Thursday, November 24, 2011

Plane Tickets Bought

Cheapness for me is "in keeping with the mood of the trip" for M. Bearing this in mind we decided not to go with ol' reliable Qantas. It is boring enough not to have had any recorded fatalities since it began in 1951, although union troubles and recent safety scares mean they're probably about due, but it's the image of being chased by a kangaroo on the tailfin of the plane which implies we'll never truly escape which was the clincher for me.

Southern China Air had the cheapest fares to Beijing. Indeed, suspiciously cheap - $200 cheaper than the nearest non-Chinese competitor. Safety reports (above) mean that every dip or rattle during takeoff will provide just that little extra bit of exhilaration. Using a bunch of meta-booking sites like Kayak or SkyScanner that bring together different booking agents from all over the internet, we weighed up our options. All pointed to the Southern China Air website as being the cheapest option. Repeated attempts at trying to buy tickets were thwarted though with the SCA website spitting out HTML code (they had an XML header for a HTML document for some reason) or simplified Chinese text. How can they keep up a plane but not a website?

It was too difficult trying to synchronize bookings between us over the internet M decided. I was worried that we would end up booking different flights. I got home first and, it being payday, set about drinking a six pack. By the time M got home, I was pretty committed to flying East China to Shanghai. The rationale was that the quarter circle between Beijing and Shanghai (between twelve and three o'clock) was not absolutely vital for us to see - we could cut that out and then catch the trans-Siberian out of Beijing. Plus it was cheaper and faster to get there - some diabolical itineraries had a fourteen hour layover between flights.

Eventually we went with East China air to Shanghai . Just a 10 hour flight for $582 each.



Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Sergeant Dunbar and the only tuna pasta that's worth a damn

Sergeant Lex Dunbar understands your life is emptier than an Easter egg mistaken for a Kinder Surprise. He knows you work at the same goddamn job every goddamn day and that couch in front of your TV is perfectly moulded to your ass. You make yourself sick and worse you make him sick.

Sgt. LD is going to change you from Larry Marshmallow to a Jake Ironside. First things first - that belt you've punched three extra holes in since you bought it has to be tightened. That's right money must be saved. So quit cramming your face with luxury pie - it's kibble from now on. Or why not try this quick, cheap and delicious recipe called Smoker's Delight (or the only tuna pasta that's worth a damn):

Smoker's Delight*
The only tuna pasta that's worth a damn
* Smoker's delight is called so because of it's intense flavor. It is said that even smokers who have long since lost their taste and sense of smell are able to experience these senses again when eating this meal.
Ingredients:


Serves 4 pathetic maggots
  • 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
Directions
  1. Boil water in a big pot and add a bit of salt
  2. Cut the chillies and garlic with the biggest fucking knife you can find
  3. Chuck the pasta in and set the timer - don't cook it for too long or the pasta will be limper than your biceps
  4. Chop the parsley
  5. Grate the parmesan cheese - does that makes your arms tired?
  6. 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
  7. Drain pasta and add tuna mixture, parsely and wallnuts
  8. Squeeze lemon over the top
  9. Add parmesan
  10. Eat and sweat - that sweat is the weakness leaving your body
Recipe Courtesy of Alexi Grivas and his "Pasta" book.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Video Game Tourism and the Azeri Oil Rocks

My interest in Azerbaijan stemmed from two completely different sources. The first from my oft-mentioned hero Ryszard Kapuscinski. In Imperium, his collection of reportage about the Soviet Union, his prose moved from the usually concrete and clipped language of a journalist and took on a surreal quality when he described climbing a tower over the Oil Rocks in Azerbaijan's capital Baku.

