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Island of the gods, guardians and peripatetic primates

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Peculiar pre-match entertainment for a Cats-Tigers clash when you’re kicking back peanuts and Bintangs in the Bali mountain jungle town of Ubud.

A dozen or so Barbary macaques parading alongside the bar – upside-down infants clutching their mothers, cocksure males trooping the colour – suggested a peculiar cheer squad on the march. Perhaps not that peculiar in Tigerland, though.

Oh, sorry, I take that back but it’s been said now. Maybe I can’t.

Bar staff have abandoned the traditional shanghai slingshot deterrent favoured by hotels for coloured laser beams, which seems to be taking the fun out of things. When you’ve been hissed at, spat on and tackled by the little blighters and their rabid claws, sympathy levels for primates aren’t high.

The lasers send them scarpering, non-violently. My remonstration to a staffer about new tech over old tech is countered with: “Monkeys are sacred, they’re guardians of our temples.”

Oh yeah, that’s right. If only they stuck to the temples and off the hotel balconies spooking the tourists.

Peripatetic chimps are far from the only organic entertainment on offer on the Island of the Gods, though. Look closely around the place and you’ll find all sorts of oddities.

Think tourists buying satay sticks and sausages to feed stray dogs. Café tables and chairs washed out to sea by the incoming tide. Hawker knock-offs three times more expensive than home. Locals eating with ducks off the same table. Girls in dental floss bikinis practising yoga in front of beachside diners. Missile-like fireworks blasting out to sea as Boeings come out of the sunset to land in the shadow of giant deity statues.

Then there are plantain squirrels whipping through the jungle foliage, giant snails, luminescent black and yellow centipedes, koi pond fish feeding frenzies, dragonflies galore, fighting cocks, masterful bird mimics.

  

Art’s everywhere you look. In religious offerings, in signs, sculptures, gardens, temples, carvings, buildings, shop fittings, traditional clothing, masonry, paintings, furniture … absolutely everything.

Construction’s going on everywhere, too. Jackhammers next door, pile-driving down the river gorge, massive refits to old hotels, including one opposite the ‘quiet’ room I booked.

I’m especially drawn to a giant carapace bamboo structure rising from a paddock smack in the middle of Ubud. Workers line up for a 15-minute rev-up from the boss before I wander over, stupidly barefoot on the hot black bitumen path, to reconnoitre proceedings. A tall lean bloke introduces himself as the property owner, says the double-shelled, thatch-roofed design is going to be a yoga studio.

Good bet it might draw a bit of attention, too. It’s been whipped up by bamboo’s wunderkind architect, Pablo Luna  – known for blending Bali’s tri hit karana philosophy of harmony between people, nature and spirituality with environmental, sustainable and biomimicry principles into his work.

It’s a fair matrix. Almost as cross-pollinated as his background:  a Chilean-born architect of Peruvian/Lebanese heritage who studied in New York before taking his work to Indonesia and South-East Asia, Costa Rica, Mexico, India and Chile.

No doubt it will slot right in with Ubud’s wealth of health and wellness practitioners. No shortage of anything in that jungle; from soothing didgeridoo drones through fusion vegan iterations to breatharian starvation rackets, propped by a multitude of souls seeking happiness, self-awareness and more Zen in their lives. For all the healing they provide, I think Lomotil’s somehow got the jump on them.

The real thing about somewhere like Ubud, and the broader Bali, is the island itself and its natural geographical attributes. A mountain bike ride, a handful of temples and waterfalls, maybe some whitewater rafting, a few palms and a rice terrace or two are about the extent of things the punters will investigate outside the insane gridlock of Seminyak and Canggu.

 

Which is a pity. I’ve had a dog-eared topographical map of the island for a while now, a bright green-coloured thing of valleys, mountains, volcanoes, precipitous gorges, rivers, lakes – a surveyor’s paradise, or maybe nightmare. Contained within its cartographic swales and saddles are a trove of ridiculously stunning tracks and defiles, villages, waterfalls, panoramas, rivers, ravines, coastal outlooks, islands to ponder, jungle …

I’ll be happy to keep ticking off place names for next decade or two given half the chance. If the bloody monkeys don’t give me rabies, that is.

Roadtripping and stumbling every step of the way …

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Dateline: April 2024, Cabbage Tree Creek: 37.6526° S, 148.8172° E 

Nice part of the world for a quick road-trip recce, East Gippsland, when it’s not on fire, that is. And also when you don’t have spare tyres flying off the back of SUVs and across the road at you at 100kmh.

Was standing in the Bellbird Hotel car park, a few metres off the road, when a sudden bang, crunch and whack had me scurrying for cover. The spare was hanging off the car, bouncing and crashing before shearing loose, belting the car behind and rocketing off into the bush.

Things that happen when you pull over. Need to keep an eye out. Couple of hours earlier, I was pondering whatever happened to the old Metung gas pools where bathers could capture the gas that bubbled up and set it alight through a wet beer box. Near Cantrill’s Lookout.

Shut down and replaced by public dunnies, and gaseous explosions of a different type. Lookout still applies, it seems. Which is what Zachary Hicks was doing offshore up the road in James Cook’s Endeavour in 1770 when he first sighted land.

