Another year, more hip-skip-hopping around the globe (previously, 2010, 2009). Go team carbon pollution:

Aachen
Auckland
Ban Khao Yai
Ban Ko Tao
Bangkok*
Berlin*
Blenheim
Canberra*
Cologne
Colombo
Frankfurt*
Fussen
Hamburg
Kandy
Ko Phi Phi
Laem Ngop
Melbourne
Munich
Singapore *
Sydney
Weimar
Wellington

22 in total. One or more days were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Posted in Travel on Saturday December 17, 2011.

1. No more chopped up Lonely Planets

Most travelers seem to have a love/hate relationship with the Lonely Planet. The flexibility it allows for spontaneous changes to itineraries is wonderful but when you make that trek up the mountain in the snow to the highly-recommended ‘authentic’ beer hall, only to discover twenty other tables of tourists, each with a LP resting on the edge of the table, it lessens the experience somewhat.

When I lived in Japan, I trekked around with a hand-me-down 1994 edition LP, margins crowded with ten years of scribbled notes, highlights and post-its. The accommodation and food sections were roundly out of date but, unsurprisingly, details on two-thousand year old temples don’t change that often. This aligns with my preferred method for using the LP: to rely on it for historic summaries and the ‘what to see’ sections and outsource getting there and finding the best places to eat and stay to either the wonderful internet, or locals in the know. The Kindle is great at connecting these pieces.

For longer trips, particularly ones where you’ll be hitting a bunch of different countries in a short time: continental Europe and South East Asia being two classic examples, your options used to be limited to:

• buying detailed guides for each of the countries you were going to, and then pre-booking a session at the physio for your return, to sort out those back pains you’d acquired from lugging four kilograms of guide books around. Maximum flexibly, maximum weight.
• acquiring a compiled “best of” LP that scrimps on detail but has good overall coverage, usually the “on a shoestring” guides. Less detail, but less back problems.
• making like MacGuyver and rolling your own, by chopping up and clipping together the bits of the books you needed. Great coverage, but limited flexibility.

None of these are ideal solutions.

The Kindle allows you to mash up all the above options into a single flow. Just grab the guide to countries or regions you’re traveling in and use the bookmarks feature to create a summary of the cities you’ll be visiting. You should also bookmark the relevant map pages, language chapters and specific transit information you need. If anything in your itinerary changes, just change up your bookmarks.

If you’re working from a couple of books, make yourself a new collection for travel. This also works for adding related books like language guides or recommended reading. Simple, searchable and super fast, it’s like having a customised travel guide that can be remixed on the fly. Supplement this with information from the internet (point 2) and some clever snippets (point 5) and use all the extra time you save chatting with locals at your destination, and you’ll be trailblazing in no time.

2. Free Internet, Anywhere

If you’ve got the 3g version of the kindle you can access the Kindle web browser from the experimental menu on the home menu which lets you interact with basic text webpages over local mobile networks. Not only does it free you from the tyranny of hotel internet, chasing wifi passwords and the traditional traveler’s ritual, ‘the midnight hunting of the internet cafe’ but it also gives you the option to switch up your itinerary on the fly, knowing that you can always keep in touch if you need to. This is brilliant.

It’s worked most places I’ve tried it, including remote Thailand, bits of China, and all over Europe. Obviously the further off the beaten track you are, the likelihood of a lack of coverage increases, but it’s still valuable for hub cities and airport layovers.

A good trick is to work out which of the services you use have a mobile or text-based version of their site and how to access it. In many cases prefixing the address with an ‘m.’ will do the trick as for Gmail (m.gmail.com), Twitter (m.twitter.com) and Facebook (m.facebook.com). All work well on the Kindle, and Gmail will also help by converting Word Docs and PDFs to a format that is readable on the device. Google maps isn’t wonderful, but works in a pinch, although you’re often better off going for the optimised maps in the LP if you’ve got it. Google translate and Babelfish both offer mobile-optimised versions of their translation tools, although text entry can be tricky for non roman character sets.

A fantastic site to remember is the mobile version of Wikitravel (m.wikitravel.org) which is essentially the world’s biggest travel guide to everywhere, available all the time. Like its older brother Wikipedia, it’s consistently improving, and finally seems to be getting quality information for most large and medium sized destinations, particularly for things to do and places to stay. How’s that for a freedom creator?

