Accents

The painting crew were run by a friend of a friend of mine. They were travelling to Montauk and I hitched a ride.  There was a Puerto Rican from near Long Beach somewhere, a gruff old guy with a beer-rounded belly and a beard, another older man with a long-broken nose, and some young guys, pale and slouching, from the unhappy suburbs round Islip. They all looked at me like I was from another planet when I wandered down their boss’s driveway telling them I’d be catching a lift. Shambling and shaggy with baggy jeans and long hair, I was used to looks like that in Long Island.

I travelled first with the Puerto Rican and a couple of the pale kids. They said nothing but the Puerto Rican was friendly, more talkative than me even. At the end of the day, I hitched a lift back again. This time with the older guy with a beard. For a while he didn’t say much.

“So, where’re you from?”

“Me, oh, I’m from New Zealand.”

“Hmh, I knew it was somewhere like that. Everyone was trying to guess where you were from. Those young guys, they’d never heard an accent so strange. They figured you must be from Connecticut or something.”

The Dangers of Dorms

The youth hostel dorm in Quetzaltenango was lots of things. It was bustling. It was friendly. It was anarchic. It was communal. A single room, a tin roof, plywood walls and 30 beds in rows, it was home to aged hippies and earnest Spanish students. It was busy, it was transient, it was a good place to meet people. It was not restful. Plastic bags cackled through the night. People stumbled in the dark. Toilets flushed. The French woman three beds down snored like a hibernating bear. After a while I got used to it. The sub-conscious sentinels that keep watch during sleep relaxed a little. Decided that I didn’t need to be woken with every noise. They relaxed but not so much so as to stop me from waking in an instant, when a drunken Dane peed on the floor nearby. The sound was unmistakeable.

“Hey!” I didn’t need to say anything. An outraged American, even closer to the urine stream, was springing to action.
“Huh”
“Not here. The toilet. The toilet.”
“Nuugghhh.”
“THE TOILET”
“Auuggghhh” The weeing stopped and he shambled off.
I pulled my pack up onto my bed and slept next to it for the rest of the night.

The next morning the Danish guy didn’t remember a thing. Drunk. Sleep walking. The urine had already soaked into the floor.

Three months later and a long way further south, in a much smaller room in Puerto Natales, I woke to the same sound. This time there were only four of us. Me, Christine the French Canadian, and Sandra and Eddie, two English travelling companions. We’d just walked round the Torres del Paine. And had celebrated that night by getting pleasantly drunk.

Once again. I didn’t have to say anything. Sandra was closer to the action.
“Eddie? Eddie! Good God Eddie what are you doing?” Sandra, was well heeled, with an accent from an expensive school somewhere. Her tone I thought was just about right for the situation. Eddie, however, was having none of it.
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m having a piss.”
His voice had a grumpy certainty to it. Quite convincing, and for a moment, still only half awake I wondered whether peeing on the floor was normal after all. Or, at least, normal where Eddie came from.

He finished his toileting and got back into bed and for a moment there was silence. Sandra was clearly as confused as me. And if Christine was awake she wasn’t saying anything. Maybe it really was normal. Maybe…
“Arrrrgghhhhh!” That was Eddie. “Where are we?”
“The youth hostel in Puerto Natales.” My chance to contribute to the conversation.
“And I was just…”
“Pissing on the floor.” Sandra finished the sentence for Eddie. Sounding rather cross.
“Fuck. I thought we were still on the trail. I was outside the tent. I couldn’t figure out why you were asking.”
“Right.”
Christine began to giggle.
“Maybe,” I wondered aloud, “you might want to mop that up?”

Maps

My mental maps from my first years of travel are much like the maps drawn by ancient mariners. Coastlines carefully plotted but with great empty spaces inland (save for the odd dragon or airport or two). If it was more than 50 miles from a surf spot, I wasn’t interested. The temples of Ubud? No thanks. Not while Padang Padang was breaking. Komodo dragons? Just big lizards really and at least two days travel from Lakey Peak. Celtic Castles? If they were on the coast, perhaps.

I arrived in Mexico in this frame of mind. And all went more or less according to plan. Arriving at night, flying over city lights that stretched horizon to horizon, we slept over at the airport. The next morning we used my carefully researched notes to get us to the right bus station on onto a bus to Puerto Escondido. For six weeks we surfed up and down the coast. In the melting heat and thumping marcismo of Puerto Escondido. In the sleepy surf camps in bandito country in Michoacan. In the dilapidated concrete shell hotels of Pascuales. I didn’t go any further inland than Tecoman. That was a trip to the bank.

We did end up, after all that, stuck for couple of days in Mexico City though. It was just the way the bus and plane schedules worked out. The first evening we were wandering round the safe but still hectic Zona Rosa, half-heartedly trying to do something, when the sky began to rain ash on us.

“Yuck”

“Pretty bad smog, aye”

“Yeah, wow what a polluted city.”

Pete scrapped a big glob of the stuff off a car windscreen. “Glad I don’t live here.”

“Yeah. It’s actually pretty hard to breath. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

The next morning skies had cleared. Big billowing clouds puffed and bulged above the horizon but above us it was fine. And the pollution seemed to have gone.

“Let’s do something.” I think it was Bill’s idea. He went and asked at the reception about day trips and they told us to go to Teotihuacan.

“Las Pyramidas”

My Spanish was still pretty bad but it sounded, I told Pete and Bill, “like there might be Pyramids there, or something.”

And so, with misplaced accents and forlorn verbs searching for objects, I navigated us via the metro to the right bus station and on to the ancient city.

We bickered a bit wandering through the tourist stalls. Pete was driving irritating me. I was bugging him. And we were both driving Bill nuts. I’m not sure we really started paying attention until we made it to the top of the, ‘Pyramid of the Moon.’

“These buildings,” a guide explained to some tourists next to us. “We ancient even to the Aztecs. They didn’t know who built them. Their legends had that the pyramids were the creations of an ancient race. Or Gods, perhaps.”

“That Pyramid of the Sun, which we are looking at, is the World’s largest pyramid outside Egypt.”

It was impressive. Hewn geometry. Jabbing into the sky. It shone lazy yellow in the sun. Behind it, the dark clouds billowed, threatening.

“Looks like thunder,” I wondered allowed.

“Thunder?” a German tourist looked at me like I was an imbecile. “That’s the eruption. You know, the Volcano?”

“Volcano?”

“Yes the one that everyone’s talking about. In the news. The ash cloud that smothered the city yesterday?”

“Ash shower? Oh. That ash shower.”

The German gave up on me and I went back to staring over the ruins. The ancient city and monuments, as old as legends, sun-gold against the eruption-dark sky north of us. And I decided that seeing I’d come all this way I should probably take notice of the land as well as the sea. Every once and a while, at least.

Of Seals, Skydives and Farewell Spit

Skydives, sandy drives and the ghost of a seal.

Here’s the story that stemmed from this, and which AA directions published.

Below is the story I would have preferred they published.

And here (at the old blog) is what really happened.

–

Falling for Nelson

One of the best things about backpacking is the lessons you learn, not only about the places you go but also about yourself. There are parts of your personality that you will never meet until you’re stranded in unfamiliar territory – making your way map-less across an unfriendly city, or trying to buy tickets in a train station where you can’t read the place names let alone speak the language. The discoveries you make will stay with you long after Rio is only a faded memory and Xinjiang a stack of photos in the cupboard.

You don’t need to lug your pack to the ends of the Earth to learn these lessons either. All you need is somewhere new. Recently, not far from home at all, travel gifted me just such a moment of self-discovery. I was poised, my feet dangling out the door of a Cessna, four kilometres above Motueka, when I learnt that I was afraid of heights.

Desperately.

Back on the ground skydiving had seemed like a great idea. ‘Why not?’ I thought. Now, as Thomas my tandem partner made the last adjustments to our gear, I had all the answers I needed to that question. We were several hundred feet higher than Mount Cook, for a start. So high that small fluffy clouds grazed like sheep way below us. And, in a few seconds, we would be travelling at over 150 kilometres per hour – straight down.

“Ready?” Thomas’s voice was as sunny as the sky above us.
“Nuuerrk,” I croaked.

With that, he accepted gravity’s invitation on our behalf and we pitched forward into nothing…

My trip to Nelson and Golden Bay hadn’t started this way. Not at all – my first mode of transport was defiantly sedate, a 1952 Bedford school bus, which took me from the airport to the World of Wearable Art and Classic Cars museum.

Why the decision to mix cars and costumes was made I don’t know, but apparently the combination is a winner. “Couples,” our museum guide advised us, “come here all the time. The women come to look at the wearable art, the men the cars. Well at least the men say they come to look at the cars but sometimes they spend more time with the dresses.”

I only had to spend a few moments with the dresses myself to realise that the men who ditched the automobiles were onto something. Woven within the wearable art is a magic of sorts and you don’t need to be interested in fashion to find it. All that is required is an eye for imagination: dreams are spliced to legends, ideas stitched to stories and fables sewn into science fiction.  After an hour at the museum it was easy to understand the tale of Russell Sutherland, the retired mechanic from Invercargill who was so inspired on visiting the museum he entered the awards himself. His design, an incredibly engineered if uncomfortable looking undergarment, won him the Bizarre Bra award for 2006 and second place in the overall event. Not bad for someone who was probably only there to see the cars.

After the museum I exchanged the bus for a car of my own and headed west, over the switchbacks of Takaka Hill and into Golden Bay. By the time I got to Collingwood the wind had gathered grey clouds, folding them over the peaks and valleys of the Kahurangi National Park. I pulled over on the edge of town to consult my directions and found myself next to the war memorial. On impulse I got out and had a look.

The story set in stone was the same in Collingwood as it is in hundreds of other small New Zealand towns: a long list of names; some surnames repeated two, three or four times. Families ended and small towns emptied. With the first footprints of rain falling on the windscreen and now feeling as glum as the thick evening sky I got back in the car and drove off to find the hostel.

The next morning the clouds were gone but the war remained. As we bumped along the track out onto Farewell Spit, Paddy our guide recounted the story of Jack Ashford, the first person to regularly traverse the spit in an automobile. Jack had been gassed at the Battle of Passchendaele, his lungs ruined. After the war, as his breathing got worse, he was told by a doctor that he had three years left to live, maybe a bit more if he got a job that kept him close to the sea. The salt air, the doctor said, might just help. So Jack found himself the one job that guaranteed salt air in abundance: Farewell Spit lighthouse keeper.

