Thursday, November 24, 2011
Plane Tickets Bought
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Sergeant Dunbar and the only tuna pasta that's worth a damn
- 300g tin of tuna - anything less than Sirena - you may as well be stuffing your face with dirt
- 3 cloves of garlic
- handful of parsely - continental or flat leaf? what the hell kind of question is that?
- 250g worth of pasta - spirals work the best but you probably like the itty bitty bow ties like your mamma used to make you wear.
- 1 lemon
- handful of walnuts
- 2 chillies
- Tablespoon of olive oil
- parmesan
- A shitload of salt and pepper
- Boil water in a big pot and add a bit of salt
- Cut the chillies and garlic with the biggest fucking knife you can find
- Chuck the pasta in and set the timer - don't cook it for too long or the pasta will be limper than your biceps
- Chop the parsley
- Grate the parmesan cheese - does that makes your arms tired?
- Heat up oil in a saucepan, throw in garlic till it goes translucent (see through you idiot) put in chillies and tuna - cook for a few minutes
- Drain pasta and add tuna mixture, parsely and wallnuts
- Squeeze lemon over the top
- Add parmesan
- Eat and sweat - that sweat is the weakness leaving your body
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Video Game Tourism and the Azeri Oil Rocks
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Pimsleur Russian
The Good
Book Review: Jupiter's Travels by Ted Simon
16/10/2011 - The Motorcycle Maintenance Course
- how to safely work on your bike
- what tools you absolutely need
- what the similarities and differences between bikes
- checked the brake pads
- opened up the seats to check out the electronics
- identified the oil filter and sump plugs
- braking systems
- chains and how many cylinders each bike has
The Must Haves
Once we finally began to do a little research things got a lot more difficult. Renting a motorbike in China is a nightmare, getting vehicles through a border is a shitfight, you can’t go in here if you have a visa from there etc. But there were a few ‘must haves’ like pins stuck to a corkboard that anchor red string, the routes between them changed but they did not. The ‘must haves’ were:
- The East Coast of China: The second largest growing industry in China is tourism and the vast majority of tourism is internal. It’s only when I think about it for more than a fraction of a second I realise that I have the most superficial understanding of China. That knowledge is quite indirect. I’m actually looking forward to seeing a country without many expectations, a clean slate. Plus they have stuff like this, The Deadly Train to Mt Huashan: http://35mm.instantfundas.com/2008/12/deadly-trail-to-mt-huashan.html
- The Caucasus: I was heavily into reading Kapuściński at the time I was initially planning the trip. He wrote a book called Imperium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium_(Polish_book) which paints the Caucasus as a complex and passionate region full of ancient alliances and grudges. How can you go past passages like this:
What caught my eye? That despite the stiff rigorous corset of Soviet power, the local, small, yet very ancient, nations, had succeeded in preserving something of their trandition, or their history, of their, albeit, concealed pride and dignity. I discovered there, spread out in the sun, an Oriental carpet, which in many places still retained its age-old colors and the eyecatching variety of its original designs.
This was written while these nations were under Soviet rule. They have since thawed and allowed to reemerged. Plus I’ve never met anyone that has been there.
- Prypiyat (Chernobyl): I spoke to a Danish man at a youth hostel in Berlin over a few beers. He was telling me about a trip he had taken to the site of Chernobyl. He told me about a visit to the hotel, situated very close to the power station that reached critical mass and began to melt down in 26 April 1986. He and a friend were walking through the hotel which had been evacuated so hastily that everything had been frozen in that moment - like an unintentional museum. He asked the guide, a Ukrainian soldier, if he could kick down one of the locked doors in the hotel. I remember the Danish man, impersonating the guide, shrugged his soldiers. So they kicked down the door. Inside was a hotel room with a pair of pants still folded over the end of the bed.
Russian
In June 2010 I left to do exchange in San Francisco and travel around Mexico with Giulia, my girlfriend, while M remained in Sydney. The idea stayed in it’s embryonic form as unrealised potential - to have it’s nuts and bolts woked through once I returned. While I was away the lease on M's palce was up. He proposed that we begin a new sharehouse with James, another good friend. I had a vision of a “war-room” a big desk surrounded by maps of the world, each one annotated with pins and post-it notes - detailing every border crossing, necessary stopping points, potential risks and all other details that had yet to materialise.
When I finally got back from America in March 2011 things had to be done quickly. If established correctly, over the next six months, skills could be attained and improved in a way only a steady routine can provide. I got my motorbike license before I had been back for more than a few weeks, got a job and moved out into the new sharehouse.
