▲ So it was very appropriate that on 4 May Maureen and I sailed out of New York on the QM2, bound for Southampton in England. These days it’s a 7 day crossing, slower than they used to do it even back in the Titanic days. Speaking of which we passed about 80km south of the final resting place of that iceberg victim. It was 100 years and a couple of weeks earlier that the Titanic went down. We passed even closer to the Andrea Doria which sank back in 1956, we were only about 25km from its location.

▲ Statue of Liberty & the Staten Island Ferry

The iconic Atlantic crossing is westbound and ends by sailing into New York past the Statue of Liberty. Travelling eastbound does mean you see the statue at dusk, no need to get up pre-dawn for your early arrival. Eastbound also means you have 5 23 hour days, going the other way gives you 5 25 hour days. No big deal, I thought, but it’s surprising how a little bit of jetlag (or boatlag) every day ends up feeling just as bad as one bigger chunk. I was surprised how out of it I felt by the end.

And on board – well you can eat a lot, I put on a little bit of weight even though I tried to avoid over-eating, jogged around the deck every day (1.9 laps to a km, it’s a big ship)  and visited the gym every day. And you drink a lot – a pre-dinner drink in one of the bars, more booze with dinner, a nightcap in another bar. The excellent jazz from the Simon Galfe trio was the best thing on the boat and they seem to have been there for a while, there are YouTube clips of them back to 2009.

Plus you read a lot and if you wish there are lectures, films, live performances, even a casino if you want to lose some money. Meanwhile a lot of ocean passes by although until the last day it was so cold and windy outside there wasn’t much demand for these loungers for watching the Atlantic disappear behind. ▼

Despite the dressing up – three nights were ‘formal’ – DJs and bow ties for the guys – it was surprisingly unglamorous most of the time. The buffet dining area (there are flash restaurants as well) is more cross-Channel (or cross-Tasman) ferry than international ocean bling.

I didn’t get the New York arrival, but at the other end we came in past the Isle of Wight and the Calshot sandspit that marks the entrance to Southampton Water. My father was from Calshot so it was an area I knew as a child. Despite all that maritime activity on his doorstep Dad ended up in the RAF, not the British Navy.

▲ Passing Calshot Spit

So an interesting week, something I’ve always wanted to do and now I’ve done it I certainly don’t intend to ever do it again!  Cunard’s pricing policy (you can pay way more booking from some countries than others) is very interesting. More on that in a future blog.

Haiti may have been knocked flat by the earthquake, but the music and art is as vibrant as ever. On my previous, pre-earthquake, visit to Port-au-Prince I stayed at the Oloffson Hotel and caught RAM on their regular Thursday night appearance. The Oloffson was the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene’s Papa Doc novel The Comedians. And RAM is the house band, voodoo jazz (or correctly vodou jazz).

The earthquake may have changed plenty, but not RAM. They’re still fantastic, fronted by Lunise and two seductively athletic dancers, backed up by 12 musicians. For me the highlight is always when the three rara horn players put down their other instruments and pick up the rara horns.


▲ Cue the rara horn players.

Haitian art is the most active and alive in the Caribbean and earthquake themes appear in some recent works. Last trip I bought a couple of paintings by naïve artist Gerard. ▼

◄ A Franz Zepherin painting of St George

And a couple of vodou-infused paintings by Franz Zepherin. Since my last visit Zepherin has caught on internationally and his prices have inflated by a factor of 10.

Perhaps the new president Mickey Martelly (‘Sweet Mickey’) will make a difference, after all he was a Haitian music star before he turned to politics. A street art portrait of the president. ▼

Friday evening – I’ll be joining Jan Morris, Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron to discuss Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of that travel classic A Time of Gifts. Artemis Cooper is currently writing a Fermor biography.

Saturday at 8 pm I’ll be talking travel!

 Wednesday 30 May – I’ll be in Moscow for the launch of Lonely Planet guidebooks in Russian.

Later in the year – I’ll be chairing the panel of judges for the 2012 Dolman Award for Travel Writing, Britain’s only award for travel books. More on that soon, when the long list of books is released.

Looking Out, Looking In
Soon after leaving Australia we passed just to the north of beautiful Lord Howe Island. Nobody was looking. Later in the flight we passed even closer to the south of Fiji, again most people are glued to their screens, window blinds down.

A380s have a great tail camera you watch on your screen, here’s the view of Los Angeles as we made our final approach into LAX.

What do the crew like best about the A380 over the 747? The entertainment system is so much more reliable, they’re not having to constantly reboot the system, restart movies or, in my case, reboot the power system for laptops. It never seems to work reliably on 747s.

