This is both by request and off the top of my head, so apologies in advance and/or blame the folks who asked for this!
Geri and I hit the beaches in Cuba (usually but not always in Cayos, CSM
being our current fave) 2-3 times a year and have been doing so since
1990 or 1991. One of our claims to fame is the fact that were were at
the first hotel on the Cayos (then Guitart, now Blau) the year it
opened.
In any case, while we would never pass up our 'arrive, lie down on the
beach, get up two weeks later and fly home' vacations, we also have a
secret life as more active tourists. This year's project was a mix of
western and Central Europe on the fly. We deliberatley booked only two
spots to stay: a B&B for our arrival in Amsterdam and a hotel in
Paris as we were to be there for Geri's birthday and two of the kids
were able to get time off from work to join us for dinner on her 60th!
Amsterdam was a lotta fun. I lived there for a while in my
teens and it was fun, if strange, to go back and see so many
changes...and so many things the same. We enjoyed the 'coffeeshops' a
great deal! And looking at the Netherland's (and most other European
countries except France) experience with legalizing marijuana was
instructive given the debate here on de-criminalization. Ie., much as
what happened here and in the States when alcohol was de-criminalized.
Food was another matter. I have always found Dutch food on the bland
side, and even trying to get a spice fix by hitting an Indian or
Indonesian restaurant didn't do it. Everyone seemed to think the food
was hotter than hades. Even Geri, not one for the tangy, found it
bland. Lonely Planet (our bible) says it's a matter of local tastes
watering down imported food prep techniques.
Mmmm...there's a lot of stuff about food in this report. That should tell you something about me!
Funny, I think the best Dutch restaurant I know of is in Oxford (UK).
And the best food we had in Amsterdam was at a Greek restaurant!
Geri will have to provide the name, but we spent a day at a tulip
farm/gardens/amusement park (if you can imagine such a thing - I'm not a
gardener so I couldn't, but there it was. All 100 hectares of it!).
We usually just walk around a place, and we did lots of that for the
week we were there. We did everything we wanted to exept for a couple
of out-of-town day trips which we didn't get to. But as we quickly
after arrival agreed that we'd be headed back, a lot of the urgent need
to see and do everything on our list disappeared.
Our B&B I would highly recommend for all but the coldest time of
year. It was a small house at the bottom of our host's garden. Like
having our own little house in the inner suburbs. We quickly made
friends at the corner pub and it was like our old neighbourhood in
Toronto all over again.
Next on our list was the Czech Republic, Prague
to be exact. When we started to slow down in Amsterdam we spent an
hour in an internet cafe and came up with a 14th convent that has been
converted into a small (20 room?) hotel. It came recommended by Lonely
Planet, and as always we weren't disappointed when following their
advice.
Wonderful time in a pretty city. Wonderful architecture and the city
centre has been very well preserved. Interesting seeing a
post-communist society too. I'm sure there are up sides of a material
and other nature, but pretty clearly there are down sides too.
One of my nicest memories of the entire trip is sitting on the patio of a
bar out over the river, drinking some wine and watching the sun go down
behind Prague castle...
Vienna was the next spot when we got...not
exactly bored....just ready to move on. Spectacular architecture from
the imperial period. Magnificently laid-out city. Between the bicycle
lanes on all major roads in the centre and the wonderful (even by
European standards) public transit system.
Viennese street food a hoot. No surprise: it features lots of different
sausages. The local fave is something stuffed with cheese and called a
'hunchback full of pus.'
Yum. :)
Viennese hotel again small, but LP-recommended and only a 5 minutes stroll from the old city centre and museum quarter.
Zurich: what can I say, there really is a
bank on every streetcorner...and in the middle of every block. And
above every bank is another bank. And underneath the streets are the
bank vaults with, reputedly, billions in gold and black market money.
Very neat, very tidy, all the things you'd expect, but also a lot more
interesting than I would have thought. Much more multi-cultural. We
were there on Mayday and joined the march, wound-up as the festival in a
local park, sampled all kinds of food and bought t-shirts in support of
group sending medical supplies to Cuba!
Very interesting dance club and music scene. Wish we had spent more
time there, but it was a last-minute decision. We had originally
planned to zip from Vienna into Venice just for the trip through the
Alps and because we spent a lot but too little time (if you get my pasta
and seafood-loving drift) at a restaurant there a couple of years ago.
But as that would have taken us further from Paris, where we had to be on 5 May, we went to Zurich instead.
Paris I must admit to not liking much prior to this visit. But as Geri has never been and it was her birthday...
Actually, it has always been Parisiens I had trouble with. But then the
latest of my previous 3 visits was 20 years ago. And it was the best, I
had thought because I had had the forethought to be there during August
when most Parisiens take their vacations.
I was pleasantly surprised. Had a great time, ate way too much very
good food (the Atkins diet was not invented in France, nor are sales of
the book doing well in the land of the croissant).
I am also invertedly-snobbishly am pleased to say I have now been to
Paris 4 times and have yet to get close to the Eiffel Tower!
Paris hotel was basic (the way we like to pay if not live while
travelling), but right across the street from the main building of the
Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter. And not, as we discovered, much of a
walk from the Abbey Bookshop, an overstuffed wonderful Canadian
bookstore that's doing a booming business and where you can get a free
cup of coffee with maple syrup while you browse.
On the Great Day, the kids arrived late morning after changing planes in
Amsterdam, and we had a wonderful dinner on the left bank looking out
on Notre Dame. Lots of champers and news from home.
After Paris we hopped the TGV (normally we travel 2nd class on the milk
runs) to Amsterdam and 4 days of decompressing in a spot that felt
almost like home before taking the final leap and heading into Pearson.
We liked the B&B we had the first time there that we booked it
again on our return.
=================
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Nicaragua Feb 2007
We're back, had a heck of an interesting vacation.
If anyone is interested here are the snaps:
http://flickr.com/ph...57594574198188/
=======================
Here's the texts of various e-postcards we sent while there to family and friends...
==========================
Since several of you wanted to know re. Nicaragua how it compares with Cuba...the first thing you notice when you get off the plane in Managua is that Cubans have fee dental care. Nicas don’t.
The second thing you notice is that even in town, most people under the age of 15 or so don’t have or don’t wear shoes.
Next you notice that the bellhop at your hotel is wearing a holster with a largish revolver in it. So does the pool guy and at least one of the waiters (the room service guy I think, his job is riskier than working tables).
Not far from where I am sitting right now is Mercado Oriental (Eastern Market). Anyone for a live hand grenade as a souvenir?
Perhaps an AKM or an Uzi¿ No joke. Live and not a paperweight.
Our hotel out on the Pacific coast was quite nice, wonderful view right on the beach. Very nice food, though no hot water etc.
Poverty here reminds me of India. Immense wealth right next to people who clearly have one set of clothes and no more. Geri and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the shade with beer a few days ago looking at a house that would not be out of place in Forest Hill in Toronto, surrounded by a wall topped with 3-4 rows of razor wire, a sentry in a concrete box with an assault rifle, and dozens of houses made from sticks and plastic sheeting, sharing an outhouse that was four sticks wrapped with one garbage bags for privacy and a broken pipe and concrete bowl for water.
¨Pleasant¨ in that we were imagining living below the ´big house´ plotting robbery, arson, and murder.
:-) sort of, but after three beers and watching life there...
Big chunks of even Managua like that too. Only corrugated iron and zinc rather than plastic.
Lots and lots of guns. Our hotel here in Managua has a law firm next door.
It has a guardbox at the entrance. A nice man with a general-purpose machine gun in it. This on a main street in a fairly ritzy district.
I’d like to think it’s the result of Nicas sharing my attitude towards the
legal profession, but I suspect it’s more generalized than that. :-)
On the up side, though they have clearly made huge compromises to get back in office, the Sandinistas just announced that they are making schooling mandatory and free again. Something it hasn’t been since they lost the 1990 election. So the hordes of kids on the street may have a place to go, though the opposition Liberal Constitutional Party is saying this can’t be afforded and that after 16 years of fees and the ´freedom’ not to send your kids to school there aren’t enough school places.
Oh, and the really cheery bit on the kid front, other than the appalling
mortality rate and the fact that abortion for any reason was made illegal just before the elections, about 20 % of the under-5 population suffers from rickets or some other nutritional condition.
One last downer before I sign off and come back in a few days with some of the positive things that sink in after you meet and talk with people...this place seems to be for US boys in their twenties what Prague is for the Brits of the same gender and age: a place to go for the hookers, the cheap beer and the surfing (OK, the surfing in Prague isn’t what it used to be since they built the floodways...).
J
Quite irritating, loud and rude. Still, the grenades work out to about
$35CAD each so... :-)
Gotta go. This ain’t Cobourg it’s true, but for all the firearms walking
around (signs outside restaurants ask people t leave them outside. Top end spots will check them), they have a fine beer in Victoria (victory).
I think I will sit outside, have one or two and count the number of sales the dozens of street vendors at the corner lights make. Not many I suspect.
Despite the fact that you can buy just about anything from them. One tried to sell me a parrot (or something similar) and a bag full of water and turtles on the way into town.
Just a bit different from Cuba, for those who were asking for a comparison.
Just a bit.
It is safe, or at least as safe as it gets in Central America, though there’s some debate about whether a lot of crime gets reported given what people think of the police, the kind of service the poor would get from them or any other public officials.
If you stayed in Managua where we are you could be in Spain, it’s just that no one wants you to walk in certain parts of town and they get very excited about it when you leave the hotel.
But in this neighbourhood there are great, dirt cheap bars and restaurants, and while the city water isn’t always drinkable, most of the (very nice) houses in this area have their own water and generator systems. Pretending there’s nothing else out there, the worst you could say about this part of the city is that it is clear that the European-looking folks are the owners and patrons of the bars etc., the ones who live in the houses. The aboriginal-looking folks are
the servers and the gardeners.
It’s when you leave the touristy bits that things change fast. Fast, fast, fast. A big part of the city was never restored after the earthquake in 1972 and while a few government buildings went in, much is open space, much is a slum of homes built of corrugated metal (remember how hot and sunny it is here), plastic and scrap wood and cement blocks.
All about a 5-minute walk from one of the ritzier hotels in town, this huge neo-Wright pyramid, that in turn is in the shadow of the giant metal silhouette of Sandino that sits at the edge of the volcano crater right in the centre of the city.
Folks all friendly enough, but not like Cuba. Not the same energy. I keep thinking they’re like the people in Belfast: after so many years of civil war, following on 50 years of military rule, nobody’s left feeling real outgoing.
Oh, and the mine thing (which I referred to in my last and which Risa and Daria got concerned about) happened a few years ago. The southern and western parts of the country and pretty much de-mined. The north is closed to tourists because of bandits (love that word “I met a buncha bandits yesterday and they were saying…”), but we’re not going there, or to the Caribbean coast where mines are still a problem in some areas. Losing your livestock to them can still be a major problem for small farmers.
In fact later today we’re off to the Best Western Aeropuerto where we meet the rest of our group tonight. We’re taking it easy as Geri has a cold. So an afternoon by the pool and much beer while Geri naps.
Anyway, I am fine, having a GREAT time and wish you were both here. Current hotel has 13 rooms, great food, a colonial mansion with a central courtyard with a garden and fountain...all protected by a nice man with a pistol and a shotgun and a doorman’s uniform at the front door.
It wouldn’t be Managua if he didn’t have at least two weapons.
:-)
====================================================
I spent an exciting morning today talking about sorghum storage and sales.
Geri spoke the words "I could have done with just two tops, two shorts and two pair of shoes".
No lie, on either count!
Details to follow. We (finally) get to the factory inspections in the Managua maquila zone tomorrow. I need to get back into a city or I will start chewing hay and talking about planting time and whether it will rain tomorrow (eating into the Weather Network’s gig).
===============================================
I’m in a small town called Rivas in southern Nicaragua, not far from the Costa Rican border.
Church here has this wonderfully goofy mural around the inside of its
dome/cupola.
Four ships. Three sinking and burning and such, one sailing victorious back into harbour.
The three; communism, Protestantism, secularism.
The fourth¿ Catholicism, of course.
Wonderfully, wonderfully cheesie.
And, of course, I could not get a photo. Will try again, but standing behind the priest as he works his gig, snapping photos of the ceiling may not go down all that well.
Darn.
===============================================
Well, this is my second attempt at this. The first, about three pages (so perhaps not a bad thing) got lost when the computer I am at seized when I hit SEND.
This hotel is a training centre for a variety of skills, including tourism
and basic computer skills, but some of their donated equipment is a little wonky. Included in that are the keyboards. So you’ll have to excuse some of the characters that don’t really work, but the keyboard I’m at is a standard English board that has been re-mapped to Spanish. So to use it properly I would have to remember where everything is on a Spanish board: something a bit beyond me today.
I’ve got today off as my cold is worse and today was to have been a very long one for me.
Let’s see if I can reconstruct things and mobbed pare it down a bit too...
We’ve really been have a fine time. The groups we’ve met with have been amazing. The ´sorghum´comment I made in my last was typical of the groups we have met.
A peasants co-op that is doing a whole bunch of things, but which got started with about $2000 from Horizons, the group we’re here with.
They used the two grand to build a brick kiln and buy some tin storage silos. Used bricks first to build a storage shed into which they put the silos. Then started selling bricks, paying co-op members in bricks for their work at the kiln (so they have the nicest houses in the district, some even have floors, though no electricity or water in the region).
The silos were combined with a micro credit programme. The peasants deposit their grain in the silos (these things are mebbe 2m tall and mebbe one around) and get the going harvest price for the stuff. They are charged 6% interested when the going rate is over 25%.
When, after a while when the harvest glut ends, the price goes up, they then sell their grain at a much higher price, they repay the advance plus interest and make much, much more profit than they used to.
Sounds a simple thing, but it has meant a huge improvement in people lives. Kids now going to school etc. Plus the grain merchants now have to deal with the co-op rather than with individual peasants, so there’s a sense of gaining some control there.
They’re also into soil conservation measures, building a small herd of pigs, family violence education, etc., etc. All funded by the 6%.
There were 25 of them at the meeting. All spoke of the differences this had made in their lives, some with tears. Quite moving.
They had decorated the shed with banners and balloons and little samples of their crops. Every once in a while the wind would push a balloon up against the tin roof and it would explode. Can’t believe people live in homes made of the stuff in this heat and sun.
Lots of stuff like that. Probably just as well the original message got lost as it was probably too hokey. SMILE.
I’ll do a separate message on the maquila sweatshops. Not good. Especially amazing when you consider that the ones we can get into are the ones the owners WANT us to see and test etc. so they can market their products as ‘approved´.
Some little detours to touristy things here and there. Our group leaders didn’t plan anything really, but Geri and I have our Lonely Planet (what else¿) and we’ve been able to do some stuff as a result. Puts things in context, historical and otherwise. Yesterday we had a meeting in a small village. PowerPoint presentation in a bamboo and thatch hut in a town with no paved roads in the sticks…bizarre...buts that’s another story.
Afterwards we visited a monument the village put up when they shot down a Somoza Air Force plane in 1979. It had been bombing them for months. Huge morale booster up here in the highlands when it happened. The villagers hauled the thing up the hill themselves and it’s quite the point of pride for the area.
The plane is on a concrete slab on a small hill overlooking the village. You look down and wonder why anyone would think there was anything needing bombing in the village, why it was bombed a few times a month for several years...nothing there, but people.
People.
Big Sandinista area. Since the revolution they’ve nearly unanimously elected FSLN folks at every level.
If what happened during the revolution wasn’t bad enough, this area was also the favourite target of the Contras as it is close to the Honduran border.
Another little anecdote. Spent some time with a NGO of ´radical social workers’ in a town of 45,000. 65% unemployment. No water system, no sewers. The town hospital I walked through and would have assumed was a decrepit prison ready for demolition if I hadn’t known.
Few houses are more than shacks with dirt floors.
The NGO has a clinic with a tech, a MD and two nurses. The MD makes $180 per month, compared to $800 for hospital (Ministry of Health) MDs, and much more for private MDs.
The hospital abides by the Nicaraguan constitution which says that healthcare is free (drafted by the Sandinistas after the revolution) in that it doesn’t charge for anything, but then like all public hospitals it can’t actually do much either. And what it does do is usually funded or supplied by WHO. There’s little or nothing of what we would consider the state or government here, outside the police and the military. And the police are definitely self-funding (i.e. they are paid little on the understanding that they will use their authority to extract cash from people, but will be around for the state when the shit hits the fan).
So it sends all its patients it can’t deal with and who can’t afford to go
private to the clinic.
One MD et al for 45,000 people.
Medicins sans frontiers used to run a dental clinic there, but it lost its
funding. No dentist around except for the very rich.
The NGO also runs a radio station and some other fun stuff. But most interesting was that everyone involved except one is 25 or younger. The idea was to bring kids from the youth programmes they run into admin positions. Really quite interesting.
There’s also a really interesting art therapy programme for kids who are the victims of family violence. The art gallery is quite frightening, angering, depressing.
The one over-25 is the priest from Quebec who started the thing (now grown into something quite impressive). A liberation theologist, he got the boot by the church, but still lives and works in the community.
The only other hospital I have seen is the ´Panadol Maternity Hospital’ in Managua. All ultra modern, hellishly expensive and sponsored by a drug company, run by a US ´health corporation.
Had a whole touristy day last week. Went to one of Nicaragua’s several active volcanoes. Lots of fartish-smelling smoke and lava roiling around. Reminds me of how I felt when I realized that while they don’t mention it on the nature programmes on TV, whales have REALLY bad breath.
Great signs telling you to hide under your car if lava bombs start up (I mean ACTIVE when I say active volcanoes) so you can be crushed to death under a really hot car. J
Odds and ends:
´Skull of the cat’ is a local corn-based moonshine. Avoid it.
Dioridiom is a village that prides itself on having a witch tradition that has survived hundreds of years of repression. Fun-looking spot. We just drove through, I am thinking we should have given ourselves free days at the end rather than at the beginning. That way we’d know where to spend our time.
Lots of US fundies around. If anything more conservative politically than the RC church, some here think there’s been an extra surge since the Sandinistas were elected. There’s so many of them that the forms you have to fill out at immigration and when checking into a hotel make on a mission´ an option under ´Reason for visit to Nicaragua´.
Clothes seemed amazingly cheap until we realized that almost all stores are selling second-hand stuff. Merchants buy at thrift shops in North America and then ship them down by the tonne.
We travel in a bus with the luggage on the roof. Got to watch it when in towns after dark and moving slowly. Last night some kids got up on the roof and were minutes away from untying the luggage and tossing it down as we moved along.
People here beg for food, not just money. And it’s not unusual for somebody to ask for your plate if you’re done but have food left.
53 universities, only two public, the rest private and most of them run by churches. Tuition runs about equal to unis in the US we were told. An engineering degree is worth about $14,000USD per year.
Despite the Sandinistas making schooling mandatory and free again, there are problems. School have shut down or been consolidated in the cities, folks outsides can’t afford transportation or materials. And there are way fewer spaces than needed.
Illiteracy has an odd demographic here. The Sandinistas copied the Cuban approach, got literacy well up there, but it has dropped since they lost the election in the early 1990´s. So illiteracy is getting close to 30%, but is concentrated in the 10-30 age group.
The biggest, nicest, cleanest and newest buildings are maquila factories. From the outside. Hellholes on the inside.
No public transportation systems (sold in the 90´s). Lots of ex-US school buses that barely slow down before a conductor jumps off and pushes people into place. They compete with each other to reach a stop with a lot of people and sometimes fights break out between conductors.
Buses are covered with prayers to Mary and Jesus re. getting them safely to their destination. Personally I think they could pay more attention to decent brakes and some driver training, easeup on the supernatural.
Cuba is shipping doctors and teachers here by the truckload. Venezuela is offering cheap oil, but the national oil company doesn’t own any refineries (sold in the 90´s) and the multinationals appear to be threatening some sort of boycott the subsidized oil.
Even up here in the highlands where support for the Sandinistas is very high, there’s a lot of anxiety about what the US will do. Their ambassador quite openly interferes in their elections, in a way Canada probably hasn’t ever seen, though mebbe the 1963 election that got Pearson elected would be closest.
At the moment the ambassador is trying to broker a merger of all the
right-wing parties so that the Sandinistas will face a united opposition next time. Plus there are always rumours of the US re-imposing the Cuba-like blockade it had in place in the 1980´s and 90´s.
People are just keeping their fingers crossed that the US is too busy in Iraq and Afghanistan to make Nicaragua a priority. A lot of the people we have spoken to say they voted Sandanista, but seem very surprised they were elected. It makes them nervous as for years Sandanista supporters would work on FSLN projects, but wouldn’t vote for them as a FSLN win would have meant the US starting the war again. Liberal governments were wildly unpopular, but people voted for them out of fear for the concequences of NOT voting for them.
If that makes any sense.
Armadillo and iguana crossing signs on the astoundingly bad (with the exception of the Pan-American Highway, the south end of the NAFTA-CAFTA highway system) roads.
Roads so bad sometimes cars will pass each other going in opposite
directions, each on the wrong side of the road as they try to avoid the worst potholes, all going 20kph.
Food good, people great. I’d come back to do this again (though less of the everybody do everything and more you go there and do your thing, I’ll go here and do mine would be good), or as a tourist.
Gotta go. Believe it or not, the first version was longer.
====================================================
Forgot...
Social safety net or whatever term you want to use has been privatized here. Just like health, it´s two-tiered.
The Sandinistas introduced fairly comprehensive if not too terribly
Generous (though given the state of the country in 1979...) programme. The governments which followed privatized it, but couldn’t eliminate it completely because of its popularity, and, I suspect, because those governments weren’t popular themselves, but elected because it meant the US wouldn’t start the war
again.
In any case, what happens now is that for anything vaguely a ´social
benefit´ in Canadian terms, you have a small amount of money from the government each month which can be directed to the commercial insurance company of your choice.
To that you add you own cash and that allows you to buy a package covering such things as EI, CPP, extended medical etc.
Of course in a country where the average wage is something like 200CAD a month not many can add much to what the government pays.
The insurance companies rely on the low incomes of so many of their clients whose premiums are paid by the government to act as a disincentive to legal action then a claim is filed and denied.
We had a chance to speak with some women who are trying to collect 3 months maternity leave they were denied by their (¿¿¿) insurance company.
They can’t afford a lawyer, the government’s responsibility begins and ends with the forwarding of the premiums, NGOs and women’s orgs and legal clinics are reluctant to take their cases because there’s no way to ensure a precedent is set that apply in future and each case will be fought tooth and nail by the insurance companies...
