It’s been quiet on the blog post authoring front lately. This is not because there hasn’t been much to talk about, so much as because I’m presently on holiday in the UK and Ireland. Apologies to those people who’ve left comments which I haven’t yet had time to address. I’ve also spent a while trying to research and author an opinion piece for the FMC bulletin (which has been an experience in itself) regarding the word “closed” as it is sometimes applied to parts if the New Zealand conservation estate. That probably won’t come out until about November and I don’t want to undercut it, but I’ll post it here some time after that and probably decorate it with some lengthier detail and references which didn’t fit very well in the Bulletin edition.
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Tag: travel
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Historic Relationships
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Perspectives from Laos, and mining the Conservation Estate
I’ve just returned from a few weeks in South East Asia, much of which was spent in Laos, albeit mostly on the tourist trail, and it’s a wonderful country. Much of what’s recently been in the media, as well as reading one of Robb’s recent posts regarding our government’s new policy of “stock-taking” the conservation estate in preparation for mineral extraction, has prompted some thoughts.
I’ll dispense with the complete story of our holiday, except to say that Laos is a fantastic place. (Some photos of the whole thing may be found here.) It’s not yet quite so touristy as neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam (having to pay the US$1 going rate to the Vietnamese immigration guy at the land border just so he’d stamp my passport was a disappointing introduction to Vietnam), and Laos has only been generally open to tourists since the 1990s. There’s a project to at least double tourism over the next decade, adapting facilities in to bring in more overseas money. The place will probably change a lot in that time, and I only hope the attraction of the tourist dollar doesn’t cause any more of the country to become like Vang Vieng, which ten years ago was a tiny village but has now turned into a giant pub crawl town aimed at young English-speaking young backpackers who typically go there to get hammered.
Laos has a devastatingly war-torn history through the last few centuries, having been hastily usurped into “French Indochina” in 1893 as part of the race between France and Britain to be first to colonise as much of the world as possible. Not long after the communists finally kicked out the French, Laos became tangled in the Vietnam war, and the USA dropped more bombs on eastern Laos between 1964 and 1973 than were dropped during the entire second world war. (Reportedly that’s about one B-52 payload being dropped every eight minutes day and night over 9 years!) To this day, Laos holds the unenvious title of being the most bombed country, anywhere, ever. It’s a sad story, especially having seen how polite and generous the people are, but on the other hand it’s good to see it’s no longer happening. The entire region is full of limestone, dotted with numerous pinnacle structures and caves. During the various wars, people frequently hid in caves, surrounding themselves with Budda statues for protection. Until relatively recently, typical life expectencies were as low as about 45, with about 25% of children dying in their first few years. With roughly 1/3 of the 260 million bombs that were dropped never having detonated, people who live in that region still suffer indiscriminately from tripping unexploded live ammunition.
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A world of small differences
This isn’t a trampey-related post, but I thought I’d write an update about what’s going on. In short, I made it to the USA without any incidents.
After an overnight stop in San Francisco, we flew into JFK in New York last Saturday (Sunday NZ time), and were taxi’d to our hotel in New Jersey, which is the main base for a couple of weeks while we do some work-related things with a company that’s 5 minutes down the road. And I use that phrase loosely, because as with everything here, it’s a 5 minute drive. It’s actually very frustrating, because although the hotel is quite nice there is nothing nearby. It’s an island in the middle of a freeway, and it’s impossible to get anywhere without driving, which is a a problem when there’s no car. Even food is a problem, because the hotel doesn’t have any proper restaurant — they just expect people to have cars.
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Outdoors in New York
I was all set up to enjoy a nice trip to the Kahurangis over Wellington Anniversary Weekend, which is this coming weekend. The bad news is that I had to pull out, which I’m quite saddened about because I haven’t yet seen the Kahurangis up close, and I was really looking forward to it. The good news, however, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that the reason I pulled out is because the following weekend, work’s sending me on a 3 week trip to New York. We’re getting diplomatic passports sorted and it’s quite exciting.
It’s actually only 2 weeks of work, and that part is really over the border in New Jersey. I’m tagging an extra week to the end to take a look around New York during which I hope to be accommodating myself on the floor of a friend’s apartment. I suspect the time of year is very against me and so far I’m not planning to take a lot of outdoors gear with me. If anyone can suggest some interesting walks or outdoor things to see that might be conveniently accessible in the region during the early to middle part of the winter month of February, though, I’d be interested to hear about them.
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An update from Peru
Here’s a quick update. Internet access is a bit trickier during the GAP tour, so unfortunately there’s less detail.
We managed to get to Peru and have been here for about 4 days. It turns out that pedestrian crossings in Lima don´t really mean anything, which is the exact opposite of Santiago. In Santiago, everyone stops for pedestrians everywhere, even when they don´t need to. In Lima the drivers line people up when they step out onto the road.
