the grand homes of the well-to-do, now housing shops, restaurants and cafés. The buildings all fuse together to project a panoply of differing colours. The Old Town encompasses a small area only, with one end of it backing on to the River Vistula. In the other direction the cobblestone lanes and alleys take you from Castle Square up to the Market Square and beyond that, into Freya street and Nowe Miasto (New Town). On the way you will see preserved medieval features like the Barbican and the City Walls. Along Podwale street there are some interesting “patriotic hero” monuments close to the Wall, eg, “The Little Insurgent” (Jan Kiliński) and a monument honouring the Katyń victims.
🔺Warsaw Uprising memorial
Talking of monuments to patriotism, to the west of the Old Town near the Jewish quarter, is the city’s most striking one. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising sculptures represent a very stirring testimony to the courage & resilience of the Polish Resistance Movement in Warsaw. The Varsovians held out for a heroically long period against the overwhelming power of the Nazi Regime and the German Wehrmacht during WWII. The dramatic bronze monument in Rynek Krasiński near the Supreme Court depicts a group of insurgents in combat with the German oppressors.
🔺Barbakan fortification
The Barbican (Barbakan), in the inner ring of the old city fortifications, like most elsewhere in Warsaw, was left in ruins at the end of WWII. It was lovingly restored in the 1950s to its pre-war state as a well-preserved Renaissance defence structure. Fragments of the defensive wall adjoined to the Barbican also survive. At night local youths, the city’s punks and other outsiders, hang out in the recesses under its archway, improvising their own musical entertainment and busking for passing tourists. Old men also sit round the Barbican, a comfortable distance from the ‘rowdies’, with the purpose of trying to attract a passing buyer for the paintings on display in their ad hoc, wall ‘galleries’. The Barbican is a very central point for the tourist trade, connecting as it does the Old and the New Towns. On a hot summer’s day, after you’ve finished admiring the impressive contours of the Barbican, it’s reassuring to know that you’re only a short stroll away from the nearest lody refreshment centre (ice cream parlour)!
If you went anywhere near the British Bulldog Pub on Al. Jerozolimskie, anytime, night or day, in the second half of July, you might think it was hosting an international AC/DC convention. In a sense maybe it kind of was. The ageing Antipodean rockers AC/DC were playing Warsaw at the time, and all their far-flung fans had gathered in or around the Bulldog pub in preparation for the big concert. In fact, just about everywhere the tourist trail led in Warsaw in late July, was full of (often brawny-looking) characters in black AC/DC T-shirts, each with the name of their favourite AC/DC album emblazoned on the front. I even spotted an “Angus Young clone” emerging from the Bulldog decked out in the familiar, trademark schoolboy uniform and cap. With all those devotees of “head-banging” music thick on the ground, the British Bulldog Pub was an especially lively, and needless to say loud place to visit in July. Inside, the beer selection was wide, serving up a variety of labels of both your UK beers and Polish piwas. The kitchen even got in the spirit of the occasion, producing a special Australian ‘Angus’ burger … let’s just hope the steaks were ‘Young’!
If you walk east from Warsawa Centralna on Al. Jerozolimskie you will eventually reach Rondo Charles De Gaulle (monument to De Gaulle). The rondo is easy to spot, in the middle is the only (artificial) palm tree in the city! Turn left here and you’ll find yourself in Nowy Swiat (Pol: New World). Nowy Swiat is a seminal street in Warsaw, linking the northern and southern ends of the city centre.
🔺Jerusalem & Palm
Ulica Nowy Swiat has the best array and variety of places to eat and shop (non-souvenirs as well!) in Warsawa. It is not however renowned only as an eat street, it is the conduit to the historic sections of Warsaw – the Old Town & the Royal Palace. Half way up the street is a monument to the great astronomer Kopernika, about here the street changes name into Krakowskie Przedmieście and we start to get the official government buildings, the main universities, the president’s official residence and the Parliament (watch out for the five man-guard of honour in front of the Sejm). Near the presidential mansion is a public bench that classily plays Chopin whilst you recline on it.
🔺Royal Route procession
Plac Królewski (the Royal Plaza) is a huge square (strictly speaking roughly triangular in shape) smack bang in the epicentre of historic Warsaw. The first night I walked down to the Square it was blocked off because there was a police “charity run” all along Podwale and up into the Royal Route. Historically royal processions went from the Square south to King Jan III’s Wilanów Palace. Plac Królewski is awash with people streaming from one side to the other, many heading for the Royal Castle. Up from the Castle a guy was demonstrating a tennis trainer gadget he was trying to flog to the passing punters. On the restaurant side of the Square stands Kolumna Zygmunta. The 22m high column is both a landmark and the popular meeting place for Varsovians. We met up here for some of the walking tours. Just across from the Column I noticed a motley parade leaving the Square, those marching were decked out in all sort of exotic ‘clobber’, bunch of mainly old guys with sheathed swords, some in flowing Cossack-like outfits, also some veterans in old Communist military-style uniforms Not sure what it was about, perhaps it was a historical anniversary of some kind, whatever … they all seemed to be enjoying the fancy dress!
Zamek Królewski is the symbolic entrance to the Old Town and its most monumental building. The Baroque-style castle facade, 90 long with a prominent central tower faces on to Castle Square. Like most of Warsaw the Royal Castle has had an extremely chequered history, having been the target of various invading armies (Swedish, Prussian, German, Brandenburgian and Russian) since the Middles Ages. Destroyed during WWII it was reconstructed through voluntary donations. The Castle for most of its existence was the centre of national power, the official residence of the Dukes of Masovia, Polish kings and the Parliament (Sejm).
🔺Old Town & Zamek
Nowadays it is a museum with many exquisite rooms, royal apartments and chambers, the best of which include the Throne Room, the Marble Room and the golden Great Assembly Hall. The hall and the royal apartments vividly recall the interior of Versailles. Pride of place among the art works are two portraits by Rembrandt kept behind glass. You need to watch out for them though as they located right at the end of the exhibitions near the exit-point, and if you are feeling a bit jaded after all the other art on display, you may slip out without spotting the Old Dutch Master’s pieces.
If you take a walking tour of Warsaw with friendly local legend Pse, the experience transcends being there … you feel like you are a local, such are the insights into the city he energetically imparts! More than a vicarious experience! I did three ‘Psexceptional’ walking tours in the four days we were in Warsawa – the “Old Town” tour, the “Food and Beer” tour & the “Communist Warsaw” tour. By the end, not only do you have a palpable feel for the city but you become attuned to Pse’s idiosyncratic mannerisms and speech patterns as well!
🔺Rondo Chas. DeGaulle
Pse is, as I said, a very enthusiastic guide with a touch of the “Duracell Bunny” about him (energised with a cache of long-life batteries). He is also very switched on and knowledgeable about all aspects of the city. Despite his not being a Varsovian by birth. I felt we were getting a real insider’s window into the city – warts and all, not just some glossy attempt to put a touristy spin on the place, portraying everything we saw as beautiful and wonderful as sometimes occurs with tour guides coasting through the motions. Pse packs a tremendous amount into his tours, full of informative snippets on the little idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of Warszawiacy, some good, some not so good. He had us on the go, a good pace but not rushed…continually showing us new things and places all through the two hours, not once did he slow down or stop to get a lody despite the fierce heat of the day!
The Food and Beer tour was probably my favourite (kind of a fast food pub crawl of the Soviet high-water mark of working class proletarian cuisine), going to various interesting little out-of-the-way cafés, fast food parlours and back lane bars. For a small charge (about 20 PLN) we sampled so many different types of piva – lagers, porters, pilsners, kozlaks, ales, American-style, Pekin-style, etc. plus culinary oddities such as the “John-Paul II” pączki (a donut of Papal proportions which I passed on!). One of the non-alcoholic beverage ‘highlights’ was the “wonderfully insipid” Oranzada (this sugary ‘treat’ was the soft drink of choice of the old Communist Party apparently). I enjoyed the visit to Soviet Warsaw’s first American-style milkbar (next door to the home of Poland’s double Noble laureate in Science, Madame Curie). We also got an informative commentary on the story behind the construction of the dynamic Warsaw Uprising monument.
🔺Signifying an inexplicable, mysterious death
On the last night of the visit I did yet another fascinating tour with another guide—Pse unavailable, must have been resting his larynx!—called “Warsaw Crime” which visited locations in the city with a secret criminal past – the site of assassinations and attempted assassinations of atheist presidents and “Black September” Middle East terrorists, weddings gone wrong, and an improbable plot to liquidate Hitler on the corner of Jerozolimskie and Nowy Swiat right at the start of the World War in 1939, etc.
Endnote: Bad food Thursday
Apparently the last Thursday before Lent is the day Varsovians really let themselves go in so far as food discipline goes.Bakers and confectioners in the city go on a donut-baking frenzy known as “Fat Thursday” (Tlusty Czwartek). The locals are given licence to indulge (or over-indulge) in calories-galore pastries of the pączek kind. The most popular is the Papal gastronomic delight known as kremówka (“cream cake”).
Pilies Gatve is the street that bisects Vilnius’ Old Town. This old cobblestone road is full of footpath cafés and restaurants. Running off Pilies are numerous old alleyways and lanes, some of which lead to flower-filled courtyards. Also on Pilies are some large churches and a small square with the obligatory souvenir stalls. Actually Senamiestis and Vilnius in general seems to be full of churches, I previously mentioned Cathedral Square and its Basilica, of itself a masthead of Lietuvos orthodox spirituality. Not surprising then that one of the city’s sobriquets is “the city of churches” (another reflecting its staunch Catholicism is “Little Rome”).
In or off Pilies there are a number of old ecclesiastical buildings with a range of styles – Gothic, Renaissance, Neo-Byzantine and Neo-Classical. The standout Catholic ones include St Catherine’s & St Anne’s, the latter church Napoleon reputedly took a distinct shine to when he ‘visited’ (a statement attributed to him is that it enchanted him so much he wanted to take it back to Paris in the “palm of his hand”!). and the very large Orthodox Cathedral (Our Mother of God) on Maironio street. Given what a staunchly Catholic country Lithuania is, I was a little surprised a the large number of Russian Orthodox churches in Vilnius – clearly the former imperial ‘footprint’ of the Russian giant is still evident in the country.
Didžioji G. has two of the most impressive cathedrals in St Parasceve and St Casimir (the latter with its unusual, small, black crown dome). In front of the beautiful pastel-shaded St Parasceve are billboards with historic photos and stalls selling paintings. Looking at the Vilnius churches you discover a chequered history, there is a pattern of most of them burning down, being rebuilt in stone, being desecrated and misused, and finally being returned to their religious function. At the south end of the Old Town, in Aušros Vartu G. you can see the only remnant of the historic wall to survive, the 15th century city gate, the Gates of Dawn (Aušros vartai) with its decorated chapel and Medieval arch. Also in Aušros Vartu are gift shops selling the Baltic Sea mineral that Lithuanians refer to as their ‘gold’, amber (worth a look inside but quite pricey).
Vokiečiu Gatve
On the western side of Senamiestis is Vokiečiu G. or German street, with its long, grassy walkway and food kiosks down the middle. Once the main area for German inhabitants of Vilnius (hence the name!) but there remains very little sense of its ‘German-ness’ today. Further to the west in Naujamiestis (the New Town) there is more trace of German past occupancy of Vilnius in the shape of a German War Cemetery.
Similarly, nearby Pylimo G. was once home to Vilnius’ large Jewish community, which before WWII numbered around 100,000 (45 per cent of the city’s population). Vilna Jews are now reduced to a few thousand in total who are mostly quite aged. The Jewish Ghetto of the 1940s is memorialised only by one or two monuments and signs. The pattern of impressive Russian Orthodox churches continues on the western side of the Old City, of special note are the Church of Saints Michael and Constantine and the Church of the Apparition of the Holy Mother of God both with beautiful Neo-Byzantine cupolas, a must-see for church architecture aficionados.
Gediminas is a name that crops up quite a bit in Vilnius – the main street, the central castle and tower, restaurants, etc. Gediminas was the powerful ruler who consolidated the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the early 14th century. Gediminas Prospektas, the city’s main avenue, runs from the north-west down to Cathedral Square & the Old City. The several previous names of Gediminas street (including Adolph Hitler Avenue) reflect ongoing periods of foreign rule (Polish, Nazi German, Soviet Russian). Gediminas Pr as befitting the major avenue in Vilnius contains most of the important buildings, the parliament, financial houses, international hotels, etc, as well as a busy “eat street” sector. Walking the length of Gediminas Avenue allows you to take in some of the Centras district’s most interesting sights. Foremost amongst these for me is the facade of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre with its fantastic, striking sculpture of three dark-garbed ‘witches’ (they looked like witches to me(?), like something out of Macbeth) in dramatic pose.
V. Kudirkas Monument
Further up on the opposite side is Vincas Kudirkas Square (named after a famous Lithuanian writer), a pleasant, calming patch of greenery set back from the street enabling visitors a respite from all that shopping and sightseeing. A fine, modern, linear sculpture of Kudirkas takes centre stage in the eponymous Square.
Lietuvos Basilica & Bell tower
The eastern end of Gediminas stops at the large Cathedral Square (Katedros aikštė) which contains several significant architectural structures. The first ones you come to are the early 15th century Vilnius Basilica and its bell tower. The basilica, the most salient Catholic structure in Lithuania, is very grand in scale with white columns and domed roof in the neoclassical style. Although it is impressive and worth a look inside, I was more intrigued by the accompanying bell tower several metres way from the facade entrance. Bell towers like this, 57m high and free-standing, are fairly unusual outside of Italy. I was immediately reminded of Pisa and the Leaning Tower. This bell tower of course lacks the unique feature that makes Pisa so world famous, it’s exaggeratedly angled bent. The Vilnius bell tower is not however 180 degrees straight up, so it was suggestive of some comparisons with Pisa! Sharing the Square with the cathedral is the Gediminas monument (a relatively recent addition), an imposing sculptural representation of the Lietuvos warrior-king, unmounted, atop a very solid block of granite. On the other side of the cathedral, in the park near the National Museum, there is yet another sculpture of Gediminas which differs in form and style from this one.
Anglijos Ducal Palace
To the right of Vilnius Cathedral (almost backing on to it) is the white Palace of the Grand Dukes. The palace is an attractive and impressive reconstruction of the original medieval rūmai (Royal palace). The Ducal Palace was part of the old lower castle and had an integral historical connexion with Poland. During the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth it was the centre of political power for both Lithuanian grand dukes and Polish kings. Later, after its glory days, it fell on harder times – at one point being quasi-demolished, then occupied by the German Wehrmacht during WWII and by the Soviet Youth Organisation. The current palace building is now a museum. Unfortunately our tight schedule precluded a visit inside, we had been allocated enough time only to do either it or the upper castle (the castle tower).
Gediminas Tower
The castle tower, to give its full official name, Gediminas Pilies Kalnas (that man again!) is raised up on a hilltop above Cathedral Square. One of the local guides explained that, owing to Lithuania being a pretty flat country, hills, like this one, are commonly described as ‘mountains’. This concept is reinforced linguistically, the Lietuvos word for ‘mountain’, kalnas, is the same word used to delineate a ‘hill’, ‘hill’ is synomous with ‘mountain’ hence the Kalnas in this case, in reality merely a mound-shaped hill, covers both ideas. There are two ways up Castle Hill: riding in a funicular transporter (for a fee), or slogging it by foot from the park below, climbing a curved ramp-way with lots of loose, rough stones on it. The ramp slope is a fair distance to walk, but it is staggered, so not too steep. At the top on the hill mound you can observe the residual bits and pieces of the original castle complex (old arsenal, garden, castle keep & the tower – not much else of the original survives). As with the tower, from the edge of the hilltop there are great views of the Neris River directly below, and of the city beyond.
The castle part (the lower castle) of this fortification is long gone leaving only the (upper) tower, which possibly explains why it is referred to officially in Lietuva as Gedimino pilies bokštas (Gediminas’ Castle Tower), a kind of compromise on the original entity – it is also known as Aukstutines Pilies Muziejus (Upper Castle Museum). The national flag (or variations of it) has been raised and lowered from the tower top at regular intervals over the last five centuries (reflecting Lithuania’s fluctuating fortunes at the hands of external aggressors – Russia, Poland, Soviet Union). Patriotic Lithuanians cherish the flag and the castle tower as the enduring symbol of independence and nationalism. Across from the tower on the mound is another remnant of the earlier fortification. The tower (as it survives) is not terribly spacious, and houses a small museum. Most visitor interest, once inside the building though, is in negotiating the 78 steps which allows you to survey commanding views all around Vilnius.
Bronze sculpture of Lithuanian hounds
Below the modest ‘mountain’ of Gediminas Castle is a large, attractive park (Bernardine Gardens), a tranquil green space with fountains, statues, an alpinarium and ponds. Try to spot a very cute bronze sculpture of three Lietuvos hounds (Skalikas) on one of the pathways. These gardens, backing on to the slim Vilnelė River on the east side, are an ideal location to stroll through or recline in.
Gedimus, Grand Duke of Lithuania (ca1275–1341). According to the “Iron Wolf” legend, founder of Vilnius
At the Town Hall in Vilnius we met up with Martina, a local student who was our guide for the walking tour. Martina’s tour took us down back alleys and lanes to lots of little out-of-the-way places, cafés and delapidated churches with tiny niches of green space around them. Apart from guiding us to see some of the best features of this small, attractively green city, the tour provided through Martina’s commentary an introduction into the way Vilnoise (and Lithuanians) think. We heard some little anecdotes that gave us a good insight. One of these involved George W Bush’s 2002 visit when he gave a speech strongly supporting the tiny country’s sovereignty. Lithuanians were so impressed with Bush’s words that they etched them on to a commemorative plaque at the Town Hall (Miestas). The Lietuvis government’s pride at being singled out for special notice by the US President turned to dismay however several months later when they discovered that Bush had recycled the self same speech, word-for-word, to all the other European countries he visited on that European tour. A bitter disappointment for the government in Vilnius, but despite this deflating backhander I noticed that they still kept the plaque up!
DIY decoration wall
Later in the walk we passed a long external wall decorated with paintings, pieces of ceramics with writing on them and other adornments. Martina explained that this practice was common to the city and told us about the visit to Vilnius by Thomas Harris, American author of Silence of the Lambs. Harris was apparently unimpressed and less than complimentary in print about Lithuania. Despite the adverse assessment the locals still posted Harris’ article up on the wall! Puzzled, I asked Martina why they would do that. The rationalisation she gave us was that because Lithuania is a small country, every mention it gets, even if negative, it is still recognition of “Little Lietuva” from the outside world, and therefore worthwhile for them to record it on the wall! This very quirky, acute awareness of their own smallness suggests to me that some kind of collective ‘complex’ prevails.
Border-crossing: Užupis
across the bridge
We explored the southern part of Pilies Gatve where Martina gave us some tips on which shops in the street have the best deals on amber (a Lietuvis speciality). Leaving the district of Senamiestis we crossed over a little bridge on the Vilnelė River into a whole new world – or so it would seem! The east side of the river is called Užupis (literally, “other side of the river”). As you walk over the bridge (keeping an eye out for the mermaid sculpture on your left below the bank), you will see a sign proclaiming “UŽUPIS RES PUBLIKA”. Outsiders might call the enclave of Užupis an artists’ ‘colony’, except that the locals call it the artists’ ‘republic’! It orginated in 1997 (pointedly on 1st of April!) when Užupis’ bohemian residents unilaterally declared ‘independence’ and formulated their its own (jocular) ‘constitution’, flag (the palm of a white hand), president and government, 11-man army, passport stamp issue, etc – democrazy(sic) gone mad some might say!
The origins of the Republic idea stem from 1995 when Užupis artists randomly adopted Frank Zappa as a sort of weird, hip “patron saint”, erecting a statue of him in the neighbourhood. Not that the experimental American rock musician had absolutely any connection whatsoever with Vilnius or Lithuania, but the local arty types just apparently took to him and decided to honour his memory.
Republican sculpture park
The “Free Republic of Užupis” is not officially recognised by anyone (outside of the avant-garde neighbourhood itself). I suspect that the city authorities (back across the river in Vilnius) accept it and humour Užupis”separatism’ because of the obvious financial payback for Vilnius tourism! Užupis is a sort of more grass-roots, wackier version of Paris’ Montmartre! Art works of various shapes and sizes, some of them, like the numerous manifestations of graffiti popping up everywhere almost organically. Užupis is flush with quirky, modernist sculpture parks & quaint little bookshops. Overall I got the impression that Užupis’ artists and residents don’t take either their art or the ‘Republic’ too seriously. And of course Užupis, as befits a community that endorses democratic modes of expression has its own DIY decoration wall for budding artists.
Although Lithuania is a small country, even by European standards, its a fair old drive from Vilnius in the south to Šiauliai, a distance of some 213km. Šiauliai (pronounced “shoo-láy”) is an industrial area in the north with the nickname, Saulės miestas, which means the “Sun City“. Driving along the main street of the town, Tilžės Gatvė, its clearly a small place but it looks fairly modern, if the Saulės Miestas shopping mall is anything to go by. We park the Mercedes near Resurrection Square and walked back to the plaza in Vilniaus G for a 150 minute reconnoiter of the town.
Modern public sculpture on Vilniaus (‘Girl with Little pipe’)
The focal point of the township is ‘Cockerel’ Clock Square, one of Šiauliai’s principal landmarks with its Lord Nelson-like monument, a high column. This is the spot in the town which locals tend to use as a meeting point. After observing the various human interactions in the Square, we moved down Vilniaus Gatvė which we discovered was a very long plaza, the busy hub of the city in fact with clothes stores, cafés, restaurants and fast food eateries in plentiful supply. Šiauliai is not a big centre of tourism, the core business for the tourist info centre is to promote tours of the nearby, magnetic Hill of Crosses. Other items of interest in the street include various statues and fountains dispersed here and there (of particular note are the Pelicans’ Fountain and the ‘Girl with a little pipe’).
Down the other end of Vilniaus street is the Šiauliai Markets which are “small potatoes” by Riga’s (Centrāltirgis) standards. I skirted past the cheap fruit and veg and found a clothing and luggage section where I managed to pick up a replacement bag for my broken one and a warm jacket for the inevitably cooler weather further north. Opposite the Vilniaus street markets is a large grassy square called Sukilėliu kalnelis (Rebels’ Hill), where a monument honours local martyrs executed in the failed 1863 Rebellion against Tsarist rule. The city of Šiauliai is nothing flash but its a decent stopover to grab some respite from several hours of non-stop highway driving.
Hill of Crosses I
After hurriedly picking up some lunch we returned to the vehicle and moved on to our real Šiauliai destination. The Hill of Crosses (Lt: Kryžiu Kalnas) is 12km north of Šiauliai. You turn off the A12 on to a road that arcs through flat, open land seemingly heading towards nothing in particular, and then suddenly there it is in the middle of nowhere, a small single building and parking lot which is the site’s entrance. Here, the administrative office has a ticket box and a toilet. An adjoining little pavilion is chock full of religious souvenirs, iconography and other devotional memorabilia.
Once inside the turnstiles, you still can’t see the religiously significant hill, there’s still is a surprisingly long walk along a winding path to get to the actual site. But when you get close to it, it is a bizarrely spectacular sight – albeit one a little disagreeable to secular minds and vampires alike! There is over 100,000 wooden and metal crosses, crucifixes and Christ on the Cross sculptures of all sizes and descriptions piled upon each other on the small hill, so many that they overflow down its sides, expanding the scope of the spectacle. So many crosses – it is of no wonder that Lithuanian people have a forté for Kryždirbystė (cross-crafting)! Despite determined efforts by the Soviet authorities to eradicate the collection of crosses, in fact even by eradicating the hill itself three times, the Hill of Crosses has survived as Lietuva’s national symbol of defiance to foreign oppression (be it German, the Teutonic Knights or Russian) and as the place of pilgrimage for devout Lithuanian Catholics.
Hill of Crosses II
As I was walking back to the exit a silver metallic sign on the path in front of the Hill got my attention: it listed a vast list of things (over 40 points) that you can’t do on the Hill … can’t walk dogs, can’t ride bikes, can’t light fires or make camp sites, can’t smoke, can’t play music or otherwise make audible noises, can’t beg for money, can’t damage the crosses/crucifixes or abscond with the ‘Valuables’, can’t cut down trees or bushes, can’t dig up the ground, can’t pollute the waterways, can’t “spread sectarian strife” (my favourite of the prohibitions!), can’t interfere with processions of pilgrims, and so on and on! However, the sign does stipulate, several times, that the prohibitions apply only to “natural persons” – presumably this means if you are a zombie, alien or artificially created cyberborg, you are free to do whatever you like on the Hill!
We decided to spend our final day in Riga staying close to Centrs and the Old Town, leisurely checking out one or two of the places Martīns had suggested we investigate. One thing Riga has no in short measure is churches, so we decided to have a closer look at a couple of the more illustrious ones. The two we visited were on either side of Ratslaukums. The 13th century Gothic-style Pēterbaznīca (St Peter’s Cathedral) in Skārnu street boasts a spire that was once the highest in Medieval Europe. Unsurprisingly then, it offers the best views of Riga from its tower (€7 entry fee, 2015); Doma Baznīca (Riga Cathedral), a monster of a cathedral amongst Baltic churches, is one of the most recognisable landmarks in Riga with its charcoal-coloured spire and weathercock (undergoing a bit of a facelift at the time we were visiting). Doma Baznīca is also famous for its formidably proportioned organ which contains a staggering 6,768 pipes!
Lutheran spires across the Daugava
We looked around for a low-key place to have lunch, and found one that suitably qualified, the Queens Pub, just round the corner from St Peter’s Church in Kalku street. The Pub (trying obviously to appeal to the growing hordes of English tourists) was decked out to try to recreate the vibe of a typical English working class inn – lots of football paraphernalia (club banners and shirts), dart boards, etc. To maintain the mood I selected the most Sasanach thing on the menu, the traditional pie and ale. The ladies in our lunch group, ignoring the faux “Anglo-ness” of the Pub, opted for a drop of Latvijan wine (fascinatingly I discovered on this trip that Latvia is the most northerly place that vintners can successfully make wine!).
The ‘overflow’ markets
When visiting Riga, one trip to the Central Markets (Centrāltirgus) is insufficient to take in the enormity of the Markets’ scope, so we ventured back for a post-prandial exploration. Whilst walking to the location I noticed something a little odd about the city trams frequently passing by. Many of these government trams were driven by women, but that wasn’t what I found odd, rather it was that most of the female drivers didn’t have uniforms, but were wearing light, summer floral-patterned dresses, the type that they might don for a leisurely trip into town to do the family shopping!
Later on back in Skārnu iela we happened upon a bar that you wouldn’t expect to find in tiny Riga, deep in the north of the European continent. The Kiwi Bar was a surprise discovery, replete with a wide choice of Australian and New Zealand beers on tap. Run by an Aotearoan expat, there was the predictable cultural symbols and icons on display, rugby balls and jumpers and pictures on the walls referencing representatively NZ fauna (ruminant mammals and flightless birds). It’s probably about the only place in Latvia where you can enjoy a Speight’s or a James Squire whilst watching cricket on TV … aside that is, from the Aussie Pub two blocks away in Vałnu street!
After drinks and an Antipodean catch-up in the Kiwi Bar we strolled round looking for a good, authentically Latvian place to eat, doing a spot of window-shopping on the way. To those in the know and interested enough to care about these things, Riga and the Rīdzinieki apparently have a growing reputation for hipness. I do not believe that this enhanced fashionability has any correlation with the fact that Riga has in recent years become the “go-to” destination for English lads looking for a cheap buck’s party! Centring around the fashionably arty street Miera iela (Peace street) is Riga’s version of ‘Hipsterville’, the young hipsters with fedoras, casual check shirts and skintight leggings are proudly there for all to see – typically, sipping an artisanal latte at DAD Café. In a shop window I think I spotted what might be the “next wave” of Rīdzinieki hipster men’s fashions, a whole series of outlandish, faux “gangster-hip” safari suits, devoid of any restraint in either colour or design! My personal favourite was the “cocaine-boss” outfit, a garish number with a pattern of black background and green coca leaves which covers the unfortunate wearer from ankle to neck!
Around Vecrīga
We had dinner in Arsenāla street in the Parliament district in a restorāns called appropriately enough Alus Arsenāls. This name in Latvijan means “beer arsenal” & the layout certainly had the appearance of a beer cellar. It was located in a basement with wall recesses with faux beer barrels protruding from them; an arched ceiling tapered on either side gave a slightly cramped feeling. An alternate perspective of this might call it ‘cosy’ (the restaurant’s website describes it as having a ‘democratic’ atmosphere). It had a good selection of Latvian beers and we shared the alus plate starter (a bit too salty for my taste). For the mains I opted for pork chops with mushroom sauce, Latvian-style which tasted OK. I thought I’d give a local dessert a go, choosing something called ‘Ambrose’, a doughy concoction consisting of rye bread & creamy berries (the Baltic staters are very keen on rye bread, the blacker the better for them!). Unfortunately this turned out to be quite bland and unappetising. Overall I thought the meal was a bit on the expensive side, but maybe in Riga it costs extra to get that “democratic’ atmosphere” they were talking about!
An attraction of Riga that no visitor should miss is Centrāltirgus (the Central Markets), the absolutely pulsating hub of the city. To get there from Ratslaukums you head south-east in the direction of Centrālā stacija (the central railway station). At Marijās iela pedestrians can cross the rail line via an underground tunnel. Look out for the colourful comic book murals on the tunnel walls (very Roy Lichtenstein style pop-art).
When you come up out of the underground, the tram lines lead you to the immense Centrāltirgus. The markets are made up of four mega-large hangars and an auxiliary building backing on to the Daugava River. The original idea of the markets when construction began in the 1920s was to use full Zeppelin hangars nearly 35m in height, but practical considerations saw the hangars scaled back to just over 20m high. The hangar designs incorporate an admixture of architectural forms – including touches of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Neo-classical.
Centrāltirgus
The four hangars are each characterised by having their own distinct type of goods: one for meat, for fish, for dairy, and for produce and vegetable. Unsurprisingly lots of pungent odours pervade the air, eg, marinated cabbage and gherkins and of course, fish. Some of the more memorable market comestibles on sale include whole pig heads, Baltic eels and lampreys, and visitors can also sample local drinks (kefīr, Latvian kvass, etc), Latvian-style cheeses, cakes and breads, all reasonably-priced when compared to “the High Street”. This is where the ordinary Rīdzinieki come for their daily needs of animal proteins, fruit and veg, so its’ an ideal place for visitors to get a “grass roots” feel for what the locals like to consume.
What’s inside the big hangars is only part of the story. Rows and rows of stalls, spilling out from the hangars as it were, fill most of the outdoor space between each hangar. Stallholders sell souvenirs, CDs, electronic appliances, shoes, everything that comes under the broad heading of clothing, plus various other apparel. In early September each year there is a “Cinema on the Wall” screening held in the Vegetable pavilion. Along with Riga’s Old Town the Centrāltirgus is UNESCO World Heritage listed.
Pilsētas Kanals
A canal jinks through the middle of Vecrīga (Old Riga), winding its way from the Osta Ferry Terminus, coming back to the Daugava near Centraltirgus. The canal, Pilsētas kanals as it is known, was originally created to provide a fortress moat for the medieval city (Old Riga being a walled city). When the fortified walls were torn down in the 19th century to extend the limits of the city, this action had the unintentional effect of creating the city canal which flows from the Daugava. Today the canal flows through some 12 hectares of city parkland. These tranquil channels of water and the surrounding strips of greenery are popular with people and ducks alike! Lots of visitors like to take boat trips down the canals (from Bastion Hill), passing under some 16 bridges (there is a 108 year-old German-built flat-top vessel still operating on the canals). Strewn alongside the canals (in the water as well) are a number of interesting modern sculptural pieces with a minimalist sailing boat motif. Both the river boat and the bank afford good views, especially of impressive buildings such as the formidably large, all-white Latvian National Opera building.
The canal-side parks (Bastion Hill, Kronvalda) are good places to relax and get a short respite from all the shopping, sightseeing and restaurants on offer in Riga. The location is quite central, a short walk from Vecrīga, so is easy to find. These two parks, comprising some 12 hectares of greenery, stretch along the Pilsētas kanals for some 3.5 km. Visitors can stroll the path parallel to the canal through beautifully manicured lawns with attractive garden settings shaded by lots of planted trees such as the Ginkgo biloba, Yellow Poplar and Kentucky coffeetree (Kronvalda Parks has over 100 species of foreign trees and shrubs). The parks contain a number of monuments and inscriptions to famous Latvians which are worth a browse.
Freedom Monument
Non-Latvian visitors might take a cursory interest in the very tall (42.7m) monument they can visit if they walk from Bastejkalns over the Brivivas street bridge. As large-scale monuments go, Freedom Monument (Brivibas Piemineklis) is an impressive work of sculpture, combining bas-relief and frieze style figures, and granite, travertine and copper materials. The monument with the feminine personification of liberty, Milda, atop, commemorates the Latvian War of Independence against Bolshevik Russia following WWI. At the base groups of patriotic Latvians are portrayed singing and fighting. Two guards of honour stand at attention at the foot of the monument and are subjected to stringent dress inspections by an khaki-clad soldier in somewhat overly-ceremonial fashion. Interesting footnote: monument guards must be at least 1.82 m tall and must remain entirely motionless during their stint of duty (good training to become a public impersonator of statues!).
The open square of Freedom Monument is encircled by the canal parklands. From Brivibas its only a short walk back across the canal bridge to Bastejkalns, or continuing along the canal pathway north, you will reach Kronvalda Parks. Both parks are popular with Rīdzinieki who like to spend hours either strolling through the tranquil gardens or relaxing near the canal. On a summer’s day refreshments are always close at hand, the area being well-stocked with mobile ice cream vendors who position their little carts strategically at all points of the parklands.
First full day in Latvia, we left our (Radisson Blu) Hotel on the unfashionable side of Riga and crossed the broad Daugava River on a windswept and ominously overcast morning for our guided city tour. We met our local guide, 27-year-old Mārtinš, at the Town Hall Square (Ratslaukums), a very central location which was the venue of the curiously named “House of Blackheads.” Standing in front of a statue of the Frankish warrior Roland in the Square, Mārtinš, gave us the low-down on Riga’s very extensive damage and subsequent rebirth after its clinical aerial bombardment during WWII. The old city was more or less totally rebuilt from the 1950s to the 1970s. They obviously did a real good job at reconstruction because many of the cathedrals and other buildings retain their authentically Medieval appearance.
Mārtinš is a part-time history tutor and part-time tour guide (everyone under 40 in Eastern Europe seems to have at least two jobs such is the general state of the economy). He filled us in on the House of the Blackheads, certainly one of the most elaborate and gorgeous buildings in Riga, the crème de la crème of Vecrīga. The original 14th century building was one of the many structures to succumb to the onslaught from both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, but the building with its wonderful Dutch Renaissance style twin facade was painstakingly rebuilt post-independence by the Latvians.
St Roland in front of House of Blackheads
The building has a history going back to the powerful medieval Hanseatic League (encompassing both Riga and Tallinn), the Blackheads were an association of unmarried German merchants and shipowners and the House was a venue where apparently the bachelor boys liked to party – hard! The name’s origin is not certain but there may be a connection with St Mauritius (sometimes called St Maurice), an 3rd century Roman soldier of African origins who is the Blackheads’ patron saint. The facade has a kind of grand church-like triangular shape with a striking and colourful portal. It is located in a great position on the southern side of the Square (hard to miss!) facing the monument to St Roland previously mentioned. Presently, this grand Gothic building is officially home to the Latvian president.
Art Nouveau iela
The streetwise Mārtinš was definitely clued up on all things Riga, he seemed to know stacks of back stories and how the locals tend to think and act. He took us to so many places of interest whilst sharing valuable insights (with lots of witty asides thrown in). We also got a sampler of Riga’s architecture – the older wooden structures, fashionable Art Nouveau blocks and some old Soviet buildings, very grey, unattractive functionalist buildings … especially fitting this description is the Latvian Academy of Sciences with its echoes of the famous (infamous?) Soviet-built skyscraper, the Palace of Cultural and Science in Warsaw. Riga is known for its outstanding Art Nouveau architecture, many in the Jūgendstil (German ‘youth’ style). Some of the best examples are to be found in Alberta Isla, probably none better than the Eizenstein apartment building with the azure-tinted windows. Also very worthy of mention is the old KGB Building in Stabu iela.
Lutheran Church of Jesus
Not far from the Academy of Sciences ‘eyesore’ Mārtinš took us to an interesting old church, The Lutheran Church of Jesus. What was special about this church was that it was an all-wood construction – in fact the biggest wooden building in Riga still surviving. When we got inside the church Mārtinš kneeled down to touch the nave floor (no, not that! … this was more of a secular gesture). He knocked very deliberately and firmly once on the wooden floor, producing a remarkably resonant reverberation right along the entire length of the nave! Just amazing acoustics!
Mārtinš concluded his highly polished presentation by showing us a few off-the-(tourist)-beaten-track spots where you can get away from the crowds and chill out, including a very nice canal-side garden park in the city. The intermittent rain we encountered didn’t manage to spoil our enjoyment of what was a very comprehensive and entertaining two-hour tour with masses of information and pointers on how to maximise one’s limited time in Riga. The accomplished Mārtinš said goodbye to us at the canal, signing off with an unorthodox but nonetheless very athletic aerial foot-clap that would have done justice to an adroit Baltic seal!
If you ever find yourself in Tallinn, feeling a bit jaded after traipsing round Vanalinn, Toompea, Kesklinn and all the other tourist traps in the central part of town, try looking a little further afield. For instance, there’s Kadriorg! Do yourself a favour and take the short tram or bus trip to Kadriorg (3.5km east of the Tallinn city centre) … especially if you are interested in seeing an 18th century Petrine Romanov palace that has touches of Versailles and Italian design about it. It’s not exactly Saint-Petersburg but it is certainly a pointer to what you should expect to find in that most western of Russian cities. The focal point of the suburb of Kadriorg (“Catherine’s Valley”) is an elegant, if small by Romanov standards, strawberry pink (green-roofed) palace. The palace (Est: Kadri Loss), is in a Baroque style, built by Peter the Great for Catherine I (not Catherine the Great but Peter the Great’s Empress, Catherine) as a summer palace. Unhappily the great Tsar died before it could be put to use, as a result Peter’s widow and thereafter Russia’s sole ruler showed no interest from that time on in wanting to live in it.
Kadriorg aed
Currently the regal building is used to house the Kadriorgu Kunstimuuseum, a collection of predominantly Western and Russian art (€5.5 charge for entry (2015)). Kadri Palace has its own miniature version of a meticulously manicured Versaillesesque garden at the back. The surrounding parkland is vast, and it’s various trails are popular with cyclists and walkers alike. The parklands are attractive for visitors to stroll through whilst they brush up on who’s who in Estonian art history (the park has a series of sculptures of famous Estonian artists scattered around the grounds).
Swan pond, Kadriorg Park
Other features of Kadriorg park include a Japanese garden, a canal with floral decorative bridges which bisects the park, and a monument (Russalka Memorial) by Estonian sculptor A Adamson. At the southern end of the parklands you can sit and relax with a picnic in a garden setting overlooking the majestic Swan Lake. The lake (or pond) is a beautiful, peaceful tree-lined pond with several little islands with domed pergolas. Close to the Swan pond is a bluish-grey and white rotunda which functions these days as the Park’s information point. Also check out the cute green mailbox across the road from the info point. Near the park entrance there is a kohvik-restoran with the distinctly German name Katherinethal.
Zhivago sisters dancing
That night, after returning from my excursion to Kadriorg, I rejoined the rest of our group in Town Hall square for a taste of Russian culture and cuisine (interestingly given the bitterness of the period of Soviet hegemony, ethnic Russians still account for over 36% of the city’s population). The place we chose was Kazatchok Restaurant in a nice location in the open space of the square. As the night and the dinner went on we were entertained by a series of dance routines by Russian dancers who donned several traditional, spectacularly colourful costumes. The dancing was very spirited, as befitting an “abundant fairytale”! The dancers were full of energetic leaps and bounds performed to the background music of predictable numbers like “Ra-Ra-Rasputin”!
Smirnoff waitress
Getting round to the dinner itself, the menu had a lot of options. No one was adventurous enough to try the ‘bear’ (as it turned out bear was out of season and thus unavailable in any case!). I didn’t like the sound of the boiled tongue much or the salted ‘surprises’ so I passed on the hunter’s menu and opted for the fish menu instead. To top a good night off, the establishment gave us all a shot of vodka on the house which we were encouraged to skol down in the spirit of Ruskiyzakazy! Good fun! Funnily enough, one of the waitress with a ridiculously huge red and green bow on her head bolted and hid when I took a photo of her. This was funny at the time but seemed strangely funny behaviour to me later because I found out that her sudden shyness at being snapped was rather at odds with the way she and her quaint Russian cultural outfit and big bright bow was brazenly splashed all over Kazatchok’s own website gallery in all its conspicuousness!
Most Tallinn visitors tend to flock to the Old Town and Toompea for the sum of their experiences of the Estonian capital. There are nonetheless other areas around the outskirts of this central section that are also worth a visit, if only to satisfy a curiosity about the less touristy parts of town. Sadama, Pohja and Kalamaja are three such sub-districts of North Tallinn. I happened upon these parts largely because our Kalasadama hotel is near them. Sadama (Estonian for ‘harbour’) is the port region of Tallinn, opening out on to the Gulf of Tallinn and the Baltic. Footnote: Tallinn’s harbour is a world-class one, when (inland) Moscow hosted the 1980 Olympic Games, Tallinn was chosen to stage the sailing events.
Close to the cruise ship and passenger vessel ports is the Sadamaturg (markets) which has stalls under the roof and outside all selling pretty much the same items – clothing, bags, ladies fashion, belts, caps, souvenirs, etc. Hardly anyone there when I visited, the stall-holders (95% women) aren’t particularly friendly but they seem to watch you pretty closely (not a great ambience conducive to relaxed shopping). You will find bargain buys at the markets but there are no better deals on offer than there is across the tramlines at Vanalinn. Obviously Sadama’s main customer target is the visitors who come off the boats & ferries from the Port (Terminal B is just behind the markets). The markets had the usual cut-price alcohol for sale, slabs of cheap Saku and A. De Coq beer, Vana Tallinn, whiskey, etc all over the shop.
Sadamaturg: arsenal
One product I spotted for sale at Sadama Markets made me look twice with some measure of alarm. One of the outside stalls was displaying an armoury of handguns and rifles, sporting weapons of all types, hunting knifes, AK-47P air rifles, ZM20 pistols, & lots more. It was quite an arsenal, a paradise for Estonian recreational shooters no doubt! My slight sense of unease was not abated by the dubious-looking, tough dude manning the stall. After dark the whole area around Sadama takes on a bit of dodgy feel, there are several striptiis clubs and shady-looking nightclubs around and behind Sadama street. Strip clubs are apparently a trend on the rise in Tallinn (they must have been slow out of the blocks on this one!).
On the western side of the Sadama foreshore the terrain becomes even more grotty and rundown, with lots of abandoned businesses, burnt-out shells of old warehouses, aicraft hangars and broken glass strewn everywhere. Near the Linnahall ferry port there is the scarred remains of an enormous concrete structure, long abandoned, on the edge of the water. Tallinna Linnahall was a concert hall and sporting venue created for the 1980 Olympics, but what remains has been likened to an ancient Mayan ruin. The roof of the grey-hued old complex, highly defaced by graffiti, is now just a roost for seabirds and an out-of-the-way rendezvous point for local youth to hang out at. One hundred metres along the shoreline from the ferry port is the Tallinn fish markets (Kalaturg), a very small affair indeed, certainly nothing like Billingsgate!
Patarei Prison
Further to the west on the coast in Kalamaja district in a sparsely populated area is yet another abandoned complex of buildings. This is the site of a very large, former prison, which had all the earmarks of being abandoned – broken glass and tiles, graffiti, and the only residents appeared to the odd stray cat. When I checked it out later I was surprised to discover that Patarei Prison had only been closed as recently as 2004 after operating for 85 years! Guided tours of the complex, now a museum called Patarei vanglamuuseum, take place in summer when the prison’s beachfront café is open. The grim place, as expected of a former penitentiary, has an air of eeriness and foreboding about it, the Patarei operators describe it as “very dark (they advise visitors to bring a torch) and partly very dangerous” (piles of loose rubble and decaying rooms). Visiting this prison-fortress museum, remaining in a condition that has not been altered, cleaned up or sanitised in any way, is a fantastic opportunity for an unusual tourist experience – to observe close at hand the workings of a harsh Soviet-era place of incarceration.
Kalamaja
We walked south through the streets of Kalamaja noting that there were ageing examples of the traditional, all-wooden houses around, especially in the less well-to-do parts of town (hence the original reason for the sub-district being called Kalamaja – meaning “fish house”). At Balti Jaam (Tallinn’s central train station) the Jaamaturg (part produce market and part ‘flea’ market) was getting underway for the day. The station markets had pre-used clothing and the usual stuff but if you have an eye for curios you might find the most interest in Balti Jaam in its old Soviet junk items, toys, weapon cartridge cases and badges. Definitely items for specialist collectors only!
Toompea Hill is the upper town, the most historic section of Tallinn (or Reval as it was originally called). It is even older than the section of Tallinn contiguous with it, Vanalinn (the Old Town). Ülemlinn (Upper Town) is the site of Tallinn’s first settlement by the Danish in 1219. Among the tourist hotspots are the Riigikogu (housed in Toompea Castle) and one of Tallinn’s most impressive kõrgumas (wall towers). Also worthy of a look on the Hill are its famous Russian Orthodox (Alexander Nevsky) Cathedral and Lutheran Cathedral (Toomkirik or Dome Church). What attracts visitors to Toompea in particular is the great views of the wider Tallinn. Toompea Hill sits on a limestone tableland 20-30 metres above the surrounding areas. Large numbers of tourists jostle for optimal position on the purpose-built Kohtuotsa and Patkuli viewing platforms, to catch a view (and a photo or thirty) of the fantastic panoramic scenery.
Nevsky Cathedral
The Nevsky Cathedral, a striking looking structure on the aptly named Cathedral Hill (AKA Toompea) opposite the city castle, is one of the first buildings you are likely to spot if you enter Tallinn from the south-west. It caught my eye straight away as we drove up Komandandi tee on the way to our hotel (a converted factory in Pohja). A closer inspection of the Nevsky church will reward the visitor with the sight of one of the best Russian Orthodox cathedrals outside of the Russian Federation (in fact the Nevsky Cathedral is a wonderful taste of what is to come if your plans include going on to visit Saint-Petersburg or Moscow at a later point). On the first day I visited the area, there was a souvenir stall seller dressed in medieval religious garb outside the church (darkly hooded, he looked a bit ominous and clandestine, like something you’d see emerging out of a darkened recess in the The Da Vinci Code). Monumental in appearance, the Nevsky Cathedral’s most distinctive external feature is the five, soaring, black onion domes. The Church, dating from the late Tsarist period, was not without controversy when completed in 1900, as it was built on a location that many Estonians believe was the gravesite of the legendary king, Kalev. The Cathedral has some 11 bells, the largest of which weighs 15 tons, large but not significantly so if you contrast it with the Kremlin’s phenomenal 202 ton Tsar Bell, but it is (unlike Tsar Bell) capable of being hung – and rung! Be prepared to queue if you want to look inside.
The Riigikogu
On the same square, a matter of metres from the building that is the apogee of Russian Orthodoxy in Estonia, is the building that embodies the sovereignty of the independent Estonian nation, Toompea Castle, which serves as the seat of parliament, the Riigikogu (literally the “state assembly” in Estonian). The structure is a large pink building (lending it the appearance of being cute but still imposing!), corner-posted at one end by Pikk Herman’s Tower, one of Tallinn’s most formidable, historic towers.
Interior of Toomkirik
Tucked away behind the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral a short distance, you will see a quite different but equally significant old church. Toomkirik, or to give it its formal name, the Cathedral of St Mary the Virgin, is the oldest and most famous Lutheran church in the city, The two great city cathedrals are quite a contrast architecturally. From the outside the white Dome Church (Toomkirik) looks a little drained in colour, making a more subdued statement than the nearby domineering Nevsky Church. Inside St Mary’s though it is more visual stimulating despite it being a bit low on lighting. The highlight of the interior for me is the various Teutonic shields with their heraldic insignias and banners displayed on the walls.
The Patkuli vaateplatvorm is located on the western edge of Toompea hill. The spacious, tableland platform looks out on a sweeping vista of Tallinn which encapsulates the contrasting old and newer parts. The view from the platform ranges from Rocca al Mare, Balti Jaam terminus to Pelgulinn, Kalamaja (with its characteristic older wooden “fish houses”), the city ports and the Baltic, to the distant TV Tower (the highest ‘spire’ in Talinn). Immediately to the left of the viewing platform you will see the back of a government building, an elegant white, neo-classical building with a fine colonnade facade.
Patkuli platform
After getting your fill of the high views you may want to lope down the 157 steps of the winding Patkuli staircase to picturesque Toomparki below. Down below, the park is a terrific position to survey the western side of Toompea. The best views of the old wall are to be had from a number of vantage-points in both the western side parks (Schnelli, Toom, Falgi ōu) and the southern parks and gardens (Lindamägi, Hirve, Harju, Komandandi and Taani Kuninga). Taani Kuninga Aed (Danish King’s Garden) is interesting to visit because it’s another place in Ülemlinn (the Upper Town) which signifies an convergence of Tallinn history and mythology. Supposedly this is where the Danish flag fell from the sky in 1219 turning the tide of battle against the Estonians. Not really something worthy of memorialising if you were an Estonian nationalist I would have thought, but it is a nice spot with an attractive setting.
Prior to going there I can’t say I’ve ever thought much about Tallinn. Having been there I now know, not only how to correctly spell its name, but what a fascinating place it is – in particular the Old Town which is one of the best preserved medieval cities in Europe. The Old Town, or Vanalinn in Estonian, possesses a neat symmetry in its circumference. You can enter Vanalinn at one medieval set of gates (Viru Gates) and follow various narrow winding cobblestone roads, past the central Raekoja plats (Town Hall Square) and eventually come through to the end (northern) point of Vanalinn (Fat Margaret’s Tower). Conversely you can start at the north end, at the Fat Margaret gate, and do it in reverse (a practical option if you are, like I was, staying in the Pohja/Sadama part of town). Much of the original old city wall has been retained and you can follow the wall as it jags round the parameter of Vanalinn.
The Wall on the western side separates Vanalinn from Toompea (Katedraal Hill) which sits on a high bluff around 30 metres above the Old Town. On the eastern side of the wall, especially in Müürivahe, the environs can get a bit smelly, it was decidedly “on the nose” when I visited, so much so that it put me off going to a restaurant I had singled out in this street! The wall towers and old merchant houses in the Lower Town with their reddish-orange roofs exude a real old world charm and you quickly come to appreciate the many different foreign influences that have exerted themselves on the city at different points in its history – Danish, Swedish, German and Russian (particularly this last one). You also get a feel for Tallinn’s past of being once part of the Hanseatic regional trading confederation.
Pre-modern city transport
In the course of your peregrinations around the town you will see several notable old spiralled churches, especially around Pikk tänav or Harju tänav. Most visitors are happy to leisurely stroll through the cobbled streets and lanes (the Old Town is very navigable by foot in good shoes), but there is also a lot of transport that can be called on. You can take one of the myriad of bicycles fitted with a box for sitting in (velotaksos) operated by boys and girls who look like (and probably are) university students. A second option is you can tour the Old Town in a toy ‘train’, the Vana Toomas. Or you might like to hail down one of the horse-drawn carriages and be driven around by two rather severe looking lady drivers in smart if a little undertaker-like outfits.
Raekoja plats is the tourist centre of Vanalinn. It’s a terrific spot to stroll round and take in the splendid architecture of the historic town. Great place also for lunch or dinner, Town Hall Square has many food choices, Estonian and Russian are popular naturally enough but also plenty of Asian, Italian, etc), as well as cafés and bars. In the Square you’ll find a big selection of what Americans call ‘sidewalk’ eateries and cafés, all grouped in an L-shaped row, a very popular spot to dine in summer. Totally predictably there’s a very touristy feel to the quarter and many restorans like Olde Hansa have gone over-the-top with the full medieval peasant kit for their serving staff! I spoke to one such ridiculously-attired waiter at this open air restaurant and I swear he sounded just like the dude in the Husqvarna TV commercial doing the exaggerated and deliberately silly Swedish accent!
Restorans around Town Hall Square
During the day suvenyras stalls monopolise Raekoja Square with stacks of clothing, bags, amber, being flogged to the mingling multitude of visitors. This is one of the best places in Tallinn to score the cheaper-priced souvenirs. When the weather obliges there is often a band or musical performers of some description performing on the stage in front of the Town Hall … that’s when it gets really crowded in the Square! Hang around the edge of Raekoja long enough and you’ll probably catch a glimpse of the horse-coach with the equestrian-garbed women drivers passing by or lined up for a fare.
The old city wall
Wandering around the Old Town especially close to Toompea Hill you will regularly run into sections of the still significantly intact medieval town wall. Tallinn owes its status as a UNESCO World Heritage city in no small measure to its winding, elongated and largely preserved historic old town wall. For the visitor, Vanalinn’s numerous passageways and towers, most famously Kiek in de Kök and Tall Herman’s Tower, are redolent of history. A particularly popular spot on the wall is Neitsitorn, which doesn’t translate as “No-sit-on” but means Maiden’s Tower (a somewhat ironic name given that at one time the Tower was uncomfortably close to a prostitutes’ prison!). Neitsitorn, now a museum cafe, draws many visitors to sit on its long balcony high up on the wall and enjoy its fine views over the city. Kiek in de Kök with the voyeuristic connotations of its name (translating as “peeping into kitchens”) is also now a military museum of sorts, appropriately enough as the tower still has nine cannonballs embedded in it from the 16th century Livonian War.
Walking east from Raekoja plats, along Harju street towards Kesklinn (the New Town), you will reach Freedom Square, a plaza of great national significance to Estonians. Towering over the square is a huge cross which symbolises the Estonian people’s struggle for independence after WWI, but more recently it was the gathering point for Estonians to proclaim their freedom from Soviet rule in 1991. Meetings and concerts are occasionally held here, but every time we visited, the predominant (indeed only) activity going on in the square was games of basketball between Tallinnese youth (basketball is Estonian’s national sport appropriately for a nation of tall people) … come to think of it, Tallinnese (linguistic purists humour me on this one!) is almost a homonym for ‘Tallness’! The large and St Johns Cathedral, a focal point of the community, is at one end of the square. This broad, open space is well worth a look even if just to get away from all the souvenir shops, narrow alleyways and confined spaces of the Old Town for a bit.
