Lost and Found August 2011 Looking for Lost German Friends; Anja, Aleks, Andrea and Stefan.

It is completely against my sense of blogging order to post something before it should be posted, but I find myself nursing a sense of guilt here. I will write ad-infinitum about the amazing Sziget Music Festival in Budapest soon, but I must send out a message to some new friends I failed to meet on the last night there.

On Saturday night, we five drank a lot of beer, and if I recall correctly, palinka shots.... that may  or may not have been with this lot, it could well have been with some Hungarians..it’s all a little fuzzy now.

Anyway, Stefan must shoulder most of the blame, I feel, as he kept insisting we stay and drink more beer, and more beer; such is the German way, he assured me. And I do have some German ancestry. But in order to leave Sziget by 4.30am, I promised, as leverage to a 106kg German drinking machine, to meet this quartet on Sunday night and buy Stefan 10 beers!

Believe me, it was the only way to get out of there before daybreak.

But that night I was sneezing a lot, you may recall. The dust hanging in the night air from the daily 100,000 music lover’s trail tramping from stage to stage (and there’s 48 of them), coupled with the smoke from the circus’ heavy oil fuelled torches triggered a massive allergy attack by the time I returned to my lodgings. Black gunk flowed like oil from my sinuses in the hot steam of the shower, and of course, I ended up with sinus and throat infections.

That’s why I didn’t turn up on Sunday night and I had no way of letting anyone know.

“Soft” I hear you say.

I completely agree, but this allergy turned viral infection would not be denied.

So, I owe you 10 beers Stefan. And I intend to get them to you somehow, whether it’s Oktoberfest or a local pub in Stuttgart.

And if Anja, Aleks, Andrea or Stefan read this, could you please leave your contact email as a comment to this post, and I will be in touch with you.

Hungry in Budapest ; Late July 2011

 The Easyjet flight was about to take off; the captain said so.

We just had to wait for the fuel re-fill to complete, get clearance, and we were off to Budapest, Hungary.

Thankfully, someone noticed a leak in the Hydraulic System.

So we sat on the tarmac for an hour, while a new plane and crew were organised. Then we walked through the rain back to the Luton Terminal, and sat there for another 2 hours.

Vacant seats were sparse. But I found one at the end of a row, sat down and promptly fell asleep. It is a new skill I have recently acquired; the ability to sleep on planes, trains and in airports.

Gone are the days of 14 hour flights LA to Melbourne and eyeballs that feel like someone’s sandpapered them down to the nerve-endings.

Now, when I’m in that vacuum of space-time-continuum in between destinations, and stimulating conversation is non-existent or has just run dry, I turn off, tune out, and drop in to a dreamless sleep.

We waited near 40 minutes for the luggage to appear on the carousel at Budapest Terminal 1. The advertisement on the column holding up the roof of the place said a lot in a strange language I took to be Hungarian. There were images of clear glass bottles containing wildly different colours of some kind of fancy liquor; and one sentence in English which said “Pahlinka, you will not ignore the noble fruit”.

It was a statement that was to prove prophetic for the coming month. Oh, how I wish I had taken heed of this sign, given to me by the universal gremlin that exists only to say “I told you so” once the damage has been done.

The couple next to me were fighting; their brats climbing all over the carousel, taking no heed of their Mother’s warnings. He was English, she was Hungarian. He was unperturbed, she was having a meltdown. She said he lost everything and they couldn’t afford his forgetfulness anymore; his wallet last week, his credit card the week before. He said everyone in the airport could hear she was a whinger, and that she always got like this when they came over to visit her parents.

I decided to exit the situation and empty my bursting bladder, would this luggage never come?

So I opened the door to the men’s room which was situated directly behind the baggage carousel, and there were 4 men, percy-in-hand, merrily pissing into the urinals, now in full view of the 200 plus passengers. There was no two door policy here!

Welcome to Hungary!

