TRAVEL WORDS

sLOVEnia – then and now

I step out of the bus into the bright light and look around. In front of me is the railway station; a good example of Austro-Hungarian architectural style. Across the busy dual carriageway is a tree-lined park with minor streets and avenues leading to the old city centre. Nothing looks familiar: I look around hoping that some kind of recognition will take place, but I have no memory of this place – neither the station nor any of the streets.

Usually when I return to a city my memory clicks into place as smoothly as a child’s jigsaw puzzle. Not today though. I sigh. The smells are all wrong, the noises are wrong and the colours are definitely wrong. As the sun burns down on my skin and the noise of the buses and cars fill my ears I remember the last time I stood in this spot…

I stepped out of the lorry and into the gloom of a wet late autumn afternoon. The driver clasped my hand, grinned and bid us goodbye. A part of me was relieved to have reached this little border town of Ljubljana in northern Yugoslavia. The journey through the Austrian Alps with its hairpin bends in torrential sleet and rain, was not the most relaxing, but as the heavy rain ran down the back of my neck and soaked through the shoulders of my jacket I craved the warmth of the cab. We headed to the information booth inside the railway station to try to find a room to stay the night. Camping was definitely out of the question.

A grey-haired woman in the booth gave us directions to a house nearby with a room to let. When we reached the address we looked up at the multi-storey building in dismay. Its concrete façade was black in the rain and the huge solid door seemed quite forbidding. Jon raised the heavy brass knocker shaped like a fish and let it fall. The noise was like a gunshot and startled me. After an interminable while we heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock and the door slowly opened. A diminutive grey-haired woman dressed in black stood before us, unsmiling. We asked her about a room for the night, speaking hesitantly in German and miming laying our heads on a pillow. A brief movement of her head indicated for us to step inside. As we stood dripping onto the tiled hallway floor we heard her locking the door behind us. I shivered: this did not feel good.

The woman beckoned us to follow her up the wide staircase with intricate wrought-iron balustrades to the second floor where she unlocked a drab brown door and waved us inside. The room was huge with high ceilings and a large sash window on one wall. Despite the size of the window the room was very gloomy mainly due to the still falling rain, but also the furnishings – a very large old-fashioned dark brown wardrobe dominated the main wall, twin metal beds with thin brown blankets faced the window, with a small worn rug between them on the brown linoleum floor. The only decoration was a dull painting of a castle in dark browns and greys in a dark wooden frame. My heart sank – but at least it was dry – and cheap.

Not wanting to go back out into the storm, we heated some soup on our little gas stove glad of the warmth it gave out and then climbed into our sleeping bags to keep warm. It was not a great night for sleeping. The rain lashed down onto the windows, which rattled in their sashes. The beds were hard and uncomfortable and someone in the next room had a hacking cough. Eventually an overcast dawn broke through the darkness and we could get up and get on our way. The rain had stopped and a watery sun attempted to shine, but the wind was blowing from the Alps and was tinged with snow. Standing at the side of the main road to Belgrade we shivered in this grey unwelcoming communist country…

Then was October 1973 and we never did get that lift. By mid afternoon we abandoned our vigil and returned to the station to get a train through to the capital city of Belgrade and on into sunny Greece. Neither of us wanted to spend another damp, cold night in Ljubljana.

Now is June 2012: a cloudless azure blue sky, the sun caressing my skin and the light so bright it makes my eyes hurt. Walking into the centre of the city I find it to be filled with charming cobbled squares, baroque churches and brightly decorated art nouveau architecture. It is vibrant with pavement cafés lining the riverside and young people sit and drink their coffee and beer. A lot has changed in this region in the intervening years – Yugoslavia is no more and Ljubljana is now the young capital city of Slovenia and even the station got a face-lift in 1980 and the only grey-haired lady appears to be me!

Life is cheap in Africa

Born into the family of a civil servant in the affluent suburbs of Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia he was a middle child and as such suffered from middle child syndrome. Squeezed in the middle unsure of his niche in the world, he became a loner. As a young man he was drafted into the artillery in the Rhodesian army where he learned that having a beer or three helped him overcome his shyness. He was once chased by an angry hippo and had to hide in a tree until it forgot about him. He never knew before how fast a hippo could move. He rolled his first car and arrived bloody and disorientated on the doorstep of a young white woman who probably saved his life. He gained a third eye.

Drifting south from his land-locked country he found himself in Cape Town where he had not one, but two oceans to play in. He learned to sail. He dreamed of taking his boat, the Jenny Wren, across the Atlantic to South America in the Cape to Rio race. He was a romantic dreamer.

He married in haste and divorced just as quickly. He started a new love affair with cheap red wine and a young abandoned mother. He had a brief sojourn to Europe where he soaked up the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but was less impressed with the Britons. He missed the warmth of the African sun on his face and returned with a new wife and child. His return to South Africa coincided with Mugabe being given his country through the Lancaster House Agreement. His country changed its name and the place where he was born no longer existed.