Spending time in Freedom Square will afford you a respite from the Old Town’s crowds and shops. Another, more aesthetically appealing place is the peaceful and tranquil parks on the western side of the city (between Toompea/Vanalinn and the central Baltic train station). Two in particular stand out, Schnelli Park and Tornide valjak. These long, delightful parklands represent a distinctive green zone cut off from the more densely populated parts of the inner city. Schnelli Park has a pond (Schnelli Tiik), once part of the medieval city’s moat, a rockery and fountain at the southern end. Within the northern section, Tornide valjak, there is two (new) small quirky, themed gardens each celebrating a (sister city) connection with Tallinn – a Kiev (Ukraine) ‘Ocean’ garden with colourfully painted tin and plastic figures of fish and other pelagic creatures; and a Ghent (Belgium) garden with vivid silhouettes of children at play. In winter Schnelli Park and the other adjoining parks take on a whole different complexion, becoming fields of snow!
During my stay in St Petersburg I got to appreciate the number and variety of bridges that there are in this “Venice of the North”. Given that St Petersburg is dissected by a series of islands and waterways, bridges are an integral part of the cityscape. There are hundreds of bridges scattered around the city and the easiest way of seeing a healthy percentage of them is from the deck of one of the innumerable canal boats. If you have the luxury of time though, on foot is a better way to view in detail at least a representative sample of the bridges. In the 19th century the city administrators decided to colour-code some of the bridges, but now-a-day only the Blue, Red, Green and Yellow (this last one now renamed Pevcheskiy) bridges remain of those originally designated by hue. The best known of these is the Blue Bridge (Siniy most), which crosses the Moika River and has the widest span of any bridge in St Petersburg. The other three ‘colour’ bridges also cross the Moika but they are less ambitious constructions than the Blue Bridge. I couldn’t really fathom where Pevcheskiy bridge (the Singers’ bridge) got its former name from (Zholtyi) as it looks more olive-green than yellow in its colouring. Some of the bridges display a mythological animal motif, eg griffins (Bank Bridge), the Sphinx chimera, aptly enough, on the Egyptian (pedestrian) Bridge.
One of the most famous bridges, in part because of its central spot in the city, is Anichkov Bridge. This bridge provides passage over Fontanka canal for traffic and pedestrians on busy Nevskiy Prospect. Visitors to St Petersburg invariably stop to admire the four bronze horse scultures on each corner of the bridge. I had several opportunities to do this as on our journeys along Nevskiy Pr we regularly crossed this spot back and forth. The four-cornered “Horse Tamers” are one of St Petersburg’s most recognisable landmarks.
Lomonosov bridge
Panteleymonosky most
Another bridge over the Fontanky River interesting in its design, is Lomonosov bridge. This bridge is a remnant of the movable, towered bridges common in 18th century St Petersburg. Lomonosov is characterised by four rusticated Doric columns which look a bit like sentry boxes on top of the bridge.
Further down the Fontanka River we came to Panteleymonovsky Bridge at the point of the river’s confluence with Moika (near the Mikhailovskiy castle). Pantelymonosky is an attractive bridge with some interesting martial elements. The bridge’s railings incorporate an impressive motif of shields, battle-axes, spears and other weapons of war. The end-columns holding up lanterns continue the theme. Its design of a bundle of spears, atop of which is a golden eagle, is suggestive of Imperial Rome.
Neva River network of bridges
Out on the Neva River the Palace Bridge (Dvoretsovy) is the bridge that gets most attention in St Petersburg. Dvoretsovy is probably the most photographed (and reproduced on posters, T-shirts, caps, etc) highlight in St Petersburg. The Palace is a bascule bridge with a mechanised, double-leaf lifting action. At night it is the standard pastime to take photos of the illuminated bridge opening for passing vessels on the Neva. The Palace bridge also features prominently in the “White Nights” cruise on the river from June to July each year.
Trinity bridge
Along the river from Dvoretsovy is Trinity Bridge (Troitskiy most), another interesting segmental designed bridge and a single-wing lifting mechanism. most visitors appreciate Troitskiy bridge for its spectular Art Nouveau feature such as the elegant metal lanterns and the elaborate rostral columns at each end. Whilst visitors tend to focus, rightfully, on the feast of grand buildings on display in St Petersburg, its good to keep in mind that the city’s bridges have a particular charm and fascination of their own.
After we returned from Pushkin we decided to catch up on a few of the recommended places that we hadn’t got to on the walking tour. The Saviour on Blood Church (AKA ‘Church of the Spilled Blood’) is on most ‘unmissable’ lists for St Petersburg. The key to this cathedral’s origin lies in its name. The church was erected on the spot (the junction of Moika and Griboedova canals) where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, hence the somewhat queasiness-inducing name. By the time I got round to visiting it I was probably suffering from ABC fatigue, the prospect of viewing yet “Another Bloody Church!” (having had my fill of them all over Eastern Europe) didn’t excite me. But even in this jaded state of mind I would have to admit that the exterior of “The Spilled Blood” left a strong impression on me. It is stunning admixture of different designs and patterns, domes with swirling colours, some pure gold and some looking like a “chocolate freckle”. I was reminded more than a little of the famous Pokrovskiy Cathedral (St Basil’s) in Moskva’s Red Square with its striped, multi-coloured domes & towers (but “The Spilled Blood” is a slightly scaled-down version of the Krasnaya church). The 16-17th century style building contrasts sharply with the Baroque, classical & more modern surrounding buildings of the area. Some expressive mosaics in the church’s interior. There’s a long string of souvenir stalls at the rear of church alongside the canal.
We crossed town to see St Issac’s Cathedral (in Russian transliterated as Isaakievskiy Sobor), one of the icons of Saint-Petersburg, right up there with Kazan Cathedral. It is located in the Admiralteiskaya district not far from the Neva River. St Issac’s is worthy of a look for its crowning glory alone – the huge fully gold-plated dome roof, identifiable from diverse parts of the city. The 250rbl entrance fee (as at 2015) is very good value because the interior is quite a treasure to behold, richly decorated with glittering mosaics & columns containing malachite & lapis-lazuli ornamentation. As an added bonus good views of the cityscape await climbers willing to walk up the 226 steps to the church’s colonnade.
Mikhailovskiy Dvorets
We went next to St Micheal’s Castle (known variously as St Michael’s Castle, Mikhailovskiy Palace and the Engineers’ Castle), located on Sadovaya Ul near another junction of the city’s canals. Mikhailovskiy Palace is in a different league to the vainglorious excesses of St Petersburg’s better known architectural tourist magnets. It lacks the glamour, richness and sheer scope of Peterhof, the Winter Palace and Catherine Palace. As castles go this pink castle with a green roof is a formidable looking structure with a moat and strong walls. The castle has a big open courtyard in the middle which is quite barren, it could do with a few pot plants & a little imaginative planning to brighten the area up. Mikhailovskiy Palace’s beginnings had an ironic element which explains the castle’s air of foreboding – built by Tsar Pavel I with the purpose of strengthening the emperor’s personal security, however Pavel survived only 40 nights in it before he was murdered! Across the road in a pleasant park overlooking the palace there is a statue of Peter the Great posing as a Roman emperor. Today Mikhailovskiy Palace is an art museum (part of the Russian Museum) with lots of works by famous Russian artists including world-class painters like Chagall and Kandinsky. Architectural oddity: all four facades, N, S, E & W, are completely different in appearance.
Apostolic Armenian Church
Getting back on to Nevskiy Pr, a monumental piece of architecture that you’ll find hard to miss as you walk the street is Kazansky Cathedral. When I first noticed this panoramic building I mistook it for the parliament or the head-of-state’s residence, not a church. It has a large, extended colonnade, bookended by two huge square arches. The colonnade with a dominant central dome is shaped in a semi-circle which encloses a small, peaceful garden with a fountain. Kazansky Cathedral’s design was based on the iconic St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, much in the way that Peter the Great’s inspiration for Peterhof was the glory of Versailles. Visits inside the Cathedral during opening hours are free. Not far from here, still on Nevskiy, we stumbled on another ecclesiastical building very different to Kazansky. The St Catherine Armenian Apostolic Church, a little Armenian church set back from the street and dwarfed by all the large elegant Art Nouveau buildings close by. The Armenian church is a small but beautiful light blue and white building. From the street you only get only a glimpse of it as it is jammed in between two large, more pedestrian-looking buildings. Up close of course you get a better view, but unfortunately, the proximity of unconnected buildings block a full, wide shot of the whole facade. Still, it is worth your while to stop and check out this minor gem of a building.
Having seen the Hermitage/Winter Palace briefly at night I was keen to return during the day and take it in more thoroughly. The facade as viewed from the Alexander Monument is one huge green and gold panorama of a palace, the Hermitage is in fact a conglomeration of several buildings, the green one, Zimadvorets, being part of the whole (Tot Pustyn). The exterior of the Winter Palace is intended to impress the viewer with its sheer size and scope … mission accomplished from first sighting!
WP marble staircase
The interior of the Winter Palace is magnificent, but my takeaway impression of all that unbridled opulence and grandeur left me thinking that very often less is more! The Museum opens on to a sublime, white marble staircase which is unfailingly packed with large hordes of visitors snapping shots of everything in sight. Absolute plethora of portraits in a long corridor of Russian generals of the Napoleonic Wars, military types in glossy uniforms with varying degrees of facial hair. Did the Russians really need this many generals to counter Napoleon? The interior apartments has the decorative style of gold and white elegance of the Louis XIV interiors, it was all so reminiscent of what I had seen six years ago at Versailles Palace. The Hermitage as a whole simply drips grandiloquence to a grotesque level of self-indulgence. Peter the Great and his successors were wholeheartedly intent in engaging in a game of ‘one-upmanship’ with the 18th century French court.
Hermitage
The Hermitage’s art collection is the envy of art galleries worldwide, and makes many of the leading museums’ holdings pale by comparison. Fantastic array of 17th-18th century European art works on display including Rembrandts and paintings by other Flemish/Dutch masters, a Michaelangelo sculpture and two extremely rare Da Vincis. The art works by Western old masters in the Palace range from Rembrandts (several works), Rubens, Van Dyke, Brueghel, Titian, Veronese, Velaquez, Hals and Raphael to De Vinci and Michelangelo. Chinese, Egyptian, Prehistoric and Modern art is also represented in the Palace’s collections. I was more impressed with the art on display here than with what I saw in the highly-vaunted Museo Del Prado in Madrid. The interior design can be appreciated for its high aesthetic content, variety of styles and superior quality. The ornately-decorative rooms should also not be missed – St George’s Hall and Armorial Hall in particular are full of objects of refined taste and gilded beauty. Whenever you go you’ll have to compete with the big crowds, processions of large group visitors tramp it’s floorboards continually, but the experience & benefits are well worth it!
‘The Bluff’ Peterhof
From the Winter Palace we ventured to the western outskirts of St Petersburg, to Peterhof, where comparisons with Versailles are even more pronounced. The grandeur of the Peterhof palace complex has earned it appellations like the “Versailles-Gorod” of Russia. Peterhof (Dut-Ger. origin, meaning “Peter’s Court”) in summer was crowded with visitors of course. We went primarily to see the Lower Park. Petrodvorets (the Grand Palace itself), in canary yellow and gold edging, looked a very splendid looking building, however we passed on getting tickets to go inside, partly because we didn’t have the time to do it justice but also we’d heard the interior wasn’t that special. Besides we still had the potentially even more exquisite Catherine’s Palace to come.
Lower Park gardens with Petrodvorets in background
From the top of the bluff (the higher level of the grounds) the Lower Gardens and multiple fountains are a great sight, adorned with numerous classical golden statues, chequerboard floor and a channel opening out into the main fountain. Similarly, glancing back up from the bottom, the sloping Grand Cascade is also an impressive vision with the Palace as backdrop. The Chessboard Cascade with its dragon motif certainly attracts the young visitor. Well worth a look also is the low, long building, Monplaisir Palace on the sea and the garden and fountains of the Orangery. The most celebrated sculpture of the Orangery fountains is that of the mythological Triton fighting the sea monster and turtles, deeply symbolic to the Russians as signifying Peter’s victory over the Swedes in the Great Northern War.
Trick fontanky
One of the parts of Peterhof most popular with the flocking multitude is the Trick Fountains, Peter the Great’s own innovation apparently, but, again borrowed from the Versailles court of the French Sun-King. Having ordered that hundreds of fountains be constructed at Peterhof and elsewhere it shouldn’t be surprising that Peter the Great might get a bit bored with playing it straight and want to sabotage some of them – what a absolute card that man was! I can just imagine a bunch of nobles and boyars vociferously objecting to Peter’s practical joking … sure thing! In fact trick fountains were quite the fashion for absolute monarchs and rulers in the day. The Hohenems Prince-Archbishop of Hellbrun Palace in 17th century Salzburg got a similar kick out of seeing unsuspecting guests get doused by trick fountains, and like Peterhof, that tradition still goes on at Hellbrun today! Still, bread and circuses and all that … I say give the people what they want, and the trick fountains are certainly a big hit, the biggest source of merriment indeed in Peterhof’s Lower Gardens (and largely but not exclusively with children!). The only thing is, I suspect the element of surprise is losing traction, Peterhof’s trick fountains are so well known now … we were forewarned about it before we went there. That said, once there, you still need to be careful where you walk. Even if the idea of the trick fountain is a bit on the gimmicky side, it should be said that it does amuse (and cool down) the horde of people who gather round the gardens. What we found wasn’t impressive before leaving Peterhof was the thoroughly inadequate and disgusting toilet facilities at the entrance/exit, a small row of portaloos (insufficient in number for the amount of visitors) with the nauseating stench of raw sewerage piling up. Such a first-rate tourist attraction for St Petersburg warrants facilities more commensurate with its importance and popular patronage.
Catherine Palace
From the Summer Palace of Peterhof we headed to the southern districts of St Petersburg to the suburb of Pushkin, formerly called Tsarkoye Selo (“Tsar’s Village”), location of another breath-taking Romanov palace, Catherine Palace. The blue, white and gold-laden Palace we see today is the product of several 18th century reconstructions reflecting the varying tastes of empresses – from Catherine I to Elizabeth to Catherine II! The result, ultimately, is more of the same of what we saw at the Hermitage & Petergof, tasteful Italian elegance, unrestrained extravagant luxury and over-ornate decoration, but it is every bit as magnificent as those other St Petersburg palaces – probably more so. The quadrangle-shaped building has many unbelievably beautiful rooms and gold encrusted apartments, the Picture Hall, the Amber Chamber, the Green Dining Room, and so on. Again the interior recollects the majesty of Versailles, especially with its close similarity to the Hall of Mirrors.
Katarinedvorets parks & gardens
The Palace grounds follow suit using Versailles as its inspiration (and even as a template). The manicured parks are equally as sublime as those at the Summer Palace, with their expansive relaxing areas, gardens, lakes and canals, unusual hedge patterns, etc. The Cameron Galleries with its bronze busts of famous historical figures and other sculptures is not to be missed either. In one of the lakeside buildings we heard an excellent performance of that traditional Russian standard, “the Volga Boatman” from a vocal quartet. The only disappointment at the Tsarskoye Selo palace was the limited lunch options on site, the relatively new restaurant was booked out on the day we visited, and because of the crowds at the palace we had a long wait for service at the other food outlets.
Not too long after arriving in St Petersburg I found myself taking a stroll down the street in the central part of the city that everyone gravitates towards, Nevsky Prospekt. It was late in the evening and for a while I was under the impression that this city of exquisite palaces & cathedrals had maybe been hijacked by a ‘Mad Max’ film production company. As I walked down Nevsky street my auditory nerves alerted me to the immediate vicinity of gangs of bikies tearing up and down Nevsky at frightening speeds. Some bikies were “burning rubber”, doing wheel stands and fishtailing their machines, generally it seemed playing games of chicken with tardy pedestrians – with not a police car in sight! I just couldn’t figure out what was happening, all that commotion. It was well after midnight when I walked back down Nevsky, sidestepping the strip club spruikers on the way to Uprising Square. In the vast square old ladies passively and quietly sit in the hope of selling their bunches of flowers, and young men are busy stencilling ad messages on the square pavement (certainly a cheaper form of advertising than paying for billboard space). As I walked I wondered if this was normally how it was like in St Petersburg, decibel-exploding motor bikes assailing the eardrums of the general population into the wee hours of the morning.
A couple of days later, back on the same street in daylight this time, I noticed a huge banner, “St Petersburg Harley Days” just near peaceful Ostrovsky Square. I had my answer to the mystery. Bikies has descended on St Petersburg from all over the globe (Germany, France, Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Scandinavia, the US, etc, St Petersburg’s own “Night Riders” included). The Harley-Davidson event was in a cordoned-off area with heavy security at each of the entry points, but it seemed that Joe (and Joanna) Public weren’t being kept out so, I ambled through the gate without being challenged to produce my HD Club bona fides. it was a big commercial operation inside the perimeter, lots of activity, people walking all over the joint. Lots of folks dressed in black, no shortage of tattoos and beards of course. There were special Harley-Davidson machines on display and promotional girls with black-and-white checkered flags which they’d occasionally wave around rather superfluously given there was no actually racing going on. Along each side of the compound was a long row of souvenir stalls selling mainly specialised motor bike-related items. Organised entertainment was aplenty, displays of bike stunt-riding and a rock band was warming up in the bandstand when I was there.
The Harley Days festival in the city is now apparently an annual event for international bikies, OK its not just for bikies … for (Harley-Davidson) motorcycle enthusiasts of all shapes and kinds. From time to time bands of these enthusiasts would rev up their motors and ride en masse in a head-turning procession along Nevsky Pr. In all some 3,000 motorbike riders were said to have attended the Saint Petersburg festival during the first couple of weeks in August … it certainly seemed like it was that many on the ground to my ears! And the bike riders and Harley-Davidson aficionados clearly enjoyed themselves, that was apparent for all to see, so much so that plans were set in place for next August’s St Petersburg HD event before this one finished.
Winter Palace after dark
Most tourists venture down to Palace Square during the day to visit the Hermitage/Winter Palace and marvel at the treasures within its doors. But the Square at night is well worth a bit of a ‘butcher’s’ also. The lit-up Hermitage looks spectacular after nightfall (in August this means after about 10pm!) as does the divinely majestic Carlo Rossi-designed arch of the General Staff Building adjacent to it. The massive square is relatively deserted after dark. There are still people leisurely strolling past the landmark of the towering Alexander Monument, but at night Dvorets Ploshchad becomes very much the domain of skateboarders, Russian youths move in to make full use of its flat open spaces. Warning: it is not necessarily a quiet place to hover around in after dark as motor bike riders (maybe it’s the Harley-Davidson mob again) take advantage of less city traffic around to regularly tear round the very broad circumference of the Square late into the evening.
Gen. Staff Bldg. Dvorets Pl.
Despite the evocation power of the majestic arch (designed by yet another Italian architect in the service of the Romanovs) and the formidable edifice shaped like an archer’s bow, the General Staff Building (GSB) is destined to always remain in the shadow, figuratively rather than literally, of the Winter Palace/Hermitage which it shares the Palace Square with (its nondescript name doesn’t help in keeping it in the forefront of tourists’ minds either). The simplicity and elegance of GSB’s clear, straight lines makes a wonderful contrast with the more ornate and intricate Winter Palace, and GSB’s proximity to the iconic Palace ensures that it will be always be in the public eye. The magnificence of Rossi’s monumental arch is one of the city’s architectural gems … don’t miss the classical sculpture on top of the grand arch celebrating the military triumph over Napoleon.
GSB arch
Dinner options in St Petersburg are numerous and varied. On the recommendation of some fellow travellers we went one night to Moskva Ana Nevskom, at the western end of the vast Uprising Square. Located on the top floor (Lev. 6) of Nevsky shopping centre just off the main road, Moskva is a large, tastefully decorated indoor restaurant (part of the Ginza Project chain) with an L-shaped outdoors section commanding great views of Saint-Peterburg. The menu was both large (printed on A3 sized paper) and extensive (Russian, Italian, Japanese, etc, too much choice really). We went with the Russian dishes, trying the Dorado Grill, the trout burgers and the Stroganoff after knish and pelmeni (potato and meat dumplings respectively) as starters, washed down with wine and a Baltica pivo or two. The waitress assigned to our table (Julia) was very attentive and helpful, sweetly apologising several times for the deficiencies of her English! The food was good if a little pricey after you added on the mandatory pectopaH sales tax, but we still left Julia an appreciative tip. The quality of the food was good but the Moskva’s main selling point is the magnificent panoramic view. The restaurant even provides a telescope for those wanting to take a closer look round between different courses. We were right on the outside edge in the corner which was certainly position A for views, though later on we realised how exposed our position was when the wind picked up and it got a lot cooler (about dessert time). Looking around at the other tables we took a leaf from the local patrons’ books and wasted no time in reaching for the complimentary blankets which were very welcome.
After you’ve had your fill of cathedrals, museums and grey ministerial buildings in the Kremlin, a good place to wind down is Aleksandrovskiy Sad immediately to the west of the wall. The tempo in these gardens is very downbeat, no hustle or bustle. You can sit and admire the attractive, colourful gardens and chill out. Or you can take a stroll along the path parallel to the wall and see yet more extremely youthful-looking guards on duty at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Grotto ‘Ruins’ which are the sparse remnants of the original city wall (in front of the high, newer, permanent Kremlin wall).
Manezh Ploshchad political protest
Manezh Square isn’t internationally well-known in the way Red Square is, but tourists in Moscow usually find themselves here at some point as it links up with other parts of the central city such as Alekandrovskiy Garden, the Bolshoi Theatre district and Red Square itself. Manezh Square is also important to Muscovites for various reasons. The area in front of the State Museum is often the scene of public protests by Russian citizens and interest groups (it also has been the site of football riots in recent years). When I was there some people were waving protest placards next to the statue of Marshal Zhukov whilst their comrades video-recorded their actions. I couldn’t read the placard’s message (in Russian) but the last word was ‘Putin’. What it asserted about him clearly infuriated a couple of surly combative types and a heated argument ensued which eventually provoked police intervention. The ‘incident’ gradually dissipated, the malcontents moved on and the placard-holder resumed her vigil, generating little interest from passing pedestrians.
4 Seasons fountain
I found the south-western part of Manezhnaya the most interesting section of this leisure park, in particular the series of attractive canals and fountains separating Alekandrovskiy Garden and the elongated underground Manezh shopping mall. This was a fun family area with children playing with the canal’s animal statues or under the Four Seasons fountain (symbolised by four rearing bronze horses) which sprays a stream of water onto passers-by. The Four Seasons fountain is another popular venue for Moscovite newly-weds. This area is always a hub of activity with ‘entertainers’ dressed as tsars, tsarinas, a ‘Lenin’ and two ‘Stalins’ (“I’ll see your Lenin and raise you one Stalin!’), all trying to coax visitors into having their picture taken with them – for a fee! The fountains have a ‘circus’ feel about them. As well as the impersonators of Soviet heavyweights and Romanov royals, there is an (incongruous) American Indian chief, various other spruikers and some unfortunate white doves with their tail feathers deliberately bent back so that they cannot fly away. The elegant, restored Manezh building (in background of photo above), once a horse-riding school, and the metro, are on the level diagonally above the fountains.
Historical impersonators
A welcome diversion from the crowded Kremlin triangle can be found in Moskva’s huge public library (nicknamed ‘Leninski’ due to its previous name VI Lenin Library). Blast from the past to see its rows and rows of card catalogues, a system still apparently in use on the main floor (the Russian State Library does have a digital catalogue as well!) I was a bit surprised by the level of security, electronic gates and guards in police flak jackets, but justified I guess because of the historic national significance of its collections. A slim but comprehensive publication on the workings and history of the Library is available. No entry fee but tourists should obtain a visitor’s badge at the front desk.
Putin Dolls the most popular!
The State Library is on the way to Arbat Street (known locally as Old Arbat), its worth the 10 minute walk as on the way you’ll see one or two other points of interest, such as Moscow’s first cinema. Old Arbat is a car-free plaza interrupted in the middle by a cross-road. In it you will find probably the best place in Moscow to buy souvenirs, including the widest variety of Matryoshka dolls depicting innumerable celebrities Russian and international (from Putin to Rasputin with quite a few US presidents, European heads-of-state and pop singers thrown in).
Old Arbat
Aside from momentos and shopping Arbat is a good location away from the centre to eat (a range of inexpensive options). The plaza is pleasant to stroll down, lots of street performers doing their thing, musicians, portrait artists, guys in animal suits wanting to hug you (prompting the odd awkward moments), etc. A huge mural depicting Marshal Zhurov (that man again!) dominates the western end of the street. There’s usually a crowd milling round one particular Jackson Pollock-inspired local artist who paints his expressive and vivid works on a broad horizontal canvas using a flourish of spray cans. For a complete contrast (and change of mood), pop around the corner at the bottom of the street into Smolensky Blvd where the festive feel of Arbat is replaced by the characteristic greyness of a remnant of the Soviet style of architecture, a tall, dour ministerial building. There is a metro station just near here (Smolenskaya) to get you swiftly back to tourism central.
To the immediate west of St Basil’s is the once impenetrable Kremlin, now somewhat demystified by the influx of modern tourism. If you walk around the entire perimeter of the Kremlin walls you get a sense of how the structure of the fortification is both symmetrical in parts and asymmetrical in others. The pattern of defensive towers positioned strategically along the walls form the shape of an irregular triangle (strictly speaking the perimeter of the Kremlin is actually five-sided). You also get an unmistakable sense of how formidable the walls are (height and depth), something they needed to be given the successive waves of assaults on the Kremlin over the centuries (Polish, Swedish, French, Bolshevik, etc). The walls’ symmetry is most apparent on the southern flank of the wall running parallel to the Moskva River.
The Kremlin
Big queues at the ticket box for both the Kremlin and the Armoury when we arrived at 10am. Even bigger queues lining up to go inside the entrance. The entrance to the outer grounds of the Kremlin is on the western side of the Kremlin, from the Alexander Garden. So after buying tickets for the Architectural Ensemble of the Cathedral Square (Rbl 500) we postponed our Kremlin visit to around 2pm (by which time the queues had diminished somewhat). Once inside the Kremlin we took in the cathedrals primarily. Much as we wanted to, we just didn’t have time to fit in the highly lauded Armoury.
Cathedral of the “Deposed Robe”
I was a little surprised that so many churches situated within the erstwhile stronghold of Communist power survived for the 70-plus years the “Religion of Atheism” held sway in Russia, but perhaps the regime had other uses for these beacons of ecclesiastical Orthodoxy, or they judged that tearing them down was just too provocative an act as countless pious Russians still held them sacred. For whatever reason they survived – the Annunciation Cathedral, Archangel Cathedral, Church of the Deposition of the Robe, etc. – with their white facades, arches & towering gold and blue domes. They all ooze a showcase calibre of magnificence. The idiosyncratically named Deposition of the Robe is probably the pick of the church buildings if you count the superb cluster of tiny golden domes which strictly speaking are part of the abutting Terem Palace. Other highlights include the Annunciation’s dazzling copper gate with gold embellishment, and the Necropolis of Ivan the Terrible and the early Romanov tsars in Archangel.
When I visited the Kremlin (August 2015), the Patriarch’s Palace (now a museum) was holding an informative exhibition on “the European Orders of Knighthood”. Included in the exhibition was an interesting video on the discovery of the long-lost Romanov crown jewels in London. After a good hour-and-a-half of cathedral-hopping we found welcome relief from the heat in the shade of the Kremlin Grand Garden, indulging ourselves in the Russian summer passion for morozhennoye (eating ice cream). After refreshments we moved on to the Tsar Bell, but first we had to contend with the over-officiousness of a characteristically large brim-capped policeman on traffic duty.
Czar Cannon
Tsar Kolokol is at the western end of Ivanovskaya Square. The bronze cast Tsar’s Bell is the world’s largest bell (6.14m high, 6.6m in circumference, over 200 tons in weight). Eavesdropping on a private tour talk a local guide was giving a Texas oil billionaire. I learned that owing to a fire the bell was never hung, let alone ever rung! Attempts to counteract the fire resulted in a large chunk of the bell breaking off and it was never reconnected. A short distance from the bell is the equally monumental Tsar Cannon, its impressiveness is symbolic only as it has never been fired in anger. At the other end of Ivanovskaya Square is Spassnaya tower, eastern exit of the Kremlin. If you exit here you will note that the gate is manned by extremely youthful-looking guards.
Guard tower on the southwest wall of the Kremlin
From the exit gate, back at St Basil’s, we walked across Red Square to experience the nearest thing Moscow has to Harrods – the famous GUM building. The giant RYM/GUM department store (formerly the State Department Store under Communism) offered air-conditioned respite from the summer sun and the crowds in Red Square (also a free WC). Good place to grab some lunch (2 large bistro-style eateries to choose from – inexpensive with excellent range of food choices) plus GUM has multiple ice cream outlets (more morozhennoye!) In GUM tourists can either shop to excess or simply roam its arcades and admire its 19th century Italian-designed elegant facade and hooped skylights. A nostalgic feature of the centre is a number of window displays showing aspects of Soviet life in the 30s, 40s and 50s (pastimes, old radios, household goods, etc). At the time we visited there was also a display of 1970s men’s and women’s fashions – such as the USSR’s 1976 version of the safari suit! Easily overlooked but part of the huge GUM complex is the toy section complete with resident store clowns to excite the imagination of the very young – this is situated behind the main building in Vetoshny Per. If you walk from here up to the end of the short Vetoshny Pereulok, turn left at Nikolskaya Ulita, this will take you back into Red Square. But only after you pass yet more of the traditionally costumed ‘noblewomen’ and Cossack warriors preening themselves for photo ops in the plaza.
Moskovsky Station, a large waiting hall, quite a stylish interior with a vast network map of St Petersburg stations embossed on one wall. It was however bereft of seating, most people waited inside the fast food outlets down one side of the hall. It was a long walk down the platform to our carriage, when we got there the gruff, unsmiling uniformed woman who checked our tickets and passports before silently waving us onto the train clearly seemed to be from the Soviet school of public relations. I found out later that these female “little Mussolinis” in the RZD (Russian Railways) ‘Army’ are called provodnitsas, there are two of them “ruling the roost” for each carriage. During the journey, they take turns, one works whilst the other “sergeant-major” rests up and hones her stern, disapproving look! We had been forewarned that luggage space in the car was very limited and worked on a “first come, first served” basis, but as it eventuated, once on board there was plenty of space for the luggage.
Sapsan V Sapsan
The Sapsan seats were comfortable enough and the ride at a cruising 180-200km an hour a smooth one (didn’t feel like we were going that fast!). We passed through several oblasts with some lovely countryside, especially the lakes to the southern side. Until we got to Tver, hardly any people boarded or disembarked at the stations we stopped at (not many people to be seen outside at all during the trip for that matter). The train’s toilets were clean and up to aircraft standard (unfortunately also aircraft size as well). The food they offered up was pretty ordinary, but OK if you like ‘plastic’ food, the time however passed pretty quickly and we arrived at Moscow inside four hours.
When we disembarked at Moscow Station after a 650km trip it was intriguing to see the nose of our Sapsan resting up against the nose of another Sapsan coming from the opposite direction. Getting off the platform and through the gate with all our luggage was a bit of a mad dash with passengers all over the place, all the trains, east and west, seemed to have been scheduled to arrive at the same time! Still, the journey itself was a pleasant way to travel between the two great European cities of the Russian Federation.
Metro art
Metro art – stained glass
We were picked up at the hotel the next morning by our designated, bilingual guide, Julia, a young Moscovite with a strong New York twang in her voice. Before tackling the metropolis she took us for a tour of the Moscow metro stations. We very quickly got a sense that trying to navigate around the Moscow Metro could be is bewildering for new tourists, especially having to contend with signs in the (foreign to non-Russians) Cyrillic script. We had Julia to lead us, but later without her, we would find out just how difficult it is. The train service is very punctual with trains arriving about every minute-and-a-half but the maze of connecting lines (blue, red, grey, etc) takes some figuring out to get to where you want to go. The real pleasure is in visiting the various underground stations to see the art work on the walls and ceilings which varies widely from station to station. Many have stupendous ornate decorations and even grand chandeliers in some. The paintings bordered by beautiful gold-leaved frames and sculptures projected Soviet propagandist aims (eg, Lenin addressing the masses, heroic Soviet soldiers, workers and athletes representing “Homo Sovieticus”, the idealised type of Soviet man). One such 1932 painting in Kiyevskaya Metro that especially caught my eye depicts Trotsky giving a speech with Stalin standing right behind him (greatly ironic given Trotsky’s fate at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen in Mexico some eight years later). It was in the metros, especially at the Ploshchad Revolutsiy Metro where we got our first inkling of how incredibly superstitious Russians are. Moscovite commuter after commuter would walk past the station’s numerous bronze sculptures of heroic Soviet citizens, but most would momentarily halt at the sculptured figure to rub usually either it’s knee or elbow for good luck.
Red Square: looking back towards History Museum
After criss-crossing the city to visit many differently-decorated but equally beautiful metros (almost all Moscow stations are underground), we exited the system at Tetranalnaya and entered Red Square near the Museum of the War of 1812. We learned from the Russian guide that ‘Krasnaya’, ‘Red’ in Russian, originally meant ‘beautiful’ and it is this connotation that the Square’s name derives from. Red Square, a huge cobblestone rectangular square (about 330m x 70m), is the centre and focal point of Moscow. To its immediate west is Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall, to the north is the State Historical Museum (and to the left of that the entrance gates to the Alexandrovsky Garden), to the east is Kazan Cathedral, the GUM department store and the Kitay-gorod commercial district, and to the south St Vasily’s (Pokrovsky Cathedral). Because of its centrality it is easy to access most of the top tourist spots from here, with people continually dissecting it to get to the next point of interest. Others just hover there taking in the sheer scope and atmosphere of it all. The Square is also regularly invaded by wedding parties with bride and groom photos in front of St Basil’s the mandatory option for newly-weds.
St Vasily’s Cathedral
When people outside of Russia conjure up a visual image of Moscow, St Basil’s Cathedral (AKA Church of St Vasily’s the Blessed or Pokrovsky Cathedral) is the icon that most associate with the Russian capital. Architecturally not really like any other structure (arguably St Petersburg’s Cathedral of the Savior of the Spilt Blood approximates its opulent design), St Basil’s is an eclectic mix of Russian, Italian, Byzantine and other Eastern styles, comprises a central chapel flanked by nine distinct onion domes with polygonal towers. The domes present a kaleidoscope of colour with their various combinations. Inside, what caught my eye in particular was the arches and entrance walls with their intricate patterns, blended colours and floral motifs. Upstairs, there is a souvenir shop, as well you can listen to a highly accomplished male quartet perform Russian songs from their CD (which you can purchase on site). NB: do not take the narrow spiralling staircase located to the right UNTIL you have seen all of the ground floor, because you cannot return down these stairs and the only exit from the first floor takes you completely outside of the Cathedral. Entry fee (2015) is 250rbl.
You can’t really experience all that St Petersburg has to offer without spending time on Nevsky Prospekt … it’s essential – and unavoidable! Dissecting the city from east to west for some 4.5km, Nevsky Pr is home to St Petersburg’s shopping precinct, restaurants and nightlife. On our first morning we left our hotel in Ligovsky Pr and walked up to the vast Vosstaniya (or Uprising) Square where Nevsky begins. At all times, or so it seems, there is a constant stream of people up and down Nevsky, shopping, wining and dining, sightseeing. On one side of Uprising Square stands Vosstaniya Metro station. On first glance I mistook it for a church, but as railway stations go it is one monumentally impressive building, a stunning but simple pavilion with a sandstone coloured circular colonnade at the top.
Yeliseev’s Food hall
There are a number of attractive Art Nouveau buildings on Nevsky. One that garners a lot of interest and visitors is Yeliseev’s Emporium, a food hall selling fine caviar, vodka & other overpriced Russian gourmet foods. Not as grand or opulent as its Moscow namesake (Yeliseev’s gastronom) which some have compared to London’s Harrods, a claim by any reckoning that is something of an over-stretch! St Petersburg Yeliseev’s in itself is quite a spectacle, from its whimsical window display with little comical figurines to it’s aesthetically pleasing interior. It’s not exactly a place for delicatessen bargain buys but it’s really worth going in for a look at the beautiful decor. On a searingly hot summer’s morning we sat under the ‘shade’ of its giant centrally positioned indoor palm sipping a raspberry lemonade & admired the balustrades & ceiling designs. I was amused by the two old men mannikins in the gold leaf balcony on the back wall who reminded me of Statler and Waldorf, the audience hecklers from the “The Muppets” TV show.
Anichkov bridge & Fountain canal
Continuing down Nevsky we soon reached the first of the waterways that gives St Petersburg its famous epithet, “Venice of the North”, Fontanky kanals (the Fountain canal).The bridge on Nevsky Pr that crosses the canal is called Anichkov Most. On each corner is the famous horse sculpture, the “Horse Tamers”. Here, you’ll find the ever-present boat trip touters, locals of all ages who all day energetically spruik boat trips to the public. Even late at night they were still hard at it on the bridge – and at the other canals further along Nevsky, Griboedova and Moika. Many spruikers used a hand-held mike to loudly announce (in Russian) the trips offered by competing boat companies. I wondered about the effectiveness of this method of soliciting for business. Because of all the noise generated by the crowds of people and the normal, heavy motor traffic on Nevsky, I doubted if anyone could make out anything much of what the touts were saying. Whilst here we confirmed our booking for a boat tour for later in the day. Many of the boat trips start from near Anichkov Bridge, although some begin from Neva Embankment (there are many, many options for canal and river tours available in St Petersburg!).
Pseudo-aristocrats & Catherine monument
A little bit past Anichkov Most is Ostrovskogo Square which is as much about peace & tranquility as Anichkov is abuzz with activity. A large monument of Catherine the Great watches over the park and garden. The reform-minded German-born empress is depicted atop a globe with some of the great men of letters & politicians of her day. This pleasant park on Nevsky Pr is a welcome refuge for visitors, a place to “take five” away from the hustle & bustle of the main street. In the tree-lined square I noticed an oddly dressed couple in 18th century period costumes leisurely strolling around the park. Observing them I discovered that they were ‘performers’ touting for tourism business, offering themselves up to visitors to have their photo taken with them at a price. Before leaving the Federation I had learnt that this was a feature common to Russian tourism, at most tourist hotspots (Peterhof, Catherine Palace, Red Square, etc) similarly over-dressed ‘aristocratic’ couples would pop out of the woodwork at the first sight of a tourist!
Heading back past Catherine II’s park we passed the street artists’ quarter where a number of artists sketched portraits for passers-by (oddly the portraitist were all males, all middle-aged or older – just as they had been in Old Arbat in Moscow!). Just along from the park is Gostiny Dvor, St Petersburg’s oldest shopping mall and not ‘tiny’ at all. Gostiny Dvor is all neoclassical elegance on the outside but inside it is rather old-fashioned in its presentation and layout. A handy place still to pop into as it has a free of charge WC.
Elisie the cat in Malaya Street
One of the more unassuming but interesting little streets running off Nevsky that I took a fancy to is Malaya Sadovaya Ul. On either side of the mall is a bronze cat (one of each sex) perched high on the wall. Walking down the plaza, the idea is to toss a coin at either cat and try to land in on the ledge. The reward for succeeding – guaranteed good luck to the thrower! This is another instance of the potency of Russian shibboleths akin to what I saw in Moscow with the superstitious mania for rubbing the knee of a sculptured bronze figure for luck as you sprint past! The rest of the pedestrian-only street contains other interesting features including a sculpture of a photographer and his dog, a kugel ball fountain which looks like a rum ball sitting on the end of a slice of cake (quite appropriate I think for a street replete with cafés selling sugary tortes and pastries). Malaya Sadovaya’s inviting benches, street lamps and overall relaxed ambience makes it a favourite haunt of young St Petersburgians – especially at night.
View from Singer Cafe (Kazan sobor)
Further along Nevsky, near Griboedova canal, we came to another wonderful old Art Nouveau building, Dom Knigi (the House of Books). It’s a very large bookshop, good for a browse (there are even some books here that are not printed in Cyrillic script!) and it’s another handy place to use the toilet gratis on the top floor. By the real reason to stop here is the Singer Cafe … no, not a cafe where you sip coffee or hot chocolate whilst a soloist or some enthusiastic amateur entertains you with a ballad or two, but a reference to the building’s “needle and stitch-work” past. Before the bookworms moved in, Dom Knigi was in fact Singer (or Zinger) House, headquarters of the Russian branch of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Singer Cafe is a bit of an icon on Nevsky Pr and we ended up having a light lunch at the cafe before resuming our walking tour of Nevsky Prospekt & its environs. The cafe had a relaxed, casual air, with staff that were attentive and polite with a good grasp of English. I had salmon pelmeni and a lemonade, more than sufficient to recharge my batteries for more foot-slogging. The upstairs section of this cafe is known for its great views of the panoramic Kazansky Cathedral (directly opposite on the other side of Nevsky) through its supersized square windows.
Coming into the Neva Embankment from the canal
After taking in a few more of the highlights of Nevsky Pr we backtracked to Anichkov Most for our boat trip. As the boat wound its way up Fontanka canal, criss-crossing the other canals and eventually turning into Moiky, an on-board commentary in Russian was played through a loud-speaker. Fortunately though for us we had our English language guide Valentina sitting with us so we got the translated version face-to-face, essential if we were to get some idea of the different buildings & bridges (very many bridges!) that we were passIng. Our boat was a flat top type, the importance of which was illustrated when we passed under bridges as low as 2.4m or 2.5m!), standing up was not recommended – for reasons of personal health preservation! One of the attendants was standing up on the boat as we were about to pass under one of the lowest bridges. He didn’t appear to be aware of its approach but at the last moment he nonchalantly ducked his head to avoid get it taken off! It unnerved us at the time but it was pretty clear that he knew all along what he was doing and was in fact just ‘showboating’ to impress the punters on board. From the canals we entered the wide and free-flowing waters of the Neva River where we got a good view of the impressive Peter and Paul Fortress. Seeing St Petersburg from the water on the Fontanka, Moiky and Gribeodova canals was a really important (and time-saving) way of getting good views of many of the city’s best buildings. By the time we had returned to Nevsky Prospekt after the two hour cruise we’d had enough of sightseeing for the day and were ready to return to Ligovsky Prospekt and make plans for dinner.
If ever you find yourself on a tour of China, one of the first places you will want to visit is Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses site and its Museum. Once you get there, while being driven to the venue from Xi’an Xianyang Airport or perhaps from your city hotel after a ride around Xi’an’s impressive City Walls, the chances are that your Chinese tour guide in the course of his or her information talk will bring up the topic of Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 visit. The celebrated occasion has entered into local folklore and Chinese guides are quick to bring up the “special anecdote” concerning the US President in the preamble they give to international tourists on the bus. I’ll get to that story soon enough but first some basic background on the Terracotta Warriors.
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The Yangs do some digging with totally unexpected consequencesThe whole phenomena of the Terracotta Warriors has its origin in March 1974 when several dirt-poor peasant farmers (thought to be seven in number) in Xiyang village in Lintong County, were digging for water in the dry, forbidding countryside 35km east of Xi’an. One of the farmers, Yang Zhi’fa, struck something hard with his hoe which he thought was a bronze relic of some kind. Digging a bit deeper he discovered the object had the form of a shoulder and torso. The other farmers, thinking they were human remains and fearful of Buddhist superstitions, urged Yang to rebury it so as not to offend the ancestors (ghost lore has been commonplace in the eastern Xi’an region for centuries). Yang was unperturbed and shortly later took the dismembered clay warrior to the Lintong Museum. Before long archaeologists from Beijing were swarming all over the site and so commenced a massive state-run excavation (of three pits) which has unearthed over the course of the last 40 years, an army of terracotta soldiers, horses and chariots, of what is the Mausoleum of the first Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi who unified China c. 221BC (imperial Qin Dynasty).
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The Terracotta Warriors discovery: Profitable to some involved but not to others!The government eventually expropriated the land from the farmers to give free rein to the excavations, effectively destroying the Yang village. The dispossessed villagers were inadequately compensated for the disruption to their lives. By the early 1990s, after years of meticulous and arduous preparation work, the site area was opened as a museum and rapidly became a modern wonder of the world and a tourist mecca. The permanent exhibition proved to be a great little supplementary ‘earner’ for local Communist Party officials and many enterprising business people also profited enormously from the financial opportunities. This propitious good fortune has not been shared by the statues’ discoverers or by the Yang community as a whole. In fact Yang’s fellow farmers blamed him for the loss of their plots and livelihoods, and he was ostracised by his neighbours. Other misfortune followed for the community, two of the farmer Yangs died, only in their fifties due to impoverished circumstance and another, Wang Puhzi, hanged himself. To the farmers who had feared that the feng shui of the location would be disturbed by digging up the area, these tragic outcomes confirmed in their minds that it had been cursed.
A Terracotta Army fan with good connexionsOver in Washington DC, President Bill Clinton, when he wasn’t being leader of the “Free World”, had been following the unfolding archaeological story of the Xi’an terracotta army with growing interest and fascination. So, not long after, on a scheduled 1998 state visit to Beijing, Clinton requested that PRC allow him to make a side trip to Xi’an so he could see the terracotta marvels in situ for himself. The Chinese authorities, sensing a PR coup in the making, arranged for Mr Yang to be on hand at the site to meet the American president before the news cameras. For the occasion the (presumably) illiterate farmer was taught a few words of English to greet the president with. As it transpired, Yang got very nervous at the prospect of meeting the US leader and when introduced to Clinton on the day, instead of saying “How are you?”, what came out of Yang’s mouth in his halting English was “Who are you?” to which Clinton instantly responded, “I’m Hillary’s husband!” The flustered Mr Yang replied,”Me too!” Everybody laughed…on the Chinese officials’ part it was more of a nervous laugh!
⬅️ When Bill met Yang (but which Yang?)
Mr Yang, ‘professional’ book-signerThe encounter between president and peasant farmer generated a second anecdote: at the meeting Clinton asked Mr Yang for his autograph. Yang, who could neither read nor write, simply drew three circles on a piece of paper. Followed a slightly uncomfortable moment … not least for the embarrassed Chinese officials in attendance. Consequently, the local authorities later sent the uneducated Yang for calligraphy lessons, after which Yang was given a job by the government in the Terracotta Warriors tourist shop. His task was to sit at a table all day signing books on the Terracotta Warriors (leading to his being called by some people, “China’s First Professional Signer”). It should be added that Yang Zhi’fa subsequently disputed the inference of this story circulated by a Chinese newspaper in 2002 that he was illiterate, contending that he in fact had a primary school education. Yang sued the newspaper and was eventually awarded damages [Yu Fei, ‘Living with the Terra-cotta Army’, (Consulate-General, Peoples Republic of China in Houston), www.houston.china-consulate.org].
Crafty Mr YangIf you venture into the Emperor Qin Museum shop in Xi’an, as I did three years ago, you will still see the same unsmiling Mr Yang, inscribing his signature on the inside of countless coffee table books, none of which are written by him! Although he looks distracted and bored in his sedentary confinement, he is in actual fact ever vigilant, on the lookout for maverick tourists trying to snap his precious photograph, something he is peculiarly adverse to. While he was looking the other way, and thinking I was out of the line of his peripheral vision, I tried to grab a surreptitious, sneaky photo of Yang from the side…just as I was about to, the sour-faced septuagenarian, suddenly and without looking towards me, raised a cardboard sign in my direction which said in large English letters, “NO PHOTOS OR VIDEOS ALLOWED!”.But is it the ‘real’ Clinton? ⤴
Other spots, other ‘Yangs’If you wander further afield around the Terracotta Warriors complex you may chance upon other individuals also purporting to be “Mr Yang”. It’s quite an industry in Xi’an! In one building near the entrance to the complex there is Yang Xi’an who passes himself off the discoverer of the warriors (although his banner actually says “the discover of the warriors”), displaying a photo of himself posing with Clinton as proof of his credentials. It transpires that this Mr Yang was in fact the manager of a Xi’an factory making replicas of the warriors at the time of Clinton’s 1998 visit – this explains the photo taken when “Slick Willie” stopped off at the factory on route to the Terracotta Museum.
Would the real Mr Yang, the genuine “Discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors’, please stand up?In the glow of world attention being lavished on the terracotta army discoveries and the recognition bestowed on Mr Yang, it is not surprising that the other three surviving farmers present at the 1974 archaeological find wanted to get in on the act. Yang Quany was also given a spot in the museum signing books for a small stipend and began promoting himself as “the discoverer of the treasures”. The remaining two Yangs followed suit. Yang Zhi’fa however discredits his fellow Lintong farmers’ motives and insists that it is he who was primus intra pares (first among equals) in discovering the Emperor Qin relics.
And it doesn’t stop there by any measure. Zhao Kangmin, retired curator of the nearby Lintong Museum, has made his case for recognition as the real discoverer. The way Mr Zhao tells it, after the initial finding Yang Zhi’fa brought the fragment of the terracotta relic first to him at his museum and that he went back to investigate the discovery, and later he reconstructed the first terracotta warrior and horse. Zhao argues that he was the one who had the expertise to grasp the significance of the cultural relics, and that “seeing” as Yang and the others merely did, “doesn’t mean discovering”. You’ll find Zhao, despite being retired, most days at the Lintong Museum where he has set up a small display of the terracotta figures. Zhao spends the day signing postcards for tourists, on the cards he writes, very deliberately: “Zhao Kangmin, the first to discover, restore, appreciate, name and excavate terra-cotta warriors” [Ibid].
Whilst the Lintong farmers haven’t made much money from discovering (or being associated with the discovery of) the terracotta army, the same can be said of the workers who did most of the hard physical work of unearthing and restoring the statues. Most of those recruited to curator Yuan Zhongyi’s archaeological team found themselves working round the year with only a break at the time of the Spring Festival holiday for a wage of only 1.72 yuan (US $0.28) a day in 1976 [Zhao Xu, ‘Yang Zhifa, 76, soldiers on amid terracotta warriors’, (09-XII-2014),China Daily USA, www.chinadaily.com].
A Terracotta Warriors discoverer-impostor industryBack at the Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum, as the fame and popularity of Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum grows, more impostors continue to spring up. These “fake discoverers” of the warriors were like Yang Xi’an, not even present at the discovery of the relics in 1974 (some are not even old enough to have been there!). A manager of one of the gift shops admitted that the complex shops hire men who fraudulently passed themselves off as discoverers of the relics to facilitate the sale of terracotta warrior books by the retailer [Simon Parry, ‘Curse of the Warriors’, South China Morning Post, 15 Sept 2007, www.scmp.com].
“The three in the middle just moved!” ⤴
PostScript: Discovery of yet more warriors made from fired clayMeanwhile back in the football field sized excavation pits at Lintong, Emperor Qin’s life-sized army of clay statues continues to grow. Archaeologists working in pit Nō 2 recently made a fresh discovery, one which might yield another 1,400 warriors, archers, horses and charioteers (and 89 chariots of war) [‘China’s Terracotta Army has new recruits’, Daily Mail, 6 May 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk]. Chinese officials have speculated that there may be around 6,000 terracotta warriors at the site still to be excavated … ensuring no doubt that there will be plenty of new and ongoing opportunities for discoverer-impostors in the future.
The Hydro Majestic Hotel stands on the upper slopes of the Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains, about 116 kilometres west of the Sydney CBD. Last December it re-opened for business six years after it’s resale and interim closure in 2008. The new owners, the Escarpment Group (a consortium of Sydney developers headed by Huong Nguyen and George Saad), have an ambitious vision for the Medlow Bath hotel, including an extension to its facilities and services, and a major renovation of the once great Blue Mountains landmark to restore some of its past glory. About four years passed before construction work even commenced on the site. Initially the new owners had to undertake a big clean-up job of the vacated property as a very large amount of assorted clutter was left behind by the previous occupants [‘Saving a grand old beauty’s soul’, Peter Munro, Traveller, 7 January 2013, www.traveller.com.au].
The Hydro Majestic through the agency of a renovation that cost $30 million has been transformed—from its erstwhile state of dishevelment and disrepair—to again rise seemingly phoenix-like in 2015. The new exterior makeover resulted in the complex’s buildings being painted uniformly white, clearly the developers are hoping that the anticipated returns will repay the investment (all up a reported $40.5 million including the purchase price) so that the venture doesn’t end up a ‘white elephant in all senses!’
Mark Foy’s Liverpool St store
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The Majestic’s current incarnation however is only the latest of many manifestations and reinventions that the hotel has undergone over its long, colourful history. The Hydro Majestic’s genesis lies in the overseas travel experiences of retail baron Mark Foy around the turn of the twentieth century. Foy was co-owner with his brother Francis of the large Sydney department store, Mark Foy’s (named after his father Mark Foy Sr) in Oxford Street, Sydney, later relocated to Liverpool Street in a famous piazza building. The young entrepreneur’s experience of health spas on the Continent gave him the idea for starting a hydropathic therapy operation in Australia. In 1902 Foy purchased several large blocks of land in the Blue Mountains to re-create a similar spa resort to the highly-popular sanatoriums he had visited in Europe. The site chosen at Medlow Bath was supposedly located on natural mineral springs that incorporated the earlier Belgravia Hotel [John Low, ‘Palace in a Wilderness: Hydro Majestic Medlow Bath’, www.bmcc.nsw.gov.au].Foy’s Blue Mountains ur-health resort
Upon completion in 1904 Foy opened his Medlow Bath hydropathic sanatorium (the first health resort in NSW) which he named the Hydro-Majestic. By this time whatever springs were present (if they ever existed) had dried up. Consequently Foy imported large quantities of mineral water from Germany for use in his establishment [www.hydromajestic.com.au (Wikipedia entry)]. He also introduced a German-manufactured generator to supply the Hotel and the surrounding township with electricity (purportedly four days before the city of Sydney achieved electricity!) [www.hydromajestic.com.au, ibid.].