Creeping cautiously over the sand in Farewell Spit Eco Tours’s four-wheel drive bus it was hard to imagine how Jack managed the journey with rattling lungs and a rattling 1928 Chevy. But Jack did more than manage. He thrived, living to see his 99th birthday. And, by the time we reached the lighthouse at the end of the sand’s empty curve, I could see how life in one of New Zealand’s loneliest places could be curative. Sitting in the shade amongst the sighing Macrocarpa – watching as clouds, sand and sea blew by – it was impossible to escape the two things that Farewell Spit had in abundance: space and peace. Each, I thought, as good an antidote to the doom of trench warfare as one could hope for.

The last lighthouse keeper left the Spit in 1984. Since then the closest thing to permanent residents to be found on the slender strip of sand are the Gannets who set up a colony on the shell banks beyond the light in 1982. From a handful of pioneer breading pairs the colony has grown to nearly 5,000 birds. It’s New Zealand’s only sea level Gannet colony and a rare example of a native bird reclaiming territory on the mainland, so we kept a respectful distance. Gannets, though, are naturally curious and pretty soon we were treated to an up-close display of aerobatic skill as inquisitive birds, their wings bent back like bows, swept by us, checking out their awkward, earthbound guests.

Later, as we headed home along the beach, impatient sand dunes casting shadows in the early evening light, I decided that out there, on the edge of the spit, I had made it as close to the horizon as I was ever going to get. I eased back in my seat, enjoying the particular type of content that comes with having been somewhere truly special, and watched as the sun fell towards the sea.

…Meanwhile, back in the sky above Motueka, 50 seconds after it started and now some two kilometres lower, my own plunge towards the Earth came to an abrupt halt. The parachute opened.

The parachute opened! And all of a sudden everything changed. The roar of the wind was replaced by silence as clear as the sky itself. I looked around, we were still a long, long way above the Earth, but now – with my fear left billowing behind me in the strengthened-nylon chute – I began to take in the world we floated over. Down below, the tiny houses and roads were still too small even for matchbox cars. While, to the south, snow covered peaks shared the altitude with us. We spun slowly, looking out over Tasman bay, where stray clouds dragged patterns of shade and light. In the distance, Nelson twinkled in the sun. And I revised my initial assessment; I wasn’t afraid of heights at all, only of falling and, once you got beyond that, the view from up there is like nothing else.

The Funeral

Tidy and tended, trailing off between sandy hills, the road took hold like a story. We’d stopped halfway, camped among the acacia trees, next to the sea, waiting for waves. We had stopped halfway, but the road kept on, like a set down book, and after a few days watching the surfless sea we decided we needed to know how it ended.

It was made of cobblestones; laid by hand, by a team of men, tapping; one stone at a time. We wandered out on to it one morning, sitting on its verge waiting for a ride. After maybe half an hour we got a lift in a rundown van held together by cheery splashes of paint.

Onde?
O fin da rua?

The end of the road? Both a question of his destination and a statement of ours.

Sem.

And so we got in. After about a kilometre curving right, towards Sao Nicolau’s northern edge.

There were houses along the way, every once in a while, in clusters, but it wasn’t until the road’s end that we hit the village proper. Worn houses square and white, or pastel pink and green, caught the light carried between the puffy rainless clouds. By then we were on the Island’s weather coast, up from a rocky shore, swept by the break and swash of trade-wind swell.

Benji and I wandered into the square. We’d lost track of the days of the week, but figured, from all the people milling outside the church, that it must have been a Sunday. We stood and watched for a bit, not quite sure what to do with our destination now we’d found it.

The bar is closed but come back to my place; I’ll get you a drink

He was old, in a frayed but otherwise tidy jacket and shirt, round around the waste and with brown skin that hung like old sails. He smelt slightly of spirits.

I’m always uneasy round drunks. Or, maybe more truly, I’m always uneasy round people full stop. I was about to thank him and politely decline, when Benji piped up.

Great, we’d love too.

Benji was a few years younger than me but an effortless traveller. From the north of France he spoke French and English fluently, and was reading a book in German. He spoke ok Cape Verde Criole too. His Portuguese wasn’t as good as mine (a small win I jealously guarded) but he was relaxed, casually taking in his stride things that set me on edge.

The old guy’s house was small and carefully kept. He and Benji chatted.

Where are you from?

France and New Zealand.

When I worked on a fishing boat we went to lots of places, but never New Zealand. That’s a long way.

The fishing boat explained his English. Throughout the lusophone countries I’d run into old men who spoke English, who’d learnt it on boats. No education, yet amongst the hard work, time to pick up enough words to thread together conversations in another tongue.

What are you doing here?

We’re surfers, camped at Barril?

Ah, I see. Come on. Finish your drinks. It’s time to go.

Where?

To the funeral. That’s what they were waiting for in the square. The graveyard is back down the road. You can catch a lift.

And that’s how we joined the funeral procession, invited by a drunk old fisherman. Piling into the back of one of a fleet of coloured, rusty Utes. The whole village was going to the burial and no one, apparently, saw anything strange in two scruffy Europeans joining them.

After maybe a twenty minute drive, following the flow of people, we wandered into the graveyard. The old guy was quietly crying now. We still had no idea who’d died. As the body arrived all the women around us, wearing dresses and headscarves, starting wailing, singing their grief into the sky. The words must have been different but the sound was strangely familiar, like that at a Tangi. The same cries in song, different words but with the same meaning. Conscious now of our intrusion into someone else’s sorrow, I touched Benji on the arm and we walked back up to the road.

A bright red pick-up pulled up. Its driver’s name written on the side: Juao de Deus – John of God. We hopped onboard and he started for home, back now from the end of the road, and away from the funeral. Back to the camp amongst the Acacias. In the small bay of Barril.

At the River

Marianne quells her internal critic in time to enjoy the view. And as someone who likes views and who also spends far too much time time distracted by his own internal chatter I’m thinking good for her.

I’m also remembering…

…late summer in London and a shorter than usual stop in between surf trips. Short enough that I’d not got round to getting a key cut for the front door of the travellers house where I was staying. The doorbell would do I figured. People would let me in. I did the same for them. It was how the house worked; enough give and take to enable a restless and shifting group of people to live together under the same roof.

Or, at least, that was how I saw it. Rhino the Sicilian South African clearly didn’t.

“You again!”

The exclamation mark was wilted; the weary anger of someone who was missing his sleep.

“Get your own key cut you lazy fuck. I’m not your doorman.”

“Sorry.” Words, especially retorts, fail me when I’m flustered. I pushed past him into the house.

Half an hour later I was walking down to Fulham, continuing my errands, seething in the smoggy heat.

What a jerk. I’ve let him in before. He’s such a weirdo too.

As I walked, concocting all the devastating retorts I’d forgotten in the heat of the moment, my mind drifted to a tale I’d read in a new-age book. In it, two monks came across a beautiful woman at the side of a swollen ford. Acceding, to her request, one of them carries her across. Later that day as they continued along their way, the other monk, troubled, asks the first.

“How could you do that? Carry such a beautiful women? Exposing yourself to temptation”.

To which the first monk answers. “That woman? Are you still thinking about her? I left her at the river.”

It’s a lamentably male-centric story, of course. But the message, I thought, wasn’t bad: it’s happened; let it go!

The trouble was, I couldn’t let Rhino go. The confrontation bugged and bugged me.

And so I stewed, all the way to High Street Kensington. What was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I learn the lesson of the monks. Why couldn’t I let it go. I was travelling, learning all these lessons, and I could never put them into practice. It was so easy I just had to stop thinking about him. And I couldn’t

Except that, oddly enough, I had. I was no longer feeling uptight about Rhino. I was feeling uptight about the fact that I’d felt uptight.

And perhaps, that was progress enough, for that over-heated August day.

:)

Soil and Sand

I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground
I’ve seen hell upon this earth
…
Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves

~ Harry Patch

Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier to have fought in the Trenches in World War 1 died last month. He survived the battle of Passchendaele to live to be 111 years old. Radiohead released a song for him, using as lyrics words from an interview Patch once gave. Have a listen.

A couple of years ago I took a tour out to the end of Farewell Spit. As our four wheel drive bus bucked and bounced over the track onto the 26 kilometre long bow of sand, our guide told us the story of Jack Ashford, another Passchendale vet. Jack had been gassed in the trenches there, his lungs ruined. Returned to New Zealand, and advised by doctors that he didn’t have long to live, he sought work in the supposedly curative salt air. He became Farewell Spit lighthouse keeper, and the first person to traverse the length of sand regularly in an automobile.

As I sat out at the lighthouse that day, eating my sandwiches under the sighing marcocarpa trees, staring at the folding swash of the waves out off the shore, I made believe a story. I sketched Jack Ashford in my head, wheezing softly, sitting beneath younger trees, on an afternoon when the seabreeze was light and the ocean no menace to ships. And I imagined him, on that day, finding in the sun and space an antidote of sorts to the doom of trench warfare.

I was doing what everyone does, of course: making up stories to avoid staring the horrors of World War 1 in the face.

But maybe…Jack Ashford did live to be 99, afterall.

Down

In the worn out torchlight I wrote in my diary:

From now on I will obey the rules of mountain safety, I will obey the rules of mountain safety, will obey the rules of mountain safety.

Exactly what those rules were I did not know. But I wrote and rewrote the promise anyhow, trying to cure the mistake after the fact. Trying bustle the what-ifs out the door. Trying to feel a little less shaken up.

The day had started later than I hoped but soon found momentum. Mid-morning I’d crawled out of my tent into the light of the unexpected arctic sun. It was, I figured, time for a wash, and so I stripped off and bathed by tipping near-frozen lake water out of my billy and over myself. Confronted with impossible odds, the fog of over-sleep surrendered without a fight. I ate, chucked bits and pieces of lunch into my bag, and set off inland, Walkman playing, singing to the valley’s echos.

My target was the lower of two peaks that stood behind the Greenlandic city of Nuuk. My original plan had been to climb both, a ridge ran between them, but I figured I’d left it too late; wasted too much of the full day needed for the trip, so I settled on the shorter hike to the first one. But as I walked under the stretched out sky, I found a purposeful groove. Every step was easier than the last; I sped over the tundra, threading a course between boulders and tea-coloured lakes. My eager legs chewed up the steep track to the lower peak. And at the top I had lunch with an older Danish guy. It was early afternoon already, but he knew the mountain, and was reassuring:

“Oh at the speed you’re walking you’ll make the it to the top of the other one. Easy.”

He also had a map.

“You see this trail? From the top it will take you straight down, so you don’t have to come back this way. Much quicker.”

