Monday, January 23, 2006

You'll come back a different person

A lot of people said that before I went away… ‘you’ll come back a different person’. I’m not sure if this is based on experience, it feels like something you’re supposed to say, or because a lot of people who go away on gap years are younger than twenty and do a bit of growing up while they’re gone. I don’t want to make sweeping generalisations, but the conversation I got out of some younger backpackers was unbelievably banal, and maybe some new experiences would give them something to talk about apart from what Sophie or Claire were doing with the rest of their gap year, or what an utter bastard Mark was to do that to Liz in Bangkok (see William Sutcliffe’s ‘Are You Experienced’ for some prime examples of these kind of characters). This is all being a bit disingenuous to the younger backpacker, when conversation with a lot of new people followed the same pattern until you’d worked out whether you liked someone enough to talk about normal things. The thing is, now I’m back I still don’t know if I’ve changed – the problem being that I was around me for the whole year, so I’ve got no idea. That’s up to friends and family to decide, but so far I don’t think I have changed – exactly how are you supposed to?

Now I’m back, I’m looking for work, but it’s slow. Job applications have so far been answered with silence, and one refusal. Something will come up, something always does unless you’re utterly determined to do bugger all. I’ve had plenty of time to go back through old photos with a strange feeling of detachment, and look back at experiences and places that while there felt like a heightened sense of reality, but now feel like a very distant memory, even after just a month. Reminders of the trip come back in the form of chats with friends who are still in South America or Thailand, and e-mails from people I met along the way – they’re still taking days-long bus journeys to see glaciers calving into the sea or drinking banana smoothies in beach shacks, while I’ve got back into cooking my own food and bitching about the rubbish on the TV. Over the last year I think I’ve experienced just about every emotion it’s possible to feel, felt supreme highs and incredible lows. Things are starting to feel normal again, after a pretty emotional new year when all I wanted to do was get on the first plane back to anywhere.

My feelings about travel, amongst other things, have changed. Before I came away I thought of the big trip as my one chance to go and see the world – then come back, having got it out of my system, and carry on with normal life. Of course, that hasn’t happened. Now, I see the big trip as just the start of a lifetime I want to spend travelling. Nowhere seems a long way away any more, and for every place I’ve been to, there are three more I want to see. Even after everything I experienced last year, I still can’t help but feel like I never really got my teeth into things, never saw everything I could have – so next time I’ll try to do it better. There are also people dotted all over the place now that I really miss, and I hope I can see them again soon. I’ve never really explored the UK and Europe, so those are on the list as well.

Work is also going to change. I’m winding down my business in its current form, to allow me more time to study, do different things, get away from a computer screen. A change of career will happen, but at the moment it’s easier to nail jelly to the ceiling than work out what that will be.

Updates on this blog will slow down now – this is my blog site for life back in the UK, and that will keep going for the time being. This blog will most likely be resurrected for the next trip – I just hope that’s not too far away.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

India - the slide show

IndiaI know other people's holiday snaps aren't always so appealing... oohh really another sunset, gosh that's lovely and so on, but I've put together a slide show of my photos from India. This one is animated and includes music, so hopefully it's a bit more fun than the usual. I loved India - can you tell?

Download the India slide show here (18MB WMV file).

I'd suggest right-clicking on the link above and choosing to save the file to your own computer.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Bolivia, then back

Subterranean templeIt seems like a very long time ago now, but just a few weeks ago I finished the trip in Bolivia. After leaving Puno and hopping over a hectic border crossing, we stopped briefly at Tihuanacu, an archaeological site and home to the Subterranean Temple and the Kalasasaya, pre-Inca ruins of comparable importance in Bolivia to Machu Picchu in Peru. As in Peru, these ruins are being restored as best they can when the Spanish took many of the stones that made them to build churches. The old saying 'you can't unbake a cake' comes into mind here - stones from temples now forming the foundations of churches, material being recycled and moved around, the very reason for the stones moving around being part of the history of the place. The deterioration of a place becomes part of what gives it character and tells its story, like the lines on the face of a loved one as they grow old - here at Tihuanacu, the tree-engulfed temples of Angkor, the crumbling sections of the Great Wall of China. When restoration work goes too far, to continue with the analogy of a human face, the result is invariably a dodgy facelift.