A series of spa pools connected by springs to the hotel generator were constructed in the nearby bush for the use of guests. Foy advertised that the Hydro would provide cures for nervous, alimentary, respiratory and circulatory ailments. Foy from the establishment’s start was also intent on trying to broaden the Hydro’s appeal, advertising it as “the most enjoyable place to spend one’s holidays” [Elaine Kaldy, ‘Medlow 1883 and Now’ (1983), cited in ‘Mb002 : Hydro Majestic’, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, www.environment.nsw.gov.au]. To coordinate the therapeutic programs Foy brought out a Dr Bauer from Switzerland to introduce guests to his “diets of weird and wonderful treatments” [www.hydromajestic.com.au].
Playboy business tycoon
Mark Foy, to all accounts, was not particularly hands-on in his business pursuits, leaving it to a host of managers and agents. The Hydro for instance was apparently leased to influential hotelier and parliamentarian James Joynton Smith in 1913 [‘K032 : Carrington Hotel’, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, www.environment.nsw.gov.au]. Foy’s conspicuous affluence and delegation of tasks to others allowed him the leisure to pursue outdoor activities. The business baron also had a reputation of being something of a playboy-about-town in the ‘Great Gatsby’ mould, legendary for throwing lavish parties for his friends at the Hydro and at his other homes at Bellevue Hill and Bayview.
Mark Foy Jr
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The Hydro Majestic owner was a keen sportsman, yachtsman and motor-car enthusiast. He was such a car enthusiast that he would periodically have sales of bulk numbers of his vehicles on site at his Bellevue Hill property [“MARK FOY’S MOTORS” (Advertisement), Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 1910 – an adroit coupling of business with pleasure on his part; cited in Pittwater Online News, Issue 102 (17-23 March 2013), http://www.pittwateronlinenews.com/mark-foy-history.php]. Foy used his fleet of cars to ferry guests on trips from Medlow Bath to nearby Jenolan Caves. He also kept horses on the grounds for guests to explore Megalong Valley by horseback [Office of Heritage and Environment (Hydro Majestic), www.environment.nsw.gov.au].
Majestic skyline
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Network of bush walks and sustainable agriculture
Foy had a series of bush walk tracks built on the cliffs below the Hydro Majestic. The walking tracks provided spa guests with a physical outlet that would complement Dr Bauer’s therapeutic programs. Guests were encouraged to exercise in the fresh mountain air as part of their recovery. These tracks with local physical features with names like Tucker’s Lookout, Sentinel Pass and the Colosseum offer breath-taking cliff views of the Megalong Valley, and are still explored by bush walkers today.As well as the hotel site itself Mark Foy purchased a considerable amount of land in the Megalong Valley to grow food for the Majestic hotel dinner tables. Foy built a large rural holding at Megalong which he called the Valley Farm, on it was a racecourse, stables, diary farm and a piggery. The farm grew corn, turnips and oats [‘Mark Foy – Retail Tycoon and Megalong Valley Farm’, www.megalongcc.com.au]. The produce grown in the valley was transported up to the resort by a flying fox Foy had rigged up.
The business tycoon also maintained personal properties on the Medlow Bath complex, including a cottage in the Valley known as the Sheleagh Cottage. This property with its great views of the valley, now called “Mark Foy House”, is today listed as a mountains getaway available for rental. It is unclear how much time the constantly on-the-go Foy spent at Sheleagh, or for that matter at any of his Sydney properties, as the newspapers of that day regularly reported him as embarking with his family on yet another world or European tour [cited in Pittwater Online News, op.cit.]. I can easily imagine Foy’s name cropping up constantly in the Vice-Regal column that used to appear in the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘The Lost World’
˚ ༘ ༘ ༘Resort’s luminaries
At the height of its popularity, in the twenties, the Hydro-Majesty was THE fashionable venue to visit, “the place to be seen” by the denizens who grace Sydney’s social pages. Over the years it has had more than its fair share of VIP guests, such as Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose novel The Lost World was inspired by the vast wilderness environment that the Hydro was set in. Other guests include Indian rajahs, Australia’s first Olympic swimming gold medal winner Freddie Lane, and the Commonwealth’s inaugural Prime Minister Edmund Barton, who died whilst staying at the resort in 1920. Boxer Tommy Burns set up a training camp at the hotel where he prepared to fight Jack Johnson for the World Heavyweight Championship in the most famous bout in Australia boxing history at Sydney Stadium in 1908. The entertainment and amusements provided by Mr Foy at the Hydro Majestic took various forms. In its heyday when it was a luxury tourist resort, balls and concerts were regular events. Singers such as the soprano queens Dames Nellie Melba and Clara Butt were hired to perform at these concerts. A curious feature was the cross-dressing costume parties of well-to-do guests in which the husband and wife swapped clothing with each other for the event [‘Saving a grand old beauty’s soul’, op.cit.].
An architectural mixed bag
Taken at its broad scope the Hydro-Majestic is an impressive if a bit discordant sight, a long line of arranged buildings, albeit positioned in a somewhat higgledy-piggledy fashion stretching for some 1.1 kilometres across the Megalong escarpment. The Hotel’s architecture is hybrid in character, with buildings being added in an ad hoc fashion over time and in a novel mixture of styles: Victorian, Edwardian, Belle Époque and a blend of Art Deco and Art Nouveau interior design.
The Hydro – in its down-market days
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The Majestic’s most distinctive external feature is the Casino building with its imposing Chicago-manufactured dome (this ‘casino’ has been used as an entertainment hall or pavilion rather than as a gaming house). The changing fortunes of the Hydro Majestic as a whole over the decades was symbolised in the fate of the Casino itself: going from the scene for grand balls and concerts in the 1920s and 1930s to a repository for (how the mighty have fallen!) pinball machine entertainment in the 1980s!
A Zimmerman
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Resident artist with obsessive-compulsive tendencies
One of the most intriguing interior features of the Hydro Majestic is the so-called Cat’s Alley, a long corridor whose windows back in the day were draped with peacock feathers. Scone-and-cream afternoon tea visitors to the hotel would stroll down the corridor strewn with puff-pillowed lounge chairs and a set of bizarre panelled scenes, hunting scenes from different historical periods, the work of a Swiss artist called Arnold Zimmerman. Panel after panel comprised Prehistoric cavemen hunting wooly mammoths, Assyrian warriors slaughtering lions, British Raj mounted horsemen hunting tigers in India, Roman soldiers killing elephants, and so on and so on. The first time I ever visited the Hydro I marvelled somewhat bemused at Zimmerman’s paintings, finding them slightly disturbing in their obsession with the monumental struggle between man and beast, terrible but also engaging in a visceral way. Visitor access was blocked to the Alley for some years but it is pleasing to note that it is opened again after the refurbishment with additional seating.
The immediacy of a vast wilderness of National Park bushland has regularly posed a danger to the Hydro Majestic. In 1905 fire destroyed the Gallery building and in 1922 did the same to the original Belgravia wing. There have been several other close calls, the latest in 2002 when Medlow Bath’s “Gothic tourist pile”, as one article described it, narrowly avoided a spot fire blaze [Margaret Simons, ‘Majestic tourist icon survives ordeal by fire’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 2002].
The Hydro-Majestic over the course of its century-plus existence has undergone a number of transformations. What started off as a hydropathic spa pretty soon morphed into a luxury tourist retreat after 1909 (“Mr Foy’s Private Lodge”), only to revert more modestly to a family hotel for ordinary guests and day-trippers. In WWII the Hydro was converted into the 118th US General Hospital to care for convalescing American soldiers, some of which showed their “gratitude” by inflicting damage on the hotel’s decor during their stay. After the War the Hydro reverted to a hotel and guesthouse. By the 1980s the buildings had declined alarmingly despite receiving a heritage preservation order in 1984, business had dropped off and the very visible signs of wear and age eventually necessitated a revamping in the 1990s and again in the last few years.
In keeping with the hybrid nature of the hotel, parts of the new Hydro Majestic exude a distinctly oriental flavour. The Salon Du Thé features a Shanghai chic tea room and bar and both it and the Cat’s Alley reprise many of the oriental traits of the original 1900s Medlow hotel which featured a Chinoiserie style favoured by Mark Foy. The Majestic’s original Salon Du Thé displayed ornaments and furnishings which included large Chinese vases and porcelain vessels, bamboo-look furniture and silk umbrellas [www.hydromajestic.com.au].
Footnote: Regaining its past glory? Will the refurbished Hydro Majestic rise again to the exalted heights it attained in the inter-war period? Will patrons flock to it again as they once did? Will it be able to attract the higher socio-economic clientele associated with a luxury resort? It is far too early to tell, but it should be noted that there is a lot more choice now in Sydney with high-class hotels and resorts. Nonetheless, the Hydro’s traditional high tea is back, the complex has more restaurant options than ever before, though the guest rooms are still on the small side! What also hasn’t changed to its advantage are the magnificent panoramic views of the Megalong Valley, they remain one of the Hotel’s strongest magnetic attractions.
Above: Flagship of the Mark Foy’s retail empire. The city department store opened in 1885, moving to the Liverpool Street site in 1909 where an ice skating rink was installed on the 5th floor in 1950 for “Fashion Fantasy on Ice” parades. In 1980, having been earlier acquired by Waltons it ceased trading permanently. Today the monolithic heritage building renamed the Downing Centre functions as a state courthouse.
Hogsback, 18 kilometres from Alice in South Africa’s Eastern Province, is just about the coldest place I’ve been to in sub-Saharan Africa, barring the mountainous Malealea region of Lesotho. In fact it is one of the few places in South Africa where it actually snows!
Auckland village, above M&C Falls (ECP)⋄The topography of Hogsback is characterised by dense forests, an extended mountain range (the Amathole Mountains), lush, verdant hiking trails (a veritable hiker’s nirvana) and teeming rivers, magnificent waterfalls such as the Madonna and Child Falls and the 39 Steps Falls, the Arboretum (a garden comprising a wide selection of international trees including a grove of Californian Redwoods over 100-years-old).
⋄In the period since JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books became famous, many acquainted with this part of Eastern Cape have drawn attention to the physical similarity of Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth with the town of Hogsback. Director Peter Jackson could as well have chosen Hogsback for the setting of “The Rings” series of movie epics had he not been a native of a country (New Zealand) with a landscape equally evocative of Middle Earth.
Even before “The Lord of the Rings” movie series some Hogsback locals did their best to capitalise on a handful of tenuous links with the celebrated Lord of the Rings author. The story goes, the ‘Rings’ books were inspired by the magical, enchanting physical form of Hogsback. The proponents of this theory point to the fact that Tolkien was born in South Africa (in Bloemfontein, Free State). The thesis loses traction when probed more closely. The famous author and avid philologist left South Africa at the tender age of three, never to return and having not ever visited Hogsback.
⋄Myth-making about the Master Mythologist:
Despite this inconvenient fact, it hasn’t stopped the local tourist industry from milking the supposed nexus at every turn! ‘Lords of the Rings’ themes pervade the town and its surrounds, driven obviously by an effort to exploit the enhanced fame of Lord of the Rings. Tolkienesque references are scattered throughout Hogsback in the names of lodgings, shops and outdoor activities – Rivendell, Gandalf’s Rest, Merrell Hobbit Trail Runs, The Shire, Lothlórien, The Rings Hardware and Bottle Shop, Hog and Hobbit, Away with the Fairies Backpackers, River Running, Camelot Cottages, etc, etc. The association can probably be traced back in 1947 with the establishment of Hobbiton-on-Hogsback, an outdoor recreation and education centre for disadvantaged kids just off the R345 as you come into the Hogsback township. The “fantasy and fairies” theme is underscored in the numerous pieces of town sculptures depicting these motifs.
The Tolkien Middle Earth connection is often emphasised in print, such as in the following: “The romance of Hogsback, is recognised by reading The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) which seems to capture the special atmosphere of the unspoilt Hogsback forests and of a time when peace will rule the world” [Trevor Webster, The Story of Hogsback, www.hogsback.com].
Talking to the staffer in the Hogsback Visitors Information Centre, she was unequivocally dismissive of the Tolkien LOTR nexus. So the lingering myth clearly wasn’t emanating from the likes of her! She also warned me against buying the primitive wooden toy horses and zebras in the street from members of the local Xhosa community. The street sellers, looking cold and dismal in the freezing conditions, were only asking R2 an animal, but the Visitors Centre lady explained that they are not properly gazed and sealed, making them a prohibited item to export out of RSA. Apparently a local artisan/sculptor had offered to glaze the artworks for the community at minimal cost so that they could charge more for the figurines, but his offer had not been taken up.
So, how plausible is the link between “Middle Earth” of Lord of the Rings and the sleepy, little village of Hogsback? Clearly, as stated above, JRR Holkien had no direct association with Hogsback, having left South Africa at age three. Information on Tolkien’s life however, suggest the existence of an indirect link. One of Tolkien’s sons, whilst in the Royal Air Force during WWII, was stationed at Hogsback and did correspond regular with the author with his reflections on the locale. These correspondences from Tolkien Junior included sketches and descriptions of the Hogsback ambience [Ibid.].
The Hog’s back!⋄Accordingly it is quite feasible that, at the very least, these glowing accounts of the mystical, magic-like countryside provided background material for the physical world of The Lord of the Rings trilogy published in 1954/55. The parallels existing present a strong case to say that the description of the Mirkwood forest in the Rings cycle may conceivably have been inspired from Tolkien having read the war-time accounts of the place provided by his son.
The tour bus took us out in the direction of the city, but we had gone scarcely any distance at all, still in Miraflores, we come to our first stop and first highlight. Huaca Pucllana is Lima’s most famous archaeological site, containing a large adobe and clay step pyramid at least 1,500 years old. It is in essence a pyramid but it is not triangular in shape. It looks to me like the apex of the pyramid has been flattened down over much passage of time. Compared to the Inca trail in Cusco I was comparatively underwhelmed by the site (although it was pointed out, it is much older than the Peruvian structure that is the cynosure of all tourists’ eyes, Machu Picchu). Found out that the ‘Pucliana’ comes from a Quechuan term, “ritual games”, a clue to one of its uses during the Wari Civilisation.
Govt House: Changing of the Guard
The tour group was your usual eclectic mix of different nationalities – Brits, Americans, Carribbeans, Romanians, Chinese, Spanish (surprise me!), and a few other unidentified nationals. Headed into Centro from there, passed something called a Chifa on the way, more of this transcultural phenomena later. We stopped at the main city squares, Plaza San Martin and at Plaza Des Armas (second time there) where I managed to get a good shot of the old man’s eccentrically-decorated dog this time. Saw the display of highly-polished uniformed guards at the Government Palace, Peru’s version of Buckingham Palace. I bought a city map from a street vendor in Plaza Mayor for 10 Sols (turned out to be so rudimentary as to be pretty useless).
ConventoConvent garden
We started our walking tour of the city from the Plaza, going past Lima Cathedral and on to the Convento de San Francisco with its distinctive yellow facade, famous for its catacombs. The Church looked pretty dusty and faded from the outside, pigeons housing themselves on every ledge of the facade. Inside, or more precisely inside and downstairs, rather gruesomely, were the inhabitants of the catacombs, the skeletal remains of to 25,000 commoners. We were issued a prohibition against photographing the countless piles of Pol Pot-like skulls, a redundant warning for me as I had not the slightest notion of it. Coming out of the ‘combs I managed to bang my head on the very low underground ceiling. The convent also houses a museum of religious art (The Last Supper with Peruvian banquet catering) and an attractive central garden.
Upon my return to Miraflores I got out at the start of Av Petit Thouars & wandered through the various native markets in the street. I was surprised to find them called “Indian Markets” as everyone in Peru seems to refer to the indigenous population as the ‘community’, Christopher Columbus’ word doesn’t appear to be in use. I had gone to the Miraflores tourist strip to get a souvenir of Amazonia. Whilst I was in that vast eastern jungle I had “ummed-and-ahhed” about getting an Amazonas shirt, coming close to buying a suitably inscribed sweater in the Posada shop but deciding that they were asking too much for it. So in the end, typically, I didn’t buy anything there, now I was trying to make amends by finding a late memento of the place.
Whilst searching in vain for the Amazonas T-shirt I noticed they had “Cholo Potter” and “Cholisimpsons” T-shirts, so The idea came to me to see if I could find a Tintin T-shirt with a Peruvian motif as I had for equivalent Tintin’s in Istanbul, Beijing & Tibet previously (I also knew there had been a comic book “Tintin & the Inca Prisoners”). I tried explaining the concept of Tintin to the stallholders … small, neat blonde boy with a kiss-curl and a little dog, looks a bit like a juvenile Kevin Rudd, the boy, not the dog! They didn’t have a clue about Tintin! I explained how globally famous Tintin was, one guy was interested in the marketing op and said he’d try to produce a “Tintin in Peru” T-shirt for next year. I didn’t introduce the thorny subject of copyright, but I figure that he would have viewed that with as much concern as he probably gave to the Cholo Potter venture!
Peruvian burqa?
Headed from the market down to a small mall that seemed to specialise in computing equipment, I found a little empanada kiosk in the mall that had a good variety of these morsels. As a reminder of some sort of technological time warp I note that Peruvian shopkeepers (and even larger enterprises) still use carbon copies for receipts! The kiosk had a small seating area reserved for customers, which I observed being used by locals with no intention of buying anything. The shop staff apparently viewed this benignly and had no interest in chasing them off, exhibiting what I imagine to be characteristic Latino insouciance.
Back in the Antigua I gravitated to JJ’s bar once more, this time steering well clear of the Pisco sours I tried a couple of the local craft brews in preference to the standard industrial cerveza, Cusquena. One, called Pilsner Callao, was OK but the strong-tasting Barbarian was too dark and bitter for my liking. JJ informed me that Barbarian was very popular at rugby restobars in Lima, which I can believe. This night the bar was more popular with the Aussie tourists and I exchanged a few stories of the Peruvian experience.
Afterwards I walked down Ca. Grau to a nearby Chifa (a locally concocted Peruvian/Chinese cuisine, very popular in this country). The place was a cod-ordinary looking nosh house with food to match! My choice (very little in the way of choice really) was a rather pitiful-looking dish comprising rice with some strips of chicken engulfed by an omelette. I amused myself during the meal talking to the waiter who was actually Chinese (from Guangzhou) in my extremely modest Cantonese by referring to my whiteness self-deprecatingly as ‘Gwei Lo’ and ‘Bak Gwei’, to which he laughed, a little uncomfortably. The rest of the Chifa staff (all Peruvians) looked on bemused by our fragmented Sino-English conversation. One worker with a particularly blanco complexion tried to second-guess what we were saying in Cantonese but he was hilariously wide of the mark! Dor–dae!
The next morning I walked down to the beach park (Playa Waikiki) to glimpse a look at the Ocean. Unfortunately a more or less permanent mist sitting about 100 metres offshore precludes any decent view of the Pacifico. The number of neatly-groomed dogs haring happily around the ocean parks suggests that dogs, not cats, are the preferred pets for Peruvians. On the way back I pass the Liverpool Restobar, a Beatles-themed shrine of remembrance for the fabled ‘Fab Four’ (still big in Lima?)…seeing that the four mop-tops disbanded the “Big B” for good in 1969, I like the sound of “Liverpool Retrobar” better for this establishment.
The Lovers’ Kiss
I’m back in Santiago later that afternoon, but my baggage is not on the carousel at the airport. When I enquire I find LAN has shipped in across to the departures for the following day without telling me. I make them fetch it back so I can get some stuff I need for the night and so I can be sure that by taking it myself to the check-in the next day that it will be on the same flight home as me (testimony to the degree of trust I would place in LAN after my experiences). The Holiday Inn airport hotel has me on Level 0, room 077! Never been below ground level before in a hotel (they should call it “the Coalminer’s Suite”!)
I have the relative luxury of not having to get to the gate for the Sydney flight until midday. On the flight had an interesting talk to a Chilean/Italian wine salesman whose sells Chilean wine to the Chinese. He said the biggest drawback of his work was the unsophisticated approach of nouveau rich Chinese punters to fine wine, indicated by their habit of drinking wine without restraint, ie, guzzling it straight down like they do beer! This necessitates an uncomfortable amount of drinking on the job by him as he says he has to match the alcohol consumption of his Chinese clients.
Footnote: Sideways does Chile The exchange with the young convivial Chilean wine salesman put me in mind of the character of Miles, the depressed and depressive failed novelist and Californian wine-snob from the brilliant Sideways movie. Later, I tweeted Rex Pickett (writer of the Sideways novel) and suggest he write a follow-up with Miles venturing off on a wine escapade to China with the comedic possibilities of seeing his appalled response to the crassness of nouveau rich Chinese businessmen about wine. Pickett heartily agreed, adding that someone should finance a research trip to China for him. As things transpired Pickett eventually decided to send Miles to Chile instead (the book Sideways 3). Maybe he ran into my Chilean wine-man at Santiago airport?
The Hotel, Antigua Mirafores, has a kind of old colonial hacienda look to it, perhaps more accurately I might say, estancia, as it was probably not big enough to be considered a hacienda. Old it is, but it is in good shape and looks like it’s had a recent facelift. At the check-in desk I experience some more of the familiar communications problems that comes with trying to converse in Spanglish. The receptionist, who had ‘Anglicised’ herself to Tanya, seems to be saying that I am entitled to a complimentary aperitif upon arrival. After waiting for a short period, during which no such free drink materialises, I return to the front desk and query this. The woman at the desk (Tanya has disappeared out the back somewhere), explains to me that the complementary item refers to the fact that I have been given a larger room (larger than what I couldn’t be sure?). Not certain how one confuses an aperitif with a room upgrade?
Somewhat disappointed—the first time round in Lima I had been unhesitatingly and unambiguously offered a complimentary Pisco sour on I arrival at the Costa del Sol at Jorge Chávez—nonetheless I decide to head for the hotel bar anyway. I am warmly welcomed by the young Limanese bartender whose nombre is Juan José (‘JJ’ he proffers for guest convenience), he is one super–animated, wound-up dude. As we engage in light badinage, I’m trying to work him out, his exaggerated theatrical flourishes make me wonder if he’s a struggling actor making ends meet behind the bar. Later on when I get accustomed to him, I think the hyper-talking JJ is just sort of high.
As I sip my obligatory Pisco sour JJ (or Jota-Jota) is only too happy to tell me all about his hopes and aspirations to leave the provincial confines of Peru and escape to the US where the opportunities to succeed are plentiful (or so he believes). The longer we talk, the more I sense that the effusive JJ is on “something”. This becomes wholly apparent when he starts asking questions about my homeland while examining a map of New South Wales online. He asks where you find pot in my home state. I tell him about Nimbin, the weed-friendly town and marijuana capital of New South Wales…he is greatly interested. While I enjoy my second Pisco I let JJ play around with my iPad. “What are you googling?”, I ask JJ?”, “I’m looking for weed”, the answer comes. “I like weed”. My suspicions confirmed, the friendly if somewhat outrageously behaved JJ is one serious devotee of ganja weed.
Soon, other guests gravitate toward the bar. Everyone apart from me staying at the Hotel Antigua appear to be gringos, as the Latin Americans say. I get talking to a cashed-up elderly Florida retiree and his daughter/granddaughter? (euphemism?) who closely resembles a young and dry Shane Gould. The Floridians are followed slightly later by Judy and Stephen, a friendly couple of self-confessed vegetarians originally from New Jersey but now self-exiled to Las Vegas. I get on quite well with Judy and Stephen, and I find each of these Yanks amiable enough company, but I am struck by the strident tone of anti-Obamaism freely expressed by them and by the Florida retiree! I guess that I shouldn’t be too surprised given the widespread economic mire plaguing America in recent times but they are not holding back on their condemnation of the Democrat president.
Potent Pisco
I’m on to my third Pisco sour by now, and agree to go out for a meal with Jude and Steve, but suddenly as they toddle off to get ready for dinner, the full potency of the Pisco hits me! I’m not sure what JJ put in it, whatever it is, I’m sure its a double, it packs a real wallop, no question about it! My head feels very fuzzy indeed, and I spend several minutes in the bar washroom frantically splashing water on my face before I am anywhere near up to going out to eat with the Vegans. Next day one of the tour guides warns me the about the pitfalls of over-imbibing on Pisco (too late!!!).
Despite still feeling rather ‘Piscolated’ I stumble off with the two Yanks to the “eat street” strip at Avenida Diagonal for a pizza meal. Judy and Stephen, after slowly surveilling every pizza joint on the street, choose one (they all look the same to me). Now, I’m not normally the quickest person at choosing from the menu but compared to these two I am positively express lane! The Nevadans appear to be on a very tightly-budgeted holiday and give the menu an extrordinary degree of scrutiny (even scrutinising the blank obverse side of the menu, just in case there was hidden options). After ordering, I sit back, bemused, observing Judy and Stephen as they mull over the menu for, I’m not exaggerating, a full 15 minutes or more. The Vegas couple discuss the various permutations of mixing and matching different items whilst firing umpteen questions at the exceedingly patient waitress – the cost of various pizzas with or without certain variables, what combination of ingredients they can substitute for the carne ones that they don’t eat, and how much of the substitute vegetable items they are allowed for the same price!
JFK statue in his eponymous park
Finally they make a decision, and as we wait for the pizzas, I get another chapter of the Obama “No we won’t!” refrain from the “Lost Vegans”. Stephen, who up to that point I think the more reserved of the two, lets fly with a very impassioned denunciation of Obama as “illegitimate”, dredging up, much to my incredulity, the old conspiratorial theory “chestnut” that Barack is in fact (sic) foreign-born! Now, aside from the self-promoting Donald Trump and a hard core of Tea Party hacks, I didn’t think anyone in America was still peddling that hoary old tale … talk about Crank Yankers! But I guess, we are talking about America, so nothing really surprises. I certainly get a sense of the Right wing Republican backlash against Obama following the GFC from the sample of Americans I meet in Lima.
I get a sense that there’s something kinda obsessive “New Agey” naturopathic(?) about Judy and Stephen, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Stephen with his free-flowing, greying locks certainly looks the part of the ageing hippy. Interestingly, Judy tells me she’s a pop/rock music journalist, which I can’t easily imagine as she looks a bit light on hipness…can’t visualise her popping up as a character in, say, Almost Famous! Based entirely on an intuitive and non-scientific hunch I make an assumption that she is some sort of self-medicator.
Parque Kennedy Flea Markets
After the meal we wander across the Diagonal to the Parque Kennedy Night Markets, AKA Mercado de Pulgas, (the local flea markets) to look for bargains. These are pretty thin on the ground however as Miraflores is a quite upmarket part of Lima and the stallholders are fairly resistant to any attempts to haggle. The usual mix of decent and rubbishy things are on offer – silver jewelry, bracelets, earrings, trinkets, beads, garments, toy and puppet llamas, and some assorted oddities such as old Peruvian coins and rusty pieces of metal whose purpose I can’t fathom. Judy buys numerous junky items whilst Step and I stand around looking unimpressed with the merchandise on offer.
Dog park by day, cat haunt by night: This JFK park should really be called Parque El Gato y Perro…during the day every canine owner in town seemed to be exercising his or her dog in the park, now it is full of stray cats, everywhere we walk along each aisle of the stalls there are cats underfoot! By this time I have sobered up enough to make a rational decision, I finally spot something out-of-the-box that really captivates my eyes – a really gorgeous blue alpaca scarf with a bit of grey in it – I unhestitatingly buy it for a very reasonable 15 Nuevo Sols! As we walk back to the hotel I feel a tangible sense of relief that I have managed to salvage something out of the tatters of a misspent night with these two oddball gringos.
I breakfast with Stephen and Judy the next morning. Judy, confides that she is given to certain (unnamed) medical conditions and pulls out a multitude of different coloured pills and proceeds to progressively down each one with every separate morsel of breakfast. I think I just found the empirical evidence for my earlier assumption.
Judy’s mannerisms and eccentricities are beginning to look a bit like Yiddish theatricality, she displays an unnerving touch of the Bette Middlers bordering on Woody Allen paranoia in her loopy, over-the-top remonstrations about most things. Submitting her omelette to forensic scrutiny at the table, she loudly declares it devoid of cheese and after calling the waitress, aggressively defies her to identify any dairy products within the egg. When the girl tries to point out clear visual evidence of cheese on the plate, Judy summarily rebuffs the suggestion and insists that another, more cheesier omelette be fetched from the kitchen! While Judy waits and continues to complain about the ‘criminal’ withholding of cheese, her partner Stephen is obviously not so picky as he quickly wolfs down the rejected omelette. They then argue about their differing assessments of the offending omelette!
I am not disappointed when 9 o’clock ticks over and I have to take my leave of this whacky American couple. As I go upstairs to fetch my bag and camera for the Lima city tour, Judy’s attention turns quickly and seamlessly from me to the newly-arrived replacement omelette. I hear her say “Finally, some cheese!” her voice trailing away as I mount the staircase.
Insulated inside room 206, upstairs in Hotel El Promedio Anodino Casa, I didn’t really hear much noise during the night. But by the time I came down for El desayuno I realised that the wrecking gang had been at it all night demolishing the building across the road. This day, I had the relative luxury of not having to make my transfer until around 9 o’clock, so I loitered over breakfast. I was back down at pick up time, but had several minutes to kill as the driver hadn’t arrived by 9. I joined the lineup of Hotel staff milling around the front door who were absolutely entranced by the spectacle of the demolition job which was tearing up the street under the guise of levelling the doomed building. Fortunately the glass front door was closed, saving everyone in the foyer from being overcome by a myriad of dust diseases. Dust abounded all over the street, which was semi-obstructed for traffic before the work started and now was totally impassable as rubble had piled up and been strewn across the street. The young hotel workers were revelling in the “Whelan the Wrecker” show on display, which was undoubtedly more fun than trying to placate surly guests or cleaning up after messy ones.
Hotel street before it was totally consumed in rubble & dust
By this time my Puno driver had turned up, suddenly materialising from out of the cloud of dusty particles. After staring at the swirling man-made dust bowl at the front of the hotel I asked the girls at reception if there was a back way out of the building. They think I’m making a joke and laugh slightly nervously whilst shaking their heads. I follow the driver outside where his characteristically languid movements desert him and he hares off at great speed through the veil of dust to the taxi parked around the corner. After a momentary hesitation I too run, trying to cover my face so as not inhale any of the dust fibres floating uncontrolled in the air.
We drive out of Puno, I grab my last glimpse of Lago Titikaka and we wind our way up the hills north towards Juliaca. The same recurring features on the sides of the road that I had seen during the last 100km of the journey to Puno reappear. At random intervals, there is the presence of stray dogs on the side of the highway, kilometres from anything or anyone else, as if they had been mysteriously dropped there by some secret canine transit service. The driver tells me that people do occasionally stop and dump scraps of food for the highway for them, that’s why they hang around in the middle of nowhere with the semblance of an expectant look on their faces.
The other discernible motif on Route 3S is the regular scattering of tiny tombstone-shaped markers on the highway. I assume that these were memorial markers rather than being actual burial places for the dead, but I don’t really know for certain. If they are, I suppose the closest, analogous thing in Australia is the cross and flower markers on roads where fatalities have occurred. The sign on the highway says Bienvenidos a Juliaca, Capital de la Integracion Andina, Ciudad de los Vientos. Juliaca, city of the wind? Wind, well that would help to explain all of the dust and dirt that flies around all over the main street! We pass the local technological university, the driver draws my attention to it. I remark how new and impressively modern it looks. He quickly tells me it is a state university only, whereas Puno (where he comes from) is a national university. He is indulging in a bit of rival city points-scoring, it seems to me.
I get the sense that my driver is not impressed by Puno’s wealthier and bigger northern neighbour. The reality is that Juliaca is wealthier, albeit as a result mainly of its ill-gotten gain. The city functions as a conduit for contraband, stolen petrol, etc smuggled into Peru via Bolivia. We drive into the airport precinct, my curiosity is aroused by a street name I chance to spot, Paseo New Zealandia, I wondered what the connection was?
Inca Manco Capác Aeropuerto reflects the recently acquired affluence of Juliaca. It is a snazzy new modern airport. The sleek control tower caught my eye, it looks like it was built by IKEA with its colourful plastic appearance. All around the airport you can see new Chinese-financed building projects underway, with signs such as the one advertising “LiuGong – Gigante de Asia”. Whilst inside the terminal I notice that the interior is not so grand as the exterior, amenities are fairly spartan really. I sit & watch the passing traffic. An adolescent comes into the departure lounge heading back to Lima. He is carrying the latest LCD Slimline television which he purchased in Juliaca at a, I’m sure, special price. People come to this mafia-controlled city from the capital & all other parts of Peru for the bargain deals. The ciudad’s market in all types of stolen goods make it a super-attractive destination for financially-strapped Peruvians to do their significant purchases in.
The Inka Instrumental Trio
As I went through the electronic barrier a three-piece Peruvian native band in front of me were putting their musical equipment through the x-ray belt, doing the body checks and passing through with all the other passengers. I assumed that they were travelling on to Lima, but once inside, they immediately set up their drums, flutes and other instruments and started playing in the lounge. They did their busking routine including … yet again (groan!) that old Peruvian classic, “El Condor Pasa” (I make a mental note never to listen to Simon and Garfunkle again!) The plane arrives, the Indian buskers pass the hat round as passengers depart, and then they pack their set up and leave the airport. Performances at the Manco Capác Airport I gather are this band’s regular gig!
Once on board, a conspicuous feature of Flight LA2096 was an absolute dearth of space in the overhead lockers. All available space was crammed full of wrapped parcels, bulky items in brand-named bags. This was another sign of Juliaca’s role as the centre for cheap domestic goods, where ordinary Peruvians flock to this sales Mecca for ofertas that they feel are too good to refuse.
A pretty smooth, short flight and I was back at Jorge Chávez. By-passing the money-exchangers who had wanted to shortchange me the first time round, I found my transfer straight away. In the vehicle the driver had his wife and tiny child along for the ride. They were a pleasant couple and I shared some of my special Cusco dark chocolate with them. Although Miraflores looked quite close to the Airport on the map, it still seemed like a long trip in the car (traffic full-on same as last time). As we get close to Miraflores, the humble shantytowns and shacks give way to the decidedly upmarket casas and haciendas of my West Lima neighbourhood.
I was collected at the Casa Andina at 7am by yet another braces-wearing Peruvian guide to drive to the (inland) port. The port was quite close by, but as usual we had to go via umpteen other hotels to pick up the other passengers. When we eventually got to the Titicaca dock we were swarmed upon by a small battalion of lakeside Indian women trying to entice us to buy a bargain-priced hat or two from a broad assortment they were either carrying or wearing.
The German tourists from yesterday’s Cusco coach were on the same Uros Islands trip as me. These upbeat Teutonic folk were certainly enjoying their Peru visit. I have noticed that Germans on holidays are able to escape the stereotypical dour visage that is generally associated with them at home.
We were shepherded on to one boat which I thought was going to be our boat for the trip, but before we could settle, the crew moved us across to another boat, and then, after an apparent another change of mind, guided over to a third boat where we were allowed to sit down. There was a bit of a delay in embarking, during which we were entertained by a pipe-playing musician in traditional garb. The piper banged out three tunes, the second instantly recognised as “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da”, the first time I had ever heard a rendition of a Beatles standard played on a Latino pan pipe! When he finished he took the hat round, most of the punters on board were not particularly generous but I tipped him 10 soles (my small contribution to the cause of local struggling community performers).
Our Titicaca tour director was the same guy who had accompanied us on the bus trip. Not sure what to make of him, he was friendly, enthusiastic certainly, but his thick Peruvian accent was hard to fathom. So, his jokes spoken in Spanglish it seemed to me, were largely lost on me!
Totora reeds, Puno
We got out onto Lago Titikaka which is 3812 metres above sea level and shared between Peru and Bolivia. It is amazing to reflect on the fact that this is an enormous inland ‘sea’, the highest navigable lake in the world, a hundred or so kilometres from the Pacific Ocean! On the outward journey I noticed that reeds were freely growing all along the northern shore of the lake.
The first island we visited in the Lake was Taquile where we leisurely wandered from one side of the island to the other, taking in the views, very tranquil, relaxed ambience. We passed the fields comprising the Islanders’ collective agricultural system which basically hasn’t changed since the 14th century. At the other side we met a family of colourfully and traditionally-attired weavers. We had a demonstration of their antiquated textile techniques, finished products of which were available to buy (I bought a floppy white hat with a colourful patterned band for 30 soles).
After Taquile we went to Llachon – Santa Maria, where a shaman prepared a Pachamanca meal for us on the beach. This is a traditional form of cooking using underground ovens (something very akin to a Māori hūngi). Part meal preparation and part religious ritual, the ceremony involved the shaman pouring wine onto the mound covering the food and waving branches and leaves over it. The purpose of this ritual was to make offerings to Pachamama/Mother Earth (the Incas’ creation myths have it that the people had their origins in the Lake!). Blessed or unblessed, the meal was delicious!
From Taquile we moved on the ‘Floating Islands’ of Uros, the highlight of the Titicaca trip. The Floating Islands were artificially constructed by the Uros people using bundled reeds from the totora plant mixed with mud to cut themselves off from the Incas and other aggressive neighbours. The community demonstrated how they expanded the tiny island by tying together extra reeds, soil and turf, and affixed to the sides of the island by rope.
The Uros, cutoff from the World in this way, survive by fishing (the Lake is stocked with Canadian trout and Argentinian kingfish) and by trading the goods and materials they produced for food from the surrounding larger islands. I couldn’t help wondering about the kind of alternative, parallel life they lived, living freely for sure, but living in a very enclosed, claustrophobic world – to my eyes. Walking around the uneven reed floor of the island was a novel and strange experience.
Whilst on Uros we were given a boat ride around the lagoon in one of the Island’s reed boats. I had used up all the money I had brought with me buying some cushion covers, so I experienced an uncomfortable moment when the reed boat pilot tried to hit me for a donation after we had returned from the ride. He looked quite put out when I intimated that I had zilch on me.
Reed boat
About 50 metres away from the island was a second, smaller artificial island, the story of its existence was a peculiar one. Four of the families on the original island fell out with the majority of the families and broke away from them, constructed a new floating island. The tourists in our group were a good bunch of people (mainly Americans and Costa Ricans), we exchanged lots of jokes, eg, do you need a passport to visit the breakaway reed island?
After returning to Puno I went for dinner in the town. Walking through the streets, just about every café and bar with a Peruvian band that I passed was playing that old favourite, ‘El Condor Pasa’. I returned to the hotel after eating and souvenir-hunting to find that a bulldozer was busy decimating an old building directly across the road – as if the road wasn’t already stuffed up enough!
Left the Sorgente hotel in Puerto Iguazú to get an early start for the bus ride to the falls area. When we arrived there were already a great number of visitors lining up at the entrance – international visitors, nationals (Buenos Aireans and from elsewhere in the country), school groups, and so on.
We were at the Argentinian section of the falls of course (on the Brazilian side the falls are called Iguaçu). Spare a thought for Paraguay and its tourism industry, the country shares the Rio Paraná with Brazil and Argentina and is just up the river from Iguazú, but none of the falls lie on Paraguayan territory.
Train thru the jungle to the Falls
Inside the national park, despite the train standing on the track, our guide gets us to by-pass the train and walk a couple of kilometres through the bush to the second train station. By getting there before the first train arrived at station # 2 this ensured that we’d be in the first train to arrive at the falls. Good, but I was left wondering WHY, a) there wasn’t more trains scheduled seeing that Iguazú was a world-class highlight on the global tourism calendar, and b) train # 1, instead of terminating at station # 2, didn’t just go straight through to the falls, considering that both trains left from the same track! To me, that would be the logical way to operate it!
The falls as a whole are divisible into two parts, the Cataracts and the Gorge. We started at the Gorge first, El Diablo Garganta. From the Gorge entrada, we still needed to walk about 1200 metres on a linear footbridge to the actual ‘Devil’s Throat’. As you get closer to the throat, the roar of the powerful waters gets louder and louder and a couple of hundred metres away, the spray shooting up from El Diablo can be seen.
El Diablo
When you finally get there, it is 100 per cent worth it! At the edge of the waterfall, the catwalk bends round into a U-shape (more accurately the structure is three-pronged, fork-shaped) to maximize the number of people that can view the waterfall from point-blank range. The viewing platform extends out over the edge of the ground (as in the Grand Canyon) so that anyone standing on it cannot avoid getting a decent old drenching! Ponchos are definitely the preferred accessory at the Throat! Standing on the footbridge, trying to look and take photos and videos at the same time, you get the sense of all that cascading power, the spectacle was quite mesmerising.
Cory – the long-nosed Argie coatí
Later we journeyed the short distance to Cataratas del Iguazú, exploring the multiple, other reaches of the falls, walking on the National Park’s upper and lower trails, the Paseo Superior and the Paseo Inferior as they are called. This gives you a different viewpoint of the Cataracts and lots more photo opportunities. Plenty of flora (in a broad, dense jungle) and fauna around, including dazzlingly beautiful and unusual butterflies and cute long-nose coatís. However I lucked out on spotting the elusive toucan, the emblematic bird of the falls.
As 80 per cent of the waterfalls are on the Argentinian side of the river, the best panoramic views tend to be from the Brazilian side or from the river itself. So, I decided on the optional speedboat ride (Macuco Safari Boat Ride) under the waterfalls itself, which was a great thrill. Be forewarned though that YOU WILL get drenched by the falls and from the motion of the boat rapidly swerving from side to side (make note to bring or wear swimmers on the falls tour).
Amenities at Iguazú left plenty to be desired. The Kiosk and the other food outlets were not good quality or value, not a great selection of food and (predictably) overpriced. Don’t try to exchange dollars at Parque Iguazú, the rate is not good, wait for BA.
The more than one-and-half stretch of Iguazú’s falls were simply astonishing to behold, even a bit intimidating to witness the scope of its sheer, unshackled power. Undeniably it is one of the natural wonders, a sublime Maravilla as the Hispanophone South Americans say.
Route 68: Political blots on the beautiful landscape
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I took a tour from Santiago to the port city of Valparaíso, 115 km north-west of the Chilean capital. The highway (Route 68) was a good quality road and we made good time getting out to the Pacific. Valparaíso’s historic fame rests on its integral role as a port, and shipping is still a key industry, although it’s importance today is not what it was strategically in the nineteenth century before the Panama Canal was constructed. Beyond the town’s central plaza lies Prat Wharf which is still a busy area for shipping and docklands.
Valpo’s kaleidoscope of colour!
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Valparaíso, or as the residents of the city (the Porteños) call it, ‘Valpo’ for short, is a fascinating place to walk around. One of the highlights is the street art and distinctive buildings, a hotch-potch of different-coloured houses, many with brightly-painted murals on their walls. A quirky aspect of Valparaíso is that you find very ordinary and humble dwellings (even rundown ones) right next to more grand and ornate buildings.
Palacio Buburizza
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Up on the heights of Cerro Alegre (literally “cheerful hill” in Spanish) visitors can view some unusual and quite distinctive examples of domestic architecture, such as Palacio Baburizza, formerly a large rambling art nouveau palatial home (now a fine arts museum). Also up on Cerro Alegre, in a kind of unofficial Croatian sector of the city, is the 1861-built Casa Antoncich, a dwelling which survived major earthquakes in 1906, 1985 and 2010, something Valparaíso is prone to given its proximity to the Peru-Chile oceanic trench. Cerro Bellavista is another part of the hilly city celebrated for its array of luminously bright murals.
City ascensor
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Topographically, Valparaíso is characterised by very steep hills surrounding the docks and shoreline. As a consequence, funiculars or as they are called here, ascensores (literally ‘elevator’, these are cable cars on very steeply sloping rail tracks) are the standard transportation options for residents in the hills to ease their descent from houses high on the hills to Plaza Sotomayor, the city Centro and the port✼. There are some 26 ascensores servicing Valparaíso. It was fun to descend rapidly to sea-level on one of these funiculars, very quick and costing only a nominal sum (about 10 Chilean pesos).
Any planned visit to Chile should factor in at the very minimum a day trip to Valparaíso, otherwise tourists will be missing out on a charming and very fascinating part of the country.
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PostScript: A touch of Australia at 33° S, 71° W?
The city centre, Plaza Sotomayor, includes the Chilean naval headquarters (Armada de Chile building), the large monument to naval hero Arturo Prat in the middle. Diagonally opposite the Armada is Cafe Melbourne, which promises “Melbourne café-style food and coffee” (is Melbourne so distinctive in food and coffee from that in other Australian cities, I know Melburnians think so but really?) The name will probably nonetheless engender some curiosity from tourists from Victoria. A further pointer on the Australiana theme, the visit to the port of Valparaíso reminded me of the city’s other nebulous connection with the ‘Land Downunder’ – Australia’s third prime minister, John Christian (Chris) Watson, was born Johan Cristian Tanck in Valparaiso of Irish-Chilean parents, an occurrence that was entirely one of happenstance!
Visiting Cusco, after experiencing Lima and the Amazonas, uncovered a whole new side of Peru for me. Being perched at 3400m above sea level, Cusco’s cool air was a world away from the steamy Amazonian rainforest I had just come from. We were advised beforehand that either chewing cocoa leaves or drinking cocoa tea was the best antidote to ward off the possibility of soroche (high altitude sickness) at such a height. I decided that the latter was the more palatable course to follow.
Santo Domingo
The elevated ciudad had a real buzz to it, a constant hub of activity that I hadn’t encountered thus far anywhere else in the land of the Incas. People were everywhere in this tourist magnet of a town, streaming up and down the principal road (Avenida El Sol) and spilling out onto Cusco’s main square,the imposing Plaza de Armas with its mixture of historic churches, pubs and restaurants.
Unaytambo
More than anywhere else in Peru, you could feel the footprint of history in Cusco. Santo Domingo Catedral/Qorikancha demonstrates quite literally the fusion of an overarching Catholic Spanish power with Inca culture and worship. Significant sections of the original Inca temple are extant despite the cathedral being built over it, so Qorikancha is a good place to start to gain an appreciation of classical Inca architecture with its mortar-less design, mathematically-precise stone construction and use of trapezoid features.
Qoricancha
Unaytambo, the lodge where I stayed, was on the site of the former Inca palacios, the centre of the once great Inca empire. The ‘street’ (sic) outside Unaytambo, Pasaje Romeritos, was really just a narrow pedestrian lane, barely wide enough to drive a donkey cart. Most of the ancient footpaths of the city were like those in Romeritos – huge slabs of stone squares laid down parallel to thin strips of small, rounded cobblestones.
Cobbled street going down to Plaza de Armas
Cusco is of course a tourist mega-magnet, and has much by itself to recommend it, quite apart from its function as a launchpad for embarking on the ritualistic ‘mecca’ to Machu Picchu. It has heaps of interesting things to see, including San Pedro Mercado (where you can buy all manner of exotic and sometimes bizarre produce), the imposing El Catedral, the Inka Museo, and countless restaurants where you can try llama, ceviche and roasted guinea pig, or if you prefer, something slightly less adventurous. There are faux museums too, it must be said. The Chocomuseo and the Pisco (Sour) Museum are respectively, a shop and a bar. Totally transparent, they don’t even attempt to thinly disguise this fact, notwithstanding their names.
Inka Museo entrada
What makes Cusco 2014 such a captivating destination is the way it’s three integral strands, the Inca culture and traditions, the Spanish colonial panoply and the more modern aspects of the town, all blend in together to give it a particular fascination.
The next morning I had my umpteenth cocoa tea in Unaytambo and scuttled out for another early start on the road. I was taxied across town to the Cusco depot of WonderPeru on the other side of Av De Sol. To my relief, given my recent experiences, they had my coach ticket for the trip. The Camino a Puño via the Pan-American Highway was a distance of 386km, and WonderPeru advertised it as a 10 hour journey which seemed rather too long a time in a seated position for that distance.
San Pedro’s Basilica
To my surprise, the coach was all quality, a real bonus. It was absolutely first-class, very modern, all the conveniences and comforts. I scored a seat upstairs right at the front, prime viewing spot. Leaving Cusco on the road south on Route 3S (glossy tourist brochures call it “The Route of the Sun), our first stop was St Peter’s, a 16-17th century colonial church in Andahualillas. This Jesuit church interior was largely wooden in structure (pillars, roof, etc), laced with large amounts of ornate gold decorations on the walls and picture frames. The walls were also adorned with magnificent frescoes and murals. A floral ornament with gold flakes on the ceiling was a standout. The altar was also elaborately decorated in gold with an Incan sun and countless small mirrors. The coach guide made the statement that San Pedro’s was viewed in Peru as the Americas’ counterpart to Europe’s Sistine Chapel. Impressive as the church certainly was, frankly I thought this was nonetheless drawing a long bow.
Raqchi casa
From Andahualillas we journeyed to Raqchi Parque Arqueológico in the San Pedro area. This was a preserved or restored Inca village comprising a bunch of rough-hewn adobe houses connected to each other. Next to the homes which resembled a clump of rubble cemented together, was the focal point of the Inca village, the colossal Temple of Wiracocha, or what remains of it. The facade stands 92 metres wide and over 25 metres high. This temple, also known as the Temple of the Supreme God of the Incas, comprised a series of pillars in the shape of massive I’s and H’s! Saw the usual grazing llamas in the village although I didn’t see any of the earring-wearing llamas that were mentioned in the tour poster.
Wiracocha
When the coach paused for lunch on the highway the guide encouraged us to try the muña tea which he claimed was far superior to cocoa tea in respect of the drink’s medicinal potency. I did but it tasted not much different to the cocoa one, weak and a bit minty but pretty tasteless. After the sixth stop on the Pan-American Highway for a digression I realised why the transportation company brochure stated it was a 10 hour marathon drive!
Colonial church
At the highest point of the camino, the 4335m high Abra La Raya, we paused to buy souvenirs from the highway stallholders. I bought an attractive little fawn and white coloured bag adorned with cute llamas and images of Wiracocha for 30 soles. Going down from La Raya, we next visited the Reyla native archaeological site (Pukará) some 3800 metres above sea level, which was a bit of a Trojan site (ie, not much to see!). We also visited the Reyla native archaeological site some 3800 metres above sea level. Close to the site was the Museo Pukará, chock full of pre-Columbian sculptures.
Dusty main drag of Juliaca
Nearing our destination for the day’s travel, Puno, we again diverted slightly to drive through the incredibly dusty and dirty streets of Juliaca. We encountered mad, anarchic traffic everywhere. The popular Peruvian three wheel motorised taxis seen in Cusco were even more omnipresent in downtown Juliaca with hundreds of them constantly darting in and out of the flow of vehicles on the ‘main drag’. We got the rundown from our guide on Juliaca’s main claim to (in)famy. Juliaca is a mafia-run town, with all manner of contraband and stolen goods on sale. People flock to Juliaca from all over Peru to pick up that 63cm flat screen TV they were after at a very special price!
Three-quarters of an hour after leaving Juliaca we reached the outskirts of the southern city of Puno and got our first (distant) glimpse of the northern edge of Lagos Titikaka. The tour party’s relief at finally arriving at Puno after 10 and a half hours on the road turned to frustration when we were blocked from proceeding to the bus depot by a religious procession moving at glacial pace. It took 15 minutes for the ceremony marking the birth of some important local saint to pass the stalled convoy of vehicles trying to enter the city. We passed the time by twiddling our thumbs (although probably the modern version of this is to say that we amused ourselves with our portable electronic devices!), taking the occasional photo of the noisy cavalcade of clergymen and women – the noisiness was coming from the odd spectacle of nuns chanting homilies out of large megaphones. This was a curious sight with the nuns extolling Christian virtues to the masses through loud-speakers which made the event look very akin to a political rally.
From the bus depot in downtown Puno, taxis took the tourists from our coach to their individual hotels. Arriving at my particular hotel, Casa Andronokaki, the street at the front of it, Independencia, looked like a bit of a bomb site, the road was really bad, rough, broken up, pieces of loose rubble everywhere! Fortunately, the chaotic and decimated condition of the street outside was not replicated in the interior of the hotel which was, given its location, quite well presented.
Transzelo, Pan-Am Hwy
Puno had a big selection of restaurants but after the all-day travel I decided the first night I’d have dinner in the hotel, bife carne, before heading down to the Centro part of Puno. Puno was lively, lots of tourist bars and eateries, souvenir shops, people walking up and down the strip. After a couple of hours of soaking up the atmosphere of Puno (OK but not really pulsating on the Cusco-scale!), I headed back up the road full of rocks to my hotel to rest up for the next day’s Floating Islands trip.
The next day on my itinerary there was a trip scheduled to Peru’s own home-grown contender for “8th Wonder of the World”, Machu Picchu. The trip started badly (again), the driver arrived 10 minutes late. Then after getting away, we had got as far as the outskirts of the Municipalidad when as a matter of course I queried the driver to make sure he was in possession of my tickets for the rail journey and entrance to the Inca site. Incredibly he didn’t have them! He thought I had them! He quickly phoned the tour organiser who indicated that the hotel receptionist was holding the tickets and had been supposed to have given them to me when we left. The driver sped back to Utaytambo nearly cleaning up half a dozen semi-comatose early morning strollers ambling insouciantly across the road on the way. Fortunately the errant but smiling receptionist was waiting outside in the road with the tickets, so the driver was able to curtly grab them and hare off once again without getting out of the vehicle.
The Andes
My driver proceeded to drive like a maniac (or if you prefer – like your average Peruvian motorist!) to get me to the Ullantaytambo railway station where I was to pick up the PeruRail train to Machu Picchu. Passing through the ingreso I was on time for my scheduled train but unfortunately the PeruRail organisation setup at the station was a shambles. There were delays, trains were waiting on the track for a long time but we weren’t allowed to board them. The train that I was told was my one came an hour later and duly went. To my surprise, although the station was packed with would-be boarders for Machu Picchu, each arriving train only contained two or three carriages! It was reassuring to reflect on the fact that PeruRail was functioning at the lofty standard of railways worldwide! I did have to admit however that the railway staff at PeruRail were extremely polite – if not particularly useful. In frustration I forced my way onto the platform and into the queue for the next train. Although the journey number on my bolero de acceso (ticket) didn’t correspond, I was allowed on to the train much to my relief.
The train went to Aguas Calientes which is the rail terminus for MP. On the way, the scenery was really picturesque, a full, flowing river with the stunning postcard backdrop of the Andes mountains, which was just as well because the trip was a very long haul. At Aguas Calientes the local Chimu reps with their yellow T-shirts were fortunately easy to spot in the tangled mass of humanity at the station gate. From there we were rushed off to the coaches which delivered thousands of visitors nonstop to the Machu Picchu site. The ride up the mountain was an adventurous one owing to the narrow, rough zig-zagging road and the propensity of the drivers to hurl their coaches blindly around curves in the road! At 2,430 metres above sea level Machu Picchu is very high but still considerably lower than Cusco and other locations in the Urubamba Valley.
