And so it ends...

...for now.

Ushered home by a smiling Polish hostess on an Irish airline and given the unrivalled welcome of Irish passport control, sure your not wearin a towel on yer head, come on in. Back on to buses where we Do Not Talk to Strangers, escorted home by phalanxes of 08 SUVs down avenues of flashy new apartment blocks unsullied by occupants, the paint long dry.

I have lost 5 kilos, 3 pairs of flips flops, 2 cameras, 2 mp3 players, 3 towels and more memories than I care to recall.

I have missed fish fingers and vinegar, crisp cold mornings and the sound of a tent zip, real butter and Bulmers, comfortable silences and being biffed. I have discovered beer, butterflies and birds, tomato and lettuce and hummus, vegitarianism and undercooked steaks.

I've learnt and forgotten, hello, thank you and please, in 15 languages. I've laughed at jokes I didn't understand, laughing only to share a smile. I've ironclad many of my stereotypes, and shattered others. I've met budding popstars and budding buddhists, dumpster divers and militant vegans, white robed zealots and near naked monks, bushwhackers and Bush-bashers and the multitudes in between. I've filled in a little more of humanity's jigsaw for myself, only to highlight how many pieces I'm missing. I have been compared to Jesus, Colin Farrell, Chuck Norris, and been called Dee, Dave, Dean, Dermot, Dickhead.

I have stood in tall buildings and hoped for an earthquake, climbed volcanoes and hoped they'd erupt, swam with alligators and hoped they'd attack, gone to football matches and hoped for a riot.

...I have travelled kilometres of airport escalators, cycled a rickshaw, lounged in business class, battled into cattle class, shared a sadhu's pipe, dived to 27 metres on a breath, slept on benches, bed bugs and beaches, climbed Mt Fuji, swam with sharks, walked with orangutans and armadillos, rode a camel, eaten momos, paneer, nasi goreng, pad thai, empanandas, dhal bhat, fished for pirhanas, conversed with minah birds, fired an M16 rifle. I have marvelled at the power of nature in a waterfall, in a sulphur cloud, in a petrified forest, in a glacier's folds, in the pulsing heart of a monsoon storm...




That's me, that is.

Crocodile DumbD

The sun is high in the sky and I squint exaggeratedly. I sit slumped atop my horse, the reins gripped in one hand, swaggering down just another dirt road. My other hand rests on my camera as if it were the butt of my trusty rifle. I tip the rim of my hat at a passing pick up and pretend the attendant dust clouds don't bother me nuthin. Vultures circle overhead, we're in jaguar and anaconda country and they smell potential carrion, but I ain't afraid. I hum "Achy Breaky Heart" to myself under my breath. Keepin it real.

I spent 4 days in the Pantanal, the outback of Brazil with a biodiversity equal to the Amazon basin and I saw more animals than I could shake my imaginary rifle at. I was roomies with Helmut. He is a retired German of indeterminate age, who now captains sailboats and quaffs beer in his spare time. He sports white hair and a thick white moustache and his grizzled face is offset by eyes as blue as the waters he plows, Arrrrrrrrrrr. He's hale and hearty and up for anything. He arises early every morning to skinny dip in rivers positively cosmopolitan with alligators and parasites and pirahnas. ( "I'd rather skinny dip with pirahnas than..."). He wanders the room naked and showers with the door open. I once tried to get in the spirit of things by doing the same but spent the whole time worrying he'd wander in casually and crack me with his towel before challenging me to a GrecoRoman wrestle which he could win with is arms tied. He dives off 12 metre rocks and rejoices in making the youth look old. He has 'Ladies' in every country he visits and recounts his elderly acrobatics gleefully. He mutters to himself absently in German and often comments to me in the same, I stopped correcting him. He would randomly burst into songs at yodelling volumes. He'd shake the trees in the jungle if he wanted the resident animal to move into a more photogenic position, the guide would only shake his head mournfully. He farts anytime, anywhere, unfazed, as if it were just another comment in German that no-one understands. Something of a legend.

The wildlife of course was the reason I had come here and it was quite spectacular. The place was a benetton ad of birds. There were kiri kiris, fierce birds of prey with the bodies of hawks but betrayed by a slightly ridiculous faded red beak like a bouncer in a clown nose. There were toucans, the bird from the guinness ads, their beaks perhaps painted by that little guy under the sea. There were macaws, or parrots as we know them, bright red and green ones or blue and yellow ones. Apparently they were always in pairs as they mate for life but judging by the squawking between some of them this didn't necessarily mean a lifetime of marital bliss. There were huge pelicans, black and white with a blood red scarf and a 2 metre wingspan, kingfishers, parrakeets, little red helmeted sparrow things, black vultures, those dive bomb birds with the long necks and awkward legs and many more that I couldn't identify.