3. Break the Juice Addiction

These days the best seat in the hostel isn’t the one with the view or the comfy couch but rather the one in cable’s reach of the one power outlet. That would be the one with the people pacing up and down in front, eying it greedily, laptops clutched to their chests, like junkies in search of a fix. Everyone needs their juice.

The battery on the Kindle lasts forever comparative to other power-hungry mobile devices. I should probably caveat this point with “when the wireless is off the battery lasts forever” but even if you’re bashing away at GMail and Wikitravel at every opportunity, you’ll still get a good couple of days out of a full charge and, without wireless, you’re looking at weeks. So break the juice addiction and do your emailing from the top of a mountain, just because you can.

4. It Weighs Nothing

How is it that every single day you travel your backpack somehow seems to mysteriously acquire another couple of kilograms. For me, the culprit is usually books. When I’m on the road I plow through a couple of novels a week, and when you can only afford to carry a couple of them you become selective, hoarding the good ones until you find a hostel that has worthy replacements to swap. Loading the Kindle before I left and breaking free of the enforced crappy holiday reading cycle was a revelation, as was losing the extra baggage.

A couple of good things to remember is that tools like Calibre can bulk convert PDFs and load them onto to Kindle, in case you’ve got some academic reading you want to get through, and that there’s a tonne of free and out of copyright eBooks that I are in most cases going to be better reading than what’s on offer on the hostel shelf. Now we just need to work out what the hostels of the world are going to do with seven million unwanted copies of Stieg Larsson books.

If you need to lose even more weight from your pack, you can also load music (or audiobooks) into the music folder and play them, even when the Kindle itself is off. This works particularly well for language podcasts or lessons, such as Pimsleur. Leave the iPod at home.

5. Travel Snippets

I like to remember what I’ve done while I’m on the road, but I’m not a fan of the overwrought travel journal. I’ve found the Kindle version of the LP, in conjunction with the highlights feature, to be an amazing way of taking notes and finding a balance between the two. Once you’ve marked up the places where you’re going (see point 1) just drag a highlight over the place or thing you did, or over the city name for general things in that city, and type a few words against the highlight. You have begun to note your way to glory.

Now, when you stumble in the door after your global adventure, just plug the Kindle into your computer and find the My Clippings.txt file in the documents folder. You’ve got a play by play summary of your trip away sorted by date and city visited. You can then expand these at your leisure. Just promise you won’t email it to anyone. Okay?

Posted in Tech on Sunday March 27, 2011.

Time for another year of travel. I took a dump from Dopplr and worked out where I’ve been. A little less this year than last year but still a decent crack, I feel.

Adelaide *
Auckland
Bangkok *
Brisbane
Canberra *
Chiang Mai
Hobart
Ho Chi Minh *
Hue
Kanchanaburi
Krabi
Kracheh
Mae Sot
Melbourne *
Parramatta *
Paxe
Perth *
Phnom Penh *
Savannakhet
Shanghai
Siem Reab
Singapore *
Stung Treng
Sukhothai
Sydney *

25 in total. One or more days were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Posted in Travel on Sunday December 19, 2010.

The function of this weekend is one of relief, a rusted yellow wrench to smash against the pressure valve, and a chance to escape the grime, sweat, and claustrophobia of Krung Thep. The target: the ancient capital of Sukhothai, a crumbling city of ruins, praised by the consulate staff in Canberra who urged us to get out, explore, and then send them an email explaining the highlights. So, bus, beer, ruins, beer, chill, write email of effusive praise. Too easy. The simplicity of this plan should make it impervious to disruption.

The plan falls apart three minutes after shouldering our way through the teeming throng of people at the Mo Chit bus terminal, as shutters are dragged down over ticket booths and options for destinations shrink by the second.

“Sukhothai?”
“No can. Full.”
“Umm, no air bus?”
“Full.”
“Tak?”
“Full.”
“Where can I…”
“Full. No can. Full!”

We wander the line and find one company that has put on extra buses heading north, late departures, expensive, but it is out there, and it is not Bangkok. We are headed for Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, and long a refuge for hippies and their brethren. The last time I was there we hiked through the hills, and the early morning songthaew ride to the bus terminal the only time I can remember ever being cold in Thailand.