We were told there’s a growing tendency by a majority of Nicas to just ignore the social insurance system entirely as filing claims is a waste of time. The government simply keeps the money in such cases. The insurance companies are lobbying to make coverage (i.e. payments) mandatory.
===================================================
Geri asked me to add to our postcards the following. My words, but she provided the info and checked over a draft. This was a meeting she attended when I was sick.
-----------------------
The group was the leadership of a women’s coffee co-op.
It was founded by former Sandinista fighters after the Contra War.
It’s more than slightly unusual in two respects.
While there were a great many co-ops formed as the guerrillas were disbanded and land reform made small plots of land available (to men for the most part) this one is open only to women and is also one which eventually included women veterans of both sides in the Contra War(essentially a civil war, though with one side funded by the US. Remember Ollie North¿).
The goals are to buy up enough land to make a model farm and to lobby the government to add to whatever they are eventually able to buy; to provide an example of practical reconciliation in the aftermath of the war, and to provide steady and reliable incomes for women and children (there were 3200 orphans in the region at the end of the Contra War)in an area where men are prone to substance abuse, selling land to large plantation owners at bargain basement
prices, buggering off with the land sale money to Costa Rica, and other stupid things.
Some women within the co-op hold plots of land ranging from one to eight hectares but many own no land directly. They contribute labour to the co-op instead. Currently about 70% of the land in the co-op is owned jointly with men, the remainder is owned by the members.
Men have a tendency to sell land in a bad year to get drunk or to do
something equally unproductive with the money. And almost all the land redistributed to landless agricultural labourers after the revolution went to men. Which meant over time much of it was concentrated back in the hands of large plantation owners.
The co-op is trying to find a niche where it can compete with the large
plantations or just avoid them completely by going into certified organic coffee production. Though it’s expensive to get certified.
They provide assistance in getting loans to women who want to join in order for them to acquire some land or to get certified. But the banks are reluctant to loan money to women without spouses, or without a spouse’s signature, and the assumption always is that title will go to a man of some sort. And the co-op is far from the point where it has the resources to loan money directly.
There was a funny bit when they talked about how much success they have had in transferring title from a male spouse to a female spouse when he is drunk.
In many ways it’s not funny as male partners almost always will their land to their oldest son, leaving their widow and other children dependent (if there’s enough land and if the oldest son feels like it) or destitute. So if the deed doesn’t get signed over when hubby is loaded...
There is also a long-standing tradition, with legal effect, which make a female spouse’s property the property of the male spouse on marriage.
The co-op works to get around this. They have gone from 120 former guerrilla veterans to over 600 clusters of growers/members. Geri doesn’t know how many, but likely in the 1000-2000 range.
They are still dirt poor for the most part, but significantly better off than they were and than the women in the region who are not members of the co-op.
While in a bad year the whole co-op might not see a Cordoba in profit
(Hurricane Mitch actually rolled things back a bit), there are some permanent improvements that everyone can see and use.
They built (with their own hands) a largish facility which they use as
everything from a dorm for members who have to travel a long way to attend meetings or training sessions (folks at Geri’s meeting had travelled most of the day prior to their meeting to attend, this is rough country), to a meeting space, to a training centre.
They also offer a literacy programme to members and encourage them to use it as a way to ensure that all members are able to participate fully in the co-op.
Geri was incredibly impressed by their confidence (they must have had a fair bit to start with given what they were) and their determination.
Problems still remain. The plantation owners, usually Nicas, aren’t happy with this development. Geri didn’t say but in this country if you are rich and unhappy about something it normally isn’t difficult to find a way of making the people you are unhappy with know about it.
There may or may not(I would think there is) be a connection between the above and the other two problems.
The co-op can grow, dry and deliver coffee beans, but it can’t roast them. For that they need much larger capital inputs then they currently are capable of. This is a problem because they need to pay the multinationals who own the roasting facilities to do it for them.
This, in turn, is a large part of the cost of production.
There are also bandits. Coffee beans are relatively valuable on a per kilo basis. Their carts/trucks are often robbed when the beans are being transferred to the roasting facilities. Neither the multinationals nor the plantation owners ever seem to be too concerned about where beans are from when someone they have never seen before shows up at their door looking to sell a couple of tonnes.
Geri had a great time overall, was really, really impressed and inspired. I’m really sorry I missed it.
======================
Maquila factories today and then we’re spending tomorrow travelling home via Houston.
Odd, in the highlands, to see cowboys heading home in the evening through town on their ponies, making cell phone calls. Should always keep the camera at the ready...
All the hotels we’ve stayed at have been great except for the one the group folks picked (not the one we chose for before they arrived) for Managua.
On the other hand, this morning I got to see a bunch of US christian bikers show up on their Harleys and check in.
Actually, mebbe that’s just another down side.
Unless something really interesting happens today, that’s it from me...
========================
The hotel was recommended by Lonely Planet (our bible), but as we left it with our Nica translator (he found stuff in it he wasn't aware of!), I can't get you the name right now. Mebbe after another cup of coffee.
It was on a stretch of beach that is mnostly vacation homes for the wealthy between the villages of Masachapa and Pochomill on the Pacific coast. About a 2 hour (safe) drive from the airport in Managua.
Small (40 rooms), family-owned. Beach great, though the sand is volcanic (as you'd expect in Nicaragua) and so hotter than heck on a sunny day. Shoes needed.
Undertow metioned by staff at hotel, but so shallow a walkout into the water that I don't think we ever got far enough out to see.
Geri may have more.
==========================
Indeed. We tend to compare Cuban 'lifestyles' to our own, ignoring the historical differences (which argeuably boil down to 'they are 'poor' because we are rich').
I don't think this was mentioned in the e-postcards I remembered to copy to myself and which have been posted here, but we had a number of conversations about Cuba whilst in Nicaragua. It's, both politically and economically, seen as an example or model. Mentioning that you have been there will make your some instant friends in a crowd.
In many regions there are more Cuban doctors and literacy workers/teachers than there are Nicaraguan staff. This is a new development for the most part, the result of the recent elections, so much commented upon.
=========================
To add to Derek's comments. The poverty we saw was heartbreaking and left you feeling humble and helpless. When they spoke of Cuba and how rich the Cuban people were it surprised some of the people with whom we were travelling. Cuba was nirvana and North America was a hollywood movie, it was so far off their radar. They were not concerned about the "things" we have but about education, health care and a safe place to live and the ability to feed their children. They know Cubans have jobs and pride and can provide for their kids and they would be happy to be able to have that and they do not aspire to be us.
The sunset on the Pacific Ocean was beautiful. I took several pictures as it went down one night and they were all in the 1 minute time frame. It is a very fast sunset and our ocean front patio with the hammock was a great place to watch the sun go down. I even got to watch it come up once.
==========================
If anyone is interested here are the snaps:
http://flickr.com/ph...57594574198188/
=======================
Here's the texts of various e-postcards we sent while there to family and friends...
==========================
Since several of you wanted to know re. Nicaragua how it compares with Cuba...the first thing you notice when you get off the plane in Managua is that Cubans have fee dental care. Nicas don’t.
The second thing you notice is that even in town, most people under the age of 15 or so don’t have or don’t wear shoes.
Next you notice that the bellhop at your hotel is wearing a holster with a largish revolver in it. So does the pool guy and at least one of the waiters (the room service guy I think, his job is riskier than working tables).
Not far from where I am sitting right now is Mercado Oriental (Eastern Market). Anyone for a live hand grenade as a souvenir?
Perhaps an AKM or an Uzi¿ No joke. Live and not a paperweight.
Our hotel out on the Pacific coast was quite nice, wonderful view right on the beach. Very nice food, though no hot water etc.
Poverty here reminds me of India. Immense wealth right next to people who clearly have one set of clothes and no more. Geri and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the shade with beer a few days ago looking at a house that would not be out of place in Forest Hill in Toronto, surrounded by a wall topped with 3-4 rows of razor wire, a sentry in a concrete box with an assault rifle, and dozens of houses made from sticks and plastic sheeting, sharing an outhouse that was four sticks wrapped with one garbage bags for privacy and a broken pipe and concrete bowl for water.
¨Pleasant¨ in that we were imagining living below the ´big house´ plotting robbery, arson, and murder.
:-) sort of, but after three beers and watching life there...
Big chunks of even Managua like that too. Only corrugated iron and zinc rather than plastic.
Lots and lots of guns. Our hotel here in Managua has a law firm next door.
It has a guardbox at the entrance. A nice man with a general-purpose machine gun in it. This on a main street in a fairly ritzy district.
I’d like to think it’s the result of Nicas sharing my attitude towards the
legal profession, but I suspect it’s more generalized than that. :-)
On the up side, though they have clearly made huge compromises to get back in office, the Sandinistas just announced that they are making schooling mandatory and free again. Something it hasn’t been since they lost the 1990 election. So the hordes of kids on the street may have a place to go, though the opposition Liberal Constitutional Party is saying this can’t be afforded and that after 16 years of fees and the ´freedom’ not to send your kids to school there aren’t enough school places.
Oh, and the really cheery bit on the kid front, other than the appalling
mortality rate and the fact that abortion for any reason was made illegal just before the elections, about 20 % of the under-5 population suffers from rickets or some other nutritional condition.
One last downer before I sign off and come back in a few days with some of the positive things that sink in after you meet and talk with people...this place seems to be for US boys in their twenties what Prague is for the Brits of the same gender and age: a place to go for the hookers, the cheap beer and the surfing (OK, the surfing in Prague isn’t what it used to be since they built the floodways...).
J
Quite irritating, loud and rude. Still, the grenades work out to about
$35CAD each so... :-)
Gotta go. This ain’t Cobourg it’s true, but for all the firearms walking
around (signs outside restaurants ask people t leave them outside. Top end spots will check them), they have a fine beer in Victoria (victory).
I think I will sit outside, have one or two and count the number of sales the dozens of street vendors at the corner lights make. Not many I suspect.
Despite the fact that you can buy just about anything from them. One tried to sell me a parrot (or something similar) and a bag full of water and turtles on the way into town.
Just a bit different from Cuba, for those who were asking for a comparison.
Just a bit.
It is safe, or at least as safe as it gets in Central America, though there’s some debate about whether a lot of crime gets reported given what people think of the police, the kind of service the poor would get from them or any other public officials.
If you stayed in Managua where we are you could be in Spain, it’s just that no one wants you to walk in certain parts of town and they get very excited about it when you leave the hotel.
But in this neighbourhood there are great, dirt cheap bars and restaurants, and while the city water isn’t always drinkable, most of the (very nice) houses in this area have their own water and generator systems. Pretending there’s nothing else out there, the worst you could say about this part of the city is that it is clear that the European-looking folks are the owners and patrons of the bars etc., the ones who live in the houses. The aboriginal-looking folks are
the servers and the gardeners.
It’s when you leave the touristy bits that things change fast. Fast, fast, fast. A big part of the city was never restored after the earthquake in 1972 and while a few government buildings went in, much is open space, much is a slum of homes built of corrugated metal (remember how hot and sunny it is here), plastic and scrap wood and cement blocks.
All about a 5-minute walk from one of the ritzier hotels in town, this huge neo-Wright pyramid, that in turn is in the shadow of the giant metal silhouette of Sandino that sits at the edge of the volcano crater right in the centre of the city.
Folks all friendly enough, but not like Cuba. Not the same energy. I keep thinking they’re like the people in Belfast: after so many years of civil war, following on 50 years of military rule, nobody’s left feeling real outgoing.
Oh, and the mine thing (which I referred to in my last and which Risa and Daria got concerned about) happened a few years ago. The southern and western parts of the country and pretty much de-mined. The north is closed to tourists because of bandits (love that word “I met a buncha bandits yesterday and they were saying…”), but we’re not going there, or to the Caribbean coast where mines are still a problem in some areas. Losing your livestock to them can still be a major problem for small farmers.
In fact later today we’re off to the Best Western Aeropuerto where we meet the rest of our group tonight. We’re taking it easy as Geri has a cold. So an afternoon by the pool and much beer while Geri naps.
Anyway, I am fine, having a GREAT time and wish you were both here. Current hotel has 13 rooms, great food, a colonial mansion with a central courtyard with a garden and fountain...all protected by a nice man with a pistol and a shotgun and a doorman’s uniform at the front door.
It wouldn’t be Managua if he didn’t have at least two weapons.
:-)
====================================================
I spent an exciting morning today talking about sorghum storage and sales.
Geri spoke the words "I could have done with just two tops, two shorts and two pair of shoes".
No lie, on either count!
Details to follow. We (finally) get to the factory inspections in the Managua maquila zone tomorrow. I need to get back into a city or I will start chewing hay and talking about planting time and whether it will rain tomorrow (eating into the Weather Network’s gig).
===============================================
I’m in a small town called Rivas in southern Nicaragua, not far from the Costa Rican border.
Church here has this wonderfully goofy mural around the inside of its
dome/cupola.
Four ships. Three sinking and burning and such, one sailing victorious back into harbour.
The three; communism, Protestantism, secularism.
The fourth¿ Catholicism, of course.
Wonderfully, wonderfully cheesie.
And, of course, I could not get a photo. Will try again, but standing behind the priest as he works his gig, snapping photos of the ceiling may not go down all that well.
Darn.
===============================================
Well, this is my second attempt at this. The first, about three pages (so perhaps not a bad thing) got lost when the computer I am at seized when I hit SEND.
This hotel is a training centre for a variety of skills, including tourism
and basic computer skills, but some of their donated equipment is a little wonky. Included in that are the keyboards. So you’ll have to excuse some of the characters that don’t really work, but the keyboard I’m at is a standard English board that has been re-mapped to Spanish. So to use it properly I would have to remember where everything is on a Spanish board: something a bit beyond me today.
I’ve got today off as my cold is worse and today was to have been a very long one for me.
Let’s see if I can reconstruct things and mobbed pare it down a bit too...
We’ve really been have a fine time. The groups we’ve met with have been amazing. The ´sorghum´comment I made in my last was typical of the groups we have met.
A peasants co-op that is doing a whole bunch of things, but which got started with about $2000 from Horizons, the group we’re here with.
They used the two grand to build a brick kiln and buy some tin storage silos. Used bricks first to build a storage shed into which they put the silos. Then started selling bricks, paying co-op members in bricks for their work at the kiln (so they have the nicest houses in the district, some even have floors, though no electricity or water in the region).
The silos were combined with a micro credit programme. The peasants deposit their grain in the silos (these things are mebbe 2m tall and mebbe one around) and get the going harvest price for the stuff. They are charged 6% interested when the going rate is over 25%.
When, after a while when the harvest glut ends, the price goes up, they then sell their grain at a much higher price, they repay the advance plus interest and make much, much more profit than they used to.
Sounds a simple thing, but it has meant a huge improvement in people lives. Kids now going to school etc. Plus the grain merchants now have to deal with the co-op rather than with individual peasants, so there’s a sense of gaining some control there.
They’re also into soil conservation measures, building a small herd of pigs, family violence education, etc., etc. All funded by the 6%.
There were 25 of them at the meeting. All spoke of the differences this had made in their lives, some with tears. Quite moving.
They had decorated the shed with banners and balloons and little samples of their crops. Every once in a while the wind would push a balloon up against the tin roof and it would explode. Can’t believe people live in homes made of the stuff in this heat and sun.
Lots of stuff like that. Probably just as well the original message got lost as it was probably too hokey. SMILE.
I’ll do a separate message on the maquila sweatshops. Not good. Especially amazing when you consider that the ones we can get into are the ones the owners WANT us to see and test etc. so they can market their products as ‘approved´.
Some little detours to touristy things here and there. Our group leaders didn’t plan anything really, but Geri and I have our Lonely Planet (what else¿) and we’ve been able to do some stuff as a result. Puts things in context, historical and otherwise. Yesterday we had a meeting in a small village. PowerPoint presentation in a bamboo and thatch hut in a town with no paved roads in the sticks…bizarre...buts that’s another story.
Afterwards we visited a monument the village put up when they shot down a Somoza Air Force plane in 1979. It had been bombing them for months. Huge morale booster up here in the highlands when it happened. The villagers hauled the thing up the hill themselves and it’s quite the point of pride for the area.
The plane is on a concrete slab on a small hill overlooking the village. You look down and wonder why anyone would think there was anything needing bombing in the village, why it was bombed a few times a month for several years...nothing there, but people.
People.
Big Sandinista area. Since the revolution they’ve nearly unanimously elected FSLN folks at every level.
If what happened during the revolution wasn’t bad enough, this area was also the favourite target of the Contras as it is close to the Honduran border.
Another little anecdote. Spent some time with a NGO of ´radical social workers’ in a town of 45,000. 65% unemployment. No water system, no sewers. The town hospital I walked through and would have assumed was a decrepit prison ready for demolition if I hadn’t known.
Few houses are more than shacks with dirt floors.
The NGO has a clinic with a tech, a MD and two nurses. The MD makes $180 per month, compared to $800 for hospital (Ministry of Health) MDs, and much more for private MDs.
The hospital abides by the Nicaraguan constitution which says that healthcare is free (drafted by the Sandinistas after the revolution) in that it doesn’t charge for anything, but then like all public hospitals it can’t actually do much either. And what it does do is usually funded or supplied by WHO. There’s little or nothing of what we would consider the state or government here, outside the police and the military. And the police are definitely self-funding (i.e. they are paid little on the understanding that they will use their authority to extract cash from people, but will be around for the state when the shit hits the fan).
So it sends all its patients it can’t deal with and who can’t afford to go
private to the clinic.
One MD et al for 45,000 people.
Medicins sans frontiers used to run a dental clinic there, but it lost its
funding. No dentist around except for the very rich.
The NGO also runs a radio station and some other fun stuff. But most interesting was that everyone involved except one is 25 or younger. The idea was to bring kids from the youth programmes they run into admin positions. Really quite interesting.
There’s also a really interesting art therapy programme for kids who are the victims of family violence. The art gallery is quite frightening, angering, depressing.
The one over-25 is the priest from Quebec who started the thing (now grown into something quite impressive). A liberation theologist, he got the boot by the church, but still lives and works in the community.
The only other hospital I have seen is the ´Panadol Maternity Hospital’ in Managua. All ultra modern, hellishly expensive and sponsored by a drug company, run by a US ´health corporation.
Had a whole touristy day last week. Went to one of Nicaragua’s several active volcanoes. Lots of fartish-smelling smoke and lava roiling around. Reminds me of how I felt when I realized that while they don’t mention it on the nature programmes on TV, whales have REALLY bad breath.
Great signs telling you to hide under your car if lava bombs start up (I mean ACTIVE when I say active volcanoes) so you can be crushed to death under a really hot car. J
Odds and ends:
´Skull of the cat’ is a local corn-based moonshine. Avoid it.
Dioridiom is a village that prides itself on having a witch tradition that has survived hundreds of years of repression. Fun-looking spot. We just drove through, I am thinking we should have given ourselves free days at the end rather than at the beginning. That way we’d know where to spend our time.
Lots of US fundies around. If anything more conservative politically than the RC church, some here think there’s been an extra surge since the Sandinistas were elected. There’s so many of them that the forms you have to fill out at immigration and when checking into a hotel make on a mission´ an option under ´Reason for visit to Nicaragua´.
Clothes seemed amazingly cheap until we realized that almost all stores are selling second-hand stuff. Merchants buy at thrift shops in North America and then ship them down by the tonne.
We travel in a bus with the luggage on the roof. Got to watch it when in towns after dark and moving slowly. Last night some kids got up on the roof and were minutes away from untying the luggage and tossing it down as we moved along.
People here beg for food, not just money. And it’s not unusual for somebody to ask for your plate if you’re done but have food left.
53 universities, only two public, the rest private and most of them run by churches. Tuition runs about equal to unis in the US we were told. An engineering degree is worth about $14,000USD per year.
Despite the Sandinistas making schooling mandatory and free again, there are problems. School have shut down or been consolidated in the cities, folks outsides can’t afford transportation or materials. And there are way fewer spaces than needed.
Illiteracy has an odd demographic here. The Sandinistas copied the Cuban approach, got literacy well up there, but it has dropped since they lost the election in the early 1990´s. So illiteracy is getting close to 30%, but is concentrated in the 10-30 age group.
The biggest, nicest, cleanest and newest buildings are maquila factories. From the outside. Hellholes on the inside.
No public transportation systems (sold in the 90´s). Lots of ex-US school buses that barely slow down before a conductor jumps off and pushes people into place. They compete with each other to reach a stop with a lot of people and sometimes fights break out between conductors.
Buses are covered with prayers to Mary and Jesus re. getting them safely to their destination. Personally I think they could pay more attention to decent brakes and some driver training, easeup on the supernatural.
Cuba is shipping doctors and teachers here by the truckload. Venezuela is offering cheap oil, but the national oil company doesn’t own any refineries (sold in the 90´s) and the multinationals appear to be threatening some sort of boycott the subsidized oil.
Even up here in the highlands where support for the Sandinistas is very high, there’s a lot of anxiety about what the US will do. Their ambassador quite openly interferes in their elections, in a way Canada probably hasn’t ever seen, though mebbe the 1963 election that got Pearson elected would be closest.
At the moment the ambassador is trying to broker a merger of all the
right-wing parties so that the Sandinistas will face a united opposition next time. Plus there are always rumours of the US re-imposing the Cuba-like blockade it had in place in the 1980´s and 90´s.
People are just keeping their fingers crossed that the US is too busy in Iraq and Afghanistan to make Nicaragua a priority. A lot of the people we have spoken to say they voted Sandanista, but seem very surprised they were elected. It makes them nervous as for years Sandanista supporters would work on FSLN projects, but wouldn’t vote for them as a FSLN win would have meant the US starting the war again. Liberal governments were wildly unpopular, but people voted for them out of fear for the concequences of NOT voting for them.
If that makes any sense.
Armadillo and iguana crossing signs on the astoundingly bad (with the exception of the Pan-American Highway, the south end of the NAFTA-CAFTA highway system) roads.
Roads so bad sometimes cars will pass each other going in opposite
directions, each on the wrong side of the road as they try to avoid the worst potholes, all going 20kph.
Food good, people great. I’d come back to do this again (though less of the everybody do everything and more you go there and do your thing, I’ll go here and do mine would be good), or as a tourist.
Gotta go. Believe it or not, the first version was longer.
====================================================
Forgot...
Social safety net or whatever term you want to use has been privatized here. Just like health, it´s two-tiered.
The Sandinistas introduced fairly comprehensive if not too terribly
Generous (though given the state of the country in 1979...) programme. The governments which followed privatized it, but couldn’t eliminate it completely because of its popularity, and, I suspect, because those governments weren’t popular themselves, but elected because it meant the US wouldn’t start the war
again.