And so I sped off, along the zig-zagging track, past part-frozen tarns. I was puffed by the time I reached the second peak but it was worth it. Put in its place, Nuuk was no longer a city, but just a tiny thumb of human presence, occupying a insignificant peninsular halfway along an immense fjord. Icebergs were dotted across the water, like the sails of yachts in summer. And it was all so empty, hills rolling into mountains, and falling into the sea. Ridges and ranges, and beyond Nuuk nothing, no sign of people, other than the pile of stones in front of me and two thinly penciled radio masts, just visible on a distant hill line. Shadows from the lowering sun left everything perfectly defined.

I drank it in as long as I dared and then started down. The track from the map wasn’t clear. But I set out the way I thought it lead, finding just enough evidence – a footprint maybe? a boot worn stone? – to convince myself that I was following something. Soon though, the way steepened. I clambered down rock too steep for soil or shrubs. And started to doubt my course, uncertainty increasing with every scrabble. It should have been obvious much, much earlier but it wasn’t until I was about a third of the way down that I realised I definitely wasn’t on a track. When finally I figured that out I stopped. Pondering for a bit what to do. I could climb back up, time was running down, but not that critical. But part of me was still beguiled by my forward momentum, reluctant to give ground, and confident for no other reason than that everything had gone so well so far. So I kept on down. Just don’t go down anything you can’t make it back up, I told myself by way of compromise.

Maybe half an hour later, and probably half way down the ever steepening face I found myself peering over the edge of something too vertical for anyone but a rock climber. Shit. Time to go back up. Except, all of a sudden, back up wasn’t so easy. True to my word, I hadn’t gone down anything I couldn’t return up. But I hadn’t figured on the dose of fear that washed out of my chest when I began to climb. I was utterly alone, unsure of my climbing ability, and far enough north that hypothermia was certain if I ended up stranded overnight. And, of course, I hadn’t told anyone of my plans. There was no one waiting for me back at the empty campground, ready to call mountain rescue should I fail to return. And this made the slope so very much more difficult. Fear made my muscles tense and weak at the same time. And the butterflies banging about in my stomach threatened to pitch me off the rock. I didn’t climb far, and I’m not sure if I could of, when I spied another route down. Not a track, but a way, maybe, off to the left of the one I’d been on, a slender course of not so steep slope skirting round the bluffs which had truncated my original route.  Until I tried it, I’d have no way of knowing if it really did make it all the way to the base. If I tried it, I might end up beyond the point of no return, far enough down that I didn’t have the strength to pull myself back up. Or too late in the fading light. Then again, for all I knew, maybe I was beyond the point of no return already. My anxious eyes ran up and down, trying to answer these questions. And in the end I decided to give it a go. Mainly, I think, because doing so delayed the moment of reckoning, the moment when I discovered I couldn’t actually boulder my way back up.

I got lucky. Each tiny crowberry-covered pitch met up with the next, carrying me past drop-offs, and across. Across, and down, until I hit the tail end of the actual track, the one I’d missed all that way back up at the peak. The track carried me out onto some grassy flats where I celebrated, laughing, talking to myself in an odd croaky voice.

After that, relief carried me away from the mountain’s base, along the side of an inlet and onto the road between the airport and Nuuk. At a bend in the road, I turned and looked back and felt a whole new – ex post – fear. How close it had been. Viewed front-on the slope I descended was little more than a series of cliffs and drop offs. My makeshift path to it’s base the only way down that didn’t involve ropes or falling. I felt a sick churning understanding, aware just how much luck had been my lifeline.

I turned again and started walking, tired legs propelled by a new need for speed: the desire to leave what might have been as far behind me as I could.

Gang Leader for a Day

Research for my Masters thesis took me to Brazil. I wasn’t particularly brave about it. Two days before the trip a friend and I replaced the white laces on my brand new running shoes with some old black ones, cunningly, we figured, reducing the risk that I’d get mugged for my shoes (yes, I’m serious, this actually happened). When I first got to Porto Alegre I became a sort of inverse vampire, desperately scampering back to my hotel the moment things got dusky – so certain was I that the streets would become filled with muggers the moment the sun sank behind the horizon. When I got to Rio – fed for months on tales of the dangers of the city – I practically commando rolled across the tarmac at the domestic airport.

In other words, I was nothing like Sudhir Venkatesh, sociologist and author of Gang Leader for a Day. He spent years researching the housing complexes of Chicago, starting off his project by being detained at gun point.

I’ve written a review of Venkatesh’s book, which is up at Scoop Review of Books.

It’s also over the fold.

Santo Antao

Reeds Higher than we were

Hazy in the morning heat Benji and I meandered along the riverside. Through bamboo-like reeds that grew higher than we were. Water gurgled and burped over the stones, in and out of pools. It wasn’t much of a river, a creek really, but it was the first flowing water we’d seen in months. After barren Sal and Sao Nicolau it might as well have been the banks of the Amazon.

Like the name suggests, the Cape Verde Islands were green once, covered in trees. That was the way the Portuguese found them. Uninhabited and verdant, oases off the edge of the Sahara amongst the thirsty Atlantic Sea. Ecosystems that had eked out an accommodation over millennia, trees feeding the rain that then fed the trees. The Portuguese put an end to this. Burnt the trees for farms and then watched in despair as the rain went too. Furthest west, Santo Antao remained the greenest. Fed by occasional showers, shrubs and bushes grew. They didn’t get far, but they sprung out of the soil in an intense purposeful green, shocking the brown around them. Villagers cultivated gardens, exporting fruit and vegetables to the rest of the archipelago. And the local divers grew pungent pot in the valleys somewhere, bobbing stoned in the trade-wind-swept sea.

The river led us past small villages of small stone houses. Past occasional smiles from doorways and the patter of life lived quietly. The islands had been a way-station during the height of the slave trade, and the villagers were a mix of Portuguese and African pasts. Their soft brown skin made them look more like Afro-Brazilians than West Africans.

Villages Santo Antao

Eventually, we reached the head of the valley, where the track left the water and started up the hillside. Puffing up the cobbled switchbacks we climbed into cooler, clearer air, stopping occasionally to take photos or catch our breaths. Two thirds of the way up we reached the clouds; small, grey tufts, they swept in groups off the sea and bunched against the hillside we climbed. We followed them up as they flowed over the ridge, eventually reaching the top of the track and the pass down into Cova. Cova (I’m sure I’m spelling it wrong) was the name we’d been given for the place at the track’s end. An ancient, extinct crater, a few hundred metres across. Its rim formed the head of the valley we’d climbed. Its centre was a flat field covered in grass. We wandered down into it.

The weather followed in its own strange way. Propelled by the wind the clouds kept climbing – up, maybe 100 metres above the ridge’s edge. There they were deserted, abandoned by the breeze. Heavy all of a sudden they fell, vertically towards the centre of the crater, dissolving as they reached the ground. We stood and marvelled, agreeing that though we’d both seen plenty of clouds in our days we’d never seen ones that flew straight down. We were still marvelling when we were disturbed from out reverie by clatter and laughter. Riding towards us were two kids on tiny, unshod and unsaddled donkeys. They had loamy brown skin and shiny white grins and were in complete control, directing the donkeys with switches of dried reed. Judging from their laughter and pointing we were obviously a splendid joke – two long haired surfers in rag-tag traveller’s clothes. No doubt every bit as strange to the kids of Cova as they were to us – children on donkeys, riding down with the falling clouds into a lost crater, beyond the track’s end on an almost forgotten, almost desert island.

On Donkeys

Globalisation

First time I got sick I stayed for a while with a friend in Bethnal Green. High up in a red-brick block of flats with black iron gates that separated the gentrified world within from the not so certain streets. I slept in the bed of a travelling South African. A window open for the summer heat let in sounds from the road below. One time, shouting woke me in the afternoon. Outside, a bunch of kids with pasty skin and shaven heads were trying to mug a Pakistani pizza delivery guy. He twirled a tiny length of chain as if it might fend them off, before thinking better of it and dashing for his scooter. Speeding away as one of the kids booted the back of the bike.

One night as I lay in bed unable to sleep I heard the smash of glass. Then the thump of car panelling being kicked. I lay flat on my back, curious but too sore to move. Wrench – a windscreen wiper bent or broken. Smash. Crack. One after another cars being vandalised. The trail of destruction moved under the window.

“Wait don’t ‘it that one,” a slurring drunken voice, an East End accent, “…it’s English.”

“Yeah.”

The owner of a Jag or a Rover got lucky and the vandals kept on down the street, breaking things, uglier than before, comforted by a lie.

…mainly built by foreign companies – Jaguar and Land Rover are owned by Tata Motors of India, BMW owns Mini and Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen owns Bentley, while the MG is owned by Nanjing Automobile Group of China…

Someone should have told them. But someone stayed quiet, staring up at the roof, a wandering New Zealander, immobilised by a disease he caught in Africa, listening to angry oafish East Enders kicking in their neighbours’ cars.

Four Things From Four Days in Samoa

Four things from four days spent in Samoa:

1. Language: sliding down l’s, hopping apostrophes and circling o’s, Samoan is a surprisingly beautiful language.

2. The Pacific: dotted with forlorn clouds looking for misplaced islands; cut by the splash of white on the reef’s edge; and patiently travelling, blown along by the trades – I could have stared at the Pacific for days.

3. Colour! Painted on the buses and shacks, and bursting from gardens. Colour, colour, colour.

4. The tropics: dilapidated roadside stores covered in posters for soap powder, the  smell of burning, the unhealthy dogs and hungry looking cats. Wherever you go, the tropics have more in common than the weather.

A Holiday to Remember

an old blog post reworked…

I’ve been in a bar fight in Bali. I remember it well. We’d been drinking arak from jam jars in a pub shaped like a pirate ship. Steve and I had almost two excuses for this. The first was the six weeks we’d spent in a tiny Catholic village on an island in the Timor Sea. Surfing all day, going to bed at dusk and waking with the roosters before dawn. We’d earned it. The second excuse was Trish, a friend of Steve’s from Wellington, in Bali on her way home from Europe. Part Malaysian, with gentle brown skin and a body that ebbed and curved pleasantly, like waves on a good day. She was keen to party too.

Steve had wandered off and Trish and I were dancing. Silly dancing to be exact – exaggerated motions, extravagant moves. To be honest, it’s the only way I can dance: I grew up in Lower Hutt. I’m sure Trish could dance properly but she was indulging me. With our spirals and twirls we cleared ourselves a corner of the dance floor. Except for a local guy with blow-dried hair that swum over his shoulders and muscles that tugged at his just-too-tight shirt. Slowly, he triangulated the dance floor so it was him dancing with Trish, not me.

