To the mountains

I originally planned to 'city-hop' from Prague to Budapest, to Sofia, to Athens or Salonica, but after living for two months in Konigstein, it felt almost painful to rush through language groups, alphabets and especially landscapes like that. I'm also somewhat overwhelmed by the mass of tourists (and tourist prices) in Prague. So I did what any good Golden Bayite would do, and headed for the hills.

First I head to the hills north of Prague...



Then next, to some bigger hills, actually the Western Tatra mountains, a tight cluster of granite peaks around 2000 m high that lie about 12 hours by train and clunky bus away from Prague, on the Slovakia-Poland border. They are gorgeous.




It's the first time I've shared a park with bears. and the excitement is enlivening, especially as it is spiced up with signs in Polish. I understand the picture of the bear. That's all.

I stay in a 'shelter' (more like a hostel) in the Chochowolska valley. The building is made seemingly of boulders and Polish enthusiasm. Like the Norwegians, they seem to love the outdoors On the Friday and Monday, I am practically alone, but during the weekend the hills are peppered with gung-ho Poles racing up peaks.

British Wildlife Report #2

For a long time I've been meaning to write about the wildlife here - subtle and cryptic, seasonal, evocative.

When I first came it boggled the mind to have no substantial wilderness around, now the little woods and moors bounded on all sides by development seem normal. Another aspect to the countryside that took getting used to was the smog-haze. Sometimes on a clear day, even in rural areas, a hill one mile away can seem hazy and indistinct. Anything more than 15 miles away can be virtually invisible! It's a combination (an interaction?) between moisture, dust and pollutants. More recently though, I've noticed the variation in this. Some days, especially in summertime, after rain, the atmosphere is as clear as in New Zealand - you can guess I relish those days!

I also relish the seasonal changes here - I caught the end of Autumn in Sussex, with its glory of russet and gold, then the bleak winter in Northumberland, Argyll, Derbyshire and London, when the land lies truly naked. (In most parts of the country, evengreens seem to account for just a few percent of the trees around) I watched the trees dress up again, one by one - beginning with the chestnuts and ending with the limestone-loving ash and the elegant lady: northern beech. Then, to cap it off, the sea of bluebells that rises to lap among the trunks in early May was breathtaking.

I can't put my finger on the particulars, but there seems to be birds around that weren't here in winter - the birds of prey in particular. I should check their migration details out. The kites with their v-shaped tails and the astounding kestrel (you may know G.M.Hopkin's The Windhover) are favourites. The crow family was faithful though, and have stuck around enough for me to identify between jackdaws (gregarious, whitefaced) and ravens (large, curved beaks, mainly solitary). Both were plentiful as I walked the vertigo-inducing path along the clifftops in south-west Cornwall. Crows and rooks are harder to distinguish. Readers' digest tells me rooks appear to wear 'baggy breeches'. Dubious

Jackdaw (Photo by John Haslam- CC Attribution licence)

There are three animals I wouldn't have seen without the aid of keen British wildlife-watchers. Walking along a canal towpath in Derbyshire, an elderly gentleman is staring at something on the other side of the canal. 'It's a grass snake'. Indeed! With the naked eye, it looks like a stick, but we are offered the view through others' binoculars and zoom lenses (by now there is a crowd). It's funny to say this, but, my first impression was... it's got no legs! A brain, a tongue, eyes.... but no legs! Like a fish, but on land. Weird.

Amazingly, it transpires it is not just one grass snake but two. Trying to eat the same toad. Incredible, to watch the drama of these three creatures, maligned in our folklore but beautiful. It is again, a fellow nature junkie who shows me the peregrine falcon chicks, perching on the custom-built nestbox on the spire of Derby Cathedral. They are fledglings, at home in the city centre, with their aggressive curved beak and comical head-bobs.

Badger, of course! (Public domain)

In Devon, around 10pm, my cousin's neighbour calls up to tell us 'the badger is here'. We head to his kitchen and watch it through the large window. It is out, on the steps, thinner than i imagined, but many times more beautiful. It picks up the bread left out for it nightly, and scoffs a slice in the shadows, before returning again and again for more. I am entranced.

Salut!

I'm in Bordeaux, the city (by the way, if you are french, the region we call 'Bordeaux' is called 'Gironde') staying with the charming Tomas and Eloise, who I met in Cudillero in Espana.

I love learning French. I finally get to use my nasal twang for some real phonemes!

I have just spent a couple of hours writing up my late August travels. Tonight we will go to sit by the vast tidal Garonne (maybe I will see some more Coypu) and probably drink red wine and eat pain et fromage (bread and cheese). Voila!