In any case, what happens now is that for anything vaguely a ´social
benefit´ in Canadian terms, you have a small amount of money from the government each month which can be directed to the commercial insurance company of your choice.
To that you add you own cash and that allows you to buy a package covering such things as EI, CPP, extended medical etc.
Of course in a country where the average wage is something like 200CAD a month not many can add much to what the government pays.
The insurance companies rely on the low incomes of so many of their clients whose premiums are paid by the government to act as a disincentive to legal action then a claim is filed and denied.
We had a chance to speak with some women who are trying to collect 3 months maternity leave they were denied by their (¿¿¿) insurance company.
They can’t afford a lawyer, the government’s responsibility begins and ends with the forwarding of the premiums, NGOs and women’s orgs and legal clinics are reluctant to take their cases because there’s no way to ensure a precedent is set that apply in future and each case will be fought tooth and nail by the insurance companies...
We were told there’s a growing tendency by a majority of Nicas to just ignore the social insurance system entirely as filing claims is a waste of time. The government simply keeps the money in such cases. The insurance companies are lobbying to make coverage (i.e. payments) mandatory.
===================================================
Geri asked me to add to our postcards the following. My words, but she provided the info and checked over a draft. This was a meeting she attended when I was sick.
-----------------------
The group was the leadership of a women’s coffee co-op.
It was founded by former Sandinista fighters after the Contra War.
It’s more than slightly unusual in two respects.
While there were a great many co-ops formed as the guerrillas were disbanded and land reform made small plots of land available (to men for the most part) this one is open only to women and is also one which eventually included women veterans of both sides in the Contra War(essentially a civil war, though with one side funded by the US. Remember Ollie North¿).
The goals are to buy up enough land to make a model farm and to lobby the government to add to whatever they are eventually able to buy; to provide an example of practical reconciliation in the aftermath of the war, and to provide steady and reliable incomes for women and children (there were 3200 orphans in the region at the end of the Contra War)in an area where men are prone to substance abuse, selling land to large plantation owners at bargain basement
prices, buggering off with the land sale money to Costa Rica, and other stupid things.
Some women within the co-op hold plots of land ranging from one to eight hectares but many own no land directly. They contribute labour to the co-op instead. Currently about 70% of the land in the co-op is owned jointly with men, the remainder is owned by the members.
Men have a tendency to sell land in a bad year to get drunk or to do
something equally unproductive with the money. And almost all the land redistributed to landless agricultural labourers after the revolution went to men. Which meant over time much of it was concentrated back in the hands of large plantation owners.
The co-op is trying to find a niche where it can compete with the large
plantations or just avoid them completely by going into certified organic coffee production. Though it’s expensive to get certified.
They provide assistance in getting loans to women who want to join in order for them to acquire some land or to get certified. But the banks are reluctant to loan money to women without spouses, or without a spouse’s signature, and the assumption always is that title will go to a man of some sort. And the co-op is far from the point where it has the resources to loan money directly.
There was a funny bit when they talked about how much success they have had in transferring title from a male spouse to a female spouse when he is drunk.
In many ways it’s not funny as male partners almost always will their land to their oldest son, leaving their widow and other children dependent (if there’s enough land and if the oldest son feels like it) or destitute. So if the deed doesn’t get signed over when hubby is loaded...
There is also a long-standing tradition, with legal effect, which make a female spouse’s property the property of the male spouse on marriage.
The co-op works to get around this. They have gone from 120 former guerrilla veterans to over 600 clusters of growers/members. Geri doesn’t know how many, but likely in the 1000-2000 range.
They are still dirt poor for the most part, but significantly better off than they were and than the women in the region who are not members of the co-op.
While in a bad year the whole co-op might not see a Cordoba in profit
(Hurricane Mitch actually rolled things back a bit), there are some permanent improvements that everyone can see and use.
They built (with their own hands) a largish facility which they use as
everything from a dorm for members who have to travel a long way to attend meetings or training sessions (folks at Geri’s meeting had travelled most of the day prior to their meeting to attend, this is rough country), to a meeting space, to a training centre.
They also offer a literacy programme to members and encourage them to use it as a way to ensure that all members are able to participate fully in the co-op.
Geri was incredibly impressed by their confidence (they must have had a fair bit to start with given what they were) and their determination.
Problems still remain. The plantation owners, usually Nicas, aren’t happy with this development. Geri didn’t say but in this country if you are rich and unhappy about something it normally isn’t difficult to find a way of making the people you are unhappy with know about it.
There may or may not(I would think there is) be a connection between the above and the other two problems.
The co-op can grow, dry and deliver coffee beans, but it can’t roast them. For that they need much larger capital inputs then they currently are capable of. This is a problem because they need to pay the multinationals who own the roasting facilities to do it for them.
This, in turn, is a large part of the cost of production.
There are also bandits. Coffee beans are relatively valuable on a per kilo basis. Their carts/trucks are often robbed when the beans are being transferred to the roasting facilities. Neither the multinationals nor the plantation owners ever seem to be too concerned about where beans are from when someone they have never seen before shows up at their door looking to sell a couple of tonnes.
Geri had a great time overall, was really, really impressed and inspired. I’m really sorry I missed it.
======================
Maquila factories today and then we’re spending tomorrow travelling home via Houston.
Odd, in the highlands, to see cowboys heading home in the evening through town on their ponies, making cell phone calls. Should always keep the camera at the ready...
All the hotels we’ve stayed at have been great except for the one the group folks picked (not the one we chose for before they arrived) for Managua.
On the other hand, this morning I got to see a bunch of US christian bikers show up on their Harleys and check in.
Actually, mebbe that’s just another down side.
Unless something really interesting happens today, that’s it from me...
========================
The hotel was recommended by Lonely Planet (our bible), but as we left it with our Nica translator (he found stuff in it he wasn't aware of!), I can't get you the name right now. Mebbe after another cup of coffee.
It was on a stretch of beach that is mnostly vacation homes for the wealthy between the villages of Masachapa and Pochomill on the Pacific coast. About a 2 hour (safe) drive from the airport in Managua.
Small (40 rooms), family-owned. Beach great, though the sand is volcanic (as you'd expect in Nicaragua) and so hotter than heck on a sunny day. Shoes needed.
Undertow metioned by staff at hotel, but so shallow a walkout into the water that I don't think we ever got far enough out to see.
Geri may have more.
==========================
Indeed. We tend to compare Cuban 'lifestyles' to our own, ignoring the historical differences (which argeuably boil down to 'they are 'poor' because we are rich').
I don't think this was mentioned in the e-postcards I remembered to copy to myself and which have been posted here, but we had a number of conversations about Cuba whilst in Nicaragua. It's, both politically and economically, seen as an example or model. Mentioning that you have been there will make your some instant friends in a crowd.
In many regions there are more Cuban doctors and literacy workers/teachers than there are Nicaraguan staff. This is a new development for the most part, the result of the recent elections, so much commented upon.
=========================
To add to Derek's comments. The poverty we saw was heartbreaking and left you feeling humble and helpless. When they spoke of Cuba and how rich the Cuban people were it surprised some of the people with whom we were travelling. Cuba was nirvana and North America was a hollywood movie, it was so far off their radar. They were not concerned about the "things" we have but about education, health care and a safe place to live and the ability to feed their children. They know Cubans have jobs and pride and can provide for their kids and they would be happy to be able to have that and they do not aspire to be us.
The sunset on the Pacific Ocean was beautiful. I took several pictures as it went down one night and they were all in the 1 minute time frame. It is a very fast sunset and our ocean front patio with the hammock was a great place to watch the sun go down. I even got to watch it come up once.
==========================
Bahamas Jan 2010
Derek and I just returned from a week in Freeport at a time share
complex called Taino Beach. It was quite cold for most of the week but
we had a wonderful time with my oldest son David and his wife Terri. We
each had our own condo, very well appointed. A beautiful place with a
fully equiped kitchen. Two sitting rooms and a balcony with tables and
chairs.
We spent a lot of time at Port Lucaya, where the cruise ships come in several times a week. We ate conch (conk) salad every day and it was awesome. It is the only place I ever have it and I can't get enough.
Terri lived there for a few years and so it was a real bonus that she knew a lot of people and it made us feel very much at home. we had a lot of fun watching the antics of young people from the cruise ships or from Florida on a junket.
Derek may add some of the fun things we saw. We met some great guys and wathed the performance of the Limbo King, who is a friend of Terri's. You can see him on you tube by looking for the Limbo King. The final time he put the bars atop 2 beer bottles and went under them. It was amazing. He also dit it with a young child laying across his knees when it was at the second lowest space. I would have said it was impossibe. He was not going to do it as Friday was Junkeroo Festival downtown but he knew we were leaving the next day and so decided to entertain us. It was so very special.
We have made friends and they have all invited us to return. David and Terri have invited us as well. SOooooooo I think it may happen.
==================
not sure how to explain conch. Texture is like squid. It is the meat from those very large Conch shells (sea shells) that you see to purchase. They are usually marinated and served in a salad with chopped tomato and hot sauce and something else (*Derek?) Thay are also served breaded but I do not like anything breaded. They must be fresh or they are very tough and rubbery with no taste. I have had them in a stew but prefer the salad where the conch is marinated but not cooked. They are chopped up as is the tomato. MMMMMMM
==================
Conch salad in the making...
http://www.flickr.co...57623247712924/
==================
We spent a lot of time at Port Lucaya, where the cruise ships come in several times a week. We ate conch (conk) salad every day and it was awesome. It is the only place I ever have it and I can't get enough.
Terri lived there for a few years and so it was a real bonus that she knew a lot of people and it made us feel very much at home. we had a lot of fun watching the antics of young people from the cruise ships or from Florida on a junket.
Derek may add some of the fun things we saw. We met some great guys and wathed the performance of the Limbo King, who is a friend of Terri's. You can see him on you tube by looking for the Limbo King. The final time he put the bars atop 2 beer bottles and went under them. It was amazing. He also dit it with a young child laying across his knees when it was at the second lowest space. I would have said it was impossibe. He was not going to do it as Friday was Junkeroo Festival downtown but he knew we were leaving the next day and so decided to entertain us. It was so very special.
We have made friends and they have all invited us to return. David and Terri have invited us as well. SOooooooo I think it may happen.
==================
not sure how to explain conch. Texture is like squid. It is the meat from those very large Conch shells (sea shells) that you see to purchase. They are usually marinated and served in a salad with chopped tomato and hot sauce and something else (*Derek?) Thay are also served breaded but I do not like anything breaded. They must be fresh or they are very tough and rubbery with no taste. I have had them in a stew but prefer the salad where the conch is marinated but not cooked. They are chopped up as is the tomato. MMMMMMM
==================
Conch salad in the making...
http://www.flickr.co...57623247712924/
==================
Italy March-April 2009
15 March 2009
Very fine time, we really lucked into a great apartment. The Duomo (cathedral) is right across the street from us. Great views, even from the toilet. Apartment itself just dandy.
We're splitting the cooking most, but not all nights with Anne and John. Makes for even more fun as shopping for food and cooking supplies becoming a big part of the week and a hell of a lots of fun, though waildly fattening. Losts of samples available at each stand or shop, plus the smells, plus the little restaurants around the market are fantastic.
City hasn't changed much, even some of the restaurants we loved 8 years ago are still going strong. Noticeably less turnover in syuch things here as opposed to home. And I could I recognized some regualrs from our last trip at a place we spent a lot of time at when last here.
With advanced reservations can now finally say have been through the Uffici. Wow, but the collection is more christian than the pope. Should have read up on the stories behind much of it as I think it would have made more sense, been more appreciated by me. Not worth asking Geri as all I get is a rant about the church, christianity and the bastards who run the joint. LOL
Time for another cappucino, look for another e=postcard at some point.
SA; please for to Helen as I of course forgot to place her address in my webmail addressbook.
18 March 2009:
Last day I'll bother to hit a cybercafe for a while, so...
The Great Dink Hunt that I began our last trip to Italy continues, with much success if I do say so myself. I even bagged a Grand Dink the other day, thanks to Anne who spotted it from 50m away.
LOL
Dink is a brand of scooter. Fascinates me to watch it. Not just for the adolescent giggle (though that's definitely there) but also as it's my barometer of globalization. As English becomes more predominent it should disappear as a brand name and when it does we will all know that global capitalism has peaked; there will be no more Dinks.
Ahem.
Speaking of capitalism, Geri made the pillgramage to the flagship Ferragamo shop. It's a bad year; she could find lots of beautiful shoes but none that were really comfortable. So she bought only one pair.
I shall be working an additional 27 calendars days...
Still, we got to intro Anne and John to the joint. Fun to see the looks on their faces.
My waistline is actually in decline despite the food and the wine. Much, much, much walking. Love this city. Can't imagine why the Italians think they can keep Italy to themselves, wish they would all just move away and leave all the good stuff behind (chefs and vineyard workers excepted of course).
Though I have yet to convince Geri to let me try the Florentine specialty; tripe. Wll have to sneak away for a while and grab some as can't while she is sitting next to me.
The search for a bad bottle of Italian wine continues. Or as my podcast language lessons would say; la cercare continuare. We are applying ourselves diligently to the cause, but as yet no luck. More later...
Geek note; guides for tour groups now have low-power transmitters and their charges receivers with ear buds. Makes for much quieter times at sights and in museums.
Also recommended; Rick Steves podded audio guides through the Uffici and the Accademia. Lots of detail on major pieces and such. And free. Unlike the provided guidie thingees.
The weather has been perfect. Into the low 20's as the highs now. Cool mornings. Perfect for walking, then a long slow lunch with a cold beer or wine, then more walking.
Apartment still has spectacular views of the building which I would place in a tie with the Taj Mahal for most beautiful I have seen.
Anne and John to Paris Friday, we to Levanto for a few days wandering the Cinque Terra, then on to whenever we decide upon (while deciding we will doubtless be engaged in the La Cercare).
Birthday was fab. Champers on the Piazza del Duomo. Then shopping at the market for dinner, then dinner and another of our taste-test evenings for the three who drink red (Geri looses out on this score with her allergies).
Yes, I feel wiser, if that can be believed, but no, not older. I shall just have to continue to compensate for age as best I can with inceasingly immature behaviours I expect.
'See' you here in a week or so...
23 March 2009
Did you hear the one about the Acrophobe (that's me) and the High Heeled Hussey?
I'm desperately afraid of heights and Geri's years at the cash at Dominion mean she needs fairly high heels to keep her spine straight.
Yesterday we did the second most demanding of the stages of the Cinque Terra hike. Because we had gotten to the start point the day before we skipped it yesterday am and went straight onto the trail. So we didn't see the notice that it was closed due to a landslide.
Some very nasty bits but we made it. Never so glad to have a beer in my life, and that means something coming from me. Scuttling over trees and dirt and boulders all 100m off the sea...only thing more scarey was going back the way we had come. At one point a couple of days ago we inched along a path over the sea and came upon a suspension bridge. Thought that would be the end of me. It was at least 100m long, and bouncy. So when you bounced up flying dinosaurs would bite off your head, when you bounced low the pirates would cut out your gizzard and feed it to the crocs 2km below.
Well, mebbe 20m long and no dinosaurs or pirates, but there could have been crocs down below.
OK, 10m long. But a very, very, very long 10m when you're afraid of heights. :-)
Geri (well, her shoes really) gots lots of second looks from the other morons on the trail who hadn't seen the notice.
:-)
The other folks on the trail all seem to be really intense hikers with their carbon fibre walking sticks and funny suits and $500 daypacks. Whom we seemed to pass alot. All that Y time is paying off? I was especially surprised by the number of kids who seemed to have trouble with the steep bits.
At the end of one stage was 400 steps up and then, just as you come over the top, a very nice seafood restaurant (they all are here) with very cold beer. We didn’t see it at first and so we walked all around the town looking for a place to sit in the sun and drink our beer. Finally up a few stairs around a few corners and there it was Voila!, we were there. and there we stayed. The sight over that last step as a flat bit came into view and as the smell of beer came wafting on the breeze...THAT dear friends and family, is what heaven should be like.
Not doing the fourth stage as it is the least scenic. Which, frankly, would be OK to do as far as I am concerned as 'scenic' seems to mean vertical views (read 'death scenes'). They are beautiful, I would have to look, would enjoy for 2 seconds and then the acro-anxiety would set in and I'd hyper ventilate and grab the wall. One night I had nothing but falling dreams and slept terribly.
[turns out that section was also closed to to slides]
But, for the views and the 1200 photos I took, I am glad we did this.
Speaking of views, the towns here are AMAZING little picture postcards, each of the five. Imagine Peggy's Cove translated into medieval Italy, then replace the bog at the back (a very nice bog it is too Brenda) with mountains. Amazingly pretty.
Even without the hiking great views and such. And there are train stations in each, a €10 pass gets you all kinds of access plus free trainfare between them and the towns outside and either end for 3 days.
The continued walking means I am now down almost 4kgs from when we left, assuming this hotel's scale about as accurate as the one at home. So I am almost as pretty as the Cinque Terra.
This part of the trip was Geri's idea, and a good one. Among other things this area is one of the few in Italy that takes white wine seriously, and after Tuscany (where they about spit when you mention it) she is having a fine time. No longer persecuted for being allergic to red.
Even the steepest hillsides here are covered with terraced strips of olive and lemon groves and vinyards.
Having great lunches, but no real dinners. Yesterday we had spectacular raw anchovies in a lemon and oil marinade. I could live on that. But on our way back to our hotel the first night we found a bar, nipped in for a drink and it turns out they pretty much feed us while we have a couple and read or plan the next few days. Most Italian bars do that, but this place does it so well we haven't any need for dinner after. We just flop and try to be nice to our feet, or sit on our terrace and do postcards.
Today just regular waking, packing for the train to Sorrento and then a bus to Positano. On the upside, the cliffs there can't be any higher than they are here, plus the exposure seems to be helping me a bit. Out the window just to my right is a 15m drop to a road that would normally bother me, provide a reasonably noticeable adrenaline charge. Nothing.
Pitons anyone? :-)
29 March 2009
Quite a lot to report, and only 20 minutes on my cafe card, this might be a two-parter. But fear not as this is also likely my last as we return home.
We had a mostly fine travel day to Positano, made all our connections straightforwardly, one was even on the same track, just a matter of standing around. The CircumVesuivus train was much fun, dunno why it seems to make people nervous. The US-based guides all are rather tense about it. Great graffitti. Naples like a bit like St. John/Hamilton/Port Alberni, only with better seafood.
But Vicki and Marjorie must be made to pay for the bus ride from Sorrento to Positano! Big time! It was a nightmare. Road is have in the cliff face and half out over it, the last 10km anywhere from 50 to 150m off the sea. Weaves back and forth and the driver outbound was clearly a cowboy, talking to passengers, trying to pick up Aussie travellers, even talking on his mobile and at one point sending a text while driving.
Geri didn't know to take her Gravol and so was quite ill from the weaving and sharp turns, my acrophobia came back big time after easing somewhat with exposure in the Cinque Terre.
Yeech!
We arrived, discovered too that the town is pretty much vertical, had a long walk down towing our luggage. Geri is now at the point where she thinks 1.5 suitcases and her weekend bag are still too much and is actually talking about further reducing it all next time. Positano did her in I think. That's how vertical it was.
After we got settled we went out for three very fast beers and dinner, and much hysterical talk about the bus ride out. Aside from my acrophobia, the driver really was a cowboy as we thought from the other, some regular, passengers' reactions. Plus on the way back it was a much better, if slower, ride.
Positano beautiful though, but awfully touristy. Way more than the Cinque Terre. And because it was off-season it was cheap and tourist-free mostly, but many things were closed and so the attraction of the place re. food and such was limited. There was really only one restaurant open for example. Frankly, while it was a pretty place, it wasn't a whole lot prettier than the Cinque Terre.
Warmer though, and we had a great cheap room in a backpacker pensione with a big terrace. which we used a lot to have lunch in and such, spent some time lying around on it reading once the town was explored. Great leg workout though.
Owner jolly and helpful. We'd go back just to lie around and tan, read.
Local food heavily seafood, all good, but again, Cinque Terre just-as and cheaper.
We heard several rumours of there being some bad wine in town while there and followed them up. Nothing. We continue to follow the trail, wherever it leads us.
:-)
One night I walked to dinner along the 'road' (stairway and walkway really) from our hotel after smoking a joint and was able to look down without trouble. Miracle cure for acrophobia???
BREAK
Let's see, where was I???
Our impressions of the town and the ride out were confirmed by some women we met from Montreal. One way around it is to be a rich backpacker as we discovered when two young women from the US showed up at our pensione after getting out of the Mercedes limo that had driven them to Positano from Sorrento.
Limoed backpackers??? Why, when I was a kid... :-)
The other nice thing about the food was that wherever you went for dinner, and there weren't many choices open while we were there, it was always less than 50 horizontal metres home, but always 500+ steps vertically. ;-)
But I could tell within hours of arriving that it wouldn't be my favourite part of the trip: no or very few Dinks to be found in Positano. :-)
On the way home we booked a Positano Porter, a small truck and two large men to have out luggage deliver from the pensione to the bus stop. Whew!
We couldn't get out on the sea to get photos of the town and area as nothing along those lines is yet open. So mostly we chilled, tanned and dank wine and beer on our terrace. Sometimes even with clothes on.
The trip back was uneventful, though Geri's allergies were turning into bronchitis. Even lucked into a Eurostar for the return trip Napoli-Firenz, so it was a fast three hours rather than the roughly 7 it would have taken otherwise. On the Sorrento-Napoli train had a nice if odd chat with a Polish injured construction worker in Italian.
We're back here in Firenze for four full days of filling-in the blanks. Geri had a doctor drop by the hotel last night and some drugs to take, so perhaps tomorrow we'll start doing the few day trips out of town we want to do to one or two of the surrounding hill towns, then mebbe collapse for a day in a bar with a terrace on some rooftop with a good book or two, in anticipation of podding our way home again (almost looking forward to it, and have been on more than one long trip where one of those first class pod seats would have been the highlight of the whole trip). :-)
General observation: much public eco-propaganda, plus things like (for those few still using disposeables I hope) battery recycling boxes at spots where tourists would likely be taking lots of photos, lots of solar systems (acive and passive) on private homes' roofs and office buildings.
One regret: I didn't start my Italian lessons early enough and am now much better, but only just in time to leave.
Unanticipated upside: Geri getting many gardening ideas. Comes as compensation for the allergic reactions to so early a spring (for us anyway).