From the tower I will be able to see the Oil Rocks shine, and Nik-Nik says that I cannot leave until I have seen this. The tower stands in the middle of the sea, the sea is black, although it is called Caspian, and I am climbing up to heaven on stairs that creak because they are made of wood, the whole tower is made of wood nailed together, it reaches to the stars, and although the wind rocks it like a stalk, it stands, gniotsa nie lamiosta (it will bend but it wont break), so on this tower I am climbing up the heaven, it is dark here, actually it is black like the sea, I prefer not to look anymore, I would like to stop, enough is enough, but I can hear Nik-Nik going farther, so I go too, into the darkness, into the abyss, into the chasm.

Whatever drove him to move to the surreal must be worth further investigation. To this end it's worth mentioning a little about the Oil Rocks. They are some of the first Soviet oil rigs, built by in 1949, to access the vast oil reserves that lie under the Caspian Sea. Instead of an isolated concrete and steel platform hundreds of kilometers from the shore, they are actually a series of interconnected islands built on rocks, landfill and mounds of dirt joined to the mainland (see image above). In the 1980s many of the wells dried up and many of the roads sunk into the sea. According to Google sightseeing:

Despite the conditions, the platforms still have a combined population of about 5,000 men, who work in week-long offshore shifts, and collectively they produce over half of the total crude oil output of Azerbaijan.


The second reason why I considered Azerbaijan worthy of a mention on my "must haves" itinerary was that they are the location of a safehouse used to protect the character Khaled Al-Asad in the 2007 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I'm sure it is tempting for many readers to write off as naive and adolescent the desire to travel somewhere based on a fictitious fight against Russian Ultranationalists in a video game, and, phrased like that, indeed it does sound ridiculous.

Nevertheless, for a moment consider the effect that the 2000 film The Beach had on tourism in Thailand, or Lord of the Rings on tourism in New Zealand. The former is not only a glorification of Thailand as an exotic and beautiful setting, it is also an unadorned statement of the backpacker's motives - to stay one step ahead of the main throng of tourists, escape the dull homogeneity and the superficial lies of the tourist highway to find somewhere exclusive and authentic. Tied to this is the extraordinary set of circumstances that are required for this to happen - a secret map is given to the protagonist in The Beach by a mad man. The implication is clear - that the proliferation of salivating westerners, trying to outrun one another is nearly complete. The contradiction of film tourism has never been so succinctly stated - if a film depicts a beautiful setting then the very existence of the film, as an artifice of mass media will result in the destruction of this setting in real life. In short the illusion destroys itself. Despite this message, tourists still flock to go and see Maya Bay in Krabi, Thailand or, if you must, "the beach from The Beach" which is resulting in numerous environmental issues for Maya Bay http://www.gluckman.com/Beach.html.

My point is that in order for a tourist to watch The Beach and still decide that it is a worthy destination despite the fact that the movie also explains, in the very same breath, why it's not, would require such a deliberate suspension of thought on the part of the tourist that we must ask "Is video game tourism so ridiculous?"

What are the differences between film and video games? The first and obvious answer is how "real" they appear - there once was a beach that looked like "The Beach" while "the safehouse" is constructed entirely from the imaginations of developers, that more than likely have never been to Azerbaijan. The argument goes film has an anchor in reality, it is not a projection of someone's imagination. The second difference is how films are a passive form of entertainment while video games are an immersive and interactive experience. Let me deal with these in turn.

For this comparison we need something a little more similar in terms of setting. Consider the difference between The Beach and the acclaimed 2004 game Far Cry. The film is contrived with it's lighting, it's perspective, it's scope, the location which it depicts, all of which are elements from reality which are picked, tweaked and chosen for the purpose of skewing reality so that it is consistent with an imaginary reality. It is interesting to note that Maya Bay was bulldozed to make it wider and sixty palm trees were planted specifically for the film. Both, Far Cry and Maya Bay have "breathtaking cliffs", "corel [sic] beds" and "transparent seas" quoted directly from the Maya Bay tourism site. It is the fidelity of the imaginary projection that is higher in film, than in video games because the reality is constructed from a composition of elements borrowed from actual reality making the projection more realistic. A computer game, on the other hand, is a synthesised imitation, as opposed to a composition.

