Horror photography!

I just got back from hiking the East Highland Way in Scotland. While I was up there I discovered a new setting on my camera. In the "text" option for taking photos of print, there are four settings. One looks indistinguishable from a regular portrait setting, one is black and white, one is negative black and white, and then there's this one, a reversed color image. Looks like a cover for some Gothic horror novel! This is the cathedral at Durham in northern England.
Another view of the same cathedral. Not sure why the sky changed color.
Julián, my four-year-old son, took this one of Papa emerging from the grave.
This decayed tomb is carved in the image of a knight. What horrors lurk beneath?

Next time: more mucking about with the camera!

Choosing my next adventure

We're getting to the halfway point of 2010, so it's time to start planning trips for 2011! Besides the usual research/pleasure trips to Oxford and Missouri, I'm thinking of going back to Harar, Ethiopia, for two months. I absolutely fell in love with this medieval walled city of Sufis, and I know someone who will rent me a house in the Old City.

As I've been planning my return, an old problem has cropped up. If I return to a country, I don't get to see a new country. This was always a problem with my return trips to India, another place I love.

Here are some alternatives. For the price of a two-month trip to Ethiopia, I could do three or even four shorter trips. One would be to The Gambia for ten days, a trip made cheaper by since my wife gave me a gift of a free ticket whenever I want to go. That was almost two years ago and I still haven't used it! Another trip would be two weeks hiking around Montenegro, with its beautiful coastline, rugged green mountains, and historic hilltop castles and monasteries. Even after these two trips I'd still have enough money to hike across Luxembourg and do some easyJet long weekend somewhere!

Tempting. . .but Harar is calling me.

I'm torn. What should I do?

Photo of Kotor, Montenegro, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Two ways to drive across Africa

My two months of travel in Ethiopia was an epic trip, but it was nothing next to the African voyages of some people I know.

Previously on this blog I've mentioned my friend Thomas Tomczyk, who is motorcycling across Africa. He started in South Africa late last year and is now. . .I'm not sure where. When I was in Ethiopia he emailed me from Kenya, but he's since dropped off the map. I'm sure he's all right, though. He's like me, with a talent for getting into dodgy situations and then getting out of them.

Thomas' website, Africa Heartbeat, contains his stories and pictures of various NGOs and charitable projects he's covered along the way. His latest article is about Tunaweza ("Yes we can") a group of handicapped musicians in Tanzania who are pulling down barriers not only for handicapped people, but between religions--the members are both Muslim and Christian.

Hopefully he'll get in touch soon because I'd like to hook up with him later this year when he passes through the Sahara. Nothing like a reunion with an old friend in a scorching desert in summertime.

When Almudena and I were relaxing with a drink in a hotel garden in Gondar, Ethiopia, we met a South African couple who are driving around the coast of Africa. Steve Lorimer and Roxy Harvey converted a British Army truck into a cushy living space and set out to circumnavigate Africa from Morocco down the west coast to South Africa and then up the east coast, around the north and back to Morocco. Their website OverAfrica recounts this 25,000 km journey. They've had some tough spots, with breakdowns both mechanical and physical, but their journey has been mostly positive. I was especially interested in their account of The Gambia, where I plan to go next, and Namibia, which is also high on my list. Their site also gives lots of advice for doing your own road trip across Africa.

All this is making me want to hit the road again. . .

The travel bug that just won't die

Sorry for the long silence, but if you're a regular reader of this blog or any of my other social media outlets like Facebook or Twitter, you know I've been in Ethiopia and Somaliland for the past two months. Besides writing, my greatest love is travel. I previously posted about my travel year of 2009, which included a lot of shuttling back and forth between Spain, England, and Missouri, plus a hike across England along Hadrian's Wall and a short trip to Holland. Fun stuff, but nothing truly adventurous.

This year started well with some adventure travel. Thanks to two of my publishers, I had the money to go to the Horn of Africa, a place I've always dreamed of visiting. When I was ten I read a National Geographic article about the monastery at Debre Damo, a medieval Ethiopian monastery on top of a cliff. The only way to get there is to climb up a dodgy-looking leather rope. I thought that was the coolest thing ever and thirty years later I finally got to do it!

Almudena joined me for the first three weeks and we celebrated our tenth anniversary in Ethiopia. We did the popular historic northern loop, taking in ancient sites such as the monasteries on Lake Tana, Gondar, Axum, and Lalibela. Then she went home and I headed east to the medieval walled city of Harar and further on to Somaliland, an unrecognized state that comprises the northern third of what used to be Somalia. It was cool to visit "Somalia" and find it peaceful and friendly, but my favorite place by far was Harar. There's a special feel to walled cities that I've noticed in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Segovia. They comprise their own separate worlds, and their inhabitants are very aware of their history and culture.