My scarf (b-day present from Anne and John) makes me look so Italian all kinds of people ask me for directions whilst I am wearing it.
Had best food experiment: typical Florentine tripe (trippa) for dinner last night. Shredded cow stomach in tomato sauce. Yum. Really.
Best bar: our local in Levanto, definitely. Friendly staff and regulars, great free food to go with the drinks. And it didn't hurt that the white was DOC Cinque Terre and quite good, the beer always Italian and cold. And it was on the edge of the Cinque Terre, my favourite part of the trip. If you're ever going, we'd also recommend our hotel there.
Best internet cafe: Cafe Ricasoli. Have a cappuccino and croissant with your e-mail. And they treat repeat customers like old friends.
Best cappucino: no such thing. All great. Ditto the expresso. Even in train stations etc.
Best red: Any DOC Montalcino. The poor person's Brunello, normally from the same vineyards too.
Best whites: the DOC Cinque Terres we tried. But this ain't Austria. Guess we'll have to flop in Vienna again sometime soon so Geri can have a whites vacation as this was definitely a reds month.
1 April 2009
We're doing our family gift shopping this morning and then packing this afternoon. So this really is the last.
Two day trips by regional buses to report. An hour of fun on the bus got us to Siena the day before last. Nice, but very upscale, non-gritty compared with Firenze. The spot to shop if you're prepared to spend lots.
Fab lunch though. Little family spot with 9 tables. Father does the menu from memory, rest of the family cooks and serves. Great pasta, best pigeon I've ever eaten. Best part: with the exception of the beak they left the head on, the way small birds are supposed to be cooked. Yummy. Cook saw me attacking with a knife and fork and popped out to tell me to use my fingers. Trattoria del Torro if you're ever in the neighbourhood, bizarrely just off one of the streets leading into the Piazza del Campo.
San Gimagnano yesterday. Rain aside, didn't really hugely enjoy as is way,way touristy. But we did get of the local white, which is very fine and pretty much the only DOC white from Tuscany I think. I'm glad we didn't book a room there to stay for a few days as it's just wall-to-wall clip joints. Though with very pretty facades and such.
I did buy a pair of Italian classic loafers there though; at Geri's insistence of course. :-)
Last night we had our fancy and expensive dinner of the trip. Food OK. Hideously expensive though. Must have been the cover for being able to watch the cooking on a video monitor. :-)
Off to the market for some oil and other food makings, perhaps a bottle or two, then an afternoon packing before we retire to a local bar to debrief. And to talk about the next trip. Southern France with a side of Barcelona is up there, but so is the Croatian etc coast down to Istanbul. And then there's that free hotel room in Buenos Aires...plus if Geri doesn't get some heavily oaked white into her soon we may have to find a way to get to Australia soon.
Up at 4 tomorrow to make our flight to Frankfurt, then into our pods and home.
Geri's youngest is opening a used bookshop in Toronto on Saturday, so perhaps back into Toronto on Friday, for sure on Saturday.
Guess that's all the news that was...sigh. Back to the world. But at least we're returning via pods. What a difference exec class makes. I'm actually not only not dreading the flight, I'm kinda looking forward to climbing into my pod, ordering up some plonk and watching a couple of new release films b
Very fine time, we really lucked into a great apartment. The Duomo (cathedral) is right across the street from us. Great views, even from the toilet. Apartment itself just dandy.
We're splitting the cooking most, but not all nights with Anne and John. Makes for even more fun as shopping for food and cooking supplies becoming a big part of the week and a hell of a lots of fun, though waildly fattening. Losts of samples available at each stand or shop, plus the smells, plus the little restaurants around the market are fantastic.
City hasn't changed much, even some of the restaurants we loved 8 years ago are still going strong. Noticeably less turnover in syuch things here as opposed to home. And I could I recognized some regualrs from our last trip at a place we spent a lot of time at when last here.
With advanced reservations can now finally say have been through the Uffici. Wow, but the collection is more christian than the pope. Should have read up on the stories behind much of it as I think it would have made more sense, been more appreciated by me. Not worth asking Geri as all I get is a rant about the church, christianity and the bastards who run the joint. LOL
Time for another cappucino, look for another e=postcard at some point.
SA; please for to Helen as I of course forgot to place her address in my webmail addressbook.
18 March 2009:
Last day I'll bother to hit a cybercafe for a while, so...
The Great Dink Hunt that I began our last trip to Italy continues, with much success if I do say so myself. I even bagged a Grand Dink the other day, thanks to Anne who spotted it from 50m away.
LOL
Dink is a brand of scooter. Fascinates me to watch it. Not just for the adolescent giggle (though that's definitely there) but also as it's my barometer of globalization. As English becomes more predominent it should disappear as a brand name and when it does we will all know that global capitalism has peaked; there will be no more Dinks.
Ahem.
Speaking of capitalism, Geri made the pillgramage to the flagship Ferragamo shop. It's a bad year; she could find lots of beautiful shoes but none that were really comfortable. So she bought only one pair.
I shall be working an additional 27 calendars days...
Still, we got to intro Anne and John to the joint. Fun to see the looks on their faces.
My waistline is actually in decline despite the food and the wine. Much, much, much walking. Love this city. Can't imagine why the Italians think they can keep Italy to themselves, wish they would all just move away and leave all the good stuff behind (chefs and vineyard workers excepted of course).
Though I have yet to convince Geri to let me try the Florentine specialty; tripe. Wll have to sneak away for a while and grab some as can't while she is sitting next to me.
The search for a bad bottle of Italian wine continues. Or as my podcast language lessons would say; la cercare continuare. We are applying ourselves diligently to the cause, but as yet no luck. More later...
Geek note; guides for tour groups now have low-power transmitters and their charges receivers with ear buds. Makes for much quieter times at sights and in museums.
Also recommended; Rick Steves podded audio guides through the Uffici and the Accademia. Lots of detail on major pieces and such. And free. Unlike the provided guidie thingees.
The weather has been perfect. Into the low 20's as the highs now. Cool mornings. Perfect for walking, then a long slow lunch with a cold beer or wine, then more walking.
Apartment still has spectacular views of the building which I would place in a tie with the Taj Mahal for most beautiful I have seen.
Anne and John to Paris Friday, we to Levanto for a few days wandering the Cinque Terra, then on to whenever we decide upon (while deciding we will doubtless be engaged in the La Cercare).
Birthday was fab. Champers on the Piazza del Duomo. Then shopping at the market for dinner, then dinner and another of our taste-test evenings for the three who drink red (Geri looses out on this score with her allergies).
Yes, I feel wiser, if that can be believed, but no, not older. I shall just have to continue to compensate for age as best I can with inceasingly immature behaviours I expect.
'See' you here in a week or so...
23 March 2009
Did you hear the one about the Acrophobe (that's me) and the High Heeled Hussey?
I'm desperately afraid of heights and Geri's years at the cash at Dominion mean she needs fairly high heels to keep her spine straight.
Yesterday we did the second most demanding of the stages of the Cinque Terra hike. Because we had gotten to the start point the day before we skipped it yesterday am and went straight onto the trail. So we didn't see the notice that it was closed due to a landslide.
Some very nasty bits but we made it. Never so glad to have a beer in my life, and that means something coming from me. Scuttling over trees and dirt and boulders all 100m off the sea...only thing more scarey was going back the way we had come. At one point a couple of days ago we inched along a path over the sea and came upon a suspension bridge. Thought that would be the end of me. It was at least 100m long, and bouncy. So when you bounced up flying dinosaurs would bite off your head, when you bounced low the pirates would cut out your gizzard and feed it to the crocs 2km below.
Well, mebbe 20m long and no dinosaurs or pirates, but there could have been crocs down below.
OK, 10m long. But a very, very, very long 10m when you're afraid of heights. :-)
Geri (well, her shoes really) gots lots of second looks from the other morons on the trail who hadn't seen the notice.
:-)
The other folks on the trail all seem to be really intense hikers with their carbon fibre walking sticks and funny suits and $500 daypacks. Whom we seemed to pass alot. All that Y time is paying off? I was especially surprised by the number of kids who seemed to have trouble with the steep bits.
At the end of one stage was 400 steps up and then, just as you come over the top, a very nice seafood restaurant (they all are here) with very cold beer. We didn’t see it at first and so we walked all around the town looking for a place to sit in the sun and drink our beer. Finally up a few stairs around a few corners and there it was Voila!, we were there. and there we stayed. The sight over that last step as a flat bit came into view and as the smell of beer came wafting on the breeze...THAT dear friends and family, is what heaven should be like.
Not doing the fourth stage as it is the least scenic. Which, frankly, would be OK to do as far as I am concerned as 'scenic' seems to mean vertical views (read 'death scenes'). They are beautiful, I would have to look, would enjoy for 2 seconds and then the acro-anxiety would set in and I'd hyper ventilate and grab the wall. One night I had nothing but falling dreams and slept terribly.
[turns out that section was also closed to to slides]
But, for the views and the 1200 photos I took, I am glad we did this.
Speaking of views, the towns here are AMAZING little picture postcards, each of the five. Imagine Peggy's Cove translated into medieval Italy, then replace the bog at the back (a very nice bog it is too Brenda) with mountains. Amazingly pretty.
Even without the hiking great views and such. And there are train stations in each, a €10 pass gets you all kinds of access plus free trainfare between them and the towns outside and either end for 3 days.
The continued walking means I am now down almost 4kgs from when we left, assuming this hotel's scale about as accurate as the one at home. So I am almost as pretty as the Cinque Terra.
This part of the trip was Geri's idea, and a good one. Among other things this area is one of the few in Italy that takes white wine seriously, and after Tuscany (where they about spit when you mention it) she is having a fine time. No longer persecuted for being allergic to red.
Even the steepest hillsides here are covered with terraced strips of olive and lemon groves and vinyards.
Having great lunches, but no real dinners. Yesterday we had spectacular raw anchovies in a lemon and oil marinade. I could live on that. But on our way back to our hotel the first night we found a bar, nipped in for a drink and it turns out they pretty much feed us while we have a couple and read or plan the next few days. Most Italian bars do that, but this place does it so well we haven't any need for dinner after. We just flop and try to be nice to our feet, or sit on our terrace and do postcards.
Today just regular waking, packing for the train to Sorrento and then a bus to Positano. On the upside, the cliffs there can't be any higher than they are here, plus the exposure seems to be helping me a bit. Out the window just to my right is a 15m drop to a road that would normally bother me, provide a reasonably noticeable adrenaline charge. Nothing.
Pitons anyone? :-)
29 March 2009
Quite a lot to report, and only 20 minutes on my cafe card, this might be a two-parter. But fear not as this is also likely my last as we return home.
We had a mostly fine travel day to Positano, made all our connections straightforwardly, one was even on the same track, just a matter of standing around. The CircumVesuivus train was much fun, dunno why it seems to make people nervous. The US-based guides all are rather tense about it. Great graffitti. Naples like a bit like St. John/Hamilton/Port Alberni, only with better seafood.
But Vicki and Marjorie must be made to pay for the bus ride from Sorrento to Positano! Big time! It was a nightmare. Road is have in the cliff face and half out over it, the last 10km anywhere from 50 to 150m off the sea. Weaves back and forth and the driver outbound was clearly a cowboy, talking to passengers, trying to pick up Aussie travellers, even talking on his mobile and at one point sending a text while driving.
Geri didn't know to take her Gravol and so was quite ill from the weaving and sharp turns, my acrophobia came back big time after easing somewhat with exposure in the Cinque Terre.
Yeech!
We arrived, discovered too that the town is pretty much vertical, had a long walk down towing our luggage. Geri is now at the point where she thinks 1.5 suitcases and her weekend bag are still too much and is actually talking about further reducing it all next time. Positano did her in I think. That's how vertical it was.
After we got settled we went out for three very fast beers and dinner, and much hysterical talk about the bus ride out. Aside from my acrophobia, the driver really was a cowboy as we thought from the other, some regular, passengers' reactions. Plus on the way back it was a much better, if slower, ride.
Positano beautiful though, but awfully touristy. Way more than the Cinque Terre. And because it was off-season it was cheap and tourist-free mostly, but many things were closed and so the attraction of the place re. food and such was limited. There was really only one restaurant open for example. Frankly, while it was a pretty place, it wasn't a whole lot prettier than the Cinque Terre.
Warmer though, and we had a great cheap room in a backpacker pensione with a big terrace. which we used a lot to have lunch in and such, spent some time lying around on it reading once the town was explored. Great leg workout though.
Owner jolly and helpful. We'd go back just to lie around and tan, read.
Local food heavily seafood, all good, but again, Cinque Terre just-as and cheaper.
We heard several rumours of there being some bad wine in town while there and followed them up. Nothing. We continue to follow the trail, wherever it leads us.
:-)
One night I walked to dinner along the 'road' (stairway and walkway really) from our hotel after smoking a joint and was able to look down without trouble. Miracle cure for acrophobia???
BREAK
Let's see, where was I???
Our impressions of the town and the ride out were confirmed by some women we met from Montreal. One way around it is to be a rich backpacker as we discovered when two young women from the US showed up at our pensione after getting out of the Mercedes limo that had driven them to Positano from Sorrento.
Limoed backpackers??? Why, when I was a kid... :-)
The other nice thing about the food was that wherever you went for dinner, and there weren't many choices open while we were there, it was always less than 50 horizontal metres home, but always 500+ steps vertically. ;-)
But I could tell within hours of arriving that it wouldn't be my favourite part of the trip: no or very few Dinks to be found in Positano. :-)
On the way home we booked a Positano Porter, a small truck and two large men to have out luggage deliver from the pensione to the bus stop. Whew!
We couldn't get out on the sea to get photos of the town and area as nothing along those lines is yet open. So mostly we chilled, tanned and dank wine and beer on our terrace. Sometimes even with clothes on.
The trip back was uneventful, though Geri's allergies were turning into bronchitis. Even lucked into a Eurostar for the return trip Napoli-Firenz, so it was a fast three hours rather than the roughly 7 it would have taken otherwise. On the Sorrento-Napoli train had a nice if odd chat with a Polish injured construction worker in Italian.
We're back here in Firenze for four full days of filling-in the blanks. Geri had a doctor drop by the hotel last night and some drugs to take, so perhaps tomorrow we'll start doing the few day trips out of town we want to do to one or two of the surrounding hill towns, then mebbe collapse for a day in a bar with a terrace on some rooftop with a good book or two, in anticipation of podding our way home again (almost looking forward to it, and have been on more than one long trip where one of those first class pod seats would have been the highlight of the whole trip). :-)
General observation: much public eco-propaganda, plus things like (for those few still using disposeables I hope) battery recycling boxes at spots where tourists would likely be taking lots of photos, lots of solar systems (acive and passive) on private homes' roofs and office buildings.
One regret: I didn't start my Italian lessons early enough and am now much better, but only just in time to leave.
Unanticipated upside: Geri getting many gardening ideas. Comes as compensation for the allergic reactions to so early a spring (for us anyway).
My scarf (b-day present from Anne and John) makes me look so Italian all kinds of people ask me for directions whilst I am wearing it.
Had best food experiment: typical Florentine tripe (trippa) for dinner last night. Shredded cow stomach in tomato sauce. Yum. Really.
Best bar: our local in Levanto, definitely. Friendly staff and regulars, great free food to go with the drinks. And it didn't hurt that the white was DOC Cinque Terre and quite good, the beer always Italian and cold. And it was on the edge of the Cinque Terre, my favourite part of the trip. If you're ever going, we'd also recommend our hotel there.
Best internet cafe: Cafe Ricasoli. Have a cappuccino and croissant with your e-mail. And they treat repeat customers like old friends.
Best cappucino: no such thing. All great. Ditto the expresso. Even in train stations etc.
Best red: Any DOC Montalcino. The poor person's Brunello, normally from the same vineyards too.
Best whites: the DOC Cinque Terres we tried. But this ain't Austria. Guess we'll have to flop in Vienna again sometime soon so Geri can have a whites vacation as this was definitely a reds month.
1 April 2009
We're doing our family gift shopping this morning and then packing this afternoon. So this really is the last.
Two day trips by regional buses to report. An hour of fun on the bus got us to Siena the day before last. Nice, but very upscale, non-gritty compared with Firenze. The spot to shop if you're prepared to spend lots.
Fab lunch though. Little family spot with 9 tables. Father does the menu from memory, rest of the family cooks and serves. Great pasta, best pigeon I've ever eaten. Best part: with the exception of the beak they left the head on, the way small birds are supposed to be cooked. Yummy. Cook saw me attacking with a knife and fork and popped out to tell me to use my fingers. Trattoria del Torro if you're ever in the neighbourhood, bizarrely just off one of the streets leading into the Piazza del Campo.
San Gimagnano yesterday. Rain aside, didn't really hugely enjoy as is way,way touristy. But we did get of the local white, which is very fine and pretty much the only DOC white from Tuscany I think. I'm glad we didn't book a room there to stay for a few days as it's just wall-to-wall clip joints. Though with very pretty facades and such.
I did buy a pair of Italian classic loafers there though; at Geri's insistence of course. :-)
Last night we had our fancy and expensive dinner of the trip. Food OK. Hideously expensive though. Must have been the cover for being able to watch the cooking on a video monitor. :-)
Off to the market for some oil and other food makings, perhaps a bottle or two, then an afternoon packing before we retire to a local bar to debrief. And to talk about the next trip. Southern France with a side of Barcelona is up there, but so is the Croatian etc coast down to Istanbul. And then there's that free hotel room in Buenos Aires...plus if Geri doesn't get some heavily oaked white into her soon we may have to find a way to get to Australia soon.
Up at 4 tomorrow to make our flight to Frankfurt, then into our pods and home.
Geri's youngest is opening a used bookshop in Toronto on Saturday, so perhaps back into Toronto on Friday, for sure on Saturday.
Guess that's all the news that was...sigh. Back to the world. But at least we're returning via pods. What a difference exec class makes. I'm actually not only not dreading the flight, I'm kinda looking forward to climbing into my pod, ordering up some plonk and watching a couple of new release films b
Costa Rica Feb 2011
E-postcard #1
As always, excuse my inability to deal with the remapped Spanish keyboard.
The best laid plans and all that. The rainy season has been especially bad this year. We arrived in San Jose to find that the bridge to where we had planned on spending the first few days of our trip was washed out. Daughter-in-law Terri's and David's place. So a bit of a jumble and we found a hotel in San Jose. Yesterday we spent a morning in the hotel spa getting the flight kinks out and getting ready for the 3 hour drive to the house, only to find that we could get to a small town, Jaco, about halfway only. Anyway, we booked into a hotel here (Jaco) and arrived yesterday early afternoon.
Heavy rain is pretty near continuous. There were landslides on the way here, one quite large. Clearing them seems to be a continuous process. Cars are waved through one at a time; I think to reduce the deaths if it starts up again. There's a spotter placed on the road who gauges the condition of the mountainside above the road and waves you through. Our taxivan driver booted it across and we got here.
Though we can't go any further and judging by the condition of the river on the edge of town may have some difficulty getting out in any direction. The rivers are all HUGE and brown when normally they are tiny and clear. One river we crossed was solidly 500m wider than the bridge over it and 2 to 3km away the land was still underwater in spots. Crocs in short supply, just hope none washed into a village. TV is nothing but news about the emergency and shots of buses sliding down hills and bodies coming out of flooded homes, villages under mud and water. Boulders washing down hillsides and taking out cars and buses.
General observations> good roads, way better than Nicaragua. Obvious wealth disparity. Lots of walled compounds for mostly US residents. The countryside no more prosperous looking than Cuba we think, though more people have cars and there are higher/end shops for tourists and US residents. Cleaner and way more prosperous than Nicaragua. Clean generally. Little roadside garbage and little sold in plastic. Lots of glass bottles, including for water. Lots of obvious sex tourism. Checkout at the San Jose hotel, fairly high/end, was a line up of middle/aged men with very young women.
Jaco is a tourist trap, all tawdry and wall/to/wall surf shops filled with stoned young Americans in bare feet, even in the rain. In other words a wonderful spot to be stuck in. Am quite enjoying this bit of mild adventure. Terri travels a little more towards the high end than we do; she's being a great sport about it though. Just a bit of panic and some reluctance to get out of the van when we arrived *we're staying at the hotel Geri and I picked out for when we had actually planned to be in Jaco later in the trip. The Poseidon Hotel a bit above a backpackers spot, though they do have a dorm section for the younger crowd. Much fun and I think Terri has started to quite like it. It helps that she has hit it off with the bartender. Cute tiny pool. Have literally seen bigger hot tubs, but it has a three/seat swim-up bar. LOL. And we had fun last night naming and playing with David's huge skin tag at the bar. His 'mini me'. Made an impression I think.
The Bible *otherwise known as the Lonely Planet( describes Jaco this way "something of a wasteland in regard to cultural offerings, but it’s a great place to get hammered and do something you'll most likely regret in the morning". Kinda sums it up and make for great people/watching.
Losing Hydro now and then a bit of a concern if we're here for an extended stay. The power lines over the river on the edge of town were under pressure from a large tree that had been washed off the riverbank In fact a big chunk of the retaining wall was peeling away from the river bank. If it comes downstream in one chunk we'll lose hydro and the bridge at the same time I think.
But the extra moving of the luggage without benefit of hotel assistance has David and me vying for the right to title our memoirs My Life as a Bellhop.
The beer tasting is going well. Pilsen is tops to date. Imperial the most popular local beer but a bit heavy and no aftertaste to speak of, so a second choice. This stop is kinda like a snow day for grown/ups. We can hang, read, drink beer and eat really wonderful fruit and seafood guilt/free because there's nothing we can do about it. The math test will just be rescheduled. LOL
For the folks who live here though this looks to be something of a major disaster. Hard to describe the rain. Mostly a steady rain it now and then suddenly turns into a downpour. Woke at 0200 this am to the sounds of rain 'drops' the size of golf balls bouncing around. Thought it was continuous thunder.
Today's plan> walk in the rain long enough to wash yesterday's clothing, hang it to dry and then have a fish lunch, retire for a movie and then try the hotel's rooftop bar as there may be folks who hang there who haven't yet seen our little show with David's skin tag.
They deserve to, of course. And so they shall.
#2
Starting to see lighter clouds and it hasn't rained in a few hours, so there's some hope. At least with the rain stopped there's a chance for some work to be done on the bridge we need to cross to get to the house, or, conversely, less of a worry about landslides if we decide to head back to San Jose.
Even if the bridge gets done soon there's no hydro or water at the house so plans remain a bit up in the air.