Fortress? Palace? Temple?
Machu Picchu was an interesting experience, certainly unique and monumentally laid out, but somehow I felt underwhelmed by its ‘grandeur’. I don’t know why, possibly I was feeling blasé about the Inca monuments as a result of all of the native sites I had seen since arriving in Cusco. I didn’t find it breathtakingly magnificent in an aesthetic sense when set against Abu Simbel in Egypt. Machu Picchu’s incomplete state seemed to me a bit of a mishmash of broken architecture. I think that when viewed from a distance, Machu Picchu is infinitely more impressive. The sum of the whole, with its pattern of terraced fields and the ruins sitting on a ridge beneath the two peaks (Machu and Huanya) is a more spectacular sight compared to it’s scattered individual parts up close. One thing there is no doubt about is that it does have atmosphere – in abundance. The clouds resting serenely on the twin peaks of a once impregnable fortress city, give it a tranquil and unearthly appearance from afar. Peaceful yes, but depopulated, never! Vast crowds throng all over Machu Picchu all year, climbing its inestimable number of steps and exploring every nook and crevice of it! MP’s enormous pulling power brings tourism, but with it the threat of degradation to the precise and fragile site!
Our guide showed us some of the more notable features, such as the Sun Temple and the sculpture known as the “Eyes of Pachamama” (two carved circles in the ground) and the Inyiwatana, a rock pillar with profound astronomical significance for the Incas. He also pointed out the line formed in the mountains that represents the hiking trail that leads to Machu Picchu. I observed countless modern-day Hiram Binghams embarking on two or four day hikes in the footsteps of that famous first trek to this archaeological magnet.
El Obreros, MPEyes of Pachamama
The great mystery of Machu Picchu is that its purpose for being remains uncertain. Archaeologists have not yet resolved whether it was built as a royal retreat or palace for the Emperor Pachacuti, or for religious purposes to honour its sacred landscape (the river that encircles most of it, Rio Urubamba, was thought by the Incas to be sacred) or for some other reason, such as defence.
The massive crush of tourists, roaming all over the site was a bit off-putting, and when the guide suggested an early departure to avoid the horrendous lines of visitors queuing up for the buses later in the afternoon, I was highly amenable to the idea. I walked back down to the entrance with the guide who alerted me to the gimmicky custom of visitors having their passports stamped with the Machu Picchu stamp (“passport control”, like it was a pretend visit to another country). Despite my scepticism about such things I went along with the charade and allowed the guide to stamp the book.
Huanya peak
The queue was already lengthy but with a host of coaches backed up in the parking area there wasn’t a long wait to get back to Aguas Calientes. Coming down from the mountain allowed passengers to appreciate how much of a ‘hairy’ ride it really was! Buses were whizzing past each other along a narrow ledge of a road, at times coming within a metre or so of the edge and the prospect of a disastrous drop to the bottom of the valley. Getting back to the base camp of Aguas Calientes early I had a lot of time to waste before the departure time for my return train to Poroy. After a pizza lunch (quite cod-ordinary) and a much needed cerveza, I wandered through the many tourist shops and the main mercado and accidentally struck a better bargain than I had intended to with a native vendor on bulk place mats (verifying as if I needed to be reminded that I am much more successful when I don’t try!).
Urubamba River from MP
Whilst in the markets I experienced that nil degree of separation sensation, running into a friend from Sydney, the organiser of a meetup group I am a member of. I did have advanced knowledge that she was travelling to Peru at the same time as me, but I hadn’t expected to run in to her at the most congested spot in Peru. Maddy, when I tapped her on the arm and she recognised me, became instantly quasi-hysterically excited in that slightly over-the-top way of hers. This seemed to spook her companion, her sister, who appeared momentarily taken aback by Maddy’s uncharacteristically Icelandic lack of composure.
Inka animal myth costumes, Aguas Calientes town
I spent the rest of the afternoon pottering around in the township of Aguas Calientes, a settlement that seems to exist solely to exploit the fame of Machu Picchu, its restaurants and goods shops there exclusively for the tourist trade.The inward trip on PeruRail to Poroy was even longer drawn out than the outward one had been in the morning (perhaps I was just tired but it seemed that way to me). Either way, it was a good three-and-a-half hours till the PeruRail ‘Express’ finally dawdled into the station. After my recent, unhappy experience of connections in Cusco I was relieved to see the Chimu driver there waiting for me at the exit. After spending half the day either in the train or waiting for it, I just wanted to get back to the Cusco hotel for a good night’s rest before the prospect of even more travelling in the morning.
This morning I was scheduled to go on the first part of the Sacred Inca Trail tour. I was collected early at my hostela by someone I would come to call Braces Guide # 1, she took me to my coach for the Inca Trail trip. We stopped on the way out of Cusco and took on more passengers. I had been noticing that all of the passengers on the coach seemed to be Spanish or Spanish speakers, but without actually realising that something was awry.
Llama waystation, Cuzco
Braces Guide # 1 then told me that I had to get off the coach because it was only for Spanish language tourists! (I had kind of already got that impression myself before her intervention). Another guide (sans braces) crammed me into a second coach. I was only settled in my seat for a moment when Braces Guide # 1 led me back to the original coach (which was still exclusively Spanish-speaking) where Braces Guide # 2 took charge and tried (unsuccessfully) to explain to me why I had ended up back in the first coach that a moment before I had been removed from! Not a great start to the SIT tour. I was the only Anglophone in a bus full of Español speakers, but at least the trip was underway.
PisacInca Citadel, Pisac
The first stop on the Trail after we enter Urubamba Valley is the archaelogical site of Pisac, 3400 metres above sea level. Lots of old Incan ruins scattered among agricultural fields on the hillsides where corn and potato is farmed in layered rows. We hear from our guide that Peru has 100s of varieties of potatoes and 1000s of varieties of corn (that’s a lot of corn!). The architecture in Pisac is pretty much decimated thanks to Pizarro and his 16th century Conquistadors, although the Inca Citadel, perched high up on a hillside is still an impressive sight and offered good views of the valley. We noticed the Incan burial tombs built into a mountain adjacent to the Citadel (the rapacious Conquistadors had ransacked these in search of gold and other valuable metals). Going back down to our parked coach we had to pass through a full-on, hectic market selling the usual tourist merchandise and paraphernalia.
The road along the Inca Trail was shockingly bad considering that this was a primary tourist route, and there was an amazing amount of rubbish strewn all over it. There were reminders of Australia in the countryside as early 20th century Peruvians had planted countless eucalyptus trees, known for their fast growing quality, on the sides of the Trail. So far my stay in the Cusco area I hadn’t experienced any side effects of the altitude but on the Sacred Trail journey I started to get a touch of the dreaded Cusco belly. I wasn’t dizzy or light-hearted or suffering from a headache but I was feeling drained and weak from a bout of diarrhoea. The Spanish on the tour kept to themselves and didn’t seem to have any English to speak off, fortunately the guide was quite competent in the language.
Ollantaytambo temple climb
We stopped in the town of Urumbamba for lunch, after lunch and some rest I started to feel better. The lunch arrangements were really dumb. Although the tour group wasn’t particular large (maybe 15 people tops), sections of the group decided to have lunch in different locations in the town, three different places. So, after we were collected in one restaurant, the bus drove across town to two separate places to pick up the others. What with delays in some of the Spaniards finishing their lunches and other hold-ups the time lunch took was stretched out for over half-an-hour compared to how long this would have taken if we were all in the same location. This didn’t make any logical sense to me – particularly as ultimately we had to skip seeing one of the scheduled features later in the day! I queried this with Braces Guide #2 but he said that the others’ lunch venue had been pre-arranged as requested by the Spanish travellers or some such bull-shit excuse. This just seemed ridiculous to me, that to save time and fit in more sights, the one group travelling in the same bus on the same day couldn’t all have lunch in the one spot!
View of courtyard from top of Ollantaytambo templeMonotaxi, Ollan
After finally getting away from Urumbamba it was a long haul to get to Ollantaytambo. On the way we passed numerous monotaxis, the tiny three-wheel contraptions (my favourite mono was the blue Batman vehicles) which are the standard form of public transport in many parts of Southern Peru.
Ollantaytambo
Ollantaytambo, although totally overshadowed in tourist itineraries by the more famous Machu Picchu, is very impressive in its own right. As well as being a vast Inca temple overlooking the three important Incan valleys, Ollantaytambo was used to house enormous quantities of stores in the sides of its mountains. We climbed to the top of the Terraces of Pumatallis which was the Incans’ route to their storehouses and granaries. Standing at the top of the Terraces afforded a panoramic view of the pueblo below and the surrounding valleys. Ascending Pumatallis, surrounded by hundreds of Spanish tourists admiring the Inca structure, I was very conscious of the irony of the moment – these modern Spaniards were in awe of a monumental structure which their Spanish conquistador ancestors had contemptuously vandalised and destroyed five centuries before. In an odd sense these tourists, rambling all over Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu and other ruins, are following their Iberian ancestors as modern raiders of a lost Inca world.
Stores & granaries in mountain, Ollantaytambo
On the return route to Cusco the tour stopped at the Indian markets at Chinchero which is high up on the cold, windswept plains (3760m ASL). The local community women, decked out in traditional native attire, gave a demonstration of wool dyeing. The process was quite labour-intensive but interesting nonetheless. And their outfits were very colourful. The severity of the cold prompted me to buy a beanie from the Indian markets.
Chinchero Native Market
By this time, about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, we were due to head back to the city hotels. I realised on checking my day itinerary that the site we had missed out on (because of the dragged out lunch fiasco) was called Boleto Turistico Del Cusco Parcial Valle Sagrado Para Turista Extranjero at Moray. I don’t know what exactly it was (no one talked about it) but the picture on the ticket suggested a kind of amphitheatre resembling terraced crop circles. I wasn’t impressed that we missed it but on alighting I still gave Braces Guide # 2 a small tip for his efforts (unlike virtually all of the Spanish tourists who were distinctly stingy!).
Finding myself in Plaza Del Armas once again, I look round for dinner options. I had tried the llama, Peruvian-style pescado (in Lima and in Cusco), the bife de lomo, empanadas in each city of the tour, but I was yet to sample the cuy (roasted guinea pig). I checked it out in one or restaurants but I must admit that it didn’t look all that inviting to me, so I decided to pass on the pig and wait until I get to Lima and try it there. One of the problems with guinea pig that puts some people off eating it is when it is presented on the dining table as the full animal, teeth and all parts, not so enticing for extranjeros like me. In the end I opt for something pretty safe and conservative, a beans and mince dish at a downmarket Cuzco diner.
Despite the baggage stuff-up I still got to Puerto Maldonado Airport way early (why do tour operators always have to get you there Über-early?). The good news was that I didn’t have to hang around the minimally-equipped outpost of an airport for long. At the check-in I found out there was a seat available on an earlier Cusco flight. It was a one hour flight to Cusco, time enough for LAN to outdo all their previous stellar catering efforts by generously providing passengers with a lolly (a single lolly) by way of a flight snack! Chimu were unaware of my flight switch and as I didn’t have a phone number for the Cusco office, the reality of getting to Cusco Airport an hour and twenty minutes early was that I would have to wait round for the transfer driver who would front up only at the scheduled time of my original flight. Waiting around all that time was an uncomfortable experience because I arrived at the airport inadequately dressed (t-shirt and shorts). It had been very hot in the Amazonia airport but the elevated Cusco was a good 15 degrees cooler than Pt Maldonado and very chilly indeed.
Cuzco Aeropuerto
I hovered round the airport entrance, poking my head outside periodically to see if I could spot the Chimu sign. Every time I did I would be pestered by a small battalion of persistent taxi drivers touting for a fare. The hotel transfer drivers were lined up 20 metres away from the entrada behind a partition. It was hard to read some of the signs, many of the drivers were too distracted or bored to hold up their signs properly. One of the driver’s name signs I noticed did no favours for an arriving passenger trying to spot him, he had scrawled the name in yellow highlighter against the white background of the sheet of paper! I passed the time chatting with a fellow Australian tourist, a young blond girl who was also waiting for her delayed pick-up, but somewhat more good-natured and patiently than I was. As it transpired my driver turned up 15 minutes after my scheduled flight.
Unaytambo Hotel
My Cusco hotel, the Unaytambo, a building in the classic Americas colonial mould, was set splendidly on the site of an ancient Inca palace. The first thing I noticed was the footpath in the lane outside my lodge. It was made of very
Steep & cobbly surfaces, Cuesta del Almirante
ancient-looking, large, flat stones in the centre, with a parallel strip on the outside comprising small round stones cemented together. This type of uneven walking surface, which I found replicated all over the Cusco town centre, was very easy to trip over. If that didn’t get you, you had to also watch out for the very large unsymmetrical steps on the steeper streets.
St Sunday Cathedral
Just across the road from the Unaytambo is the Incan Qorikancha (Temple of the Sun) which the Spanish ‘honoured’ during La Conquista by building the Santo Domingo Cathedral over the top of it! After getting my vouchers and itinerary from my local Chimu contact, I went downtown to Historico Centro, explored the main drag, Avenida El Sol, and had a typical Peruvian meal in a drab and threadbare shack of a shop. Nothing aesthetic about the joint but you could have dos cursos (two courses) for eight sols. For the primero I chose a tortilla of sorts and pescado frito (heavily-salted fish) for the segunda, which was more quantity than quality. The unglamorous side of Cusco dining for sure, but it was a good, authentic experience.
Given that Cusco is 3,300 metres above sea level I had been forewarned about the risk of soroche (altitude sickness) and was advised to take the coca plant as an antidote, either by chewing the leaves or in tea. At the hotel I decided on the coca de mate (the coca tea method) and started drinking it night and morning. It was not immensely palatable but tolerable none the less because it had a fairly neutral taste. Once you got used to it, it tasted a bit like very weak green tea.
Temple of the Sun remains
The next day I went on an organised Cusco city walking tour. My guide was a very personable mestizo local named Walter who took me first to Qorikancha, or what is left of the temple. Walter pointed out examples of Inca stonework, the outstanding feature of which is the perfect trapezoid form used by Incan architects on doorways and windows. The walking tour next took in the central Plaza Del Armas, El Catedral and Chapel. El Catedral’s main interest to me was that the building took nearly 100 years to finish. Having seen numerous houses of religion in these very Catholic countries my interest in visiting them was starting to wane, the more I saw of them the more I was reminded of a tour guide in Spain’s description of old city tours as being an exercise in looking at ABC’s (ie, Another Bloody Church!). I found out later that an operator conducts free walking tours of Cusco daily from Plaza Regocijo. The same group, FWTPeru, also do pub crawls of the ciudad. This very English trait doesn’t surprise given the large number of pubs and bar in the city (including as everywhere in the world an Irish pub or two).
San Pedro Mercado
Out on the street there is a real buzz, it’s a constantly happening sort of city, tourists roving from shop to shop (many, many shops!), checking out the bars and cafés and museums. From Plaza Del Armas we headed down Tupac Amaru to San Pedro Mercado, the biggest markets in Cusco. At this market locals and visitors can purchase a vast array of produce, including dried potato, grains and spices, seaweed, flowers, quail eggs, and even more exotic items such as pickled snakes, live frog soup, horrendous-looking donkey snouts and Amazonian tree sap remedies. The high visibility of slaughtered animal carcasses in the market is not for the faint-hearted!
Llama Corner
On the way back to Unaytambo, I spotted my first llama and got Walter to pose with it and its native camelid-herder. Before we parted Walter suggested a few museums that I could follow up by foot, viz the Museo Inka, the Pisco Museum and the Chocomuseum.
The Incan Museum, contained in a grand colonial mansion, once you got past the Museo Inka door men in traditional Inca attire, had lots of interesting features including wooden drinking vessels, colonial paintings and murals, goldwork items, native artefacts and weapons, elongated skulls and mummies (unfortunately no photos were allowed with staff strictly enforcing this rule). In the museum courtyard there were demonstrations of textile weaving. Despite the museum’s
Museo Inka
name there were also non-Incan exhibits on display, mainly relating to the Spanish Conquista era. The other two suggestions of Walter turned out to be faux museums! Both were museums in name only, in reality inside they were shops not even trying to effect the appearance of a museum! I did buy some Peruvian dark chocolate from the so-called Chocomuseum which did taste differently good.
Paititi 2 Forks Restaurant
That evening I returned to Plaza Del Armas to eat and decided on a restaurant opposite the Plaza that looked OK called Paititi. Decided to be a bit gastronomically adventurous and try the llama which was tender and tasted a little like gamy lamb. As I purchased a mains dish the restaurant threw in a complimentary drink. What else? The perennial regional favourite aperitif, the Pisco Sour. When leaving, I was amused by the restaurant symbol sign on the entrance, maybe the place should be renamed ElTenedor Dos, “The Two Forks”! How could they get something so blatantly obvious completely wrong!?!
The following day I had another early morning flight to the third country on my itinerary, Peru. Having prepared my bags, etc, the previous night, I set the wakeup time for 4:30 which would allow me enough time to shower and such and meet the 5am pickup time (once again having to forfeit breakfast). As soon I roused myself and start to get ready, the phone rang, it was reception, the transfer driver was already here, 30 minutes early! I told reception he had to wait. Either he or the local Chimu reps had got it wrong again! When I came down, just after 5, I could see that the Argentinian taxi driver was fuming, you could cut his seething anger with a gaucho knife. I reiterated what I had told reception, he was at fault coming half-an-hour early. This seem to propel him into an even bigger rage, responding with belligerence and rudeness. Once we were in the taxi, the intemperate oaf proceeded to drive like a coke-fuelled maniac at breakneck speed to the airport (fortunately there was very few cars of the freeway at that time). It was a very frosty trip with both of us seriously pissed off at that stage. I was glad to get to the airport in one piece. At least I didn’t have to deliberate over whether to give the turkey a monetary gratificación for his service(?).
Lima ‘happy’ protest San Martin Plaza
The Flight to Lima was largely uneventful. Coming out of the Arrivals, I checked the cambio rates as I had no Peruvian sols but was still holding a surplus of Australian dollars. They were offering around 2.70 to the US dollar, which was not bad, but only 1.50 to the Aussie dollar. Considering that Australia was 1.05 or 1.06 to the US$ at the time, this was a rip-off of a deal. I put my Australian dollars away & withdrew sols from the Airport ATM instead. As I was leaving for Amazonia the next morning, The tour agent had booked me in to the nearest hotel 50 metres from the Arrivals gate, Costa Del Sol. This was the first modern hotel I had encountered on the tour! I had a complementary pisco sour at the bar. Notwithstanding my initial reservations I was starting to warm to this quintessentially South American drink. As it was still only mid-afternoon I decided to head into the city. Tossing up whether to go back to Jorge Chávez to get a Green Taxi or the convenience of booking one there at the hotel reception, I went for the convenience (and an extra 15 sols). Despite the reception guy saying it would there in a moment, 15 minutes of moments passed & still no sign of the cab! I walked out into the airport street and hailed one straight away. The drowsy old codger with a rundown taxi charged me 45 sols and then proceeded to drive like someone possessed, zigzagging between cars all the way into the centro. I hadn’t been prepared for such an unnervingly hairy ride from such a senior driver. But, based on my later cab experiences in the Peruvian capital, such dangerously wayward motoring is the norm for everyone. Lima, at least the part I saw on my first day, was very grimy, dirty and faded. There were some grand colonial buildings in the city, but all of them aside from those in Plaza San Martin, were in dire need of a clean and a fresh paint job. There appeared to be hardly any gardens or green areas to speak of in the central region. Of course there was the obligatory protest against the authorities going on in the Plaza, it was typically noisy, very musical with everyone apparently enjoying themselves! In the limited amount of exploring I did, the one street that raised a little bit of interest on my part was Jr Pierola in the downtown area. This curious street was composed largely of small ‘backyard’ printing presses, stretching one after another for blocks. I had thought it strange at the time that there could be a need for this many printing shops in Lima. I didn’t find out until much later that Lima was the counterfeit banknote capital of the world! it now made more sense. Unaware of the back story, I had been thinking only in terms of legitimate, domestic demand!
Order of the “White Knotted Rope”
I walked down to the end of the street full of old technology printing businesses onto the main link road where I saw, not for the last time in Peru, an odd kind of religious ceremony. Outside of this big church, there was this line of about 20 priests standing outside the church entrance. They were all wearing a distinctive rope knot around their necks (I later dubbed them “the Order of the White Knotted Rope”). Watching the spectacle for several minutes I got the impression that I was observing some kind of phenomenon of celebrity priests. Clusters of people were standing in the street outside the cathedral (all with the devotional Catholic parishioner look about them) craning their necks and earnestly trying to get a glimpse of the “sacerdotal heavyweights”. And the priests themselves seemed to relish being the centre of attention, lapping up all the unconditional adoration like the strutting peacocks they seemed to be. Central to this spectacle was the priest in purple (rather than the standard black) who arrived late, making a rather grand entrance with quite a theatrical flourish (I didn’t actually notice if his white knotted rope was larger than the others). So, picture the scene, a cabal of monk celebrities being lavishly feted by the pious crowd, to a noisy backdrop of roving street vendors, women and girls, shrilly trying to peddle a range of religious icons, relics & souvenirs to the faithful. I felt the need to move on quickly. I tried to hail a taxi to take me back to the airport hotel but every single driver I stopped on the main avenue, shook their heads vigorously and sped off when I disclosed my intended destination. This left me perplexed, I couldn’t work out
San Jose turrones
why were they were disinterested in my fare, passing up a chance to rip off another gullible tourist. I walked back in the direction of the church to try a different street for cabs. I passed a very brightly-lit up shop selling something called ‘San Jose turrones’. These were rectangular slabs of biscuit topped with multi-coloured lollies in a gooey base, which despite being very unappetising-looking were very popular with the local customers. Curious about these delicacies I googled them later, the manufacturers themselves don’t describe these turrones as food or biscuits, but as “edible products of Peruvian traditional custom!” Back home, I consulted a work colleague who comes from Peru on the turrones, his opinion was that the most distinctive aspect of these delicacies was their rock-like hardness. Looks like I saved my teeth some wear and tear there. I asked a young Peruvian couple also trying to hail a cab why the taxis wouldn’t take me. The guy informed me that many of the city taxi drivers did not have a permit to enter the airport. He managed to engage a taxi whose driver had the permit and was prepared to take me. This was very considerate of him, but then, when I was getting into the cab, the young fellow, astoundingly, paid the fare for me (which he had negotiated at 40 sols). My protests at such generosity were deflected by the Good Samaritan. It was all I could do to slip a 20 sol note, I had in my pocket, into his reluctant hands. I must say that I was quite blown away by the kindness of this stranger! Twenty minutes later, I was having serious misgivings about having got in this particular taxi. We’d gone about 3-4km when suddenly a traffic policewoman pulls our taxi over. She speaks curtly to the driver (who is already looking quite contrite and sorry for himself) and then she starts writing a ticket. I hadn’t been paying much attention so I was not certain of his misdemeanour, but I suspect he had run a red light. After the policewoman had issued the ticket and moved away to catch some other unalert transgressors, the driver remained sitting there in the cab, crestfallen, motionless for several minutes, reading the infringement notice, then placing it on the dashboard, picking it up again, re-reading it, reading it in minute detail as if not believing the words contained on it. Seemingly stunned by his misfortune, he appeared to have completely forgotten about me in the back, the passenger! Finally, he snaps out of his torpor and slowly put the notice in the glove box, and having regained some composure, restarted the engine and drove on. Our route to the airport, circuitously down various dark backstreets, was very different to the one taken by the ageing speedhog who had brought me into town, and it took a tortuously long time to return to the airport. Finally, outside of what looked like the entrance to the airport, he came to a halt, pointed vaguely in the direction of some amorphous building in the mid distance. I was a bit dubious at about exactly where I was. The driver’s motives for abandoning me outside the airport were not hard to fathom. I figured that he was trying to recoup some of his losses (slugged with the ticket), by not entering the aeropuerto precinct he was saving money on the permit usage. Whatever! I was still a good seven to eight minutes walking from the hotel but I didn’t care. After the ordeal of the long, long journey I was glad just to get out of the taxi. The next morning I was woken up at 6am by what sounded like a Tijuana brass band playing in an unrestrained fashion. Forty metres from my hotel window a collection of musicians were loudly welcoming a returning local Lima football team.
When I got to the airport to catch my flight to the next destination, Puerto Maldonado, I found there were huge queues at the domestic airline check-in, and LAN had one line only open. After 15 minutes in the queue, the line had hardly moved, so I switched to the next line (also LAN) which had only a handful of passengers in it. After some time in this line, a LAN staff person came up and ejected me from the line, because apparently this was for ‘special’ check-ins. I remonstrated loudly with the staff, saying that LAN should have more than one lane open to cope with the overflow of passengers, but they would not budge, so I found myself relegated to the end of a now much longer queue. After three-quarters of an hour and little progress, it was pretty apparent that I would miss my flight. And I would have done so, had not a savvy American traveller I was talking with alerted LAN to my plight. The LAN staff person OK’d me to go straight to the departures gate carting my luggage with me. The sudden spike in passenger numbers at the airport was down to the school holidayers starting their trips, which underlined just how inept LAN was in planning for this annual occurrence. The plane flew first to Cusco for a stopover before going on to the Amazonia region. The Cusco trip turned into a wild salsa party, courtesy of the Latinos on board raucously singing, bumping and grinding their hips to the cabin music most of the way. Even some of the LAN cabin staff were getting into the action, turning up the volume on the music and dancing enthusiastically to the rhythm. I for one was relieved when most of these out-of-control Peruvian 20-somethings danced their way off the plane when it landed at Cusco! On the onward trip to Maldonado, the normal and more subdued in-flight entertainment replaced the passenger-generated entertainment. We were collected by a bus at the less than impressive Puerto Maldonaldo Aeropuerto. The posada lodgers gathering together in the bus were a very mixed group, nationality-wise. I had a nice conversation with two friendly American guys on the bus (not the typical loud, boastful type). On the advice of Lizbeth (our guide) to travel light, we unloaded all of the baggage not needed for the three-day trip to Amazonia in a secure storage holding (at least I was hoping it would be secure). At the river (Rio Tambopata), we took the long boat trip to the resorts (the bus group were going to three different lodges), fortunately ours’ was the closest.
Departure point for Amazonia
As we chugged down the Tambopata, I enquired “Are we in Amazonia yet?” Lizbeth replied in the affirmative, so, suppressing my instinctive reflex to say “If that’s so, where is the Amazon River then?”, I instead asked “Is this a tributary of the Amazon?” Lizbeth‘s halting response was that it was a tributary of another river which was a tributary of the Amazon. A tributary of a tributary? Someone else asked the obvious question, “How far are we from the Amazon River itself?” The guide hesitatingly replied that it was 4,000 kilometres away! The other questioner was incredulous and thought she meant 400 kilometres, and corrected her, which under pressure she eventually agreed to in an appeasing gesture. I checked later, it was 4,000km away! Not to mention several tributaries of tributaries away … through eastern Peru, across Bolivia and of course deep into Brazil. All of my tour group were caught off-guard by this revelation! Before coming to Peru we had thought along these lines: the itinerary says we were going to the Amazonas region of Peru, given we know that the Amazon River itself flows through part of Peru, ergo we will actually be on the Amazon River! Not so apparently! (I discovered later that the Peruvian part of Rio Amazon flows much farther north in the area around Iquitos).
Rio Tambo
We pulled over to the mooring for the Posada Amazonas and walked up the track a short distance to the rainforest lodge. After a welcome session in the restaurant/bar, my group settled into our rooms which were hobbled together with wood, bamboo, palm fronds, adobe mud and clay, nonetheless the rooms appeared solid enough. They were not however soundproof as all rooms were open at the top, nor were they secure as the verandahs were windowless, opening out to a view of the close-by jungle. Needless to say guests at the lodge would have been foolhardy not to use the room safety deposit boxes.
Posada Amazonas room
My room had a grand, four-poster bed with a (essential) mosquito net, reminding me of the room I had once stayed in at Livingstone in Zambia alongside the Zambesi River. The hammock in the corner seemed an over the top “Jungle Jim” cliche (and it didn’t come with a mosquito net!). In the afternoon we did an exploratory walk thorough the Amazonas jungle, climbing a 37 metre-high scaffolding canopy tower to get a view of the native bird life. Unfortunately, we didn’t see much of anything of the avian family. Lizbeth, our guide, claimed she got a glimpse of a toucan in the canopy from about 500 metres away but I couldn’t see for sure that it was a toucan! The meal in the Posada that night comprised a set menu and was excellent. Variety was provided with a good rotation of dishes each night, and breakfast and lunch were of a similar quality. Not so ideal was the electricity supply, a couple of times each day the lodge turned on the generator for an hour to allow guests to recharge their batteries, phones and cameras. The problem with this was that the generator’s availability tended to coincide with our boat excursions, so this made it difficult to keep our devices charged up. The electricity also was cut off each night at 9pm, usually ensuring an early night for most. Still, we were deep in the jungle and should have expected to forego the usual urban conveniences and rough it to some extent to give the experience more of an authentic flavour. The next day we pulled on the black wellies supplied by the lodge (most of the trails were permanently muddy in the tropical wild) and crossed the Rio Tambopata by boat to an oxbow lake called Tres Chimbadas, where we circled round the lake in a catamaran. We were on the lookout for caiman and hoatzin (could find any) and giant river otters, which we did see. I asked why we didn’t see any pirañas in the lake. Lizbeth reckoned it was because the otters love to hunt them. We moved to a different part of the river where Lizbeth supplied us with wooden branches fashioned into primitive fishing rods. This time pirañas were plentiful and quite a number were caught by the group, mainly by a Gippsland farmer’s wife (none by me!). The pirañas were surprisingly small (given their fearsome reputation), but any feelings of complacency we might have had were dismissed when Lizbeth demonstrated the razor-sharpness of their teeth in effortlessly cutting through a leaf! I was reminded of this several weeks after the trip when I heard a report of how a host of pirañas had attacked swimmers at a beach in Argentina.
Piranha ha!
After lunch we went to a nearby Collpa (salted soils) on the river bank. Here at the Clay Licks, neotropic birds ingest the clay from the side of the river bank. Lizbeth had forewarned us that macaws might not be present at the parrot clay licks and we may only see parrots and parakeets, but we were in luck as scarlet macaws were there on mass. From a elevated screen cover constructed next to the clay lick we were able to observe the normally shy macaws feeding on the clay. Without the cover we wouldn’t have been to get that close to the timid but spectacular red, yellow and blue macaws.
The Clay Licks: Scarlet macaws
Later we did a short boat ride downriver to the Infierno native community’s ethnobotanical centre (Centro Ñape). We were escorted around the ‘medicinal’ garden by an Indian medicine-man who showed us the plants that were used by the community for treating different ailments and conditions. At the end of the tour the shaman invited us to sample some of the concoctions which he claimed could treat everything from cancer to diabetics to arthritis to impotence! No one else was game but I tried a couple of the fawn to darkish brownish-coloured drinks which had a taste somewhere between sour whiskey and cough medicine. I didn’t notice any benefits but fortunately I didn’t experience any adverse after-effects either.
Jungle’s medicinal cabinet
At night after dinner we did a hike in the dark and the rain looking for jungle organisms which are more nocturnal in their activity. The night patrol turned out to be a bit of a meaningless wander as we only managed to glimpse the occasional frog, a few unexciting insects and one well-camouflaged monkey in the trees. In the morning the Amazonia adventure at an end, I said goodbye to Lizbeth who implored me to give a very good report on the tour evaluation sheet. Her earnest entreaties were of such a magnitude, as if a life or death outcome rested on my favourable response, so I was only too happy to oblige her request. In my jungle room each night when retiring, I had gone to obsessively lengths to ensure that the moissie net covered my body 100 per cent, so intent was I to try to escape the dreaded bite of the Amazonian mosquito. But just as I was leaving, they had finally got a piece of me, causing my skin to become increasingly sensitive and itchy as the day wore on.
Tambopata boat
After a 45 minute boat ride and a final photo or two of the Tambopata, we returned to the port and the Maldonado storage depot. After the bus was unloaded, I discovered that my baggage from the lodge had not been brought back. I had been a bit apprehensive that they might have missed my bag because my room was at the far end of the lodge. Indeed I had actually gone back just prior to departure time to make sure that it was still not outside the room. It had been taken so I was (deceptively) reassured. The depot staff were all relaxed about it when I reported it missing (typical Latino insouciance) and the supervisor told me not to be concerned, “no te preocupes señor“, on the next bus no problem. Frustrated, I was left to cool my heels, thinking that I should not have trusted the inept fuckers and instead carried the bag myself. I was less than amused to find out that the porters had placed my bag with another group of bags in error. Fortunately I was running early for the flight back to Cusco, so the lodge’s cockup wasn’t costly. Puerto Maldonado Aeropuerto was about as threadbare and lacking infrastructure as any airport I could imagine in South America, befitting I guess a remote jungle outpost! There was no air con and not much in the way of snacks or refreshments in the cafe. There was very few seats in the terminal and woefully few in the Departures area. This was not a place you want to get stuck in for a long time, the boredom factor would probably kick in pretty swiftly. Interestingly, the electronic detector at the baggage point seemed to be activated only by footwear! Waiting in the Departures lounge I looked round for something to distract me and find it in the shape of an odd sign on the wall. The notice lists a number of points, including a warning to passengers of their potential criminal liability in the event of flights being delayed by wild birds coming in contact with the aircraft (not sure how this could be attributed to a passenger?!?), something about passengers ingesting drugs and then being apprehended, and then later it turns out that they didn’t actually ingest any drugs and so are allowed to stay on the flight after all (I’ve no idea what this means!!!), and a statement indicating the possibility of a bomb being discovered at the airport or on board (no mention of what procedure would follow the discovery – just that there could be a bomb and folks you should know this!). El bizarro! I sighed heavily and was just happy to see the LAN jet appear on the tarmac soon afterwards.
Portenos outside Metropolitan Cathedral, Plaza de Mayo
At breakfast the next morning an Argentinian guest at the hotel strikes up a conversation with me addressing me initially in Spanish, until he, a little embarrassed, realises his error. Quite a few of the locals seem to think I’m a Latino, until I open my mouth that is! Having inadvertently broken the ice we converse whilst choosing consumables from the buffet selection. He mentions to me that the Argie president (simply known as ‘Cristina’ to the masses) was in the process of having an operation on her brain (I was aware of this, it being the main topic running on the BA news). He said it with such gravitas seeming to infer great respect, but then he applied the sting in the tail, adding in a deadpan tone betrayed only by a trailing chuckle, “Perhaps they will find nothing there!” I ask him if he knew Hugo Porta, curious if El Puma has a profile here in soccer-obsessed Argentina. Yes he does, not so much because he was an international rugby star for the Argentine team, but because he was the Government’s sports minister under the Menem regime.
The breakfast news runs yet another story about La Desaparecidos. A woman is being interviewed on television about her sister who is one of the young Argentinians who was suddenly and mysteriously seen to disappear from society. In South America this is code for ‘abducted’ by the authorities or the military and probably murdered for alleged left-wing activity (defined as subversive activity). The television ‘interview’ comprises the distraught sibling, wailing and sobbing incoherently, pleading for the return of her lost sister. What was extraordinary about this spectacle, was that, despite the woman being largely incomprehensible and reduced to a rambling, emotional mess, the coverage uncomfortably persists, letting the story run live on and on for over half an hour on prime-time TV without cutting it! On Australian or UK TV they would never permit something as indulgent and as loose and unstructured as this to happen, but I understand why it is accepted here. The plight of ‘the disappeared’ is THE emotional issue for so many South Americans, the raw wound for ordinary people which remains unhealed. The lingering issue of La Desaparecidos is the continuing, unaccounted for exemplar of justice denied for so many citizens in Chile and Argentina in particular.
Having ticked the previous day’s city tour off my list of things to do, it was now time to take the excursion to Tigre. The “Eye of the Tiger” tour, as it is called, is a standard part of all Buenos Aires tour packages. Tigre is a town at the mouth of the delta region of the Paraná River some 30 km north of BA and close to the Uruguay border. ‘Tigre’ is a bit of a misnomer, as it was thus named by the early settlers because of the presence of jaguars (not tigers as you might presume) in the region during the pioneering years. The delta comprises many branches (5000-plus waterways in all) linking thousands of tiny islands. We set out from Tigre on a river cat cruiser down one of the main tributary rivers of the Paraná, Rio San Antonio). Our guide for the Tigre tour was a very personable, gentle young guy called Jeremy (Jeremias) who looked like an Argentinian Ferris Bueller. Jeremy was very informative and accommodating, and spoke excellent English, albeit with some delightful idiosyncrasies which betrayed his non-English speaking background, for example, he referred to Canberra as a ‘planified’ city (a real gem!), I didn’t try to correct him, after all the meaning was clear, and the idea of the insular hinterland of Canberra being described as ‘planified’ sounded spot on! Jeremy mentioned that geoscientific experts have predicted that the Tigre islands which under tectonic force, are ever so slowly moving south, will eventually collide with the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires!
Tigre Art Museum
The cruise went past a number of distinctive buildings on the foreshore, none more impressive than the Tigre Art Museum with its large classical columns, extended upper deck and classy marble staircase. The waterfront along the Paraná contained a number of 19th century mansions, where the upper classes engaged in leisurely activities. There wasn’t a lot of passing traffic on the river as we cruised on it, mostly single scullers doing their rowing practice, with the occasional pilot boat and water taxi. The sight of moored houseboats and smaller ‘family’ boats were very common on the river, given the isolation of delta dwellers maritime vessels are just about obligatory. Other sights that we pass further up the river include a casino, an amusement park and old shipbuilding yards.
The floating ‘corner shop’
Another distinctive feature of Tigre and common to the entire length of the delta’s waterways is the presence of heavily-laden, wooden provisions boats. More than anything else in the region. these moored boats illustrate the isolated nature of the delta region. With no supermarkets or even shops around, the 3500 or so Tigrean locals rely on these “floating stores”. The supply boats, laden with household goods, cruise from dock-shed to dock-shed, from property to property, enabling the rivers’ residents to stock up their weekly shopping needs. Right along the lower delta there is an interesting array of riverfront houses (all dwellings on the river are numberless but are identified by their own distinguishing names), as well as holiday and camping grounds providing a weekend escape for the Portenos, and heavily wooden parklands, the delta was a traditional source of osier wood used for construction in the capital (the Osier is a willow found in wet habitats). The number of homes on the Paraná raised up on stilts was testimony to the threat of flooding, an on-going reality.
Not just the houses get put on stilts!
The river itself was alluvial, exhibiting a muddy brown colour which gave the impression of being brackish, which Jeremy assured us was more to do with the particular sediments in the water rather than any indicator of pollution. The river cat looped round in a circuit past the weird spectacle of Museo Sarmiento, a small house totally encapsulated in a large, transparent glass enclosure, which reminded me of the imposing glass cathedral in Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda. From Sarmiento we headed back into the open channel at River Plat, docking again at Tigre Delta Station. I tipped the rivercat captain 60 pesos because he got us back in one piece. The delta excursion was an interesting diversion but not really a riveting tour, and it certainly didn’t live up to the tour provider’s brochure description of the Delta del Paraná experience as a “sensation that cannot be transmitted,” and even more obliquely, “(containing) tiny details that enclose big emotions.” The tour visited the nearby city of San Isidro, which is the stronghold of rugby union in Argentina, stopping off at Puerto de Frutos to visit the dock markets where other members of our tour, comprising mainly Mexican car dealers and their spouses, clicked into bartering mode for a hectic 25 minutes of shopping! Puerto de Frutos, despite the name, seems to be a emporium for bargain domestic goods with a few tourist shops thrown in. The fruit vending side of the markets was nowhere to be seen.
Ocampo
Later, we took a tour of the Villa Ocampo also in San Isidro, the former home of a famous Argentinian woman writer and publisher, now owned and administered by UNESCO. The childless Victoria Ocampo, to avoid the Villa being acquired after her death by the right wing, militaristic Argentinian government of the Seventies, signed it over to UNESCO. Villa Ocampo is a magnificent mansion, quite eclectic stylistically, with various, many French and British, influences evident. During Ocampo’s time, it was a meeting place for many famous intellectuals and writers (Camus, Lorca, Le Corbusier, Tagore, Malraux, Borges, Graham Greene, etc), today it is a cultural centre, a venue for music and the arts. Inside, the rooms are very grand, stylishly decorated with a room devoted to the literature and magazine work (SUR) of Ocampo. As we were visiting, workers were setting up the drawing room for a jazz recital. The gardens (Centro del Paisaje) are extensive (the property is 10,500 square metres in size) and a particular delight, a reflection of the great passion Victoria Ocampo had for gardening, and for the Villa in its entirety. From Villa Ocampo, we connected up with the Av de Liberador (named in honour of the ubiquitous General San Martin whose statutes line the Avenue), the main thoroughfare passing right through the city. At the Tigre tour’s end, after getting some advice from Jeremy on what to see, I set out on foot to explore more of Buenos Aires. Being in the metro central I went first to the nearby Av 9th de Julio, reputed by Argentinians to be the widest avenue in the world. It is very, very wide, but it depends on how you look at it! Within parts of the Avenue I counted what I might call five distinct streets, the two inner ones being restricted to metrobus transport.
The 9th of July
On coming to South America, and venturing out into the busy pedestrian zones, I soon realised that here, the practice is that you walk on the right of the footpath (a reverse of the ‘down under’ custom). This makes sense, you drive on the right side and you walk on the right, so wherever I walked, I tried to be conscious of this ‘rule’. What I found though, is that the locals in the various cities do not consistently adhere to this rule. Some pedestrians automatically just veer straight across to the left side when it is closer to the shops. Accordingly, I soon adopted the approach of walking in the middle of footpaths to be flexible enough to hop either to the left or right as the occasion required.
Power dressing: 1950s dictator’s wife style
After traversing 9th de Julio I headed for the Parques district where the Zoo and Museo Evita is. Despite having an electronic assistant (my iPad maps), but because of my poor sense of direction, I managed to get hopelessly lost, and ended up backtracking to Microcentro, where I started from. Trying again, this time using a different route, I did get eventually to the Zoo and close by, the Museo Evita. I passed on the Zoo as it was too close to the closing time & headed for the museum. It had a very elegant interior with a classy staircase, but it wasn’t a very propitious entrance for me, the first thing the girl at the ticket booth mentioned to me was the toilets weren’t ‘available’. I wondered, is this code for ‘not working’? – or for “we only say we have customer toilets on the brochure to get more tourist brownie points”? Either way, after walking halfway across BA, I thought ‘great!’ Museo Evita was a good insight into Argentina’s most famous woman. On display were carefully assembled items from Evita’s childhood, her theatre and movie careers, and of course, given that Evita was a fashionista for millones of Argentinian women, her dresses and outfits (lots of them!). And, very stylish they were. A curious exhibit included in the display was Evita’s kitchen, complete with fake slabs of meat on the griller. The once powerful husband, Juan Peron, does not get much of a look-in, a single bust and one of his military uniforms encapsulates his total representation at the museum. After the museum, I did some more sightseeing around the Palermo district, before heading back in the direction of the hotel. I noticed the widespread habit of naming streets in Buenos Aires after Argentinian generals, they’re everywhere, Avenida General Paz, Avenida General Alvear, Calle General Balcarce, Avenida Díaz Vélez, and of course, Calle General San Martin. There is even the practice of naming streets after cruisers named after generals (the outstanding example of this, geared toward achieving maximum propagandistic effect, is the General Belgrano). Walking down General Las Heras I passed a street named Coronel Diaz, and concluded that they must have run out of notable generals to honour! Something else occurred to me whilst strolling around the city, there were very few priests to be seen on the streets. I had come across maybe one member of the clergy in my time in the Argentine, which seemed strange in the capital of such a staunchly Catholic country. Whimsically I pondered, were priests becoming the new desaparecidos? I stopped off in Av Las Heras for dinner, picking a restaurant that was reasonably busy but not crowded. I had pizza again and a pisco sour (I did not like this South America specialty when I first tried it but by now I was warming to it). I declined the sweet on offer, dulce de leche (I had tried it earlier at the hotel – way too caramelisingly syrupy for me!), but washed the meal down with what is becoming a custom, a bottle of Qualmes.
BA after dark
Walking around Buenos Aires at night you experience a different side to the city. All sorts of things come out of the woodwork after dark. I didn’t have to stray far from my Centro hotel to find the dodgiest parts of BA. Walking down Calle Florida from Lavalle I soon came across the illegal money changers all shouting out “Cambio, cambio” at the passing punters. Usually these street touts quote very good exchange rates for USD, but this can be a risky venture with a fair chance of you ending up lumbered with counterfeit notes. Florida is an area to exercise caution, I was warned that flashing a wad of cash could be an invitation to robbery around here. Along Florida you will also find callow youths on every corner or cross-section handing out their tiny squares of paper advertising either some special pizza deal or certain massage parlour services which may with or without the additional “happy ending”!
Wander a bit further along to Av Corboda, close to Av 9th de Julio, and you’ll soon find the spot where the local streetwalkers ply their trade. It was after 11.30 when I passed a girl standing in the shadow of a door of a closed business who canvassed her ‘recreational‘ services so softly and in such a low-key manner that I virtually didn’t notice her! My second encounter, which followed minutes later contained no such ambiguity. I was waiting at the lights to cross the road, when one overweight, overenthusiastic woman, in a very forwardly way, bounced up to me grabbing my arm and proceeded to try to entice me to accompany her to a nearby hotel for “a little drink and maybe some massage later, eh?” Caught somewhat off-guard by her directness, I fumbled around for several seconds eventually managing to utter some excuse and slipped out of her grasp and up the street. Later I learnt that the ‘sting’ involved enticing the target back to the hotel to fork out for overpriced drinks, before a taxi to a telos (quaintly described by Portenos as “love hotels”). A lot of the night action seemed to centre around Avenida Cordoba and Noveno Julio, where you can experience both the subtle and the not-so subtle approach of the street-stalking girls.
I don’t know why but this seems to happen to me on a regular basis when I head overseas. Perhaps it’s because of my preference for exploring new cities on foot and often late at night. When I do venture out in places I am visiting for the first time I often find that without either knowing where I am or any dubious intention on my part, I end up in the heart of the local red light district! I was similarly accosted by overzealous working girls when I innocently stumbled onto Canton Road in Hong Kong and Ronda Litoral in Barcelona. To avoid more encounters with late night shift workers on Av de Cordoba, I head off in the opposite direction. Needing to make another early start in the morning for the next leg of my trip, I decide to call it a night and return to my not-so-Gran Hotel. I take a circuitous route down Lavalle, noticing that despite it being past midnight the restaurants are all full of people who, revived by a late afternoon siesta, are now tucking avariciously into supersize portions of pizza, parrillada and bondiola. Everywhere Portenos demonstrating the Buenos Aires obsession with late night non-vegetarian dining!
This morning was my last in Puerto Iguazú but my time of departure had become an issue. The night before Rodrigo had read out the pickup times for airport transfers, I noted that he indicated that my time was 9am, but when I later checked my itinerary provided by Chimu, it said 11:20. At reception I tried to resolve this but they didn’t seem to know (or understand). Before having breakfast I tried phoning the Chimu reps office in Buenos Aires (I had no mobile connection in Chile but my service in Iguazú appeared to be functioning). I couldn’t get through to the Chimu number in the capital but eventually the hotel receptionist did get on to them and confirmed that the original, printed time (11:20) was the right one (Rodrigid the spoiler had struck again!).
As I sat down for breakfast I remembered that I had asked the receptionist to keep my cholera vaccine in a cool place for me (the restaurant fridge), and that I needed to take the last dose before leaving. I stopped one of the passing staff, and motioned towards the fridge inside the bar annex (only a few paces away from where I was seated). The guy ‘seemed’ to get what I was wanted. I waved my room key with the room number 221 on the tag (my vaccine in the fridge was in an envelope marked ‘room 221′). Before I could clarify further, he said ‘Si, no problema senor” and suddenly grabbed the key and bounded up the stairs to my room before I could stop him. I scurried out to intercept him on the stairs, beckoning him back down to the restaurant. I have no idea what he was going to fetch from my room because he had totally misunderstood what I was after! As he was returning, another staff person walked past and I was able to guide her by the arm to the fridge and finally retrieve the medicine. Neither of the staff seemed to have comprehended the word ‘fridge’ (although I didn’t think it was all that remote from the Spanish, ‘refrigador’). To top off this farcical exercise in miscommunication, the attendant guy didn’t return the key to me, instead the dodo leaves it with the duty person at the front desk, so I had to retrieve it later. Grrrrr! After breakfast I filled in the two hours till the departure time by making a last sweep of the Port shops for souvenirs.
The airport at Puerto Iguazú turned out to be LESS than the sum of its parts … and its parts were not all that flash to begin with! I would give it Fs for communications (big surprise!) and for facilities. The check-in baggage staffer told me my flight departure would be 30 minutes late but the Departures screen said it was on time. Who to believe? … such is South American impreciseness! The regular loud speaker announcements, heavily accented and crackling with static, didn’t clear up this contradiction (so inaudible it was impossible to be sure if the announcement was in Spanish or English, or perhaps Spanglish!). When you go through the hand bags and body search point, it was conducted in the old fashion “touchy-feely, nice to meet you” way – no technical aids like hand scanners here). Amazingly, there were no refreshment or snack facilities available inside the airport. Also, no air-conditioning, so you just had to sit there in the heat waiting for your delayed flight. A tin shack structure, but then again, maybe I’m being a bit harsh, on the positive side Puerto Iguazú was probably quite good by Fourth World standard airports!
Chatting with a widely-travelled Japanese female tourist filled in time until the flight finally got off the ground. It was a shortish trip with no dramas but one curious coda. As LA4025 descended into Buenos Aires and the aircraft safely touched down on the tarmac, the Argentinians on the plane, perhaps momentarily releasing their grips on their rosary beads, spontaneously burst into a prolonged round of very enthusiastic applause! They had done the same thing when the plane had landed at Cataratas del Iguazú International Airport on the way into Iguazú. As this didn’t happen with any flights within or to either Chile or Peru, I concluded that this over-the-top appreciation of piloting and navigational skills appeared to be confined to Argentina and Argentinians. Worryingly, I wondered if it said something about the general lack of confidence in Argentinian pilots.
My Buenos Aires hotel, blandly but inaccurately named La Gran, was in Marcelo de Alvear in Microcentre (the hotel diagonally opposite is a drab, one-and-a-half star hotel tongue-in-cheekily called ‘The Sheltown’!). La Gran is close to a square dominated by an imposing statue of San Martin, the especial Liberator of choice, I gather, for much of South America. Before coming to the Americas, based on my superficial grasp of Latin American colonial history, I had always thought this handle had been the property of one Simon Bolivar, but around here, San Martin is the Liberator-king of kudos (in BA alone you can find a Teatro San Martin, Centro Cultural San Martin, Palacio San Martin, San Martin Partido, General San Martin Metro, etc, etc). Chile also elevated him to the pantheon of their national heroes with the mandatory plaza statues, but in that curiously-shaped, tiny Andean republic, the exotically named Bernardo O’Higgins monopolises most of the bragging rights as Libertador of his nation.
Looking around the streets of BA I notice a real cosmopolitan flavour in the faces of the Portenos, compared to the more homogeneous-looking Chileans. Whereas Chileans tend towards a mestizo or native countenance and are shorter in stature, Argentinians, in the capital anyway, tend to have more of a European appearance (Spanish/Italian/German). The women, especially, on the whole are appreciably taller than Chilean women, and with a high proportion of blondes. I observed the cosmopolitan nature of the city within the hotel as well. The bellhop helping lug my suitcase up to the room was a friendly, young Armenian migrant called Haug. I engaged him in an interesting conversation and mention a curious incident in Australia which more than intrigues him (given his ethnic background), the backstory behind the mystifying murder of the Turkish consul in Sydney in the 1990s.
Tango in the street
In the evening I walked around the square to get an idea of the meal options. I discover almost immediately that my hotel is very close to the BA “red light” district, I have to say I wasn’t looking for this – seriously! Wherever I go I seem to have a knack of effortlessly stumbling in no time into the part of that particular city that houses this, most pliable of trades. I change tack and head down to Plaza Lavalle in Tribunales, where I found plenty of options for dinner. Before dining, I happened upon a nocturnal street performance of tango dancing in the plaza. Portenos call popular tango dances in plazas milongas (where punters can pay to go and take the floor to live music accompaniment), but this was a demonstration by tango enthusiasts who were basically buskers (immaculately and formally-attired buskers it should be said). Moonlight strollers milled around the canvas mat square, some in appreciation of the elegant performers throw money into the containers that had been strategically placed at different ends of the mat. I had positioned myself a bit back from the action, up against the shop front, which seem to earn the ire of the dancers who were waiting their turn for a spin. They loudly exhort me (and other apparent transgressors) to move up to the edge of the impromptu dance floor to get a better view, (more to the point I suspect their motive is to ensure the audience is within reaching distance of the containers!).
… or pretend to tango!
I selected a restaurant in Lavalle to eat, a pizza place that looked OK, it wasn’t very well patronised when I went in at around quarter to nine (fairly late time for dinner for me), only a sprinkling of customers, but the place looked quite presentable. I had a leisurely pizza and a couple of Quilmes’ (actually I was an inordinately long time choosing the pizza as there was only a marginal different between each one on the menu!). When I finished and was leaving, at around 10:30, the restaurant milieu had transformed, it was packed with people having, and still coming in to have, their evening meals. I was to learn that this was characteristically Porteno in behaviour, as late, even very late (post-midnight) dinners, are the norm for urban Buenos Aireans. Walking back to my hotel close to midnight and seeing how alive the place is, I come to appreciate what I had heard about BA, this is a city that pulsates and parties more and more the later the hour!
