Graydon's Travels

An Urban Odyssey through the UAE

2011-12-22T05:04:00.000-08:00

Dubai, December 22, 2011

I am typing this while lying beside a rooftop pool atop a high-rise luxury apartment building in Business Bay, Dubai. All around me are the improbably shaped architectural fantasies that make up modern Dubai, and in front of me, glinting silver in the sun, is the fantastic needle of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower. Below me I can hear 14 lanes of traffic roaring along the Sheikh Zayed road, and the omnipresent sound of construction cranes and pneumatic drills that are building this year’s crop of skyscrapers.

I am not much of an urbanite. I have enjoyed living in big cities for short stretches of time (a summer in London, an autumn in Budapest, a winter in Toronto, a month in Barcelona, a few months in Cairo, two years in Boston, three years in Yangon), but much of the best living I have done has happened in smaller cities or towns. I am really enjoying living in tiny Leysin now because of the wonderful outdoor activity that I can do right outside my front door. When I’m travelling, a lot of what I most enjoy is the spaces between cities, especially if I’m on my bicycle. However, much of what is most distinctive and dynamic about different countries around the world is to be found in cities, and so sometimes I have to step out of my element and into huge urban conglomerations.

This Christmas vacation, I’m spending the first half of my break doing exactly that. I flew to Abu Dhabi a few days ago, leaving behind an epic winter storm that made me wish I was sticking around to ski. I had never been to the UAE, Oman or Qatar, and that was reason enough to want to come here. The fact that several of my friends from various parts of the world have gravitated here provided motivation to make the trip this year. And so for the past few days, I have found myself in two of the most highly urbanized hypermodern cities of the world, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

When I told people that I was coming to the UAE, a frequent response was “What are YOU going to do there? You don’t even LIKE shopping!" And indeed much of the face of the UAE’s megacities consist of gargantuan shopping malls. But there are things to see that are fascinating, if not soul-satisfying, and they’re not all malls.

I’m staying here with my Canadian friend Rhea, whom I met while diving in Indonesia 7 years ago. She has since taught in Bahrain and Colombia before coming to Abu Dhabi 18 months ago. It was her suggestion that we go diving in Oman that clinched my decision to come here; experiencing the underwater world will be the perfect antidote to too much city life. Rhea has been a great tour guide, taking me around the sights of Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the most efficient, photo-friendly way possible without feeling the need to browse through designer shops along the way.

My first day in Abu Dhabi revolved around lunch at Tim Horton’s (a Canadian institution, specializing in coffee and doughnuts) at a nearby mall. Nearby is always a relative concept in Abu Dhabi; it means only 20 minutes in a car. It’s a bit sad that Abu Dhabi, as it has developed, has done so on the model of Los Angeles and Houston, sprawling enormously and designed around the automobile. It’s not a particularly pedestrian-friendly city, and the few pedestrians you do see tend to be the poor labourers from the Indian subcontinent who make up the majority of the population and do all of the actual work. Without a car, you’re dependent on taxis or the very occasional bus. After touching base with our Canadian roots, we got in the car and tried to find the Grand Mosque. Rhea’s GPS let us down, and we ended up making our way by eye to the mosque, which dominates the skyline of that corner of the city. Finding our way in was a challenge, and we ended up driving for several kilometres around the perimeter of the vast grounds looking for an entrance that was open.

Once we got inside, we realized that it had been well worth the effort. The complex is brand spanking new, and was built to be the largest, the most expensive and the most exquisitely designed mosque on earth. The architecture is quite wonderful, a mélange of styles that is huge without being bombastic, full of egg-shaped domes, slender minarets and a huge courtyard surrounded by beautiful porticos and placid pools of water. The outside of the mosque is relatively simple, with lots of big, blank white wall punctured by arches. It’s hard to get a sense of the scale of the place until you walk across the courtyard and realize how long it takes. The hundreds of tourists gawking at the mosque were dwarfed by the huge expanse of inlaid marble floor.

Inside, the simplicity gives way to a profusion of geometrical flourishes, most of them showing five-fold or ten-fold symmetry. It’s a riot of intersecting circles and curving tendrils, with a great variety of finishing touches borrowed from all over the Islamic world: Egyptian alabaster, Persian rugs and the sort of marble inlay that adorns the Taj Mahal. Everything shows really high quality workmanship, and should stand the test of time without starting to fall apart. The ceiling is particularly impressive, especially as it supports gargantuan crystal chandeliers. The overall impression is surprisingly serene, given all the individual details, and it’s the sort of place that would reward sitting quietly for an hour or two, absorbing details.

That evening we walked from dinner at the Hilton (one of three in Abu Dhabi) to the Emirates Palace hotel, a gargantuan complex that is, by some accounts, the most luxurious hotel on earth. It was a long walk through a construction site; six months earlier Rhea had walked the same route under jacaranda trees and beside flower beds, but a new road-construction project had erupted since then. Once we were inside the hotel, it was a rather surreal experience. There was a handful of staff around, and one or two guests, but the overall impression was that this entire hotel was deserted. Everything is oversized: the world’s largest and most expensive Christmas tree (last year it had $13 million worth of jewels on it), the enormously high ceilings, the huge staircases, the building itself. We crawled through the cavernous interior and out to the beach, where the scale of the building finally became evident. I felt Lilliputian as we made our way past the towering façade. When we finally emerged, I felt as though the scale and the expense and the luxury was just too much for me, and I was glad to get in a cab and head back to Rhea’s more human-sized flat.

The second day in Abu Dhabi found us renting bicycles and riding along the waterfront Corniche. I was pleased to see that the government actually found space for a bike path, as the rest of the city looks like a cyclist’s nightmare, with heavy traffic and insanely careless drivers. Feeling the wind in my hair as I flew along, I felt much happier than being stuck in a car waiting for a light to change, which is where most Abu Dhabi residents seem to spend much of their lives. We went to the huge Marina Mall to see another huge Christmas tree and to get sunset views over the Emirates Palace hotel and the nearby fantastic curves of the Etihad towers, before heading to have dinner with my friends from my Yangon days, Jared and Anna. She’s working for the Emirates education ministry, and living in a luxurious, outsized apartment in a brand-new skyscraper that costs an unbelievable sum in rent (covered by that staple of the expat life, the housing allowance). It was wonderful to catch up with them and get another inside view of life in this strange, ephemeral country.

Yesterday we jumped into Rhea’s car and drove 120 km up the road to Dubai. While Abu Dhabi has its share of huge, eye-catching modern steel and concrete, Dubai is like a set for Batman. I have never seen such a dense collection of huge buildings with such a variety of architectural flourishes. We drove along the huge, busy artery of the Sheikh Zayed Road, past the new Dubai Marina cluster of skyscrapers, and stopped at the Mall of the Emirates to have a quick peek at the indoor ski hill. Having just skied knee-deep powder in Leysin, I wasn’t really tempted to ski, but it was fascinating to see the entire artificial complex of ski hill, chairlifts, toboggan runs and Christmas trees, surrounded by restaurants with glass walls facing out onto the slopes. We walked out past yet another gargantuan Christmas tree (fairly amazing to come to an Islamic country to see the biggest Christmas trees on Earth) and hopped back into the car to head further downtown. We stopped at the beach near the iconic Burj al Arab sail-shaped hotel for some pictures (and to get sandblasted by the scouring wind) and then drove the final few hectic kilometres to our Dubai base of operations.

We’re staying in Business Bay, in the apartment of one of Rhea’s friends who taught with her in Colombia and now teaches in Dubai. It’s a ridiculously luxurious pad, with sweeping views of the surrounding architecture, but the best views are from up here on the 42^nd floor, where a small pool and lounge overlook all the crazy towers of Business Bay. The Burj Khalifa looks amazing from here, like a gigantic hypodermic needle aimed at the sky; at its foot is the enormous Dubai Mall, reputedly the world’s largest, and surrounding it is an artificial lake with huge fountains that give a musical light-and-water show every evening.

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening catching up with old friends. I met up with my friend Natalya, who was in Yangon when I was there, and with whom I stayed in Baku a couple of years ago. Her parents teach here, and she’s catching up with them and then flying to Iran and Baku to take full advantage of her 4-week Christmas break from her school in Colombia. Then I went to the Dubai Mall, past yet another towering Christmas tree and the musical fountains, to the incense-scented Souq al Bahar for dinner with my friend from high school, Debashis, who’s a corporate lawyer here in Dubai and who has watched the frantic development of the Dubai skyline and real estate market over the past six years. After a fine meal, we went for a nightcap on the ground floor of the Burj Khalifa itself in a hypermodern cocktail bar, before Debashis’ driver took me back through the convoluted roads and construction detours to this apartment building.

Overall, I would say that Dubai is incredibly impressive, having been constructed out of nothing but sand and money over the past 20 years. It’s a bit like Las Vegas, an instant city in the desert, but much, much bigger and richer. I can’t say that I would ever want to live here; the car-based culture and inhuman scale would probably drive me crazy, while the difficulty of getting outside and doing sports would be even worse for me. It’s in some ways a dystopic view of the future: hyperdevelopment, built on an unsustainable base of cheap oil, desalinated water and cheap indentured labour. On the other hand, for many people in the Arab world and in Iran and Central Asia, Dubai is probably a vision of the sort of future they would like to have for themselves in their own countries: rich, modern, socially liberal, full of culture and shopping and a sense that anything is possible.

Three years ago I visited Delos, a small, uninhabited island near Mykonos in the Cyclades. Delos is in some ways a cautionary tale, as it was once a free-trade zone where merchants from all over the Mediterranean gathered to make money and build opulent residences. It was the Dubai of its time, creating out of a fairly barren and almost waterless island a bubble of enormous prosperity. Delos attracted the envy of surrounding pirate bands, and eventually the pirates sacked the city and destroyed its prosperity. I don’t think that Dubai will fall prey to pirates (unless the Somali pirates improve their range and firepower) but I’m sure that the envy of surrounding states and the enormous bubble of real estate prices here will provide strains on Dubai’s continued prosperity. The abandoned artificial offshore island of the World complex, visible off shore from where I am sitting now, might well be a harbinger of further shocks to come.

A Guest Posting on Another Cycling Blog

2011-08-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

I've just written a short piece on Amaya William's excellent World Biking blog about the top 5 reasons to cycle China, so if you're interested, click here to have a look. My friend Kyle Henning, who cycled recently from Africa's lowest point (Lake Assal, in Djibouti) to the foot of Kilimanjaro, which he subsequently climbed on foot, also wrote a piece on the top 5 reasons to cycle Djibouti. Enjoy!

All Good Things Must Come To An End

2011-08-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

Tallinn, August 17, 2011

It's all over. I rode into Tallinn two days ago, under grey, cold skies, getting hopelessly lost in the Stalinist suburbs that ring the lovely Old City, and now the bike is packed into a box, ready for tomorrow's flight back to Switzerland, and I'm reflecting on a summer well spent.

I rolled out of Riga on August 13th, after a night of sleep in the dorm disturbed by the cacophony of a band of drunken English stag party revellers. As I lay in my bunk in the morning, summoning the strength to get up, a face peered up at mine and said "Are you travelling on a bike? Are you leaving today? What direction are you going? Let's ride together! See you in the kitchen."

After that introduction, I did in fact spend the next two days riding with Ilya, the one and only long-distance Israeli bike tourist I've ever met. It was fun to have someone to talk to on the rather dull flat sections of highway ahead, and his GPS found us a couple of quieter highway sections near the coast. It was also good to have moral support dealing with a couple of Latvian drivers with serious road rage issues; one swerved off his exit ramp to come back to the highway and try to beat me up, because he actually had to slow down for me, but I cycled around him and he decided that discretion was the better part of lunacy. Ilya, who was born in Russia, thinks that it's because Latvia has so many Russians that you see such angry driving. As the day wore on, we began riding in a pace line, taking turns breaking the wind, and absolutely flew along at 27 km/h despite a slight headwind.

The weather threatened rain all morning, and our beach picnic saw us looking anxiously out to black clouds massing over the Baltic, but by the time we reached our campsite at Meleki, about 90 km north of Riga, it was sunny and warm. The campsite was easily the nicest since the Caucasus, and we swam in the Baltic (almost fresh water; less taste of salt than in most mineral water), cooked together and swapped stories from the road. The beach was deserted, part of a nature reserve, and was easily the nicest of the summer. It was a nice antidote to all the rainy, grey weather I'd had in the previous weeks.

After a long night of deep sleep, we awoke to grey skies and rolled out of our campsite towards the Estonian border along Sunday-morning-empty highways, and then two great side roads that kept us out of the traffic. The previous day we had seen no fewer than 11 bicycle tourists, and that day we saw 6, including a German couple with whom we played leapfrog all day along the road. In Parnu, Ilya turned off to head west to the coast, while I kept heading north on a beeline for Tallinn. Another 50 flat, dull kilometres, with heavy Sunday afternoon traffic heading north to Tallinn from the coast (carrying hundreds of expensive mountain bikes from a huge bike race), and I finally ended up camping for the last time this trip in the back corner of a fallow farmer's field, tormented by mosquitoes and horseflies, after a day of 145 km, the third-longest of the summer.

The ride into Tallinn was a bit of an anticlimax, under grey skies and with cold headwinds; my thermometer read 17 degrees, and it felt colder, so I rode in my GoreTex rain jacket just to keep warm. There was little to look at, and I managed to get hopelessly lost in the suburbs before finding the little island of Gothic loveliness that makes up Tallinn's Old Town.

I felt pretty worn out by the end of the trip, despite all the flat cycling of recent weeks. I think that I took fewer rest days this summer than I usually do, and as I careen down the slope of middle-aged physical mediocrity, I think my body needs more recovery time, not less. I spent yesterday dealing with my bike (new chain and rear cassette, new handlebar grips and tape, all the cables and housing replaced, and then packed neatly in a box, all done by the nice folks at Veloplus), finding a new hotel (accommodation is tight here in Tallinn, and I couldn't stay a third night at my hotel because of previous reservations) and generally schlepping around.

Today, my last full day in the city, has been a day of exploration, under brilliant blue skies that make the soaring Gothic spires and their gilded tops look even more breathtaking than usual. I visited the three big museums in town (Tallinn City, Estonian National and Occupation) and while I thought the first two were pretty good, I thought the Occupation Museum came a distant also-ran third in the Baltics behind similar establishments in Riga and Vilnius. The only real highlight was the final resting place of the Communist statues, down by the basement toilets, rather appropriately. Tallinn has a wonderful feel to it, with a bigger Old Town than Riga, although not quite as large as Vilnius, and it feels very wealthy, self-confident and culturally alive. Being the 2011 European Capital of Culture probably helps on the last count.

I got told off a couple of nights ago by a convenience store clerk for asking her a question in Russian instead of English. This struck me as hopelessly silly in a city that is 50% native Russian-speaking, where I hear as much Estonian as Russian being spoken around me, and where many of the older generation don't speak any English. I think there are still some thorny linguistic political issues to be sorted out here.

Although Riga gets most of the buzz in Western Europe for having the most beautiful women in Europe, an unscientific study undertaken from cafe tables and while walking through all three Baltic capitals suggests that it's not necessarily the case. I found Lithuania to be full of statuesque blonde women, while Estonia has more than its share of beauty of the human sort. One thing that I did hear from Latvians was that Riga, with its RyanAir connections and reputation as a place for British stag parties, is becoming well-known for what Manila and Bangkok have long been notorious: sex tourism. I don't know about that, but there definitely seemed to be a seedier edge to Riga's Old Town than I saw in either Vilnius or here in Tallinn.

On a much brighter note, as I was coming back to my hotel this afternoon, I saw a huge crowd gathered. I thought it might be a political demonstration, so I wandered over to have a look. Instead, it was a throng of thousands of Estonians gathered to hear the Dalai Lama. I had never heard him speak in person, and I was impressed with his message, his delivery and the reaction from the crowd. Hearing a message of compassion, right thinking, environmental concern and hope for the future was a welcome antidote to the dark clouds of history still swirling over the Bloodlands of eastern Europe. As always, the Chinese government thundered warnings of economic consequences to the Estonian government for letting the Dalai Lama visit Estonia, but with a long history of defying the might of another continental empire, the Estonians politely but firmly told the Chinese to bugger off. The Dalai Lama held out the Baltic independence movements of the 1980s as examples of right thinking and non-violence in action.

I have been generally impressed by the Baltic states. In 20 years, they have all made huge strides and distanced themselves socially, economically and physically from the other post-Soviet states. I am particularly impressed that these three tiny linguistic units (Lithuania has 3.3 million people, with 2.1 million in Latvia and only 1.3 million here in Estonia) have such vibrant publishing, broadcasting and cultural industries. I think that there are other larger, richer countries that could learn a few things about organizing a progressive, forward-looking society from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

So now that the summer's riding is over, I will probably have to do one more post on highlights and lowlights and future travel plans, but until then, I will leave this post as is and thank all of my loyal readers, whether I know you personally or not, for reading through my stories from the road. I hope that they have inspired some of you to undertake your own adventures of whatever sort appeals to you.

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

PS A couple of images that will stick in my mind from Tallinn. First are the old Russian ladies begging at the foot of the stairs leading to the Orthodox cathedral. The other, completely the opposite, is the sheer monetary excess involved in renting the Segway scooters: 32 euros an hour???? Cars, skis and computers don't cost that much to rent. I'm sure the Dalai Lama would have something to say about the contrast between these two images.

Absolutely Baltic!

2011-08-12T10:50:00.001-07:00

Riga, August 12

I have been resting, recuperating and watching rain fall in Riga now for two and a half days, so it's time to pack up for an early departure tomorrow on the last leg of this trip, the 310 km from Riga up to my final destination, Tallinn. I hope that it all goes as easily as my ride from Kaunas to get here!

My friend Sion, whenever weather got cold, windy and unpleasant this winter in the Alps, would refer to it as "absolutely BALTIC out there", and I have to say that so far Latvia has lived up to his epithet, as daily highs reach the low teens, and rain and wind batter the city and the countryside. I hope that Tallinn is more Mediterranean than Baltic!

I set off from Kaunas on August 8th at 12:30, a very late start caused by my having to trudge into town, in driving rain, pushing my one-wheeled bicycle to the bike shop to pick up my newly rebuilt back wheel. I was impressed with the workmanship, and with the price tag: 50 litas, or about 15 euros, for what must have been an hour or two or labour. In Switzerland, it would have been well over 100 euros for the same job.

It had stopped raining by the time I got back to the campground, so it was actually a pleasant day for riding. I had changed my itinerary to shorten it because of the lost two days in Kaunas. I headed north and a bit west towards the town of Siauliai and its Hill of Crosses. I passed a few carved devils, one of the great obsessions of Lithuanian popular culture, well documented in Kaunas' Museum of Devils. I didn't make it all the way, but I did manage to cruise 113 very enjoyable kilometres across flat, undemanding terrain, aided by that rarest of creatures, a slight tailwind. As well, I think that the new back hub that I had installed is substantially quicker than the old hub, with less rolling friction. Whatever the reason, I managed to average an unheard-of 22 km/h that day, with long periods of cruising above 25 km/h. It was all easy and enjoyable, and I even managed to camp out in a secluded corner of a farmer's field, my first wild camping in over 3 weeks.

After a wonderful night's sleep, I awoke in the morning to the sound of strong wind rattling my tent. I stuck my head out and was happy to find that it was still a tailwind. I had to cut across the wind for an hour to get into Siauliai, slowing me down substantially, but after that I absolutely flew, often at 30 km/h across the flats, barely pedalling. It was such a wonderful feeling that I barely wanted it to stop.

I did make myself stop at the Hill of Crosses, however, and it was well worth it. Lithuanians, who must rank with the Maltese and the Polish as the most ardently Catholic nation in Europe, have been planting crosses on this hill for centuries, but the Soviets bulldozed the crosses and spread the hill with manure in order to stamp out the practice. This failed, and since independence, hundreds of thousands of crosses, from the microscopic to the towering, have been erected in a chaotic flowering of popular religion. Most crosses are planted by individuals on pilgrimage, but some carry various messages (Messianic, political, hopes for world peace). The overall impression is of an organic mass of crosses springing from the soil. In the bracing wind, the smaller crosses, often dangling on larger ones, tinkle in the wind like a vast assortment of wind chimes. There were hordes of people there, both curious tourists and Lithuanian pilgrims. I've never seen anything quite like it, and it was well worth the time lost to sailing before the wind.

I raced north towards Latvia, stopping to change money at the last town before the border, and then tacked at right angles across the wind to head east towards Rundale Palace. I got there slightly too late to go into the palace and the grounds, but I circled the moat on my bicycle and went as far as the ticket gate, admiring the sheer Versailles-like scale of the place. It was built in the time of Peter the Great by the Italian architect who built the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and it absolutely dominates the flat landscape. The gardens weren't on the opulent manicured scale of Versailles, but were still very pretty.

I rode off and found another good field for camping, with a wonderful sunset over golden fields of wheat. I awoke to yet more tailwinds, and this time I had a straight shot into Riga, with no stretches at all against the wind. I made the 63 km into Riga in 2:37, an average speed of 24 km/h, by far the fastest flat day of ing I have ever had on a bike tour. I was almost tempted to bypass Riga and just keep flying along towards Tallinn; I could easily have done 200 km that day without breaking a sweat.

Riga is a wonderful city, bigger feeling than Vilnius although with a smaller Old Town. It's on a broad river, which always helps a town's prettiness, and the Old Town (which is actually mostly reconstructed after the damage of the Second World War) is surrounded by the real jewel of Riga, the belt of Art Nouveau buildings put up around 1900 by Michael Eisenstein and other architects.

I haven't seen as much of Riga as I thought I would. Partly this is because it has been raining almost continually since I got here, reducing the appeal of walking in the streets. Also, I went out on a pub crawl on my first evening here with other inhabitants of the hostel I'm staying at (Fun Friendly Frank's), and spent much of yesterday's daylight hours asleep. I have taken some pictures of the Art Nouveau buildings, rich in carved detail like dragons, gargoyles and Greek gods. I went through the Museum of Occupation, which details with chilling precision the losses inflicted on Latvia first by the Soviets, then the Nazis, and then the Soviets. Like Lithuania, Latvia suffered enormously between 1939 and 1953, losing some 550,000 inhabitants to murder, deportation to Siberia, flight to the West or death by overwork in German concentration camps. That's about one-third of the country's population, an almost unimaginable scale of loss comparable to Rwanda or Cambodia. It's a tribute to the Latvians that they survived this series of disasters with an undamaged sense of identity and purpose.

I tried to visit the Jewish Museum today, but after a long plod through puddles and downpours, I got there to find that it's closed on Fridays. I did find a Holocaust memorial to the 70,000 Latvian Jews and 20,000 Jews from other countries who died during the Second World War; only a couple of thousand survived in German labour camps. Again, unimaginable horror and destruction.

Riga is awash in tourists, as it's a big destination for RyanAir, and after a while the hordes of Germans, Dutch, Italians, Spanish and English gets a bit much, especially the proliferation of bars, restaurants and dubious nightclubs around the Old Town. I find myself wishing for the relatively tourist-free streets of Brest or Zamosc. I think Tallinn will be more of the same, and somehow I feel as though the adventurous part of this summer's travels has already come to an end. Maybe Tallinn, this year's European Capital of Culture, will re-excite my sense of arrival.

Peace and (Epic) Tailwinds!

Graydon

Beautiful Baroque Cities and Charming, Unusual Belarus

2011-08-07T03:02:00.001-07:00

Kaunas, August 7

I am stuck in Kaunas, Lithuania's second city, for couple of enforced days off. Two days ago, as soon as I arrived here and set up my tent, my long-suffering freewheel, the bit inside my rear wheel hub that lets you coast without pedalling but then start accelerating when you start pedalling, died. It was actually kind of funny; one moment I was pedalling along, and the next my legs, pedals, chain and back gears were all spinning madly, but I was slowing to a stop. Within a few seconds, my bicycle was now an expensive and uncomfortable scooter. I scooted back to the campsite, and the next morning walked into town with my rear wheel and a spare hub that I had bought in Slovakia when I first realized that the strange noises I was hearing were presaging the demise of the freewheel. I was lucky that this happened in a biggish city in a cycling-mad country, rather than (say) in the middle of the forest in Belarus. I found a bike store that is apparently, as I type, rebuilding my old wheel (rim, gears, spokes, brake rotor) around the new hub. I hope it all goes to plan, and that at 10 am tomorrow I will be ready to ride out of here, fattened up on beer and Lithuania's great contribution to the world of beer snacks, deep-fried rye bread. Having lost two days of riding, I will have to modify the end of my route and skip the west coast of Lithuania in favour of a straight cross-country shot north to Riga.

I was actually, in a way, pleased that the freewheel broke, although I hate the loss of cycling time. This more or less completes my career grand slam of breaking things that can be broken on a bicycle. Here's a more-or-less complete list of different broken bits over the past 21 years of cycle touring.

Spokes (beyond counting; once broke 24 on one trip)
Flat tires (ditto)
Shredded outer tires (once went through 14 in a single year of touring, before getting Schwalbe Marathons)
Handlebars (hilarious slow-motion break as I sat waiting at a traffic light)
Pedal (had to take a taxi out of Nagorno-Karabakh just to find a new pedal)
Front chain rings (gears)--most recently in Przemysl, Poland
Chain (worn many out, but broken them too)
Derailleur (destroyed one in Bulgaria that required a couple of bus rides to find a new one)
Bottom bracket (several)
Frame (cracked and rewelded previous frame in Kyrgyzstan)
Braze-ons (the little rings that allow you to screw racks onto some frames)--broken and rewelded in several Caucasus towns
Wheel rims: on this trip and at the end of my Balkan Blitz too. I need to have a bomb-proof 48-spoke tandem rear wheel built, I think
Headset bearings
Pedal cranks (had to have them hacksawed off recently in Switzerland)
Saddle (ever tried riding 70 km with no seat? Luckily it was all downhill)
Rack
Rack screws
Front forks (OK, bent but not actually shattered--yet)
Seat post (again, bent rather than shattered, but once you bend it it's pretty much useless)

Anyway, this allows me the chance to bring the blog up to date. My last update was pretty selective, dealing as it did with sites associated with the Holocaust. Here I'll try to fill in the gaps between Lvov and here.