I shared a shuttle bus with some Spanish women for the drive into Budapest. Every third bill-board seemed to be advertising  a “men’s club” with women so scantily clad that most men not used to this would be putting the car into a ditch. Luckily our driver was used to this, and as he kept his eyes firmly on the road, we passed seamlessly from countryside through suburbs to city.

If I could design a city, like the character in the Leonardo De Caprio movie “Inception”, I think it would be Budapest. Two cities; Buda and Pest, on opposite sides of the River Danube.

Wide, clean streets. Not so many people, not so many cars. A low-rise city with not much above 10 stories high. Neo-Classical, Neo-Gothic, maybe a touch of Art-Deco, but the term “Eclectic” probably sums up the architectural style. The rewards of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire were spent here and in Vienna, and, despite two world wars and a communist occupation that lasted 50 years, thankfully most of it still survives.

I arrive at Veres Palne’ Utca, two streets back from the river on the Pest side. I had booked an apartment here, but it was 6.30pm and I was about 5 hours late, due to the Easyjet fiasco.

It had started to rain heavily as I stared at the 15 foot high ornate wooden doors that guarded the entrance to my new home. I buzzed the number I was given; no answer. A guy came to the door from the street, punched some numbers on a key pad, he pushed open the door and I followed him in. At least I was inside now and could camp in a corridor somewhere till morning if need be.

I took the circular stairs to the second floor, as the wire cage lift, looking like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and enclosed by ornate, black iron-work, had a hand-scrawled cardboard sign which said “meghibasodott” which I took to mean it didn’t work.

I reached the door and buzzed again, but no sign of life.

I dumped my gear on the floor, and pondered my next move.

A woman came walking down the stairs.

“Excuse me, do you speak English”

She looked slightly startled and unsure of the situation she had suddenly found herself in.

She looked at me intently, opened her mouth wide, and stuck her right index finger into her mouth. She shook it in there several times, and I realised she was pointing at something.

So I moved a little closer and thought I could see; a tooth filling!

“You have a filling”?

She nodded her head and pointed her now saliva covered pointer up the stairs.

“Dentist”

She nodded her head violently now. We were really communicating now.

“You just came from the Dentist upstairs and you can’t talk”

She nodded again.

“So you do understand English”?

She nodded again and pointed to her tooth and then again up the now darkened stairway.

She had no idea what I was saying.

I nodded and gave her a Thai wai, slightly bowing forward with the palms of my hands together.

I don’t know why.

She seemed to understand and walked off down the stairs.

There was a door across the landing from this one, and I thought I had nothing to lose by buzzing the people there.

I did. The door opened. And there was Maria.

She was waiting for me, confident I would find her there somehow. And she could let me in.

So, I settled in to my new home in Pest. The rain was tearing down. People rattled through garbage bins on the street below that were waiting for the early morning pickup. The small bars that lined the street both sides filled the street with laughter and yelling and general conversation which drifted up through my open windows.

Maria gave me a map, and said she would be back at work here in the morning, with an offer to help me orientate myself in the land of the Maygars.

The Art of Travel; Marrakech to London to Budapest July 2011

Unless you can step out of your front door and straight on to a luxury cruise ship touring the Mediterranean, you are probably going to suffer physically and mentally when you next travel.

There is nothing easy about travel, except perhaps the thought of the things you have left behind that you are glad to be rid of.

The body is not designed to cope with the rigours of travel well. You are constantly on the move through alien environments whilst every cell in your body is screaming “this is not right”.

The temperature, the noise, the language, the decompression/recompression of the plane, going through customs, the airport food, and the anxiety over whether your luggage will appear on the conveyor belt by the 4^th time around. The time zone changes, the currency changes, the humidity changes and the spare change from your last country.

The sensual assault when you walk out of the airport clutching your bags and looking for the clues given from your Lonely Planet guide and you realise you are hopelessly disorientated, it’s late, you are exhausted from a 10 hour flight and there’s not a friendly face in sight.

But this is why I travel.

This is when I am at my best and my most resourceful.