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Being a tourist in Puerto Varas
The vast majority of people in Santiago (especially women) wear jeans, at least at this time of year. They’re sold everywhere, and they’re dirt cheap. Further south, I noticed that there seems to be a bit more variety. This might be because it’s a bit colder, perhaps people aren’t quite so fashion conscious and interested in copying each other, and in general it’s a bit more touristy. While every third shop in Santiago sells ice-cream, and every third shop in Curico is a video game parlour, it appeared as if every third shop in Puerto Varas sold some kind of hiking gear, or general outdoor clothing that was mostly imported.
The day after the bus trap of death, we headed to Puerto Varas, which is a small-ish town that’s very touristy. An hour or so down the road from the more industrial town of Puerto Montt, Puerto Varas sits on the edge of the largest lake in Chile, or possibly the second largest depending on which tourist guide you listen to. In New Zealand terms, it feels a bit like Taupo. We thought our bus ride was only supposed to be about three or so hours, but it ended up feeling much longer than that. (It takes an hour by itself just to drive from Castro to the edge of the island of Chiloe, and then it’s a 30 minute ride on the ferry.)
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The bus ride death trap
Every time that Stacey or I mentioned we were planning to go to southern Chile, people would tell us that it was too late in the year, and that it would be raining all the time. This didn’t really bother us, and it still doesn’t, especially if people’s definition of “rain” is the light splattering for a few minutes that we encountered in Santiago the day before we left to go south. The south of Chile is in many ways similar to the south of New Zealand in climate, with the furtherst south (supposedly) being comparable with Fiordland. By now we’ve traveled south, and I’m writing this entry from a hostel in Puerto Varas, and the weather has actually been quite nice. Today was bright sunshine, in fact. This entry, however, is mostly about a day-trip we had when we were spending time in Castro. It wasn’t raining heavily, but there was definitely some moisture in the air.
Castro is a small town situated on a beach-front of an inlet, roughly in the centre of the island of Chiloe. It has a large fishing community and lots of seafood, none of which we tried, and a whole lot of churches that are apparently on a world heritage list somewhere. In fact, the whole of Southern Chile is full of churches that are historically interesting, and the taxi driver back in Santiago had impressed upon us that we should really go and look at some. We’ve yet to do this, though.
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Goodbye Santiago, Hello Castro
There were a couple of words and a couple of phrases that I learned fairly quickly on arriving in Santiago a couple of weeks ago. For instance, Stacey taught me that the two most important words to know on the Santiago Metro are “Salida”, which means “Exit”, and “Permisso”, which translates to “Get out of my way before I knock you face-first to the ground on the way to the Salida”.
I also picked up a couple of phrases very quickly. The first phrase was “El Hombre Araña Tres”, which translates directly to “The Man Spider Three”, or indirectly to “Spiderman 3”. It was all over every billboard and bus stop during the weekend that I arrived, but has since been replaced by advertisements for the new Pirates of the Carribean movie. (J’s are pronounced as H’s in Español, so I guess Johnny Depp’s name sounds more like Honny Depp.) The other phrase I very quickly learned was “No Tengo Frio”. This translates directly to “I don’t have cold”, or (in other words) “I’m not cold”, and I’ve now developed a reflex response towards anyone who approaches me with the words “¿Tianes frio?”
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A weekend at Curico
Curico was interesting. It’s a small town of perhaps 100,000 people, a couple of hours south of Santiago. Whereas every third shop in Santiago is selling Ice Cream (and Nestle has really cornered the market here), every third shop in Curico is full of video games. When I managed to translate a phrase at my Escula de Espanol to explain that we were going to Curico for the weekend, the immediate question was “Por que?”, or “Why?”. This isn’t too surprising-a-question, because people have about the same reasons to go to Curico as they do to go to somewhere like Levin, and it’s not typically considered a tourist destination.
The reason we went to Curico is that it’s where Stacey’s former host family lives, from when Stacey lived here in a student exchange programme back in 6th form. The Friday night bus dropped us off in the middle of town, which has apparently changed a lot since Stacey was here last. It used to be a fairly empty town without much to do, but there was a now lot of activity, and personally I found it much easier to relate to than Santiago. (It’s actually possible to walk around the centre of Curico.) Stacey managed to find where we were going pretty quickly however, despite the changes, and before long Stacey was having a great conversation with her former host mother while I was demonstrating my ability to repeat the words “No” and “Si” over and over again to one of her former host sisters, and a friend.
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Another week in Santiago
One thing I’ve noticed about Santiago since arriving has been that the drivers here are much more courteous to pedestrians than what I’m used to. When crossing a road at an intersection, turning drivers will typically give way to pedestrians even if there’s no pedestrian crossing. I’ve occasionally seen drivers flash their lights to indicate that they won’t flatten me if I walk out in front of their vehicle, and this morning I noticed people politely tooting at each other when merging lanes, to indicate to each other to go ahead. The notable place where this politeness doesn’t seem to apply is with emergency vehicles — drivers in Santiago don’t seem to give way to ambulances, and several times now I’ve seen an ambulance stuck waiting at an intersection where drivers are making no attempt to make space for it. I’ve been informed, though, that it’s only really an emergency if the sirens are going, and that flashing lights are only a semi-emergency, but not one that’s important enough for other traffic to give way. Supposedly all of the drivers know this too, so for now I might give this the benefit of the doubt.