I was stuck in Lvov for an extra day because of bike repairs. I eventually managed to get my rear gear cassette loose with the help of a bike mechanic from the Torpedo bazaar on the outskirts of Lvov. It took 20 minutes, two strong adult males, a metre of chain to immobilize the gear cassette, a huge wrench with a steel pipe for extra torque and the mechanic jumping up into the air for more leverage to get the old cassette loose. I rather think Dom Cycles overtightened it before the trip! I sat out the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm talking to Taras, the mechanic. It was a typical post-Soviet conversation, about how the Ukraine is going to hell in a handbasket, ruined by corruption and inept government. He was so down on the future that when I remarked on how much rain had been falling on me along my route, Taras replied "Even the weather is getting worse. It was much better in Soviet times! Now it's either too hot or too rainy in the summers!" That's a man deeply mired in post-Soviet depression!

After that, I went to cheer myself up in Lvov's wonderful city cemetery, full of 19th-century Polish graves ornamented by deeply-aged stone angles. Joanne was always a fan of cemeteries and photographing them, a taste that I acquired from her over the years. After this, and more yummy cake and hot chocolate at another of Lvov's wonderful cafes, I was ready to hit the road the next morning.

My ride through eastern Poland was covered in the previous post, as I rode through Belzec and Sobibor. I just wanted to add that Zamosc, a town I had not originally intended to visit, was an unexpected architectural highlight. It was laid out as a perfect Renaissance planned town in the late 1500s, and still looks like a piece of Italy transplanted into mostly Baroque Poland. The main square, with its near-perfect symmetry and soaring Town Hall, is rightly UNESCO-listed and is a perfect spot to eat, have a beer and people-watch. I actually camped for once that night, as the monsoon rains stopped for two days. At dinner, I spent nearly an hour trying to decide whether another restaurant patron was my friend Greg Swanson. He looked physically identical, with many of the same mannerisms, but from what I could tell he was speaking Polish to his companion, and looked just a little too broad in the shoulders. If it wasn't Greg, it was a perfect doppelganger.

The next day's ride, through Sobibor and on to Okuninka, was also rain-free, the first two-day interval without rain since Romania, although there was rain off in the distance, making for a great rainbow. The Carpathians were well and truly behind me, and the riding was almost Dutch in its monotonous flatness by the end of the day. As much as it's sometimes nice to trundle across the flats at a good clip, I find that for cycle touring a lack of hills makes my mind wander and I end up missing most of the scenery.

I entered country 102, Belarus, the next day, July 29th, at a small border crossing north of Wlodawa. I wanted to avoid the main crossing at Terespol, near Brest, to get through lineups faster. Instead I found myself, for the third time this summer, at a "vehicles-only" border crossing, where I had to load myself and my bike into a passing van in order to get through formalities. I don't understand this; this always happens when leaving the EU into post-Soviet countries, rather than the other way around, and it makes no sense to me. The explanation here was that the computer system needs vehicle registration numbers in order to process border crossings. This sounds completely silly, but I'm sure that somewhere there's a kernel of sense hiding. Apparently just before I arrived, two more cyclists on Dutch passports had just gone across after two and a half hours of arguing and complaining; when I showed up, there was much rolling of eyes and remarks about "tell the Dutch that they can't cycle across this border!" When I finally got into Belarus, I changed some money (at 7200 rubles to the euro, and prices given to the nearest 10 rubles, you end up with an enormous number of small, useless bills!) and then rode towards Brest. The road was pristine and more or less empty; there was a strange post-apocalyptic feeling that reminded me of riding into Tiraspol a month before. I passed through dense forests and small, swampy lakes, seeing only fishermen and the odd car, before finally entering the endless suburbs of Brest.

Brest has a strange road system that meanders all over hell's half acre before finally getting serious about going downtown. I asked some locals for directions (it was good to be able to talk to local people again after a couple of days of muteness in Poland!) and ended up entering town through Brest fortress, one of the most famous WWII sites in all of the former USSR. It was there that the Red Army, who had been occupying Brest for two years, held out for nearly a month against a huge German assault in June and July of 1941, finally being overrun when they ran out of water in their underground hideouts. There are dozens of Soviet-era memorials scattered around, with martial music being blared through loudpspeakers, Red Army tanks for kids to play on, huge sculptures and lists of the dead. It really is as though the USSR were still a going concern; even in Russia, I didn't see such an amount of active reverence for the Red Army. All the innumerable war memorials I saw in the country had neatly-tended lawns and fresh floral wreaths; this is perhaps not surprising given that Belarus lost over a third of its population during the war, in mass killings, starvation, partisan warfare, Nazi retribution and Soviet score-settling in 1944. As I left the fort and rode into the downtown core, huge signs commemorated individual war heroes.

The delightfully named Hotel Bug (that's the name of the river that forms the Polish-Belarussian border, and is pronounced Bukh) put me up for the night, and I had a good wander around the streets, trying to get a feel for the city. Several things leap to the eye in Belarus, compared to most other post-Soviet republics, although very similar to what I saw in Transdniestria. The streets are almost spotless, swept daily by a small army of street cleaners, but also thanks to people using trash cans. There is almost no advertising, probably because there is little private commercial activity. People look, on the whole, quite prosperous; there are no beggars or people picking through the garbage cans, as you see everywhere in Georgia and the Ukraine. Buildings look well-maintained, with fresh coats of paint. Shops have full shelves, but most goods are made in Belarus, with quite low prices, probably partly due to the recent currency collapse. (Strangely for the FT, they're missing three zeroes on the figures in that article; the ruble went from 3000 to 5000 to the dollar.) Any imported goods are quite expensive in comparison. The streets were full of people enjoying themselves, without the edge of public drunkenness that you always seem to get in post-Soviet countries. One man I spoke to said "Everyone talks about Lukashenko, and he's an idiot, but life here is normal, you know, pretty good."

The next day I rode out of Brest, through industrial suburbs that were full of Soviet-era factories that seemed all to be still working, a radical change from, say, the Caucasus republics and their vast blighted areas of rusting, decaying derelict factories. I rolled through farming towns, realizing that villages are still run on the Soviet kolkhoz (collective farm) basis, with village co-operatives running the local industries, whatever they are (bakeries, breweries, distilleries, sawmills). All the towns looked ridiculously neat, and in the fields combine harvesters were busy bringing in the summer harvest, often followed by storks who were gobbling up the frogs in the newly-tilled fields. It was all a bit like a documentary from the Brezhnev era of the Soviet Dream.

My destination for the day was a UNESCO-listed national park, the Belavezhkaya Pushchka, famous for hosting the last surviving (semi-) wild herds of European bison. By the time I got close to Kamanyuki at the park entrance, dark clouds had built up and an immense downpour started. When it finally cleared, I went for a look around the museum and wildlife enclosures before having a short ride around the park. It was once an imperial hunting reserve, where Russian tsars came to slaughter big game, and this was why the forests are particularly well preserved, with stands of centuries-old oak trees. The bison were actually introduced here after the last herds were wiped out elsewhere in Europe, and in fact many of the species here, like the red deer, are not native to the area. The bison get supplementary feed in the winter, so they're not exactly 100% wild anymore. I rode around with my eyes glued to the underbrush (good thing there's no traffic and the roads are perfectly paved!), but all I saw was a family of cute little baby wild boar scuttling away under the oaks, and more mosquitoes than I've seen for a long, long time.

That night, with more rain threatening, I slept at the Kamanyuki Hotel Number Two (spot the government-enterprise name!), where 8 euros bought me a luxurious room with satellite TV and a vast bed. Given how infrequently Belarus features on most cycle tourists' minds, there were no fewer than 7 cycle tourists in residence: the two Dutch guys who had preceded me over the border, two Belarussians, and two Ukrainians. It's actually a great country for cycling, with very good roads, cheap food and digs, and little traffic. I rolled out of town the next morning through the woods, where I again failed to see any bison, headed up towards the Polish border before turning southeast towards the park border and the main road from Brest to Slonim. There was no traffic at all, and it was wonderful riding through the forest in complete silence. I eventually exited the park and, somewhere over the next ten kilometres, managed to get on the wrong road, probably in a stretch of road construction. I raced along newly-laid tarmac, loving the forested surroundings, and it was only when my odometer told me that I should have reached Pruzhany and I was still in the forest that I realized something was wrong. I finally found someone to ask, and found out that I was on a new forestry road that doesn't appear on my map. I was 30 km south of Pruzhany, and it was a long, hungry slog to get there for a very late lunch. I called it quits at Ruzhany, where a search for a hotel (I had cycled through a Biblical deluge in the forest, and more rain was on its way) led to a grocery store with rooms above. This time 5 euros was the price, and I slept soundly.

Ruzhany was a bit of dead-end town, where Sunday night was spent by the local inhabitants in buying beers in the grocery store and drinking them in the park, but the next day I rode through one model city (Slonim) to stay overnight in another (Lida). Lida in particular seemed almost like the instant add-water-and-stir Chinese cities that have sprung up over the past decade. Every building in the downtown core, other than the old Lithuanian castle, was brand new, with new paint, new signs and perfectly-laid sidewalks. I splurged on an 18-euro room and was rewarded with BBC World on the TV. The sidewalks were alive with merry-makers, but everything seemed orderly and civilized, and I went to sleep pondering what makes society in Belarus function well, although in an ideosyncratic style. One theory another traveller had is that with all the government factories working, there's little unemployment and people have a sense of purpose lacking in places like the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. I don't know, but something has to explain the smooth functioning of a country that is technically bankrupt (OK, so are Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and the US is on its way, but you know what I mean). Whatever the case, seeing a country without litter, graffiti, advertising, massive unemployment or visible poverty was certainly a welcome change. Keep your eyes on Belarus; whatever happens politically or economically, they seem determined to steer their own course.

I rolled out of Belarus into Lithuania with remarkably little border nonsense, and was soon rolling through more dense forest north towards Vilnius. There was more traffic, but the excellent road surface continued right until the Vilnius suburbs, where I had the strangest approach into a national capital, along a narrow, potholed street that seemd to be going nowhere until it debouched at the main gate to the old city. Suddenly there were Western tourists absolutely everywhere (I haven't seen so many Germans, Dutch and American tourists all summer), and the streets were lined by beautiful Baroque facades.

I spent two days off the bike in Vilnius, partly because I loved the place, and partly to let my legs recover. I thought that after time off in Lvov, my legs would stay fresh, especially with such flat cycling, but I think my body is finally realizing that I'm in my forties. My thighs felt as though they were full of lead on the last couple of days of riding, and I just wanted to sleep. I did find time, though, to explore the various museums on offer, and to wander the streets in a state of sensory overload. I would actually rate Vilnius very highly as a European city to visit, up there with Prague, Dubrovnik, Venice, Split and Bruges for beauty and architecture.

The Museum of Genocide refers not, as you might expect, to the near-total destruction of the Lithuanian Jewish population from 1941-44. That's at the Holocaust Museum. Instead, this museum chronicles the determined Soviet efforts to stamp out Lithuanian nationalism and independence from 1939 to 1941 and again from 1944 to 1991. Only a week before Germany invaded the USSR, the Soviets deported thousands of Lithuanian intellectuals and potential leaders to the furthest parts of Central Asia and Siberia, and over a hundred thousand more went after the Soviets recaptured Lithuania in 1944. There's more to the history; when Poland was partitioned in 1793, Russia gobbled up its confederate state the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Lithuanians resisted Russification with revolts in 1830, 1863 and 1905 before grabbing independence in the chaos following the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Lithuanians never warmed to the idea of being part of Russia or the USSR, and they led efforts to break up the USSR in the 1980s. The museum meticulously chronicles the arrests, torture, deportations and executions that marked Soviet power in the country, and wandering through the underground KGB prison is seriously spooky.

I found myself admiring the plucky Lithuanians, and I'm impressed with what they've managed to make out of their country in the past 21 years. The country feels prosperous, modern, forward-looking and very European. There's a continuing strain of rebellion, as shown in the "constitution" in a particularly bohemian corner of Vilnius, and a love of Frank Zappa (see the memorial above). It feels as though they've successfully turned their back on the USSR in a way that many other countries can only envy. The city of Vilnius has been transformed into a cycle-friendly cultural hub (have you ever seen police patrolling on Segway scooters?), with Baroque architectural gems and a very outdoorsy, outgoing vibe that seems a world away from Taras and his post-Soviet depression in Lvov.

I rode out of town through the Holocaust site of Paneriai (see previous post) and the fairy-tale castle at Trakai (a town inhabited by the truly obscure religious sect known as the Crimean Karaites; I'd never heard of them; has anyone? Sort of Jewish, but revere Jesus and Mohammed as prophets, only believe in the first five books of the Old Testament) before making my way across hill and through vale to Kaunas. My sideroads eventually turned to sandy tracks and died, so I swept into town on the shoulder of the A1 motorway. Kaunas is like a much smaller version of Vilnius: more Soviet concrete around a smaller historic core, but still a warm, welcoming feel in the old town.

So now it's time to abandon the plan to see the Curonian lagoon and head straight north to Riga and on to journey's end at Tallinn. Six days of riding should see me there with a few days to spare to explore Riga and Tallinn. Let's hope that wheel reconstruction goes to plan!!

The Trail of Tears

2011-08-04T10:07:00.001-07:00

Vilnius, August 4

I am enjoying a second day off here in lovely Vilnius, resting my weary thighs and drinking in the gorgeous sights of this beautiful Baroque old town. I have a couple of blog updates to do today, on quite different themes, so here goes the first one.

I rode here from Lvov, now in the Ukraine, over the course of seven long days in the saddle. I rode through modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Lithuania, but if this ride had been done in 1938, I would have spent the entire ride in one country, pre-WWII Poland. As such, this whole area was devastated during the war by both Nazi Germany and the USSR of Stalin. The group worst affected was, of course, the Jews of eastern Europe, most of whom were concentrated in what was then Poland. The road I followed from Lvov to Vilnius was a true Trail of Tears; like the removal of the Cherokee in the Southeast of the US in the 1830s, this was the road followed by hundreds of thousands of European Jews in forced relocations designed to destroy their culture and remove them from the landscape. Although I had planned my route to visit the sites of Belzec and Sobibor, I hadn't really thought about the entire route, running parallel to train lines, as the actual route of deportations. This realization grew on me as I rode, colouring my perception of this area, called by historian Timothy Snyder "The Bloodlands" in an outstanding historical book of the same title.

It started as I rode out of Lvov. On the way out of town, as I passed under the train tracks towards Lublin, I saw a moving memorial to the deportation of Jews from Lvov. Lvov had almost 150,000 Jewish citizens in 1941; almost all of them were sent to Belzec extermination site, along with hundreds of thousands of Jews living in smaller towns around Lvov (the province of Galicia). The statue, of a robed, prophetic man raising his arms to heaven, stood beside plaques saying that this was the start of a road to death and destruction for the Jews of Galicia. I rode out of town, realizing that my road lay almost parallel to the train tracks which would have carried trainload after trainload of victims to Belzec.

After crossing the border (for once, it was painless), it was a short 15 kilometres to the tiny town of Belzec, only 85 km from the great metropolis of Lvov. There, just across the train tracks, was the memorial I had come to see. Most Westerners, if asked about the Holocaust, can come up with the names of Auschwitz and Dachau, but far fewer know the name of Belzec. And yet, in some sense, it was Belzec, along with Sobibor and Treblinka, that were the very heart, the epicentre of evil, of Hitler's Holocaust. At the Wannsee Conference in early 1942, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the decision was made to kill all the Jews in the General Government of Poland (most of the Polish territories captured in 1939). The Jews further east, in the parts of Poland captured by the Soviets in 1939 as well as Soviet Lithuania, Belarus and Poland, were killed in large numbers in 1941, but those in the General Government were still alive, herded into ghettoes and exploited as slave labour. After Heydrich's murder in May, 1942 in Prague, the operation to kill Poland's Jews was named Operation Reinhard in his honour. Belzec was the first of three extermination camps constructed for this purpose, and it operated from late March to December of 1942. In that time, nearly 500,000 Jews were murdered here, and only 2 were known to have escaped. Perhaps it's this grisly efficiency that has kept Belzec out of the public eye; there was nobody left to tell the story.

There's also nothing left to see. Unlike Dachau and Auschwitz, which were captured more or less intact and functioning, Belzec (and its sister facilities at Sobibor and Treblinka) had long since served its hideous purpose. After the last murders in December, 1942, the site was completely dismantled. In 1943 a group of Jewish slave labourers was brought in to dig up the bodies and completely burn them. The ashes were then reburied, the site was planted with trees and the labourers were sent to their deaths at Sobibor. It was as though this site of immense evil, along with the hundreds of thousands of victims, had never existed. To this day, Galicia has almost no Jewish inhabitants; Hitler's mad dream came true, and few of the handful of survivors remained. Galicia, once a vibrant mix of Polish Catholics, Ukrainian Orthodox believers, Jews, Roma, Germans and Armenians, has been simplified by Hitler, and subsequent post-WWII ethnic resettlements, into an almost entirely Ukrainian area. The fact that so few people know today about Belzec only adds to the sense that Hitler's attempts to cover up the crimes have succeeded to a large degree.

With nothing visible to look at, a huge artificial memorial was established in 2004. A large field of volcanic rock has been created, ringed by tangled steel rebar and the names of cities whose Jewish inhabitants rode the rails to Belzec. A few railway sleepers and rails have been dug up; they were probably used as pyres during the 1943 coverup operation. A passage leads gradually underground through the rocks to a huge stone face inscribed with an inscription from the Book of Job: "Earth, do not cover my blood. Let there be no resting place for my outcry!" in Polish, English and Hebrew. I found it very moving in its minimalism. An underground museum has also been built, very simple and compelling in its exhibits and information. You can easily read all the captions and information panels in under an hour, but it will stay in your memory for life.

I pedalled away towards Zamosc and its Renaissance core, where a wonderful Renaissance synagogue now stands empty; there are no Jewish citizens of Zamosc anymore. I went to bed very pensive, pondering the ghosts of history.

The next day was more of the same. I rode a long day through the gently rolling farmland of eastern Poland, through the city of Chelm, towards the point where the modern borders of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine meet. All the way, there was a train line somewhere close to the road, and again it was a silent witness to the horrors of the 1940s. I passed through Izbica, which was mentioned in the Belzec museum as a concentration camp that served as a feeder to the death factories of Sobibor and Belzec. This time no memorial plaque or sign was in evidence. I pedalled north into a pretty area of flat forest and small lakes, much beloved of fishermen and local Polish tourists on bicycles. The Dutch province of Gelderland (where my father hails from, originally) has helped the Polish government set up a network of bike trails to explore this area.

In the centre of the forest, straddling (naturally) a railway line, lies Sobibor death camp. This time, as I had already ridden 115 km, it was too late to get into the museum, but the open-air site was still open. Again, there are no physical remains of the facility; the Nazis obliterated it in 1943 as well. The memorials here are much simpler, but in some ways more moving and more disturbing. The trees planted in 1943 have grown up into a magnificent forest. Although I generally love forests, the evil done in this place lends a malevolent air to the trees. Along one path in the forest, a series of memorial stones have been laid to commemorate individuals known to have died in Sobibor. Although the vast majority of victims were Polish Jews, there were also some victims brought in from the Netherlands, France and Germany. I found it strange, and somehow disturbing, that the memorial stones were almost all for the Dutch victims, often laid by the descendants of the deceased. Some came from Arnhem, close to where my father grew up. Others had the same first name as my father, Gerrit. These coincidences, by creating a feeling of a linkI wondered whether it was partly because so many Dutch Jews managed to survive the war to remember their dead relatives; perhaps there were so few stones for Polish victims because so few of them had any surviving descendants to come lay stones for them. Or perhaps the post-WWII historical narrative of the Soviet bloc, in which Soviet, and especially Russian, victims of the Nazis were paramount, left little time or inclination to consider the Jewish victims of the Nazis. I don't know, but something about it left me feeling uneasy.

As I took photographs of the overgrown, unused railway siding that once led to the camp, a busload of young Israelis, some wrapped in the Israeli flag, came out of the site singing. They seemed to be on a Holocaust memorial tour, and it must have been even more emotional for them than for me to see this site of mass death, in which an estimated 250,000 people were killed. Sobibor is also little known in the West, again partly perhaps it was so deadly efficient; only about 50 people are known to have survived, most of whom escaped in the prisoner revolt in October 1943 that damaged the facility and led to it being closed.

By pure coincidence, a few days earlier I had stayed in a hotel with satellite TV and had watched a History Channel documentary about Simon Wiesenthal. One of his most notable successes in tracking down war criminals was his location of the commander of Sobibor (and later Treblinka), Franz Stangl, in Sao Paolo in 1967. Stangl was arrested, extradited to West Germany and tried for war crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison, which amounted to six months, as he died of a heart attack in 1970. Much of what we know about Sobibor came to light during this trial.

It was a shock, after all this grim recollection of death and destruction, to ride 10 kilometres through the forbidding forest and emerge at a lake south of Wlodawa (Okuninka) where thousands of people were enjoying a summer afternoon at the lake. Restaurants, fun fairs, bars and shops were packed. Life moves on, even at the site of profound tragedy.

The ride through Belarus, still along the rail lines of pre-WWII Poland, had fewer overt reminders of the Holocaust, although plenty of WWII. Belarus bore the brunt of fighting on the Eastern Front, with around a third of its population dying between 1941 and 1944. There are memorials everywhere to the Red Army, still faithfully tended with fresh wreaths, and memorials to the partisans who fought the Germans from the forests. However, the Jews of modern-day western Belarus (which was part of Poland occupied by the Russians) suffered horribly in the war years, most of them summarily executed in 1941, immediately after the German invasion, shot in forests and buried in mass graves by the SS and locally recruited death squads.

Arriving here in Vilnius, dubbed the Jerusalem of the North by Napoleon, there are more remembrances of the Holocaust. Vilnius had 140,000 Jewish citizens in 1940, and there were some 200,000 in the country as a whole. Fewer than 10,000 would survive the war. I went to the Lithuanian national holocaust memorial museum, a moving tribute to the destruction of an entire community and way of life. On my way out of town tomorrow, riding toward the coast, I will pass Pareniai, where so many Vilnius Jews were executed in pits dug outside the city.

This section of the bike trip has taught me a lot I didn't know about what happened in WWII in eastern Europe, something that is often passed over lightly in our Western history books. It has also left me saddened, thinking of how often this sort of wholesale destruction of a people has been attempted over the centuries (the North American Indians, the Australian Aborigines, Rwanda's Tutsis, the Armenians of eastern Anatolia, entire city-states in Central Asia during the Mongol onslaught, to name but a few cases). I wonder whether, as Earth's population continues to skyrocket and as more and more people aspire to a Western standard of living, putting increasing strains on land, water, food, forests, oceans, whether we will see a resurgence of this sort of lebensraum idea and killing and mass deportation to achieve it. Today war criminals get sent to the Hague; perhaps in 50 years they will be given medals by their countries instead.

Postscript, Kaunas, August 7
On my way out of Vilnius two days ago, I stopped in the forest of Paneriai, the principal site of executions of Lithuanian Jews from 1941 to 1944. As in much of the territory conquered by the Germans in 1941, from the very first days of the invasion, there were mass killings of local Jewish citizens. At first, the Germans stirred up local nationalists, angered by 2 years of Soviet oppression, by equating Jews to the hated Communists, and there were a number of unorganized killings by Lithuanian militias. Quite soon, however, the Germans organized matters and had the Lithuanian police battalions carry out their dirty work. Nearly 100,000 people were murdered in Paneriai, and most of them were subsequently dug up, burned and then the ashes reburied. I had the forest to myself in the early morning, and walking around the various Soviet and post-Soviet memorials was very moving.

Splashing Across the Carpathians

2011-07-25T11:28:00.001-07:00

July 25, Lvov, Ukraine

It's 9:30 pm of a day off here in lvly Lvov (aka Lemberg or Leopolis), a gem of a city here on the western edge of Ukraine, nestled at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, the historic capital of the region of Galicia. I really like the feel of this city. It is a piece of the Austro-Hungarian empire marooned in Ukraine, full of Catholic churches, cafes and elegant fin-de-siecle architecture. It's a bit like Budapest in its feel, thanks to the century and a half that the Hapsburgs ruled the city. It was actually a Polish city for centuries before that, a major trading centre in Eastern Europe and a major centre of Jewish, Polish, Armenian and even Greek culture. I arrived here yesterday at midday and have spent the past day and a half poking about, sampling the excellent cakes and hot chocolate (more Viennese influence) and looking at the architectural eye candy.

Before I start blogging, I should mention that the right sidebar contains links to the Google Map showing my route, and the Google Doc table with all the daily riding statistics, for those of you who want to keep a closer eye on where I've been.

Since I last blogged from Kosice, the monsoon season seems to have arrived here in central Europe, with some rain on each of the past 8 days. Some days it has mostly rained at night, but other days have been pretty soggy on the bike. Here's the skinny on what I've been up to for the past week.

Superb Slovakia

I didn't know what to expect in Slovakia; it was a bit of a mental black hole before this trip. I have to say that, although I was only in Slovakia for 4 nights, I was greatly impressed with the country as a cycling destination, and as a pretty, outdoorsy, historic country, with good, cheap food and good bike shops.

In Kosice I had my front and back hubs tightened and my bottom bracket (the thing that goes through the frame to hold the pedals) replaced. I had been hearing cracking noises from the bike as I pedalled, and I thought that it meant that one of the ball bearings in the bottom bracket had broken. The mechanics replaced the bottom bracket, but told me that in fact the bottom bracket bearings had been fine, although it was the wrong diameter, and that probably because it was too small, it wasn't being held in place properly. As soon as I pedalled off, I realized that I had misdiagnosed the problem. The noises were unchanged, and I realized that it must be the freewheel, the bit of the back axle assembly that allows you to coast downhill without pedalling. This is a more major reconstruction job, involving rebuilding the rear wheel around a new axle, so I want to avoid doing this on the road if I can at all avoid it. I have, however, bought a new axle with a properly functioning freewheel, in case I have to have a new wheel built in the next month somewhere with fewer bike shops and less access to quality bike parts.