A few years later Mugabe took away his birthright and he became very bitter about the loss of his beautiful country. His manic drinking consumed his life and slowly, but surely, his friendships died. He hit a blue period and the bottle took away his job, his wife and his children. He almost sank without a trace, but fate wasn’t ready to release him yet.

With nothing left he abandoned the coast and retreated to a family farm close to his elderly parents and tried to restore his fragile health by meditating under the fragrant orange trees and reading tomes about alternative religions. Sipping gins on the terrace he cast aside his other dreams and headed once more for the city of gold, though there was nothing particularly golden about his life there. Work filled his day and most of his nights as he battled with depression and the meaning of life.

The local township inched closer and closer to his boundaries with marauding bandits breaking in to his house – again and again. Disturbing one such person he was shot in the lung whilst giving chase. An inch away from puncturing his heart. With the surviving lung he dragged his lifeline out of the corridors of the hospital to have a cigarette, even though this resulted in a paroxysm of coughing.

By now the drinking had stopped. He had realised that there was no future in the bottom of a bottle, if indeed he had a future at all. Smoking was much harder to give up and with only one lung, breathing. not to mention life, was becoming a struggle. In the country everything rose – bills, food, petrol, crime. Everything that is except for his salary.

Then on a late summer’s evening whilst in the kitchen feeding his beloved Ridgebacks, something good to come out of Rhodesia, his luck finally ran out. A round of bullets sprayed through the window hitting him in the chest and killing one dog outright. He slumped to the floor, bleeding profusely and fumbled for his phone to call a neighbour for help.

As he lay dying beside one fatally wounded dog and the other one injured, he watched the rest of his life slowly leak away across the kitchen floor, helpless and alone. He was fifty-six.

They took his phone, his computer and a small amount of cash.

Life is cheap in Africa.

R.I.P. my anti-hero who died 28 February 2006.

Counting the Cost in Camels

Iranian / Afghani border @ Maschhad / Herat – November 1973

Having failed to reach the border in time (it closed at 6 pm) we found ourselves spending the night in a huge warehouse on the outskirts of Maschhad, Iran. I was amused to see an Australian couple roll out their rather large and lovely Persian carpet to sleep on. Goodness knows whether they ever managed to get it back to Oz.

Early in the morning we caught a bus to the border where we had to walk through no man’s land to the other side where we could catch an Afghan bus to Herat. It took hours to get through the border. The bored Afghani border guards were very keen to have some fun by offering to buy some of the females amongst us with anything from cash to camels!

Although in my head I knew (well hoped) that these border officials would not do anything illegal, I have to confess to being slightly worried at their comments. When half a dozen men with thick beards and black piercing eyes surround you, you begin to feel uncomfortable. When these same men are holding Kalashnikovs and sabres in sheaths at their sides you start to feel even more vulnerable and when one of them grins at you and strokes your hair with the end of his machine gun, you become decidedly jumpy. If he really fancied you for a ‘wife’ what could any of the dozen or so westerners actually do to prevent him?

Smiling inanely at the guards (I did not wish to offend) I handed over my precious blue British passport to be stamped. The man behind the desk looked at me for what seemed like hours studying my face and then the photograph. I tried not to feel embarrassed, but could feel the heat rising from my cheeks. He spoke aside to his colleagues who also looked at me and grinned fiercely. I have no idea what they were saying, but I knew I was blushing. Suddenly the main guy pointed at me and said,

“Thirty five camels”

his face breaking into a huge grin showing black and broken teeth amongst the mass of facial hair. Was he really suggesting that my travelling friend sold me in exchange for nasty, smelly, spitting camels?

My friend coughed nervously. He shook his head before glancing at me to gauge my reaction. I frowned – was I being undersold? Was he even serious?

“Fifty camels then, a very good deal”

I raised my eyebrows. How far was he prepared to go? The guard closest to me stroked my hair once again, grinning mindlessly and I was beginning to wish I had covered it as it seemed to be attracting too much attention. I was definitely not keen on this machine gun at my temple.

Eventually sensing my discomfort the main man stamped and handed me my passport back. Still grinning he asked my companion if he would accept the fifty camels. Uncertain of giving the right answer and not wanting to cause offence to me or the guards, he kept his gaze on the floor and muttered that he really didn’t need any camels. I held my tongue even though I was starting to feel quite annoyed. Eventually, roaring with laughter at our embarrassment, the guard shook his head and beckoned us to leave the room which we did in haste.

To this day I still wonder whether fifty camels was an insult or an honour.

‘Mosi-oa-Tunya’

It was the culmination of a three-week overland trip through five countries in southern Africa. The one place I had yearned to visit during the 12 years I lived in neighbouring South Africa and the place that had Dr David Livingstone saying in 1855,

No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes, but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight

Of course we now know that the falls were known to the Kololo people living in the area in the 1800’s who described it as ‘Mosi-oa-Tunya’ meaning ‘the Smoke that Thunders’

I arrive at the Zimbabwean side of the falls, which appears to have been untouched for the last 25 years. There is no commercialism here. Apart from a distant hum and some fine wisps of mist drifting upwards you would never know that you were so close to one of the Wonders of the World. There is a wooden kiosk where I buy my entrance ticket and nothing else, no map, no information guide and no refreshments other than a local hawker selling the usual selection of cans of cold drinks opposite the park’s entrance. A relentless sun burns down.

