Archives for February 2006
Lonely Planet Blue Lists
I’m terrible at creating top lists: too pragmatic, memory like a sieve and lacking critical faculties. The Lonely Planet crowd are more decisive and have published Bluelist, capturing ‘the world’s hottest trends, destinations, journeys and experiences for the year ahead’.
This is not necessarily a Good Thing, and thumbing through suggests it is for the coffee table or toilet rather than the backpack, but there is an interesting competition asking for submissions of people’s own Bluelists. I had a couple of stabs, one of which is based on my still-unpublished guide to Queenstown’s cafes. Have a look:
Don’t Miss North Kent. Some years ago a guidebook described my homeland as a ‘cultural wasteland’. Rather extreme, so this is a chance to correct that view. Not as hard as I expected.
The I-SPY Lonely Planet Author Game. I met a nice bloke in Darjeeling who was updating the LP India guidebook. This is partly based on our conversation (to his credit, he didn’t mention his job until after a long and hopeless discussion of ice hockey and Liverpool’s performance in Europe – the team, not the city, although I can talk to both – hopeless as I had no idea what I was talking about).
The Best Coffee and Muffin in Queenstown. As explained above.
Surprisingly difficult to squeeze lots of ideas into 250 characters. Whilst I don’t expect to win, I’d like to think these are better than a lot of dross that’s been submitted.
Cause and affect
I was reminded today that an old colleague of mine co-owns Urban Social, a glitzy dating website, which explains how I ended spotting this advertisement from a TV production company. It’s a fine example of bad English.
Learn the art of seduction …..
Fun New Channel Four show is looking for single men who feel their appearance is effecting their success rate with women. If you would like some tips, get in touch.
Effecting their success? Maybe it’s true in the literal sense, but it implies that their appearance is the key to their high number of lady friends. Perhaps what they actually mean was affecting. Sigh.
I have a couple of friends who thought their Hawaiian shirts were effecting rather than affecting their success rates – others disagreed, but they are both now happily married despite their dress sense. Eh, chaps?
Rebus will retire
Listening to Ian Rankin on the, um, eccentric Storyman on Radio 4 reminds me that there are just two Inspector Rebus novels to go. (You can still listen to the archived programme, not the best in the series.) I think he mentioned this at a reading in London a couple of years ago, but his performance at that event was a little disheartening thus I’ve erased it from my memory.
Edinburgh graduates will recognise the building above as St. Leonards police station, home of Rebus until the CID relocated recently. On the plus side there’s a new TV series in the can, this time starring Ken Stott rather than the pretty John Hannah. That’s Stott on the right, appearing twenty years ago alongside Taggart, the other great Scottish detective. The more I think about it the more I feel that Rebus might look like Gordon Brown.
Wikipedia claims that ‘The Inspector Rebus series is extremely popular, accounting for 10% of all crime book sales in the UK.’ If true, that is an astonishing success.
Dinner on the Orient Express
The Orient Express: there are few more evocative names. Extravagant dining, plush sleeping cars, intrigue, murder, such wealth, oh, such wealth… I was born well after jet travel killed the rationale of the transcontinental rail journey, but the mystique of the Orient Express remains.
As any rail geek will explain, the Orient Express was not one train but several, the equivalent of ‘First Class’ rather than any particular company’s service. The name lives on in a regular service between Paris and Vienna. But now little remains of the glamour of the journey between Northern Europe and Asia save for the excreble products of Istanbul’s Orient Express Restaurant.
You will not remember that my Round The World ticket began in Istanbul for financial reasons, hence it’s to the ancient city that I return on my last of twenty flights. Bitterly cold, a little snowy and fascinating as ever it was a pleasure to get back although I pledge that my third trip here will be in the humid height of summer to make me appreciate rather than moan about the icy winds. Most of the time was spent wandering the streets or sheltering in coffee houses thinking up Blue Lists, although a trip out to the old city walls was an engaging reminder of the lengthy history of Constantinople.
Since Tuesday was St. Valentine’s Day, and I’m single but do love myself enough to care, I took me for dinner at the Orient Express Restaurant. “A real find” writes Frommer, “worth saving space for desert” implores Time Out. Pah. The room is a endearing throwback to the turn of the last century with views over both the platforms and the Bosphorus, Ottoman-style stained glass windows and random memorabilia. However, the service was tired and perfunctory and the house special of roast lamb shoulder, whilst tender, was as bland as modern rail travel. Creme Brule should never stick in the teeth.
Difficult to believe it was a whole year and three days ago that I began my odyssey. The end is nigh.
(A few photos from the trip on Flickr; here’s my last trip to the city.)
PS Four lessons from Istanbul:
» Never visit a city with sub-zero wind chill whilst wearing low slung jeans
» The best way to clear space in a Turkish tram is to sneeze. They’re bird flu-crazy over there
» Ottoman fortresses presented a serious health and safety risk. I got pretty spooked walking near the unguarded drops of the city walls
» I have become a coffee pedant. We may return to this subject soon. The best was, surprisingly, in Gloria Jean’s
For Google’s information, the Side Pension is a clean, friendly and very warm place with an excellent location near the Blue Mosque and Haghia Sophia. Recommended as highly as the Empress Zoe, especially as I managed to snaffle some free wireless internet.
Smile and Sri Lanka smiles with you
“You been kicking off again?” read the email I’d opened. “Trouble has broken out again in Sri Lanka, this was reported the day that you were meant to touch down, coincidence? Is your name Thatcher? Been wondering why you got that pilots licence, you dodgy bloke you.”