I rode out of Kosice a bit groggy, after a huge thunderstorm kept waking me up in the middle of the night. I pedalled north at first to Presov, leaving behind the broad agricultural fields around Kosice and heading towards the foothills of the Carpathians. I then turned west and headed towards the highest part of the entire Carpathian range, the renowned High Tatras. I was hoping to do some hiking, but as I approached the mountains, I realized this was not going to happen; the peaks were completely covered by black thunderclouds, and the weather forecast was for much more of the same.

I still managed to see some lovely stuff, despite the bad weather. After a bit of a rollercoaster ride against the grain of the landscape, I coasted down from a reasonable climb and was greeted by the sight of an outsized castle dominating the landscape from atop a steep ridge. It was Spis Castle, the biggest castle in Slovakia and one of the largest in all of Europe. It was hard to get a decent picture, as clouds stayed stubbornly directly overhead, but it was impressive to see from different angles as I rode past. It marked the start of the Spis region, devastated by Mongol invasions in 1242 and repopulated by Saxon German settlers invited in by the King of Hungary. Spis is full of little medieval towns with pretty market squares, castles, Gothic churches and lovely housefronts.

I rode through one of the standouts, Levoca, which has made it onto UNESCO's World Heritage list. The main square was outstanding, with extremely pretty houses everywhere attesting to a prosperous Middle Ages for the town, based on trade. The main square was dominated by a huge Gothic church famous for its 18-metre-high carved wooden altar, supposedly the biggest wooden Gothic altar in the world. It was carved by Levoca's most famous son, the sculptor Master Paul. There was scaffolding on the altar when I ventured into the church, but a nearby museum has excellent high-quality replicas of the carvings that you can get up close to and photograph. The church was full of astrophysicists, attending a big conference on exoplanets in the High Tatras. It was funny to run into people from my previous life; in fact, one of the scientists I talked to was at Harvard when I was there (1992-94) and was the advisor for one of my fellow grad students, although I don't think we ever met.

I pushed on, into black, ominous skies, headed for the city of Poprad, but the increased hilliness and impending downpour had me looking for a place to sleep indoors. I found a little motel and got one of the better deals on rooms of the trip: 15 euros for a luxurious, enormous room with satellite TV and a big breakfast in the morning. I turned in early, replete with sausages, sauerkraut and potatoes, perfect fuel for another day in the saddle. I felt really tired, perhaps from two nights of poor sleep in my tent in the pouring rain.

All day I had noticed that many of the villages I passed through seemed to have a majority Roma (Gipsy) population. There seem to be a greater percentage of Roma in Slovakia than almost anywhere else in eastern Europe. Many non-Roma Slovaks that I spoke to displayed a pathological hatred for the Roma, and said some truly vile things about them, the sort of things that Nazis said about the Jews. I found it quite disturbing. While it's true that the Roma are in general poorer than other Slovaks, they seem to be doing materially better than the Roma in Romania or the Balkans, with quite a few members of a Roma middle class visible on the streets. On the other hand, there are a couple of definite favelas on the outskirts of some towns, and some Roma are extremely poor indeed. I remember a story a few years ago in which the mayor of a small town in Slovakia bought plane tickets to Canada for all the Roma inhabitants of his town and told them to claim refugee status when they landed. I get the feeling that a lot of Slovaks would like to do the same thing to their local Roma inhabitants. George Soros, as part of his Open Societies projects, is trying to help the poor state of public health provision to eastern Europe's Roma communities.

That night there was an apocalyptic thunderstorm that left me happy to be indoors. I got going relatively early and cut a corner to avoid Poprad and head straight to another pretty Saxon Spis town, Kezmarok. Lovely castle, great town square, and a perfect spot to sip hot chocolate, eat chocolate cake and write postcards. The local river was running very high, and later that day, Slovak TV was carrying stories of flooding in various parts of the country. I was glad that I had decided to abandon thoughts of hiking up the peaks of the High Tatras, which I still hadn't so much as seen through the curtain of rain. I rode off to Stara Lubovna, with the inevitable castle and cathedral and, more to the point, a fantastic restaurant for a vast lunch. Thus fortified, I continued the ride, over increasingly hilly terrain, towards the UNESCO-listed town of Bardejov. At one point, looking back, I could just make out, through a break in the rainclouds, the silhouette of the High Tatras; it was the only glimpse I caught of them in two days.

I got to Bardejov having covered 110 fairly tough kilometres, but decided to take advantage of a break in the weather to go see one of Carpathian wooden churches (unusually, this one was Roman Catholic), 10 km uphill out of Bardejov in the village of Hervartov. The setting was perfect, in a copse of trees overlooking the village, and when the sexton showed up with the keys, the interior was amazing, full of Gothic paintings and altars and frescoes. I coasted back to Bardejov, found a hotel, ate pizza and collapsed into bed, pretty tired after 133 km.

I spent an hour the next day absorbing the wonderful central square of Bardejov. After another night of rain, there was dramatic light, with shafts of light illuminating the pastel facades with black thunderclouds behind. The museum told the story of another rich Middle Ages trading town, which declined over the centuries as religious war tore apart the fabric of society. The town was burned by Hussites, then converted to Protestantism for a century before converting back to Roman Catholicism.

After bidding a fond farewell to Bardejov, I rode towards the small town of Svidnik. Somewhere along the way, as I properly entered the Carpathians, I crossed an invisible border line between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, or rather the Austrian-influenced hybrid of the Uniate church. The Carpathians are full of pretty little wooden churches, much as I saw in Romania, most of them Uniate and many of them on UNESCO's list. I spent much of the day visiting these churches, almost all of them Uniate (Greek Catholic; beliefs and rituals are Orthodox, but the church has the Pope as its head, rather than an eastern Patriarch). Some of them have been recently renovated, reducing their atmospheric value, but I really liked Bodruzal,

with ancient wooden walls and roof shingles and a peaceful, small interior.

The road led over the 500-metre-high Dukla Pass, site of a series of bloody battles between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht in late 1944. There are German military cemeteries everywhere, and a huge memorial to Soviet, Polish and Slovak soldiers at the summit of the pass. I coasted downhill into Poland and into more rain. I pushed on, through heavy truck traffic, as far as a tiny truck stop motel where I turned in early, shattered again.

The Push Through Poland

This ride through the southwest corner of Poland was a bit of a non-entity in terms of sights and history and culture. I spent the next day riding to the town of Przemysl, along a well-engineered modern road, up and down over low hills, through alternating patches of woods and hayfields. I did 1450 vertical metres that day, but it felt like less, as most of the climbs were very gentle. That day I discovered that I should have put on a new chain while the bike was in the shop in Kosice. All the rain meant a lot of grit on the chain, and it accelerated the erosion and grinding of the links that meant the chain was getting longer and longer, and starting to skip very badly whenever I was pedalling hard (ie uphill). I decided that Przemysl, my destination for the day, was likely to have a bike shop with new chains and other useful bits of metal.

When I got to Przemysl, a pleasant little Galician town with a lovely Baroque main square, I checked out the bike shops, but found most of them closed. I spent a lazy evening sketching the church facade and eating, and the next morning found me checking the bike shops one more time before leaving town. Several shops were either still closed or didn't have a nine-speed chain, but the last shop I went to had a chain and a friendly mechanic named Marcin who had just come back from five years working in Ireland. I bought the new chain and, in the process of putting it on, realized that the middle chain ring on the front was completely worn out. I tried to replace it, but the new ring I bought didn't fit properly, as Shimano had changed its specifications. The next several hours were spent trying to remedy this problem, and the final solution was to buy a new crank set (pedal arms and three front chain rings) which, due to another change in Shimano specifications, didn't actually fit on my bike. I then took all the chain rings off and put them onto my old pedal arm. It was a brilliant idea by Marcin, but once again Shimano found a way to foil us. The middle chain ring was a few millimetres too small to fit on the old pedal arm, even though they were exactly the same model number, just from different years. Lots of cursing, then an hour and half of hard work with a metal file and I was able to enlarge the inner surface of the chain ring enough to put the whole assembly together again. Marcin's colleague was impressed with my filing: "You are like McGyver!" High praise indeed.
Return to the Ukraine

By now it was 2 in the afternoon, and there was no way I could make it to Lvov that afternoon. I had pizza with Marcin and his colleague, then pedalled for the border where I had a piece of grim deja vu. Once again the Ukrainian border police insisted that I couldn't cross on my bike, and made me get into a minivan. Once again, we waited forever for lazy, corrupt border officials to deign to let us through. It took two and a half hours to finally get through, so I rode only 20 km into the Ukraine before finding a little hotel (the fourth I tried; the first three were booked out for weddings on this July Saturday night) beside a pond where I ate well, but slept poorly as hordes of drunk Ukrainian revellers shouted and pounded on doors late into the night.

My ride into Lvov yesterday was non-descript, other than the appalling road surface. My new chain rode smoothly on my new front chain rings, but my rear gears had also been badly ground down by the old chain, and skipped badly in my most favourite gears. I realized that in Lvov I was going to have to find a new back cassette to fix the problem once and for all. Once I finally got through construction and awful cobblestone sections of road into central Lvov, I made my way to the rather charming Cosmonaut Hostel, threw my clothes into an actual washing machine (they still look grim, but less revolting than before; bike grease is hard to get out of clothes!) and set off to see this beautiful city.

Today's cafe crawl brought me through several fine Austro-Hungarian cafes, full of sinfully rich cakes and thick hot chocolate, with occasional stops in museums and churches along the way. Lunch at the Masoch Cafe (yes, named after that Masoch, he of masochistic fame) was painful only for the length of time it took food to appear on my table. The real pain was to come when I rode through the inevitable afternoon rain to a bike shop to buy a new cassette. I found exactly what I wanted, but when I went to put it on, I found that Dom Cycle, my new least-favourite bike shop in Switzerland, had enormously overtightened the ring that holds the back gear cassette in place on the hub. No amount of pushing, pulling, grunting and swearing would make it budge, so now tomorrow morning will have to be devoted to finding either a much longer and stronger wrench, or else a long metal pipe to put over the end of my wrench to give myself enough torque to undo the un-handiwork of my overpriced and underskilled Swiss bike mechanics.

It's very frustrating to be held up by mechanical problems, but this all could have been avoided if I hadn't made a classic rookie error and not watched my chain for signs of wear. If I had changed my chain 500 or 800 km earlier, none of this other stuff would have been necessary. I thought I had learned my lesson on my year-long 2001 bike trip, when I had to replace my entire drive train in China, but apparently at nearly 43, I am suffering from premature senility. So, much as I may rail against Dom Cycle as the proximate cause of being stuck in Lvov longer than necessary, the ultimate cause is my own negligence and laziness.

I hope to be out of here by midday tomorrow, if not sooner, headed for Poland for another couple of days before riding into Belarus, another new country for me, at the historic town of Brest. From here on, my predominant heading will be north as I head for the Baltic. Appropriately enough, Lvov is right on the continental divide; its river, now buried underground, flows north into the Baltic, while most of the rivers I have encountered this summer have had the Black Sea as their final destination. With only three and a half weeks left in my summer vacation, it's time to start getting serious about making it to Tallinn. I've now rolled over 3500 km from Tbilisi; another 2000 km or so should see me to Tallinn.

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

A long stretch to Slovakia

2011-07-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

Kosice, Slovakia, July 18th

I'm sitting in an e-mail cafe (hard to find recently along my route) here in the pretty town square of Slovakia's second city Kosice. I arrived in town early yesterday afternoon (for once!), did some laundry, devoured a huge lunch, and am now taking a full day off here today while a bike shop does some maintenance on the bike.

Since I last wrote, in Chisanau, 11 days of cycling and a day of rest and wine-tasting in Hungary, along with nearly 1200 km, have passed by, so I need to do a brief summary to bring this blog up to date.

Meandering through Moldova

I left Chisanau fairly early on July 6th, full of the usual Intourist hotel breakfast buffet spread, headed towards Moldova's only real non-wine tourist attraction, the old monastery at Orheiul Vecchiul. I rode well in the morning, past the vineyards of Cricova and the other Moldovan wine producers, then took an unexpectedly hilly route east towards Transdniestria. The countryside was pretty, full of sunflower fields and little villages. Suddenly, as I crested a rise, an apparition appeared to my right. A hairpin bend in a tiny meandering river, the Raut, has been deeply etched into the soft limestone plateau, and on top of the narrow ridge between the two channels is perched a beautiful church. It dominates the huge amphitheatre of limestone left by the river's erosion. It sits on top of an old cave monastery and church, but after the wonders of Uplistsikhe a few weeks ago, the underground stuff didn't do too much for me. I did like the setting immensely, though, which was good as it cost me lots of time and backtracking to the main road. I then set off into the setting sun on a side road, across the grain of the land, with a series of ups and downs that finally petered out in an appalling dirt track that had once been paved. I found an orchard, pitched a tent out of sight of the road, and called it a day after 114 kilometres.

The next day turned into an unexpectedly epic day. I had intended to cross the Romanian border and camp immediately, making for 100 km or so. It all started out well, with the dirt road turning back into pavement, and the pretty villages and orchards continuing. Moldovan villages all seem to have wells beside the road, dipping into the aquifer that lies not too deep into the porous limestone. It's a boon for a thirsty cyclist! The villages I passed through, even though they were only 60 km or so from the capital, were poor and depressed-looking, although not as bad as what we saw in eastern Crimea.

It was hard, hilly riding until lunch, when I dropped down onto one of the main roads leading out of Chisanau that follows a river, rather than angling between valleys as I had been doing for a day and a half. I made good time up the valley and then down the other side to the Romanian border at Ungheni. It was a very hot day, and I was looking forward to getting off the bike soon. Instead, a gas station owner broke the bad news to me: the border is only open to train passengers, and everyone else, including me, has to head 23 km north to the road crossing. I gritted my teeth, polished off some more chocolate and cookies, and rode north along a very flat road. At the border, everything went smoothly in terms of immigration formalities as I entered my 100th country, but there were (very unusually for Moldova) no money-changers at the border. On the Romanian side, I asked about moneychangers or ATMs and was told that I would have to backtrack south another 24 km to the city of Iasi. More tooth-gritting, more hard cycling, and suddenly I was in Romania's second-largest city, a prosperous university town. A huge electricity blackout left my hotel in darkness and (of course) most of the ATMs to be out of action. The sixth one I tried finally disgorged some Romanian lei, and I went out to feed myself before an early night, tired out by 140 km, much of them unwanted.

Monastic Masterpieces

July 8th was a long, extremely hot but fairly flat day. I rode north, retracing my path into Iasi for 12 km, and then parallelling the Moldovan border for most of the day. It must be the poorest corner of Romania, poorer than much of Moldova, reportedly Europe's least prosperous country. For 80 km I saw no banks, no restaurants and almost no shops. This is an area of largely subsistence agriculture, with an almost continuous string of villages along the low limestone hills that line the flat, broad river valley that marks the Moldovan border. There was little vehicular traffic, with horse carts outnumbering cars at least three to one. I saw a small clan of Roma (Gypsies) collecting scrap metal into a small fleet of horse carts; three of them were trying to wrestle the rusty carcass of an ancient car into their cart, which I thought was an apt metaphor for the direction of economic change in this part of the world. Eventually the road turned away from the border and up into the hills, where I camped in a little forest for some privacy. It was a bad idea in terms of comfort, as the trees prevented any cooling breezes from hitting the tent, and I sweltered all night in rainforest conditions.

The next day was a shortish ride as I climbed over a series of parallel plateaus into parallel river valleys (Moldova all over again), passed through the town of Botosani (tens of thousands of inhabitants, fairly prosperous, exactly one open restaurant that I could find) and then pushed on towards the regional capital of Suceava. I bypassed the city and camped in a little campsite across the road from the Orthodox monastery of Dragomirna. Romania's plague of stray dogs did their best to keep me up at night; aside from Burma, I can't remember seeing so many feral dogs in one country before.

Orthodox monasteries are the main draw in this part of northern Romania (Southern Bucovina), and I spent the next two days exploring the best of them. Collectively, these 15th and 16th century monasteries, painted all over, inside and out, with extraordinarily vivid frescoes, have made it onto the UNESCO World Heritage list, and I visited five of these masterpieces. First up was the little-known Patrauti, the oldest of the Bucovina churches. It is so little-visited that it was locked up, and two fellow visitors had to go find the keeper of the keys. I loved the interior of the tiny church, its walls and arched ceilings completely covered by a maze of paintings. This church was full of military saints, as it was established by King Stefan the Great in a time of great military danger from Ottoman Turkish invaders. I found the 360-degree visual stimulation almost too much, but our guide pointed out a number of the details and stories that I might otherwise have overlooked. I staggered outside, saddled up, and set off on the long trek to Sucevita monastery, past a string of dozens of Roma horse carts, as they came back on this Sunday morning from the Catholic church in a nearby town.

Sucevita, when I finally reached it after a ride through tremendous heat, was a different story entirely. It's firmly on the tour bus circuit, and makes a popular weekend excursion for Romanian families. A wedding was shooting photos outside the walls, and the crowds were quite unlike Patrauti. The paintings were amazing, however, well worth the effort of getting to them. The most famous of them is a huge ladder that is supposed to show the genealogy of Jesus from the time of Jesse, father of King David. One of the rooms of the church is covered with gory martyrdom scenes, big on beheadings, being burnt alive and being stabbed in various grim ways. The artwork in the paintings is fine, typical of the late Byzantine style that had captivated me on previous trips to places like Ohrid (Macedonia), Bulgaria and the mountains of Cyprus. The colours, particularly the blue, are wonderful, and hard to capture on a photograph. Sadly, photography is forbidden inside most of the churches (aside from Patrauti), but I did manage a few clandestine snaps. I also loved the monastery enclosure around this and other churches, a haven of peace from the tourist frenzy outside, planted with splendid rose gardens and dotted with nuns reading Bibles on shaded benches.

I had planned to camp in Sucevita, but the campgrounds looked pretty grim, so I headed up the valley, towards a pass over the first range of the Carpathian mountains. Eventually I found a secluded logging road and camped in a clearing in the forest. My bad luck in choosing good tent sites continued. I had a lovely cool breeze, but it did nothing to keep away the clouds of supersized horseflies that plagued me all evening until I finished eating and crawled into my tent to sleep the sleep of the dead.

The next morning, I left very early to complete my climb over the pass in the cool of the morning. There was almost no traffic, and the gradient of the road stayed gentle, making for a pleasant, quick ride to the top. There were pleasant, if not spectacular, views from the crest of the pass. I spent the rest of the day pedalling down a long valley, with short side trips to more painted monasteries. Moldovita was pretty, in a quiet little village, although the two huge tour buses that arrived made it rather less quiet than I would have liked. It went a little too heavily for the death and dismemberment of saints in its frescoes, but I liked its monastery courtyard and the frescoes on the outside. I returned to the bike and flew along a newly-paved highway to Guru Humorolui, where I turned off for Humor monastery.

The Lonely Planet raves about the frescoes of Humor being the best in Bucovina, but most of them, sadly, were under scaffolding when I was there. What little I did see, though, looked as though they were painted by a more skilled brush than some of the other monasteries. I emerged into the relentless heat (38 degrees by my thermometer) and rolled back to Guru Humorolui in search of lunch.

Half a chicken and a plate of fries later, I was ready to complete my hat trick of monasteries at nearby Voronet. Despite the inevitable mass of souvenir stands outside, it wasn't very busy inside the churchyard, and I had time and space to contemplate the wonderful artwork, particularly the daunting Last Judgment on the outer wall above the entrance. Their take on the genealogy of Christ was much harder to follow and less pleasing to the eye than the Sucevita painting. Art historians make much of the famous Voronet blue pigment used on the church, but to my untrained eye, it looked much the same as the vivid blues I'd seen on other churches.

I staggered out, completely saturated with visual imagery, and found a little pension. I was feeling very tired from the heat and the hills, and decided that a long night of sleep in a real bed was called for. The little hotel that I found, the Valeria, was wonderful, with spotless rooms, an extra-long bed and delicious, filling, calorie-rich food, and an English-speaking waitress.

Across the Carpathians

My ride the next day, July 12th, was longer and harder than I had anticipated. I had seen two passes on the map, and had decided that I would probably camp somewhere between the two. However, I had a very good morning, refreshed by a wonderfully deep sleep, and charged over the first pass, an 1100-metre job, by 1:00 pm. The road was in great shape, with gentle gradients the whole way, and I felt strong on the climb. A precipitous descent through a village of haymaking led to a turnoff for the secondary road to Sighetu Marmatiei. Although the road surface deteriorated noticeably, there was hardly any traffic and the black thunderclouds massing behind me kept me pushing hard up the valley. I realized that I had enough energy and time to make it up the second pass that afternoon, and decided to go for it. I pedalled past a series of little logging towns, separated by long stretches of spruce forests that brought back, by sight and by smell, the great boreal forests of northern Ontario. Before I knew it, I was on the last climb to the 1400-metre pass, as thunderclaps echoed ominously around the valley. At the summit, a vision straight out of the pages of Bram Stoker: a church with soaring turrets was silhouetted against the inky blackness of the stormclouds. I resisted the urge to stay there, even if we weren't in Transylvania, and hurtled downhill, trying in vain to outrun the torrential rain at my back. Soaked and wet, I decided on the soft option, eschewing the tent in favour of a hotel at a ski resort (in Romania? Who would have known?) where I ate a huge dinner and slept like a log, worn out by 130 hard-won kilometres.

It was only the next day, rolling down the Izu Valley, that I got my first really good look at the higher bits of the Carpathians. They're not enormously high, only about 2500 metres or so at their highest in Romania, but they're very pretty, with good forest cover in a lot of places and hay-making villages in other spots. The valleys are full of pretty wooden houses, and this valley, the Izu, is known for its ancient wooden churches and elaborately carved wooden gateways. I detoured off the main road a couple of times to see these churches, and was greatly taken with their soaring spires and wooden shingled roofs. There's a new monastery being built at Barsana in the old wooden style, and it's quite atmospheric and very popular among the Romanian devout (ie, almost the entire population), as well as making the cover of my map of Romania.

I blew through Sighetu Maratiei without stopping; it was too late to visit the house where Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel was born, and I had a cemetery to visit. 20 km down the road, following the Tisza river along the Ukrainian border, the Laughing (or Merry) Cemetery is a big drawing card to the village of Sapanta. There a local wood carver spent a lifetime creating beautiful, vivid wooden memorials to the dead buried there, showing them in key moments in their lives (occasionally getting run over by trains or cars; more often working on farms or in shops) and commemorating them in what are apparently quite humorous poetic epitaphs in Romanian. I loved it; I felt that the art captured far more of the lives and characters of these villagers than any conventional cemetery every could have. I'd love to be buried in a similar style whenever I shuffle off this mortal coil. I found the best campsite of the trip, in a field just outside Sapanta, and settled in for a wonderful night's sleep.

Roasting on the Alfold

The heat seemed to grow more oppressive day by day, and July 14th, my three-country day, was the hottest yet. I set off a bit late after a lazy breakfast, and boiled as I crossed a low, forested pass over the last gasp of the Carpathians. Coming down the other side, I had technically entered Transylvania, and definitely entered the Alfold, the Great Hungarian Plain that lies inside a semi-circular arc of the Carpathians. Although I was still in Romania, suddenly the village road signs were bi- or tri-lingual, with Hungarian and occasional Ukrainian names. I could hear people listening to Hungarian TV and music, and speaking Hungarian on the street. I descended very slowly from the pass across the endless flat expanse that had once been the pastures for invading Magyar marauders from Central Asia before they settled down to become agricultural Hungarians. The towns seemed noticeably more prosperous and bustling than further east; I felt as though I had been travelling along a steady upward growth in economic well-being since that first day in Romania where there were no banks or restaurants at all. The thermometer topped 40 degrees for the first time that afternoon, and I took frequent shade breaks to avoid overheating, aided by the occasional ice-cold beer.

Eventually I made it to the Ukrainian border at Halmeu, in plenty of time to cut a 20-kilometre corner of the Ukraine on my way to Hungary. This turned out to be a strategic error; this was the shortest route to Tokaj, Hungary, but not in terms of time. The border was a caricature of old Communist-era frontiers, with fat, corrupt Ukrainian border officials studiously ignoring the motorists in front of them in a display of power that would (they hoped) result in more bribes being offered. I was loaded into a minivan (no bicycles or pedestrians allowed) and spent two long, hot hours waiting for the passport and car registration folks to recognize our existence, despite the Romanian banknotes tucked into my driver's passport. Finally I made it through, said goodbye to my saviour/driver and headed rapidly for Hungary, through a bilingual landscape which seemed to be a tiny corner of Hungary sliced off and added to the Ukraine. At the border I couldn't find either moneychangers or an ATM, and rode deep into the dusk across the Alfold, lit up by a rising full moon over an African-like savannah, before setting up my tent by headlamp and sleeping well after 130 roasting kilometres.

The ride the next day to Tokaj was another 130-kilometre marathon, although it was across a plain that would have made the Netherlands look mountainous. I trundled along through 41-degree heat, following little tertiary roads past little meandering rivers and prosperous, tiny towns, trying to remember what little Hungarian I once knew. I spent 4 memorable months studying math in Budapest in 1988, went back for a brief visit in 1990 and hadn't set foot in the country for 21 years. I found it strange how completely my knowledge of Hungarian had been eradicated from my brain, although individual words came bubbling up now and again, particularly in the supermarket. I found an ATM in the city of Fehergyarmat, and tried to change my leftover Romanian lei, only to be told that Hungarian banks wouldn't touch them. The teller, however, offered to change them herself (at a discounted rate, of course), and I was able to get most of the value of the lei back. Money issues at borders has been a theme this year; I need to get better information in the future about where to change money or find ATMs at upcoming crossings.