Wasn’t the first, of course, plenty of other Europeans preceded him, even Islamic explorers going back to the AD800s. Nearby Bitangabbie Bay just over the border hosts the remains of what appears to be a stone fort commonly attributed to the Portuguese navigator Cristovao Mendonca in the 1520s. Supposedly while the Spanish didn’t have an eye out.

 

The Bellbird Hotel and a Tathra beach denizen.

Sadly, a weather eye was badly needed at the next stop, further up the coast on the Tathra Wharf, when in 2008 a young fisherman’s two little kids went over the edge; one of them in a pram many people speculated was pushed by the older kid. Dad jumped in to try to save them. None of them survived.

Ensconced in a bush pole-house at Tathra high above the Bega River, I’m reminded of the graffiti I once found outside a Bega fish shop: ‘The flake you’re eating could be Harold Holt’. Irreverent but also ironic as next stop is Tilba Tilba, once home of his widow Zara after she took up with the mutton-chopped Jeff Bates.

It’s achingly pretty with its green hills, granite outcrops, yellow-tailed black cockatoos galumphing overhead and heritage buildings, including the famed Dromedary Hotel, named for a nearby mount; a sweet stop en route to the next stop.

 

Tathra Wharf  and the Mollymook beachfront.

Ulladulla/Mollymook, with its sprawling beach, heaving surf, fishing boats, rockpools, undulating golf course and glass-encased club, and Slane Irish whiskey at ALDI, makes a nice pitstop before doubling back to Batemans Bay, which has a patina of tiredness these days, and inland along the Kings Highway.

My long-suffering better half, not a great passenger, is biding the while away watching videos sans buds. By journey’s end, I’ve listened to four series of Schitt’s Ceek, which makes for a more than curious travelogue soundtrack.

Onwards and upwards takes you over the nose-bleed Clyde Mountain Pass – great lookout to the Pacific Ocean – to the brooding historic Braidwood and its ancient architecture, to the national pitstop Canberra and its stultifyingly sterile architecture, and onto the contrived heritage Hall Village, where the only heritage to be found are pretty much the trees and shrubs … possibly.

Half an hour further on looms Yass, which greets visitors with the civil works start of a 500-lot subdivision ceding its historic regional centre status to an outer ring of the ACT.

 

The Dromedary Hotel, Tilba.

Notwithstanding, the town’s pretty stately buildings and parks, its friendly folks and their tales of cops, crooks and magistrates, its genial pub chatter and generous grub, make for a curious and charming stop.

Just remember, somewhere it hosts an armed bandit who would tick off the banks he robbed on a list stuck to his fridge. Allegedly.

Armed with local pomegranate balsamic and olive oil produce, I cut out for Yackandandah in a valley beyond the knobby hills south of Wodonga. Travelling down into the Yack valley is one of the sweetest drives about, provided the dolts coming at you stay off their phones and stick to their side of the road. Once again, keep your eyes peeled.

 

Yass Post Office and High Street, Yackandanah.

Yackandandah’s  where my grandpa Ned was born, the first of eight kids, back in 1889 before being spirited away to the ancestral homestead of Banimboola, high in the Mitta Valley. His grandparents, Edward and Mary, had married at Yackandandah in 1862 before taking up life at Banimboola.

Young Ned never got to meet his granddad. Edward the senior was returning from a potato paddock across the Mitta River in darkness in 1866, when he failed to notice a flash flood had dangerously raised the waters. His own Schitt’s Creek as it unfolded.

He and his horse and pack were swept away. His body wasn’t found for several days. One more sorry episode of the wrong place at the wrong time.

Shamrocking old Sandhurst

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“Hey, rich bitch!” squawks the emaciated ice junkie skipping along the Bendigo street Jack Daniels can in hand.

Her target, an elderly woman lugging two Salvos bags, looks bewildered as the sprite runs past her, grabs an abandoned receipt from the footpath, shouts “11 dollars” and uses it to wipe her backside before dancing out in front of traffic.

One car brakes, to a barrage of abuse from the poisonous little imp. A second car stops, to the same calumny, before she scampers off toward the mall.

It’s not the first oddity since arriving at the iconic heritage Shamrock Hotel. A touched bloke bellowing ‘Stewie’s got a grand!’ over and over ran past me as I hauled my bags into the pub.

Inside, I found three kids’ swim pools of brown water ceiling leaks around the ornate stairwell. In reception. Just a spit from the framed Charles and Diana newspaper clips when the pub reopened after a major reno 40 years ago.

Settling in, the room didn’t match the website pics, much smaller. Reception staff were happy to provide another room, no charge, unfortunately it wasn’t any bigger. Then third time lucky, larger room, and again no charge. Lovely staff.

In the interim, my small three-piece cohort discovered various human hairs in a nearby eatery, Mexican staff who didn’t know what nachoes were, street smokers all over their al fresco dining, over-cooked fish, more nuffies singing and yelling on the street, and local louts hollering at them from their car.