.

Chiang Mai has a stately laid-back charm, particularly in the old city, and it invites the kind of lackadaisical, coffee sipping, book reading, tofu eating weekend that I am fully in favour of. I wander the leafy back streets and admire the numerous second-hand bookstores, their treasures weighing heavily against my post-kindle decision to not end this year with another forced deliberation over which stacks of paper I can afford to ship to the other side of the planet.

The majority of local shops are today closed and shuttered, people having headed home for the public holiday. The reason for the holiday is H.M. the Queen’s birthday which, in Thailand, is also celebrated as Mother’s Day. Earlier today, long lines of locals stood waiting to lay cones of flowers before a huge portrait of the queen, as old ladies warbled karaoke into an open mic behind it.

We’re on the hunt for somewhere to open the evening’s proceedings and the few bars which have their doors open display the usual bunch of weary looking travelers and scruffy, overweight expats. We stroll the canal for a while before setting on Rooftop John’s, three flights of rickety stairs, and a simple, open, rooftop bar still firmly stuck in the sixties. Tubes of gaudy neon lights blink to no-one in particular, and a screaming kid on the pool table voices his intense displeasure at not being allowed another coke.

We grab a table near the edge and look out over low-rise Chiang Mai. There is a Thai man sitting at the table opposite us who bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Kim Jong Il, sunglasses and all, and after some strongly worded directions from him, the serving boy climbs the barrier onto the outside ledge of the building, to sweep pieces of paper off the edge and watch them flutter three stories to the ground below.

We order a bottle of Sam Song, the acclaimed and reviled Thai fire-water. The tasting panel is unable to ascertain whether it is whiskey or rum, but is however unanimous in its verdict of “horrific.” It is almost tolerable with coke though, almost, and it gets better the more you drink. We are near the bottom of the bottle when the fireworks start going off, about a hundred metres directly above us, the difference in time between the arrival of light and sound indistinguishable at this distance, and a chest thumping boom for each and every flash.

..

It rains then, in that striking monsoonal fashion of the tropics, where the sky is clear one second and then thumping bricks of water at you the next. The volume of water is extraordinary, and small sub-sois off the main drag turn from roads to rivers in a matter of seconds. We sprint from hastily erected shelter to shelter, skipping over electric wires trailing through puddles, the water at our ankles and rising fast.

The only place that seems to be open is an overpriced Thai place just off the touristic night markets, packed with foreigners and well-lit, in contrast to the sodden, empty stalls surrounding it. The walls are covered in years of glowing praise about the food, written in multiple languages in red and blue sharpie. Based on the reviews, it seemed a dish from here was liable to cure cancer, reverse premature balding, and buy you a Christmas present that wasn’t socks, all at once. The food is unremarkable, but the wine cheap, and after finishing a bottle and abandoning all hope that the rain will stop, we’re back puddle jumping in search of a tuktuk to take us onward on our quest to unravel the mysteries of the Mai.

…

We spot the bar as the tuktuk hammers through the flooded back streets, sheeting water behind it. There is a simple orange sign and the sound of music from within, and all the windows are fogged with condensation. The driver has appropriated two signboards advertising ice-cream, and has balanced them on either side of his seat to offer some protection from the deluge. Given how wet he is, I don’t think it is working terribly well.

We’re across the threshold before we really look inside. AC/DC thrums merrily in the background and there are about twenty guys in here, heavily tattooed and in gang leathers. An enormous white dude on a table to one side, pieced, bearded and glaring. Cigarette smoke puts a haze over everything. An old Thai women stands behind a bar in the corner, three half empty bottles of Jack Daniels and what looks to be a collection of bullets in front of her. There is a slight pause in conversation as people realise we’ve wandered in. The spotlight of attention that you don’t want when those directing it look like they break children’s fingers as an amusing pre-dinner game. Fuck.

A grinning imp of a man, face a lined maze of Thai script tattooed forehead to chin, lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, steps forward, “You drink?”

Before we left Australia we were subjected to a week of briefings that were supposed to give us a crash course on staying alive, more focused on the folk being deployed to Port Moresby, or Ghana, but the presentation that jumps to mind now is the PowerPoint slide of a carefully constructed risk matrix setting out the relative risk factors of varied environments. The colours were your standard cool-to-hot blues and oranges, as favoured by so many project managers, with the deep crimson of “highest risk” reserved for unfamiliar places, while under the influence of alcohol.

