While Stocks Last

Foreign Objects Part I: The Bidet

2010-05-01T16:58:00.000Z

This is the first in a series of who knows how many (probably one) that highlights everyday objects that one might find here in Italy but not where I come from (or vice versa).

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who suffer from a classical education, and those who suffer from the lack of one. Being a member of the second group, every now and then I pick up a book that looks like it might fill in these kinds of gaps (erm, lacunae?), in some vague and vain attempt to upgrade my quiz level from Blockbusters (I'll have 'p' please, Bob) to University Challenge (Here's your starter for 10). The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton was just such a book, but it had the most unexpected of side-effects. It made me fall in love with a French man. Not De Button himself (who is actually Swiss-born and English-educated) but a certain Michel de Montaigne, an important figure in philosophy of whom I was completely ignorant. Falling in love with a man - and a French one at that - is inconvenient for a married heterosexual father of two. That the chap has been dead for over 400 years makes the whole situation more difficult to resolve - though easier to ignore.

So why did I fall in love with Montaigne? Well for one, because this particular philosopher wrote about farting. He wrote about a great deal more of course, but he considered no subject that was relevant to humans to be out of bounds. On the ceiling of his study, amongst the dozens of other quotes, was a motto from Terence (whoever he is) "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto": I am a man. I consider nothing that is human alien to me. In writing about every intimate angle of our existence, Montaigne has given us all permission to be fully and unashamedly human, and has freed us from the ugly suspicion that our private lives and thoughts are often beyond the bounds of what is permitted - or worse - what is 'normal'.

And if that wasn't enough, he also gives me the permission to write about that most worrisome of Southern European household fixtures: the bidet. The mere word has enough echoes of titillation and disgust in the Anglo-Saxon world to render it almost taboo. Certainly not a subject for polite conversation. Besides its base function, the main sin of the bidet that it is foreign, and therefore automatically deserving of suspicion. Which brings me straight back to Montaigne.

This was a man who refused to be bound by the narrow confines of nationality. He lived in France but his mind had been influenced from the beginning by the teaching and writings of a host of others from far and wide. "Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to". For him, the human experience was too vast and too varied to be contained by the laws and morals of any one country. That's not to say that he was a cultural relativist either: Everything could be judged, but should only be judged on its own merits and not one what national borders contained it.

So to my fellow non-Italians, and all other readers who might have acquired a firm though unarticulated mistrust of the bidet, I would like to try to rehabilitate this particular foreign object. Not because it is foreign, but because it is, in and of itself, an item of great and universal value to hairy-arsed humans everywhere.

Consider the problem, and its known solutions.

The problem (and one rather impractical solution) can best be considered through an old joke that I first heard when I was around 10:

A bear is in the woods, doing what bears are famous for doing in the woods, when a rabbit hops by. By way of making conversation, the bear asks the bunny "So. Does the shit stick to your fur when you go for a dump?"
The rabbit, in an understanding tone, answers "Oh yeah man, all the time".
So the bear picks up the rabbit and wipes his ass with it.

I apologise. Not for the crudity but because I'm sure you've heard the joke already.

Where I come from, there is one and only one socially acceptable solution to the above problem (I will spare you another joke about a Kerryman who goes to the city to buy a toilet brush). And we are all the poorer for it. We consider it somewhat louche and Mediterranean to want to transfer, post-poop, from the toilet to the bidet. But we see nothing wrong with scrubbing ritually for minutes, adhering to the long-disproved myth that this will actually result in a clean backside. I am a scientist by both inclination and training and I have a lifetime of control experiments, erm, behind me. I am here to tell you that nothing, but nothing, beats a bidet for that 'fresh feeling'. And all the multi-ply, extra long, fluffy labradors in the world will never change that fact.

So take a lesson from Montaigne, the philosopher who ridiculed the tiny differences in national custom that we like to exalt into profound philosophical divides. He, it must be admitted, knew his shit.

A match made in heaven...

(Somebody's bidet - certainly not mine)

Where was I?

2010-04-12T06:00:00.000Z

It's been so long since I've blogged here that it's pointless picking up from where I left off. It's been more than eight months since our move to Cagliari, so I'm going to jump straight in and try to give you a feel for the place over the next few posts.

Titles

There's something that I've come to understand after years of moving around: it's easy to like a place enough to want to live in it; it's quite another matter liking it enough to want to die there. There's a cemetery not far from where we live, and absurd as it may sound to some, it's a beautiful place to take a walk. They don't bury folks there any more - it's more of a monument than a functional graveyard - but it contains enough generations of cagliaritani to be considered a museum of personal histories.

The trees and tombs form orderly ranks and files stretching away from the main gate, and upwards along the slopes to the right. In the lower terraces, simple plaques set into uniform walls mark the final resting place of most of Bonaria Cemetary's residents. Further up the south-facing slopes, above the tree line and warmed by the year-round sun, mausoleums and miniature chapels hoist important surnames high above the hoi-polloi.

Italy is considered by many to be a nation of individualists, and I think this is more or less correct. The general disdain in which Italians (as a group) hold other Italians (as a group) is evident in everything from the polemic nature of public discourse to the no-prisoners-taken attitude on the roads here. But Italy is also a place where deference to one's social 'superiors' is evident. Titles and positions are not only prominently on display on letterboxes, business cards - and gravestones - but almost piously observed in communications. It's practically an insult to refer to somebody simply as signore (sir) when you know damn well he's a lawyer and should be addressed as avvocato. The titles can get humourously out-of-hand. Onorevole, meaning honourable, is used to refer to members of the lower house of parliament and is used regularly on TV and in public without any irony whatsoever. My personal favourite, which I discovered only recently, is the title accorded to the dean of a university: rettore magnifico - Magnificent Rector. If you write to the head of your university, it is with this absurdity that you must begin your letter.

Deference and individualism might seem like opposites at first glance, but they can co-exist quite easily when you remember that deference only requires the appearance of respect. Geert Hofstede (hat-tip to Dale Wyttenbach) has compiled country-by-country values of something called a Power Distance Index, which attempts to measure the degree to which people at the bottom of the social heap accept and expect that power is not shared equally. In other words, it is an indication of how willingly those with little power accept their lot.

(In fact if I do a comparison between my own native culture in Ireland, and that of Italy, I find that we are not terribly well suited from the point of view of risk aversion or deference to authority.)

Però

I've had countless animated conversations with Italians in general, and Sardinians in particular, about the many and varied problems facing this region and this county. The dynamics of such conversations follow a consistent pattern. My Italian friends begin by slamming complaints on top of each other, books of evidence piled up against the criminal state of affairs here. Then the pace quickens and the anger deepens into a downward spiral that can sometime end up in absurd or paranoid claims about how this is the worst place in the world to live and how it will never change. And then, in the end and when you least expect it, the diatribe pivots on a single word: però. (But. However. All the same.)

"Però ci si sta bene". (It's a nice place to live all the same.)

I don't know if Bonaria Cemetary (Cimitero di Bonaria) appears on any guide books, but if you find yourself in Cagliari and in need of some respite - and a great view of the city - then you could do worse than to spend some time here. Me, I could happily spend an eternity there.

Però...

Badly Behaved Children

2009-08-22T04:34:00.002Z

No less than 6 weeks have passed since we rolled off the ferry in Porto Torres and officially began to call Sardinia 'home'. The last 2 of those weeks I've spent back in Cork for work. My complete inability to blog in the 4 weeks in Sardinia is an indication of how completely and quickly I've settled in. I find that I can blog when I'm on the road (I'm writing this from Cork airport on my way back, erm, home, to Cagliari), but I haven't yet found a place in my normal life's routine for this activity. I will, though. Promise. In the meantime, I'll catch up where I left off.

We left peaceful Brittany and made the 4-hour drive (in five-and-a-half hours) to Paris, a place that by contrast manages to make an awful lot of noise. New York might be the city that never sleeps, but Paris is the city that never shuts up. It even snores. Certainly the Quartier Latin where we were based, has a variety of auditory expressions that would rival a philharmonic orchestra. The morning is announced by rubbish trucks and delivery vans, emptying the detritus of the previous night's excesses, and stocking up for the reprise. They are kept company by the bells of nearby churches, each with a slightly different opinion as to when the hour strikes, and how it should best be announced. The Greek restaurants start their plate-smashing from around 6 in the evening, competing with all the other tourist restaurants for the cobble-weary, knapsacked footfall. The buskers kick in on every corner with a different instrument and genre, which mixes into perfect dissonance by the time it reaches our window on the second floor of Rue Saint Severin. The final movement of the day's symphony includes a clutch of beer-soaked choristers, shouting instructions to each other from distance of 1 meter or less, before rolling in to passing taxis, or passing out in hotel foyers. The curtain goes down. You may sleep now. You have 4 hours before the garbage collection begins again.

Paris was our first city together. Letizia and I met in Dublin, but shared our first address in Paris. We stayed there long enough to know it as a living city rather than a collection of monuments. Paris is one of our horcruxes - we embedded a little splinter of ourselves here. Every time we come back, we experience a familiarity that disarms the foreboding of its features and facades. But we know its disadvantages too. I associate Paris with fatigue. It is a place that sucks the energy out of you - though of course you may enjoy the experience. Paris (within the peripherique) is a relatively small city when compared to say London, and it has a public transport system that works well. But somehow, inexplicably, everything you want to do takes a lot of time, and every joule of energy you spend seems to attract a hefty tiredness tax. (This isn't just me showing my age - I remember the very same effect 15 years ago as a - sigh - young man.) The street drains you with every footstep. It surely didn't help that for our three days there, most of those steps led from one clothes shop to the next or from one Disney attraction to the next.

For those readers who followed us around the world on this blog, I can tell you that my duties as a shopping companion correspond very closely with those of Assistant to Official Tour Photographer. In both roles, the most frequent instruction (by now unspoken, but completely understood) is 'hold my bag and keep out of the way'. Such is my expertise on the matter, I can offer tours of Paris' most authentic shopping experiences, complete with an explanation of where to find a place to sit down in even the most minimalist of shop interiors.

One thing that surprises a lot of visitors is how well and how *cheaply* one can eat in Paris. The high price of beer no longer leaves the Post Celtic Tiger Irishman breathless, but the low price of food - if you go to the right place - still has the power to shock. One of the most enjoyable was a fresh noodle restaurant recommended to us by our Sardinian friend Silvia who came to live in Paris around the same time we did and lives there still. Paris isn't the only thing Silvia and we have in common. Silvia also has a daughter called Nina - though much younger than our own. When dining together with friends and their children, sometimes a little patience is called for from all parties, and the younger the child, the more patience is required. In such circumstances, I would not normally complain about the behaviour of a friend's offspring, and certainly not on such a public forum as this (Silvia is a reader of this blog). But I have to make an exception in little Nina's case, when we met up with Silvia for noodles one lunchtime. Perhaps it was the heat of the day, perhaps the noise of the waiters shouting at each other in French and Mandarin, but this young lady did nothing but irritate her mother from the dumpling starter to the final sip of coffee. At one stage - I'm not making this up - she actually kicked Silvia. I did my best to look the other way, and pretend that nothing had happened, but obviously it was a very awkward moment. All I can hope for is that her behaviour gets better after she is born.

Afloat Again, Happily

2009-07-09T07:45:00.003Z

We have just spent our 5th night on the road: one night on the ferry to France, one night in Brittany with our friends the Crowleys (who we believe might still be our friends after our departure - though I might be misinterpreting the nature of their enthusiasm on the morning of our departure as something more substantial than relief), and three nights in my sister-in-law's apartment in Paris (one of which the said sister-in-law was brave enough to spend with us before leaving for the South). Now is as good a time as any to recount some of our travels so far. But in keeping with tradition, it's late and incomplete.

Perros-Guirec is a beautiful resort town on the Northern end of Brittany. It's where Parisians come to unwind, and where our friends Elizabeth and Andrew and their two beautiful and delightful daughters came to live after many years in Cork (Elizabeth is a Breton - or should that be Bretonne?). We woke them up at some unspeakable hour which my watch doesn't even register, and instead of hurling insults and other, heavier, items from their upper windows, they called us in, fed us, and even listened to me drone on and on about how the world was still bobbing up and down after the boat trip. We had driven for an hour to get from the ferry to Perros-Guirec, passing through some very sleepy towns along the way, one of which had a name that demands some attention: Saint-Michel-en-Greve. I happen to know for a fact that this means "Saint Michael on Strike"*. If this kind of stereotypical town-naming is allowed to continue, what's next? An Irish town called Saint Patrick Goes On The Piss. Or somewhere in Essex called Saint George Pines After The Empire?

I digress.

Andrew and Elizabeth took us down to the beach that is the focus of Perros-Guirec, where the girls began to play together in that happily un-selfconscious way that kids of that age still manage. The sun was pleasingly warm without actually hurting, an occasional passing cloud bringing some welcome shade. It was almost perfect. The fly in the ointment was the coefficient, which stood at a disappointing 55 - very low for this time of year, I think you'll agree.

What's that? You don't know what coefficient I'm referring to!? Well, if you ever come to France, and in particular Brittany, you'll want to bone up on this matter, as apparently it forms the basis of some 82% of all conversation you are likely to have with the locals. In fact the best thing you can do, pretty much as soon as you get off the ferry, is make your way to the whiteboard that will be on display somewhere near whatever beach you find yourself on, and memorize the 8 or so meteorological statistics that will be written there. Time of high tide, low tide, air and water temperatures, and of course, the coefficient. It is a very French thing, you will find, to encode all possible facets of daily life into Cartesian co-ordinates. I suspect that the meaning of most of these numbers is immaterial - it is the mere fact that they exist that gives them a sense. They give comfort in an unpredictable world. They tell you that somebody somewhere has a formula, that measurements are being taken at regular intervals, and that answers are being arrived at which eventually find their way onto whiteboards on Breton beaches. And that surely means that the rest of us can relax, or at least restrict our worrying to those results that lie outside seasonal expectations. The other 18% of the time, we can find something else to worry, and converse, about.

After Perros-Guirec we drove to the nearby Ploumanach, a gorgeous coastal town with a particularly unusual setting thanks to the pink granite that forms its border with the sea. Andrew and I settled into an easy dialogue where I would bang on about how, even now, the scenery continued to bob about thanks to my sea-legs, and he would keep mentioning the pink granite. This is the kind of conversational direction that can take hold when two men who don't know much about sports, or indeed tidal coefficients, attempt small talk. As the day wore on, we were forced to abandon the shallow-end chit-chat, and head for the deeper waters of philosophy, software and comparing the Irish with the Bretons. I fear that it is the lot of the ex-pat to continuously compare his homeland and its people with the adopted country of residence. No matter how urbane and well travelled we think we might be, there are some things that will be forever foreign. For Alan, it might be the stuborn French habit of pronouncing 'j' like 'g' and vice versa. For Andrew, the irrational absence of pub-quizes will probably always offend his Irishness. For me? Well, I have my suspicions about what the pebbles on my windscreen will be as I drive towards a new life in Italy. But let's just wait and see, shall we?

Despite their early start the next day, Andrew and Elizabeth kept us company until late, when we all retired to the utter silence of the Breton night. I fell asleep instantly, and slept deeply, rocked to sleep by the last internal eddies of the Atlantic tide.

*Alright - not entirely true. A greve, as well as being a strike, is also the word for a stoney beach. This blog will never let the truth get in the way of a mediocre story, but will at least endeaver to present it as a footnote.

Casting Off

2009-07-03T20:33:00.004Z

It's our last evening in Ireland.

Yesterday, the cut-rate courier arrived at our address to relieve us of 8 boxes of our worldly goods. He arrived late - hours late - emitting, as one English politician famously said of another, "something of the night about him". It appears that his journey was taking him to West Cork after our house so it may very well be that our 8 boxes, packed and prepped for their new Mediterranean home, will make it no further south than Bantry. This is the risk you run when you go for the cheapest bidder - the suspicion, no, the expectation, of disappointment.

And if we lose the boxes? What of it! According to Nina, we'll just go look for them. It will be an excuse for another round-the-world trip, hunting down the boxes. A global treasure hunt where the prize is a few copper pots, cookery books, stuffed toys, jigsaws, and the occasional old friend.

In managing the move, we have done a triage: What do we need on the road or immediately on arrival? (Packed in car.) What do we need soon after arriving? (Boxes by courier.) What do we need once we have established ourselves in Cagliari? (Removal company.) There is a fourth category, into which I suspect most of our 'stuff' belongs. But it has been years now that making bonfires on one's own back garden has been against the law, so it'll just stay here indefinitely. Perhaps I can get NAMA to take it on?

The trip itself can be broken into three sections (and easily reassembled, one hopes). Brittany, where we impose ourselves for the night with our friends Andrew and Elizabeth, formerly of this parish. Paris, where we impose ourselves for 3 nights with Letizia's sister Giovanna (our New Zealand fellow traveller). And Piedmont in North Italy, where we will impose ourselves on the Biaggi family, who we are accustomed to meet on the beaches of Sardinia (I wonder if we'll recognize each other with our clothes on). If this trip had a theme it could be "How to travel long distances without forking out for a hotel room". Simon and Leah in Brisbane will attest to our ability to make ourselves at home in a place that somebody else already made theirs (guys - I wish your place was on the way too - I could really do with an evening on your couch, drinking your beer, and hogging your conversation.)

In total, we're looking at around 1600km of driving - that's a little less than Santiago de Chile to Iquique, or a little more than Canberra to Melbourne and back (raising the obvious question, why would you go back to Canberra?) But I can't wait to get on the road. The emotion of motion is already clouding my thoughts, to the point where I almost don't care where we end up. A wrong turn could take us anywhere. And that's OK by me. All roads lead to Home.

Even if it turns out to be Bantry.

Cardboard Boxes and Metal Hearts

2009-07-02T06:52:00.005Z

Over the last few weeks, I've been asked 'Are you packing?' more often than a buyer at a drug deal. The answer until now has always been 'no' (leading naturally to a quick frisk, just to make sure). And now, all of a sudden, 8 cardboard boxes are waiting silently in the hall this morning, ready for collection and transport. Tomorrow we'll prepare what is to go in the car with us. The day after, we sail.

Nina and Sara are on a disturbingly even keel. They've had their last day at school, their last art class, and a few other 'lasts', and so far they have kept their heads (when many others around them were losing theirs). I'd like to think that this indicates they are emotionally balanced young ladies, but I have to allow for the possibility that Letizia and I have reared two titanium-hearted sociopaths. Or perhaps more tellingly, that Letizia and I are two titanium-hearted sociopaths, and the two girls never really stood a chance.

The last 2-3 months since Easter have been probably the most socially active time we've had in 9 years in Ireland. There wasn't a weekend where we didn't have somebody to see or something to do. And the weekdays weren't slack either. But this oddly enough makes it easier to say goodbye to Ireland (and the mid-Summer rain that's been dampening spirits over here last week doesn't hurt either). Decorum would demand some regret, some sense of loss. But the only effect that the packing has had on me is to give me bags under my eyes.

It might just be that though we've lived here for 9 years now, we never really unpacked.

Life Part II: Back on the Bus

2009-05-29T20:00:00.000Z

I'll regret this. Probably not as much as you, but I will regret this. I'm going to open this blog up again.

It has been more than eight months since we got back from our around the world trip. That is, we've been back in Ireland longer than we were ever away. The memory of those times is cataloged with all the others of our family life. They weave through the fabric of our family life as easily as we dip in and out of them. Unexpectedly, the memories are sometimes painful. No feelings of regret, just the bruising that comes with seeing how quickly time has gone by. Things happen quickly.

Since our return, I've been to three funerals, one christening and a Holy Communion (that's a lot of church for a heathen like me). My boss nearly got wiped out mountaineering in the Italian Alps (one of his climbing buddies didn't make it). Two uncles, an adoptive grandmother, and a primary school contemporary are no more. And I have finally hit 40. What can I tell you. If mortality were any more in my face, I'd be holding my nose.

But while I am officially in the second half of the game, there is still everything to play for. If there is one thing I know how do well, it's change. Moving. Starting again. (Running away?) And so we're getting back on the bus. We are leaving Ireland and moving to Letizia's home town of Cagliari, Sardinia. (My long-suffering employers have agreed to let me continue working for them from there.)

This move is the excuse I've been looking for to open fire again on this blog. Sardinia is a place I know well, but have never really lived in. It is a place that I have loved and hated for different reasons and in very unequal measure (on balance it is a place that I believe we can safely call home - for a while at least). For what it is worth to you, and for as long as it might last, I propose to offer a view of life on another island, a diary of a relocated family, and whatever else a brewing midlife crisis will provide. I will avoid, unless humour and a good story demands otherwise, the cliche'd rants on overpaid Italian bureaucrats, crazy driving and endemic gangsterism (in any case, my Irish readers won't find anything novel enough in that).

If truth be told I'm not sure where this blog is going. But if you enjoyed following us around the world, tune in and follow our latest attempt to escape from reality.

In Defense of Optimism

2008-09-15T22:22:00.000Z

The first political idea I ever remember absorbing, when I was very young, was that history moves in cycles. The idea came straight from my mother, and because it became so deeply ingrained, I've looked at both history and current affairs though that assumption ever since. When you look at particular episodes of human history, they really do come across as variations on eternal themes. In fact I'd go as far as to say that theories to explain our past are only credible if they take into account these themes. Human history is, after all, build on human nature. And since history began, human nature has changed very slowly, if at all.

I blogged about this while in Arequipa, comparing the Incas' ambitions of empire with those of the Spanish. Later in Cusco I returned to the theme, trying to explain why I couldn't trust our guide Natalie's portrayal of an entirely benign Inca culture. It occurred to me then that what I was saying about human nature probably came across as fatalistic, and even pessimistic. I'm neither of those things, and so for my own peace of mind I can't leave it there. I need to explain myself a little better. For your own peace of mind, you are better off ignoring me.

Fine - stay. But I did give you fair warning.

I said that I was damn glad that Nina and Sara were not born into Juanita's time, or the time of the Santa Catalina nunnery. I am happy that they will have the chance to live beyond a brutal and premature end as a human sacrifice (assuming they behave), and beyond the confines of the cloisters. Of course I should have said time and place. There are parts of this planet where humans, and especially female ones, have strict limits imposed on their aspirations. In the small villages of Peru, like Akorakai, adolescents depend on missions like the Medical Centre of Belen for sexual education, but they are usually delivered, unfortunately, without any reference to artificial contraception because of the Catholic sensibilities of those staffing and running those missions. Early pregnancy is, unsurprisingly, very prevalent in such communities. Today, girls in places like North-East Africa are more likely than not to have their genitalia mutilated in the name of religion or culture. Child labour and soldiery are rampant, and make a mockery of all our fine century's worth of legislation. Nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed. The incubus of medieval superstition and faith-driven barbarism seems to sit on the chest of our pretenses to progress in the industrialised world. We continue to make the same historical mistakes. Today's empires use different instruments to achieve the same ends as
Cortes, Pizzaro, the British admiralty and the Sons of Heaven. And yet - here am I writing about this from the comfort of my kitchen table, with my un-firewalled access to the internet and my uncensored bookshelf to refer to, in a country that less that a century ago was a dominion and now enjoys autonomy. A country that a century ago was ruled as much from Rome as from London, but now respects the necessary gap between church and state. Sitting at the edge of a continent that a century ago was about to descend into bloody civil war, but now has learned the error of its ways. Something surely has changed.

Something has changed, but what? Not human nature. The situation has changed. According to Philip Zimbardo, designer of the Stanford Prison Experiment and author of The Lucifer Effect (how good people turn evil), the situations in which we find ourselves have more of an influence over our behaviour than the kind of person we are. It's obvious that the situations in which we find ourselves are dictated by the systems in which we live, and those in turn are built by history. The way we live today is shaped by the memory of the accumulated mistakes and successes of our planet's past, and as such, it has the capacity to improve.

If you want to fall asleep how do you go about it? (Try to get to the end of this blog entry, I hear you say). You close your eyes, lie down and breathe deeply. In short, you pretend. Sooner or later, depending on how much coffee you've swilled that day, your pretence turns to reality. How does a society shape itself into what it wants to be? It pretends. It makes laws that may or may not be well enforced, may or may not be well supported, perhaps representing merely a cynical ploy from cynical legislators. Give that law a generation or two to bed in, and it becomes the norm, the starting point for the generation of legislators. The abolition of slavery, the introduction of universal suffrage, the abolition of capital punishment (where that has happened) are examples of building society from the facade inwards.

It's ironic that the central argument in the Zimbardo's book, which at first blush seems pessimistic, is actually a great relief. We don't all have to be heroes or saints - this would be impossible. As a group, we just need the right structures in place to keep us civilised. (The subtitle of the book could just as easily be how evil people turn good.) It's possible to see this aspect of our human nature as a reason in itself to be downbeat, and point out that civilization is just a veneer over the beastly truth. But what a veneer! Nobody scoffs at Everest because it's just part of a thin Earth's crust. Nor should they undervalue the veneer of human civilisation. It did not have to come into being. It didn't come about by accident. It arose from our nature as a species. And while we do keep repeating the same mistakes, as our civilisation gets older, and our our various national histories get woven into one international story, we are getting just a little better.

Half a World Away

2008-09-10T09:01:00.001Z

Today I was trading notes with a friend who spent some time in New Zealand. Before ever we left, he and I had talked a little about his time there, spent exclusively on the South Island. Interested though I was back then, it was an entirely different conversation this second time. Once again, being there makes all the difference. The abstract concept that I had mentally filed and labelled 'New Zealand' a year ago has been erased, and in its place are memories of a real country.

I never did find the time in South America to come back to the topic of New Zealand on this blog, so I hope you'll indulge me in a little reverie and soapboxing now.

Two images come immediately to mind when I think back on our time in NZ - especially on the South Island - that were constants in an otherwise ever-changing landscape. Firstly, the braided river systems. Wide stretches of rockstrewn flatlands through which trickled a few inches of water. Every time we drove over a bridge, we saw another one. The second, was the permanent company of birds of prey which hovered over every road we travelled like an Unholy Spirit. Both of these images bring me back immediately to the sensation of motoring though thousands of kilometers of breath-taking New Zealand beauty, and I once again experience the sense of mission and common purpose that seemed to travel with us during those weeks and months.

I'm happy to say, once more, that nostalgia plays no part in these memories, because nostalgia suggests some element of regret. And we regret nothing about NZ - not even saying goodbye when the time came. We had an unforgettable time there, made some new friends (I will email Dee - I really will!), and in 12 weeks we got to almost every angle of those amazing islands. We got, if I can be so mercenary, what we came for.

That said, I can't pretend to really understand New Zealand in any profound way, because I didn't get to understand any New Zealanders very well. They are a welcoming, hospitable people who nevertheless retain a degree of reserve that differentiates them from Australians. This is emphatically not a criticism, just an observation from somebody who has acquired the Irish habit of assuming everybody wants to be his best friend. 'Reserve', to an Irishman, is something one does to a hotel room.

It could be that the difference between Australians and New Zealanders (and in a very tenuous way the difference between the treatment meted out to the Aboriginals and the Maori) can be partly explained by the kind of people who travelled from these islands to those ones, around 150 years ago, to populate the new colony. If Australia was the dumping ground for the criminal class, New Zealand was the Ark that would carry those who wished to leave the iniquities of Britain and found a new Better Britain in the south seas. Christchurch, for example, was founded by an association presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury and whose advertising...

(taken from here)

...sought diligent labourers who could be vouched for by their local clergy. It was altogether a different way of making up the numbers than the policies that were been pursued in Australia. And this goes some way towards explaining why the percentage of Irish in New Zealand has always been much lower in New Zealand than in Australia, English and Scottish being the two dominant colonising cultures. Many generations have come and gone of course, and gold rushes in particular must have changed the composition of the population, but I feel that something of that original conservative and religious character remains around the South Island in general and Christchurch in particular (remember those absurdly long school uniform skirts!?).

But here's the kicker: I suspect that it was because of that streak of religious conservatism that New Zealand established practices that today would be considered the work of liberals. New Zealand was famously the first country in the world (yes, the whole world) to give women the vote. It was also the first, as far as I know, to set up something like social security. It was, in short, a great big open-air social experiment, and Kiwis knew it and were proud of it. They were driven not by a modern radical spirit, but out of a modern application of widely-shared christian values. That coin's other face showed itself too, for example in a relatively late acceptance of legalized homosexuality (1986) - seven years before Ireland, it should be noted, but still tardily at odds with NZ trail-blazing in other matters.

