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.