The Rain in Spain Falls only in the North.

The rural areas in Spain have proved to be much more fun than the cities for me. Lacking the stamina and inclination for drinking every night of the week, heading out to Cuidillero beach for a couple of nights was fantastic. It is almost as far from the touristic south coast as you can get. Still, it wasn´t a natural paradise. Loudspeakers in public places create facist associations for me, and tell us that it´s too dangerous to swim today. Like most places in Europe I have visited, autopistas (motorways) run through the country. Because Asturias is a hilly province, the autopistas often run along massive four lane concrete land bridges, looming dozens of metres above the valleys below. They are probably the largest man-made structures I have come across. I find their powerful curves equally elegant and frightening.

(just a baby one)

A more familiar sight is the forests of Eucalyptus, planted for firewood, and turning the soil acidic.

In Cuidillero I met some lovely Madrilenos and French travellers, wrote a little. Got rained on (rain? what´s that?) learnt a bit of Spanish Sign Language. (I was named! my name is ~strokes his beard~)


My second rural exursion was even better. Startled my Madrid´s sprawling noise, I took a bus 150km south to a tiny village which was hosting EcoPop... a festival of Eco... and ...Pop. Better still was the Sierra Gredos (pictured) behind, which loomed like friendly giants and enticed me to spend a night in the mountains, alone in a ´refugio´ surrounded by pines and granite outcrops. And more blackberries than I could ever eat. I definitely want to come back for more.

Things I have grown accustomed to

Seeing Oaks as natives, Sycamores as noxious weeds
Seeing Red Squirrels as natives, Grey ones as noxious weeds

Everyone here seeing themselves as natives, Chavs as noxious weeds

The best conversion of energy to distance/ is when your food is your fuel and your feet are your pistons.

I cycle north on my Uncle Keith's green touring bike through the midlands from Oxford. The countryside is a green sheet, punctuated. The commas of hedgerows, stops of tiny country villages. Church steeples form exclamation points and squirrel's tails make question marks.

It is delightful. I cycle through, not past the landscape, only slightly perturbed by the hazy smog that cuts out views. Cycling through a particularly lush avenue I raise my arm in glee, like a tour-de-france winner or a baptist testifying. The horse-rider approaching is confused. "The flies are bad around here, aren't they" she says.

I passed by more riders and walkers than I am cars. Two routes of the National Cycle Network (54 and 6) take me from Oxford to Derby, with only brief stints on major roads. They are detailed on a specially designed Sus(tainable)trans(port) map. Of course I lose the snaking cycle track (marked by little blue signs) about three times in every large town, but I am very grateful for this facility. Mad props.

My bike is laden with gear, which means I can't cycle no-hands (damm) let alone Vish's no-hands-no-bum trick. But it does mean I am self sufficient. I stayed my first night in a little thicket just off the road (shush). Tenting is great but it does make the brightness of the morning (4am at this time of year) very evident.

Solo cycle touring is also lonely, but I make friends rapidly through the couch-surfing website. Dave in Northampton is an accountant when he must, and a globe-trotter when he can. He is a very generous and fascinating host. Reevsie and Zena here in Leciester are lively conversationalists. They are also conservationists committed to living "low-carbon" lifestyles. There is a label on the plugs in the house detailing their electricity use. The cd player: "9 watts (playing)/7 watts (not playing) 3 watts (standby). Their dedication to their ecological footprint is both inspiring and challenging (a quota of two long haul flights for the rest of my life? gee.) I do feel at home when I discover they don't flush their pee, for water conservation reasons.

It's not all serious. Tonight Reevsie and I are making Willa Wonka sweets.

I want to tell you about the sights I saw from the plane, 10km high flying Wellington to London via Hong Kong. I have been putting it off because, ideally, I would look up the names of places on GoogleEarth. I haven’t had a chance yet.


The first unusual sight is the desert. It is beautiful and naked. Thin ridges run like veins, ribs under the skin of red sand (or is it rock?) That’s about all. It is as if the creator, if you believe that sort of thing, had been in a remarkably austere and reckless mood. Rocks, sand, those weird ridges (let’s make them run due north, eh?) that’ll do. Oh, maybe some lichens, bacteria. Let’s make it red. This is real desert – utterly no sign of humans, for an hour. It seems so foreign. I am reminded of Ursula K Le Guins vision of the afterlife: that dry land…. But there does seems to be some water. We fly over patches populated by shallow salt-lakes, usually dry, but some seem to hold a pond in the center. Occasionally the ground below is marked with just-visible rashes of green.