I liked my day of cycling, despite the risk of sunstroke. Every town seemed to have a few stork nests on top of telephone poles, and for once I was not the only crazy cyclist on the road, as dozens of locals zipped around on bikes (another echo of the Netherlands). I made it to Tokaj, a sleepy little wine-producing town, at 6 pm only to find that it had been taken over by thousands of music-festival attendees. Given that it was a festival of heavy metal bands, the number of motorbikes, tattoos, beer bellies and black T-shirts came as no surprise. The campground where I was staying was a sea of tents, and sleeping was difficult with the noise from the bands and the fans.

I did, however, stick to my plan to take a day off after 10 straight days on the bike, and go wine-tasting. After a long, leisurely, massive breakfast, I made my way into town to the Tokaji wine museum, where I learned of the illustrious history of Tokaji wines (the first AOC in the world, dating from 1723, and praised by such luminaries as Schubert and Voltaire). I then went for a more hands-on approach to my oenophilic education by going winetasting at the lovely Rakoczi Cellars. I tried various of the sweet dessert wines that have made Tokaj famous, and found that they were even more wonderful than I had remembered from 1988, as privatization has led to a great increase in quality. Made sweeter by adding quantities of grapes that have molded and rotted on the vine, the 5-puttonyos wine was my favourite, with a taste like fine honey. I bought a bottle for later consumption, and retired to my tent for more noise-interrupted sleep.

Into Slovakia

I got an early start yesterday and had perhaps the nicest single day of riding of the trip. I left Tokaj, but not its vineyards, as I circled around the foot of the ancient hills that produce Tokaji Aszu. It was a Sunday morning, and I had the road almost to myself all day, as I followed a small local route through the various wine villages. A few castles topped the hills to my right, and eventually the vines gave way to the sunflowers and corn that have been my cycling companions since Odessa. I watched storks doing their beak-chattering mating dance atop the roof of a house, and stopped to pluck ripe sour cherries from roadside trees. Before I knew it, I was at the Slovak border, where (predictably) there was nowhere to change my leftover forints. This time, at least, I knew what to do: buy more wine!! Three bottles of red Egri Bikaver weighed down my already groaning bike, and then I was off across the unmanned border into my 101st country. The road was flat, new and wide, and I absolutely flew along the 20 kilometres to Kosice, Slovakia's second city. It took longer to find my campground than to get to the city from the border. I wandered around yesterday afternoon, absorbing the lovely Central European central square, dominated by a huge Gothic cathedral (the easternmost Gothic church in Europe, I'm told) and eating ridiculous quantities of dumplings, sauerkraut and sausages.

Today is another day off; my wheel hubs have worked their way loose, and I don't know how to fix them myself. I also have been hearing ominous noises from my bottom bracket, and so I'm having it replaced, since there's a good bike shop here. Then it's off to the High Tatra mountains, to go hiking, before cutting back across the Carpathians, and a corner of southeast Poland, to Lvov. I'm running out of days on this trip; in exactly a month, I need to be back in Switzerland, so I'm having a bit of a check of the maps to see that I don't bite off more than I can chew. I think I will have to sacrifice my tentative plan to ride through Kaliningrad in favour of a straighter route through Lithuania.

Thanks for reading all the way through, and I hope to post a little more frequently in future, assuming I can find enough Internet cafes to do this.

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

A couple of curious small countries

2011-07-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

Chisanau, July 5

After a day of exploring Odessa, Terri and I spent a couple of easy days of cycling from Odessa to Chisanau, through the curious semi-state of Transdniestria. It was Terri's last 2 days of cycling, and I was relieved that finally she had a couple of relaxed, easy days to enjoy the landscape and the cycling.

The ride out of Odessa was pretty flat, and there was, for the first time since Abkhazia, very little traffic on the road. It was a rather dull landscape of sunflowers (not in bloom), wheat and pastureland, and the grey skies didn't help make it look more cheerful. As we approached the border with Transdniestria, it started to rain, and we had lunch in a little cafe on the Ukrainian side of the border while it poured down outside. Terri has gotten me hooked on french fries as the perfect cycling lunch food, and we had a particularly good lunch that day: variniki (Ukrainian dumplings), fries, meat cutlets and beer. Cycle touring burns a lot of calories, and it takes a lot of effort to keep myself from getting too thin; luckily this is generally a rather enjoyable effort!

Crossing the Transdniestrian border lived up to the hype. It's not an internationally recognized country, although it does have its own army, currency and border guards. The border guards live up to all the old stereotypes of Communist borders: big hats and outstretched hands. As we approached the border, we met a German cyclist coming the other way who had only been allowed into the country on the payment of 40 euros for the dubious offence of not having a Romanian exit stamp in his passport. Our offence was the fact that Terri had a Moldovan visa in her passport (as a Kiwi, she needs many more visas than I do). We had a long palaver, dodging the loaded question of "how much cash do you have on you?" by pulling out bank cards. The original bribe request was for 100 euros; we ignored this and sat there, trying to outwait the guards and their mutterings of "problem; BIG problem!" Eventually, one guard gave us back our passports, having entered our details into the border computer, and told us to go "to the police post". We wandered back to our bikes, looked in vain for any police, went through the last custom post and were into the country. We stopped to change 35 dollars (which Terri had set aside for paying bribes) into Transdniestrian rubles, and as we cycled away, congratulating ourselves on getting in for free, a car pulled up and a border guard ordered us back to the border.

This time the border guards had a new offence to fine us about: entering the country without filling in the entry card. This time the bribe request was for 300 euros. Terri pulled out the 380 Transdniestrian rubles and they settled for that. We were given 24 hours to transit the country, and this time nobody called us back as we rode off. The last custom officer asked us why we were crossing a second time, and when I explained that we hadn't filled out the entry form the first time, a huge corrupt grin crossed his face and he asked "How much did THAT cost you?" In fact, 35 dollars for 2 people is cheaper than Russian or Belarussian legitimate visas, and much cheaper than Terri's visas for the Ukraine or Moldova, so it wasn't too horrible. According to everyone we've met, no matter what country you're from (even Transdniestria itself), the guards won't let you go without a good shakedown for cash.

Once through the border, the cycling was great. The highway was wide and almost empty, and we rode side by side most of the way to the capital, Tiraspol. Tiraspol is one of the more surreal places in Europe, capital of a breakaway country which still proudly displays the Communist hammer and sickle and feels stuck in the Brezhnev era. The city is surrounded by the standard Stalinist apartment blocks that disfigure so many Soviet cities, but the construction cranes that we saw here and there were engaged in building more of the same: new Stalinist blocks! The streets were eerily deserted, devoid of cars and people to such an extent that we thought we'd veered into Day of the Triffids or an episode of the Twilight Zone. Compared to Russia or Ukraine, the streets and sidewalks were spotless; in fact, it was a cleaner city than most Swiss towns. There were almost none of the frenetic capitalism that characterizes both Russia and Ukraine; only a few shops and almost none of the ubiquitous Communist kiosks that we had gotten used to further east.

We met up with Lena, the woman whose tourist apartment we were to stay at, then rode off to a Stalinist block where we schlepped our luggage and bikes five storeys up a scary staircase before setting off to see the sights. The city has enormously wide main streets almost empty of traffic (I hear that Pyongyang and Burma's Naypyidaw are similar in this respect), lined by memorials to the 1992 war that saw Transdniestria win its independence from Moldova. Transdniestria has been Russian for 2 centuries, far longer than the rest of Moldova, and identifies itself as a Russian-speaking Soviet state. Big billboards talked about the importance of allying Transdniestria with Russia, and about the glories of the Red Army's victory in World War Two. People on the streets seemed more sedate and content than in, say, Ukraine. We saw plenty of young couples walking their dogs or pushing prams, and none of the public drunkenness and restless undertone of aggression that characterizes so many ex-Soviet states. We passed a curious sight in the form of the only embassies in Tiraspol: those of the equally fictitious countries of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We had a few conversations with curious locals (tourists are a bit of a rarity in Tiraspol) and then left the Brezhnev era by walking through the doors of Andy's Pizza, an exemplary fast-food chain that fed us tasty, massive meals at ridiculously cheap prices. A stroll back along the Dniestr River, with a tiny sliver of new moon in the sky, and it was time for a well-earned sleep.

Leaving Transdniestria was far easier than getting in. We rode ten kilometres (TD is a very long, thin sliver of country) to the border outside Bendery and got ready for the inevitable bribe requests. This time our offence was overstaying our visa (our 24 hours was suddenly retroactively changed to 10 hours) and not registring with the police. This time I calmly stated our case in Russian, again and again, and eventually the guard got bored and decided there were easier pickings to be had from Moldovan BMWs waiting in line behind us. We got out for free, and were very glad to be across the Moldovan checkpoints where the border guards just wanted to chat about bike touring, rather than asking for hundreds of euros.

The ride to Chisanau was relatively easy, although traffic got pretty heavy as we approached the capital. The countryside got a bit more interesting: vineyards, lavender and steep riverbanks lined the road. After a delightful picnic in a watermelon patch, we rolled into the endless urban sprawl of Chisanau around 4 pm. The hotel that Terri had had to book to get her visa turned out to be excellent, a renovated ex-Intourist concrete monstrosity, and we settled in for 24 hours of hedonism: microbreweries, a wine tour to the outstanding Cricova winery (120 km of underground wine cellars and a collection of antique wines to die for, many of them confiscated from Hermann Goehring) and an afternoon sipping fine Cricova champagne and putting Terri's bike into a box for flying. Terri headed back to Switzerland at 5:30 on a night train to Bucharest, leaving me alone to catch up on my blog and contemplate the next leg of my journey, a swing north and west through Romania, eastern Hungary and eastern Slovakia. After my recent bout of relaxation, I'm hoping that my legs are ready for two weeks of non-stop cycling! I'm also excited about the fact that Romania will be the hundredth country I've visited in my travels; I'm about half the way to visiting every country on earth, but I think I've done the easy half first.

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

Rushin' Through Russia, Crawling Through Crimea

2011-07-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

Odessa, July 2nd

Terri and I are in Odessa, a very European-feeling cosmopolitan city, after a long night bus journey from Yalta. I ordinarily avoid all encounters with public transport, but the ferry that we thought would take us from Yalta to Odessa didn't exist, so we were reduced to the ignominy of a night bus.

Since I last wrote, Terri and I rode eight days from Sochi to Yalta, along the northeast coast of the Black Sea. It was a lot harder going than I had expected, for a number of reasons: extreme hilliness, heavy traffic and a day and a half of crazy winds. We were quite relieved to make it to Yalta when we had planned to, and also quite happy to take a couple of days off the bike before heading off towards Moldova tomorrow.

Terri and I were quite happy to have a leisurely couple of days off in Sochi. I was able to find a local bike mechanic to rebuild my back wheel with a new rim, and we were able to enjoy the wonderful sets, great lighting and fabulous voices of the local opera company performing Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades. By coincidence I had just read the Pushkin short story on which the opera is based, so I could follow the story. Terri was entranced by her first-ever opera. On the second day, we were able to lounge by the pool at our swanky hotel, getting ourselves psyched up for the road ahead.

Our first day out of Sochi was perhaps the least enjoyable of the eight days. The traffic was relentless, with endless trucks grinding by noisily, covering us with diesel fumes. The road was a constant roller-coaster, climbing up hills and then diving steeply downward to cross rivers. We had hoped to make it to Tuapse, or perhaps beyond, but we had to stop at the small beach town of Shepsi, after 103 hard-fought kilometres and 2300 vertical metres. Terri snapped a spoke within an hour of starting cycling, and I was lucky to be able to fix it, as she had no spare spokes. Luckily, it was the spoke nipple that snapped, and not the spoke itself, and my spare nipples fit. In Shepsi, we enjoyed the cultural anthropology of watching the Russians at play on the beach: it was like every carnival sideshow strip in the world rolled together into one. People were firing BB guns at tin cans, trying to win stuffed animals; punching electronic punching bags; having their hair done in cornrows; barbecuing kebabs on the rocky shore; posing in the waves for sunset photos; being fired into the air by bungee catapults; having their fortunes read; buying hideous souvenirs.

The next day began with more of the same: heat, hills and hideous traffic, as far as the important road junction of Djugba. Towards the end of the day, the hills relented a bit, but we only covered 80 km and climbed 1500 metres. We stayed in a small tourist apartment run by a cheerful local family, had a dip on the local beach, and went out to a local nightclub to dance to Russian pop tunes. One of the songs had the chorus line of "Dolce e Gabbana", appropriate given the Russian love of name brand consumer items. I tried a Dagestani brandy that tasted rather like distilled sweet sherry.

On the third morning, much of the heavy truck traffic and some of the tourist car traffic vanished as we passed the road junction to Krasnodar and the cities of central Russia. The road flattened a bit as well, and we made good progress through a prosperous-looking countryside full of fruit orchards and roadside fruit stands. We had a lovely lunch stop beside a pretty waterfall, swam in the swimming hole below and enjoyed being out of traffic and in nature. The ride along the coast to Novorossiysk was pleasant and gave great coastal views. We stopped for a beer at a cafe run by a very personable Ukrainian named Stepan, who regaled us with tall tales. A few minutes later, a former professional cyclist named Edvard, a very well-preserved 72-year-old, stopped us to ask Terri if she would sell him her bicycle. He wasn't impressed with Terri's touring setup, or my cycling style (seat too high, not perfectly level). We rode through the immense industrial sprawl of Novorossiysk looking for a place to stay and for a bike shop to buy Terri some spokes. We struck out on spokes, but found a pleasant hotel in a forest behind a soccer stadium to sleep the sleep of the dead after 115 km.

The last day in Russia was an absolute marathon. We climbed up over a hill to get out of Novorossiysk and entered a landscape transformed. Gone were the Caucasus, my constant companion since Gori, replaced by the great Eurasian steppe: rolling treeless plains stretching off to Manchuria in the east and Hungary in the west. The advantage of the steppe for cycling is that it's pretty flat; the disadvantage is that there's no shelter from the wind. We had several episodes of tough headwinds, but they were compensated by long stretches of tailwind that allowed us to rack up an impressive 145 km to the very end of the road in Russia, a 10-km sand spit leading to Port Kavkaz, a ferry port leading to the Crimea. We were shattered after nearly 9 hours in the saddle, especially as the last 10 km were into a ferocious headwind. We caught a late ferry and slept on the Ukrainian side in the "VIP lounge" at the ferry terminal, on some very comfortable couches.

We awoke to a howling gale, and were told that this was pretty usual for this corner of the world. The difference in temperature between the Black Sea (to the south) and the Sea of Azov (to the north) creates constant screaming southerly winds that rake this barren, treeless corner of the Crimea. We battled gale-force crosswinds all day, finally giving up the fight after 73 hard-fought kilometres in which Terri (whose lightly loaded bike cut through the wind better than my heavy bike with its big front panniers) spent a lot of time trying to break the wind for me. We searched for a place to stay, but in this bleak Mongolian landscape, there were few people living and no hotels. We searched a nearby village for a place to put up our tent, and were shocked by the bleak, grinding rural poverty evident in the houses. We were relieved to find a nearby Uzbek chaikhana open, and slurped down lots of mutton and potatoes before putting up our tent in the shelter of their rose garden.

We awoke to more howling winds and cold, grey skies. It took more hours of struggle to finally reach the coast near Feodosiya, where it was a shock to the system to find vast holiday hotel complexes; it was a world away from the Hungry Steppe we had just crossed. We had a lavish lunch at a posh restaurant, watching dolphins frolic offshore, and enjoyed being out of the fury of the tempest. We rode along, in calm air, past Feodosiya and over a hill to the small, pretty bay of Koktebel, surrounded by the vineyards that produce its excellent brandy (a huge step up from the Dagestani stuff). Although we had only done 60 km, we stopped early to let ourselves recover from the wind. We wandered the boardwalk, eating pizza and shashlik and (thanks to my mistranslation of a menu) chicken livers before turning in, hoping that the next day would be easier.

It wasn't. We had a day equally vertical (2300 m) as the first day out of Sochi, although with much nicer views and far fewer cars. The hills were ridiculously steep, and we spent a lot of time far above the coast, in a landscape that seemed out of the Greek islands: limestone, vineyards, sparse savanna, golden grass. Occasionally we would dip to the coast, where Russians and Ukrainians were camping on the nicest beaches we'd seen yet. The day ended with Terri almost mutinous at the thought of yet another climb, but we set off and found a lovely beach at Ribache waiting for us on the other side. We devoured huge quantities of noodles, dumplings and shashlik before collapsing into bed in a fancy tourist apartment with wonderful sea views.

The last day into Yalta had another fantastically vertical morning, but then, after fortifying ourselves in the town of Alushta for more of the same, the afternoon featured only one big climb and then a more-or-less level traverse, looking down on pretty bays and up at high coastal mountains. We dropped into Yalta, found a place to stay, and set about trying to find the ferry that was going to take us to Odessa. We quickly found that it didn't exist, so we changed plans and, after an enjoyable evening taking in the atmosphere of the boardwalk, yesterday morning we got bus tickets and then set off on foot to visit Yalta's most famous attraction, Tsar Nicholas II's summer home at the Great Livadia Palace. It is more famous as the site of the Yalta Conference, where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt decided the fate of post-war Europe. After a long walk through the post-Soviet concrete disaster zone that is southern Yalta, we came out at the beautiful palace and enjoyed the views.

By complete coincidence, a month ago I was at the site of the last great WWII Allied leaders' conference, at Potsdam, outside Berlin, where I kayaked past the houses used by Stalin, Trumana and Attlee during those talks. And a couple of weeks ago, in Gori, I walked through the rail car that Stalin took from Moscow to Yalta (well, to Simferopol) for the Yalta Conference. World War Two is dogging my footsteps, and will continue to do so as I cycle onwards this summer across what historian Timothy Snyder has dubbed the Bloodlands.

We had a lovely day off in Odessa today, walking the streets, checking out the Pushkin Museum (he was exiled here for a year early in his career) and the famous Potemkin Steps and soaking up the lovely atmosphere. Tomorrow, it's back to the bikes, and an early start towards Trans-Dniestria (another slightly fictional ex-Soviet pseudo-state) and then Moldova, where Terri will head back to work, leaving me to continue northwest into Romania, Hungary and Slovakia before coming back to the Ukraine.

Cracking Up in Sochi

2011-06-20T03:23:00.001-07:00

Sochi, June 20th

I have been pretty lax about updating my blog since the beginning of the trip, but now that I have a few days off the bike, here in the Russian Riviera, it's a good chance for me to bring myself up to date.

I last wrote from Gori. After my day off there with Stalin (and the disturbing mementos: Stalin beer glasses? Busts? Wine? We've got them!) and the medieval cave city of Uplistsikhe, I rode for nine consecutive days, heading west, then looping north through the wonderful tower-studded valleys of Svaneti, before returning to the lowlands to head across the breakaway republic of Abkhazia and into Russia.

The two days I spent riding to Kutaisi, along the main east-west Georgian highway, were fairly dreadful in terms of cycling. The traffic was intense, full of aggressive lunatics in Ladas, the scenery was indifferent, and it spent much of both days raining. On the first night, I found myself staying in a room in a holiday dacha in an old Soviet spa town called Sorami, surrounded by quite lovely pine forests. I was glad to be indoors, as most of the afternoon and night saw an enormous downpour hammering down. The second night, in Kutaisi, I stayed with a cheerful Georgian family in their homestay near the cathedral of Kutaisi, which looked lovely from a distance but proved to be a ruin under scaffolding when I got closer.

From this point onwards, cycling got a lot harder. Two years ago, when I was last in Georgia, I rode up the three main roads leading into the Caucasus in eastern Georgia, but didn't have time to explore the most famous area in the Georgian mountains, the remote region of Svaneti. This year's swing through Georgia was largely planned in order to remedy this omission. I set off from Kutaisi on a four-day blitzkrieg mission to get to Svaneti and back. I chose to take a back road, up through the town of Lentekhi and Lower Svaneti, then up over the 2620-metre-high Zagar Pass and into Upper Svaneti. Most tourists skip this route, as few jeeps take this remote and poorly-maintained track, and I thought it would be good to take advantage of having my own wheels to explore it.

The ride to Lentekhi was remarkably easy, with pavement most of the way, despite reports to the contrary. I started out passing through the grand old sanatorium town of Tskaltubo, where the local police kindly escorted me through the unsigned maze of roads that made up the town. The road did not climb as much as I would have hoped in elevation, despite lots of annoying ups and downs over foothills to get into the right valley (the delightfully unpronounceable Tskhenistkali). There were beautiful sections of deep gorge, with walls of rock and forests of oak and hornbeam soaring overhead. Eventually the valley relented and a broad basin of agricultural villages flanked the road, with prosperous-looking orchards not yet bearing fruit. I got more attention from the police in Tsageri, and then, as the day ended and I found a secluded riverside campsite, another group of police showed up to make sure I was OK. I appreciated the concern, but not the fact that they returned at midnight and 5 am to wake me up and make sure I was OK. It was not a restful night!

The next day was brutally hard, as the road deteriorated into little more than a mudslide and I fought my way uphill past the zone of permanent settlement. I passed a deserted village (nobody had moved uphill for the summer grazing season yet) and camped at the head of a magnificent valley, with a huge peak soaring into the (rain)clouds and an immense glacier providing the start of a rushing mountain river. Unfortunately, this idyllic spot's charms were dampened by the unrelenting rain that had dogged me all afternoon, the horrific state of the jeep track (a pass by a bulldozer had only made it worse; I pushed the bike for a couple of hours, unable to ride) and the view just downstream. There, in the midst of this majestic scenery, the Soviets had put some sort of industrial operation, perhaps related to road construction, perhaps related to the military. It lay in ruins, surrounded by thousands of rusting metal barrels which coloured the soil and water. I have no idea what was in them, but it didn't look at all healthy. I stayed well uphill of this zone of poison and slept well on a bed of grass and spectacular wildflowers.

The next morning I awoke to yet more rain, and spent the morning pushing my bike up over the last few hundred vertical metres of the Zagar Pass, a wonderful area of pristine meadows, birds, frogs and wildflowers. There was still a lot of snow around, but luckily the bulldozer had cleared a path through the patches that had covered the road until a few days previously. When I finally reached the top, the descent proved to be almost as hard as the ascent, trying to keep my bike under control on the rockfall that was the road surface. The track would disappear periodically into bomb-crater-sized mud puddles that were remarkably hard to ride. Eventually, brakes locked, I slithered into Ushguli, the highest village in Svaneti, bristling with the medieval-looking defensive towers that make Svaneti legendary. The towers were there, but it was raining so hard it was hard to take out my camera and try to capture them. Eventually I gave up the struggle and headed down a narrow, gloomy gorge where the Ingur river starts its long march to the Black Sea. I bottomed out at another pretty, rainy village, then climbed up over a small pass to a tributary valley where it stopped raining for the first time in over 24 hours. The view down into this valley was enchanting, a series of villages, each boasting a half-dozen or more Svan towers, under the green slopes of the valley's forests and meadows, adorned with yellow rhododendron blooms. I took my share of photos, then bumped down to find a place to stay in Mestia, the region's capital.

Refreshed by some wonderful cooking at Nino's homestay, I set off early the next morning for what I hoped would be an epic day. The road down to Zugdidi had been described to me by locals as "normalno", but it was an endless morass of mud and construction for the first 90 km. The first few dozen kilometres gave me great views, as the sun had come out to reveal the high peaks of the Caucasus. I was particularly taken by the view of Ushba, the emblematic Svan summmit. After this, the road dropped into the deep gorge of the Ingur that swallowed up all expansive vistas. I kept soldiering on grimly, and eventually, halfway around a huge hydroelectric reservoir, I saw the first real pavement I'd seen in three days. Heartened by this, as well as by a couple of cups of wine and some food that were forced on me by a merry birthday party beside the road, I dug deep and rode hard until 9 pm, through the richest, lushest part of Georgia, getting to Zugdidi at dusk. I ate an enormous meal and slept like the dead after ten and a half hours and 140 km over terrible roads.

I awoke feeling surprisingly fresh and rode off to the Abkhaz border the next morning. I had waited months to get my permission to enter this self-declared independent state (it broke away from Georgia during a bloody 1992-93 war that saw 70% of the population flee to Georgia), and I was slightly nervous about the various visa and border-crossing problems that could arise. I needn't have worried. After a rather gruff interrogation from the Georgians, I made my way across my companion for the past two days, the Ingur River, and entered Abkhazia, unsure what to expect.

Southern Abkhazia, or at least what I could see of it through the steady rain, was a largely depopulated wasteland, with nature reclaiming hundreds of abandoned houses and overgrown orchards. I rode along, hoping to get to Sukhumi before 6 pm in order to get my visa at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. I showed up at 5, but was told that the bank at which I had to pay my fee was closed, and could I come back on Monday? I gritted my teeth, found an overpriced hotel, and settled in for the best sleep I'd had since the beginning of the trip.

I decided to try my luck at the northern border without a visa, and so set off to Gagra the next morning, after finding the only money-changer open on a Saturday. Abkhazia is off the world banking grid, so no ATMs and credit cards work there, and there are no private moneychangers. It added up to a late departure, but the ride to Gagra was short and easy, even with a stop to see the impressive Russian Orthodox monastery in Novy Afon (New Athos, as in Mt. Athos in Greece). Gagra was throbbing with Russian tourists, and I found a little homestay, went for a slightly disappointing swim, a satisfying supper and a beer at a nightclub that was full of Russian families dancing away with their children until the power went out all over town and we all went home to sleep at 10:30.

Yesterday I set off from Gagra for the border somewhat apprehensive. Would I be sent back to Sukhumi to collect my visa? Would I be told that I couldn't cross the border at all? (When I applied for my visa, I was told that it was forbidden to use Abkhazia to cross between Georgia and Russia.) As it turned out, after a pleasant seaside ride, with lovely vistas of forested mountains dropping into the Black Sea, the Abkhaz never even looked at me as I followed a line of Russian cars leading to the Russian passport post. A quick stamp, and I was into Russia.

Sochi is hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, and the road leading from the border to Sochi is an endless construction zone that made riding very unpleasant. I was pleased to make it into town unscathed. Terri is joining me tomorrow for the next leg of this ride, so I will have a couple of days off the bike, good for letting tired muscles rebuild. Sochi so far seems like an overpriced, underwhelming beach resort full of the Russian nouveaux-riches. I am told that the coastline improves as you head northwest along the coast, so I'm hoping for better things soon.