So is my travel bug satiated? On the contrary, it's just woken up! I'm off to Italy in May, and hopefully The Gambia this autumn. Also, I'm going to try to convince my publishers to send me back to Ethiopia next year. I made lots of friends in Harar and I'd like to visit soon.

I'm writing a series of travel articles about Ethiopia for Gadling, and when that's done in about a month I'll do a series on Somaliland. Plus I intend to get back to blogging here on a regular basis. The Internet connection in Ethiopia was terrible. Most of the country was on dialup! Stay tuned.

My travel year: a look back and a look forward

So here we are on the penultimate day of 2009. It was a pretty good travel year for me. I spent six months in Oxford and made a lot of friends there and got to hike the length of Hadrian's Wall. I also spent some time in Missouri and spent a long weekend in Amsterdam, doing some research in Delft and a couple of Dutch castles.

The year 2010 is shaping up to be even better. In fact, it will be the best year since my big Kumbh Mela year of 2001! I'll be spending seven weeks in Ethiopia, and Almudena will be joining me for three weeks so we can celebrate our anniversary. I'll also be headed to Rome for some research, doing the usual stop in Missouri, a couple of months in Oxford, and another long weekend in Amsterdam. I can't miss Amsterdam, after all! I'm also hoping to meet my friend Thomas somewhere in North Africa as he's on his final leg of his trip across Africa as part of the Africa Heart Beat Project. If we can't make our schedules jive, I'll probably end up spending a week in The Gambia.

What will 2011 bring?

Ichthyoelectroanalgesia!

A few weeks ago a fellow writer invited me to tag along to a talk at Oxford University Press about the Oxford English Dictionary, the most complete English dictionary in the world. One of the editors told us about how they put the dictionary together and all the work that goes into it. They have hundreds of readers around the world who scour through newspapers, magazines, and books looking for new words or new uses for old ones. An interesting detail was that the editors reject the majority of words people send in because they are too new, too rare, too regional, or just plain misused.

I gave them a word that probably will get rejected. Ichthyoelectroanalgesia! If you know your Classical languages, you know this means using an electric fish as a pain reliever. I came across the word in an archaeology article about old Roman and Parthian medical recipes, including one that involved pressing an area of your body that's giving you trouble against an electric fish. Apparently the low charge will relieve the pain. No, I haven't tried it.

This word stuck with me for a couple of years until I got swept up in the zine movement of the mid Nineties. Actually it started way before that, so I was hitting the second wave. Anyway, I produced my own zine dedicated to travel and archaeology and called it, you guessed it, Ichthyoelectroanalgesia. I only did four issues before I went on to other things, but I had a distribution of about two hundred and met lots of interesting people through the mail, including some I still correspond with.

I Googled my beloved word and found that two archives have copies of my zine. I've passed into zine history! One is for science fiction fanzines, which is strange since mine wasn't an sf zine, but I did trade with some sf fanzines so maybe that's where they got it from.

I'm also very proud I got to stump an editor at the OED with a word. :-)

It's Official: Kebabs Are Bad For You

In the film Casablanca, the corrupt police captain Louis Renault tells Rick Blaine that he's shocked, shocked, to discover there's gambling going on at Rick's Café Américain. A moment later a croupier hands him his winnings.

Yesterday the BBC reported that British health officials are shocked, shocked, to discover kebabs are high in calories, fat, and salt. The favorite food of binge drinkers, harried commuters, and penny-pinching backpackers, this slime on a stick apparently has an average of just under 1000 calories, the entire daily requirement for salt, and well over daily levels of saturated fat. The kebabs were tested without the rich fatty sauce that's usually slathered on as a final step in preparation.

Officials in 76 councils tested the nutritional value of 494 kebabs. The worst offenders had 1,990 calories, more than twice the daily requirement of salt, and more than three times the daily requirement of fat. More than a third included ingredients not on the labels, including several with pork. Two of the kebabs that included pork were sold by shops that claimed to be halal, meaning that they supposedly followed Muslim dietary rules that forbid pork.

But the question remains--will this make the fattest country in Europe change its dietary habits? Probably not, considering that everyone already knows kebabs are bad for you. This is probably why they are mostly eaten by people who have just been on a bender.

On the positive side, discarded kebabs make great foraging for urban England's growing population of wild animals. When I lived in Elephant and Castle, the local fox, dubbed "smokey", lived well off of kebabs and other junk food he found in the dumpster and on the sidewalk.