And of course I can't help but wonder whether this deliberately worthy approach to social mores, informed as it was by christian charity, might not have shielded the Maori from some of the worst excesses seen in Tasmania and mainland Australia. Don't get me wrong - the Maori had it bad and for a while it looked like they and their culture wouldn't last. But since 1867 New Zealand provided for Maori representation in parliament. It was only four seats to be sure, a sop with little political power, but it was four more than in any Australian colony, and these crumbs were enough to feed the political ambitions of certain sections of the Maori community, Apirana Ngata perhaps the most famous of these, his bust on prominent display in the foyer of the House of Parliament in Wellington. Mere gestures like those four seats, even if made cynically and in a paternalistic spirit, are made in any case because there is public support for the ideals that they feign. And once institutionalized, they can grow in significance over generations until they finally become what they first only pretended to be.

Today in New Zealand Maori culture is strong. There are problems for sure, but the situation is incomparable to that of the Australian Aboriginal. Anne, whom we met at a Wellington Bookcrosser meeting, told me that Maori in Australia (and there are many) find communicating with Aboriginals there to be as hard as talking with Martians. Some Maori idealists of Anne's acquaintance returned from missions in the Oz outback bitter and even racist.

As I suggested in an earlier blog entry, the Maori themselves were certainly better prepared for Europe's arrival, thanks to their agriculture and all that it led to in terms of social structures and complexity. This social and cultural similarity with Europeans meant that in times of war the Maori were able to fight back and in times of peace there was a great deal of intermarriage. But it was the nature of those who came to settle their lands too, which had an influence on the fate of the Maori, cushioning what might have been a mortal blow.

---

Back in Europe now, and trying to cushion the blow of returning to normal life (a term I can't take seriously), we can't help but look for signs of change and growth in ourselves but especially our kids. Yesterday, Sara demonstrated her new ability to pick things out on our globe here at home. She found all the countries we had been to with relative ease, immediated heading south of the equator, and generally showing a certain ease with the planet that she simply didn't have before we left. Letizia told her to put one index finger on New Zealand and the other on Ireland. Wow! She couldn't get over how far away these two points were from each other - they couldn't possibly be further. It's half a world away. And yet for as long as those braided rivers continue to trickle through my thoughts, and the birds of prey haunt my memory, it will always feel very, very near.

Now, before I disappear up my own artistry, here's a demonstration of how NOT to perform the haka, which I made to the collective embarassment of my family and the combined ridicule of three tables of Japanese tourists in a Rotorua hotel:

Em - that's me on the right, in case you weren't sure.

Family Recreation

2008-09-06T13:47:00.004Z

I'm a man of my word - a few too many words if truth be told. Back in Chile I promised the kids that on our return to Cork I would invest in a game of table soccer (or taca-taca as the Chileans had it). Yesterday, already a bit ragged from my first week's work, I stopped off in Lidl supermarket to buy their special offer. That Lidl had table soccer as a special offer was in itself a sign. It was meant to be. This sport of kings, now our official family sport, was destined to work its way into our home.

Who would have thought that the buggers weighed so much, though. Even with a strapping Pole by the name Piotr helping me to carry it out of the shop, I nearly became the first fatality ever recorded in the annals of the sport of taca-taca, almost flattened by a flatpack. It would have been an honourable exit to be sure, but somewhat premature in my table-soccer career (ah yes I remember Lawlor, they would say, full of promise but never made it out of the carpark).

It seems that fragments of our journey are trying to make their way back to us. After I finished putting together the table, I headed out to buy some beer. What should wink at me from the shelf but a six-pack of James Boag - a fine and flavourful Tasmanian beer which kept us good company on many's the evening in Oz. Let me tell you now that there are very few things as satisfying as a good beer to wash down a resounding taca-taca victory over people half your size and a quarter your age.

This isn't just recreation, it's a recreation of our journey. The fastest, most chaotic way to play taca-taca is in four - the speed is a multiple of a two-person game. When the four of us are around the table we are suddenly back on the road, back in our Fiji sandals or our Chilean boots, screaming our heads off.

It's not that I'm suffering from nostalgia for the road - at least not yet. The only thing I really miss since we came back - and especially since I returned to the office - is my girls. They were the stars of this show. It wasn't perfect - there were many problems along the way. But it was real. By the time our journey was over we had a slightly different way of communicating - a better one. A number of people have asked us, since our return, how we coped with the logistics of travelling with children for so long. The truth is that logistics is what we do at home. During what little time that I can afford each day with Nina and Sara, I typically spend it managing them. Telling them what to do. Mealtimes, tidying up, bedtime - family life can be very regimented. Of course we had to do these things on the road as well, but there was always loads of time left over. Time to explore together places where none of us know what we would see. Time to talk through problems and disagreements rather than to just issue parental diktats on the way out the door. Time to just hang out and begin to actually enjoy each other's company, and learn a little more about each other as people.

These are things that cannot survive the return home in their entirety. There's too much competition. The girls want to spend time with their friends, and I'm missing 40 hours a week. But we've noticed some changes. Since we got back, Nina and Sara are willing to spend a little more time with us, forgoing time with their mates. And with the memory of the trip as a reference point, a living example, we can reach for other, better ways of communicating rather than the rushed staccato set-pieces of the past.

So when it is just the four of us, around the taca-taca table, screaming, twisting, punching the air in triumph or burying our faces in our hands - we could be anywhere. It doesn't really matter where we are. The spirit of the trip returns with a speed and strength that makes me think that it will never be far from the surface.

Another Point of View

2008-08-31T14:21:00.003Z

I've started translating Letizia's Italian blog into English. She started out trying to maintain two blogs, one in each language, but this didn't survive the demands of packing and travel. If you are interested you can check out Why Bother and see our journey in replay though the eyes of my partner.

Cooney's World Adventure

2008-08-29T21:24:00.003Z

I posted a couple of months back about another family, based in the US, that planned to sell up and travel the world for a year. Well, the Cooney family have taken off, just 5 days after the Lawlors returned. They are currently in Mexico. You can follow them here.

I'd like to wish Mike and his family every good wish as they begin a journey that they will never forget, never regret.

Navel Gazing

2008-08-28T14:54:00.005Z

If you ask Nina what were her favourite places we visited, she would answer Sydney and Cusco. Nina and I are very alike.

It's been two weeks since we left Cusco, and I haven't yet blogged on the town itself, even if I have mentioned it obliquely a number of times. Time and distance, if I give them the chance, are waiting to rob me of my memories of this wonderful town, and so before that happens I'd like to take you on a walk.

When you turn left at the door to the Hospedaje San Blas, you walk downhill on the narrow and impossibly slippery footpaths of Cuesta San Blas. The cobbled road is wide enough for one car, and it's rarely free of traffic. At the end of the road, you cross to the pedestrianised route that leads past the famous 12-cornered stone, expertly set in place by the Incas and now supporting the Archbishop's Palace.

That's the story of Cusco: It was the capital city of the Inca Empire (its name means navel in Quechua - it was the bellybutton of their world) and most of it was torn down by the Spanish and used as a platform to built the city that you see today. At this corner you might see a very tall gringo, smiling and holding up a copy of a small magazine.

In his US accent he might call out something like:"Cusco Times*. Summer edition. Get it while it's hot!"

You may want to intervene at this point. I certainly did.

Short Frowning Gringo (Me): "That's a bit Northern Hemisphere of you isn't it? Summer Edition? It's the middle of Winter here!"

Tall Smiling Gringo: "Yeah - but it's so warm and sunny here that it just feels like Summer".

This seemed like a weak pretext on which to attempt to impose - once more - Northern Hemisphere order on a Southern Hemisphere people. But the Tall Smiling Gringo really did have a nice smile and my frown was starting to falter.

SFG: "Hmm. How long have you been here?".

TSG: "I got here 8 months ago, but now Cusco is my home. We're putting this magazine together in English and Spanish, and the proceeds are going toward helping out some of the poorer locals."

I had promises to keep and I had no change to buy the magazine so I promised the Tall Smiling Gringo that I'd buy the next time I passed by.

Walk past the TSG and the Archbishop's Palace and you will arrive at the prettiest plaza I have seen in South America. It's big but not vast. It's beautiful but not imposing. It's green, but not overgrown. Lively, but not overrun. Each side has its own character, but they all seem to get on with each other.

If you are lucky, to your left you will find somebody selling tamales. You can buy both sweet and savoury versions of this delicious street food - just make sure you try at least one.

Oh go on then - have three:

To your right stand three churches all attached to each other, the central and biggest of which is the cathedral. Inside, you will find more gold and silver than any European church you have ever seen. The tour guide will point out what you otherwise probably won't be able to see for yourself - that the artwork in these churches, created by indigenous artists commissioned by the clergy, contains hints of the religion that preceded christianity in these parts: the worship of the Sun, of the moon, but above all, of Pachamamma. In Cusco, most of what's on the surface is Spanish, but underneath, it's still Inca.

Around the main plaza (yes, called Plaza de Armas) there are many other plazas and streets worth visiting, especially to the north where a little road leads up to the Plaza Nazarene where the famously luxurious Hotel Monesterio is located. We could afford to have an aperitivo of Pisco Sours here, but not to stay. (One night in their junior suite costs the same as the 12 nights we spent in our modest hostel). On the way up, you'll pass a little street called Purgatorio - it would appear that Purgatory is a pedestrianized street (which makes sense given the relative hell of Peruvian traffic).

Heading east of here, we do a loop on our way back to Cuesta San Blas (that was a short walk, wasn't it? but with the lack of oxygen and the upward slope on the return journey, you're still puffed out I bet).

One one such return trip that I took, it was actually raining lightly. As I approached the Cuesta, there again was my tall smiling friend, still selling his magazines.

Me: "Summer edition my ass" I offered.

TSG: "Yeah! I know. Now I'm telling folks 'Get it while it's wet!'"

Nothing got this guy down. And I think that some of this must have rubbed off on me. I've been back for over a week now, and the routine of moving from place to place has washed right off us like it was never there. And I still feel great. I know the trip is over, but it'll never be gone.

(*I can't actually remember what the name of the magazine is, as I forgot the copy that I bought.)

How much did it cost?

2008-08-27T17:12:00.003Z

Now that we're back, and we know how much we actually spent (as opposed to what we had budgeted for) I can publish the finances for the trip. I've taken out some details - in particular the home running costs which vary for everyone (and in any case are none of your business thank you ;-) ). Before clicking on the link, which will bring you to a Google spreadsheet, there are a few things to note about how we organized the budget.

The first page of the spreadsheet is the most interesting one. The main section shows our predicted breakdown of costs by country and category. Then to the right there are the more sobering columns: actual expense and difference between it and the budgeted amount.

The bottom line? We spent EUR 58,400 (US$85,700/GBP46,800), not including costs of keeping things ticking over back home. It was 14% more than we had budgeted, but comfortably within our contingency plans (If we were to do it again, knowing what we know now, we could probably have come in on budget at 51k.)

Let's put this in perspective. For that same amount of money we could have bought:

A second-hand 2007 5 Series BMW.
Converted the attic (with sauna/gm) and landscaped the garden (complete with gnomes).
19 days in the Paris Ritz (not including breakfast).

I'm sure you can fill in other items - you get the picture. My point is this: it might seem like a lot of money, but that depends entirely on what you value. What you want to spend your money on. It represents accumulated years of savings for us, and the divesting of investments that might otherwise have been left in place. Some observers have made the assumption that we must be rolling in money, but that is definitely not the case. The decision to make this investment was a big one, but ultimately an easy one too.

Spreadsheet here.

8 Months in 4 Minutes

2008-08-26T21:13:00.004Z

A 4-minute tour of the world, to the music of New Zealand band Shihad (the song is called Vampires and it was playing a lot when we were there). It might take a while to load - best to let it load and watch it all at once.

Was it worth it?

2008-08-24T22:54:00.006Z

I spent the first 24 hours back in Cork debating with myself whether I was dreaming I was home, or whether the last 8 months had all been a dream. Five days later, I have not yet come to any firm conclusion, but for the sake of not looking nuts to my neighbours (be they real or imagined) I have decided to put this issue to one side in the hope that it will resolve itself one way or the other in due course.

The flight back was not as terrible as we all thought 15 hours in an aeroplane would be. Take note: 15 hours with British Airways is easier than 10 hours with LAN. It helped that we stopped off in Sao Paolo. This not only broke up the time into more humane chunks, it also added a third language to the list of announcements. And nothing beats listening to Portuguese for straight-up entertainment value. I can make absolutely no sense of it whatsoever (Letizia can). To me it's a string of noises ending in sh or aaau, and seems to require that you speak as if you had a runny nose and no paper tissues (Sara should be fluent).

I couldn't sleep much - a condition that continues to the present moment - so I wandered about the aisles regularly, or sat listening to the beautiful voice and enchanting humour of the late Peter Ustinov reading his own autobiography (Dear Me).

15 hours is a long time to think, and an even longer time to feel. I did plenty of both, though I can't vouch for the quality of either. It occurred to me that in my life, despite the handicap of truly awful financial judgement, I have made three investments (in incrementing amounts) of which I can be justly proud and unwaveringly sure:

A German latex mattress that cost me what I was sure was a fortune at the time, but which I know now to be a fair price for the most comfortable sleeping surface available to man or beast. This same poor creature remained faithful to us over the 8 months away, despite our philanderings with no less that 50 other beds. (We fell into its embrace on our return home full of the same unreliable emotions and untenable promises that a womaniser offers on repenting to his wife.)
An Alfa Romeo 156. We chose it because it looked amazing, and we should have been punished for our superficiality with a lifetime of mechanics clicking their tongues and making sharp intakes of breath. Instead, it has never given us a cause for complaint after 8 years.
This trip. Was it worth it? Hand on my heart, a thousand times yes. Why? I have not the faintest idea. Many reasons, most of which remain, for now, completely hidden to me, but I fully expect to be revealed over the next few years. I know in the bottom of my mortal soul that this was a life-changing experience, even if I feel entirely the same person I was when I left. I can see hints of change in my daughters, perhaps, because their characters are still being formed. But they too are very much the same girls who left Cork last December (though their dentists would have a hard time matching them to their records, given how many teeth have been both lost and grown). Time (the bastard) will tell exactly why this trip was the right thing for us to do now. I can tell you now that it was worth every cent.

[So now you know that the cost of the trip was more than either a latex mattress or the price of a Belgian Alfa Romeo 156 (1.8 twin spark) in 2000. I'll be a little more precise in a later post.]

On one of my extra-seat excursions, after the sky had begun to turn dark but before we had crossed the equator, I glanced out a porthole and fancied I saw the pointer stars that indicate the Southern Cross. I felt a sudden rush of excitement, but also shock, and followed the stars to see if I could make out the Cross itself. But I couldn't. There was still too much light in the sky and in any case, the two stars themselves were probably not even the pointers. I settled back in my seat for a while, dissatisfied for not having seen, for one last time, the stars that had watched over us for almost all of our journey. Worse. I felt angry and maybe even a little guilty, as if I had forgotten to say goodbye to a friend.

Last Tango in Buenos Aires

2008-08-18T21:30:00.002Z

Tonight is the last night. I can scarcely believe it. I know that I have said in previous posts that I was ready to come home, but it seems we have barely arrived in Buenos Aires and now it is already time to leave. This time tomorrow, all going well, we will be on board a British Airways flight to London, and with a connecting Aer Lingus flight we'll be in Cork at about 11am on Wednesday morning. The level of anticipation, and disbelief that the moment is here, is almost equivalent to that of our first flight, almost 8 months ago, to Beijing.

If you have enjoyed reading this blog, please stay tuned as I will be posting for a few weeks to come. I have memories of Cusco, Lima and BA that are still to be recorded, and of course even the homecoming itself and the effect it will have on all of us is a subject that might interest you. Especially if you are thinking of doing something similar yourself.

About halfway though our trip, when we got to New Zealand, it started to dawn on me that 8 months isn't very long at all. Time is the enemy, marching imperiously on without a backward glance upon the destruction it leaves behind. We did this trip now, as opposed to being sensible and waiting until the kids were older, because we had no idea of how long this life, this planet, or our freedom to travel around in it, might last. It's a cliche, but a fine one, that the right time to do something that you need to do is probably right now (adding on a year or two for planning!). While stocks last. But now our stock of eight months has been used up.

Time always wins.

But in two ways, we might have pulled the wool over its eyes for a while. Firstly, the memories of this trip will last me and Letizia for the rest of our lives. I hope that the same is true for Nina and Sara. And more: I hope that what they have experienced over the last 8 months will serve them forever. Not just to give them a taste for travel, but so that they might always remain certain that whatever life shows them, there is always something else out there. That they should never feel that they have seen everything. That they should not assume that what they see around them is the only way to live. That they should never feel trapped by illusary limits.

Secondly, even if time is the enemy, the greatest gift we had during these 8 months was the time we spent together. It is unlikely (though not impossible) that the four of us will ever share quarters in quite so intense a fashion as during this trip. I spent about 3 years worth of free time with my children, when compared to the time that I would normally have had with them at home. While this has been challenging at times - above all for Nina and Sara - it has also helped me to understand a little better who they are and what I need to do to be a better parent. The trip hasn't been about seeing the world as much as it has been about living a more intense family life, with China and much of the Southern Hemisphere as the backdrop. I should be clear about this: I am no better a father now than I was when we started. In many ways Nina and Sara got to see some aspects of my character that they might have been better off shielded from. (For example, I swear a lot. I normally offload my daily dose of profanity in the office, and I'm ueber-careful at home. Not on the road, though.) But I think we understand each other a little better, and even if that doesn't automatically lead to a better relationship, it can pave the way. We simply wouldn't have had this time together, and this opportunity to see more of each others' personalities, if it weren't for the trip.

A number of readers have suggested that there is a book in this blog. I'm inclined to agree, if for no other reasons than a vanity on my part to think I might be able to write one, but also for the fact that the experience can be best understood and appreciated in retrospect, as a whole, rather than in this diary form. Writing the blog has helped me digest our experiences as we've travelled along, to untangle at least in an initial way, the many threads that were spun each day. To write a book, to see the entire 8 months from the more stable platform of so-called normal life, would be a way of securing the memories, and of giving the trip some enduring meaning for my family. Writing is one thing, and publishing another entirely. If anyone out there knows of or can recommend either a publisher or a literary agent that would be willing to take us on, please let me know.

Tonight over dinner in the beautiful and big-hearted city of Buenos Aires, the four of us toasted our trip and our return home. To those of you who have followed, once or regularly, especially to those who have commented or emailed; to those of you who helped make this trip possible with help or understanding; and to those of you who showed us hospitality along the way; I raise my glass and drink to your health.

(Picture taken in Lima, but as you might tell from my big red face, plenty of Pisco Sours were drunk to many healths).

Cusco and the Bambini di Peru

2008-08-15T21:00:00.004Z

Remember the Black Babies? If you are of a certain age (and perhaps Irish) then you will remember being told as a child that the Black Babies were starving in Biafra and you should be ashamed of yourself not eating the delicious meal that your mother slaved over for hours (taste that guilt). You might have come back with the priceless retort that the Black Babies were welcome to your cabbage and tapioca pudding, if somebody would be so kind as to provide a serviceable postal address and a grease-proof envelope.

My point is (yes, I have one) that other people's suffering and deprivation is largely a matter for our brains, while our own tribulations are projected in technicolour detail against our hearts. Especially if those other people live a long way away. Like Tipperary for example (distance from Cork = 104.6 km). Or Biafra (no longer on the map). Or Peru.

For many years, Nina and Sara have heard about the Bambini di Peru from their maternal grandmother. Sometime she would simply relate a detail or a story. Like the time her camera got nicked on a trip to one of Cusco's outlying villages, but was quickly 'found' again once Padre Nicanor told the villagers that he wouldn't say mass in the place until the camera was returned. (It was returned, complete with the original film which when developed showed pictures of the ragged young culprits with mischevious smiles. Now that's innocence.) Other times, I have heard her use the Bambini di Peru in the same way the Biafran Babies were used against my generation. The circle was completed when one of my children offered to post their tagliatelle alla matriciana to the appropriate Peruvian address.

It is very hard for some - especially those of us who spend our working lives so much in our heads, both protected and demented by abstractions - to appreciate the harshly different reality of lives lived far away from us. In fact, even when you bounce up the barely-passable track of their remote town, trying desperately to keep up with the much more expertly driven pickup ahead of you, and pull into the turd-covered grassy area that passes for a village plaza, the concept of living like a child of Akorakai is a fuzzy one.

In a village of 150 people, these kids seem to make up a third of the population. Many of them were born in the 21st century, but most of them suffer from some effects of malnutrician. Their main food source is the crops that their parents tend: Maize, potato and beans. The bananas and bread that we brought (and Nina and Sara distributed) were rare variations to their diet. A great many of them are harbouring intestinal parasites and suffer from other problems that betray an absence in basic hygiene. Nobody tells the kids to wash their hands before they eat - only the doctors that pass through twice a month. And that message just doesn't stick.

But the effort goes on. The pickup ahead of me was driven by José (not the same one I've recently written about) and his passengers were the most important - a team of one doctor, two nurses (including Hermana Mathilde) and one psychologist, all based in the Centromedico of the Parish of Belén. This was one of their twice-monthly trips to Akorakai, a small but vital contribution to the general health of those living there. Their only alternative is a 2 hour walk (nobody has a car here) cross-country to the nearest town.

As I write from the luxury of a Buenos Aires hotel, it's hard to place myself again in the atmosphere of Akorakai, much less recall my thoughts on the place. I more or less stood out of the way, occasionally interacting with the kids in my terrible Spanish, and only occasionally understanding their answers. Most of the interaction was between Nina, Sara and the village kids. There wasn't much difference between how they got on with those kids and how they play out on the green at home, given the language barrier. The first, and entirely predictable stage was that all the young boys of the village gathered around the back of the pickup where Nina and Sara were sitting (while Daddy kept a watchful eye). This developed into a game of fling-the-hat, a game where some poor unfortunates hat would be nicked, flung at Nina and Sara, who would then toss it further. This continued for a while until the boys got bored and scattered around the various parts of the village. Then the smaller and quieter group of girls approached. Some kind of communication took place (the standard tweenie exchange of vital statistics like name and age), with Letizia acting as moderator.

I asked a couple of the boys - two particularly active ones who were jokingly asking for injections from me, assuming I was a doctor - if they planned to be doctors when they grew up. The answer was a clear no, with an overtone that to me sounded like "what kind of a stupid question is that, gringo?" I don't think many of these kids have any concept of what else life can offer, despite the fact that there was a fulltime school, even if little else, in the village (the Peruvian state seems to be putting a priority on education, even above health, for its most isolated communities). I found out later that these villages are effectively dying off - anyone with any ambition wants to move to Cusco. Those left behind are typically trapped by their own apathy.

There was still a distance between the European girls and the Peruvians, and it was maintained by both sides. The blonde girls belonged on the top of the pickup, and the locals belonged on the ground. Those positions were occasionally exchanged, but balance and order was always restored. This happened entirely by itself.

Nobody had any pretentions that this was a normal encounter. But at the end of the afternoon, after we had made our goodbyes and started to bounce down the hill again toward our completely modern existance in Cusco, Nina and Sara had at least some faces to recall when next dealing with the concept of the Bambini di Peru.

That said, I haven't noticed any new appetite for either cabbage or tapioca.

Suspending Judgement in Lima

2008-08-13T03:59:00.005Z

It's a well-known tip: when you want to see if the turbulence you've just hit really was something to worry about, you look into the face of the air staff. If they look unhappy, then you should be too. On the journey from Lima's Jorge Chavez Internation Airport to the centre of Lima, I looked into the faces of one or two pedestrians that our driver almost decorated the front of our minibus with. I could see in their expressions that this was not standard turbulance.

We had read, and been told, that Lima was not an interesting city to visit - just another big city with all the disadvanges that go along with that. But having heard the same things about Auckland, and found them not to be completely true, we were prepared to suspend our judgement for a while. That suspension of judgement almost didn't last the trip from the airport. It was hard to avoid the impression that Lima was a grime-stained, bird-shat sprawl with the manners and menace of a scene from Blade Runner. Since then, we've spent twenty-four hours trapped under a low ceiling of impregnable cloud that doesn't have the decency to rain, rain, go away, but instead remains as constant and as endless as the equally grey sea alongside us. Judgement seems imminent.

I'm OK with big cities. I'm prepared for the trade-offs. People are busier, it's harder to get around, cities can start to all look alike sometimes. But on the other hand there's often more to see, beautiful architecture and an urban sophistication that shows in the way people dress and hold themselves. In Lima I feel like we've paid our money and are still waiting for the show. The place has been shook from head to toe by earthquakes, and the surviving buildings of any significance seem mostly to be based around the Plaza Major (also known as the Plaza de Armas). That wouldn't be such a problem if it weren't for the fact that Lima measures about 100km from top to bottom, and about 50 km inland. Looking for beauty in a city that seems to be mostly made up of broken streets and sadistic traffic is a full-time job. I miss the blue skies and relative quiet of Cusco (and I owe you about 4 more blog entries on that wonderful part of the world).

But if a city lacks charm, you have to go out and make it yourself. Our approach, and again we have to thank my mother-in-law Livia for her excellent Peruvian connections, is to shun normal hotel life for 3 nights of monastic bliss. Just off Plaza Bolognesi there lies a fine but smog-stained building owned and run by the Salesian Order. Here, there is one bed per room on a long corridor of similar rooms. Cells if you will, but with the keys firmly in our own hands. The building is enormous and mostly empty, but if you find your way to the more important corners you will meet some extraordinary characters.

Padre Luigi has a long grey beard but the energy and mannerisms of a Roberto Benigni. He was born in Veneto and when he joined the order, he asked to be sent to India. The order had other plans. He has been living in the Equadorian and Peruvian jungle for the last 54 years, and is here in Lima for a while in order to complete the corrections on his translation of the entire New Testament into a language that most of us will never hear of, much less hear. Normally he lives with, and like, the people he ministers to. There is no electricity or anything else that remotely recalls civilization there. "It's a simple life" he says smiling, while I mentally conjure up images of the complexity of living without modern comforts. For 54 years.

Over in the infamous district of Callao lives another Salesian priest, also with some Italian heritage. Padre Lombardi is the director of a school for boys in an area of Lima best known for gangland murder. We went to visit him today (he sent a minivan for us, which took us into the heart of Callao and never even slowed down as it approached the large metal gate of the school, only stopping when that gate was closed behind us) and he showed us that there was more to Callao than hit the headlines. He took us to a tiny restaurant on the waterfront, owned and chefed by Señor Andreas, who specialised in ceviche. This type of dish has, as its main ingredient, raw fish. Nina (and Sara to a lesser extent) like sushi, but I wasn't prepared for the gusto with which both of them attacked the three extraordinary dishes that Andreas brought to our table, one after the other. Each dish was sublime. The first was similar to the Sardinian speciality called bottarga that I have come to love over the last 13 years, though it used the eggs of marlin or tuna rather than mullet. The second was a more standard ceviche dish, again from marlin and served with roasted maize. The last, named '20th of August' after the date of the establishment of the municipality of Callao, was spectacular. I wont try to describe it - perhaps Letizia will in a later blog (and I'll translate into English) - except to say that it was the most unique fish dish I've ever tasted and demonstrated that Señor Andreas is an artist. I'll try to pass along the name and address of this place for anyone out there interested enough in fish to brave Callao without the local priest's minivan.

We have two more nights here to see what else can be salvaged from this concrete tip. But the clock is ticking. The '20th of August', as well as marking the beginning of Callao, will mark the end of my family's journey, just a week from today as I write. Since leaving Cusco, we feel we are on the homeward track, stopping off just in Lima and Buenos Aires for rest. And yet it feels so strange to think that the 8 months have passed this quickly. During our remaining stay here in Lima and in BA I'll try to catch up with some memories and half-finished trains of thought. It might even be a case of writing from Ireland for a day or two after we get back.

After that, I'll have to decide what, if anything, to do with this blog that has been for me a very important part of this trip. Having acquired the habit of facing a blank sheet of paper on a regular basis, and somehow filling it with what I am told is occasionally entertaining details of our experiences, I will find it hard to suddenly stop. I think I'll miss the blogging as much as I'll miss the travelling.

Pisac Ruins (the Budget)

2008-08-13T03:57:00.003Z

Since arriving in South America, every time the girls have been tempted to buy something, we've told them to keep their powder dry until Cusco. We've picked up small things here and there on the way, but generally managed to keep our Pesos and Soles in our pockets. For Nina and Sara, the second day of our use of Padre Nicanor's pickup truck (Sunday before last) was the only one that counted: we were heading to Pisac.