More worryingly, I found a series of cracks in my rear wheel rim yesterday. This means that the wheel will have to be rebuilt with a new rim. I have to find the local bike mechanic this afternoon and make sure that he can do the job. This is the second rim that I have trashed on this bike; the first one was probably a freak flaw in the rim, but this wheel was never as robust as it should have been, and I'm a bit unhappy at the Swiss mechanics who looked it over and declared it fine a few weeks ago.

So from here, the plan is to ride through the Russian Riviera to the Crimea, crossing into the Ukraine, and then taking a ferry from Yalta to Odessa before riding into Trans-Dniestria, Moldova and Romania. I'm reading ahead in my Lonely Planet, getting excited about upcoming destinations. I can't wait!

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

The Gori Details

2011-06-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

June 10, Gori

I have never started a bike trip so slothfully. After two days of indolence in Tbilisi, I rode all of 85 km yesterday, getting here to Gori, Stalin's birthplace, and promptly took a day off. In my defence, I had planned to get here early enough in the day to go to the infamous Stalin Museum before it closed, but heat, hills, my own slowness and a flat tire right on the outskirts of town put paid to that plan, and once I had to stay here half the day, I decided to make a day of it and see the fortress of Uplistsikhe too.

To recap from the beginning, I got to Tbilisi late on Monday afternoon, after bad weather made me miss a connection in Munich. After too few hours sleeping in the luxurious Movenpick Hotel bed that Lufthansa gave me, I flew through Istanbul to Tbilisi and went to bed exhausted.

My two full days in Tbilisi were great fun. The last time I was here, 2 years ago, I arrived shattered from a series of big mountain passes on the bicycle, so I really just sat around and ate. This time I found the energy to explore the restored Old Town (quite Persian in its feel, although also a bit too cute for its own good), soak in the famous hot springs that were Tbilisi's original reason for existence (Pushkin's favourite bath of his life happened there) and look at the impressive collection of gold and silver ornaments at the remarkably empty National Museum. I also ate lots of good food (khinkali, khachapuri and shashlik) and had perhaps one or two too many beers the last night while listening to live music at the Irish pub Dublin.

I have been feeling very tired since the end of the school year, perhaps relief from tension, and so this was probably not the best way to start my bike trip: already tired, and with too few hours of quality sleep. Whatever the reason, it was a slow, surprisingly tiring first day from Tbilisi to Gori. I took a back road south of the Mtkvari river, and so at least missed the appalling post-Soviet driving on the main road. A tourist I met called the way Georgians drive "apocalyptic", and he's not far wrong: weaving randomly around, taking corners at speeds incompatible with the miserable brakes and tires that their antiquated cars sport, never signalling, and treating traffic lights as a mild suggestion. I was tired by the time I got within sight of Gori, only to run over a thorn and lose 30 minutes of Stalin-gazing to repairing the flat tire.

The museum today was disturbing. A lot of money and effort was put into the museum in Soviet times, building a big edifice vaguely reminiscent of El Escorial, putting the old shack in which young Iosif Jugashvili spent his first few years under an Egyptian-style temple enclosure, and building up a comprehensive hagiography of Saint Joseph Stalin. There are a few glaring omissions in the story of The Man Who Saved Russia And The World. Look as I might, I could not see a single picture of Trotsky, Stalin's rival whom he had ice-picked to death in his Mexican exile. There was not a single mention of the Ukrainian and Kazakh famines, the Great Terror of the 1930s, the Gulag or any other possible character flaws. Lots of Father of the Nation photos, but no mention that most of the people in pictures with him in the 1920s would be shot in the purges a decade later. Only at the very end, after the room with his death mask in a circular Pantheon-like enclosure, is there a brief display of books about Stalin, not all of which are complimentary. But then outside, at the gift shop, they seem to be doing a brisk trade in 20-dollar busts, 15-dollar beer glasses and commemorative plates. It made me fairly nauseous, especially the faux-religious atmosphere (shared with the Maosoleum in Beijing and the tomb of Ho Chin Minh in Hanoi).

The ruins at Uplistsikhe, on the other hand, were much better than advertised. Like Vardzia and Davit Gereja, these are cave churches hollowed out of the soft sandstone cliffs beside the river outside Gori. The rock is soft enough that most of the ceilings have collapsed, but the walls and floors still stand, showing both early Christian churches (as in Cappadocia, in Turkey) and pre-Christian temples. It was pretty and breezy and there were great views, so it was a lovely spot to wash away the post-Stalin-Museum aftertaste from my mouth.

Tomorrow, it's back to the bike, riding towards Svaneti. I finally have my Abkhazian "visa" so I should be good to ride through that breakaway republic and out the other side to Sochi. If that doesn't work, I'll have to hop a bus to Trabzon in Turkey and catch a ferry from there to Sochi.

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

The Freedom of the Eastern Roads

2011-06-04T05:15:00.001-07:00

Leysin, Switzerland, June 4

The school year has come to an end, and while I need to put up some pictures and stories from the spring term and the great cycling that I've enjoyed, it's time to talk briefly about this summer's upcoming travels.

I'm flying to Tbilisi, Georgia tomorrow evening, with my trusty Rocky Mountain bicycle, ready for two and half months of travelling the eastern fringe of Europe. I love having a long, continuous block of time for travel, and the summer vacations here at Leysin American School are ideal for that. I also love filling in blanks on my personal map of the world, and the east of Europe, particularly the ex-Soviet fringe, is terra incognita for me for the most part. I should, if all goes well, visit eleven new countries (nine real countries, and two pseudostates--Abkhazia and Trans-Dniestria), bringing me over the 100-country mark in terms of my lifetime total. After this summer, the only European countries that I won't have visited at least once will be Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Finland and (randomly) Slovenia.

So the plan is to fly to Tbilisi tomorrow and ride up to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, from where I will return to Leysin on August 18th. The projected itinerary is the following:

Tbilisi
Svaneti
Abkhazia
Sochi (Russia)
Kerch (Ukraine)
Crimea
Ferry to Odessa
Odessa
Transdniestria
Moldova
N. Romania
Hungary
Slovakia
Lvov (Ukraine)
W. Belarus
Lithuania
Latvia
Estonia

It should be about 5500 km or so of cycling, depending on exact routes. I may also, if I have enough time, nip into the funny little Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (the former East Prussian city of Konigsberg) on the way out of Vilnius.

I'm looking forward to the trip a lot. It has been a tiring school year here, and I need to clear out the mental and emotional cobwebs, and I find the road and the simplicity and discipline which it imposes is perfect for just that. I just finished reading a meticulously researched, compelling and somewhat depressing book called Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder. It explores the mass killings perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler in the lands between Russia and Germany from 1932 to 1947. My route this summer basically rolls over and through the Bloodlands, making for a slightly grim theme tying together the various countries along the route.

I hope to keep the blog updated at least weekly, although that may depend a bit on computer access and internet quality. I hope that the pictures, maps, stats and stories keep you entertained as you follow the blog.

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

A Disappointing Winter

2011-03-30T01:54:00.000-07:00

Leysin, March 30, 2011

It's a grey, rainy day and Leysin is swathed in a veil of cloud that makes it feel as though my mountain eyrie is completely alone in the world. Quite pretty, very uninviting for outdoor activities, and so a perfect day to reflect on the last three months here in the Swiss Alps, while listening to a backlog of BBC and CBC radio podcasts. (Yes, I am a nerd!)

When I last updated this blog (yes, Kent, I am still the world's laziest blogger!), the winter term here at Leysin American School was about to begin. I was looking forward to it, as Tuesdays and Thursdays during the winter are half-days for classes, ending at lunchtime, followed by afternoons on the ski slopes. It sounded idyllic, and, being a huge fan of skiing, I was looking forward to being on the slopes four days a week, plus a few evenings of skinning up the Berneuse for a nocturnal ski down.

In fact, the winter turned out to be a colossal disappointment. After a beautiful snowfall on Christmas Eve, it simply stopped snowing. In Leysin, it was almost two months before it snowed again, although it did rain once or twice. Leysin's ski slopes were appalling: icy strips of artificial snow, frequently soggy and wet, with rocks peeking through. In addition to not having any new snow, it was also remarkably warm, sometimes hot, throughout January and early February. On February 6th and 7th, I took pictures of some of our students sunbathing in hammocks, and having class outdoors. On February 12th, I had a great bike ride to Interlaken, through the ski resort of Gstaad, with barely a flake of snow to be seen anywhere.

It was not just Leysin that suffered, although we had probably the sunniest, warmest weather. Most of Switzerland also had an almost completely snow-free winter. I did go out skiing a few times, searching for that elusive endangered species, snow. I had a few good days at the nearest high-altitude resort, Glacier 3000, up above Diablerets, about a 30-minute drive from Leysin. It went bankrupt a few years ago and was bought by a few Gstaad residents, including Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone. The slopes on top of the glacier are generally not terribly steep, but between wind and very localized snowfall, there was often fresh powder up top. As well, the steeper slopes of the Combe d'Audon were open sometimes, and when they were in powder, they were truly excellent, despite the irritatingly long series of lifts to get back to the top.

I went out on a ski tour to Le Metailler, a 3000-metre mountain south of the resort of Super Nendaz, in early February, but, although we were up high, and although the views were wonderful, the snow was mushy soup full of rocks. I did a very informative avalanche course with a local mountain guide, Roger Payne, at Glacier 3000 (since there wasn't enough snow in Leysin to even pretend that there could be an avalanche).

I went with Terri to the lovely surroundings of the Gemmipass, up above Leukerbad, and had a great weekend playing on our inflatable Airboards. Another weekend, we hiked up the snowed-in road to the top of the Grand St. Bernard Pass, had soup and tea at the Hospice run by the local monks, and airboarded back down.

Mostly I played squash and rode my bicycle, trying to make the most of a bad situation. My friends in BC and Japan kept e-mailing me to tell me about the epic snow years they were having, while I looked out at the flowers blooming in February and wondered what the hell I was doing in the Alps.

A three-day weekend in late February had been pencilled in for some skiing, but with the drought continuing, I decided to add to my country count instead, and flew up to Copenhagen to visit my Yangon tennis friend Hans, who now works for the WHO in Copenhagen. It was cold and wintry and clear, and I had a great time, wandering the streets, visiting the Little Mermaid, gawking at the amazing displays in the flagship Lego store, and playing tennis with Hans. Neither a case of being poisoned by a dodgy kebab (in Denmark?!?!) nor the uniformly high prices put me off enjoying my 94th country.

When I got back, it had actually snowed, and I had one week rather like the ones I had envisaged: skiing Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in Leysin, powder at Glacier 3000 on Saturday, and snowboarding on Sunday in fresh powder in Leysin. The following week, I toured up the Pic Chaussy with my sister Audie and a couple of my colleagues, and despite there not having been snow for three days, and despite the Pic Chaussy being perhaps the most popular ski touring peak in French-speaking Switzerland, we still had fresh tracks on the way down. That weekend, I did two ski tours near Leysin with Terri, one up the col beside the Pic Chaussy (some fantastic cold, deep powder on the shady north-facing slopes) and an eye-opener of the possibilities near Diablerets, when we toured from Isenau to L'Etivaz. A week after the last snowfall, and we still had great snow. I feel that if we could find that sort of snow in the worst winter in years in the Alps, next year I will have better ideas of where to go hunt elusive powder.

A final weekend before the two-week spring break looked unpromising for snow in Switzerland, so Terri and I drove through the Grand St. Bernard tunnel to Aosta, Italy and its excellent food and general cheeriness. It was a much snowier world down there, and we had a decent day of skiing in Pila, before spending the next day walking and lunching in the snowy, pretty valley of Cogne as great fat flakes of snow belted down out of us. I was excited at the prospects of snow back in Switzerland, but as soon as the car poked its nose out of the tunnel into Switzerland, it became obvious that, as had happened several times this winter, the snow clouds had only peeked over the mountains into Switzerland before turning back again into snowy Italy. In places near the Grand St. Bernard, snow levels were only 20% of their historical average this winter.

It amazes me that after a winter spent living in a ski resort in the Alps, I only once went to one of the famous Swiss ski resorts (Zermatt), since most weekends the snow was so miserable that it wasn't worth driving a couple of hours for more rotten snow. I certainly hope next ski season is better!

For the spring break, I had tossed up the idea of abandoning the Alps in favour of the Persian Gulf, but the occasional snowfall that we had started to receive made me decide to stay in the Alps for two weeks of ski touring. I planned two five-day trips: first the Wildstrubel Route (click on "Prospectus" for the route) from Glacier 3000 to Kandersteg, then, after a day off, the classic Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt.

The Wildstrubel Route was fantastic. With my colleague Sion, I skied east under perfectly bluebird skies, along the crest of the Pre-Alpine Ridge, bagging a series of 3000-metre peaks and skiing down through fresh powder (the heavy snowfall the day before we set off helped make for fresh tracks every day). It was a seductive lifestyle: an early breakfast, five or six hours of skinning up and then skiing down peaks, arriving at our comfortable Swiss Alpine Club huts in the early afternoon, having a beer and some rosti, taking an afternoon nap, eating a lavish evening meal, and then tucking up into bed at an early hour, ready for another day of the same. There were 19 people following the same route and same itinerary, and it was fun getting to know them and sharing ideas and travel tips for the mountains. The fourth and fifth days, around the Laemerrenhutte and the Gemmipass, were the highlights, with fantastic views of the High Alps and the best powder descents, with the Rothorn providing probably the single best ski run of the entire winter.

After a lazy day in Leysin, I changed ski partners and headed to Chamonix with my colleague Paul. The plan was to spend five days ski touring between the twin meccas of Alpine sports, Chamonix and Zermatt. The weather forecast looked less brilliant than it had for the Wildstrubel Route, and so it proved. Getting to Chamonix on the little train from Martigny was a highlight of the trip, as we chugged up the spectacular Trient Gorge. Chamonix was a shock to the system after the quiet and beauty of the Wildstrubel trip, with the train filled to overflowing with hordes of skiers, and the city pulsing with the energy of tens of thousands of tourists. After a less than restful night in a local dive, we set off for the Grand Montet lift, where we found ourselves in the worst lift lines I have ever seen anywhere. We got to the bottom by 9 am, and skied off the top at 11 am. For such a mega-resort, Chamonix has some pretty antiquated and poorly-designed lift infrastructure.

It was hot as we skied down a bumpy, unpleasant slope to the Argentiere glacier and put on our skins for the climb up to the Col du Chardonnet. The climb was relatively easy, but the weather clouded over and it began to snow. At the top of the col, it became apparent that we had been misinformed about the existence of a fixed rope, and our short glacier rope was clearly too short to get us down the 100 metres of 45-degree icy slope below us. We got halfway down by abseiling on another group's rope, before they abandoned us halfway down, and it took a while to be rescued by the guides from a second group. We arrived at the first day's cabane chastened, late and tired.

The second day was more of the same, with an advertised two-hour climb and descent to Champex taking five hours, as we ice-climbed up a hard, steep slope to the Fenetre d'Arpette, having missed the start of an easier col. By the time we skied down rotten, bumpy slush in the Val d'Arpette into Champex, we had missed the last bus to take us to Verbier and the next leg of the tour. With the weather forecast looking gloomy, and our confidence shaken by two epic, rather unpleasant days, we decided to abandon the rest of the Haute Route and leave it for another time.

After the spring break, less than two months of actual school remain, and I am busy trying to line up my summer's travels. I have bought a ticket to Tbilisi, in Georgia, and I'm trying to get my Abkhazian, Russian and Belorussian visas for a bicycle ride from Tbilisi, across most of the Eastern European and post-Soviet states that I have yet to visit, to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. I'm really looking forward to this, as it will take me to a few places that I've wanted to visit for years: Svaneti, the Crimea, Transylvania and the Tatra mountains. I will certainly keep the blog updated during this trip, and maybe even before then, as the school year draws towards its close.

A look back at my time in Leysin so far

2011-01-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

January 3, 2010

It’s one of the first days of 2011 and I’m at home, nursing an extraordinarily painful tailbone, memento of a heavy fall on an icy slope two days ago while trying to re-learn snowboarding. It's probably not broken, but the bruising and swelling make any sort of sitting down, standing up or lunging forward pretty agonizing. Luckily (in some sense), snow conditions are so poor that I don't feel as though I'm missing much by not being out there every day.

I still need to write up a bit about my trip to Newfoundland this summer with my mother, Audie, Saakje and Serge, but that will have to wait for another day to do it justice.

The past four months have hurtled past rather like a luge track, and it’s only now, two weeks since classes finished, that I’m starting to feel alive again. Teaching can be a draining experience at the best of times, and when my students are neither particularly gifted (in general) nor particularly motivated, running through the donkey work necessary to run a class can be mentally pretty tough. My surroundings, perched on a mountain surrounded by higher peaks in the Swiss Alps, is pretty spectacular and the recreation opportunities they provide have been a sanity-saver since my arrival here 4 months ago, but I still find myself a bit tired and de-motivated as 2010 winds down.

My friend Kent, who visited me at the end of August, called me “the world’s laziest blogger” in a post on his excellent (and un-lazy) blog The Dromomaniac. The charge is true; keeping my blog up-to-date has been one of the casualties of teaching. Now that I have some time to myself, I should really bring you, my faithful and long-suffering readers, up-to-date on my travels this fall.

Part of the problem with living in a Western European country is that it’s not really very exotic. Searching for the unfamiliar is one of the main motivations I have for travel, and so I have perhaps travelled less than I would have otherwise. As well, not having a car is an impediment to travel here, despite the extensive public transport network. I hope to remedy that later this year, although used cars are more expensive and less reliable than in Japan, where most of my car ownership and driving has been done up until now.

Leysin is a great location for cycling, with lots of mountain passes available for riding, and small tertiary roads and logging trails to escape from the heavy traffic. I tried to get out regularly for the first two months I was here, although I should have done better at taking advantage of the terrain. One of my favourite rides was in early September, when I rode down to Aigle (a very rapid 1000-metre vertical drop) and then up to Villars (another ski resort/international school town nearby), over the Col de la Croix, down to Les Diablerets, up and over the Col du Pillon, down to the gorgeous glitterati gathering place of Gstaad, along a pretty valley to Chateau d’Oex, over the Col des Mosses, down to Sepey and a final 500-vertical-metre climb back into Leysin. By the end of the day, I had climbed over 3000 vertical metres and covered part of a stage of next year’s Tour de Romandie, a professional cycling race used as a tune-up for the Tour de France.

I also did a bit of cycling down along the Rhone Valley, where a well-designed bicycle path carries cyclists through forests and along the Rhone, far from the maddening traffic of the main roads. A lovely ride up to Morgins and down to Evian with fellow teachers was another great day in the saddle. Perhaps my favourite cycling of the fall, though, was a weekend spent riding through Burgundy with Terri, the Kiwi teacher I have been seeing here in Leysin, reliving my time as a Butterfield and Robinson cycling guide. I had forgotten how picture perfect the medieval stone villages and high-end vineyards are, and, to cap it off, we stayed in an atmospheric old castle, the Chateau Bellecroix.

I also played some good quality tennis and squash here; there are a number of keen and competitive players at LAS, including one teacher who played collegiate tennis and who subsequently was a teaching pro for five years. Leysin is also a perfect spot for running, with forests and fields traversed by a network of trails perfect for trotting along.

With my sister Audie eight months pregnant, she and her boyfriend Serge and another friend Daniel and I headed out to the mountains one Saturday to climb the nearby Dents du Midi, the 3000-metre peak that dominates the nearby stretch of the Rhone Valley. It was a long slog, but the weather was perfect and the views from the summit absolutely epic. It couldn’t have been a more perfect day out in the mountains. Some of our students were on their way the following weekend to climb the mountain

I got away from Switzerland briefly in October when I flew on EasyJet to Belgium to visit my friend Wido and his family. Wido is working for a company in Geel, a small town in the Flemish countryside, and it was great to see him again after a number of years. I spent a day poking around the city of Antwerp, which I had never seen before, and another playing tennis with Wido and his two boys, followed by a long ride through the countryside on the well-organized bicycle paths that run everywhere. The weather was perfect, and it was all in all the best possible way to spend a rare long weekend.

Shortly thereafter, I took part in a couple of genuinely Swiss festivals. First of all I made it, slightly late, to the desalpage of Etivaz, a celebration of the seasonal migration of the cows that produce the famous local cheese from the high summer pastures to the warmer lowlands. The next day I went with my mother and Terri to another cow-centred event, the famous cowfights of Martigny. Swiss cows (the females; we’re not talking about bulls here, although these cows are bigger than most bulls I’ve ever seen) are bred to be territorial and aggressive, and in early October the local farmers bring their biggest and butchest to the 2000-year-old Roman amphitheatre of Martigny to test their alpha dominance against other cows. Ten or so of these bovine behemoths are turned loose together, and after lots of ritualized snorting and pawing at the ground, eventually pairs of cows lock horns and the losers are escorted back out of the ring. I can’t say that I followed all the niceties of the rules, but I don’t think the crowd, big on biceps, mustaches, tattoos, motorcycles and wine, did much better than I did. It was a fascinating display, and one that I’m not sure occurs in many other parts of the world. It was a nice physical-cultural combination to have a wonderful bicycle ride along the Rhone to get to and from the Combat of the Queens.

I accompanied a group of high school students on a school trip to an Outward Bound centre in the Bavarian Alps in Schwangau, Germany, a few kilometres from Mad King Ludwig’s fantastical Neuschwanstein castle at Fussen. The setting was excellent, and we had heavy snow to make the surroundings even more fairytale-like. The students were, by and large, not terribly enthusiastic or good company, but a few of them enjoyed it. We did some rock-climbing, a ropes course and built a home-made flying fox across a forest ravine. The highlight (for me) was a three-day hike up to stay in a back-country hut and a climb to the summit of a nearby mountain through a wonderful sugar-frosted treescape. I think the mountain guide and I enjoyed the walk far more than our seven students. I was struck, not for the first time, by the fact that the children of the hyper-rich seem to lack a great deal when it comes to motivation, determination and toughness. A wander through Neuschwanstein on the way home and an evening soaking in 19th-century thermal baths added a veneer of cultural to this “cultural trip”. Having our van engine crack and die on the way home, necessitating a long pit stop and then piling everyone into one overcrowded bus for the long haul back to Leysin was some sort of icing on the cake of this experience.

In mid-November, I headed south of the Alps on a one-day marathon expedition to see a soccer match, the fabled Milan Derby between AC Milan (Silvio Berlusconi’s team, the most successful Italian team of all time) and Inter Milan (champion for the last 5 seasons and last year’s European champions). It was a long drive, and the weather in Milan was rainy and grim, but the atmosphere at the game was electrifying without there being any real threat of violence. The chanting, the flares, the banners and the cheering was great to see, although the game itself was a bit of a damp squib, with AC Milan winning 1-0 on an early penalty (scored by a former Inter star, Zlatan Ibrahimovic) and Inter barely making a single meaningful attempt on goal. The drive back was interminable, and I was glad I had packed my pillow so that I could sleep most of the way back. We arrived at 3:15 am and I had to be at work by 7:40 the next morning. Sleepy times! The game was a definite turning point for the Italian soccer season, with AC Milan now 13 points ahead of Inter and marching on inexorably towards the league title.

Now that it’s Christmas break, my family, who have been gathering in Switzerland over the past couple of months rather like a tribe of steppe nomads, have spent the holidays together for the first time in 20 years. It’s been great fun: building a gingerbread house (or actually, a model of an entire street), luging on crazy Airboard inflatable luges, skinning up the mountain behind us, drinking wine, playing cards and board games and generally enjoying life. As I age, I realize that gatherings like this might not happen too many more times, so it’s been important to take advantage of having everyone around. The only downer has been a distinct lack of snow, curtailing real skiing. I hope the new year brings a lot more frequent powder dumps!

So as 2011 begins, I hope to find more time and inspiration for writing and travel, and more powder for skiing. I hope that the new year finds you, my readers, enjoying the things that are important in your lives. Bonne annee!

Italy Retrospective--December 2009, January 2010

2010-08-15T18:40:00.000-07:00

Leysin, Switzerland, August 25, 2010

I'm just going to post a brief summary of some of the things that Joanne and I saw in our two-part tour of Italy. The first part, visiting Trieste, Aquilea, Venice and Rome (before flying off to Libya), was great fun. We had places to stay in Venice (my friend Manuel lent us his apartment steps from the Ponte Rialto) and Rome (Joanne's cousin), so we had good bases for exploration. The second part was a crazy road trip in a rented Alfa Romeo, flying into Catania from Malta, circling Sicily, then driving up to the Naples area before the long drive back to Joanne's Aunt Severina's house in Friuli.

I had been to Venice twice before, but I had never enjoyed it as much as this time. Having a place to stay, and visiting in the lowest of low seasons, made a huge difference. We didn't go into lots of museums and churches; we'd done that on previous visits. Mostly we wandered around taking pictures and exploring the backstreets, trying to get more of a feel for the city. Having just finished my Silk Road bike trip, I was keen to see Marco Polo's house, but it burned down about 400 years ago and now there's only the site, the Corte di Milione, to see. I loved the colours in the low winter light, especially with the reflections on the water in the lagoons.

Rome was great fun too, armed with a wonderful guidebook to the ancient ruins of the Eternal City. The last time I wandered around Rome, the ruins on the Palatine Hill weren't open, so they were completely new to me. The guidebook pointed me the way to a number of smaller ruins that I hadn't seen before, and helped me visualize the layers upon layers of history that make up the fabric of the city. Joanne loved the photographic opportunities, although she was distinctly unimpressed with the Vatican and the ostentatious wealth displayed by the Roman Catholic church.

After seeing part of the BBC travel series called Francesco's Italy: Top to Toe, we made time for the Galleria Borghese and its extraordinary collection of Baroque sculpture, particularly by Bernini. Sadly, cameras were forbidden inside. If you find yourself in Rome, you really should find time in your schedule for a visit to this gem. I had also hoped to visit the Domus Aurea, the underground rooms of Nero's vast palace that abuts the Colosseum, but we ran out of time. As the roof subsequently collapsed after heavy rain, closing the site for the foreseeable future, I now regret not visiting.

