Rishikesh

The bridge over the Ganges

Rishikesh is a holy city near the start of the Ganges. It's also where the Beatles stayed when they visited India, and where they wrote bits of the White Album.

Standard breakfast drinks: tea and fresh lime soda

Ganges at night

Trippinvignettes - Number 7

In which ‘J2’, in a fit of violence-induced-spluttering, threatens to do away with an entire village, a village that had saved our skins days before. Full story here.


Mansucum, Panama.

The Bookshop Trick

Me walking

We went for a walk one day to Connaught Place, which is an important site for tourists who wish to look at things (such as a circular park, a bunch of imported chain stores and an unnatural thickness of honking vehicles) and is thus a magnet for touts and scammers. On the way we were accosted by one such fellow, whose game was to act as your highly-paid tour guide, whether you want a highly-paid tour guide or not.

‘Don’t you want to see the India Gate, sir?’
‘Yeah, yeah I do but I’ll find it, thanks.’
‘But the Red Fort? Don’t you want to see the Red Fort, sir?’
‘Uh, I don’t know. Yeah, but I’ve got a book, we’ll find it.’
‘Why not sir? Why do you not want to see the Red Fort?’
‘Uh, I do, but…’
‘Okay I will show you the Red Fort, sir’
‘Nah, that’s okay. I’ll be able to find it’
‘No sir, I will come with you. We go.’

This could have gone on for hours, but Angie stepped in with a few stern words (for both me and the ‘guide’)

‘You’ve just got to be tougher with them. Stand up to them a bit.‘ she told me. ‘No!’ she demonstrated, index finger gesticulating formidably ‘We just want to be alone and explore the city ourselves!’

Predictably, this had no effect whatsoever on our unwanted companion. For a while longer we tried the ‘just ignore him and he’ll go away’ tactic of getting rid of him, but Angie soon grew tired of that and started ordering him again to leave us alone!! (Her exclamation marks). Of course that didn’t work, and he began pointing out things that he thought we’d find interesting. He could tell we’d find them of interest because we were already looking at them by the time he’d worked out what they were. ‘Ah, yes’ he explained form behind. ‘This is Piccadelhi’ after he saw us scoffing at an unamusing row of English phone boxes with ‘Piccadelhi’ written on them outside some awful shop.

It all came undone in a nearby bookshop. ‘Ah, yes’, he intoned again from three steps behind, ‘This is the Jain Book Depot’ as we crossed the road towards the Jain Book Depot. We went inside, thinking we could somehow lose him in a small retail space. Perhaps the lights would confuse him. We looked at books for five minutes, every now and then surreptitiously glancing toward the door to see if he’d gone. Each time, he waved back, smiling.

A much more agreeable character we encountered near Connaught Place

We decided to make a run for it; maybe try another bookshop. As we were on our way out, Angie whispered to me: ‘I’m just going to say something to him as we leave’ I led the way, brushing nonchalantly past our companion and pushing open the door, then froze mid-stride as Angie’s clear voice boomed out from behind me, drowning out all other noise in the busy store.

‘DO. NOT. FOLLOW. US!’ (Her capitals, full stops and bold type).

‘Oh-kay’ he sing-songed nervously as all eyes bounced between his embarrassed face and this small white woman with an abnormally loud voice. Sure enough, it worked, and we never saw him again.

Trippinvignettes - Number 6

This was less a quote, more a mantra repeated by ‘Dr. Blake’. Whenever someone said something he agreed with, he’d display his concurrence by pulling out his trusty old ‘Makes Sense’ verbal rubber stamp, marking the exchange a success for rationality. He’d even do it to things that he said, sprinkling the stamp about in a way that, in the end, had little meaning, and made no sense at all.


Various locations, Ecuador.

Trippinvignettes - Number 5

In which a pair of recently graduated accountants from Canberra (how could this quote not be awesome?), discuss the horrors of travel and the bliss of Public Servitude.


‘We can’t wait to get back to our new government jobs, even though we didn’t vote for this government’

‘AGREED’

Point Hostel, Lima, Peru.

Trippinvignettes - Number 4

In which ‘The Quintessential Whinging Mature-Aged Tour Group Participant’ relates, with childlike melodrama, his disgust at spending too long at an idyllic natural waterhole fed by geothermal underground springs. This was the first thing he said after looking around for ten seconds, and I thought his tour guide did a very good job of not slapping him and sending him to sit in the car while everyone else enjoyed themselves.

‘We’re not going to stay here for TWO HOURS are we?’

Ojo del Agua, Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua.

