Hiking on Soup

The first day of the Inca Trail, and we were all raring to go, kitted up with bamboo walking sticks, bottles of water, waterproofs and cameras charged and at the ready. We'd also bought the corner shop out of every single Snickers bar it had, and most of the biscuits. Snickers bars are surely bought in purely as fuel for Inca Trail walkers - their price compared to anything else in the shop is the equivalent of walking into Sainsbury's and paying a tenner for a chocolate snack bar.

Being on a tour, you get a list of what you should be packing - one day pack that you walk with, and a duffle bag which is carried by porters - your overnight things. There's a strict five kilogramme limit on what you can pack in the duffle bag, and officials even weigh the porters to make sure they've not been overloaded. This is all a good thing when you always take too much stuff, wherever you go, like I do. Without guidelines I'd likely have packed enough to spend several months on the Inca Trail, and set up my own camping store at Machu Picchu. I was doing this before I came away on this trip, its a bad habit that has followed me - much like head-spinning mood swings, spending too long on the Internet, putting too much food in my mouth at once, and being rubbish at talking to women I find attractive.

The porters, who we were all introduced to before starting the trail, were to be referred to as Cuchiwattos, not porters. Cuchiwatto roughly translates as 'studmuffin' or 'hunky fella' and is a more flattering name. There's this, and the fact that calling out 'Cuchiwatto!!' as any porters passed us on the trail brought grins to their faces. This is doubtless what every other tour group coming through here does, but they don't seem to have got bored of it. We may have had to weigh the luggage they carried for us, but the amount they carried, at altitude, was staggering. An average Cuchiwatto would walk the trail with at least twenty-five kilogrammes strapped to their back - duffle bags, gas bottles, chairs, tents, food and equipment. They carried everything strapped round their shoulders in blankets, where us tourists had padded day packs with soft, sweat-absorbing straps to carry our digital cameras and pac-a-macs.

The first day was easy going - at least compared to the second and third. Gentle slopes, lots of stops to note interesting cacti, and still some oxygen in the air as we hadn't got up too high yet. During the day, the group spread out until everyone was walking at their own pace. The busy chatter of the group as we left the first checkpoint eventually became the sound of the river in the valley below, the occasional rain, and your own breathing or humming. My attitude to walking has changed since I've been away. I used to think that going downhill was always better than going uphill - now going downhill is worse because it knackers your knees and ankles and requires more concentration to make sure you don't tumble apex over tip down a crevice. I used to want to stop continually for little breaks - now, it gets to a point where you just want to keep moving because after a point you've developed an almost autonomic rhythm, where you just breath at the right times and your legs take care of themselves. I used to want to go the least distance possible, now I want to go further if I'm enjoying it. I hope I don't forget this in six months and start complaining about having to walk down to the shops for a pint of milk.

On the first night, we camped at the base of Dead Woman's Pass, in the meeting point of three valleys, where clouds meandered by in the distance or crawled up the hills towards you. Cows and horses perched on the sides of the hills hundreds of meters up, grazing on slopes that looked so steep they should have just rolled down the mountain, and Inca ruins sat in the middle of it all, next to a football pitch and the campsite. By the time I got there, the site was fully set up, all tents erected, dining tent up, table and chairs out, knives, forks and napkins laid. The porters left after us that morning, heavily loaded, and still got to the campsite and set it up before most of the group. Even though we were hiking through remote countryside a long way from any roads, we still ate in a remarkably civilised fashion, and the food was incredible for where we were and what resources it was prepared with - in the middle of nowhere, thirty people ate three-course meals of good, hot, fresh food. The starter was always soup, usually quinoa soup - by the end of the trail I was sick to death of soup.

The food in Peru, and Bolivia, generally isn't much to write home about, unless you're writing home to tell the folks how crap the food is. Chips and rice are usually served at the same time, with virtually everything. Chips sneak in all over the place, often stirred in with lomo saltado (beef fillet fried with onion, tomato and pepper), hiding in sandwiches, and sitting around in salads. I got quite paranoid that chips were going to spring out at me from puddings and under napkins. I never quite figured out if this was actually because Peruvians and Bolivians like chips with everything, or they think tourists do. Sadly, in many foreign places, when they try and prepare 'Western' food, it's a disaster - when the local dishes are usually cheaper and better quality (and then some places are just plain bad at everything). I remember one of the worst examples being Indian baked beans (tiny little things in a nasty sauce mixed up with chopped pepper, it looked like some sort of showbiz ready-mix vomit). I can also categorically say that tea, bread, bacon, and sausages are rubbish virtually everywhere outside the UK, Heinz tomato ketchup in Australia and New Zealand is just plain wrong, and muesli is far better in most other places where it is usually served with masses of plain yoghurt and fresh fruit.

The second day's hike up to Dead Woman's Pass (so named as the profile of the pass looks from below like a recumbent, large-breasted woman) was, we were told, the worst of the trail. This involved a climb of over 1300 meters, the height of Ben Nevis, to the top of the pass at 4200 meters. The height and likelihood of altitude sickness was one thing, the fact that the entire path to the pass was uphill with very little respite the other. With the benefit of well-recovered legs, writing this at just above sea level, I can say that it really wasn't that bad - but at the time, I was supping on a cold bottle of coca tea, trying not to look uphill, walking very slowly indeed, and occasionally muttering 'come on, you bastards' at my legs. As you got higher, a hundred steps became fifty, which became twenty, and then ten, between each break. The path really may not look that difficult, but the altitude just forces you to slow right down. Still, I made it, we all made it, and the sense of accomplishment was undeniable.

The third day was worse than the second. No huge climb this time, but the cumulative effect of yesterday's walking, i.e. knackered legs, as well as absurdly steep steps and a dodgy stomach from too much soup - or maybe it was just the altitude. By the time I got to the camp at the end of the day, after a frustrating series of bends downhill into the campsite, I crawled into my tent feeling utterly pathetic. We were told that beer was available at the camp site on the last night, so looking forward to enjoying a few drinks, I bought four. After one I was out cold. At this point I want to apologise, profusely, to my tentmate Trevor. I had the very worst case of the farts through most of the Inca Trail, and the poor lad had to share a tent with me when I was practically lifting the thing off the ground. He deserved better.

The next morning, after a night of solid rain (we camped the last night in rainforest), we walked the final five kilometers to Machu Picchu, ignoring aching legs to reach the sun gate just after dawn. The view of Machu Picchu was beautiful, and it got better the closer you got. The citadel was swathed in cloud one minute, and the just as suddenly as it was covered, the clouds disappeared and revealed the ruins. This is a very well-known view - photographs of Machu Picchu are all over the place, and thousands of tourists come here every year - but we got there early enough to see the place without crowds of tourists (most come by bus from nearby Aguas Calientes, choosing to forego the three-day hike), and the scale, beauty and mystery of the place was still stunning, made all the more memorable as this was the pay off for three days hard work. Buses bring people up from the nearby town of Aguas Calientes now, and there is an expensive hotel looking out towards the citadel, but it was fascinating to imagine what it must have been like when Hiram Bingham 'discovered' Machu Picchu in 1911, the citadel apparently abandoned, cooking utensils and household items lying around (the Peruvian government is still trying to get several artefacts back from Yale University that were taken by Bingham). There are other hitherto undiscovered Inca cities further out in the jungle, at least as impressive as Machu Picchu, and it's a bit sad to think that they too will end up with buses ferrying tour groups to them through the trees.

From Machu Picchu we went to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, via Cusco. Puno was yet another place we were told was dodgy. Presumably we get told everywhere is dodgy for the benefit of the people that were thinking of walking around with their cameras hanging round their neck, passports sticking out of their back pockets, waving wads of cash in the faces of the locals and shouting 'MUG ME!!!'. In Puno we went for a meal, and were treated once more to the standard Peruvian dining experience - panicked looking waiters, more soup, only partially correct orders, and a band with pan pipes and guitar playing traditional Peruvian hits which always include El Condor Pasa. CDs are also available for sale, with phenominally badly designed cover photos of the band looking rather uncomfortable. I can only assume that all Peruvian towns have a 'hit squad' of pan-pipe players, who are tipped off by restaurant owners as soon as tourists show up - because they're always there. I don't, I hasten to add, want to knock them or deprive them of a living - most of them are really good, and the singer in Puno had such a powerful voice he could make your quinoa soup shake at ten feet.

We headed out onto Lake Titicaca from Puno in a boat with only just enough space to swing a cat, though I believe cat swinging is prohibited on most boats. Lake Titicaca (Titicaca means grey puma) is the highest navigable lake in the world at over 3800 meters above sea level, as any tour guide will be more than happy to tell you - and it is massive. Peru sees Lake Titicaca as a major tourist draw and source of Peruvian pride, and says it owns about sixty percent of the lake. Bolivia sees Lake Titicaca as a major source of Bolivian pride, and also says it owns sixty percent of the lake. Bolivia's navy also use the lake for exercises as Bolivia has no coast - it lost control of its small stretch of coast in a war with Chile in the late nineteenth century and has been trying to get it back ever since, but the Bolivians are obviously optimistic people, so they still have a navy.