Lieven’s book studies the country region by region – almost all of them could be described as ‘troubled regions’. It’s full of useful insights:

• Pakistan (population 185 million) is a far bigger problem than Afghanistan (population 30 million)
• Getting foreign troops out of Afghanistan may be an important step towards some sort of resolution in Afghanistan, but it’s much more important relative to Pakistan where getting the troops out (particularly the American ones) is the one aim nearly everybody agrees on
• Economically Pakistan is not a basket case, it may not be competitive with the booming regions of India, but it’s ahead of the densely populated, backward ‘cow belt’ region of north India.
• I’d always thought Urdu was ‘the’ language of Pakistan, in fact it’s an import at the time of partition and only spoken as a first language by a minority.

Sylvain Cypel’s Walled – Israeli Society at an Impasse is an older book, published in 2005 and although it can be a rambling account with a tendency to repeat things it’s still extremely interesting and its messages haven’t changed in the last seven years. If anything the situation has only got worse, Israel simply has not come to terms with its involvement with Palestine. The book emphasizes the role of the ‘New Historians’ who have overturned the Israeli creation myth, that the Arabs held the balance of power in 1948 and had a coordinated plan to destroy Israel. Most important they have repudiated the ‘official version’ that the Palestinians fled their homes when in fact most of them were chased out or deliberately expelled.

Of course like everything else canangsari have to move with the times and today the time-poor housewife may not have the time to create her own offerings. Market sellers have always offered ready made canangsari and today you can even buy them by the bagful in supermarkets. Of course a properly constructed canangsari has to have a porosan, a continer with betel leaves, areca nut and lime (the three necessary items for betel nut chewers) which represent the Hindu trinity of creator (Brahma), preserver (Vishnu) and destroyer (Shiva). ‘Without a porosan it’s just a decoration, not a real canangsari.’

There’s been more Japanese analysis a year after the 11 March 2011 quake, tsunami and near nuclear meltdown. It’s a big question, where is Japan going, or more accurately why is Japan going nowhere? When I visited BMW in Munich last year the BMW marketers were worrying that young Japanese were falling out of love with the car! Simply not bothering to even get a driving license.

Always keen on minting new words which creep into other languages they’ve pinpointed the parasaito shinguru, usually a ‘parasite woman,’ who stays home at their parent’s expense and uses their own earnings for fashion, travel and other personal expenditure. That’s a glimpse of the future which has already spread further, Italians have their bamboccioni, grown-up babies, Germans talk of the Nesthocker (baby bird) who simply won’t leave Hotel Mama. The otaku is a particularly Japanese version of the geek and Japan has also minted the hikikomori, a modern hermit, usually male, who has retreated to his room from where he rarely emerges, perhaps to make middle of the night runs to vending machines. A hikikomori can spend years without ever needing to talk to another human being.

The figures are of mythological (and modern) monsters and demons and they’ll meet their end on Thursday 22 March when all over the island the ogoh-ogoh figures are carried around in the Ngrupuk parade before being set on fire in a finale of noise, drumbeats, shouting, confusion and fireworks. The festivities – accompanied by loud shouts of ‘megedi, megedi’ – ‘get out, get out’ – are a purification ceremony, designed to drive demons and bad spirits out and keep things under control for another year.

Any demons who don’t get the message and depart on Thursday will get a surprise on Friday 23 March which is Nyepi, the ‘Day of Silence.’ Bali completely shuts down. Surviving demons will probably decide the island has been abandoned, so the theory goes. They’ll be bored into submission and leave Bali alone.

Nyepi is taken very seriously, from sunrise on Friday nobody will be allowed to leave their homes and that includes tourists who must stay inside their hotels. There will be no vehicles on the roads and there won’t be any flights arriving or departing Bali either. Denpasar airport is completely closed. In many places the electricity will be shut down to ensure there’s no noise from TV or radios.

▲  For our 2004 book Rice Trails – A journey through the ricelands of Asia & Australia –photographer Richard I’Anson and I wanted an iconic photograph of Balinese rice farmers working on their fields with the island’s holy mountain, Gunung Agung, towering over them in the background. Of course you need all the elements to come together, the farmers, the view, the weather, but we eventually got what we were after.

◄ And the farmers invited me to join them and have a go at planting out the seedlings.

I’d always wanted to climb Agung and on a visit to Bali this week I finally got around to it. Lots of visitors climb Mt Batur, the 1717 metre crater-within-a-crater in the centre of the island. You can zip up from Ubud in the night, climb up for the sunrise in a couple of hours and head back to Ubud soon afterwards. Some Batur climbers stay at one of the lakeside guesthouses at the foot of the volcano before their climb.