Every now and then, Livia would point out a feature of the landscape, or a town that we could see in the distance, and hazard a guess at its name. No dottora, Natalie would reply from the front passenger seat, sometimes but not always following up with the correct name and never taking her eyes off the road ahead. This happened so often that by the end of the day Nina and Sara were shooting back no dottora to everything their grandmother said.

Pisac lies about one hour drive north-east of Cusco, and on Sundays the entire centre of the town hides under the combined canopies of hundreds of market stalls selling every kind of artisanal product you could associate with Peru. But before we unstrapped our wallets and unleashed ourselves on the town, we had a little walk to do first. At least that's how Natalie described it. Rising above the town of Pisac, there is another monumental reminder of the culture that dominated here before the Spanish. By now, we were becoming familiar with the layout of Inca cities. The steep slopes that rose above the town were tamed with ancient terraces, and above those again lay the remains of Inca dwellings and temples. The scale of these gravity-defying towns never fails to impress, even more so when you're scaling them. In the constant heat of Cusco's so-called Winter, our hour's jaunt turned into a three-hour hike. The path was reminisent of our walk to the edge of Fox Glacier, in that it was narrow and fell away on one side in dramatic fashion (no sign of the the red-bearded Malcolm anywhere). I don't like heights (or to be more precise I love heights but I hate the idea of falling from them) but I've learned during this trip just how much Nina and Sara are affected by my adverse reactions and fears (thanks Leah ;-) ). Armed with this knowledge, Nina and I walked confidently along the precipice, neither allowing the other to give in to the fear.

Treats are best enjoyed when they are earned, and by the time we got back down from the Pisac ruins to the modern (so to speak) town we had earned both our lunch and our subsequent abandon to the marketplace. Another taste that I've acquired over the trip is haggling. What used to be an embarrassment is now something that I look forward to, and it's interesting to see the difference between haggling in China compared to that in Peru. Here it's harder. The vendors don't seem to enjoy it so much, and will too easily let a sale slip by rather than engage for a little longer. The Chinese vendors typically would never let you walk away without coming back with a counter-offer. Many Peruvian marketeers will just shake their head at your offer, and look at you with the same kind of disappointment as one looks at an errant child. Then again, in China the real price can be ten times less than the starting price. In Peru the maximum drop I've seen is about 30%. In China, a vendor will defend his inflated price with protestations of quality and originality. Here, you are more likely to see just a pained expression in reaction to your offer, and a plea for a lower price.

We spent more than 2 hours pinballing from one stall to the next. Every time we thought we were finished, one of the girls (and in this I include Letizia and Livia) would remember somebody else that they wanted to buy a gift for. The only thing that made the experience interesting for me was the haggling, the search for a charrango, and the knowledge that this would be our last shopping expedition before returning home.

And do you think this was the end of our shopping for the rest of our trip?

No dottora!

Heidi, the Carmelites and the Potion of Happiness

2008-08-12T15:11:00.004Z

Livia, my mother-in-law, thanks to her good works and excellent connections in Cusco, was given free bed and breakfast with the Carmalite nuns on Plazoleta San Blas, less than 5 minutes walk from our hotel. Every evening would begin with Livia joining us in our hotel, before the five of us would journey out to eat. The journey didn't take long: Of 12 nights in Cusco, we spent 8 of them dining in La Granja de Heidi, a restuarant run by Karl-Heinz from Ulm, across the road from our hotel on Cuesta San Blas (it would have been 10 nights, but Karl-Heinz and crew are closed on Sunday). I know this sounds very unadventurous of us, but let me remind you that less than 24 hours into Peru, I had become, in the words of Brian Friel, tethered to the toilet. Bound by the bowels. Anchored by the ass. Karl-Heinz and Gudrun, over the course of our time in Cusco, gave back to me that which I missed the most: my good health. Thank you Karl-Heinz, Gudrun and staff, from the bottom of my, er, bottom.

Not only is their kitchen dependable, it is delicious. Their menu combines European, Peruvian and even some Asian influences, and for those who hanker after some Southern German specialities you will even find spaetzle. All of this is served in a warm and welcoming atmosphere which is made all the more beguiling by the Tower-of-Babel variety of languages you'll hear around you. The staff hails from Germany, Peru and France, and given our own familial linguistic confusion, we weren't sure any more either what to speak, or indeed in what language we were spoken to. It made cotton wool our of our brains - and all to the good. The effect worked well with the beer and wine, and plumped the cushions of our already relaxed mood.

At the end of each meal, instead of dessert, we would take things one step further by ordering a one last round of drinks: Mate de la Felicidad. Infusion of Happiness. Nobody is fully sure what combination of herbs Karl-Heinz and Gudrun put into this tea (other than they themselves, presumably). It is part of the mystery and magic of an evening in La Granja de Heidi. There is for sure some Cammomile, and surer still the ever-present Peruvian coca leaf. The rest is conjecture and speculation. While I am not normally adverse in this blog to indulging in both, it seems pointless when it comes to the Mate de la Felicidad. Nothing I could write could imitate the pleasure, the release, the undoing of mental and physical knots that this potion unfailingly effected.

And so the evening would end, sated, fluffy and softened further by a modest bill. But there was one last element to our predictable routine that lifted the experience from mere happiness into the realm of bliss. The dream of every married man: I accompanied my mother-in-law back to the large wooden door of her convent and said goodnight.

(No familial relationships have been injured in the writing of this blog)

Driving the Parish Priest's Car

2008-08-09T20:40:00.005Z

I was named after my uncle the priest. At the time, Father Brendan was blazing an ecclesiastical trail in the US, hotly tipped (at least within our family) to be the first Irish pope. The reasoning behind my name was that I would inherit the fortune of the parish priest (at least). But shortly after being honoured with a namesake, with not a thought for the future of his nephew, Father Brendan left the priesthood, and all of a sudden I had to make my own way in the world.

Now, many many years later, Father Brendan is once more a priest (you can take the boy out of the God, but...) and finally the fortune of the parish priest is starting to faintly show its lustre. Last weekend, again through Livia's good offices, Padre Nicanor gave us the use of one of the Medical Centre's 4-wheel-drive pickups and we took to the countryside around Cusco.

The new face in the picture above is Natalie, tour guide and niece of Señora Paulina from the Medical Centre (nothing here is done without contacts - I feel like I'm back in Italy). It's all very well having your own wheels, but they're not much good if you don't know where to point them. Natalie guided us around the area that can roughly be described as the Sacred Valley for the entire weekend, helping us work out a good itinerary and giving us her insights into the history of the Inca. In some sense it was a magical mystery tour. Our ambitions in Cusco centred entirely around the city itself and Machu Picchu, and we had little or no research done on what else there was to see. Idiots. The land around Cusco is rich in magnificant historic remnants of the Inca Empire, and with Natalie's guidance we took in some of the more important ones.

First stop was a place called Moray which won't show up on many maps, and in effect doesn't have much of a road. We crawled our way up the gravel track, having already spent over an hour on sealed roads, stopping off to pick up locals who flagged us down for a lift. We parked (some of our passengers offered to pay for the lift - a humbling experience given their clearly meagre resourses) and walked to the edge, to where the ground seemed to fall away, still not sure exactly what awaited us...

These beautifully executed and wonderfully restored concentric circles, leading down to a depth of 30 meters or so, formed the world's first greenhouse according to Natalie. What you are looking at is an experiment in agriculture. A system that created different micro-climates, allowing Inca society to grow various crops all year round, and even to develop different varieties. Most importantly, this was the larder that filled the stomach on which the Inca army marched. During the phase of imperial expansion, this experiment was undertaken to help build up the surplus of food that must precede every military advance.

Nowadays it has another function. This site is considered by some as an important point of energy on the Earth's surface. When I hear the word 'energy' being used in this loose context, often by practicioners of alternative healing, I become immediately suspicious. But after climbing down to the very centre, still dealing with the altitude and heat, I was too breathless to put up a fight when Natalie suggested that we make a family offering to Pachamama. We didn't have coca leaves, we weren't inclined to sacrifice either of our daughters (given that they were well behaved that day) so we settled for one of the sweets that I constantly carry around in my pocket (we get them with the bill in Karl-Heinz's wonderful restaurant La Granja de Heidi across the road from our hotel - more on that in a later post). The Inca preferred even numbers apparently, so Natalie excluded herself from our offering. We buried the sweet, made a collective wish (which will remain as buried as the sweet itself until such time as it comes true), and struggled back to the edge of this enormous and breath-taking structure. Using steps like this...

Next on the itinerary was Ollantaytambo, another hours drive away. Guide books will often describe this as a fortress on the edge of a town, but Natalie began to show herself to be something of a maverick when it comes to interpreting Inca history. This time, the road was more civilised. We drove over the cobbles of the town and parked in the main plaza. So far it looked like a pretty, lively place. It's where the train to Machu Picchu leaves from, so there was quite a bit of tourist activity about. It wasn't until we left the plaza and walked north to the edge of the town that the vast ladder of terraces that characterized these ruins suddenly came into view. It took our already faint breath completely away. Twice in one day we had been ambushed by the Inca, despite the fact that they were swept away 500 years ago. Imagine the impression that this civilization must have made on those who lived in it, and those who came to conquer it.

We had lunch first, to prepare for the climb upwards, during which Natalie continued to give us her particular views on the nature of the Inca. She was slow to even use the word 'empire', and portrayed the way of life as a golden age for Peruvians. Nobody went hungry, the empire itself was build up by good example rather than at the end of the sword, everything was just dandy until the bloodthirsty Spaniards turned up. In our trip so far, we have seen the stamp of imperialism in every country we visited, and I feel I can say that the imprint is the same regardless of culture. The rationale behind empire, and many of its methodologies, are distinctly human and shared by British, Spanish, Papal, Mandarin, Mongol and Maori. I have learned to mistrust historical explanations that insist on exceptions to normal human behaviour. (In case this sounds fatalistic, and too pessimistic of human nature itself, I will try to give a fuller picture of what I mean in a later blog. I like to spread the pain - your pain that is - over time.)

Nina and Sara, faced with another climb, spat the dummy. So Livia volunteered to stay with them (quite happily, as she has seen all this before) while Letizia, Natalie and I hiked upwards.

In fairness to Natalie, it is hard to see the Ollantaytambo ruins as a fortress, given the lovely unguarded set of steps that run right up the middle of the terraces. The terraces themselves hold historical record of agriculture, just like back at Moray. Natalie's depiction of the site as a mixture of temple, agriculture and normal habitation made sense as she guided us up and across the structure. Always in the back of my mind, however, is the thought that only a centralized and powerful state, with endless cheap labour at its disposal, and methods of enforcing its will, can hope to construct edifices like this and Moray.

But I remain an ignoramus on all South American history and cultures, so I will have to wait until I read much, much more and compare what I have read to what I have seen, before offering anything other than these generalized and broad-sweep opinions.

Padre Nicanor has something of a reputation as a fast driver. Livia calls him Il Pirata (the pirate). Given that this was my first Peruvian driving experience, I was taking it nice and handy. I made sure, on returning the car at the end of the day, to apologise to the Padre, thorugh Livia, for destroying his reputation by tootling around the Cusco countryside like a pensioner, in a car marked with the Centro Medico de Belen. He laughed out loud and beamed at me. But there was something unpredictable and flammable about his glee, like an American caricature of a mafia godfather. I handed back the keys nervously and promised to do better the following day.

Back in the PRC

2008-08-08T13:20:00.004Z

It has finally begun. One of the reasons we went to China first, rather than last, was to avoid the Olympic Crush. Now that the games have commenced, I feel a little nostalgic for Beijing. If you want a blow-by-blow account of goings on in Beijing you can check out Brendan O'Kane's blog coming to you live from that city.

Ojo la Mierda

2008-08-08T02:46:00.005Z

I can say three things in Spanish:

I would like to rent a car. Completely useless as I have no plans to hire one in South America.
May I pay with a credit card? Completely pointless as almost nobody accepts them in Peru.
Look out for the shit. Well, I've used it once.

It's a start. These phrases are varied, though a little too utilitarian. In a social context, there's not much there by way of conversation openers, though the last one can bring a conversation to a swift end. Communication is still possible across the language barrier, providing you find the right person. José is just such a person.

I met José and his family on the confetti-strewn evening of our arrival. Livia worked with his wife Concepción in the medical centre, and even though Conceptión no longer works there, they have remained the best of friends. Their two daughters Ana and Guadalupe are slightly older than Nina and Sara but have been such good friends to the girls, and friends is what they miss the most from home. Since that first evening, we've had the pleasure of the Cruz family's company on two occasions; one day trip in the countryside around Cusco, and a meal in José's home.

The day trip to Huasau was supposed to coincide with a festival of thanks to the Pachamama, the god of the earth, fertility and prosperity. But when we arrived, the main plaza was empty. We were out by one day. Undeterred, José used the downtime to introduce me to the ancient and widespread practice of visiting the curandero, to have my fortune told using coca leaves.

In the name of journalistic enquiry, and because there was clearly bugger all else going on in downtown Huasau, I jumped at the chance. When I was led through the door into Señor Reimundo's clinic, it didn't take long for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. It took my brain a great deal longer to adjust to the strangeness of my situation. While the curandero normally permits only those seeking consultation to enter, it was clear that some translation would be required (unless of course the details of my future consisted entirely of rented cars, credit cards and turds) so Hermana Mathilde was allowed in too - she could understand my Italian and I could just about understand her Spanish. If being in a dark room with a witchdoctor and a nun weren't enough, it became clear that the curandero's Spanish was almost as limited as mine. José was called in to translate from Quechua to Spanish. Letizia joined us as well - I'm not sure under what pretext but I expect that she wanted to hear about my future first-hand, rather than hear my version of it (it's interesting that with all the potential for mistranslation in this situation, the widest semantic gap lay between male and female modes of communication).

So with an amphitheatre of spectators present, and at least three channels of communication in place, the consultation began. Señor Raimundo uncovered his selection of coca leaves, handed me one and got me to breathe on it. According to the real-time translation committee, I was going to hear about my work, my most significant relationship and my health. Work was looking good apparently, which struck me as odd given that I haven't written a line of code in 8 months. Perhaps this was Raimundo's way of telling me that my absense from the office was increasing productivity there (a tenable suggestion, I have to admit). Then, in a cruel blow for Letizia, all assembled were told that she was pretty much stuck with me for life. When it came to my health, things started to go a little less to plan. Raimundo had been cheerfully tossing coca leaves onto the table and rattling off the good news (good, unless you are married to me that is). When it came to my health, he slowed down and put his hand on his chin. There ensued a long conversation in Quechua between José and Raimundo, José's normally jocular expression giving way to concern. When the exchange finally finished, I looked at José. Está bien, he said. She'll be apples.

Balls to that, I thought, though I offered a more diplomatic version out loud. How do 2 minutes of brow-furrowing Quechua translate into 'you're fine'? Either the language is somewhat inefficient, or something was being held back. José finally came clean. Health-wise I am actually doing fine, apparently (so Letizia's life sentence is without parole). I have a certain amount of supressed anger however, that I need to keep an eye on. I was a bit taken aback, I have to say. Not by the news that I have hidden anger - I'm quite comfortable with that (I look forward to meeting the catholic-raised Irish male who doesn't have many hectares of rancour ploughed into his soul). What surprised me was that this was considered news at all. I found it a little bit Oprah for such a rustic setting. I wasn't expecting such sensibility from a curandero, and I was beginning to fear that he might prescribe a good cry for myself there and then, in that dark room that seemed to be getting fuller all the time.

I need not have worried. I didn't have to do a thing. The diagnosis was discussed in Quechua, Spanish, Italian and occasionally English by everyone but myself, and with very little need for any intervention on my part. I fished out twenty soles, thanked Raimundo, and headed for the crack of light that I correctly interpreted as the way out.

Despite, or perhaps because of, my anger issues, José invited us around for dinner a few nights later. By this stage, Nina and Sara had become great friends with Ana and Lupe. Any limitations in the intersection between my daughters' Italian and José's daughters' Spanish were more than compensated for by exchanges of gifts and mischiveous grins. So by the time we hit dessert, the kids had disappeared upstairs and I was left to fend off endless bottles of beer from José.

There is something very special about being invited to somebody else's house for dinner. The breaking of bread can put a budding friendship onto a different level, or nourish an old friendship - especially if the food is as good as what Concepción prepared for us. Around a table you can take your time - nobody grows old there according to one Italian saying. When language threatens to stand in the way of understanding, a shared meal, a clinking glass and an exchange of smiles can smoothen the way. It helps to have your wife on one side and your mother-in-law on the other to translate your gems of wit to your hosts as well. And two bottles of Cusceña beer can bring out the ability to speak Quechua as well as Spanish.

There isn't a credit card in the world that can pay for a night like that.

Meet the Cast

2008-08-07T04:33:00.003Z

We are not alone. For the first time since saying goodbye to Giovanna waaaaay back on the South Island of New Zealand, we find our family unit once more broken open. It's not just because Letizia's mother Livia is with us. Our cast of characters has expanded much further. Before I begin to introduce you to them, let me explain a little further.

Cusco has become a home from home for Livia over the last 10 years. Back then, she was introduced to Padre Nicanor, the mercurial parish priest of Belen in Cusco. In a ramshackle building, this man had managed to put together by sheer force of will and strength of personality, a medical center for his flock. The Peruvian economy is rapidly improving now, but back then the state was woefully absent when it came to public health. Livia is a doctor, with a strength of personality all of her own. The combined personalities of Padre Nicanor and Livia Rosetti have driven forward a project right here in Cusco that has improved the quality of life for many hundreds of Cusceños. The Medical Centre of the Parish of Belen is like no other institution in Cusco. Spread across three floors, it boasts a pharmacy, dental health suites, psychological services, gynacological services, alternative herbal medicine and much more. For those who can pay there is a small fee. For everyone else it is free. And it would never have happened had my mother-in-law not dedicated so much of her time and energy, collaborating with German colleagues, cajoling money from many different charitable fonts, and simply being there herself.

I've heard about this place for quite some time, obviously. I have to admit that while I admired what Livia had achieved, it was all so very abstract. Even when Livia collaborated with my mother's circle of friends back home in Carrigaline to raise money for the centre, it remained a distant and vague concept to me. I really had no idea of the importance of what had been achieved until I got here. When we stepped down from the train in Cusco, Livia was already there to meet us. She was accompanied by Señora Paulina, one of the administrative staff of the medical centre, who covered all four of us in confetti. Minutes after our arrival into our hotel/hostal in the San Blas district, another car load of new faces arrived, armed with even more confetti, as well as flowers and flags for the girls. By the time the fuss died down, and we were left to settle into our room, the lobby was strewn with petals, confetti, and emptied cups of coca tea. We were left to contemplate this whirlwind of welcome.

I have done nothing, not a damn thing, to help towards the creation of the Medical Centre here. The only reason I was afforded such a welcome was because I am Livia Rosetti's son-in-law. The intensity of this reflected glory gives an idea of the esteem in which Livia herself is held by the Belen Parish community. Since that first evening, I have seen much more with my own eyes. As well as the very intense tourist activities we've been submerged in (my lame excuse for such a poor rate of blogging this past week) we've visited the Medical Centre and gone in-country with some of the doctors as they visited remote villages around Cusco. The sight-seeing, and the first-hand view of the Medical Centre and its work, have replaced the abstraction that was Cusco with a flesh-and-blood reality that I will take back home with me and never lose.

I'll blog on both of these aspects of our Cusco experience in the coming days, but for now, I'd like you to see some of the faces that appear regularly in our day-to-day lives. I wish I could somehow make these photographs appear more than a collection of faces. I wish you could somehow be here and get to know La Hermana Mathilde, or José and Concepción and their wonderful daughters. I'd like you to know what it feels like to be in a room with the explosive Padre Nicanor, or wander through the floors of the Medical Centre of the Parish of Belen and feel the pulse of activity that pervades like an Andean drumbeat. Maybe, if I do my job right, over the next few blog entries you will get to know these people a little better, and get a sense of this place. In the meantime, here are some of the faces that populate my waking hours during this very special time in Cusco.

End of the Line

2008-08-03T02:21:00.005Z

Cusco is not our last stop on this 8-month journey, but in many ways it is our ultimate destination. After here, we have Lima and Buenos Aires to look forward to, but in both cases they are necessary stopping points on the way home. Cusco (and Macchupicchu) have been in our sights since the start. As a destination, it was all the more meaningful because waiting for us at Cusco train station was Livia, Letizia's mother. She's been coming here for 10 years or so, working on a very special project. But more on that in a later blog.

Being such a significant point in our trip, we travelled to Cusco in style. There is a train service operated by PeruRail called the Andean Explorer, which runs three or four times a week from Puno to Cusco. We booked it while we were still in Chile, and while it came in at almost 300 euro for a oneway trip, it was money well spent. For a number of reasons, it was the most spectacular train journey of my life. Never have 10 hours of any form of transport gone by with such ease.

The Andean Explorer is a colonial Gentleman's Club on wheels, trundling across an Andean wilderness, where the seats are real armchairs placed on the carpeted floors, the bathroom is a welcoming environment of dark wood and marble, and the table service is performed in a synchronised swirl of black and white uniforms. We were in the second-last car, and behind us lay the train car to end all train cars - a bar and observation deck. The elegant bar served Pisco Sours to window-side tables. The observation deck was almost completely enclosed in glass, except for the very last section - a brass rail in the open air.

Trains in Europe are hermetically sealed high-speed tubes that bullet through the landscape and skirt around cities. The Andean Explorer lets you breathe the air of the land you are passing through and instead of bypassing towns it runs right through them. When we first pulled out of Puno, I was leaning against the brass rails, ready to enjoy the receding lakeside scenery. Instead I found myself in a traffic jam in the city centre, cars on either side of me, kids and adults alike looking up at the spectacle of a badly-dressed gringo leaning out the back of the train. (Just think of the last scene from Dumbo, but with a less endearing cast). At first we just grinned at each other. Then the kids started to wave. Naturally I waved back. Nina and Sara joined me for a while, and the three of us waved at anything that moved. The girls got bored and left, but I was just getting warmed up. After 15 minutes or so I had the hang of things. Men prefered a dignified nod and a respectful smile. Adolescent males were to be saluted with a single raised hand ONLY if they initiated. Adolescent females - actually all women - appreciated a vigourous wave and a cheekily raised eyebrow. These rules applied not just for Puno but for Juliaca and every other town we passed through. My jaws were sore from smiling after the first 4 hours.

In many of the towns we passed through there were markets. It appeared that the markets formed either side of the rail and the railway line itself acted as the main thoroughfare through the stalls. Or it did until our train arrived. Business was suspended as we slowed down and squeezed past stalls selling everything from fruit to car-parts, never further away from the market tables than then length of a 20 soles note. The waving, nodding and smiling continued unabated. The relationship between those on board the train and those looking from the ground was one of mutual curiousity, neither party quite believing what was happening. I'm convinced that I saw more of Peruvian Altiplano life in those few hours than I had in the previous five days spent in Peru.

Another aspect of our train ride that made the day especially memorable for me was the company. Imagine that you're sitting on a luxury train, fresh from experiences of deprivation and sleeplessness. You've paid top dollar to be there, and just as you start to settle in, you watch a family of four lurch towards your table and proceed to surround you. Hell, right? Well Kim from Ottawa suffered exactly this fate as the four of us piled into the Andean Explorer and took up postions all around her that pretty much excluded all chance of escape. A lesser woman would have taken refuge in a book or a tall alcoholic drink, notwithstanding the hour. Kim, and her friend Janet (who was an entire merciful car away but who occasionally came to comfort Kim) handled our 'company' with the tolerance and good humour for which Canadians are deserved respected. (Kim: May there be many, many mountains. Your stories kept us on the edge of our, erm, seats.)

The reception we received in Cusco train station, and afterwards in the lobby of the Hospedaje San Blas, involved flowers, confetti and much shaking of hands and kissing. We deserved none of it, but were instead basking in the reflected glory of Livia Rosetti, my mother-in-law, who has helped to make a real difference to the lives of the people of the parish of Belen here in Cusco. I'll tell you exactly what I mean by that over the next couple of blogs.

It's been 5 days since we arrived here in Cusco, and the experience has been so full-on that it's only now that I'm catching up with the blog. I'll introduce you to a whole host of new characters over the next few days, and tell you about what we've seen since we got here. In the meantime, I should have been asleep an hour ago. Goodnight.

And on the Third Day, They Rose Again

2008-07-31T22:31:00.004Z

It was always part of the plan. The first two days in Puno were supposed to be all about getting an altitude attitude. The third day was to be all business: Onto the Lake Titicaca to see the floating Uros Islands, and then by land to the so-called Temple of Fertility in nearby Chucuito.

It was clear as soon as we arrived in Puno that it was nothing like Arequipa. If Arequipa is the White City, then Puno is the Brown City. Its bleak look is reinforced by the universal use of corrugated iron roofs. Nothing says shanty-town like those wavy lines. But we weren't here for the city - we were here for the lake. Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world, shared between Peru and Bolivia. Its most curious feature, at least for me, is the group of 42 islands floating half-an-hour off the the coast of Puno, called the Uros.

The name of these islands derives from the the name of the people who inhabit them. The Uros people lived happily alongside their other neighbours on the patch of land that is now the northern edges of Puno. Then the Inca came. The Uros felt the need to put some space between themselves and the spreading influence of the Inca, a reaction that can be readily understood. The only space they could find, however, was on the lake itself. At first they took to boats, then built little houses on those boats. In the case of both the boats and the houses, their primary construction material was the totora - a reed that is found growing in the waters all around the edges of the lake - right out as far as the current location of the islands themselves. In an excellent example of making the best of what you have, the Uros people used this reed for food as well. They took things further again - one might argue in a somewhat obsessive way - to devise a mechanism for constructing floating platforms from large blocks of roots of the totora. The Uros islands are a 600-year-old refugee camp.

Today, most Uros leave the islands at school age and don't come back. Why would they? There's no running water, precious little electricity (a few solar panels) and in any case, the Inca have been gone for quite some time. Those who remain on the islands live mostly by grace of the tourism they generate. Conservationism, this time of a unique human culture rather than an endangered species, owes much to the positive power of tourist dollars. There was no pretence in our encounters with the Uros. It was clear that they were used to boatloads of visitors, and they greeted us with song, dressed in colours that were sure to dazzle. They showed us, though the interpretations of the guide (they spoke neither Spanish nor English, but a pre-Incan dialect called Aymara) how they lived, what they ate, and with whom they traded. The experience was choreographed, neatly arranged for easy consumption. But there was no getting over the fact - we were on a floating island. We visited three of them in fact. It was home to these people. This was a way of life that was very real, totally unique and had been in place for 600 years or so.

Nina and Sara loved it. The softness of the upper layers of reed underfoot was a delight. What could be cooler than a place where you could do the jackass as much as you want and fall flat on your back with impunity. Dry land seemed unreasonably hard and unforgiving after a few hours with the Uros.

Sara is usually the dressing-up kind, but this time it was Nina who volunteered to try out the Uros traditional dress.

The islands are a living museum, a tribute to innovation in the face of adversity, and a simple undiluted pleasure for visitors.

Our afternoon program took us south of Puno, along the shores of the lake to a small town called Chucuito. There are a lot of interesting corners to this otherwise quiet and neglected town. There is the church of Our Lady of the Assumption, from where the local platoon of the Inquisition maintained adherence to accepted orthodoxy on the part of the colonising Spanish, much like the Gestapo kept the National Socialist line in Wehrmacht outposts a few centuries later. It occured to me that I wouldn't have fared very well in Chucuito at that time. Not for my agnosticism in particular, but because of my perverse ideas on what constitutes humour: Sooner or later I would have thought it a jolly jape to ask the Grand Inquisitor exactly what it was that Our Lady was Assuming.

My daughters, who if they could would have built their own Uros islands a long time ago to take refuge from my 'jokes', were less impressed with this part of the days activities. Not even a field of stone penises could impress them. The Inca Uyo, sometimes known as the Temple of Fertility, is actually a solar observatory which was probably built to indicate the beginning of important moments in the agricultural calendar. The dozens of stone phalluses seem out of place (well, yeah!) and were perhaps taken from elsewhere and put into the Inca Uyo by well-meaning locals trying to reconstruct Inca heritage destroyed by the conquistadores. As such, they stand there in an act of defiance - one bunch of pricks against another.

But the idea of the Temple of Fertility stuck. Even today there are reports of women who visit the place in order to increase their chance of getting pregnant. The reports don't mention if they take their partners with them (which would seem like a sensible backup plan). Whatever erotic charge the temple might posess is undone by the belfry of the church of Santo Domingo, which peers in from across the road, silently outraged but too elderly to quite remember why.

Caption Competition

2008-07-29T21:26:00.002Z

Perhaps I can get the ball rolling (npi) with "Spot the Difference".