In the morning, a poor, prone bloke is snoring on the footpath in front of my car outside the hotel. Should’ve invited him in for breakfast but even he might have been disappointed with the over-priced mangy big breakfast and burnt coffee. Then again, of course …

Makes you feel sad about an historical showcase like the Shamrock. It’s a pretty place this old pile. Loads of colourful leadlight, thick carpet, polished timber bannisters, cream columns, lithographs and daguerreotypes of old Sandhurst, dimpled leather Chesterfields, printed wallpaper, mosaic tiling, timber balconies, flowers, palms, giant mirrors, ceiling roses, marble mantles and fireplaces, chandeliers … seriously pretty, truth be told.

Anyway, checking out, the boss turned sour and reneged on the day before’s complimentary upgrade.

Maybe I should’ve mentioned the dirty carpet, stained sheets, lack of wi-fi, bathroom vents or fans, and 7am drinkers under our window but figured if they needed the extra $27 so badly I ought to let it slide.

Travel bites: Euphoric redemption in Bali

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A downward dog-led economic recovery is probably not what you’d expect to counter the Covid/volcano/earthquake/tsunami-led tourism recession of recent years in Indonesia’s Ring of Fire.

For one thing, yoga fanaticism, spiritual con artists – think breatharians and didgeridoo healing – were around before the ongoing flight cancellations of late.

But sticking your bum in the air in a steaming, oxygen-depleted environment in an idyllic jungle mountainside has its merits. And that taps into the Balinese economy in a reasonably big way.

You’ll lose weight, to dehydration. You’ll feel euphoric, to heat frustration. You’ll feel achievement, to the weight-loss euphoria.

For people who in their youth might have frequented the booze-holes and fleshpots of Legian and Kuta, smoking dope and scoffing magic mushrooms, it’s probably kind of redemptive. Or something.

It’s neat to fly for six hours to buy a sense of spiritual tranquillity amid a deeply religious Hindu community surrounded by natural and human disasters of a scale unimaginable to your average clueless Aussie.

But con artists, faux spiritualism and healing, yoga fanaticism and Australia prices are once again the norm in post-Covid Bali.

This is across Bali. The idyllic mountain and inland villages and towns of the beautiful Indonesian island. Not just the Legians and Canggus with their booze-riddled churls and phone-addicted narcissists.

The latter remain tide-recycling rubbish tips with fancy hotels years as before ago. It’s surfing and ocean swimming where Bali belly comes from these days, as often as anywhere else.

Up in the hills, by contrast, the palms and bougainvillea, the paddies and river gorges, are ever-increasingly frequented by travelling souls seeking spiritual succour and purpose in a steaming, sweating contortion. It’s a downward dog redemption against their Western follies and prodigal excesses.

Travel Bites: Amazon chill, Lima vultures

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Tambopata River, Puerto Maldonado, Peru

IT’S cool down in the jungle. Yes, cold. In the Amazon. But apart from the bizarre temperature for an equatorial jungle, it’s most of the other things you’d expect.

It’s isolated, remote, dangerous, poverty-stricken, primitive, environmentally threatened and scary. It’s also beautiful, diverse, enlightened, even mystical. And it’s sultry.

Cool but sultry. That wonderfully evocative description that takes in leaves so dripping in condensation you’d swear it’s raining, dark thatch huts and hammocks, jungle bars with sour cocktails in sweating glass tumblers.

And it’s also full of nocturnal screeching by unknown species, howler monkeys bellowing in foliage high overhead, deadly bushmaster snakes, leaf-cutter ants and terrifying stinging trees to which adulterers are condemned.

That’s not to forget brilliantly-coloured macaws and toucans, giant river otters, piranha, naked children playing on riverbanks, shamans growing psycho-tropic drugs, riverside gold-mining operations from makeshift canoes, alligators, jaguars, tapirs, parrots and more parrots, waterways that rise 12 metres and more in flood.

 

Lima, Peru

VULTURES. Last thing I expected. And haze. Thick, enveloping haze. Like a bushfire approaching. Thick, close, under-your-shirt haze. Creeping in like a London pea-souper.

Except this isn’t London. It’s Lima, Peru, just a few degrees south of the equator. It should be steaming, hissing, like a busted boiler valve. Instead, the temperature’s a mild mid-20s Celsius. Balmy.

And the setting sun – slumping lazily into the vast watery desert of the Pacific – is a warm, gilded disc, all fuzzy, indistinct, at the edges. A gently vanishing glow, hardly a sunset proper.

Adjudicating over this trick of nature, from the vantage of San Domingo’s steeple, is the wizened black vulture, Coragyps atratus, with a basilisk eye. 

Breathe in. The warm jet-stream rising west of Chile; the abused children’s fate adorning the billboards of this confused, for years even train-less city; the demonic Christian conquistadors of Spain and their legacy ever-present … all are considered under the withering eye of the vulture; cousin of the native Quechuans’ chief totem, the condor.

 And the sunset’s fogged, blotted. Warm, soaking, otherworldly. As if like Peru and its history, perhaps its future, it too has been forgotten by the Fates.

 

Travelogue: Zombie monk island

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Zombie monks, rocky waterfalls, distressed elephants, phallic landmarks and dodgy caiparinha cocktails … welcome to the Thai jungle paradise of Koh Samui.

Coconut island. Or so it used to be. Now the coconuts are imported-on jets from Australia, the UK, Italy, Germany, Japan, mainly.