There were also monkeys, anteaters, an armadillo (which was amazing, he was eating fruit and snuffling around only 3 feet away from me, because I am such a stealth master. They called me The Indian after that, though that may also be because of my dark and brooding good looks.) There were turtles, wild boar, water pigs, skeletons of jaguar kills, and many mammals whose names I can't spell. On the jungle trek I was walking in flip flops and nearly stood on a tarantula, the girl behind me spotted it only when I had already unwittingly stepped over it. There were also these giant ants who hollow out a tree and then defend it from all comers with ferocious bites. Bang on the tree and they swarm out, 50 bites can kill a man apparently.

I swam too with the alligators and parasites and pirahnas. The alligators would stay beside the shore, eyes and nose visible until you got too close and then they would quietly submerge completely into the murk and the water would seem to chill somewhat, shark in the water. I have never seen such impressive machines. When they walk on land they don't actually slither, they raise up on legs like hydraulics, giving them maybe a half a foot clearance, and then sort of march. And don't look them in the eye, there's nothing there.

On the Rocks

They stand in ranks of thousands, squeezed tightly together, shifting and groaning in discomfort. There's a crack like a rifle shot, a breathless pause, and a slab crumples, dropping like a hundred ton soldier fainting on parade.

I'm sorry, it really doesn't do it justice. It's from the Perito Morena glacier in southern Patagonia, one of the biggest in the world apparently.

Hill Billy Rambling

I met a man on the hill as we say, a wide-eyed arm-waving man who babbled in bullets of Spanish at me. He spoke no English and it took me a couple of minutes to work out that he had no idea where he was, compounded by the fact that he had taken LSD, lost in mind and body. So when he realised that I was heading home he latched on to me joyously for the 2 hour walk out. He bounded along behind me talking about all sorts of exciting things no doubt, with me nodding and smiling amicably. He was one of those occasional characters you meet who find the lack of any real communication no impediment whatsoever to a happy conversation. On the way I went for a swim in the river, in possibly the most beautiful swimming spot i have ever seen, the water absolutely crystal clear, it was six metres deep and I could see pebbles on the bottom. But it was also the coldest water I have ever been in. And when I emerged spluttering and shaking from the river he seemed not to realise why and leapt in, still in his trousers, only to immediately clamber frantically back out, unable to speak with the cold. He looked at me with a little distrust and I felt like i'd made a puppy lick a lemon. But I shared my lunch with him and he happily resumed his non communication with me.

We met other walkers on the way out who spoke Spanish, they bitched a little about him, said he kept repeating himself and was a genuinely stupid guy. But the walkers were generally dour types, as some tend to be, and he brightened my day, apparently he kept saying I saved his life. In return he tried to set us up on a double date with two girls on the bus back. Me and Dick, he said. I think I was Dick.

Turns out he was training to be a mountain guide.

···

My Spanish is getting better though. I spent over 6 days with a doctor from Buenos Aires who acted as my on trek/in shop/in restaurant language teacher. It was far better than any class ever could have been and free. And it was only during these all day classes that I realised what an easy language English is to learn.

Past: I He She You It They We ran.
Future: I He She You It They We will run.

Easy. Here's me like a fool giving kudos to all those around the world who speak English as a second language. Now I'm in on the joke.

During these classes I also learned the small but important distinction between mi gusto and mi gusta, it gives me pleasure and I pleasure myself.

Waiter: Did you enjoy your meal?
Dick: Yes it was delicious, I pleasure myself.

Mountain Man

I have been chasing volcanoes my entire trip, landing often on the Ring of Fire. In Japan I climbed a small string of them but never saw more than a bucket of steam. And in Indonesia where I was most hopeful, the rainy season ensured that most peaks were inaccessible and often invisible. And so to Chile, sharing the same unstable foundations an ocean away and my last chance at an active volcano. And here the signs were better. The week before I arrived a volcano had erupted 20 kilometres from my intended volcano so I was hopeful that mine might let off a sympathetic belch. Unfortunately to climb this volcano I needed to go as part of the dreaded tour group.

As a rule I do not like tour groups. Firstly, because they cost money. Secondly, because to the guide you are often no more than a bunch of the same but different babbling fools they shepherded up the day before. They make the same tired jokes, and the same tired laughs when we respond with our own not so unique wit. Also travelling alone you feel the strictures of a tour group all the more, the little compromises that weaken me like small cuts. They of course are not all bad. Travelling alone is not about being alone and so sometimes when chance has not provided you with a group of your own you can force circumstance to instead.