We visited a couple of islands on the lake - Taquile Island, where the men knit hats and clothing rather than the women, and Amantani Island, where we stayed overnight with local families. These places, where Quecha (the Inca language) is the first language and traditional dress is still worn, felt that much further removed from the trappings of the modern world, though tourism was obviously very important to the islanders, who were canny enough to ask for money to be photographed knitting or doing anything picture-worthy. Our 'mother' for the night on Amantani Island cooked for us in her tiny kitchen by the light of one candle, smoke filling the top half of the room. I babysat the four sons, if you look at being jumped on by four giggling terrors as babysitting. Trevor's wish for a guinea pig for his dinner was granted, and a black guinea pig was duly stunned, decapitated, skinned, gutted and spatchcocked. I couldn't eat guinea pig, having been close to a few in the past. We headed to the village hall for a dance with the daughter of the family, the traditional dance here resembling just managing to restrain your partner from punching you in the guts. After the dance we went to beds with Empire Strikes Back duvet covers and mattresses stuffed with straw, where I farted myself to sleep.

Enough for today - next, Bolivia and the journey home through the scariest country yet - America.

Darkest Peru

I actually left off, before the last few 'try and keep the readers happy and disguise the fact that I've been utterly useless at keeping the blog up to date' type posts, at the point where I left Chile for Peru. I decided to book a tour with Tucan to do the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, on a friend's recommendation - the Inca Trail is one of the main reasons to go to Peru, the food certainly isn't, but more of that later. I needed to book with a tour company to do the Inca Trail as access to the trail is (fortunately) restricted, so getting permits to walk the trail independently can apparently be tricky. Quite apart from anything else, I looked forward to the company I'd get on a tour, liked the idea of not having to work out where I was sleeping every other night, and figured that slogging up hills at four thousand meters would be better done in the company of people who could carry at best an encouraging word, and at worst a tank of oxygen.

Lima is one of those places that, when mentioned, gets a reaction from many people along the lines of "Oooh, [sucks through teeth], it's dodgy there, best be careful". They'll often happily recite the tale of the friend of theirs (or more likely the friend of a friend of someone they got talking to in a bar once) who lost something, had something stolen, or had a gun held to their head (I think people just enjoy the idea of knowing someone who had a gun held to their head). You therefore go expecting every stranger to be a thief, or worse. People have said similar things about half a dozen of the places I've been to, and I've been cautious in all of them, but no more cautious than I've been anywhere. Not wanting to sound too smug, I have had nothing stolen from me during the last year, lost nothing, if you don't count getting shafted on the occasional taxi fare. Places like Lima certainly do deserve caution, but not nearly as much if you know not to be in dodgy places late at night, not to get drunk with dodgy people, not to leave your bag, wallet or camera in plain sight, and not to invite robbery by looking like a rich tourist. You can't help looking like a tourist if you're one of only five white people in a nightclub, but confident body language, inconspicuous dress, and absence of shiny things seem to go a long way towards avoiding the wrong kind of attention. Besides, a lot of people would say that they had about the most fun, met some of the best people, in the places that get a lot of people sucking through their teeth - and I'd be one of them.

Peru is poorer than Chile and Argentina, that much is obvious from walking around Lima. It felt much more like I expected a South American city to feel, compared to the European feel of Chile and Argentina. Chile is the richest country in South America, and Chileans give the impression of feeling superior to their neighbours, going as far as to declare animosity towards Peru and Bolivia over long-running border disputes, and being quick to boast about their wine being the best in the world.

The center of Lima is a bustling maze of streets filled with Peruvians queuing for helado and empanadas, with latin music blaring from every third shop. Tourists move between the crowds like panicked cats. In the central square, I was approached by a very confident, smily man who wanted to sell me cloth finger puppets, ostensibly to raise money for children with Down's Syndrome. His routine was the same as every other salesman I've met on the streets of poorer countries, starting with bright, breezy conversation you'd feel rude to ignore, moving on to an innocent question like had you heard of Down's Syndrome, and then going for the sale of the finger puppet, using lines like "it's for the children". This tactic incidentally seems pretty close to the one used by the charity muggers that hang around city centers in the UK. Repeated use of the word 'no' would elicit an ever more high-pitched and pathetic voice in the guy. Of course I feel bad, on the off-chance that he is a legitimate salesman, but in so many cases, I've seen children being used as emotional pawns to extract money from dewy-eyed tourists, when they actually see bugger all of the money their feeble appearance has been used to fleece. It was the same in India, in Cambodia, in Vietnam, Peru, and Bolivia - and it drove me mad.

One young child in Lima was sat begging by the side of the main street leading to Plaza de Armas, and I thought when I saw him that he was wearing a Hallowe'en mask. It wasn't a mask - some sort of deformity or burn had left his face melted, his mouth fixed downwards in a permanent, grotesque, upside-down grin. I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't know how to react, and avoided him - even though it was just a child. Being in places like this seems to have a knack of throwing things at you at random intervals, just to see how you'll cope - and I haven't coped so well a lot of the time. A man with an open, weeping tracheotomy stood in front of me once on a train in India, and when I looked at him with mucus running down his chest and a rattling noise emanating from the hole, I jumped backwards in my seat and handed him all the spare change in my pocket.

I didn't have too long in Lima - just long enough to see the church of San Francisco's crypts and beautiful library, and get pestered by the finger puppet man. After meeting the others on the tour at the hotel, we headed for Cusco, a place that we were again told by the tour guide was 'dodgy', but which again felt a lot safer than the tour guide would have us believe. Cusco is the tourist capital of Peru, so apparently is filled to the rafters with bad characters who are waiting to take your money by means fair or foul. I saw restaurant owners enthusiastic to get you into their establishments, no worse than a Friday night down Brick Lane, and young mothers trying to sell more finger puppets - not sure this qualifies as dodgy. Other than that, Cusco is a beautiful place, following the pattern for an Andean town by sprawling up the hill sides as far as the eye can see, the center of the town marked by the Plaza de Armas with its churches, fountain and flower beds. Taxis, the spitting image of Starsky and Hutch's car, rattle and cough around the streets, barely scuffing the heels of short women crossing the street, with wide brimmed hats and wider hips, their babies strapped to their backs in colourful blankets.

The church in Cusco, like most of the churches across Peru, Bolivia and anywhere else where the Incas used to run the show here, is built using stones taken from Inca temples. At Saqsaywaman, a major archeological site and home to Inca temple ruins, as well as at Tihuanacu in Bolivia, we were told how the Spanish, upon entering the Andes and 'introducing' Catholicism to the Incas, destroyed their temples, used statues for shooting practice, and took heavy stones from temples to use in the foundations of new churches, which were built with forced labour (the Spanish employed the delightful practice of sending home for a replacement if a family member died while working). The only reason the Spanish didn't destroy Machu Picchu, it turns out, is because they never found it. Having seen the mark of French, English and Spanish colonialism (and Catholicism) across India, Asia and South America, I can't help but wonder what these places would be like now if they'd been left as they were - how would the Incas have evolved, or would they have been wiped out another way?

As soon as I arrived in Cusco I could feel the altitude affecting me, and altitude sickness got the better of me for a few days. Cusco is at around 3400 meters above sea level, enough to make walking up a small flight of stairs or a gentle slope an effort. Altitude sickness is remedied by drinking lots of water and coca tea, so soon I was peeing more than a seven year old child after a birthday party. Coca, chewed or brewed in tea by Andean people for hundreds of years (ancient Inca busts and statues show characters with balls of coca leaf in their cheeks), widens the alveoli, improves stamina, and contains various nutrients and alkaloids, including cocaine, that make work and walking at high altitude easier. Coca leaf is widely available throughout the Andes. The Spanish tried to stop coca use in Inca people on their arrival, claiming it was diabolical - then realised that no-one was working without it, and changed their minds. It's precisely this harmless leaf which, processed with alcohol, acid and gasoline or kerosine, is used to produced cocaine - so a long-used natural ingredient and backbone of an entire ancient culture becomes a substance that makes stockbrokers from Chelsea become obnoxious tossers.

From Cusco, we went to Ollantaytambo, stopping at Pisaq in the Sacred Valley for a quick warm-up walk around the Inca ruins there. Ollantaytambo is a jumping-off point for the Inca Trail, a small town with a market selling walking sticks to prop up weary hikers. The biggest surprise about Ollantaytambo was the restaurant in the center of the town. In Peru, getting a decent cup of coffee is usually harder than finding an interesting sandwich in Boots - but this place, in the middle of nowhere, boasted fantastic Andean coffee, made with a proper old Italian espresso machine, and the waiter who served it even wore a creased white shirt with a black bow tie. It's almost as incongruous as the time Simon and I found a nutty Australian woman in China, running a cafe and walking around in her lingerie.

After a night in Ollantaytambo, we were ready to start the Inca Trail, even if the neighbours had been making a racket the night before. More soon.

Home

I arrived home yesterday after taking six flights in four days, starting in La Paz. My biological clock still thinks I'm in New York, my brain gave up somewhere around Miami and my guts haven't got a clue where they are any more so they are protesting loudly. My backpack only just got here today, twenty-four hours after me, because somehow it missed a connection at JFK. Honestly, I got on the plane fine, I thought the backpack could take care of itself by now.

Life in England is normal, feels unchanged, so much so that it's making me wonder if I ever even left. The state of my trainers and my bank balance tells me otherwise. I came back a month early because I felt that I'd seen everything I needed to see, wanted to get back home and try returning to normality, and quite frankly because I ran out of money. A three-day tour to Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia was my last gas, and I left just as La Paz was working itself up to Sunday's presidential elections.

I'll be blogging on the Inca Trail and Bolivia soon, but for the moment, I'm enjoying brown toast, good tea, warmth on cold nights, the occasional wagging affection of the dog, and the worrying feeling of not really knowing what the hell to do next.