(Get stuck in - this chance will hardly come again)

Waves

2008-07-28T20:56:00.006Z

There are more ancient civilizations in South American than I can hope to remember. They all had their time, location language and culture. Some of them spread out from their points of origin and submerged others, like the waves I watched racing to the sand on Iquique beach a few days ago. The winners are the ones that we tend to remember. In Peru, the last two big winning waves were those of the Inca and the Spanish Conquistadores. On my one healthy morning in Arequipa we got a close up view of the faces of both of these cultures.

Juanita, as she is known to us today, was an Inca noble. She was about 12 years old when she walked hundreds of kilometers from Cusco to the volcanic mountain called Ampatu, about 100km from Arequipa, in the company of adults. Priests. They all climbed this mountain of more than 6000m, in sandals, using rough paths previously laid out in straw. In reaching this height - challenging even for today's well-equiped mountaineers - they were entering the world of the mountain gods. The rarefied air and exhaustion had already altered their states of mind. For Juanita, the privilige of walking amongst the gods with the priests, and the thoughts of what lay ahead, took her even further into a state of trance.

When they eventually reached the summit, Juanita was given some chichi, a beer made by the Incas. In her weakened state, the chichi made her lose consciousness. She wouldn't have felt a thing when one of the priests made a single blow to the right side of her head, just above her eye. That was all it took to end her life. In all probability, she was always destined to die this way. As part of a noble Inca family, she would have been selected early and educated with others like her about her role. She was priviliged. Her fate was to join the gods themselves, who according to the Inca priests had an appetite for young, beautiful and pure children, especially girls.

Almost six hundred years later, in the Universidad Católica di Santa María, at the end of a well-guided tour, we came face to face with Juanita. She never made it to the realm of the mountain gods. She lives in a Japanese-designed transparent freezer unit, alternating between the display location and the reseach lab (a routine she shares with the remains of several other sacrificed children of Inca times). She still bears the marks of the final blow. And you can still tell that when she was alive, she was very beautiful.

Not long after Juanita's death, a new wave broke on the West coast of South America. The conquistadores were armed with better germs, weapons (including horses) and political organization administered through the written word. The Inca were swept away.

About four blocks away from the Universidad is the Convent of Santa Catalina. It was founded a mere 100 years after Juanita's death, as part of the cloistered Dominican order by a wealthy widow of Arequipa. Aristocratic Spanish families would pay massive dowries to have their second daughter accepted as novices as the age of 12. This daughter would remain enclosed within the ever expanding walls of Santa Catalina for the rest of her life. Once a month she would be allowed a monitored 15 minute conversation through opaque grills with her family. She was permitted no news of the outside world. If she considered leaving the convent, her shamed family would have disowned her. She had nowhere else to go. She would live a comfortable life, with servants and even slaves (some of the servents were lower-class, Indian nuns), silently praying, conversing only when sewing. When she finally died, she was laid out for a day in the mortuary before being buried in the convent's own graveyard. Her family was not invited to the funeral.

As I stood looking in though the mortuary door, with my own two daughters beside me, I noticed it was lined with the portraits of many nuns, each with their eyes closed. The guide explained that while they were still alive, it was considered vanity for the nuns to have their image painted. Only when they were dead was this permitted.

Then the portraits were sent to the dead woman's family.

This last detail hit me like rabbit punch. Up until now I had been scoffing my way through the tour, making all the predictable comments that you'd expect from an unbeliever when shown the harsh and pointless regime of a misguided cult. But sending the portrait of the freshly-deceased daughter to the family that had gone without her company since she was 12!? This seemed like the unholiest of cruelties. Spiteful. I remained silent for a while, trying to collect myself, and looked at my own second daughter, shuddering at the idea of her being born into another place or time than 21st century Europe. Into Juanita's time. Into the time of Santa Catalina.

Hello Peru, Goodbye Stomach

2008-07-27T01:06:00.008Z

I've been a bit quiet for the last few days - at least on this blog. In real life I've been making quite a variety of noises, most of which are associated with an infection of the digestive system. Yup - not twenty-four hours into Peru, I suffered the revenge of Atahualpa and two days later I'm starting to recover. The problem was made worse by a sequence of misdiagnoses. After a fantastic morning in Arequipa (more on that in a moment) I started to feel aching muscles and fatigue. Arequipa is at almost 2500m so I figured that this was the beginning of altitude sickness. I took one of the pills we had bought in Chile - the nuclear option of soroche remedies. It did absolutely nothing but demonstrate its most clearly posted side-effect as a diuretic. I then moved on to the sunstroke theory. We had spend much of the morning outdoors and I was wearing heavy clothes, a small rucksack, but no hat. It was only when the floodgates opened on all access points to my alimentary canal that I conceded that I must have eaten somthing rum. Quite possibly back in Chile, but I can't say for sure.

Thanks to the various wrong turns down the diagnostic decision tree I have taken more medicine in 2 days - both in terms of quantity and variety - than in the previous 2 years. I am not exaggerating. In fact all I have eaten over this period of time has been pills. I'm not a traveller, I'm a bleedin' astronaut. (The matter is made worse by the fact that according to Letizia the food here is excellent). The final insult was having to take a 6 hour bus trip from Arequipa to Puno, with a corresponding altitude increase of about 1300m. When all you want to do is sleep and return to the sensation of being human, being driven for 6 hours to a place that promises to starve you of oxygen is not high on the to-do list.

Like bungy-jumping, these things can be overcome simply by doing things one step at a time without overly morbid thought for what lies ahead. We are now in Puno, acclimatizing nicely to the altitude (though I still wheeze when I try to shave) and with a full day program laid out in front of us tomorrow: The floating Uros Islands on Lake Titicaca, and the nearby Temple of Fertility (which promises to make the Penis Forest of Waitomo Caves' stalacmites looks like a nunnery).

Medical bulletin concluded.

Arequipa is known as the White City because of the stone it is constructed from. Viewed from a landing plane it did not appear to live up to its name. On our approach, all we saw were shanty towns strewns across small canyons. Canyons can be very inspiring to look at, but when you're down that low, and all you really want to see is a runway, they lose some of their charm. The aircraft stormed over the ridge of one such canyon, swooped over the last few corrogated iron roofs, and landed with zero panache but considerable velocity. Welcome to Peru.

The Peruvian Paradox: Peru is a much poorer country than Chile, but if you are a tourist you'll find it easier to deal with. Tourism must be high on the national priority because everything seems geared to a much greater extent to visitors from abroad. So far we have found more english spoken in the hotels, airport pickups (which we normally consider to be options for octogenarians - that reminds me: Happy Birthdays Uncles Jerry and Micheal :-) are typically free, as is wifi (though the latter is also true of Chile). It's a lot cheaper here than Chile as well, and if you're not addicted to international hotel chains you will find many excellent hotels to choose from here, with excellent friendly service. These things matter a lot to the weary traveller.

Our pickup from Arequipa airport was well organized (and I could even fit my Zimmer frame into the boot), and after ten minutes in the car we understood where the city got its name. The historical centre of Arequipa is eye-wateringly beautiful. When we hit the steets after checking in, every turn of a corner commanded a new photograph from Letizia. I should remind readers that every picture you'll see on this blog is taken by my talented wife, and the only role I play is to hold her coat and handbag, and get the hell out of the shot. Nina, Sara and I know the drill by heart now. Tenetemi questi e spostatevi.

In my next post on Arequipa I will describe the fantastic morning we spent there before medical matters intervened. My memories of the place will be enduringly positive. In the meantime here are some of those photographs. Great credit must be given to the handbag holder.

From Arequipa

Recuerdos de l'Atacama

2008-07-26T02:34:00.003Z

The Valley of the Moon doesn't need any words from me:

I Lique Iquique

2008-07-25T01:19:00.004Z

"I like Iquique". I don't know how many times I made this pronouncement over the last 2 days. Mostly because I'm surprised. This was supposed to be a place to sleep and eat for the last few days in Chile before flying on to Peru. I was expecting a place that smelled of fishmeal, and looked aged and delapidated (smelly and crumbling - just like me!).

Iquique (Ee-key-kay) used to be one of the wealthiest places on the planet. They dug their wealth out of the ground around here. More salt. Saltpetre to be precise. The nitrates that were exported to Europe from here at the turn of the 19th century were used for the complementary purposes of blowing people up, and disinfecting their wounds. The nitrate boom (npi) lasted until the end of World War I, and then the town went into decline. Valparaiso started its decline when the Suez canal was completed, and still looks ragged today. But Iquique found a replacement industry. That's why I was expecting the place to smell of fish.

What we found on arrival (which by the way was at five in the morning after sleeping on the bus for 7 hours from San Pedro) was a beautifully preserved town centre and a moderately built-up beach area about 2km out of town. Our hotel is on the waterfront and looks out over a little flotilla of red fishing boats - so red that you can even make out their colour by night - as well as an even smaller flotilla of pelicans and a lone visiting seal. From our balcony we can see the beach stretching away, the city behind it, and towering above everything, an 800m mountain range that surges up behind the city.

The most interesting road in the city is Baquedano, which is made up of the mostly restored mansions of the nitrate era. Given that the Internet in our hotel isn't working properly, we spent both of our afternoons here sitting in the sun outside Ronny Tequila's, enjoying a good lunch and using their free WIFI to upload photos and bore the hell out of you.

Because Chile is long and thin, and because there don't seem to be that many gringos on the tourist trail here, it's natural to bump into the same people time and again as you travel through the country. On the trip to the observatory I met a girl from Reunion called Nicoletta, and next encountered her on top of sand dune in the Valley of the Moon outside San Pedro. At that time she was talking to an English girl, who we briefly chatted to. Today, outside our favourite WIFI spot we bumped into the English girl again, this time with her boyfriend. From...Dublin! They are in their final three weeks of a one year journey. I asked him if he was the chap I had seen with the Dublin colours in San Pedro - apparently not. No shortage of Paddies in these here parts, it appears. (Hi Peter and Roxanne, if you get around to tuning in.)

Were looking forward to, or dreading, their return to normal life? I inquired. I had a particular reason for asking. Because our trip has always had a shape - a beginning a middle and an end - as the clock has ticked on I've found my attitude towards it changing. I remember telling my dad a few months back that if I had the money I'd happily stay out for another year, work- and school-life notwithstanding. Back in Oz, the only consolation on leaving one beautiful place was the knowledge that I was moving on to somewhere new. Well things have changed. South America was always going to be the last lap, and because that has always been its assigned role, I find that my attitude towards returning home is changing, dutifully following the curve of take off and landing that has been programmed years in advance. I hereby publically admit that I'm beginning to look forward to coming home. Funnily enough, that's what Roxanne and Peter reported as well.

Don't get me wrong. Once we recovered from our jet lag and moved on from Santiago, we've had a terrific time here in Chile. It has the flavour of real adventure that New Zealand, unmissible and rewarding though it is, didn't have simply because of its cultural familiarity. I expect even more of the same from Peru. But this time next month we´ll have spent one night in our own bed in Cork. And strangely, I'm very OK with that.

Perhaps I'm just getting old.

Same mierda, different day?

Unsavoury Tales of Salt

2008-07-24T17:50:00.005Z

In an interesting coincidence, during our visit to San Pedro de Atacama and its Salt Flats, I was reading a book about the history of salt. I picked up Salt, A World History by Mark Karlansky in Auckland airport during one of our long sojourns there. A cover as umpromising as that, I reasoned, was sure to hide an excellent book. Only a publisher who was very confidant of their author's ability to truely facinate the reader would risk their money on 450 pages of a book like that. (The same auther has a track record - a biography of the cod. As in fish. Seriously.)

But usually the simplest explanation is the correct one. A book about salt is, well, hard to swallow. I'm on page 256 now, and I feel like my brain has been pickled in brine. I have been almost entirely leached of my will to read. On the bright side, the book did help somewhat with my Santiago insomnia. And I have learned a few things, though painfully (like, not to buy the book about cod).

Why is the sea salty?

I'm very comfortable with the answer "I don't know" to most questions that anyone, especially my daughters, might put to me. I like the ring of it. I like its simplicity. And it suits me. But the nature of my children is to abhor this vacuum. When given the choice between idle and ill-founded conjecture on one hand, and the honest admission of ignorance on the other, Nina and Sara generally opt for the former. In face, in the absence of an answer to a question like "Why is the sea salty?" they are capable of constructing a complete mytholigical edifice involving princesses and tyrannical kings (who knows why, but hard-done-by princesses and tyrant kings feature regularly in their stories...)

But the answer to the above question was answered for us in, of all places, the desert. When you visit the Salar de Atacama despite being in one of the driest places on Earth you'll find salty lagoons with shrimps swimming in them, and three different species of flamingo that feed on the shrimp. Around the lagoons there is nothing but jagged salt-encrusted plains. Around the salt there is only the rocks and dust of the desert. And all of this is enclosed by the Andes on one side and the Cordillera de la Sal (yes, salt) on the other. Where does the water, and the salt come from?

I don't know.

Just kidding. Force of habit. It's meltwater from the Andean snow peaks. It flows downward like a river, but under the surface of the ground. Like any river, it carries along with it the minerals of the soil through which it runs. But this river never gets even close to the sea. It hits the high plains between the two mountain ranges, where the impermeable rock pushes it to the surface. 96% of the water evaporates, depositing the salt crystals in ever-growing clumps. The remaining 4% creates the lagoons.

The effect that this produces is best told with pictures - Letizia's of course. Looked at closely, the Salt Flats aren't really flat at all. The surface looks like badly-ploughed earth, sprinkled with snow. And when the sun goes down, the colour of the salt, and the reflection of the reddening mountains and volcano in the lagoon outdoes even Uluru. Even without the champagne.

What's that? Oh - what does make the sea salty? Well, just allow a river to reach the sea (many do, apparently) and the same process of surface evaporation, carried on over eons, makes for a salty sea. Well that's one explanation. Another one is that the evil king, punishing his two poor innocent daughters for not eating their dinner, makes them fill the sea with the kingdom's salt, teaspoon by teaspoon.

You choose.

I Spy

2008-07-23T19:25:00.005Z

I though I had seen desert. Our trip to Australia´s Red Centre was my first time in such an arid part of the world. Nine months without rain, we were told, and it looked it too. On the bus between Alice and Uluru, some parts were particularly sparsely vegetated and completely unsuitable for cattle stations. Then I saw the Atacama.

We´ve been brushing the edges of desert or semi desert for a few days already, as we´ve been making our way North aboard countless buses (well, 4 buses actually). After 2 days in La Serena we took a night bus to Calama and onwards to San Pedro de Atacama, forsaking the coast in order to follow the strongly worded advice of Iain Ballesty (I got the feeling he´d track us down and hurt us if we bypassed S. Pedro) and the gentle prodding of `Nonna Carla`.

I´ve never seen a place like the Atacama, or a town like San Pedro. San Pedro is an oasis. Literally. Everything else is dry as toast. This is not a place of little rain. It simply doesn´t happen here. You´ll appreciate that for an Irishman, this is a hard concept to register. It offends my Celtic sensibilities. Believe me, I´m not fond of rain, but I feel it may have a role to play in earthly matters. If the lunar features of the Atacama are anything to go by, I might just be on to something. Australia was just barren. The Atacama is dead. Some isolated parts are sandy in the way one would expect (or in your case David French, in the way one has experienced) but mostly I saw hard rock with a dusting of, em, dust. It´s a brave individual indeed who would try to hammer a tent peg into the Atacama ground.

Back in Santiago, Iain had told the girls how they might play I Spy in this part of the world:

"I spy with my little eye somthing beginning with S." "Sand." "Yes. Your turn."
"I spy with my little eye somthing beginning with S." "Sky." "Yep. Now what do we play?"

If you look through any edition of the Rough Guide (and we're on our 4th so far), you'll become familiar with the light brown tone of their city maps. Flicking from map to map, you could be forgiven for thinking that every city looks much like the other. Especially in Chile, where a grid layout centred around a Plaza de Armas is standard. According to the map of San Pedro, we had to walk three blocks East and three blocks South to get from the Tur-Bus terminal to our hosteria. One small but important feature of the map, that might have hinted at how different San Pedro was from all those other maps, was the scale. A San Pedro block will take you all of thirty seconds to walk. Stroll. But if you are wearing a rucksack and dragging two wheeled samsonites (admitedly much lighter than when I was dragging them through China) across dirt-track streets, spending as much energy in balancing them as dragging them, the blocks start to look big again. Even the Tur-Bus terminal itself isn't much more than a dusty corral lined with rough wood fencing. We were spared the journey by the arrival of Señor Samuel in his taxi - indistinguishable from a big city taxi in colour and model except for the fact that it took up the entire road, adobe wall to adobe wall. Our three block by three block journey, made longer by the necessary one-way system, effectively spanned the limits of this town. We weren't in the city any more.

Our time in San Pedro organised itself as follows: On both evenings we left the village on a tour bus, first to the Salar (salt flats) and then to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon). But our mornings and afternoons were spent browsing the streets, this time without the samsonites. As you might have understood, this doesn't take a lot of time. But that was fine - we weren't in any hurry. Nothing is taller than one or one-and-a-half floors high, except for the steeple of the church of San Pedro. Almost every single door is open, and shows a cafe, a shop of artisan goods, or a tour operator behind it. If this doesn't sound very enticing, you have to allow for the atmosphere. Yes, it's full of tourists, but anyone who makes the trip to a place so isolated really wants to be there, and everyone seems to fall under the same spell. There is no sign of boxer shorts emblazoned with national flags here, although I'd swear I saw a Dublin GAA jersey.

We tried out a lot of eateries, either early before our tours, or later when we returned in the dark. Not every experience was positive but my favourite was the first one we stumbled across was Bistro Les Copains on the corner of Tocopilla and Caracoles streets. A shallow room opening directly onto the street, it can fit about 10 people. The owner speaks good english makes you feel genuinely welcome. The fare is simple but good. And to top it all off, they offer a very cheap laundry service as well. Beef sandwich and clean knickers. What more could a traveller ask for.

As I said, I'll blog separately about the two tours we took. But hopefully the following pictures, courtesy of Letizia, will give you a feeling for the sand-stroked genteel nature of San Pedro de Atacama.

The Rabbit in the Moon

2008-07-22T15:32:00.002Z

On the evening of our second day in La Serena we were collected from the hotel and brought by minibus to a town about 40 minutes inland by the name of Vicuña. From there, a road of sorts led up. Up through the town. Up the side of a hill. Up through the fog that was beginning to envelope Vicuña. The road was just a dirt track, sometimes with high banks of recently cleared earth. No street lighting. This should have been well off-piste, but bit by bit our minivan was joined by others. Cars, vans and buses joined their headlights together into a slow procession upwards, until finally we all came to a stop in the carpark of the Mamalluca Observatory.

There are dozens of large telescopes pointing skywards in Central and Northern Chile. The skies here are famous for being clear. Many are European, or American or international collaborations. As our guide would later say, Chile doesn't have as much money as Europe or America, but it has lots of sky. The Mamalluca Observatory was established with the hand-me-downs of larger installations with the express purpose of acting as a public access site. Whereas bigger sites with enormous lenses will let you look in, they won't let you look up. Mamalluca's modest 30 cm reflecting telescope was more than enough for us. We were able to look at Jupiter and make out its layered surface and four of its moons. I have a starter refracting telescope at home which I've pointed on occasion at the planets (not that they've noticed). Cold hands, rickety tripods and no tracking device to keep you on target means that most of the time is spent twiddling knobs and stamping feet, and only a very few seconds actually observing. Jupiter through the lens, until my trip to Mamalluca, looked like a distant stale biscuit. Rich Tea, at a guess.

There was a full moon that night. Not ideal for looking into deep space, but nice for looking at, well, the moon. So we did. The best place to look, according to Alfredo our guide (who for some reason spoke with an accent precisely the same as my Norwegian friend Kaare - either Alfredo is Norwegian or Kaare has been having a great laugh at my expense for many's the year now) is at the edge of the moon, where you can see the details stand out in three dimensions. We studied an intriguing pimple on the lunar surface only to be told later than it was 3km deep and tens or even hundreds of km wide.

After a powerpoint presentation on the lifecycle of stars and an introduction to the "humourous" naming convention of telescopes (let's just say that astronomy nerds make us computer nerds seem like real wags), we went outside to some other less powerful scopes with wider fields of view - perfect for more moongazing. Letizia took some great pictures through the lens. Then something happened to make me lose track of the astronomical goings on: we met an Irish family of four who were on a ten week tour of South America. Their children were close in age to Nina and Sara and so before long, the four of them were running around like feral llamas, while Letizia and I compared notes with the parents. It felt really good to find someone doing something as daft as we were. I never did get around to asking names, but I did write down this blog address and I hope they get the chance to tune in (hi there family from Meath, if you're reading!).

Since arriving in the Southern Hemisphere, as well as performing important experiments in fluid dynamics, we noticed how different the night sky is down here. The Southern Cross, as its name suggests, is not visible from Ireland (unless you are looking at an Australian or New Zealand flag in Ireland). And Orion - an easy constellation to spot back home - is harder to find due to the fact that he's generally standing on his head down here. ("Silly Orion, always drunk" - Nina and Sara's interpretation). Now Alfredo (or Kaare as I had by now come to think of him) pointed out something which, in all my beer-fueled discussions on matters austral with Simon Pett, I had never noticed. The moon is upside down here too. The Man in the Moon that you can make out from the Northern Hemisphere is nowhere to be seen. In his place is the Rabbit in the Moon. And I have to say that the Rabbit is much more convincing than the Man. Find a picture of the moon (chances are it'll be a Northern Hemisphere one), twiddle it around and hold it at arms length.

What's up doc?!

Darwinism and Table Soccer

2008-07-21T14:45:00.003Z

The seven hour bus trip from Santiago to La Serena was a piece of cake. We took a taxi to the terminal of Tur-Bus, and found there a level of organisation as good as any airport. Our tickets already specified the bay number that the bus would use. We bought some food for the trip and got settled in on board. No checkin, no security - and no delays.

The place that 'Nonna Carla' had chosen for us was outside the centre of the town, just by the beach. It's clearly not swimming weather right now, but the seafront made a good place to walk. I noticed a blue sign right by the water with a picture of a huge wave on it. On closer examination it turned out to be an indication for the escape route in case of a tsunami. Nothing is left to chance in La Serena - the sign pointed away from the ocean. Darwin, like God, is being relegated to ever smaller spheres of influence by modern man.

Our hotel was actually a park of cabañas - tiny self-catering cabins that are perfect for Summer, but definitely not made to retain heat. But we were fine with it. We were glad to be out of a smoggy city, and Nina and Sara soon found little friends around the park. For families based in Santiago, La Serena is the holiday destination of choice. The Winter school holidays are on right now, so the girls (and Letizia and I) were able to resume the sport that practically defined our week in Fiji: table soccer. In Fiji, I did my impression of Little Britain's Competitive Dad, doing a lap of the table on every goal, punching the air, and generally bewildering my young (and now that I think of it, slightly cross-eyed) opponent. And yet he kept coming back for more. Sucker!!! In La Serena I tried to suppress this instinct when playing Filipe, an 11-year-old Santiago boy. And I almost succeeded. In any case, we have decided that table-soccer (or tacataca as it is known in Chile) is the sport for the Lawlor family, combining as it does a minimal fitness requirement, no dedication whatsoever and a take-no-prisoners approach to gratuitous displays of victory. We'll be acquiring a table when we get home (though we have nowhere to put it, as the funds that might have gone into converting the attic went into this trip instead).

Across the road from our cabañas we found a great steak restaurant. For less than 7 euros I got one of the best filets I've ever enjoyed. 400g of rosey-on-the-inside, al-dente-on-the-outside happiness. Our waiter turned out to have a very unusual first name. He was called Darwin. I know that Charles Darwin passed this way before on The Beagle. But I didn't think he had left his own genetic imprint on the place. Could this man in front of me be the fruit of Charles Darwin's own long forgotten experiment in heredity, I wondered? Apparently not - it seems that his father was a scientist and named his son out of reverence for a great scientific thinker. (It might have been kinder to simply call him Charles). I was tempted to ask him what names his siblings were carrying around (Copernicus is working desserts tonight and it's Einstein's night off). But he still had all the steak-knives in his hand so I though better of it. I also didn't find out if he shared my concerns about the negative effect that the tsunami sign might have on the future of the local gene pool. Some times it's safer to be on the other side of a nice big language barrier.

La Serena has a great deal more to offer than steak and table soccer of course. We took some time to stroll around the city centre, browse in a pretty covered market, and have a reasonably priced meal or two. But oddly enough, table soccer and walks along the beach (including a few goes on a bungy trampoline for Nina and Sara) was all we really wanted. The girls had had to deal with 4 days in Santiago with very little to do except watch their parents disintegrate due to lack of sleep (probably not such a bad passtime for most kids, but not nearly as good if you can't have a laugh with your friends about it). La Serena offered them a chance to just do what they wanted to do. Apart from a quick tour of a surprisingly good archeological museum - which included an orginal maoi statue from Easter Island - we contented ourselves with strolling, eating, ping-pong and table soccer. As far as this family is concerned, La Serena was a GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!

Nina and Sara, ready for the bus to get out of Santiago.

North

2008-07-20T06:34:00.003Z

Men and women have different ways of orienting themselves in the unknown. Women prefer to use landmarks when giving directions. Men, on the whole, speak in terms of compass points, road numbers and distances. I love the REM song called Stand: "Stand in the place where you live/Now face North/ Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before". I keep a little compass in my pocket. I use it to check the direction of taxi routes compared to my expectations. I use it when we are hiking to ensure we are going in more or less the right direction. But mostly I just use it because I like to know where North is. I like to picture us, in my mind's eye, superimposed on the little globe that sits in our living room back home.

Letizia likes to tease me for my y-chromosome ways. "Which way is the river?" she says, echoing a question I often ask myself aloud when reading city maps. Compass points leave her cold. But for once now, and for the next several days, we will both instantly know in which direction North lies. Even without a compass. North is the front of the bus.

Insomnia

2008-07-18T05:45:00.001Z

I have to tell the truth. Over the last four days in Santiago, I've felt like the wheels were finally coming off our little wagon. Sleep deprivation can play merry hell with your sense of wellbeing. The loneliness of insomnia dulls your daytime senses, and barbs your mood. It's hard to like a city such as Santiago in this state of mind, and so I fully accept that my memories of it are coloured darkly, unfairly.

When I think of our four days there, I think of crowded fast-moving streets that tolerate strolling visitors only with impatience. I think of feeling hunger but being surrounded only by junkfood, both local and imported. I think of high historical buildings whose elegance is studded with haphazard ground-floor commerce. I think of air that I can taste as I breathe.

But there are brighter memories too. An hour spent in the company of Iain Ballesty, Darragh's brother, over lunch. He gave us good advice for our northward trip through Chile, and made Nina and Sara laugh by telling them "I hate your guts" when they described their trips to Fox Glacier and whale-watching in Kaikoura. Our visit to the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art was well worth the time - the girls were quite engaged by it and I particularly liked the many complex tapestries and weaving styles displayed. The staff of our hotel were very kind to us, and that can make a big difference to any stay. "Nonna Carla" from the travel agency was a terrific find.

The biggest problem though was the gray pessimism that settled over us, and that I personally struggled to see past. The long road North to Cusco didn't invite us quite so much anymore. The task of organizing and then executing a plan that involved many thousands of kilometres, and bus trips of 15 hours or more, with the sure reward of being laid low for days with altitude sickness...well it led me for the very first time to look forward to going back home. I am not a person easily disposed to worry. I am irritatingly positive and boringly even keeled (Mam, Dad - you must have done something right when I was growing up). But on those occasions when my spirits dampen, the effect tends to seep to the bone. The fact that both Letizia and I have been feeling down, and that Santiago doesn't hold much interest for children, has meant that the last few days have been hard for Nina and Sara. They are patient, but I've realised that some places bring them out of themselves, while others make them sink back into their warm jackets like a tortoise into its shell. This has been Tortoise-Town.

They are simple creatures however, like their father. It doesn't take too much to find our feet again. As I write this, I am on a very comfortable Tur-Bus heading North to La Serena. The Pacific is on my left, rolling hills of low scrub to my right. The sun is shining. The girls are playing in the seats behind me, and Letizia is napping next to me. I actually slept OK last night, and I can feel the difference already. Tomorrow night we will visit one of the many observatories for which these famously cloud-free parts are known for.

She'll be right.