After two nights of saying “goodbye” and getting a send-off in various ways from my new-found Morroccan friends; I wake at 6.30 am and pack for leaving. The boys that run the Riyadh have had a big night, No-one is stirring and it doesn’t look like I have any chance of getting coffee. So, I leave without saying goodbye to my hosts and head outside for a taxi. After adventures too numerous to mention here, including a near head-on collision with a donkey pulling a cart, I arrive at Marrakech Airport. I don’t realise that it marks the beginning of 20 solid hours of travel before I arrive at my hotel in Luton, England the next day.

So the day goes; taxi to the airport, flight to Gatwick airport, then 3 trains before I arrive at Limehouse station, London. I need to get some clothes from my daughter’s apartment before Budapest, so I trudge with my bulging backpack and my laptop bag through the London summer cool and light rain to visit Kate and Wayne. I can’t stay the night as they have other guests; Wayne’s family is visiting from Australia.

It’s late July and for 160 British Pounds you can get yourself a shoebox or a wardrobe for a night’s accommodation in London. That’s about it. It’s the height of the tourist season and the place is full of palace and cathedral gawkers. So if I bypass London and go to Luton, I can stay near the airport and embark from there for Budapest. It seemed like a really clever idea at the time.

It’s great to see Team KW again. Unfortunately, Wayne has broken his foot after jumping the fence to their apartment one night. I have had one beer in a month in Morocco teetotaller territory, but my exile from alcohol ends exactly now as Wayne hands me what seems like a giant green beer can.

The cold foam hits the back of my throat with a rush, and things start to go a little hazy from herein.

I can remember going to the local pub for traditional English Fish and Chips with Kate, Wayne, Dave and Janet, and Lisa and Simon.

I can remember Dave and I thrashing the lot of them at pub dominos, and also the resident pub German Shepherd coming around for food, not pats.

I can remember tearing myself away around 10pm and, with extra clothes on board, trudging back to the Tube station, again through the rain.

I know I am fading fast; I’m carrying about 28kg which represents my whole life at this stage. I start to ache all over and wonder if I am coming down with the ‘Flu. I take the first train and get to Victoria station. It’s cold, bleak and deserted. I sit down to wait for the train to Luton which arrives at about 12.15am. I can’t fall asleep....I want to...but I must catch this train.

Finally it comes.

I find a seat and can’t help but sleep fitfully, trying to watch the stations, and having the woman sitting in the seat across from me laugh every time my head tumbles onto my lap and I wake, startled, checking that I haven’t slept through my stop.

Finally, Luton appears; nearly there. Through the rain once more. Through the car park. Find a taxi.

15 minutes later I get to the hotel, then check in, then get into the room and collapse.

I wake 13 hours later and feel like I’ve been run over by a freight train.

I look at myself in the mirror.

I can’t believe how much weight I’ve lost, maybe 6 or 7 kilos.

The shorts that fitted so snugly when I bought them in Thailand actually fell off me when I put them on last week in Marrakech.

It’s time to start eating again.

I found the breakfasts I was given in Morocco to be almost completely lacking in nutrition. Based on the French style; croissant and white bread rolls with butter and jam, and Mint Tea and Coffee just didn’t suit me. I resorted to making myself eat half a roast chicken most days, but still most of the muscle I normally carry just disappeared.

Staying healthy and fit is one of my greatest challenges while travelling. I feel that if I lose my fitness, to a great extent I lose my edge. I don’t feel as good, and I’m not as capable when it comes to pushing physical boundaries or getting out of the tricky situations you often find yourself in, if you are up for adventure, that is.

Just the look of a strong, fit physique is enough to give you free passage through most places. The reality is, in most of the places I have been, most of the men are quite soft physically, and they are looking for soft targets if they want to rob, rip-off or cause harm to you.

So, for me, the physical enables the appreciation of the Art of Travel; the emotional, the spiritual, the mental.