We set off up the Vulcan Villarica in a group of ten. Before we had even reached the first designated rest stop our party had to stop for one member to get her breath back. The rest of the group were very nice about it, smiling and joking, ha ha ha. I unfortunately, sensing a busman's holiday of sorts, was unable even to muster a reassuring smile. We were 10 minutes into a climb over mixed terrain of maybe 4 hours.

We continued in this vein all the way up. Our ice axes clinked along through the loose volcanic stones like the bells of lost goats. Watching the trudge of the guides boots, the tiny steps as he inched his way up, was soul destroying. I didn´t think a pace could be too slow to find a rhythm but I now know this to be true. Many of you will be familiar with my occasional wheeze (which many of you have unkindly compared to any number of farmyard animals in the past). This can come on me if I get out of the shower too quickly, and yet here it was absent.

The hordes caught us up on the steepest bit of the climb, a broad chute of ice and loose rock. Cries of "Rocca" rang out every few seconds and we would all look up to see if we could get one right in the face, as rocks sized from golf balls to footballs bounced by. Other parties, impatient with our pace-of-the-slowest, chose this point to overtake us, scrambling past huffily (i could go your pace, its just these girls, don't you see, take me with you).

And so we finally top out, straight into a cloud of sulphur that would down an elephant. It hits the back of your throat like vinegar steam from a bag of chips. When the wind changed we could get right over the yellow and black crust to the edge of the crater but there wasn´t a hint of lava below. Some folks threw rocks in speculatively. I am not sure if this was intended to induce some sort of seismic event in the earth's crust below but I had a go anyway, just in case.

···

I have reached the end of the second day of a three day trek. The climb here was steep, right up over the passes and it was a heads down slog, take refuge in the rhythm. Stubborn patches of snow hid in stubborn patches of shade and beckoned the child in me but these icy streaks promised only snowmen of many corners. Two birds of prey ride ride an updraft beside us, orbiting each other like satellites in a sky that is the uniform blue of a lazy painter.

The others have gone for a stroll to another lake so I am alone. The silence rests on my ears like the sun on my back. The refugio is beside a lake in a bowl of towering jagged edges. High on these edges rock stacks climb up unsteadily from scree slopes, watching warily for the winter ices that have ravaged them. A bird bounces obliquely across the lake like a skimming stone, once, twice, and our painter has put a white tail on him like a jet stream.

At night, come quick, the stars, God has left the lid off.

···










Breathtaking isn´t it?

Random bits and pixels...

Balinese dance


Kuala Lumpur Towers


Santiago scene


South American dawn


Just me and my beer, having a laugh at my drinking problem.


Sumatran house


Indonesian crater lake


The death throes of a Bali sunset


A Hindu celebration in a Muslim country

Bien Giorno!

So I have made it at last to South America, with 6 weeks at my disposal instead of the 6 months I had planned and still tender from the loss of my beautiful painted travel companion Toni.

Sure tis a tough life.

My accent was mistaken the other day for that of an American. This occurs regularly but this is the first time it was mistaken by another irish person. I have been away too long (I sooooooo didn't get it from Friends). At a climbing wall in Christchurch the receptionist asked where I was from and I told her Ireland. I love that accent, she says, practically doubling up, as if with indigestion. Yeah, well I don't really have an irish accent, I say, smiling winningly, meaning, tell me how hot my accent is. No, she says, you don't and turns away, tapping a pen in her teeth. It hurt a little. Even if she was a pig.

Now the problem is not one of accents but language, as I struggle to remember my 5 or 6 hours of Spanish lessons from ten months ago. In the hostel I stayed in in Santiago there was a bizarre mix of nationalities and languages. Ten of us around a dinner table with French, Spanish, Portuguese and English flying around and everyone seeming to be multilingual except me. If one of the French is talking to me a sentence may start in Spanish, meet a blank look, grind into English and then finish in French with a flare of frustration. It does not help that rogue elements of my long buried Italian and French keep rearing up and providing close but erroneous versions of Spanish words. I even had to babel fish the 'Diarmuid is a Tourist'.

I have painstakingly retro capitalised the languages in that paragraph. I think I got them all.

I visited a museum dealing in pre Columbian art and it was pretty fascinating. It struck me again the simliarities between races separated by oceans. The pyramid structures of the temples, so similar to the Asian ones I have seen. And the use of psychotropic substances by the shamans to predict the future and help cure ills, which sounds like what the druids of Ireland used to do. What we didn't have was a game called El Juego de Pelota, a popular ball game where the losing team was decapitated. (How did they ever keep a league running?)