The implication here is that as the fidelity increases in video games and imitation of actual settings can be achieved more accurately people travelling to various locations because they have played them in video games, or video game tourism, will become ever more prevalent.
This is accentuated by the fact that increasingly our world is a constructed one, a patchwork dreams, strung together from movies, advertisements of all forms and various other forms of mass media (ahem video games) as opposed to first hand experience.

This brings me to the second difference which is the degree of interactivity required of the audience in video games. I'd posit that there is a far more substantial barrier between the viewer when they watch a movie than with a player enjoying a video game. It is almost superfluous to say that this is because the player is able to exercise a degree of control over the movements and events within the game that are just not possible in a film. The real question is how is this likely to affect video game tourism in the future? Let me answer this question with another question: Have you ever spent holidays glued to your PC or console? Was it enough of an escape to experience a world by proxy through a character on the screen? If I am being too cryptic - the second difference might serve as a counter-point to the first - instead of wanting to travel somewhere because one has seen it in a video game, experiencing this place through a video game could become sufficient. It brings to mind Total Recall and the Philip K Dick story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" on which the movie was based. So in the future instead of rocking around a South-Pacific atoll with an M4 Carbine would it be enough to dig your toes in the sand and feel the water lapping at your toes. Either way it is worth considering the two meanings of the phrase "Video Game Tourism".



Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Pimsleur Russian

I walk to work down what must be one of the ugliest streets in Sydney (Regent St). If I'm not enjoying any of the sights down this concrete smog filled corridor I may as well learn something while I do it. It was this line of reasoning that had got me onto Pimsleur. It was recommended to me by a friend of mine - on the basis that it was made in the 70s, was invented by a linguist that studied the way which people learn a language and it's what the FBI and CIA use - both of which must have a profound understanding of other languages and cultures (sic). I am now about two thirds of the way through which means that I have done about 30 hours. There are ninety lessons split up in to three parts of 30. I religiously do one half hour lesson on my way to work each day - this way I'm insulated from the junkies asking me for money and, if you prescribe to the school that turns up the car radio when they fart, from the smells of that terrible street too.


The Good
My generation was brought up in front of commercial TV. Our food was loaded with chemicals and I'm pretty sure the rooms we grew up in still had lead in the paint. This means our attention spans suck. Not a good asset when trying to learn a language - especially when you're relying solely on your non-primary sense, hearing.
Pimsleur do a pretty great job of getting different words through without me tuning out. Their technique is basic: teach you a word in a context, repeat, change the context of the word, get you to translate the word in a sentence, then translate the same word in a different context. Pretty soon you have at your disposal a bunch of words which you will continue to use as you learn new ones - keeping them fresh.
Early on this is great for making the content stick in your head. By the second part the gaps in audio, when you are expected to translate something into English have reduced in length, so you really need to know it straight away otherwise they start giving you the answer before you've finished. I found I had to repeat some of the lessons or even some blocks of lessons until I really remembered the content.
You begin by learning the really important stuff right off the bat. "I don't understand" "I don't speak Russian" "Do you speak English?" "Can you repeat that?". Later there is content about travelling, asking directions and buying things - which is all invaluable.
They somehow managed to stopped me from getting bored which is a small miracle but it's difficult to know how much of that was due to me being able to repeat whatever Russian I was hearing in a menacing voice to be overheard by a "norm" at the lights.

The Bad
A lot of the content of the course seems to be geared towards the jetsetting businessman who is also a closet alcoholic (we learn "wine" and "beer" almost before anything). The bulk of the beginning of the course is all about eating and drinking and inviting people to places. It seems pretty formal - it wasn't until about twenty lessons I found out that there was an informal way of addressing people.
They gloss over a lot of the grammar, or rely on you to learn it implicitly - that is don't explain the rules to you directly, instead expect you to work them out from the context of numerous sentences or pieces of dialogue.