I have met so many fellow travellers for whom fear was a constant companion. There were places they wouldn’t go and experiences they wouldn’t have. They travel like a day at the office; 9 to 5, and then hunker down in the hotel looking for a TV channel in their native language, after sloshing down a meal little different to that of home.

I have begun to call it the 2 day syndrome.

Most people only stay in one place for 2 days then move on.

Up early to make the hotel breakfast buffet or the hostel toast and tea.

Get the sneakers on the bus or the pavement.

Experience a cornucopia of visual stimulants created or preserved for the travelling tourist.

And unless your destination is for a specific reason; such as a bull run in Spain or as a stand-in Jesus Christ to be nailed to a cross at Easter in the Philippines; your experience will probably be about Art.

Art Galleries, Architecture, Sculptural Statues, Museums and Music. With the odd day at a Writer’s Festival or a visit to William Shakespeare’s ink pot. The Art of a well-engineered bridge, or the Natural Art of a landscape.

Hell, even if you just lie on a beach you read a book!

Perhaps these are the things we deny ourselves in our normal daily grind. That we feel the need to fill our spirits with images that inspire us with their sheer beauty that we can take away with us in our minds. These things that are so visible and that mostly represent the best of Human creative expression and inspiration. We nibble away at this food for the soul to provide the succour we need to get through the next period of purgatorial penance, the wasteland of our everyday lives, until we have the opportunity and the time to do this again.

But, is this merely a sugar-hit you pick up from a Thomas Cook drive-through?

A new friend who has travelled far more widely than I have, piqued my interest in this subject when she said " I've travelled to so many cities, but to each one, I'm still a stranger".

Is this the Art of Travel?

The Arab Spring; Marrakech Scorecard July 2011-08-12

It was a typical Marrakech evening.

Hot and dry, with a calamity of characters offering taxis, bananas, a horse-drawn cart or hashish, I set out across the Grand Square to the road which leads to where the gates of this walled city once stood, so that I could run outside the walls where the heat was less and the wind vainly tried to clear the air of the acrid diesel fumes which burned your lungs.

All of a sudden I found myself in the midst of a demonstration. There was some scuffling going on which was concerning until I realised it was just some overzealous organiser insisting that the banners be carried in a particular order. I pushed through quickly to the front of the mob. Men and women at the front were carrying large framed photographs of the King. These were older people, and I knew this was one of the “staged” rallies in support of the King, who had been forced to offer the people a referendum, a vote to change the constitution and have free elections. Till now, the King selected the parliament and the Prime Minister. Now he will select the Prime Minister from the winning party.

It occurs to me that at this moment in Syria there are people getting shot by their own security forces for demonstrating for political and economic change. A chill runs through me, it hasn’t happened in Morocco, yet.

Younger people are calling for greater division of Religion, Monarchy and State, but you never hear of it in the media. But I know the movement is gathering momentum and the hunger for change is palpable, you can feel it in the air, spreading across the Middle-East.

I tear a muscle in my left hip, running on the hard, uneven tiles that line the footpath outside the fortress walls, and limp back to the tranquillity of my Azahara Riyad. Ibrahim rushes to me when I enter, and asks if I can take a look at Ali, he is unwell. I walk across the marble courtyard to where Ali sits, his face grimacing in pain and his hand holding the side of his right cheek.

“Salaam, Ali. Votre visage? Qui est de la question?”

“Oh, la dent la dent”

I take his hand away and his cheek is hard and swollen and he is in a lot of pain.

I ask Ibrahim if it has happened before.

“Oui, but this time is the worst”

Ali has a tooth abscess. He needs to see a dentist who will probably just pull the tooth out. That is how they deal with these problems here.

I give him some strong paracetamol tablets with codeine for the pain, and instructions to take them 4 hourly.

It is coming to the end of my time here.