In the same museum was a temporary exhibition on the Moche civilisation and the role of sex in the reincarnation of their leader. Various weird stuff involving slaves who had been skeletonised( ears, lips, nose, etc cut off) having, lets say, non procreational sex, with female slaves. And all participants would ultimately be executed. A quote "First 2 women give a stick to a bird with human features and then the figures use the stick to stir a potion, then the vessel is taken to a terraced platform where it is poured on the back of Wrinkle Face (a dominant supernatural force in the World of the Ancestors) while he engages in vaginal copulation with a woman in the shadow of a temple with a gable roof." The exhibition never really let you know if any of the acts or rites were actually carried out or were just legends which is mildly frustrating. Then again, childish as it may be, any exhibition featuring the phrase " A woman masturbating a pelican" can't be all bad.

But probably one of my favourite things about Chile so far is the mere existence of a character named, drum roll please... Bernardo O'Higgins. Brilliant. And he is actually a big deal in Chile's history, something about helping to found the country or something, but seriously, who cares, savour that name a little, its a thing of beauty.

The Tsunami Tourist

From when we started in Indonesia.

***

Another bus station in the early morning, hazy from an all night bus journey in a fridge. Sitting around the periphery of the station yard are the usual mix of gruff and grisly men taking their first coffee of the day. We are grunted into sitting at one of their tables and they hold forth over us, at us, ignoring us, chatting to us. They are serious men yet they goose each other and giggle like school girls. I wonder should I try and join in.

We have arrived in Banda Aceh. This was one of the hardest hit areas in the tsunami at the close of 2004. Somehow we have managed to arrive here with little idea of how the area was faring now, only having been reassured that any tourism was a good thing. We are aiming for the island of Pulah Weh just off the coast of Aceh.

It starts on the way to the boat. Our tuk driver points at a factory up ahead. Tsunami, he says but it is unclear what he means until we get closer and realise the "factory" is actually a ship. It is perhaps a hundred metres long and half that wide, a cargo ship. It has settled permanently in the middle of a residential neighbourhood of single storey houses. At this point we are still several kilometres from the sea. As if this marked some sort of border, the scars are suddenly everywhere. Houses crumpled in on themselves, the concrete and cable supports buckled and twisted, or plucked from their foundations. The occasional eery site where all that remains is the tile floors, rain washed maps to vanished homes.

There's a new bridge with the splinters of the old one still jagged underneath. At one point desolate black lakes clogged with debris and tree trunks line the roadside. Locals sift through them, I can only imagine what they find.

There is an occasional palm tree amongst the buildings, towering upto fifteen metres into the grey sky, their leaves still ragged and broken. Higher says our driver, the water went higher. And there was no higher ground, nowhere to run.

Suddenly we feel like vultures. We huddle down in our little seat as far as we can. People stare at you most places in Indonesia but here I imagine it to be accusatory, even when they smile. Our driver tells us with a small smile that he lost a baby and I shrink a little more.

The sea is so calm, we might as well be boating on a lake.

Pulah Weh is a breeze dried piece of paradise, snorkelling with turtles in seas that are brochure blues, framed by jungle and palm trees. Five naked brown boys prance around in the waves, the picture of innocence (though they show an impressive knowledge of the mechanics of love whenever Toni has her back turned. I try and put on a disapproving look but fail. There's five of them, naked, humping the air. "Are you?" their raised eyebrows ask.)

Pulah Weh island itself felt much less impact from the tsunami, with jungle hillsides rising up almost from the waters edge, but it still bears the scars. The water came as high the floor of our beachside cabin, raised as it is back on the hill slightly, and the Malaysian couple inside at the time were safe. But when the water receded it took most of the lower structures with it and the topsoil. Trees line the back beach, many now with their roots exposed. Some of them lie still slumped on the beach, untethered, a picture of defeat.

There are barely a handful of tourists here. The whole country seems to go through cycles of recovering from natural disasters and social upheaval so that tourism comes and goes like the tides. Aceh, with its regular natural disasters and an ongoing separatist conflict, seems to be one of the last places to regain the traveller's trust. And then this week there's another offshore earthquake, another tsunami warning and the area's battered reputation slips a little further.

Those stubborn grass stains...

It is standard with NZ's island ecosphere that anyone entering is strictly checked for any foreign matter that they may be carrying on their person. My trekking shoes always get pulled out and inspected and this time it was no different. The last checker before the arrivals lounge. Eh aisle 5 there, she says, they'll have a look at your boots. Grand, I say, relieved to be within an hour of a bed after 60 hours without.

There seems to be a lot of police in aisle 5 and they're taking their time with the people ahead of me, emptying entire suitcases. Turns out aisle 5 is not the quarantine people at all, its customs, those lovely folks with the stern faces and the rubber gloves. Apparently my hasty route down from Indonesia through small out-of-the-way airports has set some rubber clad fingers flexing. Someone's been behaving like a drug mule. I'm ok though, I don't think I'm smuggling any narcotics. Ha bloody ha.