Sleepwalking in Santiago

2008-07-15T22:46:00.003Z

We've been in Chile for 2 days now, but so far we're experiencing it through the haze of jetlag. It was always our plan to take the time here to recover from the inevitable effects, and to plan our trip in detail. We're succeeding in doing the latter, but the jetlag is taking longer than we expected. Dave French, whose travelometer goes Spinal Tap style all the way up to eleven, tells us that we need to allow one day for every time zone change. At that rate, we'll be almost finished with Chile by the time we fully recover.

We've taken a close look at our plans for the next two weeks. Our fixed point is Cuzco on the 30th of July. Our plan was to cover the distance from Santiago to Arica (30 hour bus trip) and cross from there to La Paz (another 7 hours), spending 2 days there before moving on to Lake Titicaca. There are too many problems with this. Firstly, in our rush North, we would miss out on many sights and experiences that Chile has to offer, chief amongst which is San Pedro de Atacama. Secondly, we could expect to be laid low with altitude sickness in La Paz for the 2 days we planned to stay there, recovering just in time to leave.

Our new itinerary leaves us more time in Chile, stopping off in La Serena (and getting a tour of the Mamalluca observatory), then making our way to San Pedro de Atacama for two nights of desert contemplation and a visit to the Salt Plains. Finally we will spend two nights in Iquique from where we will fly directly to Araquipa in Peru. We'll have time to reach Cuzco via Lake Titicaca - we wouldn't think of missing out on that.

Even without the language gap - which Letizia is spanning brilliantly - managing your own trip in Chile is not as straight forward as in Australia or New Zealand. There's a huge variety of bus companies, each with their own specialised areas of interest. High car hire cost rules this more independant option out. And even if LAN and other airlines have an online booking system, not all flights are available this way. We decided to seek out the help of a travel agency and basically picked the closest one to our hotel that we could find in the Yellow Pages. With the address in hand we went out to find the office, expecting something like Flight Centre - a highstreet shop with lots of brochures in the window (and maybe even an inflatable pilot outside the door). What we found was a doorbell to a closed office on the 11th floor of a 12 floor building. So we rang.

The door creaked open, and a suspicious pair of eyes peered out at us. Clearly not used to personal calls. Once the initial suspicion passed, we were invited in,. An english speaker was found but it was becoming clear that this agency did not deal with the public. But once it was established that Letizia was Italian, conversation switched immediately to Italian. The company was Italian-owned, and we were speaking with the daughter of the owner. All doors opened. Take off your coats! Sit down! A few moments later the owner herself swept into the room, introducing herself to Nina and Sara first as 'Nonna (Granny) Carla', before directing a tornado of welcome at Letizia and me. There was no talk of business at first - that would have been crude. This was business Latin style. Carla brought us out onto the balcony to admire the sunset over Santiago. She showed us pictures of her grandchildren back in Europe, and we approved. We described our travels to her and she expressed her approval. When, and only when these nicities were observed did we move on to what might have brought us to her office. Up until that point we might just as easily have been making a courtesy call to a distant relative.

A little over 24 hours later, we now have travel and accommodation and some activity vouchers for the rest of our Chilean stay, as well as our flight to Peru - all in the quaint kind of customized plastic folders that were used at home when flying was still something of a big deal. Now we just have to kick this jetlag and get stuck in.

Tomorrow we make a day trip to Valparaiso. More when we get back from that.

At what point should one start screaming?

2008-07-12T11:28:00.003Z

The morning we were to leave for Fiji, things were running like clockwork. We dropped extra bags in the hotel we were to stay in (from where I'm writing this blog entry), dropped off the rental car to Apollo (the last one we'll need on this entire trip), and were in the airport in plenty of time for our flight. It was 2 hours delayed - no big deal. But as the clock ticked down it was pushed back another 2 hours. Then another 2. Then four hours. Instead of leaving at 14:30, we were now promised that the 'engineering requirements' were sorted and our flight would leave at 00:30. It had been a long day, but Nina and Sara to their great credit were extremely patient, and we had a promised departure time. But airline promises are made to be broken. After another few hours we were called together and told that we were being, in their parlance, off-loaded until 06:00. Strange given that we were never loaded in the first place.

We were told that we would be put up in a hotel, given call cards and fed before being shuttled back to the airport for the rescheduled flight. These things happen. We were tired, disappointed, but there is no point in getting angry in these situations. What happened next however, made me angry.

Flying means queueing. Being off-loaded means queuing back through passport, back through customs and back through biosecurity, all in order to queue to get assigned accommodation, queue for the bus, and then queue in the hotel lobby behind all the other poor schmucks. And then, if you're very unlucky, after spending 12 hours in the airport, watching day turn to freezing night, the hotel reception staff will tell you that they don't have any rooms left. None. Nothing in reserve. We'd booked a Quantas flight that was actually operated by Air Pacific, whose ground representatives (in their absence) was Air New Zealand, who had directed us to Hotel Grand Chancellor using an indepentant coach service (and no Air New Zealand ground staff reps). We were four layers away from the root cause of our problem and one step removed from the people who had got us into this immediate predicament. The staff were understanding, but couldn't really help. Air NZ wasn't answering the phone, and all the other hotels nearby were fully booked. It was 10 in the evening, and we had maybe 5 hours sleep opportunity ahead of us before being cattle-trucked back to the airport. If we could only find somewhere to sleep!

Someone, somewhere suggested that we stay in "the house". A stand-alone, self-catering flat around the back of the hotel. "Is it warm?". Yes, we were told. We took it. It was glacial.

I have never felt so sorry for my children, and so guilty for uprooting them from their comfortable existence back home, as I did that night when I saw their earlier spectacular patience rewarded by shivering covers in a strange and inhospitable bedroom. We got our bus 4 hours later, and went through the same queues in reverse - groggy and dislocated, uncertain even yet of whether our flight would be ready.

It ended well. We made it to Fiji. We lost out on one night, but really enjoyed our six remaining days in the tropical sun. I am the forgiving kind, and would normally concentrate on the fact that we got over the bad stuff. But I'm still composing the letter to Air New Zealand whose lack of organization let to that evening's final insult.

How many c*nts can I get for a Fijian dollar?

2008-07-12T10:01:00.005Z

They say the c-word still has the power to shock. I agree. I never imagined I'd be dipping my nib into that part of the lexical inkpot for this blog and so, surprised by its appearance, I find myself blotting out a little with asterisks.

It's all Sara's fault. Last night, our last night in Fiji, I was lying in bed, concentrating on not feeling either sore or sorry for myself. I had spent the week eating three square meals - no, cubed meals - a day at Plantation Island Resort, and now I was trying to manage my own internal queue for the buffet. Somewhere deep in my intestines, far too close to the exit, the guests were elbowing for position. I was not in the most receptive mood for humour. But the most irresistible humour is accidental. Sara's speciality. She's starting to read Harry Potter now (sibling rivalry has an important role to play in children's development) and she gives us regular updates from whatever corner of whatever bedroom she happens to be sleeping in on any given night. And so she began.

"In Hogwart's, the money they use is called mumble"

I raised an eyebrow, and turned my head to Letizia beside me. "What was that sweetheart?"

Sara, louder: "In Hogwart's, the money they use is called mumble that definitely began with the letter c".

I manage to sit up a little, and started elbowing Letizia. "Once more? I can't hear that last word."

Sara, impatiently: "In Hogwart's, the money they use is called cunts".

Ouch! There is was! There it is!! What the hell is going on!! She's a 7 year old, and she has never ever heard that word. With the appeasing tone of voice that one reserves for hostage situations I said "Could you spell that please?"

"K-N-U-T-S."

"Cnoots" I replied, before she even finished. "Cnooooots!! Can you say it back to me?"

"Cnooots".

"Yes! Good! Cnoots!"

Emergency over, Letizia and I hidden by a corner of our L-shaped room, let the tears roll silently down our cheeks, shaking with laughter for minutes but afraid that we would be heard by the girls, still concentrating on their reading.

Soon after, I started drifting off to sleep, disturbed occasionally by recurring shakes of suppressed laughter and intestinal cramps, thinking what a stupid cnooot I'd been for eating so much.

Previously, on Lost

2008-07-12T04:45:00.004Z

The story so far: Our time in New Zealand is almost up. We spent 4 days in Auckland, headed to Fiji for a week, and we're now back in Auckland for one night before heading East again, across the Pacific Ocean to Chile. I'll try to compress the days since the glowworm caves into this one blog entry...

Auckland gets a bad rap in tourist lore. Just another city. Concrete Jungle. Fly in and move on. Based on this reputation, we decided to book a motel near the airport and shuttle in and out to the city centre as we wanted/needed. Our first impression of Auckland was confirming our prejudices. We pulled up outside our motel - the Travel Air Motel - and got a sinking feeling. We're not so picky. We have only run away from one other hotel in 6 months. But when we saw our rooms, we realised that we had been completely misled. If I had thought of it in time, I would have taken pictures for you to compare to their website. We got into the car again, leaving some of our our luggage, with a plan to see the city and look for alternative accommodation for the following nights, and were very pleasantly surprised by what we say. It's a bigger city than anything else we've seen in NZ. Bigger and more built up than the capital, Wellington. But it was pretty. There was a nice rolling feel to the streets (a bit like parts of Wellie), nice views out over the water, and parkland easily visible from parts of the built-up centre. With the help of i-Site, at the base of Auckland's famous Sky Tower, we found a great deal for a luxurious hotel right in the centre. We figured that the relaxing part of our trip (Fiji) could start a few days early.

And that's how it came to pass. We went back to the fleapit near the airport, paid $20 penalty for late cancellation, picked up our luggage and left in a cloud of dust and relief. That was the easy part. Then came the walk of shame. When you're staying in a posh hotel, it seems bad form to trail across it's wide lobby, dressed for the road and with laden down with bags of groceries and knicknacks. But when you have to do it, do it with your chin up. We must have made a fine sight, Cheerios poking out of the plastic bags, a dusty single file of noses in the air. We shopped a little, took a spin across harbour bridge to Devonport for a walk and a few photos, ate on Ponsonby Road, and checked out Auckland Museum (again, an excellent example of how museums should be put run).

If I hadn't bungied in Taupo, I would have considered jumping off the Sky Tower, but luckily all that was out of my system. Instead we hand a poolside view of the jumpers from the fifth floor of our hotel. The tower itself is a beautiful feature of the city, and I was surprised to learn that it was so new - built in 1995. It dominates the cityscape, and gives the place a focus and an identity. It's hard to imagine Auckland without the Sky Tower. That's the best test for any new structure (I wonder if Dubliners have yet come to the same conclusion about the Spire).

During our 12 weeks in New Zealand, I've learned that this is not just a smaller, colder version of Australia, nor are Kiwis indistinguishable from Aussies. There is something very different going on here, and these two new countries have very different histories despite their superficial similarities. I have at least one other blog in me about those differences, and the part they play in explaining the gap between Maori and Australian Aboriginal. It's unfortunate, but probably unavoidable, to describe New Zealand by contrasting it with its bigger neighbour. But the fact remains that the differences really are surprising. If history had taken a very slightly different turn (for example if NZ didn't take part in the Boer War, and thereby find itself afterwards in a period of intense nationalist sentiment), New Zealand just might have been federated alongside New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and the others into what became Australia. The fact that it didn't, and has continued in many different political, social and cultural ways to plough its own furrow, has added to the diversity of this region, and provided the world with some truly worthwhile examples.

I'm going to miss the place, but I'm more than ready to move on. We've been too long in English-speaking countries which, for all their differences, are clearly not going to be as different as China was, or as Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina are likely to be. The next six weeks might be viewed as our homeward leg. We're going to cross the International Date Line within an hour of taking off tomorrow. For those of you in Europe it means that, like a coin moving invisibly between a magician's hands, we'll appear on the other side of your screen. From 12 hours ahead of you, we'll suddenly be just 5 hours behind you. Having lost hours with each move to the east, we'll be paid back in bulk (and in advance for future time zones crossed) by being given the chance to live parts of the 11th and 12th of July twice. We're getting closer to home, and we can now say that next month, we'll be back in Ireland.

It might be viewed as our homeward leg. But I'll play every mental trick that I can to remind myself that six weeks is a looooong vacation, even if it comes as the last six weeks of an eight month trip. I'm gasping for the kind of discomfort that comes with moving through non-English speaking territory, and the chance for Nina and Sara to see a whole other way of life.

Afterglow

2008-07-04T09:31:00.002Z

We changed our plans to go straight from Roturua to Auckland in favour of a one-night stopover in Waitomo Cave. This tiny little place, almost on the West coast of the North Island, is popular for caving and black-water rafting. But we were not going for any more extreme sports. After Zorbing, Bungy Jumping, and playing mini-golf in the rain (mini-golf has always been extreme for us - the last time Letizia and I played, it was midnight and we were under the influence of large gins-and-tonic - I blame you guys Phil and Sheila) we had a more gentle activity in mind: watching glow-worms. While in the South Island, we missed a few opportunities to see glow-worms, and Waitomo Cave has a great reputation in this regard.

We opted for a combination tour of Aranui Cave (no glow-worms but beautiful rock formations) and the glow-worm tour of Waitomo Cave itself. Aranui has the singular feature of having been discovered by a wild pig, though the cave was named, most unfairly in my opinion, after the Maori hunter who was chasing the pig at the time. We were given a great tour that took us deep into the earth and shown stalactites that had been forming over hundred of thousands of years (it takes a century to add one cubic centimetre to these natural sculptures).

Respecting the convention honoured by caves the world over, certain structures were given names to reflect passing resemblances. At one particularly populated section of the cave, our guide stopped and her torch beam settled on one formation after the other and she reeled off their poetic names: Snow White, Elephant's Head, Fairy Glade etc. Then she snapped her torch off, and walked wordlessly past Penis Forest and the adjoining I've Never Seen One So Big.

Waitomo Cave was a great deal more spacious, and the management had worked much harder on making the interior as pleasant as possible. Well-crafted spiral staircases led down to the cathedral, and the lighting was beautifully executed. The geological features were less dramatic than Aranui, but the cave's history is no less compelling. The guide pointed towards the "most recent" rockfall to have taken place - a large chunk of limestone that fell from the roof of the cathedral around 2000 years ago. "That rock fell when Jesus was alive", I said to Nina, an idea which elicited the sought-after oohs and aahs. The cave itself was formed about 6 million years ago, which is around about the time that the evolutionary tree branched - one branch leading to the Orangutan, the other to you and me. But we were there to see something ephemeral. A creature whose lifespan is less than a single year. An insect that when it reaches maturity lives for 2 or 3 days, living only long enough to breed.

We were led down some more steps to the sound of water. I say 'sound' because it was harder and harder to see anything. Our group of about 15 people felt our way onto a boat, and then pushed off into total darkness, silent except for the lapping of water and the occasional intake of breath. Above us, the ceiling was a net of green-blue points of light. Not like a starry sky as the brochure would have us believe. The points moved in relation to each other as we floated by underneath, a parallax effect created by the fact that the net of glow-worms took on the concave shapes in the stone above. It's hard to find a complete silence. Nature is loud, not just cities. The last time I remember a perfect silence was in a woods just outside Jasper in British Columbia, Canada. To achieve that sort of quiet you either need the kind of expanse that Canada provides, or the kind of deathly enclosure you'll find in a cave. As much as I enjoyed the light-show, I enjoyed the peace it brought even more. I sat back, one arm around Nina, and just kept on looking up.

We Stink. Again.

2008-07-03T10:16:00.001Z

Look out for the smell of rotten eggs! This is the advice given to everyone going to Rotorua, as if we were all brought up with malfunctioning fridges stuffed with unused eggs. I for one had no idea what rotten eggs smelled like, though after a week in Rotorua I know now. The warning are so stark and alarming that when you actually get there you end up wondering what the big deal was all about. Sure there's a bit of a whiff in the air, but nothing too overpowering. Of course after 6 months on the road our sense of smell has probably diminished somewhat a little. (And the commonplace about deficient senses being compensated by others has proved to be nonsense. My sense of humour, for example, is as poor as ever.)

A week is a long time in politics they say, but it's a fleeting moment in Rotorua (see??!!). Even in bad weather, the list of things to do is longer than the time you have to do it. The essence of the place might lie in the springs, mud and volcanic walks that together provide the famous aroma. But Rotorua is also home to a vibrant Maori culture that is very happy to share itself with visitors (well, rent itself out really), and there are a number of extreme activities that can be enjoyed or endured there. Zorbing (covered in a previous post) was invented in Rotorua, and is the only place in NZ that I know of where you can do this.

After 8 weeks in the South Island, with hardly a Maori face in sight, we were expecting to get a closeup view of New Zealand's indigenous culture right here. One of our first actions on arriving in Rotorua was to book ourselves in for an evening of Maori song, dance and food - the famous hangi (a method of cooking using heated volcanic stone and mounds of earth). There were many such events competing with each other, and we went with the recommendation of our motel host. It was run in a nearby hotel, and included transport to and from. From the outset of the evening, it was clear that this was going to be the kind of get-together that I would warn tourists visiting Ireland against. The vast majority of the audience appeared to be bussed in directly from Japan. And I learned more about the European travel woes of the Queenslanders with whom we shared a table than I did about Maori life and attitudes. It was the equivalent of a sightseeing bus tour through Maori culture, but you know, once in a while a open-top bus tour is a good start when getting to know a new place.

It didn't bother this particular musical snob that the singing was backed up with a gently strummed guitar - who would walk out on a trad musical session when somebody pulls out a 'foreign' instrument like a bouzouki or a banjo (I'll admit to getting antsy when a piano accordion is produced, but I'm of one mind with Gary Larson when he depicts that particular instrument as Hell's equivalent of the heavenly lyre). And I quite liked it when the poi dancers picked on Letizia and dragged her up on stage to learn a little about this most graceful of Maori activities. Letizia, being of a shy disposition, was not particularly happy about it at all, but she acquitted herself very well in front of her family, the Queenslanders and the small Japanese city. And if I may say so, she showed that an Italian woman can sway her hips was every bit as much allure as any Polynesian.

I wish the same could be said for my ability to perform the haka. As soon as Letizia was allowed to return to her place, the male performers came down into the audience in search of 'volunteers' to learn this warrior posture dance. If you follow rugby, or you read this blog regularly, then you know what I'm talking about. Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora! Tenei i tangata, puhuruhuru! A menacing chant accompanied by much foot-stomping, thigh-slapping, eye-popping and tongue-protrusion. A quasi-musical performance likely to put the fear of a painful death into anyone watching (a bit like the aforementioned piano-accordion, now that I think of it). Maori people, on the whole, are beautiful to behold. The woman possess an appeal that is hard to convey but easy to appreciate. The men are tall, muscular and hard to argue with. This is how I ended up on the stage, alongside my haka mentor, squinting against the spotlights. It's hard to imagine a greater mismatch than this woolly-jumpered stick man set along side a man who clearly started life as a an enormous pair of pectoral muscles around which a human was generously constructed. I watched and tried to keep up as the warrior showed me the basics, but the results, far from being fierce and frightening were perceived by my watching (and filming!) family as oscillating between high comedy and low farce. All I had to show for my efforts at the end of the evening was a little tiki that I was given before leaving the stage (which I think I still have), and two badly bruised thighs (which I definitely still have).

We did lots of other fun and unusual things in Rotorua, which I won't bore you with right now (though I reserve the right to return to), including a trip to a mud spa, and a half-day wandering around the original Rotorua bath houses, now an excellent museum. In this last place, we learned that Rotorua is New Zealand first major tourist attraction and has been welcoming geothermal pilgrims for more than 125 years now. My guess is that more people have been to Rotorua than have had occasion to smell actual, real-life rotten eggs. In fact if humans were even close to being truly rational beings, people would be warned to check their eggs, and throw out any that smelled like Rotorua.

Taupo Bungy

2008-07-02T10:28:00.005Z

I had no intention of doing a bungy jump. If I was going to do anything it would have been a parachute jump. But then I saw the Taupo Bungy location. It's a huge cantilevered platform that stretches 30 metres out, high above the blue-green Waikapo river. It looks like an enormous diving board - and I suppose that's exactly what it is. Hell - I can parachute back home.

I went through a phase of reading about capital punishment a few years back, and one of the titles was The Executioner's Protocol that details the routine followed on US death rows. Every detail of inmate preparation is codified in elaborate detail. Everyone in the execution team knows what they must do at every stage of the procedure. Giving every step a sense of quasi-religious ritual takes everyone's mind off the less palatable goal to which they are all working. As I watched Charlie and his assistant haul back up the bungy, fasten my leather ankle-straps (Velcro? you've got to be kidding!), check and cross-check the various carabiners, cords and catches that made up the bungy kit, I felt I was watching the Film of the Book. Was it possible that the only way these guys could bring themselves to chuck a perfectly polite and otherwise healthy customer off their lovely cantilevered platform, was by playing mind games with themselves? I thought that was MY job?

"Do you want to touch the water?"

I looked down the 47 meters (that's not much change from 150 feet folks) to the river.

That water down there? Em, OK. I'll dip my hands, I said, thinking that they could use a little rinse given how sweaty my palms had become. My nerves still were serviceable though. I was no more anxious than I might be before a speaking engagement (perhaps where the topic is freedom of conscience and the audience is a pickup full of Kalashnikov-wielding Taliban). I was invited to walk to the edge and toe the white line that marked the boundary between platform and void. I shuffled over. Dead Man Walking!

Here's are the rules for jumping off a high platform:
1) Fool yourself with steps: Driving there; Getting out of the car; Paying your money; Walking to the preparation area; Let them strap you in; Fall. Take these steps in perfect sequence, forgetting each one as it passes, only thinking about the one in hand.
2) Abstract the height (easy for Abstracto!) in a cartoon fashion. Think canyons, coyotes and delayed applications of the law of gravity.
3) Obey. Do not think. (There'll be plenty of time for logical regret later). When the man says stand on the white line, do it. When the man says wave at the camera, give a nice rigid-with-fear arm quiver. When the man says fall forward, remember that he might seem nice and calm now, but if you piss him off he will beat you to a pulp with that clipboard. And then he'll push you off anyway. Especially if you are the weeping Japanese girl that was up just before me.

So I obeyed. I really, really didn't want to do it. The moment I had toed the white line, the coyote disappeared and all I was left with was the canyon. I didn't have the will to take the step for myself, and so I entrusted myself to Taupo Bungy's fear of litigation, secure in the knowledge that if anything went wrong it would be ALL THEIR FAULT. So there! I leaned out.

My recollection of what happened next is fogged by physical violence and adrenalin. I was mugged. Gravity mugged me. It scooped me off that ledge with the tenderness of a metal claw, and dragged me towards the water. I didn't feel like I was falling 47 meters (well - what experience would I base it on?), just that I was travelling very very fast. I think I had the presence of mind to scream on the way down, something I'm obviously very proud of. And I remember reaching out with my hands to see if I would really touch the water as promised, only to get my head and shoulders completely ducked. I wouldn't like to guess how long I was submerged - it wasn't long enough to inhale, luckily. But it was long enough for me to form the classical facial expression of the slightly irked customer. Head cocked, one eyebrow raised, what part of 'dip my hands' do you not you understand? But the thought was immediately erased by the realisation that I was still alive and I couldn't fall any further. (Wrong again - there's quite a fall left in that second bounce).

"That was the stupidest thing I've done all day" I said to the boat crew who untied me and ferried me to the shore. In truth, it wasn't. I'm glad I did it. It was a blast. But it left no lasting effect, except for an ugly insight into the last moments of suicide jumpers (a decidedly terrible way to go).

If you are going to New Zealand, and you are thinking of a bungy jump, I can recommend Taupo Bungy to you as a good starter, better in my opinion than the better-known but over-trafficked A.J. Hackett jump in Queenstown. It's slightly higher, it offers the option of a dunk in the water, the setting is much more beautiful, you won't have to wait as long, and the crew there are terrific. It's right in the town of Taupo as well, so you can go have a beer or a bite to eat afterwards. Just don't do it before.

And the evidence (Mam, Dad - you might not want to watch this)...

Bubble Boy

2008-06-26T05:23:00.003Z

Don't know what the guy on the left is so excited about - I was the one who rolled down the hill in the big plastic bubble.

It's called Zorbing. Extreme? Not really. Extremely silly for sure. And well worth the 44 bucks.

Are you a traveller's friend?

2008-06-26T02:54:00.003Z

It occurred to me a while back that the most prized thing for any traveller in a new town is a friend. If you are lucky enough to have one already, or at least have a contact name so that you can make a new friend (as has been the case for many of the places we've visited), then great - but that's not always going to be the case. Another great way to make friends is through Bookcrossing - we met Anne, Liz, Barbara, Aoife at the Wellington Bookcrossers meeting. And if you're very lucky indeed you'll come across gems like Di in Wellington.

But people like Di are a rare breed. There are many like her who feel a solidarity with strangers who are traveling (very often, they are travellers themselves), but there are very few indeed who would act on it spontaneously as she did. I wonder if there isn't some way of making it easier.

If you are reading this blog entry, and consider yourself the kind of person who likes to meet new people, show them the ropes in a new town, and swap travel stories over a coffee, let me know by commenting or emailing (brendan dot lawlor at gmail dot com). It's possible that there's a niche out there for a web-based service to exchange contact details between travellers to, and residents of, various cities around the world. When we get back to Ireland, I'd like to think that we could help somebody traveling there to orientate themselves, especially if they are in a similar situation to our one now (i.e. travelling with kids). Maybe you think the same way?

I know that Couchsurfing has an option to just offer a coffee rather than a place to stay, but the name and idea behind that site probably scare off most of my age. Dopplr has a "Who lives in this city" tab but doesn't allow you to meet anyone you don't already know. Perhaps there's something already out there that can do this - let me know if you have found it. I'd love to use it!

Walking on Fire, but not on Air. Yet.

2008-06-25T06:53:00.005Z

When Nina was celebrating one of her earlier birthdays - probably fourth - she and her friends were running round the front garden when it started to rain. Letizia called from the house - "It's raining out there!!". Nina responded by rounding up her friends "It's raining out the front garden. Quick. Everyone round to the back garden."

We laughed at the time of course, but we've been playing a larger scale trick for the last month or so on the South Island. "It's raining East of the Alps - quick - let's head West". And it has by and large worked. We've seen a bit of rain, but nothing sustained, and nothing that didn't clear up about 100km into any given trip. Our luck has finally run out.

The last 4 nights - 2 in Taupo and 2 here in Rotorua have been rainy. Though we've dodged the worst of the showers (more though luck than planning) and succeeded in getting out and about, there was no getting around the fact that this was not jumping weather. Certainly not with a parachute, and probably not even a bungy. But don't count us out quite yet. The bungy site in Taupo is gorgeous. It's so beautiful that I've been overtaken by the desire to do it myself. It's only an hour back down the road, and if the Sunday weather forecast is what it promises (and we don't chicken out) we'll celebrate our 11th wedding anniversary by chucking ourselves off a cliff. Can you think of a better way?

In the meantime, our South Island glacial walk is being tidily balanced with a series of North Island geothermal experience. New Zealand lies, tectonically speaking (ahem), right along the line between the Australian plate and the Pacific Plate. As the Pacific pushes under the Australian it formed the Southern Alps and so indirectly the glacier we walked along. The action that has generated so much ice in the South Island creates fire in the North. Taupo, and even more so Rotorua, are bubbling, steaming, sulphurous centers of seismic, geothermal and volcanic instability. Every town we've visited since leaving Wellington has experienced some cataclysmic event thanks to the fault lines that lie below. Napier was wiped out by a 1931 earthquake, an eruption deleted an entire Maori town just over a hundred years ago near Rotorua, and Lake Taupo itself fills in a dormant caldera that when it last exploded about 1800 years ago, left its stroke in the writing of the Chinese and Romans, by means of a global ashen mark in the sky.

The signs of this volatility are everywhere. When you drive outside of Taupo, steam pours out of the greenery and across the road near the geothermal electricity generation station (7% of NZ's electricity is generated this way). Nearby, the Craters of the Moon Geothermal Walk offered us a way to get a closer look, and smell. But far more spectacular is the Wai-o-Tapu (Sacred Waters) site, 30km outside of Rotorua. We visited this today, luckily without getting rained on, and enjoyed scenery that until now I would not have said belongs on Earth. Letizia has taken some fantastic pictures, a few of which I've nicked. Don't tell her! Mind you, what's she gonna do? Chuck me off a cliff...? Oh.

The Best Day So Far (Apparently)

2008-06-23T08:15:00.001Z

"That was the best day of the trip so far" said Nina, with the typical exaggeration and amnesia of a nine-year-old. With so many UNESCO World Heritage sites under our belt, with Beijing, Sydney, Fraser Island and Fox Glacier still bearing 'Wet Paint' signs in my own mind, why in god's name did she choose Napier, pretty though it is, as The Best? You tell me.
Out of the various options Napier had to offer, Nina nad Sara chose the playground and Marine World. Letizia and I chose a self-guided tour of the Art Deco buildings, and the Earthquake Museum (Napier was flatted in 1935 by an 8.6 quake and subsequently rebuilt in an almost uniform Art Deco style).