I also, with lots of help with Joanne, finally manage to track down the infamous rubber stamp in my passport, translating the information page into Arabic. You need this in order to get a Libyan visa, and it's almost impossible to find someone who will do this service. I had been searching for this stamp since Sofia, Bulgaria six weeks earlier, and it was just in the nick of time. I picked up my passport from a translation agency one day before we flew to Tripoli to start our Libyan tour, followed by our brief sojourn on Malta.

We returned to Italy in early January, when we flew from Malta to Catania. We had rented a small car over the internet, but when we got to the rental place, Joanne used her charm, blond hair and Italian skills to get us a slightly larger and much better car, an Alfa Romeo, which was our home base for the next two weeks. It also meant that we got to fulfil an old dream of ours, driving through Italy in an Alfa.

The plan was to spin around Sicily before heading north towards Friuli, via the Naples area (Campania), checking out the great classical ruins along the way. Sicily was one of the centres of the Greek world, known as Magna Graecia, and features some of the best-preserved Greek temples in the world.

We started off with a run up to Taormina. It was a tough job finding parking on New Year's Day in this popular resort. The weather was rainy and the scenery and ruins didn't inspire us too much; the peak of Mt. Etna was hidden from view by clouds. It was a pity, as I have a poster of a painting of Taormina by my favourite Hungarian painter, Csontvary, on my wall, and I had had very high hopes of spectacular views. On the drive back south, towards Siracusa, we passed by the offshore islands said to be the rocks hurled by the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus at the fleeing ships of Odysseus.

Siracusa, the ancient Syracuse, was quite nice. Syracuse was one of the largest, most powerful city states in the classical Mediterranean, and its extensive museum is chock-full of wonderful vases, statues and other art. We strolled around the ruined theatre and hippodrome, and drove out of town to see the large-scale walled fortifications that the city erected to ward off a Roman army in the late 3rd century BC. It didn't work, and the city was sacked in 211 BC, with one of the most notable casualties being the greatest Greek mathematician, Archimedes.

The next day, we drove inland from the south coast to visit the wonderful Baroque town of Modica. The town was destroyed in an earthquake in the 18th century and rebuilt in a riot of exuberant Baroque architecture. We saw plenty of wonderful, quirky detail in the balconies that overhang the stone streets of the town centre. It was only afterwards that we realized that we had forgotten to find what is rumoured to be the finest gelateria in all of Italy. We consoled ourselves with some great artisanal chocolate in Ragusa, then drove hell-for-leather towards Piazza Armerina and its extraordinary Roman mosaics, another great tip from Francesco's Italy.

I have seen lots of wonderful Roman and Byzantine mosaics all over the Mediterranean, but this was quite amazing for its scale and conception. The house, which seems to have been an Imperial hunting villa during the 3rd century AD, had floors completely covered with mosaics depicting hunting, and also the capture of live animals for the Roman circus. There are a dozen or more rooms, although some are closed for restoration, and we walked on overhead walkways to look down on the artwork. It was pretty breathtaking stuff, and deserves to be better known, although I'm not sure it could handle many more tourists on its narrow walkways.

We drove west along the coast, ending up in a campground near Agrigento, ancient Akragas. The next day we devoted to the wonderful Valley of the Temples (a strange name, as they sit atop a ridge), one of the best-preserved ensembles of Doric temples anywhere. The Parthenon, for all its fame, can hardly hold a candle to the Greek temples of Sicily and Campania. We started off in the museum, but the real highlight were the three best-preserved temples, which were like a course in the history of Doric architecture. The temple of Juno and the temple of Concordia are remarkably well-preserved, with Concordia almost completely intact thanks to its conversion into a Christian church in AD 597. The ruins of the temple of Zeus are impressive for their sheer scale, although they're hardly standing. Lots of other more fragmentary ruins testify to the size of the city in ancient times. Nowadays the town is apparently better known for its dominance by the Mafia.

That evening, we drove onwards to the next ancient site along the coast, ancient Selinunte. It was the most westerly Greek colony on Sicily; further west was the territory of the Carthaginians, and to the north were the indigenous and slightly mysterious Elymians. It has a wonderful seaside location, and walking among the ancient stones on a sunny day, with a sea breeze, was absolutely magical. The ruins came in two lots: a few enormous temples close to the parking lot, and a more distant ruined city core with a couple of temples. The size of the nearer temples was absolutely colossal, and the sight of the fully reconstructed Temple E, surrounded by the scattered enormous blocks of Temples F and G, was particularly photogenic. I loved the walk between the two sets of ruins, although Joanne rather wished we had taken the little shuttle train.

That same day we had a double-header of great temple ruins, as we headed to Segesta, located on a high plateau inland from the coast. There are really only two ruins of note here in the capital of the Elymians. The Doric temple is magnificent in its setting, even though it was never completed. The hilltop theatre has a magnificent view over the plateau down towards the sea, which would make for a great play-going experience.

From here we drove into the big bad city of Palermo, once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe, especially under the rule of Arab kings and then the Normans, when it was the second largest city in Western Europe after Cordoba. Driving into town was more than a bit hair-raising, and we got lost despite our satellite navigation system. We parked the car and had a wander around the historic centre of the city, past the great Norman Gothic cathedral and the palace. Although the architecture is impressive, much of the centre is falling into ruins, a stark contrast to most of the other cities we had seen on Sicily. The usual explanation for this is that urban renewal money after the war was siphoned off by the Mafia and never reached the centre.

The next morning we visited the cathedral of Monreale, with its exquisite, large-scale mosaics. I loved them, although Joanne found them a bit over the top and too religious. Much of the Bible, both old and new testaments, is depicted in luminous gold, making for an overwhelming impression.

We spent the rest of the day driving east along the north coast, stopping very briefly at Cefalu to take a picture of the pretty coastal town, and then at the fragmentary ruins at Tyndaris. Although situated in a pretty location above the sea, and with an interesting history, the ruins could not really hold a candle to the wonderful series of ruins we'd seen up until then, and we left fairly quickly. Nowadays Tyndaris is better known for a church which attracts hordes of religious pilgrims.

That evening we made it to Messina and, unable to find a campground that was open during the winter, we ended up taking the ferry to the mainland and camping just up the Calabrian coast at Rosarno in perhaps the most beautiful campground of the trip, high above the ocean. Sadly, the next day, just after we had left town for Naples, the city erupted in a four-day race riot orchestrated by the local mob, the 'Ndrangheta, in which the local Italians chased out all the African migrant workers who usually pick fruit and work in factories, doing jobs that Italians refuse to do. The Italian press spent the rest of our time in Italy hand-wringing about what was wrong with Italian society that such an outrageous event could have occurred.

I had imagined that Sicily would be the poorest part of Italy, but I was, Palermo excepted, wrong about this. Instead Calabria looked a lot poorer, and the Naples area was absolutely dismal, with urban and suburban blight wherever we went. The city was a sea of garbage and urban decay, with suburbs that alternated between sad and menacing. We stayed at a campground in Pompeii, well outside the downtown, and after a good night's sleep in our tent, we moved inside to cabins as the heavens opened in a four-day downpour. The only drawback to being warm and dry was that we discovered the cabins were used by local prostitutes to turn tricks, resulting in some interesting late-night background noises.

Our four days of sightseeing were jam-packed with great things to see, although the rain took some of the fun out of photographing what we saw. We began with Pompeii, a place that I had skipped 21 years before in favour of Herculaneum. No place in the world better captures the feeling of a Roman city than these ruins, entombed in ash and mud in AD 79. Almost all the wonderful ruins that I've tramped through over the years have the problem that walls are not left standing to any great height, meaning that most of the city's urban fabric has to be imagined, rather than being seen. Pompeii, buried to quite a depth by the eruption of Vesuvius (a much smaller mountain than I had thought) lets us see the first storey and sometimes even the second storey of Roman houses, complete with frescoes, graffiti and mosaics on the walls. Much of the ruins are, sadly, out of bounds, but enough is open to allow a full impression of a prosperous Roman provincial town frozen in time. I particularly liked the brothel, and the amazing mosaic of Alexander the Great facing the Persian emperor Darius III in battle.

Herculaneum is a much smaller site, but even more deeply buried, allowing for even more detail on the upper stories. I liked Herculaneum a great deal, and the obscure villa, probably belonging to the emperor Nero's family, in Torre Annunziata was a great find. Torre Annunziata itself, however, was one of the most dismal towns I've ever seen, and driving around the back streets, foiled by a one-way street system, we actually felt a little concerned for our own security.

We spent a day in Naples itself. The town looks like a poster child for a failed attempt at civilization, amazing since it was, in the 18th century, one of the great cities of Europe. We walked from the train station and its population of druggies and street crooks to the archaeological museum, one of the great collections of Roman antiquities in the world, rivalling those in Rome itself. Fantastic sculptures everywhere, but the real highlight was the collection of mosaics and frescoes from Pompeii. There's even a Secret Cabinet, where the collection of Roman erotica was kept hidden from Victorian eyes. On the way back to the train station, we ate pizza at the Trianon pizzeria, allegedly the finest in Naples and, by extension, the world. I was skeptical: pizza is pizza, I thought, but I was wrong. It was exquisite, and made up for the misery of the city itself.

Our last day was spent exploring the most northerly of the great Greek ruins of Italy, at Paestum, an hour's drive south of Naples along the coast. Although I thought that the temple at Segesta was the single best temple of the trip because of its hilltop setting, the three large standing temples at Paestum may be the best, or at least the most educational, ensemble that we saw. The temples, all from the 6th century BC, allow the visitor to trace the evolution of the Doric style from its overtly Egyptian early phase, with lotus capitals and swelling, bulbous columns, to the austere, formal perfection of the classic phase. In the museum, we saw very rare Greek wall paintings, from the elaborate local Greek cemeteries. My favourite showed a depiction of death, with a man's soul making a perfect swan dive into the waters of the river Styx.

It was, of course, raining heavily by the time we left, and so our tour of the Amalfi coast was less spectacular than it might have been. I had been skeptical of claims that this stretch of coast, along a peninsula south of Naples, is the most spectacular bit of scenery in Europe, but it did largely live up to its hype. The towering, vertiginous coast, with villages and towns clinging to its cliffs, was stunning and I wish we had had more time and better weather. It's hard to believe nowadays that tiny Amalfi once rivalled Venice, Genoa and Pisa for mastery of the seas in the 10th century.

We drove north, taking advantage of the only clear day in the forecast, all the way to San Vita al Tagliamento and Joanne's aunt's house. We spent a few days resting up, with a couple of side trips by car, up to the mountains of Forni di Sopra, and to Udine, looking for the tomb of the little-known 14th-century traveller Fra Odorico di Pordenone. The church containing it was always closed, but on the last day, I managed to cycle to Pordenone, on my newly rebuilt rear wheel, and see the tomb and its stained glass. Odorico travelled to China about 25 years after Marco Polo's return, and wrote a book about his exploits. He comes across as rather more religiously zealous and credulous than the Venetian, although curiously several of his stories about more outlandish bits of the world are the same as Polo's account.

And then it was time to leave; Joanne to fly back to Canada, and me to ride my bicycle into Venice, to Marco Polo's house. Joanne and Graydon's Excellent Alfa Romeo Tour of Italy had come to an end.

Bhutan Retrospective (April 2008)--Land of the Thunder Dragon

2010-06-26T07:36:00.000-07:00

Thunder Bay, June 25

I can’t believe that more than two years after visiting Bhutan, one of the least-visited countries in the world, an exotic Himalayan kingdom that had been on my radar screen for over a decade, I still haven’t written anything about the unforgettable ten days I spent there in April, 2008 with Joanne, during the spring Thingyan (Buddhist New Year water festival) break from teaching in Yangon. Now that I have some time on my hands and some inspiration (why have I been so tired for the past two months?), it’s time to remedy that omission.

The two things that most people know about Bhutan, surely one of the world’s more obscure countries, are that it costs $200 a day (minimum) to visit, and that its far-sighted king Jigme Wangchuk has chosen an unorthodox model of development that includes the idea of Gross National Happiness, rather than Gross National Product, as being the best way to measure the well-being of a country. I knew a little more before we went, such as the fact that Bhutan, in stark contrast to many other Himalayan countries, has done an exceptional job of maintaining forest cover, and the fact that there has been an exodus of Nepali-speaking people from Bhutan over the past twenty years to refugee camps in southeastern Nepal, as a result either of Bhutanese discrimination (the refugee’s version of events) or of a crackdown on illegal immigration (the Bhutanese government’s version). However, I still didn’t know much, and I was eager to see what the country looked like as a result of following its own path to development.

Once you accept that visiting Bhutan is going to be expensive (that $200 figure is accurate, with a possible discount down to $160 a day during the monsoon season), it’s pretty straightforward to arrange a visit. Although visitor numbers were kept low for years, the government is now pushing for an increase, and essentially anyone willing to stump up the necessary cash is welcome to come and visit. Joanne and I Googled tour operators in Bhutan, found a few who wrote back quickly, and chose the one that sounded most promising. The nice thing about having to pay so much money is that we got to write our own tour, picking the places that sounded most interesting, and even arranging to split up for three days to do different things (a remote festival for Joanne to photograph while I went hiking). It hurt to part with so much money, but I figured I’d never be so close to Bhutan again with enough cash in my pocket, so I winced and signed up.

Our flight from Yangon to Bangkok was on the slightly dodgy airline Myanmar Airlines International. The aircraft was actually painted in the colours of Bhutan’s Druk Air, with only a tiny MAI logo above the door to show that MAI sometimes leased the plane. We flew in at 9 pm and scooted to a nearby cheap hotel for a few hours of rest. At the truly hideous hour of 2 am, we woke up again and headed back to the airport. To our amazement, the check-in desk at Druk Airways, the Bhutanese national carrier, had a very long lineup, mostly of Indians on shopping trips. Bleary-eyed, we checked in after a long, sleepy hour of waiting and made our way out to the very same plane we had disembarked from 7 hours earlier. Too bad we couldn’t have just slept on the plane overnight!

We flew to Calcutta first, where the Indian shoppers were exchanged for more Western tourists. The approach into Paro airport was as dramatic as we had heard, with the airplane banking in through a deep valley, rather like Luke Skywalker flying in to attack the Death Star. We deplaned onto the tarmac and stood blinking in the sunlight, before taking a few pictures of ourselves with the airplane. The terminal building, like all structures in Bhutan, has to adhere to traditional architectural styles, which meant that the arrival hall, both inside and out, was a rare counterexample to Douglas Adams’ remark that no language on earth contains the expression “as beautiful as an airport”. We were one of the last pairs of tourists to make our way through the immigration queue, where our visas were stuck into our passports and where we met the man who would be our guide for the duration of our visit, Ghalley.

We spent much of the day poking about the town of Paro, and driving (nearly two hours) from Paro to the capital, Thimphu, surely one of the least-known capital cities in the world. All the way Joanne and I had our noses pressed to the glass, trying to see as much as possible and see how reality matched up to the Shangri La tourist brochure image of The Land of the Thunder Dragon.

Paro boasts an impressive dzong, the first of many of the solid, rectangular forts that we would encounter throughout the country. The walls are massively solid, sloping inwards like Lhasa’s Potala, painted white and ochre, while the gently sloping roofs look almost Chinese except for the small gilded spires. Carved wooden balconies hang below some of the upper-floor windows. Photographing it, on the banks of a rushing Himalayan river, with men and women in traditional dress crossing an old prayer-flag-draped suspension bridge in front of it, I felt that I really was in a country with its own rich historical traditions. The dzong, like much of Bhutan’s architecture and religion, is very similar to what you see across the Himalayas in Tibet; the Bhutanese, like the Sherpas in Nepal and other cultures in the Indian Himalayas, are a Tibetan people ethnically, linguistically and religiously. In fact the English word Tibet is said to be a corruption of Bhot, which is also the root of the name Bhutan. The people look quite Tibetan in their features, although with an admixture of the Indian subcontinent in them; looking at my Bhutan photos, the faces almost look Burmese at times.

As we drove around, we noticed that not everyone was wearing the traditional dress (kiri for the women, gho for the men), and Ghalley explained that to work in the tourism or government sectors, or to visit a government office, traditional dress had to be worn, but otherwise it was optional. We saw a number of young people dressed in jeans and leather jackets in downtown Thimphu, trying to look vaguely rebellious. The gho is best described as a checked knee-length dressing gown, worn with knee socks and shirts with huge white cuffs that fold over the sleeves of the gown. The women’s kiri is a floor-length wrap-around skirt, like a Burmese woman’s tamein, worn with a short jacket above.

The country looks relatively clean and extremely uncrowded by the standards of the region; with only 700,000 inhabitants (compared to 27 million in Nepal), Bhutan is a relative minnow. We saw quite a few cars, many of them quite new, and well-paved roads, and the general look was more prosperous than Nepal or rural India. We were told that a typical government office job pays about $250 a month, far above the average in the Indian subcontinent. In fact, when we drove by a road construction project, we saw Bihari labourers from India breaking rocks; Bhutan imports them since Bhutanese are apparently not crazy about doing menial work for low wages.

The landscape was pretty vertical, with fairly steep-sided valleys carved out of high mountains. The reason why the airport is so far from Thimphu is that Paro is one of the very few places with enough flat land for aircraft to land. Bhutan, unlike Nepal, has almost no low-lying plains; the boundary with British India was drawn at the foot of the hills. This explains a large part of why Nepal is so much more densely populated than Bhutan. There certainly was tree cover, but much of the landscape looked much drier and rockier than I had anticipated, far from the lush forests of central Nepal.

One of the quirks of Bhutan is that the import and sale of tobacco is forbidden. Prohibition being as ineffective as it is, there is apparently a thriving trade in black-market cigarettes from India, but I didn’t see anyone lighting up openly. I did see a man with a furtive, unlit cigarette cupped in his hand in a building in Paro, while there was a definite whiff of tobacco smoke in the Thimphu post office. Given the tremendous health burden that smoking puts on a country, the prohibition seems like a good idea, making Bhutan one of the only countries that has decided that health benefits should trump tax revenues.

As we drove around, one of Bhutan’s most distinctive idiosyncrasies was everywhere to be seen. Phallic imagery, held to be useful in driving away evil spirits, was unmissable: painted on white-washed walls wrapped in dainty ribbons, standing out proudly from doorframes above yak skulls, or dangling in outsized carved wooden form from the eaves of houses and monasteries, phalli were everywhere. The Bhutanese seem to be as obsessed with the erect male member as were the ancient Greeks and Romans!

The traditional architecture that had so charmed us at the airport and at Paro dzong was everywhere in evidence. It worked on houses, generally constructed out of adobe and timber, but on modern concrete blocks, the paint job did little to hide the essentially modern and ugly nature of the buildings. On the other hand Thimphu looks a lot nicer than most cities of its (small) size in the developing world, so maybe the slightly fake paint job is better than the alternative. Thimphu is a fairly modern creation, a bit like Bhutan itself; the first king of Bhutan, the current king’s great-grandfather, only took the throne in the early 20th century, and Thimphu became the capital even later, in the 1960s. It sprawls slightly across the valley floor and a short distance up the pine-clad slopes of the Himalayan foothills, looking like a cross between a Japanese provincial town and a very small, very clean version of Kathmandu.

We drove around the town briefly, passing crowds of citizens paying their respects to the new government ministers appointed since the country’s first-ever democratic elections, held just two weeks earlier. The men wore ceremonial white scarves draped over one shoulder like small togas; we were told that a man’s rank could be read from the colour of his scarf, and these white scarves were the badge of the common people, while yellow, red, green and blue showed various grades of nobility and royalty. We also were passed by the king’s car, which was accompanied by one of the smallest official motorcades in all of Asia.

The rest of the day passed in a long nap, supper and a good night’s sleep. Supper was a delicious confection of cheese and chillies that Joanne liked so much that she tried to get it served at every subsequent meal. We awoke the next day refreshed, ready for a day of poking around the capital. We began the day by walking out of our little hotel and staking out a spot on a bridge over the river for taking pictures of people. We were fortunate in our choice of location, with crowds of schoolkids crossing the bridge to get to school, and hundreds of farmers and city-dwellers headed to and from the market and bus depot, making for a good cross-section of the population. The students all had to wear uniforms based on traditional dress, albeit accessorized with stylish sneakers and knapsacks. A few monks, dressed in the same Burgundy colours as in Tibet and Burma, stood out in the sea of kiris and ghos worn by the adults. Wizened old faces of bow-legged farmers contrasted with the porcelain doll complexions of stylish young women from the city.

After breakfast, Ghalley arrived to take us off on our city tour. We covered an amazing amount of ground in a single day, visiting no fewer than eight different sights. We started off at the thaksin reserve, where the national animal, looking like a cross between a deer, a goat and a bison, wanders around a fenced-in enclosure in the hills above town. The king decided some time ago that it was un-Buddhist to keep a wild animal in captivity and ordered the reserve closed down, but the thaksin kept wandering back to their old enclosures, so it was decided to keep it open to help out these animals who had become accustomed to the free handout. We kept driving steeply uphill to the end of the road at a telecom tower, where thousands of multi-coloured prayer flags hung in crazy profusion from every branch of every tree. After absorbing the vast views over Thimphu and the mountains beyond, it was back down the hill to a small nunnery (populated by some of the least motivated nuns I have ever seen but visited by some wonderful old female pilgrims) and then a school teaching the traditional arts of the country. The students seemed about as absorbed by their chosen arts as the nuns had been, with the only signs of animation in the courtyard during tea break as boys and girls flirted and exchanged mobile phone numbers. Some of the Buddhist thangkas and murals and sculptures showed promise, but overall the quality of workmanship was underwhelming. However, it was good to see that the government is trying to keep traditional arts alive as the country modernizes.

The weekend market, our last stop before lunch, was much more rewarding, at least in terms of local colour. Every second stand seemed to be selling hot chilli peppers, and the women could easily have been from Burma’s Shan State with their weather-beaten friendly faces and brightly patterned kiris. There was a great variety in facial types, with some classic Mongolian and Tibetan features and others looking as though they had stepped off the streets of Calcutta.

At lunch we handed over our bundle of $100 bills to the owner of our tour agency to pay for our tour, and had an interesting chat with him. He said that the former king, Jigme Wangchuk, the architect of Bhutan’s modernization, had watched the self-destructive demise of the Nepalese monarchy and decided that the Bhutanese system of government was going to have to change from a benevolent absolute monarchy to a limited constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. Even though most Bhutanese probably would have preferred the king to remain in office and continue to hold the reins of power, he decided that one way to avoid the sort of nepotistic corruption that blighted Nepal was for him to abdicate in favour of his son, thus eliminating the power base for the families of his three wives which were widely perceived as becoming too wealthy and powerful for the good of the nation. The elections which had just occurred were another step along the path to developing a modern state; the party which had won a surprisingly large majority was viewed as being opposed to the royal ex-inlaws.

We headed out, sated with momos, and made a brief drive-by visit to a memorial gompa to the third king (the current king’s grandfather) before heading to the day’s photographic highlight, Changantha Lhakhang, a small, brightly coloured monastery full of painted prayer wheels and dedicated pilgrims. Joanne had me working as a photographer’s assistant, spinning prayer wheels to get just the right effect. As we left, we met another family of pilgrims with about eight teeth between them, and Joanne managed to get them to pose for her with the mountains and the monastery in the background. We finished our tour at Trashicho Dzong, the king’s official residence and palace. It was huge and imposing and almost completely empty, although at the end of our visit, the king drove by and there was a flurry of activity of soldiers and officials keeping the few tourists motionless and out of the way.

Cities are all very well, but a Himalayan kingdom’s highlights are, by their nature, outdoors. We had chosen to walk up to the isolated Gasa hot spring east of Thimphu to begin our whirlwind tour of the countryside. Joanne absolutely loves hot springs, and I have to admit that after a day of hiking or skiing, there’s nothing that feels better than a good soak. We drove out of town for three hours, crossing a 3050-metre pass, the Decho La, which was completely swathed in dense fog. Ghostly cedar trees peeked through here and there, adorned with thousands of strings of Buddhist prayer flags; our driver and Ghalley helped Joanne add our contribution to the fluttering colourful tangle. A memorial gompa commemorated modern Bhutan’s only war, a brief fight in 2003 against Indian rebels sheltering in the south of the country.

Our road descended into another steep-sided valley, and then passed through the town of Punakha and then headed uphill along a dirt track in ever-increasing states of deterioration. After a series of dramatic, erratic switchbacks, we tumbled out of our vehicle in a tiny hamlet at an elevation of 2300 metres. Our outsized caravan was slowly assembled: two cooks, a muleteer and his assistant, our driver, Ghalley, five mules and enough food for a battalion for a week. Joanne, worried that she wouldn’t be able to make it three hours up the valley to the hot springs, had opted for her own mule, and we set off with me strolling alongside her as she perched a bit precariously on her saddle. On the steeper downhills, as we crossed small streams, the mule owner had her get off and walk, and sometimes she would forget to climb back aboard, meaning that she still limped into the hot springs with a sore knee and ankle.

The walk was wonderful, passing through dense rhododendron forests punctuated with bamboo stands and waterfalls and alive with dozens of species of birds. It reminded me strangely of the highlands around Nikko that we visited many times during our stay in Japan. I wandered along happily, looking for birds in the dense undergrowth and absorbing the surroundings. The skies, leaden at first, began to drop drizzle as we progressed, and when we finally got to the hot springs, the rain settled in for a prolonged fall. Our entourage set up our tent, and we wandered out for a soak in the tubs, not terribly crowded at this point in the afternoon. There are few things as enjoyable as soaking in hot water while cold rain or snow pelts down on you. As far as atmosphere and cleanliness go, the pools finished a poor second to any Japanese onsen, but it was fun to see the local Bhutanese enjoying themselves, as they gathered in increasing numbers as dusk approached. After a delicious meal in our cook tent, Joanne and I wandered out for another soak, this time barely finding space in any of the pools. At least the rain let up, so that our night sleeping in our tent wasn’t too soggy.