Salt and dead trains

A quiet moment for me
Originally uploaded by Big Trippy Nathan.

Aaargh, I still have to update the blog with what happened on the Inca Trail, and also the visit to Salar de Uyuni, which I just got back from. Hopeless I know, but if I wasn't off having all these experiences I'd only end up writing about what I had for breakfast, and you don't need to hear that.

For the moment, see the latest photos on Flickr - including the stunningly beautiful white-out of Salar de Uyuni, thousands of square kilometers of salt flats, and the eerie train graveyard.

Thought for the day: if they ever made a movie of the story of my trip, how would they ever direct all the dogs?

Christmas appeal

I'm in South America, a long way from family and friends, and not entirely sure what I'll be doing for Christmas yet. It's not really important to me - I miss my mates and my family all the time at the moment, Christmas won't change that. I'm pretty glad to be out of the UK and avoiding what I'm sure will be a non-stop barrage of rubbish pop songs, TV advertisements for sales that end boxing day, tacky decorations and 'meaningful' messages from fusty old clergymen, along the lines of 'Most of The World is Having a Rubbish Time This Christmas So Just Think About That'. Christmas for my family this year will be a muted affair anyway.

Earlier this year, my cousin Kathy died of cancer, aged just 37. She was a gifted artist, a good friend and confidante, a gorgeous girl and great fun, with an infectious giggle. I managed to make it back to the UK to see her before she died, a very weird month I'd rather forget - her death left a gaping hole in my family.

One thing that made life a lot easier during this time was the St Elizabeth Hospice where she stayed at the end. The nurses were caring and patient (particularly with my entire family and several friends around), and Kate was well looked after. When she died, they were an amazing blur of hugs, trays of tea and sympathetic words.

You may not know me or may have another place to put your hard-earned this Christmas, but if you like you can donate a gift to the hospice that took care of Kate through this web site. Certainly don't bother getting me a present!

More soon - I'm in La Paz, Bolivia, after surviving the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, altitude sickness, copious quantities of soup and witnessing the death of a perfectly healthy guinea pig.

Backpacker tales

Standard conversation between backpackers meeting for the first time:

"So where have you come from?"
"Peru."
"Oh wow, did you enjoy it? I´m going there next."
"Yeah, it was OK, but I much preferred Bolivia."
"How so?"
"Oh, more chilled out, the people are lovely, and it´s so cheap. What about you, how long have you been travelling?"
"Me? Oh, ten months now"
"Wow, a big trip then - round the world?"
"Yeah, one year altogether. You?"
"Three months, just South America. Where have you been so far?"
"Oh, India..."
"India, cool, how was it? I want to go there next..."
"Oh yeah brilliant, it´s really good fun if you just get over the culture shock thing. So yeah, there, China, South East Asia..."
"Favourite place so far?"
"Oh, almost certainly India. Stayed in places for, like, ten pence a night, did some voluntary work..."
"Yeah, same here in Venezuala."
"You went to Venezuala, isn´t it dangerous there?"
"Oh no, it was fine, plus the people I was living with really looked after me."
"Oh yeah, same here, they were really cool."
"As a matter of fact, I´m probably moving there."
"Really?"
"Yeah, the village I stayed in have made me their chieftan."
"Ah, I see..."
"In fact, they worship me as a diety incarnate..."
"..."
"...and they sacrificed a virgin for me."
"Just the one?"
"?"
"Well, in the place I stayed in they built a fifty-foot tall statue of me, in gold, sacrificed ten virgins, two cows, and a cat."
"Well, I say one virgin, it was more like all the virgins they could round up actually."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. And the president of the country has commissioned an opera of my life story. And I underwent an ancient initiation ceremony where they cut off my head and pickled it in a jar before a witch doctor sewed it back on chanting my name."
"So where are you heading next then?"
"Home, you?"
"Yeah, home."
"What are you going to do?"
"Dunno, temp for a while maybe."

Food, glorious food

I haven´t really given Chile the time I´m sure it deserves. After one night in Santiago I headed into Argentina with Sanita and Camilla who I met on Easter Island, to Mendoza, a hedonistic, relaxed little town (well, I say little, a million people live there but it just feels little) just over the border in Argentina. Mendoza is the wine capital of Argentina, responsible for seventy percent of the country´s wine production. The centerpiece of Mendoza is the relaxed and clean Plaza Independencia, a sun-peppered maze of smooth paths dotted with benches where Mendocinos hang out.

The journey from Chile to Argentina by road was worth the bus fare and maybe a bit more for unbelievable views of the Andes. The road curves up steep hills back and forth, back and forth, and huge trucks throw themselves round the bends like they´re in a race - I half expected to see a coach teetering on the edge of a precipice with a youthful Michael Caine in the back shouting "Now hold still!" to the tune of The Self Preservation Society (sorry, movie geek took over there). A train line follows the road, but in many places tunnels and track have been destroyed by landslides and rocks - the whole road has a very temporary feel to it, as if the mountains could decide at any minute to wipe it out with a few casual rockfalls, and people would have to find another way through.

Arriving at Mendoza we were taken to a hostel on the outskirts of the center by one of the guys who hangs around at bus stations, train stations and airports ready to sell a bed for the night to any backpacker who was unprepared and hadn´t booked somewhere - like us. By this time there were five of us, Michael who the girls had met in Bolivia, and Jake who I thought was Spanish, but it turns out his Spanish was just really good. A lot of the time, getting off a bus, train or plane, you can instantly spot the other backpackers who aren´t totally sure what they´re doing, at which point you sheepishly approach each other with a line like "so do you know where you´re going?" - and before you know it you´ve formed a tight-knit group in twenty seconds flat, the whole thing being safety in numbers, or maybe an unspoken reliance by everyone on the person who looks slightly more like they know what they´re doing to sort out accommodation, speak to the taxi driver, and basically be Mum.

Walking into the hostel we were taken to, we entered an airless sweatbox of a room, a dorm for about seven people so cramped that you´d be sleeping with someone´s bad socks soaking the sweat from your brow as you twisted and turned in sodden sheets, craving air and getting only other people´s farts and dry-mouthed snores. Fortunately we turned right back around and left the hostel, trying to explain to a crestfallen picky-upy-from-the-station guy that we couldn´t stay there because the dorm was muy, muy pequeno and muy, muy caliente. Lo siento, but gracias for the lift into town. After walking through Mendoza for a short while we finally found Hostel Independencia, and five of us approached the shocked-looking girl at reception to ask for a room, to which her response was that we all looked ´unusual´. It turns out after subsequent investigation that when she said unusual, it was the best English word she could come up with to describe ´sweaty, knackered and fed-up looking´.

Our first night in Mendoza, and we went to Las Tanjeras to eat on the recommendation of the guys in the hostel. Las Tanjeras is a tenedor libre (all you can eat) restaurant, and a fine place indeed. Not just because of unlimited quanities of food (Sanita thought this was why I liked it so much and it´s a perfectly good reason), but also because the place was packed with Argentinians eating and having a good time, the whole room occasionally exploding with noisy renditions of Happy Birthday, or people banging on the tables with their cutlery. As hungry as we were that first night we all engaged in an almost orgiastic fit of eating from the numerous dishes on offer, accompanied by generous quanitities of great, cheap red wine.

With a tenedor libre the main problem is the sheer diversity of foods on offer, and having to try and eat in a reasonably co-ordinated fashion rather than throwing ten different and completely diverse things on your plate. I failed and just stuffed myself silly, from fantastic grilled lomo (steak), to lamb, sausages, freshly-cooked fish in cream sauce, salads, gratin potatoes, mashed potatoes, sauteed potatoes, pasta, spinach lasagne, empanadas (little meat pasties), calamari, fresh fruit, flans, ice cream, banana toffee custard, whipped cream and more. We could have rolled out of the place. On top of this we were served by a waiter, Antonio, who I believe is the template from which all waiters should be cut. Tall, composed, with as Jake suggested a slight hint of Basil Fawlty but none of his insanity, polite, friendly and completely professional. And this in an all-you-can eat restaurant, where his counterpart in the UK would probably be a spotty, lopsided-baseball-cap-wearing, couldn´t-give-a-monkeys teenager who´d spit in your food soon as look at you and roll their eyes if you even looked like you were going to ask for another glass.

The lifestyle in Mendoza is very Spanish, with people not eating until after ten and not drinking until after midnight - our standard finishing time was about 3 am, except for a night in the El Rancho nightclub which finished when the sun came up and the McDonalds next door was opening for the day. It wasn´t all Bacchanalian excess though - a trip out into the Andes to go white-water rafting was superb fun, with the five of us and this Argentinian in the back, shouting at us to paddle paddle paddle even as we´re totally submerged by water in the frothy rapids. That and a winery tour, almost obligatory in a big wine town but actually pretty dull, and it was time to move on to Bariloche. That is, it was time to move on after we ate at 1884, apparently the 7th best restaurant in the world, right in Mendoza and doing a mean chocolate pudding.

I really am obsessed with my stomach.

As Mendoza is wine capital of Argentina, Bariloche, nineteen hours south on the bus from Mendoza in Argentina´s lake district, is the chocolate capital, a Swiss-style town right down to the St Bernard dogs. On the shore of the vast Lake Nahuel Huapi, the background a beautiful and neverending collection of Andean peaks, the town is obviously a tourist Mecca, but who gives a monkeys when the chocolates and cakes are fantastic. We stayed for a few days in La Morada, a hostel nestled on the side of a hill and looking out over the lake, where I did nothing more than read and think, while Michael and Sanita went walking up the side of a hill and nearly needed a St Bernard to go get them back. It rained virtually the whole time, but La Morada was a quiet, calm haven with one of the best views out of the window I´ve ever seen.