Before I travelled around Mexico I had made an attempt to learn Spanish. Giulia and I had sat down for an hour every day and had gone through the Rosetta Stone language program. For those who don’t know it, Rosetta Stone is a computer aided language learning. You match words with pictures, written text with spoken words and even speak to the program during each lesson, it corrects your pronunciation. We had worked quite hard, in the weeks before we went to Mexico, and were ruthless with our self-assessments - anything under 90% meant we had to repeat the lesson. Driving our van up to the Mexico-US border at Tecate, I was quite confident that I had a natural affinity for learning languages. It was only moments later, in the customs office, a Mexcian guard sitting, his feet on the desk watching hysterical Mexican soaps, that everything I had learned seemed completely inadequate or irrelevant. I resorted to the practice that I considered a ghastly idiocy, adding an O on the end of a English words to Spanishify them. I was lucky that passporto was actually a word.
During my two months in Mexico my Spanish improved then stagnated then began to deteriorate when the finish line was in sight. The thing that I had learnt, obvious as it seems for anyone that has travelled outside Europe is that not everyone speaks English.
With this in mind I decided that I absolutely needed to learn a language. I had read that Russian would be the best - for everywhere but China and Western Europe - most places would have been part of the USSR and thus, the older generation, at least, would be able to speak Russian. Learning Russian in under a year was a big ask. The Foreign Service Institute says that learning Russian to an intermediate level takes 1095 hours - that’s more than an hour a day for three years. I had to work to eat and so didn’t have the luxury, that I, quite honestly, thought I deserved, which was sitting around all day learning foreign languages. I limited myself to a class in the excellent continuing education courses at the University of Sydney, done once a week for a few hours, and the Pimsleur Language course, done as a half hour audio lesson every day for 90 days. This two pronged attack would be my best shot at learning something usable whilst travelling around. Almost every phrase I learnt, I recited with the picture in my head of using it to communicate some vital piece of information with a Azeri service station owner in a flyblown corner of Baku on the Caspian.
The Motorbike
The idea of taking this grand tour on a motorbike came the first time I saw a Enfield Bullet, the font of the Royal Enfield on the fuel tank that was shaped like a bicep, reminded me of English colonial graphic comics for boys. They always told heroic and ludicrous stories that appeals to the pre-rational male (ie boy). It promised me some sort of connection with this past that was far more invented than real but still seductive.
Enfield Bullets are still made according to the 1940s casts that the English left when they left India in 1945. I did find out that it was the done thing, almost to the point of cliche in the adventure biking world, to buy an Enfield Bullet and ride it around India. Why not buy one in India and ride it through Nepal? About a million reasons revolving around disputed regions, multiple entry visas, insurance, the seasons and time.
8/11/2011 - Riding in the Rain
Twenty minutes later I was at Central station. A voice came over the loudspeaker, still hollow through the peak-hour rush
“Trains have been hit by lightning - there are major delays on all tracks”
Should I go home and get my bike? I got to the platform and the sky looked moody but like it was clearing up. I decided the best option, and the one I secretly wanted, was to get the train home - get my bike and ride it to my grandmothers place to have dinner. I called her - she had not forgotten our dinner date - so it was on.
I just got home when the heavens opened up for a second time. Not a good omen. I waited and again the sky looked clear and if it might resist the urge to let loose again. Technically we had had showers (the plural) so it was time to go. I marshaled my courage - got changed into my armour, mounted my bike and left. I felt nervous pulling out of the small alley behind my street - all the people in cars looked so protected. I glimpsed two people smiling and talking in there - blissfully unaware of my anxiety. I took it easy. It was not until I was just over the harbour bridge that the heavens opened up in earnest. Rain hit my helmet like small pebbles, it stung my eyes. My rear tire had gone flat a few weeks earlier and I had taken it into the mechanic to get plugged. I remember him telling me that the tire had about a thousand k’s left on it before I would have to get it replaced - surely a situation that would be exacerbated by the wet. Occasionally when I pulled off at lights too quickly I could feel my bike would rotate to the left, pivoting on the front wheel. It was only when the tire would gain traction, jolting forward that I realised it had been spinning. I put my visor down and went on - I could feel my top half get sodden but even though I could see my pants glisten with moisture they felt dry.
Eventually I made it to my grandmother’s place - I felt tense. We had a great dinner and I talked about my trip with them but then it was time to leave.
When I mounted my bike for the way back I felt looser, much more relaxed - my control was much more sure. Even though the rain was harder this time. The closer to the city I got the harder the rain fell. This time however there was an odd quiet, one that is achieved through solitude and adversity - when the chatter of your mind dissolves and all you have is the present. I went home a different way so that I would not have to pay the toll over the harbour bridge. Over the Gladesville bridge I could see every pothole, every imperfection in the road clearly - even though this time I had my visor down and it was covered in rain drops. Was this the birth of a new instinct?
By the time I got back to Erskineville I was soaked, my leather jacket felt and looked like lead. People were shielding themselves on the footpaths and water flowed from right across the entire road, from gutter to opposite gutter. I pulled into the alley behind my house. Let myself in the backyard, and into the house - the rain was hitting the corrugated iron like a drumroll. The quality of the rain was absolute this time - not some strange physical relative motion experiment whereby it feels heavy when you’re on your bike but to standing observer it is just a drizzle. I let myself into my house, had a scotch, smoked a cigarette and watched the rain come down.