The playground turned out to be what Italians call a 'pacco' - a waste of time, something that doesn't deliver on its promise. A disappointment. It was relatively new, wit a quirky design that looked well against the Art Deco backdrop of the town. But it was ill-concieved and badly maintained. The girls squeezed what they could from it, but left knowing that, given the glowing reports we had received, it should have been better.

They endured the Art Deco tour before falling gratefully upon Marine World, fuelled with stories of being able to hold penguins. These girls have fed wild dolphins in Tangalooma, and seen dozens of them surf the bow waves of the catamaran on Milford Sound. They've seen truely spectacular synchronized dolphin shows in the Gold Coast. Napier's Marine World, on the face of it, should have been a let down. But that same childhood amnesia and fixation with the here and now prevailed. They loved the tricks of the single, ancient dolphin called Kerry. And although they've seen fur seals in the wild on at least 3 occasions here in New Zealand, they still adored the pup that was taken for walkies around the thin Winter crown that lay scattered about the small poolside terraces. The half-hearted applause sounded like piss dribbling out of a bucket onto concrete, but that didn't diminish their enthusiasm. And at the end of the show, they did get to hold a penguin; a Little Blue called Alfred who was missing one eye and blind in the other. An admission-paying parent might mistake this for a 'pacco', and a pathetic one at that. But Nina and Sara, as they posed with the shivering bundle (penguins, the girls reminded me, shiver from warmth rather than cold) just felt how good the moment was.

We duely visited the museum where the girls remained unmoved by an old lady's filmed testimony of the earthquake, whereas I was close to tears. But they were just words from an old lady with a lot of makeup. Words are rarely enough for kids.

After our relatively busy day, we relaxed in the hostel for a few hours. I tried to read but failed; I was dragged to the pool table where my daughters found themselves in unquestionable need of help (this was their first time playing pool) but unwilling to properly accept it. "We'll just use our own rules, Daddy". When I challenged Letizia to a game, and discovered that it was also her first time, Nina and Sara looked on, in open-mouthed thrall of their father's consummate skill. I'm a below-average player of pool. Well below average. I should have been a 'pacco'. I know that I'm a 'pacco'.

We ate dinner in a Mongolian BBQ, where most appealing characteristic for the girls was the unlimited supply of icecream and soft drinks that came with the meal. Letizia and I are unashamed hard-asses when it comes to eating healthily, but every now and then we ignore our own rules. Afterwards, we walked back to the hostel joking about all the funny made-up words the girls used by mistake just a few years ago (they love stories about when they were younger). And this was the contented atmosphere in which Nina proclaimed this to be The Best Day So Far.

More often than not, I don't respond in the positive to my daughters' requests to play. I'm stuck in a book, talking to Letizia, or worse - working on this stupid blog. Too often, I am missing one eye, and blind in the other. But not today. Today I played pool, joined in, laughed - I might even have skipped at one point. I did enough today for my amnesiac daughters to forget the fact that their father is often something of a 'pacco', and they just felt how good the moment was.
If it's this easy, this inanely, embarassingly easy to make them happy, why the hell can't I manage to do it every day?

Micro Blogging

2008-06-19T04:36:00.003Z

I've finally given up and signed up for Twitter. To those who already know about Twitter and just don't get it - I know! Me neither! For those who don't know what twitter is, consider it like a micro-blog, where you can send a small message (140 characters) just to let your friends/colleagues/wardens know where you are and what you are doing. The limited size and format of the messages means that you can send text messages from your mobile phone to twitter's number and so keep your friends updated even when you are far from a computer.

In the spirit of intrepid exploration that defines this trip (ahem), I've decided to try it out. To the right of this blog you'll see a little window that shows the last five entries I've made on Twitter. My Twitter page is here.

To complete the picture, Facebook has an application that channels my tweets (for that is the noun employed to describe a Twitter message) into my Facebook micro-feed.

And to those of you who know what Facebook is, and just don't get it....I know! Me neither!

Flying Kites

2008-06-18T10:02:00.007Z

It was our third time going to Te Papa, Wellington's famous museum. We were late getting there and Nina was stressed in an understated way visible only to her parents. We were supposed to be attending a Maori kite-making session, but Letizia and I had dawdled over our morning lattes - at least that's how Nina would have it (If only her respect for time-keeping extended to things that her parents cared about - like bedtime, for example).

To their great credit, Nina and Sara can amuse themselves for many hours with nothing but scissors, stickytape and cardboard foolishly discarded from the Adult World. These are the basic elements and implements in the Junior Alchemy Set. From these, all Art springs forth. The transformation of base cardboard to precious artifact is unstoppable when catalysed with enough self-belief, perseverance and Pritt-Stick. This is the core dogma of the religion of Make and Do, to which my daughters fervently adhere. Deep indeed is their conviction in redemption through the transformative power of handicraft. The very thought of a creative opportunity lost to the whims of their parents (an unhurried breakfast, for example, or an irreverent haste in disposing of beer cartons) weighs heavily on their tender hearts.

In the name of this religion, we have left a trail of cut-out houses and paper hats across two continents and three countries. For this have our generous hosts found, after our departure, tell-tale traces of paper clippings on their carpets, leading to mutilated egg-cartons and water-bottles stuffed hastily into shallow-grave cupboards. And for this did we race to the fourth floor of Te Papa, and elbow ourselves a place at the altar of Arts and Crafts.

I never knew that the Maori made kites, but apparently it was an important part of celebrating Matariki, or Maori New Year. Not that I knew this at the time. The Te Papa staff probably explained this at the start (when we were still looking for space in the car park) but even if they had told us on our arrival I probably wouldn't have been very receptive. All I knew was that I was perspiring like a pig, breathing like an ill-hinged bellows and surrounded by a confusion of sticks, crepe-paper and strangers. And all because of Nina and Sara's fundamentalist and irrational beliefs vis-a-vis Making Things With Paper. This is not a state of mind that lends itself to making new friends.

And yet that's exactly what happened. That new friend was an Aussie woman with a broad smile, a disarming openness, and a positive attitude made of reinforced concrete. Di, and her beautiful daughter Trinity, had the misfortune to share not only the table but the only serviceable roll of stickytape with us, and it cost her dearly. Di has done her fair share of traveling, and living beyond her native borders and explained that as a result, she feels a certain solidarity with travellers. It's one thing to feel sorry for strangers (and god knows that our demeanour evoked pity), but it's another matter entirely to do what Di did next: to invite those strangers to dinner. To make such a leap of faith in your fellow man takes something special. When we got over the initial shock, we of course accepted the invitation.

Di, thanks for your kindness. If one day back in Cork I scare the bejeezus out of some unsuspecting backpackers by inviting them home for dinner, it will be entirely your fault.

Bachelor no more!

2008-06-17T10:23:00.001Z

Some Facebook buddies were already a little concerned to see the message "Brendan Lawlor and Letizia Aresu are now friends", given that Letizia and I will be 11 years married in a week or so. Well, it gets stranger. I have learned that I am no more to be a bachelor. In 1990 I became a Bachelor of Science and never thought I'd look back. But all that is to change. No longer a Bachelor, I am to become a Master of Science (at this rate of backwards titles, I'll be a Sonny-Jim of Science in a few years, and then an Infant of Engineering). The exam board of the Cork Institute of Technology met today to consider, amongst many other things, my meagre thesis. I've just this it has been accepted.

It's about time I became a Master of something, and I can't think of anything I'd prefer to be a master of more than science. I owe my brother Stephen a great deal for suggesting that I do this in the first place (and taking care of the printing in my absence), Letizia for her helping me see it through, and this trip, whose looming departure date basically scared me into finishing on time. Well - kinda on time. I owe at least one more thank-you: to Simon and Leah, who as well as giving us somewhere to stay, and excellent company (which we still miss), also offered me a Real Computer to complete some necessary corrections to the thesis during our stay with them.

Troublesome Treaties

2008-06-16T12:01:00.000Z

Since we've left Ireland almost 6 months ago, the Irish people gave Bertie Aherne an early bath, albeit indirectly, and now have rejected the Lisbon Treaty as well. The best political commentator I know (that's you Jim if you're reading) predicted a year ago or more that Bertie would finally have to go if and when the economy started to splutter, and I'm in no doubt that he was right on this. I wonder if the fact that it continues to splutter, belch and occasionally fart is partly responsible for the treaty's rejection as well. In any case, the Irish had the opportunity to decide whether the Treaty was a good idea or not, and their voice was duly heard, even it it's hard to tell what it's saying.

The Lisbon treaty was negotiated and redrafted over years by expert civil servants and lawyers, translated into every official European language by dedicated teams of polyglots, and debated for months by various national parliaments and the Irish electorate. The Treaty of Waitangi (1840) by contrast was drafted in 4 days by three men (and not one of them a lawyer), translated badly by a missionary, and debated by a subset of Maori chiefs, none of whom really had the authority to sign it on behalf of their people, and for whom many of the concepts of modern statecraft meant nothing. But sign it they did, and in so doing transferred sovereignty of the islands of New Zealand, considered at that point to lie in the hands of the United Tribes of New Zealand, to Queen Victoria of England.

That the United Tribes of New Zealand was non-existent in any functional sense didn't seem to matter. There was no political union under Maori - the Maori name for New Zealand (Aotearoa) was unlikely to have been used by Maori, and was probably a romantic invention of European missionaries. The very word Maori was only coined by Maori as a way to distinguish themselves from the Pakeha (Europeans), and means simply 'ordinary' or 'normal'.

That key words from the treaty like, em, sovereignty for example, were translated badly (and inconsistently with previous English/Maori documents), was overlooked or ignored.

British motives behind the treaty are interesting to look at. It's easy to imagine the Treaty as the product of rapacious imperialism, but the kind of people behind its creation (James Stephen, Lord Glenelg) were those who pushed successfully for an end to slavery in the British Empire. Conditions for the Maori had become particularly difficult since whalers had started operating from New Zealand's shores, and it was felt that something had to be done to protect and conserve New Zealand for the Maori. But the unseemly haste, which made the treaty such a flawed document, was driven by baser motives: a race against time to prevent The New Zealand Company from seeing though its plans of 'Systematic [private] Colonisation' of the islands. And the way in which colonisation was seen through was far from the 'New Zealand for the Maori' sentiments nurtured by the Treaty's creators and sponsors. Settlers and Crown authorities often interpreted the treaty in ways that favoured Pakeha over Maori, or else disregarded the provisions of the Treaty entirely.

The very fact that there was a treaty at all is another indication of the difference between the fates of Australian aboriginal and Maori societies (no - I'm not through with this topic yet). A treaty was required because New Zealand, unlike Australia, was not deemed to be Terra Nullius by the British. It was occupied and defended in a way that Europeans could related to. Farming was well established, and a continuous state of war between tribes, with alliances chopping and changing regularly, meant that the technology and organisation available to Maori for their first contacts with Europeans was enough to keep them at arms length for quite a while.

Tasman arrived in 1642, lost four sailors to Maori spears, and buggered off. A full 127 years passed before the next European explorer, James Cook, passed by, and despite his famous ability to negotiate with locals, and the advantage of a Polynesian language speaker on board, still managed to get into several skirmishes. Although the Maori came off worst in these clashes, the belligerence of the natives was reported back to London and surely had some influence on the selection of New South Wales over New Zealand as a suitable place to set up a penal colony. And that relative proximity of a British outpost in Sydney just 10 years after Cook's voyage allowed the Maori to build up a relationship with London gradually. Sixty years passed between the settlement of Sydney and the Treaty of Waitangi, during which there was much trade and exchange of people, and the gradual establishment of private whaling stations on New Zealand coasts.

For the first New Zealanders, almost 200 years passed between first contact with Europe and final colonisation. Compare that with 10 years for the Eora people of Sydney, and consider also that Australian colonisation took place without a treaty, and with complete and total disregard for the First Owners of Australia. No provision was made for the protection of their rights or property, as happened in New Zealand. Although technically subjects of the Crown, those who attempted to repel the invasion of their lands were officially considered on a par with enemies of the state. This ambiguity in law left the Aboriginals to the tender mercy of settlers, by whom they were considered at best competition, and at worst, vermin. I've already mentioned the fact that Australian aboriginals were still hunter-gathers, given Jared Diamond's reasons for why this was so, and outlined how this left the Aboriginal less prepared, technologically and socially, for invasion and sustained warfare. This lack of preparedness, the speed of colonisation, and its ferocity, meant that Aboriginal societies in Australia (and in the case of Tasmania, even the population itself) were destroyed. And it's not at all clear to me if they will ever recover. It was an exact analogue of what happened to the Moriori of the Chatham islands, except in this case the both the aggressors and the vanquished were Polynesians. The Maori suffered terribly but were able to defend themselves better and their society was not dealt quite the same killer blow and in the case of Australian aboriginals.

Through a mixture of base and noble purposes, the Treaty of Waitangi was more or less thrust upon the Maori, but I wonder what would have happened if it had not? The fates of other Polynesian peoples, under the "broad sweep of history" that Jared Diamond describes in Guns, Germs and Steel which I blogged about recently, was varied and ranged from absolute annihilation to a retained and functioning independence. There's no safe assumption that things would have been any better for the Maori without Waitangi.

The unity of Europe was conceived with noble reasons - to end the wars that had raged between the constantly switching alliances of European tribes, to protect itself from external aggression, and to create and environment suitable for mutual prosperity (some of which seems remarkably similar to the situation that pertained amongst Maori before Waitangi). Europe has rejected unity attempted in the past by horse, sword and panzer, until it's more recent acquiescence to the pen. The Treaty of Lisbon, written in dense legalese and referring to many other previous treaties, may have been effectively just as open to misinterpretation (and misrepresentation) to Irish voters as Waitangi was to the Maori. It might have been put in force over the heads of all EU countries other then Ireland. I'm happy we had our opportunity to vote on it, but I think that the arguments for the treaty was made very badly indeed, and I'm not sure sure that we'll be any better off for having rejected it.

I Got the Paua

2008-06-12T11:10:00.007Z

We have a flair, it would appear, for reaching southernmost points. Today we drove to Cape Palliser for almost no other reason than it was in a corner we could easily reach - my travel strategy is the same as my tooth brushing technique. We were expecting to find a lighthouse, and a seal colony there. Or would that be a seal dominion now? Or a constitutional monarchy of seals, perhaps? In any case, we found ourselves traveling a one-way road, that finished in Cape Palliser itself and frayed quite a bit towards the end. The road seemed far too close, and at too similar a height, to the waves of Cook Strait which thrashed menacingly on one side with high mountains just a hundred meters inland of us. One big wave would have sorted us out. But we made it to the Cape, and we could see the lighthouse alright (it wouldn't be much of a lighthouse if we couldn't, now would it) but there wasn't a seal in sight.

This was supposed to be one of NZ's largest colonies. I thought we'd be deafened with the noise of barking (and the odd rendition of Crazy). But when we stepped from the car, and began to walk along the verge that separated the barren soil from the stony beach, there was nothing but the wind and the waves pushing back at us, asking us what the hell we wanted anyway.

Good question, actually. A seal, perhaps? We had driven for 2 hours to get here so a New Zealand fur seal would be nice. We've seen one or two before, but we we don't have any back home so we're not ready turn up our noses at them quite yet. We looked out upon the stones and the waves, and implored the Maori spirit of the sea to reward us for our trip but all he did was blow Letizia's beanie off (yes - that beanie) and along the beach. We gave chase and eventually caught the beanie just before it was lost to us forever. Incredibly (in the sense that it sounds made up, and probably is) the flyaway headwear led us to a treasure, a collection of paua shells just lying there on the grass, unclaimed. We had already paid 12 bucks a pop for a lot of these mother-of-pearl shells back in Christchurch, so we obviously took a few as, er, consolation for the missing seals.

As we started to make our way back to the car, Letizia managed to hear the call of nature over the noise of the wind and waves, and made her way towards the nearest bit of scrub at the edge of the shore. The girls and I prepared ourselves for a wait, but we needn't have bothered. Letizia had barely disappeared from view when suddenly, there she was again, running towards the car at a speed that was all the more impressive for the headwind she had to content with.

She had found the seals.

Wellington Fits Like a Glove

2008-06-11T12:50:00.004Z

The Southern Cross bar on Abel Smith Street is large - it must hold as many as 200 drinkers when full, and many of them sit outside when the weather permits or (in the case of smokers) when the law insists. It's the outdoor voices that you can hear the most from our apartment. But from six floors up, the distance is sufficient to filter out all content, just leaving the carrier signal, a white noise that is distinctly human in its cadence but devoid of even a single recognisable word. Tomorrow morning, that's how these conversations will be remembered even by those who are engaged in them now. I'm hearing 8 hours into their future.

I love the noise. I love being back in the city. The only thing you could hear in our Christchurch house was Willard the cat occasionally mewing and the canary next door whistling the first two lines of Happy Birthday To You. That was very peaceful and welcome for a while, but by the end it was the constantly murmured rosary of city life that I was praying for.

I love Wellington. I love the fact that we exit our apartment practically onto Cuba Street which feels a bit like Newtown in Sydney. Undeniably smaller, but unmistakeably urban and confidant. Using my recently developed Index of School Uniform Skirt Length (which I recognize is borderline perv, but I am a Man of Science, dammit, and data are data) I can report that the atmosphere in Wellington is much less austere than Christchurch. I love the fact that there are too many museums and places of historical and political interest here, and that I will have to choose carefully the ones I plan to visit. I love that at the end of every day here so far I feel I've seen something worthwhile and only added to the list of things to be seen before we leave.

Let me give you an example of a day well spent. Letizia went to get her hair done today, something that ladies (and especially Italian ladies) will know is the kind of service that one can only safely look for in a town that you either know very well, or trust based on its appearance of sophistication. Together with Nina and Sara, I toured the parliament house and executive wing and then crossed the road to see the decomposed remains of an original Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi (the 1840 'agreement' between Queen Victoria and the collected heads of the various Maori tribes that brought New Zealand into the British Empire as a colony - a document held in such disdain by Maori that the National Archive provides a wooden bowl of water outside the Constitution Room where it is displayed room, so visiting Maori may symbolically decontaminate themselves after viewing it).

This evening, after chilling out at home for an hour, we went to the Opera House to see a superb performance of Cats. Well I'm assuming it was superb. A man can only be expected to devote a minimum of attention to the appreciation of music, when he is watching a troupe of lithe actresses, dressed in figure-hugging body stockings, crawling around the stage on all fours. Oh look, people clapped a lot. I clapped a lot. It was all good.

And this was a typical day for us here in Wellington. Not every day involves leotard-clan feline impersonation of course, but at the end of the day, when we relax back 'home', there is generally a feeling of having seen something worthwhile. Accompanied as ever by the satisfying background music of people with more stamina and fewer responsibilities than us having a good time into the wee hours.

In point of fact, as I write this I've noticed that the noise has faded away. It must be damn late. And there's lots more to do tomorrow. Goodnight, and pleasant dreams (purrrrr).

Learn Italian (then read my wife's blog)

2008-06-11T04:52:00.002Z

The folks who have helped me learn Chinese have now started a similar service to learn Italian. It's Europe's most beautiful language, all the more pleasing as it offers no commercial advantage whatsoever. So check it out, and then check out Letizia's blog to see how much you've learned!

How not to be a Racist

2008-06-09T06:46:00.002Z

When Europeans first went sailing around the globe, and bumped into (or more accurately, collided with) other more primitive societies, they asked themselves the question "How is it that we have the ships, guns, horses, writing and all the other trappings of civilization that allow us to conquer those others who have little of none of these advantages?". In the absence of any scientific explanation of how Man came to spread himself over the earth, Europe explained its success in terms of racial superiority, or believing in the 'right' God, or both. Five hundred years later, the same science that developed the ships and guns finally delivered the answer to that question.

It has been the consensus for some time now, and expressed in an accessible way by writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, that all currently living members of the genus Homo are, genetically speaking, brothers. We are Homo Sapiens sapiens, distinguished from our ancestors (say some) by our faculty for language, and we probably first appeared in Africa about 100,000 years ago. If you read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel you'll find a patiently paced description of the "broad sweep of history": the initial many colonizations of the globe by Homo Sapiens sapiens, and the more recent one that led to the Eurasian conquest of the rest of the planet (the result of which is clearly visible both here in New Zealand and back in Australia).

If you don't read Diamond's book, let me try to lay out its thesis in a nutshell. It was Europeans' guns, ships, germs, horses and political/societal size and sophistication that led to its victory over North- and South-Americans, SE Asians, Polynesians, Africans and Australian Aboriginals. These are the self-evident proximate causes of conquest. The ultimate causes lie in Eurasia's early transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming. The production of excess food created a positive feedback loop with increased population densities - the more food, the more people, the more labour, the more food. This led to a necessary stratification in society: chiefdoms and kingdoms - a means by which strangers living in close proximity could co-exist more or less in peace, with the kingdom acting as arbiter, and central point of trade. (Smaller societies, based around the tribe structure, kept the peace and managed trade through personal ties and reputation: Everyone knew everyone else, perhaps even related.) Stratification led to a specialised craftsman class, freed from the direct production of food, able to invest energy inventing better tools, methods, metallurgy and so on. This was the initial vector whose trajectory finally brought literacy, science and technology.

The domestication of animals, and their subsequent living in close quarters with man (very close, according to what Australians say about New Zealanders ;-) ) led to the co-evolution of epidemic diseases, and partial human immunity in farming populations. Most of the fatalities in subsequent collisions between Old and New Worlds were due to disease rather than warfare.

So that's a very basic description of the connection between the switch to farming and its consequences in terms of the proximate causes of Eurasian conquest.

So the question now can be reduced to: how and why did Eurasians switch to farming earlier than their global cousins? Those disposed to race-based answered will have the opportunity here to insist that Eurasians were simply smarter than their cousins. This is an easy solution but there is no reputable evidence for this. Diamond's gives an extremely comprehensive answer that can be reduced to one word: luck. Culo. Bald, unearned fortune. The more extended answer, in three words, is location, location, location. The fertile crescent and the Yangtze and Yellow rivers where agriculture first began, were home to the great bulk of those wild cereals, roots fruit and animals that firstly lent themselves to domestication and secondly provided enough calories in a single 'package' to compete with and displace hunter-gatherer modes of existence. While Man experimented globally with farming, Eurasia was by a wide margin the best-equipped laboratory (and also has a geographical axis that was best disposed to a transmission of newly domesticated crops, animals and techniques).

Maori vs Australian Aboriginal

Some peoples suffered more than others during the Eurasian conquest. Few fell apart quite as much as the Australian Aboriginal. In a later post, I'll finally try to make a comparison between what happened here in New Zealand to the Maori, and what happened in Australia, based on what I've seen in both places and what I've been reading since hitting the road. This much is clear to me: there's no need to lean on race as an explanation.

If some day, science finds that Europeans are genetically so different from Australian Aboriginals as to indicate that we do not come from the same stock - that we are effectively different species - then the government of Australia will have a very difficult ethical issue on its hands. How can you apply Man's law and confer human rights on a race other than the human one? But it would make some things simpler for the likes of you and me. It would give rational expression to that part of us that looks at the state of the Aboriginals today and asks "what the hell is wrong with them anyway?".

Luckily for moral philosophers and Aussie lawmakers, there is no such challenge to face. The rest of us have to get our heads around a more complex, but ultimately more satisfying, answer to silence that persistent suspicion that they are not like us.

Some News from Sichuan

2008-06-07T06:48:00.003Z

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had contacted what few people I knew or had met who live in and around Chengdu in the Sichuan province, to see how they were faring since the earthquake. This evening I got an email from Sim's Cozy Guesthouse in Chengdu. Since the crackdown in Tibet and the earthquake centred in Wenchuan county, Chengdu tourism is seeing a dramatic fall off (Chengdu is a launching pad for travelers to Tibet). Here's what Sim has to say:

Recently, some of our guests called us to ask if Chengdu is safe to come, and others just skipped or cancelled to come to Chengdu (or Sichuan ). Here one thing we would like to announce to everyone is that you are safe at Chengdu , so please come to visit us! We luckily did not affected by this earthquake, and except some people who are afraid to sleep in their apartment buildings are sleeping in tents in parks, but the city is operating properly. You are able to visit Panda Center , Mt. Emei , Leshan Grand Buddha, Yibin Bamboo Forest and so on.
...

If your friends want to come but going to skip Sichuan because of the disaster, we really hope that you can tell them to get the accurate information from us and judge if it’s worth to visit. Please do not just be away from Sichuan . Disaster area is recovering everyday, and situation is changing all the time. Also, if there is anyone interested in volunteer work, we know some groups who are in actions and we try our best to make it work out.

Best Wishes

Sim and Maki

P.S. According to the latest notice, Tibet is going to be open for foreigners in the end of June after the torch relay finished in Lhasa .

I'm just passing on the message to anyone interested in visiting Sichuan. Inform yourself as to the real situation before discounting it out of hand. And if you do decide to visit Chengdu, you can do no better for cheap, confortable friendly accommodation than Sim's Cozy Guesthouse.

Wellington for the Rugby

2008-06-07T05:03:00.005Z

We're in Wellington, on the North Island, where it's Ireland vs All-Blacks (that's rugby, for readers from the US) tonight at 7:30 local time. We don't have tickets of course (and even if we had, Nina and Sara would have spat the dummy at the prospect of being forced to watch the game from the windswept terraces), but we are living around the corner from the very lively Cuba Street, and will probably take this opportunity to go to the nearest Irish bar and watch the match on the big screen. That's assuming we don't get kicked out or deported for bringing minors to the pub.

In 100 years of playing the New Zealand team, Ireland has a perfect record. We've never beaten them. When Munster beat a visiting All-Black some time back in the 1950's, the euphoria was such that somebody wrote a play about it. But all is not well in the NZ camp. Eight months ago, they lost to Wales, and judging by the tone of sports commentators you'd think it happened yesterday. To Kiwis, rugby is more, much more, than a game. It is a symbol of national pride, and the very idea of losing is something that perhaps due to a lack of practise, they are not comfortable with.

If there is an upset tonight, then I suspect that any advantage my Oirish accent has given me up till now will vanish. I suspect I'm very safe though.

How much for the whale?

2008-06-06T08:22:00.003Z

If you get into a boat in Kaikoura and head East for just a few minutes, you will go over the edge of a vertical cliff with a drop of about 800 meters. The drop leads down further to a canyon 1300m at its deepest point. Within easy sight of the shore, you are off the continental shelf and into deep ocean water. The combination of the deep canyon and the intersection of two opposing ocean currents in these waters, brings nutrient rich deep-water closer to the surface, creating an ecosystem all of its own. The krill and plankton attract the fish, the fish attract the squid, the squid attract the whales and the whales attract the tourists.

They used to attract the whaling industry of course, but in New Zealand that all came to an end at the end of the 1970s. Apart from the ecological considerations behind the decision to ban whaling in NZ waters, the economic results are interesting. Whales in Kaikoura are like the trees on Fraser Island in Queensland, in that they are worth more alive than dead. The tourist industry here in New Zealand isn't just about bungy jumping and tequila slamming. It's about hiking through nature reserves and observing wildlife in its natural context. Conservation-based tourism is big business. Just about every reserve or animal encounter we have seen on the South Island is in private hands, and in each case the result of tourism is increased stocks and greater understanding of the creatures in question. The inclusion of wildlife in the global money-go-round seems to be working to the mutual benefit of economy and ecology alike. Economic pressures tend to operate in favour of conservation at the moment, but what happens in the case of a downturn?

Take the yellow-eyed penguins we saw on the Otago Peninsula. They are the rarest penguins in the world and their fate is now inextricably linked to the bottom line in the privately-owned Penguin Parade, and by extension to the global human economy. In this case, Penguin Parade isn't just an organization that brings you to see the animals in their natural environment, they are the animals' landlords. They own the patch of land that is the Yellow-Eyed Penguins' remaining breeding colony. Any number of international conservation charities would happily contribute towards the stabilization of Yellow-Eyed Penguin numbers, but Penguin Parade prefers NOT to take their money in order to continue running the business as they see fit. To be fair, they put their money into replanting the tree and shrub cover whose loss originally led to the dwindling number of this rarest of penguins. But if Penguin Parade ever goes out of business (perhaps tourist numbers will drop in the future thanks to increasing costs in flying?) then the penguins are on their own again. Or worse - evicted from their only remaining habitat in order for that land to realise a greater economic value. Many want to see the environmental cost of flying reflected in the cost of airfares. But economies can be as complicated as ecologies, and one side-effect of this move might be the collapse of global wildlife-based tourism, with consequent collapses in conservation efforts. I have no idea of course - I'm just speculating.