We drink.

One of the bigger guys has been dancing around with what looks to be a mortar round, fat stubby fins clustered around the base, that he’s holding as he mock-tangos back and forth. One of the fins snaps with a sharp, ‘ping’ and there is a resounding metallic thunk from next to the table. He has just dropped it on the floor. I feel the floor shake through my feet, then continue to vibrate as several more choppers pull up outside. We are given more beer by someone in leather who has a fetching chain wrapped around his wrist. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is spiraling out of control.

And then our friend the imp puts on ‘My Sharona,’ grabs a skinny Tony Jaa lookalike by the waist, kicks the fallen bomblet to one side, spins him onto the floor, and it all gets a little weird.

Posted in Travel on Sunday October 17, 2010.

I thrash back and forth for an hour in the pre-dawn fuzz before giving up and hauling myself upright. The air-con has clicked off at some time during the night, and it is hot already, as the sun creeps around edges of stippled grey in the sky. A tepid shower, in the haphazardly tiled bathroom, neck angled to avoid hitting my head on the roof, provides none of the refreshment it should. I am sweating as I step out of the water. I will continue to do so for the rest of the day.

I am the first one of the group downstairs. The cavernous dining hall, empty every other day this week, is this morning teeming with people. There must be a conference here today. A line snakes out the door as people queue to sign in, and I notices smiles and head nods between people in the queue; everyone knows everyone, or at least makes a good show of doing so.

I head for the coffee, a tarnished and battered pot that emits the smell of stale Nescafe. Still, it’s caffeine, and dearly needed. As I fumble for the milk jug, a woman, head to toe in peacock green, and with a pin that would make Madeline Albright jealous, leans across me and places a stirring spoon into my coffee with a toothy smile. I manage a grin in return and shuffle back to my table in the corner to watch proceedings.

It smells of the tropics today, the steady rain overnight putting a gloss sheen on everything: rust-stains and dirt streaks in shining relief against the dead grey sky. But it is not polluted, the air, or not noticeably so, and this surprises me. I remember the smothering heat and exhaust-choked air of my last visit, shirt wrapped over my face as we sat on the open-windowed public bus as it idled in traffic. We paused for thirty minutes or so, stuck in a Chinatown side-street, an immobile island in the sea of commerce around us. T remarks that the traffic is worse than KL, and that this is somewhat of an achievement in South East Asia. Nate gets out of the bus to stretch his legs, walks a slow circle around us, then heaves himself aboard again. We have not moved. This is close to ten years ago now.

So yesterday, as we whisked over the traffic in the efficient, clean public transport system, and the clear blue sky showed a city that stretched right to the horizon, it occurred to me that Bangkok has changed, and much more than I had expected it to. In the time large Australian cities have spent bickering over the implementation of smart cards on the struggling, poorly connected public transport system, the Thais have built the public transport, linked it to a smart card network, connected the smart cards to the atms, then linked these to essential services. Taking a leaf from Japan’s book, the atms are the service centre where you, in addition to banking, top up mobile credit, pay bills, clear flight bookings and recharge any of those aforementioned smart cards.

It’s eminently sensible and makes me wonder about the two-dollar-munching obelisks that grace Australian shopping malls, that click and crunch as they struggle to produce a balance statement on request. This is not smart technology, nor a strong use of a network, it is a profit creation device, one akin to speed cameras on deserted weekend freeways, right on that corner where the speed dips to sixty, but only for two hundred metres.

This coffee is horrific.

A group of Thai men, having collected their folders of conference paraphernalia, take the table across from me and the last man to the table realises there isn’t a seat left for him. He glances around at his options, and as he does so, is teased about, just perhaps, having to sit with the foreigner. This causes much amusement amongst the group, and they titter as he pointedly turns his back on them, and moves to sit on a free table on the other side of the room, alone. His colleagues continue to chortle for a while, then turn their attention to plates piled with wilted vegetables, red chilli heaped on top, and the ever present fish sauce glistening like the rain-slick streets outside.

Good Morning Bangkok.

Posted in Asia on Sunday August 8, 2010.