After bathing one more time in the early morning in a failed attempt to beat the crowds, we retraced our steps to the car, spotting more birds (red-vented bulbuls, whistling thrushes, grey-headed flycatchers and a host of unidentified species). The ground was richly carpeted with exquisite wildflowers. For one of the first times in our visit, the grey skies parted and we had views of distant Himalayan giants, as well as an imposing dzong looming above the dense forests on a distant ridge. Joanne’s mule was behaving mulishly, and I burned some calories whacking it across its backside with my walking stick trying to get it to move. It took nearly four hours to get back to the car, and after a picnic on the richly dunged grass beside the road, we swayed down the rollercoaster road back to the pavement, and drove onwards to the town of Punakha, site of an impressive dzong. There was a large population of monks, many of them young novices, and Joanne and I took lots of photos of them as they clowned around boyishly in their free time. The walls were adorned with exquisitely painted mandalas, and the prayer hall was a thing of beauty. Ghalley gave us a really informative talk about the symbolism of the Six Realms mandala, which had three animals representing the deadly sins of lust (a rooster), hatred (a snake) and ignorance (a pig). We headed up the hill to our lodge, a pretty cluster of cottages that seemed like a piece of Shimla or Darjeeling plunked down in Bhutan. The hotel was full of a group of wealthy bird-watchers, and the gardens were alive with dozens of species. Like all the Himalayan countries, Bhutan is an ornithologist’s dream. Our lodge was perhaps the nicest hotel of the trip, and we slept long and deeply.

The next day Joanne’s new guide and driver arrived, and we drove together towards the east before we split up. Joanne and her guide headed further east towards a festival, while Ghalley and I turned off southwards on a lightning trip to the marshy highland valley of Phobjika. During the winter there is a resident population of extremely rare black-necked cranes, but we there in the wrong season, and so we had to make do with the scenery and a visit to the crane conservation centre. Amazingly, even in sparsely-populated country like Bhutan, conservation efforts for rare species can be difficult because of human population pressure and habitat destruction because of farming, as is the case here. Luckily the king, and his father before him, are quite keen conservationists, as befits devout Buddhists. The dramatic scenery on the pass into the valley made up for the lack of cranes, as did the flowering rhododendrons in the dense forest. Joanne and I said goodbye in the junction town of Wangdus Phodruk and I headed back to Thimphu, daydreaming most of the way through persistent drizzle and greyness.

After a good night’s sleep, Ghalley and I drove back up to the telegraph tower above Thimphu where we met up with our trekking team. Again, the number of people and mules involved in going on a three-day trek was excessive; I was employing 5 men and 7 mules. I thought of multi-day treks I had done elsewhere in which I had carried everything I needed on my own back. We set off ahead of the horses, as the cooks had to wait for forgotten equipment to be brought up from the office in Thimphu. It was a relief to be walking essentially on my own, under my own power and at my own pace, the only way to see and appreciate the Himalayas. We walked under leaden skies that spit rain periodically, through moss-covered primeval forests of cedar and rhododendron alive with myriad birds, some of them completely new to me. A couple of hours of steep, steady ascent brought us to Phajo Ding Gompa, a small, remote monastery at 3400 metres that clings to the slopes like the popular image of Shangri La. We waited in the cold for an hour and a half for the horses to catch up with the all-important lunch, and had time to discover that the monastery looked a lot better from a distance. The young novices were fun to watch, though, as they played soccer and a form of bocci in the fields behind the monastery.

Mist-shrouded mountains

With monasteries atop

Himalayan high

Rainbow-framed Thimphu

Shimmers a mile below me:

A good morning’s hike

After our long-delayed lunch, I climbed ahead quickly, stomping up over the vertiginous 3850-metre pass behind the monastery, then settling down in the mist to take pictures and wait for the horses. I felt intensely alive, as I always do walking in the mountains, concentrating on the views and the wildlife, measuring my body against the unforgiving test of the vertical landscape. Once across the pass, the landscape changed entirely to a high-alpine moorland, with the rhododendrons shrinking to dwarfish shrubs. We picked our way along crumbling, rocky ridges, across marshes and along exposed hillsides. The earlier rain turned to occasional snow flurries, but my thermometer never dipped below freezing and walking kept me warm. On our way through one small meadow, we scared up a male and female monal pheasant. They exploded up off the ground, wings beating noisily, then swooped downhill in a flash of iridescent blue and green feathers. I felt lucky to have spotted them, and my good mood continued all through the afternoon’s walk under increasingly sunny skies until we set up camp just above a marshy meadow called Semkhota at 4000 metres. I felt like some early European explorer, sitting on my camp chair writing up my diary as the various staff set up tents, fired up stoves and began plying me with tea, soup and food. I sat writing up my diary and watching birds, completely at peace with the world, until a sumptuous feast appeared (as well it might, given how much food we were carrying!)

After a restless altitude-affected night in the tent, the next day was easy, surprisingly so since I had been warned that trying to walk from Thimphu to Paro in three days was pushing the limits of what could be done. Instead, after less than four hours of actual walking, we set up camp in the early afternoon. I wandered along happily all day along a ridge, past a series of small alpine lakes, overjoyed to be footloose in the mountains. We saw another female monal pheasant, and later watched a small falcon catch a hapless rosefinch in mid-air. The dwarf rhododendrons were alive with several species of rosefinches, the vibrant scarlet of the males standing out against the green of the shrubs. We eventually dropped off the ridge, plummeting 600 vertical metres to cross a river, then climbing half as far up to a sunny ridge full of yak pastures, where we lunched at noon looking south at a magnificent panorama of snow-capped peaks. After lunch, it was less than an hour’s easy stroll to our campsite, in another yak pasture called Jangchulhaka at 3600 metres’ elevation. I sat outside in the sunshine writing, watching rosefinches, sketching and reading, at complete peace with the world.

The final day of walking was again shorter and easier than I had expected. I slept well, awoke early, breakfasted handsomely and then sat at a lookout atop a hill behind the camp, taking photos of the high peaks to the northwest which had made a rare cameo appearance from behind their constant veil of clouds. The forest was alive with birds, including some beautiful black and yellow grosbeaks. Ghalley eventually summoned me and we dropped off our ridge through thick rhododendron forests, along a lower ridge to a tiny, picturesque dzong and finally down, down, down endlessly to Paro. The relentless rhythm of my footsteps as we headed downhill got into my head and I found myself composing songs in my head to the beat.

After a relaxed trailside picnic, we were down at our car before 2 o’clock. We drove down into Paro town and found our hotel tucked into the farm fields beyond, where Joanne arrived a few hours later. She was full of excitement from her drive out to the festival, and had a camera card full of great pictures of dancers, monks and local farmers with their weather-beaten faces and kindly expressions. After dinner, we amused ourselves trying to take pictures of Paro Dzong, lit up at night and dominating the skyline.

Our last full day in Bhutan was spent walking up to one of the undoubted highlights of the country, a key feature of any tourist itinerary, Taktsgang Gompa. Also known as the Tiger’s Nest, it hangs improbably from a seemingly inaccessible cliff face in the mountains just above Paro. We set off early, and by 8:30 we were at the parking lot below, where Joanne was loaded onto a mule that seemed more lively than her mount at Gasa. I set off on foot, keen to see whether I could beat her to the top. It was no contest; I sat at the top for a quarter of an hour waiting for her to arrive, staring across at the incredible piece of architecture that is Takstgang. There were quite a few Western tourists, but they were outnumbered by Bhutanese pilgrims. I noticed that with very few exceptions, the Westerners rode mules up, while the Bhutanese walked. This may have something to do with the fact that the Westerners outweighed the Bhutanese by an average of 40 kilograms, little of that muscle.

When Joanne arrived, we walked down a steep slope to a waterfall and bridge that gave access to the final stairway to the monastery. The buildings, whitewashed with ochre and gold highlights on the upper stories, seem to sprout organically from the rocks, clinging to the cliffs like moss. It’s an incredible feat of engineering, ascribed in myth to a famous Tibetan figure, the 8th-century spreader of Buddhism throughout the Himalayas, Guru Rinpoche, who’s supposed to have flown here on the back of a tiger. It was destroyed in an electrical fire in 1998 and only reopened a few years ago, after an expensive rebuilding.

It was at this point that I made an unfortunate split-second decision that coloured the rest of the day. At the entrance to the complex, visitors are required to leave bags, as the authorities are concerned both about backpacks banging into wall paintings and with various pieces of art disappearing into the private collections of tourists. I took my camera with me (even though we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, I wasn’t going to leave it sitting at the entrance), but in a moment of inattention I left my fancy trekking watch, with its altimeter, compass and thermometer, attached to the outside of my camera bag in the pile of tourist backpacks.

The inside of the monastery is impressive, everything you expect a Tibetan Buddhist temple to be: dark, mysterious, full of statues and colourful mandala paintings, redolent of yak butter. We wandered around happily absorbing atmosphere, finally emerging to find my watch, predictably, gone. I was outraged; the bag had been left in an area overseen by a surly Bhutanese soldier who was completely unconcerned about the theft. This did nothing to endear him to me, and his abrupt, dismissive answers soon had me yelling at him. I was certain that the soldier was either inattentive and incompetent, or else had actually stolen the watch himself. It was foolish of me to have left the watch on display rather than attaching it to my wrist, but I had been lulled by the fact that we were in a Buddhist haven of Gross National Happiness, and at a place of worship and pilgrimage. I hate having things stolen, especially something that was a cherished gift from Joanne, and I vented my annoyance on the sneering soldier before stomping off back down the mountain. Checking the rest of our possessions, Joanne found that one of her two bags had been opened, although nothing had been taken. Presumably the thief had been interrupted by tourists arriving; this was just as well, as in Joanne’s other bag there was a purse full of dollars that would have been a far more valuable prize.

The rest of the day followed unpleasantly, with telephone calls, complaints to the police, and a summons to the office of an arrogant army major who, in classic bully style, tried to shift the blame onto the hapless and blameless Ghalley. I was having none of it, but as an outsider I was able to ignore the blusterings of the officer without worrying about the consequences; Ghalley left worried that somehow he was going to end up getting blamed by the army for the theft, when in fact he was about the only person who couldn’t have stolen the watch.

The theft left a pall over that last day, although stumbling across an archery competition on our way back to our hotel redeemed the day partly. Bhutan’s national sport is archery, and the only Olympic medal ever won by the country’s athletes came from a female archer. Driving through town, we spotted a cluster of people holding bows and Joanne insisted that we drive over to watch. The men wore traditional ghos with a series of blue, green, red and yellow scarves handing from their belts, but their bows were expensive modern composite competition models. Their precision was impressive, especially given the enormous distances over which they were shooting (well over 100 metres). A reasonable crowd had gathered to watch and cheered each shot with genuine enthusiasm. Joanne and I tried to capture the moment of release with our cameras, but I found it an almost hopeless task. Joanne was much better at freezing the arrows as they left the bowstrings. It was a nice bonus to see the archery, as we had hoped to see a competition in Thimphu but hadn’t been in town on the proper day. Walking back to the car, we were amused to realize that we were walking through knee-deep patches of wild cannabis, which the Bhutanese call "pig grass". I wonder if they have chilled-out pigs with goofy grins and ridiculous appetites?

That evening we dined well, slept long and deep, and drove to Paro airport the next morning. Despite the expensive, tedious annoyance of the stolen watch, I was very impressed overall with Bhutan overall. Its scenery is impressive, it is doing extremely well at preserving its fragile Himalayan environment, its economic development seems to be far more equitable and well-thought-out than in India or Bangladesh or Nepal, and its culture seems to be standing up well to the tsunami of creeping global uniformity overwhelming other countries in Asia. Even its politics seem to be headed along the right path. Given unlimited time and money, I would gladly go back to Bhutan and spend a couple of weeks trekking across the high passes and mountains of the extreme north of the country. If I had the chance to teach or work there in some capacity, I would go there in an instant; a better country for hiking, biking, photography, bird-watching and immersing oneself in a fascinating culture would be hard to imagine.

As we flew back towards Bangkok and our connecting flight to Yangon, both Joanne and I agreed that our visit to the Land of the Thunder Dragon had been one of the highlights of our time in Burma, and were glad that we had paid the money for the privilege of seeing one of the most interesting countries in all of Asia. Country number 72 on my lifetime list gets special billing as one of my favourite destinations so far.

Click here for a Google map of this trip.

Click here for the first part of the Facebook photo album of this trip.

Click here for the last part of the Facebook photo album of this trip.

Libya Retrospective (December 2009)

2010-06-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

Libya might not immediately spring to mind as a prime tourist destination, but it’s been on my mental radar for over a decade. In 1998, while travelling with Joanne through the Middle East and North Africa, we tried to get Libyan visas in Morocco and Tunisia and were turned down (“Why don’t you apply in your own country?”). We did get as far as reading the Libya section in the Lonely Planet North Africa guide, though, and it sounded wonderful: Roman ruins and spectacular deserts. In 2004, we talked about doing a Libya trip over Christmas, but I ended up resigning from my school in Cairo, and instead Joanne and I rendezvoused in Indonesia to go diving on Pulau Weh; this was unfortunate timing as we arrived just in time to be caught up, but not swept away, in the great Boxing Day tsunami that devastated the Indian Ocean.

Fast forwarding five years, Joanne and I both still wanted to see Libya, so when we decided to meet up in Italy at the end of my cycling blitz through the Balkans in December, 2009, we started arranging a Libya trip as part of our travels. Unfortunately, since our first attempt in 1998, all sorts of new rules have been introduced to force tourists to take a guided tour and to have a tour guide with them at all times, while the black market in foreign currency which once made Libya relatively cheap has disappeared with the end of economic sanctions. All this ended up making our trip pretty exorbitantly expensive, at least by my cheapskate standards, but we figured that the opportunity cost of not going now and trying to arrange to go another time would be even higher. We bought Air Malta tickets to take us Rome-Tripoli-Malta-Sicily, and found a travel agency that came well-recommended, then gritted our teeth and paid for the tour.

The process of getting a visa proved to be a ridiculous soap opera for me. Both of us had to get a stamp put in our passports translating the information page into Arabic. This in itself is ridiculous, as most Arabic-speaking countries, or the Chinese or Iranians or Armenians or Ethiopians for that matter, seem to be able to figure out Roman script just fine. I’ve heard that the reason is that Libyans have (or had in the past, perhaps) passports written entirely in Arabic, and that the EU made them translate the information pages into Roman script, and that Colonel Gaddafi wanted to have a tit-for-tat retaliation. Whatever the reason, the Libyans won’t help you out by telling you where such a translation stamp can be found, and to complicate matters, the stamp is supposed to be authorized/notarized/something-ized by your country’s foreign affairs ministry, or at least by your embassy. Some internet searching turned up a place in Ottawa for Joanne to get it done, but my attempts throughout the Balkans were less successful; many translation services didn’t have a rubber stamp to stamp things into the passport, and the Libyans wouldn’t accept a translation on a separate slip of paper. I struck out in Sofia and Tirana, and was getting really frustrated when Joanne found a place in Rome that would do the job. It was actually a bit hit or miss once we got to Rome, but it all worked out; the translation bureau was used to doing this sort of thing, had a rubber stamp and did the translation of my name and date of birth a couple of days before our flight.

The flight down to Tripoli on December 18^th was a far cry from the days during the post-Lockerbie air embargo on Libya, when most travel to Libya involved flying to Tunis and then catching buses and taxis for the long overland drive to Tripoli. We had a long delay in Malta, spent listening to the increasingly improbable tall tales of an old British man, and it was after dark when we got through immigration and wandered out to find our tour guide, whom I will call Hisham to avoid getting him in trouble with his government. At least paying the big bucks got us a guide with perfect English; Hisham had grown up until age 14 in England, where his father was studying and working. By the time we made it out to the car, we’d learned that his family was Berber (the indigenous non-Arab population of much of North Africa) and that he had little patience for the pontifications of “the Colonel”, the man who for 40 years has ruled Libya with an iron fist. He complained of the repression of the Berbers by the Arabs, a complaint common to Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. We drove through the sprawling concrete suburbs of Tripoli in the dark, looking for a place to eat, and ended up in an open-air café close to the harbour, with sea breezes ruffling the palm trees and the old city with its monumental gate lit up by floodlights.

We stayed not in a hotel but rather a small apartment building owned by our tour company above their offices, where James, an immigrant from Ghana, worked hard to keep the rooms immaculate and our breakfast plates full. Across the street was a police building, and we were warned not to take any pictures in this direction, as the secret police would be watching and would not be amused. On the morning of the 19^th, Hisham arrived and we set off to see the sights of Tripoli. It’s a city with an ancient past; its name harks back to the Tripolis, or Three Cities, that occupied this stretch of coast in classical times: Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Oea (the ancient name for modern-day Tripoli). It was a major port in the Muslim period, ruled over by a Turkish governor nominally subservient to Istanbul, but with a fair amount of local autonomy. The old city has a number of old mosques and bazaar shops from the Ottoman period, while in the surrounding neighbourhoods Italian colonial architecture crops up here and there. Most of the cityscape, however, is dominated by generic concrete boxes in various states of disrepair. Tripoli certainly doesn’t exude an air of great prosperity, despite the large oil revenues that flow into the country. Hisham said that most Libyans believe that Gaddafi has become personally immensely wealthy along with his relatives and associates, while the country as a whole has languished economically.

Our first stop was at the National Museum, a storehouse of the historic and artistic wonders of the country. The two great attractions of Libya for tourists are the Sahara (which, short of time and money, we were going to have to skip this time around) and the great classical ruins along the coast. The best sculptures, mosaics, coins and other artefacts from the various ruins are all in the Tripoli museum, and we had a wonderful morning taking pictures of mosaics and marble torsos. The museum was almost deserted, except for a gaggle of art students from Tripoli university who were gathered in a room full of nude sculptures, practicing their life drawing. I guess in a Muslim society, you’d be unlikely to have nude models posing for your art class, so this seemed a clever compromise. There were a few interesting pieces of cave art, as well as the jeep that a young Gaddafi drove during the military coup that installed him in power in 1969. At the entrance to the museum there is an amusing poster showing Gaddafi and his new best friend Silvio Berlusconi ogling the marble statue of a nubile nude female: very appropriate on both counts!!

Hisham, Joanne and I then wandered around the old town of Tripoli, visiting a few mosques and old buildings, and letting Joanne magpie around the silversmiths’ shops. One of the few real vestiges of Roman Oea is the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, standing in a square in the old town. It was carved to mark the visit of the Roman Emperor to the city, and was subsequently buried in drifting sand, preserving its carving quite well. The arch now sits a couple of metres below the present street level. One of the nicest restaurants in Tripoli faces the Arch, and Joanne decided that we should have dinner there one night. It became a running joke between Joanne and Hisham as to whether our tour budget covered a meal in that café of stew cooked in a stone amphora which had to be smashed open to serve the food. Every day Joanne would ask whether tonight was the night, and every night Hisham would claim it was too expensive.

That afternoon Joanne took a nap, Hisham went off to work out at his gym, and I walked around the streets, trying to get a feel for the vibe of modern Libya. There was heavy traffic on most streets, although not of flashy new luxury cars. Most of the vehicles seemed to be second-hand cars a decade or more old, many still sporting the country stickers of where they had been imported from: the Netherlands, Germany and, most commonly, Switzerland. The irony is that Switzerland and Libya have been locked in a ridiculous diplomatic row for the past couple of years that started when Geneva police arrested (and subsequently released) one of Muammar’s sons and his wife for mistreating their Filipina maid while visiting Switzerland. The Libyan government has reacted with its usual impetuous nature and banned oil exports to Switzerland. It has also arrested two Swiss businessmen who were in Libya when the row erupted and kept them in prison for over a year. The Colonel has been handed extra ammunition in his campaign by the silly Swiss vote to ban the construction of minarets, allowing him to claim that Switzerland is the epicentre of an anti-Islamic crusade against Libya and calling for a jihad against the Swiss. Somehow the rest of the EU was drawn into the dispute, and for a couple of months after our visit, EU nationals were unable to get visas to Libya.

This sort of diplomatic flap is nothing new for Libya, nor unique to Switzerland. While we were planning our trip, Canada and Libya had a spat over the Colonel’s decision to visit Newfoundland on his way back from the UN General Assembly, and the Newfoundland Lieutenant-Governor’s refusal to turn over her official residence for Gaddafi to stay in; a subsequent request to allow the Colonel to erect his tent in the LG’s garden was also a non-starter. Subsequently the Libyan government, or at least part of it, declared that no Canadian tourists could come to Libya, a declaration that was denied by the Libyan embassy in Ottawa, but which was confirmed by travel agents who reported that Canadian tour groups were being forced to cancel their trips to Libya. Luckily we both have EU passports in addition to our Canadian ones, and the ban on EU visitors hadn’t yet come about, so we got in without a hitch.

The streets of Tripoli are full of pictures of the Great Man himself. There are two forms: either towering posters in which he always seems to be smiling (in an “I’ve got all the money and you don’t!” sort of way) and clasping his hands together or holding his Little Green Book, or small photos on display in businesses and for sale in shops which specialize in his image. The other popular subject for posters is the African Union, a brainchild of Gaddafi’s that was implemented on September 9, 1999 (9-9-99, as the posters point out) to increase African unity. Not many concrete steps taken so far, but a great forum for Gaddafi to strut his stuff on a friendly stage. I walked by the headquarters of the International Popular Committee for Gaddafi Human Rights Prize (really; I’m not making this stuff up!) and was amused to see that it was closed and seemed not to be in use. Maybe it’s not really so popular?

The next day was spent exploring our first big Roman ruin: Sabratha. We drove west for an hour, through heavy Tunis-bound traffic and scrubby, dusty countryside, to reach a sprawling site beside the Mediterranean. Both Joanne and I really liked the place, almost completely deserted and with lots of layered sandstone contrasting photogenically with the blue skies. Sabratha was first a Phoenician port, and one of the most striking structures is the Tomb of Bes, a rather over-reconstructed Phoenician tower tomb dating back to the 4^th century BC, looming skywards like a missile, albeit one with cute carved lions at its base. The rest of the site dates from Roman times: a couple of forums, merchants’ districts, the ancient port which once exported wild animals, slaves, ivory and olive oil, the theatre district and the vast, beautiful theatre. The houses still had mosaic floors in place, while the baths and public latrines were easily discernible. A few columns and headless marble torsos balanced in place beside the sea, and the stones of the olive merchants’ warehouses were still stained with spilled oil. The theatre was magnificent, with its three-story backdrop of Corinthian columns looming high behind the stage, and the seats sweeping back above the passageways. I’ve seen a lot of Roman and Greek theatres, and the only other one I can remember that is this large and this intact is the striking black basalt theatre of Bosra, Syria.

We snapped lots of photos, followed the polished presentation of our endearing local archaeological guide Mufta (“My name means ‘key’ in Arabic; I am the key to unlock the secrets of Sabratha!”) and sat gazing out over the Mediterranean, the transportation highway of the classical world. Just beside the ruins, a series of wooden fishing vessels were pulled up on the beach. Mufta told us that these were some of the boats used to smuggle illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa into the EU via Europe’s soft underbelly: Malta and Sicily. Colonel Gaddafi encourages the trade as a way of annoying the EU. Libya itself is full of migrant workers from south of the Sahara; most menial labour is done by men from Niger, Mali, Ghana and Burkina Faso, willing to work for $10 or $20 a day, wages for which no Libyan would bother getting out of bed.

We were just on our way out of the site, back to the car, when we realized that we had skipped the museum. We argued with Hisham about whether it was covered in the tour price (for what we were paying, it certainly should have been) and then trooped back into the museum for 15 minutes before it shut for lunch. We were both glad that we did, as the museum was stuffed full of fantastic statues and some exquisitely detailed mosaics, my favourite form of Roman art. I don’t know whether I’ve ever seen such finely detailed mosaics as I saw in Libya on this trip; they seemed more paintings than arrangements of coloured tiles. Subjects ranged from abstract geometric designs to life-like depictions of animals, birds and fish to mythological scenes. My favourite in Sabratha was a huge floor from, I think, a Byzantine church featuring an immense and detailed peacock.

We returned to Tripoli through, of all things, a rainshower. My status as a rain god, able to bring precipitation to the driest places on earth (the Sahara, the Atacama, Central Australia, the Taklamakan) was reinforced. It was a break in the usual weather pattern that we experienced, in which sunny, pleasant mornings gave way to very strong afternoon winds blowing up clouds of dust and sand.

Early the next morning we set off on a long road trip. Hisham drove while Joanne busied herself with tunes; there was fundamental disagreement over what was great music, with Hisham a huge fan of dance music and techno and Joanne and I more dinosauresque in our tastes. Our route led us southwest, through increasingly dry countryside, towards the ancient caravan town of Ghadames, down near the point where Tunisia, Libya and Algeria meet at a point. We passed through a few dusty, featureless towns before turning off to see a couple of ancient Berber granaries, fortified enclosures of dozens of rooms, often several stories above ground level and accessible only by precarious pseudo-ladders of dried and cracking tree branches driven into the adobe walls. They looked like Escher engravings, their jumble of rooms and storeys seemingly optical illusions. Historically each room would have held the grain of a different family; the various families of a district would have united to build a fortified joint storehouse to guard against the ever-present threat of bandit attacks or raids by desert Arab Bedu.

The first granary was down in the dusty, featureless plain, but the second, Qasr Nalut, was up on an escarpment, nestled amidst the crumbling arches of an abandoned Berber village (the inhabitants had been built a new village of soulless concrete nearby in the 1970s). The views down to the plain, the wonderful jumble of arches and irregular walls and the general air of deserted desolation was a welcome relief after hours of dust and decrepit trucks. We stopped for lunch in a nearby town, and then our highway meandered up and down across a sandstone plateau before entering a long wadi that led eventually to Ghadmes, 600 km southwest of Tripoli. We arrived in the late afternoon, and I spent the remaining hour of daylight walking through the walled date plantations to the old town and having a quick sneak preview before our official tour the next day.