It was ok for a while, all part of the joke. Trish rolled her eyes. Eventually though, it needed to stop. Trish wasn’t interested and I was going to run out of dance floor if he kept it up. And so, following the advice of the Lonely Planet, I told him we were married: “Sorry mate – kita karwin”

If he understood my slurred Indonesian he didn’t listen. Trish tried next. She spoke Indonesian better than me. Unfortunately, she hadn’t read the guidebook: “Not interested friend. I like girls and he likes boys.”

That was a mistake. Not because he actually believed her. But more because it showed he wasn’t being taken seriously. He puffed up, turned away from Trish and – whap! – punched me in the throat. I can still remember my shock, my rising adrenaline, the gasp as my airway closed for a moment.

It wasn’t much of a fight. Like I said, I grew up in Lower Hutt – I know a thing or two about fights. In
particular, how to avoid them. I started talking, mollifying. Trish did the same, Steve turned up and things were eventually smoothed over.

And that’s the end of the story.

Funny thing is there’s another tale from that night. One I heard Steve tell years later at a barbeque in Manly. Almost every detail was the same, except in his retelling, Steve was the guy getting punched. I didn’t say anything; I didn’t know what to say. But I’ve wondered about it ever since.

Steve must have believed what he was saying was true. Why make something up in front of someone who was there. He even started the story by turning to me and saying, “remember that time in Bali?”

So I have a theory. Stories are currency on the road, exchanged to ease boredom while waiting for planes, shared on overnight buses, told to gob-smacked strangers around campfires. And, as far as surfers’ tales go, that bar fight’s ok. At least if you’re the guy who got hit. But if you weren’t, you hardly have a story. So I figure Steve must have begun retelling the story, with him on the receiving end. A small lie, all fair when you’re spinning a yarn. But told and re-told, stories take on a life of their own. And this one, I suspect, eventually ejected his real memories from the nest. By the time we were both sitting at that barbeque,

Steve was telling the truth as he remembered it.

Of course, there’s a competing theory. As you may have noticed I like story telling too. And, lord knows, there have been enough overnight buses and delayed planes in my life. So, it’s possible that I’m the culprit, maybe. But I don’t know. That punch, that choke, that shock, they all still feel awfully real.

On Arrival

…another writing course exercise

Like ghosts in a dream, icebergs appear in the mist below. Until then I’d been my own gritty fog. Three hours sleep in a Reykjavík dorm, the ache of an ended relationship. The torments I always have at the start of a trip: you’re unprepared, you’re over spent, why are you here? It vanishes with the icebergs. I see one and then realise that, like the night’s first star, it’s surrounded. Two. Three. Four. Hundreds! I press my nose to the small oblong window. I want to sing or at least shout “icebergs” to everyone on the plane. I keep it to myself but I’m bubbling like freshly opened soda. The sea below us is glassy-still, pale-blue and woven with filaments of cold, white cloud.

The icebergs gather, beautiful, but more important still, road markers: the point where Greenland stops being an idea in a book I’d read somewhere and starts to become a place where I’m actually going to stand.

The continent follows. We circle a giant Fjord and land next to a village of scattered, hopeful, red and blue houses. We stand on the airstrip, boots crunching on the gravel, breaths puffing in front of us. The view is giant-sized. Mountains, cut steep out of granite, tower and fall from the icecap. In the valleys glaciers, spines of splintered ice, inch to the sea.

Propellers stopped, it’s quiet. The sort of swallowing silence that turns shouts into whispers. Out front, the icebergs saunter, glowing like shattered stars. Water sculptured by water – curves and swoops, steeples and arches, coils and lenses of blue in white.

Next to me, two pretty Spanish day-trippers, wrapped in scarves and stylish coats, babble – every bit as excited as I am. “Est magico, est magico,” one of them keeps saying.

I have three weeks in Greenland, under the northern lights, north of the Arctic Circle. And then, after that, the frustration of never quite finding words to do justice to it all. In the end I will give up and just borrow from the Spanish lady. I tell you: Greenland is magic or, at least, as close to it as I have ever been.

Monument

a writing course exercise…

In 1666 a bakery blaze became a firestorm that swept across London. It destroyed Saint Paul’s Cathedral, razed the homes of bankers, and burnt the slums of the poor. The army fought it by blowing up buildings and pulling down houses with grappling hooks. It sparked a refugee crisis and led to the lynching of unfortunate French and Dutch. On the continent it was claimed as divine retribution. It may have put paid to the plague.

I knew none of this when I got off at the wrong Underground station in 1996 and, acting on a whim, decided to go for a walk.

It was autumn and the sky was held together by concrete coloured clouds. Stranded by changing seasons and changing travel plans, I was wearing borrowed clothes, cold in the wind, and struggling, without really knowing, to come to grips with the city I’d found myself in. Everything cost so much. The footpaths were packed, and walking meant weave and bluff, weave and bluff. It wasn’t Wellington, and it was stranger than Kuala Lumpur and Medan because it wasn’t meant to be. It was flat and formless, and run through with congested streets. It never seemed to end.

I was walking with my head down, thinking about places I’d rather be, when the street I was on spilled into a square. A stone column stood in its centre. It was carved and ornate with fluted sides and capped with a golden crown. It struck up at the sky and stuck out from the buildings around it. I guessed it had to be old. I walked over. A plaque at its base explained.

A monument to the great fire of London, built between 1671 and 1677. 202 feet high and 202 feet from where the fire first caught. Designed by Christopher Wren, the architect who remodelled London in the wake of the blaze.

For half an hour I forgot about being cold and lost, and marvelled at the history in front of me, wandering off eventually. I didn’t even think it might be possible to climb the tower as well as read about it.

That discovery was M.’s, made the following spring. We met in the travellers’ house where I lived. She was black haired and pretty, and joked she was the palest Californian I was ever going to meet. We liked the same music and worried about the same things. We wandered around London together. I took her to the Monument wanting to show off this thing I’d found.

She discovered the entrance and we deposited our two pound coins, climbing the spiralling stairs, hands trailing on the hand-worn rail. At the top, we stood together on the almost empty viewing platform.

We were looking out at London from a tower that was built just after Abel Tasman set sight on New Zealand and before the first Spanish settlers reached LA. We were looking out at a city that was at least as old as the Romans, which had been captured by Vikings, and which became the heart of an empire. Above us, blue and grey shared the sky. And out front the metropolis sprawled off, held up by cranes. The Thames curved in and out, dodging buildings and ducking bridges. High rises, churches’ steeples and motorways jostled for space. And the suburbs shrank away.

What way do you think we’re looking?
I don’t know. I wonder, are those hills or clouds?
I think the buildings stop eventually.

-~-

That day has its share of stories. How close we stood; what we did, and what we didn’t do. The one that remains most tangible now is less complicated though. Simply, the way the city – stacked up on all that history, and laid out in front of us like a map – became more manageable as we stood there together, eyes straining, wondering if we could see to its limits.

From the Monument Tower Webcam at Sunset

Rain

We were sitting in the bank, waiting to cash our travellers cheques when it started to rain. The clouds had been gathering for days, thick and grey, lowering the sky, but we hadn’t thought about rain. In Nusa Tengara the weather had been fine, blue skies and trade winds, for half a year at least.

In a few minutes this all changed. Rumbling thunder, then watery splats as, one after another, the first swollen drops fell onto the road. For a moment the rain was spaced out, falling here and there, but then the cloud truly burst, and it pelted down.

“Rain“

“Pissing down“

“Good thing we’re inside aye“

We hadn’t thought about rain, but everyone else was waiting for it. The water filled the streets with children.  Running out of houses and buildings, laughing and clapping, shouting and dancing. An impromptu football match kicked off. Teenage men skidding across the tarmac, chasing a semi-deflated ball as it splashed between the puddles. Some of the younger kids simply stood, their hands held up, catching raindrops, smiling at the sky. Adults gathered in the eves of buildings, shouting greetings and jokes out across the weather.

I shared a bemo with a Dutch guy once, who told me that the end of the dry season was a time of hunger in South East Indonesia, and that the rain meant the end of this. But these people were celebrating, living in the town where I’m guessing food didn’t run out. Maybe it was still habit, or maybe times really were rough, or maybe they were just glad for the change.

It only lasted fifteen minutes then petered out. At its end we wandered into the street, amongst the running children, talkative adults and the steamy, sated smell of the Earth replenished with water.

Storm Surge!

When I drove to work on Wednesday morning the hail was piled up like snow in the streets of Berhampore. An hour earlier, maybe  a little more, the Thunder woke me, and I lay in bed listening to it boom, counting the seconds between the lightening flash and following sound.

I can barely remember the last time I heard a storm like that in Wellington. In Sydney they used to roll across the city regularly – I can remember watching from the KPMG building where I worked above Darling Harbour as white-purple bolts crashed into the Western Suburbs. I can remember racing to cover the windscreen of our flatmate’s car so it didn’t shatter under the marble size hailstones belting out of the sky. I can remember sitting on the beach on dusk, in a warm calm world again, watching the passing squall, fading out to sea, electric light on the horizon.

From summers in Long Island I remember storms on humid nights. One which passed directly overhead, lightening striking a power pole at the end of the street where my then girlfriend lived. We road over from my place to find the fire brigade dowsing the surrounding trees and the power pole splintered and smoldering on the ground.  We rode on to her place to find the television ruined. Despite the fact it was off, and turned off at the wall. It had been plugged into a multi-point surge protector too – all that was left of that was a melted lump of plastic.

Anyhow, while I was lying in bed on Wednesday morning, listening to hail and thinking of storms in other countries, someone was up videoing. You can watch the Wellington storm on YouTube. And read about it on the MetService blog.

Maybe I should of used a dictionary afterall

Hah. Under my post on corruption, Harvest Bird offers an even better tale of the perils hidden between the words of other people’s languages.

Which reminds me:

One winter in Madeira I met Tony, an artist and surfer from Wales. Like me he was trying learning Portuguese. Unlike me he eventually got there. In the meantime though, one afternoon he went up to a local joiner to buy some wood for picture frames. When the time came to talk prices, tired of the same old “quanto coosta” he decided to try something new – an attempt at, “how much do you charge?”

Or, as he put it that afternoon, “Quanto caga?”

Alas for Tony, if you want to say “how much do you charge?” in Portuguese. You’d say (sorry about my spelling): “Quanto cobra?” Or something like that.

“Quanto caga?” on the other hand, means – once you allow for bad grammar – something along the lines of: “how much do you shit?”

Tony never told me the joiner’s reply…

Corruption!

I work in international development. Corruption is something development types take seriously – it gets in the way of markets and stops governments from doing good things like providing health care or building schools.  In general, it’s a bad thing. So bad in fact that, as an idealistic younger man, I travelled to Brazil to study something called the Orcamento Participativo, a system of municipal governance which, among other successes to its name, was credited with reducing corruption in the cities where it ran.