A lady thoroughly roots through my bag, emptying every little thing. I apologise for the dirty clothes that have built up at the bottom of my bag and go to help her take them out but am told in no uncertain terms to sit down and not touch anything for the duration. Behind the lady is a two way mirror. Occasionally she disappears inside for ten, twenty minutes at a time. I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable. At another counter a short-tempered model (or so she declares), is giving them all sorts of shit about how exhausting her day has been and that this is bullshit and etc. She is screaming guilt at them and its getting on my already shaky nerves, like listening to a baby crying.

The officer returns and the questions start.

Have you been in contact with any illegal drugs recently?
Eh...... no.
Please be aware that we have some highly sensitive machinery here that can pick up traces you aren't even aware of.
Riiiiiiight.

The thing is I might maybe just have once been in contact with a fella, our neighbour on one island, who had some locally grown medicinal plants on him which he wanted to share. And we did. Just the once. I'm honestly not a fan of the stuff (ask my dealer, not funny, sorry ma n pa). But we were drunk and there were no police on the island so we said what the hey. Anyway.

So I tell her about this once off. She promptly does some sort of smear test on my phone. Sticks it in a machine which beeps loudly (so loudly) and comes back to me with a print out.

See this line. That's marijuana.
On my phone?
Yes.
Shit.

I hadn't even used my phone on the island. She wanders off and I am sweating bricks. My stomach is rumbling ominously but I fear if I ask to use the bathroom they'll make me bring a sieve. She comes back and starts telling me my rights. I feel the situation sliding out of control.

Then I realise she is just talking about my rights with regards a strip search and I breathlessly agree to anything which will prove I am not smuggling drugs.

I am brought into a small room by two burly uniformed men. They run through the procedure, one of them dons some gloves. I strip slowly, and only as requested by an officer who thoroughly checks each item. I am strangely beyond shame, just seeking closure now. In no time I am standing naked before them.

Raise your balls.
I raise my balls.
Spread your cheeks.
I spread my cheeks.

Grand.

And thats that, suddenly they're all smiles. You can get dressed now, they say. That was painless eh? says one, like a dentist.

And I am free to go.

Sea the World!

Today I went diving again and all ( or at least some ) of those things I had meant to say about it before came flooding back. As much as possible I will limit my use of words like beautiful, gracefulness, magical, breathtaking etc. It's difficult though.

The colours of the fish are pretty much indescribable, the variety and seeming randomness of it all has no doubt bolstered many a man’s belief in God. I instead will postulate the existence of a little man in a cave under the waves, who decorates the fish using only a bottomless pot of rainbow paint and an intimidating imagination, whilst surviving on a diet of magic mushrooms. For me it is the only logical explanation.

The most impressive colours belong to the smallest in the sea whereas sharks, deliberately grey and background, impress instead with their size and potency. I’ve seen four of them aligned on the bottom, sitting out a strong current in formation, like fighter planes grounded by high winds. And these were reef sharks, the most pedestrian of sharks, but with white tips on the end of their fins like wing markings. On the same dive, while tacking across the current to avoid being slingshot off into the blue, I crossed over a green turtle. He passed a foot under me, his shell as big as a coffee table and the urge to reach out and hitch a ride was overwhelming, but we are schoolchildren touring a reactor, do not touch. The turtles are probably my favourites, they do not swim, they glide, taking off and landing. They look wise and patient, the owls of the underworld.

There are obviously a lot of species which deserve a mention. There’s the famous little clownfish who to be honest seemed a little cranky to me, guarding their little underwater shrubs so jealously. They zip out to meet you and audibly (if you listen close enough) bark at you and then disappear back into their shrub like a small dog back between its owners legs. The juvenile harlequin funnylips is like the clownfishes flamingly flamboyant, carefree cousin, his frilly fins whirling and spinning into each other so that you can’t tell where one starts and another begins. He bounces around upside down, no doubt humming a tune to himself as he nibbles his way along the sea bed. There's the not-so-fun banded sea snake, the black and white stripes of Danger! conveniently identifying him as containing enough poison to kill 15 of us mere men. And yet he is 3 feet from us and we are trying to get even closer as he weaves gracefully through the coral. Then there's the little cowfish with his big eyes and a body shaped like he's swallowed a building block. He doesn't so much swim as put-put around on his hover fins. Crocodile fish, the overdressed lionfish, the speckled leopard sharks, the angry and stout not-so-little titan triggerfish, the tripped out sea slugs, the list is already too long.