Trippinvignettes - Number 3

In which ‘Shazza’ reveals the complex dichotomy of her feelings towards coati, the cute and cuddly ground-koalas of South America. Upon meeting us, she told us how she hadn’t had a drink for well over a week. Later that evening at dinner, in a blizzard of strine-flavoured profanity, she drunkenly displayed the reason for her period of self-denial. Hair styling by Miss Breoni Taylor.

'...a***holes... except this one... Smell ya fingas: BURNT TOAST!! Not just 'like'- EXACTLY!! Burnt f***** toast!!!'

Arabian Restaurant, La Paz, Bolivia.

Charming Puerto Vallarta

Angie, self-portrait with 2-for-1 margarita

Enormous, waddlesome tourists clutching ice creams and fistfuls of pesos guffaw along the spotless waterfront. Tour agency spruikers attempt frantically to strike up conversation in the hope of a commission. ‘Hey, are you guys from Minneapolis?’ they ask us too brightly, their distended eyes betraying their desperation as we keep moving, heads down. We hear their anguished calls from afar: ‘Do you want to go to Yelapa??’


Restaurant spruikers block the pavement and manhandle pedestrians into their establishments. The touchy-feely one dressed in a gorilla suit seems especially popular. Taxi drivers cluster on the dark corners and offer drugs, massages or taxi rides (in that order). Plump North American students in seas of gelatinous sequins joggle in the windows of loud, flashing clubs like satiric Amsterdam window displays. They wear balloon sculptures on their heads and chug 2-for-1 margaritas. Their liquored, glossy lips mime along to the music: ‘Man, I feel like a woman’.


A block away, in the brimming tourist market, untold oceans of lurid fecal matter (or souvenirs) are on display. Listless t-shirts hang like carcases in the suffocating, breezeless air while small fans struggle valiantly to circulate the wretched atmosphere of an marketplace both figuratively and literally overcrowded. ‘I’m shy, BUT I’VE GOT A BIG DICK!!! Puerto Vallarta’ the shirts proclaim. ‘F.B.I.- Federal Breast Inspector. Puerto Vallarta’ sings another. Below the shirts are shelves filled with souvenirs- pieces of crap that have been superglued to other pieces of crap. The resulting amalgamations have then had ‘Pto. Vallarta’ scribbled on them with felt-tip marker and been thrust optimistically into the world.

In contrast to the tack of the waterfront, the people at the hotel were lovely, and even had Escher in to do the staircases

That this exists is novel and amusing at first, but it soon becomes scary and intensely depressing. All this stuff is here because that’s how people want it. They buy the shirts and guzzle the weak drinks and get groped by gorillas and look positively enthralled and come back for more next holidays. It’s everything the Gold Coast wishes it could be, and once the novelty of the spectacle had dissipated, we couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Trippinvignettes - Number 2

In which ‘Protein Man’ relates to us some of his finer points.

‘I’m probably the strongest man in Buenos Aires. No wait, I AM the strongest man in Buenos Aires’.

Hotel La Casona, Cartageña, Colombia.


Runners up from the same night:

‘I drive fast and furious’

‘I drive better drunk than most Canadians do sober’ (This was his explanation as to why he should be allowed to drink-drive)

New, Improved Dave

Before: Mild-mannered gringo rasta

Part of Operation: Get-Into-America-and-Britain-Hassle-Free.

After: Mild-mannered generic gringo. Go straight through, sir.

Trippinvignettes - Number 1

What This Is

Continuously, we run into people that play memorable little bit-parts in the low-budget road movie that is this trip. Most of the time, I can’t take a picture of them, because that would be rude, and the reason they’re so memorable is something to do with something they’ve said, which is also difficult to photograph. Hence the need for Trippinvignettes, little incidentals that show the meaningless-but-remarkable kinds of soundbites we encounter on the Gringo Trail. Sometimes it’s something stupid someone has said, and sometimes it’s something funny, or just something plain bizarre. It'll be semi-regular, I'll put up a new one when there's nothing else happening.

Most of the quotes are word-for-word, though sometimes we’ve (Angie and I) had to paraphrase or reconstruct lengthy diatribes from memory, but I always try to keep the spirit of what was said. Most of the names featured have been changed, just in case the subject can’t appreciate the humour.

These pictures are meant to be lighthearted and fun, though if the truly stupid lend themselves to vicious treatment, that can’t be helped. Most of the players here were nice people, some of them we ended up hanging out with for a while. So if you suspect you’re part of this series, please don’t be offended…

Number 1 - The Perils of Bus Travel.

In which ‘Spencer’ advises how to avoid and deal with threatening situations on Mexican buses.