Unlike corruption, tipping, on the other hand, isn’t something development types think so much about. It doesn’t lead to war, or stagnation, or disease. It’s not without its challenges though. Especially as no two countries have exactly the same approach to it. In New Zealand you don’t have to tip at restaurants and you’d be thought of as positively odd if you tried to tip anywhere else. In New York, on the other hand, not only do you need to tip restaurant staff even if the service is poor, but you also need to tip bar tenders and hairdressers. In other countries like England and Spain the norms are different again.

Having muddled my way around the globe’s tipping norms, by the time I got to Brazil for my masters research I figured I’d stop guessing and simply ask. Sure, there was the risk that the porter, or waiter or whoever, might say yes even when a tip wasn’t necessary but I figured they were poorly paid service workers in a third world country. If I ended up giving them a few extra dollars when it wasn’t really necessary, what was the harm.

The only real problem I had was that I didn’t actually know the Portuguese word for ‘tip’. Not such a big problem though, I decided I’d just use the Spanish word – propina – instead. Often-enough Spanish and Portuguese words are interchangeable. And in the South of Brazil, where I was, the local vernacular had a stronger than usual Spanish influence.

And so it was that I spent my first few days dealing with my tip uncertainty in a straight-up manner. I asked the nice old guy who carried my bags at the hotel if it was “normal dar uma propina” for his services. He looked at me a little funny – probably struggling with my accent or grammar – but took the change I gave him. The same thing happened with the waitress at the vegetarian restaurant, the guy at the café and the woman at the hairdressers. (Although, she started with a puzzled ‘no’ before changing her answer to ‘yes’). I was a bit suspicious, no one ever really turned my offer of a tip down, but in general the process seemed to be working. I was being straight up, and practicing my Portuguese to boot. Something that, from the strange looks I was receiving, I really did need to work on.

Despite all this, when the chance arose, I did take the opportunity to get independent verification of local tipping norms, and of my use of the word ‘propina’. My chance for this came through Yamil, a friend of a friend, who I went and stayed with in Gramado. He spoke perfect English, had travelled a lot, and aided whenever he could during my stay in Brazil.

And so, one afternoon, I explained to him what I’d been doing and asked whether ‘propina’ was indeed the right word.

His reply started with a laugh.

“No in Portuguese the word is Gorgetta. And here in the south of Brazil the word ‘propina’ means something like a bribe.”

So there I was – student of anti-corruption measures, spending my first few days in Brazil wandering about, trying desperately to bribe my way through its service industry. No wonder they kept giving me strange looks.

Life in the Slow Lane

I was living in London when I had my first attack of reactive arthritis. Every couple of days I’d take the underground from Bethnal Green where I was couch sitting to Charing Cross Hospital. Sometimes, when I felt up to it, I’d stop and sight-see on the way. I was more mobile then than now, but still painfully slow.

And so I spent a lot of time hobbling in and out of Tube Stations. I would alight from the train, shuffle out of the way, and start towards the exit. First amongst a throng, then a crowd, then a trickle. Then by myself, in the empty echoing tunnels. If the station was large enough, or the walk long enough, other trains would arrive, and the walkway around me would fill with sound and people again, before it emptied out. Occasionally, I’d have company; the brave or determined elderly. Sometimes there’d be a line of us, spread out along the handrails like mountain climbers on a rope.

The other day, I was having coffee with a friend who also has a chronic illness. We talked, as we often do, about the frustrations of being unwell. One frustration that I wouldn’t have predicted in the days before the arthritis is the frustrated grind of expectations, the things I want to do with my life, still set by the norms of the people around me and life before I was sick, against the realities of being unwell. Things could be much worse, and I’m lucky and have a lot to be thankful for. But it’s hard not to feel sorry for yourself sometimes when it seems like life’s bustling out of the station in front of you, and you’re left limping along behind.

Or, at least, that’s the glum view of it all. What I need to remember is that, despite the faltering steps, I still made it out of the Underground in the end, and got to see most, if not all, of the things the city had to offer…

Gravel Roads and Aching Bones

Wednesday

Holidays in aching bones are different, but different isn’t always bad. I’d rather be walking or surfing but I’m not. And so –

When you can’t move much you think carefully about the place you’re going to stay. And when you’re there, you notice things that might have passed you by had your own momentum been greater.

We’re at Riversdale, staying in a cabin in the grounds of Orui station. A quiet bend in the coast; the weather tempered by topography. Other than summer holidays it’s rarely busy; on weekdays in winter it’s on the edge of empty. There are irritations – joyriding teenagers in quad bikes first amongst them – but they’re usually escapable.

On calm mornings, the sun wakes up over the glassy sea, warm from the first, washing everything in melted red, then green. On days like today when the Nor’Wester is blowing the sky becomes stretched; rain clouds trapped far to the west along the Tararuas, high clouds spread out, hurrying – bent by the jet stream into streaks and sweeps.

The first afternoon we were here I went for a bodysurf. Limber enough, just. Catching the waste high waves that pitched over the sandbars. I even got a couple of barrels, a couple of moments watching the pitch and swirl of watery light before being tumbled through the shallows. As I did all this – some weird middle aged guy in a wetsuit and a hood, bounding about in the already too cold sea – the day gave way to evening and strokes of sunlight turned everything to a weary rural gold.

Yesterday we drove up to the empty coast at Otahome, looking north to Castlepoint. Today I’m sitting by the cabin, on the edge of the homestead’s gardens, kept company by the farm cat. There’s a grey warbler singing somewhere and the wind is in the trees, coaxing quiet applause from the poplars and sighs from the ancient pines.

The sky is sailing by – a storm in the Tasman maybe but here, two mountain ranges East we’re far enough away for all of that to be missing us, resting by the sea.

-~-

Sunday

And yesterday we drove home, via Flatpoint, along the gravel forestry road, break pads smelling of burning dust. I scanned the coast for surf spots and we made it to Gladstone by late afternoon. The grass was still summer brown but the willows and poplars were filled with autumn colours. Chocolate in Greytown and sun set as we got home.

Wipeout!

On You Tube – the Verizon Wireless big wave wipeout awards. For what it’s worth, Ross Clark Jones gets my vote.

Funnily enough, the worst wipeout I ever saw didn’t involve a surfer at all. I was travelling north through Latin America and had stopped for a week in Puerto Escondido. The last two days the swell got huge – long lines of menace heaving in from the unending Pacific. Grinding top to bottom closeouts exploding sand-saturated water into the sky. Evil rips snaking out to sea.

I quit while I was ahead and, along with everyone else, sat it out in my hammock. Safe on the hill, yet still swallowing adrenaline with each set that thundered in.

On the second afternoon, cooled by a gentle sea breeze, I was sitting watching, scaring myself with thoughts of actually going for a surf, when I saw the Pelicans. Just beyond the breaking waves, two of them, feeding on a school of fish.

Pelicans are actually amazing surfers. You’d see them in the morning at Puerto, riding the offshore breeze, skimming along the tops of the steepening swells, sailing to safety on the updrafts above the breaking waves.  But these two were concentrating on the fish – caught up in a feeding frenzy. And, as any big wave surfer can tell you, when the surf’s huge it really pays to keep your eyes fixed out to sea. They’d been feeding for maybe 15 minutes slowly following the fish in, when a giant set groaned in out of the green and blue. Tripping on the shallower sand, the waves stood up like apartment blocks. And the Pelicans figured it all out too late. Desperately flapping, clumsy in take off, trying to get above the rising swells. The first bird made it, just squeaking over the top of the biggest wave. The second one didn’t stand a chance. By the time it was flying properly, the wave – at least five times overhead for a human, impossibly huge for a bird – was on top of it, a giant, barreling righthander.

It was hopeless but, in do or die-mode, the bird did everything right. Rather than try and fly over the beyond vertical breaking wave, it banked off the wall and sped south, heading for the shoulder and a chance of escape. It’s exactly what any surfer would have done. And for a moment I thought it might win the race, gathering speed in the mouth of a cave-like barrel, desperately aiming for unbroken water.

But it wasn’t to be. Not quite fast enough, it got winged by the upwash of the exploding lip and in an instant was gone, engulfed in detonating water. Unaware, the wave steamed on in but I was on my feet now, shouting at the wind.

Caught right in the heaviest part of a huge set wave, on a maxed out day at one of the world’s most dangerous surf spots, the bird had to be dead. Ripped wing from wing, I figured. Sitting back down, I stared out over the stella white sweep of foam that followed in the set’s wake, looking for a body. Nearly a minute went by. Then, all of a sudden, there it was! Way on the inside, near the beach, flopping around in the water. Alive, but broken surely. It tried to take off, but got hit by a whitewater, and washed further in. And then, in a gap between waves, the impossible happened. It steadied itself, flapped its wings, built up speed, got gliding, made it over the next whitewater, and soared to safety out to sea.

Up on the hillside, the witness to all this, I stood back up out of the hammock and started to clap and cheer.

Fishing

As the setting sun etched Marlborough from the western horizon, we set on a bench by the melted-glass sea, watching a husband and wife bring a long line in. He waded into the gentle swash and gathered large sweeps of nylon, while she looped coils; division of labour thread together by quiet chatter.

I envied the passtime that brought them to the beach amongst the evening’s calm.

We waited until the fish came in, hooked on bifurcations from the central line, swerving left and right, fighting against the water that left them behind. He plucked them out one by one, different shapes and sizes, and set them in a plastic crate of freshwater to drown. Killed by rules no one explained, they flipped and flopped against each other. Ebbing. Ebbing. An orange fish opened and shut fins like Japanese fans, trying for purchase in the unanswering air. I chewed glumly on my pizza and thought of drowning swimmers waving for help off empty beaches.

Behind us a car drove by, a trailer in its wake, an unshackled safety chain rattling angryly as it bounced along the road. Kapiti Island sat patiently, as the evening dressed it in shadows. Seagulls watched our dinner sulkily. And the fisherman took the smallest fish, freed the hook from its jaw, and set it back into the sea.

Getting out more often

On Saturday, angling for late summer sun, Jo and I drove to Titahi Bay. Almost freed by steroids, we walked along the beach and waded into the warm green sea.

Rolling in like sighs from the Tasman, the waves were almost too soft to bodysurf. But after all these years I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve. So I caught some – tilting down the little drops, skipping across the flats and sinking into the ebbing white water.