News to me, literally, and particularly surprising since I was in Polonnaruwa, just 40 kilometres from the new front line. Michael, my driver, had only made passing reference to the Tamil conflict when he explained that, since some hotels windows had been broken in the town three weeks previously, we’re be staying in a smaller village about 15 kilometres further west.
Maybe that’s a truism of modern warfare: the further away from the conflict, the closer you are thanks to TV and the internet. (Much like watching motor racing – at the track you’ll hear all the noise but see none of the action.)
Sadly the news is spreading. I was the only resident at the guest house in Giritale and beyond a handful of package tours I encountered few independent tourists. Whilst making a visit to the relics of the cultural Triangle a more personal, enchanting experience, one can’t help wondering what impact a decline in tourists revenues will have on Sri Lanka. First the Tsunami and then the breakdown of the ceasefire between the Government and the Tamil Tigers (not that we’re allowed to call it over, yet). Trouble comes in threes. What next?
Compared with the trials of India travelling in Sri Lanka is a delight. Less tension, less pressure, less humidity and more grins. Rarely have there been so many warm, genuinely welcoming people. With more teeth than a kindergarten at Christmas, I achieved a smile success rate of approximately 96%. Smile and Sri Lanka smiles with you.
The country divides into a handful of broad regions. To the Central West lies Colombo, the only significant city, with the best beaches to the South West at Hikkaduwa and beyond. The Central Highlands are home to tea growing whilst the Cultural Triangle, centre of the Sinhalese Culture, lie to the North. Disputed Jaffna Province is at the North Eastern tip of the island.
In search of a cultural overdose I headed around the Cultural Triangle. The Flickr Photoset gives a taste of what there is to see with the story of that trip in the comments, which will not be repeated here.
Yes, I did grow fat on culture (and curry and rice); what sticks in the mind is the scale and complexity of the Sinhalese civilisation, dating over hundreds of years.
The great dagobas of Anuradhapura were the biggest structures in the world save the Pyramids at Giza. Today, they are striking: how must they have seemed 1,000 years ago? Equally, what was going through the minds of the King’s architects when told to ‘build me a fortress on that 200m pillar of rock’ (or whatever unit of measurement they used)? But they did it, and painted 500 buxom damsels under an overhang for good measure.
When taking my first ‘emerging world’ trip to Egypt in 1994 (’decaying world’ might have been a better description) I relied on a guidebook for information, phone cards for communication and a trust compact camera powered by 2 AA batteries to capture a few pictures. Now, the first thing I needed to buy in Sri Lanka was a multisocket adapter to charge my various digital devices via the country’s unique power sockets.
This may be a reflection of me rather than the world as a whole (although the dreadlocked pasty lass behind me asked for the same thing), but did give a good reason to begin negotiating the grittier parts of town. And electricity is something Negombo locals use to great effect at the feast of San Sebastian.
Sri Lanka, like India is both an ethnically and religiously diverse society. Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims dominate whilst a Christian enclave persists on the west coast where the Portugese first landed.
Returning to Negombo we drove through streets under lines of fairy lights hundreds of metres long. The Church was festooned in red and white flags and bulbs whilst icon stalls and balloon sellers set up shop at the main entrance, a curious combination.
By Saturday night the town ws en fete but the high point was Sunday evening, when a statue of Jesus was paraded around town for several hours on top of a tuk tuk before reaching the Church for the beginning of Mass. The crowds were dense and endless; when trying to reach the airport a couple of hours later we were stuck for twenty minutes in a sea of bodies. So busy, the tuk tuk driver turned his engine off – unheard of!
The real pleasure of the event was seeing the town assembled en masse, in a peaceful ceremony without beer being drunk or fists thrown. Hard to imagine Britons of all ages behaving the same way, sadly. Or smiling at strangers, come to think of it…
And then I was home.
Visit Sri Lanka. The country needs you. You may need it.
The perfect elephant
What is the perfect elephant? For Buddhists celebrating the Esala Perahera, during which the Buddha’s tooth is paraded through Kandy on the back of an elephant, two things are important: size and proportion. All four of the animals legs plus trunk, tail and penis must touch the ground simultaneously.
That’s why Raja was a national hero, Malagawa Tusker for 50 successive years until his death aged 80, and the only stuffed elephant in the world. Not many elephants make the grade, apparently.
(Insert your own joke here.)
Life on the hip-hop line
Is it cooler to live at Ice-T or Ice Cube? Or, for that matter, on Cypress Hill? ‘Spose it comes down to who’s the better actor. These and many other questions raised by this marvellous tube map.
Update: Now there’s also an imaginary map of sponsored stations, clever but depressing since I’d be living in a world of financial services – Cahooting Bec on the Northern Rock line. Surely better to live in South WimbleDonkey Kong.
In Hong Kong, the Revolution has begun
Chris Patten notoriously shed tears at the return of Hong Kong to China as he sailed away on the Royal Yacht Britannia. Whether repression or revolution would follow, no one knew. As it turns out, the ‘one country – two systems’ approach has worked reasonably well, although the Special Area continues to be ruled by undemocratic institutions. Have the Chinese accepted the situation? No more! Riots have begun, started by Mainland Chinese visting for the Lunar New Year holiday. And where are they taking place?
Disneyland.
Crowds tried to scale the fences to get into the park, sold out for eight days in a row. It’s encouraging to see that communal anger can be raised by a sense of powerlessness and inequity, but I’ve been to Hong Kong Disneyland, and I have to report that it’s very tame and very small. Not worth impaling yourself for.
(Via BB)