Originally I only had two weeks to spend in Chile - then I went into Argentina instead - now I wished I had longer. Argentina is a great place I´d love to come back to, to see everything I missed. And eat a lot more. Chile I´ve given no time to at all save for three nights in Santiago and a worthwhile trip to the Museum of Precolumbian Art, so that´s another place for next time I´m round this way... whenever that is. It´s election time in Chile at the moment, so the TV screens are plastered with images of presidential and senatorial candidates waving to crowds, kissing old ladies, and walking flanked by their deputies. Chile has a woman candidate for President in this election, and women appear to be prominent in the election generally, in a country that has apparently just got self-concious about appearing to be chauvanist and male-dominated. Doesn´t change the fact that most of the TV programs seem to include scantily clad women disco dancing.

At the moment I´m in the VIP lounge at Santiago Airport, where I have access to unlimited free drinks, biscuits, Internet, and a good shower complete with complimentary toothbrush, mouthwash and razor. I´m here after buying my way in for fifteen dollars, after realising when I got to the aiport that my flight to Lima was twelve hours later than I thought it was. This caused mild panic, much like when I was woken this morning at the hostel after sleeping through my alarm clock, with the taxi to the airport waiting outside. It´s all the fault of a bloke called Phil who I bumped into after meeting initially on Easter Island - he wanted to go out for a drink, so I ended up with three hours drunken non-sleep last night. One very strange thing happened last night, that I do remember - I wished a man who wanted to sell us nasty plastic jewellery outside a bar good luck, saying to him ´Via con Dios´- ´Go with God´. I only used this because Keanu Reeves did at the end of Point Break and I thought it sounded good. The man however craned himself over my shoulder and said very quietly:
"We... killed... your... son". I know sometimes things get lost in translation, but he said the same in Spanish, so what the hell he was talking about I wish I knew.

So late tonight I get to Lima, Peru, and the start of a fourteen-day tour including a hike up the Inca trail, still counting down the days to the end of the trip. I´m just off to do some stretches and walk around the duty free shops a few times, I think I need the exercise.

Rapa Nui

I included Easter Island on my trip because I was so curious about it, and it turned out to be easy to do on the way to Chile, whereas for most people it´s an expensive flight or two to one of the most remote populated places on Earth. I knew about as much as most people - that it was small, remote, and had a lot of big stone heads on it. There is that movie, Rapa Nui, with Jason Scott Lee in it, but I never paid any attention to it, and apparently neither did anyone else. I half imagined the only way to get there would be in a biplane piloted by a mad Chilean who would land us on the high street, dodging horses as we skittered to a halt to be greeted by a gruff customs official with an unfeasibly large moustache and a cigar the size of a demi-baguette - but it turns out they have a proper airport, and the plane was a very modern Airbus on its way to Santiago. Furthermore I can confirm that Easter Island has one ATM, Internet access, cars, and wheelie bins. Reality has almost always been more mundane than I expected things to be, except for India.

Leaving Tahiti, I boarded the flight to be greeted by LAN Chile air stewards wearing scary black and red uniforms that made them look somewhere between concentration camp commandants and dominatrixes, but maybe that´s just my twisted mind. Easter Island was the first sniff of land we saw since Tahiti, and you get an idea how small the island is when the runway virtually cuts across the whole thing. The airport is one of those very small places where you walk off the plane down steps and across the runway, not through a tunnel that makes you feel like a gerbil in one of those combi-cages that´s all connected by tubes. Outside the airport I met a friendly lady called Sandra who took me back to her residence, a ten minute walk from the airport in Hanga Roa, the only real settlement on the island. Guest house (residence) owners are waiting at the airport every time a flight comes in, shouting "Sir! Sir!" across the arrivals hall, even as you stumble numb-headed and back-packed around trying to remember where you put your passport.

They speak Spanish in Easter Island, as it´s part of Chile and many if not most of the people there now are Chilean, after most of the original Rapa Nui were wiped out by in-fighting, disease, cannibalism (apparently), and being taken from the island by waves of slave ships. My Spanish wasn´t too hot after I got my GCSE in it over ten years ago, and I also kept getting confused after only just having got the swing of French on Tahiti, so I kept saying Oui when I meant to say Si. The quality of Spanish used by the average tourist is pretty poor unless they´ve been practicing for a while, so questions will be asked in Spanglish, e.g "Hola Señor, donde est the bathroom, por favor?". The locals often answer Spanish questions in English, presumably as they´d rather not listen to you mangle their language for the next five minutes or look embarrassed at them before saying "No hablo mucho Espanol, sorry..."

After propositioning Camilla and Sanita outside a restaurant in Hanga Roa, I had people to share a jeep with to explore the island, so we took off in a 4x4 to see the sights - while Easter Island is pretty small, it´s not all walkable unless you take whole days to do just that, so the preferred way of getting around is a hire car. Four or five car hire places in Hanga Roa for a place the size of Easter Island may be overcrowding the market a little, but that´s obviously where the money is.

The stone heads, Moai, are to be found all over Easter Island, looking inwards from the sea - over eight hundred of them in all, half of those unfinished, lying around Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater from which they were carved. Most of the Moai at major sights of interest are once more standing tall, after having been toppled during inter-clan conflicts on the island in around the sixteenth century. Easter Island is mercifully free of souvenir vendors at every site of interest - you just drive up and take a look with relatively little hassle. My first sight of the Moai felt a little like a dream come true - they are impressive, big (most are several meters tall), but more than that they are a symbol of a place that was always a very, very long way away, and to see them it´s still a mystery quite how, and why, these giant monoliths were carved from the hillsides of Rano Raraku and erected all over the island. Rano Raraku itself is fascinating - half-finished Moai stand still embedded in the sides of the hill, some now no more than giant faces peering skywards from the grass.

Easter Island has a nice feel to it, with locals who are neither obsequious nor aloof, just friendly and relaxed. You get the feeling that because so many people don´t get a chance to come here, it´s never more crowded than one or two flights a day can make it, the place is running at a happily relaxed pace. The bars and restaurants are expensive - not compared to home, but compared to a budget destination I suppose. That said, Te Moana in Hanga Roa served great food and cold beer, had great staff (and, sorry, but they were all beautiful), and had live music most nights - altogether a more appealing proposition than trying to cook with the overpriced, wilted vegetables from the local supermercados.

While there, I also got to go snorkelling in crystal water just off the coast, with clear visibility twenty meters down to the ocean floor, to see my old favourites, parrot fish. The coast of Easter Island is another great feature of the place - dramatic, jagged outcrops of volcanic rock jut into the water where they are pummelled by runaway trains of waves, huge, tsunami-like monsters that churn the surf up so much it goes as white as milk. Easter Island even has a beach of clear waters over pinkish sand, where fish swim around your feet and vendors sell barbecued chicken, cold Sprites and souvenir mini-Moai, a row of Moai looking inland at the back of the beach as if they disapproved and turned their backs on the whole thing.


On Easter Island I saw one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life, and it was a complete surprise - it almost made going there worth it all on its own, and when Camilla, Sanita and I reached it after over an hour´s uphill walk from Hanga Roa, we all went silent. The volcanic crater at Rano Kau on the Western tip of the island was an utterly unspoilt place of simple, stunning natural beauty, with an emerald lagoon in the base, and a view out to the endless Pacific through a break in the wall of the crater. It´s places like this, that I had never really heard about before, that blow my mind. Just don´t tell anyone about it.

Next, Chile for one night, and Argentina, one of my favouritest places yet.

Tahiti

Some places live up to expectations, some exceed them, and some just plain suck. Sorry for the poor English but you get my drift. I`ve found so far that the places that the guidebooks tell you to go to, the places that are `famous´, the places that come heavy with the weight of expectation, rarely satisfy. What charm they may have had is diluted by aggressive hawkers, greedy taxi drivers, indifferent locals and drive-through McDonalds restaurants.

One of the images a lot of people have in mind is of a golden beach, bathed in sunshine, with a swaying palm tree and a woman in a sarong. It`s only when you actually get to the beach that you realise just how clever photographers and marketing people are, as the beach pictured on the brochure didn`t show the dog crap and broken glass around the paths, the overpriced drinks and fetid snacks in the restaurant, or the fat Germans pacing around in minute Speedos shouting abuse at the underpaid waiters. The more time I`ve been away, the more I`ve seen that there are hardly any places that have the power to surprise, to really satisfy, to exceed your expectations and leave you speechless. But I´ve still found some. Tahiti wasn`t one of them.

Tahiti embodies for some the idea of an island paradise, just the name does it, like a trademark. It was in Tahiti that the crew of Captain Bligh´s Bounty stayed for ten months collecting breadfruit plants - they loved the place so much that they rebelled when they had to leave. I went to Tahiti out of curiosity, because it was on the way somewhere else, not expecting too much. It turned out to be OK, but it´s no paradise. I stayed at a small pension (guest house) on the outskirts of town, Pension Teamo, looked after by the amiable and fussy Marie-Claude, just her name taking me back to school French lessons and the Bertillon family. Roaches scuttle over the floorboards in the evenings and noises wake you in the dead of night like someone is actually attempting to check the size of their room by swinging a cat, but otherwise it was comfortable, and the place comes with the added bonus of two small Gauloise-smoking Frenchmen who look like they`ve been there since the 1970s. Speaking of the French lessons, I must have paid more attention than I thought when Miss Benfield was spitting down the microphone in class, as my French dusted off almost respectably - French is the main language in Tahiti.