Gnarled and pitted wood rests where it has fallen, shapes transformed by the tiny creeping filaments of the moss that covers everything, in this place so textured with age. It is in everything: in the soil woven thick with fibrous, sinewy roots, in the song of the tiny birds that whip amongst the canopy, and in the Maori prayer that echoes through the trees, a complex baritone chant that surrounds the knuckly boughs and reverberates, liquid and substantial. But most of all, it is in him, as he towers above, timeless and massive. There is an air of certainty here. Of inevitability.

Kauris spend the first hundred years of their life fighting to clear the canopy, and to reach into the sun. There are trees of that age scattered around the edges of the clearing and their slender trunks look fragile in comparison to the massive bulk of Tane Mahuta squatted in front of us. This is the world’s largest known kauri, and it is some two and half thousand years old. His name means the “Lord of the Forest” and he is the one that dug his shoulder into the muddy ground, coiled, heaved, and rent Papatuanuku and Ranginui asunder. In this, he created the earth, and the sky, and brought the huddled god-children, blinking, into the light.

I spin a slow circle and take in the vertical abbreviations in endless green, and try and judge their age. It is sobering to think that before these trees reach the sunlight, we will again be returned to dust in the ground. Still he towers above us.

.

A school of fish are pinned to the wall with nails. They spell the Maori word, Koha. It means a gratuity, a gift. The fish are chocolate, and I take one from the wall and chew on it. Behind me, a mountain of butter or, more specifically, a particular mountain modelled in miniature, in butter, shares centre stage with a radio in the shape of pavlova. I am in New Zealand. I ponder if I can get away with taking a second fish.

..

It took longer than we had planned to clear the sprawl of the city of sails, Auckland’s network of freeways, perpetually under-construction, are lined with witches hats and empty in the pre-dawn light.

In time the blocks of prefab industrial buildings give way to the rolling greenery of the hill country, the road ducking and weaving between hedges of scraggly gorse. On the way we talk of the burden of assumed responsibility, and she says, “It’s getting easier, you know, getting easier every day. At first it was demanding, and difficult, and it put me in a bad place. It still is, of course. It still is difficult. I guess there was an element of guilt there, a sense that somehow, in some way, there was something you could have done differently that would have changed things. You have to let that go, or it’ll tear you open, but once you do, it becomes much easier.”

She had mentioned this in December, briefly, as she stood by the window and looked out over the city. A punctuation, a pause, and a furrowed brow before she turned away and pointed out her school, her college, the path we had traced in the rain as we tramped the back streets beside backpackers on the piss. The lines on the hotel window remind me of those painted on the inside of the cabin that undulate as they trace the curve of the fuselage.

…

I have spent fifteen minutes in an unfocused daze glaring at the walls of the cabin. The lines. This is dendrochronology for the jet-set: a record of the passing of designer signed glasses over dappled grey Formica, white linen, and perfect half triangles of folded navy-blue tissue paper. My head rests against the wall of the cabin, and the gentle vibration of the engines rattles my teeth.

I follow these lines as they buck and curve, cut short by dotted plexiglass, and the blue on blue on blue of the early morning Tasman beyond. The Weather Report mutter in my ears in approbation, bass, strings, and the clicking of my teeth an unintended solo.

I have the volume down enough to hear cabin noise and this half-heard jazz is entirely at odds with the Chilean pop, as interpreted by the immaculately-manicured hostie, that issues from the galley behind me, accompanied by the soft clinking of cutlery.

The seat belt sign above me illuminates, dings, and Senores Pasajeros are asked to secure their seatbelts. I drift out of consciousness.

….

The sign, framed in the green and yellow so favoured by the DOC, informs me that this tree is partnered with another. One whose clumpy, knotted branches stretch into the mountainside mists of a pentagonal island several hundred kilometres off the southernmost tip of the four major islands of Japan. I’ve been there too. It took a pre-dawn departure and seven hours hiking up trails set between the roots before we stood at the top and leant back slowly, marvelling at the spread of branches shaped over four thousand years.