One thing for sure, being unable to walk around in the evening because we're tired of being rained on by then and having only a choice between a hotel room and a bar is having an effect both on our budget and our livers. When we have a better sense of whether the house is still an option we'll have to look at how to plan out the rest of the trip. Returning home early might be an option, but we of course took the cheapest tickets we could buy and so at the very least we'd be looking at an extra charge for the change. And with the tourists still apparently leaving in droves there might not be seats available in any case.
Some entertainment last night from a young US man down the outdoor corridor/balcony from us. He was going on at length to a Tica *female Costa Rican ( about how crude Americans are when shaving their nether regions, at least in comparison with Ticas/Ticas. It all seemed kind of innocent, not at all as if he was trying to get into her pants. Kinda cute really.
Fingers crossed please...
#3
Since last I bored you all to tears we checked out of our hotel and, thanks to Terri and David, moved to the condo spot they had planned for their visit here next week. This will be a great help to us in trying to keep the damage to our budget under control as they've graciously and generously given us one of the bedrooms. The up side to the cost of this trip as it has developed is that we need no longer worry about having to fuss over whether we can afford to head to Cuba for x-mas. We can't.
Much different experience in the new spot. Modern condo overlooking the beach. All mod-cons and such, the washer and dryer being particular treats as when travelling we normally do laundry in a sink and hang our unmentionables all about our room. Adds a homey feel when far from the nest. :-) Something which at least a few of our fellow castaways don't do much of, judging by the stink of them a few days after the bridge and highway were washed away. Or perhaps they had sent their luggage ahead and were stranded with nothing but the clothes on their backs. I should have asked. :-)
Pools and an attached casino. An OK but rather pricey restaurant as well. But with a view across a garden and onto the beach which would make it worthwhile on a nice day. Clearly meant for US tourists as the prices are in USD, the thermostats in F, the TV channels mostly US, and all instructions etc. in English.
We went shopping yesterday to stock the fridge here. Two things worth noting. One an orange-flavoured beer (which I am ashamed to say I quite like), the other the prices. Not much less than what we would expect to pay at home except for the meat which was more expensive. Tourists and ticas with shopping lists in English at the Super Mercado. An open-air market at the south end of town that's clothes and fresh fruit and veg that we walked through but didn't shop at.
A shame we never got up to the roof bar at our last hotel as I'd plans for using a pen to add a face around David's skin tag and introduce it as Jimmy Durante (really his idea, though he has been talking about a tattoo for the same effect, only permanent).
Speaking of tattoos, it goes with the 20-something tourist population here I suppose, but the town has a number of tattoo/piercing joints. Even the middle-aged surfer chicks and dudes, of which there are many, are well-decorated. Also over-tanned and looking generally dissipated. Enervated. Dehydrated. Well-toasted. Under-embalmed.
The younger set is seen early in the day lying about or sitting on curbs clearly suffering from ecstasy hangovers. Until about noon there are almost as many of them as there are stray dogs roaming the streets. Which is saying something.
The older folks seem to go for different drugs as there are signs at every pharmacy (many of them here, way too many for a town of perhaps 4,000, half that permanent at most I should think) advertizing the fact that Viagra and it's various imitators can be purchased here in volume, at low, low, low (or so they say) prices, and all without a prescription.
No one has offered to sell me any weed. Unusual I understand.
The weather is supposed to brighten somewhat and a day by the pool with an audio book would be a very pleasant way to get some vitamin D. Which given the weather is one medicine in short supply.
Did I mention the sex shops? Do I need to? Or the razor wire. Most especially the razor wire around the daycare centres (several, must be free or subsidized or intended for tourist families; the former I suspect). Normally I find signs of that kind of security unpleasant, but if that's what it takes to keep the little buggers inside the fence, I'm all for it.
On a brighter note, there are a fair number of electric cars rolling around and at least two places that rent them. And the largest and largest number of election signs about the place are for the Greens. Lots of hummingbirds all over the place. Great cheap food at simple roadside stands/restaurants called sodas.
Worst news: the water remains brown and rescue operations continue across the country in spots. Still looks like we have little or no chance of getting to the house. Jaco has its tawdry charms, but even I will have exhausted them in another day or two I think. My iPod is loaded and we've some books with us, but if we remain stuck here for too much longer without pool/tanning/reading opportunities I expect we'll either have to pack up and head back to San Jose early or we will find ourselves reduced to simple card games and funny-noises-using-body-parts contests.
Something to look forward to. I've always been a dab hand with a moist armpit and a supple palm. !Hasta la victoria!
Best news of the week: Geri bought a baseball cap during the momentary appearance of the sun yesterday. It has a bottle-opener built into the brim.
Bought a Costa Rican cigar. Very nice. The Cubans I normally smoke are more expensive here than in metro Cobourg. Priced for US tourists I suppose. Sit still in a bar long enough and a nice man will try and sell you a box or ten of Cubans. Well, something resembling a cigar in a Cuban box at least.
Bye for now. If this is annoying any of you and you want off the list, do feel free to say so.
#4
Bit of a gap there that you all likely appreciated. Terri´s house had no internet access.
We checked out of the condo complex in Jaco and headed to the house, passed a lot of road and village damage on the way. In some places the road was closed for several days because a landslide came across it on the way to inundating a village. Mud to mebbe waist height in people´s houses. Though on the way back in the same places the cleanup looked nearly done and furniture etc was up on roofs drying.
Some pretty serious road washouts, one near the house left a telephone pole hanging in space and required a significant shift of the road to one side.
The house great, very comfortable and all, but we got perhaps an hour of sun all week, right up to the day we left when of course it was bright and clear. Lots of hummingbirds, the odd toucan, iguanas and best of all, one litre bottles of beer. Best feature: plastic thatch on the rancho by the pool.
David and Terri drove us back to Jaco and we hopped a bus from there. Met a nice Dutch fellow who helped out, not least by letting Geri have his seat at the front of the bus to help with motion sickness.
Bus had no AC but the windows opened and the driver kept the door open most of the way. Better than AC really. Food vendors got on and off along the way, walking the aisle with a cooler and bagged goodies. Occasional reminders of Cliffside trips by bus in Italy when driver mopping sweat, drinking water, talking to friends, and, oh yes, driving. Lots of babies crying too, including me when we teetered on the edges of cliffs. Tica friend of the driver was I think making fun of me, not realizing that me leaning out to the left and well into the aisle was all that was keeping us from falling a zillion metres to the bottom of the cliff on our right. lol
With so long passing since my last postcard I am reduced to random notes:
1. Muni and cantonal elections under way. Seems like about 50% women candidates. Most signs are for the eco party and the libertarian party.
2. Lots of religious signage and big new prod churches.
3. Garage at Jaco condo had almost as many Hummers and Range Rovers as hookers.
4. David´s driving has improved.
5. Ceviche, apparently the national dish, is addictive (raw fish marinated in citrus, herbs added).
6. Canadian colony near Terri’s house. Surprised how much of a strain an English-French-Spanish conversation was.
7. Bus did 105km in 2:45. Very scenic, much fun, highly recommended.
8. Howdy honking not as du rigueur here as Cuba but still pretty common.
9. Kids sell fish by roadside like kids sell lemonade at home.
First impressions of San Jose (last time here were in the Best Western): it´s a hopping town. Lots of street vendors. And if Jaco a tawdry bordello kind of town, San Jose is like something out of film noir.
More on that later though.
Last bit: thanks Shelly for the suggested great little hotel. We have a mango tree right outside our door. Only problem is getting lost on the way to breakfast. 35 room hotel but many windy corridors with little gardens and common rooms all over the place Best $35 a night hotel since India I think.
Bye...
#5
Dying for a nap, so again in point form:
1. Fine debate yesterday re. the pros and cons of various guide books in the hotel´s internet cafe. LP wins again. Steves’ got toasted for being too US-centric (even the Americans found it hard to use re measurements and such. Book says miles, road signs say klicks). Frommers gets pooh-poohed for suggesting Quality Inns and Motel 6s.
2. Couple from Perry Sound made the mistake of driving into town. Older folks, find buses etc. intimidating. Kid on motorcycle rides alongside for a few blocks, stays right with them. Then leaves. Suspect number two then shouts from a car that the kid slashed their tires. They stop and get out to look at the tires and suspect 3 really does slash the tires. Suspect four plays the good samaritan while the car is emptied as she distracts them. Passports and all, and they go home tomorrow. Mebbe. After they got to hotel had to park on street and now have more damage. Another reason to get some fun from the bus.
3. Hotel breakfast fab, setting, in a courtyard garden, really nice. Homemade jams etc. really good. $9 extra over basic room charge to have two. Carambola (starfruit) juice to die for.
4. Geri peeked in the higher end rooms that were vacated today. Next time, if there is one, that´s what we´ll shoot for. Not that there was anything wrong with the one we got. But these like garden suites.
5. Hotel crowd are mostly LP types. Surfers through to seniors with multipocket vests. Mostly Scandinavian, bunch of Canadians, one or two US couples. Lots of birdwatchers. Can birdwatch over breakfast or in several of the hotel common areas. Funky mini rainforest run by retired hippies a few blocks away. Bizarre. Urban weird. Blotter acid has a lot to answer for, though this actually quite nice.
6. May have to trash my ´CR-no army since 1948´shirt as a border fuss with Nicaragua has ´cops´out looking a lot like infantry and arriving with their own helicopter gunships and artillery. Too bad, one nice myth gone...
7. No booze in three days now. No DTs either, so guess I´m good.
8. Holiday Inn on a nice plaza. Chock-full of middle-aged men from the US looking for sex. Sad.
9. Noticeably cooler here compared to the coast. Nice mornings, rainy afternoons.
10. Shopping fun, but abysmally so in the touristy bits. Cheesy. CR snow globes, t-shirts made in China etc. Regular shopping more expensive that I would have thought. No artisans in the artisan market. Just guys hawking Cuban cigars to Americans for twice what I pay at home.
11. Tica/Tico goths kinda fun to look at. Sweaty. Spoils the effect.
12. Lots of beggars.
13. Local bakery fab. Great pastries, sweet and savoury. Lots like it around.
14. Pensions discussion post-breakfast. US now at 72 for full benefits. >Didn´t realize. Oddly, same person lamenting this then trashes French for protesting increase in their retirement age.
15. Areas around the Mercado Centrale and the bus terminal are just hopping. Lots of street vendors etc. Smells a little off-putting though. But best part of central SJ for camera work.
16. Cast iron school building from the late 1800s.
17 Lots of razor wire, but beats Nicaragua in that there are no or few guns. And only cops have them.
18. Lots of ´great man´ statues and parks. No women.
19. Street-level air pollution a killer.
20. Whopper houses with whopper walls, lots of rag-pickers with carts with bike wheels with no rubber on them.
21. TV offerings on local channels a global collection of shows featuring breasts and old men. Old men with bad dye jobs.
22. Our corner store has a corner within it where the family running it lives and eats etc. Kinda of odd to be looking for beer (hey, I said I hadn´t drunk any, not that I hadn´t wanted to, it’s HOT here kids) and walking down an aisle and finding yourself in some one´s kitchen as they are having Sunday soup.
Bye. That´s it from CR
As always, excuse my inability to deal with the remapped Spanish keyboard.
The best laid plans and all that. The rainy season has been especially bad this year. We arrived in San Jose to find that the bridge to where we had planned on spending the first few days of our trip was washed out. Daughter-in-law Terri's and David's place. So a bit of a jumble and we found a hotel in San Jose. Yesterday we spent a morning in the hotel spa getting the flight kinks out and getting ready for the 3 hour drive to the house, only to find that we could get to a small town, Jaco, about halfway only. Anyway, we booked into a hotel here (Jaco) and arrived yesterday early afternoon.
Heavy rain is pretty near continuous. There were landslides on the way here, one quite large. Clearing them seems to be a continuous process. Cars are waved through one at a time; I think to reduce the deaths if it starts up again. There's a spotter placed on the road who gauges the condition of the mountainside above the road and waves you through. Our taxivan driver booted it across and we got here.
Though we can't go any further and judging by the condition of the river on the edge of town may have some difficulty getting out in any direction. The rivers are all HUGE and brown when normally they are tiny and clear. One river we crossed was solidly 500m wider than the bridge over it and 2 to 3km away the land was still underwater in spots. Crocs in short supply, just hope none washed into a village. TV is nothing but news about the emergency and shots of buses sliding down hills and bodies coming out of flooded homes, villages under mud and water. Boulders washing down hillsides and taking out cars and buses.
General observations> good roads, way better than Nicaragua. Obvious wealth disparity. Lots of walled compounds for mostly US residents. The countryside no more prosperous looking than Cuba we think, though more people have cars and there are higher/end shops for tourists and US residents. Cleaner and way more prosperous than Nicaragua. Clean generally. Little roadside garbage and little sold in plastic. Lots of glass bottles, including for water. Lots of obvious sex tourism. Checkout at the San Jose hotel, fairly high/end, was a line up of middle/aged men with very young women.
Jaco is a tourist trap, all tawdry and wall/to/wall surf shops filled with stoned young Americans in bare feet, even in the rain. In other words a wonderful spot to be stuck in. Am quite enjoying this bit of mild adventure. Terri travels a little more towards the high end than we do; she's being a great sport about it though. Just a bit of panic and some reluctance to get out of the van when we arrived *we're staying at the hotel Geri and I picked out for when we had actually planned to be in Jaco later in the trip. The Poseidon Hotel a bit above a backpackers spot, though they do have a dorm section for the younger crowd. Much fun and I think Terri has started to quite like it. It helps that she has hit it off with the bartender. Cute tiny pool. Have literally seen bigger hot tubs, but it has a three/seat swim-up bar. LOL. And we had fun last night naming and playing with David's huge skin tag at the bar. His 'mini me'. Made an impression I think.
The Bible *otherwise known as the Lonely Planet( describes Jaco this way "something of a wasteland in regard to cultural offerings, but it’s a great place to get hammered and do something you'll most likely regret in the morning". Kinda sums it up and make for great people/watching.
Losing Hydro now and then a bit of a concern if we're here for an extended stay. The power lines over the river on the edge of town were under pressure from a large tree that had been washed off the riverbank In fact a big chunk of the retaining wall was peeling away from the river bank. If it comes downstream in one chunk we'll lose hydro and the bridge at the same time I think.
But the extra moving of the luggage without benefit of hotel assistance has David and me vying for the right to title our memoirs My Life as a Bellhop.
The beer tasting is going well. Pilsen is tops to date. Imperial the most popular local beer but a bit heavy and no aftertaste to speak of, so a second choice. This stop is kinda like a snow day for grown/ups. We can hang, read, drink beer and eat really wonderful fruit and seafood guilt/free because there's nothing we can do about it. The math test will just be rescheduled. LOL
For the folks who live here though this looks to be something of a major disaster. Hard to describe the rain. Mostly a steady rain it now and then suddenly turns into a downpour. Woke at 0200 this am to the sounds of rain 'drops' the size of golf balls bouncing around. Thought it was continuous thunder.
Today's plan> walk in the rain long enough to wash yesterday's clothing, hang it to dry and then have a fish lunch, retire for a movie and then try the hotel's rooftop bar as there may be folks who hang there who haven't yet seen our little show with David's skin tag.
They deserve to, of course. And so they shall.
#2
Starting to see lighter clouds and it hasn't rained in a few hours, so there's some hope. At least with the rain stopped there's a chance for some work to be done on the bridge we need to cross to get to the house, or, conversely, less of a worry about landslides if we decide to head back to San Jose.
Even if the bridge gets done soon there's no hydro or water at the house so plans remain a bit up in the air.
One thing for sure, being unable to walk around in the evening because we're tired of being rained on by then and having only a choice between a hotel room and a bar is having an effect both on our budget and our livers. When we have a better sense of whether the house is still an option we'll have to look at how to plan out the rest of the trip. Returning home early might be an option, but we of course took the cheapest tickets we could buy and so at the very least we'd be looking at an extra charge for the change. And with the tourists still apparently leaving in droves there might not be seats available in any case.
Some entertainment last night from a young US man down the outdoor corridor/balcony from us. He was going on at length to a Tica *female Costa Rican ( about how crude Americans are when shaving their nether regions, at least in comparison with Ticas/Ticas. It all seemed kind of innocent, not at all as if he was trying to get into her pants. Kinda cute really.
Fingers crossed please...
#3
Since last I bored you all to tears we checked out of our hotel and, thanks to Terri and David, moved to the condo spot they had planned for their visit here next week. This will be a great help to us in trying to keep the damage to our budget under control as they've graciously and generously given us one of the bedrooms. The up side to the cost of this trip as it has developed is that we need no longer worry about having to fuss over whether we can afford to head to Cuba for x-mas. We can't.
Much different experience in the new spot. Modern condo overlooking the beach. All mod-cons and such, the washer and dryer being particular treats as when travelling we normally do laundry in a sink and hang our unmentionables all about our room. Adds a homey feel when far from the nest. :-) Something which at least a few of our fellow castaways don't do much of, judging by the stink of them a few days after the bridge and highway were washed away. Or perhaps they had sent their luggage ahead and were stranded with nothing but the clothes on their backs. I should have asked. :-)
Pools and an attached casino. An OK but rather pricey restaurant as well. But with a view across a garden and onto the beach which would make it worthwhile on a nice day. Clearly meant for US tourists as the prices are in USD, the thermostats in F, the TV channels mostly US, and all instructions etc. in English.
We went shopping yesterday to stock the fridge here. Two things worth noting. One an orange-flavoured beer (which I am ashamed to say I quite like), the other the prices. Not much less than what we would expect to pay at home except for the meat which was more expensive. Tourists and ticas with shopping lists in English at the Super Mercado. An open-air market at the south end of town that's clothes and fresh fruit and veg that we walked through but didn't shop at.
A shame we never got up to the roof bar at our last hotel as I'd plans for using a pen to add a face around David's skin tag and introduce it as Jimmy Durante (really his idea, though he has been talking about a tattoo for the same effect, only permanent).
Speaking of tattoos, it goes with the 20-something tourist population here I suppose, but the town has a number of tattoo/piercing joints. Even the middle-aged surfer chicks and dudes, of which there are many, are well-decorated. Also over-tanned and looking generally dissipated. Enervated. Dehydrated. Well-toasted. Under-embalmed.
The younger set is seen early in the day lying about or sitting on curbs clearly suffering from ecstasy hangovers. Until about noon there are almost as many of them as there are stray dogs roaming the streets. Which is saying something.
The older folks seem to go for different drugs as there are signs at every pharmacy (many of them here, way too many for a town of perhaps 4,000, half that permanent at most I should think) advertizing the fact that Viagra and it's various imitators can be purchased here in volume, at low, low, low (or so they say) prices, and all without a prescription.
No one has offered to sell me any weed. Unusual I understand.
The weather is supposed to brighten somewhat and a day by the pool with an audio book would be a very pleasant way to get some vitamin D. Which given the weather is one medicine in short supply.
Did I mention the sex shops? Do I need to? Or the razor wire. Most especially the razor wire around the daycare centres (several, must be free or subsidized or intended for tourist families; the former I suspect). Normally I find signs of that kind of security unpleasant, but if that's what it takes to keep the little buggers inside the fence, I'm all for it.
On a brighter note, there are a fair number of electric cars rolling around and at least two places that rent them. And the largest and largest number of election signs about the place are for the Greens. Lots of hummingbirds all over the place. Great cheap food at simple roadside stands/restaurants called sodas.
Worst news: the water remains brown and rescue operations continue across the country in spots. Still looks like we have little or no chance of getting to the house. Jaco has its tawdry charms, but even I will have exhausted them in another day or two I think. My iPod is loaded and we've some books with us, but if we remain stuck here for too much longer without pool/tanning/reading opportunities I expect we'll either have to pack up and head back to San Jose early or we will find ourselves reduced to simple card games and funny-noises-using-body-parts contests.
Something to look forward to. I've always been a dab hand with a moist armpit and a supple palm. !Hasta la victoria!
Best news of the week: Geri bought a baseball cap during the momentary appearance of the sun yesterday. It has a bottle-opener built into the brim.
Bought a Costa Rican cigar. Very nice. The Cubans I normally smoke are more expensive here than in metro Cobourg. Priced for US tourists I suppose. Sit still in a bar long enough and a nice man will try and sell you a box or ten of Cubans. Well, something resembling a cigar in a Cuban box at least.
Bye for now. If this is annoying any of you and you want off the list, do feel free to say so.
#4
Bit of a gap there that you all likely appreciated. Terri´s house had no internet access.
We checked out of the condo complex in Jaco and headed to the house, passed a lot of road and village damage on the way. In some places the road was closed for several days because a landslide came across it on the way to inundating a village. Mud to mebbe waist height in people´s houses. Though on the way back in the same places the cleanup looked nearly done and furniture etc was up on roofs drying.
Some pretty serious road washouts, one near the house left a telephone pole hanging in space and required a significant shift of the road to one side.
The house great, very comfortable and all, but we got perhaps an hour of sun all week, right up to the day we left when of course it was bright and clear. Lots of hummingbirds, the odd toucan, iguanas and best of all, one litre bottles of beer. Best feature: plastic thatch on the rancho by the pool.
David and Terri drove us back to Jaco and we hopped a bus from there. Met a nice Dutch fellow who helped out, not least by letting Geri have his seat at the front of the bus to help with motion sickness.
Bus had no AC but the windows opened and the driver kept the door open most of the way. Better than AC really. Food vendors got on and off along the way, walking the aisle with a cooler and bagged goodies. Occasional reminders of Cliffside trips by bus in Italy when driver mopping sweat, drinking water, talking to friends, and, oh yes, driving. Lots of babies crying too, including me when we teetered on the edges of cliffs. Tica friend of the driver was I think making fun of me, not realizing that me leaning out to the left and well into the aisle was all that was keeping us from falling a zillion metres to the bottom of the cliff on our right. lol
With so long passing since my last postcard I am reduced to random notes:
1. Muni and cantonal elections under way. Seems like about 50% women candidates. Most signs are for the eco party and the libertarian party.
2. Lots of religious signage and big new prod churches.
3. Garage at Jaco condo had almost as many Hummers and Range Rovers as hookers.
4. David´s driving has improved.
5. Ceviche, apparently the national dish, is addictive (raw fish marinated in citrus, herbs added).
6. Canadian colony near Terri’s house. Surprised how much of a strain an English-French-Spanish conversation was.
7. Bus did 105km in 2:45. Very scenic, much fun, highly recommended.
8. Howdy honking not as du rigueur here as Cuba but still pretty common.
9. Kids sell fish by roadside like kids sell lemonade at home.
First impressions of San Jose (last time here were in the Best Western): it´s a hopping town. Lots of street vendors. And if Jaco a tawdry bordello kind of town, San Jose is like something out of film noir.