The next day was spent prowling around the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site now completely uninhabited. Once again, as at Nalut, the government had built the inhabitants of the traditional adobe medina a new town of concrete apartment buildings. The new town lacked the atmosphere and beauty of the old one, but had running water, electricity, indoor plumbing and lots of parking, so the inhabitants quite gladly moved house. The old town was left to crumble for a decade or more before foreign visitors and UNESCO pushed the government into preserving the town before it crumbled into dust. The result is fairly amazing, a museum town quite unique in feel.

The town is out in the unremitting sunshine and heat of the desert sun; even in December, the temperatures got pretty warm by mid-day. In order to keep houses and streets cool, the town was built as a maze of covered tunnel-like streets with courtyards and houses opening off these corridors. The Stygian darkness is pierced by dim skylights set into the roofs every once in a while, giving rise to a striking banded pattern of light and dark as the passageways curve gently away into infinity. With no outdoor clues to help, I was soon hopelessly disoriented, although Joanne did a much better job of keeping her bearings. We were both glad to have Abdul Rahman, our local guide, to show us the way around. Some of the houses are being renovated; their owners still have the keys, and see the potential for tourism to generate some revenue. Small groups of labourers from Niger trundled up and down the corridors with wheelbarrows, repairing walls, whitewashing and then painting colourful geometric designs on them. Benches were built into the walls for neighbours to sit and chat, whiling away the long, hot afternoons. They were unoccupied now; the vast caravan trade that made Ghadames one of the most famous towns of the Saharan trade network, a commercial rival to Timbuktu, is gone now, as is the street life, the markets, the cries of merchants, the bustle of camels and horses. There is great aesthetic beauty to old Ghadames, but it is a melancholy beauty that cries of loss and bygone greatness.

For me the highlights were the mosques, their whitewashed minarets a glaring contrast to the blue skies, their courtyards a welcome escape from the gloomy labyrinth of the covered streets. After taking hundreds of photos, we finally made our way past the deep spring which made life possible in Ghadmes and to a restored old house for a lunch of roast camel. The house, decked out in traditional finery, was cool and spacious, and we reclined on cushions on beautiful rugs sipping tea and admiring the painted decorative flourishes on the walls. We climbed up to the roof and looked out over the sea of other rooftops, punctured here and there by palm trees or minarets. From above, it was clear how much of the town was in ruins; some of this damage dates back to an air raid in the Second World War, while some comes from the exodus of Ghadames residents to the bright lights of Tripoli, leaving their old family houses to decay. Looking out over the town, for the first time since arriving in Libya I felt as though I was in Africa, rather than in the Mediterranean world. I could feel the pull of the Sahara, and regretted that we weren’t headed south into Niger and Chad, following in the footsteps of many generations of camel caravans before us.

We ended the day by driving to an old Turkish fort a few kilometres out in the desert. Ras al Ghoul (I had never realized that the English word ghoul comes from Arabic) wasn’t much to look at, but nearby were some rather scenic dunes. We climbed up dutifully, hoping for a breathtaking sunset, but the sun merely faded into a gray haze on the horizon, leaving Joanne and I to blow bubbles over the Sahara sands (trying in vain to recreate pictures we had taken eleven years earlier in Tunisia, not far from Ghadames). I wished we had enough time and money to head out into the deep desert, but it was not to be.

The drive back to Tripoli was uneventful, with a stop at one last Berber granary and then at a small Berber village situated spectacularly on the very edge of a vertiginous escarpment. We took photos of ourselves leaping upwards near the edge, then got back into the car for the rest of the long drive back to Tripoli and our familiar guesthouse and the ever-smiling Charles.

The next leg of the trip involved a flight to Benghazi, the second city of Libya, 700 km by air, or over 1000 km by road, to the east, on the other side of the Gulf of Sirte. We bid a temporary farewell to Hisham at the airport, as in Benghazi we would have a new minder for the next three days. Saad was a bit older and quieter than Hisham, but spoke excellent English, acquired while studying aeronautics in the UK. We sped away from the airport, headed northeast towards the Greek ruins of Cyrenaica, racing the clock to fit in all the sights before they closed.

First up was Tocra, a small and largely unexcavated city beside the sea. Although there was little in the way of actual sites, Adbul Marwa, an enthusiastic local guide, helped bring the jumbled stones to life. The real highlights, however, were an Italian fort (built out of the stones from the Roman city in 1912) and the tortoises that overran the site, butting shells with each other in a funny mating display. There were some fine mosaics in the Byzantine church and attached bishop’s palace, while the walls of the gymnasium were still covered with two-thousand-year-old schoolboy graffiti.

We sped along the coastal road to Tolmeita, ancient Ptolemais, another city still largely buried beneath the sands of time. We scarfed down a quick lunch beneath the trees of the museum before admiring the usual marble sculptures and mosaics and taking a quick run through the ruins. Only a few blocks of what was once the main city of Cyrenaica have been dug out, but they attest to the wealth of the city, and to the engineering prowess of its inhabitants. Vast subterranean cisterns stored 6000 cubic metres of water beneath the forum. We listened as Hakim, our guide for Tolmeita, told us how the city had suffered in the great Jewish Revolt that convulsed Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica in AD 115, and then the massive AD 365 earthquake, before slowly sinking into oblivion after the Arab conquest and the establishment of new cities. It was amazing to think of how many decades of excavation still remain in Tolmeita and Tocra, and how many artistic treasures and historical surprises are still buried beneath the farmers’ fields there.

Our last stop of our whistle-stop tour was probably the most interesting. We raced along back roads away from the coast, through limestone hills that provided a lush contrast to dusty Tripolitania; no wonder the Italians were such eager colonizers of Cyrenaica in the early twentieth century. Just before closing time, we drove into Qasr Libya, where construction in the 1950s had unearthed an unexpected find, a floor decorated with fifty mosaic panels, apparently from a Byzantine church. The quality of art was a bit cruder than in the breathtakingly detailed Roman mosaics we had seen elsewhere, but they were fascinating nonetheless. There were personifications of rivers like the Tigris and the Euphrates, and also of the little town of Olbia-Theodoria, where Qasr Libya now stood. There were plenty of animals and fish, including an unexpected scene of a deer eating a snake. The highlight, however, is the only known contemporary portrayal of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Pharos of Alexandria, the monumental lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour. It is shown as a massive square tower, accessed by a drawbridge, topped with a large statue of the sun god Helios; behind it is another statue atop a smaller structure.

We drove at a more leisurely pace, through the gathering dark, through the green countryside towards Al Bayt, the modern town where we were staying. By a happy coincidence, a conference of Libyan doctors was ending that evening at our hotel, and we were able to gorge ourselves at their final-night buffet.

We awoke the next morning, Christmas Day, to a rise of exceptional beauty that set the scene for a wonderful day. The day was devoted to the main tourist attraction of eastern Libya, the Greek city of Cyrene. On the way out of al-Bayt, we stopped in to see a ruined temple of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing. Not much to look at, but a nice deserted, wind-swept site on the pretty plateau. We got to Cyrene early and found, for the first time all trip, a number of other Western tourists, mostly Italians driving their own four-wheel-drives on their way to the Sahara. Our guide for the site, Abdul Gaafar, was the former archaeological boss of Cyrene, and was very knowledgeable and keen to share his stories of the city’s glorious past.

Cyrene, like the other cities around Benghazi, lay on the eastern side of the fundamental fault line dividing the Mediterranean in pre-Roman times. To the west lay predominantly non-Greek city-states, mostly Phoenician; the three cities around Tripoli were all founded by Phoenicians. To the east lay the Greek-speaking world, of which Cyrene formed a part. Even after the Romans turned the Med into their own private lake, that boundary was important; to the east of it, in places like Cyrenaica, Greek remained the language of business, everyday life and even government, while to the west Latin prevailed. That boundary would later become the boundary between the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire and the Roman Catholic states of the west. This meant that the cities we saw in Cyrenaica had long Greek histories before the Romans ever showed up. This meant lots of Greek inscriptions to be seen, and often two quite separate city centres: a Greek agora and a subsequent Roman forum; a Greek theatre sculpted into a hillside and a later Roman one built free-standing and impressive; small-scale Greek baths and huge Roman ones; Greek temples and then huge, bombastic Roman ones.

Cyrene has been extensively excavated, and so there were a lot of details to catch our eye: graffiti and inscriptions in the old Greek gymnasium, mosaic floors, wonderful statues. The gymnasium has had all the columns around its edge re-erected, giving a vivid feeling of what the place must have felt like in its heyday. The inlaid marble floors in an opulent villa built by one of the Emperor Hadrian’s freed slaves spoke of the luxury of the Roman period. We walked down from the upper city to the old holy sites of the lower Greek town, past Greek baths excavated into the rock of a cliff, to the old temple of Apollo. I loved the feel of the town, and even the hordes of Libyan tourists who showed up as lunchtime approached couldn’t take away the blue skies, the golden stones and the air of history. Some of the Corinthian capitals, in place of the usual acanthus leaves, had instead the leaves of the medicinal plant Silphium. This plant, endemic to Cyrenaica, was one of Cyrene’s major exports but was harvested to extinction in Roman times.

We had lunch with crowds of Italian tourists, and then drove a few kilometres to the vast Temple of Zeus; it is one of the few temples that the Romans rebuilt much smaller than the grand Greek original. The city was badly damaged during the Kitos War, the second of three large-scale Jewish revolts against Roman rule; in AD 115 Jewish diaspora communities in Cyrenaica, Egypt, Cyprus and the Levant rose up and killed their Roman garrisons and the Greek and Roman civilian populations, inciting bloody reprisals by the Emperor Trajan. According to contemporary accounts, almost 220,000 people died in Cyrenaica alone, and the land was left depopulated, requiring colonists to repopulate it. The original Greek temple was one of the largest Doric temples in the Mediterranean, an Archaic structure of massive columns that owed much to Egyptian temple architecture. After the temple was torn down by the rebels, the Romans rebuilt it on a much smaller scale inside the original enclosure; maybe this was because the town was no longer such a huge population centre. The sandstone of the temple was so full of fossil seashells that it seemed to be more shell than sand.

From the Temple of Zeus, we drove through a pretty, deserted countryside, atop the limestone plateau with its maquis scrub; from the surroundings and the azure waters far below, we could have been in Sicily, or Montenegro, or southern France, or southern Turkey. No wonder the Greeks and Romans, and later Mussolini’s Italians, so loved the area: it reminded them of home. Abdul Gaafar and Saad pointed out the ruins of villages, the small mounds of prehistoric ruins, the berries and flowers and herbs. It was a wonderful afternoon to be alive and to be driving down to the Mediterranean out of the Green Mountains. We ended up on the coast at Apollonia, once the port for Cyrene. Again, not much was excavated, and most of that was Byzantine (Joanne and I had little patience for most Byzantine ruins, with their ponderous churches, sloppy workmanship and re-used stonework.) On the other hand, the theatre is wonderful, facing out to sea (how did audiences keep their eyes on the stage with such a magnificent natural backdrop), and even the Byzantine churches had lovely columns carved from striped marble that caught fire in the late afternoon light. The sunset over the Green Mountains and the ruins of Apollonia was a perfect way to end Christmas.

On our way to the airport on Boxing Day, we stopped by one last historic site, a remote and obscure piece of prehistoric Berber art, a series of surprisingly modernist figures carved into rock at a tiny village called Slonta. The carvings were completely unlike the classical formalism we had been seeing for days. Here strangely misshapen faces, carved to follow the natural contours of the rock, peered out of odd corners of the stone, beneath bulging elephants or atop a sinuous snake. It was hard to make out figures at first, but as our eyes adjusted to the style, we could make out human figures dancing and sitting, and clusters of faces staring out urgently like Gothic gargoyles. I wished we could have stayed longer to look at the carvings and try to decipher them, but time was ticking on inexorably, and we were several hours from Benghazi airport. We hurtled across the lush green fields of the Green Mountains, through an area much favoured by Italian settlers in the early 20^th century, pausing for a moment to savour the Fascist colonial architecture, now abandoned and derelict, in a farming town. As we approached Bengazi, we passed through an area where overgrazing and over-cultivation had turned the land into a dust bowl. We then dropped down to the coastal plain, away from the greenery, and made it to our flight with time to spare.

After a lazy afternoon and evening in Tripoli, spent getting an awful haircut and eating excellent Lebanese food and Turkish pastry, we were ready for our last full day in Libya. We had saved the best for last: Leptis Magna. We already knew that it ranked up there with Ephesus, Pompeii, Palmyra, Petra and Baalbek as one of the greatest classical ruins in the Mediterranean world. We just hoped it would live up to the hype. We needn’t have worried. Leptis Magna was, in fact, magnificent. The amphitheatre and the Circus Maximus, outside town beside the Mediterranean, were immense and very impressive. The Circus actually had seats facing outwards to the sea so that mock naval battles could be staged for the amusement of the crowds. We made our way into the heart of the old town, via the huge port complex beside the silted up harbour.

The city of Leptis Magna was always an important port for the Romans. Its hinterland produced grain and olives for the Roman market, but it was also an important export point for slaves, wild animals for the Roman Coliseum and ivory. Its most important export, though, was an Emperor. Septimius Severus, who rescued the Empire from civil war in AD 193, was born in Leptis, and lavished funds on it to tart up his hometown, particularly before he came on an official visit. As a result, everything in Leptis is on an epic scale. It’s also well-preserved, since it was deeply buried in sand over the centuries, preserving walls and columns a couple of stories deep. For tourists today this is perfect; instead of foot-high wall foundations, you’re surrounded by a storey or more of Roman masonry and marble, allowing you to see what the city would really have looked like. It’s a bit like Pompeii or Herculaneum, except on a much bigger scale.

We started with the elaborate Arch of Septimius Severus, commemorating the big guy’s trip home. It’s covered by wonderful carving, although the originals are now in the Tripoli museum. In places, you can see where the carvings were left unfinished, perhaps because of the death of the Emperor in 211. We wandered through to the monumental bath complex, with brick walls still 2 storeys high. It’s one of the largest Roman baths I’ve seen, and it was only one of several equally impressive baths known to have existed. The Severan Forum was huge, full of impressive carved Medusa heads and arched arcades; it must have been even more impressive, even more a statement of the wealth and power of the Empire, back in its heyday. Behind one of the enclosing walls, the judicial basilica, the law court, was covered in amazing carving of the labours of Hercules, of centaurs and warriors and satyrs. Inscriptions in huge carved letters proclaimed the greatness of various emperors.

Down towards the sea, we came upon less bombastic architecture at the octagonal market. There were standardized measures of length, volume and area to prevent cheating, and reliefs of trading ships carved on the walls. Everywhere there were massive columns, carved from striped marble and granite of exceptional quality, probably imported all the way from Egypt. These were so well carved and so well preserved that in the 17^th century, the French consul to the area shipped off dozens of the columns to France, where they now decorate the Palace of Versailles. Other columns lay on the shore, where they were abandoned during subsequent, interrupted attempts at looting by the French. Some of the columns bore Corinthian columns with silphium leaves, as in Cyrene. Here and there we came across old Phoenician inscriptions, and we kept an eye out for the phallic depictions scattered around the site. Unlike some other Roman cities, these were not signs to the local brothel. Instead, they were supposed to ward off the evil eye, and one carving shows a phallus with legs (and its own subsidiary phallus) doing battle with the evil eye. There are so many inscriptions in Leptis, lining the excavated facades of the streets, that it would take experts years to translate and catalogue them all. We felt very much part of the bygone city as we wandered through the grid of streets.

We finished up at the theatre, with its wealth of carvings and its theatre district. Inscriptions over the grand door report on the renovation of the complex by a local magnate. Smaller carvings report on particular plays being performed, like tattered posters of plays gone by. The theatre is hardly as impressive as Sabratha’s, but it’s still a wonderful structure, with the distracting view of the Mediterranean waters behind, and the vast sweep of the ruins visible in all directions from the upper seats.

We drove back to Tripoli more than satisfied with our overdose of classical ruins. That night, as Hisham picked us up to take us to dinner, Joanne asked once again if we were going to the Marcus Aurelius arch café to eat stew-in-an-amphora. Hisham said no, and started driving towards a fish restaurant before pulling a U-turn and heading towards the arch. The stew was worth all the anticipation, baked to perfection in its clay jar before being extracted by smashing the top. We dined well, staring out over the lit-up Roman arch and basking in the historical ambience.

Our last morning in Tripoli was spent at our guesthouse, relaxing. We left slightly left to catch our flight to Malta, and this caught up with us as we got stuck in endless traffic, and then Hisham got pulled over by a traffic cop. He searched long and hard for his driver’s license, but when he finally found it, the cop spotted that Hisham had two licenses (one that he had lost, replaced and then found months later) and promptly wrote him a huge ticket that probably cost him a few day’s profits from the trip. As we drove off, Hisham grumbled that he’d had about as much of Libya as he could take and that he should move back to Malta and its nightclubs and beautiful women. (He was off to Malta in 2 days’ time for a New Year’s party holiday.) We made it to the airport just in time, passed on the opportunity to buy the famous “Stamps of American Aggression” for sale in the souvenir shops, said goodbye to Hisham, and headed off on the brief hop to Malta, glad to have entered the strange modern world of Muammar Gaddafi and the fabulous ancient ruins that are its highlight.

Malta Retrospective (December 2009)

2010-05-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

I didn't do Malta much justice on this blog when I went there in December, so I'll try to elaborate the single paragraph I wrote at the time.

Joanne and I flew Air Malta to get from Italy to Libya in December, and on the way back to Italy we took a four-day stopover in Malta, a place neither of us had ever visited. I had heard of Malta: I knew that the Knights of St. John had made it their island fortress, that it had withstood a long siege and constant aerial bombardment by the Germans in World War II, and that lots of Brits head to Malta for their holiday. I was keen to flesh out this very bare-bones portrait when I arrived in my 90th country.

Our first view of Malta came as we rode the bus into Valetta town from the airport. The main island of Malta is small (maybe 30 km in length) and very densely populated. Most houses are made of limestone, making for an attractive colour to the small towns. Valetta itself, the main city and capital, looked scruffier and didn't impress ut at first. We walked through the old town, found a cheap guesthouse and set off to explore the town.

The Maltese language, closely related to Arabic but written in Roman, looks daunting, full of Qs and Xs. Luckily, almost everyone speaks great English too. Malta's position, between Sicily and Tunisia, means that it has been a crossroads of cultures and languages for millenia. While most tourists come to Malta for the nightclubs of Sliema or the diving and rocky coastline of Gozo, we decided that ancient history should be the theme of our brief visit.

Our first day, it wasn't until late afternoon that we got out into the hilly stone streets of old Valetta. We walked around the seafront, shivering slightly in the brisk wind and watching other tourists walking around looking bemused, trying to figure out what there was to see in Valetta. There wasn't much, so we wandered around and watched the sunset over the Grand Harbour, the reason for Malta's strategic importance to the British Royal Navy.

The next day, after an early-morning rush to get tickets to see the Hypogeum, Malta's premier pre-historic sight (only 10 people can get tickets the day before; the other 60 tickets sell out months in advance), we got on the bus and trundled the 25 kilometres northwest to the Gozo ferry. All the way, we were hardly ever out of the built-up suburbia that covers so much of the green countryside, and it took forever to get anywhere. Gozo, a half-hour ride across a lovely blue strait, was quite different, with only 10,000 inhabitants rather than the quarter-million on Malta island. We caught a bus up to Ggantija, the largest and oldest of the large megalithic temples that are scattered all over the islands.

Built in 3600 BC, the temple consists of two oval enclosures with stone altars inside. The stones forming the walls are massive, a couple of metres high and with a mass of several tons. The Maltese claim that this is the oldest surviving free-standing structure in the world, and it certainly predates the Pyramids by about 900 years. There were almost no interpretive signs at the site, so the culture and architecture were perhaps less impressive than if we had known more about them. We did draw a few inferences from what we could see. The limestone temple stones seemed to have been carved with obsidian or some harder stone, and we could see the remnants of decorative swirls, raised dots and spirals on some of them. We could also see traces of red ochre that once coloured the walls. There were holes in the stones that seemed to have been for liquid offerings, and others that seemed to have been for wooden barriers. There were even a few small holes carved in the uprights that reminded me of the astronomical sighting holes I had seen in Karahundj, in Armenia, a few months earlier. Joanne was less taken with the place than I was ("No good for taking pictures!"), and was glad to head off to the Gozo Archaeological Museum as soon as decently possible.

At the small museum, we saw some of the small finds from Ggantija and other sites on Gozo: little statuettes, both life-like and also with the exaggerated hips, thighs and breasts of the Earth Mother Goddess who seems to have been worshipped by the early Maltese. We saw better-preserved examples of the decorative carving in the temples, and saw models of what the temples would have looked like in their heyday. A long trek back, by bus, ferry and bus again, brought us to Valetta for a great dinner of rabbit (a Maltese specialty) and an early night.

The next day we tackled the main archaeological museum in Valetta, full of more carvings and sarcophagi and full of the historical interpretation lacking at the temples themselves. I was particularly taken by the exquisite small carving known as The Sleeping Lady, and the similar Venus de Malta;I bought a replica of The Sleeping Lady for my mother. The Maltese islands have no fewer than 23 Neolithic sites scattered across their small land area, a testament to the vitality of the early agricultural society that blossomed there 6000 years ago, and the museum does a good job of putting it into the wider Mediterranean context.

After this educational visit, we got on another of the ubiquitous old yellow buses and headed southeast to Tarxien temple and the Hypogeum. Along the way, we passed the neighbourhood where hundreds of African migrants and asylum seekers live for years in limbo, waiting for their refugee claims to be processed. They pay thousands of dollars to be smuggled into Europe and cross from Libya in rickety fishing boats such as we had seen near Sabratha a week earlier. The Maltese press is full of stories and letters about the migrants; Malta, like Ireland and Italy, has discovered that while it has been happy to export thousands of emigrants around the world over the centuries, it is less keen on other people immigrating to its crowded shores. The Africans sit in the sunshine, forbidden to work, waiting day after day, year after year, for something to change.

Tarxien is more elaborate than Ggantija, and dates from 4 centuries later, around 3200 BC. It has been pretty extensively reconstructed, and we had seen the originals of most of the good carved stones in the museum, but it was still easier to visualize the temple in its glory days than it had been at Ggantija.

We hustled off down the street to the Hypogeum to make it in time for our tour. The Hypogeum is the most atmospheric and eerie of the Neolithic sites on Malta, and also its most fragile. It lies completely underground, and was discovered a century ago by someone digging a water cistern. It seems to have been both a mass tomb and also a temple. Only ten people an hour can visit, in order to avoid the growth of bacteria and mold on the walls that would destroy the fragile wall paintings, and photography and any sort of bags are prohibited to avoid people bumping into the walls. The surviving paintings are a bit reminiscent of the earlier cave paintings I saw years ago in Lascaux, France, with depictions of the deer that the early Maltese must have hunted. The ceilings are decorated with swirls of red ochre. There are three levels of rooms carved into the rock, forming a slightly confusing maze of intersecting spaces. The walls on the second level are carved in brilliant imitation of the construction techniques of the aboveground temples we had just seen. The Central Chamber and the so-called Holy of Holies, dimly lit and seen from a distance, seemed to exude pre-historic mystery and romance. Our allotted 30 minutes was over all too soon, and we were back on the street, blinking in the bright sunlight and wondering if it had all been a dream. It was very Indiana Jones-esque, and well worth the early-morning queueing the previous morning.

Not yet satiated with megalithic temples, we hopped onto another bus and rolled off to the southern coast to see Hagar Qim, the best situated of the temples. For the first time, the surrounding countryside, consisting of fields and cliffs sloping down to the sparkling Mediterranean, could be considered lovely. The two temples seem to rise organically from the stony ground, although the protective canopies that UNESCO and Heritage Malta have constructed over them do nothing for their appearance. These temples had the highest, most massive walls we had seen, and had all the features we had come to expect: massive doorframes, carved decorations on the stones, altars and rounded niches within the temples. The setting reminded me of the wonderful cliff-top ruins of Kourion that Joanne and I had visited in Cyprus in 2008.

That evening, as we walked around Valetta in search of cheap eats (a tough task, given the high prices of everything on Malta), Joanne pointed out the prevalence among the teenage boys of jeans worn so low that they were belted below the buttocks, showing a good 20 centimetres of designer boxer shorts. Joanne spent a half hour trying to photograph the best examples of Maltese Teenager Butt, but it was a tough task to undertake discreetly, and the results were mixed. We had better luck photographing our third successive beautiful sunset.

Our last day on Malta was pretty low-key, with a visit to the baroque St. John's Co-Cathedral, the centrepiece of the Order of the Knights of St. John, also known as the Hospitallers. We had seen their castles and fortifications all over the Mediterranean over the years: Jerusalem, Krak des Chevaliers and Tartus in Syria, Bodrum in Turkey, Rhodes in Greece, Cyprus. They had been pushed westward relentlessly by generations of Turks until they made their last stand on Malta, where they withstood The Great Siege by the mighty Ottoman fleet in 1565. Their flag, dominated by the Maltese Cross, flies everywhere on Malta, and Malta is still one of the most staunchly Catholic countries in the world, an enduring legacy of the crusading Knights. The cathedral itself was excessively baroque and gave Joanne the heebie-jeebies and left her angry at the ostentatious wealth that the church flaunted. I enjoyed the historical atmosphere, but I was glad to get out of the gilt (and guilt?)-laden interior and the huge hordes of cruise-ship passengers that packed the church.

That evening, our last in Malta, was also the last evening of the decade: December 31st, 2009. We had an early flight the next morning, so we celebrated the end of the Noughties early with a bottle of prosecco at sunset in a park overlooking the Grand Harbour, composing haiku. Mine read:

2009
Burma, Canada, Silk Road
Stillness and motion

Dozens of countries
Years flashing past like snowflakes
The Noughties depart

Overall, Malta was a bit disappointing, with too much traffic and suburban sprawl and not enough scenery, but the megalithic historical sites made up for that. I'm not sure I would choose Malta for a beach holiday, although perhaps the scuba diving on Gozo would be enough to hold my interest. It was certainly a worthwhile stopover, but three days was about as much time as I wanted to spend there. I was glad to fly off early on New Year's Day, 2010 to Catania, on Sicily, in search of Greek and Roman ruins.