They’re looking for sun, snorkelling and Singhas. One thing to know, just quickly, is when you get on the turps in Samui, check you’re not drinking real turps, or ethanol as might be the case.

The young fraulein next door at my Fisherman’s Village resort wasn’t so judicious, and copped two bouts of home-brew poisoning from cocktails. Should have learned the first time.

The caiparinhas still taste okay to my mind. A bit odd maybe but the cachaca they’re usually made from can be pretty dodgy anyway. And as my octogenarian Brazilian gynaecologist mate Dr Mario often told me: “Caiparinha can cure a lot of ills but it can create a lot of ills, too.”

Why they’re even selling Rio caiparinhas in Samui’s a fair question but, hey, it’s the tropics. Why not? It’s hardly the only oddity.

My Samui oddities actually start on the plane. The MA128 redeye. Poor Indian bloke lost his shoe, which he’d kicked off before falling asleep. Found it up the other end of the plane after a rigorous search aided by a strident Probus toastmistress telling anyone not blessed with deafness that this poor chap had lost his shoe.

“How could that possibly happen?” she repeats over and over as if an answer would materialise if she asked often enough. But a dozen times doesn’t do it.

My missus, laughing into her airplane pillow almost enough to accident (my new verb), confesses in whispered hysterics: “I kicked it on the floor when I went to the toilet in the middle of the night. I thought I’d keep kicking it and see what happened.”

Ha, ha, yes very droll, I think as I congratulate the poor sable sap on his shoe’s eventual return. He seems buoyed by the feigned concern masking the fear my significant other might burst out laughing. Or worse.

The peculiarities continue apace. At the ethanol bar, Coco Tam’s, I see two young blokes belting the suitcase out of each other shortly before midday. I think it’s part of a promo stunt as a truck-load of midgets drive past bellowing “Tonight, tonight!” to advertise a Muay Thai boxing tournament. It’s something else. They don’t want to discuss it with me.

Strikes me as odd, too, to later see a bullfight on local tellie with excited locals spilling over the fence as two bloodied buffalo rammed heads and horns in a nasty test of testosterone. Drags on for half an hour, again with a screeching harridan beseeching her wager to take out the other beast.

In the end, one bull just ambles off. He’s had enough. So have I. My taxi driver proudly points out the stadium, a dirty paddock, the next day. Certainly no Spanish matador’s gilded arena but I’m warming to the Samui strangeness.

At Wat Kunaram, in the island’s south near Ban Thurian, I find Buddhist devotees praying to Luang Phaw Daeng, a monk who’d predicted the day of his death at age 79 back in the 1970s. He fasted and fed himself a special diet that’s purportedly responsible for his body’s mummified state ever since.

The monk’s corpse sits upright in a large glass case, his head assuming a rock star aspect because of the sunglasses shielding his no doubt spooky-looking eyes from scrutiny.

Yeah, it’s zombie-creepy but the religious ectoplasm floating about lends the show a nice Zen aspect. Monks chanting in the temple to the rear, and another bright and colourful new temple next door again extend further gravity to what’s patently a con.

Not so sure about the jovial monk at the Big Buddha temple at Bo Phut. For a few bob, he happily half-drenched me, splashing water over my head and repeating “Goolark, goolark!” at great pace for a couple of minutes. Tell him I’m on my honeymoon and he nearly falls off his perch laughing.

The “goolark” seems to come to fruition the next morning with a phone call from home with a tidy new contract. The financial reporting season also turns up a larger-than-expected return on a few stocks I’d squirrelled away.

I keep smiling and drive south to Lamai’s Hin Ta and Hin Yai — two rocky protruberances loosely resembling a penis and a female pudenda. Grandpa Rock and Grandma Rock are an immensely popular tourist drawcard with stalls, spielers, restaurants and hotels all around.

Sex might sell in the fleshpots of nearby Chaweng but here it sells in the diluted version of geological anatomy.

A fat Japanese bloke poses on the ground, prostate, with grandpa strategically positioned to emerge from his midriff. Giggling European girls pose with fingers pinching poor old pop in the background. The Muslim girls are up for a laugh, too.

Others place their young children in front of grandpa for a family happy snap. Camera tricks and dick tricks corroborate in a tropical puppetry of the penis.

The Samuis like their rocks. My hotel, the Beluga, is built around them. In addition to its fluorescent indigo, lime, blue and red lighting, the hotel features smart, glazed rocky faces metres high and metres long in the walls of its rooms. My bathroom is a rocky cavern with a shower and a dunny and a few tiles. Quite remarkable, too, if not especially sexy.

It’s Greek-inspired Thai contemporary architecture. All blazing white stone, sparse vegetation – a central frangipani and a palm or two only – and designed by a Frenchman named Roman. Go figure.

Nearby is local tourist trap Valentine’s Rock, which you can pose beneath for 100 baht, alongside hosts of heart-shaped sculptures. Get your toes nibbled by fish in a pond, too, if you fancy. Or pose by the two-metre wooden penis central to the park there. Someone got through Samui Tourism 101 with flying colours.

If you like your rocks hot, you can climb up the hill to a café with a balcony lookout over Lamai and its ever-encroaching palms and jungle, and fishing boats out to sea. A fistful of wooden hashtag signs await your photo-selfie opportunity: #lovely #viewpoint, #hi and the likes.