Afterwards we drove up a little hillock and sat in the car.  Beyond the tidepools waves broke like glass in the sun. Further out still, the rising norwester pulled tufts of white from the sea off Plimmerton. We ate our iceblocks and immersed ourselves in papers on the art of aid growth regressions and the economics of family planning. These were very happy hours.

Poste Restante!

It seems impossible now, but in the beginning at least, I crisscrossed a world which barely had an Internet. Bali, when I first got there, was filled with places to make international phone calls instead of cyber-cafes. And it was only intermittent postcards that let my parents know I was still in one piece in the Mexican wilds.

Change was afoot, of course. The guys I lived with in New York used the “net” to figure out what the waves were doing, and thought my habit of trying to predict the wind from the flow of the clouds almost as quaint as my accent. The surfers in the small town in Portugal were I stayed spent the evenings at home flirting and gossiping in on-line chat rooms. And slowly restaurants started sprouting computers. Increasingly, other travellers would offer to exchange email addresses.

I didn’t actually get an email account of my own until 1999. But got the hang of things quick enough after that. It made life easier. On the other hand…

-~-

Benji and I arrived just in time, having woven our way on maps of broken Portuguese and Creole through the cobble stone streets of Sao Vicente. Giddy, from the overnight ferry ride across the trade wind washed sea and the new surroundings – a proper town! – we burst into the post office in an ebullient clatter.

“Poste Restante?”

We were directed to a counter round the back.

“Boa tarde. Tem cartas para Terence Wood e Benjamin Prou?”

In Germany we would have been doomed. Two guys in their early twenties, with long hair and baggy hotch-potch clothes, mangling the language and grinning like Cheshire cats.  But in those African Islands, dots of sand floating off the Sahara, people laughed in post offices and excitement was infectious. Behind the counter the woman smiled a big beautiful smile and joined in on the game.

“Talves,” she said with mock seriousness, making an act of looking for letters which might or might not exist.

She returned with a pile, and began doling them out one by one.

We kept score like they were goals in a penalty shoot out. I got the first one. Benji equalised, then pulled ahead, then I got a second…in the end he won four letters to three. Not that it mattered.

With hasty ‘Obrigados’ trailing in our wake we raced back to the hotel, flopped down on our beds and read. Letters from girlfriends, friends and family, written 6 weeks ago but news to us. Words lifting up off the page, forming half painted pictures, restitching frayed connections and continuing conversations before heading on their way – dispersing into the chatter of the ceiling fan above.

Iceland Sliding Under the Waves

Rain Clouds In Reykjavik

Via Dani Rodrik and the Dim-Post, Michael Lewis writes of Iceland’s unravelling in Vanity Fair.

It’s a good read but it’s central flaw, I think, is the emphasis – verging on sneering at times – on Icelandic culture’s contribution to the country’s demise.

I guess I’m unconvinced because the Icelanders Lewis meets don’t seem much like those I met in my travels there. True, of course, that I wasn’t exactly hobnobbing with investment bankers and politicians but, at the same time, despite being of a eminently barge-able physique I was never shoulder checked by burly Icelandic men. (Something which apparently happened repeatedly to Lewis during his visit). And the much vaunted stubborn Icelandic self-reliance came coupled with a good does of common sense, at least in the people I met.

Reykjavik Graffiti

More than that though, I’m just inclined to believe that if you give enough people incentives, opportunities, and a fairy tale ideology that says it really can be so, they’ll make a mess. Regardless of their own particular cultural milieu. This is a global crisis, after all.

-~-

Mostly unrelated: trying to couple a little bit of culture with my geysers and glaciers I carried round Halldor Laxness’ Independent People, reading it by candlelight in empty Icelandic campgrounds at night.

If my memory’s not betraying me here, the protagonist’s undoing, having escaped debt bondage, endured grinding poverty and braved a witch’s curse, is his dogged independence, coupled the bursting bubble of World War One wool prices.

Bill

On the subject of ants.

The waves in Sumbawa were good, but busy. Which meant that every morning Bill, my Welsh travelling companion, and I would get up in the almost-cool, pre-dawn-dark and paddle through the dusk out to the reef. Doing this earned us a few waves, half an hour maybe, before the pack hit.

You had to be quiet though. Any noise and the definitely not soundproof bamboo walls meant you’d wake the other surfers. And they’d be hot on your heals.

You can imagine my surprise then, when one morning our painfully quiet routine was interrupted by a yelp.

“Fuck!”

“Bill?”

“Fuck, fuck, ow,” SLAP, “ow,” SLAP, “FUCK!”

I turned on the light, illuminating a scene which has stayed so much longer than my other memories from that trip. Bill, a 6ft tall Welshman with snow white hair, was naked, his boardshorts round his ankles, desperately slapping his backside and swotting at his genitals.

“Ants man. In my board shorts.”

The shorts had been on the floor of the hut all night and, tempted by the damp I guess, the ants had crawled in as we slept.

Now, attacked by some hideous beast, they were fighting back. It was painful to watch. Clearly, there was nothing I could do. Except chuckle encouragement.

Eventually, Bill won the battle and, in a different pair of shorts, joined me on the way to the surf.

Funnily enough, if my memory serves me right, the waves were still uncrowded that morning. Perhaps the other surfers, woken by the war cries of an enraged Welshman, decided to wait until the sun was safely in the sky, having chased away the demons that haunt the jungle’s Sumbawan night.

-~-

Naturally enough, I was punished for my schadenfreude a few days later when I picked up my Lycra rashshirt from the ground and, whap!, was stung by a scorpion.

Liverpool Undressed

On the brink, at the top of the stairs, I stopped.

“You comin’?” Jamie was looking back up. Standing, grinning in the green light seeping round the edges of the big black doors. His rolly polly North Hampton accent was made for invitations. He might as well have been asking me in for tea.

The rest of the guys were already inside. If I didn’t follow, I’d be on my own in the falling nighttime cold. If I went in…

I’d never been to a strip club before. I’d never even thought about it. The more I did – in those dwindling moments left to me to make up my mind – the more unsure I was.

It would be dishonest if I claimed too much of the moral high ground for myself back then. But, even so, in a vague not fully formed way, paying to watch people undress seemed both silly and wrong. On the other hand, if I didn’t go in, the alternative was hours on my own on the streets of Liverpool. And explaining myself to the rest of the guys.

“Come on. We’ll ‘ave a laugh. Then we’ll head into town.” Jamie was like a mother hen; albeit the sort that goes to strip clubs.

“Sure,” I started down.
“It’s ten quid to get in but you get a ticket for a free lap dance when you pay”.
“Great.“

Inside, the roaming half-light revealed a beguilingly normal bar. Padded bench seats and slick aluminum tables surrounded a dance floor of clean, varnished wood. The seats were filled with men. Rowdy talk and laughter rode the ebb and thump of rap music.

In the middle, four or five bikini clad women were dancing; curving like equations, swaying like wind charms.

“There’s the lads!” Jamie was less distracted than me.

Our workmates had a table in the corner. We picked a path around the edge of the dance floor to where they sat.

“Owrrr…look at that. ‘as anyone ordered a dance yet?”
“Rory’s just getting one.”

Rory was our boss. Like all the company’s managers he was well-heeled. Mid thirties, boyish but groomed, thick floppy hair and a voice plummy and polished by an expensive public school somewhere. Out on the dance floor he gave one of the women his voucher and she followed him back to the table. He sat and she began to dance in front of him.

Not sure where to look, I ended up watching the other men in the club instead. They clustered in groups, hunched closer than they needed to, herding. Each bunch was different – suits, rugby lads, thin and twitchy men in thick black jerseys – but their faces shared expressions: dopey, inflated with audacity, like misbehaving school boys.

Jamie was next to get a dance. This time I watched. He sat. She moved in close. He looked at the rest of us, grinning. She removed her bikini top and started to twist with the music. With her hands she lifted and lowered her breasts, leaning in so that they were inches away from his face. Jamie’s cheeks puffed out like he was holding his breath. The effort of having to focus on something so close was making him cross-eyed.

It must have lasted three minutes. She had a pretty face, auburn hair, and flow and curves – and yet the dance was as seductive as algebra. There was nothing tangible that made it that way; her twists and turns were technically correct, and her part-open mouth and intent stare had all the dimensions of lust. But it was acting. Of course. And I’m not sure how you’re meant to be attracted to an act.

When the time was up, she stopped in an instant and snapped her bikini back on. Her eyes radiated a bruised kind of anger. Jamie said thanks, I think, but by then she was already striding back to the dance floor.

“You like that?”

“Oouuhh”

“If you buy me a beer I’ll give you my dance ticket.”

“Alright. ‘ere’s ten quid. Get me one too.”

I stood at the bar for a bit and looked around, bubbles tumbling over my tongue. Jamie was starting his second dance, the rugby lads were cheering, the nervous guys in the black jerseys were starting to relax. Around it all, a remix of one of the summer’s R & B hits was playing. A rap track that bounced over, of all things, a sample from Bach. I was walking back towards the dance floor when it happened. For just a moment the base and vocals stopped and the only music left was the sample, played on a flute.

I don’t think anyone else actually noticed. The women kept dancing and the men kept watching. But, for a second or two, context stolen by the three hundred year old ode to a prince that filled the club, it all seemed almost beautiful. Not the dancers, and certainly not the patrons but everything together – the mess we make of things.

And then, luckily, before the universe collapsed, the bass kicked in again and the moment was swallowed.

-~-

Oh – and the name of the Bach tune that was being sampled: Air on the G String. Seriously.

-~-

Hmmmmm…..well I’m going to publish this, just to get it of my drafts list. Despite the fact that it didn’t really work. And despite my worry that it will seem like empty moralising or a justification of strip bars. Just to be clear: I don’t think women who undress for money are bad, I don’t think men who go to strip clubs are bad. But I do think the whole phenomenon is kindof sad. And I think a world without strip clubs would be a better one.

[Update:the Guardian has a grim report on the English Lap Dancing industry.]

Puerto

From the scrapbook.

The scungy courtyard and scrawny rooster could be anywhere. The surfboard snapped in three couldn’t: Puerto Escondido

The Plan

A day off work, a small sou’-west swell and a remote bay with a reef break. That was the plan. Drive over at night, sleep in the car park and beat the onshore.

But an old friend turned up. Called as I was packing the car. So I ended up out of the way, in a pub in Eastbourne swapping stories over beer. I didn’t start the drive until close to 10. Highway, hill climb, country roads, gravel roads and finally a track, marram grass shishing under the car. It was midnight by the time I got there.

I stopped the engine, replacing music and the thwap of three and a half cylinders with silence. With no moon there was nothing to see, just a dark so thick it wove shapes at the edges of my headlights. Stretching my legs, I stood for a bit in chill of the offshore breeze in the empty lonely car park. Out in the the dunes somewhere, something’s footsteps rustled.