25th May Square
The next day is the city tour – our group was guided round BA by a tall, slim, dark-haired young woman who looks as much like a model as a guide. We headed first to the central Plaza de 25 Mayo where Diana the guide-model gives us a rundown on the Square’s critical function as a platform for Portenos to protest against the excesses of authoritarian Argentinian rule. Some of these protests have a ritualistic nature, such as the mothers who regularly gather at a particular spot (an X literally marks the spot!) in the Plaza to stage a vigil, a silent protest with placards against the unaccounted for disappearance of their children (la desaparecidos). Our tour takes in the ritzy neighbourhood of Retiro, the more fashionable, comfortable eastern suburbs such as Barrio Norte and Palermo (which has several parts, one ostentatiously called ‘Palermo Hollywood’), San Telmo, the dockside Puerto Madero (once a rundown slum area now reconstructed as aspirational middle class), and La Boca, one of the city’s tourist highlights. Along with large numbers of visitors, we strolled along the safe part of La Boca, El Caminito, a triangular walkway lined with convertillos (rows of oddly-connected buildings in a dazzling diversity of bold colours), beautiful murals, sculptures, souvenir shops, art and craft markets. In the plaza tango dancers demonstrated their steps whilst visitors eagerly snapped pictures. A popular feature of the brightly-painted museums in Calle Caminito is the presence of dolls on display on the balconies which are caricatures of famous Argentinians. Maradona, Evita and Juan Peron, and other, less recognisable figures, gaze down on visitors from second floor balconies. Maradona worship is of course alive and well in Argentina, and nowhere is this more on display than in the heartland of his former team, Boca Juniors. In Caminito there are a number of similar caricatures in doll or other form which gently and affectionately poke fun at the flawed football maven.
Guys & dolls in Boca
Our BA city tour ended at Recoleta where we visited one of the most fascinating cemeteries in the world, Cemetaria Recoleta, whose most famous expired resident is Evita Peron. For a cemetery, it is a constant hub of human activity. BA Walking Tours advertise their tour of Cemetaria Recoleta as being “fun, comprehensive, in-depth (but not literally”)”. The amount of time that Argentinians appeared to spend here, I concluded that they can’t all be here ONLY to see Evita’s tomb. Many of the curious visitors seem to come to explore its dozens and dozens of rows of vaults in hope of discovering some famous statesman or general (very many of which are interred here), for whatever reason it exacts quite a pull on people. Diana, our ciudad guide, recounted her own father’s experience that he was initially very reluctant to visit when she suggested it, but once there, he ended up staying for five hours! Recoleta is a large, crowded cemetery, comprising countless large vaults and towering monuments, many very old, all tightly packed together in rows separated by narrow lanes. Open space in the Cemetery is at a premium, all the land is taken up with conjoined vaults and monuments, many of which are examples of impressive and elaborate masonry.
Recoleta from the Mall
Whilst Argentinian visitors to Recoleta Cemetery delight in discovering the monuments to the famous personages in BA history, the number one objective for the majority of non-local visitors is to locate the burial monument to its most internationally famous resident, Evita Peron. Given that Argentina’s one time First Lady was so famous (and became so much more famous posthumously thanks to the Rice and Webber musical), there is a surprising complete absence of signage pointing the way to her tomb. I used the directions provided by the Lonely Planet Argentina Guide to trace the indirect and convoluted path to Evita’s tomb. I’m pleased to say the book did accurately guide me to the precise location of the tomb. Also surprising, there is nothing special or distinctive to mark the final resting place of Evita, its not gold-lined or especially ornately grand or even large in any way, it is like all of the other family vaults around it. Actually, she is buried in HER family’s vault (the Duartes), rather than in the presidential Peron vault (in fact Juan the dictator is buried separately to Evita in a different cemetery in Buenos Aires! There must be a story in that.) There was no big crowd milling around the Duarte vault, just a constant trickle of visitors coming up for a look and a photo and then quickly moving on. I had a short conversation at the vault with a couple of nice expatriate Persian women who were now domiciled in London. They were interested in Iranian migrants in Australia, I told them how they had split into three distinct camps based along political/religious lines (uncharacteristically of me to go off-topic, I probably hadn’t done this for at least a day!).
Cemetaria Recoleta is home for untold numbers of cats, moggy strays in all manner of colours, shadings and patterns. They look pretty comfortable and settled in this “city of the dead,” I suspect that cemetery workers and the odd local visitor provides food for them. One sight that I came across intrigued me a lot. In one of the lanes, about four rows west of the Duarte vault, there, crammed in between two family vaults, three cemetery labourers were sitting and eating in a tiny box structure (about 2 metres wide by 4 metres long), which was their lunch room! For these workers, there was no sense of distance from the subjects of their labour, even in their off-duty moments.
After leaving the Cemetery I removed to the Recoleta Mall directly across the road from it to have some lunch with two Chinese/American women from the tour. We went to Macdonalds (or, in Spanish America, should that be called Macdonaldos?), the girls enthused about how much better the Angus beef burger was in Buenos Aires compared to California … “Really?”- but what caught my eye whilst we were eating, was that the side balcony of the Macdonalds store offered the optimal, elevated vantage point to get great overview photos of the vast, sprawling cemetery, which I duly took advantage of!
The tour activity that night was a trip to San Telmo to see the Ventana Tango Show. As the result of some random selection process I was seated at a table with a Francophone and frank-talking Gallic woman and a non-English speaking Columbian technician. The Frenchwoman (let’s call her Clare, that sounds familiar), had a reasonable handle on English, was quite loquacious, and she seemed to have a lot of opinions (doesn’t really sound French, does it?). Being sociable, I tried to engage in conversation with the non-English speaker at the table, the Columbian guy, but clearly I was making no headway. Several minutes of frustrating and awkward attempts at conversation ensued. At first, he would appear to follow my question (or at least not look discomforted by it), but whenever I tried to extend this line of enquiry, I would lose him totally.
Tango Club in Balcarce
Despite these setbacks I was determined to keep the conversation going … somehow. I remembered that Clare had mentioned at the introduction that she was a teacher, or had been a teacher, one or the other, I wasn’t paying that close attention. So I developed this, well, I’ll call it a method for lack of a better word, to get the conversation past the stillborn stage. I would proceed with an opening gambit, a question to engage the Columbian (his name incidentally was Pablo), and then when, inevitably, the conversation would get log-jammed and Pablo would register that blank and uncomprehending look that was becoming familiar, I would turn to the only-too-eager-to-help Clare, and repeat my statement in English to her (with a bit of hand-gesturing and Spanglish thrown in for emphasis). The over-keen Clare would then pick up the threads of my floundering question and try to translate it to Mr Columbia using the limited amount of Spanish she commanded. I would sit back and watch Clare struggling to translate my question with Pablo looking more and more uncertain. Admittedly, this did not get us very far in the direction of a flowing three-way dialogue, but it served to get me off the hook that I had put myself on in the first place! I felt kind of bad for Clare’s discomfort, but I figured that, being a teacher, she would probably view the whole thing as a pedagogic exercise and maybe even relish the challenge! At least that’s what I told myself. And, it did eat up some time while we were finishing our dinner and waiting for the show to begin. When the tango show finally got underway, we were seated right at the front and so had an excellent view of what was an enjoyable performance. But as the show went (and on), I started to get very tired (the comprehensive lack of sleep in Santiago had at last caught up with me), and I could hardly keep my eyes open. The show itself, when I could focus on it for any miniscule amount of time (constantly drifting in and out of the “half-dream room” as I was), comprised tango dancing supplemented by some other auxiliary activities on stage (eg, a comedic performance of rapid fire rope snapping by an urban gaucho). Clare, unsurprisingly, was NOT impressed by these extra-curricular acts. I kind of agreed with her about the lack of purity in the performance, but at that stage I was just happy that it was finally over and I could get back to the hotel.
On the bus returning to the hotels a couple started addressing me in Spanish, when I indicated to them through gestures and expressions that I had no español (or at least, to put a very generous spin on it, un poco españolsólo), they apologised for mistaking me for being Hispanophone and switched to talking in halting English. I discovered that the couple were los recién casados, newly-weds from Madrid, this was the second time in three days that I had crossed paths with Spanish honeymooners from Old Castille. In Madrid it must be the “lets honeymoon in Latin America” season, but more to the point I realise that it makes logical sense for Spanish outward-bound tourists to gravitate towards Latin America – for convenience of communication, and out of a curiosity about a geographically distant set of countries which share a common language with Spain but are distinctly different types of societies to it.
Early the next morning the taxi does indeed get ‘removed’ to the airport at Santiago, but fortunately for the continued progress of my trip I get to keep it company on its journey. In the cab the transfer driver hands me a sheet from CTS to evaluate my experience of the Chilean leg of the tour. As the trip proceeds I find that this becomes the norm for Chimu – someone gives me a form with five minutes to complete it, just enough for a fleeting, impressionistic take on their performance, when you’d like to be take the time to be expansive about the things you didn’t like! The skeptic in me rails against this dubious, paying ‘lip service’ kind of practice, but nonetheless in the few moments I get before we get to SCL Airport I make a rushed attempt to summarise my complaints of the Chilean experience. I return the sketchily-filled questionnaire back to the driver and offer him some of my pre-breakfast snack (chocolates).
On the catwalk at the Devil’s Gorge
At the airport I find myself once again exposed to the vagaries of LAN customer service. The seemingly complacent, unhelpful staff are vague and imprecise with their directions as to where I go next. I try to print my own boarding pass for Argentina from the self-serve ticket machine as advised by LAN staff, but the machine is not cooperating! Fortunately, a useful Chilean representative of Chimu Adventures is at hand and he comes to my assistance and manages after a few tries to print out my tickets (I’m absolving him from my general criticism of Chimu). By the time I get to the Immigration control point for departure, SLC’s signage is misleading and some of the necessary passenger forms are missing, the immigration official at gate 17 is not only unsympathetic and typically blasé when I protest about the shambles of the setup, she is seemingly sarcastic to boot! She forces me to go back and repeat the whole immigration passport check stage. Her inflexible, uncooperative manner leaves me to wonder, following on from my earlier experience with the LAN front counter, if the phrase LAN public relations is an oxymoron! If its anything to go by, some of the staff I’d met so far were certainly oxymoronic.
The flight to Buenos Aires is uneventful and pretty smooth. After touching down at the Airport I have a lengthy delay waiting for my connection to Iguazu. I pass the time sampling my first taste of Quilmes whilst staring out of the airport bar window at the Rio de la Plata, trying to see if I can chance a glimpse of the distant Uruguayan coast (the vast River Plate is up to 40km wide at some points). The Quilmes seems quite a decent cerveza, but maybe I’m just thirsty. After a second sampling, no, I decide, I do prefer this Argentinian drop to the Cristal I had in Chile. The flight is a fairly brief one, as the plane nears Iguazú the jungle becomes more and more dense. Then just as we get the “prepare for landing” instruction, I get my first, partial sighting of the Iguazú Falls. It’s certainly partial because I can barely make out the misty spray of the falls on the horizon, spiralling upwards out of a broad patch of deep green. I sit back and wait for mañana, when all of the mystique of the Falls will be revealed, hopefully.
Iguazú Falls are a cis-trans-border phenomenon, encompassing both Brazil and the Argentine, with a third country, Paraguay, on the same river very approximate to the location. My hotel in Puerto Iguazú, La Sorgente, is not old but its not new either, and the room door uses those old cumbersome latchkeys which I always have trouble with, but that aside, it is a quite reasonable lodging (outstanding even if I might extend to hyperbole, if the point of comparison is the dire AH Hotel in Santiago!) After settling into my room, I wander up for a look round the town. Frankly, it is a quite unprepossessing place, old dilapidated buildings, many signs have faded or partially unhinged. The surface pavement(sic) of the roads are a strange and primitive concoction of jagged pieces of broken rock mortared together, the result of which is unfriendly to both car tyres and human feet. The local youths seem to spend all day cruising up and down Avenida Cordoba in their defect-laden, beat-up old cars, their hands manically tooting the horn for no reason. And, as in Chile, the many mangy-looking, roaming dogs are an integral feature of the rundown local ‘picturesque’. Whatever money the Government makes from Iguazú Falls tourism (and I imagine it would be lucrative), by the look of this place it is certainly not being pumped back into the Iguazu infrastructure!
My first night in Puerto Iguazú I had dinner at the popular Colors restaurant in the Avenue. I’m not really much of a ‘foodie,’ someone with an always active and overdeveloped appetite, but in the spirit of “when in Rome …” I went for the whole meat package, the formidable bife de lomo, cooked Argentinian parrilla-style – an enormous 135g slab of tenderloin steak. More rare than I would usually have it, but I did enjoy it, and managed to get through it all, probably in part because I had skipped lunch and was a tad ravenous by 7pm.
Sth America’s Waterworld
The next morning was a scheduled early start to fit in a full day at Iguazú Falls. This left me less than 15 minutes for a ‘run-through’ breakfast, even less given that the Iguazu bus arrived five minutes early, meaning I had to quickly grab my bag upstairs and scoot out the door brushing away the bread crumbs as I go. Like the early morning departure from Santiago, this was basically a sans breakfast day. I find that the bus isn’t ‘full’ as claimed by la guia who was obviously trying to hurry me up to keep on schedule, however we do make several hotel stops on the way to pick up a lot more people, so in retrospect I can understand his desire to expedite the action. We get to the entrance of the Falls complex and of course it is full of visitors, international, Argentinians from other regions, school groups, etc. After getting our tickets and navigating the turnstiles, the guide decides that we should by-pass the train immediately inside the gates and walk a couple of kilometres through the bush to the next train station. This sounds a bit curious to me, walking when the train is just there, but when we get to the second station he explains the method in this, the entrance train (which didn’t get to the second point until after we had got there by foot) had to terminate, and so passengers would have to alight to await the other train which is the one which goes to the Waterfalls. Our advantage, the guide was at pains to stress to us, was that by getting there first, it would ensure that we were in the first train to the Falls. Fine! But I was left wondering why, a) there was wasn’t more trains scheduled seeing that Iguazu was a world-class highlight on the global tourism calendar, and, b) the first train just didn’t go straight through to the Falls, considering that both trains left from the same track! To me, that would be logical, but it may not be the Argentinian way!
The tour’s main guide, Rodrigo (who I renamed ‘Rodrigid’ as the day wore on), a smug dude with good English, displays an irritating trait of always referring to members of the tour group only by their surnames (no mister, señor, señorita,and so on). He annoyingly persists with this military-style form of address. Now, he may just be lazy and not want to bother to learn tour members’ first names, but I find it disrespectful and decide to throw it back at him by pointedly calling him “Mr Rodrigo” or sometimes plain “Apelido“, which made him laugh but I’m doubtful if he got my point.
El Diablo
The entirety of the Argentine section of the Falls can be split into two parts, the Cataracts and the Gorge. We arrived at the Gorge first, the entrance to which in Spanish is called Entrada to El Diablo Garganta, still needing to walk almost 1200 metres on a linear footbridge to the actual ‘Devil’s Throat‘. This recently-constructed metal and wood bridge or catwalk is somewhat of a marvel of engineering in itself, as it would have posed considerable challenges to erect across such turbulent waters. As you get closer to the throat, the roar of the powerful waters gets louder and louder and a couple of hundred metres away the spray shooting up from El Diablo can be seen. So, two trains, a hike through the jungle and a further ‘walk on water’, all of the preamble is worth it, 100 per cent, when you finally get to see it! At the edge of the waterfall, the footbridge bends round into a U-shape (more accurately, fork-shaped) to maximize the number of people that can view the waterfall from point-blank range. The viewing platform extends out over the edge of the land (as it does at the Grand Canyon), so that anyone standing on it, cannot avoid getting a decent old drenching! Ponchos are definitely the preferred fashion garb at the Throat! Standing on the catwalk, getting soaked by the spray, trying to look and take photos and videos at the same time, you get the overwhelming sense of all that cascading power! There is water everywhere you look, the impact of the spectacle is just totally fixating! I was fascinated by dozens of little birds that would rapidly dive into the enormous mouth of the waterfall, disappearing into the all-encompassing spray as if the mouth had swallowed them up, only to return skywards several seconds later. It was like they were playing ‘chicken’ with this, most powerful beast of nature, the whole spectacle was quite mesmerising.
Paseo Inferior
Later we explore the multiple, other reaches of the Falls, walking on the National Park’s two trails, the Paseo Superior (Upper Trail) and the Paseo Inferior (the Lower trail). This gives us a different viewpoint and lots more photo opportunities. We also explore the Park’s flora and fauna. Unusual, dazzlingly beautiful butterflies can be seen as can the coatí, which are plentiful in number. These small, long-nosed relatives of the raccoon show no fear of humans and tend to hang round close to the Park kiosk and restaurant having recognised the visitors’ role as purveyors of food. As we cross one of the waterfalls on a catwalk we notice a family of the raccoon-like mammals directly below our feet on another rung of the bridge making the same crossing but seemingly unperturbed about how close they are to getting swept into the rushing waters of the falls.
As 80 per cent of the Waterfalls are on the Argentinian side of the river, the best panoramic views tend to be from the Brazilian shore. As I hadn’t had time to arrange a visa for Brazil before leaving Australia, I did the next best thing which was to pay for the optional Macuco Safari speedboat ride under the Falls. Before you get onto the boat, an attendant gives you a green waterproof bag and asks you to divest yourself of as much clothes as practicable. I was rather disdainful of the guy in front of me who had stripped right down to very brief swimmers, thinking that this turkey was really overdoing it, maybe he just had an exhibitionist bent? When I realised how drenched we would get in the boat, I took it all back. Only then did I remember the advice from the Chimu consultant in Sydney to pack my swimmers (I was kicking myself because I packed them but left them behind in the hotel room that morning!). Once underway, I soon realise that my concern was less about the threat posed by the precipitation from the Waterfall above, than from the action of the powerboat. As the boat accelerates and powers through the water, swerving rapidly from side to side, the huge waves rushing in over the side of the speeding boat douses me and fills up the bucket seat with water. Every time this happens, I instinctively rise from the seat and frantically start scooping the water out whilst clinging urgently to the seat in front. And as I do this the boat attendant immediately orders me to sit down. This pattern is repeated every time a horizontal flow of water rushes in. I bounce up and down continuously to keep bailing the water out; at the same time I had the added anxieties of trying both to avoid the vigilant watch of the zealous crew member and not to lose my camera overboard. Eventually, when I realise that it was inevitable that I was going to be saturated, I give up and stoically resigned myself to my fate. Mercifully, the ordeal is soon over and we return to the shore where I seek out a rock in the sun to dry myself on. Notwithstanding my discomfort due to a temporary state of sogginess, the boat afforded the perfect, up-close viewpoint of the falls.
Cory – the long-nosed Argie coatí
After the speedboat escapade the tour guides shuffle us immediately on to an open-top truck for a slow drive through the Nacional Parque jungle and rainforest, stopping several times to have our attention directed towards different types of forest vegetation. If the idea to pile everyone into the back of an open-top truck was devised to help the boat passengers dry off, it was certainly appreciated – the hot jungle sun took care of the rest! If there was a disappointment with the jungle part of Iguazú ,it was with the paucity of wildlife that we managed to spot. Apart from the conspicuous, aforementioned raccoons, little else in the way of fauna could be spotted. I wasn’t exactly expecting to see jaguars or ocelots in the trees (perhaps thankfully so!), but I was hoping for a glimpse of the odd tapir and certainly, of the elusive toucan, given that this South American bird appears on just about every Falls souvenir painting, plaque and fridge magnet sold in the local shops!
Most of laCatarata visitors seemed to be be from other parts of Argentina, probably a big proportion from BA, but the day-trippers in my tour group were a real mixed bag, North Americans, Britons, Australians, other South Americans, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch. I engaged in a stimulating conversation with a young Spanish honeymooner who has surprisingly good English. An endearing sidelight of our talk was, if I said anything she thought of note, she would turn and patiently translate it to her new husband who was both monolingually Spanish and seemingly monosyllabic. As the señora and I conversed in English at great length, this was considerate of her, making him feel connected to the discussion.
La Catarata
Argentinians like to refer to Iguazú Falls as ‘lamaravilla‘ (the wonder), witnessing its massive power and sheer scope is undeniably one of the world’s great sights. Given that ”comparisons are odious”, as the cliché would have it, I am be reluctant to speculate as to which is the greatest waterfall, Iguazú or Victoria Falls (Southern Africa – even leaving aside the problematic question of what we mean by ‘greatest’). That I visited both waterfalls when they were not at their peak complicates this issue further. Rather than trying to rank them, it is more useful to recognise that both waterfalls are stupendous natural phenomenons in their own distinct ways.
For another thing, it is a bit of an “apples and oranges” comparison, they are both waterfalls but are quite different in their form and composition. Victoria Falls or Mosi-o-Tunya, is the largest, single curtain of water in the world, at its highest it is 26 metres taller than the highest point of Iguazú. Iguazú, conversely, is composed of approximately 275 discrete waterfalls (rather than one continuous stretch of water), and extends all of 2.5km along the Argentine-Brazil border, the sheer number of individual waterfalls scattered about the place makes for an unforgettable spectacle. The pros and cons can be stacked up against each other, one after another. there is nothing at Iguazu to equal the Devil’s Pool in Zambia! The metal footbridge at Iguazú allows you to get right on the edge of the waterfalls, palpably face-to-face with an incredibly imposing curtain of water known to Argentinians as the Devil’s Throat, but at Iguazú you can’t leap into the rushing waters of a rock pool which pushes you to the very precipice of the waterfall, as you can at Victoria Falls. Both of these falls, you can see, have their own distinctive characteristics, and both are world-class natural wonders, exceptional in their own ways.
On returning to the hotel I had intended to eat at the hotel restaurant, until I notice that they are still painting the interior. Accordingly, I decide to avoid the paint vapours and head back to the township to eat. I discover that Puerto Iguazú is much larger than the one street (Av Cordoba) ‘hick town’ I had assumed it to be on my first day. Cordoba Avenue is not even the main road but leads on to Victor Aguirre, a much more central street with its own little side streets. This part of Port Iguazú is made up of a liberal smattering of largely unexciting bars and eateries, and a welter of souvenir and gift shops all basically duplicating each other’s products as you commonly find in any tourist Mecca. After dinner I take a last look round the township and head back to LaSorgente. My last night in the port of Iguazú.
Bellavista mural, Santiago showing Valparaiso hasn’t monopoly on murals!
Day 3 in Chile, CTS has organised a city tour of the capital. Yesterday I had complained about the Valparaiso tour bus being late and having to wait round twiddling my thumbs for the best part of an hour, so overnight I receive a neat, typewriter-typed note under my door. It says, “Dear Sir, Tomorrow I happen to look at 9:00 for city tour. Regards, Monica”. I inquire at reception as to the whereabouts of this ‘Monica’ (the English was not perfect but it was a marked improvement on the others’ attempts, so I thought possibly she could help with the communication problem). “Is Monica here?” I ask, based on a not unreasonable assumption. The duty reception guy looks a bit puzzled, hesitates and then answers “No”. When I asked where she was, he says simply, “At home!” so I thought the absent Monica was off-duty. I am perplexed when he admits that she does not actually work at the hotel. In exasperation I ask him, “Who is Monica?” With a sheepish look on his face and a shrug of his shoulders, he tells me in his very halting English, “She my wife!”. So, this fellow’s wife, when told of my frustrations, volunteered to go lookout for the bus’ arrival in the morning. I thought that this was sweet that a hotel employee’s wife was trying to help me with my tour connection, but with all the confusion I was experiencing and creating, I was starting to think that my stay in this mishmash of a Santiago hotel was becoming something akin to a FawltyTowers episode, a feeling given further currency with every new miscommunication experienced.
Presidential Palace: Allende’s last stand
The ciudad tour takes me to several of the outer barrios of Santiago. These suburbs tend to be cleaner areas with smarter-looking houses than around where I’m lodged (Historico Centro). Definitely seeing the more affluent, middle class areas of the capital now, with names like Independicia, Providencia, El Golf (sounding very aspirationally bourgeois – love it!), Bellavista and Barrio Brasil. Lots of new construction, commercial and residential, happening. We visit another former home of the famous Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, this one in Bellavista. There is more parkland, larger green areas here too. We come back later to the city centre, see the presidential palace where Salvador Allende fought his last stand against the Pinochet-led military coup forces in 1973. Like many older Chileans, our tour driver/guide is clearly no fan of the Pinochet regime, giving us his opinion of the Pinochet era in very scathing terms. We ventured on to Plaza de Armas (most South American cities have a Plaza de Armas or Armes, Santiago’s one was founded in 1540), and typically, there is another political demonstration going on. With this one, the large boldly-coloured banners waved by the protestors contain the words ‘sindicato’ and ‘bancerios’ – so I’m speculating that its a protest by Chilean trade unions against the rapacious policies of big banks, a familiar theme for the left in Chile.
Peaceful demonstration in Plaza de Armas – still Santiago’s la policia are out in force.
When I returned to my hotel after the tour, there was another note from the staff waiting for me. I was due to leave Chile the next day for the next leg of my South American trip, Argentina, but the time for departing had apparently been changed, and the non-English speaking staff had been tasked with the duty of conveying this to me. Having been palpably unsuccessful in their attempts to date to verbally communicate with me, they were now resorting to written communications.
The note that had been slipped under my door, which I suspect hadn’t been written by the aforementioned Monica, reinforced the notion that the formidable barrier of English still loomed as large as ever. The letter addressed me as ‘sr.’by which I guessed they meant ‘Sir’, and not I hope ‘Sister’! (only later did I twig that the ‘sr.’ signified of course Senor!). The note’s meticulously-typed message was divided into two versions, the first in Spanish (perhaps hoping that I had become fluent in the Latin tongue overnight!), followed by an English one which mentioned 5:15am as the new transfer time, but also (unhelpfully) with the imprecise Spanish word ‘retirarn’(?) incongruously inserted into the middle of the message otherwise entirely written in English. Thus, it somewhat clouded it’s meaning, but the message did end however on a self-improvement theme – “(we) apologize for the problem of communication, (and) try to improve our shortcomings in the future” – an admirable sentiment, albeit coming way too late to help me!
Later that night I get yetanother note under the door. This one reads: “Dear Guest, your Taxi removed on Sunday at 5:15am to Airport.“ By now I had got the gist of what was meant to happen, but upon receiving this latest message I was tempted to ask reception, “OK, my taxi is removed at 5:15, si, but what about me???” but didn’t have the energy to embroil myself in another agonising, circular conversation with the English-deficient staff!
The staff at this hotel, I must say, have been always polite and attentive, if largely incapable of helping me due to the language barrier. Invariably, our conversations (perhaps more quasi-conversations) would usually end with the staff member with a sheepish expression on his or her face apologising profusely for inglés inadequacies. It was manifestly clear to me that I had been assigned to a hotel which catered exclusively for Spanish or Portuguese speaking guests. I was left to muse on the obvious point of what an invaluable advantage it would be to come to South America equipped with a decent smattering of Spanish (or even a reasonable bit of working Spanglish!).
My sojourn at the nondescriptly-named AH Hotel, which perhaps would have been better named AA Hotel (as in Absolutely Anonymous Hotel!), had been underwhelming from the get-go. Aside from the diabolical communications situation, the hotel and room added up to just about the worst accommodation experience I have ever had in all of the five continents I have visited (although a guest lodge in Johannesburg also registers high in my International Hotel ‘Hall of Infamy’). The room of itself was basic and serviceable (just), though the floor was a bit dirty. Worse of all, it’s location was terrible, directly across the way from reception and a few steps away from the hotel entrance. This was catastrophic for anyone trying for a peaceful sleep as people (guests) were coming in at all times of the night, pressing the buzzer to be let in (nothing as modern as swipe access here!). At one point, the person at reception, which was supposed to be manned 24/7, went walkabout around 3.30-4 in the morning, so there was a returning guest at this time continuously pressing the buzzer and banging on the glass for a good ten minutes before the AWOL staff person finally stumbled into consciousness and answered the door call.
The buffet breakfast, in keeping with the hotel’s other shortcomings, is very basic, spartan really, even for a continental, and the quality is cod ordinary by any standards. Being in this one star joint for only a couple of days, I decide to stick it out for the duration and vent my displeasure at the tour company in Sydney. Also, the stoic in me reconciled it as being all part of the vicissitudes of the global travel experience, the luck of the draw that you will always get your share of when you go to Third World regions.
In the afternoon I went for my own city tour by foot. Next to my hotel I found and old inn with the intriguing title “Expedio de Bebida Alcoholicas Hotel” (the plaque on the wall said it was a ‘B’ hotel, so what does that make the one I was lumbered with, I wondered). It’s clientele seemed to be backbackers and other transients. Someone told me it was a kind of jokey name, that it was’nt intended to cater specifically for practising alcoholics. In any case there are enough of these establishments in Santiago to go round. I explored the area on the other side of the water-deficient Rio Yaque del Norte, visited the markets at Bellavista, the Funicular and the City Zoo park where I witnessed an anti-abortion rally in full flight. A young, enthusiastic pamphlet distributor tries to foist her anti-abortion literature on to me. I demur to her attempts to make me take her rigid Catholic ‘pro-life’ message, managing to utter a terse “Si a aborto!”, which left her sour-faced as I scuttled off.
Traffic lights juggler, Bellavista
Travelling round the different barrios, I note the presence of what might be generously labelled “performance traffic artists”, young guys who juggle balls, ten-pins and various other round or curved objects in the air at traffic lights for the entertainment of drivers waiting for the lights to change. They obviously know exactly how long the lights stay red because they always cease their performance with enough time left to sweep past the drivers’ windows in the hope of receiving some small change from an appreciative ‘audience’. I compare this street activity to the windscreen cleaners you see in operation at traffic lights in Australian cities, but these guys are obviously much more original and inventive in the way they etch out the shell of a living on the streets.
Walking through Parque Forestal a young guy accompanying his girlfriend passes me, and then suddenly backtracks to caution me, first in Spanish and then in English, of the danger of carrying my expensive camera in too loose a manner. I thank him for his concern, which served to reinforce the earlier tourist warnings I had received of the risk of “grab-and-run” thefts in the more isolated parts of Santiago.
Santa Lucia Hill: Best views from Santiago
Later on I head south to follow the long Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins (for short, the Alameda, which is a much more manageable handle!) a principal Centro road which sweeps past Paris-Londres. As dusk falls I pass the National Library and the high hill of Cerro Santa Lucia with its fine, sandstone rotunda building, fountains and ornate columns. Santa Lucia offers the best views of the capital but is also a danger spot for tourists after dark, due the incidences of thefts there as well.
That night, I have that South American staple, empanadas, for dinner, just as I did for lunch yesterday. In truth, I’ve probably had my fill of empanadas by this point! But they are tasty and filling, and come in sufficient variety (carne, jamon, pino, pollo, neapolitan, etc), an easy, convenient meal. And, if it came down to a choice in South America only between eating them or the unappetising ceviche, it would be empanadas for me every time!
My initial impression of Santiago, as I enter the central region by taxi, is not especially favourable – grimy, dirty, old faded buildings, a place where compulsive graffiti escribitors seem to be in their element. Packs of mangy-looking stray dogs roam the streets, I was informed later that there are upwards of 350,000 scattered throughout Santiago (mucho mucho perros!). As we drive down Gral MacKenna, we pass Mercado Central, this area is in an olfactory sense, very much on the nose 24/7, which is not surprising as it is the location of the city’s central fish markets!
I find my driver somewhat disconcerting. The white-haired old guy looks unnervingly like Pinochet and is possessed of the barest modicum of English. I ask him tourist-type questions, he stares blankly, uncomprehending. Occasionally he latches on to a recognisable word or two in English, but this only prompts him to launch into a further flurry of rapidly spoken Spanish. At this we both sigh quizzically. I wave an imprecise finger in the air and say inquiringly “hotel, si?”, he echoes my ‘si’ and he drives on in silence. When we arrive at my hotel in Ismael Valdez Vergara, the linguistically challenged driver (Miguel is his name) gives me his mobile number (I thought, what good is this?!? … better if he gave me HIS interpreter’s phone number!)
Once inside the hotel, the language problems exacerbate rather than diminish. No one who works here speaks anything like remotely passable English. In time Icome to rely on other guests, Brazilians and Uruguayans in particular, with a reasonable amount of English to translate for me to the staff. Asking simple questions soon becomes burdensome, eg, “where do I buy bottled water”? (having been sensibly warned to give the local tap water a wide berth). Eventually I managed to get out the word ‘aqua’ which is close to the Spanish ‘agua’ but I think the receptionist was too confused by my early burst of too-fast English to comprehend. At this point in the trip, my neophyte Spanish was way too rudimentary to grasp the generic term, let alone the distinction between agua con gas and agua sin gas. My question confuses the apprehensive woman at reception, after some hesitant, uncomfortable moments, she responds by phoning a friend. Her phone friend, with a little better English, soon latches on to what I’m after and asks me to hand the phone back to the reception person, to whom she explains precisely what I want. Newly enlightened, the hotel woman quickly gives me directions to the nearby supermercado, one problem solved. While I have this at least partially Anglophone woman on the phone I venture a second question: “Where can I find casadecambio“. She struggles initially with this one too, my undoubtedly unorthodox pronunciation not helping, but eventually she comprehends and asks me to hand the phone back to the receptionist again. After they talk, the receptionist hands the phone back to me and the caller advises me that the woman I am with now (ie, her) can exchange money. Phew! Its been hard work just to get to find out that the person who can’t understand me is the person who can help me get what I want! Fortunately and a little surprisingly, the reception woman is happy to exchange $40 Australian for 20,000 Chilean pesos which is very fair – to me! (on my later attempts to exchange Australian dollars for nuevo sols in Peru, I find myself decidedly on the wrong end of the deal!).
Worker protest against the authorities, a Santiago way of life!
After settling my belongings in the room I wander out for a bit of a reconnoitre of Santiago. I get about 25 metres from my hotel in Ismael Valdez Vergara and I run into my first South American protest event in Parque Forestal (the first of many such observed people demos on my trip). All the protestors are decked out in blue or orange T-shirts, all blowing unrestrainedly on shrill whistles with the accompaniment of the usual cacophonous musical instruments. As far as I could work out from the banners, they were protesting against the low salaries of trabajadores (roughly translated, hard-working employees), a common complain as worker salaries are generally quite low in the country in the light of 30%-plus inflation affecting the economy. I could see that this was a serious protest by the workers, but one trait I noted each time I happened upon such displays of ‘people power’ in South America is that the participants seem to be having a good time all the same!
The next morning on the street, given my overwhelming lack of Spanish and zero local know-how, I am bemused that several people ask me directions (I think, I hardly look like a local, surely not?). “Recoleta Mercado this way?” an elderly Chilean man inquires. I give reassuring credence to his half-question, half-statement, beckoning in the direction he is heading, ‘si’! Now, obviously I’m not sure where it is, but I’m trying to be helpful and I’m at least not giving him an altogether false lead (although later in Buenos Aires I almost certainly did!), as I know that the Recoleta, a main cross-road, is down that way somewhere, so hopefully and logically the markets with its name is also somewhere near the road called Recoleta (although this does not always follow in Chile as I come to discover).
I was told to be ready at 8:30 to be picked up by the CTS Tourismo bus for a day tour to Valparaiso, some 115-120km west of Santiago on the Pacific coast. It is much nearer to 9:30 when the bus finally arrives (my first lesson in South America that punctuality applies to me rather than to my transporters!). Adrian, the tour guide is refreshingly bilingual and very proficient in English. When we get out of the municipalidad onto Route 68 I meet some chatty, senior American tourists at a servicio in the Curacavi Valley, and it is a relief to have a fluent conversation in English after the frustrating experience of trying to communicate in “Spanglish” on the previous day. The rest of our Valparaíso group are Brazilian tourists with minimal if any English (one is OK), but they seem a nice bunch of women.
In the bus the guide Adrian reveals that Chile is numerically divided into administrative regions, number 1, number 2, and so on. The problem with this neat categorisation is that number 3 was skipped over and never assigned to any region. Adrian’s explanation for this illogical anomaly is that Chileans aren’t good at maths (I decide this is one of those self-deprecating national jokes, kind of like the equivalent of an Irish joke told by the Irish against themselves).
As we head down Route 68 for the Pacific Coast, massive advertising billboards announcing the upcoming Chilean elections blot the landscape. These unsubtle messages are of course positive reinforcement to the voters of the merits of candidates and their parties. One element of this political advertising that you wouldn’t see in Australia is that the prominent female candidates running for presidential office are identified on the mega-billboards solely by their nombres (first names). Michelle (the former president) and Evelyn (the right-wing challenger), are presumably well enough known politicians to make a connection with the electorate on the basis of presenting to the public as mononymic (one name only). Their parties’ respective spin doctors and marketeers would be only too aware of the advantages of establishing familiarity and therefore trust. Using the first name of the candidate projects a more intimate, friendly connection, they appear more accessible to (and for) the masses (in the Americas context, Evita’s use of a mononymic identity comes immediately to mind). While we are traversing the countryside, Adrian informs the group of Chile’s peculiar “obsessive-compulsive disorder” with the tuber – Chile produces some 3,800 species of potatoes (who’d have thought there was that many or that much point of difference!). Apparently, Chile and Peru vie with each other as potato producers, each asserts that IT produces the most varieties in the world of the humble spud!
Ampitheatre ‘roof’
Upon approaching Valparaíso, we by-pass it and head for Vina Del Mar, a coastal resort town about 9km up the road. VDM as the locals call it, is equipped with a big casino, as you’d expect of a tourist town keen to encourage well-heeled visitors to part with their disposable holiday income. We visited the unusual Quinta Vergara Amphitheater and the recently earthquake-damaged Palacios Vergara (both in Parque Quinta Vergara). The idiosyncratically-designed Amphitheatre annually hosts the largest International Song Festival in South America, which draws the like of international performers such as Elton John, Morrissey, Julio Iglesias and Sting. It is a differently-interesting construction, very airy (decidedly open air in fact!), based on the Ancient Greek model, with its most distinctive feature, the multiple vertical poles “suspended from the air”. I think if I was sitting directly under the seemingly-insecure hanging steel poles, I would find my attention somewhat distracted from the concert! Afterwards, we have an excellent seafood lunch at Delicias del Mar lashed down with liberal servings of Cristal (the local cerveza). This restaurant has more than the odd quirky touch. The foyer entrance resembles a bric–a–brac and curios shop, being packed with various stuffed animals, display cabinets of old coins, knickknacks and wooden mastheads carved in the shape of topless maidens. Inside the restaurant, the contents of the walls divulge the owner’s serious Marilyn Monroe obsession with a myriad of photos, prints, clocks and other decorative features representing the iconic Marilyn.
In Vina del Mar we also see its famous clock made out of flowers (RelojdeFlores). This much-photographed, unusual, organic timepiece was a gift to Chile from Switzerland to celebrate the 1962 Football World Cup in Chile. Also in this resort town, at Museo Fonck, we see the Chilean mainland’s only moai, a gigantic stone statue from Easter Island (Easter Island is so removed from the American continent I’m not sure a lot of people automatically get its connection to Chile).
Valparaiso: murals & colour
The port city of Valparaíso alone makes the visit to the west coast worthwhile. It’s a very interesting place, especially its own distinctive domestic architectural style, a hotchpotch of different-coloured and sized houses, many with brightly painted murals on their walls (the guide, Adrian describes this as “good graffiti” as opposed to the ‘malo’ type of graffiti consisting of erratic and indecipherable doodling which infests many parts of Valparaiso). Intriguingly, you will find very ordinary and humble dwellings (even ones which are little better than rundown shacks) right next to structures which are diametrically the opposite, very grand and ornate buildings. On the hill of Cerro Alegre we view various examples of unusual Valparaiso buildings, such as Palacio Baburizza, a large, imposing art nouveau building incorporating a distinctive “witches’ hat” style of vaulted roofing (now a fine arts museum). Also on Cerro Alegre in the Croatian sector, is the 1861-built Casa Antoncich which survived major earthquakes in 1906, 1985 and 2010.
Palacio Buburizza, Cerro Alegre
Topographically, Valparaíso is marked by very steep hills surrounding the docks and shoreline. As a consequence, funiculars or ascensores (cable cars on sloping rail tracks) are the principal mode of transport for residents in the hills to descend to Plaza Sotomayor and the city centro. There are some 26 ascensores servicing Valparaiso. It was novel and fun to drop down to sea-level on one of these funicular contraptions, the journey takes only a few seconds and costs a nominal sum, about 10 Chilean pesos (virtually nothing given the value of the Chilean peso!). The city centre, Plaza Sotomayor, includes the Chilean naval headquarters (Armada de Chile building), the large monument to naval hero Arturo Prat in the middle, and Cafe Melbourne on the other side, it’s sign promising “Melbourne café-style food and coffee” (is this in some sense distinctive from food and coffee in other Australian cities, I ask?) but its name will probably entice some curiosity from tourists from Victoria). Beyond the plaza is the docks (Prat Wharf), always coursing with shipping activity. The docklands house a handicrafts markets where I buy my Valparaiso souvenir.
Ascensores: the quick way back to sea-level
I observe that Adrian, our helpful guide, has this little artifice with his tour talks where he’ll try to tailor the information to suit the interests of the particular national group of tourists he is leading. He mentions to me in passing that he regularly has Australians on his tours, so I was able to enhance his repertoire of anecdotes by telling him about a little-known Australia/Valparaiso connection, Australia’s third prime minister, Chris Watson (first Labor Party PM, youngest-ever PM) was born right here in Valparaíso with the name “Johan Tanck”. Adrian is wrapped on hearing this, immediately googles it to confirm the information, and is not even disappointed to find that Watson, is only partly ancestrally Chilean … Watson perpetuated a lifelong myth that his parents were migrants from Scotland who had stopped over in the Chilean port on route to Australia (his mother was in fact Irish). With genuine relish Adrian enthused that he would store this snippet up to use when he takes his next group of Aussies … I replied “Don’t be surprised if none of them know this about Watson guy, it (or he) are not well-known even in Australia!”
That night back in the capital, I have dinner at a Peruvian-style restaurant, of which there are quite a few in Santiago. I order lomodepollo and taste the popular South American bebidas, Inca Cola, a sickly, gold coloured and vapid tasting concoction. I’ve no understanding as to the reason for this drink’s mass popularity in Latin America. I am amused to observe one of the diners in the restaurant, a Chilean guy, with his family. As they’re about to start tucking into their evening meal, he pulls out his transistor and starts happily playing its noisy music. Interestingly, no one (including the staff) objects to his providing his own musical entertainment, even though its staticky sounds are competing with the restaurant’s background mood music. But I remind myself, this is South America, people take a more relaxed, laissez–faire attitude to such matters.
𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓈𝓉𝒶𝓉𝑒 𝟤𝟧, 𝒩𝑒𝓌 𝑀𝑒𝓍𝒾𝒸𝑜, 𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝑜𝒻 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓊𝓃𝑜𝒻𝒻𝒾𝒸𝒾𝒶𝓁 𝒷𝓇𝒶𝓃𝒸𝒽𝑒𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝒫𝒜𝐻
𝑅𝑒𝒹𝑒𝑒𝓂𝑒𝓇 𝒯𝓊𝓃𝓃𝑒𝓁 (𝐼𝓂𝒶𝑔𝑒: 𝒲𝒾𝓀𝒾𝓂𝒶𝓅𝒾𝒶)
𝒮𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒸𝑒: 𝓇𝑒𝓈𝑒𝒶𝓇𝒸𝒽𝑔𝒶𝓉𝑒.𝓃𝑒𝓉
Passports or their document antecedents were known to exist in ancient civilisations – artwork from the Old Kingdom (ca.1,600 BC) depict Egyptian magistrates issuing identity tablets to guest workers; in the (Hebrew) Bible Judaean governor Nehemiah furnishes a subject permission to travel to the Persian Empire; Ancient Chinese bureaucrats in the Han Dynasty (fl. after 206BC) issued a form of passport (zhuan) for internal travel within the empire, necessary to move through the various counties and points of control.
Henry V
A ‘passport’ letter furnished by King Charles I to a overseas-bound private citizen of the crown, dating from 1636
It was only with the arrival of world war in 1914 that governments, motivated by security needs, turned their attention to tightening up entry requirements between the new nation-states, putting immigration quotas on the agenda (US legislators for example were eager to check the flow of immigrants into the country). Spearheaded by the newly created League of Nations (and aided by the availability of cheaper photography) a passport system began to evolve that was recognisably modern. The League in 1920 introduced a passport nicknamed “Old Blue”—specifying the size, layout and design of passports for 42 of its nations—thus establishing the first worldwide passport standards𝔹. Passports “became both standardized, mandatory travel documents and ritual tools reinforcing national identity” (Schewe).
Marc Chagall (self-portrait): one of a number of famous Nansen passport holders
Marco Polo’s ‘Travels’
Battūta’s travels (Image: ORIAS – University of California, Berkeley)
Image: www.history.com
Marco Polo, adapting to Tartar dress
Battūta/Juzayy’s ‘Rihla’
(Photo: History Extra)
Baroness Derouche (Source: This Day in Aviation)
(Photo: Stephanie Wallace/IMdiversity)
But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.
The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).
Women in Aviation International: best strategy, targeting girls at a young age to foster the ‘bug’ for a flying career
(Photo: PPRuNe Forums)
(Image: julkaisut.metsa.fi)
(Source: Abandoned Spaces)
Postscript: The island’s 13th century footnote in history Jussarö first gets a mention in medieval Danish documents, appearing in King Valdemar II’s Survey (or “Court Rolls”), a document compared to William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book record. The ‘Survey’ of Valdemar II of Denmark (reigned 1202–1241) was a land register of Danish settlements and their populations, c. 1231 (Nils Hybel, The Nature of Kingship c.800–c.1300: The Danish Incident , (2017)). Jussarö is included in the royal survey apparently because it was on the Danish route map (www.en.jussaro.net).
(Source: nationalparks.fi)
(Image: Aviointeriors S.p.A.)
Business-savvy Harvey sensed there was a gap in the market and in 1876 he clinched a deal with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF)ⓐ to open eating houses along the railroad. The start was modest, one small lunchroom in the Topeka (Kansas) depot of the railroad. But from these modest beginnings Harvey created a thriving railway hospitality concern and more. The prototype Harvey lunchroom has been described as “the progenitor of what (Americans) think of today as a diner” [Stephen Fried, quoted in ‘Tracing the Recipes of America’s First Restaurant Empire’, (Sara Bonisteel), Epicurious, 18-Jun-2013, www.epicurious.com].
(Photo: www.railroadmemories.com)
Having traversed the slopes of Zhângbáishān nán (Changbaishan South) and Zhângbáishān xī (Changbaishan West), it is only fitting and proper, in the best traditions of Ed (Hilary), that you should explore the other available slope at Changbai, the North Slope❅.
Zhângbáishān bêi is the most popular section of the Changbai Mountain range. Everywhere across the West slope there were buses unloading visitors, many, many visitors and (therefore) queues! Understandably, the punters were predominantly Chinese from the vast pool of internal tourists who travel from all over the country, but also discernible were pockets of South Korean tourists, including women wearing the hanbok (traditional Korean formal dress).
Before you join the hordes of people ascending the wooden staircase to get a better view of the mountain waterfalls, you might want to linger around the shop stalls long enough to sample the local “hot spring eggs” which are boiled ‘naturally’ in situ in the surrounding hot springs. After trying the eggs (also available in a range of colours), another activity that takes on the element of ritual for the secular visitors is the quasi-ceremonial washing of hands in the nearby “hand washing pool” (supposedly according to the sign posted, a very warm 42°C).
As you proceed along the wooden walkway you will see, strewn all over the ground, pock-marked water holes comprising the mountain’s naturally-heated springs. Most climbers will make for a spot on the boardwalk that will offer the best vantage for the many waterfalls cascading down from the rim of the mountains.
The waterfalls, whose origin point is the majestic strato-volcanic Changbai wonder of Tianchi lake (known in local circles as “the source of three rivers”), function as an ideal backdrop for the myriad of visitors intent on getting their full complement of selfies.
The steps to the right take you up to a quaint bridge and viewing platforms, under which the Weihe River flows down from the main waterfall which comprises a 68-metre drop from the top. Around this spot you can be guaranteed of getting the best vistas of the range and waterfalls.
Another thing you can do here, also with an element of the ritual to it, is drink from the “sacred well”, the Yu Jiang spring. But of course, partaking of the healing waters of Changbaishan is of itself not sufficient, the authentic tourist experience necessitates visual documentation of the ritual.
While you are ‘playing’ the North Slope (as one Chinese English-language promotional blurb interestingly described it), this might also involve a trek through the wilderness down a long set of steps to explore another stretch of Changbai waters. The notice near the start of the wooden track alerting you to the fact that the proximate wilderness is the habitat of the Siberian tiger might be a salutary warning to anyone who might be foolishly tempted to wander too far off the track.
My appetite whetted, I wanted to delve a bit more of the mystery of the “Hermit Kingdom”, so long cloaked in secrecy to the outside world. A subsequent boat trip up the Yalu left me little more enlightened about what life looked like across the border. Although our hire vessel got pretty close at times to the North Korean mainland, there was a bland homogeneity to what I could see…miles and miles of attractive but uninhabited hills and meadows, pockets of farmed land, the odd isolated building, a few roads, the occasional vehicle, but hardly a human to be sighted!❈
Touring Changbai County
Having planned from the start to include Changbai Mountains on my itinerary of the North-East tour, I was (mildly) hopeful that its proximity to the border might offer up new opportunities for North Korea-watching.
The Changbai border towns on the Chinese side are quite remote and relatively lightly populated (most of the internal tourists skip straight past them and make for the much vaunted mountains themselves). All along the Yalu river border between the two countries, there were no Korean border posts or guards in sight. The river itself was the only buffer (no barbed wire fences like I saw north of Dandong). It occurred to me that this un-patrolled, quite narrow and innocuous-looking waterway would not pose much of a challenge to any impoverished North Korean determined enough to escape to the Chinese side in pursuit of a better and more prosperous life. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Korean refugees clandestinely slipping across the river border and being absorbed into a community with which it already had cultural and linguistic affinities.
Having hired a Baishan taxi for the day, we visited several of these border villages on route S303. Here I got a chance to see just much Korean culture had permeated the border and river into China. At one point on the river near Maluguo Town, we stopped at a spot where some peasant farmers had laid out their bright harvest of red peppers on the wall to dry (and to sell). This was part of a little trading post peddling various little North Korean trinkets and knicknaks.
The Korean changgu, integrated into Changbai County public sculpture and municipal utilities ▼▲
Korean influences on Changbai County
While here, I bought some North Korean currency packaged in a passport-type folder. The value of the North Korean notes and coins (chon) amounted to over ₩1260. As it cost me only CN¥20 to buy, I figure that’s pretty indicative of how low regard the North Korean won is held in round these parts!
Continuing on for a few hundred yards we stopped at Guoyuan Village, a tourist an attraction in border country which houses a model Korean village. The village consists of some basic Korean log timber dwellings, a backyard produce garden and a well. The adjoining Korean-style gardens contains a pleasant stream with an agricultural water-wheel with a scattering of sculptures. We stayed here about an hour, wandering the gardens and taking photos. Curiously the place was deserted, we were the only visitors here, no staff around either (though there was a Korean restaurant at the front of the village). Suffice it to say it was a very peaceful and serene setting and a very pleasant diversion.
Heroic scenes from Chinese history ▲
Spying on the North Koreans? ▲
Imitation Great Wall and scenic North Korean peak ▲
A pagoda-roofed border site for scenic views of the DPRK▼
The canyon boardwalk takes about 40 to 50 minutes to complete, depending on how fast you want to go, how many times you want to stop and injest the atmosphere and the scenic views, take photos, etc.
The canyon cuts its way through a dense forest of ancient arboreal specimens. The raised boardwalk allows spectacular views down the 100-metre deep canyon to the river. The walk includes a couple of Indiana Jones-style swaying bridges (not quite as ‘hairy’ a crossing as in the “Lost Raiders” movie). The highlight of the canyon for me was the multitude of intriguing and unusual rock formations to be seen.
The next day we made for the town tourist centre to buy tickets to Changbaishanxi or Changbai Mountain West⍟. Our overriding objective was to see the famous Changbai Tianchi – the much touted “Heavenly Lake”. When our bus got to the car park at the foot of the Tianchi mountains we were aware from the vast crowds and lines that greeted us, that it was everybody’s overriding objective.
We had already caught glimpses of the glistering white, snow-like peaks as the bus chugged up the winding road to the tourism site. After availing ourselves of the toilets near the car park (there being no public amenities at the top of the mountain barring a single souvenir stall), we joined the thronging lines of people embarking on the climb.
From the bottom looking up, there are two walkways, on the left the down staircase and on the right the wooden up staircase. Unfortunately, for walkers going up the right-side steps, some people coming down were blissfully unaware of or simply ignored the clearly posted signs about keeping right on the way down. As a result, walkers going up regularly have to dodge and weave their way round non-conformist walkers on the wrong side. Annoying!
What was already a challenging walk up the mountain, was made more difficult by the heat of the day. Especially so for me…because of the anticipated cold of the mountains I had worn Long Johns under my jeans. This made the climb up for me very heavy-going indeed. The ascent to Heavenly Lake in high summer is not “a piece of cake”…but of course you can always stop at any point, take a breather and admire the unrelentingly beautiful vista.
A further off-putting element for a first-time climber at Changbai West is the deceptiveness of the slope. Rather than one (very) long, single “Stairway to Heaven”, the section of stairs you were struggling up would end, only to be continued by a new section. On the ascent, as we paused to take deep gulps of air, we found it difficult to gauge exactly where the top was! It was like the mountain peak was teasing us…just when we were beginning to feel relief having sighted (finally) what we thought was the summit, it would be taken away from us by the appearance of another (and another) extension of the seemingly never-ending stairway.
The one redeeming feature of this long arduous climb is that the steps are marked at five-metre intervals, so as you breathlessly drag yourself onward and upward, at least you know how far you’ve gone. But we didn’t check on the vertical distance before we embarked on the challenge of the Tianchi stairs. So this proved only of limited comfort to us seeing we had no idea how far there was still to go!
When we ultimately made it to the summit there was genuine relief to be felt. As well, there’s a congratulatory sign at the top to verify the achievement: SUMMIT! GREAT JOB! it proclaims. The sign informs walkers that they’ve reached a elevation point some 2,470 metres above sea-level, numerical confirmation of how high they’ve climbed.
For those who can’t physically manage the walk or just don’t feel like doing the ‘hard yakka”, there is the option of ascent by sedan. You can be ferried up the mountain’s infinite number of steps by a brace of hired carriers. You may even experience the momentary pleasure of imagining, just fleetingly, that you are like some distant China emperor! I did however spare a sympathetic thought for a couple of the sedan carriers I passed. There they were about two-thirds of the way up, two fairly slenderly built guys, slumped over, sprawled on the steps, the effort of transporting their rotund and corpulently-proportioned client in this stifling heat was just too much for the poor fellows.