The German honeymooners who ask me to snap a photo of them have a #inlove sign. Where’s a #frankfurt sign when you need one, I wonder.

A wobbly funicular with cheerful giggling guides, and consignments of coconuts for the café, will take you up upwards if you’re thinking rugged be buggered. Whatever you do, don’t take the car. The grade is ridiculously steep.

Night falls and my neighbours have erected a pair of wooden teepee frames, adorned with fairy lights, and a swag of turquoise bean bags, atop the granite tor adjoining our two hotels. So we sit on the beacon rocks as the sun tumbles behind us into the jungle and fishing boat lights emerge on the horizon. Frosty Singhas complete the scene.

Full-body tattoos, G-strings and bare-butt wide-crochet skirts, hotel staff in white cotton trousers, tees and waist sashes seem the order of the day in this part of the world. If you’re wearing anything, that is. One thing I spy are scars which it unfolds are painful stinger tattoos left on those silly enough to swim in the ocean waters at night. Vinegar and raw alcohol help but best you don’t harbour any such ambitions.

The barman making me a caiparinha, Wun Chai, is a father in waiting. Any day now. His wife and first child are in Myanmar, where he was born. He’s hoping to see them in four or five months, when next he gets shore leave. Long and anxious wait. He shows me pretty photos.

I discover a strange bar among the giant seaside boulders beside Grandpa and Grandma. It’s a reggae bar cum tree house cum memorial to Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Not a straight line in the place and two beers under your belt you become a serious leg injury liability. Drop a match and you’d all be toast.

But the place is rather brilliant. Cushions galore, ladder steps everywhere, crooked branch handrails, red and yellow lighting… it’s a kind of deranged Peter Pan Lost Boys cubby hut meets Pirates of the Caribbean Isla de Muerta bar.

It’s called The Rock Bar, of course. Looks like an underground bar buried under dried palm fronds until you delve inside, whereupon it takes on a high-rise aspect from its tangled base between several shoreline boulders.

The scent of cannabis glides up, over and through the bar’s multifarious levels. A Thai-Jamaican band has set up just inches above the incoming sea. I natter to a pleasant young English couple freshly out of India, and its food poisoning/starvation/disease horrors, and now optimistically eyeing Angkor Wat and old Saigon.

I tell them to play it safe in Australia, that our shark-snake-scorpion-spider terrors are greatly overrated. Maybe one day, they suggest. They’d rather take their chances just about anywhere else.

I wonder on, gently buzzed with caiparinha and Chang. I trip over a glass artisan busy fire-blasting a blue-eared sausage dog. Then a coach-load of Japanese tourists descending on a massive timbered seafood eatery. Then a snapper in tamarind sauce at a humble adjoining beachside restaurant where alluring chargrill scents mix uneasily with sewerage pongs. The tamarind wins, just.

The cats and dogs are plump, their pelts thick and clean, and their demeanour strangely amicable. The cat doesn’t even chase a mouse I spot on the sand. Just looks and moves on. The mouse shits itself, mind you, and whips out of its path.

One more oddity. The place doesn’t look so prosperous that the mutts shouldn’t be mangy and distemper-afflicted. And I wonder what’s happened to rabies, nature’s way of keeping the animal kingdom from taking us over.

Inland at Na Mueang waterfall, an 80-metre cascade in a pretty jungle hideaway, visitors skid and slide over slippery rocks as they seek out their perfect snapshot. Auto apertures can’t cope with the dark foliage and brilliant sunlight, though, resulting in indistinct silhouette shots.

Long-suffering elephants, swaying sadly in their chained misery, are coerced upriver to the falls with loads of tourists on their backs. The river’s anything but a sandy passage. It’s rocks, rocks and more rocks. One slip by the pachyderm and everyone’s cactus.

The island’s centre, a mess of hills covered by palms after earlier being denuded of the trees, hosts a criss-cross of roads, back-tracks and short-cuts to avoid the coastal towns. Lamai to Mae Nam takes me little more than 20 minutes in a brand-new cab with an enthusiastic driver keen to test the brakes at speed.

Mae Nam, looking out across the turquoise to Koh Pha-Ngan and Koh Toa, is a mess of hotels and resorts, dusty roads, shops and houses. And tourists seeking out Family Marts, 7-Elevens and stores with cheaper meals, snacks and beers than the hotels offer.

Inside the hotels, visitors sunbake, drink, swim and eat between yoga downward dogs, deep-tissue massages and self-pedicures walking the abrasive beachfronts. I splash about for a bit, laze about and scoff a pad thai from a neighbouring beach restaurant before sidling up to a prospective drinking buddy at the pool bar.

We bang on about San Diego and Sarawak golf courses, kangaroos, Thai food, Bangkok, the Frankfurt Motor Show, Italian and Brazilian thieves, Japan and a rambling agenda of loose travel-related stuff. Caiparinhas and Changs. Great conversationalists the two of us, hic!

 

charango

While my charango gently weeps …

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Charango: It looks like a wooden armadillo. You know, those critters always getting skittled on South American back roads. Anteater-like, shell-dwelling rodents that musicians like to behead, gut, slap a fretboard on and then a poultice of nylon or gut strings.