Jōmon has rested there since humans huddled in groups around their fires, set between the barrows, shaping tools of bronze. This squatting giant felt the pull of seasons before people had arrived, before roads, before cars, and before the view from the clearing took in the structures erected on the islands in the blue haze of distance. Cranes and gantries that plot the initial point in the parabolas of white scrawled across the sky, tracing the rockets launched from Tanegashima as they claw their way beyond the pull of the earth. That there is evidence standing in front of us of these kind of time frames leads to a very acute feeling of insignificance, and the realisation that we humans, for all our bluster and self-worth, are but a buzzing noise, half-heard, at the edge of the world’s history.

…..

We collapse onto the grass at Manukau, and my heart soars. The spray-flecked breeze brings with it the smell of chips, and the laughter of the kids playing touch with a rolled-up ball of newspaper beside the fountain. I can just make out a santa-hatted figure at the far end of the beach, reaching forward into a yoga pose I cannot identify, nor replicate. We are engulfed by the familiar sounds of summer: that meaty thwomp of a wet tennis ball being lofted into the ocean by a cricket bat, the squawks of those enormous red-beaked gulls as they fossick amongst the kelp, the snap of unfurling canvas in the breeze.

The essence of the Pursuit of Happyness, she says, lies in seeing mistakes, feeling the shape of them, and then laughing them off for their triviality. That y, for example, it has always bugged me, “and that’s the point,” she says, “that’s the whole point of the movie. Seeing the frivolous for what it is and moving past it.” This resonates, the cracks meld, and I stretch back and take in the sun. One of the kids has scored a try and is thumping his chest, newspaper held aloft.

……

This has been a pilgrimage of sorts, I think, a quest to reach out for something spiritual, if spiritual is the right word for we two godless, empty vessels. But there is spirituality, for me, in the wonder I feel in these two places separated by hemispheres. For all the treated pine boardwalks, the shutters of cameras clicking behind me, and the carefully hidden dark green barbed wire wrapped around the base of the tree, there is something beyond measure in the age of this place.

Our fingers wrap, brown on white against green. She is back then, for a second, and I drink it in.

Then it flickers and fades and she recedes. Disconnects. I fail to chase it because I know something has changed. Something fundamental. And from that comes a powerful desire to grasp the present and to shape it. To leap between the connections and to trace them back to their source, and be kinetic and frantic and alive in the way only humans can. For all the crossed paths, confusion, and duality of the past few days, this is good madness. It is transient in a way that is entirely at odds with this place, but that is human, and it lifts me up and gives me purpose.

We look out over the forest. There is a spider crouched on a broad leaf at eye level, powerful jet-black front legs tapering to a rear of mustard yellow, the outline of a smaller spider in reverse, and its whole function centres around this deception. It jerks a few steps backward then leaps forward and is gone, in the perfect choreography of something that is not what it appears to be.

We are here, both of us, in this place beyond time, and we are both thousands of miles away, seagulls chasing each other into the pines and the smell of salty air as irresistible as the call of friends and family, as they collapse onto the grass ahead of us, laughing. The future unfurls beneath my feet. It ripples and shears, and is beautiful in all its scattered, tangled complexity.

Posted in Mwah on Sunday May 30, 2010.

A stream of Daft Punk helmeted motorcyclists zip past, the single traffic light reflected as a jagged lipstick red smear in their mirrored visages. They lean hard to avoid the bus. Kick up dust. I give my window a half-hearted tug, but it’s wedged open, and the tiny half curtains ripple in the morning breeze. The dust has shaded the walls of the houses facing us a burnt ochre, and on one huge letters spell, “Welcome” and “LOVE” in lazy broken loops of white spray-paint. We are angled diagonally across the intersection, stuck behind a teetering pile of wooden wardrobes being drawn by a vehicle that resembles the result of a drunken tryst between a ride-on lawnmower and a bullock cart.

Emerging from the stalls that line the road, snack food vendors use the opportunity of a halt in motion to push their way through the swarm of old women negotiating the loading of a stack of chairs, and step up onto the bus. The driver and conductor share a brief exchange as the light changes to green, and manoeuvre the bus past wardrobes, escaped chickens, and stacks of wilting vegetables, before returning to their primary conversations on respective mobiles. The last stack of tightly-bound red plastic chairs is heaved onto the roof with a clatter and the women push forward to climb aboard. Inside the bus, vendors weave their way up and down the aisle, tiny chickens splayed wide across single skewers, glistening with honey and oil. The couple in front of me haggle for chicken livers with a girl who cannot be more than fifteen years old.

