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.