My stay of a few days was spent wandering the capital Papeete, were locals drive huge pickups they bought on credit and a small kiosk on the waterfront was the only place to buy remotely cheap food, and heading out to see the coast with some folks I met in the pension. I never got to see the rugged interior of the island, an unpopulated area of forest and jagged volcanic peaks, so my lasting image of Tahiti is of new housing being built on ledges cut into the hill-side, a Carrefour supermarket bustling with shoppers, and the buzz of vans and cars on the streets of Papeete, with the occasional comical sight of a cyclist`s pilion passenger playing his guitar as the bike wobbles down the street.

Your image of the food on a Pacific island may be of mouthwatering tropical fruits, colourful fish and yams, served on huge banana leaves. In Tahiti that`s sadly not the case. Most of the food is dried, preserved, processed and tinned, shipped in from thousands of miles away. The island has almost no food production of its own. The only place we found to get reasonably priced, reasonable food was Les Roulottes, a huddle of food vans down near the waterfront serving steak frites, fish, pizza, Chinese dishes and crepes to a mixed crowd of locals and tourists, while a local band played plinky-plonky Polynesian music in the background.

Nights in Papeete took on a slightly seedy quality, especially at the weekend, but the place felt basically safe. Dealers attempted to call you over to dark corners, and girls in very short skirts hung around the neighbourhood of our pension by the side of the road, including a beautiful Fafafini with the longest legs I`ve ever seen. Fafafini are transvestites, but more than that, they are boys who have been raised as girls - a tradition in Polynesian islands, when a family has no female children.

Tahiti was good harmless fun for a few days - but no more. Easter Island, next, had a completely different feel, and something incredible that I wasn´t expecting.

Island hopping and going doolally

The first problem I have to tell you about is that I am using a French keyboard, which for some reason quite beyond me has all of the keys in the wrong places; they apparently don't think that QWERTY is a sensible layout. As a result I am typing at the speed of someone who is scared of computers and taps away very slowly as if they are afraid the keyboard will give them an electric shock and a sharp slap and tell them they're stupid.

My photos are much more up to date than this blog at the moment. I've been taking pictures but for a little while haven't had the time to write, and wasn't in the right frame of mind either, in fact for much of my time in New Zealand I went a bit potty. I'm not so sure that it has worn off yet. Bleep bleep.

So it's back yet again to where I left off, with more digressing than Ronnie Corbett (in his big chair with his story about heh heh heh what the producer said to him) and Doubtful Sound. I took an overnight trip with Real Journeys, a pretty slick Kiwi tour operator, after deciding not to see Milford Sound, which is the big draw in New Zealand - a good reason not to go for fear of competing for space to enjoy the place with ten other boats and fifteen kayaking Kiwi Experience trippers barking woo and yay at each other with gay abandon. Doubtful Sound was named by our old mate Captain James 'Imaginative Names' Cook as exit from the waters of the sound was made doubtful by low winds. Judging by his previous efforts, Doubtful Sound could easily have been called 'Not Totally Sure Sound', 'Unsound Sound', or 'Oooh I Just Don't Know Really Why Don't We Wait A Little While And See What The Wind Does Meanwhile Let's Have A Nice Cup Of Tea Sound'. I realise that last name is a bit much.

Doubtful Sound is a very, very beautiful place. When all of the engines of our boat, the Fjordland Navigator, were turned off at night, we were able to stand on the bridge of the boat and listen to the perfect quietness, broken only by distant bird calls and the trickling of waterfalls from the previous day's rainfall. The Fjords tower above you, somehow still shrouded in trees and greenery despite there being no soil on the rocks to support them. Whole clumps of trees occasionally fall from the faces of the fjords in giant 'treevalanches'.

Ours was the only boat on the water, so we had the whole place to ourselves - sharing it only with the birds, a colony of dozing fur seals, and a pod of inquisitive bottlenose dolphins that swam with the boat, leaping over the bow waves, until they got bored and left us alone, still going "oooooooh", with big grins on our faces. Dolphins just seem to have that effect - pure, unadulterated, contagious joy. For all I know they were swimming with the boat to see if there was a way they could get an innocent tourist overboard to eat them or perform cruel experiments on them, but joy is how it came across.

About twelve people on the boat out of sixty or seventy were aged below sixty-five, and half of them were the crew. The rest were on the more mature side, a fearsome tour group of silver-haired troublemakers, recklessly emptying the tea urn, foolishly taunting the wildlife expert while he gave an excellent slide show, and impishly having sing-alongs with the piano. I know I'm being cheeky here, but in all seriousness, the elder tourist is amongst the worst behaved I've seen, particularly on airplanes, where they're still deciding what seat to take and moving their bags while the plane is actually taking off, air stewardesses frantically trying to get them seated at high speeds on a forty degree angle.

From Doubtful Sound, I headed for Queenstown, the tourism capital of the South Island, and then left just as quickly as I got there after I realised that the place put me in a foul mood as soon as I arrived. Not being in the mood to jump off a bridge or out of a plane, and not being interested in sitting drinking overpriced designer fruit smoothies with a po-faced bunch of snowboarders in expensive sunglasses, the place had nothing to offer me. Luckily about an hour up the road I found the far friendlier and easier-going Wanaka, a toned-down version of Queenstown. The highlight of Wanaka for me had nothing to do with snow capped peaks - the superb Cinema Paradiso shows movies in a small theatre, where the seats are old sofas and armchairs, and even an old Morris Minor, where you crash out in the back seat and watch the movie through the windscreen. Great quality food is available to eat before, during or after the show with not one heat-lamp hot dog or greasy nacho in sight. It was like crashing out at home to watch a movie, only with a great big screen.

After Wanaka I stopped at the stunning Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, with blue ice creaking like a great living thing, then pootled up the lonely West Coast where endless stretches of rocky beaches are pummelled by the sea and perpetually shrouded in spray, and drove through Arthur's Pass, back to Onuku Farm Hostel outside Akaroa. It was the first place I stayed at in New Zealand, and I'd been looking forward to getting back there. Driving around the South Island had been good fun, but often lonely, apart from meeting some cool people briefly along the way, and I was craving company. One thing this trip has taught me is that while I'm happy in my own company, I have my limits, and I need to be around people. A lot of time on my own in New Zealand gave me plenty of time for thought, a luxury I didn't really have on this trip until that point, and it wasn't such a good thing. I realised somewhere in the South Island that I felt absolutely exhausted - with traveling, with seeing new things, with being a stranger - and felt like quitting the trip and going home.

I stayed at Onuku for a week, doing a little work in exchange for a place to park the van, with the intention of staying there for the summer, leaving out South America and getting home via the US or back through Asia - then I changed my mind again and decided to carry on. I've done this since about five or ten times, so have been beating myself up for being a doddering indecisive berk. The time that I was at Onuku, again, was great - Steve, Erina, Tim, Babe the dog and two orphan lambs, amazing quiet and peace, and the chance to cook proper meals and feel at home, sleeping in the van at night under a sky groaning with stars. I was sad to leave, but the irony of it was that maybe stopping at Onuku allowed me to relax enough to feel ready to move on.

From Onuku, I made a beeline for the North Island, and I'd hardly set off before I started losing the plot again - recently my concentration span seems to make a goldfish look bookish and focused, and I have less patience than a small child in Asda. After an uneventful trip across the Cook Straits between the South and North Islands and a day out in Wellington, I drove to Worldwide Backpackers, which I'd booked by phone earlier that day, thinking I was being really organised. I wanted a private room after having been by myself in the van for five weeks and being unable to face the prospect of a dorm, what with all the conversation, snoring and waiting for the shower.

Having driven back and forth and round about Wellington's one-way system for about forty minutes, thrashed the van to within an inch of its life, and finally managed to park on the one remotely nearby piece of available road at a one in two incline in a ropey area, I finally entered the backpackers so wound up my hands were shaking and I was looking slightly like the Hulk immediately before shirt-popping time. To top this off I was greeted by a girl with no discernible sense of humour and huge unblinking eyes, who told me I'd have to find somewhere else to park. When I decided I couldn't be bothered I told her I'd just cancel the room if that was OK, to which the response was 'vell, I vill charge you sixty dollars' - damn fool, I gave them my credit card number when I booked. Relenting, I paid the girl for the room in cash, plus a twenty dollar key deposit, took the room key, and went to find somewhere else to park.

After getting lost in one-way streets, steep, steep hills and finally ending up on a motorway heading northwards out of Wellington with no way to turn around, I just kept going, finding a campsite in the arse end of nowhere and mailing the key back a day later. The rationale I employed when finding the campsite was a reflection of how buggered my mind was - I wouldn't turn off to a place called Avalon because it was named after a Roxy Music song, but I did turn off at a place called Whitby because I went to Whitby on my holidays in the UK once and liked it.

The North Island of New Zealand didn't do it for me as much as the South, but then I didn't really give it a chance, concentrating on getting to the Far North to see Amy, a girl I met in Cambodia and spent time with in Vietnam, and get away from the heavily touristy areas. Brief stops at Waimangu and Lake Taupo were a good chance to explore areas of geothermal activity, fields that belched steam from between the tough gorse, where the smell of bad eggs hung in the air and the ground made noises like a hungry stomach.