On the other side of the road, behind a perfectly level fence that doesn’t quite reach the ground, sits a chipped and colourless temple. It is straddled by an equally chipped and colourless concrete Buddha, with prominent nipples and a beatific gaze that takes in the shabby wooden lodgings scattered around him like discarded children’s toys. An old monk, hand holding his glasses against his nose, and waving frantically to catch the driver’s attention, begins to head in our direction. As he crosses the courtyard in front of the wat, three novitiates, orange-robed and running, converge on the shuffling older man. First a bag is slipped over one shoulder, a water bottle pressed into a waiting hand, and a sheaf of bank notes slipped into a pouch around his neck. At the threshold they stop and stand in a line, grinning.

The monk steps aboard and stops, blinks, and for a moment looks concerned. As if only just learning where he is, he pats the pouch at his side, and begins rifling urgently through its contents. Papers and water are held, chin to chest, as he rummages through the bag. Finally he smiles, nods, and withdraws a crumpled packet of cigarettes and a battered phone. He waves at the trio of shaven-headed, saffron-robed youngsters and begins to shuffle to the back of the bus, before being instructed by the driver to ride shotgun, up front, robes curling around the gearstick.

Ever since we set off, the TV mounted to the front dash has played karaoke, and the video to every song is a slight variation on the same story: a woman, who works in a restaurant, stares wistfully at her mobile, waiting for it to ring. We cut to the love interest who is busy in his inevitably solid and respectable job: smashing rocks into smaller rocks, delivering large bottles of water, or welding something to something else. There are several closeups of his mobile, sitting just out of sight. Perhaps it has slipped out of his pocket, or between the seats of his car. It is ringing, and he cannot hear it. She is lost, unsure what to do, and so she rings again. And again. When it seems all is lost, and our girl is stumbling through the rain-lashed streets, crying, the phone will ring. We see it again, close, and it’s definitely his name and suddenly he’s there with an umbrella, and an easy smile, and they duck into a restaurant so that she can look bashful as she feeds him a spoonful of noodles. Their phones rest against each other on the table, together at last. These bricks of plastic are the stars of this show, and the people surround them mere props, useful only in bringing them together.

The girl with the livers has failed to convince the couple in front that they represent a sensible investment, and so she scrambles to the front to step down and off. Her hands and face are streaked with the red black dirt that covers everything, and there are shining streaks where the fat from the chicken has run down her arms. As she nears the steps her pocket begins to ring, and she hands her skewers to a friend and pulls a phone from her jumper.

With a sigh, the wind kicks up again. The sting of dust particles prickles against my cheek, and clumps of discarded plastic press against the bus, then drop to the ground, lifeless. There will be no rain today, and restaurants in this part of the country are few and far between, but I wonder who is on the other end of the line. Whether she has a water delivery man of her own, and if their mobiles huddle together at night, waiting for their time in the spotlight.

Posted in Travel on Tuesday April 6, 2010.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand (via. 3qD)

Posted in Textism on Tuesday March 23, 2010.

Although I use Dopplr to keep track of where I’m travelling to next, I thought I’d steal a leaf from Kottke’s book and record cities I’ve been to each year. Here’s 2009:

Adelaide *
Agra
Amritsar
Auckland *
Aurangabad
Brisbane *
Bundi
Canberra *
Christchurch *
Dandenong
Delhi
Hobart
Indore
Jaipur
Jalgaon
Launceston
Mandu
Melbourne *
Mumbai
Omkareshwar
Parramatta
Perth *
Queenstown
Sydney *
Udaipur

26 in total. One or more days were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Posted in Travel on Friday January 1, 2010.

The station in Jalgaon is small in comparison to the Victorian grandeur of Chattrapati Shivaji in Mumbai. Three sleepy platforms, attendants sprawled head to toe against the dusty outbuildings, as the pakora vendors heat oil for the first batch of the day. Even the flies seem slow and disinterested. The clipped voice of a woman, the same as can be heard in every station across the country, repeats departure announcements over and over, first in Hindi, then English, until they lose meaning and become tone poems celebrating destinations unknown.

2621 Chatabadi Express to Bhopal 8 hour fifteen minute departing.
8601 Darjeeling Mail to Varanasi 8 hour twenty minute departing.