More on that later though.
Last bit: thanks Shelly for the suggested great little hotel. We have a mango tree right outside our door. Only problem is getting lost on the way to breakfast. 35 room hotel but many windy corridors with little gardens and common rooms all over the place Best $35 a night hotel since India I think.
Bye...
#5
Dying for a nap, so again in point form:
1. Fine debate yesterday re. the pros and cons of various guide books in the hotel´s internet cafe. LP wins again. Steves’ got toasted for being too US-centric (even the Americans found it hard to use re measurements and such. Book says miles, road signs say klicks). Frommers gets pooh-poohed for suggesting Quality Inns and Motel 6s.
2. Couple from Perry Sound made the mistake of driving into town. Older folks, find buses etc. intimidating. Kid on motorcycle rides alongside for a few blocks, stays right with them. Then leaves. Suspect number two then shouts from a car that the kid slashed their tires. They stop and get out to look at the tires and suspect 3 really does slash the tires. Suspect four plays the good samaritan while the car is emptied as she distracts them. Passports and all, and they go home tomorrow. Mebbe. After they got to hotel had to park on street and now have more damage. Another reason to get some fun from the bus.
3. Hotel breakfast fab, setting, in a courtyard garden, really nice. Homemade jams etc. really good. $9 extra over basic room charge to have two. Carambola (starfruit) juice to die for.
4. Geri peeked in the higher end rooms that were vacated today. Next time, if there is one, that´s what we´ll shoot for. Not that there was anything wrong with the one we got. But these like garden suites.
5. Hotel crowd are mostly LP types. Surfers through to seniors with multipocket vests. Mostly Scandinavian, bunch of Canadians, one or two US couples. Lots of birdwatchers. Can birdwatch over breakfast or in several of the hotel common areas. Funky mini rainforest run by retired hippies a few blocks away. Bizarre. Urban weird. Blotter acid has a lot to answer for, though this actually quite nice.
6. May have to trash my ´CR-no army since 1948´shirt as a border fuss with Nicaragua has ´cops´out looking a lot like infantry and arriving with their own helicopter gunships and artillery. Too bad, one nice myth gone...
7. No booze in three days now. No DTs either, so guess I´m good.
8. Holiday Inn on a nice plaza. Chock-full of middle-aged men from the US looking for sex. Sad.
9. Noticeably cooler here compared to the coast. Nice mornings, rainy afternoons.
10. Shopping fun, but abysmally so in the touristy bits. Cheesy. CR snow globes, t-shirts made in China etc. Regular shopping more expensive that I would have thought. No artisans in the artisan market. Just guys hawking Cuban cigars to Americans for twice what I pay at home.
11. Tica/Tico goths kinda fun to look at. Sweaty. Spoils the effect.
12. Lots of beggars.
13. Local bakery fab. Great pastries, sweet and savoury. Lots like it around.
14. Pensions discussion post-breakfast. US now at 72 for full benefits. >Didn´t realize. Oddly, same person lamenting this then trashes French for protesting increase in their retirement age.
15. Areas around the Mercado Centrale and the bus terminal are just hopping. Lots of street vendors etc. Smells a little off-putting though. But best part of central SJ for camera work.
16. Cast iron school building from the late 1800s.
17 Lots of razor wire, but beats Nicaragua in that there are no or few guns. And only cops have them.
18. Lots of ´great man´ statues and parks. No women.
19. Street-level air pollution a killer.
20. Whopper houses with whopper walls, lots of rag-pickers with carts with bike wheels with no rubber on them.
21. TV offerings on local channels a global collection of shows featuring breasts and old men. Old men with bad dye jobs.
22. Our corner store has a corner within it where the family running it lives and eats etc. Kinda of odd to be looking for beer (hey, I said I hadn´t drunk any, not that I hadn´t wanted to, it’s HOT here kids) and walking down an aisle and finding yourself in some one´s kitchen as they are having Sunday soup.
Bye. That´s it from CR
Istanbul Nov-Dec 2011
After the LabourStart 2011 conference Geri joined me and we holidayed
in Istanbul for 10 days. What follows are vacation e-postcards to
friends and family.
Some of you all find this repetitive because you're 'friends' with my personal Facebook account. sorry. There won't be one of these every day.
I was late getting to our hotel from the post-conference LabourStart meetings but Geri had a chance to sleep-off her jet lag and was ready to go. We found a nice simple restaurant not too far from our hotel and had a great dinner. Our hotel is inside the old city walls, in Sultanahmet. Makes for a fun neighbourhood, but there is one down side: despite the room having all mod cons in it the sewers in the old city are a bit restrictive and so you can't flush paper. Quite a problem, overcoming 50+ years of training. :-)
Today we spent wandering around. All the major sites we wanted to see were closed on Mondays, but still it was fun to see the city from a quick bus tour and get a sense of how everything is oriented, how far we are from what we want to see etc. And at the Blue Mosque we ran into a small crowd from my conference, while on the way to Hagia Sofia we bumped into some more. A small world...
Just randomly walking we came across:
1. A street of shoemakers. In the dark, when it was quiet, we could hear dozens of cobblers tapping nails into shoes. Very cool.
2. Pomegranite juice may be my favourite drink, surpassing beer.
3. A restaurant serving a very nice lamb stew done in clay pots that are then, in high tourist fashion, tapped until the top pops off and it can be served. Ours went fine but another couple had a problem. Waiter-in-training hacked instead of tapping and the resulting explosion pretty impressive. No one hurt but much laughter and bits of lamb and pot all over.
4. Globalization: African footballer on TV flogging KFC in Turkish.
5. This place hops after dark. Most everything, including museums, open to midnight.
6. Chess set for sale: pieces are the players in the Gulf Wars and the 'War on Terror'. The Bushs, Blair et al on one side, Saddam, bin Laden et al on the other. Very well done too.
7. Very impressive transit system everywhere except the old city.
8. Old city also falls down sewage-wise. We can't flush paper, have a little bin instead. Otherwise hotel like the one I had for the conference: all mod cons but small.
9. The cult of Ataturk is alive and well.
10. There really are only 500 people in the world. Yesterday we twice ran into comrades from the conference. Some Egyptian folks at the Blue Mosque, some Taiwanese and a Canadian at the Hagia Sofia.
11. We could live here as long as we could eat in the restaurants. So far the worst was OK, the other very good and very, very cheap.
12. One out of town day booked: to Pamukkale (Google it). Looking at Cappadocia too.
13. Turkish bath/scrub (large hairy man beats you up with rough scrubs and towels, then steams you to mush) in a hamman tomorrow.
More to come, but internet connection unreliable and my mailer seems not to like the homemade batch uploader that sends photos to Flickr. But am trying to clear photos from camera regularly, so here is the link to the photos of this trip (post-conference, if you want the conference stuff for some reason let me know): http://www.flickr.com/photos/dblackadder/collections/
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So today was a High Tourist Day. All that was missing a High Group Tour Guide and a sensor in which was burning a huge wad of cash.
Might as well just come out and say it: we bought a carpet. We like it, it is carry-able and it works with a space we have that has been dying for a rug other than the rag rug we have there now for a long while. So no apologies, no embarrassment, and does anyone want a cat prone to hairballs?
Second, I must have inadvertently stepped on some important and mobbed-up toes, because there I was this afternoon, recovering from having bought a carpet from a nice man whose brother is a close personal friend of Paul Martin's, enjoying a steam bath, when a very large bald hairy man wearing an odd plaid skirt came over to me and started whaling away on me.
Having reduced my legs to uselessness, he punched me repeatedly in the stomach, chopped at my upper body until I was pretty much paralyzed, then gave me two simultaneous 360-degree titty twisters, flipped me over, tried to stick each big toe in an ear to the tune of 'Cracking Spine', leaning on me with his considerable weight concentrated at the point of his elbows, and when I wouldn't (couldn't really, all I had on was a goofy plaid towel with tassels) pay up he threw me in a corner and tossed scalding water on me. Having peeled-off two layers of skin he then worked me over with a sheet of sandpaper before soaping all his fingerprints off my body (evidence doncha know) and sticking a thumb in each ear and doing his best to make them meet in the centre of my heard.
If you ever have a steam bath here I'd suggest that you learn the Turkish phrases for "I'll pay, I'l pay" and "what's the vig?"
OK, enough stupid. It was a Turkish bath and it was fun and the bath we went to has been in business for just over 600 years. And it was painful at the time but you can have a beer after and I am thinking I might just have one (massage, not beer...well, perhaps both) a day until we leave. And mebbe come back for one on a regular basis. And pay to get my assailant...errr...masseuse...a registration number as a RMT in Canada so I can claim the whole thing on my benefits plan. :-)
It was fabulous.
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Bit of minor catch-up now that we're getting ready to pop out for dinner:
1. Burma has a 'right of return' citizenship law, meaning I can take out citizenship if I want to.
2. Geri had fun and you will soon be able to see the photographic proof of it, in the shoe district. $16USD for fab shoes.
3. Silver and pearls district right next to the shoe bit.
4. The grand bazaar fun but mostly touristy stuff or the equivalent of a dollar store The exception being the antiques section. Which was full of stuff from North africa and India. I should have said 'we think' as the thing is immense and we covered only a very small portion.
5. Most shopkeepers in the GT have a prett ydetailed knowledge of Canadian geography. impressive really. Probably better than most Canadians.
6. Only thing we bought was a scarf which Geri got down to 18 from 35 Lira. Much fun.
7. There is a corset shop in the GT for both genders. Frightening.
8. After we bought our carpet and I was carrying it I thought we'd be left alone by the touts, but not so: "Sir, that looks painful, you need another just like it to balance you out." :-) I like the touts here. They have a sense of humour about their work and don't take it too seriously, don't expect you to either.
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Budget-wise, we found it fairly easy. We used points for the flights and the hotel we're in is 30 Euros (it's not as official as Cuba, but tourists are encouraged by merchants to pay in Euros though you can also use Turkish lira, in fact if you do there's a roughly 10% discount) a night. As you can hopefully tell from the photos it is small but comfortable and modern. I was in a smaller room for my conference in the modern part of the city and it was 6-7 times as much I think.
Getting around outside the old city is easy. The transit system is very modern though the subway needs to have about 100 more stations to fully cover the city. There is a tram line that crosses much of the European side of the city with trains coming very frequently. There are buses, some of which have dedicated lanes they don't have to share, even with taxis. And there are tonnes of taxis.
We're not finding walking a problem at all. Lots of hills but none huge. And the sidewalks become stairs where needed.
The only problem I could foresee would be in getting around the old city. It's not accessible and there's no public transport worth mentioning, nor could any fit on the surface. Walking or taxis are the way to go here. Or stay outside this area and take group bus tours into the area now and then (there's lots to see and do in the rest of the city).
Photos are being added as we go along.
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Ours is a strange tribe. Secret signs and rituals, displaying our rank in dress. Today at breakfast each and every table had a bible on it (Lonely Planet I mean). German, English and French. The newbies in cargo pants and hiking boots and quick-dry hoodies. The rest, inevitably going to the same places and doing the same things, in grown-up clothes.
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I think you all may get stuck with more of these missives than you bargained for. Feel free to ask to be taken off the list. Trouble is, we walk and we walk and we walk, then we have lunch and walk some more, but we don't seem to be hungry most days when dinner time rolls around. As with today when we decided to skip it, stay in and watch the rain, up load photos, deal with e-mail and, you guessed it, do postcards, digital and paper.
Hit the Little Hagia Sofia today. Along with the larger edition pretty much one of the five or ten oldest christian churches around, though the Littler is currently in use as a mosque. Very simple, very nice, well worth the 200m walk from our hotel. :-) Plus it still has its bazaar (churches and mosques were often endowed with a bazaar for income from shop rentals) intact and operating after 1500 years (assuming it was built with the church). Some nice little shops, the whole well out of the way. Wonder it's not more popular.
Spent most of today, about 6 hours, at the Topkapi Palace. Much fun, great architecture. Wildly expensive lunch, but it was cold and windy so... Great views from the restaurant. Best bits the jewels and such and the harem. Emeralds the size of baseballs Diamonds the size of ping pong balls. Some wonderfully worked gold (the Topkapi dagger spectacular but not the most so). Candlesticks each of 48kgs of 22 carat gold and covered with literally 1,000s of diamonds. Worker rock crystal that was so fine and so thin that you could mistake it for glass.
Harem fun too. Would love to see the sections closed-off. You can get a peek every now and then and they look fantastic, and well-maintained.
The other fun bit was the relic collection that the Sultans built up over the years. The walking stick Moses used. Probably when he parted the sea, almost certainly he had it under his arm when he was handed the tablets (tho I have always had a problem with the 10 Commandments story. No ratification vote...). The finger of John the Baptist. The Beard of Muhammed, his gold and jewel encrusted sword from a period when he and his followers didn't have a post to piss in. A piece of the cross JC was crucified on. Best of all, the sword David used to kill Golaith. All labeled as though they had just been carbon dated. :-) I guess if the Sultan paid a pile for it, it pretty much has to be genueine, no? Only if it was free or cheap could it be challenged I guess. Would you want to be the one to say "Err, excuse me, but I think Your Highness just dropped a bundle on some chicken bones, wood chips and barber shop sweepings."?
We're off to Pamukkale next Tuesday for the day. Flights were stupid cheap, compared with a 10 hour bus ride it was a no-brainer. One hour flight out about $60 all-in, back about twice that.
Most exciting news of all and every travellers Holy Grail: we found a ritzy hotel not far from ours which has a happy hour hors d'oeuvres buffet that is free. We'll make it a stop each day on our way home for a drink and a free dinner.
Which means I can send even more of these! :-)
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We're close to the mid-point of the holiday portion of the trip and Geri's toe and back could use a break so we're taking a day to hang at the hotel and things nearby, enjoy a bit of sun on the terrace, read, and, yes, do postcards. Beautiful day. I am sitting here watching a steady stream of ships heading from the Med through to the Black Sea. Hardly any coming the other way, I wonder if there are timed traffic patterns? Morning traffic eastbound, afternoons west?
I've lost at least one prior e-postcard that I think was sent, but have also had some get stuck and not go anywhere as the CUPE mail server seems to occasionally decide I am a security risk while here. Apologies for any duplication, the last time it took days for the 'not sent' notification to get to me so I'm going to include some stuff that may have been in a previous message.
1. Love the transit system here. We used the tram (streetcar) yesterday several times and it is up there with Vienna's I think. Toronto's new streetcars should be so good. Under Ford of course it won't matter since they will be sharing what should be an exclusive right of way with cars. Which happens here only in the old part of the city where the streets are narrow. These lovely even down to the multi-lingual stop announcements. We also spent some time on and round Taksim Sq. and so took the funicular that connects the tram line down on the waterfront to the metro station up on the hill at the square. No tourist antiquity, it's a driverless high-tech thingee. Too bad it goes up in a tunnel instead of on the surface though. Nice view of the Bosphorous if it did. There are also commuter trains to the outer suburbs (this a city of 12 million I think). Also almost all very new looking. And electric.
2. I'm never going to develop the ability to speak more than a dozen standard phrases of Turkish. This language right up there with Czech and all the tonal languages as far as difficulty is concerned. But it can be fun to see the Arabic/Moor/Romance/Persian influences and realize that if you speak the word in Urdu or in Spanish or in Italian you suddenly know what it means. Maidan to Meydani for example or Cadde to Calle.
3. Stopped on the main high-end shopping drag, Istklal, for coffee. Facing the windows in comfortable little chairs and suddenly a weird gaggle of Japanese tourists all dressed in electric plastic walked by. Dayglow orange and green and red and whatever coloured plastic clothing and boots. Electric green coat with gold boots just about made me gag. A family/ A club? Street theatre? Then a few minutes later an elderly man came along, re-arranged the flower pots on our window sill to better suit him, smiled at us and walked off.
4. You realize just how clean the city is when in the modern bits. Way cleaner than Toronto for example. Lots of uniformed street cleaners everywhere. Old city has no litter, but is old. But the modern bits sparkle.
5. Nice man showed us how to buy transit tokens yesterday. Everyone like that. You can stop a shopkeeper or tout from trying to take you somewhere or sell you something by asking them directions or how to do something. The pitch stops, they help, everybody smiles, and you can walk off before they get back into sales mode. Very nice.
6. Street food here mostly Turkey's version of bagels, roast corn and roast chestnuts.
7. Just noticed a few days ago that our toilet, and most I have seen, has a nozzle/faucet built-in to the back rim I presume this is the mod con version of the bucket-and-cup substitute for toilet paper that I last ran into in India. Faucet knob on the wall. If pressure sufficient and faucet control fine enough, I could put on a puppet show for myself. Mebbe take photos. :-)
8. Had lunch at Altin Balik on Turnaci just off Istiklal. Wow. Best calamari we ever tasted with an very nice sauce they whipped-up and the local sea bass wonderful. Plus they bring a selection of fresh fish to your table, you pick the beastie you want and tell them how you want it prepared. One very fine meal.
9. Across the street from the second floor of the restaurant was a window either covered with sawdust or containing a room full of sawdust, and some homemade electrical connections worthy of Delhi. So come, eat at this place before it disappears in the fire to come.
10. A shop just off Istiklal sells nothing but booze and potato chips. Reasonable selection of both considering the shop is mebbe 10sm at most. Why go anywhere else?
11. Lots of 'subtle' sexism. As at a restaurant table when I get to taste the wine, I get the bigger pieces of everything and am clearly expected to order for Geri. But some of the complaints I heard at the conference from a young woman travelling outside Canada for the first time may be more about commercial harassment than sexual or gender.
12. Here on our hotel terrace I can see 30+ ships lined-up either for the Bosporus or for one of Istanbul's ports. To my left is Little Hagia Sofia (Little St. Sophia), a 1500 year-old church now a mosque. A little further left are the minarets of the Blue Mosque, and in between is an Ottoman palace on the Asian waterfront of the city. Some kids are playing football on the sports field/community centre across the road, and a nice man is pushing a cart down the street bellowing something that invites folks in the neighbourhood to give him recyclables that he then sells. I wouldn't need to win a whole lot to be able to live like this the rest of my life...
13. I'm keeping pretty much up to date with photo uploading. So if anyone is bothering to look, there are a bunch of new sets. I wish I could convince myself that the photos of buildings like the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi or especially the Hagia Sofia in any way convey how impressive the buildings are, but I can't. Sigh.
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Had lunch in a ritzy restaurant under the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. Way out of our price range, but pretty good, plus it was raining, so...sitting there, watching fishing lines with a half dozen sardines each come up out of the water and disappear up above as the fishers on the roadway pulled in their catch. If it had been warm enough we would have been on the terrace out front, ducking the wriggling fish and the weights at the end of the lines. And there are LOTS of lines. Every metre of waterfront has at least 2 fishers. Later found a bar on the other side of the bridge, beer and a water pipe.
Good thing lunch was first as otherwise watching the fish 'flying' straight up while working the water pipe would have suggested something other than dried apples in it.
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Just quickly (we're both awake in the middleof our night for some reason)...
It was about 8 hours from Toronto to Munich and then about 3 to Istanbul after a change to a Lufthansa flight. We came on points and so had exec class seats. Pods to Munich, the disappointing Lufthansa Business Class from there onwards.
The return flight is through Frankfurt. Unfortunately not ebough of a stop there to justify any time in the Star Alliance exec class lounge. Last time there the 'car wash' toilet seat feature made the extra travel time well worthwhile.
Never felt unsafe. Doesn't mean we weren't of course.
I think all I can say is that no one has shown any hostility in any way. Most actively friendly, and not just folks trying to sell us stuff, but people like the fellow who approached me on the tram platform yesterday when he noticed me taking photos of the New Mosque (new because only 600 years old).
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Now that I'm awake, here are a few more answers:
1. Tipping in taxis is to just round up to the nearest lira. Otherwise a few coins, though at higher-end restaurants 10% is about right and sometimes included in the charge anyway.
2. Weather has been near-identical to Cobourg's.
3. Credit cards everywhere, and better than the US (where we were in September) becuase chip cards are standard here. In this as in many regards, you should expect what you would in any other European country.
4. Better to exchange money at a Cambio than a bank as the charges are less. Banking machines everywhere too
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Odd notes and such this time. Every time??? Geri has a bit of a cold so I am hoping we'll take it easy today and not venture too far from home. So some post-breakfast scribbling on the terrace would seem to be in order. Yesterday was a bit dismal and rained a bit on and off after a few hours of blue skies in the morning. Today the blue seems to be holding. The Sultanahmet area goes from looking washed-out and dingy to pretty in the sun.
1. Only once in all our rides on public transit was Geri not offered a seat by a youngish man. and this without her (mis?)using her cane. :-) But when she has used her cane as when we've had a flu day of hiking around, she has had repeated comments from everywhere from shopkeepers to museum staff about it. Cuban of course, and quite intricately carved.
2. Yesterday in the morning we took a cheap (unguided) cruise up the Bosphorus to the second bridge, not quite to the Black Sea, and back.
3. Fishers really are everywhere along the water. Christopher would fit right in.
4. There's an island not far from the first bridge which is entirely devoted to a couple of restaurants and a cafe. And right next to it is a floating doghouse. Photo to prove, complete with a bird on the doghouse.
5. After, we had lunch in a ritzy restaurant under the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. Way out of our price range, but pretty good, plus it was raining, so...sitting there, watching fishing lines with a half dozen sardines each come up out of the water and disappear up above as the fishers on the roadway pulled in their catch. If it had been warm enough we would have been on the terrace out front, ducking the wriggling fish and the weights at the end of the lines. And there are LOTS of lines. Every metre of waterfront has at least 2 fishers. Later found a bar on the other side of the bridge, beer and a water pipe. Good thing lunch was first as otherwise watching the fish 'flying' straight up while working the water pipe would have suggested something other than dried apples in it. We both quite liked the 'hubble-bubble'. Pleasant apple flavour.
6. We think the anti-smoking laws must be new. Yesterday we could hardly see the no-smoking sign in the bar for all the cigarette, cigar and water pipe smoke. :-)
7. The bar and restaurant (on opposite sides of the bridge but both on the lower level) had fab views of the ferry landings. Quite a show. Continuous and fast.
8. In the bar Swansea vs. A. Villa was on. Swansea getting more cheers. Perhaps out of sympathy: no matter what the game's outcome the team has to return to Swansea. :-)
9. Reading a bit of the local English language papers in our 'free hors d'oeuvres bar'. Parliament just enacted a Council of Europe convention on violence against women Wildly progressive in comparison with our laws. For example arranged marriages are now illegal. Parents can be charged and the marriage itself reversed. But I can't find a definition of 'economic violence' against women. In any case it is now a crime here.