The desert gradually melds into semi-desert. Now I start to see roads. Very straight roads. Roads like these that my father travelled. Days before I left, he told me, for the first time, the story of riding his motorbike, at sixteen, across the outback. Hitting sand dunes on the road and struggling to keep the bike upright. It’s a bit easier when you are seven miles up.

I wonder, marvel at the persistence and determination of our species. Who would live out here? Who could live out here? But people do. I notice some dwellings. We fly north-west, and as we near Alice Springs I see for the first time here valleys, gullies, creeks. The earth once again is shaped by water running off it, not just by the wind. It is something of a relief to see.

The landscape doesn’t change much until we leave Australia, somewhere near Darwin. I manage to see a few bejungled islands near PNG, and then the sun goes down. It’s a little symbolic. I know very little about Indonesia, the Phillipines, and we fly over them in darkness.

Going Hong Kong to London we pass over the mass of central Asia. Range after range of lumpy, forested mountains, then dry pointy mountains, then high, snow capped, gravely mountains. In between are expanses of land with little agriculture and settlement. I can see why. Sometimes giant sand dunes can be seen engulfing flat, arable land. Sometimes hills are terraced and farmed. Following the contours of the hills, these ancient techniques are visually stunning.

We fly over Mongolia, and then Siberia. Late spring up there and there is a lot of green. Serpentine rivers and lakes. Passing Novosibirsk, where Mel once lived, the cloud clears and I see a massive lake, but not the city.

The closer we get to Great Britain, the more homogenous the land below. Poland, Denmark, Gotland, the Netherlands. They all look the same from up here. Green pastures, intensely developed. I can imagine what the landscape looks like on the ground. My heart sinks a bit. I know that I am here, in Northern Europe, to connect with people, not monumental landscapes. I guess I’m just a bit greedy and want to do both at once. I will too, just wait.

Travellers congregate

(Written mainly on Monday 27 May.)

Temperature on arrival: twenty-six degrees celsius. Temperature today: ten.

What, dear readers, can I say about London? Many of you, I imagine will have been here at some point (bless our middle class cotton socks) for longer than me. I have been here for four days. At the moment I’m missing the wilderness, so let me tell you about birds and stuff.

Twice I’ve walked along the canal towards Paddington – the birdlife in the canal is impressive. Canada Geese calmly patrol the area. Most unusual are the moorhens. They have these amazing feet, with a series of round pads along the massive toes. This allows them, I suppose, to patter along lilypads and sneak through rushes. (I have to practice sneaking through rushes myself, to handle Regent Street. Ha!) By flailing their wings and pushing with these considerable paddles they can almost completely lift themselves out of the water while remaining stationary. Impressive. These dark, vocal birds are bullies: they chase birds twice their size from their very visible nests. They must do the same with predators.

Another highlight was seeing the pukekos. Yes, pukekos are found all over the world (so are sparrows. Hong Kong had a skinny, sweeter singing, territorial sparrow.) The pukekos here are much smaller, about the size of a bantam hen. They aren't of course called pukekos here. Wikipedia lists the names of this bird as: Purple Swamphen, Porphyrio porphyrio, African Purple Swamphen, Purple Moorhen, Purple Gallinule. My favourite is "Sultana Bird" - from the French - talève sultane. Porphyrio porphyrio here have more dark grey and less blue plumage, but they are unmistakably pukekos. They strut and flick their white arse like ours do.

Less similar to the antipodean version are the magpies. Here they are graceful, like large cuckoos, with a long tail. Namvula greets a magpie if it is solitary: ‘good morning magpie, how are your wife and kids?’. Not to do so brings on calamity. The crows are a bit of a favourite. Totally black, it’s as if you are always seeing them in silhouette.

Like most cities, there is not one, but thousands of Londons. Geographically, mine has centered around Ladbroke Grove where I am staying with my cousin Namvula. It is a suburb both refined and quirky. Trees, mainly plane trees, line almost every street (streets with names like Oxford Gardens) My first evening here I saw children practicing cartwheels on the pavement and a man biking with seven dogs on seven leads. Like the rest of London, he had no cycle helmet – hurrah! It makes cyclists seem much more human, much less freakish. I see posters advertising the health benefits of cycling on bus shelters. Good.

My London also has had an African side to it. Namvula’s mother is Zambian and many of her friends I have heritage in that continent. Ore, a Nigerian boy I met liked my beatboxing and we performed together at a talent quest in a South London school. I've heard a South African soul singer, Morrocan gnawa-jazz fusion, and 'Mama Africa' Miriam Makeba. This is a city of many possibilities, a city where it seems no-one is a true foreigner.