Quickly, before the isolation began whispering me ghost stories, I put down the back seats, made my bed, pulled the boot shut, cracked the windows ever so slightly and locked the doors with a clunk.

-~-

Not quite 5 hours later the beep of my alarm stole my dreams and dragged me into the almost morning’s almost light. Groggy in the grey, I crawled out the door. The sky was filled with thick low clouds; the offshore had gone. A gentle puff of wind crept in from the sea.

Southerly.

I was as early as I could be, but the onshore won the race. With it’s arrival went my chances of surfing the reef in the bay.

Plan B.

Twenty minutes away was a point. If the southerly stayed light it would still be clean. Not reef break barrels but long loping walls at least.

I ate as I drove; boards, sleeping bag and mattress bouncing in the back with the potholes.

The road led south, past empty farm houses and churning shingle beaches. In front of me the coastal ranges reached into the clouds, yielding to the sea only at the last possible moment, conceding in steep, scree covered slopes.

Amongst all this the second car park brought better news. A light onshore out the back but calm on the inside. Waves, maybe head high, maybe head and a half, long clean sets with long clean walls. No crowd of surfers. No one at all.

With the wind still light I wasn’t about to wait. I tugged on my wetsuit and set myself a forced march over the steep hill that stood between the end of the road and the paddle out spot. Half way up, I came to a halt. My lungs were rung free of air.

“Damn hill’s getting steeper.”

It was the best explanation I could think of. Though I didn’t know it then, the problem wasn’t the hill but my heart and the valve that no longer worked.

When the air returned I resumed my walk, over the hill and down to the rock point. I picked my way carefully to the jump-off spot.

I lept in on a surge of whitewater and paddled out, oily kelp slipping past my hands.

With the point to the myself I chose a take off spot down the line a bit, where the swells had bent enough to be clean. I’d barely had time to get my bearings when a wave came through. I spun and paddled. To my feet, angling down the line, around the first section and then sweeping turns along the wall.

Paddling back out I started singing to myself.

Later, when my arms gave out I walked back to the car. I changed and ate, and pulled the mattress out and lay on the grass. It was still quiet, no one round, just the lapping of the southerly breeze. The silence that had been eerie in the dark the night before was now only peaceful.

After weeks of commuting and computer screens, work plans and crowds of people, I drunk in the space, watching the waves. When I got my energy back I headed over the hill for another surf.

Later still, driving home with rain starting to fall and the rising southerly traipsing through the trees, I saw my first car for the day – a surfer, heading towards the sea.

“Good luck,” I mouthed as we steered past each other.

Foot back on the accelerator I pondered my own fortunes. I never got to surf the reef but was happy all the same.

The best laid plans often go astray. Sometimes though, everything ends up fine even so.

An Incident at Arawhata Road

Andy was driving too fast, he always did back then. A hundred and fifty kilometres an hour down a straight but perilously thin country road. Jeremy was in the front, paler than usual. His left hand was holding his right, squeezing it tight. I was in the back, hunched in something approximating the brace position.

Things sped past: letter boxes, trees, cows, fences…

…WHAM!…

A black shape hit the windscreen and bounced up into the boards on the roof.

“What the Fffff…”

“Holy Shhh…”

Jeremy and I swallowed our profanities. Andy was Christian. Swearing pissed him off. He drove faster when he was angry.

“Pukeko”, he said as he slowed the car to a halt. “Lucky it didn’t smash the windscreen”.

“Heck yes,” Jeremy’s face was inches from the point of impact.

We got out of the car. The bird was still there, wedged in under the boards. Gently, remorsefully maybe, Andy pulled its limp body free and placed it on the road.

“I should run it over, put it out of its misery.”

“Run it over?!?” Shock was giving way to anger now. I liked Pukekos.

“Put it out of its misery?!? The bloody thing is already dead. It just hit the goddamn windscreen at something approaching the speed of sound. Trust me, there is no misery left to put it out of. The. Bird. Is. Dead!”

My mouth hadn’t even had time to close after the last exclamation mark when “the bird” took the opportunity to disagree.

It stood up, swayed, took a couple of unsteady steps, shook its head a few times, took one look at the three unshaven humans looking at it, and sprinted off into the bushes.

[Image from Wikipedia Under Creative Commons. More info here.]

Summer Holidays

I love my tent. We’ve travelled together north of the Arctic Circle and as far south as the Straits of Magellan. I’ve camped in it on the beach in Chile and in the middle of the Outback in Australia.

I love my tent; unfortunately, I’m not the only one. As best I can tell, the Wind Gods also find it very pleasing. Why else would they follow it so? Patting it, playing with it, buckling it under their breath.

There was the night in Iceland where the gusts fell furious off the Vatnajokull ice sheet, shrieking through the empty campground. Even the old guy who ran the place reckoned it was a storm to remember.

Then there was the time in Patagonia when it blew like the clappers and I managed to set the tent side on to the wind. With every squall caving the walls in on us, my French Canadian travelling companion and I didn’t get much rest. Our only satisfaction being the next morning comparing our still standing tent with the other walkers’ bubble tents now strewn about the campground like bluebottles washed up by the tide.

And there was the gale at Tora. Stampeding out of the valleys and running down the coast at the same time, the wind blew so hard that Jo and I slept only in two minute bursts.

So it was that when we went camping this summer we went prepared. Arriving to a blowy westerly we put the tent up, parked the car up-wind and almost on top of it, and set out the storm guys, anchoring them to rocks and vehicle. We waited for the worst.

Then, the strangest thing happened. The wind got less rather than more. And we spent three days becalmed, alone on a small corner of farmland next to a quietly chattering sea. At night we slept under uncountable stars. During the day we bathed in the sun, read, did nothing, and enjoying being somewhere where nothing was the norm.

I spent hours trying to find words for the way the Cabbage Trees cut trails between the tanning land, sleepy-still sea, and swallowing sky.

After a day of this even the tent relaxed, yawning lazily in the occasional puffs of breeze.

The Camera

The jacket was horribly torn. It had been there a while – flapping forlornly amongst the gorse. It was stained, billows of rusty red spread across the fabric which remained. I found the camera in a pocket. Curious, I had the film developed. This was the last shot taken.

Take care in the countryside.

Scrapbook Xmas Goodies

Padang Padang, back in the days when, so long as you ate there, you could stay for free in the beach-side restaurant.

And then, in between naps and reading, you could keep an eye out for  moments when the crowds vanished and the waves kept rolling in…

…it’s all changed now, but there are still places like this if you look. So, if that’s your thing, my Christmas wish is that I hope you find one. And, if it’s not your thing, have a happy holiday, Christmas day, and new year all the same.

Ubirr

Paint peeled by the sun and wood warped from the damp, the Border Store youth hostel was worn out. Dilapidated. Almost empty.  Dust and thread-bare carpet, pulled apart paperback books. Tables without chairs and couches that gave up, exhausted, under your weight. The only other guest was an Italian biologist, Cristina.

She spoke hardly any English and me not a word of Italian. So we patched together conversations with Spanish, patience and slow careful phrases. But long before we’d climbed to the top of Ubirr we’d run out of words. And as the sun began to set we sat in silence, warmed by the heat radiating out of the giant old stone and looking out to the view.

Even if we’d been able to talk we wouldn’t. Set out in front of us a patchwork plain of swaying grass and bursts of trees took on colour. Fading with the heat that kept them swirling, giant dust devils performed their last pirouettes. They snaked and bent, eddies of warmth that sucked red dust high into the softening sky.

At the end of the view was the Escarpment, a long line of cliffs stretched out across the horizon. In the wet season it becomes a giant waterfall flooding the Kakadu. Drowning the roads and freeing the Crocs from the billabongs. For now though, it sat dry and quite. All the more beautiful in that evening light because it marked off somewhere I absolutely couldn’t go, the end of the road; the beginning of indigenous-Australian Arnhem Land.

From the Scrapbook

We camped for a week in the rain, on a tiny lava island, in a small decaying tent before we got to the day this photo was taken. But, as the scrapbook suggests, it was worth it…

Dang!

The Greatful Dead crept up on me slowly.

This isn’t a horror story.  The Grateful Dead were a band. They sounded a bit like the Eagles. Or, maybe, a bit like the Eagles would have if the Eagles wrote poetry on acid and played concerts filled with 3 hour guitar solos.

In America the Dead are huge. Growing up far from anywhere though, I remained unaware of them for most of my youth. First contact was at a party once when a snowboarder fresh back from the States talked about the Greatful Dead fans he’d met. They were, apparently, into some “freaky shit”.

Next I heard of them was in the NOFX song, Jenny: “You follow us around, we’re not, not the Grateful Deaaaddd…” A friend explained this one to me. “Yeah, they’re a hippy band, they’ve been playing concerts for years. Their fans follow them from concert to concert. It’s really strange.” I agreed. It was.

I met my first Dead Head (for that, readers, is what their fans are called) in Mexico. Living off a trust fund as best I could tell, if he wasn’t following the band he was “surfing” at Puerto Escondido. He was a nice guy, even if he never seemed to surf. He’d get stoned in the evenings and play us cassettes from concerts while the setting sun melted the clouds red. We’d sip Coronas, he’d pull cones, and every once in a while he’d pipe up. “Oh man, listen to this…wow…that’s poetry.” Just in case we’d missed it, he’d repeat the couplet in a very serious voice.

Pretty soon Matt, my South African travelling buddy, and the best teller of jokes I ever met, had the poetry, and the voice, down pat. He began to use it on long bus journeys to make me laugh.

“Under the moon – you! – have to choose…Some times you win. Sometimes you…loose.”

It was mean but it worked. And, quite possibly, God made note of my mirth, and made plans for me.

A few months later I met a girl in New York, who I fell for and stayed with for two summers. She, I discovered much too late, a was a fan. She had all the CDs and hadn’t quite dropped everything to follow them round for ever, but she had been to plenty of their concerts.

I was torn. She was smart, pretty, and very cool. But try as I might I couldn’t get the music. The odd song seemed ok, but really…imagine diluting the Eagles and stretching them out over several hours. I promised never to go to a concert.

I still don’t think I was wrong about this. But I wasn’t totally right either. People are welcome to their tastes, and shouldn’t be judged for them (how could a self-confessed Duran Duran fan say otherwise). There’s more though, because there was actually one song which I really did like.

It wasn’t actually written or played by the Dead, mind you. It was a cover of Wild Horses by lead singer and guitarist, Jerry Garcia’s Bluegrass side project – Old and In the Way.