After Captain Renault pockets his winnings, he blithely orders Rick's Cafe closed. He's under political pressure to do so. I wonder, after the officials at the Local Authority Coordinators of Regulatory Services made their report and satisfied their bosses, did they light up a fag and pop down to the nearest pub for a pint?

The Road Has A New Face

One thing that's really struck me lately is how many Chinese tourists there are now. I first started noticing them a few years ago, and can't recall seeing any before that. I did meet a Chinese Christian pilgrim in Jerusalem in 1990, but he was a different story. It's the peak of the tourist season here in Oxford, and there are Chinese tourist groups everywhere, taking photos with expensive-looking digital cameras (mine's made there too!), trying fish and chips, and blocking the sidewalks as they gape at the beautiful architecture. In other words, they're just like tourists from everywhere else. The new money in China seems to be getting spent on the same kind of vacations as elsewhere.

And then there are all those Russian millionaires at the Sotheby's auctions in London. I didn't used to see them ten years ago either.

The Day I Didn't See A Yeti

A BBC reporter wrote earlier this week about his hunt for the mande barung, a jungle version of the famous yeti or Bigfoot, supposedly to be found in the jungles of eastern India on the border with Bangladesh. He interviewed eyewitnesses and came across some interesting footprints, but didn't see the creature itself. Go figure.

As an agnostic in all things both spiritual and mundane, I can't utterly discount the possibility of giant human-like creatures in the world's remoter regions, but my own experience in the Himalayas makes me doubtful.

Back in 1995, I hiked to the Annapurna Base Camp, at an altitude of 5,050 meters deep in the Himalayas. I'd already heard talk of the yeti, and even met a Sherpa who claimed to have seen one. He pointed to a rock just off the trail and said he saw one sitting on it. When I asked what it looked like he said, "It looked like a man."

Once I got to the base camp, I stayed in a stone hut nearby and the next morning went exploring. Pretty soon I came across some amazing tracks in the snow. They looked for all the world like the footprints of a barefoot man, except very large and strangely rounded. I followed them for about a hundred meters onto a part of the slope shielded by a high outcropping of rock. This part of the slope hadn't received any sunlight, and so the snow hadn't melted at all. The tracks there were different--much smaller and obviously animal in origin. I'm hardly an expert tracker, but to me they looked like a fox's. I retraced my steps and looked at the "yeti" footprints. They were obviously on the same trail and there were no other tracks in the vicinity, and nowhere for the yeti to run off onto the rocks and a fox to miraculously take up the trail.

So this is what happened: the snow on one part of the trail got warmed by the sun and the tracks partially melted, becoming wider and rounder. The claws became "toes" and the pads of the feet joined into one oval mass. I've read up on this phenomenon and apparently it's quite common.

Oh well. If I hadn't let my curiosity push me into tracking a yeti, I might have become a believer.

Third World Children 1, Obnoxious Backpackers 0

Speaking of class warfare, I saw a great example of the worst that backpacking culture has to offer when I was in Nepal back in 1994. I had just come back from trekking the Annapurna circuit and base camp, this being back when you slept in village homes and there weren't any internet cafes along the route.

I came back to Pokhara, a small city that acts as a launching off point for many of the best Himalayan treks. I'd rented some gear and needed to return it. When I got to the store, I found the owner was out and his nine year-old daughter was running the shop, and deep in an argument with three burly Israeli guys.

Israeli backpackers have a bad name overseas, and it's because many of them have just gotten out of the army and are a bit high-strung. Perfectly understandable after spending a couple of years dodging terrorist snipers and car bombers, but can't they go through post traumatic stress disorder in their own country?

Anyway, these three heroes were shouting at this kid because they didn't want to pay for their last day of equipment rental. They said that since they hadn't kept the stuff for an entire day they shouldn't have to pay, but it was evening, closing time, and any sane person could see they were in the wrong. The little girl was obviously sane. She held her ground, demanding the ten rupees they owed her (a grand total of 30 cents) while they towered over her in an aggressive semicircle, shouting at her and moving closer and closer, fists clenched.

It was beginning to look like they were going to hit her and I would have to come to the "rescue". I started calculating just how thoroughly they would kick my ass before the whole market piled into the store and lynched these guys.

But the little girl saved me from having to save her.

She stomped her foot on the dirt floor, shot out a little hand towards the biggest of the three and shouted "No! You give me ten rupee!"

They backed down, tossing a ten-rupee note on the ground and stomped off, muttering things in Hebrew that were probably not fit for adults to hear, let alone nine year-old girls.

I paid my bill without even checking it.

Lesson learned: nine years in a Third World country makes you tougher than two years in a First World army.