At one of the dive sites you swim out a mere 5 metres from the shore and a sea cliff drops away under you, ultimately to a depth of 2000 metres, imagine taking your kids there for a dip. Another time I snorkelled along the top of a slope where the shallows ended and the seabed disappeared downwards. Sand passed steadily under me and down the slope into the darkness and I felt as if I was perched on the rim of a giant egg timer which was gently willing me into its depths.

Going into the blue is to swim away from any features, in our case the sea wall we had been handrailing, until all around you is a blue infinity. With only your dive buddy as a handle you no longer have any relation to anything concrete, you are suspended in an empty void. It strikes me as one of those human sensations unencountered anywhere else in our existence, as with free falling from a plane perhaps. Once I’d drank my fill, I fixated on my buddy’s back and willed myself not to fall into the hysteria that was nibbling at the edges.

Ones in India perhaps?

I'm in Ind-ones-ia.

I like crosswords and stamps and books by dead russians.

In fact Indonesia does have distinct shades of India about it and I had a lot to write, but I'm afraid I've just gone and got bogged down in more scribblings. Read these as if I am mumbling them through my beard.

***

The call to prayer of the mosques still gives me the shivers, tugging at hidden strings in the music of a foreign language. Glancing into the mosques, seeing the rows of men, heads bowed. It makes me wish I belonged a little. In one town I sit on my balcony and listen to the different mosques loudspeakers drowning each other out, competing for worshippers. Some swallows on a balcony nearby chirp and cheep away, oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion, like kids in church. It is five in the morning and the sun struggles to rise over the volcano which dominates the skyline, its crown lost in cloud.

We get a bus out in to the countryside to go jungle trekking and see the orangutang. Numerous random stops, including one spent singing Maroon 5 with just another local guitar hero. Toni has her head out the window for most of the 4 hour journey taking in the sights while I, being a veteran of one Indian campaign no less, affect nonchalance and try to sleep.

We drive past a school. The kids are standing in ranks in the school yard, the girls like miniature nuns, the boys like sailor cadets maybe. The teachers stand at the front in military green, their shoulders and chests adorned with merit ribbons, like a visiting delegation of war veterans. Every couple of hundred metres is a mosque with a dome crudely hammered out of corrugated iron, streaked in rust, no fancy marble glazing here. Yet every house seems to have a satellite dish the size of a small car. There are rows of tiny minibuses, garishly coloured, brightly decrepit, going nowhere.

***

We decide to do a guided trek to see the orangutan, the jungle people. Our guide makes monkey calls and disappears occasionally in earnest searchings. We half expect him to come back in a monkey suit.

He is a little obsessed with the idea of a banana representing a penis. He tells us about the betel nut, is good for a young man's banana, he says and he gives me a worryingly knowing wink. Later he says I shouldn't give my banana to the orangutan, oh I don't have one, I say, yes you do, he says and laughs and I am a little afraid of what the locals do with their bananas and the orangutans.

He jokes about one of them being his wife. Brave brave man.

Then we actually get to meet them. A mother and a baby, the baby clambering and hanging from its mothers coat as if by velcro. They come and sit with us awhile. I have heard of people who meet these creatures and cry, and it makes some sense. The mothers face is wise, bored, patient, resigned. They make you if not tearful, at least reflective.

I reflected that it is funny that those who decry the concept of evolution are offended by the notion that we might be descended from apes. I think it is us who are the embarassing relations, in our gluttony and our haste and our short sightedness. And me making it all a little worse with my many tonnes of air-fuel carbon emissions.

Our guide carries a machete which I hope he will attack the vegetation with as we battle our way into the untouched wilderness. But the trail is distinct and well worn, and he uses his knife only to slice and dice some pineapple. Which he has brought in his bag. He continues his monkey calls and sometimes it seems to work only as an echolocation system for the other guides and their parties who we occasionally meet. It starts to feel like we are 20 groups painstakingly criss-crossing and avoiding each other in an area the size of a football pitch. And it is all good.

We are in a little wooden restaurant shack on the rivers edge in the darkness. The electricity has gone again so the mood is candlelit. There are cats somewhere nearby making that unnerving crying infant sound, their pitch rising and falling like wind through bottle tops. They know the weather is about to break. Thunder passed up the valley earlier in the day but it was lost without its rain and lightning. Now the narrow valley is lit sporadically, as if by a broken strobe. Above us the gods beat their drums and the heavens open on our corrugated roof. We are lost in noise.

You can drown in the jungle noises, your senses numbed by it, and sit idle for hours, stoned on it.

The Tsunami Tourist

Another bus station in the early morning, hazy from an all night bus journey in a fridge. Sitting around the periphery of the station yard are the usual mix of gruff and grisly men taking their first coffee of the day. We are grunted into sitting at one of their tables and they hold forth over us, at us, ignoring us, chatting to us. They are serious men yet they goose each other and giggle like school girls. I wonder should I try and join in.