At the end of my first week in Marrakech, I would have been happy to quit and go somewhere else. But now, I feel reluctant to leave. I have made some good friends, and I almost feel a part of this place. I think and speak in French now, and have become accustomed to the pace of life here and the often crazy ways things are done. If I had any issues with what I thought Islam was before I came here, they are now gone. The Moroccans are a pious people, and basically good in their core beings, much like most people, I guess.

So now comes the scorecard for Marrakech/Essaouira as a potential home;

Environment (natural and un-natural)                                                                     5 (out of 10)

Food (ok, but not as good or as spicy as I expected, issues with freshness)     5

Social (friendliness, helpfulness, welcoming, social opportunities)                    8

Security (trustworthy, physical safety)                                                                     6

Weather                                                                                                                         6

Accommodation (quality, comfort, cost)                                                                 8

Value for Money (living costs, entertainment)                                                       7

Visa (availability and cost)                                                                                          6

Total                                                                                                                   5/80    66%

Standard visas are valid for 3 months from entry for most British Commonwealth nation’s citizens. Longer visas can be obtained but you need to show proof of sufficient funds to support yourself.

Obviously, security is a major issue in Morocco. The bombing that occurred just weeks before I arrived was denounced by every person I spoke to. They brought the subject up, as if they felt outsiders need to know how the average Moroccan feels about the subject. I did not encounter anyone I would term as “fundamentalist”, but that does not mean they don’t exist. However, I did not encounter any situations where I was at risk, despite my sensitivities.

If I were to live here, I would divide my time between Marrakech, and a beach city, perhaps Agadir. Marrakech can have poor air quality due to the bowl-like effect the surrounding mountains give. This place has gotten under my skin, and I am reluctant to leave.

But the journey must go on, for my quest to find the best place to live.

Next stop Budapest, Hungary. Home Number 4.

Home to Marrakech July 2011

It was the perfect homecoming.

Crowds milled around groups of musicians and snake charmers just as I remembered.

There was a fire on the sausage barbeque stand again; the fat was spitting out of the broken skins and flames were dancing in the acrid smoke, as the barbeque boy vainly tried to move everything to the side.

The call to prayer from a hundred minarets echoed through the square, and a donkey pulling a cart loaded with watermelons rebelled against the sharp sting of the whip, and bucked and kicked the underside of the cart, and then shat unceremoniously on the concrete as a palpable symbol of protest. A car, then a motorbike ran through the shit almost immediately and spread it like mustard on a kebab. The crowds then filled the space and spread the shit to the four corners of Marrakech.

Yes, it felt like home.

Hot and noisy, smoky and chaotic, pungent and urgent.

Women walked by in tailored silk pantsuits of pastel blues and greens and pinks with matching head-scarves and straight backs and heads held high.

The touts were scanning the crowds for new arrivals; tourists, the most valuable and sort after commodity in Marrakech.

A woman cleaning hotel rooms seven days a week earns 1,000 Dinars or 100 Euros a month. It was relatively easy to pick up 50 or 100 Dinars from a new tourist, before they became immune to the constant stream of beggars and pleaders, before they lost the guilt that most from the first world experience when confronted with the third world.

I walked down the alley off Le Place to Hotel Cecil, and was greeted like a prodigal son returning home.

“Salaam Aliekaam, Bonjour, welcome, welcome”

Everyone wanted to know about Essaouira, and I was given a room for 4 people at 50 dinars less than I previously paid. Most travellers stay only 2 nights, then are never seen again, so I was a rare commodity.

So I caught up with Nouradine, and Houda, and one night at the ginger tea stand I met the Cambridge twins; Robin and Rob.

They had just finished degrees in Mathematical Biology, and apart from being genuine genius’s they were really great guys. Robin is the opening batsman for the Cambridge First 11, and was about to tour India with the team. Rob, who is fluent in French, was taking a year off study and going to French Guiana to teach kids maths. We had a lot of laughs and agreed we would try to meet up when we were all in London again.