At the summit there’s a large rectangular-shaped wooden viewing platform to gaze out on the Heavenly Lake. Almost all of the ballast was on one side of the platform, everyone with a camera or a mobile phone was jockeying for the optimal position on the the lake side to take photos and selfies from.
The utter serenity and stillness of the idyllic landscape, of this gem of nature, contrasted with the jostling and chattering of the human visitors. But it was undeniably a sight worth the trek up the mountain. Seeing Tianchi, with its pristine blue waters at the very top of such a vast mountain peak, was proof that the tag “Heavenly Lake” was not hyperbole. This picture-perfect strato-volcanic crater lake must be one of the most photographed rural lake settings in the world.
The return walk down was much less taxing on the legs than going up, a leisurely saunter requiring relatively little effort by comparison, notwithstanding the cautionary sign at the start of the downward stairway: “Many Steps / Take Care / Please Go Slowly”.
You’ll find Marshal Museum in Chaoyang Street, a street worthy of exploring more widely while visiting Shenyang, its variety and interest extending well beyond Marshal Museum in itself. On the day we visited the museum it wasn’t drawing the same numbers of people who were swarming all over the Imperial Palace, but it certainly was attracting a very healthy sum of interested punters in its own right.
What is today a museum was the former home of a family of prominent Dongbei warlords in the first half of the 20th century – the Zhangs, a brace of Zhangs, father and son. During China’s turbulent “warlord era” following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, Generalissimo Zhang Zuolin established a power base in the Northeast region. This was his home and after he was assassinated in 1928, his son Zhang Xueliang assumed the mantle as Dongbei warlord and Chinese strongman.
In large part because the younger Zhang lived a very long life (to 100) and there are more resources on him, the personal artefacts, possessions, photos, etc. contained within the museum puts more focus on Xueliang than on his father.
The mansion-cum-museum’s layout comprises several separate building connected by a series of courtyards. While not as lavish or large an affair as the “Puppet Emperor” Pu Yi’s palace-museum in Changchun, the Marshal Mansion exudes a powerful sense of the power players in control of Chinese’s destiny before the ascent to power of the communist rulers.
The key architecturally piece, the standout of the museum is the mansion itself. The building is Neo-Gothic in style, not mega-large but substantially large. The curious thing was that in front of the facade was what looked like a random dump of very large rocks, collected together in a large pile. I thought it an odd juxtaposition but I realise it wasn’t merely happenstance and doubtlessly it held some deep cultural and perhaps even religious significance※.
The other buildings represent a hotch-potch of different architectural styles, ranging from traditional Siheyuan buildings to South China pavilions to habitable structures blending Western and Chinese styles.
The interior displays have a predictably martial theme (befitting the military power-players the Zhang were) and there’s a section devoted to Zueliang’s exile and migration to Hawaii after his fall from grace – with lots of pictures and material.
One of the rooms contains an inventive and spectacular war mural which is part painting and part sculpture, depicting a full-on visualised battle scene which is graphically very effective.
Two of the outdoor exhibits which caught my eye were of a transportation kind. The museum held two of the Zhangs’ vehicles: the Zhang family sedan (a horse-drawn carriage) and a motor truck, the sign for which makes the claim to be if not China’s earliest automobile (I doubted this!), at least one of the very earliest automobiles in the country.
⇡Marshal Zhang’s accountant
Like the nearby Imperial Palace, Marshal Zhang Museum makes much use of waxworks type mannequins to enhance the “historic atmosphere”. So we find different buildings ‘peopled’ by life-size dummies – the warlord’s administrators (accountants and such), his military staff and other functionaries of the mansion✦.
Next door to the Zhang museum❂ is another tiny (micro-) museum – the Shen Yang Financial Museum. Our tickets got us into this museum as well so I wasn’t sure if there was some formal nexus between the two museums.
Entry to the Marshal Zhang Mansion Museum (as of September 2019) is ¥60 adult and ¥30 concession (same fee structure as for the Mukden Palace).
Although Shenyang’s fame resides with the only other Chinese imperial palace outside of Beijing, the old city of Shenhe has other attractions in the neighbourhood worthy of a diversion away from the palace and Shenyang Street. I have already touched on Marshal Zhang Mansion (and museum) and Chaoyang Jie (the subject of separate blog pieces). 
But if you want to explore other places in Shenhe District (Shênhé Qū) celebrating Chinese history and culture, you could start just across the road from Gù Gōng. I happened upon this fairly new monument site to China’s past set in a wide plaza running from Shenyang Jie to Shengjian Lú. The monument, typically Chinese in design, comprises a busy ‘canvas’ of numerous bronze relief sculptures crammed together and mounted on to two long walls which face each other. The monument’s subject matter represents various threads drawn from China’s long and turbulent history of empire and war (no thematic shortage of martial figures on horseback with weapons) .
Another interesting digression can be had by following Shenyang Jie south for several blocks. There are are some splendid examples of modern buildings borrowing from the traditional styles of Chinese architecture. Eventually you will arrive at a rather magnificent Chinese arch at a major intersection in the road. A pagoda-style structure – dwarfed by comparison – sits atop the massively proportioned arch (this human-made icon is best viewed at night when luminously lit up)
If you’ve been to Beijing and trekked the city’s tourist trail, you will inevitably see, et al, the Forbidden City (Zǐjìnchéng) 顾功. If you subsequently also find yourself as a visitor in the principal city of Liaoning province, Shenyang, you’re almost equally inevitably going to include the Northeast version of Beijing’s imperial gem on your “to see” list.
For some, seeing the provincial version of the Forbidden Palace with the image of the monumental original in mind, might prove somewhat of a letdown. Shenyang Imperial Palace (Gù Gōng) 顾功❋ is a mere one-twelfth the size of the fabled Forbidden Palace, yet it would be very harsh to write off Gù Gōng as a pocket edition of the Beijing prototype. The architects have condensed a great deal of real estate into the >60,000 square metres of the palace grounds at Shenyang. There are more than 300 rooms and around 20 separate courtyards in the complex. Note: The cost of a ticket to enter the Shenyang Imperial Palace and Museum is set at parity with the nearby Marshal Zhang Mansion (60 CN¥ for adults).
Gù Gōng was built in the 1630s under the directions of Nurhachi and Abahai (the two founding emperors of the Qing Dynasty from 1644). Shenyang Palace’s layout comprises three sections, an eastern, middle and western section (this latter section was constructed by a later Qing emperor). The eastern section includes a component known as the “Ten Kings’ Pavilion” – a group of pavilions where the Qings determined imperial policy for the internal affairs of the country.
The architecture of Gù Gōng is interesting in itself. Stylistically, Gù Gōng is a blend of different building styles. The many buildings and structures comprise an architectural amalgam – among these, Han, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan styles can be readily discerned within the palace’s four walls.
The museum component of Gù Gōng includes a raft of Qing imperial art treasures. Among the items on display, direct from the Qing emperor’s pantry are many peerless examples delicate and beautifully glassware, together with enamel vases and gourds, ivory utensils. Not to forget the other such irreplaceable knickknacks from the erstwhile royal household. 
Apart from visiting the palaces’s artworks and artefacts and it’s pavilions, another thing you can do at Gù Gōng, if you really want to get into the decadent spirit and sense of privilege of the Qing lifestyle, is costume hire! For not too many shekels✫ you can physically transform yourself into a Qing emperor or empress…for a few fleeting moments. Once you’ve traded your civilian garb for some over-the-top, fake imperial clobber (the colour red is non-negotiably mandatory), the vendor will snap a series of photos in various poses against an appropriate backdrop, ie, astride a mock Chinese imperial throne! 
Shenyang lu
Our ultimate day in Harbin, what to do? My own leaning, on surveying the options, nudged me towards a trip to Unit 731 (AKA Detachment 731), a museum established in a multi-building complex which was used by the Japanese military and scientists to carry out heinous biological experiments on the local population during the Thirties and Forties. My travelling companion’s inclination however was for spending a less sombre and more genteel day at Tai Yang Dao (Sun Island). In the end what swayed it for Sun Island was proximity, it being a short boat distance from Central (Z.Y.) Street, compared to Unit 731 which was located in the city’s back blocks, requiring a long train trip from the centre.
We decided crossing the river by boat would be the optimal way to get to Sun Island. The other but considerably more expensive way to get to Sun Island is by cable car, which certainly provides a bird’s-eye level vantage point during the crossing (you can also get there circuitously by taxi, crossing a series of bridges). There is no charge to visit Sun Island but access to amusements, rides, activities, etc attract a charge.
The water transport to Sun Island departs from the wharves at Sidalin Park✹. Boats run pretty much continuously all day✥ to the island, so popular is the venue. Although it’s just across the Songhua River we didn’t make straight for Sun Island. The three-quarter full charter boat took a left once out in the channel and headed down the river for a view of the city south skyline behind Stalin Park down to the bridges. We also got to see some of the nearby uninhabited islands overrun by the reeds and wild grasses of the wetlands. I say ‘uninhabited’ but this is only 99 per cent factual. As we make a bee-line for 太阳岛, coming up on your left is the local branch of the men’s nude bathers’ club (fortunately, some might say for sake of aesthetically considerations, the Harbin naturalists are a discreet distance away).
As the ageing journeyman ferry chugs across the water we take videos of the approaching island and the cable cars being pulled back and forth. I remind myself that in just a few months time this trip won’t be possible…the clear aqua-turquoise surface of the river will become solid frozen with the onset of Harbin’s winter. Amusingly, we pass a line of swimmers in single file. These, older men mainly, are slowly swimming, or more accurately half swimming, half dog-paddling, their way from an island to the mainland. Each of them is carrying a rucksack of belongings attached to them by rope like an umbilical cord✧.
As the boat approaches the island wharf, one or two landmarks catch the eye from the river. The first, from a distance looks like a light-hearted sculpture of a very large white swan or is it a goose? When we got to the wharf we realised it wasn’t a pop culture artwork, but the comical masthead on a pleasure vessel for visitors (and especially children) to ride on.
The second, much more visible landmark getting the attention of the boat passengers looks like a historic European castle rising up out the treetops, something you might find on the Danube – in Budapest for instance. Once ashore, on closer inspection, it’s historical pedigree is found wanting. It is of more origin and seems to be inspired by the logo figurehead castle you see at Disneyland! The ‘castle’ turns out to be the central administrative and amenities building for the island’s commercial operations. 
Getting around the island by foot is possible but it covers a large expanse of land and the attractions are quite spread out. So from the wharf we decided to use the “people mover” or the mini-bus to get-about (¥20 each). This made logistical sense but our experience was that it proved a very poor service provider. I was expecting it to operate as a flexible “hop-on, hop-off” arrangement (a lá the Big Red Bus in capital cities globally), but we were not able to hail down one of the many vehicles continually circling the park (every though we had purchased tickets). Each time we tried the bus driver refused to stop for us even when the vehicle was virtually empty (great PR Sun Island!). Apparently our ticket permitted us to use certain passenger service vehicles only (not explained at point of sale). 
That said, the island park did not lack for attractions and points of interest. The various, quaint bridges around the ponds makes for nice “eye-candy”. A Russian-style village garden added to the theme park feel of Sun Island. The section containing the waterfalls and accompanying rock caves were a real highlight for photography manic-obsessives❂ (tip: the pick of the pix is an angled one capturing both the rock-face waterfalls and the big balloon in the shot). 
Many of the island fixtures are well worth a close-up inspection. The mega-scale, modernist monument (a combination of white ovals and arches) near the Greenway is an interesting feature in itself. Another white structure with two storey viewing towers of the water is similar appealing in its design. I was also taken by the supersized “organic sculpture” that we stumbled upon. This creation was another popular point for visitors to mill round and snap endless selfies. The mainly green and red bird (of paradise?)◙ is entirely a floral construction in the familiar style of Jeff Koons (the gigantic floral puppy that once graced Sydney’s Circular Quay, now in Bilbao, Spain). 
And if nature encounters with fauna are your bag, then Sun Island will not disappoint. You can visit a section of the park with fenced off animals of the more gentle kind like deer and caribou. Here for a fee you can pat and feed members of the Cervidae family inside an enclosure. I noticed that with the deer, familiarity brings a singular expectation on their part. Far from being reticent and shy, the creatures can sniff out a food-toting human from 60 feet.
But the one member of the animal kingdom that seems most at home on Tai Yang Dao are small rodents from the Sciuridae clan. The island abounds with the common acorn-addicted squirrel, plentiful on the ground and in the trees. So numerous they are, they have been designated their own section, “Squirrel Lake”, but you don’t need to go here to find them, they inhabit the entire wooded area of Sun Island. While walking around the island, at the back of the Russian model gardens, I spotted a ginger cat in hot pursuit of a squirrel, desperately but hopelessly trying to diminish the fleet-footed Sciuridae population by one.
From Harbin’s tourism centro, Zhongyang Jie, you can find your way to Zhaolin Park by heading north one block. This succulently lush green park with its verdant plant life is a great place to retreat to, getting away from all the people, all the hustle and bustle of Zhongyang Street. And it’s very reachable via a short walk down Shangyou Street from Z.Y. Street. 
Zhaolin Park, attractively set on a large block of public land (more than 8 hectares), is roomy yet it is also compact…it fits quite a lot of things into its space while still allowing you the freedom to roam around. What defines the essence of the park is the canal that snakes it’s way through the park and gardens. It is the thread that connects the various parts of green Zhaolin. By walking in concentric circles around the park you can acquaint yourself with the various quaint and charming bridges which cross the canal at different points. 
Zhaolin Park is well resourced, little wonder then that families tend to flock there. It especially caters for the juvenile visitor. Exotic birds in large cages in one part. Several different amusements for children are contained within the park perimeter, plenty of gentle rides for the younger child. For the family as a whole, the most popular element are the paddle boats. You can hire a colourful boat and paddle a course up and down the canal. 
Being on the lookout for traces of the Russian presence that once pervaded Harbin, I particularly noticed the old entrance gates and buildings on my way in and out (in Senlin and in Shangzhi streets). The structures project a distinctly Russian dome character in the design. It is refreshingly and perhap surprising to report that Zhaolin Park is adequately equipped with toilets, but if I had one quibble it is the same one I have with most many public parks. Given the constant and steady stream of visitors Zhaolin receives, it could do with a lot more seats for the punters distributed right across the park.
Zhongyang✽ Street (to insiders Z.Y. Street for short) proclaims itself in the elaborate, neon-lit arch that spans the start of the street. A small plaque hanging from the arch announces: 中央大街建筑艺术博物馆 -Architectural Arts Museum of Central Avenue, a tag that is a bit pretentious for what is Harbin’s high tourism pedestrian street. 
The commercial hub of the street comprises restaurants, eateries, souvenir shops and hotels. The further you go down the street towards the river, the grander the buildings become. This is where many of the city centre’s older and grander Russian buildings are, including several palatial structures in the Baroque style (alas, some of these grand old mega-buildings have suffered the ignominy of being sub-divided to accommodate KFC and other fast food operators). 
Although Z.Y’s Russianness can be glimpsed everywhere. Place names, shop and restaurant names for the most part are present in both Russian and Chinese. But he Russian imprint on Zhongyang is more profound than this. At many of the street’s corners you can see the Russian architectural influences in the onion domes, minarets and spires sitting atop many buildings. 
With Zhongyang’s cornucopia of niteries and gift shops, the street flows with people ever-so slowly ambling up and down the old cobblestone pavements. They are present from first thing in the morning through to and beyond nightfall. But it is at night that Z.Y. Street really comes alive. The street is a thriving heartbeat, and the night beat is a musical one! The melodic sounds of old-fashioned small bands and trios can be heard all along the central thoroughfare. This recurring feature gives Harbin its nickname of Music City (although Harbinites tend to render it in English as ‘Muisic’ City). The musical highlight for me was a solo guitarist playing with great gusto from an upstairs Z.Y. balcony. This ‘muso’ who wasn’t Chinese (possibly he was Russian) was really going off, strutting his stuff for the gathering of visitors below with Jimi Hendrix-like zeal and vigour! 
Heading westerly up Z.Y. towards the river you will come to a heavy traffic cross-street. The town planners’ solution to this impediment to pedestrian progress was to build an underground pathway which allows those on foot to by-pass the dense vehicular traffic overhead. Known as the “Pedestrian Tunnel under Zhongyang Street”, the tunnel has the additional function of being a secure space for the city’s youth to congregate. Here, the local kids hang-out, skate-board or play ti jianzi (the popular game of foot shuttlecock that many Chinese especially in Beijing are obsessed with). A couple of passageways funnelling off from the tunnel lead to a small U-shaped shopping arcade which caters mainly for tourists. 
If ever you find yourself in Harbin, China, and can manage to tear yourself away from the great northern city’s tourist Mecca Zhongyang Pedestrian Street (AKA Central Street), you should head northeast in the direction of the old town district. Our destination, Lao Daowai (literally “Outside the old road”) on the occasion we visited Harbin, was a sprawling area on the northeastern side of Harbin, although its hard to pin down exactly where the district begins (at least it is for a Wàiguó rén passing through).
We started out in Daoli District at St Sophia Square, a pleasant open plaza about three blocks east of X.Y. Street. At one end of the square is the St Sophia monument, a large black arch and skeletal structure mimicking the shape of the church. In the shadow of the arch is an improvised amusement park where pre-school kids can be shunted round the square in a giant robotic “Star Wars clone” of a moving contraption or via some other similarly ‘cool’ vehicular means. 
The landmark arch also provides a popular modern visual backdrop in good weather for newlyweds regularly seen there with photographer in tow… invariably you will find at least happy couple all decked out in the full matrimonial outfit taking advantage of the setting to pad out their wedding videos. 
The Russians are long gone from here of course but they left a host of architectural calling cards around the square. Pride of place in the plaza lies with the historic Russian cathedral (собор) Saint Sofiya. Some of the older (Russian-era) buildings in Harbin are also close to the square. Daoli’s grand buildings (such as the dome edifice in picture 1 above) share the area with working class markets and what looks like the city’s theatre district. 
Go further north and further east and you will reach Lao DaoWai. Here you will find pockets of urban decay, where grand houses and apartments in the Russian era once stood, the remnants have fallen on straitened times. In one particular street I observed rows of such old faded buildings with the distinctive Russian-style roof peaks in very dismal, unloved condition. You could say, taking the glass half-full line, that it conveys character to the ‘ancient’ city-scape, but truly some of DaoWai’s residential blocks are barely habitable, and to be perhaps a bit uncharitable, little better than crumbling wrecks on the outside. 
From here we made for the Lao DaoWai riverfront. This turned out to be the most lively and fun part of the district. First up, the road leading to the water (ie, to the Songhua River) was a mishmash of different businesses in (at best) ordinary looking premises, interwoven with a number of interesting buildings and structures which make good use of traditional Chinese architectural motifs and features. 
The river offered up a most pleasant diversion from the grit and grim of downtown Lao DaoWai. There is a long waterfront promenade which winds it’s way back southwest to the popular Zhongyang Jie area and beyond. A leisurely walk along the riverfront allowed us to take in many attractive and interesting sights. As we arrived, fishing boats were returning with what seemed quite modest and even disappointing catches. Following the lead of the locals, we went aboard one of the working vessels to investigate. All the sea seemed to yield up to these fishermen were tiny shrimp, shrimp and more shrimp, a quite miserly haul I thought for an afternoon’s net work. 
Nearly halfway back to “tourism central” (Z.Y. Street), the Lao DaoWai promenade abruptly ends at a set of short, steepish steps. The riverfront path however continues eastwards through Daoli and the central area via other walkways which take you past (among other things) a landmark, upmarket riverfront hotel with a very unusual six-seater vehicle out the front and the Songhua River Bridge (below).
With the use of language aids or without them, exploring the physical structures of the former Manchukuo (Manchu State) Imperial Palace provides a fascinating insight into a dark chapter of official life in Dongbei under the Japanese military occupation of the 1930s and 1940s.
One of the most interesting and sought-out items in the museum’s exhibits is the personal vehicle which belonged to Pu-Yi, a 5.7m long black car✪ housed in its own (garage) section of the complex. The “king-sized” vehicle is quite a rare old 1930s auto, a famous “Bubble Car” – American made by the Park Automobile Co. There’s a little souvenir annex attached to the ‘garage’ for car enthusiasts to secure a momento.
The palace contains a lot of Pu-Yi paraphernalia and minutiae, personal items like his traditional ceremonial garb, his official uniforms, his BP device and his trademark circular spectacles. Wall photos and information extracts chart the last Chinese monarch’s story from the imperial palace to incarceration to rehabilitation and life as an ordinary private citizen.
The outside feature of the palace that most captured my imagination though was below it: an air-raid shelter. The increasingly paranoid puppet monarch (no doubt alarmed by the fading fortunes of Japan in the world war) had his own underground bunker constructed. The rooms in the bunkers were grimly threadbare, starkly contrasting with the lavish living quarters of the palace above.
Elsewhere there apparently used to be a tennis court and a small golf course on the grounds. To leave the palace you need to go through an inner gate which looks like the exit, but it’s not, the actual exit going from the palace to the street is further down a hill. As you walk, to your right look for the palace’s horse racetrack (still operating, there was show-jumping happening while we visited). The entire perimeter of the palace is surrounded by high concrete and brick walls.
When we lobbed through the doors of a provincial Chinese hot springs hotel which bore the name “The Milky War”, I did momentarily think of the famous 1980s song by The Church. Once inside, any association with inter-galactic imagery quickly vanished. The Milky Way Hot Springs Hotel in Changchun turned out to be an empty metaphor, the hotel’s interior didn’t correspond to anything remotely resembling the stars of any Solar System I’ve seen✥. 
In one sense though I found the “Milky Way” was actually “out of this world”. It was nothing like any other hotel I had encountered before. The reception area was very opulent, very large, lots of gratuitous items of an aspiring luxurious lifestyle. 
But we didn’t get a chance to absorb the Milky Way extravagance because we were whisked through to a changing area where our shoes were ‘confiscated’ and replaced by flip-flops (a variation on the usual practice in China of leaving your shoes at the front door). We were instructed to divest ourselves of our street clothes (which were bagged and deposited somewhere), and given gender colour-coded pyjamas to wear inside at all times. My “Corporate Vasco de Gamas” were a greeny-yellow colour with a circular pattern (all male guests wore the identical outfit), while my partner (and all of her sex) were decked out in a matching pink number with the same pattern. Already I was feeling like I was at an institution more so than in a resort. We were also issued with a plastic wristband (also colour-coded naturally!) with an activation device which we were to use to gain entry to the “mess hall”, to open our assigned lockers in the change rooms and to redeem our shoes.
Our sojourn at the Milky Way hotel was calculated to take advantage of its special VIP day which it offered from time to time (we were eligible for the special deal by accumulating Milky Way bonus dockets). The big payoff was a special price (one night only) which included lunch and a feast fit for the Ming Dynasty. 
So, when we got to the Milky Way dining area at 5 o’clock (a common time for Chinese to start tucking into supper), at the entrance between us and the food, there was a twenty deep block of pink and green pyjama–clad foodies already queued up for an onslaught on the “feast for an emperor“. 
Once the human roadblock had dissipated, we were able to appreciate the advice of “a friend of a friend” to go light on the lunch. I was glad for the heads-up, otherwise I would never have had the room to go full-tonk at the Gargantuan culinary extravaganza on offer. The range and quantity of foods and beverages was mind-blowing (did I mention dessert?), so we were up for seconds, thirds, etc. Did we over-indulge? You bet ya! But we did try to pull back enough so that we could sample everything on offer. 
Being unfamiliar with some of the Chinese specialities on the trays, it was somewhat of a trial and error process, hit and miss as to what appealed to my taste buds. In the spirit of new dining experiences I allowed myself to taste something in a white bottle called Maotai, an alcoholic white spirits drink distilled from sorghum and Baijiu, a clear grain-based liquor❅. The famous China brew came with a stellar recommendation, but frankly to me it was impossible to get down more than a few mouthfuls. The taste was not really silky smooth, more like liquorice-flavoured sickly Raiki with a sweet and sour texture. 
The next morning we made for the hot springs waterworks on level four. After the disappointment of Fengcheng’s so-called hot springs resort back in Dandong territory, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Changchun resort was the real deal. I liked the way you could hop from one tub to another until you found a temperature that suited you. We started at a warm 36°C and gradually worked our way up as our bodies adjusted to the increased heat. But after five minutes in the 44°C pool we realised we were literally out of our comfort zone and retreated to a more tolerable temp. 
Chaoyang Street in the Imperial Palace district of Shenyang, overshadowed by the proximity of the city’s most illustrious tourist drawcard, the Gu Gong Palace itself, doesn’t get the interest it perhaps deserves. Visitors to Shenyang tend to be drawn to Gu Gong and with equal magnetic force to the “shoppers’ paradise” of the Middle Street Pedestrian Mall . But if you divert some of that time to exploring Chaoyang Street, you might happily discover some less known little treats it has to offer.
Fengtian office of Southern Manchurian Railways (131 Chaoyang Street)
Shenyang Huangchengli Cultural Industrial Park (129 Chaoyang Street)
Shenyang and Chaoyang Jie’s penchant for turning the ordinary and mundane into something fresh and different is ably illustrated by the makeover given this old industrial complex. Situated like the ex-Manchurian Railways depot in the 皇城社区 (Huangcheng neighbourhood), a narrow entrance lane from the street leads to a small square. A new project, still presently in the process of completion, is to transform what was a drab old industrial site into a visually more appealing urban landscape. An attractive and classy new arch adorns the entrance to the square and historically and culturally relevant murals and other artworks including elegant carved relief panels decorate the walls. A subject figuring prominently in the industrial park’s paintings is local celebrity and 1930s Dongbei martial strongman Marshal Zhang (“the younger”). The artistic facelift of the old industrial complex on Chaoyang Street is a refreshing innovation in Shenyang, but one for which the city has precedents, eg, Shenyang’s 1905 Cultural and Creative Park taps into that same artistic and aesthetic potential for transforming a depressed industrial wasteland. 
From near Changchun’s central train station we waved down a cab to take us to the site of Changchun’s cinematic claim to glory in China, the Jilin province city’s pioneering film studios. Although it looked fairly close on Google Maps it took an eternity to get to the former movie site of CFS, Changchun Film Studios. Road distance in China is measured in the conventional way by metric length, but also by the number of motor vehicles they’re are between point A (where you are) and point B (where you want to go).
The setting for the film studios is an impressive one. From the street front you enter a big green park and walk up a grand, sweeping drive. At the top of the drive is the film studio complex, but before you reach the studio entrance, you have to contend with Mao Tse-tung. There he is, “the Chairman” standing erect, as he was in life, larger than the life of any one Chinese person. A gigantic, white statue of Mao, waving benignly at every human figure passing within the shadow of his massive, immovable image※.
It was quite late in the day by now but we were still keen after travelling that far, to see inside the CFS Factory/Museum. The callow youth on the turnstiles gate had other ideas…he point-blank refused us entry because it was after 4 o’clock, less than an hour till the museum closed. Unable to dissuade him, we went away disgruntled but decided to explore the outside parts of the site anyway.
This bore unexpected fruit as we discovered a nice little courtyard adjacent to the factory with an overt military touch (statues of heroic patriotic types and other martial figures, battle-green painted artillery guns, etc). The factory’s military theme is continued in the forecourt which exhibits a fighter plane of 1950s vintage.
Before leaving altogether we chanced a quick look-through of the CFS gift shop which was still open. This proved a fortuitous diversion on our part…while unenthusiastically perusing the shop’s uninspiring assortment of predictable souvenirs on the shelves we noticed a side door ajar which we took advantage of by slipping through it and into the exhibits area. Thus, through a combination of arse-lucky opportunism and devious initiative we did gain entry to the factory after all and for gratis! 
The public CFS Studios display comprised a long, darkly-lit corridor which threw the lighted exhibits down one side into relief. These exhibits were a miscellany of items reflecting the film company’s past productions, the result undoubtedly of a raid on the props department and the costume wardrobes (old military weapons, uniforms and paraphernalia), old style 35mm film cameras and sound recording machines, etc.
The military theme of the factory exhibition was further underscored in the choice of film posters to display…war movies galore! The impression that CFS’ most popular movie genre was war was hard to ignore on this evidence.
Peaking inside a few of the rooms running off the main corridor revealed that the complex was still a hub for contemporary film-making. Production tech staff could be seen working on documentary and TV projects using modern technical equipment (not the antique stuff in the corridor).
Another room off the corridor held a small viewing theatre…surprisingly to me the projector was running a 1930s British B & W film starring Larry Olivier (not dubbed into Chinese and no one watching!). Elsewhere in the room there were pictures and bios of Chinese film-makers, dubbers and other behind-the-camera personnel who had made a contribution at CFS Films during its halcyon days.
The props displayed were for the most part interesting and authentic-looking (authentically old too!), but I did find the stuffed tiger mounted and encased in glass right at the end of the passageway rather incongruous and something that didn’t add to the CFS collection.Changchun Film Studio Group Corporation (Ch: 长春电影集团公司) (to give it its formal title) was the first film production unit registered by the PRC in 1949 after the communist victory. Changchun Film Studios was chosen to fill the cinema production void left by the Japanese Manchukuo Film Association and the Northeast Film Studio. The Corporation also operates the somewhat maligned Changchun Film Theme Park elsewhere in the city.
Very many cities in China have a Zhongshan Park 中山公园 (perhaps the most famous is Beijing’s Zhongshan Park near the Forbidden City). In honour of the Chinese Republic’s first president, Sun-Yat-sen, it became a standard practice to name public parks after the revered Dr Sun, who within China is better known by the name Sun Zhongshan. 
Dalian’s Zhongshan Park is certainly one of the most chilled-out and slow-paced of the parks named in celebration of “the Father of Modern China”. Entrance to the park is from Huanghe Lu, one of Dalian’s busiest, traffic-heavy roads. Once you come under the canopy of its large trees you only need to penetrate the park’s perimeters by the smallest of distances to put the constant noise and shuffling of traffic on Huanghe behind you. 
The first thing that my eyes lit on as I followed the park’s curving pathway was the rich variety of plant life in the park’s garden. It had lots of different Chinese natives but interspersed with these were some exotics like, of all things, pockets of the unforgiving prickly-pointed Mexican yucca (below). Seats, tables and and the occasional gazebo can be found within the park. I liked some of the (minimalist) sculptures too. 
Of Zhongshan Park’s many patrons using the park, two groups were of most interest to me. The park’s central square bordered by neat hedges, Weeping Willows and Conifers, was the setting for numerous games of cards – people engrossed in playing cards being watched by equally engrossed onlookers. I noticed, here and elsewhere in this city, the penchant for card games by the locals (cf. the preferred pastime for Liaoning’s other principal city, Shenyang, which is checkers). The card players in the park seemed wholly serious about their games, notwithstanding the fact that no money appeared to be waged on the outcomes.
Meanwhile, diagonally across from the numerous, endless “no stakes” games of poker, or whatever the preferred Chinese card game is in this region (it wasn’t Mah-jong they were playing, I could see that!), an assembly of local seniors were hard at it constructing a commendable Sino-version of “Dad’s Army”, or so it appeared to this unenlightened Júwàirén✻. Led by a no doubt self-appointed “sergeant-major”, the mainly septuagenarian band were strenuously and loudly put through their paces in a set of vigorous military-style exercises…hup, two, hup, two stuff straight from the US military drill-book. 
First we had to join a lengthy queue to get in to the museum, a popular site (we spent 10-15 minutes in the hot late summer sun alternately admiring the elegantly attractive edifice of the museum and snapping pictures of the nearby phallic-suggestive Friendship Tower). 
Once inside though, it was worth the temporary discomfort, it was a neat and compact little museum of Lüshun art history and archaeological pre-history. I was drawn to the museum’s collection of regional artefacts, ceramics, figurines, statuettes, vases, Buddhist artworks and its anthropological holdings. But what took my eye in particular were a couple of large, very ancient-looking stone writing tablets. I also took a shine to the large and very dramatic historic battle painting in one of the rooms. 
Outside again, we were given enough time to use the close-by, rusty old Russian-era gun emplacements as a mood-capturing backdrop for half-a-dozen selfies. After that, we barely had time to admire the site’s well-maintained gardens before we were whisked off back to the tour bus to explore other, less historically significant parts of the district.
After a busman’s lunch (on the bus!), the next time-wasting activity on the agenda at Lǚshùn was a boat ride arranged for its own sake. We filed out of the tour bus and aboard an old boat and handed a slim satchel of sausage (prompting an instant misunderstanding: I thought the paltry offering of protein was for us to consume on the ride). The boat, carrying fifty or sixty Chinese nationals and myself, charted an oblong-shaped course, going out one side of the harbour and then returning the other thirty minutes later.
I have no notion of, nor was I enlightened as to what the purpose of the boat ride was. We were shown no notable sights or landmarks, saw nothing but empty stretches of water inhabited by other passing vessels some engaged in the same futile, unspecified mission as ourselves. All this leads me to conclude that the purpose was a nihilistic one, an existential muse on nothingness…or perhaps the real reason lay in the small portion of meat we were all given at the start. Everyone else on the boat quickly divested themselves of their piece overboard where it was gratefully snapped up by the swarming flock of seagulls which had been shadowing our boat’s course. With nothing else to do I duly followed suit. Clearly, the the boat trip was part of a supplementary feeding program for the local colony of seagulls in Lǚshùn.
In a twinkle we shape-shifted from clueless, futile wanderers in the Yellow Sea to gimlet-eyed consumers on a warehouse shopping junket. We were enticed with sparkling opals, beads and precious other gemstones. In a showroom an adolescent Chinese “Joe the Gadget Man” sales dude went through a “show and tell” routine demonstrating how either genuine the precious stones were or how expensive they, I couldn’t be sure which. The Chinese tour party seemed quite engrossed by his highly animated showy spiel, to me it was all a bit ho-humdrum. We moved to the food section of the building where we inspected rows of the dried fish delicacies and all manner of other comestibles that Chinese consumers like to stock up on in large quantities. 
Our final Lǚshùn stop to waste an hour or so was the saddest experience of the day. It involved a trip to a Chinese “drive through” zoo. Not an enlightened zoo like Western Plains Zoo which places the animals’ welfare and happiness at a high premium by allowing them the distance, space and relative freedom to move – as only an open plains environment can do. No, this was more like the bad old western zoos of the 1960s which doubled down on confinement and captivity, corralling the creatures, mainly here Eurasian bears of various kinds and a few tigers, into tiny, unsanitary cages, so they could be stared at through the bars. Bored and immobile, they were pathetic sights.
The only animals given a bit of space and exercise were the zoo’s Bengal tigers and tigresses. These big cats were allowed to prowl round a dusty strip of turf, albeit a fairly restricted one. We, the humans, were permitted to take photos as we circled round the mainly listless tigers from a good, safe distance. Occasionally an attendant would throw them slabs of meat from a truck.
The last of the animals on display for the public’s enjoyment were a pair of large brown bears. Ostensibly, they were better off than their caged compatriots because they were sitting in a large pond of water. But I think that was just for the benefit of paying customers, so they can see them frolicking in a riverine environment. When the gates close for the day I suspect they get shuffled back into their 4 x 3 cages. In any case the water quality in the pond didn’t look all that flash, it looked a bit dirty, and this was not helped by visitors in the buses chucking water bottles into the pond to get the Ursus arctos to stand up so they can take better photos. 
Having wasted enough time in Lǚshùn, some enjoyable, some so-so, we started back to Dalian and our digs at the ubiquitous Jinjiang Inn.
Lǚshùn, Lüshan, Lvshunov (旅顺) – variations of nomenclature for a settlement with a long, multinational history as highly prized first-rate port and a key strategic location on the Northeast coast of Asia. For some tourists, Lǚshùn is merely a peninsula appendage to a trip to Dalian, Liaoning’s second city. Popular for visitors from China, Russia and Japan – at the crossroads of the three differing cultures – and for anyone, anywhere, interested in the modern history of the region.
But for those less interested in the story of the North Asian powers’ struggle for supremacy in Port Arthur (Lǚshùn’s former name under the Russians), there are plenty of other diversions and attractions to fill in a day in the Lǚshùn area. Crossing that spectacular, breathtaking bridge that separates Dalian from Lǚshùn, passing some impressive modern residential monoliths (obviously a lot of new estates cropping up recently), we made not for Lǚshùn’s history-soaked prison or museum…our first stop was at a submarine base at the ports with a large aged submarine in pride of place. On first sighting the displayed veteran U-boat I was initially under the misapprehension that it was a Japanese World War 2 sub left behind by the Japanese Navy or perhaps captured by the Chinese at the war’s end (a sort of spoils of war on show won from the vanquished foe). 
On taking the tour through the permanently moored submarine (opened for inspection at both ends of the craft), I soon realised I was wide of the mark. This was in fact a Chinese naval submarine, a Type-033 submarine actually (which is probably quite significant detail to your average, obsessed submarine aficionado)※. And the whole enterprise, known as the Lushun Submarine Museum (established 2015), is a new feature for China (the country’s first museum to exhibit naval military culture). 
The other attraction at the museum vying with the ex-service sub is a submarine simulation exhibit, a room devoted to recreating a realistic'(sic) submarine cruise. Severe looking naval servicemen man the entrance, herding waves of visitors in and out in regimented fashion. The tightly packed paying punters in the room jockey for the best posy to take pictures of the ‘demo’: comprising the virtual submarine, with its commander barking orders to his crew, steering a safe sea-course between a host of pop-up enemy frigates while notching up the odd warship ‘kill’ itself…in effect a large scale video game on a super-wide screen with all the bells and whistles, not to mention the “real-life” sound and lighting effects to conjure up the appropriate atmosphere.
After the Submarine Centre we were ready for a more hands-on 3D animation (or at least that was the view of the tour organisers). We piled out of the bus and into what ostensibly was a commercial building. Inside we were led to a room to indulge our inner-nine-year-old in a video game. We were equipped with sonic “ray guns” (or whatever the equivalent current millennial term is) and invited to pretend that we were riders on an out of control roller coaster. Our seats rocked and rolled violently tossing us to and fro…we sat there immovable, gaining what vicarious pleasure we could muster by ‘zapping’ 10,000 demons each, only to find ourselves desperately trying to dodge the infinite number of remaining malevolent dragons, zombies and other miscellaneous monsters hurtling towards us without respite. Most of the adult Chinese tourists seemed to be totally captivated by the virtual “make-believe” alternate universe, whereas for me it was, at the least, a novel, “one-off” experience, considering I am someone with no interest in ‘civilised’ computer games, let alone ever contemplated visiting a fantasy arcade venue to play games of a unrelentingly violent nature.
Russian Street (Russian Lu), or as it is sometimes rendered, Russian Style Street or Russian Custom Street, is a lingering reminder of the days the city of Dalian was an outpost of Moscow. Today the connexion to an erstwhile Russia is most visually embodied in this single street to the north of Shengli Qiào (Shengli Bridge), near Dalian’s Xigang district.
The start of the street is marked by (what I imagine was once a very grand but what is these days) a large, aged Russian mansion. A sign in front of it proclaims the Russian heritage, русский. Russian Street is a longish, commercial street (with a short side lane appended to it) near the city ports. Rows of stalls line up on the inside of the street in front of the bricks and mortar shop buildings. It’s a street restricted to pedestrian traffic, although this in no way hinders the bike and scooter riders and the odd delivery van with its Russian goods. 
Virtually all of Russian Street’s gift shops sell more or less identical merchandise – moon cakes in highly decorative boxes, inexpensive bars of Russian chocolate (going at 10CN¥)✺, jewellery and opals, decorative lighters, toy weapons, tanks and missile launchers❂, and above all, rows and rows of the famous Matryoshka dolls (also commonly called Babushka dolls), so many that they they were almost spilling out into the street. I noticed that China’s Matryoshka dolls are more orthodox than the kind I found in Moscow, where the vendors with unbridled commercial zeal were fast at it selling all manner of variations on the dolls-within-dolls theme (Vladimir Putin dolls, Barack Obama dolls, Lady Gaga dolls, Elvis dolls, and so on ad nauseam).
Half-way down there’s a authentic Russian pectopaH (restaurant)…a lot of visitors don’t venture much further than this point and it’s a good deal less busy than than the Shengli bridge end. Russian Custom Street ends at a roundabout with a large official-looking building of state, there are a couple of small coffee shops and a number of food outlets spread out along the thoroughfare. 
A conspicuously heinous reminder of the Japanese connection with Dalian (Dairen to the Japanese) and the peninsula can be found at Port Arthur (renamed Ryojun by Japan after its victory in the 1904-05 war with Russia). Specifically this can be seen in the former Russian-built Japanese Prison (now a museum) with its “hanging wall” and other torture devices used by the Japanese Kwantung army against Chinese.
There are other threads linking Dalian to its Japanese (and of course to Russia⍟), but while in Dalian I took time to visit a part of the city with much less unsavoury and more positive connotations of the former Japanese occupancy. We took a taxi from the city centre to a fairly lengthy street called Qiqa Street, not far from the Midtown area…this street is a quaint reminder of Japanese influence and imprint on the city. 
Walking along it, I can’t say that much of the architecture in this street looks particularly Japanese in appearance, although to be fair we only had time to explore the western end of the street. The street dog-legs right at one point and heads east for quite a number of blocks in Zhongshan district. However, on our abridged tour we did see a number of Japanese businesses – eateries, hairdressers, and other shops – as the presence of Japanese characters on a number of the shopfronts testify. At least one block of the street has a concentration of these shops with eateries such as the pint-sized JoJo’s Tea (light Japanese meals, run by Chinese staff). 
Qiqa Lu also has several buildings unrelated to Japanese culture or cuisine including a Chinese government building and the equivocally named “Paparazzi Who’s the Murderer? This commercial entity comprises a red telephone box at the front of the premises. When you lift the receiver, a metal door to the left swings open to reveal ….? I remain ignorant as to the raison d’être of Paparazzi Who’s the Murderer? Is it a bar, a nightclub, is it a mystery/crime-themed theatre-restaurant? Having not ventured inside, I guess the answer will remain elusive….
From our hotel in Lianhe Road in the Shahekou district of Dalian, Xinghai Square didn’t look that far away on Google Maps. Wisely, we decided against footing it to the Square, as the taxi ride took a surprisingly long time to get there. Located south-west of Dalian CBD, Xinghai Square is a very large city ‘square’ (in fact it is circular in shape) comprising large lawns and hedged gardens, dotted with modern sculptural pieces depicting rowing, sailboarding, gymnastics and other outdoor activities.
Although a pleasant place to aimlessly wander round at any time of day (barring inclement weather), the best optics are had at night. The lights on the phalanx of modern high-rise, residential monoliths surrounding the largely parkland square provide an illuminating backdrop to it. At the water’s edge there’s a high rectangular concrete platform which is sharply raised at both ends to resemble a ski jump or perhaps an enormous skatepark. Many visitors amuse themselves by climbing the steep high ends by themselves or in tandem with their friends to catch the ocean views to the south – looking out over Xinghai Bay to the spectacularly long and modern sea bridge (Xinghaiwan Bridge) and beyond, to the Yellow Sea. Most, having carefully treaded and scrambled their way to the top of the ‘skatepark’, take the opportunity for the obligatory 25 to 30 selfies! 
After nightfall most interest is concentrated on two parts of Xinghai Square. One, alongside the ‘skatepark’, is the brightly-lit amusement park and auxiliary restaurants, a collection of largely stock-standard rides and entertainments, a sort of Dalian answer to Brighton Pier (without the pier!). The other, which draws the bulk of nocturnal visitors to Xinghai Square, is the vast circular fountain and its colourful displays of vertical water propulsion which draws hundreds to witness the vivid spectacle and video-record the event on their phones. Providing audio for the spectacular waterworks show is a accompanying musical soundtrack, with a mixed bag of numbers ranging from melodic Classical Chinese pieces to international pop like Simon and Garfunkel. 
But the biggest spectacle of the night was the mass exit at the immediate conclusion of the vivid colour water show. People who moments before had been quietly watching the performance were all instantly and determinedly making for the exit gates at a fast rate of knots – as if they had suddenly remembered another engagement they had! The exiting crowds scattered in such numbers that the handful of police on duty had difficulty in keeping them off the roadway. Waves and waves of them streamed out of the precinct on to Huizhan Road and into taxis and cars. 
From the advanced publicity I had envisaged a Chinese version of some kind of swanky, luxurious modern resort complex surrounded by flowing meadows, undulating hills, wooded forest* and a pleasant babbling brook. Imagine my disappointment when we arrived to discover nothing resembling a health farm or even an ashram exuding the enlightenment of the Bhagavistawama. 
The ‘resort’ was in the middle of the township…a dusty side-street off the main drag, it was a series of rundown, crumbling, grimy buildings not suggesting the hot springs country recuperator I was picturing on the way there. 
The rooms were equipped with a brace of hot tubs (large, deep bathtubs really) and apparently there were hot springs below the ground pumping up thermal water. I couldn’t personally verify the bona fides of the springs’ healing powers but I took it at face value. In any case, even if the medicinal therapeutic benefits lacked evidence, it was very welcome just to relax and unwind for an hour or so each day in the heated tub. On my travels in China I haven’t encountered many baths in the hotels and appartments I have stayed in.
Even if it didn’t measure up to my (Western) understanding of a de luxe country hot springs resort, I have to admit that it was certainly a bargain deal and tariff: three meals a day (with the owner family experiencing authentic local tucker at varying odd times), two rooms plus the hot tub facilities for ¥150 per night. Although when the plumbing burst at 3am one night and we ended up almost up to our ankles in water that may or not been from the springs, I did have some fleeting, momentary doubts about our choice. But this can happen anywhere at any time, so I passed it off as part of the experience.
Don’t get me wrong, while the resort’s surface appearance and location may not have not been exactly the ticket, and about as far from a top-of-the-range rural resort you can get, the town and surrounding countryside of Fengcheng did have a certain attraction. A sleepy little Chinese backwater hamlet during the day, takes on a lively night-time ambience with the constant blare of street music reverberating up and down the main street of the town. 
Fengcheng’s natural environs (just a leisurely stroll from the built-up area) have a lot to offer in the way of walks through wilderness, viewing pleasant rivers and streams and some dazzling local fauna. All in all our brief sojourn in Fengcheng was a chill-out, low-key diversion from the urban tourist trail. 
Fengcheng, Liaoning province, is about 35 miles or so north-west of the city of Dandong
Before coming to Dandong, my only exposure to China’s greatest human-made wonder was a day visit years ago to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall near Beijing. So I was interested while in Dandong in taking the opportunity to see a very different and quite remote section of this greatest of walls. I also relished the chance to experience a section of 长城 that would not be maxed out with zillions of formicating tourists. Visitors often complain that seeing the Wall at the more popular sections like Mutianyu, Juyong Pass or Jiankou entails having to manoeuvre round countless numbers of slow-moving or immobile walkers, thus taking the gloss off the unique Chángchéng experience.
We toured the Hushan section (about 15km north-east of Dandong) on a warm midsummer’s day. At the entrance gates to the site (a pseudo-ancient wall edifice created to create the ambience of a historic wall structure), the process of entry was fairly seamless, our tickets, pre-arranged, were purchased on the spot and we moved through the turnstiles and were funnelled into waiting transporters. From there we were whisked off to the start-point (about 700m distance from the gate), passing ambling visitors and a large heroic sculpture positioned about half-way to the Wall’s first part. The tourist start-point contains an impressively restored main tower (the two-storey gate tower).
On the structure itself there was a steady stream of inquisitive visitors eager to climb and explore the Tiger Mountain Great Wall. Well patronised but nothing like the “Boxing Day” crowds and queues in the Beijing district Walls. The only part of the Wall where a slight bottleneck eventuated was two-thirds of the way up to the summit where we had to line up (in a fairly orderly and polite fashion for a Chinese queue) to climb a set of very steep and narrow stairs. Once past there, there wasn’t any further encumbrances impinged on a very smooth climb to the Wall’s highest point.
The authorities don’t want anyone to ‘kindle’ the Great Wall
As I expected, some of the Wall’s floor surfaces were in better condition than others, but it was all still perfectly walkable. From the highest lookout point there are commanding views across the border into the uniformly wide, unpopulated fields of North Korea. The descent down from the summit is mostly very steep and winding. At the foot of the stairs on the eastern (border) side is a raised battlement area containing the relics of a couple of mounted guns that are several centuries past their use-by date.
By Great Wall standards Tiger Mountain isn’t a particular long section compared to others—distinctly short to be precise—but it still provided a reasonably testing walk in the hot summer of August even for those of reasonable solid fitness. On the descents especially, there was some steep, narrow and tricky steps requiring a careful and steady step. At the end of the walk, at the car park right on the PDRK border, there is a statue of some significance and nearby two strategically positioned refreshment outlets competing for your business. After a energy sapping morning’s climb there were many takers for a cool beverage. For those of us on an organised tour, a pick-up bus arrived within ten minutes to take us back the start-point, from where we were relayed back to the main gates by a “people mover”.
There is a row of souvenir stalls adjacent to the entrance wall building but unfortunately we were denied a chance to peruse the Wall-related merchandise as we were whisked off again back to the tour bus. If you continue past the Hushan site for a couple of kilometres on the winding Provincial Road north, there are several good vantage points on the side of the road from which to take good, unobscured long shots of the highest watchtowers on the Wall peering out from the mountain’s canopy.
From our mid-city hotel in Dandong we took a tour upcountry following the river road (S319) into Hushanzhen and beyond. At the northern outskirts of the city we stopped for our first glimpse at the Korean side of Yalu Hé. The spot we stopped at contained a memorial to the Korean War sacrifices (two statues of heroic Chinese servicemen) and a stall hawking the usual military-themed momentos and souvenirs. The crossing point here to North Korea was fairly narrow and was marked by the barely existing remnants of an old wooden bridge (the bridge itself was long gone with a few rotting planks visible where the posts of the bridge once stood). Little could be seen on the other side, a wasteland of grasses and vast meadows.
After a mandatory stop at Tiger Mountain to see the Hushan Great Wall (see separate blog), we ventured on to lunch at a pleasant roadside restaurant, one that specialises in the tourist trade, shuffling bus loads of lunching tourists in and out swiftly to capitalise on high turnover profitability. 
Further up the river we stopped again at another bridge, this one with stronger historical overtones of the Korean conflict. This bridge bore some similarities with the famous Dandong Broken Bridge in that it was also a disconnected structure. From the Chinese shoreline it looked like a normal bridge, but once on it you soon realised that it jutted out only about two-thirds of the way to the opposite mainland, ending suddenly and abruptly in the middle of the Yalu river! Many, many Chinese tourists took the stroll along the length of the abridged bridge reading the Korean War information boards on the side as they went. Having reached the point where the bridge ended, it was obligatory for all to pull out phone cameras and take photos of themselves with the North Korean remote countryside as a backdrop. 
In what seemed almost conspiratorial, the North Koreans on the other side had truncated their bridge in a similar manner (although what there was of it was not as long as the Chinese one). I have no notion as to why these two sides of the bridge don’t connect or why they were at some stage severed, but I’m sure there’s a back story to it, if I could avail myself of the necessary Mandarin. 
The site has plenty of tourists stalls, as well as an amicable fellow dressed in Korean War era uniform with a blackened face and a rifle who provided ‘atmosphere’ for the historic site, making himself available to tourists for ‘authentic’ looking photos. Next to the bridge there was a wharf from where we took a long boat trip out into the river. The boat charted a course around the waters veering into North Korean territorial waters…we got close enough to the Korean mainland to make out farms, the occasional building, a handful of motor vehicles, but saw precious few actual North Koreans. 
Our boat passed a desolate fishing boat reeling in its net in the windy waters and eventually disembarked at an another point down the river where we were entertained by an all-female music concert which included both Chinese singers in traditional costumes and a girl pop band with members dressed in a kind of retro-Sixties’ outfit. Back at the wharf we returned to the bus for the long drive back down the S319 through Kuandian County, reaching the outskirts of Dandong just in time to join the afternoon gridlock on Binjiang East Road.
Dandong in China’s North-eastern Liaoning province is 541 miles from Beijing, but only some 105 miles from Pyongyang, North Korea’s seldom seen capital. But Dandong is much, much closer to North Korean soil as a visit to the most eastern city in China’s Dong-Bei will confirm. From Dandong’s shoreline on the Yalu River, the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Korea (PDRK) is just the distance of one short bridge away. 
We, like millions of Chinese visitors from other parts of the vast country, paid the admission fee (¥30 per head) to tour the bridge open to the public✹. This bridge is no ordinary bridge even by Chinese standards, the bridge is truncated on the Korean side as a result of war damage. This is the famous Yalu River Broken Bridge. Built by Imperial Japan in 1911, the half-way section of the bridge was destroyed by an American B-29 bomber during the Korean War. The bridge has been deliberately kept un-repaired since for its Cold War propaganda points-scoring (and the eastern sections of the bridge subsequently dismantled by the North Koreans). 
At night the Broken Bridge is at its most visually striking as the bridge cascading into a revolving spectrum of colours. Climbing on to the bridge itself (draped in Chinese flags) during the day allows visitors, some in guide-led tour groups, more opportunity to study the bridge’s intricacies in detail. The swing bridge signage contains detailed information explaining its unusual engineering specifics, a “Unique Horizontal-Opening Beam Bridge” (a special thrill for civil engineering tragics and graduating Lego enthusiasts alike). 
The bridge was very well attended on the afternoon/evening we visited, everyone making their way to the famously truncated section of the bridge to survey the damage close-up. The end-point, with people jostling for prime position, is also the best spot to peer into the “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea, home of the colourfully unstable President Kim. Just across from here is the “ghost town” like city of Sinuiji…at night bereft of lights, and during the day scarcely little to be seen, a scattering of seeming abandoned grey old buildings, a strange orange dome-shaped structure that catches the eye and a dilapidated Ferris wheel, and precious little else. Eerily it is seemingly also bereft of observable human life. An added nationalistic touch for very many of the Chinese visitors was to snap a selfie with both the red Chinese flag and the Sinuiji “still-life” backdrop.
Of course back in Chinese Dandong you can find a North Korean presence right here. Several of the restaurants in riverside Binjang Middle Road are North Korean (run perhaps by economic refugees who had once taken the chance to hop over the Yalu at some point to find more profitable trade and opportunity on the Chinese side). 