We have arrived in Banda Aceh. This was one of the hardest hit areas in the tsunami at the close of 2004. Somehow we have managed to arrive here with little idea of how the area was faring now, only having been reassured that any tourism was a good thing. We are aiming for the island of Pulah Weh just off the coast of Aceh.

It starts on the way to the boat. Our tuk driver points at a factory up ahead. Tsunami, he says but it is unclear what he means until we get closer and realise the "factory" is actually a ship. It is perhaps a hundred metres long and half that wide, a cargo ship. It has settled permanently in the middle of a residential neighbourhood of single storey houses. At this point we are still several kilometres from the sea. As if this marked some sort of border, the scars are suddenly everywhere. Houses crumpled in on themselves, the concrete and cable supports buckled and twisted, or plucked from their foundations. The occasional eery site where all that remains is the tile floors, rain washed maps to vanished homes.

There's a new bridge with the splinters of the old one still jagged underneath. At one point desolate black lakes clogged with debris and tree trunks line the roadside. Locals sift through them. I can only imagine what they find.

There is an occasional palm tree amongst the buildings, towering upto fifteen metres into the grey sky, their leaves still ragged and broken. Higher says our driver, the water went higher. And there was no higher ground, nowhere to run.

Suddenly we feel like vultures. We huddle down in our little seat as far as we can. People stare at you most places in Indonesia but here I imagine it to be accusatory, even when they smile. Our driver tells us with a small smile that he lost a baby and I shrink a little more.

The sea is so calm, we might as well be boating on a lake.

Pulah Weh is a breeze dried piece of paradise, snorkelling with turtles in seas that are brochure blues, framed by jungle and palm trees. Five naked brown boys prance around in the waves, the picture of innocence (though they do show an impressive knowledge of the mechanics of love whenever Toni has her back turned. I try and put on a disapproving look but fail. There's five of them, naked, humping the air. "Are you?" their eyes ask.)

Pulah Weh island itself felt much less impact from the tsunami, with jungle hillsides rising up almost from the waters edge, but it still bears the scars. The water came as high the floor of our beachside cabin, raised as it is back on the hill slightly, and the Malaysian couple inside at the time were safe. But when the water receded it took most of the lower structures with it and the topsoil. Trees line the back beach, many now with their roots exposed. Some of them lie still slumped on the beach, untethered, a picture of defeat.

There are barely a handful of tourists here. The whole country seems to go through cycles of recovering from natural disasters and social upheaval so that tourism comes and goes like the tides. Aceh, with its regular natural disasters and an ongoing separatist conflict, seems to be one of the slowest places to regain the traveller's trust. And then this week there's another offshore earthquake, another tsunami warning and the area's battered reputation takes another knock.

On the Road...

Dear Diary,

I told the guys I'd be writing to you about them and they insisted I disguise their names which I have duly done.

J.ames has given me a wetsuit with holes in it that give views which only one's doctor and one's darling should be subjected to. The lads qualify as neither so I wear togs underneath. I am still worried the lads will start calling me SeaGimp.

J.ames insists on talking to me while I am sitting on the toilet, even though he knows how uncomfortable this makes me. We might have to have a family meeting about it. P.aul says he is Canadian but does not have any Canadian flags sewn on to his bag. This makes me suspicious, I will see if he likes Celine Dion.

J.ames has R. Kelly on his iPod. This threw the future of the road trip into doubt but I quietly checked with the local authorities and they said they were aware of the situation and to continue as normal. I soldier on but have taken to sleeping with an open penknife.

J.ames wets his wetsuit when its dry. We will be walking down to the sea to surf and he will get a slightly distracted look and then smile slightly and we know he has just got a headstart on getting his wetsuit wet. It's wrong I tells him but he only laughs slightly hysterically.

My eyebrows, no doubt bolstered by the sun, wind, fresh air and water, are growing at a prodigious rate. I am worried that soon my eyelids will become obsolete. The lads will call me Curtains.

I have got that strange man pride of wearing the same boxers for 5 days. I also went unshowered for 7.

There is a condom kept in the tent in case anyone "gets lucky". We fight over who will get to use it, bald men fighting over a comb.

****

I went to the hills on my own after the lads went back to work, lived out of J;ames car, walked the peaks, swam in streams every day and watched solo sunsets with a bottle of red wine and a book. I camped in a valley ringed by slag heap giants, the barren peaks huddled together in a line, their shoulders rubbing like a barbershop quartet. On one of my walks I got lost on one of these shoulders. I battled my way through irreversable shrub forests and barbed wired plantations and then ran out of water in the midday sun effectively passing out when i got back to the car. Inevitably one of the highlights of my time here.