10. Also in the process of amending their constitution. Have to say in many respects their current one, while it has some serious flaws (making the military a kind of constitutional court with the right to stage a coup being one small example), also has some enviable bits. Being secular and so for almost 90 years is one. I find it irksome that I live in a country where a large minority have some other religious belief or none at all but where we all, and our laws, are subject to compliance with the Christian god's rules and regs. Especially while we have a Prime Minister who thinks that The Flintstones was a documentary. It must also be nice to have a head of state who's not only elected but a citizen of the country s/he runs. Oh, and all the legislative bodies of government here are elected...and awake, as far as I can tell. Unlike a certain senate. :-)
11. Where was I before I got all preachy? Ah, yes, the Turkish Constitution. Anyway, the military bit, there since the War of Liberation, is going. And while it will remain secular (it looks like anyway), the current prohibition on any religious display or activity or dress while on public property looks to be going. There will be some provision supportive of religious freedom etc. It recently became possible in law for women to attend university while wearing islamic head scarfs, though not, I think, the full near-purdah clothing. But apparently this change was challenged and it's constitutionality is in doubt so something explicit is to appear in the Constitution.
12. Too bad recognition of minority ethnic rights not in the cards as far as I can tell. Kurds treated like shit here and Kurdish organizations of any kind all appear to be labelled as 'terrorist'. Ditto journos critical of the government. Turkey has more of them in jail than any other country I think. Glad I left my IFJ card at home. :-)
13. Taking photos here starts conversations. Mostly people just smile and say 'welcome'. Probably because that would the limit of their English. But sometimes, as yesterday at the Eminou tram stop, you come across someone with a fair bit of the language and you have a nice chat.
14. The Hippodrome, the Roman horse track, near the Blue Mosque, is closed to most traffic. At the entrances are remote-controlled stainless posts that sink into or rise up from the cobbles when a parking attendant presses a wireless remote button. Stupid I know, but I thought much fun. I used to be a parking lot attendant, bored it would be fun to see if the post motors are powerful enough to lift, oh, say, a garbage truck. A taxi? Or whether they are fast moving enough for a game of chicken with a tour bus. :-)
15. Huge wine industry here. Government can't ban alcohol (see secular constitution above) but does heavily tax all but beer. Some nice wines and some varietals that we have never heard of before. Local only?
16. From the water we got a chance to see the huge Rita-Carleton development in its entirety. Hotel and condos, as in Toronto I think. In the new part of the city's European side it completely dominates the skyline in an area not short of skyscrapers. Remarkably ugly.
Off to walk the area around the spice bazaar, supposed to be the last bit of the old city untouched since the 1950's tourism-wise at least, then our free food bar (the waiter deserves his own entry in one of these e-cards and will get it), then an early night as we're being picked-up around 0500 tomorrow to make our flight to Pamukkale.
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Added a few new folks to the thread. Few of you just slipped through the cracks, another one or two we left off thinking a spouse would pass them along, but then you never know, so....
Getting towards the end of the trip (I can tell because we always through our restaurant budget to the wind and just go for a comfortable spot, regardless if there is a cheaper and possibly even better bit of street food available just outside). :-)
17:45 call to prayer just starting as I write this. Kinda nice, hits us from 3 or more mosques here Not that anybody except the tourists pays attention any more than everyone rushes off to church when the bells ring on Sunday at home.
1. Parks here have lots of clean benches. LOTS. And I think I have yet to see one without a kiddies play area and at least one muni worker sweeping or brushing or washing.
2. On a not-unrelated note, solid waste trucks have 3-man (always men) crews. Nice uniforms too. The Sultanahmet uniform is a nice bright green.
3. In the older parts of town fruit and veg carts are common. Vendor pushes it along, shouting out (I presume) what he has for sale).
4. Lots and lots and lots of cats. And everyone feeds them.
5. Has to be 20+ daily newspapers. Lively, despite the threat of imprisonment under the bizarre (almost as much so as the British) laws re. libel and the rather unique crime of 'insulting Turkishness'.
6. Got a peek at an empty tram car driver's compartment Very star Trek. when I grow up I want to be an Istanbul transit driver.
7. In the old city parking is a world-class sport. People park where and how they can, the city responds with various devices meant to keep cars off curbs and sidewalks etc. But the drivers are both skilled and creative (and on steep hills don't turn their wheels in as it causes the to take up more space). Can also lead to pedestrian traffic jams as tight spaces between parked cars and traffic combines with Turkish politeness ("No, after you...no, after YOU...no...").
8. Stiff climb up to and then part way just up the Galata Tower. 70m or so. Nice view. Sitting inside with a window having tea I could pick out my fellow acrophobes as they slid along the wall and into the window niches when they got to them. Looking very stressed too I should say. I gave it a try but the open railing and narrow deck under my feet was too much. Would have been able to manage it if they had proper safety netting, air bags on the ground, safety harness and ropes, chicken wire wrapping the deck circling the tower, guards along the railing, their arms linked, and a helicopter circling over the waiting ambulances.
9. Only 2 full days here in Istanbul left as tomorrow is out trip to Pammukkale. . Thurs and Fri. The Chora Church's Byzantine mosaics supposed to be spectacular, but after 3 trips to Italy, churches kinda pale. More so after easy-on-the-aye mosques with their geometric decorative designs. The prospect of diabetes-inducing gilt and such not too enticing right now
10. Huge seagull hovering outside our window as we have lunch in the Tower cafe. Muzac system playing 'Three Times a Lady' and 'Can't Stop Loving You'.
11. Istanbul is where tulips came from. Netherlands just controlled the trade. This place in spring makes Ottawa look like a plain lawn.
12. Disappointment: no sufi shrines and all the dervish stuff is faked for tourists.
13. No skateboard or rollerblades seen. Nice!
14. Grand total of two beggars seen, one of them a kid who was rather well-dressed for what he was doing and so may just have been trying it on.
15. Next time we're here: summer, so we can spend more time on terraces. And we'll book cooking classes in advance.
Bye. We need to be up at 0400, so having an early night with the assistance of a couple of large Efes. Some Beyaz white in Geri's case.
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This is likely the second-to-last postcard.
1. Monday night we found a nice little neighbourhood water pipe cafe that may never have seen a tourist before. No alcohol, just a couple of for items, lots of tea and a water pipe for every table. A very nice little cozy spot, if it served beer I'd move in. Server an awkward teenager in leggings who moved like a newborn horse, spoke excellent English. Her parents own the place. Goofy Turkish comedy films on the TV. Lovely spot just outside one of the entrances to the Little Hagia Sofia.
2. The flight out to Denezili went well. The Ataturk airport domestic terminal is dandy, lots of staff for everything and even though they have more security checks, you get through faster because there are more stations. And the security types aren't rent-a-cops, and are mostly women. :-) All spoke English, including the cafe staff.
3. My cold has migrated to Geri.
4. If your ticket and boarding pass say 'be at the gate 45 minutes before departure', do that. A lot of the gates just lead to a bus transfer. Miss the bus and...
5. Men, wear tightish pants when travelling through Ataturk as all belts must come off and a bit of slack can take your pants a long way.
6. Turkish Airlines uses a bunch of Manchester United stars for their safety video. Different.
7. Ataturk's a CAT III airport. Too bad Denezili isn't (see below).
8. We were on an early model A319. New seats and all but the spacing was a reminder of why the 'good old days' are the good old days There was so much knee room people could get the aisle to the window seat without anyone even standing up, let alone having to get out into the aisle and completely out of the way.
9. The flight was early morning. Landscape rugged, small mountains, barren because the wheat and corn harvest is done. Small villages in valleys. Not much water aside from a few large lakes. And some of the lakes appeared to have either salt pans or fish corrals. The former seems more likely to me for some reason.
10. Like most airports here, Denezili's is both civilian and military.
11. The area's big industries appear to be marble/stone works and textiles. Huge textile factories.
12. Our airport transfer took us to the Koray Hotel to wait for the tour start. I would avoid. By Cuban standards a 1.5 star I should think. Heating in the dining...well, really, the everything room...was provided by a wood stove with an over-long horizontal pipe leading to a homemade (and badly) hole in the wall. The hotel also has a door from the third floor bar that leads to nothing more than a three-floor drop. Look for the photo of the door swinging in the breeze.
13. Rural Turkey very, very, very clearly not nearly as prosperous as urban Turkey. Not just Istanbul: the cities and large towns we drove through showed this too.
14. Apartment buildings clearly take some time to complete in rural Turkey as buildings are occupied on the ground floors and up as the upper floors are still under construction.
15. In villages could still see large groups of women getting together to do things to crops to prepare them for eating or storage. All by hand. Regret: driver too fast, couldn't get decent photos
16. First stage of our tour: the Pamkkale necropolis. Cemetery going back to the Greek period. Through Roman, Byzantine periods to 1334 when an earthquake meant it was abandoned. Jewish section from the Roman period. Loved it, but not much to say. See the photos when I get them uploaded (hopefully later today).
17. Ditto the city itself.
18. Small spa-like centre in the national park where an agora (marketplace) sunk in an early earthquake and flooded with hot spring water. Now used as a pool, complete with fallen columns etc. from the Roman period at the bottom.
19. Quite a high-end little place. 25lira just to swim. Plus they have goofy but expensive things like 'doctor fish' treatments wherein you sit in a tank with a bunch of remora-like fish that nibble-off all your dead skin etc. It's the 'etc' that worries me.
20. Full of desiccated German women of a certain age, desiccated German men of a certain age who can be distinguished from the desiccated German women of a certain age only by the fact that they use carbon-fibre walking sticks to go anywhere and everywhere.
21.The calcium deposit cliffs and pools and the walk down the terraces is just amazing. See the photos, but know that they do nothing like justice to the experience. Plus by walking down you feel like the soles of your feet have been exfoliated. Which they have. And scaled by the ater rushing down at the top, frozen by that same water by the time you get to the bottom.
22. While there really was no way around doing a group tour unless we were prepared to spend at least one night out of Istanbul (but then again, see below), we were again reminded why we don't like group tours. There was a museum we would have spent time at if we were on our own, we got stuck in the obligatory visit to an 'onyx factory' which was a sales stop and nothing more, and got to live with other people's enthusiasm for delay.
23. Beer of the day was Efes Dark. Indulged while playing with the cats and watching them go to sleep on my jacket at the spa.
24. Geri's folding stool again proved it's worth. She could rest her back anytime, anywhere. Thing just hangs off my shoulder bag when not in use and folded. Can't weigh much more than and possibly less than 500g.
25. One nice thing about the group tour was meeting a Brit couple. Both a little off-centre. She recently got a free trip to Mexico by volunteering to be a test subject for a drug company with a cholera patch it hopes will replace the shot. I was mildly surprised to find that I am not interested in that kind of free travel. I amy be brighter than I think.
26. There is a town named Batman in Turkey.
27. The restaurant the tour took us to for the included lunch served something that I think can only be described as "dismal food".
24 Back at the Carpak/Denezili airport, which is new and vast and empty, we were told that fog had resulted in our flight being cancelled and we could either get a night in a hotel or a bus ride to an airport 4 hours away at Izmir(ly 4 hours drive away). We took the drive, tried to sleep, made friends with a young Indian couple and sisters from the US, survived, but collapsed into bed when we got to our Istanbul hotel having been up (some bus naps excepted) for something like 28 hours. Izmir airport older but very efficient Interesting, and I think this is true at Ataturk in Istanbul too, there's not much by way of a closed period for flights. Even though residences are visible from the runways.
25. Our second last day: perfect weather but we have low energy. And Geri's cold means she's leaning towards staying in and vegging with her iPad.
26. Red lights in some urban areas have a countdown the way pedestrian crossing lights at home do. A chance to get ready to stomp on it at the earliest opportunity. Not that everyone, including our bus driver on the road to Izmir last night, pays attention to red lights late at night. And drivers in rural areas don't pay a lot of attention to white lines, solid or not.
27. Bus played a Turkish potboiler soap the whole time. By the end I was kinda interested...
28. Turkish politics interesting. AKP religious and extremely right-wing, but really wants into the EU so tidying-up its human rights record. Also clearly plans on replacing the US as it withdraws from the region. Some goofy regional imperial ambitions. References to Cyprus (or the northern bit anyway) as 'our foster-land'.
Ta-ta. Will send on something else if any interesting happens (by my definition, obviously :-) ) before we leave, otherwise just look for a 'home safe and sound' message when we get there and can say that.
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Now in Franfurt in the Lufthansa Biz Class lounge (they have an even ritzier First Class lounge). Nice, as always, and I do enjoy the 'mini car-wash' toilet seats. Been a couple of years since we were last here, good to see they haven't disppeared. Always a bit awkward taking photos though
, so may have to rely on the old ones already on Flickr.
This lounge nothing on the Turkish Airlines lounge at Ataturk. Best we've ever seen. Grand piano (with player), pool table, lending library, cinema with mebbe 30 seats, architecturally interesting design...worth the flight on its own.
I added photos of the Ataturk lounge to our Istanbul photo collection.
Anyway, I guess that's about it. Another couple of glasses of champers before we head to the gate. Geri's gagging for some toast, will have to see if they can rustle something up.
Hope somebody got something from all these. Remember most of the posts above were family/friend postcards, so if you can't figure something out or want some further info just ask.
Some of you all find this repetitive because you're 'friends' with my personal Facebook account. sorry. There won't be one of these every day.
I was late getting to our hotel from the post-conference LabourStart meetings but Geri had a chance to sleep-off her jet lag and was ready to go. We found a nice simple restaurant not too far from our hotel and had a great dinner. Our hotel is inside the old city walls, in Sultanahmet. Makes for a fun neighbourhood, but there is one down side: despite the room having all mod cons in it the sewers in the old city are a bit restrictive and so you can't flush paper. Quite a problem, overcoming 50+ years of training. :-)
Today we spent wandering around. All the major sites we wanted to see were closed on Mondays, but still it was fun to see the city from a quick bus tour and get a sense of how everything is oriented, how far we are from what we want to see etc. And at the Blue Mosque we ran into a small crowd from my conference, while on the way to Hagia Sofia we bumped into some more. A small world...
Just randomly walking we came across:
1. A street of shoemakers. In the dark, when it was quiet, we could hear dozens of cobblers tapping nails into shoes. Very cool.
2. Pomegranite juice may be my favourite drink, surpassing beer.
3. A restaurant serving a very nice lamb stew done in clay pots that are then, in high tourist fashion, tapped until the top pops off and it can be served. Ours went fine but another couple had a problem. Waiter-in-training hacked instead of tapping and the resulting explosion pretty impressive. No one hurt but much laughter and bits of lamb and pot all over.
4. Globalization: African footballer on TV flogging KFC in Turkish.
5. This place hops after dark. Most everything, including museums, open to midnight.
6. Chess set for sale: pieces are the players in the Gulf Wars and the 'War on Terror'. The Bushs, Blair et al on one side, Saddam, bin Laden et al on the other. Very well done too.
7. Very impressive transit system everywhere except the old city.
8. Old city also falls down sewage-wise. We can't flush paper, have a little bin instead. Otherwise hotel like the one I had for the conference: all mod cons but small.
9. The cult of Ataturk is alive and well.
10. There really are only 500 people in the world. Yesterday we twice ran into comrades from the conference. Some Egyptian folks at the Blue Mosque, some Taiwanese and a Canadian at the Hagia Sofia.
11. We could live here as long as we could eat in the restaurants. So far the worst was OK, the other very good and very, very cheap.
12. One out of town day booked: to Pamukkale (Google it). Looking at Cappadocia too.
13. Turkish bath/scrub (large hairy man beats you up with rough scrubs and towels, then steams you to mush) in a hamman tomorrow.
More to come, but internet connection unreliable and my mailer seems not to like the homemade batch uploader that sends photos to Flickr. But am trying to clear photos from camera regularly, so here is the link to the photos of this trip (post-conference, if you want the conference stuff for some reason let me know): http://www.flickr.com/photos/dblackadder/collections/
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So today was a High Tourist Day. All that was missing a High Group Tour Guide and a sensor in which was burning a huge wad of cash.
Might as well just come out and say it: we bought a carpet. We like it, it is carry-able and it works with a space we have that has been dying for a rug other than the rag rug we have there now for a long while. So no apologies, no embarrassment, and does anyone want a cat prone to hairballs?
Second, I must have inadvertently stepped on some important and mobbed-up toes, because there I was this afternoon, recovering from having bought a carpet from a nice man whose brother is a close personal friend of Paul Martin's, enjoying a steam bath, when a very large bald hairy man wearing an odd plaid skirt came over to me and started whaling away on me.
Having reduced my legs to uselessness, he punched me repeatedly in the stomach, chopped at my upper body until I was pretty much paralyzed, then gave me two simultaneous 360-degree titty twisters, flipped me over, tried to stick each big toe in an ear to the tune of 'Cracking Spine', leaning on me with his considerable weight concentrated at the point of his elbows, and when I wouldn't (couldn't really, all I had on was a goofy plaid towel with tassels) pay up he threw me in a corner and tossed scalding water on me. Having peeled-off two layers of skin he then worked me over with a sheet of sandpaper before soaping all his fingerprints off my body (evidence doncha know) and sticking a thumb in each ear and doing his best to make them meet in the centre of my heard.
If you ever have a steam bath here I'd suggest that you learn the Turkish phrases for "I'll pay, I'l pay" and "what's the vig?"
OK, enough stupid. It was a Turkish bath and it was fun and the bath we went to has been in business for just over 600 years. And it was painful at the time but you can have a beer after and I am thinking I might just have one (massage, not beer...well, perhaps both) a day until we leave. And mebbe come back for one on a regular basis. And pay to get my assailant...errr...masseuse...a registration number as a RMT in Canada so I can claim the whole thing on my benefits plan. :-)
It was fabulous.
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Bit of minor catch-up now that we're getting ready to pop out for dinner:
1. Burma has a 'right of return' citizenship law, meaning I can take out citizenship if I want to.
2. Geri had fun and you will soon be able to see the photographic proof of it, in the shoe district. $16USD for fab shoes.
3. Silver and pearls district right next to the shoe bit.
4. The grand bazaar fun but mostly touristy stuff or the equivalent of a dollar store The exception being the antiques section. Which was full of stuff from North africa and India. I should have said 'we think' as the thing is immense and we covered only a very small portion.
5. Most shopkeepers in the GT have a prett ydetailed knowledge of Canadian geography. impressive really. Probably better than most Canadians.
6. Only thing we bought was a scarf which Geri got down to 18 from 35 Lira. Much fun.
7. There is a corset shop in the GT for both genders. Frightening.
8. After we bought our carpet and I was carrying it I thought we'd be left alone by the touts, but not so: "Sir, that looks painful, you need another just like it to balance you out." :-) I like the touts here. They have a sense of humour about their work and don't take it too seriously, don't expect you to either.
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Budget-wise, we found it fairly easy. We used points for the flights and the hotel we're in is 30 Euros (it's not as official as Cuba, but tourists are encouraged by merchants to pay in Euros though you can also use Turkish lira, in fact if you do there's a roughly 10% discount) a night. As you can hopefully tell from the photos it is small but comfortable and modern. I was in a smaller room for my conference in the modern part of the city and it was 6-7 times as much I think.
Getting around outside the old city is easy. The transit system is very modern though the subway needs to have about 100 more stations to fully cover the city. There is a tram line that crosses much of the European side of the city with trains coming very frequently. There are buses, some of which have dedicated lanes they don't have to share, even with taxis. And there are tonnes of taxis.
We're not finding walking a problem at all. Lots of hills but none huge. And the sidewalks become stairs where needed.
The only problem I could foresee would be in getting around the old city. It's not accessible and there's no public transport worth mentioning, nor could any fit on the surface. Walking or taxis are the way to go here. Or stay outside this area and take group bus tours into the area now and then (there's lots to see and do in the rest of the city).
Photos are being added as we go along.
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Ours is a strange tribe. Secret signs and rituals, displaying our rank in dress. Today at breakfast each and every table had a bible on it (Lonely Planet I mean). German, English and French. The newbies in cargo pants and hiking boots and quick-dry hoodies. The rest, inevitably going to the same places and doing the same things, in grown-up clothes.
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I think you all may get stuck with more of these missives than you bargained for. Feel free to ask to be taken off the list. Trouble is, we walk and we walk and we walk, then we have lunch and walk some more, but we don't seem to be hungry most days when dinner time rolls around. As with today when we decided to skip it, stay in and watch the rain, up load photos, deal with e-mail and, you guessed it, do postcards, digital and paper.
Hit the Little Hagia Sofia today. Along with the larger edition pretty much one of the five or ten oldest christian churches around, though the Littler is currently in use as a mosque. Very simple, very nice, well worth the 200m walk from our hotel. :-) Plus it still has its bazaar (churches and mosques were often endowed with a bazaar for income from shop rentals) intact and operating after 1500 years (assuming it was built with the church). Some nice little shops, the whole well out of the way. Wonder it's not more popular.
Spent most of today, about 6 hours, at the Topkapi Palace. Much fun, great architecture. Wildly expensive lunch, but it was cold and windy so... Great views from the restaurant. Best bits the jewels and such and the harem. Emeralds the size of baseballs Diamonds the size of ping pong balls. Some wonderfully worked gold (the Topkapi dagger spectacular but not the most so). Candlesticks each of 48kgs of 22 carat gold and covered with literally 1,000s of diamonds. Worker rock crystal that was so fine and so thin that you could mistake it for glass.
Harem fun too. Would love to see the sections closed-off. You can get a peek every now and then and they look fantastic, and well-maintained.
The other fun bit was the relic collection that the Sultans built up over the years. The walking stick Moses used. Probably when he parted the sea, almost certainly he had it under his arm when he was handed the tablets (tho I have always had a problem with the 10 Commandments story. No ratification vote...). The finger of John the Baptist. The Beard of Muhammed, his gold and jewel encrusted sword from a period when he and his followers didn't have a post to piss in. A piece of the cross JC was crucified on. Best of all, the sword David used to kill Golaith. All labeled as though they had just been carbon dated. :-) I guess if the Sultan paid a pile for it, it pretty much has to be genueine, no? Only if it was free or cheap could it be challenged I guess. Would you want to be the one to say "Err, excuse me, but I think Your Highness just dropped a bundle on some chicken bones, wood chips and barber shop sweepings."?
We're off to Pamukkale next Tuesday for the day. Flights were stupid cheap, compared with a 10 hour bus ride it was a no-brainer. One hour flight out about $60 all-in, back about twice that.