The Weird
There are some awesome conversations like lines taken from French New Wave cinema as well as some poor desperado who just doesn't get that a girl is not really interested in going out with him.

Man: Would you like to get something to eat at 3?
Lady: No
Man: At 4?
Lady: No
Man: At 5?
Lady: No
Man: At 6?
Lady: No
Man: At 7?
...
Man: At 12?
Lady: No
Man: Would you like to get something to drink at 3?
Lady: No
Man: At 4?
Lady: No
Man: At 5?
Lady: No
Man: At 6?
Lady: No
Man: At 7?
...
Man: At 12?
Lady: No, you don't understand.
Man: I don't understand?
Lady: You don't understand Russian.

Nice one Casanova.

The gender roles are pretty old school. I remember one lesson a wife is asking her husband for money so she can go out and buy a pretty hat.

All lessons are taught to you by three voices - one male, one female and the narrator is a male voice too. For the first forty or so lessons, these three voices are polished as if from people who take out the silver spoon from their mouths only to help themselves to more luxury pie. Out of nowhere at the fortieth lesson the non-narrator male voice gets the boot and is replaced by a gravelly harsh voice. It sounds like someone that sleeps under a bridge and smokes Pall Malls but is a welcome change in pace.

Conclusion
It's a pretty massive call to be able to teach a language in 45 hours face-to-face let alone over tape. All in all I'm pretty happy with how it's gone but it's definitely not enough on it's own to learn a language. I still haven't got to the end but I have a sneaking suspicion I will not be able to understand the news in Russian by then. I am not sure how to bridge this gap.

Book Review: Jupiter's Travels by Ted Simon

In my opinion, travel plans are like children, best conceived when you have had a bit to drink. My latest plan, and the wildest yet, was created in this manner but it was only through websites like Horizons Unlimited that brought it from the lofty heights of "just imagine" to the ground-floor of "holy shit, this is actually possible". I am probably showing my reliance on technology here but, for me, what makes Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels so remarkable is he had the courage to make a trip in an age when his access to information from other travelers would have been extremely limited by comparison. Perhaps no-one had completed a similar trip on a motorcycle before him, indeed his itinerary must have been remarkable and unique enough at least to warrant the Sunday Times sponsoring him and running regular updates on his progress.

The raw data of his itinerary is considerable in itself - Ted Simon rode 63,000 miles over four years, beginning in 1973, in which he traverses every non-polar continent, reaching 55 countries. Naturally just dropping numbers like this does the book little justice because the most important part of "adventure motorcycling" is the first word. Here, again, Simon clocks up some real corkers of which I will only describe a few so as not to ruin too many surprises. Early in the piece Simon is about to cross the border into Egypt which is in the closing stages of the Yom Kippur war. Naturally he is quite apprehensive about crossing, having been told by many people he meets beforehand, in Tunisia and Libya, that he will not be allowed through. After a fairly large amount of official bullying, in the form of spurious red tape, he is allowed in. He is ecstatic. A few miles further however he realises he has dropped his wallet somewhere after this crossing:
The wallet contained driving licenses, vaccination certificates, credit cards, photographs, currency and an address book. Losing it seemed like an overwhelming disaster.
When in a panic he returns to look for it he sees someone bending down, picking something up off the road. This person waves him through and he goes. It's not till later he realises that the man is probably picking up his wallet. While most people would have chalked this down to carelessness Simon allows it to cut to the very core of his masculinity:
I had thought I was a man...I was after all just boy quailing before the first figure of authority that came my way.
It is difficult to work out if Simon is relentlessly self-analytical because it is a natural feature of his personality, his writing or simply the natural mode of someone who is travelling for four years alone on a motorcycle. What it does provide is one of the most interesting aspects of this book - he is flawed and human and extremely honest, documenting self-doubts so candidly and forcefully that one could be under the impression that he has a slight masochist bent. The reason his personality is so interesting is because it is not one you would automatically equate with someone that would make such a trip. Before having read this I would naturally assume that anyone who spent four years alone travelling around the world would have to be almost superhuman, eternally positive, constantly relaxed and cordial. This superman would have little room for sensitivity and self-criticism especially on a scale which Simon has it. Simon gets tetchy, sulky, bored and weary all fairly often. Yet it is these very features that render the texture of his journey so compelling and provides the bridge between the story and the reader. In other words - "he's so human and he did it - why can't I?"