Finally, I got to Monganui, and Amy's parents' cattle farm, where I spent a few days helping to move stock from field to field, riding around on the back of a quad bike, watching a calf being born, feeding thirsty calves and getting covered in slobber and cow shit out in the fresh air. It was superb, and Amy and her folks made me feel totally at home, even though her dad called me a 'Dingle Pom' because I couldn't put string through a loop for an electric fence without getting confused - I guess I'm a clueless townie.

New Zealand was fantastic - diverse landscapes, beautiful wildlife and great people in a place that felt like home, but a greener, grander place. No wonder so many people are moving there.

So, after spending the last few weeks not being sure whether I want to call off the trip or keep going, I'm in Tahiti now, and flying to Easter Island tonight - keeping going out of curiosity, but feeling ready to go home, so it's a good job I'm going in the right direction. Tahiti is very French, very hot and humid, and pretty expensive, but its been good for a few days, partly down to meeting some more cool people. They're all surfing on Moorea now, I'm off to see big stone heads.

Heading east

I really have been sloppy with my blogging of late, for which I am very sorry. Nevertheless, as my blog's statistics suggest, people have still been coming to the site through search engines, and invariably being disappointed with what they've found, if what they've been searching for is anything to go by...

Search engine queries used to find this site, exactly as they were entered:

• Gay full body massage Chennai
• Are celebrities overpaid?
• Counterfiet [sic] watches
• How to pack for a trip to London in November
• How big is my van
• Weird massage experiences
• Porkinson sausages
• Photos of a drunkards liver
• Nathan smells

I'm in a list-writing mood, so here are some facts about New Zealand, now that I have been here for thirty-eight days:

• There are more sheep than people in New Zealand.
• Sheep have been trained to sniff for drugs at airports, and are now used as seeing companions for the blind as well as in bomb disposal.
• Sheep who fall off hills and land on isolated rock ledges can survive for years on the grass they find there -they are known as hermit sheep. Their wool grows so long that they cannot see any more and resemble giant balls of wool.
• A sheep called Tundra in the South Island just off the West coast can talk, draw simple diagrams, and re-wire household electrical appliances.
• Green spaces and squares in Christchurch today were once used to grow potatoes to send to England after World War II.
• New Zealand's less well-known food export after lamb and wool is cheese, which is extracted from mines near Rotorua. New Zealand has been mining cheese since 1867. The cheese is infused with gases common to that area produced by geothermal activity, imparting a distinct flavour and scent. It is most often packaged as The Laughing Cow, Dairylea, and Tesco Value Cheese Spread.
• Maui rental campervans are predominantly hired by Germans with no sense of humour.
• Wellington has a bitch of a one-way system.
• Coin-operated showers at all campsites are all set to operate for precisely fifteen seconds too little.
• The Cosy Corner motor camp at Mount Maunganui has the nicest smelling toilets in New Zealand.

I can't provide proof of all of the facts above.

I left things off in the last entry with a trip to Doubtful Sound, which now seems like ages ago, and opportunities to get on the Internet have been few and far between. Nevertheless, I will be catching up with things as soon as I get the chance - I've seen lots of places, met some great people, and gone slightly mad. Now I'm in Auckland, and in a few hours I fly to Tahiti, about which I know nothing more than a perky-breasted maiden there once got together with Fletcher Christian and sparked the mutiny on the Bounty. The next entry therefore will hopefully cover the rest of New Zealand, including Doubtful Sound, stunning glaciers, musical toilets, the day I nearly gave up the trip, chasing cows, getting lost in Wellington, and much more.

Bell Birds

I've recorded a couple of things just recently, thought I'd share one of them, the sound of bell birds singing in the evening (916k MP3).

More soon, I know, I'm being rubbish with keeping the blog up to date again.

Doubtful Fantastic

Dolphin
Originally uploaded by Big Trippy Nathan.

Extra... extra... lots of new pictures from Doubtful Sound, the Catlins, and other nice bits of New Zealand are now on Flickr.

I'm currently esconsed in Wanaka, a very pleasant and relaxed little town towards the West Coast, after spending about two hours in Queenstown, which was definitely not my kind of place. More soon on Doubtful Sound and recent goings-on, but in the meantime, take a look at the pics...

Kia Ora pt II

After I picked up the van from Christchurch about a week and a half ago now, I drove out to Akaroa on the Banks Peninsula, a small town with a Maori name but French street names, something I never quite got to the bottom of.

Akaroa set the tone for the standard New Zealand tourist experience - the towns and what they offer are after all playing second fiddle to the landscape, so they don't need to make much effort. The standard set-up involves a small cafe, souvenir shop, and usually at least one place selling staggeringly expensive merino wool goods. Merino wool is incredible stuff, keeps you warm when it's cold and doesn't get all itchy and sweaty when you get warm, but you pay through the nose for anything made of merino - I've only been able to afford a beanie. There's something about souvenir shops that gets me though - aside from a bookmark or a t-shirt with the name of the place you're in emblazoned upon it, every souvenir shop is usually selling identical tat to the next. This ranges from beeswax knee rubs through chilli oil to photo albums, wrought-iron biplanes made of recycled beer kegs, and special organic tea blends picked and tested by monkeys. It's all crap, and you can only get it in souvenir shops, assuming you stayed in the shop long enough to buy anything because the scent of pot pourri is usually so thick in the air that your eyes are running and you're going dizzy in seconds flat.

I stayed for three days just outside Akaroa at the beautiful and very chilled out Onuku Farm hostel, a place run by the cordial Steve and Erina, hiding towards the top of a hill, surrounded by trees and fields, nestled in fantastic gardens. I felt relaxed as soon as I got there and ended up reluctant to leave. I slept in the van, spent warm evenings in the living room with the fire blazing chatting with the others there, and went walking in the surrounding hills, getting blown about by hurricane force breezes, stared at by sheep, and falling on my arse walking down muddy slopes. It was a great start that hasn't been matched so far. There's also something about sitting on top of a pile of rock staring out in the direction of Antarctica that makes me a bit contemplative - but more of that later.

After leaving Onuku and Akaroa, I headed South, taking a meandering course along always quiet roads, never more than a couple of cars in front or behind, through fields filled with sheep, sheep and more sheep, and only occasionally cows, deer and alpaca. The landscape alternates between stunning alpine ranges of scantily clad snow-capped peaks with lakes of beautiful deep-blue water, and flat areas like the Canterbury Plains that are so like home, you half-expect to pull into Kings Lynn, Bury St Edmunds or Kersey at any point. Small towns whistle by in the wink of an eye, even the big ones are comfortably small, spread out, with the skyline uninterrupted by tall buildings.

After a couple of quiet nights at Peel Forest and Lake Tekapo, places with nothing much more to offer than long walks and more merino jumpers, I stopped for a night at Mount Cook, a small settlement nestled in a valley. Standing outside my van in the evening, I thought I heard thunder - it turned out to be avalanches up in the mountains. The landscape in Yunnan, China had a similar trick to the landscape here - as you drive along and up and down, mountains and valleys reveal themselves, views dynamically changing as clouds move and you move among them. After a while you stop getting out of the car to take photos quite so often because if you did it every time you saw something impressive, you'd be stopping and starting the whole time.

Driving in New Zealand has allowed me to sample the radio stations here - and they're a mixed bag. The only station I've heard playing anything from this decade by the sound of it was Dunedin's student-oriented radio station, Radio 1, which I was disappointed to drive out of range of. Otherwise it's lots of commercial stations playing 'Classic Hits of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties', which usually means the kind of songs that end up on useless Telstar compilations, Billy Ocean's 'Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car', Backstreet Boys, and more Billy Ocean, interspersed with adverts with cheese-tastic jingles.

From Mount Cook, I headed out to the coast. Oamaru, my first stop, was a quiet town with a strong historical feel and a penguin colony, where I failed to see any penguins. Oamaru is an attractive little place, but the local kids are doing their best to make it look disreputable by wheel-spinning up the street every so often. The sad, funny thing about kids in small towns is that they usually don't have much more to do than doughnut their cars around supermarket car parks, drive as fast as they dare along the high street and look menacingly at tourists, so they do that. Real gangsters are driving along gritty city streets in low-rider cars with suspension that bounces, their hoes in tow and their pieces packed. Kids in small towns always look a bit misplaced and slightly daft hanging out of their windows, beanies slung low over their foreheads and 50 Cent booming from their stereos, with a church tower and colourful gardens as a backdrop.

The kids notwithstanding, Oamaru was a nice town. I bought a book from the Slightly Foxed secondhand bookstore, and thought I'd slipped into a timewarp. The lady that served me appeared to be wearing Victorian costume, she wrapped the book in brown paper and tied the package with brown string before stamping it with the shop's stamp, then cut the string with a pair of ancient, giant shears, and wrote what she'd sold me in a giant ledger with a fountain pen in an elaborate font. I half expected to step outside the shop to the sight of a penny farthing trundling past and a gentleman with a handlebar moustache tipping his top hat while saying "Good evenin' Master Nelson, it's a mite nippy out today, how's the coach and horses?".

From Oamaru I've done a big loop around the southern coast, ending up where I am now, in Te Anau, camping in nearby Manapouri, on the other side of the Southern Alps from Doubtful Sound and the Fjordland National Park. Aside from meeting a girl who knew Seam Reap and the guys at Earthwalkers in the middle of nowhere, and picking up a hitchhiker with whom I talked nonsense solidly for four hours, it's been quiet, sometimes unnervingly so. I've been wandering where all the other tourists are, but then a concrete-faced old man drives another rental motorhome in the opposite direction to mine and looks disapprovingly at my spray-painted van, and I'm reassured. He's going in the opposite direction.