(note how close Mengjiang’s eastern boundary came to China’s principal city Peking)
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In 1939 South Chahar and North Shanxi provinces (both predominately Han Chinese in population✥) were added to the ‘Mongolian’ regime, now renamed the Mengjiang✼ (or Mongol) United Autonomous Government (蒙疆聯合自治政府) (Měngjiāng Liánhé Zìzhì Zhèngfǔ Mōkyō Rengō Jichi Seifu) with its capital in Kalgan (Zhāngjiākǒu) [ibid.]. On paper Prince Demchugdongrub remained Mengjiang head of state (until 1945), his main function seems to have been to give the territorial entity the countenance of legitimacy. One manifestation of Mengjiang’s Mongolian roots was Demchugdongrub’s adoption of the historic Mongolian calendar…1936, Mengjiang’s creation year, became the year 781 to associate the regime with Genghis Khan (below) and the height of power of the Mongol Empire [John Man, The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, His Heirs and the Founding of Modern China, (2015)]✧.
Wang’s defection to the Japanese was motivated by this and he envisioned his alternate government, RNGRC, would provide him with the power base within China he was seeking▣. With Wang’s appointment as “Chinese president”, Demchugdongrub’s MAF was subsumed under the Wang regime, but in practical terms the MAF was still autonomous of it, if not of the Japanese [‘Mengjiang’, (Military Wiki), www.military.wikia.org].
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(map source: www.globalsecurity.org)
Greater Union (henceforth GUT) was involved in all forms of the movie business – production, distribution and exhibition. The Bondi Studios made a few silent films in the late 1920s, like The Adorable Outcast and most notably The Term of His Natural Life which cost £60,000 and bombed badly at the box office [‘Cinesound Productions’, Sydney Morning Herald, 06-Aug-1934 (Trove).
Stuart F Doyle, GUT managing director, appointed former film publicist Ken G Hall as general manager of the newly formed Cinesound Productions. Two more Cinesound studio locations were opened, one at nearby Rushcutters Bay and the other at St Kilda (in Melbourne). Over an eight-year period (1932-40), with Hall at the helm as producer-director, Cinesound produced 17 feature films (16 of which were directed by Hall). The first of the sequence, On Our Selection, revolved round the adventures of one of Australian cinema’s most popular characters, Dad Rudd and his family. The film, benefiting from a new sound-recording system invented in Tasmania, was a box office triumph for Cinesound, earning £46,000 in Australia and New Zealand by the end of 1933, providing a tremendous fillip for the fledgling studios [Andrew Pike & Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, (1998)].
Cinesound and Hall exploited On Our Selection’s popularity with a series of sequels, Grandad Rudd, Dad and Dave Come to Town and Dad Rudd, MP. Of these the ‘Dad and Dave’ entry especially proved a hit, matching the profitability of the original movie.
↗ Ken G Hall (centre) with American actress Helen Twelvetrees during filming of ‘Thoroughbred’ (photo: Mitchell Library)
⬆️ Australian cinema’s long tradition of Bushranger flicks beginning with the original 1906 feature film
With the outbreak of world war Cinesound called a halt on feature film production. During the war years the studios directed all energies into making newsreels, initially covering the war against Japan and beyond that on all aspects of Australiana.Newsreel rivalry: Cinesound Vs Movietone: the focus on newsreels by Cinesound was not a novel innovation. From its outset Cinesound produced newsreels – short documentary films containing news stories and items of topical interest – in competition with the rival Fox Movietone company. The two newsreels differed in content, Cinesound concentrated on Australian only topics while Movietone covered a mix of international and national news✤.
Newsreels in Australia prior to 1956 occupied a unique place in media and communications. Before the introduction of television, cinema-goers’ exposure to newsreels (part of the “warm-up” for the main feature) were the only images Australians saw of their land – the footage of elections, natural disasters and other such events [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.]. Thus, newsreels like the Cinesound Review, with its distinctive red kangaroo symbol, were an important source of news and current affairs, and were an integral part of the cinema program [‘Cinesound Movietone Australian Newsreels’, (ASO) (Poppy De Souza), www.aso.gov.au]✙. According to Anthony Buckley, the newsreels reflected Ken G Hall’s “pride and spirited nationalism” [Buckley, A, ‘Obituary: Ken G. Hall’, The Independent (London), 17-Feb-1994].
Ken G Hall in his autobiography contended that Cinesound Productions never lost money on any feature films. Some did very well – crime drama The Silence of Dean Maitland, for instance, for an outlay of £10,000 returned takings of more than £70,000 in Australia and the UK [Graham Shirley & Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, (1989)]. One Cinesound movie however, strictly-speaking, probably did lose money…Roy Rene’s single venture into celluloid, Strike Me Lucky, in which ‘Mo’s’ humour, robbed of it’s spontaneity in live performance didn’t translate well to the big screen and was reflected in negative critical reviews and at the box office [Film Review: ‘Strike Me Lucky’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19-Nov-1934 (Trove)]. Despite Hall’s faith in the studios’ films, from 1937 there was a decline in box office returns (prompting GUT head Doyle to resign). Another (external) factor affecting Cinesound profitability occurred in 1938 with the passing of the Cinematograph Films Act in the UK…under this legislation Australian films no longer counted as local, their removal from the British quota meant a loss of market for Cinesound and other Australian movie producers [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].
⬆️ ‘Smithy’ star Ron Randell later pursued a career in Hollywood
(Source: Nafida Mohamed)
Aden Settlement ⇡
FSA Flag ⇡
Aden street riots 1967 ⇡
NLF (South Yemen) flag ⇡PPS: Condemnation by association
⌂ 1890s map of the Samoan Islands 
After RLS’s death of a stroke in December 1894 after decades of ill-health, his widow sold up and returned to California. Since then, Villa Vailima initially housed the German colonial administrators followed by the New Zealand ones. After decolonisation it became the residence of the Western Samoan head of state. Finally, restored to its impecable state, it was transformed into its present incarnation as the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum on the anniversary of the novelist’s death.
RSL’s study and the smoking room are probably the highlights of the tour for several reasons…on display in the former is a bookcase full of original translations of RL Stevenson works. Even more impressive, it contains the novelist ’s original, solid wood writing desk (on which he wrote his last four novels). The pièce de résistance for me though was in the downstairs smoking room – a double fireplace had been installed (and never used!) It seems that the Scot wanted the “feel-good” reassurance of having a quintessential feature of his former Northern hemisphere life – irrespective of how incongruously impractical it seemed (and how puzzling to Stevenson’s Samoan attendants!), located in the steamy tropical climes of the South Pacific. RL’s wife Fanny had her own familiar reminder of home at the Vailima house, she had the walls of her bedroom lined with polished Californian redwood [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett et al) (2003)].
The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).
The Hotel, 2006 ⍐
We booked into Rydges Hotel in Queenstown✲, New Zealand’s capital of adventure tourism. Whitewater rafting, bungy jumping and Jet Shotovers beckoned, but as our hotel was handily situated in proximity to the wharf on picture perfect Lake Wakatipu, something more sedate – a leisurely boat trip across its glistening waters – was what took our immediate fancy.
From the Queenstown wharf we caught the vintage twin screw steamboat TSS Earnslaw❁…the journey was a complete step back in time…a slow and leisurely ride across Lake Wakatipu with the boat chugging along at a 1924 pace. No one on board much minded the pedestrian progress we were making. The only downside to the trip was trying to avoid inhaling the vessel’s toxic nasties, trying to survive the vile fumes of black smoke emitted from the steamer’s coal-fired boilers pervading the air inside the Earnslaw.
My highest highlight of the tour however was the demonstration of rounding up and penning a drove of sheep. This was made memorable by the antics of the leathery-faced old shepherd guy and his “Abbott and animal Costello” routine with the farm’s working border collie. The old farmer was a real joker, entertaining us with his dry commentary which bore more than a touch of the John Clarke quippery – and the same flat deadpan delivery. To start the show, he barked out instructions to the collie to tear madly all over the top paddock fetching the grazing sheep. After terrorising and cajoling the sheep into one cowering bunch, the dog efficiently corralled them into the enclosure at the south end. Then, with mission accomplished, the farmer, with comic timing and mock annoyance, remarked of the still heavily panting dog, “I don’t know why he’s so tired! I’m the one who does all the work”!
The one-liners didn’t stop when the farmer donned his “shearing kit”, the blue and red overalls of his defleecing trade, to do some serious bladework. With a couple of hand-picked Romneys, he demonstrated (with accompanying audio) how to give a sheep the “Full Monty” crew cut! I’m not sure if the sizeable cohort of Japanese tourists on hand were sufficiently au fait with ‘Kiwised’ English to get the gist of the demonstrator’s jokey spiel and all the nuances of his wry humorous asides, but they generally seemed to sense the comic implications of the situation and enthusiastically laughed accordingly.
The other stand-out feature of the visit, the afternoon tea, was held in the Colonel’s Homestead, an elegant turreted terracotta red and white building set against the impressive backdrop of the towering Walter Peak. The high tea worked a treat with very generous servings of scones and pikelets and the obligatory jam and cream, all washed down with a nice cuppa. Afterwards, a leisurely lakeside stroll through the homestead’s très picturesque English-style gardens set the seal on a great day’s outing.
Time passed at the right pace on the return journey in the Earnslaw to Rydges – the tour operator organised a traditional sing-a-long to the accompaniment of the boat’s period-piece piano. We were given a complimentary “NZ Song Book” and encouraged to join in. The songs were every bit as vintage as the 1912 vessel and only a bit cringeworthy, but hey it was all part of setting an authentic mood for a momentary step back into yesteryear.
Three hundred years ago this coming April, London merchant-cum-journalist Daniel Defoe published his debut novel anonymously✱ – it was to become one of the most iconic and most imitated literary works ever…it began with a title page descriptor that read in full:
Once “cast on Shore by Shipwreck”, Crusoe, isolated and alone, is forced to make the best of a perilous predicament in an alien and challenging environment. His solitary, epic struggle in the face of hardships and the existence of threats from wild animals and the unknown elevates the story to mythic proportions. The myth is complete when Crusoe ultimately succeeds in conquering all impediments and fashions the island into his own “miniature Great Britain”.
⍐ One of the numerous screen adaptations of the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ tale
Before I ever visited the UK I wasn’t at all familiar with Selfridges. I knew about Knightsbridge and Harrods and its preciously preserved pedigree all right…we’ve done that! My first time in London I was on a bus travelling (make that crawling) down Oxford Street heading towards the West End when I was enlightened as to the existence of the second-best known upmarket London department store. As the bus idled stationary I spotted a sign in front of a building that said ‘Selfridges’, my first thought, I remember, was “strange name!”…but when I think about it now I vaguely recall that I had previously heard the name Selfridges, but without inquiring further at the time I sort of formed the literal impression that it was a store as the name sounded that “sold fridges”, ie, a purveyor of domestic white goods! So when I did eventually get my beak inside the store’s doors at 400 Oxford Street I was surprised to see lines and lines of (pricey) fashion wear, shoes, accessories, skin care products, bags and more – but not one refrigerator in sight! (in its time it has apparently sold most everything!)
Even without visiting Selfridges’ flagship Oxford Street store, you may well be aware of it or of its US-born founder Harry Gordon Selfridge thanks to the recent ITV television series Mr Selfridge (first aired in 2013). The series was a period drama about the flamboyant, visionary retailer and the interactions that take place around him in his eponymous London department store✱.
A Marshall Field blueprint for London
Wisconsin-born Harry Gordon Selfridge initially earned his business ‘spurs’ working for Chicago department store Marshall Field & Company (right), this segued into him purchasing his own department store in Chicago. In hardly any time at all the mercurial Selfridge abruptly re-sold the business, making a quick profit and retired to play golf. In 1906 while holidaying in London, Selfridge sensed a new retail opening for his entrepreneurial talents in the British capital. For £400,000 he purchased land and surrounds for a novel custom-built, mega-department store in the then unfashionable, western end of Oxford Street [‘Harry Gordon Selfridge’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
A ground-breaking, landmark modern steel-framed building
Construction of the Selfridge store was something of an architectural coup in itself. It won praise in its day from British building journals for its innovative construction methods…built with steel frames and reinforced concrete allowing for much narrower than usual walls, the frames permitted a far greater window area, so very large plate-glass windows could be installed (12 of which were the largest sheets of plate-glass then in the world!) – making for much more interior natural light and brightness (designed by famed US architect Daniel Burnham and associates). Originally comprising a 250′ x 175′ site, Selfridge’s had nine Otis passenger and two service lifts and six staircases. 100 separate departments were spread out over eight floors. While the physical construction of the Oxford Street store took only 12 months, Selfridge had first to overcome London City Council’s raft of objections (unprecedented size of the commercial structure, fire danger, etc). Selfridge and his engineers’ lobbying of the LCC Committee eventually resulted in the passing of two local building acts – LCC (General Powers) Acts of 1908 and 1909 – necessary for the Oxford Street project to be completed [Lawrence, ibid.]☯.
Selfridge, customer-centred strategies ahead of the curve
Harry’s approach to retailing was characteristically innovative on many fronts. Selfridge placed tremendous faith in advertising, the 1909 campaign leading up to the store’s opening cost a reported $500,000 in 1909 money [‘Selfridge Dies: Ripon Lad Who Jolted Empire’, The Milwaukee Sentinel, 9-May-1947 (online fiche)] (Britain’s biggest ever ad bill to that point) and he used it imaginatively together with ingenious publicity campaigns. Selfridge was the first retailer to make popular the idea of “shopping for pleasure”, rather than it being solely a functional task undertaken for necessity (as people conceived of it prior to Harry’s advent). In-store activities and arrangements often were original and novel (eg, displaying the monoplane used by aviator Louis Blériot in the first cross-English Channel flight at Selfridge’s (1909)✜). Another interest-generating feature in the store was Logie Baird’s television prototype shown on display in 1925.
A visceral, holistic experience
Selfridge’s vision was to make the department store more than just a shop where you went to buy goods, he continued to introduce new features to Selfridges…elegant (moderately priced) restaurants, a library, reading and writing rooms and special reception rooms for French, American and ‘Colonial’ clientele. There were cookery demonstrations in the kitchenware section. All this marked a radical departure from the practices of other department stores which employed floorwalkers to ‘shoo’ people out of the store who were just hanging around and not actively engaged in buying an item! Even the store’s roof was put to productive if curious usage (a shooting range for an all-girl gun club as well as an ice rink✧) [Lawrence, loc.cit.].
The female shopper as an identified demographic
Selfridge saw the role of the department store in macrocosmic terms – “the store should be a social centre, not merely a place for shopping”. Unlike the conservative establishment of the day and much of the mainstream, Selfridge endorsed the Suffragette Movement…the new store was (in part) “dedicated to woman’s service”. In a 1913 advertisement Selfridge described the store thus: Selfridge and Co: The Modern Woman’s Club-Store” [‘Suffrage Stories/Campaigning for the Vote: Selfridge’s and Suffragettes’, Woman and her Sphere, (Elizabeth Crawford), 16-May-2013, www.womanandhersphere.com; ‘Selfridge Lovers: The Secret behind our house’, www.selfridge.com]. Astute businessman that he was, Harry popularised shopping as a leisure activity specifically for women…to make it a more welcoming and conducive place for them to spend time (and money!), he displayed freshly scented floral arrangements and had open vistas in the store, he employed musicians to perform and added beauty and hair salons (Paris-inspired) and art galleries. And he introduced public restrooms for women to the store (the first time ever done!)❅
[Forbes, loc.cit.].
The H.G.S. leadership style
As retail magnate go, Selfridge went against the grain for his day by not being an authoritarian business leader. He was temperamentally inclined towards fairness with regard to remuneration, increasing the wages of his staff, elevating them above “wage slavery”, treating them as employees as opposed to ‘servants’ (cf. Harrods) [ibid.]…not to overstate it, Selfridges shop floor staff were still exposed to long, long hours of drudgery but they were paid a livable wage for their arduous labours. A sample of the quotes attributed to Selfridge reflect his anti-dictatorship approach to business and interpersonal relations: “The boss drives his men, the leader coaches them” ; “The boss depends on authority, the leader on good will” ; “The boss says ‘I’, the leader says ‘We'” ; “The boss inspires fear, the leader inspires enthusiasm” ; “The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown, the leader fixes the breakdown” ; etc.✥ [‘Harry Gordon Selfridge’, Wikipedia, op.cit.]
Selfridges post H.G.S.
Selfridge & Co’s reversal of fortunes signalled a move from its circling competitors…rival department chain John Lewis & Partners acquired some of Selfridges’ provincial stores in the Forties, which was a preliminary move to John Lewis’ eventual takeover of the flagship Oxford Street store (1951). In turn John Lewis was itself acquired by the Sears Group in 1965. Its current owners, the Anglo-Canadian Galen Weston company bought Selfridges in 2003 for a reported £598M. Today the store name ‘Selfridges’ survives on the Oxford Street building, and in the three other regional branches in the counties (Trafford Centre and Exchange Square, both in Manchester, and the Bullring in Birmingham).PostScript: ‘Selfridges gets Sixties hip In 1966, Selfridges, by now under Sears Holdings boss Charles Clore, recognised the youth market with a separate outlet for young women, Miss Selfridge (forming a link back to Harry Selfridge’s traditional focus on female customers). The new store in Duke Street signalled Selfridges’ wholesale embrace of the Sixties’ fashion revolution. Miss Selfridge used mannequins based on the straight line form of 1960s iconic model Twiggy and sold the latest in Mary Quant and Pierre Cardin fashions. In the early 2000s Miss Selfridge was acquired by the Arcadia Group [‘Selfridges 7 things’, op.cit.].
A journey to Trinidad (that’s the one in Cuba, not the one also in the Caribbean Sea which is nearly always spoken of in the same sentence as ‘Tobago’) takes you right into the heart of azúcar country. The nearby Valle de Los Ingenios (‘Valley of the Sugar Mills’) housed the vast sugar estates of the 18th-19th centuries (three score and ten sugar cane mills remain in the three-fold Sancti Spíritus valley system). Sugar, one of the staples of the Cuban economy, and enforced slavery (facilitating its economical production) was the foundation upon which Trinidad’s great colonial wealth rested.
We got a two minutes on the spot lesson from the guide about the layout of the sprawling city and outskirts, the different barrios (neighbourhoods), consejos populares (villages), etc. The far-too-many-to-count casa facades we passed were uniformly pastel in colour – cream, baby blue, mauve and pink seem the most popular choices for the houses. A treat was grabbing a peak inside some of the tiendas (shops) as we passed, the highlight being shops with wonderful Trinidadian artworks (strikingly colourful paintings and bold and bright ceramics). The guide gave hints on where to buy gifts, and where to eat and drink the local food and spirits at reasonable prices! Underscoring the old charm of Trinidad are the archaic cobblestone roads everywhere we went…I noticed something puzzling about them – every afternoon water would stream down (occasionally rush down) the valleys in the middle of the cobbled laneways and roads. I wondered where the water was coming from (run-off from the casas?) and meant to ask our guide about it but forgot to!
Plaza Mayor
If you’ve just touched down in Trinidad this is the ideal place to start from and fan out and explore the ciudad antigua. The square is the hub of the colonial old town, a place where people congregate, relax, chill out, sit and connect to wi-fi – if you are lucky (and have a stack of patience!). Restaurant choices aplenty across the other side of the square (an accompanying cool mojito obligatory with all meals). The central section of the square comprises a four-part attractive garden setting with hedges and palm trees. Enclosing the individual gardens are white fences, with another outer fence made of white wrought-iron grilles surrounding them. Decorative statuettes and vases added to the cute appeal of the plaza gardens.
Plaza Mayor is also a place where you’re likely to see some of Trinidad’s impromptu artists and musicians performing in the square…on one extremely hot day I saw a “living statue” in (lack of) motion, the guy was dressed in heavy, bulky religious garb, looking like he’d was doubling for Brother Cadfael or perhaps an extra in the Da Vinci Code! Everybody else was in shorts and T-shirts, I don’t know how he could stand the searing humidity, his back was a mat of perspiration through his tunic. No sign though of any relief from divine intervention coming his way in the sweltering heat, notwithstanding his appropriate ecclesiastical attire! While in the vicinity, also worth a gander, just off a side street to the square, are a few specialist museums – notably the Museo Histórico Municipal, one exhibiting colonial furnishings and another colonial architecture.
Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba (about 250km from Havana) is another day trip highlight within reach of the capital. The name Cienfuegos literally means “One thousand fires”, whilst the beauty of its architecture has invited comparisons with Paris and other European capitals, earning itself the sobriquet La Perla del Sur (Pearl of the South).
Other points of interest within Parque JM are a statue of the eponymous and ubiquitous hero of Cuban independence, Martí, an impressive, fawn coloured triumphal arch erected in 1902 to celebrate Cuba’s independence (diagonally across from the Ferrer building), and a crimson-domed gazebo or bandstand (note a recurring motif here: crimson appears from all the evidence to be the preferential colour of Cienfuegueros‘ when it comes to domes of buildings in the city!). The park is a great place to stroll round or just sit (plenty of shaded seating) and relax while watching the passing parade of Cienfuegueros.
The architectural feature that most gives Ferrer Palace its distinctive character is the cute little rooftop cupola – which is reached via by a narrow spiral staircase made of wrought-iron. From atop the Ferrer’s endearing cupola, a viewing tower (a mirador) affords you fantastic 360° views of the city and the nearby bay. A cost applies to ascend the narrow staircase (one at a time!): 1 CUC per climber).
The pueblo of Santa Clara is inextricably woven into the story of Ernesto Guevara and his victory in the decisive battle of the civil war against the Batista regime. Guevara or simply ‘Che’ – the image that launched a million T-shirts, and the man who signed many more million pesos’ worth of Cuban bank notes!✱ – is proudly remembered and commonly revered, especially in this part of Cuba, as two separate Santa Clara monuments testify.
The first is in the centre of the township itself, a monument to the final victory of the war (Battle of Santa Clara, 31st December 1958) when a Cuban battalion under Comandante Che derailed a train carrying government troops, ammunition and heavy weapons, intended to reinforce Batista’s embattled army in Havana.
A portion of the captured train still sits on the site, now part of a monument to the battle which clinched victory for Castro and the Cuban rebels. In Spanish the monument is called Monumento a la Toma del Tren Blindado (literally “Monument to the Taking of the Armoured Train”)
The mausoleum remains a popular place to visit for tourists as well as Cubans, there were several big tourist buses and umpteen dozen cars in the parking lot when our group visited. The immediately noticeable feature of the mausoleum building which is set down on a wide patch of land is the extra-large statue of Che. Cast in bronze, it is 22 feet high and characteristically depicts Che armed and dressed in army/militia fatigues. The statue officially goes by the somewhat ‘highfalutin’ title Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex (AKA Complejo Monumental Ernesto Che Guevara).
Security around the mausoleum entrance was pretty tight, more guards than you think might be necessary hovered around the entrance portal. We all lined up and were soon ushered in by a bevy of serious-faced officials and whisked out again fairly rapidly. There was not a lot to see inside in any case, it was dimly lit and unnervingly cold. We glanced at the photos of the 30 dead comrades on the wall and spotted a few pieces of Che paraphernalia on display – such as Che’s handgun (Czechoslovakian), his water canteen and field glasses.
The museum maintains a strict prohibition on the taking of photos within the burial vault, so I didn’t even give a thought to trying to sneak a quick ‘Polaroid’ (even if I had one) – the officials, all wearing the same “not happy Juan” face, gave the impression they meant business!
From rustic Viñales we did a long trek by road (some eight hours) to the province of Mantanzas, our ultimate stop was a resort spot on the south coast called Playa Larga (Eng: ‘Long Beach’). This picturesque coastal village was the scene of the explosive Cold War incident in April 1961 when a CIA-financed and US-trained force of exiles attempted to invade Castro’s Cuba from the south (Playa Larga was one of the two beaches that the mercenaries landed at✱). Courtesy of the media and publicity at the time, westerners know this area as the Bay of Pigs…in Spanish the name is Bahía de Cochinos. ‘Cochinos’ does translate to ‘pigs’, but in Cuban Spanish ‘Cochinos’ can also mean ‘triggerfish’. Given the abundance of colourful fish (including triggerfish) we saw whilst swimming in the bay (and the visible lack of pigs at the site!), the term ‘Bay of Triggerfish’ sounds infinitely more apt!
As we came off the Autopista Nacional and headed south, passing a vast area of wilderness and swampland on our right (Parque Nacional Ciénega de Zapata). A short while later we reached Boca de Guamá (Mouth of the gulf), known for its resorts and boat rides through the massive great swampy peninsula. When we got to ‘Long Beach’ we stopped near a scuba dive-and-snorkel hire kiosk where there was an entry point into the bay to swim. To get into the water we had to cross a narrow but jagged rocky shore. Halfway across the rocky ledge, the folly of not bringing rubber-soled aquatic shoes to Playa Larga became painfully apparent to me (ouch!). The Caribbean water was a beautiful turquoise colour but I found it a bit choppy for swimming (explains why there was only a couple of other people swimming there when we visited). This didn’t seem to deter the snorkellers in our group who thoroughly enjoyed plunging under to explore the delights of the bay’s coral reefs❂.
A stopover here also offers you an alternative to swimming or snorkelling in the bay. If you cross back over the coastal road, passing the dive and snorkel kiosk and head in an inland direction, the short trail through the wilderness will land you at another aqua delight of Playa Larga, a swimming-pool size natural cénote♉! After experiencing the joys of swimming in cénotes in Southern Mexico, I had been anticipating trying out a cénote in Cuba. Unfortunately two things soured the experience – the cénote (unlike the ones in Mexico) didn’t have a cavernous limestone roof and a deep well where you had to descend down a spiralling staircase – elements contributing to a large part of both the fun and the atmosphere! Also, access to the natural pool was inhibited by the existence of a razor-sharp corridor of more jagged rocks. Although the pool looked enticing I didn’t much fancy trying to negotiate the pointy edges, so, my enthusiasm dampened, I hastily turned tail and headed back to the shore.
After spending the night in a casa particular in nearby Caletón we made for Playa Girón to re-live the Cuban regime’s most treasured moment in it’s 60-year revolutionary history. The Bay of Pigs Museum (AKA Museo Girón) in casts a different light on a tense Cold War moment, one that narrowly skirted a global confrontation, to that portrayed at that time by the news medias of First World countries. The museum’s narrative recounting the Bay of Pigs incident describes a episode of national defence against US aggression and imperialism. The exhibits, the photos, letters, maps and diagrams are intended to celebrate the heroic efforts of Cubans, soldiers and civilians, in patriotically repelling the invasion of the homeland.
The surprisingly small museum (just two rooms) displays many black-and-white photos of the episode, various uniforms and medals, examples of the combat artillery, mortar guns and rifles used in the conflict, many of these weapons look like they’d have been considerably old even in 1961! Note: the taking of photos inside the BoP Museum is not permitted unless you pay a 1CUC fee up front at the entrance table.
Outside the museum entrance, there are a couple of props that add gravitas and dramatic colour to the museum’s “mission statement”. In pride of place, on display is a Hawker Sea Fury F-50 fighter plane (the type of British-manufactured aircraft purchased by Premier Castro and used by the Cuban forces in countering the invasion). To the right of the entrance are two Soviet era tanks, all weaponry associated with the 1961 event.
The work put into Museo Girón demonstrates how seriously the government took the incident – and still do! The minutely detailed story of how the Cuban government and people foiled a bungled American attempt to invade Cuba makes an unambiguous point about national memory…unencumbered by subtlety: both the citizens of Cuba and the outside world dare not forget La Victoria! and the country’s no pasarán resolve when it comes to repelling outside invaders. The museum revels in reminding visitors of a nadir reaching low point in US policy towards Cuba from the not-so-distant past which brought international disapproval and opprobrium down on the Kennedy administration and the CIA.
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✱ the other being in the cove named after 17th century French pirate Gilberto Girón, Playa Girón, 35km further south
❂ in the bay there’s a 300m long coral wall a short swim away from the shoreline
♉ a deep, natural well or sinkhole formed by surface limestone rock caving in and exposing ground water
The road from Havana to Viñales is 180km of often grinding, bumpy and gravelly surfaces. We reached Cuba’s far-western province (Pinar del Río) and closed in on Valle de Viñales, a destination well worth the three to four-hour haul. The 11km long Viñales valley is situated in remote countryside but the whole valley has a “postcard pretty” Arcadian look to it, a veritable, verdant green-belt of agrarian plenitude. Everything is lush and green, everywhere, acres and acres of tobacco fields stretching back to the mountains.
The built-up area of Viñales isn’t very “built-up” as townships go. In fact Viñales probably qualifies as no more than pueblo (village) size, it is really an aldea (hamlet) and a laid back, low-key one at that. We drove up and down the main drag, Salvador Cisneros, to get a feel of the place…sleepy and slow-paced even here. A few cars and trucks around, but mainly they were sharing the road with oxen and horses pulling carts. Small and off the pace it may be but there’s a good scattering of restaurants and bars (both alcoholic ones and Tapas ones), sufficient variety to satisfy hungry visitors. One store I spotted on Salvador, breaking a continuous line of eateries, was doing a roaring trade – it was, naturally enough, the pueblo’s rum and cigar shop!
Viñales is devoid of hotels (nearest: Pinar del Río) but tourist accommodation is amply catered for through casas particulares (private guesthouses), which there are in droves. Every street in the village had its fill of brightly painted colonial wooden houses which functioned as homestays. We stayed in a very compact casa two blocks back from the village centre, it was tucked in among a row of about ten or so casas all side-by-side. From the front the houses looked cutely quaint, or quaintly cute (take your pick!), with their colourful walls and sillóns (rocking chairs) on the porches. We had a friendly pair of hosts, guajiros – as rural folk are commonly called in Cuba. . Desayunos were right up to expectations, omelette of choice, porridge with exotic fruits, tea or coffee (breakfasts in the casas all over Cuba were uniformly similarly) [see PostScript on Cuban casas].
We were in the drying hut being shown by the carga de mano how to smoke a cigar Cuban-style when something humorous but also quite poignant occurred. Roaming purposelessly all over the tobaco granja were these countless, mangy dogs, one of them lumbered slowly into the hut in the middle of the cigar demonstration and lay down on the floor. Unexpectedly, to my surprise the old dog started wheezing, laboriously, continuously and heavily…the tobacco farm dog, it seemed, by dint of its constant exposure to the harmful weed, had become a victim of passive smoking!
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※ another observable pattern are homestays or casas run by mother-and-daughter teams 
Somewhere around the western end of thriving Bishop Street (Obispo) in Havana, Habana Vieja merges into Habana Centro. With Centro being within close walking distance of the Old Town, its firmly entrenched on the Havana tourist route. There’s history – Capitolio and the Museum of the Revolution, and diversity – El Barrio Chino (Chinatown), the grimy, rubbish-strewn back streets and the upmarket five-star hotels and museums. Architecturally, the buildings in Centro are a mix of the old and the new (or newer)✱. Many survive from the colonial past, including some elegant classical examples of Cuban Baroque, together with those erected during the post-Soviet era.
Paseo de Prado, the city’s main boulevard, is a good place to start exploring Centro. Down one end is the solemn and imposing Capitolio Nacional building, Cuba’s most significant political symbol which formerly housed the national capital seat of government. When we visited the building was closed for renovations, it’s famous replica “White House” dome was receiving a facelift. El Gran Teatro next door is an equally impressive vintage building. North along Prado is where all of the big international hotels are located, overlooking a verdant leafy refuge, Parque Central, a city park which is a bit short on grass but nonetheless is a good spot to chill out away from the buzz and high activity of Old Havana’s Obispo.
Prado is also where you’ll find amble evidence of something else Havana is famous for these days, its classic old American cars. Carefully restored, spotless and immaculately maintained Chevs and Dodges (pink seems the preferred colour but blue is well represented too) line up in the parking lanes next to Parque Central. Stand anywhere along Prado during the day and you’ll be able to observe a constant parade of (mainly open-top) autos zooming up and down the boulevard (many of the classic cars are available for hire to chauffeur sightseers around Havana).
If you venture from Parque Central over the Prado to the western side streets, you’ll find a very different side of Habana Centro. The grand, showcase buildings of Paseo del Prado give way to lots of decrepit old structures that look decidedly the worst for wear, many are the crumbling casas of the city’s poor. The neigbourhood here take on a much more grimy and squalid appearance, characterised by dirty, rubbish-strewn footpaths, broken sewerage, potholes, markets bustling with people, noisy street vendors, numerous roaming stray dogs and the rotting remains of food. Sanitation appears a low priority in this rundown part of Centro. Just a short distance away is Chinatown, its entrance marked by an impressive pagoda-style gate but the neighbourhood, ironically, is populated by very few residents of Chinese ancestry!
A leisurely drive along the Malecón is another “must-do” when in Havana…the route west out of the city towards Pinar del Rio will usually take you via the Malecón. The Malecón (or Avenida del Maceo) snakes its way for some seven kilometres along the city seafront, bordered by a long seawall to protect the coast and city against the often wildly crashing waves. Local convention attests that the ideal way to do the Malecón drive is in a hired classic American convertible in the afternoon…the sight of these glistening Chevys, Buicks and Cadillacs on the wide coastal stretch of road against a backdrop of the setting sun of themselves earn a place in the highlight reel of Havana’s special features, as are the views afforded of Havana’s impressive harbour (Bahia de la Habana).
The long promenade’s other attractions include the historically and strategically important Castle Morro and views across the bay to the historic San Carlos de la Cabaña fortifications on the eastern peninsula (Habana del este). Dotted all along the foreshore are bunches of fishermen trying to land a catch with their lines and nets – usually with a botella de ron (rum bottle) close at hand. When the Malecón reaches the district of Vedado you’ll likely catch sight of the odd, remaining architectural ‘eyesore’ – ugly, monolithic apartment buildings, leftover examples of the brutalist Soviet architecture that imprinted themselves on the Havana landscape from the 1960s to the 90s. The most notorious of these Malecón monstrosities is the high-rise Edificio Girón, dubbed by many Habaneros “the ugliest building in Cuba”!
While you are in the vicinity of the Malecón, you might be curious to find out more about the sugar cane-based alcoholic beverage that Cubans are obsessed with, a visit to the Club Rum Museum (Museo del Ron) would fill in a lot of the background for you. You can find the Rum Museum on Avenida del Puerto (south of the Malecón and past the Cruise Ferry Terminal).
From our landing point in Havana, we made straight for our casa in the city. Tiny room (especially for two!), all round minimalism, minimal Inglés spoken by the staff, but it was right in the heart of La Habana Vieja, the old city. Two cross-streets (most of the ‘streets’ are hardly more than lane width!) away from our guesthouse is Calle Obispo (Bishop Street), a cobblestone pedestrian thoroughfare that runs through the heart of Old Havana – we made for this place pretty much as soon as we settled our belongings in the room.
Obispo connects Parque Central (near Havana’s main street Paseo de Martí, AKA Paseo del Prado) at one end with Plaza de Armas and the waterfront at the other. A big chunk of the activity, the vibe, happens on or around this street. A real assortment of shops, giftwares and numerous eateries to choose from. There are cafés and several banks/ATMs for your dinero necessities on Obispo. Obispo is the easiest spot to pick up a bargain souvenir or memento, the “el cheapo” place to buy artesano regalo items is the small undercover handicrafts market half-way up Obispo. 
On our last day in Havana there was a colourful street carnival happening right along Obispo – performers on stilts wearing vivid, silky garments and flowing robes were winding their way in a slow procession down the narrow thoroughfare as the crowds swelled around them, dancing, constant pulsating musical rhythms, everything seemed quite spontaneous and of course the locals were right into it!
Keep heading east on Calle Obispo, past the Cuban band with its musicians all decked out in white, and you’ll reach the tree-lined Plaza de Armas, an ideal spot to get away from the full-on tourist overload of Obispo. With seating all around the square it’s easy to find a calm, quiet spot shaded by large trees overhead and be surrounded by the presence of nice greenery. After you’ve rested a bit, there’s history on all sides of the plaza to see – as you enter the plaza you pass a elegant white, mansion-like building, Casa de Gobnierno y Palacio de Municipal. Capitanes Generales Palace, as it is also known, is now a museum with a grand courtyard, but at the time of the Spanish-American War (1898) this was the American Government’s administrative headquarters for the four years the US was in control of the island of Cuba. You can pick up a souvenir “Revolutionary green” military cap with obligatory red star from the hawkers constantly circling round the square – it will cost you 2-3 CUC more if you want one with the iconic image of “El Che” (Guevara) as well!.
To the immediate north of Plaza de Armas is Havana’s historic colonial bastion fort, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza (lit. “Castle of Royal Force”) complete with watchtower, moat and thick limestone walls…the fortress was built to defend against unwelcome 16th century privateers and buccaneers. Its location looks strategically sound to me, looking straight down the bay towards the open sea, but I read somewhere, in the ‘Rough Planet’ guide I think it was, that the powers-that-be in colonial times weren’t all that thrilled about where it was located (it should have been right on the water’s edge apparently) and this led to the Castillo being decommissioned earlier than intended. Since it’s military function ceased, it has been variously used as for archives and conservation, as a library, and is now the National Maritime Museum. Interestingly, the info sign on the fort entrance gate near the rusty old cannons is in two languages – Spanish and Braille!
If you hang round the Plaza long enough you are better than an “even money” bet to meet, without any effort on your part, young local women keen to make your acquaintance…they are very friendly and if you converse with them for any amount of time, you’ll discover that a surprising number of them, by coincidence, are professional dancers currently in a hiatus period work-wise. Their sociability and amiability will often extend to an abiding interest in knowing the location of your casa! Prudence and a cautionary approach is strongly recommended to visiting single tourists.
If you have managed to escape the attentions of the convivial ladies doing their utmost to supplement their meagre monthly wages, take a right at Plaza de Armas and head down Oficios, you’ll soon be at San Francisco Plaza, a large, open square bereft of shade facing the Cruise Ship Terminal (Terminal Sierra Maestra). As you enter the plaza the first item of interest immediately to your left is a modernist sculpture directly in front of the formidable looking Lonja del Comercio commercial building. This relatively recently added (2012) French-created, bronze sculpture (aptly named ‘In Conversation’) catches the eye of most visitors. I like the way the piece plays with the space of the two figures, leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps – both the physical gaps of space and what the two engrossed in dialogue might be conversing about…its an intriguing and compelling piece of public art!
Also, worthy of a peek on the opposite side of the Plaza, astride the archaic Convento de la San Francisco, is a much older, representational sculpture, a statue of the celebrated and loveable Havana vagrant ‘Cabellero de Paris’. Visitors line up here for the chance to take a ‘selfie’ with an arm round the bronze shoulder of one of the “favourite sons” of old Havana. Pedestrians tend to slowly circle around the square, taking in the sights, the buildings, the sculptures and statues, the famous fountain, the busy ferry terminal. Never far away from the wandering tourists are the souvenir hawkers, especially visible here are the ambling cigar-sellers peddling the trademark product synonymous with everything Cuban. From San Francisco Plaza head west for a sight of Plaza Vieja with its central fountain and colourful collection of arched colonial buildings in pastel blues and yellows. From here, take any street to the right and you’ll end up you back in Obispo and tourism central.
Obispo – looking toward Plaza de Armas ◮
Our visit to the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, AKA the Deir el-Bahri (“Northern Monastery”) was the highlight of the visit to Luxor, a happy wrap to a long day mostly spent peering into a raft of dark, underground Egyptian burial tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. 
From the Queen’s monastery entrance gate near the West Bank of the Nile we were ferried out to the site in “people-movers”, open transit E-vehicles. This sublime gem of a temple stands out from the others for several reasons! First of all – the fun-sounding name, we were informed by Bakr that it is correctly pronounced “Hat-cheap-suit” which is a pretty good memory device to resort to, but the quipsters in our tour party were quick to translate it into “Hot n’chicken-soup” or even more absurdly “Hot-chip’n’soup”! (in the dusty air and baking heat of the Valley, lunch was never far from our minds!). It was special too because remarkably Queen Hatshepsut was only one of two female pharaohs in Ancient Egyptian history (d.1458 BCE, 18th Dynasty). 
The first, Sobekneferu (d.1802 BCE, 12th Dynasty) was a more shadowy figure and a much less substantive ruler. Hatshepsut first ascended the imperial throne as co-regent with her half-brother but assumed full pharaonic powers after his death. Her reign was notable for its building projects, especially around Thebes (her crowning glory this memorial temple, Deir el-Bahri, built in Western Thebes) and for extending the kingdom’s trading links possibly as far as Punt (Eritrea) in the Horn of Africa. 
In the contemporary images, statues and sculptures of Hatshepsut✱, she is depicted (on her own orders) as a man, eg, the free-standing colonnade sculptures of the Queen in her showcase Thebes temple show her with a manly build and a characteristic pharaoh’s beard and attire. Lastly there is its peerless aesthetic appeal. Most of the other mortuary houses in Luxor’s valley look drab and unprepossessing by comparison. The temple is magnificently set in a natural valley against a towering backdrop of massive craggy mountains. Though upward of 3,500 years old in some ways it looks strangely modern with its ramps, two-tired terraces and the simplicity of clean, white, sharp lines of the colonnades and facade…the simplicity of the building and the way it blends into the landscape reminds me a bit of the architecture of Chicago’s Prairie School. Hatshepsut’s pet name for the temple was Djeser Djeseru (“splendour of Splendours”), in the ancient era the elegant simplicity of Deir el-Bahri was enhanced by a number of aesthetic features and elements that haven’t survived to the present day (eg, an avenue of sphinxes, fountains, lines of myrrh trees from the land of Punt) [The Rough Guide to Egypt (2007 Ed.)]. 
The distressing, tragic contemporary association with this sublimely beautiful monument is that it was here that 58 international tourists as well as four Egyptians were massacred by terrorists in 1997, a further 26 visitors or more were injured in the onslaught (the worst-ever terrorist atrocity involving tourists in Egypt). The terrorist group, suspected to be a splinter arm of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (Egyptian Sunni Islamist organisation)✥ entered the complex in the guise of security guards, trapping the victims inside the temple and setting on them with knives and guns. The murderers later fled and committed suicide in the surrounding hills. The largest proportion (>60%) of the murdered tourists came from Switzerland (later on Swiss intelligence ‘determined’ that Osama Bin Laden had bankrolled the operation). A direct consequent of the Luxor massacre was both a beefing up of tourist security and a drop in Egypt’s tourist numbers. Subsequent terrorist attacks elsewhere within the country has ensured the maintenance of high levels of security by the Egyptian authorities to this day.
The temple and other monuments we were going to see were originally on Philae island, but by the 1960s the Egyptian government, concerned at the harmful effect the periodical flooding of the island was having on the monuments and its archaeological relics (a by-product of the Aswan Low Dam), decided to relocate them to a more optimal place – mirroring the story with the Abu Simbel Tow Temples and the Aswan High Dam. The nearby island of Aglika was chosen as the new site and in a logistics exercise that consumed virtually all the seventies, Philae’s temples and monuments “island-hopped” to Aglika. 
There was some inexplicable delay (becoming quite the norm) when we got to the wharf in getting a boat to ferry us to the new island. One of the random fellow passengers on the boat ride was perhaps the most exotic ‘apparition’ we had encountered in all our time in Egypt. I say ‘apparition’ because although she was real, so oddly and eccentrically was she decked out in extravagant garb and paraphernalia, she was totally out-of-place with everyone else in the sweltering heat of the day. The image that occurred to me when I saw her was of a kind of Egyptian “Mary Poppins”. She was covered from head to foot in multi-layers of gaily coloured clothing, fancy “Sunday-best” gloves, etc, the whole kit! Yes and of course the obligatory umbrella as well! She also looked like she could seamlessly slot into the cast of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, no problems. We were all melting in the oppressive tropical heat in our thin cotton T-shirts, shorts and sandals, so I can’t imagine how she was feeling it. As it transpired, ‘Maryam’ Poppins had an eccentric personality to match her flamboyant attire. She tried to blame us for the boat’s delay and then wanted to use us as money-changers. I couldn’t quite fathom what exactly the proverbial bee in her over-veiled bonnet was! 
As the boat neared the island the vision was an enchanting one, the central complex of buildings seemed to be growing out of the lush green band of trees and bushes which surround it! It was easy to spot the distinctive twin pylons of the Temple of Isis. Philae was one of the strongholds for the cult of worshipping the all-empowering Egyptian goddess. 
Once you set foot on the island you find its full of fascinating monuments and artefacts which reveal a rich and varied history and an assortment of diverse cultural influences. The earliest religious structures reach back to the 4th century BCE and the Pharaonic era. Others date to the Ptolemaic Kingdom (Alexander the Great’s Graeco-Egyptian successors from Ptolemy I up to Cleopatra). A number of the buildings still extant were erected under the aegis and command of Roman emperors, eg, the Kiosk of Trajan (above). Even the early century Byzantine rulers have left an imprint on Philae as did the Coptic Christians. 
Most impressive of all perhaps is the forecourt of the main temple with its splendid colonnaded, the courtyard is an irenic atmosphere-evoking space. Also calming and softening the setting was the afternoon sunlight filtering in between the temple’s columns and reflecting on the still waters of the river in the background. The temple’s stand-out for me remains the striking reliefs of Egyptian deities (especially) on the Second Pylon (above), sharply defined sculptures which have been exceptionally well-preserved (or restored) bearing in mind that the temple walls had been half-submerged for considerable periods when it was still located on the vulnerable Philae island. 
In addition to the Temple of Isis and the Kiosk of Trajan, the island contains five lesser temples, two Roman gates, the Portico of (Emperor) Augustus and the Pavilion or Vestibule of (Pharaoh) Nactanebo I. The site’s various buildings are rich in the representation of pictographic narratives…the trained eye of Egyptologist Biko drew our attention to other, unauthorised markings on the monuments – various graffiti inscriptions is left by past visitors from the Roman epoch through to the Napoleonic period…which is visual confirmation – if we needed it – that graffiti has been around for just about forever (‘How Old is Graffiti?‘, www.wonderopolis.org). 
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✱ 8.8km south of Aswan as the Nubian Corvus flies!
The stock standard, organised tour of Egypt offered by x-plus one number of tour operators and agents typically has an itinerary which comprises Cairo, Gaza Pyramids, Saqqara, a Nile cruise, Luxor and the Valley of the Kings (and maybe Queens), and Karnak, maybe Aswan if you’re lucky and Alexandria, less likely to be included. Sinai doesn’t score a guernsey and the Temples of Abu Simbel, way down in the Nubian south close to the border with Sudan, is often only available as a cost add-on option. But worth it…if you were permitted to visit just one archaeological site in Egypt, Abu Simbel should be the one!
The trip south to Upper Nile
We left bustling, teeming Cairo and journeyed to the Giza Railway Station preceded by a short stop at the Canadian Youth Hostel for a refresher/change of clothes. There was no rush as it turned out, we twiddled our thumbs while the overnight train to Aswan waited dormant on the platform for two hours before it departed. Egyptian Railways’ so-called Abela “Sleeping Train” was on the whole relatively comfortable, but it took a torturous 13½ hours to get to Aswan, and although we had our own separate (small) compartments I got very little sleep in the night in the noisy, overcrowded carriage with the jerky motion of the train. The on-board toilets were a bit dire and the railway staff gave us something cold and rubbery to eat…though they were very polite about it. As least we fared better than the other half of our tour group, their (following) ER train broke down on route in the heat for five hours, standing still, no air con!
Leaving the car park and side-stepping through the souvenir wallahs trying to steer us towards their goods stalls, we walked along a curved access road down a slight incline. As we rounded a corner, we get our first sighting of what we had come to see. Superimposed on the cliff face of a mountain were two sets of monumental carved figures, it is an amazing spectacle that greets you, the sheer scale is jaw-dropping, breathtaking…no superlatives you can think of seem adequate at the moment. The first wonder you come to are a set of four colossal (20m high) statues representing Rameses II, the famous pharaoh of the New Kingdom (19th Dynasty), seated on his throne. The four❈ monumental figures are set in rock relief, a niche carved out of the mountain wall. Behind the tetrad of Rameses’ is a temple dedicated to the pharaoh. Further along the mountain is a companion monument to Rameses’ consort, the Temple of Queen Nefertari. One hundred metres to the right of Rameses’ monument, also built on an extended arm of the artificial hill, is the smaller Temple of (the Goddess Hathor and) Queen Nefertari. In front of the temple is a frieze comprising large sculptures of figures (Rameses and Nefertari who unusually was rendered to be of equal height to the pharaoh).
⇧ Queen Neferari Monument
How to move enormous solid objects of such colossal weight and density was the challenge facing the team. The ingenious solution was to cut the statues into manageable (up to 20-ton) blocks (some sections so delicate that handsaws had to be used) that could be then transported to the temples’ new home and there carefully reassembled. For this to succeed required absolute mathematical precision, patience and a long time…but it worked and the statues were rejoined remarkably without recourse to glue or any form of adhesive substance [‘1964-1968 Rescuing Rameses II’, Amanda Uren, http://mashable.com]
Inside the temples
Concrete domes and arched doorways were integrated into the construction of the artificial hills to create the two temples in the new location. Inside are treasury rooms, sculptures and numerous wall and column decorations in honour of Egypt’s most long-lived pharaoh. Photography within the Greater and Lesser Temples is not permitted, but packets of postcards depicting pictures of the interior treasures and of the 1960s relocation project can be purchased at the site.
We spent two hours exploring Abu Simbel but could have stayed longer, Biko however was quick to hurry us back to our mini-bus with his now familiar cry of yalla-beena! The temple site was becoming people top-heavy with new tourist buses arriving every hour, we knew that we needed to make tracks in the desert – especially if we were to avoid, as much as we could, having to travel in full tropical sun. We left happy and content that we had witnessed one of the best ancient complexes we would see. So many of Egypt’s archaeological monuments are magnificent, but very few of them can be said to match the rarefied atmosphere of Abu Simbel Tow Temples.
⇧ Night viewings of the spotlighted Rameses II monument are spectacular and popular
The drive from Alexandria to El Alamein was a pretty tedious affair, the M40 is a dry, dusty, monotonously homogeneous-looking road. On the right we gleaned glimpses of the sea interspersed with long lines of newish looking seaside villas and resorts (many appear unoccupied), which contrasted with a vista of unremitting desert wasteland on the left. One hundred and six kilometres of hum-humdrum tedium in fact!
The memorial building, sand-blond in colour and with lavish arches, is a fitting and respectful tribute to those who fell in the desert campaign. The cost of establishing and maintaining CWGC is met by contributions from the Commonwealth countries whose soldiers took part in that theatre of war, its lawns, groves and gardens are kept in immaculate shape by a dedicated staff of Egyptian groundsmen and gardeners. After the visit to the Commonwealth graves we returned to the war museum where we dropped off the Israeli guy. As we turned the vehicle into the road that took us back to Alexandria he was last seen on the M40 getting into in some fracas with an Egyptian guard over his travel papers.
Footnote: elsewhere at El Alamein, located separately, there are two other, tiny military cemeteries commemorating combatants on different sides who lost their lives in World War II – a Greek war memorial (its portal taking the form of an ancient Greek temple) and cemetery containing the remains of that nation’s soldiers who died in the two battles of El Alamein. There is another ossuary memorial to Libyan troops who fought for Fascist Italy in the campaign. Bakr didn’t mention either of these war cemeteries and I certainly didn’t spot them on our travels.
Mt Sinai is a place of contrasts. Obviously there is the spiritual dimension to Sinai, a sacred location for the three great and distinct Abrahamic religions. It is also a place that swings widely in climatic conditions, hot desert weather during the day but can be “cold as” at night, especially when your sleeping arrangements are exposed to the desert winds. We spent the night in a flimsy Bedouin camp shack, trying to sleep on what passed in the Bedouin world for ‘bedding’ – on the floor lying on a kind of stiff, itchy strip of carpet (no sheets), a pillow comprising a hard mat made of tent canvas rolled up like a newspaper that felt like it had an iron bar inside, and as a doona, a thin, coarse camel rug with more than a lingering whiff of the even-toed ungulate about it! Definitely a case of more ‘Bedouin’ than ‘bed’!!! Outside, conditions were bitterly cold, something akin to a gale-force wind was blowing and we could palpably feel it through the several gaps in the door! (clearly, the locals round here have never heard of the terms ‘doorstop’ or ‘windbreak’!)
Outer walls of the monastery
✥ some ‘ascenders’ like our travelling companions from ‘Bris-Vegas’ chose to take the camelid transport route to the top, but in their case this resulted in a unexpected, nasty altercation with the camels’ Bedouin owner who was aggrieved that they didn’t pay (what he reckoned was) the full amount for the hire of the camels (he was still hounding them for more Egyptian pounds back at ground level in the morning!)
✱ some time after our Sinai excursion, all tours of Saint Catherine’s were suspended in owing to a heightening of security issues in Egypt – fortunately this proved to be only a short-term situation which was massacring the local business, tourism is back in full swing now in South Sinai, even more so for the sun, sand and dive resorts at Dahab, Nuweiba and Sharm El-Sheikh
✧ or to use the current PC term, “the Hebrew Bible”
⊡ not to be confused with the identically named ‘Moses’ Spring’, a locality in Jordan similarly revered for its “God-given” healing waters
Many years ago I did a side excursion from Egypt’s tourism central, departing from the bustling, over-peopled Cairo to cross the Suez Canal into Asian Egypt, to the under-peopled peninsula of Sinai. To many who haven’t been there, the Sinai probably sounds like a land of extremes of climate and dry harsh, unforgiving terrain, photos of the landscape certainly convey that impression…I remember the deprivations suffered by Peter O’Toole and his boy servant as they tried to cross Sinai’s blindingly windstorm-swept desert by camel in the classic film Lawrence of Arabia). The desert is one powerful element of the land for sure, but the coastal strip on the western edge of the peninsula on the Gulf of Aqaba reveals a very different picture. Dahab midway up the Gulf is one such oasis jewel in a rugged and unyielding desert landscape.
But first we had to get there! Our mini-bus drove from Cairo to Sinai (under the narrow channel of water!), from one continent, Africa, to another, Asia. The Egyptian tour guide Biko didn’t seem to know exactly where Dahab was, and so instead of going straight down the Red Sea coast, we went right across the top, west to east, ending up at Taba✱ on the Israeli border where we found ourselves tensely eyeballing the heavily armed Jewish soldiers on the other side of the border gate in Israel’s Eilat township.