The book also works as a piece of history. It is superfluous to say the world in 1973 was a very different place to what it is today. His adventures are very much of-the-time. He spends a few months in Californian hippie commune, is arrested and jailed in Brazil for being a spy but the most interesting such passage is when he comes across the last islands of colonialism in Kenya. A hundred miles from the equator he meets the Thompsons on a farm that looks like "Sussex England" complete with flowers and hedgerows. Authur Thompson has African domestic help and is fully aware that his way of life is dying. Simon provides an account that shows their way of life as noble, in both senses of the word, and anachronistic, even for 1974. It is a fascinating account, bordering on the surreal of how the English, as well as most European colonial powers, were able to import their way of life, right down to the English furniture in the house into a completely alien context. Simon hits a melancholy note, rightly or wrongly, when he depicts the stoicism with which the Thompsons approach the fact that their way of life is inevitably ending, saying that the "Kenyan government is bound to buy us out soon". When this happens they plan on going to South Africa, instead of back to the England which they've tried so hard to recreate. While not arguing in favor of colonialism the subtext here is that these people will soon be forever displaced - that their home will cease to exist. This is particularly resonant considering the book as a whole and the inevitable fact of any such journey, namely that sooner or later it must end, and once it does how can anyone return to a normal way of life, or in the words of Thomas Wolfe - "You can't go home again".

Unless you want to employ a fragmented narrative, the pace and tone of the account is set by the travel itself. This is a failing of Jupiter's Travels which begins ecstatically and furious in North Africa but ends weary and subdued at the end in India. The tipping point for me was Australia, which starts with one of the most hilarious passages in the entire book in which Simon attempts to dispel, but ends up confirming the Australian stereotype in which women dress in a scandalous manner. It's worth quoting at length with the qualifier that Simon nowhere else employs language that today would end up raising more than a few eyebrows and perhaps some law suits too:
I saw women who had apparently slipped offstage during the interval of a matinee performance of Cabaret. They looked as though anything less than rape might be mistaken for indifference. I noticed that many men wore tailed shorts with cute little slits up the seams like cheongsams to show a little extra flash of thigh, and the obscene thought crossed my mind that maybe they were hoping to be raped as well.
Back to the pacing - above the natural ebb and flow of the journey one can discern that, for Simon, the constantly new is beginning to get a little old. He combats this with the overarching theme from which the book get's it's title. The book begins at the end where Simon is marooned by the side of the road in India - he is helped and ends up at a Raj's house. The Raj is having a wedding at his estate and Simon features at a celebrity guest. Simon is told that the Raj's is a clairvoyant and wants to speak to Simon. The clairvoyant tells Simon:
You are a very determined soul. This is reflected in your mind. You are Jupiter
This falls slightly flat and consequently the overarching theme of the book feels a bit tacked on as if it's trying a bit too hard to provide unified meaning to something that is inherently chaotic and random as a trip around the world. Luckily because it is tacked on and there are no trite attempts at tying moments in travel to Simon as Jupiter - the rest of the book is insightful and brilliant account of a courageous and thoroughly entertaining journey.