Well, no animals were hurt in this musical experiment, if that’s any consolation. Perhaps an endangered timber or two — I can’t vouch otherwise. What happens in Bolivia, where this was made, is all mystery to me.

Not that that’s where I found this charango — the 10-string fake armadillo. I brought it for $US300 on the streets of neighbouring Cusco, high up in Peruvian Andes. Pig of an instrument, too.

I’ve fooled around with guitars, mandolins, bouzoukis, banjos, citterns, fiddles, mando-cellos, ch’ins, bandurias, balalaikas, instruments I couldn’t even name.

I’ve re-tuned them, de-tuned them, battered them with brass, glass and chrome slides, distortion pedals, wah-wahs, tube-screamers, samples and patches . . . all sorts of nonsense. Tortured the neighbours a good bit too, I confess. But this charango’s a tricky proposition.

I’ve watched all manner of Andean pan flute band and thrash-strumming charangeur, I’ve seen some remarkable jazz and tango extracted from the instrument. It gets me dabbling about with the creature. Confused as all get-out, mind you.

The instrument has 10 strings in sets of two, four of them in unison, one an octave apart _ in the middle of the sets. The two sets either side are roughly in the same high-pitched settings.

Rather than climbing from low to high in pitch, this thing starts high, descends and then rises up again. Basically, two sets are tuned like a mandolin, or tenor banjo, or violin _ in fifths, reconciling on the seventh fret. Four sets, one of them overlapping, are like the highest four strings of a guitar. Go figure.

I show this box of mystery to a mate who’s handy with all manner of musical critters. His eyes light up: “Murph, what a gem!” Yeah sure, I think.

“I can’t scratch a tune out of the swine. It rolls about, jumps octaves, tricks you every second note. Sounds great until you play three notes in a row,” I reply.

My mate smiles back, inscrutably. He then proceeds, gently — you don’t rush these things — to work his way through  Rondo á la Turk  on the charango.

I slide back into my seat for the ride. I don’t know what I was expecting.  Duelling Banjos, The Devil Goes Down to Georgia , some O’Carolan . . . anything but Mozart’s impossible  Rondo á la bloody Turk.  Last time I saw anyone playing that on strings it was Phil Emmanuel, Tommy’s brother.

But, nope, this was a Tuesday night, at Geelong’s Irish Murphy’s pub — barely anyone around — and a bloke sitting in the corner.

Take a bow, Geoff Sinbeck.

On the road to Machu Picchu

TRAVEL: Inca Trail wraiths on road to Machu Picchu

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MACHU PICCHU: The wraiths slide down the cliff, clinging to the blue mossy granite, slinking toward the eerie stone structure that is Phuyupatamarka.

Chilly tendrils of mist reluctant to give up the earth, they whip down and over its ancient concourse, scrubbing it with a ghostly ether. They then race up the yellow grassy headland towards me.

The tendrils launch themselves at me, enveloping my throat, my arms, my body, and whispering threats I can’t understand. I freeze as they race past me toward a soaring cliff’s edge and more interlopers who have invaded their ancient enclave.

In the rarified air of the Andes, 10,000 feet above sea level, the ghosts of the ancient Inca kings are reminding me they don’t like visitors. Or so I think. Suddenly, an updraft, born far below _ a mile below, in a small town anxious to scrawl its destiny in the sand _ shatters the icy fingers and blows them to the four winds.

Maybe it’s the lack of oxygen but my imagination’s running riot. It’s been like this for days as I trudge past rocky ruin after beautiful rocky ruin, in the cloud forest of Peru’s High Inca Trail.

Looking down at faraway Aguas Calientes, I wonder if the vapours stalk its townsfolk too, mistaking them perhaps for shades of the marauding Spanish man-horse beasts who whipped the Incas into submission with arquebus, religion and disease 500 years ago.

Not all of the Incas succumbed, though. Learning of the slaughter at Cuzco and elsewhere, and fearing their own, many withdrew to the faraway reaches of the mountain jungles.

The most famous of their abandoned hideways is where I’m headed. The lost city of Machu Picchu. Spirits willing.

Discovered in 1911 by a professor from Yale, Machu Picchu is hard to get to. Five days by foot across stony frozen passes, along vertiginous crevasses, past brightly-coloured wild orchids, in the shadow of serrated snow-capped peaks, suspension bridges, wild rivers.

The trail is beautiful going but tough. Treacherous rocky paths and staircases — one foot wrong and you’ll do an ankle, knee or worse —  are constant pitfalls for the unwary. I limp in, up and over the Inti Punku/Sun Gate ridge, knees considerably worse for wear.

It’s little wonder the wicked Pizarro brothers never found Machu Picchu. Outsiders would only ever find it by accident, which is exactly how Hiram Bingham did so a century ago.

In 1911, Machu Picchu was an overgrown ruin Bingham mistook for Vilcabamba, believed the last stronghold hideaway of the Incas. His stunning find sent an electric shock through the world of archaeology.

The day I arrive, it’s still red-hot _ a favourite in a huge world-wide 100-million vote for the New 7 Wonders of the World. The place is buzzing with hundreds of tourists pouring over the site, 2350 metres above sea level.