Most exciting news of all and every travellers Holy Grail: we found a ritzy hotel not far from ours which has a happy hour hors d'oeuvres buffet that is free. We'll make it a stop each day on our way home for a drink and a free dinner.
Which means I can send even more of these! :-)
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We're close to the mid-point of the holiday portion of the trip and Geri's toe and back could use a break so we're taking a day to hang at the hotel and things nearby, enjoy a bit of sun on the terrace, read, and, yes, do postcards. Beautiful day. I am sitting here watching a steady stream of ships heading from the Med through to the Black Sea. Hardly any coming the other way, I wonder if there are timed traffic patterns? Morning traffic eastbound, afternoons west?
I've lost at least one prior e-postcard that I think was sent, but have also had some get stuck and not go anywhere as the CUPE mail server seems to occasionally decide I am a security risk while here. Apologies for any duplication, the last time it took days for the 'not sent' notification to get to me so I'm going to include some stuff that may have been in a previous message.
1. Love the transit system here. We used the tram (streetcar) yesterday several times and it is up there with Vienna's I think. Toronto's new streetcars should be so good. Under Ford of course it won't matter since they will be sharing what should be an exclusive right of way with cars. Which happens here only in the old part of the city where the streets are narrow. These lovely even down to the multi-lingual stop announcements. We also spent some time on and round Taksim Sq. and so took the funicular that connects the tram line down on the waterfront to the metro station up on the hill at the square. No tourist antiquity, it's a driverless high-tech thingee. Too bad it goes up in a tunnel instead of on the surface though. Nice view of the Bosphorous if it did. There are also commuter trains to the outer suburbs (this a city of 12 million I think). Also almost all very new looking. And electric.
2. I'm never going to develop the ability to speak more than a dozen standard phrases of Turkish. This language right up there with Czech and all the tonal languages as far as difficulty is concerned. But it can be fun to see the Arabic/Moor/Romance/Persian influences and realize that if you speak the word in Urdu or in Spanish or in Italian you suddenly know what it means. Maidan to Meydani for example or Cadde to Calle.
3. Stopped on the main high-end shopping drag, Istklal, for coffee. Facing the windows in comfortable little chairs and suddenly a weird gaggle of Japanese tourists all dressed in electric plastic walked by. Dayglow orange and green and red and whatever coloured plastic clothing and boots. Electric green coat with gold boots just about made me gag. A family/ A club? Street theatre? Then a few minutes later an elderly man came along, re-arranged the flower pots on our window sill to better suit him, smiled at us and walked off.
4. You realize just how clean the city is when in the modern bits. Way cleaner than Toronto for example. Lots of uniformed street cleaners everywhere. Old city has no litter, but is old. But the modern bits sparkle.
5. Nice man showed us how to buy transit tokens yesterday. Everyone like that. You can stop a shopkeeper or tout from trying to take you somewhere or sell you something by asking them directions or how to do something. The pitch stops, they help, everybody smiles, and you can walk off before they get back into sales mode. Very nice.
6. Street food here mostly Turkey's version of bagels, roast corn and roast chestnuts.
7. Just noticed a few days ago that our toilet, and most I have seen, has a nozzle/faucet built-in to the back rim I presume this is the mod con version of the bucket-and-cup substitute for toilet paper that I last ran into in India. Faucet knob on the wall. If pressure sufficient and faucet control fine enough, I could put on a puppet show for myself. Mebbe take photos. :-)
8. Had lunch at Altin Balik on Turnaci just off Istiklal. Wow. Best calamari we ever tasted with an very nice sauce they whipped-up and the local sea bass wonderful. Plus they bring a selection of fresh fish to your table, you pick the beastie you want and tell them how you want it prepared. One very fine meal.
9. Across the street from the second floor of the restaurant was a window either covered with sawdust or containing a room full of sawdust, and some homemade electrical connections worthy of Delhi. So come, eat at this place before it disappears in the fire to come.
10. A shop just off Istiklal sells nothing but booze and potato chips. Reasonable selection of both considering the shop is mebbe 10sm at most. Why go anywhere else?
11. Lots of 'subtle' sexism. As at a restaurant table when I get to taste the wine, I get the bigger pieces of everything and am clearly expected to order for Geri. But some of the complaints I heard at the conference from a young woman travelling outside Canada for the first time may be more about commercial harassment than sexual or gender.
12. Here on our hotel terrace I can see 30+ ships lined-up either for the Bosporus or for one of Istanbul's ports. To my left is Little Hagia Sofia (Little St. Sophia), a 1500 year-old church now a mosque. A little further left are the minarets of the Blue Mosque, and in between is an Ottoman palace on the Asian waterfront of the city. Some kids are playing football on the sports field/community centre across the road, and a nice man is pushing a cart down the street bellowing something that invites folks in the neighbourhood to give him recyclables that he then sells. I wouldn't need to win a whole lot to be able to live like this the rest of my life...
13. I'm keeping pretty much up to date with photo uploading. So if anyone is bothering to look, there are a bunch of new sets. I wish I could convince myself that the photos of buildings like the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi or especially the Hagia Sofia in any way convey how impressive the buildings are, but I can't. Sigh.
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Had lunch in a ritzy restaurant under the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. Way out of our price range, but pretty good, plus it was raining, so...sitting there, watching fishing lines with a half dozen sardines each come up out of the water and disappear up above as the fishers on the roadway pulled in their catch. If it had been warm enough we would have been on the terrace out front, ducking the wriggling fish and the weights at the end of the lines. And there are LOTS of lines. Every metre of waterfront has at least 2 fishers. Later found a bar on the other side of the bridge, beer and a water pipe.
Good thing lunch was first as otherwise watching the fish 'flying' straight up while working the water pipe would have suggested something other than dried apples in it.
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Just quickly (we're both awake in the middleof our night for some reason)...
It was about 8 hours from Toronto to Munich and then about 3 to Istanbul after a change to a Lufthansa flight. We came on points and so had exec class seats. Pods to Munich, the disappointing Lufthansa Business Class from there onwards.
The return flight is through Frankfurt. Unfortunately not ebough of a stop there to justify any time in the Star Alliance exec class lounge. Last time there the 'car wash' toilet seat feature made the extra travel time well worthwhile.
Never felt unsafe. Doesn't mean we weren't of course.
I think all I can say is that no one has shown any hostility in any way. Most actively friendly, and not just folks trying to sell us stuff, but people like the fellow who approached me on the tram platform yesterday when he noticed me taking photos of the New Mosque (new because only 600 years old).
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Now that I'm awake, here are a few more answers:
1. Tipping in taxis is to just round up to the nearest lira. Otherwise a few coins, though at higher-end restaurants 10% is about right and sometimes included in the charge anyway.
2. Weather has been near-identical to Cobourg's.
3. Credit cards everywhere, and better than the US (where we were in September) becuase chip cards are standard here. In this as in many regards, you should expect what you would in any other European country.
4. Better to exchange money at a Cambio than a bank as the charges are less. Banking machines everywhere too
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Odd notes and such this time. Every time??? Geri has a bit of a cold so I am hoping we'll take it easy today and not venture too far from home. So some post-breakfast scribbling on the terrace would seem to be in order. Yesterday was a bit dismal and rained a bit on and off after a few hours of blue skies in the morning. Today the blue seems to be holding. The Sultanahmet area goes from looking washed-out and dingy to pretty in the sun.
1. Only once in all our rides on public transit was Geri not offered a seat by a youngish man. and this without her (mis?)using her cane. :-) But when she has used her cane as when we've had a flu day of hiking around, she has had repeated comments from everywhere from shopkeepers to museum staff about it. Cuban of course, and quite intricately carved.
2. Yesterday in the morning we took a cheap (unguided) cruise up the Bosphorus to the second bridge, not quite to the Black Sea, and back.
3. Fishers really are everywhere along the water. Christopher would fit right in.
4. There's an island not far from the first bridge which is entirely devoted to a couple of restaurants and a cafe. And right next to it is a floating doghouse. Photo to prove, complete with a bird on the doghouse.
5. After, we had lunch in a ritzy restaurant under the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. Way out of our price range, but pretty good, plus it was raining, so...sitting there, watching fishing lines with a half dozen sardines each come up out of the water and disappear up above as the fishers on the roadway pulled in their catch. If it had been warm enough we would have been on the terrace out front, ducking the wriggling fish and the weights at the end of the lines. And there are LOTS of lines. Every metre of waterfront has at least 2 fishers. Later found a bar on the other side of the bridge, beer and a water pipe. Good thing lunch was first as otherwise watching the fish 'flying' straight up while working the water pipe would have suggested something other than dried apples in it. We both quite liked the 'hubble-bubble'. Pleasant apple flavour.
6. We think the anti-smoking laws must be new. Yesterday we could hardly see the no-smoking sign in the bar for all the cigarette, cigar and water pipe smoke. :-)
7. The bar and restaurant (on opposite sides of the bridge but both on the lower level) had fab views of the ferry landings. Quite a show. Continuous and fast.
8. In the bar Swansea vs. A. Villa was on. Swansea getting more cheers. Perhaps out of sympathy: no matter what the game's outcome the team has to return to Swansea. :-)
9. Reading a bit of the local English language papers in our 'free hors d'oeuvres bar'. Parliament just enacted a Council of Europe convention on violence against women Wildly progressive in comparison with our laws. For example arranged marriages are now illegal. Parents can be charged and the marriage itself reversed. But I can't find a definition of 'economic violence' against women. In any case it is now a crime here.
10. Also in the process of amending their constitution. Have to say in many respects their current one, while it has some serious flaws (making the military a kind of constitutional court with the right to stage a coup being one small example), also has some enviable bits. Being secular and so for almost 90 years is one. I find it irksome that I live in a country where a large minority have some other religious belief or none at all but where we all, and our laws, are subject to compliance with the Christian god's rules and regs. Especially while we have a Prime Minister who thinks that The Flintstones was a documentary. It must also be nice to have a head of state who's not only elected but a citizen of the country s/he runs. Oh, and all the legislative bodies of government here are elected...and awake, as far as I can tell. Unlike a certain senate. :-)
11. Where was I before I got all preachy? Ah, yes, the Turkish Constitution. Anyway, the military bit, there since the War of Liberation, is going. And while it will remain secular (it looks like anyway), the current prohibition on any religious display or activity or dress while on public property looks to be going. There will be some provision supportive of religious freedom etc. It recently became possible in law for women to attend university while wearing islamic head scarfs, though not, I think, the full near-purdah clothing. But apparently this change was challenged and it's constitutionality is in doubt so something explicit is to appear in the Constitution.
12. Too bad recognition of minority ethnic rights not in the cards as far as I can tell. Kurds treated like shit here and Kurdish organizations of any kind all appear to be labelled as 'terrorist'. Ditto journos critical of the government. Turkey has more of them in jail than any other country I think. Glad I left my IFJ card at home. :-)
13. Taking photos here starts conversations. Mostly people just smile and say 'welcome'. Probably because that would the limit of their English. But sometimes, as yesterday at the Eminou tram stop, you come across someone with a fair bit of the language and you have a nice chat.
14. The Hippodrome, the Roman horse track, near the Blue Mosque, is closed to most traffic. At the entrances are remote-controlled stainless posts that sink into or rise up from the cobbles when a parking attendant presses a wireless remote button. Stupid I know, but I thought much fun. I used to be a parking lot attendant, bored it would be fun to see if the post motors are powerful enough to lift, oh, say, a garbage truck. A taxi? Or whether they are fast moving enough for a game of chicken with a tour bus. :-)
15. Huge wine industry here. Government can't ban alcohol (see secular constitution above) but does heavily tax all but beer. Some nice wines and some varietals that we have never heard of before. Local only?
16. From the water we got a chance to see the huge Rita-Carleton development in its entirety. Hotel and condos, as in Toronto I think. In the new part of the city's European side it completely dominates the skyline in an area not short of skyscrapers. Remarkably ugly.
Off to walk the area around the spice bazaar, supposed to be the last bit of the old city untouched since the 1950's tourism-wise at least, then our free food bar (the waiter deserves his own entry in one of these e-cards and will get it), then an early night as we're being picked-up around 0500 tomorrow to make our flight to Pamukkale.
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Added a few new folks to the thread. Few of you just slipped through the cracks, another one or two we left off thinking a spouse would pass them along, but then you never know, so....
Getting towards the end of the trip (I can tell because we always through our restaurant budget to the wind and just go for a comfortable spot, regardless if there is a cheaper and possibly even better bit of street food available just outside). :-)
17:45 call to prayer just starting as I write this. Kinda nice, hits us from 3 or more mosques here Not that anybody except the tourists pays attention any more than everyone rushes off to church when the bells ring on Sunday at home.
1. Parks here have lots of clean benches. LOTS. And I think I have yet to see one without a kiddies play area and at least one muni worker sweeping or brushing or washing.
2. On a not-unrelated note, solid waste trucks have 3-man (always men) crews. Nice uniforms too. The Sultanahmet uniform is a nice bright green.
3. In the older parts of town fruit and veg carts are common. Vendor pushes it along, shouting out (I presume) what he has for sale).
4. Lots and lots and lots of cats. And everyone feeds them.
5. Has to be 20+ daily newspapers. Lively, despite the threat of imprisonment under the bizarre (almost as much so as the British) laws re. libel and the rather unique crime of 'insulting Turkishness'.
6. Got a peek at an empty tram car driver's compartment Very star Trek. when I grow up I want to be an Istanbul transit driver.
7. In the old city parking is a world-class sport. People park where and how they can, the city responds with various devices meant to keep cars off curbs and sidewalks etc. But the drivers are both skilled and creative (and on steep hills don't turn their wheels in as it causes the to take up more space). Can also lead to pedestrian traffic jams as tight spaces between parked cars and traffic combines with Turkish politeness ("No, after you...no, after YOU...no...").
8. Stiff climb up to and then part way just up the Galata Tower. 70m or so. Nice view. Sitting inside with a window having tea I could pick out my fellow acrophobes as they slid along the wall and into the window niches when they got to them. Looking very stressed too I should say. I gave it a try but the open railing and narrow deck under my feet was too much. Would have been able to manage it if they had proper safety netting, air bags on the ground, safety harness and ropes, chicken wire wrapping the deck circling the tower, guards along the railing, their arms linked, and a helicopter circling over the waiting ambulances.
9. Only 2 full days here in Istanbul left as tomorrow is out trip to Pammukkale. . Thurs and Fri. The Chora Church's Byzantine mosaics supposed to be spectacular, but after 3 trips to Italy, churches kinda pale. More so after easy-on-the-aye mosques with their geometric decorative designs. The prospect of diabetes-inducing gilt and such not too enticing right now
10. Huge seagull hovering outside our window as we have lunch in the Tower cafe. Muzac system playing 'Three Times a Lady' and 'Can't Stop Loving You'.
11. Istanbul is where tulips came from. Netherlands just controlled the trade. This place in spring makes Ottawa look like a plain lawn.
12. Disappointment: no sufi shrines and all the dervish stuff is faked for tourists.
13. No skateboard or rollerblades seen. Nice!
14. Grand total of two beggars seen, one of them a kid who was rather well-dressed for what he was doing and so may just have been trying it on.
15. Next time we're here: summer, so we can spend more time on terraces. And we'll book cooking classes in advance.
Bye. We need to be up at 0400, so having an early night with the assistance of a couple of large Efes. Some Beyaz white in Geri's case.
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This is likely the second-to-last postcard.
1. Monday night we found a nice little neighbourhood water pipe cafe that may never have seen a tourist before. No alcohol, just a couple of for items, lots of tea and a water pipe for every table. A very nice little cozy spot, if it served beer I'd move in. Server an awkward teenager in leggings who moved like a newborn horse, spoke excellent English. Her parents own the place. Goofy Turkish comedy films on the TV. Lovely spot just outside one of the entrances to the Little Hagia Sofia.
2. The flight out to Denezili went well. The Ataturk airport domestic terminal is dandy, lots of staff for everything and even though they have more security checks, you get through faster because there are more stations. And the security types aren't rent-a-cops, and are mostly women. :-) All spoke English, including the cafe staff.
3. My cold has migrated to Geri.
4. If your ticket and boarding pass say 'be at the gate 45 minutes before departure', do that. A lot of the gates just lead to a bus transfer. Miss the bus and...
5. Men, wear tightish pants when travelling through Ataturk as all belts must come off and a bit of slack can take your pants a long way.
6. Turkish Airlines uses a bunch of Manchester United stars for their safety video. Different.
7. Ataturk's a CAT III airport. Too bad Denezili isn't (see below).
8. We were on an early model A319. New seats and all but the spacing was a reminder of why the 'good old days' are the good old days There was so much knee room people could get the aisle to the window seat without anyone even standing up, let alone having to get out into the aisle and completely out of the way.
9. The flight was early morning. Landscape rugged, small mountains, barren because the wheat and corn harvest is done. Small villages in valleys. Not much water aside from a few large lakes. And some of the lakes appeared to have either salt pans or fish corrals. The former seems more likely to me for some reason.
10. Like most airports here, Denezili's is both civilian and military.
11. The area's big industries appear to be marble/stone works and textiles. Huge textile factories.
12. Our airport transfer took us to the Koray Hotel to wait for the tour start. I would avoid. By Cuban standards a 1.5 star I should think. Heating in the dining...well, really, the everything room...was provided by a wood stove with an over-long horizontal pipe leading to a homemade (and badly) hole in the wall. The hotel also has a door from the third floor bar that leads to nothing more than a three-floor drop. Look for the photo of the door swinging in the breeze.
13. Rural Turkey very, very, very clearly not nearly as prosperous as urban Turkey. Not just Istanbul: the cities and large towns we drove through showed this too.
14. Apartment buildings clearly take some time to complete in rural Turkey as buildings are occupied on the ground floors and up as the upper floors are still under construction.
15. In villages could still see large groups of women getting together to do things to crops to prepare them for eating or storage. All by hand. Regret: driver too fast, couldn't get decent photos
16. First stage of our tour: the Pamkkale necropolis. Cemetery going back to the Greek period. Through Roman, Byzantine periods to 1334 when an earthquake meant it was abandoned. Jewish section from the Roman period. Loved it, but not much to say. See the photos when I get them uploaded (hopefully later today).
17. Ditto the city itself.
18. Small spa-like centre in the national park where an agora (marketplace) sunk in an early earthquake and flooded with hot spring water. Now used as a pool, complete with fallen columns etc. from the Roman period at the bottom.
19. Quite a high-end little place. 25lira just to swim. Plus they have goofy but expensive things like 'doctor fish' treatments wherein you sit in a tank with a bunch of remora-like fish that nibble-off all your dead skin etc. It's the 'etc' that worries me.
20. Full of desiccated German women of a certain age, desiccated German men of a certain age who can be distinguished from the desiccated German women of a certain age only by the fact that they use carbon-fibre walking sticks to go anywhere and everywhere.
21.The calcium deposit cliffs and pools and the walk down the terraces is just amazing. See the photos, but know that they do nothing like justice to the experience. Plus by walking down you feel like the soles of your feet have been exfoliated. Which they have. And scaled by the ater rushing down at the top, frozen by that same water by the time you get to the bottom.
22. While there really was no way around doing a group tour unless we were prepared to spend at least one night out of Istanbul (but then again, see below), we were again reminded why we don't like group tours. There was a museum we would have spent time at if we were on our own, we got stuck in the obligatory visit to an 'onyx factory' which was a sales stop and nothing more, and got to live with other people's enthusiasm for delay.
23. Beer of the day was Efes Dark. Indulged while playing with the cats and watching them go to sleep on my jacket at the spa.
24. Geri's folding stool again proved it's worth. She could rest her back anytime, anywhere. Thing just hangs off my shoulder bag when not in use and folded. Can't weigh much more than and possibly less than 500g.
25. One nice thing about the group tour was meeting a Brit couple. Both a little off-centre. She recently got a free trip to Mexico by volunteering to be a test subject for a drug company with a cholera patch it hopes will replace the shot. I was mildly surprised to find that I am not interested in that kind of free travel. I amy be brighter than I think.
26. There is a town named Batman in Turkey.
27. The restaurant the tour took us to for the included lunch served something that I think can only be described as "dismal food".
24 Back at the Carpak/Denezili airport, which is new and vast and empty, we were told that fog had resulted in our flight being cancelled and we could either get a night in a hotel or a bus ride to an airport 4 hours away at Izmir(ly 4 hours drive away). We took the drive, tried to sleep, made friends with a young Indian couple and sisters from the US, survived, but collapsed into bed when we got to our Istanbul hotel having been up (some bus naps excepted) for something like 28 hours. Izmir airport older but very efficient Interesting, and I think this is true at Ataturk in Istanbul too, there's not much by way of a closed period for flights. Even though residences are visible from the runways.
25. Our second last day: perfect weather but we have low energy. And Geri's cold means she's leaning towards staying in and vegging with her iPad.
26. Red lights in some urban areas have a countdown the way pedestrian crossing lights at home do. A chance to get ready to stomp on it at the earliest opportunity. Not that everyone, including our bus driver on the road to Izmir last night, pays attention to red lights late at night. And drivers in rural areas don't pay a lot of attention to white lines, solid or not.
27. Bus played a Turkish potboiler soap the whole time. By the end I was kinda interested...
28. Turkish politics interesting. AKP religious and extremely right-wing, but really wants into the EU so tidying-up its human rights record. Also clearly plans on replacing the US as it withdraws from the region. Some goofy regional imperial ambitions. References to Cyprus (or the northern bit anyway) as 'our foster-land'.
Ta-ta. Will send on something else if any interesting happens (by my definition, obviously :-) ) before we leave, otherwise just look for a 'home safe and sound' message when we get there and can say that.
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Now in Franfurt in the Lufthansa Biz Class lounge (they have an even ritzier First Class lounge). Nice, as always, and I do enjoy the 'mini car-wash' toilet seats. Been a couple of years since we were last here, good to see they haven't disppeared. Always a bit awkward taking photos though
, so may have to rely on the old ones already on Flickr.This lounge nothing on the Turkish Airlines lounge at Ataturk. Best we've ever seen. Grand piano (with player), pool table, lending library, cinema with mebbe 30 seats, architecturally interesting design...worth the flight on its own.
I added photos of the Ataturk lounge to our Istanbul photo collection.
Anyway, I guess that's about it. Another couple of glasses of champers before we head to the gate. Geri's gagging for some toast, will have to see if they can rustle something up.
Hope somebody got something from all these. Remember most of the posts above were family/friend postcards, so if you can't figure something out or want some further info just ask.
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