Climbing Agung is a more serious effort, particularly if you want to get to the highest point on the crater rim at 3142metres. To accomplish that you need to start from Besakih, Bali’s most holy temple, at around midnight to be up at the top at 6am for dawn. You will have climbed 2000metres from your 1100metre high starting point.

I chose the easier option, starting from the Pura Pasar Agung temple north of Selat. I was picked up from my hotel in Ubud at midnight and at 130 am lined up in the car park below the temple at 1572metres. Despite the less than perfect weather (it was the wet season) there were a surprising number of climbers. My guide Ketut and I teamed up with four other climbers and their two guides, both of them young women, and we stuck together all the way to the top. A couple of other climbers were already there when we reached the crater rim at 530 am, after 4 hours climbing.


▲ It was already starting to get light and by dawn there were about 15 of us perched on the rim. My GPS said we were at 2873metres, so more than 250metres below the highest point, which we all agreed seemed distinctly unlikely! Perhaps Agung really is somewhat lower after the 1963-64 eruptions. It’s still classified  as an active volcano, but has not had a serious eruption since that series which killed nearly 2000 people. It’s not possible to make your way around the rim from our point to the highest point, but volcanoes aren’t like mountains, I reckon just getting up to the crater rim is good enough.

◄  Offerings and statues perched on the rim of the crater.

An hour later, we seemed to unanimously agree it was time to head down, the visibility was less than perfect and it was cold and windy on the top.













As often happens with mountains it was harder getting down than going up, the descent only took 2-1/2 hours, mostly because we made no rest stops on the way down, but I doubt we moved any faster. Agung is not a technical climb in any way, but it’s often more a clamber than a walk and it can be very slippery.

▲ Descending Agung

It’s also utterly relentless, climb-climb-climb then descend-descend-descend, there’s never a moment’s level break. I’ve climbed higher and made equally long ascents and descents in one go, but I don’t think my legs have ever been so tired. I was beginning to stumble by the time we got back down to the car park, one ankle didn’t feel right for the next 24 hours and two days later my legs are still aching.

The most interesting parts, I thought, were the whole question of the war on drugs, particularly in Colombia. Read about the damage done by thoughtless aerial defoliation and you quickly see why the US can so easily become so mistrusted and disliked in so many countries. Plus that final chapter on assisted suicide and our rights to do what we want, as long as it doesn’t harm others.

▲ He barely touches on that popular Asian and Pacific stimulant the betel nut. In Papua New Guinea it’s known as buai and I spent some time wandering the buai markets of Kokopau and Buka, on opposite sides of the Buka Passage which separates Buka from Bougainville. The Kokopau buai market sign warns you, in pidgin English, not to chew baui in the market and to ‘kipim Kokopau taun klin’ – keep Kokopau town clean. Air Niugini must be one of the few airlines which warns you that not only is smoking banned so is chewing betel nut.


▲ The market sold the three things needed for betel nut chewing – the buai nut itself (50t is about 25c US), the mustard stick (daka) and the crushed-coral lime powder (cumbung). Like cigarettes or alcohol first encounters with betel nut are not pleasant! Long term use stains your mouth and teeth red, keep going and eventually your teeth will turn black.

▲ Tobacco leaves, pre-rolled (in newspaper) cigarettes and cigarette lighters were also on sale in the market.

The Devil’s Picnic also only mentioned fleetingly another popular intoxicant, the qat or khat of the Middle East and East Africa, particularly Somalia and Yemen. Coincidentally when I arrived back in Australia after my PNG trip my taxi driver from Melbourne airport was from Somaliland and he told me were to find qat – if I needed some – near the Lonely Planet office in the Melbourne district of Footscray. 

Next stop was Buka, which meant an early departure. The PMVs – Public Motor Vehicles – up the coast from Arawa to Buka depart at 3 am! Or at least they’re supposed to, I was up ready for mine and it didn’t turn up until 430.

▲ Three hours later we’d arrived at Kokopau at the northern corner of Bougainville Island.


▲ The narrow Buka Passage separates Kokopau from Buka and water taxis shuttle back and forth across the passage all day for a flat fare of K2 (50c US) per person.  The fast flowing Buka Passage, the water often flows through the passage at 6 knots.


▲ I stayed at Destiny Haus, a new place right on the water’s edge and there was always activity on the Passage to watch. During the long civil war most of Bougainvlle was closed off by the fighting and Buka became the de facto capital of the province. Part of the peace agreement was a higher level of self government for what is now the Autonomous Region of Bougainville with its own parliament building in Buka. In 2014 there will be a referendum on independence for the region.

▲ From Buka I flew to Kokopo/Rabaul in New Britain. As we climbed over the coast I looked down on this reef and spotted a cargo ship, stuck high and dry.