As I battle my way through the untamed foliage the noise is both exhilarating and deafening; any conversation is impossible. Suddenly the falls come into view. Such a spectacular sight it literally takes my breath away. I get wet, I get dry and I get wet again. I stand as close to the edge as I dare, overlooking the mighty curtain of water from the Zambezi River cascading over the basalt rock cliffs, the columns of ‘smoke’ rising, and a myriad of rainbows forming. Such power. Nature at her most magnificent.

My heart lifts. I have a broad grin on my face. This is why I travel. ‘Hakuna Matata’ my friends. All is well.

Room 202

If you have read my experience “Windhoek Warning” you will know what this is about. If you haven’t, perhaps you should read that post first so this makes some sort of sense.

Monday dawned and we reluctantly returned to the police station in Windhoek to obtain the necessary copies of the crime report in order to put in insurance claims on our return to the UK. This was unable to be done on Sunday because the Duty Officer did not have a key for the room in which the only photocopier was situated. Neither of us looked forward to going back into the city, but needs must. We finally managed to persuade the manager of the villa where we were staying to add the cost of a taxi to the police station on to our bill so we could be dropped off right outside the door. Then the fun began.

After queuing at the complaints desk for 40 minutes in a hot, malodorous and jam-packed room we finally reached the counter only to be told,

“Oh no madam, this is not where you need to be, you need to go upstairs to the black door marked Enquiries”.

So, elbowing our way back through the crowd, we went upstairs and through a black door marked Enquiries only to be informed,

“Oh no, madam you need to go upstairs to Room 202, the crime enquires”.

We were now beginning to wonder how many floors there were in this building, and how many rooms marked ‘Enquiries’. There were an awful lot of black doors along each of these corridors. Anyway, we climbed up another flight of stairs in search of Room 202 – the doors had no logical numbering to follow so we wandered up and down the narrow corridors. No-one challenged us.

Eventually at the end of one corridor we found Room 202 where three constables were sitting behind desks piled high with beige files of varying thickness– no signs of computerisation in here. Looking at the reams of paperwork, and the height of the files, my heart sank; it was obvious that these guys had a lot of crime reports to deal with – and equally obvious they weren’t going to recover any of our items. But I needed that crime report for my insurance claim; I realised this could take a while.

One of the older constables eventually raised his head,

“Hello madam, what can we do you for?”

I passed over the slip of paper that I had been given when I reported the crime. He took it gingerly, glanced at the crime number, flicked through the top of his pile of reports and said,

“No, that’s not here, I put it somewhere, now let me think, where did I put it? No I cannot remember, maybe you can come back later?”

and put his head back down to his paperwork. I explained that we couldn’t as we were flying out in the morning and it was important that I had copies of the report today for insurance purposes, but I wasn’t sure anyone was listening. A young lady then entered the office and our constable became engaged in conversation with her, rubber stamping and filing more complaint sheets. She left and once more his head went down. I sighed; it was going to be a long morning.

Eventually he paused in his stamping and looked up to find that we were still patiently waiting in his office. He then jumped up, grabbed an enormous bunch of keys from a drawer and beckoned us to follow him down the corridor. He unlocked one room, peered inside it, shook his head, locked the door and continued to the next room into which he disappeared. We waited outside for several minutes not sure whether he wanted us to follow him inside and just as we were thinking of doing that out he came and beckoned us to follow him back into Room 202. What was all that about?

As we re-entered the room one of the younger constables stood up at his desk and handed over a green folder – yes – our report! But this wasn’t over yet. Now for the issue of the photocopier. Today, being Monday, thankfully the room was not locked, but to get the three copies we required would cost us NAD$30. I calmly explained that we did not have any cash – it had all been stolen during the mugging, but we did, fortunately, have one credit card, so would they accept that? No; they didn’t have a card machine.

After much discussion and shaking of heads one of the constables gave us directions to the nearest ATM and my poor husband was duly dismissed to draw out some cash feeling very uneasy about going out on his own worried that he would be mugged yet again. I dare not leave the office in case our report vanished under one of those piles, which were growing by the minute. The constable scrawled something onto the record sheet which accompanied my report – no doubt writing something to the effect “don’t bother any further with this one as the victims are leaving the country tomorrow” and I have a feeling that once we had left our report would vanish for good. Meanwhile I eyed that green folder like a hawk.

My husband eventually returned, puffing and sweating, but at least in one piece – those stairs, that heat and the stress of carrying cash were not having a good affect on him. I was concerned that he might not survive until the flight!

The money was handed over and we were led to yet another Enquiry office – Room 211 – where we waited for a different young constable to go and make the three copies I’d requested. We then returned to Room 202 – it was beginning to feel like home there – where the older constable took his rubber stamp and joyfully stamped each copy, signing them with a flourish and handing them over to us with a wide grin. I thanked him and we left, grateful that it had only taken us three and a half hours!