Down in Aguas Calientes celebrations are in full swing. Cusqueno beer, pisco sour cocktails and cachasa caiparinhas you might drive your car on are all disappearing fast. Raucous Santana riffs are stripping the lurid paint from the town’s walls, so too the village brass band and classical music blasting from the town square’s stage. Even builders are dancing on the church roof.

The following day, it’s officially listed as a maravillo  —  in company with the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, Rome’s Colloseum, the ancient city of Petra, Rio’s Christ Redeemer statue and Mexico’s Chich aacén Itz aacá.

I get back up the mountain by 7am to beat the rush, which I do by about 10 minutes.

 

A Bali volcano, a witch queen and a palace mystery

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TRAVEL: DOUBT if living in the shadow of a Bali volcano is everyone’s cup of tea. Especially one that’s  properly blown its stack in ready living memory and poised to do so again any minute now.

When you’re a peasant farmer living a subsistence existence in eastern Bali your residential options aren’t many, though. Even so, the grey Gunung Agung, set to erupt again, 50 years after its last eruption — about 15 seconds ago in geological terms — is revered rather than feared.

The gentle Hindus living in the shadow of Agung believe it was formed from a fragment of the cataclysmic splitting of Mount Meru — the cosmological spiritual axis of the universe — by the god Pasupati. At 3140 metres in height, 10,000 feet or so, that’s a fair fragment.

Geologically, Agung is impressively known as a stratovolcano. Standing at its base, driving about in its penumbra, basking in the sun in the rice fields around it — however you interface with it — its omnipresence is undeniable.

Visitors arrive by bus, motorbike and chartered taxis to witness its towering attitude, many of them happily scoffing banana fritters for breakfast before launching into a bike ride back to Bali’s cultural heartland, Ubud.

Pea-green rice paddies, terraces and palms, villages and villagers, it’s all very picturesque. The bonus is bugger-all puffing because it’s all downhill, for the main part anyway. And at the bottom, there’s invariably a Bintang or two awaiting the desiccated pedaller.

And really,  who’s normally going to worry about a volcano in Bali? Ummm, yeah. Of course, the recently smoking Mount Rinjani on neighbouring Lombok was of concern, too, and with good reason. But it’s funny how it, and other ash and pumice-belchers in Indonesia, don’t generally stop the tourists or locals going about their business. Go figure.

First time I encountered Agung was 20 years ago, climbing a multitude of steps in the blazing heat at its Besakih foothill temple. Its impressive nature drew me back recently, as did the surrounding countryside with its glistening terraces, sighing palms, snake-fruit orchids, forests and humble villages. I’d forgotten the rocky, tortuous roads, which have improved markedly but with a commensurate increase in traffic.

I headed south and east in Agung’s shadow, searching for a royal water palace I’d once visited in Amlapur. My old photos showed exquisite stone sculptures, a multi-tiered fountain, terraced gardens, stone bridges — a gorgeous collision of colour, art and water fed by natural springs.

When my taxi ushered me to the site, however, I was bewildered. Nothing seemed the same. Not a skerrick. The buildings were unrecognisable, the entire shape of the water palace totally unfamiliar.

But the hydro-folly, which dates to 1919, was remarkable nonetheless. It boasts exquisite floating pavilions and carved stone walkways, palms and lotus ponds, flowers, grassy terraces, arches, statues, royal furnishings and photographs of its builder, the King of Karangasem, with all his 24 kids. Prolific bloke, that one.

It was built around a pool, the Kolam Dirah, once part of a punishment site for black magic practitioners and named for a legendary witch queen who fought it out with the king of what’s now East Java back in the 14th century. These days, the only detainees in the water palace appear to be dozen inquisitive and out-of-place deer kept coralled in pits. It’s considerably more salubrious than in the past.

Like the surrounding countryside, it was battered by the 1963 Agung eruption along with an earthquake in 1979, which all but destroyed the place. World Bank funding has helped restore the palace to its original glory and a steady succession of taxis and tourists keep the turnstiles clicking. Visitors can stay on site in villas if they so wish. With Agung to the north and the sea and Lombok’s Rinjani to the south, its outlook is spectacular.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure how I’d got it so wrong, though. This was not the water palace I visited at Amlapura before and, with precious little Balinese in my kitbag, no-one I met could understand my confusion or offer an explanation. Back in my hotel, at neighbouring Candidasa, I consulted a couple of dog-eared guidebooks and Dr Google before finally getting to the bottom of my mystery.

Turns out I Gusti Bagus Djelantik, the King of Karangasem, built not one but two water palaces. I was at the Taman Ujung water palace. The one I was missing was Tirta Gangga. Both of them are in Amlapura and only a few kilometres apart. My driver had simply gone to the palace he thought I wanted.

So go figure. Two of the things. I suppose it’s a kind of royal equivalent to stumping up a couple of cars for your teenage kids. When you’ve got two dozen fractious rug-rats, why wouldn’t you build two swimming pools? You can’t throw them in a volcano if they’re acting up, can you?

Then again, when you’re a king …

belugarocks

TRAVEL: Rocking the tourist trade on Koh Samui

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There’s tourist dollars in stones, stoners and supernatural oddities in the jungle paradise of Koh Samui.