I’m still teetering from my bout of food poisoning the day before, and I blink in the harsh glare of the morning sun. The temperature is pushing thirty and it’s barely gone eight. On the far side of the tracks, behind the hodgepodge of crumbling station buildings comes the scattered honking of the swarming rickshaws at the main entrance, mingled with the sounds of the market beyond.

With a rumble that drowns out the rickshaws, a train draws into view and, in a second, the vendors are up and moving with purpose. They sweep up baskets of snacks, piles of tiffins, pots and mugs and swing themselves aboard before it has pulled to a stop, to ply their wares of chips and chai, locks and trinkets as they yell their slogans at the top of their voices. “Chai-wallah chai, ah, garam chai, masala chai, chai, chai, ah, chai-wallah chai.” Pakoras are dunked in sizzling oil and the smell of deep fried batter mingles with the stench of cow shit and human sweat. This train has the same number as the one I’m to catch, and what appears to be the same destination hand painted in light-blue letters on the side. It is on the opposite platform.

I stand, swing my backpack up, and ponder whether I need to hoof it across the footbridge. “You’re going to Chittaurgarh, sir? Not that train, sir. This platform. Two trains cross. The same number but one goes up and the other down,” says a bespectacled man who has appeared at my elbow. After barely two weeks in the country, I have developed a healthy sense of scepticism in regard to any directions, instructions, guidance, help or support given to me by anyone.

The Italians have elevated the robbery of tourists into an art form as revered as the works of Puccini or Rossini: a beautiful theatre of spilled drinks, swapped tables and waiters in collusion with the pickpockets. Even the most opportunistic of South East Asian scammer will attempt to fleece you with a grin, “the temple is closed, mister” and striking a bargain in China is similar, a transaction, hard fought, where both parties will swear at each other, curse and bicker, and then smile and nod after the deal is done. It’s just business. It’s very different here, where an edge, a real sense of desperation, underlies everything.

“Thank you,” I say, and turn my back on him as I try and decipher the platform information on the crumpled scrap of paper that is my ticket. He is right. I sit back down. “What country you are from, sir?” asks the man, and this is always the second question. I tell him Australia, and he smiles broadly, “I have just been there, to Sydney.” I am surprised, and it must show on my face, because he rushes to explain, “my bank had a conference there. World-wide. They sent a few people from India. My bank was chosen.” I ask him how he found Sydney, “it is a beautiful city, but empty. I would walk at night and see empty streets, empty shops. I felt alone.”

We stand and watch the hive of activity across the platform. “In India, connectivity is no problem,” he says, and he’s right, there is usually a train running from whatever part of the country you are in to wherever you need to get to. It’s capacity that is the issue. For a country teeming with people, any infrastructure built around moving them from one point to another must have capacity and flexibility that would make most Western transport planners go weak at the knees. The trains are full, the buses are full, the share jeeps weave delicate patterns around the cows milling in the street, as those unlucky enough not to have a seat inside the car cling to the running boards, the doors, or anywhere a hand hold can be found.

But connectivity is not a problem, and right on time the train to Chittaurgarh grinds to a halt. I bid the banker goodbye and pull myself aboard. The cabin is full, the odd bunk here and there still folded up and out of reach, but most are occupied by families sitting cross-legged, children on their laps. The floor is covered with food scraps and rubbish, and a child with a tangle of stumps, rather than legs, pulls himself along the floor of the carriage, sweeping a filthy cleaning cloth ineffectually with one arm. The other is used to reach for handholds, and to pull himself forward. Passengers push him aside with their feet as they shove luggage onto racks, before bending down to continue their negotiation with drink vendors through the windows of the carriage. There is a shudder, the train lurches into motion, and the boy grabs at my ankle.

We clear the platform and, as the last of the vendors swing themselves back down off the train and begin the walk back to the shade of the station, I notice that the walls of huts facing the tracks have been covered in hand-painted advertising slogans. Sandwiched between a freshly painted Tata Indicom logo and a whitewashed advertisement for locally manufactured bicycles, is a faded blue and gold slogan for what appears to be an energy drink: 2Tough – Strength is life, weakness is death.

The boy is still holding my leg, and he cups a hand and places it on my knee. There are Taj shaped haystacks in the fields, and it is hot.

Posted in Travel on Monday December 7, 2009.