16/10/2011 - The Motorcycle Maintenance Course

M and I signed up for a motorcycle maintenance course run by the St George and Sutherland Community College. It runs over two Sundays (five hours each day) and is the longest course this side of a complete mechanics certificate. All for $145 in total.Link here: http://www.sgscc.edu.au/search/?keyword=motor. The two days were split into the first which was basically theory based while the second is where you get your hands dirty.
On the first day we got up real early - and rode from Erskineville to Jannali. We got there about ten minutes late and I took a chair next to a bathtub that I later found out contained molasses. It was hot and we were in a metal shed and I don't know a lot about molasses except it prevents rust, smells like it's good for dissolving human bone and tissue and is vomit inducing if you sit next to it hungover in a hot shed.
Our teacher's name was John. He was a straight shooter with crooked teeth, was in his late fifties with the skin of someone that has spent enough time outdoors to know something about how to fix things. He smoked incessantly throughout the class. The twelve students, myself included, seemed to consist of inner-city types that go around in tough leather jackets but have hands like lilies. I guess we were all there to change that. This became most obvious when we went through all our tool kits that came with the bikes and lived under the seats. Most of us didn't know what they were but one guy had removed his entirely and replaced it with hair-gel and a bottle of cologne.
The teaching began at a very elementary level including:
  • how to safely work on your bike
  • what tools you absolutely need
  • what the similarities and differences between bikes
We then looked at all the bikes - lined up. We then:
  • 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
He noticed that my bike brake pads needed changing and we all wanted to change our oil. Some people wanted to add some components like another horn. John was cool with all these things and the beauty with having a second Sunday was that we could buy the components we needed during the week (I bought a new oil filter, o-ring, brake pads and crush washer) then attach them the next week.
He asked us what all our bikes were called - because we were all newbies to the motorbike world we had not even considered naming our bikes. He surprised us all when he said his was called Steve. I rode Steve here? Weird.
The second Sunday was all work. All eleven of us (one of the guys did not turn up for the second day) put all our bikes in the shed. Somehow I was hungover again but this time it was mercifully cold. I spent the day under my bike sweating and swearing. I even started to spit on the ground every now and again to make the whole experience a little more authentic. If I had thought about it then I would have got a nudie calendar and stuck it on the wall. John was immensely helpful throughout the whole thing. He never seemed to tire of helping everyone out. I changed my brake pads, changed the oil and checked the sparkplugs. John showed us how to change the brake fluid. By the end of the day I felt that I had a much better understanding of how motorbikes - specifically my motorcycle worked. John said that if we wanted to it would be cool for us to come back when the course was running and fix our bikes under his guidance free of charge. Right on.

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:

  1. 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
  2. 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.

  1. 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

I left work early, hoping that the heavy grey clouds would not bear any fruit. I’d made it to just outside The Clare, about a hundred metres before they did. I stood under the awning, listening to Christopher Hitchens and waited for the rain to subside. It had been a hot and muggy day and I hoped that this was just a short downpour which would normalise the heat and take the moisture out of the air. I stayed there for about twenty minutes, watching the gutters fill with water and the buses zoom past, splashing UTS students and workers. No one seemed prepared for the rain, only about one in ten had umbrellas. Before I had left work I looked up the weather on the internet - I had never looked for more than a binary state in weather reports - it was either sunny or raining but “showers” said to me a brief tantrum of rain and then everything would glisten then go mat again.

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.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Introduction

A pen is the most fearless explorer and when I printed out half the world on an A4 sheet and got out my red felt-tip pen I had an inkling that my movements were at best a bit optimistic. It was in April 2010 that I drew a line that began in Pyongyang, moved through Beijing, up into Mongolia, back south through Nepal, then India. It continued effortlessly to Pakistan, Central Asia, Caucasus and then Ukraine where it met the map’s edge. The pen had no idea about mountain ranges or visa’s or even if there were roads. It was fuelled by a source that was both clean-burning and intoxicating. It was also completely unrealistic. It didn’t really stop M and I, both of us at work, communicating over Gmail from constructing completely elaborate and ridiculous itineraries. Who cared where the money was supposed to come from or about political situation in Kashmir, just make sure we go around Afghanistan because that place is nuts.