Soughing palms, sun-scorched beaches, waterfalls, elephants and croc farms might be the island’s ostensible attractions but it’s giant granite boulders and plain weird that underpin the tourist trade too.

At Wat Kunaram, in the island’s south near Ban Thurian, for instance, I find Buddhist devotees praying to Luang Phaw Daeng, a monk who’d predicted the day of his death at age 79 back in the 1970s.

The monk’s corpse sits upright in a large glass case, his head assuming a rock star aspect with sunglasses shielding his no-doubt spooky looking eyes from scrutiny. He fed himself a special diet that’s purportedly responsible for his body’s mummified state ever since.

It’s zombie-creepy but the religious ectoplasm floating about lends the show a nice Zen aspect. Monks chanting in the temple to the rear, and another bright and colourful new temple next door, extend further gravity to what has to be a con.

The jovial monk at the Big Buddha temple at Bo Phut is a different matter. For a few bob, he happily half-drenches me, splashing water over my head and repeating “Goolark, goolark!” at great pace for a couple of minutes. I tell him I’m on my honeymoon and he nearly falls off his perch laughing.

His “goolark” seems to come to fruition the next morning with a phone call from home with a tidy new contract. The financial reporting season also turns up a larger-than-expected return on a few stocks I’ve squirreled away.

Driving south to Lamai, I find Hin Ta and Hin Yai — two rocky protruberances loosely resembling a penis and a female pudenda. Grandpa Rock and Grandma Rock are an immensely popular tourist drawcard with stalls, spielers, restaurants and hotels all around.

Sex might sell in the fleshpots of nearby Chaweng, the island’s capital, but here it sells well in the diluted version of geological anatomy.

A fat Japanese bloke poses on the ground, lying on his back with grandpa strategically positioned to emerge erect from his midriff. Giggling European girls pose with fingers pinching poor old pop in the background. The Muslim girls are up for a laugh, too. Others place their young children in front of grandpa for a family happy snap.

Camera tricks and dick tricks corroborate in a tropical puppetry of the penis.

The Samuis like their rocks. My hotel at Lamai, the Beluga, is built around them. In addition to its fluorescent indigo, lime, blue and red lighting, the hotel features smart, glazed rocky faces metres high and metres long in the walls of its rooms.

My bathroom is a rocky cavern with a shower and a dunny and a few tiles. Quite remarkable, too, if not especially sexy. I feel a bit like Fred Flintstone.

The hotel is Greek-inspired Thai contemporary architecture. All blazing white stone, sparse vegetation – a central frangipani and a palm or two only – and built by a Frenchman named Roman. Go figure.

Night falls and my neighbours have erected a pair of wooden teepee frames, adorned with fairy lights, and a swag of turquoise bean bags, atop the granite tor adjoining our two hotels.

So I sit on the beacon rocks as the sun tumbles behind into the jungle and fishing boat lights emerge on the horizon. Frosty Singhas complete the experience admirably.

I discover a strange bar among the giant seaside boulders beside Grandpa and Grandma. It’s a reggae bar cum tree-house cum memorial to Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

Not a straight line in the place and two beers under your belt you become a serious leg injury liability. Drop a match and you’d all be toast.

But the place is rather brilliant. Cushions galore, ladder steps everywhere, crooked branch handrails, red and yellow lighting … it’s a kind of Peter Pan Lost Boys cubby hut meets Pirates of the Caribbean Isla de Muerta bar.

It’s called The Rock Bar, of course. Looks like an underground bar buried under dried palm fronds until you delve inside, whereupon it takes on a high-rise aspect from its tangled base between several shoreline rocks.

The scent of cannabis glides up, over and through the bar’s multifarious levels. A Thai-Jamaican band has set up just inches above the incoming sea.

Inland at Na Mueang waterfall, an 80-metre cascade in a pretty jungle hideaway, visitors skid and slide over slippery rocks as they seek out their perfect snapshot. Auto apertures can’t cope with the dark foliage and brilliant sunlight, though, resulting in indistinct silhouette shots.

Long-suffering elephants, swaying sadly in their chained misery, are coerced upriver to the falls with loads of tourists on their backs. The river’s anything but a sandy passage. It’s rocks, rocks and more rocks, and they’re working for peanuts, and bananas.

One slip by the pachyderm and everyone’s cactus. Except the operator.

Nearby is local tourist trap Valentine’s Rock, which you can pose beneath for 100 baht, alongside hosts of heart-shaped sculptures. Get your toes nibbled by fish in a pond, too, if you fancy.

If you like your rocks hot, you can climb up the hill to a café with a balcony lookout over Lamai and its ever-encroaching palms and jungle, and fishing boats out to sea. A fistful of wooden hashtag signs await your photo-selfie opportunity: #lovely #viewpoint, #hi and the likes.

The German honeymooners who ask me to snap a photo of them have a #inlove sign. Where’s a #frankfurt sign when you need one, I wonder.

On the way back down the hill I realise I missed the Valentine park’s central sculpture — a two-metre wooden penis. Punters are milling about for photos and selfies.

Seems some smart cookie got through Samui Tourism 101 with flying colours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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