Kia Ora pt I

I whinged about the price of Internet access in the last post as many places in New Zealand have coin-operated Internet PCs, which demand you pump in another two dollars every ten minutes or so. It's like playing some greedy arcade game, even more frustrating when I take hours on end carefully uploading and captioning photos and honing these blog entries down from war-and-peace length train-of-thought streams of cobblers to the slightly more streamlined cobblers you're reading now.

I'm staying in a backpackers in Oamaru, on the East coast of New Zealand, partly to take a break from the van I've been sleeping in for the last week, and partly because they have free Internet access. I'm more enthusiastic about the free Internet access than taking a break from the van because I've slept better in the van than just about any other time in my life. While I've been writing this I've only been distracted by two people attempting to conduct a conversation in Japanese around mouths full of food, which is pretty good going. I tried to write the blog the first time in Christchurch while resisting the urge to pummel the man four seats down into unconsciousness with his keyboard after he kept making a deep, resonant snorting noise - the kind you'd make if you were trying to suck your brains out through your nose. It was like waking up on an Indian train. Listening to Japanese, or any other language, can be very frustrating because I can tell my brain is still hoping to understand something if it listens long enough. I was easily distracted by the full-mouth Japanese conversation earlier (they were eating for a while) because I was reading a novel by Ethan Hawke, which was basically enjoyable, but he insists on using the word 'breasts' far too often, which eventually becomes annoying.

I got to New Zealand a week or so ago now, and I've hired a small van from Escape Rentals - if I was going round New Zealand, it was always going to be in a van, despite it being a really uneconomical decision when it's only me, petrol is exorbitant, and you still have to pay to park it most places. Nevertheless, I am driving a colourfully painted van with a ram down one side and a bull down the other, which makes me feel potent. The van is even called The Ram, and this name was given to me by the guy at the hire place in a growling voice, so I could tell it was a serious vehicle. I'm cultivating my beard and wearing a beanie to really get into the spirit of things, but I'm aware that image is an issue for some. A ten-year-old boy said to me the other morning, "My sister says that all people who sleep in vans are freaks, but I don't think so."

I was sad to leave Australia, but it wasn't the place as much as friends there that I miss. Sydney is a great city, and Fraser, the Whitsundays and Uluru were must-do experiences, but Oz was the first place I saw after Asia, and it took me a while to get used to it. Australia is designed to cater to even the lowest common denominator, the hung-over nineteen year old gap year student with the sense of direction of a blind hedgehog in a bag. There was none of the sense of excitement and risk that came with traveling in Asia - I'm not asking for danger, but there was that much more satisfaction in Asia if you just managed to get on the right bus - this is obviously quite apart from the fact that I've learnt a great deal traveling in Asia, but didn't feel like Australia taught me much. Australia felt less like traveling, what I came away to do, and whatever the hell that is, more like just taking a holiday. There are millions of English people all over the place there anyway, so it felt like home from home, even though it's a home with insects, plants and animals poised to kill you, staggering distances from one place to another, and a weird predilection for putting beetroot in burgers.

Because I don't know when I'll be on the Internet next, I'm posting this now - to follow, New Zealand, yes there are sheep everywhere, rumbling in the mountains, and penguins that won't show up on time.

Shortest blog entry yet

Internet access in New Zealand a rip off. Have 57 seconds left. Aaargh. Will post soon, still alive, New Zealand beautiful, driving a van, cooking on gas. Kisses, N.

Mad dingos and Englishmen

OK, so we hardly saw any dingos on Fraser Island, just two skulking about when we ate a picnic on the first day and one on the beach, but I liked the title, and there were a lot of English people around.

The four-wheel drive camping safari to Fraser Island was the highlight of my time in Oz - it had some stiff competition against the Red Center and the Whitsundays, but it was fantastic fun, and enough to restore my love for the seaside. OK, I still can't stand tacky beaches, but sitting round a barbecue to keep warm with a group of funny people, huddled between a four-wheel drive vehicle and a tent, drinking nasty wine and listening to a drunk Frenchman play a didgeridoo while the surf washes the shore in the background - this is the stuff that memories are made of.

Three groups from Palace Backpackers in Hervey Bay were prepared for their trip by the fastest talking Australian I have ever met. He spoke so fast I don't know if even he knew what he was on about, but it was something to do with putting the tents on the cars and driving to Woolworths to pick up food for three days. Our groups were all randomly assembled it seems, but to me, our group getting together was sheer luck - we all got on like a house on fire, and we didn't have the American guy that slept through the safety briefing and was heard to say "F*ck it man, I'm gonna catch a dingo". He could have got annoying.

Fraser Island was bigger than I expected, in fact it's huge, over 100 km long, all made of sand. Huge sand spits hide inland behind lines of trees, creeks and washouts run down to the sea from the island, the endless Eastern Beach is a national highway and aircraft runway combined, and the roads are only traversable by four-wheel drive. Dingos, goannas and birds rules the island, and whales, sharks, turtles and dolphins rule the waters. You can't swim in the sea because of the sharks, jellyfish and strong undercurrents, unless that is you're a Norwegian called Raimond who knows no fear. Fraser Island is beautiful, and getting onto the Eastern beach, facing away from Australia out to the Pacific, seeing dolphins jumping in pairs from the water as the sun rose, was truly memorable.

The group wandered the island following a loose itinerary set out for us by Palace - but the beauty of the self-drive format was that we took ourselves where we wanted to go. I can't stand being shepherded around the place by tour guides so this was perfect, but we still had our Danish drill instructor, Helle, to keep us moving on if we stayed in one place for too long. Our first discovery on the island was the stunning Lake McKenzie, an inland freshwater lake of incredible deep blue water over pure white sand. The photo on the right is a rare shot in that it doesn't have an overweight fifteen-year-old Australian kid being molested by seven of his mates in it.

We decided straight out to camp on the beach - the inland campsites had a no-noise regulation after nine at night, and the good thing about our group was that we immediately knew we would be making some noise after nine at night. By the end of the first night, we were busy laughing hysterically at something none of us quite seem to remember, and we didn't really stop for three days. The problem with a group of people getting together and having fun is that you end up saying 'you had to be there' to people who weren't, because the stories just don't sound as funny, and this was one of those cases. Nevertheless, highlights in the mirth stakes included Raimond being attacked by an underwater dingo, the sand monster, Raimond in general, Adam the 'Hand Grenade' going off after drinking enough Jack Daniels to make an elephant dizzy, Ping Pang Pong and Chris volunteering to drink for Helle, and the French lads complete inability to play Ping Pang Pong. You see, you had to be there.

With six drivers in our car we had six different people take opportunities to try and kill everyone. The inland roads of the island have holes a foot deep, are basically just sand tracks, and wind round and up and down hills, but it's incredible what a feeling of invincibility you have driving a filthy great Toyota four-wheel drive, a bit like being in an arcade game as Andy described it - it was great fun. The only problem was that while the driver was having great fun, everyone in the back was being thrown a foot off their seat by the bumps. Driving on the beach took an an extra element of danger with loose sand, deep washouts, creeks, planes and other cars - a couple of times, sitting in the back, we saw sky, then sand, then our lives flash before our eyes as the car bounced about over sand or dropped into a washout.

Fraser Island was a great combination of natural beauty and hilarity with a great group of people - we were all a bit cheesed off to leave. See the photos from Fraser Island here.

Strayan

I've written this in an Australian accent mate, so that's the best way to read it.

Strayans have some weird words, mate. More than two syllables gets a bit tricky, so fair dinkum, many words that would take too long to say get boiled down to two syllables, sorry, syllies, usually ending in 'o' or 'ie'. Too easy.

Mushies are what you can have on your burger along with your beetroot, no, they're not the peas, they're the fungus. Rego is what you've got to do to keep your car on the road. Brissie is up the coast from Sydney and the full name is only two syllies anyway so I'm buggered if I know why they shortened that one, champ. Tassie however makes a lot of sense because that is one long bloody name to be saying when you could be cracking open another stubbie. I'm not even going to bother telling you what a stubbie is, but rest assured that XXXX is not called that because Queenslanders can't spell 'beer', it's something to do with monks.

You can keep your stubbies in this esky mate, cos I can't stand warm grog - my mate cracked the shits yesterday and we nearly had a blue because he wouldn't chuck a U-ey back to the bottle shop for some more ice, even though it was the avo and the eskies were warm and the patties were starting to smell ratshit - he was only being a whinging bastard because he was rooted after a sick night with some Sheilas we met up the whoop-whoop, and he's a two-pot screamer anyway.

Island-hopping

It was a real relief to leave Cairns - Bohemia was getting to feel just plain strange, and I spent my last evening there in a one-sided drunk conversation (me listening, him talking) with a truck driver called Kevin who had recently crashed his truck and decided to come to Cairns for two weeks to drink himself silly. He was a very friendly bloke with hands like hams and a big red nose from all the beer he'd been drinking, but it was one of those conversations that worries you slightly because you're not sure where it's going to end, and it ended pretty much where any drunk conversation with a stranger has recently with words such as 'Bush', 'Blair', 'Howard', 'F*ckers", 'Oil', and phrases such as 'This world is going to hell'. Strange how if you talk for long enough you end up coming to the conclusion that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and yet here we all still are - goes to show how much those Jehovah's Witnesses know. I've heard some real gems while sharing a beer with a stranger, and such is the nature of the beast that it often takes a short while to recall them - in Cambodia I was talking with an American about tourists from different places and how some were very different from each other. I made a remark about chalk and cheese, and he paused for a moment before saying "Yah.... chocolate cheese...".