I spent a scorchingly hot afternoon looking at the 2 palaces in Marrakech with Eve. She had just completed a post-graduate business degree in Oregon, and was travelling her way through Morocco and Europe on her way back home to Bangkok, where she had previously worked as an accountant. We had an enthusiastic tout offer to take us to see an auction at the spice market, but when we got there it was just a room, and any auctions were long finished. We were then palmed off to the spice shop next door, and my sinuses nearly exploded when I had a bag of pure menthol almost shoved up my nostrils “to try”. Eve then nearly exploded with laughter when I told the tout she was from Siberia. “Velly nice,welcome, we love Sibleerlia”.

I moved to a new Riyadh called Azahara. It was away from the square near the outer walls and was much quieter and like moving back into medieval times. There were woodworking shops where craftsmen painstakingly carved intricate Arabic designs based on sacred geometry into cedar and pine, much as their forefathers had, and shops where women made carpets on looms, or cut out fabric to be hand sewn into shirts and Habibs.

Azahara was sumptuous. A large courtyard of marble tiles and columns, and a marble fountain. Five-pointed brass stars were inlaid in the floor, and under a canopy of intricately painted geometric patterns were heavily cushioned couches where breakfast was served, and mint tea or “Moroccan Whiskey” could be taken during the day. My room was the size of a house, with Berber carpets, a bar, and a ceiling I can only describe as breathtaking. The cornices and ornaments were so finely detailed, I had never stayed anywhere even remotely like this, it was so beautiful.

And I was the only guest.

Ibrahim, Ali and Rasheed ran the small hotel for a Frenchman, who lived in Paris and visited once a year. There didn’t seem to be much marketing going on to fill the other rooms, but I wasn’t complaining!

So the next week passed in a flurry of socialising with my new found Moroccan friends, and a disastrous two day trip to Rabat, the capital of The Kingdom of Morrocco.

More about that in the next post.

The Spy who Loved Me (Almost); Marrakech, Morocco July 2011

I felt like I was a character in a John Le Carre cold war novel.

Every time I entered the ancient souk that surrounds le Place Jmaa El Fna I had the sense that I was being followed.

I could have been Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, hell that’s just down the road! Or an undercover man, maybe even a double agent!

I was entering enemy territory. They knew. I knew it.

If I wasn’t cool, if I didn’t keep my wits about me they could capture and torture me, and draw every important piece of strategic information from me, and I would leave a broken man.

Broken and Broke.

I would probably have a large Berber carpet rug, 3 pairs of goats leather shoes with the toes pointed skywards, a sliver tea service set, a tagine or two, enough spices for the next decade, a camel leather bag to carry it all in, emerging back into the blinding midday sunlight looking like Demis Roussos in a long, white, hooded Arab Jelaba.

They would use underhanded tactics to confuse and entrap me.

Like suddenly a swarthy man would materialise next to me, and holding out his hand (for a handshake) say “bonjour Monsieur , comment ca’ va’? If I responded “ca’ va’ bien” he would say “ah francais” if I refused to speak or said something like “non parlez francais” he would say “Espana, Non, English?  “Where are you from” “Auslalia?” Welcome, to Maroc. Auslalia is beautiful, no?

And if I returned his handshake he would invite me to come and meet his family and take mint tea with them “as fliend” and watch a berber rug being made on a loom in the traditional way.

Then he would lead me into the darkened depths of the labyrinth, through archways and laneways, up stairs and down stairs, till we would come to a non-descript hole in the wall.

He was just the go-between, paid to deliver me to a team of super-salesmen in a Marrakech market megastore who were probably the direct descendants of Ali Baba’s forty thieves!

So, a strategy was needed.

Firstly, never shake their hand.

The swarthy sales man would get agitated and offended but I was not their “effendi” or friend. Their hand was usually pretty dirty anyway.

Secondly, have some fun with them.

Go round a corner and duck into the shadows of a deep, dark doorway, and watch the panic as they run after your ghost down the alley.

Or, when you are asked where you are from, just say “Siberia”.

“Sibeerlia, we love your country”!

Welcome to Morocco, Welcome to Marrakech.