But I wasn't thinking any of these things on Thursday morning as we motored out of South Bay, and off the edge of the continental shelf, with the privately-owned Kaikoura Whalewatching company. All I was interested in was seeing some whales, and I got what I wanted. In two hours on the water we had three close encounters with Sperm Whales. The way we used to find them was the same hunting technique as formerly used by whalers. These mammals are deep divers, resting at the surface to breathe for 10-15 minutes, re-oxygenating their muscles, before diving for 30-40 minutes. They announced ithemselves with 2-meter spumes from their blowholes, giving us time to race over to them to watch their heads and torsos bob above the surface for a short while. Then finally, as they began their next dive, they lifted their powerful tails gracefully above the waterline, sinking out of sight and leaving a growing circle of flat water known as the whale's footprint.

When we drive along a coast road, we mistake the sea for its surface, and consider the waves and swell to be all there is. For the Sperm Whale, the surface is the place where it spends the least time, the place where it comes by necessity rather than choice. It's nothing more than a filling station. A necessary but inconvenient stop to fuel its deeper activities. It is also the interface where man and whale interact, where the whale becomes an agent in the human economy. I hope that its market as a target for the camera-shutter rather than the harpoon remains viable.

Plans and their Enemies

2008-06-01T23:14:00.005Z

"No plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy". I've heard this quote a number of times and it makes sense to me. I thought we would learn how to roller-blade together in Sydney, ice-skate in Christchurch, and ski in Queenstown. But once we got to these places, things took their own course. But that's OK. The adage is meant to reassure that it's not so much the plan as the planning that really prepares you for the fight.

But what fight? What is the enemy in a round the world trip? It's the same one we all fight back home. Time. Eight months sounds like a long time, but it's not. It ambushes you each time you look at the calendar. Eventually you ask, so much time has passed already, and what do we have to show for it?

When we started traveling in China I was expecting chaos without, and turmoil within. But it wasn't like that. Despite our strange and sometimes chaotic surroundings, it was still us. We were still the Lawlors, operating as ever we did, dealing with new situations. And that was a good thing. Now, with two-thirds of the trip-of-a-lifetime behind us, living in a city that is similar (too similar?) to what we left behind, we are still the same family. And somehow that feels not so good anymore.

I was as certain as I could be about anything that this journey would change us as individuals and as a family. And yet I see no evidence of it. Perhaps we will only see the full picture in the rear-view mirror when this trip is behind us. Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of fragments of that picture here and there, scattered along the road we are traveling, blurred by the speed at which we're moving. But probably it's just the product of a mind that demands signs and patterns even where there are none.

We're leaving Christchurch first thing tomorrow morning. It has been the perfect base from which to visit the rest of the island, and thanks to the home swap (which included the use of a car) we're slightly under budget, for a pleasant change. We're taking two days to get up to Wellington, and we expect to find a very different city there. It would be reasonable to say that Christchurch is more like a very big suburb than a city, and a conservative one at that. (One of the things that caught my attention here was - don't laugh - the length of school uniform skirts. The poor unfortunate girls of Christchurch have to wear ankle-length tartan curtains that to me seem practically Taliban. The length and the pattern give away the Scottish influence that I think lies behind this conservatism.)

Museums here in Christchurch were not up to much (especially the Science Museum), whereas Wellington is home to the famous Te Papa museum - walking distance from our apartment. For the first time since Shanghai we'll be living in the centre of a city, and the idea is very appealing.

There are some great cafes and restaurants here. Tonight, for example, we will have our last meal in a Sichuanese restaurant called Ginkgo, where we can enjoy the same dishes that we had in Chengdu: Kungpo Chicken, Mapo Tofu and 'fish-flavoured pork' (!).

Despite my various misgivings about the town itself, I'm still experiencing some pathetic sentimentality leaving it behind. This house has been a good home for us, and we will surely miss Willard and Satie, the two cats of the house, whose very different personalities mirror to some extent the differences between Nina and Sara.

Inevitably, the fact that we are already leaving another place behind serves as another irritating reminder of how quickly time is going by. In the end, time is all we really have, and that just makes it harder to watch it flow though our fingers.

Punakaiki

2008-05-30T10:51:00.009Z

We packed our gold mining gains, and a souvenir pan (you never know) from Shantytown into the car, and continued northwards towards Greymouth and ultimately Punakaiki. This place is famous for its pancake rocks and its blowholes. The pancake rocks are a cliff formation peculiar to the area, formed underwater by marine animals obligingly turning into layers of limestone, sequentially and over a period of tens of millions of years. The finished product was thrust out of the sea by an earthquake, to form cliffs. The blowholes are holes (unsurprisingly) in the pancakes through which large volumes of liquid (maple syrup say, or perhaps just seawater) are squeezed at high tide. You can just see why people flock here. Just.

Punakaiki was the only other stop off on the West Coast that we thought was within easy striking distance and even vaguely interesting. Our expectations weren't high, and in one important way they were met: The food west of the Alps continued to disappoint. Had we eaten some of the pancake rocks themselves, rather than the disagreeable stodge for which we exchanged perfectly good real money in Punakaiki's only tavern, we would have been no worse off. If this is what the locals themselves regularly eat then clearly there is another variety of blowhole here whose eruptions are independent of the tide.

But all that was to come later.

When we first arrived, we went straight to the rocks, and took the path that led in a circuit from the main road to the cliffs, through abundant flax growth, and back. It was close to sunset and Letizia started snapping away in light that perfectly displayed the strange formations. There was something strange in the atmosphere that at first I put down to the rocks themselves, the noise of the waves' impact underneath us, and to the isolation lent by the surrounding flax.

But after the light had faded and we had found our motel - situated on a tiny sliver of land with the darkened beach on one side and an even darker enormous cliff on the other - I realised what it was that had struck me as odd earlier on. Since leaving Cork, we've either travelled inland, or on the eastern seaboards of enormous landmasses. This family of islanders had just seen a sunset over the sea for the first time in 5 months.

MTV (Maori Television)

2008-05-28T10:52:00.003Z

[Updated May 30th to sort out cut&paste problems in first paragraph]

When you switch on the telly for the first time in New Zealand, you'll find that one of your viewing choices will be in a language that you have probably only heard before on the rugby pitch, when the All-Blacks perform their famous haka. The Maori language is like nothing I've ever heard before, and strange to a European ear. But when James Cook (there he is again) made contact with the people of New Zealand in 1769, he had on board somebody who could understand these men, and could make himself understood. That man was called Tupaia, a Tahitian chief picked up during the first part of the Endeavour's voyage. The reason that Tupaia understood the Maori is because the Maori, like Tahitians, are Polynesians, and speak languages that come from the same sub-family of Austronesian. The Polynesian people swept eastwards across the Pacific from 1200BC until 1000AD, starting from Taiwan and inhabiting island after empty island, eventually doubling back to find Earth's last big true Terra Nullius, New Zealand. And they did it a good six to eight hundred years before Cook passed by.

When you first enter the country, even at the airport, you see the Maori language all around you. Like Ireland, official signage is always bilingual. Like Ireland, certain terms in the one language have found their way into the other. Most white Kiwis will know what mana is or what whakapapa means - not just words but even Maori concepts form part of New Zealand's shared vocabulary. The cross-fertilization works both ways. After Cook had moved on, and traders and whalers moved in, the Maori needed to expand their own language to deal with things they had never seen before, and they used transliterations, just like we've heard in the Chinese language a few months ago. For example hipi renders the idea of the then-unknown sheep and pata sounds like the foodstuff that the Maori had never know, due to the lack of large mammals on the islands: butter. (I have no idea where Lake Wanaka got it's name...)

Take all these things together - Maori Television, a single Maori language respected with dual signage, a keen sense from white New Zealanders (Pakeha) of Maori culture - and you get an outsider's feel for the difference between the situation of the Australian aboriginal and the New Zealand Maori. The Maori suffered under colonization, make no mistake. At one stage during the late 1800s most whites believed - many with regret - that this was a people doomed to extinction. But they survived conquest better than the Australian peoples, and adjusted with greater ease into an essentially European political framework.

Why?

At the moment, I'm reading another, older Jared Diamond book called Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond offers an explanation for what he describes as the "broad pattern of history": how Europeans (or at least Eurasians) came to conquer the rest of the planet, rather than Africans, Native Americans, or Australians. I'll wait till I finish the book before trying to summarize it on this blog, why the fates of the Maori and the Australian First Owners have differed so much.

For now, let's look at another related New Zealand story that Guns, Germs, and Steel relates. The book starts with a discussion on the spread of the Polynesians across the Pacific. This is because that movement serves as a kind of Human History in a Nutshell, a small isolated example of what happened globally when anatomically modern Man spread from Africa to almost every corner of Earth. The islands that they conquered or filled varied enormously in climate, size, isolation and domesticatable plants and animals. Over the two millennia of exploration, the inhabitants of each of these islands tended to lose their cultural memory, forgetting where they had come from and simply adapting to conditions on each of the islands. The starkest lesson that can be gleaned from these adaptations lies in the story of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands.

When they settled in New Zealand, the people who came to be known as the Maori brought with them some domesticated crops (the earliest Polynesians were already farmers). Some of the crops they had didn't thrive in the colder climate even on the North Island, but others did and the Maori people came to depend on agriculture more and more, especially after they hunted the larger flightless birds on New Zealand to extinction (the Moa being the most well-known example). By the time New Zealand was fully colonized by the Maori, they were organized into territorial tribes. At any moment in time, some tribes were at war with each other, while others cooperated (a perfectly normal state of human affairs). Some time before 1500, a group of Maori left NZ and settled the Chatham Islands, 800km East of where I'm sitting now in Christchurch. Life on the Chathams was not the same as where they had come from - it was too cold even for the few crops that remained to the Maori. But it was abundant in seafood. The Chatham Islanders reverted to a hunter-gatherer way of life and while this was the right choice (indeed their only choice) for survival in these conditions, it was the wrong choice geopolitically and it sealed the Moriori's fate.

In order to survive on an island that could support no more than 2000 people, they developed a strategy for dealing with conflict that excluded outright war. It wasn't strictly pacifist - you could still take a stick to your neighbour in a ritual fight. But once you drew blood, that was as far as you were allowed to go. There was no food surplus, nor way of storing it, that would in any case have provided for maintaining even temporary armies. There were precious few natural resources that could have provided for weapons. If the Chatham Islanders had kept up their Maori ways, they would have wasted what the islands had to offer, and died out.

When contact was next made with the Moriori people, by whaling and sealing ships around 1800, the word was brought back to the Maori in New Zealand of islands that were bountiful and inhabited only by a group of people who had no concept of weapons or war, and simply no idea how to defend themselves against outside aggression. A total of around 800 Maori chartered a European ship, and went to settle the Chathams. Those of the unfortunate Moriori who escaped slaughter tried repeatedly to negotiate their way to peace (it was all they knew) but merely ended up as the slaves of the Maori. The consequent genocide was practically complete in 1933 when the last full-blooded Moriori died.

By recounting this story I am not criticizing the Maori - what they did was in complete accordance with what they would have expected to suffer if they were defeated in war themselves. Nor am I saying that the Moriori are to be commended for their pacifism - their lack of defence was not a principled stand as such, but simply due to the fact that as a people they had forgotten how to fight. The real tragedy as I read it, is the fact that neither side understood that they were brothers, separated by just a few hundred years. And the immediate lesson that I take from it is that, if you extrapolate out the 2000 years of Polynesian colonization to the 40,000 years of the movement of modern Man, you are left with the similar conclusion that every one of the current wars raging on the planet right now is a war between brothers. That is not a liberal, bleeding-heart opinion. It is, to steal a phrase from Stephen Jay Gould, a contingent fact of history.

Selling up to travel

2008-05-28T00:19:00.004Z

Just to put our own little trip into perspective, check out this family from Florida. They're selling the family home, and embarking on a round-the-world trip for a year with their three teenaged sons. The have a blog too, which I will definitely be subscribing to.

Flash in the Pan

2008-05-27T07:22:00.004Z

We stayed a second night in the Glowworm cottages, and already traumatized by the truely awful food available in the local pubs, we decided to play it safe and 'take the soup' on offer from our hosts, and hang out in the lounge for the evening. The next morning we headed back north again on our way to Punakaiki - home of pancake rocks and blow holes (what now?)

But before arriving there, we stopped off in a place called Shantytown, just outside of Greymouth. Shantytown is a reconstruction of a goldmining town. So much of white New Zealand history is bound up with this metal. It's discovery secured the future of the then-colony, attracting tens of thousands of prospectors from all over the world. The most exciting activity in Shantytown by far (even more exciting than the ham and cheese sandwiches) was panning for gold. Here, you are guaranteed a find. You're given a pan with stone and a very small amount of real gold, and instructions on how to pan. I was helping Nina and Sara (by edging them out of the way in order to make sure that they didn't lose whatever miniscule amount was in the pan) and discovering how unnervingly addictive it could be to stare into a pan of gravel, looking for flashes of gold.

The place was very quiet - it is off season - and felt all the more twee for the lack of crowds. There was a ride on a steam train which went all of 100 meters in one direction, before reversing back again.

I'd like to say that 5 months on the road has raised Nina and Sara's expectations and standards when it comes to entertainment. But it hasn't - they loved this place. To be fair to them, they loved the fact that the found gold and got to take it away with them. And I suppose to be even fairer to them, deep down I really like that they can enjoy a place like this without turning their noses up at it.

Interestingly enough, when we were there we met a lady from Clare (where my dad is from) who lived in the UK now but who had a niece in Carrigaline (where we call home). So if you're from Carrigaline, and you have an auntie Bridie (who's married to a kiwi) - she says to say hello!

Walking on Water

2008-05-26T08:44:00.007Z

We shouldn't be let mind a dog, never mind two children. The night before our planned excursion on Fox Glacier, Sara gave her unsolicited opinion on the food in Arthur's Pass in the direct and physical way that we are used to from the girl: she barfed it all back up before bedtime. It wasn't looking good for the hike. To make matters worse - much worse - the following morning as we got up early and started to prepare ourselves the same child pointed out, again in the most direct way possible, that her stomach was empty and her sugars were low, by fainting in the bathroom. She didn't black out, but she ended up on her arse, murmuring slowly to herself, until we set her on the bed and put her head between her knees. Really - if anyone feels like reporting us, I'd almost encourage them.

But it gets worse again. Sara recovered quickly, and protested our decision to call off the glacier trip. She insisted that she wanted to do the hike and that she was fine now. We weren't buying it but set off to Fox Glacier (half an hour's drive from Franz Josef) to see if we could get a refund of the $100 deposit. When we got there, and explained Sara's alternating puking and swooning, Malcolm our guide-to-be told us that she'd be fine (these Kiwis are as good as the Aussies at shrugging off illness, danger and common-sense).

So, responsible parents that we are, we continued to increase Sara's sugar levels using fruit sweets and juice, fitted herself and Nina out with boots, and got on the bus with the guides that led to the start of the trail.

What's a glacier anyway?, I hear you ask (admittedly over the noise of those baying for our children to be removed for their own safetly). It's a river, really, that moves 100,000 times slower than normal rivers. Instead of water, flows ice. Instead of a spring, there's a snow-collecting basin (called a neve) over 3000m up the mountain, where today's snow compacts yesterday's and eventually compresses it into ice. The ice flows downhill under its own weight, moving on a layer of water formed where the ice meets the underlying rock, but also moving internally, in a plastic flow. At the bottom of the glacier, the terminal, where the higher temperatures defeats the pressure, the ice finally melts and runs off as cloudy green streams.

The way you get up onto Fox Glacier is to start near the terminal of the glacier and hike for the best part of an hour along the mountainside - the bank of this river of ice - until you reach a point where it's safe (in the I-have-signed-a-waiver sense of the word) to move onto the glacier itself. To reach this point, we had to climb a fair bit, as well as move along a narrow trail at the edge of a bluff. This last fact might alarm American or Antipodean readers. That's because they know what the hell a bluff is. A bluff in European English is a clever card-playing pretence, and very little else. So when we were told in advance that we would be walking along a bluff, I thought it odd but not much odder than anything else I've been told by a guide in the last 5 months. Halfway along our hike to the edge of the ice, we found out what a New Zealander means by a bluff. A bluff, so far as I can now tell, is a f**king great cliff with a 100m drop. It has a path alongside whose width is very much economy class. And by way of support for those who might have fainted that morning there is a chain and a red-bearded, grinning guide. (Social services numbers are in the Government section of the phone book, if you haven't found it yet).

We survived, and not having been killed are of course stronger (big chunks of ice bring out the Nietzsche in me). Nina and Sara dealt with the heights like two little girls who know what it feels to zip along on a flying fox at 7 meters, and we all went on to have a surreal and rewarding experience walking on top of a glacier for 90 minutes or so.

When we got to the edge of the glacier, we were handed poles, and told to put on our instep crampons. And then we walked on water. We stepped onto 12km of frozen but moving water. The surface was broken in a thousand different ways. Where it met the mountainside, it thrust upwards, trying to burst its banks. The centre of the flow moves faster than the edges, creating crevasses whose depths are disguised by the pools of water that fill them. We were walking in the melt zone of the glacier, where the liquid flow created other perfect imperfections on the icescape - archways, circular pools and waterfalls. From the mountain, the uppermost surface of the glacier is undulating but looks smooth. Up close, it is anything but. The ice looks like a snapshot of the choppy surface of a lake on a windy day.

On any trip, there are inevitably things that you wish you had kept your wallet closed for. You're probably glad you did them but you wished you didn't have to pay so much for it. We spent less than 100 euro in the backpackers in Franz Josef, and a little over 100 euros for the half-day trip on the Fox glacier. It was one of the best value highs we've had on the trip so far. If you come here with kids, be aware that there is practically nothing else to do in either Franz Josef or Fox Glacier. The evening activity is limited to going to the pub, and apparently they get quite boisterous. Our irresponsibility as parents doesn't extend to finding out in person.

Honest!!

West over Arthur's Pass

2008-05-23T08:03:00.001Z

For the first time in quite some time, this blog is coming to you live. I've paid my blog debt and now I'm reporting directly from Franz Josef on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island.

We stayed put in Christchurch for almost 2 weeks, but we couldn't resist any longer. We got into the car this morning and headed over the Arthur Pass. We've been looking west to the distant Alps since we first arrived in Christchurch, but it was only today that we pointed the car that way. After about 5 minutes in the car I mentioned to Letizia that finally being on the move again felt good and in fact moving has become our natural state of being. Staying put, even just for a week or two, was starting to weigh us down.

From coast to coast it's only a little over 200km. The first 70 kms were on the Canterbury Plains, flat and straight, with the foothills of the Alps appearing out of the mist. The second 70km was spend riding out of one valley and into another, each one different to the last. Some were tiny patches of fertile land, perhaps with a lake, others were stony flat badlands, others again with forests, until we reached Arthur's Pass. The rest of the trip to the coast was a steep and scenic descent to the sea. We turned south, lush treefern forests to our left, and the waves of the Tasman to our right. We were heading down to see the glaciers - and walk on them too. From start to finish we didn't pass anything approaching a large town. There were a dozen or more small towns, or collections of houses offering fruit, art or B&B. One sign advertised psychic readings and vegetable soup - an unusual combination that somehow seemed to work (something fulfilling, that also leaves you feeling full).

Our base for the next two nights is a small, cozy and cheap place called Glowworm Cottages in the centre of Franz Josef. For a room with four bunks, a kitchenette and an ensuite the total price for the 2 days comes in just under 100 euros. After that we'll head back up North to check out the Pancake Rocks, do a little panning for gold, and hopefully have the time and weather to check out the Devil's Punchbowl (thanks for that tip, Paul C).

Franz Josef was our first choice for a glacier walk, but unfortunately there's an age/height limit that Sara couldn't quite pass, not even on her tippy-toes wearing a pointy hat. A little further down the road, Fox Glacier doesn't have such requirements. But apparently the hike that leads up to the ice itself presents its own challenges - narrow trails with steep drops for example. We'll see if the Adrenalin Forest experience has prepared Nina and Sara (and Letizia and me, for that matter).

The town of Franz Josef is probably a great place if you don't have kids, but the only thing to do around here other than climbing a glacier is going to the pub. I think (hope) the glacier experience will be a positive one, but if you come here with kids, don't stay more than one night.

More tomorrow, if we survive the hike on the ice.

Trying something out

2008-05-22T08:25:00.003Z

I've been using Zemanta for the last few blog entries, by way of making it easier to link to related wikipedia articles, and finding related news. But now I've come across something called Apture which allows me to do something similar, but connecting to a larger selection of links, using multi-media formats which pop up directly on the screen.

For example if I mention a song called No Alarms and No Surprises by Radiohead, I can easily set up a few references to YouTube and similar. A reference to Hu Jintao might yield different results on different media formats.

Let me know if it gets too irritating.

Traveling with Kids: A New Website for Parents

2008-05-21T09:06:00.005Z

For Irish readers, I'd like to point you at a website that has just launched. It's called Sticky Fingers Travel and is dedicated to those who know, or who are willing to discover, that having kids is no obstacle to real travel. It's worth checking out, and preferably signing up, and becoming part of this new community.

Campervan: Epilogue

2008-05-18T22:16:00.007Z

When we first climbed aboard the campervan a few days previously, I had two concerns:
1) Would the whole thing topple over on a sharp turn; and
2) Would the campervan turn into a bloodbath on wheels - the kind of Lord of the Flies scenario that Manchán Magan was hinting at a few weeks back.

Before:

After:

In retrospect, we were inviting disaster. The four of us are used to being in close quarters, but it's an entirely different proposition to invite a fifth person, even if they are family, to suffer the inevitably claustrophobic atmosphere of a young family. Giovanna was taking a big risk of finishing her break in New Zealand on a bum note.

The thing about campervans is that although they look impossibly unstable, they are built to hold together in the tightest corners - as long as you take it nice and easy. And family is pretty much the same - it tends to work even in the most demanding situations. You just have to slow things down and take your time. We didn't topple over - there wasn't even a moment of worry. We managed to have an excellent campervan experience, memories that will last us a lifetime, and one very happy zia Giovanna. I think we did it just by avoiding stressful timetables and activities, by loosening the rules a little, and by having a laugh whenever possible.

The drive back from Hanmer Springs was very easy. We stopped off once more at our local freewifi point, stopped in Waikari to pay due respect to Giovanna's Dunny (see below), and drove into Christchurch dancing around the campervan to the sounds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Unfortunately the next day we had to say goodbye to Giovanna. It seemed impossible to accept that a month had gone by so quickly, and that we had gone from six to four in a matter of days. I personally wasn't prepared for how bad it felt to lose Duncan and then Gio'. Again, the speed that time is passing by continues to amaze me, and that was part of the problem. I felt very down for a full day, and poor Nina ended in tears at the end of the day, thinking about Giovanna.

But we're up and running again now. We've been taking it easy, saving time and money (thanks to the home swap) here in Christchurch, but we've already ben thinking and planning ahead. Later in the week we'll head to the one remaining part of the South Island that we haven't seen yet, the We(s)t Coast, including Franz Josef glacier and Pancake Rocks. Then one week later, we'll finally be heading north to Wellington to begin our 4 weeks adventures in the North Island. We've also found accommodation in Fiji for our 'week out' between NZ and South America (and for slightly under budget!) And we've finally started thinking about how to divide our time in South America (about time I guess).

There's a lot still ahead of us. From here on in we're on our own. I think we'll be OK.

Campervan: Day 5

2008-05-15T23:03:00.004Z

After breakfast with the sandflies (we had Cheerios, they had us) we set off for our last camping night in Marouia Springs. Not far away from Hanmer, these springs have a completely different feel. They are run by Japanese owners and as well as a few small outdoor thermal springs pools they have a Japanese bathhouse. Here you can soap up and scrub up outside of the water, shower it all off, and then get into the hot thermal bath - all while comtemplating the mountain view outside the window that covers one side of the bathhouse. Cozzies are optional for the uninhibited (and the mountain outside is uninhabited). A fabulous experience for anyone interesting in getting their kit off in nature without getting arrested. But because the owners are Japanese and not Scandanavian, the bathhouse is divided into male and female halves, and never the twain shall glance, much less meet.

The effect of the bathhouse was terrific. After a drive from Saint Arnaud, and over 36 hours and 250kms since my last shower, I felt completely renewed after an hour in the springs and baths.

All aglow after the thermal treatment (holding the pink bag in which I store soaps, conditioners, and my testicles should I ever need them again).

Unfortunately the campsite which is part of the springs complex was closed (more frozen pipes!) so to find a place to stop we continued down the road to Hanmer Springs. We were just using it as a place to sleep and eat this time, and the place we found was Rustic Cafe and Tapas Bar. If I weren't so forgetful as to have left my sunglasses behind me the last time we stayed here, I might have thought of returning to the place next door, where I probably left them.

We found an unusual way of connecting to the internet from Hanmer, thanks to the advice of the very helpful waiters in Rustic. If you ever find yourself wireless in Hanmer Springs, it's worth your while parking outside this place if you want to catch up on your email. Given the absence of either WIFI in the campervan park, or an internet cafe, we did what we had to do:

I might add that the campervan came into its own on this occasion. And given the Mission Impossible atmosphere we had created in our own (sad) little world, Letizia's beanie seemed ready to double as a balaclava at any moment. Elegant and ingenious - can't get any more Italian than that.

Campervan: Day 4

2008-05-15T07:08:00.003Z

In keeping with the Camper! theme, every time I've gone to use the showers in whatever halting site we've found ourselves, my thoughtful wife prepares a little bag with shampoo, conditioner etc. A petite pink bag. Not unlike a handbag. I've had to make the walk of shame from the camper to the showers, pink bag swinging in my hand, greeting anyone I meet in deeply compensatory tones. At this point, Nina and Sara are taking the piss out of my 'borsa rosa' and saying what a girly-girl I am.

We left Nelson City for the middle of nowhere, also known as Saint Arnaud. This was to be Duncan's fault, or Duncan's kudos, depending on how badly or well things went. We had no idea if the place was even equiped with a powered site for the camper, or indeed if there was any reason to be there in the first place, other than the fact that it was approximately half way between where we were and where we next needed to be. Duncan had told us that there was nothing there but it was a beautiful nothing (Bel Niente). Sitting on the edge of Lake Rotoiti, Saint Arnaud has one hotel and a camping site. What the hell - we were up for it.

Before we left civilization, we stopped off in another of Duncan's recommendations: WOW. The World of WearableArt. About 20 years ago in Nelson, a show that combined art and fashion was born. The only requirement of the work presented was that every piece had to be wearable. The idea took off, and after another few years it grew so popular that it had to move to Wellington in order to cater for the ever increasing audiences. It's improbable, odd and if I'm honest not entirely enticing at first. But it's really worth visiting. The shows themselves, which can be viewed in the mini-cinema at the end of the gallery, look like a fantastic evening out.

An unexpected side-effect of our visit to WOW was the aquisition of a work by a local artist. Che Vincent's workshop is very close to Nelson, just off the road to Abel Tasman we had taken the previous day. One wall of the gallery's foyer was covered with these little creatures. We had to have one - we're already working on the next parcel to send home (number 5!).

We stopped off on the way for another Irene Safari, which in the camper now includes hot coffee!We made our picnic on a little bench at the top of a hill in the middle of logging country, where the scenery was dominated by planned and orderly conifer forests, and some closely shaved peaks that didn't look like they were going to produce again any time soon. How odd it was then, from this height that didn't offer much beauty, to come across the following work of philosophy carved into our picnic table:

I can subscribe to that. First talk, then trousers.

The Bel Niente turned out to be accurate on both counts. Other than the fabulous Lake Rotoiti, a takeaway/shop and a small motel, there was only the campsite and its resident sandflies. The lady running the DoC campsite told me that the sites were indeed powered, but due to the cold weather, the hot water was switched off.

How's that now?

Yes, I had heard correctly. If it's very cold, then the pipes might burst, so there are no hot showers in Winter. I did the spoken equivalent of a double-take (think of Porky Pig, but without the keen intellect) and - fair dues to the woman - she kept a straight face while running this logic past me a second time.

After a small walk around to check for kiwis (nope, no kiwis here), and a brief tour of the main road (nope, no Kiwis here), we settled in for the night. The kids watched Ghostbusters II, we ate some dreadful pizza, and then all fell asleep listening to the wind, and the noise of the branches overhead scratching the top of the campervan. At least I think thats what it was...(who ya gonna call?)