****

In a way my sense of direction has just failed me again only on a grander scale and I have caught a flight back up to Malaysia instead of to South America. Eleven hours in the wrong direction perhaps but then every direction is homeward bound on this side of the world.




Thats right, yours truly. Rad.

Happy Christmas folks...

So I had a different christmas, my first away from home at the ripe old age of 28. And as such it wasn't a christmas, I talked with the family while huddled in an alcove in the dark and rain on a beach on the other side of the world as they stood around waiting for my whimsical red wine wanderings to end so they could go open their pressies. From the start our little band of away-from-homers made a decent effort to make the occasion christmasy. We opened the day with a smoked salmon, cream cheese and brown bread breakfast, washed down with a cheap Baileys substitute. Seagulls hovered in the wind around us like we were returning trawlers. And us sprawled in the sun, our short sleeved shirts another effort to formalise it all. Then later, in a cave more used to student booze ups than buffet dinners, we served up a christmas fare of boiled ham, potatoes, sweetcorn and peas, pineapple, onions, stuffing and red, red wine. It was quite delicious but for me, try as we might, christmas did not come to the remote beach in New Zealand. For me, christmas is a ten day stretch, if not the whole month of december, where I get to see all those people who I haven't seen, maybe since the previous christmas. And I get to sit around with my big family and make the same jokes we've made for years and which, unlike us perhaps, never seem to grow old.

I am currently road tripping here, with surf boards on the roof and bikes racked to the back, wobbling our way along the coast in a top heavy van. So far the bikes remain unused, their chains rusting in the salty air as we chase the surf. I am new to this surfing game and I suck momentously. The water is head freeze cold, as fresh as the melting ice caps it comes from. I fittingly use a shambles of a wetsuit with some of one leg missing, a hole the size of my fist in the crotch and a sleeveless upper body like a girls one piece swimming costume. To counteract this I wear a hood which isolates me further from the others as I struggle in a very private battle with my board. Catching a wave is all well and good when I can barely sit on the thing. Each time I am swept off it brings the same instant angry frustration as stubbing your toe, and I shout and curse this great unwieldy ironing board I am trying to master. My shouts are impotent, lost in the rumble and ssssssh of the waves and it only makes me all the more exhausted. On occasion sheets of rain sweep across us, the wind whips the white tops up and I feel a little bit homesick, chilled to my core, an Irish winter's day in a New Zealand summer.

On the beach recovering, I watch a couple of small yellow-eyed penguins make their waddling way up the sand dunes. For some reason they remind me of an old married couple struggling back uphill from the shops, the woman leading the way and nattering away about this and that ( "Oooh I see the cormorants are back for christmas, and I have nothing for them..."), the husband patiently, silently walking in her wake, both their heads craning forwards as if crossing a finishing line.

In the evening I watch the sun set behind a small headland, great rays of light, like a snapshot of an explosion, light up the gathered clouds in a pink glow. The faces of the illuminated clouds seem to look into the suns cauldron with awe, its contents hidden tantalisingly from me, where I stand has gone dark and cold. I suspect a man less burdened by facts and figures could spend a fulfilling life trying to see into that cauldron, to see for himself what the clouds hold in such reverence.

I got a rugby ball stuck in the tree where we were camping, the same tree we hung our wetsuits from like upside down scarecrows who agitate in the wind, creepy in the dusk. I threw a variety of small hard objects up the tree to retrieve the ball and not all of them came back down. Occasionally a gust of wind would dislodge one and it would thump down unexpectedly like a rogue coin in those waterfall-coin games at the amusements. Not all of them came down though, and I like to think it is my legacy at that spot. If they do fall, and do hit someone, i can only hope that it is one of those people who feels obliged to leave a legacy of beer bottles and one-use barbecues. I have given Mother Nature the ammunition, it is up to her now.

We ate christmas dinner with a Czech couple. Their traditional christmas dinner involves carp. The carp is often left to swim for several days in the family bath tub to clear the mud out of its gills. Apparently many of the carp are saved by the tearful last minute intervention of the family children, who are unwilling to celebrate christmas by eating their new found friend. I am sure if we did the same with all the animals we eat over christmas there'd me more than a few disgruntled fathers on christmas day, grumbling quietly as they push their sprouts and soy-based ham (Sham) around their plates, while the kids happily charge around the garden slipping in fresh pig shit. Best christmas ever, they'd say.

Christmas down under Down Under

Just to clear up a slight misunderstanding. I am in New Zealand (not Oz), for a Christmas and New Years which will mostly consist of a surfing/mt biking road trip. I landed down on the South Island today and the first smell on leaving the airport was that of freshly cut grass. I thank you.