La PazMy first view of La Paz was the most impressive - from above, as the bus crested the hills surrounding the city. La Paz sits in a valley like a giant goldfish bowl, home to over two million people, the houses clinging to every single available piece of land, right up the sides of the hills. A quarter of the entire population of Bolivia are estimated to live here - in La Paz itself, and El Alto, the overspill city on a plain above the valley. We stayed at the Hotel Senorial Montero, a grand name for a fairly grand if cavernously empty hotel that towered over the slightly ropey part of town it sat in, a huge glass front springing from the top of a colonial era building on Plaza Alonzo de Mendoza. I say the area was ropey because the security guard wore a bullet-proof vest.

Apart from the bullet-proof vest, Plaza Alonzo de Mendoza was patrolled by characters I'd recognise anywhere - I've seen them in many of the cities I've been to on the trip, as well as London, Leeds and Ipswich. I don't know if they have a name but I'll call them Skinnylegs. Without wanting to generalise, these guys are usually using some sort of substance or alcohol - you can see it in the drawn, almost cadaverous faces and wild, staring eyes. There's this and the very skinny legs, usually wrapped in very tight jeans, usually with white trainers at the end. That's the Skinnylegs bit. Finally, they're always in a hurry - where to, I don't know, but I'm almost certain that trouble happens when they get there. Watch out for them next time you go shopping. No really, watch out.

Witch?La Paz felt safe and generally relaxed, but with a busy energy to the place right up to last thing at night, all the more so for Bolivia being in the midst of presidential election fever and the run-up to Christmas. Market stalls were selling Christmas decorations by the bundle - beeping, flashing lights, cribs, Jesus and Mary statuettes, full-on nativity scenes, sweets, baubles and tinsel were all being snapped up from stalls run by the women with the big hats and the bigger hips. La Paz did at least manage to avoid festooning the streets with crap lights and playing 'So here it is, Merry Christmas' at full blast from every shop front. There may have been an Andean equivalent ('Tan aqui­ esta, Feliz Navidad'?) but I didn't notice it. The Witch's Market in La Paz featured dozens of stalls all selling various strange statues and souvenirs, llama foetuses hanging morbidly from the displays, offering good luck and protection if thrown underneath a new house or burnt with herbs.

Walking through the streets of La Paz was a great experience in sensory overload the like of which I hadn't experienced in a while. Crowds move slowly up the hills, pouring around market stalls selling everything from chewing gum to shoes, snack packs of Oreo cookies to CDs - everything in La Paz is for sale right on the streets. Cars and vans casually push past and through the crows, teenagers leaning precariously out of the vans to shout their destination to anyone who wants to get aboard - public transportation in La Paz is mainly by small Toyota vans packed to the gills with Bolivians. A walk back to the hotel one night took us through the middle of dozens of table football games, the air filled with the sound of hundreds of little players rattling around on spinning metal rods. This is the first fully electronics-free amusement arcade I'd ever seen - fantastic. The area of town around the church of San Francisco in the center was a sharp contrast to uptown, with expensive, touristy bars like Mongos, and the embassy district. Every city I've seen has had an embassy district that was so well insulated from the rest of the city, I'm sure you have to walk a while outside to remind yourself where you are.

I love long daylit corridors IIThe Iglesia San Francisco (yes, another one) in La Paz had a great surprise in store - a fascinating exhibition on Anne Frank. I never knew much about Anne Frank, but the exhibition had a complete history of her time hiding in a loft in Amsterdam, up to her death from typhus in a concentration camp in 1945, complete with masses of photography, and diagrams of the house where Anne and her family hid. It seemed a little bit incongruous to be learning about a Jewish girl hiding in Holland in a church in South America, but there we have it. The church was also a great maze of silent corridors and narrow staircases, with various paintings and statues hidden away in corners, carved wood jostling with brightly painted walls, and the occasional hideously kitsch neon-haloed Jesus or Mary. While I can't stand what they stand for, there are very few other places that are as interesting to wander around as big old churches.

I flew out of La Paz the day before the presidential election - a day before all of the shouting slogans over megaphones, flag waving and non-stop TV adverts from candidates came to a crescendo. The winner was Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, the first to become president in Bolivia - in the run-up to the election, his face (huge smile, more teeth than five Davina McCalls) was to be seen all over the city on posters and flyers, along with that of Jorge Quiroga (aka Tuto), his main opponent. Morales' party is called MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), where 'Mas' is Spanish for 'More'. Quiroga's party is called PODEMOS (Poder Democratico y Social), where Podemos means 'We can'. This emotive use of acronyms got me thinking to what the UK's party names could stand for - but I didn't get too much further than 'Lucky Anthony Blair Obfuscates Unctuously and Repeatedly'. And apart from being smart-arsed, it just isn't very catchy.