‘I was on the bus in Mexico, and I had two seats to myself, so I got out all my things- my iPod, my camera and my phone and some books and put them on the seat next to me, and then I noticed some Mexican guys looking at me and looking at my stuff, so I got all paranoid and I got my knife out, and just held it you know, like that. But it turned out they just wanted to talk to me and that's where I learnt alot of my Mexican words like extraeño.’

Lazybones Hostel swimming pool, Leon, Nicaragua.

Hello, Mexico

...and hello glittery gimp masks

Waiting for Sushi

The Botero Museum

These guys are a constant worry here. This painting is The Thief.

This is a city we recently visited, Popayan.

Angie getting silly with Miro

Headlamp fun.

Party Hostel

A smoke machine is spewing fog through a strobe light, there's a bunch of drunken Irish yelling abut funny hat night and, of all the god-awful music on offer, Ace of Base is playing. Plus it's only a quarter past seven on a Sunday evening. Yes, you're in a party hostel. This one wasn't so bad though, because I got to wear the best hat.

Friends Arrive

It was on our second day in La Paz, while we were having breakfast, that Marc and Bre stumbled in. Much yelling and hugging ensued; these to were the first familiar faces we'd seen in seven months, and we'd been counting down to this day for a long time. Marc and Bre had travelled from Rio down through Brazil, into Argentina and then up through Bolivia. Long ago we'd decided to meet somewhere in Bolivia, and this is the reason for mine and Angie's enormous loop-the-loop through this continent. We spent the day catching up, exploring La Paz, getting used to the fact that we were all together in Bolivia and went out for a celebratory Mexican dinner. We finished off the evening in an orange nightclub, that fittingly, reminded us of Wollongong's pumping nightspots where it all began....

Uspallata- Hotel Vienna

The Clerk.

Uspallata was only an hour or two down the road, and home to a surreal David Lynch-esque hotel that put us all slightly on guard. The bespeckled octageneric clerk checked each one our party of four in, an excruciating half hour process that ended with a roll call to make sure nobody had left in frustration at being stuck in the lobby for so long. He quickly developed an obsession with Megan, who we were traveling with; it was a starkly one-sided affair that began with several silent minutes of disturbing eye-sex (accentuated by his round, triple-thickness glasses) and culminated in several desperate pleas for 'un beso, un beso' (a kiss, a kiss) when we collected our bags the next day.

La Cumbre

The next day we escaped Cordoba and arrived in La Cumbre, a quiet, cold little village in the mountains. We climbed a hill to look at a Christo and the town itself. That night we ate a fantastic meal at one of the rare restaurants in Argentina that does not conform to the seemingly state-enforced menu of steak, hamburgers, pizza or multitudes of ham/cheese combinations. The place we went to served dishes if not from, then inspired by, places around the world. Well, India and Mexico at least. I ordered a curry, muy picante (very hot). The dish I got was wonderfully smooth and sweet, the Argentine version of hot. Angie had a Mexican dish that really was spectacular, although again, devoid of any real heat. The entrée of samosas was also lacking heat- the middles were still frozen when they arrived. Both times.

Uruguayan football etiquette 101

"Haha, look at this country- 'You are gay'"
-Homer (Simpson)

From Buenos Aires, we jumped aboard a ferry to float on over the brown River Plate. During the hour-long voyage I remembered a conversation I'd had a few days earlier...


While relaxing in the TV room in a BA hostel, we got chatting to a guy from Uruguay. Just like the rest of South America, Uruguay is obsessed with futbol. What does that mean for us? Well, one of those weird tidbits that my memory inexplicably chooses to file in a safe and easy to reach place relates to the last World Cup, when the Socceroos knocked out Uruguay in the qualifiers. Something the coach said about Uruguay having a God-given right to be a part of the World Cup sticks out... Anyway, how would the average Uruguano on the street (or in the hostel) feel about this? Time to find out...

The first time I brought the issue up of that game, our Uruguayan friend happily ignored the question, and recited each of the three years Uruguay had successfully captured the World Cup.

I pressed again. The reply this time was simply along the lines of '...yes, football is very important for my country...'. Just a nibble, but this fish wasn't biting hard enough. I'd come this far, I wanted to resolve the question, for science.

One more prod... and a cold stare chills the entire room. The words come slow and quiet on icy breath: 'Yes, we were knocked out by some... kangaroo team'. Absolute silence. Even the TV stopped making noise.

'..but it doesn't really matter to me anyway.'

This from someone who doesn't even profess to be interested in the game. Experiment successfully completed, I shut my mouth and resolve that if this issue ever comes up in Uruguay, it will be me who sidesteps the subject (and claiming New Zealand citizenship if need be).

The boat docked, we were hurried through a just-for-show bag inspection and put on board a bus bound for a Uruguayan beach.