I'm in Byron Bay, a well-known, hippyish town about eight hundred kilometers north of Sydney - this is my last stop before returning to Sydney and then on to New Zealand next week. I'm still coming down from the hilarity and beauty of a three-day camping safari on Fraser Island and the relaxation and stunning sights of a three-day sailing trip round the Whitsunday Islands. After leaving Cairns, I headed for Airlie Beach on a very long Greyhound bus journey with a driver who virtually ate his microphone when he made announcements to the passengers, so the sound coming out of the speakers was half announcement, half porno soundtrack, slurping and sucking noises echoing round the bus. An old French teacher used to do that when she coached us on pronunciation in the language lab, and it was enough to put you off your lunch.

Airlie Beach was a one-street load of nothing-muchness to compete with Cairns, but a pleasant enough place to 'chill out' for the night before heading out to the Whitsunday Islands. When I say 'chill out' this is one of the activities you can engage in at the beach in Australia. 'Chilling out' usually means doing very little, which is OK for about an hour and then becomes a bit of a hassle. 'Chilling out' therefore has to be punctuated with short bursts of activity such as eating, drinking, and walking. If 'Chilling out' really starts to get on your goat you end up binge-eating, as drunk as a monkey, wandering the streets like a lost child. I'm not so good at 'Chilling out'. I'm going to try giving up ranting about beaches as it's not got me anywhere - they're all the same and have stubbornly refused to change their ways despite my going on endlessly about them. Australian Beaches are at least devoid of dodgy looking teenagers in hoodies sitting looking threatening in their Ford Escorts, and rubbish fairground rides operated by fat blokes with mullets who shout 'scream if you wanna go faster' to spotty teenage girls, which is more than you can say about Felixstowe.

The three-day, two-night sailing trip round the Whitsunday Islands on the Providence V was fantastic. A small-ish group half comprised of stern-looking Germans gathered at the marina to board the replica topsail schooner, welcomed on board by a three-man (well, two-man one woman) crew, after being equipped with stinger suits (wetsuits to protect swimmers from jellyfish stings - box jellyfish stings in this area are potentially lethal) by a lady called Mrs Snorkel. I was desperate to ask her if she met Mr Snorkel before or after she'd got into the business. We headed out from the marina to Hayman Island and Blue Pearl Bay, sailing some of the way, using engines when the wind was too low, on the beautiful Providence, all colourful ropes, gleaming chrome and freshly repainted deck. You could tell it was going to be a good three days - even the Germans turned out not to be that stern.

I was really nervous at the prospect of snorkeling, seeing as how it involves swimming, and I am a truly pathetic swimmer, but after donning stinger suit, snorkel, flippers and waterproof camera and stepping gingerly from the beach into the chill waters of Blue Pearl Bay, I became a converted person. Snorkeling rocks. We swam out, made more buoyant by stinger suits, over my first coral reef. Even underwater, 'whoooaaaaahhhhh' comes across quite well. It was beautiful. Coral formations shaped like mushrooms, brains, antlers and spaghetti were patrolled by fish so colourful you can't help but think evolution just wanted a bit of an underwater Mardi-Gras because it was bored with using browns and greys. Parrot fish in stunning greens, pinks and blues flapped tiny flippers lazily while bottom-feeders pecked at the reef floor, and a humungous Mauri Wrasse chugged slowly along the fringes of the reef. We told Grant, the skipper, about the Mauri Wrasse, and he coolly responded with "Yeah, that's Elvis". When we sat on the beach afterwards and got talking to two lads who worked in a resort there, they explained that all of the Mauri Wrasse in that area were called Elvis.

We had plenty more opportunities to snorkel on the trip, in coral gardens that seemed to get progressively bigger and more impressive, some of the most stunning sights being coral reef dropping away like cliffs to reveal ocean floor thirty of forty feet below, the bottom still visible through the deepest blue water. Inquisitive fish would still be swimming around your ankles even as you walked on to the beach, and new colours and shapes always appeared from the gloom to surprise you. Floating above the reef, looking down, gave me a weird sensation of flying and peering into a completely different world. When we weren't snorkeling, we were taking it easy on the deck, reading, chatting and cracking open the beers in the evenings to watch the sun set.

Even though I haven't been too keen on beaches, Whitehaven Beach on was a revelation. Pure white silica sand like snow lay in giant semi-circular spits around blue-green waters off Whitsunday Island. Even the Italian who insisted on taking his shorts off and jumping up and down in the sea seeking the attention of four beautiful girls in bikinis like Honeychile Rider wasn't enough to spoil it, and the four Honeychiles turned in disgust and left the Italian alone and looking like an utter berk, so it was all good.

Next post (because I haven't been outside in way too long and I need to eat) the Fraser Island trip - the Hand Grenade, underwater dingoes, and laughing until your cheeks hurt.

Tribulation and sunbathing

I'm back in Cairns after a quick and quiet trip to Cape Tribulation. Cape Tribulation was named by Captain Cook after he ran his ship the Endeavour aground here on the Great Barrier Reef. There are also, named by Cook, Mount Sorrow and Weary Bay. He then moved on to name some other less well-known sights such as Cheesed Off Cove, Not Again Bay and Why Does This Keep Happening To Me River.

Cape Tribulation is host to a mix of environments all meeting by the coast - tropical rainforest, mangrove swamp, reef, and backpacker hostel. I stayed in (inclusive in my tour price) PK's Jungle Village, a fun budget backpacker place, as someone has probably described it in a brochure. It provided all of the necessary elements of a backpacker's place, namely pool, beer, carvery dinners big enough to floor a rhino, and the same fifteen songs that play in every other hostel. These songs include anything by Jack Johnson, Joan Jett singing "I love Rock and Roll", and "Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I really do like Jack Johnson, but the swine is on everywhere here.

Cape Tribulation was beautiful, but activities were thin on the ground unless you forked out another couple of hundred dollars to go sea kayaking or jungle surfing, whatever the hell that is. The highlight of Cape Tribulation was not the German tourists with the rude stares at the beach, funnily enough, but a boardwalk through a section of rainforest and mangrove behind Myall Beach. I was up and out early enough that I was the only one on the path, and stopped several times to admire the foliage, look for frogs, and jump out of my skin every time I thought a cassowary was about to jump me.

Dorm sleeping is a mixed bag - in my very limited experience of dorms so far, I've found good chats with friendly dorm mates combined with irritating and even disturbing noises in the dead of night. At PK's, the room was all kept awake for a short while by one fellow who was suffering from a simultaneous fit of coughing and farting while he was awake, and snoring while he was asleep. First thing in the morning, the alarm call of choice is the rustling plastic bag. I shouldn't complain too much about the dorm at PK's - in the dorm I stayed my first night in Cairns, one of the three other lads in the room came in during the night with a woman, and the room was then treated to a combination of slurping and choice quotes such as "but everyone's in the room!" and "why don't we go in the showers?". Drunk people don't seem to realise that their whispering has all the subtlety of a herd of stampeding rhinos.

Having returned to Cairns, I'm staying at Bohemia Resort, a pleasant, clean, newish place miles out of town with all the atmosphere of an aircraft hanger full of young Conservatives on valium, in my own private dorm to avoid slurping and plastic bag-related disturbances. Back in Cambodia, an Aussie fellow I met described Cairns as a 'nothing little town', and I can see what he means - there isn't much here after you've had a meal, a fruit smoothie, a sunbathe and a cold stubbie, and it's a hell of an anticlimax after hearing the name of the town over so many years as being a backpacker mecca of some sort. I'm happy here for forty-eight hours but any longer and I'd be climbing the walls. A walk around town earlier today took me to the Esplanade, a place where the grass is carpeted by bodies, skinny and fat, white, yellow and brown, all toasting themselves in the sun. They have to do this around a giant shallow lagoon-style swimming pool built behind the actual beach, as when the tide is out, there is a mile of mud between the sand and the sea, making it a bit like sunbathing at the side of the Orwell Estuary.

Sunbathing as an art form is intriguing to me. I've got a suntanned face and arms from wearing short sleeves, but the rest of me is still standard pasty English white, with the exception of the tanned chevrons on my feet from wearing sandals. I never quite seem to get my act together to working on a tan, but the guys down at the Esplanade are obviously putting in a lot of effort. People apply suncream and then cook one side before turning over to cook the other - I haven't actually heard any timers going off to prompt this, I assume it happens when you start feeling just crispy enough. I'm also not sure if it's necessary to prod anyone's thigh with a fork and see if the juices run clear. The irony of all this is that these people, predominantly Westerners, are all trying to achieve the perfect bronze (shoe-leather) tan, while all over Asia, women cover themselves from head to foot in the sun and bleach their skin to achieve the white skin that is in fashion there. Westerners want to be brown as they think it makes them look healthier and maybe more prosperous, Asians want to be white as they don't want to look like they work on a farm.

I've also noticed a worrying trend amongst older married couples - that being the complete illiteracy of one member of the couple. The evidence I've seen for this is that they wander past shops and restaurants, and then stop to read a sign or menu. Rather than both reading the sign or menu in silence however, one of them has to read the whole thing out aloud to the other. I've noticed this before at home, so it seems to be a worrying international phenomenon.