Everyone I spoke to in Bolivia had an opinion on the candidates for president - they're much more likely to have a strong opinion here than we are in the apathetic UK, when gunfire is still ringing in people's ears from protests in the last few years, the last few presidents have never made it to the end of their terms, corruption is rife, and hot topics include how to deal with Bolivia's natural gas resources, and whether or not to ban and destroy the coca leaf, a crop which has a long tradition in the Andes but which has obvious connections to the narcotics trade. Depending on who you spoke to, Jorge Quiroga's campaign was funded by the US who wanted leverage in this part of the world, he was corrupt, or Morales was a drugs baron who favoured coca growing because he was building cocaine processing plants all over Bolivia, and he was corrupt. More often than not, all of the candidates were corrupt, and Bolivia was buggered whoever won.

A quiet moment for meBefore leaving Bolivia I took a three-day trip to Uyuni, to see the Salar salt flat and the train graveyard - a mind-bogglingly beautiful pure white expanse of nothingness, followed by a mess of rusting hulks. Pictures do the job better than words here, so see the photos of Salar de Uyuni and the Train Graveyard on Flickr. That's me in the picture on the right, being rather freaked out by the prospect of heading home the next day.

From Bolivia, it took six flights in four days to get back to the UK - I hardly touched the ground the whole way. I had no choice but to go through a rather scary country on the way back, a heavily armed fundamentalist autocracy with a government-controlled media and miasmatic corruption. That's the USA, kids, hope you got the joke*. The security checks at Lima airport before boarding the plane for Miami were quite something. I think my backpack was x-rayed about five times. I then had to open it in the presence of a security official, who ascertained that my head torch was not a terrorist device, shortly before she accidentally broke it. All people queuing to check in their baggage had to stand in front of a little lecturn-like table and answer a series of questions from an American Airlines staff member - the questions were about such things as had I packed my bag myself and what was the purpose of my visit to the USA. I felt like the next question would be something like "At any time in the last month have you used the word 'Jihad' or 'Infidel'?", or "When packing your bag, were you or any person present with you chanting in Arabic?".

This didn't finish when I got to Miami. A customs official the size of a fridge freezer looked at me with the utmost suspicion and something resembling loathing because I hadn't put where I would be staying in Miami on my customs form. I tried to explain that it was because I was there for one night and didn't have anywhere booked, but his response was "You gotta understand, you haven't put anything here, you could, you know....". I could what? Bomb Miami? Because I hadn't booked a hotel? Surely terrorists book hotels, they're organised fellows aren't they? I thought better of actually vocalising this for fear of being carted off to a small room and being given a body cavity search by a women called Lurleen with a tazer gun and bosoms like two fully inflated Volvo airbags.

After a very comfortable night in the Hilton hotel in Miami, my one and only real hotel splurge for the year, I took a flight the next day to a scrotum-tighteningly cold New York, where I stayed in a truly crappy hotel to bring myself back to reality before catching the flight to London the next day. I knew I was on a BA flight because the stewardesses were such miserable po-faced tarts. My first night in the UK was spent at the Thistle hotel at Heathrow, listening to a paraletic group of nazis whose every other word was 'f**k', and drinking a bad pint of Stella. Ah, home, sweet home.

So now I'm back, and getting back into whatever passes for real life. It's all been very strange. I'll keep you posted.

* I liked every American I met on the trip - open-minded, intelligent, and friendly, and acutely aware of people's perception of the US. One girl wore a T-Shirt with an apology and the statement 'I didn't vote for him' in several languages.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Buy the pictures, donate to charity

Faves

I've taken thousands of pictures over the last year, all the good ones and quite a few crap ones making it onto Flickr. The Faves set has the cream of the crop.

Now, I've just set up a new online gallery of my best pictures from last year's trip. You can buy prints, have them framed, even get a pack of greetings cards. All proceeds from the sale of photos will be donated to St Elizabeth Hospice, who nursed my cousin Kathy before her early death from cancer last year.

Click here to view and buy prints from my trip