Chengdu Revisited

2008-05-14T09:06:00.004Z

The recent earthquake in Sichuan hit 50 miles northwest of Chengdu, where we stayed just 4 months ago. I've contacted Sim's Cozy Guesthouse, and luckily they haven't suffered any damage or injury. I've contacted Erik Wiersma to make sure he's good too, and hopefully I'll hear back from him.

Reports on damage in Chengdu itself seems to conflict, some talking of almost 1000 deaths, others report minimal damage. The Chinese people that we met a few weeks ago in Slope Point were from Chengdu. I've been in contact with them, and some of them have been home. One of them has suffered heavy damage to his apartment and possessions.

The Olympics are just around the corner and Bejing must surely have imagined different international headlines than those that have come to pass. So much has happened to China since our time there, first the Tibetan unrest, subsequent suppression and public opprobrium that followed, and now this devastating and tragic earthquake. In the first case, the Chinese showed their similarity with the Burmese regime, and in the second, they demonstrated the difference, by accepting foreign humanitarian aid immediately and mobilising the army in Sichuan as urgently as they did in Tibet. (Burma by stark and disgusting contrast are centralizing their resources into the administration of a referendum of dubious worth, and keeping US and other aid at arms length and away from those who need it.)

My undiluted sympathy goes out to those Chinese people caught up in this natural disaster. It has perhaps given an opportunity for ordinary people worldwide to connect to ordinary people in China through fund-raising and humanitarian organizations, over the heads of politicians and outside the straitjacket of politics.

Campervan: Day 3

2008-05-14T07:04:00.005Z

Abel Tasman Park, in the northwest of NZ's South Island, is accessible from a number of points, one of which is a town called Marahau 60km from Nelson City. There's a coastal walk that leads from the Wainui at the tip all the way back to Marahau which takes about 3 days to complete. Some day I'm going to do that. But for now we were content to do a half-day walk, facilitated by Aquataxi. More like a bus service these guys will take you to one of 5 or 6 points along the coastal walk, and pick you up from another. The walks are all well maintained and marked. It couldn't be easier.

When we set off from Bark Bay, with a 7.7km walk to Torrent Bay, Nina was in bullish mood. "This is too easy!" she insisted. The trail was mostly covered by the canopy of the trees above us, but it did follow the coast and climb up above it too. Every now and then we could look out over the water, or down to an inlet, and curse the fact that you didn't pack your swimmers - or to hell with swimmers, at least a towel! One hour later, when the gradient had asserted itself a little, Nina's attitude had changed: "Why does the trail have to go UP?", she asked in pained tones. Where do you start with a question like that? Poor Nina and Sara. We've calculated that since we left Cork, they have hiked around 75km. Those are real hikes, not including city walks and general traipsing around. They have both had plenty of practice of hiking in Cork, and plenty of notice about what might await them on this trip.

Why does the trail have to go up?

Oh my wonderful little Nina, the trail will go up, and the trail will go down. And sometimes it will wind around on the level for so long that you will forget that you are even on a journey. And at the moment when it gets really tough you might be surprised by a stupendous view afforded only to those who put in the effort. The trail goes up because that's what the trail does. And when it goes down, it goes down because it already went up. Make your peace with the fact that sometimes it will be harder than others, and that all you have to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other and know that sooner or later, it will get better. We all know that the good stuff doesn't last, but not even the bad stuff does.

On a less chocolate-box philosophy note: The temperature has improved tremendously - enough so that Letizia was able to sleep without her beanie! There's an unconscionable and irresistable provocation if ever there were one.

Campervan: Day 2

2008-05-13T10:01:00.003Z

We woke up early in the freezing morning in Blenheim, with various extremities suffering from exposure. In the daylight we could see that our corner of the 'Holiday Park' wasn't much more salubrious than a supermarket carpark. Duncan joined us for brekkie before heading back to Christchurch for a 2pm flight, eventually attracting the unwanted attention of the New Zealand police due to the rush he was in. (Very unlucky, when you consider we had covered more than 2000km a few weeks ago and seen exactly two speed traps).

We unplugged the campervan, as if it was just a big toaster (well fridge, really) and headed towards Nelson via Picton. Picton is the place where the ferry between the North and South Islands leaves from, making its way thorugh the spectacular Charlotte Sound. We'll be passing that way again at the start of June when we leave Christchurch behind for good, and go check out Wellington and beyond.

Just outside Picton we saw an enormous logging shipping facility with what looked like around 100 tips of 3 or four hundred logs each. Moored alongside was a ship with all its hold doors open wide, and specialized log-moving vehicles buzzed around in front of it - looking tiny in front of the ship, but at the same time dwarfing the logging trucks that they were unloading. Those logging trucks look plenty big when you share the road with them. I know that the logging industry here is probably being run along sustainable lines, but the sight of this enormous appetite for timber is still unsettling. It's made worse by the fact that there are signs all around the top end of the South Island of deforestation.

Despite all that, the road between Picton and Havelock is not to be missed. The road rises and falls along the coastline, which looks out onto Charlotte Sound. The views from on high are magnificent and the peace and quiet when you pull in and sit at the shoreline is something that oddly, up until now, has been hard to find during our stay so far in New Zealand. For once, we could hear a variety of birdcalls coming from the trees. And fern trees - the first we've seen since Queensland.

I finally saw a tamed version of the Pacific thanks to the insular and peninsular complex of Marlborough Sounds. Warmth at last - all of this scenic experience was blessed with sunshine as warm as you'd find on an Irish spring day, and that sunshine lasted us all the way to Nelson, where we found a campervan park within walking distance of the city centre.

We ate the best homous and falafel I've tasted in, well, perhaps ever (if you're ever in Nelson City, call in to Falafel Gourmet - they make from scratch with carefully sourced ingredients). Things were looking up.

What's a traveling family's favourite berry?

2008-05-13T09:42:00.003Z

The lie-berry of course (pronounciation courtesy of Sara).

The Christchurch library near us is the business. As well as a fantastic selection of books, a huge upper limit on how many books they can take out, and DVDs as well, it's a cool place to hang out. There are playstations for rent, computers to access for free and listening posts for music. And there are green beanbags every where for you to lie on. That must be where it gets its name from.

Camper?

2008-05-12T17:53:00.000Z

Here's how it goes:

Brendan walks into the local carhire agency and says, in his normal manly way:

"I'd like to hire a vehicle where I can sleep, prepare food, and still drive from place to place".

"Camper, sir?"

"Well, I'll give it a try", I said, loosening my wrist, upping my voice pitch a few notches and repeating: "I'd like to hire a vehicle where I can sleep, prepare food, and still drive from place to place, dahling."

"Camper, sir!!??"

And so it goes on. Of course it didn't happen, but thanks to Duncan for the original 'joke' which then set the tone, and the catchphrase ("Camper?" pronounced in a shrill Aussie accent) for the rest of our time on the road in our Winnebago.

Do our bums look big in this?

The first leg of our journey was the longest and took us from Christchurch to Blenheim - the central winegrowing town in the centre of NZ's Marlborough region. The coastal road along the way near Kaikoura is amazing - the road is meters from the Pacific spray, dozens of seals hang around by the water's edge undisturbed by the passing traffic, and hanging in the background are the snowcapped mountains.

We stopped off in The Store (recommended to us by Simon and Leah), and it was already dark at that point. An unmissable spot on the main road, it's probably best seen during the day to appreciate it's setting, but we still found it very special, and it's open fire and wooden furniture was particularly welcoming.

We got to Blenheim so late that pretty much all the restaurants were closed. We rang one of the restaurants attached to a winery called Herzog and made it there in 20 mins from the camper park, only to find an ultra-luxurious and suitably expensive place, well out of our price range. Fair enough that it was Duncan's last night with us, but we weren't going to make that even more tragic by forking out 130 dollars a plate (not including the wine). The evening started going downhill after we arrived too late for a number of other restaurants, but was saved by Bellafico's in the centre of Blenheim who took us in and fed us well for a decent price. Great local beer too.

The evening was freezing - the coldest yet - and our first campervan sleeping experience involved certain people wearing beanies in bed. Discretion prevents me from naming names.

Last Blast from Hanmer Springs

2008-05-12T04:47:00.005Z

I mentioned a snowfight...

...Hanmer Springs is a memory now. Duncan has returned to Sydney and Giovanna has just boarded her flight to Paris. It's back down to the core team again. Since I've last blogged, we've been on a five-night campervan experience. I've got lots of free time this week to assault you with Tales of the Camper. Watch this space.

Snow and Steam in Hanmer Springs

2008-05-08T09:37:00.003Z

Our group has been expanding ever more. As well as Giovanna, we were also joined by Duncan all the way from Sydney. We knew when we made our goodbyes in Sydney that we would see Duncan again - he promised to come and show us around NZ, as he used to live in Wellington. We complicated matters by choosing Hanmer Springs as our destination - somewhere Duncan has never been. All the better, perhaps.

We needed two cars to move around, and that qualifies as a convoy where I come from. We didn't have the CBs, and Kris Kristofferson was nowhere to be seen, but we did have a bad attitude and scant regard for the law. No, that's not true either. Damn. Well, Duncan got a speeding ticket towards the end - does that count? Look - we're hard, and you'll just have to take our word for it.

What does Hanmer Springs have to offer that Alice Springs didn't? Springs. Thermal ones, sulphuric ones. Hot ones, cold ones. And water slides too. And on the Christchurch side of Hanmer Springs theres a place called Thrillseekers Canyon, where among the many activities on offer is Whitewater Rafting. Yes! You the readers of this blog (or 22 of you the readers of this blog - or actually about 10 of you, plus Sam my godson who has probably voted 12 times by now) have put Whitewater Rafting as the top must-do experience of New Zealand. And do you know what? I'm never asking you anything else again!!

Oh it started well alright. We were given the briefing by a wild-eyed Graham who made Sara laugh from the get-go. His front teeth were missing (we were too polite to ask if he lost them rafting) as were some other items like fear and perhaps judgement. We got suited up and then carried our raft down to the Waiau river. The trip was a Grade 2 'scenic', which is probably just one step up from a punt on Christchurch's Avon river. It's the rafting equivalent of a busy shopping day on Patrick's Street, Cork - you'll get thrown around a bit but nobody will get hurt (as opposed to the same street at night, which would be more of a Grade 4). As ever, we were lucky with the weather. Our drive from Christchurch was pleasantly sunlit and by the time we reached Thrillseekers Canyon the conditions looked ideal. But by the time we reached the water's edge and looked up at the sky, we realised that we had already seen the best the day had to offer. From here on in it would all be downhill, downstream, but - and this is the crucial part - upwind.

Five minutes into our family rafting experience, it became clear to our guide that we were going to take twice as long as normal to reach the end, such was the headwind we were dealing with. Five minutes after that, it started to rain. The temperature wasn't forgiving either - Sara, from behind a blonde scowl and gritted teeth, offered the observation that 'the whole world is an icecube'. Another five minutes passed and we were now trying to row backwards to avoid being hit in the eyes with hailstones. Duncan pointed out that the only form of precipitation we had missed was snow, and sure enough it began to snow. Sara had retreated into her coat to an extent that would make a tortoise proud, and a quick look at her aunt Giovanna's face demonstrated to me that not only would we have to deal with difficult weather conditions, but we were also carrying an Italian Time Bomb on board. Never mind Kris Kristofferson - we were missing Sylvester Stallone on this trip. It didn't help that Duncan and I were pretty much enjoying ourselves, and Graham's manic laughter down the back was tipping towards the hysterical. If something didn't happen soon - by which I don't mean more weather - it was going to get very ugly.

That something was a jet boat operated by Thrillseekers Canyon. It roared around the corner and pulled up alongside. Graham didn't even finish the sentence that began with "Does anyone want to transfer" when Gio and Sara were already onboard the jetboat, their paddles still spinning like tops in the centre of the raft, cartoon-style. The remaining four of us, and Graham, continued to paddle against the wind, the odds, and the prevailing flow of logic. We had pretty much got to the end of the trip when the jetboat reappeared. Gio didn't look much happier, and Sara was nowhere to be seen (she was out of sight, tucked into the lap of her aunt). The rest of us got on board the jetboat, the Thrillseekers got the raft onboard too, and off we went back to the relative warmth of the boathouse. But not before Giovanna delivered, using the kind of facial and manual body-language that come so naturally to Italians, her feedback to the proprietors.

We shivered up the road to Hanmer Springs, in search of hot water. We couldn't have picked a better place. It's a weekend getaway for lots of Kiwis and the price of the motels shows. If you want to rent a house there for a few days (much better value) then you'll have to book well in advance if you have weekends or school holidays in mind. Right across the road from our motel was the Thermal Springs, a complex of 12 different baths or pools, with temperatures ranging from 20 to 43 degrees. We suffered one last indignity of walking out of the changing rooms in freezing conditions in our 'cozzies' before settling into the pools, looking up to the sky and seeing once more, snow falling. From the comfort of 38 degree geothermal water, this time the snow was welcome.

The rest of our stay in Hanmer Springs was taken up with a long hike (including the second snowfight of our trip so far), a long brunch and another long and relaxing evening in the springs. If you come to New Zealand, make some time for Hanmer Springs.

Dunedin and the Otago Peninsula

2008-05-07T09:26:00.007Z

When we finally found a motel in Dunedin, We booked in for two nights. We decided we'd need a full morning and afternoon on the Otago Peninsula, allowing us the evening and the following morning to explore Dunedin itself.

The tip of the Otago Peninsula is just 45 minutes drive from Dunedin centre, and its attraction lies primarily in the wildlife that inhabits it. The stars of the show are the rarest of all penguins - the yellow-eyed penguin - which has a small colony on the peninsula. The private company that owns the land and organizes tours has built a series of camouflaged trenches and observation huts to allow close viewing of these very unsociable creatures. But before we turned up at our booked toured, we went to the very tip of the peninsula to visit the albatross centre.

I've never seen an albatross, and I was looking forward to seeing for myself their 2m wingspan. When we inquired at the centre, we learned a few things: firstly, we probably wouldn't see any albatrosses that day as they were out to sea, feeding; secondly, if we wanted the tour, which included seeing an albatross chick, it would cost us more than NZ$200 for the family. I was not happy. The penguins were already coming in at about NZ$250, and we had already baulked at paying over NZ$100 to see the mansion home of one of New Zealand's richest men of the 19th century. Uluru was still weighing on our minds and budget. We left the centre after reading interesting information about how longline fishing was reducing their numbers, but how cooperation between fishermen and environmentalists resulted in a few simple techniques that protected albatrosses while improving fishing catches.

We walked along the clifftop to see whatever nesting birds were there, and perhaps see a southern fur seal if we were lucky. After 10 mins, our luck proved to be better than we could have hoped for - a free albatross. A lone bird glided in along the cliffside, then circled the hill that sits in the centre of the sanctuary. It soared in and out of view, and made a spectacular sight for the dozen or so of us that picked the right time to wander outside, though we never managed to get a photo.

With a free albatross, our karma was in credit, but Penguin Place - the private sanctuary for the rare Yellow-eyed Penguin - looked like it was going to to balance the books. We were all keen to see these creatures waddling in that ridiculous but adorable way along the beach, as the brochures portrayed. It was only after we paid the hefty fee, watched an introductory Attenborough video and sat in the little lecture room for a talk on what makes Yellow-eyes so different and so rare, that it was pointed out to us that during this time of year these animals are out to sea fishing, only returning to their nests when they're full, and there were no guarantees that we were going to see anything.

Yellow-eyed penguins nest in whatever cover they can find near beaches. We were taken by rickety bus to the edge of their colony, and led through the aforementioned trenches to the beachfront observation post - a half-buried shack with a plank missing at eye level. There wasn't a penguin to be seen. There were about 20 in our group, staring eagerly out to see, waiting for a returning penguin to turn this visit into something other than the world's most expensive peep through a seaside letterbox. 15 minutes later, the only things waddling ridiculously along the beach were 20 or so sullen punters, making their way back to the bus.

Just before getting back on the bus however, we took a detour along the hillside overlooking the beach. Lo and behold lying in the grass in the distance was - apparently - a yellow-eyed penguin. It was only when the animal finally started to move around that some of us were convinced that it wasn't a taxidermist's 'backup' penguin. If the excitement of seeing our investment start to yield some return wasn't enough, our guide's walkie-talkie crackled in the news that there was a penguin on the beach too, just coming out of the water. Then another. Before we knew it, we had gone from zero to three (somewhat distant) penguins and a closeup southern fur seal (to, ahem, seal the deal you might say. Sorry. It's late. And Duncan's influence hasn't worn off yet even though he's now back in Sydney.)

So Penguin Place was saved a long chiding from irate customers about false advertising, thanks to the fact that two penguins had stuffed themselves with fish, and a third, that at first appeared to be stuffed, couldn't even be stuffed to get off his arse to go out and fish.

The next morning we were presented with Anzac biscuits by the landlady of the motel. We hadn't realised that Anzac Day - the occasion that Australians and New Zealander's remember their war dead - fell on the very day we were planning to explore the town. Almost everything was shut. Pity really - it looked like an interesting place. We did spend a fair bit of time in the Otago Museum, where amongst many other things there were excellent exhibits on the Maori people, and on Melanesians, Polynesians and Micronesians. I never knew there was such a place as New Ireland, but there it is, bold as brass, east of Papua New Guinea (in fact politically part of PNG) and sporting some specialised wooden carvings known as Malagan. Obviously some bugger somewhere thought it would be a jolly jape to name some unfortunate recipient of imperial hospitality after a country that had already had its fill of the same.

And on another politically uncomfortable note, the most noteworthy expression of solidarity with NZ soldiery that I saw on Dunedin on Anzac day was a blackboard set out on the Octogon (central feature of Dunedin) next to a huge poppy, that read "Thank you Helen Clarke for keeping our troops out of Iraq".

To Dunedin via the Catlins

2008-05-04T01:00:00.003Z

We're just back from two nights in Hanmer Springs, but I'm still deep in blog-debt so I'll first describe the last stages of our tour of the southern part of the South Island.

Our constant companion on the new Zealand road is the circling bird of prey. If we were of a nervous disposition, we might have interpreted the wheelings overhead as a vote of no confidence in our ability to survive New Zealand's extreme sports (or indeed extreme driving). The reality is that these birds hover over the highway looking for 'squashums' (squashed possums) - it's easier to have your pick of animals already picked off by cares, than to hunt them down yourself.

First stop was a fossilized forest lying in the intertidal region of Curio Bay, less than an hour from Invercargill. It sounded dramatic and had the added frisson that the tide had to be out in order to see it. Being a landlubber, I didn't even bother to check the tide times before setting off, happy to leave it all to chance. As chance would have it, we arrived just in time - in time to watch a powerful Pacific tide wash over a black, stump-pocked sheet of rock. The spectacle provided by the dangerously fast tide was more interesting by far than the fossilized tree stumps that we came to see. I can't imagine where the Pacific Ocean got its name. Seemed pretty angry about something from where I was standing.

After Curio Bay we moved to the nearby Slope Point, the South Island's most southerly point and our trip's lowest latitude. We were halfway round the world, and at our nadir, so it made sense to stop off for a coffee at the Nadir Outpost just set back from Slope Point.
"Do you do coffee?" I asked as we walked towards the entrance.
"Yes, come right in" the lady replied in an accent that sang gently in a way that no Kiwi or Australian accent can.
She brought us to the small and sparsely furnished front room of Nadir Outpost (itself just a little bungalow sharing its grounds with a few other low buildings) and disappeared to prepare the coffee and hot chocolate. By the time she got back I had understood where she was from.
"You're Welsh" I suggested.
"From South Wales, yes."
Interestingly specific. The last time I encountered a similar precision was in reading about Captain James Cook. Nobody is sure if in naming the East coast of Australia New South Wales he was merely pointing out the geographically obvious, or whether more pointedly he was deliberately snubbing the northern half of Wales. I've only been to North Wales once - an attempted cycle from Anglesey to Aberystwyth. I stopped off in a town with a generously long and unpronounceable name to ask directions. I wasn't so much rebuffed as contemptuously ignored - and I thought everybody loved the Irish (this was pre-Celtic Tiger). It might not have helped my case in approaching strangers in the street that I was wearing a pair of Lycra bicycle shorts long before Little Britain's only gay in the village made it either fashionable or profitable to do so. Whatever the reason, my experience leaves me happy to believe that Captain Cook, the man who added so much to the world's atlas had good reason to delete North Wales. Accordingly, I was happy for Beverly, the landlady of the Nadir Outpost to set matters straight on the precise nature of her Welshness.

Because I'm a nosey git, I learned more. Once upon a time she was married to a man who had no interest in travel (sound familiar?) When they eventually parted ways, she met Richard, who had also suppressed a desire to travel for the sake of his former partner. Within days of becoming a couple, they sent off an application to emigrate to Australia - almost without even having to discuss it, such were their shared assumptions on travel. They spent 7 years in Queensland, Australia before deciding to get out of the heat and move to New Zealand (mission accomplished - it was not warm at Slope Point!!) They had been there for 18 months when we met them. It's interesting to note that having children is not nearly as incompatible with travel as having a reluctant spouse is.

Next stop on the Catlins was a waterfall by the name of Purakaunui Falls. The last time we stopped the car to walk to a waterfall it was at the Kondalilla Falls in Queensland. On that occasion what started as a gentle amble finished under a cloudburst, sandals wedged with mud, and nothing but a pair of structurally compromised umbrellas that served more for comical effect - and perhaps as protection from falling leeches - than as a way to stay dry. The whose-idea-was-that silence in the car after Kondalilla was not something I wanted to repeat. And yet when the walk to Purakanui Falls turned out to be a brief and dry one, I couldn't help feeling that the overall impression it made was also brief and dry. I'm sure that when pleasant Purakanui is a long lost moment, catastrophic Kondalilla live on in the collective family memory. That's the nature of travel stories.

The last stop of the day was a place called Cannibal Bay. I've no idea where the place got its name - though it is a well-documented fact that the Maori practiced ritual cannibalism on their defeated enemies. Our hope for the place was to find some sea lions, or lions-of-the-sea as Sara was calling them under the influence of 5 days on the road with predominantly Italian spoken. Our hopes came to nothing alas, but our spirits remained inexplicably high:

We ran around the beach for a while, Nina keeping a watchful eye on the tall grass in the dunes where sea lions were reputed to hide. You don't want to get between a sea lion and the sea, by all accounts. We needed have worried.

We spent as much time off the main road as on it that day, having stopped off at many points of interest, and getting trapped behind at least two flocks of sheep (the latter opportunity giving me the opportunity to see just how unprepared that species is for a life without man - if we don't make it, sheep are next on the list). Catlins Coast box ticked, we packed into the car, and motored into the sunset towards Dunedin. More on that next.

Playgrounds

2008-05-01T22:00:00.000Z

There's a little playground down the road from where we're staying in Christchurch. Nothing new there - there's a little playground down the road in Carrigaline, Cork, the place we call home. I've taken Nina and Sara to the local playground here a number of times in the last 2 weeks. Their favourite ride there is a tyre suspended horizontally from three chains in such a way that it can not only swing, but also spin. Nothing could be simpler.

As far as I can tell, it's their favourite ride firstly because they never quite know what direction it's going to swing or spin in next, because their Daddy is an unpredictable pusher. It might just swing when they thought it would spin, or the other way around.

The other reason I think it's their favourite is because that's the one where I have to participate. They get quality Daddy time, and it's clear that I'm enjoying myself as much as they are. That's the difference. I'm not in a hurry to be somewhere else. It's a simple pleasure that happens more often on the road than it does at home.

In most other respects, life with the kids is just like home. I have to correct them, and sometimes I'm not as patient and understanding as they need me to be. I still have to say things three or four times before they listen to me. We still fall out for short periods of time.

But the counter-balance, the moments when we're just OK being with each other and talking (with Sara this is a kind of one-way download from her to me where I have to work hard to identify the message buried within the verbosity; with Nina it's almost the opposite where I have to interpolate the few words into the idea that she roughly sketches; in both cases it requires me to shut up and listen), are more numerous than at home. I would have paid the tickets for this alone.

Milford Sound

2008-04-30T23:39:00.000Z

The far southwest corner of New Zealand's South Island is known as fiordland. If you take a look at a road map of the island you'll see that this is the place where all roads come to an abrupt halt. From Queenstown we drove to Te Anau, a small little town that serves as a way-station for the fiordland. From where we could either move down to Manapouri and get a boat-bus combination to Doubtful Sound, or else drive up and slightly east to Milford where boats could take us directly out on the waters. We opted for Milford Sound - it was further away and would involve retracing our steps to move on, but it was much less expensive than getting to the more isolated Doubtful Sound.

We never regretted our choice, both the drive there and the 3 hour catamaran cruise around the sound were spectacular. During our week's ramble around these parts we were very lucky with the weather. It's well into Autumn here in the Southern hemisphere, and we've had a lot of rain or cloud cover in Christchurch. On the road we had almost unbroken sunshine. Even though Milford Sound is one of the wettest places on the planet (6.5 m of rain a year; one day in two it rains; a drought is 9 days without rain), the only time we got wet was when the skipper one of the waterfalls that lines the steep sides of the sound. Autumn sunshine brings another great advantage in this part of the world - a variety of leaf colours that are hard to imagine. Every hue possible between gold and deepest red presented itself sooner or later, often as part of a breathtaking natural composition set into the steep mountainsides.

The cruise brought us out to the edge of the sound, to the Tasman Sea. The last time we looked on this body of water it was from the other side - from Sydney. I feel nostalgic for that city more than any I've ever visited, so much so that even looking at the Tasman Sea was a boost. On cue, more than a dozen huge southern bottlenosed dolphins came alongside and in front of the catamaran and surfed on its bow waves. The wild dolphins we fed in Tangalooma seemed even more delicate and alien when compared to these robust creatures. But the same mutual curiousity defined the 10 minutes or so we spend in each other's company. These individuals turned on their sides to look up at us, and reacted enthusiastically when we waved back at them.

From Milford sound

We got back into the car and made a dash south to get to Invercargill in good time for dinner. We would use this town as a launchpad for the Catlins Coast - the southern drive that takes in fossiled forests, and a place called Cannibal bay - on our way to Dunedin. More on that tomorrow.

Duncan from Sydney join us tomorrow for a few days, bringing our number up to 6! Letizia and I realised that in our trip so far we four have never really been alone for long periods. In Sydney and Brisbane we had friends around us (in Brizzy it was more like being part of a big family with the Petts!). China was the place where we relying most on each other's company. We will return to that state when Giovanna leaves us in a few weeks, and things are likely to stay that way until near the end of our trip when we meet up hopefully with Letizia's mum in Peru. We will see, by and by, what kind of challenges that isolation might present.

We're Being Followed!

2008-04-30T12:13:00.000Z

I don't know how to explain this, but a certain Mr Smiss and his long-time-companion Pernod (an assumed name if ever I heard one), seem to be following in our footsteps. And so closely as to make the experience distinctly uncomfortable for us.

I'll be keeping a close eye on matters.

Queenstown Part II

2008-04-30T11:13:00.000Z

What goes up, must come down. Newton's fictional apple did, and so did a whole bunch of very real people when they chucked themselves off a perfectly good, and very pretty, bridge just outside of Queenstown. People have been chucking themselves off Kawarau bridge now for quite some time all beccause about 20 years ago, a kiwi gentleman called AJ Hackett decided that he would replicate the Vanuatu ritual of throwing oneself from a tower, with each ankle tied by a vine rope. Using elastic 'bungy's instead of vines, he was able to make a potentially fatal but thrilling experience available to a paying public and he demonstrated its efficacy by doing an unapproved bungy jump from the Eiffel Tower in 1987. Since then, at least 18 people have been killed doing similar jumps, but none of them, as far as I can tell, with AJ Hackett.

I had no interest in doing a jump before coming to NZ (though I am partial to the idea of jumping out of an airplane). The bungy was Letizia's gig. To be more precise, it was Letizia and Simon's gig. We were supposed to meet Si and Leah in Queenstown, but unfortunately it wasn't to be. Little Caitlin discovered a 200km car journey limit, the outer bounds of which were defined by copious amounts of projectile vomit. The Pett family was staying in the North of the South Island, and Letizia was stranded in Queenstown without a jumping buddy.

I offered. I did really offer. And I meant it too. But the sudden change in circumstances rattled Letizia's resolve, and after watching a dozen or so people (all apparently part of the same Japanese family) demonstrate the various ways in which one should, and should not, fall from a height, she opted not to jump. But watch this space. I feel the story has still got legs.

With Christchurch behind us, the planned part of our journey was over. What lay ahead, we would make up as we went along.