You can listen on Youtube here. I’m guessing if you do it won’t sound like anything much (the sound’s not great and such is the capricious nature of magic). But, for reasons I still can’t explain, the first time I heard it it sounded so good I didn’t just wanna buy the album and play it forever. And it didn’t just make me want to get into bluegrass, either. It made me wanna grow a beard and a tummy, hitch up my overalls and move to the Appalachians and live the fucking stuff.

Needless to say I didn’t; I’m a man of rather low motivation more than constant sorrow.

But anyhow, all this does go to show one thing. Never call other people strange at the beginning of your blog post. Who knows, before you get to the end, there’s every chance you’ll appear even stranger still.

Gator!

For the first time in almost five years, as the four-wheeled drive taxi stumbled along the track out of Liberia, I felt a sense of home. It stemmed from nothing much; just the colour contrast of the thirsty brown hills and the midday-blue, wind-ruffled sea. If you go surfing in the Wairarapa in summer sometimes the colours you see, winding your way down hills on gravel roads, are almost the same.

The feeling came from nothing much and it didn’t last long. Pretty soon the fauna of north-western Costa Rica were doing their best to remind me that wherever I was, it sure wasn’t home.

My first night in the campground descended into an escalating battle of wits between me and the local mapache (a type of raccoon). They expressed interest in my bag of food. I hung it out along a rope between two trees. They climbed along the rope. I tied another rope to the first so that my food hung in mid-air between the trees. They began to clamber down. I moved the food into the tent with me and spent the night cuddling it. Several apples still went missing…

The next day I met the Army ants. A metre wide column of them crossing the nature trail I was walking on. Like an angry and dangerous queue they seethed forwards while nature did it’s best to get out of the way. All around small insects hopped, flapped and fled. And plenty didn’t make it. It was grim to watch but fascinating in a macabre way: an insect would be overtaken, and swallowed under a mass of ants, it’ struggles would cease and it would be maneuvered back down the column.

Later, having leapt over the ants and continued with my walk I met the monkeys. From high in the trees a whole gang of them watched as I passed underneath. First with sullen suspicious silence, then with jeering hoots, they let me know they weren’t so keen to have me there. I retreated back towards the camp.

In the mornings, as I walked down the beach to surf, I’d stumble across straggling baby turtles, still trying to make it out to sea. One evening playing cards, they guy next to me discovered a large scorpion climbing up his leg. I found a dead sea snake on the beach.

I’d been there just about a week when it really happened, though. I’d surfed ’til dusk in small waves, the tide was unusually high, and the sea had washed in to meet the lagoon. What used to be a sand spit was now covered in shallow water. And as the sun set I waded along this towards the beach proper. The warm tropical air was full of salt and colour and I was half lost in day-dreams.

The alligator can’t have been more than three meters away when it reared out of the water. I saw its jaws, its head, its front half, rise up, then splash down, then disappear.

Guided completely by the second bit of my fight-or-flight mechanism I turned (I had been walking straight towards the creature) and ran. In an attempt to get more speed from my legs I also began to holler: “aaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh”.

The noise sustained my sprint almost all the way to the sand dunes, where eventually I stopped. Needless to say there was no alligator behind me. Indeed, as I turned I could see it, no more than six feet long, swimming out to sea at speed, performing, I’m sure, the alligator equivalent of the same mad dash I’d just undertaken.

Whatever else you might say about the Wairarapa, you won’t meet too many aligators there. At least not in this geological epoch.

Jardim

There are plenty of surf spots where you’ll spend time waiting for the surf to pick up; there are a few where you’ll spend as much time again hoping it goes down.

For three days the waves in front of the village had been huge. Somber green-grey lumps of North Atlantic that focused on the point. To catch them you’d take the largest board you could find, put yourself in their way, turn, and paddle with all your might. If the wave was feeling kind, and if your frantic arm-strokes summoned you enough momentum of your own, at the critical moment you’d be at right place with enough speed to tap into the sweeping wall of energy. You’d leap to your feet as gravity pulled your board underneath you and speed away from the exploding peak towards the shoulder and down the point.

If you got it wrong you’d fall and be steamrolled by endless tonnes of whitewater that tore you to bits and pushed you down into the deep black below. Sometime later feeling bruised and bedraggled you’d be let up for air.

It was fun, I guess.

Some surfers thrive on the adrenaline that comes with riding big waves. To be honest the thing I enjoyed most was the weary, elated relaxation I felt at the end of the surf. It was the relative absence of adrenaline – the pleasant after-glow once it was gone – that I got off on.

Anyway, three days of oxygen deprivation and adrenaline inundation was about enough for me, and so when I woke on dawn on the fourth morning to the sounds of a calmed sea I was actually excited.

Maria and Lydia were already awake and into their chores, their conversation bursting back and forth in strongly accented Portuguese. I said good morning, grabbed some bread and wandered onto the patio to check the surf. Even in winter dawn was barely cold. It was dead calm and the only motion to sea was that of the swell that still wrapped and rolled down the point.

“Smaller”, I said.

It was still there but definitely smaller. As the waves bent and broke the glassy sea they looked nothing so much as fun. I was still sore from the day before but wasn’t about to waste any time. Give it an hour and everyone would be out – making the most of the change in conditions. And I didn’t fancy hassling for waves. So I pulled on my wetsuit, told my big wave board it could have a rest day and grabbed my 6′6″ – the board I used on the fun days.

There wasn’t a surfer in sight when I got to the boat ramp where you start the paddle up the point. “Keep sleeping guys,” I thought cheerily as I watched four waves, double head high max, roll down the point. This was going to be fun.

Such was my hurry to get a few to myself that I didn’t bother to try and time my paddle out from the boat ramp. When the swell was big waves broke right in front of it washing around jagged, barely submerged boulders. But the swell was small I figured, and the other surfers waking any time now, so I skidded hurriedly down the mossy concrete and sploshed into the sea.

I’d made it out about 10 yards – enough to be safe on a small day – when I found myself desperately paddling over the low tide shallows trying to dodge a wave that came from nowhere and which stood bigger than it ought to be, draining water off the rocks. There was no way I was going to make it past it, so I tried to duckdive. Caught right where it was breaking. Whump! The whitewater hit me and, while it wasn’t huge, it was strong enough to tumble and drag me back to the shore. By the time I got there my knuckles were bleeding from bangs on the rocks and my board had another ding.

More carefully the second time, I waited for a gap and paddled out. The swell might be smaller, I figured, but it still had a kick.

It takes about ten minutes to paddle from the boat ramp to the part of the point which you surf. You can actually paddle round from the back of the point too – it’s shorter, but I always prefer the paddle from the ramp. It gives you time to watch the waves as they break, and figure out where to sit and what you were in for. Even on a small day it’s worth doing.

This morning, though, the main thing I was learning was that it wasn’t actually that small at all. Wave after wave rose out of the deep and along the lava rocks. The surf still looked amazing, but I was kind-of disappointed: fun and small was what I wanted. I was also beginning to worry whether my 6′6″ was up to the job.

There was only one way to find out.

So I got out to the point and sat there, just off the shoulder of the main peak, marveling at how quick the waves were getting bigger again. Behind me, perched on terraces above the point the village was as peaceful as sleep. But twenty metres to my left oxen-like waves were rising out of the ocean, steepening and growing as they hit the shallows before plummeting into broken white.

There’s no point watching surf like that for too long. If you do, fear takes hold, and you’ll fall for certain. You just need to get a wave. And so when a slightly wider set stood up in front of me I swallowed, turned and set my arms spinning. Big waves travel fast and you need to be doing the same if you want to catch them. The trouble is, even with the best of intentions, once a wave gets big enough, you’ll never get a 6′6″ moving with speed sufficient to hop on board. I was in the wrong place too – away from the first peak but because this was a wide set, sweeping in from the west, the wave was busy redoubling its efforts right where I was trying to catch it.

I caught it, I guess you could say, although it would probably be more accurate to say it caught me. I jumped to my feet but I was never going to get clear of the falling lip. So, continuing the motion, I lept – clear of my board and out into space. When things go wrong in big surf leaping isn’t such a bad idea. If you’re lucky you’ll land ahead of the wave. Like a leap from the high diving board at the pool, you’ll hit the water with a bang at the bottom, but if it all works out you’ll penetrate and the worst of the wave will wash over you.

I didn’t penetrate.

Instead I hit the water with a thump that knocked the air out of my lungs and then skidded under the breaking lip. An instant later the falling whitewater found me, tore me in several directions at once and finally settled on dragging me into the depths.

Once the worst of the turbulence subsided I opened my eyes. If the water’s clear enough after a wipeout, this is a good idea. You can get your barings and figure out which way is up. The water was clear alright, off that sandless lava island. But I opened my eyes to find my self surrounded by black. Even if the water is clear, if you’re deep enough, you still won’t see much.

Surprising myself given the circumstances I didn’t panic. It wasn’t the first time that winter I’d found myself in water deep enough to be inky. The trick then was to use your own buoyancy to give you a sense which way up was and start swimming in that direction. Pretty soon the sun will appear, a floating orb guiding you to the world of the breathing.

Except this time it didn’t – after a couple of strokes, with the water as black as ever I started to feel afraid. Maybe, disorientated, I wasn’t swimming up at all?

With an intensifying ache my lungs pleaded for air.

I paused for a moment. And finally saw it, like a dim light wrapped in green cellophane above me – the sun. I was swimming up, I’d just started from somewhere awfully deep.

By the time I got to the surface I was my lungs were screaming and I felt faint. I burst panting into the air.

Things could have been worse. There could have been another wave breaking on top of me. My board or leg rope could have snapped. But the ocean was calm again – it was a one wave set, and my board bobbed happily, and in one piece, next to me.

I climbed on, paddled limply away from the point and any other breaking waves, and lay for a while gulping down air. Eventually, I mustered the strength to catch a little one down the point to the boat ramp.

Back on land I stood dripping for a while and then figured I couldn’t give up. The surf was big, but it was breaking perfectly. And if I quit now I’d beat myself up about it for days.

And so I went and grabbed my big wave board, waited for a nice long lull, leapt off the boat ramp, and paddled back out.

By the time I made the lineup again it must have been well over an hour since dawn. I knew everyone else was awake, I’d seen other surfers watching from the village as I paddled for my ill-fated wave. But, all of a sudden, no one seemed to be in a hurry.

So, long after first light, as I guided my 7′4 into it’s first set wave of the morning, I did so, in an empty sea, still on my own.

Pinned to the wall

Jardim do Mar, Madeira: late afternoon, early autumn. The wind running round the point and then sou’east – towards the Sahara.