Dahab Dive Centre, Aqaba Gulf ▲
The Masbat ▲
There is an old Bedouin township in Dahab that predates the tourism hub that developed in the Nineties…before its tourism potential was tapped Dahab was a small, sleepy Bedouin fishing village with lots of camels, goats and sheep wandering randomly around the streets (they are still wandering the town!). I discovered that the local Bedouins, like the market workers in Cairo, are good hagglers when it comes to trading with the tourists…even the very young ones it seems are seasoned negotiators at it – such as the doggedly determined five or six-year-old Bedouin girl we encountered at a cafe on the Masbat who just wasn’t going to be bargained down by Biko for her modest offerings of beaded tribal bracelets and trinkets.
The old Crusader castle, south of Taba ▲
Onsite site map
Zona arqueología
The Kuk
Templo de Kukulcán
El Caracol
Spot the iguana!
La Iglesia
Chichén-Itzá vendors hard at it! Sombreros for a hot day.
The therapeutic springs of the limestone Travertines
Who? Well, me for one! Frankly for one thing I’ve never seen the sense of collecting a whole bunch of extra garments and accessories on route that I’ll have to squeeze into my already bulging luggage and then lug around to every single hotel, coach and airport for the entire duration of the trip, it flies in the face of my simple and practical philosophy of “always travelling as light as possible”. Besides, with the “El Cheapo” stuff you’re not buying quality that’s going to last any decent amount of time!
Fridgelandia
Henpecked!
Chico Senõr Potter
Where is Tintin’s Inca prisoners T-shirt?
0nly a fiver! Not worth the effort to copy!
Simple unpretentious craftsmanship from the developing world
Tecoh cénote
Guía José conducts a cartography class in the field!
The roof of something deep, dark & delightful…
Being a hesitant auto-immerser in any deposit of water greater in scope than a domestic bathtub, an aquatic prevaricator who can hold his own and delay with the best of them, I coaxed and eased myself with glacial speed into the seemingly bottomless, blue-turquoise chasm. The water was a little cool at first but I soon accustomed to it. The water quality looked pristine despite it being in constant by visitors, I was attracted by the appearance of a myriad of tiny colourful fish visibly close to the surface. The pool looked very deep…José speculated at least forty metres deep. Above us small birds flitted around the cave, dipping and diving in and out of several holes in the roof that have formed over the millenniums. The light emanating from the holes through tufts of vegetation provided a kind of natural spotlight projecting on to the water, giving the entire cavern a magical glow.
The beautiful azure water!
Aquanauts of an ancient cénote!
With one arm securely clasping the floatation device I took a breather, and while I was there I was able to have a good look around the cavern roof above. Bright beams of light from the limestone roof illuminated the water surface like a spotlight and made it possible to make out the presence of a few hibernating Mexican bats suspended from various nooks and niches of the craggy rock. Our guide pointed out that the walls of the cave accommodated a host of other small creatures like iguanas and spiders. I liked how there were lots of long, long vines growing over the edge of the cliff and cascading down almost to the water✥…the vines looked sturdy but I wondered if they were strong enough for any daredevil adventurer brave (or stupid) enough to swing off them from the roof into the water?
A gate-opening chico & the word of Señor Jesuchristo
A typical Yucatán Sunday spread!
Being our last night in Mérida, Hector took us to one of the liveliest and most crowded nightspots he knew in Mérida City Centre, Le Negrita Cantina (corner of Calles 49 and 62). We got a sensory dose of typically pulsating Mérida night-life here…wall-to-wall people seated cramped close together munching burritos (my non-appearing cerveza seemed to have been redirected back to the brewery – in a nearby town!) in an enclosed firetrap, wait-staff constantly circling round the tables with trays of margaritas, sangritas and micheladas looking for homes. Couldn’t really hear ourselves speak with the din going on, but the exciting buzz of the non-stop musical band and the dancing was great to experience!
Mérida historico centre: Lucas de Gálvez market – the large mauve square next to the Post Office
That well-known international fashion label “Tonny Halfmaker”!
Market Carnicería: Butchers’ fresh!
The markets were of course abuzz with people coming and going every which way, these were locals mainly it seemed. I didn’t spot many overseas tourists while I was there, just swarming bunches of Meridians with that characteristic Mexican build, squat and solid forms busily stocking up on the weekly groceries, or perhaps there to find a special gift, some trinkets, or more practically, invest in a new pair of budget-priced shoes or a new pair of ‘threads’.
Lucas de Gálvez (continued!)
Joyerías galore!
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Mérida: town “planning” by numbers!
“Lovers’ double-handlers” – for Amantes gigantes!
Pasaje de la Revolucion
Casa Monteja: stamping on the subjugated natives!
Montejo courtyard
Olimpio Cultural Center
Courtyard of Museo Fernando GPM
Ateneo Peninsular, next to El Catedral
Castro’s ‘Conquista’
Plaza De la Independencia (Zócalo)
Palenque Parque Nacional
The site map
Temple bas-relief
Temple reliefs
Temple of the Crosses
A city of temples under cover of jungle
We had some free time to spend scaling one or two of the less formidable pyramids before tiring of this novelty. As we followed Rafa back to the entrance, we swiftly and adroitly swerved past lines of souvenir vendors loudly hawking their wares on the pathway. Outside, the group regathered and were shepherded by Rafa towards a nearby trail heading into a denser part of the jungle. I mentioned above that the temples of Palenque were of indeterminate number. The reason for this is that virtually the entire ancient city of Palenque was swallowed up by the jungle some time after the Mayan inhabitants left the area (circa AD 800). What what we could see and explore was the small portion that had been discovered and unearthed to this point!
Rafa blending in to nature – at one with cedars & sapodilla
The temple, liberated from La Jungla!
Before heading back out of the Palenque jungle, Rafa invited us to explore an underground entrance point largely concealed by a rock ledge. Most of us took the challenge to climb down into the hole which led into a short, very tight and damp tunnel which came out at a shallow stream of water. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be looking for in the tunnel, a rare, fossilised Palaeolithic Age Mexican marsupial perhaps…it was too dark to see much of anything in the tunnel in any case!
Human “pack mules” doing the hard yakka…”Aspro, anyone?”
Big Maya
H. Xibalba
Hotel decoration
Silent Howler
𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧𖡧
Tope
Banner site map
Cascada las Golandrinas
Thatched souvenir tienda huts
The falls’ steps
Waterfalls in the jungle
Town of San Juan Chamula
First-hand encounter with the ‘Conflicto de Chiapas’
The ‘contingencies’ included having to deal with unofficial roadblocks on the highway. Chiapas State is base to the Zapatistas (officially Zapatista Army of National Liberation – EZLN), a small, left-wing political/ militia group resisting the authority of the central government in Mexico*. As we approached the outskirts of Chamula our mini-bus came to a fairly abrupt halt with half-a-dozen or more vehicles banked up in front of us. A group of Zapatistas or their rural trade union affiliates had blocked access into the town, draping banners across the road stating the protesters’ current, specific beef with the unsympathetic government (Hector had earlier warned us of the prospect of this and there had been recent reports in the media of buses being hijacked by the Zapatistas!).
By the time we left Chamula (late afternoon) it was starting to get cooler – a pointer to the town’s highland location (altitude 7,200 feet!) We arrived back at Casa Margarita with time to relax before dinner. I took in the splendid hacienda-like ambience of the hotel’s outdoor central courtyard before venturing out to do some restaurant hunting and catch some of the town’s night-time sights I hadn’t yet discovered – like this modern SC administrative building.
C de Guadeloupe entertainers
Zócalo: “Euro Bungy”
The highlight of our first full day in San Cristóbal was a trip to a massive Mexican “grand canyon” north of Chiapa del Corzo. The canyon, known as Cañón del Sumidero, was observable by taking a speedboat ride down the Grijalva River which flows through the canyon. When we got to the river-side pier about mid-morning it was a hub of activity. We were assisted in donning life jackets and directed along one of several short wharves which (oddly) have boats permanently attached to them. From here we crossed onto our assigned speedboat itself and set off downstream.
Early on, we passed under a bridge before heading towards the canyon…the course of the river comprised long, straight stretches punctuated by several bends of up to 90 degrees in angle. The boat’s pilot would gun the vessel down the river at full throttle for a few hundred metres, then cut the engine at different spots to allow us a photo op and to take in particular features of the canyon. Occasionally he offered commentary – in Spanish only! While he nattered on we contented ourselves with taking in the scenery…and there was plenty of that to see – misty waterfalls and verdant vegetation growing off the cliff-faces which at certain parts of the canyon extended up vertical walls over 1,000 metres high! One moss-covered botanical species on the cliffs we saw was the gorgeous Arbol de Navidad (Christmas Tree).
Mossy vegetation & Navidad on the canyon walls
Arboreal simians in the canopy
The boat went as far at it could up the Rio Grijalva – the end point was when the river came to a dam wall at the northern end where there’s a hydroelectric power station. From this turnaround point, in contrast to the leisurely pace of the outward leg, the boat powered back to the jetty on the return leg without halting. The whole trip took us somewhere between two and two-and-half hours to complete, I guesstimated the distance covered was about 13 kilometres.
Throughly trashed crocodile [photo courtesy E Greschman]
The Zócalo and points south
There was time, once back at San Cristóbal DLC, for another wander before dinner through the shop-strewn streets of the city centre. I began my exploration from the Zócalo…San Cristóbal’s main square is not the biggest you’d ever see in Mexico but it contains a lot of pleasant greenery and a good supply of bench seats to put your feet and watch the locals. My attention though was drawn towards one particular toy being hawked in the square, a cute, colourful, thin lizard-like creature given to bouncing around the pavement in a series of sharp jerky motions (a sure winner with the ankle-biter brigade!).
Specialist agricultural produce-growers market
Not sure about the fare at this restaurant but the doorman was a bit of a head-turner!
Oaxaca: this wasn’t the overnight bus to Chiapas but given how long the trip took, it might well have been!
Actually it was in this bus, an ADO autobus, that we trekked from Oax to San Cristo
Cantinflas in his most famous role as Passepartout
Chiapas & the road to SC
Casa Margarita’s courtyard
The agave piña – a long, long road to fruition
With the approach of nightfall looming we turned off the Oaxaca highway into a mezcal distillery in the town of San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya¤. To state what will soon become bleedingly obvious this proved to be the most popular stop of the day! The distillery was set up for tastings just like a regional winery. Before we got to sample the eagerly anticipated local drink though, the distillery honcho walked us through the manufacturing process which is a very, very protracted and complicated one…first the root, the piña, is extracted from the agave after the plant had been grown for about eight years! We were shown a big, eight foot deep earth pit where in the next stage of the process the workers bake the piñas under smoking logs and rocks before removing them to be fermented for a further 5-15 days. After this the fermented by-product gets bunged into a clay brick still to be distilled using heated firewood. When it reaches its purest form (which is called blanco), the aging process in oak then begins…Phew!!! Incredibly time- and labour-intensive process eh?
The valley view – bereft of any blots on the landscape, ie, peacock imitating musclemen!
Mexico’s calcified kale (‘castle’)
Oaxaca’s travertine terraces
Complex of Mitla’s Columns
El Palacio’s intricate fretwork friezeAnother point of difference between the two was distinctly olfactory – visiting the “cotton castle” of Pamukkale, it was nigh-on impossible not to be affected (if not overcome) by the overpowering smell of sulphur in the air, it was everywhere! El Agua’s sulphur deposits by contrast didn’t exude that same invasive hold over our sense of smell (thankfully!).
Oaxaca’s “Maravilla Chica”
Oaxaca – Hidelgo
‘Michael Jackson’ in attendance at Alameda Carnival
We headed back to the Zócalo to find a place with a decent lunch selection…reflecting on what had transpired at the cafe, it was clear to me that we had turned up during the afternoon siesta, the locals obviously knew that, that’s why it was empty (unlike the last two times we were there!). But because we were there, they obviously didn’t want to turn away the tourist dollar, so their scheme was to cobble together anything, maybe leftovers (who knows what!) and fob us off with that. Another valuable lesson learnt: don’t enter a Mexican eatery during siesta time! I stored it up alongside strictly avoiding any salad in prepared meals at Mexican restaurants!
Árbor of Sánta María
The church & the topiaries of Sánta María
El Zócalo
Museo Frida Kahlo, Coyoacán
Stairway triptych on the Conquista
Palacio jardens 
The murals took up huge slabs of wall space on the first floor of the palace, each mural depicted different phases of Mexican history starting with a scene from life in Pre-Columbian indigenous society. Rivera’s murals are all about social commentary, especially articulating the attitude of the conquerors towards the indígena peoples after contact – the mistreatment and abuses exacted on the Aztecs and other Meso-American Indians. One of the politically committed Rivera’s societal concerns in the mural project was to express through his art a counter-view to the prevailing European perception at the time which tended to wholesale denigrate the mestizo and native populations.
On the staircase between the ground floor and the second floor a very large mural is devoted to Rivera’s take on 20th century Mexico, his summary of society in the first-third of the century…the vast canvas is peopled by an eclectic mix of historical characters with portraits of his beloved Frida, Mexican political figures, American capitalists like Rockefeller, powerful revolutionary warlords Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and in accord with the artist’s communist allegiances, Karl Marx. This panel is in fact part of a ‘triptych’ of murals which on the stairway – the other monumental sections, reaching up to the ceiling almost, convey the ferocity of Cortes’ assault on the Mexica and the indigenous determined attempts to resist the Conquistadors.
The history murals are a very large body of work undertaken on a massive scale, a monumental project which took Rivera around six years (ca 1929-35)…the murals were intended to encompass all four open corridors of the square building but he never found the time to complete it. There are other large-scale panel paintings by Rivera (does he ever do small-scale?) on the third floor of the building, but the mural depiction of Mexico’s course of history from pre-Hispanic period through the Conquista up to the 20th century are the principal attractions of this magnet for tourists wanting to experience more of CDMX’s distinctive cultural ethos.
Cuba Street fashions
Palacio Postal
Palace of Fine Arts: Mexico City’s cultural hub and finest building. Constructed over 30 year period interrupted by the Mexican Revolution and CDMXs notorious soft soil issues (Designer: Adamo Boari)
Entrance to Church of San Francisco in Av Madero
Cinco de Mayo
Dali-surreal piece
Two mariachis looking for their instruments?
Trios match
We made a slightly premature exit from Arena Mexico – nothing was spoiled, we weren’t psychic but somehow we sensed the “good guys” would triumph in the deciding third fall (tres caídas) – to avoid the end-of-night rush. Back at Colonial Doctores station, clutching our cheap souvenir luchador mask, we boarded one of CDMX’s strange box-shaped carriages for another zig-zagging journey on the Metro to Centro. When we alighted at our nearest Metro station, the obliging and ever affable Milton walked us back to our hotel near the Almeida Park.
Venturing outside of our hotel in Calle Luis Moya, the first thing that struck me about Mexico City was how cold it was. It was night and winter time but I somehow supposed its proximity to the Equinox meant the climate would generally be fairly consistently tropical✼. Certainly, the attire of the Mexiqueños I saw on the street indicated that the locals themselves clearly felt the cold – puffer jackets, coats, scarfs, beanies and (always) long trousers were the fashion de jour.
I had a succulent meal of cacti
Tarta temptation
A 50kg cake – perfectly fitting the bill for a king-sized party!My frustrations began with several fruitless attempts to secure a boarding pass through AA’s Sydney electronic ticketing system. An airline official intervened at this point advising me that I needed to obtain something called an ESTA* before I could proceed with my trip. This was news to me as my travel agent hadn’t mentioned this requirement to me during the preparations for my Central American tour. Arggh, bad start! The official directed me to a nearby Flight Centre office where I obtained the ESTA (at a moderate cost of $US14 – $A18.95) only to discover the sting imposed by Flight Centre who ripped me off to the tune of an additional $45 just to photocopy the single sheet document!
Even after I had got past the electronic interrogator with its game of 20 questions, the whole boarding process continued on and on with no apparent end in sight – positively labyrinthine I concluded! Collecting and reassigning my luggage was followed by mandatory de-belting and de-shoeing at the insistence of Customs Nazis barking orders and commands with Third Reich-like zeal (OK, yes American customs officers have no monopoly on bluntness or lack of manners…but they are certainly world-class in that department if my two horror stretches through the LAX maze is anything to go by!).
(Source: https://www.worldatlas.com/)
Valparaíso, or ‘Valpo’ for short, today has a faded, glamour but stacks of aesthetic character – with a higgedly-piggedly, chaotic pattern of brightly coloured houses, “a heap … a bunch of crazy houses” as poet Pablo Neruda described them, and numerous run-down/falling-down Victorian mansions (conversely on a cautionary note, the city these days also has a criminal underbelly including endemic petty crime and prostitution). Remnants of the city’s former glory and especially its quaint charm remain however: the old and rickety ascensores (inclined motorised lifts, called funiculars elsewhere) transport passengers up and down Valparaíso’s steep, undulating hills, from atop the cerros visitors enjoy sweeping views across the bay and the ports. It’s a city awash with the most brilliant murals on the walls of houses and commercial buildings which themselves exude colour and character.
Valaparaíso’s “salad days” were in the 19th century, during this period it was a world-class port on the Europe to California shipping route. A combination of the devastating 1906 earthquake and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 signified the rapid commercial decline of Valparaíso, once known as the “Jewel of the Pacific”. This small city on the eastern edge of the Pacific 11,326km from Sydney might seem an odd place for a turn-of-the-century Australian prime minister to be born◙, but in 1867 one such future PM was born there (also see Postscript). His name at birth was Johann Cristian Tunck. Tunck’s father was Chilean of German stock whilst his mother was born in New Zealand of Irish ancestry. After his Chilean father disappeared early on, his mother remarried, changing the child’s name to John Christian Watson.
(Photo: NRMA)
Early Federal Australian politics entailed a three-way tussle between Watson’s ALP, the Protectionist Party led by Deakin and the Free Trade Party under Reid. Watson’s ascension to the prime minister-ship in 1904 was a novel occurrence: (the ALP was the) first national, labour-based government in the world; Watson at 37, the youngest-ever Australian PM[3]. The advent of Watson’s “workers'” government was met with cynicism and hostility as it challenged the hitherto standard notion that the working class were capable of assuming the mantle of government and succeeding. It didn’t as it eventuated succeed, surviving not quite four months before Watson found his government’s position untenable and was edged out of power¤ … but this was more to do with the nature of the Watson government, a minority one, than the quality or performance. Basically it couldn’t muster the numbers in parliament to continue governing and the governor-general appointed George Reid to the PM-ship in August 1904[4].
Labor front runner from Double Bay with Van Dyke beard
In the 1920s Watson played a leading role in establishing and guiding the NRMA (National Roads and Motorists Association), and in the formation of Yellow Cabs (taxi service), and in the 1930s, AMPOL (Australian Motorists Petrol Company), all of which illustrate the former PM’s interest in motor transport. One of his other interests, cricket, led to him being appointed a trustee of the Sydney Cricket Ground in Australia[9].
Valpo view
Desert City
Those visitors that didn’t want to do the camel ride (speaking personally, I had sated my taste for camel rides striding high atop a collection of even-toed ungulates in Egypt on an earlier occasion), went for a combined dinner and show. The eating conditions were pretty rudimentary (one tick for authenticity at least!) – we were seated on large sand-filled cushions which were resting on ancient-looking strips of carpet bleached dry of colour by endless exposure to the harsh sun … however I would concede that the meal was quite good (falafel & kebab roll) except for the rather tasteless penne.
The dancer twirled around in circles – in one direction – ever more frenetically. He did this for so long I thought he would surely have to unwind in the opposite direction for the equivalent amount of time before he would be able to regain his balance! … but he was OK. Halfway through his twirling performance his whole outfit lit up like New Year’s Eve … at this point for some reason, randomly, the idea of suicide bombers came into my mind – maybe it was the way he was self-activating the light show (ie, himself) by repeatedly flicking a switch on and off! Fortunately for all the show ended peacefully and we eventually returned to our more comfortable beds in the hotel.
Tourist Town
International bragging rights!
Mall & BurjAll manner of piscean life can be viewed from the transparent wall – sharks, hammer-heads, stingrays and multifarious smaller fish. We saw scuba divers swimming among the sea creatures, cleaning the gigantic pool with long blue hoses. The neoprene-clad divers were getting unnerving dead-eye stares from the sharks. Hopefully for their sake the human “Creepy-crawleys” do their work AFTER the members of the lamniade family have been fed!
We did the standard thing, paid to go up to the Observation Deck, Level 124. If you want a higher view you can go up to the top viewing deck at Level 148 (out of 163 levels all up) – which will cost you about AED350.
But level 124 was high enough for us, the view from there was like looking at a space age city – vast modern buildings and vast intersecting arterial freeways, surrounded by an ocean of sand – made to look all the more Sci-Fi by a constant haze circling around the periphery. The waterworks of the Dubai Fountain was a spectacular hydro-sight from above. Back on ground level the Burj has an interesting info display on the history of the building’s construction, charting it stage-by-stage and metre-by-metre.
D. Museum
The fort is square-shaped & towered, in the open courtyard are some aged cannons and a summer hut composed of palm fronds (known as an Arish). On display both outside and inside the walls are dhows (traditional boats). The museum provides a good grab of local history amidst all the newness of Dubai.
On a conservation note for Dubai, the end of the creek has a waterbird and wildlife sanctuary. The abra is a pretty basic, old form of watercraft but it got us across the creek reasonably quickly so we could spend plenty of time visiting the network of street and arcade vendors alongside the creek.
The Széchenyi Medicinal Baths are the largest in Europe and one of the continent’s most famous thermal pool complexes with a history dating back over 100 years. It reminded me of the old Ramsgate Baths 50 years ago, but with a liberal measure of grandeur and style about it✦. This place really brings the punters in, all ages and types. It is open every day of the year and I reckon some locals do come every day! Its function and importance to the average Budapester is more analogous with that of the democratic beach in Summer in an Australian coastal fringe city.
I liked the Baths’ architecture a lot – grand, very ornate with arched columns with the complex as a whole set in the middle of a pleasant city park which the baths share with a circus and an amusement park. On the left side of the pool, near the Pepsi sign, groups of older men, half-immersed in water, were busying themselves attentively in games of chess.
It was good to experience the environment of a typical Budapest thermal spring, even if I found the aesthetics of the baths more rewarding than the actual swimming, or more accurately, wading.
I was returning to the city centre having already been in earlier in the day and seen Stephansdom (St Stephan’s Cathedral) with its distinctive-patterned mosaic tiled roof; the Stephansplatz, densely populated with Mozart-themed totes flogging tickets to The Marriage of Figaro outside the subway exit, and on the other side of the square, lined up on the street, a row of fiakers (gaily decorated, horse-drawn hire carriages). 
a small city with street after street packed with outdoor beer taverns
Bratislavsky Hrad from Staré Mêsto
The Gothic style Charles Bridge over the Vltava River connects the Old Town (Stare Mêsto) with the Lesser Town (Malá Strana) and Hradčany (Prague Castle). It’s construction, the Stone Bridge, was begun by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in 1357. It’s a wide bridge (nearly 10 metres wide from wall-to-wall) but it needs to be considering the ongoing pedestrian congestion on it.
The old cobbled road bridge is full of street vendors selling food or more commonly souvenirs (small paintings and drawings of Prague city scenes are popular items but also other crafty trinkets). The bridge is also a favourite haunt for various musicians who ply their trade in the hope of attracting the generosity of appreciative tourists. As we crossed one particular lively folk band caught our eye, they were an eclectic, motley crew – dressed like gypsies doubling as extras from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, complete with bongo drums and Scottish bagpipes.
Looking around the wide open square I noticed there were lots of these cute little three-wheel yellow ‘taxis’ darting all over the place … they looked like cramped smart cars on bicycle wheels. There was a number of fine historic buildings to see, especially the Dietrichstein Palace, the Hotel Grandeeza & some churches. I understand that under the square though, there is much more of interest, a big underground labyrinth with cellars which historically Moravians have stored food and aged wine (Brno’s favourite alcoholic beverage). I would have liked to explore this subterranean realm but unfortunately this ‘whirlwind’ tour of Brno didn’t allow for it.
From the top we had to descend down a narrow wooden staircase over 35 flights of stairs (fortunately you don’t have to return via this route as there are lifts that take you up). Once at the operational level you discover that part of the erstwhile salt mine is actually a huge sculpture palace/museum … the older pieces were carved out of the natural rock by miners, the newer ones by contemporary artists. Many of the salt sculptures have a religious theme (the Last Supper, Pope John-Paul II).
The underground tour, 327m below the surface, goes for three kilometres and it looks like there a lot of space down there, not as cramped as I imagined it would be. Whilst doing the tour though it is hard to appreciate just how big the mine is (287m long in fact!). The tourist route (there is also a pilgrims’ route and a miners’ route) takes us a tiny fraction of the mine’s entirety. At various points of the mine passageway there are dozens of sculptures of historical and mythological figures and an underground lake too.
The mine’s highlight is its four magnificent salt chapels (Wieliczka has been characterised as a vast underground salt cathedral!). Even the impressive chandeliers in the chapels are made from salt. It’s amazing to reflect that Kopalnia soli Wieliczka yielded the everyday commodity of table salt from the 13th century continuously till 2007 when it ceased production. Whilst you are undertaking the tour you might want to hold off on buying any of the salt mine souvenirs at the underground kiosk. The stalls outside sell most of the same momentos for less than half the price (even the shop at the exit at ground level is cheaper than the kiosk).
“Graduation Tower“
Whilst I was anticipating my upcoming trip to Poland with much relish, as to Eastern Europe as a whole, the prospect of visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau site wasn’t one I was looking forward to. I wasn’t at all keen on visiting the former Nazi concentration camp … maybe I have been fed on too much of a vicarious experience courtesy of the SBS network’s televisual obsession (so it appears at times) with all things to do the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II!
Today, Auschwitz is a much-visited museum and a memorial to the victims of the Third Reich. There was a crowded, chaotic scene at the entrance, long lines of tourists queuing up. Eventually we got inside the building after making it past the bag checks and scanning of the heavy security screening at the gate. It was an eerie feeling walking through those notorious, infamous gates of Auschwitz I (notwithstanding that the ominous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” we passed under is only a replica of the original one which was stolen in 2009). The incongruity of the scene was very stark, very apparent – constant streams of people milling all over the onetime prison, going from block to block, in a place that otherwise was just so barren, desolate and abandoned!
A room full of discarded footwear
Wartime streetcar
Impress machine & Swastika floor design
Schlinder’s Desk
Survivors’ Arc
Main Square
Cloth Hall
Zamec Courtyard
The Jasna Góra complex at Częstochowa, viewed as a whole, looks like a fortified city with its formidable walls engulfing the ecclesiastical buildings. We walked from the large carpark through the archway bearing the elaborate crest enscribed with the words of Pope John Paul II’s motto (“Totus Tuus”). Many, many visitors, mainly tour groups of pilgrims were streaming through its gates.
Basilica Noir Madonna
Religo-market
🔺Staré miasto market place
🔺Warsaw Uprising memorial
🔺Barbakan fortification
🔺Jerusalem & Palm
🔺Royal Route procession
🔺Old Town & Zamek
The Food and Beer tour was probably my favourite (kind of a fast food pub crawl of the Soviet high-water mark of working class proletarian cuisine), going to various interesting little out-of-the-way cafés, fast food parlours and back lane bars. For a small charge (about 20 PLN) we sampled so many different types of piva – lagers, porters, pilsners, kozlaks, ales, American-style, Pekin-style, etc. plus culinary oddities such as the “John-Paul II” pączki (a donut of Papal proportions which I passed on!). One of the non-alcoholic beverage ‘highlights’ was the “wonderfully insipid” Oranzada (this sugary ‘treat’ was the soft drink of choice of the old Communist Party apparently). I enjoyed the visit to Soviet Warsaw’s first American-style milkbar (next door to the home of Poland’s double Noble laureate in Science, Madame Curie). We also got an informative commentary on the story behind the construction of the dynamic Warsaw Uprising monument.
Drama HQ Vilnius
V. Kudirkas Monument
Lietuvos Basilica & Bell tower
Anglijos Ducal Palace
Gediminas Tower
Bronze sculpture of Lithuanian hounds
Gedimus, Grand Duke of Lithuania (ca1275–1341). According to the “Iron Wolf” legend, founder of Vilnius
GW Bush plaque
DIY decoration wall
Border-crossing: Užupis
across the bridge
Republican sculpture park
Modern public sculpture on Vilniaus (‘Girl with Little pipe’)
Hill of Crosses I
Hill of Crosses II
Underground pedestrian by-pass near the Markets
Centrāltirgus
Pilsētas Kanals
Freedom Monument
Bastejkalns Parks
Kadri Loss
Kadriorg aed
Swan pond, Kadriorg Park
Zhivago sisters dancing
Smirnoff waitress
Nevsky Cathedral
The Riigikogu
Interior of Toomkirik
Patkuli platform
Church of “the Spilled Blood”
Mikhailovskiy Dvorets
Apostolic Armenian Church
A couple of days later, back on the same street in daylight this time, I noticed a huge banner, “St Petersburg Harley Days” just near peaceful Ostrovsky Square. I had my answer to the mystery. Bikies has descended on St Petersburg from all over the globe (Germany, France, Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Scandinavia, the US, etc, St Petersburg’s own “Night Riders” included). The Harley-Davidson event was in a cordoned-off area with heavy security at each of the entry points, but it seemed that Joe (and Joanna) Public weren’t being kept out so, I ambled through the gate without being challenged to produce my HD Club bona fides. it was a big commercial operation inside the perimeter, lots of activity, people walking all over the joint. Lots of folks dressed in black, no shortage of tattoos and beards of course. There were special Harley-Davidson machines on display and promotional girls with black-and-white checkered flags which they’d occasionally wave around rather superfluously given there was no actually racing going on. Along each side of the compound was a long row of souvenir stalls selling mainly specialised motor bike-related items. Organised entertainment was aplenty, displays of bike stunt-riding and a rock band was warming up in the bandstand when I was there.
The Harley Days festival in the city is now apparently an annual event for international bikies, OK its not just for bikies … for (Harley-Davidson) motorcycle enthusiasts of all shapes and kinds. From time to time bands of these enthusiasts would rev up their motors and ride en masse in a head-turning procession along Nevsky Pr. In all some 3,000 motorbike riders were said to have attended the Saint Petersburg festival during the first couple of weeks in August … it certainly seemed like it was that many on the ground to my ears! And the bike riders and Harley-Davidson aficionados clearly enjoyed themselves, that was apparent for all to see, so much so that plans were set in place for next August’s St Petersburg HD event before this one finished.
But is it the ‘real’ Clinton? ⤴
Would the real Mr Yang, the genuine “Discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors’, please stand up?
In the glow of world attention being lavished on the terracotta army discoveries and the recognition bestowed on Mr Yang, it is not surprising that the other three surviving farmers present at the 1974 archaeological find wanted to get in on the act. Yang Quany was also given a spot in the museum signing books for a small stipend and began promoting himself as “the discoverer of the treasures”. The remaining two Yangs followed suit. Yang Zhi’fa however discredits his fellow Lintong farmers’ motives and insists that it is he who was primus intra pares (first among equals) in discovering the Emperor Qin relics.
Whilst the Lintong farmers haven’t made much money from discovering (or being associated with the discovery of) the terracotta army, the same can be said of the workers who did most of the hard physical work of unearthing and restoring the statues. Most of those recruited to curator Yuan Zhongyi’s archaeological team found themselves working round the year with only a break at the time of the Spring Festival holiday for a wage of only 1.72 yuan (US $0.28) a day in 1976 [Zhao Xu, ‘Yang Zhifa, 76, soldiers on amid terracotta warriors’, (09-XII-2014),China Daily USA, www.chinadaily.com].
“The three in the middle just moved!” ⤴
The Hydro Majestic Hotel stands on the upper slopes of the Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains, about 116 kilometres west of the Sydney CBD. Last December it re-opened for business six years after it’s resale and interim closure in 2008. The new owners, the Escarpment Group (a consortium of Sydney developers headed by Huong Nguyen and George Saad), have an ambitious vision for the Medlow Bath hotel, including an extension to its facilities and services, and a major renovation of the once great Blue Mountains landmark to restore some of its past glory. About four years passed before construction work even commenced on the site. Initially the new owners had to undertake a big clean-up job of the vacated property as a very large amount of assorted clutter was left behind by the previous occupants [‘Saving a grand old beauty’s soul’, Peter Munro, Traveller, 7 January 2013, www.traveller.com.au].
Mark Foy’s Liverpool St store
Foy’s Blue Mountains ur-health resort
Upon completion in 1904 Foy opened his Medlow Bath hydropathic sanatorium (the first health resort in NSW) which he named the Hydro-Majestic. By this time whatever springs were present (if they ever existed) had dried up. Consequently Foy imported large quantities of mineral water from Germany for use in his establishment [www.hydromajestic.com.au (Wikipedia entry)]. He also introduced a German-manufactured generator to supply the Hotel and the surrounding township with electricity (purportedly four days before the city of Sydney achieved electricity!) [www.hydromajestic.com.au, ibid.].
Mark Foy Jr
Majestic skyline
‘The Lost World’
The Hydro – in its down-market days
A Zimmerman
In keeping with the hybrid nature of the hotel, parts of the new Hydro Majestic exude a distinctly oriental flavour. The Salon Du Thé features a Shanghai chic tea room and bar and both it and the Cat’s Alley reprise many of the oriental traits of the original 1900s Medlow hotel which featured a Chinoiserie style favoured by Mark Foy. The Majestic’s original Salon Du Thé displayed ornaments and furnishings which included large Chinese vases and porcelain vessels, bamboo-look furniture and silk umbrellas [www.hydromajestic.com.au].
Above: Flagship of the Mark Foy’s retail empire. The city department store opened in 1885, moving to the Liverpool Street site in 1909 where an ice skating rink was installed on the 5th floor in 1950 for “Fashion Fantasy on Ice” parades. In 1980, having been earlier acquired by Waltons it ceased trading permanently. Today the monolithic heritage building renamed the Downing Centre functions as a state courthouse.
Auckland village, above M&C Falls (ECP)
Even before “The Lord of the Rings” movie series some Hogsback locals did their best to capitalise on a handful of tenuous links with the celebrated Lord of the Rings author. The story goes, the ‘Rings’ books were inspired by the magical, enchanting physical form of Hogsback. The proponents of this theory point to the fact that Tolkien was born in South Africa (in Bloemfontein, Free State). The thesis loses traction when probed more closely. The famous author and avid philologist left South Africa at the tender age of three, never to return and having not ever visited Hogsback.
The Tolkien Middle Earth connection is often emphasised in print, such as in the following: “The romance of Hogsback, is recognised by reading The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) which seems to capture the special atmosphere of the unspoilt Hogsback forests and of a time when peace will rule the world” [Trevor Webster, The Story of Hogsback, www.hogsback.com].
Talking to the staffer in the Hogsback Visitors Information Centre, she was unequivocally dismissive of the Tolkien LOTR nexus. So the lingering myth clearly wasn’t emanating from the likes of her! She also warned me against buying the primitive wooden toy horses and zebras in the street from members of the local Xhosa community. The street sellers, looking cold and dismal in the freezing conditions, were only asking R2 an animal, but the Visitors Centre lady explained that they are not properly gazed and sealed, making them a prohibited item to export out of RSA. Apparently a local artisan/sculptor had offered to glaze the artworks for the community at minimal cost so that they could charge more for the figurines, but his offer had not been taken up.
So, how plausible is the link between “Middle Earth” of Lord of the Rings and the sleepy, little village of Hogsback? Clearly, as stated above, JRR Holkien had no direct association with Hogsback, having left South Africa at age three. Information on Tolkien’s life however, suggest the existence of an indirect link. One of Tolkien’s sons, whilst in the Royal Air Force during WWII, was stationed at Hogsback and did correspond regular with the author with his reflections on the locale. These correspondences from Tolkien Junior included sketches and descriptions of the Hogsback ambience [Ibid.].
The Hog’s back!
HP site
Mirafores
Govt House: Changing of the Guard
Convento
Convent garden
Upon my return to Miraflores I got out at the start of Av Petit Thouars & wandered through the various native markets in the street. I was surprised to find them called “Indian Markets” as everyone in Peru seems to refer to the indigenous population as the ‘community’, Christopher Columbus’ word doesn’t appear to be in use. I had gone to the Miraflores tourist strip to get a souvenir of Amazonia. Whilst I was in that vast eastern jungle I had “ummed-and-ahhed” about getting an Amazonas shirt, coming close to buying a suitably inscribed sweater in the Posada shop but deciding that they were asking too much for it. So in the end, typically, I didn’t buy anything there, now I was trying to make amends by finding a late memento of the place.
Whilst searching in vain for the Amazonas T-shirt I noticed they had “Cholo Potter” and “Cholisimpsons” T-shirts, so The idea came to me to see if I could find a Tintin T-shirt with a Peruvian motif as I had for equivalent Tintin’s in Istanbul, Beijing & Tibet previously (I also knew there had been a comic book “Tintin & the Inca Prisoners”). I tried explaining the concept of Tintin to the stallholders … small, neat blonde boy with a kiss-curl and a little dog, looks a bit like a juvenile Kevin Rudd, the boy, not the dog! They didn’t have a clue about Tintin! I explained how globally famous Tintin was, one guy was interested in the marketing op and said he’d try to produce a “Tintin in Peru” T-shirt for next year. I didn’t introduce the thorny subject of copyright, but I figure that he would have viewed that with as much concern as he probably gave to the Cholo Potter venture!
Peruvian burqa?
Back in the Antigua I gravitated to JJ’s bar once more, this time steering well clear of the Pisco sours I tried a couple of the local craft brews in preference to the standard industrial cerveza, Cusquena. One, called Pilsner Callao, was OK but the strong-tasting Barbarian was too dark and bitter for my liking. JJ informed me that Barbarian was very popular at rugby restobars in Lima, which I can believe. This night the bar was more popular with the Aussie tourists and I exchanged a few stories of the Peruvian experience.
The next morning I walked down to the beach park (Playa Waikiki) to glimpse a look at the Ocean. Unfortunately a more or less permanent mist sitting about 100 metres offshore precludes any decent view of the Pacifico. The number of neatly-groomed dogs haring happily around the ocean parks suggests that dogs, not cats, are the preferred pets for Peruvians. On the way back I pass the Liverpool Restobar, a Beatles-themed shrine of remembrance for the fabled ‘Fab Four’ (still big in Lima?)…seeing that the four mop-tops disbanded the “Big B” for good in 1969, I like the sound of “Liverpool Retrobar” better for this establishment.
The Lovers’ Kiss
Antigua Miraflores
Somewhat disappointed—the first time round in Lima I had been unhesitatingly and unambiguously offered a complimentary Pisco sour on I arrival at the Costa del Sol at Jorge Chávez—nonetheless I decide to head for the hotel bar anyway. I am warmly welcomed by the young Limanese bartender whose nombre is Juan José (‘JJ’ he proffers for guest convenience), he is one super–animated, wound-up dude. As we engage in light badinage, I’m trying to work him out, his exaggerated theatrical flourishes make me wonder if he’s a struggling actor making ends meet behind the bar. Later on when I get accustomed to him, I think the hyper-talking JJ is just sort of high.
As I sip my obligatory Pisco sour JJ (or Jota-Jota) is only too happy to tell me all about his hopes and aspirations to leave the provincial confines of Peru and escape to the US where the opportunities to succeed are plentiful (or so he believes). The longer we talk, the more I sense that the effusive JJ is on “something”. This becomes wholly apparent when he starts asking questions about my homeland while examining a map of New South Wales online. He asks where you find pot in my home state. I tell him about Nimbin, the weed-friendly town and marijuana capital of New South Wales…he is greatly interested. While I enjoy my second Pisco I let JJ play around with my iPad. “What are you googling?”, I ask JJ?”, “I’m looking for weed”, the answer comes. “I like weed”. My suspicions confirmed, the friendly if somewhat outrageously behaved JJ is one serious devotee of ganja weed.
Potent Pisco
JFK statue in his eponymous park
Parque Kennedy Flea Markets
I breakfast with Stephen and Judy the next morning. Judy, confides that she is given to certain (unnamed) medical conditions and pulls out a multitude of different coloured pills and proceeds to progressively down each one with every separate morsel of breakfast. I think I just found the empirical evidence for my earlier assumption.
Insulated inside room 206, upstairs in Hotel El Promedio Anodino Casa, I didn’t really hear much noise during the night. But by the time I came down for El desayuno I realised that the wrecking gang had been at it all night demolishing the building across the road. This day, I had the relative luxury of not having to make my transfer until around 9 o’clock, so I loitered over breakfast. 
I was back down at pick up time, but had several minutes to kill as the driver hadn’t arrived by 9. I joined the lineup of Hotel staff milling around the front door who were absolutely entranced by the spectacle of the demolition job which was tearing up the street under the guise of levelling the doomed building. Fortunately the glass front door was closed, saving everyone in the foyer from being overcome by a myriad of dust diseases. Dust abounded all over the street, which was semi-obstructed for traffic before the work started and now was totally impassable as rubble had piled up and been strewn across the street. The young hotel workers were revelling in the “Whelan the Wrecker” show on display, which was undoubtedly more fun than trying to placate surly guests or cleaning up after messy ones.
Hotel street before it was totally consumed in rubble & dust
We drive out of Puno, I grab my last glimpse of Lago Titikaka and we wind our way up the hills north towards Juliaca. The same recurring features on the sides of the road that I had seen during the last 100km of the journey to Puno reappear. At random intervals, there is the presence of stray dogs on the side of the highway, kilometres from anything or anyone else, as if they had been mysteriously dropped there by some secret canine transit service. The driver tells me that people do occasionally stop and dump scraps of food for the highway for them, that’s why they hang around in the middle of nowhere with the semblance of an expectant look on their faces. 
The Inka Instrumental Trio
A pretty smooth, short flight and I was back at Jorge Chávez. By-passing the money-exchangers who had wanted to shortchange me the first time round, I found my transfer straight away. In the vehicle the driver had his wife and tiny child along for the ride. They were a pleasant couple and I shared some of my special Cusco dark chocolate with them. Although Miraflores looked quite close to the Airport on the map, it still seemed like a long trip in the car (traffic full-on same as last time). As we get close to Miraflores, the humble shantytowns and shacks give way to the decidedly upmarket casas and haciendas of my West Lima neighbourhood.
I was collected at the Casa Andina at 7am by yet another braces-wearing Peruvian guide to drive to the (inland) port. The port was quite close by, but as usual we had to go via umpteen other hotels to pick up the other passengers. When we eventually got to the Titicaca dock we were swarmed upon by a small battalion of lakeside Indian women trying to entice us to buy a bargain-priced hat or two from a broad assortment they were either carrying or wearing.
Totora reeds, Puno
The Uros, cutoff from the World in this way, survive by fishing (the Lake is stocked with Canadian trout and Argentinian kingfish) and by trading the goods and materials they produced for food from the surrounding larger islands. I couldn’t help wondering about the kind of alternative, parallel life they lived, living freely for sure, but living in a very enclosed, claustrophobic world – to my eyes. Walking around the uneven reed floor of the island was a novel and strange experience.
Reed boat
Left the Sorgente hotel in Puerto Iguazú to get an early start for the bus ride to the falls area. When we arrived there were already a great number of visitors lining up at the entrance – international visitors, nationals (Buenos Aireans and from elsewhere in the country), school groups, and so on.
Train thru the jungle to the Falls
El Diablo
Cory – the long-nosed Argie coatí
As 80 per cent of the waterfalls are on the Argentinian side of the river, the best panoramic views tend to be from the Brazilian side or from the river itself. So, I decided on the optional speedboat ride (Macuco Safari Boat Ride) under the waterfalls itself, which was a great thrill. Be forewarned though that YOU WILL get drenched by the falls and from the motion of the boat rapidly swerving from side to side (make note to bring or wear swimmers on the falls tour).
Paseo Inferior
Route 68: Political blots on the beautiful landscape
Valpo’s kaleidoscope of colour!
Palacio Buburizza
City ascensor
Santo Domingo
Unaytambo
Qoricancha
Cobbled street going down to Plaza de Armas
Cusco is of course a tourist mega-magnet, and has much by itself to recommend it, quite apart from its function as a launchpad for embarking on the ritualistic ‘mecca’ to Machu Picchu. It has heaps of interesting things to see, including San Pedro Mercado (where you can buy all manner of exotic and sometimes bizarre produce), the imposing El Catedral, the Inka Museo, and countless restaurants where you can try llama, ceviche and roasted guinea pig, or if you prefer, something slightly less adventurous. There are faux museums too, it must be said. The Chocomuseo and the Pisco (Sour) Museum are respectively, a shop and a bar. Totally transparent, they don’t even attempt to thinly disguise this fact, notwithstanding their names.
Inka Museo entrada
Andahualillas facade
San Pedro’s Basilica
Raqchi casa
Wiracocha
Colonial church
Dusty main drag of Juliaca
Transzelo, Pan-Am Hwy
The next day on my itinerary there was a trip scheduled to Peru’s own home-grown contender for “8th Wonder of the World”, Machu Picchu. The trip started badly (again), the driver arrived 10 minutes late. Then after getting away, we had got as far as the outskirts of the Municipalidad when as a matter of course I queried the driver to make sure he was in possession of my tickets for the rail journey and entrance to the Inca site. Incredibly he didn’t have them! He thought I had them! He quickly phoned the tour organiser who indicated that the hotel receptionist was holding the tickets and had been supposed to have given them to me when we left. The driver sped back to Utaytambo nearly cleaning up half a dozen semi-comatose early morning strollers ambling insouciantly across the road on the way. Fortunately the errant but smiling receptionist was waiting outside in the road with the tickets, so the driver was able to curtly grab them and hare off once again without getting out of the vehicle.
The Andes
At Aguas Calientes the local Chimu reps with their yellow T-shirts were fortunately easy to spot in the tangled mass of humanity at the station gate. From there we were rushed off to the coaches which delivered thousands of visitors nonstop to the Machu Picchu site. The ride up the mountain was an adventurous one owing to the narrow, rough zig-zagging road and the propensity of the drivers to hurl their coaches blindly around curves in the road! At 2,430 metres above sea level Machu Picchu is very high but still considerably lower than Cusco and other locations in the Urubamba Valley.
Fortress? Palace? Temple?
Our guide showed us some of the more notable features, such as the Sun Temple and the sculpture known as the “Eyes of Pachamama” (two carved circles in the ground) and the Inyiwatana, a rock pillar with profound astronomical significance for the Incas. He also pointed out the line formed in the mountains that represents the hiking trail that leads to Machu Picchu. I observed countless modern-day Hiram Binghams embarking on two or four day hikes in the footsteps of that famous first trek to this archaeological magnet.
El Obreros, MP
Eyes of Pachamama
Huanya peak
Getting back to the base camp of Aguas Calientes early I had a lot of time to waste before the departure time for my return train to Poroy. After a pizza lunch (quite cod-ordinary) and a much needed cerveza, I wandered through the many tourist shops and the main mercado and accidentally struck a better bargain than I had intended to with a native vendor on bulk place mats (verifying as if I needed to be reminded that I am much more successful when I don’t try!).
Urubamba River from MP
Inka animal myth costumes, Aguas Calientes town
The Andes, postcard perfect!
This morning I was scheduled to go on the first part of the Sacred Inca Trail tour. I was collected early at my hostela by someone I would come to call Braces Guide # 1, she took me to my coach for the Inca Trail trip. We stopped on the way out of Cusco and took on more passengers. I had been noticing that all of the passengers on the coach seemed to be Spanish or Spanish speakers, but without actually realising that something was awry.
Llama waystation, Cuzco
Pisac
Inca Citadel, Pisac
The road along the Inca Trail was shockingly bad considering that this was a primary tourist route, and there was an amazing amount of rubbish strewn all over it. There were reminders of Australia in the countryside as early 20th century Peruvians had planted countless eucalyptus trees, known for their fast growing quality, on the sides of the Trail. So far my stay in the Cusco area I hadn’t experienced any side effects of the altitude but on the Sacred Trail journey I started to get a touch of the dreaded Cusco belly. I wasn’t dizzy or light-hearted or suffering from a headache but I was feeling drained and weak from a bout of diarrhoea. The Spanish on the tour kept to themselves and didn’t seem to have any English to speak off, fortunately the guide was quite competent in the language.
Ollantaytambo temple climb
View of courtyard from top of Ollantaytambo temple
Monotaxi, Ollan
Ollantaytambo
Stores & granaries in mountain, Ollantaytambo
Chinchero Native Market
Cuzco Aeropuerto
Unaytambo Hotel
Steep & cobbly surfaces, Cuesta del Almirante
St Sunday Cathedral
Given that Cusco is 3,300 metres above sea level I had been forewarned about the risk of soroche (altitude sickness) and was advised to take the coca plant as an antidote, either by chewing the leaves or in tea. At the hotel I decided on the coca de mate (the coca tea method) and started drinking it night and morning. It was not immensely palatable but tolerable none the less because it had a fairly neutral taste. Once you got used to it, it tasted a bit like very weak green tea.
Temple of the Sun remains
San Pedro Mercado
Llama Corner
Museo Inka
Paititi 2 Forks Restaurant
When I got to the airport to catch my flight to the next destination, Puerto Maldonado, I found there were huge queues at the domestic airline check-in, and LAN had one line only open. After 15 minutes in the queue, the line had hardly moved, so I switched to the next line (also LAN) which had only a handful of passengers in it. After some time in this line, a LAN staff person came up and ejected me from the line, because apparently this was for ‘special’ check-ins. I remonstrated loudly with the staff, saying that LAN should have more than one lane open to cope with the overflow of passengers, but they would not budge, so I found myself relegated to the end of a now much longer queue. After three-quarters of an hour and little progress, it was pretty apparent that I would miss my flight. And I would have done so, had not a savvy American traveller I was talking with alerted LAN to my plight. The LAN staff person OK’d me to go straight to the departures gate carting my luggage with me. The sudden spike in passenger numbers at the airport was down to the school holidayers starting their trips, which underlined just how inept LAN was in planning for this annual occurrence. The plane flew first to Cusco for a stopover before going on to the Amazonia region. The Cusco trip turned into a wild salsa party, courtesy of the Latinos on board raucously singing, bumping and grinding their hips to the cabin music most of the way. Even some of the LAN cabin staff were getting into the action, turning up the volume on the music and dancing enthusiastically to the rhythm. I for one was relieved when most of these out-of-control Peruvian 20-somethings danced their way off the plane when it landed at Cusco! On the onward trip to Maldonado, the normal and more subdued in-flight entertainment replaced the passenger-generated entertainment. We were collected by a bus at the less than impressive Puerto Maldonaldo Aeropuerto. The posada lodgers gathering together in the bus were a very mixed group, nationality-wise. I had a nice conversation with two friendly American guys on the bus (not the typical loud, boastful type). On the advice of Lizbeth (our guide) to travel light, we unloaded all of the baggage not needed for the three-day trip to Amazonia in a secure storage holding (at least I was hoping it would be secure). At the river (Rio Tambopata), we took the long boat trip to the resorts (the bus group were going to three different lodges), fortunately ours’ was the closest.
Looking around the streets of BA I notice a real cosmopolitan flavour in the faces of the Portenos, compared to the more homogeneous-looking Chileans. Whereas Chileans tend towards a mestizo or native countenance and are shorter in stature, Argentinians, in the capital anyway, tend to have more of a European appearance (Spanish/Italian/German). The women, especially, on the whole are appreciably taller than Chilean women, and with a high proportion of blondes. I observed the cosmopolitan nature of the city within the hotel as well. The bellhop helping lug my suitcase up to the room was a friendly, young Armenian migrant called Haug. I engaged him in an interesting conversation and mention a curious incident in Australia which more than intrigues him (given his ethnic background), the backstory behind the mystifying murder of the Turkish consul in Sydney in the 1990s.
Tango in the street
… or pretend to tango!
25th May Square
Guys & dolls in Boca
Recoleta from the Mall
Tango Club in Balcarce
On the catwalk at the Devil’s Gorge
Iguazú Falls are a cis-trans-border phenomenon, encompassing both Brazil and the Argentine, with a third country, Paraguay, on the same river very approximate to the location. My hotel in Puerto Iguazú, La Sorgente, is not old but its not new either, and the room door uses those old cumbersome latchkeys which I always have trouble with, but that aside, it is a quite reasonable lodging (outstanding even if I might extend to hyperbole, if the point of comparison is the dire AH Hotel in Santiago!) After settling into my room, I wander up for a look round the town. Frankly, it is a quite unprepossessing place, old dilapidated buildings, many signs have faded or partially unhinged. The surface pavement(sic) of the roads are a strange and primitive concoction of jagged pieces of broken rock mortared together, the result of which is unfriendly to both car tyres and human feet. The local youths seem to spend all day cruising up and down Avenida Cordoba in their defect-laden, beat-up old cars, their hands manically tooting the horn for no reason. And, as in Chile, the many mangy-looking, roaming dogs are an integral feature of the rundown local ‘picturesque’. Whatever money the Government makes from Iguazú Falls tourism (and I imagine it would be lucrative), by the look of this place it is certainly not being pumped back into the Iguazu infrastructure!
Sth America’s Waterworld
Paseo Inferior
La Catarata
Presidential Palace: Allende’s last stand
Peaceful demonstration in Plaza de Armas – still Santiago’s la policia are out in force.
Traffic lights juggler, Bellavista
Santa Lucia Hill: Best views from Santiago
Worker protest against the authorities, a Santiago way of life!
As we head down Route 68 for the Pacific Coast, massive advertising billboards announcing the upcoming Chilean elections blot the landscape. These unsubtle messages are of course positive reinforcement to the voters of the merits of candidates and their parties. One element of this political advertising that you wouldn’t see in Australia is that the prominent female candidates running for presidential office are identified on the mega-billboards solely by their nombres (first names). Michelle (the former president) and Evelyn (the right-wing challenger), are presumably well enough known politicians to make a connection with the electorate on the basis of presenting to the public as mononymic (one name only). Their parties’ respective spin doctors and marketeers would be only too aware of the advantages of establishing familiarity and therefore trust. Using the first name of the candidate projects a more intimate, friendly connection, they appear more accessible to (and for) the masses (in the Americas context, Evita’s use of a mononymic identity comes immediately to mind). While we are traversing the countryside, Adrian informs the group of Chile’s peculiar “obsessive-compulsive disorder” with the tuber – Chile produces some 3,800 species of potatoes (who’d have thought there was that many or that much point of difference!). Apparently, Chile and Peru vie with each other as potato producers, each asserts that IT produces the most varieties in the world of the humble spud!
Ampitheatre ‘roof’
Valparaiso: murals & colour
Ascensores: the quick way back to sea-level